prankster, Bernie Cieplicki made Sykes and Rivers provide the bulk of the horsepower while he merely steered.
They passed though Kivu as silently as wraiths and continued down the road for another two hundred yards. Sykes and Rivers were lathered in sweat and blowing like draft horses.
“You guys look a little spent,” Cieplicki quipped. “I guess I shouldn’t have left my foot on the brake.”
“You’re an asshole, Bern,” Paul wheezed.
“That’s what people keep telling me,” Cieplicki replied with a grin cocky enough to make Rivers want to swipe it off his face.
“Let’s mount up,” Sykes ordered.
With the lights off and using night vision goggles, Cieplicki drove them away from Kivu, at a crawl at first, to keep the engine noise down, but within a mile he had them up to forty. The wind whipping through the open windows was hot and stank of the nearby river but they needed the windows down because Book and Paul watched the surrounding jungle with their weapons ready to engage.
It took them two and a half hours to reach the Scilla River where it flowed into the Chinko. Someone had destroyed the makeshift ferryboat Mercer had mentioned, the barrels lay scattered along the riverbank, and there was no sign of its corrugated metal deck.
“From here it’s all on foot,” Sykes said, unlimbering his big frame from the Jeep. “Let’s hide the truck and wait until dawn. I don’t want to go stumbling around the jungle without knowing who’s out there.”
“You mean what,” Bernie said.
“That too.”
In the predawn hour, they made their approach to the village where Mercer had seen the stele. The nocturnal animals had already found their dens for the day and the diurnals had yet to emerge. There was no evidence that anyone was in the area, but they took no chances. They crossed the ancient mine, noting the breach in the levee where Mercer said he and Cali had been sluiced down to the river. Farther on they came to the village. Covered by Cieplicki and Rivers, who stayed at the tree line, Sykes entered the clearing. Nothing remained of the village but the burned husks of the huts, blackened piles of grass and mud that had once been home to the innocent. The air reeked of putrid flesh.
The utter futility and waste of it all sickened him.
He cast around for the stele. Mercer said it was about seven feet tall and impossible to miss, but Sykes didn’t see it. Unable to shake the feeling that he was being watched, and not only by his own men, he methodically crisscrossed the jungle clearing. The grass was littered with hundreds of spent cartridges. He picked up one to sniff it. It still smelled of gunpowder. He passed a pile of loose rocks and was about to ignore it when he stopped and went back. In the tricky dawn light he had to squint to make out the odd writing that remained on the larger pieces.
“Oh, Mercer ain’t gonna be happy ’bout this.”
He jogged back to the tree line where Rivers and Cieplicki waited.
“What’s the word, Boss Man?”
“The stele thing’s all smashed up. Can’t be more than a few pieces the size of a brick.”
“Explosives?” Cieplicki asked.
“No. I’d say they broke it with hammers or rifle butts. Also I’ve got the feeling we aren’t the only people in the area.”
“Could be villagers returning.”
“Not at five o’clock in the morning.” Sykes went quiet, thinking through his options. He had gotten a few hours of sleep on the flight to Africa but that had been thirty-six hours earlier. He was exhausted. His eyelids felt like they had an inner liner of sandpaper. But he’d been trained to ignore such distractions. He came up with his plan and issued his orders. Cieplicki and Rivers took off at a run while he remained in the jungle watching over the clearing. He heard no movement, no coughs or the scrape of cloth over vegetation, but he was certain he wasn’t alone.
Moving as carefully as a stalking leopard he made a wide half circle around the village, careful not to step out on the exposed bluff overlooking the river. He found nothing.
Rivers and Cieplicki were back in eleven minutes, and had Sykes not been so uneasy he would have reproached them for how long it had taken to run the mile to the truck and back. They brought back three military- issue backpacks, heavy nylon bags that could support more than a hundred and fifty pounds. Leaving Cieplicki to cover the woods, Sykes and Rivers took the bags to the ruined stele and carefully started filling them with pieces of the ancient marker. They were careful about weight distribution, for while Bernie could more than handle a load, Sykes and Rivers were much bigger and stronger men.
When they had one filled, Rivers heaved it off the ground.
“What do you think?” Book asked.
“Hundred and sixty, hundred and seventy.”
“Thank God it’s only a mile,” Sykes said and looked up sharply when a bird suddenly launched itself from a tree. He waited a beat but nothing more happened.
They had secured all the larger pieces and were down to fragments the size of acorns half-buried in the ground when Cieplicki opened fire. His single shot was answered by at least eight guns ripping on automatic. Sykes and Rivers dove flat, shoving the bags into a row for cover, their guns resting on the priceless relic.
Cieplicki came out of the woods a moment later, laying down a wall of fire to keep the rebels in the woods. He reached his teammates, leaping over the bags and rolling around so his AK was pointed back at the woods.
The jungle fell silent again.
“This isn’t good.”
The Delta operators only had two spare magazines each; that’s all the kids they’d taken the guns from had carried. It wasn’t nearly enough for a protracted fight with more than a half dozen rebels.
“Discretion and all that,” Sykes said. He fired a quick spray into the woods and slid his pack’s straps over his shoulders, using the power of his legs to deadlift the heavy burden. Cieplicki and Rivers did likewise. As a team, they started running back toward the Jeep at the confluence of the Chinko and Scilla rivers.
The packs were too heavy to slap against their backs as they jogged along the embankment, and before he’d gone a hundred yards Sykes felt the tendons and ligaments in his lower back popping. Then the muscle pulled. It was a merciless knife-edged pain that exploded against the top of his skull, and every step served to deepen the agony. Yet he did not slow. He gritted his teeth against the torment, the thought of dropping the pack never entering his mind.
The gunmen kept to the woods as they pursued the team, taking poorly aimed potshots that forced the team to zigzag as they ran, adding tremendous pressures to knees and spines as they returned fire to keep the rebels at bay.
Grimacing with each footfall, Sykes kept telling himself to ignore the pain, but the agony was beyond belief. Searing waves of pain radiated from his lower back, and when he jinked, the added strain sent a bolt of fire to his brain. He could barely twist to return fire, so he held the AK one-handed and popped off covering shots.
He’d carried an injured man in Afghanistan, a local fighter who’d taken shrapnel to the gut, but it was nothing like this. The deadweight in his pack ground him down, made him question everything he’d ever done in his life to bring him to this torture. He glanced at his men. They knew the pain too. It was etched in their faces and in the sweat that poured from their skins. Even Paul Rivers, a towering ox of a man, was feeling it.
And still they ran on.
They reached the mine, plunged down into the section of blown-away levee without pause, and gutted their way up the other side, legs moving like pistons. Sykes faltered near the top and felt Bernie ram his shoulder into the pack to see him up those last couple of feet.
Unbelievably they were outpacing the rebels thrashing their way through the thick jungle. One of the rebels realized their quarry was getting away and dashed out from the bush. As rear guard it was Rivers’s job to cover their backs. Every few moments he’d look over his shoulder. He saw the skinny African leap out of the jungle and start sprinting. Without breaking his pace, Rivers fired a quick burst. The rebel went down as if he’d been jerked by a string.
“Last one…,” Cieplicki panted, pausing to swallow the pre-vomit saliva that flooded his mouth. “Last one to the Jeep is a rotten egg.”
He retched and a trickle of bile dribbled down his chin onto his khaki bush shirt.
