Читать книгу Target Response: - William W. Johnstone - Страница 6

The swamp was thick with green mist; the mist was thickest in the flooded forest. Banks of greenish haze drifted through clusters of dripping trees.

The swamp by night was a noisy environment. It rang with shrill cries of animals and birds, growls, grunts, hisses, and bloodcurdling shrieks. Adding to the unrest was a constant counterpoint of splashes, drippings, creaks, and groans. All sounding against a steady background of the insect chorus: buzzing, chirping, humming, droning.

It was night of the third day. The hunt was still on.

East of the Rada River the flooded forest was fitfully lit by a number of flickering phantom lights. The ragged globes were beads of brightness widely scattered through the sprawling vastness of the morass. Fireballs that hovered over the watery avenues honeycombing the area.

One such light appeared in a winding channel at the southeast corner of the drowned jungle, floating about four feet above the surface of sluggish black water.

The channel snaked its way through the marsh, twisting and looping, filled with blind curves and sudden turnings. It was never more than fifteen feet across at its widest; its average width was ten feet and in some tight spots it narrowed to barely eight feet. Its depth varied between five feet and eight feet, with everywhere a soft, mucky bottom. No earthen banks bordered its sides.

Such was the nature of the drowned forest. A vast bowl filled with tall, straight trees, it had become submerged in recent years when a feeder stream of the Rada had carved a new channel into what had formerly been boggy marshland, totally flooding it.

The tall trees were unable to survive the constant immersion and quickly succumbed. Their cores rotted, their branches refused to put forth new leaves, and the trees died. Many of the slim, straight trunks remained standing, rising from the black lagoon like the pillars of a flooded cathedral.

But the swamp was a crucible of creation, teeming with green, pulsing life. Plants that had previously led a marginal existence thrived in the new aquatic environment, swarming it with masses of vegetation.

A variety of trees took hold in swamp water: mangroves, cypresses, and water oaks. Not tall and slender, they were stunted, dwarfed, and gnarly, with serpentine root and branch systems. Spiky.

Shaggy vines, flowering lianas, and cablelike creepers draped the dead tree columns, wrapping them with an elaborate three-dimensional webwork that screened out the sky.

Now, a ghostly light rounded the bend and came into view, hovering in midair. No will-o’-the-wisp or luminous mass of marsh gas this, but rather the crackling head of a flaming torch fixed to the bow of a boat.

Like the surrounding plant life, the boat, too, was designed to flourish in the wetlands. A slim wooden dinghy, it had a pointed bow and squared-off stern. Its low sides, flat bottom, and shallow draft fitted it for the shallows of the swamp.

A small outboard motor was attached to the transom board at the stern. The shrouded engine drove a long, slim shaft about four feet long that extended like a metal stinger from the back of the boat. The shaft was fixed so that it lay almost horizontal several inches below the surface of the water. The tip of the shaft sported four small, propeller-like fins. The motor turned the finned shaft, providing propulsive power.

The near-horizontal extension of the driveshaft and its minifinned propeller allowed it to operate in shallow water while minimizing the risk of snagging. Should the fins become fouled by reeds or underwater plants—a frequent occurrence in the swamp—it was relatively easy to clear them.

Two Nigerian soldiers manned the boat.

Ojo the steersman occupied the stern seat, operating a tillerlike handle attached to the motor housing. The motor was mounted on gimbals that let it traverse a free arc of movement away from the stern board. By moving the tiller to the right or left, the steersman altered the position of motor and driveshaft, allowing him to control the direction in which the craft was heading.

The second man sat at the bow, serving as spotter. Rasheed held a six-foot-long pole that he used to ward off floating logs and the like, break up tangles of vines or creepers, and push the boat away from obstructions pressing it too closely on either side.

Ojo the steersman was round-faced, fleshy, heavyset. A coastal dweller born and bred, he was no stranger to the marshy river deltas of the Nigerian southlands, but this miserable manhunt in the swamp had long ago begun to get on his nerves.

Not so much the surroundings but the quarry they hunted had thrown a shadow over his soul.

The spotter, Rasheed, was one of Ali Abdul Mukhtar’s militia men recruited into Minister of Defense Derek Tayambo’s elite corps of bodyguards. His hawklike features and lean body type marked his origin in the arid northern region.

These seething swamplands were doubly alien and oppressive to one accustomed to the bone-dry, desertlike plains of the north. But what Rasheed lacked in affinity for the swamp he made up for with the ferocity of his fanaticism.

He was a Believer, a Muslim jihadist who’d sworn fealty to warrior-imam Mukhtar’s holy crusade to turn Nigeria into an Islamic state governed by the tenets of ultraorthodox sharia law. The purity of his hate for the infidel allowed him to transcend the bodily and psychic discomforts of the marsh.

As for Ojo, he was a swampman and its hardships were second nature to him. He had no liking, though, for the haughty northerner Rasheed with whom he’d been partnered.

And even less liking for this grinding hunt for the elusive American…

Lighting the way forward was the torch, a wandlike length of wood whose knobbed head had been dipped in tarry pitch and set aflame. Its base was wedged into a metal ringbolt at the tip of the prow, securing it in place. It thrust forward at a tilted angle away from the boat.

It was torchlight that created the illusion of a phantom fireball drifting above the swamp.

At least a half dozen other such flickering fireballs coursed through the flooded forest this night, each one shed by a torch fixed to the bow of a similar boat coursing the waterways in search of one lone man.

Man? Devil, more likely, thought Ojo.

The American was an implacable enemy haunting the swamp, at least in the minds of the Nigerian troops who had been seeking him in vain for three days and nights. No ghost he, but a creature of flesh and blood—of that there could be no doubt.

The proof was in the ever-mounting toll of bodies of slain comrades found floating facedown in a blackwater channel or sprawled in a heap on solid ground. They had been shot, stabbed, clubbed, and even strangled to death.

Human prey had become predator, targeting isolated individuals, stragglers, and others who’d become separated from the main body of troops.

A shot would ring out somewhere in the swamp and when the hunters came to investigate, they’d inevitably find another of their number dead with a bullet in the head or heart.

A shriek would sound in the night—or in daylight—from behind a patch of brush and a victim would be discovered with his throat cut or his middle ripped open to let his guts out.

Worse, though, to the living, because so unnerving, was the death that came wrapped in silence.

A line of soldiers would be filing along a trail when suddenly the next-to-last man in line would glance over his shoulder to pass a remark to a comrade who was bringing up the rear only to find that that man had disappeared.

A search along the back trail inevitably would reveal the vanished one not too far behind the nearest bend, slain in some singularly unpleasant fashion.

This slow, steady attrition of their numbers was dispiriting—demoralizing. The troops would have been glad to declare that the American had perished somewhere in the swamp and taken themselves back to the barracks at their home base in Lagos.

Alas, it was not to be. Their commanding officers would not have it so. They took their orders from two white men, the South African mercenary Krentz and the Yankee spy Ward Thurlow. This pair of outlanders were favored associates of Defense Minister Tayambo, the supreme leader to whom all members of the elite bodyguard corps had sworn unquestioning allegiance.

Truly the ways of politics—like fate—were strange, thought Ojo, shaking his head. One thing was sure, however: the manhunt had gone sour. It might well be cursed.

The fierce joy experienced by the hunters on the second day when one of the Americans was slain and the other fled into the flooded forest had long since dissipated, eaten away by the rising body count of their own.

Surely the other American would soon be taken, if not by the troops then by the swamp itself. The swamp was a mankiller, and this man was a foreigner, an outlander infidel soft with the corruptions and weaknesses of the Great Satan U.S.A.

So argued the optimists in the ranks. Instead, the reverse had happened. The lone American seemed to thrive in the difficult environment, while the manhunters continued to fall victim to him.

Each setback, each freshly slaughtered corpse, further enraged the company commanders. Of course, the officers stayed safely out of the swamp, remaining behind on riverboats or in the camp pitched on the point at the junction of the Rada and Kondo Rivers.

Nothing would do but that the rank-and-file troops must continue the quest day and night, even to this midnight hour of the third day, when a half dozen boats prowled the flooded forest to rout the quarry from his hiding place.

Better to be riding on a motorboat than prowling the land areas of the swamp on foot, thought Ojo. Even with such uncongenial company as Rasheed.

The northerner sat perched on the bow thwart holding the pole lengthwise across the tops of his thighs, his back turned to Ojo. Rasheed’s stiffly held neck and upright posture radiated the innate arrogance that Ojo found so offensive.

The steersman was careful to suppress all signs of dislike, however. Rasheed was touchy and quick to take offense, especially at a real or imagined slight from one like Ojo, who was not one of his jihadist coreligionists. And he was ever ready to avenge such slights.

An enormous panga in a leather sheath was worn strapped diagonally across Rasheed’s back, with the hilt protruding within easy reach behind the top of his left shoulder. His assault rifle lay behind him, propped muzzle-up where the middle thwart met the starboard gunwale.

Ojo’s rifle stood in a similar position, leaning against the near side of the middle thwart where it joined the port gunwale. Several inches of water in the bottom of the boat prevented its occupants from laying their rifles flat there.

The engine puttered away, venting a cloud of blue-gray exhaust. The channel wound through what seemed like an endless tunnel whose walls on either side were pillared by dead tree trunks and veiled by trailing tangles of vegetation.

Torchlight added to the eeriness of the scene, throwing murky shadows into ceaseless, restless motion.

The passage once more began to narrow. Stands of mangrove trees bordered it on both sides, extending their massive, intricate root system into the water. Branches intertwined overhead, forming an archway.

Ahead, a sturdy bough crossed the channel at right angles, stretching out about eight feet above it. A thick branch abundant with foliage.

Ojo eyed it with unease. Such overhangs could be dangerous. Leopards liked to take their prey from above, lurking on a sturdy tree limb to pounce on the unwary victim below, fastening powerful fanged jaws on the back of the prey’s neck and breaking it. Their preferred method of making a kill.

Ojo shrugged off the thought. He well knew that the flooded forest was barren of leopards. The big cats—leopards, cheetahs, lions—all shunned this forlorn swamp.

Even the carrion-craving jackal, that none too fastidious cousin of the dog, gave it a wide berth.

No, the danger here came not from feline predators but from reptiles; namely, crocodiles and snakes.

The boat neared the overhanging limb. Some bits of tree moss dropped off the branch to fall plopping into the water. The limb creaked as if under some heavy burden.

Rasheed looked up, tilting his head back. Something moved up there—

A lightning bolt detonated in the cramped space of the channel. Simultaneous with the lightning came a booming thunderclap.

Blasted out of the bow thwart, Rasheed fell backward into the bottom of the boat.

Ojo had time to register the thunderbolt that struck down Rasheed. That was all. Defying the maxim that lightning never strikes twice in the same spot, a second such thunderbolt struck Ojo.

The top of his head exploded and he ceased to exist.

The boat continued its slow forward course. The big leafy branch shook as a pair of hands gripped it and a massive form swung down into view. The nightcomer dropped into the boat as it passed beneath him. He was mindful of the danger of swamping the craft or putting a booted foot through its bottom. He landed lightly in the beam of the boat, its widest part, touching down easily in a muscular crouch.

His weight caused the shallow-draft dinghy to sink deeper into the water, for an instant sinking it so that black water rose dangerously close to the tops of the gunwales. He rode out the disturbance like a surfer on a board, minutely adjusting his position and maintaining his balance until the boat rose and righted itself.

He was…Kilroy.

Kilroy piloted the boat farther along the channel, whose switchback course ultimately wound toward the west.

A night and a day, and half a night again had passed since the ambush that killed Raynor and saw Kilroy flee into the depths of the flooded forest.

He had evaded his pursuers by the simple strategy employed by most successful fugitives—by being willing to take the chase to more extreme limits and endure more unremitting hell than those who were hunting him were willing to undergo.

A heavy rainfall on the night following Raynor’s death had allowed Kilroy to slake his thirst and fill his canteen with fresh water. With Raynor gone, Kilroy had enough MREs to last for several days.

Plastering his flesh with handfuls of black mud, smearing it over every inch of exposed skin, had won Kilroy some relief from plaguing insect pests. He had caught a few blessed hours of fitful sleep wedged into a treetop.

Daybreak. He’d expended his assault rifle’s last rounds escaping the ambush in the valley. No matter. He still had his .44 Magnum handgun and survival knife to take the war to the enemy.

The flooded forest was ideal for bushwhacking; it made it so easy for lone troops to become separated from their fellows. A hand from behind clapped over a foeman’s mouth to stifle his cries, a razor-edged knife blade cutting a throat—and the deed was done.

The first Nigerian soldier he’d slain had furnished him with a rifle and ammunition to further fuel the ongoing fight. As the long, murderous day had worn on and their numbers decreased, the men of Tayambo’s elite bodyguard had grown unsure of who was hunting whom.

Night fell, and with it had come teams of torch-bearing boatmen to ply the flooded forest and bring him to bay. Kilroy had welcomed their advent; a motorized dinghy was his ticket out of the swamp.

Hours had passed before the proper opportunity to strike presented itself. A lone boat separated from its fellows, taking a course that would deliver itself into his hands.

He had raced to get ahead of it and intercept it, jumping from matted tussocks to gnarled mangrove root works, climbing trees and crawling out to the ends of their branches to leap to his next solid stepping-stone through blackwater channels. He had lost a rifle along the way.

But he had reached the critical junction point ahead of the boat, whose bow-mounted torch glowing fuzzily through green mist heralded its arrival from a long way off.

Kilroy had scaled a mangrove tree, climbing out along a branch that overhung the channel. It had groaned with creakings and sagged dangerously under his weight but held. Crouched on a crooked limb, hidden by masses of leafy boughs, he had waited with drawn gun and a hunter’s terrible patience for the boat to arrive.

As it neared, he had drawn a bead on the spotter in the bow and shot him in the heart. A second shot had taken the steersman above the eyebrows…and the boat was Kilroy’s.

He now moved to take control of the boat, a type familiar to him. It was the same basic model of slim, shallow-draft craft used in swamplands around the world, from Central Europe’s Pripet Marshes to the archipelagoes of Malaysia.

The engine was about the size and horsepower of a lawn mower motor. The tiller was fitted with a handgrip throttle controlling the rate of fuel flow.

The boat nosed against a cluster of half-submerged mangrove roots, bumping into them. Kilroy’s form unfolded, moving aft.

Ojo the steersman sat slumped against the stern’s square-edged transom, dead hand still clutching the tiller. A .44 slug had taken him above the eyes, blowing off the top of his skull. His head was tilted back over the top of the stern board, shattered cranium oozing blood and brain matter into dark waters.

Kilroy pried open the steersman’s fingers, unwinding them from the handle of the tiller. He elbowed the corpse to one side, careful not to upset the boat.

The bow was snagged in a knotted tangle of mangrove roots, its progress temporarily halted. The motor idled, sputtering, laying down a plume of blue-gray exhaust that mixed and merged with the green mist.

Kilroy made quite a sight. His shirt was in rags, and his baggy pants were in little better condition. Strapped across his upper body was a shoulder harness with a holstered .44 under his left arm. He still retained his sheath knife and canteen.

From head to toe his body was covered with a coating of stinking black mud, protection against the hordes of omnipresent swarming insects. Without it they would have eaten him alive or driven him mad.

As it was he was perhaps not at the moment what could have been called entirely sane.

The mud pack also provided good camouflage. Only the whites of his eyes, his teeth bared in a snarl, of which he was unaware, and the palms of his hands and undersides of his fingers broke the dark uniformity of his mud-daubed form.

Using Rasheed’s pole, he pushed off from the mangrove roots, freeing the boat’s snagged bow. He steered it into the middle of the channel.

The throttle was already set low; Kilroy left it alone, fearing to throttle down any farther lest the motor stall and he be unable to restart it. He pushed the tiller handle downward, causing the engine to tilt forward and raise the driveshaft and propeller clear of the water.

The boat now drifted forward, drawn solely by the sluggish current. The two shots with which he had downed the boatmen had sounded with thunderous crashings.

In their aftermath, the cries and howls of the swamp had become muted and stilled. Even the ferocious whirring and buzzing of the insect swarms had temporarily subsided to a hush.

Kilroy listened for the answering call of man-made sounds: gunshots, shouts, or boat motors. Anything that would indicate the nearness of other boatmen searching for him. No such noises were to be heard.

It seemed he had slipped pursuit for the moment.

He turned out the steersman’s pockets but found nothing of value. He hoisted the body over the side, easing it into the black water.

The corpse bobbed around, rolling so that it floated facedown, its shattered skull upturned. An arm got snagged on a mangrove root.

The drifting boat began to pull away and presently left the cadaver far behind. Kilroy took note of the two assault rifles on board and eagerly examined them. They were dirtier than he liked but nonetheless in decent working order. With them he also found a canvas ammo bag filled with spare magazines.

Kilroy thrilled to rising exultation. Armed with this much firepower, he’d raise merry hell breaking the ring with which the opposition had encircled him.

Careful to avoid disturbing the balance of the low-sided boat, Kilroy moved forward.

Rasheed the spotter lay faceup with his back on the bottom of the boat and his long legs tangled up in the bow. His eyes were open; they’d rolled back in the sockets so only the whites showed. His mouth gaped open. Flies were already buzzing around inside it. They really flocked to the hole that the .44 slug had punched through his chest.

Kilroy hooked his hands under the dead man’s arms, hoisting him up and draping his upper body across the port gunwale. He drew the panga from its sheath, holding it up to the torchlight and eyeing it. The long blade was a well-tempered piece of steel with a keen edge. He could put it to good use should the occasion arise. He decided to keep it, and the sheath, too. He worked the scabbard and straps free of the body.

The corpse he didn’t need. It would follow the steersman’s into the water.

Kilroy wrestled around with it, positioning it preparatory to dumping it overboard. Hard work, made doubly difficult by the need to take care to avoid tipping the boat, forcing him to expend a lot of energy he could ill afford to spare.

The placid waters of the channel began to swell and seethe with agitation. The boat swayed from side to side.

Something bumped against the bottom of the hull, nearly causing Kilroy to tumble overboard. He saved himself by gripping the gunwales. For an instant he thought he’d collided with a submerged log or rock. The turbulence increased, whipping up the surface of the water.

Suddenly something emerged from below, thrusting an enormous wedge-shaped snout into view.

The snout divided in two, opening on the fulcrum of a massive pair of jaws, revealing a stinking, gaping maw whose upper and lower halves were lined with double rows of jagged teeth. Each tooth was roughly the size and shape of a flint arrowhead. Topping the far end of the snout were two golden, glittering orbs.

Crocodile! Kilroy had dodged plenty such during his time in the swamp but this brute was one of the biggest he’d yet seen.

It closed its jaws on the head and shoulders of Rasheed, hauled him over the side. The boat tipped hard to port, nearly capsizing before the corpse came free of it. Rolling its massive bulk to one side, the crocodile submerged, dragging the body underwater. The wave generated by its movements rocked the boat again.

Kilroy lunged for the stern, gripping the tiller and levering the driveshaft and propeller into the water—not too deep, for fear of disturbing the thrashing crocodile in its feeding frenzy.

Opening the throttle, Kilroy powered the boat away from the croc and its prize and out of rough waters.