Chapter 7

 

Men appear outside, half a dozen, their silhouettes warped by the shimmering curtain of the waterfall. When they enter Veronica recognizes them as their jungle abductors. Two of them hold rifles; the others have pangas dangling from their belt. They are led by Patrice.

The one-eyed man produces a key, undoes their chains, withdraws them from the anchor rock, then reattaches them to the big padlock so the captives remain yoked together by their ankles. The others go among them, grabbing their arms and pulling them to their feet without niceties. It all happens very quickly. Veronica allows herself to be pulled along after Patrice, through the waterfall, out of the cave. The sudden sunlight is blinding.

They are led down along a muddy trail that winds through ragged plots of farmland worked by women, children, and a few old men, all barefoot and dressed in rags. Some are half-crippled by injury; others have misshapen goiters erupting from their necks. Some wield hoes with big metal blades that look rusting shovel heads. The rest use sticks and bare hands. All watch amazed as the white captives are led through their fields like cattle being taken to slaughter. The occasional buildings are mud huts with misshapen walls and unevenly thatched roofs. Only a few scrawny goats and chickens are visible.

"Vous voyez," Patrice says. He sounds angry. "You see."

Veronica is too caught up in her own misery to sympathize with that of these strangers. Her strength has ended, she is only able to walk because Derek is holding her up. They stagger to the bottom of the hill, to a broad, flat bean patch where Gabriel and the dishdash man stand as if waiting for a bus. The dishdash man holds a white telephone as big as a brick; it looks like a cell phone from the 1980s. The word Thuraya is embossed on its plastic shell.

"You see," Gabriel says to them, indicating the fields around them, and their wretched inhabitants. His voice is serious, as if he is imparting great wisdom. "This is my home. This is where I grew. Once there was a school and a church. Now they are ashes. The jungle has grown over the roads that once led here. We cannot grow enough to feed ourselves. We have no money for the market. We are too far from the roads to trade, we have no gold or gasoline to smuggle. We would leave our ancestors' land, but there is nowhere to go. Even the pygmies live better than us. We must have money. We must be strong. We have no choice. It is strength or death. You understand?" He sounds almost guilty.

The captives stare at him dully. He nods shortly, as if he has explained everything, and looks up to the western sky. Patrice produces lengths of mudstained yellow rope and begins to go among the captives, binding their arms behind them as he did in the jungle. Veronica cries out as the rope tightens on her scabbed wrists, but she doesn't resist. There doesn't seem to be any point. Her fate seems preordained.

Once they are roped together again, into two groups of four, their ankle chains are removed and piled beside Gabriel. The man in the dishdash walks among the captives, examining them carefully, as if looking for flaws. Veronica's shoulders and wrists are hurting again, she wishes their chains had not been replaced by ropes.

She hears a faint and familiar noise, the distant buzz of an approaching helicopter. Hope soars in her heart as she thinks of the UN helicopter they saw. But the buzzing aircraft that crests the hill, moving straight towards them like some gigantic June bug, is painted black, not UN white.

As the helicopter nears its noise becomes incredible, deafening. Its rotors are like smeared halos. Crops ripple as it passes low above the fields, and the wind it generates is gale-force, Veronica has to lean forward to stay upright as the helicopter stoops and lands in the bean field before them. The rotor wash crushes the nearby plants flat.

A watchful part of her mind notes the aircraft's streaked and peeling paint, the fading Cyrillic letters stencilled on its nose. The pilot is a white man, unrecognizable behind a helmet and bulky radio headset. The passenger compartment is occupied by three rusting metal benches. A man in a dishdash, holding one of the rifles with wooden handles and curved ammunition clips - a Kalashnikov, according to Derek - sits alone in the back row.

The engine noise abates to a dull roar. The man with the Thuraya phone shakes hands formally with Gabriel. Then he produces a pistol from his billowing robe. The captives are pushed up onto the helicopter, forced to sit on the two front metal benches. The two dishdash men sit behind them. Veronica is between Jacob and Derek in the foremost bench. She feels dizzy, and not just from sickness, or the powerful smells of rust and gasoline. This all feels so unreal.

The engine roar intensifies, swells into a pounding howl that seems to drown out all possible thought. Veronica tries to brace her legs against the steel wall in front of her. Her muscles have no strength in them. Then the aircraft lurches like an earthquake, they rise with sickening speed, and Veronica barely manages to lean over before vomiting onto the rusting floor.

She feels a little better when she sits up straight again. The aircraft pulses with the beat of its engine, rattling her bones inside her body, provoking all her wounds and blisters anew, and the wind blowing through the helicopter's open sides and broken windows is freezing, but at least her head has cleared somewhat. Beneath them the Congo is a rolling green carpet. They are flying northwest, low to the ground, following the contours of the hills and valleys. When they crest the hills, she can see the snowcapped Ruwenzori mountains to their right, their peaks mostly hidden by a dense curtain of crowds; and further south, behind and to the right, the jagged Virunga volcanoes. Under other circumstances the panoramic view would be exhilirating.

They fly over tiny communities, clusters of mud huts hidden in the valleys of these rolling hills, connected by a network of red dirt trails like capillaries. Once they cross a larger road, big enough for two-way traffic, but only a few burnt-out wrecks are visible. Then for some time there is nothing, an endless, undifferentiable ocean of green hills carved by winding, silvery rivers. Only the occasional tin roof winking in the sunlight, or the sight of a canoe in a river, indicates that the land beneath them is at all inhabited. Veronica remembers reading that three million people have died in the lands below them over the last ten years, victims of civil war and anarchy. It is a terrifying thought.

The helicopter follows the path of a river that cuts its way through steep and rocky gorges, a gouged scar in the dense green jungle. They fly over a series of whitewater rapids and waterfalls until they reach a steep river gorge with a floor that looks like an anthill, a broad swathe of red populated by hundreds of little black dots. There is nothing green left in this sheer-walled valley, it is little more than a swampy, fissured field of red mud and water-filled craters. Beyond this ravine the whitewater resumes.

As they grow closer the dots resolve into men. Few look up towards the helicopter. Most are busy working in the riverbed. Others shoulder enormous burdens and climb laboriously up the side of the gorge, in a single-file line that reminds Veronica even more of ants, ascending dizzying switchbacks to the wide, narrow ribbon of green on the overlooking cliff. An airstrip, paralleling the edge of the ravine.

The timbre of the engine changes, and the helicopter begins to descend to the airstrip. A battered wooden building with a tin roof perches between the grass runway and the nearly sheer rock face. There is a satellite dish beside it. Some kind of settlement has grown on the other side of the airstrip, a collection of tentlike shelters, most of them little more than primitive tepees, canvas or plastic sheets draped over cut branches. Tendrils of smoke rise from open fires.

There are people moving amid the settlement. None pay much attention to the incoming helicopter. The landing is much smoother than the takeoff until the final shuddering transition from airborne to earthborne. After the engine shuts off Veronica's ears keep ringing with its noise. Momentum keeps the rotors spinning.

The pilot detaches his headset, revealing a ragged beard and shoulder-length dark hair. He disembarks and walks to the sagging, weatherbeaten wooden building. The gunmen sitting in back stay where they are, waiting for something. Boys begin to stream onto the runway, hooting and shouting with mocking triumph, boys armed with guns or pangas or both. Most are in their teens, but some look no older than twelve. Most are shirtless. Their eyes are wide and bloodshot. Dozens of them throng around the helicopter, waving their weapons in the air, pretending to shoot at their new captives, poking with gun barrels at those sitting on the sides of the benches.

Veronica looks beyond their homicidal welcoming committee, hoping for some reprieve. She sees a huge machine gun fed by long chains of bullets, and two rocket launchers, gleaming bulbous cones sprouting obscenely from tarnished tubes of dark metal, propped up against a big wooden crate. The ground is strewn with yellow plastic jerrycans, metal pots, empty bottles, coils of wire, charred bits of wood, unidentifiable debris. A few lean, feral-looking dogs prowl the open places. A scattering of older men sit and stand amid the shelters, dreadlocked men in their twenties and thirties, lean and strong, wearing rubber boots, red bandannas, necklaces of bones and bullets, pangas and rifles. They observe the airstrip with cold, flat expressions that make Veronica shiver. It is like staring into a nest of rattlesnakes. The exuberant frat-boys-gone-psychotic aggression of the teenagers is almost charming compared to the silent, predatory menace beyond.

Beside her, Derek says, his voice raw, "I'm sorry. I don't think we're going to get out of this."