by Alex Archer
It all meant little to her.
Dr. Lidia do Carvalho had paid her a visit in her chambers as she packed for the trip's final leg. Each expressed pleasure the other had made it out alive. The doctor asked if Annja might please help her young daughter. Although she obviously felt constrained in what she said, supporting Annja's suspicion the rooms were bugged, Annja got the strong impression the little girl was being held hostage for her mother's compliance.
Annja felt genuine sympathy. Yet she had to tell the doctor there was nothing she could do for the child until she had finished what she was doing now. Lidia, though obviously disappointed, thanked her for her kindness and left.
Annja wished she could help. But Dan's death had sealed her, it seemed, to his viewpoint. She felt Lidia's pain. But Lidia and her daughter were only individuals. How could a the welfare of single individual or even two be weighed against the common good?
The Promessans had committed grievous crimes, against all humankind, as well as Annja and Dan. By withholding their knowledge they caused enormous suffering.
Now Annja would wrest the secrets forcibly from the Promessans' grasp or die trying.
And in return she would give them retribution.
****
The mercs along the rail grew impatient with the would-be hunter. They stopped screeching at the still-unseen monkeys and began to chant, "Billy, Billy," as Lieutenant McKelvey, a nervous American probably in his early thirties but with the receding hairline, lined face and stress-sunk eyes of a middle-aged man, ran around trying to bring them back to some kind of order.
Billy shouldered his rifle. Still no targets presented themselves. He held his fire. As if to assert his own dominance, he brandished his rifle above his head, miming triumph. Annja stopped straining her eyes at walls of green – always seeking the tree with nine trunks – to watch the proceedings. She felt a mild stirring of professional anthropological interest.
The chanting subsided. Annja was unsure why. Billy shook the rifle and grinned at his comrades below him. Annja raised a brow. That teeth-baring display was certain to be interpreted by the monkeys as a threat, and Annja wondered how they would react.
Nothing prepared her, or any of the hard men on the riverboat, for what streaked out of the dense green brush like a line of shadow.
Annja heard it hit, a distinct thump, with a slight crunching sound like gravel beneath a boot. Billy's grin froze on his sun-reddened face. He glanced down at his chest. The butt of an arrow stood a handsbreadth from his sternum. The fletching was black as crows' wings.
"An arrow?" he said in a puzzled voice.
He pitched forward. His body cleared the rail by a couple of inches to plunge into the reeking, tannin-stained water, raising a greasy splash to wet the chests and legs of his comrades, who stood gaping with an utter lack of comprehension at what had just happened.
Billy bobbed back to the surface. He floated on his back with his arms outflung, eyes staring sightlessly at the hard blue sky. Red stained the yellow water around him. The arrow jutted up from his chest like some defiant banner.
With a furious scream a mercenary raised a machine gun and emptied the big box of .223-caliber ammunition clamped to its side into the undergrowth. Instantly the others joined in, blasting the greenery on full-auto with assault rifles and light machine guns and the shotguns.
Lieutenant McKelvey shouted himself hoarse trying to get them to cease fire. The boat groaned low in the water from the weight of ammunition as much as other supplies for the small expeditionary force. But in a serious fight those crates could be used up quickly.
In the end he drew his own side arm, a Springfield Government Model .45, and fired it in the air in an attempt to stop the mindless explosion of firepower. What stopped them, though, Annja thought, was simply that they'd exhausted their magazines.
The fury ebbed from the men as they broke out empty magazines and replaced them with full boxes. In part it was because of the utter lack of response to their bullet storm. Some wood splinters flew, some branches fell, a green flurry of leaves flew up in the air to settle on the slow flow of the river. A flight of small scarlet birds rose twittering hysterically from a nearby tree and flew inland in a colorful cloud.
Otherwise, nothing. No screams. No bodies. Not even more arrows. When the hammering racket of the gunfire ceased, the silence was complete.
The boat chugged on. Bellowing orders, the captain got the helmsman to turn the wheel over hard to port and swing the stubby bow back toward the middle of the broad river.
Billy's body was left bobbing in the wake. No one seemed inclined to get the captain to halt the boat or make any effort to reel in the body.
Annja had avoided interaction with the hired guns as much as possible, aside from their none-too-effectual lieutenant. She didn't want them to notice her, even though she knew they had been instructed to follow her orders instantly and without question. But now she turned to one who stood near her holding a big shotgun tipped over a camo-clad shoulder.
"What happened to never leaving a man behind?" she asked.
"He lost. Let the gators have him," the man said.
****
No matter how it felt the heat was probably not greater at night, Annja thought. She tried to sleep. Only the crush of fatigue had driven her at last, long after sunset, from her self-appointed lookout at the Marlow's bow. She had exacted promises from Captain Lambert and Lieutenant McKelvey that they would detail men to keep watch throughout the night for the nine-trunked tree.
The heat where she lay on her thin pallet before the wheelhouse, unallayed by the rain that had fallen earlier, made sleep hard to find. The mosquito netting she had formed into a sort of pup tent above her restricted such airflow as there was from the boat's slow, steady passage upriver. And when sleep came, the images she saw were anything but soothing.
She came awake to great weight pressing down on her body and stinking breath filling her nose and sinuses. Her eyes snapped open.
A beard-stubbled face loomed inches above hers. The mosquito netting had been stripped away. Starlight gleamed in pale slitted eyes. The mercenary smiled.
"We're gonna have us some fun, honey." She felt the hot kiss of steel against her throat. "Scream and I'll cut you."
Chapter 26
For a moment Annja stared into the man's narrow and hard face. Then she sighed and went limp.
"That's right, honey," the man said in his Midwestern accent. "Just take it easy. You'll like it. You'll like it so good you'll think you never got it before."
He laid the flat back of his combat knife between her breasts, slid its tip into her thin blouse beneath the top buttoned button. "Once you do Ranger," he said, "you won't never be a stranger."
Annja moved like a viper striking. Her left hand shot out to seize his knife wrist, shoving it and the big blade, gleaming in starlight, to the side. It cut loose her blouse button as she whipped it away.
His eyes widened. His smile turned nasty.
"So you want to make it interesting – "
He sat astride her belly. He was too far up to control her long, powerful legs. With her foot flexed she snapped a kick against the back of his head, hard.
His head whipped forward. He reared back upright in reaction, waving the knife wildly. He had come up onto his knees, taking most of his weight off her. She whipped up her legs. Her feet went around his neck. She locked ankle over ankle.
Tucking her arms like a boxer's, clenching her fists, clenching her whole body to aid her effort, she rolled to the right with all her strength and weight.
The man's neck broke with a nasty sound.
The motion threw his body off her. It flopped like a fish in the scuppers in a final spasm.
She jumped up. Her nostrils were flared, her eyes wide and furious.
She had an audience. At least a dozen men were gathered around, standing or squatting to watch the show.
She swept them with a glance like lasers.
&
nbsp; "Anybody else want to play?" she challenged them.
If they rushed her she was ready to summon the sword. But in a way she already had. The mystic steel had entered her spine, her soul. The fires of its forging blazed through her eyes.
One by one the men slunk away.
****
At about ten the next morning a French man the others called Taffy stood leaning over the starboard rail trailing his fingertips in the swelling yellow wake of the boat. Annja was in the bow doing some stretching in the limited space. The former paratrooper was perhaps twelve or fifteen feet from her. Sudden movement drew her eyes. An object like a blunt arrow broke the yellow swell. It was a huge black caiman.
The alligator-like reptile's mouth was open wide, showing pale yellow-pink lining and lots of teeth. It slammed shut like a bear trap on the Frenchman's arm. The broad, tapering head enveloped the limb to within six inches of his shoulder.
The Frenchman screamed in a clear falsetto. With a wrench of its huge body the caiman pulled him over the rail and into the water with a foam-edged splash.
Another shoot-out instantly followed. The mercs seldom strayed far from their weapons by choice, and doubly so since the arrow had come out of the green blankness of the woods. They emptied their magazines again into the roiling water. Annja wondered if they remembered their comrade was in there with the caiman, or whether they wanted to save him from a horrible death. Maybe they just didn't give a damn.
****
More arrows flew from the shadowed bank when the boat wandered near in late afternoon. All fell short, disappearing into the river. With none coming near and McKelvey glaring at his men with a hand on the butt of his side arm, the mercenaries did not respond with a storm of fire. Instead they gripped their weapons hard and watched the jungle edge with hot, straining eyes. The boat scuttled back out toward the middle of the river.
Lieutenant McKelvey tried to strike up a conversation with Annja. He seemed diffident, more than half-ashamed. Perhaps he felt embarrassed by how little control he had over his men, who squabbled often and violently now, and seemed to refrain from falling on and killing each other solely because of the imminent prospects of easier prey.
She wondered how such an ineffectual man could find himself in charge of such predators in human form. She saw no better reason than that the mercenaries' masters, back at the gold camp or beyond, had decreed him so. The mercs with regular military experience, she knew, were massively conditioned to obey anyone their superiors told them to.
Mostly Annja tuned the lieutenant out, as she tuned out the bugs that swarmed and buzzed and bit incessantly. He was a tool to the great purpose she felt called on to serve. Not a good tool, particularly – and he and his men were likely too many or too few for what lay ahead. But they would serve well enough if the dangers of their quest wore them away instead of her, so long as she was left to face the final and greatest challenge.
In the end it was her task alone.
****
That night a scream awakened her.
She rolled off her pallet. Somehow she got out from under her mosquito netting without tangling herself in its folds. She was on her feet in a crouch in an instant, the sword firm in her hand.
She saw a flicker of motion from the top of the wheelhouse. A head with terrible incurving teeth flashed down to grab the upturned screaming face of a young man. Then coils as thick around as a truck tire slid down and around him, glistening in the light of the just risen moon. They seemed to move slowly, inexorable as fate. Yet by the time she reached him, sword raised to sever those thick brown-on-bronze loops of muscle, he was wound about three times.
His right arm, pinned against his body, couldn't reach his weapon. Annja saw the peristaltic action of the great serpent's body as it contracted around him, even as its weight bore him over the rail and off into the water.
The little round Belgian captain was out in a night-shirt, holding a big flashlight and screaming at the helmsman. The crewman had dozed at his wheel, and a trick of the current had drawn the boat under the overhang of trees on the banks. The anaconda had simply dropped down on the deckhouse from a branch and awaited prey.
In between barrages of abuse at his crewman she heard the captain wondering aloud just how the current could have so moved the boat when its slow, faithful engine was driving inexorably against it. As he vanished into the wheelhouse to take over the helm himself, Annja looked around to find the deck crowded with the surviving mercenaries. Instead of emptying their weapons into the waters that had claimed a third comrade, they all stared at her with big, round eyes.
"I was too late," she said. "Sorry." She walked forward. The mercenaries standing between her and her comfortless pallet melted from her like mercury from a fingertip. She made no mention of the sword.
Annja smiled a big smile. Grumbling, the others turned away. Presumably their work had inured them to horrors. These were new horrors, but, in the end, just horrors.
What force could make the boat stray from midstream like that? she asked herself as she ducked under the netting once more.
All might be explained by superior technology. That was what she had come for, wasn't it?
She lay back down. The gauntlet had been thrown. She would face her enemies boldly, unafraid.
She slept solidly the rest of the night, untroubled by dreams.
As the sun's first light poured forth, pursuing them upriver, the Marlow lookout's call roused Annja. Blinking and fuzzy she crawled out from beneath the mosquito netting to stand upright in the bow.
Ahead, just where the great river bent to the right, its base obscured by mist as if it floated on cloud, a vast tree or collection of trees with nine trunks wound somehow together leaned out over the mighty Amazon.
Chapter 27
Their beachhead was a natural clearing filled with shoulder-high grass. Natural seeming, Annja realized, when she saw that what she had taken for a driftwood raft caught on the bank, another hundred yards or so past the nine-trunked tree, was actually the remnant of a wooden dock, slumped into the water.
As the Marlow approached shore the men gripped their weapons and stared fixedly at the landing site. Annja thought it was professionalism belatedly asserting itself. A distressed-looking McKelvey disabused her of the notion as he removed his crumpled boonie hat to wipe sweat from his forehead.
"This is a bad place," he said. "We better pray your man Moran gets plenty reinforcements in to us pretty quick, like he said he would."
"Why is that?" Annja asked.
"A logging party got ambushed ten, twenty klicks back upstream from here, not three months ago. They had a whole security company with them, 120 men or more, with armored cars, machine guns, mortars, everything. Another two or three hundred workers, bulldozers, the whole nine yards. The Indians, just wiped the jungle with 'em. Total massacre."
"Why didn't I hear about it?" Annja demanded. It seemed to confirm they were in fact within reach of her goal. It also confirmed the level of danger.
"It wasn't the kind of thing that'd go on FOX News, ma'am," he said. "Not everything that happens even gets on the Internet, especially when it happens way out here in the back of beyond. A few survivors made it back to the gold camp. Some of Bull Campbell's boys heard the bosses. Sounded like a real horror show."
"What happened to the survivors?"
The lieutenant shrugged. But Annja noted his eyes slid away from hers. The Amazon camps were an ultimately Darwinian environment. And the big cage in the river always needed new gold panners, she reckoned.
Ashore, the men moved with self-confidence seemingly restored by familiar tasks. They unreeled rolls of the same German razor tape that topped the fence around Feliz Lusitânia. They set up curved plastic tablets whose convex face was stamped with the legend Front Toward Enemy. They erected little stands of equipment. It was all a very solemn ritual.
Annja had already knocked about the world enough in her young life to be familiar with most of it. The kn
ife wire was suitably nasty. So were the Claymore mines. And the infrared detectors and infantry radars were undoubtedly far keener at night than plain low-tech human eyes.
Any stray capybara that chanced to wander out of the bush was certain to meet a swift and horrid fate.
As the activity got well under way McKelvey came to Annja, standing near the water. He seemed pleased. "We've got it under control now," he said. "We're doing what we do. We shouldn't have any trouble now."
"That's what we thought all along. And you've lost three men," she said.
His worried expression came back. "Well, I know there are Indian attacks all the time... ."
"In the backcountry, on mining and logging camps," Annja said. "Tourist and trade boats come up and down this river all the time. They don't get attacked by Indians. Why your men now? With all these other incidents? And how many cases of anacondas attacking people have you heard about?"
"Well – there's those movies... ." His voice trailed off as he realized too late how lame that sounded.
"There are documented accounts," she said. "A few. But three fatal attacks? You think that's coincidence? Something doesn't want us here, Lieutenant."
"Rationally – "
"Yeah. That's what I want to believe, too. But how rational is that level of coincidence?" Annja surprised herself with the question.
"Well... that's what all the guys with guns are for, aren't they?"
She resisted an urge to pat him on the cheek. "Sure, Lieutenant. And they'll probably even be some help."
He smiled and nodded. "Lucky there's a clearing here, huh, Ms. Creed? Helps a lot."
"I'm not so sure it's luck. I suspect this is an old, abandoned rubber plantation. The jungle takes longer to reclaim some fields than others."
"Huh," he said again. "You really know a lot about this place, don't you, ma'am?"
Annja scanned the surrounding trees. There was a break to the northeast. Beyond it she glimpsed more grassland. "Not as much as I intend to, Lieutenant."
