The Taste of Fear (27 page)

Sal left the cover of the church and approached cautiously, the rifle’s laminated wood butt stock pressed tightly against his shoulder, his left hand on the forend grip, his right on the pistol grip, his index finger taking up the slack in the trigger. He reached the discarded pistol, picked it up, and crossed the final few feet to Jahja, who was still trying to crawl away. Pathetic. He put his foot solidly on the man’s back and shoved him to the ground.

Jahja rolled over. His eyes burned with black hatred.

“Allahu Akbar!” he shouted, blood spurting from his mouth.

Sal raised the handgun and squeezed the trigger.

Jahja flopped to his side. His legs twitched. Then he lay still.

Resisting the urge to empty the entire magazine into the fanatic, knowing he needed to save ammunition, Sal returned to the church to finish the Irishman off. He didn’t care if he had given his word or not, the man was too dangerous to set free. As soon as he entered the nave, however, he froze. The overturned chair in the transept was empty.

Damien Fitzgerald was gone.

Steeling her nerve, she checked his pulse.

None. He was dead.

“Thank God,” she said softly. Reassured by the sound of her voice, she added, “You deserved it, you sick bastard.”

Scarlett padded around for his assault rifle, touched cool metal, worked the strap loose from around his neck, and hooked it over her shoulder. Right. Now what? A gun wasn’t going to do much good against darkness. She probed blindly with outstretched arms. It took her a few minutes because she was moving slow, not wanting to knock her head on something, but she eventually determined she was in a tunnel approximately five feet wide. The length? No idea.

Given she could only go one way or the other she went to her right, hoping it wasn’t leading her deeper underground. She walked cautiously, one hand against the rocky wall. With each step, her head cleared and she became more frightened as the reality of her new predicament settled over her like a lead cloak, wanting to crush her strength, her spirit.

The mine could be like an ant farm, with hundreds of tunnels zigzagging every which way. How would she ever navigate her way out? There were likely animals around as well. Certainly bats and insects. Maybe something worse. Maybe something huge and reptilian and ancient that hadn’t been discovered yet because it lived in the middle of the Congo at the bottom of an abandoned mine.

Fresh panic fluttered in her gut. What if she never reached the surface? How long would she last? Even if she was lucky enough to find water—flowing water without a rotting carcass upstream, not a dirty, stagnant pool—she would never find food. She would be doomed to die the slow and painful death of starvation, not much more than skin and a skull on an emancipated body, her final moments spent curled up in a fetal position, as if rigor knew what was coming and decided to prematurely settle in.

Then again, she thought, she might slip and crack her head long before that.

Abruptly her hand brushed a vertical strip of wood.

A ladder.

A tremor of relief rocked her body. She gripped the worn and roughly hewn parallel stringers and tried to rattle them. They were solid, affixed somehow to the stone wall.

She climbed.

Ten feet up the rock closed in around her so she was ascending through a tight tunnel drilled through the earth. Twenty feet. Thirty. Thirty-five. Had she really fallen this far? When was the shaft going to end?

A rung snapped under her weight.

Scarlett cried out, her feet suddenly dangling in the air, her hands holding on. She kicked frantically. Kicked and kicked and found purchase. She clung fiercely to the left upright, her breath coming in deep and ragged gasps in the dark.

Okay. Enough excitement, she thought. You can’t stay here forever. So move.

She moved, now stepping on the outermost edges of each rung, which she thought would be stronger. It turned out she’d been almost at the top because several steps later the ladder came to an end, the top poking a couple feet above the floor of a new lateral shaft. Carefully, very carefully, she shifted onto the dirt ground, where she flipped onto her back, grateful to have something beneath her again. She stared up at the dark, listening to her breathing, and she frowned—in a good way. Was the air less stuffy, less dank? Was this the original level she’d been on before crashing through the rope bridge?

She pushed herself to her feet and started in the opposite direction she’d gone earlier, believing it would take her back the way she’d come. She went slowly, knowing her next step could send her plummeting down a different ladder hole. After about twenty paces the blackness started to lighten, or at least she thought it did. Another twenty paces confirmed it. The blackness was now a deep gray. The air had changed as well. It smelled cleaner. Hope welled in her chest. She’d never felt such euphoria. She felt as if she was floating. A little farther on spears of sunlight pierced the dark. She ran the remaining distance. Not caring about ladder holes or rocks in her path or anything. Maybe she was a little crazy right then. Maybe something had ticked over inside her head from sane to insane. Maybe—but she didn’t care. All that mattered was getting out of the god-awful mine.

Scarlett kept running and before she knew it she had burst through the mesh of vegetation overgrowing the exit, crashing into a bramble of bush and small shrubs. She fell to her chest and laughed and sobbed. The smell of dirt and grass was divine. Emerging from the darkness to the light felt like some miraculous rebirth. She was free!

Not just from the mine,
she realized, still high on ecstasy,
but from the terrorists as well.

Scarlett didn’t know how long she laid there for, reveling in her freedom, but eventually she pushed herself to her feet and turned around in a full circle.

Some of that elation dripped away. There was no field ahead of her. No scattering of ruined buildings. All she could see in every direction were masses of verdant green trees and bush. It took her a moment to realize what had happened. She’d exited a different mineshaft than the one she’d entered. That worried her. If she went the wrong way now, she would be hopelessly lost.

Scarlett’s temporary high plummeted to a new low and she felt defeated. She slumped down on a large rock and ran her hands through her oily hair. Her tan sandals were mud black. The frosty-pink nail polish on each of her toenails had been scraped away. Her legs wept with sores. Her dress was filthy and spotted with blood. The top three buttons were missing so it hung open around her neck, exposing her white bra and the necklaces.

The necklaces.

Sitting straighter, Scarlett yanked the steel pendant over her head and cracked it open to reveal the compass. Thank you, old woman. Knowing she would only have one chance to get this right, she cleared her mind of everything but the matter at hand. The compass had said they’d gone northwest from the riverboat. The original mine entrance was directly opposite where they’d emerged into the clearing, which meant it was in the same direction, northwest—which meant if she headed south, she should find her way back to the clearing.

Right?

Right.

She hoped. She turned the compass housing until the direction of the travel arrow was facing the south marker. She adjusted her feet until the red part of the needle—the part that faced south, because she was in the southern hemisphere—was aligned with the orienting arrow.

Holding the compass flat, Scarlett set off in a southward direction.

The vegetation was dense. Several times she was forced to circumvent impassable obstacles such as thickets of razor-sharp thorns or gigantic spider webs dotted with thousands of tiny spiders. At one point she heard a primal, ghoulish screech echo through the towering canopy. She looked up and saw shadowy shapes swinging through the branches. They were agile and stealthy and most likely chimpanzees—ruthless and organized hunters that fed on smaller monkeys. Scarlett might not be a small monkey herself, but she didn’t want to wait around to see if they knew that. She began to run, tripping and falling several times in her haste, only slowing again when the otherworldly cries faded behind her.

Nevertheless, the farther she went with no sign of the clearing, the more disillusioned she became with her orienteering skills. What if she was going the wrong way? What if she’d gone too far east or west and walked straight past the clearing? Or what if the compass was in fact made for the northern hemisphere, not the south. Did that make a difference? All she knew was magnetic compasses were fitted with weights, because the needle not only pointed either north or south but also down, since both poles were buried deep within the earth. If the counterbalancing weights were indeed mixed up, would that affect the reading? Did her compass even have weights? After all, she’d bought the damn thing from a third-world market.

She wanted to scream. She was no freer than when she was under the thumb of Jahja and his henchmen. Regardless, stopping wasn’t an option, nor was turning back. She trudged on, the rifle strap digging ever deeper into her shoulder, the barrel smacking the back of her legs. She focused on the pain, welcomed it even, because it kept her moving and alert.

Then, like stepping through a magic curtain, the forest vanished and the field appeared, golden-green in the sunshine. It was beautiful, picture-perfect. If Scarlett had the energy, she might have whooped with joy. But all she did was sag, exhausted, against a tree and try to catch her labored breath. Her dress, she noticed, was now ripped in several places and was so saturated with sweat she might have stepped out of a swimming pool. Her throat was on fire, as if she’d just run a marathon.

Minute by minute Scarlett began to regain her strength and pull her thoughts together. And she became increasingly glad she hadn’t celebrated after all. It would have been premature and foolish, because what was she going to do now? Run in bullets flying à la Chuck Norris, cutting down all the bad guys?

She straightened and surveyed the backside of the cluster of brick-and-stone buildings. Creep had been the one guarding the door to the prison the day before, and now that he was dead, she hoped no one would be watching it. If that turned out to be the case, and she could slip inside the prison unnoticed, she’d rally Thunder and Sal and Miranda and make a break for the river.

Was that the plan then?
Apparently so. Simple and sweet and likely suicidal, it was the best she could come up with.

She crept along the edge of the forest until she had a clear view of the street—and what she saw confused and terrified her.

There were three bodies lying in the dirt.

One was Joanna. Who were the other two?

Before Scarlett allowed herself to begin on wild speculation, she dashed across the open grassland to a lone silk cotton tree that was halfway between the edge of the forest and the ruins. The diameter of the trunk was at least six feet, providing her ample cover. She peered over a buttress root and gasped. One of the bodies was Miranda. She recognized the girl’s long hair and lanky limbs. The other was pudgy and dressed in olive green.

Jahja?

Scarlett experienced a sudden disassociation of sense. Why did they kill Miranda? And who the hell killed Jahja? Where were Thunder and Sal? Were they dead or alive? And where were the other two gunmen? She closed her eyes briefly against the dizziness that threatened to drop her.

There was only one way to find out.

She hefted the AK-47 in front of her. It was heavy, maybe seven or eight pounds, and smelled of oil. She said a silent prayer, apologizing to whoever was listening for being an atheist for so many years, then darted out from behind the tree. She covered the last fifty yards to the back of the prison, slunk along the side of the building, peeked around the front corner.

The street was empty except for the three bodies.

She followed the façade of the building to the front door and slipped inside. Coolness. Darkness. And Thunder, curled into a ball, exactly where she’d left him.

He was alive!

She knelt beside him. “Thunder,” she said urgently. “What happened?”

He opened his eyes. They were rheumy and unfocused. “Shooting,” he mumbled.

“But why?”

“Don’t know.”

“Where’s Sal?”

“Took him.”

“I know. I was here for that. He never returned?”

“Don’t think.”

“Okay, hold on. I’m going to go look for him. Then we’re getting out of here.”

Outside, holding the assault rifle in both hands, diagonal across her chest like a soldier, Scarlett felt like a pretender, considering she didn’t even know how to use the stupid thing. But she felt more confident gripping it that way than letting it dangle uselessly at her side. She looked left, then right, like she’d been taught by the police officer who’d visited her elementary school twenty years ago. No drunk drivers. No terrorists pumped to rape or kill her. She dashed across the road without incident and before she could think better of it rushed through the church’s front entrance, pointing the rifle ahead of her, ready to fire at anybody in camouflage.