Hour of the Assassins

by Andrew Kaplan

  He killed a saucer-sized pimpled frog and cut it into bleeding pieces with the machete. He threw about half the bleeding pieces into the water for chum, then used the rest for bait, his fishing hook and line attached to a long, bamboo pole. After about half an hour, he had caught three razor-toothed piranha, which he hauled out, wriggling and snapping at the hook with angry jaws. He killed them by slapping them repeatedly with the flat of the machete. They were about four to five inches long and most of that was mouth. The trickiest part was cutting the hooks out, because the dead jaws would still snap shut spasmodically. After he retrieved the hook from the last fish, the steel slashed with bright tooth scars, he gutted the fish with the machete and soon had them broiling on sticks over the fire.

  The last thing he did before settling down to dinner, the trees glowing red from the sun, as though reflecting a distant battle, was to strip. Dozens of leeches clung to his legs, their black, slimy bodies fat with his blood. The only way to get rid of them was to touch them with the tip of a lighted cigarette, one at a time. The leeches would shrivel and dance with a foul, crackling smell before they would drop off. As each one fell, he daubed the tiny, puckered wound with iodine. Soon his legs and feet were splotched with stinging iodine stains, as though he were suffering from some horrible skin disease.

  Thick clusters of black and gray ticks, their squashy bodies bloated to the size of dimes on his blood, had collected in his armpits and crotch. Only the stinging splash of iodine could make them drop off, one by one, like rotten nuts from a decaying tree. He knew if he tried to pull them off, the tiny black head would stay embedded in his skin and infect. He shivered with the sharp pain of the iodine stinging his armpits and crotch, but so far as he could tell, he had gotten all of them. He smeared a part of his precious supply of insect repellent all over him and once more pulled on his filthy clothing, which had already begun to mildew and rot, the cloth turning a vaguely greenish hue.

  Life in the Amazon wasn’t exactly like a Tarzan movie, he reflected, as he tore into the muddy-tasting piranha and faintly acrid purslane, washed down with the coppery water. Of course, when Tarzan had yodeled through the jungle tendrils, nobody ever mentioned the mosquito bites on his ass, he thought wryly. Maybe that’s why Tarzan had yodeled. He allowed himself one of his precious candy bars, which had melted to a shapeless fudge, for dessert, to get the filthy taste of dinner out of his mouth. The only decent part of the meal was the crumpled cigarette he lit when he finished eating.

  He threw a few pieces of green wood on the fire to send up a thick column of smoke to help drive off the mosquitoes. He knew the fire might alert the Achuals to his presence, but there wasn’t much he could do about that. Unless he cooked his food and boiled his water, food poisoning and bacteria were bound to kill him anyway. Even so, he was just buying a little time and he spent a few cheerful minutes trying to calculate when the inevitable dysentery and malaria would hit him. Just thinking about it made his stomach rumble uncomfortably.

  So he thought about the Starfish Conspiracy. He had to grudgingly admit that they had used him, that he had acted as their unwitting agent. Harris and Wasserman were involved for sure, not to mention the mysterious von Schiffen, whoever the hell he was. But they had obviously miscalculated, because they certainly hadn’t expected him to get out of this alive. Once they found out, he’d have the lot of them, and maybe even the Company, still after him. What Cunningham had told him so long ago still held. He would have to watch his back. But he had foxed them, he thought exultantly. He was still alive.

  “I’m still alive, you bastards!” he shouted into the inky darkness. The jungle seemed to echo with his cry and it was taken up by the chattering birds and a nearby colony of monkeys, their raucous shrieks filling the night with terror. He felt something silky brush his cheek and then it was gone with a faint stir of air. He shivered with disgust and huddled closer to the fire. It might have been anything: a spider or a vampire bat, most likely. God, he hated this sickening, living hell.

  They had sent him on a one-way mission and that made it personal, he thought grimly. He had a score to settle with them because they had put him here. But why? Why after all these years had they wanted Mengele terminated? Von Schiffen and the Starfish Conspiracy, who were they?

  He remembered something Mengele had said. Something about Müller. That Müller was one of the few Kameraden who refused to betray him. That meant that others had betrayed him. Others in ODESSA. There could have been a power struggle within ODESSA between Mengele and von Schiffen.

  But then how could the Company have been involved? Those were pretty strange bedfellows. He began to get a vague feeling of dread. Whatever they were after, he knew it wasn’t just beer and pretzels. He remembered Auschwitz and the old Gypsy and he began to shiver. He couldn’t quite grasp it, but it smelled as rotten as this, filthy jungle. Whatever the Starfish Conspiracy was, it was still running and there was the terrible feeling of being caught in a nightmare that you can’t wake up from. Somewhere, like a snake oozing out of its old molted skin, the horror was stirring to life again. And he was the only one who knew about it. It was the Starfish or him—and it was more than personal. It was war.

  He reached the edge of the mangrove swamp by the early morning of the third day. The steambath heat and the insect onslaught had badly weakened him and he was suffering from recurrent bouts of fever. The jungle was slowly devouring him whole, as an anaconda devours its prey.

  A fetid odor of decay wafted from the brooding darkness of trees, garlanded with hanging moss and liana vines, their spaghetti tangles of roots exposed above the still, black surface of the water. A poisonous miasma of something evil seemed to hover in the gaseous air. A black water snake corkscrewed across the stagnant water, its head poised over the inky surface like a hook. Bubbles of foul-smelling marsh gas languidly widened and popped in the stillness. A thick branch trailing in the water was lush with obscenely pink and white and purple orchids. Their very prettiness seemed somehow macabre in this terrible place, Like lilies in a corpse’s hand.

  Caine went into the swamp, jumping from root to root and grabbing at sticky vines to keep from landing in the shallow black water that might conceal patches of quicksand. But after a hundred yards or so he had to give it up. There was no telling how far the swamp extended. He hurriedly retraced his steps until he reached solid ground again. There was no help for it. He would have to try and go around the swamp.

  Turning away from the Yarinacocha, he penetrated deeper into the jungle. Now the tall trees, hundreds of feet high, completely screened the sky and he was in a world of semidarkness. The air was loud with insect buzzing and they swarmed around him like a mist, despite the insect repellent. The foliage was as thick as a wall and he had to hack his way through with the machete.

  Left and right, left and right, he slashed at the living green barrier before him until he thought his arm would drop off. His right arm grew numb and he switched to the clumsier left; then the right and then the left, then the right again, until the blade slipped from his lifeless fingers. He turned and looked back to see how far he had come, then checked his watch in disbelief and horror. In over an hour of exhausting work he had managed to cover barely a hundred yards! He sank to the ground with a sense of complete despair, of the utter futility of it. He would never be able to make it!

  The forest stirred ominously around him, like a fermenting brew. It was a malevolent, seething mass-shapeless and alive. A hairy black tarantula, the size of a dinnerplate, ran along a vine, inches from his face. The trees were crawling with sickly green and rust-colored fungus and grotesque insect shapes. Pale white grubs clustered on the sticky undersides of leaves. Bloated black beetles and roaches scurried restlessly along the ground. The rotted remains of a lizard stirred with movement as maggots and fat red worms fed off it. Everything fed off everything else in this cannibalistic universe, he thought with horror. He felt it was impossible to go on. The jungle had won, he thought dully, as he felt his
will to live ooze away, like everything else here. It was as though his body had turned to liquid.

  Aren’t you something, some part of him jeered. Sitting there and feeling sorry for yourself, with injuries that any hospital emergency room would laugh at. Remember Chong and Lim. Remember the old Gypsy and the camp. Those millions of inmates would have swapped places with you in a second and thrown in their eyeteeth into the bargain.

  He had to survive. He had to. He was the only one who could get to the bottom of the Starfish, the only one who could stop the horror. He couldn’t shake a sense of foreboding about the Starfish. He didn’t know how he knew it, he just knew it.

  You have to make it, he told himself. Because you’re the only one who can do anything about it. There is no one else.

  He got to his feet, electrified. With a sense of purpose he had never felt before, Caine picked up the machete and began hacking viciously at the green wall in front of him.

  The canteen was empty and he desperately needed water. He looked around at the thick ropes of vines and slashed at a vine as thick as his forearm, as high up as he could reach. Always make the first cut on top, he remembered. Then he severed the vine down low and let the clear, warm water, tasting of vegetation, drip into his mouth until he was full. He cut another vine and used it to refill the canteen.

  About an hour later the first attack of dysentery hit him, the cramps doubling him over with sharp surges of pain, like a knife slowly twisting in his intestines. Soon the cramps were forcing him to relieve himself every twenty minutes or so. He pulled down his grimy pants and squatted where he stood, his bowels twisting with pain. After the sixth or seventh time nothing came out except a slight trickle of foul brown liquid. He had nothing to wipe himself with and the crack between his buttocks was soon chafed and raw.

  On and on, he hacked away at the jungle. Without the coca leaves that he chewed constantly, he would have collapsed a long time ago. By midday the swamp that had loomed like a black cloud on his right, began to peter out and he could head in an easterly direction once more.

  It was late afternoon when he forded a wide brown stream, using a pole on the upstream side to break the current. After crossing, he carefully dried the carbine with his shirt. Then he washed his clothing in the stream and spread them on the sand to dry. He lit a cigarette from the last pack in the knapsack, rolling the smoke sensuously across his mouth and deep into his lungs. A scarlet macaw chattered merrily, high atop a fat paxiuba palm. The cigarette was delicious and he sat there, quietly smoking. Later he used the glowing cigarette butt to clean off the leeches and ticks, and then daubed his wounds with iodine.

  When his clothes were dry, he dressed and he had barely started again when he saw and shot a parrot. After about half a mile he found the tiny clearing by the giant spiderweb and set up camp. He made a camp bed, collected deadwood for kindling, and plucked and cut up the bird.

  He chopped down a nearby plantain tree with the machete, cutting it off about three inches above the ground. Using the curved edge of the machete, he scooped a bowl in the portion of the trunk still protruding from the ground. The bowl quickly filled with clear water drawn up from the roots, but it was far too bitter to drink. He splashed the water out of the bowl with his hands and waited for it to refill. By the fifth bowlful the water was fresh and drinkable. He filled his canteen and covered the stump with broad plantain leaves, to keep off the insects. The stump could provide water for days, if necessary.

  The tough bananalike plantain fruits could not be eaten raw. He threw a dozen of them into the fire to roast, next to the parrot. Of course, the plantains wouldn’t do his dysentery any good, but he was very weak and needed nourishment desperately.

  Night fell like an ax over the jungle, and as always, the darkness echoed with the shrieks of hunter and prey. A few furtive stars could be seen blinking over the clearing, like the glowing eyes of stalking predators.

  “My compliments to the chef,” Caine announced and pushed away the remnants of the parrot. The charred bird tasted like gamy chicken; the hot plantains were coarse, grainy, and slightly sweet. All in all, it was a pretty good meal. He was about to light a cigarette, when the dysentery grabbed him again. He staggered into the darkness and painfully relieved himself. When he finished, he huddled closer to the fire as a protection against the unseen predators and insects. Every day in the Amazon is a victory, he thought.

  A full day of rest in camp would do him a world of good, he decided before turning in. He spent the next day resting under the mosquito net on the camp bed, in the shade of a palm tree. He passed restlessly from strange, confused dreams to waking, his clothing soaked with sweat. He had dreamed about a giant starfish living like some mythological creature in the flames of the Auschwitz ovens, tearing the skeletal bodies to pieces with its slimy arms and devouring them one after the other. He lay sweating under the mosquito net and tried to sort it all out, but he couldn’t. Somehow it had all melted into a jumbled kaleidoscope of images: Wasserman and Mengele, Lim and C.J. and Inger, the Amazon and Laos and Paraguay. They were all part of the same, confused pattern.

  The tropic sun pounded down on the clearing as on an anvil. Caine tossed and turned throughout the afternoon. Twice he walked down to the stream and bathed. Now, huddled by the fire like some primitive ape, he felt sane for the first time in days. A low growl came out of the darkness and he superstitiously touched the carbine. Probably a jaguar, he thought, and felt the hairs on the back of his neck bristle.

  Nature had nothing to do with good and evil, he felt. Nature just was, that’s all. And it didn’t care. It was neither friendly, nor hostile, simply indifferent. And man was just another life form scrambling for existence. If there was any truth in the world, that was it, like the fire in front of him, which obeyed the same laws of combustion whether it was used to roast a parrot or burn the Temple of Zeus at Ephesus. All the rest was human invention, words told around a camp-fire to charm away the specters of the night.

  “I’ll drink to that,” he toasted loudly and took a long sip of plantain water. Overhead the stars glittered brightly, like holes poked in the fabric of night, to reveal the light of another, brighter universe.

  He resumed the weary march shortly after dawn, in a torrential downpour that plastered his clothes and the mosquito netting to him like a tattered outer skin. The monotonous chop-chop of the machete sounded dull and squashy amid the dank, dripping leaves. The leeches clung to him in clusters, like slimy grapes. He had to stop every fifteen minutes to burn them off with a precious cigarette, cupping his hand over it, to keep it from getting soaked. He was beginning to worry about how much blood he could lose to the leeches before they bled him white.

  Shortly after the rain stopped, he used half of his last cigarette to burn away the leeches again, then smoked the rest. He glanced ruefully at the butt before flicking it away. Something told him, he was about to give up smoking.

  The dense foliage began to thin out a little and soon he was able to slip through it and he hung the machete at his belt. The high trees formed a dark tunnel, dense with insects and heat and he drank frequently from the canteen. The ground felt loamy and dank underfoot and black pools of water were everywhere. The bush was loud with the croaking of frogs and the whine of the mosquitoes.

  Sweat blinded his eyes and he moved like a machine through the endless chain of black pools and foul, squashy mud. And then he almost pitched forward because his feet couldn’t move against the suction of the soft mud. He tried to wrench free and sank up to his thighs before he realized that he was caught in quicksand.

  Don’t struggle, his mind urged him desperately. But the thought of such a horrible death panicked him; to disappear forever without a trace in this horrible muck was more than he could bear. Drop the pack and rifle, damn it! You have to lighten up, he screamed at himself. He dropped the rifle and wriggled out of the pack. They sank without a trace into the few inches of murky water that floated on the quicksand. That’s it, he thought a
s he lay back, his arms spread wide to spread the weight. The black water was almost up to his nostrils. But at least he had stopped sinking. So far, so good. Was there anything he could grab? A slender liana vine hung just a few feet out of reach. Close, but not close enough. If he could only reach it. Then he remembered the machete.

  With infinite care, he slid his hand down to his waist and slowly pulled the blade free. Holding it in a death grip by the tip of the handle, he stretched out his arm till he thought he would dislocate his shoulder and just managed to touch the vine. He poked it tenderly with the hooked point of the machete and managed to hook it. He pulled the vine toward him until he could just reach it with his fingers. Clamping the machete blade between his teeth, he pulled the vine gently with his fingers till it was taut. He grabbed it tightly, wrapping the vine around his wrist, and with a sudden heave he pulled with all his strength, kicking out both legs at once.

  His legs came free to the knees with a loud sucking noise, and he scrambled up the vine like a monkey till he was on solid ground. It took a while before he realized that he had done it. He was free! An incredible sense of joy took hold of him and he began to laugh wildly till the tears came to his eyes.

  He finally managed to calm down, except that every once in a while, without quite knowing why, he would break into a little snort of laughter. All right, he thought. What did he have left? There was the machete and the almost empty plastic canteen attached to his belt. He had been lucky that it was almost empty. No doubt its buoyancy had helped him. All he had in his pants pockets were a few coins. His left shirt pocket contained the soaked Payne passport and a wet, smelly wad of money. In his right shirt pocket was the vial with the tip of Mengele’s thumb floating in the formaldehyde, like a piece of discolored wood.