Ghost Watch (20 page)

‘Strategic withdrawal,’ Rutherford said. ‘You know, we pull back, make a plan . . .’

The big man didn’t buy it. ‘You leavin’ him behind, yo,’ he said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, angry, disappointed, and helpless.

‘No one’s getting left behind,’ I told him and waited for lightning to strike me dead because, as things stood, we really didn’t have very much choice but to leave Deryck and the others to whatever fate held in store for them.

‘Bull fucking shit, motherfuckers,’ said Boink, seething, seeing through the lie.

‘You
can’t
leave them behind,’ said Leila. ‘No sir, I won’t allow it.’

Ryder opened his mouth to speak but I cut him off with a look before he said something he’d regret.

‘We need to move because the danger is still too close.’ I didn’t wait for consensus. They got the drop on us once; next time we might not be so lucky. ‘Get your personal items and let’s go. Leave nothing behind.’

None of the principals moved.

‘Now,’ I said.

Still no movement.

‘
Hello?
’

Ayesha began to walk and resistance from the others crumbled. Our principals seemed to give a collective shrug and put one foot in front of the other. I wasn’t going to complain. We stopped by the nearest anthill. West kicked the top off the mound, and wiped his face and neck with the foul-smelling dirt while he explained why.

‘I’m not doing that!’ Leila exclaimed.

‘Malaria is not something you want, ma’am,’ said West. ‘It’s a bitch to get rid of. You get chills, fevers, enlarged spleen and liver. Get it bad enough and it’ll kill you. The mosquitoes carry it, along with Dengue Fever, Philariasis and River Blindness. The dirt mixed with dead ant will keep them at bay.’

‘No.’

Ayesha rubbed the dirt on her neck, face and hands. Boink did likewise.

‘There’s no paparazzi here,’ I reminded the celebrity.

‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’ she said as she resigned herself to what she considered ignominy and smeared a handful of dirt on her cheeks.

‘Whatever gives you that idea, ma’am?’

‘You’re smiling.’

I looked away and took Cassidy forward to scout the path ahead. The volume of water coming down the hill was mind-boggling, the ground criss-crossed by rivulets gurgling, splashing and dribbling. We picked our way silently in the dark through the dense foliage, heading for the deep, rumbling sound of a massive volume of water tumbling and boiling in a confined space; a waterfall, perhaps. It turned out to be a ravine like the others we’d encountered. I reconnoitered upstream a hundred meters while Cassidy headed down and found us a fallen tree to use as a bridge. Fifty metres further on, another ravine. We crossed this one by wading through a waist-deep pool of icy water where the current wasn’t as strong. With luck, the ravines were natural barriers that discouraged patrols. Not far beyond this second ravine, we came across three trees in a clump, surrounding a small room-sized clearing. Thick liana vines hung down from branches hidden somewhere in the total blackness of the canopy. This was as good a place as any to hole up and get some rest. It was two thirty-five in the morning and we were all dead on our feet.

I split the watches between Cassidy, Rutherford and me – I took the first – and everyone else did their best to sleep until dawn, the women, wrapped in a poncho, spooning each other. LeDuc, Cassidy, West, Rutherford and Boink shared two more ponchos between them.

Shivering in the light drizzle, I sat with my feet and ass in a puddle with a Nazarian and M4 for company, and counted frogs jumping through the water that ran down the hill, some of them chased by large black snakes. To keep myself awake and the exhaustion at bay, I thought about the Chinese guy and what he might have been doing in the FARDC camp. I agreed with West that he probably had a connection to the weapons, but was that where it ended? I thought about Twenny Fo and the assurance I’d given Boink about us leaving no one behind and his reaction to it. I thought about Fournier and what might have happened to him; about Peanut; about the officer on his knees with his hands lying twitching in the mud in front of his eyes. I thought about the FARDC troops shooting RPGs into the Puma. I thought about the patrol ambushing us, and about the futter of Cas-sidy’s black throwing knife as it flew like an attack butterfy, burying itself in the back of the African soldier’s head. I thought it was luck of the most fucked-up kind that, given the size of the DRC, we should come down in the middle of a firefight. I mean, what were the odds? And something about all this congealed into a vague pattern that left me with a feeling of unease, which led to thoughts of Anna and the office at the Oak Ridge facility and the black hole in her chest; her heart pumping furiously while her life leaked onto the carpet through the ragged wound in her back.

Half an hour into my one-hour watch, footsteps on the leaf litter behind caused me to squeeze the Nazarian tighter, but it was Leila. I wondered what she wanted.

‘You should be asleep, ma’am,’ I told her as she walked in front of me.

‘I couldn’t. Too many ants. And I . . . I wanted to thank you for bringing Ayesha back for me.’

I hadn’t done it for her, but I let it slide. ‘There’s no need to thank me.’

‘Just doing your job, right?’

‘It’s going to be a long day tomorrow,’ I reminded her. ‘You need to get your rest.’

‘Do you find me attractive, Vin?’

I wasn’t sure which part of that surprised me the most, and then decided it was the fact that she knew my name. ‘I’m not sure I know what you mean, ma’am,’ I said, stalling.

‘Call me Leila, okay?’

‘Sure.’ I said, nearly putting ‘ma’am’ after it.

‘Well? Do you?’

‘Do I what?’

‘Find me attractive?’

Hmm . . . one of the more unexpected questions I could have had to answer, given that it was three in the morning, we were in the middle of the rainforest, and she’d given me the impression that she thought my station in the universe was a rung above dirt. I thought about the answer. Yeah, she was beautiful, as well as sultry, and even sexy, in a put-you-over-my-knee kind of way, but attractive? No, she was way too selfish, too spoilt, too needy and too narcissistic for my tastes. I liked women who were happy to concentrate on
me
, not on themselves – even if they were faking it.

She sighed impatiently. I was taking far too long to answer, obviously. ‘What I want to know is whether you want to fuck me?’

‘What?’ I said, the question making me gawp.

She kneeled in front of me, threw her hair back and slid down the zipper on her jacket.

‘Stop right there, ma’am,’ I told her. Going to sleep on guard duty was a punishable offense, and, though I wasn’t sure of the statute, getting laid while on it was probably in the same ballpark. And besides, being completely sober, I had enough control to realize that the offer was going to come with strings attached – make that steel cables. I knew enough about Leila by now to understand that she was used to having her way, even if she had to work a little to get it.

‘If you call me “ma’am” one more time, I’ll slap you,’ she warned me.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m a woman, you’re a man . . .’

‘You’re a woman who wants something and you think I’m the man who can make it happen. And none of it has anything to do with sex.’

‘Fuck . . .’ Leila sat on her haunches and pulled the zip back up to her neck.

‘So what’s going on?’ I asked her.

‘I don’t like you, Cooper.’

‘You don’t like me so much, you want to get jiggy with me.’

Silence.

‘What is this about, aside from me being irresistible?’ She glared at me. ‘Leila, I’m gonna have to ask you to go back with the others and—’

‘Not long ago, Deryck and I had something special,’ she blurted. ‘I was hoping that we’d find a way back to each other on this trip. That’s the real reason I went through with it – this concert. Losing him has taught me that. And now you’re gonna leave him to die.’

‘And you think a little hubba-hubba with me will get you what you want?’

Leila stared at me. Even though I couldn’t see her eyes in the darkness, I knew that they were projecting waves of anger. There was a time not too long ago when I would have given the consequences a careless shrug and put this woman on her back anyway, but that was before Oak Ridge. I considered the best way to handle this and decided that subtlety wasn’t my friend.

‘Do you want to die here, too?’ I asked her.

‘No.’

‘Leila, there’s a better-than-even chance that none of us will get out of here alive. We’re surrounded by hostiles in a foreign environment and we’re on the run. We have no radio, next to no food, zero intel and limited ammunition. The odds of a successful rescue are massively weighted against us. If we try to do what you want, go to the FARDC camp and demand the release of our principals,
our
survival chances will reduce to somewhere around zero. Said another way, and you’re forcing me to be blunt, your ex has ceased to be a priority. Like it or not, keeping you, Ayesha and Boink breathing is top of our hit parade right now.’

Leila stood up and looked down at me. ‘You ever been in love, Cooper?’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Everything,’ she said.

‘Look, I can’t –
won’t
– risk everyone’s life because you believe your needs are more important.’

Leila turned and walked off, after she’d taken a few steps pausing to say, ‘One day, Cooper, you’re going regret that we ever met.’

I watched her walk up the hill and the old Cooper shook his head at the missed opportunity. If I’d let her have her way with me and then said no to the quid pro quo, would I have been any worse off than I was now?

The new post-Anna Cooper, however, knew what she meant about love giving everything meaning, and he congratulated me for realizing that actions had consequences and that, for once, the old Cooper had considered what they might be before letting his dick out to play.

Leila’s poster came to mind, the one showing the star all steamed up, her sexual appetite looking for a solid three-course meal. And the old Cooper wished the new Cooper would go get lost in the forest.

At three forty-five, I got another tap on the shoulder. It was Cassidy.

‘You’re early,’ I told him.

‘Couldn’t sleep. The ants in this place are gonna be a problem. Anything out there I should know about?’

What I want to know is whether you want to fuck me?
‘Yeah, I’ve seen a thousand sets of frogs legs hopping past. Should make LeDuc happy.’

I left the sergeant to the watch, walked over to the trees and found some steaming rancid warmth under the poncho with the men. Despite the ants, sleep took me away almost immediately. It started out peaceful enough, but then I found myself alone with my usual nightmares – on top of a cold brown mountain with the remains of my unit as sword-wielding half Taliban–half scorpion creatures arrived to cut up my men. And then I was falling backward from a great height as a human wave of fanatics charged while I froze in the snow beside a dead man whose machine gun fired bullets that had no effect on the advancing horde. After which, pink froth bubbled from the crimson hole in a ribcage while I reached in and tried to find the bullet. And then I was on a wind-blown hill, strangers blaming me for Anna’s death while scorpions poured out of the earth that had been freshly dug for a coffn.

Lying in the semi-conscious zone between sleep and wakefulness, I had the feeling that there were other twisted memories on the way, or that maybe I’d replay these ones and twist them still further, so I opened my eyes. It was five-forty and my muscles were cramped in the fetal position. Somewhere above the canopy, the sky was sliding to gray and mist was floating through the trees. The rain had stopped. I untangled myself from various arms and legs, brushed ants from my neck and forearms, and walked stiffy a dozen meters from our bivouac to take a leak. Rutherford was on duty. I walked across and down to him and said, ‘Morn—’

He cut me short and informed me with a couple of hand movements that a five-man enemy patrol had crossed the second ravine and was coming our way.

I stood absolutely still rather than taking cover, movement being what the human eye is most sensitive to. It was difficult to see the men and I eventually picked them up thirty meters below us and to our right.

As Rutherford indicated, it was a six-man patrol, and they looked to be on the job, moving slowly and carefully through the mist, no one talking or smoking. Our position was relatively well hidden among scrubby bush. In this low light we were black on black to them. Confirming this, one of their number looked our way but didn’t see us. The men kept walking, heading right to left across our front. I wondered what the purpose of the patrol might be. Were they out looking for us?

Three of them carried QCWs, three had assault rifles, and one of them had another type weapon slung over his shoulder, a telescopic sight slipped into its top rail: a sniper rifle. All six carried packs.

When we were well behind in their six o’clock, I went to wake the rest of our band while Rutherford kept watch. The SOCOM boys woke quietly when I squeezed their shoulders, their eyes opening wide – alert. Ryder needed heavy prodding. LeDuc was already awake. With a bunch of hand signals I gave them all the story. As I saw it, there was no doubt about our course of action. We couldn’t have an enemy patrol operating in our area. Also, the Africans had guns, which meant they had ammo and we needed that. The brief council having concluded, each of us took a civilian to wake, covering their mouths with our hands so that no one made any noise.