“Please tell me there are no snakes in this part of the world.”
“Hardly any,” he lied.
“Can we at least strip out of this gear?”
“Better wait until we get through the swamp. The boots will help keep our feet dry, and we can hide everything in the jungle. No sense hanging out a flag that there are two of us.”
Lisette pulled at the front of her hazmat suit, and he did the same, feeling the welcome offshore breeze enter his neckline, cooling his sweat-soaked shirt. Beneath their suits, they both wore black T-shirts and black BDU pants tucked into military boots. Not exactly the best color to blend in during the day, but then they weren’t thinking of traipsing through a jungle when they dressed this morning.
Even though the suits were hot, difficult to move around in, Marc and Lisette got to work, searching the boat to see what they could salvage. He found a canvas bag filled with tools, the majority of which he dumped. Lisette rummaged through the front of the boat and found binoculars and a first aid kit as well as some other items she tossed into the bag. Marc pulled open Daron’s hazmat suit and went through his pockets. A cell phone, cigarettes, and a lighter, but no wallet or ID. The phone was on, but no signal. He left the phone, but took the lighter. “I don’t suppose you found any water.”
“Not a drop,” she said.
“My kingdom for a canteen, even an empty one.”
“What would you give for some clean biohazard tubes?” She patted the pockets of her hazmat suit.
“Better than nothing. What about the one with the glass found on the ship?”
“I have no idea where it is. But if their sole purpose was to take it and us to prevent anyone from suspecting that this virus was manmade, they failed.”
“Unless of course we die out here. Then they’ve succeeded.”
“McNiel will send someone for us.”
“Only if he knows where to look.”
He searched the horizon, seeing nothing. Just endless ocean, and he glanced up to the sky, saw clouds moving in. If it was humid in that jungle now, it would be even more so once the rain came and went. He gripped the side of the boat, saw a small anaconda swim past, maybe five feet in length. Thankfully Lisette didn’t notice. He hopped off the port side into the shallow water. When he reached up to help Lisette, they heard someone shouting in the jungle on the starboard side. Lisette grabbed the canvas bag, jumped down next to Marc. Both ducked, just as two men in camouflage fatigues armed with M4s came bursting from the trees, their boots splashing in the swamp.
Marc put his finger to his lips, then pointed into the jungle, indicating that Lisette should head in first and he’d cover her. He drew his Glock, held it ready. When she was in the trees, he felt the boat move as someone started to climb on board. A shout followed, something about a body in the water. He heard splashing and assumed that they were wading into the ocean to retrieve the driver’s corpse. Marc glanced back, saw Lisette in the shadows, her gun drawn. Now or never. He crouched down, backed into the trees, keeping the boat between him and the open sea.
When he reached Lisette’s side, he said, “Did you see how many?”
“Only two.”
“Good odds.”
The men were speaking, their voices drifting toward them on the wind.
“French,” Lisette said. “With the occasional Portuguese scattered throughout.”
“We were heading due south when they took us from the boat. I’d say that puts us in French Guiana or Amapá.”
“Quiet.” Lisette closed her eyes, apparently trying to listen. Like Marc, she was fluent in several languages, her specialty being Russian. Neither of them spoke Portuguese. But French was Lisette’s native language, and she was better able than he to translate the mix. After a moment, she looked at him, smiling slightly. “They seem to think that the boat crashed and that is what killed the two men. They surmise that the driver fell out and drowned after the crash. They think the hostages met the same fate.”
“I like their reasoning.”
“They are going back to the compound.”
“Stay here or follow?”
“What are the chances we’ll be found if we stay?”
Marc glanced out to the horizon, then at the boat and the surrounding jungle growing right up to the water, thinking the wreckage would be next to impossible to spot from the air or the sea. “Our best bet is to get out of these hazmat suits and follow.”
Lisette gave a sigh of resignation. “I had a feeling you were going to say that.”
The dense jungle teemed with insects, buzzing and biting. Marc and Lisette could do little more than brush them away from their skin as they tracked the two men, staying far enough back to avoid being seen, but still keeping the men in sight. Both searched for movement in the leaves above, leaves that canopied what appeared to be a definite trail leading from the swampy coastland to the dense interior of the rainforest. They would never have been able to find the path on their own.
If they were in Amapá as he suspected, they sure as hell weren’t heading toward any metropolitan areas. The Amazon rainforest dominated more than ninety percent of Amapá, and seventy percent of that forest was unexplored, knowledge he’d learned from a previous ATLAS operation that took him into the area a couple of years ago in search of a splinter terrorist group suspected of working some sort of bio lab for the Black Network. ATLAS had not been successful in their search back then. The jungle was too dense, and the canopy of broad-leafed trees and vines prevented them from locating the compound from the air.
And now it seemed that he and Lisette were on the trail of someone who had sent two people specifically to the freighter. Whether because they knew ATLAS had agents there or to determine if anyone suspected the deaths on board were possibly due to a terrorist action, Marc didn’t know. At this time, it mattered little.
There was no doubt in his mind that they were dealing with the same group. Which meant that they could very well discover what had eluded them before. Of course, if they found the compound, Marc wasn’t sure of the next step. He hadn’t quite gotten that far in his plans. He only knew that they couldn’t survive on the edge of that swamp hoping that someone might pass by and find them, which meant walking into the lion’s den was their next best option to stay alive.
Up ahead, the movement on the path stopped, and Marc held out his hand in warning. Lisette stilled behind him. He pointed into the dense foliage; she nodded, then carefully threaded her way within, crouching out of sight behind a large, broadleaf plant. Marc did the same on the opposite side of the path, and moments later, as a mosquito landed on his face, and he fought the urge to slap it, or move at all as he held his Glock at the ready, he heard the heavy steps of someone on the trail. One of the guerrillas, his M4 held in front of him, lumbered past, checking from side to side. He continued on another twenty feet, then stopped, retraced his steps even more slowly on the return, checking behind the bushes and trees that grew close to the trail. Marc saw him approaching Lisette’s spot. If the man gave it any more than a cursory glance, he’d see her. And Marc would have to kill him, which would bring the other running.
He could take them both. That wasn’t the issue. What concerned him was that after hours of following them on this trail, he didn’t know how close they were to the compound. The last thing he needed was for a couple of gunshots to bring out reinforcements.
The jungle floor was covered in damp and rotting leaves, no rocks anywhere for him to toss. And just when Marc decided that he was going to have to shoot, to hell with the noise, he heard a rustling, snapping, static sound coming from high up in the canopy of trees. The rain, he realized, just as the front man called out. The rear gunman turned, hurried away down the path, as the warm precipitation eventually found its way through the dense leaves, the large drops splashing down to the forest floor.
Neither Marc nor Lisette
dared move for the longest time, and it took every ounce of concentration to ignore the itching from the mosquitoes’ continuous bites. Marc turned his face upward, but not much of the rain made it down, at least not yet, and he took a deep breath, trying to fill his lungs with the hot, humid air. Lisette made a soft click, and he clicked back, signaling that he agreed it appeared clear. Lisette stood, her gun pointing up the trail as she crossed over to where Marc waited.
“That was closer than I cared for,” he said quietly.
“Too close.”
They stepped out, started down the path until several minutes later, they could no longer tell which direction the two men had taken. When the sun had been out, Marc knew they were heading due west. Now, with the rain obscuring the sun, the direction was no longer obvious. Their makeshift tour guides were long gone, and that meant that Marc and Lisette would be navigating the trails—if they ever found them again—on their own. Their odds were diminishing with each passing minute, and Marc stood there trying to decide which trail to take, none of them looking thoroughly traveled. Finally he picked one, and a few feet down he came to a couple of important realizations.
First, they were thoroughly lost without a way to contact anyone.
Second, there was a trip wire across the trail in front of them.
One wrong step and they were dead.
“We’re damned lucky we didn’t blow ourselves up long before now,” Marc said as he and Lisette attempted to navigate the paths, which were turning wet and slippery from the rain. Undoubtedly the closer they got to the compound, the more traps they’d have to contend with. They’d relied on the two gunmen to get them through. Now they were on their own, and an hour later, his head ached and his shoulder and neck muscles protested from the constant looking down, making sure they weren’t tripping land mines.
They’d located five more trip wires, two in the last hundred yards, and so it wasn’t surprising that they’d covered very little distance. Even so, he hoped the increasing frequency of the booby traps was a good sign—assuming this alleged Network compound even existed, and they weren’t walking into some drug cartel by mistake. Not that one wasn’t as dangerous as the other. At the moment, he and Lisette were tired and hungry, and he was regretting his decision to follow the two gunmen.
The sound of the rain did little to muffle the constant birds’ chirping and insects’ buzzing. What it did do was remind him that he was damned thirsty. Eventually water started seeping down the long vines twisting around tree trunks, some of it pooling into the bases of plants, and Lisette took out her clean biohazard tubes and found a plant with sword-shaped leaves, using it to direct the water into her tubes. Marc did the same. It wasn’t much, but it helped. The tubes filled, they both drank, and Lisette used some of the water to wash her face.
“No canteens,” she said, looking up into the bright green canopy.
“What are you talking about?”
“The two men. Neither carried any water. You don’t do that out here unless you are very sure of where you’re going.”
She was right. That meant that the two had to have access to a nearby water source. The logical explanation was that the compound was very close. Unfortunately it did neither of them any good. Even if there was a clear trail, with the danger of the trip wires, they couldn’t go any faster.
They rested about ten minutes, then started out again when they heard the sound of someone moving up ahead. Lisette and Marc stopped in their tracks, then stepped back into the jungle, listening.
Signaling to Lisette to stay where she was, Marc moved closer, and through a break in the leaves, could just make out an armed sentry on his rounds. Marc quickly assessed the location. The trail opened to a clearing of low-lying plants, but no trees for at least a hundred yards. And beyond that, he saw a razor-topped chain-link fence. Inside the fence’s perimeter, however, the trees created a thick canopy over the several buildings within, and in a few places, the shallow roots had grown beneath the chain link, lifting it. Apparently they weren’t too worried about discovery in this remote a location with such good camouflage. The low shrubs allowed the sentries to see anyone approaching the compound on foot from the jungle, yet effectively camouflaged the area from above, where air patrols might notice a cleared jungle floor or rooftops of a building.
The guards, like the two men who had found them on the beach, were carrying M4s, the Cadillac of guns compared to the usual cast-off weapons smuggled in from other countries that usually ended up with the drug cartels. In Marc’s mind that meant money, organization, and the means to put it all to good use.
This was bigger than the average drug runner.
His gut told him they had found the hidden South American compound for the Black Network. Quite possibly the location where this deadly hemorrhagic virus was located.
And they had no way to warn anyone.
He and Lisette retreated back into the forest, far off the trail into a shelter of vines that had crept across the branches of several trees.
Intending to wait for nightfall, they found a wide tree with strangler roots shooting out from the sides, which created a cradle of thick, smooth branches. Not exactly the softest of beds, but much drier than the damp forest floor. The jungle’s oppressive humidity after the rainstorm sapped Marc’s strength. At the moment they were seated at right angles, their shoulders touching as they leaned against the smooth and twisted trunk. They napped the best they could, each taking a shift as sentry. When it was his turn, he crept out to the forest’s edge near the clearing and watched the guards, making note of their patrol patterns and the compound layout, at least what he could see from his vantage point.
When he returned, Lisette was awake—assuming she’d even slept. They were hungry, bitten by more bugs than Marc could count, and when Lisette pulled out two granola bars, his stomach rumbled. “Where did you get these?”
“The boat. In the same compartment as the first aid kit. They’re probably ancient, but I’m fairly certain granola has the same half-life as radioactive waste.”
He wanted to kiss her. Hell, he would have had she given him the slightest sign that she was still interested, and he wondered—not for the first time—if she was seeing someone else. Or was it, as she said, that their job as ATLAS agents made it too difficult to maintain a relationship, especially when they were constantly being deployed to foreign countries, with their various operations keeping them apart for weeks at a time.
“Do you ever think about us?” he asked, after he’d finished his granola bar and the last of his water.
“Snake.”
“What?”
He looked over at her, saw her pointing to somewhere beyond the veil of vines, then focused that direction. At first glance it appeared as though he were looking at a tree limb mottled in shadows maybe eight inches in diameter. On closer inspection he realized the limb was moving, and he reached for his knife, as the twelve-foot-long anaconda coiled and uncoiled around the tree limb, its movement slow and lumbering as it lowered itself to the ground. He relaxed somewhat at the sight of the large bulge in the snake’s middle. Unless the reptile was looking for an after-dinner snack, it wasn’t hungry. And sure enough, when its head made contact with the ground, it slithered off in the opposite direction, undoubtedly toward the water and more desirable habitat. “No worries,” he said.
“The answer is yes.”
Marc glanced at Lisette, but she was still watching the anaconda. “Yes?” he echoed.
“Do I think of us. I do.” Her answer caught him off guard, and just when he was wondering how to respond, that this was surely a positive step, she said, “But I also think of Becca and Griffin and how he suffers, even two years later.”
“Their marriage was over long before she was killed.”
“But it changed things,” she said, leaning her head back against the tree roots.
“Why?�
� he asked, even though he felt certain he knew the answer.
“Because I realized I could never live that way, wondering every time you leave on an operation, if you will be coming back . . .”
He didn’t tell her that he shared the same fears about her—even to this day. What he did say was “I wonder if things would have been different if we were accountants not spies.”
“We are not.”
“If we get out of here, I could always go back to school.”
She smiled, her dark eyes lighting up with humor as she reached out, grasped his hand, and gave it a quick squeeze, her palm, like his, hot and sticky with sweat. When she let go, her expression turned serious. “I am hoping you have been thinking of our next move, instead of what might have been.”
“I have. But I figured if a snake was going to eat us, it was time to open up.”
“You opened up, as you called it, before I saw the snake.”
“Maybe I’m psychic.”
“What you are is incorrigible. Your plan?”
“Our only option is to break into the compound and find a way to communicate with the Desdemona or HQ to give them our location.” He nodded in the direction of the compound. “I’ve been watching the sentries. They pass by in fifteen-minute shifts. One of them was leaning on the fence, which tells me it isn’t wired. I don’t imagine they’re going to have the grounds lit up like a beacon, not when they’re worried about aerial surveillance, which means our best chance is after nightfall.”
The Dark Hour Page 19
