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“I better get up there,” she said.
As she prepared to move, she felt it again—a slight tremor coming up through the steel deck. In her last conversation with Ransom, the engineer had said that he was confident that the passive damping system would hold as long as the seas stayed below thirty-five feet. Waves that high occurred rarely in the South China Sea, and even then, only during the harshest typhoon conditions.
She sca
32.
Thirty-two feet. That was worrisome.
The monitor blinked and a new number popped up.
33.
“Let’s go,” she said. “We need to get this thing over with as fast as possible.”
Gideon stood motionless, hands chest high. “Do you speak English?”
The boat captain’s eyes twitched to the side, briefly sca
But Gideon didn’t move. The captain leaned closer, whispering conspiratorially, “Before they see you.”
Gideon knelt, ducking below the gunwales of the speedboat.
“Who are you?” the boat captain said.
“My name is Gideon Davis. I was sent here by the American president.”
The man ran his eyes over Gideon and cackled, forcing smoke through his broken teeth. Gideon realized how absurd his story sounded and tried to explain himself.
“My motorcade was ambushed. Someone in town gave me your name. He said I could hire you to take me upriver.”
The man narrowed his eyes. “Upriver? You crazy.”
“A thousand dollars.”
The man laughed.
“Two thousand.”
The boat captain stopped laughing. Despite his better judgment, he actually seemed to be considering the offer, when a noise on the quay drew his attention. Someone was shouting at him. The boat captain tried to hide his pistol as he shouted back at the person on the quay.
Gideon heard footsteps coming toward them. Then the unmistakable sound of a gun being racked.
“Shit,” the captain whispered. Then he dove into the cabin. The huge Mercuries roared to life. “Get the mooring line!” the captain shouted.
Bullets started thwacking into the sides of the boat. Gideon could see he’d be shot if he jumped onto the quay to take the mooring line off the cleat. So he grabbed the pocketknife he’d taken from Genth=Á€eral Prang, flicked it open, and severed the yellow nylon cord in a single quick motion.
The boat surged away from the quay, throwing up a massive rooster tail and showering the three jihadis on the quay with water. Gideon ducked behind the gunwale, still gripping the knife tightly in his hand.
As he crouched behind the gunwale, he studied the blade of the Bench-made liner-lock. It had a pocket clip for easy access, and you could open it one-handed with the flick of a wrist. His father had always carried a knife. Always. He used to say, “A man who doesn’t carry a knife is like a woman who doesn’t carry a pocketbook.”
The captain looked over his shoulder at him, his gaze resting briefly on the knife.
“Which way are you going?” Gideon said.
“Downriver to KM.”
Gideon shook his head. “Turn the boat around. We’re going upriver.”
“You want to die, find somebody else to take you.”
“I told you, I’ll give you two thousand dollars,” Gideon said.
“Show me,” the captain said.
“I don’t have it now. I’ll get it.” But the captain held his course. “Please trust me, I really am an envoy for President Diggs. You’ll be paid.”
Still, the captain didn’t turn the boat around.
Gideon extended his arm, pointing at the captain’s face. “Up! River! Now!”
Gideon realized that he was not pointing with his finger but with the knife. He had intended not to threaten the man, just to make a strong point. But it was too late. The deed was done. He also knew that if he showed any weakness, he would never reach his brother.
The captain’s eyes flicked around the boat, and Gideon followed his look to the Colt on the floor. He had apparently set it down when he started the boat, but when he pulled away from the quay, the centrifugal force had caused it to slide away from him, and it was now out of reach.
For a moment, their eyes locked. Finally the man spun the wheel hard, and the boat headed back upriver.
Gideon scooped up the Colt and instinctively worked the slide, checking the chamber. He held the weapon over the side, hit the magazine release, dropping the clip into the water, then racked the gun and ejected the round in the chamber.
“What the hell?” the captain said. “Why you doing that?”
“I don’t like guns,” Gideon said, tossing the empty weapon on a bench seat in the aft of the boat.
The man scowled in disgust. “We get where you want to go, you go
The steady roar of the Mercuries was not quite deafening, but it was loud enough to discourage conversation. Eventually Gideon closed the knife blade against his thigh and slid it back into his pocket.
Noticing that the threatening blade had been stowed, the captain of the boat finally spoke againe aÁ€. “You really work for President Diggs?”
Gideon took out his soaked wallet, peeled out a wet business card, and set it on the wheelhouse. “That’s me.”
The captain stared at the card for a moment, raised one eyebrow, then said, “My name is Monyet. But people call me Monkey.”
Gideon pulled out General Pang’s map of Mohan, indicating the spot deep in the island’s interior. “There’s a city right here called Kampung Naga. That’s where I want to go.”
“City?” Monkey laughed derisively. “There ain’t no city there. That’s the end of the earth.”
“End of the earth?”
“You know what Kampung Naga means? It means ‘Town That Doesn’t Exist.’” Monkey dragged a dirty thumb across the middle of the map, leaving a smudge. “See this? That’s where you hit the waterfalls. No boats past that line.”
“Then get me as close as you can. I’ll go the rest of the way on foot.”
The captain lit a cigarette. “They’ll kill you before you get there.”
“Jihadis?”
“Jihadis?” The man looked at Gideon like he was a fool. “You been listening to me or not? There’s no jihadis up there! How you have jihad, you don’t have no God?”
“Then who lives up there?”
“Tribesmen. Jungle people. Stick you with arrows, eat your ass.” Gideon heard fear in the man’s voice. “Why you want to go to this place anyway?”
“To find my brother. You might have heard of him. His name’s Till-man Davis.”
Monkey shrugged.
“He calls himself Abu Nasir.”
Monkey’s face went stiff. He studied Gideon’s face, as if noticing him for the first time. “I should have known. You look like him.”
“We don’t look a damn bit like each other,” Gideon said. The words came out stronger than he’d intended. As someone who generally thought before he spoke, he was a little surprised at the vehemence of his response. Gideon didn’t look a thing like his brother. Gideon was tall and muscular, like his father, while his brother favored his mother’s side of the family—short and wiry.
“The eyes,” Monkey said, staring hard into Gideon’s face. “You both got them scary green eyes.”
Scary eyes. It was something he’d heard once from a girlfriend. He’d been taken aback by her observation, since he’d never thought of himself as a scary-eyed kind of guy. But now the one physical trait he shared with his brother seemed to confirm Uncle Earl’s claim that Tillman was in fact Abu Nasir. “So you’ve actually met him.”