of Giordino and the other prisoners, and his feet kept moving.
Though his clothes had dried after his earlier swim, now they were soaked from endless sweat. He prayed for rain, knowing it would help him elude the trackers. But the normally reliable Panamanian skies failed to cooperate, offering nothing more than an occasional drizzle.
He slipped on a patch of mud, then pulled himself onto a tree stump and rested. The darkness also seemed to have slowed the trackers. A distant barking told him he still held a comfortable lead, but he soon spied a faint glow through the foliage from the searcher’s lights.
Pitt dragged himself to his feet and pressed on into the gauntlet of unseen branches. Hour by hour, the night wore on in a cycle of plodding, tripping, and stumbling through the jungle. Always, the din of dogs overshadowed the jungle’s other sounds.
Moving like a zombie, Pitt staggered through a grove of bamboo—then took a step and felt only air. He collapsed over the lip of a narrow ravine, tumbling headfirst down a grassy hill and into a small stream. He sat there for several minutes, the cool water washing away the pain of his bruises and lacerations. Overhead, a seam of twinkling stars provided a faint but welcome light.
The water would give him the chance to escape the pursuing dogs. After refilling Zhou’s canteen, he shuffled down the center of the creek. The water seldom came past his knees, but it was deep enough to mask his tracks. With the starlight, he found the going easier, even as he slipped and fell in the streambed. He followed it for what felt like miles but was in fact only a few hundred yards.
Reaching a low bank, he hobbled up the stream’s opposite bank and entered a grove of kapok trees. A low branch beckoned, and he shimmied onto it and rested.
The jungle had quieted, and he heard few noises except the stream. He no longer detected the chase dogs, giving him hope that he had finally given them the slip. As he leaned against the trunk, he realized the pursuit had been almost as taxing mentally as it was physically.
He was fighting the urge to sleep when he heard a rustling in the bushes across the stream. He looked over his shoulder as a yellow glow bounced through the foliage. He froze as the silhouette of a large dog materialized above the far stream bank, sniffing the ground.
Pitt cursed his bad luck. Following the streambed, he had inadvertently reversed his track and traveled toward his pursuers.
The German shepherd gave no indication it saw or smelled Pitt. He held perfectly still in the tree, not even breathing. The yellow glow grew brighter until a gunman with a flashlight emerged from a thicket and called to the dog. It turned to its trainer and began to follow, but not before letting out a growl.
Ten feet from Pitt, a roar erupted like a lion in an electric chair. Pitt nearly flew off the branch but caught himself as the gunman’s flashlight scanned the tree. The light found a furry black-and-brown creature perched a little above Pitt. It was a howler monkey, and it let out a second raucous cry before hopping onto another branch and scurrying away from the light.
Pitt sat frozen at the edge of the flashlight’s beam as the dog barked wildly. The beam wavered, then bounced back to capture Pitt dead center. Pitt dropped from the branch and hustled through the grove of trees. A second later, a burst of gunfire chewed up the kapok tree’s now empty branch.
The jungle fell still as the echo from the gunfire receded. Then the landscape erupted in squawks and cries as a thousand animals fled the scene. Pitt headed the pack, scrambling through the maze of foliage with his hands outstretched. The first rays of dawn were creasing the sky, aiding his run. And run he did.
The German shepherd had been sent to follow but hesitated at crossing the stream, giving Pitt an extra head start. But the shepherd found a narrow place to cross the stream and resumed pursuit. Its incessant barking allowed Pitt to gauge the dog’s steady approach. Although tired itself from the nightlong chase, the shepherd kept coming.
Pitt had little energy left for an extended sprint. He knew he couldn’t outrun the dog, but if he could separate it from its handler, he might have a chance. The question was whether he had enough left in him to fight the dog.
The barking grew closer, and Pitt decided it was time to turn and fight. He realized he’d left his sharp stick by the tree when he fled. As he scoured the ground for a new weapon, he overlooked a low tree branch and ran face- first into it. The blow knocked him flat to the ground. As he lay there dazed, he heard the barking approach. But he also heard a metallic clacking that seemed to vibrate through the earth.
On instinct alone, he crawled forward, past the tree and up a small mound. The sound grew louder. He fought his pain and peeked over the mound.
In the dim light he saw a train—not twenty feet away. He shook off the thought it was a mirage and staggered to his feet. The train was real, all right, crawling through a narrow cut in the jungle, pulling flatbed cars loaded with shipping container after shipping container.
Pitt stumbled toward the tracks as the shepherd crested the mound and sighted him. With a renewed fury, the dog sprinted after Pitt as he staggered on rubber legs for the train.
A half-loaded flatcar was passing by, and Pitt dove for it. His torso hit the bed, and he clawed forward as the dog attacked. The German shepherd leaped and clamped its jaws onto his dangling right foot.
Pitt rolled onto the flatbed as the dog hung from his foot in midair. Pulling Zhou’s canteen from his neck, he flung it at the dog. The canteen struck its snout, and the shepherd whimpered and let go. But a moment after falling to the gravel beside the rails, the shepherd regained its senses and chased after Pitt’s flatbed. For a quarter mile, the dog ran alongside it, snarling and leaping but unable to jump aboard. Then the train crossed a ravine over a narrow trestle, and the dog was forced to give up. Pitt waved farewell to it as it barked and howled in frustration at the vanishing train. Crawling across the flatbed car, Pitt then curled up next to a rusty container, closed his eyes, and promptly fell asleep.
63
THE SLOW-MOVING FREIGHT TRAIN JOLTED TO A stop, awakening its lone passenger. Stretched out on one of its flatbeds, Pitt pried open his eyes under a bright morning sun.
The Panama Railway train had reached its terminus at a rail yard in the port of Balboa. Near the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal, and just a few miles south of Panama City, Balboa was the key transit point for shipping across the isthmus. Pitt jumped off the flatbed car and found himself surrounded by a steel jungle. Mountains of multicolored shipping containers were stacked in every direction. He looked down a long line of rail cars to see a gantry crane positioned over the tracks and workers beginning to off-load the ubiquitous containers.
Standing near the end of the train, Pitt followed the tracks out of the rail yard, figuring the odds were high that the local rail authorities would treat him as a vagrant. Exiting the yard, he climbed a rusty chain-link fence and found himself in a neighborhood of aged warehouses. A half block away, he noticed a small building with a handful of cars parked out front. It was a run-down bar that catered to the local dockhands. A faded sign proclaimed it
Pitt walked into the dim bar, garnering stares from the few early-morning customers already warming the barstools. Pitt approached the bartender, then caught a glimpse of himself in a large mirror behind the bar. The sight nearly frightened him.
It was the image of a tired, emaciated man with a bruised and bloodied face, wearing soiled, shredded, and equally bloodied clothes. He looked like a man returned from the dead.
The bartender looked at Pitt as if he’d landed from Mars, then pointed to a corner next to the restroom. Pitt ambled over and was relieved to find a battered pay phone. Though all but extinct in America, the venerable pay phone lived on around the world, sometimes in the most unlikely of places.
Reaching an English-speaking operator who balked only momentarily at his request to make a collect call to Washington, D.C., Pitt soon heard the line ringing. Rudi Gunn’s voice jumped an octave after hearing Pitt say hello.
“You and Al are safe?”
