Ballistic

THREE

A rifle cracked, ripping branches and brush above Gentry’s head as he ran down a slight hill. The killers were close at his heels; he picked his pace up even more, and his thighs burned as the lactic acid squirted from his bloodstream into his muscle fibers.

He’d choreographed this escape, had made several dry runs, had chosen this route to maximize the effect of the natural dangers of the jungle. Natural dangers made more dangerous via certain unnatural means that he had planned.

His left hand reached back and took hold of the hilt of the machete strapped to the side of his backpack. He pulled it free of its Velcro binding, and with a single strong swing he hacked into a bush to his right. Behind the bush he picked up a smaller trail, even darker under the canopy and covered in roots and vines, and here Court went up onto his toes and pulled his knees high to keep from hooking his feet under the obstacles in his path. His pursuers had seen him leave the main trail; of this he had no doubt. They’d be on him again in seconds. He tossed the machete aside as he ran; he loved the blade and would likely need it again soon, but he had to focus all his concentration on his fast footwork and rely on muscle memory in his upper extremities to unhook the shotgun on the right side of his pack. He pulled the pistol grip and swung the weapon out in front of him, pointed it straight up as he ran, holding it with both hands, the barrel just in front of his face.

The trail went down another hill, with large thick-trunked trees on all sides. He opened his eyes wide to take in every bit of light available to him, took them off the trail for one second as he looked for just the right tree, for just the right branch, and he found it.

Another shot behind — he heard the supersonic crack as it raced past his left ear. The hunters were no more than thirty yards back; they’d be crossing the ground he now stepped on seven or eight seconds behind him.

Perfect.

Gentry ran on, passed under the tree, under the branch he’d searched for in the low light, and he fired the shotgun straight up in front of his face. He racked another round and fired once more; the weapon’s recoil jolted down against his shoulder joints.

Fifty feet above him a seven-by-four-foot hive of African killer bees took the two blasts of the double aught buckshot directly at its base; the impacts blew the bottom of the hive apart and knocked the entire fat structure loose of the branch, and like a piano falling from a tree, it dropped towards the trail, slamming through branches as it came down hard.

Court was over the lip of a small rise, leaping into the air to vault a felled cypress, when the hive smashed into the ground twenty yards behind him.

The comandante was a fit man in his thirties; still, he could not keep pace with the younger men in his force. He was nearly the last in line on the trail as they ran down a hill; in the dark distance he saw the spark of flames from a shotgun. The boom of the weapon’s report was absorbed into the humid air of the green jungle around him. Though nearly as wild from the chase as his men, the comandante retained the presence of mind to duck on hearing the second gunshot, and this put him at the very back of the pack on the narrow trail. He’d just picked up his feet again when he saw the huge object ahead of him falling through the few dull rays of light that made its way through the canopy.

He did not know what it was; never in a million years would he have been able to guess. Only when the tall, fat lump crashed to the earth, virtually enveloping the first two men in the column in some sort of dark cloud, did he shout out a confused and nonspecific warning to his team.

And only after the first screams, only after the first jolting burn on his forearm just above where his glove ended and his exposed skin began, only after the exploding, swarming, darkening fog surrounded his men in front of him — only after all this did he know.

Bees. Thousands — no, tens of thousands of enraged bees covered his screaming, writhing, frantic soldiers. In seconds guns began to fire wildly in the sky in a pathetic and futile act of desperation; well-trained soldiers ran into the thick woods along the trail and fell and kicked and swatted the air like maniacs.

The comandante was stung on the face, on the neck, again on the arm, and he stumbled and then turned to run back up the trail, back up the hill, through the outskirts of the mad swarm of livid lit cigarettes stabbing at him from all sides, the steady downpour of caustic acid rain, the viscous cloud of tiny fireballs of molten lava.

He screamed, pushed the button on the walkie-talkie, and screamed some more, and then he fell, and the stings dug deeper into his skin.

He almost made it back up to his feet, but his fleeing men — each battling panic and agony and the near-zero visibility caused by the swirling, swarming insects — knocked him back down on his chest as they retreated back in the direction of the creek.

The comandante slid a knee under his body to push himself up again, but the dark cloud enveloped him; every nerve ending in his body ignited, and he grabbed at his pistol to fight off ten thousand attackers.

Court ran on, away from the screams and the disjointed gunfire in the jungle behind him. He pictured a dozen men, but that was conjecture. He’d not once looked back at his attackers. He based the number on the fact that the helicopters’ distinctive sound told him they were Hueys, and everyone in Court Gentry’s world knew that a Huey could carry fourteen geared up gun monkeys.

The cries of agony backed up his guesstimate. The howls of human suffering sounded like they came from about a dozen men. Which meant the other chopper would likely have the same number. Why vary the size of your fire teams?

The two helicopters circled high above; they’d dropped off their men, and they would wait for the order to come and collect them.

Gentry made it out of the thick jungle and onto the main road, turned to the south, and slowed to a jog. He had no idea where the other team was now; if they’d gotten out of the marsh, they could be on this very road, but if they were, they’d be at least a kilometer back.

He allowed himself a moment to relax as he jogged, but the moment ended abruptly as he heard a truck approaching from behind. There was only one truck in the village; it was an old flatbed owned by one of his coworkers and was used only to bring the salvaged iron up this road from the wreckage site to the dock for transport back to Fonte Boa.

Court slowed and turned, expecting to see Davi behind the wheel.

But no, one hundred yards back he saw Davi’s truck, but it was full of armed men in bush hats, and as Gentry turned back to run for his life, he heard the pops of rifles.

“Fuck!” shouted Gentry as he dashed off the road, back into the thick jungle, digging his way through vines and bush and palm fronds the size of truck tires, desperate to make himself small, fast, and slippery.

As he pushed his way into the tangle of undergrowth, he worked on a new plan. His old plan had been simple. He had a canoe stowed under the little bridge just a hundred and fifty yards ahead. He’d planned on running up the road, sliding down the bank, and then making his escape via the little boat, being careful to dodge the choppers by staying under the trees that hung out over the river’s edge.

But now he’d have to approach the bridge from upriver, which presented one extraordinary obstacle. Or a dozen or more obstacles, depending on how you looked at it.

Both sides of the riverbank north of the bridge were literally covered with crocodiles.

Huge fucking crocodiles.

As Court powered through the nearly impenetrable growth, he settled on his new plan — a plan that would require skill he was not sure he possessed, execution he was not sure he could pull off, and luck he was not sure he could count on.

But it was better than dancing down the road ducking rounds from a truck full of rifles.

He heard the men entering the vegetation behind him. A few fired their guns into the trees and bushes. Court knew his trail would close itself as soon as he moved through; he was not worried about the men any longer. Their eyes could not see him and their guns could not reach him.

But he was worried. He was worried about the damn crocodiles ahead.

The rifle fire picked up. It was as if the men were trying to tear their way through the jungle with lead. It would not work, not before Court made it clear. But that was not to say that one lucky bullet fragment couldn’t crash its way through and bury itself into the back of the American’s head.

Court ducked down lower, pushed through on his hands and knees, scraping them raw in the process. He ripped down spiderwebs the size of fishing nets and used the barrel of his shotgun to knock a boa constrictor from a low hanging branch so he could limbo under it without fear of having the angry snake wrap around his neck.

Soon he broke out of the jungle and onto a hill above the riverbank. Forty yards to his left the wooden bridge sat invitingly in the sun. His little boat bobbed in the shade under it, a canvas tarp tight as a drum over it for protection. Below him, and for at least twenty-five of the forty yards along the water’s edge, a dozen crocs ranging in size from six to sixteen feet basked in the mid-morning rays.

Gentry found a thick vine that shot out from the bank in a diagonal off to his left, ran over the riverbank, and connected to the highest, most outstretched limb of a two-hundred-foot-tall kapok tree that hung over the river like a great arm.

It might not take him all the way to the bridge, but it would get him to the bank right next to it. That was far enough from the crocs, and that would be just fine.

He’d tossed his machete ten minutes earlier, so he pointed the wide barrel of his shotgun just above where the vine entered the hard earth.

And then he hesitated. Panting from the exertion, stinging from the abrasions on his hands and knees and the scratches and insect stings he’d picked up along the way, he just stood there, his shotgun poised to fire. He had swung on vines many evenings with the boys in the village; he trusted their strength and their ability to get him from here to there. But in his mind’s eye he saw this plan of his going very, very wrong. In fact, he could not even conjure a mental image of the next fifteen seconds going off without a hitch.

A long, angry burst from an automatic rifle thirty yards behind him in the jungle helped him focus on the task at hand. He fired the pump shotgun at the vine, it split and frayed beautifully, and he caught it with his free hand before it swung away. Hurriedly, he refastened the shotgun to his backpack one-handed and leapt into the air to take the vine at the highest point he could reach. His sore red hands gripped hard, his legs wrapped around tight, and he began swinging off the hill and over the massive reptiles below.

The vine shot him above the near bank; he passed over sleepy crocodiles warming themselves at the water’s edge. Many of the crocs lay with their toothy mouths wide open, cooling their bodies with the intake of air and presenting an especially ominous image to swing over.

His grip was secure; he grimaced with the effort but held firm as gravity took him out over the water now, his legs jutted in front of him, his knees cinched tight against the vine, and his eyes focused on his landing area on the bank by the bridge.

The vine was supple and green and healthy; he could count on it to get him across.

But not so the high tree limb from which it hung. Termites had nested along the crook where it separated from a larger branch, weakening the joint. Without Gentry’s acrobatics the limb would have held for another year, until the rainy season pushed winds across the continent and the brittle wood snapped in a storm.

But this limb did not have another year. It would fail now.

Gentry’s worst-case scenario came to pass in two stages.

The first was more of a slip of the vine at the tree branch; there was a lurching and a catch. Court was well out away from the land, easily ten feet above the water and sailing fast. He kept his grip but jacked his head off of his intended destination and up towards his lifeline’s connection with the tree.

He just managed to focus his wide eyes on the distant point as the tree limb cracked and broke.

Gentry’s momentum, with his legs out in front of him, sent his body spinning backwards one full revolution through the air, twenty feet up. He found himself facedown as gravity took over, and he dropped towards the water emitting a primordial scream of terror.