by David Gilman
The helicopter turned. Max followed the sound, checking that Xavier was behind him. They crouched and a narrow window between the low branches allowed them to see the chopper hover over the sea, its blades dissipating the black, choking smoke, blowing it aside, as if the beast had snorted air in search of its prey.
Satisfied that nothing remained alive, the helicopter banked away and headed for its mother ship on the horizon.
“I killed my brother,” Xavier said, his body trembling. Shock was setting in.
“If that’s true, he let you,” Max said. “We’d better check your wound, Xavier.”
The boy pulled back. “Leave me alone.” Tears welled in his eyes.
This wasn’t the time to play field medic. Max saw the glitter of light fade through the leaves. It went dark. He checked his watch—6:20 p.m. They could go no farther. Max was already thinking of how to survive the claustrophobic hours in the jungle when, as if on cue, night sounds erupted. Cicadas chattered in deafening unison, and the screeching pitch of night beetles, like a short-wave radio being tuned, filled the night air. Max pulled Xavier down into the base of a tree whose roots flared out like shields from the trunk. This was not ideal. He did not want to spend the night on the jungle floor. Spiders, ants, snakes and all kinds of animals would be moving.
Leaves rustled.
Creatures moved.
The jungle was alive.
Max’s eyes were wide open, staring into the darkness. Pulling his knees up, he felt for anything he could use as a weapon. His hand found a stick, and he held it across his body like a sword, giving himself the confidence of having something for self-defense, even though he knew it would be useless if anything dangerous attacked. Creatures were on their night hunt. Rustling and scratching surrounded him, and Max did not know whether he and Xavier were on the menu. Xavier’s exhaustion and grief held him in a cocoon of deep sleep. Max had become his guardian but had no illusions that they would survive a predator’s attack. He had seen men stalked and killed by lions when he was in Africa. He could never erase the horrendous sight from his mind, or the sounds of the men’s screams as they were torn apart. If fear was the key to survival, then Max thought he should live forever.
Survive, learn and never take your own courage for granted. There are times you have to dig deep to get into the zone that drives you on—that’s how you stay alive.
His dad’s words came unbeckoned into his mind. He squeezed his eyes closed, torn between the comfort of his father’s voice and wanting to blot out the face that came with it. Max grimaced. Time to forget the emotions. Get on with it. If his dad were here, would he be doing this? Was there anything else Max should do? His choices were limited. Stay put and survive till morning and then try to determine a plan of action.
Then, out of the darkness, fingers of light pierced the mangrove forest. An animal’s eyes gleamed as the light swooped across them. The slow rhythmic beat of an outboard engine broke the silence. The Coast Guard team was looking for survivors. Max heard their muffled voices. Americans. Their unhurried search faltered once or twice as they found another body in the water. “Here’s one of them,” a voice called. The engine spluttered as the revs were reduced. Max strained to hear. They were about fifty meters offshore. The searchlight’s beam swung crazily and then settled. Max saw the fractured illumination create shadow and form through the low branches. One of the men cried out, “What’s that? There!”
The lights swung away from the jungle. “Crocs! They’re going for the dead guy in the water!” Two rapid gunshots boomed through the night. Max heard the men whoop with success and heard one shout, “Saltwater croc! Did you see the size of him? Wow!”
Xavier jerked awake as the gunshots reverberated across the water. A cry of alarm escaped from his throat.
Max reached behind him and pushed a restraining hand against the boy’s face, whispering urgently, “It’s all right. It’s all right. They’re searching for survivors. They just shot at something, that’s all.” Max did not have the heart to tell him about the crocodiles and the bodies in the water—it could well have been Alejandro’s body the croc had tried to savage.
Someone shouted a command.
“All right, you men! C’mon, get that guy’s body aboard!”
A slushing rush of water carried across the surface. Max imagined the estuary yielding the body as it was hauled into the boat. He shuddered. He had been attacked by crocs before, but the thought of them prowling through the night waters of the mangrove swamps, ready to take the corpses of the men from the boat, made his stomach squirm.
“You think the Yanquis come for us?” Xavier whispered.
“No, they’ll patrol until daybreak and then do a final search of the area as soon as it’s light. Until then we have to stay exactly where we are, but I think we have to get off the ground. There’s too much going on in there,” he said, nodding toward the dense jungle. The sweeping light from the men’s boat had illuminated ropelike vines coming down from the tree’s canopy. Max tugged. It took his weight easily. “It’ll be OK. We have to climb into the tree. We’ll be safer from whatever’s hunting down here.”
Xavier eased himself from the ground. It was almost pitch-dark, and he reached forward like a blind man stumbling in an unknown place. His hands found Max and gripped his shoulder. “We don’ know what’s up there. The big cats, they hunt in the jungle. They climb the trees. Nowhere is safe. Maybe we swim, into the river, then around the headland.”
Xavier’s nerve had broken. He pushed against Max in the darkness, but Max turned his shoulder and shoved hard, forcing the boy back against the tree. Xavier grunted with pain. Max knew he could not afford to fight now. If they started rolling around on the floor, grappling for supremacy, that would attract bigger creatures than the insects that still shrieked around them. There were killers in the jungle, and the men were still nearby in the boats. The boy obviously had no idea how lethal the jungle and mangroves could be. He was probably a small-town kid who hung around bars and ran messages for his brother.
“We can’t do that, especially not at night—and not with those men out there.” Max could feel the boy’s nervousness as well as his own. He had no desire to go wading waist-deep in the dark estuary with saltwater crocodiles cruising. Max knew the boy wasn’t thinking straight, and if he panicked, they both might die. There was no choice; Max had to shock him into focusing on survival.
“Don’t tell me what to do!” Xavier grunted, trying to push Max away.
“Listen to me,” Max hissed, his hand reaching to the boy’s shirtfront, twisting it into a knot. He used his strength to hold Xavier back, to stop him from running blindly into the night. “We survive every minute. We can’t even think about tomorrow! We can’t even think about getting out of this mess tonight. We stay where we are and do the best we can. You want to go out there? I don’t like crocodiles or water snakes, and I don’t like men with guns. They killed the others. You think they won’t kill you?”
Max felt the boy’s body relax in surrender. Xavier had never had to think for himself. Alejandro had shielded him all his life. His thought process was totally messed up.
“I’m thirsty. I am hurting. I need water,” he whimpered.
Max pulled him forward and pushed the creeper into his hands. “If we get through tonight, we’ll get water tomorrow. Now climb! Get into the fork of the tree. I’ll be right behind you.”
No sooner had Max issued the command than a bloodcurdling wail tore at their nerves. Xavier hesitated, his feet already off the ground, but his hands froze in fear as they clutched the creeper.
“Get going!” Max yelled, forgetting there were men probably within earshot. Like a child’s scream, the sound became a banshee wail of fear. And closer! Palms and bushes thrashed as something hurtled toward them from the depths of the night.
Max’s hair stood up on the back of his neck, and ice-cold goose bumps tickled his spine. What was it? It didn’t matter; there was no time to think about it. Xavier had stil
l not moved. Max punched him hard. The boy shouted in pain, but it did the trick—he scrambled up the creeper. The undergrowth shuddered as if a mighty force had been let loose. The sounds of terror escalated, louder and louder until they were almost unbearable.
The searchlight swung into the trees, and Max saw a deep black shadow of a beast, its eyes glaring yellow, its ivory-colored fangs smothered in blood. A black jaguar gripped a paca, a rodent about the size of a small dog, in its unyielding jaws and shook it violently, killing it by snapping its neck. The big cat turned and carried its prey into the smothering forest. The searchlight jerked through the night. Max and Xavier clung to the fork in the tree’s boughs. They heard the boat cutting back and forth in the shallow water, the beam of light sweeping across them. But no alarms were raised, no voice called out and no gunshots tore into the jungle. The boat’s engine pitch changed as the throttle was opened, roaring louder and then becoming more muffled as it eased away into the surf. The two boys were left with the comparative silence of the chattering insects.
Had the big cat caught their scent? For all Max knew, the hapless paca had come between them and the jaguar, offering a more manageable victim. A clawing, biting attack surging out of the blackness would have been all they’d have known about it.
How close had they been to death?
A few strides?
Despite the cloying heat, Max shivered.
It had been too close.
It was the longest night Max could remember. When the cool predawn light seeped through the canopy, he blearily checked out the ground below. His face was puffy from fretful sleep, his limbs stiff from lying crookedly in the tree. Beyond the strong breeze swishing the palm fronds and treetops, he could hear the sea washing against the shore.
He shook Xavier. The boy groaned, then quickly sat up. Max clambered down the vine and moved toward the sound of the crashing surf. He reached the small beach where they had landed the day before, and now he could see that Alejandro had chosen the only place where they had any chance at all of getting ashore; they were on a spit of land. Fifty meters away, curving into the estuary, the mangroves cluttered the shoreline. For the two boys to try to make their way through there would have been exhausting, dangerous and probably impossible.
The salt air refreshed Max, but he resisted running into the small waves to wash himself free of the grit and sweat that had clung to his body since they entered the jungle. The Coast Guard cutter was still beyond the reef, while men in Zodiac inflatable boats swept the lagoon, doing a final daylight search for bodies. Max kept a low profile in the undergrowth and scrunched down into the sand. A moment later, Xavier joined him, shivering despite the warm breeze. He had barely slept, evidently. Max looked at the boy’s agitated state. Perhaps it was more than fear and grief that Xavier was dealing with.
“Listen, are you on drugs? Are you going through withdrawal?”
Max could see the boy’s expression was genuine. “Drugs?” Xavier asked. “Are you kidding me? Alejandro would kill me if he saw me touch that stuff. I need a cigarette. You got any smokes?”
Max was relieved the problem wasn’t as bad as he’d imagined. He shook his head. Xavier shrugged and nodded toward the water. “They still here, eh?”
“They won’t hang about all day; we’ve just got to wait until we can move,” Max said. He was already planning their escape from the confines of the overgrown peninsula.
“Move? What do you think we can do out here? We’re going to die—that’s what’s going to happen to us. This is the wilderness. Nobody lives here; nobody comes here. Except the drug boats. This is what we do: we wait till they have gone and we light a fire, a big fire. We make smoke. The boats will come for us.”
Max didn’t look at him, keeping his eyes on the inflatable that weaved its way in and out of the coral outcrops. It seemed to Max that the men were withdrawing to the ship, that they had achieved most of their tasks the night before.
“You can do that, if you want,” Max said, “but what exactly are you going to make a fire with? And, if you do find a way, how are you going to survive until someone, maybe, sees the smoke? You have no food, you have no water and you’re going to have to stay in that tree for safety. I reckon you’ll be dead in less than a week. You think your drug-running friends haven’t already heard about the attack? They’ll be lying low for a while. They’re not going to come out here when there’s a Coast Guard patrol in these waters.”
Max squirmed back into the undergrowth, Xavier dogging his footsteps. “We need water now; otherwise we won’t even get through today,” Max said.
They were above the high-water mark, and Max was scrabbling in the sand. He lifted up two or three fan-shaped shells. “Find me some rocks that look like these.” Max ran his finger along the ragged edge. “Broken, like this.” He beckoned Xavier into the trees and began the search. “We need something that might cut. You want a drink? Find me a cutting stone.”
Making sure they stayed out of sight of the patrolling sailors, it took twenty minutes to find half a dozen stones; then Max made his way back to the mangrove. He took one of the jagged rocks and began stripping fibers from a palm tree, twisting and gathering them until they became long and thick enough to act as rough string. Then, finding a piece of fallen wood, he split the string apart near one end with the sharp stone and forced the stone down through the string. Using the fibers, he bound the stick at the base of the jagged rock, then did the same at the top of the split, securing the rough-edged piece of stone. Max had just made a primitive ax.
He pulled down one of the vines and hacked at it. It took three or four attempts, but he finally managed to cut away a two-meter section. He kept his thumb over the end, as you would cover the end of a hose.
“Open your mouth,” he told Xavier. Max held the vine over the boy’s mouth and released the pressure of his thumb. Water trickled down and Xavier slurped greedily. It tasted slightly woody, but they both drank without hesitation.
“Where did you learn that?” Xavier asked.
Max shrugged. You had to think for yourself. You had to look around and see what might save you. He knew it must have been his father who had told him about water collecting in jungle vines. That thought was interrupted by the sound of the ship’s horn blowing. Max ran back to the shore and hunkered down among the small bushes. The American cutter was turning. Mission accomplished.
Xavier muttered under his breath. Max did not need to understand the language to comprehend its meaning; it was obvious that he was cursing the men who had killed his brother.
The boys lay in the sand and watched until the vessel disappeared behind the headland. Max gazed at the sky. A couple of pelicans turned languidly on the wind and settled near the reef to fish. If only he could catch a pelican and tie a rope to its leg, he’d have a perfect fish catcher. A darker shadow blotted the sky. The batlike wings of a frigate bird angled across his vision. Its thin tail moved slightly and the bird skimmed away. But its shape nudged his memory. He would have to be careful out here—there were vampire bats.
Xavier turned to him. “You get water from a tree—you will find a way to make a fire.”
“No, I don’t want to be rescued. And certainly not by any friend of yours.”
“My brother saved your life, not just mine,” Xavier snarled.
“Yeah, so I could babysit you.”
The two boys glared at each other. But then Xavier, understanding the truth of Max’s statement, nodded. “OK, so what do we do?”
Max gazed across the mouth of the river. The tide was turning; there was already a sandbank exposed in the middle. “We’re going to make a raft and get upriver; that way we might find a settlement. But first I have to get across there and recover whatever I can from the boat’s wreckage. That’s where the tide’s washed everything.”
“You’re a crazy boy, Max. Those mangroves”—he shook his head—“I don’t know. You get into trouble, I can’t help you.”
Max stayed fully
dressed. That onshore breeze had done them a favor and kept mosquitoes away from them during the night, but it also disguised the fierceness of the sun. He knew that if he stripped off for the swim, his skin would burn badly in the water. And, even though it would be hard going, he wanted the comfort of his boots when he got into those mangroves. Using a fairly straight branch as a pole to help against the force of the undertow, Max edged forward, allowing the shaft to bear his weight as he tested the depth ahead of him.
He looked back over his shoulder, swimming on his side, warily keeping an eye open for crocodiles. He could not bring himself to think about what lay in the tangled roots of the mangroves ahead of him; the fer-de-lance, one of the world’s most poisonous snakes, inhabited this area, and a single bite from one of them would kill him. He told himself to control his imagination. Let that run riot and he may as well give up now and float out to sea to die. Wild thoughts could paralyze him with fear.
He had instructed Xavier to start pulling down palm leaves from the smaller trees, tear them into strips and tie the ends of each strip together; they could use this as binding. He caught a glimpse of him sitting on the narrow strip of sand, palm leaf held over his head, shading himself from the sun, watching Max struggling to swim across the estuary and the tide. Max groaned in frustration. This was going to be hard work in more ways than one. If he had had enough air in his lungs, he might have yelled at the boy to get busy, but he needed all his strength to push and kick ahead.
The water became shallower; now he could stand chest-deep, which helped push him on toward the foul-smelling mangroves exposed by the retreating tide. He waited, letting his eyes adjust to the shadows, desperately checking for any flurry of water that would tell him a crocodile had scented his presence. He edged forward, feeling the uneven ground beneath his boots. He stumbled once and went under, then pushed himself clear, gasping. The closer he came to the tangled undergrowth, the more disgusting the smell of the water became.
He could see bits and pieces of wreckage from the boat caught in the unyielding roots. After the explosion, there would be very little left, but some fragments would have survived. He had spotted a long white shape and suspected he knew what it was. It was not as pristine now as when he had sat on it speeding across the ocean. The bench seat’s leather cushion was scorched, but the stitching had held, and the foam interior had not been penetrated by any water. It was a good flotation device. Shattered wood from the destroyed boat bobbed beneath the mangroves. A useful length of rope had entwined itself, snakelike, around the roots.