face and body whipped by the unseen tentacles of overgrowth. The path
twisted-right, left, right, right, right, Jesus! circles-and then
became straight again for a short stretch at the bottom of the slope.
But it was still true. He was still on it. That was all that mattered.
Then he veered off. The path wasn’t there. It was gone!
There was an ear-shattering screech in the darkness, magnified by the
jungle downpour. In the beam of his flashlight, deep within a
palm-covered hole below him, was a wild pig suckling its blind young.
The hairy, monstrous face snarled and screeched once more and started to
rise, shaking its squealing offspring from its teats. McAuliff ran to
his left, into the wall of the jungle. He stumbled on a rock. Two,
three rocks. He fell to the wet earth, the flashlight rolling on the
ground. The ground was flat, unobstructed.
He had found the path again!
He got to his feet, grabbed the light, shifted the rifle under his arm,
and raced down the relatively clear jungle corridor.
Clear for no more than a hundred yards, where it was intersected by a
stream, bordered by soft, foot-sucking mud.
He remembered the stream. The runner who had used the name Marcus had
turned left. Was it left ? Or was it the from the opposite direction?
… No, it was left. There had been palm trunks and rocks showing
through the surface of the water, crossing the narrow stream. He ran to
the left, his flashlight aimed at the midpoint of the water.
There were the logs! The rocks. A hastily constructed bridge to avoid
the ankle-swallowing mud.
And on the right palm trunk were two snakes in lateral slow I motion,
curving their way toward him. Even the Jamaican mongoose did not have
the stomach for Jamaica’s Cock Pit.
Alexander knew these snakes. He had seen them in Brazil. Anaconda
strain. Blind, swift-striking, vicious. Not fatal, but capable of
causing paralysis-for days. If flesh came within several feet of the
flat heads, the strikes were inevitable.
He turned back to the overgrowth, the beam of light crisscrossing the
immediate area. There was a dangling branch of a ceiba tree about six
feet long. He ran to it, bending it back and forth until it broke off.
He returned to the logs.
The snakes had stopped, alarmed. Their oily, ugly bodies were entwined,
the flat heads poised near each other, the blind, pinlike eyes staring
fanatically in the direction of the scent. At him.
Alex shoved the ceiba limb out on the log with his left hand, the rifle
and flashlight gripped awkwardly in his right.
Both snakes lunged simultaneously, leaping off the surface of the log,
whipping their bodies violently around the branch, their heads zeroing
toward McAuliff’s hand, soaring through the soft leaves.
Alex threw–dropped? he would never know-the limb into the water. The
snakes thrashed; the branch reeled in furious circles and sank beneath
the surface.
McAuliff ran across the logs and picked up the path.
He had gone perhaps three-quarters of a mile, certainly no more than
that. The time elapsed was twelve minutes by his watch. As he
remembered it, the path veered sharply to the right through a
particularly dense section of fern and maidenhead to where there was a
small clearing recently used by a band of hill-country hunters.
Marcus-the man who used the name of Marcus-had remarked on it.
From the clearing it was less than a mile to the banks of the Martha
Brae and the campsite. The Dunstone advantage had to be diminishing.
It had to be.
He reached the nearly impossible stretch of overgrowth, his flashlight
close to the earth, inspecting the ground for signs of passage. If he
stepped away from the path now-if he moved into the underbrush that had
not seen human movement-it would take him hours to find it again.
Probably not until daylight–or when the rains stopped.
It was painfully slow, agonizingly concentrated. Bent weeds, small
broken branches, swollen borders of wet ground where once there had been
the weight of recent human feet; these were signs, his codes. He could
not allow the tolerance of a single error.
“Hey, mon!” came the muted words.
McAuliff threw himself to the ground and held his breath.
Behind him, to his left, he could see the beam of another flashlight.
Instantly he snapped off his own.
“Hey, mon, where are you? Contact, please. You went off your pattern.
Or I did.”
Contact, please … Off your pattern. The terms of an agent, not the
language of a carrier. The man was MI-6.
Past tense. Was.
Now Dunstone, Limited.
The Dunstone team had separated, each man assigned an area … a
pattern. That could only mean they were in radio contact.
Six men in radio contact.
Oh, Jesus!
The beam of light came nearer, dancing, flickering through the
impossible foliage.
“Here, mon!” whispered Alex gutturally, hoping against reasonable hope
that the rain and the whisper would not raise an alarm in the Dunstone
ear.
“Put on your light, please, mon.”
“Trying to, mon.” No more, thought McAuliff. Nothing.
The dancing beam reflected off a thousand shining, tiny mirrors in the
darkness, splintering the light into hypnotically flickering shafts.
Closer.
Alex rolled silently off the path into the mass of wet earth and soft
growth, the rifle under him cutting into his thighs.
The beam of light was nearly above him, its shaft almost clear of
interference. In the spill he could see the upper body of the man.
Across his chest were two wide straps: one was connected ‘ o an encased
radio, the other to the stock’ of a rifle, its thick barrel silhouetted
over his shoulder. The flashlight was in the left hand; in the right
was a large, ominouslooking pistol.
The MI-6 defector was a cautious agent. His instincts had been aroused.
McAuliff knew he had to get the pistol; he could not allow the man to
fire. He did not know how near the others were, how close the other
patterns.
Now!
He lashed his right hand up, directly onto the barrel of the pistol,
jamming his thumb into the curvature of the trigger housing, smashing
his shoulder into the man’s head, crashing his left knee up under the
man’s leg into his testicles. With the impact, the man buckled and
expunged a tortured gasp; his hand went momentarily limp, and Alex
ripped the pistol from it, propelling the weapon into the darkness.
From his crouched agony the Jamaican looked up, his left hand still
holding the flashlight, its beam directed nowhere at the earth, his face
contorted … about to take the necessary breath to scream.
McAuliff found himself thrusting his fingers into the man’s mouth,
tearing downward with all his strength. The man lurched forward,
bringing the hard metal of the flashlight crashing into Alex’s head,
breaking the skin. Still McAuliff ripped at his mouth, feeling the
teeth puncturing his flesh, sensing the screams.
They fell, twisting in midair, into the overgrowth. The Jamaican kept
smashing the flashlight into McAuliffs temple; Alex kept tearing
grotesquely, viciously, at the mouth that could sound the alarm he could
not allow.
They rolled over into a patch of sheerjungle mud. McAuliff felt a rock,
he tore his left hand loose, ripped the rock up from the ground, and
brought it crashing into the black mouth, over his own fingers. The
man’s teeth shattered; he choked on his own saliva. Alex whipped out
his bleeding hand and grabbed the matted hair, twisting the entire head
into the soft slime of the mud. There were the muffled sounds of
expulsion beneath the surface. A series of miniature filmy domes burst
silently out of the soggy earth in the spill of the fallen flashlight.
And then there was nothing.
The man was dead.
And no alarms had been sent.
Alexander reached over, picked up the light, and looked at the fingers
of his right hand. The skin was slashed, there were teeth marks, but
the cuts were not deep; he could move his hand freely, and that was all
he cared about.
His left temple was bleeding, and the pain terrible, but not
immobilizing. Both would stop … sufficiently.
He looked over at the dead Jamaican and he felt like being sick. There
was no time. He crawled back to the path and started once again the
painstaking task of following it.
And he tried to focus his eyes into the jungle. Twice, in the
not-too-distant denseness, he saw sharp beams of flashlights.
The Dunstone team was continuing its sweep. It was zeroing in.
There was not an instant to waste in thought.
Eight minutes later he reached the clearing. He felt the accelerated
pounding in his chest; there was less than a mile to go. The easiest
leg of the terrible journey. He looked at his watch. It was exactly
four minutes after twelve midnight.
Twelve was also the house of noon.