As Mengele rushed for the door, Caine grabbed a ballpoint pen from the desk and raced after Mengele, cornering him in the lab. Mengele stood there panting, his tongue lolling like a heat-stricken dog, his eyes darting around frantically. He threw a flask at Caine and Caine barely managed to duck out of the way. Before he heard the flask smash behind him, he had already begun to move.
He aimed a stab at Mengele’s eye with the pen, but the stab was a feint and as Mengele’s arm came up to block the blow, Caine side-kicked Mengele’s groin. The back of Mengele’s head was exposed as he doubled over with a high-pitched scream. Caine stabbed at the back of Mengele’s neck, ramming the pen into the small indentation between the neck and the base of the skull. Caine felt a sudden tremor as Mengele’s body collapsed. He had hit the foramen magnum, perhaps the most vulnerable spot in the human body. Mengele was dead before his body hit the floor.
A savage exultation flooded Caine. It was like nothing he had ever felt before. A sense of pure joy and freedom beyond orgasm that only the gods can know. He let out an insane animal yell that was both terrible and awesome—the triumphant howl of primordial man, the killer ape. The hunter had made his kill and for an instant the jungle itself stood still.
A wide-eyed Indian face peered at him from the front doorway. Caine grabbed a flask and heaved it at the Indian, and the head disappeared. The flask shattered harmlessly on the doorpost. He suddenly became conscious of the babble of voices outside and the sounds of running. His body still tingled with the thrill of what he had done, but he knew he had almost run out of time.
He picked up a small corked vial that contained some tissue specimen floating in formaldehyde and slipped it into his pocket as he ran back to Mengele’s office. Helga had managed to get up on all fours and was slowly crawling, like a massive sloth, toward the scalpel on the floor. Caine kicked her in the side, connecting with the spot under the ribs that boxers aim at, and she dropped as though she had been poleaxed. He grabbed the scalpel and ran back to Mengele’s body.
Mengele’s hand was curled and grasping as Caine turned it over. It looked like a bird’s claw. He slashed quickly at the first joint of the thumb, the blood spilling over his hands and onto the floor. He felt no repugnance as he sawed away at the ligaments of the joint. It felt good to have Mengele’s still warm blood bathing his hands, almost as though he were enacting some ancient, savage ritual, washing his hands in the blood of his enemy. The scalpel grew slippery in his hand and he had to wipe his hands on Mengele’s shirt.
He glanced up to see three or four Indian faces staring at him from the doorway, their eyes wide with horror at the hellish spectacle of the white man kneeling over the body, dismembering the white god, Mengele. They were too frightened to attack or even move. None of them had ever seen anything like it. The white man with the bleeding face was a jungle demon incarnate.
“Justice,” Caine shouted at them, his body swaying drunkenly as he straightened up, his eyes burning with flames that were not of this world.
“For the Jews,” he cried, and then he remembered the old Gypsy at Auschwitz. “And the Gypsies. And for all the poor bastards from whom God hid His face when they cried out to Him!” he spat out. “And for me,” he said with quiet intensity. “Caine, the killer.”
And he lifted Mengele’s dead hand to his lips and savagely bit off the thumb at the nearly severed joint He spat the bloody joint into his hand. A sense of release came over him, like a baptism, and he flung the hand away from him and stood up. His lips were red and glistening with Mengele’s blood.
He glared at the Indians and began to walk toward them, as they started to back respectfully away from him. Like all primitives, they knew that madness is inspired by the gods. Then he stopped. He heard Rolf angrily cursing in German and Spanish, outside. He was screaming at the Indians to get out of his way. Caine had only a few seconds left.
Instantly he whirled, leaped over the body, and ran for Mengele’s office, clutching the bleeding finger in his fist. The doorpost cracked with a loud snap from the .300 caliber slug as he ran past it. He charged across the room and dived headfirst through the window, tearing the screen away and taking it with him as he rolled on the dark ground. He ran across the dark compound with sudden zigzags, like a fleeing rabbit, as the shots of the Winchester echoed through the night.
He stumbled and seemed to hear the hum of a bullet as it whizzed through the space where his head had been. He was tumbling in the mud and suddenly found himself waist-deep in the stream. He dived under the surface, letting the current carry him toward the black wall of the jungle’s edge.
The water was cool and soothing as he floated with the current. It felt like balm to his burning skin and the tension began to drain away. He wanted to float forever down the stream, like a log, drifting into a peace he had never known. The coolness touched him with a sense of absolution and he was almost asleep when he came to with a sudden jerk, thrashing and sputtering in the stream. A part of his mind was sounding a desperate alarm—unless he got moving, they would kill him.
He waded to the mudbank and staggered up the slope, somewhere near the edge of the clearing. He had to find the trail back to the Yarinacocha before Rolf and the Indians tracked him down. The darkness was almost complete and it was impossible to orient himself. Even if he found the trail, to attempt the jungle by night was madness. He was sure to lose his way in minutes. But to stay was certain death. Hell, it was death either way, he reasoned. Reason, that was pretty good, he thought. For the first time since they had marched him to the Anthill, his mind was reasoning again. He began searching for the mouth of the trail among the dark trees.
One by one the lights of the institute clicked on, casting dim pools of light over the compound. Soon the Indians would be after him, he knew. They would try to get him before he faded into the dark bush. But the light was a godsend. It would help him to find the trail and he ran faster. He thought he spotted the opening where he and Pepé had emerged from the trees and headed toward it at full speed, when he collided with an Indian, suddenly emerging out of the artificial twilight.
Caine lay dazed on the ground for a moment, then leaped to his feet as the Indian sprang at him, his tattooed face like a ferocious demon mask. Caine pivoted, his feet slipping in the dirt, moving into a clumsy spinning back-kick that luckily caught the Indian high in the chest, knocking him down. Caine didn’t hang around to finish the Indian off. He had to get to the safety of the trail. He didn’t think they would try to track him in the darkness; that would make them crazier than he was. Suddenly an opening in the trees was before him and he dived into it. Darkness swallowed him as he staggered down the trail, his chest heaving desperately for air.
Somehow he stumbled on through the darkness, branches whipping at his face, until his legs finally collapsed under him. The pain washed over him in waves, his body shivering with the violence of it. There was no end to it, he thought dully. The blackness of the jungle was ominous and eternal, like that of the grave, and his imagination populated it with snakes and scorpions and ugly, crawling shapes. So this is what it’s like to be blind, he thought with a shudder, and a feeling of helplessness and horror engulfed him. Stop it! he warned himself. That way madness lies. Who wrote that line, anyway? he wondered. Somebody. Shakespeare, probably. You’re alive, damn it. Alive! You did it, you son of a bitch. You pulled it off!
His breathing had grown more regular and the shivering began to ease off. Where was the thumb? he wondered, and it took him a full minute before he realized that it was still clenched in his fist. With fumbling fingers, he took the vial from his pocket and plucked out the tissue specimen. He put the thumb into the vial, recorked it tightly, and replaced it in his shirt pocket, buttoning it securely, the sharp smell of the formaldehyde filling his nostrils. He’d swap the thumb for a cigarette in a minute, he decided. If there was a part of his body that didn’t hurt, he couldn’t feel it.
They were sure to close his escape route, he knew. By morning
Rolf would have radioed Pucallpa and the gunboat would be alerted, so the Yarinacocha was out. And even if he could somehow make it back to Pucallpa, the town was too small and isolated for him to evade the authorities and the Indians. Pucallpa would be a death trap, he realized.
Jesus! He had them all after him now: the Peruvian Army and policia, the locals, the Nazis, the Chamas, Yaguas, and Shipibos. And he was on their ground, not his. For him there was only the jungle, where no man can survive alone for long. They had him boxed, all right. And in the morning Rolf and an army of Indians would be on his trail, and they could move twice as fast as he could. It was hopeless.
If he could just get back to the survival pack he had hidden, he thought. It was his only chance. He thought about the AR-15 carbine hidden in the tree, and felt better. If he could just get back to it, he could take a few of the bastards with him, he reflected grimly. Christ, he wanted a cigarette badly. There were cigarettes in the survival pack, he reminded himself. He had to get back to it.
What time was it, anyway? He brought his wrist up to his eyes, the radium watch dial glowing in the darkness, like a constellation of stars. His eyes fastened greedily on the tiny specks of light. A quarter after nine. It was still early, in spite of everything that had happened. The night seemed endless.
Where was C.J. now? he wondered. Probably having dinner in some fancy restaurant, her face glowing from an afternoon on the beach, surrounded by the murmur of conversation and the tinkle of cocktails. Did she think of him, or was she really taken by all the superficial charm of the people around her? He felt a kind of contempt for their world of surfaces, filled with those who do not know that the ocean is not the surface you can see, but the depths that cannot be seen. Suddenly he began to laugh, because as desperate and painful as his situation was, he was luckier than they were. He was alive! He could feel life pulsing through his veins. He wondered if C.J. could ever see things that way.
He felt something move across his foot and he froze, the sweat rolling down his face as though it would never stop. Something long and slow and he knew it was a snake. And then the movement stopped and he was sure that within inches from him, somewhere in the darkness, the long, forked tongue was flicking out, sensing the air for the heat of his body, waiting to strike. He held his breath in terror. The slightest sound or movement would give him away. His instincts, harking back to tree-dwelling days, were screaming at him to run, but he couldn’t move. What was it? he wondered desperately. It was too light for a boa constrictor and that meant it could well be poisonous. There was no sound of rattling, so it probably wasn’t a bushmaster. It could be anything, a fer-de-lance, a palm viper, or a deadly coral snake. Whatever it was, it wasn’t his idea of a house pet. A bead of sweat hung on the tip of his nose, itching maddeningly. Go away, his mind screamed and it was almost worth getting killed just to scratch his nose. If he could just see its head—but it might be anywhere.
The screech of a howler monkey sounded from the darkness far above him. The cry was taken up by a trio of macaws and the jungle came alive with chattering cries. And then a slender, pale shaft of light touched his foot. It was the moon! he thought exultantly. If the snake would just move, he had a chance to get away. He could just make out the trail in the dim, ghostly light. He had to get out of there! Move, you bastard! Move!
At last, after what seemed like an hour, he felt the snake slither on and on across his foot and disappear, with a faint rustle of leaves, into the darkness. It must have been a good eight feet long! He forced himself to wait for at least twenty seconds more, counting them as if they would never end. He moved his stiff legs and broke into a run down the trail, feeling his way as much as seeing. It was time to perform the classic, military maneuver known as “Getting the fuck out of there.” He had to put as much distance between the institute and himself as possible before daylight. The distance he covered this night was all the head start he was going to get If only he had a flashlight! Or a cigarette, damn it, he thought, rubbing his nose gratefully as he ran.
The night passed in a kind of twilight daze, like that odd moment between sleep and waking when one is not sure which is the reality and which the dream. His brain was dizzy and increasingly confused. He couldn’t tell whether it was fatigue, or the darkness, or the pain, or the rising fever from the ant bites. Time and again he lurched into trees and bushes, bouncing against them, like a beaten fighter against the ropes. Each time they knocked him down, he would scramble up again and stagger on. He blundered into invisible spiderwebs that tickled his face with long, sticky fingers. With a shudder he tore through them with flailing arms and stumbled ahead, his skin crawling with the feel of hairy legs and no way of telling whether they were imaginary or real. He was completely exhausted, yet he went on and on, hardly knowing what he was doing. His arms hung like dead weights from his shoulders and his head swayed drunkenly, lolling on his panting chest.
It was nearly midnight when he finally collapsed. He tried to crawl to his feet, but he couldn’t make it and fell face-first into the decaying earth. Got to rest, he thought stupidly. You can’t rest, another part of him said. If the Indians don’t get you, the bugs and snakes will. You can’t lie down on the ground in the jungle. It was as though he had three selves: one that obstinately refused to move; a second that insisted on it; and a third that observed the debate as though it were a tennis match.
Your only chance is to rest, he told himself. No, your only chance is to move; there’s time enough for rest in the grave, he countered. Somehow he got to his feet again, stumbled ahead, and then he was down again. Can’t stay here, got to move, he thought dully, licking his dry lips with a tongue that felt raspy as a file. Take one more step, Hudson’s voice was screaming at him from the darkness and he was up again, lurching farther down the trail and then he was down again, sprawling in the rank, moist dirt.
The darkness was complete and he couldn’t tell whether it was the night, or whether he had blacked out. Got to get off the trail. Can’t let them find me here, his thoughts clinking dully against each other like coins in a nearly empty purse. He crawled heavily into the bush and blindly pulled at palm fronds to make a rough bed. The frond edges cut his fingers, but he was already in so much pain that he hardly felt it. He collapsed with a dry rustle on the small heap of fronds and then there was only the darkness.
Caine woke with a start at the cracking sound of a broken twig. The jungle was bright with the milky light of morning and the merry chirp of birds. The air buzzed with the sound of insects and it took him a few seconds before he remembered where he was. Through the dense foliage he could see the naked, brown figure of an Yagua on all fours, sniffing the ground like a dog. They were tracking him!
The Yagua stood up and carefully inspected the bushes along the trail. He was carrying a blowgun, a bamboo quiver of darts dangling from it. Caine knew that the darts were tipped with curare. Just to prick your finger with one of the darts would cause death within fifteen seconds, and he remembered Father José telling him that the Yaguas could hit a parrot at a hundred yards with their blowguns.
He needed a weapon desperately, he thought, his skin shiny with sweat. The Indian’s gaze passed right across the sun-dappled foliage in front of Caine, and Caine’s muscles tensed into knots. A shout sounded farther down the trail and the Yagua turned and trotted away. As he disappeared from sight, Caine began to breathe again. He glanced down at his sweat-slick arms, the skin swollen and welted as boiled sausage and he began to panic. The heat was intense and he couldn’t tell whether it was fever from the ant bites, or just the sun.
“Are you okay?” Hudson’s voice sounded in his ear, just as it had when he had sprained his ankle on their first twenty-mile cross-country march in Panama. Hudson had shown him how to tightly bind the ankle, but Caine didn’t think he could walk on it. Hudson just stood there glowering at him.
“When I say ‘Are you okay?” I mean, are you okay? I don’t mean your ankle. That’s just pain and pain is just pain. It�
��s no excuse for not doing anything. What I want to know is, are you okay?”
“I’m okay, Hudson, I’m okay,” Caine muttered, just as he had that time in Panama. He scrambled painfully to his feet and began to check his pockets, but there was nothing he could use for a weapon. He began to move slowly through the bush and cautiously started hiking down the trail, keeping his eyes peeled to the ground till he found what he was looking for: a dead branch of hardwood, about an inch in diameter. With difficulty he broke the branch into two roughly equal pieces, each about eight inches in length. He tied the two sticks at the ends with a length of tough, slender vine, which he cut by chewing with his teeth so that the sticks were connected by a two-inch-long stretch of flexible vine. He got a sense of power by just holding the crude nunchaka he had just constructed. It wasn’t the greatest weapon in the world, but he felt better just having it. You used it by holding one stick and whipping the other at your opponent, and it was efficient enough to have been outlawed as a deadly weapon by the state of California. He grimly looped the nunchaka through his belt and started down the trail toward the Yarinacocha.
Caine could hear the sounds of the Indians crashing through the bush long before he could see the shimmering light of the sun reflecting off the water. He quickly abandoned the trail and angled into the undergrowth, toward where he estimated he had cached the survival pack. If he could just get to the pack before the Indians spotted him, he might have a chance, he thought anxiously. Then he heard something and froze.
The Indians were all around him. He could hear the faint rustlings of movement as they picked their way through the jungle. Down toward the water a voice that sounded like Rolf’s was snapping orders in a muffled tone. There was a shout and then an ear-piercing scream that was cut off as suddenly as it had begun. The sweat poured into Caine’s eyes, stinging them sharply, and he blinked to clear them. He wearily leaned his forehead against a tree, the rough bark scratching his skin. Why didn’t they find him and just get it over with? he wondered.
Hour of the Assassins Page 27