Ghost Watch (23 page)

‘
Nous sommes Américains. Nous sommes avec vous. Nous portons le drapeau blanc,
’ LeDuc repeated.

‘
Mais vous êtês Français?
’ the man asked LeDuc.

‘
Oui, je suis Français,
’ LeDuc answered. ‘MONUC.’

An exchange between the two men followed as the African inspected Leila and Ayesha. He seemed to like what he saw. He then moved up and down the line, not so happy to see the US Army and the USAF.

The kid from the squad, accompanied by someone probably not much older than him, stepped forward, picked up our weapons and ejected the magazines before placing them back on the ground. Junior snatched the backpack from Ryder and stuffed the mags into it.

‘He accepts that we are not their enemy,’ LeDuc told us, ‘but he is still nervous. He is only a junior lieutenant and I think he is not sure what he should do.’

The officer nodded as LeDuc spoke, as if he understood English, but he plainly didn’t. He approached me and said, ‘
Vous êtes Américain, hein? Ou en êtes-vous en Amérique?
’

‘What did he say?’ I asked LeDuc.

‘He asked whereabouts in America you come from.’

‘Tell him Shitsville, New Jersey.’

Whether the lieutenant understood or not, he nodded, moved up the line and stopped at Marcel. ‘
Parlez-vous Français?
’ he asked, looking the man up and down.

Sweat leaked from every pore on Marcel’s body. He shook his head, maybe a little too vehemently. ‘N-no, no speak French,’ he managed to get past his lips.

The lieutenant nodded and something caught his attention on the ground, sticking out from under Cassidy’s boot. He bent down, tapped Cassidy’s leg to get him to shift his weight, then picked the object up. Jesus – the fexcuffs removed from Marcel’s wrists. He twirled them in front of his eyes and looked at Cassidy and then at Marcel. Did he understand their signifcance? The lieutenant’s squad passed a couple of quiet, nervous comments between themselves.

The officer didn’t say anything, but kept looking at the cuffs and then back at us.

‘
Nous sommes amis,
’ LeDuc reassured him – we’re friends.

‘
Oui . . . oui,
’ the officer said, puzzled by something. But then he seemed to come to some agreement with himself and said, ‘
Amis.
’ Friends. He motioned to the kid to pass him the pack containing the magazines. He opened it, pulled one of them out, inspected it briefly and then tossed it back in. From the hollow sound it made, I knew it was the empty one, the mag from Marcel’s weapon. He extracted another mag from the bag and gave it the once-over, dropped it back in, frowned and zipped up the bag. I didn’t like any of this.

‘
Les armes de Chine,
’ he said, motioning at the guns at our feet.

He’d observed that we had some Chinese weapons – that much French I could take a stab at understanding.

‘
Oui
,’ LeDuc spoke up. ‘
Nous avons pris vos adversaires.
’

‘
Avez-vous les tuer?
’

‘
Oui
.’

‘What was that about?’ I asked LeDuc, his exchange with the officer having lost me pretty much out of the starting gate.

‘I told him that we killed his enemies and took their weapons.’

The lieutenant and his unit seemed to have relaxed somewhat, their beaming smiles being a big clue. Apparently, we’d done the right thing here at least.

‘Tell him that we are survivors from a helicopter crash and that several of our party have been captured by his enemies,’ I said.

LeDuc told him and the man nodded, taking it in.

He walked past Leila and Ayesha and grinned like an idiot as he looked them up and down. I had no doubt about what was on his mind. Two minutes alone with Leila and I knew he’d change it.

‘Can you tell this clown to stop leering at me?’ said Leila, flicking her eyes at me.

‘LeDuc, tell the officer the women in our company have HIV,’ I told him.

‘What?’ Leila spat.

‘I’m just giving him a good reason to stop thinking about what he’s thinking about.’

LeDuc passed on the news about the unfortunate condition of our women and the officer shook his head, saddened, and took a couple of paces back, as if Leila and Ayesha were contagious.

‘See?’ I said. ‘Worked.’

Leila’s eyes flashed dangerously, like some kind of poisonous sea creature changing color.

The lieutenant moved on to Boink, and looked him over like he couldn’t quite believe humans grew that big. And, mostly, he was right.

‘Wass this motherfucker want?’ Twenny’s lieutenant asked.

‘Don’t know,’ said West calmly. ‘Just smile and be cool, Gigantor.’

The African said something to Boink.

‘Wad he say?’ Boink asked.

LeDuc informed him. ‘He said you must be very rich to be as big as you are.’

‘Motherfuck,’ Boink muttered.

The officer said something in rapid-fire French to his patrol, and then addressed LeDuc.

‘He wants us to follow him,’ said the Frenchman.

‘Do we know for sure which outfit these men belong to?’ I asked.

‘
Oui
. They are NCDP – your allies.’

‘All right!’ said Ryder. ‘Friends and allies.’

‘The jury’s still out on both points,’ I reminded him, doing an impression of a smile, my face still a little swollen.

The unit part-led, part-escorted us diagonally up the hill, toward the extremity of their lines, LeDuc chatting to the officer as we climbed. Once on the crest, we turned roughly northwest and followed the ridgeline, the sound of small arms fire getting closer and crackling like squeezed bubble wrap. Eventually, we came across soldiers guarding the flanks of the rebel’s line. The men stopped what they were doing and stared at us, many standing as we walked by. Some gave Leila and Ayesha predatorial grins.

‘So what’s the verdict?’ Rutherford asked. ‘Are they friendly?’

‘Have they shot us?’ LeDuc answered. ‘We are lucky they are not Mai-Mai or Ugandan renegades.’

‘If you say so,’ I told him, not convinced.

In attitude, age, numbers and disposition, these men seemed identical to the FARDC force opposing them. The only differences I could see were in the uniforms they wore – superseded US Army jungle pattern BDUs. They carried mostly M16s and some AK-47s. I saw a couple of M16s propped against a log and went close enough to see that both had their numbers intact, which told me that they were meant to have them.
Friends and allies.

We came out of the rainforest on the crest of the ridgeline, and an unobstructed view across to the eastern horizon opened out. The trail took us close to the edge of empty space. I looked over a precipice and the rock face quickly fell away to a sheer cliff – a drop of close to a hundred and fifty feet. At the base of the cliff was a lake of milky blue water. I’d been wondering why the FARDC company hadn’t just retreated to another, more tactically favorable, position, which suggested that maybe it was the rebels who were pinned down up here on this hill, forced into a corner of sorts with the cliff at their backs and nowhere to retreat to. But even if that were the situation, it was a hell of a position to have to assault. A little down the hill, in the dappled light streaming through the treetops, I could see a mortar crew working up a sweat, the explosions hammering the FARDC positions in the valley below, the sound muffled by eight hundred meters or so of rainforest.

This HQ was roughly the same size as the FARDC’s one that West and I had scoped, though the rebel HQ was better appointed, with half a dozen US Army tents similar to the ones our forces used in Iraq and Afghanistan. Several uniformed men were standing behind a trestle table, in discussion over a map, surrounded by a cohort of men armed with newish MP-5 machine guns. West nudged my elbow and motioned off to the opposite side of the area, where four corpses with black, swollen tongues and broken necks were hanging motionless from the bough of a tree, entertaining a black swarm of flies. A bird perched on one of the heads, leaned over and nonchalantly pecked at an eye socket. A blue patch on the corpse’s shoulder told me that these were DRC men. I glanced at Marcel, who appeared to be shaking, on the edge either of falling to the ground in a blubbering heap or breaking into a run, neither of which would be healthy for him, or us, right at the moment.

Even though the men at the trestle tables were maybe only in their late twenties, or early thirties, they were obviously the commanders. The lieutenant escorting us waited till one of the men looked up and motioned him over, which happened eventually. The lieutenant marched to the desk and saluted a short, fat guy in his early thirties, who wore a thick leopard-skin headband, Ray-Ban ‘Aviator’ sunglasses and held a black walking stick with gold handle. A brief conversation ensued between them and then Tubby with the fancy headdress came over to us, accompanied by the lieutenant and three of the men with the Heckler & Koch rattles.

‘Good morning,’ he said in a deep French-accented voice. ‘We are Colonel Makenga.’

Given the use of the plural ‘we’ here, I wondered whether one of the folks accompanying him shared his name and rank. Or maybe English was not his first language and he’d simply gotten it wrong. Or – third option – the guy was an asshole, prone to using the royal ‘we’ on account of his ego was selling tickets on itself.

‘Which one of you is in command?’ he continued.

‘Me,’ I said. ‘Major Cooper, United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations.’

‘We are pleased to meet you, Major.’

Hmm . . . option three.

‘And what are you and your people doing in our quiet little corner of the world?’ He glanced at Leila and Ayesha and gave them the slightest of bows, creating another couple of chins that butted up against all the others and pushed out beads of greasy sweat along the crease lines.

The colonel’s lieutenant hadn’t had the opportunity to pass on our story in any detail, so I gave him the headlines about us being on our way to the MONUC compound at Goma, where two of our party were to give a concert for the UN contingent, before our French-made helicopter decided to fall out of the sky.

He stroked his chins while I talked, appearing to be in thinking mode.

‘We came down close to your enemy’s line,’ I continued, ‘and several of our party were captured and taken prisoner.’

‘Hmm, that is not good news,’ he said. ‘So . . . how can we possibly be of assistance?’

‘We need to contact our people at Cyangugu, let them know what’s happened. So, if you’ve got a satellite phone . . .’

He gave a big sigh and then shook his head like he was deeply sorry. ‘We agree that this could be a course of action; however, your country has seen fit not to provide us with such luxuries as satellite phones. Our communications here are extremely limited.’

‘Is there any way we can get word out?’

‘We could send a runner, perhaps, but not in our current predicament. We’re afraid you will have to stay with us.’

He admired the handle on his walking stick – a solid gold rooster. Chunky gold-link bracelets manacled his wrists, and a nugget of gold the size of a pork knuckle swung from his thick neck on a gold chain. Even aside from the fact that he wore more bling than a Reno pimp, there was something off-putting about this guy. Maybe it was the affected speech patterns together with the disconcerting fact that, snake-like, he didn’t appear to blink. Or perhaps it was the violence that seemed to sit, suppressed, just below the civility. I could imagine this guy petting a puppy one minute and then dashing its brains out with that cane of his the next. And, of course, the four hanging ornaments looking at their toes on the edge of the compound helped this allusion along nicely. The bird perched on one of those ornaments squawked and flew off.

‘Oh,’ Makenga said, raising a finger as if he’d just had an afterthought. ‘Your Chinese weapons. Our lieutenant informs us that you claim to have taken them from our enemies down in the valley.’

Claim?
‘That’s correct,’ I said.

‘Along with the weapons you were captured with, there was a sniper rifle and high-power binoculars.’

I saw that all our weapons, backpacks and camelbacks were collected on one of the trestle tables.

Captured?
‘Yeah,’ I said, wondering where this was going.

‘How do we know you weren’t sent to kill us?’

What?!
Even though the use of the words ‘claim’ and ‘captured’ were ringing alarm bells, the question was so left of field that I found myself wondering whether this guy’s ham and cheese on rye was missing something important, like the ham and cheese. I noticed again that there were a lot of guys standing around with MP-5s. I also noticed that they were now glaring at us and, from the expressions on their faces, all of them appeared to have eaten something that hadn’t agreed with them.

‘Pardon me?’ I said, trying to think fast. I felt a little like I was back in LeDuc’s chopper when things were spinning out of control.

‘How can we be sure that you and your party are not mercenaries?’