The Consignment (27 page)

CHAPTER 35

“If Internal Security gets hold of me,” Trevanian concluded, “I’m a dead man.” It was an hour before daybreak, and I’d been fetched from my bunk over at the hangar by the pink-faced Brit soldier and taken to Trevanian’s office in the terminal. Trevanian had just spent ten minutes alone with me, explaining the problems he’d had checking out my story. What had finally convinced him, it seemed, was a rumor he’d picked up from a highly placed source in the Congolese government. The rumor was that Cecille Lagundi’s father was talking about offering his Internal Security goons a bounty on Trevanian’s head once the rebels were suppressed. “Does that make you happy?” Trevanian said.

I studied the map on the wall. The colored pins around Mbuji-Mayi had been drastically rearranged. “I didn’t sign the statement in order to get you killed. I signed it to get myself out of jail.” I faced him. “You help me get my son out of Dujanka, and I’ll retract it.”

“That won’t be enough to save me.”

I lifted a shoulder. A retraction was the only thing I had to offer.

He got up and came around to the wall map and pointed. “The rebels have almost been pushed out of Mbuji in the last few hours,” he said. I glanced at him. The only way an operational success like that could have been achieved was with infantry. Trained infantry, using U.S. night-vision equipment. He felt my glance, but let it ride. “By lunchtime, the place should be secure.”

“So?”

“When they lose Mbuji, the rebels won’t retreat east, they’ll come this way.” Trevanian swept his hand southeast of Mbuji, straight over Dujanka. My stomach turned over. “They’ll grab what they can and destroy the rest as they go.”

“You can’t stop them?”

“They’ll be spread out for miles through the bush. Moving like that, they’re not a target anyone can hit.”

I asked him what kind of defense existed out at the mines.

“The bigger places have got private security arrangements. Mostly with me.”

“Dujanka?”

He turned his head, no.

I looked at the map. Brad was out there, stranded and vulnerable. He didn’t know it, but within hours he was going to become part of the front line. I asked Trevanian about getting a chopper out there, airlifting Brad and his colleagues back to Kinshasa. He waved my suggestion aside.

“Here’s the deal. I’ve got a chopper leaving in twenty minutes. It’s going out past Dujanka to Zanda.” He placed his finger on a large mine southeast of Dujanka, near the Angolan border. “It’ll resupply the security team at Zanda, then fly back to Mbuji to join the cleanup.”

“It could land at Dujanka on the way out.”

“That’s the option. I could get your son out to Zanda.”

I asked him about security there.

“I’ve got a team there, ex–British army. Once they’re resupplied, they won’t be overrun.”

I turned it over. “The government’s paying you to help them fight the rebels.”

“That’s right.”

“And the mining companies are paying you to defend their mines.”

“What’s this got to do with your son?”

“Nothing.”

“Right.”

We looked at each other.

“Okay,” I said. “Get Brad out to Zanda, and I give you my word, I’ll retract the statement.”

“I don’t need your word. You and your wife are coming with me.” When my forehead creased, he said, “That’s the condition. Either you two come with me, or your son stays where he is.”

“What’s this got to do with my wife? If you want me to go, okay. But leave my wife out of it.”

“Both of you, or no deal.”

“You want to tell me why?”

“Sure.” He turned from the map and dropped into the chair behind his desk. He looked up at me. “You signed my death warrant. Until it’s unsigned, you and your family are going to stay close to me. Close enough for me to reach. Do we understand one another?”

We understood one another. I didn’t like it one little bit.

When I returned to the hangar, there were the first signs of people stirring before sunup. Fiona was already out of her bunk and dressed, I found her sitting by herself at one end of a trestle table, near a lamp, drinking coffee. When I slid onto the bench beside her, she made as if to rise. I placed a hand firmly on her arm.

“This is about Brad.”

She darted an uncertain glance at me, then slowly sank back down. I quickly explained the situation out at Mbuji-Mayi to her just as Trevanian had explained it to me. Then I told her about the chopper. “It’s leaving in fifteen minutes. We’ve got seats if we want them.”

“We can get to Brad?”

A guy wandered from his bunk to the coffee machine. I lowered my voice. “This guy providing the chopper, his name’s Trevanian. He’s the one I was dealing with in New York. The one who bought the Haplon shipment, the one with the diamond you analyzed?” Fiona nodded. “Well, there were other diamonds. They got stolen, probably by the daughter of the Congolese Minister for Police. The daughter’s trying to get me to blame Trevanian for the theft.” Fiona cocked her head, not sure where this was leading. “Trevanian wants to keep me close, he needs some time to figure out how to deal with the daughter. If he gets me to this mine at Zanda, that’s perfect. His people there can hold me as long as he likes. Problem is, he wants you and Brad there too.”

“Why?”

“Leverage against me.”

She gave me a sideways look. “What’s our alternative?”

“We don’t go.”

“And Brad?”

“He stays in Dujanka and takes his chances.”

“That’s not an alternative.”

I didn’t respond.

“Are you trying to scare me or something? Don’t you want us to go?”

“I’m trying to be honest with you.”

“Well, you’re two years too late.”

The guy from the coffee machine came and sat opposite us. I gave him the eye and he shuffled away from us down the table. I faced Fiona again. She was staring at the steam rising from her mug.

“This isn’t about us,” I said. “This is about Brad.”

She got up. “Let’s go before we miss the goddamn chopper.”

The first thing I saw as we climbed aboard the chopper were the Haplon boxes, about a dozen of them, each one containing a set of four-thousand-dollar-apiece night-sights. Underneath these were cases of ammo, then, down toward the tail, unlabeled crates that I recognized as another part of the Haplon shipment, mortars and shells. At the back, more crates of P23s.

The pilot was a Brit, one of Trevanian’s men, dressed in fatigues. He nodded to us as we clambered into our seats, then turned to speak with Trevanian, who’d slid into the empty copilot’s chair beside him. The engines were already fired up, the rotors whup-whupping as they turned. I saw Fiona having trouble buckling herself into the seat harness, so I stepped across, crouching, and helped her. She pointed to the boxes, the Haplon labels.

“Night-sights,” I told her, raising my voice over the engines. She jerked her head back toward the crates. “Weapons and ammo,” I said. I snapped the harness buckle closed, then reached up over her head and flipped open the locker. I pulled out a headset and mike. I plugged the cord into its socket then handed her the unit. She shook her head. “Put it on and keep it on,” I told her firmly. When she’d put it on, I showed her how to work the mike button. “Just do what the pilot says. Stay buckled up. If you see anything the pilot should know about, hit the mike button and let him know.”

“Anything like what?”

“Like someone on the ground trying to shoot us down.”

Her eyes stayed on mine. When she saw I wasn’t joking, her jaw went tight. I squeezed her shoulder. She turned and stared out the window. Trevanian waved me back to my seat, and I sat and buckled up and put on my headset.

We lifted off smoothly, the chopper tilting forward, swinging north and then east, in moments we were passing over the airport perimeter. In the east, the gray sky was starting to color, the faintest whisper of pink. We could make out the outlines of the refinery and the storage tanks, the noxious black smoke was still billowing, blowing west over the city. As we climbed, we saw the lights of Brazzaville and Kinshasa, separated by a dark belt of water. The great river was a thick dark smudge snaking away from us into the interior, a colossal aquatic highway inland. We slowly veered southeast, and within minutes we were beyond the outer edges of the city and passing over open country. As the sun rose, we could make out the pattern of the land passing beneath us, the bare red earth, the scrub, and the rocks and trees.

After fifteen minutes, the pilot reached across and touched Trevanian’s shoulder, then pointed to a road a few miles up ahead. Through my headset, I heard him tell Trevanian, “We stay just south of that road most of the way to Mbuji.” When Trevanian nodded, the pilot pointed again. Farther up the road, there was a column of vehicles, as we got nearer we could make out trucks and armored personnel carriers. The pilot dropped a few hundred feet to give Trevanian a closer look. The open-back trucks were crammed with Congolese soldiers, they waved at us, laughing and shouting as we swept over them. Farther on, the pilot fired a test burst from the Haplon minigun mounted on the right skid of his chopper. The bullets flicked a line of dust up the side of the dirt road and disappeared into a stand of trees. Satisfied, the pilot pulled the chopper back up to cruising height.

I glanced across at Fiona. She had taken off her headset and dropped it on the floor, now she stared out the window. Rocks and red earth. Moments later, she rested her head against the glass and closed her eyes.

CHAPTER 36

We flew for more than an hour, stopping once at an army base in the bush to refuel. Dirt tracks crisscrossed the country at wide intervals. We passed no major towns, just the occasional small village, generally a collection of huts huddled together in the middle of nothing and nowhere. The few people we saw took cover when they heard the chopper, their goats and cattle scattering as we thundered across the sky. The sun was well up when I took off my headset and went across and sat next to Fiona. She stared out the window.

“What can you see?”

“Nothing.”

“It won’t be long now.”

She dipped her head. She continued staring out the window.

I wasn’t going to reconnect with her that easily, I knew my wife better than that. The white heat of her anger was passing, but now that she’d had time to think over what I’d told her about my work at Haplon, the fading heat was leaving behind a deposit like cooling lava. Untouchable. Fast becoming solid and immovable.

“I want to tell Brad myself,” I said. “About my work.” She didn’t respond, so I touched her arm. “I’d like to tell him myself.”

“I heard you.”

“You’re not making this easy.”

“No,” she agreed, facing me. “But if it makes you feel better, fine. You tell Brad, okay?”

I held my tongue. It wasn’t easy. Then Trevanian turned and signaled me back to my seat, he gestured for me to put my headset on, and Fiona turned away from me. I went back to my seat. When I’d put my headset on, Trevanian pointed.

“Over there, eleven o’clock.”

On a dirt track through the scrub, there was a column of vehicles that wasn’t throwing up any dust.

“Stationary,”
the pilot remarked as we got closer. He scoured the country farther up ahead, then pointed to a horseshoe-shaped range fifteen or twenty miles away.
“Dujanka.”
He glanced over his shoulder to be sure that I’d seen it. I nodded, then reached across and tapped Fiona on the thigh.

“Dujanka.” I pointed the range out to her. This time when I told her to put on the headset, she did. Then I pointed out to her the line of stationary vehicles.

“Is that a drilling rig?”
the pilot wondered aloud.

After a moment, Fiona hit her mike button.
“It’s a rig. It’s definitely a rig.”

The pilot nodded.
“Only place it could come from’s Dujanka.”

I exchanged a glance with Fiona. I could see that she remembered it too, what she’d told me about her last radio contact with Brad. He’d mentioned the possibility of abandoning the mine. I asked the pilot if we could go down for a closer look. Trevanian okayed it, and the chopper slowed and gently dipped.

We got down to about three hundred feet, then circled. The truck that was pulling the drilling rig had its hood up. A couple of Congolese guys were standing on the truck’s front tires, inspecting or repairing the engine, they craned around to look up at us. Trevanian trained a pair of binoculars on the convoy. After a minute, he shook his head.
“No white men.”
He handed the binoculars to me.

I focused on the truck and rig, then the trio of four-wheel-drives. The logo of Barchevsky Mining was visible on two of the doors. The black guys who’d been lounging in the shade were on their feet now, waving to us. But Trevanian was right. No white guys.

I hit the mike button.
“They’re definitely from the mine. Can we land?”

“Can you see your son?”

I shook my head.
“If he’s not down there, they’ll know where he is.”

Trevanian turned that over.
“Okay,”
he conceded.
“But we can’t put down too close or we’ll have twenty of the buggers trying to get on board.”
Then he told us how he wanted to work it. We’d land a few hundred yards from the convoy, and the pilot would keep the rotors turning. Trevanian and Fiona would stay with the pilot in the chopper, while I went and fetched Brad, or at least found out where he was.

When we had the plan straight, the pilot took the chopper down. We landed on the dirt track a few hundred yards east of the convoy. I took off my headset, and unbuckled my harness. Trevanian jumped out and came around and opened the rear door.

“Mind the rotors!” he shouted, patting his head in warning. “Keep down!” When I jumped down, he grabbed my arm and shouted in my ear. “If they stampede this way, we’ll have to take off! Make sure you’re on board before we do!”

I nodded, and he released my arm. I bent low, got myself well out past the rotors, then stood upright and walked back down the track. The track elbowed a hundred yards in front of me, the vehicles were farther on, hidden by the scrub.

It was already hot, but I walked fast, the dust rising around my ankles, perspiration rolling down my neck. I was almost at the bend before I really paid any attention to the tire tracks I’d been walking on for some while. The reason I finally noticed them was that they suddenly started zigzagging crazily, left, right, then left again. I slowed, my gaze following the tire tracks to where they slewed off the road and stopped. Then I stopped. I looked back to the chopper and saw Trevanian waving his arm at me, urging me to get on and find Brad. I almost did, but those tire marks bothered me, so I stepped off the track first to give the marks a closer inspection. I squatted on my haunches and considered the zigzag trail. Too controlled for a blowout. No nearby potholes. A puzzle.

Then I saw the other marks in the sand. Bootprints. I looked around, farther off the road, and saw bootprints everywhere. I stood up. I dropped my head to one side and looked ahead to the elbow in the track, listening. The only sound came from the chopper way behind me. Then I noticed something glinting in the sand beneath a nearby bush, and I went over. I crouched down. It was an empty magazine case from an AK47. The hairs prickled up my spine.

Then I lifted my eyes and flinched. A body lay not three yards away, behind the bush. An African, shot to pieces, there were flies but no smell, the blood was fresh.

I got up and backed away. When I hit the track I turned and walked toward the chopper, looking back over my shoulder, then I jogged. I didn’t know what I was jogging from at first, but then fifty yards short of the chopper I glimpsed men with guns moving through the bush behind me. Then I ran.

Trevanian jumped out of the chopper, dropped on one knee, and raised a gun to his shoulder. As the chopper engine picked up revs, Trevanian fired. I heard the bullets flick through the bushes away to my left, then someone behind me fired and dirt kicked up on my right. I ducked under the rotor blades, kept running, and leaped through the open door. Trevanian scrambled in after me, shouting, “Go! Go!” and a second later the chopper lifted off.

Behind us, the guys with guns were coming onto the track, trying to get a clear shot at the chopper. A bullet pinged off the rotor blades, but the chopper stayed low, skimming trees. Trevanian fired a burst out the door, then he yanked the door shut, and in moments we were clear, out of effective range. The pilot was already on his radio, relaying the news back to the nearest army base. He told them that there was rebel movement southeast of Mbuji-Mayi, a small convoy from the Dujanka mine appeared to have been ambushed twenty miles northwest of the mine, number of casualties unknown. He hung up the handset.

I slumped into my seat and looked at Fiona. She was already looking at me, her face ashen. Number of casualties unknown. I wiped the sweat from my eyes and unbuttoned my shirt. Then from his place back on the crates, Trevanian called out to us, asking if we still wanted to see Dujanka. I turned in my seat to face him. I didn’t have to speak. He got up and clambered past, instructing the pilot to fly us on to Dujanka.

The mine came up fast. We circled high overhead while Trevanian worked the binoculars, making sure, this time, about what we were getting into. The camp consisted of fewer than a dozen prefab buildings with corrugated iron roofs, all located within a short valley formed by a V-shaped range. The only track ran northwest from the camp, out of the valley, and on toward where we’d just left the stationary convoy.

“Deserted,”
Trevanian decided, handing me the binoculars.

The pilot dropped lower, did a circuit about a hundred feet above the range. I peered through the binoculars. There was no sign of life. If the camp was deserted, then everyone had been with the convoy. Everyone.

“Let’s go down,”
I said.
“I want to take a look around.”

“Both of us,”
Fiona cut in. She’d put on the headset. She had her forehead pressed to the window as she stared down at the camp.

The pilot looked to Trevanian, who finally nodded. It was clear he thought we were wasting our time.

The chopper made a fast, low pass over the camp, and when no one emerged from the buildings, we swept up the southern arm of the V, and the pilot put the chopper down near the crest. From there we could see down into the camp and out along the track to the northwest. The pilot throttled back the engines, and as the rotors idled down, Trevanian climbed back to us.

“What do you need, twenty minutes?”

“Give us half an hour.”

He checked his watch. “Maximum,” he said. “I’ll come down too.” He consulted the pilot. They decided the pilot would fire one shot if he wanted us back at the chopper, if maybe he’d heard something over the radio. Two shots if he saw vehicles approaching along the track. Trevanian clapped him on the shoulder, then the three of us got out.

The ground was rocky, we picked our way around the boulders. Then we reached a bare patch and scrambled down the slope, skidding crablike, but after a couple of minutes we hit a goat track and the walking got easier. Below us, the camp looked abandoned. The only sound from down there was the occasional popping of the iron roofs as they expanded in the heat. Behind us, the chopper engines finally died. The goat track petered out at the foot of the ridge, near a stack of fuel drums. We passed the fuel drums, walked into the dusty square in front of the buildings, and stopped. Silence.

Fiona suddenly called, “Brad!” Her voice broke, she called again, louder. The sound drifted over the camp and into the hill behind. Trevanian looked at me from the corner of his eye. Then Fiona strode toward the first building, and we followed.

The first building was the office block. Everything looked intact, there was no disorder, it seemed that the miners had taken their time, packed up what they needed, then left. Trevanian stayed in the office while Fiona and I went on to the mess hall. Six tables, benches down either side, and a kitchen out back. Empty. We went out, and across a dirt alley was a long building raised off the ground and mounted, like the office block, on steel stumps. There was a run of about a dozen identical red doors. A long porch, the railings draped with various items of laundry. It was the living quarters. Fiona went across.

“Brad!” she called, and her voice bounced off the building and drifted away.

“Leave it,” I said. “There’s no one here.”

She went up the steps, crossed to the first door, and tried the handle. It was locked, she shoved it with her shoulder but it wouldn’t move. She tried again, twice, and I finally gave up and went over.

“Stand back,” I said.

She stood back, and I stepped up and kicked the door hard. It cracked and flew open. There was a single bed inside, a side table and lamp, and a built-in closet. The bed hadn’t been made, and there was an old
Newsweek
on the floor. The room could have belonged to anyone. Fiona opened the closet door, passed a hand over the clothes on the hangers, then turned on her heel and walked out. She tried the next door, it was locked too, so she stepped back and waited for me to kick it in. I obliged, then while she went inside, I walked down the porch, kicking in the remaining doors, and once I’d finished I sat down on the steps to wait for her to get done.

She came right along, room by room, then she went into the second-to-last room and didn’t come out. I gave her a minute, then I got up and dragged myself across to the door. She was sitting on the unmade bed. The built-in closet was open, and she had an old frayed denim shirt of Brad’s clutched in her lap. Her thumb rubbed the shirt like she was actually touching him, like she had his skin beneath her hand.

I went inside. There was a faint smell of aftershave, I closed my eyes, then opened them again. On his bedside table lay a paperback. I flipped it over, and my heart lurched.
Black Hawk Down,
the story of the Mogadishu disaster. Brad, before he left the camp, had been reading about me.

Then from outside, up on the hill, came a single rifle shot, a retort that echoed and sank into silence. I sat down on the bed. Fiona raised Brad’s shirt and pressed it to her face and rocked forward. There was nothing for either of us to say. I let her cry for a while, then I put my arm around her, and she held Brad’s shirt against her eyes.

“We have to go back to that convoy,” she said.

I said nothing. I knew there was no chance in the world Trevanian was going to risk losing the chopper by flying back there. I got her up onto her feet and out on the porch, and she let go of my arm and held the railing. She said she was okay. She still had hold of Brad’s shirt.

Trevanian called to us from the door of the office block, telling us to head back to the chopper, that he’d be a couple of minutes behind. Then he went back inside.

I hung my head. I went down the steps and Fiona came after me and we walked back through the deserted camp without speaking. The heat seemed oppressive now, almost unbearably heavy. We passed the fuel dump and turned up the goat track, trudging upward. After several minutes, just short of the crest, I stopped and shielded my eyes against the sun. The chopper stood silhouetted against the blue sky. I couldn’t see the pilot, and the chopper engines were silent. Fiona stopped, put her hands on her hips, and bent to catch her breath.

I touched her arm as I went by. “Wait here.”

“What?”

“Wait,” I said, and walked on. The cockpit, I saw when I got closer, was empty. But a few steps farther, and I saw the pilot, he was lying in the shade beneath the chopper’s tail. I went over. I didn’t have long to convince him to return us to the convoy, Trevanian was already halfway up the hill behind us.