I lean out the back as Dalton covers me. I listen for Victor but hear nothing. Then I listen for Anders. Still nothing. Is he lying low with Maryanne? I hope so. I pat Storm, reassuring her, and she nuzzles my hand.
“I’m coming out!” a voice shouts. “And I have a hostage. Fire at me, and I fire at him.”
It’s Anders. My heart thuds, and Dalton tenses, rocking toward the front hatch. Anders is coming that way, and there’s nothing either of us can do to stop him. Leaping from the plane would only give our attackers a second target without protecting the first.
“You folks can see me?” Anders says. “Just stay cool, and he’ll be fine.”
Anders appears through my angled vision out the hatch, and when I see him, my heart does a double thud. His hostage is the young hostile. The boy isn’t small, but beside Anders, he looks like a child, his face blank with terror as Anders hustles him along, positioning the boy between him and the forest. Between him and whoever is out there with bows and arrows.
Whoever? No, we know who it is now. The shaman and her troop of hostiles.
A soft noise behind us has me spinning, gun up, cursing myself for not monitoring that open back door. But Émilie is—she has Victor’s gun, which Petra must have given her, and she already has it trained on the newcomer. Or she did, until she saw it’s Maryanne. That’s part of Anders’s ploy. Create a distraction so Maryanne can get to us.
I let Émilie help Maryanne in while I cover Anders. When Dalton eases forward, I resist snatching him back. Yes, he’s moving into a more exposed position, but Anders needs that. From our vantage point, Petra and I can only survey the left side of the forest.
Dalton hesitates a split second, and then darts to the other side of the hatch. No one fires from the forest. Outside, Anders is almost to us, still using his military voice as he talks to the hidden hostiles. That voice is rock-steady, just short of a bark.
He’s almost to us when the arrow comes. He must hear a thwang that we miss. He moves fast but the young man still lets out a hiss of pain, and we open fire. We shoot into the trees, above anyone’s head, the sudden gunfire intended as both warning and cover as Anders drags the boy the last few feet, and then Maryanne and Émilie haul them both in.
Once they’re inside, we stop shooting, and the forest goes silent. While Petra and Dalton stand guard, I crawl over to the boy.
Blood soaks his shirt. A hole shows the arrow’s path through his side.
“They aimed at him,” Anders growls as he rips off the boy’s bloodied and dirt-crusted shirt. “They damn well aimed at him. Their own goddamned guy.”
I get the young man lying down. Maryanne is there, crouched at his side, gripping his hand.
“You’re okay,” Maryanne says. “You’re okay.”
She smiles down at him, and it’s a big smile, one that shows her teeth—her filed teeth—and that is intentional. When she says “You’re okay” again, his eyes fill with tears.
“Yeah, he’s fine,” Anders says. “Looks like they just nicked him.”
That isn’t what Maryanne means. Not the injury but his ordeal.
You’re safe. You’ll be fine.
“If I hadn’t seen it coming, though?” Anders shakes his head. “It was a chest shot. Motherfuckers. They were taking out their own guy.”
I could say that I’m not surprised. At the time, I’d been too worried about Anders to see the danger the boy faced, but now I realize that they absolutely would have taken him out. Maryanne had warned us that the shaman wouldn’t hesitate to use him.
Did they shoot him so they could get to Anders? Or to show us the futility of taking hostages? Or because the boy had been too “weak” to avoid capture?
From what Maryanne said of the shaman, I’m betting on the last two. Even with that insight, though, Anders couldn’t have foreseen this. He comes from the military, where taking out your own man is unthinkable.
“You’re okay,” I tell the young man, and he seems to see me for the first time.
“Careful,” he whispers, his voice rough with disuse. “Please, please be careful. She’s…”
He swallows and doesn’t finish, and he doesn’t need to. The “bad guys” in this scenario may be a distant Danish corporation and its agents, but the real danger lies in its victims.
We want to help the hostiles—or at least those who’ll accept help—but that doesn’t matter. There’s no opposing team to fight, so the hostiles will fight us. We still don’t want to attack if there’s a choice, especially when they may have Felicity and Edwin. I ask Anders, but he hasn’t seen them. He did see Victor and thinks he’s dead.
As Dalton and Petra and Émilie guard the exits, I talk with Anders, and the boy contributes where he can. Bennett. That’s his name. First or last, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter yet.
Anders spotted one hostile—that’s how he saw the movement that preceded the arrow fire. He’d also spotted another before he’d grabbed Bennett. Dalton and Petra check Anders’s directions and find both hostiles still in place.
According to Bennett, there are five people left of the shaman’s group. Two of them are watching “the old man and the girl.” Felicity and Edwin are alive. Relief surges … until I realize this only adds to our need to resolve this peacefully. Otherwise, the hostiles may kill them for revenge.