"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.
10
Lyons returned from the jungle after dark. He wore a loincloth and black body paint patterned in red. He carried his fatigues and boots in a bundle under his arm.
As he crossed the clearing where the tribe camped, the women looked up from their cook-fires at the transformed civilizado. They smiled, gossiped to one another about the North American, continued flaying meat and turning it on their fires. Children clutched the fingers of his free hand, skipped with him on the trail.
The boats had been moved. On the riverbank, webs of woven branches concealed the airboats. The patrol cruiser was now moored under the overhanging branches of a tree that leaned over the river. The branches screened the boat from any observation from the sky. During the day, the Indians had lashed hundreds of branches around the rails of the cruiser. It looked like a sandbar overgrown with small trees.
On the beach, by the light of a battery lantern, Thomas continued distributing captured weapons and packs to his men and to the warriors of the tribe. Two of his men gave up their Remingtons, took Heckler & Koch automatic rifles. Blancanales sat off to the side and watched as Thomas and one of his men argued. The Indian gripped his Remington, pushed the G-3 away. Finally, Thomas spun to face the shimmering expanse of moonlit river, impressively fired burst after burst of .308 slugs into the night. He offered the smoking auto-rifle again to the soldier. The man accepted it, passing his pump-action shotgun to a village man.
Lyons walked into the glow of the lantern and squatted with the others. Except for his size, he looked like one of them. Blancanales stared for a minute, studying the transformation of the blond college-educated ex-LAPD officer. Lyons, still affected by the narcotic, wore his hair cut like Thomas's men, his sideburns shaved away, the nape of his neck shaved high. Genipap stained his hair, his face and his body black. Red rectangles marked his shoulders, like an officer's epaulets. A braided band of natural fibers held up his loincloth. Braided bands circled his ankles. He wore custom-made Indian sandals, new but already black with mud and body paint.
The Indian men glanced at Lyons when he joined them. Four men, who Blancanales knew had taken the hallucinogen with Lyons, grinned to their friend, then returned to assembling their gear. One Indian spoke with Lyons, and the two men bantered back and forth.
Blancanales watched with disbelief. Did Lyons speak the local language? Lyons even moved like the other men. He reached out, touched one of the G-3 rifles, his motions fluid yet deliberate. He ran his fingers over the cocking lever, the foregrip, the receiver, his touch on the plastic and steel looking as if he stroked a living thing.
"Lyons! Are you okay?"
Night-faced, his blue eyes like neon in the electric light, the blackened Anglo turned. "I'm great. How are you, Pol-li-tician?"
Studying his friend's face, Blancanales saw no obvious signs of drug intoxication. "You want some coffee? We need to talk about going downriver."
Lyons nodded. "On the boat..."
Striding through the darkness to the boat, Blancanales followed the trail up the riverbank. He glanced back for Lyons, looked directly into his face. Lyons walked only a step back, silent in his thin sandals. Continuing, Blancanales heard only his own boots on the trail, the rustling of his Beretta's holster against his camo fatigues. He heard no one behind him.
An embankment sheered into the river water. The aluminum gangway spanned a twelve-foot gap between the vine-tangled riverbank and the camouflaged cruiser. Blancanales pushed through the mass of growth lashed to the rails. On the deck, he heard the gangway flex. He looked back again and once more saw Lyons a step behind him.