Operation Congo (S-Squad Book 9) Read online

  OPERATION: CONGO

  S-Squad Book 9

  William Meikle

  www.severedpress.com

  Copyright 2020 by William Meikle

  - 1 -

  At eight in the morning, it was already hot enough to raise a sweat while sitting still. Even under a canvas canopy, the heat came in waves off the river as if an oven door had been left open in an already warm room. The S-Squad sat together in the shade while their guide at the outboard at the rear sang raucous songs in a language none of them understood. Banks suspected they were being laughed at. It didn’t surprise him. They were a sodden, sweat-soaked, sorry excuse for a crack team. Coupled with the fact that they’d now come into a dead zone for the sat phone and there was no way to phone home and complain, things weren’t off to a very good start.

  And it’s only going to get worse the deeper in we get.

  As usual, Wiggins was doing the most complaining.

  “Golden sands, big cocktails, and long-legged lassies with easy smiles and loose knickers. That was your promise, wasn’t it, Cap?”

  John Banks managed the energy for a laugh.

  “Stop your whining, Wiggo. There’s water, and it’s hot, isn’t it? At least we’re not freezing our balls off this time ‘round.”

  Wiggins swatted a buzzing cloud of black flies from in front of his nose.

  “My bollocks haven’t seen much use recently,” he replied. “They could drop off and I’d never notice they were missing.”

  “You couldnae find them with both hands anyway,” Hynd added.

  “No worries on that score, Sarge. I’ve got your missus for that job.”

  Hynd reached over to try to slap Wiggins on the head. The corporal leaned away and set the boat to swaying below them.

  “Stow it, lads,” Banks said softly. “Let’s at least act as if we ken what we’re doing on this trip?”

  Banks had been called in to the colonel’s office at lunchtime the day before. He knew another assignment was probable and was looking forward to some action, for they’d been rattling around the base for weeks now and there was only so many hands of three-card brag, so many games of pool or darts that the squad could play before going stir crazy. He knew as soon as he saw the look on his superior’s face that it was serious.

  “This could be a bad one, John,” the colonel said. “Tough terrain, little in the way of back up if it goes south, and a lot of unknowns.”

  “Right up our alley then, sir,” Banks replied, trying for some levity, but it fell flat.

  “Listen up. This is going to have to be a short briefing. There’s a plane waiting on the tarmac, and I want you kitted up and on it within the hour. Time’s a factor here.”

  Banks shut up and listened while the colonel talked of a medical emergency in the Congo, a possible plague that needed to be nipped in the bud, and of a WHO team gone missing in thick jungle out of phone range.

  “Get in, find them, and get them out. We can get you in less than fifty miles from where they were last seen and get you a boat into the Congo tributaries where they went. After that, you’ll be on your own until you get out to where the phones work and call for extraction. You’ll find more detail in your inbox; once you get to that, you’ll have as much gen as I’ve got and enough time to peruse it on the flight. Get your men to kit up for hot, wet jungle. Now move, Captain—you and yours have got a plane to catch.”

  He’d moved, first wrangling Hynd and Wiggins out of the mess, rounding up Davies and Wilkins in the gym, then kitting up before heading out onto the tarmac to their flight. The colonel hadn’t been wrong about the urgency— the plane took off while they were still getting settled down. Then they were into the waiting part of their ‘hurry up and wait.’ The rest of the squad spent the trip playing brag, with the sarge winning big from everyone else; Banks knew better than to get into a game when Hynd’s luck was running hot. He stayed in his seat going over the material the colonel’s secretary had dropped in his mail. He didn’t learn much more than he’d already heard but one passage in particular got his attention. It was an email between one of the field medics and his superior at the WHO.

  I’m quickly coming ‘round to the view that this isn’t a disease at all. It has all the symptoms of a highly systemic poison and given that it has only so far shown up in this one community on the river, we might be better served in searching for an environmental source. It may be that there is something in the water? Or maybe something new in their diet? That’s how I’m thinking now at least. I’ll keep you posted.

  Banks had searched for a follow-up but that was the last item of correspondence from the medical team, dated more than twenty-four hours previously. Since then, numerous attempts had been made to establish contact, all of them to no avail. Which was why the squad was now, under complaint, making their way up a tributary of the eastern Congo on this slow boat to nowhere.

  “Why us, Cap?” Wiggins said as he lit up a cigarette, an attempt to keep the flies at bay. It wasn’t working. “Do we have signs on our backs? Give us all the shite jobs, please?”

  Banks couldn’t really begrudge Wiggins the moan. The corporal was right in that they were on a run of missions that had all gone south one way or another. First, they’d lost McCally in the disaster at Loch Ness, then on through the loss of another man in Syria, the clusterfuck in Norway, and lastly losing the man they’d been sent to save in Mongolia.

  Nobody dies this time out. Not on my watch.

  Their boat guide had told them it would be a three-hour trip and dead on time they rounded a bend in the river and saw a settlement on the bank ahead of them. It only took seconds to spot there was something wrong. It was a small village, half a dozen mud and straw huts, and what had been three large tents, obviously the medical team’s quarters, to one side. One of the tents had burned, its embers still smoking. Another had a splash of red across one side that Banks knew from experience wasn’t paint. Two long canoes, paddles in their bellies, sat beached on the shore. There was no sign of life.

  He didn’t have to give an order. The pack of cards got stowed away fast, cigarettes were extinguished, and every man had a weapon in reach as the guide brought the boat up to a rickety wooden jetty. Banks led them out of the boat, up and across to the riverbank.

  “Sarge, you, Davies, and Wilkins take the huts. Wiggo and I will check the tents. No heroics and no shooting unless it’s real trouble. Keep in sight of another man at all times and be back here in five. If you find anybody, shout out.”

  Without waiting for a reply, he led Wiggins away to the right towards the smoke rising from the burnt-out tent.

  There was no sign of life. They found blood on the ground outside both the surviving tents and the charred remains of two bodies in the burned area, but the only thing they found inside the tents was a tumbled, broken array of medical equipment and computers.

  “Bloody hell, Cap,” Wiggins said. “It looks like a bomb hit it. What happened here?”

  Banks had no answer. He only knew that they were looking for twelve WHO people and there were only two bodies. The job had suddenly got a lot more complicated.

  - 2 -

  Frank Hynd felt the old familiar tension rise up in him as he led the two privates towards the mud and straw huts. No matter how much action a man saw, no matter over how many years, he still felt the ball-tightening pressure, still had to fight to maintain focus and relaxation. The place felt dead and quiet but he’d seen men killed who’d taken situations exactly like this one for granted. And the two lads he had with him, although good men both, were still young in many ways. He owed it to them to give his full attention.

  He approached the first hut with his weapon rai
sed, motioning that the other two should stay behind him and cover him as he stepped to one side of the open doorway. He stood still listening. On hearing no sound from inside, he chanced a look.

  It was a single, empty area was a hard mud floor with a center hearth, the ashes in which looked dark and cold. He stepped inside and found nothing except three discarded wooden bowls, the contents of which were a congealed, foul-smelling mess of meat and some kind of vegetable he couldn’t identify. He wasn’t about to try a mouthful.

  The second hut proved to be as empty as the first, with more half-eaten bowls of food the only evidence someone had been there recently.

  In the third hut, they found the source of the food, a large clay pot suspended over a hearth that was still warm to the touch. A noxious smell rose from the mouth of the pot.

  Davies was the first to speak.

  “Bloody hell, Sarge. What were they cooking up in here? Meth?”

  Hynd found a wooden ladle hanging beside the pot and used it to stir the concoction inside. The smell immediately got worse.

  “Give it a rest, Sarge,” Wilkins said. “That’s worse than one of Wiggo’s farts.”

  “Just a second. There’s a chunk of something in here. I want to see what it is.”

  Whatever it was, it was almost too large for the ladle and in the process of removing it from the pot, it slid out of the cup and landed with a thud on the floor. The three men gathered ‘round.

  “What the fuck is that, Sarge?” Davies asked.

  “You’re the medic here,” Hynd answered. “You’ve got the biology experience. You tell me.”

  Davies bent for a closer look but Hynd stayed where he was, looking down from above at what looked like the lower leg and foot of some bird—a very large bird.

  “Ostrich?” Wilkins said.

  “Here in the jungle? No, they’re plains beasties,” Davies replied. He poked at the foot with the barrel of his rifle. Some of the skin sloughed off, revealing partially cooked flesh below. The stench that rose from it was almost overwhelming and they all backed away towards the doorway in search of clear air.

  “If not ostrich, what? An eagle?” Wilkins asked.

  “It would have to be bloody enormous,” Hynd answered. He reckoned the foot to be more than eighteen inches from front to back, each talon being as thick as a man’s wrist. “Have you heard of eagles that size?”

  He didn’t say it—the younger lads hadn’t been there—but he was thinking of the mess in Siberia, the genetic experiments, and the huge birds from out of the past capable of bringing down planes.

  Have those fuckers multiplied? Are they spreading?

  “Fetch it out into the light, lad,” Hynd said to Wilkins. “The cap will want a look at it.”

  Wilkins looked green at the gills but he took a deep breath, ducked into the hut, and was out again before he had to open his mouth. He dumped the foot on the ground. At the same time, a wail rose from the dock. Their guide had caught sight of what they had at their feet.

  “Mokele-Mbembe,” he shouted. “Mokele-Mbembe.”

  He started to untie the boat. Hynd broke into a run towards the jetty but was too late to stop the man from getting the outboard going and taking the craft off and away back downriver from where they’d come. The man didn’t look back and was soon lost ‘round the bend of the river, only the throaty rumble of the two-stroke engine remaining until it became too faint to hear.

  “What the fuck got into him?” Wiggins said at Hynd’s side. The corporal and the captain had come to see what the fuss was about. Hynd brought them up to speed, leading them over to the partially cooked foot.

  The captain looked at it and Hynd saw a worried look in his old friend’s eyes.

  “You know what this is, Cap?” Hynd asked.

  Banks shook his head.

  “No. But the docs who were here thought that there might be a poison involved here, something the locals had been eating. I’ve heard stories before about bushmeat gone bad—it was one of the theories about how AIDS got started. Ebola too. So what I’m saying is, nobody eats anything that we didn’t bring in ourselves. And if anybody touched that thing, I suggest you boil some water and have a good scrub, right now.”

  Banks took Hynd to one side away from the others and spoke, keeping his voice low.

  “It looks like this isn’t just a simple in and out rescue,” he said. “There was a dozen WHO people here and what looks like a score of locals. There are only two bodies. What we need is a clue as to where they’ve gone—or been taken. Take Wiggo and scour the riverbank, north and south, see if you can find a trail to follow. I’ll go through the camp here again. There are a whole mess of busted computers in the big tent so Wilko might be able to get something from them. Meet back here in thirty, one way or the other. We’ll set up camp here for the night and I’ll decide our next move once you report back.”

  Hynd nodded then called out.

  “Wiggo, get your fat arse over here. We’re going for a walk.”

  They went north first, boots sucking in clinging mud along a narrow riverbank.

  The foliage hung low to the water, slapping wetly around their heads and shoulders as they pushed though it and every step was met with a rise of black flies, heavy clouds of them that got into Hynd’s mouth, nostrils, even ears. He got out a cigarette, passed one to Wiggins, and lit them both up. The smoke thinned the flies out a bit but not even the stench of Capstan Full Strength was strong enough to stop them being a hard-to-ignore nuisance.

  “What are we looking for, Sarge?” Wiggins said without taking the cigarette from the corner of his mouth.

  “Anything that’ll show us where everybody went,” Hynd replied.

  “And what if they went by boat?”

  “Use your head, lad. We’d have seen tracks on the riverbank back at the village. There were none there.”

  “I hate these fucking Marie Celeste jobs. Risking our arses to save scientists without an ounce of common sense between them. It’s fucking Syria all over again.”

  “Yon wee lassie you were keen on was worth it though, wasn’t she?”

  Wiggins smiled at the memory.

  “Aye. If we find another like her, I’ll no complain.”

  “That’ll be a first.”

  Hynd put a hand up to quiet Wiggins before the corporal could reply. When he’d parted the foliage in front of him, he saw a wider patch of flat, muddy bank straight ahead. Without consciously thinking about it, he swung the rifle from his shoulder into his hands and used the barrel to push the hanging greenery aside.

  There was no one on sight, no movement save the soft lapping of the river on the mud. He took two steps forward then stopped. The mud here was covered in tracks; human for the most part, many footprints centered alongside several long grooves that led down from the top of the bank into the river. Both men got the import immediately.

  “They took them out by boat after all,” Wiggins said.

  “Looks that way, lad,” Hynd replied. “Four long canoes, heading north into the jungle by the looks of things.”

  They followed the grooves in the mud back up the bank away from the river. At the top of a slope, they found a trail leading back south the way they had come. On the ground at their feet was a torn scrap of white material—a piece of a lab coat, the white liberally spattered with dried blood. There were also more footprints here; some of the tracks showed imprints of work boots or thick-soled trainers but the bulk of them were the result of bare feet. Everything seemed to back up their theory that this was the point of flight. Then Hynd’s eye caught something else, a larger print, almost obscured by the human prints that overlaid it.

  It looked like the track of a massive bird and had been made by something the same shape and size as the remnant they’d taken out of the cooking pot back in the village.

  “There’s something not right here, Sarge,” Wiggins said. “I can feel it in my water.”

  “That’s just a dose of the clap. Eyes fron
t, lad,” Hynd replied. “I’m guessing this track takes us back to the village. Let’s see if they left us any other breadcrumbs.”

  - 3 -

  Banks led the two younger privates back to the main tent.

  “We’ll set up in here for the night,” he said. “Davies, get a brew on. Wilko, clear out the hardware and see if you can get anything off any of the hard drives. There might be something there that can help us make some sense of this mess.”

  Banks stood in the tent doorway, lit up a smoke, and tried to formulate a theory based on what he saw around. It looked like a classic abduction scenario; the WHO team and the villagers surprised, maybe while sleeping, and spirited off who knew where, the only casualties being some poor bastards who had the misfortune to be awake at the wrong time. The only thing he couldn’t factor in was the bird-like foot that the sarge had dragged out of the pot. It was the wild card here but he had a feeling it had some bearing on what was happening. He just couldn’t see how it fit.

  He was still musing on that when Wilkins called out from inside the tent in an atrocious American accent.

  “Stop your grinnin’ and drop your linen. Got something.”

  “Do me a favor, lad,” Banks said, “I get enough of that shite from Wiggo without you joining in. What have you got?”

  “Emails mainly,” Wilkins said sheepishly. “Back and forth between somebody here and New York by the look of things. Some of them are badly fragmented and there’s several complaints about the patchy satellite service and such. But there’s quite a bit of material and I’ve managed to pull a stack of twenty or so emails from the last week. A lot of it is boring admin stuff, requests for supplies and the like. But you need to see this.”

  The private had managed to load the data onto his phone. He passed it to Banks. It showed a single, densely formatted piece of text with no line breaks, but Banks had no trouble reading it.