Black Rain

She nodded. “Seemed a little odd to me as well. My guess is: Kaufman was either lying or he didn’t know, and he made up that story to give himself some type of residual value and reduce the chances of being shot at sunrise. He was a bastard but he was smart.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But now what? If we pop the wrong color smoke, or shoot the wrong flare it could scare off the pilot. It might be better to do nothing, let his curiosity bring him in closer. We can dig up Kaufman’s people and put on their uniforms.” Hawker looked out to where he and McCarter had buried the dead mercenaries. “If the pilot sees us like that, he might land … or he might just strafe us as he flies past and then head off into the distance.”

“I’m not real interested in going through that again,” she said. “But the only alternative is five days in the jungle. Choose your poison.”

After the night they’d just lived through, Hawker had no desire to face even one of those things in the tangled darkness of the rain forest. He guessed that the helicopter would come back, but it was a coin flip as to whether they’d last that long and another question altogether as to what would happen after that. Still, two days in the well-defended clearing and a fifty-fifty shot seemed like better odds than four or five days trudging through the jungle.

Either Danielle sensed this or had come to the same conclusion. “Let’s wait,” she said. “And let’s keep this from the others.”

Hawker nodded, and noticed McCarter walking toward them. The professor had bled through the dressing on his arm. “Looks like you’ve got another patient.”

Danielle turned around. “Sit down,” she said, looking at McCarter. “Let me rewrap that.”

McCarter took a seat and tried to hold still as Danielle cut the gauze from his arm. He seemed distraught to Hawker, almost despondent.

“Rough night?” Hawker asked, trying to lighten his mood.

McCarter did not respond directly. “When my wife was sick,” he said finally, “there were nights, during the chemo, that I would hear her throwing up violently in the bathroom down the hall. Dry heaves for what seemed like hours, and then she’d rest against the closed door, and it would rattle as she shivered.”

He closed his eyes for a second and choked back a lump in his throat. “But she didn’t want my help or my pity,” he said at last. “She just wanted to be well again. And in her mind, as long as I didn’t hear, she could pretend it was working, she could pretend that she was getting better. So I would lie there, hour after hour, fighting every urge in my body to run to her, so we could both pretend she wasn’t dying.

“That’s what last night felt like to me,” he explained. “Like a message being delivered over and over again and we’re all pretending not to hear it, all pretending like we’re not going to die.”

As McCarter finished, he and Danielle exchanged looks and they seemed to make some kind of connection. Hawker didn’t know what it was, but as much death as he’d seen in his life, most of it had been mercifully quick. He was thankful for that.

He looked McCarter in the eye. They needed him to hang on, they needed everyone to hang on. “We’re not dead yet,” Hawker said.

“But tonight will be more of the same,” McCarter replied.

“Maybe,” Hawker said. “Maybe not. In any fight, things always look worse from your perspective. All you see are your own losses but none of your enemies’. Your mind tells you he’s still at full strength, when undoubtedly he’s weakened.”

Hawker pointed out into the jungle. “We didn’t do so bad last night. We’re alive. And we lit those things up pretty good. Some of them are going to die off, others will lick their wounds and stay away, and that means less of them around to bother us tonight.”

That thought seemed to bolster McCarter. “That makes sense,” he said. “But they will be coming back.”

“Yeah,” Hawker said. “I’m guessing they will. We just have to make sure we’re ready for them this time. More ready than we were yesterday.”

“And how do we do that?” McCarter asked.

“First off, we need to do some research,” Hawker said.

McCarter’s face brightened. “Research,” he said. “I like research. What are you thinking?”

“Yeah,” Danielle said suspiciously as she wrapped McCarter’s arm in new gauze. “What are you thinking?”

Hawker pointed toward the forest again. “We have to go out there and poke around in the trees for a bit. Take a look at a few things.”

McCarter’s face showed a negative opinion of that plan. “Did I tell you how much I hate research? Can’t stand the stuff.”

Danielle laughed as she finished taping off his new bandage.

“No, seriously,” he said. “I always have the assistants do it for me.”

“Nice try,” she told him. “But he suckered you on that one.”

A minute later Hawker and McCarter were grabbing two radios. The first one sounded intermittent and weak.

Hawker grabbed a second one and clicked the mike; it seemed to be working. “This one’s good.”

“Try to make it last,” Danielle said. “The charger’s down.”