32.
Thirty-two feet. That was worrisome.
The monitor blinked and a new number popped up.
33.
“Let’s go,” she said. “We need to get this thing over with as fast as possible.”
Gideon stood motionless, hands chest high. “Do you speak English?”
The boat captain’s eyes twitched to the side, briefly scanning the quay. “Down!” he said in strongly accented English. “Now!”
But Gideon didn’t move. The captain leaned closer, whispering conspiratorially, “Before they see you.”
Gideon knelt, ducking below the gunwales of the speedboat.
“Who are you?” the boat captain said.
“My name is Gideon Davis. I was sent here by the American president.”
The man ran his eyes over Gideon and cackled, forcing smoke through his broken teeth. Gideon realized how absurd his story sounded and tried to explain himself.
“My motorcade was ambushed. Someone in town gave me your name. He said I could hire you to take me upriver.”
The man narrowed his eyes. “Upriver? You crazy.”
“A thousand dollars.”
The man laughed.
“Two thousand.”
The boat captain stopped laughing. Despite his better judgment, he actually seemed to be considering the offer, when a noise on the quay drew his attention. Someone was shouting at him. The boat captain tried to hide his pistol as he shouted back at the person on the quay.
Gideon heard footsteps coming toward them. Then the unmistakable sound of a gun being racked.
“Shit,” the captain whispered. Then he dove into the cabin. The huge Mercuries roared to life. “Get the mooring line!” the captain shouted.
Bullets started thwacking into the sides of the boat. Gideon could see he’d be shot if he jumped onto the quay to take the mooring line off the cleat. So he grabbed the pocketknife he’d taken from Genth=Á€eral Prang, flicked it open, and severed the yellow nylon cord in a single quick motion.
The boat surged away from the quay, throwing up a massive rooster tail and showering the three jihadis on the quay with water. Gideon ducked behind the gunwale, still gripping the knife tightly in his hand.
As he crouched behind the gunwale, he studied the blade of the Bench-made liner-lock. It had a pocket clip for easy access, and you could open it one-handed with the flick of a wrist. His father had always carried a knife. Always. He used to say, “A man who doesn’t carry a knife is like a woman who doesn’t carry a pocketbook.”
The captain looked over his shoulder at him, his gaze resting briefly on the knife.
“Which way are you going?” Gideon said.
“Downriver to KM.”
Gideon shook his head. “Turn the boat around. We’re going upriver.”
“You want to die, find somebody else to take you.”
“I told you, I’ll give you two thousand dollars,” Gideon said.
“Show me,” the captain said.
“I don’t have it now. I’ll get it.” But the captain held his course. “Please trust me, I really am an envoy for President Diggs. You’ll be paid.”
Still, the captain didn’t turn the boat around.
Gideon extended his arm, pointing at the captain’s face. “Up! River! Now!”
Gideon realized that he was not pointing with his finger but with the knife. He had intended not to threaten the man, just to make a strong point. But it was too late. The deed was done. He also knew that if he showed any weakness, he would never reach his brother.
The captain’s eyes flicked around the boat, and Gideon followed his look to the Colt on the floor. He had apparently set it down when he started the boat, but when he pulled away from the quay, the centrifugal force had caused it to slide away from him, and it was now out of reach.
For a moment, their eyes locked. Finally the man spun the wheel hard, and the boat headed back upriver.
Gideon scooped up the Colt and instinctively worked the slide, checking the chamber. He held the weapon over the side, hit the magazine release, dropping the clip into the water, then racked the gun and ejected the round in the chamber.
“What the hell?” the captain said. “Why you doing that?”
“I don’t like guns,” Gideon said, tossing the empty weapon on a bench seat in the aft of the boat.
The man scowled in disgust. “We get where you want to go, you gonna wish you never did that.”
The steady roar of the Mercuries was not quite deafening, but it was loud enough to discourage conversation. Eventually Gideon closed the knife blade against his thigh and slid it back into his pocket.
Noticing that the threatening blade had been stowed, the captain of the boat finally spoke againe aÁ€. “You really work for President Diggs?”
Gideon took out his soaked wallet, peeled out a wet business card, and set it on the wheelhouse. “That’s me.”
The captain stared at the card for a moment, raised one eyebrow, then said, “My name is Monyet. But people call me Monkey.”
Gideon pulled out General Pang’s map of Mohan, indicating the spot deep in the island’s interior. “There’s a city right here called Kampung Naga. That’s where I want to go.”
“City?” Monkey laughed derisively. “There ain’t no city there. That’s the end of the earth.”
“End of the earth?”
“You know what Kampung Naga means? It means ‘Town That Doesn’t Exist.’” Monkey dragged a dirty thumb across the middle of the map, leaving a smudge. “See this? That’s where you hit the waterfalls. No boats past that line.”
“Then get me as close as you can. I’ll go the rest of the way on foot.”
The captain lit a cigarette. “They’ll kill you before you get there.”
“Jihadis?”
“Jihadis?” The man looked at Gideon like he was a fool. “You been listening to me or not? There’s no jihadis up there! How you have jihad, you don’t have no God?”
“Then who lives up there?”
“Tribesmen. Jungle people. Stick you with arrows, eat your ass.” Gideon heard fear in the man’s voice. “Why you want to go to this place anyway?”
“To find my brother. You might have heard of him. His name’s Till-man Davis.”
Monkey shrugged.
“He calls himself Abu Nasir.”
Monkey’s face went stiff. He studied Gideon’s face, as if noticing him for the first time. “I should have known. You look like him.”
“We don’t look a damn bit like each other,” Gideon said. The words came out stronger than he’d intended. As someone who generally thought before he spoke, he was a little surprised at the vehemence of his response. Gideon didn’t look a thing like his brother. Gideon was tall and muscular, like his father, while his brother favored his mother’s side of the family—short and wiry.
“The eyes,” Monkey said, staring hard into Gideon’s face. “You both got them scary green eyes.”
Scary eyes. It was something he’d heard once from a girlfriend. He’d been taken aback by her observation, since he’d never thought of himself as a scary-eyed kind of guy. But now the one physical trait he shared with his brother seemed to confirm Uncle Earl’s claim that Tillman was in fact Abu Nasir. “So you’ve actually met him.”
“Once.” The air whistled loudly through Monkey’s teeth as he drew on his cigarette. “But he’s not someone you forget.&#m">Á€8221;
“Why is that?”
“Wherever he goes, people die.”
A sick feeling washed over Gideon. But before he could ask anything more, Monkey narrowed his eyes and pointed toward a bend where the river snaked around a low island, barely more than a sandbar covered by a few miserable-looking trees. A powerboat was making a sweeping curve toward them.
“They must have radioed ahead,” Monkey said. The distant silhouettes of the men in the boat became clear enough to see that they were carrying AK-47s.
“Can they catch us?”
“We find out soon enough.” Monkey firewalled the throttle and the big Mercuries howled in response. “Hold on.”
The noise was deafening as the speedboat slammed into the chop. It was obvious Monkey meant it literally when he said hold on. Gideon’s fingers whitened as they clenched the gunwale. Every tiny wave jarred his teeth.
Monkey pointed at the pistol Gideon had taken from him. “You gotta shoot. There’s more clips in the storage compartment under the seat back there.”
Gideon eyed the pistol but didn’t move from the gunwale as Monkey steered toward a small channel on the far side of the island. The boat was getting closer. In his mind, Gideon could feel the Colt’s grip on his fingers, its texture, weight, and heft. He could feel the dance of his hands on the slide, the safety, the magazine release. His father’s favorite pistol was a Kimber 1911, pretty much the same model as this one, and Gideon had shot endless piles of ammo through it.
“Take the gun!” Monkey was sweating, his face a mask of concentration. “I saw how you handled that gun. I know you know how to shoot. Shoot.”
They weren’t going to make it. Gideon could see the intersection of the two arcs. Monkey’s was the more powerful boat, but the jihadis were tracing the interior arc of the circle, and there was nothing Monkey could do to avoid being intercepted.
“Shoot!”
Gideon took a tentative step toward the rear of the boat where the pistol lay. It would be so easy. All he had to do was—
The boat shuddered and slammed into the air. They must have hit something—a submerged log, a sandbar—Gideon wasn’t sure. But whatever it was, the whole boat went airborne for a moment, the Mercuries jumping up in pitch for a moment as they clawed for purchase in the air.
Gideon lost his balance, grabbing for the railing as the boat slammed back into the water. When he looked toward the back of the boat, the Colt was tumbling in a high slow arc through the air. And then it was gone, swallowed by the boiling wake of the speedboat.
Gideon surveyed the deck, looking for something he could use to fend off the attackers. Within seconds a plan was forming in his mind. Grabbing a life ring attached to a yellow nylon rope, he flicked open the Benchmade he’d taken from the Prang and sliced the ring free. Then he grabbed an axe that was duct-taped to the bulkhead, and wrapped two loops around the axe head, securing it with a quick square knot.
“gonÁ€Turn toward them!” he shouted, jabbing his finger at the pursuing speedboat.
“What?” Monkey said.
“We’re not gonna make it. Head straight for them.”
Monkey gripped the wheel, his teeth gritted. For a moment he kept barreling straight toward the inlet. But then, he yanked the wheel in the direction Gideon was pointing.
Suddenly the two boats were heading toward each other at a combined speed that probably exceeded a hundred miles an hour. The eyes of the jihadis went wide with surprise. The distance had closed to only a matter of a few hundred feet by the time the first of them managed to shoulder his AK and start shooting.
“Straight for them!” Gideon shouted. “Straight for them.”
Gideon heard the bullets snapping in the air around him and thudding into the hull.
“Hold steady . . .” Gideon was swinging the axe over his head in a slow circle.
Monkey held his bearing, turning what had moments ago been a chase into a game of high-speed chicken. As the distance closed, Gideon saw it register on the face of the jihadi boat’s pilot. Seeing that a collision was inevitable, he suddenly swerved. The shooters lost their balance and, for a moment, stopped firing.
That was all the time Gideon needed.
When the boats flew past each other, missing by inches, Gideon let the axe fly. It sailed through the air, trailing yellow rope in its wake. The bow of the jihadis’ boat passed under the rope, which caught on the edge of the windscreen. The axe whirled around in a short arc, snapping like a whip and embedding its blade in the driver’s chest.
A heavy thump jarred Monkey’s boat as it caught the weight of the man’s body. The contest between man and boat was no contest at all. With the axe still buried in his ribs, the jihadi was hurled fifteen feet into the air. For a moment he was pulled behind the boat, flailing like a fallen skier caught in a tow rope, before the axe blade tore free from his chest. He sank immediately.
The remaining jihadis scrambled toward the wheel of their driverless boat, but not before the boat slammed onto the little island and flipped. The men pinwheeled in the air before falling in heaps on the sandbar or splashing down into the water. One landed in a small tree and was impaled by the sharp end of a leafless limb. His body convulsed for a brief violent moment, then hung lifeless, like some horrible twisted fruit.
And then Monkey’s boat was around the bend, and the jihadis were gone.
Monkey shook his head, eyes big as shot glasses. “You messed them people up,” he said, his expression a mixture of fear, gratitude, and amazement.
The entire episode had taken less than a minute. Gideon expected to feel some kind of remorse over the horrific deaths he’d caused. And yet he didn’t. He realized, too, that he hadn’t felt any fear, just a sense of total absorption in the moment, of utter commitment to the fight.
Then, when the emotion finally came, he was surprised by what he recognized was an almost giddy sense of well-being, even a kind of elation. Men had tried to kill him, and he had survived by ghtÁ€killing them. Simple as that.
He felt his teeth bare in a brief, feral smile.
My God, Gideon thought. What’s wrong with me?