He had his hands full.
The collision had knocked Mariella free from the man’s grip. All three of them fell against the truck’s front bumper. Broken-Nose slashed at Gabriel’s head with the revolver. Gabriel ducked so that the blow landed on his left shoulder just inches from one of the cuts from Tomás’s whip. His arm went numb for a moment. He swung his own pistol at the other man’s head, but the man avoided the blow, grabbed Mariella again, and shoved her hard against Gabriel. She fell against his chest and both of them went down.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“We’ll talk about it later,” Gabriel said, sliding out from under her.
Snarling with hate, Broken-Nose jerked his gun toward Gabriel, who couldn’t stand up without risking getting his head chopped off by the machine gun fire. He grabbed Mariella and rolled instead. Broken-Nose’s revolver roared twice. Splinters leaped up and stung Gabriel’s face as the bullets slammed into the bridge planks. He did the only thing he could. He tightened his grip on Mariella and kept rolling.
Right under the railing and off the side of the bridge.
Mariella screamed as they plunged toward the river. Gabriel hung on to her and managed to turn their bodies so that they would hit the water feetfirst. He hoped the river was deep enough so that they wouldn’t break every bone in their bodies when they landed.
Despite the tropical climate, the streams that flowed through these highlands were cold, so the chilly water packed a breathtaking shock as Gabriel and Mariella plunged into it. They went under, deep. But their descent had slowed by the time Gabriel felt the rocky stream bed under his booted feet. He kicked off against it and sent them back toward the surface.
The swift current had them in its grip, sweeping them away from the bridge. As they broke the surface and Gabriel hauled air into his lungs, water geysered around them from bullets splashing into the river. Broken-Nose was still up there on the bridge shooting at them.
“Got your breath?” Gabriel shouted to Mariella. When she nodded, he added, “Well, hold it,” and went under again. Their clothes and boots helped hold them down as the current carried them along.
Gabriel kept them underwater until Mariella began to writhe and struggle in his arms. He figured she wouldn’t be able to hold her breath much longer, so he headed for the surface again. When they came up this time he saw that the current had carried them around a bend in the river. The bridge was no longer visible behind them.
“Hang on to me,” he told Mariella. “I’ll try to get us to shore.”
“I can swim,” she insisted.
Gabriel let go of her. The current was too strong for them to swim directly to shore, but they were able to angle in that direction and slowly make their way closer to the east bank as the river carried them along. Finally, they both grabbed vines that dangled from overhanging tree branches and pulled themselves onto dry land again.
As Gabriel lay there breathing heavily, he listened to the diminishing sounds of gunfire. The battle between the bandits and Esparza’s men seemed to be just about over. He didn’t know who had won…but the overpowering advantage the machine gun conveyed didn’t make him optimistic about the outcome.
Concern for Cierra gnawed at him. Even though she’d had good cover with Escalante, that machine gun had thrown so much lead that they would have been in considerable danger from ricochets alone. And those .50-caliber slugs would chew right through the brush where some of Escalante’s men had hidden. The odds, not in the bandits’ favor to start with, had gotten a lot worse once that big gun opened up.
But there was nothing he could do about that now, Gabriel told himself. He had his own worries, such as being stranded in the middle of the Guatemalan jungle with Mariella…and with only one gun. He was thankful he’d been able to hang on to the Colt, and he still had a box of ammunition in his pocket. Once the revolver dried out, it ought to work. It had been through worse.
If Broken-Nose and his friends had survived—and Gabriel had a feeling that was likely—they would come looking for him and Mariella. The two of them needed to get moving. He sat up and asked her, “Are you all right? Were you hit during all that shooting?”
She was breathing heavily, too, and it took a moment before she was able to struggle into a sitting position and give Gabriel a weak nod. “I’m fine,” she said. “I wasn’t hit.”
“How about before? Do you have any injuries from when Esparza and his men interrogated you?”
“How do you know about Esparza?”
“A friend introduced me to him. Hopefully you’ll get to meet her.” If she’s still alive. Gabriel thrust the thought away. “I knew he was involved because he matched the description of a man who’d come to the Olustee battlefield looking for information about General Fargo.”
She nodded as if what he’d said made perfect sense to her.
“Esparza tried to make me talk,” she said. “But I didn’t care what he did to me. I wasn’t going to betray my people.” A bitter tone came into her voice as she added, “In the end it didn’t matter. He found out what he needed to know another way.”
That statement puzzled Gabriel, but now wasn’t the time to probe deeper. He got to his feet. “We’d better get moving. We need to get away from the river before that bastard comes looking for us.”
“Podnemovitch,” Mariella said. “That’s his name. Alexei Podnemovitch. He’s some sort of distant cousin to Esparza. I think Esparza’s mother was Russian.”
Always good to put a name to a face, Gabriel thought. Even an ugly face.
He took Mariella’s hand and helped her to her feet. Heading east, they started into the thick jungle that lined the river.
Vines curled around their feet and brambles clung to their clothes, slowing their progress through the vegetation. Gabriel kept a close eye out for snakes. The birds that would normally be singing in the trees were quiet now, startled into silence by the thunderous gunfire that had filled the canyon just minutes before.
“Did you get the flag?” Mariella asked after a few minutes’ slow progress.
“The one you brought to New York? Yes, I have it, and the Fifth Georgia’s regimental flag as well.”
“The other flag isn’t important. What about the water?” Her voice caught a little. “Was…was any of it left?”
“You mean the water that was in that old whiskey bottle?” Gabriel shook his head. “Sorry. It all spilled when the bottle broke.”
Mariella winced. “I was afraid of that. Your brother didn’t think to try to collect any of it and have it analyzed?”
“We had other things on our minds. Should we have?”
“It would have been better if you had. The water was more important than the flag, although the flag does show the location of Cuchatlán.”
“Cuchatlán,” Gabriel repeated. “What’s that?”
“My home.”
He heard the wistfulness in her voice and would have asked her to tell him more about it, but at that moment he heard men’s voices coming from somewhere close by. He stopped short and held up a hand in a signal for Mariella to halt as well.
They stood there, motionless and silent, and listened for a moment. The voices were coming closer, so Gabriel motioned Mariella toward a jutting rock face covered with vines. She hurried over to it, grabbed hold of the vines, and started climbing.