“Yeah,” the man grunted. “And you must be Gabby Fleming. Or is that an alias?”
“Yeah,” Charity said, by way of a reply. “Are you ready to go?”
“Not so fast,” Napier replied. “I got a few questions, first. And take your hand off that pea-shooter before you hurt someone.”
“Mister Napier, I was told you’d be helpful and cooperative.”
“I might be a sight more helpful if you don’t shoot my ass by accident. As far as cooperation—you need me, I don’t need you.”
Looking around the dilapidated hangar and at the house beyond it, Charity removed her sunglasses. “Looks to me like you could use any help you can get.”
Napier laughed, which brought on a fit of coughing. When he finally got it together, he fixed his one eye on Charity for a moment. “Look, lady. I don’t need help from anyone. That private terminal you flew out of? I own it. I also own most of this side of the Aripo range and, if I was so inclined, I could buy and sell you and Colonel Stockwell.”
“Somehow I doubt that,” Charity said, removing her hand from the flight bag, but leaving it open.
“I introduced toilet paper to people on the river,” Napier said. With a grin, he added, “Really cleaned up.”
“On toilet paper?”
“Last time I checked, my net worth was about five million.”
Charity eyed him closer. Nothing about him spoke of wealth, and there was nothing in his bio to indicate it, though his bio was mostly empty after dropping off the grid in the late seventies.
“So why are you helping?”
Napier jerked a thumb behind him. “Mostly for kicks, but the Colonel said I get to keep the boat.”
Charity noticed the boat for the first time. It sat back in the gloom inside the hangar and was painted nearly all black.
“Is that the boat you’re going to take me upriver in?”
“If you’re fool enough to go, yeah.”
Charity walked past the big man, entering the hangar. When she spoke, her words echoed off the metal walls and roof of the hangar. “What’re your questions?”
“Not a lot of choppers around here. What’s the range?”
Stepping up closer to the boat, she noticed that it was a catamaran. “She has auxiliary fuel cells, which are full. At cruising speed, I can cover the four hundred miles easily.”
“And you’re qualified to fly backcountry? There ain’t no airports or even a wide spot to set down, where we’re going.”
“I’m qualified,” Charity replied, turning back to Napier, who stood in the open door. “And I’m in a hurry. Are you coming with me or not?”
“You got stones,” Napier said, with a chuckle. “I’ll give you that. Yeah, I’ll guide you. And if you still want me to take you upriver, I’ll tote your cute ass up there. Odds are I’ll never see you again, though. You go into that jungle, you’ll end up as croc and piranha shit on the river bottom.”
“Let’s get in the air, then,” Charity said, ignoring both taunts.
Ten minutes later, they were in the air, swooping down toward the east coast, before turning south and flying low over the water, just half a mile offshore. She really felt good, being back in the air.
“Stick to the coastline,” Napier said. “It’s about sixty miles to the point at Galeota. Then turn right to a heading of two-three-zero and hold that for fifty miles to the delta. Where you wanna go is ninety river miles from the delta. Shorter if you fly a straight line over all the twists and turns.”
“We’ll show up on radar if we fly high over the jungle.”
“What radar?” Napier said. “You gotta get all this techno-modern shit outa your mind. You’re going back in time a couple thousand years down there.”
Charity considered what he’d said. The route he described would be almost exactly half her fuel. “How far is it in a straight line?”
“No clue,” he replied. “I was never fool enough to fly anything down there.”
“Best guess?” Charity asked looking over at him. He was looking straight ahead through the windshield, so all she saw was his left profile, with the eye patch. Below the patch, mostly covered by his graying beard, she could see a long jagged scar.
“Flying straight from Galeota to the island in the river? Probably cuts thirty miles from the distance.”
“Any place to refuel in Galeota?”
“Nope.”
“Near the island?”
“Nope,” Napier replied again. “I’m tellin’ ya, this is beyond Third World. There ain’t even electricity for a hundred miles of where you’re going. The airport you left is the closest one to where you’re going.”
Charity flew on in silence for a few minutes, the new port at Galeota coming into sight.
“We’ll follow the river going in,” she said finally. “Coming back, we make a beeline for the airport at Port of Spain.”
“I got about two hundred gallons of kerosene in the hangar and another two hundred gallons of regular gas. Mix ’em right and you have a pretty decent replacement for Jet-A.”
Charity looked over to see him grinning at her. “I’ll stick with the airport fuel,” she said.
The sun was slowly burning off the morning fog. The mist hung in the air just above the water, rising up to the high jungle canopy along the shore. Karl Aleksander shoved off from the pier and engaged the boat’s transmission. It had been several days since he’d delivered the seed to the old man and his neighbor. The babo wanted to know if they had planted it.
The only other person on the boat was the man they called Botaniker. Not that he had any kind of formal education in botany, but Hans Gruber had always preferred plants over people. He’d found a number of plants deep in the jungle that he was unable to identify in his dozens of books.
Lately, Gruber had been working on cross-pollinating different sub-species of the coca plant. There were only four known species, three being cultivated and one that grew wild on the eastern slopes of the Andes. From his research, Gruber had felt certain that there was a fifth ancestral form of the plant and he’d located it, deep in the highland jungle.
“Are you sure you can tell what they planted?” Karl asked.
“You said they planted four days ago. The shoots should be sprouting today.”
“That is not what I asked,” Karl growled, spinning the wheel to dodge a large crocodile swimming in the shallow water, with what looked like a half-grown tapir in its mouth.
“From the shoots, it is easy to tell if they are coca plants,” the botaniker said. “In a week, they will be half a meter tall. I developed the plant to grow very fast.”
They continued in relative silence for several more minutes, until they reached the southern end of the land their grandfathers had settled more than sixty years earlier.
As they rounded a curve in the river, the wall came into view. Extending twenty feet out into the water from the bank, it was an impressive sight—built four meters in height, with each plank ten centimeters thick and set two meters into the ground. They were locked together with five-centimeter tongue-and-groove joinery and iron hasps, creating a solid wall that would stop a speeding truck. It was more than enough to keep out the jungle animals.
“What were they thinking when they built that?” Hans asked.
“Our forefathers had powerful enemies,” Karl replied, as he watched the men and women at work in the fields. The gate keepers were also farmers and hunters. They supplied most of the food for the community, hunting in the jungle and raising crops on the three kilometer by one hundred meter clearing.
From shore to shore, the island had been clear-cut in a straight line, the clearing more than two hundred meters wide. The caracoli trees, which the great wall had been built from, had a natural defense against insects and rot, even buried in the muck at the shoreline. Deadfalls in the jungle took hundreds of years to decay.
Coming alongside the wall, Karl brought the boat down to an idle, matching the flow of the river and holding the boa
t steady against the current. The island was nearly flat, rising only two meters above the river at its highest point here. From the boat, Karl could almost see the other side of the island three kilometers across the clearing.
There was a door in the wall that allowed access to the other side. A small group of men lived with their families close to the wall, their homes set back into the woods a few meters from the clearing. On the jungle side of the wall, native plants grew like they did everywhere else in the jungle: very fast. It was the job of these men to keep the area on the other side of the wall clear and to maintain the wall itself. Karl had been out to the wall, many times. It didn’t need much in the way of maintenance. In fact, in the sixty years of its existence, there hadn’t been a single panel that needed to be replaced.
“I still think it looks ugly,” the smaller man said, pushing his eyeglasses up on his nose.
“Your thoughts do not matter, Botaniker,” Karl hissed. “The babo says we need it, so we need it.”
Karl finally spotted her thick mane of blond hair, as she carried a basket of vegetables out of the garden toward one of the houses. Jenifer Wirth was more than ten years younger than Karl, still a girl really. She was sixteen years old and the daughter of one of the gate keepers.
Jenifer saw Karl looking, and waved. He waved back as her father came out of the field. Erik Wirth was a giant of a man, bigger than Karl. Wirth didn’t like Karl, nor did he like his daughter associating with him.
Karl gunned the engine and the boat sped away. Wirth will just have to get used to the idea, Karl thought. He’d chosen Jenifer years earlier, and made it known to the other single men in the community. The council had approved the union, even over the father’s protests.
Marriages in the small community had to be closely monitored and both parties’ pedigrees examined carefully. This had been instituted long before Karl was born, to prevent inbreeding as much as possible. Girls were made available to prospective husbands on their fourteenth birthdays and married at seventeen. Karl had made it clear a week before Jenifer’s fourteenth birthday that he would kill anyone who applied to be her suitor. He and Jenifer were scheduled to be united in just a few months.
A few minutes later, Karl slowed the boat as they neared Vicente Navarro’s land. Turning the boat, Karl idled toward shore. Just as the keel made contact with the bottom, he gunned the engine for a moment, driving the boat up onto shore. He quickly shut down the engine and went forward, vaulting over the bow and pulling the boat further up onto shore. The water level rose only when the floods came, so he usually didn’t bother to tie the boat off to anything.
“Let us go see what they are growing,” Karl said to Gruber.
At the top of the low riverbank, Karl easily saw that most of the cassava plants were gone. Only a few rows remained near the old man’s hut. Where the cassava had once stood were now hundreds of rows of furrowed dirt. Tiny green plants only a couple of centimeters tall and a meter apart sprouted up in straight lines, thousands of them.
Gruber trudged past Karl, heading straight for the nearest row. There, he knelt by the tiny plants. “These are definitely my coca plants,” he muttered, looking down the length of the row. A short man with long white hair was approaching.
Hans stood up, as Karl came up beside him. “Is that the farmer?”
“Yes, his name is Vicente Navarro,” Karl answered. “He is supposed to be some kind of shaman or something.”
The two watched as the old man came nearer. When he was close enough, Karl pointed to where the old crops still grew. “Why do you still grow cassava?”
The shaman didn’t answer until he was just a few meters away, where he stopped and looked at the two white men. “The cassava near the jungle grows slower. They will ripen soon.”
“You were told to harvest it all and plant the coca.”
Vicente turned and looked back at the few remaining rows, still shaded from the late morning sun by the jungle just beyond his house. When he turned back, he shrugged. “Planting the coca there will do no good. It will never mature before the floods come.”
Karl started to say something, but Hans interrupted. “He is right. The coca will grow tall very fast, but the alkaloid content will be poor, at best. The plants need full sunlight.”
Vicente nodded slightly to Hans. “We can plant there if you wish. But it will lower the price of the crop as a whole.”
“How can a few poor quality plants bring down the price of the others?” Karl asked, unconvinced.
“He is right again,” Hans said, returning the old man’s nod. “The leaves will look just like those from the plants in the sun, but they will be far less potent. The chemicals used for extraction would be wasted on those leaves.”
“Fine,” Karl sneered. “Keep the cassava.”
In the distance, all three men heard a beating sound, as if someone were hammering quickly on a large bass drum. The sound rose in intensity, then faded for a moment. It rose, this time louder, and faded again.
“What is that?” Hans asked, staring toward the tree line at the north end of Vicente’s property. “Thunder?”
The sound grew steadily louder, rising and falling in intensity. Karl shielded his eyes against the glare of the sun, scanning the treetops for the source of the noise. Suddenly, a large black machine came over the trees, following the river. Karl had seen small airplanes fly over before and knew what they were. He’d seen pictures of this sort of machine, but had never personally seen a helicopter before.
Flying past where Karl had beached the boat, the helicopter climbed quickly. At the apex of the climb, it swooped around in a tight turn, then came back down to treetop level. The front of the thing was pointed toward them as it came to a stop over the river. The whirring blades caused spray to come off the water beneath them and created thousands of round ringlet waves, like so many stones being tossed into the still water. The trees that lined the riverbank bent and swayed, then the force of the wind hit the men in the field like a gale, kicking up dust from the dry ground.
Karl ran quickly for the boat, where he’d left his rifle. Jumping over the gunwale, he pulled the rifle from its rack next to the helm and brought it up to his shoulder. The wind-generated waves from the helicopter rocked the boat as he aimed and fired.
The helicopter rolled violently sideways, then dropped its nose and accelerated downriver, just a meter above the deadly water. In seconds, it had disappeared beyond the trees. Karl followed the sound and saw the helicopter again as it rose above the jungle canopy, its nose low, accelerating away to the north.
Though he was strapped in tightly, Thurman gripped the grab rail with one hand and his seat with the other. Charity followed the river, only a few feet above the water, whipping around each cutback in the river, turning the chopper nearly on its side at times.
Any doubt he’d had about her ability in the back country vanished in the first fifteen miles of river flying. Glancing over at her, he thought she looked as if she were out for a drive in the country. With her right hand on the stick in front of her and her left hand down at her side on the other control, she seemed to move with the chopper as if they were one.
“I take back anything I said about your flying ability, lady,” Thurman said into the little boom mic in front of his mouth.
Charity glanced at the giant in the passenger seat. Even with the secondary controls removed, he filled the whole right side of the aircraft. It appeared as if at any moment he was going to pull the grab rail off the side of the windshield frame.
“Relax, Mister Napier. Grab your shoulder harness. It’s easier to control your upper body than those grab bars.”
Thurman looked over at her again. She was totally relaxed and actually seemed to be enjoying herself. He released his death grip on the rail and seat, and grabbed his shoulder restraints.
“You’re gonna have to follow the river on the return. I’m pretty sure my stomach is just a couple miles back.”
Charity glance
d over and smiled. “You’re holding on wrong,” she said. “Cross your arms.”
Doing as he was told, Thurman did feel more secure and in control of his body. They’d dropped down below the treetops a mile upriver from the delta, and he was pretty sure he had bruises on his legs and right shoulder from being banged around.
“Better slow down,” Thurman said. “The northern tip of the island is coming up in another mile or so.”
Charity put the bird into a slow climb, bleeding off speed as she rose higher for a better view. At two hundred feet, she could see over the jungle canopy. Her eyes saw nothing but green all the way to the far horizon. The tops of the trees seemed to be mostly all the same height. Here and there, mist clung to low spots, the horizon hazy but brilliant blue above.
“It looks just like you said,” Charity commented in awe. “Like some other world.”
“Out here,” Thurman began, “things just ain’t really all that far removed from the primordial ooze our distant ancestors crawled out of.”
Charity continued to follow the river, just above the trees. Part of the landscape ahead was different. The jungle didn’t look as thick, and there was a haze hanging over it.
Thurman saw her notice it and said, “That’s the brotherhood’s settlement. Can you imagine what life was like when they first came here?”
“Brotherhood?”
“Stockwell didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?” Charity asked.
They rounded another bend in the river and a dock came into view. After ninety miles of flying, seeing only two loincloth-clad men paddling canoes, the dock seemed incongruent to its surroundings, an insult to the tranquility Charity had felt in the place as she wove the chopper upstream. The river seemed to split on either side of the dock, both branches equal in size.
Beyond the dock, homes and buildings could be seen, set back among a stand of trees. To Charity’s eyes, it appeared as if the jungle had been thinned and all the undergrowth removed. A little town had been built among the trees.
The architecture and layout of the buildings she could see looked like a throwback to the middle of the last century. If there had been rolling hills, she’d have guessed she was somewhere in Southern Europe.
Ruthless Charity: A Charity Styles Novel (Caribbean Thriller Series Book 2) Page 9