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."
14
Chan Sann lifted the rifle to his shoulder to scan the night with the electronics of the Starlight scope. He saw a phosphor-green river extending into the distance. No boat, no mass of branches and wood, nothing moved on the calm surface. Every few minutes as he paced the deck of the gunboat, he switched on the Starlight's power, scanned the river again from the north to the east, where the form of the airboat waited in the shallows, then returned to the north in a long, slow sweep.
For an hour he waited, pacing the deck, scanning the river. His soldiers held their weapons ready to direct the fire of auto-rifles, machine guns, rocket launchers at the boats coming downriver. Camouflage or fire power would not save the enemy. The Brazilian or Bolivian army unit that had captured the two patrol craft would die in the concentrated fire of the gunboat, the grenade launcher on the airboat, and the M-60 atop the cliff.
But the enemy did not float into the trap.
At 3:00 a.m. precisely, Chan Sann radioed his other soldiers. He spoke first with the airboat.
"No movement at all on the river," came the report.
"Now lookouts. Lopez. Hoang. Report."
Static hissed. He waited, impassive, his thick Asian features like a mask carved in stone, his hooded eyes unblinking, focused on his thoughts. His muscled neck tensed slightly, tendons and veins beginning to stand out from his dark and flawless skin. "Lopez. Hoang. Report. Immediately."
"This is Williams. I saw them before I came down the hill."
"Were they in their position?" asked Chan Sann, his voice toneless.
"Hey! We're here. This is Lopez reporting. Everything's okay here."
"Why did you not answer immediately?"
"We... we had a snake problem... this black snake. It crawled up on us."
"Did you leave your position?"
"No! No, no, we didn't. But we had to deal with the snake. Todo es bueno ahora."
"What have you seen?"
"On the river? Nada. Zero. We heard some shooting. We don't know who it was..."
"Report if you see movement. Williams, report."
In the mud and rotting vegetation of a trail on the hillside, Lopez and Lyons sprawled next to the radio. In the darkness around them, the Xavantes listened for movement around the unit. Lyons held his hand radio ready as he listened to the Cambodian question his other mercenaries. "Williams. Did you meet the enemy?"
"No. Not yet."
"There was shooting."
"We thought we made contact, but..."
"Go to the river. Find the enemy. Report when you make contact. I will radio for the plane."
"We're hitting them in the dark? In the jungle at night? No one'll know who's bloody shooting at who! It'll be total chaos! You'll gas us!"
"Go to the river, Williams. Make contact. When the plane is above you, mark the position of the enemy with flares. You will withdraw then."
"You'll gas us! We don't have masks or oxygen. If the wind's wrong, we won't..."
"You have your instructions, Williams. Obey the instructions."
After a long, static-scratched pause, Williams finally responded, "Yeah, good enough. We'll do it. But you've got to give us the time to withdraw."
"Report when you make contact."
In the darkness and stink of the slimy trail, Lopez cursed, "Jesus, Williams is gone..."
"Chan Sann would risk gassing his own soldiers?"
"It's happened before. Williams saw it."
Lyons keyed his hand radio. "Pol. Wizard. Man in Black here. Did you hear what the man said?"
"But it won't happen. Over."
The line of Xavantes and foreigners continued downhill. As they neared the river, the hunter-point man had the others halt while he and Thomas scouted the last hundred yards of trail. Lyons followed several steps behind them, finding his way by touch through the darkness.
Splotches of blue glowed in the black. Lyons peered at the blue, saw phosphorescent footprints. He pressed his fist into the slime and debris matting the jungle floor. His fist glowed blue in the dark, a circle of blue remained in the slime.
"Civilizado!" the hunter called out.
Lyons followed the phosphorescence to the river-bank. The trees thinned. Starlight illuminated the rain forest, the muddy banks, the river beyond. Lyons saw the hunter motioning to him. Thomas squatted on a dirt embankment. When he heard Lyons and the hunter, Thomas pointed to the dark expanse of the river.
"The boat. There."
Three hundred yards away, the long rectangle of a lighted window floated in the night. An amber streak shimmered on the placid, slowly flowing river.
"Can't get them there," Lyons told the other men. Thomas translated to the hunter as Lyons keyed his hand radio. "Wizard. The Man in Black again."
"What's the word?"
"Are these radios absolutely secure?"
"Positive. Unless someone has one of the three radios, the transmissions sound like noise from space."
"We got a problem. The gunboat's on the other side of the river."
"What's the distance?"
"A thousand feet, minimum. I'll have to pull a scam, get them over here."
"Wait, man. Listen, I've got the plan..."
Williams and his squad of mercenaries wandered in a lightless maze of mud and branches and vines. They could not risk flashlights or machetes. For an hour, they groped through walls of night-flowering vines and thorn trees, men clutching at the others around them, falling into slime, entangling their rifles and gear and arms in unseen masses of plants. Bugs swarmed around them. By touch and compass, they finally found the river.
The men flopped in a grassy clearing surrounded on three sides by forest. On the fourth side, the grassland fell away to the river. Bleeding from cuts and bites, soaked in sweat and slime, Williams stared up at the shadowy forms of trees and through them at the stars. After the darkness and claustrophobia of the jungle, the infinite depth of the night's star-shot dome intoxicated Williams. He sprawled on his back, cool water rising from the mushy grass beneath him. He sucked in breath after breath, thinking, scheming. How do I live through this night?
Fighting panic, he considered his problem. He swatted at droning insects, called out to the circle of soldiers, "Guttierez!"
A man slipped through the grass, silent, only a shadow in the night. Guttierez, a bulky Puerto Rican con who had worked in Europe, Beirut and Pakistan, crouched beside Williams, his rifle ready, his eyes scanning the dark tree lines.
"And O'Neill!"
A second rifleman struggled from the muck to stand up.
"Stay low!" Williams hissed.
"Stow it. No one's out there." O'Neill plodded across the marsh to them, his boots sinking with every step. The overweight alcoholic fugitive from Europe flopped down without a pretense of military posture.