Jack kicked himself for not including some kind of airborne defense in their small arsenal of mostly automatic weapons.
Suddenly, weapons fire opened up from the bow’s upper deck as Sarah, Danielle, and a few of the scientists began shooting with arms from the forward locker. There were now nine M-16s firing blindly upward into the canopy.
“Good girl,” Jack mumbled as he quickly inserted another magazine.
At that moment, a long line of twenty-millimeter red tracers broke through the trees and stitched a long line of holes across the bow. They heard a scream; one of the female assistants working with Professor Keating had cried out as one of the large rounds nicked her arm. Jack could hear the damage the shells were doing to the interior of Teacher as whoever was at the controls now directed the vessel toward the middle of the tributary.
A mere hundred feet above the tree line, the two Gazelle gunships swung around. Their target was far more evasive than they were led to believe. Mendez only said they would encounter a riverboat. But this craft was maneuvering as if it were a river patrol boat. And they were taking an inordinate amount of fire from below. So far the lead Gazelle had felt the distinctive thump of several small arms impacts against its aluminum fuselage. Whoever was below had organized a defense against the attack with lightning speed, and the volume of fire was amazing.
Mendez radioed the second Gazelle that they should make a scissoring maneuver and come at their target from two different directions, catching the boat below in a crossfire that should at the very least disable it. He would concentrate fire on the bow and his wingman would take the rear, possibly hitting the engine compartment, and bringing the evasive vessel to a stop. Then they could strafe the craft at their leisure.
The two French-built Gazelles climbed to an altitude of two hundred feet and then split apart. They would start their killing run in two minutes. They would line up the copters with the aid of the FLIR and start their assault as early as a thousand yards from target. Giving their ammunition a far better chance of slicing their enemy in two.
Jenks fought his way into the navigation and sonar section of the boat. Several heavy rounds had at one point almost ended his career as they slammed into the hull and rocked the galley area, sending pots and pans everywhere. He spotted three of the lab technicians, who were hiding behind one of the couches in the crew lounge. Instead of feeling sorry for the two women and one man, he started kicking at them as they tried to crawl away.
“Get you fucking asses out there and defend yourselves, you fuckin’ idiots. Move, I said.” He took a final swipe at the crawling techs and then turned and made his way to his seat at the navigating console.
The technicians quickly stood and ran for the spiral staircase that led to the upper deck. They must have figured that the odds of surviving the bullets outside were far better than they would get facing the master chief.
Jenks reached out and pulled up a clear red-tinted cover that had a flash symbol on it. Then he turned in his chair and hit several switches marked dwael. He watched as a monitor located above the sonar and communications panel flickered to life.
“Sons of bitches want to play with technology, we’ll fuckin’ play with technology,” he grumbled as he hit the FLIR tracking system he had installed at the last minute when it had been offered to him by the Event Group technicians in New Orleans. It had been installed for use in detecting animal movement where thick cover foliage was blocking all other sensory systems. Now he would use the forward-looking infrared system and DWAEL to make a whole new weapon, a stinger for the old Teacher. The deep-water argon-enhanced laser was a new system that was to be used for getting precise readings on deep canyons of unknown waterways, such as the supposed lagoon they were heading for. But little did most of the public and military know, the laser itself, if turned to full power, could be used as a very efficient cutting instrument. The main problem was supplying the system with enough juice from Teacher’s generators to switch it from being a depth finder to a killing weapon. The master chief, though, knew his boat. He reached out and found the main power connection for Teacher’s many systems and then isolated the sonar console and generator stations. He pulled as hard as he could on the main conduit, breaking the line free from the cabinet, which in turn popped the emergency breakers for everything except the systems he had isolated, causing a major breakdown in the boat’s power grid. In layman’s terms, the master chief had basically pulled the plug.
On the upper deck, Jack and the others held their fire as they heard the screaming approach of the Gazelles’ charging at Teacher from above. He encouraged everyone to aim at the noise. He knew it was a lost cause, but they had to try something.
Suddenly a warning horn blared and Jenks’s voice came out over the loudspeaker on the tower.
“All hands, grab your socks and hold your cocks! Hit the deck and keep your eyes closed!”
Jack and Carl hollered for everyone to get down. They heard a motor engage and, before Jack threw himself to the rubber-matted deck, he saw a small section on the starboard side of Teacher rise. A long, cylindrical arm was hydraulically activated and swiveled its clear glass head around as the arm extended from the opening. It resembled a ballpoint pen with a lightbulb attached to the tip. Immediately recognition dawned in Jack’s eyes as a memory flashed into his mind. He recalled his days at Aberdeen proving ground, specifically the Argon laser systems they had been working on, a larger version of what he had just seen come up from Teacher’s hull. But he knew that they were using it for many nonmilitary things like speed and radar enhancements, measuring tools that were accurate to the millimeter. What was the master chief up to?
He heard the generators below deck go full throttle just as Virginia brought Teacher to the center of the tributary again. Then the engines shut down. The hairs on Jack’s arms began to tingle and he smelled ozone in the air as electricity was being put out at a monumental rate of power. The current was starting to escape containment and the hair of everyone on deck began to rise.
“Oh, shit, stay down!” Jack yelled just as the helicopters above the trees let loose with their cannon.
Rounds started striking the water three hundred yards from Teacher. The red tracers came down in a magnificent straight line as the two attacking Gazelles made their way to the stalled boat. Then suddenly a loud crack sounded from everywhere. Teacher’s bulk was slammed into the water as Jenks discharged the power that had built up in the laser, sending out a straight beam of white light that burned its way through the thick canopy of trees in a microsecond. As the beam reached out, the cutting began.
The lead pilot saw something explode from below; his target’s being covered by trees, he thought sure he had hit one of the enemy’s gas tanks. Then suddenly the trees disappeared in a bright flash. He was momentarily blinded as a brilliant white light shot up and out. The beam caught his wingman cleanly down the middle of the Gazelle, neatly slicing the helicopter into two distinct pieces and sending its spinning rotor blades off in all directions. The white-hot beam ignited the aviation fuel and the remains of the copter plunged neatly through the trees into the river below.
The leader immediately ceased his run and let up on the trigger as he turned his Gazelle away from whoever had just fired at them from below. The nature of that weapon he didn’t know, nor did he care to remain and find out firsthand what had so suddenly ended the life of one of his employees. As he ventured a look behind him, the brightness of the beam of light lessened even while it still searched the area for its second target. The pilot turned the throttle on his collective all the way to the stops and tried to turn, but the beam, though faded in intensity, turned with him. It easily sliced through his tail boom. The helicopter started to spiral out of control. The trees rushed up and the pilot closed his eyes, waiting for the inevitable, crushing death that was waiting only seconds away.
Jack knew they were lucky. Teacher, still out of power and drifting, floated past some of the remains of the first Gazel
le. As he watched the burning wreckage slide below the dark waters, he had his proof that someone was out to stop them at all costs from reaching the lagoon.
Ten miles to the stern of Teacher, Farbeaux had thought he saw the flash of gunfire through the canopy. He walked to the bow of the Rio Madonna and stared out into the darkness. He was soon joined by Captain Santos.
“You saw this thing also, señor?”
“I saw something.”
“Ah, perhaps it was just heat lightning, a common thing on the river.” Santos watched the Frenchman for a reaction. The captain was pleased to see the frown on his face.
“Perhaps.” Farbeaux turned away and saw that Mendez and his pet killer hadn’t moved from the fantail. They sat silently at their small table watching the night around them. The only visual evidence that they were there at all was the soft glow of Mendez’s cigar, and even that hid the smile on his face.
15
It took six hours to patch the holes in Teacher. Jenks had taken the pats he received on the back as well as expected as he supervised the repairs, grumbling about the slow reaction time of his crew, claiming they could have defended his boat faster than they had. If the truth be known, he had been stunned at how fast the major had organized the defense. Jenks now regarded the army officer with a little more respect.
The good news was the engines weren’t hit. They started downriver as soon as the worst of the hull breaches had been fixed. The rest of the time was spent putting back the pieces of the boat’s interior.
On watch abovedecks in the early morning hours after most of the major repairs had been made, Mendenhall, Sanchez, and Sarah watched the low-hanging branches slide eerily close to their heads. The antenna tower had been lowered again since they entered the rain forest, otherwise they would surely have lost it by this point. The drone of the engines, coupled with the anticollision strobe atop the deck fore and aft, lulled the lookouts as they fought to remain awake.
Sarah was alone in section three, just aft of the navigation section, when she saw a very low-hanging tree branch. Mendenhall momentarily illuminated it so Sarah could see it. Then he moved the light away and clicked it off to preserve his own night vision. Sarah leaned over as the large branch cleared her head by less than a foot. That was when she felt something touch her baseball cap and then remove it. She thought she hadn’t lowered her head far enough, that it had been snagged by the branch, until she turned and saw the hat hanging there, the dark little fingers holding the bill and turning it. Sarah’s eyes went wide as Mendenhall laughed.
“I think a monkey just stole your hat,” he called from the top of section four.
As Mendenhall continued to laugh, the red cap was tossed back at Sarah, who caught it before it went over the gunwale.
“Must not have fit,” the sergeant said with a chuckle.
Suddenly a small arm reached out and removed the bush hat from his own head and he instinctively ducked, but both arm and hat had disappeared into the trees.
“I guess it thought yours would be a better fit,” Sarah said with a grin.
Mendenhall cursed. He clicked on the spotlight and aimed it at the trees. He shined the bright light behind him and then all around. Then he quickly shut it off.
“Sarah, now, this is no shit; there are about a hundred …things in the trees.”
Sarah seated her cap back on her head, still smiling. “Monkeys?”
Before he could respond, the deck was inundated with small objects they immediately recognized as exotic flowers, bananas, and berries of every sort. Then the night erupted with chattering, not monkeylike at all in its sound, or maybe it was, Sarah thought, but it was as if the animals in the trees were laughing: their chatter was interrupted by short gasps of air. Sanchez immediately called out for Mendenhall to shine the spotlight his way, that something was in his hair. As he did so, his and Sarah’s eyes widened when the light fell on a shiny-skinned four-limbed creature that had its tail firmly wrapped around the corporal’s neck. It was running its small hands through his thick, dark hair, jabbering, and appeared to be petting Sanchez.
“What in the hell is this thing?” he called out, afraid to move. “It’s kind of fishy smelling.”
Sarah couldn’t believe what it was she was looking at. The animal was about three feet in length and for all practical purposes did resemble a monkey, except it had not one hair on its body. Sarah started breathing a little heavier than before as she carefully and slowly reached out to push the intercom button.
“Chief, kill the engines,” she said.
Without asking any questions, Jenks shut down the diesels and the night went silent. Sarah could now hear the lone creature sitting atop the head of the marine coo and chirp. It almost sounded as if it were singing as it groomed the hair of Sanchez.
Sarah still had the button depressed for the intercom and without removing her eyes from the bizarre scene three sections back, she found the button for the sciences lab. She hoped someone was still working down there.
“Anyone up in science?” she said in a barely audible voice.
There was no answer. Then the deck hatch above her opened and Virginia stuck her head up.
“The master chief wants to know if there’s a problem; he said he can’t get through your intercom,” she said as she climbed out onto deck. Then she saw Sarah was still holding down the talk switch on the communication intercom. Virginia looked to where Sarah was looking and froze. “Oh my god,” she whispered and then without turning, pried Sarah’s finger from the button. “We have a visitor, Chief; everyone’s all right.”
“A visitor?” he asked.
“This thing has scales, and its fingers are wet and they’re webbed,” Sanchez said, still not moving.
“Hold it together, Corporal, I don’t think it’s aggressive,” Sarah managed to say.
The small creature looked up at the sound of the humans’ voices and tilted its head. It jabbered softly, and then it stood and reached for a passing branch and easily lifted itself free of the corporal’s head and disappeared into the canopy. Its swinging tail was the last thing they saw as it vanished completely.
Sarah reached down and picked up a twig that had berries still attached to it. She pulled one off and ate it.
“Good,” she said.
“That’s not a very good thing to do, not very scientific, Sarah,” Virginia said as she picked up a beautiful species of orchid she had never seen. She smelled it and then placed it in her hair, above her ear. “Have Corporal Sanchez fill out a written report on his description of what occurred, even his feelings on the matter. Okay, Sarah?” Virginia added in a distant voice. “What an amazing animal.”
Sarah watched Virginia reenter the hatch and then looked at Mendenhall. As she watched, a small hand jutted from the trees and slammed his bush hat back onto his head. He ducked as laughterlike chatter sounded all around the drifting boat.
The twin diesels fired back up and Teacher started forward again. This time, the three lookouts would have no trouble staying awake.
Most of the off-duty crew, twenty of them, were in the cramped dining section of Teacher eating a breakfast of ham and eggs as they listened to Mendenhall and Sarah tease Sanchez about his strange encounter in the dark morning hours.
“And these creatures weren’t aggressive at all, or timid?” Ellenshaw asked, his white hair looking as if a garden hoe had churned it up.
“Well, ask the corporal, he had a little better view than Will or I,” Sarah said as she sipped her coffee with difficulty. Even hours later, it was difficult not to laugh.
Sanchez shot her a look and then had to smile himself. “No, I didn’t exactly get the feeling they were timid,” he said as he took a bite of his toast.
“And they definitely looked aquatic in nature; you actually saw the webbing between its small fingers?” Heidi Rodriguez asked.
“Saw and felt it,” the corporal said, losing his appetite for his toast. “And it smelled to high heaven, like …
well, fish.”
As they talked, they heard Teacher’s engines shut down.
“All hands are asked to join Major Collins on the upper sun deck,” Jenks’s voice said over the intercom.
Sarah looked out of the large window as she rose and saw it first. “Jesus, look at that,” she said as she hurried from the dining section toward the nearest stairwell that led upward to the deck above.
The others glanced out the windows and then hurriedly followed Sarah.
Jack and Professors Nathan and Pollock were on deck with the rest of the first watch. Virginia was busy snapping pictures and Nathan had a video camera out, documenting the amazing sight above them that had been illuminated by the boat’s external floodlights.
Sarah joined Jack and shaded her eyes from the bright glare. “Beyond belief,” was her simple statement.
“What in the hell are they supposed to be?” Jenks said as he joined them after placing Teacher’s automated systems online.
Towering above them, on both sides of the tributary, stood two eighty-foot statues. They were ancient with vines and other vegetation growing from age cracks in their stone.
“They’re like no Incan gods I have ever seen,” Nathan said as he continued to film with the camera.
“They are carved directly from the granite of the cliff,” Virginia said as she turned to photograph the other one on the opposite bank. “They’re identical depictions of the same … same deity,” she said, snapping four quick pictures.
“Look at the hands,” Jack said.
The large hands of the carvings were webbed, like those of the small creatures that were reported by Sarah and her night watch. The statues had scales like a fish and the body was humanlike, very massive, and depicted strength. The head was the most amazing thing of all. Its features were that of a fish, but in the shape of a human head. Several rows of finlike flaps extended downward from the neck and head and draped just over its broad shoulders. The lips were thick, pursed like those of a fish; the nose was but two small holes; and they could make out the gills that ran along each side of the jaw in four distinct lines. But the most amazing feature was the way in which the carvers of these ancient statues had depicted the eyes. Although human in shape, they had dead dark pupils like those of sharks.
Legend: An Event Group Thriller Page 28
