came down harder, all but drowning out the shouts of his pursuers. He clambered over a rotting log, jerked apart a curtain of low-hanging vines, and slipped through it. The pounding of his heart roared over everything else. He didn’t have a chance and he knew it. God help him when they got him.
The rain and mud made footing next to impossible. He slid and started to fall, then recovered and looked back. He could see the first ones clearly. There were three of them. Forty feet behind him at best. Big, powerful black men in jungle camouflage uniforms. Razor-sharp machetes flailing the thick growth before them. Then one of them saw him and they locked eyes.
“There he is!” he yelled in Spanish, and they surged forward.
Those eyes-homicidal and utterly merciless-and the determination behind them were the most frightening thing Marten had ever seen. In that instant he knew that if they caught him he wouldn’t just be killed, he’d be butchered on the spot.
He ran on, the jungle as thick as a web around him, as if the rain forest itself had joined the enemy. Behind him came more shouts and then more still. They were closing in, and fast.
“My God,” he breathed. “My God!”
His lungs were on fire; his legs had nothing left. He was starting to turn, to look back, more out of instinct than anything else, when suddenly the ground gave way beneath him. In a blink he was plummeting down a steep embankment. Trees, ferns, vines, foliage of every kind flew past. He tried to dig in his heels, to get some kind of purchase that would slow him. At the same time, he reached out, frantically trying to grab hold of anything that would break his fall. Nothing did. The rain-soaked soil was so slick it might well have been ice. He went faster. Then faster still.
Suddenly his right arm circled a vine, and he pulled it in tight. There was a wrenching jolt and he stopped, face up against the sky. For the briefest moment he clung there, the tropical rain washing over him. Then he let out a huge breath and looked down. His legs stretched out over nothing. He had come that close to going over the edge and plunging into whatever was below. He flashed on the cascade of falls he’d seen when he’d been with Father Willy less than an hour before. Remembered looking down and seeing them disappear into the jungle floor a thousand feet beneath. If that was the terrain here, he had come within inches of his death.
Suddenly his chest heaved and he made some kind of animal cry, half sheer horror and half release. From somewhere far above he heard the voices of the soldiers. They were rough and raw and urgent. He had no idea how far he had fallen or if there was a way they could work around and come at him from the side or if they had ropes and would just rappel down to where he was.
He looked to his left and saw another vine. Beyond it was another. If he could use them to move across the face of the cliff or steep hillock or whatever it was, maybe he could find solid footing on the other side. If so, he might work his way into the jungle and hide there until darkness came. Something, he estimated, that would occur in no more than two hours.
He took a deep breath and grasped the vine tightly. Another breath and he swung toward the one just beyond it. He reached it and grabbed hold, then carefully tested its strength. Satisfied, he let go of the first vine. He repeated the procedure once and then again. Now he could see his destination, the edge of the ravine into which he had fallen. The rain came down harder. If the soldiers were still up there, he had no way to know.
Another breath and he swung again, almost reaching the far side before the momentum pulled him back. He tested the vine and swung once more. Closer this time, but not quite. Another swing and he almost had it, his fingers brushing the shrubbery that lined the edge before his momentum carried him back.
“Easy,” he breathed and swung again. This time he went a little further. The shrubs were right there. He reached out, grabbed hold of the closest plant, and-suddenly there was a sickening jolt as the vine pulled free of the soil above. For the briefest instant he hung in midair; then came a shower of rocks and mud and he plunged backward into nothing.
He heard himself scream as he fell. For a second he thought he saw water, a fast-rushing stream cutting through the jungle far beneath him. He kept falling and falling. Then he hit something hard and everything went black.
3
Seconds or minutes or days passed before Marten opened his eyes and looked up. He was alive, he thought, and wet and moving. The night sky above, what little he could see of it through the thick canopy of trees, was bright and starlit. Then he realized that he was in a river of some kind and the current was carrying him downstream.
It was then he remembered Father Willy and the photographs and the soldiers, his mad escape through the jungle, the vine and its pulling free, his terrifying fall. The thing he had hit hard, that had knocked him unconscious, had been the river; water, so delicate while drinking or bathing, so like concrete when your body hits it at high speed and from a distance. And now, so obstinate when you tried to navigate through it. What he had to do was to swim to one shore or another, then take stock and see if he was really alive or if this was all some kind of dream after death and the place he was trying to navigate was the netherworld.
THURSDAY, JUNE 3. 12:12 A.M.
Marten read the illuminated face of his watch. Somehow he had reached the riverbank and crawled up it in the dark. How far he had come he didn’t know. His only reference was the sound of rushing water not far away. For a long moment he lay there doing little more than breathing. Then slowly, deliberately, he moved his right arm and then his left. Then one leg and then the other. Each move had hurt, but as far as he could tell nothing was broken. Now he took stock of the rest. There was a long raw scrape on his right leg that ran from just below his knee to his ankle. His left elbow and forearm were raw as well, the same as his forehead at the hairline. His lightweight tropical shirt and trousers were both torn but serviceable; his travel pouch that held his passport and small travel wallet around his neck was still there. His hiking boots, while soaked through, were still on his feet.
He sat up and listened, wondering if the soldiers had been able to follow him. If they were out there now in the dark, closing in through the thick growth of the jungle that lined the riverbank. He heard nothing but the distant chatter of a night bird. Again he looked up through the trees. As before, he saw starlit sky. Then the thought came that he had no idea where he was or which way the river flowed, east or west, north or south.
Bioko, he knew, was an island in the Gulf of Guinea. That meant that whatever waterway he had been swept along would eventually run into another, larger channel that would lead to another and then to the sea itself. If he could follow it and reach the shore he might find a village that had a boat he could hire that would take him north to the capital city of Malabo and the Hotel Malabo, where he’d left his things and where he might learn the fate of Father Willy, and then, as quickly as possible, get on a flight back to Europe.
Marten pushed himself to his feet and walked twenty or so yards back to the river’s edge. Judging the direction of the current, he moved off in the dark, hugging the riverbank and following it toward what he hoped would be the sea.
4
SIMCO HEADQUARTERS. MALABO. 12:23 A.M.
