”Are you all right?” she called over the storm.
”Yes. You?”
”I’ll live. Maybe,” she qualified it.
He grunted. “You’re damn lucky, English. I’m going to sleep.”
Without another word, he collapsed, not even bothering to crawl into his sleeping bag. Margo glanced at Kynan. He gestured for her to rest.
”My watch,” he said in his careful English.
Margo just nodded, knowing she’d have found the strength to stand watch if she’d had to, but thanking God and every angel in the heavens she didn’t have to. If another emergency threatened, Kynan would wake them. She fell asleep before her cheek even hit the sodden sleeping bag.
Five days into their wretched journey, they ran out of food-and Koot van Beek fell seriously ill. He woke with a high fever and terrible chills.
”Malaria,” he chattered between clenched teeth.
”But we took anti-malarials!”
”Not … not a sure-fire prevention. G-get the quinine tablets.”
Margo dug out the medical kit with trembling hands. She read the instructions again to be sure, then dosed him with four tablets of chloroquine and covered him with one of their sleeping bags. They had no food left to help him regain his strength. The river banks were barren of anything that could be shot and fetched back as food.
Where are all those stupid animals when we need them? I’m hungry-and Koot may be dying!
She’d have shot anything that remotely resembled food in a heartbeat. She’d even have cooked one of those lousy drowned carcasses, if she could’ve gotten close enough to one to snag it. She bit her lips and tried to cope with an overwhelming sense of failure. When they stopped for the night, pulling the raft onto the flood-ravaged bank, Margo sat in her miserable corner of the raft and held her head in her hands and started admitting the hardest truths she had ever had to face.