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  Then Twenny Fo jumped into the picture, pulled Leila to her feet, and the two sang an upbeat number followed by a saccharine duet that made me want to reach for a bag. Leila waved to the audience and blew everyone kisses as she walked offstage, the crowd applauding, wolf-whistling, and calling out lewd propositions.

  The rapper diverted their attention with a change of pace, a song recalling neighborhoods in the Bronx, wrapped in a beat that made as much sense to my ears as French. But the black audience responded, moving and swaying, hands in the air, lost in the music. Twenny Fo performed about fifteen or so songs and the crowd was functioning as one organism, the music its lifeblood, its oxygen. And then Fo was gone. Initially stunned, the crowd refused to believe that the concert was over and demanded more, chanting and stomping and clapping. Something was missing. He hadn’t performed his signature tune. The audience knew it and wouldn’t let him go.

  I scanned the crowd for more threats but couldn’t see any. It was a sea of expectant, enthusiastic black faces out there. I continued scoping the area and saw that Colonel Firestone was enjoying the concert from the second-story balcony of the base HQ overlooking the stage. Five men were with him – Biruta, Ntahobali, Lockhart, and the two men I had seen getting out of the Mercedes. There was no room up there for the bodyguards.

  ‘You were slow getting to those guys,’ said a voice behind me as I caught the scent of mountain flowers on a warm spring day. It was Leila. She was toweling off her wet hair, having just come from taking a shower. Without makeup, her beauty was almost freakish, the type that could launch a thousand ships. Unfortunately, the personality that went along with it would happily see them all dashed onto the rocks, the passengers and crew drowned. But maybe I was doing her an injustice.

  ‘Do you like your job, soldier?’

  What was I supposed to say?

  ‘Well?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m in the Air Force, ma’am, which makes me an airman,’ I said.

  ‘Well, whether you like it or not, airman, one word from me, and you won’t be doing it no longer.’

  Her attack took me by surprise as much as the guy with the knife had. If I’d been expecting anything from her – and I wasn’t – maybe it was just a plain, ordinary thank you.

  She turned and walked off, still toweling her hair. I signaled West to stay with her while I imagined how she’d react to being thrown over my knee. I glanced at my watch. In another thirteen hours or so, we’d be back at Kigali airport, and this detail would slip from the uncomfortable present into the happily forgotten past.

  Then a familiar tune brought my attention back to the stage. It was

  ‘Fighter’, Twenny Fo’s mega hit. He had re-appeared and the audience began singing along with the familiar lyrics from the chorus: There ain’t got no force righter than a US Army fighter. I wondered what the Marines and the Navy had to say about that.

  ‘Hey,’ said Travis, appearing beside me. ‘Great concert.’

  ‘Great,’ I echoed.

  ‘Nice take down, by the way. And good of Leila to come over and thank you,’ he said.

  ‘That’s just what I was thinking,’ I said.

  Smoke machines swamped the stage with a white mist. Twenny Fo was two-thirds of the way through his big number. The song was building, getting louder, harder. Then some familiar sounds made me finch involuntarily: small arms fire, helicopters, rocket-propelled grenades. Explosions boomed through the speakers, seemingly getting closer. Brutal searchlights kicked in with a blazing light that backlit the smoke and reminded me of blinding white phosphorus. Suddenly, a powerful downlight illuminated the scene from overhead and the crowd went berserk. I shook my head in disbelief because there I was – on stage. The figure took two steps forward as the smoke curled in and around it, and I saw my face, the one in the photo taken by Fallon: bleached white skin, black eye sockets and grinning jaws defined by vertical red lines. Finally, a real explosion boomed out like a powerful grenade detonating in an enclosed space. A ball of orange light and a giant white smoke ring rolled up into the overhead lighting and brightened the night sky.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Rutherford, joining Travis and me. ‘Is that fuckin’ Ryder?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I said. It was either Ryder or a dead man. Come to think of it, perhaps it was both.

  The audience was whooping and hollering as the music died down. The figure remained on stage, looking even more ominous in the growing silence. Then the lights were turned off and the stage went dark. Only when the crowd went completely manic did a single spotlight snap on. Ryder was gone. In his place stood Twenny Fo, and waves of adulation poured forth.

  Whatever I thought of Fo and Leila as people – and so far I didn’t think much of either – they burned hot in front of a crowd.

  The rapper told them he thought they were one of the best crowds ever, if not the best. He said they were doing a great and worthy job of representing their country’s values. Then he gave them a last wave, punched the air, and ran off into the wings.

  The audience wouldn’t stop chanting until the stagehands appeared and started packing up the equipment. Only then did the crowd begin to disperse.

  Rutherford and I met up with Cassidy and West backstage, where our principals were having their egos stroked by Colonel Firestone and Colonel Biruta.

  ‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ I said, stopping Ayesha as she wandered past. I looked into her almond eyes for the first time. She wore tinted contact lenses to make them a bright blue, a striking contrast to her coal-black skin and white close-cropped hair. ‘Have you seen Captain Ryder anywhere?’

  ‘Calling me “ma’am” makes me sound like my grandmother,’ she said with a smile. ‘You can call me Ayesha.’ She touched my body armor with her finger. ‘As for Duke, yes, he’ll be out in a minute. Hey, I saw what you did out there – quick off the mark.’

  ‘That’s ’cause I gave him a shove,’ Rutherford told her.

  She smiled at us flirtatiously, then walked over to Leila. I noticed that Firestone had pulled Travis to one side, and the two were involved in a heated conversation. Firestone waved some papers at him.

  ‘Man, what a rush!’ said Ryder, who came up behind us.

  His eyes were the size of dinner plates. One of them was still edged with black makeup and beneath his left ear was a patch of white he’d missed. I wanted to be mad at the guy, but he’d come here straight from a seat behind a battery-operated pencil sharpener at Andrews and probably didn’t know any better.

  ‘They pay you?’ I asked.

  ‘I did it for free. Why?’

  ‘I was going to ask for my cut.’

  ‘Can I have everyone’s attention, please?’ It was Travis, and he was standing on a box backstage. Everyone stopped what they were doing to listen. ‘I know it’s late and everyone wants to hit the hay, but Colonel Firestone has asked us all to assemble at the mess hall in ten minutes.’

  ‘You know what this is about?’ Rutherford asked me.

  ‘Nope,’ I said, but I had a suspicion that when I did find out, I wouldn’t like it.

  ‘So, if you could all make your way over there now . . .’ Travis said.

  Cassidy, West, Rutherford, Ryder, and I formed the standard loose diamond around the principals and their companions and headed over to the mess.

  ‘You care to give us a preview?’ I asked Travis when we caught up with him.

  ‘There might be a change of plan,’ he said.

  ‘There might?’

  ‘Okay, there will.’

  ‘Surprise, surprise,’ I said. ‘Give it to me.’

  ‘Sorry, Vin, but you’ll have to hear it from the colonel – orders.’

  Firestone was waiting with Biruta, Lockhart, and the two men from the Mercedes and their bodyguards. The tour arrived pretty much en masse, and then split into either Camp Leila or Camp Fo.

  ‘The civilians with Firestone and Lockhart,’ I said to Travis under my breath. ‘What’s their story?’

  Before I co
uld get an answer, Firestone held up his hands and said, ‘People . . . can I please have everyone’s attention?’ He waited until the room had quietened down. ‘A couple of items. First of all, congratulations to everyone for putting on such a wonderful show. It was a huge morale booster for the men, knowing that people of your caliber were prepared to come all the way to Africa just to entertain them. So, again, on behalf of the whole camp, thank you.’

  A short round of self-congratulatory applause followed. I noticed that neither Twenny Fo nor Leila was clapping.

  ‘Second, we’ve had a request from the French. Now the French – the folks who brought you in on their choppers – provide the lion’s share of the UN peacekeeping force across the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They’ve formally asked if you would be prepared, on your way home, to delay your trip by just one evening,’ and he held up an index finger to underscore the point, ‘to give a performance to their peacekeepers in Goma.’

  Everyone looked at each other for a reaction.

  ‘This has been on the cards from the beginning, hasn’t it?’ I whispered to Travis.

  ‘Not as far as I knew,’ he replied.

  I stared at him.

  ‘Okay, I apologize.’

  ‘Not accepted.’

  All I could do was shake my head. Arlen had assured me that PSO security issues would transcend all others. In this instance, a higher-up who spent most of his time with his lips on the rim of a cocktail glass had made a promise or repaid a favor and, if Fo and Leila agreed to the diversion, there was nothing I could say to stop it.

  ‘The request has come through proper channels,’ Firestone continued. ‘And it’s been given the green light by Washington and your respective management, but the decision is up to y’all, of course. Unfortunately, though, we must have your answer within the hour so we can pave the way with the French MONUC forces.’

  The stagehands and dancers were mostly shrugging or nodding as they discussed it, their body language saying, ‘What the hell . . . Why not?’ I glanced at Leila. Her arms were folded, and there was a frown on her face. Seemed, for once, we were on the same page.

  ‘Well, I’ll leave y’all to talk it over,’ Firestone said. ‘And once again, thank you so much for the fantastic show.’

  ‘What do you think?’ Travis asked me.

  ‘You know what I think.’ Then I turned to Cassidy, West, Rutherford, and Ryder and said, ‘Feel free to agree or disagree, but I say no.’

  No one said yes.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ asked Travis.

  ‘There are only five PSOs providing protection for thirty people,’ I answered.

  ‘That’s a big consideration, obviously.’

  ‘Though not big enough, obviously. Leaving the numbers aside, we have no appreciation of what the situation is like in the DRC.’

  ‘True,’ he said.

  But I knew he didn’t care what I had to say. The only people he wanted to hear from were Leila and Twenny Fo. I was sure about Leila’s position. Twenny Fo was the variable. My take on him was that he actually wanted to be here for reasons I didn’t fully understand. Question was, did he want to be here longer?

  The rapper turned and faced Leila, and once again their courtiers and hangers-on lined up against each other for a showdown.

  ‘I have scripts to read, an album to cut. I’m leaving,’ said Leila, loud enough to be heard throughout the room.

  Twenny Fo walked over to her. ‘C’mon, Leila. One day extra,’ he said, ‘That’s all they askin’.’

  ‘No,’ she said, her weight on one leg, arms folded tightly across her chest.

  ‘When we was together, we promised ourselves we would give some-thin’ back to our fighting boys,’ Twenny pleaded. ‘Come to Africa, make a contribution, and see where we come from. We were gonna tour, remember? And then our managements got involved, and it got whittled back and whittled back again, and then it was down to one concert. Now we got t’ opportunity to do one more. It’s jus’ one more. The people here are makin’ a sacrifice. What sacrifice we makin’?’

  I was starting to wonder about Twenny Fo. Just maybe all the bad boy crap was record company marketing and there was more to Fo than he was prepared to admit in public. And then there was Peanut – the guy standing behind Twenny, chewing on a Mars Bar, barely engaged with the situation. The kid was plainly a float short of a raft, yet the rapper had taken him in and was looking after him.

  Leila eyed her ex-boyfriend. ‘Maybe if you hadn’t got with that bitch from Electric Skank, or whatever they called, we’d have had us a different story here,’ she said.

  Shaquand said, ‘Uh-huh.’

  Ayesha said, ‘You know it.’

  ‘I didn’t get with no one,’ Twenny said, palms face up. ‘You’re talkin’ about photos in a motherfuckin’ magazine. They made somethin’ innocent into somethin’ else, you feel me? You know what they like.’

  ‘I think you’re lyin’ to me like you always do.’

  The rapper shook his head. ‘C’mon, Leila. We’re in Africa, baby. You ever gonna come back here?’

  ‘I don’ know why I came here in the first place.’

  ‘We wuz asked. And we wanted to do some good. Just one more day.’

  Leila shifted her weight to the other leg and placed a hand on her hip. ‘No.’

  ‘C’mon . . .’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Leila . . .’

  The singer sighed heavily and looked up at the ceiling.

  ‘It’s only one more night,’ he reminded her.

  Something about her stance suggested that she might be wavering. ‘One show. That’s it. But you owe me.’

  ‘All right!’ Twenny exclaimed and stepped forward to embrace her. Leila held up a hand to palm him off.

  ‘Don’t think this changes anything ’tween us,’ she warned him. ‘And you can be sure I will collect.’

  I pictured a couple of pounds of flesh.

  ‘Sure, okay. But dis is right.’ Twenny stepped back and went into a huddle with Boink and Snatch.

  I could smell something coming, the scent building in strength the way a siren increases in volume the closer it gets.

  ‘Excuse me, Colonel,’ said Lockhart to Travis. ‘There are some people I’d like you to meet. This is Piers Pietersen from Swedish American Gold. And this is Charles White.’

  Pietersen was the tall guy with blond hair and blue eyes. White was black with a stocky Neanderthal physique and a heavy jaw that reminded me of Magilla Gorilla. Who were these guys? And who were their goons, a small posse of heavy-set knuckle-draggers of mixed genealogy who looked vaguely African but were probably from someplace else?

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Lockhart said, introducing the players and ignoring the hired help. ‘This is Lieutenant Colonel Travis. The colonel was responsible for organizing the show you saw this evening.’

  Handshakes ensued.

  Then Lockhart noticed me standing next to Travis. ‘Oh, and this is . . .’ his eyes dropped to the name tape on my pocket, ‘. . . Cooper, rank unknown.’ I saw his eyes snag briefly on my OSI patches before turning away. I didn’t rate a handshake. He turned to Travis. ‘If possible, Mr Pietersen and Mr White would like a word with Leila.’

  ‘Leila would be delighted,’ Travis said.

  I wasn’t so sure. Delight was not something I’d seen her do. But the special agent side of me was intrigued. Why was a guy from Swedish American Gold hanging around a US Army training base? Who was Mr White? And why were they buddies with Mr Kornfak & Greene? I followed them over to where Leila was standing, and Travis handled the introductions. The meeting was short. Leila claimed fatigue and a headache, delight eluding her, and Travis had a second concert to organize before he hit the sack. Tomorrow was going to be a big, bad day in a country I knew nothing about, except for the one comment Arlen had made about the Democratic Republic of Congo across the border being the problem child these days.

  Merde’

  ‘Aren’t
we supposed to be heading north-east?’ I said into the microphone, looking over LeDuc’s shoulder and checking our heading on the compass among the flight instruments.

  The French pilot’s now-familiar voice came through my headset over the cacophony of the Puma’s whirling parts.

  ‘There is a front all the way from Lake Kivu to Kigali, but a narrow band of clear weather is on the DRC side of the border. This is the best choice,’ he said.

  I’d been briefed that Goma was only a hundred klicks away and just inside the DRC, as Cyangugu was just inside Rwanda. The plan I agreed to was to fly parallel to the border heading generally nor’ north east, keeping the aircraft within the relative safety of Rwandan territory and ducking across into the DRC only when we were adjacent to the MONUC encampment. Instead we were flying northwest across the border with the vast expanse of Lake Kivu away on our right when it should have been stretched out beneath us. A thick band of black cloud sat low over the lake and, to the east of its shoreline, gray wisps of rain hung from the underside of the cloud base like veils of a spider web. Flashes of lightning rippled through mighty thunderheads. Above us, however, the sky was a friendly late afternoon blue, the color mothers dress baby boys in. I conceded defeat. The flight path was the Frenchman’s call, just as the security arrangements were mine. Supposedly.

  ‘We won’t arrive in twenty minutes’ flying time. It will be closer to fifty,’ said LeDuc.

  At least Travis had listened to my request to cut the show down – an unplugged version of the one given at Cyangugu. So on this trip, there’d be no stagehands, no dancers, no pyrotechnics, and no Ryder stand-in. At first, Leila had put up a fight, but then Ryder had a word with Ayesha, who then fed it to Leila that she was the only entertainer the men really cared about seeing. Of course, the diva found this argument utterly convincing.