Chapter 3

 

When Elaine crawled back inside the cave, she found Stanley Ketchum lying in exactly the same position she’d left him in, staring at the ceiling, a hopeless expression on his face.

Elaine knew how he felt. He knew that diamond smuggling operation—his “baby”—had been permanently exposed. It would be impossible for him to continue now.

She squatted down beside him. “Stan, you have to get on your feet and let me help you down to the bottom of this hill. My man is on the way to pick us up.”

“I can’t,” he grunted, looking down at his injured leg.

“You don’t have any choice. Do you want to die up here all alone in this cave?”

“I’m telling you, I can’t walk. The bullet must be lodged in a nerve—the pain is unbearable.”

Elaine wondered if he was exaggerating, stalling, trying to find some way out of the situation.

“Stan, listen to me. Your diamond smuggling operation is over, but I’m going to find a way to keep funding the clinics.”

He glanced sharply up at her face. “How?”

“It’s not important right now. You just have to trust me.”

“Trust you?” He laughed and then coughed a couple of times. “You expect me to trust you, after you lied to me nonstop for three days about being some cheap Texas gold digger and conned me into bringing you up here?”

“Do you have a choice?” she said, looking down at his swollen leg.

“You’ll have to take it out,” he grunted.

“Take what out?”

“The bullet,” he said, nodding down to his thigh. “If you pull it out, I can probably walk. Otherwise, forget it.”

 

* * *

Elaine found a pair of needle-nose pliers in Stan’s backpack.

At the mere sight of the tool in her hand, Stan gulped down some Jack Daniels, and then started coughing again. He was now lying in a supine position, with the back of his head flat down against the carpet of dried bat guano, his eyes focused on the cave ceiling, a grim, resigned expression on his face.

Elaine had no clue what she was doing, but if she wanted him to walk, there wasn’t much choice. It occurred to her that removing a slug from someone’s body might be a good thing to teach new agents at the Secret Service Training Academy. They taught you everything you needed to know about “taking a bullet for the President” or whoever you were assigned to protect if you were working in the Uniformed Division, but not how to take one out of person who’d been shot.

“Are you ready?” Elaine said.

Stan raised his head and took one last swig of the bottle.

“Go for it.”

Elaine leaned forward, kneeling on his leg with the weight of her body. She stretched the bloody, swollen hole open with the fingers of one hand and splashed some of the whiskey into it.

As she expected, Stan bucked around, cursing Elaine and her relatives, especially any that she might have in Texas.

She rinsed off the pliers with the whiskey—at least they were shiny and clean—and set the whiskey bottle down in the guano. “Try to stay still, please.”

“Just get it over with,” Stan gasped.

Transferring the flashlight to her mouth and putting even more of her weight on him, she leaned forward, pulled open the hole again, and slowly inserted the pliers.

Stan spewed out a string of curse words that described a few sexual acts that were anatomically impossible, some of which involved Elaine. She tried to ignore his obscene litany as she continued to push the nose of the tool deeper and deeper into the muscle. She finally felt the pronged end tap something hard. Stan opened his mouth to yell, but nothing came out.

He became very still.

She glanced up and flinched. His head was lolled to one side, his mouth open. For a terrible second she thought he was dead. But in the dim light, she could make out his chest rising up and down.

Good, she thought. She moved the pliers carefully in and out of the wound—she could feel the ends of the tool clicking against something hard.

I sure hope that’s not bone, she thought, but it felt and sounded metallic.

Using both her hands now, she gingerly pulled the handles of the pliers apart. Stan’s leg twitched underneath her and he let out a low, unconscious moan. Blood oozed out around the implement.

With a little more fiddling, Elaine sensed the business ends of the pliers were clamped around whatever it was. What else could it be but a bullet slug? she thought, and she was in such an elevated state of anxiety she almost laughed. She had little knowledge of anatomy and prayed that she wasn’t going to cripple him for life.

Holding firmly onto the offending object, sweat ran into her eyes and she had to blink a few times to clear her vision.

Here goes, she thought, and gripping the pliers ever more tightly, she began to pull, being careful to bring the instrument straight out, trying to keep the little chunk of metal from scraping the tender nerve endings along the sides.

She half-expected Stan to suddenly sit up upright, wide-eyed, and let out a blood-curdling scream.

But he only moaned again, still unconscious, one arm flailing a little.

“Got it!” Elaine cried, the flashlight dropping from her mouth.

She triumphantly held the squashed, bloody metal slug in the air, wishing somebody could see it.

She dropped the bullet on top of the rock ledge.

 

* * *

A few minutes later, Elaine helped Stan limp toward the tunnel that led out of the cave. She had wrapped the wound tightly with duct tape, the same way she had bandaged the knife wound in his forearm, and had then woken him up with a splash of water in the face. The swelling in his thigh had receded a bit—removing the bullet seemed to have helped.

There was only one backpack now—Stan’s—which was now strapped to Elaine’s shoulders. She had filled hers with non-essential items, including the broken GPS transmitter, and she had tossed it down the hole that led to the lower chamber. She left no trace behind that indicated any human beings had been in the cave, other than footprints in the guano.

The diamonds were now in a plastic bag, stuffed into the secret pocket inside Stan’s backpack where the invoice for the medical supplies had been hidden.

Elaine had to take hold of Stan’s wrists and half-drag the injured man through the tunnel to get him outside. With the AK-47 strapped to her chest, this wasn’t easy. For once she was thankful for the bat guano—the powdery excrement was slippery and helped his body slide along the passage.

When she finally got him out into fresh night air, it felt wonderful, or at least it did to her. She’d been breathing the faint stench of ammonia from the guano for so long she had become accustomed to it—almost.

She helped Stan to his feet and brushed him off, keeping a sharp eye on him at all times. She had his Glock and his knife safely zipped into her windbreaker pockets, but she wasn’t taking any chances. Stan had mentioned that when he worked for the CIA, he had done heinous things “for the greater good.” Even if Stan believed that she was only after Raj, he might feel justified kicking her into a ravine for the sake of funding the clinics.

The two of them began slowly descending the rocky slope, slipping and sliding now and then, with him leaning on her and grunting almost with every step.

After taking only about ten steps, Stan suddenly stopped. “Wait! We have to block up the entrance.”

He was right—somebody might find it.

Elaine helped him back up to the opening, and with some struggle, they managed to get the boulder pushed up against it so that it was obscured.

“Are you going to tell me exactly what you’re planning to do?” Stan said, as she started helping him back down the hill.

“I’m taking you back to the clinic so Anneke can take care of your leg.”

“And then?”

“Then we’re going back to N’Djamena so you can give Raj his monthly shipment of diamonds. Business as usual. You can’t breathe a word to him about anything that’s happened.”

Stan seemed to accept this much, or at least pretended that he would go along with it. They continued descending in silence, with him limping along and putting so much weight on her shoulder that it was hard for her to walk. Sweat was pouring down his face, which had gone a chalky pale and looked ghastly in the dim light. She decided that he indeed must have been in a lot of pain—you couldn’t fake that look.

Now dawn was upon them—the horizon to the east was glowing a faint pinkish-blue.

When they neared the bottom of the hill, Stan said, “And who exactly is picking us up?”

“One of my colleagues.”

Stan’s sat-phone started ringing from behind Elaine’s head—it was in the backpack.

“That’s probably him,” Elaine said.

They stopped walking and Elaine reached over her shoulder and pulled the ringing phone out. But when she looked at the number on the display, she didn’t recognize it.

“Who is it?” she said, turning the display towards Stan.

He wiped the sweat from his eyes and squinted at the number on the screen. “Anneke.”

Elaine looked at her watch—it wasn’t even five a.m. yet. “Why would she be calling at this hour?”

Stan shrugged. “I have no idea.”

Elaine unzipped her windbreaker pocket, pulled out the Glock and handed him the phone, pointing the gun at him. “Answer it. And don’t tell her a thing. I’m warning you.”

Glaring at her, Stan pushed the button.

“Yes?” he said in a guarded tone.

Elaine could faintly here Anneke’s voice, the Dutch accent. It sounded like she was saying something about Rohaan, the guard.

Stan covered the phone with his hand. “Rohaan is missing.” Into the phone, he said, “He’s probably just drunk and wandered off.”

Anneke responded with a question that Elaine couldn’t quite hear.

“Everything’s fine,” Stan said into the phone, looking at Elaine. “We’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

“Be careful,” she heard Anneke say ominously. “He might have run into the Janjaweed.”