If … if he could find the path and keep to it.
He pulled up the lapels of his field jacket to ward off the rain and turned toward the cabin door above the wind of the plane. He opened it, raised himself with one knee to the right of the strut, and reached into the small luggage compartment behind the seat. He pulled out a short-barreled, high-powered automatic rifle—one of the two that had been strapped below the front seat of the Halidon car. The clip was inserted, the safety on. In his pockets were four additional clips; each clip held twenty cartridges.
One hundred shells.
His arsenal.
«I’ve got to reach them,» he yelled through the downpour at the ganja pilot. «I sure as hell don’t want to answer to New Orleans!»
«Them New Orleens boys is a tense bunch. I don’t fly for ’em if I got other work. They don’ lak nobody!»
Without replying, McAuliff raced toward the edge of the grassland slope. The path was to the right of a huge cluster of nettled fern—he remembered that; his face had been scratched because his hand had not been quick enough when he had entered the area with the Halidon runner.
Goddammit! Where was it?
He began feeling the soaked foliage, gripping every leaf, every branch, hoping to find his hand scratched, scraped by nettles. He had to find it; he had to start his entry at precisely the right point. The wrong spot would be fatal. Dunstone’s advantage would be too great; he could not overcome it.
«What are you lookin’ for?»
«What?» Alex whipped around into a harsh glare of light. His concentration was such that he found himself unlatching the safety on the rifle. He had been about to fire in shock.
The ganja pilot had walked over. «Gawddamn. Ain’t you got a flashlight, man? You expect to find your way in that mess without no flashlight?»
Jesus! He had left the flashlight in the Halidon plane. Daniel had said something about being careful … with the flashlight. So he had left it behind! «I forgot. There’s one in the plane.»
«I hope to fuck there is,» said the pilot.
«You take mine. Let me use yours, okay?»
«You promise to shoot me a couple a bucks, you got it man.» The pilot handed him the light. «This rain’s too fuckin’ wet, I’m going back inside. Good huntin’, hear!»
McAuliff watched the pilot run toward his aircraft and then quickly turned back to the jungle’s edge. He was no more than five feet from the cluster of fern; he could see the matted grass at the entry point of the concealed path.
He plunged in.
He ran as fast as he could, his feet ensnared by the underbrush, his face and body whipped by the unseen tentacles of overgrowth. The path twisted—right, left, right, right, right, Jesus! circles—and then became straight again for a short stretch at the bottom of the slope.
But it was still true. He was still on it. That was all that mattered.
Then he veered off. The path wasn’t there. It was gone!
There was an ear-shattering screech in the darkness, magnified by the jungle downpour. In the beam of his flashlight, deep within a palm-covered hole below him, was a wild pig suckling its blind young. The hairy, monstrous face snarled and screeched once more and started to rise, shaking its squealing offspring from its teats. McAuliff ran to his left, into the wall of the jungle. He stumbled on a rock. Two, three rocks. He fell to the wet earth, the flashlight rolling on the ground. The ground was flat, unobstructed.
He had found the path again!
He got to his feet, grabbed the light, shifted the rifle under his arm, and raced down the relatively clear jungle corridor.
Clear for no more than a hundred yards, where it was intersected by a stream, bordered by soft, foot-sucking mud. He remembered the stream. The runner who had used the name Marcus had turned left. Was it left? Or was it the from the opposite direction?… No, it was left. There had been palm trunks and rocks showing through the surface of the water, crossing the narrow stream. He ran to the left, his flashlight aimed at the midpoint of the water.
There were the logs! The rocks. A hastily constructed bridge to avoid the ankle-swallowing mud.
And on the right palm trunk were two snakes in lateral slow motion, curving their way toward him. Even the Jamaican mongoose did not have the stomach for Jamaica’s Cock Pit.
Alexander knew these snakes. He had seen them in Brazil. Anaconda strain. Blind, swift-striking, vicious. Not fatal, but capable of causing paralysis—for days. If flesh came within several feet of the flat heads, the strikes were inevitable.
He turned back to the overgrowth, the beam of light crisscrossing the immediate area. There was a dangling branch of a ceiba tree about six feet long. He ran to it, bending it back and forth until it broke off. He returned to the logs. The snakes had stopped, alarmed. Their oily, ugly bodies were entwined, the flat heads poised near each other, the blind, pinlike eyes staring fanatically in the direction of the scent. At him.
Alex shoved the ceiba limb out on the log with his left hand, the rifle and flashlight gripped awkwardly in his right.
Both snakes lunged simultaneously, leaping off the surface of the log, whipping their bodies violently around the branch, their heads zeroing toward McAuliff’s hand, soaring through the soft leaves.
Alex threw—dropped? he would never know—the limb into the water. The snakes thrashed; the branch reeled in furious circles and sank beneath the surface.
McAuliff ran across the logs and picked up the path.
He had gone perhaps three-quarters of a mile, certainly no more than that. The time elapsed was twelve minutes by his watch. As he remembered it, the path veered sharply to the right through a particularly dense section of fern and maidenhead to where there was a small clearing recently used by a band of hill-country hunters. Marcus—the man who used the name of Marcus—had remarked on it.
From the clearing it was less than a mile to the banks of the Martha Brae and the campsite. The Dunstone advantage had to be diminishing.
It had to be.
He reached the nearly impossible stretch of overgrowth, his flashlight close to the earth, inspecting the ground for signs of passage. If he stepped away from the path now—if he moved into the underbrush that had not seen human movement—it would take him hours to find it again. Probably not until daylight—or when the rains stopped.
It was painfully slow, agonizingly concentrated. Bent weeds, small broken branches, swollen borders of wet ground where once there had been the weight of recent human feet; these were signs, his codes. He could not allow the tolerance of a single error.
«Hey, mon!» came the muted words.
McAuliff threw himself to the ground and held his breath. Behind him, to his left, he could see the beam of another flashlight. Instantly he snapped off his own.
«Hey, mon, where are you? Contact, please. You went off your pattern. Or I did.»
Contact, please … Off your pattern. The terms of an agent, not the language of a carrier. The man was M.I.6.
Past tense.
Was.
Now Dunstone, Limited.
The Dunstone team had separated, each man assigned an area … a pattern. That could only mean they were in radio contact.
Six men in radio contact.
Oh, Jesus!