ENCOUNTER by Hep Aldridge (bill gates books recommendations .txt) 📕

If nothing shows up, then, yes, we can break here until the drone is done.”

“What if we don’t find anything?” Doc asked.

“Well, I guess we’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it,” I said and found a large rock to lean up against as I sat down. Yep, …when we come to it…

Joe had the drone in the air, heading to its designated search area as I looked at my watch. It was 10:00 a.m. We should have an answer well before noon—nothing to do but rest and worry.

I think I did more of the latter as I monitored Joe’s pad with the camera feeds. He was keeping an eye on the drone’s progress on the laptop. Eduardo watered the mules; it looked like he was doing well. Being young and able to shake off injuries that quickly made me envious as a pain made itself known in the leg I had gotten shot in almost two years ago. Ahh, youth, I thought.

Forty minutes later, Joe said, “It’s done; the fly over is done. The computer is processing the data now. That was enough to bring everyone to their feet and group around where he was sitting. Another five minutes or so, and an aerial view of the jungle came up on the screen. Joe typed in a command, and the vegetation layer began disappearing. Soon, just the ground contours and solid features were visible. I will admit, this was some cool stuff. At first, it was hard to make out features, but as Joe magnified the image, we could pick out rock formations and a rectangular object in the forest.

Joe said, “Based on where I started the scan, away from the clearing where Tamara’s village was, I believe this is the hut where he said the two elders lived. I was looking at the surrounding area and saw nothing that looked like a path or trail.”

“I don’t see a trail, Joe,” I said.

“I know, just a minute,” some more commands, and the picture changed again, with more clutter being removed. As the computer processed the image, you could see a faint line beginning to appear going from the front of the dwelling toward the village and continuing in the opposite direction into the jungle.

“There it is,” Doc said, pointing to the faint line appearing.

“Maybe so, let’s hope that’s the trail they followed from the stream they talked about; at least it’s someplace to start. Joe, can you overlay our current location on this?” I asked.

“Yep, give me a minute,” a few more keystrokes and some typing on the pad that had our GPS map, and we had the overlay. It gave us both good news and bad news. The good news was that it showed us the direction we would have to head to intersect with the path. The bad news was it looked like it would be three miles or so of bushwhacking to get to it; no other visible trails were evident.

“Okay, everybody, load up. We’ve got some ground to cover. Ladies, if you would do the honors as before, please cover our trail as best you can once we dive into the bush.”

Out came the machetes, and once again, we headed into the jungle undergrowth.

Chapter Thirteen

Four hours of brutal bushwhacking later, we had covered a little over two miles. We took a break, and as we rested, we decided we needed to push on until dark. If we didn’t pick up the new trail by then, we would stop and camp. We didn’t want to take the chance of pressing on and missing the trail in the darkness. Water, jerky, energy bars, the routine had become all too regular in the last 48 hours, but necessity is a mother, or however that saying goes.

Luckily, just before dark, we found the trail or more of a path, really. Now, I know why it didn’t show up well on the LIDAR image; it was barely visible, and we were standing on it. We decided to follow it until dark and then camp. We were all beat from the harsh conditions of our trek that day but wanted to maximize our use of daylight. We still had some very nasty unhappy campers after us, after all.

When we stopped and set up camp, we agreed we could risk building a small fire to heat our evening meal and hold some of the chill at bay. We were sitting around the fire when Joe said, “Looks like they got through,” as he handed me the tablet. I looked down and hit play; the video plainly showed seven men passing the camera we had set on this side of the landslide our big boom had created. It had been recorded when the motion sensor triggered it. The time stamp showed it to have been taken two hours ago, just before dark.

“Well, that’s that. They are following us, but I’m not sure they will continue after dark. If they make camp for the night, that will put them over a day and a half behind us. That’s a much better lead than we had before Dimitri’s big boom,” I said as I passed the pad around for the others to see.

Reggie said, “There were seven men. I thought you said there were only six?”

“I did; they must have gotten an extra or picked up an extra from the Brotherhood. Who knows?”

“Did you notice a couple of them were sporting bandages, and I’m not talking band-aids? It looks like they got injured during their altercation with the Brotherhood,” O’Reilly observed.

“Oh, darn,” Dimitri said, “too bad they don’t have to be carried.”

“We’ll need to get a good night’s sleep tonight. Tomorrow, we’re going to take advantage of this path. Now that we’re not having to beat our way through the brush, we need to pick up the pace.

“Slave driver,” Dimitri said as we huddled around the small fire. He reached into his pack, pulled out a bottle of his favorite Russian