The Heaven Trilogy

by Ted Dekker

  David turned to Ingersol. “You mean chances of walking out of that jungle alive, or chances of killing Casius?”

  Ingersol looked up at him blankly.

  “Either way, some people are going to die. The only question is how many,” David finally offered, and then added for Ingersol’s benefit, “and who ends up taking the fall for it all.”

  CAPTAIN RICK Parlier blinked at the sweat snaking into his eyes. His square jaw sported three days of stubble, efficiently covered by a healthy layer of green camouflage paint, accentuating the whites of his eyes. His right hand gripped a fully loaded M-16. His left hand vibrated loosely to the thumping Pratt and Whitney above them. His last cigar protruded from curled lips. He was going back in, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

  Parlier glanced at the others sitting expressionless in the dimming light and turned his head to the trees rushing below. The blades of the DEA troop carrier beat persistently above him as the helicopter carried his team farther and farther into the uncharted jungle. He’d taken Ranger teams into the jungle three times before, each time successfully accomplishing the objective laid before him. It was why he’d been selected, he knew. He could count the number of men with active jungle combat on a few hands. Now desert, that was different—a whole flock of them had tasted battle in the desert. Not that they’d actually fought much, but at least there had been real bullets flying around. Neither environment was what most would call a blast. But then, except in literal terms, war never was. He preferred the jungle anyway. More cover.

  He’d thought the use of three teams to take out one man a bit hyperactive at first. But the more he read up on Casius, the more his appreciation for the two helicopters chopping in the sky behind them grew.

  Three teams: Alpha, Beta, and Gamma, he’d dubbed them. Eighteen of the best jungle fighters in the Rangers’ arsenal. The plan was simple enough. They would be dropped off on the summit of a mountain overlooking the val- ley Casius was supposedly headed for. The teams would set up observation posts and send scouts into the valley. Once positive identification had been made, they were to terminate the target at the earliest possible opportunity. Until then, it would be a game of waiting.

  Only one restriction hampered their movement. Under no circumstances were they to pass the cliffs. Why? Why did the bureaucrats place any of their nonsensical constraints on them?

  He glanced over his men, who sat unmoving. Behind those closed eyelids lives were being lived, memories recalled, procedures rehearsed. His first lieutenant, Tim Graham, looked up. “Piece of cake, Cap’n.”

  Parlier nodded once. Graham was their communications man. Give him a diode and a few capacitors and Tim could find a way to talk to the moon. He could also wield a knife like no man Parlier had ever seen, which was probably the single greatest reason the army had managed to steal the boy away from eager electronics firms.

  The rest of the team consisted of his demolition expert, Dave Hoffman; his sniper, Ben Giblet; and two other light-fighters like himself: Phil Crossley and Mark Nelson. The team had trained and fought together for two years. There could hardly be a tighter fit.

  His mind wandered to the target’s portfolio. Casius was an assassin with “numerous” confirmed kills, the report said. Not ten or sixteen, but “numerous,” as though it was a secret number. A sharpshooter who favored a knife, which meant he had the nerves of a rhino. Anybody who had the skill to take out a target at a thousand yards yet chose to get up close, eyeball to eyeball, had a few screws loose above them eyeballs. The worst of it was the man’s apparent adaptability to the terrain. Evidently he had grown up in this jungle.

  “What odds you put on this guy lasting the day?” Graham asked.

  Phil scoffed. “As far as we know the guy’s back in Caracas smokin’ a joint and laughing his head off at the Rangers streaking off to pop some white man in leech country.”

  Someone chuckled. Hoffman eyed Phil. “They wouldn’t send three teams to a drop point unless they had it on good intel this guy would show up.”

  “You don’t get good intel this deep, my friend.”

  “Ready the drop line,” Parlier barked as the helicopter feathered near the summit of their drop zone. The troop carrier hovered over a break in the canopy. Hoffman threw the two-hundred-foot rope overboard. Parlier nodded and he dropped into the trees, disappearing below the canopy. One by one the Rangers lowered themselves into the trees.

  DEEP WITHIN the mountain, Yuri Harsanyi sat shivering with excitement. In less than an hour a helicopter would take him away to safety. And with him, the large black suitcase that held his future: two thermonuclear weapons.

  He had carefully stored the devices in his case the night before and then secured the straps tightly around the leather bag. The replacement bombs sat powerless in Abdullah’s casings. When he tried to detonate his bombs, he would get nothing but silence. By then Yuri would be far removed, living a new life, squandering away his newfound wealth. He had rehearsed the plan a thousand times in the last three days alone.

  Yuri saw that the left strap had loosened slightly in the humid heat. He cinched it tight and hoisted the suitcase from the floor. If they decided to inspect him now, he would have a problem, of course. But they’d never checked his bags before. He glanced around the room he’d lived in for so long and stepped away for the last time.

  An hour later, precisely on schedule, the helicopter wound up and took off with Yuri sweating on its rear bench.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CASIUS PLUNGED through the dense foliage, sweating bare chested, with mud plastered up his legs and streaking his chest, his black shorts now clinging wet and torn down the right thigh. He’d covered forty miles in the twenty-four hours since entering the jungle, tracking by the sun during the day and by the stars at night. He’d slept once, eight hours earlier. His father would have been proud of him.

  But then his father was dead.

  Casius halted at the edge of a twenty-foot swath cut from the forest floor, surprised to see the wide scar so deep in the jungle. The canopy above had survived and now grew together, creating the appearance of a large tunnel through the underbrush.

  He pulled out a wrinkled topographical map. The compound lay ten miles to the east, in the direction of this wide overgrown path. Casius crossed into the jungle and resumed his jog.

  Since his departure from the city, he’d eaten only papaya and yie palm cut on the run, but hunger pains now slowed his progress. Without a bow and arrow, killing a heron or a monkey would be difficult, but he needed the protein.

  Ten minutes later he spotted the root that would give him red meat. Casius took his knife from his belt, cut deep into a twisted mamucori vine, and let the poisonous sap run over his blade. Under normal conditions the Indians dissolved the poison in boiling water, which would evaporate from any dipped surface, leaving only deadly residue. But he had neither the time nor the fire necessary for the application.

  Finding the howler monkeys was like finding a traffic light in the city. Approaching them undetected wasn’t nearly as simple. The small animals had an uncanny sense of danger. Casius slipped behind a tree and eyed a group of five or six howlers shaking branches fifty meters away, high in a Skilter tree. He slid into the open and crept toward them. The approach was painstakingly slow, and for fifteen full minutes he inched forward, until he came to rest behind a large palm. Four monkeys now sat chattering unsuspecting on the end of a branch that hung low, no more than twenty meters from his position. Casius slipped from behind the tree and hurled his knife into the group.

  They scattered in terror as the knife flipped toward them. The blade clanged into the branches, grazing one of the monkeys. It was two minutes before the poison reached the monkey’s nervous system and sent it plummeting from its perch high in the tree, unconscious. He picked it up, snapped its neck with a quick twist, and resumed his push south. The poison would be harmless to him, and the meat would replenish his depleted energy. He had always preferre
d meat cooked but he had learned to eat it however it came. Today a fire was out of the question, so the meat would remain raw.

  The sun had already dipped behind the horizon by the time Casius reached the rock outcropping overlooking the Catholic mission station, twenty miles south of his destination by the map. A scattering of buildings rose from the valley floor—it was inhabited then. Once the valley had been vacant. Now, even from this distance, a mile above, Casius could see a cross at the base of an airstrip flying a limp windsock.

  A slow river wound its way past the end of the airstrip and then lazily wandered through the flat valley toward the south. If there was one thing Casius needed now it was information, and the mission might give him at least that.

  He dropped from the cropping and began the descent. He’d seen no one on the station. Odd. Where were the Indians? He’d think they’d be loitering all over the place looking for whatever the missionaries might give them in exchange for their souls.

  Half an hour later, he stepped from the jungle under a black sky and jogged for a long house lit with pressure lamps from the interior. The night sang with overlapping insect choruses, and the memory of it all brought a chill to Casius’s spine.

  Casius ran up to the house in a crouch and flattened himself next to a window. He looked through and saw two people seated at a wooden table, dipping spoons into their evening meal. A priest and a woman. The priest’s collar was missing, but there was no mistaking his black-and-white attire. The woman wore a white T-shirt, the sleeves rolled once or twice baring her upper arms. Her dark hair fell shoulder length and for a moment he thought she reminded him of a singer whose music he had once purchased. Shania Twain. He had put the CD through his sound system only twice, but her image had made an impression. Or was it that actress . . . Demi Moore? Either way she brought images of a soft-souled American to his mind. Somehow misplaced in this jungle.

  He watched the two eat and listened to their indistinguishable murmur for a full minute before deciding they were alone. He slipped around the house.

  SHERRY STARTED when a knock sounded on the door. Rap-rap-rap.

  The evening had been quiet. There were the comforting sounds normal to jungle living: the forest’s song, a pressure lamp’s monotonous hissing, clinking silverware. Following the father’s confession of his parents’ sacrifice, the day had floated by like a dream. Perhaps the most peaceful day she’d experienced in eight years. They talked of what it meant to lose life and what it meant to gain it. They talked of real love, the kind of love that gave everything, including life. Like her father had given, and according to Father Teuwen, the kind they were all asked to give. She let herself go with him, remembering the passionate words of her own father—reliving the best of her own spiritual journey, before the box.

  It brought her peace.

  For the last twenty minutes her mind had come full circle, to the box, to suffering. She had cried, but it wasn’t a cry of remorse. It was the cry of a heavy meaning. A head cold was coming on, she thought. Unless it was only the day’s crying that stuffed her sinuses.

  And suddenly this rap-rap-rap on the door.

  She glanced at Father Teuwen and swiveled in her seat to see the door swing open. A well-muscled stranger stood in the frame, his arms hanging loosely to his sides, his legs parted slightly, his shoulders squared. But this simple realization quickly made way for the dawning that the man wore only shorts. And torn shorts at that.

  Sherry felt her jaw part slightly. His face was painted in strokes of green and black that swept back from his nose, casting the odd illusion that his head belonged on a movie screen, not here on a mission station. Brown eyes peered from the paint. A sheen of moisture glistened on the intruder’s dirtied chest, as if he’d worked up a good sweat and then tumbled to the dust. Short-cropped, dark wet hair covered his head. If she didn’t know better, she would have sworn that this man had just come from the jungle. But she did know better. He was a white man. And white men didn’t come from the jungle during the night. It was too dangerous.

  The stranger stepped into the room and pulled the door closed behind him. Now other details filled her mind. The sharp edges to his clenched jaw, the hardened muscles, the muddied legs, the wide band of browned tape around his thigh, the bare feet.

  He was dripping on their floor.

  “Good evening,” he said, speaking evenly as if they should have expected this visit.

  The father spoke behind her. “My goodness, man. Are you all right?”

  The man shifted his eyes from Sherry to the priest. “I’m fine, Father. I hope I’m not intruding, but I saw the lights and hoped I could ask you a few questions.”

  Sherry stood. His voice moaned through her skull like a howling wind. She saw that Father Teuwen was already on his feet, gripping his chair with one hand. “Ask a few questions? Heavens, you sound like the jungle patrol or something, popping in to ask a few questions. Where on earth did you come from?”

  The man shifted his dark gaze to Sherry for a moment, and then back to the priest. He looked suddenly lost, she thought. As if he’d crossed over from another dimension and mistakenly opened their door. She noted that her pulse raced and she assured herself that the man meant no harm.

  “I’m sorry, perhaps I should leave,” he said.

  “No. You cannot leave, man!” the priest objected quickly. “Look at you. It’s night out there! A bit dangerous, don’t you think?” He paused, catching himself. “But then I suppose you already know that. You look like you’ve just spent the day in the jungle.”

  For a moment the man did not respond and Sherry thought he had indeed made a mistake and was now looking for a graceful exit. A hunter perhaps. But what would a hunter be doing running around barefoot at night? The whole thing was preposterous.

  “Perhaps I’ve made a mistake by coming here,” the man said. “I should leave.”

  The father stepped up beside Sherry now. “This is a Catholic mission,” the priest said evenly. “I’m sure you know that. I’m the priest here—I think I have the right to know the identity of a man who calls on my door in the middle of the night, don’t you?”

  The man’s arms still hung loosely at his sides, and Sherry noted that the knuckles on his right hand were red with blood. Perhaps he was a drug runner, or a mercenary. Her pulse quickened.

  “I’m sorry. I should leave.” He shifted his feet.

  “And why do you insist on withholding your identity, sir?” Father Teuwen asked. “I will have to report this, of course.”

  That stopped the man. He eyed the priest long and hard. “And if I tell you who I am, you won’t report me?”

  So the man was on the run! A fugitive. Sherry’s pulse quickened again. She glanced at Father Teuwen and saw that he was grinning knowingly.

  “That would depend on what you tell me, young man. But right now I can tell you that I’m imagining the worst. And if you tell me nothing, I will report what I imagine.”

  The stranger slowly smiled.

  THE MOMENT the priest stood, Casius knew coming here had been a mistake and he cursed himself.

  He had wanted to leave then, before the father asked any questions. Perhaps a missionary would hold his curiosity. But the priest had proved otherwise. And now he had no choice but to either kill them or take them into some kind of confidence. And killing them wasn’t really an option either, was it? They had done nothing; they were innocent.

  The woman’s eyes were ringed in red, as if she’d been crying recently. He smiled at the father. “You’re a persistent man. You don’t give me much choice. But trust me, you may wish you’d let me go.”

  “Is that a threat? I suppose that goes for the sister as well.”

  He noted the woman’s quick glance at the priest. So she was a nun then. Or at least she was being cast as a nun by the father. “Did I threaten your life, Father?”

  The father glanced at the nun. “You don’t have anything to fear from us.”

  Casius decided he
would give them a bone, a herring—just enough to draw out their knowledge of the region. Sooner or later they would call on the radio, of course. But by then it would no longer matter.

  “I work for the DEA. You know the agency?”

  “Of course. Drug enforcement.”

  “We suspect a significant operation south of here. I’m on a reconnaissance mission. I was inserted a mile from here, at the top of the western ridge.”

  The priest nodded.

  Casius paused, searching their eyes. “I’m planning to take the Caura River south tonight.” In reality he was headed north, of course. “As for my dress, I realize it’s not every day you see a westerner traipsing through the brush near naked. But then I’m Brazilian, from Caracas.”

  “You don’t sound so Brazilian,” the father said.

  Casius ran out a long sentence of fluid Portuguese, telling him he was wrong before switching back to English. “I attended university in the United States. Now, if you don’t mind, I have a few questions of my own.”

  “And your name?” the father asked.

  “You may call me Casius. Anything else, Father? My GPA perhaps? My ancestry?”

  The woman chuckled and then launched into a cough. Casius smiled at her. “You’re quite bold, Sister. Not many women would willingly choose the jungle as a place to live.”

  She nodded slowly and spoke for the first time. “Well, I suppose I’m not most women, then. And not many men, Brazilian or not, would run through the jungle, half naked, in bare feet.”

  She sounded as if she had a cold from her husky tone. He ignored the comment. “Have you heard rumors of any drugs south?” he asked, turning back to the father.

  “To the south? Actually no. Which is surprising, because most of the Indians we serve are from the south. How far did you say?”

  “Thirty miles, along the Caura River.”

  The father shook his head. “Not that I am aware of. They must be well concealed.”

  “Possibly. But I suppose that’s why they pay me. To find the difficult ones,” Casius responded.