Congo Dawn Page 44

  This time Mulroney’s action did draw disbelieving stares from the Ares Solutions team. Ernie Miller took a quick step forward to say quietly but urgently, “You’re bluffing now, boss, right?”

  If her Ares Solutions teammates thought Mulroney in turn to be bluffing, Robin knew otherwise. The painful grinding of metal against her molars, an anticipatory quiver in the hand holding the Beretta, a quick, sharp breathing above her ear all told Robin her captor was aching to pull the trigger. Mulroney’s chin brushed her hair as he turned his head toward Pieter Krueger.

  “You got a shot, you take it! The hostage is not a factor, understand?”

  “Got it, boss!” Krueger’s weapon rose unhesitatingly, shifted fractionally. They were not even going to give Jini a chance to surrender. And if Michael was in the way, too bad!

  No, that’s exactly what Mulroney wants! If Michael’s shot in the process of killing Jini, Mulroney can write it up as a hostage standoff gone bad. He’ll have witnesses, too. And if it sets off an explosion, even better. Then he can say Jini chose to commit suicide, taking the hostages with him. Conveniently leaving no witnesses against him. Except me!

  Robin’s despairing train of thought did not delay her instinctive reaction. A kick of her boot backward missed her intended target, the groin, but caught Mulroney’s inner thigh viciously enough to draw a grunt of pain, a relaxing of that grinding metal against her face. A deadweight sag forward, a twist to the left broke the hold on her neck.

  Then Robin was free and racing forward, toward the Quonset hut. “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

  Would her former teammates actually shoot her in the back? Or would Robin’s intrusion into the line of fire be, as she hoped, enough to give them pause? Robin’s shoulder blades itched, bracing for a bullet. But none had come by the time she reached the barricade and spun around. “Please, you’re not going to shoot me, are you? Pieter? Ernie? Just give me ten minutes to try to talk them into a no-conditions surrender.”

  Trevor Mulroney had recovered his balance, the Beretta coming up in his hand. But Robin’s plea, her use of their names, was having its intended effect. Her teammates were looking at Robin now, not through her to the targets behind. On their faces she could read discomfiture, uncertainty.

  “Please, just ten minutes,” Robin repeated.

  Without waiting for Mulroney’s orders, they were lowering their weapons, Pieter Krueger last of all. Robin drew a deep breath as she saw Trevor Mulroney slip the Beretta in unspoken acquiescence back into his holster.

  In the next instant, a hard hand was again grabbing Robin’s arm. But this time to drag her behind the barricade and into the Quonset hut.

  The Quonset hut was a seething mass of bodies crowding every available inch of floor and bunks. Among them Robin spotted little Rachel curled up on her mother’s lap. A man beside them carried one arm bound in a sling. At the windows, sentries mounted a lookout with assault rifle or bow in hand. But a glance confirmed the rifles had no clips, the bows no arrows.

  One bunk held the boy Robin had last seen in the Taraja clinic. To Robin’s relief, Jacob was sitting up, eyes alert, leg freshly bandaged. But she’d already taken in the IV bag hanging from an upper bunk, a bandage matching Michael’s above Jacob’s right elbow. A field transfusion. No wonder Michael had looked so pale!

  Dark faces, black eyes had all swiveled to stare at the intruder. Though Robin read in them fear and worry, she spotted neither tears nor hysterics. Just a patient, somber resignation, even on children’s faces, that twisted her heart. But it was toward a single set of lighter features, the long, lean frame that stood tall and whole and only inches away, not limp and bleeding on the ground, that Robin stepped instinctively forward.

  “Careful!” Releasing the grip with which he’d yanked Robin inside, Michael raised an arm to block her advance. “Let me get this off before it blows!”

  Joseph had already moved to Michael’s side, machete in hand. Robin suppressed the wobble that threatened her voice as she saw the caution with which the rebel leader sawed wires, duct tape. “I was sure that was all a bluff.”

  Joseph looked up from the wires. “The dead man’s switch was a bluff. But this had to be real. Trevor Mulroney is an expert on such things. He would know if it was not genuine.”

  “And the explosives outside?”

  Joseph carefully lifted the mass away. “The explosives are real. But the barrels now hold mostly dirt and debris. We used their contents to fight. It was our hope to hold off our enemy long enough to give Michael’s friend time to send help. Do you bring news from him?”

  “A bigger question—what are you doing here?” The moment Michael stepped clear of the explosive vest, it was he who closed the gap, yanking Robin against him in a hard embrace. Now it was Michael’s deep voice that shook as he spoke into her hair. “In all this mess, I was thanking God you at least were out of reach and safe. I just about lost it when I saw you out there with Mulroney, that gun to your head. I should never have dragged you into this.”

  Robin wrapped her own arms around Michael’s torso, where the duct tape had been. Let her head rest against his T-shirt. Under her right ear, she could hear the fast, hard thump of his heartbeat, feel a quick rise and fall of muscle. Her nostrils were filled with the wonderful, live perfume of perspiration and smoke and gunpowder and that particular masculine musk that was Michael’s own scent.

  Robin did not want to move. How long she had waited for this. Longed for it with a ceaseless, yearning ache that carried not the slightest hope of realization. Dreamed of it with such vivid clarity as to awaken her in the night with tears on her face.

  This was spring after endless, dreary winter.

  A stream of cool, rushing water in the most barren and thirsty of wastelands.

  It was coming home.

  But however much Robin would have liked to stay just where she was for the rest of her life or a year or an hour, there was no time for personal indulgence. Reluctantly she lifted her head.

  “I had to come! They were going to shoot you both. I heard Trevor Mulroney give the order to take Jini out without even giving him a chance to surrender. And to take you out, Michael, if that was necessary to get a clean shot.”

  Letting out a sigh, Michael straightened, his arms falling away from Robin. “I was afraid of that. So I’m right that your presence out there means Mulroney’s found out just what I’m doing here with Joseph. And therefore that I’m not really Joseph’s hostage. Does he know also about the pictures and files? Were you able to get those to Miriam? And what about Alan Birenge? Any hope he’s galloping to the rescue?

  “I sent off the images and files myself to your journalist friend.” Feeling suddenly bereft as Michael released her, Robin folded her own arms across her chest. “Believe me, I made no reports to Mulroney or anyone else about Joseph. Once I’d seen those pictures, that video, I just couldn’t! But I knew the Taraja computer would be the first place our tech people checked once that material went public. So I decided to send it from my own. But that backfired because our tech guy somehow managed to dig the stuff from my own personal accounts. And he passed it on to Mulroney.”

  What had happened next at Taraja, to Ephraim, Robin didn’t elaborate. It would only be more worry for Michael now if he knew. And by the time it was necessary to tell him, one way or another this would be all over.

  “By then Birenge had the intel. And he said he’d help. But Mulroney says he’s tracked down where Alan is and has contacts there going after him. That he’ll never be given opportunity to air Joseph’s evidence. And even if Alan Birenge and his family got away, Mulroney’s pretty much told me he’s not going to back down. Those M4s aimed at you out there won’t cut through these walls. But Mulroney’s got an RPG launcher locked and loaded. And he’s not bluffing about using it! The explosives you’ve got rigged out there—even if those drums are mostly empty of flammable material—will they go off if an RPG launches through the front door?”

 
Tawny and black eyes exchanged a grim glance before Joseph nodded. “Yes, such an attack would detonate the explosives, destroying this place. But we had no choice. Without the threat, Trevor Mulroney’s force would have rushed us an hour ago when they discovered we no longer possessed ammunition for defense.”

  “Then—I don’t know what to say. To suggest.” A Marine always had an answer. Always found a way to turn defeat into victory. Never gave up, never surrendered. That was the creed on which Robin had based her life.

  It was also a lie. Sometimes when you’d done all you could, done the right thing, taken a stand on the side of justice—sometimes life still threw a curveball. The bad guy outfought the hero. The Joker caught Batman. Lex Luthor defeated Superman. Instead of Tripoli’s white sands or the halls of Montezuma, those brave, young Marines found themselves stranded ashore at the Bay of Pigs.

  And maybe Captain James T. Kirk could wriggle his way out of a fictional no-win scenario by rigging the Kobayashi Maru test, but Robin had nothing to offer. Only an apology that must be made before it was too late. “There’s something else I have to tell you. It’s no happenstance Mulroney found you here, planned this trap. It’s all my fault.”

  Robin could not bear to watch conviviality fade from the two men’s eyes, so she permitted her own gaze to roam across the sea of dark faces who thankfully could not understand her English, and so if they comprehended their peril, at least they did not know how close it was.

  “If my slipup hadn’t alerted Mulroney about Joseph and his evidence, there’d be plenty of time for Alan Birenge to go for help. And Mulroney would still be unaware that Michael knows the truth about Joseph and the rhenium. Even this trap you walked into—it’s my fault too because Mulroney got the idea from me. Not intentionally. I was trying to talk him into letting Joseph and his people just walk away from the mine and the rhenium.

  “Instead he got the idea to open the gates and make Joseph think I’d been successful with Birenge so he was pulling out. In trying to help, I’ve placed you all in terrible jeopardy. And what he’s planning out there now—I wish I had better news. I told them I’d try to talk you into surrendering. But the truth is, Trevor Mulroney doesn’t want you to surrender. He wants you to resist so he has an excuse to kill you. To kill everyone who knows the truth. He still thinks he can get away with it all. And I—”

  Robin could no longer keep the tremor from her voice. “Bottom line, without a miracle, I’m not sure he isn’t right.”

  Across the crowded hut, all eyes remained on the three-way conversation just inside the doorway. In them Robin could glimpse now expectancy jostling worry and resignation as though the listeners assumed that conversation, Robin’s own intrusion, promised succor. Earlier she’d been glad they could not understand the English. But now as Robin turned back to Joseph, she did so in Swahili, her glance addressing the entire hut. The boy Jacob, watching from the bed. Joseph’s older brother Simeon, holding a bow at one of the windows. Little Rachel wrapped tightly in her mother’s arms. All the men, women, and children squeezed into this inadequate refuge who’d turned out not to be, as she’d believed, targets and victims of a vicious rebel and killer named Jini, but Joseph’s family and neighbors.

  “Can you forgive me? All of you. But especially you, Joseph. For all the trouble I’ve brought upon you. For being part of the team that came here to capture or kill you. For the evil perpetrated against you by a man of my own race in which I too have played a part.”

  Forgive?

  Joseph could only stare at the mzungu woman. Robin Duncan was requesting his forgiveness? After what he had done? After his own terrible conviction that he himself was beyond forgiveness, redemption?

  But the sincerity of her plea, the sorrow and remorse in eyes the odd blue and green hues of an ocean wave, were no illusion.

  For Joseph, it was the last straw.

  Not of hope.

  But of hate.

  For too long since he’d returned to the Ituri, every pallid mzungu face had held for him the sneering, arrogant features of his betrayer and enemy, Trevor Mulroney, so he could admit it to be one reason he’d resisted his father’s advice to seek help from such as Michael Stewart. He’d come to understand the cruelty and violence of his countrymen who’d risen up to wreak their revenge on such invaders. Burned to have it within his own power to execute such revenge.

  But in so doing, he’d allowed himself to forget others of pale skin who had not been cruel and greedy and deceitful. The Stewarts and others of their race who had been not only his boyhood instructors, but his friends at Taraja. The volunteers in the displaced persons camps who’d labored long and hard for refugees not of their own people. The foreign journalists who’d employed him, perhaps for their own purposes and a good story, but who’d troubled themselves to reach into their own pockets to provide a Congolese orphan, as he’d believed himself to be, an education and a future.

  For all of this. For all the anger and bitterness he could now let go forever, worthless thistledown to be swept away by a monsoon wind. For the healing brought to his heart and soul when these two mzungus chose to stand with him this day. Who had been strangers but were now friends. For all of this and more, Joseph could speak in a voice that was not his own but held a joy and release he’d left shattered at his father’s feet on top of a rock outcropping.

  “If the almighty Creator can forgive even me, if my people here can forgive my many mistakes, then who am I to speak of forgiving you? But such as I can give, I grant freely. If you will but forgive me too for the hate that has been in my heart against those like you.”

  The mzungu woman blinked her ocean-hued eyes. “Yes, of course I do.”

  “Good. And now you have shown to me what it is I must do.” A peace he’d not known it was possible to feel in the midst of such darkness rested upon him. This exhilaration was not the gladness he’d known in promising Paradise to his father; it was far greater. He had prayed for deliverance. And though he had not at first recognized it, the almighty Creator had indeed brought deliverance. Not the deliverance he’d desired, imagined, demanded from his Creator, resulting in an enemy bloody and destroyed on the ground.

  Deliverance from hate.

  Deliverance from the crushing, choking rage which had so blinded him that he had not been able to see light in the darkness.

  Deliverance from despair. Whatever happened this day, if like his father he did not survive to see the dawn, the truth had gone out. And were not the times and end of the wicked also in the almighty Creator’s hands? Trevor Mulroney would not remain victorious forever.

  Joseph looked around at the crowded room. His people. His family.

  He groped for the heavy, slick feel of metal in the harness he wore. Sliding the weapon free, he handed it to the mzungu woman. “Let us end this now. I will do what you were sent to ask. Inform your commander that I am coming out unarmed and alone to surrender.”

  Robin took the gray, metallic object he was holding out. Her Glock. Automatically she ejected the clip, confirmed it was empty, snapped it back in even as she protested, “Joseph, you can’t just walk out there! Didn’t you hear what I said?”

  Robin switched to swift English as she slid the Glock into the holster on her own belt. “Trevor Mulroney has given orders that you are not to be allowed to surrender. You step out there unarmed and alone, and they will shoot you! You’ll be throwing your life away.”

  Joseph answered in the same language. “And if I do not, they will destroy all of us. Is that not also what you said? I did not surrender before only because my enemy would have no further reason to keep my people alive. But now my surrender is their only hope. Perhaps if he has me, Trevor Mulroney will spare these others, at least the women and children. If not, it will at least offer additional delay for the journalist to send aid. What other choice remains?”

  What other choice? Robin looked pleadingly at Michael. His expression had gone bleak, but not with the condemnation for which Robin had br
aced herself. “Joseph’s right, Robin. You can’t be blaming yourself for this any more than Joseph should for being in the wrong place and time to offer Mulroney the rhenium. You did what you could. What is, is. But if Mulroney won’t let us surrender to the UN, and we can’t count on Birenge riding to the rescue, I can’t see another option either. Would you choose differently if these were your people?”

  No, she wouldn’t, Robin recognized helplessly. Michael straightened his long body. “In any case, Joseph won’t be going out alone.”

  Robin stiffened as his intent sank in. But Michael’s hand was now at Robin’s back, urging her forward. “But first, those ten minutes of yours must be about up. We’d better get you out there while you still can.”

  As Michael exchanged a swift look with Joseph, his tone hardened. “Give Mulroney a message from all of us. We don’t negotiate with terrorists either!”

  But Robin held her ground against Michael’s propelling hand. “If you think I’m leaving, think again! Were you listening? If Mulroney’s not going to let you walk away, he’s sure not going to let me.”

  Michael’s jaw clenched. “Out there you’ve at least got a chance. Teammates you can appeal to. Are you forgetting why you came to the Ituri to start with? Your sister and niece are counting on you to come home.”

  This time Robin did move, but not toward the door. Inches from Michael’s solid frame, she tilted her head back to say softly, “Kristi and Kelli are in God’s hands. Your own sister and you, too, taught me that. As for you, Michael Stewart, I left you once before when I should have tracked you down to the ends of the earth. Should have trusted the man I knew when I never heard from you. I’m not leaving you again. Where you go, I go. Not unless you’re going to bodily remove me. And let me tell you, I kick, claw, and bite!”

  The seriousness of their situation hardly warranted the half grin thawing Michael’s stony expression. “I’d sooner tangle with a mother leopard. Which I guess leaves only one option.”