The smells were cloying and pungent as the turgid water carried rotten vegetation, leaves and branches. On the side of the mountains she saw the white strings of waterfalls, the massive rock formations crowned with jungle.
They passed no villages now. Nothing. Jungle and river stretched endlessly, the river-flood wide, in places treetops jutting out of the water. The world here was primitive and beautiful.
She focused on that as a means to stay relaxed. But what came to mind was how great writers in the past were so fascinated by the mysteries of non-Europeans and how different it all was now. Then, thinking about Porter Vale, she finally slipped again into the somnambulant state of semi-sleep.
Loud talk and then a splash snapped her awake. She opened her eyes into the blinding, setting sun, her heart racing, thinking something terrible was happening, then realized the boat had stopped moving forward, holding with the current.
She took a moment to remember where she was. It came to her then. She thought they were under some kind of assault.
“What’s going on? Where’s Porter?”
Narith pointed. “River dolphin in the net.”
At first she couldn’t understand what she was looking at and what he was saying. What the hell were dolphins doing up here?
Out in the murky brown water Porter and some young kids were pulling on something that looked like a fishing net.
Then she saw two odd-looking, dome-headed dolphins leap from the water, and a third. They seemed highly agitated and were swimming around Porter.
Narith fought to keep the boat steady in the currents in the narrow, rocky area. “The dolphin a baby,” Narith said, “will drown if under more than fifteen or twenty minutes. Maybe less if panicked.”
Kiera took off her hiking sneakers and pants before jumping in. She swam to Porter and the kids who were trying to free the dolphin. Now she saw the trapped creature thrashing under the water in the net. Porter was trying to cut the net with one hand and hold the dolphin back with the other.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked him.
“I need to get him up for air,” Porter said. “You cut the net.” He handed her the knife. “Let me go under him and bring him up.”
Porter then went under and came up with the dolphin in his arms and lifted its head and blowhole out of the water far enough for it to breath.
Kiera cut frantically through the net.
Finally the two Laotian boys helped Porter maneuver the squirming animal through the hole she’d made and it burst free.
They watched it swim off to join the frantic pod, the baby snorting and leaping to the apparent joy of the rest of the pod of half a dozen or so animals.
“Nice job,” Porter said to the kids. They swam back to shore and she saw they had a small boat there.
She and Porter tread water, kicking against the current, and watched as the pod circled and leaped into the air spitting long streams of water.
Unlike the familiar bottle-nosed dolphins, these had round, snoutless faces unlike any dolphins she’d ever see.
“What are they doing here?” Kiera asked.
“They’re Irrawaddy freshwater dolphins. They normally aren’t in the Kong this far up. Usually they hang around in the Mekong and Tonle Sap. They run in small pods and follow the fish. It’s a smorgasbord this time of year. The flood plains on the Mekong create the greatest explosion of fish in any river in the world. They also feed off the decaying, submerged vegetation.”
She watched them now as three huge dolphins came up out of the water in formation.
“Are there a lot of them?”
“No. Almost extinct. There are less than two hundred as far as they’ve been counted,” Porter said, kicking over to her. “These guys generally wander from southern Laos into northern Cambodia. And, for reasons known only to them, they have a bad habit of liking people. They’re supposed to be a protected species, and the Lao consider them sacred, but they let their nets go for days at a time and the dolphins sometimes get caught and die in them. In Laos everybody not up in the high mountains fishes and accidents like this happen.”
A dolphin burst like a missile up out of the water five feet from her and dove back into the water. It brushed right past her, turned and did it again, its smooth skin sleek against her leg.
“He likes you,” Porter said. “Obviously he’s a bit desperate or demented.”
“Thanks.”
Porter chuckled. “If he starts coming closer and rubs your legs that means he really likes you and is interested in mating. Mating is a big activity in Laos, in and out of the water. A Victorian explorer came through here and was shocked by all the fornicating going on. As Kipling put it, it takes a great deal of Christianity to wipe out uncivilized Eastern instincts, such as falling love at first sight. And that happens regularly.”
I can be vulnerable, she thought. The dolphin might want to mate, but she found herself looking at cocky Porter Vale, dolphin rescuer and one brave son of a bitch.
The dolphins circled and Porter splashed playfully at them. They were kids in a local swimming hole. The dolphins appeared to love the game, running side by side, leaping together as graceful as any creature.
“Say goodbye,” Porter said. “We need to get going.”
They climbed back on the boat and she tugged on her pants and boots. At least she felt cleaner now as they headed upriver.
Twilight slipped over the river and the fireball of a sun slid toward the horizon beyond the jungle.
“Boats,” Narith said, pointing back down the river.
A quarter-mile downriver two boats emerged from the twilight gloom, heading toward them at high speed.
“Could be trouble,” Porter said. He was checking his Glock again.
Narith headed the boat straight for the mangrove trees on the shoreline and that alone told her it was trouble.
22
Narith ran the boat at top speed, plowing through the river.
It quickly became apparent they couldn’t outrun the powerboats heading their way.
Narith turned directly toward the shore.
“Speedboats go upriver to Attapeu all the time,” Porter said. Then added, with very little conviction, “Hopefully they aren’t really interested in us. Just racing.”
They stared at the boats as they shot up the center of the river, but then they changed course and headed directly toward Narith’s longboat.
“That’s not good,” Porter said. He pointed to the sky. “And that’s really not good,” referring to a chopper that suddenly appeared over the treetops maybe half a mile away. “Get your pack, we’re going to abandon this thing and head into the swamp.”
“That swamp?”
“Yeah. But at least it’s the best place to get lost.” He shook his head. “Didn’t take long. This is Laos, goddamnit,” Porter shouted back toward the closing boats and chopper. “You bastards don’t respect borders?”
Not anymore than we do, Kiera thought.
A searchlight on one of the chasing crafts snapped on and stabbed at them as the boat quickly closed in.
This was followed seconds later by a burst of automatic weapon fire from the lead boat still hundreds of yards away but closing fast.
Kiera ducked behind the boathouse as Narith drove straight into the tops of the nearly submerged mangrove trees of the monsoon-flooded banks of the swamp.
“Get ready to bail,” Porter yelled.
Kiera dipped her arms into the straps of her backpack just as their boat knifed into a tangle of partially submerged fronds and tree limbs, lurched violently sideways, slamming her against the boat’s small cabin, knocking her breath out for a moment.
They came to an abrupt stop, knocking them all to the deck as the boat wedged in the limbs of a tree. Narith scrambled back to get his flute case.
“Go go go!” Porter yelled.
They jumped overboard into the dark mass of half-submerged foliage.
Kiera slipped off a limb as she struggled to find footing. She sank in the water to her chin, reached up and grabbed the limb and began pulling herself toward the shoreline.
Her legs took a beating from the branches and roots, the jungle grabbing at her every move. Her backpack snagged several times as she tried to keep up with Porter.
They swam, waded and clawed their way deeper into the swamp until they were able to find the bottom under the waist high water, reaching slightly higher ground.
The speedboats had reached their boat and the searchlight slashed through the foliage, tracking back and forth, but restrained from getting any closer by the heavy, partially submerged foliage.
Porter and Kiera huddled behind tree trunks. She couldn’t see Narith.
When automatic gunfire raked the trees, she plastered herself against the slimy surface of the tree trunk. “I’ve never been shot at before. I don’t think I like it much.”
“Some things get easier with repetition,” Porter said, “but getting shot at isn’t one of them.”
Above them the chopper circled, a powerful searchlight like a white hot sword flailed at the tops of the swamp trees, but was unable to cut through.
***
Two hundred feet over the river, as the chopper dipped and bucked in the wind, Cole yelled, “What the hell is going on down there? I don’t want her dead. Goddamnit, she’s no good to me dead.”
Cole listened to the radio traffic as he searched through the dark using night binoculars. The yellow-tongued bursts of machine gun fire from the river boat sent him into a rage.
Christ, those morons.
He couldn’t believe how undisciplined Besson’s guys were.
“Get men in there,” Cole said. “They better not be dead. If that woman is dead…”
Cole choked back his anger, his blood pressure pushing on every artery in his body and brain, thinking he’d never dealt with such incompetence. The Loa commander was getting well paid to handle this and so far he wasn’t doing a very good job. If he had acted like they were passing, left one boat further behind, they could have nabbed them in open water. Damn communist idiots.
Cole took some deep breaths to get himself back under control. He had blood pressure issues and stints in two arteries. But this situation was unacceptable. And it could end up causing some sort of incident that could metastasize into some international incident, as well as give him a fucking stroke.
“You need to widen the net now.” Cole, pulling his headphones back, yelled over the roar of the chopper, “I thought you had boots on the ground to cut off escape routes!”
“This is Laos and that’s a swamp,” Besson shot back with a flare of anger as the chopper bumped through the gusts.
After some conversation with the men in the boats on the river, Besson said, “One of the boats is moving on ahead and will drop some men to cut into the swamp and head them off.”
The chopper’s searchlight raked the jungle, but no light was powerful enough to penetrate the thick skin of the swamp’s canopy.
23
“Narith,” Porter whispered harshly, “where are you?”
Narith muttered something and they knew he was close by.
“He’s lost his flute, or it’s caught up in the branches,” Porter said, heading toward the sound of the voice. “We need to get him and get out of here.”
Kiera let go of the branch she was holding onto and followed, working through the tangle.
They found the monk struggling to get his flute case loose. Porter pulled up the tangles of branches and Narith freed the case.
Narith, his robe wrapped and tucked around him, led the way. They clawed and kicked and pulled their way through the tangle and back to where they could stand and walk deeper into swamp.
Kiera stumbled with them into the utter blackness of the swamp, tripping over roots in the water, hanging vines slapping at her like angry snakes. No other environment bothered her the way swamps did and mangroves were as bad as they come. She began to worry more about what creatures she might encounter than she worried about the gunmen hunting them.
When she felt something brush against her lower leg as they now waded up to their waists in water she jumped, thinking it might be a gator or a giant python.
Porter grabbed her. “Keep moving.”
“Something—”
“Just keep moving. If anything grabs you, I’ll kill it. Don’t worry about the crocs in here. They’re Siamese. They’re actually gentle creatures.”
“Bullshit. No such thing as a gentle croc.”
“There are,” Porter insisted in a hushed voice. “They are not nearly as aggressive as others in their species. They do a big service by actually creating the waterways between the rivers and lakes and the paddy fields.”
Gentle my ass, she thought. No creature with a two-foot-long jaw filled with nasty teeth is gentle. Porter’s attitude of nonchalance didn’t persuade her to relax.
It soon became clear they weren’t just going to walk out to high ground and find a nice path to run on. They were in a huge swamp and it looked like they’d be there awhile.
The heavy air reeked of decay and death and she heard sounds everywhere. And the mosquitoes hit in swarms and some were so big they screamed around her ears like fucking bats. The only light source came from some decaying vegetation that had a muted, greenish glow like it was from another planet.
If Dante didn’t have a rung that looked like this, she thought, he hadn’t gotten around enough. The bugs, snakes, gators, heat, dark, and nauseating stink from rotting vegetation, the muck, hidden roots, slapping vines…
She shoved away the dark thoughts, concentrating on making her way around a massive tree, climbing over its slimy gigantic roots. When she was clear of it she stopped. “Porter?”
She felt a little tinge of panic.
A hand clamped over her mouth. Porter pushed her down lower into the water and pulled her behind a tree base. Then she saw the reason. Flashlights probed the swamp well ahead of them.
She sank to her shoulders in the water, her feet sinking into the muck.
Porter, lips on her ear, whispered, “Just stay put. I’ll deal with this.”
He had his ever present Glock in his other hand. He gave her a little pat on the shoulder, like that was supposed to calm her down, and then slipped off into the darkness.
She swore softly, not knowing which was the worst scenario, going forward and risk getting shot, or staying were she was and risk getting eaten.