by Nate Granzow
Cover art designed by Kevin Granzow
Copyright © 2014 by Nate Granzow
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means: electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the written prior permission of the author.
ISBN 10: 1496022882
ISBN 13: 978-1496022882
Note: This is a work of fiction. While the names of some public figures, locations, and actual world events are real, the characters in these pages and their exploits are entirely fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
To my dad, Curt, for his ongoing inspiration. If I can harness a tenth of his creativity, I’ll have more unique ideas than I could write about in a lifetime.
To my wife, Traci, for her immeasurable and
unwavering support.
To my brother, Kev, my designer and a master of his art that enhances my own.
To my daughter, Melanie, and my mother, Betsy, for brightening my days and filling me with fresh
optimism.
To my numerous writer friends, especially Steven Hildreth Jr., Tracey Kelley, Chad Michael Cox, and Craig Van Langen, whose eagerness to share their experiences and significant
writing talents has been and continues to be a driving force for me as an author.
"For greed, all nature is too little." — Seneca
PREFACE
Amazon rainforest, Southwest Venezuela
A middle-aged Yanomami warrior slipped soundlessly to the edge of a clearing. The enemy tribe's shabono—a towering open-air hut and home to an entire village—stood before them, veiled in a dense morning fog. The warm, pre-dawn rain pattered through the leaves above him, rolling through his bowl-cut black hair and down his sun-darkened skin. Eyes fixed on the slowly brightening sky, he adjusted his grip around the worn handle of his palm-wood bow as a ragged line of his fellow warriors—red loin cloths about their hips, bright feathers tied to their upper arms, and long, fine sticks piercing their lips, cheeks, and nose—approached and knelt.
Despite his best efforts to control his respiration, he struggled to catch his breath. His calloused fingers held the base of an arrow tight to the bow's bromeliad-fiber string, but his arms shook from the exertion.
With each passing day, his joints stiffened, his reflexes slowed, and his muscles softened. If he were to become a unokai, a blooded warrior, this would likely be his last opportunity. He simply couldn't compete with the younger warriors anymore.
But today, he would deliver a swift death to his enemy, and a ceremony would await him upon his return, bringing honor to his family and wives to his bed.
The warriors on both ends of the line called out, mimicking a macaw's cackle to signify their positions.
An ongoing spiritual battle had been waged between the two tribes for generations. When their own villagers took ill, it was almost always because the enemy tribe's shaman had cursed them with evil spirits. Hekura spirits. Their shaman, in return, would call forth a curse upon their enemies.
But ever since the white man arrived and built their fortress above the ancient grounds of the dead—the forbidden place—the curses had escalated.
Days before, the women of their village had wrapped the corpse of an elder in leaves, waiting until the bones had been picked clean by insects to prepare it for cremation. The village would consume the man's ashes on their annual day of remembrance. But something dragged the corpse away before it was ready. Scavenging animals, they'd thought. But soon thereafter, the beasts responsible grew bolder, attacking the tribe's women and children while the men were away hunting and fishing.
The only explanation: The enemy tribe's shaman had allied himself with the white man, who must have found a way to harness stronger hekura spirits than any they'd seen before.
This raid would set things right. They'd kill the other villagers and the shaman as retaliation for the attacks. And he'd been allowed the first opportunity to slaughter an enemy warrior, a rare and welcomed privilege. As the sun rose, their enemy, too, would rise, entering the jungle to tend their crops. The first man to exit the palisade would be his for the taking.
Any moment now.
The sun rose, the rain abated, but the waiting continued. He grew anxious. Something was amiss. The villagers should have risen by now. Cautiously moving from cover, he approached the palisade. A sharp chorus of carnal screams interrupted the silence.
The warriors paused, listening to the ringing cries as they died away, and then cautiously entered the stronghold through an open gate.
Ravaged bodies, like tossed and broken dolls, lay scattered across the vast central courtyard. Torn and shredded as if by a thousand wild beasts, the entire village lay decimated, mutilated beyond recognition.
Daring another step, the warrior stopped suddenly, a startled gasp slipping between his lips as a crudely sharpened tree limb impaled his abdomen and deflected off his spine, emerging through his lower back. Falling to his knees, overcome by pain as the world grew dark, he stared in awe and terror at the hulking, ghostly figure approaching him, swelling with roiling bands of muscle as its jaws opened to reveal rows of piranha-like teeth.
Hekura. Hekura.
ONE
Colombian airspace, 1,400 feet above ground level
Four years later
"Austin, you awake up there?" asked a voice crackling urgently through the static. Adjusting his headset, pilot Austin Stewart replied playfully, his gruff voice tinged with an English accent, "Well Leo, clever boy, if I wasn't, we’d be in the dirt by now, wouldn't we?"
The rumbling old Fairchild C-123 "Provider," as the U.S. military had called the unsophisticated-looking cargo plane during its heyday, had its bowels full of jungle fauna bound for the Hygeia pharmaceutical research laboratories in San Cristóbal, Venezuela.
"We've got a mess back here. One of the straps holding the cargo just snapped, and Javiar's got a crate crushing his leg that I can't lift by myself."
"Bollocks. I'll be back there in a second." Slipping his headset off and turning to the copilot—a stoic Venezuelan with a thick, jet-black moustache and a pair of blue-dyed ostrich cowboy boots planted shakily on the rudder pedals—Austin said, "Take the wheel…I'm sorry, what was your name again?"
"Matheus, sir," the man replied softly.
With his usual copilot and best friend Jeremy Barreto at home recovering from a bout of Dengue fever, Austin had been forced to enlist one of the other pilots at the airbase to take his place at the last minute. He hadn't met this man before, and Austin's estimation of the stranger's skill was based only on what he'd seen on the first leg of the flight. But the skies were clear and even a child could hold the plane steady for a few minutes.
Unstrapping his lean, six-foot-two frame from the seat, Austin plunged through the narrow aperture separating the cockpit from the cargo hold.
Javiar lay clutching his leg with one hand, pushing against the crate with the other as he moaned in pain. Over the roar of the engines, Johnny Cash's "Ain't No Grave" echoed through the plane's cargo bay.
"What a mess this is. You said the strap broke?"
"Yes, it did. If we'd make a habit of replacing the damn things before they become too frayed to hold up a man's pants, this wouldn't happen," Leo said, shaking his head in frustration.
"Take it up with management when we get back. I put in a request two months ago, and they called it a non-essential repair," the Brit said, sifting through the spilled plant matter as he assumed a squat position, slipped his fingers beneath the wooden crate, and nodded to Leo. As they lifted the case and freed their colleague, something slapped against the fuselage, followed by a metallic twang. The plane suddenly b
anked hard left, sending the men tumbling to the side of the fuselage. The craft's engines groaned loudly as the men fought the sudden increase in G-forces pinning them down.
Austin scrambled toward the cockpit, pushing leaves and canvas-wrapped seedlings aside as he recovered from the sudden turn, but the large craft had begun a steep ascent, the nose aimed toward the blue heavens. His boots slipped on the steel floor as he climbed toward his seat.
"What the bleeding hell is going on up there?" Austin yelled into the cockpit. "This isn't a ruddy jet fighter, you pillock."
"We're being shot at," Matheus cried, overcome with panic and twisting the control yoke with the urgency of a rally car driver approaching a hairpin turn.
"Shooting at us?"
"Coming from the ground. People are firing guns at us."
Austin suddenly realized what the man meant. Their route regularly put them in the vicinity of a large FARC guerilla encampment. These men, Austin had learned from previous flights, were both heavily involved in weapons and drug smuggling, and loved nothing more than shooting at the plodding aircraft as it passed overhead. At their cruising altitude, though, the fire seldom, if ever, got remotely close.
The plane's stall warning beeped loudly.
"Stop climbing, dammit. We're out of danger, and you're going to stall out," Austin shouted.
"Sir?"
"Put the deuced nose down, now."
"I…I can't," Matheus said, staring at his hands on the control yoke, bewildered.
Flung forward against the instrument panel as the plane stalled and twisted into a sharp dive, Austin dodged into his seat, batted the copilot's hands away from the control yoke, and seized his in an iron grasp. He leaned back, pulling with all his strength as the cargo plane cut through the wisps of cloud cover, the green rainforest canopy below growing larger in the windshield.
Matheus was right.
The controls were unresponsive.
Austin thought back to the moment before. The twang he'd heard must have been a bullet severing the Provider's elevator cable.
A one in a billion shot.
His vision went red as the extreme g-force pushed blood into his skull, his heart pumping violently as he realized he wouldn't be able to pull the plane up in time.
Johnny Cash's gruff baritone still flowed through his headset. And if these wings don't fail me, I will meet you anywhere….
"Brace for impact!" Austin screamed, trying to be heard above the plane’s groaning framework.
Tree limbs scraped raggedly against the plane’s aluminum skin as it broke through the jungle canopy, the wings and horizontal stabilizers ripped from the fuselage with a cataclysmic bellow.
Without his safety harness in place, the jarring loss of momentum hurled the pilot through the broken windshield, his body tumbling through the air. The oxygen rushed from his chest as he came to an abrupt stop, slamming into a thick nest of moss and vines.
For ten minutes, amidst the fading cries of disturbed birds and monkeys, Austin didn't move. First, he struggled to believe he was still breathing—in his mind, he’d already written himself off as dead. Then, upon accepting that he'd survived, Austin began to worry what he'd find if he looked down at his body. He imagined limbs twisted horribly, his body still too shocked to register the extreme pain soon to come. So he just breathed the stifling jungle air. Breathed and prayed he'd only imagined the entire thing. Surely this was only a nightmare.
Finally forcing himself to move, Austin slowly and deliberately rolled over and stared at the smoldering remains of the aircraft lodged in the crotch of a towering Kapok tree two hundred feet behind him. One of the engine's propellers, the blades stripped to jagged nubs, still rolled slowly. The copilot's body—shredded by the windshield's jagged glass—hung limp from the cockpit by one of his garish cowboy boots, his neck twisted at an aberrant angle.
Examining his body, Austin found himself, surprisingly, entirely intact. But upon looking down, the pilot gasped and pinched his eyes shut, gripping the surround tree limbs as though holding on for his life.
Because he was.
Austin's stomach turned as he dared another glance down at the dense weave of green and brown spiraling hundreds of feet away to the forest floor.
*******
"How did it happen, Austin?" Denver Senske asked calmly, though the kneading of her wiry hands indicated a perturbed mental state. A short, gaunt woman with thin, white-blonde hair, Denver wasn’t ugly, necessarily, but her features could be best defined as angular and sharp, punctuated by eyes too small and dark for her face.
"Quickly," Austin replied, gently massaging the swelling in his shoulder as he stared at his supervisor coldly. "It happened quickly."
Turning away from her office's window, she smirked. "Cute. You understand that I'm sending you back for a new sample, don't you? I've been waiting on this plant quite a long time."
The pilot grimaced as he leaned against the wall. His supervisor's office had not one piece of personality in it: no pictures of family, no favorite coffee mug with a clever aphorism on it, even her desk lamp was a company-issued, industrial-looking piece. It was a reflection of her character. All business.
"You sure you want me to be the one to do it? I made a real hash of it last time."
"Yes, you did. But unfortunately, the list of qualified pilots I can trust with this information is slim. And of those, only one owes me so many favors." Settling into her desk chair, she pulled a stack of already-neat paperwork from an organizer, tapped the pages against the desktop and began straightening the edges.
"That's one thing I've always appreciated about you, Denver. You always make blackmail sound so bloody friendly."
She smiled curtly. "I don't consider it blackmail. I see it as a friend looking out for a friend. I'm keeping your sordid history as an arms trafficker to myself and off your records, and in return, I expect you to maintain the secrecy of this perfectly legitimate business endeavor."
"The words 'secrecy' and 'perfectly legitimate' seldom go together," he said distantly, looking through the vertical shades covering the window and toward the rolling green knolls surrounding the city. He caught his fingers reaching unconsciously for the cigarettes in his coat pocket.
"You're in no position to argue about ethics with me, Austin." She slid the paperwork carefully back between the organizer's dividers. "You know I want that plant, and you're going to be the one to get it for me. Surely you want it to be made available for research as badly as I do."
He licked his lips.
"Why do you say that?"
She paused before replying, "I know about your condition, Austin."
His eyes widened, but his jaw remained clenched. "You've been poking through my medical files. That's naughty of you. I may not be the most familiar with the human-resources handbook, but I'd be willing to wager that's a breach of doctor/patient confidentiality."
"I'm your supervisor. The health of my employees is of the utmost importance to me," Denver said with false sincerity.
The Englishman was instantly reminded why he felt physically uncomfortable in his supervisor's presence. Though their relationship had always been platonic, he couldn't shake the sensation that Denver carried herself like one of his ex-lovers. She always seemed to know his most intimate secrets, and never let on when she was feeling vindictive enough to use them against him.
"My health is really none of your business, Denver."
She leaned forward and her voice lowered. "This plant could save your life."
He stepped forward, placed his palms on her desk, and leaned toward her, whispering, "You're being naïve; that's unlike you. That plant isn't going to save anyone."
The two stared at one another, neither blinking nor looking away. Finally, Austin stood straight and asked, "So, what happens if I refuse to go back?"
"Of course you would ask that," she said, her voice changing back to her usual barbed impatience. "If you refuse, I'll see to it that you never work fo
r the company again, that your pilot's license is revoked, and that the proper authorities are notified of your dealings in Sierra Leone."
There it was.
The vindictive ex-girlfriend behavior.
Grabbing a paperclip from his boss's desk, Austin bent it around his finger. "Pretty sure there's a statute of limitations regarding things that happened so long ago."
"So now you're a lawyer, too? Well if you practice law as well as you fly a plane, you may want to consider hiring an attorney."
"Funny."
"Austin, I know you're trying to be cheeky, but I mean this sincerely: Fuck up again, betray my trust, or otherwise interfere with getting this plant back to this laboratory, and I'll destroy you."
Slipping the straightened paperclip between his teeth, the Brit muttered, "I'll need a new plane."
TWO
Hygeia Pharmaceuticals Clinical Research Center
San Cristóbal, Venezuela
Dr. Olivia Dover adjusted her protective goggles as she stood before the laboratory's mass spectrometer, awaiting the familiar beep that signaled the test's completion. A slender woman in her mid thirties, Olivia stared absently at her reflection in the glass separating her from the hallway, noticing in the fluorescent glow of the overhead lights that her once coffee-toned skin had faded to a surprisingly pale hue for a woman with Argentinean parents. Too much time indoors. She instinctively checked her walnut-colored hair in the tight bun she'd tied; then swiped the few errant hairs around her temples behind her ears.
Her reflection suddenly became clearer against the worn canvas jacket of a man walking down the hall. Tall, with a fair but weathered complexion and short brown hair tinged with the subtlest shade of orange, he looked as though he'd been without a shower or shave for a week. The man turned and cast her a sidelong glance, his hands in his pockets, as he strolled toward her supervisor's office.
