Blood Memory (Mongol Moon), page 17
For a moment he wondered if he should respond or not before punching a quick “Okay” and hitting send. A vowel; it was okay.
He left a paper Congolese franc on the counter and walked out the back of the bar into the African day.
The heavy Ural truck filled with soldiers in front of Captain Grigor Pulleraski stopped quickly. His driver hit the brakes, with a curse, and the smaller Toyota Hi-lux they were driving in stopped just in time.
“Who taught those idiots to drive!” his driver shouted. Without radios, the commands had often been abrupt as they had traversed Zambia, looking for the colonel’s prey. Frustration happened.
Their vehicles were dirty and the men stunk. They had been pushed hard, but Pulleraski knew they would not break. But he also knew that they did not really care about the goals of this mission. They would go where the colonel led, but it was not personal for them like it was for him. They would rather be back at the mines, drinking and shooting.
They had reached the town of Pweto, a critical piece of terrain in the maze of roads that made up Africa. The colonel was sure they would meet the Americans here, either in the town or near it. Either was fine for Pulleraski. He wanted this business over and done with.
He climbed out of the Toyota and saw his men scrambling around. They knew the drill by now. Secure the roads, secure more fuel, and secure more rations and water if they could.
Standing in the middle of the street was the bearded colonel, shouting at his men. Pulleraski shook his head in disdain. To him, Chechens were all the same, and it was the rare Chechen, even former VDV officers, that could be expected to command men with the grace a man from a good Muscovite family like his own could.
Yet the Chechen colonel was in charge, and despite their failures so far, the man’s intensity and bloodlust was a credit to even his notoriously violent people.
“I will send a team to the north to check the airfield. I doubt they are there, but who knows with Americans and their damned airplanes,” he told the colonel. The “airfield” was really just a long strip of paved dirt, good enough in places like this. It had been carved out of the jungle by a former politician to serve as his personal landing strip, before he had been killed in an airplane crash. Ironic.
“Good,” the colonel replied. “Make sure we have men facing south here. They will have to come this way, and I want them in close. No one fires until they are in the city.”
Pulleraski knew why. The American fifty calibers were fearsome weapons at any range, but excelled at longer distances, reaching farther than their own light machine guns could. If the colonel laid his trap in the open, the Americans, despite being fewer, could use their radios and heavier guns to maneuver around the Russians. The colonel’s plan was sound, and Pulleraski saw no need to recommend another. Not that the colonel would listen.
Instead, he headed to a bar across the street. They had hours, maybe a day even before the Americans would arrive, and the men they had sent down the road would warn him. It was time for breakfast.
Lieutenant Kasparov joined him, and behind the lieutenant came Sergeant Major Gagarin. Pulleraski surveyed the bar. A mix of Africans and one white man. He pointed to the bar, and Gagarin walked up to find them vodka. The husky, bald sergeant major leaned over the counter and grabbed a bottle, pointing to three glasses sitting behind the bar. It hadn’t been a question, and the lone bartender, a nervous African man, knew enough to not defend his bottle.
The men sat. Their legs and rear ends sore from the constant jostling of bad shocks over worse roads. Pulleraski set his rifle on the table, and the other two men leaned theirs against the ledge. If something were to happen, a jumble of rifles on the table was not ideal, and Pulleraski outranked them all.
“We have time for the whole bottle?” Kasparov asked, smiling.
“That depends how fast you drink it. It isn’t the caviar you ate from gold spoons when you were younger,” Gagarin joked, putting the bottle on the table with a thud. The lieutenant and the captain were both from good families, and those connections had helped them advance within the company. Gagarin had made his way on his skills alone, but bore no ill will to the others. This was how the game was played, and it did him no good to hate anyone for the gifts they had been given. He had been given gifts too. Different, more lethal ones.
Captain Pulleraski grabbed the bottle first and unscrewed the cap. “Benefits of rank. Na zdorovye.” He filled each glass, then raised his. “To the president.”
The others raised their glasses to meet his, and repeated his toast. The liquid was fierce as it went down, but he wouldn’t allow his companions to see him suffer.
“Is there no water?” Kasparov asked, the missing part of the ritual disturbing him.
“Go ahead,” Pulleraski said, laughing, “put your canteen under the sink and drink that African sewage. I bet Gagarin would appreciate the man above him dying, like how Dmitri was killed by the Americans at the road crossing and he is now sergeant major!”
It was a common joke that the dark humor of a mercenary appreciated. If a man ahead of you in rank died, you took his place and his pay.
Kasparov went next, pouring himself a drink. He didn’t wait for the others before he drank. Exhaling with a slight wheeze, he coughed a little. “Well, it is better than no vodka at all, sir.”
Gagarin took his turn, wordless, as the colonel approached. If the man was a Muslim, he had left the tenets of that faith back in Russia. The colonel could drink as hard as any man there. Pulleraski offered him a drink, reaching up with the bottle. The colonel just shook his head.
“No. We will keep the men at their posts for another hour until we are convinced the town is secure, and then we will rotate the guards through every three hours. We will funnel them into this main street here. It seems like it has seen its fair share of fighting already.”
For the first time, Pulleraski studied the town he was in with a more critical eye. It was fairly typical of an African town, but unlike most of the small villages they had passed, this one bore the telltale scars of history. The buildings were pockmarked with holes in the cement and metal, and some were missing corners on upper stories. Battles had happened here, and the people had neither the time nor the resources to put their town back together again. In this town, people were not strangers to war, and with any luck, they would see its face again soon when the Americans drove into their trap.
The colonel then noticed the man sitting behind them. A tall, athletically built white man with wavy blond hair. Pulleraski saw the colonel pause, a look of recognition creeping across his face, but it disappeared as soon as the man spoke.
“Howzit?” he asked, using the greeting they had heard many of the whites in Africa use.
“Afrikaner?” the colonel asked.
The blond man responded in a language they knew to be Afrikaans, but none of them spoke it. The Chinese they worked for were not terribly fond of their main competitors in Africa, and the white Afrikaners were few and far between to begin with. Pulleraski zoned out and looked around the bar as the colonel went on. The red paint that covered the walls screamed at him like a demon, and he quickly turned to his comrades at the table.
“What do we say we make a wager? Losers have to give up their servant to the others for a week back at the mine,” Gagarin offered. Each of them had what could most favorably be described as a “servant” back at the mine. A more accurate description would be a slave. Someone who cooked for them, cleaned their rooms, washed their uniforms, and, if the need was present, met more personal desires.
“You just want mine because I have an actual woman, unlike you two who have old fat grandmothers,” Pulleraski laughed, taking another drink.
“Untrue,” Gagarin said, holding up a finger and smiling. “I picked mine special… because she looks so much like Kasparov’s mother.”
All three men burst into laughter, and the bottle made another round.
“But, really, how long do we have to wait?” Kasparov asked. Of the two, he was the only one with no experience in the Russian Army, which was the usual path into a career in a private military. No doubt his family had been in business with the company’s owner and had secured him this spot. He didn’t seem suited for anything else.
“I think soon. Let’s get this over with.”
Gagarin glanced back behind Pulleraski at the white man seated behind them and nodded in his direction. “Should we be…?”
“If he speaks Russian, he’d be the first South African I’ve ever met that did,” Kasparov said, drawing a nod from Pulleraski. Neither had spent more than a minute with a native white South African in their lives, but their assumption was a fairly reliable one.
“When they get here—today, tomorrow, whenever—the colonel will ambush them, and we will be out of here and back to the mine,” Gagarin said, nodding for effect. He had served with the colonel the longest, and his loyalty was without question.
“We should be back to the mine already,” Pulleraski corrected him. “That is our mission.”
“We are Russians, and Mother Russia is at war. Who are we if we do not fight her enemies?” Gagarin retorted.
“Soldiers do their duty, even if it bores them.”
“Killing Americans is our duty.”
“If it is done in the service of defending the mine, yes. But for now, it is exposed.”
As the two men spoke, Kasparov took a few extra turns at the bottle, which was now running at a state of unacceptable lowness.
“It is not exposed,” Gagarin offered the quick retort in defense of his colonel. “The other half of the unit is there with the armored vehicles!”
“The slow half that we left behind?”
“Yes, they undoubtedly went back to the mine when the colonel separated us.”
Pulleraski thought on this possibility. It was the problem with the Russian army in one perfect example. The colonel had told no one except the officer he had left in charge of the other group what their orders were. No one had any idea where they were or what they were doing. They could have returned to the mine, they could be following them as fast as their tracked vehicles could keep up, or they could have driven to Nairobi and opened a restaurant. There was just no way to know.
“You are probably correct,” he admitted.
“But what alternative do we have?” Gagarin asked.
“Ask yourself this, Gagarin, if that American machine gun had hit the colonel at the crossroads, would we still be here?”
“Would we not avenge him?”
“He is a soldier, and that would have been a soldier’s death. We would mourn him, I would become the colonel, Kasparov would become the captain, and you would become the lieutenant, and we would all be back in our mines, and you back with Kasparov’s mother.”
The men laughed again uproariously, even Kasparov, who could not muster the energy to defend his mother’s name.
“Yes. The Americans would be gone to whatever death the war has in mind for them, and someone else would avenge the colonel’s fucking terrorist brother.” Pulleraski spat the last words out. Chechens could be tolerated, but terrorist Chechens who died in the service of Allah were a plague that most Russians would rather see exterminated.
“Let’s hope they come tonight then,” Kasparov said, his face deep in contemplative thought. “Before we run out of vodka and start to drink Vladimir’s diesel.”
Once again the table erupted in laughter. Each man taking a drink of the dwindling bottle, and focused on his mates, making sure they didn’t take more than their share. Their attention on themselves, they missed seeing the blond man behind them pull out a phone and send a text.
***
The darkness had started to descend on the hills overlooking Lake Mweru. Darkness came quickly this close to the equator, as if the sun fled the sky away from the dangers of the night. Sunset brought a new world of sound and terror to the forests of the Congo. Noises became louder, and every snap or crack of a branch triggered a rightful sense of mortal terror. The knowledge that predators unlike what most Western men had ever seen uncaged were stalking you pushed one’s heart rate to the limits.
The jungles and forests of the Congo were no place for a lone man at night; nevertheless, behind the trunk of a large, vine-wrapped East African juniper knelt another predator. A human. John had changed into a dark shirt, to meld into the shadows of the forest. He leaned against the tree, as to sit in the bush invited a plethora of unknown creatures from the forest’s floor into a shirt or down the waist of your pants. It was safer, if more tiring, to stay upright.
The pistol that was stuffed into the back of his pants was still there, but it had been joined by a rifle he had acquired from a local merchant. The AK74 was old, and its wood front grip had long since rotted away in the decades of African humidity it had experienced since it had arrived here from a factory in Izhevsk. It had been replaced by a poorly fitting piece of metal, hastily wrapped in some wire and burlap. The weapon may have looked like a disaster, more likely to harm its own user than any potential targets, but John had broken it down in the merchant’s stall and tested it in the woods. It was as lethal as the day it came from the factory.
Waiting, John wondered how many wars this rifle had seen. How many lives it had taken. How many men had held it, fired it, died with it. This was likely its last rodeo. It had one more life to take, and then it would be thrown away, and it could rest. Just one more piece of military equipment that had been used and discarded for nature to reclaim.
Feeling the night’s chill set in, he hunkered down against the ground, hoping to gain another degree of warmth from the soil. The ground stank like it was rotting. The smell filled his nostrils as he waited. It smelled like death, for that is what it was. The leaves and animals that now covered the forest floor, once vibrant with life, were now mostly dead. Even the living creatures who scurried across the dirt to survive could not escape the inevitability of the smell, and carried it with them in their endeavors. He shifted his knee and felt something hard. Something metallic, something that had come from man.
He froze and his heart leapt. If it had been one of the thousands of landmines that were strewn haphazardly about the Congo, he would have already been dead. He reached into the thick shrubs of brush around his knee, and pulled out a circular metal object, half buried in the dirt. Brushing it off, he looked at it and smiled.
It was a clock. Not just any clock, but a clock from an instrument panel of an airplane. A MiG to be precise. Turning it over, he saw it had been etched, first in Russian, then in Arabic, and finally in English. A smile crept across his lips as he thought of the path this clock had taken to arrive here, buried in the jungle floor.
There had always been rumors that during the fighting in 2000, what the outside world had called the Second Congo War, that the Rwandans had shot down a Zimbabwean MiG-23. The wreckage had never been found, which wasn’t a huge surprise. No one wanted to go searching the jungle for an old plane in the middle of a war, and the Zimbabweans had denied it anyway. It had been a rumor, one of the many myths that wove themselves into the tapestry of Africa itself.
Muammar Gaddafi, the former dictator of Libya, had given the Russian-made fighter-bomber to the President of the new state of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe after the end of the Rhodesian Bush War. A group of white former Rhodesian Air Force officers, unhappy with the change in regime, had sabotaged and destroyed half of the newly founded communist nation’s air force.
Later, the planes had been sent by Mugabe to help his friend, then president of the Congo, Laurent-Désiré Kabila. Neither this plane nor Kabila survived the disaster at Pweto. After the total collapse of the Congolese and Zimbabwean forces, and their internment in Zambia, Kabila had been murdered by his own bodyguards in a coup. The plane this clock had fallen from had gone from one dictatorship to another, and then another, before the Rwandan Army had reached into the sky and pulled it down.
Two of the three African leaders had met violent ends, while the third, and arguably the worst of the lot, had died peacefully at the age of ninety-five in a luxury home in Singapore. If the arc of history trended towards justice in the rest of the world, it was a concept that had yet to come to Africa.
The phone in his pocket vibrated, and he tossed the now useless clock to the ground before pulling his phone free. Covering the light from the screen with his hand, he read the message from Patrick.
About to close up. Last customers have left.
John sighed, ran his hand through his hair. Had it worked? Had Maria really pulled it off? He typed into the phone a reply: Awesome. Grab the car and I’ll meet you there, don’t wait up.
The code was necessary. Although he doubted this particular group of Russians could intercept and read these messages, it was still possible, and he wanted to take no chances now. He tightened the plate carrier he had carried in the duffel bag all the way from the HMMWV. It was one of a half dozen the embassy had, and he had made sure he had one. He felt the tightness of the thick ceramic plates squeeze around him as he thought of Maria’s arms.
She did it.
She had not wanted to, he was sure of that, but she had done it. After he had left the bar and the Russians, he had spent the rest of the day with Maria. They had locked themselves back inside the pure white walls of the luxury hotel and pretended nothing outside existed. It had been easy to do, with the beautiful view both outside and inside, it had taken minimal effort to forget the danger and death that lurked everywhere around them.
They had drunk wine and laid intertwined in each other’s arms again, like not a single day had passed since they parted. The time had gone by slowly, glacially, but looking back on it, it had felt like an instant. They had been lying there in bed, the rays of the afternoon sun reflecting off the still waters and pouring through the window, when he had asked her.
“I need your help again, tesoro.”
