Hour of the Assassins

by Andrew Kaplan

  When he finally opened his eyes and focused them, he realized that he was staring at a strange marking on the trunk. His heart skipped a beat when he recognized it. It was the blaze he had cut the night before last, to mark the way to the survival pack. He started into the clearing toward the three cedro trees and then froze. A wide-eyed Yagua was staring right at him, the blowgun already being raised to his lips.

  Caine dived sideways into the brush as the poison dart thunked into a tree trunk, vibrating inches from his head. He rolled and, in complete desperation, charged at the Indian, who was raising the blowgun into position for another shot. He wasn’t going to make it, because the gun was pointed right at him and there was no way to miss at this range. Caine tucked his head and went into a forward roll, the dart ruffling his hair as it passed. With a loud war cry, the Indian dropped the blowgun and whipped out a knife.

  Caine scrambled wildly to his feet and pulled the nunchaka from his belt. Warily the two men crouched and began to circle each other. The Indian slashed at Caine and he pulled back just in time, the glittering blade just missing the tip of Caine’s nose. The Indian shouted again for help and Caine knew he had to end it right away. He stumbled and the Indian thrust forward at Caine’s belly, but the stumble was a feint and Caine completed the move with a slicing crescent kick that knocked the knife hand sideways. Caine whipped the Indian’s arm with the nunchaka and the Indian screamed and dropped the knife. Caine whipped the nunchaka back horizontally with a wrist flick. The stick crashed into the side of the Indian’s head with a loud crack, knocking him to the ground. The Yagua lay unmoving, a thin trickle of blood seeping from his ear.

  Caine didn’t take the time to check whether he was unconscious or dead; he raced for the center tree and tore wildly at its hollow core for the survival pack. He wrestled the suitcase out of the trunk and scrambled into the foliage only seconds before the clearing filled with chattering Yaguas and Chamas. Caine rolled behind a dead tree trunk which was swarming with termites and cautiously zipped open the suitcase.

  The AR-15 came to his hand like an old friend and when he slammed the first clip home, he no longer cared whether they heard him or not. His eyes had gone flat and cold. He was the hunter once more. He carefully peered over the trunk at the clearing.

  There were half a dozen Indians running toward him, three of them wildly waving their machetes. Caine swung the gun into firing position over the log and began rapid-fire, aiming at the farthest one first and working back toward the lead Indians. They went down like figures in a shooting gallery and the two lead Indians didn’t realize what was happening at first. Then they turned to flee and he got them in the back, just like that.

  Silence filled the clearing, palpable as the humidity, as Caine grabbed the knapsack and headed back toward the trail. He had to get across to the other side before Rolf got there. Caine hesitated at the edge of the trail, crouching in the age-old stance of the jungle predator, his senses alive to any movement. A sudden stab of pain drilled his cheek and he almost cried out. He winced and an insect the size of a dragonfly buzzed his ear and was lost in the trees. He had been bitten by a mutaca and almost immediately he could feel the skin on his cheek tighten as it began to swell.

  The trail was clear; all he had to do was cross it. Sure, he told himself, but he couldn’t make his feet move. How many times had they tried to cross empty trails in Laos, only to get cut down by the unseen enemy? Go on, you bastard, do it, he urged, but his feet were frozen in place. He wiped the sweat from his eyes with his sleeve. The dense greenery across the trail beckoned him like a distant view of Shangri-La. Why does a killer cross the road? he asked himself stupidly. To get to the other side, you gutless son of a bitch, he answered, jeering. Do it! You’re a dead man anyway, so just get it over with. That’s not why you cross the road, he amended. You cross it because you can’t stay here. And he stumbled awkwardly across the trail and crashed into the trees.

  Rolf and the Indians would be along at any second, he realized, and feverishly dug in the knapsack for a length of fishing line. Rolf had the Winchester, with its greater range, but he had the AR-15 for firepower. Rolf was the key. If he could get Rolf, the Indians were odds-on to run for it. Then he saw two Chamas far down the trail and fired at them. They dived into the foliage for cover. He had to move quickly.

  He tied one end of the fishing line to the bush and crawled through the scratching, tearing undergrowth to a tree about twenty yards away, trailing the line behind him. He propped the knapsack beside the tree as a shooting rest and took up the slack in the line. Now all he had to do was wait.

  Sweat blinded him and he had to keep wiping his eyes with his sleeve. It was Laos all over again, he thought. It was like a wound that wouldn’t heal, a dull ache that never went away. “You never came back,” C.J. had said. It was exactly the way it had been for them. The fetid heat and sounds and stench of the jungle and always the enemy, invisible and yet you knew they were there. It had come back, that awful sense of frustration, because you never saw them, not even when they got you. You would lie there, your life draining away, while the medic told you it wasn’t bad, you would make it. You were one of the lucky ones, boy. You were going home. And you could look up and see the lie in the medic’s eyes, because he wouldn’t look at you and you knew it was bad, because you couldn’t feel it and those were the ones everybody said were the bad ones. And they would check your dog tags, for the blood-type, the medic said, but you knew that it was for the records before they shoved you into a body-bag. And there was nothing you could do, so you just lay there, feeling your life drain away and thought that you had come so close; you had almost made it. But it didn’t matter anymore, because C.J. had been right all along. He had never come back.

  He whirled at a sudden rustling sound behind him, his heart fluttering like a trapped bird, but it was just a large turtle plodding through the undergrowth. Rolf would send the Indians around to outflank and flush him, he reasoned. He had a fairly decent field of fire, he thought, peeking carefully around the tree, but there was nothing to see but the dappled greenery along the trail. Where was Rolf? He had to draw his fire. If he waited much longer, the silent Indians would have him boxed. His nerves were screaming, like a fine wire being drawn tighter and tighter, until he couldn’t stand it anymore.

  He jerked cautiously at the fishing line and the bush rustled harshly. Almost immediately the thwang of arrows flew at the bush, followed by the crash of the Winchester. Damn! He hadn’t spotted it. He desperately jerked the line again and the Winchester fired again, followed by a sudden, arching rain of arrows and darts at the bush. Caine jerked the line feebly once more and waited breathlessly.

  An Yagua cautiously emerged from the undergrowth, his eyes rapidly darting about. Something must have frightened him, because he pressed back against the foliage. Come on, you kraut bastard, Caine pleaded silently. Then there was a movement, as a hand or something shoved the Indian forward from behind and Caine fired rapidly, emptying the clip at the bush behind the Indian.

  As the Yagua tumbled dead to the ground, Caine slammed home another clip and continued firing at the bush until the clip was empty. Suddenly there was a murmur of voices and he could hear the Indians running, the sounds receding in the sullen heat. Caine loaded another clip and sprinted back across the trail, diving into the brush for cover, but nothing happened. He crept in a wide circle until he neared the bush he had been firing at. He went down on his belly and crawled slowly, one step at a time, until he was within close range. Then he snapped into a kneeling firing position and put half the clip into the area around the bush.

  The jungle was silent except for the endless insect whine that was as much a part of the jungle air as the heat and the humidity. Caine crawled on his belly until he saw the bodies. Rolf was lying facedown, his back stained a dull red with blood. Next to him, a dead Yagua lay curled in a fetal position, part of his face scooped out, leaving a bleeding red mass. Someone must have run off with Rolf’s Wi
nchester, because it was gone, he noted. Caine kicked Rolf’s body over, but there was no need for a coup de grâce. He could see that at a glance. Caine stared down at Rolf’s dead eyes.

  “I forgot to tell you. I cheat,” he said to the dead, staring eyes. A cluster of insects had already formed near the body, feeding on the blood that seeped from Rolfs chest.

  Caine ran back to the trail and retrieved the knapsack and fishing line. He trotted down the trail till he reached the edge of the water, the placid surface sparkling in the sun. There was no sign of the lancha. They must have sunk it, he mused. In the far distance, he could just make out the gunboat as it patrolled near the shore, the sound of the diesel engine like a distant insect buzz. Rolf must have radioed ahead, he thought with chagrin. The Yarinacocha and Pucallpa were closed to him for good. The trap had snapped shut.

  He found Pepé’s body on the mud flats, near the water. The caimáns hadn’t gotten to him yet. His stomach had been pierced by a long Yagua arrow, the barbed point extending almost a foot out of his back. A deep rust-colored gash showed across the nearly severed throat, where a machete had mercifully put Pepé out of his agony. Caine sank to his knees in the rank mud beside the body. For the first time since he had found Lim’s body that day in Laos, and for no reason he could fathom, he began to cry.

  CHAPTER 15

  “Plucking a parrot is not one of the more entertaining ways of spending your time,” Caine said, and was suddenly aware of the sound of his own voice. How long had he been talking out loud to himself? he wondered. Ever since the stream, yesterday. It was the loneliness, the complete isolation, he surmised. The dense, endless green of the rain forest had cut him off from the rest of humanity as completely as if he were an astronaut, marooned on an uninhabited planet.

  “A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth,” he recited loudly to the big, brownish spider, near the center of the giant web, just a few feet away. The web was as large as a bedsheet. It glistened with a poisonous, iridescent shimmer in the relentless heat, but it screened out the insects on that side. That was one of the reasons he had chosen this spot as a campsite.

  Where was that line about being a fugitive from anyway? he wondered. Probably the Bible. It sounded like the Bible, he reflected. He shook his head and resumed plucking the bright green feathers, one by one. It would be good to taste meat again, he thought. It had been a lucky shot. The parrot had been just sitting on a branch, barely ten feet over his head and he had fired the carbine at once, without even taking the time to aim.

  This was the fourth day, he remembered. The second since the impassable mangrove swamp had forced him to abandon the bank of the Yarinacocha. He still wasn’t sure whether he had made the right choice.

  “We are all constantly confronted with choices. What makes a survival situation different is that there are no second chances. In the jungle the punishment for a mistake is death,” he remembered Hudson saying just before they jumped from the plane.

  Well, he would know in a day or two, he shrugged. Of course, standing on the mud flats looking down at Pepé’s body, there really hadn’t seemed to be much of a choice.

  For the Chamas and Yaguas who lived south of the Yarinacocha, between the institute and Pucallpa, he was an outcast, a murderer. Even if they feared him as a demon, he knew they wouldn’t hesitate to turn him over to the Peruvian Army authorities, who probably wouldn’t bother with the niceties of a trial. Even if they did, he could think of better ways to spend the rest of his life than in some hellhole of a Peruvian prison.

  That left only the jungle as a way out. It was a long shot, but it was the only shot he had. The jungle north of the Yarinacocha was largely unexplored. That area was Achual country, the most savage tribe of the southern Amazon, where no Chama or Yagua would dare venture. Father José had told him that the Peruvian Army had twice sent military expeditions into Achual country. No trace of either of the expeditions was ever found. The jungle had simply swallowed them up. So Caine would be safe from the Chamas, Yaguas, the Nazis, and the authorities; they would simply assume he had died in the jungle. God knows, that was a reasonable assumption, he reflected. Because the jungle was doing its best to kill him.

  Starting out, the plan had hot seemed that crazy. It was only thirty to forty miles from where he stood on the mud flats to the banks of the Ucayali. There were no mountains, ravines, or major topographical obstacles between him and the river that anyone knew of, and no matter which way he went, so long as he headed roughly east, he was bound to strike the Ucayali.

  Once there he could raft, or get a boat to take him downstream to Iquitos, where he could catch a flight to Lima. He doubted that the news about Mendoza would reach that far, and even if it had, they would be looking for McClure, not someone named Payne. Thirty miles wasn’t so much. A good marathon runner could do it in under three hours easy. He ought to be able to do it in a day or two, he had reasoned. He had the survival kit and the carbine and the training to do it. All in all, the idea seemed plausible.

  Except that he hadn’t really taken the Amazon into account. He was alone and unaided and the jungle was trackless. The total distance for him wasn’t thirty miles, but perhaps two or three times that, because he could hardly travel in a straight line. And whether or not he had realized it when he began his march, he was in a desperate race against time.

  Because the real dangers of the jungle are not the spectacular one that people imagine. Certanly no one in his right mind would want to cozy up to a caimán alligator or a poisonous snake, Caine reflected. But by and large, these creatures are timid of men and are rarely encountered. The true dangers of the jungle were the mind-sapping heat, insects, and bacteria, which were inescapable. The jungle destroyed a man slowly with thirst, pain, and disease, like an insidious poison. Caine knew that he had to get to the river before gangrene from a tiny, unnoticed scratch, fever, and malaria would inevitably bring him down.

  He had started his march along the bank of the Yarinacocha, weaving his way through the endless thicket of brooding trees strung with liana vines that grew as thick as a man’s thigh, and dense saw-toothed grasses. The air was heavy with a rank smell of vegetation and black mud that sucked loudly at his already rotting jungle boots. Caine carried the knapsack on his back, the canteen and machete at his hip, and the carbine slung over his shoulder. He wore the mosquito net loosely over his head, like a ghostly bag. Every so often the foliage was too thick and he would have to hack his way through with the machete.

  His head pounded from the hammer strokes of the blinding tropic sun. The attack of countless, stinging mosquitoes and borrachudos was relentless. His body ached with every step, the mud clinging to his feet like lead weights, and he had to stop every hundred paces or so to sip water from the canteen.

  Paradoxically, in the rain forest where it rains at least once a day, even during the so-called dry season, it is thirst that is the greatest problem, he reflected as he waited for the mud to settle in a hole he had dug about four feet from the bank. The hole filled with muddy ground water and once the mud settled, he could fill the canteen, add a Halezone tablet, and drink the brackish liquid. The problem wasn’t a lack of water, but that it was virulent with bacteria and animal and vegetable poisons. Clean, fresh water was simply unavailable, yet he needed a lot of it—the fever, heat, and his exertions vastly increasing the natural rate of dehydration.

  Judging by the bits of floating leaves and bark, the current near the bank might just be a little too swift for the piranha and he decided to chance it while waiting for the mud to settle in the hole. He quickly stripped naked and eased himself into the tepid, brown water, moving as little as possible. The feel of the water was delicious as it soothed his skin, burning with the fever from all the ant and other insect bites. He couldn’t relax for a second, though, and cautiously kept his eyes peeled for piranha, electric eels, caimáns, and water snakes. A sudden ripple near his toes had him scrambling frantically out of the water and onto the bank, like a
slapstick character in a silent movie. He hurriedly smeared handfuls of mud all over his body, to soothe his skin and protect it from the insects. He was brown as a Negro with the mud, as he quickly climbed back into his filthy clothing. He filled his canteen with the tobacco-colored water, took a long swallow, and resumed his march.

  All in all, he made pretty good progress that first day. The mud had proved fairly effective against the insects, and as a bonus, it seemed to cool his fever and help heal the ant bites. But as the drying mud began to crack and flake off in the intense heat, his skin began to itch maddeningly. He had to clench his fingers desperately to prevent himself from scratching as tears of frustration stung his eyes. The tiniest break in the skin could turn gangrenous.

  He made camp about fifty yards from the lake to avoid the dense fog of mosquitoes that gathered at the water’s edge. He still had a good two hours of daylight, but there was a great deal to do. He hacked a tiny clearing with the machete and constructed a rude bamboo-and-vine bedframe. It was essential not to sleep on the ground. He laid a bed of palm fronds on the frame and dug a mudhole in the bank for water. A late afternoon shower had soaked the deadwood, but he managed to collect a good supply of kindling from the hollow, inner lining of a dead cedar trunk. He also collected a dozen handfuls of dry fibers, found at the bases of palm leaves, for tinder. It was time to forage for dinner.

  He found a large, fungus-like colony of purslane growing near the mudhole. The nondescript yellowish flowers hardly looked inviting, the reddish stems fleshy as giant worms, but it would make a tolerable salad—except for the roots, which were poisonous. He collected an armful of stems, leaves, and flowers, enough for dinner and breakfast as well.