by Roland Smith
“What did he want?” Dylan asked.
“He wanted to know how much fuel we needed. I told him we were just picking up a passenger.”
“What does the Rivlan run on anyway?”
“Nothing they have on the barge, that’s for sure.”
A man stepped out of the shadows. He had a large duffel bag slung over his shoulder. If this was Agent Crow, he had lost at least a hundred pounds.
“Are you Ted Bronson?” the man asked without looking in Dylan’s direction. The gravelly voice hadn’t changed. Dylan would have recognized the sound of it anywhere.
“Yes, sir,” Ted said. “At your service.”
“You’re earlier than I expected.”
“The boat is faster than she looks.”
The boat is faster than any boat on earth, Dylan thought. Crow is in for several surprises before the night’s out.
“Grab his bag, Dylan.”
And here comes the first surprise.
Dylan reached over the gunwale. Agent Crow stopped him, staring in complete shock.
“Dylan Hickock?”
“You’ve lost a lot of weight,” Dylan said. “You look good.”
“What are you doing down here?”
“I guess I could ask you the same thing. My dad’s working for Ted here, and for Travis Wolfe. How I got down here is kind of a long story.”
“Your dad’s aboard?”
Dylan shook his head. “He and Mom are up in Washington.”
“Maybe we could continue this reunion after we get under way,” Ted said. “They’re waiting for us upriver, and I’d like to get going.”
“Aren’t you going to refuel?” Crow asked. “As I understand it, this is the last refueling barge for miles.”
“Tank’s full,” Ted said. “Come aboard. Untie the lines.” He climbed back up to the pilothouse.
Dylan took Crow’s duffel and set it on the deck. There obviously wasn’t much in it.
Crow climbed over the gunwale. “I’ll get the stern line.”
“Great.”
Dylan walked up to the bow and undid the line. As soon as it was free, Ted started maneuvering the Rivlan away from the barge.
“I can honestly say you’re the last person I expected to see down here,” Crow said, walking up to bow.
“I could say the same thing for you,” Dylan said.
“What do you hear from Buckley Johnson?”
“Nothing,” Dylan said. “I haven’t seen him since Mount St. Helens erupted.”
“Why do I find that hard to believe?”
Dylan shrugged. “Because you’re a cop and you don’t believe anybody.”
“There’s some truth to that,” Crow admitted, giving him a slight smile. “I’ll tell you why I’m here. Buckley Johnson is working at Robert Lansa’s jaguar preserve.”
It was Dylan’s turn to be shocked. “What makes you think that?”
“I’ve been tracking him for months. He passed by here a couple of days ago ferrying Jake Lansa and a couple of Travis Wolfe’s people upriver. And if you’re thinking about warning him that I’m coming, go ahead.”
“Go ahead?”
Crow nodded. “He can run, but he can’t hide. I’ll run him to ground eventually.”
“He’s an old man,” Dylan said. “He returned the money.”
“I’m an old man, too. And it doesn’t matter that he returned the money. He hijacked an airplane. It’s a serious crime.”
“He needed the money to save his son.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“Yeah,” Dylan said. “And I believed him.” Buck’s son had been dying of cancer when Buck hijacked the airplane. He needed the money for an experimental treatment, but his son had died before Buck could get the money off the mountain.
“Might be true,” Crow admitted. “But that doesn’t alter the fact that he broke the law.”
“He saved your life on the mountain.”
“That is true,” Crow said. “Although I don’t know how he did it. We were buried under a ton of burning trees.”
Dylan didn’t exactly know how Buck had done it, either, but he suspected the Sasquatch had something to do with getting the men out of the smashed car. Crow had been unconscious with a broken leg and hadn’t seen them.
“However he managed it,” Crow continued, “it still doesn’t take away the hijacking.”
“What are you going to do when you catch up to him?”
“Arrest him.”
“Then what?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been after Buck for years.”
“Decades.”
“Okay, decades,” Dylan conceded. “What will you do after you arrest him?”
“Retire, I guess.”
“Go fishing?”
“I don’t fish.”
“Travel?”
Crow shook his head.
“Collect stamps? Learn a foreign language? Buy an RV and see the country? Go cruising? Write your memoirs? Get married and have a family?”
Crow shook his head to all of them.
“So what are you going to do all day?”
Crow stared at him for a long time, then said, “The truth is, Dylan, I don’t know.”
Dylan knew what he was going to do. “I’m going to call Buck.”
“Be my guest.”
Dylan caught Marty in the middle of flipping an omelet.
“I wish there was more than one omelet pan,” Marty said. “By the time I get this one finished, the first three will be ruined.” He looked at Dylan. “Agent Crow is aboard?”
“Yeah.”
“We’ll give him the coldest omelet.”
“I need to use your Gizmo.”
“Back pocket,” Marty said.
Dylan fished it out and looked at the screen. “How do I make a call?”
“Depends who you want to call,” Marty answered, flipping the omelet again.
“I need to call Buck Johnson. Crow says he’s at the jaguar preserve.”
“Buck Johnson, from your story?”
Dylan nodded.
Marty slipped the omelet onto the fourth plate. “I’d call Ana. She’ll put him on if he’s there.”
Dylan handed the Gizmo back to him.
“Uh-oh,” Marty said.
“What?”
“Blank screen.”
“Battery?”
“I don’t think so. We better get Ted.”
They found him sitting in the pilothouse with Agent Crow. He was staring at his Gizmo, looking perplexed.
“Did you get ahold of Buck?” Crow asked.
“No, the Gizmo is —”
“Dead,” Ted said. “Mine, too.” He looked at Crow. “Can I borrow your sat phone?”
Crow handed it to him. Ted dialed a number on speaker and let it ring for a long time before ending the call.
“That was Ana’s sat phone. She would have answered if she had gotten the call.”
He dialed another number, and a voice answered after the first ring.
“Yeah,” Al Ikes said.
“It’s Ted. I’m using Agent Crow’s phone.”
“Because your Gizmo is out,” Al said. “So are ours. Your tech team on Cryptos is working on the problem, but so far they haven’t cracked it. Looks like you’ve been hacked. Where are you?”
“Just leaving the fuel barge.”
“What about the Rivlan’s sat feeds?”
“The Rivlan was never set up with communications because we have the Gizmos for that,” Ted said. “The Rivlan’s sat feeds are on a different server, different partition, and they’re working fine. I might be able to switch the partition, but that would take time, which we don’t have. We need to get to the preserve and find out what’s going on. If you find anything out, give Crow a call.”
He handed the phone back to Crow.
“I’m not sure what all that meant,” Crow said, pocketing the phone. “But I take it that there ar
e some outside forces working against you.”
Ted laughed. “You’ve got that right.”
“Noah Blackwood?”
“No doubt.” Ted looked at Marty. “You have our grub ready?”
“Our grub is ruined,” Marty said.
* * *
The grub was not ruined, but it was colder than Marty would have liked. As they all stood and ate in the crowded galley, Ted gave Agent Crow an abridged rundown of the recent skirmishes between Noah Blackwood and Travis Wolfe, leaving out several important details, such as the baby dinosaurs and grand theft helicopter.
Crow listened carefully as he ate his omelet — and half of Marty’s — finishing the last bite just as Ted concluded his story.
“Delicious,” Crow said, dabbing a bit stray egg from the corner of his mouth with a paper towel. “The best meal I’ve had since I got down here.”
By the way your flesh is hanging on your bones, Marty thought, it looks like the only meal you’ve had down here. “It would have been better to eat fresh from the pan,” he said.
“It was still good,” Crow said. He looked at Ted. “So this Noah Blackwood is a bad guy.”
“That’s putting it mildly.”
“He hides it well,” Crow said. “I’ve seen his show a couple of times.”
“The show is part of the elaborate scam,” Ted said.
“So what do you think his intentions are?”
“He’ll try to take back what we took from him, then he’ll try to kill us,” Ted said with a smile on his face.
“The helicopter,” Crow said
And his granddaughter, and a couple of dinosaurs, Marty thought.
“Right,” Ted said. “You might not want to get mixed up in this.”
“Nothing else to do,” Crow said.
“Except to arrest Buck Johnson,” Dylan said harshly.
“That, too,” Crow acknowledged calmly. “I have no real authority down here, but I do have good contacts with Brazilian law enforcement, which could be helpful to you.” He put his empty plate in the sink. “Since I’m along for the ride, you might as well introduce me to the rest of your crew.”
“This is the rest of the crew,” Ted said.
“What? Who’s piloting the boat?”
“No one,” Ted answered.
A look of alarm crossed Crow’s face.
“No worries,” Ted said. “The Rivlan drives itself at this speed.”
“What about logs and river debris?”
“You mean flotsam and jetsam,” Marty said. “The Rivlan has an automatic garbage detector.”
“I hope you’re right.” Crow looked out the porthole. “Your friend Dr. Wolfe told me this thing was fast. At this rate, we won’t get to the jaguar preserve for three days.”
“We’ll get there a bit faster than that,” Ted said. “Do you get motion sickness?”
“I haven’t yet, and I’ve been on the river for months.”
Ted looked at his watch. “We better get below and strap in.”
“Strap in?” Crow asked. “On this old tub?”
Marty and Dylan just grinned.
Snap!
Grace moved her hand out of reach of the sharp teeth just in time.
“Close one,” Luther said. “But look at it this way. If you lose a digit, you still have nine left.”
Grace was fond of her fingers and wanted to keep them. It was a little after nine in the morning, but already her black curly hair was matted with sweat. She wasn’t sure if it was due more to the heat or her fear of losing a finger. Luther had several scrapes on his hands from near misses. Every time the hatchlings nicked him, he gave a crazy grin, a fist pump, and shouted, “Missed!”
Grace hadn’t quite gotten used to Luther’s new skinhead look. His bright red hair was starting to grow in around the scabs from his clumsy shave job. Back in civilization, if she had seen him walking down the street toward her, she would have turned and run. In the rain forest, for some reason, he wasn’t quite as frightening.
Buck Johnson stood outside the corral watching the feeding. He’d barely taken his eyes off the hatchlings since their unveiling the day before. But he wasn’t just watching them, he seemed to be studying them. Ana, on the other hand, was paying scant attention to the hatchlings. Early that morning, when everyone in camp had woken from their fitful sleep, they had discovered that all of their communications were down, including Ana’s sat phone. She had spent the entire morning pacing around the small camp trying to find a signal, and was still pacing around, with no luck.
Snap!
“You better watch out,” Luther warned.
Grace was worried about the communications being down, too, but she needed to stop thinking about it before she lost a finger. She took a deep breath to clear her mind.
“I don’t want to overstep my bounds,” Buck called out from across the enclosure. “But I wouldn’t mind trying my hand at feeding your friends.”
Grace looked at Luther. As head dinosaur keeper, it was his call, not hers.
“Fine with me,” Luther said. “As long as you don’t lose your hand while you try your hand at it. How are your reflexes?”
“I guess we’ll find out,” Buck said, coming around to their side.
Luther gave him about five minutes of instruction. Buck listened carefully, then said, “You know, I’ve been watching you for the past half hour, and it seems to me there might be a better way to get the food into them without bloodshed or loss of limb.”
“The important thing is for them to get an equal share,” Luther said.
“Understood,” Buck said, slipping on a pair of disposable gloves.
Grace stepped back and made room for Buck at the rail next to Luther.
“You want the one on the right or the one on the left?” Luther asked.
“I kind of want both of them, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind, but don’t blame me if you get bit. They’re as fast as cobras.”
“I noticed that,” Buck said. “I actually don’t think you’re taking advantage of how fast they are. It might be easier if I just show you.”
Luther shrugged. “They’re your hands to lose. Go for it.” He joined Grace at the rail.
The hatchlings were clearly agitated by the delay. Their heads were bobbing up and down, and their tails were whipping back and forth furiously.
“I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Grace whispered.
“It’ll be okay,” Luther said, but he looked worried.
Buck took two hunks of thawed red meat out of the bucket, one for each hand. The hatchlings got excited thinking they were finally going to be fed, but instead of offering the meat to the hatchlings, Buck held on to it.
Luther shook his head. “If you don’t give it to them in the next five seconds, they’re going to break down the barrier and eat you!”
Buck shook his head without taking his eyes off the hatchlings’ bobbing heads. “I don’t think so. Watch.”
At the moment the hatchlings’ heads were the farthest apart from each other, Buck tossed the meat up into the air.
The hatchlings snapped at the meat like a pair of falcons snatching pigeons on the fly. The meat disappeared down their long throats.
“Wow!” Grace said.
Luther scowled. “Lucky toss.”
Buck threw two more hunks of meat.
Snap! Snap!
Gone.
The hatchlings appeared to love the new feeding technique. Their heads weren’t bobbing around, they weren’t trying to bite each other, they weren’t smashing themselves against the barrier anymore, and Buck’s fingers were still intact.
Ana walked up. “What’s going on?”
“Dino breakfast,” Buck said, tossing two more chunks.
Snap! Snap!
“Can I try?” Grace asked.
“Sure,” Buck said. “They’re your dinosaurs.”
Grace stepped up, grabbed some meat, and gave it a toss.
&
nbsp; Snap! Snap!
“This is going to make the feedings a lot faster,” she said.
“And safer,” Luther pointed out as he gave the new technique a try.
Snap! Snap!
“Feeds will be twice as fast,” Luther said. “The other great thing about feeding on the fly is that we’ll only need one person to do the feeds now. That will give me a chance to look around, maybe do some canopy zip-lining.”
“You’re not doing any zip-lining until Flanna gets back,” Ana said.
“Okay,” Luther said.
Grace narrowed her eyes at him. It wasn’t like Luther to give in so easily.
“What?” Luther said.
“Flanna may not be back for days.”
“I guess I’ll just have to wait.”
Grace knew Luther had no intention of waiting.
* * *
The worst part of going fast was slowing down.
If you were going to puke, this is when it would happen. Ted pulled back on the throttle, slowing the Rivlan down from nearly two hundred miles per hour to ten miles per hour in about five seconds, sending everyone’s stomachs to the tips of their toes. Marty looked at Crow. The agent’s tropical tan had turned a pale shade of green. Marty knew exactly how he felt. It probably hadn’t been the best idea to serve cold omelets slathered in congealed butter just before takeoff. Dylan was out of his chair, mouth covered, rushing up to the deck. Crow was fumbling with his seat belt. It didn’t look like he was going to make it before something embarrassing happened, but he managed to get himself free and hurried up the steps behind Dylan.
Ted swiveled around when he heard the retching from above. “Oops! Guess I should have slowed down a bit more slowly. You okay?”
Marty was about to say something about land lubbers and their weak stomachs, but then he heard Crow’s heaves joining Dylan’s. Marty barely made it to the gunwale before he lost everything.
