by Alex Scarrow
‘Jay-zus, Maddy.’ He sighed and rubbed his temples. ‘I just about nearly caught up with yer convoluted thinking. And then you throw more notions into the pot. Do you ever give that head of yours a rest?’
‘No. I guess that’s why I’m always crabby.’
Liam laughed. Better that than to say ‘aye’.
‘Anyway, do keep up, Liam. I’m just saying that we need to hear out both sides. We need to talk to Waldstein and we need to know what that message is. Then we can finally decide what it is we should be doing. Whether we’re for, or against, the end of the world happening in 2070.’
Mr Pineda studied Bob with a wary frown. ‘You a big man. VERY big man, brudder. You a army man?’
Bob sensed the pilot was addressing him and put file-sorting on hold for the moment. ‘Clarification: are you asking me whether I am a military unit?’
Mr Pineda nodded. ‘Mil-try man, army man. Yes.’
Bob considered that for a moment. Technically speaking, he was. ‘Yes. I am.’
‘You fight in the big war?’ The pilot pointed across the moonlit river to the jungle on the far side. Nicaragua.
Prototypes of Bob’s particular batch had been tested in several combat zones. Of course, the AI was earlier-generation software, which had been prone to several glitches. There was a notorious incident of a support unit using an earlier version of his AI base code. The incident was referred to by the military as an ‘extreme blue on blue’. A unit undergoing testing in the field had somehow managed to flip friend/foe identifier tags and massacred almost an entire company of US troops as they slept in their beds.
Bob, personally, had seen plenty of combat and not malfunctioned once.
‘I have fought in many combat zones.’
Mr Pineda’s eyes rounded. ‘Many battle? Tell me which.’
For a moment he evaluated whether any information he divulged might present a contamination risk. In this case he decided it could not be significant. The pilot appeared to be mildly intoxicated and, it seemed, for the moment the normal protocols of zero tolerance on contamination had been suspended. Suspended until Maddy finally decided what their role was going to be.
‘The guerrilla resistance in Washington State against the German invasion of America. The siege of Nottingham, AD 1194. And the defence of Emperor Caligula’s imperial palace, Rome, AD 54.’
The pilot’s eyes narrowed for a moment as he took that in. Then without warning he exploded with a high-pitched hyuk-yuk-yuk belly-laugh. ‘Puppysho’! You playin’ wid me!’ He leaned over and slapped a bony hand on the meaty bulge of Bob’s shoulder. ‘I like you, big man! You got funny in you.’
Adam and Billy turned to look at the riverboat pilot rocking backwards and forwards, hooting with laughter.
‘Him, your big friend.’ Billy nodded at Bob. ‘He is mercenary? Hired gun?’
As far as Adam understood the set-up of Maddy’s team, that seemed to be a close enough approximation of Bob’s role. ‘Yes, I s’pose in a way that’s what he is. Like their bodyguard.’
‘This is good. There is much … how-say –’ Billy clucked his tongue as he trawled his simple English for the right word – ‘much hazard along the Coco. The jungle, very dangerous place.’
‘I came here two years ago with some others,’ Adam replied. ‘The Contra war in Nicaragua had recently finished. It didn’t seem so bad then.’
‘Things become much worse now. Many Contra rebels now become bandits. Murder. Steal. Not good.’ Billy reached into his knapsack and pulled out a battered old AK47 with a broken and taped-up wooden stock. ‘Maybe need this.’
‘Jesus. You serious?’
Billy nodded. ‘Also, some Indian tribe … Bad experience with rebels, with gringos. They not friendly no more.’
That hadn’t been Adam’s experience. The remote riverside villages they’d visited with Professor Brian had welcomed them with open arms.
‘Rebels do many raid, kill Indians. This make Indian no longer trust all gringos. We must be careful on river.’ Billy nodded towards Bob again. ‘Your big mercenary? What guns does he bring?’
‘Guns? None. No weapons. Well, none that I’m aware of.’
‘No gun?!’ Billy’s face creased with disbelief. ‘No gun? Hired gun have no gun?’
‘I don’t know if he uses one.’ He glanced across the deck at Bob’s broad frame. ‘Mind you, I’ve got a feeling he’s probably good with his hands.’
Billy followed his gaze. He appraised the support unit for a moment. ‘We meet Indian … they be much scared of him. He so big.’
‘He is something of a brute, isn’t he?’
‘But, we meet rebels?’ Billy sucked in his teeth, making a soft whistling sound. ‘Not scare so easy.’ He patted the rust-flecked barrel of his AK. ‘We need guns.’
For the first time since agreeing to come along, Adam felt a cold tickle of uncertainty.
Chapter 15
1994, Río Coco
The next day, it was Liam’s keen eyes that picked it out first. A curious thing. Nestling in the drooping branches of an guanacaste tree that was overhanging the river on their right – the Nicaraguan side.
It was almost completely hidden among the dense foliage.
‘What is that?’ he shouted over his shoulder. He had been sitting up front, his – now usual – perch on the prow: bare feet and legs dangling over the side, enjoying the cooling up-spray of water as the launch chugged relentlessly down the chocolate-brown Río Coco, mid-channel.
Billy joined him up front and squinted at where he was pointing, finally picking out the mottled green-brown wreckage dangling amid the branches of the tree.
‘Is helicopter.’
‘Helicopter, did you say?’ Liam had never seen one of those up close. He’d seen them regularly enough from afar, crossing the ever-blue September sky over New York – hedge-fund managers, Wall Street traders, billionaires commuting to and from work. That, or news choppers. ‘Oh! Could we go take a closer look at it?!’
Billy shrugged cautiously. ‘You the client.’ He turned and gestured at the wheelhouse. Mr Pineda was already spinning the wheel. The riverboat swerved in a lazy arc towards the right bank.
Fifty yards upstream, the grumbling burr of the engine was cut to an idling chug and Mrs Pineda drifted slowly beneath the enormous sweeping spread of the guanacaste tree.
Liam gazed up through the lattice of creepers, vines and branches at the dangling wreckage above him. Adam and Maddy joined him at the front.
‘Wow, that’s pretty cool,’ said Maddy. ‘Is that a US army chopper?’
‘American, yes. But it is unmarked,’ replied Billy.
Adam squinted up at it. Sunlight was lancing down between the branches, spears of light dappling the deck, the awning, their upturned faces. ‘US Army all right, but look – all the identifying markers are painted out.’
Maddy made a face. ‘Oh come on … the US army doesn’t creep around anonymously. They do shock and awe, not subtle –’
‘Covert operations,’ said Adam. ‘The Americans weren’t supposed to be in Nicaragua. Not supposed to be interfering in their civil war in any way.’ He reached out and grabbed a branch to help stop the riverboat’s gentle drift. ‘Of course they were. They were bankrolling the war against the Sandinistas.’
Adam nodded at the riverbank on the far side. ‘They set up training camps over there in Honduras, training thousands of Contra rebels. They equipped them with ex-US army guns, vehicles, helicopters – everything they might need to fight the Nicaraguan army and bring down the socialists. And, of course, made sure they painted out all the US army identifiers.’
‘I’m going up to get a closer look,’ said Liam. He pulled himself up on to a low bough. The tree creaked under his weight, a gentle breeze whispered through the dangling vines, stirred the reeds sprouting up from the shallow water.
‘It was a dirty war, Maddy,’ said Adam. ‘I’m surprised you don’t know about it.’
She s
hrugged. ‘Well obviously I’ve heard of it, but, you know, it’s not a period of history that I’ve read up on.’
‘It was a war President Reagan had to act like he didn’t know anything about. So it was waged on his behalf by the CIA. And because it wasn’t a legal war – if you can accept such a ridiculous idea as a “legal war” – there were no rules of conduct, no Geneva Convention. It was dirty.’
Billy nodded. ‘Many, many bad thing done.’
Liam pulled his way up into the tree. Reaching himself from one creaking bough to the next. Closer now, he could make out more details of the rusting camouflage-green bulk of the fuselage. The helicopter’s plexiglas cockpit shield, right next to him, was cracked, mottled green and fogged by a thin layer of algae and moss. He gently rubbed at the moss, cleared a foggy gap and peered inside. He could just about make out the pilot’s seat and the pilot still strapped in it; a skeleton wrapped in desiccated flesh, wearing a camo-green flightsuit and a faded yellow neckerchief. He must have been killed on impact.
‘Nice.’
Liam worked his way around the side. Midway along its fuselage, an open gun bay, the rusting barrel of a heavy machine-gun protruding, and from its open breech, the long drooping loop of a high-calibre ammunition belt, the brass shell casings long ago oxidized and turned a bright mint-green.
He grinned at the sight of the gun. ‘You should see this!’ he called down. He wanted to get closer, to climb into the gun bay and take a look around inside, but the movement along the branches had already made the rusting hulk stir – a warning. It was dangling in the tree, firmly ensnared in the branches and vines like a fly caught in a spider’s web. All the same, there was enough deadweight resting here that it could possibly be shaken loose if he was foolish enough to clamber around inside it. Anyway, the riverboat and the others were directly below. He decided not to chance his luck. He’d seen enough.
‘All right, I’m coming back!’ he called down to them.
He turned to make his descent, shifted his weight, and to steady his balance he reached out to grab a dense cord of vines dangling beside him. His hand closed round something that felt soft and leathery. He turned to look at what he was holding on to.
A corpse.
‘Oh Jay-zus!’ He lurched backwards, nearly losing his footing.
Weather-worn rope snapped and the carcass suspended from it tumbled down through the branches. ‘Look out below!’ Liam shouted.
It landed on the deck right beside Maddy with a soft thud and a rattle, a bundle of bones linked by leathered tendons that crumpled in on itself as it hit the deck. It took her a moment to realize she was staring at the jumbled remains of a human body.
‘Oh, gross!’ She jumped backwards and placed a hand over her mouth.
‘Crap!’ Adam stared at the corpse.
Mr Pineda hurried out of his wheelhouse, arms flapping. ‘What jus’ landed on me lanch?!’ He joined them along with Bob, a circle of them staring down at the wrinkled cadaver.
‘Relax. It is old body,’ said Billy. ‘From the wartime.’
‘That’s … that’s horrible …’ said Maddy. She slumped down to sit unsteadily on the gunwale. ‘I think I’m gonna puke.’
Bob squatted down, prodded and probed the corpse with a thick finger. ‘Information: the body appears to have been skinned.’
‘Skinned?’ Adam looked more closely. He was right. They were looking at dried tendons, muscle tissue and bones.
Maddy turned and emptied her guts over the side into the river.
Billy and Adam hunkered down beside Bob. Billy nodded slowly. ‘Indian do this. Revenge on gringos.’
Bob looked up at the wreckage. ‘It appears the helicopter crashed on the way back over the river.’
‘Survivors … found by Indians –’ added Billy.
‘– and made an example of,’ finished Adam. ‘A warning to the rebels.’
Billy nodded.
‘Jesus,’ whispered Maddy, wiping her chin dry. ‘That’s … horrific. That poor –’
‘He was probably already dead. Don’t shed too many tears for this bloke,’ said Adam. He nodded up at the wreckage. ‘These were the bad guys, Maddy. Dogs of war, mercenaries, psychopaths … Guys from the world over attracted by the money, the excitement of a killing field with no rules of conduct.’
Adam prodded the skull tentatively with his finger. It rolled over on to its side, exposing a solitary tuft of blond, buzz-cut hair sprouting from a dark patch of leathery skin on one temple. ‘Think about what atrocities he carried out, OK? How many peasants he gunned down in their fields, how many farms he torched?’
They watched Liam clambering down through the lower branches of the tree, all silently hoping another strung-up body wasn’t going to be shaken loose and tumble down on to the deck like over-ripe fruit.
‘Whatever happened to him,’ said Adam, ‘and any others in that chopper … I suspect they knew exactly what they were letting themselves in for. Maybe they even deserved it.’
Chapter 16
1994, Río Coco
The rest of the day passed without event. They spent the night tied up to a tree amid a thicket of reeds, all of them suddenly a little more wary of their surroundings. Billy suggested setting up a nightwatch: three-hour shifts until dawn. Maddy volunteered Bob to do all the shifts. She told Billy and Mr Pineda that he didn’t need sleep.
‘What man don’t ever need no sleep, sister?’
Maddy offered some fluff about him having some sort of medical condition – an anti-narcolepsy that prevented him from doing so.
‘Ain’t natural, your man,’ said Mr Pineda, shaking his head.
You can say that again, she was tempted to reply.
The next morning, after a breakfast of refried beans in tortillas and a pot of bitter black coffee, Mr Pineda fired up the diesel engine. It stirred to life with a phlegmy cough and his riverboat nosed its way out of the reeds and into the sedate flow in the middle of the Coco River.
‘You know where we gung still, sister?’ the pilot asked again.
Maddy deflected the question to Adam. ‘Keep going downriver, Mr Pineda,’ he replied.
‘Downriver?’ He shrugged. ‘Tha’s it? Jus’ downriver?’
Maddy met Liam’s eyes for a moment. There was a question in his expression. You sure he knows where he’s leading us? Not for the first time she found herself wondering just that. She watched Adam during the morning, pulling his journal out, reading his notes, comparing what they were passing on the riverbanks with the sketches and maps in his notebook.
During the morning they came across the first of two riverside settlements: stick-and-straw shacks on stilts at the river’s edge, canoes overturned and pulled up on shingle and mud. Liam craned his neck to catch a glimpse of the inhabitants, but he saw no sign at all that the place was inhabited, save for the faint threads of recently doused cooking fires.
‘They hear the boat arrive,’ said Billy. ‘Learn to hide from rebels when they come.’
Later in the afternoon they rounded a bend in the river and came across the second settlement. Adam recognized it immediately. ‘We definitely stopped over at this place. It’s just as I remember it.’ He flicked through the pages in his journal. ‘There! This town is called … well, I can’t pronounce it, but in English it means “the Bend in the River”.’
Liam looked at the riverbank. It hardly deserved to be called a ‘town’. ‘This place actually has a name?’
This second settlement seemed to be not much more than a clearing in the jungle, populated by an afterthought of branch-and-reed lean-tos.
‘There’s more to it up there in the jungle,’ said Adam. ‘More a big village than a town really. Couple of hundred people, I’d say. The Zambus here were lovely and friendly last time.’ He turned to Maddy. ‘This is definitely the place; this was the last village we visited before we turned and headed up the tributary on the right and into Nicaraguan jungle. We should pull in here.’
Mad
dy nodded and Mr Pineda eased the riverboat across the broad river, out of the main flow and into shallower water littered with the rotting red-brown stumps of tree trunks lurking just beneath the surface. He eased the boat skilfully in among them until it finally rode up gently on a soft bed of silt.
Billy jumped over the side with his knapsack on his back, his AK tucked away inside, the barrel poking out the top – a quick grasp away from being pulled out if needed. Bob splashed down beside him and the pair of them grabbed the line Mr Pineda tossed to them and tied the boat up round the broad trunk of a guanacaste tree.
The others jumped into the ankle-deep water and waded up on to the muddy riverbank.
Adam cupped his hands. ‘Hellooo! Anyone hooome?’
His voice echoed through the rainforest and bounced back at them. The cheeping, chirruping, hooting all around the jungle and coming down from the broad guanacaste leaves above them, seemed to momentarily hush as if also expectant and awaiting an answer. There was none.
Billy called out something in Zambu.
The echo of his high-pitched voice eventually faded to nothing.
‘This place looks like it’s been abandoned,’ said Maddy.
‘No,’ replied Billy. ‘Look. They come.’
The first curious faces emerged from the jungle undergrowth, peering out from behind shoulder-high bushes.
‘What did you call out?’ asked Adam.
‘I say – we not soldiers.’
‘Look!’ Liam exclaimed, pointing. More faces had emerged. Dark-skinned. They were darker-skinned than the Miskite Indians they’d glimpsed along the river’s edge so far. Liam grinned. ‘Hello there, people! We … Come … In … Peace!’
Maddy sighed and shook her head. He could be such an idiot.
Several of the bolder Zambu men stepped out of the undergrowth into plain sight. Slender, short men with arms and legs dark and thin like charcoal-blackened branches and heads that looked one size too big for their shoulders. They stood in the rags and remnants of clothing. Torn and faded T-shirts, khaki shorts. Some of them wore flip-flops.
