Sun walked toward him. “I’ve thought of killing him. But I haven’t. I loved him. I thought. I’ve been trying to figure out if there was some way to get him help.” She stopped just short of him. Her body almost touched his. He could feel her warmth and smell her personal scent. It always reminded him of green tea. “And now I know there’s something worth preserving inside him. For Sprout’s sake, if nothing else. I won’t kill him or you. Until I know there’s no other choice.”
He started to say something. She stretched up on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “You’re a good man, Mark. I haven’t known many of those. Go back to bed. And relax: if I can’t find some way to help you, then I will find a way to kill you. And that’s a promise.”
25
Sunday,
December 20
Kongoville, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
“Tom, no!”
Hopping furiously, he tried to pull on a pair of jeans. Outside, it was still night in K-ville.
That bastard Meadows, Tom thought. He actually stole my body for a joyride. His memory was a blank for what the hippie puke had done. But he knew it had happened.
“You’re not strong enough,” she said. “You’re still healing. I saw you when you came in. You looked… you looked as if you couldn’t possibly survive.”
And the fuckers dosed me with drugs. I told them never to do that! “Yeah, well, I’m better now,” he said. “I found out who shot me and kidnapped my daughter. And now I’m going to make the motherfucker pay.”
“What about the Nshombos?” she asked. “They weren’t happy about what happened in Paris. They won’t want you setting out on your own selfish vendetta.”
“The little bastard’s their enemy, too,” he said. “He committed crimes against the People’s Paradise. If they can’t see that, fuck ’em.”
On the Lualaba River, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
After catching up on his sleep, Wally spent a lot of time checking himself for rust spots. He’d let the problem slide while he was too exhausted to do anything about it. He managed to get the worst of it, but there were places he couldn’t reach. And he only had the single damp towel to work with. It never dried out.
He’d been completely submerged during his fight with the crocodile, and had been out in the rain a few times since then, but until now he hadn’t had much chance to do anything about it on account of Ghost. She still followed him. But without her knife, that was pretty much all she could do. He tried talking to her every time he caught a glimpse, but inevitably she backed off.
He landed his boat at river’s edge after a particularly hard rain. Rainwater sloshed around the bottom of the boat, soaking his pack, not to mention his feet. He hoped to find suitable leaves in the jungle, something that would help him wipe everything down. Also, he had to pee.
Everything reminded him of Jerusha. She would have been able to tell him which plants to look for, which leaves to use. Right off the bat. She wouldn’t have laughed at his clumsy attempt to build a rain shield for the boat out of leaves and limbs. Well, she might have laughed, but not unkindly. She had a nice laugh.
Wally lost track of the time. He spent more time than he had intended on his ultimately unsuccessful side trip.
On the way back to his boat, he heard voices coming from the river.
He crept back to his landing site. Leaves rustled. Undergrowth crackled. And his joints-still sore from the fight with the croc-groaned like the hinges of an old door. Wally wasn’t built for stealth.
But the newcomers didn’t seem to notice. Whatever they were talking about (another pang of loneliness, another memory of Jerusha), their conversation indicated no sign of alarm. He peeked through the long leaves of a bushy fern.
“Wow,” he whispered.
A hospital barge had moored itself at the center of the river. It looked to be thirty or forty feet long, perhaps a little more than half as wide, with a flat hull. Most of the deck was taken up with a narrow cabin, built of sturdy timber with a pitched roof of corrugated aluminum. Clean white paint blazed in the sun, bright enough to make Wally squint. The walls and roof were marked with red crosses.
A long, sleek whip antenna arced over the roof; it bobbed gently when the barge swayed on its anchor line. The space inside was probably divided into multiple rooms; Wally counted two doors on the near side. The guy on the roof wore the uniform of a Leopard Man. Regular soldiers patrolled a narrow walkway around the cabin. A handful stood on the side facing the riverbank, where Wally had gone. It seemed pretty obvious they were discussing the stolen PPA boat.
These were the men who’d delivered the virus to Nyunzu. The virus that had killed Lucien, and all the other kids Wally had buried with his bare hands.
He clenched his fists. Well, I’ve found it. Now what?
The barge towed a small rowboat. Three soldiers climbed in, threw off the ropes, and rowed over for a closer look at Wally’s stolen boat. One shouted something to his colleagues. He pointed at the rusted orange stump where the forward gun mount had been.
In response, the men on the rowboat unslung their rifles and started peering nervously into the jungle. So did those watching from the safety of the barge. It seemed they’d heard about Wally. Good.
The easy part was that he didn’t have to take them by surprise. Better if he didn’t, in fact: the barge had a radio. If the barge reported an attack here, that could only help Jerusha’s chances of escaping with the children.
The hard part was figuring out how to get to the barge without getting soaked again. He also didn’t want to lose his own boat. What would Tarzan do? Wally thought for a few seconds. Heck, yeah! He’d swing onto the barge.
Wally craned his neck, looking for overhead vines. There weren’t any. Nuts. Wally sighed. The vine thing would have been neat. He watched the rowboat, the barge, the ripples on the water… Huh?
Wally looked again: ripples on the river. Tiny inverted “V”s, glistening chevrons pointing at a barely visible snout, two eyes, and the back ridges of a river croc. The PPA men hadn’t seen it.
If he waited for the men to come ashore, he could take care of them pretty quickly. But others might take his motorboat while he was busy. He’d lose his chance to destroy the barge, plus he’d have to walk all the way to Bunia.
Wally resigned himself to getting wet again. Rats.
He leaped out of his hiding spot, ululating like Johnny Weissmuller. Ignoring the pain in his legs and hips, he charged down to the river, pulping the underbrush beneath his feet. With the running start, he cleared the final twenty feet with a single jump. He cannonballed into the river, a few feet behind the crocodile, before the landing party had time to react. Their colleagues on the barge shouted warnings. Somebody managed to squeeze off a burst from his rifle. The rounds pattered harmlessly into the river.
Wally grabbed the croc’s tail with both hands. It twisted around, angry as it was ugly. It tried to snap at him. But he heaved, swung the hissing reptile in a few wide circles overhead until it made a nice whistling sound, and released it.
The croc’s snout hit the middle guy right in the gut, knocking him clear off the boat. Its thrashing tail clotheslined the guy on the left. The rowboat flipped, tossing soldier number three into the river.
Heh. Bet Kate’s never done that.
The barge men opened fire while he slogged his way to the rowboat. A hail of bullets pinged and whanged from Wally’s chest, sliced into the water on either side of him, and tore through the jungle behind him. A row of bullet holes perforated the rowboat, but they were too small to sink it before he paddled over to the barge.