Amazon Slaughter

9

Wei Ho walked in his garden. Around him, captive birds sang in the jacaranda trees, the unseasonable lavender blossoms falling from the branches as the tiny birds — yellow, blue, iridescent green — fluttered from tree to tree. Recirculated water splashed over the rocks of an artificial brook. Behind all the other sounds in the domed, sealed garden, the whir of air conditioners rose and fell as the machines created the cool dry environment that Wei Ho demanded. When he drifted through the flowers and trees, enjoying the bird songs and the stereophonic classical Chinese music, he put the Amazon far from his mind, imagined himself to be walking in his garden in Shanghai so many years before.

A chime announced the arrival of Chan Sann and Abbott. Wei Ho clapped. A girl shuffled to him, brushed and straightened his silk robe, then shuffled away as silently as she had come.

Guards preceded the two visitors, stood at their sides as the Cambodian soldier and the American physicist entered. The heavyset Chan Sann stepped forward, bowed stiffly.

"Master, we have lost a patrol. Fifteen soldiers, two officers. One large craft, two hovercraft. Gone."

"How?"

"We do not know. Perhaps Indians, perhaps Brazilian army. The patrol had found a village. They captured several Indians for workers. Then they reported sighting a group of Brazilian soldiers. They captured the Brazilians, then we heard no more from them."

"Where was this?"

"Upriver. In Bolivia. We have depleted the Indians in this area. We must send patrols to other areas to satisfy Mr. Abbott's requirements."

"Send a small plane to overfly the last reported position of the patrol," Wei Ho instructed. "If the river craft can be recovered, send another patrol. If the plane or patrol encounters organized resistance, dispatch a plane with gas. There can be no opposition to our efforts."

"And if the opposition is soldiers of the Brazilian army?"

"Let no man escape."

Chan Sann's square, brutal face never broke its mask-like composure. In 1979 the Cambodian fled his country as the People's Army of Vietnam routed the forces of Pol Pot. Sann and his Khmer Rouge soldiers had joined Wei Ho's personal guard in Burma. As they had for Pol Pot, the Cambodians killed without question. Unlike the American physicist Abbott, they acted instantly on Wei Ho's instructions.

"And now you, Mr. Abbott. More delays?"

The American shuffled forward. Years of heroin addiction had reduced his body to a gaunt wreck. Sweat pasted his thick hair to the sickly gray skin of his scalp. Sun scars marked his nose and sallow cheekbones. The preceding three days had aged the once brilliant atomic theoretician. He carried the stink of fetid mud. Wei Ho stepped back from the odor.

"They die," the American told him. "I can't stop the dying. I thought it was the exposure. I rotated the work gangs. I kept the rem count down. But they died. Even the road gangs, the jungle cutters with no exposure whatsoever, they die."

"Why does this concern me?"

Abbott reached for the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket, the action exposing welts of needle scars on his forearms. One of the guards rushed forward, as quick as a snake and seized the addict's hand in mid-motion. Abbott obediently dropped his hand. The guard returned to his stance at attention, watching every move of the visitors.

"I'm sorry... I forgot about your security... My point is, how can you expect me to hold to your timetable? I don't have the technicians, I don't have the workers, I don't..."

"Chan Sann!" The Chinese leader pointed at the Cambodian officer. Wei Ho's never-tanned, never-lined face was a pale frozen mask. The cold, imperious expression like a warlord's, the black hair, the silk robe and the garden created an image repeated a thousand times in the old books of China. "Have you failed in your responsibilities?"

"No master. My patrols fill the quotas, despite the greater distances they must go to find Indians."

"Yes, they bring me Indians," said Abbott, "Indians who don't know how to use a shovel. Who work a day, two days, then sicken and die. Women with babies. And a baby dies in the camp and the woman cries and moans until one of your men comes and cuts her throat. And the Indian men try to protect the women, and after the shooting's over, there's a pile of dead slaves. What I want to tell you is that if you want this project completed, get me workers. Not starved Indians, not slaves — workers."

"That is not possible, Mr. Abbott. We cannot... advertise."

"Then it's not possible to finish the project."

Wei Ho regarded the American with calm, expressionless eyes. Should he have the stinking creature killed for his impertinence? Hacked apart, hands and feet then the limbs severed hack by hack until only a truncated flopping mass of screaming flesh remained? Unfortunately, no. Without Abbott, no plutonium. And until the drug-wasted atomic physicist completed the project, Wei Ho knew he must tolerate the American's whining. Even if Wei Ho found another scientist, he would not gain the secret of the laser separation of the isotopes. Only Abbott knew the process. Only he could lead the technicians. So the creature's miserable existence continued.

"Then we will find you the workers, Mr. Abbott. The project must proceed to completion."

After Wei Ho dismissed him, Abbott hurried from the air-conditioned garden. He restrained his body's drug hunger while the sheet steel of the inner security door slid aside. Stone-faced Chinese guards glanced at him through the bulletproof glass ports of their stations. One guard, his Kalashnikov rifle held constantly at the ready, followed a step behind as the gray, stooped American shuffled the length of the corridor. A second guard station, identical to the other, protected the door opening to the outside. Another pair of Wei Ho's personal bodyguards looked from their bulletproof ports and threw switches to roll aside the steel door.

Heat washed over Abbott. His expectation of the needle became urgent, sexual. Quickening his steps, he avoided the stares of the Cambodian and Thai mercenaries manning the perimeter of Wei Ho's compound. He almost ran to his Toyota four-wheel-drive land cruiser. Gunning the engine to life, he ground the gears.

The Cambodians inside the guardhouse sneered at the addict. The electric gate finally rolled open. Abbott stomped the accelerator to the floor and left the fortified compound behind.

He sped along the narrow asphalt road as far as the first turnoff. Swerving onto a dirt track, he drove a few hundred yards into the jungle. There, invisible from the main road that interconnected the several compounds, Abbott quickly tied off his left arm and plunged a syringe into a vein.

Abbott fell back against the seat as the heroin rush surged through him. A wind swayed the interlocking branches of the trees. Semiconscious, his head lolling from side to side, he stared around him at the lush growth that walled the clearing.

A living prison. Walls a thousand miles thick. Brave with the drug's strength, Abbott considered his future. He saw only death. He lived surrounded by suffering and despair and hideous death. The Indian slaves died of disease, shootings, whippings, loneliness and radiation. The technicians also died of disease and radiation and killed one another in drunken quarrels. The guards died in riverbank mud, ambushed by Indian bows and shotguns, sometimes died on stakes in the villages, mutilated, impossible to recognize as human. Death everywhere.

And now death within him. The cancer pain throbbed in his chest, always present. Abbott would die. The cancer ate at his lungs. He had no hope of treatment. The Chinaman would never allow him to leave for surgery and treatment.

So Abbott would die. Surrounded by walls of jungle and by death and by unlimited heroin.

Ah. The heroin.