Blood Sun (21 page)

Not quite.

Cazamind had sounded worried—even, Riga suspected, scared. There were enormous implications for Cazamind’s “people.” Tendrils of corruption squirmed through the corridors of power in America and the UK, and national interests were at stake. All because a fifteen-year-old boy had outwitted them all. It seemed obvious Max Gordon had learned
something
.

Extreme caution had to be employed. A swift and low-key operation to remove the problem had been sanctioned, and the job had to be done by one man. The money was already in Riga’s Swiss bank account. It was more than generous, and he was to have anything he needed—weapons, transport and information.

A private Learjet with long-range tanks was a more luxurious way to travel across the Atlantic, and unlike Charlie Morgan, who had sat cramped in the back of an overcrowded commercial flight, Riga had unlimited resources at his disposal. He was already in Central America in a place of Cazamind’s choosing. From his vantage point deep in the rain forest–clad mountains, Riga could strike at Max should he ever reach this inhospitable area.

Riga was not waiting in luxury, however. The palm-leaf roof of the long hut kept the scorching sun off him, but the stifling jungle humidity enveloped everyone like a blanket soaked in hot water.

A decrepit air conditioner whirred noisily, the tatty piece of ribbon tied to the front grille fluttering pathetically, showing that the ancient cooler should have been replaced years
ago. But the killer had learned to ignore any personal discomfort. This apparently abandoned airfield cut out of the limestone hillside deep in the forest was used years ago by the CIA for arms shipments to insurgents in Cuba and Central America. Those days were long gone, but secret airfields were still used by the people Riga worked for, as well as by the drug cartels, who needed to move shipments across vast areas of jungle.

Riga’s satellite phone beeped. It was Cazamind.

“The boat has been dealt with. They recovered two bodies; the others would have disintegrated when it exploded.”

“Was Gordon’s body found?”

“No. Two men.”

“Then we can’t be sure.”

“No one would have survived.”

“I want to double-check.”

There was a pause. “All right, Riga. As soon as it’s possible, I’ll have the attack helicopter’s video surveillance tape downloaded to you. But I think it’s over.”

Riga liked certainties. It was how he earned his reputation. It was how he stayed alive.

“I’ll wait,” Riga said.

Xavier followed Max’s instructions, just as he had promised, though he thought he was being asked to do girl’s work. He sat under the shade of a palm tree plaiting together strips of palm frond into a circle, like a crown. He had seen young girls at village weddings wearing things like that on their heads. It
was a decoration! He wanted to protest but did not. It was of no consequence. He would keep his word to
este chico y sus angeles
—this boy and his angels.

Max used his teeth to tear apart some of the cotton pieces he had fished out of the water. They still stank of the fetid mangrove swamp, and he hoped he was not inviting every lethal germ under the sun to invade his body. He tore them into a roughly circular shape and then began ripping strips round the edge. This was going to help them survive the intense sunlight and the flies and mosquitoes. Xavier was muttering under his breath as he painstakingly braided the palm strips. He was clumsy and made a mess of it once or twice, but with grim determination, a tight smile and a shrug, he had continued the task.

It was only a small point, but Max had not told him of the palm crown’s use. If Max could get the boy to help without him needing to question and challenge him, so much the better; then the end result would be self-explanatory. Get on; do the job. Save time; save energy.

So far, so good.

Max knew he had to be organized. Tasks had to be performed, one of which was to make the raft. He could have used the animal tracks to help find their way out of this jungle and get inland, but that would be asking for trouble sooner or later. They certainly didn’t have any effective means of cutting their way through the dense undergrowth. They might not be able to stay on course; they would make less than a kilometer a day and would be vulnerable to the jungle predators. Max had considered the options and was convinced the river offered the best chance of escape. Sooner
or later, he felt certain it would take them to a settlement or a town where he hoped the people might have heard of his mother or Danny Maguire. Then he might have a chance of tracking her journey. But he and Xavier needed food and water, much more than the slender vines offered; otherwise they were not going to be strong enough for what was bound to be an arduous journey.

Following Max’s lead, Xavier pulled down thin, twisting creepers that snaked up tree trunks and grubbed up ground roots to bind together the wood that they had gathered. Then Max put a layer of palm leaves on top, which he secured with the fibrous string Xavier had made earlier.

Max pointed. “You should let me see that wound.”

Xavier pulled back. “It’s OK. I don’ want you messin’ with it. What? Now you a doctor or somethin’?”

“OK. If it’s infected, it’s infected. You want to die of blood poisoning, that’s your business.”

Xavier looked worried. He eased up the damp T-shirt and looked at the wound for himself. “You think it’s infected?”

“You don’t let me look—I can’t tell.”

“You won’ touch it? Promise?”

“I promise. But you let your brother’s men fix you up; you never whimpered then.”

“What is ‘whimpered’?”

“Moaning like a baby.”

“Me? Hey, you look all you like. Here!” And Xavier pulled up his T-shirt and knelt next to Max.

The dressing had long since disappeared, and one of the butterfly clips had torn loose from the skin, which was puckered and looked clean. The salt water might have even aided
the wound’s healing, but one edge of the wound was discolored, and that blemish was creeping round the boy’s side. It looked to Max as if there was some festering underneath the broken skin, which meant that in a couple of days, exposed to the river water, the infection could go right through the boy’s body.

“Does that hurt?” Max asked as he pressed very gently on the affected part.

Xavier yelped. “You said you weren’t gonna touch!”

Max looked at him. He needed Xavier to feel good—especially for what Max was going to propose. “You’re tougher than I thought,” he said.

“Yeah? I mean, yeah. I’m tough.” And then he thought about it. “Why?”

“It’s infected—it must hurt. You didn’t say anything.”

Xavier wasn’t in much pain, but he pulled a face. It was good to let Max think he could handle it. “It don’ hurt so much.”

“But if that infection gets worse …” Max paused and shook his head sadly, turning away from the boy’s gaze.

“What? Is bad? You think is bad?”

“I wouldn’t be able to get you out of here. I’d have to leave you.”

“What!”

“I’ll send help as soon as I find it.”

“No way! You go, I go. That’s the deal. That’s what I said. I’m with you.”

Max put his arm on the boy’s shoulder. “Good, I was hoping you’d say that. Then you’ll let me fix it?”

Xavier wasn’t certain, but he had talked himself into a corner. Or rather Max had. “OK,” he said.

Max turned over a rotten log. Poking it with his steel-tipped piece of wood, he made sure there were no snakes curled beneath it. Then, skimming away the desiccated wood with his new ax, he found what he was looking for. He carefully lifted the wriggling maggots from the trunk and laid them on a palm leaf. Food and medicine.

Xavier lay on his side, his arm covering his eyes. Max had just explained that you could eat maggots for protein, providing you didn’t take them from a rotting carcass of an animal. Xavier had squirmed almost as much as the maggots, and the reason he had covered his eyes was because Max had popped two or three of the maggots into his own mouth and crunched, not so happily, away. Max grimaced.

“They’re not that bad,” he lied. “They’d be much better cooked, I suppose, but beggars can’t be choosers.”

“I am not going to eat those things. I will puke if you put those squirmy things into my mouth. Puke more than you have ever seen in your life. I would rather die.”

“I didn’t think you’d want to eat them—I brought these for your wound; I’ll find us some food later.”

“And you’re gonna do what?”

Max knelt next to him, took three or four maggots from the leaf and laid them gently on the festering wound. “Don’t look, Xavier. These things could save your life.”

Xavier muttered a private mantra—which sounded like a prayer—to keep his mind off the things that were eating into his flesh. He could barely feel anything other than a soft
tickle as they dug into his wound. But he refused to look at it and decided to stay somewhere in his head until this crazy English kid told him it was all OK. He should have been in Miami or New Orleans or anywhere else in the big U.S. with a new name and a new identity, money in the bank and he and Alejandro driving open-top sports cars. It would have been a good life, a safe life, and they would have been legal. But it had all gone horribly wrong, and now he lay in the jungle with maggots eating into him. The devil must be laughing somewhere, getting his own back for all the bad things Alejandro and his men—and Xavier—had done.

“I’m going to forage for food,” Max said, interrupting his thoughts.

Xavier propped himself up and looked toward the dense undergrowth. “You forgettin’ what’s in there? How many lives you think you got? Just ’cause that big cat killed somethin’ las’ night, you think he still ain’t hungry? Maybe he has a friend and say to him, ‘Hey, amigo, you hear about those two kids down near the beach? They got no water; they got no food. They’re just two dumb
chicos
stranded in the middle of nowhere. They got meat on their bones, and they got nothing to fight with.’ ”

“Jaguars hunt alone and at night.”

“So how come you know everything?”

“I read books and my dad told me.”

“Uh-huh. Your daddy lets you come all the way out to Miami where you help a drug smuggler from gettin’ whacked?”

“I didn’t know you were a drug smuggler.”

“So? If you’d known, you’d have let that crazy guy kill me!”

“If I had, I wouldn’t be in this mess,” Max said.

“Hey,
chico
, I saved your ass from Mr. Happy Snappy Crocodile.”

“I don’t think so. You didn’t shout loud enough.”

“You got all that mud and water in your ears—tha’s not
my
fault. OK. I
tried
to warn you. Don’ you ever say thank you for nothin’?”

“Thank you, Xavier Morera Escobodo Garcia, for trying to shout loud enough.”

“You’re welcome. But you get into trouble again, you on your own.”

Max left him in the shade of the palm trees. He knew he wouldn’t move. The jungle was one place Max did not want to be injured or ill; it was bad enough being fit and strong and having to cope with the energy-sapping heat, which was why he had some sympathy for Xavier.

Max scoured the jungle for any berries, seeds or nuts that he thought were safe to eat. Some he was uncertain of and let them rest on his tongue before spitting out the acid taste. He found three fruits he recognized—light yellow guavas from a tree with white flowers and a nice dark clump of finger bananas. Green-encased coconuts that had fallen from the palm trees had stubbornly resisted being smashed against a rock outcrop, but Max wedged his spearlike shaft into a twisted tree trunk and slammed the coconuts onto the metal tip. They split, revealing the brown hairy coconut inside. He pierced a coconut’s eyes and sucked the white liquid. Now that he had supplies, their chances for survival grew every
moment. Cutting and splicing palm leaves together, he made an efficient bag to carry the food he’d foraged.

Max bent down, scuffed aside fallen leaves and dug his fingers into the earth. There was moisture in it, which wasn’t unusual—jungles were usually damp—but he knew rain squalls often hit this part of Central America. One of the noises that came out of the jungle was a creaking groan. It had taken Max some time to remember where he had heard those sounds before—it had been in a bamboo garden his dad had once taken him to. And bamboo held water. There was no choice: Max had to penetrate the darkened jungle, locate the bamboo, then find his way out again.

Flashes of color dipped and swirled through the branches as screeching birds clattered their way into the high canopy. Max moved carefully, listening to the rustling footfalls from unknown creatures around him. The pictures of his mother were still safe and dry in the wallet in his breast pocket. He saw her smiling face in his mind’s eye, felt the warmth in his chest and imagined the melodic song of a jungle bird was that of his mum gently calling him.

Max eased aside the low branches and stepped inside a claustrophobic world that soon engulfed him.

Sayid watched as the people in biohazard suits carried a covered corpse out of the tunnel. They eased the orange-colored body bag onto a gurney and wheeled it to an isolation tent that had been set up on the platform, where another figure, also dressed in a biohazard suit, waited. Sayid could just make out what was happening inside. The body bag was lifted, slipped into yet another protective covering and replaced on the gurney. The side flaps of the tent were opened; regular paramedics took the stretcher and disappeared from view. For a moment, Sayid watched while the recovery team was washed down with what looked like a steam hose as they stood in a catchment tray. He was less interested in them than where Danny Maguire’s body was being taken.