Except for a side trip to Isla Cotorra, Keene spent his time in Pedernales bartering for necessary supplies and trying to gain the confidence of the locals. He did not come close to finding what he wanted, but he did discover that he would have to make do with whatever resources Green Impact could scrounge. On the South American coast, he would have no access to the truly high-tech materials he preferred.
He was not particularly perturbed.
Sometimes it was less efficient—and less satisfying—to rely on fancy gizmos. TheMission: Impossible routine, he thought, didn’t work nearly as well in practice as it did in concept.
After almost a week away from the encampment, and Selene, Keene grew anxious to get back.
“Time to say good-bye to the big city,” he told his guide. Though sure that his sarcasm was lost on the man, Keene offered to buy him a meal and a drink in a seedy seaside cantina that appeared to be the center of the town’s entertainment. They started out at the bar, where, with a great stroke of luck, Keene found several disgruntled oil workers who had been fired from theValhalla rig.
Without the prospect of continuing paychecks, the rig workers were perfectly happy to talk with a man who would buy them as many cervezasmás frías as they wished to imbibe.
Keene’s Spanish was good enough that he quickly put them at ease. He discovered that, after theYucatán incident, Oilstar had hired one bastard of a new security chief who had overhauled all the rig procedures, cracked down on booze and drugs and cigarettes, and enforced discipline with no exceptions. A veritable military commander.
Sipping his beer, Keene nodded sympathetically. His commiseration was genuine. From what he had seen while sneaking aboard theValhalla with Terris, the previous procedures had been laughably lax, but he wouldn’t have gotten along well with such rigid rules himself.
By the time the evening was over, the men had told Keene more than he had hoped to discover, and an overall plan gelled in his mind. Given a few lucky breaks and a lot of determination, he was quite convinced, he could succeed in his plan to force Frik to sit up and take notice. He had never trusted Frikkie Van Alman, and now he understood why. The Oilstar man had much to answer for. Not that Selene was an angel. She was an expert manipulator with plenty of blood and blame on her own hands, but Paul Trujold’s daughter was just a minor player compared with Frik.
Leaving at dawn in their inflatable boat, Keene rode back through the caños with his guide, a silent man who spoke enough Spanish to be understood, but chose not to speak much at all. Keene talked for his own benefit, but soon gave up expecting a response from the Indian. Painfully aware of how much he missed McKendry, he made himself as comfortable as possible and began the kind of mental gyrations that had proven useful in the past.
He had acquired some supplies, though not enough, and a few luxuries, including a well-wrapped package of chocolates that the trade-post owner had sold him for an exorbitant amount of money. Chocolate was common in Venezuela, but these were imported from Belgium. Why anybody would want to do such a thing baffled Keene, but what did he care as long as they earned him extra Brownie points from Selene.
She gave him a sense of purpose, which he needed more than ever. Since the fateful night on the oil tanker, he had felt lost and empty without his partner and best friend. Life had seemed to be one continuous string of adventures when they were together.
Not, he thought, that what he was doing now was dull.
The whole truth was that he was the sort of man who needed to have a driving goal, even if it drove him over a cliff. Still, if not for the ministrations of Selene Trujold, he would have been unlikely to pick this particular obsession.
He thought back to the night on theYucatán . Again, in his mind’s eye, he watched McKendry get shot twice and catapult backward off his bicycle onto the equipment-strewn deck…before he himself was hurled overboard in the grenade explosion.
He sought to find something amusing in the image of himself hitting the water, but without McKendry as his audience and straight man, nothing seemed funny. Perhaps someday his cocky good humor would return. It sure had gone AWOL since his recovery and time in the jungle.
Around lunchtime, lulled by the boat’s movement and the early-June heat, Keene dozed off. When he awoke, in the midafternoon, he noticed a succession of Indians looking out at them from the sides of the water. Without signaling to his Warao guide, they hauled up fishing baskets and nets and disappeared into the jungle.
“Why are they so skittish?” he asked, hoping for an answer.
His guide pointed at the sky ahead.
Tendrils of smoke stained the fluffy low thunderheads brewing deeper over the delta jungle.
A hot dread and certainty told Keene that the source of the smoke was the Green Impact camp. “Faster!” he yelled to the Indian, who urged the outboard motor to a quicker pace. But the guide was cautious as he looked around, apparently searching for assassins in the underbrush.
As the boat came up against the narrow streams that led to the palafitos, the Indian slipped over the side and sprinted barefoot into the jungle away from the camp. He didn’t wait to be paid, didn’t help to unload supplies, didn’t even glance at Keene’s stricken face.
Setting aside his personal fear, Keene raced toward the camp. What he saw pumped him full of adrenaline. Carnage, bloodstains, and a handful of bodies left lying in and around the ruins of the huts. Some of the wet green trees were smoldering, but most of the wood and thatch huts in the encampment had burned themselves out, leaving mounds of white ash and charcoal poles. The dry palm fronds and lashed twig walls must have gone up like tinder.
He stumbled around in a daze, calling out Selene’s name. The compound’s weapons cache was in splinters. A crater sat where the lockers full of explosives had been detonated. He found seven corpses. Two looked like Venezuelans, mercenaries he guessed from their nondescript fatigues, which lacked the insignia of any legal or military organization. The remaining bodies were Green Impact members, five of the twelve robust men and one woman he had left behind.
There was no sign of the others. This was no jungle raid by robbers intent on grabbing supplies for a black-market sale; this was a planned operation, well executed, with no intent other than to wipe out Green Impact.
Desperately he rechecked the dead, searching for the woman to whom he had become so attached. She was not among the recognizable bodies. There was no skeleton in the charred shell of the palafito the two of them had shared.
Praying that she had gotten away, knowing that to be as much a fantasy as hoping Terris McKendry was still alive, Keene vomited on the ground. Trembling, he sat up and spat at the unknown perpetrators of this new crime. There is one place, he thought. One infinitely small possibility.
He jumped back into the small boat and motored it as quickly as it would go. In the ever-narrowing caños, he repeatedly got caught up in mud banks and overhanging bushes. Relentlessly, he pushed on toward the place where he and Selene had made love that day, the little meadow surrounded by tall grass and trees.
This is my retreat,she’d said. If she’d made it out of the camp, it was where she would have gone.
Keene found the sheltered jungle clearing, and in it he found Selene. She was propped against a mound of dry grasses. Scarlet and yellow birds fluttered around, but she didn’t move as he approached.
“Selene!”
He thought he saw her shoulders twitch.
Reaching her side, he knelt down in the damp earth. He took her hand and stroked her cheek. Her skin was gray and clammy, her lips dry. He kissed them, but it did nothing to awaken her. She made small sounds, and he heard a rattle within her chest and throat. Blood was congealing on her shirt and abdomen and on the ground around her. The blood was leaking from beneath her hands, which were clutched under her right breast.