come to a decision. “I want you to take the men—all of them—and set off after him. I’m not asking anything clever. I want you to bring him back to me alive if you possibly can. I would like to have the pleasure of finishing this once and for all. But if you think he’s going to get away, then kill him and bring me back his head. Do you understand? This time, I want to be sure.”
“Yes, sir.” Njenga showed no concern about killing and decapitating a child. All that mattered to him was the money that would come to him at the end of the month.
“Go now. Don’t come back until the job is done.”
A few minutes later they all left, twelve men carrying a variety of weapons, including spears, knives, and machetes. Half of them had guns. Njenga himself carried a German-manufactured Sauer 202 bolt-action hunting rifle equipped with a Zeiss Conquest scope. He knew he could shoot the eye of an antelope out at two hundred yards. He had done so many times.
They found two tracks at the river. The first one went into the bush and came back again. The second, which was much clearer, headed off toward the north. This was the path they chose. Alex Rider had a two-hour start, but they were Kikuyu tribesmen. They were taller, faster, and stronger than him. They knew the land.
They set off at a fast run, dodging through the undergrowth, confident that they’d catch up with him in no time at all.
23
SIMBA DAM
THE BIRDS PERCHED HIGH UP in the camphor tree were definitely vultures. The shape was unmistakable—the long necks and the bald heads—and the way they sat, hunched up and still. There were about ten of them, ranged across the branches, black against the afternoon sky. But the question Alex had to ask himself was: Were they waiting for him?
He had no idea how long he had been running for, but he knew he couldn’t go on much longer. He was dehydrated and close to exhaustion, his arms covered in scratches, his face burned by the African sun.
The bits of his school uniform that he was still wearing couldn’t have been less well suited to this sort of terrain. The black polyester pants trapped the heat, and his lace-up dress shoes had caused him to slip twice. Each time he had come crashing down to the ground, he had wearily reminded himself that there was a bomb strapped to his back. Not that he could have forgotten it. The weight of Rahim’s backpack was dragging him down, the straps cutting into his shoulders. Well, if the bomb went off, the vultures would have their feast. It would just come in snack-sized pieces.
The journey should have been simple. After all, he had seen where he had to go from the air.
Unfortunately, the landscape looked very different at ground level when he was stuck in the middle of it. The sudden rising hills, the thick vegetation, the spiky shrubs that forced him to turn another way . . .
all these had been flattened out when he was in the Piper Cub. The bush had swallowed him up. The dam, the pylons, the track had all disappeared.
He had to rely on the map and his own sense of direction. To start with, he had kept the river on his right—near enough to glimpse the water through the trees but not so close as to attract the attention of whatever might be lurking within it. That was his greatest fear. He was in the middle of a killing field
—and he wasn’t being escorted around like a tourist in a four-by-four. It had been midday when he set out and most of the animals would have been asleep, but the sun was already beginning to cool and very soon they would awaken and begin their ceaseless search for food. Was he prey? He could imagine his scent creeping out. All around him, invisible eyes could be watching his progress, already measuring the distance. He had seen elephants, monkeys, and, of course, crocodiles. What other horrors might be waiting for him around the next corner if he was unlucky? There could be lions or cheetahs.
He had thought of taking the Dragunov sniper rifle or searching Rahim’s pockets for other weapons, but in the end he had decided against it. Rahim might need them when he recovered consciousness.
Now he wished he hadn’t been so generous.
After about half a mile, he had turned away from the river, heading in what he hoped would be the direction of the dam—and it was then that his progress became harder. This time it was the map that was deceiving him. It hadn’t showed that the ground sloped steeply uphill, although he should have worked it out for himself. Rahim had told him that the water held back by the Simba Dam flowed through two hydroelectric turbines. Since water only flows downhill, it was fairly obvious that he would have to climb.
It was hard work, weighed down in the hot sun. And the African landscape was huge. He knew he had only two miles to cover, but somehow the distances seemed to have been magnified so that even a shrub or a tree right in front of him always took too long to reach. Worse still, after leaving the river behind him, Alex had lost all sense of direction. The colors were too muted: the pale greens and browns, the faint streaks of yellow and orange. You could hide a herd of elephants here and not see them. There was nowhere for the eye to focus. There were no people, no houses, nothing that looked like a pathway or a road. This was the world as it must have been long ago, before man began to shape it to his needs. Alex felt like an intruder. And he was utterly lost.
But as long as he was climbing uphill, he had to be going the right way. He stopped and took out Rahim’s water bottle. He had already drunk from it three times, and he had tried to ration himself, but even so, he was surprised to find it almost empty. He finished the last drops and slung the empty container into the bush. Let the Kikuyu tribesmen pick it up. Alex had no doubt that they were already closing in behind him.
The bush ahead suddenly parted. Alex froze. It was an animal of some sort, small and dark, hidden by the long grass. And it was headed toward him. For a moment he felt the same uncontrollable terror that McCain had inflicted on him at the crocodile pit. If this was a lion, then it was all over. But then he relaxed. The animal was a warthog. For a moment it stared at him with its small, brutish eyes. Its upturned nose sniffed the air, and Alex could imagine it asking itself the same question it must ask every day.
Alex looked back. What time was it? There was a mountain ridge over to the west, lost in the heat haze like a strip of gray silk. The sun was sinking slowly behind it and there was already a faint moon visible against the clear blue sky. A meeting place of night and day. Alex wiped a grimy hand over his face. A mosquito whined in his ear. He wondered if Rahim had woken up yet. What would the Indian agent do when he discovered he was alone?
A movement caught his eye. At first, Alex thought he had imagined it—but there it was again. An animal? No. About a dozen men were making their way toward him. They were still at least half a mile away, far down at the bottom of the slope that Alex had been climbing. They were spread out in a line and Alex could just make out their black faces, the combat clothes they were wearing, and the weapons they carried or had strapped to their backs. He knew exactly who they were. He also knew that if he had seen them, they had seen him. If he stayed where he was, they would be with him in less than fifteen minutes.
