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amorphous as some kind of mental and emotional breakdown ticked him off.
    It was a fact that the months spent in captivity hadn’t been a picnic. From beginning to end, what had happened had been a prime example of bad timing and bad luck.
    The assignment to escort an Indonesian government official to the small village of Tengai hadn’t been high-risk, or even particularly interesting. Carter had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Two rival rebel factions had chosen that particular village to clash. When the shooting started, Carter had kept to task and protected the official, but when they had finally made it out of the building, their transport and backup were gone.
    If they’d stayed inside and kept out of sight, in all probability they would have been in the clear, but one of the village children had been cut up by a ricochet and Carter had started to treat him. Two of the rebels who were still holed up in the village had accosted Carter at gunpoint, ignored the government official and demanded Carter leave with them.
    They didn’t want to kidnap a bureaucrat. What they needed was a trained medic.
    After stripping the official of his suit, his watch and all of his cash, the men had herded Carter into the jungle, his weaponry, communications equipment and medical kit confiscated along with his boots.
    Apart from the restricted diet—crazily enough, stolen army rations—and the hours spent kicking his heels under armed guard, nothing horrific had happened. He had been too useful. He’d treated two of the rebels for gunshot wounds, delivered a baby and dealt with a minor outbreak of dysentery. When he’d finally managed to slip away at night, four months after capture, all he’d had were his clothes, a knife he’d managed to steal and the remnants of his medical kit.
    Without a compass—and travelling beneath a canopy that blocked both the sun and stars, burying him in either a soupy half light or impenetrable darkness—he had ended up travelling in a circle and had practically walked back into the rebel camp. A sentry had spotted him and fired, but the fact that he’d been hit at all was a miracle, and the sentry himself didn’t register the hit. The rebels as a force were canny and elusive, but they weren’t trained soldiers. They relied on surprise and the threat of their weapons—not accuracy.
    A brief search was conducted, then abandoned, and Carter was able to put some distance between himself and the camp. After that, things had gotten a little hazy. He’d injected himself with morphine, lain up for a day, strapped his leg with his shirt then started to walk. The next day he’d found a small settlement and managed to get some food and water. With the help of the village midwife he’d extracted the bullet then had spent the next three days on his back in a small tin shack fighting off a fever.
    With his leg heavily bandaged and seeping, Carter had been escorted by one of the villagers to the next village further down the valley, on the verge of the Kalimantan Lowlands. It was there he’d gotten the news that a private team was looking for him—not the army rescue squad he’d expected.
    Apparently, after political pressure exerted by the government official who had been left kicking his heels in Tengai, the peacekeeping unit had been forced to withdraw from Borneo. The irony that the official he had been commissioned to protect from the rebels had left him hanging out to dry wasn’t lost on Carter. Lately, with his luck, crossing the road had become dangerous.
    Carter brought the truck to a halt in front of the sprawling, one-storied house, perched on a bluff above the bay. The house, which he’d bought from his parents along with the farm, was old and comfortable, hemmed by verandas and large sweeping lawns. A cooling breeze rustled through a clump of oleanders, the scent of the jasmine that grew wild in the