50

They made camp, cooked and ate in silence, tuned in to the jungle, alive to the tiniest sign of human approach. Since dealing with the two mercenaries, Black had felt his equilibrium return. His mind was clear and focused. The balance of power between the three of them had shifted. The bond between Riley and Fallon seemed to have loosened and he detected a renewed respect from both of them. Their muted reactions suggested to him that while they might have seen action in Syria, it was of the kind conducted at arm’s length, through the scope of a rifle. Killing up close with a blade was a large step up in every way. If it overwhelmed you, if afterwards you shook and trembled and had nightmares, you were the kind of soldier who was likely to be killed very soon. Survival required a cool head and a cold heart.

The colder the better.

Sometimes, in order to stay alive, you needed to be more dead than death.

Throughout the night they took turns on watch, crouching, alert, rifles cocked, until again the heli passed overhead on its pre-dawn run to Platanal. At first light Black skirted the circumference of their camp, checking the tripwires he had tied across the access points. There were no alien footprints. No signs of disturbance. It was good news. They were still ahead of the game.

In the absence of a stream or overnight rain to fill their canteens from the palm-leaf funnels they had placed in their necks, Black chopped down lengths of thick bamboo, cut nicks in the stems and tipped out the water trapped inside. It had a bitter, pithy taste but was fresh and clean. They used it to brew coffee, topped up their supplies from more stems and set out, aiming to reach their objective by nightfall.

Black marched without pain or stiffness. He was just another animal in the jungle, observing, anticipating, ready on a hair trigger to react. To counter the danger of meeting more patrols he imposed a new drill. Every ten minutes they would stop for thirty seconds to listen, watch and sniff the air.

They continued in this way for more than three hours. Marching, stopping, listening, marching, then, during one of their silent pauses, Black caught a faint change of scent.

‘Smell that?’ he whispered.

Riley and Fallon shook their heads.

At first he believed it might be human sweat. The smell of a man who hadn’t seen soap for a week. He sniffed again and changed his mind. ‘Woodsmoke. Could be wrong.’

The others couldn’t detect it.

They pressed on for another half hour, Black occasionally catching the same scent and wondering whether his mind was playing tricks. He was bringing up the rear of the party when Fallon held up a hand. He pointed to a rubber tree a short distance in front of them. A flash had been cut in its trunk with a machete. Black stepped up for a closer look.

The scars in the bark were far from fresh and showed the early signs of healing. They had been made months rather than days or weeks before. The symbol that had been carved consisted of two parallel lines bisected with a slanting vertical: ≠. Black felt an unsettling sensation in his stomach. It was a symbol he had seen before, many times. Every experienced bushwhacker had his own distinctive sign he used to mark his way or to signal his route to others who may be searching for him.

‘Boss?’ Riley said.

‘That flash … It’s the one Finn always used.’

Riley and Fallon exchanged a glance as if doubting Black’s sanity.

Black quickly assembled the evidence in his mind: the mention of Brennan in Finn’s diary, the cover story to Kathleen about a job in Africa, his shame when going cap in hand to Towers and the distinctive flash. Its presence could be purely coincidental, but the fact that it was here, on the precise bearing between the airstrip and the Sabre compound, lent weight to his theory: that its maker was navigating by compass rather than GPS. Its position on the trunk, at ninety degrees to their current course, suggested that if it were Finn who had left it, he was heading to their left.

There was only one logical explanation. If Finn had been following a straight compass bearing, the flash would have marked a point of deviation from his route. A point to which he would have had to return in order to resume his previous course.

Finn had been here. He was following the same trail. Somehow, for reasons he had yet to explain, their destinies had contrived to combine.

He smelled it again.

This time there was no doubt. The others smelled it, too: smoke from a cooking fire. It was being carried on the gentlest of breezes from his left, from the direction in which Finn – if that’s who it had been – had been travelling.

‘We should take a look,’ Black said.

‘What if it’s trouble we could do without?’ Fallon said.

‘We need to know what we’re up against – what we might run into on the way back.’

The argument was unanswerable. They brought out their GPS units, got a fix on their current position and marked it as a waypoint. They could now head out in any direction and be guided back.

The smoke was coming from the north. Black followed his nose and after a hundred yards found another similar flash. After another hundred there was a third, and a short way beyond it they picked up the meander of a small stream that wandered between the rubber trees. One by one the signs started to add up. The ground began to rise ahead of them. A gentle slope became a steeper one. They arrived at yet another flash and up ahead, saw an unusual glimpse of sky – a break in the trees.

They crept upwards to the top of the rise where they remained in cover behind a dense clump of leafy palms. On the far side was a sight Black hadn’t expected to see: a clearing no more than fifty yards in diameter, in which there were a number of circular huts and a single traditionally built longhouse thatched with palms. On top of the building was a wooden cross, signalling that it was a Christian mission. A number of semi-naked children were playing football on an area of dirt shared with chickens and goats. A few older ones were crouching at the margins. Black noticed that several of these teenagers had lifeless, glazed expressions of the kind he had seen on the faces of the young in conflict zones across the globe.

‘Sorry, boss. Not sure we can handle them,’ Riley said.

Black ignored the remark and continued to watch. A short while later, a woman of about thirty-five wearing a blue smock dress and sandals, her hair tied back from her face, came out of the longhouse carrying a small child. She set it down with two young girls and went to talk to a teenage boy who was sitting by himself. He watched her place a hand on his shoulder and talk to him gently.

‘Seen enough?’ Fallon said.

‘Stay here. I’m going to talk to her.’

‘You’re what?’

‘I want to know where all these kids are coming from.’

‘What does it matter?’ Fallon said.

‘Personal reasons. Take a break. Relax.’

Ignoring their objections, he sloughed off his pack and tried the best he could to scrub the greasy camouflage cream from his face and arms with water from his canteen. Then, leaving behind his rifle, pistol and machete, he circled around to the far side of the clearing where he arrived at a narrow but well-trodden trail that led northwards from the settlement into the forest. Just outside the margins, he took up position behind the knotted roots of a large ‘walking palm’ – a wigwam-like structure of roots, on top of which a full grown tree was improbably balanced. From this angle he could see inside the various buildings in the encampment. In total there were perhaps forty or fifty children and teenagers and one more adult woman moving about inside the longhouse. The smoke they had smelled was coming from a fire burning inside a crude cooking range built from mud bricks, situated in an open-sided structure that served as a cookhouse.

Black paused to question his motives. Was he taking an unnecessary risk in exposing himself? Of course he was. There was no logical answer but some instinct told him that it was something he had to do. He decided to trust it.

‘Hola. Buenos días. Habla inglés?’

The woman in the blue dress spun around, her hand pressed to her chest in alarm. She was younger than he had at first thought, perhaps not yet thirty.

He held out his hands in a gesture of openness and smiled. Some of the footballing children, who, at first sight of the stranger had frozen in curiosity, ran towards him. They swarmed around his legs and tugged excitedly at his clothes.

‘I’m English,’ Black said, noticing the second woman coming to the longhouse door. She was identically dressed and of a similar age. She exchanged an anxious glance with her colleague but overcame her fear and stepped forward. ‘I’m trying to find out what happened to a friend of mine.’ It was hard to make himself heard above the babble of the children’s voices. He ‘may have passed this way last year. His name was Finn. Ryan Finn.’

The woman nodded and called out to her colleague, translating what Black had just told her. A look of understanding, though not quite one of relief, spread across the other woman’s face.

‘Yes, Mr Finn was here,’ the woman closest to him said guardedly, in good but heavily accented English. Her features were plain and her hair scraped back, but her deep brown eyes had the arresting quality of one motivated by a higher purpose. ‘You look like a soldier.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I’m an old friend. We were soldiers together – in the past.’ He paused to consider the significance of this revelation. Finn had come halfway across the world to work for Sabre and upped and left before he got paid. ‘You said he was here?’

She nodded. ‘Just a moment.’ She came forward and called the children away, clapping her hands and sending them back to their game.

They obeyed without question, letting go of his clothes and straggling back to the open area at the side of the longhouse.

‘I’m sorry. This is unusual,’ the woman said. ‘We don’t have many visitors.’

‘I understand. My name’s Leo. Leo Black.’

She swept him cautiously with her eyes. ‘Isabel. My colleague is María Luisa.’

‘Is this an orphanage?’

‘Not all of them are orphans, but most.’

‘May I ask what happened?’

‘Their parents were miners. Illegal miners. They were here for years, since the 1990s. Our mission tended to them. Just north of here there’s a trail that leads down to the river that will take you across the border to Brazil. That’s where we’re from, my order – Boa Vista.’

‘The families were cleared out?’

Isabel nodded. ‘Two years ago there was a government ultimatum. The mineral rights were sold to a private company. The miners who refused to go were hunted down and killed. Men and women. The lucky ones were taken to work elsewhere. The children were left to fend for themselves. In a bankrupt country there is nowhere for them to go. Brazil doesn’t want them either. So –’ she shrugged – ‘that is why we’re here.’

‘Was it Sabre who killed them?’

She hesitated before giving a guarded nod. He admired her courage, coming out unarmed to meet a strange man who had emerged from the forest.

‘I think my friend, Mr Finn, had been working for Sabre. I believe he may have disliked what he saw there.’

His words seemed to register. She looked at him squarely as if deciding to trust him.

‘Would you like some coffee?’

‘Yes, please.’

She led him to the open-sided hut, gesturing to María Luisa to leave the visitor to her. María Luisa smiled uncertainly at Black, then turned back to the sullen teenager she had been tending to.

They entered the shade of the hut. Black sat on one of the wooden stools arranged around a rough-hewn table while Isabel poured coffee from a pot on the stove. She set down two tin mugs and took a seat opposite. Black thanked her, noticing her tough, practical hands as they lifted their cups to their lips.

‘So, tell me – what do you want to know?’ Isabel said.

‘What were the children’s parents mining?’

‘Coltan. Also gold. Believe me, none of them got rich.’

‘And the company that bought the rights, is that Sabre?’

‘Yes. They have a mine twenty kilometres from here.’ She nodded towards the east. ‘Some of these children have parents who are employed there.’

‘Does the company give you money?’

‘No. But they leave us alone.’

She held him in a level gaze which was neither friendly nor hostile but which asked him to get to the point.

‘My friend, Mr Finn, is dead,’ Black said. He noticed a flicker of emotion register on Isabel’s face. ‘He was killed last month – in Paris, France, as a matter of fact. He was working on something unconnected but I fear his death had something to do with his time with Sabre. You said he was here –’

Isabel took another sip of coffee, her eyes softening a little. ‘Almost one year ago, he arrived here one morning. He was sick with fever, delirious. He had nothing, no possessions, just the clothes he was wearing. We thought he might die … he didn’t. After a week or so he started to recover. He stayed for another week doing some repairs on the mission house. Then we told him how he could travel over the border into Brazil. He was a good man …’ Her voice carried a hint of sadness. She glanced over to María Luisa, who was still talking gently to the boy. ‘That’s Rafael. He doesn’t speak. He’s fifteen years old. He’s been with us for two years. He sits all day by himself. Your friend, Mr Finn, he got Rafael to help with his work. Taught him how to use a saw and a hammer. He was good to him.’

‘He had children of his own. Three.’

‘Yes, he told us.’

‘Did he tell you anything else – what he’d seen at the mine, perhaps?’

‘Only that he didn’t like the way it was run. He had a disagreement with the people there and decided to leave, even though he was sick. He thought we should leave here, too. He was worried we might be in danger.’

‘In danger of what?’

‘These children are all witnesses. One day they might give their testimony.’

‘He had a point. What’s stopping you?’

‘Their lives have been disturbed enough. If we have to leave, we will know.’

‘God will tell you?’

Isabel gave a hint of a smile. ‘I thank you for your concern, Mr Black. You don’t have to worry about us. We will be looked after.’

Black looked into her dark, determined eyes and hoped that she was right. Eyes that Finn must also have gazed into as she told him the exact same thing. We will be looked after. What would Finn have done? The man he knew would not simply have left them to their fate without any prospect of help.

The sound of a child’s cry carried over the sound of the football game. They looked over to see María Luisa picking a sobbing boy off the ground. He was bleeding from a cut on his knee.

‘I should let you get back to them,’ Black said. He finished his coffee and stood up from the table. ‘Goodbye. And good luck.’

He waited for a moment in order to give her the opportunity to ask him what exactly he was doing here at her mission in the middle of the rainforest. She was wise enough not to take it.

‘Goodbye, Mr Black,’ Isabel said. ‘I am sorry to hear about Mr Finn. We liked him very much.’

She gathered up the empty cups then went to help María Luisa with the crying child.

Black headed back the way he had come.

The silent boy, Rafael, rose up from his haunches and watched him until he disappeared from view.