Target Response:. William W. Johnstone
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out for a second,” he muttered.
Kilroy helped Raynor extricate himself from the mass of roots. He held him under the arm, steadying him. Raynor shivered. Kilroy guided him to the tree the monkeys had quitted, easing him down so he sat with his back propped up against the trunk.
The monkeys swarmed the upper boughs of a nearby tree. They were small creatures, each measuring about eighteen inches long from head to toe pads, with long, thin, curling tails. They had short brown fur, black snouts, and gray bellies. Still agitated, they howled and screeched down at the human intruders.
Dusk was falling fast; shadows thickened in the basin’s gloom. In the thinning light Kilroy eyed Raynor.
Raynor’s bitten left arm was grotesquely swollen from fingertips to shoulder. His hand was thick and clumsy as if covered by a gardening glove, with fingers the size of sausage links. Beyond the arm itself, the creeping red flush denoting the poison’s progress had spread to his neck and the top of his chest.
Kilroy started at what sounded like distant shouts. They were hard to distinguish over the monkeys’ clamorings.
Alert, intent, he listened for a repetition of the shouting. None came, and he’d almost convinced himself that his ears had been playing tricks on him when there came the sound of a shot.
A dull, flat cracking report that came from a good distance away, but all the same, a shot. A few beats later, a second shot sounded, as if in response to the first.
With no visual referents it was hard to determine from what direction a sound emanated, but it seemed to Kilroy as though both shots had come from somewhere to the west, beyond the basin.
The reports further stirred up the monkeys, sending them into fresh screams of outrage and abuse.
“We’re in for it now,” Raynor said. “Sorry.”
“Can you walk?” Kilroy asked.
“Sure. Give me a hand up.”
Kilroy gripped Raynor’s right hand and helped him to his feet. Raynor swayed, then recovered his balance.
“I’m useless. Take off while you’ve still got a chance,” Raynor said.
“Don’t talk stupid,” Kilroy said.
“Face the facts—I’m done.”
“Hell, if you can stand, you can walk. If you can’t, I’ll carry you.”
“You’ve already carried me long enough, Kilroy. Too long.”
“Don’t throw in the towel now, Bill, not when we’re so close to the river.”
Raynor shook his head. “Alone, you can make it. Not with me. The poison bite’s getting to me…. It’ll finish me off soon anyway.”
“Guys have lived through worse than that and so will you,” Kilroy said. “Hey, I’m supposed to be bodyguarding you. What’re you trying to do, make me look bad by dying on me?”
Raynor forced a smile. It was pretty ghastly—Kilroy could see the skull behind that smile.
“Do I have to carry you out of here? Because we’ve got to go and I ain’t leaving you behind,” Kilroy said.
“You hardheaded bastard. All right, I’ll stick for now. You can let go of me,” Raynor said.
Kilroy released his grip on the other’s arm, standing ready to catch him if it looked like he was going to fall. Raynor lurched, steadying himself by taking a wider stance. “Okay, I’m all right. I may just be able to do you some good yet. Give me the weapon,” he said.
“Now you’re talking,” Kilroy said, grabbing up the M-16 and handing it to Raynor. Raynor slung it over his right shoulder.
A lot of dead wood littered the ground. Kilroy found a likely-looking branch and picked it up. It was three feet long, solid, mostly straight, with a knob at one end. He tested his weight against it; it seemed sturdy enough.
“Here, use it as a cane,” he said.
Raynor shook his head. “Don’t need it.”
“Maybe you don’t need it now but you might later. What the hell, when you run out of ammo you can throw it at the enemy,” Kilroy said. Raynor took it.
Twigs and pieces of rotten fruit from above began pelting the ground around the two men.
“The monkeys are throwing them at us. Let’s get out of here before they start throwing something else,” Kilroy said.
He and Raynor started up the long, shallow slope leading out of the basin. It was a relatively dry spot of ground, watery mud oozing up to only the tops of their boot soles with every step.
After a few tentative strides Raynor began using the makeshift cane to brace himself. He lurched along like a drunken man but kept moving.
The slope was covered with spindly ten-foot-tall trees whose interlaced boughs formed a thin but more or less continuous canopy. The duo slogged to the crest of the slope, the southern rim of the basin.
It was a low elevation but still provided a vantage point of sorts. Ash-gray shadows pooled in the hollows of the landscape, thickening and thrusting east. Through a gap in the trees a stretch of the river could be seen.
On the far side of the crest, a short downgrade slanted into a broad valley whose low point was cut by a sluggish blackwater channel that ran roughly east–west.
At the west end of the valley it joined the river bordering the rim of the basin, the Rada River, upon which Kilroy had earlier seen the barge and on its far bank a column of troops. Neither were now in view.
“We’ll go downhill and follow the creek to the river,” Kilroy said. Raynor grunted assent. He was saving his breath for walking.
He and Kilroy descended into the valley. The hillside was covered with the same type of spidery, stunted trees that covered the inner wall of the basin.
At the bottom of the hill the ground leveled off into a muddy field thick with knee-high weeds. The spidery trees thinned here, giving way to tangles of scrub brush that screened off much of the surroundings, forming a kind of maze.
The foliage ended near the channel, leaving a five-foot-wide strip of bare earth bordering the edge of the north bank. The strip was a game trail, its muddy surface marked by the hoofprints and paw marks of the creatures that used it.
The bank ended suddenly, dropping three feet straight down to the water below. That explained why the trail was bare of the basking crocodiles that sunned themselves on riverbanks where the water was easier to access.
Kilroy and Raynor paused under the foliage at the edge of the tree line. Shadowy stillness was broken by the gurgling sounds of slow-running water.
Kilroy reached out to part the bushes. Raynor’s good hand clutched the other’s shoulder. “Kilroy,” he began, soft-voiced, “if I don’t make it—”
“You will,” Kilroy said.
“If I don’t, when you reach Lagos, don’t trust Thurlow,” Raynor said.
Ward Thurlow was the CIA agent who’d been the primary liaison with the Pentagon’s investigative unit, the team of which Kilroy and Raynor were now the only two survivors.
“You’ll make it. But why Thurlow?” Kilroy asked.
“I’ve done plenty of thinking since we took it on the run, turning the facts over in my head and trying to make sense of them. I keep coming to one conclusion: it had to be Thurlow who fingered the team to Tayambo,” Raynor said.
“I never had much use for the guy, but how do you figure him for the Judas?”
“Process of elimination. That the others were flying back to Washington yesterday was a closely held secret. So was the fact that you and I were nosing around at the Vurukoo fields.