Mutation

by Roland Smith

  Smarter than me, Wolfe thought. “Thanks.”

  Wolfe started poking around to see if something nasty popped out. He stirred up a family of agoutis. The cat-sized rodents blasted by him, squealing. He was happy to see them. It meant there were no venomous snakes or predators in residence. But one of them didn’t make it. Wolfe heard a loud whack behind him and turned around. Raul was holding his trophy by its hind legs, grinning. It was the first time Wolfe had seen him smile.

  Big rat for dinner. Not the first time.

  Wolfe crawled into the fuselage. It smelled like burnt rubber, rotting vegetation, and what he assumed was agouti urine. The instrument panel had been pried off and taken away along with everything else that could be removed, including the seats. It didn’t look like the fire had spread to the inside. He examined the skin inch by inch and came to a blackened rip in the metal that was clearly not caused by the crash.

  “It caused the crash,” he said under his breath as he ran his fingers along the gash.

  Wolfe was far from an expert in these things, but it looked like the chopper had indeed been shot down. But by who? And why? He spent a few more minutes looking around inside. The authorities had taken the remains of the two pilots, and except for the camera and journals they’d sent to Wolfe, there had been no sign of Sylvia and Timothy. It had been clear to the authorities that animals had been at the pilots. They theorized that Sylvia and Timothy had probably been dragged deeper into the forest and eaten. Nothing was wasted in the rain forest. Protein was consumed.

  Wolfe had seen the grisly photos of the two dead pilots still strapped into their seats. But he didn’t understand why Sylvia and Timothy hadn’t been strapped into their seats. They did crazy and dangerous things, but neither one of them would have failed to buckle up. Did they unbuckle themselves, or did someone else do it for them?

  Wolfe crawled out of the fuselage. Raul had gutted, skinned, and spitted the luckless agouti. Wolfe was hungry, but a large rat was not what he had in mind for dinner. He grabbed his pack and leaned against a tree, shifting his weight off his prosthesis.

  The agouti was beginning to sizzle and smelled a lot better than he expected. It felt good to get off his feet, but it was going to feel even better to take his leg off. He glanced at Raul. He wasn’t sure if the other man knew about his leg. He rolled his pant leg up, took out his tool kit, and disassembled the various screws, straps, and Velcro. He looked up again. Raul was staring at him. Clearly, Raul hadn’t known. Wolfe wished he still had his leg, but he was years beyond being embarrassed about it. He set the prosthesis to the side, took the sock off his stump, and began massaging it with the concoction Ted had come up with to ease the pain and treat the chafing.

  Raul stepped a bit closer to watch.

  “Do you speak English?” Wolfe asked. Raul hadn’t uttered a single word since meeting him at the preserve.

  “A little.” Raul pointed. “The leg.”

  Wolfe smiled. “Yeah, it’s inconvenient not having one.” It was obvious by the look on Raul’s face that he didn’t understand. “I lost it,” Wolfe said.

  Raul nodded and went back to the fire to tend to the roasting rat meat.

  Ideally, it would have been best to give the stump a rest until morning, but that wasn’t going to happen now. Instead of using the Gizmo’s GPS, Wolfe slipped on his headlamp, took out a map, and spread it on the ground, thinking it would be easier to explain to Raul what they needed to do on paper.

  “Raul?”

  Raul held up a finger for him to wait a minute. He was testing his culinary masterpiece to see if it was done. Apparently it was, because he pulled off a hind leg and brought it over.

  “Thanks,” Wolfe said, forcing a smile. He took a bite and found it surprisingly good. The joke in the field was that when eating exotic camp meat, whether snake or bird or mammal, everyone said it tasted like chicken. The roasted agouti tasted more like rabbit — a little gamey, but not bad. He took another bite and wondered what Marty could do with agouti meat if given a chance.

  Wolfe pointed a greasy finger at the map. “We are here,” he said, then moved his finger. “Flanna and Jake are here.” He traced a line to where they would have to travel to intersect with the others. “We go here to catch them.” He didn’t bother to try to explain where Flanna and Jake were going, or why they needed to catch up with them.

  Raul nodded as if he understood.

  “Two hours,” Wolfe said, holding up two fingers and pointing at his watch.

  Again, Raul nodded.

  Once they were under way, Wolfe’s plan was to send Raul ahead, because with his bum leg there was no way he could keep up with the smaller man. He would explain this to Raul after they started out.

  “Are we good?” Wolfe asked.

  Raul answered by grabbing the stick he had carved earlier and brandishing it as if he were going to clobber Wolfe with it.

  Wolfe could not have been more shocked. Without his prosthesis, he was completely at Raul’s mercy. And Raul did not look to be in a merciful mood.

  Wolfe glanced at his pack. He had a pistol and knife inside, but the pack was five feet away. It might as well been a mile. He’d never reach it.

  After everything I’ve faced in my life. All the dangers, diseases, having my leg chewed off by a dinosaur, I’m going to be murdered by a berserk indigenous Brazilian in the middle of nowhere with a stick.

  The situation was so ridiculous, there was nothing Wolfe could do but laugh. The laugh seemed to disarm Raul to some degree. He was still holding the stick at the ready, but his fierce expression had softened.

  “I kind of hope we can work this out,” Wolfe said quietly. “I’d prefer not to be killed if it’s all right with you.”

  He wasn’t certain Raul understood the words, but he hoped he understood the nonthreatening tone. To his surprise, Raul now seemed to understand everything he said, and much more.

  “Not kill,” he said. “Capture. This is the place.”

  “What place?”

  “The place I told them I would bring you.”

  “Who did you tell this to?”

  “Os três.”

  Wolfe’s understanding of Portuguese was rudimentary, but he could decipher this. “Who are the three?”

  “Forest men.”

  Wolfe stared at Raul for a few moments, trying to absorb what he was saying. “What do you mean by ‘capture’?”

  Instead of answering, Raul hit the stick on the ground three times. Three men stepped out of the forest into the light of the fire. They held blowpipes to their lips. The pipes were as tall as they were, and all of them were pointed at Wolfe’s head. The men were naked except for loincloths held around their stout brown waists by leather strings. Hanging on the strings were wooden clubs, dart quivers, and two-way radios. Like Raul, their brown skin was tattooed with jaguar spots.

  “Os três,” Raul said quietly.

  “I see that,” Wolfe said calmly, trying to disguise his own fear, which was not caused by the blowpipes, the clubs, or the sudden appearance of the three men. What was most disturbing were the two-way radios. Uncontacted tribes did not carry sophisticated communications equipment.

  Wolfe was usually the tallest man in the room, and the strongest. But without his leg he was the shortest and the weakest. He hadn’t felt this vulnerable, this exposed, since he had been dragged one-legged out of the Congo on a litter more than a decade ago. He didn’t like the feeling.

  “What do they want?” he asked.

  “They want us to go with them,” Raul told him.

  Wolfe forced a smile. “What if I refuse?”

  Raul shrugged.

  One of the men lowered his pipe and approached. He reached down and picked up Wolfe’s prosthesis, backed away, and looked at it in the light of the fire. A second man joined him, leaving Wolfe covered by only one man. They started talking to Raul about the leg in their native tongue, pointing to the boot still attached. Raul seemed to understand them and res
ponded in kind. Wolfe didn’t understand a word of it. It occurred to him that with one man guarding him, this might be his best shot of getting out of the situation, but it wasn’t a good enough shot.

  Raul walked back over to him, carrying the leg. He dropped it on the ground in front of Wolfe. “I need the tag on neck.”

  Wolfe wanted to say no, but there was little point. With one leg he was virtually helpless. He took off the tag and tossed it to Raul. Raul removed the tracking tag from his own neck, snapped both tags in two, and tossed them into the fire.

  “Phone,” Raul said.

  “Why?”

  Raul darted in and grabbed Wolfe’s backpack. He found the Gizmo in the side pocket, smashed it repeatedly with his stick, then threw it into the fire with the tags.

  Wolfe was not completely discouraged. For years he had functioned perfectly fine in the woods without a Gizmo or a tracking tag. He took some comfort in the fact that they hadn’t just killed him outright. This meant they wanted him alive for some reason.

  “They want us to go with them,” Raul said. “You need to put the leg back on your …” He hesitated.

  “The word is stump,” Wolfe finished for him. “What if I say no?”

  “I think they will kill you.”

  “Thanks for the clarification,” Wolfe said.

  “I don’t know that word.”

  “Not important.”

  Wolfe began the elaborate procedure of putting his prosthesis back on. The jaguar men stepped closer to watch every complicated move. If they were going very far, which he assumed they were, he was going to have a problem. The stump was still very tender.

  Raul rifled through Wolfe’s bag, taking his gun and knife and anything else that might be used as a weapon. He put these in his own pack and dropped Wolfe’s back in front of him.

  “I need to tie your hands,” he said.

  “How about we skip that part?”

  Raul shook his head.

  Before getting to his feet, Wolfe picked up the agouti meat and took his time eating it, trying to exert some semblance of control over the situation. They let him finish.

  A small victory.

  He tossed the bone into the dark and got to his feet. He tested the prosthesis, keeping a close eye on the three blowpipes, which were again pointed at his him. Raul tied his wrists together with zip ties.

  Zip ties and two-ways. Not good.

  “Hard going in the dark,” Wolfe commented.

  “Cats see at night,” Raul said.

  They started off into the dark forest.

  It was just after midnight. Marty and Dylan were belted into their seats as the Rivlan veered around a bend in the river at well over a hundred miles an hour. There was a long straight stretch of river in front of them without any boat lights.

  “It’s kind of like flying,” Marty said.

  “Hang on,” Ted said. “I’m going to open her up and see what she can do.” He pushed the throttle forward.

  Marty was slammed back into his seat and thought his lungs were going to collapse from the pressure. At 210 miles an hour, the Rivlan started to shudder. Ted eased back on the throttle until they got to 130 miles an hour.

  “Not bad,” Ted said, slowing down the Rivlan even more. “We have a lot of boat traffic coming up around the next bend.” He pointed to a live satellite feed on one of the monitors. “Looks like we’ll have to chug along for a couple of miles before we can let her rip again. If you two want to unbuckle and stretch your legs up top, go ahead. I’ll let you know before I step on it.”

  “Good idea,” Marty said, getting out of his seat.

  Ted grinned.

  Dylan stood up and stretched. “I think I’ll stay down here with Ted. I have some questions about how this thing works. When will we get to the fuel barge?”

  “Half an hour or so,” Ted said.

  “I’m still not sure why we’re stopping at all,” Marty said. They had gotten word from Ana that something had happened to Laurel and Dr. Lansa, and now Wolfe’s signal had gone offline.

  “Because we said we would,” Ted said.

  “Yeah, but that was before everyone disappeared.”

  “All the more reason to pick up reinforcements,” Ted said. “It will only take a minute to snag him from the barge.”

  Every minute counts, Marty thought. He went up top and breathed in the fresh night air. It had cooled down some and the sky was clear, no moon, but a million stars. The riverbanks were dotted with small campfires and dim electrical lights powered by generators that echoed across the water. Marty climbed into a hammock, put his hands behind his head, looked up at the sky, and thought about his parents. They had been missing for months now. Every day that had gone by, it had looked more and more unlikely that they had survived. His parents had spent more time outdoors under the stars than they had indoors under roofs. They were both experts in wilderness survival.

  If they were alive, they would have found their way out of the rain forest by now. If they were injured and couldn’t travel, they would have found a way to get the word out by now.

  “You okay?” Ted had stepped out onto the deck.

  “I was thinking about my parents,” Marty said.

  Ted sat down on a crate near the hammock. “We’re all thinking about them.”

  Most of the time, Marty could keep the heartache at bay, but it was back, and so heavy he thought the hammock would break. “It’s been too long,” he said.

  “I don’t know about too long,” Ted admitted. “I wouldn’t give up hope. Sylvia and Timothy are tough and resourceful. If anyone could survive a helicopter crash, it’s them. As you know, the four of us grew up together. Sylvia and Timothy always thought Wolfe and I were wimps. And compared to them, we were.”

  “Do you think Blackwood has anything to do with this?”

  “Whenever something goes south on us, Blackwood is usually behind it, but I don’t know how he’s managing it this time around. To snatch Laurel and Doc so quickly, and maybe Wolfe, he’d have to have an elaborate network of people already in place. And I’m not just talking about Butch and Yvonne. He’d have to have a dozen people or more down here, and there aren’t a dozen people within a hundred miles of the jaguar preserve. It’s in the middle of nowhere. We have an extensive dossier on Blackwood. As far as we can tell, he has no contacts in Brazil.”

  Marty thought about it for a minute. “Why not?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Noah has contacts everywhere. Why not in the fifth-largest country in the world, with the largest concentration of wildlife on the planet?”

  Ted stared at Marty in the shadowy light. “I’m sure he’s done Wildlife First shows down here.”

  Marty shook his head. Except for the most recent episodes, he had seen every Wildlife First ever produced. He had watched the show all the time back when he was at OOPS, long before he learned Noah Blackwood was a serial liar and homicidal maniac.

  “Your eidetic memory,” Ted said.

  “There have been two hundred and sixteen episodes,” Marty said. “Want me to list where they’ve all been filmed?”

  Ted smiled. “That won’t be necessary. I believe you. And you’re right. It’s very strange that he’s never done a show down here.” He pulled his Gizmo out, thumbed something into it, and read for a couple minutes. “Here’s another strange thing. Wildlife First airs in every South American country except Brazil, which is the biggest market down here. There are dozens of comment strings complaining about it. Brazilian networks say that they’ve tried to air it, but have failed to reach an agreement with Blackwood’s production company.”

  “Why?” Marty asked.

  “That’s a great question. And we should have asked it a lot earlier than this. We’ve been looking for things that are there. You thought outside the box by finding something that wasn’t there.”

  Ted was always talking in riddles like this. “Is that a compliment?”

  “Of the highest order
.” Ted started tapping on the Gizmo again. “I’m emailing Al. He needs to look into this.”

  Marty swung out of the hammock and walked up to the bow. An array of bright lights twinkled about half a mile ahead. “I think we’re coming up on the fuel barge,” he called back.

  “So we are,” Ted said. “I guess I better climb up to the bridge and act like I’m actually driving this thing. Do you feel like whipping something together for a midnight snack? After we pick up Crow, we’ll be going full speed ahead and we’ll have to stay buckled in.”

  “Sure,” Marty said. Cooking would help him get his mind off his parents. He went down to the galley.

  * * *

  Dylan was getting a drink of water when Marty slid down the galley ladder behind him, nearly scaring him half to death.

  “Jeez!”

  “Jumpy,” Marty said. “How do you like your eggs?”

  “Over easy.”

  “I’m making cheese omelets.”

  “Then why did you ask? And why are you making breakfast at one in the morning?”

  “Because Ted is hungry and we’re not going to get a chance to eat because he’s putting the pedal to the metal after we pick up your friend Crow.”

  “He’s not exactly my friend.”

  “Whatever he is, he’ll be on board in a couple of minutes. We’re coming up on the fuel barge.”

  “You need help making breakfast?”

  “Nope,” Marty said. “You better get up top. I’m sure you and Agent Crow have a lot of catching up to do.”

  Dylan hurried up the ladder.

  “You handle the lines,” Ted shouted from the fake pilothouse.

  Dylan wove his way through the crates to the bow, watching the well-lit fuel barge get bigger and bigger as they chugged closer and closer. He wondered if Agent Crow was on the barge watching. He wondered what Agent Crow’s reaction would be when Crow saw him. A man on the dock tossed him a line. He caught it, wrapped it around the cleat, then hurried to the stern and caught the second line. The man who threw the line shouted something to him in Portuguese, which Dylan didn’t understand. Ted came down from the pilothouse. Dylan thought he would be in disguise as the dumpy Theo Sonborn, but he was just the James-Bond-look-alike genius Ted Bronson. He shouted something in Portuguese back at the man. The man shrugged and walked away.