The Twain Maxim (16 page)

The jungle was like a sauna with plants. The canopy was uneven, sometimes high and complete, emptying the ground below, sometimes patchy with thick undergrowth. Man Bites Dog seemed instinctively to know which apparently impenetrable vegetation could be easily pushed through and which was too dense to attempt.

The air was alive with insects, their hum counterpointed by chirrups and shrieks. They were progressing at less than a mile an hour, but Jim couldn’t have cared less. The jungle was magical and touched something deep inside him.

Man Bites Dog pulled him up. He pointed forwards into the gloom where something was rustling. “Elephants,” he said. “If I talk they will move away pretty quick.” For a few moments they heard branches cracking. “Let’s wait,” said Man Bites Dog. “Give them time to move further away.”

Jim took off his rucksack, sat down and pulled a
water-bottle
out of a side pocket. He drank some, then offered it to Man Bites Dog. The boy took a few gulps, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and gave the bottle back to Jim. Then he took his own canteen off his hip, drank more and offered it to Jim. “Thanks,” said Jim. He was studying the GPS screen. “We’ve got another hour and a bit of walking before we’re at the spot Mycock reckons Terry fell out of the helicopter.”

 Man Bites Dog nodded. “We eat when we get there,” he said.

Jim was as wet as if he had been thrown into a
swimming-pool
fully clothed, but the linen absorbed the moisture and didn’t cling to his body. Stafford was a genius, he thought. He imagined how awful it would be if his clothes were sticky and chafing. He got up. “Time to go.”

“Wait more,” said Man Bites Dog. “No hurry here. Mustn’t get tired. Not to start with.”

Jim sat down again.

A quarter of an hour passed.

“OK,” said Man Bites Dog, “let’s go.” He got up, slung on his bundle and hung the assault rifle on his shoulder. “The elephant trail will go our way, I hope. We move easy and slow and make plenty of noise.”

“OK,” said Jim.

“The animals don’t like noise so they will keep away.”

“What else is in this part of the forest?” said Jim easing on his rucksack.

“Depends,” the boy replied. “Depends on where you is.”

“Lions?”

“Maybe.”

“Crocodiles?”

“Not up here.”

“Hippo.”

“Down further with the crocodiles.”

“Elephants we know about.”

“Pigs, monkey, antelope, lots of birds.”

“Fish?”

“Stream fish.”

“Gorillas?”

“Other side of the mountain. None this side, all gone – eaten during the war.”

“That’s sad,” said Jim, wondering whether the forest creatures were being frightened away by their talking. With their sensitive ears, they’d be able to hear them coming from miles away. “Giraffe?”

“Sometimes.”

“Snakes?”

“Plenty of snakes, big ones and little.”

“Where did you learn your English?”

“Stripy horses.”

“Zebra?”

“No not zebra, like zebra, but like antelope too.”

Jim couldn’t imagine what that might be. “I know I’ve said this before, but your English is very good, Where did you learn it?”

“A long time ago,” said Man Bites Dog.

“Not when – where?”

“Small monkeys, big monkeys, lots of monkeys,” said Man Bites Dog.

“You’re not going to tell me?”

“Tasty monkeys, not so tasty monkeys.” He stopped in his tracks and listened, concentrating. “OK,” he said finally and started to walk again.

“What was it?” said Jim.

“Nothing,” said Man Bites Dog.

Jim was starting to feel the weight of his pack. He was looking forward to arriving at their destination. The GPS told him they were eight miles from the mining camp and two from where they had left the Huey. They were nearly at the point where Kitson had fallen.

The jungle was very dark at the grid reference Baz had given him, a dense canopy of high trees blotting out the sun, but for shafts of light that streamed through the odd break in the foliage. It was a dappled, shady world of roots and leafless vines where they could step across the only impediments to the path, rills of shallow water. The air was heavy with the scent of rotting humus. “We’re here,” said Jim. “We’ve arrived.”

“Look for butterflies,” said Man Bites Dog. “They circle the dead. They like the sweetness.”

“And flies?”

“Yes.”

Jim took off his rucksack and put it in a direct beam of light, then set the GPS to record the spot. “Let’s look for ten minutes, then eat.”

“Let’s eat,” said Man Bites Dog. “Better to eat before finding than after.”

There was a grim logic to that and Jim was hungry. “OK,” he said. He burrowed in the rucksack and pulled out two packages about the size of a girl’s clutch purse. They said “First Strike Ration” on them. Jim threw one to Man Bites Dog. “I don’t know what’s in here – maybe it’s a picnic.” He tore off the plastic packaging and opened the card pouch, which contained a selection of plastic bags. “Honey barbecue beef pocket sandwich,” he read.

Man Bites Dog was rifling through his parcel. “Pepperoni pocket sandwich,” he said.

“Two drinks.” He opened one. “Water.” Jim passed him a half-empty bottle. Man Bites Dog poured the water into the bag that contained the powdered Lifesaver drink and watched it inflate to the size of a balloon. He drank from it
and a peculiar expression crossed his face. “Taste funny,” he said, and handed it to Jim who sampled it.

“Gatorade,” he said, “well, something like it.” He took a couple more swigs and passed it back. “Pour it into the bottle.”

Jim opened his sandwich and had a bite. Not bad, he thought. “Not as good as your monkey stew.”

Man Bites Dog was devouring his sandwich with gusto.

Jim went through the rest of the food and put most of it into the ziplock bag that had come with the pack. He set aside the poppy-seed cake to one side and bagged up the tuna sandwich, tortillas, crackers and cheese. Then he bagged the drink packets and dithered about saving the dessert bar. He left it out with the beef jerky – what with all the sweating he could do with the salt. He stuffed the bag into the rucksack and dug down to the water purification bottle. “We’ll fill up the water bottles here, then set up camp and go looking for Terence.”

Down one side of the rucksack, Jim found a long nylon envelope and pulled it out. It was about the size of an old style broadsheet newspaper and weighed two or three pounds. “Tent,” he said sceptically, to Man Bites Dog, and opened one end. He was still holding the remains of his sandwich so he slid the contents out a little way by pinning the whole thing under his arm and tugging the innards with his left hand. It was a collection of nylon sheets with bendy canes. He finished his sandwich and turned the envelope around to get a more comfortable grip on the contents. Another tug – and it exploded into his face knocking him backwards.

“Bloody hell!” cried Jim, through a mouthful of sandwich,
and shoved the fully expanded tent off him. It bounced away and Man Bites Dog grabbed it.

Jim stood up, picked up his water-bottle and drained the remnants. Then he returned to the tent’s bag. He found six little stakes inside it, which he used to fasten the tent down. At a pinch they would both fit into it.

Now he remembered his cake and began to eat it. “What have you got?” he asked Man Bites Dog.

“Chicken sandwich,” said the boy. “It’s good.”

Jim put the dessert bar and the jerky into his right trouser pocket. “We’ll burn the rubbish later,” he said, scrunching it into a ball. “Give me your canteen and I’ll fill it up.”

“I’ll come with you.”

They walked fifty yards to a rill that ran down from the steep gradient above. Jim unscrewed the base of the water purifier and dipped it into the shallow stream. “This inner core,” he said, pointing to the ceramic structure in the centre of the plastic bottle, “is a filter. It cleans out all the nasty stuff, like bacteria, viruses, mud and shit, all the crap that pollutes water and makes you sick.” He screwed the bottom back on and pulled out a plunger in the base, gave it a couple of pumps, took the nozzle off the top of the bottle and water poured through the filter jacket into an inner bottle. He poured the contents into Man Bites Dog’s canteen, and repeated the process until it was full.

“That’s magic,” said Man Bites Dog. “Let me try please.”

Jim handed him the bottle, which, following Jim’s instructions, the boy filled. “Magic bottle,” he said, each time he took the top off and water flooded into the inner bottle. Jim’s pet bottle was full. Jim drank what was left in the Lifesaver.

Man Bites Dog drank some water from his canteen then cupped water from the stream in his hands and drank it. “Tastes the same.” He topped up the canteen from the stream.

“That water would probably kill me,” said Jim.

“No,” said Man Bites Dog, “not mountain water. It’s clean.”

“Maybe,” said Jim. “I’ll make a quick call, and then we need to start searching.”

He tapped in St George’s number and got voicemail. “Blast.” He tried Stafford.

“All sorted?”

“All sorted,” came the reply.

A minute later he was through to St George. “How’s it going?”

“Not getting much stock,” said St George. “It shot up to nearly eight pounds at one stage.”

“Leave the order in at two fifty,” said Jim.

“We instructed lawyers on the bid, but chances of pulling it off don’t look good.”

“Leave it as is till I get back.”

“Very good,” said St George. “Any luck?”

“With Terence?” Jim felt a little guilty. “Not yet. I’m sitting approximately where he fell, but there’s no sign of him.”

“A good sign, I hope,” said St George.

“Yes,” said Jim. “I’ll be back next week but now I’ve got to sign off.”

The phone was on one battery bar when he hung up, but it flicked back to two. The bloody thing certainly sucked the juice. He turned it off. He turned to Man Bites Dog. “Where shall we go?”

Man Bites Dog rolled his eyes. “Don’t know.”

“Let’s go across till we’re just out of view of the camp, swing down in a circle, then come up the other side and back down again to the camp.”

Man Bites Dog shrugged.

“He’s meant to have fallen here, give or take. There’s not much ground cover. He can’t be far away.”

“Don’t think he’s here,” said Man Bites Dog. “Doesn’t feel right.”

“Come on.”

They walked down the incline of the forest till the camp was just out of view. “You go a bit further,” said Jim, “but keep me in sight and follow me around.” It was now well into the afternoon and they had about four hours of sunlight left. The jungle crackled in his ears like dying embers. The undergrowth was sparse but still dense enough to act as cover for anything even a few metres ahead. It seemed like a pretty hopeless task – even if they successfully combed a few dozen acres of forest, there was still the probability that the location might be out by a quarter of a mile, which was more than enough to throw them hopelessly off target.

But he had come this far for his friend, Jim thought, so he’d give it his best shot. If they found Kitson’s body, he would bury it as best he could and take a GPS fix. Someone else would have to come back and get it.

Half an hour later they saw an aerial display of butterflies circling in a shaft of sunlight ahead, fluttering and whirling in the brightness. Jim braced himself for an ugly scene, but when they reached it they found a giant pile of elephant dung, still steaming.

Jim sat quietly and watched the fire, which Man Bites Dog had lit with a book of matches from the fire-lighting kit. He was very tired, happy to sit in the dark and eat his tuna sandwich, cheese and biscuits, and dessert bar. He toyed with chewing a stick of caffeine gum to perk him up, but decided against it.

Jim was glad he hadn’t found Kitson rotting in the undergrowth. While his body remained undiscovered he was, in a way, still alive. In a quantum mechanical way, Kitson was both alive and dead till observed by someone in either state. It was nice to think that somehow you could skip between life and death in the way that a photon passed through the “twin slit” in the quantum-physics experiment. Science seemed to suggest nothing was absolutely true and that miracles could spring from paradox. But people weren’t massless particles of light. They were great lumps of atoms. When they were propelled by gravity into something hard, they didn’t form waves. Instead they shattered and splashed.

“Where did you learn your English?” Jim asked, for the third time. His brain was shaking off its torpor and he was determined to get to the bottom of this.

“A long time ago,” said Man Bites Dog, slowly.

“Who taught you?”

“An old man,” said Man Bites Dog. “A priest.”

“In your home town?”

“Yes.”

Jim waited to see if Man Bites Dog would add some more information. He didn’t, so he went on, “Why did you leave home?”

Man Bites Dog looked at Jim for a long moment. He tore
open a packet of beef jerky and bit off a chunk. He swallowed it. “I was taken,” he said finally. He gazed up at the canopy, then hopped to his feet and jogged away into the dark.  

Higgins woke at dawn, got up and dressed. He felt
foreboding
, a sense that had served him only too well in his years of operating in some of the nastiest places on earth. He never, under any circumstances, ignored the nagging ache of uncertainty. He could be taking his kids to Disneyland Hong Kong or out shopping in London when it crept over him but, wherever he was, he would stop what he was doing and triple check for anything with the slightest chance of causing him trouble. Paranoia wasn’t some kind of disease: it kept a man alive. He didn’t need to imagine that everyone hated him to keep sniffing the air.

He went out on to the bungalow’s veranda. Everything was quiet as the giant red sun began to rise over the horizon. There was nothing going on in the barracks, not that that surprised him – yet it seemed quieter than usual and he couldn’t see any of the itinerant dogs that normally sloped around. He walked towards the compound. He couldn’t hear any of the usual noises. Not a single snore or clatter came from the forty men in their barracks. He went to the door of the main blockhouse and opened it. The room was in a state, beds thrown aside and cupboard doors open. No one was there.

Higgins ran to the next block. It, too, was deserted.

He dashed up the hill to the bungalows and crashed into Baz’s bedroom. “Get dressed and grab any stuff you can carry. You’ve got about three minutes.”

Baz raised his head. “Wha’?”

“I’m out of here in three minutes. If you’re not by the chopper in five you can talk to the rebels on your own.”

“What?” Baz sat up with a start.

“It’s the Christ Reunion – they’re coming up the hill.”

Baz vaulted out of the bed. “Shit,” he said, naked and suddenly wide awake.

“I won’t wait,” shouted Higgins, and ran outside.

Baz could see distant figures in a disordered column about three hundred yards from the mine. He ran along the front of the bungalow and down the side towards the helipad. He was carrying the leather tote bag in which he kept everything important, but that was no guarantee he hadn’t forgotten something vital. Too fucking late, he thought, as he sprinted to the gate, which was jammed open with an oil drum.

The prop on the helicopter was already turning over; Baz pulled the barrel out of the way and the gate swung closed. With the bag under his arm, he ran flat out to the Huey. He jumped into the front seat, panting, and slammed the door. His face was red, and sweat was bursting out across his forehead. The three Chinese support staff were sitting, fearful, in the back and he tossed his bag on to them. “You told those bastards first.”

“Shut up – I’m busy,” said Higgins, powering up the chopper. “We’ve got to be out of here pronto.”

He pulled the yoke and the helicopter lifted off. He poured on the power and turned, swooping away low over the treetops.

 “You told those bastards that the Christ Reunion army was coming before you told me!” Baz was livid.

“It was either rescue one evil bastard, or rescue three innocent guys and risk leaving the nasty sod behind,” shouted Higgins, above the engine noise.

“I won’t forget that,” roared Baz.

“Good,” shouted Higgins. He was smiling to himself. Evidently Baz had forgotten the pound of uncut stones in his luggage. As soon as they touched down in Goma, Higgins was going to be on the next plane to Kinshasa and then home. In about a day and a half he would be in the arms of the little lady he loved. He’d been away too long.

As Adash saw the distant helicopter take to the air, soar above the trees and head for Goma, he smiled. The slightest whiff of his presence and everyone fled. He took towns and villages like that. He told them he was coming, approached, and the enemy soldiers melted away, leaving only those who couldn’t flee, normal people, women and children. Then he was free to do as he pleased. “The Christ Reunion army is the most feared band of men on earth,” he whispered, to a soldier, who nodded respectfully.

The mine was supposedly worth a billion dollars and he had come to take possession of it for himself and his patron. He wondered whether anyone had been left behind for him to kill.