by David Gilman
“I want to double-check.”
There was a pause. “All right, Riga. As soon as it’s possible, I’ll have the attack helicopter’s video surveillance tape downloaded to you. But I think it’s over.”
Riga liked certainties. It was how he earned his reputation. It was how he stayed alive.
“I’ll wait,” Riga said.
Xavier followed Max’s instructions, just as he had promised, though he thought he was being asked to do girl’s work. He sat under the shade of a palm tree plaiting together strips of palm frond into a circle, like a crown. He had seen young girls at village weddings wearing things like that on their heads. It was a decoration! He wanted to protest but did not. It was of no consequence. He would keep his word to este chico y sus angeles—this boy and his angels.
Max used his teeth to tear apart some of the cotton pieces he had fished out of the water. They still stank of the fetid mangrove swamp, and he hoped he was not inviting every lethal germ under the sun to invade his body. He tore them into a roughly circular shape and then began ripping strips round the edge. This was going to help them survive the intense sunlight and the flies and mosquitoes. Xavier was muttering under his breath as he painstakingly braided the palm strips. He was clumsy and made a mess of it once or twice, but with grim determination, a tight smile and a shrug, he had continued the task.
It was only a small point, but Max had not told him of the palm crown’s use. If Max could get the boy to help without him needing to question and challenge him, so much the better; then the end result would be self-explanatory. Get on; do the job. Save time; save energy.
So far, so good.
Max knew he had to be organized. Tasks had to be performed, one of which was to make the raft. He could have used the animal tracks to help find their way out of this jungle and get inland, but that would be asking for trouble sooner or later. They certainly didn’t have any effective means of cutting their way through the dense undergrowth. They might not be able to stay on course; they would make less than a kilometer a day and would be vulnerable to the jungle predators. Max had considered the options and was convinced the river offered the best chance of escape. Sooner or later, he felt certain it would take them to a settlement or a town where he hoped the people might have heard of his mother or Danny Maguire. Then he might have a chance of tracking her journey. But he and Xavier needed food and water, much more than the slender vines offered; otherwise they were not going to be strong enough for what was bound to be an arduous journey.
Following Max’s lead, Xavier pulled down thin, twisting creepers that snaked up tree trunks and grubbed up ground roots to bind together the wood that they had gathered. Then Max put a layer of palm leaves on top, which he secured with the fibrous string Xavier had made earlier.
Max pointed. “You should let me see that wound.”
Xavier pulled back. “It’s OK. I don’ want you messin’ with it. What? Now you a doctor or somethin’?”
“OK. If it’s infected, it’s infected. You want to die of blood poisoning, that’s your business.”
Xavier looked worried. He eased up the damp T-shirt and looked at the wound for himself. “You think it’s infected?”
“You don’t let me look—I can’t tell.”
“You won’ touch it? Promise?”
“I promise. But you let your brother’s men fix you up; you never whimpered then.”
“What is ‘whimpered’?”
“Moaning like a baby.”
“Me? Hey, you look all you like. Here!” And Xavier pulled up his T-shirt and knelt next to Max.
The dressing had long since disappeared, and one of the butterfly clips had torn loose from the skin, which was puckered and looked clean. The salt water might have even aided the wound’s healing, but one edge of the wound was discolored, and that blemish was creeping round the boy’s side. It looked to Max as if there was some festering underneath the broken skin, which meant that in a couple of days, exposed to the river water, the infection could go right through the boy’s body.
“Does that hurt?” Max asked as he pressed very gently on the affected part.
Xavier yelped. “You said you weren’t gonna touch!”
Max looked at him. He needed Xavier to feel good—especially for what Max was going to propose. “You’re tougher than I thought,” he said.
“Yeah? I mean, yeah. I’m tough.” And then he thought about it. “Why?”
“It’s infected—it must hurt. You didn’t say anything.”
Xavier wasn’t in much pain, but he pulled a face. It was good to let Max think he could handle it. “It don’ hurt so much.”
“But if that infection gets worse …” Max paused and shook his head sadly, turning away from the boy’s gaze.
“What? Is bad? You think is bad?”
“I wouldn’t be able to get you out of here. I’d have to leave you.”
“What!”
“I’ll send help as soon as I find it.”
“No way! You go, I go. That’s the deal. That’s what I said. I’m with you.”
Max put his arm on the boy’s shoulder. “Good, I was hoping you’d say that. Then you’ll let me fix it?”
Xavier wasn’t certain, but he had talked himself into a corner. Or rather Max had. “OK,” he said.
Max turned over a rotten log. Poking it with his steel-tipped piece of wood, he made sure there were no snakes curled beneath it. Then, skimming away the desiccated wood with his new ax, he found what he was looking for. He carefully lifted the wriggling maggots from the trunk and laid them on a palm leaf. Food and medicine.
Xavier lay on his side, his arm covering his eyes. Max had just explained that you could eat maggots for protein, providing you didn’t take them from a rotting carcass of an animal. Xavier had squirmed almost as much as the maggots, and the reason he had covered his eyes was because Max had popped two or three of the maggots into his own mouth and crunched, not so happily, away. Max grimaced.
“They’re not that bad,” he lied. “They’d be much better cooked, I suppose, but beggars can’t be choosers.”
“I am not going to eat those things. I will puke if you put those squirmy things into my mouth. Puke more than you have ever seen in your life. I would rather die.”
“I didn’t think you’d want to eat them—I brought these for your wound; I’ll find us some food later.”
“And you’re gonna do what?”
Max knelt next to him, took three or four maggots from the leaf and laid them gently on the festering wound. “Don’t look, Xavier. These things could save your life.”
Xavier muttered a private mantra—which sounded like a prayer—to keep his mind off the things that were eating into his flesh. He could barely feel anything other than a soft tickle as they dug into his wound. But he refused to look at it and decided to stay somewhere in his head until this crazy English kid told him it was all OK. He should have been in Miami or New Orleans or anywhere else in the big U.S. with a new name and a new identity, money in the bank and he and Alejandro driving open-top sports cars. It would have been a good life, a safe life, and they would have been legal. But it had all gone horribly wrong, and now he lay in the jungle with maggots eating into him. The devil must be laughing somewhere, getting his own back for all the bad things Alejandro and his men—and Xavier—had done.
“I’m going to forage for food,” Max said, interrupting his thoughts.
Xavier propped himself up and looked toward the dense undergrowth. “You forgettin’ what’s in there? How many lives you think you got? Just ’cause that big cat killed somethin’ las’ night, you think he still ain’t hungry? Maybe he has a friend and say to him, ‘Hey, amigo, you hear about those two kids down near the beach? They got no water; they got no food. They’re just two dumb chicos stranded in the middle of nowhere. They got meat on their bones, and they got nothing to fight with.’ ”
“Jaguars hunt alone and at night.”
“So how come y
ou know everything?”
“I read books and my dad told me.”
“Uh-huh. Your daddy lets you come all the way out to Miami where you help a drug smuggler from gettin’ whacked?”
“I didn’t know you were a drug smuggler.”
“So? If you’d known, you’d have let that crazy guy kill me!”
“If I had, I wouldn’t be in this mess,” Max said.
“Hey, chico, I saved your ass from Mr. Happy Snappy Crocodile.”
“I don’t think so. You didn’t shout loud enough.”
“You got all that mud and water in your ears—tha’s not my fault. OK. I tried to warn you. Don’ you ever say thank you for nothin’?”
“Thank you, Xavier Morera Escobodo Garcia, for trying to shout loud enough.”
“You’re welcome. But you get into trouble again, you on your own.”
Max left him in the shade of the palm trees. He knew he wouldn’t move. The jungle was one place Max did not want to be injured or ill; it was bad enough being fit and strong and having to cope with the energy-sapping heat, which was why he had some sympathy for Xavier.
Max scoured the jungle for any berries, seeds or nuts that he thought were safe to eat. Some he was uncertain of and let them rest on his tongue before spitting out the acid taste. He found three fruits he recognized—light yellow guavas from a tree with white flowers and a nice dark clump of finger bananas. Green-encased coconuts that had fallen from the palm trees had stubbornly resisted being smashed against a rock outcrop, but Max wedged his spearlike shaft into a twisted tree trunk and slammed the coconuts onto the metal tip. They split, revealing the brown hairy coconut inside. He pierced a coconut’s eyes and sucked the white liquid. Now that he had supplies, their chances for survival grew every moment. Cutting and splicing palm leaves together, he made an efficient bag to carry the food he’d foraged.
Max bent down, scuffed aside fallen leaves and dug his fingers into the earth. There was moisture in it, which wasn’t unusual—jungles were usually damp—but he knew rain squalls often hit this part of Central America. One of the noises that came out of the jungle was a creaking groan. It had taken Max some time to remember where he had heard those sounds before—it had been in a bamboo garden his dad had once taken him to. And bamboo held water. There was no choice: Max had to penetrate the darkened jungle, locate the bamboo, then find his way out again.
Flashes of color dipped and swirled through the branches as screeching birds clattered their way into the high canopy. Max moved carefully, listening to the rustling footfalls from unknown creatures around him. The pictures of his mother were still safe and dry in the wallet in his breast pocket. He saw her smiling face in his mind’s eye, felt the warmth in his chest and imagined the melodic song of a jungle bird was that of his mum gently calling him.
Max eased aside the low branches and stepped inside a claustrophobic world that soon engulfed him.
Sayid watched as the people in biohazard suits carried a covered corpse out of the tunnel. They eased the orange-colored body bag onto a gurney and wheeled it to an isolation tent that had been set up on the platform, where another figure, also dressed in a biohazard suit, waited. Sayid could just make out what was happening inside. The body bag was lifted, slipped into yet another protective covering and replaced on the gurney. The side flaps of the tent were opened; regular paramedics took the stretcher and disappeared from view. For a moment, Sayid watched while the recovery team was washed down with what looked like a steam hose as they stood in a catchment tray. He was less interested in them than where Danny Maguire’s body was being taken.
Sayid quickly manipulated the keyboard, found the cameras he wanted and watched as the body was loaded into the back of an ambulance. The area had been cordoned off by police. He had lost sight of the two men who had initially run after Danny, but now he saw a police officer wave a silver Mercedes through the security area. Sayid froze the frame and zoomed in on the car’s window. It was the same two men.
A police motorcycle escort led the ambulance away from the station, and the Mercedes tucked in behind. The small convoy sped away into London traffic. Seconds later the tape went blank. Sayid keyed in a search for a London street map. He needed to work out which way the ambulance was going. And now that he had his program in place, he would be able to link into the CCTV street cameras that adorned almost every building and streetlamp in the city, watching like vultures.
Max followed the faint outline of an animal track through the undergrowth. He moved slowly and cautiously, always listening to the sounds of the jungle, muscles tensed, the length of the metal-tipped shaft in one hand, the crude ax in the other. The complaining bamboo was somewhere over to the right. Every twenty paces, he had tied a thin strip of salvaged cotton cloth on low-lying branches so he could find his way out. He tied the last piece round a branch exactly where he was to step off the animal track. It was so overgrown that unless he could take a mental picture of where he had walked, even the cotton strips could be lost from sight. The next dozen paces took him nearly fifteen minutes—pretty good going, given the density of the trees and vines. He bent leaf stems to help him find his way to the cotton strips but was wary of where he grabbed a handhold; some of those slender branches were armored with vicious, needlelike thorns. If they broke off in flesh, they would fester, and tropical fever could soon follow. Then he would be a helpless victim of the creatures of the jungle.
Finally, the dense thicket of bamboo was in front of him. Each shaft was thicker than his leg and soared up into the canopy. He tapped one of the poles. It sounded hollow, but the next ringed section gave him hope. Using his shaft of wood as a spear, he pressed the point against the bamboo and leaned with all his weight. A small crack appeared and moisture seeped out. Now that the bamboo had been split, he aimed carefully and cut away more of the wood with his ax. Water poured out; he went down quickly on one knee and sucked in the cool, clear liquid. He did this two or three more times, and once he’d drunk enough, he filled the water bottle.
He turned round, searching for the way he had come in, but nothing looked familiar. It was just a mishmash of trees, vines and undergrowth. His foot caught a root and he fell back; for a brief moment he felt a surge of panic as he went under the claustrophobic foliage. Something bit his shoulder. Like a scorpion sting, it broke skin. Twisting quickly, he saw that he had landed on one of those viciously spiked branches he had been so careful to avoid.
For a few seconds, it felt as though the jungle and its heat encircled him, making it impossible to move. Sweat stung his eyes. Then, as if someone had turned off the volume, the jungle went silent. All his instincts were heightened. Somewhere behind him, the bushes shuddered and he saw a shadow mottled with yellow and black markings appear and disappear just as quickly. It was as if there was a tunnel through the tangled undergrowth barely knee-high from the ground.
Max gazed down through the green light until he saw the face of the jaguar. His eyes were on the same level as the big cat’s. The jaguar made a small, snarling sound, baring its fangs, but it did not seem to be an overtly aggressive act. Max realized that he was nodding as if he understood—this was not his hunting ground; it belonged to the cat. A deep, almost unfathomable part of him recalled the time in Africa when a shaman had saved his life and endowed him the primal ability to project himself outside of his body and into the consciousness of other creatures. Like now.
There was another movement behind the big cat, and Max heard a softer snarl. It was a young jaguar, probably no more than a year old, still too young to provide for itself. It had to learn to survive in the jungle, but for now it was protected by its mother.
The burning pain in his shoulder snapped him back to reality.
He blinked. The tunnel was empty. The moment was gone.
Xavier made teeth-sucking noises as he squeezed out the thorns from Max’s shoulder and muttered as he applied himself to the task. Max grimaced and gasped as the boy’s nails dug into his flesh. A
couple of thorns had broken off in his shoulder muscle. Max told Xavier how to get them out by using a flat piece of stone to drag the flesh upward until the ends appeared—squeezing embedded thorns could make them fester. But the stubborn thorns were in too deep; Xavier had to try forcing them out. All he got was blood that welled into the punctures.
Enough was enough. “OK, leave them, Xavier. We’ve got to push on.”
“You sure ’bout that? It don’ look too good.”
Max nodded. They had to finish the raft. The pain would have to be endured, but the injury worried him. How long did he have before the wound became infected and rendered him useless? Now, more than ever, he needed some luck on his side if he was to survive. Instinct demanded that he strike out and get as far as he could upriver. Somewhere in this impenetrable world was the place where his mother had died. He had to know the truth about her death. And why his father had, by his own confession, abandoned her.
Riga studied his laptop screen as he followed the surveillance video of the firefight between the attacking helicopter and Alejandro’s go-fast boat. It had taken the better part of the day for the secret report to reach him from Cazamind’s contacts in a U.S. intelligence agency. The silent film offered no indication of the power of the guns as they hammered the boat into submission, but as Riga’s analytical eye studied every movement of the desperate fight, he acknowledged an admiration for Alejandro’s skill and courage. The film showed no evidence of the boat running away from the fight; rather, it was taking the fight to the helicopter. He saw bodies fall and watched as the boat zigzagged across the reef. There were moments when the boat was out of view, and it was these missing fragments of time that held his attention. He played the download time and again. There were clearly six people on the boat at one stage, and from what he had been told, Max Gordon was one of them. The helicopter had obviously overshot the boat, and when the camera focused again on the fight seconds before the boat exploded, Riga counted the bodies. It was possible that the boat’s passengers had been killed and now lay out of sight or that they had fallen overboard in those missing moments, but Riga was not convinced. The boat had swerved for land, the angle had changed, the waves obscured an erratic maneuver and then, as the helicopter had gone past, turned and reengaged the men shooting from the speeding craft, there were only two men left standing. The exploding boat would have disintegrated them, or their bodies may have been thrown clear. The Coast Guard had reported recovering two bodies, both men in their early twenties.
