It was a snap, like a twig breaking.
She turned off the light, lowered herself into a crouch and listened — waiting for the sound to return and hoping it wouldn’t.
Her bladder could wait. She felt around for vines and branches, marking the perimeter of the path, then began duck-walking backward.
After a few awkward strides she stood and turned toward the village.
A muted crack sent her back into a crouch.
Seconds passed.
Her thighs began to burn. She aimed her darkened flashlight through the undergrowth, toward the sound. Her hand was wobbling when she switched the light on, then off again.
Through the brush she saw a tiny reflected glint. Water? Metal?
It didn’t matter.
Megan shot up and started sprinting toward the village.
“She saw me!” a man yelled in Spanish.
Then heavy footfalls. Several.
A flashlight beam shot across the trail in front of her. She lunged to her right and collided with a tree limb. The sting didn’t register, but the hand reaching through the thicket and grabbing her jacket did. She twisted violently but the grip held firm.
Her teeth clamped down on a finger. She tasted blood.
“She’s biting me. Come around and get her.”
The man’s voice — composed, in control — sent a shudder through her. His grip didn’t loosen.
Megan found a thumb and bit down again, this time like a crazed animal trying to dismember its prey. The man’s grip weakened for an instant. It was long enough.
She took off toward the village, her flashlight beam jerking wildly, her arms thrashing at low-hanging branches.
A beam of light came at her before she’d taken ten steps. Megan turned and plunged headlong into the jungle.
28
Luke had the bogey’s head in his nightscope’s crosshairs when his team leader, Alpha, ordered him to kill the unidentified man.
“Omega, the bogey is now your target. Take him out.”
Kappa, the lead element of the insertion team, was tucked into a shallow inset between two warehouse buildings on the far side of the pier. The unidentified bogey had come within five meters of Kappa’s position. He had strayed into the mandatory kill zone. He was now a target to be destroyed.
“Anyone have an identity on the target?” Luke whispered into his throat mic while moving his rifle scope back and forth between the target and Kappa.
The target had no weapon. He was likely a civilian worker at the seafood-processing plant that North Korea used to camouflage a naval installation at the far end of the pier.
“Omega, take out the target. Now!”
Even in a whisper, Alpha’s voice carried the force of a locomotive at full throttle.
Luke clicked back one magnification setting on his scope — he didn’t want to see the man’s face — and re-centered the target’s head in his crosshairs.
“Omega, do you read me?” the team leader said. “I am ordering you to take out the target.”
The target suddenly turned toward him like a deer sensing danger. Luke took out the last few millimeters of slack from his trigger.
A muted spit came from his rifle.
Four hundredths of a second later, the target’s head lurched back and he slumped onto the pier.
Kappa leapt from his shadowed recess and dragged the lifeless body into his small hideaway.
“Insertion team, move in,” came the order in Luke’s earpiece.
By the time he and the other members of the insertion team reached the pier, Kappa had taken a position farther out on the concrete platform, and Luke was crouched in the inset that Kappa had just abandoned.
Beside him, lying face down on the concrete deck, was the target he had destroyed a few minutes earlier.
The small male figure was dressed in tattered civilian clothing and his feet were bare. His limbs were spread at unnatural angles, and the pool of blood under his head was still spreading.
Luke grabbed the dead body by a shoulder and turned it over.
Blood oozed from a single bullet hole above the right eye.
Just below the entry wound, staring back at Luke, were the wide-open eyes of an adolescent boy.
Luke pitched forward in his bed, his chest heaving.
The stabbing pain punched through his forehead. He spread a hand across the front of his head and squeezed. When the pain finally left, he threw his legs over the edge of the mattress and turned on his bedside lamp.
“God damn me to hell,” he whispered.
Twelve years later he still could not fathom how easily he had crossed over into the darkness of Proteus. He had chosen an unholy alliance with some perverse inner demon, and a young boy had paid for that choice with his life.
He had slaughtered an innocent. He carried the weight of that truth like an iron yoke. It never left him.
The clock on his bed stand read 3:07 A.M. He was done sleeping for the night.
Megan sprinted into the jungle. The trail quickly narrowed into a tunnel-like passageway, and a tangle of branches grabbed at her shoulder. The roots and vines were closing in around her.
Behind her the heavy footfalls grew louder with each stride.
A flashlight beam flickered through the latticework of thick jungle growth on her right. Then another light. Both were moving faster than she was, angling toward her. Megan tried to scream, but the sound came out as a throaty whisper. She was already out of breath.
A man behind her yelled in Spanish, “Cut her off at the clearing.”
They were herding her like stray cattle through a chute. She hadn’t been on this side of the village and had no idea what was ahead.
Megan painted the other side of the trail with her light, looking for a break in the path, a way out. She guzzled air but couldn’t get enough to keep up her pace. Her legs were weakening, her strides shortening.
She was oxygen-starved, and the footsteps behind her sounded like thunderclaps.
The trail suddenly widened and the vegetation thinned on both sides. The flashlights to her right were clearer now, bobbing up and down in cadence with the thrashing legs and angry grunts converging on her.
The shielding walls of jungle on either side of her path were disintegrating into a clearing!
Megan glimpsed a small break in the undergrowth on her left and dove through it. She rolled down an embankment, tumbling blindly, her arms wrapped around her head. Soon she was flipping end over end, picking up speed as the slope turned down. Branches reached out of the blackness and slashed her arms and face. While fighting to tuck herself into a tight curl, something hard punched her ribs and pushed the last pockets of air from her lungs. She fell limp and bounced down the incline until the ground below her finally gave way and she plunged into a free fall.
Thump. She hit a soggy patch of earth.
There was no pain, but her thoughts were slow to come and her body didn’t want to move. Fear left her. There was only the feeling that all of this was coming to an end. The shouted commands and angry voices flitted at the periphery of her mind as though they did not matter anymore. She felt her chest rising and falling. The sound of running water soothed her.
It was a river, and soon it was the only sound she heard. A stream of unanswered questions and what-ifs — life’s unfinished journey — tumbled through her mind, carried by the watery cascade.
A hand touched her face. Fingers stroked her forehead. She soon realized that they were her fingers.