Emerald Buddha

Chapter 22

Uncle Pete hurried through the rain forest with the vitality of a teenager, and Drake struggled to keep up. The shooting had been all the warning they’d needed, and the wily Thai had made it clear that Drake would have to maintain the pace or be left behind. Drake couldn’t discern any trail Uncle Pete was following, but he trusted that he knew what he was doing. In any case, Drake had no choice, the H&K in his hands slim comfort given the gunmen behind them.

When they’d been underway for two hours, Uncle Pete stopped, listening for signs of pursuit. After several minutes he grunted and sat beside a tree, cross-legged, and closed his eyes. Drake stared at him unbelievingly.

“What are you doing?” Drake hissed.

“Thinking.”

“Unless it’s about our funeral, shouldn’t we keep moving?”

“Depend.”

“That’s helpful.”

“It why I thinking.”

“Should I wake you if an army of murderous drug runners show up?”

“Not sleeping. Thinking,” Uncle Pete repeated, his tone annoyed. He cracked an eye open and glared at Drake. “Take five.”

“You do remember that we just survived a helicopter crash and narrowly escaped being gunned down, right?”

“No talk. Think.”

Drake gave up. He lowered himself to the ground and tried to occupy himself by inspecting his weapon, but quickly realized he had no idea how to break it down to clean it properly. He didn’t want to take the chance of dismantling it only to discover he couldn’t reassemble it correctly — the middle of the jungle while they were being pursued wasn’t the right place to learn how difficult it might be.

He tilted the gun and a rivulet of dirty water trickled from the barrel. Drake didn’t have an inkling whether the weapon could still fire, but figured Uncle Pete would. The bullets were watertight, he guessed, but he didn’t actually know. After shaking the gun a few times, he set it down beside him and watched the area they’d passed through.

Minutes dragged by, and Drake was becoming increasingly impatient when Uncle Pete’s eyes popped open and he fixed Drake with a flat stare. His gaze drifted to the weapon and he clucked his tongue. “Give me gun.”

Drake obliged, and Uncle Pete quickly fieldstripped it and wiped down the parts with his shirt before snapping it together like he’d done it a million times. Which, for all Drake knew, he had. When he was finished, he stood and motioned to the left. “We go now. I keep gun.”

Drake was in no position to argue, so he nodded and offered a silent prayer that the shifty Thai knew what he was doing. Based on his performance with the weapon, Drake would have said he did, but that was hardly the same as leading them to safety. Still, even though a slender reed upon which to hang his hopes, it was better than nothing, so Drake followed Uncle Pete without question or complaint.

As the day wore on, the heat climbed to a swelter, the air thick as syrup as they made their way further from the river. Drake busied himself with swatting away invisible insects and hoping that there were no snakes lurking nearby. Uncle Pete soldiered on as though he had a map in his head, his steps unwavering until they reached a gorge that dropped precipitously to a stream below.

“Now what?” Drake asked.

“Go south.”

“How do you know which way that is?”

“Sun set in west,” Uncle Pete explained, as though describing the earth’s rotation to a none-too-clever child.

“How far do you think we are from the border?”

“Maybe thirty, thirty-five klicks.”

“So in miles, that’s… about twenty?”

“Maybe.”

“Aren’t there any villages between here and Thailand? Or maybe further inland?”

“Hill tribes. But maybe more men with guns. Not safe.”

“Then how are we going to get out of here?”

“Walk. My wings all broken.” Uncle Pete’s face was a blank, and then he grinned. “You want adventure, right? This adventure.”

“What about Allie and Spencer?”

“Have own adventure.”

“Right, but what if they’re in trouble?”

“Spencer seem good with gun. Know ropes, that right?”

“Possibly.”

“Then worry ’bout us.”

“But we have to try to find them.”

“Can’t do anything now. Bad men behind. Our job stay alive. Mekong to right. We get to river, maybe catch boat.”

Uncle Pete’s logic was difficult to argue with, Drake had to admit. Get to the river and follow it south. The Mekong was a major waterway, and there would be barges, ferries, and cargo vessels plying their trade. All they had to do was evade the drug-gang gunmen and any other threats the jungle threw at them and find the Mekong.

“How do you know it’s there?”

“It downhill.”

Drake didn’t ask if that meant the river was at a lower altitude, or whether Uncle Pete was expressing a preference for following gravity because it would be an easier hike. In the end, Drake supposed it didn’t matter.

Uncle Pete looked ready to say something else when he stiffened and stared off into the distance. “Hear that?” he asked in a whisper.

“No, what?” Drake whispered back.

“Someone follow.”

“Are you sure?”

“Quiet.” Uncle Pete stood stock-still for half a minute and nodded. “Not far behind.”

“What do we do?”

“We go.”

“Right. But how do we lose them?”

Uncle Pete spit into the bushes. “We don’t. We kill.”

“What? We can’t go around murdering people,” Drake protested.

“They kill you, then.”

Drake swallowed hard, reality setting in. He was in another nightmare like that with the Russians in the Amazon, where only one party emerged alive. Suddenly the innocuous jaunt the CIA had described had become a killing field; and in his corner was a highly questionable Thai whose background was a complete unknown and who had the only weapon.

Uncle Pete set off at a fast trot and Drake hurried to keep up. They moved along the ridge, the drop to the stream steep and deadly, and then the trail forked. Uncle Pete took the uphill track, surprising Drake, but stopped after a dozen yards and broke a couple of branches before he turned on his heel and led Drake along the downhill slope. Drake understood his strategy without any explanation — it was possible their pursuers might believe they’d taken the high road, buying Drake and Uncle Pete a little additional time.

Ten minutes later, Uncle Pete stopped beside a clump of bamboo. He eyed several fallen stalks and selected two yellowed, desiccated lengths, and reached into his pocket and removed a butterfly knife, which he flipped open theatrically. He made short work of fashioning two jagged points, and then set to work on trimming the opposite ends so he had a pair of six-foot-long spears.

Drake watched him wordlessly and then whispered, “What are you going to do with those?”

“What you think?”

“Why not just shoot them?”

“Maybe. Depend how many.”

“Can’t we just hide?”

Uncle Pete nodded. “We will.”

“Where?”

He pointed at a banyan tree whose branches shaded the trail. “In tree. They come, we jump, spear like fish.”

“That’ll never work. Just shoot them.”

“Shooting make noise. Bring more bad men.”

“Shooting’s efficient. Something goes wrong, we’re dead if all we have is spears.”

“Still got gun. Spears better.”

“It’s insane.”

“Come. We climb.”