Page 17 of Soul on Fire
“Roger, Commander.” Elliot gave the signal to his team. They were up and ready, waiting since the five minute mark. Now, they pulled their night vision goggles down from their foreheads, tightened their straps, and checked their concealed holsters and their pistols. Checked their spare magazines tucked into pockets and jackets. Dressed in civilian clothes with their watch caps pulled low and with canvas jackets and scarfs around their necks, they looked like Euro trash, aid workers, and journalists. Elliot and Jumper carried backpacks. Doc Smalls had his medkit hidden in his ratty duffel, the straps over his shoulders like it was a backpack. He said it looked cool, the way all the backpackers did it.
“Landing configuration,” the pilot said over the headset, his voice tinny in Elliot’s ears. Above, thewhump whumpof the rotors beat the air, a drum against the dark African night, the black so thick and dense it seemed hard, like something he could reach out and touch. On the flight, he’d made out campfires and villages, points of light they swept above at just forty feet, beneath the radar ceiling out of Dar es Salaam. In the distance, Kigali, the Rwandan capital, gleamed, and closer to the L-Z, Gisenyi was a bright spot in the darkness. But across the border, where there should have been life in Goma and in the Congo, there was nothing but darkness.
“Checklist complete,” the crew chief called. He leaned out, his NVGs like antennae sticking from his eyeballs. “Twenty feet… ten. L-Z is clear, Commander. Upward slant on your left. Rotate ninety degrees. Looks good on your right.”
The gear thumped, three points of contact absorbing twenty-two tons of steel on bare earth. The wheels sunk, slipping in the loose red dirt. “We’re down. Good luck, L-T,” the pilot said through the headset.
“Thanks.” Elliot passed the headset to the crew chief and came back into the world of noise, the roar of the rotors chewing the night, the whine of the engine desperate to take off again. His guys were already out, fanning around the helo and taking cover in the sugarcane, setting up a perimeter and watching the darkness. He followed, sweeping the cargo hold one last time, checking for gear left behind before clapping the crew chief’s hand and sprinting around the tail of the helo. He headed starboard to the grass and the sugarcane, low and fast. He came down to one knee, pistol up, sweeping his sector of midnight.
Ten seconds, that was all it took. The helo rumbled, blades whirring faster and turning high-pitched as they lifted the helo from the earth. Dirt whipped from the dry field, slicing his skin. He took it, kept staring into the night, not blinking as the Seahawk swept over their heads and sprinted into the darkness back to theKearsarge.
Silence. There was a ring in his ears from the helo, but it faded like a bell shivering out, leaving nothing behind.
They stayed still, waiting. Letting the night seep into them and them into the night. Smoke filled their noses, wood and burning rubber. Cooking fires and more, something from over the border. The dirt was springy, slightly damp. Dew in the night, and the scent of rain over the mountains. A chill nipped at their exposed skin.
Darkness surrounded them, enveloped them, cocooned them. Elliot’s NVGs bathed the world in green and shadow, the faintest starlight creating a world of smudged hills and shifting shadows, wind moving over grass, outlines of mountains in the distance that faded to smoke as a cloud passed before a single star. On three sides, massive mounds of ink-black thrust to the sky, capped with moonlight. Volcanoes.
They’d landed on a line between Karisimbi and Nyiragongo, with the Mikeno volcano in the distance. He took it all in, the whine of the NVGs whisper-soft in his ear, and then flicked to infrared mode.
From the shadowed swamps of NVGs to the LSD insanity that was infrared. The world became a rainbow, a shooting star, a Van Gogh of neon pulsing with light.
The jungle was hot. Overhead, shapes moved in the black sky, triangle wedges in red and yellow. Bats, he figured out, a moment later. The earth glowed a warm yellow-green, the grasses cooler, the rocks still hot from the sun. Far away, a village slept in the dark, the dying campfire purple-red, the people sleeping inside their huts red smudges on an orange ground. He flicked infrared off. “Clear,” he whispered, his throat mic picking up the movements of his vocal cords. His team echoed back. All clear.
He checked his digital display, the headings and GPS coordinates, figuring their direction. They’d head southeast and cross the border at the edge of the forest. He took point, gliding through the darkness past each of his team. They rose around him, silently coming up out of the earth as if they were born from darkness.
Four hours until BMNT—beginning of morning nautical twilight. They had a little over three klicks to the border and another fourteen klicks after that to Goma.
Night sounds slid between the team members, bat wings flapping, shifting wind in the grasses and the thick, creaking branches of the forest. Far off, sounds like screams, but not human ones, filtered from the mist. Monkeys, high above in the canopy. Wet earth squished beneath their boots and the night’s cooler humidity clung to their skin. The wind rose and fell, dusted their faces with grit.
They moved silently, spread in a wedge.
The ground was uneven, volcanic soil cratered and pocked with hills and ravines and brush-tangled slopes that bled into black in their NVGs. They swept their pistols slowly left and right in sync with their gazes. Nothing and no one out in the wild.
At the border, Hood and Cole, who’d replaced Schafer and Ras, dropped and unpacked the wire cutters, snipping through the bottom of the fence until there was enough room for them to shimmy under. Then they put it back, taking a moment to melt the links back in place with the MAP gas blowtorch, a few seconds spent per link.
“Border crossed at 0230,” Elliot called. “Fourteen klicks to target.”
* * *
An hour before BMNT,they arrived at the outskirts of Goma. Darkness shrouded the city, electricity nonexistent, the only light coming from fires lit in barrels on the street and behind houses, and the bouncing headlights of motorbikes weaving through the narrow, broken streets. The smell hit them like a punch, a million people living in cramped conditions in the oppressive heat, with piles of garbage and a total lack of sanitation services. It was a dead-animal-left-to-rot smell mixed with woodsmoke and diesel.
The CIA station was buried in the warren of the city, past shops and markets and strands of motorbikes and barrels burning on the corners of dirt-packed streets. They’d put away their weapons and had started slouching, had shoved their hands in their pockets. Cole smoked, pulling out a pack of Bringis from Sudan. Locals glanced once at them and passed them over.
There was an urgency in the air, a palpable tension that hung in the back of Elliot’s throat. Locals were making their way out of town, even in the pre-dawn darkness, and heading south. Chukudus piled high with belongings trudged in packs, and motorbikes snaked between groups of women and children, all trying to get away.
The deeper into the city they got, the more groups of armed men they saw. No uniforms. These weren’t the Congolese army. One man in an ancient tank and torn skinny pants bummed a cigarette from Cole, fist bumping him while holding his duct-taped AK-47.
Twists and turns, Elliot checking the GPS as discretely as he could, navigating them in the slowly-growing light. The sky turned gray, going from dark to smudged ink to a hint of cobalt ringing the city before being swallowed by smoke rising from the thousands of fires. Beneath their feet, broken glass, refuse, and crunchy used condoms ringed the roads and piled in the gutters with waste.
After a dogleg down an alley to avoid a roving band of gun-toting men, they came to the station. It was a hole-in-the-wall shop, a narrow store opening sandwiched in a line of a dozen storefronts, each shuttered with a steel gate and a thick chain.
Elliot put Hood and Cole across the street, watching both directions of the side street the station faced. He sent Jumper around back, watching the alley.
“Snake Pit, this is Black Mamba. I’m at your gate.”
The radio crackled. Silence, for a long moment.
Then, hands from within pushed back a steel door that groaned on its slides. A woman appeared, her long brown hair braided down her back and dressed in the uniform of any NGO working in Africa: khakis, dirty t-shirt, bandana. She could have been thirty-two or forty-two. She was beautiful in the way that women get when they’ve experienced real life and have lived beyond high school and college parties and bar crawls. There was a sharp intelligence in her eyes as she raked her gaze over Elliot.
