Hour of the Assassins (37 page)

Caine ran back to the trail and retrieved the knapsack and fishing line. He trotted down the trail till he reached the edge of the water, the placid surface sparkling in the sun. There was no sign of the
lancha
. They must have sunk it, he mused. In the far distance, he could just make out the gunboat as it patrolled near the shore, the sound of the diesel engine like a distant insect buzz. Rolf must have radioed ahead, he thought with chagrin. The Yarinacocha and Pucallpa were closed to him for good. The trap had snapped shut.

He found Pepé's body on the mud flats, near the water. The
caimáns
hadn't gotten to him yet. His stomach had been pierced by a long Yagua arrow, the barbed point extending almost a foot out of his back. A deep rust-colored gash showed across the nearly severed throat, where a machete had mercifully put Pepé out of his agony. Caine sank to his knees in the rank mud beside the body. For the first time since he had found Lim's body that day in Laos, and for no reason he could fathom, he began to cry.

CHAPTER 15

“Plucking a parrot is not one of the more entertaining ways of spending your time,” Caine said, and was suddenly aware of the sound of his own voice. How long had he been talking out loud to himself? he wondered. Ever since the stream, yesterday. It was the loneliness, the complete isolation, he surmised. The dense, endless green of the rain forest had cut him off from the rest of humanity as completely as if he were an astronaut, marooned on an uninhabited planet.

“A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth,” he recited loudly to the big, brownish spider, near the center of the giant web, just a few feet away. The web was as large as a bedsheet. It glistened with a poisonous, iridescent shimmer in the relentless heat, but it screened out the insects on that side. That was one of the reasons he had chosen this spot as a campsite.

Where was that line about being a fugitive from anyway? he wondered. Probably the Bible. It sounded like the Bible, he reflected. He shook his head and resumed plucking the bright green feathers, one by one. It would be good to taste meat again, he thought. It had been a lucky shot. The parrot had been just sitting on a branch, barely ten feet over his head and he had fired the carbine at once, without even taking the time to aim.

This was the fourth day, he remembered. The second since the impassable mangrove swamp had forced him to abandon the bank of the Yarinacocha. He still wasn't sure whether he had made the right choice.

“We are all constantly confronted with choices. What makes a survival situation different is that there are no second chances. In the jungle the punishment for a mistake is death,” he remembered Hudson saying just before they jumped from the plane.

Well, he would know in a day or two, he shrugged. Of course, standing on the mud flats looking down at Pepé's body, there really hadn't seemed to be much of a choice.

For the Chamas and Yaguas who lived south of the Yarinacocha, between the institute and Pucallpa, he was an outcast, a murderer. Even if they feared him as a demon, he knew they wouldn't hesitate to turn him over to the Peruvian Army authorities, who probably wouldn't bother with the niceties of a trial. Even if they did, he could think of better ways to spend the rest of his life than in some hellhole of a Peruvian prison.

That left only the jungle as a way out. It was a long shot, but it was the only shot he had. The jungle north of the Yarinacocha was largely unexplored. That area was Achual country, the most savage tribe of the southern Amazon, where no Chama or Yagua would dare venture. Father José had told him that the Peruvian Army had twice sent military expeditions into Achual country. No trace of either of the expeditions was ever found. The jungle had simply swallowed them up. So Caine would be safe from the Chamas, Yaguas, the Nazis, and the authorities; they would simply assume he had died in the jungle. God knows, that was a reasonable assumption, he reflected. Because the jungle was doing its best to kill him.

Starting out, the plan had hot seemed that crazy. It was only thirty to forty miles from where he stood on the mud flats to the banks of the Ucayali. There were no mountains, ravines, or major topographical obstacles between him and the river that anyone knew of, and no matter which way he went, so long as he headed roughly east, he was bound to strike the Ucayali.

Once there he could raft, or get a boat to take him downstream to Iquitos, where he could catch a flight to Lima. He doubted that the news about Mendoza would reach that far, and even if it had, they would be looking for McClure, not someone named Payne. Thirty miles wasn't so much. A good marathon runner could do it in under three hours easy. He ought to be able to do it in a day or two, he had reasoned. He had the survival kit and the carbine and the training to do it. All in all, the idea seemed plausible.

Except that he hadn't really taken the Amazon into account. He was alone and unaided and the jungle was trackless. The total distance for him wasn't thirty miles, but perhaps two or three times that, because he could hardly travel in a straight line. And whether or not he had realized it when he began his march, he was in a desperate race against time.

Because the real dangers of the jungle are not the spectacular one that people imagine. Certanly no one in his right mind would want to cozy up to a
caimán
alligator or a poisonous snake, Caine reflected. But by and large, these creatures are timid of men and are rarely encountered. The true dangers of the jungle were the mind-sapping heat, insects, and bacteria, which were inescapable. The jungle destroyed a man slowly with thirst, pain, and disease, like an insidious poison. Caine knew that he had to get to the river before gangrene from a tiny, unnoticed scratch, fever, and malaria would inevitably bring him down.

He had started his march along the bank of the Yarinacocha, weaving his way through the endless thicket of brooding trees strung with liana vines that grew as thick as a man's thigh, and dense saw-toothed grasses. The air was heavy with a rank smell of vegetation and black mud that sucked loudly at his already rotting jungle boots. Caine carried the knapsack on his back, the canteen and machete at his hip, and the carbine slung over his shoulder. He wore the mosquito net loosely over his head, like a ghostly bag. Every so often the foliage was too thick and he would have to hack his way through with the machete.

His head pounded from the hammer strokes of the blinding tropic sun. The attack of countless, stinging mosquitoes and
borrachudos
was relentless. His body ached with every step, the mud clinging to his feet like lead weights, and he had to stop every hundred paces or so to sip water from the canteen.

Paradoxically, in the rain forest where it rains at least once a day, even during the so-called dry season, it is thirst that is the greatest problem, he reflected as he waited for the mud to settle in a hole he had dug about four feet from the bank. The hole filled with muddy ground water and once the mud settled, he could fill the canteen, add a Halezone tablet, and drink the brackish liquid. The problem wasn't a lack of water, but that it was virulent with bacteria and animal and vegetable poisons. Clean, fresh water was simply unavailable, yet he needed a lot of it—the fever, heat, and his exertions vastly increasing the natural rate of dehydration.

Judging by the bits of floating leaves and bark, the current near the bank might just be a little too swift for the piranha and he decided to chance it while waiting for the mud to settle in the hole. He quickly stripped naked and eased himself into the tepid, brown water, moving as little as possible. The feel of the water was delicious as it soothed his skin, burning with the fever from all the ant and other insect bites. He couldn't relax for a second, though, and cautiously kept his eyes peeled for piranha, electric eels,
caimáns
, and water snakes. A sudden ripple near his toes had him scrambling frantically out of the water and onto the bank, like a slapstick character in a silent movie. He hurriedly smeared handfuls of mud all over his body, to soothe his skin and protect it from the insects. He was brown as a Negro with the mud, as he quickly climbed back into his filthy clothing. He filled his canteen with the tobacco-colored water, took a long swallow, and resumed his march.

All in all, he made pretty good progress that first day. The mud had proved fairly effective against the insects, and as a bonus, it seemed to cool his fever and help heal the ant bites. But as the drying mud began to crack and flake off in the intense heat, his skin began to itch maddeningly. He had to clench his fingers desperately to prevent himself from scratching as tears of frustration stung his eyes. The tiniest break in the skin could turn gangrenous.

He made camp about fifty yards from the lake to avoid the dense fog of mosquitoes that gathered at the water's edge. He still had a good two hours of daylight, but there was a great deal to do. He hacked a tiny clearing with the machete and constructed a rude bamboo-and-vine bedframe. It was essential not to sleep on the ground. He laid a bed of palm fronds on the frame and dug a mudhole in the bank for water. A late afternoon shower had soaked the deadwood, but he managed to collect a good supply of kindling from the hollow, inner lining of a dead cedar trunk. He also collected a dozen handfuls of dry fibers, found at the bases of palm leaves, for tinder. It was time to forage for dinner.

He found a large, fungus-like colony of purslane growing near the mudhole. The nondescript yellowish flowers hardly looked inviting, the reddish stems fleshy as giant worms, but it would make a tolerable salad—except for the roots, which were poisonous. He collected an armful of stems, leaves, and flowers, enough for dinner and breakfast as well.

He killed a saucer-sized pimpled frog and cut it into bleeding pieces with the machete. He threw about half the bleeding pieces into the water for chum, then used the rest for bait, his fishing hook and line attached to a long, bamboo pole. After about half an hour, he had caught three razor-toothed piranha, which he hauled out, wriggling and snapping at the hook with angry jaws. He killed them by slapping them repeatedly with the flat of the machete. They were about four to five inches long and most of that was mouth. The trickiest part was cutting the hooks out, because the dead jaws would still snap shut spasmodically. After he retrieved the hook from the last fish, the steel slashed with bright tooth scars, he gutted the fish with the machete and soon had them broiling on sticks over the fire.

The last thing he did before settling down to dinner, the trees glowing red from the sun, as though reflecting a distant battle, was to strip. Dozens of leeches clung to his legs, their black, slimy bodies fat with his blood. The only way to get rid of them was to touch them with the tip of a lighted cigarette, one at a time. The leeches would shrivel and dance with a foul, crackling smell before they would drop off. As each one fell, he daubed the tiny, puckered wound with iodine. Soon his legs and feet were splotched with stinging iodine stains, as though he were suffering from some horrible skin disease.

Thick clusters of black and gray ticks, their squashy bodies bloated to the size of dimes on his blood, had collected in his armpits and crotch. Only the stinging splash of iodine could make them drop off, one by one, like rotten nuts from a decaying tree. He knew if he tried to pull them off, the tiny black head would stay embedded in his skin and infect. He shivered with the sharp pain of the iodine stinging his armpits and crotch, but so far as he could tell, he had gotten all of them. He smeared a part of his precious supply of insect repellent all over him and once more pulled on his filthy clothing, which had already begun to mildew and rot, the cloth turning a vaguely greenish hue.

Life in the Amazon wasn't exactly like a Tarzan movie, he reflected, as he tore into the muddy-tasting piranha and faintly acrid purslane, washed down with the coppery water. Of course, when Tarzan had yodeled through the jungle tendrils, nobody ever mentioned the mosquito bites on his ass, he thought wryly. Maybe that's why Tarzan had yodeled. He allowed himself one of his precious candy bars, which had melted to a shapeless fudge, for dessert, to get the filthy taste of dinner out of his mouth. The only decent part of the meal was the crumpled cigarette he lit when he finished eating.

He threw a few pieces of green wood on the fire to send up a thick column of smoke to help drive off the mosquitoes. He knew the fire might alert the Achuals to his presence, but there wasn't much he could do about that. Unless he cooked his food and boiled his water, food poisoning and bacteria were bound to kill him anyway. Even so, he was just buying a little time and he spent a few cheerful minutes trying to calculate when the inevitable dysentery and malaria would hit him. Just thinking about it made his stomach rumble uncomfortably.

So he thought about the Starfish Conspiracy. He had to grudgingly admit that they had used him, that he had acted as their unwitting agent. Harris and Wasserman were involved for sure, not to mention the mysterious von Schiffen, whoever the hell he was. But they had obviously miscalculated, because they certainly hadn't expected him to get out of this alive. Once they found out, he'd have the lot of them, and maybe even the Company, still after him. What Cunningham had told him so long ago still held. He would have to watch his back. But he had foxed them, he thought exultantly. He was still alive.

“I'm still alive, you bastards!” he shouted into the inky darkness. The jungle seemed to echo with his cry and it was taken up by the chattering birds and a nearby colony of monkeys, their raucous shrieks filling the night with terror. He felt something silky brush his cheek and then it was gone with a faint stir of air. He shivered with disgust and huddled closer to the fire. It might have been anything: a spider or a vampire bat, most likely. God, he hated this sickening, living hell.

They had sent him on a one-way mission and that made it personal, he thought grimly. He had a score to settle with them because they had put him here. But why? Why after all these years had they wanted Mengele terminated? Von Schiffen and the Starfish Conspiracy, who were they?