Our Hearts. Chapter Nineteen. The Rain

The downpour crashed down upon the old Belgian base around four in the afternoon.

It struck not gradually, not with timid harbingers, but all at once, totally, with a leaden, monotonous heaviness—the way a theatrical curtain falls at the finale of a drawn-out tragedy. First, the forest grew paralyzed: the birds, the cicadas, the shrieking mona monkeys—everything fell silent, pressed into the bark and moss. The sky thickened to the state of wet velvet, a dense, dark-blue velvet, swollen with storm water. And then it poured. Large drops, the size of a finger joint, fell with such terrifying force that they churned the orange dust of the parade ground, instantly turning it into the viscous, pulsating, glistening blood of the earth. The jungle drank this water greedily, with a visceral hum, rustling with millions of glossy leaves.

Imani stood in the doorway of the kitchen block, her shoulder leaning against the rough, damp-oozing concrete jamb. The air around her thickened, steeped in the sharp scent of ozone, rotting wood, crushed greenery, and the bitterish smoke from the smoldering cast-iron stove. She wore faded jeans and a men’s cotton shirt with rolled-up sleeves—her only armor left from her past life in Bata Kolé. Ilunga had brought them clothes, but for now she had no desire to change. She was watching.

Beneath an awning of torn corrugated iron, leaning against the bunker wall, stood a long plank table. Over it, heads bowed, two men were frozen.

A husband and a lover.

Two men, carved from entirely different stone, yet in a strange, almost magical way balancing each other in this damp, rotting haze. Between them, weighed down at the edges by two rusted assault-rifle casings, a walkie-talkie, and a mug of cold coffee, lay a printout. Ilunga had arrived with it this morning in his crumpled Pajero—detailed satellite images of the Kato-Tombe quarry. The paper had already begun to ripple from the dampness, imbued with the smell of gun oil and tobacco. From above, the camp appeared as a perfect, sterile geometry: the white rectangles of containers, the mathematically precise perimeter of barbed wire, the blind squares of the watchtowers, the dark, gaping maw of the hangar. It was death, categorized and shelved, translated into the language of simple engineering semiotics.

Imani watched them through the silver mesh of the rain.

Ilunga stood on the left. His faded camouflage t-shirt clung to his broad back, a colored shirt thrown over it. The partisan’s profile seemed carved from ancient basalt—calm, collected, impenetrable. His finger, with a torn nail, slid slowly over the grainy paper, tracing the lines of invisible fronts. This is what a man looks like who has prepared for battle a thousand times, knowing that one day the forest will take him forever, yet continuing to return.

Leo stood on the right. In a multi-colored mottled jacket without insignia, his short hair darkened by the moisture. The American had frighteningly changed over these days: the metropolitan gloss had vanished, his movements had shed their academic fussiness, becoming predatory, economical, like those of a wild forest cat. The virus and the jungle had reforged him, burning away all the superficialities, leaving only a hard, lethal framework. In his insomnia-sunken eyes, there was no longer any fever or confusion. Only clarity. The cold, surgical, terrifying clarity of a man who has peered over the edge. The dark copper of the bracelet on his right wrist gleamed dully in the gray gloom of the awning.

Between the men, there was neither enmity nor awkwardness. Only a wise, dense silence—the silence of two warriors who understood that any words about the past right now would destroy more than they could save.

“Confirmation from Langley came through the night,” Leo’s voice sounded dry and steady, cutting through the deafening drumbeat of the downpour on the corrugated roof. “The strike complexes on the destroyer have been switched to combat mode. Missile launch is tomorrow. Estimated time on target is zero six thirty. Right after dawn.”

He touched the center of the satellite image with the point of a pencil.

“Four Tomahawks. Two thermobaric warheads will crack open the barracks by the old mine and the hangar. Two bunker-busters will strike right at the base of the hill, above the vault of the adit where Girard’s lab is located. They will trigger a directed collapse. Hundreds of tons of incandescent rock will seal the adit tight. The temperature will exceed three thousand degrees. The virus, the pitchblende—everything will burn in milliseconds.”

Ilunga leaned in closer, narrowing his pupils, dark as overripe olives.

“And the mercenary camp?”

“As we discussed, to minimize casualties, you will lure them out of there before the strike. But protocol requires visual confirmation of the target’s destruction. I will be here,” Leo’s pencil slid to an elevation in the east. “A blind spot for their perimeter cameras. I’ll record the impact, and then send the verification code.”

Imani took a step from the doorway into the gloom of the awning. Her voice sounded quiet, yet with that cast, chthonic unyieldingness with which water wears away stone:

“I am going with you.”

Both men raised their heads simultaneously. The rain behind their backs seemed to lose its rhythm for a second.

Ilunga frowned, his jaw muscles flexing.

“That is madness, Imani. A missile is not a rifle bullet. The shockwave, the thermal blast… If the wind shifts, you’ll be covered in scorching dust and concrete shrapnel.”

“I won’t let him go alone,” she stood next to Leo. Her hand familiarly, almost reflexively, rested on his forearm. The copper touched her skin, and Imani felt how beneath the cotton fabric his pulse beat evenly, unhurriedly. We are bound—her touch said.

Ilunga looked at her with a long, attentive gaze. A complex, multi-layered shadow flickered in his eyes—the bitterness of loss mixed with a deep, unconditional respect for her choice. He gave a short nod. Once. The question was closed.

“My men are ready,” the partisan told him, clipping each word as he tapped a knobby finger on the paper map near the residential barracks of the main mine. “We have been working on this all day. I’ve made arrangements with the shift supervisors. Tonight, as soon as it gets dark, the workers will begin to riot.”

“How exactly?” Leo leaned forward, eyes fixed sharply on the map.

“The way cornered people riot. They will say rumors have reached them from the village about the black blood, about the dead miner Benga. They are terrified. They are convinced this is a new Ebola, and that the white mercenaries locked the contagion behind the fence so as not to halt production. The riot will be primal, loud. They’ll roll their dump trucks onto the roads, light fires in iron barrels with diesel fuel. They’ll get drunk on local moonshine…”

He looked at Leo, then at Imani.

“It makes the blood hot, and fear disappears. They will scream, beat the fences with rebar, demand answers. True chaos will break out.”

Ilunga smiled a crooked, almost predatory smile.

“The Southbridge mercenaries will have to pull almost their entire personnel to the quarry to keep this enraged mob from breaking through to the expensive equipment,” and, tracing a finger along the map as if closing the circle of a trap, he continued. “And at five thirty in the morning, when the sky begins to gray, my boys will strike from the flank. We’ll empty a couple of magazines into the air over the watchtowers and plant a grenade in the empty tire warehouse. The roar and the flames will be such that their commander will have no choice. She will throw the last reserves from the base into the fight. They will run to defend the quarry. And the missiles will fall on a half-empty camp.”

“What if the mercenaries don’t buy it?”

“They have to.”

“Alright,” Leo breathed a sigh of relief. “That means by six thirty, only the on-duty guards will be left at the adit.”

The drops steadily tapped out their rhythm: tock… tock… tock…—as if an invisible clockwork mechanism were counting down the final hours of a vanishing world.

“Tonight, Kasongo will come for you,” Ilunga continued, gathering up the map and rolling it into a tight tube smelling of gunpowder. “He knows the forest trails like the back of his hand. He will drive you past the posts to the foot of the eastern hill. From there, you will climb up yourselves. After the strike, go down to him; he will be waiting in the hollow. He will bring you back here.”

“Thank you, Ilunga,” Leo said, looking him straight in the eye.

The partisan did not reply. He shoved the rolled-up map into his shirt’s breast pocket, leaned heavily with his palms against the edge of the table, and looked out at the red, bubbling mud beyond the awning.

“And what then?” he asked after a prolonged pause, without turning his head.

The question hung in the damp air. Leo looked at Imani. She answered him with a long, calm gaze. In that visual touch there were neither doubts nor fear—only a singular, unbearably tender, enduring space that belonged to them alone.

“We will leave,” Leo replied.

Ilunga turned around. His face remained a mask of wet stone.

“Where?”

Leo stayed silent. He had no route. Boston remained in a past, dead life. Langley had turned into a double-edged tool that would have to be discarded tomorrow. There was only this rain, this jungle, and the woman whose breath he felt on his skin.

“I can smuggle you across the border into Zambia,” Ilunga offered in a businesslike, emotionless tone. “I have people there. Smugglers’ trails. No border control. No unnecessary questions.”

“There is no need, Ilunga,” Imani said softly but firmly. Both men looked at her. “I must say goodbye to my grandfather. In Mbanza-Ngungu.”

Ilunga closed his eyes.

“Alright. Let me at least drive you to Lubumbashi,” he agreed. “From there you can go west… or wherever you decide.”

Leo and Imani nodded simultaneously, like a single organism.

The partisan reached into his jacket’s inner pocket, pulled out the stub of a chemical pencil, and tore a scrap of paper from a notepad. Pressing it against the rough board of the table, he quickly jotted down eleven angular digits.

“Here,” Ilunga handed the paper to Leo. “It’s a phone number. A man in Kinshasa. Ngala. Tell him you’re from me. He is a master. He will make you both clean documents—passports, driver’s licenses, whatever you need. Genuine blanks. With them, you can fly out of the country anywhere you want. All he needs are your photographs.”

Leo took the slip, folded it in half, and carefully slipped it into his shirt’s breast pocket. He understood the true, colossal price of this gesture. Ilunga was giving them not just a contact—he was giving them the right to a future.

“Thank you,” Leo’s voice faltered with a barely noticeable, genuine hoarseness. “This will really come in handy.”

Ilunga pushed himself back from the table. For a few seconds, he looked at them in silence. At his wife, standing shoulder to shoulder with another man. At the white American who had come here a stranger, and now carried the rhythm of Katanga in his blood. At two people, strangely intertwined into one, indestructible, living knot.

“Take care of each other,” he said hollowly, with a barely perceptible, instantly suppressed vibration in his voice.

He turned around, pulled his faded cap down over his head, and stepped out from under the awning into the solid wall of the downpour. The water very quickly soaked through the fabric, ran down his broad back, and glistened on his wet neck. His massive boots squelched as they bogged down in the red clay.

The Pajero’s diesel sneezed, roared, spewing out a cloud of bluish smoke. The headlights smeared a dim, blurred yellow light across the wall of the jungle. The SUV pulled away, its tires biting into the soggy rut with a growl, and within a second its heavy silhouette began to dissolve, melting into the green gloom, swallowed by the endless torrent of water from the heavens. A moment later, the sound of the engine vanished too, leaving behind only the absolute, total symphony of the rain.

Ilunga was gone.

Imani stood at the very edge of the awning, looking into the emptiness of the clearing. Large, stinging drops were blown in by the wind; they settled on her cheekbones, on her chin, got tangled in her eyelashes, mingling with the invisible, transparent moisture clouding her gaze. Whether the water was salty or from the sky, she did not know. And what did it matter—both were equally wet. The thin copper bracelet clinked softly, musically, as she clenched her fingers into a fist.

Leo stood nearby. He did not try to embrace her, did not violate the boundary of her farewell. He was simply there—an undeniable, warm presence. His shoulder an inch from her shoulder. The scent of his damp skin, bitter coffee, and steel—next to her scent of costus and rain.

Tomorrow the sky would crash down upon this earth in roaring fire. Tomorrow everything would change forever. But now, in this fluid, drawn-out second, the world had narrowed to the size of a tiny island beneath a dirty corrugated roof.

Imani unhurriedly turned her head. Her eyes—fathomless, black, with amber veins, absorbing all the gloom of the oncoming evening—met Leo’s eyes.

She reached out her hand. Her cool fingers slid along his wet cheek, traced his jawline, touched the pulsating vein on his neck.

“Come to me,” she whispered so quietly that the words did not sound, but rather seemed to spill into his waiting lips.

And Leo took a step. No, he didn’t just follow her—he pulled her himself into the thick, breathing darkness of the bunker, pressing her to him with such force as if trying to hide her beneath his own ribs. To a place where there were no printouts, no missiles, no past. To a place where the stifling heaviness of the tropical night advanced slowly and inevitably, closing over them in a protective, absolutely hermetic dome.

Chapter Twenty. Copper →
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