Bodyguard: Ambush (Book 3) (23 page)

‘Which way now?’ asked a tall
soldier in mirrored shades, his voice travelling clearly in the still, hot air of the
savannah.

Buju began walking slowly towards the
baobab, following the traces of the swept track. Connor’s heart was in his mouth,
and his hand went to his knife in readiness. Amber and Henri clung on beside him, the
boy’s laboured breathing whistling in his ear. As the soldiers drew ever nearer,
the three of them sank further into the hollow of the boughs, in a futile last attempt
to stay hidden.

Buju knelt to examine the earth once
more.

‘It’s hard to tell,’ he
replied. ‘They’ve wiped their tracks.’

The rebel in the mirrored shades swore,
kicking at the dirt with a heavy black boot.

‘Spread out!’ he ordered his
soldiers. ‘They can’t be far away.’

‘Wait!’ said Buju, holding up
his hand. ‘You’ll disturb any signs they might have left.’

Standing, he scanned the terrain, his gaze
passing over the long grasses, the baobab tree, the tangle of bushes … then flicking
back again to the baobab. Connor felt like a mouse caught in the deadly sights of a
hawk.

It was all over. There was nowhere to run.
No chance of fighting. No hope of hiding.

‘What is it,
Buju?’ asked the rebel.

Buju’s gaze immediately dropped to the
discarded branch, several metres from the base of the baobab.

‘Have you seen something?’
demanded the rebel, his mirrored glasses glinting in the sun as he looked sharply
around. ‘Where are they?’

‘This way,’ said Buju, walking
purposefully on.

Connor peered from the bough as Buju
proceeded to lead the soldiers
away
from their baobab tree and into an acacia
thicket. Connor was utterly baffled, until he saw the gleam of a large machete, its tip
pressed against the small of the tracker’s back.

‘Buju looked straight at us!’
exclaimed Amber under her breath. ‘He
knew
we were hiding
here.’

Connor nodded solemnly. ‘That’s
why he went the other way.’

‘He’s on our side?’
questioned Henri, no longer wheezing so badly.

‘Apparently so. By the looks of it,
he’s being forced to track us.’

Cautiously sitting up, Connor peered in the
direction the rebels had gone. Amid the tall grasses on the next rise, he spotted the
distinctive red beret of the boy soldier. They were still heading away from them. But
how long Buju could keep up the pretence of following a false trail was anyone’s
guess. And Connor didn’t think the rebel with mirrored sunglasses was likely to be
taken for a fool.

‘Let’s
move while we can,’ he said. In the distance he could see the ridge upon which the
lodge was located. Gloriously lit by the morning sun, it offered the promise of a safe
haven. But between them and the ridge stretched the open savannah populated by herds of
grazing zebra, kudu and antelope, along with the unseen threat of lion, leopard and
cheetah lurking in the undergrowth.

This assignment should be a walk in the
park for you
, Charley had said.

Some walk this is turning out to
be
, thought Connor as he took a bearing on the ridge with his compass watch.

Swinging his legs off the bough and on to
the trunk, he clambered down from the baobab, followed by Henri and Amber. Once on the
ground they lost sight of their destination, but, relying on the compass, they set off
due south.

‘How long do you think it will take us
now?’ asked Amber with an anxious glance at her asthmatic brother.

‘Depends how fast we can walk,’
Connor replied as they headed up a rise, winding between clumps of bushes and trees.
‘Four, maybe five hours.’

Above their heads yellow weaver birds
swooped, catching tiny insects disturbed from the grass by their feet. The bush hummed
with life and the sun, blazing in the powder-blue sky, was already sending ripples of
heat up from the ground. Connor wiped the sweat from his brow as they continued to
climb.

‘Do we have any water?’ asked
Henri, his voice tight and hoarse.

‘Sure,’ said Connor, having
filled the bottle back at the
cave.
Stopping, he unscrewed the cap, inserted the Lifestraw and passed the bottle to Henri.
‘Only take a few sips,’ he advised. ‘It might be some time before we
reach the river and can refill.’

Henri grimaced at the taste of the warm
chemically treated water. ‘What I’d do for an ice-cold can of Coke,’
he sighed.

As he sucked on the straw, Amber said
quietly, ‘It’s good that Buju’s still alive.’

Connor nodded, his eyes scanning the scrub
for any sign of predators. The knowledge Gunner had imparted about the African wildlife
made him more aware than ever of the constant danger surrounding them.

‘Probably means our parents are OK
too,’ continued Amber, phrasing it more as a question than a statement.

‘Yes, it seems likely,’ agreed
Connor, taking the water bottle back from Henri. As long as Laurent and Cerise served a
purpose for the rebels, then Connor reasoned they might still be alive – if only as
hostages to demand a ransom from the French government. It was a slender hope but a
credible one.

As they approached the top of the rise, a
gunshot echoed across the plain.

‘Down!’ cried Connor, pushing
both Henri and Amber to the ground.

There was more gunfire – but at a distance.
Retrieving the binoculars from his pack, Connor knelt up and searched for the source of
the shots. But he didn’t need binoculars to realize what was happening.

Buju fled through the bush, crouching down
low as bullets tore up the undergrowth around him. The threat of his own torture and
death had impelled him to track the children. But he hadn’t been able to betray
them. Not when he knew the horrendous fate that awaited them.

Of course he’d spotted the three
youngsters in the baobab tree. To a tracker, it was the most obvious place to hide. And
the red hair of the French brother and sister was like a beacon in the bush. But, when
he’d seen them tucked in the hollow of the lower boughs, it wasn’t their
faces he saw but the faces of his own children. He realized that whatever the risks to
his own life he couldn’t be responsible for their capture. No parent on earth
would wish their offspring to suffer at the hands of these cruel rebel soldiers.

After leading the gunmen away from their
quarry, he’d kept up the pretence of following a live trail. But it wasn’t
long before Blaze began to suspect something. That’s when he’d made the
stupid mistake of fabricating a sign – to convince the rebel they were still on the
right track. Asking some of the soldiers to cast ahead, he’d snapped a plant
stem when he thought no one was looking.
Then a minute later announced its discovery and the direction in which the children were
supposedly fleeing.

But the boy soldier No Mercy had spotted his
deception and declared him a liar.

That was the moment he ran for his life.

‘Don’t let that snake get
away!’ Blaze snarled over the ferocious blasts of AK47s.

Like a bolting rabbit, Buju zigzagged
through bushes. If he could reach the cover of the jungle, he might have a chance of
losing them among the trees. But blood flowed freely from the gash across his back where
Blaze had slashed at him when he’d fled. He could feel it dripping off him,
leaving a bright red trail in his wake.

The soldiers raced after him, their guns
blazing.

A bullet clipped his shoulder, knocking him
to the ground. Buju got up, staggering, before another shot pierced his thigh. He
stumbled on, the treeline almost within reach, until he felt a rock-hard strike to his
back as a round punctured his right lung. He was crawling now, the jungle only metres
from him …

Suddenly all was calm, the heavy thunder of
gunfire fading and the sounds of the savannah returning. He could hear the saw-like buzz
of cicadas in the grass. The warbling of weaver birds in the trees. The braying of zebra
and somewhere in the distance the mighty roar of a lion. Buju saw his lifeblood seeping
into the red earth and grasped the rich soil between his fingers for one last time,
savouring its warmth and comfort.

Then the tracker was
wrenched from his dying peace as Blaze planted a foot on his back, seized the curls of
his hair and jerked his head back.

Pressing the edge of his machete against
Buju’s throat, he demanded, ‘Which way did the children
really
go?’

Buju gasped in pain. ‘They’re
miles … away … by now.’

‘You lie. I know we were on the right
track.’

‘You’ll never find them …
without me,’ wheezed Buju.

‘We’ll see about that,’
said Blaze and drew the blade sharply across Buju’s throat.

Blood sprayed into the red earth and the
tracker fell still. Flicking the gore off his machete, then wiping it on the dead
tracker’s shirt, Blaze stood and surveyed the savannah.

‘Double-back to the baobab
tree,’ he told his gang of misfit soldiers. ‘That’s where we lost
their trail.’

As No Mercy obeyed Blaze’s order, he
thought he caught a gleam of reflected sunlight on the rise. A second glint convinced
him that he hadn’t been mistaken.

Sickened at the sight of Buju’s
slaughter, Connor lowered his binoculars. He’d seen the boy soldier with the red
beret point in their direction and wondered how on earth they’d been spotted so
quickly. Buju no longer knew where they were so he couldn’t have betrayed them.
Then, as he stuffed the binoculars back in his Go-bag, Connor cursed his stupidity –
he’d been looking due east so the sunlight would have reflected off the
lenses.

‘What’s going on?’ asked
Amber, still lying prone in the dirt beside her brother.

‘Buju’s just been killed,’
he explained.

‘My God, no!’ The blood visibly
drained from her face as the hope she’d held for her parents’ survival died
along with Buju.

Connor dragged the two of them to their
feet. ‘The gunmen are coming this way. We need to move fast!’

Staying low, they kept to the cover of the
bushes as much as they could. Without Buju to guide the rebels, Connor hoped the
soldiers would be slower to track them. So long as the three of them stayed out of
sight,
they might still have a slim chance
of evading their pursuers.

Cresting the rise, the savannah once again
opened out before them, mounds of granite boulders breaking up the terrain between
strips of dense undergrowth and islands of flat-top trees. In the distance the land
flattened out into a grassy plain where the Ruvubu River wound like a glistening python,
dividing the valley in two. Until now Connor hadn’t given any consideration as to
how they’d cross that wide stretch of waterway …
if
they even got that
far.

He risked a quick glance back and spotted
the red beret racing through the long grass and bushes towards them.

‘Keep going,’ Connor urged,
directing Amber and Henri downslope.

Running as fast as Henri’s asthma
would allow, they followed an animal trail across the savannah and into a dense thicket.
Emerging at the other side, Amber came to an abrupt halt, Henri and Connor almost
running into the back of her before they also froze.