After double-checking the boy’s work on my sidearm, I pulled Patterson away from the other prisoners.
“See that guy?” I said to Patterson, nodding in the direction of Nakdali. “He had a passport on him, Abdul Nakdali. Great news, right? Now you don’t have to extradite Ms. Sabel.”
He took a moment to answer, and when he did, his voice was halting. “That is good news. But they’ll still have questions about the dead man.”
I nodded. “You shot a prostrate man in the act of surrendering. Why would you murder a government official, Patterson?”
Patterson’s eyes shifted, looking around me. He leaned in, conspiratorially close. “Did you see what he was doing to her?”
“You brought her here.”
“I never thought he would do anything like that. My understanding was that we were meeting Sri Lankan investigators.”
“In the middle of the Caribbean?” I said. “At a site that’s blurred off the satellite maps?”
“You don’t understand,” Patterson said. “I can help you.”
“Help me what?”
“You stormed a government facility. You’ll be lucky if they call it treason instead of terrorism. I can help you. I can put in a good word for you.”
“Syrians kidnapped Pia Sabel in Washington. My rescue team followed her GPS signals here. If this is a government facility, which department hired them to kidnap her? Yours or Caldwell’s?”
Patterson moved back as if I’d slapped him. He pulled himself together and leaned back in. “I can help you. You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”
“So clue me in,” I said. “Who runs this place?”
Patterson shifted his weight. His eyes surveyed the ground around me. “That’s classified.”
Carmen stepped up to us.
“What do you think of this guy?” I thumbed over my shoulder at Patterson. “Did we rescue him or catch him?”
She shrugged and motioned me away. I walked a few steps with her.
Carmen said, “The water is rising. We need to move the group.”
I looked down the slope, at the end of the circle of flashlights, and saw muddy water lapping at the edge. It was inching relentlessly up the incline. Connections to other caves were underwater. We had only one way out. The cliff.
Satellite and topographical maps are the lifeblood of soldiers. I’d been smart enough to save a few to my phone while I’d been online. One showed an old lighthouse on the northeast corner of the island and some fishing huts with a pier on the southeast. We were on the northwest, about five miles from the huts.
From the way Chamberlain described the storm’s track and speed, we were in the worst of it now. If we could last another hour, conditions would steadily improve. That hour had a rising flood on one side and a platoon of Syrians on the other.
“Move everyone uphill,” I said, “but leave Ms. Sabel and the kids for last. Let them get as much rest as possible.”
I grabbed a flashlight and headed upstream with Tania. The cave narrowed to a slot twenty yards from our bivouac. We studied the darkness with thermals that told us we were alone, then switched on a flashlight for a brief look before moving forward. Twisting sideways in some places and crawling in others, we explored the opening.
In less than a hundred difficult yards, we came to the cave’s mouth, an impressive opening that yawned into the storm’s noise and darkness. The mouth was shaped like a cone, the narrow end being our cave exit. A flat floor had formed from sand caught in the bottom. Someone long ago had made a circle of stones for a fire pit. At some point even further back in time, the right-hand corner of the ceiling had fallen into the sea below, leaving a couple of jagged boulders behind. One formed a ledge to my right; the other stuck halfway out over the ocean, creating a defensible space behind it. Beyond the ledge, a trail ran from the fire circle, past the ledge, around the corner, and disappeared into the night.
Outside, daylight was getting through the cloud layer. Not enough to call it first light, but less than the total darkness when we landed. We could see rough shapes and distinguish between light and dark objects at short distances.
I inched to the left, and Tania crept to the right. I reached the boulder that stuck out over the edge and had a look around. Waves crashed against the rocks below, shooting foam and sea into my face. Wind and rain whipped around me like evil children trying to tug me to my death. On the opposite side of the opening was a good-sized trail that wandered away into the night.
I slipped behind the boulder and held my flashlight out over the cliff as far from my body as possible. With one quick flick, I illuminated a small section of the trail … and one pair of NVGs.
Three bullets whizzed past me.
I didn’t stick around to count heads. Tania blew a few rounds at the first guy to come down the trail.
“What the hell you doing, Jacob?” she said. “Now they know all they have to do is seal the entrance.”
“They just got here, or they would’ve done that already.”
“So we should’ve left twenty minutes ago.”
“And go where?”
She shrugged.
I reached in my pack and found a couple frag grenades. “Back in a flash.”
Crossing to her side of the cave mouth, I reached the trailhead. A large, flat stone protected me from the hostiles on the trail as I heaved a grenade around it. The circle of death it created did little damage because it bounced away and off the cliff, exploding above the surf below.
Timing the delay a little better, my second attempt exploded in the air above the trail.
A little cautious inspection with the thermals showed me a clear path for at least twenty yards. I moved up it, Tania covering behind me, and discovered the trail ran along a jagged and treacherous cliff to the surface above. I could see Syrians taking cover twenty yards farther up.
We backed up to the drier and more defensible cave mouth.
“Can you hold here?” I asked.
“Does the pope sleep in the woods?” she said and crouched behind a boulder.
I made my way back down the narrow, twisting cave. Carmen stood at the edge of the rising water.
I stepped to her side. “How fast is it rising?”
“Faster every minute,” she said. “I think the other caves are full or blocked, and this is the only empty space to fill. Twenty minutes from now, we’re swimming.”
A sharp shriek rang through the caves. Everyone turned to face Ms. Sabel, who was awake and looking embarrassed.
Most of us knew about the boss’s nightmares. From the time her mother was strangled, she slept three hours and woke up with an ungodly screech. Word was, her mother’s ghost visited every night and showed her an ugly future if she didn’t do more, push faster, work harder.
Carmen and I stared the others down, even the children. Then we started moving out. Dhanpal and Carmen helped Ms. Sabel with the exhausted children while Tony and Miguel pushed our prisoners forward.
After snapping the plasticuffs off him, I put a shoulder under Salih and helped him limp forward. “You’re the guy who told Ms. Sabel there were eight men on the island, right?”
“That’s right,” he said in Arabic. “The others took the boat and left with the children.”
We lagged behind, his wrecked knee causing him pain with each step. He’d spilled his information easily, but I still didn’t trust him.
“What boat?” I said.
“Colonel Nakdali contracted a passenger ferry.”
Nakdali, a few yards ahead of us, flinched at the mention of his name. He glanced over his shoulder.
“How many children did they take?” I asked.
“Sixteen. All that were left.” He waved at the children while his pal, Masri, tried to shut him up with icy glares. “We thought these children had drowned.”
“There was a whole platoon out there when I landed. What happened?”
Salih stopped walking and squeezed my shoulder, a genuine look of surprise on his face. “I swear, I do not know.”
They say the first thing to die in battle is the truth. I couldn’t tell if I was getting it from him or not. He sounded sincere, but his information was way off.
Nakdali turned and faced us.
“I will help him,” he said with a commanding tone. His accent was light, with deep vowels.
Whether he was genuinely concerned for his soldier or just wanted to shut the young man up was irrelevant. I let him take Salih’s other shoulder.
Nakdali was a thin, wiry man, early fifties or a hard-used forty. His wrinkles were deep and plentiful, and gray hair ran in thick streaks through the base black.
“I hold you responsible for killing nine of my men,” he said, leaning around our patient.
I admired him for taking the initiative, trying to take control.
I did some quick math in my head. “Eight, actually. One guy we tied up. They were trying to kill us, y’know.”
“We do only what we are legally contracted to do—”
I held out a hand to stop. “Who contracted you?”
He clenched his teeth and glared.
Miguel had stopped in front of us, blocking the way. He motioned me to join him. “Too small a space.” He waved a hand at the wider cave mouth. “When the water gets here, we have those ledges. Nothing else.”
He was right. Once the water crested the last rise and began spilling out, all kinds of bad things would happen. You didn’t have to be an engineer to see erosion would begin any minute and escalate quickly.
The ledge on the right was big enough for three or four adults. The boulder on the left, half of it hanging over the edge, could squeeze in a couple more. That meant I could save five or six of our fifteen lives.
“Jacob,” Tony said from the back of the line, “water’s coming faster. Ten feet behind me.”
“Miguel,” I said, “take the machinegun and the two Syrian soldiers. Send them out on the trail ahead of you.”
He nodded and pushed Salih and Masri ahead of him. Salih complained in Arabic, and I explained that they could give him the medical attention he needed. Which was true. But the hostiles on the trail would have to deal with their comrade’s ravaged knee.
Pia and Dhanpal took the kids to the ledge, squeezed in, and held on tight. Carmen pushed Patterson and Nakdali to the cliff’s edge just as water began pouring out of the cave. The stream went from a trickle to a hose to a fire hose in seconds. Tony and I were stuck in the middle, water hitting our legs hard. The fire circle stones washed away, nearly taking the two of us with it. Pulling him by his good arm, I got Tony to the trailhead seconds before a head-sized rock rolled through where we’d been standing. A moment later, a knee-high rock broke free, bowled through, and plunged over the cliff into the darkness.
Miguel made progress while Tania covered him. They advanced step-by-step as the trail edge eroded beneath them. With nowhere else to go, Tony and I followed them a few feet up the trail.
Salih called out in Arabic to his friends and waved a white cloth. After his third attempt at shouting into the tempest, a reply came back. They stepped out to help him.
Miguel hung back at the last bend, watching with his thermals. When our two prisoners were met and taken in, he and Tania reported back. “Three hostiles on the trail. Must be more topside.”
“Agreed—” I was cut off by a crashing sound, followed by a child’s scream.
In the cave’s mouth, a man-sized chunk of limestone had fallen, forcing the water into two streams around it. One stream was hammering Carmen, Patterson, and Nakdali, forcing them nearer the cliff. They clung to each other and a piece of the boulder.
Tania kept watch on the trail as Miguel and I linked arms, planted our feet in the violent rapids, and reached out. My fingertips reached Carmen’s, but the plume of water between us was too much. Ms. Sabel left the children and stepped through the charging water. She grabbed my shoulders and locked her arm in mine to lengthen our reach. Carmen grabbed her hand and pulled herself through the torrent.
Next came Nakdali, struggling with his bound wrists. He put his elbows around Ms. Sabel’s head and wedged his foot behind mine before moving his arms to surround my head. As he made the last leap to Miguel, a taller and more difficult reach, his feet left him and he flew into the raging current.
Letting go of Miguel, I grabbed him by the collar and struggled with his weight in one hand. I was unwilling to lose my footing when Miguel grabbed him and tossed him like a rag doll to dry ground.
Patterson watched Nakdali’s near-death experience in horror, then held his hands out to Ms. Sabel, begging her to release his plasticuffs. She shook her head. He came forward and encountered Nakdali’s problem in the same place. As his feet swept out from under him, Miguel caught him and tossed him on top of Nakdali.
Ms. Sabel climbed back to the children while I pushed Patterson and Nakdali to the trailhead.
With sincere humility, Nakdali said, “Thank you for saving my life. And thank you for showing Salih a little mercy.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. “I’d consider it a debt repaid if you told me where your men took the children.”
“Children?”
“We’re missing sixteen children. Salih told me you took them off the island. They had a window of about seven to ten hours, which means they transferred them to someone else in the Dominican Republic. Where are they?”
“They’re coming,” Tania called out.
Miguel and Tony scrambled to find defensible positions.
Nakdali’s eyes searched mine for a long moment. “We will talk after the storm passes.”
I stared at Nakdali, turning his words over in my head. There was a threat lurking somewhere in his phrasing.
Was he a step ahead of me?