14
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.
Suddenly the blizzard of broken leaves ceased. The airboat shot out of the reed bed, entering a stagnant marshy lake semi-isolated from the river by mud banks. A few seconds later, the first powerboat burst from the reeds some fifty feet to starboard.
Nina instantly recognized Fang as one of the three men in the boat. He gave her a nasty smile. The smile vanished as she whipped up the gun and fired off the remaining rounds at him. The boat’s driver ducked and turned the vessel sharply away from her.
“Son of a bitch!” Nina snarled as the gun clicked empty. The speedboat swung back around. Fang jabbed an angry finger at her. She displayed a finger of her own, which served only to infuriate him even more.
He brought up an MP-5, as did the other passenger in the backseat, both men aiming at the airboat—
“Shit!” Chase yelled as the second boat drew level on the port side. A man inside it was also aiming a weapon—but this was no submachine gun. It was an American M72 rocket launcher. “RPG!”
Nina didn’t need to know what the initials stood for to realize that they were in serious trouble—the warning in Chase’s voice was enough. She dropped as low as she could into the airboat’s hull, arms covering her head.
The man with the tubular launcher lined up the sight on Chase, braced himself for the recoil…
And fired.
Chase pulled savagely on the steering levers and spun the airboat a full 360 degrees as it skimmed over the turgid water, the rocket missing him by inches as he was whipped out of its path. Its smoke trail streaked past—and hit the security guard in the back of the other speedboat square in his chest.
He was hurled over the side of the boat, the missile’s rocket motor still burning as he hit the water—then it exploded, a bright red waterspout gushing fifty feet into the air, pieces of body spinning within it.
The speedboat’s driver stared slackly at Fang, in shock at his near miss. Chase swerved the airboat sharply to starboard, aiming at their vessel. Fang shouted a warning, but too late.
Chase slammed his craft broadside-on against the speedboat. The driver and Fang were both knocked from their seats, the latter’s MP-5 whirling over the side of the boat and disappearing into the churned-up, bloody water.
The second boat turned to follow as Chase accelerated away. Some distance beyond it, the third boat finally broke through the wall of reeds and rejoined the chase.
Nina lifted her head. “What happened?”
“One-nil to us!”
“One boat?”
“One guy.”
“Is that all?”
Chase scowled. “Okay, let’s not keep score.” He rapidly checked the surrounding area. More reeds on the other side of the lake, and a long, thin island rising slightly above the water, a few twisted trees along its length…
And something else in the water, in front of the island.
He aimed the airboat at the dark objects lurking just under the surface. “What are you doing?” Nina asked. “You’re heading straight for that island!”
“I know!”
“Shouldn’t you, maybe, go around it?”
“Shortcut!” Chase yelled. He could now make out more of the shapes, even the smallest of them as big as the airboat.
Nina saw them too. “What are those?” she demanded anxiously.
“Hippos!”
It was indeed a herd of hippos, wallowing in the still waters of the lake, only their eyes and nostrils exposed. Fully grown, an adult hippopotamus weighed more than four tons—and despite its almost comical appearance, possessed a vicious temper. Even the slightest provocation could rile a hippo to a lethal anger.
Which was exactly what Chase needed.
He checked the positions of the other boats. The nearest was twenty yards behind, the late arrival more than a hundred yards farther back. Fang and his driver had only just recovered from the collision, their speedboat coming back to life with a surge of froth from its stern.
“I know I keep saying this,” he shouted to Nina, “but hold on tight!”
She hugged her arms tightly around one of the bench seats. “Why are you driving at hippos? Are you insane?”
Chase couldn’t hold back a smile as he remembered being asked that same question by another woman only a few days before. “It’s been suggested!” He looked for a hippo that was more or less lengthways-on to him, found one, steered the airboat at it—
The enormous animal was only a few inches below the water, less than the airboat’s draft. There was a hollow bang as the prow rode up the hippo’s rump and over its back. Roaring in surprise and fury, the hippo thrust its huge head upwards—just as the airboat’s flat bottom skidded over it. The speeding vessel was thrown out of the water.
Only for a moment, only by inches—but it was just enough for it to clear the lip of the bank. The airboat skidded on its belly across the island, scraping over tree roots and rocks before splashing back down into the river on the other side.
Nina and Chase looked back.
The entire herd had been roused to instant collective rage by their passage, the calm waters erupting as furious hippos burst from their torpor to find a target for their anger.
The lead speedboat, its driver already committed to following Chase and Nina over the crest of the little island, fit the bill perfectly.
A fifteen-foot bull hippo exploded from the water directly beneath the speedboat and batted it into the air as if it were a plastic toy. One of the three men in the boat flew out and plunged screaming into the midst of the rampage to be instantly crushed to death.
His two companions fared no better, the vessel flipping end over end and smashing into a tree. It sheared in two, the forward half shattering against the gnarled trunk along with its occupant, the rear section cartwheeling over the ground—and blowing to pieces in a huge ball of flame.
“Now it’s one-nil!” Chase whooped, pumping a fist.
The two other boats hurriedly changed direction, splitting up to avoid the hippos and pass around each end of the island.
Nina looked ahead as Chase revved the engine and powered away from the island, hoping to take advantage of their brief lead over the speedboats. She couldn’t see much except the deeper water of the river off to the left, and another thick bank of reeds to the right. “Which way do we go now?”
Chase was asking himself the same question. The speedboats could still outpace them on open water, which left him no alternative but to head into the reeds and try to lose them.
But then what? Fang must have worked out by now that they were heading north, so even if they did manage to shake them off by hiding in the mass of vegetation, his two boats could just break off, go upriver and wait for their prey.
Which meant… they had to get rid of Fang and his men. Take out their pursuers. Go on the offensive.
Something of a problem, considering their lack of weapons.
Chase took a moment to survey the contents of the airboat from his vantage point. An oar secured to one side of the hull, the mooring rope, a hook at its end …
An idea came to him. He made a sharp right turn, heading back towards the nearer speedboat. “Chuck me that rope!”
“You’re going towards them!” Nina protested.
“I know! The rope, chuck it up here!”
She did, then dropped as low as she could in the hull as Chase caught the rope and hefted the hook in one hand. The speedboat was approaching rapidly, the three men aboard barely able to believe their luck as their quarry came straight to them.
Chase worked the steering levers to sway the airboat, trying to make himself a harder target. The men on the powerboat realized that he was charging right for them in a suicide run and opened fire. Chase hunched down as bullets whipped past, the boat taking hits. Another piece of grillwork was blown off.
Collision course—
The driver of the speedboat swerved first, throwing off the aim of the other men. Just as Chase had hoped.
He hurled the hook at the speedboat. It hit its bow with a bang as the two vessels passed. The rope whipped out behind it.
The hook shot back across the bow—
And caught on the handrail, snapping taut.
The gunmen were just recovering their aim when the nose of their craft suddenly flew up into the air, the speedboat flipping upside down as the airboat yanked it backwards.
All three men were flung from the boat, splashing into the muddy water. A moment later, the inverted speedboat landed on top of them and slammed them into oblivion.
The airboat lurched as it dragged the speedboat behind it. Chase pointed at the metal ring where the mooring rope was tied to the hull. Nina clambered over to it and, after some fumbling, unfastened the knot. The rope shot free and disappeared behind them, the airboat surging forward as the weight of the capsized speedboat was released.
Chase looked up to get a bearing on the sun, then turned northwards. There was still one more boat chasing them, its engine revving.
There was another noise too, a distant rumble somewhere off to the northeast.
Rapids.
But Chase didn’t have time to think about it. More small islands lay ahead, knots of earth and rock and trees with narrow waterways winding between them. A pair of gazelles looked around in fright at the noise of the boat, then fled, leaping from one island to the next.
Envying them their speed, he turned left, hoping to get back onto the river leading to Nagembe—
“Eddie!” Nina yelled, pointing back. Chase saw Fang’s boat only twenty yards to port, angling after them.
Fang stood in the passenger seat, holding the top of the windshield. He had something in one hand, sunlight flashing from it—
“Jesus!” Nina gasped. “That crazy bastard’s still got his sword!”
Chase could imagine only one reason why Fang would have that particular weapon at the ready. “He’s going to jump aboard!”
“Oh my God! What does he think this is, Pirates of the frickin’ Caribbean?”
“Get up here!” Chase yelled. “You drive the boat—I’ll take care of him!”
“Are you serious?”
Chase flashed her a crooked grin as he awkwardly got out of the seat to let Nina climb up. “Stand by to repel boarders!” He jumped down to the deck as Nina took the controls.
The speedboat was level with them now, closing fast. “Go between the islands!” Chase told Nina as he picked up the oar, indicating the twisting channel ahead.
“It’s too narrow! This thing steers worse than an SUV!”
“Just pretend you’re trying to swerve through the potholes on Fifth Avenue!” Chase gripped the metal frame supporting the chair with one hand just as the speedboat slammed into the side of his vessel, kicking up a wall of water and almost throwing Nina from her perch. Chase staggered, only his hold on the seat keeping him from being knocked flat on his back.
With a yell, Fang leaped from the speedboat.
He landed in the empty bow of the airboat and immediately dropped into a fighting stance with his sword held out before him, legs spread wide for balance as Nina clumsily guided the vessel into the channel between the islands. It was too narrow for both boats to enter side by side; the speedboat slowed abruptly and swerved in behind her, the tip of its bow only a few feet from the airboat’s stern.
Chase quickly assessed his opponent. The sword-cane wasn’t just an affectation—Fang clearly knew how to wield the blade in anger.
And all he had as a weapon was an oar…
Fang sprang forward, the sword slashing at Chase’s head. Chase whipped up the oar to deflect it.
Crack!
The oar broke in two as the sword sliced cleanly through it. Dismayed, Chase ducked, then dropped the clumsy paddle end as Fang drew back and attacked again, this time stabbing at his chest. He swung the other piece of the oar like a club, trying to hit Fang’s sword arm as he twisted away from the thrust.
Fang saw the move coming—and changed targets.
The sword sliced through the sleeve of Chase’s leather jacket and into his right bicep. Chase roared in pain, dropping the oar and grabbing the wound with his left hand as his adversary drew the bloodied sword back for another strike—
The airboat shook violently, the edge of its hull scraping along the steep bank of the channel as Nina’s turn went wide. Fang lurched, throwing his arms out for balance.
Chase dived at him.
He rammed the top of his head into Fang’s rib cage like a charging bull, following with a punch from his left hand into his stomach. Air whooshed from Fang’s mouth and he fell back onto one of the bench seats.
Chase straightened and grabbed Fang’s sword arm with his left hand, fiercely gouging his thumb into the tendons in his wrist. If he could make him drop the sword—
Pain exploded in his wounded arm. Fang was doing the same to him—but his thumb was digging into the bloody cut in his bicep!
Chase screamed, the pain almost overwhelming him. He released Fang’s wrist and wrenched himself free of the other man’s grip, in the process stumbling over a seat and falling on his back.
Fang stood and raised his sword, about to plunge it down like a steel stake into Chase’s heart—
Nina slammed the airboat against the other bank of the channel, this time on purpose. Dust and stones showered its occupants. She hauled at the controls, the craft rocking drunkenly across the confined waterway.
Staggering from the impact, Fang fell, the blade still pointing down at Chase—
Chase saw the flash of silver descending and snapped up both his legs, catching Fang’s torso on the soles of his boots and flinging him over his head to crash down in front of the driver’s seat.
Another bank loomed ahead. Nina pulled on the control levers, the airboat slewing sideways around the curve and just barely avoiding impaling itself on the rocky shore before sweeping out of the channel and back onto another river, now heading downstream. The speedboat followed, gaining speed and moving alongside.
Its driver took out a gun.
Chase rolled and jumped to his feet, wincing at another searing stab of pain from his arm. Fang seemed dazed, but he was still holding the sword.
If Chase could kick it out of his hand …
He leaped over the bench seat—
Nina saw the gun pointing at her. “Shit!” She swerved the airboat—not away from the other vessel, but towards it.
The deck shifted beneath Chase as he landed, his boot just missing Fang’s hand. He wobbled, unbalanced.
The other boat swung away, its driver sawing frantically at the wheel to avoid a collision, his gun momentarily forgotten.
Fang’s arm sliced up.
The blade chopped through Chase’s jeans and bit into his calf in a spurt of blood.
The agony was so great that Chase almost passed out. He collapsed onto one of the seats. Fang got to his feet, ponytail whipping in the wind. Chase could see Nina in the driver’s seat behind him, a look of helpless horror on her face.
He pressed his left hand over the wound, a new wave of pain rolling through his leg. Fang sneered down at him, lifting the sword again. The bloodied tip danced like an insect in front of Chase’s eyes, about to make a killing thrust—
Fang’s head suddenly snapped forward as Nina smashed her boot heel into the back of his skull.
He staggered—
And came within reach of Chase’s uninjured leg.
Chase drove his foot hard against Fang’s kneecap. It crunched horribly, Fang’s face contorting in pain as he hobbled backwards. Nina swung her arm and delivered a backhand punch into his face as he drew level with her, knocking him back still farther—
His ponytail caught in the propeller.
Before he even had time to scream, Fang was snatched off his feet and dragged headfirst into the unprotected blades. A huge spray of gore spewed out from the airboat’s rear like a psychopath’s lawn sprinkler, the wet crunch as his skull disintegrated audible even over the noise of the engine. His headless body dropped to the deck beside the driver’s seat, still clutching the sword in its twitching hand.
Nina had no time to react to the awful sight, because she had two other things to worry about. The driver of the speedboat, though looking just as shocked and disgusted by the death of his boss as she was, had gotten over his loss very quickly and turned back towards her, gun in hand.
And the river itself was becoming rougher, the formerly placid waters starting to churn and froth as they picked up speed, rapids flowing towards a—
“Waterfall!” she screamed.
Ahead, the river swept over the edge of a vast bowl, a depression caused by the geological rifts that cut through the Okavango Delta. The cliff wasn’t high, the drop of the falls no more than twenty feet, but it would be more than enough to wreck the airboat and probably kill its occupants on the rocks below.
Either the driver of the speedboat hadn’t seen the approaching falls, or he had but was angry enough not to care, because he powered toward the airboat.
“Hang on!” Nina yelled to Chase, just as the two vessels collided. “Jesus!”
She clung tightly to the control levers, all too aware that she hadn’t had time to fasten herself into the chair, and used them to redirect the vanes behind the propeller. The airboat swung around, slithering along the water’s surface like a stone on ice. If she had enough space, she might be able to bring the craft about in a long sweeping turn before it reached the edge of the falls.
Another collision, harder, almost throwing her from the seat. Fang’s sword fell from his nerveless hand and clanged onto the deck. Chase dragged himself towards it, crawling painfully over the seats.
Nina held her turn, the airboat finally starting to respond as the blast from the propeller pushed it around. She looked at the speedboat.
The driver was aiming his gun at her—
She ducked. The bullet burned the air just above her.
Chase heard the shot, glanced across at the new threat and kept crawling.
The speedboat closed in once more, bouncing through the choppy waters. The cliff was coming up fast, fifty yards, the thunder of the falls rising.
The driver fired again. The shot hit the airboat’s engine with a loud spang. The engine immediately coughed and rasped as a fine spray of oil jetted from a crack in its casing. Smoke billowed from the exhausts, streaming out behind the propeller.
Nina cringed as the man lined up a last shot—
Chase grabbed the sword and flung it at the speedboat.
It stabbed into the driver’s shoulder, sticking out like an oversized dart. He wailed and dropped the gun, fumbling to pull the blade out of his flesh as his boat curled away from the airboat.
Nina pulled at the control levers, slewing the airboat around. The engine struggled behind her—but still had just enough power finally to bring the vessel into a turn, skipping over the surging water as it hurtled towards the edge of the cliff, now only ten yards away, five…
The airboat skimmed through the mist of spray along the edge of the falls, parallel to the drop for a moment before turning away and sweeping towards the bank.
The speedboat wasn’t so lucky. The driver spun the wheel in a desperate attempt to turn away, but with only one hand he couldn’t bring it about fast enough. The boat shot over the edge and smashed into the rocks beneath the stormy water. It blew apart in a splintered shower of wood and fiberglass and steel.
Fighting the controls, Nina as much willed as guided the airboat towards the shore. The engine was on fire now, thick black smoke belching from it. She braced herself as rocks scraped the underside of the hull, the river shallowing to nothing—
The airboat skidded out of the water onto the muddy bank, then banged against a steeper grass-covered slope and came to an abrupt halt. Nina jumped from the driver’s seat just before the crash. She hit the ground with a thud, bouncing once before coming to rest in a patch of tall dry grass.
She sat up, head spinning. The airboat’s engine had stalled, a column of oily black smoke rising from it.
Where was Chase?
“Eddie!” she cried, slithering down the slope, her twisted ankle throbbing. Fang’s decapitated corpse lay in a broken heap over one of the seats, but Chase was nowhere in sight.
“Down here,” came the wheezing reply in a familiar Yorkshire accent. Chase’s hand rose up from behind the other side of the boat and waved weakly at her before its owner levered himself into a sitting position. He indicated the body. “Used Shorty here as a cushion. Not exactly an air bag, but it worked, sort of.”
Nina came around the boat to help him. “How badly are you hurt?”
“Well, I got stabbed in the arm and had my leg cut like he was trying to carve a turkey, so take a guess.”
She kneeled to examine the wound in his calf. His jeans were soaked with blood. “Jesus. This’ll need stitches.”
“If you’ve got a needle and thread on you, go for it.”
“All I’ve got’s an empty gun. Can you MacGyver anything from that?”
“Only if I bang myself on the head with it until the pain goes away.” Chase tried to stand up, but grimaced sharply when he moved his leg. “Oh, fuck! That hurts. That really fucking hurts.”
“Just keep still. I’ll see where we are.” Nina climbed back up the grassy slope, hoping to see some sign of civilization.
All she saw was water. They’d landed on an island, rapids rushing over the falls on both sides.
“I think we have a slight problem!” she called back to Chase.
“No change there, then,” he said with a sardonic smile. “What’s wrong?”
“We’re stranded! This is an island.”
“You’re joking.” Nina shook her head. “Buggeration—”
“And fuckery, I know.”
“Right.” Chase twisted to get a better look at the air-boat’s engine, wondering if there might be a chance of restarting it, but the smoke pouring from a crack in the metal block immediately told him that its working days were over. “Well, this is fucking marvelous. They’re bound to get a chopper or a plane into the air to look for us before too long, and this”—he jerked a thumb at the pillar of smoke—“is going to lead ’em right to us!”
“Not if somebody else sees us first!” said Nina, suddenly waving her arms above her head.
Chase looked at her incredulously. “What the bloody hell are you doing?”
She pointed into the sky. “Look!”
He turned his head to look back out over the falls … and saw something completely unexpected.
It was the aircraft he’d noticed in the distance earlier—but it was something much more exotic than he’d thought.
Descending towards them was an airship. Its fat cigar-shaped hull was emblazoned with several company logos, but the largest read “GemQuest,” the G represented as a stylized diamond. It approached with a spooky silence for something so large, the whine of its three vectoring propellers only becoming audible over the noise of the falls when it was less than a hundred yards away. The two props protruding from the lower sides of the hull above the gondola cabin tilted upwards, slowing its descent.
“Okay,” said Chase, “I’m impressed.”
The mooring lines dangling from the seventy-five-yard-long zeppelin’s nose dragged over the island as it eased into position, blotting out the sun. The propellers shrilled, holding it in a hover with the gondola about twenty feet above the ground. A door in the cabin slid open and a blond man in a broad-brimmed safari hat leaned out. “Ahoy there!” he shouted, his accent South African. “We saw your smoke—you need a hand?”
Chase had a sarcastic rejoinder lined up, but Nina spoke first. “We’ve got an injured man here! Can you get him to a hospital?” Chase mouthed “hospital?” to her—the last place they needed to go while wanted for murder was any kind of state facility—but she shook her head very slightly, indicating that he should keep quiet.
The man exchanged words with the pilot, then looked back down at them. “We surely can, miss! Just give us a minute to come a bit lower. This is the tricky part! Can your friend stand up?”
Nina hobbled back to Chase and carefully helped him up. He groaned at the pain from his calf when he straightened his leg. “How bad is it?” she asked, worried.
“SAS one-to-ten pain scale? About a five,” he said, wincing.
“And on a normal person’s pain scale?”
“Somewhere in the aargh-Christ-kill-me-now range.”
Nina assisting him as best she could with her own sore ankle, they made their way up to the top of the slope. The gondola was now hovering unsteadily about four feet from the ground.
“Okay, let’s get you aboard,” said the man, jumping down from the door. His weight gone, the airship rose a foot before the engines reduced speed slightly and the gondola dropped again. He made a face when he saw the bloodstains on Chase’s tattered clothing. “Jesus, man, what happened to you?”
“Boating accident,” Chase deadpanned. He reached into the cabin with his left arm, Nina and the South African lifting him inside. The back of the cabin was mostly occupied by electronic equipment, including a screen showing what he recognized as a ground-penetrating radar image. The zeppelin was being used to conduct an airborne geological survey, hunting for diamonds. The pilot revved the propellers to hold the aircraft steady, increasing power as first Nina and then the crewman climbed aboard.
“Have you got everything from your boat?” the man asked, looking down at the smoking airboat. He did a sudden double take as he saw Fang’s body. “God’s balls! What happened to him? Where’s his head?”
Chase flopped into a seat. “In the river, on the propeller, on my jacket…”
The South African looked shocked. “This was no boating accident! What’s going on?” He fell silent when Nina pointed her gun at him. The pilot looked around, eyes bulging in surprise.
“I’m sorry to have to do this,” she said, “but I’ve had a really shitty day—several days, in fact—and I need you to take us to…what was the name of that village?”
“Nagembe,” Chase answered.
“What he said. I know it’s not far, so if you could just take us there as fast as possible, I’d be very grateful. How about it?”
Hands half-raised, the South African nervously backed up and sat in the empty copilot’s seat. “I think we can manage that for you, miss. Can’t we, Ted?” The pilot nodded repeatedly in confirmation.
“Great.” Nina sat in the chair next to the survey equipment, noticing something in a tray on the desk. “Eddie, here,” she said, tossing him a phone. “Call TD, get her to meet us when we arrive. How long will it take to reach the village?” she asked as Chase started to dial.
“About thirty minutes,” the South African told her. He paused, then gave her an incredulous look. “Are you really hijacking a zeppelin?”
Nina managed a tired grin as the engine noise increased, the airship rising and turning north. “You know what’s weird? That’s not even the craziest thing I’ve done today.”
“That’s one hell of a story,” said TD.
Chase stretched his neck, working out a crick. “Tell me about it.”
TD had hurriedly taken off from the airfield shortly after Yuen’s jet departed; the sight of one of the mine’s massive trucks smashing through the fence and heading off across the desert with tanks in hot pursuit had been something that, as she put it, had Eddie Chase written all over it. Still airborne when she got Chase’s call, she changed course for the airstrip at Nagembe and arrived a few minutes before the airship. At the prompting of Nina’s gun, the pilot brought the zeppelin down next to the Piper. A quick hobble between the two aircraft saw Nina and Chase aboard TD’s plane in time for a rapid takeoff, watched by a group of surprised locals who had come to find out why a gleaming airship had made an unscheduled stop at their little village.
Now they were across the border in Namibia, sitting in a darkened room in an abandoned bush farmhouse. As TD gave Nina and Chase first aid, including stitching up the wound in Chase’s leg, they told her about the afternoon’s events. “I knew political assassinations weren’t your style, Eddie,” TD said with relief.
“But how are we going to prove it?” Nina wondered miserably.
“That’s not your biggest worry just now,” said TD. “It won’t take long for the story to get out of Botswana and into its neighbors. A lot of people will be looking for you—you need to get out of here before that happens. And I don’t just mean out of Namibia. I mean out of Africa.”
Nina ran her hands back through her disheveled hair. “How are we going to do that? We’ve got no passports, no money—and we’re wanted for the murder of a senior government official! There’ll be pictures of us at every airport on the continent!”
Chase looked thoughtful, but also somewhat troubled. “I might be able to sort something out… but it’ll mean calling in a big favor.” He frowned. “Maybe too big. Mac probably won’t go for it.”
“Mac?” asked TD, surprised. “You want to ask Mac for a favor?” A sly smile crept onto her face. “In that case, I might be able to help. He was down here on business last year, and now he owes me a favor. Well, several favors.”
“Who’s Mac?” Nina wanted to know.
“Old friend,” Chase said, giving TD a suspicious look. “Why does Mac owe you a favor?”
“Several favors.” She waggled her eyebrows suggestively.
Chase was appalled. “He’s twice your age!”
“He has lots of experience,” TD countered.
“He’s only got one leg!”
“Which opens up all kinds of new poss—”
He threw up his hands in horror. “Don’t! Don’t say another bloody word!”
“Possibilities,” TD finished with a toothy grin.
Chase made a pained face. “Oh, why’d you have to tell me that? You and Mac? Eehew!” He shuddered.
TD folded her arms and pouted. “Do you want me to help or not?”
“Yes, very much,” Nina cut in before Chase could reply. “Who’s Mac?”
“He’s somebody who can get you and Eddie to England,” TD told her. “It might take a day or so, but he has the connections to arrange travel for people even without passports.”
“How?”
“Mac’s got friends in high places,” said Chase. “Or low places. Depends how you look at it.”
“Either way, I’m sure he’ll help you,” TD said. She smiled at Chase as she took out her phone. “Do you want to talk to him, or shall I?”
“You have a word,” Chase said. He put a hand to his forehead and sighed. “Or several.”