beyond the point of the near-fatal encounter.
McAuliff saw that the revolutionary had tied a cloth around his forearm;
Alex spat the blood out of his mouth as he noticed it, and rubbed the
area of his kidneys in abstract justification.
The Jamaican pointed up the slope with his left hand and put his right
hand to his mouth at the same time. A whistled treble emerged from his
lips. A bird, a bat, an owl…. it made no difference. There was a
corresponding sound from the top of the riverbank, beyond in the jungle.
“Go up, mon, I will wait here,” said Lawrence.
McAuliff would never know whether it was the panic of the moment or
whether his words spoke the truth as he saw it, but he grabbed the black
revolutionary by the shoulder and pushed him forward. “There won’t be
any more orders given. You don’t know what’s back there. I do! Get
your ass up there!”
An extended barrage of rifle fire came from the river.
Lawrence blinked. He blinked in the new moonlight that flooded the
riverbank of this offshoot of the Martha Brae.
“Okay, mon! Don’t push.”
They crawled to the top of the slope and started into the overgrowth.
The figure came rushing out of the tangled darkness, a darker racing
object out of a void of black. It was Alison.
Lawrence reached back to McAuliff and took the flashlight out of Alex’s
hand. A gesture of infinite understanding.
She ran into his arms. The world … the universe stopped its insanity
for an instant, and there was stillness. And peace and comfort. But
for only an instant.
There was not time for thought. Or reflection.
Or words.
Neither spoke.
They held each other, and then looked at each other in the dim spill of
the new moonlight in the isolated space that was their own on the banks
of the Martha Brae.
In a terrible, violent moment of time. And sacrifice.
Charles Whitehall intruded, as Charley-mon was wont to do. He
approached, his safari outfit still creased, his face an immobile mask,
his eyes penetrating.
“Lawrence and I agreed he would stay down at the river.
Why have you changed that?”
“You blow my mind, Charley..
bore me, McAuliff!” replied Whitehall. “There was up there!”
was in the middle of it, you black son of a ” Jesus, why did he have to
say that? “And you’re to learn what the problem is. Do you understand
that?”
Whitehall smiled. “Do tell … whitey.”
Alison slapped her hands off McAuliff and looked at both men. “Stop
it!”
“I’m sorry,” said Alex quickly.
“I’m not,” replied Whitehall. “This is his moment of truth. Can’t you
see that, Miss Alison?”
Lawrence’s great hands interfered. They touched both men, and his voice
was that of a thundering child-man.
“Neither no more, mon! McAuliff, mon, you say what you know! Now!”
Alexander did. He spoke of the grasslands, the planea plane, not the
Halidon’s-the redneck ganja pilot who had brought six men into the Cock
Pit to massacre the survey, the race to the campsite, the violent
encounter in the jungle that ended in death in a small patch of jungle
mud. Finally, those minutes ago when the runner called Marcus saved
their lives by hearing a cry in the tropic bush.
“Five men, mon,” said Lawrence, interrupted by a new burst of gunfire,
closer now but still in the near-distance to the north. He turned to
Charles Whitehall. “How many do you want, fascisti?”
“Give me a figure, agricula.”
“Goddammit!” yelled McAuliff. “Cut it out. Your games don’t count
anymore.”
“You do not understand,” said Whitehall. “It is the only thing that
does count. We are prepared. We are the viable contestants. Is this
not what the fictions create? One on one, the victor sets the course?”
The charismatic leaders are not the foot soldiers….
They change or are replaced … the words of Daniel, Minister of the
Tribe of Acquaba.
“You’re both insane,” said Alex, more rationally than he thought was
conceivable. “You make me sick, and godn you-”
“Alexander! Alexander!” The cry came from the riverbank less than twenty
yards away. Sam Tucker was yelling.
McAuliff began running to the edge of the jungle.
Lawrence raced ahead, his huge body crashing through the foliage, his
hands pulverizing into sudden diagonals everything in their path.
The black giant jumped to the water’s edge; Alex started down the short
slope and stopped.
Sam Tucker was cradling the body of Marcus the runner in his arms. The
head protruding out of the water was a mass of blood, sections of the
skull were shot off.
Still, Sam Tucker would not let go.
“One of them circled and caught us at the bank. Caught me at the bank
… Marcus jumped out between us and took the fire. He killed the son
of a bitch; he kept walking right up to him. Into the gun.”
Tucker lowered the body into the mud of the riverbank.
McAuliff thought. Four men remained, four killers left of the Dunstone
team.
They were five. But Alison could not be counted now.
They were four, too.
Killers. The Arawak four.
The death odyssey.
Alex felt the woman’s hands on his shoulders, her face pressed against
his back in the moonlight.
The grasslands.
Escape was in the grasslands and the two aircraft that could fly them
out of the Cock Pit.
Yet Marcus had implied that there was no other discernible route but the
narrow, twisting jungle path-a danger in itself.
The path was picked east of the river at the far right end of the
campsite clearing. It would be watched; the MI-6 defectors were
experienced agents. Egress was a priority; the single avenue of escape
would have automatic rifles trained on it.
Further, the Dunstone killers knew their prey was downstream. They
would probe, perhaps, but they would not leave the hidden path
unguarded.
But they had to separate. They could not gamble on the unknown, on the
possibility that the survey team might slip through, try to penetrate
the net.
It was this assumption that led McAuliff and Sam Tucker to accept the
strategy. A variation on the deadly game proposed by Lawrence and
Charles Whitehall. Alexander would stay with Alison. The others would
go out. Separately. And find the enemy.
Quite simply, kill or be killed.
Lawrence lowered his immense body into the dark waters. He hugged the
bank and pulled his way slowly upstream, his pistol just above the
surface, his long knife out of its leather scabbard, in his belt-easily,
quickly retrievable.
The moon was brighter now’ The rain clouds were gone; the towering
jungle overgrowth obstructed but did not blot out the moonlight. The
river currents were steady; incessant, tiny whirlpools spun around
scores of fallen branches and protruding rocks, the latter’s tips
glistening with buffeted moss and matted green algae.
Lawrence stopped; he dropped farther into the water, holding his breath,
his eyes just above the surface. Diagonally across the narrow river
offshoot a man was doing exactly what he was doing, but without the
awareness Lawrence now possessed.
Waist-deep in water, the man held a lethal-looking rifle in front of and
above him. He took long strides, keeping his balance by grabbing the
overhangin gfoliage on the river@g bank, his eyes straight ahead.
In seconds, the man would be directly opposite him.
Lawrence placed his pistol on a bed of fern spray. He reached below and
pulled the long knife from his belt.
He sank beneath the surface and began swimming underwater.
Sam Tucker crawled over the ridge above the riverbank and rolled toward
the base of the ceiba trunk. The weight of his body pulled down a loose
vine; it fell like a coiled snake across his chest, startling him.
He was’north of the campsite now, having made a wide half-circle west,
on the left side of the river. His reasoning was simple, he hoped not
too simple. The Dunstone patrol would be concentrating downstream; the
path was east of the clearing. They would guard it, expecting any who
searched for it to approach from below, not above the known point of
entry.
Tucker shouldered his way up the ceiba trunk into a sitting position. He
loosened the strap of his rifle, lifted the weapon, and lowered it over
his head diagonally across his back. He pulled the strap taut. Rifle
fire was out of the question, to be used only in the last extremity, for
its use meant-more than likely-one’s own execution.
That was not out of the question, thought Sam, but it surely would take
considerable persuasion.
He rolled back to a prone position and continued his reptilelike journey
through the tangled labyrinth of jungle underbrush.
He heard the man before he saw him. The sound was peculiarly human, a
casual sound that told Sam Tucker his enemy was casual, not primed for
alarm. A man who somehow felt his post was removed from immediate