Gideon's War/Hard Target (12 page)

But who had sent them? Islamist sympathizers within the Mohanese military working under General Prang? Unlikely. They would have sent locals who spoke Malay, and Gideon had heard these men speaking English. Plus, how could they even have known Gideon was in the country? The answer came to Gideon in the form of two chilling questions: Could it be Tillman? If it wasn’t him, who else could it be?

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CAPTAIN AVERY TAYLOR HAD been waiting for three hours in the anteroom of the opulent offices of the commanding general of the Mohan Defense Forces when his phone rang. Captain Taylor was not an easy man to rattle. But when he found himself talking directly to General Ferry, the commander of SOCOM, he broke into a sweat.

The general did not engage in pleasantries. “Where is your platoon, Captain?” he demanded.

“Here in KM, sir, making arrangements for the SEALs and Delta to—”

“Negative, son. Not anymore. You have new orders. By direction of the president of the United States I’m now ordering you to lead your platoon in an assault on the Obelisk. You need to seize the rig on or before twelve hundred hours your time.”

Captain Taylor’s mind briefly went blank. Back in Coronado he’d had access to the finest equipment available in the world. But here in Mohan, his men had arrived with nothing but sidearms, M4 carbines, and a paltry amount of ammunition. Political considerations made it impossible for them to bring any materiel that was deemed to have “offensive capability,” as they were here solely in a training capacity. They had no boats, no chutes, no scuba gear, no comms equipment, no grenades, no night vision . . . The list of what they didn’t have that they ought to have for a night assault on a well-defended naval target could have gone on for pages. “Twelve hundred hours today, sir,” Taylor said in confirmation. “Local time?”

“Today. Twelve hundred hours, Mohan time.”

The room Captain Taylor stood in was a huge, echoing marble chamber with the air of a mausoleum.

“Sir, wegrent, n don’t have much in the way of gear.”

“The president is speaking to the Sultan right now. Anything you need, he will supply.”

“Twelve hundred hours.”

“Captain, I am fully aware of the difficulty of this mission. Therefore I will not detain you any longer. If you get one iota of shit about anything from the Mohanese, you call me direct on this number. Clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Captain, this is how humble soldiers like you and me get into the history books.”

As Captain Taylor thumbed the off button on his phone, a Mohanese soldier, an immaculately groomed adjutant whose coat dripped with gold braid, opened the massive teak door and said, “Captain, the general can spare five minutes for you.”

Captain Taylor said, “Sorry, but I can’t spare five for him.” Before the gawking adjutant could reply, Taylor was sprinting down the long marble hallway. Praise the Lord! he thought. This was the real shit!

After they found the pictures of Gideon, the surviving highlanders had a heated argument. It didn’t take them long to come to a decision.

Gideon didn’t need to speak their language to understand what they’d concluded: being in proximity to Gideon Davis was hazardous to their health. They shouted angrily at him, pointed at the trail leading deeper into the jungle, and threatened him with their spears.

“Okay, okay,” he said softly, backing away from them. “I’m going. I’m sorry. I didn’t know anyone was chasing me. I’m sorry about your friends.”

Once he was comfortably beyond spearing range, he turned and jogged down the trail a couple of hundred yards, then stopped and hid behind a tree. The shouts faded after a few moments. Oddly, the tribes men walked back in the direction from which they had come, toward the river, silently carrying their dead comrades. Gideon waited until they were gone before he returned to the scene of the battle.

The three jihadis lay on the ground, arms splayed, mouths open. It made him a little queasy looking at them. They seemed half like men, half like sacks of meat. Who were they? They were all small-statured Asians. Mohanese? Maybe. But why did they speak English? Were they led by someone who spoke English? Or were they Americans who just looked Mohanese? Were they Asians—jihadis possibly—from various countries who spoke English because it was their only common language?

Gideon steeled himself for an unpleasant task. Each of the dead men carried a small backpack. Gideon unzipped each pack in turn and went through it systematically, looking for food, water, and information. The highlanders had already ransacked their gear . . . but they might have left something that would give him a clue as to who had sent these people after him.

He found precious little.

There were a few pieces of spicy beef jerky tucked into an inside pocket. Another had an unfinished candy bar hidden in his shirt, the silver foil carefully folded over the crescent of bite marks. A half-full canteen lay in the weeds near the third man. Gideon wolfed down the jerky and the chocolate, then chased it with a few mouthfir ¡€†uls of water. He knew he had to ration his water. There was plenty of water in the rain forest, but it wasn’t potable. In all likelihood it would give him dysentery— uncomfortable in a civilized area, but potentially deadly up here.

Everything else that might have been of any use to him—cell phones, radios, tools, weapons—was gone, taken by the highlanders.

The men carried no IDs, no wallets, no credit cards. The highlanders might have taken currency. But credit cards? IDs? They’d have left them. And yet there was nothing here. These men had been sanitized before they had been dispatched.

After he finished his modest meal, Gideon crouched in the dim light and tried to think what to do next. Whoever these men were, there would be more of them waiting if he went back the way he’d come. Getting to Kampung Naga was still the only way he’d find his brother.

He and the highland tribesmen had hiked at a pretty good clip for most of the previous afternoon. They might have made ten miles. He pulled out the map. If he was reading the scale correctly, he still had at least fifteen miles to go. Maybe more. And that was assuming he was even heading in the right direction. The town was due south. He could orient himself based on the direction of the rising sun, of course. But that wasn’t like navigating by compass. If he veered east or west by a few degrees, he might miss his destination entirely.

He looked around. Daylight was beginning to filter down through the heavy canopy of foliage. Everything was strange to his eye—the broad-leaved bushes, the gnarled trunks of the tall trees, the curious-looking fruit hanging here and there, the vines that twined upward into the green distance.

When he was a kid, he and Tillman had spent hours and hours wandering in the woods and fields around his house. By the time he was in junior high, he knew every plant and bush and berry—which were good to eat, which weren’t, which berries gave you the runs, which plants made you itch or break out, which ones cut you or stung you. Here he was like a baby—completely at the mercy of the jungle. Even the hoots and cries of the animals rising up around him meant nothing to him.

He had to move. Every minute he spent here was a minute closer to death. He figured the faster he got to wherever he was going, the faster he’d know if he was in the wrong place or the right place.

Gideon stood, feeling more acutely the blisters that had formed on his feet. He measured the dead men with his eyes, removed the boots and socks from the tallest one, and put them on. They were tight, but still better than his soggy wingtips.

He began trotting down the trail—just a slow jog, enough for him to make ten miles in a matter of a little over ninety minutes. The pace would force him to use up his water a little faster. But he determined it was still his best course of action. If he’d been at home, lost in a national park, then a conservative, hunker-down-and-wait-for-help strategy would probably be the smart play. But help wasn’t coming here. And the only people looking for him wanted to kill him.

As he ran, he counted his strides. He figured he had a stride of about four feet. That was roughly fifteen hundred strides to the mile. Back home, he ran regularly—four miles, most days. Sometimes five. He hadn’t run more than seven miles at a stretch since college. Could he run fifteen?

Probably. It was no good thinking about it, though.

So he just kept running and counting, counting and running.

He came to the first village at just past the two thousand mark. Unlike the village he’d passed through with the tribesmen on the previous day, this one hadn’t been burned. But it was abandoned. Food was rotting in the houses. Whoever had left here had bailed out so quickly they didn’t have time to take their food with him.

There were several small trails leading out of the village, but only one large trail heading south. He took a few sips of water, chose the large trail, and plunged on.

At the eight thousand mark, he reached another village. This one was larger than the last and seemed closer to civilization. There was no electricity, but there were lamps, gallon cans of kerosene, tire tracks in the ground. The tracks weren’t for a car, though. Something smaller, like an ATV. Gideon estimated that a couple hundred people had lived in the town, but the surrounding fields and houses had been burned to the ground.

What was going on around here? This was starting to look like a full-fledged war—a war accompanied by something resembling ethnic cleansing.

As he paused, he saw something red lying on the ground. A flower. A red flower. He reached down and picked it up.

It was a poppy. He surveyed the field. And then he saw it. Much of the field was burned. But not all. Opium poppies. Someone was growing opium up here.

There was no time to think about what this meant—if it meant anything at all. He ran.

The trail had widened as it left the burned village and had parallel ruts—presumably formed by the wheels of regular ATV traffic. Though it was wider than the trail he’d been running on earlier, it was covered in weeds, as though it hadn’t been used much lately.

By the time he passed ten thousand, Gideon’s body started rebelling. At home, with a good pair of running shoes, a good night’s sleep, and plenty of food, a five-mile jog would have been routine. But he’d only eaten a few morsels in the last twenty-four hours and hadn’t slept worth a damn in forty-eight. So there was nothing routine about this run. He kept running, but his limbs felt leaden, his head throbbed, and his lungs ached. Every stride seemed to be an act of will.

But he didn’t stop. The heat was not too bad here in the highlands—but he knew he was operating on a water deficit. He wouldn’t last much longer without water. When he reached fifteen thousand, he finally stopped to drain the canteen. He leaned against a tree. Next thing he knew, he was sitting, staring blearily up into the dark canopy of the jungle. For a moment he couldn’t remember where he was. A monkey appeared, stared curiously down at him, then leapt to another branch, screamed once, disappeared back into the dim distance. Gideon tried to force himself to his feet, but his body kept coming up with reasons not to.

He closed his eyes and thought back to the day when his father and mother had died. That’s who I’m here for, he thought. Whoever my brother has become, whatever he’s become, I’m here for him. He pictured his brother sitting on the front steps of the house, that terrible empty expression in his eyes.

And then Gideed ¡€†on was on his feet, pressing on into the jungle. Occasionally he passed through a stream. It was all he could do not to stop, lie down in the stream, and suck the water into his mouth.

He knew there was a point where dysentery was less of a danger than immediate dehydration. But he kept telling himself that he hadn’t reached that point quite yet.

The sun was higher in the trees now. He felt himself getting more and more light-headed, less and less clear in his thinking.

The trail he’d been on had been going due south for a while. There was no trick to navigating it. It simply headed south. But suddenly the trail split.

He stopped. Which way? He looked up, trying to determine by using the sun which way was south. But the sun was high in the sky now, and it was harder to tell east from west. Both trails were equally rutted. There were no signs, no marks, nothing to indicate where they were heading.

He realized after a while that he had been standing, staring up in the air for a long time. How long, he wasn’t sure. His mouth felt like a bag of sand.

Somewhere in the back of his mind a voice said, Okay, this is it. Time to find water.

But where?

Earlier it seemed like he’d been splashing through a stream every five minutes. He looked around. No streams were visible anywhere. He knew that if he just pressed on, he’d find one. And yet . . .

And yet neither his mind nor his body seemed capable of moving. He couldn’t make up his mind. Which way? The trail on the left or the trail on the right? He stared up at the sun. A shaft of light pierced the leaf and plunged into his eyes, blinding him momentarily. He realized vaguely he’d pushed himself too far, let his body dry out too much. He closed his eyes.

How far had he come? Gideon wondered. Was he even close to Kampung Naga? He realized he had stopped counting strides a long time ago. How long was a long time? Five minutes? Five hours? He really wasn’t sure.

Gideon stood, swaying, eyes closed, waiting to fall.

It was just a matter of time before his legs gave out, he thought. Just a matter of time.

But he didn’t fall. Instead, he smelled something.

Smoke.

A vague signal penetrated his consciousness. Smoke. Smoke equaled people. People equaled water.

Opening his eyes, he saw the leaves stirring in a bush near his face. The wind was pushing them to the right. Which meant the smoke was coming from the east. If he took the trail on the left, that would lead him to the fire.

He swayed, almost losing his balance, before he was running again. It might not have been actual running. In reality it might have been a slow, painful, tottering walk. But it felt like a sprint.