“You never know,” he said simply.
We went with it. He’s a real high-performance type and highly motivated, thanks to the live feed of my men sitting in his living room, threatening his wife and kid.
We went by foot and boat after that. He climbed a peak not an hour ago—scrambled up there just like a monkey with binoculars. He saw smoke. He thinks he knows where they are.
An hour later, we’re stepping out of our canoes.
My guys and I have sprayed ourselves with deer piss. This is something you get in a bottle when you’re a wilderness guide. It’s a way a hunter masks his scent. If Kiro is out here somewhere and really did live wild all those years, our rugged leader theorizes, it could help mask our approach.
My guys gear up their rifles and adjust their night-vision goggles. We’ll be underestimating Kiro exactly zero more times. An orderly named Donny out at Fancher Institute gave us a lot of good intel on the man.
Sir Gore-Tex-a-Lot finishes tying down the canoes with a bungee cord. I stand over him, watching while the men spray more deer piss on themselves.
“What time is it when your favorite hobby involves spraying yourself with deer piss?” I ask him.
He looks up at me, confused. “Are you asking me the time?”
“No, I’m asking you,what time is itwhen your favorite hobby involves spraying yourself with deer piss?”
He gives me a stony look.
“Time to get a new hobby.”
He doesn’t find it funny.
Garrick the journalist snickers.
Garrick and his clipped British accent accused me earlier of not holding up my end of the bargain with his editor, Murray. He informed me that the idea of an embed is to be where the action is, where Kiro is, not hanging back with the man directing the action. He’d accused me of scuttling the deal.
“You still feel like I scuttled that deal, Garrick?” I asked when we found the bodies of my forward team, buzzing with flies. “This the kind of story you were looking to be embedded in? Would certainly give new meaning to the term ‘embedded.’”
He had little to say to that. In fact, I wasn’t entirely sure he got the joke, though admittedly it was a stretch. Our guide wanted to radio back about the bodies, but I put him off of that idea easily enough.
Garrick took a few photos. He even shifted a body to get a better shot, much to the disgust of our guide.
“They’re dead,” Garrick informed him clippedly.
We make our way through the forest and around a bluff. Our guide has a topographical GPS that tells us there’s a cave system to the south, and between that and some sort of triangulation involving the wind and the smoke, he has their location.
I find it dubious until we actually get the cave in view and see the smoke puffing out the entrance.
We trudge nearer. When we’re quite near, he steals up and scopes it out with a mirror on a retractable rod, then returns to inform us that there is one person in there—a woman.
“No man?”
“I’m sure.”
“Thank you, Santa,” I say.
It’s the girl—it has to be. Orderly Donny has informed us that Kiro would do anything to protect her. That’s the mistake my first group made. Not going for the weakness.
We tie up our guide with his precious bungee cords and head up to the cave, picking around the trees and boulders.
“Kiro?” she calls.
It’s not the smartest for me to head in first; she could be armed, after all. Garrick has a passing acquaintance with the girl, and he assures me that she’d know perfectly well how to shoot. But a leader who stops taking risks becomes brittle; that’s something that Valerie likes to say.
And I really, really want to see her face when I pop in.