“Pretty decent breeze. What do you make for direction?”
“At our backs now; blowing west to east.”
“And say two to three minutes for the Wakinyan to cover the five hundred yards the range finder gives us.” He turned the cylinder over to work the timer. “I’ll set the timer for a minute and a half. Catch them dead in the center that way.”
“Not right here, Blainey.”
“Why?”
“The shock wave could still catch us. We’re in a valley right now, but we can make that work for us by climbing out after setting the charge near the rim.”
“I like your thinking, Indian.”
Heading west, they soon reached the point where the valley began to slope upward. Blaine’s eyes darted furiously from the trail to the range finder, which so far had shown nothing.
“Get ready, Blainey.”
McCracken handed the range finder to Johnny and pulled the explosive cylinder from his pack. It was heavier than it looked, and he lowered it to the ground to set the timing and release mechanism. The whole process was incredibly simple.
“Just tell me when.”
The sweep of the range finder’s arrow found a small splotch coming in from the east and the wind that blew toward it.
“Now, Blainey.”
McCracken had already set the timer on the 1:30 mark. He flipped a switch; a small light next to it glowed dull dusty red.
“Let’s move, Indian!”
They sped up the slope and out of the valley, never looking back. McCracken’s eyes darted constantly to his watch. Wareagle counted the seconds in his mind. At a minute twenty-five, Blaine started to shout a warning that was lost in the blast that followed.
It came like a sonic boom, a hammer blow striking the earth itself. The night was instantly alight with a blinding orange flash that turned white as heat poured from it. A hot gush of air caught Blaine and Johnny from behind and pitched them airborne. Branches, stones, fragments of boulders and trees rained down on them as they instinctively covered their heads. A fire that was too hot to burn very long continued to light up the night. The air crackled and popped. McCracken’s face was singed, and his breath was hot.
“The Wakinyan are burning in hell, Indian,” he said finally.
“Only if hell will have them, Blainey.”
They moved over tough terrain, up a steep grade. The flames died before long, but a whitish glow continued to emanate from the area of the blast. A huge, gaping scar would be left in the body of the jungle, but its soul was unmarred. Johnny assured Blaine of this.
The two men walked until the terrain became too treacherous and they were forced to stop until the next morning. Though both were exhausted, they maintained alternate watches all night. Neither wanted to admit their fear that the Wakinyan might have survived the massive blast, but they felt it nonetheless, and Blaine spent his watch with his eye on the range finder.
The arrow swept monotonously and found nothing.
At dawn they started out for where they had left Luis and their boat. It was a two-hour journey, much of it downhill. The last stretch was accompanied by the quiet sounds of the trunk river, which had delivered them to the jungle in the first place. At last Wareagle led the way down the first path that looked familiar. It was all McCracken could do to restrain himself from bursting out of the jungle in glee. Everything considered, it wouldn’t bother him terribly if he never saw the Amazon Basin again.
Up ahead, Wareagle had stopped on the trunk river’s bank, shoulders stiffening in familiar fashion.
“Son of a bitch,” Blaine muttered when his eyes followed Johnny’s toward the water.
The boat was missing. Luis was gone.
“Looks like I didn’t give the bastard enough whiskey.”
“No, Blainey,” said Wareagle.
And that was when McCracken realized Johnny was looking upward to the right, toward a shape swaying in the breeze. Luis, more accurately what remained of him, had been hung from a tree branch twenty feet off the ground. His eyes bulged, and his tongue protruded grotesquely. Hanging had not been the worst that had happened to him.
His hands and feet had been sliced off. The blood that had dropped from the stumps had pooled in the brush and leaves, scarlet red against dark green.
Blaine and Johnny barely had time to glance at each other before the pair of Blackhawk helicopters swooped down over the river and hovered with machine guns clearly leveled at them.
“Raise your hands in the air and hold your positions!” a voice blared over a loudspeaker. “Repeat: Raise your hands in the air and stay where you are!”
McCracken found himself doing just as he was told, though his gaze was fixed on the course of the empty river. The descending Blackhawk pushed its stiff back wind into him, and he closed his eyes against the sudden onslaught of debris. He couldn’t see anything now, but there was nothing to see. Their boat was long gone by now, and the blackest part of this heart of darkness was surely on board.
Part Two
Omicron
Chapter 10
“…Please wait for the tone to speak.”
Patty Hunsecker left the same message yet again, this one perhaps a bit more harried and frantic, because she felt something was dreadfully wrong.
Of course, she had felt that way for some time now, but this was different. She found herself lingering by the upstairs study window that overlooked the front of the family’s Laurel Canyon home, seeing nothing but the dark.
Nothing.
That was what Captain Banyan of the Los Angeles Police Department had thought of the story she had brought to him, passing it off as sheer fabrication. The FBI and the Justice Department had agreed. Most recently her collected tear sheets, now a bit ragged around the edges, accompanied her to the office of her congressional representative. The man’s chief aide promised to get right back to her.
He hadn’t.
There was only one place left to turn, the place she probably should have gone to in the first place: Blaine McCracken. Why not? He owed her, didn’t he? Hadn’t he said as much in Guam eighteen months before? Maybe he had forgotten. In any case, he hadn’t returned the emergency calls she had been leaving on his private answering machine.
Call back, McCracken, goddamn you! Call me back! She looked away from the window toward the phone. It didn’t ring.
Her mind drifted to the time in her life when she had first met McCracken. She’d left Stanford after her junior year and used the trust fund left to her by her grandmother to purchase and outfit the Runaway, a research vessel crammed with scientific equipment. She was going to spend her life at sea, dedicating herself to studying the oceans and preserving their ecological balance. It was a good dream. But her parents had resisted even discussion of the issue, so she hadn’t included them in the decision. Strange people, her parents. They’d married young, and had had her barely a year later. Around the time she turned thirteen, they decided to have more children. Her first brother was born later that year, her second brother two and a half years after. The boys were not even of school age when she left the house for college; they were still strangers when she took off for the Pacific.
But now her parents were both dead, and the boys were fully in her charge. There was so much to consider, so much to do. She had inherited not only her brothers, but also her family’s great wealth.