Sarah came up level with me, and we both had our hands on our knees, panting for breath as if we"d just finished a 200-meter sprint.
"Sarah, take off your underwear."
She looked at me blankly. She"d heard me say that before, but not in a situation like this.
"What?"
"Your panties, I need them." I"d already taken off my jacket and was pulling off my shirt. I was after the T-shirt underneath. Her expression told me that she wasn"t sure about this.
"Sarah, trust me. They must have dogs." She didn"t bother to ask, just moaned to herself about getting undressed.
In any other situation it would have been quite nice to watch her drop her jeans and peel off her underwear, but that was the story of my life: wrong time, wrong place.
I got my shirt back on and shivered as it touched my skin. Sarah was busy doing up her jeans. I picked up her panties and placed them with my T-shirt between the rocks and a bush. If we were being tracked visually or by dogs they would get to this point. The mutt doesn"t know what"s really happening and what exactly he"s looking for; to him it"s just a game. A dog can confuse an item of clothing with the quarry and a.s.sume victory with its find. Then the handler has to get the dog sparked up again before it will continue.
Dogs pick up scent in two different ways: from the air, and from contact with the ground, trees, plants and buildings. Airborne scents don"t last long; they are quite quickly blown away by the wind. Ground scent, however, can be obvious to a dog for anything up to forty-eight hours, and can be generated not only by leaving your smell on things you touch, but by your movement itself. If you"re walking on gra.s.s, or pushing through vegetation, you"ll crush leaves and stems with every step.
Even on bare ground your footprints will release air and tiny quant.i.ties of moisture that have been trapped in the earth, and they smell quite different from the air above ground. From your "scent footprints," a dog can even tell which direction you are moving in, because as you push off each step with your toes, the front of the scent print is more obvious than the heel, and it doesn"t take long for a well-trained dog to work out what that means.
Just as each person"s footprints look slightly different to the human eye, so does the mixture of scents in a smell footprint to a dog. If he"s really switched on, he might even be able to track one individual where there are a number of people traveling together.
A dog could out-hear, out-smell and out-run me. But I could outthink him.
"The strongest odor is from the sweat glands," I said to Sarah.
"But at the moment I think your underwear will smell more than your T-shirt." I grinned.
"Nothing personal."
She thought about it and nodded; she had to agree on that one.
"OK, follow me. Step by step. Don"t touch anything, not even to lean on." I started to pick my way over the outcrop, sticking to the highest rocks to keep out of any areas where scent could be trapped. Hopefully, they would be washed clean by the rain.
We moved into dead ground, carefully picking our way to prevent leaving sign. I started to move back down to the river. I got seventy-five meters short of the water and moved left until I saw the fallen tree.
From nowhere, the heli reappeared.
We hurtled under the trees, hugging them as if they were long-lost relations.
I heard the groan of the rotors again, moving deliberately over the top of the canopy. It got so close I could feel the downwash. I suddenly made sense of what it was doing it was following the line of the stream, maybe patrolling any exposed waterways because that was all they could see down here. It moved off and so did we.
The fallen tree looked quite promising. There were enough branches to hide under, and we could even get under the trunk where it lay clear of the ground. It was going to be a squeeze, but we"d be needing to huddle together anyway to share body heat.
Sarah was down on her knees trying to catch her breath. She searched my face as I motioned her in.
"Why aren"t we running?"
"I"ll explain later, just get under cover."
She squeezed in and I followed. The underside of the trunk was just as wet and cold as the open air, but we were hidden and had a chance to rest.
I wasn"t too sure anymore if this was a good decision, but it was too late to worry now.
I made sure I could see the first turning point before the stream by sc.r.a.ping away the mud between the trunk and the ground. I"d used the same tactic time and again in the jungle, where it was standard procedure to "loop the track" and put in an instant ambush on your own trail. If we were being followed, they would pa.s.s no more than sixty or seventy meters away and move half left, away from us and into the dead ground.
There they"d find the stream, and start trying to cast over the other side to pick up our scent or ground sign again. That would give us vital time in which to act; if I saw dogs while lying up, I"d just have to make a run for it.
The heli pa.s.sed overhead yet again, this time at speed, but we were well concealed. It could stay there all day if it wanted to, it wouldn"t make any difference. Sarah was looking at me, waiting for an explanation.
"We wait until last light and go back toward the road." I pointed uphill.
"That way."
She wasn"t enjoying this outing, but she cuddled into me. I was wedged against the trunk, looking out; she was behind me, her body spooned against mine with her arms around my chest. I could feel her warmth. I tried hard not to think about how much I liked her depending on me. Continuing to look out, I tilted my head toward her.
"Concealment is our best weapon. It"s going to be cold, and you"ll think you"re about to die, but you won"t as long as we keep close and keep each other warm. Do you understand that?"
I felt her nodding, then she squeezed herself a little more tightly against me. Even in these circ.u.mstances, I had to admit it felt good.
There were three situations I"d hated all of my life: being wet, cold or hungry. Four, if you included having to s.h.i.t in the field. All our lives, even as children, those are the three things that most of us try to avoid, but here I was, doing it again, and I couldn"t help feeling that, at thirty-eight, I should be seriously concentrating on getting a life. The one I had seemed to be going nowhere fast.
As the minutes ticked by my body started to cool, even with Sarah snuggling in behind me, and the ground itself seemed to become colder and soggier. I could feel her body warmth at the points where she was making contact with me, but the rest of me was freezing. Every time she fidgeted to get comfortable, I could feel the cold attack the newly exposed area.
She fidgeted again and muttered, "Sorry, cramp," as she tried to stretch out her leg and tip up her feet in an effort to counter it.
I kept stag, listening to the stream, the wind in the treetops, the rain dropping onto the leaves and debris on the forest floor. There was a murky, calf-high mist permeating the woods that reminded me of stage smoke. That could work either for us or against us: it would give us some visual cover if we were forced to move, but it was also good for the dogs.
As time pa.s.sed without any hint of a follow-up, I started to feel better about our situation. I looked at my watch: seven forty-six. Only another twelve hours or so until last light. Doesn"t time fly when you"re enjoying yourself? At least the Baby-G surfer was keeping cheerful.
Sarah had settled down and wanted to talk.
"Nick?"
"Not now." I needed time to think. I wanted to take a long hard look at what she"d told me, and to think about all that had happened. Was she bluffing about the Netanyahu plot? How did they plan to kill him? How had she been planning to stop them?
My head was full of questions, but no answers. Now wasn"t the time to ask. Tactically, noise had to be kept to a minimum, and besides, I needed to keep my head clear for the task in hand. I had to get out of here alive, preferably with Sarah still alive, too, for there was still another job to do.
n hour later Sarah and I were chilled to the bone and shivering violently.
I tried to combat the cold by tensing up all my muscles and then releasing them; that worked for a while, but I was soon shaking again. I didn"t have a clue how Sarah was coping, and I didn"t care now; my head was in hyper mode trying to work out my options. Was she telling the truth? Should I call London if I got out of this? Should I get help from within the U.S.? From Josh, maybe? No, he wouldn"t be back from the U.K. yet.
I heard a noise and hoped that I hadn"t.
Peering through the mud hole, I opened my jaw to improve my hearing.
My heart sank. I turned my head to look at Sarah, who was just about to tell me that she"d heard the dogs, too. The sounds were coming from the direction of our approach. I couldn"t see them yet, but they would be on us. It was only a matter of time.
My eyes and puckered lips told her to stay quiet, then I moved my head back to the hole in the mud.
Sarah put her mouth against my ear.
"Come on, let"s go." I whispered for her to shut the f.u.c.k up; they were coming over the brow of the rise.
There was a gang of them. The first thing I noticed was the two big snarling dogs on long leads, steam rising off their wet coats, their handler fighting to keep control. The good thing was that they were German Shepherds; they weren"t tracker dogs, but "hard" dogs--there to bridge the gap between us and the pursuers if we were spotted. The other good thing was that they didn"t look quite so big with their coats wet against their skin.
The pursuit consisted of a six-man police team. One of them had a springer spaniel on a lead, its nose to the ground, loving the whole business.
Apart from the tracker-dog handler, none of them was dressed for the hunt; they were wearing just their normal brown waterproof jackets, and two of them were even in shoes, with mud splattered up their pressed brown and yellow-striped trousers.
They pa.s.sed us in a haze of dog noise and steam as our tracks took them half left, away from us and toward the stream. The moment they were in dead ground I turned to Sarah.
"Now we go."
I squeezed under the trunk and immediately broke into a run in a line directly away from the river. Maybe my hide-until-dark plan hadn"t been such a good idea after all. The only option now was to outrun the team. It was unlikely the dogs would tire, but they could go only as fast as their handlers, so I would just have to get them exhausted. The police had looked wet and ha.s.sled, and were breathing hard. Even in our s.h.i.t state we should be fitter than they were.
I pushed on, looking for a point where we could hide a change in direction.
It might not stop them, but it would slow them down. After close to thirty minutes of hard running through thick woodland I had to stop and wait for Sarah to catch up; she was panting deeply, clouds of her breath fusing with the steam coming off her head. When we moved off again I checked my watch. It was ten thirty-nine.
We went for it for another solid hour. Sarah was lagging farther and farther behind, but I pushed the pace. I knew she would keep going. When we used to train together in Pakistan she would never give up, even on a silly fun run. And then it was only her pride at stake; now it was a bit more than that.
We were in low ground and I could see sky about 200 meters in front of us, through the tree trunks. I heard the sound of a car, and then splashing on tarmac.
I crawled up to the tree line. It wasn"t a major road, just a single carriage way in each direction, and not particularly well kept, probably because it wasn"t used that much the sort of backwoods road that looked as if the tarmac had just been poured from the back of a slowly moving truck and left to get on with it. It might even be the same road as the last one, there was no way of telling. The rain wasn"t firing down like a power shower anymore, just a constant drizzle.
I still didn"t have a clue where we were, but that didn"t matter. You"re never lost, you"re only in a different place from the one you wanted, and at a different time. Sarah had crawled up next to me and was lying on her back. Her hair had clumped together, so I could see the white skin of her skull. We looked as if we both had our personal steam machines strapped to us.
I decided to turn right it could have been left or right, it didn"t really matter and just follow the road; at some stage we"d find a vehicle, or at least discover where we were, then work out what we were going to do.
"Ready?"
She looked up and gave a nod and a sniff, and we crawled backward, deeper into the tree line. I got to my feet and she accepted my outstretched hand. I hauled her upright and we started running again, paralleling the road. After only a minute or two I heard a car; I got down and watched as it splashed through the potholes, lights on dipped, side windows misted up and the wipers on overtime. As soon as it had disappeared from view we were up and running.
The next vehicle was a truck loaded with logs; its wheels sank into an enormous pothole and threw up a wall of water that fell just short of us.
There seemed to be a vehicle of some description every five minutes or so. Most were going in our direction, which was a good sign. I didn"t know why, but it felt that way.
After another two kilometers or so I began to see lights forward of us and on the opposite side of the road. As we got closer, I could see that it was a gas station-c.u.m-small general store with a tall neon sign saying, "Drive Thru Open" in orange letters. It was a one-story, flat-roofed, concrete building with three pumps on the forecourt, protected by a high tin canopy on a pair of steel pillars. The place had probably been state of the art when it was built in the Sixties or early Seventies, but now the white paint was gray and peeling, and the whole fabric of the building was falling apart. I knew how it felt.
There were windows on the three sides of the shop that I could see; above the ones at the front were large, red, raised letters telling me the place was called Happy Beverage & Grocery. Faded posters advertised coffee and corn dogs, Marlboro and Miller Lite. They were all the same, these sorts of places, family-run as opposed to franchised mini-markets, and I knew exactly what this one would smell like inside a mixture of stale cardboard and cona coffee, fighting with the aroma of the corn dogs as they rotated in their gla.s.s oven. All rounded off, of course, with a good layer of cigarette smoke. The main sound effect would be the hum of fridges working overtime.
Even the pumps outside were early Seventies. This place was in decline; maybe years ago, when the road was first built, it was a major hot spot, but once the freeways had been laid to move the growing population of North Carolina, the traffic went elsewhere. Happy Beverage & Grocery looked like it was already history.
I stopped just short of the Drive Thru sign on the other side of the road and got down. Sarah joined me, and I told her to wait where she was. I crawled forward. I"d been right; now that I could see through the windows my eyes. .h.i.t on packets of everything from Oreos to Cheerios, and a line of gla.s.s-doored fridges which were less than a quarter full of milk cartons and c.o.ke cans. A large gla.s.s pot of coffee was stewing away on a hob, alongside a whole range of polystyrene cups, from two pints down to half a pint, depending on how awake you wanted to be. If you wanted cream, it would be powdered, without a doubt.
On her own, as far as I could see, and sitting down behind the counter, was a large woman in her mid-thirties. I could see only her top half; she had peroxide-blond "big hair," which was probably kept that way with a can of lacquer a day; she must have been one of those Southern women the radio program had been talking about. The T-shirt was probably her daughter"s, going by its tightness. I couldn"t see her bottom half, but no doubt she"d be wearing leggings that were about four sizes too small. She was eating a corn dog and reading a magazine, and somehow managing to smoke at the same time.
I crawled back to Sarah.
"Can we take a vehicle?" she said.
"Not yet. It doesn"t look as if she has one."
Beyond the shop was another tarmac road that met this one at a T-junction. The only thing that interested me was that where you have junctions, you nearly always have signposts.
We headed for the junction. The neon light was reflecting off the rainswept road and the hard standing of the pump area. I had to remind myself that it was still daytime. The sign said, "Drive Thru," and I"d do just that, given half a chance.
I started to envy the woman with big hair. She was sitting in there with a TV or radio on, and the heaters would be blasting away to keep the condensation off the windows; in fact, she was probably keeping so hot that she might need to knock back a c.o.ke after the corn dog. I wondered how she"d keep the cigarette in her mouth.
We pa.s.sed the shop and carried on to the junction. I motioned for Sarah to wait, but she"d got her breath back, and with it some of her old habits.
She"d never liked being ordered around and not being part of the show.
She came with me.
I moved forward the last ten meters and spotted a signpost, green tin on a tin stake. To my left, the way we had come, wasn"t signed; to my right was a place called Creedmore, which was no good to me I didn"t know it from a hole in the ground. But I knew where Durham was. It was just west of the airport; lots of people and traffic, somewhere we could get lost. The sign said that the road facing me was going that way.
It pa.s.sed the gas station at the junction on the left, went uphill for about half a mile, with muddy drainage ditches on each side, then disappeared to the right behind a line of tall firs. That was where I wanted to go once I"d lifted a vehicle, but before I did anything I had to make sure the woman couldn"t call for help. My eyes followed the phone lines from the building across the junction. They paralleled the road running from my left to right.
I moved in the Creedmore direction, about twenty meters beyond the junction, and crawled back up to the road, looked and listened. Absolute silence. I got to my feet, nodded at Sarah and we sprinted across. Once back in the trees, I followed the phone lines until I found a pole about five meters short of the junction.
I started taking my belt off, and asked Sarah for hers. This time she didn"t question me. She followed the line of my gaze as I studied the top of the pole.
"Are you going up there?"
"I want to cut the line to the gas station."
"Are we going to rob it?"
Sometimes she had only a nodding relationship with reality. I stopped pulling my belt off and looked at her.
"Are you serious?" I wondered about what had happened to all those expensive years of university training. She had enough brain power to move a gla.s.s without even touching it, but sometimes she didn"t seem to have even an Eleven Plus in common sense.
"We"re just going to get a car and get the f.u.c.k out of here," I said.
"We have guests arriving, remember?" I mimed a dog biting with my hand.
I took her belt and buckled the two together to make one big loop. Hers was the American"s heavy biker"s belt, with a Harley-Davidson logo that said, "Live to ride, ride to live." I dropped the loop at the bottom of the pole, hooked my feet inside either end, gripped the pole with my hands, and started to climb. I"d learned how to do this from a doc.u.mentary on the South Pacific, when I"d seen blokes use similar devices to climb coconut trees. You slid your feet up as high as you could, keeping the strap taut, then pressed down until it gripped. It was then a matter of reaching up and gripping the pole with both hands, lifting your feet again, and so on. That was the theory; the pole was so wet and slippery, however, that it took me several attempts to master it. At the end of the day, though, I was rather impressed with myself; if ever I was marooned in Polynesia, I wouldn"t go hungry.
I heard the hiss of tires and the drone of an engine getting closer. My heart missed a couple of beats while I wondered how I"d explain myself, then both sounds changed direction and died as the car turned and headed toward Durham. It happened twice more. Each time, I stopped and waited until the vehicle had gone. At least the treetops gave me some cover.
I had just another couple of feet to go when I heard a fourth vehicle approaching, but this time from the direction of Durham. It was going slowly and coming close.
I looked down for Sarah, but she was already moving away from the pole and into cover.
The car drew up at what I guessed was the junction and stopped. I heard a door open and the sound of radio traffic. It had to be a police cruiser.
I couldn"t reach down for my weapon, because it was taking all my strength and grip just to stop myself sliding back down the pole. I wondered about climbing up the last couple of feet so I could rest on a cross spar, but the way my luck was going I"d probably f.u.c.k it up and come hurtling down like Fireman Sam and land on their heads.