RACE AMAZON: Maelstrom (James Pace novels Book 2)

by Andy Lucas

  He didn’t know their names, nor did he understand many of the languages they used. Occasionally they spoke in English and, from these snippets, he gleaned that they were nearing their destination. As the men were careful not to use names in front of the prisoners, Bailey had made up his own names for them based on their physical features.

  The one who had laid into Poranchez was tall and thin, with a hooked nose and an air of malevolence. Naturally, he became known as Hooky. Another suffered from quite severe dandruff; noticeable in his jet black hair. He became Dusty. Their final tormentor was very short and muscular, so he acquired the name Stumpy. The leader did check on them from time to time; he was given the title Lenny.

  Hooky had spent the past two days obviously enjoying hurting them, slapping, poking, kicking and occasionally threatening them with the razor-sharp blade of his machete. He was the worst but the other two joined in happily; mainly with gestures although Stumpy often spat in their faces, especially if they stumbled and fell. Walking with their hands tied behind their backs, they couldn’t save themselves if they fell and both men were heavily bruised and cut from regular falls.

  When the men did use English, it was for the benefit of the prisoners. They would talk about the money they were about to earn for bringing them in alive, and how much fun their paymasters would have torturing and eventually murdering the prisoners.

  They also had a running bet on how long Bailey would survive. Even they were aware of how serious his head injury was and they’d been betting each other almost since the forced march began. Would he last two hours, or five more? Would he survive a cold, rainy night without shelter? Bailey took great satisfaction from having outlived all of their predictions so far.

  The shadowy gloom of the forest floor in daylight thickened into the enveloping weight of darkness, as night fell at the end of the second day. How Bailey had managed to keep going, having lost so much blood from his partially closing wound, was anybody’s guess. He himself had no idea; he’d just kept putting one foot in front of the other for fear of being viewed as a burden and killed by their captors.

  The first day was the worst, with the dizziness and nausea settling by the second.

  Poranchez wasn’t in much better shape except that his injuries were all superficial, and inflicted by the bullying mercenaries – he had no major wound to contend with. Bailey had done his best to keep up conversation with him during the relentless drudgery of trekking up the trail. At the start, Poranchez had responded but gradually he’d withdrawn into himself until now, Bailey’s attempts to talk to him were flatly ignored.

  Bailey wondered if his unresponsive friend’s feet were as blistered and sore as his own. Slicked with sweat and glad of the coolness the night would bring, he kept walking and waited for Lenny to decide to call a halt for the night. An hour after night had fallen, word came back down the line that they were to stop. A few minutes later, happy that his men were still alert and watchful, Lenny came back down the row of men, moving quietly down from his permanent position up at the front of the line. He stopped as he drew level with the prisoners. In the darkness, Bailey sensed rather than saw his unpleasant grin.

  ‘We aren’t stopping for the night,’ he said. ‘We’re having a water break and then we’ll move on. Only a few miles further and we get to the extraction point. Then,’ he leaned in closer and Bailey caught the stench of stale sweat and halitosis, ‘I get to rid myself of you two. We all get paid and you…well…you just get dead.’

  ‘Sometimes life doesn’t quite work out the way we plan,’ reasoned Bailey calmly. ‘Don’t write us off too soon. Whoever is paying you to bring us in might have more use for us alive than dead, did you think of that?’

  ‘You can think that if it makes you feel better,’ Lenny spat. ‘I still think you’d better enjoy your last few hours while you can.’

  ‘Okay. Why don’t you untie us and let us go then,’ Bailey jibed. ‘I promise to use my remaining time wisely if you do.’

  ‘Smart mouth,’ Lenny said, his tone suddenly edged with steel. ‘All I know is that you and your friend are gonna die. And it’s only the thought of losing money on this deal that has stopped me and my men killing you ourselves.’ He meant every word, that much was clear.

  ‘You could end up dead before us,’ Bailey retorted, his anger rising. He was exhausted, thirsty and didn’t have the patience to play the co-operative prisoner any longer.

  Lenny laughed a surprised chuckle. When he spoke, it was in a high, questioning tone steeped with sarcasm. ‘Do you think so? Really?’

  ‘Stranger things have happened.’

  ‘Unlucky for you, not this time. You are gonna die and I’m gonna watch.’

  Barely had the last word sounded from his lips than Lenny died; his head suddenly exploding like an overripe watermelon struck by an invisible sledgehammer.

  6

  ‘Don’t cry out,’ Cosmos warned, raising a finger to his lips. If death had just been about to sneak up on him again; angered at his narrow escapes so far, it was about to be really annoyed at being thwarted again.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Pace recognised the face but his mouth took a little longer to get into gear. As his senses returned, his addled brain realised that he was lying on his back in the mud, with his pack digging painfully between his shoulder blades. The storm raged furiously above the canopy and he could see the rain pouring unhindered on to the narrow strip of road a few feet from where he lay.

  Cosmos was crouched down by his side, also looking out through the wisps of roadside foliage, looking for something although Pace had no idea what it might be. Visibility was still practically nil, so an army could have been standing in the middle of the road; there was no way to see through the falling wall of water.

  Just then, a female head rose from behind Cosmos, closely followed by the rest of her body. Obviously shaken, Ruby looked over at him and noted Cosmos’ raised finger warning. Pace crouched up to join the huddle.

  His chest had cushioned the Sten in his fall and the gun was undamaged. His inflamed wound grumbled at the added insult but at least they still had a weapon to use. It then dawned on him that Cosmos must have carried both of them, on his own, across the road. The solid wall he had ridden into had actually been the giant Kenyan. But where was Hammond? He was nowhere in sight.

  Satisfied all was well, Cosmos quickly motioned for them to follow him deeper into the jungle, which they did, the Sten instinctively finding its way into Pace’s grip.

  Weaving around trunks and pushing through a thick lattice of vines and climbing plants; some with painfully concealed thorns on the stems, Cosmos led them unerringly through the gloomy forest. Streams of water poured down tree trunks and dripped all around the lianas, coating trailing creepers already swollen with a sheath of soaking moss. Small waterfalls gushed down between some of the largest trees but this was no time for a shower.

  The heat remained oppressive despite the torrential rain and they were glad when, a minute or so later, he called their little trek to a halt. He’d stopped nowhere in particular; the jungle still looked thick and uninviting. Beneath the canopy, light was subdued and shadowed completely in large patches, although hued green from passing through the treetops over a hundred and twenty feet above their heads. To Ruby, nothing stood out as different but Cosmos knew exactly where they were.

  Just having him with them, larger than life and physically towering, encouraged her own flagging spirits, and her mind began to click into overdrive in an attempt to make some sense of the past two days. Before she could pull any threads together, however, she saw him shin up one of a dozen or so hanging vines that lay tangled against the trunk of an ancient tree, a few feet off to her right. Within a minute he’d climbed up forty feet. She admired him with a professional’s gaze, knowing how difficult it was to climb a free-moving rope to such a height, let alone a slippery creeper.

  At about fifty feet, he drew level with one of the lower branches, in itself thicker th
an a man’s waist and almost completely encased with moss, lichens and sucker plants; some flowering. Manoeuvring his buttocks nimbly onto this branch; making it look very easy, he grinned down and beckoned them to follow him up.

  The tree trunk looked oddly twisted, unnaturally grey and bulbous. Pace didn’t know enough about botany to recognise a tree totally encased by a strangler fig.

  The fig had fallen as a seed and been trapped against the tree’s bark, many decades before. Once there, it had sent out aerial roots that grew down to the forest floor, from where they drew up vital water and nutrients, allowing the seed to grow. Strangler figs; and there were several types, just kept growing and growing; up, down and around, eventually totally encasing the parent tree and killing it. Though long since dead, the tree remained standing and the fig had usurped its place in the forest ecosystem without having to try too hard.

  Pace gripped a vine, watching as Ruby chose another. The climb would have been impossible with their backpacks because they weren’t climbing up strong rope this time. Neither of them knew how much weight the vines would hold, so they took a moment to stash their packs between some buttress roots, covering them effectively with handfuls of leaf litter.

  He agonised about leaving the Sten behind but knew it would make the climb more difficult. Loathe as he was to leave it, leave it he did. All he took was a small torch and a bottle of energy drink, which he jammed into his belt.

  The MicroCam remained snugly in its belt pouch.

  It wasn’t quite as easy as Cosmos had made it look and he didn’t have the finely conditioned muscle tone of the giant, though being in the forest for so long had toughened him up. Ignoring the prickling around his chest through gritted teeth, he made it up the vine in respectable time, despite feeling fresh blood seeping from beneath his dressing.

  Ruby virtually scampered up her vine and was waiting for him, hardly out of breath, when he hauled himself onto the branch a few seconds later. Once up, the reason for the climb was clear.

  Nature, by accident, had allowed for a depression where the branch joined the trunk. Over time this depression had become covered by the body of the strangler fig. Tightly knotted, the sheath of the fig had created a small natural shelter between itself and the dead trunk. It was ten feet high and five across; resembling a large, enclosed bird’s nest.

  Cosmos had previously torn away some of the creepers to form a makeshift entrance and had already squeezed his huge frame inside. Ruby and Pace followed the African inside. It was a tight squeeze for the three of them but at least it was impossible to fall out. The vegetation was so thickly entwined that it gave the shelter a solid, reassuring feeling.

  It was obviously a hiding place. But what was Cosmos hiding from? Or who? This seemed more likely, given their own recent experiences? Had he run into whoever butchered the athletes on the road?

  ‘Where’s Max?’ Pace panted, still slightly winded from the climb. It was dingy inside the hide and the cloud of anger that swam onto Cosmos’s features was more felt than seen. He did not answer. ‘Cosmos? What happened to you two?’

  ‘That is something I have been trying to understand myself,’ answered the giant, thinking back. ‘I do not really know. We were making good progress for a while but Max argued for a rest stop.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with that. Okay, so he wanted a break.’

  ‘I didn’t think we had the time. The rain was stopping and I was not tired because we had not been riding for long. I thought the same as you do now,’ he said to Pace. ‘That he was tired himself and didn’t want to admit it, so I agreed to stop for ten minutes.’

  ‘Any problems on the road?’ His question was a veiled probe about piles of dead bodies. Had they been there for Cosmos and Hammond to find?

  ‘I saw things later that I wish I had not, but that was later,’ his face looked pained. ‘At the time, no. Everything was clear and I was concerned for your life. We had to get help quickly.’

  ‘Go on.’ said Ruby, fearing to hear the rest but needing to understand.

  ‘I should never have agreed to stop,’ continued Cosmos bitterly. ‘Max was on the back seat. We slowed to a stop and I was about to get off of my saddle, then…’

  ‘Then?’ asked Pace

  ‘Then,’ he went on, ‘the next thing I knew I woke up in the middle of the road, with a terrible headache.’

  ‘What?’ Ruby’s was a reactive question.

  ‘I woke up, which I suppose I should be grateful for,’ he added ruefully.

  Pace didn’t know why he was so surprised; at that point he would have believed almost anything. Reality and his oh-so-normal life back home in leafy Essex were long forgotten. Fighting to survive cleared the mind of disbelief and had expanded his boundaries of acceptance.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ frowned Ruby. ‘What are you saying? That you had an accident? Did you fall off?’

  His eyes had adjusted to the gloom and Pace noted that her face was taut with anxiety. Too much had happened too quickly and she looked on the verge of screaming her head off with frustration. He grasped one of her hands and gave it a squeeze. She didn’t pull away or even turn to acknowledge him but the tension in her shoulders seemed to soften a fraction.

  ‘I did not fall. I was hit over the back of the head. Clubbed from behind like a helpless animal,’ explained Cosmos solemnly. ‘I do not know how long I was unconscious but when I awoke, Max was gone and so was our bicycle. That’s all I know,’ he added softly, subconsciously rubbing what must have been one hell of a lump on the back of his skull. To floor a man of his stature, the blow must have been either incredibly heavy, or professionally delivered. But Hammond? Why? What would he possibly have to gain?

  And if it wasn’t him, then who sapped Cosmos and took Hammond? For the next half an hour they discussed the possibilities but came back to the same point; that they had no way of knowing what happened because Cosmos had been unconscious.

  Equally disturbing was the revelation that Cosmos had recovered his senses and pushed on alone, only to come across the same pile of corpses they had discovered; only when he got there they were still flaming. He’d seen no sign of the perpetrators and had slipped into the jungle for cover.

  Having a good idea of where he was, he took the brave decision to try to get to the river section by walking alone through the jungle. He aimed to run parallel to the road as much as he could. Apart from a near miss of treading on a snake and jumping quickly to avoid being bitten, the journey had been uneventful.

  He had reached the river after twelve hours of hard slog, only to find the staging area swarming with heavily armed men; of various ethnic backgrounds. He described them as mercenaries.

  Remaining hidden in the jungle, Cosmos had overheard snippets of conversation. Some were in Spanish and French but the majority in stilted English. He overheard two of the men laughing together. All they were waiting for was the final competitors to turn up. Once everybody had been killed, they could move on to their next objective.

  Cosmos had seen the hovercraft that they were supposed to use for the leg downriver, still tethered to a small wooden jetty, but they were well guarded. They looked undamaged but he couldn’t be sure because of the distance involved.

  He finished by explaining how some of the men had laughed about a radio message from another group of their men, telling them of the road massacre and of taking prisoners away to the main rendezvous. The corpses had been torched and left behind to strike terror into the hearts of those teams still to pass by; a twisted message of doom.

  ‘I can’t believe this is happening,’ breathed Ruby. ‘I don’t understand any of it. It is so barbaric!’ Her one hope for salvation; the staging post, had just been flushed down the toilet and she couldn’t see another way to get to safety.

  ‘I killed one of them yesterday,’ Cosmos suddenly spoke up again. ‘I was trying to leave the area; to make my way back to you two, when one of the men must have been patrolling the jungle. I walked straight into h
im.’

  ‘I’m sure you had no choice,’ Pace agreed. ‘And you’re not alone on that score.’ This was a very dangerous situation for them all. Too many good people had already died for no reason. Cosmos appreciated the unconditional support.

  ‘This is true. He went to shoot me, so I snapped his neck. There was no choice but I thank you for your words. I wish it had not been so.’

  Although Pace understood, a slight shiver ran up and down his spine at the thought of how destructive those big hands could be. For a second he had images of them closing around his own throat, before shrugging them off. He was very glad the man was on their side.

  ‘So you waited to warn us? When did you find this place?’

  ‘I needed a hiding place and taking to the trees seemed best.’

  ‘How did you know this was here?’ asked Ruby. ‘It’s perfect. You can’t see a thing from below.’

  ‘I was lucky,’ he said. ‘I saw the vines hanging down and started to climb, as fast as I could. I checked out the nearest trees and found this hide on the fifth tree I looked at.’

  A welcome silence filled the alcove and Cosmos shifted his weight on the root-matted branch. Sitting on the roots was actually quite comfortable and, for the first time in days, Pace felt completely safe. It also made the hide feel more homely; even the dripping water was unable to penetrate inside. He took a second to flash his torch around inside. There was no sign of spiders, snakes or bugs but Cosmos would have already removed any, so it wasn’t surprising.

  The torchlight was effective and gave good illumination in such a confined space. Pace figured it wouldn’t make them visible to anybody on the ground and decided to leave it on. He pulled out the energy drink he’d carried up with him and passed it around. They all took a long drink before Cosmos continued with the story. The already stifling heat inside their hideaway rose with a smell of sweating bodies but they ignored it.