RACE AMAZON: Maelstrom (James Pace novels Book 2)

by Andy Lucas

  Smiling with relief, he relaxed into his harness and waited for the ride to end.

  11

  ‘You’re a very lucky man,’ the familiar lips chided warmly, almost the moment that the outer door had been slammed shut and the harness removed.

  Her eyes brimmed wetly and a silver trail of tears tracked down her cheeks. Leaning against him; hardly daring to believe he was real, Sarah half laughed and hurriedly wiped her eyes with the back of her hands, at the same time cocking her head upwards as if to keep the water trapped between her eyelids.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ Pace asked, feigning a sternness his overjoyed heart didn’t feel.

  ‘I could ask you the same question,’ she cried softly into his shoulder. ‘Were you deliberately trying to scare the living daylights out of me? I’ve been worried sick for days, praying you were still alive.’ Her cheeks flushed hotly.

  ‘What happened?’ was all he could say. Seeing her again so overwhelmed him that he was lost for the words he knew should be coming out of his mouth. He had so much to ask her, and so much to tell her, yet his tongue seemed to have short-circuited. Before she could reply, another voice broke in on them. It was the same gruff speaker he’d heard on the other end of his radio set.

  Pace twisted his body to see who the voice belonged to, eyeing the approaching soldier carefully.

  ‘I’m glad to see you, Mr Pace. How do you feel?’ It was a genuine question but there was little sincerity in the man’s tone.

  ‘I’ve had better days.’

  ‘I bet you have.’

  ‘Would you mind telling me who you are, where the hell I am and what the bloody hell is going on.’

  ‘I know you’re in the dark. There are some things I can tell you and some that I can’t.’

  The man was mixed race, tending more towards the lighter skin tones of an Asian rather than the ebony of Afro-Caribbean heritage. His nose was thin and slightly bent at the tip, as if it had been broken more than once. He looked close to one hundred and ninety pounds, sported a heavy build and wore his hair cropped close to his skull. He wore a black combat suit with no markings, military boots and carried an evil-looking survival knife set in a sheath just above his left ankle. A webbing pistol belt, snugly housing a large automatic pistol, gave him an air of purpose.

  ‘Okay, so start with something you can tell me,’ said Pace.

  At this point, another similarly clad soldier walked into view, carrying two plastic mugs of steaming coffee.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, as she took it from him, then handed one to Pace. The hot liquid was strong, sugary and milky. He hated sugar in hot drinks almost as much as he hated milk in coffee but he managed a couple of swallows and felt the warmth flooding down into his stomach, revitalising his spirit a little more.

  ‘Well, Mr Pace.’ Pace tutted sharply and asked the man to call him James. ‘Okay, James. My name is one of those things I cannot tell you, not my real name anyway. For the sake of convenience you can call me Baker.’

  ‘Special Forces?’ It seemed too obvious not to be the case. In return, Baker smiled and shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘Forgive me, Baker, but you don’t sound Brazilian.’

  ‘Let’s just say that I’m a specialist in this kind of operation and leave it at that.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Pace conceded, ‘but I expect as much information as you can manage.’

  Baker proceeded to fill him in as much as he was going to. It seemed that Doyle McEntire had decided it was time to use a team drawn from his company’s more than useful private security arm. A group of thirty individuals had been hastily gathered, equipped and dropped into Brazil clandestinely after it became clear that the local authorities were struggling to deal with the situation.

  The rescue team had set up a central base of operations and scoured the route in a desperate bid to recover as many competitors as possible. Baker’s tone told him their efforts hadn’t been completely successful. Pace saw the pile of smoking bodies in his mind’s eye, so didn’t need to be told.

  ‘How many have you saved? I couldn’t tell you that Cosmos and Sarah weren’t with me when we spoke on the radio, it would have compromised their escape plan. Now I know you are real, and not a trick, they’ll need your help. You have to go and get them now.’ His voice cut the air with urgency.

  ‘Were they in a hovercraft, sir?’ The question came from the second soldier, still standing behind Baker. Pace shot him an enquiring look and the man met his gaze squarely.

  ‘Yes, they were going to make a run for Manaus if I didn’t return in time,’ he explained. An oppressive atmosphere had sprung up from nowhere and his sixth sense tickled at his spine with icy fingers. ‘They thought it was a ruse, to trap us. I said I’d go alone and come back with help. They’ll have started their run by now. What time is it?’ For some reason, his brain forgot that he had a watch strapped to his own wrist.

  Baker fixed Pace with a sombre stare. ‘The hovercraft was picked up on our tracking system before we reached you. It got about ten miles downstream before it was destroyed by enemy action. Looks like a couple of fast boats intercepted them. I’m very sorry.’

  ‘Sunk?’ Pace was dumbstruck. More good people, friends even, gone forever. They’d been through so much together and he owed his very life to each of them. Pace hadn’t even been there with them at the end.

  ‘I should have been with them. I owe them everything.’

  ‘Then you’d be dead, just like them,’ said Baker. ‘And what would that achieve? Nothing.’ He wasn’t being deliberately blunt. Later, after knowing him better, Pace would begin to understand that Baker was a man of few words and of little wasted breath.

  ‘That would be the last thing they’d have wanted,’ soothed Sarah. She held his hand again and gave it a gentle squeeze. ‘They would be over the moon to know you escaped with your life.’

  Of course she was right. If the circumstances were reversed, he wouldn’t have begrudged them their lives; far from it. Still, their loss was devastating to him. Wonderful souls had been murdered. The image of Ruby’s slim frame being torn to shreds by gunfire chilled him to the bone. And then there was Cosmos. How anything could snatch the life from such a gigantic presence was hard to bear. Their loss was more than a horror, it was a tragedy.

  ‘No one should have died. That wasn’t the point of any of this.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ admitted Sarah gently.

  Unable to cope with the flood of emotions threatening to swamp him, Pace pushed thoughts of fallen comrades from his mind and took time to have a good look around.

  The bare metal of the fuselage was uniformly black and there was thin, dark cord carpeting on the floor. He was able to stand up straight, with a good few inches left to spare. There were no windows anywhere.

  ‘We couldn’t use a helicopter,’ Baker answered his querying look. ‘They just don’t have the range to get in here deeply, and none of them large enough to carry men and equipment have any real speed. Have you ever heard of tilt-rotor aircraft?’

  Pace nodded slowly. ‘Aircraft that look like normal turboprops but have engines and transmission nacelles mounted on each wingtip. They fly like a conventional aeroplane but can take off and land like a helicopter.’

  Baker smiled and nodded. ‘You know your aircraft. The nacelles look like large rugby balls with the propellers sticking out the front end. They pivot up ninety degrees for take-off and landing so the props spin like miniature helicopter rotors at the end of each wing. This allows you to take off and land like a helicopter, as you rightly said, then you can drop the props back level again once you’re up and you have a standard aeroplane. It gives the range, power and speed of a small plane but with the versatility of a helicopter.’

  ‘This is an Osprey we’re in now, right?’ Pace had remained interested in military aviation after leaving the Royal Air Force and was intrigued at the thought of a conventional aircraft with the strategic benefits of a helicopter.

/>   Baker nodded. ‘Built for the United States Navy, it is based on a variant known as the V22 Osprey. Naturally, Mr McEntire has paid for some very extensive modifications that help with covert ops.’

  ‘Like no windows.’

  ‘Only in the fuselage,’ he explained. ‘There are windows in the cockpit of course. The airframe is standard but the electronics are top of the range. Most is equipment you normally only sell to the military; it’s against the law to sell it to civilian outfits, but McEntire obviously has his sources.’

  ‘So I’m beginning to see,’ agreed Pace.

  ‘The aircraft has some very special modifications built-in,’ he spoke airily, gesturing around with his large hands. ‘It is virtually invisible to radar and satellite tracking. The fuselage is reinforced against small arms fire and the engine exhausts have been muffled to reduce the heat signature. We carry no running lights and the internal lights cannot be seen outside because there are no windows. The pilots use night vision systems after dark so they don’t have cockpit lights on. Even if they did, the treated glass used for the cockpit windows is coated to stop spillage.’

  ‘So, we are in a perfect night aircraft,’ Pace summarised.

  ‘True.’

  ‘How many people are on board?’ The large lower deck was totally empty. This was obviously where the cargo or troops were usually kept. The single flight of steps led upwards, he guessed, to the flight deck.

  ‘Only seven,’ Baker answered. ‘We couldn’t risk bringing any more on the rescue. It can carry over fifty at a push but come and see for yourself.’

  He stopped at the steps and waited while Baker slipped past him and went on up. The other soldier obviously had things to do on the lower deck because he made no move to follow them. Pace followed Baker up, trailed by Sarah.

  The steps led him into an enlarged cockpit area which was spacious and crammed with bank upon bank of computer terminals and hi-tech gadgetry, all slotted neatly into flush fitting consoles and wall panels. Chairs, bolted to the floor, sat in front of these stations. Most of these chairs were empty, their screens silently relaying information to nobody in particular.

  Radar scopes scanned green and orange at different terminals, whilst text scrolled continuously across screens, set at a forty-five degree angle into the roof edges of the Osprey’s fuselage. There was little noise inside the Osprey and the ride was so smooth that Pace could easily have thought himself to be in a room underground if he hadn’t known he was really skimming above the dark heart of the Amazon.

  A mass of electronic instruments comprised the control systems that two pilots carefully tended. A female, crop-cut and dark clad like her male colleagues, sat off to one side, navigating. Another two members of the rescue team stood impassively around a small circular table in the main area; it was a high table, designed to be used when standing, sporting nifty metal grab rails around its circumference. The table top itself was a circular computer screen and the men were discussing a detailed, digital chart currently on display.

  These were serious men, with automatic weapons slung easily on shoulder straps. Their features looked Caucasian but both were very heavily blacked up around face and neck. They were fighting men and each exuded a similar sense of solid professionalism to Baker. He introduced them as Smith and Brown. All exchanged brief handshakes and they left them to their planning; Pace following as Baker led him over to a long, low seat built flush against the fuselage.

  They all sat down, for a moment in silence, then Baker buckled himself into one of five seatbelts. He seemed relaxed as he motioned for them both to do likewise. A sudden sensation in the pit of Pace’s stomach made the reason clear. They were about to land.

  Sarah suddenly grabbed at her seatbelt for dear life, as the aircraft literally leaned over on its side and pulled up into an incredibly tight one hundred and eighty degree turn. Baker just held the edge of the seat, seemingly unaffected by the next few minutes of wild turning and pitching. Pace was an experienced pilot and his body naturally compensated for the sudden movements.

  The landing itself was over barely before Pace realised it had happened. The pilots bled off the speed as they switched the nacelles gradually through ninety degrees, until their forward momentum stopped and they hovered, motionless, in the night sky. Easing down the throttles, the Osprey slowly descended until the wheels touched down.

  Baker led them back down the steps and out of a large rear door that had opened and lowered, to form a ramp. Outside, he spoke to someone curtly and so rapidly that Pace couldn’t catch what was said. Sarah stayed close behind him but the rest of the crew made no move to join them.

  They had landed in a sizeable clearing, edged by huge forest trees. At some point in time one of the trees had fallen, dragging a few of its neighbours down with it; so intertwined most of them were with creepers and vines. The soldiers had helped nature by clearing away the rotten wood to make their camp. It was large enough to take the Osprey but not by much. Pace knew it had taken a highly skilled pilot to get them down in one piece.

  With its hugely outsized rotors now slowed to walking pace, it looked menacing, even in repose. It was painted completely black; an ugly-looking machine yet strangely graceful with it. It reminded him of a squashed down Hercules transport, but the wings were short and stubby, capped with nacelles that were more cigar-shaped than he’d imagined, with darkened windows in the cockpit and an array of ugly attachments all over. Slung beneath the nose section sat a large calibre cannon, set into a turret-ball mount. He recognised it as the same attachment fitted to attack helicopters like the Apache and Cobra.

  Baker didn’t pause in his stride and there was no sign of whoever it was he spoke to; they must have disappeared around the other side of the aircraft Pace decided.

  Walking beyond the clearing, returning with a strange feeling of homecoming, the trees swallowed the rapidly clouding night sky from view. For somebody more used to semi-rural England, he couldn’t understand why he felt so comfortable beneath treetops that had made him feel so claustrophobic barely two weeks before.

  The camouflage netting was so good that he nearly walked right into it. If Baker hadn’t stooped and lifted the curtain, he wouldn’t have seen it in the thick darkness beneath the trees. It wasn’t like any netting, military or otherwise, that he had ever seen before. It had a solid inner lining to block all light. As Baker lifted it, a wave of red light rolled out to taunt the darkness.

  He held it up for them to enter and they slipped beneath it, moving inside what soon became apparent was a command tent. Once inside with them, Baker dropped the curtain. The red light was then replaced by the harshness of bare electric bulbs.

  The command tent reached to a height of twenty feet in the centre and sloped down to three feet at the edges. Circular, like a miniature big top, it was dark green and vaguely musty. The camouflage netting draped from the lower lip of the tent, which was designed to be open, down to the ground sheet.

  Lights were of the bare-bulb variety, taped up to the plastic support skeleton of the tent. Basic in design, it looked as if it could be put up and down in a matter of minutes. At least it was waterproof, Pace thought, as the first drumming of rain on canvas told him the forest had started another of its watering sessions.

  Even beneath the canopy, it was falling noticeably heavily within a few moments. Pace had always liked the sound of rain on a caravan roof, or rattling against a windowpane, and he felt a shiver tingle involuntarily up and down his spine.

  ‘What can you tell me about what happened out there?’ Baker’s question came from the far side of the tent, where he had seated himself behind a computer console. The chair was canvas, similar in design to a camping chair, and was one of a dozen or so that made up the furniture inside. There were three laptop computers, a fold-up table sporting a merrily bubbling coffee percolator and a stand-alone rack filled with automatic rifles, handguns and something resembling a bazooka. It was sparse and also completely empty.

&n
bsp; ‘What do you want to know?’ Pace replied, moving across to join him. ‘People were suddenly getting murdered all around us and I still don’t understand why.’

  ‘You will, but for now try telling me about the people you say died. Did you run into any of the other competitors, alive I mean?’ The image of burned, twisted corpses sprang back into his mind and Pace shook his head solemnly.

  ‘Not alive, no.’

  ‘Go on. Please, it’s important.’

  ‘I saw bodies,’ he explained tightly. ‘Out there on the road but they were in a real state.’ Bile burned at the back of his throat. ‘Burned beyond recognition and covered with flies.’

  ‘You think they were competitors?’ Baker tapped a code into the computer as he spoke, not looking at Pace but concentrating hard on the screen in front of him. ‘Any clothing or unburned parts you might have recognised as specific people?’

  ‘Not that I noticed,’ Pace replied sharply. ‘I didn’t feel like rummaging around the entrails to find out. Whoever did it couldn’t have been far away so we high-tailed it into the jungle and laid low.’

  Baker didn’t bat an eyelid at the rebuke. ‘Definitely the best thing to do, given the circumstances.’ Then a question he didn’t expect. ‘And did you kill anybody?’ Baker turned and noted Pace’s incredulous expression, mistaking it for poor hearing. Louder this time, he repeated himself. ‘I asked if you killed anybody.’

  Pace flicked his eyes across to where Sarah was standing. She looked at him, expectancy creasing the corners of her eyes. Then he looked back at Baker. ‘I can’t be sure. There was some shooting and admit I did some of it. I can’t say if anybody died at my hands.’ It was a blatant lie because he knew he’d killed several men with the Sten but Baker didn’t need to know that, and neither did Sarah.