Before I can answer, we hear a third bang, and now he’s awake. “Where did that come from?” I ask, staring into the dark jungle. “Can you tell?”
He turns toward the sound, digging his phone from his pocket, then pulls up the compass app. “West.” When he closes the app, I see the time on his home screen. It’s not quite ten p.m. We only slept for half an hour.
His phone has no cell service, and its power is down to 3 percent.
“Come on!” I toss back the mosquito netting and turn on the flashlight. “If it came from the west, it has to be Silvana and her men.”
Luke grabs the flashlight and turns it off again. “We can’t hike at night, Maddie. If we use the light, they’ll see us coming from a mile away.”
“Okay, then we’ll walk on the beach, but stick close to the tree line so we can hide again if we need to. Let’s go!”
Climbing down a tree with no light is far from easy, and I tumble at least a third of the way to the ground. But then I’m up again, pulling on Luke’s arm as soon as his boots hit the jungle floor. “Leave the hammock. We’ll come back for it.”
“Maddie ...”
“We’resoclose, Luke.” To Genesis. To my insulin. To Ryan’s murderer. “But if you want to stay ...” He’ll be safer here in the tree.
Luke groans. “Come on.”
We head west along the beach, and a few steps later, we hear another bang. I pull Luke to a halt in the sand, with the sharp metallic impact still ringing in my ears. “Whatisthat?”
“I don’t know,” he whispers. “But it sounded close. Maybe just around that bend.”
We stare at the moonlit curve in the coast, where a thick patch of jungle hugs the shore. The banging, like a hammer hitting metal, echoes toward us again. “Come on.”
We pick our way through the brush as carefully and quietly as we can in the dark, and I pray that we don’t run into a snake or a caiman. Within minutes, we hear voices shouting orders, then I see a flash of light through the foliage.
I put a hand on Luke’s arm, and he stops, squinting, as he follows my gaze. “I can’t tell what they’re doing,” he whispers. “We have to get closer.”
The noise covers the sound of our approach, but my heart still hammers in my throat as we walk, hunched over, toward the edge of the jungle.
At the tree line, Luke pulls me back from a sudden two-foot drop into stagnant water, lit by a bright battery-powered utility light hung from a tree.
There is no beach here. There is only a scraggly stretch of marshy inlets, fingers of water reaching into the jungle.
Overhead, vines stretch from tree to tree creating a dark nest of shadows cast by that one bright light.
“Duck!” Luke whispers as he pulls me down behind a thick fern at the edge of the marsh.
Several men in jungle camo stand on top of what looks like an upside-down boat floating in the murky water. One shouts directions at the others while they work with hammers and what look like blowtorches.
I study the long floating object, and finally I realize that the inverted boat is being welded to another, larger boat, which is nearly submerged. “They’re making some kind of submarine.” And while some men are welding it together, others are loading it with ...
“Is that cocaine?” I squint at the square packages, but I can’t tell much in the dark.
“Some if it.” Luke points at a man emerging from the jungle with an armload of smaller square bricks. “Butthatis plastic explosive.”
“Whoa,what?” Why would they load drugs and explosives onto the same boat?
“¡Venga! ¡Apurate!” a man in camo shouts from the shore, and my throat suddenly feels tight.
“That’s one of Silvana’s men,” I whisper to Luke, pointing him out. “If he’s here, we must be close to their base camp.” I turn to stare south, through the jungle, and adrenaline fires through me. “Genesis is around here somewhere.”
And so is Julian.
GENESIS
“... and it has to be soon!” Holden leans around Penelope to whisper fiercely to Domenica.
