Camouflage Heart by Dana Marton Page B

the hostages that he was coming. How many guerillas were still down there? Where were the tourists?
    Finding them quickly was key. He had to get them up to the surface before the men in the camp above realized he was down here. He didn’t like the explosives they had. It would be too easy to collapse the main tunnel and trap everyone below, buried alive.
    He rushed forward and came to a door, solid metal. For a moment he considered a grenade to throw off the men on the other side, give him a chance to take a couple out before they got their bearings. But he still didn’t know where the hostages were. He couldn’t risk harming them. They could be hidden somewhere deep in the myriad tunnels, or they could be just on the other side of this door. The latter would be nice. He didn’t have much time to look for them.
    He kicked the door open, rifle raised in front of him.
    And found himself face-to-face with Hamid and twenty of his men, armed to the teeth.
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    T HE RAIN WAS COMING DOWN pretty hard, the river was rising. Audrey couldn’t see it, but she’d had to move back three times now when the water reached her feet.
    Had Brian made it to the camp yet? She strained her ears for the sound of gunfire, but couldn’t hear anything. It seemed impossible that he would succeed. She’d seen the camp. The force he would meet would be overwhelming. She shouldn’t have dragged him into this. She had sent him into sure death.
    He had insisted on helping her. What pushed him forward? What made him override the instinct of self-preservation in the interest of others? She wondered if he regretted ever having met her. If it wasn’t for her, he would have been halfway out of the jungle by now.
    And then it occurred to her that they hadn’t simply “met.” He had saved her, choosing to risk his own freedom, his own life. He had made the decision selflessly, expecting nothing in return.
    Despite his battered appearance, there was a strength in the man as she had never seen before. Tremendous courage, and yet vulnerability, too. And as little as they knew each other, she felt herself respond to him.
    She kept her hands on the ropes that held the boats. One of the lines moved, grew taut. The water was high enough to lift that boat. The rope held, but she worried.
    She planted her boots firmly in the muddy ground and pulled, managed to make some progress, felt as the bottom of the boat scraped into the mud, but no matter how much she struggled, she couldn’t get it out of the water. The second she relaxed her arms, the water took the boat again, and when it did, the side banged against a rock a few feet ahead of her. Bang. She yanked at the rope, but the river had the boat now. Bang. Bang. Bang.
    She waded into the water, wanting to put herself between the boat and the rock, to at least keep it quiet, keep from being discovered. She grabbed theside of the other boat for support, and felt it wobble. The water was taking this one, too.
    Bang. Bang. Bang.
    She couldn’t let both boats slip into the water. She wasn’t sure how long the ropes would hold, how long the palm tree would make it once the river was high enough and the current and debris started to push against the trunk. She took off her rifle and threw it inside, grabbed the hull and pulled with everything she had, made some progress, infuriatingly slow, but the boat did slide forward, inch by miserable inch.
    Bang. Bang. Bang.
    She pulled until her shoulders ached, until she was breathing hard, sweat mixing with rain on her face. But she got the boat to higher ground, untied its rope from the palm tree and tied it up again to a tree a couple of yards farther into the woods.
    She waded into the water for the other boat, got in up to her chest before she reached it and realized she could do little. She had to untie it, let it move past the rock and tie it up again. Pulling it out of the water at this stage was beyond her