Dead in the Water (29 page)

Flying alongside the river, about fifty feet above the trees, Terry eases a small lever to open a valve on the tanks, and their precious fuel starts to stream out.

With less than ten miles to go, the fuel gauge is reading ominously close to zero. Terry is edgy: “If it wasn’t for this bloody cloud we should be able to see Boa Vista by now. I can’t let any more go. If the fuckers make us do a circuit we’re in deep shit. ”

“
Am I on log watch?”

“
I guess. If the engine stops, the Duck’s a glider. A tubby overweight useless bloody glider. Yeah. Watch out for logs. ”

“
Right.”

“
Good man.” Then he’s back on the radio, talking to Boa Vista Air Traffic, updating his position, telling them that the engine has stabilised since they lost height, but that the fuel situation is worse than he’d anticipated. “My GPS tells me we’re seven miles South West, but I do not have visual. Guide me in please.” Air Traffic Control confirms their position and after a couple of minutes advises Terry to turn East, away from the river and from the town itself, which is largely on the West bank of the river, and to begin his approach. As they complete a half circuit, they cross back over the river and an avenue of runway lights appears some three miles in front of them. Terry lowers the stubby little wheels that pass for landing gear and eases back on the throttle. As he does so, the engine coughs. Terry swears. If the engine fails now they’ll be landing in a shanty town. He waggles the wings to coax the last drops of fuel into the lines. “I think we might need some of your woman’s magic, JP.”

The Tin Duck
seems to cover the last hundred metres to the runway
more slowly than it is possible for a plane to fly, but they touch down safely, accompanied by a fire truck, racing alongside them, sirens blaring, as they roll to a halt. Terry breathes out a great sigh, as if he has been holding his breath for the past five minutes, and puts his head in his hands.

“
Nice flying, boss,” says Jeremy.

“
Fucking bonkers, ask me. But hey. We’re here. One to add to the collection, eh.”

One of the guys in the fire truck leans out of his window and gives them the thumbs up, but there’s a look of slight disappointment on his face: racing a clunky old floatplane along the runway is not much of a tale to tell, although it will no doubt get embellished as the days pass.

“
That was the easy bit,” says Terry, as another siren starts to wail, and from the terminal building two jeeps marked
Polícias
–
Controle Do Immigration
speed out towards them. “Now all we got to do is bullshit our way through immigration control.”

Within minutes of the plane coming to a stop, three police officers with sub-machine guns board and order Terry to taxi across to an imposing windowless concrete slab on the opposite side of the airport from the terminal building. He makes a play of trying to start the engine, which stutters briefly into life before cutting out again as soon as he eases the throttle forward.

The first interrogation is in the floatplane. With
The Duck
ringing to a raucous fusillade of bullet-like rain, everyone is shouting to be heard, adding to the confusion, the misunderstandings and the hostility of their interrogators.

For a town that hardly existed, except as a remote outpost, as recently as fifty years ago, Boa Vista is large, brash and pretentious; and, like the surrounding forest, has been subject to accelerated growth and decay in overlapping cycles, gaining and losing reputations, infamy and hangers-on as fast as the B-List celebrities who have visited to flirt briefly with concern for the rain forest and its indigenous peoples. The 1980s and early nineties saw a gold boom. This has now made way for new growth industries: eco-tourism and cocaine smuggling. The building where Terry, Jeremy and Rachel are taken is a response to the latter. Some twenty metres long by ten metres wide on the outside, with heavily reinforced concrete walls it is noticeably smaller inside, the double-skin steel doors electrically bolted behind them. They are searched and questioned separately.

For Jeremy the ordeal is not as bad as he’d feared, the most worrying moment coming when he’s asked why a representative of the
One World
environmental group should be dressed as a mechanic. After looking at Jeremy’s passport, in which he’s described as a charity worker, however, the rather portly officer assigned to him loses interest; and locks him into a small room on his own. This cube is furnished with nothing but a wooden chair, a large-dialled electric clock and a closed circuit video camera mounted high up in the corner by the door; the unpainted concrete walls, dribbling with damp and stained black with mildew; a large, bare light bulb hanging from the centre of the ceiling, the only colour in the room an aurora of algae on the ceiling above it. The thick steel door is locked; the only sound he can hear, apart from his own breathing, the rhythmical buzzing and squeaking of the electric clock, the red second hand twitching in time to the electric motor, but not moving forward.

And here in this mouldering isolation chamber, with time stuck forever at 9.50 and a bit, he waits, insulated from what’s happening elsewhere in the building, exhaustion fast catching up with him. Whatever was in the shot given him by the French medic, its effect has drained away.

A uniformed female immigration officer leads Rachel into the room and, barely acknowledging Jeremy’s presence, tells her, “You must wait here until the pilot is finished.” Then leaves the room, slamming the heavy door shut and bolting it.

“
Are you OK?” he asks. She nods, but doesn’t go to him. Clutching the little leather bag given to her by the Yanomami, she sits on the chair. He wants to take her in his arms, but Jeremy rarely acts on impulse, and the last thing he wants is for her to feel unsafe with him.

“
Yes,” she says, taking stock. “I’m, OK.”

“
Rachel,” he says tentatively, kneeling beside her. “Do you remember me?”

“
Of course I do.” Terry had warned him about the possible after-effects of the GHB: not only the loss of short term memory but general confusion and unfocused fear of physical contact. He would dearly love to hug her, to be the person to comfort her.

“
Rachel, I don’t want anything from you. I just want to be sure you’re alright.”

“
I’m fine… They say they’re going to contact the British Embassy. Ring my parents. I guess they want to check on my story. But I think they believe me. They let me keep the camera. And the satphone.”

“
That’s good.”

“
Right. That’s good,” she repeats. “They say the Embassy can sort out my passport.” It’s unsettling, talking to her, this extraordinary young woman who has so troubled his equilibrium, as if they were in a formal debriefing session. Rachel’s memories of the Yanomami, and of the horrific events from which they sought sanctuary, are as vivid as ever. But Terry was right about the date rape drug: she remembers nothing of Sanders rescuing her, and has no idea what happened to Dias.

“
Sanders said he was taking you back to your parents.”

“
Why would he do that?”

“
I don’t know. I hoped you’d be able to tell me.” She shrugs. “Is he a friend of the family?”

She shakes her head gently, trying to dredge up an elusive memory. “I don’t know. How did he know where we’d be?”

“
He said you sent a text message to your dad saying you were heading for Esmerelda.”

“
Did I?”

“
Same one you sent to me. That’s why I ––”

“
Yes. I texted Dad.” They both stop. The red second hand of the clock screeches forward a couple of seconds before falling back again. “The satphone only worked for half a day or so …” She trails off.

“
So either your dad knows this guy Sanders and .. belt and braces.”

“
Sorry.”

“
He asked Sanders to try and find you ––”

“
Or Sanders tapped my phone, read the message, and came looking for us… He must have known we’d survived…. Found my passport in the village…Why didn’t he just kill us?”

“
Maybe he did want to take you to back to London? Could it be they want something from your dad.”

“
They?”

“
He’s not working on his own.”

Jeremy wants to look at the material on the video camera, but there’s nothing in the battery. “Is there any charge on the satphone?” he asks. She shrugs, and switches it on.

While he’s trying to get the satphone working, Rachel retreats into a trance-like state, her mouth half open, eyes wide, staring through the wall at the horrors she has witnessed. She shuts her eyes and starts to shake and cry, folding her arms around herself.

“
Rachel. Let me hold you.” Without looking at him, she nods her head. And he moves over to her and cautiously, gently, puts an arm around her, uncertain and apprehensive of her response. She grabs him, a lost child clinging to a parent after the terrors of separation. Then, almost immediately, pulls away.

“
Thank you,” she says. And they revert to the disconcerting formality that she seems more comfortable with.

“
Can you take video on this?” She shakes her head. “Photos?”

“
Yes.” Puzzled, she shows him and they scroll through the pictures in the memory, most of them taken in the settlement, many of them featuring José or Pablo. At first he’s surprised that she can look at these without flinching, then realises she’s avoiding looking. They come to the pictures that Jeremy had been looking for.

“
You remember taking these?”

“
No.” He’s scrolling between three photographs taken on the river; all of them of an approaching inflatable. In each of them a stockily built man is standing at the back, his hand on the tiller of the powerful outboard motor. In the first, taken with the boat about seventy metres away, a man is standing in the prow, aiming a rifle directly at whoever is taking the picture; in the second, at about thirty metres, the same man is waving to the photographer, his rifle nowhere to be seen; and in the third, taken from about ten metres away, the man, now clearly identifiable as Sanders, has a rope in his hand, about to throw it. “I didn’t take them,” says Rachel.

“
You don’t remember taking them.” She looks doubtful. “That’s why he didn’t kill you. He saw you taking photos on your phone and at that distance he wouldn’t have known that you didn’t have a satellite connection. He assumed you were sending those pictures to your dad even as you took them. And then … I don’t know … maybe he gave you some bottled water, which is how he got you to take the drug.”

“
And what about José Dias?”

“
We’re never going to know. Unless we go back and find Sanders and he tells us. They were heading for Mavaca. With you unconscious, he could say you were dangerously ill; maybe he thought that would get him a quick ticket out.”

The clock scratches at the silence, the sound of the toiling electric motor resembling chalk screeching on a blackboard. Then Rachel reaches out, takes Jeremy’s hand and squeezes it. “Thank you,” she says, without making eye contact. An image flashes through his head of holding her hand like this as he assured her that she’d be safe working with Ronaldo and Chimo. He wants to hold her, to kiss her. “Where are you going to go when we get out of here?” she asks.

“
I’m going to London with you.”

“
How can I get to London? I don’t have a passport. I don’t have money.”

“
The Embassy looks after its own. They’ll sort something out.”

“
Then you need to get to London now,” says Rachel. “I’ll get my passport sorted out and come on after. You get to London. Tell people what’s going on. Take the video. Take the evidence. Get it broadcast. My dad’s got connections.” Her faith in Mark and the English media is reassuring.

“
I’m not going to leave you, Rachel. We’ll go together.”

“
That’s just wasting time. I’m OK. It could be a week before I get a passport.”

“
We’ll talk about it later.”

She turns away, folding her arms.

“
Did you bribe them?” asks Jeremy.

“
What was needed, Jez. There’s plenty left.”

“
I owe you then.”

“
Yeah. You owe me. But another time, right.”

“
Terry ––”

“
Listen. This is where I want to be. Not in Caracas. I’m here. Right. They used their new machine to check out the
Duck
. Ten times more sensitive than the sniffer dogs they used to have. The
Duck
is clean. And basically they’re lazy fuckers. If the machine says ‘fine’, then it’s fine. It was the bullet hole in the float that bothered them most. I told them a story about shooting caiman…. And … here I am.”

“
Shooting caiman?”

“
It’s the kind of story they like…. So what are you guys going to do? Stay around in Boa Vista. Find a nice hotel? Have a little holiday?”

“
Get Rachel into a hospital. Make sure she’s OK. Then ––”

“
I’m fine. I need to get to the British Embassy.”

The metal door is pushed open and two of the officers who boarded the plane come in to the room. “OK. You can go away now,” says the senior. His partner looks resentful, as if allowing them to leave is a missed opportunity.