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Once Tanner figured they were deep enough into the jungle for him to wield the machete without the sound of it carrying to what he hoped were the still-sleeping pricks who’d taken her, he took it from his belt and began swinging it.
The vegetation gave way relatively easily and they picked up speed, but not enough.
The woman was slowing them down. She was doing the best she could—he had to give her that—but she was having a tough time. He could hear her behind him, breathing hard, tripping over roots and vines, swatting at the bugs.
If there was one kind of wildlife that definitely used this trail, it was the kind that flew, crept and crawled.
“This is a jungle, dude,” one of Tanner’s instructors at STUDs training had said when they’d been dropped into a jungle in Belize and one jerk had bitched about the seemingly endless insects. “Did you think somebody would come through and spray it with Raid?”
They’d all laughed, but the truth was that the little shits made things tougher than they already were. They got in your eyes. Your nose. Your mouth. They got into places nobody but you or the lady currently in your bed ever touched. They made you itch, so you scratched—and the more you scratched, the more you itched. Then the places you’d scratched swelled up and sometimes they became infected.
Infection was not something to treat lightly in an environment like this.
Christ only knew what bacterial life forms made the jungle their happy home.
Besides, the last thing he needed was the woman coming down with an infection. Still, no matter what happened, he wouldn’t have to deal with her for very long.
With luck, they’d reach the river by late afternoon.
He’d had a couple of hours between the Super Hornet depositing him at Boca Chica and the chopper picking him up, and he’d spent the time going over satellite photos of the area where Alessandra Wilde had been snatched, where he’d been likely to find her—and had.
As luck would have it, he knew the area. He’d been in this part of San Escobal before, back in the days when a cocaine drug lord had pretty much owned it, but the so-called civil war had changed everything, including who held what territory.
One thing had not changed.
The geography.
The river, especially.
There was one out there, all right, ten, maybe eleven klicks to the west where it cut through the thick foliage like a sluggish brown worm. A couple of villages sat on its overgrown banks. Villages meant fishermen, and fishermen meant canoes.
Tanner was counting on finding one of those canoes. He’d buy it, steal it; he didn’t care which. The main thing was to get to the river, acquire a boat, take it to a place where they could make a relatively easy crossing into Guatemala. The he’d call in a chopper and get himself and the woman out.
It sounded easy, but life had taught him that what sounded easy rarely was.
In this case, success depended on a lot of things, starting with the woman’s kidnappers not finding this trail.
Talking to her, he’d made it sound like that was nothing to worry about, but of course he’d lied. Not about all of it. The part about the trail being well hidden and seemingly unused was true. So was the part about the benefit of leaving clues to convince her captors to go in the wrong direction.
What he’d lied about, or maybe it was better to say what he’d simply not bothered mentioning, was the possibility her captors knew the area as well as he did. Then they’d be aware of the old trail, and if they weren’t complete idiots, they’d figure out that maybe that was the route she’d taken.
Something long, slender and green lay along the length of a branch just ahead. It was a green tree snake, a nonaggressive creature that would as soon slither away as bite.
Should he call the woman’s attention to it?
Which was the wiser move? Point it out? Not point it out? Either way, she’d freak. There was something about snakes that terrified women. Well, men, too. He could still remember the ungodly shriek of one guy on a BUD/S training mission years before when a harmless snail-eater had slithered over his bare toes.
“Snake.”
The whisper came from behind him. Surprised, Tanner looked back. The woman pointed to the tree.
“Snake,” she repeated softly. “Harmless.”
No panic. She was out of breath, sure, but she was calm. And she was giving him advice.
Hell.
She was giving him advice? On snakes?
