by Stuart Gibbs
Erica jagged to the left a split second before Zoe pulled the trigger.
The grenade launcher boomed. The recoil was so hard that it threw Zoe and me backward into Mike. We sailed across the cabin and slammed into the far bulkhead.
The sudden turn of the plane had given us a slightly wider angle on the missile. Zoe’s shot was perfect. It nailed the warhead full on. The missile erupted into a fireball right behind us, so close that we were buffeted by the shockwave. Our tail tipped upward, and the jet slewed wildly as Erica fought to get it under control.
Several trees below us were charbroiled in the blast, but we escaped it.
Except for the shrapnel.
Large chunks of missile scattered in all directions. Several hit our plane, punching holes through the walls like they were made of tissue paper. One whistled right past my head, then left a gaping exit wound on the far side of the cabin. Within seconds, the jet looked like a flying piece of swiss cheese.
Our tail caught the worst of it. Red-hot debris nearly sheared it right off.
The jet shuddered worryingly. The controls trembled in Erica’s hands. “Crash positions everyone!” she announced. “I need to land this thing now!”
“Land it where?” Murray howled. “There’s nothing around us but jungle!”
“Not quite,” Erica said.
Through the cockpit window, I saw what she was looking at. In the midst of all the greenery, a slash of dark blue was quickly approaching.
“Um, Erica,” Mike said warily. “I hate to break it to you, but I don’t think this plane is designed for water landings.”
“Maybe not,” Erica agreed. “But I don’t see any other options. Hang on!”
We scrambled back through the perforated plane, threw ourselves into our seats, buckled up, and folded ourselves into crash positions. Even Murray stopped praying to do this.
Erica pushed the stick forward, bringing the jet down in as flat an angle as she could. Through a brand-new hole in the floor, I watched the terrain change from green to blue as the jungle ended and the lake began.
Zoe reached across the aisle. I took her hand in mine and held it as we quickly lowered toward the water.
Murray was reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
We skimmed across the surface of the water, then dropped down onto it. The plane jolted abruptly, as though Erica had slammed on the brakes. We were thrown forward against our seat belts once again. Anything that wasn’t bolted down flew toward the front of the jet and clanged off the bulkhead.
A wave exploded over the front window, and the jet shuddered to a stop.
We were alive.
We had a good three seconds to be thankful about that. Then the plane started sinking.
Water gushed through the numerous holes in the floor and sloshed through the open doorway. Within seconds we were ankle deep in the lake.
We hastily unbuckled our belts and scrambled from our seats. “Get my gear!” Erica ordered. “We’ll need it to survive!”
Mike hustled to the rear of the plane, opened the door to the luggage compartment—and found nothing there at all. The entire tail of the plane had snapped off during landing and was now twenty feet away, quickly disappearing beneath the surface. “The gear is gone!” Mike reported, then came running back up the aisle.
There was now more than a foot of water in the jet. It was going down fast.
“Abandon plane!” Murray announced. “Abandon plane!” When he got to the cabin door, however, Erica was standing in his path, blocking the exit. “Why aren’t you abandoning the plane?” Murray demanded.
“I’m a little concerned about the crocodiles,” Erica replied. She said it very calmly, as though she was talking about a pack of stray dogs, rather than a bunch of enormous, prehistoric man-eating reptiles.
I glanced out my window. We had skimmed all the way across the lake and almost made it to the far bank, which was lined with dozens of very large crocodiles. Until a few seconds before, they had been basking in the sun, but the plane crash had jolted them out of their stupor. Sensing easy prey, they were slithering into the lake and coming for us. It turned out, hungry crocodiles could move much faster than I’d realized. They raced toward us through the water, their beady little eyes poking just above the surface.
“Crocodiles?” Murray gasped, then turned his eyes to the heavens. “What did I ever do to deserve this?”
“Attempted murder, for one,” Zoe answered, then ticked more things off on her fingers. “Plus terrorism, assassination, destruction of public property, and being an all-around jerk. The question is really, what haven’t you done to deserve this?”
We were now up to our knees in water. The plane was tilting down and toward the left, where the lake was surging through the open door.
Erica scrambled to the opposite side of the plane and opened the emergency exit. Because of the tilt of the plane, this side was drier, with the right wing jutting up above the lake’s surface. Erica swung through the doorway onto the wing.
The rest of us followed her without hesitation. After all, Erica seemed to have a plan while we didn’t. (Well, I did have a plan, but it was simply swimming away from the crocodiles as quickly as I could and hoping they’d eat Murray first. Plus, I wasn’t sure it would work.)
More crocs were closing in on the right wing, but there was also a large tree with vine-draped branches extending out over the lake. The vines dangled seven feet above the tip of the wing, tantalizingly out of reach.
However, since the left side of the plane was sinking faster than the right, the right wing was slowly tilting upward. Erica edged out to the tip as it rose a few more inches, then leapt up and grabbed a low-hanging vine. She quickly shimmied up it into the branches of the tree, well out of crocodile range.
As she jumped, though, the wing trembled ominously. It had suffered serious damage in the crash and seemed ready to pop off. If we didn’t want that to happen, we’d all have to be very calm and careful.
Which was exactly the opposite of how Murray behaved. “I’m next!” he yelled, shoving the rest of us aside and racing up the wing. “Me me me me me!” Then he bounced on the wing like it was a diving board and grabbed a vine himself.
The wing shook wildly from his actions. Part of it tore from the hull of the plane with a sickening screech of rending metal.
Erica glared at Murray as he scrambled up into the branches, looking like she had half a mind to send him back down and tell him to wait his turn. Only, that wouldn’t have done the rest of us any good, and we were running out of time.
The broken wing dipped back down toward the surface of the lake. A crocodile the length of a car bobbed up only a few feet away from me, its mouth gaping open like a bear trap.
I heard some guttural reptile noises from behind me as well. Several crocs had swum through the open door of the plane and were now inside the cabin. One was gnawing on the grenade launcher.
Zoe and Mike went next. Since Zoe was short, Mike gave her a boost to get to the vines. Then he leapt up himself. He tried to do it carefully, without putting too much force on the wing, but it still quivered dangerously. More metal tore along the joint where the wing met the plane.
There was a sudden roar and a roiling of water inside the jet. Two big crocs were fighting each other for dibs on me.
I scurried out to the end of the wing, hoping it would hold long enough for me to jump off it.
It didn’t.
I had almost reached the tip when the wing tore from the jet hull and dropped back down to the lake’s surface with a resounding slap. The enormous crocodile who had been lurking close by wasted no time. It lunged from the water, dug its claws into the metal, and began hauling itself up. The two crocs who had been fighting inside the jet immediately put aside their differences, squeezed through the door of the plane, and flopped onto the wing as well.
Their added weight pulled it even farther down into the water.
A dozen more crocs surfaced around me.
When you chose to become a spy, in the back of your mind, you always knew there was a chance you could get killed by various things: guns, knives, bombs, missiles. Up until that morning, I had never considered crocodiles to be a possibility. But now it looked like Death by Crocodile was increasingly likely.
“Ben!” Erica yelled.
I tore my attention from the advancing reptiles to find Erica dangling upside down above me. She had hooked her knees over a branch, braced her feet below another one, and was reaching down to me like an acrobat hanging from a trapeze.
The closest croc was now only a few feet away and moving fast.
I leapt up and grabbed Erica’s hands. In the branches around her, Mike and Zoe struggled to pull her and me up into the tree.
As they lifted, the big croc lunged for me. I did the only thing I could think of.
I kicked it in the nose.
I gave the kick everything I had. It barely fazed the croc at all, but it prevented the beast from biting my legs off. It dropped back to the wing, sneezed, then sprang at me again.
Thankfully, my friends hauled me out of range just in time. The croc’s jaws snapped shut right beneath my toes. It plopped back into the water, then angrily turned on the other crocs nearby, roaring so loud it shook the tree. The smaller crocs quickly swam away in fear.
I found myself clustered with Zoe, Mike, and Erica in the branches, clinging to them with all my might, my heart thudding in my chest.
Below us, there was a final blorp of air as the jet sank beneath the surface of the lake. It quickly vanished into the murky depths.
Murray was picking his way through the branches ahead of us, working on saving his own skin without any thought for anyone else. Sensing our angry stares, he turned back to us with a sheepish smile. “Well, that sure was exciting, wasn’t it? Glad to see you all survived.”
“No thanks to you!” Zoe snarled. “You are the lowest, most despicable, slimiest weasel who ever walked the earth!” She swung through the branches as nimbly as a gibbon, quickly catching up to Murray. Even though he was bigger than her, she was amped up on anger and adrenaline. She slammed into him, grabbed him by the neck, and prepared to fling him into the lake, where several hungry crocodiles waited below.
“Stop!” Erica yelled.
Zoe reluctantly paused her attack. “Why?”
“We need him.”
“For what?” Zoe asked bitterly. “This whole thing was only a trick to get us on a plane and blast us out of the sky.”
“Not quite,” Erica insisted. “It wasn’t a lie that SPYDER is holed up somewhere down here.”
“How do you know?” Mike asked. “Murray’s lied about everything else.”
“But not this,” I said, realizing what Erica meant. “SPYDER fired that missile at us. And those pilots are certainly heading to rendezvous with them as well.”
“Exactly.” Erica turned to Murray. “You really thought you were going to SPYDER’s headquarters, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Murray mewled. “I thought I’d meet up with them after bailing out of the plane. I had no idea they wanted to kill me. Man, you can’t trust anyone these days.” Even though it made sense that he might only be saying this to save his skin, I believed him. Murray’s reaction to his betrayal had been too real.
“Good.” Erica picked her way through the branches, heading toward Murray, oblivious to the man-eating reptiles below us. “Okay, team, here’s the deal: We are in serious trouble. We might have survived for now, but we are still stranded in the middle of the jungle, and all our supplies just sank into the middle of Crocodile Central. I estimate our chances of survival at around fifty percent. And if we actually succeed in getting back to civilization, we still have to confront an adversary who obviously wants to eliminate us.”
“Excellent,” Mike said sarcastically. “Good pep talk, Erica.”
Erica ignored him. “There is one bright spot, though. SPYDER thinks we’re dead, which gives us an advantage against them.” She reached Murray, grabbed his wrist, and deftly wrenched his arm behind his back.
Murray yelped in pain.
“You know where they are,” Erica told him calmly. “So take us to them.”
6
ORIENTEERING
Somewhere in Quintana Roo, Mexico
March 29
1200 hours
“We’re in the wrong Mexico,” Mike said.
I turned to him, concerned. We had been hiking for hours, and even though there were trees to give us shade, the temperature was still broiling. I figured there was a good chance that Mike might have gone delirious from the heat. “What do you mean?”
“Whenever you see a commercial for Mexico, they never show this part,” Mike groused. “They always show these beautiful white-sand beaches, and quaint little towns, and fiestas full of happy people. They never show jungles and crocodiles and”—he paused to smack an insect on his arm—“clouds of mosquitoes. I want to be in the Mexico in the commercials. Not this one.”
“There are much worse parts of Mexico than this,” Erica pointed out. “If we’d gone down in one of the southern deserts, we probably would have fried to death by now. At least here, there’s shade and water.”
“I suppose,” Mike said, then added under his breath, “though this still stinks.”
I didn’t argue with him, as I was in complete agreement. It was a testament to how lousy our situation was that Mike was in such a grumpy mood. Normally, Mike was an unflappable optimist; I’d once heard him refer to a glass with a tiny bit of water in it as “almost one percent full.” But now, given our dire circumstances, all of us were miserable. In addition to nearly having died several times that morning alone, we were now lost in a jungle filled with poisonous snakes and malarial insects. The plant life was impenetrable and full of thorns; we constantly had to work our way around large thickets, which made our progress maddeningly slow. Meanwhile, all our phones, sunblock, and food had gone down with the plane. I was hot, sweaty, hungry, and exhausted. And yet there wasn’t any choice but to keep pushing onward.
There was only one positive to our circumstances: We were with Erica. If it hadn’t been for her, our situation would have been even worse.
We all knew how to survive in the wilderness, at least in theory. We had taken rudimentary courses in it at spy camp. But that didn’t mean we were prepared to survive. We weren’t. Erica, meanwhile, was prepared for almost anything.
As usual, she was wearing her utility belt. From it, she had produced a compass, a collapsible flask, and water-purification tablets, all of which had proven exceptionally useful. (Erica’s mother had recently bought me my own utility belt, though I had never taken the time to load it with survival supplies—not that it would have mattered, as I had also forgotten to bring it.) After we had climbed down from the tree, we had found a relatively crocodile-free section of the lake, filled the flask with water, and purified it. Once everyone had drunk their fill, Erica had determined that the best course toward the coast was north-northeast and led us that way. Most of the development in the Yucatán was along the water, and the missile had come from that direction as well, so Erica figured it was the best way to go.
Short of the compass, there was no other way to get our bearings. Once we had left the lake, the trees had become too spindly to climb, and the land was ridiculously flat; there wasn’t so much as a hill in any direction. Thankfully, we had found occasional pools of water along our route, so we had managed to allay the danger of dehydration for most of the morning.
Now, however, it had been well over an hour since we had last seen water. In the searing heat, whatever fluid I had in my body was quickly leaching out of my skin. I felt as though I could fry an egg on my forehead, while my tongue was like a dry lump of sawdust in my mouth.
There had been one moment, only fifteen minutes after starting our trek, when we had thought we might not have to walk at all. A helicopter had come skimming along above the trees, heading
for the lake where we’d crashed. Mike, Zoe, Murray, and I had assumed it was a rescue operation and wanted to flag it down, but Erica had refused. “It’s SPYDER,” she insisted. “Coming to confirm we’re dead. If you let them know we’re here, they’ll finish the job.” So we hid in the thick underbrush and watched the chopper through the leaves. When it reached the lake, it hovered over the point where the plane had sunk for a few minutes, as if the people on board were searching for signs of life, and then raced back toward where it had come from. That direction was north-northeast as well, the way we were already going, confirming that Erica had made the right call. We weren’t only heading toward civilization; we were heading toward SPYDER as well.
If we ever got there.
Mike and Zoe appeared to be suffering as much as I was, but Murray looked far worse. His upbeat, cocksure persona had vanished. He was a shell of his former self, and he made no secret of how miserable he was. He shuffled his feet through the dirt, pausing every now and then to moan despondently. He didn’t even bother to swat the mosquitoes away.
Finally, somewhere around moan number 362, Zoe snapped. “All right!” she screamed at him. “We get it! You’re unhappy! Will you shut up?”
“No,” Murray replied morosely. “I deserve to be unhappy. I just found out SPYDER wants me dead.”
“Big deal,” Mike said. “SPYDER wants all of us dead.”
“Yes,” Murray conceded. “But you already knew that. I thought these people liked me. I thought they were my friends! And now it turns out, they felt I was expendable.”
“Really sucks to get betrayed by people you trusted, doesn’t it?” I asked pointedly.
“I’m well aware of the irony here.” Murray stepped over a log, acting like this small act was as exhausting as climbing Mount Everest. “But that doesn’t make it any less upsetting. I know why they wanted you dead. You’re the good guys! You’re the enemy! But why would they want me dead? I’m Murray! I’m fun! I’m charming! And clever! A lot of their evil plots would have gone nowhere without me.”
“They didn’t go anywhere anyhow,” Zoe said. “Ben and Erica always thwarted them.”