The Embedding

SIXTEEN

At night, the women of the village replenished the wood on the bonfire platforms in the small clearing and set light to them.

Fire flared across the flood. Danced on the waves the stamping feet set up.

Pierre was still wading round the hut and moaning—his blanched body ghostly in the flickering light.

With nightfall insects also descended. The three undrugged spectators felt the needle-pricking and the fierce flushing itch. Tom Zwingler located a tube of insect repellent in his bag.

“I’ll swear things are crawling on my legs,” shivered Sole as he smeared some cream on. “You saw all those damned leeches on Pierre. Can’t you feel something?”

“Won’t get through your clothes,” hoped Chester, who did not like the idea of being fed on by leeches. “Water’s moving about your legs, is all.”

“Why is it?”

“All the dancing.”

“Flies don’t seem to bother the Indians much. Maybe it’s the fires. Women and kids have moved near them.”

“Let’s move nearer. The men are all stoned anyhow. They couldn’t care less.”

“Queer, isn’t it—not caring about strangers watching this? A foreigner even taking part in it. I got the idea they were secretive from what Pierre wrote.”

“We don’t exist, man,” sniggered Chester. “Just let them wait.” He brandished his dart gun in the air.

However, wait was all they had to do. No helicopter showed up.

They stared at the ecstatic faces in the firelight. Waited, while the Bruxo with bloody nostrils led the men endlessly round the hut.

Listened, without comprehension, to the myths being chanted.

“There’s an undertow, Tom—”

“Shut up about the fucking leeches will you? Sure I feel something—but just shut up about it!”

“You think it’s the dam, Chris?”

“Maybe.”

“Shit, man, this place’ll take days to drain!”

Tom Zwingler thought about it.

“We’re near one of the main river channels. But it must be emptying in a hell of a hurry if we feel effects already—”

“Didn’t you say the dam would strip away like sealing tape?”

“I guess I did, Chris.”

“If we’re feeling it here, what the hell’s it like downstream !”

“Maybe a bit more than we anticipated? If that’s the case, where the hell are Chase and Billy?”

“Could be the water is pulling,” grunted the Negro. “Better than leeches I suppose.”

“What was the time fuse on those mines, Chester?”

“Fifteen minutes, Mr Sole. They just had to dump the mines down the side of the dam from the helicopter—”

“Isn’t that cutting it a bit fine?”

“Christ, no—they fly straight on after dumping them. No sweat—they’d be miles out of the blast zone.”

When the second steel suitcase had slid underwater, Gil flew the machine on along the line of the dam for four kilometres to the trees.

As they rose up over the first wall of forest, a line of half a dozen coin-size holes suddenly punched themselves in the plexiglass.

Gil’s jaw shattered.

Flew away in a spray of blood and bone splinters.

He fell across the altitude control stick, his heavy body thrashing about on top of it. From the remnants of his mouth gurgled a sheeplike bleat.

Like water spilled from a jug, the machine began to fly at the ground.

Billy caught hold of Gil’s body; but they were too close to the trees already. The helicopter struck. Turning over twice, its blades scythed leaves and branches before they crumpled up and snapped.

The wrecked machine settled into a nest of branches and hung there, dripping fuel. It didn’t burn. But the broken bodies inside burned with pain enough.

Billy fought back the nausea of his broken bones and got the hatch open. He peered down upon tier on tier of interlocking branches. Red macaws spattered through the foliage, visions of his own heartblood, as Billy fainted.

Burning with fever, flybites and hunger, Raimundo stumbled out from the cover of the trees on to the freeboard of the dam. He tried to see where the helicopter had fallen. But couldn’t.

Yet he heard the noise from the treetops, then the sudden silence, and a sullen grin spread across his face. The automatic rifle trembled in his hand as he turned away from the forest to face the causeway stretching endlessly towards the east.

How bitterly he hated this dam. How purely too. For days as he waded through the jungle the dam had been burning into his mind’s eye like a red-hot bar. Even the agony of worms hatching out in his wounds meant nothing.

It stretched into the distance—on one side it drowned the world, on the other side it strangled it.

Then, absurdly, as he stared, the dam bloomed into a sunburst. Before his eyes flowered an incandescent point of sunlight, that bored painfully into his vision.

Instinctively he jerked his head away.

The sunburst moved with his head, though already the actual light had disappeared in a boiling cloud of mud and foam.

The ground snatched itself away from his feet, a fist of air slapped him down.

Raimundo picked himself up and fled back into the trees, terrified and confused. He collapsed inside the forest, exhausted. He still saw that heatflower—it glowed with the power of his hatred, and only faded as his strength ebbed.