Instinct: A Chess Team Adventure - By Jeremy Robinson Page 0,135

run out of air. He would surface with them and then fire. It would be easy.

King turned forward and swam hard ahead of the group, making for the glint of metal he’d seen. Lightning shot through the sky again and he saw it just beneath him. He reached out, fumbled, and then wrapped his hands around the familiar object. He turned forward just as the team headed for the surface.

The Chess Team’s tactic had been to rise as one, possibly confusing Weston by giving him multiple targets, but as they watched him rise with them, each one of them realized his aim would be true.

Sara would fall first.

But if they didn’t rise to take a breath, all would drown.

King pushed hard against the river bottom and shot up like a torpedo. He breached the surface before the others and took aim with Rook’s lost .50-caliber Desert Eagle, clutching it in both hands.

The taste of silty fresh water filled his mouth as he took a breath. His eyes caught sight of Weston’s head cresting like a rising submarine as Sara neared the surface. The sight of Weston’s head rising held his gaze with laserlike focus. He pulled the trigger as Weston rose, pulling his own trigger a fraction of a second later. Weston’s shot went wild as he was flung backward.

All but Sara rose from the river in time to see Weston’s face implode and exit through the back of his skull. His body fell flat and shifted to the side of the river, where it bounced off the wall.

The hybrids above wailed, calling out for their father. But his body, now stuck against a branch, lay still and unmoving.

Their father was dead.

They stood still at the cliff’s edge, their pursuit forgotten, and mourned him.

The old mothers, however, barely flinched. They weren’t interested in the father. Their eyes were on Rook.

Sara surfaced, sputtering and looking for danger. King joined her.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Where’s Weston?”

King held up the magnum and checked the magazine. Empty. “Dead.” Returning his gaze to the old mothers, he wondered when they would make a move. By the time they freed themselves from the river, they’d be too exhausted to run very far, let alone fight.

“Knight,” King called out. “Where does this river go?”

“It runs southwest through Laos and into Cambodia.”

“Past Anh Dung?”

Knight thought about it, recalling the map he’d taken from the maze chamber and cross-referencing it mentally with the maps of the region he’d memorized on the flight over. “Yeah, it does.”

King nodded. That’s where they’d stand their ground against the old mothers.

Birthplace of Brugada.

A village plagued by death.

Unwitting guinea pigs to Weston’s observations.

Home to a field full of land mines.

Anh Dung.

They would finish this where it all began.

SIXTY-FIVE

THE CHASE TURNED into a surreal, slow-moving event. The river had widened and the flow had dwindled to the speed of a casual Sunday drive. The Neanderthal women ambled along the riverside cliff casually, now only ten feet above the water, as they gave chase to what Rook now referred to as their “Great White Hope,” aka himself.

The storm had ebbed some in the past ten minutes, but flashes of lightning still lit up the sky, shaking the world around them and filling the air with the scent of ozone.

Since Weston’s death there hadn’t been any sign of the hybrids.

The group had taken to lying flat on their backs, going with the flow and trying to rest before they made their move. And that moment seemed to grow closer every second as water poured into the river from hundreds of fast-moving rivulets, each contributing to the rising water level. They’d passed under several fallen trees that the Neanderthals most likely used to cross the river. Each time they’d passed under, the old mothers tried plucking them from the water. But their short arms couldn’t reach. With the water level rising, however, they would soon be able to pluck the team out of the water like pickles from a jar.

King estimated they’d traveled at least two miles from the mountain and the ancient hidden city of Meru. Thunder rumbled again, but sounded different somehow. Distant, yet continuous, and somehow odd. Then it occurred to King that the thunder hadn’t been preceded by a flash of lightning.

Queen said aloud what he was thinking. “That’s not thunder.”

The group leaned up and began to tread water again, looking up-river. They couldn’t feel it in the water, but they could see it. A wave of energy flew through the ground, shaking trees