Snakehead

now.
    And how had they known?
    “There was a beacon inside the heel of one of your sneakers.”
    His sneakers.
    Alex looked down at them. All the color had faded, and they were ragged, full of holes. Was it possible, what he was thinking? Could it possibly be true? Alex had been given the sneakers when he was on the aircraft carrier that had picked him up when he first landed in Australia. The beacon had been added by Colonel Abbott when he was staying with the SAS in Swanbourne.
    He was wearing the same sneakers now.
    He had been given a complete change of clothes by Cloudy Webber when she had dressed him as an Afghan—but the shoes hadn’t fit him, so she had allowed him to keep his own. He hadn’t changed again until his dinner with Major Yu. He had worn the English designer shirt and jeans until he had arrived at the hospital. There had been fresh clothes in his room. But neither Major Yu nor Dr. Tanner had provided him with new footwear. So the beacon that he had been given in Swanbourne must still be on him. It wouldn’t be working. It had been designed for short-range use.
    But it might be battery-operated.
    Alex fought back the surge of excitement. He was too afraid of being disappointed. He leaned down and pulled the sneakers off so that he could examine them. If there was a tracking device, it would have to be buried in one of the heels. There was nowhere else to hide it. Alex turned the shoes over. The soles were made of rubber, and he couldn’t see any openings or anything that looked like a secret compartment. He pulled out the insoles. And that was when he found it. It was in the left shoe, directly over the heel: a flap that had been cut into the fabric and then sealed.
    It took Alex ten minutes to get it open, using his fingers, his teeth, and a sharp stone from the riverbank. As he worked, he knew that this might all be for nothing. The battery had been there for two weeks. It might be dead. It surely wouldn’t fit the transmitter in the watch anyway. But the chances of finding a second battery in the Australian outback had been zero to begin with. Alex found it hard to believe that he had been carrying it all the time.
    He pulled open the flap and there it was—the little pack of circuitry that had been designed to save his life during the bombardment in Swanbourne. And there was the power source too, a straightforward lithium battery, about twice the size of the one that should have been fitted into the watch. Alex eased it out and held it in the palm of his hand as if it were a nugget of pure gold. All he had to do was connect it. He had no screwdriver, no conductor, no metal contacts, nothing. Easy!
    In the end, he broke two spikes off a nearby shrub and used them as miniature tweezers to pry out some of the wires from inside the heel of the shoe. It seemed to take forever, and as the sun climbed higher, he felt the sweat trickling down his forehead, but he didn’t stop to rest. Painstakingly, he unstitched the inside of the radio beacon until he had two lengths of wire, each one barely more than an inch long. Did the battery still have any life? He rubbed the wires against it, and to his delight, he was rewarded by a tiny spark. So now all he had to do was connect the battery to the watch, using a couple of pebbles to keep everything in place. There really was nothing more he could do. He set the battery next to the watch with the wires trailing inside, the two of them feeding precious electricity into the transmitter, and balanced the entire thing on a rock. After that, he went and lay down in the shadow of a tree. Either the transmitter was working now or it wasn’t. He would find out soon enough.
    A few minutes later he was sound asleep.

21
    ATTACK FORCE
    A LEX WAS WOKEN BY the sound of a helicopter. For a moment he was filled with dread, fearing that the Bell UH-1D had returned. If that were the case, he would let them take him. He simply didn’t have in him to fight anymore. There was nothing left with which to fight back. But squinting into the sun, he saw at once that this was a bigger helicopter with two sets of rotors: a Chinook. And there was a figure already leaning out of the front door.
    Blue eyes. Short black hair. A handsome, slightly boyish face. It was Ben Daniels.
    Alex clambered to his feet as the Chinook landed on a patch of scrubland a short distance away. He went over to it, taking care where he put his bare feet. It would be just his luck to step on a death