One hour after detonation
Every time Mary Pat Foley pushed an elephant ear or palm frond or hanging vine out of her way, she either drew chides from a troupe of monkeys or sent a flock of birds wheeling above the canopy, squawking and crying as if to say, Here they are! Here they are!
They’d crossed several trails, two wider and more groomed than the others, but decided to keep to the jungle rather than venture out and face strangers, who might draw unwanted attention. Five hundred acres was almost one square mile, plenty of room to get lost. With luck and a little care, Foley hoped it was enough to stay lost long enough for help to arrive—if it was coming at all.
Johnson had holstered his sidearm. Foley had stuffed the little .380 in her pocket. They found they needed both hands to keep the thick vegetation from shredding their arms and faces. They moved slowly and methodically, trying to keep from leaving a clear trail in the undergrowth and using the sun filtering through the trees to keep them from going in circles and walking into the arms of Sabine Gorshkova. Every step kicked up a centipede or sent a snake slithering over dead leaves. Foley calculated she had inadvertently eaten at least three spiders and wore the homes of at least a dozen others in her hair.
Johnson, in the lead, slowed enough to gingerly clear a web, and the silver-dollar-sized spider hanging with it, out of their path.
“What’s the difference between a jungle and a tropical rainforest?” he whispered.
“I don’t know . . .”
“If you know what you’re doing,” the agent said, “it’s a rainforest. If you don’t, it’s a jungle.”
Affability under extremely harsh conditions was apparently Johnson’s superpower.
Screaming monkeys and tattletale birds, or possibly some deadly viper, would be what got them killed, but in the meantime they had to contend with all manner of itchy creatures—chiggers and ticks and sand flies that were, at the moment, competing with a cloud of mosquitoes for every drop of Foley’s blood. It was some kind of blessing that she would not survive long enough for malaria or dengue fever to manifest.
The foliage thinned some, hardly noticeable unless you happened to be bushwhacking through it.
“Maybe we should try to find high ground,” Foley said. “So I can make another call.”
A flock of unseen birds chattered out of the canopy somewhere behind them.
“These guys are professionals,” Johnson whispered. “And we don’t know what’s going on with all the explosions. We may be in some kind of Red Dawn situation right now.” He caught Foley’s eye and shook his head. “And I’m not joking about that, ma’am. It might be better to hunker down and keep you—”
His head snapped upward, as if he’d gotten a sudden shock. Foley thought he’d been bitten by a snake, until the crack of a gunshot filtered through the trees a moment later.
Johnson hunched forward, favoring his left arm. He’d been shot. Foley tried to see where he was hit, but he threw his right arm around her and pulled her into the underbrush, disappearing into the jungle shadows.
She hoped.