Page 69 of Over the Edge

“Some of our people went missing. Haven’t checked in.”

Mansur choked and coughed. Anna leaned over to slap him hard on the back and mutter, “Hold it together.”

Over Mansur’s ongoing coughs, she said to the militiaman, “Our bodyguard in the Jeep behind us will pay any road maintenance or security fees.”

“It’s not a Jeep,” the thug responded archly.

She knew the difference between an American-made Jeep and a British-manufactured Range Rover, of course.

The thug passed out of sight and Mansur stared in his side-mounted rearview mirror. “He’s talking with your boyfriend.”

“Trevor is not my boyfriend,” she snapped.

“Had me fooled. The way he looks at you—it’s like he’ll tear apart any man who comes near you.”

Really? Twenty-four hours ago, she’d have been over the moon to hear that. Now, she didn’t know how to feel about it. Trevor hadditchedher without even a good-bye. Even after—

—Best not to go there, right now. When she stopped long enough to really think about it, she was going to be royally ticked off.

“Okay, the Englishman is passing a wad of cash to the border guard,” Mansur reported. “Here comes the guard. Look natural,” Mansur whispered.

The more natural anyone tried to look, the more guilty they inevitably looked. Thankfully, the guard merely lifted the flimsy gate across the road and waved them forward.

After that, the road deteriorated into a two-lane track. The terrain was stony, and the tracks they drove in were gray stone with a dusty strip of dead grass between them.

“Is this considered to be a road in this part of the world?” she asked Mansur.

“This is a reasonably good road, in fact. The dirt tracks are the bad ones. In the dry season they’re so dusty you can hardly see where you’re going, and in the wet season, they’ll mire down all but the stoutest vehicles.”

They banged along the rocky tracks for the rest the afternoon. As the sun set behind the mountains looming around them now, Anna asked her companion, “Do you plan to stop for the night?”

“We’ll have to. We won’t make the Bagva Pass before full dark, and you don’t want to go through there in anything but broad daylight.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“Somebody’s bound to shoot you.”

“Is there a village nearby where we can stop?” she queried.

Mansur considered. “If we head north at the next intersection, there’s a village up that way a bit.”

She turned on her headphone and waved out her window to indicate to Trevor that he should turn on his headset as well. Until they found a way to recharge the current batteries or buy new ones, they were preserving the energy the headsets had now.

“What’s up?” Trevor asked.

“Mansur says there’s a village north of the next intersection. Do you want to stop there for the night?”

“Absolutely not. I trust the locals less than I trust Mansur. And I think he’s bloody toxic.”

“Fair enough. What’s the plan then?”

“Satellite imagery shows a patch of trees a few miles in front of us. Plenty of cover to camp in, tonight. We’ll stop there.”

They did, indeed, drive into a forested area before long, and Anna directed Mansur to pull off onto a small side track. They followed it up a mountainside for a little ways, and Trevor flashed the headlights behind them, indicating that they should stop.

They pulled both vehicles off the path, such as it was, and drove behind clumps of thick brush. The camouflage wasn’t perfect, but the vehicles weren’t obvious to the casual observer passing by.

Anna climbed down from the truck, stiff and sore.

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