The DMZ Page 41

  The guerrillas had heard it too. This time there was no answering gunfire but a shout, then the crackle of pursuers who were no longer trying to be stealthy. Julie knew she should keep going, that it was foolishness to waste precious seconds. But she couldn’t go without knowing. She crouched on the other side of the fork, hidden by a drooping frond of a dwarf palm, and looked back.

  She saw Victor step over the log and wrest the AK-47 from Carlos’s grasp. And she saw his next action, so quick and without hesitation she would not have had time to scream her protest even if it hadn’t caught in her throat. There were no words, no recrimination, not even anger on his impassive dark features as Victor slid the pistol from his belt, put it to Carlos’s temple and pulled the trigger.

  Julie gagged as Carlos twitched once, then slumped sideways. Linda stepped over the log behind Victor, and the spiteful pleasure with which she glanced down at the dead boy, then turned to search the open space, galvanized Julie into movement. Dropping to her hands and knees, she scrambled into the underbrush, worming her way into a dense tangle of vines and orchids. Behind her she heard Linda’s angry shout. “Where is the girl?” Then Alberto calling, “Which way now, Victor?”

  Julie wanted to stop and cry—or at least throw up. But she threw herself frantically forward even as the horror of what she’d just seen replayed itself in vivid technicolor over and over in her mind. Had Carlos known what would happen? Julie was certain he had, despite his assurances to her. He had deliberately sacrificed himself to let her get away.

  With that conviction, Julie’s horror and the terror that propelled her onward gave way to a terrible anger and a steely determination. She was not going to let these men—and women—waste that sacrifice. As Carlos had said, she could not allow this to be for nothing. She would get away, and she would be free, and if she couldn’t bring Carlos back, she would at least bring retribution on these people if …

  If it’s the last thing I do.

  A sob caught in Julie’s throat, but she pressed forward, crawling under branches, rising to a hunch-backed scuttle when the tangle around her lifted a little, pushing herself always to greater speed until she was gasping for breath and she didn’t know whether the salt trickling into her mouth was tears or sweat.

  The resistance to her groping hands gave way so suddenly that Julie sprawled forward onto the ground. She was out of the underbrush, and ahead of her lay only the tall columns of the hardwoods and the open forest floor between them. Pushing herself to her feet, Julie broke into a staggering run. If she could put enough of those massive tree trunks behind her before her hunters burst out of the underbrush …

  That was when she saw him.

  He was standing in a direct line between Julie and the beckoning freedom of the forest trees, tense and motionless and almost invisible in his battle fatigues against the dappled backdrop of a moss-draped tree trunk, his head raised high as it turned in a slow, deliberate survey, his AK-47 unslung and cradled in a rock-steady grip. Enrique Martinez had obeyed Victor’s orders to circle around, and he was waiting for her.

  Julie checked in momentary panic. She saw to her left the belt of grasses and reeds and other tall plants that marked the edge of the swamp through which the guerrillas had come. It was a dangerous place with the possibility of snakes and alligators and other things she didn’t even want to think about. But its cover was her only chance. Julie veered in that direction.

  She was too late. Her movement had caught Enrique’s peripheral vision. He spun around, the AK-47 coming up as he did. Julie braced herself for the impact of the bullets. But they didn’t come, and for a measureless instant his eyes held hers, the guerrilla killer who had once saved her life and now had planned her death, and Julie saw blazing fury there and a determination as steely as her own. As Julie whirled around and began to run, he broke into an easy lope in her direction.

  He didn’t shout for his companions, but ran as silently as she, shoving his assault rifle back over his shoulder for easier movement as he did so, racing through the zigzag pattern of the trees at a tangent calculated to cut Julie off before she reached the cover of the swamp.

  Julie ran with a speed born of despair, forcing her laboring lungs to find fresh reserves from somewhere. But he was fast and strong, and he wasn’t exhausted by hours of marching or that last desperate scramble through the brush. When she glanced sideways, he had gained on her visibly, and though Julie wouldn’t let herself look again, the heavy pounding of his boots grew ever louder and closer in her ears. Her outstretched hands were brushing the first green fronds of the swamp when she felt a hand come down hard on her shoulder, spinning her around to meet the molten copper blaze of his glare.

  She had lost, Julie knew with despair. He had caught her, and he would kill her as his companions had killed Carlos. But she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of making this easy for him. If she had to go down, she would go down fighting, as Carlos had.

  As he shifted his grip to her arms, Julie fought back, lashing out with feet and hands, twisting and turning in his grip, and more than once she almost broke free. The fury of her resistance carried them deeper into the vegetation that edged the swamp. Fronds closed in above them and mud oozed over her shoes. He grunted as her teeth sank into the heavy material of his sleeve, and for one hopeful moment his grip slackened.

  But he was vastly stronger than she, and the adrenaline that had carried her this far was ebbing fast. Though it seemed she had fought him for an eternity, it was probably only seconds before he caught her hands behind her back and kicked her feet out from under her. Julie lay face down with mud in her mouth and the heavy length of his body pressing her down so she couldn’t breathe, and she could feel the shudder of his quickened breathing against her back and smell the sharp tang of his sweat and the faintest lingering musk of his cologne.

  Then she felt his diaphragm tighten for speech, and his breath came hot and close against her ear. When he spoke, it was nothing her wildest imagination could have expected.

  “Would you shut up and keep still before you get us both killed?”

  His low furious order had been in English, not Spanish, and Julie grew instantly still under the weight of his body as it registered that he hadn’t spoken in the stilted accent she’d heard the guerrilla fighter use until now, but with the idiomatic fluency of a native-born American.

  As though he sensed her capitulation, her captor slackened his grip and rolled off her so she could breathe. Rolling over, Julie stared up at him, stunned, taking in—as though she had never seen him before—the hard, clean planes of his face, shadowed now by the lack of a shave that morning, the unyielding lines of jaw and mouth only inches above her, and the narrowed gaze that was not looking down at her but was already busy searching their surroundings with the professional vigilance of a soldier.

  “You’re not a guerrilla!” she whispered with sudden incredulous certainty. “You’re not even Colombian, are you? But if … if you aren’t Enrique Martinez, who are you?”

  His glance flickered briefly to her face before he rolled with one smooth movement to his feet and reached down to pull her up. “Captain Rick Martini,” he answered curtly, “7th Special Operations Group, Fort Bragg, North Carolina.”

  EIGHTEEN

  “NOW, GET THAT UNIFORM OFF!” Enrique—no, Rick—yanked at her knapsack, pulling it loose from her shoulder, where it had somehow managed to stay during all her frantic scramble. Julie stared at him in bewildered outrage. Had he lost his mind—or had she?

  He was already rifling through the bag, yanking out a pair of the khaki pants and shirts she’d packed for the trip and hadn’t touched in these last weeks. Shoving them into her arms, he snapped impatiently, “They’ve got a tracker device on you. How do you think we found you? We’ve got maybe two minutes until they’re on us, so stop wasting time.”

  Julie went cold as his meaning sunk in. She scrambled to unbutton the shirt of her camouflage fatigues and tug off her shoes to pull off the
heavy pants. Rick turned his back on her and stepped away. Pulling a two-way radio from his belt, he barked into it in the flawless Colombian Spanish that turned him suddenly back into Enrique, the guerrilla. “Go right! Go right! She’s out there and headed away from the swamp!”

  The reeds and swamp grasses closed around Julie so that she couldn’t see, but she could hear the thrashing and snap of broken branches as her pursuers burst out of the underbrush. A blast of gunfire followed, directed toward the woods rather than the swamp, a total waste of ammunition since the guerrillas rather obviously had no target in sight. She heard Victor echo Rick’s order. “Go right! Go right! She’s in the woods!”

  Julie was buttoning up the khaki shirt with fingers trembling from haste as Rick spun around on his heel. “That will give us maybe five minutes—until Rafael over on the other side lets them know you didn’t come that direction. You’re lucky I found you and not him or you’d be dead right now,” he informed her curtly, as though she needed that information. “Now where’s the boy?”

  Julie swallowed hard against a fresh stinging in her eyes. “He … he’s dead! Victor shot him.”

  Rick’s mouth set grimly, but he wasted no time asking for further details. As Julie tugged her sneakers on over the soggy mess her quick change had made of her socks, he scooped up her muddy fatigues from the ground. Running his fingers along the bottom edge of the shirt, he stopped as he came to a small protuberance under the hem. “There it is.” Taking a banana clip out of one of the pockets of the ammo vest he was wearing, he swiftly wrapped the uniform around it. “It’s a waste of ammo we might need later, but I don’t see any rocks out here.”

  Leaving her side, he pushed through the reeds until he was out of sight. Julie heard a splash. Then he was back. “Let’s go! Their tracker is an old Russian-bought one—nothing like ours. American, I mean. It’ll give a GPS coordinate, but their grid is so small, all they can do is pinpoint a general location and rely on a visual to ID the suspect. With that bug buried in a couple meters of swamp water, they’ll have to check every bush before they can be certain you’re no longer in the area.”

  His explanation had lost Julie. But it didn’t matter. She’d caught the pertinent points. The guerrillas had not just depended on their guards but had planted some kind of tracking device in the clothing Linda had given her. One more indication of her importance to the guerrillas—or rather, the spy they’d thought her to be—since they surely didn’t waste such expensive and hard-to-get technology on their typical kidnap victim. Another gift from Aguilera’s musulmanes allies?

  And Enrique—or rather Rick Martini. Julie’s mind was still reeling with the effort to process this new development. First Sondra, then Tim, and now Enrique. Was anyone who they appeared to be? The hand radio at the guerrilla fighter’s belt sputtered static. No, she couldn’t call him a guerrilla anymore. What was he? She’d just have to call him Rick.

  “Enrique! Where are you?” The angry voice through the static belonged to Victor. “We don’t see the girl anywhere!”

  Rick snatched the radio again from his belt. “Keep heading straight. I’m going after her. You’ll catch up with me if you stay on her trail.”

  He hit a button, and the radio went dead. “We’re going to have to keep this off. Which is too bad, as we won’t be able to track what they’re up to. With any luck they won’t realize I’ve gone AWOL for some time yet. Now, let’s get out of here. You step where I step. And keep up!”

  Unlike Carlos, Rick made no gallant offer to add her load to his own but stepped out immediately, AK-47 in hand, barrel pointed upward, leaving Julie to snatch up her knapsack and scurry after him. He led her not up onto firm ground but through the tall reeds that bordered the swamp, and he was not moving as Julie had, in a headlong scramble that strove for as much speed as possible, but carefully, almost slowly, sliding between the reeds and the occasional patches of ferns and elephants ears so noiselessly, their tops didn’t sway. Julie, stretching her legs to match his longer stride, wanted to scream to him to hurry, to run. And why was he dragging her through this mud and water and who knew what else when dry land lay only meters away?

  Glancing back, Julie saw that swamp water was filling their tracks almost as fast as they abandoned them, and that the reeds closing behind them gave no sign of the trampled trail she’d left behind in her own scramble. He knew what he was doing, she admitted grudgingly. Who—or what—was this man? Seventh Special Operations Group … where had she heard that before?

  Of course! The Green Berets Bill Shidler had mentioned when they were flying over San José. What had he said—that there were Green Berets training Colombian counter-narcotics forces there? Was this Captain Rick Martini one of them? Did he know Colonel Thornton?

  Keeping her eyes on the green and brown of Rick’s back, Julie concentrated on setting her feet precisely in his steps. Rick had shoved his assault rifle back up on his shoulder where it couldn’t bump into anything, but Julie could see his hand hovering near a sheathed knife on his belt, and as he slipped silently forward through the reeds, he was constantly swiveling his head from side to side. Every few meters he turned to glance back, not at Julie but over her head to study their back trail. He might almost have forgotten that Julie herself was at his heels except for her clear impression that nothing went on around him that those narrowed eyes did not note.

  Their leisurely pace lasted only until they stumbled upon a stream draining into the swamp. At first it was just a muddy, meandering delta where it trickled through the reeds and grass. But once Rick swerved their path into it, a few paces brought them into the open where a narrow brook burbled between shallow banks that led at a right angle from the swamp edge deep into the tall marching columns of the rainforest. There was nothing to be gained now by stealth, and Rick immediately lengthened his stride to a trot, splashing up the middle of the stream as easily as though he were on dry land.

  This time Julie instantly grasped the reason for his action. Like the swamp edge, the brook would hide their passage from anyone still following their trail. She didn’t like the feeling of exposure the open forest gave her so she willingly quickened her pace as well.

  But she couldn’t keep it up for long. The rushing water that Rick was splashing through as though it were not there came almost to Julie’s knees, and the stones on the stream bottom made footing precarious. She struggled to dredge up an added reserve of strength, but in the last horrible hours she had dredged up too many such reserves, and she simply had none left to give. Her breathing, which had slowed almost to normal during their unhurried procession through the reeds, came hard again, and her side felt on fire. She wanted to double over with the pain of it.

  She had fallen a dozen paces behind when Rick swung around, his impatience clear in the tight set of his jaw. “Is there a problem?”

  Julie halted right where she was in the middle of the stream, bending over so her hands rested on her knees, her hair hanging down into her face as she panted for breath.

  “Yes, there’s a problem!” she retorted. “I’ve been running for hours. I’m dead tired! My side is killing me! I can’t keep going like this.” Julie felt an odd nibbling where her sock had slid down into her wet sneakers and stifled a shriek as she caught sight of something black and shapeless attached there. “And I’m being eaten by leeches!”

  Rick splashed back to her side. Without a word, he unsheathed his knife and reached down to flick the leech free from her ankle. Straightening up, he made a quick scan downstream, then up. “Okay, I think we’ve lost them. We’ll take a short breather. Can you walk just a little farther? I’d prefer better cover than this.”

  Suppressing a groan, Julie stood up straight and splashed slowly after him onto the bank. “I can walk fine. Just don’t ask me to run.”

  Rick kept his stride down to a sedate walk as he led Julie away from the stream. He didn’t allow them to rest in the open but kept walking until they came to an odd experiment of nature. Two maho
gany trees had survived the sapling stage a little too close together so that as they grew, the two trunks had grown into one.

  Eventually, either the symbiotic relationship or some disease had killed the trees, for now the only green festooning their branches was of moss and a tangle of vines that made the whole thing look like a jungle gym for Tarzan. At the base of the double trunk, rot from ground moisture had eaten into the dead wood, leaving an opening that led into its interior. Producing a penlight from another pocket of his ammo vest, Rick flashed it around inside.

  “It’s empty. We’ll take fifteen minutes.”

  As they stepped inside, Julie saw that the hollow was bigger than she’d expected, extending the width of both trunks and above them as well. The parasitical relationship of the mahogany twins had kept them from growing to normal height so that the fork where they branched out into their first limbs was only about twenty feet overhead. This too was rotted through so that a dim green light filtered down through the opening.

  Empty pods and a pile of rotted grass and twigs indicated that some animal had once had a den here. But there was no sign of residents now, and the floor of the hollow was agreeably dry. Julie sank gratefully down onto it, slipping her knapsack from her shoulder. Beside her, Rick lowered himself to the floor as well. Julie noticed he had positioned himself directly opposite the opening where he could watch what lay outside, and she saw him glance upward as though measuring the opening overhead for an escape route.

  Leaning her head against the rotting wood, Julie eyed him surreptitiously. She’d had no time since his astonishing revelation to do more than slip and slide at his heels. She made a conscious effort to reshuffle his image into this new shape that was not a guerrilla or the killer she’d presumed him to be, but a soldier of her own country. An elite soldier at that.