Andy McDermott - The Tomb Of Hercules

“Today just keeps getting better,” Nina grumbled as she tied the ranger’s hands behind him, then knotted the other end around his ankles, pulling his feet back under the chair. “First we’re accused of murder, now we’re assaulting a park ranger and committing grand theft… boat.” Once she’d finished, Chase checked the knots, tugging them tighter. The ranger winced.

“It won’t hold him for long,” Chase told Nina as he led her from the hut, “but we won’t need long to get away from here. These airboats can move.”

“Yeah, but where to?” she asked.

Chase thought for a moment, then ducked back into the cabin, returning with a tourist map of the Okavango Delta. “Hey, it’s better than nothing,” he said as he hopped onto the jetty to untie the airboat.

Nina stepped cautiously aboard, the flat hull rocking beneath her. With both the propeller and the driver’s seat raised high above the metal deck, the vessel looked horribly top-heavy. “Is this thing safe?”

“Safe as any other vehicle we ever get into.”

She buried her face in her hands. “Oh, God…”

Chase threw the mooring rope aboard and climbed into the boat, examining the engine. He inserted the key and turned it. “Okay, this is going to get loud!” The propeller growled into a blur behind the protective metal grill. He clambered up into the driver’s seat and buckled himself in, resting his feet on the pedals and taking hold of the two long levers that controlled the steering vanes behind the propeller before revving the engine. The air-boat slid from the jetty, then accelerated away.

Nina and Chase barely exchanged ten words in as many minutes as the airboat sped north, and it wasn’t because the noise of the propeller made conversation difficult. She barely even looked back at him, instead watching the vibrant wetlands glide past. In return, the inhabitants of the Okavango watched them as they headed along the winding river. Buffalo and wildebeest warily observed their passage from the muddy banks, shoals of glittering fish darting out of the airboat’s path beneath the clear water.

There were other, less timid creatures in the water as well. Crocodiles occasionally surfaced to investigate the noise, while Chase made a point of giving larger animals like elephants and hippos a wide berth. A small group of leopards on the shore tracked the boat with unblinking stares as it passed.

Nina gazed back at the silent predators, her awe at their surroundings numbed by the aftermath of her fight with Chase, muddled feelings sitting in her stomach like a stone. Finally, she looked back at him. “Where are we going?”

He slowed the engine, the propeller’s rasp falling. “There was a village on the map to the north that had an airstrip. Somebody’ll have a phone-we can call TD and get her to pick us up.” He looked around to get his bearings, noticing that the aircraft he’d seen earlier was now closer, circling slowly off to the northeast. He tossed the folded map down to her. “Actually, check the route, make sure we’re going the right way.”

Nina opened the map, which flapped in the breeze. “Where are we?”

“Find Ranger Station 12; that’s where we were. Bottom left corner.”

She scanned the map. “Got it.” Running her finger up the page, she found a village with the symbol of an aircraft next to it. “Did you mean Nagembe?”

“Is there an airfield there?”

“Yes.”

“Then yeah. How far is it?”

Nina checked the map’s scale. About forty kilometers. “Twenty-five miles.”

“Be there in less than an hour, then. No problem.” Chase noticed Nina’s face fall as she saw something behind him. “Or not…”

He looked around through the grill of the propeller-to see three speedboats racing along the river behind them.

Closing fast.

Even from a distance, Chase picked out Fang in one of the boats, his ponytail streaming in the wind behind him.

“Great, a killer with a grudge!” he said as he jammed the airboat to full power.

How fast can this thing go?” Nina shouted.

Chase looked back at the other boats, which were eating up the distance between them. “Not as fast as them!” The airboat relied for its speed on its shallow draft to lower the water resistance, but its square bow was far from hydrodynamic.

He looked ahead again. There was no way to outrun the boats on the open river. They would catch up very quickly.

Which meant he had to get off the open river…

He tossed the gun to Nina. “Use it if they get too close,” he told her, steering the airboat towards a vast field of tall reeds. “Tell me what they’re doing!”

“Coming after us… Still coming after us…You get the idea!”

Chase shot her an annoyed look, then concentrated on steering the airboat. The water ahead became murkier-shallower, mud banks rising beneath the surface-

A shot cracked behind them. Chase looked back. A man in one of the boats had a rifle in his hands. The way his craft was bouncing through the water, he had almost no chance of scoring a hit-but sometimes a person got lucky.

Chase hoped that Nina’s pendant would live up to her belief in it.

The speedboats were under a hundred yards behind now, and the airboat was going flat out. The river still wasn’t shallow enough to impede their pursuers, but the edge of the swath of reeds was coming up fast-

More gunfire, this time from automatic weapons as men on two of the boats let rip with MP-5s. Their aim was still off, but with the number of bullets they were spraying they had much more chance of scoring a hit.

“Stay down!” he shouted to Nina. But there was no way he could take cover himself, elevated and isolated on the high seat.

Nina dived to the deck. Chase ducked as low as he could as bullets clanged around him. Part of the protective grillwork broke loose and dropped onto the propeller, instantly shredding into thousands of metal splinters. He risked a glance back. Almost half the prop was now exposed, a lethal blur right behind him.

A bullet twanged off the engine casing. The other boats were only fifty yards away, closing fast.

Nina raised her head just as the airboat reached the edge of the reeds, a wall of green rising as high as ten feet out of the water. The boat’s flat prow mowed them down, carving a path. She covered her eyes as fragments of leaves and stalks whipped down around her. A huge commotion erupted off to one side; for a moment she thought it was an explosion, then she realized it was birds , thousands of them leaping from their perches on the tops of the reeds and taking to the air in fright, wings cracking.

The reeds were higher even than Chase on his raised seat, his vision ahead filled with nothing but vertical lines of green. Swaying stalks thrashed at him, but he couldn’t shield his face-he needed both hands to steer. He kept the power on and turned the airboat deeper into the bizarre forest, the exposed propeller slashing the plants to shreds.

The speedboats followed, roaring outboards and intermittent bursts of gunfire behind him-

There was a loud thump and the note of one of the engines changed abruptly, the propeller overrevving as it breached the surface of the lake. The boat had run onto a mud bank under the shallow water.

But it had only slowed the boat, not stopped it. It quickly cleared the obstruction.

And the other two boats were still slicing through the reeds. One on each side, trying to flank them.

Nina looked for the nearest boat. Hunched low, her head little more than a foot above the waterline, she could see only the occasional flash of white hull. The reeds were so dense that anything more than ten feet away was practically invisible. But she could hear it all too clearly, its engine roaring and the towering stalks crashing and snapping before it.