“Nice night for a swim, huh, Al?” Mike murmured into my ear. “Okay, real quiet now; we’re almost at the shore. I’m gonna set you down easy. About twenty yards south we’ve got some cover, but it’s gonna be a long twenty yards, Al. Easy now. Almost there.”
He took his arm away and I sank about a foot before my butt hit the bottom. I raised my head a little and saw a chopper over the river, so low, the water churned beneath it, the wind of the blades creating little whitecaps in the harsh glare of the searchlights. I didn’t see the other one. We were about five feet from the rocky shore. The ground rose sharply toward a densely wooded hillside directly ahead.
“Okay,” Mike breathed. “On my mark. Three, two, one . . . mark!”
I was a couple of seconds behind Mike. I never was good at races. In PE the whistle would blow and everybody would be six feet in front of me before I took the first step. Mike was already out of the water, running doubled over, his knuckles practically touching the ground, before I even reached the shore. I told myself as I started to run that the roar of the helicopter behind me wasn’t getting louder, but of course it was.
Mike had reached the edge of the trees, waving his arms frantically, as if that’s all I needed to run faster.
About halfway between the water and the trees I froze. The second gunship had risen from behind the trees; I was trapped between them. The air began to whip around me as they bore down, and I stood still, pinned like a bug by the blinding searchlights. I could hear Mike screaming my name.
I don’t know how long I stood there, river water pooling under my wet tennis shoes, waiting for the bullet to rip through my brain. All I know is after a lifetime or two Mike made a decision and came to get me, grabbing me by the shoulder and hurling me toward the safety of the trees.
I stumbled once, tearing the knee in my jeans on the rocky ground. Mike yanked me up and half dragged, half pushed me into the crowded underbrush of the wooded hillside.
He pushed me face-first into the ground and put his hand on the small of my back as he whispered in my ear, “Don’t move!”
The choppers circled slowly overhead. Sometimes they sounded right above us; sometimes the blades’ thumping sounded very far away. The searchlights stabbed through the canopy, and they looked like white columns, the kind you see on Southern mansions, as they illuminated the misty air.
The columns of light kept moving farther and farther away, and after a while I couldn’t hear the helicopters’ engines at all. Finally, I couldn’t take it and told Mike I had to pee.
“When you gotta go, you gotta go,” Mike said. So I went behind the nearest tree, and when I came back Mike was sitting up. He unwrapped a piece of gum and carefully folded the stick into his mouth. I sat down beside him and examined the tear in my jeans. My knee was bleeding.
“Catch your breath, Al. We got five, maybe ten minutes,” Mike said around his fresh wad of gum. “They’re looking for a place to land.”
“And what happens after they land?”
“They’ll come for us on foot. They’re very determined little suckers.”
“Who are determined little suckers?”
He didn’t answer at first. He picked up a stick and commenced to jabbing it into the rocky ground.
“The Company,” he said.
“OIPEP?”
He nodded. “OIPEP.”
“Why is OIPEP trying to kill us, Mike?”
“I don’t think they’re trying to kill you, Al. It’s me they want.”
That didn’t surprise me. Mike had betrayed the knights and OIPEP, but I still didn’t understand why he had kidnapped me. Did he think I still had Excalibur?
He stood up and brushed the leaves and dirt from his butt. “Look at this! I just bought these,” he said, referring to his Dockers. “Stain-defenders!”
He turned to me. “Sorry for snatching you like that, Al, but I’m in a bad way now and like it or not, you’re the only port in this particular storm.”
“What storm? What are you talking about, Mike?”
“Well, you could say it’s all a big misunderstanding. But it’s more a matter of the left hand not knowing what the right’s doing. You ready?”
“Ready for what?”
He walked past me, deeper into the woods, without looking back.
“It’s your call, kid. Stick with me and you got a fifty-fifty chance of seeing your sixteenth birthday. Hang here and you got a hundred percent chance of having your head snatched straight through your backside.”