to feel around. After a moment Susan joins him.
"Wish we had a light," Jacob mutters under his breath. "Maybe turn on that laptop –"
"Here," Susan says. "Look. There's a phone."
Green monochrome light blooms inside the hut, emanating from the clamshell cell phone Susan holds. Jacob kneels beside a tangle of wires, plastic and metal at the edge of the room.
"Here we go," he says triumphantly. "Car batteries. Must be seriously jury-rigged. But it will do if there's any juice left."
He takes up two wires. A spark flickers between his hands, then another, and another; then three more, with longer pauses between; then three more, in quick succession.
"What are you doing?" Tom asks.
"Turning it off and on again."
"That's all? That's our signal?" Veronica feels betrayed.
"Morse code," Jacob clarifies. "I'm doing some SOSes. Then I'll tell them what's happening, our names, everything."
"Them who?"
He hesitates. "Hard to say. The NSA is supposed to pick up every satellite signal on Earth, and they should be looking for us. Also the satellite company might pick up on it, lots of guys who work there are ham-radio types, they'll know Morse code when they see it, and they probably have the lat-long coordinates of this dish. I never said this was guaranteed. But it's a chance."
Veronica doesn't complain. Some hope is infinitely better than none. She goes back around the building, just to be sure, and when she sees a little green LED winking on and off above the dish, her heart soars. It seems incredible that they can communicate across the world with nothing but that box full of electronics, the ceramic dish below, and the few stacked car batteries inside the building.
Susan joins her, still holding the terrorists' phone, now folded and dark. They wait in silence. A long time seems to pass before Jacob emerges from the building.
"OK," he says shakily. "Might as well stop, I'm getting too sloppy."
"What do we do now?" Tom asks.
"Run. And pray."
* * *
Jacob staggers with every step, and in the growing predawn light Veronica can see his face and arms are covered with blood and muck. She supposes she looks much the same. The world has begun to swim dizzily around her. Her throat is as dry as desert rock, she aches for water. She keeps having to reach for branches and tree trunks to steady herself. Luckily there is no shortage of those, and she has been pierced by so many jungle thorns in the last few hours that she has almost stopped feeling their white-hot bites. Behind them, Tom, Judy, and Susan trudge mechanically onwards through the thick and trackless African bush.
"I don't understand why they keep biting me," Jacob groans. "I can't possibly have any blood left."
Veronica says, "We all have malaria by now. Guaranteed."
"Ten-day onset time. If we're still alive in ten days I will treat cerebral malaria as a cause for rampant celebration."
They reach another thicket so dense it is practically a wall. Veronica wants to go around, but murderous gunmen are surely on their trail already, and they have decided to continue due east no matter what, for fear of going around in circles. She groans, covers her head with her arms, and forces herself into the bush.
The vegetation around here isn't like Bwindi. This soil is too stony to support huge canopy trees. Instead, low palms and vine-covered leafy trees stand above an amazingly dense underbrush of ferns and grasses, which in turn conceal creeper vines or thorn bushes that seem to reach out with stealthy fingers to grasp at passing ankles. The trees block out most but not all of the sun's dawning light. They have heard a few rustles of animals fleeing their noisy approach, and once something small and slimy, probably a frog, bounced off Veronica's arm, but there have otherwise been no signs of animate life. Unless she counts mosquitoes. Their ceaseless buzzing and biting threatens to drive her mad.
"Hey," Jacob says wonderingly. He has stopped walking and is staring up into the air. "You guys hear something?"
"Yes," Tom grunts. "Mozzies."
"No. Listen. I think I hear a plane."
Everyone stops and looks into the sky. Veronica realizes he's right, not all the buzzing is insectile, there's an airplane approaching - and suddenly it flashes past, white as a cloud, half-obscured by palm leaves, maybe a thousand feet above the ground. They glimpse it just long enough to register its odd shape. Its wings seem very long and narrow for its body, and two wide struts extend downwards