One of the Green Impact men rustled through the bushes, calling out, “Hey, what’s going on?” The voice held annoyance and curiosity, but not suspicion. Not yet.
Ray yanked the string, pulling the grenade detonator pins. The Green Impact guard, finally doing his duty, switched on a big flashlight and shone it around the jungle. The beam of light, splashing like melted butter across the branches, struck a scrambling Ray and his partners.
“Hey! I see you!” the Green Impact man called out.
As if on cue, the grenades exploded. Thatch smoldered and burst into flame. Green Impact members started screaming.
“I see you too,” Ray muttered as the shock wave bowled him over into the muddy ground.
32
By the time the grenades exploded, Manny and McKendry had reached the third hut. They saw two blond men on separate cots scrambling awake, shouting, looking at each other. In an instant, both of them had grabbed pistols from beneath their beds and lurched up, swinging the weapons to point at the door.
McKendry was determined to make an arrest, as if to prove to himself that he was in control. He even shot the first round, hitting one of the terrorists squarely in the right shoulder. The crack of his weapon fire sounded loud but was rapidly overwhelmed by the racket in the encampment.
The second blond man pulled up his own pistol as Manny charged forward and threw a pillow at the man’s arm. The terrorist’s shot was wild; the bullet splintered one of the wooden poles beside Manny. Even though there was no longer any need for silence, Manny chose to pull a sap from his belt. He pushed the terrorist’s gun arm away and swung the sand-filled pouch hard into the man’s skull. His head snapped back and he collapsed onto the bed he had only partially gotten up from.
McKendry bent over the first downed terrorist, pleased to see he was still alive and conscious, though barely.
“Selene Trujold. Where is she?”
The man coughed and bled. His eyes sharpened with awareness enough to gasp, “Fuck you!”
McKendry stood up, his face grim. “Bleed to death, then.”
Outside he could hear more weapon fire accompanying the crackling flames from the explosion. He didn’t mind that Ray had blown up the explosives depot, leaving Green Impact without its stockpile. Now was the time for open action.
The flames from the explosion lit up the area, casting witches’ shadows and creating more uncertainty than illumination. He could see that the fire had spread to the central mess hall.
A moment later, the propane tanks exploded in a cough of feathery blue fire that bowled over two of the Green Impact terrorists and splintered the trees within fifteen feet into kindling.
At ground level, Ray and Peta and the two mercenaries were rounding up some of the Green Impact terrorists; a few others hid in the underbrush and opened fire.
McKendry didn’t care about them. He was interested in only one person, and he was determined to get her—for Keene, and for himself. He could save her a lot of trouble if she capitulated. A whole lot.
Pushing his way to the open deck of the palafitos that overlooked the calm caños, McKendry shoved aside a small table where two unwashed coffee cups sat.
Below, he saw someone climbing into a boat. He could not tell for sure in the darkness, but his every instinct told him that it was Selene Trujold. Without calling for others to join her, she slid out into the waterway, moving with spare motions.
In a blaze of anger at José for disobeying instructions, McKendry raised his rifle, sighting in. He would deal with the Venezuelan later. The lazy slug was probably curled up in the bottom of one of the boats he’d been sent to disable. Meanwhile, he could not let the woman get away, not after what she had done to Joshua.
An expert marksman, he aimed, centering the crosshairs on Selene’s head as she entered a shaft of starlight. Through his sight, he watched her head turn to the right, toward the fringe of the jungle. She raised her arm, and he could see the pistol in her hand.
Allowing himself no distractions, he focused on her temple and squeezed the trigger—
“No!”
Manny Sheppard slapped the barrel of McKendry’s rifle aside as the gun went off. Looking downstream, he saw Selene drop, facedown, into the bottom of the boat, which was drifting slowly downriver.
He turned to glare at Manny.
“We need her alive, remember,” Manny said. His voice was very quiet. “She has to tell us where Frik’s artifact is.”
McKendry remembered that Manny had been a friend of her father’s, and that he had known Selene since she was a little girl. He remembered, too, that he was not a killer. Not like this. Shooting someone—man or woman—in the back in cold blood.
He looked back at the boat, which continued to drift. As he watched it, he saw a bloodied hand emerge from the inside and grasp the edge.
He shoved past Manny Sheppard. Ignoring the ladder, he leapt from the hut to the floor of the jungle and wove his way through the underbrush. He knocked branches away and splashed through shallow rivulets.
His headlong rush came to an abrupt halt when he tripped over José’s still-warm body. The Venezuelan had taken a bullet straight through the forehead. His knife, small protection against a pistol no matter how accurately thrown, was nowhere to be seen.
Helluva marksman, McKendry thought, remembering Selene’s raised arm. He stood still and stared into the impenetrable darkness, in the direction her boat had taken.
Behind him in the camp, a few scattered shots rang out before the gunfire ceased completely.
By dawn, after searching through the caños and the islands in the vicinity of the camp, Manny found the bloodstained boat. It was still drifting downstream, but there was no sign of Selene Trujold, or her piece of the artifact.
33
For three months after his idyllic afternoon with Selene, Joshua had worked with the members of Green Impact to scrounge weapons, ammunition, and explosives. He and Selene went over and over the plans of theValhalla until they both knew them by heart. Finally, the day after his birthday, he took off with a Warao guide to see if he could get more information and supplies in Pedernales.
It was his first trip out of the jungle since the night on theYucatán .
They took a boat for some twenty winding miles from the jungles to Pedernales, where he had been told he could safely gather additional information and equipment for the operation against theValhalla platform.
The town lay at the tip of Punta Tolete, where a confluence of delta streams emptied into the gulf. While apparently the closest thing to a town within reasonable distance, it was really not much more than a supply stop. Any hope he had of finding more than basic survival necessities was crushed upon his arrival.
The hub of civilization in the Delta Amacuro, the settlement had grown from nothing half a century ago, when oil exploitation on the adjacent Isla Cotorra had brought the petroleum business to the continent’s edge. Enough traffic and business and people came to the area to set up a town and create a booming local economy.
By the mid-1970s, however, the oil fields had been played out, and the operating firm had abandoned the wells and pulled up stakes, leaving the locals to fend for themselves. The town’s economy crashed, most of the transplanted people departed, and only empty, dilapidated buildings remained. In recent years, speculators had reopened the operations, squeezing hard until crude oil began to flow yet again.
Pedernales was reborn, but it remained a sickly child at best.
Since the locals had not seen Keene in the area before, he was able to move around without fear of being recognized or asked inconvenient questions. For all the villagers knew, he was another one of the yuppie ecotourists who came to the delta, traveling by motorboat up the caños to look at the birds and the wildlife before returning to their expensive homes and fancy restaurants to talk about their “dangerous jungle ordeal.”