“Did we lose navigation?”
“No, not yet.” He drove to a spot beneath some overhanging trees and parked. “Okay. You’re good.”
While Kristi crawled over the console into her seat, he sent a quick sitrep to Shields. Then he called up a map of Nigeria on his phone, blew it up until he found Gulu, and studied the surrounding area.
“If we bypass the roadblock and get back onto the highway, we’ll eventually cross the Kaduna River at a little town called Wuya. Then we could either continue northward to cross the Niger at Kainji or veer southwest to cross it at Jebba.”
“Which do you think is safer?”
“Neither.” He scrolled around, looking for a solution. “Bridges are natural bottlenecks—places where it’s easy to stop and screen traffic. If I were trying to catch someone, I’d use them as chokepoints.”
“Do we know for sure those guys were Sky Kings?”
“No, but we can’t take any chances.”
“Then what do we do? We can’t drive across the river. It’s too deep and wide. The SUV won’t fit in a boat, even if we had one. We can’t swim across—not unless we want to be crocodile bait. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be eaten.”
He couldn’t help himself. “But you tastesogood.”
“Stop.” But she smiled.
While she opened the peanut butter and crackers, he searched for a solution, looking for smaller bridges, railway bridges, even pedestrian bridges. “There. We’ll take back roads toward the Okobi Wildlife Preserve. We’ll try to cross on the old railway bridge there. That way we won’t have to cross the Kaduna River at all.”
He typed the coordinates into the vehicle’s navigation system.
“What about trains?”
“According to the map, it’s not an active rail line.”
“Is the bridge safe?”
“It was built for freight trains, so I’m sure it can hold us—if it’s still standing.”
“Maybe we should ditch the SUV and hire a boat.”
He’d thought about that. “We could do that and rent or steal another vehicle on the other side. But I see that ending in one of two ways. Either the boat owner or witnesses sell us out, or they and their families end up dead. The fewer people we drag into our situation, the less collateral damage we leave behind.”
“Oh, God. I hadn’t thought about that.”
He started the engine, drove back through Gulu, and crossed over the highway, where traffic was backed up for a mile and the exit they’d taken was now blocked.
Kristi’s jaw dropped when she saw. “We barely got away.”
While she passed him a dinner of crackers covered in peanut butter, Malik watched the rearview mirror, leaving Gulu behind them and muting the navigation system, which kept trying to get them to turn around. Farms quickly gave way to scrubland crisscrossed by dirt roads and deepening forest. He followed the roads, moving steadily southwest.
But out here, far from other sources of light, the vehicle’s headlights were like beacons. Anyone hiding on the forested hillsides would see them.
He stopped, turned off the vehicle.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s time to switch gears. I have no idea what we’ll run into out here, so I want to be ready. I’m going to move a few things around, position my firearms, and grab my night vision goggles in case I need them.”
He climbed out, got out the M4 carbine and the other SIG, along with spare magazines, which he arranged near his seat. Then he took his helmet out of his duffel bag and settled it on his head. He flipped down the NVGs and turned them on to check them.
“Whoa.”
Staring straight at him from a nearby bush was a big, fat warthog.