Congo Dawn Read online

  “You there! Stop!” The atrocious attempt at Swahili confirmed these were no Congolese militia, but the mzungu warriors his own eyes had witnessed lifting off with their load of ore in the combat helicopter. Or so he’d believed. And if they’d spotted him, they must also have witnessed his confederates taking refuge in their underwater sanctuary.

  He dived just as a bumblebee shape roared low overhead. Gunfire peppered the water as he swam downward. A hand found the hull of the sunken barge, then the jagged edges of the opening. Surfacing into the air bubble, he tugged free from his body harness a palm-sized fluorescent lantern—tough, waterproof, with an LED light that did not require batteries—also purloined from those convoys. In its light, he counted with relief eight faces around him, including the young features and awkward paddling of the boy Jacob. They’d all made it.

  But they could not stay here. Not just because of a rattle of gunfire against the hull overhead, so close to the river surface. But one or more of those bullets must have penetrated the fuel tank because the sheen of petroleum on water had become a rapidly spreading rainbow shimmer, acrid fumes already making it hard to breathe.

  “They know we are here,” he told the others. “The gunfire comes from mzungu troops. They are between us and the mine. But if we dive deep and head for the opposite bank, perhaps it will be possible to escape into the forest. You know what to do then.”

  The pumping fuel was now a noxious pool a thumb’s width in depth atop the water. They could wait no longer. Petroleum fumes burned his nostrils as he drew in as much air as his lungs would hold. “Now!”

  Switching off the lantern, he dived through petroleum until his groping hands encountered ore bags, then forced his way through the passage with every bit of power still in him. He pushed out of the opening but remained underwater, swimming until another stroke would have him breathing in water before breaking the surface.

  But he had not followed the instructions he’d given to his companions. This refuge was hopelessly compromised. They would not be able to return. But he at least could not simply flee. All hope that remained to him hinged on retrieving what he’d so cautiously hidden away in his treetop eyrie. His strenuous underwater sprint had carried him at least twenty meters downstream from the sunken barge. Not far from the opposite bank, he spotted another head breaking the water’s surface. The first of his companions.

  The mzungus had spotted it too. As his companion scrambled to the safety of brush and trees, their gunfire shifted direction. But even with their special eye gear, the far side of the river would be almost invisible from the mzungu position. With triumph he saw a second companion scramble to shore before turning his own powerful strokes toward the near bank.

  But the mzungus had also recognized their need for more light. He was almost to shore when a flare shot high above the sunken barge. Its red blaze caught at the rainbow sheen now spreading out into the river. It illumined, too, several heads still bobbing in the water.

  Shocked comprehension propelled the man dubbed Jini to faster speed. His feet touched river mud just as the flare splashed down into petroleum. The barge’s fuel tanks must have been quite full, the air pocket transformed into a time bomb of built-up gases, because the resulting explosion was far beyond what he’d anticipated. Fire and thunder shot skyward. The barge itself lifted completely out of the water, splitting into pieces before crashing down with a force that sent a surge of water well up onto the bank. Flaming chunks of wood, metal, and rock cleared the treetops before raining down on river and forest.

  Shouts of fury and pain from the mzungu position indicated that some falling debris had found a target. As they redoubled their gunfire, an anguished cry rose from the far riverbank. A limp body fell back into the water.

  Jini had reached the near bank. But as he clambered out of the water, he realized with horror he was not alone. A thin, lithe figure with a dragging limp had scrambled to shore beside him.

  The boy Jacob.

  There was no time for reprimand. The roar of an aircraft was now sweeping back upriver. As a bumblebee shape soared into view, a searchlight on its belly caught both fugitives full in its beam. Above it, another mzungu in body armor leaned out an open door, assault rifle in his hands angled downward.

  For one long, terrible heartbeat, the two fugitives remained pinned in that harsh, white beam. But the search beam had also revealed the high, protruding buttresses of a liana-infested African teak. Its upper regions offered access to the lower branches of a neighboring mahogany. Jini shoved his young companion ahead of him into the underbrush just as the gunman opened fire.

  The boy had understood. A bare foot slapped at root buttresses while a hand grabbed a liana. As the boy disappeared upward into the dark camouflage of night and leaf cover, the man dubbed Jini followed. The first bullet creasing his ribs did not slow his upward rush. He was reaching for the safety of a mahogany branch when a second agonizing pain stabbed through his right shoulder. The liana in his grip slid from suddenly helpless fingers.

  Then followed only the sensation of falling before blackness swallowed him up.

  By the time Robin scrambled to her feet, the column of fire was sinking below treetop level, the last flaming debris drifting down like dying fireworks. Pieter Krueger snatched a radio from his belt. “Miller! What’s going on there? What just blew? I need a situation report now!”

  The radio crackled. “That was the barge you saw go up. Our mission’s blown. Three dead targets. None of them Jini. Two injured on our end. Chopper’s heading this way to evacuate them. Alert the doc to be on standby. No prisoners taken. Repeat, no prisoners.”

  Emitting a furious stream of Afrikaans and Swahili, Pieter Krueger and Samuel Makuga headed at a run toward the Quonset hut. Robin leaned in urgently toward Michael, still hunkered beside the dead healer. “You know I’ll have to make a report on all this. So who was that man? What did it mean, all he was saying? Did I hear right that this prisoner might be our ghost’s father? That would be one motive for helping a killer. And what’s your connection here?”

  Guards hurrying forward kept Michael from an immediate answer. As they took charge of the fallen prisoner, he walked instead to the water’s edge, crouching down to scrub at hands and forearms. Replicating his action, Robin whispered forcefully, “If you won’t talk to me, someone else is going to be pushing you for answers. And believe me, they won’t be as patient or—well, as friendly to you as I’ve been.”

  Lowered eyelashes hooded Michael’s dark glance. “You do what you have to, Robin. I’ve already told you I know nothing that could further your mission or your search for this Jini. That still stands. As for that man, like I’ve said before, a lot of people in this region know the Stewarts, especially my father. But . . .”

  He shifted position to stare speculatively toward the brush corral, where frightened shouts and wailing indicated its occupants no longer­ slumbered. Robin had finished her scrubbing. Before she could rise to her feet, a wet hand shot out to grab her dripping forearm. Michael’s lowered tone was urgent, compelling.

  “Robin, I may not know anything, but there are things I’m beginning to wonder. Things I need to check out. Is it too much to ask you to hold off on that report? Give me twenty-four hours max. Trust me, a report now won’t further your mission. Holding off—well, it just might make all the difference.”

  Robin stared at him without trying to shake off his grip. “Now you’re asking me to trust you when you’ve made it clear you don’t trust me.”

  “It isn’t you I don’t trust.” Michael released her forearm. “So is that a yes or a no?”

  Beyond the chain-link perimeter fence, flashing lights and a growing roar signaled the executive helicopter approaching. Robin’s hand radio crackled. “Duncan, where are you? Get that doc over here now.”

  “We’re on our way.” Jumping to her feet, Robin met Michael’s hooded gaze. “Twenty-four hours, then. Unless some compelling reason comes along to change my mind.”
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  Neither operative they unloaded from the executive helicopter proved seriously wounded. One had been knocked out cold by falling debris, but his Kevlar helmet had saved him from worse injury. A chunk of metal shrapnel from the barge had sliced through the ­other’s upper thigh but had missed any major arteries, Michael assured the man as he stitched him up.

  At dawn came the funeral Robin had expected to encounter earlier. This included the three dead insurgents pulled from the river along with the elderly healer and the Taraja massacre victims whose delivery Pieter Krueger had ordered now that secrecy no longer offered any advantage. Accustomed though she’d become to its necessity, the haste with which such recently living, breathing human beings were thrust into the ground still seemed to Robin almost indecent.

  Anguished wails and tears accompanied a brief service before slag was piled over the communal grave to form a crude burial mound. The prisoners were given little time to mourn, guards herding them back to their normal tasks before the rising sun cleared the treetops.

  With his expatriate patients resting comfortably, Michael insisted on making a round of the camp’s sick and injured. This time Pieter Krueger shrugged indifference. But a snap of Samuel Makuga’s fingers scrambled a security guard to dog Michael’s steps. Which might be why Michael’s patient queries received little response beyond yes or no. Still, the remaining casualties of that earlier bombing appeared to be well-tended and healing.

  Thanks to the man who’d shown himself this very day a spy and accomplice to the same injuries he’d tended.

  Robin, who hadn’t waited for Michael’s invitation to tag along, glanced back at the security guard as they exited the brush corral. Reminding herself the militia uniform spoke no English, she looked at Michael. “If you won’t say anything else, can you at least tell me the context of what that old man kept quoting? You said it was something your father preached about. Could it be some code he thought you’d understand? Something that would identify him or the son he mentioned?”

  Michael slid the same glance back at the guard. “That’s just it, I don’t see how. It wasn’t something my father said privately. He said it so often and so publicly, it was almost a joke in these parts. You’ve got to understand, my father was old enough to remember when the Belgians pulled out and Mobutu took power. And he was very much a product of his times. It wasn’t that he didn’t recognize injustices that concentrated wealth in the hands of white foreigners while reducing to servitude the local population. But he also remembered a stability long gone by the time Miriam and I came along. A time when one could travel from Taraja by road, train, and boat all the way to Kinshasa or Nairobi without so much as packing a gun. Like the Roman Empire, he used to say. The Romans weren’t always just. But the stability, roads, and law they brought permitted early Christianity to spread the width and breadth of their empire.

  “When the insurgencies started, Dad worried about his Taraja students and the local Christians listening to rebel promises of freedom and a more equitable society. He felt—with justification, as it turned out—that the insurgents were just thugs out for their own crack at the treasure chest. So he’d quote a verse to warn against sympathizing with the rebels. Isaiah chapter 5, verse 20: ‘Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness.’

  “Of course the students and even the village leaders would argue back that the same verse could be applied to mzungu colonialists calling their system good instead of evil. And after independence, mzungu corporations who’d prop up their own pet dictators in exchange for lucrative mining concessions. My father would try to convince them Mobutu and his Western allies were at least better than the rebels. With less success as a new generation grew up. I remember going out to a village with my dad as a boy where their leader had some pretty strong words about making excuses for evil authority. He told my father that refusing to address injustices that pushed people into rebellion was as much calling evil good and good evil as the rebels themselves. That as a follower of Jesus Christ, he’d lived long enough to understand that teaching his people to live righteously was the only way true change would come to the Congo. But he could sympathize with the rebels’ motivation and rage. That village was—” Michael’s jaw suddenly snapped shut.

  Glancing up, Robin spied a fleeting unreadable expression before his face went abruptly blank. “So you think he was making some oblique reference to Trevor Mulroney’s local allies. That Wamba’s so-called law enforcement being former insurgents somehow justifies the old man allying with Jini?”

  But Michael was done reminiscing. Curtly, he cut Robin off with a sharp hand gesture. “If I had any specifics, you think I wouldn’t spill them? That I don’t want to stop a killer as much as you do? But let me say this. If you want to talk about calling evil good and good evil, you might want to look a little closer than Governor Wamba.”

  “Just what are you implying?” Robin stopped dead in Michael’s path. “If that’s another crack at Ares Solutions, all we’re doing is the job we’ve contracted. And doing it well.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  She might have argued further. But a helicopter was angling in from the river, this one an Mi-17, and as Michael and Robin approached the Quonset hut, Pieter Krueger emerged, radio in hand, to call impatiently, “Duncan, that’s our ride out, so wrap it up. And I need Stewart.”

  A disheveled, bloodied Ares Solutions team climbing down from the Mi-17 explained Krueger’s demand. While assorted cuts and contusions had not been deemed serious enough to abandon their mission, there was a deep gash across Ernie Miller’s cheekbone that had narrowly missed an eye. He reluctantly permitted Michael to clean the wound and put in stitches but brushed off his personal injury in fury at the mission’s lack of success.

  “We were right about the barge. Just as we’d counted on, the chopper spooked them into the river. We got a head count too before the op blew sky-high. Whatever force this Jini has stashed elsewhere, we counted only eight perps diving for cover when that chopper closed in. One of them looked small enough to be that boy Jacob. Whether that explosion was accidental or rigged, I couldn’t begin to say. They couldn’t have counted on getting clear in time, so I’m leaning to accidental. Either way, it created enough confusion that all but three insurgents escaped into the bush. We thought we’d treed a couple of them on this side of the river. Found a blood trail to indicate our door gunner in the chopper wounded at least one. But it turns out our perps climb like monkeys. Wounded or not, somehow they made it into the foliage where the chopper couldn’t follow. Since we don’t climb like monkeys, it was pointless to go after them until daylight.

  “Once we did have light, we climbed the tree where the chopper team had seen two of them disappear. Managed to follow the blood trail across several hundred meters of canopy before losing it. Which means they could be kilometers away by now. And since Jensen tells me the rainforest is swarming with refugees from yesterday’s raid, there’s no way to pick out by aerial recon which are our fugitives!”

  Ernie was even more furious over the elderly healer’s death. “Who gave orders to fire? A mistake? How do you make a mistake like that, Makuga? If your guard didn’t do this on purpose, he deserves to be strung up by the thumbs for sheer stupidity. Now we’ve not only lost our principal target, but we can’t even question the mole. So where does that leave us?”

  Samuel Makuga was scowling at the criticism, but Pieter Krueger responded calmly. “We still have our bush hunt. We froze the perimeter advance for yesterday’s raids. If we’d nabbed Jini, we wouldn’t need it. Since we didn’t, we go back to our original plan. And we got the message, at least, so we know how news was getting to Jini. Clever using coconuts. As expected, this one warned of the threatened firebombing. But it also asked for an update on Taraja. Which indicates Jini hasn’t been able to communicate inside the mine since the logging stopped.”

  “Which leaves the question, just who was our mole?” t
he Mi-17 pilot, Marius, spoke up. “Makuga, you handle prisoner labor. You must have some kind of database of prisoner IDs and criminal records. Who was this guy? What was his crime that sentenced him here?”

  But the militia commander was unhelpful. “Who can tell? Prison workers are assigned by the authorities in Bunia. We do not ask who they are or what they have done, only if they can work. You will have to discuss such matters with Wamba himself.”

  “We do have some good news,” Ernie interjected. “It took some climbing, but we followed signs from the river back to a nice little treetop hunting blind with a perfect line of sight to the mine. We found quite a cache of explosives, detonators, and other odds and ends. Even assault rifles such as your mine security carry, Makuga. Which means our ghost has been right under our noses since the beginning. And assuming he escaped empty-handed, we’ve at least crippled Jini’s capacity to mount further attacks.”

  Robin saw Michael’s intent gaze following the conversation as he packed up his brown medical bag. Was Krueger forgetting there was an outsider in their midst? Perhaps not because the South African immediately raised a hand to cut off discussion.

  On their return flight, Marius again hovered onto the Taraja lawn to disgorge his extra passenger. Swinging down from the open side door, Michael shot Robin a pointed glance as he shouldered his medical bag. A reminder of her promise?

  Though Robin had no time to make a report in any case as the C-130 cargo run was just taxiing toward the Ares Solutions camp when the Mi-17 touched down on the airstrip. Somewhere in its cavernous interior were medical supplies the Taraja clinic urgently needed. With the clinic no longer housing mine victims, Robin was anxious to deliver her requisition before someone—Pieter Krueger or Trevor Mulroney—decided such largesse was no longer called for.