The Daredevils' Club ARTIFACT

by Kevin J. Anderson

  By the time the grenades exploded, Manny and McKendry had reached the third hut. They saw two blond men on separate cots scrambling awake, shouting, looking at each other. In an instant, both of them had grabbed pistols from beneath their beds and lurched up, swinging the weapons to point at the door.

  McKendry was determined to make an arrest, as if to prove to himself that he was in control. He even shot the first round, hitting one of the terrorists squarely in the right shoulder. The crack of his weapons fire sounded loud but was rapidly overwhelmed by the racket in the encampment.

  The second blond man pulled up his own pistol as Manny charged forward and threw a pillow at the man’s arm. The terrorist’s shot was wild; the bullet splintered one of the wooden poles beside Manny. Even though there was no longer any need for silence, Manny chose to pull a sap from his belt. He pushed the terrorist’s gun arm away and swung the sand-filled pouch hard into the man’s skull. His head snapped back and he collapsed onto the bed he had only partially gotten up from.

  McKendry bent over the first downed terrorist, pleased to see he was still alive and conscious, though barely.

  “Selene Trujold. Where is she?”

  The man coughed and bled. His eyes sharpened with awareness enough to gasp, “Fuck you!”

  McKendry stood up, his face grim. “Bleed to death, then.”

  Outside he could hear more weapons fire accompanying the crackling flames from the explosion. He didn’t mind that Ray had blown up the explosives depot, leaving Green Impact without its stockpile. Now was the time for open action.

  The flames from the explosion lit up the area, casting witches’ shadows and creating more uncertainty than illumination. He could see that the fire had spread to the central mess hall.

  A moment later, the propane tanks exploded in a cough of feathery blue fire that bowled over two of the Green Impact terrorists and splintered the trees within fifteen feet into kindling.

  At ground level, Ray and Peta and the two mercenaries were rounding up some of the Green Impact terrorists; a few others hid in the underbrush and opened fire.

  McKendry didn’t care about them. He was only interested in one person, and he was determined to get her—for Keene, and for himself. He could save her a lot of trouble if she capitulated. A whole lot.

  Pushing his way to the open deck of the palafitos that overlooked the calm caños, McKendry shoved aside a small table where two unwashed coffee cups sat.

  Below, he saw someone climbing into a boat. He could not tell for sure in the darkness, but his every instinct told him that it was Selene Trujold. Without calling for others to join her, she slid out into the waterway, moving with spare motions.

  In a blaze of anger at Jose for disobeying instructions, McKendry raised his rifle, sighting in. He would deal with the Venezuelan later. The lazy slug was probably curled up in the bottom of one of the boats he’d been sent to disable. Meanwhile, he could not let the woman get away, not after what she had done to Joshua.

  An expert marksman, he aimed, centering the crosshairs on Selene’s head as she entered a shaft of starlight. Through his sight, he watched her head turn to the right, toward the fringe of the jungle. She raised her arm, and he could see the pistol in her hand.

  Allowing himself no distractions, he focused on her temple and squeezed the trigger—

  “No!”

  Manny Sheppard slapped the barrel of McKendry’s rifle aside as the gun went off. Looking downstream, he saw Selene drop, face-down, into the bottom of the boat which was drifting slowly downriver.

  He turned to glare at Manny.

  “We need her alive, remember,” Manny said. His voice was very quiet. “She has to tell us where Frik’s artifact is.”

  McKendry remembered that Manny had been a friend of her father’s, and that he had known Selene since she was a little girl. He remembered, too, that he was not a killer. Not like this. Shooting someone—man or woman—in the back in cold blood.

  He looked back at the boat which continued to drift. As he watched it, he saw a bloodied hand emerge from the inside and grasp the edge.

  He shoved past Manny Sheppard. Ignoring the ladder, he leapt from the hut to the floor of the jungle and wove his way through the underbrush. He knocked branches away and splashed through shallow rivulets.

  His headlong rush came to an abrupt halt when he tripped over José’s still-warm body. The Venezuelan had taken a bullet straight through the forehead. His knife, small protection against a pistol no matter how accurately thrown, was nowhere to be seen.

  Helluva marksman, McKendry thought, remembering Selene’s raised arm. He stood still and stared into the impenetrable darkness, in the direction her boat had taken.

  Behind him in the camp, a few scattered shots rang out before the gunfire ceased completely.

  By dawn, after searching through the caños and the islands in the vicinity of the camp, Manny found the bloodstained boat. It was still drifting downstream, but there was no sign of Selene Trujold, or her piece of the artifact.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  For three months after his idyllic afternoon with Selene, Joshua had worked with the members of Green Impact to scrounge weapons, ammunition, and explosives. He and Selene went over and over the plans of the Valhalla until they both knew them by heart. Finally, the day after his birthday, he took off with a Warao guide to see if he could get more information and supplies in Pedernales.

  It was his first trip out of the jungle since the night on the Yucatán.

  They took a boat for some twenty winding miles from the jungles to Pedernales, where he had been told he could safely gather additional information and equipment for the operation against the Valhalla platform.

  The town lay at the tip of Punta Tolete, where a confluence of delta streams emptied into the gulf. While apparently the closest thing to a town within reasonable distance, it was really not much more than a supply stop. Any hope he had of finding more than basic survival necessities, was crushed upon his arrival.

  The hub of civilization in the Delta Amacuro, the settlement had grown from nothing half a century ago, when oil exploitation on the adjacent Isla Cotorra had brought the petroleum business to the continent’s edge. Enough traffic and business and people came to the area to set up a town and create a booming local economy.

  By the mid-1970s, however, the oil fields had been played out, and the operating firm had abandoned the wells and pulled up stakes, leaving the locals to fend for themselves. The town’s economy crashed, most of the transplanted people departed, and only empty, dilapidated buildings remained. In recent years, speculators had reopened the operations, squeezing hard until crude oil began to flow yet again.

  Pedernales was reborn, but it remained a sickly child at best.

  Since the locals had not seen Keene in the area before, he was able to move around without fear of being recognized or asked inconvenient questions. For all the villagers knew, he was another one of the yuppie ecotourists who came to the delta, traveling by motorboat up the caños to look at the birds and the wildlife before returning to their expensive homes and fancy restaurants to talk about their “dangerous jungle ordeal.”

  Except for a side trip to Isla Cotorra, Keene spent his time in Pedernales bartering for necessary supplies and trying to gain the confidence of the locals. He did not come close to finding what he wanted, but he did discover that he would have to make do with whatever resources Green Impact could scrounge. On the South American coast, he would have no access to the truly high-tech materials he preferred.

  He was not particularly perturbed.

  Sometimes it was less efficient—and less satisfying—to rely on fancy gizmos. The Mission: Impossible routine, he thought, didn’t work nearly as well in practice as it did in concept.

  After almost a week away from the encampment, and Selene, Keene grew anxious to get back.

  “Time to say goodbye to the big city,” he told his guide. Though sure that his sarcasm was lost on t
he man, Keene offered to buy him a meal and a drink in a seedy seaside cantina that appeared to be the center of the town’s entertainment. They started out at the bar where, with a great stroke of luck, Keene found several disgruntled oil workers who had been fired from the Valhalla rig.

  Without the prospect of continuing paychecks, the rig workers were perfectly happy to talk with a man who would buy them as many cervezas más frías as they wished to imbibe.

  Keene’s Spanish was good enough that he quickly put them at ease. He discovered that, after the Yucatán incident, Oilstar had hired one bastard of a new security chief who had overhauled all the rig procedures, cracked down on booze and drugs and cigarettes, and enforced discipline with no exceptions. A veritable military commander.

  Sipping his beer, Keene nodded sympathetically. His commiseration was genuine. From what he had seen while sneaking aboard the Valhalla with Terris, the previous procedures had been laughably lax, but he wouldn’t have gotten along well with such rigid rules himself.

  By the time the evening was over, the men had told Keene more than he had hoped to discover, and an overall plan gelled in his mind. Given a few lucky breaks and a lot of determination, he was quite convinced he could succeed in his plan to force Frik to sit up and take notice. He had never trusted Frikkie Van Alman, and now he understood why. The Oilstar man had much to answer for. Not that Selene was an angel. She was an expert manipulator with plenty of blood and blame on her own hands, but Paul Trujold’s daughter was just a minor player compared with Frik.

  Leaving at dawn in their inflatable boat, Keene rode back through the caños with his guide, a silent man who spoke enough Spanish to be understood, but chose not to speak much at all. Keene talked for his own benefit, but soon gave up expecting a response from the Indian. Painfully aware of how much he missed McKendry, he made himself as comfortable as possible and began the kind of mental gyrations that had proven useful in the past.

  He had acquired some supplies, though not enough, and a few luxuries including a well-wrapped package of chocolates that the trade post owner had sold him for an exorbitant amount of money. Chocolate was common in Venezuela, but these were imported from Belgium. Why anybody would want to do such a thing baffled Keene, but what did he care as long as they earned him extra Brownie points from Selene.

  She gave him a sense of purpose, which he needed more than ever. Since the fateful night on the oil tanker, he had felt lost and empty without his partner and best friend. Life had seemed to be one continuous string of adventures when they were together.

  Not, he thought, that what he was doing now was dull.

  The whole truth was that he was the sort of man who needed to have a driving goal, even if it drove him over a cliff. Still, if not for the ministrations of Selene Trujold, he would have been unlikely to pick this particular obsession.

  He thought back to the night on the Yucatán. Again, in his mind’s eye, he watched McKendry get shot twice and catapult backward off his bicycle onto the equipment-strewn deck … before he himself was hurled overboard in the grenade explosion.

  He sought to find something amusing in the image of himself hitting the water, but without McKendry as his audience and straight man, nothing seemed funny. Perhaps someday his cocky good humor would return. It sure had gone AWOL since his recovery and time in the jungle.

  Around lunchtime, lulled by the boat’s movement and the early June heat, Keene dozed off. When he awoke, in the mid-afternoon, he noticed a succession of Indians looking out at them from the sides of the water. Without signaling to his Warao guide, they hauled up fishing baskets and nets and disappeared into the jungle.

  “Why are they so skittish?” he asked, hoping for an answer.

  His guide pointed at the sky ahead.

  Tendrils of smoke stained the fluffy low thunderheads brewing deeper over the delta jungle.

  A hot dread and certainty told Keene that the source of the smoke was the Green Impact camp. “Faster!” he yelled to the Indian, who urged the outboard motor to a quicker pace. But the guide was cautious as he looked around, apparently searching for assassins in the underbrush.

  As the boat came up against the narrow streams that led to the palafitos, the Indian slipped over the side and sprinted barefoot into the jungle away from the camp. He didn’t wait to be paid, didn’t help to unload supplies, didn’t even glance at Keene’s stricken face.

  Setting aside his personal fear, Keene raced toward the camp. What he saw pumped him full of adrenaline. Carnage, bloodstains, and a handful of bodies left lying around in and out of the ruins of the huts. Some of the wet green trees were smoldering, but most of the wood and thatch huts in the encampment had burned themselves out, leaving mounds of white ash and charcoal poles. The dry palm fronds and lashed twig walls must have gone up like tinder.

  He stumbled around in a daze, calling out Selene’s name. The compound’s weapons cache was in splinters. A crater sat where the lockers full of explosives had been detonated. He found seven corpses. Two looked like Venezuelans, mercenaries, he guessed, from their nondescript fatigues which lacked the insignia of any legal or military organization. The remaining podies were Green Impact members, fivce of the twelve robust men and one woman he had left behind.

  There was no sign of the others. This was no jungle raid by robbers intent on grabbing supplies for a black-market sale; this was a planned operation, well-executed, with no intent other than to wipe out Green Impact.

  Desperately he rechecked the dead, searching for the woman to whom he had become so attached. She was not among the recognizable bodies. There was no skeleton in the charred shell of the palafito the two of them had shared.

  Praying that she had gotten away, knowing that to be as much a fantasy as hoping Terris McKendry was still alive, Keene vomited on the ground. Trembling, he sat up and spat at the unknown perpetrators of this new crime. There is one place, he thought. One infinitely small possibility.

  He jumped back into the small boat and motored it as quickly as it would go. In the ever-narrowing caños, he repeatedly got caught up in mud banks and overhanging bushes. Relentlessly, he pushed on toward the place where he and Selene had made love that day. The little meadow surrounded by tall grass and trees.

  This is my retreat, she’d said. If she’d made it out of the camp, it’s where she would have gone.

  Keene found the sheltered jungle clearing, and in it he found Selene. She was propped against a mound of dry grasses. Scarlet and yellow birds fluttered around, but she didn’t move as he approached.

  “Selene!”

  He thought he saw her shoulders twitch.

  Reaching her side, he knelt down in the damp earth. He took her hand and stroked her cheek. Her skin was gray and clammy, her lips dry. He kissed them, but it did nothing to awaken her. She made small sounds, and he heard a rattle within her chest and throat. Blood was congealing on her shirt and abdomen and the ground around her. The blood was leaking from beneath her hands, which were clutched under her right breast.

  Beside her, he found a blade; Venezuelan military issue with the initials J.R. scratched into the rubber grip.

  Keene had enough experience with battlefield injuries that he didn’t try to think about how to save her; not here, far from even so much as a well-stocked first aid kit. He felt tears moisten his cheeks.

  “Can you hear me, Selene?”

  She seemed to know he was there beside her. Without opening her eyes, she roused herself enough to lift her left hand, stretching it toward him. In her fingers, she gripped the artifact.

  Keene could not have cared less about the mysterious piece of technology that had been scraped up by Oilstar’s test drill in the Dragon’s Mouth. As far as he was concerned, it was the cause of all of the death around him. McKendry, the members of Green Impact, and now Selene.

  She pushed harder. “Take it,” she said, and he did. “Up to you now,” she whispered. “Oilstar’s fault. Stop—”

  Then she did stop: breathi
ng and living.

  Keene felt the sharp edges of the object in his left hand; felt the temperature of his palm drop as it sucked the heat from his skin. He wanted to fling the damned piece of junk into the steamy jungles, where it would sink into a caño or be overgrown with weeds. But to Selene it had been worth dying for … and Frikkie seemed to believe it was worth the price of murder.

  With his right hand, Keene picked up the knife that had killed the woman he had begun to love. “Rest in peace, Selene,” he said, testing its weight in his hand. “I promise I’ll take care of Oilstar.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  On her way to The Traffic Light, Peta’s pager buzzed.

  She ignored it at first.

  The restaurant where she’d been headed was so named because the owners had imported and erected what had, until recently, been the only traffic light on the island. The traffic light didn’t work, nor was it meant to do so. It was a curiosity, intended for no other purpose than to direct people to stop and sample the food. Of course, the truth was that the place was already so popular with the locals that they had all the customers they could handle.

  After months of eating only because it was mealtime, finally, tonight, Peta had been looking forward to stopping in at The Traffic Light and eating Maggie’s oildown. She had never been good at making the Grenadian national stew of breadfruit cooked in coconut milk with salted meat and vegetables, mostly callaloo, and lots of seasoning, but she loved to eat it. Especially now, in early August, when lobster season was in full swing and Maggie could be persuaded to throw in the occasional tail.

  That was the way Arthur had liked it best, too.

  The two of them had shared oildown at The Traffic Light once a month. The meal was followed by a monthly evening of poetry. Since Maggie would not accept payment from either of them, they submitted to the poetry in exchange for the meal. Arthur didn’t mind. In fact, he occasionally read some of his own scribbles to an enthusiastic audience. She only half-listened, dreaming on a full stomach about Captain Bligh enduring a mutiny because he had used essential water for his breadfruit saplings instead of giving it to his crew.