The Consignment (21 page)

When the lifeboat steadied again, I eased off the rope-brake. Nothing happened. I looked above me, at the pulleys, stern and bow. They were both snagged. I jerked the rope-brake, but still nothing happened.

“Give it a shove,” I told Rita.

She reached over and pushed the gunnel, and the lifeboat swung out, then back. I tugged at the control rope. Nothing.

“This probably isn’t the time, Ned, but that pilot boat’s getting awfully close.”

Soon, someone would come out to throw a ladder over the ship’s side. I looked up at the snagged ropes, and then, stupidly, I jumped. It wasn’t a big jump, barely six inches, a frustrated attempt to shock everything free. But when my feet landed, the rope-brake shot out of my hands, and the lifeboat gave way beneath me. I fell, snatching for a handhold, and caught the ship’s bottom rail as the lifeboat jerked to a halt. I was suspended, on tiptoe in the slewed lifeboat, my hands gripping the ship’s rail.

Twisting, I looked up. The rope-brake was caught in the tangle of ropes and pulleys overhead. If the tangle slipped or came free, the lifeboat would plummet into the sea, taking me with it.

“Hang on, for chrissake.” Rita got down on her knees and looked at me through the rails. “Don’t let go. I’ll get someone.”

“No.”

“Well, what can I do?” she whispered urgently.

I shuffled my feet along the tilted lifeboat gunnel toward the highest point, the bow. At the same time I moved my hands along the ship’s rail, trying to keep my weight on my arms. As I inched along, I felt sweat break out on my palms.

“You’re nearly there,” said Rita. “Come on.”

When my chest came level with the ship’s bottom rail, I grabbed the next rail up. Then I glanced down. There was a shimmer of moonlight on the black sea.

“Tell me what to do,” she said.

“Keep back.”

My arms were weakening fast, and the longer I waited, the worse it was going to get. So I fixed my eyes on my hands. I grabbed a steel upright and took a firm hold, then I shoved off the lifeboat hard, hauling with my arms. The lifeboat lurched, I swung my leg and got my right knee cocked over the ship’s lowest rail. My left leg flailed against the hull. I hauled and scrabbled, finally got myself level with the deck, then I got my head through the rails, then my chest. Rita grabbed me under the arm and hauled, and I dragged myself through the railings, rolled onto the deck, and just lay there. I saw the moon and the clouds. Rita’s face.

“I’m okay.” I gasped for air.

“Okay? I don’t care if you’re okay. You try that again, I’ll murder you.”

When I got my breath back, I sat up and flexed my arms and looked over the side at the dangling lifeboat. It wasn’t going to take anyone anywhere.

Voices came from up near the bridge, then two figures appeared on the upper deck. Damienenko and Bosnitch.

I got up. Crouching, Rita and I crept back across the deck and into the storage room. We dived down the stairs and made it back to our cabin without passing anyone. I shut the door behind us, slumped back against it, and we looked at each other. The Haplon weapons were going to dock. Our plan had failed.

A short while later, Bosnitch flung open the door and saw us lying on our bunks. I peered at him around the edge of my paperback. He looked from me down to Rita without saying a word, then withdrew, closing the door. We listened to his footsteps recede.

“They’ve found the lifeboat,” said Rita.

I’d figured on that. And I’d also figured that if we stayed put, Damienenko was going to have a hard time guessing exactly what had occurred out there at the stern. He had a crew full of guys who’d been skirting trouble all their lives, men whose only real loyalty was to themselves. After seeing the flare and tracers, any one of them could have decided this wasn’t the best time to be aboard a ship running guns into the Congo.

I dropped my paperback, reached under the mattress, and pulled out the atlas. Mbuji-Mayi.

“He’ll be fine,” said Rita. I paused, then looked over the edge of my bunk. She had her own book lying open on her arm. “Your son,” she said. “Studying the atlas isn’t going to help him much anyway.”

“Are you a mind reader now?”

“We’ve already arrived in the Congo. What else could you be looking at in the atlas?” After a moment, she reached up and touched my hand. “He’ll be fine,” she said. There was a knock at the door, and she let her hand fall.

When the door opened, the guy standing outside wasn’t one of the crew. He was an African, dressed in a dark green uniform. He had a holstered pistol on his hip and a green cap on his head. He took off the cap as he came in. I sat up. Rita got out of her bunk, and the guy smiled at her.

“Mademoiselle Durranti. Welcome to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” He shook her hand. He was young, early thirties, but self-assured. Someone used to getting his way. He told her his African name, which was unpronounceable, then advised her to call him Henri. “I will take you to your embassy,” he said.

Rita shot me a glance. It seemed too good to be true. “The embassy sent you?” she said, facing him again. “Did you come out with the pilot boat?”

“I have my own boat.” He looked up at me, extending his hand. “
Bon soir,
Monsieur Rourke.” I reached down from my bunk. Then as I took his hand, I noticed the name tag on his breast pocket. Captain Henri something unpronounceable. Sécurité. My hand went rigid in his.
“Oui,”
he said, grinning when he saw that I’d seen it. “Monsieur Rourke, you are under arrest.”

CHAPTER 26

Twenty minutes later, the ship docked and I walked down the gangway with my hands cuffed in front of me, Rita and Internal Security Henri following behind. He hadn’t been aggressive and he hadn’t explained the nature of my supposed crime. It was an official concern, he told us, he hadn’t been informed of the charge. His orders had come through to him that morning from Kinshasa, he said, his job was to get us transported to the capital, Rita to the U.S. Embassy and me to his superior officers who, presumably, would know what to do with me.

There’d been an argument about the handcuffs, but I’d eventually relented when Henri pointed out the soldiers loitering on the dimly lit docks, cradling AK47s. It wasn’t so much a threat, more an attempt by Henri to open my eyes to the reality of my situation. He meant to carry out his orders, with or without my cooperation. Damienenko and Bosnitch came out from the bridge and watched us descend to the dock, they didn’t say a word.

The dock smelled bad. It wasn’t just an odor, it was a stench like rotten mango. As I stepped onto the dock, a great spurt of raw sewage shot from a pipe near the gangway and dropped into the water by the ship. Henri didn’t even notice. He nodded me toward a prefab single-story concrete office block by the nearest warehouse, where a faded sign said
BUREAU DE L’IMMIGRATION
.

Henri hadn’t been pleased to discover that we weren’t carrying passports, and now as we crossed to the Immigration office he asked if we had any money. I exchanged a glance with Rita. He asked us again.

“Twenty dollars,” I said.

“You?” he asked Rita.

“Nothing,” she said, and he smiled.

That smile of his was starting to get to me. He told me he needed my twenty bucks for Immigration, so I stopped and hitched up my hip. Rita fished out my wallet, removed a twenty, and gave it to him. Then she flashed the empty wallet at Henri before shoving it back in my pocket. Welcome to Africa.

Inside the Immigration office there was an empty waiting area and three large tables at the rear. On the wall hung a photo portrait of the latest Congolese President, in military uniform, with lots of medals and bars on his chest. At the farthest table, two guys were eating a late supper, spooning stew from their bowls. When one of them scuttled away, Henri took the vacated seat. Then a soldier strolled in, his forearms resting on the AK47 he had slung from a strap over his shoulder. He put one foot up on a chair and chatted with Henri.

“How long’s this going to take?” I called across.

Henri flicked a hand imperiously. He continued shooting the breeze with his buddy, so I sat down on the bench beside Rita.

“What happened to the other twenty?” I asked her quietly.

“I palmed it.”

“Which leaves us?”

“About a hundred and twenty.”

“Somewhere safe?”

“I damn well hope so.” She glanced down to her cleavage.

I told her that if we got separated, I wanted her to get hold of Channon, have him call in a strike on the containers.

“They’re not going to separate us,” she said.

“And contact Brad,” I told her. “Get whatever help you can at the embassy. Make sure he’s safe. Pull whatever strings you can.”

“Is this before or after I find out what our friend Henri here’s done with you?” Her glance slid by me. “Don’t look now, but I think the boss just arrived.”

I looked. A guy built like a refrigerator was standing in the doorway. He was wearing a blue uniform, there was a tag on his breast pocket saying
IMMIGRATION
and something else I couldn’t read. His eyes were red, like he’d been sleeping, and he didn’t look too happy about being called from his bed. Over at the table, the soldier stood up. The other guy started digging in a drawer, while Henri got to his feet.

The big guy went across, had a brief talk with Henri, then finally settled himself behind the main table. Some forms were produced. The big guy looked over and crooked a finger at Rita. I rose to go with her, but he wagged his finger at me and clucked his tongue.

For the next fifteen minutes Henri acted as translator between Rita and the Immigration boss, a totally bizarre session in which Rita was asked everything from the color of her eyes to the number of previous visits she’d made to each one of the Congo’s neighboring states. The junior official copied Rita’s answers down onto forms as if they actually mattered. Rita kept her cool. She answered the absurd questions and signed each form as it was completed.

While this was going on, I became aware of machinery moving outside on the docks. I stood and looked out a window and saw the derricks up on the
Sebastopol
working. I went to the door. Outside, three low-loaders were parked near the ship, the first truck was already loaded with two Haplon containers. The unloading from the ship was being carried out under military supervision, there were guys in fatigues everywhere, and officers bawling orders. I noticed that the containers hadn’t been opened. As long as they stayed that way, Channon wouldn’t have any trouble taking them out.

“Ned,” said Rita quietly behind me.

I turned. She wasn’t looking at me, she was looking at the soldier who was sighting down the barrel of his AK47 at my head. I opened my cuffed hands. “Hey,” I said. I looked toward Henri, the gun stayed trained on me. “Tell him to stop pointing his gun.”

“He saw you near the door,” said Henri.

“I don’t care where he saw me. Tell him to put the thing down.”

“Will you run?”

I couldn’t believe the question. Run? I was handcuffed, there were soldiers everywhere, and I was in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Where the hell was I going to run to?

“Tell him to put it down.”

Finally it was the Immigration boss who gave the order. Disappointed, the soldier lowered his gun. Then the Immigration boss beckoned me over. I went and braced my hands on his table.

“I’m five-eleven,” I said. “I weigh a hundred and seventy pounds. I’ve never been to this hellhole before, and from what I’ve seen in the past half hour, I doubt that I’ll be back.”

The guy eyeballed me lazily. Henri gave him a letter, presumably the orders about me from Kinshasa. The Immigration guy ran his eyes over the letter and passed it back. There was a discussion, then Henri got up and went to the door. When I glanced over, he was folding my twenty bucks into the letter. Returning to the table, Henri passed the letter to the Immigration guy, who took it and turned his back. The performance was utterly childish, everyone in the room knew what was going on. At last the big guy dug a rubber stamp from his drawer. He banged the stamp down on the letter, tossed the letter at Henri, then walked out.

Rita leaned across to me. “You’ve arrived.”

Henri waved us curtly to the door.

Outside, another Haplon container had been off-loaded from the ship and transferred to a truck. The Congolese army wasn’t wasting any time. As we trailed Henri past the trucks, Rita nudged me, nodding to the first truck in line. A white guy in military fatigues was busy giving orders to the Congolese soldiers. When he saw us, he turned and watched us go by. He made no attempt to hide. Then something about the loading caught his attention and he forgot about us and yelled at the soldiers again. “Hey, is that gonna bloody do it? How many fucking times have I told you?” He went to fix the problem.

“Brit?” said Rita quietly. I nodded. I’d been on joint maneuvers with the British army many times, even fought alongside some of them in the Gulf. Good soldiers. Poorly equipped, but tough. “What’s he doing here?” she said.

“Mercenary.”

Her head swung around, she looked back at the guy. I wondered how long it would take her to make the connection. A few steps farther on, she got it. “One of Trevanian’s?”

“Has to be.”

“He was giving the local soldiers orders.”

Lifting my chin toward Henri just in front of us, I shook my head. Not the time to talk. Rita shot another backward glance at the trucks, then we passed behind a warehouse.

A vehicle was waiting for us there, a jungle-green Toyota. Rita and I were bundled into the backseat by the armed soldier standing guard, then an unarmed soldier emerged from the shadows and got into the driver’s seat. Henri got in beside him, then the guard with the AK47 climbed into the back behind Rita and me. We turned a hundred and eighty degrees and cruised back along the docks, passing the trucks, then the ship. Up on deck, Damienenko was supervising the unloading of another Haplon container. Near the stern, Bosnitch, the mate, was trying to get the dangling lifeboat back to its station.

Looking up at them, Rita mused, “Now where’d you rather be?”

I leaned forward and asked Henri where we were going.

“Kinshasa,” he said.

The driver was middle-aged and gaunt, one of the thinnest men I’d ever seen. He banged the steering wheel with his palm, and repeated it, “Kinshasa, Kinshasa,” and grinned.

Soldiers were positioned behind sandbags outside the dock gates, their weapons pointing down the road toward the local town. A sergeant came out from the gatehouse and looked in at us warily, but when Henri snapped two sharp words at him, the sergeant couldn’t get the gates opened fast enough. He actually saluted as we drove out. I exchanged a glance with Rita. The sergeant was clearly petrified of Henri.

After a hundred yards we turned onto a sidetrack. I leaned forward again.

“We heard there’s been fighting here.” No response. “In fact, we saw it,” I said. “Flares. Maybe some tracers.”

“No fighting.”

“It sure looked like fighting.”

Henri waved a hand like he didn’t want to hear any more about it. When Rita asked how long it would take us to get to Kinshasa, he told her we’d arrive the following morning. She groaned. But I was far more concerned about the nocturnal gauntlet we were about to run.

“Does your man in back know what he’s doing?” I asked Henri.

Henri spoke to the soldier in French. The soldier dropped the tailgate, shuffled onto it, then stood up and faced forward. We must have been doing nearly sixty. Henri pointed to a road sign ahead, and as our headlights lit the sign up, it disintegrated in a shower of bullets from our guard’s AK47. Inside the cab, the noise was deafening. The guy kept blasting when we were long past the road sign, in the end Henri shouted and thumped his hand on the roof. The guy still wouldn’t stop shooting, so Henri gave the hand brake a jerk. The Toyota jolted, there was a loud bang on the roof, and the blasting stopped dead. A second later, the guy shuffled back inside sheepishly and closed the tailgate. Rita dropped her head into her hand.

A few miles farther on, two soldiers suddenly appeared out of the darkness in front of us, waving us down. We stopped, and a third soldier came out of the bush. He shone his flashlight in at us, flourishing a pistol and shouting. Our guard in back did nothing.

Henri turned in his seat. “This man want money.”

“You already took it.”

“Tell him to screw off,” said Rita.

Henri seemed remarkably unconcerned about the pistol waving by his ear. When he warned us that the guy would make trouble, I said, “If you can’t get us five miles past the goddamn port, Henri, how do you expect to get us to Kinshasa?”

“Hundred dollars,” said Henri, and I shook my head and he spoke to the soldier again. Then he turned back to me. “Fifty.”

“For crying out loud,” said Rita.

“Fifty dollars.” Henri held out his hand. The guy with the pistol stuck his head in, he looked with bloodshot eyes at Rita and me. Mainly at Rita.

When I shook my head again, Rita said, “You know what you’re doing, right?”

I nodded. I wasn’t sure that I did.

The guy with the pistol suddenly pushed a hand in toward Rita. She hunched her shoulders and cried out, but the next moment there was a rattle of gunfire from the darkness real close. The bloodshot eyes widened in surprise, then the guy spun around and ran. In back, our guard dropped the tailgate and opened fire indiscriminately. I grabbed Rita and shoved her down. The smell of burnt powder filled the cab, my eyes stung. Henri shouted in panic, the driver hit the gas, and we lurched forward and accelerated down the track.

I sat up and looked back. There were powder flashes off in the bush, Henri’s buddies who’d tried to shake us down were finally returning fire at their ambushers. We sped on up the road, took a bend, and the flashes disappeared behind us. Henri looked over his shoulder, his eyes wide.

“No fighting?” I said. “That’s what you call no fighting?” I held up my cuffs and told him, “Take them off.” Henri shouted past me to the soldier in back. I thrust my hands forward between him and the driver. “Take these damn things off!”

Henri shouted to the soldier again. Rita shouted, “Ned!” and then there was an explosion of pain in my shoulder and I cried out and slumped against the door. My hand clutched my shoulder. Our guard’s gun butt hovered over me, Rita screamed at him, then Henri barked an order and the gun butt withdrew into the back.

“Ned. Oh, shit. Are you okay?” said Rita. “Oh, shit.”

I nodded grimly. It hurt like hell, but it was just the muscle, not the bone, nothing was broken. Rita started abusing Henri then, and after a minute I hauled myself upright and pulled her back into the seat. She kept on at him. I let my head fall back and closed my eyes and tried to forget the pain. We were in no position to dictate terms, but Rita couldn’t help herself, she was letting off a week’s worth of fury. Henri growled a couple of times but his heart wasn’t in it. It didn’t matter anyway. However much she screamed at him, my cuffs were staying on.

Sometime in the night, we stopped for gas. About twenty trucks were parked at the ramshackle gas station, it seemed most of the drivers weren’t eager to brave the road alone at night with a coup going on. Congolese army vehicles were parked there too, and soldiers wandered around, being careful not to stray too far beyond the dim yellow light near the gas pumps. The night air was warm, the sounds of insects and larger animals out in the darkness pulsed loud. We sat in the corrugated-iron diner with Henri and our guard and ate a meal of sweet potatoes and grilled goat while our driver organized the refueling. It took him the best part of an hour. A couple of hookers were working the gas station, Rita kept herself entertained counting the minutes they gave each client around behind the diner. Nobody got more than ten. One guy only got three.