‘Billy?’ he called back cautiously. ‘Billy … what’s just happened here?’
The guide hastened across the ground towards him, looking anxiously up and down the river, over his shoulder and back at the jungle. Finally, a few yards short, he lowered his gun. ‘They come!’
‘Who did? Who came?’
Billy puffed air for a moment, then said, ‘Rebels. Bandits. They come …’ He turned and pointed at the jungle he’d just emerged from. ‘Take your friends away.’
Bob joined them. ‘Are Maddy Carter and Adam Lewis alive still?’
Billy nodded. ‘They kill the Zambu men – worth nothing to them. But your friends? They take them for money.’
Chapter 22
1994, somewhere in the Nicaraguan jungle
Inside the cloth hood they’d pulled down over her head, Maddy could see nothing. She was in a frightening, bewildering world of darkness. She could hear the brush of undergrowth, the thud of dozens of hurried, booted footsteps, the jangle of military webbing, an exchange of hissed voices in mixed languages. Some Spanish, some heavily accented English.
She felt a heavy hand thumping her back every now and then. Grasping her upper arm and guiding her around unseen obstacles. ‘Move! Keep moving!’ a voice growled at her.
She recognized the sound of Adam’s breath nearby, gasping from the exertion. She heard him trip and tumble into undergrowth, the smack of a heavy blow and his voice crying out.
‘OK! OK! Please … don’t hurt me! Don’t shoot!’
‘Get up!’
On the blank canvas of her hood, she tried to picture what had just happened to them in the last five minutes. One moment, the four of them had been sitting around the fire – Billy had just excused himself to go empty his bladder. Adam had been telling her about his trip here two years ago. The two young Zambu were talking and giggling about something.
Then all of a sudden they were there. They’d arrived silently, almost materialized out of thin air. The first moment she sensed they were not alone was when Adam had suddenly stopped talking and his face had gone white. She’d turned round to see what he was looking at and saw them.
Two dozen men in threadbare and patched khaki greens, staring silently at them, like the emerald-hued ghosts of long-ago fallen soldiers. Every one of them armed, some wearing rusting belts of corroded ammo, some carrying machetes.
She looked around for Billy. There was no sign of him – just when they damn well needed him and his ancient-looking AK47. What happened next happened so quickly. The rebels advanced cautiously across the open space towards them.
Adam slowly stood up, raised his hands and showed them he wasn’t holding anything. ‘We’re not armed! We’re not armed!’
‘We’re just passing through,’ Maddy added lamely.
One of the rebels had the tattered remains of some sort of regimental insignia on the collar of his olive-green tunic. His face was all beard, as black as night, and deep-set eyes shadowed beneath the peak of a crumpled old US army forage cap. She presumed he was their leader.
He drew up in front of Adam and Maddy, silently appraised them for a moment. ‘English? American?’
‘I – I’m British,’ said Adam quickly. ‘We were … we were just stopping for a bit.’ He tried a disarming smile. ‘We can move on if – you know – if you want to camp here?’
The leader ignored that. Turned and spoke over his shoulder to the men behind him. A quick stream of heavily accented Spanish between them. The men responded immediately, moving to look inside the tents, unzipping them and dragging the contents out.
‘Help yourself,’ said Adam. ‘Please. Take – take w-whatever you need.’
The leader grinned. ‘We will.’
One of the men wrenched the backpack roughly from Maddy’s hands and delved inside it. It didn’t take him long to find the roll of dollar bills. He tossed it across to his leader who inspected it for a moment before tucking it into an ammo pouch.
The men were quick and efficient with their pilfering. Bagging their food, their water bottles. Some of them helped themselves to the items of clothing they came across; socks seemed to be of particular interest to them.
‘We are finished here,’ said the leader. ‘We will go now.’
For just one moment, Maddy thought that was it. Their ordeal over with. They’d come, taken what they needed and were going to be gone as quickly and silently as they’d arrived. But then the leader slowly strode across the clearing towards the two young Zambu men. He casually raised his handgun at one of the young men and shot him in the head; in a heartbeat he shot the other. Two shots as quickly and thoughtlessly as that … pap, pap. Both young men flopped lifelessly to the ground.
‘Oh … my God!’ Adam whispered as he gazed ashen-faced at the dead young men, the blood pooling in the mud beneath them. The leader calmly tucked the pistol back into his belt.
Then a coarse hood was tugged down over Maddy’s head. She felt her arms being grasped roughly and yanked behind her back, rough twine wound round her wrists and cinched painfully tight.
She heard the man’s voice again. ‘We will leave now.’
It seemed like they were frog-marched several hours. Stumbling through the undergrowth blindly, it was hard to know. She could tell from the effort, the angle of the ground beneath her feet that they were making their way up a gentle incline, heading away from the river into the low jungle hills that rose either side of it. They stopped for a rest just once, and then only briefly. Her hood was lifted just high enough to expose her mouth. A flask of water was forced between her lips and although it tasted foul she gulped thirstily. Tilting her head back slightly, she looked down her nose beneath the hem of the hood, and thought she caught a brief glimpse of Adam’s trainers.
The flask taken away, she caught her breath and whispered, ‘Adam? Is that you?’
‘Yeah, it’s me. You all right?’
‘I’m really scared.’
‘Me too.’
She caught the faintest whiff of tobacco smoke, heard the men talking in hushed voices nearby.
‘Where are the others?’ hissed Adam. ‘Do you think they’re following us?’
God, I hope so.
‘Liam and Bob won’t abandon us,’ she replied. ‘I promise you that.’ Although she couldn’t be sure they’d know which way to go. These men were leaving tracks that could be followed, surely? Or maybe that was the sort of thing that only happened in movies: a keen tracker’s eyes spotting a freshly snapped twig, the subtle impression of a footprint in the dirt.
‘They’ll be following us,’ she said, not entirely sure they were. ‘Biding their time, Adam. Trust me.’
A heavy fist punched the side of her head hard. ‘No talk!’
She saw pinpricks of light, felt her balance go, and all of a sudden she was lying on her back, her head spinning, her ear on the side she’d been punched roaring with white noise.
The hood was pulled roughly down. She felt hands grapple with her, jerking her on to her feet. It seemed their rest was now over and they were on the move again.
They marched uphill for another couple of hours and, finally, she was relieved to feel the incline become flat ground, the uneven jungle floor – all thick, foot-snaring roots, tangled creepers and spongy, yielding dirt – become firm and even.
Different sounds now. The jungle noises had receded.
We’re in a clearing.
The hooting, chirruping noise of the jungle had been replaced with the sound of some sort of a camp. She heard more voices, men calling out to each other. The chopping of wood, the dull thung of a cooking pot being banged nearby, pop music on a tinny transistor radio. The crackle and spit of a fire. And it was getting cool now. She supposed it must be near nightfall, or dusk at the very least.
Finally she heard the rattle of a latch and felt the hands of her captor shove her forward on to the ground. She felt the same hands pull the twine painfully tighter as she was tied to something. She heard t
he clatter of a loose door, then … then, finally, sensed they’d been left alone.
‘Adam? You there?’
No answer.
‘Adam.’
She held her breath for a moment, hoping that she might hear his laboured breathing coming from nearby. But she heard nothing.
‘Crap,’ she muttered, wanting her quiet voice to sound vaguely defiant: the spirited young heroine spitting venom at her tormentors. It didn’t. It sounded warbly and thin and fearful. At least not tearful. She was damned if she was going to sob like a little girl.
Yet.
Chapter 23
1994, Nicaraguan jungle
It was getting dark now. Too dark for them to risk stepping off the narrow jungle trail they’d been following so far. They could veer a yard or two from it in the dark and run the risk of never finding it again.
So far, by the green filtered light of afternoon, even Liam had been able to follow the trail left by the men: a groove worn in the damp soil by several dozen army boots; twigs, vines and branches hacked away by machetes to keep the way clear. Billy told them this was more than likely a trail regularly used by the rebels. He explained that the few militia groups that still remained at large in the jungle were largely nomadic, constantly moving between established camps and caches to minimize the risk of being cornered by Nicaraguan troops. This trail, provided they didn’t wander from it, would almost certainly lead to one of their camps.
Although Liam had been eager to press on, to not stop for anything, it made sense to settle down where they were and continue the pursuit again at first light.
So they did. No fire, no food, just some much-needed water from their sloshing canteens, and then Liam found himself curled up on the jungle floor between Bob and Billy, looking up at the dark shifting shapes of the leafy canopy above and catching the occasional glimpses of the clear evening sky beyond: a salmon pink of combed-out thread-like clouds that deepened in the space of an hour to a night-time blue peppered with stars.
He could hear the deep, even bellows-like rustle of Bob’s breathing. Not sleeping, but perhaps the closest to it the support unit would ever know. He knew Bob would be devoting a portion of his consciousness to collating data – his memories – grouping theme- and category-linked recollections, ditching irrelevant, frivolous or duplicated ones. Cross-referencing important ones and trying to extract a deeper understanding from them, to know this world better.
To know himself better.
Liam recalled what the support unit had told him earlier that afternoon: that he no longer functioned within the strict binary limitations of his original installation code. That to all intents and purposes he could almost be regarded as an individual in his own right now, capable of deciding his fate, his goals … perhaps on some level even deciding how he felt. On one hand, Liam decided that was quite an unsettling notion, that something as big, unstoppable and lethal as Bob could set his own agenda – make his own choices. But on the other hand – and this was the phrase Bob had used – he chose to follow their orders.
He chose to.
Bob had told him he trusted their judgement. Perhaps there was something more comforting in that? Bob’s co-operation, his compliance, was now built on something more than a mere program routine, a line of code, that (let’s face it) could just as easily misfire or go wrong as any piece of technology. No, his dogged, unfailing reliability was built on whatever passed as affection in his digital mind.
‘You wake, Mr Connor?’
Apparently Billy was awake too.
‘Yes. I’m finding it quite difficult to get to sleep actually.’
The guide turned over on to his side. ‘There were many of them. I see this. Many.’
‘You saw them? The men who took Maddy? I thought you said you missed them? You said you were away in the jungle relieving yourself when they came?’
‘I … return … I …’
Liam understood. ‘You were hiding?’
He saw the dark outline of Billy’s large head nodding. ‘I stay in jungle. I – forgive me, Mr Connor. I … I just watch. I let them go.’
Liam heard the shame in the man’s voice. Shame. He knew that feeling all too well: the fear of the moment castrating any ability to act, to step into the breach. Freezing a man and leaving him useless and irrelevant to unfolding events.
‘I seen twenty, thirty of them. All have gun. If I come out … they shoot me dead. No problem. So I stay hidden.’
‘It’s all right. There was no sense in charging out. There’s courage, Billy, and then there’s plain stupid … and a fine line dividing the two.’ Liam recalled Rashim’s several acts of derring-do back in the seventeenth century that might have made worthy material for a heroic poem or sea-shanty, but could quite easily have spelled the end for their ship and crew.
‘Fact of the matter is you’re still alive and able to help us find them. We’ll track them down.’
‘What is plan? When we find them?’
Jay-zus … I don’t know. As always seemed to be the case, there was no plan. Just the sense of travelling in the slipstream of a runaway problem and hoping there was a chance to have a grab at the rear bumper.
‘We’ll find them first, Billy … then I suppose we’ll work out what we’re going to do then.’
Billy grunted, then settled back on the ground. After a while Liam could hear his deep, even breathing. The guide was clearly well used to making do with the jungle floor for a bed.
A plan? The best plan Liam suspected that he was likely to come up with was simply unleashing the full wrath of Bob on those rebels, like opening a bear’s cage on an unsuspecting audience. But perhaps they were going to have to be clever about it. Not some half-baked roar and charge into their camp but a ruse, some distraction to draw the rebels’ attention and firepower elsewhere. After all, Bob could be brought down with enough guns levelled at him. It had happened before. And if Billy was right, and these fellas were all carrying big guns of one sort or another …?
He fell asleep trying to figure out what they were going to do once they caught up with the rebels, half aware that any plan he conjured up was likely to fall apart in the first few seconds.
Chapter 24
1994, the rebel camp, Nicaraguan jungle
The hood was removed from Adam’s head. His eyes blinked and watered at the light of the desk lamp sitting on a wooden crate beside him.
‘Yes, you must let your eyes adjust.’ He recognized the voice of the leader. ‘Are you thirsty? Some water?’
Adam nodded. His mouth was dry. He looked around as the rebel leader poured some water into a glass. They were in a tent. No, it looked more permanent than that – a wooden shack, with a canvas roof. In one corner a cot and a desk. Some wooden crates, a cheap radio, an old black-and-white TV, a battered filing cabinet.
The man held the glass of water to Adam’s mouth. ‘You said you are British?’
Adam gulped it down. ‘Yes,’ he replied finally.
‘Good.’ The man smiled. ‘I like Britain very much.’ The leader’s thick beard parted and revealed a spread of tobacco-stained teeth. ‘As a young man I went to school there. Very good school. Very expensive. Winchester? You know of it?’
‘I’ve heard of it.’
‘You like football?’
Adam shrugged.
‘I love your football. My favourite team is the Manchester United. Very good.’
‘They’re rubbish. I’m more of a Manchester City fan, myself.’
The rebel leader looked at him sternly for a long moment, then without warning he laughed and slapped Adam on the shoulder. ‘I think you are joking with me, yes? Because these two teams are the natural enemies of each other?’
Adam nodded.
‘I am Colonel Alvarez. Manuel Alvarez. And tell me please, what is your name?’
‘Adam.’
Alvarez unbuckled the gun holster from his hip, pulled up another stool and sat down on it. ‘Well, Adam, I think I like you.
You have cojones.’
Adam looked around the room. There were maps on the desk, a signed photograph of President Reagan. ‘You’re Contra rebels?’
Alvarez’s brow wrinkled, a momentary glassy look in his eyes. A hand absently reached out for the gun, pulled it from the holster. Adam recalled then how casually, how completely without any delay or deliberation, he’d executed the two young Zambu men.
‘We do not call ourselves that. We are freedom fighters.’
‘But the war’s finished now.’
Those killer’s eyes glared at him as the fingers absently stroked the gun’s cross-hatched grip. ‘The war continues, until we overthrow the communists who have taken over my country.’
‘And you take back what is rightfully yours?’
He kicked himself. Careful, Adam. Be very careful. The man was capable of killing without warning.
‘Rightfully? Yes.’ Alvarez rubbed the cuff of his frayed army tunic on the gun’s breech, carefully wiping it clean of moisture. ‘My father was one of the generals. Our country was ruled very well. The people were happy, they had food. There was law and order.’
While the generals drove around in Mercedes and sent their children to expensive private schools, no doubt, Adam wanted to add, but the gun sitting in Alvarez’s lap, being caressed, kept him quiet.
‘They were better times for my country. Before the communists. Our country was a beautiful one. Now people starve, crime is everywhere.’ Alvarez’s eyes seemed to be glazing over, taking him somewhere else – the past. There was something about that that frightened Adam, as if, with Alvarez absent, it was his eager and restless hands that took temporary command and would decide his fate.
Adam decided to bring the man’s focus back. ‘Why have you taken us prisoner?’