Amazon Burning (A James Acton Thriller, #10)

by J. Robert Kennedy

  Hundreds of natives were in the pit, toiling under the supervision of uniformed guards.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked, unable to restrain himself, the sight simply too horrible. “What are you people doing?”

  “Nothing that should have concerned you.”

  The voice, near perfect English with a hint of an accent, came from behind him. He turned to see an Asian man in an impeccably maintained black suit, despite the conditions. The temperature was quickly dropping with the sun, the humidity still high, Mitchell already dripping from spots he’d rather not mention in polite company. Yet this man seemed oblivious to it all.

  “Who are you?” asked Jenny, fear mixed with defiance in her voice.

  He pushed up against her slightly, drawing and giving comfort from the contact.

  “I am Dr. Chen. You are now my prisoners.”

  “You can’t do this!” exclaimed Jenny. “We’re British citizens! People will be looking for us!”

  “That’s right!” Mitchell decided he better join in to deflect any anger that might be directed at Jenny for speaking out. “We’re both British. And he’s American”—he motioned toward Turnbull—“you can’t just abduct us like this. People know where we are!”

  Chen smiled. “I can assure you, Mr. Terrence Mitchell of University College London, that no one knows where you or your wife or your unfortunate new friend are. This location is completely secure, and only a handful of people on the planet know where it is actually located. Not many more know of its existence. You, Mr. Mitchell, are quite alone right now, and I would highly suggest you cooperate, lest you find yourself laboring in the mines for the rest of your life.”

  Mitchell bit his lip shut, grabbing Jenny’s hand and squeezing it to try and urge her to keep quiet, the secret of their connection apparently not much of one.

  The room was silent.

  Chen smiled. “Very good. Put them with the others,” he said motioning to the guards. He pointed at Henderson. “Please follow me.”

  Mitchell, Jenny and Turnbull were herded in silence deeper into the facility then through what seemed to be an enclosed breezeway into another building that contained several jail cells.

  The misery on the faces of those already jailed pushed the last bit of hope he had been clinging to out of him.

  Dr. Chen stepped outside, the sun nearly set now, the slaves being gathered together for the long drive up the spiraling road that rimmed the ever expanding mine. It had been barely a blight on the landscape when he had first arrived to take over three years ago, and now it was a going concern, pulling out of the rock some of the rarest substances known to man.

  The technology sector was dependent upon these scarce substances, names like Lanthanum, Terbium and Thulium barely known to the average consumer, yet their hybrid cars, permanent magnets and medical x-rays wouldn’t function without them. And what the public didn’t know, was that the world was running out of economical access to these substances. Which meant that any find, no matter where, had to be exploited until alternatives could be found. And if they couldn’t be found on the surface of the planet, then companies and countries would turn to space.

  Most Americans thought the Chinese space program was a vanity play like the Apollo program had been. Apollo was a race to the moon not for scientific or human endeavor, but to beat the Soviets. The Chinese were happy to leave the world thinking that their manned space program was simply a matter of national pride.

  But it wasn’t.

  They had already put men in orbit and they had plans to build a space station of their own, a moon base, and eventual Mars base. All ahead of the Americans and now inconsequential Russians. Not to be first, of that they were quite certain they would be since America had bankrupted their economy. No, it was for the rare earth elements contained in outer space. It was the Chinese plan to be the first to be situated for mining asteroids, the moon, Mars, for the rare earth elements they contained. Not for national pride, but for world dominance in the marketplace.

  The nation that controlled the supply of the building blocks of today’s technologies controlled everything, from consumer electronics to advanced military weapons systems. And already China controlled 95% of the supply, with the United States so distant it might as well not be on the scoreboard.

  And mines like this would allow them to secretly stockpile even more without the world knowing, to use for their own domestic needs, leaving the world prices to continue to rise as the earthbound supplies dwindled, and as China’s space program marched on, unchallenged.

  It made him proud to be Chinese.

  Imagine what America could accomplish if it didn’t waste money on the silly trappings of democracy? Of exercising its morality on the world and fighting wars for the national interest, then wasting billions upon billions in the vain attempt at nation building.

  It was a sad joke.

  “You were wise to bring them here,” he finally said to Henderson as he stood at the edge of the pit, staring down as the lights shut off, the only remaining those of the headlights of several buses bringing the natives to the surface. They had cut a road from the Rio Negro to the mine several years ago, being careful to make certain it couldn’t be seen from the air, the beginning hidden in an inlet that was invisible to anyone passing by on the river. With it they had sailed in all the heavy equipment and continued to get supplies along it, not the least of which was fuel and explosives, something any mine such as this needed in abundance.

  And of course it was used to export their precious product.

  “We were lucky. I had no idea who the other two were until that Mitchell guy started yelling at Turnbull. Once I heard that I realized the story had spread and they’d need to be taken in.”

  “Very wise thinking on your part.” Chen rarely paid out compliments, especially to non-Chinese, but Henderson had proven capable, and useful. He didn’t seem bound by the usual morals that he encountered in Westerners. That wasn’t to say his people didn’t have morals, it was merely that they thought of life differently. In the West, it was a moral dilemma on whether or not to sacrifice one life to save others, or to raze an old neighborhood to make way for the new.

  In China, you sacrificed for the greater good. If someone should need to die to save others, it was done. It was insanity to leave someone with Ebola for example alive to infect others, when their immediate execution and disposal could save potentially hundreds of lives. It was also insanity to hold up progress for the sake of preserving the old. The ancient? Yes, he agreed the past should be preserved whenever possible, but China hadn’t hesitated to flood entire ancient cities when building dams, because it was for the greater good.

  And in the United States? Where progress was held up because some group didn’t want a century old building destroyed to build a new skyscraper? It was laughable. On nearly every street in China you could find something older than the entire United States.

  It was one of the many ways China prospered while the West buried itself in paperwork. The Keystone pipeline? It would have already been built. To fail to see the benefit to the United States was to be blind. China had its environmentalists, but fortunately they had no platform to speak from, so their impact was negligible. And their funding, usually from the West, quite often had them vilified by the public.

  “What are you planning on doing with them?” asked Henderson.

  “We’ll treat the environmentalists as the useful idiots they are. Ransom them as if they were captured by some rebels, then kill them, dumping their bodies somewhere they can be found. No one will think they have any connection to us.”

  Environmentalists! If only Americans knew where their funding came from, they might not be so willing to listen so trustingly.

  With countries like Saudi Arabia pouring tens of millions of dollars into the campaigns against Keystone and other projects that might give the United States its energy independence from the oil Sheiks of Saudi Arabia and the other eleven OPEC coun
tries—none of which are considered true democracies—it was no wonder the debate had been muddied. Pipelines were the safest method of transport for oil—that had been proven over the past century without a doubt. Rail was far more dangerous, and truck even more so. To try and use trains and trucks to transport oil would waste an incredible amount of fuel, contributing to the very greenhouse gases that the environmentalists claimed to be against, and it would kill thousands over time if all pipelines were to be replaced.

  So the alternative proposed by the truly nutty? Just don’t use oil. Chen and his friends always had a good chuckle while watching CNN or the other Western broadcasters when they interviewed the truly delusional. It was even more entertaining to see that the press and the public were actually being swayed by these insane messages. Chen had no problem with America shutting off the taps from the Canadian Oil Sands. It meant more oil for China. China would continue to grow, and as it did, it would need more and more of the world’s oil.

  And if America preferred to buy its oil from Islamic states like Saudi Arabia and Iran, along with near-communist states like Venezuela, then so be it. It showed the hypocrisy of the entire environmentalist movement in his opinion. Clearly women were of no importance to them since these countries for the most part treated their women as second class citizens, and some like Saudi Arabia, like mere chattel. He found it quite humorous to see women’s groups protesting the “tar sands” as they intentionally mislabeled it, while remaining silent on the atrocities committed against the women of the countries they seemed to prefer to buy oil from.

  When was the last time a Canadian woman was stoned to death for kissing the man she loved? Or beheaded for witchcraft?

  He shook his head.

  Thank the ancestors I’m Chinese!

  China would never be handicapped by the idea that everyone’s opinion mattered. In China it was recognized that some people truly were stupid, and that their opinions weren’t valuable. In the United States they could get elected. Like the Congressman who wasted everyone’s time grilling an Admiral because the Congressman, elected to help lead his country, was concerned that stationing eight-thousand extra Marines on Guam might cause the island to tip over and capsize. In China he would have been ‘disappeared’, in the United States he was allowed to try and suggest later it was humor rather than idiocy.

  The same man opposed Keystone.

  Scary.

  Chen resumed walking along the perimeter, his heart, beating a little quicker than it should, thoughts of the stupidity of others and the ability of his country to capitalize on it like no other, usually causing it to do so.

  “And the other two? The husband and wife?”

  “We’ll hold them until we clean up the rest of this mess, then dispose of them with the bodies of their compatriots. Again make it look like rebels.” Chen smiled. “The Amazon is a dangerous place, people die all the time.”

  “It might not be so easy this time, though.”

  Chen’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

  “I just found out before we arrived who this Professor Palmer is.”

  Chen stopped, turning to face Henderson. “She is a university professor, from London, England, is she not? That is what your report said.”

  “Yes, but I now have additional information.”

  Chen frowned. “You mean you sent me an incomplete report?”

  Henderson gulped. “Well, no, I mean, yes, but I thought you would want at least the preliminaries so you could make a decision on what to do. The financial information hadn’t come in yet, and I assumed you wouldn’t want to delay my report for information on a university professor’s credit report.”

  “Yet you bring it up now.”

  Henderson reached into his satchel, pulling out a folder. Chen waved it off. “Tell me what you missed in your initial report.”

  Henderson edged himself away from the precipice only feet away. “It turns out she is worth millions. Hundreds of millions.”

  Chen felt his chest tighten. “This changes everything.”

  “Yes. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to eliminate them?”

  He prided himself on controlling his anger, and he did so even now as his arm darted out, his knuckles drilling into Henderson’s esophagus, collapsing his windpipe. As Henderson doubled over, gasping for breath, Chen circled behind him, then pushed him over the edge of the pit with a single shove of his foot.

  The collapsed windpipe failed to produce any sound as another idiot fell to his death, unable to fail him again.

  Chen turned as footfalls quickly approached. It was one of his Venezuelan men, one who he was assured could be trusted.

  “Sir, I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said, keeping a noticeable distance from the edge.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the Lil’ Jag, sir, she broken again.”

  Chen shook his head. One of their trucks, an old workhorse that was used to pull the runway camouflage into place was constantly breaking down. He had requested a replacement from Beijing but one had yet to arrive. It had proven so unreliable, the men had taken to calling it ‘The Lil’ Jag’, the TOYOTA emblazoned on the tailgate painted over with ‘JAGUAR’. He sighed. “Do it by hand.”

  “Yes, sir, we already are, I just thought you would want to know why we were delayed.”

  Chen smiled slightly. “A wise decision. Now go see if you can get that piece of Japanese garbage working for tomorrow’s departure.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  He watched the young man sprint away from him, casting a terrified look down the pit. Chen was pleased the execution had been witnessed by at least someone. It meant the entire camp would know before the morning, and discipline would be all the more the order of the new day.

  TikTik sat huddled on some sort of seat. It felt quite soft to the touch, but the physical comfort it provided did little to make up for the mental torture she was under. She and Tuk’s mother sat side-by-side, holding each other as they sat inside the belly of this beast that would carry them to the surface. She had never seen anything like it, and couldn’t comprehend what it might be. When they had arrived earlier in the day at whatever hell this was, it had been the most terrifying experience of her life. No one spoke their language, no one could explain what was happening, and when they were forced inside the beast, several of the men fought back, but were beaten until they bled, then tossed aboard.

  No one had fought them getting on for the journey back to the top.

  They had survived being transported in the beast, its angry growl and stench almost overwhelming, but it proved to be nothing to the pain and torture that awaited them at the bottom.

  Never had she worked so hard in her life.

  They had moved, carried, pushed, pulled, more stone and other odd contraptions than she had thought possible, and she now ached and bled all over.

  And poor Mother!

  Tuk’s mother slowly sobbed beside her, her body nearly broken, she far too old for the demands being placed on it.

  And her heart was broken. No one had seen Tuk since the attack. In fact, TikTik was certain he hadn’t returned since she had caught him staring at her, but others said after she had awoken that they had heard him scream and someone had thrown a spear at one of the Panther People.

  It had bounced off.

  Many assumed Tuk was weak, but she didn’t. She had seen him lift things that any man would find challenging, and the fact that he had thrown the spear and it had hit its target proved to her that he might very well be an able hunter but lacked the confidence due to his failure at the skill when he was a boy.

  She had been surprised how all day, while toiling, her thoughts had been dominated not by the death of her future mate Bruk, but by the missing Tuk. She couldn’t stop worrying about him, wondering if he had survived, the Panther People sent after him returning empty handed according to Mother.

  From what she had learned after waking during their forced march to this monstrous scar o
n the Mother’s land, only Bruk had died. Other than Tuk, everyone was alive and uninjured, for which she thanked the Mother. As they had travelled they had all agreed that these strange creatures, wearing curious furs of black from head to toe, must be the fabled Panther People. She had heard the stories of course as a child, but never really paid them much mind when she got older, realizing that the bedtime stories were meant to scare children into obeying the laws laid out by their parents, the elders, and the Mother.

  But now that they had proven true, it made her wonder about some of the other terrifying stories from her youth. Could they be true? Could they all be true? She simply couldn’t believe it.

  Yet here she sat, in the belly of a beast of transport, having seen massive beasts deep in the pit the height of several men, pushing stone and dirt around with ease, a man at the controls, a man who looked similar to her—not like these Panther People.

  But these men who worked the mine with them weren’t beaten, weren’t yelled at. They were treated with respect, and often were the ones doing the beating and the yelling. She wondered what made them different from her except for their appearance and the odd skins they wore.

  What makes them better than us?

  The beast shuddered to a stop at the top of the hole, it gently growling as everyone was herded off and led into the darkness.

  What more can they possibly do to us?

  She trembled at what her imagination produced and instead focused on Tuk and her prayers that he was alive and safe, somewhere far from the horror they all now found themselves in.

  Barasana Village on the Rio Negro, Northern Amazon, Brazil

  Tuk looked to the girl named Kinti, his eyes questioning, hers filled with fear as she clung to the large spirit. She was clearly not afraid of him, and in fact he had seen many Spirit People in their village. It made him wonder if this village was blessed somehow by the Mother, or if they were merely friends.