Ник Картер - War from the Clouds

We had no choice. The hill behind us was filling up with Marines or guerillas, or both, getting into position to catch us in a crossfire that not even the ants would escape with their antennae intact.

Although I was convinced that they could see us, or had seen us earlier and were moving up by quadrant positions, I sensed another opportunity to build my image as a magician with the good Colonel Vasco. I motioned for Antonio to follow me.

Using my elbows as legs, I edged across the narrow ledge to one side, where the drop to the rocky area below wasn’t quite so high or so steep. We eased over the edge like a couple of eels. We were no sooner dropping through space than I heard the sharp bark of the colonel.

“Fire, fire, fire! Annihilate them!”

He had obviously lost his desire to quiz me and then personally remove my intestines. He wasn’t about to let me slip away again as he had back there on the compound trail.

Antonio and I hit the ground at the same time. He landed lightly, flipping over in the air to keep his feet. I miscued slightly and came down on an angle, pitching forward and clanking my ankle on an outcropping of rock. The pain rumbled up through my body like a tidal wave of pellets. I stifled a yell, unwilling to give the colonel even a brief moment of pleasure.

We were off and running — me limping — even before the Marines and guerillas stopped firing. We were in the dark trees before they appeared on the ledge above. I knew they would expect us to run straight down the steep hill through the trees.

“You go left,” I said to Antonio, gasping from the pain that was still running its course through my bones. “I’ll go right. Stay near the top of the hill. When you’re clear, meet me at the lookout point I told about, the one overlooking the valley and Mount Toro.”

Further instructions were cut off by a fusillade of bullets tearing through the trees. Antonio took off, as directed. I ran-limped the other way, hearing the shots above me and the bullets thudding into the rocky soil right behind me.

I hadn’t gone twenty feet when the bullet caught me. It was a ricochet off a rock, but it was just as effective as if it had come straight from the muzzle of the Russian automatic weapon. I felt the dull thud in the soft part of my left side, toward the back. I kept running, though, waiting for a hail of bullets to cut me down.

I made it three hundred yards before I collapsed from the pain. My ankle throbbed like a tympanny drum. My side, bleeding profusely now, felt as though a shark had taken a bite out of it. Weakness came with the pain and I had to rest.

There were no further gunshots from above. Soon, though, I heard them thrashing down through the trees. Most of the search party was heading downhill, but the colonel, wising up to me now, had sent some of his men on sideways sortees. It wouldn’t take too many of them to finish me off.

I got, up, ignoring the pain and weakness as much as was humanly possible — which wasn’t much — and stumbled along for another two hundred yards, then started straight downhill. I was giving them a hell of a lot of jungle to search. I just hoped I didn’t get lost in the process.

Within an hour, I was lost, and didn’t care. The pain was a steady rasping throughout all of me, no longer concentrated in my ankle and side. Weakness was also constant, and building with galloping speed. I could tell that my mind was flirting with delerium and I tried to keep clear thoughts, make clear decisions.

But one trail looked like another. All streams seemed to be the same stream that I had already crossed, and re-crossed. All rocks in my path seemed like rocks I had fallen over miles back. I went on and on, up and down the hill. Sometimes, I rambled over high ranges where the trees were sparse and the going easy. Sometimes, I plunged down steep ravines and found myself in thick jungle where the going was all but impossible.

I kept on, knowing that it was necessary to lose myself in order to lose the enemy. I knew also that I had to stop the bleeding in my side or I would simply phase myself out in that thick jungle. I stopped at a stream beside a mossy bank. I took off my shirt, with painful exactitude, and looked at the wound. It was ragged. The bullet must have been in the process of breaking up when it struck me. There were at least three punctures, one large and two small. Blood was streaming from each of them.

I tore off a piece of my shirttail, having the presence of mind to make a small mental pun about tearing off a piece of tail, and gathered up some wet moss. I wrapped the moss in the fragment of shirt material and, using the tape that had held Wilhelmina in place, I stuck the soggy bandage against the wound and taped it into place.

New pain shot through me, threatening to black me out. I took deep breaths and remember thinking how nice it would be to crawl inside that mossy bank and to go to sleep, only to awaken as a carefree and unhunted insect or worm. What sweet bliss that would be.

Strangely, the memory of Elicia’s farewell kiss was what brought a sense of reality to my mind. I remembered that dark night on the dirt road near her cousin’s hut when she had stood on tiptoe to kiss me, sweetly, firmly. I hadn’t been kissed in so innocent and pleasant a fashion since I was a teenager in high school. Perhaps my fond recollection of that kiss had something to do with the fact that Elicia, if she were in the United States, would be a relatively carefree teenager in high school. Instead, she was a peasant girl on this tormented island, open prey to the two-legged animals from another island, destined to grow old, abused, wornout and desolate by the time her teen years had barely gone by. My God, I thought, we Americans really have it soft.

And then I mentally crossed out the “we.” At the moment, I was one American who didn’t qualify for the soft life.

I moved on then, and the pain strangely abated in my side. My ankle continued to make its presence known, though, so the going was still difficult. By mid-afternoon, I had just about had it. My thoughts were weird and detached and I knew that I was getting delirious by leaps and bounds.

I saw myself running naked on a Caribbean beach, pursued by a flock of naked beauties. Even as I was considering turning to face them, and my delicious fate, the image shattered and I was sliding down a mountain of hot lava, feeling my body actually being cooked by the intense heat. I went suddenly cold and aroused to find myself submerged in a cold, fast-running creek. The water was loosening the bandage over my wound and I crawled from the creek to dry myself on leaves and to re-apply the bandage.

Hunger rose again in my stomach with a great rumbling. I couldn’t be starving. It had been just over twenty four hours since I had eaten, but I had been burning up a lot of calories in that time. And losing a lot of blood.

After an hour or so resting on the creek bank where I failed to build up energy, as hoped, I struck off up a worn path that led up over a slight rise. It wasn’t a steep rise, but climbing it was like trying to scale the south wall of Mount Everest. I reached the top, saw that the path disappeared into a wooded ravine, and decided to go down and see where the path led.

I took two steps, my ankle twisted on a rock and sent a searing pain through all my joints. I felt myself passing out and looked skyward for a point in reality. Nothing was real up there. Clouds floated in an azure sky, but they were no longer real to me. They could have been marshmallows in blue jello for all I knew.

The sky suddenly began to race before my eyes. I didn’t know that I was falling until I hit the ground and felt stones scraping my face and hands. I was sliding down into the ravine where, something in my demented mind told me, great nests of jungle snakes waited to devour me after filling me with their painful poison.