Snakehead

surrounded by stubby, dwarflike trees that he couldn’t name, a few boulders, and some termite mounds. There was a sweet smell—something like moldering wood—in the air. And that was all. If nowhere had a middle, this was it.
    There was nothing he could do. Nobody was going to operate on him, but he would die anyway—either from starvation or disease. Assuming, of course, that a saltwater crocodile or a snake didn’t get him first. Alex wiped a grimy hand across his face. It seemed to him that from the moment this mission had begun, nothing had gone right. He had never been in control. He cast his mind back to the office in Sydney and Ethan Brooke outlining what he would have to do. He was there to provide cover, that was all. It was going to be easy. Instead of which, he had been thrown into the worst two weeks of his life. God! He should have listened to Jack Starbright!
    He looked again at the mountains. It would take him forty-eight hours to reach them at the very least. Too long. And why should he assume anyone lived there? He hadn’t seen any roads or houses from the plane. If only he could get in touch with MI6. He glanced at his wrist. Miraculously, despite the battering it had taken, the watch was still in place. The question was—why hadn’t it worked? Smithers had built it for him personally. The watch must be sending out a signal. So what possible reason could MI6 have to ignore it? Alex remembered his meeting with Mrs. Jones and Ben Daniels—Fox, as he had once been known. Alex couldn’t believe that the SAS man would let him down. So what had gone wrong?
    He took the watch off and examined it. Although it looked cheap and tacky, like something he might have gotten in a street market in Afghanistan, the watch would have been built to last. The strap must have been strong to survive the journey over the Bora Falls, and Alex guessed the case would be waterproof. The hands were still showing eleven o’clock. Alex turned it over. There was a groove going all the way around the underside. He realized that the back must screw off. He pressed his thumb against it and twisted. The case opened with surprising ease.
    The watch contained some complicated microcircuitry that Smithers must have designed and installed. It was completely dry. There was no evidence of any water seeping in. The whole thing was powered by a battery, which should have been sitting in a circular compartment, right in the middle.
    But there was no battery. The compartment was empty.
    So that was the answer, the reason why his signal hadn’t been heard. There had been no signal. But how could it have happened? Smithers had always been on his side. It was completely unlike him to forget something so basic. Alex had to fight back a wave of fury. His whole life snatched away from him simply because of a missing battery!
    For a moment, Alex was tempted to fling the watch into the river. He never wanted to see the wretched thing again.
    For a long time he didn’t move. He let the sun beat down on him, drying out his clothes. A few flies buzzed around his face, but he ignored them. He found himself playing back everything that had happened to him…the waterfall, the flight through the rapids, the moment he had set the hospital ablaze. Had it really all been for nothing? And before that, his dinner with Major Yu, the chase on the Liberian Star , the discovery of Royal Blue, the toy warehouse in Jakarta, and the arrival of Kopassus.
    No battery!
    He remembered his time in Bangkok with Ash and the story he had been told about his father in Malta. That was the only reason he had agreed to all this, to learn something about himself. Had it been worth it? Probably not. The truth was that Ash had disappointed him. His godfather. Alex had hoped he would have been more of a friend, but despite all the time they had spent together, he had never really gotten to know him. Ash was too much of a mystery—and from the very start he had set out to trick Alex. That business on the beach in Perth.
    He remembered his first sight of Ash, dressed as a soldier and carrying an assault rifle, looming out of the darkness as Alex stood on a fake mine in the middle of a fake barrage. How could they have done that to him? It had all been a test.
    “You weren’t in any real danger. We knew exactly where you were all the time.”
    That was what Ash had told him that first night at the Peninsula Hotel, sitting out at the swimming pool. Alex remembered it