by WW Mortensen
“Shall I take first watch?” Sanchez asked.
Ed sat on some deadfall at the rim of the fire pit they’d dug into the moist soil of the forest floor. He shook his head. “No, I’ll do it. I’m too excited for sleep. You get some rest.”
Sanchez nodded, and moved to the tent.
“You know, this is as far as he got,” Ed said.
Sanchez turned, smiling. “Wake me in four hours.”
Ed watched him disappear and swivelled again to the brooding jungle. Beyond the fire-glow, the totem’s silhouette rose a dozen feet or more, black like the surrounding trees. A surge of adrenaline flooded his veins. Was this real? Or was it some waking vision of the dream that had possessed him for most of his adult life?
Reaching into his shirt pocket, Ed retrieved the cloth bundle he always kept on his person. Unwrapped, the stone disc seemed small and insignificant. He turned it reverently, every curve and indentation imprinted in memory. The disc was warm to the touch.
Pocketing the object, he got up, needing to relieve himself. He walked to a kapok tree several yards from the campfire. Slung over his shoulder was the Weatherby. He removed the rifle and leaned it against the tree’s thick bole.
Unzipping, he looked up through the tangled branches. The rain had stopped. Finally! In all the excitement he hadn’t noticed. Meagre gaps in the canopy revealed twinkling stars and a pale moon. He closed his eyes. Though the drizzle had stopped, a constant, enveloping patter came to his ears as water dripped through the leaves. The sound was familiar and would resonate long into the night, much like beautiful music. Zipping up again, he returned to the fire and reclined. For the first time in days—weeks—he felt at peace.
The hairs on his arms stood up. He wasn’t alone.
Ed sat up quickly and looked past the fire, into the undergrowth.
Staring back at him, reflected in the firelight not ten feet away, were two large, round eyes.
Ed’s blood ran cold in a flooding rush. Obscured by foliage, he couldn’t identify the species of animal, even at such close range, but its stare was intense and calculating. His heart pounded. A jaguar?
Fearing to break eye contact, he fumbled blindly for the rifle.
He couldn’t find it. It wasn’t there.
Shit. He’d left it by the tree.
Still, it stared.
Where was the damn flashlight?
He panicked, and for the briefest of moments glanced away. Both the flashlight and rifle were right at his side—he’d been reaching too far.
When he turned back, the eyes had vanished.
Ed’s heart skipped a beat. He tensed, listening for movement, twigs breaking, leaves rustling. Anything. But there was nothing. Quickly, he stood and played the beam of the flashlight across the foliage.
Something wasn’t right. He couldn’t see the animal, but whatever it was, it was there; he could feel it peering back at him from the darkness as he stood clearly bathed in the glow of the fire. Carefully, he put the rifle to his shoulder and aimed it into the night.
He stood like that for an age, tensed and unmoving. Finally, poor judgement got the better of him.
Slowly, he moved into the jungle.
• • •
Robert Sanchez woke with a start—and knew immediately that something was wrong.
He lay frozen, not daring to breathe.
Water dripped from above, splashing on the nylon. It had stopped raining. Besides the dripping, there was an eerie silence.
Where were the insects? The usual sounds of the forest? The forest was never this hushed.
Slowly, he sat up, reaching quietly for the insect mesh. The sound of the zip as it opened was impossibly loud.
Outside, the fire had burned low. Ed was gone.
“Amigo,” he called softly, not daring to raise his voice.
No answer.
He crawled from the tent and called again. Still no answer. Though he carried a flashlight, his eyes had adjusted to the darkness and he refrained from using it. He took two steps forward… and then tensed, his skin prickling.
He was being stalked.
Years ago, he had been trailed by a puma; it hadn’t attacked, and indeed, he’d heard only its occasional soft footfall and caught glimpses of it through the underbrush. But it had watched him, and he’d fled its territory with it close behind. He would never forget the sensation he’d felt even before he was aware of its presence; a perception beyond the normal senses that had warned him he was in danger. The same awareness that makes the deer run before it sees the hunter.
The exact sensation that led him to believe there was an animal in the bushes watching his every movement.
Cautiously, he moved nearer the smouldering fire, scanning the shadows.
He expected the attack.
He knew it would come—perhaps from behind, perhaps from the bushes at either side. He hadn’t figured it would come from the trees above.
The rustling of leaves alerted him to his error. He looked up as something large and dark dropped from the branches.
It was no puma.
Distantly, he heard a crack like thunder—a rifle shot—and everything went instantly black.
THE
FIND
1
BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA
TWO WEEKS LATER…
It occurred to Rebecca Riley that she may have erred. The thought came as she stood hungry and exhausted with her luggage at her feet in the tiny front office of the Edificio de Carga No 1, a squat structure adjoining El Dorado’s main passenger terminal. By then, of course, it was too late to rectify—she’d come too far to simply turn around and head home. And yet here she was, alone in a country wholly unfamiliar to her, unable to speak the language, and now, seemingly, with a serious transportation dilemma. Coming here might not have been her brightest idea.
Leaning against the counter, she fanned her face with her passport while the skinny man with the bushy black moustache shuffled through her papers again. She didn’t have time for this: the thought of being stranded in such unbearable heat was bad enough, but more than that, she was on a tight schedule.
“Ir una manera? One way?”
“Si, gracias,” she said without confidence. She knew precious little Spanish.
Again, she checked her watch: an hour had passed since she’d gotten off the Avianca flight from New York. She’d been led to understand that her next flight, to Leticia in the country’s south, had already been confirmed. She’d made sure to check before leaving home. The reason for the delay, then, was a mystery. After all, it was a cargo flight, and she wasn’t crossing any borders.
Seconds passed as there was more shuffling.
Rebecca sighed uneasily and pushed her sunglasses back on top of her head. She knew she probably looked a fright. She felt flushed, clammy all over—the heat was never kind to someone as naturally fair as herself—and her tee-shirt clung to her, damp with sweat. She tied her black, shoulder-length hair into a ponytail and then gently massaged her temples, feeling a migraine coming on.
Having travelled little in her thirty-three years, she felt way out of her depth. She hadn’t once been overseas—hadn’t been anywhere—since moving from her homeland of Australia and basing herself in New York four years ago. She’d only decided to come down here the day before yesterday. Clearly, such trips needed a great deal more planning.
This is what you get for making rash decisions.
It wasn’t the first time in the last few minutes she had so berated herself. Then again, abnormal circumstances had led her here, and she hadn’t really had a choice, had she?
You could have ignored it.
No, she couldn’t have. To calm her nerves, she went over it again, as she had dozens of times since Monday. That day, she’d headed into work early, taking advantage of the short and uncrowded walk from her apartment to 79th Street and Central Park West, where the columned facade of the American Museum of Natural History had cut into a grey sky. She’d dive
rted to the staff entrance, taking the stairs to her office and booting her computer before popping down the darkened hall to grab a coffee. The usual rituals, just like every other day.
When she’d gotten back to her desk, the email had been waiting for her—and it had stopped her cold in her tracks.
The subject field had been empty. It was the name of the sender that had caught her off-guard.
REARDON, E.
When had she last heard from Ed? A year or more?
She hadn’t opened it immediately. In fact, she’d stared at the screen, running through the different scenarios that might account for him re-establishing the lines of communication. The two of them hadn’t parted on great terms.
When she finally reached across the desktop to click the mouse, no imagined circumstance had come close to what awaited her.
So now here she was, after a frantic two days getting the necessary air tickets and paperwork in order. The curator and department head—her boss, who seemed to have a host of friends in high places—had no trouble getting the visa application fast-tracked on her behalf. She had some time owing and had promised to be back in two weeks. As for the International Health Certificate—requiring proof of vaccinations, particularly for yellow fever—she’d already received the various shots in preparation for next month’s assignment to Caripe in Venezuela as a special guest of the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas. That trip was to be her first outside of Australia or the US, and given the research was to form the basis of her upcoming dissertation had not been hastily co-ordinated. Quite the opposite: more than three months of solid planning had gone into it.
It should not have been surprising, then, that considering she’d been ready to leave last night—Tuesday evening—barely thirty-six hours after opening Ed’s email, the first flaws in this excursion were now emerging. But she had to see this through, and that so, time was a factor.
The neatly uniformed official made a brief phone call. A moment later, another man, balding but equally presentable—and likely the first man’s supervisor—emerged from a door behind the counter. The two men calmly traded sentences in Spanish. The supervisor made a second phone call and at its conclusion turned to Rebecca and asked her some questions in fluent English.
She answered them, thinking she had already gone through this. Still, it was a relief to be free of the language barrier.
At last, the supervisor smiled faintly, passing back across the counter the paperwork the first man had spent minutes shuffling through. “I must apologise, it seems there has been a… misunderstanding.”
“Sorry?”
“Our freighters do not normally carry civilians out of Bogotá, and I can find no record of any arrangement.”
Rebecca massaged her temple again. “I need to get on a flight today.”
The supervisor nodded. “I have spoken to the captain of a flight leaving in four hours. I can get you on it but will need to charge your card. Si?”
Rebecca was confused. She thought this had been sorted—no, knew it had—and baulked, but not for long. What difference did it make? They could get her on a flight, that was all that mattered. She passed the man her Visa.
Eventually, the supervisor motioned to the door through which he himself had entered. “Go through, please.”
Wasting no more time, Rebecca thanked both officials, almost tripping to the floor in her haste to grab her bags. Beyond the door, a brightly lit passage opened straight into a fume-filled hangar. Across the tarmac sat a narrow-bodied Boeing 727-200F with the word ‘Aerosucre’ on the side. Beneath its belly, various boxes and crates lay ready to be heaved up to the large nose-door above the cockpit. Two men in grey, sweat-stained overalls stood amongst it all, shouting in Spanish, directing a yellow forklift.
Rebecca made her way towards them, sighing with relief, and then suddenly remembered.
Shit!
Amid the chaos of the past two days she’d forgotten she was meant to be somewhere on Saturday night. It was no big deal: just a date with a guy one of her friends was trying to set her up with. She’d forgotten to tell him she’d be out of town. A call from the hotel in Leticia would have to do, she decided. Still, she felt terrible about having to stand him up, mainly because she’d done so last weekend. She hadn’t been feeling sociable and had postponed that date with some weak, last-minute excuse. She could only imagine his reaction when she told him why she couldn’t make it this Saturday night.
Saturday morning, she’d be deep in the Amazon jungle.
2
JUST OUTSIDE MONTE OESTE, THE AMAZON BASIN
TWO DAYS LATER…
Sandros Oliveira skimmed the surface of the river and landed the Cessna with a loud splash and a spray of water. Turning the seaplane to the bank, he nudged the narrow wooden jetty extending from its edge and alighted, heading for the reed-thatched hut at its end.
Atop vertical stilts, the small, wooden building appeared to float on the water’s surface, jutting from amongst the riverbank’s lush foliage. As he made for it, Oliveira’s heavy black boots reverberated on the timber planking. In all, there were three jetties with enough room between them to accommodate a small boat or floatplane. Oliveira strode down the central and longest platform. Nearing the hut, he noticed the repairs to its storm-damaged roof were still unfinished. A section of thatching was yet to be replaced and the timber framework beneath was exposed to the clear, midmorning sky. He made a mental note to attend to it just as soon as he was done with the business at hand.
Across the water, away from where he was heading, a small flock of brightly coloured parrots squawked in the trees. Insects buzzed loudly in the hot, humid air. The jungle was alive with sound.
Oliveira barely noticed, and certainly didn’t care. He stared straight ahead, his eyes shaded by a pair of silver aviator sunglasses. With each hurried step, the single braid of hair he wore swung rapidly, fanning his neck above the collar of his shirt, which, unbuttoned and sleeveless, allowed a light breeze to similarly fan the sheen of sweat on his hairless, dark-skinned chest.
Shoving open the door, Oliveira strode into the hut.
Despite the sunlight spearing through the hole in the hut’s roof and between the thin gaps of the slatted timber walls, it was dark inside. Oliveira lifted his sunglasses, sitting them atop the khaki headwrap tied about his forehead. With a darting glance he took in the single open room, which he confirmed to be empty save for a dozen or more wooden crates scattered across the floor. Many of the boxes were stacked haphazardly on top of one another, and several had their lids off. All of them he ignored. At the back of the room, in the corner, sat a wooden table. On top of this lay a pile of equipment, mainly the strewn innards of a disassembled radio and various bits of communications hardware. Amongst the chaos lay the object of his search. He lifted the satellite phone’s handset and dialled.
The line opened, and Oliveira introduced himself to the voice at the other end. The connection was poor, and static hissed like a snake. He issued instructions.
After a brief pause, a second male voice came on the line. “Sandros?”
“I’m glad I got you,” Oliveira said in Brazilian Portuguese. “I have information.”
“Go on.”
“There has been movement downriver,” Oliveira began. “Americans, and with them a lot of equipment.”
“And you’ve identified them?”
“No, but—”
“Then they are probably like the rest,” the voice interrupted. “Oil or mining. Not unusual.”
“Perhaps, but I doubt it. They are trying to keep a low profile. And they have disappeared deep into the jungle. One came in from Leticia yesterday to join them. She secured passage on a boat heading downstream: the Tempestade. I believe it was sent for her.” Oliveira leaned forward in his chair, lowering his voice. “There is strange talk as well. They have found something.”
The voice at the other end was momentarily silent. “Get to the point, Sandros.”
Oliveir
a hesitated, and static washed down the line. “Ramos,” he said at last. “It is about your brother.”
3
RIO TEKENU, THE AMAZON BASIN
THE NEXT DAY…
Rebecca was dozing by the Tempestade’s stern when the booming cry of a black howler monkey roused her. Though her cabin was below deck, it was cooler topside, which was where she had spent most of the last forty-eight hours.
In the end, the flight south to Leticia out of Bogotá had been pleasantly uneventful. She’d been happy about that. Getting to Leticia had been essential; as the gateway to the Amazon, the small border town on the triple frontier of Colombia, Peru, and Brazil was the most suitable place from which to launch the final leg of her journey. After staying the night and getting her passport stamped, she’d headed east into Brazil by privately chartered floatplane to Monte Oeste, a small village on the river where she’d been instructed to seek out an old wooden trawler owned by a friend of Ed’s who would be waiting to take her downstream. Though she had been the one to wait—she’d done so for three hours in the blazing sun—it hadn’t been a problem. That had been two days ago, and she’d been on the river ever since.
Rebecca sat up. On the other side of the net slung above her hammock, mosquitoes swarmed in their dozens, waiting for her to emerge. She supposed she might never have done so if not for a painful rumble in her stomach; as it was, she was soon up and searching for something to satisfy the pangs.
As she came around to the bow—spraying insect-repellent liberally—she heard a voice.
“They take some getting used to.”
Rebecca swung around. Chad Higgins stood on the wooden rail skirting the port side of the Tempestade, gripping the roof above the wheelhouse. When she’d first met him, she’d been surprised. He was nothing like what she had pictured. For starters, she’d been expecting someone older; he could only have had one or two years on her and seemed altogether too fresh-faced for someone who’d spent the last decade plying the Amazon as a riverboat captain.
