Between the village and the ground, there were an estimated two dozen tribespeople dead; and with ten onboard, that meant that either there were sixteen or so more dead bodies that hadn’t been found, or several of them had managed to escape into the forest. Lee liked to think it was the latter.
The Black Hawk full, Lee cut the ropes away and signaled the pilot – who was now under the careful watch of Greg Karlson – to come out of the hover and start the flight back to civilization.
“Phoenix,” Silva said from the pilot seat of the civilian freight helicopter, “we’ve got contact.”
Phoenix poked her head into the cockpit and looked at the radio. “John?” she said. “is that you?”
“John’s with us,” came the answer from an unfamiliar voice. “But he’s busy looking after the injured.”
Her blood ran cold with those words – ‘the injured’. “Is the research team safe?” she asked.
“Four out of six,” the voice said. “Which is a whole hell of a lot better than it would have been if John hadn’t been there. I’m one of them, Greg Karlson.”
“Is that your helicopter on our radar?”
“Yeah,” Karlson replied, “that’s us. Now, can you start arranging somewhere to go for medical care? Some of us are bust up real bad. There are ten survivors from the village too.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Phoenix said, happy beyond belief that John was alive and safe. She didn’t know how he’d managed it, but was glad that he had.
Silva, to his credit, had tried to make it there on time, but the Black Hawk was a lot faster, and had already been in the air for some time, and they’d never really had a chance.
She turned to Silva. “Okay,” she said, “let’s get back to Cruzeiro.”
She just hoped it had a decent hospital.
Diego Marcelles was pissed. One drug lab destroyed meant over a million in lost income a month, in US dollars. Maybe more.
Was it the US military? Those sonsofbitches were always causing problems. Well, he thought as he smoked a cigar, he had ways of dealing with them.
He radioed his men, as he stood looking at the ruins of the cocaine lab. “Are you in position?” he asked them.
“Yes,” came the reply.
“Good. If you see something, tell me. Wait for my word, you understand?”
He got confirmation, and smiled to himself. From their positions in the high ground, they would spot those choppers from a long way out, if they returned the same way they’d come.
And then the Yankees would learn not to piss off Diego Marcelles.
Chapter Nine
“What the hell was that?” Phoenix asked, as the radar screen lit up like Christmas.
Silva looked at her, eyes sorry. “Not good. Not good.”
“What the hell is it?”
“It’s a damn missile,” Hartman said from behind her, as he peered at the instruments. “And it’s aimed right at that Black Hawk.”
Phoenix sagged in her chair. “Oh no,” she whispered. “Oh no.”
Lee felt the aircraft lurch to one side, and knew the pilot had gone into evasive maneuvers; the IV from the onboard medical kit that he’d just inserted into the arm of a gunshot victim from the tribe burst out, blood and fluid spurting wildly all over the cabin.
What the hell?
And then he heard it, the telltale, high-pitched screech of a Stinger surface-to-air missile, closing in fast.
Too fast.
“Brace yourselves!” he called out.
Damn, he thought, what next?
Lightfoot wasn’t flying the crew he was supposed to be flying, but he knew if the Stinger hit, he’d die just the same; and so he put everything he had into avoiding it.
He had no idea where it had come from, but it had to be close, too close for active countermeasures to kick in, and he was left with trying to move the large helicopter out of the way of the agile little missile; but it was too little, too late, and he knew it was only a matter of time before . . .
“It’s hit!” Silva cried out, and Phoenix almost cried out as she watched the impact on the radar.
“Get us over there,” she told him. “Now.”
Lee felt the impact, waited for the chopper to explode; but when it didn’t, he knew the pilot had turned them enough, just enough, to take the shot right at the rear.
It meant the strike wasn’t fatal, bless him, but it also meant the rear rotor was taken out, and the chopper started to pitch and dive and spin, and Lee wondered if the crash that would inevitably follow might kill them all anyway.
“It’s a hit!” Pedro Gonzales called into the radio. “I got the bastard, I got him!”
“Well done, Pedro,” the voice of Diego Marcelles came back to him. “Is it destroyed?”
Gonzales watched as the tail section leaked smoke and flame, sending the craft into a spin that took it over the treetops and over the horizon, beyond his eyeline. He waited a few moments more, moments that seemed to last forever.
And then, in reward for his patience, he could actually feel the impact rock the ground even from this distance, could hear the unhappy scarp and thud of heavy metal impacting the ground, and he smiled broadly.
“Yes, Padrón,” Gonzales said happily. “It is destroyed.”
Chapter Ten
Whoever the guy at the wheel was, Lee decided, he was an incredible pilot; despite being hit and being thrust into a flat spin from which there might have been no hope of recovery, the guy had managed to keep the Black Hawk aloft for long enough to avoid the trees, until he found a river and made a controlled crash-landing in that.
The impact had still been enough to rattle the teeth and – from the screams of pain around him – maybe even enough to break a few bones, but the water had absorbed a lot of it, and they were all now shaken and injured, rather than dead.
He started to rally everyone together, to get them off the chopper before it blew; and slowly, the passengers started to drag themselves into the water, swimming or wading to shore.
Lee heard the sound of another chopper and looked up, saw a freight helicopter hovering above the scene, coming in for a tight landing in a clearing by the riverbank.
Damn, he’d never been so pleased to see Phoenix in his life.
The villagers, talking among themselves, had clearly had enough though, and started to race away to the other bank from where the helicopter had landed, and where Lee and the research team were headed, even dragging their injured away with them.
Lee watched as Gale and Lisa started off after them, oblivious to the danger they were in, calling to them, presumably begging them to come back. But they had had their fill of the modern world, and Lee couldn’t blame them. Being attacked once was bad enough, but twice?
It was then that Lee realized that Greg hadn’t emerged yet, and nor had the pilot. “Marcus!” Lee shouted to the big man. “Come and help me, would you?”
He watched as Hartman exited the chopper, M4 in his hands; and before his friend was with him, he already started to wade back out to the aircraft.
He pushed inside, saw the two bodies at the front, seemingly unconscious, heads rolled to the side, and he moved forward, checking for damage.
The pilot’s face was a mess, and from the way his body was folded, it was clear that he had some broken ribs, in addition to a possible skull fracture.
Greg, on the other hand, was blood-free, although it looked as if his legs had been crushed by the front console, which had folded in on him.
“Grab the pilot,” Lee told Marcus, who immediately slung the rifle and carefully unbuckled the man from his seat, pulling him out and taking him out of the chopper. “And then come back and help with this guy,” Lee called after him, recognizing that he was going to need some assistance; the guy was jammed in tight, and getting him out was a two-man job at the least.
A few moments later, Marcus popped his head back through, immediately crawling into the cockpit and leaning into the console, try
ing to move it while Lee pulled Greg free.
“Do you want the good news or the bad news?” Hartman asked him as he strained against the console.
“Give me the good news first,” Lee said. “I’m a positive kind of guy.”
Hartman grunted, and Lee wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be a laugh. “Well, the good news is, I got the pilot safely to shore. Eve’s keeping an eye on him.”
“Okay,” Lee said. “And the bad?”
“There look to be a bunch of caimans, headed this way.”
“You’re kidding?” Lee asked.
“I’m afraid not, John. We need to hurry, or all three of us are gonna be a snack for those guys.”
Hartman strained harder, and harder, the blood vessels in his eyeballs threatening to pop with the effort, and finally there was movement, and Lee pulled Karlson clear, falling with the guy in his arms back into the main cabin.
“Okay,” said Hartman, “let’s go.”
“I’ll take Karlson,” Lee said. “You grab Roberts and Harwood.” They might be dead, but he didn’t want the caimans taking their bodies. They deserved a proper funeral, if possible.
“Right,” Hartman said, grabbing the two bodies, one under each arm as he waded out into the river, hot on Lee’s heels.
Lee glanced right, then left, and saw the caimans, maybe five or six of them in the dark, eyes twinkling in moonlight that had been revealed now the storm had finished and the clouds had cleared. They were swimming close, just a few yards away now; and then he heard the single gunshot from the cockpit of the freight helicopter, and a terrified scream.
Chapter Eleven
Lee dragged the body onto the shore, Hartman following, as they ended up next to Eva and the pilot.
“What the hell was that?” Hartman asked, and Lee shrugged his shoulders. Was Silva up to some kind of trick?
But then the dead body of Eduardo Silva was thrown from the chopper to land on the sandy riverbank, a single gunshot wound in the back of his head.
And then Phoenix emerged, an arm around her neck, a pistol to the side of her head.
Lee recognized the man stood behind her with the gun, from briefing files on Apex Security.
It was Daniel Forster, one of the most experienced – and ruthless – of the company’s team leaders.
Forster had decided to stay in the Black Hawk instead of fast-roping in with the men; he wasn’t sure if it was just luck, or some sort of hidden sixth sense that had made him back out at the last second, but he was glad he had – all of the men who had gone were dead now, with all manner of primitive weapons sticking out of them.
He had hidden under the rear seats when Lee had climbed up the ropes; not out of cowardice, but out of a desire to see the mission through to the end. If he’d just flown away in the Black Hawk, he would have been okay, but he wouldn’t have fulfilled his end of the contract – a dead research team, as well as a destroyed village and an annihilated tribe. if he allowed the research team to board, however, and then came out, all guns blazing in the confined space, he would have nicely ticked all of the boxes.
But then that bleeding-heart hero Lee had dragged all sorts of people onboard, the injured and even the dead, damn him, and Forster had been so crammed in that he hadn’t been able to move a muscle.
And some stupid sonofabitch had launched a missile at them, which hadn’t been part of Forster’s plan at all. But, always ready to make the best of things, he remained hidden – though in tremendous pain from the crash, his head spinning and surely with at least three broken ribs – and had bided his time until everyone was distracted, at which point he had slipped out of the chopper, climbed aboard the new one, shot Silva, and taken the girl hostage.
Now all he had to do was shoot the others, then escape in the freight helicopter. It wasn’t as pretty as the Black Hawk, but it would certainly do.
And then, before he got back to his superiors, he could work out how to put a positive spin on the story of how this little operation had turned into a complete disaster.
“What do you want?” Lee asked him, hands up in placation in front of him, the guy only six feet away on the narrow bank. Even in the dark, of night, fresh and clear after the storm, he could see the callous determination in the man’s eyes.
“I just want to go home,” Forster said. “But to do that, I need the rest of the research team. Where are they?”
“Took off after the villagers,” Lee said. “They could be anywhere by now.”
He knew this wasn’t true, though; he’d seen them just after the gunshot, coming back on the far side of the river, and had gestured for them to get down, to take cover. But Forster definitely didn’t need to know that.
“You’ll have to find them, I’m afraid,” Forster said. “Or else the princess here gets it.”
“Don’t,” Phoenix said, body jerking violently as she threw an elbow back into Forster’s injured ribs, crumpling him in the middle, “call me ‘princess’!”
Lee took the opportunity and rushed forward, grabbing the gun and raising it into the air as Phoenix jumped to safety. Forster pulled the trigger and the weapon discharged into the night sky; but then, seeing that Lee was unbalanced with his arms in the air and his feet lower down than his own, by the river bank, Forster charged forward, pushing Lee backward, until they both crashed into the river.
Lee felt the warm water all around him, and latched himself onto Forster, making sure he couldn’t get away. He felt the man clawing at him, then a heavy hammer fist that struck him above the eye. Lee hit back, targeting the ribs that he’d seen were injured. Forster gasped, and then let his fingers scrape up Lee’s face and into his eyes, digging them in hard, trying to gouge them out of his head.
Lee twisted and turned with the pain, could just make out that people were shouting from the bank at him, though he couldn’t make out what they were saying, and he ground his fist into Forster’s ribs again in a vain attempt to make him give up the eye-gouge.
And then there was a horrendous, terrible, horrifying scream, and the fingers went slack of their own accord and fell away from Lee’s eyes.
And when he finally managed, through the pain, to open them, he wished he hadn’t; for there in front of him, was Forster’s head, half-swallowed by a caiman, the jaws wrapped around the upper portion of the skull, the huge teeth digging straight through the face. Even in the darkness, Lee could see the flash of Forster’s left eye, in a gap between two of the teeth.
And then the fearsome animal dragged Forster down with it, back into the water, and Lee thought that he might just be next.
But then the sound of an M4 opened up, and Lee watched in gratitude as the caimans scattered, swimming away from Hartman’s expert shots.
He dragged himself onto the shore, pained and exhausted. “Tell Gale and Lisa to come on over,” he whispered to Hartman. “And then let’s get the hell out of here.”
Twenty minutes later, they were airborne again, flying back to the relative safety of Cruzeiro do Sul. The chopper held Lee, Phoenix and Hartman, along with Gale, Eve, Lisa and Greg, with the dead bodies of Roberts, Harwood and Silva also making the trip.
Lee piloted the chopper, while Phoenix sat next to him in the co-pilot’s seat, hand on his arm for comfort. Lee welcomed it.
“I can’t believe what happened,” Gale said, coming to sit near Lee. “What we discovered, what we could have discovered, all gone. Now all we’re left with is dead bodies.” She began to cry, and Eva held her.
“Dead bodies,” Lee agreed, “yes. But also maybe something else.”
“Like what?” Gale asked, almost beyond caring now, in a state where she believed that truly nothing good could ever happen.
Lee reached into the cargo pocket of his pants, and pulled out the purple orchid he had been studying earlier. It was damp and bedraggled, but very possibly the very last of its kind in the world.
“Like this,” he said, to the incredulous gasps of the researchers, and then smiled widel
y. “Like this.”
Epilogue
Chicago Tribune
University Heads Killed in Car Crash
By Saul Underwood
Two major academics, and pillars of the world-renowned University of Chicago were killed yesterday when the vehicle in which they were traveling was involved in a head-on collision with a truck.
Gregory J. Dunford was the university’s president, and Thomas N. Bakula served as Dean of the Biological Sciences Division. It is believed they were traveling together to a meeting when the tragedy occurred.
The driver of the truck has not been identified, and several eyewitnesses state that someone escaped the cab and ran from the scene. The police are appealing for more witnesses, but early reports indicate that the truck might have been stolen.
In other tragic circumstances for the university, a team of six professors and doctoral students are all believed to have died during a plane crash in Brazil, where they were to have performed research into the immune systems of river fish in the Amazon.
“It is a dark week indeed for the university,” said Professor Sylvia Darrow, who was known to have worked closely with Professor Bakula., and who helped organize the research expedition. “We have lost some of our key personnel, and I have lost some dear friends. It is a tragedy that is difficult to put into words.”
Sylvia Darrow closed the newspaper, folded it, and put it on the seat beside her as the limousine ploughed slowly through the downtown traffic.
It was a tragedy, she thought; it really was. But it was a tragedy that had left her ten million dollars richer, for doing nothing more than passing on a dummy watch and doing a bit of play-acting.
Reports from Brazil seemed to indicate that everyone was dead – the research team, the tribe, the men of the hired security team, and John Lee himself. It was all a bit confusing, but it seemed that a local drug gang armed with SAMs had something to do with it. And now Dunford and Bakula were dead too, before they could start asking any awkward questions.
THE EXTRACTOR Page 14
