by Matt Lincoln
“Oh,” she laughed when she realized what Sylvia meant. “That’s the dark skies. I forget you don’t have them up north sometimes.”
“I wouldn’t exactly call Miami northern,” Robbie chuckled.
“No, I guess not,” Penny agreed with a smile. “But most everything is northern compared to here. Everything in the States, anyway.”
“Fair enough,” he relented, and he and Ethan turned their gazes upward to see what all the fuss was about then.
“Whoa!” Ethan exclaimed. “I can’t even see much of the sky, and I can still tell that’s not normal.”
“It’s normal on the southern and some middle Keys,” Penny explained, staring up at the pieces of the sky they could see, littered with an almost wholly unobstructed view of the Milky Way galaxy spanning across the entirety of the sky. “You can’t often see it from Little Torch, but here it’s every night. This is my favorite part about coming down here to these smaller islands.”
“You called it the dark skies?” Ethan asked, tearing his eyes off the sky and looking down at her now. “That’s what that means? You can see the whole galaxy?”
“Yep,” she said, drawing her own gaze down to his fine features and his kind eyes now, which glistened in the reddish hue of the unusual starlight. “That’s what it’s called.”
All of a sudden, standing there with him and looking into his eyes, it was like someone knocked the breath out of her. Not in a bad way, though. For a moment, she thought she could get lost there with him forever.
No, not in a bad way at all.
31
Ethan
We found scuffles in the dirt in that clearing where we got a glimpse of our brilliant galaxy in the sky, indicating that a campsite may have been there not long before. It took us some time to notice it for all the staring up at the starlight.
As for me, I couldn’t take my eyes off Penny. That was the brilliant view that captured me at the end of the day, though what she called the “dark skies” was nothing to balk at, either.
“Do you think they’re gone now?” Muñoz asked, crouched down and running her hands over the dirt where it looked like a tent had been nailed in since it last rained, leaving marks behind.
Her brow furrowed together in worry, the lines the expression brought to her face illuminated even further by the starlight, making her look older than she was for once.
I knew what she was feeling, though probably not quite as strongly. If the people we were looking for had set up camp in that clearing and had gone now, that meant that Birn could be gone, too. In more ways than one. They could’ve taken him with them wherever they went. Or… well, I didn’t even want to think about that. Not any more than I already had, anyway.
I shook my head to clear it and gave her a warm smile.
“We don’t know that for sure,” I assured her. “There are all kinds of people who camp here, Boy Scout troops and such. Isn’t that what you said, Penny?”
“What?” the sailor asked, looking dazed as she continued to gaze at me. “Oh, right, Boy Scout troops. Yes. They come here often. The gang would have to try to lie low because of that.”
“Hear that?” Holm asked, crossing over to Muñoz from where he had been crouched down, examining some other markings himself, and patting her on the shoulder. “This could’ve been anyone’s campsite. We have no idea if the people we’re looking for have been here or not.”
We all knew that by “the people we’re looking for,” he really meant Birn. But even my partner, apparently, didn’t want to speak his name for fear of giving voice to our darkest thoughts on the matter.
“You did think they might be here, didn’t you?” Muñoz asked, gazing up at Penny. “You thought that this might be it.”
“I did, but that’s only because this clearing makes such a good campsite,” Penny said kindly, giving Muñoz a warm smile of her own. “They could very well have set up camp elsewhere, and these guys are right that it was another group that used this place. It’s a well-known spot, after all. The gang could’ve easily gone for a more remote location in order to avoid running into anyone else on the island.”
Muñoz seemed to relax some at this, her shoulders slacking as she stood up and clapped some dust off her hands.
I gave the sailor woman a grateful look.
“Thank you,” I said quietly, so only she could hear, and she nodded and smiled up at me.
“So, where to next?” Holm asked, standing next to Muñoz now and wiping some dust off his trousers.
“I have one more idea,” Penny said, furrowing her own brows together as she thought about this. “It’s a makeshift campsite on the other side of the island, not quite close to the shore, but far enough away that not many people make it out there.”
“Why not?” I asked, thinking that they could just anchor their boats on that side of the island and get there easier than we got here.
“There’s no easy way to get there,” she explained, seemingly reading my mind even after a short time of knowing each other. “There are no more well-worn paths in that area. It’s just the difficult ones, like the ones we’ve been taking, so that we don’t run into anyone.”
“Got it,” Holm said with a dark laugh. “So we’ve got to get scratched up even more now.”
“Sorry,” Penny said without much sympathy, flashing him that lopsided grin that I’d already come to like so much. “But it’s the only way to get there and find them.”
“Let’s get going, then,” I said, clapping my hands and nodding to her again. “We don’t have any more time to waste.”
That gave voice to the somberness we were all feeling. It had been days since Birn was taken by then. Who knew what had happened to him in the meantime? If we didn’t find him that night… well, there was no other option. We had to find him that night.
Penny continued to lead the way into another set of difficult terrain, and then another, and then another. Eventually, there was no true discernible path anywhere at all, and we just made our way through heaps upon heaps of forest in search of this clearing Penny was thinking of.
Holm and I had to have our flashlights on now in order for us all to see, though Penny and Muñoz kept their own off to conserve their batteries and not draw unnecessary attention to ourselves.
I was more glad than ever to have her with us.
“Thank you for coming,” I murmured in her ear as I pushed yet another branch out of my face. “I don’t know where we’d be without you, trying to navigate through all this alone with no idea where we’re going.”
“I thought you might feel that way,” she chuckled, her eyes sparkling back at me in the light from my flashlight. “I’m glad I’m here, too.”
“How far are we?” Muñoz hissed from behind me.
“Not far,” Penny whispered, and I noticed that her voice had dropped down a peg since we had last spoken a few moments before. “We’re getting closer, so we should try to keep it down more.”
I nodded, and we continued on in relative silence, the only sounds the inevitable snapping of twigs beneath our feet and the surrounding animals in the forest.
That is until we heard voices drifting back to us through the trees, muffled by the distance and all the branches between us.
I exchanged a glance with Penny and immediately flipped off my flashlight. Holm did the same a split second later.
I strained my ears, trying to make out what they were saying. The voices were male. That much I could tell, but everything else escaped me. There were no distinct words or accents that I could make out. I couldn’t even tell if they were speaking English or not. The sounds were too muffled for that.
But they were voices, alright—human voices. And Penny had said that no normal campers made it back here.
It had to be them.
I could almost feel the tension rising in our little group as the others realized the same thing. We stood there frozen for several moments, not wanting to risk pressing forward and allowing th
ese men to hear us, and not wanting to miss an opportunity for us to hear them ourselves.
But it soon became clear that we would never be able to make out what they were saying from where we were. There was too much distance, too many trees.
Finally, Penny took a cautious step forward, and then another, and then another. I followed behind her at the same snail’s pace, and then Muñoz followed me in turn with Holm bringing up the rear.
There wasn’t much light, just a tiny bit from the stars poking through the few remaining gaps in the canopy of branches and leaves above us. My eyes adjusted to the new darkness, and eventually, I was able to make out the outlines of Penny in front of me and Muñoz behind me. But mostly, I pressed forward by feel, one hand on Penny’s shoulder and the other pushing away branches, keeping them from poking into my eyes. I felt Muñoz’s hand on my shoulder in turn as she did the same, and no doubt Holm was holding on to her, as well.
We moved so slowly that I could barely hear our feet snapping the twigs on the ground anymore. Every time I placed my foot down, I pressed it so slowly that the sound was muffled beneath my boot. The others did the same, and I was impressed that even Holm could keep his large feet from making a mess of things.
We continued to be able to hear the voices, but they remained muffled. Penny eventually started to lead us to the front left, toward the voices, and I knew that we were getting closer as the voices became more clear.
They were speaking English, I realized. There were two men, and one of them had an American accent. The other, to my best guess, was Jamaican.
I still couldn’t make out any words, though, even when Penny instinctually stopped to see if we could, and the rest of us stopped behind her.
We listened intently for some time again, but the voices were still too muffled to make out any distinct words other than the occasional “you,” “that,” or “so,” that told me they were speaking English.
As we grew closer, I realized they sounded kind of agitated. Their voices were sharp, and their tones raised. But I still couldn’t hear what they were saying.
We continued on like this for some time, stopping and starting to try to hear what they were saying and make out just where the voices were coming from in relation to our own position in the woods.
As we grew closer and closer, we moved slower and slower, not wanting them to think the few sounds that we did make were anything other than the natural rustling of leaves in the wind or twigs beneath the feet of small animals.
Eventually, it became possible to make out their voices better.
“This is ridiculous,” the Jamaican man hissed, his accent thick but still understandable since his English was good. “We cannot simply camp out here forever. Not with him stashed in that tent. Anyone could find us, and then what?!”
“And then we get rid of them,” the American man hissed back, sounding more than a little irritated with his companion. “Not many people come around these parts, and if they do, it wouldn’t be hard to dispose of them.”
“Dispose of them?” the Jamaican man repeated, aghast. “Children camp here! Do you want to kill a bunch of American children? You cannot be serious. This is not what I signed up for. Not what any of us signed up for!”
“We’re not going to kill kids,” the American man scoffed. “Don’t be ridiculous. No one camps out this far, except for maybe a few adventurous adults. And we haven’t run into any of them yet, have we? It’s stupid that we’re even expected to stand watch like this. No one’s going to show up, and we could be getting a full night’s sleep.”
“Your confidence will be the death of us all,” the Jamaican man spat, and the two of them continued on like this for some time.
I glanced back at Muñoz, as my eyes had become accustomed to the almost total darkness by then. The men had spoken of another man, one who had been “stashed in a tent,” as they put it. It was written all over Muñoz’s face that she was thinking the same as me. They meant Birn.
And that was a good thing. They hadn’t said anything about him being dead, just tucked away in a tent. If he was dead, they would’ve just disposed of him some other way instead of letting him rot in their campground.
No, Birn was still alive. And we were going to find him that night.
32
Ethan
Smoke from a fire billowed all the way to where we were standing then, and I realized that we must have been very close to the campground.
Penny glanced back at me, and I gave her a curt nod, confirming that I knew what she was thinking. She started to press forward again, slower than ever now. It was now or never.
Eventually, Penny stopped and whipped up an arm to stop me, as well, her elbow jamming right into my stomach. I managed not to gasp in surprise and reached back to stop Muñoz and Holm in turn.
It took me a minute to realize why Penny had stopped. She could see the flickering fire just around one of the branches in front of her, and if I craned my neck, I could see it, too.
I blinked as my eyes adjusted to the newfound light. The men stopped talking then.
“Did you hear that?” one of them, the Jamaican, asked, and I cursed internally. They had heard us.
“Probably just a fox or something,” the American said dismissively. “You worry too much.”
“You worry too little!” the other man snapped, and it was clearer than ever that tensions were running high in the camp.
I thought back to my conversation with the man who had surrendered back at the beach house. He had indicated something similar, that when the gang took Birn, it fragmented in a way. The men had stuck together, but half of them were angry that the other half had taken such a drastic step in kidnapping a federal agent.
I couldn’t blame them. They would all be in big trouble when MBLIS was through with them.
I placed my hand where my gun rested at my side and looked back at Muñoz again. Her expression reflected my own, I was sure. It was now or never—time to act.
I nodded to Penny, and she stepped aside, allowing me to take the lead now that we had reached our destination.
As I took her place in front of the group, I was able to make out the campground better. It was a small clearing, smaller than any of the others we had been to that day, and there were tents spread all around it.
I squinted to try to see past a tent at the very edge of the area and realized that the clearing stretched on further than I had originally thought, branching off into a thin path and then spreading out again to make room for even more tents down the line. I couldn’t see any further than that, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if the clearing bent around even farther than I now thought.
I realized that if those tents were full, there were a lot of men here.
“You don’t hear that?!” the Jamaican man hissed to his watch companion.
The two of them were sitting on opposite sides of a broad campfire as if they wanted to be as far away from each other as humanly possible while still fulfilling their duties. The American man looked to be around thirty and was poking at the fire with a stick while chewing something, probably gum or tobacco by the look of it. The Jamaican man looked to be about a decade or two older and was sitting hunched over on a log, his hands clasped in front of him with the whites of his knuckles clearly visible, revealing his nerves.
As soon as the man said this, I ducked back just in case he could see me through the branches as I could see him.
“You’re paranoid,” the American man said, chomping on what I decided was no doubt tobacco some more.
“And you are stupid!” the Jamaican man spat, and then I felt his eyes boring in on us.
I didn’t dare steal a glance to make sure, but I could almost guarantee that he had caught sight of one of us in the branches. A glance at Penny confirmed that she was thinking the same, and she shrugged as if to say that we might as well engage them now since we were going to have to eventually, anyway.
And just like that, I stepped out from
behind the branch, and in front of the campfire between the two men, my gun trained out in front of me.
“Military!” I hissed in as low a voice as I could muster while still sounding forceful. “Don’t move!”
The Jamaican man froze in his tracks, as he had already been on his way over to us. The dance of the firelight glistened in his dark eyes, and his alarm was obvious. He had one hand on a gun hanging at his side, but it wasn’t trained on me like mine was trained on him.
The American man just sat there on his log, dumbfounded with his jaw slackened, the chewing tobacco a giant wad hanging out of the side of his mouth and clearly visible to us all.
Penny and Muñoz were now on either side of me with their own weapons, and Holm was on Muñoz’s other side, his gun trained right on the American man should he dare to make a move.
“Don’t even think about it,” Holm growled in a low voice, his eyes trained on the man. I noticed now that there was a gun sitting at his side as well, though his hand wasn’t on it.
I glanced around at the tents. There wasn’t a rustle in a single one of them, our voices low enough not to wake them.
It must’ve been later than I thought, I realized. It had been around ten when we started heading this way after giving up on the last clearing. It was the middle of the night now. We had been on the island all day, slowly but surely making our way through the foliage in our search for our missing agent.
“Where is he?” I murmured, training my gaze back on the Jamaican man, as he sounded like he would be easier to convince to give up this madness, and the American still looked too dumbfounded to speak, anyway. “Where’s our agent?”
“I… I…” the man stammered, shaking his head at me as if he still couldn’t believe what was happening to him right then.
“Tell us,” Muñoz hissed, her eyes boring right into his and showing him that she meant business. Her gun was unwavering in the air despite her shoulder injury, pointing right at his heart.
