Page 49 of Soul on Fire
Ikolo chuckled, a tiny smile playing over his lips.
Elliot wanted to drown in that smile, tease it out, make Ikolo laugh and break out into the wide, wonderful smile that stopped his heart.
The mission has priority. “He said he couldn’t tell him we’d been killed, but that he’d die knowing he’d succeeded. He’s definitely in contact with Majambu.”
“Yes, I think so. Word travels up and down the tracks and winds its way through the forest, but not as far as back to Goma or Ituri, not in two days. Majambu must have arranged this himself.”
“Which means they were either face-to-face or in contact over the phone.” Elliot stared at the forest and listened to the emptiness. “You have a cell phone?” He’d left his behind on theKearsarge, along with all of his personal effects.
“I do, in my pack. I keep it off. It’s for emergencies only. There’s no signal out here.”
“How far do you have to go to get signal?”
“On this road, there’s signal in Sake and Lubutu, the halfway point to Kisangani.”
Elliot flopped the giant’s body on his back and reached into his pockets. Cigarettes and condoms in one, and—bingo—a cell phone in the other. It was a flip phone, something from the 2000s. He flipped the lid. Half battery life. No reception.
But there was a full call history, including two numbers dialed in the last day.
“Have aid organizations ever deployed a mobile cell tower out here?”
“Occasionally, but they are hard to power. Generators must run constantly to keep them going, and there isn’t enough fuel for that in the forest.”
Elliot winked. “We won’t need a generator for this.”
* * *
Chapter Nineteen
The Congo Forest
They swappedout the rusted Kalashnikovs for the LRA’s better rifles and took all their ammunition before they made their way back to the motorbike.
When Elliot flipped one of the fighters and stripped his weapons, his vacant eyes were reddened, somewhere between bloodshot and a crimson wave seeping up from beneath his lower lids. He’d recoiled and moved on quickly.
He’d never seen that before.
They returned to where they’d hid the motorbike and dug it out. By the time they’d hauled it to the track, they were both drenched in sweat and breathing hard, nearly doubled over as the humidity tried to force them to their knees.
“How far to Lubutu?” Elliot poured some of their water over his head. He shook it off, drops flying, and shivered as the rest ran down beneath his shirt.
Ikolo drank after him. “About a half hour, maybe more if the road is bad.”
“Get us there as fast as you can and then punch us through. I want to get beyond Lubutu and beyond, out to where there’s no cell signal.”
Their thighs slid together when Elliot climbed behind him on the motorbike. He pressed his palm against Ikolo’s stomach and pulled them close and his lips lingered over Ikolo’s skin as he breathed him in. Ikolo tipped his head back with a sigh. Their cheeks nuzzled, a soft caress before Ikolo sat up, revved the engine, and took off.
“Why go through Lubutu? Why not try and call Majambu? He must be one of those numbers.”
“Knowing which number is his doesn’t help us. We need to know where he is or where he’s going. I think he called those LRA fighters from Lubutu and had them go back to the village to wait for us. That village was still smoking when we arrived. You could feel the heat from the ground, which means they hadn’t been there long. Whatever call they received wasn’t made much before then either. If Lubutu is where the nearest signal is, then Majambu was in Lubutu. Now we need to catch him on his phone again.”
The motorbike rumbled over the packed dirt and past the smoldering ruins of the village. They’d never know its name, would never know who lived there. But they’d killed the men who’d slaughtered the people, and they were on the trail of the man who’d ordered their deaths. That had to factor into the human equation somewhere.
* * *
Lubutu was a blur,a mishmash of dirt roads and concrete buildings sprawling in a clear-cut field, appearing out of nowhere in the middle of the forest. The concrete rotted off in clumps of blackened ruins, wilting in the tropical heat. Men, women, and children walked the streets covered in red mud, from their shoulders to their feet, so thick it caked on to their skin and their clothes like a suit of armor.
“It’s a mining town,” Ikolo said, slowing as they passed a busy market. People ignored them and carried on with their lives, buying bananas and cassava and taro. Smoked monkey hung from one stall next to a plucked and charred bird. “They dig for ore. Cobalt mostly. But gold and diamonds, too. People dig for minerals in their yards or in their neighbors’ yards. Anywhere they can. There are traders who will buy a bag of rocks with cobalt ore here for twenty dollars. That’s a fortune in the Congo.”
