Vector

by James Abel

  “Stay on the boat, Colonel. Go back.”

  Eddie must really be here.

  I shook my head. “Now who’s the naive one?” I said. “You’re telling me if I leave, I’ll be safe?”

  She said nothing. Then, reluctantly, “You have a point. See those guys by the railing? They were taking bets on how many hours you’ll last. Ten to one . . . not ’til tomorrow.”

  The boat bumped the dock. Whatever it is that constitutes instinct, every Marine knows that you ignore it at your peril, and the woman’s dirty green eyes blazed with passion now. As if to tell me, You fucked up my plans, too.

  I thought back, There’s no way I’ll leave this place before finding out about Eddie. He would not leave if it was me, so goddamn you, CIA.

  The gangplank lowered and a few riders filed off, but most would stay on, bound for other settlements. I noticed one little girl holding a liter-sized empty beer bottle as a doll, whispering to it, and glancing back with curiosity at me, having heard what her parents were saying about me, clearly wondering with those big eyes if Joe Rush would even make it all the way ten feet to shore, before shotguns blasted out from one of those buildings ahead.

  I told Rooster that I was getting off here, but he was going back to Porto Velho, and I got no argument! Rooster, pale and trembling, just nodded. He was a good man, and his bravery was used up.

  Somehow, that talk—my protecting Rooster—made the woman answer me finally, and identify herself. It was a shock. She wasn’t CIA at all.

  TEN

  The ambush came in the middle of the night.

  Undercover Brazilian Federal Police Captain Izabel Santo reached to wake me at 1 A.M. but I was up, having heard the scraping outside. I stopped her hand before it touched my shoulder. In the dark I rolled from the unzipped sleeping bag and gripped my Taurus. The two special-assignment cops and I had practiced moving around the hotel room in blackness, the Brazilians fast-crawling to a corner, me swinging up into the latticework roof support. To turn on the bare bulb would have sent a crack of light beneath the door, alerted any attackers. But the light probably didn’t work anyway. No electricity did in New Extrema after 11 P.M., when the municipal generator went off, and jungle noises flooded in.

  “You’re police?” I’d asked Izabel on the boat, amazed, hours ago. “Investigating your own people?”

  “You don’t have internal investigations in your own country?” she’d snapped.

  “Why are you on this boat?”

  “Because we followed you. You and your friend show up, and you are clearly not just doctors. You work with Anasasio, a crook. You go to the gold rush, where there are smugglers. At first I think you are smugglers, too, but now I see that if these people—these filhos da puta—are after you, maybe you found what we’re looking for.”

  Posing as magazine reporters, Izabel said, she and Sublieutenant Nelson Salazar had been taking photos of smugglers paying off local police.

  Having a raging argument while trying to look casual before a boatload of curious strangers can be difficult. She called me a fool and a suicide and kept insisting that I stay on board with Rooster, sail past New Extrema, and perhaps my cowardice might keep us alive.

  “Maybe you work with them,” I said.

  “Maybe you are an idiot, Joe Rush.”

  “Eddie is my partner. Would you leave yours?”

  She argued—hissed—that I wouldn’t do Eddie any good if I was shotgunned to pieces. That maybe Eddie was not even here. That if I would just give her a day or two, she could call Brasília, people she trusted, and arrange for a chopper full of SWAT fighters—her own unit—to arrive.

  “Eddie is my best friend.”

  Rooster had looked relieved to be leaving. I liked the guy. He was a miner, not a fighter. I did not want his death on me. He’d done enough by getting me this far.

  Izabel had given up. Go ahead and get killed, Colonel. Be one more casualty, because we will not help you.

  But just before the boat pulled off an hour later, I was surprised to see her and Nelson come down the ramp, knapsacks on, cameras around their necks.

  “Don’t say anything, damn you,” she snapped, as they walked past and Rooster waved good-bye from the deck.

  We checked into the only “hotel” in town, a modular collection of four cinder-block pillboxes, more jail cells than rooms. After dark the Brazilians snuck into mine. We rolled up knapsacks beneath a blanket to look like me, asleep. And now the cops fast-crawled to the same front corner. That way, if they had to shoot, they’d not fire toward each other.

  “I would not leave someone I loved either,” she’d told me an hour ago, still angry but slightly calmed down.

  Captain Santo was armed with a silver-coated .45 caliber 1911 Remington. Nelson had an Imbel .45. The Remington would kick back but without muzzle flip, so it was a better weapon for a lighter woman. The stopping power of both guns exceeded that of my Taurus. I swung myself up to the ceiling-support latticework and lay, facing the door. Izabel had guessed that the attack would come from one or two people. They’d expect me to be alone.

  I could only hope she was right as my heartbeat rose and I felt the salty taste of Lay’s potato chips in the back of my throat. I’d not eaten them in years. But for some reason, I taste Lay’s when I am afraid. A psychologist would probably say it goes back to my youth. Eating Lay’s while hearing about the death of a grandparent. Or when I saw a car wreck. Who the hell remembers how these things start.

  Outside, another whisper. A creak. Maybe the door had pushed in slightly. Maybe someone had tried to move it, to check the latch lock.

  Two A.M. Nothing.

  Maybe whatever had been outside was an animal, rubbing against the door, or wall, and it had moved away.

  • • •

  My turn at guard duty. Nelson snored. Izabel sighed as she slept, and her rapid eye movement was fierce. Perhaps in a dream she was already fighting.

  The ceiling was low, maybe seven feet high. The walls were starting to crumble from Amazon humidity. Rooms sat on both sides of a short open-air passageway, partially covered by a raised tin roof supported by rotting latticework. Rain would blow into the corridor if the wind came in sideways. The floor was packed dirt with rat holes chewed in cinder block. Patient vermin lived here. There were no windows, and each unit was provided with a bare forty-watt bulb suspended from a noose of copper wire. The artwork—when there was light—was graffiti, in charcoal, of rubber tappers. A lone man in rags and homemade rubber shoes made slash marks in a tree with a machete, and hung a battered tin cup by a nail, to catch white dripping latex. In the next drawing, he rolled latex into volleyball-sized spheres.

  Hieroglyphics in the Amazon. Next, the man, a woman, and a child carried the harvest down jungle footpaths, the balls around their shoulders. They were human pack animals. The balls were loaded on a ferry, bound for sale.

  I might have been looking at cave paintings in France depicting bison hunters twenty thousand years ago. The last illustration, spilling onto the next wall, showed two men with shotguns, crouched behind a big buttressed tree in the jungle, as the rubber tapper walked back home, toward ambush. True story? Tonight’s prediction? What had the poor man done to deserve his upcoming fate?

  “If we get out of here alive, my bosses will lodge a complaint about you in Washington,” Izabel had said earlier, as we ate a dinner of rice and beans, purchased from the shirtless, beer-bellied man who owned the “hotel.”

  “If we get out, be my guest,” I replied. “Anyway, isn’t New Extrema out of your jurisdiction?”

  “My jurisdiction is Brazil.”

  “New Extrema is rough,” I said, meaning for a woman.

  “I led the raid that recovered that laptop, caralho. The one you learned about in New York from the FBI. You wouldn’t know anything if not for me,” she snapped with contempt, “so
don’t talk to me about rough.”

  But this furious professional was a lifeline. She’d possibly saved my life, at least for a while. In return I had made her risk greater. And when I confirmed how she had discovered my identity, my admiration for her grew.

  “You stole my plate or fork in the hotel.”

  She grinned, and her smile was transforming, beautiful, gone. “Your prints and photo went to our lab, and from there . . . well . . . pretty stupid of your FBI to send you here secretly and not tell your DEA. When we tell the DEA in Rio that we have an American smuggling drugs here, they get back to us and say, no, no, this man, he is not a smuggler. He is a big hero in the United States.”

  “My people make mistakes sometimes,” I admitted, weary of her sarcasm. “But you seem worried that yours will shoot you in the back.”

  She seemed about to explode. But then she said, softer, “Okay, okay. Let us make a truce.”

  A border had been crossed, and Nelson didn’t like it. The big sublieutenant seemed overprotective of her. Maybe there was something personal there. I didn’t ask. I didn’t care.

  Friends now, kind of, I thought.

  Three A.M. Maybe no one was coming tonight.

  • • •

  Captain Izabel Santo took a turn at guard duty. I watched her silhouette in the dark as I started to doze off. She never moved. She seemed to barely breathe.

  The room had a hand-operated water pump above a basin sink of mahogany—an out-of-place $5,000 worth of rare wood but, locally, junk. There was an outhouse, but Izabel said outhouses were prime locations for ambush, so no use of the stinky facilities tonight.

  “Piss in your water jar, Joe America,” she said.

  If I thought the boat ride had been long, it was nothing compared to that night. Dawn seemed far away. If we lasted that long, the man who operated the local outboard service had promised to take me to the island, and accepted advance payment. But the look in his eyes suggested that he expected no second payment, at least not from me. The sense was that my expected fate was common knowledge in New Extrema. No one mentioned it. It was like being in an old Gary Cooper movie, High Noon.

  Three ten. Izabel started talking softly, in the dark. She knew I was awake.

  “After I realized who you are . . .” she said, stopped, and restarted, having a problem with saying something nice. “Look, I know what you and Major Nakamura did last year in Washington. You saved thousands of people. It was on the news here. You deserve better than being left out to dry.”

  I tried to sleep over the sound of dogs snarling outside. I heard the two police officers whispering angrily in the darkness. Now Nelson was up, too.

  There was something off in how the two cops treated each other; a coolness that I could not pin down. Again I wondered if they were in a personal relationship. Or maybe, with Izabel in the lead, this was some male/female dustup. Maybe Nelson resented a female boss. Nelson was tough to read, although he’d shown black humor when informing me—through her—that my Taurus had probably been one of the 98,000 units sent back to the manufacturer recently by the São Paulo State Military Police when it was discovered that the guns could discharge without the trigger being pulled. “Try not to shoot yourself, gringo,” he’d said as he grinned.

  Finally, around 3:40 A.M., I actually fell sleep.

  Four A.M. I was suddenly awake at a scratch on the door.

  Here we go, I thought, scrambling for my perch. I heard my own breathing as I lay atop the rickety two-by-fours holding up the slanting tin roof. I heard a pitter-patter on the roof. Rain. Something fast and squishy ran across my wrist as I heard squeaky protests from a corner where—on the beam—the rats probably eyed me back.

  Then my attention was pulled away by another scuff outside, a bump against the door. I raised my pistol.

  Oink, came a faint muffled sound.

  Shit.

  It was pigs. Town pigs. Rooting around out there, in the dark. I relaxed. False alarm again. SHIT!

  Wait a minute. In a jungle town you don’t let pigs out at night, or something will come and eat them. Back in Smith Falls you never let small animals out at night.

  The door smashed inward as my gun swung up. Shotguns blasted, loud as bombs in the cramped space. BOOM . . . BOOM.

  The room was lit by bursts, and in them, glimpses of the police in the corner, firing, and a shotgun barrel swinging up at me. Two attackers there, one in the doorway, one just inside the room.

  BOOM!

  I felt the support give way.

  I was falling, falling toward the floor.

  ELEVEN

  Sound and smell came back into the world to the pulsing pain in my back, broiling heat, rain pattering on tin, the low, long cry of a jaguar in the jungle. I was on the ground, in my hotel room. I smelled jasmine and diesel fuel, chicken shit and singed shotgun shells. And the sweet/sour post-combat odor of viscera. Turning sideways, in the light of the flashlight lying on the ground, I saw the remains of the rat that had saved me, shredded, a torn up mound of fur and blood a foot away from my face. The creature’s movement had distracted the gunman. The blast had ripped through rotten roof support. I’d crashed to the ground, but the low ceiling had limited fall distance, and I’d toppled half onto the bedding below.

  I’d bruise badly, but did not think myself seriously injured.

  “Joe?” A whisper from Izabel Santo.

  “I’m okay. Nelson?”

  His voice was shaky with pain. “Aqui.” Izabel had a flashlight, too, and its beam showed blood on the big officer’s forehead, running down between his eyes. Minor head wounds can bleed heavily. But the dark mass clotting the right side of his chest was wet and evil looking. Izabel’s eyes were huge in the wan light. She turned the beam on our attackers. One had fallen inward to die just across the threshold; the other had been driven back and into the open-air corridor by our multiple shots.

  Make sure they are dead before looking at Nelson.

  I bent over the man in the doorway. He was a stranger. Both men, I realized, had failed to cut down their shotgun barrels, which would have created a spread pattern to obliterate all life in our room. Overconfident or stupid, they’d kept the barrels long. The flashlight beam played over the face of a pale-skinned, thickly blond-bearded stranger. His kufi, an Islamic skullcap, had fallen off his head and lay bent in half on the ground.

  I’d look for ID later. I moved quickly into the corridor, to see that the second attacker was Anasasio, shot four times in the chest. In death, still dressed in his Italian clothing, one loafer off, he looked surprised.

  I stood over my ex-translator’s body and felt the greatest rage seize me. There was no question now that Eddie was close. But it was also clear that whatever we did next, we had better do it fast. More attackers might be outside. Izabel hissed something that I did not hear as I rapidly moved down the corridor to stop at the door of the owner’s cubicle, last one on the right. A pale-yellow, flickering light beneath the door came from a kerosene lamp, or battery power. The hammered tin door looked flimsy. No one inside could have slept through the fight.

  I heard a shuffling noise in there, a scrape, a hiss.

  I kicked the door in, and he sat at a table across the room. In the kerosene light he was turning to me in fear and astonishment. He was in his underwear, on a three-legged stool before a glowing ham radio. The ham was warming up. I saw a large revolver a foot from his hand, and a half-empty bottle of cachaça. A second figure reclined on his single bed against the wall and for a half second drew my attention. It was an inflated blow-up sex doll; smiling pouty lips, blue eyes, hoop earrings. The hotel owner was so shocked to see me that he rose. In his face was terror. I couldn’t tell at first if he was involved in the attack. But then his eyes changed, and his hand shot toward the revolver. I pulled the trigger of my Taurus twice, and he grunted and stumbled sideways, retched, and
toppled into the blow-up doll, which bounced away as if it feared being touched.

  “Where’s Eddie?” I demanded, as if the man understood English, as he lay bleeding on the floor.

  He clutched his throat, although there was no wound there. He grabbed at my shirt. He was trying to speak but clearly had no idea what I had asked him. Blood money—Brazilian real that the assassins had given him—lay scattered on his packed-dirt floor.

  The ham radio would be the chief means of communication from this outpost, which lacked cell towers or phone access. The gunfire had silenced all life-forms within a few hundred yards. But I was sure that all residents of the pinprick hamlet would be up, aware, maybe trembling, maybe staring at their doors, maybe praying on their knees or clutching knives or single-bore, ancient shotguns to try to protect their children. They’d be making pacts with angels.

  Let me live tonight. Let my family stay alive.

  I almost shot Izabel Santo when she appeared behind me, breathing hard. From her crisp movements and set of jaw it was clear she was a combat veteran. Maybe she’d been in some of those pitched battles that Brazilian feds have had with gangs in the slums—favelas—of the east. She expertly wielded Anasasio’s Cartuchos, his Brazilian-made Remington pump-action 870 copy. All emotion had compacted into alert determination. She reacted in fractions of time. Her head flick to the left—toward town—told me that no one else was out there at the moment. The shift to the right and head shake told me Nelson was in bad shape. I was connected to her as I might be to Eddie in a fight. There was no need to say out loud that more killers were probably waiting to hear what had happened. Maybe from the ham radio. Or when our would-be assassins returned to where they’d started out. Probably the island.