Our Hearts. Chapter Seven. The Raid

“Wait for me.”

The whisper burned against his ear—hot, corporeal, vibrating at the lowest, almost ultrasonic frequency. This voice was not born in the larynx, but at the very center of the chest, beneath the bone of ribs slick with sweat, where a restive, agitated heart beat rapidly. Leo lay in pitch-black, enveloping darkness that felt almost tangible to the touch. The air was steeped in the thick, intoxicating scents of night jasmine, damp post-storm earth, and the sharp, bitter aroma of costus—an ancient perfumery root whose fragrance recalled both dry tree resins and musk.

Imani was close. Her skin—feverishly hot, flawlessly smooth, moist with a fine sheen of sweat—slid across his chest, crowding out the world from his consciousness. Leo felt every line of her body: the graceful, confident pivot of her hips, the sharp, graphic collarbones beneath his palms, the chiseled curve of her neck. Her short, coarse coils of hair tickled his chin, leaving a faint scent of palm oil and smoke on his skin.

The copper hoop on his right wrist burned with a dry, almost deathly cold, contrasting sharply and painfully with the searing heat of her breath. Leo arched to meet this slow, hypnotic movement, his fingers digging into the dark, taut surface of her back. There was no refinement or hesitation in this surge—only pure, primal physiology, merging with something undeniable, ancient as the earth itself.

Imani leaned even closer. Her lips, hot and soft, brushed his neck below the jawline; her teeth, with a slight, palpable pressure, nipped his pulsing carotid artery, and she slipped directly into his bloodstream, leaving a burning wet trail on his skin:

“Wait for me…”

A sharp metallic clatter shattered the dream.

Leo’s eyes flew open, his mouth frantically gasping the stale, suffocating air of the wooden trailer. Blinding beams of headlights, slicing through the pre-dawn gloom, swept across the plywood and tin walls, piercing the torn mosquito net on the window. Outside, with a menacing, low growl, powerful, tuned diesel engines sputtered and choked at idle. Cutting through the rumble were sharp, guttural commands, shouted simultaneously in two languages—French and English.

Leo rolled off the narrow cot, instantly feeling the sticky sweat cool rapidly on his chest. He pulled on wrinkled jeans, shoved his bare feet into high boots without even lacing them, and bolted out into the stifling, motionless Africa.

In the cleared glade of the WHO camp stood two large Toyota Land Cruiser SUVs. Fine orange dust and exhaust fumes hung in the air like a dense suspension, illuminated from within by powerful halogen headlights. The car doors swung open almost simultaneously. Men in full tactical gear spilled onto the trampled mud: dark-sand plate carriers, heavy load-bearing vests, Kevlar helmets devoid of a single identifying mark or flag.

In the hands of the gunmen, Leo immediately recognized a weapon hard to mistake for anything else—Israeli Emtan MZ-4P carbines with shortened fourteen-inch barrels, gas-piston operating systems, red dot sights, and tactical flashlights mounted on side Picatinny rails.

Six men. Three heavily built local Congolese with frozen, wooden expressions, and three white men—weather-beaten, with bruised knuckles, tight lips, and the impassive, area-scanning gazes of professional private military contractors.

The FARDC soldiers, officially assigned by the government to guard the WHO field hospital, did not even attempt to raise their worn rifles. They silently lowered their muzzles to the ground, pressing themselves into the shadows of the bamboo awnings. Their captain stood by the furthest tent, staring at the mud beneath his boots with the emphatic, deathly indifference of a man whose mobile account had already received the required transfer. The camp guard simply folded up in the face of overwhelming force.

Sarah and Rémi, who were on duty, were already running out of the laboratory block, buttoning their medical coats on the go.

A broad-shouldered mercenary—a blond man with a thick, short beard, a deep scar cutting through his left eyebrow, and a snug-fitting helmet—strode purposefully straight toward the doctors.

“Where is the body?” he barked in flawless French, without the slightest hint of a Provençal or Parisian accent.

“You have no right to barge into an international UN quarantine zone!” Huybrechts stepped forward, physically blocking the entrance to the mobile refrigerator container. “This is a WHO facility! We are under strict epidemiological protocol!”

“We’re here to retrieve our employee,” the mercenary didn’t even raise his voice, but it carried the monolithic certainty of a man accustomed to giving orders.

“You’re out of your minds!” Rémi stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Sarah, his face pale with anger and impotence. “He had hemorrhagic fever! An unknown, extremely aggressive strain! The corpse is shedding contagious biological material every second, his cells are breaking down right now. You’ll infect your entire fucking mine and die there in forty-eight hours!”

“That is not your concern, Doctor.” The blond man gave a curt nod to his men: “Toss him in the trunk.”

Two of the fighters, pulling half-mask respirators over their faces and slipping into thick rubber gloves up to their elbows, headed toward the morgue doors.

Leo stepped into their path. Adrenaline, boiling over from his shattered dream, drowned out the last remnants of reason and fear.

“You will not touch him!” Leo blocked the blond man’s way, standing chest-to-chest with his body armor. “We need to finish sequencing the genome! There’s a mutation happening in his tissues unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Take him away, and in three days your camp will turn into a rotting graveyard! You won’t even make it to a helicopter!”

The blond slowly looked Leo up and down—lingering on his bare feet in unlaced boots and hands trembling with tension.

“Step aside, kid,” he hissed through his teeth.

Leo didn’t budge. Pure, adolescent fury seemed to ignite within him. He lunged forward and grabbed the nylon strap of the fighter’s tactical vest with all his might: “I said, you’re not—”

The strike followed instantly. Without winding up, via a short and terrifying pivot of his entire torso, the lightweight polymer stock of the Emtan slammed precisely under Leo’s ribs, right into his solar plexus.

Air burst from his throat in a hoarse, wet wheeze. The world before his eyes collapsed instantly into a single sparking white dot. Leo dropped to his knees right in the runny red mud, his mouth gaping helplessly as he tried to take even one frantic gulp of air, but his paralyzed diaphragm refused to work. Such sharp pain flared in his ribs it felt as though the bones had cracked and pierced the soft tissue.

“Leo!” Sarah screamed desperately.

The blond lowered the rifle barrel and ran his bored eyes over the biologist writhing on the ground.

“If you’re so smart and care so much about the virus, then you’re coming with us. You can work as a safety consultant. Get him up.”

Two local fighters grabbed Leo under the armpits and jerked him roughly to his feet. His legs buckled; a persistent, sour taste of gastric acid, bile, and iron filled his mouth. He was dragged to the first SUV and shoved brutally into the back seat.

Meanwhile, a thick black plastic body bag was carried out of the mobile morgue. The zipper was sealed with a metal clamp, but even from several meters away, the bag reeked of the stagnant, sickeningly chemical scent of formaldehyde and suffocating bio-decay. With a dull, heavy thud, it was tossed into the trunk of the second vehicle.

“Wait! Stop!” Sarah dropped her things and ran out of her trailer. In her hands, she dragged an orange nylon backpack adorned with bright biohazard symbols.

Approaching the open car door where the fighters were shoving the semi-conscious Leo, she threw the bag onto his lap with all her strength.

“There’s a suit, respirator, disinfectants, syringes, and antibiotics in there! Put everything on as soon as you arrive! Don’t breathe their air, Gonzales! Do you hear me?!”

Rémi tried to break through to the jeep, but a cold, blued rifle barrel immediately materialized in front of his chest.

At that moment, the team leader stepped back a few meters, pressed a finger to his tactical headset, and began speaking rapidly and abruptly into the microphone. Leo, fighting through the ringing in his ears and the savage pain in his chest, leaned his temple against the dusty glass and tried to listen.

The language sounded entirely alien. It bore no trace of the soft, burring vowels of French, the crisp rhythm of English, the guttural Semitic vocabulary of Yiddish or Hebrew, or the melodic, vowel-rich fluidity of the local Bantu dialects. It was a harsh, incredibly dense, choppy speech, bursting with strange hissing sounds, clicking stops, hard consonants, and closed vowels—as if someone were loudly snapping dry pine branches or striking sparks from flint. One could discern Romance roots, but they were mangled by Slavic coarseness.

“So you’re Gonzales?” the leader asked, sliding into the front seat. Without waiting for an answer, he waved his hand: “Alright, let’s go.”

The door slammed shut with a crash. The diesel roared. The SUV tore off, showering the doctors standing by the tents with a cloud of brick-red mud and burnt diesel soot.

The ride through the nocturnal jungle felt most like a sluggish crawl inside the esophagus of a giant, invisible beast.

Thick, fleshy fern and wild banana leaves whipped against the Toyota’s armored windows with a deafening, machine-gun clatter. Huge vines, draped from the canopies of ancient trees invisible in the absolute dark, looked like rigid, blind snakes in the beam of the powerful halogen headlights. The forest didn’t just grow—it lived its own aggressive life: it festered, evaporated moisture, slowly devoured itself, and immediately regenerated in an endless cycle of decay. Time inside the vehicle lost all sequence. It felt to Leo as though they had been driving for days, though barely forty minutes had passed.

A stagnant, heavy stench filled the cabin: a blend of alkaline gun oil, diesel, stale male sweat, cheap tobacco, and sourness.

With every deep pothole, with every harsh jolt of the suspension bringing them closer to the foothills, a strange, unprecedented sensation began to boil somewhere inside Leo.

Deep within his chest cavity—right behind his rifle-bruised sternum—an invisible, phantom mechanism came to life. An internal Geiger counter.

At first, there were sparse, barely perceptible clicks. A slow, erratic rhythm. Crack… pause… deep breath… crack again.

But the deeper they pushed into the forest, the closer they drew to the mining company’s restricted territory, the more frequent and aggressive these discharges became. The earth around them was steeped in some ancient, sullen pathology. The copper bracelet on Leo’s right wrist turned so icy that the skin beneath it began to numb. The metal’s cold resonated with a mounting vibration in his own bones. The internal clicking accelerated, turning into a rapid staccato, merging into a single, irritating, persistent hum that made his teeth ache.

The jungle parted abruptly, as if someone had sharply swept back a woven curtain of vines before the speeding car.

The morning sun illuminated a tall, monumental fence. A solid concrete plinth three meters high, topped with steel chain-link and three rows of electrified «Egoza» razor wire. Industrial floodlights on corner towers still burned, washing the cleared strip in a deathly, pale-phosphorous glow.

The massive, hydraulically driven steel gates slid aside heavily and silently. The SUVs rolled into the guarded territory of the «Kato-Tombe» mine.

The camp inside the perimeter was shockingly, drastically different from the pitiful, mud-spattered tents of the WHO mission. Here stood strict, flawless rows of snow-white residential container modules, raised on half-meter metal pilings to protect against snakes and damp. The external units of powerful Mitsubishi Electric air conditioners hummed a continuous bass note on the roof of every trailer. The hulking bodies of heavy mining equipment—yellow excavators, dump trucks, and drilling rigs—loomed darkly on cleared pads.

But the main thing that seized Leo’s attention lay directly in the side of a red hill towering in the center of the camp.

A rectangular concrete portal was roughly and deeply cut into the rock face. The tunnel entrance was sealed by a massive steel blast door with a dual-position handwheel lock—exactly the kind installed on nuclear submarines or in government bunkers.

Beside the entrance, a dedicated diesel generator the size of a large shipping container thundered continuously. It operated with a low, vibrating hum, feeding high-voltage power through thick black cables straight into the cave. Two gunmen with rifles at the ready guarded the entrance.

The counter in Leo’s chest went into a frantic, unbroken, unbearable staccato. He felt nauseous.

The SUV stopped at the largest, two-story modular building with tinted panoramic windows. The door opened, and Leo was unceremoniously shoved outside. He barely stayed on his feet, his fingers gripping the orange backpack of protective gear so tightly his knuckles popped.

The module’s plastic door opened with a quiet pneumatic hiss, releasing a gust of freezing, sterile, conditioned air into the street.

A woman stepped onto the metal porch.

She was around forty-five. Tall, lean, with an impeccably straight, almost military posture. She wore pressed dark-gray trousers and an ivory blouse of thick silk, looking wild and surreal amidst the Congolese mud. Dark hair, with elegant streaks of gray at the temples, was pulled into a tight, severe knot at the nape. Her face—with its chiseled, high cheekbones, thin lips, and deep-set dark eyes—projected absolute, icy control over herself and her surroundings.

Behind her, looming like a massive cast shadow, emerged a man of about the same age. He was thickly built, with a bull neck, a completely shaved skull, a broken nose, and a thick mustache. A jagged burn scar ran down his bare forearm. His stance, and the way his eyes instantly evaluated fields of fire, betrayed the training of a career special forces officer.

The woman slowly descended the metal stairs. Her expensive leather boots crunched dryly on the gravel. She approached Leo, stopping one step away.

“Hello, Doctor,” her voice was low, velvety, and utterly indifferent. She spoke French with a faint, hard Eastern European accent. “You must be Dr. Leo Gonzales. My name is Diana Pătrașcu. And this,” she made a barely perceptible gesture with a slender hand toward the bald giant, “is Dragoș. Dragoș Horia. He is in charge of security for our facility.”

Leo straightened his shoulders, forcing himself past the dull, nauseating pain in his solar plexus: “You have abducted an employee of an international UN mission. That is a grave criminal offense…”

Diana stopped him with a raised palm bearing an expensive silver signet ring—softly, but with absolute finality: “We haven’t abducted you, Doctor. We have brought you in for an urgent consultation. Our employee is dead, and we have no virologists among our security staff. Your expertise is vital to us.”

At that moment, the blond commander, whose rifle butt was still echoing in Leo’s ribs, walked up: “What should we do with the body, Ms. Pătrașcu?”

Diana cast a quick, thoroughly disgusted glance at the black plastic bag the fighters were already pulling from the trunk of the second jeep.

“Take it to the freezer for now… Yes, and get our guest some breakfast.”

Chapter Eight. The Return →
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