Eight

by WW Mortensen

  With that, he left her to gather her gear. Ed had told her to pack lightly, just the necessities. Donning her khaki Ranger cap and heaving her knapsack, she joined the others assembling beneath the tarpaulins.

  The last to file in was Sanchez, with Elson and Martins in tow. The two younger men were both in their twenties, with brown eyes and short dark hair, and were today wearing khaki-coloured singlets. Elson was taller and more serious-looking, while Martins, of sturdier build, wore a perpetual smile.

  Sanchez took Ed gently by the arm. “Amigo, I have looked at the river. There was much rain yesterday, and the water has risen. I don’t believe the risk of flooding is greater, but I have warned the men to be wary. They may need to move the camp deeper.”

  Ed placed a calming hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Whatever you think best. That’s your department.”

  Sanchez turned and in Brazilian Portuguese issued instructions to Elson and Martins. The two parted with friendly nods goodbye.

  As they disappeared, Ed gathered the remaining group. Despite being told to pack sparingly, Ed, Sanchez, and Enrique each carried an amazing amount of gear. Sanchez and Enrique both wore hunting rifles slung over their shoulders.

  “Okay,” Ed said, “listen up. We’ve got a two-day hike through some of the hottest, wettest, toughest jungle on the planet. It’s vital you follow any instruction from Robert or me to the letter. By nightfall, we should be at S1. Getting out to S2—and Advance Base Camp—will take another day. Separating both sites is a deep ravine; it’s passable, but dangerous, and we’re going to need your A-game. All clear?”

  Nods all round. Without further delay, they crossed the clearing. On the camp’s north-western side, a rent in the underbrush marked the beginning of a crude path. Machetes were still required, and Ed and Sanchez did the bulk of the cutting.

  Rebecca settled into a rhythm, unlike Owen, who walked directly in front of her, constantly fidgeting with the load on his back. Behind her, bringing up the rear, was Enrique, and perched behind his head, on top of his backpack, sat Priscilla. Faint, tinny strains of music flowed from the earbuds Enrique wore. She was glad that both men were preoccupied. Knowing it was going to be a long day, she was happy not to waste her energy with talk.

  They moved deeper into the jungle.

  As they did, Rebecca observed an aspect of her surroundings that surprised her. Rather than striking denser, tougher undergrowth—precisely what she had expected—it seemed that the more progress they made, the easier the going became. The forest floor was now surprisingly open.

  Glancing about, it wasn’t hard to determine why. Above, the canopy was so dense that almost no light filtered through. Clearly, it was difficult for trees to grow in the eternal shade below. She could only assume the reason the vegetation she’d encountered at the river’s edge was so dense was because the canopy was broken.

  Now, at ground level, she moved through the gloom and over a forest floor covered in leaves and dead wood. All around, massive buttress roots snaked through the soil supporting thick, bare trunks that soared without branching until they were beyond the level of the canopy. Some of the larger trees must have reached 150 feet or more.

  In the spaces between their towering forms, the smaller shrubs competed for what little sunlight spilled through. Other plants like orchids and bromeliads, in their own upward scramble, had done away with roots in the soil altogether, scaling the trunks of their host trees. Above them, in the overstorey, crisscrossing vines climbed even higher.

  As she stared about herself in awe, it dawned on Rebecca that she was in a kind of huge, silent battlefield, where the reward of victory was simply a place in the sun. She could almost feel the plant life jostling and scrambling and fighting for it, engaged in a war that had been fought over thousands—millions—of years.

  In the scheme of it all, she felt small and insignificant, an intruder with no right to be there.

  The day grew increasingly humid. The oppressive heat seemed to clamp over Rebecca’s mouth and nose like a great hand. Her clothes dripped with sweat, and her legs felt heavy.

  Enrique must have sensed her predicament and tapped her on the shoulder. “Senhorita, you should remove your hat, it will help you cool,” he suggested. “You lose a lot of heat through the top of your head.”

  “Really?” Rebecca panted, “I didn’t know that.”

  “Here, let me take your pack, until you get back your breath.”

  “No, I couldn’t… but thank you.”

  “I insist. It is no trouble. I am more used to this humidity than you.”

  Rebecca felt guilty, but the thought of lightening the load for even a short while was irresistible. She removed her pack and passed it gratefully to Enrique. He carried it in one hand and moved ahead while Ed—who had pulled over to the side and had removed his own short-brim Bush Hat—slipped in behind her.

  “He’s got a crush on you,” he whispered.

  “Don’t be silly.” Rebecca nudged him with her elbow. “He’s just being sweet.”

  They kept moving. Time passed slowly. The scenery, as it had all morning, remained unchanged, bathed in a faint green light that filtered weakly from above. When they came to an area of the forest that was different, Rebecca came to a sudden halt—just as those in front of her.

  All around, and above them, strong, thick webs laced the trees in a ghostly silver-grey. Densely woven, they were tens of feet in length—it was as though giant nets had been cast across the path above their heads. The whole place had a quiet, eerie feel to it.

  Rebecca knew there was nothing strange about the scene. These were ordinary spider webs, built by a common species of orb-weaver.

  But no-one said a word as they eventually got going and passed beneath them.

  Rebecca kept her head low, glad when they had left the huge silver nets behind.

  10

  They didn’t stop for two hours and took their first break as they came to a large tree that had fallen across the path. It seemed as good a place to rest as any, and well overdue; by now, Rebecca was walking on legs of lead.

  Off to one side, Ed and Sanchez stood deep in hushed discussion. At the flared base of a massive capirona tree, Owen and Jessy sat in silence, drinking from their canteens in great gulps. A few feet away, Enrique sat on the ground with Priscilla, his head bobbing gently to the beat of the music flowing from his earbuds.

  Rebecca sat beside him, groaning with relief. “What are you listening to?” she asked, taking a sip of water. Enrique offered her the buds, and she held them to her ears.

  Don’t you, step on my blue suede shoes…

  “The King,” he said with a smile, curling his upper lip in a passable, somewhat endearing impersonation of his idol.

  Rebecca smiled. “Ah… now I get it,” she said, trying—again unsuccessfully—to give Priscilla a pat. “You know, you’ve got the same initials.” She passed the earbuds back. “Elvis Presley. Enrique Paulo.”

  “Si, I realised.” He grinned.

  “Thanks again for helping me out back there.”

  “My pleasure. It is very hot today.”

  Rebecca took another swig just as a voice interrupted them. Sanchez waved Enrique to where he and Ed were standing.

  “Please excuse me, senhorita,” Enrique said.

  Rebecca gave him the thumbs up and shimmied over to Owen, who was telling Jessy about his work with the National Indian Foundation of Brazil, FUNAI, which was the agency tasked with protecting the rights of the nation’s indigenous peoples.

  “Most recently I was based in the eastern Amazon, near the Pindare River, a guest of the Awa-Guaja. They’re a fascinating people—the women breastfeed monkeys, you know. They raise them as their own children.”

  The rest of the story was all too familiar. As the irrepressible tide of miners, loggers, and oil companies pressed farther into the Amazon’s undeveloped regions, indigenous peoples were increasingly vulnerable. Today, the Awa-Guaja people were among the mos
t endangered on the planet.

  “It’s tragic,” Owen said. “Up to a third of them have never been in contact with Westerners, yet we’re a direct threat.”

  Jessy frowned. “Never been in contact with Westerners?”

  “Yes, never—and this is a group of people we’ve studied for a long time. There are dozens of tribes in Amazonia whose existence we merely suspect. Imagine the impact on them.”

  “That’s an exaggeration, right?” Jessy said. “I mean, I’ve heard it before… but the suggestion there are people out here who know nothing of the outside world seems far-fetched.”

  “Not at all,” Owen said. “It’s thought there could be as many as sixty undiscovered tribes in Amazonia.”

  Jessy raised her eyebrows.

  “Staggering, hey?” Owen said. “We’ve put people on the moon, have explored other planets, and yet here are people with no written language and who hunt with bow and arrow and worship monkeys and jaguars as they have for thousands of years, living as they did back in the Stone Age. That’s all they know. While we’re heading to the stars, right here in our own backyard are some of our greatest secrets.”

  Indeed. After yesterday’s discovery, Rebecca wondered what other mysteries the jungle was hiding.

  “Okay,” Ed said. “We need to get moving, people.”

  They made two more stops that day, one at noon, and another a couple of hours later. By late afternoon, Rebecca was exhausted, and not just physically. Her head throbbed, and her legs ached, but her mind, too, was tired, and her concentration wandered. Unaware of time, she hardly noticed the forest darkening around her.

  Her thoughts were far away when Ed announced they’d arrived, only snapping out of her daydream when she noticed that everyone else had stopped walking. She stopped as well, and looking up, understood why no-one was speaking.

  Made of stone, it towered perhaps twelve feet above the jungle floor. A tangle of vines had only recently been hacked away from it and now lay draped across it like a thin fringe of hair, apt considering that from behind the long green veil there peered a giant stone face.

  It stared back at them silent and brooding, its unseeing eyes looking out from deep within the shadow of a thick browline. The forehead was tall and slightly tapered at the top. The mouth, set below a long, sharp-angled nose, was a thin, unsmiling groove that cut across a powerful and prominent jawline. Rebecca had seen that face before.

  Owen began to speak. “Holy shit,” he said slowly, “it can’t be… it looks just like one of those…”

  Rebecca interrupted, finishing the sentence for him.

  “Easter Island statues,” she whispered.

  11

  “I wasn’t expecting this,” Rebecca said as she stared up at the statue.

  She summoned her knowledge of Easter Island and its famous carved-stone inhabitants. She knew it lay somewhere in the South Pacific, off the west coast of South America and east of Polynesia, and that it was covered in hundreds of unusual stone statues, the most recognisable looking much like the one in front of her. She knew also that the statues were shrouded in mystery—their reason for being there and how they got there in the first place. She’d heard weird stories of aliens and UFOs, all of which seemed ridiculous. There was a rational explanation for everything.

  A handy one escaped her, though, and perhaps the rest of them, too, as they stared up at the giant brooding face.

  “It’s stunning, isn’t it?” Ed said. He stood in front of the statue, bearing the proud look of a father showing off a newborn.

  Rebecca nodded. It was stunning. Appraising the sculpture, she guessed it weighed upwards of eight or nine tons. How its makers could have carted it through the jungle and placed it here was beyond her.

  She was opening her mouth to say so when Ed cut her off. In the blink of an eye, his expression had turned serious. “I know you’ve all got questions, but you’ll have to save them. We need to build a fire and get the camp up and running.”

  Rebecca understood the reason for his urgency. All around, the jungle was slipping rapidly into a deeper gloom.

  And this, S1, was the scene of the attack on Sanchez…

  The statue forgotten, Rebecca turned, scanning the forest. Everything seemed as it should be.

  Just the trees…

  Surprised to find herself so jumpy, she loosened her pack and tossed it to the ground. While they’d been crowded around the statue, Sanchez and Enrique had slipped away, and reappeared now with a couple of large, polycarbonate crates. To one side of a shallow depression between the buttress roots of a large kapok, a pile of camouflage netting lay discarded; obviously the crates had been stashed during a previous trip. Inside the containers were several lightweight dome tents. As Sanchez and Enrique moved to start a fire, Rebecca and Owen hauled out the tents. Jessy, captivated by the statue, reluctantly joined them.

  They worked quickly in the fading light. Ed, meanwhile, busied himself with a different task. Kneeling, he removed an object from Sanchez’s backpack—a small but sturdy black metal box no longer or wider than a notebook computer, though almost twice as tall—and then another from Enrique’s. On the front panel of each was a series of dials, switches and an LED display, and on their sides were sections of open horizontal grating like the face of a speaker. He then removed two more such units from his own pack and set all four devices on the ground in front of him.

  Rebecca paused. “What are those?”

  Ed lifted one of the boxes and turned it over. “Just a thought I had. It’s called the UltraRid X40. Believe it or not… it’s a pest repeller.”

  Rebecca cocked an eyebrow.

  “A precaution, only, I assure you,” Ed said. “I arranged for them to be sent down, got Chad to deliver them. They came on the same boat as you. This particular model is used commercially in factories and warehouses to repel rodents and insects.”

  Moving beside him, Rebecca knelt to examine one of the boxes. “It’s an ultrasonic device.”

  Ed nodded. “You’ve heard of them? Apparently, they emit a high-intensity, ultrasonic soundwave, which affects their nervous system or something.”

  “Many arthropods sense ultrasound via a tympanic membrane known as the ‘chordotonal organ’,” Rebecca said. “A concentrated ultrasonic blast would likely cause extreme irritation.”

  “Right,” Ed said. “Anyway, the wave is apparently inaudible to humans and most mammals, so it shouldn’t bother us, or even Priscilla; at most, we might hear a soft background hum. Obviously, I haven’t had a chance to run a test.”

  Owen had been listening to the conversation. “What about power?”

  “Lithium polymer cell,” Ed said, “Fully rechargeable. We’ve got a solar-powered recharger if we need it, though I understand the X40’s power consumption is minimal.”

  With that, Ed stood and placed the four devices about fifty feet apart in a square around the camp. As he went he initiated a switch on each box and a corresponding green light sprang to life, followed by a gentle humming.

  Once he’d finished, Ed said, “Each unit covers roughly 2,000 square feet—or 30,000 cubic feet. But I can alter the shape and dimension of their range accordingly. If they work, placed now so their fields don’t overlap, we should have about 8,000 square feet of protection—about ninety feet on all sides. That includes a dozen feet or more vertically, up into the trees.”

  As he spoke, Ed retrieved more equipment from the storage crates, this time eight sturdy, all-weather, tripod-mounted motion-sensors. Once she finished erecting her tent, Rebecca helped him create a larger square outside the original square formed by the X40s, with sensors on each corner and in the middle of each side.

  They’d constructed, essentially, an invisible, eight-foot high fence around the campsite.

  “I guess we’re stuck inside the perimeter?” Rebecca said.

  Ed nodded. “Like the X40s, the motion detectors work on an ultrasonic system, too, so ambient light levels or the target’s optical
characteristics aren’t an issue. Still, we don’t want them set off by rain or tiny critters scurrying about in the undergrowth, so I’ve flicked them to ‘passive’. But if something big crosses them, we’ll know about it.”

  Big.

  “No coverage above the sensors?” Owen said.

  Ed shook his head. “Unlike the X40s, the motion detectors are line of sight only.”

  Rebecca had wondered about that, too, and as she studied the equipment noted there was one more feature Ed hadn’t told them about. Attached to some of the tripod legs were long, vertical bars. They looked like heat lamps, but were clearly UV-emitting floodlights, or ‘blacklights’. Ed had done his homework. Biologists use blacklights in the field to locate scorpions, which fluoresce under ultraviolet light. Similarly, tiny scales on the bodies of some spiders, too—particularly jumping spiders—reflect UV. If the sensors were tripped, no doubt the lamps would activate, bathing the area in ultraviolet. Clever—but was it overkill? Ed wasn’t expecting any problems; he’d said so, and she herself hadn’t thought there was an overt cause for alarm. But suddenly, she was hit by a flash of self-doubt: blacklights, motion sensors, ultrasonic devices—

  It’s better to be prepared. We’re dealing with the unknown.

  She put it from her mind and took a seat by the fire. With little fanfare, the last of the daylight dissipated and darkness descended, repelled only by the crackling orange flames. All around, insects chirped and buzzed. The black boxes hummed.

  Sanchez prepared dinner with Owen and Enrique’s assistance. Jessy returned to the statue. The stone carving, only feet away, seemed to come alive in the shifting glow of the fire, radiating not only an aura of mystery, but something more.

  Rebecca turned to Ed, who was sitting with her. “I suppose now is the time to address the elephant in the room, right? Why, Ed, is there an Easter Island statue in the middle of the Amazon jungle?”