by Hank Parker
So he’d given his captors some information, enough to lead them to believe he was telling the truth. He admitted that he was with the agency, revealed Curt and Mariah’s names, and confirmed that he was working with them. But he’d told them it was about an international drug cartel and that his colleagues had already left for Thailand, in pursuit of the ringleader. He figured the story would at least buy him some time, maybe allow him to escape somehow and warn his colleagues.
But they’d been back within hours. They’d called him a liar and claimed they had ready access to a worldwide information network, that Curt and Mariah had never left the Philippines, and that they now had the two Americans in custody. If he didn’t talk, they said, didn’t tell them everything, they would kill his colleagues. Angus had no way of knowing if they were bluffing about holding Curt and Mariah, but he had no reason to doubt it and every reason to believe that they would carry out their threat. And that was something he would do everything in his power to prevent. He could never live with himself if his actions led to his father’s death.
But Angus also figured that even if he talked, these thugs would probably kill Curt and Mariah. He decided to take the chance that they were bluffing about the capture. He refused to talk more.
So they’d injected him.
Hours later, when he’d emerged from a fog, his captors told him what he’d disclosed. His CIA experience, his history with Cothran, Curt, and Mariah, their reasons for being in the Philippines, and the one thing that he’d hoped against hope that he’d never reveal: that Curt was his father. And now he had to live with what he’d done.
* * *
Very early the next morning, Mariah and Curt exited their hotel into a driving rain, loaded their bags into the back of a dark green Land Cruiser, and climbed in, Curt in the front and Mariah in the back. The driver introduced himself as Lieutenant Ray Alvarez, from the U.S. Navy, as he slowly pulled away from the curb and flicked the wipers up to a high speed. Mariah shivered in the Cruiser’s AC.
They soon left the city behind. Mariah strained to see where they were going, but all that was visible was what the headlights illuminated: the road immediately ahead and a fringe of dark bushes along the sides. At first Alvarez and Curt talked to each other in a kind of shorthand that made Mariah wonder if this was another guy Curt already knew, but soon she decided that this was simply the way military people communicated. She gathered that Alvarez and his team comprised a United States–Philippines task force that worked in counterterrorism throughout the region. “Essentially,” she heard him to say to Curt, “we focus on Abu Sayyaf.”
“We have recent intel,” Alvarez said, “that Omar was sighted with an Abu Sayyaf element near Mount Dajo. That’s about five miles from here, in the middle of the national park. Plan is to capture the guy. He could be carrying this virus, but we’re not even sure what to be looking for, let alone how to handle it safely. He might even threaten to release it somehow. That’s where you come in.”
“Expecting any action?” asked Curt.
“Most likely not. We’ll have the element of surprise. But you never know for sure. We do know about your own special ops background, Dr. Kennedy, but it’s probably best that your partner remain behind. She’ll be safe at our base camp.”
“No way,” Mariah said quickly, surprising even herself. “Curt and I are a team. Besides, you said you aren’t expecting opposition.” Actually, I’m pissed that you’d even consider leaving me out of this, she thought to herself. She was part of this mission, and she was damned if she’d be left out of this important phase of it. “We stay together,” Curt said. Mariah cheered inwardly.
“Fine,” said Alvarez. “Your call.”
The paved road gave way to a dirt track. The early-morning blackness grew darker. Branches began to brush against the side of the Land Cruiser. Mariah imagined that the jungle was closing in all around them. She saw dark shadows loom up and then disappear in the headlights. Some of the shadows looked animate. She could no longer distinguish between the road and the dense surrounding rain forest.
When the forest finally receded, Mariah realized that they’d arrived at a clearing. The rain was still steady. She and Curt donned camouflage-colored ponchos, climbed out of the Land Cruiser, and followed Alvarez around to the back.
Mariah watched as Alvarez reached into the back of the vehicle and pulled out a hip holster attached to a web belt. He opened the holster, took out a pistol with a black rubber grip, released the magazine, and handed the empty gun to Curt, grip first. “I assume you’ve used a Beretta,” he said.
Curt nodded and gave the gun a thorough visual inspection, then took the loose magazine from Alvarez and removed all the rounds. Inserting the empty magazine into the pistol, he carried out a complete function check with the gun pointed toward the sky. He replaced the cartridges in the magazine, reinserted the magazine, and secured the safety. He reached for the web belt, secured it around his waist, and holstered the gun. He saw Mariah watching him, an eyebrow arched.
“I was a soldier,” he said. “Remember?”
By now, Mariah could see that at least a hundred men had assembled in the clearing and lined up in military formations. She heard unit leaders giving instructions to their troops in English and in an unfamiliar language that she assumed was Tagalog. The troops then started to move out, on foot. She and Curt followed.
“Mariah,” Curt said quietly as they started down the road. “Stay right behind me, okay? Don’t let me out of your sight.”
Mariah nodded and followed behind him silently. She focused on his back and plodded along, trying to make as little noise as possible. She marveled at how quietly a hundred men could move through the night. Her eyes began to adjust to the darkness and she found that, even in the rain and gloom, she could see the soldiers closest to her and Curt.
After a while—Mariah was finding it hard to judge time and she didn’t want to illuminate her watch face—they left the road and headed deeper into the jungle. The dense vegetation blocked much of the rain. They appeared to be following a narrow trail. The ground was wet, muddy, and crisscrossed with fallen tree trunks and limbs. Mariah slipped several times. The air was so thick with humidity that she found it hard to breathe. Cicadas buzzed incessantly from the dripping trees. Smaller insects, mostly mosquitoes by the sound of them, jabbed at her face and tried to crawl into her mouth, nose, and eyes. They seemed oblivious to the DEET she had slathered on earlier in the Land Cruiser. She was certain that many of them carried the pathogens for malaria, dengue, perhaps even yellow fever, and who knew what else.
The air smelled of rotting vegetation. She heard guttural squawks, low cooing noises, and loud, crowlike kras. She figured birds would be sleeping. It couldn’t be later than 4 a.m. Could some of the noises be monkeys? She’d read that long-tailed macaques were abundant in this part of the Philippines. Were there any dangerous predators in the Philippines jungle? She thought about venomous snakes and then shook her head to try to make the thought disappear.
She was breathing hard with exertion. The rain had finally let up, but the heavy air somehow seemed no less wet.
Curt stopped without warning and Mariah almost ran into him. He turned and held a finger up to his lips. Mariah hardly dared to breathe. She imagined that the thumping of her heart was echoing off the dense jungle foliage.
She heard a loud cracking noise that sounded too sharp and clipped to be a breaking branch. Then the sound of a string of exploding firecrackers. Curt pushed her roughly to the ground, dove down beside her, and whispered hoarsely, “Ambush! Stay low! Don’t move!” She remained motionless, listening to snapping noises whipping above her and softer, chunking noises as the bullets hit something solid.
Something fell with a thud on the ground near her. She heard a low moan. A soldier? He must have been hit! thought Mariah. She resisted an overwhelming urge to rise up and run, instead flattening herse
lf as low as possible to the ground, willing herself to slow her wildly beating heart and to wall out the snapping noises overhead. She pressed her moist hands against the ground to keep them from trembling, and swallowed down the acid bile rising in her throat. She heard the moaning again. I’ve got to help the guy, she thought.
Suppressing her fear, she quietly crawled toward the sound. In the pitch-black she relied on her ears to guide her. She bumped against something, reached out, and touched a man’s head. Her hand felt wet and sticky. She heard a man trying to speak. Was he saying “please”? Then he was silent. She found the man’s wrist, felt for a pulse, then let go.
She heard more gunshots, closer, and forced herself to remain still. She hoped that it was return fire from the task force and not the insurgents. Then the sounds began to recede. A sign that the ambushers were on the run? Trying to help the wounded soldier had momentarily given her something else to focus on, but now the fear came flooding back. God, let this be over soon, she said to herself. Or at least let it get light again.
Mariah lay as motionless as possible for a long time. She assumed Curt was nearby but didn’t dare call out to him. It grew quiet. Even the jungle noises had stopped. As she waited in the silence, dark shapes in front of her began to look animate. She couldn’t stand it. She had to know what was out there. She reached into a pocket, pulled out a small flashlight, and switched it on. She could see that she was in a clearing surrounded by dense jungle foliage. She heard the sound of approaching voices. She switched off the light and stayed still, hoping she couldn’t be seen. She could hear men conversing in an unfamiliar language. The voices grew closer.
Then she felt rough hands on her shoulders.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
SEPTEMBER 4 (SEPTEMBER 5, PHILIPPINES TIME)
JOLO, PHILIPPINES
Mariah struggled against a rope that tightly bound her wrists. Her back was to a large tree, her arms tied together on the opposite side of the trunk. A man she didn’t recognize stood in front of her, his hand raised to eye level, a knife gripped in his fingers, its curved blade streaked with rust. Two other men stood nearby, rifles aimed at her.
The man with the knife slipped the blade under the top button of Mariah’s long-sleeved shirt and gave a little tug, severing the button. One by one he repeated the process until her shirt was open at the chest. He then worked the blade under the front of her bra, sliced it, and pulled the severed halves away with a gentleness that made Mariah feel she was about to vomit.
As the man stepped back, appraising her, Mariah struggled to restrain her rage, to control an urge to spit in the man’s face and scream at him. But she knew that would be a mistake, that it would only provoke him more. So she focused on details of what she was seeing, letting her scientific training kick in. Middle-aged, she noted. Bearded face, matted hair, uneven teeth stained reddish. Probably from betel nut, a kind of seed, she’d read, that people chewed in this part of the world. The man wore flip-flops, baggy trousers, and a ragged T-shirt with a Chicago Bears logo. He was licking his lips now, lifting his hands and leaning toward her.
Okay, she thought to herself, but I’m not going down without a fight. Her arms were still tied behind her, but he hadn’t gagged her. She’d bite him, tear a piece off his face if she had to. She tensed herself as his face closed on hers, his tongue still flicking across his lips.
A volley of shots rang out. Mariah instinctively squeezed her eyes shut but then forced them back open to see the man pitch backward, fall to the ground, twitch, and lie still. Mariah heard more gunfire and saw the other two men who’d been standing silently off to the side go down. One lay motionless and the other clutched his bleeding right shin and moaned.
She heard a familiar voice behind her.
“It’s okay, Mariah,” said Curt, approaching her and averting his eyes at the same time. “I’m here. Are you okay?”
Mariah simultaneously felt relief and something else. Embarrassment. And shame, she told herself, knowing immediately how illogical that feeling was. “I’m fine,” she said. “Just get me untied.”
* * *
Now that he’d made the decision, Tony Parnell felt a sense of relief. His source had reported that the Omaha scare was a false alarm even though the city’s residents had panicked. The suspected Kandahar outbreak had turned out to be some kind of pneumonic plague. Nasty bug in its own right, even caused hemorrhaging, and the single Nebraska infection had apparently been passed along by a dog to its owner. But it was nothing like Kandahar and no further cases had cropped up.
Still, Parnell was sure there’d be plenty of other Kandahar reports in the days ahead. The country was terrified and even a minor, innocuous bug could be perceived as a suspected case. Diagnostic labs would be working day and night. Local authorities would be imposing their own quarantine zones. Common cold and flu victims would be presumed Kandahar cases and would be isolated from the rest of society.
Fearing exposure to the deadly virus, citizens were trying to flee the country, but other nations were refusing to land U.S. flights, and Canada and Mexico had closed their borders. The feds need to take charge, Parnell thought. The social order was breaking down. Soon it would be every man for himself.
Which is what led Parnell to make his own decision. He would immediately move his family out of Philadelphia. His wife’s sister had a place in rural Pennsylvania, up near the New York border. Plenty of room, few neighbors. His wife and young son would be safe there. At least for the time being.
* * *
That afternoon, back at the soldiers’ camp, Mariah wanted nothing more than to take a long nap and wake up with no memory of what she’d just been through. She shuddered as her mind continued to flash with images of filthy, matted hair, rusty knifepoints, stained teeth, and the calm, leering approach of that human animal. She had no doubt about what those guys intended to do to her. Thank God Curt had arrived when he had. But now he seemed to be keeping his distance.
Despite her exhaustion, she forced herself to keep moving, offering to help with the other men from Alvarez’s team who’d been wounded in the ambush. She didn’t mention to anyone that her training was in veterinary medicine, no one asked, and she simply moved from soldier to soldier, cleaning and stitching up the wounds that appeared in front of her. Caring for the others helped take her mind off what she’d been through, but she knew the respite was only temporary. When she’d done what she could for the last of the men who’d been waiting in the camp’s makeshift infirmary, she glanced at her watch assuming it would be late in the afternoon, and was shocked to see it was just after 1:00 p.m. She felt as though she hadn’t slept for a week. She stood there, looking out at the surrounding rain forest, trying to decide whether to offer more help or simply succumb to her fatigue and curl up on a cot somewhere, to sleep a long dreamless sleep.
Then Curt arrived. From the puzzled look on his face, Mariah knew he’d probably seen her staring off into space. He asked how she was doing and then told her that the man they’d shot and captured had revealed the location of the guerrilla camp and that he and a team of soldiers were heading there now. Mariah noticed that Curt was wearing a new ball cap with the task force logo emblazoned on it. They’ve probably made him an honorary member, she thought to herself. They haven’t offered that to me.
Mariah tried to push the cynicism and exhaustion out of her mind. The thought of being alone, of not having anything to do while Curt was gone, terrified her. And so, as Curt turned to leave the tent, she said, abruptly, “I’ll come, too.”
* * *
Angus figured it had been about twelve hours since he’d coughed up the information. So far only one person had come back into the building, just long enough to leave him a bottle of water and a cup of cold rice. They’d left him untied. At first he didn’t understand why, but when he’d tested the only apparent way out of the windowless storage shed, a heavy metal door that was ob
viously padlocked on the outside, he grudgingly accepted that he was trapped.
Or was he?
Now Angus began a methodical search of the building, not sure what he was looking for, just something, anything, that could help him escape. The shed was ruggedly built, smooth concrete walls and floor, looked like it might have been constructed back in the 1950s. The ceilings were high, a couple of vents up near the roof line, but no ladders, no way to scale the walls even if he could pry out the vents, which at any rate seemed too small for him to fit through. Tools? One old screwdriver and a small wrench on a low shelf. He pocketed both of these. A short section of two-by-four leaning against a wall. Maybe he could bang it against the door, alert people outside. But would he alert the wrong people, his captors, who he was pretty sure wouldn’t be too far away?
He stood in the center of the shed and began a slow, 360-degree turn, taking in every detail, concentrating, thinking.
The forklift.
It looked like it hadn’t run for decades, but that part didn’t bother Angus much. He had some mechanical skills and knew quite a bit about cars. Except this wasn’t a car, wasn’t remotely like anything he’d ever driven before. Still it would have an engine, a clutch, accelerator, brakes. How hard could it be?
He walked over and inspected it. All the pieces seemed to be there, even a key in the ignition. It had a flat tire, but that was no big deal. He wouldn’t be driving it far. He hoisted himself up into the worn seat and turned the key.
No sound, not even a clicking noise.
Dead battery. Angus hopped down, checked the cables. They weren’t connected. Made sense. They’d have uncoupled them so that the charge wouldn’t draw down as fast in storage. He scraped some corrosion off the terminals with a piece of scrap wood, hooked up and tightened the cables with the wrench in his pocket, and tried the starter again.
The engine turned over, coughed, wouldn’t fire. Check the gas. Sure enough, empty. He sniffed the tank. Diesel. There had to be some gas, somewhere.
