Orinoco

by Dan Pollock

  Even so, Chucho would need his guidance. So Oscar modified his plan to include a visitation to the ore ship. Then he went over it several times, while the small Kamarakota nodded eagerly.

  “I understand,” Chucho said. “No problem, boss.”

  “You will have exactly one hour,” Oscar said, as he began setting the alarm timer both to arm the device and provide the requisite delay. It was a tricky manipulation, especially considering that Oscar’s own hands seemed somehow to have been switched—the right where the left should be, and vice versa. And, of course, the slightest slip of the fingers would close the firing circuit and change them all, in an incandescent instant, into permanently disembodied warriors.

  But there was no apocalyptic slip. Oscar completed his meticulous work, while Chucho stripped off his coveralls and covered his face and naked body with flat-black camouflage cream, then tugged a black watch cap over his dark, shiny hair. Finally, Chucho stuffed the completed bomb into his black nylon daypack along with a coiled line and shrugged his small arms into the straps.

  “Okay, boss,” he said, thumbs up and grinning.

  Together they managed to topple the stuporous Angel and roll him away from the doors. Then they opened it a crack, just enough for the small black figure to slip out into the darkness.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  A dozen years before, as a young Kamarakota warrior initiated into the ritual of yopo, Chucho had discovered the name of his kindred spirit-animal—the jaguar. And it was this soft-footed stalker of the forest that he became now, as he glided soundlessly through the layered darkness beside the ore-crushing plant. He was accustomed to hunting under the influence of the black powder’s secondary phase. After the drug’s initial visionary effects passed, a magical wellspring of energy was released, and sense perceptions, especially night vision, were heightened. Another name for yopo, in fact, was “hunting powder.”

  Chucho was very much aware of tapping these magical powers now. Off to his right, berthed portside, was the ore-oil carrier that had excited Oscar. The forecastle and the much larger aftercastle surrounding the funnel were limned in a faint wash from distant docklights, but the long well deck in between remained in darkness. Behind it, perhaps two hundred meters back against the old San Félix docks, was the sleek stem of the Kallisto.

  Chucho scuttled on beside the cargo ship, past a too-exposed accommodation ladder amidships, till he drew even with the break of the forecastle. A half-dozen ropes fanned out fore and aft from the ship’s steel flanks. After surveying these mooring lines, Chucho selected the one in deepest shadow—a forward breast rope, angling slightly aft from foredeck to dock and helping to hold the ship close alongside.

  It was toward the bollarded end of this rope that he now stole, in a crouching run that exposed him to view for perhaps two seconds—far too long a time, to be sure, if anyone on the aftercastle bridge were watching the dockside approaches. But no klaxons sounded, no searchlights blazed. The Kamarakota-jaguar waited motionless a full minute, hugging his knees beside the anvil-sized bollard, catching his breath but unable to slow his heartbeat. Then he slithered out along the thick manila and wire rope, twining around it with arms and ankles and suspending himself upside down.

  With grave slowness, then, he began to work his way outward, hand over hand, then bunching and straightening his legs like a monkey or a creeping caterpillar—no longer a jaguar. In order to spot him, the officer of the watch would have to lean outboard from the port bridge wing—and then look very closely at the exact right spot for a span of several seconds. For Chucho’s progress remained furtive, and nearly undetectable to himself. Yet he did move incrementally up the rope and, eventually, nearing the ship’s side, touched his watch cap against a circular tin shield designed to deny shipboard entry to wharf rats.

  The shield, however, was to Chucho no more than a momentary impedance. He doubled his knees to his chest, clamping the rope securely between ankles and shins. Then he let go both hands, letting his trunk dangle straight down. The tricky part came next—contracting his stomach muscles and whipping his head, shoulders and torso back up again on the far side of the rat guard while grabbing upward for the rope.

  On the first attempt he barely missed it and swung down so violently he nearly lost his foothold and splashed into the oily black channel between ship and dock. That would certainly have startled awake any less-than-vigilant officers or deckhands above. Still dangling upside down, Chucho took a moment to catch his breath and relax his strained abdominals, before launching himself into a second attempt. This time his right hand snagged the rope, and an instant later his left hand clamped beside it. He was then able to release his leg grip and hang vertically by his hands.

  Uncomfortably exposed now and swaying slightly, he began to work himself hand over hand toward the ship. When he was far enough beyond the tin shield, he swung back up and scissored his feet and ankles around the rope, then resumed his slothlike upward progress.

  Finally he bumped his head against steel plate. A glance over his shoulder showed the thick mooring rope passing through a fairlead opening in the foredeck bulwarks. A rat could squeeze through the scuppers, but not a man—not even a very compact jaguar-man like Chucho. But he was able to lift and wedge one bare foot in the fairlead, then reach and swing an arm over the bulwarks. An instant later he landed silently in the grooved waterway at the edge of the foredeck. He crouched here, catching his breath, assessing his safety and his next moves.

  A hundred meters aft, the ship’s principal superstructure loomed up, sparsely lighted at the funnel and on the ladder between bridge decks. The bridge wings appeared deserted, but Chucho knew danger lurked on the navigating bridge itself. It was from behind those dark windows that any unauthorized movement on deck—among the night-shadowed thicket of ventilators and derricks, kingposts and catwalks—would be detected.

  He checked his digital watch, a present from Oscar, who had bought it off a Caracas pickpocket. A full twenty-seven minutes had elapsed, nearly half Chucho’s allotted time. The effort thus far had sheened him with sweat; thought of the looming deadline now increased the slick coating that smeared his camouflage. It was the jaguar’s fault! The fiendishly patient predator had no sense of passing time.

  Chucho eyed the nearest ventilator hood, perhaps two meters away. This, as Oscar had explained, probably served the forwardmost cargo bay immediately below. Next he slipped off his small backpack, carefully extracted the armed device, checked and recoiled the attached line. Then, cradling the bomb in his hands, he crawled forward on his belly—a jaguar again, approaching his prey through the savanna grass—inching toward the ventilator. In a moment, he could touch its base. Another moment, and he extended the bundled explosive upward and dropped it into the ventilator cowl, letting the line uncoil through his other hand. He lowered the small weight gently into the number-one hold, until he felt the line slacken. Then he tossed the rest of the rope in after it and began worming backward toward the ship’s side.

  With the lethal countdown proceeding below him, Chucho could no longer afford long motionless intervals. No sooner had he gained the bulwarks than he slid over them and began shinnying down the breast rope. A few heart-pounding, sweat-soaked minutes later he was crawling over the cold iron bollard and onto the wharf. Then, without pausing for breath, he scuttled straight across the dock and into the welcome shadows of the ore-crushing plant.

  *

  By Oscar’s watch, less than six minutes remained until detonation when the CANTV truck’s back door squeaked open and Chucho scrambled inside. Oscar flicked on the interior light and swiveled from the driver’s seat to see the Indian’s grinning thumbs-up.

  Oscar started the motor. “We’re too fucking close,” he explained. “We could get blown to shit here.”

  He relocated the truck around a dark corner, where it would be shielded from any blast by the corrugated metal sides of a transit shed. Three minutes to go.

  Then he climbed quickly ba
ck beside the two brothers—not out of any desire for camaraderie, but to be as far as possible from the windshield. As a further safeguard, he instructed Chucho to get himself and Angel underneath a tarpaulin, then had them all lie flat on the floor close behind the front bench seat.

  They waited like this in the darkness for what seemed an eternity. When Oscar checked his watch by flashlight, only five minutes had passed—but two minutes beyond the alarm detonation time he’d set.

  His eyes met Chucho’s and exchanged mutual apprehension.

  “Is no good, boss?” Chucho whispered. “Clock broken maybe?”

  “Give it a couple minutes.” Oscar feigned a calmness he did not feel, switched off the flashlight. He began counting silently—to sixty, then a hundred. Then a hundred twenty—two more fucking minutes. Maybe the damn clock was no good. Or Chucho had botched the job somehow. Or the bomb had been discovered and disarmed. The secret police or Guardia Nacional would be surrounding the truck even now, guns trained. Or they were on their way.

  Mierda! He couldn’t lie here and wait to be arrested or turned into a hunk of bleeding meat. The operation was fucked up. It was time to run.

  Just as he decided this, the world erupted in a monstrous, shuddering roar. The windshield burst inward, the seatback slammed on top of them, and the back doors were blown from their hinges and flung off into the night. At the same time, the entire truck was being shoved backward and sideways, battered by sheets of corrugated metal, skidding on its tires, yet somehow staying upright.

  A moment later, as Oscar huddled under the tarp, blast debris began to clatter noisily down on the truck roof. Oscar clasped his head, his ears still ringing. Then came a second blast, of lesser ferocity; the bomb must have caught the ship’s fuel tanks. Oscar tried desperately to recall what he was supposed to do next, and to summon the will to do it, but the yopo had messed up his mind. It was Chucho who reacted first, groping around in the truck’s glass-strewn interior, finally locating the flashlight and switching it on.

  The beam skewered Oscar as he peeked from under the tarp and managed a hopeful grin. It wouldn’t do to let the Indians know he’d nearly fouled his pants; that was hardly the appropriate reaction from a veteran demolitions man. Chucho’s black-camouflaged face, meanwhile, was creased with concern as he peeled back the tarpaulin. Finally, his flashlight revealed a big mounded shape that shifted and stirred and groaned.

  “Angel!” Chucho cried out, continuing in the Pemón language. “Please, Angel, say something!”

  A moment later Angel’s melon-sized head rolled into view. But his eyes were focused, and his teeth bared in a fearsome grin. It had apparently taken the double concussions to rouse him from his yopo-induced trance. The big Kamarakota proceeded to wag his shaggy head like a bear emerging from hibernation, then turned his grin upon his half-brother.

  “Hey, Chucho,” he asked, “did I miss something?”

  *

  The three kilos of C-4 detonated in the number one hold of the ore carrier had drastic consequences. They seemed all to occur in one shattering simultaneity, but were actually linked in an intricate chain of destructive events. The lateral force of the explosion ripped out the cargo-bay side walls, letting the river plunge into all the gaping holes below the waterline, and ruptured the ship’s forward collision bulkhead and the watertight bulkhead aft.

  The upward blast, meanwhile, not only obliterated the hatch cover but ripped out a huge chunk of the main desk, causing portions of the superstructure fore and aft to collapse into the open middle of the ship. The double bottom plates, along with the fore peak ballast tanks and the bottom skin, remained intact, buttressed by the surrounding barrier of the Orinoco.

  Fortunately, the bulk carrier had not yet taken on its tons of crushed iron ore, for anything in the number one hold would have been turned into volcanic ammunition to rain down on the surrounding harborside. Still, there was no shortage of deadly shrapnel. Steel decking, metal fittings, mast stays, pipes, shattered derrickposts, iron match battens, shredded hatch covers, all were snatched up by the exploding gases and sent flying.

  In one lethal instance, an iron cleat traveling at high velocity decapitated the already stunned third officer on the collapsing bridge, a ghastly price for his having failed to detect Chucho’s stealthy incursion. Likewise the radio officer, fleeing the wireless room on the lower bridge, was whipsawed by a detached funnel stay, then struck by the collapsing funnel itself and flung overboard. Two men sleeping in the forecastle crew quarters were killed by the concussive blast a hellish instant before being pulped by flying steel.

  But the more spectacular effects were proceeding below. After buckling the plates and strongbacks that supported the decks and bulkheads, the fiery blast had expanded, in a deadly race against the in-rushing water, until it ignited the fuel oil bunkers amidships, which sent a second explosion ripping through the hull. This thunderous boom was punctuated by a massive geyser shooting hundreds of feet into the Orinoco night, then cascading down onto hissing deck plates. Wearily, then, the entire gutted ship subsided in flames to the river bottom, consigning three more crewmen to watery graves.

  Even without iron ore erupting skyward, the shower of destruction from the ship was considerable. The air blast had already stripped galvanized sheeting from nearby buildings, torn off rooftiles, twisted gantries, ripped up huge sections of wharf and smashed every window in sight—and some far beyond. Now the following rain of fiery debris set blazes all along the docks and adjacent offices and sheds—and on the nearest ship.

  Which happened to be the Kallisto, two hundred meters astern.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Jacqueline Lee had a childhood habit of sleeping with her face sandwiched between pillows. And on this night it proved a very fortunate habit. Though the top pillow did nothing to muffle the thunderclap from the exploding ore ship, it did shield her face from flying glass when the shock wave shattered her stateroom window—and every other window in the luxury yacht.

  Without knowing quite how, she found herself on her feet in her darkened cabin. The first thing she saw after she found the wall switch was a blank panel where her closet mirror had been. Next she noticed the carpet and bedspread and writing desk were all strewn with broken glass—and she was standing barefoot on more glass shards, her left big toe covered in blood. Her stateroom window was now an empty rectangle with jagged edges and shredded drapes. Then a second deafening detonation shook the Kallisto—and pitched her into a corner.

  She scrambled up, verifying, at a single glance, that she was now bleeding from her left elbow and calf—and probably several other places she couldn’t see. But obviously graver dangers were at hand.

  Night before last, in her room at Hato La Promesa, she’d heard more distant detonations—on Cerro Calvario—yet hadn’t felt personally endangered. But these terrifying blasts confirmed all her father’s warnings—the terrorists would not stop with destroying Proteus’ corporate property; D.W. and his family were prime targets. Late last night, when he told her he’d arranged for National Guardsmen to patrol the docks, and for two Venezuelan security men to spend the night on board and travel with them all the way into the Caribbean, Jacqueline had thought her father a bit melodramatic. Now she was profoundly grateful for his foresight and only prayed the terrorists would be driven away from the ship.

  But she couldn’t stand here waiting like a helpless ditz.

  She belted a white terry robe around her nakedness, scraped bloody glass dust from her bare feet, scuffed into her down booties and slipped outside—banishing a wild impulse to snatch her Handycam and document whatever was going on.

  The lower-deck alleyway, dimly lighted by art deco sconces, was deserted. In fact, nothing was out of place there, with the exception of a cock-eyed Erté print. As she hurried forward past the guest cabins, the door to the master stateroom opened inward and D.W. burst out. There was a wild look in his eye and a blued-steel .45 automatic in his fist. Blood trickled down one
side of his face and patterned his blue, quilted-satin robe.

  He turned the pistol aside and seized her shoulders. “Jacqueline, thank God! Are you hurt?”

  “Daddy, I’m okay! But you’re not! Let me see.”

  “Not now. Listen, you must stay inside your room! Don’t go outside for anything! Understand?”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “Yes, yes. But we cannot wait for them. Go inside!” His scowl, and the vein pulsing at his temple, brooked no opposition. With his free hand, he dug into a pocket and pulled out a snub-nosed, nickel-plated revolver—a lady’s handbag gun she’d practiced with before. “Five shots, all chambers loaded,” he growled at her, “double action, plus a grip safety here, remember? Just point and shoot.”

  He slapped the rounded rosewood grip in her palm and rushed off down the alleyway. As she watched his stumpy legs pounding up and around the curving stairs, she suddenly realized two very frightening things—she was smelling smoke now, and hearing an ominous crackling from somewhere close by.

  “Daddy, wait!”

  But he was gone. She stuffed the gun in her robe and hurried after him. Above, illumined by muted wall fixtures, the salon was in shambles. All the wraparound windows and etched-glass panels were blown out, and the same chaos prevailed in the enclosed afterdeck. The shelves here behind the wet bar were emptied of stock; the smashed bottles had emptied their contents on the mauve carpeting. Tables, lamps and art objects had likewise been hurled onto the carpet, which glittered from wall to wall with crystalline debris and crunched wherever she stepped.