William Christie 02 - Mercy Mission

by William Christie

  "Not like those easygoing North American bees?"

  "Nope. No sense of humor at all."

  Scanlan tapped him on the shoulder, then grimaced at the pain it caused her swollen hand. "Rich, what would you do if I were allergic to bee stings."

  "Unless you had one of those allergy injectors, all I could do is try to keep your airway open."

  "If something like that ever happens," she said seriously, "I want you to leave me behind."

  "Don't be melodramatic. This was just a nasty lesson in how fast the jungle can turn on you. We'll be more careful, keep hanging together. We'll be all right."

  Welsh dispensed Benadryl antihistamine capsules from the first-aid kit, and after a short rest they got moving. By the time they found a stream to wash in, the mud had dried, brown and hard and scratchy like plaster. It made the bee stings even more painful, if that was possible.

  The stream was slow-moving and about ten feet wide. There was practically no bank; the trees grew right down into the water. After finding a sharp bend where they couldn't be easily seen, Welsh stood guard while Scanlan rinsed herself off.

  He was very anxious about being even that exposed in broad daylight, and rested on one knee with the pistol ready. When she was through, he dunked himself and his pack in the stream. They went back into the trees and slumped down on their packs. Welsh was livid, mainly with himself. "After everything that's happened, to be ambushed and fucked up by bees!"

  Scanlan reached over and gently took his hand. "Are you sure you're all right?"

  Welsh put his other hand on hers, very gently. "I think I'm having a bad day. You want to bag the rest of it?"

  "I was really hoping you'd say that." She paused. "By the way, what's for dinner tonight?"

  He smiled through swollen lips. "We could go back and get some honey?"

  "God, that's really funny," she said, without a trace of amusement in her voice.

  "Okay, I see some water lilies growing in the stream. We'll boil up the tubers. I'll throw in a line, see if there's any fish."

  "Great," she said, again without enthusiasm.

  "Hey, if you've got a better offer, take it."

  "I'm not being ungrateful...yes, I am being ungrateful, and I apologize. I was just thinking back on that snake with more than a little longing."

  "The jungle version of Murphy's Law. When you don't want snakes around, you're up to your ass in them. When you're ready to start eating, they're nowhere to be found."

  They made camp a short distance away, and both felt sick the rest of the afternoon, and would until the venom passed through their systems.

  To take his mind off it, Welsh began putting together a fishing rig. Always carry line and hooks in your survival kit. He cut a piece of monofilament fishing line as long as the width of the stream. Every six inches along the line he tied an overhand knot loop. To each of the loops he tied a shorter leader line with a hook on the other end.

  "I've never seen anything like that," said Scanlan.

  "Probably because it's illegal any place with fish and game laws. It's called a trotline—a poacher's rig."

  Welsh dug around with the machete for worms and grubs to bait the hooks. When he had enough, he took the whole rig down to the stream. He tied a sizable rock to one end of the long line and tossed it out into the water. The other end was tied to a strong sapling on the bank.

  "With the rock sitting on the bottom the hooks hang at varying depths," he explained. "Much better chance of something biting. And since we can just leave it there, I don't have to sit on the bank like Huck Finn with his cane pole, in full view of anyone who might happen by."

  He checked the line every so often, but nothing bit. So it was stewed water-lily tubers for dinner. Welsh diced in the earthworms left over from the fishing bait. Worms were high-quality protein, he explained to Scanlan, with most of the essential amino acids. He really thought she'd draw the line on that, even after all his fast talking. She ate it, but withheld comment. She was as hungry as he was.

  During the flight from the bees, the nylon upper had come apart from the sole of one of her running shoes. Welsh contributed some tough nylon threads from a piece of parachute cord, and the big needle he brought to puncture blisters. Scanlan did the jury-rigged sewing job.

  In the predawn darkness Welsh found three small catfish on the trotline, and the shredded remains of several more that something larger had taken the opportunity to feast on. He grilled the fish over a quick fire, and then, swollen and hurting on top of everything else, he and Scanlan continued on their journey.

  Chapter Thirty

  By the sixth day in jungle they were pretty ragged. Their clothes were torn, even with corrective stitching every night. Averaging a meal a day, not always large, was only enough to keep them going, not maintain their weight. Welsh soon noticed his ribs protruding. Scanlan's clothes seemed to be hanging looser by the day. And the only good thing about their general lack of cleanliness was that being outdoors they could smell neither themselves nor each other. They were constantly wet: from the daily rains, the draining heat, or just walking through the damp foliage. It was like wearing a second skin of sweat and grit.

  Just moving through the jungle brought endless scratches and insect bites. These were carefully tended every night, because in that climate small wounds boiled up into serious infections terrifyingly quickly.

  After being subjected to the elements, a marginal diet, and the ordeal of movement in difficult terrain, it didn't take long to reach that level of fatigue where you found any number of excellent reasons for not moving at all.

  From hard experience in the Marine Corps Welsh understood this perfectly. He strictly adhered to a daily schedule. Scanlan occasionally grumbled at his fanaticism, but he went by the Marine Corps maxim that it was time to worry only when the troops stopped bitching. From the first day in the jungle it had been clear that Margaret Scanlan would walk until she dropped rather than concede that she was incapable of keeping up with him. Everyone found their determination in a different place.

  On the afternoon of that sixth day they were out of water, but Welsh wasn't really concerned. If they couldn't find a stream or pool, he'd go to low ground and dig. Water nearly always bubbled up into the hole. Wait for it to clear or strain it through a piece of cloth.

  Before it came to any of that, some noise attracted his attention. "Hear that?" he said.

  "What?" said Scanlan.

  "Listen."

  "All I hear are birds."

  "That's it. You know what brings so many birds together?"

  "Stop teasing."

  "Fruit trees. As you've noticed, the jungle isn't carpeted with fruit trees. The few there are attract a ton of birds. And even if the fruit is high up in the canopy, they knock a lot on the ground."

  "What the hell are we waiting for?"

  "My thoughts exactly."

  They followed the noise, and it was a longer walk than expected. As usual in the jungle, they didn't see what they were looking for until they were right on top of it.

  "Wild plantain trees," said Welsh. "A nice little grove of them."

  Scanlan audibly smacked her lips. "Bananas."

  "Plantains. More starch than sugar."

  "Look," she said. "Up there."

  Welsh shaded his eyes with his hand. Tiny forms were flitting about in the canopy and adding to the general din. "Spider monkeys. Not as noisy as howlers, but less shy."

  "Aren't you going to shoot one?"

  Welsh smiled. "Don't have anything against eating your ancestors, eh? I'd just waste my ammo trying to hit something that small that high up. And if I only wounded one, we'd lose it in the brush."

  There was still some fruit hanging. Welsh knocked a bunch down with his staff. "Everything spoils so fast in this climate," he said. "We'll just take tonight's dinner."

  He bent over to pick up the fruit. There was a tugging at his pack. He turned around. Scanlan was pointing. Two large male monkeys had whipped
down a tree, touched ground, and were advancing on them, screaming and gesturing wildly.

  The snap of the shot was drowned out by all the commotion, and the largest monkey pitched backward, limbs akimbo. The other looked down with an amazed expression, then tore off into the tree. There was a stampede, and within fifteen seconds there wasn't a monkey left in the neighborhood.

  A thin wisp of smoke curled from the end of the sound suppressor. "Damn," Welsh said. "They were really wild. Protecting their territory, aggressive as shit. Probably never saw a human before." He turned to Scanlan. "Any objection to saving the plantains for dessert?"

  "Are you kidding?" she replied, with a look of pure bloodthirstiness. "I've had snake and iguana so far. Why not monkey?"

  "Why not?" Welsh asked.

  "You could pass me one of those plantains now."

  "Have you had dysentery yet?" Welsh asked.

  She gave him a look. "I think I would have known."

  "You haven't because we've cooked everything. We'll boil the plantains. And they're better that way. Really."

  She said it with great forbearance. "Yes, I'm sure they are."

  They decided to move out of the area before stopping to cook. If they were attracted to the plantains, someone else might be too. Scanlan carried the monkey, tied to a stick, so he could walk point with the pistol.

  There was still the matter of water. And as usual, Welsh heard it running before he saw it. But as he slowly pushed through the leaves, he also heard something unusual. He held up a hand and Scanlan froze behind him. It wasn't the unnatural sound of human movement; softer, though still out of the ordinary. And it was right in front of them.

  Welsh didn't know if they could back away without making noise. If they hadn't been out of water he might have tried. And if it had sounded like someone shifting around in an ambush position. Or bees. But something made him move forward. He brought his pistol up, took two steps forward, slid under a branch, and there was the stream.

  Welsh literally felt the hair go up on the back of his neck. It was an instinctive, primitive reaction. Standing on the edge of the stream, halfway in the water, was a jaguar. The big cat, a female, had one protective paw atop the carcass of a wild pig. The light came through the canopy and caught the black rosettes blending hypnotically down her yellow sides. Temple art, Welsh thought.

  He was transfixed. The jaguar was still breathing hard from the hunt. Her tail waved languorously, and then stiffened as Scanlan made a tiny noise coming up. The cat's black-tipped ears twitched, she dropped to a crouch, and the head turned quickly. Welsh found himself gazing into two sublime pale yellow eyes. He and the jaguar stared at each other, and then the cat picked up the pig in its mouth, cleared the stream in a single powerful bound, and plunged into the trees on the opposite side. The movement and disappearance were so fast Welsh though he might have had a hallucination.

  "Did you see that?" he whispered.

  "Yes, I'm sorry I scared it."

  "The breeze must have been blowing toward us; she didn't get our scent. Don't worry, she's the dominant predator in this jungle, and we were just an annoyance." He sat down beside the stream, the pistol in his lap. "No wonder the Indians worshipped them. Did you ever see anything more magnificent in your life?"

  "It was beautiful, but I thought you were going to shoot it."

  Welsh shook his head vehemently. He was facing the opposite side of the stream, and Scanlan saw him bring his sleeve up to his face. "Are you okay?" she asked.

  Welsh turned to her, his eyes shining. "Do you know how lucky we were to see her out here? Free? What a gift!"

  She smiled warmly. "So there's a spiritual side too."

  The male in Welsh only shrugged. "So how do we interpret such a powerful omen?"

  "I'll leave that to you. I'm still trying to decide whether we have good karma because we got out of the hotel and lived through that ambush, or bad because we have to eat bugs in the jungle."

  "You'll never let me forget about those termites, will you?" They'd come across the distinctive aboveground nest mounds in the course of an otherwise food-less day. Welsh smashed the nests with a rock and quickly shoveled the pieces into their mosquito head nets. He dunked them in the nearest stream, dissolving the nests. The occupants were de-winged and roasted in the embers of a fire. Scanlan apologized yet again for being ungrateful, but said that she would still hold it against him.

  The thought of it made Welsh smile as he looked around the stream. It was only a foot wide, shaded by the trees and dappled by sunlight, so shallow and clear that the gravel bed was visible. "This is beautiful, isn't it?"

  She sat down beside him so they could speak very softly. "What my dad used to call a good medicine place."

  Welsh slipped off his pack and began filling the water bottles. He shook them vigorously to dissolve the iodine.

  "I suppose in another few years the chainsaws will take care of it," Scanlan said.

  "Careful," he warned. "People will start calling you a cynic like me. Don't worry about the jungle. They can cut the hardwoods, slash and burn, run cattle in for American fast food. But the soil isn't Iowa, pretty soon the cattle have no graze, and within a generation the jungle is back. A few jaguars will come out of hiding, and all the get rich schemes of twenty-first century man will look like the Maya temples you find around here with the vines growing over them."

  "I suppose that's a hopeful thought."

  "As hopeful as you can get with homo sapiens running around loose."

  "I don't know. If people are educated, they can change things."

  Welsh smiled sadly and shook his head again. "I know my species." He passed her a water bottle. "And now we've got to get hydrated and find a spot to cook some monkey."

  Scanlan sighed. "There's your realistic side taking over again. You notice I didn't say cynical."

  "I appreciate that."

  Later, hunched over the fire, he said, "Arm or a leg?"

  "Whatever's medium-rare."

  "Well-done," said Welsh. "I'll give you the long reason again. We were talking about what humans are doing to the tropical forest. Well, the forest has its own defenses. Out here there are viruses we've never encountered, just waiting to hop aboard. Mr. Spider Monkey may be immune, but our DNA is uncomfortably similar. Both HIV and the Ebola virus got loose when some Africans decided to snack on raw chimpanzee. So we'll have our monkey well-done."

  "You know, if you just gave arbitrary orders I could enjoy being resentful. Well, I'm glad you cut his little hands and feet off anyway. I think I've dealt with things pretty well, but I'd have trouble with fingers and toes."

  After they finished it was still light, so they kept walking. They were halted by a river more than fifty yards wide with a very fast current. "The good news," he said, "is that this is the Belize River, and they don't name things after Belize in Guatemala. The bad news is that we have to cross it to get anywhere."

  "And I suppose the risk of drowning is the bad news."

  "I couldn't have put it any better. I'll throw my trot-line in the water tonight, and maybe we'll have fish for breakfast before we drown."

  "I wouldn't have put it like that," she said.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  In the morning there were two peacock bass high up on the trotline, and a catfish near the bottom.

  After breakfast Welsh showed Scanlan how to make a raft. He spread the nylon tarp on the ground and placed both their packs side by side in the center. Then he rolled the tarp around them like a cigar. He tied one end off with parachute cord. He put his mouth over the other, blew the package up like a balloon, and tied that end tightly.

  He braided the remaining parachute cord into a triple thickness, tying one end around her waist with a bowline knot, the other around his.

  "Whatever happens," he said, "happens to both of us."

  "That could be good or bad. We just float across?"

  "Actually, we kick like maniacs. And whatever happens, don't let go
of the raft."

  "Don't worry about that."

  They went across at first light, when there was less chance of being observed. A running start and a hard leap off the bank onto the river. The water was freezing, and the current took hold of them. They kicked hard, but made more progress downstream than across. As they finally got close to the opposite bank, it looked like they'd made a major miscalculation. The bank was high and undercut, with no place to get a handhold and pull themselves up.

  Welsh was starting to get both tired and concerned when he saw it. The river had eroded the bank and dropped a tree into the water. The trunk had snagged a lot of other floating branches. At least the raft was out in front of them so it would get impaled by a branch first.

  They hit the tree trunk so hard it slid a little deeper into the water. Now Welsh was really concerned. If the trunk came off the bank they were going downstream with it. He hooked one arm around the trunk, pulled the folding knife from his pocket, and cut the parachute cord linking them. "Pull yourself up," he shouted over the roaring water.

  Scanlan went first, inching up the trunk and snapping off branches. The trunk was saturated with water. The bark slid off at every touch, and the underlying wood was slick as glass. Welsh pushed from behind, and Scanlan scrambled onto the bank. The trunk slid a little bit more. She reached out her hand for his; he gave her the raft instead.

  A foot from the bank, both Scanlan's hands grabbed the back of his shirt collar in a death grip, and he half pushed, half flipped onto the bank. As he was lying there gasping for breath, he could see that only a few inches of the mushroomed root system was still on the bank. Then he rolled over and Scanlan's face was right in front of him.

  "That was fun," she said.

  "Funny you should say that," said Welsh. "I didn't like it at all."

  "Next time bring a rubber raft and an outboard."

  "I'll make a note of that."

  When he got his wind back, they carried the raft intact to the high ground overlooking the stream-valley. Since they'd floated more than a quarter mile downstream from where they'd initially crossed, Welsh had to pull the map out to find where they were.