any noises except those we made ourselves, as branches snapped beneath our feet and leaves rustled in our wake, but we didn’t dare hope that we had escaped unnoticed.
The air was thick and hot, and I was soon slick with sweat and short of breath. At least my sight was returning; bright colours pulsated strangely, and little showers of glittering sparks cascaded across my field of vision, but I could see and make sense of the world again.
Ahead of me Reyes pulled up to a halt so sudden that I nearly crashed into her.
“What is it?” I whispered.
She pointed downwards. I looked down and saw a thin dirt trail wending its way through the jungle.
“Might be an animal track,” she said, “might be people.”
“Should we follow it?”
“How should I know?”
After a second I forced a rueful smile and said, “I was sort of hoping you had all the answers here.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve never actually been lost in the jungle pursued by bloodthirsty paramilitaries before, so you’ll have to forgive me if there’s a certain amount of making it up as I go along here.” She considered. Her face was already laced with scrapes and smeared with mud. I supposed I looked even worse. “No. Can’t take the chance. Sorry.”
She pushed on into the forbidding wall of jungle, raising her arms up to protect her head. I grunted, dismayed, and followed.
The ground grew steeper and rockier, and the hardwoods, vines and bushes were slowly replaced by palms and ferns. These were much easier to walk through, but they grew from ground covered with slippery boulders rendered almost invisible by slick moss. I slipped on one, fell into a mud puddle, lost a shoe and had to stop to recover it. Reyes hovered above me as I emptied it and put it back on, fumbling feverishly with the laces. I knew a minute’s delay could conceivably mean our deaths.
A few minutes later I began to hear an ominous rushing sound. Soon afterwards we stumbled out onto a rocky bluff above a roaring whitewater river lined with a scree of rocks and pebbles. It was twenty feet wide at its narrowest, dotted with rocks the size of washing machines wet from the constant spray. The mist rising downstream indicated the rapids became even more violent there.
“Shit.” Reyes looked like she wanted to kick something. “God damn it.”
I seconded the sentiment. In both directions the river bent back towards where we had begun. We had to either somehow cross it or double back.
“We can’t go back,” she decided. “Actually, this might be good. If we can get across, that might buy us some time.”
I stared at the howling river. “Big if.”
“True.” She considered. “You see that rock there?” She pointed to one just under the surface, about three feet from the shore. “And there, and there, and that one?”
I gave her a dubious look. I saw what she was proposing – try to jump from rock to rock – but they were all either underwater or soaking wet. “I don’t know.”
“If you’d rather we can go back and try to make nice to the narcos,” she said sarcastically. “Or just wait here and see what happens.”
A sudden thought occurred to me. I pulled my iPhone out of my pocket, hoping against hope – but Martinez had been right, there was no signal out here.
“Does that have GPS?” Reyes asked, and when I nodded, “Good. Turn it off, save the battery.”
As I did so she took off her dark jacket. For the first time I saw the small automatic pistol on her belt. She drew the gun, took my iPhone, and bundled the jacket tightly around them both.
“Not exactly a dry bag,” she muttered, “but it’ll have to do.”
I slipped and fell while descending to the riverbank, which did nothing for my confidence. My Saucony running shoes, which had never had much in the way of treads, were covered with wet mud. I stared into the raging waters. The river was easily powerful enough to kill us both. But, incredibly, this seemed the least bad option.
“Do you think we can drink this?” I asked. Our exertions had left me painfully thirsty.
She shrugged. “I think right now dirty water is the least of our problems.”
I got down on all fours and drank from the river like a dog, thinking of the Biblical passage where a general chose his troops from men who did this. Upstream of me Reyes did the same.
“Hey,” I said, trying to make a joke, “go downstream, I don’t want your germs.”
Reyes rewarded me with a thin smile, then stood. “Do you want to go first?”
I swallowed. “Not really.”
“OK. Follow my lead.”
She flung her jacket across the river, then took her position on the shore nearest the first rock in the implausible stepping-stone bridge she had pointed out, rose onto the balls of her feet, and took a moment to breathe deeply. I watched uneasily. Even if she could do this, that didn’t mean I could; I was a runner and gym- goer, but not near as athletic as her.
She leapt like a ballet dancer. The first rock was about half an inch underwater. She bobbled the landing but somehow righted herself and continued without hesitation. The next rock was flat and above water, and she made a perfect crouching three-point landing, two feet and one hand on its slick surface. The third jump was the hardest, to an underwater rock with a sharp peak, but she made it look easy, bounced right off it and onto the next rock, like a stone skipping across the water, soared onto the far shore, and skidded and sprawled ingloriously onto the pebbled scree that fringed the river.
Reyes scrambled to her feet, grinning ruefully, and shouted to me, “Come on!”
I approached the edge of the river as if about to go over Niagara Falls without a barrel. The water whipped past as fast as I could run. But it had to be done.
“Visualize it!” Reyes instructed. “Be confident! Don’t hesitate!”
I closed my eyes, tried to imagine success, couldn’t, took three deep breaths, opened my eyes, and made myself jump.
My foot skidded off the first rock and I fell into deep whitewater that spun me around like a rag doll in a washing machine before plunging me down a steep drop worthy of a roller coaster. I curled into a fetal position half a second before slamming side-first against a wall of rock, and barely had time to take a breath before being yanked underwater as if by a giant hand, then expelled to the surface again and dragged over a field of sharp rocks that tore at my back and arms like a cheese grater.
I choked on a mouthful of water, flailed with all my limbs, caught a brief glimpse of the shore. My primal survival instinct somehow propelled me scrambling to the edge of that shallow patch of fanged stone, just in time to dive out of the main current before it swept me over another five-foot drop, and into a relatively placid eddy that swirled in a steep-sided rocky inlet. There I grabbed a dangling tree root before I could be sucked back into the mainstream. The water was still so powerful that it was all I could do to hold on. I looked around frantically.
“Grab this!” Reyes shouted above me, and the sleeve of her jacket slapped me in the face. She stood on dry ground directly above me. I grabbed the jacket. With her aid, and a final desperate effort, I managed to reverse- rappel out of the river and onto the dry ground beside her. There I flopped down and heaved for air like a dying fish.
She crouched beside me. “You OK?”
I managed to nod. I thought it might even be true. The river had left me with cuts and bruises aplenty, but no broken bones.
“Well,” she said, and shook her head in amazement, possibly at my survival. “Not exactly elegant, but any landing you walk away from is a good one, right?’
“Right,” I gasped. “Next time I’ll go for style points. It’s like figure skating. Artistic impression is very important.”
She chuckled. I managed a triumphant smile myself.
Then she glanced to the other side of the river, and her laugh suddenly faltered, and she dropped to a tense crouch beside me.
“What is it?” I whispered, but I already knew.
