Deep Cover (The Trigger Man Book 2), page 13
Sweat running off his forehead, Eloko turned and caught the stares of Ibaka, Trager, his combat-ready men, and the chained slaves. “I will prove it to you all, again, so there is no doubt in any of you of my power!” He held his pistol high above his head. “I cast spells over my weapons. You want to know what this pistol does? It fires justice bullets. Only justice bullets. If you are pure of intent and loyal to me, the bullets cannot harm you. If you are my enemy, or there is deceit in your heart, the bullets will kill you and send your spirit into darkness, where it will become lost forever in the nightmare realms of the great Congo, where demons will feast on your soul for eternity. Are you ready for my bullets to test you?”
One prisoner sobbed as tears gushed from his eyes.
The other six remained still and silent as their bodies tensed.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
Captain Eloko pressed the weapon against the head of the first slave and squeezed the trigger. The noise of the bullet sounded loud in the otherwise silent mining camp as the dead slave fell face first into the mud.
Eloko stepped up to the second man, squeezed the trigger, blowing apart another skull.
Kiambi had witnessed plenty of Eloko’s executions during his incarceration, but nothing prepared him when Eloko spun around and placed the weapon against his own sweaty skull, like a man ready to commit suicide, and fired.
The bullet sounded.
The casing ejected from the chamber.
Smoke spewed from the muzzle.
Yet Captain Eloko remained unharmed.
The warlord returned to the line and fired the weapon into the back of each slave’s head, executing them all.
Or so Kiambi thought. One fallen slave struggled up out of the mud. He was not dead or even injured, for the bullet intended to shoot through the back of his head must have been a blank or a misfire.
Eloko grinned and lifted the slave to his feet and shook the already shaking man. “I know it wasn’t you. I know your so-called friends made you do it. So, you will tell me where you hid the diamond, as a loyal subject would.”
Kiambi couldn’t hear what the prisoner mumbled, but he witnessed plenty of nodding from Eloko as they conversed. Then the warlord marched over to one of his soldiers, who then disappeared into the jungle for perhaps fifteen minutes before returning with a largish, rough diamond wrapped in cloth.
Eloko smiled again. “Ah! See, that wasn’t so hard.” He beckoned for Trager, Kiambi and Ibaka to step close to him.
They all complied.
Ibaka was trembling, and so was Kiambi. Trager must have felt fear too because of all the tensing and eye-flickering they were witnessing in Eloko, but Trager hid it well if he did.
Eloko switched magazines on his pistol. His movements were slow and careful. “Do you three now believe that I am a sorcerer? That I control real magic? That I can make any of you die with a click of my fingers?”
Ibaka nodded. “I never doubted you, my Captain.”
Kiambi nodded vigorously in agreement. The doctor was a pious Christian, had been his entire life. Had he expressed too many opinions concerning the love of his god towards all people and his faith in this higher power, and had this displeased Eloko? Kiambi knew he was about to find out in the coming seconds. “I believe you too, Captain. I always have.”
Kiambi felt sick when he spoke those words, denying his faith in this public scenario just to save his own pointless life in this moment. He knew this was trickery, and the simplest solution was a pistol loaded with both blank and live rounds. It took nerves that Kiambi could never possess, to point a weapon at one’s own head and pull the trigger, hoping that you had remembered the order of rounds correctly.
Eloko turned to Trager, and the two men locked stares. He waited impatiently for an answer.
Trager just stared back into Eloko’s dead eyes and spoke using careful, controlled words. “Your powers are impressive, Captain. I’ve never seen their like before.”
Eloko’s hand shot up, and he fired his pistol three times, once at Trager, once at Kiambi, and once at Ibaka.
The mine supervisor dropped dead into the mud.
Trager and Kiambi, however, remained upright.
Kiambi touched his chest.
No blood decorated his fingers, and there was no pain.
He checked his shirt, pulled open the buttons, finding no entry wound.
Trager too appeared as equally baffled that he was not dead.
“See,” Eloko said with the practised grin of a madman. “Guilt is very easy to determine. Let this be a lesson for you, Sergeant Trager and Dr Kiambi. Today I’ve proven both your loyalties. Don’t let that loyalty falter, because when you betray me, I will know the truth. And so will my magic bullets.”
25
The return drive to the rebel camp seemed to make Trager sicker than he had been when they had first arrived at the mine. The rough road, erratic speeds and stop-start motions caused him to vomit often, and soon his bile streaked down the outsides of the truck. When he wasn’t spewing, he closed his eyes while trying to take in deep breaths.
Kiambi sat on the floor between Trager and Eloko. He looked at his limbs, which were like twigs. He felt the tears as they streamed down his sunken face. Sometimes when Eloko or other soldiers pressed their weapons against his head, ready to execute him, he wished that they would so this could all end. As a Christian, he couldn’t commit suicide, as that was a mortal sin, so his ending, when it came, would always be tied to the will of others.
Then he would remember his family and his daughters, lost to him, and how he might one day get back to them. And he also remembered the women, boys and girls of this camp, forced into soldiering and prostitution, and how he’d helped them with their ailments when they arose. It was only the needs of the innocents that he could serve with his skills, which kept him going.
“We’re here,” said Eloko as they arrived back at the camp.
Trager stepped onto solid ground and seemed to recover a little from his nausea now that he could stand straight again and was not confined to a vehicle roughly traversing a potholed muddy road.
Eloko grinned at Trager when he saw the man was in pain, but his eyes were like shadows. “You didn’t shit in my truck?”
Trager frowned. “No. I shit in the jungle like everyone else.”
“Runny shit, no doubt.” The warlord belly laughed as he pounded Trager on the back, a gesture designed to appear friendly, but was a reminder of Eloko’s physical power and his ability to hurt anyone whenever he chose to. “You are sick, my friend. You have angered the spirits.” Eloko gestured to Trager’s vomit trails staining the outside panels of his truck. “I have good reason to believe that maybe you’ve lost control of all your orifices.”
“You’re not worried about my well-being, Captain.” Trager couldn’t hide his sarcastic tone.
“I don’t worry about anyone. I don’t have to. Because I know everyone. I see all your souls, better than you see them yourselves. I know who is sick, who is healthy, who will live to the end of each day and who will not. Your spirit selves cannot hide their truth from me. The invisible world is mine to control.”
Trager snorted a laugh.
“You don’t believe, Sergeant. I see that. You pretend you are better than all this, but you pass like a shadow through a material world of falsehoods.”
“What do you care what I think?”
Eloko’s eyes stared unblinking. “I will give you some peace of mind, Sergeant. You will die soon enough, and so will your friends. I’ve seen the future. But you will not die today, and not from the evil spirits that made you vomit all over my beautiful truck.” He again slapped Trager hard on the back. “Smile, Sergeant. Enjoy what life you have now. Live in the moment, because here and now is all that matters. Go pound that beautiful piece of ass you keep locked up in your cabin. Enjoy your passions with the delightful Molly McEwan. I tell you this, Sergeant, because joy never lasts forever. Not for you, at least.” He looked over to his own hut, then grabbed his crotch. “Speaking of living in the moment…”
Trager and Kiambi watched Eloko stride towards his harem. When the warlord was beyond their sight, Trager grabbed Kiambi and dragged him through the mud to his bungalow.
“What’s happening now?” Kiambi asked, intensely feeling the fear that was always with him.
“Nothing sinister.” At his bungalow, Trager pounded on the door. “Molly, it’s me. Alex.”
Several seconds of fumbling passed before the locks unlatched and Molly stood before him, with a pistol tight in her sweaty palm. Her eyes were red and her nose runny.
“You okay?” Trager asked.
Molly nodded and hugged him.
“Where is Javor? Why are you alone? Don’t you know you can’t be alone in this camp, with these crazy drug-addled soldiers wandering around taking whatever they want?”
She shook her head, then sobbed. “Mamadou insisted Javor help bury his brother. I should have gone with them, but… I was scared to leave. Then they kept… Peering through the windows.”
“What? Who?”
“Eloko’s men. Came right up to the windows. Demanded I… perform.”
Trager snarled as his face twisted into ugliness. “But no one touched you?”
Molly frowned and withdrew from him. “No! Didn’t make it any less scary.”
Kiambi shrank into a corner of the bungalow, feeling that he didn’t belong as a witness to this intimate conversation.
Trager pulled her close and hugged her again, his personality switching from anger to compassion in a single moment. “I know, and I’m sorry. I’ll deal with this. But first, I need to deal with my illness.”
He turned to Kiambi, stared him down, and the doctor finally understood why he was here.
26
After checking the Australian’s temperature, blood pressure, throat, eyes and ears, and asking various questions about his diet, aches and pains, sexual appetite and other bodily functions, Kiambi said, “It’s food poisoning.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, or it’s a stomach bug, which is essentially the same thing. Either way, nothing to worry about, and you’ll recover in a few days. You just need rest and lots of fluids.”
Trager tensed, then said, “Mate, could it be something else?”
The doctor shrugged, then noticed Molly’s worry, equal to Trager’s. Then Kiambi remembered Eloko’s quasi-prophetic words concerning Trager’s impending death and immediately dismissed it from his mind as folly.
“Radiation poisoning?” Molly spoke before Trager could say what was on both their minds. “Could Alex’s symptoms result from exposure to fissile materials?”
Kiambi stared at them both for a long ten seconds. This was not at all what he was expecting, and he wondered how this connected to any of the horrors they experienced in this camp on a daily basis. “Why do you ask that?”
Trager grimaced. “The places me, Molly and the corporal visited while we’ve been away this last week, there was nuclear waste.”
“You were both exposed? And Mr Terzic as well?” Kiambi asked as his body tensed. He wondered if there was nuclear waste in the camp, and if they were all being exposed to it even now.
Then he remembered a week ago, Trager and Terzic had lowered a metal-framed contraption containing six oil-barrel-sized drums into the Kadei River. He had not understood why at the time, but now it made sense; this was the nuclear waste Trager and Molly were talking about. He remembered his studies on nuclear medicine, which didn’t amount to much in the CAR, but knew enough to recall water was a highly effective means of halting gamma rays emitted from radioactive isotopes.
“The drums in the river, they are the source of the radiation?”
Molly nodded.
“Do you have any symptoms, miss?”
She shook her head.
“What about Mr Terzic?”
“He hasn’t mentioned anything.”
“Has Mr Trager spent more time near the fissile material than either of you?”
Another shake of the head.
“If exposed together, you should both have the same symptoms. Take off your shirts please, both of you?”
Molly looked to Trager, and he nodded that it was okay to do so. When they stood topless, him bare-chested and her in a bra, Kiambi examined their skin. Both bodies featured plenty of cuts, mosquito bites and sores that came from living rough in the jungle, and old scar tissue from past wounds, but nothing unordinary.
“You’re both okay.” Kiambi motioned they should dress again. “There would be blotches on your skin, burns and sores, but there is nothing. It’s food poisoning. At worst, dysentery.”
Trager nodded as his breathing slowed to a more normal rhythm. “Thank you, Doctor.”
The doctor sighed and smiled. “Mr Trager, Ms McEwen, now that I’ve helped you, can you please help me? You are both kind people, and I am desperate for your assistance.”
“What kind of help?” Molly buttoned her shirt.
Kiambi sobbed. “My family. I’m worried about them.”
Trager said nothing as he dressed and wouldn’t look at Kiambi. Then he caught Molly’s stare, and her eyes told him it was his duty to aid the doctor.
“I didn’t know you had a family, Derek,” she said.
Kiambi clasped his hands together as if in prayer. “My wife and three daughters, Alzina, Edmee and Saforah, I haven’t seen them in seven months. I don’t know if they are safe or hurt or dead.”
Molly touched him on his bony elbow. “I’m so sorry.”
“That’s enough,” Trager interrupted. “Kiambi, your situation is no different than anyone else in this camp.”
“Please, Sergeant. I’m worried sick for my family. I’ve done everything I can to help Eloko’s men when they fall ill or become wounded. I proved that again today, with Mamadou’s brother, trying to save him even when it was hopeless. How long must I prove my loyalty?”
Trager circled the doctor, like a lion stalking a frail impala. “We are all prisoners here, Doctor. If you wish to have benefits, you need to prove your value, not your intentions.”
Kiambi couldn’t help himself and sobbed. “How? How else can I offer any more value than I do?”
Molly gave Trager a disapproving stare. He ignored her. “There are three types of people in this world, Kiambi. The first are the powerful men, who control money, resources, corporations, countries, and armies. The second are people like us.” He waved his hand to include Molly, Kiambi and himself. “We are skilled individuals, valued by the powerful people because our qualifications and experiences aid them in maintaining and enhancing their powers of control.”
“And the third type?” Molly asked.
Trager waved his hand towards the camp. “The men and child soldiers, the enslaved miners, and the girl prostitutes. Replaceable in an instant by more of the fallen who line up by the thousands, waiting for an opportunity not to starve to death with the pitiful resources powerful men will throw their way.”
“What is your point?” Kiambi wiped away more tears that streamed down his face. He didn’t like Trager’s tone, for he sensed no compassion in him.
“Life is a struggle, Doctor, and the world order is always trying to pull you down. The only hope for people like us is to work hard and become one of the powerful people; otherwise we might fall forever into that endless pit of hopelessness you can never escape from. Pull yourself out of your misery and become like Molly and me, closer to the higher rungs of life’s ladder. When you do, you won’t need to ask us for help. You will no longer beg for reuniting with your family, but demand it.”
“So you won’t help me?”
Trager shook his head. “Only one man can help you now, Kiambi, and that’s you. Help yourself.”
The door burst open, and Corporal Terzic stormed inside. He was out of breath, and his eyes were wide with fear. “Fuck! Sergeant. Sir, we’re in serious fucking trouble!”
Trager pulled his pistol from his belt holster. “Are we under attack?”
“Negative!” Terzic ran a hand through his hair. “Sorry, sir, didn’t mean to surprise you like that. We are not under attack, but the news isn’t good.”
Trager nodded. “Then what the hell is going on, Corporal?”
The colour quickly drained from Corporal Terzic’s face. “Sir, three and a half million dollars just disappeared from our operational account! And it looks like someone has used that money to hire an assassin. And who that assassin is targeting, I have no fucking idea!”
27
Cape Town, South Africa
Baku to Cape Town via Istanbul proved to be an uneventful flight. After a routine customs check using the first of two fake passports, Mark Pierce took a shuttle bus from Cape Town International Airport into the city’s business district. The sunny weather lifted his mood, and so did the view. Cape Town was modern and picturesque, featuring a magnificent vista over the Atlantic Ocean and the powerful Table Mountains backdrop behind him. For Pierce, the South African metropolis was one of the most beautiful cities in the world, rivalled only by Sydney, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, and Hong Kong. He realised he’d missed vibrant and cosmopolitan culture — not that he could afford time to relax. A busy schedule awaited.
In a hotel on Main Road overlooking Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, Pierce downloaded and installed a sophisticated encryption program on his burner phone. A single message waited on the fake Gulzar Zam Dark Web contact page, requesting a change of target, to that of Pierce himself. This proved that Sergeant Trager and Corporal Terzic had discovered their missing money and learned of the assassin they had unwittingly paid for. Hopefully this had caused confusion and would support Pierce’s plan in the coming days. He smiled and posted a reply message, saying the target would only change if accompanied with the correct password. He imagined how Trager and Terzic would sweat when they read this reply, and wondered how long it would be before Idris Walsh learned of their fabricated deception towards their boss.
