Amazon Slaughter

13

An explosion of xenon and rotor blast descended from the night. Lopez and Hoang, shielding their eyes from the flying sand and leaves, watched the helicopter pass over them. Fitted with xenon landing lights and fiberglass pontoons, the Huey troopship hovered over the ridge. Mercenaries slid down lengths of rope to the ferns, forming a circle of outward-facing riflemen. Then the brilliance that bathed the hill switched off, returning the scene to moonlit night. The helicopter soared away.

"Think maybe there's some Indians who didn't see that?" Lopez asked Hoang. "Maybe Chan Sann should have included some skyrockets and sirens."

Their radio buzzed. "This is Williams. Where are you?"

Hoang waved a flashlight. One shadow broke away from the other forms, weaving through the rocks to the cliff edge.

Williams, a square-shouldered felon from the slums of London, wore no face blacking. They spotted the mercenary squad leader's white features from ten yards away. A black beret was tilted across his forehead. He carried an Uzi submachine gun.

"Over here," Lopez called out. "Watch where you walk, it drops off. Straight down."

"So where'd you see the soldiers?" Williams demanded.

"Didn't see nothing, man." Lopez pointed east, to the darkness and jungle below the hill. "We heard them chopping trees, digging in down there."

"I only saw one river boat when we flew over..."

"That's cause the other one got wasted."

"Blown away," Hoang added." Way gone."

"Oh, Lord," Williams sighed. "You think it's the army?"

"Who the hell knows?" Lopez flipped a glowing cigarette butt off the cliff. "That's why Chan the Man's sending you down there."

"Great, just blinking great. See you later." With a wave, Williams started back to his squad.

"Maybe, baby," Hoang said as the ten men filed away into the jungle, their weapons and equipment clanking as they hacked their way through the undergrowth with machetes. "Maybe we see you, maybe we don't."

In the shot-riddled cabin of the gunboat, Gadgets's electronics covered a table. Wires led from a cassette recorder to the circuits of a slaver radio.

While Lyons, Blancanales and Lieutenant Silveres waited, Gadgets rewound the tape, then pressed the play button.

"Calling Chan Sann. This is Lopez."

"This is Chan Sann. You reached the position?"

"We're here. Looking down on the river."

"Do you see the Brazilians?"

Advancing the tape, Gadgets skipped on to another exchange. "Do you see the boats? Lights?" the Asian-accented voice asked. The Latin voice replied, "No, nothing like that." Gadgets skipped again. The Asian voice spoke once more. "Find the Brazilians. Block their retreat." An English-accented voice pleaded, "You've got to get us out of there before the plane makes its run."

"I will radio you..."

"That's what I taped," Gadgets told them. "The one called Chan Sann is downriver somewhere. I figure he put some men on the ridge overlooking the river. And the helicopter brought in a squad."

"And then the plane," Blancanales added.

"The plane will come at daylight." Lyons touched up his body blacking with smears of genipap. "Question is, with bombs or gas?"

"Takes a whole lot of high explosive to chop up the jungle," Gadgets answered. "I'd bet it's gas. Dig a hole, get behind a tree, can't hide from gas."

"Thomas told me about entire villages dying," Lyons said. "People dying with yellow blood coming out of their mouths."

Lieutenant Silveres listened to the exchange without comment. He cleaned and oiled the G-3 auto-rifle, watching Blancanales sketch a map by the glow of a rag-shaded flashlight. Blancanales drew the curve of the river around the headland and pinpointed their position. An X marked the cliff overlooking the bend in the river. He put a question mark on the west side of the hills intersecting the river.

Setting down the auto-rifle, Lieutenant Silveres took the pencil and indicated two more snaking curves in the course of the river to the northwest. At the edge of the paper, he drew a zigzagging line.

"This is the border of my country, the Mamore. The first town is 108 kilometers from there."

"Is that where your unit is stationed?" Blancanales asked.

"There is a garrison in Guajara."

"Is that your unit?" Blancanales persisted. "Will they have the soldiers to assist us when we attack the..."

The lieutenant interrupted him. "It would be better for you to discuss that with my superiors. I will help you while we are in Bolivia. But I cannot talk of what the army will or will not do when we enter Brazil."

"Then a Brazilian force will intercept us here?" Blancanales pointed to where the river from Bolivia met the Mamore River.

The young officer only shrugged.

"Forget the Brazilian army!" Lyons stopped the questioning. "That's tomorrow. The slavers will annihilate us..." he grabbed Gadgets's wrist, looked at his watch "...in three and a half hours."

"If we stick around," Gadgets said.

"If we cut loose and try to continue north..." Blancanales pointed to the next bend in the river "...we get gassed. And we have another problem. Our plane will be coming in at dawn." He looked at Lieutenant Silveres. "And maybe the Brazilians, too. We can't offload that plane in the middle of a three-way firefight."

"Problems? We got no problems!" Lyons buckled on his bandolier of Atchisson magazines and slipped the weapon's sling over his shoulder. "Who wants to go for a walk? We got the best jungle fighters in the world sleeping out there. Their fathers were headhunters and their grandfathers ate missionaries. Me and them are going over that hill for a rumble with the crazies. Want to come, get with the fun?"

Gadgets grinned to Blancanales. "That's our man, back to normal."

"I'll come," the lieutenant volunteered, standing up.

"You sure, kid? I kicked you hard, you could be..."

"It was nothing."

Lyons laughed at the young man's machismo, threw him a rag soaked in genipap. "Then black up."

A hunter who had once lived in the area with his family and tribe led the North American and the Brazilian and their Xavante allies along an Indian trail. Cutting straight south, they followed the narrow overgrown track, the hunter guiding them by memory and touch through the darkness. Every man walked with his hand on the shoulder of the man ahead of him in the line. Lyons walked third in line. Several positions behind him, he heard the lieutenant's boots crushing the rain forest debris that matted the trail, his uniform's pockets and flaps catching on branches and vines.

Night sky finally appeared above them as the trail led up the hillside. By starlight and the light of the setting moon, they crouch-jogged between the rock slabs and low growth of the ridge. A clinking rang from a pocket of the lieutenant's fatigues. Lyons called a halt and padded silently back to the young officer.

"You're making noise," Lyons whispered. He slapped at the lieutenant's pockets. He felt keys under the cloth. "Get rid of those! You don't need those in the middle of the Amazon."

"They are the keys to my apartment in Belem. I forgot I had them," Lieutenant Silveres apologized. The key ring jingled as it fell to the trail.

Lyons buried the shiny pieces of brass under the forest mulch, then returned to his place in line. The group continued in silence, moving fast.

An auto-burst stopped them. Flat in the wet ferns and mud, Lyons listened. The line of Indians sprawled along the trail, shotguns and G-3 rifles pointed into the night. More shots blasted the silence, one rifle firing, then another.

But no bullets winged past them. A hundred yards down the hillside, in the total darkness of the jungle, a rifle fired a last burst.

A soldier shouted in English, "Quit that, you demented fool! You're shooting at me!"

Lyons recognized the voice from Gadgets's tape recording. He crawled to Thomas and the hunter-point man. "That's the squad from the helicopter."

"We kill?"

"You think your perimeter men can handle them? The men standing guard? "

"If slavers come to boats. They lost in night."

"We want the two men who are watching the river."

Thomas and the hunter whispered back and forth. "He knows all the trails. We kill men on mountain, then kill squad."

"Maybe." Lyons keyed his hand radio, whispered. "Politician. Wizard."

Both men answered. "Here."

"You hear the shooting?"

"What's the body count?" Blancanales asked.

"We didn't even see them. That was the slavers shooting at each other. They're wandering around, shooting and screaming. You could warn the perimeter men..."

"How?" Gadgets asked. "We don't know their language."

"Yeah, that's right. If there's an emergency, give them one of your radios. Thomas will give the instructions. We're continuing on. Over."

Tapping Lyons, the black-painted hunter pointed to the north. Thomas questioned the man in whispers, the hunter nodding. "He says we go take slavers. You, me, him. They close."

Lyons leaned his Atchisson against a rock and slipped off his bandoliers. He pulled back the Beretta's slide to chamber a subsonic 9mm slug. "Let's go."

Leading the way through the angled stones, the hunter moved like a snake, slithering through crevices, slipping through undergrowth without stirring a fern or branch to betray his passing. He carried only a machete. Thomas followed a body length behind the hunt. Lyons struggled to keep pace with him. He scuffed his knees and elbows; he caught his web belt on rocks. He reached into shadow and felt insects skitter up his arms.

After several hundred yards, the hunter stopped and motioned Thomas and Lyons to crawl up beside him. They sprawled on the high point of the ridge. To the west, black masses of treetops blocked the moon. To the north, starlight illuminated in grays and blacks the rocks and the wide river and the rain forest on the far shore. The hunter pointed.

A red spark flared where the ridge fell to the river, a glowing face emerging from the black. The amber mask disappeared, the cigarette zigzagging as the smoker gestured in the darkness.

"Jerk-off clowns," Lyons almost laughed.

"What?" Thomas whispered.

"We take them prisoner. For information. Is that possible?"

Thomas nodded. "Possible."

"Tell your man. I go first. And watch for trip lines, booby traps."

Sliding and crabbing over the rocks, Lyons closed in on the mercenaries. He heard their voices. He slowed, keeping his chest pressed to the rocks. He dragged himself over uneven stones, infinitely slowly, watching the phantom cigarette-lighted faces of the two men. A sharp stone gouged the skin of Lyons's chest, belly, hip.

One man talked in the English of prime-time American television and tits-and-ass movies; he had a French accent. The other mercenary spoke Tex-Mex street argot.

"I mean, like that Chinaman must be totally messed up in the head, loco, dusted... This scene out here is total weirdness. Like I'm part Apache Indian. And what am I doing? Wasting Indians. I do not like this crap. And Chan Sann the Man! When I see that dude, I see skulls. A world of skulls."

"Hey, maaan, ssshhh. He could hear, dig?"

"Oh, yeah. Jesus. He gives me the shakes."

Flat on the small rocks and grasses, Lyons inched forward. One man faced the river, the other watched the river and the slab-strewn hill, his head swiveling back and forth, the back of his head to Lyons.

Lyons forced his limbs through a flat slow-motion crawl, sweat running from his body as he strained. He pressed forward, then waited, relaxing, breathing, listening to their conversation. He watched the lookouts as they smoked and bitched.

Only a body-length's distance of rocks and flattened ferns separated Lyons from the mercenaries. He slipped off the safety of the Beretta. With the fingers of his left hand, he found a pebble. He flicked it past the lookouts. The pebble hit a wide leaf.

"You hear that?"

"What?"

Another pebble skipped across an exposed stone slab. The mercenaries whipped their heads from side to side, staring into the night.

"Something's moving out there — put away that flashlight! You want them to cut loose at the light?"

Another pebble.

"Ohhhh, shit! I'm turning this gun around already!"

Hearing the scraping and clanking of metal on stone, Lyons scrambled the last few feet. He threw an arm around the neck of one man, pointed the Beretta into the face of the other man. The one he held was bucking and twisting.

"Don't move or you die!"

A black hole yawned in the pale circle of the seized man's face as his mouth fell open, cigarette clinging to his lip for an instant.

"You speak English, mister?" gasped this man that Lyons gripped in a choke hold. "We talk, we help you. Anything. We the good guys."

"Thomas! I got them. "

A few steps away, shadows rose from the ferns. Thomas and the hunter walked up to the mercenaries and began to search them. Lyons kept his arm clamped around the one man's throat, the Beretta never wavering from the face of the other one. The Indians found knives, a snub-nosed .38 revolver, tobacco and marijuana cigarettes, a plastic bag of pills.

Lyons laughed. "Did you come out here to shoot people or to party?"

"We no shoot people! We good guys, supercool dudes."

"You American?" the Latin asked. "I'm American, too. I'm Miguel Lopez, from San Antonio, Texas. That's Pierre Hoang."

"You're mercenaries, killing these people and their families." Lyons motioned to Thomas and the hunter. "You take them for slavery, you work for terrorists..."

"We didn't know that until we got here!" Lopez protested. "We're a thousand miles from anywhere. If we don't do what the Chinaman and Chan Sann tell us, he'll skin us alive. And that's the truth. For real. He's done it to guys. Skinned them. We've wanted to get out of here since the day we got here!"

"What do you know about the reactor?"

"You don' wanna go there. It's a death trap. Radiation city. But I'll show you where it is if you'll get us out of this jungle. This whole scene's insane."

"First, you take us to Chan Sann."