Congo Dawn Page 33

  No, just the committed surgeon he was. Hurt and anger eased in Robin’s chest. It would be like Michael to see the boy as his patient rather than a fugitive who should be reported immediately to the Ares Solutions team. To take matters into his own hands rather than risk being delayed or stopped. Robin could admit that if he had alerted her, she’d have felt obligated to alert in turn her field commander, Pieter Krueger.

  Still, if Robin had pieced this mystery together correctly, Michael could be walking himself into serious trouble. She could not have left her chase to seek backup now, had she chosen. The necessity for stealth was making her slow, and the two men were barely visible up ahead in the green light of her NVGs. Without that advantage she’d have already lost their trail.

  Literally a trail, as Robin could now see. The very trail, she suddenly realized, from which those refugee children had emerged—could it truly have been only the previous morning? With worn, packed earth under their feet, the two men were moving even faster. Robin broke into a trot, heard the slap of her own boots against hard ground, and dropped again to a fast walk.

  That she could have snatched a radio from her belt and alerted her colleagues, even scrambled one of the Mi-17s to fly overhead, Robin brushed from her thoughts. She had only suspicions, however plausible, and Robin did not even like to think of Krueger’s or Makuga’s reactions if they saw Michael in his current guise. Somehow she doubted either would consider humanitarian impulses an excuse not to arrest him—and his young companion—on the spot. Besides, if she was right about who needed Michael’s medical services, Robin would not want to risk spooking a patient back into hiding, perhaps to his death. Whatever he’d done, whoever he’d gotten himself involved with, Jacob was still only a child.

  So Robin settled herself to a distance that maintained her two targets at the very edge of her NVGs’ field of vision. It was years since she’d had to put her own field skills of stealth and speed into practice, but the shift came automatically—breathing through her mouth for greater quiet, sliding her boots along the trail to feel out obstacles before stepping on them. So long as Michael did not turn on his flashlight, she was safe from discovery.

  She’d hardly voiced the thought when light blazed into her field of vision so that she had to push her NVGs to her forehead. Perhaps feeling he was beyond spying eyes from the Ares Solutions base, Michael had in fact turned on his flashlight. Robin stepped instinctively from the trail to crouch behind a high mahogany root. And not as silently as she’d hoped because the beam swung instantly around to scan the trail.

  The thin ray played over the gnarled maze of buttresses and creeping roots, then withdrew. Robin waited for three long breaths before rising again to her feet. By the time she’d stepped back onto the trail, the flashlight beam and the men were no longer visible. Sliding her NVGs into place, Robin hurried down the trail. Less than fifty meters later, she discovered how the men had so completely disappeared.

  The trail dead-ended at a road. Just a one-lane dirt track such as jeep tires had worn from the airstrip up to the Taraja compound, but wide enough to permit passage of a sizable cargo truck. Washed-out ruts and a knee-high tangle of weeds, vines, and ferns carpeting the central median made clear the road had not seen recent use. Well off to Robin’s left, a dot of light in her night vision goggles was the flashlight beam. From its rapid bobbing up and down, the two men had now broken into a run.

  Robin could guess where she stood. This was the original colonial-era road linking the Ituri Rainforest with the outside world. If Robin correctly remembered Jensen’s satellite maps, the road’s trajectory skirted through Taraja’s burned-out fields and houses not far beyond the Ares Solutions base camp to join up eventually with the dilapidated highway system linking Bunia with the Congo River, then went on through nearly two thousand kilometers of rainforest to Kinshasa, the capital. Trevor Mulroney had forked over a considerable sum not even a year ago to clear this road so that his convoys could ferry supplies and workers from Bunia and return with processed ore.

  Only to have it closed down again under the assaults of Jini’s rebel force.

  All of which meant that the direction in which the flashlight had disappeared led toward the molybdenite mine, a full night’s march on foot; Robin could only hope that wasn’t the two men’s destination. With no advantage remaining in stealth, Robin, too, broke into a trot. But the unevenness of the washed-out ruts required caution. She couldn’t afford to find herself stranded alone in the night with a sprained ankle. Even worse, while minimal rain made it through the rainforest canopy to the jungle floor at least fifty meters below, there’d been enough to leave these ruts sticky and slippery with mud, so Robin had to wade instead through the central median’s knee-high vegetation. She was further slowed by the necessity of checking both sides of the road for trails, since she could not assume the two men’s trajectory would not leave the main road.

  But though she could hope Michael and his companion faced similar limitations, not a glimmer of light had reappeared in Robin’s night vision goggles by the time she dropped to an exhausted walk. Were the two men even still ahead of her? Or were they long gone down some side trail so that Robin could end up trekking all the way to the mine without coming across them? Either way, this was getting ridiculous. And two-legged predators were hardly the only danger in an equatorial rainforest. Pieter Krueger would rightly ream her out for abandoning every mission protocol in her impulsive pursuit.

  A looming obstacle blocking the road ahead solidified Robin’s indecision. A massive hardwood toppled across the track, she confirmed as she approached, its girth as tall as a two-story building. Like some beached octopus, the huge limbs of its vast crown sprawled several truck lengths in all directions. Storm fall or one of Jini’s exploits?

  Even if Robin weren’t dog tired, she would have zero interest in clambering over rotting limbs or scaling that colossal trunk. Not alone at night when a breaking branch could mean far worse than a sprained ankle. Surely Michael and his companion had turned off well before this. She’d take her return trip more slowly. Check more carefully for side trails. Either way, she’d already gone much farther than was prudent.

  God in heaven, you know exactly where Michael is, even if I don’t. He has such faith in you. So much love for this place. So much passion to help its people. Whatever you choose to do with my life, won’t you please, please at least protect his?

  Robin had turned back from the fallen tree when that very action captured a glimmer at the edge of her peripheral vision that was not the green glow of NVGs. She froze, moving only her head to probe the darkness.

  Nothing. Had she imagined that single flash of white light? Swinging around, Robin slipped into a tangled labyrinth of limbs and leaves until she was brought up short against a chest-high bough. But it had been sufficient. At this angle, though still obscured by vegetation and fallen limbs, there was no mistaking a light somewhere beyond the fallen tree’s crown. No, make that two lights.

  Cautiously reversing course, Robin emerged again onto the road. A search revealed no side trail, but she did discover broken and trampled­ vegetation leading around the felled hardwood in the direction of those lights. Robin eased herself through the vegetation, sorely tempted to dig out her own flashlight since the NVGs’ green glimmer made a single snapped twig or crushed frond difficult to mark. Losing the trail, she had to retrace her steps until she found a snapped-off elephant ear.

  But it was only a dozen paces later when Robin stepped around a tree trunk to see a light now fixed unwaveringly up ahead through her night vision goggles. Another few paces, and Robin could hear a murmur of voices. When the light grew too bright for her NVGs, Robin again pushed the goggles up onto her forehead. Her rambling trajectory would seem to have brought her all the way around to the far side of the fallen tree’s crown because she could now make out the road with the looming bulk of the tree trunk across it.

  Much closer, the fork of two fallen limbs formed a triangular
shelter. Robin had been right that there were two lights, not one. The youth she’d already surmised to be Michael’s companion was angling the penlight downward to where Michael knelt on the ground, medical bag open beside him, bloodied hands busy with gauze bandaging and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide.

  The patient was stretched out full-length on his side. Like Michael’s guide, he wore nothing but a pair of tattered shorts, his body streaked with mud except where Michael had cleaned it away from a section of rib cage and upper back. Vines tied odd tufts of leaves and feathers to biceps and thighs as though some bizarre attempt at jewelry. Just beyond the patient’s outflung hand sat the second light. No flashlight this, but a palm-size fluorescent lantern such as Robin’s own Ares Solutions field kit might contain. Hardly a piece of equipment one would expect a rainforest villager to be carrying.

  But then, this was no ordinary villager.

  Nor was it the boy Jacob.

  If Robin recognized instantly the broad features, full mouth, and prominent nose, it was because they’d had little reason to change since that university ID photo. Why had Robin assumed the picture to be an old one, the rebel leader a much older man? This one could not even now be far out of his teens. Surely no older than Robin’s own brother when he’d been killed in Afghanistan.

  But if she’d doubted, there was no missing what the play of light from that fluorescent lantern revealed. A poorly healed burn running up the underside of that outflung arm from wrist almost to armpit, the scar tissue fissured and pale against surrounding chocolate-brown flesh.

  Robin’s first impulse was triumph and relief. Against all odds, unbelievably, she’d completed the mission for which her team had been contracted. A radio call, an Mi-17 filled with Ares Solutions operatives, and this would all be over.

  I can go home! Kristi can have her operation!

  But as she slipped closer, relief was giving way to stomach-roiling agitation. Robin had understood an impulse to help the boy Jacob, whose life Michael had already once held in his hands, enough to forgive a clandestine mission to save that life again. But offering succor to the very enemy Robin had committed herself to capturing? A mass murderer of women and children, destroyer of his own countrymen’s homes? And while the man’s injury looked ugly enough, it was clearly in no way life-threatening.

  Worse, Robin could not even convince herself Michael had been brought here under duress or false pretenses. While a man-tall bow and deadly looking sheaf of arrows lay on the ground just beyond the patient, both Congolese appeared currently unarmed. Nor did Michael seem under any coercion as he finished swabbing clean his patient’s right shoulder and shifted to a long, curved needle and surgical thread.

  On the contrary, he and his patient were engaged in a low, swift Swahili conversation, interrupted only by a single groan from the patient as Michael pulled the first stitch tight. Nor did that conversation seem in any way hostile. Michael’s speech was patient, his expression calm, compassionate. His doctor face, Robin thought of it. The patient’s swifter tone was filled with distress and urgency, but it held no overtones of anger or threat. The youthful guide shining a flashlight on Michael’s rapidly moving fingers was nodding earnest agreement, occasionally adding a phrase of his own.

  Robin slipped noiselessly, cautiously from one shadow to another. The American doctor was just tying off the final suture, clipping it with a small pair of scissors, by the time she’d approached close enough to make out what Michael was saying in his fluent Swahili.

  Unbelievable words.

  Impossible words.

  The words of a traitor.

  “Joseph, I promise I will not let this go. Not all mzungus are faithless. Your father did right to send you to me. I only wish I had known before. I am not sure what I can do to help. But whatever it is, you can count on me.”

  Robin listened no longer. Sliding her Glock from its holster, she allowed the fury to build up in her if only because tears of disappointment and betrayal were not an option for a Marine.

  For a Duncan.

  No longer making any pretense of stealth, she strode out into the open. Deliberately, she trod on a branch underfoot. At its snap, three heads jerked her direction, three pairs of eyes mirroring the same startled astonishment.

  Robin’s narrowed glare was only for Michael. But when she spoke through clenched teeth, it was in her own halting Swahili, each cold word deliberately chosen. “So this is the jini for whom we’ve searched. Thank you, Docteur Stewart, for delivering him to us.”

  As she’d hoped, Robin’s statement threw into confusion this cozy little rendezvous of conspiracy and treachery.

  With a cry of horror and denial, Jini—no, Joseph—jerked himself to a sitting position, bare heels scrabbling at the dirt as he scrambled back from Michael. Dropping the flashlight, Michael’s guide dived for bow and arrows. But Robin was already striding forward, Glock angled downward to center on the youth’s chest. “Drop those, or I will blow a hole in you.”

  Black eyes glared, but bow and arrows fell to the grass.

  “Joseph, stop. You will tear open your wound again. You must not believe her. It isn’t true. I did not bring her here!” Michael looked up at Robin, hands still filled with scissors and suture needle. “Robin, please put the gun down. This isn’t what it looks like! Joseph isn’t who you think!”

  “Things are not as they seem.” Dying words of the old healer.

  Robin shook them off to demand hotly, “Are you saying this isn’t the insurgent leader they call Jini? That isn’t the scar we were told to watch out for?”

  She’d addressed Michael in English, her Swahili already stretched to its limit. But while the youth on the ground showed no comprehension, Joseph’s snatching up of his scarred arm against a bare chest indicated a more extensive education. Michael answered patiently, “Yes, this is the man you call Jini. As we’d surmised, his real name is Joseph, youngest son of Jean-Luc, the healer you met at the mine. I’ve just had to tell him of his father’s death.”

  That explained the man’s distress, killer or not. “But just about everything else we—you—thought was the truth is not. ‘Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.’ Jean-Luc was right. You’ve got to listen to what Joseph has to say.”

  “Listen! Has he bewitched you?” Robin cried out. Down on the grass, Michael’s youthful guide was twitching ominously. Would he risk launching himself at her? Joseph’s scooting retreat now placed him outside the angle of her weapon. Robin took two long steps backward to cover all three men with her gun.

  “Just tell me one thing,” she seethed through clenched teeth. “Tell me he didn’t set that bomb at the mine. Tell me he isn’t responsible for the dead bodies I saw with my own eyes. For women and children burned and bloodied beyond restoration. Tell me he didn’t butcher innocent victims in their beds. Then you can try telling me things aren’t as they seem. Because from where I’m standing, things look exactly as they seem! You aiding and abetting a fugitive and murderer. Me holding you prisoner and getting ready to call in backup.”

  Shifting her Glock to a one-hand hold, Robin reached for her radio. But just then the man named Jini spoke, his voice so un­expectedly young and unhappy Robin dropped her hand from her radio. “No, I did set that bomb. But I did not mean to hurt anyone.”

  His English was careful but far more fluent than Robin’s Swahili. “I will never forgive myself for their deaths. And the others killed at Taraja. But I did not kill them, I swear. How could I? They were my family. My aunt, my cousins, my uncle. It is for them I am fighting. But I failed them, too, as I have failed in all else.”

  “You haven’t failed yet, Joseph,” Michael interjected urgently. “And this isn’t your fault, if it was your doing. Mistakes happen. In fact, Robin, I’m beginning to think very little of what we’ve been told, of what you’ve been told, is true. Tell her, Joseph.”

  Genuine pain in the rebel leader’s tone carried conviction. But then this man had already proved himself a maste
r strategist as well as killer. Robin’s exhaustion, confusion, the plea in Michael’s steady gaze were making decisions difficult. But one thing she could cling to in making a choice.

  Her duty.

  Robin reached again for her radio. “If there are mitigating circumstances, I, as well as the rest of my team, will be happy to hear them—back at base. I’m calling in a chopper and ground team. The jeep should make that road in no time. Whatever Jini—Joseph—has to say can wait that long. One way or another, it’s time to put an end to this.”

  “Why, so you can collect your bonus and run back to your sister and niece? Is the money more important than justice?” Michael half rose from the ground as Robin keyed her radio. “Robin, you can’t do this! If you’re the person I think you are, you won’t do this. You’d be signing Joseph’s death sentence. Maybe even mine and yours.”

  Michael’s accusation stung most because such a consideration had actually crossed Robin’s mind. “Don’t be ridiculous! I’m doing this because it’s the right thing to do. And you seem to have forgotten what side you should be on! If it’s Governor Wamba you’re concerned about, believe me, we’re not stupid. We’re not just going to hand over a prisoner to the locals without checking out the situation, even if it means flying him to Kinshasa or out of the country. He’ll get a fair shake. On that you have my word. Or is that no longer worth anything to you?”

  But now it was Michael who gritted his teeth. “As I’ve said before, it’s not your word I doubt. It’s your associates’. And I’m not talking about Governor Wamba. ‘Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.’ Remember I told you how Joseph’s father argued about that with my dad. Only it wasn’t local warlords he was referencing.”

  As sudden suspicion tightened Robin’s face, Michael nodded. “That’s right! It was the hypocrisy of mzungu colonialists and profiteers like Earth Resources. The real bad guy here isn’t Jini—Joseph. Or his father. Or even Governor Wamba. It’s Trevor Mulroney, your boss! Now do you see why we can’t let you call in the troops?”