Night in the Trees

The thing about a predator in the dark is that you can hear it breathing, if you stop breathing yourself.

Vega stopped.

She sat motionless against the buttress root with the Glock drawn flat across her thigh and Roman's hand still locked in her left. She did not turn her head. She let her eyes drift out of focus, the way the sergeant in a documentary had once said you should in the dark, and she listened to the jungle with her entire skin.

Frogs. Insects. A faint, far-off drip of water. Under them, a different rhythm: the slow, patient crunch of a boot, placed with great care on wet leaves. Not one set. Two. Perhaps three. They were circling.

"Three," breathed Roman, so quietly that it was almost a thought. "To the north. Spread wide. Walking in a crescent."

"You can hear them."

"I can count them. It is a skill." His hand tightened on hers. "They are professionals. They have been following us since the river."

"Since the river?"

"The caiman. It did not like us. Neither did they."

"How do you know it wasn't—"

"Because the water moved against the current." A fractional pause. "Somebody was already in it."

Her stomach turned over.

"Kessler," she whispered.

"Probably. He sells to half of Colombia." Roman let out a slow, thin breath. "They will have night vision. I would suggest that we avoid being visible."

"We're sitting in a hole in a tree."

"Then let us be a very good hole."

She almost laughed. It rose in her throat and she swallowed it. Her mind had gone cold and clear and fast, the way it did in the first second of a chase. She ran the options: three men, night optics, automatic weapons. Her: a Glock with eleven rounds, an unreliable shoulder, and four cracked ribs. Him: a one-legged, one-armed, one-shouldered man who could barely sit.

It's not a fight, she thought. It's a trap.

She felt along the ground for the paracord.

…

It took forty seconds.

She laid the line across the path the three would have to take, a foot off the ground, anchored to a sapling on one side and the buttress on the other. She hung from the cord the shell of an empty energy-bar wrapper and the broken half of the satellite phone, and arranged them in the leaves with the delicate care of a woman setting a table for a dinner she doubted anyone would survive. Then she crept back to the root. Roman had not moved. He was watching her with an expression of grave, appalled admiration.

"A tripwire," he whispered.

"A bell."

"A bell."

"If it rings, we know where they are."

"If it rings, they know where we are."

"Yes," said Vega. "That's the fun part."

She slid down beside him. He shifted, with a barely audible hiss, and she felt the heat of him through the damp cloth, and she was suddenly, intensely, ridiculously aware of how close she was sitting.

"If this goes wrong," he said.

"It won't."

"If it does. Take the pistol. Go east. Do not look back."

"No."

"Vega."

"No. We've had this conversation." She did not look at him. "Last time you said if we survive, I'll apologize for two hours. I'm not letting you off the hook."

A long breath.

"I did not say I would apologize for two hours. I said you would receive one."

"Same thing."

"It is categorically a different thing."

"You're stalling."

"I am attempting to ensure that you stay alive long enough to be annoyed with me."

"That's the dumbest reason I've ever heard."

"It is the only one I have."

She bit the inside of her cheek, hard, to keep from smiling in the dark.

Tink.

It was tiny, a faint metallic note, like a coin dropped on a stone.

Both of them went rigid.

Tink-tink. The cord had been touched. The wrapper rustled. In the blackness, not fifteen feet away, someone whispered a word in Spanish, a short ugly syllable, and was answered by a click.

Safety off.

"Now," said Roman.

She was already moving.

…

She shot the first one through the leg.

It was a clumsy shot, hasty, ugly, aimed at the glow of a rifle sight that bobbed in the gloom, and it caught the man in the thigh and sent him down with a scream. She rolled left. A burst tore through the ferns where she had been, spitting dirt, chewing the bark off the root behind her. A flashlight stabbed through the trees and swept the clearing, and she shot it out.

The dark closed over them like water.

Two more.

She hit the earth on her elbows, panting, and brought the pistol up. Her ears rang. Her ribs felt as though someone were pulling a hot wire through them. Somewhere ahead, a man was shouting orders, low and flat and professional, and she heard the unmistakable rasp of a magazine being swapped.

"Left," whispered Roman, from behind. "Fifteen meters. Behind the large tree."

"I can't see."

"I can. Aim two hands to the right of the trunk."

She aimed. She fired.

A grunt. A thud. A rattle of metal.

"One," said Roman.

"Where's three?"

"I do not—"

Something hissed past her ear.

It was a bullet, a single hot dart of air that tore through the dark and thudded into the root by her head. She jerked back. She felt the chip of bark sting her cheek. And in the same instant a shadow detached itself from the trees on her right, tall and thin, with a long barrel and a lens that glowed green, and raised the rifle to its shoulder in a movement as smooth as breathing.

She had a pistol. She had two seconds. She did not have the angle.

This is it, she thought, with perfect calm. This is the one I don't see.

Something hit her from the side.

It was a body, a wall of heat and weight, and it drove her into the leaves with a crash that knocked the breath from her lungs. A hand closed around the back of her head. An arm locked across her ribs. She heard a sound like a hammer striking a side of beef, and a grunt, once, deep in a chest. A hot wetness spread across her shoulder.

"Roman—"

"Stay down."

She twisted. He was over her. He had thrown himself over her like a blanket over a flame, his whole body arched across hers on the ground, his bad leg dragging, his bad shoulder jammed against her collarbone. In the starlight she could see his face. It was gray, and wet, and a few inches from her own, and his eyes were blazing.

"You idiot," she said. "You can't stand."

"I stood."

"You're hit."

"It is nothing."

"It is not nothing!" She had the Glock pressed against his side, and she could feel it shaking. "Get off, I can't see—"

"I am not moving."

"Roman!"

"I am not moving, Vega." The words came through his teeth. "I have been moved for fifteen years. I have been managed. I have stood behind walls and let other men take the bullets. It is the thing I am best at, and I am so very tired of it. I will not stand behind you." A breath. A tremor. "Not behind you. Over you. Let me."

She stared at him.

Over his shoulder, a rifle muzzle glittered. The man with the green eyes was walking toward them, quite slowly, with an expression of vast professional patience. He was in no hurry. He had all the time in the world.

Vega fired past Roman's ear.

…

It was over in four seconds.

The shot caught the man in the center of the chest. He dropped his rifle. He sat down in the ferns with a look of vague surprise, as if someone had spoken to him in a language he didn't recognize, and then he fell over sideways and did not move.

The jungle went quiet.

She heard the frogs begin again, one by one. She heard the drip of water. She heard her own breath, harsh and wet, and under it the slow thud of another heart, pressed against her chest.

Roman's weight on her shifted. He rolled, with a groan, onto his back in the leaves, and lay there staring up at the black canopy with his chest heaving.

"Show me," said Vega.

"It is nothing."

"Show me."

She tore his shirt. The bullet had taken him across the top of the left shoulder, a long ugly furrow through the muscle, bleeding sluggishly. It had missed bone. It had missed the artery. It had missed, by a margin she did not like to calculate, his throat.

"Shallow," she said, and her voice came out wrong. "It's shallow."

"As I told you."

"You are the dumbest, most stubborn—" She pressed gauze to the wound, hard. He hissed. "I should have let you bleed."

"Yes."

"I should have shot you."

"Yes."

"You can't just throw yourself on me!"

"I appear to have done so."

"With no warning!"

"I did not think there was time to send a memo."

She sat back on her heels. Her hands were slick with his blood. Her whole body was trembling. And before she knew what she was doing, she'd bent forward and laid her forehead against his sternum, in the leaves, in the mud, in the dark, and she was breathing in short hard gasps that she did not recognize.

A hand came down on the back of her head.

It was very gentle. It rested there, warm and heavy, as if it had always known the shape of her skull. His thumb moved slowly in her hair.

"I am sorry," said Roman. "I frightened you."

"You scared me."

"I know."

"I thought you were dead."

"I was not."

"I thought you were dead, you son of a bitch."

"I know," he said, very quietly. "I heard."

…

They did not sleep that night.

She took the first watch, and then, when her eyes would not stay open, the second. The dead men lay where they'd fallen. She'd found their radios and silenced them, a precaution, and she'd taken their water, and a pistol, and a pair of night-vision goggles with a crack in one lens. The goggles made the jungle look like a lime-green dream.

He sat against the root with his shoulder bound and his leg stretched out, and she sat next to him, close, closer than was strictly necessary. It was cold, now, with the dew coming down. He had given her his jacket, and she had put it on, and it smelled of him: gunpowder, cedar, sweat, a faint sharp note of blood. She did not take it off.

For a while there was no sound but the frogs.

"You did well," he said at last.

"I killed a man."

"You killed him because he was about to kill me." He paused. "It is not an excuse. It is a fact. You will have to decide how to hold it. I would suggest holding it lightly, and for a short time."

"That's what you do?"

"That is what I learned." His voice was soft. "I cannot say that it is wise."

She looked at her hands. They had stopped shaking. They were gray with dried blood and pale at the knuckles.

Fish swim in the deep ocean, she thought. Birds fly in the high sky.

It had always sounded so free.

"I always thought," she said slowly, "that if I ever had to do that, I'd be able to... put it down. Like a bag. And walk away."

"Can you?"

"No."

"No," Roman agreed. "That is what separates us from the men who do it for money."

"Is it?"

"I hope so."

She tilted her head back against the root. Above them, through the gap in the leaves, the sky had cleared, and she could see the stars: millions of them, enormous and cold, unwinking.

His hand found hers on the ground between them.

He did it without looking. He simply moved, an inch at a time, until his knuckles brushed her knuckles, and then his fingers curled over hers and held, the way a man holds a rope in the dark. Not a command. Not a claim. It was a simple, uncomplicated, almost clumsy grip.

It was the grip of someone who had needed to be near another human being for fifteen years, and had finally been permitted to ask.

She did not pull away.

She turned her palm up and laced her fingers through his, and the two of them sat together under the stars, saying nothing, while the jungle sang its enormous indifferent song.

Somewhere, very far off, to the south, there was the sound of rotor blades.