Caterwauling. Laughing. Crying out in pain.
None of these seemed like a good idea to get the guard’s attention.
But fire did.
Unfortunately, my lighter was in my day pack. The fear of fire would have to do.
“Stand over here across from the door,” I said to Kinkaid, “and answer my questions. Then get ready to hightail it.”
I hopped up to grab hold of the single crossbeam securing the hut’s roof. It felt like it’d hold my weight. “When I was a kid,” I said, “I used to climb trees all the time. I loved climbing trees.”
“Fascinating.”
“Isn’t it?” Still hanging from the beam, I bent at the waist to swing my feet up to my hands, then pivoted up onto straight arms like a gymnast on the high bar. “But I was awful with languages. Still am.” From my straight-arm position I leaned my body over the beam and got a foot on top. Simple matter then to hoist myself up, balancing on the stout wood. I turned slightly so I could see the guard through the crack in the hut’s doorway. “So tell me,” I asked Kinkaid, “what’s the Portuguese for fire?”
“Fire?” He frowned a moment, but I couldn’t tell whether he was searching for the word or searching for the reason I asked. “It’s fogo.”
“Sorry, I didn’t catch that.”
“Fogo,” he said louder.
The guard shifted his weight.
“Okay, so if I wanted to start a fogo, what would I use?”
“Matches or a lighter, I guess.”
“What’s matches in Portuguese?”
“Fósforo.”
The guard did more than shift his weight. Now he turned and I could see his rough-shaven face as he peered through the door’s crack.
“That’s promising,” I said to Kinkaid. “I’ve learned two new words today. Use them in the sentence, ‘I want to start a fire with these matches.’ May be you should kneel down while you say it.”
Kinkaid’s smile spread slowly across his face. He knelt and swept his hand through my dirt map, then cupped his fingers together and said, slightly louder, “Vou provocar um incendio com os fósforos que tenho aqui.”
Bingo. The guard silently unlatched the door, jerked it open, and charged inside directly underneath me.
“Pare!” he ordered, brandishing a shotgun.
In the time it took him to remember there were supposed to be two prisoners, I dropped behind him and laid a game-winning field goal kick between his legs. He hunched and groaned. Kinkaid’s eyes widened in sympathetic response, then he laid a right hook to the guard’s nose. Cartilage crunched. I grabbed the rifle from the falling man’s limp hands. The beefy guard thunked onto the earthen floor.
Nighty-night.
The rifle turned out to be an ancient bolt-action single-barrel like the one Scooter kept behind the freestanding cupboard in his trailer. I’d shot at and missed many a rabbit when Scooter was in town or busy at the bar. While Kinkaid shook out his hand, I opened up the gun. Empty. So Goldtooth didn’t trust the hired help. Well, you work with what you’re given. Maybe we’d run across a box of shells somewhere. I snapped the gun closed.
“Let’s go,” I said to Kinkaid, slinging the rifle over my shoulder. “Remember your route?”
“Yeah. What about the mine?”
I stopped in the doorway and looked back. “What about it?”
“Aren’t we going to do something to stop it?”
“Against a dozen armed men?”
His strong lips pressed into a thin line. I could sympathize. I didn’t like the mercury dumping, either, but now wasn’t the time to deal with it.
“Look,” I said, “maybe you can get some of your friends together to come back later and do something. For now, I’ll meet you at the end of the airstrip. If they come after you, keep running. I’ll find you.”
“All right.”
Kinkaid bolted off along his assigned route, quickly disappearing. I headed into the compound to try to locate my gear.
Five smallish buildings lay between our hut and the office where we’d been robbed. Most of the garimpeiros were out on the job, and the handful of guys loitering in the open-air food court were consumed by their card game. I threaded my way between buildings and through trees, keeping low, keeping my head down, keeping my empty rifle ready to swing.
At the building where we’d been questioned, low murmurs told me there were at least two men inside. Probably the principals—El Capitan and Goldtooth, which meant the Shotgun Kid wasn’t far away. Was my gear inside or had it been taken someplace else?
I crept around front. When I poked my head around the north corner, the three still-loitering Yanomamo women and the kid looked at me curiously, then ignored me. I eased the front door open, and when no one came running to stop me, slipped inside.
The small anteroom held nothing but a chair and a closed door into the big man’s office. Eavesdropping is something I do when it’s necessary and I don’t feel particularly guilty about it. Especially when the eavesdroppees have held a gun on me. I forgot about eavesdropping when they started yelling. Fortunately, these guys enunciated for effect when they yelled and my Portuguese was up to the task.
“The only way to handle them is to get rid of them!” Goldtooth shouted.
My blood warmed all over. Good thing Kinkaid and I hadn’t waited around to be shot. My nerves hummed.
“Do that and start a war!” yelled someone else who was not El Capitan. “We can find a better way.”
“They are stupid Indians,” the donos spat. “What do they know? What do I care about them?”
“The village leader will work with us if we—”
“He is a stupid old man. They will not do as they’re told. They come beg for food and whiskey and give nothing in return. I’m through with it. Get out of my sight.”
I slipped back outside into the relative cover of the next building. In a few seconds, the sullen Shotgun Kid stamped out and headed toward the food court, clearly put out.
So the Shotgun Kid showed some spunk against authority. Interesting development. Didn’t help me find my gear, though.
I edged to the building’s backside and found another little room stacked floor to ceiling with supply crates, mostly dry beans, rice and glass bottles of Coca-Cola. True to my luck, no shells. And no day packs. No duffels. No nothing.
I didn’t like the idea of being out in the jungle with no gear whatsoever, but it looked like I didn’t have a choice. First things first. Rendezvous with Kinkaid. Better there were two of us against the world if it turned out we couldn’t get our gear.
Outside, a wave of muffled shouts caught my attention. Darting along the compound’s edge, I made my way toward the noise, following the wave to the rumbling, hissing hell of the mining pit. I skidded to a stop at an outbuilding near the pit’s edge. Between the leaves and slender tree trunks to my right, I saw two camouflaged gun-waving types running toward the mine. Ahead of them, Kinkaid’s crisp beige shirt flapped as he sprinted full tilt to the edge, took off, and leaped into the gaping, twelve-foot-deep hole.
Fear clenched my gut as Kinkaid flew, arms pinwheeling forward like a long jumper’s. No way, I thought as he sailed, stopping time, defying gravity. Then Mother Earth decided she’d been denied long enough and he arced, impossibly graceful, into the pit, aiming for the moving conveyor belt.
He missed.
His leap fell a good two feet short of its mark; his body dug knee-deep into the mud. The miners howled with laughter, pointing and shouting. The man working the firehose shut off the water and stared. The pistoleiros stopped at the pit’s crumbling edge to tee-hee. Kinkaid struggled to pull himself out of the sucking mud, his glasses askew on his face. He got one leg out before the pistoleiros quit chuckling and raised their guns.
You know those moments when your body overrides your brain and you do the next thing in front of you even though it seems insane?
Adrenaline surged through my chest and arms, making me unsling the rifle from my shoulder. My legs sprinted toward the pistoleiros. On them before they saw me, I swung the rifle like a softball bat and clobbered one on the back of the head, knocking him out cold where he stood. The other turned, mouth open in surprise. He grabbed my shirt collar with one hand, nearly pulling me off my feet. I fought his grip, swinging wildly at his face. He dropped his rifle and caught hold of my upper arm just as the pit’s edge gave under our combined weight.
I lost my stomach. Mud flew as we plunged down the muddy side, rolling twice. We whacked bottom, me on top, and slid through the slime into a shin-deep puddle where the fire-hose guy stood. The pistoleiro lost his grip on me as I wriggled off and scrambled to my knees. He crawled after me. The useless rifle tangled in my legs. I fell on my butt. I heard a heavy clunk, then the pistoleiro stared blankly over my left shoulder and fell face-first into the mud.
The firehose guy standing over the pistoleiro waved the heavy hose nozzle and smiled. I heaved for breath, rocket fuel in my veins.
The garimpeiros were really laughing their asses off now. On the other side of the pit, Kinkaid had freed himself from the black mud and waded slowly but single-mindedly for the conveyor belt.
“Don’t!” I yelled as I gained my feet. “That feeds a rock grinder!”
“I know!” he shouted back.
Above me, Kinkaid rode the conveyor belt’s long slope to the top, about halfway to the point where he was about to become ground round. I started to yell again but a gunshot cut me off. Kinkaid ducked and spun. I glanced up at the pit’s edge. The donos had a rifle aimed at Kinkaid.
The fire-hose guy shoved the hose under my arm and cranked the lever. A blast of water shot out of the nozzle—no arc—and plastered Goldtooth with several hundred gallons a minute of filthy water, blowing him off his feet and me off mine. The fire-hose guy leaped back. My butt hit the ground and I slid a few inches back, driving more muck under my shirttail and into my pants. Somehow I held on to the hose, spraying water into the air. Laughter, dampened by the soft mud, echoed thickly in the pit. When Goldtooth looked like he wasn’t going to reappear, I jumped up and threw the hose down where it writhed like a snake, firing everywhere at once.
The conveyor belt hadn’t shut down yet and Kinkaid had nearly reached the grinder. I hightailed it over and climbed onto the belt, sprinting to the top where Kinkaid jittered like a nervous cat trying to decide exactly how far that jump really was.
The noise fell on my head like an anvil. The belt emptied into a massively toothed roller grinder, which had been rigged to sit at a forty-five-degree angle. A few small rocks danced in the hopper, chewed off of larger rocks and waited their turn to be caught in the teeth and ground to powder. A work platform had been built about six feet away from the hopper. Between the hopper and the platform was nothing but empty air down a few feet to where the fuel tanks that fed the generators sat. We steadily backpedaled on the conveyor belt to stay out of the hopper.
“The ledge!” I yelled over the clatter and crunch. “Get a running start!”
Kinkaid shook his head. “Let’s take out the generators!” he yelled. “Stop the gold processing!”
“We don’t have time!” I shouted back. “We gotta get outta here!”
“Come on!”
He jumped down through the gap. The fuel tank ponged when he landed. Then he disappeared.
Well, hell. I drew the line on this one. There was no way I’d help him with his little sabotage activity when I should be concentrating on getting out alive. I backed up a few steps, glancing behind me to see how much space I had for the jump. Movement on the pit’s opposite side caught my eye. More pistoleiros had arrived, and El Capitan stood next to the dripping Goldtooth, who shouted and waved his arms. At least ten rifle muzzles pointed at me.
Shit.
I dropped into the gap after Kinkaid, where the conveyor belt provided a wide swath of cover from the rifles. Kinkaid hunkered a few feet away, twisting off the tank cap.
“You gonna water down the diesel with spit?” I asked.
He flashed a cheeky grin. “Nope.” He turned away from me slightly and unzipped.
Good grief.
“You’re gonna need a full bladder,” I informed him.
“Fait accompli,” he replied. After a moment, he zipped up, then started grabbing handfuls of mud off his boots and cramming them down the nozzle for good measure, smearing muck all over the tank in his hurry.
His hurry was the only thing I agreed with. While he did his best to foul the generators’ blood supply, I watched the fresh batch of pistoleiros figuring out how to get to us without crossing through the mud pit. Our way out was simple: duck under the shed housing the generators, which would probably render us both deaf, and slip out over the runoff spillway. One of the gunmen started down the slippery slope while El Capitan motioned the Shotgun Kid to run the long way around the pit to cut us off.
“Are you done yet?” I yelled over crunching rocks and growling generators.
“That’s it!” Kinkaid shouted.
“This way!”
I was right about the path under the generator shed: the noise reverberating down onto my head made my eyes water. But the path was also dry, at least here, so we scrambled along relatively easily until we came to the shed’s backside where the spillway vomited its mercury-tainted waterfall.
Mercury doesn’t smell, which is what makes it so dangerous—you can’t tell poisoned water from safe water. I felt a twinge of gladness Kinkaid had taken the time to sabotage the generators. It wouldn’t stop the mining for good, but it’d slow it down a little.
Kinkaid jumped over the spillway and turned to wait for me. I’d already committed, was in the air, when I saw the Shotgun Kid step out from behind a boulder, his gun trained on Kinkaid. No time to react. I landed, held up my hands and, heart pounding, waited to be shot.
“Come with me! Quickly!” the Shotgun Kid said in English. He motioned with his gun and didn’t try to take my useless one.
If the Shotgun Kid held a grudge against El Capitan and the donos, I reflected, Kinkaid and I just might have gotten very lucky.
I nodded at Kinkaid. We followed the Kid deep into the forest, well away from the struggling pistoleiros. When we were some distance up the hillside and the noise of the now-gagging generators had become a dull grumbling, we hunkered down behind a stone outcropping. The Kid put down his gun. Kinkaid took off his glasses and started wiping at the mud smears with his surprisingly clean shirttail tugged out of his pants. I tried to wipe some of the muck off my legs to disguise the fact my hands were shaking uncontrollably. Helluva adrenaline kick.
“My name is Porfilio,” the Kid said. “You must take a message for me to the Yanomamo village. You a friend of the Yanomamo, right?” he asked Kinkaid.
Kinkaid’s eyes narrowed, wary. “I’m a scientist,” he said, “and I don’t like what the gold processing does to the water. It’s illegal.”
“So is destroying someone else’s generators,” I remarked.
“Yes,” Porfilio said, ignoring me. His gaze, wide-eyed and earnest, latched on to Kinkaid. “I know. I want to bring the Yanomamo and the mining together, not to fight. The colonel will destroy the village. He will not listen to me. Which is why I must fight him myself.”
“Why would he destroy the village?”
“To stop the Yanomamo from being in his way. The little villages are banding together to come destroy the mine. Rumors of fighting everywhere. The Yanomamo want their land back.”
Kinkaid nodded. “So you want to negotiate a truce.”
“More than a truce,” Porfilio said solemnly. “A partnership. Stop the mercury. Stop the tearing up of the land. Stop the killing of Yanomamo, of miners.”
Kinkaid put a hand on Porfilio’s shoulder. “What’s your message?”
I stared at the two of them while they kept talking—two idealists out to save the world. If my hand hadn’t been so slimy I would have slapped my palm to my forehead in disbelief. Time to excise myself from this little do-gooder club and be on my way.
Then Kinkaid nodded, shot me a quick glance…and nearly knocked the breath out of me. His angular face intense, his longish hair slicked back, glasses off, and an eight-hour beard scruffing him up, he could have passed for a bedroom fantasy involving black leather and scented oil.
And dammit, his eyes were a deep, deep brown. My very fave.
“I’ll take your message,” he said to Porfilio. “I’ll help in any way I can.” They shook muddy hands on it. Friends of the Earth, I thought, in more ways than one. What next? Cut their palms and become blood brothers? But Kinkaid’s hand, grungy as it was, looked strong and capable, like it could accomplish anything he wanted it to.
I cleared my throat. “We gotta get outta here. What’d they do with our stuff? The stuff from the plane?”
“I took it,” Porfilio said proudly. “I bring it to you tonight.”
I shook my head. “With your friends looking for us everywhere? No good. I plan on being miles into the jungle by nightfall. It’s now or never.”
Porfilio’s face darkened as he considered this. It obviously bugged him not to give my gear back, but was it worth the risk? Then his black eyes cleared and he nodded. “Go to the other side of this hill and wait for me in the little cave. I meet you there soon.”
I didn’t like the wait, inevitable as it was. But the prospect of spending twelve hours in the open jungle at night without my first-aid kit or fresh water didn’t appeal to me, either. The research station might be able to provide supplies, but we had to get there first, and it was a good fifteen miles away.
“Okay,” I said finally. “The little cave. If you don’t show up in an hour, we’re going anyway.”
Kinkaid put on his glasses, ruining the fantasy. “It’s not safe to leave without our gear.”
“No, but it’s not safe to stay for long. We can’t afford to hang around until the bad guys find us.”
“I will hurry,” Porfilio said. “Here.” He dug into his leather ammo pack and plucked out a handful of shells. “In case they catch me and come after you.”
I took the shells, suddenly feeling like hell for making him go get my gear. If El Capitan suspected the Kid of screwing him over on our behalf, El Capitan would doubtless de-capitate him. Based on the conversation I’d heard earlier, Porfilio already walked a thin line with Goldtooth.
But Scooter came first. I’d been fooling myself to believe I could get by without my climbing gear. I needed that stuff, bad, or else Scooter didn’t have a chance.
After Porfilio took off, Kinkaid and I hiked around the hill. It took me a half hour to find the little cave, which turned out to be an oversize cleft in the rocky northern face. Still, there was room to wedge ourselves inside. A good-size manioc tree shielded the entrance. Kinkaid shoehorned himself in to sit sideways, his long legs stretched across the cave. I followed, sitting to face him. If I pressed my sore ribs hard against his calves, I could just stay in the shadow, out of sight. I loaded up the rifle, then laid it across my lap.
“I don’t know your name,” Kinkaid said after a while.
I picked up a stick and started digging mud out of my boot soles. “Robards.”
“Is that your first name or your last?”
“My first is Jessie.”
“Short for Jessica?”
“Yeah.”
“You study bromeliads, huh?”
“Look, you don’t have to make small talk.”
He fell silent. The dim light threw his cheekbone into sharp relief. Just under his lenses, that pinup bad boy impression lurked, taunting me. Okay, he’d landed the plane and saved my life. He’d made a helluva jump into a mining pit, was cool as a cucumber under gunfire, and managed to single-handedly shut down the compound’s generators. But I didn’t want to be his friend.
I guess that didn’t mean I had to be an ass, though.
“Sorry,” I said. “Busy day.”
“I know what you mean.”
“So you’re an entomologist,” I said. “What are you doing at the research station?”
“That’s base camp. I’m here looking for the Traça do Corpse.” He sat up a little straighter. “A colleague of mine spotted it last week. It’s huge—” and here he demonstrated with his hands “—a wingspan of nine inches, and pollinates an orchid—”
“Wait,” I interrupted. “What is it? A bee? A beetle? What?”
“Traça,” he said, pushing his glasses up his aquiline nose. “A moth. The Corpse Moth.”
Not the Corpse Moth. The Death Moth.
According to Harrison’s notes, that moth was the Death Orchid’s sole coevolved partner. Sighted last week, it would have been out pollinating the Death Orchid, which itself would have been blooming. And the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.
I looked at the man who happened to be the straightest line I had at my disposal.
My days of working alone were over, at least for now.