Amazon Slaughter at-4

by Dick Stivers

  “Put some Thorazine on the list. Isn’t that what they use when PCP crazies hallucinate?”

  “Don’t worry about him. I asked Thomas about it. He told me Lyons’ll be all right tonight or tomorrow.”

  “Sane or not, Lyons travels tonight. We leave here at dusk. We shouldn’t be here now. The slavers lost a patrol and three boats. Today or tomorrow, they’ll send another patrol.”

  “Gringos!” Lieutenant Silveres called from the cabin door. “Am I your prisoner, also?”

  “No, sir,” Blancanales told him. “You are not. In fact, we need your help as liaison with the officials of your country.”

  The lieutenant sat on the bench with them. “Why do you make a recording?”

  “A report to our superiors,” Blancanales replied.

  “In the Central Intelligence Agency?”

  “Why did you assume those Cubans were CIA?” Blancanales asked.

  As the other men continued talking, Gadgets packed up his recorder and took it back to his electronics kit. He prepared the radio and tape unit for a transmission.

  “Does not the CIA use Cubans?”

  “There are many Cubans in the world. Millions.”

  “And many Americans, also,” the lieutenant countered. “In countries where they do not belong. Where are my pistol and rifle, gringo? If I am not a prisoner, I want my weapons returned.”

  “Certainly,” Blancanales answered, his voice smooth, smile lines crinkling the corners of his eyes. “We will return your weapons when we cross the border. Right now, however, you are in Bolivia. And it’s not proper that you carry a weapon in a country where you don’t belong, isn’t that correct?”

  “What? And by what authorization do you operate here?”

  Giving his Beretta a last wipe with an oil rag, Blancanales snapped in the magazine, reholstered the auto-pistol. “This is Bolivia. We operate by the authorization of the government of Bolivia.”

  “Pol! Over here,” Gadgets called out. “You got to help me run up this antenna. It has to go up this boat’s radio mast.”

  “Show me the authorization!” the lieutenant demanded.

  Blancanales went to the railing and pointed south. “You have to ask the man who issued the directive. You go upriver about five hundred miles, hop over the Andes, make a right turn at La Paz and go straight to the Minister of the Interior. He’ll tell you all about it.”

  *

  Over four thousand miles away, in the corn-room of the Stony Man complex in Virginia, the identification signal from Gadgets’s radio squawked from the wall-mounted monitor:

  “Good morning! This is Mr. Wizard, calling from far, far away. Stand by for transmission.”

  As the machines automatically recorded the message, Aaron Kurtzman returned to his makeshift desk with coffee and lunch. Unwilling to wait in his own office for the overdue transmission from Able Team, Kurtzman had brought his briefcase to the corn-room. Now he heard the voice of Gadgets Schwarz. Dropping his lunch on the table, spilling half his coffee, Kurtzman hit the interoffice button on his telephone.

  “April! Able Team reporting!”

  “There in a second,” the young woman called.

  Electronically scrambled, transmitted to an orbiting satellite, relayed to the National Security Agency in Washington, then relayed to Stony Man and decoded, the voice of Gadgets sounded toneless and mechanical, as if synthesized. Yet his friends recognized his idiomatic phrases and oblique humor. Kurtzman recorded the report. April dashed in, took notes.

  “We’re about ten miles southeast of the Brazilian border. Not that that means anything — everywhere out here is nowhere. We have made contact…”

  *

  Throwing open the outer door to the pistol range, April grabbed a pair of ear protectors and jammed them on her head. She fumbled a page of notes, picked it up. Before she had properly fitted the plastic and foam phones over her ears, she elbowed through the inner door. She saw Mack Bolan sighting his .44 AutoMag on a fifty-foot target. Andrez Konzaki, standing on his aluminum canes, watched from a step away.

  Bolan was committed to constant practice with all his weapons.

  The muzzle-shock of the AutoMag in confined space hit April’s left ear like a hammer. She staggered slightly, and cupped her hand over her ear.

  “Mack!” she cried out, her ear throbbing. “Why bother with bullets? Just point that thing at the bad guys, and let the noise knock them down.”

  Bolan smiled. He saw the papers in her hand. “What goes on?”

  “Able Team finally reported.” She passed the notes to the commander of the three blazing counterterrorists now in the Amazon.

  Holstering his auto-cannon, Bolan speed-scanned the first page of notes, passing the page to Konzaki. The men read the pages for pertinent details. Konzaki took a microcassette recorder from his coat pocket and verbally listed the weapons and equipment requested by Able Team, “Twenty-five Remington 870s, Parkerized, plastic stocks and foregrips. Mag extensions. Luminescent sites. Twenty-five hundred double-ought buckshot rounds. Three thousand rounds of .308 NATO in H & K magazines. Fifty sets of load-bearing equipment, size small through medium. Ten hand radios. Rations, vitamins, medicine for one hundred people…”

  Bolan sat back on the shooting bench, shook his head. “Leave it to Able Team to find the weird action.”

  “What did you say?” Konzaki slipped off his ear protectors.

  “Cuban slave raiders — what do you think of that?”

  “I think we should reserve an interrogation room at Langley. Put some questions to those animals.”

  “I’ve put out a call for Grimaldi,” April told them. “When he calls back, if he can make it, he’ll go south.”

  “We can’t wait for him. If he’s not available immediately, find a pilot down there who’ll land a seaplane on that river.”

  “And what about the inquiry to the Brazilian authorities?” April asked.

  Bolan shook his head. “We have no reason to believe it isn’t their reactor down there. They could be running the operation with mercenaries and crazies so they could deny it if it’s discovered. Until we know for sure, I won’t risk betraying our guys. How quick can you get those shotguns, Andrez?”

  “One call for the shotguns and ammunition. One call for the LBEs, one for the radios. I can have it all by the end of the business day.”

  “I thought they’re on a reconnaissance mission,” April commented. “But this sounds like they’re assembling an army down there.”

  “Well, it’s like this,” Mack Bolan, veteran of hundreds of missions himself, told his favorite lady. “It’s one thing to give a good man instructions and send him out to do a job. But once he gets there, sometimes he has to do what is necessary. We’ve got three of the best down there. Three times over if need be, they will do what must be done.”

  He looked at April penetratingly, yet affectionately, then shifted his eyes to the targets down-range as if contemplating the eternal shapes and moves of his war everlasting, and picked up the AutoMag again to blast some more holes with all the purity and precision of the cosmic balance itself.

  That was Mack Bolan. Staying hard. The soul muscle behind Able Team’s pulsebeat. Forever.

  Your move, Able.

  9

  Wei Ho walked in his garden. Around him, captive birds sang in the jacaranda trees, the unseasonable lavender blossoms falling from the branches as the tiny birds — yellow, blue, iridescent green — fluttered from tree to tree. Recirculated water splashed over the rocks of an artificial brook. Behind all the other sounds in the domed, sealed garden, the whir of air conditioners rose and fell as the machines created the cool dry environment that Wei Ho demanded. When he drifted through the flowers and trees, enjoying the bird songs and the stereophonic classical Chinese music, he put the Amazon far from his mind, imagined himself to be walking in his garden in Shanghai so many years before.

  A chime announced the arrival of Chan Sann and Abbott. Wei Ho clapped. A gir
l shuffled to him, brushed and straightened his silk robe, then shuffled away as silently as she had come.

  Guards preceded the two visitors, stood at their sides as the Cambodian soldier and the American physicist entered. The heavyset Chan Sann stepped forward, bowed stiffly.

  “Master, we have lost a patrol. Fifteen soldiers, two officers. One large craft, two hovercraft. Gone.”

  “How?”

  “We do not know. Perhaps Indians, perhaps Brazilian army. The patrol had found a village. They captured several Indians for workers. Then they reported sighting a group of Brazilian soldiers. They captured the Brazilians, then we heard no more from them.”

  “Where was this?”

  “Upriver. In Bolivia. We have depleted the Indians in this area. We must send patrols to other areas to satisfy Mr. Abbott’s requirements.”

  “Send a small plane to overfly the last reported position of the patrol,” Wei Ho instructed. “If the river craft can be recovered, send another patrol. If the plane or patrol encounters organized resistance, dispatch a plane with gas. There can be no opposition to our efforts.”

  “And if the opposition is soldiers of the Brazilian army?”

  “Let no man escape.”

  Chan Sann’s square, brutal face never broke its mask-like composure. In 1979 the Cambodian fled his country as the People’s Army of Vietnam routed the forces of Pol Pot. Sann and his Khmer Rouge soldiers had joined Wei Ho’s personal guard in Burma. As they had for Pol Pot, the Cambodians killed without question. Unlike the American physicist Abbott, they acted instantly on Wei Ho’s instructions.

  “And now you, Mr. Abbott. More delays?”

  The American shuffled forward. Years of heroin addiction had reduced his body to a gaunt wreck. Sweat pasted his thick hair to the sickly gray skin of his scalp. Sun scars marked his nose and sallow cheekbones. The preceding three days had aged the once brilliant atomic theoretician. He carried the stink of fetid mud. Wei Ho stepped back from the odor.

  “They die,” the American told him. “I can’t stop the dying. I thought it was the exposure. I rotated the work gangs. I kept the rem count down. But they died. Even the road gangs, the jungle cutters with no exposure whatsoever, they die.”

  “Why does this concern me?”

  Abbott reached for the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket, the action exposing welts of needle scars on his forearms. One of the guards rushed forward, as quick as a snake and seized the addict’s hand in mid-motion. Abbott obediently dropped his hand. The guard returned to his stance at attention, watching every move of the visitors.

  “I’m sorry… I forgot about your security… My point is, how can you expect me to hold to your timetable? I don’t have the technicians, I don’t have the workers, I don’t…”

  “Chan Sann!” The Chinese leader pointed at the Cambodian officer. Wei Ho’s never-tanned, never-lined face was a pale frozen mask. The cold, imperious expression like a warlord’s, the black hair, the silk robe and the garden created an image repeated a thousand times in the old books of China. “Have you failed in your responsibilities?”

  “No master. My patrols fill the quotas, despite the greater distances they must go to find Indians.”

  “Yes, they bring me Indians,” said Abbott, “Indians who don’t know how to use a shovel. Who work a day, two days, then sicken and die. Women with babies. And a baby dies in the camp and the woman cries and moans until one of your men comes and cuts her throat. And the Indian men try to protect the women, and after the shooting’s over, there’s a pile of dead slaves. What I want to tell you is that if you want this project completed, get me workers. Not starved Indians, not slaves — workers.”

  “That is not possible, Mr. Abbott. We cannot… advertise.”

  “Then it’s not possible to finish the project.”

  Wei Ho regarded the American with calm, expressionless eyes. Should he have the stinking creature killed for his impertinence? Hacked apart, hands and feet then the limbs severed hack by hack until only a truncated flopping mass of screaming flesh remained? Unfortunately, no. Without Abbott, no plutonium. And until the drug-wasted atomic physicist completed the project, Wei Ho knew he must tolerate the American’s whining. Even if Wei Ho found another scientist, he would not gain the secret of the laser separation of the isotopes. Only Abbott knew the process. Only he could lead the technicians. So the creature’s miserable existence continued.

  “Then we will find you the workers, Mr. Abbott. The project must proceed to completion.”

  After Wei Ho dismissed him, Abbott hurried from the air-conditioned garden. He restrained his body’s drug hunger while the sheet steel of the inner security door slid aside. Stone-faced Chinese guards glanced at him through the bulletproof glass ports of their stations. One guard, his Kalashnikov rifle held constantly at the ready, followed a step behind as the gray, stooped American shuffled the length of the corridor. A second guard station, identical to the other, protected the door opening to the outside. Another pair of Wei Ho’s personal bodyguards looked from their bulletproof ports and threw switches to roll aside the steel door.

  Heat washed over Abbott. His expectation of the needle became urgent, sexual. Quickening his steps, he avoided the stares of the Cambodian and Thai mercenaries manning the perimeter of Wei Ho’s compound. He almost ran to his Toyota four-wheel-drive land cruiser. Gunning the engine to life, he ground the gears.

  The Cambodians inside the guardhouse sneered at the addict. The electric gate finally rolled open. Abbott stomped the accelerator to the floor and left the fortified compound behind.

  He sped along the narrow asphalt road as far as the first turnoff. Swerving onto a dirt track, he drove a few hundred yards into the jungle. There, invisible from the main road that interconnected the several compounds, Abbott quickly tied off his left arm and plunged a syringe into a vein.

  Abbott fell back against the seat as the heroin rush surged through him. A wind swayed the interlocking branches of the trees. Semiconscious, his head lolling from side to side, he stared around him at the lush growth that walled the clearing.

  A living prison. Walls a thousand miles thick. Brave with the drug’s strength, Abbott considered his future. He saw only death. He lived surrounded by suffering and despair and hideous death. The Indian slaves died of disease, shootings, whippings, loneliness and radiation. The technicians also died of disease and radiation and killed one another in drunken quarrels. The guards died in riverbank mud, ambushed by Indian bows and shotguns, sometimes died on stakes in the villages, mutilated, impossible to recognize as human. Death everywhere.

  And now death within him. The cancer pain throbbed in his chest, always present. Abbott would die. The cancer ate at his lungs. He had no hope of treatment. The Chinaman would never allow him to leave for surgery and treatment.

  So Abbott would die. Surrounded by walls of jungle and by death and by unlimited heroin.

  Ah. The heroin.

  10

  Lyons returned from the jungle after dark. He wore a loincloth and black body paint patterned in red. He carried his fatigues and boots in a bundle under his arm.

  As he crossed the clearing where the tribe camped, the women looked up from their cookfires at the transformed civilizado. They smiled, gossiped to one another about the North American, continued flaying meat and turning it on their fires. Children clutched the fingers of his free hand, skipped with him on the trail.

  The boats had been moved. On the riverbank, webs of woven branches concealed the airboats. The patrol cruiser was now moored under the overhanging branches of a tree that leaned over the river. The branches screened the boat from any observation from the sky. During the day, the Indians had lashed hundreds of branches around the rails of the cruiser. It looked like a sandbar overgrown with small trees.

  On the beach, by the light of a battery lantern, Thomas continued distributing captured weapons and packs to his men and to the warriors of the tribe. Two of his men gave up their Remingtons,
took Heckler & Koch automatic rifles. Blancanales sat off to the side and watched as Thomas and one of his men argued. The Indian gripped his Remington, pushed the G-3 away. Finally, Thomas spun to face the shimmering expanse of moonlit river, impressively fired burst after burst of .308 slugs into the night. He offered the smoking autorifle again to the soldier. The man accepted it, passing his pump-action shotgun to a village man.

  Lyons walked into the glow of the lantern and squatted with the others. Except for his size, he looked like one of them. Blancanales stared for a minute, studying the transformation of the blond college-educated ex-LAPD officer. Lyons, still affected by the narcotic, wore his hair cut like Thomas’s men, his sideburns shaved away, the nape of his neck shaved high. Genipap stained his hair, his face and his body black. Red rectangles marked his shoulders, like an officer’s epaulets. A braided band of natural fibers held up his loincloth. Braided bands circled his ankles. He wore custom-made Indian sandals, new but already black with mud and body paint.

  The Indian men glanced at Lyons when he joined them. Four men, who Blancanales knew had taken the hallucinogen with Lyons, grinned to their friend, then returned to assembling their gear. One Indian spoke with Lyons, and the two men bantered back and forth.

  Blancanales watched with disbelief. Did Lyons speak the local language? Lyons even moved like the other men. He reached out, touched one of the G-3 rifles, his motions fluid yet deliberate. He ran his fingers over the cocking lever, the foregrip, the receiver, his touch on the plastic and steel looking as if he stroked a living thing.

  “Lyons! Are you okay?”

  Night-faced, his blue eyes like neon in the electric light, the blackened Anglo turned. “I’m great. How are you, Pol-li-tician?”

  Studying his friend’s face, Blancanales saw no obvious signs of drug intoxication. “You want some coffee? We need to talk about going downriver.”

  Lyons nodded. “On the boat…”

  Striding through the darkness to the boat, Blancanales followed the trail up the riverbank. He glanced back for Lyons, looked directly into his face. Lyons walked only a step back, silent in his thin sandals. Continuing, Blancanales heard only his own boots on the trail, the rustling of his Beretta’s holster against his camo fatigues. He heard no one behind him.