Camouflage Heart

by Dana Marton

  His lungs choked with the water he swallowed, but he reached her. “Hang on tight.” He cut the vine that held her trapped.

  The current grabbed on to the extra weight and pushed them both under for a second. They came up spluttering. He kicked with his feet to stay afloat, grabbed onto the rope, one hand over the other again and again, struggling to pull them in.

  The progress was slow, swimming in the strong current with her hanging on to his neck damn near impossible. They spent as much time underwater as above it. But then his feet touched the muddy bottom, and soon hers did, too.

  For a moment they clung to each other, standing together against the rage of the river that swirled around them. He barely caught his breath when he heard the spluttering sound of a motor then the next second spotted the boat that came from upriver.

  Damn.

  He pointed it out to Audrey, took a deep breath, and when he saw her do the same, pulled her under with him. He headed for an overhang of bushes by the bank, going by feel, the water so murky there was no point in opening his eyes. He held her hand tight, came up when he felt the branches with his other hand, pulled her farther in.

  “Omar’s men?” Audrey whispered against his ear.

  Overhanging leaves hid them from view, but they could see the river through the small gaps between branches.

  “Poachers.”

  The boat stopped and the six men inside looked over the tied-out log. One of them killed the motor, scanned both banks. Brian strained to hear what they were saying, but couldn’t. Then they tensed, reached for their weapons.

  He grabbed his knife under the water, knowing there was little he could do if they spotted his hiding spot. They had guns. Even if he threw the knife well and took one out, the other five would shoot Audrey and him into sieves.

  But the men weren’t looking at him. Soon they all turned their attention upriver. And then he could hear it, too, the sounds of a motor once again.

  The boat that came around the bend was smaller than the poachers’, but the four guerillas were better armed, holding semiautomatics instead of hunting rifles. The two groups watched each other warily, neither of them saying a word to the other.

  For a moment, the tension was palpable in the air, every man gripping his gun. Then the guerillas floated by. Their small boat carried some kind of a crate, covered with tarp. The men were positioned two in the front, two in the back. He watched them carefully, but didn’t recognize any.

  The poachers waited a good ten minutes before they followed.

  When they were out of sight, Brian waded from under the bushes and, once he made sure it was safe, he signaled to Audrey to follow. They made their way to shore—not an easy task. There was no game trail on this side, the vegetation thick to the point of impenetrable, as the plants fought for light.

  He was careful to select the thinnest spot, to bend the branches instead of breaking them, to trample as little as possible. Even when he got past that first barrier, he made a point to walk on moss that would spring back up fast, or on stones, instead of in mud that would leave tracks—in case the guerillas came back later to investigate. Audrey followed his example without having to be told.

  Once he was sure they couldn’t be seen from the river, he stopped. “Check yourself over.” He turned from her. “Let me know if you need help.” He ran the odd scene on the river through his mind again. It didn’t add up. His instincts bristled.

  “I’m glad they didn’t get into a fight,” Audrey said behind him.

  He peeled off his clothes and squeezed the water out, draped them over branches, careful not to put anything on the ground.

  “That’s just it. The poachers had a better boat and it was loaded. But the guerillas had better weapons. I thought they would attack.” His legs and torso were all right, but he had a couple of leeches on each arm, five fatties on his shoulders where they had sneaked under his collar.

  Judging by the squeak that came from behind him, they had gotten Audrey, too.

  “Help,” she said.

  He turned and found her staring at two big ones just below the spot where her collarbones met. She still had her underwear on, and the soggy cotton tanktop that hid nothing.

  “Don’t pull,” he said. “Their jaws can get ripped. Anything that stays under your skin ups your chances for an infection.” A lighter or some salt would have helped, but they didn’t have either. “If you can stand them for another minute or two, they’ll get full and fall off on their own. It’s the safest.”

  “Oh, gross.”

  “So tell me about your sister,” he said as one of his friends dropped to the ground. He kicked it away with his boot, then looked around for food. A profusion of palm trees grew around the river, but it looked like the wildlife had already gotten to them.

  “She’s great. She’s younger than me, very pretty, very wild. And she is brilliant, working on her Ph.D. in mathematics. If she wasn’t my sister, I could really learn to hate her,” she joked. “We missed spending time together and she decided to come with me for moral support. She’s a teacher so she has the summer off anyway. Trev is always up to his neck in work. They got married last year. Actually, she met Trev at my wedding.” The last words were said on a tone slightly different from the rest.

  He shook the water out of his boots, scraped off the river mud. “Do you miss your ex?”

  She gave him a small, wry smile. “No. I still see him from time to time. Trev and he are close friends.” She thought for a moment. “I miss the idea of true love, that it’s supposed to last forever through thick and thin. I mean, I know now that the whole thing is just a fantasy. A couple is just two people, and people change, and sometimes they change in different directions. I guess I miss the innocence of believing that happily-ever-after is possible. My parents are divorced. I always swore that would never happen to me. I hate failing.”

  He could understand that sentiment. Brian shook out his pants and put them back on. “My father used to say romance was invented by greeting card companies and Hollywood to sell merchandise.”

  Pain was real, as was violence, the old man had said, and the struggle for survival. There were hormones and pheromones, and good old-fashioned primal sexual instinct, but that was all. Everything else was just stuff people deluded themselves into believing.

  His parents had cared for each other and that made for a decent marriage and a fine home for him. But whatever their marriage had been before his father had gone off to war, it was certainly no passionate love affair after. The war had changed him, he used to say. It had changed both of them.

  “Here we go.”

  Her leeches fell off almost at the same time as most of his, and she skipped to step away from them. She reached for the spot on her skin, but he stopped her. “Let it bleed for a while. The blood will cleanse the wound. It’ll stop on its own.”

  He nudged the last leech on his shoulder, and when it let go, he put on his shirt, just as Audrey finished buttoning hers.

  “Aren’t you worried about blood loss?” She looked at him.

  “A handful of leeches don’t take enough to be concerned over.”

  “They’re still nasty.” Her voice was thick with revulsion.

  “We better get going. We have to find a place to camp before nightfall. Tomorrow’s gonna be a rough day. But if we keep a good pace, we’ll be at Hamid’s camp by tomorrow night.”

  She nodded and followed him without complaints. They walked upriver, at enough distance from the muddy bank to avoid leaving tracks and keep out of the dense undergrowth that grew there. He cut back to the water only twice, to remove the two vine ropes from the palms and toss them into the river.

  Something about those guerillas didn’t sit right with him. They might yet come back to look for the poachers. He didn’t want them to find his and Audrey’s tracks instead.

  FIRE MADE all the difference. The smoke repelled the bugs, the heat kept the chill of the night at bay. Audrey picked the last of the m
eat off the fish bones. Compared to the bitter roots they had existed on all day, the meal seemed like an extravagant treat. Thanks to Brian.

  He sat across from her, engrossed in making more hooks from bone. His clothes were drying on the bushes, side by side with hers. Since it wasn’t raining for once, they were aiming for a dry night with dry clothes and some sleep in comfort. Their boots hung upside down, speared on three-foot-tall sticks to keep them off the ground and away from bugs. Brian had sprinkled the perimeter of their small camp with ashes to keep crawling insects away. Ants hated ashes, apparently, as did a number of their other bugsy friends.

  If you had to be stuck in the jungle, this was the man to do it with. Audrey stood to stretch her legs, her eyes straying to his shoulders, the way the firelight played on the muscles that flexed when he put pressure on his knife. His hands were steady. She only remembered seeing them shake a couple of times today. Amazing what two days of freedom did to the man.

  He was transforming slowly, in front of her eyes. He was moving better, his legs getting accustomed to walking. Even his gestures and the way he carried himself were changing. She could have sworn he had grown taller, although it was probably an illusion. He was walking straighter, his body growing used to being free from the confines of the cage.

  “How old are you?” she asked, then regretted it. The question would probably make him think of the years he’d lost. “You don’t have to answer. Never mind.”

  “What’s today?”

  She left the hotel a week ago. “The seventh. August,” she added.

  He raised his gaze to her, his expression inscrutable. “I turned thirty-one last month.”

  She stared at him. “I’ll be thirty-one this fall.”

  They were the same age. It drove home the horror he must have been living in the past couple of years. When she had first seen him, she had thought him old enough to be her father. Even now— She would have definitely not guessed him to be thirty-one.

  It wasn’t his body—that looked powerful, ageless. She let her gaze slide over the wide shoulders again and the well-muscled arms, the flat stomach, then glanced away when she got to his underwear—if it could be called that—the handmade piece was little more than a loincloth.

  The illusion of age came from the ever-present shadow on his face, and in his brilliant blue eyes. Eyes that said they’d seen too much.

  She’d glimpsed eyes like that before at the clinic, seen the men and women who had tried to escape their memories by hiding behind drugs or alcohol. Half the people she’d admitted had had some history of severe trauma, physical or sexual abuse, rape, war. A handful of veterans were in residence at any given time.

  Brian fed the fire.

  Where would his past take him? He had such a strength, not just of his body, but a steel core inside.

  He met her gaze, and she looked away.

  She shook their clothes out, turned them on the branches to bring the wet sides closer to the fire. A wad of crumpled papers fell out of his pocket. “What’s this?”

  “Probably Omar’s shopping list. It got wet before I had a chance to read it. I can read words here and there. None of it makes any sense. I kept them to use as tinder, but they never had a chance to dry out.”

  “Do you speak Malay?”

  He nodded. “I picked up some over the years.”

  She flipped through the pages, her gaze settling on what looked like numbers. She pulled closer to the fire. If she looked at it from just the right angle… “There’s a date here.”

  “Yeah?” Brian went back to carving, not looking too excited.

  “August ten.”

  “Maybe he was asking Hamid to a meeting, although—” He set the hook aside and reached for the papers.

  “What?”

  “The guerillas don’t exactly schedule like businessmen. It’s always in a few days, or after the monsoon. They have a different sense of time here in the jungle. Giving or taking a day doesn’t matter much. Hell, most of the time they probably don’t even know what day it is.”

  “What’s KL?” She scrutinized the paper over his shoulder.

  “Where?”

  She pointed.

  “Damn.”

  “What?”

  “I thought it was a blotch. KL is what the locals call Kuala Lumpur, the capital. Nobody but tourists say the full name.”

  He riffled through the pages. Silence stretched to a minute, then two.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  He turned to look at her. “The crate in the boat.”

  She nodded.

  “Maybe the guerillas didn’t shoot at the poachers because they couldn’t risk return fire.”

  “Makes sense if the crate was full of explosives.”

  “Or maybe they were just in a hurry to get somewhere.”

  She tilted her head. “Kuala Lumpur, August tenth?”

  He came to his feet and put on his pants. “When we get to Hamid’s camp, we’ll radio it in.”

  “Do you think they’re planning an attack?”

  “A couple of days ago, I would have said no. Going after civilians wasn’t Jamil’s M.O. and Hamid wouldn’t have done something this major without his support. But now…” He shrugged. “Omar is just hotheaded and bloodthirsty enough. He wants to make a name for himself. He wants to bring the fight to the next level. He probably has some kind of an agreement with Hamid. It makes sense.” He stared into the fire, his expression pensive.

  “This is major, isn’t it?”

  He nodded. “There’ve been changes. Talk. I don’t know—a feeling around camp. Too much coming and going. I knew something was up, but I thought it was just Omar, trying to figure out a way to get himself to the top. If we are right and there’s an attack planned in KL, it could be just the opening act. Omar and Hamid are both in on it. What if the others are, too? What if this is the beginning of a major offensive?”

  “We have to let someone know.”

  “We can’t be still in the jungle when it happens, that’s for sure. I have a feeling the Royal Malaysian Air Force will retaliate by bombing the hell out of this patch of the island.”

  She checked her clothes, found them dry and put them on, except for the socks. Brian had warned her to let her feet breathe at night.

  It said something about the man that he took care to explain the smallest things to help her avoid discomfort. He had been giving her a crash course on jungle survival as they’d walked, giving her his vote of confidence that she would remember and could handle things. Instead of treating her like a clueless burden, he related to her as an equal—a teammate. She appreciated that.

  “So what do we do now?” she asked.

  “Get as much sleep as we can, then start out at first light. Hamid probably has a satellite phone or radio. We’ll call in what we know.”

  Chapter Six

  The rain had started toward dawn and forgot to stop. Although they kept close to the river, there was no point trying to get a fish for lunch—lighting a fire was out of the question. They ate grubs and whatever fruit they could find as they walked, boots sticking in the mud.

  Starting midafternoon they started to check the water’s edge more and more often, fighting the dense vegetation to get to it. Then they came across the spot they were looking for—a narrow area where the bushes had been cleared. Brian looked over the two motorboats pulled up on shore.

  He watched the trail from the cover of the bushes, and when he was certain it was deserted, turned back to Audrey, who squatted behind him.

  “I have to go check out the camp while there’s still daylight to see.”

  She rose, ready to follow him wherever he would lead her. Her blind trust in him was gratifying and frightening at the same time. What the hell was he supposed to do with her? She’d be in danger if she came with him and she’d be in danger if he left her here alone. There was no safe spot for an untrained civilian in the jungle.

  “What’s wrong?” S
he blinked away the raindrops that clung to her eyelashes, squinting, puzzled at his hesitation.

  She looked like a drowned mouse. She looked gorgeous. He’d had beautiful women at one time in his life, although his relationships had tended to be as brief as they were few and far between. One girl had accused him of missing the bonding gene. She had been right. He barely remembered her, other than that she’d been fun-loving and easy.

  “I can’t believe we’re finally here. We’re going to get Nicky back today.”

  He nodded. There was nothing easy about Audrey Benedict.

  He motioned to her to stick to him as he followed the trail at a distance from the forest.

  Unlike Omar’s camp, Hamid’s was much bigger than just a clearing in the jungle. Shacks spread up the hillside, with a large steel-frame building dominating the landscape, a gray satellite dish on top outlined against the green background. He could see all manner of industrial equipment, rusting, overrun by vines, in the process of being reclaimed by the jungle.

  “An abandoned mine,” he whispered to Audrey, keeping behind the bushes as he eyed the structures. There was nobody outside, and he couldn’t blame them, the rain was coming down pretty hard. He could see shadows moving in several windows. They were watching.

  He tensed when the door of one of the sheds opened, but the man who came out sprinted to another building without looking their way.

  “Come on.” He kept low as he moved ahead, circling the camp. They had to get the layout before night fell.

  “How many of them do you think there are?” Audrey kept close behind.

  With everyone inside, it was hard to tell. The rain complicated things. From the size of the dozen or so huts, he figured about fifty men. Of course, half the huts might be empty or, on the other hand, there might be many more guerillas, hiding from the weather in some mine shaft. There could be an army underground, the mine could probably hold hundreds. But he didn’t think so.