Rosa Rio
Copyright© 2025 by Jody Daniel
Chapter 9
“Goma Tower, Reaper niner three two ready for takeoff at one seven. Departure straight out to the south. We have information Charley,” Nisreen transmitted crisply, her voice steady, clipped, utterly professional.
I sat back, eyes sweeping over the instrument panel, fingers light on the throttle quadrant. Every dial, every needle was where it should be. Tookie-Tookie — the nickname we’d given our bird, the Embraer EMB 312 Tucano — waited at the holding point, muscles coiled like a runner on the blocks. For this mission she wore the call sign Reaper Nine Three Two.
“Reaper niner three two, you are cleared onto runway one seven. You have air control clearance. Take off when ready, ” came the tower’s reply, the crackle of VHF wrapped around calm authority.
I flicked a glance at Nisreen. “Ready, Ice?” I asked, calling her by her call-sign. Cool under fire, sharp as broken glass.
“All systems go, Spoon. Let her rip,” she said, using my own handle, her grin flashing quick and dangerous in the half-light of the back cockpit.
I eased the Tucano forward, feeling the vibration build beneath me as we rolled onto the runway, nose swinging to catch the white-painted centreline. Then, without hesitation, I rammed the throttle to the stops. The turboprop wound up with that raw, metallic howl I loved — the sound of restrained violence breaking free.
The acceleration pressed us back in our harnesses. Nisreen’s voice cut through the engine noise, calm, measured, counting out the speeds.
“Forty knots ... fifty ... sixty ... sixty-five ... seventy ... seventy-eight ... eight-three ... ninety — Vee Rrr!”
On her call of Velocity Rotate, I eased back on the stick. The nose lifted, weight sloughed off the wheels, and then — clean, sweet separation. Tookie-Tookie unstuck from the tarmac and we were airborne, climbing into the heavy Congolese sky.
“Undercarriage going up,” Nisreen said.
I felt, more than heard, the thump and shudder of the wheels beginning to cycle. Instinctively, I tapped the toe brakes, bleeding off the last of the spin. At a hundred and seventy-five kilometres an hour, you don’t want a pair of wheels still screaming when they draw up into the bays.
We were heavy today — four Hydra-70 rocket pods, two AIM-9 Sidewinders, a targeting pod, and enough internal fuel to give us an 800-kilometre round trip. Peacekeeping, they called it, though peacekeeping with teeth. The Oryx troopship we were escorting — the South African Air Force bird we called “Whirlybird” — carried the boots and berets. We carried the stings.
“Climbing to angels one-five,” I advised, watching the altimeter tick. The prop clawed us up steadily. “Ready on the O2 when we pass eleven-three.”
“Roger,” Nisreen replied, her hand already brushing the oxygen switch. “Standing by. Whirlybird airborne at five o’clock low.”
I glanced at the TCAS scope, then out the canopy. Sure enough, a squat gray shape down in our rear quadrant, rotors flashing as the Oryx heaved itself into the sky. Solid, dependable, but slow — an easy mark without us.
“Got them on TCAS,” I confirmed. I dipped the wing and began a slow, protective orbit around the chopper. “Starting first spin around Whirlybird. Holding off two klicks.”
The horizon tilted. The Congo rolled beneath us, a sprawl of deep green jungle and the occasional red-brown scar where roads or villages pushed back the forest. The air was humid, the haze already thickening though it wasn’t yet morning.
And so began our first operational sortie.
I risked a glance back at Nisreen. She was busy, eyes flitting across her console, but I caught it anyway — a spark. The faintest glimmer of excitement lit her dark eyes. She tried to hide it, tried to keep her expression locked in its usual calm.
I felt it too, if I was honest. The thrum of the machine beneath me, the tension of carrying live ordnance, the knowledge that lives depended on us today. Out here, we were more than pilots — we were guardians, sharp-winged angels riding shotgun over a fragile peace.
And damn if it didn’t feel good.
From fifteen thousand feet, the Congo was less a jungle and more an ocean. The canopy stretched to every horizon, rolling and unbroken, a living sea of green that shifted with the sun. From the Tucano’s nose I could trace the subtle contours — long ridges rising like waves, valleys folding inward like troughs. The light picked out the textures: glossy emerald crowns that shimmered under the sun, darker patches where the morning mist still lingered, gray wisps dissolving reluctantly into the heat of the day.
The Oryx below had done its work quickly — down, off-load, up again — and now it was only a memory, a fading speck somewhere east, returning to Goma. The clearing it left behind was already swallowed back into the jungle’s indifference. From up here, it felt as though nothing had ever disturbed the rhythm of the forest.
The sun was climbing higher now, burning away the last of the haze. Shadows shortened, slipping away from the treetops until the whole canopy seemed to glow, as if lit from within. Rivers caught the light and winked like silver threads weaving through the green, disappearing under the leaves only to re-emerge miles away. I could see clearings too — pale squares cut by human hands, scars in the wilderness, though even they seemed softened by distance, smoothed out by the sheer immensity of what surrounded them.
I kept the Tucano in a gentle orbit, the stick steady under my hand. The engine’s hum was a low, constant heartbeat, the only sound inside the cockpit besides the occasional rustle of Nisreen shifting in the back seat. She didn’t need to say anything. There was nothing to say.
For a moment, everything was still. The sky above was a perfect blue, so clean it looked endless, and the earth below was an unbroken tapestry. It was hard not to be lulled by it — the sense that the world, for once, was content to rest. The tension that had wound tight in my chest during the drop-off began to loosen. The Congo, from here, was serene. Eternal. A painting that breathed.
I kept up my rhythm — scan the flight displays, check the engine gauges, sweep the attitude indicator, drift my eyes to the map and the range rings. Everything was in the green. No warnings. The annunciator panel was a black calm of LED silence that felt almost obscene in its normalcy. We’d been circling for what felt like the umpteenth time; muscle memory did the turning, my hand light on the stick as I trimmed for a level pass two kilometres behind the Oryx.
Nisreen was quiet in the back, fingers ghosting over her consoles. Then she spoke, flat and exactly timed the way she does when she wants me to stop daydreaming.
“Sunlight glinting off glass. In a clearing center on the nose, two point eight klicks.”
“Got it,” I said, reflex more than thought. I nudged the nose a degree, bringing her call into the headset in a cleaner line. Instruments bled into each other across my peripheral vision: airspeed steady, altitude steady, fuel margins comfortable. The Tucano felt obedient under me.
“Coming up on the visual screen ... zooming in...” Her voice tightened fractionally. “I have — I have a six-wheeled armoured vehicle. Radar dish and missile launcher on the roof. They’re positioning the tubes to track the Oryx.”
Time shoved its shoulders. Words slowed. The map that had been only a pattern of greens and rivers turned into geometry — man-made, deliberate, and ugly. I didn’t need to hear the word to know the threat; the way Nisreen spoke told me everything. I said it before I processed it. “WZ551, 6×6 IFV, mobile SAM system. Copy. Ready the rockets and the Sidewinders.”
Her answer was unnervingly calm. “Ready on Hydras and Sidewinders. All armed.” She said it like she was reading the ingredients on a menu — creme-topped cupcake at tea time — except this menu was death.
Distance bled away under the range rings. Two point eight became two point two, then one point nine. The Oryx wasn’t fast enough to outrun what was being readied on that little square of dirt. If those tubes finished their sweep and a missile left that launcher, the Oryx was done.
“Hydras tracking — locked on target,” she said.
“Fire.” My voice was a short, hard word and it left my throat with no room for argument.
Nisreen’s tempo shifted. “Firing in three ... two ... one — salvo gone!”
The left wing erupted into daylight. Nineteen Hydra 70 APKWS rockets unleashed almost simultaneously, a staccato of raw thrust and geometry: solid-fuel motors igniting, each streak a white-grey spine against the blue, ribboning smoke hugging the trajectory. The cockpit filled with a deep, pressure-heavy vibration that ran up through the stick into my fists. I could see the muzzle flame flicker along the wingtip reflected in the canopy glass. The WZ551 turned as if remembering it had a job to do, its launcher pivoting and bearing toward the Oryx, tubes angling like the jaws of a predator.
The Oryx must have gotten a threat warning on its systems – its crew popped flares and started a violent countermeasure; a small glittering bouquet blooming away from the aircraft in an attempt to distract any missiles fired towards it.
Then nineteen of our seventy-four rockets hit the mobile SAM launcher.
The first contact was not sound but light — an obscene, instantaneous bloom of orange that painted the undersides and sides of the trees around the clearing in red hot colour. Then came the rest: orange, yellow, crimson, a brutal palette that exploded outward in sheets of fire. The IFV disintegrated in a choreography of metal and combustion; hull plates ripped and curled, fuel and payload detonated in successive pops like a percussive orchestra. In my windscreen the vehicle became a constellation of fragments, then a single, expanding bloom of smoke and heat that rose, black and hungry, into the sky.
“Splash one!” Nisreen called — still oddly composed, though I could hear the grin in her voice — and I had to laugh, because ‘splash’ was for water strikes and she knew it. In the rear-view mirror the lines of her face were lit by reflected fire; excitement flashed behind her calm eyes like a storm caught in sunlight.
“Good shot, Nissie,” I said, the words sounding small against the afterimage of the blast.
“Well, with nineteen rockets fired, at least ONE should have hit!” she giggled, the sound a bright, human thing after all that heat and metal.
“All nineteen hit,” I said. The truth hit me in a different place than the sight — some grim, professional pride. “You didn’t just hit it. You vaporised it.”
There was a pause, and then that shy, almost embarrassed voice that never matched the woman in the back cockpit: “Sorry...” She sounded like a girl who’d been given permission to break a vase and then blamed herself for the noise.
The jungle went back to its painting beneath us — green, indifferent — while smoke plumed and curled skyward on the spot where the WZ551 had been. In the headset, the engines’ steady note was suddenly the only normal thing left. My hands loosened on the stick a fraction. The annunciator warning panel stayed dark. The world outside felt both smaller and more dangerous all at once.
And we carried on towards Goma...
Later that afternoon in a village across lake Kivu in Rwanda.
The slope above Lake Kivu, on the western shore, the Rwanda side, shimmered beneath the noonday sun, a restless sheet of heat that pressed down on the earth until even the dust seemed to glow. The village clung there, a cluster of round huts with thatched crowns, their walls of packed earth the colour of ochre. Narrow paths threaded between them, worn smooth by countless bare feet. Smoke rose in thin, wavering plumes from cooking fires, each column drifting into the thick air until the whole clearing was shrouded in a faint, blue haze.
Children darted between the huts like bright-winged birds, their laughter carrying through the air, cutting against the drone of cicadas. Some clutched sticks, spears in games of battle; others raced toward the lake’s edge where the shallows sparkled, plunging in with shouts that rippled across the water. Their limbs glistened, wet with lake water and sweat, as the heat chased them back to the shore.
Women moved in rhythm, their lives a choreography of quiet purpose. One stirred a pot of cassava over an open flame, shielding her eyes from the smoke that coiled around her face. Another adjusted the basket poised on her head, steady even as she bent to scoop up a bundle of firewood. Two elder women sat together on a reed mat, their pestles rising and falling with a steady beat, grinding grain while murmured words passed between them, broken now and then by low laughter.
Goats grazed among the huts; their bleats brief interruptions in the rhythm of village life. A dog lay in the scant shade of a tree, ears flicking toward passing insects, eyes half-lidded in contentment. The sun was relentless — its heat a living thing that pressed on shoulders, weighed down brows, and turned breath into warmth.
The scent of roasted bananas mingled with woodsmoke and the damp musk of the jungle pressing at the village’s edge. The forest loomed — thick and alive, its canopy a wall of green humming with hidden life: the chatter of unseen monkeys, the flutter of wings, the sigh of leaves heavy with humidity. Beyond it all, the lake glimmered — vast, patient, eternal.
Here, among the Tutsi, memory lingered but rarely announced itself. The scars of the past — when neighbours had once turned against them, when their families had been hunted down — lay mostly unspoken, folded into the rhythms of daily life. To outsiders, the world might see only smoke and sun and laughter; for those who lived here, every pestle-beat, every fire lit, carried an undertone of survival.
Now, they lived under the uneasy watch of men with guns in the hills. The rebels claimed to shield them, a kind of guardianship that hung like a shadow, half promise and half threat. Yet in the clearing of the village, it was the everyday that mattered most: the hiss of food simmering, the patter of children’s feet, the hum of insects rising with the heat.
The camera of the world might tilt upward to capture the smoke weaving into the sky, then pan down to catch a child’s face bright with joy, a mother’s hands darkened with work, a field where goats nosed through dry husks. Life continued here, not in defiance but in endurance — stitched together in firelight, sweat, and laughter beneath the unrelenting Rwandan sun.
The hut at the village’s rim breathed smoke and shadow. Its woven mat was a dark island on the packed-earth floor; five men sat cross-legged there, shoulders squared, silhouettes cut sharp against the thin light that crawled through the reed walls. Their clothing — muted grey and dark green, cut for movement, not celebration — made them look like strangers in a place that kept its own slow rhythms. They were not the village’s fathers or elder farmers. They were something else: a guarded presence, spoken of in low voices and watched with cautious eyes.
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