I raised my ear off the pillow and listened to the noises coming from down the road. I knew those noises. There was a time when I’d been the one making those noises. Three hundred yards away, soldiers were opening motel doors, dragging sleepy eco-tourists from warm beds, shoving them against the wall, pushing a photo in front of them, and barking in whatever dialect they speak on Borneo, “Have you seen this American?”
They were looking for the perpetrator of something.
I hadn’t perpetrated anything, but I was pretty sure I knew who had.
Whatshername drew lazy circles on my chest with her finger. She was about to say something when someone pounded on my door. Four bangs, all rapid and demanding. The way MP’s bang on doors. My heart stopped until I heard Agent Tania whisper-shouting. “Jacob. Damn it. Wake up!”
Crap. I definitely knew who the perpetrators were.
My eyes rolled to the ceiling and I thought about life and death and love. I’d thought I was dead twenty-three times and didn’t care much for the experience. I’d never been afraid of it. I’d killed all the people who tried to kill me. I just didn’t want to check out on someone else’s schedule. But that was war, and I thought I’d left all that behind.
My job at Sabel Security had become a matter of careening from one ill-conceived, spur-of-the-moment crusade to the next. Death had been more remote when I walked point in Kandahar. If all I cared about was life and death, the choice was obvious: re-enlist.
But then there was the love part.
“You gone answer door?” Whatshername said.
Thinking of her as Whatshername was a bad thing, I knew that, and I even felt bad about it, but she had one of those Asian names with sixteen syllables, all vowels, and I was raised in Iowa where the toughest phrase was crop rotation.
It was the love part that kept me on the job. I was in love with my boss, Pia Sabel. Six foot and built like a tiger; she was the kind of woman a man like me would die for.
Well. Theoretically.
Tania pounded on the door again.
I extricated myself from under Whatshername’s naked body and savored the scent of the jungle motel’s ancient battle with mildew. A glance at the clock didn’t help much, 3? 4? I snapped on the light and blinked at the mirror until my reflection came into focus. I looked like hell.
I yanked the door open and Agent Tania glared at me, her nostrils flaring.
The only thing average about her was her height. The rest was sleek and exotic. I’d fallen in love with her ages ago when I’d pulled her from a burning Humvee in Nuristan Province. She refused to date me until after we’d both left the Army. It lasted fourteen glorious months. Then I blew it.
“I hope you’re not paying for that,” Tania said pointing her nose past my shoulder.
“HEY!” Whatshername said.
“Hey,” I said.
“Wait, the hotel lady?” Tania half-asked. “Really. Never mind. Just MOVE.”
“Yeah, I heard them down—”
Tania was already trotting away. “Get the translator, we leave in thirty seconds.”
I kicked my t-shirt in the air, pulled my boxers up, and slipped into my shirt on its way down. Five seconds later, I had my trousers on and was scooping a handful of toiletries into an open kit. I zipped my travel bag closed and kissed Whatshername on the lips while I pulled my Glock from under the pillow.
I said, “Happy birthday.”
“Best Birthday yet,” Whatshername said. “Jacob Stearne come back next year?”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” I lied and bolted.
Tania tossed our duffels from the second floor walkway to Ms. Sabel in the alley below. Ms. Sabel caught them and stuffed them into the back of our SUV. An Olympian, soccer star, boxer, and billionaire, she worked harder than any man I knew.
Our translator, a little stunned and sleepy when I dragged him out, scratched his head and watched the women as if it were a tennis game. A Borneo native studying at Georgetown, he was one twenty soaking wet, so I picked him up and tossed him to Ms. Sabel. She broke his fall, landed him on his feet, and spun back so fast her ponytail hit him in the face.
The bang of an explosion echoed in the street, far side of the building. Tania and I vaulted the railing together. Ms. Sabel slipped into the driver’s seat and racked the seat back. Tania lunged across the translator. I took shotgun. Slinging our SUV through the mud, Ms. Sabel navigated the alley by moonlight before turning onto a jungle trail.
We banged through ruts and potholes, across a muddy rice paddy, and onto a cart path, while big green leaves slapped the truck like a drum roll. Finally she found an actual road. A single lane of soft mud. The back end slid wide when she made the turn. I shot Ms. Sabel a slow-down glance that she ignored.
“This road goes to Bandar Udara Yuvai Semaring,” the translator said.
“Do they have an airport?” Ms. Sabel shouted over her shoulder.
“It’s in Indonesia,” he said.
“Shit.” She slammed on the brakes, revved the engine, slipped the clutch, broke the back tires loose, and spun the truck around in the lane. Mud and bugs splattered in our open windows bringing the smell of shredded leaves with them.
“What happened?” I said. “I thought we were here to donate a school.”
“Later,” Ms. Sabel and Tania said in unison.
I shot a glance at the translator. He shrugged.
Apparently, whatever happened since Whatshername poured me that first drink involved pissing off two of the three countries on Borneo. Maybe she’d offended all three, but I wasn’t going to ask about Brunei.
“Where does this road go?” Ms. Sabel asked.
“Gunung Mulu National Park,” the translator said.
“Where’d we leave the jet?” she asked.
“Marudi, on the other side of the park.”
“How far?”
“Four hours.”
“It’s only a hundred freaking miles to the coast,” she said.
The translator waved his hands at the twisting, unimproved road before us. “Four hours.”
She took his estimate as a challenge and pushed the pedal down. I checked my seatbelt and gripped the A-pillar’s grabhandle. We slipped around corners, climbed up mountains, flew down slopes, bounced our butts through dips and bumps for over an hour before sunlight began to paint the cloud bottoms pink and the fringes in an iridescent yellow. When we hit a patch of smooth road, I began to nod off.
“Bad news,” Ms. Sabel said with her eyes in the mirror. “Lights.”
I craned around to peer between the stacked duffels and caught a glimpse of cone-shaped lights moving through the trees in the valley below. Three vehicles by my count. Three cars could carry four to six guys each, meaning twelve to eighteen hostiles.
Odds like those represented a serious tactical problem. They told me it was a Sabel Charities trip; a simple fly-in-fly-out deal where my only mission was to keep Ms. Sabel safe from purse snatchers. Once again, I’d underestimated how much trouble the young bleeding-heart-philanthropist-CEO could find when she tried hard enough. I glanced at her to gauge how deep a hole we were in. Her solid biceps, visible through her skintight Under Armour, flexed and strained through every shift. Her legs tensed and contracted as she worked the brakes and clutch. Her eyes, intent and determined, never lost their laser-focus on the curves ahead.
I didn’t need to know exactly what went down in the hamlet last night; our pursuers were out to kill us.
