Page 51 of A Very Happy Thanksgiving
Although I hadn’t been in Indonesia for long, I’d quickly learned that meant “shut up.”
“We have company,” I whispered into my mic. “At least two.”
The prickles on the back of my neck turned to needles that stabbed me in the spine as I felt the visitors coming closer.
Closer.
My sixth sense hadn’t been misfiring over Marc. No, there was something else in this forest, and suddenly, the kooks from Wild Roots weren’t our biggest problem anymore. My gut felt as if it were being squeezed by a giant hand, and I knew, I just fucking knew, there were more hostiles in these trees.
Slowly, silently, I slid my comms unit out of my pocket and sent a two-word message: Code Shark.
Soon after our team’s inception, the members of the Choir had created our own rating system, kind of like DEFCON, but less boring. Bear, shark, lion, crocodile, and hippo, in that order. The most dangerous animals in the world? Not quite—that would have been mosquito, man, freshwater snail, snake, and assassin bug. But we’d all agreed that being trapped in a room with a snail would hardly be terrifying, so we’d switched things around. I’d argued in favour of “snake” because being stuck in a room with a shark wouldn’t be scary either, not unless the room was filled with water, and then we’d have a bigger problem than an oversized fish. But Dice, with her menagerie of pet snakes, had vetoed their inclusion, so “shark” it was.
Anyhow, Code Shark meant there was a problem, a big one, and I hoped someone would clue Emmy in through her earpiece because I couldn’t exactly explain right now.
Echo responded first, probably because she was never more than three feet from an array of electronic devices.
“I’m here, but I don’t have eyes. There won’t be a satellite over your location for sixty-seven minutes. Can you talk?”
Click click.
I followed up with a message:
Me
Tell Heath to get Marc and Serena out of there. Fast.
If this situation went south the way I feared it was about to, they were sitting ducks. Echo relayed my words, and down below, the bush rustled unnaturally.
Then a whisper.
“Frank’s looking out the window. I need to hold.”
Fuck.
I couldn’t talk, but I could launch the hummingbird. I slid the case out of my backpack and powered her up just as Storm came online.
“Howdy, folks. Is that the hummingbird? You want me to fly her?”
Click.
Lag didn’t matter for surveillance the way it did for targeting, and I needed to keep my wits about me and my hands free. Backup was thirty minutes away, allegedly. The bird flew off with Storm at the controls, and I settled into a crouch and focused.
The hostiles were moving past me now, two of them, slipping through the trees with a reasonable degree of stealth. They were used to this.
“Friend or foe?” I whispered.
Could they be military? The Indonesian authorities were assisting with the search—had wires gotten crossed, and they’d come to reconnoitre a property already allocated to us?
“I’ll check into that,” Priest said.
Storm began narrating. “Two hostiles at your three o’clock. I don’t have the best view through the canopy, but they look like males.”
Priest took over, the only member of the ground team who could talk freely. “Stay high; look at the bigger picture.”
In the house, Emmy kept up a stream of chatter about her Indonesian vacay and the shitty places she’d stayed. But she managed to slip in a few snippets of information.
“…are the three of you digital nomads? Influencers? Who else brings a laptop to paradise?”
