by Andy Lucas
But then the smell hit them.
It was initially just a faint hint of distaste, carried on the soft breeze. Pace didn’t even register the change as a smell at first; just as a sensation of something being different. As they pedalled further up the road, they rounded a slight bend and found the road stretching straight out ahead of them again, for at least three miles. At the same moment a sudden waft of the smell swamped them, almost as if they’d ridden through an invisible curtain, the inhuman stench attacking the back of their throats with acidic bitterness.
Reeling from the stink, he suddenly spotted a slight bump in the centre of the road about half a mile ahead of them. The bump was smouldering beneath the hot, mid-morning sun.
The cloud was one of flies, not water vapour.
Pace’s heart sank as they rode nearer and he filled Ruby in on what he could see ahead of them. She couldn’t see past his broad back and wide shoulders but she was assaulted by the stench as much as he was. He managed to keep his breakfast down then, not so Ruby.
As he pulled the bike to a stop some twenty feet from the scorched humanity piled up in the middle of the road, she leaned out and vomited a few mouthfuls of bile onto the baking mud.
Time slowed to a crawl. He swallowed back his own horror as they both dismounted to behold a nightmare.
The bodies were in an appalling state of decimation. Some sick-minded joker had torched them, hopefully after death, but the odd shred of singed cloth and a couple of half-burned backpacks, smouldering at the edges of the pile, were all the identification needed. He shuddered at the sight and felt his anger becoming rage; icy and hard.
Behind him, Ruby was sick again.
The jungle was thick with hanging vines and trailing lianas but Attia’s razor-sharp machete sliced through them with little effort.
He was cleaving his own trail through the vegetation, skirting around trees and the worst of the low scrub, slashing expertly with his blade when he had to. He was an old hand at this business and knew he needed to conserve his energy in the draining humidity. It had been difficult to play the novice for the benefit of the others but he didn’t have to pretend anymore. After ten years of conducting operations in this type of terrain, he was almost as proficient as a native Indian.
Every now and then he hit upon a patch of extremely thick, shoulder-high greenery; where a hole had opened in the canopy above and allowed a prolific explosion of growth directly beneath. These were rare, so his progress had been steady.
He stopped regularly to check his position with the GPS set and compare it to the co-ordinates he had memorised weeks before. He was nearly on top of them, after a full fifteen hours walking, when he finally paused for a drink and a few biscuits before the final push. He ate and drank standing up, enjoying the steaming tranquillity of the dark forest that others might have found frightening.
A further twenty minutes brought him to the exact co-ordinates he wanted and, as he’d expected, the jungle looked as untouched and brooding as ever. There were no signs of disturbance; no broken tree limbs or crushed plants. It was just hot, humid and eerily quiet.
The tracer unit in his hand was working perfectly, he knew. What he wanted could only be in one place. Playing Attia, the racing doctor, had entailed fitting in with the others and carrying the same kit as the others. He’d managed to conceal the chest brace, fake skin sections and GPS unit but he would normally want specialist climbing equipment before tackling a search job in the canopy. All he’d managed to do was spirit a set of climbing spikes; hand and feet, from the challenge supplies they’d supposedly left behind at the tributary. These, he mused, would just have to do.
Quickly strapping on the spikes, he sucked in a deep lungful of soggy air and set about the nearest tree trunk. An hour later, he was well into the search, eighty feet up, moving across the thinnest of upper branches, tree to tree, to try and spot any signs of a crash site. It was painfully slow work yet he was agile and moved fluidly, with no thought to how far below him the forest floor sat. Ideally he would have set up guide ropes and used a pulley system to move around the treetops but not today. Instead, he moved slowly, testing branches as he went to make sure they would take his weight. His eyes scanned the tops of the trees while his skin revelled in the feel of a cool breeze that skipped across the roof of green, whispering between the thin branches beneath a grey sky.
Attia paused to take in the view, stretching for miles in each direction; an undulating expanse of huge tree tops merged into one living, breathing entity, with an occasional loner sticking its crown up higher than the rest to form a little island of green, brown and red. It never ceased to amaze him how magnificent it was but he had no time for the luxury of sightseeing, and so turned back to the task in hand.
Night was falling and several hours had passed since beginning his search. He was just beginning to think about making his way down when he pushed aside a heavily-leafed branch to be faced with singed twigs and a massive tear in the canopy. Heart skipping, he moved more cautiously and forced tired eyes to redouble their efforts. Within minutes, he began to make out traces of wreckage lodged in branches all around the immediate area.
He’d expected to find nothing but scattered wreckage and was hoping to locate the pilot’s body, using the tracking system secreted in her boots that was still sending its signal, via satellite, to his GPS unit. He was stunned to struggle through some precariously thin upper boughs, turn, and suddenly be confronted by the sight of a crumpled Harrier, complete save for its tail section and the tips of both wings. Carefully planted explosives, detonated by a simple timer, had hewn off the tail just behind the shattered Perspex of the cockpit, and trimmed two feet off of each wing tip, dumping it barely seventy feet down into the treetops, so low had been the pilot’s skimming flying style.
Charlie Stallie; renowned within the unit both for her incredible physique and her amazing skill as a pilot, was no stranger to low-level flying. She’d learned the basics with the United States Marines; they being the people who allowed her to train on a front-line fighter like the Harrier. It wasn’t a standard commission, as she had been recruited initially to the National Security Agency, as a gifted translator, straight from college. A flair for private flying, a dogged patriotism and psychiatric evaluations suggesting she would perform well in the field had seen her role quickly mutate. She had jumped at the chance to play the spy and, barely a decade later, she had been seconded into the Marines, excelling in fighter school and using her new-found skills for the covert benefit of her country, mainly in the Middle East.
At the tender age of thirty-three, she had been loaned out to the British secret service, both as an operative and also as the American’s partnership liaison officer. It all sounded very corporate, as espionage mainly was in the new century, but the reality was still lethal.
Beyond governments, international law, treaties, conventions and big business, she soon discovered that the world was blanketed by unaccountable and invisible organisations. Each country had its place, knew friend from foe, and slotted within a global network that existed to balance the status quo.
Presidents, prime ministers and chancellors knew little detail but trusted that their own secret services could resolve any serious problems, with no direct come back. It was a tried and tested system that had existed for decades, with governments getting on with running the world, safe in the knowledge that issues such as terrorism, nuclear proliferation and biological weaponry development were being constrained.
As traditionally covert organisations the world over were being made more accountable to the public, at least in the West, an ultimately gritty layer of subterfuge remained untouched and unknown. It was ‘need to know’, and very few people did, with those in the know having a vested interest in keeping things quiet.
Publicly, governments ran countries, within alliances, using differing political systems, for better or worse depending on your viewpoint. Everything came down to money; the global economy, at the
end of the day and how each country sought to exploit its natural resources, including its citizens, to best advantage. Democratic freedom and liberty opposed the ideology of dictatorships reliant on suppression of the people. Wars were fought by aircraft, soldiers and sailors, in the name of justice, or plain survival.
Underpinning every government was the secret service system; seeking to protect a country and its interests from destruction, be that physical or financial. These were also run on national lines, although international co-operation crossed borders as a matter of necessity.
Finally, dwelling deep in the shadows, lurked the network of operatives who risked their lives daily to nip rising tyrants in the bud, gather intelligence, sabotage weapon tests, assassinate difficult political figures and generally do all the nasty, morally questionable things that sometimes needed doing to protect society. The network was vast, intrinsically linked by a desire for results, had little to do with national idealism, transcended governments, and existed through cooperation; America, Europe, China and Russia, to name but a few, all fielding agents who were often on first name terms with each other.
For Britain, protection came in the form of its own exclusive club member; the McEntire Corporation.
Charlie knew all this and the information inside her head could have literally brought governments to their knees. Her head, or what was left of it now, was little more than a jumble of smashed bone and mashed brain matter. Just to be sure the pilot did not survive, tiny detonators had been built into the flying helmet; placed against each temple. At the same time the explosives went off behind the cockpit and out on the wingtips, a synchronised timer in the helmet set off both charges, shooting two steel bullets directly into her skull, imploding it so quickly that her hands continued to fly the controls for a moment afterwards.
The Harrier should have cart-wheeled into the trees and been completely destroyed. Attia had no idea why it had fallen more or less intact. Still, it made his task a lot easier and he set about it.
He had known Charlie, in the biblical sense, on more than one occasion over the last year and he was saddened to see her inert corpse still strapped into her seat, shoulders matted with dried blood and putrefying brain matter. Maggots were feasting on her and they, in turn, were being gobbled down by a cockpit full of brightly coloured birds and buzzing insects.
A few violent waves of his hand sent them exploding skyward, whistling, squawking or humming angrily at having their dinner disturbed. His nostrils rankled at the sickly stench of many weeks steaming decay and he knew well not to look too closely at the partially skeletal remains
There was nothing in the cockpit he needed to see anyway. He knew the swarms and hungry birds would soon return and he could not watch a lover being eaten before him. Swallowing the bitterness rising in his throat, he moved around carefully to the nose section. It was tricky to manoeuvre around such fragile tree limbs and he stopped several times when he feared the whole aircraft might crash down to the forest floor in a cloud of splintered wood. It didn’t, and he made it to the underside without a problem.
He knew where the secret compartment was but if he expected to find the prize inside, he was quickly disappointed. The compartment was empty; had been empty all along if he was any judge of his surroundings. He knew he was the first human to clap eyes on the plane since it went down and a quick sweep with a Geiger, cunningly built into the GPS unit, showed little more than background radiation.
‘This is going to get very messy,’ he told the ugly corpse that had once been Charlie. ‘I think a few more of us will be joining you before too long,’ he prophesised sadly. The insects, and then the birds, returned to their meal seconds after a troubled Attia began his cautious descent to the forest floor, far below.
4
There were at least two bodies, maybe more. Bits and pieces had been hacked off, leaving an evil jumble of flesh, seared right down to exposed bone in places.
Pace would have needed a long, lingering examination to be sure of just how many bodies might be in there but he didn’t have the stomach for it. He felt numb and found his fingers instinctively gripping the Sten more tightly.
He had seen similar sights before, especially when flying as part of the British contingent of the UN, in several peace-keeping operations within the African theatre. It was a long time ago but exposure to previous horror allowed him to quickly adjust to the stink in the air and ignore the swarms of flies eagerly waiting for their feast to cool a little. That was when a thought struck home; he should be filming what was happening to them, which he quickly did.
‘Who do you think they are?’ whispered Ruby, suddenly leaning heavily against his shoulder. Deep down, she knew well enough but hoped to be contradicted. Pace wasn’t going to help her out on that score.
‘What’s left of Team One,’ he said slowly. ‘As for who, I can’t tell. It might be all of them in there.’
‘But what about Hammond, and Cosmos? Did they see this and just push on? You don’t think they’re mixed up in there too, do you?’ Her face was pale with shock, her head shaking in visible disbelief.
‘I don’t think so.’ A niggling message itched at his tired brain until he had to acknowledge it. The message told him that this was no time to stand around, out in the open; they were in danger again. ‘But we shouldn’t stay here.’ His words came out too harshly and she shot him an uncertain look.
Gripping the bike by the handlebars, he led Ruby across to the far side of the road and pushed directly into the thick jungle, without pausing. He concentrated on moving about thirty feet into the foliage, with the actual journey being nearer to sixty feet by the time they had circled around huge tree trunks, waist-thick aerial roots and luminescent green ferns with stems as thick as a man’s arm.
Propping the bike against a massive tree trunk nearly twenty feet in circumference, he motioned for both of them to sit, with a downward wave of his hands, suddenly aware that they should be making as little noise as possible. They both crouched on a matted forest floor of dead leaves and thin, fibrous, ground roots.
‘What is it?’ whispered Ruby, both of them having pushed their radio microphones away from their mouths.
‘This is getting terrifying,’ she whispered again. ‘James.…I don’t understand…who would do something like this?’
‘It definitely wasn’t the locals, that’s certain. Bodies don’t burn that easily – they’re too full of fluid. Did you smell the petrol?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘It’s a very modern way of starting a barbeque, don’t you think?’
‘So, who? Those men back down the road? Do you think there are others out here, waiting to catch us?’
‘It’s logical to assume that the same people who tried to kill us earlier are actually part of a much bigger group, given what we’ve just seen,’ he reasoned evenly. ‘Those two weren’t alone after all. There were others.’
‘Now you’re really scaring me,’ she shuddered. ‘You don’t know really. You’re just guessing, right?’
‘You’re right, but it adds up if we like it or not. Whoever it is could still be close by, so we need to be on our guard. Forget about moving hard and fast, that won’t keep us alive. We must be very cautious.’
‘I agree with you there.’ She forced a watery smile and wiped away tears from the inner corners of her eyes, smearing whiter streaks across her dirty face.
Not for the first time that day, he had a very real suspicion hovering at the back of his mind that neither of them would survive to ever come out of the Amazon, though he would try his hardest to keep them alive.
‘If whoever did this is after the race competitors, it makes sense that they’d stick around and wait for the other teams to come charging in here too.’
Although her instinct was to flee, she agreed with him and they settled down to wait. Morning eased into midday and they remained secreted in the small space between the buttress roots, well hidden from prying eyes. Ruby even managed
some fitful sleep during the next few hours, with Pace on guard.
He watched the minute hand on his diving watch crawl terminally slowly around the face, the luminous hands and time gradations clearly visible in the gloom. When he wasn’t looking at his watch he was peering down the fixed sights of the Sten. Sweeping it from left to right with mechanical regularity, he sat with his back pressed firmly up against the tree trunk, finger curled around the trigger.
He couldn’t understand where the killers had gone. Why go to the extremes of torching bodies just to leave? And why murder innocent people in the first place? Life in the sweltering rainforest was no help at all, as it continued to squawk, chatter, cry and occasionally shriek above him, making it hard to concentrate.
The two human beings were the only creatures that stayed totally silent. He watched and sweated; Ruby slept and sweated. Wolf had known his name and admitted to being paid money to murder them, so it must be all the competitors that were being targeted, Pace reasoned. Why? He had no idea.
After nearly two hours or so, Ruby’s eyes twitched open and she came back to him. Once fully roused, she was as worried as before. They didn’t talk much aside from exchanging the odd whispered word of encouragement. Pace stayed alert and focused on the surrounding jungle, watching for an attack. In the end she dozed off again.
His watch told him they had been waiting in silent vigil for over three hours before muscle cramps and general frustration finally urged him to take a chance. He gently shook Ruby awake before leaving the bike lodged between the roots and heading quietly back towards the road together. They skirted the same mass of trunks and hanging vines until the wide slash of reddish brown mud became visible.
Their ears tuned out the natural sounds of the rainforest and searched for the slightest hint of a spoken word, a footstep or other human activity. There was nothing out of place, save for the stink of charred death that still floated languidly on the still, humid air. With the sun riding high in the clear blue sky, beating ferociously down upon the road, the smell had worsened.