by Marc Cameron
“He kills Russian babies,” Aleksandra said when she wheeled around to face Quinn, as if he needed an explanation for her actions. “I will not waste another bullet.”
“Understood,” Quinn said, already moving to pick up the motorcycle. He’d hoped they’d be able to use the Chechens’ Jeep to make it down the mountain, but now that wasn’t going to happen. “Did he tell you anything?” Quinn climbed aboard the bike and toed it back into gear. He checked the safety on his 1911 before passing it over his shoulder to Aleksandra, who returned it to the daypack.
“They were supposed to catch up to Zamora and kill him,” she said, throwing a leg over the back of the bike and settling in around his waist.
“After he led them to the bomb?” Seconds counted now, and Quinn was already rolling.
“No,” she said. “He was clear on that. They were to kill Zamora when they caught him, here on the Death Road.”
Quinn grabbed a handful of brake and brought the little Yamaha to a slithering stop. A brown slurry of mud and gravel ran around his mud-caked boots.
“Wait a minute,” he said, turning to look at Aleksandra whose face was just inches away. “You say these men worked for Rustam Daudov?”
“I am sure of it,” she said.
Quinn blinked, letting the words sink in. Turning, he released the brakes, giving the bike as much throttle as the muck would allow.
“That means the Chechens already know where the bomb is,” he yelled. “If they get there before Zamora he’s a dead man.”
“Or the bomb is already gone,” Aleksandra said.
CHAPTER 55
The incident with the Chechens had cost valuable time. Periodically, the clouds would thin and Quinn caught a glimpse of another vehicle ahead, winding its way along the steep edge of the twisting road as it snaked back and forth, down toward the Amazon Basin.
The lower they went, the thicker and warmer the air became. Quinn found it easier to think and the suffocating panic of near drowning began to seep away. Feeling crept back to his hands and face. Aleksandra too became more animated, looking around to take in the sights rather than ducking in behind him.
Nestled in the rolling hills, the subtropical village of Coroico was a favorite weekend getaway for more well-to-do La Paz residents when they grew weary of the stark, airless Altiplano. They were, in effect, coming down for air.
The clouds parted, revealing a swath of blue as Quinn pointed the little Yamaha toward the edge of town. Two boys of nine or ten walked barefoot, whacking sticks on the ground at the edge of the lonely road. A low sun hung over the tree-covered hills to the west, drawing clouds of steam from the jungle.
The boys stopped, interested in what the two frozen-looking crazy people were doing on a motorcycle in their town. Quinn rolled up beside them.
“How’s it going?” Aleksandra said from the back, her voice trilling in perfect Spanish. The dark skin of his Apache grandmother allowed him to blend in, but for all his language ability, this was one he’d never learned to speak. Aleksandra was close enough to Quinn’s ear, though, that she was able to give him the gist of their conversation.
The boys waved politely, ducking their heads.
“We’re looking for some friends who came in ahead of us,” Aleksandra said. Quinn couldn’t help but think of how sweet she could make her voice considering what he’d seen her do just an hour before.
“Which ones?” the smaller of the two boys in a dirty white T-shirt asked.
“Have there been many?”
“Not many,” the boy said. “I hear there was a mudslide and the miners are marching.”
Alexandra translated in quick whispers.
Word traveled fast in the Andes, a fact that Quinn knew they would have to depend on if they wanted to find Zamora.
“Our two friends are traveling together,” Aleksandra said. “One has a tiny mustache like a little mouse.” She made her voice go higher as if she was telling a story. “The other has a flat nose like he fell against a wall.”
The boys laughed at her impressions. Though Quinn didn’t understand all the words, he knew who she was talking about with each description. He couldn’t help but think she would have made an excellent schoolteacher if she hadn’t gone the professional killer route.
“He stopped at my auntie’s store for a coffee,” the boy said, smacking his stick against the ground as he spoke. “Then they left for Rurrenabaque.”
“How far away?”
The boy consulted with his friend. “All night at least,” he said, scratching his nose. His friend nodded his head in agreement.
“Are there any airplanes here?” Aleksandra asked.
Laughing at the thought, the boys suddenly looked up the road. “More friends?” the boy in the white T-shirt said.
Quinn turned to see Jacques Thibodaux’s big face looking at him from the passenger window of Adelmo’s van. Bo leaned forward from the backseat, a broad grin spreading across his face when he saw Aleksandra.
* * *
Valentine Zamora beat on the dashboard with the flat of his hand, cursing at Monagas and ordering him to drive faster. Though not as steep as El Camino de la Muerte, the road from Coroico to Rurrenabaque wound its way deeper and deeper into the jungle, more like a river of thick mud than an actual road. Less than two hundred miles, the trip took nearly ten hours — all night — and Zamora had not slept for a moment.
The sun was just pinking the horizon by the time Monagas rolled the Land Cruiser into the river town of Rurrenabaque, known as simply as Rurren to the locals. It took Monagas less than twenty minutes to rouse a sleeping fisherman and rent his open wooden boat for the river. Zamora rarely used the Beni River camp and had little in the way of staff in the area. He’d thought it better to keep Yesenia and Angelo and a couple of others to guard Pollard and the bomb. Many men would have made it too much of a target.
Once on the boat, he held up his finger to have Monagas wait a moment to start the engine. He took the satellite phone from his pack and punched in the number. Ever the calm adventurer, his hands trembled at being so near his prize.
“Sí,” Diego Borregos said, answering the phone.
Zamora had expected the Yemeni.
“We are almost there,” Zamora said.
“Good,” the Colombian said. “I am not so fond of your friends. May I have the location now? I am ready to be rid of them.”
“Of course. But there may be a problem,” he said, thinking of the Chechens. There had been no sign of them either on the road or in the camp, according to Pollard, but one could never be too careful.
“Don’t worry so much, my friend.” Borregos laughed. “If you had no problems you wouldn’t need my services. I will handle whatever issues I find as long as I can get your friends what they want and be rid of them. Now…” The Colombian’s voice grew grave. “You pay me for transport along our… established routes. Give me the location and I will meet you there.”
The Colombians knew nothing of the bomb itself, thinking only that he was selling arms as he usually did and had had a run-in with his tyrannical father.
Zamora held his breath. In the end, he had to trust someone.
CHAPTER 56
January 10
Quinn’s eyes slammed open when the van bounced over a downed log half sunken in the middle of the road. He’d been dreaming about a walk with his daughter and the rutted road provided a rude awakening. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked around to get his bearings. The sun was fully up, but it was still early and the relative cool of night still hung in the trees. Roosters crowed behind a line of shanty houses along the road leading into town. Two blue and gold macaws perched like sentinels high in a gnarled branch, looking more like vibrant jungle ornaments than actual birds.
Aleksandra sat in the back of the van beside Bo, and Thibodaux thumbed through a pamphlet in the front seat beside Adelmo.
Quinn sat up in his middle seat, stretching his back, waiting for the old wounded p
arts of him to wake up. At thirty-five, the life he had led made the years doubly hard on his body. He turned half around in his seat.
“Have you got any kind of signal?” he asked Aleksandra.
She nodded. “He is on the river.”
Adelmo negotiated with a fisherman to secure a boat and a sack of provisions including bottled water and several dozen cunapes, a sort of bulbous Bolivian cheese bread that, Adelmo explained, got its name because it resembled a woman’s breast. Thibodaux ate them like popcorn and took to calling them boob biscuits.
The unflappable Aymara driver had become caught up in the chase and offered to come with them downriver for no extra charge. Quinn wouldn’t allow it. Where they were going there was bound to be bloodshed. It was bad enough to have Bo along. They paid him well and said their good-byes while they boarded the slender wooden craft that looked like a sort of canoe made of planks from a wooden privacy fence. It proved to be watertight, though, and the little Nissan motor was sound and had them nosed out into the muddy river in a matter of minutes.
“Where are we now with a signal?” Quinn asked, popping the lid on one of the water bottles. As cold as he’d been the day before, he preferred it to the oppressive heat and humidity of the Amazon Basin. He was an Alaskan at heart and always would be.
“My battery is dying and there was no time to charge it,” Aleksandra said. “I have it turned off for the moment, but he was a mile ahead of us when I last checked. Just before we get to that spot, I will check again and so on. Until then we must keep watch.”
Thibodaux sat on an overturned plastic bucket at the tiller, steering away from the muddy bank to head downstream through the low green hills toward the Amazon. A youth spent exploring the Louisiana bayou made him the natural choice to drive the boat.
Three miles from town, the boat slid past a group of chunky capybara grunting in the thick reeds along the bank. A giant ceiba tree grew on a heavily buttressed trunk behind the pig-sized rodents. Hanging moss and aerial ferns hung like decorative feathers from the great tree’s crown, spread high above the surrounding canopy. Troops of squirrel monkeys scolded from the surrounding trees. The rolling hills gradually flattened. Flocks of birds wheeled above open marshes and grassy pampas that reached back in pockets surrounded by the black green of seemingly impenetrable rainforest. The jungle crowded closer as they motored farther north. Dense branches drooped along muddy banks, skimming the brown water.
Bo dangled his hands in the water with Aleksandra, who crouched beside him on the floor of the boat.
A sudden pop and a whooshing spray caused everyone on the boat to jump. Quinn’s hand fell instinctively to his pistol. He smiled when he saw the patches of slick, rubbery skin break the surface of the water beside the boat.
Thibodaux popped another boob biscuit in his mouth. “That’s a good sign, l’ami,” he said. “The little book Adelmo’s bride gave me said that when you see pink dolphins you don’t have to worry about the crocodile caiman things and can go in swimming. Sort of reminds me of home… minus the pink dolphins.”
Bo leaned over to take a whiff of his armpits. “I still smell like rosy lilac water.” He grimaced at Jericho, the wind blowing a lock of blond hair across his face. “You, however, ought to jump in. You know how you get when you haven’t bathed for two days.”
“We don’t have time,” Quinn said. “And besides, just because the caimans are afraid of dolphins doesn’t mean the piranhas are.”
Bo jerked his hand out of the water. “I hadn’t thought about that.”
“Or how about those teensy little catfish?” Jacques observed around a mouthful of cunape. “The som-bitches swim up inside you when you pee underwater and get stuck in there.”
Aleksandra crinkled her freckled nose in disgust. “How do you know this revolting thing?”
Jacques took slug of bottled water. “Jungle training.”
“I didn’t know you’d been to jungle training,” Quinn said. “That’ll come in handy out here.”
“Truth be told”—Thibodaux grinned—“I haven’t really. I saw it in that Tom Berenger Sniper movie.”
“Who knows,” Quinn said, looking ahead at the thick foliage along the river. He swatted a mosquito that landed on his forehead. “Maybe that will come in handy too.”
CHAPTER 57
Pollard moved like a robot, taking one last look at the bomb before he screwed the false wooden panel on the crate. As per Zamora’s plan, a half dozen military-grade Kalashnikov rifles would be stacked in front of the false front in case anyone got nosey. Pollard found it mind numbing what he’d do to keep his family safe for a few days longer.
He was smart enough to know that crazy bitch Lourdes would kill them eventually. He’d seen the black hole in her eyes when she’d first walked in his classroom what now seemed like months before. He’d been away from such things for so long that he hadn’t recognized it until it was too late. Marie stood no chance against a woman like her. She was too nice, believing that even people who did bad things were by and large good at heart and would all jump at the chance to mend their ways if only given the right set of circumstances. She gave money to beggars at every street corner and wept at the poverty of people who had to send out Internet scams from Nigeria to survive. People are mostly moral, she’d often say, if you give them a chance.
He called such naïve notions the Mermaid and Unicorn Fart Theory, explaining to his classes that though they sounded sweet and fantastical, they were every bit as foul smelling as their normal, everyday counterparts.
Sometimes bad people were just that: bad people. They might pet a puppy because society expected them to, but in their hearts they wanted to kick it across the room and listen to it yelp. Marie just wouldn’t be able to get her pretty head wrapped around such a person. Matt was sure of it.
Yesenia startled him out of his inner dialogue when she stepped in the door of his hooch, rifle slung across her chest as always.
“Señor Zamora will be here soon.” Her chin quivered ever so slightly as she spoke. “So you are going away.”
“It is better for you that I take this thing away from here,” he said.
“I wish that I could come with you.”
“Me too, Yesenia.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “If I can figure a way out of this, I’ll make sure you get to school.”
“I do not know much, Dr. Matt, but I do know Señor Zamora.” She looked down at the toes of her boots. “He will kill you when you’ve finished — and your wife.”
“I know,” Pollard said.
She looked up at him. “Then why do you do as he asks?”
“Because every moment that I do, my wife and son stay alive for just a little while longer. And as long as they live, no matter how awful the circumstances, I can cling to the hope that I can figure out a way to save them.”
“I like that,” Yesenia said. “It makes me think of my sister.”
“Me too,” Pollard lied. In reality, such futile hope sounded a lot like a unicorn fart.
Yesenia suddenly turned her head to one side so quickly it knocked the parrot feather out of her hair. She lifted the rifle.
“Dr. Matt,” she said, looking at the door. “Do you hear that?”
* * *
“Something is wrong.” Zamora stood in the middle of the wooden boat and watched Borregos’s Piper bank in over the jungle from the north. “I don’t know what it is, but I can feel it.” He toyed with the holster at his side, unsnapping and snapping it absentmindedly while he tried to work out what was going on.
Monagas let the boat drift against the slow current.
“Shall I continue upriver?”
“No,” Zamora said, still looking. “Our plan depends on the Yemenis taking possession of the bomb.”
Monagas nodded, and aimed the boat for the bank ahead.
A six-foot caiman hung motionless in the shallows, staring at the interlopers to his territory with nothing but the twin bumps of his eyes and the tip of h
is toothy snout breaking the chocolate surface of the river.
They were roughly four miles up a tributary from the main arm of the Beni, off the beaten path of eco-tourists. Even the local indigenous tribes knew this was a river of no return — a place where piranha, electric eel, and deadly snakes were nowhere near the most dangerous things in the jungle.
Zamora took a deep breath, scanning the shadowed foliage that came right to the water’s edge in most places. Angelo stood on the small apron of bank below the boughs of several ceiba trees, hanging heavy with their own weight. Behind him, a barely noticeable trail vanished into the undergrowth, connecting the river to the camp nearly fifty meters away.
Angelo waved with his ball cap, smiling as if he was happy to see his boss.
The roar of the Piper’s engines diminished as it touched down on the grassy strip hacked out of the jungle in back of the camp.
Zamora turned back to his companion. “Be watchful.”
“As always, patrón.” Monagas nosed the boat sideways against the muddy bank and killed the engine. He threw the landing line to Angelo, who helped Zamora over the side and up a teetering path of wooden planks he’d placed on the squishy mud.
“All is well?” Zamora asked, still sniffing the air for any sign of the Chechens. “You have not seen any other boats or aircraft?”
Angelo snapped to attention, patting the rifle slung across his chest. “No, patrón. I have been on guard. It is only us and Dr. Matt. The aircraft just arrived.”
“I see that,” Zamora said, still toying with the snap on his holster. He brushed past the stubby Angelo, pushing his way through the thick undergrowth for the camp. They’d purposely left the trail to the camp tangled and choked with vines to discourage visitors from the river.
