One moment they were slogging through the sand and the next t
he beach rocked beneath their feet and a buckling explosion that Gray felt in his chest came from the jungle. Smoke and debris rose above the trees that lay in the direction of the trail. He dropped the water and started running.
Gray
did not have to remember where he had placed the mines. He came upon a section of the trail where the foliage was obliterated and two men lay in the dirt. The first one lay face up and was more shiny dark red than any other color. The second man lay face down and blood covered his back. Tendrils of smoke still rose from tattered cloth, flesh and shredded plant material.
A long bamboo pole with a small b
lade on one end lay shattered along side the first man. A small shovel, a large plastic bucket, mangled and holed like a sieve, and a small net that on second glance was a bag made of netting, lay in the trail.
Gray
pushed into the jungle and squat beside his companions.
“
This is what we recovered,” Anna said. Her shaking hands were bloody as were two rifles, a Glock pistol and a machete that lay beside her.
When
she saw Gray’s gaze fall upon the blood tipped spear at her side, she said, “The one farther up the trail was crawling to his rifle.”
Gray placed a hand on Anna’s back and looked
over at Keegan and Paolo who were grinning broadly. When he turned to Shinobu, the old man’s gaze was focused up the trail. “You guys did great,” Gray said.
From the angle, Gray could not tell if a smile or a snarl
came to Shinobu’s lips. “Are any of you hurt?” Gray asked.
Anna shook her head. “No, just shaky
, jittery.”
Keegan shook his head.
The old man turned to face Gray. He was grinning and put his left hand to his ear and held up the clacker in his right hand, pressing the side of his hand against his right ear. “Next time I will cover both ears.” He turned his gaze back to the trail.
“Oh, yeah, sorry, Shinobu.”
“What?” he said, dead pan and without altering his gaze.
Gray glanced at Anna and she
was suppressing a giggle. Keegan’s shoulders shook with mirth. Gray just shook his head, trying not to grin. “A hoard of these guys may be here in about fifteen minutes, and I don’t think they will come running down the trail. We need to get out of here,” he said although he was sure they already knew that.
Paolo was frowning. “We should wait and use the
other mine on the next pirates that come down the trail. We should not miss this opportunity.”
Gray shook his head. “Paolo, those men are not stupid. It is very likely they will not come down the trail but parallel to it and we would be out gunned if they did.”
“They are vermin, Gray. You overestimate their intelligence.”
In a
n urgent tone, Gray said, “Paolo, please! We don’t have time to argue about it here! They’ll be on us in about fifteen minutes. Anna, unhook the clackers and then go get the other mine. Shinobu, roll up the wire. Keegan, grab the blade end of that pole thing the guy was carrying and then help Dayah carry the food and tools to the shelter. We will meet at the shelter. Go, go, we do not have much time.”
Paolo grabbed Anna’s arm to keep her from unhooking the clackers. “I’ll stay here by myself,” he said. Anna
angrily pulled from his grasp and looked to Gray.
“Paolo, you are not the sweetest guy around but I do not want to lose you.
We can plan out something better.”
Keegan said, “L
et the asshole stay.”
“Dammit, Keegan,
you ain’t helping. Paolo, there’s four of us here that don’t want you to stay. Don’t make the kind of mistake Melanie and Lex made.”
“This is nothing like that. I’m not giving myself up to them. I’m going to kill them.”
“Paolo, you are endangering the others by this bullshit. It’s bad for us if that mine falls into their hands and we are wasting time. We have to get out of here!”
Anna said, “Let him stay.
”
Dayah had a bag over her shoulder ready to leave. “Let him stay.”
Gray looked at Shinobu. The old man had an angry expression on his face. He held up one of the clackers and said, “This is the live one,” and handed it to Paolo. He started pulling in the wire to the one they had detonated.
Gray
grimaced but squatted and quickly examined the rifles. One was a polymer stocked AK-74 or at least a relative because it used the smaller projectile 5.45 x 39 round rather than the 7.62 x 39 round used by the AK-47. The action appeared undamaged other than dents. The stock and forearm had holes through them and Gray could not tell if the gas tube was damaged. There was not enough time to disassemble it for verification. One of the mine’s steel projectiles had blown a hole through the plastic clip about three inches down from its mouth. If a cartridge was jammed inside the clip as a result, the rifle would in effect be single shot but there was no time to work on it. The rifle was virtually useless in a fire fight. He slipped the sling of the rifle over his back and caught Dayah and Keegan as they were about to head down the trail. He dropped the Glock into one of the empty bags and handed Keegan the machete.
He picked up the second rifle, an AK-47. It had some nicks and dings but looked otherwise functional. When he worked the action a couple
of times, rounds chambered and extracted. “Do you know how to use one of these?” he asked Paolo.
“Yes.”
After Gray had inserted the two ejected rounds back into the clip, he handed the rifle to Paolo, saying, “If that mine falls into the pirates’ hands, I will kill you myself. If it looks like you are going to die, detonate the mine. Anything I should tell your fans?” Gray said, not disguising his anger.
The man gave him a surprised look but only shrugged.
Gray turned and went up the trail to the farthermost man and pulled the straight razor from his pocket. He sliced the entire thigh muscle from the man’s leg and cut a slit deep into the mass of meat so he could grasp it. After wiping the razor on the man’s shorts, he pocketed it and picked up the meat. Anna was waiting for him and made a face when she saw what he had done but did not say anything. Shinobu was ahead of them going down the trail and they caught up with him at the beach. He turned toward the shelter but Gray stopped and dragged the meat around in the sand to remove the dripping blood. He and Anna then angled off toward the water where Gray slung the chunk of flesh as far out into the water as possible. They both washed the blood from their hands. Gray asked Anna to grab the empty gift baskets left on the beach and hide them in the jungle. While Anna was gathering the baskets, he went back to the case of water he had dropped and hoisted it onto his shoulder and took off for the shelter.
Keegan, Shinobu and Dayah were waiting at the shelter. “Grab everything usable, we
’ll have to abandon the shelter,” Gray said. “We can eat when we reach the flat.”
They grabbed the remaining blankets and the shovels and started
east up the slope. As they climbed through the jungle, Gray watched for signs of their passing. He instructed them to avoid trampling vegetation or leaving footprints where the earth was soft. He slashed a branch from a bush and followed them, scuffing out the marks they did leave. When they reached the tree line they no longer left any trace other than places where the crumbly rock crushed beneath their feet and it was easily brushed away. They worked around the peak in silence and dropped their gear on the flat close to the cave. Grey took the binoculars from Shinobu and climbed to the north side of the peak. Staying low enough to avoid making a silhouette, he brought the glasses up to his eyes, holding them around the front lenses in a way that the last three fingers of each hand shaded the lenses to avoid creating a flash that the men might see.
Melanie was
not shackled to the pole. Two men were in the clearing and the motorboat was at the dock. Gray climbed down from the peak to the flat where Anna was handing out sandwiches, yogurt and fruit drinks. When she brought his food, he told her Melanie was not at the pole. She pressed her lips together and made a worried face but went on distributing the food.
After Gray told the others what he had seen from the peak, he
sat down with the AK-74 and reexamined it. He removed the clip and began unloading it, dropping the cartridges onto a blanket. By slapping the clip against his palm, he managed to get the two mangled rounds out of it. With the tip of the knife he had given Anna, he removed burrs of plastic around the entry hole that were hanging up good cartridges. He reloaded the clip with the remaining cartridges, checked the bore and slapped the clip into the gun. Working the action by hand, he rapidly chambered and ejected rounds onto the blanket until he realized how much noise the clattering action was making and he stopped. There were no jams, which was a very good sign but when the function of a weapon was a matter of life or death, it had to be tested completely and the only way to do that was to fire it, not only to test its basic functionality but to find out where it shot in relation to its sights.
If he were to fire the rifle now, the pirates
could gain an approximation of their location, with more or less accuracy depending upon where they were at present. If men had started across the island immediately after the mine went off, they could be nearly to the beach and firing the rifle might compromise the cave as a shelter. Despite not getting to test the rifle, he was going to be forced to trust it. He asked the others to gather around.
“I’m going to go down and try to give Paolo some cover if the pirates flank him.”
Anna made a pained expression and lowered her head into her hands. Gray put an arm around her and gave her a very brief hug. If he was going to be of any help he had to move fast. He did not wait for comments.
Gray was breathing heavy by the time he reached the beach. He kept close to the edge of the jungle
so he could dive in if necessary. The break in the jungle where the trail started was just ahead when the first pops of rifle fire started. His heart sank.
He moved into the jungle. The shots sounded like they were coming
from just north of the trail and about as far up as where they left Paolo. He ran until he had covered about a hundred yards and then slowed. When he was about 75 yards from where he thought Paolo should be he stopped and became very still. A yell came from up ahead that did not sound like Paolo. It was answered by another voice ahead and to the right. Gray was pushing through dense cover when the mine exploded. The flash came from well east of where he had heard the voices. Two quick shots followed the explosion. In a moment the two voices started up again, loud, closer together and excited. Gray slipped back into the dense cover and waited. Now it sounded like more than two voices, all directly east of Gray.
He back tracked about twenty yards and moved north very slowly.
He thought the men were talking loudly because their hearing was impaired by the unexpected blast. They should not be able to hear him moving. When he judged he was a hundred yards north of the trail he turned east again for about a hundred yards. The voices stayed in the same position. He moved slowly back toward them.
The jungle became thinner about 50 yards from the trail so he could not move forward.
Peering through the leaves of the last cover, he could see three of the pirates standing near where his companions had hid in cover and detonated the first mine. They were looking down at something on the ground and that filled Gray with dread.
The men moved
onto the trail and turned left. Gray lost sight of them for a few seconds but caught glimpses of them as they passed breaks in the jungle. They stopped at about where the man lay from which he had cut the chunk of meat. After chattering loudly for half a minute they moved on east. When their voices receded he worked his way south toward the trail.
Paolo lay on his stomach. Gray did not have to check for a pulse. The last two shots he had heard were likely fired point blank at his head. There were two entry wounds, one on the left side of his face ahead of his ear and the other above the ear. The right side of the skull
was blown out and his brains were spilled onto the jungle floor. A bloody wound in his side was probably inflicted during the first volley of shots. Paolo was grasping the clacker in his hand. Gray lifted him enough to make sure he was not lying on the AK-47 Gray had left with him. The pirates had taken the rifle.
Fighting an ache in his heart, Gray rose and walked parallel to the trail to where the last mine had gone off. He walked on past it looking for signs that it caught one of the pirates but he found none.
Gray considered dragging Paolo back for burial but decided he and Keegan could come down and carry him away on a stretcher. The decision was less for respect of a dead body than for not wanting to leave a trail that could lead the pirates to the other burials. After listening for a minute, he took the trail back to the beach and then on up to the flat.
When Gray came around to the east side of the peak, the others came out of the foliage along the path to the flat. Anna ran to him.