Congo Dawn Read online

  “Good. I may need that intervention. Tell your friends the deal is theirs.”

  He’d just signed away a treasure his own passport country would give its own collective eyeteeth to possess, but the fact disturbed Trevor Mulroney not at all. Despite that proffered knighthood, Mulroney felt no particular loyalty to the British Crown. On the contrary, he still owed a grudge for Parliament’s decision to abandon Rhodesia’s colonial leadership to its ungrateful majority population and despot Robert Mugabe. Howard Marshall’s “friends” were far more profitable allies and business partners. And since an alliance with the Americans ensured a responsible Western government controlling said treasure instead of some despot, in the end the Crown would benefit too.

  Trevor Mulroney was feeling almost cheerful as he rang off. A sensation banished by the jangle of a voice message downloading, its calling code the DRC’s 243. Ituri province was two hours ahead of London’s Greenwich Mean Time, which meant 2 a.m. Hardly an hour for social calls. Mulroney hit redial.

  “Krueger? I assume you have good reason for disturbing my sleep.” That he was already up, Mulroney forbore to mention. “What’s the emergency?”

  “Sorry about that, boss. I’d meant to leave a message. No real emergency. But I got a call from Rhodes over at the mine. Some of the off-duty guards were getting tipsy tonight. The new supplies arrived, and they’ve been celebrating. One of them happened to mention—well, maybe it’s nothing, but you said you wanted to know immediately if anything turned up on that logging detail.”

  “Just get to the point!” Trevor Mulroney cut in impatiently.

  “Well, it turns out there was one more member of that work party who was never questioned. I guess they didn’t think of it.”

  “And why not?”

  “Because he’s one of the casualties who was airlifted out before the interrogations ever started. An older boy. Jacob by name. Maybe it doesn’t make any difference. He’s only a kid, and he’d hardly collaborate with blowing himself up, right?”

  “On the contrary, it changes everything!”

  The small girl sobbed softly into the darkness. The painful weight of her bound arm had stirred her to uneasy wakefulness. But it was another pressure that made her squirm with discomfort. Back home with her mother, she’d have scampered off to a corner of the kraal. Here there was no kraal, and when in desperation the girl had ­earlier relieved the pressure where she sat, a woman in a white coat had scolded her furiously before leading her through a door into an adjoining small room. There she’d demonstrated the purpose of two foot-shaped depressions on either side of a hole in the concrete floor.

  But no one was responding now to the girl’s whimpers. And the darkness was too complete for her to find her own way. In any case, she was afraid to move. She’d never slept anywhere but a mat flat on the ground. This metal frame on which she’d been placed was so high off the ground it gave her vertigo even to thrust her bare foot over its sharp drop-off.

  If her mama or baba were here, there would be strong arms responding to her unspoken plea. A crooning voice soothing her fears. But first her father and now her mother had been snatched from her, and the small girl no longer dared ask where they’d gone. So she curled herself into a tight ball well away from the drop-off, whimpering with growing emphasis.

  Out in the corridor, a guard had heard the child’s whimpers but chose to ignore them. The second guard lay stretched out on a mat just outside the ward door, snoring. He himself was not striding back and forth from any sense of duty. A closed and latched door had shut away his charges for the night, and his assignment did not include mounting any guard on the clinic itself.

  No, his wakefulness was of a more personal nature. A package of khat leaves and hand-rolled cannabis cigarettes had been an essential element of the guard’s daily rations since he was press-ganged as a boy of just ten years into rebel commander Wamba’s army of freedom fighters. The excitable euphoria produced by chewing khat leaves made the things he was forced to do in battle easier to endure. The cannabis offered solace and relaxation afterward.

  Clinic personnel had made no objection to the two guards chewing their khat ration on duty, perhaps had not even been aware of it. But the mzungu doctor had come along just as the guard was lighting a cigarette, furiously snatching it from his hand. Samuel Makuga’s stringent orders had precluded shooting the doctor. But the guard now lit his third cigarette as he paced down the hall. One more smoke before retiring for the night, this one out-of-doors.

  Sliding the interior bolt from the clinic’s rear door, the guard stepped outside. A full moon risen high overhead reflected palely from slow ripples of the river that edged the clearing’s rear perimeter. The guard’s own cigarette tip glowed fiery red against dark silhouettes of banana palms and fruit trees as he drew in a lungful of cannabis smoke, savoring the relaxed languor coursing through his limbs. A shadow flitting toward him, then another and another, roused no curiosity. When a sharp blade slashed the guard’s carotid artery, the only emotion he had time for was astonishment.

  “Rachel, why are you still awake? Be silent and go to sleep!”

  The impatient demand from the dark was a voice the small girl had known all her short life. If she did not yet fully understand relation­ships beyond mama and baba, she knew Jacob was family, her mjomba—someone to whom she could confide her distress. Though her mumbled explanation elicited an annoyed sigh, this was followed by creaks and rustles of someone climbing out of the neighboring cot. Then arms lifted her down until her feet touched concrete. Fingers gripping her wrist guided her forward between cots until she bumped into a door. She knew now where she was. She pushed the door wide enough to slip through, her small feet unerringly locating depressions in the floor.

  She was still tugging her clothing back into place when a crash of wood against concrete startled her. The corridor door slamming open against a wall, her ears deciphered. Then much closer she heard a sharply indrawn breath, followed by the warmth of a body crowding in beside her, the soft click of the lavatory door easing shut.

  And just in time. A rush of footsteps entered the infirmary ward. Low male voices were accompanied by a beam of light that played across a gap at the bottom of the lavatory door. Its probing illumination cast into sharp relief her youthful relative’s pain-drawn features above her. The fear she glimpsed on them silenced any thought of protest when his hand came down hard over her mouth.

  Darkness returned as the beam moved away. The spastic trembling of her uncle’s thin body against hers had now roused the small girl’s own fear so that she remained as motionless under his grip as a duiker fawn spooked by hunters. From the other room, she could now hear thuds. Grunts. An anguished gasp of pain. A startled scream that subsided immediately to a bubbling moan.

  A murmured babble rose to audible Swahili. “Is this all? Were there not more?”

  “Shh, I hear voices coming. We must be gone.”

  A rush of retreating footsteps returned the night to stillness. But the hand over the small girl’s mouth did not ease for several heartbeats. When it dropped away, a whisper against her ear commanded, “Do not move until I return for you.”

  The warmth of her uncle’s body left her side. A creak signaled the opening of the lavatory door. Crouching down, the small girl waited obediently. But with restored quiet, her fear was subsiding. And among voices now approaching rapidly down the corridor was the scolding one of the woman in the white coat.

  Emboldened, the small girl crept out into the infirmary ward. But she stopped almost immediately when her bare feet felt under them a viscous liquid that had not been there before. She slipped in the puddle, grabbing for balance at the nearest cot. But there, too, she encountered dampness. Jerking her hand back, she fell full-length on her belly.

  The puddle beneath her was now soaking through her clothing. Splashing across her face. And young though she was, she knew that metallic taste on her lips. The hot, iron scent in her nostrils.

  She
couldn’t even whimper her terror. If her young relative was anywhere still in the room, she could make out no rustle or movement that might be his. The approaching voices out in the hall broke off abruptly. The only sounds were the scattered drip, dripping of liquid splashing against liquid.

  Until the small girl remembered how to scream.

  The flitting shadows that had entered the building were now melting away into banana patch and orchard. But a man pulling himself noiselessly into a mango tree inched forward until a low-lying branch offered him a direct line of sight through a screen window. Lanterns moving around inside illuminated a grisly scene.

  Here was the collateral damage from that steam engine explosion. And now they’d been silenced so the dangerous truth might never come out. All but a small girl child, who screamed piercing anguish and confusion. How had she managed to escape?

  “Mon Dieu! Yesu Kristo! What monster could do such evil? Pour l’amour de Dieu. Dear God, have mercy!” Exclamations in babbled French and Swahili—or were they prayers?—from a woman in a white coat rose above the murmur of several men crowded into the room.

  Then he heard the name by which he’d become known. “Jini! . . . monster . . . evil.”

  I am no monster!

  Or am I? In fighting to redress evil, have I now become the evil they accuse me of being? The evil I sought to defeat?

  The man could summon little sorrow over the older burn victims. Even had they survived such terrible injuries, their future here in the Ituri would have been as great a burden to themselves as others. They were better off where they now found themselves.

  But he could regret the young boy sprawled out like a broken doll on one cot. And the small girl crouched like a wild animal in the aisle between two cots. Would the things she’d seen and heard this night ever fade from her mind?

  He told himself that collateral damage in war was inevitable. That none of this had been his instigation. That achieving his mission was worth the price of a few more casualties of war.

  But he could no longer convince himself of such a lie. The blood spilled in that room—such streams of it, dark against the white sheets, rich scarlet where the lantern light touched—was now added to so much other blood staining his hands.

  As to his mission, he was no longer sure it was still achievable. Not since he’d seen for himself the armed encampment spilling out onto the airstrip below this medical outpost. From the moment he’d spied the massive combat helicopters, spotted the smaller aircraft circling purposefully overhead, he’d had no doubt as to their target. If he still believed in miracles, he could consider it such that he and his men had been close enough to reach their sanctuary before those spying electronic eyes swept overhead.

  But they could not remain in hiding forever.

  Then he’d received the message that impelled him to this place. Only a fool traveled the jungle at night. Or a desperate man. What mattered was that the helicopters believed this, too, for they did not fly at night.

  So he and his men had risked a river passage difficult even by day when one could spot loitering crocodiles and hippos, low-hanging snakes, snags that could flip a canoe.

  And some protective presence seemed to have watched over their passage because the only snake dropping into their canoes had been a python—a struggle to subdue, but not poisonous. Under a rising moon, the crocodiles had remained slumbering on the riverbanks, while the lethal shadow of a hippo lunging at one canoe had retreated easily under the furious blows of several paddles.

  And now they must risk the same passage again. Not only because night was fast ebbing, and they must be back within their sanctuary before dawn’s first rays. But because the clinic personnel were no longer the only audible voices, and he could now hear as well the roar of an approaching vehicle.

  Dropping to the ground, he threaded through banana palms toward the glimmer of water that was the river. Behind him, he could still hear the female clinic worker’s shrill babble addressed to almighty God, to Jesus Christ. A pang of grief pierced the shield guarding his heart so that he stumbled needlessly over a tangle of vines.

  If only he, too, could still pray!

  There’d been a time when such prayer was a part of every day. The automatic response to all the good and ill of life. Jointly with his village under his father’s headship and in his own individual thoughts. Even when he’d been exiled from his birthplace, during all the years of study and work, he’d never stopped praying. Never stopped believing in the Creator God to whom his father had taught him to direct such prayers.

  When on that day he’d run away, as much in shameful fear as obedience to his father’s last command, slipping and sliding over thrusting buttresses, snakelike roots, mud, and moss until he’d at last tugged from his feet those shiny city shoes of which he’d been so proud, even then he’d still screamed out his mental supplications.

  But his prayers had only blown away unanswered like the smoke rising from the devastation he’d once called home.

  And now he no longer dared to pray.

  If his father, if his instructors, both mzungu and Congolese, who’d once taught him right here at Taraja, had not been deceived, if this earth did indeed have a Creator and Judge, then that Creator no longer chose to hear his prayers. Not after the terrible things he’d done. The rivers of blood staining his hands.

  Which made it foolishness to dwell on past hopes and dreams. They only distracted from the path of action to which he was now ir­reversibly committed.

  The man called Jini pushed away further introspection as he emerged through a patch of brush onto the riverbank. A gap in rainforest foliage offered by the width of flowing water permitted light of moon and stars to outline human shapes. The elongated ovals of several canoes. Climbing into the nearest, he picked up a paddle. Without need of speech, his companions followed suit.

  The other canoes had pushed away from the bank when he heard the low, urgent call. He stiffened, head turning to seek out the river­bank shadows from which that whisper had come. But he made no attempt to push off the canoe, his hand shooting out to stop his nearest companion, who had shoved his paddle into the current.

  Because the name the whisperer had called out had been his own.

  Not the name of the monster he’d been labeled.

  But that to which the man now called Jini had been born.

  A persistent jangle rolled Robin over on her cot. She focused blearily on the phosphorescent cell phone screen.

  2 a.m.! Not good anywhere on the planet. Or had Kelli simply forgotten the time change from South Carolina to the DRC? Robin groaned. This had better be worth disturbing her sleep.

  “Robin? You’d better get up here.”

  Michael’s terse order snapped Robin to full wakefulness. She was already switching on a fluorescent lantern, reaching for boots as she demanded, “What is it? What’s happened?”

  “Just get up here. And bring whoever’s in charge down there.”

  The phone went dead. But by the time Robin tugged on boots and snatched the M4 and knapsack kept always within arm’s length on a footlocker, she could hear the revving of an engine. The camp jeep. If there’d been some alert, why had her own radio remained silent?

  But when Robin emerged from her tent, the rest of base camp still drowsed silently. An earlier downpour had tapered off to the slightest drizzle, leaving the ground so slick underfoot Robin had to pick her way carefully through the tents. She spotted the jeep tearing out onto the airstrip just as she reached the camp perimeter. Reaching past the night sentry to release the mesh gate for herself, Robin sprinted across the jeep’s path, waving wildly. As it screeched to a halt, she hurried around to the driver’s door.

  Pieter Krueger rolled down the window. A single passenger rode shotgun beside him. Samuel Makuga. “What are you doing up at this hour, Duncan?”

  “What are you doing up?” Robin demanded. “I was actually heading to look for you when I heard the jeep. This is about Taraja, I assume. W
hat’s going on up there?”

  The South African mercenary looked annoyed. “How did you hear about Taraja? Yes, there’s been some commotion at the clinic. Makuga and I are heading there to check it out now. And since we’ll hardly need a translator, you can return to your beauty sleep.”

  But Robin had already yanked open the rear door and was climbing in. “No way. Michael—Dr. Stewart—called and asked me to come. Ordered me, rather. And since Mr. Mulroney appointed me liaison to the Taraja people, I’m coming along.”

  “It’s your lost sleep!” Pieter Krueger started the engine again. Samuel Makuga had not so much as turned his head to glance at Robin. How had the two men learned so quickly of the problem at Taraja? Of course Makuga had guards stationed there. But that could only mean—

  The path leading from airstrip to clinic was designed for pedestrians. Pieter Krueger simply gunned the jeep’s four-wheel-drive capacity through brush and over roots until they’d reached the open clearing. Jouncing headlight beams caught Michael Stewart and his brother-in-law, Ephraim, waiting for them on the clinic veranda.

  “So what couldn’t wait until morning up here?” Pieter demanded as the three new arrivals stepped onto the veranda.

  “See for yourself.” Picking up a kerosene lantern at his feet, Michael led the way into the clinic. Inside, Robin could smell immediately the familiar mineral-sharp odor that was spilled blood. Dread grew inside her chest as she followed the others down the corridor. The doors to the other two patient wards were closed, but she could hear agitated voices behind them.