"All the others were either in their middle years or older," Alberto said. "These two, the two who are missing, are much younger than that. Twenty or twenty-one. No more."
"You think they've been taken alive?" I asked him.
"It could well be. Like many tribes, they like to freshen the blood occasionally. They frequently take in young women, keep them until the baby is born then murder them."
"For God's sake, let's get out of here," Hannah said. "I've had about all I can take." He turned and hurried to the end of the jetty and boarded the canoe.
There wasn't much more we could do anyway so we joined him and paddled back downstream. The journey was com-pletely uneventful. When we drifted in to the jetty at the edge of thecampo, Lima was waiting for us looking more nervous than ever.
"Everything all right here?" Alberto demanded.
Lima said anxiously, "I don't know, Colonel." He nodded towards the green curtain of jungle. "You know what it's like. You keep imagining that someone is standing on the other side, watching you."
Forest foxes started to bark in several different directions at once. Alberto said calmly, "I suggest we walk back to the plane quietly and get inside with the minimum of fuss. I think we're being watched."
"The foxes?" I said.
"Aren't foxes - not at this time in the morning."
The walk to the plane was an experience in itself and I ex-pected an arrow in the back at any moment. But nothing happened. We all got inside without incident and I took the controls.
I taxied to the end of thecampo. As I turned into the wind, an Indian emerged from the jungle and stood on the edge of the clearing watching us, face painted for war, magnificent in a head-dress of parrot feathers, a spear in one hand, a six-foot bow in the other.
Hannah picked up one of the machine-guns and reached for the window. Alberto caught his arm. "No, leave it Our turn will come."
As we moved past, another figure emerged from the forest, then another and another. I don't think I have ever felt hap-pier than when I lifted the Hayley over the trees at the edge of thecampo, stamped on the rudder and swung north.
There was no landing strip at Forte Franco for the simple rea-son that the post had been built on an island strategically situ-ated at the mouth of the Negro about a century before the Wright brothers first left the ground.
We radioed the bad news ahead the moment we were in range, just to get things moving, then put down at Landro. Alberto wasted little time in getting under way. He ordered his men to prepare the launch for a quick departure then went into Landro with Hannah to see Figueiredo. I was waiting at the jetty with Mannie when the colonel returned. Hannah was not with him.
"What happens now?" I asked.
"There should be a reply to my message from Army Head-quarters by the time I reach Forte Franco. I would imagine my instructions will be to proceed up-river at once with my command. All thirty-eight of them. 'I've a dozen men down with fever at the moment."
"But surely they'll send you reinforcements?" Mannie said.
"Miracles sometimes happen, but not very often, my friend. Even if they did, it would be several weeks before they could arrive. This kind of thing is an old story as you must know, Senhor Mallory." He looked out across the river to the forest. "In any case, in that kind of country, a regiment would be too little, an army not enough."
"When we landed, you said we'd be safe on that side of the river," I reminded him. "That they never crossed over."
He nodded, his face dark and serious. "A cause for concern, I assure you, if it means they are moving out of their usual ter-ritory." The engine of the launch broke into life and he smiled briskly. "I must be on the move. Senhor Hannah stayed at the hotel, by the way. I'm afraid he has taken all this very hard."
He stepped over the rail, one of the soldiers cast off and the launch moved into midstream. We stood watching it go. Alberto waved, then went into the cabin.
I said, "What about Hannah? Do you think there's any point in going for him? If he runs into Avila in the mood he's in..."
"Avila and his bunch moved out just before noon." Mannie shook his head. 'Best leave him for now. We can put him to bed later.'
He turned and walked away. A solitary ibis hovered above the trees on the other side of the river before descending like a splash of blood against the grey sky. An omen, perhaps of worse things to come?
I shivered involuntarily and went after Maiffiie.
SIX
The Scarlet Flower
In the days which followed the news from up-river wasn't good. Several rubber tappers were killed and a party of diamond prospectors, five in all, died to the last man in an ambush not ten miles above the mission.
Alberto and his men, operating out of Santa Helena, didn't seem to be accomplishing much, which wasn't really surprising. If they kept to the tracks the Huna ambushed them and if they tried to hack a way through the jungle, their progress was about one mile a day to nowhere.
In a week, he'd lost seven men. Two dead, three wounded and two injured, one by what was supposed to be an accidental cut on the leg with amachete which sounded more as if it had been self-inflicted to me. I saw the man involved when Hannah, who was flying him out to Manaus, dropped in at Landro to refuel and I can only say that considering his undoubted pain, he seemed remarkably cheerful.
Hannah was making a daily trip to Santa Helena under the circumstances which left me with the Landro-Manaus mail run in the Bristol. The general attitude in Manaus was interesting. Events up-river might have been taking place on another planet as far as they were concerned, and even in Landro no one seemed particularly excited.
Two things changed that. The first was the arrival of Avila and his bunch - or what was left of them - one evening just be-fore dark. They all seemed to have sustained minor wounds of one sort or another and had lost two men in an ambush on a tributary of the Mortes on the side of the river where the Huna weren't supposed to be.
Even then, people didn't get too worked up. After all, Indians had been killing the odd white up-country for years. It was only when the boat drifted in with the two dead on board that the harsh reality was really brought home.
It was a nasty business. Mannie found them early on Sunday morning when he was taking a walk before breakfast and sent one of the labourers for me. By the time I got there people were already hurrying along to the jetty in twos and threes.
The canoe had grounded on the sandbank above the jetty, pushed by the current. The occupants, as was discovered later from their papers, were rubber tappers and were feathered with more arrows than I would have believed possible.
They had been dead for at least three days and were in the condition you would have expected considering the climate, flies buzzing around in clouds and the usual smell. There was one rather nasty extra. The man in the stern had fallen back-wards, one arm trailing in the water and thepiranha had taken the flesh from his bones up to the elbow.
No one was particularly cheerful after that and they clus-tered in small groups, talking in low voices until Figueiredo arrived and took charge of things. He stood there leaning on his stick, face sombre, the sweat soaking through shirt and linen jacket and watched as half a dozen labourers with handkerchiefs around their faces got the bodies out
The Huna bows were six feet in length, taller than the men who used them and so powerful that an arrow taken in the chest frequently penetrated the entire body, the head protruding from tbe back. They were usually tipped withpiranha teeth or razor-sharp bamboo.
A labourer pulled one out of one of the corpses and handed it to Figueiredo. He examined it briefly then snapped it in his two hands and threw the pieces away angrily.
"Animals!" he said. "They'll be coming out of the jungle next."
Which started the crowd off nicely. They wanted blood, that much was evident. The Huna were vermin and there was only one way to handle vermin. Extermination. The voices buzzed around me. I listened for a while, then turned, sick to the sto
mach, and walked away.
I was helping myself to a large Scotch from Hannah's private stock when Mannie came in. "That bad?" he said calmly.
"Everywhere you go, the same story," I said. "It's always the Indians' fault - never the whites."
He lit one of those foul-smelling Braziliancigars he favoured and sat on the veranda rail. "You feel pretty strongly about all this. Most people would think that strange in some-one who was at Forte Tomas. Who came as dose to being butchered by Indians as a man can get."
"If you reduce men to symbols, then killing them is easy," I said. "An abstraction. Kill a Huna and you're not killing an individual - you're killing an Indian. Does that make any kind of sense to you?"
He was obviously deeply moved and at a distance of years knowing in detail what was even then happening to his people, I suppose the plain truth was that I was hitting close to home.
He said, "A profound discovery to make so early in life. May I ask how?"
There was no reason not to speak of it although the tightness was there in the chest the moment I began, the constricted breathing. An unutterable feeling of having lost something worth having.
"It's simple," I said. "In my first month on the Xingu I met the best man I'm ever likely to see if I live to be a hundred. If he'd been a Catholic, they'd have tossed a coin to decide be-tween burning or canonising him."
"Who was he?"
"A Viennese named Karl Buber. He came out here as a young Lutheran pastor to join a mission on the Xingu. He threw it all up in disgust when he discovered the unpalatable fact that the Indians were suffering as much at the hands of the mission-aries as of anyone else."
"What did he do?"
"Set up his own place up-river from Forte Tomas, Dedicated his life to working amongst the Civa and they could teach the Huna a thing or two, believe me. He even married one. I used to fly him stuff up from Belem without the company knowing. He was the best friend the Civa ever had."
"And they killed him?"
I nodded. "His wife told him her father was desperately wounded and in urgent need of medical attention after the Forte Tomas attack. When Buber got there, they clubbed him to death."
Mannie frowned slightly as if not quite understanding. "You mean his own wife betrayed him?"
"She did it for the tribe," I said. "They admired Buber for his courage and wisdom. They killed him as Father Conte was killed at Santa Helena, that their chiefs might have his brains and heart."
There was genuine horror on his face now. "And you can still think kindly of such people?"
"Karl Buber would have. If he were here now, he'd tell you that the Indian is as much a product of his environment as a jaguar. That he only survives in that green hell out there across the river by being willing to kill instinctually, without a mo-ment's thought, several times a day. Killing is part of his nature."
"Which includes killing his friends?"
"He doesn't have any. He has his blood ties - family and tribe. Anyone else is outside and on borrowed time. Ripe for the block sooner or later as Buber discovered."
I poured another whisky. Mannie said, "And what is your personal solution to the problem?"
"There isn't one," I said. "There's too much here worth the having. Diamonds in the rivers, every kind of mineral ever heard of and probably a few we haven't. Now what man worth his salt would let a bunch of Stone-Age savages stand between him and a slice of that kind of cake?"
He smiled sadly and put a hand on my shoulder. "A dirty world, my friend."
"And I've had too much to drink considering the time of day."
"Exactly. Go have a shower and I'll make some coffee."
I did as he suggested, sluicing myself in lukewarm water for ten minutes or so. As I was dressing, there was a knock at the door and Figueiredo stuck his head in.
"A bad business." He sank into the nearest chair, mopping his face with a handkerchief. "I've just been on the radio to Santa Helena, giving Alberto the good news.
The military had installed a much more powerful radio trans-mitter and receiving unit than his in the hangar and had left a young corporal to man it.
"Hannah stayed up there overnight," I said as I pulled on my flying jacket. "Any word from him?"
Figueiredo nodded. "He wants you to join him as soon as possible."
"At Santa Helena?" I shook my head. "You must have got it wrong. I've gotthe mail run to make to Manaus."
"Cancelled. You're needed on military business which takes precedence."
"Well, that's intriguing," I said. "Any idea what it's all about?"
He shook his head. "Not my business to know. Where military affairs are concerned, I have no jurisdiction at all and what's more, I like it that way."
Mannie kicked open the door and came in with coffee in two tin cups. "You've heard?" I said.
He nodded. "I'd better get across to the hangar and get the Bristol ready to move."
I stood at the window beside Figueiredo, sipping my coffee, gazing down towards the jetty. A cart came towards us, pulled by a couple of half-starved oxen, a collection of moving bones held together by a bag of skin. The driver kept them going by sticking a six-inch nail on the end of a pole beneath their tails at frequent intervals.
As the cart went by, the smell told us what was inside. Figueiredo turned, an expression of acute distaste on his face. He opened his mouth to speak and the rain came down in a sudden rush, rattling on the corrugated-iron roof, drowning all sound.
We stood there together and watched the cart disappear into the gloom.
It was still raining when I took off, not that I was going to let that put me off. The massacre of Santa Helena had been worse, but the two poor wretches in the canoe had brought a whiff of the open grave with them, a touch of unease, a feeling that some-thing waited out there in the trees across the river. Landro was definitely a place to put behind you on such a morning.
I followed the river all the way and seeing no reason to push hard, especially once I ran out of the rain, took a good hour over getting there, giving myself time to enjoy the flight.
I went in low over Santa Helena itself, just to see how things stood. The mission launch was just leaving the jetty and moving down-river, but the old forty-foot military gunboat was still there. A couple of soldiers moved out of the hospital and waved and Hannah came out of the priest's house. I circled again, then cut across the river and dropped into the airstrip.
There was a permanent guard of ten men with two heavy machine-guns. The sergeant in charge detailed one man to take me up to Santa Helena in a dinghy powered by an outboard motor.
Hannah was waiting at the end of the jetty, smoking a ciga-rette. "You took your own sweet time about getting here,' he commented sourly."
"Nobody told me there was any rush," I said as I scrambled up on to the jetty. "What's it all about anyway?"
"We're going to drop a few Christmas presents into your friends the Huna," he said.
He had a couple of large sacks with him which he handed to the soldier in the boat. He went down the ladder and cast off. "I'll send him back for you. I've got things to do. You'll find Alberto at the priest's house. He'll fill you in."
He sat down in the prow, lighting another of his inter-minable cigarettes and shoved his hands into the pockets of his leather coat, looking about as fed-up as it was possible to be.
I was completely mystified by the whole affair and keen for an early explanation, so I turned away and hurried along the jetty. There was a sentry at the land end who looked bored and unhappy, sweat soaking through his drill tunic. There were two more beside a machine-gun in the church porch.
I found Alberto in the priests's house. He was lying on a narrow bed, minus his breeches, his right leg supported across a pillow while his medical corporal swabbed away at a couple of leg ulcers with cotton wool and iodine. Alberto, who looked anything but happy, was obtaining what solace he could from the glass in his left hand and the bottle of brandy in his right.
"Ah, Senhor Mallory," he said. "I would not wish these things on my worst enemy. Like acid, they eat right through to the bone."
"Better than having them on your privates."
He smiled grimly, "A sobering thought. Has Captain Hannah explained things to you?"
"He said something unintelligible about Christmas presents for the Huna, then took off across river. What's it all about?"
"It's simple enough. I've managed to lay hands on a half-breed who's been living with them. He's fixed the position of their main village for me on the map. About forty miles into the bush from here."
"You're going to attack?"
He groaned aloud and moved restlessly under the corporal's hand, sweat beading his forehead. "An impossibility. It would take us at least three weeks to force a way through even if my man agreed to lead us which he would certainly refuse to do under those circumstances. It would be suicide. They'd pick us off one by one."
Jack Higgins - Last Place God Made Page 7
