* * *
“Quicksand?”Kristi stared at him, her mind taking a moment to catch up. “Is it going to swallow the SUV?”
She’d heard about people being rescued from quicksand during the rainy season, when sandy soil became saturated, especially around Lagos, but she hadn’t worried about quicksand since she was about nine years old.
“I don’t think so.” He moved carefully toward the front again. “We’re no longer sinking, but the front tires are almost buried.”
“How do we get it out?” She glanced around, some image in her mind of thick banyan vines.
“We don’t, not without a winch. We’re not going anywhere—not tonight.”
Kristi’s stomach knotted. “We’re just going to stay here?”
“For now.” He walked to the driver’s side passenger door and grabbed his duffel. “Climb out here. I’ll set up a bivouac. You can get some sleep.”
“You want tocamp—with the lions?” She had one particular lion fresh in her mind, and that lion wasn’t too far away. “There are snakes, too—poisonous ones—and spiders and scorpions.”
He took out his body armor and strapped it on. “Where’s your spirit of adventure?”
She sat on one of the back seats. “It’s here in the vehicle where it can’t be eaten.”
He chuckled, reached for his helmet. “I promise I won’t let you become dinner.”
She took it off, handed it back to him, the world going dark. “Why can’t we sleep in the SUV?”
He strapped on the helmet, flipped down the NVGs, and glanced around. “We don’t want to be inside the vehicle if the bad guys find us. We’d be sitting ducks. We want to be watching from a distance so that we can conceal, evade, and escape.”
“Okay. That makes sense.” Still, she didn’t move.
“In the morning, we’ll take only what we need and start walking. I can try to rent another vehicle or hotwire something on the other side of the river.”
“Steal a car? You know how to do that?”
“I learned all kinds of skills in special operations.” He held out his hand, helped her climb out. “I’m going to put on my chest rig and holsters. Can you carry the water? Grab whatever you need, but leave the food. We don’t want to draw in predators.”
Kristi reached for the water, the darkness seeming to press in on her.
You can do this.
She’d just spent four days as a prisoner of traffickers. She could handle a night in the wild, especially with Malik beside her.
Looking like a soldier now, he walked to the rear of the vehicle, opened the lift gate, and rummaged around. “They should have an emergency kit. Here it is. There’s a flashlight for you. They’ve got a plastic tarp, too. Cool.”
She took the flashlight from him, turned it on, pointed the narrow beam of light at the wall of trees to the left of the poor SUV.
“Just don’t shine it in my eyes.”
“Right.”
He slipped his duffel on like a backpack, then locked the vehicle, pocketed the keys, and led the way into the trees, testing the ground before each step, the soil wet and muddy. “I don’t see anything here that might want to eat us.”
Kristi used the flashlight to watch where she stepped, following closely behind Malik, her senses trained on the forest around her with all of its strange noises.
The chirping of insects. What sounded like a monkey. The breeze in the canopy.
The ground began to slope uphill.
“Don’t look to your right.”