Congo Dawn Page 2

  Paradise Lost.

  Strange that only now, as he contemplated its loss, did the village administrator recognize any similarities between this place to which he’d been so reluctantly exiled long decades ago and a Garden described in the Holy Scriptures. A Garden where the first man and woman had opened their eyes to the presence of a Creator God who walked with his children.

  Had that first couple looked out as he did now over such endless, tossing, verdant waves? Had they marveled at orange, pink, and lilac flowering trees and rainbow-hued orchids spilling over branches and down tree trunks? Had they smiled or frowned at the chattering, chirping, croaking, cawing, and other noises that signaled the jungle’s richly varied animal life? Black-and-white colobus monkeys. Cockatoos and macaws. That rarest of rainforest mammals, the okapi, an odd if beautiful hybrid of zebra and giraffe. The more abundant duikers and bongo antelopes kept in check by leopards.

  And human predators as well, indication that this was not after all the original Paradise. Down below, a group of village men were just now emerging from the rainforest into an orchard of mango, citrus, papaya, and coconut palms. Among limp shapes slung across shoulders, the administrator could pick out antelope, boar, and a vine-tied clutch of pangolin, that tasty rainforest resident with the shape of an opossum and the shelled armor of an armadillo. Added to the catch of those fishermen in the pirogues, the village would eat well tonight.

  Yes, if life here was simple, isolated, precarious of existence, bowing always to the vagaries of nature that could in an instant send flood, forest fire, or pestilence to sweep away the timid hold its small band of human inhabitants had carved out on the riverbank, it was perhaps not so ill as the older man had often thought it.

  In a gesture that surprised him with its violence, he slapped the gray rock chunks from his son’s hand. “As you said, Son, when have the people under whose soil such treasures have been found ever been permitted to profit from its wealth? Tell me now! Whom have you told of this treasure of yours?”

  His son looked more bewildered and disappointed than angry at his father’s reaction. “I saw no reason to keep it secret. On the contrary, it took much persuading before my employers were convinced that I was not wasting their time.”

  The younger man held up a small, plastic-shelled oblong. The administrator alone among the villagers would recognize its purpose. A cell phone.

  “I have already let them know that I have confirmed a sufficient source to justify their interest. And why not? We will need help from the outside—much investment—to develop this treasure. The first step will be to open the old road.”

  He’d lost his father’s attention. This rocky knoll had always been a handy lookout for forest fires. But not for enemies slipping up on the village. The jungle canopy was too impenetrable for that. This time, though, the height of the stony outcropping had provided advance notice of invasion. The older man was already scrambling downward toward the village as quickly as the steep slope permitted. As soon as he was within earshot, he raised his voice in an ululating cry.

  It was too late. The roar of two helicopters swooping in low over the jungle had roused more curiosity than alarm. The villagers were hurrying into the open to stare upward as the helicopters hovered above a cassava field.

  Shiny black shoes slipped and skidded on the rock behind the administrator as his son scrambled after him. “Baba, there is no need of fear. It is only our investors.”

  But the men jumping from the helicopters’ open sides did not wear the suits or carry the briefcases of businessmen. These were predators. And not of animals, but of men. More ominously, neither did all have the dark skin or features of Congolese.

  His son was now at the older man’s side. “There has been some mistake. I will go speak to them.”

  But his father was shoving him into the cover of trees and lianas and brush with all the strength of rage and panic and despair. “No, I am chief here. I will speak for my people. You must escape. You must find help.”

  The screams had already begun. His youngest son had obeyed his orders and was no longer in view. As he strode into the open, the older man found himself in complete agreement on one point.

  Life for his people, his village, this beautiful rainforest paradise, would never be the same.

  CNN, Kinshasa, DRC—The Democratic Republic of the Congo made public today the latest discovery of this mineral-rich nation’s exploitable natural resources in the northeastern province of Ituri. This vein of molybdenite, prime source of the rare metal molybdenum, already shows promise of surpassing the recent molybdenite finds in Mexico and Siberia combined.

  Wall Street Journal, New York—Mining companies hoping to cash in on Ituri molybdenite were disappointed to learn that global consortium Earth Resources has already struck a deal with DRC’s Ministry of Mines in Kinshasa for an exclusive mining concession in the aforementioned zone. Earth Resources CEO Trevor Mulroney and regional governor Jean Pierre Wamba in Ituri province’s capital of Bunia jointly express their satisfaction that this project will bring badly needed economic stimulus and employment into this war-weary and poverty-stricken province.

  Military Industry Today, London—News flash for the private defense industry. Prominent British entrepreneur Trevor Mulroney announces the recent acquisition by his consortium Earth Resources, Ltd, of a controlling interest in the private military corporation Ares Solutions. The original founder of Ares Solutions two decades ago, Mulroney expresses pleasure at this new alliance between Ares Solutions and Earth Resources along with expectations of continued rapid growth and profits for both entities and their shareholders.

  Kinshasa Times, Bunia, DRC—Breaking an extended cease-fire, rebel forces are again threatening the peace of northeast Congo, using the cover of the Ituri Rainforest to strike villages and raid government installations. Daily reports of atrocities are pouring into UN peacekeeping headquarters in the Ituri capital of Bunia. Recent advancements in mineral development of the region have been threatened by attacks on the molybdenite mine and ore-transport convoys.

  ITURI RAINFOREST

  He could stop this with a word. A raised hand.

  Instead he began the task for which he’d come as a band of armed men fanned out, kicking in bamboo doors, tossing torches onto thatched roofs, dragging residents still groggy with sleep into the open. A spattering of gunfire on the far side of the village signaled the first resistance.

  He made no effort to interfere when the first woman was tossed down onto the red dirt of the clearing. Flames leaping high from burning huts now matched the red and orange streaks lightening a dawn sky above the jungle canopy. The gunfire had become a steady staccato. He closed his ears to its clatter. To the shouts, screams, moans. The terrified sobbing of a child.

  But he could not so close his eyes. These images would never leave his mind.

  By the time all fell silent, the rising sun had cleared the treetops. But its cheerful rays could not penetrate a black pall of smoke that drifted upward to cast its spreading shadow across the sky.

  He turned his head as a hand touched his shoulder. His second-in-command stepped close to murmur urgently, “The searchers found nothing. Learned nothing. We must go before the smoke is spotted and others come.”

  But he shook off his subordinate’s warning hand to stride out across the clearing. Stepping around prone shapes and viscous scarlet puddles, he peered through smoldering doorframes until the thunderous crash of a collapsing roof startled him into prudence. Only when he was satisfied nothing remained to be done did he lift a hand in signal. As he slipped noiselessly into the rainforest’s camouflage of leaf and vine and root, a phalanx of phantoms melted into invisibility with him.

  Behind them, all that remained of what had been a tranquil rainforest community were embers and dead bodies.

  He did not permit himself to waste a heartbeat on pity.

  After all, none had been granted him or his!

  UGANDA-DRC BORDER

&nbs
p; “The problem with these people, bokkie, isn’t that they can’t be bought. It’s that they just won’t stay bought!”

  Robin Duncan had no illusion that the brawny, flaxen-blond South African mercenary was referencing their Congolese driver, who still sat unmoving behind the steering wheel of the ancient two-and-a-half-ton market truck, staring out a cracked windshield.

  Nor a dozen equally brawny Caucasian males hunkered down on a pile of luggage in the truck bed.

  Nor even the two border guards who’d waggled their heads and AK-47 assault rifles at the passports and stamped visa forms Robin offered through a rolled-down window.

  No, Pieter Krueger’s latest disgusted pronouncement was directed at the same person or persons responsible for Robin’s own sour attitude and sore posterior. Cracked vinyl upholstery over broken wire springs was hardly adequate protection against twenty kilometers of jolting through deep ruts, untrimmed brush, and dry streambeds. Especially when she’d been awake and on the move for over twenty-four hours.

  Robin straightened her spine to ease stiffened back muscles as she stepped away from the truck cab. Just beyond the truck’s rusted hood, a metal pole extended across the dirt track. A round hut squatted in the shade of several large mango trees, its conical thatched roof giving the appearance of a witch’s hat.

  Black letters staggered drunkenly across the whitewash of the hut. Services de l’immigration République démocratique du Congo.

  A touch of officialdom drooped from a second metal pole, this one vertical. The sky-blue banner with a diagonal red stripe banded in yellow and a yellow star in the upper-left corner—the DRC’s most recent version of a country flag. A scattering of cinder-block shacks completed the hamlet. Shops, apparently, from the boxes of cigarettes, aluminum cookware, grain sacks, and mounds of fruit and vegetables that were identifiable even under a coating of red dust.

  But if this Congolese strip mall existed to capitalize on transnational traffic, business was poor. The market truck was the only vehicle pulled up to the roadblock. Behind it, the dirt track snaking back through the no-man’s-land held only a few trudging pedestrians balancing loads on their heads along with a rapidly approaching dust cloud. A motorcycle, judging by the size of the cloud and the distinct rumble. Beyond the roadblock where the road disappeared again into a dense tangle of green, not a motorized vehicle nor even a bicycle was in sight.

  Which might account for the swarm of vendors already mobbing the truck with dusty glass bottles of Coca-Cola and Primus, the region’s ubiquitous local beer, as well as plastic baggies filled with a cloudy ­liquid that could be palm wine or coconut water. And the bored indolence with which the two guards ambled around the truck to peer through the wooden slats at its cargo of passengers and luggage.

  “So just what’s the holdup?” A hand dropped onto Robin’s shoulder. “Why are they not letting us through?”

  “They say there’s a problem with our papers. You’ll have to go inside and speak to the com-mander.” Robin inched away as Pieter Krueger’s large frame loomed uncomfortably close. She’d been working a UN fact-finding mission as team linguist in Haiti when the private security company that held her contract, Ares Solutions, had contacted her. Two of the language skills listed on her résumé—French (excellent) and Swahili (passable)—were urgently needed for a brand-new security contract in eastern DRC. The hazard pay bonus offered was generous enough to suggest caution if Robin didn’t need the money so badly. She’d been issued a replacement for Haiti and an e-ticket to Kenya by the time her duffel bag was packed.

  In the Nairobi airport, Robin had joined up with some two dozen other Ares Solutions operatives. From their introductions, the group constituted a fairly stereotypical representation of their chosen career in more ways than just the inevitable safari-style clothing, Kevlar vests, wraparound sunglasses, and muscled builds. Two German commandos. Several Australian and New Zealander former paratroopers. A scattering of East European elite troopers whose Cold War training offered few employment opportunities at home these days but was a hot commodity in the private military market. Robin’s only countrymen were a pair of Vietnam-era Green Berets, gray-haired and weather-beaten.

  But by far the largest contingent were white Africans. South African commandos who’d gone freelance once their country fell under black rule. Rhodesians who’d fought as teenagers in Ian Smith’s Bush War before that country became Zimbabwe. Angolan Portuguese. Three white Kenyans who’d served in the British Special Air Service. A pair of apartheid-era Afrikaner combat helicopter pilots.

  All had that ineffable air—less arrogance than supreme self-­confidence combined with somewhat-unkempt personal grooming—that suggested they’d knocked around the planet’s sleazier underbelly long and successfully enough that they simply didn’t care what any other human being might think of them. Dangerous men, definitely. For hire, perhaps. But still warriors and superlatively expert at their craft. English was the one language they’d all demonstrated in common. None spoke more than a few words of French or Swahili, not even the Kenyans, in whose country the latter was a primary language among its black majority population.

  Well, that was why Robin was here.

  The single other outlier on this mission was a third passenger now clambering down from the truck cab, pale-blue eyes blinking behind metal-rimmed glasses. His gaze shifted only fractionally from the reinforced screen of a tough-travel notebook computer to find his footing. Round-shouldered, brown hair untrimmed, Carl Jensen looked so much the image of Shaggy on Scooby-Doo that Robin had found herself instinctively glancing around for his canine companion.

  “You mean you’ll have to speak to this commander.” White teeth flashed in chiseled, handsome features as Krueger stepped forward to reclaim the space Robin had inserted between them. “You did well enough in Arua. But border authorities in these parts are not so predictable, especially for a woman. Just stay close to me, speak only the words I give you, and you’ll be safe enough.”

  An Afrikaner in his late thirties, Pieter Krueger had introduced himself in Nairobi as manager for Ares Solutions’ African operations. He’d herded the group onto a C-130 four-engine military cargo plane chartered to ferry their team along with a full load of mission supplies from Nairobi to Bunia, in the DRC. But the pilot had announced midflight that their clearance into the Democratic Republic of the Congo had been inexplicably revoked.

  They’d diverted instead to land in Arua, a Ugandan border town. While a handful of Ares Solutions operatives remained behind to mount guard over the plane’s contents, Robin had used her halting Swahili to help Krueger negotiate ground transport just over the Congolese border, where arrangements had been made for an air pickup from Bunia.

  “But we do not have much time. We still have a drive ahead to the airstrip, and our flight could be landing anytime now. You might as well learn now our new mutual employer has no patience for un­punctuality.” Krueger’s hand on Robin’s shoulder slid down to the small of her back as though to steer her toward the border outpost. “I must say a female translator is still a surprise. I have served in the past with Trevor Mulroney, and he is not the sort to hire a woman for such a mission as this. Or at all. Not that I am complaining to have such a pretty young bokkie on the team.”

  Robin gritted her teeth at his appreciative leer and the warm pressure of his hand. Pieter Krueger had insisted Robin join him and Carl in the truck cab instead of crouching down against a whirlwind of red dust in the open truck bed. To facilitate communication with the driver had been his stated rationale. The South African mercenary was admittedly a striking male specimen whose rugged, blond good looks could have graced a Nazi-era poster for Aryan perfection. And single, he’d been quick to let Robin know.

  But after the past hour of running commentary on corrupt African governance, unruly native populations, Krueger’s exploits fighting in Africa’s many wars, and the general worthlessness of the entire continent north of Johannesburg, Robin wasn’t so sure she’d
brokered the better deal. And if his Afrikaner slang was the endearment she guessed, Robin was going to have to set some hard boundaries before this contract progressed much further.

  Not for the first time in the testosterone-dominated profession she’d chosen.

  “So, anything cold to drink around this place?” Carl Jensen slammed shut his laptop to glance around.

  “Cold, no. Wet, yes. Just don’t buy anything that isn’t factory bottled if you don’t want to pay for it later.” Gesturing to where her teammates were already trading coins for drinks, Robin used the interruption to step discreetly away so Pieter Krueger had to drop his hand. The South African threw her a sharp glance, white teeth disappearing into a frown. But without further comment, he strode toward the whitewashed hut. Robin followed, deliberately lagging two paces behind.

  Overhead, a fierce sun marked the hour as close to noon. Breaking out a hand wipe from the knapsack she carried over one shoulder, Robin swabbed perspiring cheeks as she walked. It came away sodden with red mud. A breeze whistling through the mango trees brought with its cooling touch a scent of dust and green mangoes, manure, and fermenting palm sap, tapped all over Africa as an alcoholic ­beverage.

  Drifting from inside one of the shops, the syncopated beat of a carved-wood drum accompanied a man’s voice crooning a Swahili folk ballad. In a cultivated field beyond, a pair of zebras, mother and foal, munched contentedly on whatever crop was planted there.

  Zebras! How long had it been since Robin had glimpsed a zebra outside a zoo?

  There’d been a time in Robin’s far-distant childhood when the sights, sounds, and smells of an African countryside roused only delight, a magical real-life version of Disney’s The Lion King. The vast green horizons and bright-red earth like nothing else she’d seen on the planet. Those peculiar flat-topped trees for which she knew no name, dotting open pastures like inverted brooms. Clusters of thatched huts, round and square. The chaos and bright colors of an open-air market. Grinning dark faces and the staccato of bare feet pounding in dance for the latest community excuse of celebration.