By now the rebel’s two sisters, Carmen and Cara, had
spotted him. One gave a soft cry and made to rise. “Get down!” Linc’s order, for all its lack of volume, carried with it unarguable authority. The young girl froze. “Tell her to stay put. He might be her brother, but the others aren’t.”
Kerry conveyed the message in whispers, but in a considerably softer tone than Linc’s. Carmen whispered something back, her face working with emotion.
“What did she say?”
“That her brother wouldn’t betray us,” Kerry translated.
Linc wasn’t convinced. His eyes remained on the far riverbank. The soldiers were conferring while they lounged and smoked and relieved themselves. Occasionally one would gesture across the river. One reeled in the rope and examined it. He gave it one swift tug between his hands. It snapped in two.
Kerry looked at Linc. He shrugged. “I told you only a fool would try it.”
Some of the rebels offered opinions. Others seemed supremely unconcerned and dozed as they leaned against their jeeps. The one identified as the courier who had made arrangements for the orphans’ escape kept glancing furtively toward where they lay hidden in the brush. After almost half an hour, the one obviously in charge ordered them all back into the Jeeps.
“What’s the consensus?” Linc asked Kerry.
“They’re going to try another road and cross the river farther downstream.” She was leaving something out. Her guilty expression told him so. He took her jaw in his large hand and forced her head around. His eyes demanded the truth. “Then they’re going to come back this way and keep looking for us,” she added reluctantly.
He swore. “That’s what I was afraid of. Okay, let’s start moving.” He checked to make certain that all the jeeps had turned around and disappeared into the jungle before he lined the children up safari-style. He would lead, Joe would take up the rear. Kerry was to keep to the middle to encourage laggers and make sure no one wandered off the path Linc would cut with the machete.
“Tell them we’ll be moving quickly. We’ll take breaks, but only when absolutely necessary. Tell them not to talk.” He relaxed his stern demeanor when, at Kerry’s translation, the children looked up at him fearfully. “And tell them how proud I am of them for being such good soldiers.”
Kerry turned warm beneath the heat of his eyes. She was included in his compliment. After she passed it along to the orphans, they smiled up at him.
They fell into Linc and struck out through the dense jungle, which would have been impenetrable were it not for the merciless hacking of Linc’s machete. Kerry kept her eyes trained on his back. Before wading into the river, he had tied the sleeves of his bush jacket around his waist and fashioned a sweatband for his forehead out of a handkerchief. The muscles of his arms, back, and shoulders rippled with each upward swing and downward arc of the huge knife. Kerry let that supple rhythm entrance her. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have had the energy to place one foot in front of the other.
Her aching body cried out for rest, her dry mouth for water, her empty stomach for food. When she was certain that she would drop on the next step, Linc halted and called a rest. Bearing Lisa, who had fallen asleep in her arms, Kerry slumped to the ground. The children all did the same, dropping in their tracks.
“Joe, pass around that canteen, but be sure to ration the water.” Silently the boy moved to obey Linc’s request. “How long have you been carrying Lisa?” he asked Kerry as he dropped to his knees beside her and offered her the canteen that had been hanging from his own belt. She in turn raised it to Lisa’s parched lips.
“I don’t know. For a while. She was too exhausted to take another step.”
“I’ll carry her from now on.”
“You can’t carry her and cut a path at the same time.” She lifted her heavy hair off her neck, knowing that she would never take a hairbrush for granted again.
“And I can’t afford to have you collapse on me. You’re not having your period or anything like that, are you?”
She gazed back at him in speechless astonishment. She didn’t even realize that she let go of her hair and let it fall back to her shoulders. She ducked her head. “No.”
“Well, that’s good. Now take a drink of water.” After she had recapped the canteen and handed it to him, she said, “I’m sorry about your cameras.”
“Yeah, so am I. We’d been through a lot together.”
She could tell by his grin that he was teasing her. “I mean it. I’m sorry you had to destroy them.”
“They can be replaced.”
“What about your film?”
“I hope the containers are as watertight as they’re advertised to be. If they are, I’ll have a helluva story to sell when I get home.” He stood up. “I’ll carry Lisa, and no more arguments about it. We can’t go much farther before dark.”
He offered his hand to her. Kerry accepted it gratefully and relied on him to pull her to her feet. He swung Lisa onto his back, hoisted her into a comfortable position, and moved to the head of the line again.
Kerry felt dangerously close to tears.
She became immune to the buzzing insects, the slithering progress of jungle reptiles close to her feet, the sweltering, steamy afternoon heat, the raucous chatter of monkeys and the keening of birds. She concentrated solely on following Linc’s lead and staying on her feet even when her body threatened to fold in upon itself and never move again.