Target Response, page 2
Kilroy cut a long strip from the bottom of his shirt and used it as a makeshift bandage to wrap the bitten area of Raynor’s forearm.
“Stupid of me,” Raynor said, shaking his head. “I put my hand on the tree without looking and the damned thing got a piece of me.”
“Look at the bright side—at least it wasn’t your gun hand,” Kilroy said.
“Yeah, sure…”
“Take a drink of water,” Kilroy said, indicating the canteen hanging from a strap around Raynor’s neck and across his shoulder.
Raynor shook his head. “That’s all right. Let’s get going.”
“Doctor’s orders. It’ll give you a boost and you need one now.”
“No—”
“Quit fucking around and do it. You can play hero later.”
Raynor unslung the canteen and screwed off the cap, which was secured to it by a tiny length of chain. He held the canteen to his lips and tilted his head back, taking a mouthful. He swirled the water around in his mouth before swallowing, the muscles of his throat working painfully.
He held out the canteen to Kilroy. “Not thirsty,” Kilroy said.
“Now who’s playing hero? Cut the shit,” Raynor said.
Kilroy accepted the canteen, taking a small swig from it. The water was warm, almost hot, but the wetness was refreshing. He screwed the cap back on and reached toward Raynor to return it.
“You keep it,” Raynor said.
Kilroy made a face. “Aw, for chrissakes—”
“You’ll be doing me a favor. It’s one less thing for me to worry about.”
“All right, but only because it’s easier than arguing about it. We’ve wasted enough time here already,” Kilroy said. He fitted the strap over his head and slung the canteen down along his side.
A faint noise behind him caused Kilroy to glance back over his shoulder toward the far end of the glade, the way they’d come. There was a rustling in the brush and a flicker of motion in the bushes about thirty yards away.
A Nigerian soldier in olive drab fatigues parted the foliage and stepped into view in the open. He saw Kilroy and Raynor as he entered the glade. He froze for a beat, then shouted something and reached for the rifle strapped over his left shoulder.
Kilroy already had his AK-47 raised, shouldered, and swinging toward the newcomer. The selector was set for single shots. He squeezed the trigger. The rifle barked.
The trooper fell backward, dead. The space that he’d been occupying opened up, affording a view of several more soldiers positioned in single file along a trail reaching back through the brush.
Kilroy shot the next man in line. The others jumped to the sides, taking cover.
Angry shouts and shots erupted along the trail. A racketing clamor of autofire erupted. The soldiers weren’t aiming at anything they could see—they were just shooting into the glade in the direction from which the gunfire had come.
Other shouts sounded in the near distance, coming from the right and left of the trail, the voices of other hunting bands calling out to their comrades under fire.
Hot rounds zipped through the air, smacking tree limbs and cutting down branches. They all fell wide of the mark, but once the troopers got their bearings and augmented their numbers with reinforcements, they’d zero in on their targets.
Kilroy’s expression was rueful. If he only had a tenth of the ammunition they were so prodigally expending, he could clean house. But he didn’t, so—
It was time to move out.
“Here we go again,” he said sourly.
Crouching low, he and Raynor scrambled into the brush on the near side of the glade, disappearing behind a tangle of green.
The chase was on again.
By midafternoon they seemed to have lost their pursuers. One thing that couldn’t be outrun, though, was the poison in Bill Raynor’s system. Raynor had been favoring his left arm, the limb that had been bitten by the black centipede, holding it close to his side, using it as little as possible.
He and Kilroy were making their way through a patch of dense scrub brush. Kilroy was a few paces ahead, blazing the trail. The ground was spongy underfoot, the tangled foliage bunched up close.
Raynor stumbled, bumping into a low, shrub-like tree with his left side. He gasped, trying to regain his balance. He grabbed a tree branch with his right hand, steadying himself.
Kilroy looked back. Raynor stood frozen, eyes squeezed shut, face a mask of agony. Kilroy caught a glimpse of Raynor’s left arm. The forearm was swollen to twice its normal size.
Raynor opened his eyes; it took several beats before they came into focus. Kilroy went to him. “Let me see that arm,” he said.
“It’s nothing,” Raynor said.
“What affects you affects me. So let’s see.”
The arm was deep red from elbow to wrist. A paler red blush extended into the bicep area and the back of the hand, outriders of the crawler’s toxic contagion. Kilroy touched Raynor’s bare arm, careful to rest his fingertips well away from the bandaged area of the bite. The skin was hot to the touch.
Raynor’s glassy-orbed gaze met Kilroy’s clear-eyed appraisal without flinching. “It is what it is. Nothing to be done about it. It hasn’t reached my legs, so let’s keep moving. Cover as much ground as possible while it’s still daylight,” Raynor said.
Kilroy nodded. “You ready?”
“Lead on.”
Kilroy turned, resuming his forward progress. Now that his face was turned where Raynor couldn’t see it, his expression was worried. Not for himself but for Raynor.
Kilroy trudged onward, the other following. He caught himself listening for the sound of Raynor’s footfalls, to make sure he was keeping up behind him. Were they making progress?
Yes, of a sort, if progress was defined as putting some distance between them and the hunters. But their course was taking them not out of the swamp but ever deeper into it.
Kilroy glanced over his shoulder, back along the trail. “If you need a break, sing out,” he said.
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll walk your ass into the ground,” Raynor said. His face was sallow, strained. He did not so much walk as stagger.
The slog into the morass continued. The two men didn’t talk much. They needed to save their breath for the hike, and besides, when they opened their mouths to speak, gnats flew into them.
The air was so heavy, so humid, it was as moisture-laden as it was possible to be without actually raining. Kilroy longed for a rainfall. It would give them a chance to slake their thirst and refill the canteen with fresh rainwater.
Distant thunder rumbled, but no drop of rain fell. Tortuous miles grew as the day lengthened and the gloom deepened.
They came to a basin, a shallow hollow several football fields in length. The boggy ground was a maze of dozens of small ponds linked by twisty creeks and threaded by narrow lanes of solid ground. There had been a fire here once, possibly caused by a lightning strike during the dry season. The basin was studded with skeletal remains of dead trees killed by the blaze. Most stood upright but a number of them had fallen, forming impromptu walkways and bridges.
Kilroy halted. “What are you stopping for?” Raynor demanded.
“I’m going to climb a tree and take a look around,” Kilroy said.
“Oh—sorry. Thought you were stopping on my account…”
“Don’t think so hard.”
Raynor sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree. He looked like hell—filthy, haggard, and exhausted—but so would any man who’d spent a day and a half in the swamp.
Kilroy figured he looked the same. What worried him was the haunted, feverish look in Raynor’s eyes and the way the bones of his skull showed beneath taut, yellowish skin. His face was taking on the semblance of a death’s head. And his left arm—it wasn’t good. The swelling had reached his hand and the red flush was stealing up into his shoulder.
Kilroy unslung his rifle and set it butt down on the ground, leaning it against the fallen tree.
He crossed to a nearby tree that he’d picked to use for his vantage point. It showed a number of limbs that had broken off close to the trunk, forming ladderlike handholds. The green fought to reclaim its fire-blighted hulk, wrapping it with a mass of flowering lianas and dangling vines.
Kilroy reached for a low-hanging limb that looked sturdy enough to support him and tested his weight against it.
It held, so he pulled himself up, knees and thighs gripping the trunk as he reached for the next handhold. He wedged a booted foot in the crotch where a branch joined the trunk, affording him a steady platform. He groped for the next handhold and mounted higher.
In this fashion he scaled the tree. His ascent was not without incident. More than once, a branch that he tested snapped off under his hand and fell to the ground. That’s what testing is for. When it happened he was braced and ready with a solid perch beneath him. But it always came as an unpleasant discovery.
The noise was the worst part, for a dead tree limb breaks with a sharp, sudden crack like a rifle report, and it sounded dangerously loud in his ears. The first time it happened, it started a sudden flight of birds from a nearby tree. They took to the air as one, scattering in all directions. Kilroy worried that the sound or sight would draw the attention of nearby spotters.
He did not climb straight up the tree. The branches were not uniformly steady enough for that. He followed a spiraling course up and around the trunk. When he was fifty feet above the ground he stopped. That was high enough. None of the branches above him looked able to hold his weight.
In his treetop perch Kilroy took his bearings. Heat, haze, clouds, and the long shadows of falling day all conspired to obscure his vision and blur the view, hemming in the horizon.
Below, swampland extended in all directions out and away from him. No structures, no signs of human habitation showed as far as the eye could see. A pale sun disk hung about thirty degrees above the western horizon, floating amid towering gray clouds.
Nearer, a quarter mile west of the basin, a branch of the river wound and coiled its way down from the north, sluggishly flowing south. The water was so brown it was almost black, the color of coffee murky with coffee grounds.
Kilroy and Raynor had come down from the northwest, striking a roughly southeasterly course. Kilroy scanned the northwest quadrant, searching in vain for some sign of the derricks of the Vurukoo oil fields rising above the treeline. An unbroken vista of swampland unrolled toward the north.
East of the basin lay a vast tract of flooded forest, masses of gray-green foliage held in a web whose strands were channels of stagnant water.
South, the swamp extended to a low ridge that stretched east–west along the horizon. Beyond it, a tantalizing sliver of silver emptiness wavered at the limits of visibility. It glimmered like a mirage, winking in and out of sight.
That razor line of open space could be the Kondo, the big river into which all the water-courses of the swampland ultimately drained. An avenue of escape to the coast, the goal that he and Raynor sought.
That would make the water west of the basin the Rada River, which flowed southwest to meet the Kondo somewhere beyond the ridge.
Kilroy’s spirits lifted.
They received a swift check from a glimpse of motion on his right.
A boat rounded a bend of the Rada and came into view. A long, open bargelike boat with a stern-mounted motor. In it were about eight to ten men—soldiers armed with rifles.
The boat came downriver, creeping along at several miles per hour. There was something ominous in its slow, steady advance. It rippled the water’s surface with an arrow-shaped wake. Its stern was tailed by a thin, fan-shaped plume of blue-gray exhaust from the motor.
Now Kilroy could hear the engine’s stuttering putt-putt. He squirmed around on his perch, putting the tree trunk between him and the boat. The troops betrayed no sudden excitement or alarm, fired no shots. He guessed they hadn’t seen him.
On the far side of the river, a line of soldiers inched into view, marching south in single file on a path that ran along the top of the west bank. There was something about them suggestive of a column of ants.
Kilroy was unable to see the Rada’s east bank, hidden from him by an overhanging canopy of foliage. Was there a second column of soldiers prowling the river’s near side?
He didn’t intend to stick around and find out. He started his descent, covering behind the tree trunk as much as possible to screen himself from the hunters on and along the river.
He looked east, beyond the basin rim where a flooded forest was webbed by dozens of waterways. Several of the widest channels were speckled with objects floating on the surface. At this distance they were mere blurs, but they could have been small boats filled with more hunters.
Kilroy climbed down as quickly as he dared, careful to avoid breaking any branches, whose sharp cracking sound would alert the troops. About halfway down to the ground, he stepped onto what he thought was a sturdy branch—only to have it move underfoot.
Recoiling, he looked down. Coiled around the branch below was a huge snake, a python twenty feet long and as thick around as his thigh. Its scaly hide was brown with dark brown bands.
It writhed, its sinuous body one giant muscle. It lifted a massive, boxy head, yellow eyes glaring. Jaws gaped, baring a fanged maw and wicked forked tongue, as it hissed a warning.
Kilroy’s heart felt like it jumped up into his mouth as he was seized for an instant by primal fear. Adrenaline flooded him.
His nerve returned. He drew the survival knife from his belt sheath and brandished it, holding on to a branch with his other hand.
The python was curled around the branch below so that its swaying head was at the far end of the branch. A long upswooping curve of its neck raised its heavy head, bringing it to Kilroy’s eye level.
Kilroy knew that the python kills not by its bite but by constriction, wrapping its muscular coils around its prey and crushing the life out of it. Lethal or not, though, a bite from those curved and gleaming three-inch fangs would be no picnic. The python also uses its hard head as a club to stun its victim into insensibility.
He and the python were eye to eye. “I’ll cut your fucking head off,” Kilroy rasped throatily. He wasn’t sure he believed it, and he didn’t think the python did, either.
The python hissed in response, a sound like the venting of a steam engine.
Steadily eyeing the serpent, Kilroy squirmed away from it, circling to the other side of the trunk. One foot extended, he felt around with it until he found a lower branch opposite that wasn’t occupied by the python.
Clenching the flat of his blade between his teeth to free his hand, Kilroy hastily climbed from his perch, scrambling down the side of the tree. Coming to a branch twelve feet above the ground, he gripped it in both hands, extended his arms full length beneath it, and hang-dropped to the earth below. Soft, marshy soil cushioned his fall, which he took on bent legs.
The python remained where it was on the branch, looping its head around the trunk to follow Kilroy’s progress. Kilroy scrambled out from under the tree.
Raynor was on his feet, holding the M-16 in one hand, muzzle angled toward the serpent. Kilroy sheathed his knife, securing the butt strap that held it in place. “Don’t shoot—he’s harmless.”
Raynor laughed without mirth. “That must be why you got down that tree so fast.”
Kilroy grabbed his rifle. The python made no move to pursue. Kilroy gave the snake a dirty look. “You’re lucky I didn’t turn you into a pair of cowboy boots, you prick,” he said to it.
The python seemed unimpressed.
“What’d you see up there? Apart from your new buddy, that is,” Raynor asked.
“One of those good news, bad news deals,” Kilroy said. “The bad news is that there’re troops a quarter mile west of us. There’s a river there—the Rada, I think. They’ve got a boat looking for us. Ground troops, too.”
“How many?”
“A shitload. There’s a flooded area to our east. Looked like there were boats out there, too.”
“And the good news?”
“There’s a big river to the south. The Kondo, the one that’ll take us to the coast.”
Raynor showed his teeth in a forced grin. “How far, Kilroy?”
That was the question. On foot through the swamp, while being sought by a small army? And Raynor with a skinful of poison, his condition worsening by the hour?
“How far?” Raynor repeated.
“A day’s march,” Kilroy said, not sugarcoating it, giving it to him straight. Raynor’s face fell, his expression one of defeat.
“Or a couple of hours by boat,” Kilroy added quickly.
“We don’t have a boat,” Raynor said. “Why not wish for an airplane while you’re at it?”
“We’ll steal one or hijack it from the Nigerians. If it comes to it, we can build a raft and float downstream on it by night.”
“It’s a plan, anyway.” Raynor’s tone was bleak.
He and Kilroy resumed their trek, crossing south across the basin. Not much of a hike if they had been able to move in a straight line. But the swamp offered few straightaways and no easy routes.
It was a journey of constant detours, zigzagging between isolated spans of solid ground too soon interrupted by marshy bogs, impenetrable thickets, and channels too deep to ford.
Several hours passed before they neared the basin’s south rim. The way was barred by a belt of black muck some fifteen feet wide.
Kilroy used his knife to cut off the branches of a slender sapling, trimming it down to an eight-foot pole. Toeing the edge of the black belt, he probed the mud with the pole. The stuff was deeper than a man’s height.
Not quicksand, but quickmud.
Twenty yards away, a fallen tree stretched across the black belt at right angles. It had once stood on the far side but had toppled toward the near side, forming a natural bridge that spanned the quickmud. The trunk was largely bare of branches where it crossed the obstacle; it was three feet in diameter, its rounded upper surface partly covered by patches of moss.
Raynor handed Kilroy his M-16. “You take it. My sense of balance is a little shaky. I wouldn’t want to fall in and foul it.”
