The Democratic Republic of Congo
It was a rough road that the lone Toyota four-wheel-drive was trying to negotiate, and the going was agonisingly slow. One moment the worn tyres would be slithering and fighting for grip in yet another axle-deep rut of loose reddish earth, the next the creaking, grinding suspension would bump so hard over the rubble and rocks strewn everywhere that the vehicle’s three occupants were bounced out of their seats with a crash that set their teeth on edge.
At this rate, it was going to be several more hours before they reached the remote strip where the light chartered plane was due to pick up the two Americans and fly them and their precious cargo to Kinshasa. Once they got to the airport, the pair intended to waste no time before jumping on the first jet heading back home and getting the hell out of here. But safety and escape still seemed a long way beyond their reach. They were still very much in the danger zone.
The battered, much-repaired old Toyota was one of the few possessions of a local man named Joseph Maheshe who now and then hired himself out as a driver and guide to tourists. Not that many tourists came here anymore, not even the thrill-seeking adventurous ones. It was a precarious place and an even more precarious trade for Joseph, but the only one he knew. He’d been a taxi driver in Kigali, back over the border in neighbouring Rwanda, when the troubles there twenty years earlier had forced him and his wife, both of them of Tutsi ethnicity, to flee their home never to return. Joseph had seen a lot in his time, and knew the dangers of this area as well as anyone. He wasn’t overjoyed that the two Americans had talked him into coming out here. He was liking the grinding sounds coming from his truck’s suspension even less.
While Joseph worried about what the terrible road surface was doing to his vehicle, his two backseat passengers had their own concerns to occupy their minds. They were a man and a woman, both dishevelled and travel-stained, both shining with perspiration from the baking heat inside the car, and both in a state of great excitement.
The man’s name was Craig Munro, and he was a middlingly successful freelance investigative reporter based 7,000 miles from here in Chicago. In his late forties, he was twice the age of his female companion. They weren’t any kind of an item; their relationship was, always had been and would remain professional, even though the lack of privacy when camping out rough for days and nights on end in this wilderness sometimes forced a degree more intimacy on them than either was comfortable with.
The woman’s name was Rae Lee, and she had worked for Munro as an assistant and photographer for the last eighteen months. Rae was twenty-four, second generation Taiwanese-American, and she’d been top of her law class at Chicago University for a year before switching tracks and studying photography at the city’s prestigious Art Institute. She had taken the job with Munro more for the experience, and for ideological reasons, than for the money – money being something that wasn’t always in good supply around her employer’s shabby offices in downtown Chicago. The camera equipment inside the metal cases that jostled about in the back of the Toyota was all hers. But as expensive as it was, its true value at this moment lay in the large number of digital images Rae’s long lens had captured last night and early this morning from their concealed stakeout.
It was an investigative journalist’s dream; everything they could have wished to find. More than they’d dared even hope for, which was the reason for their excitement. It was also the reason for their deep anxiety to get away and home as fast as possible. The kind of information and evidence they’d travelled to the Democratic Republic of Congo to acquire was precisely the kind that could get you killed. And the Congo was a very easy place in which to disappear without a trace, never to be seen again.
The hammering and lurching of the 4x4’s suspension made it impossible to have any kind of conversation, but neither Munro nor Rae Lee needed to speak their thoughts out loud. They were both thinking the same thing: when they got back to the States, their work would begin in earnest. The physical danger would be behind them, but the real grind would await them, and Munro’s endless deskbound hours of writing the sensational article would be just part of it. There would be scores of calls to make, dozens more contacts to chase, many facts to verify before they could go live with this thing. It was serious business. While what they’d found would cause a substantial stir in certain quarters, not everyone would be supportive. Some very wealthy and powerful people would use every ounce of their influence to block the publication of this information in every way possible. But what they had was pure gold, and they knew it. They were going to be able to blow the lid off this whole dirty affair and open a lot of eyes to what was really happening out here.
‘How much further?’ Munro yelled, leaning forwards in the back and shouting close to Joseph’s ear to be heard.
‘It is a very bad road,’ the driver replied, as if this were news to them. He was a French speaker like many Rwandans past a certain age, and spoke English with a heavy accent. ‘Two hours, maybe three.’ Which put them still a long way from anywhere.
‘This is hopeless,’ Munro complained, flopping back in his seat.
Rae’s long hair, normally jet-black, looked red from all the dust. She flicked it away from her face and twisted round to throw an anxious glance over her shoulder at the camera cases behind her. The gear was getting a hell of a jolting back there, though it was well protected inside thick foam. ‘We’ll be okay,’ she said to Munro, as much to reassure herself as him. ‘Everything’s fine.’
But as the Toyota bumped its way around the next corner a few moments later, they knew that everything wasn’t fine at all.
Rae muttered, ‘Oh, shit.’
Munro clamped his jaw tight and said nothing.
The two pickup trucks that blocked the road up ahead were the kind that were called ‘technicals’. Rae had no idea where that name had come from, but she recognised them instantly. The flatbed of each truck was equipped with a heavy machine gun on a swivel mount, drooping with ammunition belts that coiled up on the floor like snakes.
The machine guns were pointed up the road straight at the oncoming Toyota. A soldier stood behind each weapon, ready to fire. Several more soldiers stood in the road, all sporting the curved-magazine Kalashnikov assault rifles that Rae had quickly learned were a ubiquitous sight just about everywhere in the Congo, across a land mass bigger than all of Europe.
‘Could be government troops, maybe,’ Munro said nervously as the Toyota lurched towards the waiting roadblock. In a badly decayed and impoverished state where even regular army could closely resemble the most thrown-together rebel force, sometimes it was hard to tell.
‘Maybe,’ Joseph Maheshe said. He looked uncertain.
There was no driving around them, and certainly no way to double back. Joseph stopped the Toyota as the soldiers marched up and surrounded them, aiming their rifles at the windows. The unit commander was a skinny kid of no more than nineteen. He was draped in cartridge belts like an urban gangsta wraps himself in gold chains and had a semiauto pistol dangling against his ribs in a shoulder holster. A marijuana reefer the size of a small banana dangled from his mouth. His eyes were glassy and his finger was hooked around the trigger of his AK-47.
‘Let me handle this,’ Munro said, throwing open his door.
‘Be very careful, mister,’ Joseph Maheshe cautioned him. Anxiety was in his eyes.
As Munro stepped from the car, two soldiers grabbed his arms and roughly hauled him away from the vehicle. Rae swallowed and emerged from the other passenger door, her heart thudding so hard she could hardly walk. She’d heard the stories. There were a lot of them, and they generally ended the same way.
The soldiers on the trucks and on the ground all spent a second or two eyeing the Oriental woman’s skimpy top, the honey flesh of her bare