Crocodile Tears

Nairobi and spoke fluent English. McCain took one last look at all that remained of his fiancée. A single tear stole out of his eye and crept down his cheek. He wiped it away with the back of his hand.
    Also on the table was a scrap of material, part of Alex’s shirt. McCain examined it. “What about this?”
    he asked.
    “ It was in the same place.”
    “ By the river.”
    “ Yes, sir.”
    McCain held the shirt in his huge hands, tugging at it with his fingers. It had been more than two hours since he had noticed that Myra was missing and had sent out his men to find her. They had come back with this. What could possibly have happened? He had left her standing on the observation platform, waiting for the child to come to the end of his strength and to fall as, inevitably, he must. There was no way that Alex Rider would have been able to reach her. Nor could he have escaped. It had all been too carefully arranged. And yet there was something …
    “ There is no blood on this shirt,” he said. “We’ve been tricked. Somehow, the child got away.”
    Njenga said nothing. The rule here was to speak only when it was essential.

    “ He can’t have gone far, even with a two-hour start. He has nowhere to go. He won’t have crossed the river, not knowing what’s in it. So it should be a simple matter to track him down.” McCain had come to a decision. “I want you to take the men—all of them—and set off after him. I’m not asking anything clever. I want you to bring him back to me alive if you possibly can. I would like to have the pleasure of finishing this once and for all. But if you think he’s going to get away, then kill him and bring me back his head. Do you understand? This time, I want to be sure.”
    “ Yes, sir.” Njenga showed no concern about killing and decapitating a child. All that mattered to him was the money that would come to him at the end of the month.
    “ Go now. Don’t come back until the job is done.”
    A few minutes later they all left, twelve men carrying a variety of weapons, including spears, knives, and machetes. Half of them had guns. Njenga himself carried a German-manufactured Sauer 202 bolt-action hunting rifle equipped with a Zeiss Conquest scope. He knew he could shoot the eye of an antelope out at two hundred yards. He had done so many times.
    They found two tracks at the river. The first one went into the bush and came back again. The second, which was much clearer, headed off toward the north. This was the path they chose. Alex Rider had a two-hour start, but they were Kikuyu tribesmen. They were taller, faster, and stronger than him. They knew the land.
    They set off at a fast run, dodging through the undergrowth, confident that they’d catch up with him in no time at all.

Chapter 23: SIMBA DAM

    THE BIRDS PERCHED HIGH UP in the camphor tree were definitely vultures. The shape was unmistakable—the long necks and the bald heads—and the way they sat, hunched up and still. There were about ten of them, ranged across the branches, black against the afternoon sky. But the question Alex had to ask himself was: Were they waiting for him?
    He had no idea how long he had been running for, but he knew he couldn’t go on much longer. He was dehydrated and close to exhaustion, his arms covered in scratches, his face burned by the African sun.
    The bits of his school uniform that he was still wearing couldn’t have been less well suited to this sort of terrain. The black polyester pants trapped the heat, and his lace-up dress shoes had caused him to slip twice. Each time he had come crashing down to the ground, he had wearily reminded himself that there was a bomb strapped to his back. Not that he could have forgotten it. The weight of Rahim’s backpack was dragging him down, the straps cutting into his shoulders. Well, if the bomb went off, the vultures would have their feast. It would just come in snack-sized pieces.
    The journey should have been simple. After all, he had seen where he had to go from the air.
    Unfortunately, the landscape looked very different at ground level when he was stuck in the middle of it. The sudden rising hills, the thick vegetation, the spiky shrubs that forced him to turn another way …
    all these had been flattened out when he was in the Piper Cub. The bush had swallowed him up. The dam, the pylons, the track had all disappeared.

    He had to rely on the map and his own sense of direction. To start with, he had kept the river on his