Congo Dawn Page 32

  “Until this evening, when I was filling in those village leaders on the same details I gave the BBC stringer. An elderly man with paramedic training who spoke fluent, educated French. That’s when Ephraim informed me Joseph’s father was just such a man. A government civic administrator assigned to the Ituri during the early Mobutu era, who’d stayed on to marry and raise a family here. But here’s the kicker. According to Ephraim, Joseph’s village was a day’s travel from here down the old road on the bank of a river at the base of those rock outcroppings. Quite likely the same village where my father used to let Miriam and me go climbing until the civil war got too bad for travel.”

  Robin’s head was swimming with her effort to piece together Michael’s revelations. “What is it you’re suggesting? I mean, so what if the old man is this Joseph’s father! Or if his sons studied at Taraja. Doesn’t that make it even more likely he’s our insurgent leader? Especially if the family survived the massacre and are maybe less forgiving than you or Miriam. After all, our intel on Jini cites specifically that he is highly intelligent and has a certain level of education. So maybe that old man ended up under arrest because he was this Jini’s father and was also involved in the insurgency. Maybe the prisoners didn’t come from some Bunia jail but were rounded up in recent fighting.”

  Robin broke off with stunned disbelief as the implications of Michael’s words, of her own question, sank in. “Wait a minute! If you’re suggesting the molybdenite mine actually was the site of Joseph’s village, that those prisoners looked familiar because they’re the villagers you used to visit there—exactly what are you suggesting? About Trevor Mulroney and Earth Resources? About Ares Solutions? About me?”

  “Like I said, I’m just passing on intel,” Michael answered evenly. “But when you run to your boss and tell him who your ghost really is, you might want to ask what happened to the local community that used to be where he has his mine. Best scenario, maybe he’s got no idea and would be glad to know his local muscle like Wamba and Samuel Makuga haven’t been completely forthright with him. Worst-case scenario—”

  Robin must have imagined that voice in the darkness had ever held a smile for her because now it carried only bleakness. “I won’t go there. But maybe while you’re asking other questions, you need to be asking yourself exactly what kind of people you’ve chosen to fight with and for.”

  It was so unfair—it echoed so closely Robin’s own earlier self-doubt—that she felt as though she’d been punched in the stomach. Through clenched teeth, she gritted, “I know who I’m fighting against, which is what counts. I’m fighting against a killer who butchers villagers and murders innocent people in their hospital beds. Have you forgotten that?”

  And I know who I’m fighting for! A little girl who deserves to live as much as any of these refugees.

  Michael didn’t get a chance to retort because this time the crack of dry wood snapping was too loud and abrupt for either of them to miss. Long experience and training told Robin exactly what it meant in the split second it took her to react. That earlier rustle and snapping of a branch had not been Michael as she’d assumed, but someone else. Someone hiding close by while Michael and Robin argued. Someone whose muscles had grown weary of immobility but, in trying to ease stiffness, had stepped unwittingly on a fallen limb.

  Robin’s Glock was out and up even as Michael stepped forward, the thin ray of his flashlight scanning underbrush beneath the fruit trees.

  “Show yourself!” he called out in Swahili.

  Another rustle. A shaking of ferns and bushes. Then a dark shadow rose against a mango trunk. Michael’s flashlight flickered up a gangly, adolescent frame to brush across a young face too gaunt for the huge, black eyes, high-bridged nose, elongated jaw.

  The boy Jacob.

  “Who are you?” Michael demanded. “What do you want? Why are you hiding? Is there anyone else with you?”

  His flashlight probed the underbrush as their captive obeyed a wave of Robin’s gun to step forward onto the path. Only once the beam of light returned to play again over their captive did Robin take in what Michael had immediately recognized.

  This was not in fact the boy Jacob, but a youth several years older and as many inches taller. Perhaps as old as seventeen or eighteen, despite an emaciation that made age difficult to judge. It was the very similar gaunt, dark features, the same bruised, haunted expression in the eyes, the pain lines grooving a full mouth, the tattered shorts that were the newcomer’s only article of clothing, even a bloody, dirt-encrusted bandage wrapping one thigh that had created the illusion of their missing patient.

  “I am alone. I was looking for Taraja. For the docteur Stewart.” The youth’s black eyes blinked rapidly under the flashlight’s glare. “I saw you come, heard you speak. But I could not understand your words. And when I saw the woman had a gun, I hid.”

  Just another refugee then. How many were still out there in that black rainforest night? Robin slid the Glock back into its holster. Michael simultaneously lowered the flashlight so it no longer dazzled the youth’s eyes. “I am Dr. Stewart. And the woman will not hurt you. She is leaving now to her own place.”

  He nodded up the trail. “Taraja is this way. If you’ll come with me, we will tend to your needs.”

  Robin didn’t linger for some polite farewell but headed down the trail. Already behind her, she could hear a flood of low, urgent Swahili. She wasn’t sure if she was annoyed or relieved at Michael’s cool assumption of authority. Especially since Robin hadn’t missed that when he’d stepped forward, he’d done so in such a way that placed his broad frame between Robin and whatever was hiding in that brush.

  Robin quickened her steps. She could no longer hear Michael or the youthful refugee. But the staccato of drums, hand clapping, and singing followed Robin all the way out onto the airstrip. Here in the open, the long slash of close-trimmed grass and leveled earth permitted a vista of night sky unknown under the rainforest canopy. The moon had not yet risen above the treetops. But earlier rain clouds had retreated enough to offer a scattering of star patterns against black velvet overhead. Across the airstrip, the harder, brighter glitter of the military encampment’s security lights offered a reference point for Robin’s steps.

  Robin did not head immediately toward those lights. This close to her own base, she no longer felt the lingering apprehension that had dogged her down the blackness of the trail. Wandering a few dozen meters to the very end of the airstrip, Robin stretched out in the pool of shadow cast there by the massive hardwoods that marked the boundary of virgin rainforest. She slipped the uncomfortable lump of her Glock from her back holster and laid it close at hand, then impulsively slid her night vision goggles from the knapsack.

  Once she’d settled the NVGs into place, the stars visible overhead immediately multiplied by a factor of ten: bright clusters, swirls, patterns no naked eye could ever envisage a rain-drenched night sky holding. A reminder that this universe held far more than Robin’s own limited vision could grasp? That perhaps, as Miriam insisted, an almighty Creator really was working his own immutable purposes, even if Robin could not see them?

  Straight ahead, the brighter luminosity of the NVGs had transmuted the airstrip into a long, silver-green ribbon, marred only by the hulking insect shapes of the Mi-17s squatting near the Ares Solutions base. Even as Robin tucked her knapsack under her head, the two helicopter engines roared suddenly to life, their rotors picking up speed until their furious beat and the noise of the engines had completely drowned out the singing and drums. Slowly the two Mi-17s lifted from the ground to bank over the rainforest canopy in the direction of the mine.

  As music and starlight recaptured the night, Robin let tension slip away. Tilting her head against the knapsack so that star clusters and constellations filled the vista of her NVGs, she deliberately shut all else from her senses. The military encampment. The lethal weaponry of the Mi-17s. The horrible events of the last twenty-four hours. Her worry that she still had not heard fro
m Kelli.

  Which left only the serene, perfect beauty of that night sky and the music still wafting down from the Taraja compound. Even as one song followed another in glorious harmonies, a single word stood out.

  “Yesu ni wangu wauzima wa milelee.” “Jesus my Savior is mine forever.”

  “Yesu anipenda.” “Jesus loves me.”

  “Yesu, nuru ya ulimwengu.” “Jesus, Light of the World.”

  Yesu.

  Jesus.

  The musicians’ simple expression of faith and hope lifted up against the unrelenting darkness of the jungle night did something in Robin’s chest, brought those annoying tears springing again to her eyes. Those refugees up the trail in the Taraja compound were survivors of far more horror and death than she’d ever encountered. Yet they had clearly found something she had not.

  Was Miriam right? Could it really be as simple as that last chorus? The darkness was no less profound around these refugees, their universe filled with no less pain. But a Light moved through the darkness with them. A Light filled with so much love and warmth and comfort that Robin found herself shaking with her longing to possess it.

  The drumbeat had slowed, the lively melodies giving way suddenly to a song that was also slow and minor of melody and hauntingly, piercingly sweet. “Baba Mungu yetu uliye mbinguni . . .”

  The song was a prayer. Robin translated the phrases to English in her mind. “Our Father God in heaven . . . teach me your ways. . . . Give me an obedient heart. A heart of humility and full of love so that I may be able to do your will. . . . Give me a heart full of justice that I might find rest and peace.”

  It might have been a prayer for all the Congo. For an entire planet where peace and justice and love appeared to be in such short supply. As the final sweet refrains died away, silence fell at last over the night; even the animals and birds nesting overhead finally settled into slumber so that the sighing of wind through leaves and branches and the rumble of the generator at the Ares Solutions base alone remained to make music. Robin found herself shaking with sobs, tears pouring down her cheeks, so she pushed the NVGs up onto her forehead to grope for a tissue packet tucked into a pocket of her knapsack.

  Baba Mungu yetu uliye mbinguni, she cried out silently, repeating the words that had been so familiar in her childhood. Father God in heaven. Jesus, Savior, Light of the World, who once walked this earth and took upon yourself the weight of human evil and sin. If you’re listening to me right now, won’t you please let me know you hear? It’s not that I don’t believe you’re up there somewhere beyond those stars. Nor even that you’ve got some ultimate purpose of your own in this world’s darkness and suffering. I have no right to judge your actions or inactions. You are so great and powerful. I am so very small.

  But that’s just it! What good does it do to pray when you’ve already made up your mind and will in the end do whatever you choose? How can I even ask you to hear my prayers for one little girl when you let go unheard—or at least unanswered—the cries of so many heartbroken mothers, starving babies, little girls being raped, fathers seeing their children hacked to pieces, even if it is for some vital divine reason only you know? How can anything I say or do move the Creator of this universe from what you’ve already decided for my life, for the lives of my sister and my niece?

  And yet those refugees at Taraja sing of their heavenly Father as someone they can know and love and trust. Someone they are convinced loves them back. Who cares about their pain. Me, I guess I’ve always seen a heavenly Father as I have my own father. Someone whose love you have to earn and who’s just waiting to pounce if you don’t measure up. Maybe I misjudged my father. Maybe he really did love me in his own way, even though he never let me know any of those nice things he told Kelli about me. Maybe like a drill sergeant does with raw recruits, he figured if he ever praised us, we’d stop striving for excellence.

  But I don’t care anymore what Colonel Christopher Robert Duncan thought of me if I could only know, as those refugees and Miriam and Michael and Ephraim seem to know, that I’ve been wrong about my heavenly Father. That human suffering and God’s love really aren’t mutually exclusive. Yesu anipenda—Jesus loves me. I want to know in the very core of my being that it’s no fairy tale but the ultimate truth of this universe. I want to know, not just hope, that your light is stronger than the darkness. And that in the end, your purpose on this planet will truly bring forth something so beautiful and shining and pure, it will be worth all this blazing furnace of killing and pain and death!

  Robin could not have said how long she sat there, arms wrapped around her knees, staring out into the darkness that had replaced the star-studded splendor of the NVGs. At least until tears had dried to salty streaks that puckered and pulled at her skin. If an answer came from somewhere beyond that night sky, she didn’t hear it. But at long last she heard something else. A rustle in the brush near where the trail led to the Taraja compound. If an animal, it had to be a big one. After her earlier fright, Robin did not take any chances this time but immediately tugged her night vision goggles back into place.

  As always, it took a moment to adjust to the odd green light. To find through lenses the exact spot where she’d seen underbrush sway. Yes, there it was again. A ripple among ferns, banana palms, a patch of bamboo, following the edge of trimmed vegetation toward her own position. Robin dropped her angle of vision slightly. Two moving shadows emerged against the backdrop of vegetation, distinctly human and male in shape. The leap of Robin’s heart identified the taller, broader shadow.

  Michael.

  And what was he carrying in his right hand? Robin’s NVGs dropped farther. A bag. From its shape, the same medical bag he’d lifted aboard the Mi-17 yesterday. Then this was definitely no stroll in the night. The other shape, thin, lithe, leading the way with sure, quick strides despite almost total darkness, matched the youth they’d encountered earlier on the trail. Where could the two men be going in this dark jungle night? The youth had said he was alone. But that did not preclude other refugees left behind in the rainforest in need of help.

  Yes, that was a logical explanation for the two men’s presence and that medical bag.

  Though Michael’s steps were less certain against the green glow of her NVGs—twice she saw him catch his balance as a boot met root or vine—already in the few moments she’d been spying, the pair was closing in on the same high, black wall of untrimmed rainforest at the end of the airstrip where Robin had sought solitude. They skirted close enough to where Robin sat huddled against a mahogany buttress that she could hear their breathing, a muffled thud of boots that must be Michael since his companion was barefoot.

  Why she didn’t call out a greeting, why she rose noiselessly instead to follow, Robin could not quite have defined. Perhaps it was the stealth with which the two men had made their way along the tangle of underbrush when a far easier course would have simply struck out across the airstrip. Perhaps it was that Michael had not turned on his flashlight though here existed no rutted trail for boots to feel out in the darkness.

  Or perhaps it was that Michael had changed his clothes since Robin had last seen him. She could remember jeans and a light T-shirt in the thin beam of his pencil flashlight. Gray or pale blue.

  So why would he now be wearing camouflage fatigues?

  Not just camouflage fatigues either. Night fatigues. Without Robin’s NVGs, the dappled olive, brown, and black pattern would have made Michael as invisible against the backdrop of rainforest and night as his companion’s mud-streaked black limbs.

  Leftovers from Afghanistan?

  Or hunters’ gear?

  Either added up to a deliberate evasion of the militia standing guard around the Ares Solutions base camp on the far side of the airstrip. Hurt and a burgeoning anger replaced idle curiosity as Robin slid around massive hardwood trunks, stepped over protruding roots. Despite the grudging information he’d divulged on the trail, Michael had made clear he didn’t completely trust Robin.

 
Or at least not her associates.

  Was Michael still pursuing his own investigation? But what could this youth offer to draw Michael alone into a black rainforest night? And with his medical bag? If there were refugees who could not make it to sanctuary on foot, why not an entire party? Stretchers? Even a request to the Ares Solutions camp for one of those Mi-17s as a medivac?

  A sudden thought leaped in her heart. The boy Jacob. Was there a reason this newcomer looked so much like him? An older sibling or relative with whom the fugitive had found refuge? That bloody strip of gauze they’d found. If his wound had worsened, if Michael’s careful stitches had been torn open again, those who’d orchestrated the boy’s escape might seek clandestine aid. After all, to return openly to the Taraja clinic would surrender the boy straight back into Samuel Makuga’s hands.

  But that would make Michael’s youthful companion an insurgent!

  And Michael an accomplice.