Page 31 of Murder Island
“Vanda,” Gurney repeated. He turned to the two men who’d found her. “Put her on the payroll.”
Gurney’s assignment was to make the mine as productive and profitable as possible, and he knew the natives wouldn’t work for nothing. Just close to it.
He took one last look at Vanda as she reached the bottom of the pit. She was young and strong.
Definitely worth fifty cents a day.
CHAPTER 35
PERCHED IN A mesh sling high in the jungle canopy, Kira Sunlight watched it all through her powerful spotting scope. She was in head-to-toe camo, blending in perfectly with the dappled foliage. Her brightly colored curls were tucked under a mottled-green hood. Her cheeks and forehead were daubed with green and yellow face paint.
She watched as the woman and her baby disappeared beneath the rim of the mine, then she swung the scope back to Gurney. He was tall and muscular, with a long nose and an imperious look. Kira could read the body language of the two men in front of him. Their postures telegraphed submission, maybe fear. Maybe they knew what she knew.
Rupert Gurney, she had learned, was a very dangerous and unpredictable man. Kicked out of the British Special Forces for dealing drugs. Convicted of kidnapping, grand larceny, and assault in the years after. Escaped fromEngland’s supermax Belmarsh prison and turned up six months later as a freelancer in Yemen, teaming up with a militia later accused of grisly war crimes.
And now he was in charge here, running a stolen copper mine for persons unknown. Wherever there was nasty work to be done, Gurney was apparently the man to do it. As long as the price was right.
Kira made another of her cold calculations. Cal Savage was evil. She had no doubt about that. Evil ran in his blood. But on paper, Rupert Gurney seemed almost as bad. Besides, Kira had always been adept at compartmentalizing. Her plan was to complete this mission, suck up to Cal, get him to lead her to Doc—assuming he hadn’t already been executed. For now, she put that grim possibility in another compartment.
Kira dialed the scope in tight on Gurney’s head and put the crosshairs on his temple. One hundred yards. Easy shot.
If she’d brought a gun.
Savage had offered her an SSG, or any weapon she wanted. But Kira told him she wanted to travel light, and she preferred her own methods. Assassination was easy. Bang. Over in a second. But if Savage really wanted to discourage future interlopers, there were more effective techniques. Kira knew them all. She had learned them as a teenager.
She slipped the spotting scope into a pouch and tucked the hood tight around her neck. She grabbed theclimbing rope and rappelled down to a lower branch, one wide enough to nap on.
She settled against the smooth curve of the trunk and settled in to wait for dark.
That’s when she did her best work.
CHAPTER 36
THE TWO MEN stood by the antique cannon on the hill overlooking the beach. They did not fit in. They were both white, for one thing, and neither spoke the local language. They’d arrived on a small motorboat that morning. The island was small and remote, but sometimes boaters discovered it by accident and hung around for a day or two to enjoy the scenery. The residents were content to ignore them, as long as they didn’t cause any trouble. With their Hawaiian shirts and cargo shorts, these two looked like just two more misguided tourists.
As the men watched, a large fishing boat pulled up to the wooden dock. A mass of villagers swept down the beach as the boat tied off. Curious, the two men walked down the slope, too, adjusting their baseball caps to ward off the glaring sun.
As they reached the beach, the three-man boat crewwas working a huge rusty winch amidships. Slowly, a large shape rose from a hatch, held aloft by a thick rope.
A great white. Twenty-footer, at least.
The arm of the winch swung over and deposited the stiff shark onto the dock. There was a huge metal hook through its upper jaw and a harpoon gash in its right flank. From where the two men stood on the beach, they got a potent waft of dead-fish stink, so strong it made them both gag.
Men and teenage boys swarmed around the shark’s body as it settled on the dock, tugging on its fins and poking at its rows of daggerlike teeth. One of the village men elbowed the kids aside and whipped out a ten-inch knife. He jabbed it into the underside of the fish just below the gill slits and ran the blade all the way down to the pelvic fin. The pale belly skin parted and the innards spilled out in a froth of pinkish water.
Howls and shouts rose from the crowd. The young boys pushed in closer. The men grabbed them by the shoulders and pulled them back.
Everybody was staring at the freshly released stomach contents.
Two discernable objects had survived the shark’s digestion process—a Caucasian male arm from the elbow down, and a wad of clothing that looked like it had once been part of a white suit.
The men in Hawaiian shirts looked at each other.
“Holy shit,” said one.
“I think we just found Vail,” said the other. He reached into his fanny pack and pulled out a satellite phone.
CHAPTER 37