F.U.B.A the lost team

The pirogue slid out of the reeds on a skin of black water and Randy saw the checkpoint too late to pretend otherwise.

Three oil drums painted white marked the channel. A chain hung between them, sunk just below the surface, and a square of timber on pilings held four men with rifles and one boy with a whistle on a cord. A rusted outboard lay on its side under a tarpaulin. Above them, nailed to a pole, a hand-lettered board warned of cholera in French so badly painted it looked drunk.

The boatman hissed through his teeth and throttled back.

“Keep straight,” Randy said.

The old Yamaha coughed blue smoke into the wet heat. Oscar sat in the bow with a stained veterinary cooler between his knees and a folded tarpaulin over two carbines. Jonny had a cap pulled low and the expression of a man forced to attend his own hanging. Manny kept one hand on the kid curled in the bilge under mosquito netting.

The kid had one sleeve dark with blood.

On the platform, one of the riflemen waved. Not a greeting. A demand.

Randy stood carefully in the stern, enough to be seen, not enough to tip them over. He lifted both palms. The sat handset rode in a pouch under his shirt, hard against his ribs. The unknown caller had spoken in clean French, calm voice, no name, and had changed two things before the team left Kinshasa: don’t land where planned, and don’t use the direct road east.

Too helpful. That was the trouble.

The rifleman shouted. “Coupez! Coupez!”

The boatman killed the engine. The pirogue drifted the last six yards and bumped the pilings. The boy blew his whistle because he had been given a whistle and wanted the world to hear it. Birds came off the far bank in a burst.

One of the men looked at the covered shapes under the netting. “What is this?”

“Vaccines,” Randy said in French. “Emergency movement for Beni sector. You stop this boat, you explain it to the district doctor when children start dying.”

The man squinted. He wore flip-flops cut from truck tire and a football shirt gone grey with sweat. His rifle was Chinese and clean at the sling point. Somebody had issued it, not inherited it.

“No movement today.”

“Then your officer can sign for the spoiled stock.”

Randy nodded at Oscar. Oscar unclipped the cooler and cracked the lid. Inside sat dry ice, ampoule trays, and a laminated card with blue logos stacked like prayer flags. It had taken cash and a crooked warehouse manager in Kinshasa to build the lie in four hours. It looked convincing from two feet. From ten inches it fell apart.

The rifleman leaned down for a closer look.

“Don’t,” Manny said sharply in French. “If that ice burns your fingers, I’m not wrapping them for you.”

The rifleman jerked back more from the tone than the words. Manny did doctor well because he didn’t soften it.

Another man came from the shack at the rear of the platform. Better boots. Better watch. His shirt had epaulettes without rank tabs. He looked at Randy first, then at the boatman, then at the kid under the netting.

“That one.”

“Fever,” Manny said. “From a raid west of Vitshumbi. We’re taking him out before he stops breathing and troubles all of us.”

The officer stared at the blood on the sleeve.

“Fever shoots now?”

“It does where people are stupid.”

Jonny made a noise in his throat that might have been a laugh or indigestion.

The officer held out a hand. “Papers.”

Randy passed over a waterproof pouch. Inside were transfer manifests, a provincial seal that should not have existed, and the sort of signatures men trusted because no one could read them. The officer took his time. He wanted to be seen taking his time. Behind him the boy blew the whistle again until one of the riflemen cuffed him.

“Where are you going?” the officer asked.

“Katala mission.”

“Road goes there.”

“Road is cut.”

“All roads are cut.”

“Then we agree on something.”

The officer looked up. Randy gave him a tired, irritated face, the face of a man burdened by work and convinced local obstacles were beneath him. It often passed for authority.

“Open the netting,” the officer said.

“No,” Manny said.

The officer’s eyes narrowed.

Randy stepped in before the edge turned. “Doctor’s orders. He thinks the child’s got a hemorrhagic fever because he likes drama. If you want your men handling body fluid, that’s your command.”

The word fever moved through them faster than threat. One rifleman took half a step back. Another spat over the rail.

The officer’s expression changed by a millimeter. Enough.

“What organisation?”

Randy named one from the stack in the folder, then another. It was rude, overfamiliar, and exactly the sort of merger-babble aid agencies used after donor conferences. The officer let it sit. Randy watched his face and knew he had not understood a word past organisation.

“Tax,” the officer said.

“Receipt,” Randy said.

The officer smiled without humour. “Tax.”

Randy sighed, dug into the side pocket of the cooler, and produced a carton of Marlboros and a roll of Congolese francs held with a rubber band. The officer weighed the options, took both, and tucked the money under his shirt.

“Go,” he said. “If anyone asks, I did not see this boat.”

“If anyone asks,” Randy said, “you stopped a cholera run for fourteen minutes while bargaining over cigarettes.”

The officer stared, deciding whether to be insulted. Randy smiled first. It put the insult in the officer’s pocket where he could not return it.

The chain rattled up out of the water. The boatman restarted the Yamaha. The pirogue nosed through.

They did not speak until the platform was swallowed by reeds and distance.

Then Jonny said, “Lovely. We’re a plague boat now. That’s cheerful.”

“You object to survival?” Randy said.

“I object to dying stupid. That lad with the whistle would’ve sold his mother for fifty dollars. They’re all too clean. Too settled. Someone’s feeding them.”

Oscar kept his eyes on the banks. “Aye. Ammunition cans under the shack. New tarps. Fresh-cut posts. Somebody’s paying for order.”

Manny eased the netting off the boy in the bilge. He was no more than sixteen. A graze had opened the outside of his upper arm and another round had gone through the meat above his hip. Not pretty, but survivable if rot did not get there first. Manny pressed a folded pad against the wound and checked the tape he had laid on an hour earlier.

The boy flinched awake. Wide eyes. White all around the brown.

“Easy,” Manny said in Swahili rough enough to be understood. “You’re still in the world.”

The boy licked cracked lips. “Masika?”

Randy glanced back. “What’s he saying?”

“He wants to know if his sister made it.” Manny looked at the boy. “Did she?”

The boy turned his head into the timber and shut his eyes.

That was answer enough.

The river narrowed. Green walls on both banks. Floating hyacinth. The smell changed from open water to rot and fish scales and petrol. Randy kept one hand on the pistol under his shirt and one eye on the boatman. Pascal’s code phrase had got them this far in Goma, to this boat, to this boy. Pascal himself had not appeared. He had sent a cousin with a split lower lip and a promise he’d join them upriver after checking the road.

Promises. Congo ran on them. Most were bad fuel.

By noon the channel became too shallow for the engine. They grounded twice in yellow mud before the boatman shook his head and pointed to a bank hidden by papyrus.

They disembarked in silence. Boots into warm muck. Oscar and Jonny took the long bags. Manny and the boatman carried the boy between them up a goat track slick with algae. At the top sat a lorry with no bonnet and a cracked windscreen starred white on the passenger side. Blue letters on the door read EAU POTABLE. Someone had painted a red cross over the old company logo and done neither job well.

Jonny looked at it and said, “If that heap gets us there I’ll convert.”

“To what?” Oscar asked.

“Anything listening.”

Randy checked the road. Wheel ruts filled with brown water. Char from an old tyre fire. Cassava peels. No fresh prints he trusted because too many feet had been through.

“Move,” he said.

They got the boy in back on sacks that had once carried cement and now carried lies. Manny climbed beside him. Oscar rode front with the boatman. Jonny and Randy hung off the rear boards, rifles wrapped in canvas until they needed honesty.

The road climbed out of the marsh and broke apart by degrees. First potholes. Then gutters. Then sections where the road simply surrendered into gullies and somebody had driven around the memory of it through fields and over roots. Villages came and went in glimpses: a woman pounding grain beside a satellite dish with no cable, children chasing a bicycle rim, a bar with warm beer signs and no glass in the windows.

Twice they hit checkpoints too small to matter and too dangerous to ignore. The first took cash. The second took chlorine tablets and a warning about bandits ahead that sounded rehearsed.

“They all point us the same way,” Jonny said after the second. “Left at every fork. Never mind the map. Never mind the old road. Like sheep through a race.”

Randy had seen it too. On the briefing imagery there had been three approaches into the village cluster west of the lake. Since touch-down, each one had somehow become impassable, forbidden, washed away or occupied by men with identical expressions and different badges.

He leaned through the cab window and tapped Oscar on the shoulder. “Next split, we test it.”

Oscar nodded once.

They found the test two kilometres later. A side road peeled south into teak and red clay, narrower but still drivable. No barrier. No burned truck. No old women sitting on stools to make them turn back. Just a road with no audience.

“Take it,” Randy told the boatman.

The man hesitated.

“Take it.”

The lorry bounced onto the side track. Branches scraped the roof. Two bends in, Oscar slapped the dashboard.

“Stop.”

They all froze with the engine ticking.

Oscar got out and crouched ahead of the front wheel. He touched the mud, then pointed with two fingers. A strip of green fishing line lay under a wash of leaves, almost invisible where it crossed the track at ankle height. It ran into brush on the left and down under a cut bank on the right.

“Neat little sermon,” Oscar said.

Jonny climbed down, peering. “Pressure?”

“Pull. Likely snaps a striker or dumps a charge into the ditch line. Depends how much effort they’ve put into our education.”

Randy moved up beside him. There was a sweet stink under the leaf mould. Fertiliser. Diesel. Homemade.

“For us?”

Oscar glanced back along the way they had come. “For somebody in a vehicle. This road’s been left quiet so someone clever thinks they’ve found a gap.”

Jonny spat into the dust. “Funnel.”

Oscar unpacked a canvas roll, took out clippers and a collapsible mirror, and eased himself down flat to sight under the bank. He worked without theatre. Fingers slow. Breathing steady. Manny kept the boy in back from trying to look. The boatman crossed himself, then seemed to realise the place had several gods and changed his mind halfway through.

A minute later Oscar held up a chunk of yellow soap carved to cradle a blasting cap and wrapped around a little cylinder of powder and scrap. Child’s work made deadly by patience. He snipped the line, removed the cap, then lifted a second charge from farther back that would have taken men bunched around the first.

“They wanted a lesson plan,” he said. “One bang to stop, one to finish.”

“Can we pass?” Randy asked.

“Aye, if we fancy the next one. This approach has been dressed. Someone’s looked at it recently.”

Randy made the decision there. Not because he liked the main route. Because the trap told him the side road mattered to someone.

“Back out.”

Jonny shook his head as they reversed through brush. “Every escape lane salted. Every signpost singing the same song. This is filth.”

“Save the poetry,” Randy said.

“It’s not poetry. It’s arithmetic.”

Back on the main road they pushed on through heat that pressed sweat out of the body and left the salt on the skin. The lorry’s radiator began to complain in a high kettle whine. Manny made the boatman stop under a jacaranda stripped bare of bloom and changed the boy’s dressing on the tailboard while flies found every wet place they could.

The bullet had gone clean through the arm. The hip wound was uglier. Manny irrigated it from a squeeze bottle, picked grit out with forceps, then packed and bandaged while speaking to the boy in the same level tone he might have used to ask for tea.

“What’s your name?”

“Blaise.”

“Who shot you, Blaise?”

The boy stared at the trees.

Manny cut tape with his teeth. “If I don’t know who’s hunting you, I can’t say whether I’ve helped or only moved the problem.”

Blaise swallowed. “Not militia.”

“Who then?”

“Men from the company.”

Randy turned from where he had been scanning the road.

Blaise saw that look and hurried on. The words came in bursts, thin and breathless. Manny translated when the Swahili got too local.

“There was a raid at the mission station last night,” Manny said. “Men in mixed uniforms. Some local militia among them, but others in plain kit. Good boots. Radios. They wanted Pascal.”

“Where is he?” Randy asked.

Blaise shut his eyes.

Manny asked something else. Blaise answered with one hand over his face.

“Dead,” Manny said. “Maybe. He says they beat Pascal behind the chapel when he wouldn’t give up where the white workers were moved after the first handover.”

“The first handover?” Oscar said from the cab.

Manny nodded. “That’s what the boy says.”

Randy stepped closer. “Moved by who?”

Manny asked. Blaise shook his head weakly, then said a name none of them knew. Another followed. Neither meant anything to Randy.

“What did they want from the hostages?” Randy said.

Manny put it to him. This time the answer came fast, frightened, as if saying it aloud was worse than the wounds.

“Not money,” Manny said. “Or not only money. They kept asking for a notebook. Belonged to a woman with the NGOs. And a black machine she carried with a red light.”

“Camera?” Jonny said.

“Could be GPS,” Oscar said. “Could be sat tracker. Could be a survey tool.”

Blaise grabbed Manny’s wrist and rattled off more.

“He says one of the plain-clothes men spoke French from the capital. Not local. He said, ‘Find what she wrote before she gives it to the lake people.’”

“The lake people?” Randy said.

Manny relayed it. Blaise looked lost. He repeated the phrase and added another in Nande. Manny frowned.

“Could mean men at the compound on the shore. Could mean traders. Could mean somebody with boats. He doesn’t know. He was hiding under cassava baskets by then.”

Jonny let out a long breath through his nose. “There’s your ransom. A notebook. Christ.”

Randy looked down the road at nothing, the pieces trying to fit while refusing to. Four aid workers taken in one snatch. A patched briefing packet. A dead field supervisor’s sat phone. A route that kept changing under their feet. Men from an oil company raiding a mission station for information the militia should already have if this were simple kidnapping.

He crouched by Blaise. “How many hostages alive?”

Blaise stared, not understanding the English. Manny translated.

“Four,” the boy whispered. “When Pascal sent me. Four.”

“When was that?”

“Yesterday morning.”

Not fresh. Not stale. Bad enough.

They rolled again with the lorry groaning through ruts and over roots thick as cable. Twice the road pinched to nothing where rain had chewed whole sections away. At one washout, a bridge had gone except for two concrete stubs and the snapped backs of girders in the stream below.

The boatman stopped and spread his hands. Finished.

Oscar climbed down, studied the gap, then the banks, then the truck. “We’re not taking this pig across anything improvised.”

“No argument there,” Jonny said. “It’s held together by dust and prayer.”

Randy walked the edge. Twelve feet across. Twenty down to a brown torrent full of branches. On the downstream side, somebody had laid old cable reels in the mud, maybe preparing a repair, maybe waiting for funding or God.

Oscar pointed to a line of felled eucalyptus stacked off the road. “Locals started a bypass and stopped. We finish it.”

For the next forty minutes they worked with a jack, a spade, chain, and bad language. Oscar directed. Randy and Jonny levered timber into place. The boatman whined until Randy told him he could either sweat now or explain later to men with guns why he had stranded them. That improved his character. Manny kept Blaise shaded and dosed him with water and tablets, checking the pupil response, checking the pulse, always checking.

Oscar crawled the makeshift track on his belly before he let tyres touch it. Halfway across he rapped the timber and listened.

“You hear that?” he called.

Randy didn’t.

“Exactly. Hollow.”

Oscar dug at the near wheel line with his knife and exposed a cavity stuffed with loose brush. Under that, a glimpse of metal. He grinned without joy.

“Another trick.”

They uncovered two mortar shells wired under the bypass, angled up from the bank so a loaded axle might collapse the top and set the nose fuzes off together. Crude, but enough.

Jonny sat back on his heels. “I’m running out of ways to say funnelled.”

“Try shut up and hand me the pliers,” Oscar said.

He disarmed that one as well, sweat dropping off his nose into the red soil. When it was done they shifted the wheel track a yard wider and dragged more logs in. The lorry crossed one tyre-width at a time with all of them walking beside it, palms on hot metal as if they could hold it up by belief.

On the far side Randy looked back at the broken bridge and the bypass trap and felt the pattern harden. Not random. Not village opportunists. Somebody with enough foresight to shape traffic over days. Maybe longer.

The country opened after that. Scrub, then low fields, then black volcanic ridges to the east under a haze that hid their tops. Toward evening they passed the husk of a drilling camp or survey site, chain-link flattened, generator stolen, white prefab cabins burned down to warped frames. The company logo on a fuel tank had been scrubbed off but not well enough.

Blaise sat up at the sight of it and started speaking before Manny asked.

“He knows this place,” Manny said. “Says the woman with the notebook came here two weeks ago with another NGO worker and a priest. They argued with the site manager. She was writing everything down.”

“Writing what?” Randy said.

Manny asked.

“Names,” Manny said after a moment. “Truck numbers. Sick villagers. A spill in the stream. Payments to a militia commander. He says she told Pascal if anything happened to her, the notebook went to the lake.”

Jonny barked one short laugh. “There it is. We’re not retrieving hostages. We’re cleaning a desk.”

Randy did not answer. He was looking at the scrub beyond the burned cabins where a line of tyre marks cut off the road toward higher ground, then vanished in grass. Not old. Not fresh enough either. Everything here lived in that ugly middle.

Near dusk they left the lorry under a stand of banana and went on foot. Blaise could not continue. Manny wanted to stay with him. Randy refused that and compromised with harder maths: they all moved, slower, with the boy hidden in a drainage cut under netting and brush forty metres off the road, morphine light, water, and a local woman from a nearby hamlet bribed to watch from a distance until first light. Manny hated it. Randy hated it more. But dead men rescued no one.

They took only what mattered. Weapons. Charges. Med kit. Water. Radios. The sat phone.

The last approach to the village ran through elephant grass higher than a man’s shoulders. The track split around termite mounds and rejoined. Insects whined. Somewhere ahead, a dog barked twice and stopped. Randy moved first, reading ground by habit now: cut stems, heel prints, a cigarette filter ground into damp soil, a single bootlace hook shining where somebody had snagged and torn free.

He raised a fist. The file stopped.

Ahead, through the grass, the roofline of the schoolhouse showed grey against the dark. Cinderblock walls. Corrugated iron patched with tar. One acacia tree to the west. Open ground on three sides. Too open.

Oscar slid up beside him. Randy pointed.

“See the ground by the left wall?”

Oscar nodded. “Fresh scrape.”

“And there.”

A rectangle in the earth where something had been dragged. Posts cut low. Not old fence. Firing positions perhaps. Or support for tarps. Randy brought the binoculars up slow.

The windows had been blacked from inside except for two narrow shooting slots. One door stood open six inches. Too neat. No cooking fire. No children’s noise. No goats. The village huts beyond the school looked inhabited by their laundry and abandoned by their people.

Jonny crawled in on Randy’s other side, breathing hard through his nose. “Tell me I’m being pessimistic.”

“You’re being repetitive,” Randy said.

Jonny peered through his own glass, then swore softly. “See that track from the north? Drag marks. More than four. They’ve cleared arcs in the grass too. Bastards have mowed lanes.”

Oscar’s hand went to Randy’s forearm. “Trip line. Eleven o’clock. About fifteen yards short of the outer fence.”

Randy found it. Thin wire, low, running from a split post into a clump of weeds where no weeds should have been. Secondary wire farther in. He kept searching and found another glint near a puddle, then another where the path naturally narrowed between two termite mounds.

Not a holding site. A harvest.

He eased back from the grass and looked at the sat phone in his hand. Black plastic. Scratched screen. Dust still trapped at the antenna seam from whatever dead man had carried it before him. The voice on it had changed their route and told them the hostages were still at the schoolhouse.

Still.

Randy felt the small cold place open in his chest where anger lived best.

“Someone built this for us,” Jonny said.

“No,” Randy said. “For whoever came.”

Oscar’s eyes stayed on the schoolhouse. “Question is whether our four are bait, bodies, or already gone.”

Manny arrived low and silent from the rear, unusual enough on its own. “There’s another thing,” he said. “The village well behind us. Fresh footprints. Mixed soles. Children’s prints overlaid by combat boots. Civilians were moved out in a hurry.”

Randy looked once more through the glass. At the blacked windows. The open door. The clean lanes through the grass. The cut for fields of fire.

He thought of the man on the phone with his measured French and his useful amendments. He thought of Martin Keating in his cold room. He thought of a notebook passing hand to hand while men died around it.

Then, in the fading light, the schoolhouse door opened another inch.

Just enough for a face to appear in the gap.

White. Blood on the forehead. Eyes wide.

One of the hostages saw them.

And somewhere under the grass between Randy and that door, a red diode winked once.

Randy watched the diode wink again under the grass and counted to five before he moved his hand.

Oscar came in close, cheek and beard silvered faintly by the last of the light. Jonny stayed lower, rifle tucked in, old bones and bad temper both grinding at the same time. Manny hovered behind them with the med bag riding high between his shoulders like a second man.

Randy pointed with two fingers.

Left wall. Door. North track. Rear huts.

Oscar nodded once. “If I lift the left corner and pop the classroom side, we get shock and dust. If they’ve stacked the hostages central, we may not kill our own.”

“May,” Jonny muttered. “Lovely word.”

Randy kept his eyes on the schoolhouse. “You’ve got two charges. Small. Surgical. Like a private hospital if private hospitals blew bits off buildings.”

Oscar snorted through his nose. “Refined violence. Understood.”

Manny leaned in. “The face in the door looked conscious. Blood loss maybe not bad. If we get a gap, I want them moving on their own feet.”

“If you get a gap,” Jonny said, “I want a castle in Ayrshire.”

Randy ignored him. He was still reading the dark around the schoolhouse. Empty huts beyond. Laundry hanging dead from a line. A bicycle with no front wheel. A cooking pot overturned near a doorway. Nothing moved except moths and one scrap of white paper snagged on thorn. The silence sat wrong. Villages had sounds even when people hid. Babies. Coughs. Chickens arguing. Here there was only insect noise and, farther off, a metallic thump from the mining town, steady as somebody shutting a giant locker door.

He drew back from the grass.

“We don’t touch it in the dark,” he said. “Too many strings we haven’t found. We go before first light when they’re tired and when anyone watching from distance still sees night. We cut lanes now, quietly, and mark safe feet.”

Jonny stared at him. “You’re planning a bloody gardening project in a minefield.”

“I’m planning not to stamp on a gift-wrapped surprise, John.”

“Only my mother called me John.”

“She must’ve wanted you to have a chance.”

Oscar smothered a grin. Manny didn’t. Randy saw the edges of it anyway, brief and unwilling. Good. Men breathed better when their mouths remembered how.

They spent the next hour belly-down in the grass, mapping death by touch and patience.

Oscar found the first anti-lift rig in a tuft of creeper at the fence line: a Chinese grenade body with the spoon trapped under a carved bit of hardwood and monofilament run through a drilled school ruler pegged into the soil. Somebody had made it neat. Somebody had had time. Randy lay beside him while Oscar worked a Leatherman under the wood and pinned the spoon with a bent nail from his little tin.

“School supplies,” Oscar whispered. “Very educational.”

Randy scanned the windows. “Save the lecture.”

They found more. Wire at ankle height from termite mound to fence post. Mortar rounds buried nose-up in a shallow trench and linked by command wire under a layer of swept earth. Two pressure pads made from flattened cooking-oil tins and battery clips. The red diode belonged to a crude receiver unit packed in a plastic soap case, taped to a nine-volt battery and nestled under roots where a child might have hidden marbles.

Not militia fieldcraft. Or not just militia. This was patient. Layered. Somebody had built it for a specific arrival path and expected men disciplined enough to avoid the obvious approach and still die in the alternatives.

Randy took the handset from his pocket once and looked at its blank black screen. He wanted it to ring. He wanted a voice. He wanted one clean thing he could shoot.

It stayed dead.

By the time the sky thinned from black to iron-grey they had one narrow way in and one narrower way out, marked by snapped grass stems tied in tiny knots. Oscar laid his charges against the left classroom wall and the rear corner where cinderblock had been patched with softer mortar. Tape. Putty. Cord. A surgeon setting instruments out in a place with no anaesthetic.

Randy checked watches by touch.

“On breach, Jonny takes the yard and windows. No heroics. No chasing. Oscar, in and left. I take door. Manny, you stay one man back till we call the room. Then get your sheep moving.”

“Hostages,” Manny said.

“Alive hostages if they obey. Sheep if they don’t.”

Manny looked at him in the dark a second longer than usual. Randy knew what the man wanted to say. About Blaise. About the woman by the drainage cut. About all the arithmetic Randy kept forcing because someone had to. Manny let it go.

Jonny settled behind a hummock with a field of fire on the door and both front slots. “If there’s a PKM in there, I’m lodging a complaint.”

“You can write it up after,” Randy said.

“To whom?”

“The bin.”

The first bird started up somewhere far off. Another answered.

Randy raised three fingers. Folded one. Then another.

On one, the world kicked.

Oscar’s charges punched the wall with flat white light and a hammer blow that slapped Randy in the chest. Cinderblock dust flew out in slabs and chalk. Before the echo finished rolling, Jonny opened with two short controlled bursts at the shooting slots. Sparks snapped from the shutters. Somebody inside screamed in a voice too surprised to have courage in it yet.

Randy was already moving.

He hit the door with his shoulder as the blast-shocked hinges gave, rolled through dust and powdered cement, saw desks on their sides, saw blue plastic jerrycans, saw a man rising behind a teacher’s table with an AK halfway up. Randy put two rounds through the man’s sternum and stepped over him. Another shape by the blackboard. Oscar got that one, muzzle flash white in the grey room. Then a third from the blown wall, trying to crawl toward a handset on the floor.

“Don’t,” Randy said, and shot him through the hand and face in one line.

The room stank of old piss, explosive residue, blood, and chalk gone damp and rotten. Child-sized benches had been stacked into a barricade near the back. Behind it, tied wrists, taped mouths, four adults crouched on the floor in dust and terror, blinking as if the dawn itself had burst in.

Manny came through the breach on Randy’s shoulder.

“Move, move, move.”

He ripped tape from the nearest woman’s mouth. She gasped and doubled over coughing. Another hostage, a man with a shaved head and wire spectacles bent flat to one side, kept saying something in Dutch or German or both, too fast to parse. The third was the face from the door, forehead split, one eye clotted. The fourth looked barely conscious, skin waxy, shirt dark at the ribs.

Oscar kicked away the handset the crawling gunman had reached for. It was better than militia scrap. Encrypted commercial set. Fresh battery. He didn’t stop to admire it. He pulled a knife and started cutting wrists.

“Back wall clear,” he said. “No second room.”

Jonny’s rifle cracked outside. Once. Twice. Then a burst. “Yard contact. One runner east side.”

Randy crossed to the windows and took a slice through the slit. One body by the acacia. Another folded in the grass near the fence where Jonny had caught him trying to break. No movement from the huts. No engines. No voices. It should have felt wrong. It felt perfect for exactly the kind of thirty seconds that always lied.

“Manny, triage as you walk.”

“I need ten—”

“You need feet.”

Manny snapped his jaw shut and slung the weak hostage’s arm over his own shoulders. Oscar took the woman with the split forehead. Randy yanked the spectacled man up by his harness straps and shoved him toward the breach.

Outside, dawn gave shape to the place without warming it. The schoolyard was a patch of hard dirt, rusted goalposts, three stumps where flagpoles had once stood. Jonny had shifted to a new firing point behind an overturned water trough, rifle steady, old face set in a complaint God never answered.

“Lovely morning for philanthropy,” he said.

“Rear route,” Randy told him. “Now.”

They moved.

The safe lane Oscar and Randy had cut in the grass felt too narrow for boots and panic. Manny half-dragged the wounded man, talking all the while in that maddening Manc rhythm of his, as if nonsense itself could keep a body upright.

“Head up, la’. Road’s a liar and dirt’s got teeth. Breathe before the dark gets ideas.”

The hostage stared at him, not understanding a word and somehow obeying all of it.

Randy was three paces from the termite mound that marked the turn when the second force announced itself.

Not with shouting. Not with a sloppy burst from too far away.

With a disciplined volley from their rear left, exactly on the line to cut off the withdrawal lane.

Rounds snapped through grass at chest height. One smacked into the termite mound beside Randy’s face and sprayed him with red dust. Another hit the wounded hostage Manny was dragging and spun the man half around in Manny’s grip with a wet impact like somebody had slapped a coat against a wall.

“Back! Back!” Jonny roared.

Too late for back. The lane behind them was a funnel and now somebody owned the mouth of it.

Randy dropped flat, saw movement through stems sixty metres rearward by the huts they had marked as empty. Not militia ragtag. Better spacing. Better fire control. Dark kit. Radios. Men who had rehearsed a stop.

They knew exactly where to point.

Oscar was down already, peering over his rifle. “Six at least. Maybe more. Rear cut-off team.”

“Sold,” Jonny said. “Told you. Fucking sold.”

Randy fired two quick rounds at a muzzle flicker and saw one man drop to a knee, but the others didn’t crowd him. They spread. One moved wide right to find angle. That, more than the shots, told Randy what he needed to know. These men had not come to collect hostages. They had come to erase an event.

The wounded man in Manny’s grip made a long animal sound and sagged.

Manny went down with him, hands already at the wound. “Through the chest. I need cover.”

“You’ve got geography,” Jonny said, and fired again.

The hostage with spectacles started to bolt blind into uncleared grass. Randy caught the back of his collar and slammed him into the dirt.

“Stay where the dead haven’t taught lessons.”

The man froze, panting.

Rounds clipped the school wall behind them. Dust puffed from the cinderblocks. Somebody inside the village shouted in French. Another voice answered from farther back, cooler, radio-clipped.

Oscar’s head turned a fraction. “They’re talking to someone else.”

“Who?”

“Someone not under fire.”

Randy made the decision before he could dislike it.

“Oscar. Smoke?”

“White only.”

“Good enough. Two pots on the rear line. Jonny, own the right flank. Don’t win, just insult them.”

Jonny grinned without humour. “At last, a task fit for me.”

“Oscar, after smoke, peel left through the fence gap. Get us to the truck. Manny, can he walk?”

Manny had his hand inside the hostage’s shirt, pressing field dressing hard into the hole. Blood pumped warm over his fingers. He looked up once. That was answer enough.

“We carry him,” Randy said.

“That lane won’t carry panic and a casualty,” Oscar said.

“Then we carry both.”

He pulled a grenade from his vest, counted, and sent it low toward the huts where he had seen the radio man. The blast cracked flat and ugly, spraying dirt and palm-thatch. Jonny used the sound to move ten feet right and open up on a muzzle flash that had grown too confident. A man cried out. Another voice barked orders.

Oscar popped smoke. One canister bounced in the dirt and immediately stitched white fog low across the grass. The second landed farther rearward and poured out a thicker screen. Wind barely touched it. For once the air chose a side.

“Go!” Randy shouted.

Manny and Oscar hauled the hit hostage under the armpits. The woman stumbled but kept moving. The man with spectacles crawled first, then crabbed, then found enough sense to stay on hands and knees where Randy shoved him. The fourth hostage, a broad-shouldered woman in a mud-stiff skirt, turned once toward the schoolhouse as if something of hers remained inside it. Randy grabbed her sleeve and dragged her with the rest.

Fire came through the smoke, probing. Not wild. Searching by memory and map. A round took the broad-shouldered woman in the calf and dumped her with a scream into the grass. Manny let go of the chest casualty, spun, jabbed a tourniquet high and hard in one brutal motion that made her slap at him like a child. He tied it and yanked her upright.

“Two legs became one,” he said. “Use the one left.”

Randy almost laughed. Almost.

They hit the fence gap and spilled into the back lane between huts. Mud walls. Broken cassava baskets. A goat skull on a post. Here the fire dipped for a heartbeat because the second force did not want to rake through blind compounds and maybe hit its own partners. That meant partners existed. It meant somebody at the school had expected relief from behind or expected to hand bodies over.

Jonny paused long enough to lean into a doorway and put a burst through a man rising there. The body fell backward among cooking stones.

“Not empty,” he said.

“No villages are,” Randy snapped.

A burst from deeper in the lane chewed adobe by Manny’s head. Oscar answered with three fast rounds, then a fourth after a breath. Silence from that doorway.

They turned left where the lane split around a wrecked generator trailer. Randy had parked the route in his head during the approach: lane, cassava patch, drainage ditch, then the stand of banana where the truck waited nose-out under cut branches. Two hundred metres if no one objected.

The second force objected hard.

An engine coughed to life beyond the huts. Not their truck. Something lighter. Technical or pickup. Men shouted in French and Swahili. Radio voices overlapped. One phrase cut through clean enough for Randy to catch.

“…window closed. Close it now.”

No collection. No negotiation. Close it now.

They reached the cassava patch and the ground opened ugly underfoot with old hoe trenches hidden by leaves. The man with spectacles went down again. Randy hauled him up. The chest-wounded hostage had stopped making noise. His heels left two dragging commas in the dirt behind Oscar and Manny.

“Name?” Randy asked him, though he knew the man might not answer in English, might not answer at all.

The eyes rolled toward him, huge and already loosening. “Pieter,” he said, or maybe Peter. Blood bubbled at his lips after the first syllable.

“Keep that for later,” Randy said.

A pickup burst from behind the schoolhouse into view through a break in huts, a white Toyota with no doors and a pedestal mount in the bed. Not local junk. Too clean at the grill. Too straight on its springs. The gunner swung the weapon but had only slices through buildings.

Jonny saw it too. “That’s not village kit.”

“No,” Randy said. “It bloody isn’t.”

Oscar stopped, knelt in the cassava without asking permission, and pulled a flat pouch from his rig. “Three seconds.”

Randy knew better than to question the liturgy. Jonny shifted to cover him. Manny kept hauling Pieter, breath rasping. The others crouched because fear finally made them obedient.

Oscar clipped, armed, and flung a small charge into the lane the Toyota had to take between the generator wreck and a masonry wall.

The pickup hit it at speed.

The blast was not large. It was precise. Front axle came off line with a metallic shriek, the bonnet jumped, and the whole vehicle speared sideways into the wall in an eruption of brick dust and shattered radiator steam. The gunner disappeared in the impact. The driver’s horn jammed on one single hideous note.

“Three seconds,” Oscar said, already moving again.

Randy wanted to shake his hand. Instead he shoved the hostages forward.

The drainage ditch came up at the far end of the patch, black water a foot deep and slick clay on both banks. They had crossed it in silence before dawn using a plank from a ruined chicken pen. The plank was still there, narrow as regret.

Jonny went first across, turned, and covered. The broad-shouldered woman hopped over half-falling and nearly took him into the ditch with her. He swore at her in Scots broad enough to count as artillery. The spectacled man crawled. The split-forehead woman crossed with Oscar’s hand on the back of her neck steering her like luggage.

Then Manny and Randy brought Pieter.

Halfway over, fire found them again from behind and farther right. A flanking pair. Smart enough to push wide while the rest fixed front. One round punched the plank by Randy’s boot. Another hit Manny’s med bag with a smack and burst a spray of gauze and ampoules into the water.

“Move him!” Randy barked.

They almost made it.

Pieter’s body convulsed once. Blood ran from his mouth over Manny’s sleeve. The weight changed. Anybody who had carried enough men knew that moment. They become more object than person. Not heavier. Just absent from their own bones.

Manny kept dragging.

“Leave him,” Jonny shouted from the far bank. “Leave the poor bastard and save the breathing.”

Manny did not let go.

Randy grabbed the back of Manny’s webbing and together they hauled Pieter into the mud among the banana roots. Bullets chopped leaves overhead. One green trunk burst and sprayed sap.

The truck sat ten yards away where they had left it under fronds and torn netting, EAU POTABLE faded on the tank in flaking blue letters, red cross hand-painted on the door by some previous liar. Engine cold. Keys with Oscar, because Oscar trusted machines more than people.

“Get it live,” Randy said.

Oscar ran for the cab.

Jonny dropped to one knee at the ditch and started buying the next twenty seconds a round at a time. He had a bad angle and knew it, but his shooting was mean and experienced. He did not waste bullets on noise. He waited for shape, movement, decision. Then broke it.

Manny ripped Pieter’s shirt open with both hands. Entry high left chest. Exit maybe none. Breath barely there, then there again, wrong and wet.

“Needle,” Manny said to himself, rummaging with blood-slick fingers through what remained of the bag. “Needle, you miserable circus.”

The broad-shouldered woman grabbed his wrist. “We have to go.”

He shook her off without looking.

Randy covered the ditch line and the lane beyond it. He could hear men approaching through cassava. Not rushing. Careful now. They knew the team had a vehicle. They would want to hit it before it moved or track it after. Maybe both. Maybe there was another block farther down the road already set. That thought sat in his head cold and simple: already set.

The truck engine coughed once, once again, then caught in a diesel rattle and a belch of blue smoke.

Oscar leaned out. “Now would charm me.”

Manny slammed the decompression needle into Pieter’s chest with a hard practiced thrust. Air hissed. Pieter’s eyes flew open with pure blind terror.

“There you are,” Manny said. “Don’t be dramatic.”

A burst ripped the mirror off the truck and sent glass into Oscar’s lap.

“Randy!”

“Load!”

Everything narrowed then. No plan left. Only sequence.

Jonny broke from the ditch and ran backward three steps, firing. Randy shoved the two women at the tailgate and threw the spectacled man after them. Oscar bailed from the cab long enough to help haul them in. Manny and Randy lifted Pieter together. The man screamed once when the movement jarred his chest, a raw wet sound that ended in a cough of blood over Randy’s sleeve.

They got him onto the truck bed.

Jonny hit the tailboard last, one boot slipping in mud, and Randy physically threw him the rest of the way in before diving for the passenger door. As he grabbed the handle, something moved in the banana stand to his right where nothing friendly should have been.

A man in dark clothes, close. Too close. Carbine up. Clean-shaven. No militia charm strings or scavenged nonsense. Just purpose.

He had been waiting on the truck.

Randy fired through the windscreen corner before the man completed the mount. Glass crazed white. The first round took the man in the throat. The second punched him backward into the cut leaves. His carbine went off once into the dirt.

“Drive!” Randy shouted, climbing in through powdered safety glass.

Oscar did.

The truck lurched out of the stand, clipped one banana trunk hard enough to peel bark, and found the track in a spray of mud. Behind them the second force opened up in a final full-volume attempt to kill the engine, the driver, the tyres, the deal, anything still moving. Rounds hammered the tank and bodywork. One punched through the rear panel with a metallic bong and whined out the front floor by Randy’s boots.

Then they were through the first bend and the fire broke on trees.

No one spoke for fifty yards. There was only engine noise, someone sobbing in the back, and the loose rattle of spent brass rolling under the seats.

Oscar hunched over the wheel, jaw tight, eyes scanning every rise, every rut, every place a roadblock might bloom. “If they sold the assault window, they sold the exfil.”

“I know.”

“You’ve a gift for reassurance, Randy.”

Randy wiped blood and glass off his cheek with the back of his hand and looked at the sat phone in his lap. Still dead. He wanted to put it through the windscreen. Instead he turned in his seat.

In the truck bed Manny was over Pieter again, knees braced wide to ride the jolts, one hand sealing the chest dressing, the other pumping a bag-valve mask from the remnants of his kit. Jonny crouched beside him, firing a look rearward every few seconds through the torn canvas flap. The two women clung to the side rails. The spectacled man had both hands over his mouth, as if that could stop the whole world getting in.

Pieter’s shoes drummed once against the metal floor. Then stopped.

“Manny,” Randy said.

Manny did not answer. He listened with two fingers pressed into the side of Pieter’s neck, then started compressions because there was nothing else left that counted as defiance.

The truck hit a pothole deep enough to launch everyone an inch. Manny kept the rhythm. Hands locked. Down. Release. Down. Blood spread beneath Pieter in a dark sheet that moved with the slope of the floor and the truck’s sway, washing into the corrugations, gathering around bolt heads, touching Jonny’s boot.

Jonny looked down at it and then away.

“Tell me we’ve still got four,” he said.

No one said anything.

Oscar drove harder.

The road ahead curved into teak and red clay and whatever had been arranged there for them next. Behind, the schoolhouse was gone from sight. In Randy’s head it remained clear as a photograph: blacked windows, opened door, perfect timing, the close man in the banana stand already in place before the rescue even started.

Not an ambush improvised on noise. Not locals reacting. A package built, baited, and closed by schedule.

The sat phone lit green in his hand.

Once.

Then again.

The sat phone lit green again as the truck slewed through a bend and bounced hard enough to slam Randy’s shoulder into the door.

He snatched it up.

No number. Just the same dead little screen and that green pulse, like it was enjoying itself.

He thumbed accept. “Talk.”

Nothing.

Only a faint open hiss. Not line noise. Breathing, maybe. Or a bad connection carrying engine vibration from somewhere else. He waited two beats too long, because some part of him still believed information arrived before bullets if you paid enough.

Then a clipped male voice, distant and flattened by the link.

“You are behind schedule.”

Randy stared at the handset. “That all you’ve got for me?”

“Proceed to Kasinga. Aircraft cannot wait past—”

The line chopped. Came back. “—thirty minutes.”

“Who is this?”

No answer. Then, as if reading from a card: “Use the north approach. Do not use the service road.”

Randy looked out through the dust-whitened windscreen at the red clay track they were already on. “You ringing to tell me where not to die, you can start by using names.”

The voice ignored him. “Confirm package count.”

Randy’s mouth flattened. “Confirm you’re not a ghost.”

The line went dead.

He held the sat phone for another second, thumb pressed into the casing. Then he shut it off and dropped it into the footwell.

Oscar glanced over, one eye still on the track. “Useful?”

“Like a fork in a gunfight.”

“Inspiring stuff.”

In the back Manny was still over Pieter out of stubbornness or habit, maybe both. Randy twisted in his seat and saw the truth arrive by small details. No rise under the bag-mask. No fight left in the hands. Manny stopped compressions not because he wanted to but because the truck hit a washout and almost pitched him over the body. He caught himself on the side rail, looked down once, and put a palm over Pieter’s face.

That was that.

One of the women let out a sound through her teeth and swallowed it at once, as if noise might bring the shooters back. The other had her arm clamped around her own ribs. Blood had dried black down her sleeve. The spectacled man sat folded in on himself, spectacles gone, eyes raw from dust and shock.

Jonny crouched near the tailgate with his rifle angled through a split in the torn canvas. “Still with us?” he called forward.

“For now,” Randy said.

“Aye, marvellous. Put it on the brochure.”

The truck thumped over roots and found firmer ground. Teak gave way to scrub and then to old company cut, the remains of a road widened once for heavier vehicles and then left to crack and sprout grass down the middle. Here and there the ditch held pieces of industrial life: a tyre carcass, a drum with its lid peeled back, a burst sack of cement gone to stone around its own corners.

Randy took the map from his thigh pocket and flattened it on the dash with one hand. Kasinga strip sat ahead on the paper in a clean neat line, one of those lies maps tell because the world looks obedient from above. Seven kilometres if the road held. Less if the road was honest, more if men had touched it first.

“North approach,” Oscar said.

“He told me not to use the service road.”

“So naturally we’ll not trust a word he said.”

“Now you’re catching up.”

Oscar showed teeth for half a second. Then he leaned over the wheel and drove around a dead excavator half sunk into its own spoil.

Randy looked back again. “Manny.”

Manny had already moved on from the dead. He was beside the woman with the bloodied sleeve now, cutting her shirt open with trauma shears that had lost one black plastic handle. His hands were red to the wrists. He checked pupils with a penlight, then pressed along the upper arm until she hissed and jerked.

“Round passed through soft tissue,” he said. “Missed the bone if we’ve got any luck left in the bucket.”

Jonny barked a laugh with no humour in it. “Empty bucket, lad.”

Manny ignored him. “Need her still. Need clean hands I haven’t got. Need ten minutes that also do not exist.”

The woman looked at Randy, not Manny. People usually did. He had the gun and the face that said decisions even when he wanted neither. She was in her thirties, fair under the dirt, hair hacked short with a knife or bad scissors. Dutch, maybe. Belgian. Aid field type. Capillaries burst in the whites of her eyes. She said, in careful English, “We were told there was a plane.”

“There is,” Jonny said. “Somewhere else.”

Randy said, “Save your breath.”

She kept looking at him until Manny put two fingers under her chin and turned her face toward the light. “If you want to keep the arm, stare at me instead,” he said.

The road dipped. Burnt diesel tainted the air ahead, faint at first, then stronger. Not fresh. Hours old. Enough for Randy to smell it through the truck’s own hot-metal stink.

He sat up a little straighter.

Oscar smelled it too. “That yours?”

“No.”

“Good. I was starting to worry.”

The first marker for Kasinga was a leaning board sign with the company logo sanded off in a rough oval and the word AIRFIELD barely visible under mildew. They passed a ditch full of broken glass and ration tins, then a pair of concrete gateposts with no gate between them, only one hinge hanging and a weld seam bright where somebody had cut the rest away recently.

Beyond the posts the land opened.

Randy saw the runway and knew in the same instant that nothing friendly had touched it since dawn.

Black scars ran diagonally across the strip where fuel had been poured and lit. Not random patches. Deliberate bands, spaced to ruin landing roll and takeoff both. The grass verges on either side were singed flat. Halfway down the runway an old fuel bowser lay on its side in a bed of soot, its tank peeled open like a fish belly. Near the threshold, where the Twin Otter should have stood if this had ever been the real plan, there was only churned mud, tyre cuts, and a rectangle of cleaner concrete where something heavy had sat for a while and then left.

No aircraft. No ground crew. No movement.

Just heat shimmer and crows hopping around the wreck of a windsock mast.

Oscar slowed without being told.

In the truck bed nobody spoke for a long five seconds. The engine rattle seemed louder for it.

Then Jonny said, “Well. There’s a surprise no bastard alive could’ve predicted.”

Randy scanned left, right, tree line, hangars, fuel point, admin shack. Empty can kill as hard as occupied. A place this clean sometimes meant waiting guns.

“Keep moving,” he said. “Don’t stop on the strip.”

Oscar took them past the gate at a crawl, front wheels crunching over broken glass and char. The admin shack had been hit with bursts through both windows. A white plastic chair lay on its back in the dirt. The hangar beyond it had one sliding door buckled inward and a roof panel peeled up by blast pressure. The smell was all wrong for militia vandalism. Less chaos. More chemistry. Burnt accelerant. Cutting charge residue. A bitter metallic tang Randy knew but could never have named if asked in polite company.

“Hangar,” he said.

Oscar steered toward it.

“Open ground,” Jonny snapped from the back.

“I’ve noticed,” Oscar said.

“Don’t get chippy because you’ve driven us to a funeral.”

“Could’ve walked if you preferred.”

Randy put his hand flat on the dash. “Enough.”

The truck rolled into the shadow of the hangar and stopped amid old oil stains and a drift of blown paperwork plastered against the far wall by grease. The cool inside hit them by comparison only. The roof trapped heat and cordite.

Randy got out first. Boots on concrete. Rifle up. He moved to the buckled door, checked the side office, then the rear opening where weeds had grown through cracks in the slab. No bodies. No waiting shooters. A workbench overturned. A torn crate marked AVTUR FILTERS. Empty racks where tools had hung. Someone had not only left, they had stripped the place on the way out.

“Bring them in,” he called.

Oscar backed the truck deeper under cover while Manny climbed down and started triage properly. Jonny jumped out, stretched his back with a groan, then went straight to the opening to watch the apron, because misery was his natural state but he still worked.

Randy walked the line of the hangar mouth and studied the runway.

The burn bands crossed at angles that would force a pilot into damaged rubber or heat-softened surface no matter how clever he got. Somebody had done the maths. Somebody had also hit the fuel dump with shaped intent. The bowed tank shell lay thirty metres from its plinth, moved by overpressure, not fire alone. Bits of mounting bracket were embedded in the dirt behind it.

Oscar came up beside him, wiping his hands on his trousers after killing the engine. “You’re smelling it too.”

Randy nodded.

Oscar squatted by a fragment near the threshold, pinched it, brought it to his nose, then looked at the bowser, the runway, the roofline, each in turn. He moved with the brisk concentration of a man reading a language he disliked but spoke fluently.

“Plastic explosive on the mount points,” he said. “Fuel laid after. Ignition train set so it takes proper once the aircraft’s gone, not before. Burn cuts across the strip are measured. Look there.”

He pointed with two fingers. Randy followed the line and saw what he’d missed: little scuffed crescents at the edge of each blackened band where charges or fuel cans had been placed in near-identical positions.

“Militia don’t waste effort like this unless they’ve had tuition,” Oscar said. “And if they had tuition they’d still be messy. This is clean. In and out. No panic. No scavenging after. Whoever did it knew exactly how long they had and what they wanted to deny.”

“Aircraft lifted before the fire,” Randy said.

“Aye.”

“Could’ve been warned off after.”

Oscar looked at him sidelong. “Could’ve. Could also be the whole point from first breath.”

Behind them Jonny said, loudly enough to save the trouble of pretending not to hear, “There was never a pickup.”

Randy turned.

Jonny stood in the opening with his rifle slung and the dead man’s dust still on his face. He looked older than he had that morning. Not softer. Just stripped. “That’s it, isn’t it? No little misunderstanding. No delayed pilot. No airstrip goblins. They wanted the aid lot out the schoolhouse and us all dead between there and here.”

Manny was kneeling by the wounded woman under a hanging chain hoist. He had torn open a saline bag with his teeth and was spiking it one-handed. The spectacled hostage sat on a dented compressor housing, both elbows on knees, staring at Pieter’s covered shape in the truck bed. The second woman stood near him, one hand on the compressor as if the floor still moved.

Randy said nothing.

Jonny stepped farther in. “Say it. Come on. You’ve been chewing it since Kinshasa.”

Oscar straightened. “He doesn’t need to say what’s written on the wall.”

“Aye, well, I’d like to hear the words before we all die of implication.”

Manny tied off the line around a bent steel support and finally looked up. “Maybe save the family meeting till after I stop her leaking.”

“She dies whether we whisper or not,” Jonny said.

The wounded woman’s eyes flashed. “I am here.”

“Then hear it from a professional pessimist,” Jonny said. “Your company friends sold the route, burned the plane, and if there’s anyone still looking for us it won’t be to hand out blankets.”

Randy crossed to him in three steps, close enough that Jonny’s mouth shut on the next line. “You want to panic the room, do it outside.”

Jonny held the look. Then he dipped his chin once. “Fine. Outside.”

He turned and went, muttering, “As if the room needed my help.”

Oscar watched him go. “He’s not wrong.”

“No,” Randy said. “He’s just loud.”

Manny cut away more cloth. The wound in the woman’s arm had bled less now, but the flesh around the exit was ugly and packed with grit. “Her name’s Elise,” he said without looking up.

Randy blinked once. “She tell you that?”

“She did. Useful habit, names. Better than ‘the one who might faint.’”

Elise’s mouth twitched, which under the circumstances counted as energy. The other woman said, “Anja.” Then she touched the spectacled man’s shoulder. “And Tomas.”

Tomas looked up as if from deep water. “Pieter?” he asked.

Nobody answered fast enough.

He nodded anyway. Understood. Looked down at his hands.

Manny said, “I need space. Oscar, find me whatever this place used to call a medical cabinet. Jonny can complain at a distance. Randy, choose whether we’re staying ten minutes or ten seconds because it alters how much I dare do.”

Randy checked his watch though time no longer had manners. “Ten minutes. Maybe less.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the one you’re getting.”

Manny grunted and went back to work.

Randy stepped out into the light with Oscar.

Heat hit like a door opened on a boiler room. From outside, the hangar looked worse: blast scoring around the frame, one corner of the roof dark with fire wash. Beyond the apron sat the admin shack, the fuel dump, a radio mast with its cables cut and coiled neatly at the base. Neatly. Randy stared at that for a beat.

Not looted. Cut. Deliberate again.

Jonny was twenty metres away behind a stack of old tyres, smoking a cigarette he’d probably forgotten he had. He sucked on it once and flicked it into the dirt when he saw them.

“Feel better?” Randy asked.

“No. Felt busy.” Jonny wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Any sign of our welcoming committee?”

“Not yet.”

“That’s what worries me. Men who leave this clean don’t leave blind.”

Oscar had already moved toward the fuel dump. He circled the shattered plinth, crouched, and touched one of the bracket scars. “Randy.”

Randy joined him.

There, under the soot, was a strip of olive tape not wholly burned away. Beside it, a bit of twisted wire insulation, green and black.

Oscar said, “Military pattern. Good stock. Not market rubbish. See the cut? Proper crimp, proper line. And here.” He picked up a sliver of copper tube. “Det cord sleeve. Tight work. Whoever did this had kit and training both.”

“Company security?”

Oscar shrugged one shoulder. “Or ex-soldiers on private money. Same haircut by the end.”

Randy looked at the runway again. The rectangle where the aircraft had sat nagged at him. “How long since lift?”

“Hours. Not many. Tyre edges still holding shape in the mud. Fire after departure maybe fifteen, twenty minutes, enough to keep the story straight if anyone asks why the pickup failed.” Oscar paused. “If there’s anyone left to ask.”

Jonny snorted. “There won’t be a report. There’ll be a phrase. Regrettable loss of contact. Security conditions on the ground. Thoughts with the families.”

Randy did not tell him to shut up this time.

He walked the apron to the admin shack and kicked the door open. Inside, heat, flies, and paper ash. A wall map of concession blocks hung crooked. Filing drawers gutted. The radio set had been removed from its shelf but the mounting bolts remained. On the desk, under blown dirt, he found the corner of a carbon-copy form stuck to sweat-ringed wood. Flight manifest. Most of it torn away. Only the bottom strip left, signed with a surname he didn’t know and a departure time an hour earlier than their agreed window.

He folded the strip and pocketed it.

In the waste bin someone had left a paper cup with lipstick on the rim. Fresh enough not to have fully dried into the paper. That irritated him more than it should have. Civilian normality. Somebody drank coffee while helping erase them.

Outside again, he scanned the tree line through his optic. No sparkle. No movement. But there were too many good places to lie up and watch a burned strip. No one had to be close.

He went back into the hangar.

Manny had laid Elise on a canvas groundsheet salvaged from a locker. The saline hung from the chain hoist. A compression bandage now wrapped her upper arm tight and white already blotched pink through the centre. He was checking Tomas’s pupils, then his ribs, then his wrists where the bindings had gone deep.

“You collecting us all?” Randy asked.

Manny did not look up. “I’m checking who folds first. It matters.”

“What’s hers?”

“If we move now she may keep the arm. If we move rough she may lose it. If she spikes a fever in the next day, we’ll all learn new swearing.” He shifted to Tomas and pressed two fingers into the man’s sternum. Tomas flinched. “Bruised chest. Dehydrated. Shock. Anja’s the strongest of the three, which is unfortunate because it means she’ll pretend she’s fine until she drops.”

Anja stood with her chin up and said, “I am fine.”

Manny pointed at her without looking. “That. Exactly that.”

Oscar entered carrying a rusted green tin with a red cross barely visible under grime. “Cabinet,” he said. “Contents depressing.”

Manny opened it. Gauze gone brittle, iodine ampoules from some forgotten decade, two tourniquets, one still sealed. “I’ll write a thank-you note.”

Randy leaned against the truck and looked at his people. Oscar calm in the way of men who accept bad news as a technical problem. Manny locked into hands-on necessity because if he stopped moving he might have to think. Jonny at the door, watching outside and inside at once, anger keeping him upright. Three survivors who had expected rescue and got arithmetic instead. Pieter under a blanket that didn’t hide the shape enough.

No aircraft. No comms mast. Burned strip. Clean demolitions. Unknown voice pushing them toward a trap right up to the minute the trap became inconvenient.

That closed one branch of thought. Others opened.

“What are our options?” he said.

Jonny laughed once. “Death by road. Death by jungle. Death waiting politely for the company to tidy up.”

Oscar said, “Road back west is poisoned. They know the truck. They know our likely fuel state. They know we’d think of the lake roads if we’d any maps worth a damn.”

Manny said, “You’ve skipped the part where one patient can’t march and one probably shouldn’t.”

Anja spoke from the compressor. “There is a mission road. South of—”

Randy looked at her. “From where?”

“We came part of the way by truck before the abduction. There was an old Catholic station. Not operating. Mud chapel. The driver said the road once reached plantations farther south.”

“Told by the driver or told to the passengers?” Jonny asked.

She stared at him until he looked away first.

Tomas rubbed his bound wrists. “Our driver argued with men at a barrier. Company men, I think. Not militia. Better boots. Radios. One had a yellow hard hat in the cab.” He swallowed. “After that they took us off the proper road.”

Oscar and Randy exchanged a glance.

Manny said quietly, “Useful little detail, that.”

Randy crouched in front of Tomas. “When was this?”

“Morning before. I think. Hard to know.” Tomas shut his eyes, trying to build it from broken pieces. “We stopped at a place with tanks. Storage. Then another vehicle joined us. White pickup. No markings.”

“The same model that came in at the schoolhouse?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Anything else? Names. Patches. Language.”

“French. Swahili. Some English.” Tomas opened his eyes. “One man spoke as if he had gone to school in Europe. He kept saying there had been an administrative misunderstanding.”

Randy stood up slowly.

Jonny saw it on his face. “That phrase means something?”

“It means our friends like office words while arranging murders.”

Oscar leaned on the truck’s wing. “Could still call them.”

Randy looked at him.

Oscar nodded toward the sat phone on the cab floor. “They expect movement. They expect us either dead or obedient. If you ring now from a burned strip they’ll have to choose whether to lie badly or send someone to complete the job.”

Jonny said, “Excellent. We invite assassins to our barbecue.”

“We already have assassins,” Oscar said. “Question is whether we let them come to ground we can read.”

Manny glanced up from threading a fresh dressing. “And while the tactical poets decide, my patient continues to own only one functional arm.”

Randy went to the cab, picked up the sat phone, turned it over in his hand. Scuffed casing. Dried mud in the seam. A device given by men who had never intended it to save him. Maybe only to count him.

He walked back to the hangar door.

Outside, beyond the black runway, the tree line stood dark and still. No movement. No flash. But stillness in places like this was often men lying on their stomachs with patience.

He called the last incoming contact.

The phone searched. Found. Connected so fast it confirmed everything.

A different voice answered this time. Female. Professional. Soft enough to sound harmless. “Yes?”

Randy smiled without warmth. “Aircraft’s gone.”

A pause that was maybe surprise, maybe a file being opened. “Who is this?”

“Don’t insult me.”

Another pause. Then: “Mr. Keating, where are you calling from?”

“The strip you told us to reach.”

“We lost contact with the ground element there.”

“Did you?”

“We’ve had reports of hostile activity.”

Randy looked at the burned runway. “That’s one phrase for it.”

“We are trying to establish alternate extraction.”

“No, you’re not.”

The voice cooled by a degree. “I understand you’re under stress.”

Jonny, close enough now to hear, mouthed under stress and rolled his eyes.

Randy said, “You sent us to a pickup that lifted early and was covered by demolitions done by trained men. Your route was burned in before we arrived. So let’s save one another time. Who took the plane off my strip?”

Nothing. Then: “I’m not authorised to discuss operational—”

He hung up.

Oscar exhaled through his nose. “Subtle.”

“She answered too quick,” Randy said. “They were waiting.”

The sat phone rang at once.

He let it ring twice, three times, then answered.

The same woman. No softness now. “Do not disconnect again.”

“Or what?”

“You are in an area with multiple armed actors. If you want any chance of recovery, you will move east immediately.”

Randy looked at the map in his head, the roads they had not used, the roads men with money could own without appearing on paper. East meant lake access. East meant somebody else’s prepared ground.

“Not happening.”

“Mr. Keating, listen carefully. There are assets moving toward your location with instructions to assist.”

Jonny mouthed assist and made a small shooting gesture with his finger to his own head.

Randy said, “How many assets?”

The hesitation was tiny. Enough.

“Enough.”

He hung up again and this time took the battery out.

Manny looked over from Elise. “That sounded healthy.”

Randy held up the battery between finger and thumb. “Company’s sending help.”

Jonny gave a hard little laugh. “There. We’ve our answer.”

No safe route left. Not by strip. Not by road they knew. Not by radio. Not by waiting.

Randy spread the paper map on the truck bonnet and pinned the corners with a magazine, a wrench, the sat phone body, and Oscar’s knife. The page fluttered in the hot draught off the apron.

“Listen,” he said.

That got all of them. Even Tomas.

“We are done with extraction. From here on, this is survival. That means no assumptions that any road is clear, any voice is friendly, or any marked site exists to help us. We move for concealment, water, and choices. In that order.”

Oscar was already tracing lines with one dirty fingernail. “South gives us broken mission road if the hostage memory’s right. Maybe old plantations, maybe swamp, maybe both.”

“West is known bad,” Jonny said.

“East is suicide,” Randy said. “North puts us back toward checkpoints that now have our truck.”

Manny tightened Elise’s bandage. “Then south it is, unless you’ve hidden a helicopter up your arse.”

Randy ignored that. “We ditch the truck before dark. It’s too visible and too known. We strip ammo, water, medical, tools. Burn anything with names. Pieter comes with us until we can do better than a blanket in a truck bed.”

No one objected. That was answer enough.

Anja stepped closer to the map. Her finger hovered, uncertain, over a thin line printed so faintly it almost vanished into the fold. “There,” she said. “The driver crossed himself when he saw that road.”

Jonny looked at her. “Comforting.”

She looked back. “He said the forest there eats witnesses.”

Silence sat in the hangar for a beat.

Then, from far beyond the runway, came the low mechanical growl of engines.

Not one. More than one.

Oscar lifted his head first, expression going still. Jonny was already moving for the door. Randy crossed to the opening and dropped to a knee behind the tyre stack, glass crunching under his boot.

Across the heat-shimmered approach road, dust rose above the trees in two separate plumes, both coming fast.

He counted the seconds between sound and sight and knew they had less time than Manny wanted, less cover than he liked, and exactly one choice left that belonged to them.

“Strip the truck,” he said. “Now.”

The dust kept coming.

Randy had the tailgate down before the engine noise cleared the trees.

“Water. Ammo. Med kit. No arguments.”

Oscar was already in the truck bed, shoving cartons and jerry cans forward with his boot. Jonny ripped open the tool locker and threw out what mattered and what did not in one foul-tempered sweep. A jack. Wire. Two tarps. A sack of cassava flour gone damp at the corners. Manny handed up bandages with one hand and kept the other pressed to Elise’s shoulder dressing so it would not slip while she stood there white-faced and stubborn.

The engines came louder. Not labouring. Not local wrecks held together by prayer and string. Clean revs. Better maintenance.

Randy looked once across the apron. Dust boiled above the far tree line in two straight plumes.

“Leave Pieter covered,” he said.

Nobody looked at the blanket in the truck bed.

Tomas climbed up to help and nearly fell when the suspension bounced under him. He had office hands, split now at the knuckles and black with dirt, but he moved when told. Good enough. Anja took two water cans by their handles and dragged them clear. Blaise stood close to the hangar wall, clutching the battered clinic cooler against his chest as if it still held medicine instead of dressings and a bottle of iodine.

Oscar dropped down from the truck with a green plastic crate of magazines and said, “Give me ninety seconds.”

“You’ve got forty.”

“I’m English enough to ignore impossible instructions.”

“Geordie,” Jonny muttered. “Foreign in his own country.”

Oscar gave him a look and snatched the fuel hose.

Randy saw what he was about before he said it. “Small.”

“Aye.”

“No fireball fantasy.”

“I know what a fuel-air mix does and doesn’t do, thanks.”

Oscar worked low and fast, siphoning diesel into a cut-open cooking-oil tin, running a dark ribbon beneath the cab and under the rear axle. Not for spectacle. For blindness and panic. Randy liked him best when he was insulted. It sharpened him.

Manny came with the last of the dressings, clamped in his teeth while he tied the med bag shut. “Elise walks. Tomas walks. Anja can carry a small load. Blaise is done if we run.”

“Then we don’t run,” Randy said.

Jonny straightened with Randy’s rifle case in one hand and a coil of tow cable in the other. “You hear yourself?”

“Frequently. It’s a burden.”

The vehicles broke from the trees then. First a Land Cruiser with a black grille guard. Then a pickup behind it. Both pale, both dust-filmed, both moving too hard for men feeling their way. They knew the strip. Or had been told enough.

Randy grabbed the map from the bonnet, folded once, twice, stuffed it into his shirt. “South tree line. Thirty metres in. Hold there till I come.”

“No,” Jonny said. “You come too.”

Randy took the tow cable from him and slung it round his shoulder. “I’ll be right behind your sunny disposition.”

Oscar was on one knee by the truck’s front wheel, thumb on the clacker, wire hidden in the grass and rubble. He looked up at Randy, all business now. “If they dismount before they close, I’ll let them look.”

“If they see the tracks?”

“They’ll see them. The trick is what they think the tracks mean.”

Randy took one last sweep. Blanket over Pieter. Burned strip. Split hangar. Admin shack punched open and black at the window frames. Too much sign. Too little time.

“Move,” he said.

They moved.

The first thirty metres into the scrub were easy because fear did half the work. Then the ground turned broken, littered with termite mounds hard as fired clay and waist-high thorn that caught at sleeves and trouser legs. Randy came last but one with Oscar behind him, laying the wire through grass stems and fallen sheet metal, careful not to snag, careful not to leave anything that shone.

He heard brakes bite on the apron.

A door opened. Then another.

Men’s voices. Not the loose sing-song at a roadblock. Short words. Spaced out. Sector calls.

Jonny glanced back from behind a liana trunk. Randy jabbed two fingers downward. Stay.

A voice carried across the strip. English.

“Cab clear.”

Then French from another angle. “Corps dans la benne.”

Body in the bed.

Not militia. Not villagers with borrowed rifles. Security men, or soldiers pretending not to be.

Randy crouched beside Oscar in a hollow under roots and watched through leaves.

Four visible. Maybe six. One at the Cruiser with a headset wire under his collar. One moving to the admin shack. Two circling the truck with rifles up. Better boots, dull tan, no bright market trainers. Webbing that fit them. They had come to erase, not bargain.

The man by the truck yanked the blanket halfway off Pieter and let it fall back. No flinch. No mutter. Just work.

Another voice. “No sign of Keating.”

Randy’s jaw tightened a fraction. So there it was.

Oscar’s thumb settled on the plunger.

“Wait,” Randy breathed.

The headset man looked down at the tyre tracks leading from hangar to truck, then toward the south tree line. He squinted. Thought. Lifted a hand.

“Trail team—”

“Now,” Randy said.

Oscar thumbed the clacker.

The truck did not erupt. It kicked.

A flat crack under the cab. Then diesel flashed low and dirty along the underside, coughed into the front wheel well, and blew a slab of black smoke and metal fragments across the apron. The man nearest the bonnet vanished in it. Another spun down hard, hands to his face. The blanket over Pieter lifted once and settled. The Land Cruiser’s windscreen starred and sagged inward.

Randy was already moving.

“Go.”

They crashed deeper into the trees while behind them men shouted in English and French both, commands stepping over pain. A burst of rifle fire slashed blind into the scrub. Branches snapped three metres left of Randy’s shoulder.

Jonny answered once, controlled, one round only, just enough to make them check themselves.

“Move, you miserable choir,” he hissed.

The forest took them in stages. First thorn and scrub. Then older trees. Big buttress roots, slick fungal rot, a roof of leaves that shut out the strip and the heat-glare with it. The air changed there. Damp earth. Fruit gone sweet then sour on the ground. A stagnant trickle somewhere under fern. Sound got close and strange.

They pushed south by compass and by the dead line in Randy’s head, the faded mission road Anja had pointed to with a shaking finger. It was a line from another century, printed by men who thought straight edges meant control. If it still existed at all it would not look like a road. It would look like memory.

Behind them, firing rose and fell. Not pursuit at once. Regrouping. Casualty check. Radio traffic. Then, farther off and to the west, a different noise opened up.

Automatic fire. Ragged. More guns. More mouths.

Jonny heard it too and spat a curse. “There’s your other friends.”

Pinned from both sides now. Company men at the strip. Militia or hired locals working in from the west where the roads and checkpoints lay. It meant somebody had cast a net, not sent a search party.

Randy kept walking.

After twenty minutes the ground dipped and the first of them started to come apart.

Elise stumbled on a root and would have gone down if Manny had not caught her harness. Tomas kept turning his head at every crack in the trees, burning energy on panic. Blaise’s breath had gone high and thin. Anja still carried one of the water cans but her steps had shortened to half-strides.

Manny clicked his tongue once. “Halt.”

Randy gave him five seconds of silence, then ten. Enough.

Manny put them in a rough crouching ring under a fig tree whose roots made walls around them. No one sat fully. No one wanted to admit they might not get up.

He checked Elise first, fingers deft under blood-stiff cloth. “Any numbness?”

“No.”

“Liar.”

“Then a little.”

“Good. Means the arm’s still speaking to you, even if badly.” He looked at Tomas. “Drink. Not all. You’re not a camel and we’re not in a Bible painting.”

Tomas took the canteen with shaking hands.

Jonny stood off to one side watching their back trail, rifle low, head turning with the old instinct of a man who knew resting could get you killed. But some of the pointless edge had gone out of him. The strip had stripped it, maybe. Bitterness was easy when there was still a chance somebody up the chain had merely been incompetent. Harder now.

Oscar crouched beside Randy and held out his hand.

Randy gave him the map.

Oscar opened it against his thigh. The paper was soft at the folds and smelled of mildew and old ink. A survey print from a missionary archive, copied and recopied until the contour lines looked like smoke. One red pencil mark crossed the south route near a chapel symbol so faded it could have been a stain.

“See this?” Oscar said.

Randy leaned in.

“Drainage line here. If the old road was built by priests and not engineers, they’d have followed higher ground till they were forced not to. We keep the dip on our right, we might cut it.”

“Might.”

“Aye.”

Randy looked over at Tomas. “You. Logistics.”

Tomas looked up slowly, as if the word had come from another life. “What?”

“You’ve been waiting to tell me something useful. Best pick now.”

Anja turned her face away at once. Elise stared at Tomas with the tired fury of someone who had already had this argument in private.

Manny heard it too. His hand stopped over a bandage roll.

Randy rose and crossed the roots in two steps. “Talk.”

Tomas swallowed. “Not here.”

Randy looked around at the forest. “Do advise me of the drawing room I missed.”

“It isn’t—” Tomas cut himself off and rubbed dirt down his face with both palms. When he spoke again he did it to the ground. “We weren’t taken because of ransom. Not really.”

Jonny gave a dry bark of laughter from the tree line. “No. Do continue. We’re all students.”

Tomas flinched at the sound of him, then pushed on. “We were doing relocation audits near the concession villages. Food stocks. Water points. Numbers moved from one camp to another. Standard work. We started seeing the same names appearing on dead lists and aid rolls in different places. Whole settlements burned and then recorded as voluntarily vacated. Security incidents always just before survey teams or land assessors arrived.”

Oscar’s gaze flicked to Randy, then back.

Tomas licked cracked lips. “At first we thought local administrators were skimming relief supplies. Then Anja found vehicle records that didn’t match the official movements. Fuel allocation. Helicopter drums. Company convoys appearing where there were meant to be none.”

Anja spoke without lifting her head. “We found burial sites.”

No one said anything.

The westward gunfire rolled again, closer this time, then cut off as if a hand had closed over it.

Randy said, “Whose company?”

Tomas looked at him. There it was in his face. Shame, fear, the little bureaucrat’s instinct to avoid saying a thing plain in case plain speech made it real.

“The same people who hired you.”

Jonny turned from the trail. “I am shocked.”

“Quiet,” Randy said.

But it was out now. The shape of it. The holes in the briefing, the names withheld, the wrong Keating on the folder, the cooked airstrip, the calls steering them east toward prepared ground. Recover the hostages if they knew nothing useful. Kill them if they knew too much. Either worked for someone paying invoices with clean signatures.

Oscar tapped the map once with a dirty fingernail. “What did you take?”

Tomas froze.

Anja answered for him. “Copies.”

“Copies of what?”

“Manifest sheets. Site security logs. Payment ledgers. Radio transcripts. Images.” She looked at Randy then, not pleading, just spent. “One of the local drivers started bringing us things after his brother disappeared. He thought if records existed, someone outside might care.”

Manny sat back on his heels. “And the notebook?”

All three NGO workers looked at him.

“The dead fixer,” Manny said. “Men beat him for a notebook. Boy heard them ask for that and a black machine.”

Tomas shut his eyes once. “Pascal took one paper notebook. Names, dates, plate numbers, air tail numbers when we could get them. The machine was a drive. Rugged case. Black rubber.”

“Where is it?” Randy asked.

Anja gave a small, bitter smile. “If we had it, do you think I’d still be alive?”

Oscar looked away first. Not out of softness. Out of arithmetic.

“They wanted more than witnesses,” he said quietly. “They wanted the paperwork back before anyone could price it.”

“Price it?” Elise said.

Oscar met her stare. “Everything has a price. Bodies. Land. Silence. You lot just happened to be standing where the columns crossed.”

Jonny came in from the trees and squatted on his haunches by Tomas. “Let me save us time, mate. Did you tell anyone before all this?”

Tomas looked at him. “We tried.”

“Tried where?”

“Regional office. Then headquarters. Not all of it. Enough to trigger a review.”

“Names.”

Tomas gave a helpless laugh. “You think they used their own names?”

“Did anyone answer?”

A pause.

“Yes,” Anja said. “And after that we were told to wait for a secure debrief. Then our local contact vanished. Then our convoy was diverted.”

Randy watched their faces, not their words. Tomas afraid of blame. Anja afraid of being too late. Elise furious with all of them, maybe most of all herself for surviving by chance. Blaise silent, eyes huge, understanding only pieces and enough of those to know adults had made a machine that ate people.

Manny cinched shut the med bag and stood. “There. Everyone has confessed. We’re all cleaner souls.”

“Not now,” Jonny said.

“It is exactly now,” Manny said. “Because if fear gets a vote, it’ll start choosing who matters.” He pointed at Tomas with two fingers. “You. Breathe from the bottom, not the top. You look like a man trying to inflate himself by panic. Elise, move your hand. No, the other hand. Good. Blaise, come here.”

The boy obeyed.

Manny took the clinic cooler from him and set it at the base of a root. “What has four legs at dawn, two at noon, three by evening, and still complains at every stage?”

Blaise blinked.

Jonny stared. “If the answer’s me, I’m shooting you myself.”

“It is obviously you,” Manny said. “But the lesson remains. Bodies change shape under burden. So we change how we carry them. Tomas takes no water cans. Jonny takes the cooler. Blaise carries nothing but his own feet. Elise keeps left of me. Anja with Oscar because he can count and you look like numbers calm you.”

Anja almost smiled despite herself.

Manny looked at Randy. “And you can decide whether to kill anyone who says we should split up.”

Tomas spoke before Randy could. “Maybe we should.”

Every head turned.

He knew at once he had said it badly, but bad truth was still truth. “I mean if they’re following the team, maybe the rest of us are safer separately. Smaller signatures. Different directions.”

Jonny’s face closed like a fist. “And if they catch one group first, they learn where the others are by asking with pliers.”

Tomas swallowed. “I’m trying to be practical.”

“So am I,” Jonny said. “Practically speaking, the moment you step ten yards alone in this jungle, you become a missing-person poster.”

Randy crouched in front of Tomas. “Look at me.”

Tomas did.

“There are three things hunting us. Men from the strip. Men from the roads. And fear. The third one is quickest. So no more helping it. We move together.”

Tomas nodded.

Randy stood and looked around the ring. “And we are not throwing away what you found.”

That got them all. Even Oscar.

Elise said, “You can’t protect us and carry a scandal.”

“Watch me.”

“This isn’t a scandal,” Anja said. “It’s evidence of mass killing.”

“I know what it is.”

“No,” she said, anger cutting through exhaustion. “I don’t think you do. Villages were emptied. Men shot in pits. Women disappeared after temporary holding sites were set up for ‘security screening.’ Children turned up at clinics with burns and no adults. Then the company reported insurgent disturbance and paused drilling until the area was ‘stabilised.’ That is what they are hiding.”

The forest seemed to listen.

Somewhere off to their right a hornbill flapped heavy from one tree to another. Then silence closed again.

Randy said, “Then we carry that too.”

Jonny frowned at him. “To where? The nearest newsroom? You got one tucked in your sock?”

Randy ignored the tone. “First we get out of the kill zone. Then we decide who can be trusted to receive it.”

Oscar folded the map with careful fingers. “If there’s anything left to receive.”

Randy held his stare. “You saying drop them?”

Oscar took a second with that. “I’m saying this stopped being a recovery the minute the plane lifted. Now it’s witness management. The company’s already chosen its answer.”

“And ours?”

Oscar’s mouth twitched once, no humour in it. “I prefer not being murdered for administrative convenience.”

Jonny snorted despite himself.

Randy slung his rifle. “Good. We’re aligned.”

They moved again.

The forest thickened as the ground rose. Old trunks with bark plated like armour. Vines thick as a man’s wrist. Patches of slick black mud where rotten leaves had turned to soup. More than once they had to pass gear hand to hand through gaps between roots while Manny guided Elise over with the patience of a man crossing old people through traffic. Randy set the pace just below collapse. Faster and the civilians would blow up. Slower and the net would close.

Twice they froze flat to the ground while distant voices carried through the trees.

The first time it was French on the left flank, too far to make out words, but there were enough boots with it to tell Randy these were sweepers, not hunters. Men on a line. Company side.

The second time it was singing.

Low at first, then nearer. A militia file moving somewhere parallel in the undergrowth west of them, one man chanting and the others answering. Randy tasted iron in his mouth. Singing men were either very young or very sure.

He angled them southeast to split the difference between the two threats and trusted the old road line a little more than he trusted luck.

By late afternoon they hit the first sign that the dead map had once been alive.

Not a road. A cut in the land.

Two shallow ditches running almost straight beneath the trees, choked now with saplings and creepers but too deliberate to be natural. In the middle lay a raised strip of packed earth gone soft with years. Randy knelt and scraped away the leaf mould with his knife. Laterite. Compacted. Man-made.

Oscar grinned without showing teeth. “Priests,” he said. “Bloody determined lot.”

Jonny scanned ahead along the green tunnel. “I apologise to none of them.”

Anja touched the edge of the old road with the toe of her boot as if checking it would hold. “I never thought I’d be happy to see this.”

Manny looked down the long buried line and said, “Paths are promises. Roads are debts. This one’s both.”

“Please never stop being impossible,” Jonny said.

Manny hefted the cooler. “You’d miss me before sunset.”

Randy held up a hand.

Ahead, half swallowed by fig roots, stood a stone marker about knee high. Moss skinned most of it, but one face still showed a carved cross and three letters under it. S M A, or maybe S N A. The rest gone.

He crouched by it, fingertips on the stone. Cold. Old. Real.

Then he saw the boot print beside it.

Fresh.

Not theirs.

Deep heel. Lug pattern modern and sharp-edged. One print only at first, then another where the undergrowth bent away from the road into thicker trees east of the marker.

Oscar saw it over his shoulder and lost the last of his grin.

Randy pointed. No words.

Jonny was there in two steps, then Manny behind him, steering the civilians back with his forearm before they could trample anything.

“Single man?” Jonny whispered.

Randy shook his head. “No.”

He could read enough now. The first man had stepped off the old road to let others pass. There, broken fern. Here, a snapped twig chest high. A smear of fresh mud on bark where a sleeve had brushed. Not a patrol walking blind. Men using the missionary road because they knew it existed.

Company? Militia? Another team? Didn’t matter yet. What mattered was they were in front.

Randy rose slowly.

Tomas had seen the faces change. “What is it?”

“Traffic,” Jonny said.

“How recent?” Anja asked.

Randy looked at the dark wet edge of the print. Minutes? An hour at most. Hard to tell under the canopy, but not old. Not safe.

He scanned left and right. The old road dipped ahead into a patch of giant bamboo where sightlines narrowed and sound turned strange. Good place for a listening post. Better place for an ambush.

Behind them, very faint now but unmistakable, a distant burst of gunfire rattled from the direction of the strip.

The net was still moving.

Randy made the choice before anyone could ask him to explain it.

“We don’t turn back. We don’t split. Oscar, with me. Jonny, rear and right. Manny keeps them tight. No one steps off my footmarks unless they fancy leaving pieces behind.”

Elise said, “Whoever’s ahead may not be hostile.”

Randy looked at the print again. Clean sole. Professional tread. Men who could walk this line had reasons. None of them good.

“Maybe,” he said.

Then he drew a slow breath, tasted leaf rot and old stone and the thin electric edge that came before contact, and led them down the dead road toward whoever had found it first.

Manny caught Randy by the sleeve before the old Scot could go down.

“Stop there,” he said, already on one knee.

Jonny had made a sound like disgust more than pain. He put a hand on the bamboo and missed it. Blood showed between his fingers where he’d been pressing his side since the strip, not much before, more now, dark and sticky through the torn shirt.

“For fuck’s sake,” Jonny muttered. “Everybody’s always touching me.”

“Because you leak,” Manny said.

Randy turned and scanned the road cut behind them. Green walls. Shadows between trunks. Nothing moving yet. That meant nothing. He knelt anyway and took Jonny’s rifle for a moment while Manny went to work.

The medic’s hands were quick and mean. Tape bitten free. Scissors out. A foil packet torn with his teeth. He peeled cloth away from the wound and Jonny sucked air hard through his nose.

Elise took half a step forward. Manny stopped her without looking up.

“No audience.”

“What is it?” Randy asked.

“Not what hit him at the school.” Manny pressed gauze into the wound, watched what came back. “That one’s been lying to us. Got a fragment still riding in him. Heat’s up. Smell that?”

Randy did. Sweet rot under sweat and river mud.

Jonny rolled his eyes toward the canopy. “Nice. Let’s all stand here and discuss me like livestock.”

Manny jabbed a syringe into muscle, smooth and practiced. “If you were livestock I’d have sold you by now.”

Oscar crouched beside Randy, map folded to a strip in one hand, the little captured handset from Kasinga’s burned admin shack in the other. He had stripped it to the shell, rewired the battery with tape, and spent the last hour with one ear to its hiss like a man listening at a wall.

“Contact ahead moved off the road again,” Oscar said quietly. “Two, maybe three men. They’re not rushing.”

“They know we’re behind them?” Randy asked.

Oscar tipped his head. Maybe.

Blaise stood with the clinic cooler against his shin and watched Manny’s hands with fixed concentration, as if memorising the trick. Tomas had Anja by the elbow. Elise held her bandaged arm against her chest and said nothing. They were tired enough now to be good at silence.

Manny wrapped the dressing, tied it down, and looked up at Randy.

“He walks slower. He carries less. He gets fever by dark.”

Jonny pushed himself straight before Randy could offer a hand. “I walk exactly as fast as my natural brilliance allows.”

“You walk as fast as pus permits,” Manny said. He packed away the used dressings. “Listen. A body’s a house. You let one bad tenant stay in the walls, soon enough he invites cousins. We’ve got a crowded house.”

Jonny stared at him. “That your comforting bedside manner?”

“It means don’t be heroic with me.”

Randy handed the rifle back. Jonny took it and winced once, tiny, almost polite.

“Move,” Randy said.

They came off the old mission line where it dipped into giant cane and bent east through thicker growth. Not a path so much as a suggestion: a place where lianas were cut old and vines had not fully reclaimed the gap. Whoever had gone ahead knew ground. They did not break branches unless they had to. They did not bunch up. They left just enough sign to keep a man guessing.

Randy liked them less with every step.

A hundred metres in, he found the first lie they had been left.

Boot marks veered north around a buttress root, clean in the black soil. Good weight. Good spacing. Men moving with purpose.

Oscar crouched, looked once, and shook his head.

“Toe pressure’s wrong,” he said.

Randy saw it then. The prints were stamped. Heel too neat. Depth too even. Somebody had made a drag frame or lifted boots onto sticks and printed them for show. A schoolboy trick, except not here, not under this much pursuit, not by men with polished soles and expensive radios.

Jonny spat into the leaves. “Well. Educated bastards.”

Randy smiled without warmth. “Nice of them to give us ideas.”

He brought the group in close around a buttressed tree and gave orders in a whisper. Oscar and Jonny on security arcs. Manny with the civilians. No one wandering. He and Oscar doubled back twenty paces, stepped into a side pocket of scrub, and built their answer.

A length of green trip wire from the schoolhouse bundle. Two rifle grenades they’d stripped for explosive fill. A rusted sardine tin to hold the pressure and channel the bite. Not pretty. It didn’t need to be. Oscar worked with his head bent and his long fingers patient as a watchmaker’s.

“You’re grinning,” Randy said.

“I’m not.”

“You are. Sick man.”

“It’s professional satisfaction.”

They set the little charge low where a boot would brush it if a tracker cut the corner exactly as Randy would. Then they stepped back into their own prints, brushed out the last two metres with a leafy branch, and moved on.

A quarter hour later Oscar got the radio to speak.

Not clearly. Not for long. But enough.

He raised two fingers. Everyone froze.

Static, then French under it. Clipped. Male. Too disciplined for militia chatter. Grid references. A check on east screen. Another voice answered from farther off, signal weaker. Then English, flat and bored: “...confirm package count when visual obtained.”

Randy and Oscar looked at each other.

Same phrase. Same tradecraft. Same people or close enough.

Oscar turned the volume down until it was barely a mosquito in his palm. “Not a company security guard on local wages, this lot.”

“No,” Randy said.

Manny, behind them, said softly, “If the butcher keeps asking the weight, it isn’t because he loves cattle.”

“Thank you, Socrates,” Jonny murmured.

They cut south again to break any line being built on them. Randy used stream beds where he could, stone patches where he couldn’t, and every hundred metres he stopped to listen with his whole body. Once he heard nothing except the click of insects and Manny’s breath behind him. Once he heard a branch close on the left and swung onto it, rifle up, only to find a blue monkey staring from a forked trunk with stolen outrage in its face.

By mid-afternoon Jonny’s shirt was soaked through. Not from rain. Fever sweat. The old Scot was pale under the grime and had gone from swearing conversationally to saving it for special moments, which worried Randy more.

Manny checked him on the move when he could, a hand to neck, fingers to wrist, eyes on the pupils.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“You know my name.”

“Tell me anyway.”

Jonny looked at him as if weighing whether murder was worth the effort. “Jonny Macrae. Since we’re being formal.”

“What day is it?”

“The bad one.”

Manny nodded. “See? Sharp as cut glass.”

Anja stumbled crossing a root web. Tomas caught her. Elise nearly dropped the document satchel when her injured arm failed. Blaise had gone quiet in the dangerous way, all reserve burned out. The whole column was shrinking into itself, each person carrying what hurt and trying not to spend words.

Randy found water by smell before he heard it. A mineral damp under the rot. Then the trickle itself, somewhere ahead and lower.

The stream was narrower than he feared and uglier than he wanted. Black water over stones, five metres across at most, steep clay banks chewed by old flood. Trees leaned over it, roots exposed like fingers. One bank had a half-collapsed fisherman’s platform of poles and raffia lashings. The other rose into thorn and low fern. Good crossing if they were lucky. A coffin if they were seen.

Oscar belly-crawled to the edge and glassed downstream with a compact monocular. Randy went upstream. Twenty metres up he found an old ford where the stones broke the current, but the mud around it had been recently cut by boots.

Not many. Not old.

He came back low and hard.

“People used this today.”

“Who?” Tomas asked.

“If I knew, I’d send them a note.” Randy looked at Manny. “Can Jonny cross under his own steam?”

Manny gave Jonny one glance. “Ask his liver.”

Jonny wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I can manage a puddle.”

“That isn’t what I asked,” Randy said.

Jonny gave him a crooked look. “No. But it’s what you’re getting.”

Randy set the order. Oscar first across to secure the far bank. Then Blaise with the cooler tied high. Tomas and Anja. Elise with Manny. Jonny and Randy last.

Before they moved, Oscar handed over the hiss-box radio. “If I don’t come back, don’t fiddle with the red wire.”

“That’s the sort of sentence one treasures,” Randy said.

Oscar slid into the stream without another word, one hand holding his rifle high, boots feeling for stone. He was halfway when the radio in Randy’s hand crackled.

“...north bank hold. Wait for blue...”

Then silence.

Randy looked up.

The shot that hit the water beside Oscar was suppressed and vicious, just a hard spit and a white smack in the stream. Then three more came from the far bank fern.

“Back!” Randy shouted.

Oscar didn’t go back. He lunged forward, almost fell, caught himself on a boulder, and fired from the water. Muzzle flashes tore gold in the green shade. Jonny dropped prone at the edge and opened up across Randy’s shoulder. Manny shoved Blaise flat behind the clay lip with one arm and dragged Elise down with the other.

Then the near bank answered.

Not theirs. Somebody hidden fifty metres downstream under the roots. Automatic bursts raked the fisherman’s platform to splinters and stitched across the mud where Tomas had been a second before.

Militia on one side. Company on the other. Clean enough now.

“Move!” Randy snapped.

The stream became noise and flying mud. Oscar reached the far stones and rolled behind a root mass, firing controlled pairs into the fern. Randy turned and sent a short burst downstream at the near-bank gun. A man shouted in Lingala. Another voice, in French, sharper, ordering correction.

Jonny fired twice more and suddenly folded as if somebody had cut his strings.

He did not cry out. His rifle went sideways. Blood jumped from his thigh in bright arterial pulses and sprayed the clay by Randy’s boot.

Manny was on him before he was fully down.

“Tourniquet. Tourniquet now.”

Randy slammed his rifle down, hauled one from Manny’s pouch, cinched it high above the wound and twisted until Jonny’s face turned to old paper. The Scot made a small, filthy sound between his teeth and tried to punch him. Randy took it on the forearm and kept twisting.

“Leave it!” Jonny gasped.

“Not in your nature to make sense, is it.”

Oscar shouted from across the water, “Far bank two down, maybe three. More moving behind.”

Rounds snapped over the stream and smacked bark from the tree above Randy’s head. Tomas crawled to the satchel, dragging it by the strap. Anja lay flat with both hands over her head. Blaise had the cooler under him like a shield. Elise, white-faced, was trying to help Manny open another dressing one-handed.

Manny packed the entry wound, searching with his fingers through blood while Jonny bucked under him.

“Talk to me,” Manny said.

“Talk to yourself.”

“Gladly. Here’s one. What has four walls, one bad pipe and a tenant who won’t pay rent?”

Jonny’s eyes found him through the pain. “You are deranged.”

“Correct. The answer is still your leg.”

Randy risked a look downstream. Three figures in mixed kit were moving under the near-bank roots, low and quick. Militia by the look of them. Cheap rifles. One bright football shirt under webbing. On the far bank, he caught a glimpse of better shape and discipline. Men in drab shirts, no wasted motion, using hand signals. He put two rounds at a muzzle flash and saw a shoulder disappear.

“We can’t stay,” Oscar called. “They’re trying to pinch the crossing.”

Randy knew it. Everybody knew it. The stream was not the problem. The banks were. If the far side team slid upstream and the militia rushed from this side, the column would be caught in the cup.

Manny tied off the dressing and looked up. No speech. He didn’t need one.

Jonny saw the look pass between them.

“No,” he said. Breathless now. Cold coming into his face. “Don’t be dramatic. Leave me the rifle and sod off.”

Blaise made a sound in his throat.

Tomas said, “We don’t have time.”

Elise turned on him with murder in her eyes. “Shut up.”

Anja, flatter than the mud, said, “If they take him alive—”

“They won’t,” Jonny said. “I’m difficult.”

More fire from the far bank. Oscar had shifted position and was making them pay, but not enough. Not for long. Randy heard a whistle downstream, militia talking louder now, confidence growing with numbers.

Manny tore open an ampoule with blood-slick fingers. “Painkiller. He’ll drop pressure. He may stop shouting. That’s the sales pitch.”

Jonny bared his teeth. “You have a vile bedside style.”

“Take it or don’t. River doesn’t care.”

Jonny nodded once. Manny pushed the drug in.

Randy made his choice and felt it in his gut before he spoke it.

“We carry him.”

Tomas stared. “What?”

“We carry him,” Randy repeated.

“Randy,” Oscar called. “Decide quickly, mate.”

“Done already.”

Tomas looked from the stream to the trees and back, measuring lives in panic arithmetic. “If we carry him, all of us slow. They catch us.”

“If we leave him, they still catch us,” Randy said. “Only then we’re the kind of men who leave him.”

That landed where it needed to. Not on Tomas. On the others.

Manny gave a brief nod and went to work with no more argument. He snapped two sapling poles with Randy’s help, cut a poncho into strips, and built a drag sling in twenty brutal seconds. Jonny drifted in and out while they worked.

“Listen to me,” Manny said to him, leaning close. “A river asks two questions. What will you give up, and what will you hold above your head? Answer right.”

Jonny blinked at him. “I preferred morphine to philosophy.”

“That was both.”

Oscar rose on the far bank long enough to throw. The grenade bounced off a root tangle above the hidden company men and cracked the green apart. Dirt, leaves, one scream. He used the second of noise to sprint ten metres upstream and waved hard.

“There’s a cut path here. Narrow. Do it now.”

Randy grabbed the front of the sling. Manny took the rear. Jonny hissed through his teeth as they lifted.

“Elise, Blaise, across. Tomas, help Anja. Oscar covers. Go.”

Everything after that broke into fragments.

Blaise slipping on the first stone and catching himself with the cooler held high like a sacred thing.

Elise crossing one-handed and swearing softly in Dutch with each step.

Tomas half carrying Anja, both of them bent low while rounds slapped water around their shins.

Manny and Randy taking Jonny’s weight and finding there was more of it every second, because a wounded man does not simply weigh what he weighs. He drags at decision. He drags at time.

A burst from downstream chewing bark beside Randy’s cheek.

Oscar firing over their heads, calm as a man pegging washing.

Then the far bank alive again. Another shooter. Another line on them.

Randy dropped the sling for one second, went to a knee in the stream, and emptied half a magazine into a patch of fern where he’d seen movement. Something jerked and vanished. Good enough. He hauled Jonny up again.

The current shoved at their calves. Stones rolled underfoot. Manny nearly went over and saved it with one savage twist that made Jonny groan deep in his chest.

“Nearly there,” Manny said.

“You said that before I liked you,” Jonny muttered.

Oscar reached down from the far bank and caught the front pole, hauling with Randy. They dragged Jonny into the cut path, into thorn and shadow.

“Up,” Randy said to everyone. “Move.”

They moved.

Not fast. Never fast enough. But with the blind, stubborn rhythm of the finished. Oscar and Randy took point by turns, one hauling, one shooting when needed. Manny kept a hand on Jonny’s neck every few steps, checking pulse, muttering to him, muttering to himself, muttering to the dark.

Behind them the two enemy groups found each other properly. Shouting rolled down to the stream. A short hard exchange of fire. Militia rage against trained impatience. That bought minutes. Not many.

The path climbed through scrub into taller trees where the ground turned spongy with old leaf fall. Night came under the canopy before the sun was done elsewhere. Shapes blurred. Distances lied.

They halted once in a bowl between roots because Jonny’s dressing had blown through and Manny needed pressure on the wound.

The medic worked by shielded red torch, face close, glasses fogging with his own breath. He cut away more cloth. The bullet had gone in and not come out. High thigh. Too high for comfort. Bad place. Blood vessel country.

“How bad?” Randy asked.

Manny did not answer at once. He pressed, listened, thought.

“Bad enough to tell the truth to priests,” he said. “Good enough that I’m not yet giving up my seat.”

Randy crouched beside Jonny. The old Scot’s eyes were half open, tracking badly.

“You with us?”

“Against medical advice.”

Randy squeezed his shoulder once and stood. “We keep moving.”

No one complained now. Even Tomas. Especially Tomas.

Oscar had the stolen radio tucked to his ear as they dragged through a stand of ebony saplings. Every so often he stopped, listened, and changed their angle by ten degrees.

“Far side team’s split,” he said once. “One element following the stream, one trying to get ahead.”

“Militia?”

“Haven’t heard them on this set. Which may be the point.”

Manny, behind them, said, “Two hyenas and one goat still means a funeral.”

“Save your sayings,” Jonny whispered. “Use them when I’m dead. Might improve them.”

“You’re not dead,” Manny said.

“Disappointing for some.”

They hit a second watercourse close to full dark. Not a stream this time. A broad, sluggish branch of river, black under overhanging trees, fifteen metres across and slow as oil. On the near bank lay the remains of an old crossing: two dugout canoes pulled into reeds, one split, one patched with sheet metal and bitumen. A cable used to run bank to bank once. Only a few strands remained, sagging into the current.

Randy stared at it and felt the chapter of bad choices opening wider.

Oscar checked the canoe with his boot. “Floats. Probably.”

“Probably?” Elise said.

“Comforting word, that.”

Gunfire cracked somewhere behind them, farther off than Randy wanted and nearer than he could accept.

Manny eased Jonny down onto a mat of reeds. The Scot’s skin shone with fever now. He was shivering despite the heat.

“His pressure’s falling,” Manny said. “If we stop much longer, we stop for good.”

Randy looked across the river. The far bank was a wall of darker dark. No lights. No village sound. No frogs, which he didn’t like. The place felt used and abandoned at once.

Oscar had the radio to his ear again.

“What?” Randy asked.

Oscar raised a finger.

Static. Then English. Different voice this time. Female. Crisp. “West bank team report. West bank team report. Package may include wounded contractor. Priority unchanged.”

Oscar lowered the set.

“Wounded contractor,” Jonny said faintly. “That’s me. Nice to be recognised.”

Randy scanned the trees behind them. If the company men came up on one bank and the militia onto the other, this river became a pen.

“How long to get him over?” he asked.

“In that?” Oscar glanced at the patched canoe. “Three trips if we don’t fancy drowning.”

“We haven’t got three trips,” Elise said.

“No,” Randy said. “We haven’t.”

He made the plan in pieces because that was all there was time for. Blaise and the cooler first with Oscar in the canoe. Then Oscar back for Anja and the satchel. Tomas swimming a line if the old cable failed. Elise helping Manny rig Jonny into the hull on the final crossing with Randy pulling from the stern. Ugly plan. Fragile plan. The only one in reach.

They shoved the canoe into the black water.

It took Blaise and the cooler and Oscar’s careful weight and moved with a low, wet complaint. Halfway across the bow dipped and Randy’s heart went to his teeth, but Oscar shifted, balanced, and kept going. The hull kissed the far bank.

One trip.

Back it came, slower.

Behind them, on the bank they had left, a beam of white light flicked once through the trees and went out.

Not militia. Too clean.

“Tomas,” Randy said, “you’re next.”

The Dutchman swallowed and nodded. Anja climbed in beside the satchel, face empty with tiredness. Oscar pushed off again.

The light flashed a second time, lower now, probing.

Manny laid a hand on Jonny’s chest. Counting breaths. Not enough.

“Randy.”

“I know.”

A burst of fire snapped from upstream on the opposite bank.

Everyone froze.

It wasn’t at them. Not yet. Voices followed. Men moving. The wrong men on the wrong side.

Militia one bank. Company the other. Just like the stream, only wider, darker, and with less room for error.

Oscar had reached mid-river with Anja when the first torch came on behind Randy through the trees, a sharp cone spearing trunks.

Then another answered from across the water.

For one second the river held both lights, white on black, crossing each other over the patched canoe where Anja crouched and Oscar bent low over the paddle.

Randy looked down at Jonny, at Manny’s hands, at Elise standing with her good arm wrapped around herself and the bad one hanging, at Blaise already on the far bank clutching the cooler like a last clean fact in the world.

Then he lifted his rifle and said, “Push faster.”

The torch on their bank dropped to ground level, searching the reeds.

The torch across the river steadied on the canoe.

And from the dark behind Randy, close enough now to smell sweat and damp webbing, a man spoke in English.

“Don’t move the boat.”

“Try me,” Randy said, and dropped flat as the night split.

The shot from behind him tore leaves over his head. He rolled into the reeds, muzzle up, saw a white beam jerk sideways and fired at the light, not the man. The torch burst. Someone cursed in English. Close. Too close. Oscar was still out on the water with Anja, black shapes cut across by the torch on the far bank.

“Move!” Randy shouted.

Gunfire answered from the opposite side, a harder, flatter rhythm than militia panic. Company men. Their tracers stitched low over the canoe and hit water with quick silver snaps.

Manny had Jonny by the webbing and was dragging him downslope, boots furrowing the mud. Elise went with them, one hand under Jonny’s shoulder, teeth bared with the effort. Tomas was in the river up to his chest, pulling on the sagging remnants of cable with both hands and turning his body sideways against the current.

The man behind Randy moved again. Reed stems twitched. Damp webbing scraped bark.

Randy fired twice into the dark mass and heard the satisfying, ugly sound of both rounds arriving in meat. No cry after it. Just a body folding through brush.

Then the grenade tin he and Oscar had rigged back along the cut path gave a metallic cough.

A beat later the bank behind them turned inside out.

The blast rolled through the trees and slapped the river flat for a second. Shards hissed through leaves. Men on the west bank shouted over each other. One of them screamed in French for lights. Another never finished what he started.

“Again!” Oscar yelled from midstream.

Randy looked up. Oscar had hauled the canoe around broadside to shield Anja as best he could and was digging the paddle in like he meant to row through brick. The patched hull took two rounds. One punched through the sheet-metal patch with a clang like a dropped pan. The other skipped off the gunwale.

Blaise’s thin voice came from the far bank. “I have the rope!”

“Hold it!” Randy shouted.

He slid to Manny and caught Jonny under the armpits. The Scot was half there, eyes glassy and mean in the torch flashes.

“Told you,” Jonny breathed. “Shite holiday.”

“Save the brochure review,” Randy said.

They dragged him the last four metres to the bank. Mud sucked at their boots. Manny’s breath rattled. Elise slipped once, caught herself with her bad arm, made a noise through her nose and kept going. Across the water Anja stumbled out of the canoe. Oscar shoved it back at once.

The far-bank torch steadied and painted Randy’s chest.

He shot the lamp out.

Someone over there answered with a burst that shaved bark from the tree by his left shoulder. Tomas grunted in the water and nearly vanished.

“Get in,” Manny said.

“No room,” Randy said.

“There’s no room for dead either.”

Oscar brought the canoe in ugly and fast. Blaise splashed beside him up to the waist, hands on the bow. The boat smelled of bitumen, river rot, and old fish. Water slopped in the bottom around a rusted jerrycan cut into a scoop.

They loaded Jonny first. There was no neat way to do it. He went in with a groan, one leg wrong, rifle across his chest. Manny climbed after him. Elise tried. Randy shoved her back.

“Next trip.”

“There isn’t a next trip.”

“There is if I say so.”

“Christ, you do sound English when you’re lying.”

“Scouse,” he said, and shoved the stern off.

He and Tomas held the canoe till the current took it. Oscar paddled. Manny crouched low over Jonny, one hand clamped on him as if grip alone could keep blood in a man.

Rounds cracked from both banks now. Militia on the far side had found courage in the lights. Company men on the near bank had found each other after the blast. The canoe crossed through converging fire, a black nutshell on black oil.

Randy grabbed Elise and pushed her into the shallows. “With me.”

She stared at him as if he were mad.

“Unless you fancy staying,” he said.

Tomas came out of the water, heaving. “I go too.”

“Good. Swim.”

They went in at once. The river was warm on the skin and cold under it, layers of foul water turning around Randy’s legs. He kept his rifle up till he couldn’t, then slung it and swam one-armed, pulling against the weak drag of the cable Tomas had found. Elise kicked beside him with short, angry strokes. Behind them the near-bank men lit fresh torches. One beam found their wake.

The far bank exploded in muzzle flashes.

For one blind second Randy thought Oscar had turned on them. Then he heard the note. Different. Louder. Jonny, firing from the canoe by sound and hate.

“That lunatic’s awake,” Elise gasped.

“Scottish,” Randy said, mouth full of river.

Hands seized his vest and hauled. Blaise and Oscar dragged him onto the mud. Tomas rolled in after him on hands and knees, vomiting black water. Elise clawed her way up the bank and lay flat, chest pumping.

The canoe came in broadside and half full. Manny jumped out and dragged Jonny after him. Jonny still had the rifle. His face had gone grey clay under the fever.

Across the river the company men were collecting themselves. Their lights moved in a rough line up and down the opposite bank, searching for a shallower crossing, a pirogue, a bridge, a miracle.

“They’ll split,” Oscar said, breathing hard. “One team follows the stream line. One goes round.”

Randy was already crouched by the body of the man he had shot near the reeds. They had hauled something from him in the scramble: a handset the size of a brick, a folded map in a clear sleeve, and a chest rig cleaner than anything the militia ever owned. The dead man smelled of repellent and cordite. White skin under the blood. Cropped hair. No insignia. A private soldier with his labels cut off.

Randy unfolded the map under his red lens.

Not a route sketch. A job sheet.

The old mission road. The stream crossing. The river branch. Arrows and timings in grease pencil. Two words ringed near the southern edge of a lake line.

Lake House.

Below that, block capitals.

CONFIRM PACKAGE. DISPOSE OF ALL WITNESSES.

He showed Oscar. For once the Geordie had nothing clever ready.

Manny glanced over from Jonny. “Bad?”

“Worse than advertised.”

Jonny gave a broken laugh. “There’s a novelty.”

Randy found a frequency card tucked behind the map, then a laminated photo packet. Not of the hostages. Of his team. Randy stepping out of a side door in Kinshasa. Oscar at the hotel loading dock with a case in his hand. Manny buying bottled water from a boy at the kerb. Jonny smoking and glaring at traffic as if it offended him personally.

Taken from distance. Taken by someone patient.

The west-bank torches began to move south.

“They’re going round,” Elise said.

Randy folded the map. “Then so are we. We beat them to their own front door.”

Nobody argued. Not even Tomas, who was still wiping river from his mouth with a shaking hand. There are moments when the lie comes out of a thing and leaves only shape. This was one of them. Rescue was finished. Extraction was finished. What remained was pursuit in both directions and one hard point on a map where the men behind it might still be reached in person.

Manny shot Jonny with something from a capped syringe and tightened the dressing till the Scot swore weakly.

“You walk if you can,” Manny said. “You don’t, we carry till we break.”

Jonny looked at Randy. “If you leave me, I’ll haunt you badly.”

“Your conversation’s punishment enough,” Randy said.

They moved.

The ground rose away from the river through tangled cane and old coffee rows gone wild. Twice they found cut sign: a machete shave on sapwood, boot tread in wet clay, cigarette paper trapped under a root. Lead team work. Professional. Fast. A line pushing back to the lake.

Randy set the pace by Jonny’s limits and hated every minute of it. Stop. Lift. Drag. Walk. Oscar took point with the dead man’s map in his hand, squinting by red light when he dared use it. Blaise stayed glued to the cooler and never complained once. Manny kept checking Jonny and Elise and then the others too, as if injury might appear by neglect. Tomas and Anja spoke little. They were beyond fear now and into the narrow country past it, where people save breath because they know they may need it for running.

Once, near a fallen kapok, Randy heard engines carry thin through the trees.

Lake.

An hour later the smell reached them. Diesel. Generator fumes. Hot metal. Then a weaker edge under it, something sour and chemical. Burned paper.

Oscar dropped into a crouch and raised a fist.

Ahead, the forest broke around a low ridge. Through the leaves Randy saw water reflecting a slit of moon and, on the near shore, a compound tucked into the trees as if it wanted to disappear from the lake rather than command it. Two prefab buildings with corrugated roofs. A wire fence half hidden in climbing vine. A timber jetty. A radio mast braced with cables. One long shed with the doors open on a pair of boats nosed in shadow. A floodlight tower kept dark. Generator house at the rear. Three parked trucks under netting. Men with rifles at each corner, not slouched militia but sector-scanning paid hands. More near the jetty.

And at the center of it, on a lit verandah screened by mosquito mesh, a man in a pale shirt sat at a table with a radio handset, a bottle, and a stack of files. No rush in him. No nerves. Waiting, because waiting had worked so far.

Randy watched him lift a glass, listen to someone report, and say something short in French. One of the corner men moved at once.

Field chief, Randy thought. Not because of rank tabs or swagger. Because everyone else bent around his smallest gesture.

“Nameless little king,” Jonny whispered from where Manny had eased him down.

Manny pressed him back. “You whisper again and I’ll sedate you out of spite.”

Oscar passed the dead man’s map to Randy and pointed with two fingers. “Generator house there. Fuel drums stacked behind. The boats are their way out. The files’ll not be the files. Not the important ones.”

“No,” Randy said. “Those go in a box near him or under him.”

Tomas leaned in, eyes fixed on the verandah. “The notebook could be there.”

Anja touched his sleeve once. Steadying him or stopping him, Randy couldn’t tell.

There were at least twelve visible. More likely sixteen. Enough to kill them all if they came straight through the gate. The fence had no lights because it didn’t need them. The trees had been thinned in lanes. The open ground inside was raked earth and crushed shell, pale under moonlight. No cover but stacked fuel, a rusted grader blade, and the shadows behind the buildings.

Oscar opened his pouch. He laid out what was left like a miser counting his last coins. Two bricks of plastic explosive, one cut ragged where he had shaved from it before. Three detonators. A length of shock tube. A single grenade. Tape dark with old dirt.

“That’s the hymn sheet,” he said. “One breach. One proper distraction if I’m feeling poetic.”

“You feeling poetic?” Randy asked.

Oscar looked at the compound. “Filthy with it.”

They built the assault in whispers.

Manny would keep the civilians low in the dead ground by the ridge until the first blast, then run them through whatever hole Oscar made and straight for the boats if they were clear. Blaise stayed with Manny. No debate. Tomas and Anja carried evidence if evidence appeared, and if it didn’t they carried water or ammo or each other. Elise objected to every word of being grouped with the runners until Manny leaned so close their foreheads almost touched and said, very softly, “If you want to help them die, stand where you are. If you want to help them live, do exactly what I say.” She stared at him, then nodded once.

Jonny insisted on taking the support position.

“You can’t stand,” Manny said.

“I can swear sitting down.”

“You’ll bleed out.”

“Then I’ll save time.”

Randy crouched in front of him. “Listen to me, moaning-face. You hold the breach lane from here. Nobody gets behind us from the left. Short strings only. Don’t be a hero. Nobody likes one.”

Jonny’s mouth twitched. “I’ll try and be a better class of bastard.”

Oscar crawled off with the explosives. Randy waited, watching the verandah. The pale-shirted man had company now: another European, broad in the shoulders, headset on, sidearm worn high and clean. Extraction-team lead, probably. He pointed toward the southern track. The man in the pale shirt shook his head, tapped the files on the table, then the radio. Not yet. Finish the paperwork of murder before departure.

Manny checked Jonny again in the dark. Fingers at the neck. Hand on the dressing. Small motions. Ritual and labour together.

Randy leaned close. “When it goes, you move on me.”

Manny did not look up. “When it goes, he may not wake if his pressure drops.”

“That a warning?”

“That’s me charging you interest in advance.”

Randy almost smiled. Didn’t.

Minutes stretched. A guard yawned by the gate and rolled his shoulders. One at the jetty stepped aside to piss into the bushes. Somewhere near the generator a fan belt squealed and recovered.

Then Oscar’s tiny red lamp winked once from the fence line and vanished.

Randy breathed in and raised his rifle.

The left side of the compound opened with a flat, hammering crack.

Not a movie fireball. Something meaner. Fence posts kicked outward. Fuel drums behind the generator leapt and clanged into one another. A blast wave slapped leaves off branches. The generator coughed, shrieked, and died, and darkness dropped over the compound like a blanket thrown from above.

Randy was already moving.

Jonny fired first from the ridge, disciplined and ugly, rounds stitching the jetty lane and taking the pissing guard in the side before he could turn. Randy hit the broken fence at a run, saw one man in silhouette trying to rise with his weapon, and shot him through the chest so close the muzzle flash lit the man’s face from underneath. Oscar came through smoke on his right like he’d climbed out of the blast itself.

“Gap’s open!” Oscar shouted.

Return fire slashed from the verandah and the roofline. Tracers licked through smoke. Manny was up with the civilians, driving them low toward the breach with one arm windmilling. Blaise had the cooler. Elise had Jonny’s spare magazines shoved under her good arm. Tomas and Anja moved bent double.

Randy cut left, putting rounds into the verandah mesh. Men there dived. The broad-shouldered extraction lead came through the screen with his pistol up, calm as a man stepping onto a range. He got one shot off. It punched splinters from the post by Randy’s ear.

Oscar killed him with a burst that folded him over the railing.

“Buy me ten seconds!” Oscar yelled.

“For what?”

“You’ll hear it!”

Randy hated that answer and obeyed it. He drove straight across the yard, using the smoke from the generator as cover. A company gunner in the doorway of the long shed opened up with a short carbine. Randy dropped to one knee and shot under the muzzle rise. The man spun backward into the boats.

On the ridge behind them Jonny’s rifle barked again. Again. Then stopped. Randy risked half a glance and saw Manny and the others through the breach, inside now, where he had wanted them. Good. Keep moving.

The pale-shirted field chief was gone from the verandah.

“Office!” Tomas shouted from somewhere behind Randy. “He kept them in an office!”

A spotlight snapped on from the mast and raked the yard.

Not power from the dead generator. Separate battery. Clever. Nasty.

The beam found Manny with the civilians midway across. Fire ripped toward them from the far corner tower.

Jonny’s rifle woke up from the ridge in one long savage burst, brighter, faster, desperate. The tower gunner jerked back and vanished. The spotlight slewed skyward and held there.

“Scottish enough for you?” Jonny roared, voice cracked raw.

Then the second charge went.

Oscar had put it under the mast stay, and when it blew the tower leaned, hesitated, and came down through its own light in a shower of sparks. The beam cartwheeled over the compound, over the lake, over the trees, and died in the mud with a hiss.

Randy hit the verandah steps and took the office door with his shoulder. It held. He shot the lock, kicked through, and went in under the gun smoke.

Small room. Metal desk. Map boards. Portable air-conditioner dead and ticking. Two filing cases dumped open. Burn barrel in the corner. A laptop half closed. A satellite modem. Three hard cases with tamper seals. And the pale-shirted man on the far side, not running now, holding a compact pistol with both hands and looking at Randy as if he were a delivery that had come to the wrong entrance.

He was older than Randy had guessed. Fifty, maybe. Sun-bitten. Expensive watch. No tie. The sort who wore local mud on polished boots and thought it counted as intimacy with a country.

“You are very expensive to clean up,” the man said.

Randy shot him in the shoulder before he could finish the line.

The pistol flew. The man slammed into the wall and dropped to one knee, one hand clamped over the ruin of his shirt. Blood ran black in the room’s low light.

Oscar burst in behind Randy, checked corners, then the desk. “Found their little cupboard.”

The hard cases were heavier than paper. Drives. Maybe radios. Maybe cash. One had a customs seal from Mombasa torn and retaped. Another carried the oil company’s field logistics stencil under black spray paint that hadn’t fully hidden it.

The wounded man laughed once through his teeth. “You don’t know what any of it means.”

“No,” Randy said. “That’ll be your interview segment.”

Outside, the fight had changed shape. Fewer shots. Closer shots. Someone screaming near the breach. Manny shouted for Tomas by name. The lake answered with an engine turning over.

Oscar looked through the doorway. “Boat crew’s trying to cast off.”

“Stop them.”

“You?”

“I’m busy.”

Oscar went.

Randy crossed the room in two strides, seized the field chief by the front of his shirt and dragged him onto the desk hard enough to spill files and blood together. The man tried to keep his face arranged and almost managed it.

“Names,” Randy said.

“You won’t get out.”

“Probably. Names anyway.”

The man’s eyes slid to the burn barrel. Pages still curled there, edges red. Randy smelled melted plastic under the paper smoke.

“Tomas’s drive,” he said. “Notebook. Where?”

The man smiled with one side of his mouth. “If they mattered, they’d be ash.”

Randy hit him, not theatrical, not wild. A short punch to the wounded shoulder. The man made a small animal sound and all the composure drained out of him for a second.

“Where?”

“Boat locker,” he gasped. “Blue hull. False floor.”

Gunfire hammered the verandah outside. Close enough that plaster dust jumped from the lintel.

“Who gave the order?” Randy said. “Kinshasa. The strip. The school. Who signed it?”

The man licked blood from his lip. “Signed? Nobody signs. That’s why men like you exist.”

Randy heard boots coming hard along the verandah and pivoted in time to shoot the first one through the doorframe. The second man fired from the hip. Glass burst behind Randy. The round hit the filing cabinet and whined. Randy put two into him and heard him fall back over the threshold.

Manny appeared there instead, face striped with soot, rifle up.

“They’re bunching by the jetty. We need to move now.”

Randy dragged the field chief upright and shoved him at Manny. “Can he walk?”

Manny glanced at the blood. “He can be motivated.”

“Do it.”

They moved into a yard gone bad with smoke. One truck burned under the netting. The generator house was on its side of destruction now, a pulsing orange in the rear of the compound. Tomas and Anja were on the verandah floor stuffing files and drives into a canvas sample bag with both hands. Elise covered them from one knee, white-faced, arm hanging useless but rifle steady enough. Blaise stood by the breach with eyes too old for him and the cooler still hugged to his chest.

Oscar was at the boats, half in one of them, firing into the shed. “Got your notebook!” he shouted, and flung a black oilskin ledger onto the jetty boards.

Randy saw the movement a fraction too late.

Not from the boats. From the dark under the verandah where the fallen mast had left a wedge of shadow. A security man, hit earlier maybe, not dead enough, propped on one elbow with a pistol braced over a crate. He wasn’t aiming at Oscar. He wasn’t aiming at Randy.

He was aiming upslope.

At Jonny on the ridge.

Randy fired and missed by an inch.

The pistol cracked once.

Jonny jerked as if somebody had kicked the stool out from under him. His rifle slipped from his hands and clattered down the dirt.

For a second nobody moved. The whole compound seemed to hold its breath around that one small sound.

Then Oscar shot the man under the verandah until the slide locked back.

Manny was already running for the ridge. Randy went with him because there was nothing else to do. Behind them he heard Tomas shouting about a drive, heard Elise swear at him to leave the papers and take the cases, heard the captive field chief laughing again in wet little bursts because men like him always found one more joke.

Jonny lay on his side among crushed lantana and broken twigs, looking annoyed.

That was the first thing. Not pain. Annoyance, as if this final insult had interrupted him.

The round had gone in high, near the collarbone, and come out somewhere Randy didn’t want to look at twice. Blood soaked the webbing and ran under him in a dark fan. Manny dropped to his knees and clamped both hands on the wound, then shifted, searching, pressing, already knowing.

“Stay with me,” Manny said, voice level by force.

Jonny rolled his eyes toward Randy. “Told you,” he whispered. “Better class.”

“Shut up,” Randy said.

“Aye.”

He tried to smile. It made Randy angrier than the blood.

Below them the lake engine caught properly. Another one answered farther out, beyond the jetty, hidden in the dark.

Manny worked. Gauze. Pressure. Fingers slipping. No wasted movement, no theatre. But his face changed by degrees, the way a man’s face changes when hope is no longer part of the job and the hands continue anyway because stopping would be a kind of betrayal.

Jonny’s eyes found the sky through the trees. “Don’t let... them write it,” he said.

“No.”

“Mean that.”

“I do.”

Manny looked up once. That was enough.

Jonny’s breath went out of him in a long, irritated sigh, like a man settling an argument he never wanted in the first place. Then there was only the engine noise from the lake, the crackle of burning fuel, and Manny’s bloody hands still pressing on a body that had left.

Randy took Jonny’s rifle because it was there and because leaving it felt impossible.

Below, Oscar shouted, “Randy! Boats!”

Randy stood. Manny did not move for one second more. Then he closed Jonny’s eyes with his thumb and rose with blood to his wrists.

At the jetty Tomas held up a hard drive the size of a cigarette packet, mud-slick and shaking in his hand. Anja had the oilskin notebook under her shirt. Elise stood over the wounded field chief with his own pistol aimed at his head. Blaise was staring at the lake.

Out beyond the reeds, two running lights were coming in fast across the black water toward the compound.

Their colour was wrong for fishing boats.

And from the radio on the verandah, clear through the hiss and the fire, a woman’s voice said, “Lake team report. Confirm disposal.”

The first boat hit the jetty broadside and hard enough to throw sparks off the cleats.

“Move,” Randy said.

He did not shout it. He did not need to.

Tomas was already off the verandah with the sample bag banging against his thigh. Anja came after him, one hand under her shirt where the oilskin notebook was jammed flat against her ribs. Elise took two steps, nearly folded, caught herself on the post with her good hand, and kept going anyway. Blaise still had the cooler. He looked at the lake, then at Randy, waiting for permission to be afraid.

“Now, son.”

That got him moving.

Oscar kicked the radio off the verandah table and stamped on it once. The woman’s voice died in a spit of static. Manny came down from the ridge with blood up both forearms and Jonny’s spare magazines looped through his fingers.

Randy saw his face and knew not to ask.

The second boat was coming in fast on a shallow angle, outboard whining high, white bow wave in the first thin wash of dawn. Men in dark kit crouched in it, rifles up, not fishing men, not militia peacocks with charms and bandoliers, just clean shapes doing clean work.

On the boards by the boats lay the black oilskin ledger Oscar had thrown clear. Beside it, half under a rope fender, a folded map case. Randy scooped both without breaking stride.

“Elise with me,” Manny said.

“She can walk,” Elise snapped.

“You can bleed while walking. Congratulations.”

Randy pointed at the breach in the fence. “Road line east. Oscar last.”

Oscar looked back once toward the ridge where Jonny lay in the lantana. His mouth did something hard and private. Then he slung the satchel of charges higher on his shoulder and ran.

They made the fence in a knot of shadows and smoke. Behind them a man on the first boat opened fire from the hip, too quick, rounds slapping the mud by the generator ruins. Randy turned and put two into the bow. The shooter vanished. The boat slewed, hit the jetty, rebounded.

They were through the breach when the world behind them lifted.

It was not one of Oscar’s charges. The sound had a rougher bite to it, close earth and metal and a body torn apart all at once. A second later came the yelling.

Randy stopped and looked back.

The blast had gone off on the ridge track above the compound, where the shadows were still thick under the scrub. Dirt hung there like smoke. Something black cartwheeled into a bush. Another man was down on the path clutching what had been his leg.

Manny saw it too. “That miserable old bastard.”

Jonny had mined his own way in.

He had done it quietly, like he did everything that mattered.

The men from the boats checked up at once, splitting their attention between the compound and the ridge path now seeded, for all they knew, with more surprises. One man dropped to a knee and started waving others away from the track. Another shouted for wire cutters that were not there.

Minutes. Maybe less.

But Jonny had bought them.

Randy turned and ran.

They cut east along a stand of low bananas and then into older growth where the ground rose in roots and red stone. The lake stayed off their right shoulder, hidden and then flashing through gaps, brightening from black to gunmetal. The compound noise thinned behind them and changed shape. Less panic now. More order. Men getting their heads back.

Randy opened the map case as he moved. The paper inside was damp at the corners, marked in grease pencil and French block print. Fuel. launch. stores. strip.

There.

An old line inland, little more than a slash through a plantation grid, ending at a rectangle marked only with one word: Moba.

Not the town. Too small. A private mark. A bush strip.

“Got us a runway,” he said.

Oscar was behind him, breathing hard, not winded, just working. “Us, or them?”

“Smugglers, by the look. Better class of criminal than the one we just robbed.”

“Low bar, that.”

Manny hauled Elise over a tangle of fallen coffee limbs. “How far?”

Randy checked the scale against his thumb. “Six klicks if God’s in a generous mood.”

“Then he’s not coming,” Manny said.

They pushed on.

The plantation had died by layers. First the fences had gone. Then the roofs. Then the paths. But rows remained in the land if you knew how to read them: old mango shade trees in straight patient files, coffee bushes gone woody and high as a man’s chest, rusted drums half-buried near a caved shed with the words HUILE MOTEUR barely visible under moss.

Elise stumbled and sat down hard without meaning to. Manny was on her at once, one knee in the leaf mould, fingers under the dressing on her arm.

“Leave it,” she said.

“No.”

“It’s not the arm.”

“What is it then?”

She looked away. “Everything.”

Manny tore open a packet with his teeth. “Excellent diagnosis. Hold still.”

Randy listened. No engines close. No firing. Birds lifting somewhere behind them in short bursts. That was worse than shots. Shots told you where men were. Birds told you where they had just entered.

Tomas came back up the line, sample bag clutched to his chest like a child. “There were hard cases in the office I couldn’t—”

“You got what you got.”

“There may have been payroll ledgers. Names.”

Randy kept walking. “Then carry the names you’ve got.”

Tomas looked as if he wanted to say more, but Anja caught his sleeve and pulled him on.

They found the old plantation track under creeper and went faster for two hundred metres. Then Oscar held up a fist.

Ahead, beyond a break in the brush, sat the remains of a lorry sunk to its axles, bonnet open, cab burnt to a frame. Fresh prints around it. Not many. Three men, maybe four, and recent enough that the clay edges still looked cut rather than softened.

Randy crouched by the nearest one.

Lug sole. Deep heel. Same disciplined weight distribution he had seen all week from men who did not belong to any official story.

Oscar leaned over him. “Forward?”

“Forward.”

“Could be strip security.”

“Could be our funeral party.”

Oscar glanced back at the civilians. “Same destination either way.”

They went around the lorry in a hook through brush so thick it combed twigs through their sleeves. On the far side Randy found what he wanted and hated. A cigarette butt, filter crushed flat in careful fingers, and beside it a ration wrapper in English from a brand no local gunman bought by accident.

Manny came through with Elise. “Talk to me.”

“They’re ahead.”

“Close?”

“Close enough to leave litter.”

“Lovely.”

Randy looked at Blaise. “Still with us?”

The boy nodded once.

“What’s in the cooler?”

Blaise glanced down. “Ampoules. Some vials. Two sandwiches from yesterday that could kill a man.”

“Good. Keep the biological weapons secure.”

The boy gave the faintest snort. It was enough.

They crossed a shallow drainage cut and climbed into a belt of teak. Here the old strip line showed clearer. Trees had been felled long ago and not fully reclaimed the earth. The ground flattened. Grass changed. Randy smelled old fuel before he saw anything built by hand.

Then Oscar touched his shoulder and pointed.

Through the trunks ahead stood a windsock pole with no sock on it, just the metal ring squeaking in the breeze. Beyond that, a long raw opening in the trees. Grass runway. Burnt patches at one end. A tin shack crouched to the left under blue tarp, and beside it an aircraft nose with its cowling off.

“Christ,” Manny said. “There is actually an aeroplane.”

“Don’t trust miracles,” Randy said.

He watched for movement. Found it at the shack. One man with a shotgun. Another coming round the aircraft tail with a jerrycan.

Not security men. Too loose in the shoulders. Too interested in each other. Smugglers or bush freight crew, which in practice meant the same thing.

The aircraft was a battered Caravan, white once, now dirt-striped and patched with primer. One tyre looked soft. Cargo door open. Good enough.

Randy handed the map case to Oscar. “You speak nice. Go make friends.”

Oscar smoothed his expression the way other men checked a magazine. “And if they’re not sociable?”

“Then I’ll introduce myself from behind you.”

Oscar went out onto the strip with his hands visible and his accent polished up a shade. The man with the shotgun lifted it, uncertain rather than eager. The one with the jerrycan squinted, then looked past Oscar at the armed line coming through the trees and realised his morning had worsened.

Randy could not hear the first exchange. He could read the shape of it, though. Oscar all calm reason. Crewman defensive, offended, calculating. Shotgun man deciding who needed shooting least.

Then the jerrycan man saw the blood on Manny’s sleeves. He saw Elise. He saw the sample bag and the cooler and the way Randy stood half-hidden in the tree line with a rifle pointed nowhere obvious. His face changed. There was money in this now. Urgent money.

He shouted toward the shack. A third man came out buttoning his shirt, broad belly, pilot sunglasses, no hurry until he saw the group. Then plenty of hurry.

Oscar turned and lifted two fingers.

Come ahead.

Randy brought them out.

The pilot smelled of stale sweat, avgas, and clove cigarettes. His French had that flattened border-country chew to it. Oscar answered him in the same language, then switched to English for Randy.

“He says the strip belongs to no one, which means his cousin and whichever armed men are nearest. He says the aircraft can fly if not overloaded. He says there will be a price.”

“Tell him he can name his children after me if he leaves in three minutes.”

Oscar relayed. The pilot barked a laugh that showed a gold canine. He held up five fingers.

“Five thousand dollars,” Oscar said.

Randy shook his head. “Tell him three now, three if we live.”

The pilot listened, spat, considered the tree line behind them as if he too could hear the pursuit beginning to knit itself together, and dropped his hand to four.

Randy said, “Done.”

The pilot grinned. “Cash first.”

Tomas looked scandalised. Randy felt around inside his vest, pulled out the oil-company emergency roll he had not yet spent, and peeled notes off into the man’s palm.

“Fuel,” Randy said. “Wheels. Start it.”

The strip erupted into motion.

Shotgun man dragged chocks. Jerrycan man slammed the cowling shut and latched it with a length of wire. The pilot climbed into the left seat and began his checks with brutal speed, no wasted ritual. Oscar and Manny shoved the civilians toward the cargo door.

Then the first burst of fire came from the trees north of the burnt lorry.

Rounds snapped through leaves and punched a fist-sized hole in the tin shack. Shotgun man vanished under the aircraft. The pilot ducked, swore, and kept working.

“There they are,” Manny said, almost conversationally.

Randy dropped beside the Caravan’s nose wheel and fired two fast shots into the green flare of muzzle flashes. Oscar was already moving left, low and neat, toward a stack of oil drums by the edge of the strip.

“Get them aboard!” Randy shouted.

Elise tried to climb and failed. Manny boosted her one-handed, then shoved Blaise up after her. Tomas threw the sample bag into the hold as if he feared he might lose courage if he held it another second. Anja turned back.

“The notebook stays with me.”

“Lovely speech,” Randy said. “Inside.”

She went.

The engine coughed, caught, died.

The pilot pounded the panel with the flat of his hand and hit the starter again.

Oscar reached the oil drums and looked back at Randy. He held up a detonator in one hand and traced a small circle in the air with the other.

Improvised. Fast.

Randy nodded.

Another burst tore into the strip edge. Men were moving out there now, not blind firing, using the trees, trying to widen the angle and pin the aircraft. One of them called in English, sharp and professional.

“Aircraft crew! Step away! This is not your concern!”

The pilot shouted back in French that everything on the strip was exactly his concern, especially if it paid cash.

“Can’t fault the man’s principles,” Randy muttered.

Manny took a knee by the cargo door and fired controlled pairs into the tree line, then ducked back to check Elise’s face, then fired again. Medic and rear guard. Just another morning’s work.

The engine caught properly this time. The prop blurred. Avgas stink rolled over them.

“Two minutes!” the pilot yelled.

“You’ve got thirty seconds,” Randy yelled back.

A shape broke from the trees on the left, trying the old hard sprint that only works if the men you’re charging are worse than you. He had a headset around his neck and a compact rifle tight into his shoulder. Randy hit him once in the chest. He folded mid-stride and skidded on the grass.

From the right flank came a deeper crack. Manny jerked back against the door frame.

Randy was on him at once. “Hit?”

Manny looked down, annoyed. A crease along the outside of his plate carrier, webbing cut, flesh scored red under the arm.

“Only slightly murdered.”

“Can you shoot?”

Manny raised the rifle and fired three rounds by way of answer.

Out by the drums Oscar pressed the clacker.

Nothing happened.

“Ah,” Oscar said, as if the device had merely disappointed him socially.

He yanked at something on the ground, stood, and ran three steps toward the strip edge before hurling a grenade into the shallow ditch where the right-flank shooter had settled.

The blast punched mud and leaves into the air. Oscar hit the dirt behind the drums as return fire raked the metal.

Randy heard another sound under it all then. Thin at first. Growing.

Engine. Not aircraft. Truck.

“They’re bringing wheels,” he said.

The pilot leaned out his window. “I go now or I never go.”

Randy looked at the hold. Civilians aboard. Evidence aboard. Manny bleeding, Oscar still outside, himself not yet in.

He made the only cut left to make.

“Take them.”

Anja’s face appeared at the cargo door. “No.”

“Tomas can explain. You can testify. That’s the job now.”

“We don’t leave—”

“You absolutely do.”

Elise was behind her, white as paper, eyes bright with pain and fury. “What about you?”

Randy glanced at Oscar. Oscar glanced back. No discussion needed.

Manny answered for all three of them. “We’ll steal another miracle.”

Blaise crawled to the doorway, cooler wedged between his knees. “Randy—”

“Listen to me.” Randy put a hand on the door frame, close enough that the boy had to hold his gaze. “Whatever they call this later, whatever version turns up with the corners cut off, you remember their names. All of them. You understand?”

Blaise nodded, hard.

“Good lad. Sit down.”

The truck burst out of the trees at the north end of the strip, bouncing wild, grille wired with mesh, two men standing in the bed.

Oscar rose from behind the drums and fired into the windshield. One of the bed men went over the side. The other dropped to a knee and sprayed.

Randy slapped the fuselage. “Go!”

The pilot shoved the throttle. The Caravan lurched forward, tail wagging. Manny hauled himself up onto the step, fired one last burst over Randy’s shoulder, then jumped clear as the aircraft gathered speed.

The truck veered toward the rolling plane.

Oscar hit the deck and pressed the clacker again.

This time the drums went.

Not all of them. One. Enough.

A bloom of orange punched sideways across the strip edge and took the truck in the front quarter. It did not explode cleanly. It slewed, tyre blown, hit a rut, and rolled once in a slow, ugly heave that shed men and doors and loose gear across the grass.

The Caravan bounced through its own dust, nose light now, prop clawing. For a second Randy thought it was too heavy, too late, too much of everything.

Then it lifted.

Not pretty. Not by much. But it lifted.

He watched it clear the tree line with metres to spare, one wing dropping, then catching. Sun struck the belly and flashed off it once. Then it was over the lake, climbing east.

Silence did not follow. Gunfire did.

Randy dragged Manny behind the shack as rounds whipped through the space where they had been standing. Oscar came in from the drums with soot on his face and a nick across his cheek, breathing hard and smiling the wrong kind of smile.

“One away,” he said.

“Brilliant,” Randy said. “Fancy being the second.”

The pilot’s two ground crew were gone. Sensible men. Randy looked around the shack and found what the smugglers had hidden in the only place smugglers ever hid anything: under everything else. Spare fuel. Two crates of mixed tinned food. A toolbox. A rust-filmed motorcycle with no front brake and tyres like old fruit.

Oscar saw it. “Absolutely not.”

Randy kicked the starter. The engine coughed into life with a sound like cutlery in a tin sink.

“Absolutely yes.”

They did not all fit. So they made it fit. Manny in the middle because of the shoulder graze and because he swore more if given the rear position. Oscar behind, one arm through the cargo webbing they had ripped from the shack, rifle across his lap. Randy driving.

They hit the old service line south as bullets smacked the shack wall behind them.

The track was a disgrace. Ruts deep as graves. Washed sections bridged with poles silvered by age. Twice Randy thought the front wheel would simply part company with the rest of the machine and leave them to discuss the matter on foot. But the line held and the strip fell away behind them.

No one spoke for the first kilometre because the engine noise took all the room. After that Manny leaned close enough to be heard.

“You sent them with the evidence.”

“Aye.”

“You think they’ll get through?”

“No.”

“Comforting.”

Oscar had one hand pressed to the back of Manny’s carrier where the round had creased flesh. “He’s losing less than he complains about.”

“That’s because I’ve got reserves, son.”

Randy kept his eyes on the track. The trees broke once and gave him a long look west over the lake. Tiny against the light, the Caravan was a moving speck. Too far to help. Too far to hurt.

He thought of Jonny on the ridge, face turned to the sky as if unimpressed by the whole arrangement.

No report. No parade. Just a patch of broken lantana above a lake no one at home could point to on a map.

They rode until the fuel gauge stopped pretending to know anything. Then they found a charcoal road, bribed a trader for more petrol from a blue plastic drum, and rode on. At noon they abandoned the motorcycle in a cassava field and bought places in the back of a fish truck under tarpaulin that stank of scales and diesel. By nightfall they were in a mission clinic with a zinc roof and one working fan, Manny stitched by a nun who had seen worse and charged nothing, Oscar asleep sitting up for eleven minutes and then awake again, Randy on the veranda with the oilskin ledger and a torch.

The notebook was better than the drives in one important way. Paper did not care who owned the software.

Dates. Transfers. Relocation tallies that did not match burial counts. Fuel allocations for convoys that officially never ran. Security invoices folded into community outreach budgets. Initials beside names. Payments to local commanders. Payments to district officers. One page headed only with a thick black line and beneath it three words in French.

Gestion des victimes.

Victim management.

He turned the page.

There were names under that too.

Pascal. The NGO team. Local witnesses. Boatmen. Priests. Drivers.

And, near the bottom in a hurried hand added later, three surnames he knew better than his own.

Keating. Keating. Keating.

Not one man then. A family. Or a habit. Or a machine that kept one useful name on the paperwork while the hands changed behind it.

At dawn a radio in the clinic office coughed up the first harmless version.

Aid workers recovered after militia violence near disputed concession.

No company named. No villages named. No dead named. The segment lasted forty-one seconds between football and a ministerial reshuffle. By the second bulletin the wording had improved itself further. Confusion. Criminal opportunism. Regional instability. Allegations unverified.

Randy listened from the doorway while a nurse boiled instruments in a dented pot.

Oscar came up beside him tying a fresh bandage on his cheek. “We have become weather.”

Manny, pale and stitched, lowered himself onto the bench with a wince. “Seen the television version yet?”

“There’s better lies on radio.”

“Wait.”

They did.

Two days later, in a concrete guesthouse outside Kisangani with a satellite dish cable-tied to a drainpipe, they saw the polished one.

A woman in a blue jacket spoke to camera in London or Brussels or some other city with good dry cleaning. Behind her, file footage of aid trucks on a road nowhere near where any of them had bled.

An unnamed energy company expressed relief at the safe recovery of three international staff and one local assistant following a criminal kidnapping by armed elements. Questions concerning misconduct had been referred to an internal review. Regional sources cautioned against misinformation spread by hostile interests. One contractor was believed dead. Others unaccounted for.

One contractor.

Jonny reduced to a clerical fog.

Tomas switched the set off so hard the plastic cracked.

“They already had the statement written,” Anja said.

Elise sat on the bed with her arm in a sling, jaw locked. “Of course they did.”

Blaise was by the window. He had not said much since the strip. Now he asked, “Will they say Pascal stole from them too?”

Nobody answered.

Later that afternoon two embassy men came in clean shirts and tired expressions and took Tomas and Anja downstairs with their statements and one copy of the drives. They did not ask for the notebook. Randy had not told them about the notebook.

When Tomas came back up he looked older by years.

“What happened?”

“They want chain of custody. Originals. Authentication. Context.” He gave a thin laugh. “They want patience.”

“And what do you want?”

“A room with no telephones.”

Anja came in after him carrying a stamped envelope. “They say we should not discuss names until families are notified.”

“Whose families?” Randy asked.

She looked at him for a long second. “Exactly.”

That night Oscar made three duplicate sets from the drives that still read. One for Tomas. One for a church legal office in another country. One sealed in plastic and taped under the sink cistern in their room because all proper archives begin somewhere shabby. Manny wrote the dead on the inside cover of a medical ledger he had bought from the guesthouse clerk.

Not just Jonny. Pascal. Pieter. Drivers. A catechist from a mission by the river. Two villagers Tomas had identified from photographs in the compound office. Names with mud still on them.

“What’s that for?” Randy asked.

Manny did not look up. “Because paper burns.”

Three days later the company issued a longer statement. It praised regional partners. It condemned lawlessness. It denied systematic wrongdoing while welcoming dialogue. It mentioned no graves. It called the documents incomplete and possibly fabricated. One phrase appeared twice.

Administrative misunderstanding.

Tomas read it aloud in the room and then had to stop. Elise took the page off him and finished it through clenched teeth.

Oscar stood by the sink, folding a strip of map into smaller and smaller squares. “There’s your education. Slaughter enough people in broad daylight and a solicitor will call it filing error.”

Randy was at the window. Outside, boys were kicking a plastic bottle in the dust. A truck backfired in the street. Somewhere someone was frying plantain in old oil. Life went on with the stubborn vulgarity it always had.

He thought of Martin Keating in his cold room in Kinshasa, brass plate on the door, good china cups, no company name. He thought of the green light on the sat phone, the voice asking for package count, the woman on the radio asking for disposal like she was checking stock.

Manny closed the ledger. “So what now?”

Randy turned from the window.

On the table lay the notebook, the copied drives, the folded statement, and Jonny’s magazines, still muddy from the ridge.

Outside, somewhere below in the guesthouse courtyard, a vehicle door shut. Then another. Men’s shoes on the stairs, not hurried, not heavy. Men who expected to be admitted.

Oscar had already picked up his rifle.

Randy put his hand on the notebook.

“Now,” he said, “we find out who still wants the story dead.”