“I saw all I needed to convince me,” Dallas said, looking at Britta, Dan, Steve, and Graham in turn. She looked down at the silk pantsuit, knee-length brocade vest, and soft pumps she was wearing, then glanced at the others. “We may not have the right clothes or shoes for this little hike, but I hear my momma’s voice saying, ‘Girl, get your tail out of there now!’ and I always listen to my momma. Let’s move!”
The makeshift backpacks were shouldered quickly as Britta leaned down to help Graham to his feet.
“I’m not going,” Graham said. His eyes were swollen and red and his face bore the ravages of a man thirty years older.
“You have to go,” Britta said.
He shook his head slowly. “My life died with Susan. Go. I’ll tell them I’m MacCabe.”
“You don’t look anything like Robert MacCabe, and I’ll not lose another passenger. Now, come on, Doctor.”
Robert retraced his steps to their side and heard the exchange.
“Doctor, either you get up, or I’ll pick you up myself.”
Graham sat completely still, his eyes focused on the wreckage. There was a faint sound to the east, and Robert looked eastward with growing fright.
“Doctor, for God’s sake, you’re going to get us all killed if you…”
“I said, go on without me!” Graham snapped, not looking up.
Britta knelt beside him, speaking urgently in his ear. “Doctor, we can’t leave you, which means our lives are in your hands. And we’ve got a badly hurt pilot who is going to need your help through this ordeal. But there’s more. If Susan could materialize right now, from what I saw and heard of her, I’m absolutely sure she’d tell you to get up and get out of here. She’d want you to live, not follow her in a suicidal refusal to keep trying.”
Graham looked up at Britta. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but…”
“That’s it!” Robert said suddenly, putting his computer case on the ground and leaning down to thread his hands beneath Graham’s arms and yank him up. He turned the doctor around to face him, a maneuver Tash did not resist.
“Look!” Robert said, his words coming in terse, urgent packets. “I can’t… begin to… know how you feel… but… I swear I’ll slug you into a coma and drag you if you don’t come voluntarily. Please! PLEASE!”
Graham sighed and looked down. With tears pouring down his face again, he turned to Britta, catching her eye.
“You’re right about Susan, you know.”
They moved rapidly into the brush and trees bordering the western end of the crash site just as the thumping noises in the distance rose significantly in volume and definition until the rotors of a rapidly advancing helicopter could be clearly heard.
“Come on, y’all! Hurry! Hurry!” Dallas shouted, breaking everyone into a jog. She held the doctor’s hand and pulled him along.
A brushy landscape of low-growing banana trees mixed with palms and sporadic taller trees lay before them, little of it conducive to evading a helicopter — and the one they were hearing was approaching rapidly, now little more than a mile away.
Robert turned, walking backward for a moment as he yelled, “Over here!” He motioned to them to hurry, pointing to a thicket of trees surrounded by dense ferns which formed a low-hanging canopy over the ground. “Down! Just get in there and sit.” Robert pulled Dallas and Steve in as Britta guided both Graham and Dan under the canopy.
The distinctive whap-whap-whap of a Bell UH-1 Huey grew to thunderous proportions behind them, then suddenly diminished.
“He’s landing,” Dan explained.
“What do we do now, Robert?” Dallas asked in a loud whisper. “We don’t have any guns. Shouldn’t we keep moving?”
“I expected them to come our way,” Robert explained, still breathing hard from his exertion. “We don’t want to be spotted from the air.”
“But if they come looking for us on foot?” Dallas added.
“They’re still on the ground back there,” Dan said. “I think… we’re in more danger from a ground party, especially since they can follow our footprints.”
There was a sudden rustling to one side and Robert looked over, startled to see Dallas scrambling to her feet and clawing her way out from under the brush. “Dallas!”
“Dallas yourself!” she shot back. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Britta hesitated, watching Robert MacCabe’s face in the partial shadows and wondering what to do. Suddenly he was in motion as well, pulling them out of the hiding place. He checked a small compass as they resumed walking as fast as possible to the west and into deeper jungle, with the vivid memory of Susan Tash’s long fall from the helicopter filling everyone’s mind.
Behind them, at the crash site, a Vietnamese search-and-rescue helicopter was touching down.
Kat folded the antenna on the satellite phone and turned toward the departure gate for the flight to Ho Chi Minh City. Jordan James had sliced through all the red tape to arrange her entry into Vietnam and promised to relay the word to Jake.
Kat hesitated at the podium and turned, spotting a tall, sandy-haired Caucasian male in a business suit a hundred feet away pretending not to be watching her. But he had been, and Kat suppressed the feeling of apprehension, the feeling that she was missing something very significant, and very dangerous.
She looked again, but the man had gone.
CHAPTER 22
The presence of another helicopter at the crash site was an unwelcome surprise to Arlin Schoen as they approached from the south and circled at a discreet distance. He shook his head in disgust and sighed, his eyes scanning the eastern horizon as he wondered how many more helicopters would be coming now that the crash was officially discovered and broad daylight filled the landscape.
“What do you want to do?” the pilot asked, gesturing at the occupied clearing.
“Stay at least a mile distant and bring us to the western side. We can’t go look around the wreckage for footprints, but if they’re on the run, they’ll be running west.”
“And if we find them? What then — shoot them one by one from the air?”
Schoen nodded. “If we can find them.”
“And if not?”
“Then we get the hell back to Da Nang and try to get out of here.” He leaned forward. “How much fuel does this thing have?”
“About three more hours, depending on how much you make me hover.”
“Arlin,” one of the men in the back said, grabbing his shoulder. “If we don’t get back there and get our plane, they’ll nail it down, either with red tape or something worse. And if they do that, we won’t get out. Please! Let’s abort this and go. I think we’ve lost them anyway.”
Schoen shook his head no. “It’s not over. It’s not compromised unless that reporter surfaces.”
“Dammit, who are you, Captain Ahab? We’ve lost this round. They wouldn’t crash where they were supposed to, and now we’re flying around a friggin’ jungle acting like Vietcong looking for downed GIs. Let’s just get the hell out of here!”
“I said no.”
“Why, man?”
“Because what that damned reporter has is worth the risk.”
Dark clouds looming ahead, heralded by the boom of distant thunder, increased the anxiety of the six survivors as they stumbled and pushed their way through the increasingly dense jungle vegetation. The sound of monkeys chattering away and racing around blended with the eternal buzz of flies and other flying insects. The humidity made even the diminishing cool of the morning seem oppressive.