by Ted Bell
He was sold to Wajari, a great chief of the Xucuru who guarded one of the work camps for Muhammad Top. Top learned he’d been captured. The first night he’d been dragged from the camp and nearly interrogated to death by Papa Top. Somehow, he convinced his interrogator that he was a British scientist and not a spy. Shortly thereafter, he was sent back to the camps to do slave work for the guerilla armies. There, it was assumed, he would die of natural causes.
His role at the camp was one with an extremely low life expectancy. He was not good at following rules. Now, in addition to his road construction, he was part of a doomed brigade used day and night as human targets.
He’d offended a guard by not responding quickly enough to an unintelligible order. The man had struck him on the side of the head with the butt of his gun, knocking him to his knees. He’d gotten to his feet, his blood up, and grabbed the man by the neck. When the man spat in his face, he’d disarmed him and nearly beaten him to death with his bare fists. No one even bothered to watch. It was over in a minute or two.
He stood glaring at them, taunting the guards with their automatic rifles leveled at his heart, waiting for one of them to kill him on the spot. Two of them grabbed him from behind and bound his wrists behind him with hemp. Then they took him away.
Only Machado wished him farewell. “Go with God,” the boy said.
“You better Belize it!” he said to the boy as they dragged him away to the camp commandant’s tent.
His punishment was swift and typical. After two nights in a hellish device called the Barrel, he had been assigned to what the guards jokingly referred to as the Green Berets. This joke derived from the fact that new initiates had their heads dipped in a vat of green dye. The Green Berets were a group of condemned men sent into the jungle for target practice.
The tactical commanders for guerilla combat training in the dense jungle had devised this system to provide a more realistic experience for their young guerilla fighters. The need for fresh targets was never ending. Most were killed by live fire. Mines or sniper bullets felled others. A few committed suicide to end the agony, and a tiny fraction escaped.
HE HAD ESCAPED. He had done it by melting away during a live fire exercise with many other fleeing targets. He had found his spot, stopped, clutched his gut, and screamed as if mortally wounded. He then dropped into the shallow water of a muddy stream. He waited for five minutes and no one came. He started crawling, later swimming as the water deepened. He swam to where the stream joined a wide green river. He rolled over to his back and let the water take him away. The sun broke from behind a cloud. His face broke into a wide grin: go with the flow.
In this environment escape was a relative term. He had been on the run for five days and nights. He had even less food than he’d been provided with in the camp. Beetles and grubs became a staple. He was exhausted, dehydrated, and on the brink of starvation.
On the sixth day, he could not get to his feet. And the drums were getting louder. Willing panic to subside, he rested quietly on his back for a few moments, hidden by the thick reeds, his emaciated chest heaving. His head suddenly jerked spasmodically to one side. He’d heard something, indistinct, but nevertheless disturbing.
After survival as a living target, his ears were keenly attuned to any variation in jungle sound. He gently placed a hand palm down on a patch of dry ground, a recently acquired method of detecting hostile vibrations.
A tremor, a snapping twig, or a parrot’s sudden shriek might herald the approach of a war party.
Indian headhunters, elite centurions of a murderous cannibal tribe called the Xucuru, had been chasing him since his miraculous escape. He was weak, he knew, to the point of utter exhaustion. He’d slept, but only fitfully, and always with his ear to the ground.
Nothing of significant note, however, now reached his ears. An earlier sound, which had resembled the thrum of a small marine motor, must have been just the sound of his own blood thrumming in his skull. No, there was no motor. No tourist boat full of saviors headed upriver to rescue him and deprive the Xucuru warriors of their evening meal. The tourist idea was admittedly laughable. No tourist boat ever ventured this far upriver. Sane men seldom did.
He would die alone, but not wanting for company. The irony of the jungle. There was too much of everything. Too much vibrant existence, too much life, too much death. He felt it in his bones: the cellular activity of jungle life humming at every conceivable level.
Some of the worst life-forms were in the river.
He’d been drifting with the currents. The wide, olive-green river had been his refuge for two long days. He’d tied leafy branches to his head, arms, and upper body, hoping to blend with the half-submerged logs and floating vegetation on the river. The silvery piranha hadn’t bothered him, mercifully. Nor had the candiru, an eel-like fish that swims up any available human orifice. That was the one that terrified him most.
A young member of his expedition had been standing in the river, the water just above his knees, urinating. A week later, he died in feverish agony. A candiru had swum up the boy’s urine stream and become lodged in his penis. There, feeding on the host’s blood, the tiny creature had grown to enormous size. The resulting infection led to the amputation of the organ and the boy’s painful death.
He rolled onto one elbow and pushed the reeds aside so he could see the river.
The Xucuru warriors chasing him since his escape from the compound would not let something like a river stop them. In his mind’s eye, lying on the bank, he could see the savages racing through the jungle, their naked bodies slathered with streaks of black and red paint, their seven-foot bows and five-foot arrows, their clubs, their blowpipes, and their spears. All would have sworn the blood oath not to return without his head.
It was widely rumored amongst the prisoners in the camps that no one had ever really escaped. The Xucuru warriors hired by the soldiers were relentless in their pursuit of escapees. They would much rather die by each other’s hands than return empty handed.
Keep moving, his urgent mind told his wasted body. Wait, the body replied. Wait!
Five minutes.
Please.
Yes. Do nothing. Surely there was time to lie here on the banks of the Xingu to be warmed by the sun. How sorely he’d missed its warmth. To relax for a time, let the skin and bones dry out. He let his muscles go, digging his fingers into the soft mud beneath him. He felt his mind start to slip, and wondered if the sudden shivering was malarial. If yes, without the malaria pills they’d taken from him, he would surely die. How could one be so cold and yet so hot at the same instant?
The sun was just another brutal enemy. Once he’d regained some strength, he’d have to drag himself back inside the trees, else the harsh rays would soon fry his flesh. He was nearly as naked as the men who chased him. He was dressed only in what remained of the rags he’d escaped in.
He slept.
And awoke some time later to swarms of piums, clouds of invisible microscopic monsters, which attacked him mercilessly. They left smears of blood where they bit, blood that could attract the piranhas when and if he returned to the river. Fully awake now, for a time, he considered the pleasures to be had in simply dying. Cessation of hunger and pain. Peace. It would be so easy to give in.
His reserves were nil. In captivity, the daily battle to survive had taken its toll, left him depleted in body and mind. He was tired and desperately hungry now. He groaned loudly and fought the urge to sleep again. Hadn’t he just slept? How long? A minute? An hour? More? He had no idea.
Around him, the animals of the daylight, too, were noisily preparing for sleep. The nocturnal creatures, their omnivorous appetites whetted, were beginning to stir. The air was suddenly cool. The sun fell suddenly in these latitudes and left behind a sky of cobalt blue and vermilion against which the black palms marching along the riverbank were silhouetted.
High above the treetops, a small cloud, lit from within like a Venetian lantern, hovered above the dark sea
of trees. It was really all so very beautiful here. This twilight hour was like some faint memory of love; or fading dreams of happier childhood times. He closed his eyes and tried to hold these comforting images, but they skittered away, leaving a vacuum that delirium could slide into unobserved.
He fixed his pale eyes on the waning yellow moon and wondered if he had the strength of soul to survive.
For not the first time in his life, death looked good.
Alexander Hawke, dreaming of peace, finally slipped into the waiting arms of a coldly beckoning Morpheus.
2
H awke’s vivid dreams were filled not with beauty but with looming images of death and horror. During his long months in captivity, he had become a new man. Different, and, he thought, during those periods when he felt rational, not necessarily better. He had seen true evil up close on a daily basis. For most of his life he’d refused to shake hands with the devil. Now, he felt they were on a first name basis.
The inhumanity he’d witnessed in the terror-training camps was of a different order of magnitude from anything he’d ever experienced before. In the waning days of the first Gulf War, young Royal Navy Flight Lieutenant Alexander Hawke had been flying close air support at low altitude over Baghdad. His airplane had been blown out of the sky by an Iraqi missile battery and both he and his weapons officer had been captured within the hour. It had been a most unpleasant experience. Yet even his brutal Iraqi jailers had shied away from the kind of cruel savagery he’d witnessed in the jungle camps.
He’d always suspected that men with absolute power were capable of absolutely anything. Now he knew that old axiom to be true. He felt weakened by the sureness of this belief, diminished by his new knowledge. Which was strange. Alex Hawke had always lived by the rule that what did not kill him only made him stronger. But Hawke did not feel strengthened by what he’d seen in the jungle.
He only felt colder.
Colder and harder.
The stars and bit players of these past episodes in captivity haunted his nightmares. In his malarial state, they crowded his waking hours as well. He would see a figure standing in a clearing, beckoning him; blink, and they would be gone. The thin line between nightmare and reality was becoming dangerously blurred. What was he really made of? What was he truly capable of? He didn’t know anymore.
The drums were silent. Perhaps the Xucuru had moved on. Missed him, somehow. He was conscious of a strange new sensation. Hope.
Now, lying hidden in his bed of reeds beside the river, edging toward consciousness, he was suddenly sure of one thing. There could be no surrender. Not now. Not yet. He must have slept all night, because he felt just a hint of the old vigor as he struggled awake.
No, not quite yet, old fellow, the narrator of dreams was saying in the background. Feverish and shivering, he allowed himself to drift upward, float into the conscious green realm of heat and jungle. The sun was up, fierce, reflecting off the brown surface of the river and the extravaganza of colors that comprised his forest. He rubbed his neck just below the ear, and his hand came away sticky. A vampire bat had nipped him during the night.
Blood, he thought looking at the smear on his palm. He smiled at the bright red oxygenated sight of it. He was probably infected, and probably dying of septicemia, but by God he was still alive. He had one chance, he thought, small as it might be. One last chance to escape.
You better Belize it.
There was a way, he thought now, sitting up in his bed of reeds, that the doomed expedition he’d led could be remembered as a success. If he could just put his current predicament in the correct perspective, he could argue that this one man, the lone survivor of an expedition purportedly launched to find El Dorado, the Lost City of the Amazon, had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
What he had discovered could prove to be vastly more valuable than some fabled city of gold. If he could survive to tell the tale.
He stood up, stretched his limbs. He was free. He had work to do. Yes. He was determined to survive long enough to raise an alarm about things he had witnessed. Evil was spawning under the perfect cover of the canopy. Even in his own span of captivity, he had sensed its insidious monstrosity. A force for terror was growing like some cancerous being, its tentacles reaching deep into the vast uncharted Amazon Basin, unseen and unchecked. Somehow, he had to live long enough to tell this story.
A howler monkey screamed just inches above his head and snapped him back to what now passed for reality. He froze. A lone jaguar was circling nearby, his nose in the air. He would easily die right here if he didn’t act fast and with something akin to rational thought. One needed to prioritize at times like this, that’s what his stint in the military had taught him about survival in hostile environments.
Hawke did just that.
One, keep breathing. Two, fashion some kind of weapon. Three, get to an outpost on the river. Get help.
A telephone. That’s what he needed. For that, he had to reach the nearest sizable river village. He had used the stars last night, making a rough calculation as to where he was. He believed the nearest outpost would be Cuiaba, a few days’ river travel to the east. It was hardly civilization but it would do for now.
He would need a sharpened bamboo spear. And a canoe. He’d learned their simple construction watching the Indians construct them in the camps. He would find and kill a tapir. With their short limbs, the small piglike mammals were easy to catch. Yes, first track and kill a tapir with his spear. Stretch its skin over a bamboo frame and build some kind of small canoe. Yes.
He shaded his eyes, peering over his stand of reeds, scanning the river in both directions for any sign of the Xucuru. Nothing. Only the indolent flow. The glare off the sun-flecked water was paralyzing, making his eyes red and watery. He needed to get out of the sun and find his tapir, build his boat. He felt dizzy and wanted to lie down again but there was no time for that. He must hurry.
His mind raced ahead of his body as he made preparations to move on.
He told himself he would be safe when his canoe reached Cuiaba. They would give him the pills for his fever. They would bandage his seeping wound. He would eat something other than roots and worms. He would dine on roast lamb and sleep once more in a feather bed. He would see friendly faces once more. He needed—damn mosquitoes!—he needed to get out of the blistering heat or he’d soon pass out again and then his goose would be well and truly cooked.
He managed to stagger a few steps through the deep mud and once more he was safely under the green umbrella. Gathering strength from some resource deep inside, he moved quickly through the tall thicket. He could see the bend in the river curving away. He had an eye peeled for a lone dugout, the inevitable Xucuru scout traveling in advance of the war party searching for him.
He made his plans for the possibility of survival. He would hide by day. He would fashion some kind of torch and travel by night. He would track and kill his tapir and eat its flesh. With its skin, he would build his canoe. When the sun fell, he’d return to the river and civilization.
That, at least, was the plan.
BY MIDDAY, with the sweat pouring off of him, and the subsequent chills, Alex Hawke had accomplished most of his objectives. He had eaten raw tapir with gusto. He’d built a respectable canoe, light and easy to portage. He desperately wanted to keep moving while there was still some light but he found he was completely spent and could do no more. The fever had overtaken him again.
The green world was spinning and he feared he might fall or slip into unconsciousness in an exposed or unprotected location. He quickly found a spot where he could remain hidden but still see the river. There he made himself as comfortable as he could under the shade of his newly built canoe. He needed rest, now, sleep.
As he drifted off, he imagined, or perhaps heard, the drumbeat mounting steadily in the jungle. It came to him as a repeating two-syllable beat, high-low, high-low. Slipping down to an uneasy slumber, he thought it sounded like kill you…kill you…kill you…
HIS REST was cut short by disturbing sounds on the river. His eyes popped open to see the sun was still burning high above. He hadn’t slept long. Someone was coming. He sat bolt upright, instantly aware of the danger. He groped for his spear but couldn’t find it. Had he left it leaning against the base of the tree where he’d collapsed for a moment? No? He must have done so. He must have—
It wasn’t a lone scout in a dugout canoe.
It was a sleek black jet boat from one of the camps with a fifty-caliber machine gun mounted atop a squat tower at the stern. The twin jet drives were bubbling beneath the transom, moving the patrol boat forward at little more than idle speed. Besides the skipper at the helm and the gunner on the stern, there were two men in jungle camo on the bow, one sweeping a submachine gun from side-to-side and the other with a bullhorn.
The bullhorn was calling his name.
Hawke! Hawke! Hawke!
So. They had somehow learned his name.
He had no time to ponder that. From the jungle upriver, came an even more dreadful sound. It was the sound of fierce wild howling he’d heard late at night in the camps whenever someone tried to escape. It was the sound of the fighting dogs the guards kept for their protection and amusement.
They’d loosed the damned dogs on him, the dogs and the dark hooded ones who came in the middle of the night. Stood like ghosts above your pit.
“Las Medianoches,” Hawke said, whispering the name of every Brazilian child’s nightmare, and then he climbed to his feet and ran for his life. Medianoches…the word meant “middle of the night.” For that’s when the real monsters came out to play.
He ran in wild desperation. He ran well past the frontiers of exhaustion, deep into uncharted territories of pain. He knew he could not run much longer. The howling dogs were on his heels and he drove himself blindly through the dense jungle, tripping, falling, knowing it was useless even as he pumped his knees and tore through the thick undergrowth and looping vines.