by Greig Beck
She grinned at Francisco, who nodded and raised his silver eyebrows at her. There was a muffled discussion on the other end of the phone, then Alfraedo cleared his throat.
‘Señors, there have been no attacks for days, no sign of any bandit activity in the area, and we have a team of American Green Berets patrolling the jungle. I think to wait any longer brings a risk of losing more than we gain. Don’t you agree?’
He sat back and folded his hands across his enormous belly. The unanimous decision to restart drilling was made within another three minutes.
Aimee pulled on a pair of khaki pants, still stiff with traces of red mud up to the thighs, and tucked a grey T-shirt into them. Thick socks and damp work boots were next, the boots lacing over the pants and halfway up her calves to seal her off from anything that decided to hitch a ride. Last to go on was a belt with a black holster. Their small security contingent had machetes for the jungle, but only Alfraedo, Francisco and Aimee had sidearms. Aimee hoped Alfraedo never needed to reach for his in a hurry as it was almost fully obscured by the paunch that hung over it. For that matter she hoped he never had to reach for anything down there in a hurry. Errk, she thought briefly.
They set off just after eight in the morning, along a walking track the men had cleared through the jungle. Once outside the camp perimeter, Aimee was reminded why they didn’t bother bringing vehicles – the wetter it got, the deeper the mud. Eventually the trucks would sink to a point where they would need to be dug out. Best just to use leg power.
The small army of twenty riggers, half a dozen security men, manager, supervisors and Francisco and Aimee plodded along without speaking. The jungle was waking around them and the squelch of their footsteps seemed unnaturally loud in the dark green tunnel. As the sun rose, it lifted the moisture from every tree, bush and blade of grass, forming a thick, hot blanket that resettled over the jungle for the rest of the day. Aimee was breathing heavily and aching from knee to groin – the thick, viscous mud fought to steal their boots with every step. A single mile had never felt so draining, and when the rig superstructure came into view she almost whooped with delight.
The framework of the rig had been dropped into place by giant helicopters and pieced together on the ground. It stood like the skeleton of a blue and white ship in a sea of red mud, its hundred-foot mast the core of a metal framework over a central pipe that ended in a conventional rotary drill, that with all its spikes and knobs, it looked like a colossal insect’s feeding apparatus, ready to puncture the earth’s skin and suck out its blood.
Aimee sighed with relief as she stepped up out of the mud. She scraped what felt like pounds of the stuff from her boots against the steel grid platform that extended all around the machinery, then stamped her feet and stretched her back.
While the riggers set about checking the equipment in preparation for restarting the drilling, Alfraedo ordered the security team to make a sweep of the surrounding jungle – just to be sure there were no bandits waiting to place a bullet between someone’s shoulderblades. Aimee could tell by his relaxed manner that he wasn’t expecting any trouble; after all, it’d been quiet for days now.
With a whine of the generators and a deep thump, the machinery restarted and the drill began its descent once again. Due to the depth at which they were drilling and the dense matrix they were encountering, speed of penetration had slowed to around a dozen feet per day. At the time they had been ordered to stop drilling, they were already a mile down and not far from their target depth. Their seismography readings had shown they were within a few dozen feet of the gas chamber. Unless they encountered any deep-mass obstruction, they should be into the gas pocket by the early evening. Once there, they would withdraw the penetration drill tip and replace it with a drill head dotted with unlockable perforations that would enable the gas to flow into the pipe.
Alfraedo had promised that the final penetration drill bit was to be brought to Aimee, untouched and uncontaminated, before the gas began to fully flow. She needed a sample of the rock from the inner skin of the chamber, away from its centre, or floor, where the more mature and heavier gases would have settled over the millennia. She knew that if she were to find a viable sample of living microorganisms, it would be in the thin crust at the roof of the cavern where, theoretically, methanogenesis would have last occurred. Or, if she was really lucky, was still occurring.
Aimee had set up her equipment under a sheet of canvas stretched between metal poles at the outer edge of the rig. A table and single chair completed her South American office. Soon, after weeks of advising, she would finally be hands-on. First, she would need to ascertain how much gas scrubbing was required to bring the natural product up to international standards, and then she would need to supervise the compaction work. The gas had to be compressed 600 times to a liquefied state for shipping – a process that was extremely dangerous, but necessary to get any sort of economy on cost of transportation.
‘I’ve got something for you, Dr Weir,’ said Francisco Herrera.
She hadn’t noticed him approaching and jumped at the sound of his voice. He bowed slightly and Aimee wondered how he managed to stay so spotless. She only had to walk twenty feet outside her door to have red mud splattered up to her knees and perspiration stains like a football player. She looked down: his boots were only slightly reddened by the mud; and his crisp white shirt was as dry as if he had been on a gentle stroll through a Boston park in springtime. Aimee, on the other hand, felt and looked a wreck.
From behind his back Francisco produced a cream-coloured woven fedora with dangling seedpods strung around its brim. He placed it on her head and touched the pods so they swung back and forth, creating a nearly impenetrable barrier for the insect hordes.
‘I hear it works for the Australians,’ he said, giving her a smile that wrinkled his perfect little silver moustache.
Aimee laughed. ‘I love it, and thank you.’
The elderly doctor, from the tiny town of Rosario, was the only person she really spent any time with in the camp. His olive skin was an indication of his local Indian heritage, and she had enjoyed hearing the stories he told her about his people and their culture. Despite their friendship, however, he just couldn’t help being inordinately formal all the time, to the extent of refusing to call her by her first name. But rather than making him seem stuffy, it just made him more likeable.
She flopped back down onto her chair, her arms flung out at her sides and exhaled slowly. She pulled off the hat and pushed more of her stray hair back under the brim before replacing it and looking up at him.
Francisco looked at her for a moment longer and then became serious, leaning forward as if about to tell her a secret. ‘Something troubles you, Ms Weir?’
‘It’s nothing. I’m tired and homesick, and thoughts of old friends keep whirling around in my head. Aimee gave him a crooked smile.
Francisco’s eyes twinkled. ‘Hmm, something tells me this friend is a man, and not so old, yes?’
Aimee’s eyes slid away from the small dapper man, and though she seemed to look out at the jungle her vision was focused on something a lot further away. ‘Yes, a man, and no, not so old.’
A yell from the edge of the jungle and the sound of sloshing feet brought Aimee’s head around quickly, causing the seed pods strung around her face to clack together. It was the security detail, yelling in rapid Spanish to the foreman and Francisco. Even from a hundred or so feet away from where she sat, she could see their faces were pale and their eyes were as wide as those of startled horses.
Francisco walked across the gantry to meet the men, holding up one hand to slow them down. Though Aimee had undertaken a crash course in basic Spanish before departing, all she could make out was something that sounded like ‘un jaguar muerto’. A dead jaguar? she thought. What’s the big deal? She got to her feet, and strained to hear more.
After a few minutes, Francisco returned and explained that the security detail had found something at the edge of the jun
gle that they believed might be the result of an attack by a jaguar.
‘It would be best if you stayed here for a while, Dr Weir. Just until we make sure the animal is not still in the vicinity.’
Francisco seemed slightly embarrassed to be so solicitous towards her, especially as Aimee was nearly half a head taller than most of the Paraguayan site workers and taller again than himself.
Aimee smiled and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Francisco, an old friend taught me how to shoot, throw a knife and a good punch. He also took me to places a lot more dangerous than a jungle with a few big pussycats hanging from trees. I’ll be fine, you’ll see. I may even be able to help.’
There’s that old friend again, she thought and couldn’t help a lurch deep inside as she recalled the times she had spent together with Alex Hunter. Even if they were over, the memories, and the skills he had taught her, would stay with her forever.
Francisco shrugged. ‘Somehow, I knew you would want to come. Just be aware that this area of the jungle is very dense and very dark. People rarely venture into its depths; for that reason it has been known for hundreds of years as La oscuridad verde … the Dark Green.’
Aimee pulled a comic spooky face. ‘I’m not afraid of the dark, so lead on.’
Her face grew serious again as she followed the small doctor off the platform and into the red mud. And believe me, I know dark. Despite the intense humidity, she shivered as she recalled the dangers she and Alex Hunter had faced deep under the ice of Antarctica.
Alfraedo’s security men led the way through the dense jungle to a clearing. Even before pushing through the last of the foliage, Aimee could hear the mad zum of millions of insects in the open area. The security men stood back to allow her, Francisco and Alfraedo to enter first – and she noticed none of them looked in a hurry to follow.
The clearing, little more than twenty feet across, was a riot of colour and movement: the ground crawled and the air seethed with an insect horde in a feeding frenzy.
Aimee almost gagged. What she smelled wasn’t just decomposition, it was also the smell of torn-apart bodies, viscera, urine and faeces. In the humidity of the jungle, odours got trapped and concentrated in small areas – like this clearing. She couldn’t just smell the stench; she almost tasted it.
‘Jesucristo!’ Francisco crossed himself, then turned to one of the men and spoke in hurried Spanish before pulling an immaculate handkerchief from his pocket and folding it over his nose and mouth. The man nodded and raced back along the trail.
In a few moments, he returned with a small chemical fire extinguisher and sent a freezing white cloud into the clearing. The insects disappeared instantly, even the scavengers on the ground heading for the cover of the underbrush.
With the insects gone, the raw carnage was laid out before them. To call it a massacre would imply some force had overcome these humans, beaten them into submission and then to death. But this went beyond anything one human could possibly inflict on another, Aimee thought; it was complete physical annihilation. The bodies had been obliterated in a mad frenzy.
Francisco was the first to step forward. As he did so, his boot squelched, not in the ever-present mud but in a carpet of shredded flesh and bone.
‘Dios Padre Todopoderoso – oh my.’
He looked around, obviously unsure of where to start – there was no single body left intact to examine. It was impossible to tell if there were two or ten bodies in the mess. Even the skulls had been cracked and opened, pieces of cranial bone thrown around like shards of broken pottery. Francisco used a stick to lift a lump of flesh, his eyes narrowing at the strange marks at its edges.
Whoever the men were, they had been armed. Aimee could see guns flung around the clearing; several were bent nearly in half. Her eyes traced a line of bullet holes up the trunk of a particularly broad tree – and stopped at a pale flap plastered against the wood about ten feet up from the ground. She frowned and stepped a little closer. It was a square piece of flesh, still streaked with blood, but intact, and showing a tattoo of a crude blue crucifix. Aimee felt acidic liquid rise at the back of her throat. She knew that tattoo – she had seen it on the bicep of the big Green Beret. She remembered the self-assured Captain Michaels and the almost cocky thumbs-up he had given her. Was he here too? Had he also been reduced to … this mess? She closed her eyes and held her breath for a moment.
When she opened them, Francisco was beside her. His eyes had found the scrap of skin in the tree too, and when he looked into her face again, Aimee could tell he was probably thinking the same thing she was. That fragment and its placement was no accident. It was … what? A warning, a trophy? She shuddered.
‘Could your Green Berets be this savage, Dr Weir?’
Aimee backed up a step as the insects started to descend once again. She shook her head. ‘No, Francisco, this is the Green Berets. And I don’t think any human being could inflict this … this insanity on another.’
Francisco looked back at the chaos, his pallor telling her that he was finally seeing it for what, and who, it was.
Together, they backed out of the clearing, the doctor’s eyes bulging slightly above the handkerchief that he held over his nose and mouth as a barricade against the returning swarms of insects. For the first time, Aimee noticed that his permanently immaculate trousers were stained red to the knees.
The short trek back to the rig was made in silence. Aimee pushed her new hat to the back of her head so she could dab at the greasy perspiration on her forehead. The deep background thrum of machinery reminded her of the hurricane of insects that had boiled over the pile of flesh in the small clearing. She felt sick, and a long, long way from Connecticut.
Francisco appeared beside her and held a silver flask under her nose, the top already unscrewed. The peaty smell of whisky rose up and Aimee took the ornate little bottle from his hand with a whispered ‘Thank you’. She took two good gulps of the fiery liquid, feeling it burn a path down her throat to settle in her stomach with a warm, pleasant bloom.
She handed the flask back. ‘What could have done that to those men, Francisco? I don’t believe it was a jaguar.’
Francisco took a small sip of whisky himself and carefully screwed the crested lid back into place. He pursed his lips before responding, his perfectly trimmed silver moustache bunching at its centre.
‘I’ve never seen, or even heard of, such butchery, Dr Weir, and I also find it hard to believe sane men were responsible. Even brutal torture could not inflict such damage. I also do not think a jaguar was responsible.’ He paused. ‘It is known that some of the drug dealers from the north keep tigers and bears as pets, and sometimes free them into the jungle when they tire of them. Even so, the creatures would have had to find their way through a lot of jungle; and besides, I think there was too much … anger in the attack for it to be an animal.’ He sighed and rubbed the silver lid of the flask with his thumb before holding it out to her again.
‘Will you send the men’s remains home?’ Aimee asked after taking another sip.
He shook his head without looking at her. ‘Impossible – little will remain in a day or so. The jungle is very good at cleaning up after itself.’
THREE
Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska; US Military Space Command
Colonel Jack Hammerson sat behind an oak desk the size of a small Buick and lifted the progress report on Captain Alex Hunter. He pinched his bottom lip between thumb and forefinger as he read the details.
Newly promoted to the rank of colonel, after fighting against it for months, Hammerson – or the Hammer as he was known friends and colleagues – was beginning to enjoy the new pay grade and larger office now that it was confirmed he would still have direct line of command over his beloved HAWCs. Colonel Hammerson had been in the military all his life. His rise to his current position had been largely due to a mix of intelligence, competence and ferocity in various Special Forces operations – first as a participant, then as a leader. The Hammer now hea
ded up one of the most lethal and covert teams in the world: the elite Hotzone All-forces Warfare Commandos, or HAWCs for short – a select few drawn from the ranks of the Green Berets, Navy SEALS, Special Forces Alpha and the Rangers. When the HAWCs were deployed, the job got done, no matter how bloody or brutal. It was a tough unit, and there were very few functioning old HAWCs – Hammerson being an exception. Most lasted fewer than five years – usually rotated out before psychological burnout, or their good luck came to a sudden end and they finished up as an unidentified corpse in a bloody hotspot somewhere on the globe.
Hammerson’s eyes travelled back and forth over the charts, images and small print of the report and gave a half-smile. Its subject, Captain Alex Hunter, was one of his most experienced HAWCs and by far the most mystifying. The young man hadn’t so much been born for the job as manufactured for it by circumstances. Alex Hunter had been changed, and Hammerson had authorised it personally. The genesis had been an assassin’s bullet; comatose, with the bullet buried in an inoperable position in the centre of his skull, Hunter looked to be heading for an existence dependent on artificial respirators and feeding tubes, immobile and unresponsive, until his once giant frame transformed to a living cadaver before their eyes. Hammerson owed his life a hundred times over to taking risks, and he had taken one with Alex Hunter. The secretive USSTRATCOM Medical Division, or UMD, had been testing a new treatment that was years away from human trials. A chemical restorative that had the potential to get soldiers back on their feet and able to keep fighting while they were literally being blown to pieces. The new batch had been ready for testing, but no one expected it to work.
