Soon.
Don’t act strange. Don’t draw attention. Don’t even look alive.
Brian hid his shaking hands under his arms. He had spent the last four years waiting for a chance to escape, but now that the opportunity was here it overwhelmed him. He took a slow breath. He was in better shape than he’d been at any of his previous attempts. Which still didn’t guarantee that he could break out of his prison and make the two-week trek out of the Malaysian jungle.
“We’ll be back in three days, four at the most,” Jamil, the guerilla group’s leader, said to his younger brother on the other side of the clearing, the tension obvious between the two men even from a distance.
The steadily pattering rain drowned out the younger man’s reply. The mesh of banana leaves Brian had woven among the top bars of the tiger cage leaked here and there, but the makeshift roof kept the worst of the weather off him. He watched his captors from the corner of his eye, keeping his head turned toward the trees. He didn’t want them to know he was paying attention.
“Haven’t you wasted enough time trying to convince everyone Hamid is wrong?” Omar raised his voice and could be heard now even over the rain. “We’ve become like old women, talking around campfires. Bullets win wars, not talk.” He spat the words. “We can start by sending this one’s head—” he jerked his thumb toward Brian “—to the city.”
Jamil lifted a placating hand. There was a presence to the older man, a careful dignity that the others lacked. “We are freedom fighters, not terrorists.”
And that’s where he was wrong, Brian thought. Jamil and a couple of the older men in camp might have started out as freedom fighters, but Omar and his young friends were in this for entirely different reasons. They liked the outlaw power of bending to no government, taking what they wanted when they came across someone weaker.
Jamil nodded to his men and disappeared into the jungle with them. Brian stared straight ahead, not looking at the remaining fighters, but aware of each and every one. The small guerilla group consisted of about three dozen men. Eight had gone for supplies two days ago. Jamil was taking six to talk alliance with a larger group on the other side of the mountain.
For the next few days, the camp would be as thin as ever, and tomorrow night Ahmad would be on guard duty. Ahmad would let him go to the bathroom without pistol-whipping him first for the bother, or standing behind him the whole time with a rifle barrel pressed between his shoulder blades.
Just a little longer. Just another day. Brian closed his eyes. He needed some sleep, to have as much energy as possible when the time came. The familiar noises of the jungle filled the night, the chorus of frogs interrupted now and then by the shrill cry of a bird, the buzz and chirp of a million insects filling in the occasional silence.
His mind drifted, but something prickled at the edges of his consciousness. Something was missing. The camp was quiet. Unnaturally so. No human voices joined that of the jungle. He opened his eyes.
Omar still stood on the same spot, but a dozen of his men were gathered around him. Now what? He watched as some kind of silent communication passed between them and the men melted into the jungle one by one.
Minutes passed, then came the sounds of gunfire from the distance. Some of Jamil’s men jumped up and ran into the forest. Brian swore under his breath. If Omar managed to wrest leadership of the group, he was finished.
A good hour went by before the last gun fell silent, and not long after that, the first fighters returned to camp. Jamil’s men were not among them.
Brian swallowed his desperation and tried to catch Ahmad’s eye. If he could get the younger man to come over, let him out of the cage… But Ahmad was busy at the other end of the clearing, joining the celebration that had begun.
It didn’t take much before half the camp was drunk and the other half well on their way. Brian looked up at the darkening sky. They hadn’t come for him yet, but he knew Omar would get to it sooner or later. Whether or not to keep their prisoner alive had been one of the main disagreements between the brothers. Omar would want to reassert his new authority by making a point.
He had to go. Now.
“Ahmad,” he called out on a low voice when the man walked near him.
The young fighter turned to see what he wanted, but then stopped, his attention drawn to a commotion at the edge of the clearing. The group that had gone off for supplies was returning.
Damn it. Not that, too.
So much for taking advantage of a sparse camp. What the hell were they doing back? The trip to the nearest kampongs, the few villages that were this high up the mountain, usually took five or six days.
And then he saw the hunched figure they were shoving in front of them.
Another prisoner.
He leaned forward to get a better look at the young man. No, not a kid—it was a woman. Definitely a woman.
She was pushed close enough to the low fire that burned under a hatch-roofed shelter, so he could see her clearly now. Her hands were bound behind her, her mouth gagged. The light of the flames glinted off blondish hair.
Jamil hadn’t been keen on the practice of exchanging hostages for money. On the odd occasion when Omar’s men brought back some easy target they couldn’t resist, they were sent upriver to a larger guerilla group whose leader, Hamid, was an expert in this kind of business. There had been talk of a job he had recently pulled, how they were expecting the batch of hostages to bring in over a million ringgits a head.
The woman turned for a moment, and the fire lit her face enough so that he could see her eyes. They were filled with stark terror, so vivid he could feel it in his own chest.
She stirred something in him, bringing back memories, making him remember why he had joined the Special Designation Defense Unit in the first place. It used to be his job to stop this kind of thing from happening, to get to the bad guys before they got to the civilians. But he had failed.
Where the hell had Ahmad gone? Now was the time to slip away, while everyone was busy with the new prisoner.
One of the men tied the woman to a palm tree. They probably would make her write a letter to her loved ones in the morning. Then in a week or two, the money would arrive and someone would walk her to the nearest village. At least, that’s how Hamid ran his deals.
He glimpsed Ahmad at last. The man had strode back to the fire and was now taking his turn from the bottle, satisfying his curiosity about the prisoner. He was too far to call to without drawing attention.
The fighters were getting louder, and Omar was busy writing on loose sheets of paper on his knee, looking up now and then when his men toasted him. Then he rolled up the papers, tied them with a piece of string and handed them to Ahmad.
This was it. Brian got to his feet and crouched—the tiger cage did not allow him to stand to his full height. He called to the young fighter as the man walked by the cage. “I need to get out for a minute.”
“I’ll tell one of the guards.”
The two men on guard duty were at the fire with the rest, having abandoned their posts to check out the new prisoner. Jamil wouldn’t have tolerated that. Omar didn’t seem to notice.
“It won’t take long. The others…” He let his voice trail off.
The others would beat him for the fun of it. And they were drunk enough so they might not know when to stop. Ahmad understood and stepped to the nearby post for the handcuffs, threw them into the cage. Brian slipped on the rusty metal pieces and clinked them together, hoping it sounded enough like the click that locked them. And it must have, because the door opened to let him out.
He walked in front, dragging his right foot, exaggerating the limp. He wanted anyone who watched to think he couldn’t run even if his life depended on it. And it did.
He stepped a couple of feet deeper into the jungle than was necessary, made sure they were behind thick enough vegetation. He fumbled with his rope belt, let his pants drop, then spun with full force and brought his fists to Ahmad’s temple. The man folded without a sound.
Brian grabbed the gun even before he pulled up his pants. “Sorry, buddy.”
He pocketed Ahmad’s knife, took the rolled up sheets of paper. They would come in handy once he got far enough that he could risk starting a fire. He listened, but no shouts rang out from camp, no sign that his actions were heard or seen, just the coarse jesting of the men about the woman. As he turned to leave, he heard Omar join in. That didn’t bode well for her.
A true leader knew how to rein in his men, but Omar had never been good at delayed gratification. He was too smart to intentionally kill her, but not smart enough to realize that if he let his men go at her, she probably wouldn’t survive the night, and they would lose out on the ransom money.
Brian gripped the gun. He should be running right now. He should be a hundred feet away.
Ahmad groaned.
Two hundred.
He couldn’t go back for her. What if she didn’t speak English? She would probably fight him. He didn’t look any different from the guerillas—even his clothing was the same, his original uniform having rotted off him in the jungle’s humid air years ago.
She could get both of them killed. And even if he managed to get her away from camp, she would slow him down. What the hell could she know about jungle survival? She would probably keel over from the first bug that bit her. And no way to get her away unseen, either. The attention of every man in the camp was focused on her, and would probably stay on her for some time—an unexpected gift he should be taking advantage of.
And yet, he could not forget the look in her eyes.
Damn.
He pulled the man’s hat off and shoved it into his mouth, tied Ahmad’s hands behind his back with his belt. With a last glance at him, Brian crouched and rushed left, moving silently over the mossy ground as he circled the camp.
SHE WAS GOING to suffocate.
Audrey Benedict tried desperately to draw enough air into her burning lungs, but her mouth was taped shut, and her nose was plugged from crying.
She didn’t understand a word the men around the campfire were saying, but she had no trouble interpreting their savage expressions. She had a good idea what they had in store for her. She looked up to the stars and prayed, for herself and for her sister—for someone to get to Nicky in time, now that she had failed.
She took one jerky, hard breath after another, desperate to clear her airway. An urgent shout rang across the clearing. She scanned the darkness beyond the fire, struggling against the ropes that bound her hands. The guerillas were grabbing for their guns, rushing toward a young fighter who had staggered out of the forest. Some of them ran into the jungle behind him.
Were they under attack? Dear God, let it be a rescue team and not another group of bandits.
She felt a sharp tug on her rope before it went slack, then she was yanked back through the bushes with force. She scrambled to see who or what was behind her.
If she weren’t gagged, she would have screamed.
As it was, she couldn’t open her mouth, and the wildman of the jungle who had her didn’t leave her time to faint. He grabbed her wrist tight enough to cut off circulation and pulled her after him with frightening speed, flying through the blind night without a sound. She, on the other hand, got caught on every branch.
Her right hand was still tied to her feet, loose enough to allow movement, but not so she could reach her face. He had her other hand and wouldn’t let it go, though she pulled until she thought her skin would rip off.
She was dizzy from lack of air, her ears popping. Stop! She screamed, but it came to no more than an unintelligible sound in her throat. She threw her full weight to the ground, bent head to hand, ripped the tape off her mouth.
She gulped the night air, her surroundings coming back into focus slowly. The rifle hanging from the man’s shoulder knocked against her elbow as he snatched the tape from her before she could toss it. He put a finger to his lips, barely visible under a fright of a beard that came to the middle of his chest. Okay, she was supposed to be quiet. She got that.
The man pulled her up, then forward again relentlessly, and she chose to believe he was trying to help her. She preferred it to thinking she was being kidnapped again. But even if that was the case, he was only one man. She was still better off than a few minutes ago.
A creek crossed their path and he dragged her into it, moving fast from stone to stone, going downstream in the middle. The canopy was thinner here, some moonlight filtering through. She followed his movements as closely as she could, trying to stay out of the water as much as possible. She’d read about the parasites.
“Bolehkah tolong saya?” She whispered one of the few sentences she knew in Malay. Can you help me?
A look of surprise crossed his face before he nodded and put his fingers over her lips. She flinched away from his dirty hand and split fingernails. He didn’t seem to notice her distaste and moved on, hauling her behind him.
After a few hundred yards, they reached a bend where thick vines hung into the water from the branches above. He stopped and cut off her dangling ropes, tucked them into his shirt, then turned his back to her.
“Get on,” he said in English.
She hesitated a moment, but when he gave an impatient grunt, she put her arms around his neck, keeping her face from the filthy dreadlocks that streamed halfway down his back.
He bent his knees and reached under her legs with his hands, wrapped them around his waist, then let them go to reach for the vine. The rifle scraped against her side. Could she get it away from him? The sudden possibility of freedom sent blood rushing through her head. Then common sense put in an appearance and prevailed. Even with a gun, her chance of making it out of the jungle alone was uncomfortably close to zero. For one, she had no idea which way to walk.
The decision was taken from her as they were moving up, higher and higher. She didn’t dare let go of him now to grab for the rifle. He was going way too fast for as dark as it was.
Freaking Tarzan. Either that or the missing link. But he spoke English and he hadn’t hurt her yet. She hung on to that for hope.
Sweet heavens but he stunk.
The higher he climbed, the tighter she gripped, until he growled again, and she remembered herself and loosened her arms. If she cut off his air, they’d both fall to their death.
They reached a limb at last, and he waited until she climbed on, guiding her with one hand. Then he leaped after her, with considerably more speed and grace than she had moved. He clamped onto her wrist again—not as tight this time—and pulled her behind him as they made their way from branch to slippery branch, tree to tree. Then they stopped, and she could hear men running through the jungle below.
Her knees shook. At least it was too dark to see the ground so she could pretend they weren’t all that high up. The tree canopy was one solid mass beneath them, with a fifteen-to-twenty foot gap above, then another layer of canopy that blocked out most of the sky. After a few minutes, the man next to her grabbed her and pulled her forward again.
“Where are we going?”
He ignored her and she didn’t have the where-withal to demand an answer, needing to keep her full concentration on her feet so she wouldn’t fall.
A good hour must have passed before they began to descend. He waited and listened before lowering her to the ground and jumping after her.
The first thing she saw was the mouth of a cave in front of them. Their flight from the guerillas apparently had a destination.
It would have been nice if that destination was a village from where she could have contacted the authorities for help, instead of a cave in the middle of the wilderness, but still, at least they would be out of the rain for a while. And maybe in the morning she could convince the wildman to lead her out of the jungle.
“Come on.” He pulled her forward.
She followed him into the pitch-black cave with some misgivings. Was he a hermit? Was he even sane? Her eyes adjusted to the darkness slowly. The place was about the size of her living room back home. He led her to the back and helped her climb the rock face.
“Is this where you live?”
“Hurry.” He pointed with his head, and she spotted the ledge a good fifteen feet above. She slipped, but before she had the chance to fall, he propped her up and came after her.
The rock was covered with something soft and slippery that stunk bad enough to make her gag, the space she reached no more than a three-feet gap between the ledge and the ceiling. But it would keep them sheltered from view.
What little moonlight lit the cave didn’t reach the back of the crevice where they lay side-by-side, their arms touching. When he moved away, she wanted to move after him until they touched again, needing that human contact, the knowledge that she wasn’t alone in the darkness—but she didn’t dare. She had no idea what to expect of him.
“Who are you?” she whispered, risking getting him mad at her for talking.
“Brian.”
A normal, ordinary name, familiar. And he did speak English. She relaxed a little. “Are you American?”
“Montana.”
Her lungs expanded. She tried to picture a cowboy inside the wildman but she failed. “I’m from New York. Audrey Benedict. What are you doing here?”
“The guerillas caught me a couple of years ago.”
And then she remembered the large cage and something in it she hadn’t been able to see because it had been too far from the fire. She’d had enough to worry about at the time to pay much attention to it. Had that been him? The horror of being kept in a cage like an animal, year in, year out, constricted her throat. God, what had they done to him? No wonder he looked barely human.
Was that what would have awaited her if he hadn’t broken them out? Her insides trembled, slightly at first, then more violently. Then he found her hand in the darkness and squeezed it. In warning. She heard voices below. There were people in the cave.
She shook harder, saw light flicker above. The guerillas had a flashlight. Panic gripped her, pushing her muscles to bolt, but there was nowhere to go. An arm slid over her middle as Brian pulled her to him and held her tight in the darkness, probably only to restrain her from doing something stupid, but she didn’t care. She burrowed into the comfort of the contact, curling against him like a child.
The night thundered outside, the rain coming in a downpour now, drowning out the sounds of the jungle. After a while, the men talked less and less, eventually falling silent, the flashlight no longer searching the walls. Had they decided to wait out the night?
She lay absolutely still, barely daring to breathe. Her limbs were going numb, but she didn’t dare move. Passage of time was impossible to judge.
After what she thought might have been a couple of hours, the rain let up. A strange noise was filling the air. The men were talking again. She was pretty sure they were swearing. Had they found something? The odd din grew. Birds. The flapping of wings. But not quite chirping. The alien sound came closer. Something brushed against her leg. Brian cradled her head, his lips close enough to her ear to touch it.
His voice was barely a whisper when he spoke. “Bats.”
She jerked against him, but he held her tight. Something swooshed so close she could feel the wind of the wings on her skin. A claw scraped against her scalp.
Her mouth was muffled against Brian’s chest before she had a chance to scream.
They were in a bat cave!
And guerillas hunted them below with machine guns.
Things were about as bad as they could get. Then she felt something soft splash on her forehead, and finally figured out what the spongy, rank dirt was below them. They were lying in bat droppings.
She gagged, but pressed her lips together, not daring to make a sound. She buried her face against the chest of the man next to her, who smelled only marginally better than their surroundings, and held on for dear life.
Don’t move. The bats won’t kill you, but the men below will. Don’t panic. She repeated the thought over and over, hypnotizing herself to remain still and silent.
A good hour passed before all the bats were in and settled, and the cave was quiet once again.
“Are the men gone?” she whispered, her nerves as shaky as her limbs.
“They left when the bats started to come home.” His chest rose and fell against her cheek. “Damn.”
“What?” God, don’t let it be more bad news.
“I wanted to get out before the bats got in. If we disturb them now, they’ll start swarming and alert everyone around.”
“We’ll have to stay until they go hunting again?” She didn’t have it in her. She couldn’t handle it.
“We’ll wait a while then see what we can do.”
He must have known she was at the end of her rope, because he didn’t make her wait long. “Move little by little, a fraction of an inch at a time,” he said, and showed her what he meant.
She slid across the slippery rockface in increments, trying not to think of what she was sliding in. A bat screeched and flapped its wings above. Her heart pounded in her throat, sweat beading on her forehead as she waited.
Brian held still, too. Neither of them dared as much as breathe too hard. The night hunters settled back to sleep above.
More and more light filled the cave now, the sun coming up. Brian tugged on her arm. She kept her gaze on her feet, away from the bats, as she crept after him.
A half an hour passed before they made it off the ledge, but after that the going was easier and faster. Brian signaled her to stay back as he went to check out the cave’s entrance.
He limped. She hadn’t noticed that last night in the dark. He had seemed to move through the jungle with skill and confidence.
He was gone only a few minutes then stuck his head back in and motioned for her to follow. Thank God, it had been dark when he’d broken her out. He was even scarier in the daylight. If she’d seen him like this she might not have gone with him.
Filthy clothes hung on a surprisingly muscular body, his hair and beard matted like the fur of a wild animal—with plenty of gray in it. She figured him around fifty. There was a hardness to him, an uncivilized ferocity around his silvery blue eyes that startled her with their intensity. Under any other circumstance, she would have run screaming from the man.
As it was, she followed him deeper into the jungle, brushing bat droppings from her clothes. Who was she to turn up her nose at his appearance? In all likelihood, she didn’t look much better.
He moved at a steady pace until they found the creek again. The rain stopped, a small comfort she appreciated. It’d been days since she’d been dry. Her wet clothes chafed her skin with every step she took; her feet felt like they were boiling inside the high-top leather.
He set down the rifle and took off his boots before wading into the water. “You should clean up,” he said, fumbling with his mismatched shirt buttons.
“Is it safe?”
“We have a few minutes.”
She shook her head and pointed at the creek.
“Fast-moving water is all right. The leeches and the other stuff that’ll get you in trouble like stagnant pools. Stand on a stone. Don’t drink.”
The man didn’t have a slow bone in his body. His clothes dropped with much greater speed than she’d been prepared for. He turned from her, but gave no other concession to privacy.
He was all bone and muscle under the dark skin that was a living memorial to the most deprived abuse—a horrifying array of scars visible through the dirt. His hair covered his wide shoulders. He reached for the rag tied around his waist and loosened it.
She looked away.
He probably was used to lack of privacy.
She set her sweaty feet free from the tyranny of the leather boots, and waded downstream. Lord, the cool stream felt good. She bent to wash her hands, then scooped up a handful of water and threw it on her face. If she found a deeper spot somewhere, she could attempt a quick full-body dip. No such luck. A quick scan proved the creek to be evenly shallow.
“Don’t go far,” Brian called after her. “There are some large predators out there, a bunch of poisonous stuff, too.”
He was right. Her guide had been good about pointing out the hazards of the jungle—tigers and snakes on the top of his list. But her brain had been shook up since, her world turned upside down. She relieved herself, watching the bushes, then moved back closer to him.
They were in the middle of the Malaysian jungle, hunted by bloodthirsty guerillas—among other animals. And her sister was— No, she couldn’t afford to think about Nicky now—couldn’t, or she would fall apart.
She could do this. One step at a time. To save Nicky, she had to keep herself alive. Right now, all she had to focus on was cleaning up. It would help if predators didn’t smell her from a mile.
“We can’t stay long,” he said without turning around. “We’re too close to camp.”
Audrey pulled her shirt over her head. Undressing in front of a stranger was the least of her worries.