The thought came to her unbidden: did Cutter dream of making her disappear? Did he lie awake at night, thinking of the woman she wasn’t, and wishing for her to be?
She remembered him calling her by that other name, so sure, alive until she said no and snuffed out whatever spark of hope he had harboured that it might all work out. For all the talk of divergent evolutions and sciences, Cutter was like any other romantic. He desperately wanted to believe in the happy ending.
But then, so did she.
Jenny looked into the dark shadows that were all she could see of his eyes as he stared out into the night, and couldn’t bring herself to believe it could ever be so, because when she looked at him she felt something inside herself she couldn’t understand, even though she knew full well what it was; a yearning that mirrored his own.
And yet she was getting married, to someone else...
It was peculiar. It was more than that. It was as though she had known him for such a very, very long time.
A glare that reflected on the glass brought her out of her reverie and back to the here-and-now. She turned to look back even as the headlights of a rapidly approaching SUV lit up the inside of the Land Rover. Jenny scrambled around in her seat, trying to see anything in the blinding light. Beyond the impression of speed, it was impossible. The intensity of the lights grew as the gap between the vehicles closed rapidly.
Then it swept past, disappearing up the road. Two hundred metres away it pulled over.
Jenny turned her eyes to the front in time to see a dark figure step out into the road and throw something in front of the Rover. A thick belt of nails shredded the tires as they drove over it. The rubber detonated, the air exploding out of them, and everything seemed to drop as the weight of the vehicle came down hard on the wheel rims.
The next thing she knew she was being hurled across the back seat by the sudden deceleration as the Land Rover slewed wildly in the road. She slammed up against the glass, cracking the side of her head off the rim. Her vision filmed over redly. She was screaming, Cutter was shouting, the engine squealing and the ruined wheel-rims shrieking. It was an uproar of violence and fear trapped within the claustrophobic confines of the cramped car.
Nando wrestled with the wheel, but the skid became a full slide, all hope of control ripped out from under him by a block of concrete fifty yards down the road from the nail belt. The Rover hit it almost side on, Nando over-compensated, and the vehicle spun wildly out of control. There was a sickening stomach-churning moment of inertia, then the crippled vehicle completed the spin, flipped, and came down on the roof. The metal frame screamed in protest as the sudden weight crushed down on it, but before the road could completely destroy the frame and crush them all, the Land Rover flipped again, coming down on the passenger side. Then it rolled, spinning out of control on the metal.
Cutter lay with his shoulder and neck pinned against the buckled roof. His chest burned where the seat belt cut into it. He could feel the trickle of blood down the side of his face. His vision blurred as he tried to move. Beside him, Nando groaned.
The Rover had come to a stop on its roof.
He could see Jenny. Without a seat belt to restrain her she had been thrown about viciously as the Land Rover had flipped. She was crushed up against the ceiling, and wasn’t moving. There was blood on her cheek from a cut above her eye.
“Is everyone okay?” Cutter said, twisting around as he tried to reach the buckle and spring the mechanism. The blood rushed to his head; he felt it pulsing against his temples and behind his eyes.
Before either of them could answer, flashlights probed the darkness, playing over their faces. Jenny groaned as the light lingered in her eyes. An overwhelming sense of relief surged through Cutter. In those few moments she hadn’t answered him worms of dread had burrowed down into his gut. He wouldn’t lose her, not twice. He refused to.
The flashlight beams crossed, and then came up over his face, fiercely bright in his eyes. He tried to shield them with his hand, but moving only brought on a whole new world of hurt. There were at least three of them; there were that many lights. Why had they been on the road? Why had they thrown the belt of nails? Why had they even been there, out in the middle of nowhere? This road ran back to the reserve centre and out among all points that the rangers travelled to observe the wildlife they protected; it wasn’t a shopping route, there were no Sunday drivers out to enjoy the pretty countryside. Which meant that whoever they were, the men behind the torches had to have known who they were ambushing.
All of these things went through Cutter’s mind in the blood-swelling silence that preceded a single shocking and sickening sound: breaking glass. The men had turned their torches on the Land Rover’s windows, driving them against the surface again and again until the glass shattered, spraying inward.
Cutter twisted wildly around in the prison of his seat, trying to see what was happening. He felt the bite of shards against his face and then he saw the black-gloved hands reaching into the back and grabbing Jenny by the feet and ankles as she kicked and screamed hysterically.
His fingers found the button on the buckle’s clasp and pushed it down. For a sickening second he hung there, still trapped by the force of gravity, then he fell, hitting the roof of the car hard. His head took most of his weight from the impact. His vision blurred sickeningly as his eyes filmed over with a wash of blood that turned the night world red.
Then he twisted his body, reaching around into the back of the car. He didn’t know what he was doing; he wasn’t thinking, he was just grasping, determined not to let Jenny go. Her hands found his. She screamed his name over and over: “Nick! Nick!” as they dragged her out.
He hung on for dear life, for her life, but she slipped between his fingers. He crawled over into the back seat, scrambling toward the broken window, cutting up his hands and knees on the broken glass and not feeling a thing. He couldn’t look left or right, his eyes were fixed on Jenny as she was dragged further and further away.
Nando was out cold in the front seat. He had no idea how close the creatures were, so thick was the trailing mist, they could have been twenty feet away, and he never would have known.
She begged him, and that was the worst of it. Frightened, desperately afraid, she begged him over and over.
“Nick! Please God, Nick, don’t let me go! Nick!”
Her hands slipped from his fingers until he was grasping at empty air. He threw himself forward, trying to worm out through the broken window, to catch her and bring her back.
And then something hit him; a torch, a crowbar, a booted foot, he didn’t know. It didn’t matter. It took him across the side of the head and the world lurched sickeningly as it faded. Cutter reached out one last time, desperately trying to find her hand in the darkness that consumed his mind.
It wasn’t there.
The last thing he heard was her voice, desperately screaming his name.
TWENTY-TWO
Jack Stark drove the ambassador’s Escalade into the devouring dark.
He came like an avenging angel in the night.
The engine whined sickly as he grated through the gears and forced it up and down the assault course of tracks that twisted through the oppressive trees. The lights barely touched the night as the rising mist diffused what little illumination they offered. It was almost as though the air had been replaced by a viscous liquid.
He had the co-ordinates written down on a scrap of map, the destination ringed in red.
Stark hit the clutch again, cold fury driving his mind and body.
Chaplin had sold them out to the poachers. A man named Eberhardt had bought them for the not so princely sum of US $50,000. That valued their lives at 6,250 bucks apiece. There wasn’t a chance in hell he was going to let Chaplin get away with this.
He hit the accelerator, ramming the gear-stick into place.
It hadn’t taken long to get what he needed from the dying man. Most civilians made the mistake of thinking torture wo
rked, but it seldom did.
Almost never, really.
Stick a finger in a bullet hole and wriggle it around, all you do is cause a finite amount of pain. It hurts, no denying that, but the body can process it, can understand it and — most importantly — limit it. The threat is far more potent a tool.
The threat is infinite. He had crouched down beside the dying man and given him the simplest of choices, life or death. The others were dead, and the man’s fate lay in Stark’s hands. He wouldn’t kill him, though. There would be no quick surcease. No going gently into the endless winter night. There would be pain and suffering every inch of the way. It was that simple.
“I could make it painless,” he had said, doing exactly what he hated, pressing his finger into the worst of the man’s open wounds, “but I won’t. It will hurt you to live, or it will hurt you to die, but either way it will hurt. The only thing I will do if you co-operate is call you an ambulance. It’s your call.”
Eberhardt’s man had sung like the proverbial canary.
The German fronted a lucrative business in import and export, bolstering his finances with pretty little rarities. There was a collector out there for everything.
Eberhardt had given them simple enough instructions: silence the boy. No matter what the cost, his story wasn’t to be told. Stark could guess why; Cam Bairstow knew the village had been attacked by creatures, and what kind of creatures. His knowledge would bring scientists and worse, tourists, looking for those exotic animals.
Dead, Cam was just another lost student taken by the rainforest. Unfortunate, to be sure, but that was the way it was. Students came to study the environment and the ruins and were rarely prepared for the harsh nature of the Amazon. It was the same in Kenya and Nigeria and Bolivia and all these other exotic places.
And then it hit Stark, the truth beneath everything, the single illuminating fact he had been searching for. The poachers knew exactly what the creature was. They had seen it, or been attacked by it, and realised that they had found one of the truly exotic specimens, one so rare that collectors would pay real money for.
The Thylacosmilus was their own personal diamond mine. And they didn’t have a clue where it came from.
But now the British government had sent them looking for Cam — so what did that mean?
He had assumed the poachers intended to kidnap and ransom them, just as the so-called freedom fighters would, making demands, listing concessions, but that kind of thinking was dreadfully naive.
No, kidnap-and-ransom would only bring more attention to the thing these people were trying so desperately to hide. So there had to be another answer.
What it came down to was this: as far as the poachers were concerned, Cutter and his team were a thorn they would be better off plucking out of their flesh. They didn’t want money — they wanted these intruders dead. Eberhardt’s kind were hardly strangers to murder. Their money greased most of the wheels in this godforsaken tin pot ‘democracy’. Their money financed the Shining Path, providing guns and ammunition to destabilise the regime, and provided the propaganda machine with grist to pretend the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement were interested in truth and reconciliation.
Eberhardt was, in the most basic of senses, an evil man.
He had offices in Lima and Cuzco as well as bonded warehouse facilities in the main port of Calloa. None of these were of interest to the SAS man. The poachers had to have a base of operations out in the rainforest itself; that was what he was interested in, that and what he could expect to encounter there.
He had taken his phone out of his pocket and dialled the first two digits of the emergency services number, then held it out, inviting the bleeding man to finish dialling.
“All you’ve got to do is tell me where it is.”
“They’ll kill me.”
“That’s supposing you don’t bleed to death first,” Stark had said almost amicably.
“You don’t understand.”
“So help me to.”
“He owns your man.”
“Who?”
“Chaplin. Eberhardt owns Chaplin. Chaplin is his cabron,” Stark’s Spanish was weak, but he knew the word well enough to appreciate the way the bleeding man spat it out; it had several colourful connotations including goat, bastard, and man-whore. None of them was particularly promising, given that Chaplin had taken the team out into the middle of nowhere.
Had he even filed the permits with the authorities? Was there an actual expedition, or was it merely another level of the deception? Was Chaplin playing his own game, or playing the poacher’s? He didn’t need to think about it.
A few minutes in the man’s company had told him all he needed to know. Stark trusted his instincts when it came to back-stabbing scum like Chaplin. They might have the patter and the smooth looks to go with it, but they were rotten inside, and that rot always broke out eventually.
Chaplin had taken Cutter and the team out into the jungle to die.
The man had nothing to gain from lying and everything to gain from telling the truth. “The co-ordinates for the Río Huepetue compound are Latitude 12° 45’ 0 South, Longitude 70° 34’ 0 West.”
Stark dialled the last of the digits and told the paramedics that they had a dying man up at the ambassador’s summer house.
“Thank you,” the bleeding man had said.
“I’m not a monster,” Stark told him.
“Eberhardt has nine men out at the compound. The front entry is protected by high security, but there is a second way in through the tunnels from an abandoned temple. We use that route occasionally, but it is generally unguarded. Don’t walk up to Eberhardt’s stronghold waving your gun. He has eyes everywhere.” The German gestured weakly upwards, as though at the trees. Stark took the warning to mean that Eberhardt had some pretty hefty surveillance at his disposal.
“You didn’t have to warn me.”
“You didn’t have to make that call. We are even.”
“Yes, we are.”
He left the man alone with the horrors of the dark, and went in search of the ambassadorial staff. His instincts told him that they were for the most part honest — Cam would likely be safe.
Then he needed some wheels. The garage had been filled with inappropriate cars, high performance sports models or trendy about-towners. Of the seven vehicles, the Escalade was the only one that looked like it might make it out into the rainforest’s more remote spots without floundering on the terrible roads. He had been half tempted to fire up the Lotus Elan, just for the sake of it, though. Like women, some cars were made for speed with no consideration for comfort. But they were hellishly good fun to drive hard.
He reached over the seat for the radio, driving with one hand on the wheel and one eye on the road. The radio was tuned in to the military channel, 2112. Holding it to his mouth, he thumbed down the transmitter and spoke for the sixteenth time in sixteen minutes.
“Cutter? Anyone? This is Stark. Come in Cutter. Are you receiving me?”
And for the sixteenth time he was answered by radio silence.
He laid the handset aside for another minute.
They were relatively short distance receivers with a range of about fifty kilometres, further during the hours of darkness. Probably less now, though, with the weather conditions as they were, the insidious low-lying fog crawling about on the roads and through the trees. It was a dirty creature, moving with infinite slowness as it draped itself across the branches and weighed down the thick vines. The words would get clotted in the fog, reducing the range to no more than fifteen klicks.
Balancing the wheel with his thigh, Stark unfolded the map again, cross-referencing the co-ordinates of the hidden entrance to the Río Huepetue compound. He had programmed it into the GPS, but didn’t trust the results it was showing. Given his speed, he estimated the location as being considerably further away than the technology indicated.
His gut said the satellite was wrong.
Stark folded the map wi
th one hand, following the creases, and picked up the radio again.
“Cutter? This is Stark. Pick up your damned radio, man! Cutter, do you hear me?”
This time, as he was about to discard the handset, it crackled into life, Cutter’s Scottish burr was breaking up badly. It didn’t matter.
“Cutter, we’ve got a problem. I need you to get away from everyone. We need to talk.”
“Stark?” For a moment the crackle of static was the only thing on the line, then the Professor’s voice came through again. “What the hell are you doing out here?”
“Change of plans, Prof. Let’s just say it all came together. Now I’m taking measures to make sure it doesn’t all fall apart again.”
“They’ve taken Jenny, Stark. They snatched her right out of my hands.”
A low branch lashed across the windscreen. Stark yanked down hard on the wheel with his free hand, swinging the Escalade around a dark lump in the middle of his path.
This road wasn’t made for one-handed driving. The wheel bucked in his hand as the Escalade juddered through the potholes and over the broken stones. Dividing his concentration between the road and Cutter was a recipe for disaster. He slowed to a stop.
“Okay, talk to me, Professor. What’s going on?”
“We were ambushed as we tried to get Blaine back to the hospital.”
“Slow down, Prof. From the top. What happened?”
“Poachers. Military. Shining Path. I’ve got no bloody idea.”
“The beginning, Cutter.”
Static buzz crackled for a full thirty seconds.
“We found another slaughtered settlement,” he said, his voice slower now, his accent thinner. “Chaplin was killed while we tracked the Thylacosmilus that had killed most of the villagers. As we tried to retreat to the vehicles, we were attacked. Blaine was injured protecting Abby.”
“Chivalrous idiot,” Stark said. “How badly is he hurt?”
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