by Dick Stivers
“The appetizers!” Thomas exclaimed. “We eat!”
A tangled mass of caterpillars squirmed on the leaf. Barely suppressing a laugh, Thomas took one, popped it into his mouth. He watched the three North Americans as he took several more, threw the handful in his mouth. The tail of one whipped about on his lips until he sucked it in.
His stomach heaving, Lyons watched Blancanales take a caterpillar and eat it. Blancanales took another one, bit off the head, looked at the oozing fluids, then finished it. Gadgets saw Lyons not eating.
“Hey, man. Get with it. High protein.”
“Think of them as sushi,” Blancanales told him. “You’re at a Japanese restaurant eating raw fish. Sea anemones. Except they’re still moving. Once you get past that, the taste is all right.”
Lyons stared at the caterpillars. They writhed their fat bodies against the slick leaf. Some were blue and white, some bright yellow, others reddish. Some of them had long waving antennae.
Blancanales leaned toward Lyons and told him, “You have to. It’s one of the rules of indigenous operations. Eat their food, talk their language, sleep with their girls. Go to it.”
Reaching out, Lyons glanced up, saw all the Indians watching him. He steeled his gut, took one of the wriggling larvae. It was warm in his fingers. Keeping his eyes on the Indians, he thought of egg rolls in a Chinese restaurant and tossed the caterpillar into his mouth. It knotted itself up on his tongue in the long instant before his jaws closed.
Like a half-melted chocolate, it squashed between his teeth. Only after he swallowed did he taste it. A flavor not unlike chicken cream soup. He liked it. He grabbed three more, gulped them. Again, the cream-soup flavor, but with accents of spices he couldn’t identify.
“Hey, they’re great!” he told Thomas.
All the Indians laughed. Thomas slapped him on the back, shook his hand. Then Thomas reached into the fire’s embers, pulled out a blackened tin can.
“Now try some grasshoppers!”
After their meal of caterpillars, roast cicadas, and baked-in-the-shell turtle, Thomas told Able Team what he knew of their mission’s objective. “Two years ago, the army comes. They have machines, boats, helicopters. The soldiers take many Indians, make them slaves. If Indians no work, army shoot. Soldiers make camp for slaves. Sharp wire, high houses with machine guns. Many dogs. But Indians live. Sometimes we attack when they cut jungle. We kill soldiers. Save some Indians. So army get fast boats, boats that fly. More fences. Bombs. Man step on bomb, legs gone.
First, they make road, then dig great holes. Holes bigger than trucks, bigger than many trucks. River boats bring much concrete, long steel. They make concrete buildings in holes. Much of building in hole, only top of building above dirt.
More Europeans and Chinese come, with many machines…”
“Europeans? Chinese?” Blancanales interrupted.
“Yes. Many. Maybe North Americans. They have light hair, light skin. Chinese never work, only watch. Sometimes kill Indians. Maybe the Chinese the boss. They bring new machines, make electricity. Make place like Dr. No, in movie. You see James Bond? Like that…”
“Were you in there?” Lyons asked.
“No. Later some Indians escape. Boats come from mountains, bring yellow sand. The army, the Europeans, the Chinese, they never touch sand. Only Indians. Soldiers wear mask. Soldiers who drive trucks wear mask.
“There is fire. Much fire, not water. Sometimes smoke that kills, one minute and — dead. Soldiers wear suits like spacemen. Indians work, then much sickness. Many Indians sick. Hair fall off, skin fall off, teeth fall off.
“Soldiers take Indians to river, machine-gun. But not all die. We help, they live month, two month. Then they die. Strange things on hands, feet. Sometimes in body — here.” Thomas thumped his chest.
“Did you take them to doctors?” Blancanales asked.
“Doctors?” Thomas almost spat the word. “Government doctors? Army doctors? We take sick men to church station, one night helicopter comes. Many soldiers.”
“Are you sure it was the army? Brazilian army?” Lyons pressed.
“I know army. In time of my father, grandfather, army takes Indians. They are slaves on railroad, on boats. Then for many years, no more slavery. Some government people help Indians, some soldiers build roads with machines. But then army comes to build the city, they take Indians for slaves. Same as old times.”
“Where is their territory?” Lyons asked. “Do they have patrols?”
“Soldiers guard city. Leave only to take slaves. Find villages, attack. Take men, take women.”
Blancanales studied the map and pointed to their position. “We are in Bolivia now. Do the soldiers attack Bolivian Indians?”
“Map means nothing. Never see soldiers of Bolivia. They camp on roads, stay in trucks. No government here.”
“Let’s go, gentlemen.” Lyons gathered up his equipment. “Enough talk. Time to make distance.”
Thomas issued instructions to his men. His son scattered the ashes of the fire with a stick. As the smoke dissipated, the insects returned. Flies found Lyons’s bare skin. He swatted at them with his wet shirt, then slipped on the shirt and pulled the collar up to protect his neck.
Across the clearing, he saw one of the Indians touching up his black body paint. Lyons went to him and squatted down to watch. The Indian squeezed the juice of a fruit into a can, then added pinches of a powdered herb and stirred. He smeared the black mixture onto his skin.
The Indian offered the can to Lyons. Lyons smelled the juice. It had an odd greasy-bitter smell. The Indian stuck a finger in the can and drew a stripe across Lyons’s face.
Lyons held the can up to the flies. None of them came near the can. Stripping off his shirt, he smeared the juice on his shoulders and neck. Insects landed on his arms, and he smeared the last of the mixture there.
Gathering up weapons and cartridge boxes, the Indian pointed to an uncrushed fruit and said, “Genipap.”
“Ge-ni-pap,” Lyons repeated.
Thomas and Blancanales left the clearing. Gadgets shouldered his backpack and followed. Lyons kept the can and fruit, returned to his equipment. He slipped on his shoulder holster and bandoliers, draped his wet shirt over his pack, jogged after the others.
Insects bit his unprotected skin. The fruit and soot-blackened can in one hand, the Atchisson in the other, he couldn’t swat the flies away. He twisted and jerked as he walked, the flies lifting away for an instant, then returning.
He didn’t suffer long. In a few minutes, they came to a stagnant stream overhung with branches. Fragments of midday light flashed on the green water. Lyons squinted against the sudden brilliance, saw on the muddy slopes several canoes camouflaged with brush.
Indians threw aside the branches and fronds. They stacked their boxes and packages in the fire-hollowed interiors of the boats. Blancanales and Gadgets passed them their packs. While the others arranged the equipment, Lyons squatted at the water’s edge and squeezed genipap juice into the battered can. He dipped the can in the scummy water to thin the juice, then dabbed the mixture on his torso. Blancanales watched him.
“Go easy on that stuff,” he told Lyons. “There’s no way to know what it is.”
“I don’t care what it is, the bugs don’t like it. It’s definitely going to save my white skin.”
Thomas saw Lyons blacking his body. “Good. On skin. Face. Hair. Make you not look like civilizado.”
Lyons squeezed the last of the juice out of the fruit and massaged it into his hair and sideburns.
Jaws a foot wide snapped at him. Rising from the stagnant shallow, a ten-foot-long crocodile opened its jaws to take Lyons’s legs. Scrambling backward, digging in his heels and feeling his boots slide in the ooze, Lyons looked into the mouth of the reptile. The jaws opened impossibly wide, exposing jagged rows of teeth. Lyons clawed at the bank, his fingers slipping in the slime.
The jaws ripped away a strip of his pant leg. Lyons heard himself crying ou
t as the crocodile gained another few inches. As the jaws yawned again, Lyons tore his Python from his shoulder holster. He stuck his arm out, the muzzle of the revolver only inches from the pink flesh of the creature’s upper palate.
The 158-grain jacketed hollowpoint slug punched through the soft tissues and exploded from the top of the reptile’s skull, the impact snapping the crocodile’s head back and killing it instantly. Brain gone, its head flopped forward and lay still in the mud. The unblinking eyes bulged from the sockets.
Even as nerve spasms twitched the tail, the Indians crowded past Lyons and dragged the reptile up from the water. They pulled it to higher ground and set about butchering it with their machetes.
Lyons sat on the water’s edge, his Colt Python still in his hand. He stared at his ripped pant leg.
“Good, good, Ironman,” Thomas congratulated him. “Much meat, meat for everyone.”
Gadgets called out to him. “That insect repellent attracts crocodiles. I’d rather get bitten by a fly anytime!”
5
All through the afternoon, Blancanales floated in a green world. The Indians — one man at each end of the narrow canoe — paddled without pause for hours, leaning deep into each stroke, alternating their strokes from side to side. Blancanales sat low in the boat, reclining against his pack, only his knees and face showing above the sides. He had offered to help row, but the Indians pointed to the jungle, touched their eyes, pointed at Blancanales. Blancanales nodded his understanding, radioed Lyons and Gadgets to stay low and unseen.
They passed riverbanks tangled with roots, shallows choked with fallen trees, mud slopes crowded with crocodiles. River birds startled from the water in sheets of winged color. They passed unending walls of jungle. Often, the outspread branches of the huge trees closed over the narrow river, creating a hundred-foot-high tunnel.
Abraham rode in Lyons’s boat. He played bamboo panpipes from time to time, the fluting melodies drifting over the water to Blancanales, who also heard the boy’s laughter as Lyons tried the panpipes.
Lyons buzzed Blancanales on his hand radio. “Hey, Politician. You know what? This kid knows the Gettysburg Address by memory. Word for word.”
Shadow claimed the river as the sun fell in the sky. Blancanales pushed back the camouflage-patterned crush hat he wore, looked up at the sky, checked his watch. Sundown would come in two hours. He keyed his hand radio and said to Gadgets, “Mr. Wizard, ask Thomas Jefferson when we’ll make camp. We’re losing daylight.”
After a pause, Thomas’s voice answered. “Soon. Maybe hour. Then we stay at village. I like this radio. Maybe we get radios. Is possible?”
“We can work out a deal.”
A whistle came from the shore. The Indian boatmen stopped their rowing. The whistle rose and fell. Blancanales’s radio buzzed: “This is Thomas. We go to shore now. Please, I speak with men…”
Blancanales and Lyons held up their hand radios. The boatmen had heard radios before, but never the broadcast of words in their own language. They recognized Thomas’s voice, listened to his instructions. They kept looking across the water to Thomas, then looking at the radio. After his voice cut off, Blancanales and Lyons acknowledged.
“Got the message here,” Lyons told him.
“These men heard it, too.”
The boatmen saw the foreigners speaking, then tried to speak, also, all four chattering and shouting into the microphones. Thomas had to shout at them across the water to stop the noise. After checking their shotguns and putting the weapons at their feet, they paddled for the riverbank.
Blancanales did not see the waiting warriors until the boats touched the weeds and knotted roots of the shore. Black with body paint, the men left cover and helped pull the dugout canoes onto the bank. They carried bows and arrows, spears, old single-shot shotguns. There were no greetings, no friendly chatter. Some of the men and boys stared at the North Americans, but the others spoke quickly with Thomas, gestured to the north with their weapons.
Thomas turned to Able Team. “I am not chief. Molomano is chief. Fight soldiers many times, lose men. Much sadness with women. Children hungry. When soldiers near, Molomano no fight. Always run. But soldiers find village this day, attack. Take some men for slaves. All other people run away, hide here. This good chance for you to make many friends, make Molomano strong chief again. I tell him three civilizadoscome from United States to help fight soldiers. That good story, yes? We fight soldiers?”
“We want prisoners. Soldiers to question.”
“Question, then kill, yes?”
Groups of Indians clustered along the trail. Voices greeted Thomas and his men. But when the tribespeople saw the foreigners, they went quiet. Children ran behind their mothers, young boys gripped their stick spears. Nursing mothers covered their babies.
In a glance, Blancanales spotted malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies in many of the people. Like the warriors with Thomas, the men wore loincloths. Children wore nothing. Most of the women were dressed in shapeless handwoven robes belted with braided fibers. One pregnant teenager wore a faded red football jersey, her seven-month belly stretching the number 10. Many of the people had running sores, spindly arms and legs. The babies of women with shriveled breasts cried continuously, always hungry for milk their mothers didn’t have. Older children had the distended bellies of malnutrition.
Thomas strode through the gathered tribe, calling out to the people, pointing from Lyons to the loads of crocodile meat his men carried. Flies and insects covered the meat, buzzed in swirls as Thomas pantomimed Lyons shooting the reptile. The people turned to Lyons, stared at the shirtless white man with the blackened body and face.
Blancanales leaned to Lyons, spoke in a low voice. “Notice that he left out the screaming and crawling.”
“Hey! You look down the throat of a crocodile and keep your cool.”
“Pol!” Gadgets hissed. “Catch his act. You could learn something.”
They watched as Thomas described in words and sounds and pantomime the DC-3 coming out of the sky. He slipped the Remington 870 from his shoulder, presented it to Molomano.
Puzzled by the unfamiliar weapon, the chief pointed it at the sky, pulled the trigger. It was unloaded. He looked for the latch to hinge the shotgun open as if it were a single-shot. Thomas pointed to the foregrip, moved his hand in a pump motion.
Jerking back the pump, slamming it forward, the chief chambered a round and aimed at a tree. The weapon didn’t fire. Thomas reached out, pushed the safety across. The chief aimed again, fired.
Leaves and twigs showered the trail. Chief Molomano grinned. Thomas made the pumping motion again and again. Chambering shell after shell, the chief fired five more times.
Jumping with excitement, Molomano flourished the shotgun in the air, shouted to his warriors. They shouted, waved their spears and old shotguns.
Thomas called out to Able Team, “Shoot your guns!”
Gadgets and Blancanales fired three bursts from their autorifles; Lyons pulled out his Python, fired an instant later. The pistol’s deafening blast brought laughter from the tribesmen. Thomas held up his M-l carbine, pointed to the north. All the men shouted, waved their weapons.
Thomas went to Able Team. “It is agreed,” he told them, slinging his M-l over his shoulder. “Tonight, we kill soldiers.”
*
An hour before dark they were heading west. Three tribesmen — Molomano and two warriors — accompanied Able Team and Thomas’s fighters. They carried only weapons and ammunition. For the first mile, the line moved at a steady, jogging pace. Point men sprinted far ahead to scout parallel trails and check possible ambush sites before dark.
Lyons realized Able Team slowed the Indians. The black-painted men ran effortlessly and unconsciously, their sweat-glistening legs flashing in the fading light. From time to time, they forgot the North Americans, leaving the three men behind. Then they glanced back, slacked their strides until the clothed and weapons-heavy Able Team closed the line.
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br /> Counting in pounds, Lyons totalled the weight of the weapons and ammunition he carried. The Atchisson, almost ten pounds loaded. Four extra magazines of 12-gauge, five pounds. The Beretta and two twenty-round magazines, four pounds. And then the weight of his Python.
Behind him, Blancanales and Gadgets carried almost as much weight. With every step, their boots shattered the silence of the ferns and hardwoods. The Indians’ feet skipped over the bedding of dead leaves and wood and living vines without a sound, the tribesmen barefooted, Thomas and his men in water-softened leather sandals.
Miles later, as night closed on them, they reached the point men. The paths had taken the twelve men from one side to the other of a fold in the river. Thomas, Molomano and the point men huddled in a whispered exchange for a minute. Thomas then took the information to the three foreigners. “Soldiers camp in the village. They have boats. Big boats with lights, machine guns. Big for many men. Two boats that fly…”
“What do you mean, ‘that fly’?” Lyons asked.
“I do not know the word. They have propeller in back end, two men, maybe three ride. It not touch water.”
“Air cushion!” Gadgets told them. He asked Thomas: “They spray water out the sides?”
“Yes, yes. And some shoot machine gun. Some bombs. Fly over water, over sand…”
“And the soldiers?” Lyons interrupted.
“Many. Some on boat, some in village. They have many Indian people for slaves. Some of this tribe, some of other tribe.”
“And did your men see the guard around the camp? What are their positions?” Blancanales asked.
“Many. They saw soldiers putting bombs around village. Bombs with long string, if touch string, boom. Like a hundred shotguns. Other bombs with electric wire. If soldiers see Indian, hear Indian, turn on bomb.”
“Claymore,” Gadgets concluded.
“No fun,” Lyons said. “Going up against claymores in the dark, in the jungle.”
“Who says we have to slip in on land?” Gadgets asked.
“Get boats, float down on the current,” Blancanales nodded.