A flicker of movement high in the sky caught her attention. She searched first with her eyes, then with the binoculars and caught its silver reflection from the moon.
It was a drone, descending from a great height. She watched it come down in spirals, like the threads on a screw, and as it came lower, she saw it was larger than the small, sarin-carrying drones of the other day. She also noticed it would descend right above her location.
She looked at the bluff and realized Hiyoki was on his small laptop controlling the drone.
Moving quietly from her hiding place, Hunter searched in silence to find a better one. A light wind blew down the river valley and she saw the ghost-like feathered tops of the carrizo cane move and sway. Looking up once more at the drone, then at the men across the river on the bluff, she crept across the area, staying low all the way to the edge of the cane right at the river’s edge.
She pushed into the thick cane and found a small game trail carpeted with yellow leaves. It made for silent travel, although she had to squirm between the cane stalks to make it through the narrower part of the path.
She heard the drone as it passed, buzzing steady and constant as it flew in patterns over the area. She moved deeper into the cane, but there wasn’t all that much of it to begin with. The strip of cane lined both sides of the river to about twenty feet in width, and continued along the river’s edge for a hundred yards before thinning out, only to begin again a quarter mile upriver. There was no way to make it to the next growth of cane.
Hiyoki said, “You two, get across this river and find her.”
Chuy looked at Felix and said, “Let’s get the boat.” They walked to the shack and carried the aluminum boat and two oars to the bluff, then they walked upriver until there was an arroyo cutting the bluff edge that reached the river below.
The two men carried down the boat, with Chuy in front, and put it in the water. They crossed the river in less than two minutes, slid it up on the bank, and pulled their pistols as they searched for Hunter, using the lights on their phones to look for tracks as the drone buzzed overhead.
Ashton called Hiyoki on his phone and said, “Have you killed her yet?”
“We are looking now. She is close, and my men are closing in while I circle with the drone. You can help them hunt for her. Maybe you will find her first.”
Ashton felt his scalp crawl at the thought of facing an armed Hunter Kincaid. He said, “You go ahead, but I’ll drive closer.” He returned to the Navigator and took a gravel road toward the two faint lights he could see in the distance. He bounced and wallowed on the road, which was seldom used and had weathered badly in the past. When he found a plac
e to park on a rise some fifty yards from the two searchers, he took the bulb out of the dome light and exited the vehicle quietly before making his way in the dark toward them.
The tarp stirred in the back of the Navigator, and a bloody hand emerged to grasp the edge and push it to the side. Lincoln Jones sat up, weaving and leaning to one side. He looked around for a moment as one eye failed to work properly, and he wiped the wound in his head with a hand, trailing blood through his hair and down onto his shirt. Crawling across the seat, he reached the rear door’s handle and after fumbling with clumsy hands, managed to get it open.
He pulled himself to the opening and fell out of the car to the rough ground, groaning as he hit. Using his hands, Lincoln pulled himself into the brush near the car.
Hunter listened to the two men near her as their boots crunched gravel, and when one of them hissed to the other, “She’s in the cane,” she crawled farther away from the voices until her hand went into the water.
The last two feet of river cane protruded from the water because of recent rains upriver, and that left less room for her to hide. The drone went over the cane, going slower and barely above the tops of it, but the Carrizo was so tall and dense that she remained unseen.
Felix’s voice sounded only feet from her as he pushed through cane by stamping and breaking the slender stalks near the roots to open a path. “Chuy, work towards me.”
Breaking cane sounded ten feet from Hunter as Chuy said, “Bueno, primo.”
She was between the two men and at the water’s edge. The full moon glowed above to leave few shadows to use for cover. She turned off her handie talkie and dug under the dense yellow leaves, placing it and her phone in the hole before covering them up as she thought of going in the river to escape.
One of the men almost stepped on her outstretched hand as he searched, and she knew she had to move, now.
Lying flat on her stomach, Hunter inched to the water, easing the cane aside so the tops didn’t wave to give away her position.
A snake slithered across her bare hand when her fingers first touched the water and Hunter almost yelled, but kept control as the reptile disappeared into the cane. She had to be careful not to make noise or splashes even though she was still in the cane and not swimming.
A narrow opening let her see across the river to the Carrizo cane at the bottom of the bluff, and to Hiyoki standing on top, looking across the river at the strip of cane where she hid and where his men hunted for her.
Breaking cane sounded on both sides of her as the killers worked toward each other, and her. She had no time.
Easing her hands into the water to feel ahead helped her move silent but fast. Hunter kept her palms touching the silt covered bottom and eased forward, taking a last look across the river before taking a deep breath and pushing forward to submerge her head, then shoulders and back, and finally her legs.
It was like being completely blind. She kept her eyes open in murky water that even the bright moon couldn’t penetrate more than a foot. She progressed with her hands extended and touching the bottom, and she crawled toward Mexico. Under the surface, the river bottom sloped down and seemed relatively free of debris.
She touched a turtle and felt it swim from her as she moved forward. The river bottom continued downward, and she felt the current pushing her downriver, so she had to fight against it as she struggled forward. Her lungs began to burn, and she knew that surfacing in the river would be a death sentence.
The river deepened even more, and the increased water pressure made her ears feel as though they were stuffed with cotton.
When the bottom suddenly deepened at a sharper angle, Hunter hoped it meant she was close to the bluff side. Her pulse pounded in her ears from lack of oxygen and her chest involuntarily hiccupped in desperation for a breath.