The Armada Legacy (37 page)

For a few seconds Brooke was certain she was going to drown. She was completely blind. The brackish water was leaking past her tightly-clenched lips into her mouth. At the last possible moment, her thrashing hand found air. Her fingers gripped onto something – it was the grab-handle above the cab door – and with all her strength she managed to pull herself to the surface and take a gasping breath.

She blinked the water out of her eyes. A powerful swirling current was sweeping the truck down the river. She could feel the vehicle rotating as the water carried it along. The level was rising in the cab. Rising higher.

Groping and splashing about, she managed to retrieve her bag and then clambered up onto the dashboard and out through the hole where the windscreen had been. As she balanced precariously on the crumpled bonnet, the truck lurched. She lost her balance and plunged into deep water.

Brooke had always been a strong swimmer, but the battle against the river current was very nearly the end of her that night. By the time she’d fought her way to the dark bank and found a large rock to climb onto, she was utterly spent. The truck was long gone, probably a kilometre downstream by now, or sunk to the bottom.

But Serrato and his men were nowhere to be seen or heard. That jubilant thought was enough to energise her. Coughing and spluttering, brackish water and mud dripping from her clothes, she made her way through the reeds of the riverbank to more solid ground.

Away from the rush of the current, the jungle was filled with a million night sounds. It was cold, too, and Brooke was soon shivering in her saturated clothes. She found a spot to rest against a fallen tree trunk and emptied out her bag by the pale moonlight that filtered down through the leaves. The pack of cold meats she’d so carefully prepared was full of river water, which she wasn’t sure was safe to consume even though she’d swallowed a lot of it. The talcum powder had been meant to keep her skin dry to prevent infections – a tip she’d remembered from flipping through a survival manual once. Now it was useless, sodden into pasty clumps. She stripped off her T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, wrung them out as best she could along with the wet towels, then rubbed herself to keep warm and put the damp clothes back on.

The air was thick with mosquitoes. At least not all her plans had been ruined by the river. She unfolded the mosquito net and draped it loosely round herself. It was large enough to cover her completely, from head to foot, and once inside it she felt strangely comforted despite the alien sounds all around her, the hooting of night birds and the strange, grating bark that she was certain was the roar of a jaguar or some other nocturnal predator prowling not too far away.

Let it roar, she thought. She was free. Smiling, she closed her eyes and curled up against the tree trunk.

Dawn came not with glorious rays of sunshine peeping through the treetops to bathe her in golden light, but with a cascade of torrential rain that jolted her from her sleep and instantly soaked her through all over again.

There was little point in trying to stay dry in this place, she decided as she packed her things up and set off, following the course of the river. Her legs, arms, shoulders and everywhere else ached badly from the effort of last night’s swim – and the truck crash probably hadn’t done her muscles much good either. But she was determined to keep moving, no matter what. The trainers weren’t going to last forever in this extreme terrain; she was hoping that sooner or later she’d find some kind of human habitation, maybe even a village where she might be able to use Serrato’s jewels to secure transport or help. She couldn’t be too many miles from people.

She couldn’t be too many miles from Serrato’s compound either, she thought with a shudder. There was no doubt that he would be hunting for her right now. She wished that the rifle she’d stolen from the guard hadn’t gone down with the truck – she felt very defenceless without it.

The rain stopped. Brooke walked. And walked. And walked. Rested a while, drank some of her water, forged onwards through the endless greenery. It was hard to keep track of time. Her clothes didn’t seem to dry despite the fierce heat that followed the deluge: they just got more and more cloying and filthy and torn. The water in her bottle was going down too fast. She’d thrown away the tainted meat, thinking of botulism and typhus. All around her were a million varieties of leaf, root and berry, but she had no idea which might sustain her, or which might instead bring on a horrible, slow death.

By the time the sun had begun to go down behind the trees, she was staggering with fatigue, dehydrated and badly in need of more rest. She found a patch of leafy ground that was soft and dry, settled down on her towels and cocooned herself in the mosquito net to shelter from the clouds of insects that swarmed everywhere. Darkness fell over her like a blanket.

In her dreams, Ramon Serrato was running his hands over her. Try as she might, she just couldn’t get away from his touch. She could feel the pressure of his fingertips crawling lightly over her skin. He’d pause, then move his hand a little further, one finger at a time, always smiling, always watching her with that look in his eye. ‘No,’ she murmured, reaching out to slap his hand away. ‘Get off. Get off.’

She opened her eyes. The night song of the jungle creatures chirped and cackled all around. Her resting place was softly moonlit, enough to be able to make out the shapes of things on the outside of the mosquito net.

Brooke started.

Something had moved.

Something had moved
inside
the mosquito net. Like in the dream, she felt the light pressure of fingertips on her skin. The pressure shifted slightly, then paused again. She blinked. Was this still part of the dream?

That was when she saw the hand on her shoulder.

Except it wasn’t a hand.

Brooke screamed and began thrashing wildly to unravel herself from the net. ‘Oh, God, get off me! Get off me!’ Kicking out with all her strength she felt the net rip. She extricated her body from the torn material and scrambled to her feet. But she was too dizzy from lack of food, from the long march through the jungle, from stress and disorientation. She fell back among the leaves.

The spider had dropped down from her shoulder and was sitting poised on the ground a few inches away. Its body was silvery brown in the moonlight, and with its bristly legs braced wide apart it was just a little smaller in span than a human hand. Its eight clustered eyes were black and beady and watched her inscrutably.

Brooke scrabbled away from it. ‘Shoo!’ she yelled, flinging a handful of dirt. ‘Shoo!’

The spider sensed that it was under threat. Its innate defence mechanism was a danger warning that made it rear up on its back legs, pawing the air with its forelegs, swaying its hairy body gently from side to side and revealing its venomous fangs. It was a highly aggressive species that would attack with shocking speed if the warning wasn’t heeded.

Brooke’s fingers found a rotted piece of branch on the ground. She swung it at the spider. ‘Go on, piss off and leave me alone!’ she yelled.

And the spider attacked her.

She couldn’t have moved out of the way in time. It scuttled straight at her and she felt a sharp pain in her left forearm, like a hornet’s sting. She screamed and lashed out again with the branch. The spider crawled unharmed into the shadows to wait for its prey to die. Or to wait for the next victim to come along. It didn’t care either way.

Brooke dropped the branch and staggered dizzily to her feet. Was it exhaustion and dehydration making her feel so sick, or was it the spider’s bite already taking effect? She whimpered in terror and clutched her forearm. Two puncture marks in the soft flesh of its underside were rapidly swelling and burning terribly.

‘Oh no,’ she groaned. ‘No, please, no.’ She managed to gather up her things. She had to keep moving. No choice now.

The jungle seemed to be laughing at her as she staggered away through the night. She was crying from the pain of the bite on her arm. It was dark. Getting darker. She could hardly see any more …

Then she could see nothing at all as her knees gave way under her and she collapsed into the foliage. She rolled over on her back, tried to call for Ben. Then the darkness swallowed her up completely.

Some time afterwards – it might have been moments, or weeks – she sensed movement. Consciousness filtered back. Her first panicked thought was that it was the spider. The spider was coming after her again.

But no, it wasn’t the spider, she realised; the movement was hers. A gentle swaying motion. She understood. She was being gently carried.

She opened her eyes to the hazy grey light of pre-dawn. The face that looked down at her was like nothing she’d ever seen before. The man’s dark skin was adorned with swirls and daubs of colour. Brooke only saw it for an instant before she passed out again.

When she reopened her eyes, the sun was blazing brightly above her. Into the blinding light came another face. A Caucasian face, with blue eyes that gazed down at her with care and concern.

‘Ben?’ she mumbled, trying to reach out to him. ‘Ben, is that …’

‘Shush, child,’ said the man.

Chapter Forty-Nine

The hunt was into its third night now.

The column of open Jeeps and assorted four-wheel drives slowly made its rocking, bouncing way along the track through the dark forest, the growl of their engines reverberating off the dense foliage. The swarming insects drifted like dust particles in the beams of their headlamps. The vehicles were filled with men and weaponry, badly overloaded now that two Jeeps and one of the trucks had run out of fuel miles back and their occupants had had to clamber aboard wherever they could find room, to avoid being left behind in the green wilderness. Ramon Serrato wasn’t about to let anyone or anything slow down his hunt for his missing prize.

Sitting in the front passenger seat of the lead Jeep with Luis Bracca driving, Serrato was deathly pale, his hair all awry and pasted to his brow. The silk suit that he hadn’t bothered to change out of in his hurry to leave the compound was damp with humidity and sweat, stained with jungle dirt and spray from the wheels of the open Jeep. He’d been withdrawn and morose all day and for most of the previous one, barely speaking to anyone. Those men who knew him best could see the simmering fury in his eyes, even now, more than forty-eight hours since the fire at the compound and the woman’s humiliating escape. They could only whistle, shake their heads and muse over the kind of fate he must have in store for her when he caught up with her again.

But after all these interminable hours of searching through rainstorms and murderous heat they’d still found nothing but empty jungle – not since two nights ago, when less than three miles into the chase they’d come across the tyre marks where the truck she’d stolen had come off the road and gone crashing down the steep hillside below. Serrato had halted the convoy and personally led a squad of twelve men, with Vertíz and Bracca, on foot down to the ravaged area of river bank where the vehicle had ploughed into the water. But the truck itself had vanished, along with its driver.

None of the men had dared to voice the thought that passed through most of their minds: the woman was dead, either killed in the crash or drowned in the fast-moving river. Not even Vertíz and Bracca, who enjoyed more leeway from their master than anyone else who’d ever worked for him, had been inclined to question his order that they return to the Jeeps and continue their search by road. ‘I know her,’ he’d insisted. ‘She is smarter than that. This is an obvious feint to throw us off the track. She put that truck over the edge deliberately, but she wasn’t in it any longer.’

But if it was true that she was still on the road somewhere ahead, she was almost ghostlike in her ability to elude them. Two whole days of exhaustively scouring every route, down to the smallest boggy, swampy track, were beginning to take their toll on the men. Their only food and water were the scant provisions they’d managed to snatch from their quarters in between helping to put out the last of the fire and being scrambled for action. They’d had no sleep other than the few short breaks they’d been allowed as Serrato drove them mercilessly on, combing an ever-increasing area of jungle to no avail. It was futile.

Still nobody spoke a word of complaint. Many of them knew from experience what Serrato could be like when he was upset – but not one of them had ever seen him in a state like this one before.

It was after two in the morning when Serrato finally signalled the convoy to halt and rest for a while. The weary men left their vehicles and limped and stretched their way over to a small clearing near the narrow track. Weapons were stacked against trees. Sticks were gathered, a fire was lit. A bottle of aguardiente surreptitiously did the rounds, quick slugs of the strong liquor taken with a nervous glance over to where the boss was sitting on a fallen tree away from the group. A few of the men exchanged dark, resentful mutterings. Nobody was very happy with the situation.

Serrato was too wrapped up in his own brooding thoughts to take notice of their mood. He looked up sharply as Vertíz and two others, Alva and the new guy Santos, approached. ‘What is it?’

Vertíz showed him the small GPS navigation device he was holding. ‘Boss, we’re going round in circles. We’ve come all this way and we’re still only a few miles from base. The jungle’s playing tricks on us.’

‘It’s impossible,’ Serrato snapped – but when he snatched the GPS from Vertíz and looked at the small lit-up screen, he could see it was true. They weren’t even that far from the road. He clenched his teeth and sat with his face cupped in his hands.

Santos, encouraged now that Vertíz had finally spoken up, stepped forward and said, ‘Señor Serrato, many of us believe that the woman was inside the truck when it went into the river. Some of the men are saying …’

Serrato turned to look at him. ‘Yes?’

Santos should have heard the dangerous edge in his boss’s voice, but he made the mistake of going on. ‘They are saying we should give up this search and go back to base. Most likely, she is dead.’