A long, angry burst from an automatic rifle thirty yards behind him in the jungle helped him focus on the task at hand. He fired the pump shotgun at the vine, it split and frayed beautifully, and he caught it with his free hand before it swung away. Hurriedly, he refastened the shotgun to his backpack one-handed and leapt into the air to take the vine at the highest point he could reach. His sore red hands gripped hard, his legs wrapped around tight, and he began swinging off the hill and over the massive reptiles below.
The vine shot him above the near bank; he passed over sleepy crocodiles warming themselves at the water’s edge. Many of the crocs lay with their toothy mouths wide open, cooling their bodies with the intake of air and presenting an especially ominous image to swing over.
His grip was secure; he grimaced with the effort but held firm as gravity took him out over the water now, his legs jutted in front of him, his knees cinched tight against the vine, and his eyes focused on his landing area on the bank by the bridge.
The vine was supple and green and healthy; he could count on it to get him across.
But not so the high tree limb from which it hung. Termites had nested along the crook where it separated from a larger branch, weakening the joint. Without Gentry’s acrobatics the limb would have held for another year, until the rainy season pushed winds across the continent and the brittle wood snapped in a storm.
But this limb did not have another year. It would fail now.
Gentry’s worst-case scenario came to pass in two stages.
The first was more of a slip of the vine at the tree branch; there was a lurching and a catch. Court was well out away from the land, easily ten feet above the water and sailing fast. He kept his grip but jacked his head off of his intended destination and up towards his lifeline’s connection with the tree.
He just managed to focus his wide eyes on the distant point as the tree limb cracked and broke.
Gentry’s momentum, with his legs out in front of him, sent his body spinning backwards one full revolution through the air, twenty feet up. He found himself facedown as gravity took over, and he dropped towards the water emitting a primordial scream of terror.
FOUR
Gentry let go of the vine; it was only in the way now.
He crashed through the black surface in a belly flop, well aware that the crocodiles on both sides of the bank would all be awake, alert, and pissed.
Sinking in the black with the wind knocked from his lungs, it took him longer than he wanted to get the backpack off. With it he sank into the muck; the river was only seven or eight feet deep here. After he removed the backpack, he yanked the shotgun free. Swimming while wielding a 12-gauge shotgun would be ridiculous, but leaving it down here in the mud while reptiles the size of four-man canoes roamed above would be insane.
After grabbing his weapon Gentry pushed off the bottom to shoot to the surface and lost one of his shoes in the process. He kicked the other off as his head popped out of the water. He shook his long wet hair from his eyes and turned back to the nearest bank, twenty-five yards away.
Two big crocs slid into the water before his eyes, heading in his direction. Next to where they entered the river, he noticed the bank empty. He was certain he had swung over a monstrous sixteen-footer in that spot just seconds before.
Court lay on his back in the water and kicked frantically while his head remained up and his pistol-grip weapon pointed in the direction of the bank. It was an uncoordinated half backstroke that derived no speed from its efficiency but much from its intensity.
Crocodiles do not normally eat meals that are alive. Instead they kill their prey by biting down with their clamplike jaws to take hold and then spinning it in the water in order to drown it.
But Court knew that he, as a fragile human being, would not be drowned. The bite would not kill him outright, but the spinning and the flailing and the whipping tail would shatter his neck and break his body, turn him into a lifeless rag doll, even before his lungs filled with the river’s hot black water.
He had twenty yards to go to his boat; he would head straight to the bobbing canoe and avoid the bank now, as crocs were even faster on land than in the water. Panic threatened to overtake him; he knew he had not even looked at the far side of the river to see how many of the hungry fuckers over there were coming out for a quick and easy one-hundred-seventy-pound lunch of fresh meat.
Instead he focused on the white water churned up by his pounding bare feet.
There it was. The first big beast was upon him; it looked like a fat gray tree trunk through the foam until his big mouth opened, inches from the tips of Gentry’s toes. With a scream of terror Court spread his legs apart and raised the shotgun.
Click.
He had not pumped another shell into the chamber after using the shotgun to sever the vine.
The reptile was on him now.
He jabbed the inside of its mouth with the muzzle of the gun.
In the two seconds since he’d stopped kicking he’d begun to sink in the water, and he felt the fore claws of the animal against his leg as they sank. The smack in the mouth caused the croc to flail back for a brief instant, and Gentry used that instant to charge a fresh shell into the chamber of his 12-gauge as he sank deeper, faceup, into the river.
He went under fully now, pushed his weapon up until he felt the neck of the reptile above him, and pulled the trigger one-handed.
Boom!
The recoil pushed him deeper, deep enough to avoid the spinning animal’s huge tail as it thrashed near the surface. Court turned and swam quickly down and away, along the bottom of the river for a moment as he neared his boat. He shot back to the surface and jacked a fresh shell into the breach as he spun back around, found a new croc on him, its mouth just beginning to open to initiate the death grip. This beast was no more than ten feet long but still quite deadly. Gentry shot the gray monster between the eyes.
The blast of double-aught buckshot was roughly akin to ten simultaneous rounds from a.32-caliber handgun. At point-blank range to the face of even a massive reptile, it was almost certainly a mortal wound. But the death throes of such a powerful creature are just as dangerous as the attack, and again Court had to kick and twist and flail at the water to get away.
He also knew the fresh blood in the water would attract hundreds of piranha in seconds; he had to get out of there immediately for way too many reasons to count. He ejected the spent shell, chambered a fresh one, and kicked frantically towards his canoe.
He heard the first snaps of gunfire as he took hold of his little boat under the bridge, but he ignored them for now. With a free hand he unhooked the ties holding down the canvas tarp from two of the cleats. He tossed the shotgun onto the tarp and pulled himself into the craft. The massive open mouth of a twelve-foot crocodile lurched from the water behind him, followed his legs up and over the little boat’s edge, but the jaws snapped shut without taking hold. The animal’s front leg had made it into the canoe, and his thrashing weight threatened to flip the tiny craft over with Court inside it. Court grabbed the 12-gauge and fired one-handed into the reptile’s neck, flipping it back off the boat.
He tried to rack a fresh shell, but his gun was empty. The rest of his ammo was in the backpack at the bottom of the river, so he tossed the shotgun aside as he pulled the rest of the canvas cover free and let it fall into the water. Another long burst of rifle fire shot foam into the boat, but the distant soldier’s gun emptied before he could hit either the canoe or the American.