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The general did not engage in pleasantries. “Where is your platoon, Captain?” he demanded.
“Here in KM, sir, making arrangements for the SEALs and Delta to—”
“Negative, son. Not anymore. You have new orders. By direction of the president of the United States I’m now ordering you to lead your platoon in an assault on the Obelisk. You need to seize the rig on or before twelve hundred hours your time.”
Captain Taylor’s mind briefly went blank. Back in Coronado he’d had access to the finest equipment available in the world. But here in Mohan, his men had arrived with nothing but sidearms, M4 carbines, and a paltry amount of ammunition. Political considerations made it impossible for them to bring any materiel that was deemed to have “offensive capability,” as they were here solely in a training capacity. They had no boats, no chutes, no scuba gear, no comms equipment, no grenades, no night vision . . . The list of what they didn’t have that they ought to have for a night assault on a well-defended naval target could have gone on for pages. “Twelve hundred hours today, sir,” Taylor said in confirmation. “Local time?”
“Today. Twelve hundred hours, Mohan time.”
The room Captain Taylor stood in was a huge, echoing marble chamber with the air of a mausoleum.
“Sir, wegrent, n don’t have much in the way of gear.”
“The president is speaking to the Sultan right now. Anything you need, he will supply.”
“Twelve hundred hours.”
“Captain, I am fully aware of the difficulty of this mission. Therefore I will not detain you any longer. If you get one iota of shit about anything from the Mohanese, you call me direct on this number. Clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Captain, this is how humble soldiers like you and me get into the history books.”
As Captain Taylor thumbed the off button on his phone, a Mohanese soldier, an immaculately groomed adjutant whose coat dripped with gold braid, opened the massive teak door and said, “Captain, the general can spare five minutes for you.”
Captain Taylor said, “Sorry, but I can’t spare five for him.” Before the gawking adjutant could reply, Taylor was sprinting down the long marble hallway. Praise the Lord! he thought. This was the real shit!
After they found the pictures of Gideon, the surviving highlanders had a heated argument. It didn’t take them long to come to a decision.
Gideon didn’t need to speak their language to understand what they’d concluded: being in proximity to Gideon Davis was hazardous to their health. They shouted angrily at him, pointed at the trail leading deeper into the jungle, and threatened him with their spears.
“Okay, okay,” he said softly, backing away from them. “I’m going. I’m sorry. I didn’t know anyone was chasing me. I’m sorry about your friends.”
Once he was comfortably beyond spearing range, he turned and jogged down the trail a couple of hundred yards, then stopped and hid behind a tree. The shouts faded after a few moments. Oddly, the tribes men walked back in the direction from which they had come, toward the river, silently carrying their dead comrades. Gideon waited until they were gone before he returned to the scene of the battle.
The three jihadis lay on the ground, arms splayed, mouths open. It made him a little queasy looking at them. They seemed half like men, half like sacks of meat. Who were they? They were all small-statured Asians. Mohanese? Maybe. But why did they speak English? Were they led by someone who spoke English? Or were they Americans who just looked Mohanese? Were they Asians—jihadis possibly—from various countries who spoke English because it was their only common language?
Gideon steeled himself for an unpleasant task. Each of the dead men carried a small backpack. Gideon unzipped each pack in turn and went through it systematically, looking for food, water, and information. The highlanders had already ransacked their gear . . . but they might have left something that would give him a clue as to who had sent these people after him.
He found precious little.
There were a few pieces of spicy beef jerky tucked into an inside pocket. Another had an unfinished candy bar hidden in his shirt, the silver foil carefully folded over the crescent of bite marks. A half-full canteen lay in the weeds near the third man. Gideon wolfed down the jerky and the chocolate, then chased it with a few mouthfir ¡€†uls of water. He knew he had to ration his water. There was plenty of water in the rain forest, but it wasn’t potable. In all likelihood it would give him dysentery— uncomfortable in a civilized area, but potentially deadly up here.
Everything else that might have been of any use to him—cell phones, radios, tools, weapons—was gone, taken by the highlanders.
The men carried no IDs, no wallets, no credit cards. The highlanders might have taken currency. But credit cards? IDs? They’d have left them. And yet there was nothing here. These men had been sanitized before they had been dispatched.
After he finished his modest meal, Gideon crouched in the dim light and tried to think what to do next. Whoever these men were, there would be more of them waiting if he went back the way he’d come. Getting to Kampung Naga was still the only way he’d find his brother.
He and the highland tribesmen had hiked at a pretty good clip for most of the previous afternoon. They might have made ten miles. He pulled out the map. If he was reading the scale correctly, he still had at least fifteen miles to go. Maybe more. And that was assuming he was even heading in the right direction. The town was due south. He could orient himself based on the direction of the rising sun, of course. But that wasn’t like navigating by compass. If he veered east or west by a few degrees, he might miss his destination entirely.
He looked around. Daylight was begi
When he was a kid, he and Tillman had spent hours and hours wandering in the woods and fields around his house. By the time he was in junior high, he knew every plant and bush and berry—which were good to eat, which weren’t, which berries gave you the runs, which plants made you itch or break out, which ones cut you or stung you. Here he was like a baby—completely at the mercy of the jungle. Even the hoots and cries of the animals rising up around him meant nothing to him.
He had to move. Every minute he spent here was a minute closer to death. He figured the faster he got to wherever he was going, the faster he’d know if he was in the wrong place or the right place.
Gideon stood, feeling more acutely the blisters that had formed on his feet. He measured the dead men with his eyes, removed the boots and socks from the tallest one, and put them on. They were tight, but still better than his soggy wingtips.
He began trotting down the trail—just a slow jog, enough for him to make ten miles in a matter of a little over ninety minutes. The pace would force him to use up his water a little faster. But he determined it was still his best course of action. If he’d been at home, lost in a national park, then a conservative, hunker-down-and-wait-for-help strategy would probably be the smart play. But help wasn’t coming here. And the only people looking for him wanted to kill him.
As he ran, he counted his strides. He figured he had a stride of about four feet. That was roughly fifteen hundred strides to the mile. Back home, he ran regularly—four miles, most days. Sometimes five. He hadn’t run more than seven miles at a stretch since college. Could he run fifteen?
Probably. It was no good thinking about it, though.
So he just kept ru