SOUTHERN PAKISTAN
He wasn’t sure how it happened.
Only that it did.
Despite their best precautions, including stealing two more bicycles and using side roads to leave the port city the night before, someone had caught up to them at dusk sixty miles northeast of Karachi.
The side roads had led them to the national highway, which skirted the eastern bank of Kalri Lake while connecting Karachi to Hyderabad. They had followed it for almost twenty miles, before cutting east toward the mountains leading to India.
It was here, along a narrow road bordering the Hub River at the bottom of a narrow canyon, that Atiq’s posse had caught up to them. And it came in the form of a silent bullet buzzing his ear, splintering the wood of a tree bordering the road.
Gorman reacted first, dragging Maryam with him off the bikes and down the steep hill. Vegetation scraped them as they shifted from tree to tree, dropping down the heavily forested canyon wall, managing their downward momentum as best they could.
Too fast and they could lose their footing, tumbling out of control to a certain death a few hundred feet below, where the rocky foothill bordered the Hub River’s roaring rapids.
Too slow and they risked a bullet to the head.
But it was Maryam who made them stop halfway the moment the terrain leveled off for a few feet, forming a narrow ledge before it dropped again at an even steeper angle.
“See anything?” Gorman asked, catching his breath, huddled next to her behind a fallen log, the Beretta in his right hand. He gave the near-precipice a respectful glance before inspecting the woods above them. He somehow hoped to remove the threat and return to the road.
“Not a damn thing,” she replied, also clutching a 9mm Beretta, but with both hands, long and thin fingers wrapped around the handle.
A shadow shifted some fifty feet above them, dashing nimbly in between trees. Then another figure positioned itself to the right of the first one, and a third person appeared off to their far left.
They were being hunted, encircled.
The one in the middle was big and bald, with powerful shoulders, holding a rifle with a bulky silencer. For an instant a beam of dying sunlight forking through the canopy touched him, before he vanished behind a towering pine. Too quickly to fire but long enough for Maryam to mumble, “Ahmed?”
“What?” Gorman whispered.
“Ahmed,” she repeated. “The other operative with Manish … in Karachi.”
“How the hell did he—”
“You are surrounded by bounty hunters! There is a price on your heads!”
The voice boomed through the murky woods, echoing off the opposite wall of the deep ravine a few seconds later.
“There is no escape!”
In the twilight of their world, Gorman stared into her eyes, which widened with fear. If they were captured, the ISI could kill him, though more likely they would hold him hostage for a future trade. They might beat him up some and probably interrogate him extensively. But in the end, he was a valuable asset worth saving for a future exchange. It was just the way the game was played, especially with someone as powerful as Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence.
But Maryam … the things those assholes would do to her.
In his decades managing foreign nationals spying against their own governments, Gorman had seen his unfortunate share of assets caught in the act of treason. It was the stuff of horror novels.
And he would be damned if he was going to let that happen to Maryam.
He put a hand to her face, feeling her breath on him. “Nothing will happen to you. You hear me?”
She placed a hand over his and slowly nodded.
“Follow my lead,” he whispered, before giving her a kiss.
Looking back at the cluster of trees above them as darkness rapidly overtook them, he shouted, “Okay! We give up!”
And he slowly stood.
It was an old trick, and he didn’t really think it would work.
But what did they have to lose?
A pair of shadows broke the vertical edge of the trunks by just a few inches.
But it was enough.
Maryam fired, the shots thundering as bark exploded in clouds of splinters.
Agonizing screams—high-pitched cries—came a second later, as the reports echoed off the opposite canyon wall.
They slid downhill on their backs, using their feet to slow themselves, keeping their hands free. Rocks, exposed roots, and fallen branches scraped them, but they were out of options and persisted, finally reaching the bottom of the canyon.
The sandy shore, broken up by clusters of stunted trees and waist-high vegetation, led to the river. It was a splashing mess of whitecaps colliding with boulders as the last of the day’s light gave way to an indigo sky.
Gorman paused a moment, realizing how bad the swollen river looked, especially without life jackets and at night. For a second he recalled a whitewater rafting trip down the Colorado a lifetime ago.
A silenced bullet ricocheted off a rock in a burst of pulverized limestone. It provided the required motivation for Gorman to tug Maryam alongside him.
They jumped feetfirst into the dark rapids as another bullet sparked off to his left.
But all he heard was Maryam’s scream just before the shockingly cold waters swallowed them. A current stronger than the worst riptide swirled them at dizzying speed. He managed to keep hold of her while trying to look ahead in the turbulence. He was under one moment and surfacing the next, trying not to swallow water, holding his breath as long as possible.
“Don’t fight it!” he shouted the instant they surfaced in unison, her wet hair all over her face. “Float … feetfirst!”
And she did, holding his hand, trying to remain clear of the rocky bottom, the angered water blinding them, making it nearly impossible to breathe as he tried to maneuver them in between—
Suddenly realizing they were rushing straight toward a boulder slick with algae, Gorman pushed Maryam out of the way. He shoved her as hard as he could into the current gushing between the incoming massive rock and another one.
“Bill!” she shouted as he let go of her hand.
But in an instant, she was gone, floating downstream.
Right before he crashed into the boulder.