“More importantly, where is he?”
“Let’s do a commo check and find out.”
“He’s probably figured out that we stole a boat. So ask him if César has realized that.” He reminded her, “Quick call.”
She dialed Collins’ sat phone number from memory.
“Ask him to find out how much the boat-stealing fine is and pay César from our stash.”
Taylor held the phone to her ear and listened to the ring, then ended the call and turned off the sat phone. “No answer.”
Which could mean anything your imagination wanted it to mean—sleeping, showering, flying off with all the money, or dead.
Taylor said, “I’ll try again later.”
“Okay.” Brodie looked at the landscape passing by. There was still open grassland on the left bank, which gave him a clear view of the terrain. But on the right bank, the savanna was giving way to thick jungle which he, as a half-evolvedHomo sapiens, instinctively equated with danger.
He looked back toward Kavak and stared at the massive tepui that dominated the terrain for miles around. The towering gray escarpment looked like a wall built by giants, and the flat peak was still shrouded in white, rolling clouds in an otherwise cloudless sky. This place, he thought, was primeval—Jurassic Park on steroids. Pemón World. Kyle Land.
He thought back to that travel poster at the airport. It was prescient.This is my destiny.
He looked at Taylor, who was playing with her cell phone. “If you have service, I want the name of your carrier.”
She glanced up from her phone. “I’m looking at the aerial photos I took. I think I see where we are, and where we’re going.”
“That’s always good to know.”
“I took a basic course in aerial recon. How about you?”
“I was just a lowly infantryman. All I needed to know was what I could see, hear, touch, and smell at ground level.”
“I… when I was in Afghanistan, I was called into Bagram a few times… to look at aerial photographs of towns and villages that I was working in… to try to ID residences of suspected Taliban collaborators and sympathizers.”
Brodie had no comment, but apparently Operation Flagstaff was still weighing on her mind—and her conscience.
She said, “They told me these people would be turned over to the Afghan security forces for interrogation.”
Also known as torture. Followed by the usual bullet in the back of the head.
Maggie Taylor must have known this on some level. He asked, “Who was asking this favor of you?”
“Army Intel… and other people who were… not identified.”
“Friends of Trent.”
“Probably.”
They continued upriver. Walls of tropical trees towered on both sides now, and the riverbank was choked with vegetation. Brodie kept the canoe in the center of the river, away from both banks. Every few minutes he cut the throttle and listened to the sounds of the jungle—lots of squawking birds, and now and then a crazy shriek that he guessed was a howler monkey. It was getting hotter, and the flying insects were becoming annoying. He thought of his uncle Reggie, who’d served in the Mekong Delta on a river patrol boat. Reggie got killed a few months after arriving in country, ambushed by bad guys who opened fire from the riverbank. His dad had a photo of Reggie on his boat, young and dumb, smiling and shirtless with his dog tags hanging around his neck, and in the background was a thick jungle wall that came right up to the river. Brodie remembered thinking that he’d never want to be in a place like that.
Reggie had never come home from the war, and in a way Captain Mercer had never come home either. And in never coming home, Kyle Mercer never took off his armor, never hung up his sword and shield. He was still a soldier, untempered by peacetime, fighting his own endless war.
Brodie raised his binoculars and scanned the riverbanks, but the growth was so dense that he couldn’t see more than ten feet into the dark jungle. But somewhere along here, farther upriver, would be a place where a boat could come ashore.
Taylor, who was still looking at her aerial photos, said, “We should be coming to a sharp right bend in the river.”
“Okay.”
“What do we do if we see indigenous people in boats coming toward us?”
