Invasive Species (2 page)

Casamance Region, Senegal, West Africa

THE SINGLE-PROP BUSH
plane sliced through the base of a towering cumulus cloud and emerged into the brilliant tropical sunshine. Sitting in the shotgun seat, Trey Gilliard took in the explosion of colors: golden light turning the base of the clouds silver, a sky of the deepest purplish blue, and below, the vast, rumpled green expanse of rain forest.

Malcolm Granger's voice came over Trey's headset. “Looks like broccoli.”

Trey had heard this before. They'd sat side by side in this two-seater Piper PA-18 many times over the years, Malcolm fighting through wind shear and thunderstorms and clear-air turbulence and air currents that could slam you into the ground like a fist, all to help Trey find what he'd come to see.

“I effing hate broccoli,” Malcolm said.

Trey had heard this, too.

“Lower,” he said.

He saw Malcolm frown and glance over, his mirrored shades catching the sunlight. But Trey knew he wouldn't have to ask twice. This was what it was like, being Trey's pilot. You did what he said or you flew with him once, kissed the ground when you landed, and never let him near your airplane again.

Malcolm was one of the few pilots who'd come back. In fact, if Trey called, he'd cancel whatever else he had on his schedule and haul this little Piper—or one of the other bush planes he owned—over to whatever forest, desert, or mountainside Trey had staked out.

“What's the fun in life,” Malcolm told anyone who asked, “if you don't try to end it every once in a while?”

The sound of the engine changed, grew rougher, as the plane slowed and dipped toward the forest canopy. From above, the carpet of leaves seemed as soft as a huge bedspread, but this was a fiction. Guide your plane into it, and you'd find out soon enough exactly how soft it was.

People in Trey's line of work—and there were a few—had found out. He didn't need to learn it for himself.

Still . . .

“Lower,” he said.

Trey was his own boss. He chose when to work, where to work, what he wanted to do.

He knew how lucky he was to be able to live this way, since no one in their right mind would hire him full-time. There were only a few people left on earth who, like Malcolm, could put up with him.

Over the years, though, a few organizations had figured out a way to use what he offered: an aggressive intelligence untethered to common sense; a willingness to take whatever chances were necessary to achieve his goals; and the ability, above all, to plunge into the wilderness, see everything there was to see, and report back on what he'd found.

Turn the wheel of Trey's personality just one or two degrees, and he might have ended up a mercenary, a soldier for hire. He'd met enough of them on his travels and could see the similarities—foremost, a disdain for staying in one place, for following the rules, and for most of humanity.

The difference was small, but crucial: Mercenaries liked to kill, and Trey didn't.

Instead he preferred to save. To preserve. Which was why he was here now, in this remote region of Senegal, just beyond the line where the savanna ended and the rain forest began.

To see what was here. To see what was worth saving.

The organization paying his bills this time was called the International Conservation Trust. ICT. When they could tolerate working with him, they'd send him to some remote region and gladly forget about him for a while.

He'd disappear into the wilderness, and when he emerged weeks later, gaunt, dirty, sometimes ridden with parasites or feverish from disease, he'd report on what he'd found. What birds were new to science. What endangered mammals were making their last stand. What bizarre eyeless salamanders writhed through pitch-black caves. What plants, whose blooms or seeds might give birth to medicines that could cure cancer, clambered for the light in untracked swamps.

In an age of massive destruction, Trey told them where they should spend their precious resources.

Then off he'd head to another wilderness.

Staying sane, barely, only because he could spend most of his time where no one else would go.

“What do you see?” he asked.

He heard Malcolm laugh. They were fifty feet, no more, above the canopy. The plane bucked and slewed in the warm currents rising from the breathing leaves.

“Trees, Thomas,” Malcolm said. “One fuckin' tree after another.”

Malcolm was the only person who called Trey “Thomas.” Though it was his name: Thomas Hunter Gilliard III.

Trey.

Malcolm pointed with his chin. Trey nodded. He'd seen it, too: a small troop of colobus monkeys, their thick fur red and black against the green. Six of them perched in the canopy's branches, looking up at the plane roaring past them.

Before Trey would disappear into the forest, he and Malcolm would undertake this kind of survey from the air. ICT called them Emergency Assessments, and what they did was allow Trey to identify the least damaged areas. Only then would he return on foot and begin to inventory what was there.

He and Malcolm had been flying a grid here in the Casamance forests for five days. So far Trey had been disappointed. The forests seemed tainted to him, impure. Sure, there were giant kapok trees, monkeys, beautiful birds, an abundance of butterflies down there. But also fresh clearings made by human hands, smoldering fires, and other signs that the forest was being plundered for wood or cleared for farms and pastures.

Maybe he'd come too late. He should have been here five years ago.

He lifted his gaze and felt himself grow still inside. “The hell is that?”

Even over the headset, Malcolm heard the change in Trey's tone. Following the direction of his gaze, he turned the plane to the west. The sound of his low whistle reached Trey's ears.

Perhaps two miles ahead of them, a large expanse of forest was dying. Bare trees looked like contorted skeletons, their branches pointing to the sky like accusing bony fingers. The leaves that remained were yellowing, sickly. As Trey watched, a gust of wind whirled some of them into a dust devil, leaving another bare branch behind.

“Ugly,” Malcolm said.

Trey was silent.

“I'll take us north and back east,” Malcolm said.

“No.” Trey took a breath. “Maintain course.”

“But—”

Trey knew. The dying forest lay beyond the boundaries agreed to by ICT and the Senegalese government. It was outside the grid. Trey and Malcolm didn't have permission to fly over.

“Maintain course,” Trey said again.

Malcolm kept the Piper flying west. The dying patch of forest, miles in extent, drew closer.

Trey leaned forward, his gaze unwavering. Trying to see, to understand. Was there any kind of industry here? Had some oil pipeline burst, some mining-operation tailings lake overflowed?

Trey couldn't understand how. He could detect no roads leading from the edge of the inhabited land, five miles to the north, to this stricken forest.

Maybe when they were closer . . .

But they never got the chance. Trey caught a glimpse of a sudden dark form rising from the canopy directly in front of the Piper. The computer in his brain, the part that identified and categorized everything he saw, said:
Bird. Raptor. Black kite.
Second-year male.

Then it struck the plane's propeller and became nothing but chunks of meat and a burst of feathers. A dark penumbra that wreathed the windows for an instant before being whipped away.

The plane's engine coughed, choked. Died.

They flew, glided, in silence. The single propeller on the Piper's nose did not move.

Malcolm, his left hand fighting the yoke, his right reaching for the ignition, said, “Shit.” Trey didn't need the headset to hear him.

The plane dipped toward the canopy. Trey braced himself for the impact.

I'll live,
he thought.

I'm not done yet.

They were maybe twenty feet from the topmost limbs when the engine fired. The propeller spun, slowed, then sped into a blur. Malcolm pulled back on the throttle and the plane's nose rose. Just a little.

They hit an air pocket and dropped ten feet. Trey could see butterflies spinning amid the branches below. A tiny pool of water trapped in a bromeliad plant winked in a beam of sunlight.

Malcolm pulled back harder. Again they rose, the engine coughing and groaning. The plane swung north. Trey lifted his gaze and saw, a mile or so ahead, the edge of the forest, the almost surgical line where the jungle came to an end and the savanna began.

The savanna. Flat land. Fields and pastures and roads, any of which could be used as a landing strip if you really needed one.

Trey knew that the pilot's thoughts were traveling the same track. Malcolm pulled back on the yoke one more time. The Piper fought its way upward, until the rumpled forest was a thousand feet below. Trey could see the yellow grasslands, the gleaming silver stripe of the Gambia River, the blue Atlantic.

The engine died again.

“Hang on,” Malcolm said.

The plane glided on the hot, rising air, losing altitude faster and faster even as they came closer to the savanna and possible salvation. Trey looked down and saw the forest reaching for them as they fell. He could see the muscles on Malcolm's arms knot as he struggled with the yoke.

Their destination lay just ahead: a flat grassy field across the Massou-Djibo Road, which ran along the forest's edge. Trey's brain calculated distances and speed, and he knew they wouldn't make it. They were going to hit the trees.

But they didn't. Trey hadn't calculated for Malcolm's cussedness, or his understanding of his little bush plane. Through sheer willpower and physical strength, the pilot wrestled the dead plane over the last line of forest. Vines whipped the wings as they went past, and then suddenly they were a hundred feet over level, treeless ground. The dirt road sketched a red-earth line through the grassland below.

“Hang on,” Malcolm said again. The Piper glided, the blurred ground racing just below them. A moment later they made contact, rose a few feet, and then touched down for good and were bumping across the field. Stones kicked up by the tires rattled off the fuselage.

Malcolm brought the plane to a halt. After a few moments' silence, Trey pulled off his headset. “Thanks.”

Malcolm shrugged and stretched his arms. “No worries.”

Then, scanning the empty landscape around them, he sighed. “Guess we'll have to walk out,” he said.

Trey unsnapped his harness, swung open the door beside him. Hot air wafted in, along with the sound of crickets and the staccato call of a red-eyed dove.

“Won't be the first time,” he said.

Malcolm laughed. “Or the last.”

*   *   *

THEY STOOD ON
the road. There was no sign of cars, or people, in any direction. A single cow stared at them from a nearby pasture. Clouds were piling up to the west, foretelling storms that afternoon. There were storms in the Casamance every afternoon.

“Gonna get wet,” Malcolm said. Then he rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I know: Won't be the first time.”

“Let's go,” Trey said.

They set off, maintaining an easy pace that still ate up the distance. Both of them were tall, but after that the similarities ended. Trey, an American, was dark, olive complexioned, with deep-set eyes and a strong nose and chin. People said they could never tell what he was thinking, which was fine with him.

Malcolm, who'd grown up in Cape Tribulation, Australia, was more solidly built, with a broad, flat face and blue eyes. If he ever traded this life for a desk job, he'd be fat in a month. His unkempt blond hair was thinning, and his face and freckled arms were always either pink, sunburned, or peeling.

Trey was thirty-six. He'd never asked Malcolm's age, but guessed about fifty.

As if intuiting Trey's thoughts, Malcolm said, “This is where I s'pose I should say that I'm getting too old for this crap.”

Trey didn't even dignify that with a response.

*   *   *

THEY'D WALKED FOR
about a half hour when Trey stopped still in the middle of the deserted road. He leaned his head back, let his eyes scan the sky until they focused on a martial eagle circling, a black cross against the blue sky high above.

Malcolm had seen this behavior before. He wanted to get back to civilization so he could collect his tools and a vehicle, come back, and rescue his plane, but he knew there was no point in interrupting Trey's train of thought.

As they stood there in silence, thunder rumbled in the distance.

Finally Trey allowed his gaze to drop. “Malcolm,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Back then, right before we hit that kite, did you smell something?”

Malcolm blinked. This wasn't what he'd expected. “Did I what?”

“There was an odor rising from that dying forest, something I've never encountered before. Didn't you notice it?”

After a pause, Malcolm shook his head. “Sorry, but if I did, the memory's been wiped clean by the almost-dying stuff that happened afterward.”

Trey frowned. Before he could speak, they heard the sound of an engine. Perhaps a mile up the road, a pickup truck was heading toward them. A plume of reddish dust rose in its wake and the sun reflected off its black metal cab. They were about to be rescued.

Trey said, “What's killing that forest?”

Malcolm had no answer.

But it didn't really matter. When Trey got like this, he wasn't really talking to you. He was talking to himself, and you just happened to be in the vicinity.