Beneath a Southern Sky - By Deborah Raney Page 0,78
speak over the lump in his throat. “Nathan Camfield. Dr. Nathan Camfield. I’m a missionary to the Timoné village two days downriver.” Now the words poured out in a rush. “I’ve been held captive here for… What’s the date?”
The man looked at the bulky watch he was wearing. “It’s the sixth.”
“No, what month?”
The American scratched his beard. “How long have you been here, man?”
“I don’t know. I-I’ve lost track. It was late July when I came.”
“July? Are you sure? It’s April.”
Had he been here less than a year? It seemed much longer, a lifetime. “My wife… I left her at Timoné. Can you take me there?”
“Briggs!” he shouted at the man guarding Juan Mocoa. “We’ve got a problem!”
The two men conferred quietly while Nate stood outside his prison hut. Excitement rose in him as he thought of the possibility that these men might be his way out. He guessed—by their coarse language and the fact that they had business with the likes of Juan Mocoa—that they were involved in the lucrative drug trafficking that thrived in the area, but surely their sense of decency would persuade them to help a fellow American.
From their coded conversation Nate surmised that Juan Mocoa had been employed as a courier for their business. Mocoa’s greed had done him in. He had apparently tried to get a piece of the action for himself, and now, in spite of giving up the location of his secret cache, it seemed they didn’t forgive easily.
Nate watched them carefully, knowing that Juan Mocoa’s fate might determine his own. Red Beard started for the river and motioned for Nate to follow him. But before he had taken ten steps, Nate heard the sickening sound of a gunshot fired at close range.
Three hours later, Nate sat in a small flat boat, the putt-putt-putt of the outboard motor the sweetest music his ears had ever heard. He leaned against the filthy canvas tarp at the back of the boat, trying not to think about the heavy bundles the tarp concealed. He might be dreaming, yet never had his dreams conjectured fleeing Chicoro on a boat loaded with cocaine and piloted by drug traffickers. If this was real—and he prayed it was—God did indeed work in mysterious ways.
Juan Mocoa had paid a traitor’s price and now lay rotting on the floor of the rain forest. But the fact that Nate was now on-board this boat seemed to indicate that the Americans had no intention of harming him. Still he understood that his passage with them depended on his silence.
He remembered the way Mocoa had kept his guards well supplied with cigarettes and rum, and he speculated on Juan Mocoa’s motivation to keep him captive in Chicoro. Perhaps because Nate was an American, Mocoa worried that he was sympathetic to the cartel Mocoa had defrauded, the one that now provided Nate passage on this boat. Or perhaps Mocoa simply feared that if Nathan were released, he would report him to the national authorities and ruin his successful little private enterprise.
His mind reeled with all that had happened, and confusion spun a web around his brain. Perhaps he would never know exactly why he had been held here. And yet, as this place of his captivity faded into the distance, one fact gave him peace, one truth made sense of the senseless. He had remained faithful. And he had shared the object of that faith with every villager who had come near his humble prison. Every guard, every youth who delivered a gourd of water or a rice-filled leaf to his hut had heard the name of Jesus. In spite of the language barrier, he had made every effort to point them to the one, true God Almighty. Perhaps that had been God’s purpose in this all along.
As the boat entered the wide part of the river and picked up speed, Nathan began to tremble. A spate of adrenaline and renewed hope coursed through his veins, but he was weak from the extended lack of exercise and proper nutrition and from the ongoing effects of the injuries he had suffered in the fire. As a doctor, he recognized that his health was in a gravely compromised state. He felt panic rising within him at the thought of Daria in captivity. Could she have survived the type of imprisonment he had endured? His mind simply could not sort through all the possibilities.
In the front of the boat, the two Americans shouted back and forth over the