The Consignment (24 page)

CHAPTER 30

Jay groaned. I went over and crouched by him.

“You need water?”

He made a sound and I bent my head closer.

“Up,” he said, and I put an arm around his shoulders and eased him up against the wall. He winced and clutched his chest.

“Any better?”

He sucked in air through clenched teeth. “Man,” he said. “Oh, man.”

“You’ve been sleeping.”

“I been dyin’.”

I looked at his eyes, they were clear. Then I shuffled around and sat beside him with my back to the wall. His head fell back, he closed his eyes.

“Feel like some mother run me down with his motherfuckin’ truck.” After a second he opened his eyes and looked at me. “They didn’ do nothin’ to you.”

“I’m waiting my turn.”

One corner of his mouth turned up, then he clutched my arm and squeezed it tight, his face suddenly bunched in pain. The air hissed through his teeth as he breathed. He moved, got himself into a position that didn’t hurt so much, then let go of my arm. There were deep scars on his knuckles. Old scars. He saw that I’d seen them.

“You wonderin’ about them Bibles?”

“No.”

“Whatchoo doin’ here, anyways?”

“I’m a geologist.”

“Like mines, that shit?”

“Yeah.”

“Smart,” he said.

“You don’t have to talk.”

“Like you got somepin’ better to do.”

I told him I was thinking about his injured rib.

He put his hand inside his shirt, then winced. “ ’S’okay. Not gettin’ any worse.” Perspiration trickled down his face and neck. He was in pain but holding it back, trying to distract himself by talking. That wasn’t going to work for very long. “I ever get a hold’a that Johnny, man,” he said. Johnny. The dead white kid with the severed arms and the AfricAid sweatshirt. I didn’t say anything. “Got some mouth, the fuck. Talked us in here, now probly talked his ass out’a here already, an’ gone.”

I asked why he and Johnny had been arrested.

“ ’Coz we was rubes, man. ’Coz Johnny keeps his brains in his butt an’ his mouth.”

When I asked if Johnny lived in Kinshasa, Jay made a face.

“Detroit. He ain’t never seen this shithole till last week, same as me.” Then Jay dropped a hand to his ribs and rocked forward. I offered to call the warder, but he rolled his eyes at me and shook his head. After a few seconds the pain seemed to ease, he rested back against the wall and let his breathing settle. After a minute, he spoke again. “I get back home, might just as well reenlist.” At that, I gave him a sideways look, more than just a little curious now. He lifted his chin at the walls. “U.S. Army, man. Safer’n this fuckin’ place.”

I turned that over. “Your friend Johnny ex-Army too?”

“Corporal. Meant to have some fuckin’ brains.”

I asked how long they’d been out.

A year, Jay said.

A year. For most grunts who leave the Army, the first six months aren’t usually too bad, everyone seems to cope short-term. But after a year they’ve generally split into three classes. Guys who are going to make it in civilian life, guys who are reenlisting, and guys who are just about ready to do something extremely stupid. Jay and his dead friend Johnny seemed to be straight out of class number three.

I said, “So now I am getting to wonder about those Bibles.”

“You an’ me both, man,” he muttered.

“Who was Johnny working for? Some Christian aid agency?”

Jay snorted. “Tol’ people he did.”

“But he didn’t.”

Jay faced me. “What’s it to you, motherfucker?”

Jailed in the Congo midcoup. Ex–U.S. Army grunt. I was pretty sure by then, but I decided I might just as well ask him anyway. “You a mercenary, Jay?”

He held my look a few seconds, but finally gave up and turned away.

“Jay?”

“Freelance security.”

“Working for who?” He didn’t answer, so I prompted him. “Trevanian?”

“You-all a geologist? Kiss my ass.”

“Trevanian’s men do security at our mines.”

He looked at me again. “No shit,” he said. When I shook my head, he spent a few seconds thinking things over. Then he said, “We just signed up and got flown out here an’ stuck in a hotel. We been sittin’ on our butts, waitin’ till some brother come pick us up, tell us what to do. Hell. Maybe was your mine we was meant to be going to. Mbuji?”

“Mbuji-Mayi.”

“Hey.”

“That’s not a mine, it’s a town.”

“It’s big fuckin’ trouble. This whole shitfight started out there.”

My gut lurched. “You sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. Guy meant to pick us up, he couldn’t make it. Too busy with the bust-up in Mbuji, that’s what they tol’ us. Sit tight. So we do. Nex’ mornin’ five crazy fuckers kick our door in, haul our asses down here. Johnny keeps tryin’ to talk to them, like tryin’ to be reasonable. Shit. Reasonable? I tol’ him to shut his big fuckin’ mouth. But man—talkin’s like his thing.” Jay paused. “Shit. Talk hisself out’a any damn thing. Talk me right into any damn thing too.” Then he moved, not much, but the rib seemed to do something inside him. He cried out and pressed back against the wall.

“Stay still,” I said, crouching beside him. But when I rose and turned toward the peephole, Jay clutched at my leg. I looked back down at him, his lips were pressed tight together, his eyes were wide in pain and desperation and he was shaking his head. He couldn’t take another beating. I bent and prised his fingers off my pants. “I’ll try to get us some food. Some more water.”

Amazingly, I managed it. The warder seemed to be acting on new instructions from Lagundi. When I finally got him to the peephole, communicated what I wanted, he disappeared for fifteen minutes, then returned and unbolted the door. He pushed the door open and I stood up and he waved me to the rear of the cell. As I went back there, he ordered Jay to follow me. Jay tried to stand but couldn’t. He slumped down groaning and clutched his ribs. Even the warder could see it wasn’t an act. He came in and put a canteen on the floor, and a small plastic bucket, then withdrew, rebolting the door.

In the canteen, there was water. In the plastic bucket, several pieces of tropical fruit that had started to turn. Overripe mangoes, blackening bananas, and a few other things I could barely recognize, let alone name. I put the bucket between me and Jay and we went through the fruit, peeling it, scraping off the worst parts, and dividing the rest. Between mouthfuls, we swigged the water from the canteen.

Brad was somewhere out near the fighting in Mbuji-Mayi while I was stuck in a jail cell in Kinshasa, eating rotten fruit and waiting for Lagundi to decide what to do with me. I hadn’t felt so physically helpless, so totally frustrated, for years, not since I was lying half-dead in some hovel in the Mogadishu backstreets, weaponless, watching the blood ooze from my stomach into my shirt and pants, and listening to the Somalis raining fire down on two trapped Rangers across the street. Neither one of them made it, but they probably saved my life. Now I chewed the pulpy mango and drank the brackish water and found my memories of Mogadishu turning to Dimitri. He’d seen the worst of the Mogadishu firefight, yet he’d gone through the whole thing unscathed. He’d gone through his Delta career the same way too, right up till he took the shot down in Colombia that shunted him out of Delta and into Hawkeye. Being trapped in a Congolese Internal Security jail cell was the kind of thing they trained you for in Delta—Dimitri’s kind of action, not mine—it was something I’d never remotely expected to face. When I signed up for Hawkeye, I wanted simply to serve again. Instead, a trapdoor had suddenly opened beneath my feet and dropped me into a nightmare world I knew nothing about.

When we’d finished the fruit I shoved the bucket into the corner. Jay held out the canteen and shook it. A mouthful.

“Yours,” I said, and he drank it straight down.

Then he dropped the canteen by his side. “Hey, whatchoo in here for anyway?”

“Same as you,” I said, and when he grunted, I quickly elaborated. “For nothing. Nothing at all.”

“Ain’t that the truth.”

Now that he wasn’t pretending to be a Bible peddler, he didn’t need to play the ignorant innocent abroad. I figured he might actually know something about the coup and the fighting outside. But when I asked him if he could remember anything from before he was arrested, any more about the fighting out in Mbuji-Mayi, he turned his head.

“Wasn’ payin’ it no mind. Johnny tol’ me it was gonna be okay, couple a days keepin’ our heads down in the hotel, we was gonna be picked up for sure. Me, I jus’ chilled out, got some z’s. You wanna know ’bout that strategy shit, you akse Johnny.”

For a long time I stared at the floor between my feet. Internal Security had arrested two of Trevanian’s new recruits and murdered one of them. The split between Lagundi and Trevanian had turned lethal, and I was caught right between them. Finally I got up and went over to the bucket in the corner and unzipped to take a leak. The door bolt clunked back. As I looked over my shoulder, the door flew open and three guards and the warder rushed in. I zipped up and turned just in time to take a rifle butt in the gut. I crashed back into the wall, then dropped to the floor, winded. I lay there, curled up, trying to breathe. One guard stood over me. I saw the warder and the two other guards beating Jay, and shouting. Jay screamed, raised a hand to ward off the blows, then one guard swung his boot into Jay’s rib cage. There was a deep thud, a faint cracking sound, and Jay toppled onto his side, his face smacking hard against the floor. A moment later, blood came bubbling out of his mouth.

I tried to get up, tried to breathe, but I couldn’t. They kept kicking Jay, driving their rifle butts into him. Then one blow caught his temple and the bone crunched. Jay’s body went momentarily rigid, then his arms flopped, his face dropped onto the floor again, and his tongue lolled out of his blood-soaked mouth.

After a few moments they stopped hitting him. One guard grabbed Jay’s lifeless arm. Finally I got air into my lungs, I pushed myself up, but the guard kicked me in the gut and I went straight down again. I rolled and covered myself as they dragged Jay’s body from the cell. The door crashed closed and the bolt slammed.

When they were gone, I rolled onto my front. At last I got myself up onto my hands and knees. I’d seen men die, too many, but never like that. I’d never seen any creature on God’s earth die like Jay. I crawled a few feet, braced one hand against the wall, then dropped my head and threw up hard.

CHAPTER 31

I hadn’t had time to get myself properly together when I heard the warder returning ten minutes later. I retreated to the rear of the cell and set my back against the wall. I wasn’t ready to die. My son needed me. I had to see my wife. But if Lagundi had delivered the verdict against me, these guys would carry it out, I knew that now. I fixed my eyes on the door. I found myself praying beneath my breath, calling on God to watch over my wife and son, to deliver my soul.

The door finally opened, I crouched and braced myself. I saw the warder. Then the door opened a little farther, and there—there was Rita Durranti.

“Jesus Christ, Ned.” I stared at her. The warder smiled, and if I could have gotten to him in that moment I would have killed him. Rita seemed to sense that. She stepped in and took hold of my arm. “You’re out, Ned. You’re getting out.” She looked over her shoulder, and, pushing past the warder, Alex Channon stepped into view. He wasn’t in uniform. He held a hand toward me, I was stunned.

“Alex?”

“Move,” he told me with his usual quiet authority. “Or you won’t be getting out, ever.”

Rita led me out, then Alex placed a hand on my back and turned me down the passage. There the warder passed us on to an armed Congolese soldier who escorted us upstairs. I started telling Channon about Jay, the split between Trevanian and Congolese Internal Security, but Channon told me to shut my mouth. The large reception hall was empty, the soldiers and the prisoners I’d seen earlier had all gone. Alex and Rita kept me sandwiched between them, we followed the soldier to a desk where a lone Internal Security officer was waiting for us. He turned a big ledger around, then opened it to a blank page and made all three of us sign. The mindless bureaucracy of a madhouse. The formality completed, he insisted on shaking Channon’s hand. After that, the soldier escorted us out through the forecourt and onto the street, where a Ford off-roader with diplomatic plates was parked. Another soldier stood guard over it. The body of Jay’s friend Johnny had been removed from its place by the guardhouse. While Channon handed over a fistful of U.S. dollars to the two soldiers, Rita and I got in the back of the Ford. Then Channon got into the driver’s seat.

“There’s a gun in the side pocket,” he told me, hitting the ignition. “It’s loaded.”

I took it out. I asked him who I should shoot.

“Anyone who tries to stop us.” He reached beneath his jacket and took out his own pistol as we pulled away from Internal Security HQ. Then he placed it on the seat beside him and looked at me in the rearview mirror. “How are you feeling?”

“Alive.”

He gave a tight smile. I turned, bewildered, to thank Rita.

“Thank Alex,” she said. “If he hadn’t shown up, I wouldn’t have gotten you out. Are you hurt?”

Bruised, I told her. Nothing serious.

“Lucky man,” murmured Channon.

I asked him what in the world he was doing in Kinshasa. “Shouldn’t you be in Washington?”

“There’s a U.S. aircraft carrier lying off the coast here. I flew out to join them, see if they could track down the
Sebastopol
. Now the carrier’s taking evacuees. Americans and Europeans. Some UN people. Choppers have been flying out there from the embassy all day long. Everyone wants out.”

I looked at Rita, then back to Channon. “Why’d you need to track the
Sebastopol
? The beacons—”

“The transmitters never worked,” he said. “Complete fucking disaster. They gave out before you left the Hudson.”

“So where’s the Haplon materiel?” I asked. Channon was silent, he stared straight ahead. “We haven’t lost it,” I said.

“We never had it.” He looked pained. “After the
Sebastopol
sailed, we weren’t picking up any signals. It took me three days to convince the Navy we needed some help. Best they could do was get me to a carrier in the area, monitor the sea traffic.” He gestured around the eerily empty streets. “Then this goddamn coup.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“I’m trying to find the stuff.”

“We’ve just shipped six containers of U.S. equipment into a civil war.”

His voice rose. “I’m not over the moon about it myself, Ned. All right?”

I slumped back in my seat. I could not believe it. As I was digesting the awful news, I became aware of the burned-out buildings we were passing, and the bodies lying in the street. I turned to Rita.

“Where’s Brad? Did you find him, did you get him out?”

“I couldn’t trace him. His name’s not on any of the evacuee lists.”

A cold chill ran up my spine, but I forced the fear down. There was nothing I could do about Brad just then.

“I saw Cecille Lagundi in the jail. You’ll never guess what her father does for a living.”

“He’s the Minister for Police,” said Channon, and I looked at him in the rearview mirror. “Our ambassador told me,” he explained ruefully. Apparently Channon had been present when the ambassador contacted Cecille’s father with a warning to keep the Congolese police clear of the embassy. Marines from the carrier had flown into Kinshasa and laid down a secure perimeter around the embassy. If the Congolese police crossed the line they were liable to be shot. “Lagundi,” Channon finished. “I nearly died when I heard the name.”

“Oh, this is great.” I held my forehead. “Our ambassador knows the guy?”

“They’re not drinking buddies.”

“No one mentioned that to us back in New York. You were chasing background on Cecille for two weeks. Our spooks didn’t match the names?”

“Evidently not.”

“Oh, for chrissakes.”

“Get down!” he shouted, then he jerked on the wheel. I was flung sideways into Rita, then there was a roar of automatic gunfire, we hunkered down in the seat. Channon threw the vehicle left then right. There was a bang and a spray of shattered glass, Channon turned sharp left and accelerated, there was a loud popping sound, then the gunfire faded behind us.

“Rita?” said Channon. She lifted her head off the seat and brushed the glass from her hair. “You hit?”

“No,” she said.

“Ned?”

“I’m fine.” I sat up, shaking off the shattered glass.

The rear window and the one to my left had imploded. Up front, Channon raised his hand and fingered two bullet holes that had appeared in the roof about eighteen inches from his head. “Twelve-year-old with a damn AK47.”

I asked him if he knew where we were going.

“Embassy.” He dropped his hand. “I want you two on the next bird out.”

Every shop front we passed now was smashed, some were still burning, smoke billowing upward, grim markers over the destruction. There were bodies too, lying by the buildings, and some farther out in the street. When a flock of crows flapped into the air then resettled on a body as we passed, nobody talked for a while. Then Channon pointed over to the east. A chopper rising into the sky just a mile away. Channon picked up the radio handset.

“Oscar five nine, Oscar five nine, this is Charlie six, do you copy me, over?”

“We read you, Charlie six.”

“I’m approaching the ex–fill site from the south. One vehicle. You should have visual.”

“Negative, Charlie six.” We drove for another minute, then turned a corner. The radio crackled into life. “Okay, Charlie six, we’ve got you. Come on in.”

Channon went straight up the long avenue and past a nest of sandbags. A Marine darted out, I turned and watched him drag a coil of razor wire across the road behind us.

The park in front of the embassy was really just an open space of bare earth, a few token eucalyptus were planted around the edges for shade. Channon parked beneath one of the trees and we got out. There must have been two hundred people there, but everything seemed remarkably calm. The Marines were running the evacuation like clockwork.

The evacuees had been formed into chalks, lines of around twenty people apiece, they were all waiting their turn to be ferried out. Not just men, there were women too, and some children. Now that they’d made it inside the protective line of razor wire and into the care of the Marines, you could read the relief on their faces.

Channon took us across to the Marine captain organizing the chalks. The captain didn’t hesitate when Channon requested our immediate departure. He simply deleted two people from his list, then asked us our names. He entered them, and pointed us to the rear end of the chalk. “Stand back there. When the helicopter lands, wait. When I call you forward, proceed in an orderly fashion, single file, to the open door. You may be assisted aboard.” He nodded to Channon, then walked away.

“Just do like he says,” Channon told us, leading us to the first chalk. “I have to see the ambassador, I’ll be out to the ship later.”

“What about Brad?”

Channon backed away. “Tell them on the carrier. My bet is, he’s out there waiting for you.” He raised his hand, half salute, half wave, then he turned and jogged across to the embassy. I watched until he’d entered through the gates.

“Hey,” said Rita when I left the chalk. When I didn’t answer, she came after me. “We’ll lose our places.”

I found the Marine captain giving instructions to his men. I asked him if he had access to the names of everyone who’d already been evacuated. He did.

“B. Rourke,” I said, and I spelled it for him. “Can you try that for me?” He entered the name into his organizer. It drew a blank. “Try Barchevsky,” I said. He tried it, but that drew a blank too. I explained that they’d come from another part of the country. “Mbuji-Mayi. The diamond area. Geologists. Has anyone come through from there?”

“Miners?”

“Yeah, miners. Anyone.”

“There was a bunch of miners went through first thing, but they’re all in here.” He tapped his organizer. Then he pointed. “Along on chalk four, there’s some more. But they’re all in here too.”

The buzz of talk all around suddenly grew, people craned back, some of them pointing off to the west. I looked that way and saw a small black dot in the sky. A chopper. The Marine captain ordered Rita and me back to our chalk, and we went. Rita stopped at the chalk, but I kept going.

She skipped after me. “Hey, this is us.” She pointed to the chopper. “That’s our lift out.”

I passed the rear of chalk three and saw the miners in chalk four immediately. Half a dozen unshaven guys in their thirties, their faces baked brown by the sun. I went straight up to them.

“Anyone here just come from Mbuji-Mayi?”

Three of them had.

“The Dujanka mine?”

None of them.

“I’m looking for a Bradley Rourke. He’s a geologist.”

Nobody knew the name.

“He was working for Ivan Barchevsky.”

There was silence. My heart sank. Then one of the three from Mbuji-Mayi said, “Why you looking for this guy Rourke?”

“He’s my son.”

The miner looked at me, thinking it over. Then he said, “I was working on one of Barchevsky’s mines. He shut them all down. We flew back in with him this morning.” When I asked if he knew whether Barchevsky had been evacuated, he shrugged. “I guess. Last I saw him was at the airport.” He gestured vaguely. “He had a car waiting. The rest of us piled in a bus.”

“Did anyone go with him?”

He shrugged again. He didn’t know. Maybe, he said.

“A guy in his early twenties. Wiry. Looked a little like me.”

He turned his head, apologetic. He really hadn’t noticed.

“Ned,” said Rita, tugging my sleeve, looking up at the nearing chopper.

Then the miner volunteered, “I think Barchevsky was going to his office first. Maybe he didn’t make it here.”

“His office.”

“He’s got an apartment there.” He pulled out his wallet and gave me Barchevsky’s business card. He suggested I try calling.

Then someone shouted, “You two!” and everyone turned. The Marine captain was pointing at Rita and me. “Get back in your chalk. You miss this bird, you go to the end of the line.”

Rita grabbed my arm, she hauled me around behind chalks three and two. The chopper was close enough to hear now. As it neared, flares shot out to either side of it, decoys for any ground-based missiles. I turned Barchevsky’s business card through my fingers. “When we get to that damned carrier,” Rita said, watching the chopper, “I swear I’m going to get down on my knees and kiss the deck.”

“I’m staying here.”

She faced me. She shook her head. “Don’t be crazy. You heard Channon. Brad’s probably out there already.”

“His name’s not on the list.”

“So they’ve made a mistake.”

“If his name’s not on the Marine list, he hasn’t made it out.”

“There’s nothing you can do about that.”

I looked at the embassy gates. I squinted as the descending chopper stirred up a swirling dust cloud.

“You’re really not coming,” Rita said, raising her voice over the chopper engines.

“Chalk one!” bellowed the Marine captain over a megaphone.

“I’ll get the next one.”

“I can stay,” she shouted.

I shook my head, grabbed her arm, and put my mouth to her ear. “Go! Go on!” The others in the chalk were moving forward, I pushed Rita firmly after them. She looked back over her shoulder and I waved her on, then I turned and headed for the embassy. There were no guards on the gates. I guess with the Marine perimeter stretching around the block, they thought the place was already secure. A lone Marine was posted at the door of the building. I told him I needed to see Channon, but when he discovered I had no ID he pointed me back to the park.

“Look, just tell him I’m here, okay? Rourke. Ned Rourke.”

He finally went to pass the message. When I turned and looked across the park, chalk one was climbing aboard the chopper. Rita was the last in. The doors closed behind her, then the captain gave the pilot the thumbs-up, and the chopper lifted, tilting into the air.

“Mister.” A white woman wearing horn-rimmed glasses leaned out the plate-glass door. “Can you give me a hand in here? I need some furniture shoved, it’s heavy.”

The chopper passed directly overhead and I followed the woman inside.

The front desk had been abandoned. She led me a short way down the hall, and I saw people, local and American, scooting in and out of offices, their arms piled high with paperwork and files. There was some shouting too, an atmosphere of urgency and restrained hysteria. Turning in to her office, the woman pointed to the three filing cabinets in the corner. She explained that she’d cleared out the first two, now she needed to get to the one at the rear. I went and shoved the front cabinets out of her way, it didn’t take me a minute. She opened the third cabinet, asking me if I could take some files along to the shredder. Before I could reply, she was piling the files on my arms. When I was loaded, she nodded me to the door, and I didn’t linger, I went out and found someone else loaded with paperwork, then followed him down the hall. The hall passed right through the embassy, opening onto an enclosed porch at the rear. A shredding machine had been set up there. Through the windows out back I could see a U.S. government–issue incinerator, gas-fed, being loaded with shredded paper. The paperwork and files were piled high around the shredder, the operation had some way to go. I dumped my files on the heap, then slipped past a couple of locals in white shirtsleeves and went up the back stairs.