Unless, of course, you planned on landing in a jungle canopy, hundreds of feet above the ground.
At that point, you were on your own.
“Time!” Grimaldi said.
Bolan shoved off and hurtled into howling space.
* * *
FORTY-FIVE SECONDS can feel like an hour in a free fall. Ferocious winds peel back the skydiver’s lips and ripple his cheeks, whip at his limbs and body, driving him off course unless he’s learned to navigate with arms and legs while plummeting toward impact. If the jumper isn’t screaming, an impressive silence overcomes the world. It’s possible to lose touch with reality, enter a state of self-hypnosis and forget to keep an eye on the altimeter or to pull the rip cord, which is where the Vigil 2 comes in. A pop, a jolt and suddenly the chute is open. Just as suddenly the jumper must display a whole new range of navigational skills.
All jungles are composed of layers. The looming giants are emergent trees that make up the upper canopy, their huge branches expanding above smaller neighbors. In Brazil, those giants are known as angelim pedra—“angel’s heart.” Next comes the main canopy, trees with broad crowns filling gaps between the giants, their limbs a home for orchids, bromeliads and lichens. Lower still is the shrub layer, consisting of young trees and smaller woody plants; and underneath is the field layer, with its seedlings, ferns and scattered herbs. Finally, in perpetual shade, the jungle floor is paved with fallen leaves and rotting vegetation.
Bolan’s task was to avoid the thrusting crowns of the emergent giants and penetrate the lower canopy with minimal damage to himself or his equipment. After disengaging from his parachute harness, he’d descend to ground level and take up the hunt. His drop zone had been picked with GPS precision, supplemented by the latest aerial photographs. He knew exactly how the chosen stretch of jungle should appear to someone swooping from a bird’s-eye view, and what he saw below him matched the photographs.
It almost worked.
No one could photograph the wind, however, or predict when it would suddenly lash out to spoil a puny human’s best-laid plans. The gust that caught his chute drove Bolan east, a hundred yards or so off course. Not much, in terms of hiking distance—but he wasn’t hiking. He was falling, and the tree beneath him now, soon to make impact, seemed to be the tallest angel’s heart for half a mile around.
A last-second tug on Bolan’s left-hand riser spared him from being impaled on a thrusting branch. Then he was in the tree and grappling with the chute’s suspension lines as another gust caught the Intruder’s canopy and whipped it westward, trying hard to take its passenger along for the ride. Bolan found the quick-release clasps on his harness, unsnapped them and sagged with relief as the chute sailed off without him.
He took a rapid inventory of his limbs and digits, found them all in working order and proceeded to adjust his gear. His small reserve chute was the first item to go, left slung over a branch where it would ultimately rot away or make a nest for birds. Bolan shifted his assault pack to his shoulders, adjusting its padded straps. He left the crash helmet and goggles on for safety’s sake, in case he slipped somewhere along the way and came too close to jutting, eye-gouging twigs. The headgear also would protect his face and scalp from nervous tree-dwellers.
Because the canopy was alive.
Brightly colored birds and butterflies were the most obvious treetop inhabitants, but they were not alone. A teeming world of invertebrates, reptiles, amphibians and mammals lived among the upper reaches of the jungle, some never descending to the forest floor until they died and their bodies dropped to feed the scavengers below. Others would cling to their high perches even after death, until decomposition turned them into fertilizer for the other plants that strove for sunlight at the apex of the canopy.
Most tree-dwellers were harmless, but Bolan could still be swarmed by ants or wasps as he descended, bitten by a viper or a lethal Brazilian wandering spider. Even a nonvenomous boa, if startled, might sink its backward-slanting teeth into Bolan’s face or neck, and throw its coils around him, toppling Bolan from his perch to certain doom.
So, easy does it on the long way down, trusting his climbing spikes and strength to get him back on terra firma.
One step at a time, he started to descend.
* * *
MERCY CRONIN DID her best to hide the terror threatening to overwhelm her. She slogged and stumbled through the forest in her husband’s footsteps, gunmen marching out in front and coming up behind them, pressing close. If she slowed down, the man behind her snarled and jabbed her with the muzzle of his automatic rifle, laughing when she yelped in pain. That mockery had prompted her into a stubborn silence, and she kept pace with the grim parade as best she could.
Why are we still alive? she wondered. It made no sense. Threats against their mission had increased during the past few months—had become almost routine—although the source was not identified. Abner had explained that several elements were bent on driving the Mundurukus and the other forest tribes from their ancestral homes and hunting grounds—loggers and oil men, cattle barons who would raze the rain forest and turn it into grazing land. A mission was an anchor for the aborigines, and education worked against the common propaganda line that they were hopeless savages.
The Cronins had endured the threats and prayed, trusting God to keep them and the Mundurukus safe. Now that the worst had happened—the murder of their innocent parishioners—and Abner and Mercy were witnesses, logic said she and her husband were living on borrowed time. Whoever had dispatched these goons to raid Missão Misericórdia surely could not allow eyewitnesses to live. The easy thing—the smart thing, from a murderer’s perspective—would have been to kill Mercy and Abner outright, and bury them or let the jungle consume their flesh and bones.
So, once again, why are they still alive?
The question frightened Mercy, but the answers offered by her mind were even worse.
It couldn’t be a kidnapping for ransom. She and Abner had no wealthy relatives or backers in the States—no church with deep pockets would bail them out of danger. On the contrary, they’d burned their bridges when they had left Miami for Brazil two years ago. The U.S. State Department might protest their abduction, but the Cronins were not prominent or wealthy—no one worthy of a rescue operation or any negotiation with a gang of terrorists. Perhaps they would secure fifteen minutes of fame in some media markets back home, but Mercy knew they would be forgotten just as quickly.
Why abduct them then?
Perhaps to make them an example, which had terrifying implications. Mercy pictured graphic scenes of torture and humiliation, their mutilated corpses left beside some forest road or even dropped off in Cáceres as a warning to any who might follow their lead in aiding the native tribes. The visions left her weak and trembling, wishing she could cling to Abner’s hand, but her kidnappers had secured their wrists behind their backs with plastic ties.
That made hiking through the jungle doubly awkward, as they trudged through mud, tripped over roots or slipped on ridges thick with fallen, rotting leaves. When someone up ahead released a springy branch or dangling creeper, Mercy had to duck or let it slap her in the face, stinging her cheeks. She couldn’t fan away the swarms of flying, biting insects but was forced to squint her eyes instead—which then obscured the narrow shaded trail and made her prone to stumbling. If she fell, her sole recourse was twisting to one side, taking the impact on her arm and shoulder, rather than her face.
All in all, it was a march of misery with cruel death waiting at its end.
Back in Miami, some of their acquaintances had taunted Abner, not quite joking when they’d claimed her husband sought a martyr’s fate in the Brazilian wilderness. Mercy, who knew Abner’s heart and shared his passion, thought those people were wrong. But now, it seemed, their gibes would be borne out. When word got back to Florida, their former friends would sit
nodding over coffee or cocktails, saying that they’d known what to expect from the beginning. She and Abner would be branded fools, but even that was covered in the Good Book.
Apostle Paul had said to the Corinthians:
We are fools for Christ’s sake, but ye are wise in Christ; we are weak, but ye are strong; ye are honorable, but we are despised.
And also had preached:
For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.
It troubled her that she couldn’t draw comfort from the scriptures under the threat of agonizing death. Was her weakness proof that she didn’t deserve salvation? Would she be forgotten by her Lord as well as the world at large?
Another jab into her back made Mercy stumble, almost falling, but she kept her balance, slogging on.
Toward Judgment Day.
* * *
IT TOOK BOLAN the better part of forty minutes to climb down the huge trunk of the angel’s heart that had broken his fall. A sense of urgency was driving him, but one false move could mean a broken arm or leg, maybe a broken neck, and that would be the end of it.
The end of him.
So Bolan took his time, setting his spikes on one boot, then the other, using any handholds he could find along the downward path, from limbs to vines as thick as steamship mooring lines. The vines couldn’t be used for the acrobatics of a Tarzan movie, since they clung to looming trunks with grim determination—some eventually strangling their hosts—but they served as a rope ladder of sorts for Bolan’s descent.
A spider monkey watched him for a while, remaining carefully beyond arm’s reach and studying its larger relative, clucking advice or criticism as the spirit moved it. Bolan wasn’t worried about monkey bites—not from a single specimen, at least—but he stayed alert as he dropped lower, watching out for scorpions and tree vipers. A sting from the former likely wouldn’t kill him, but viper venom produced fever, nausea with bloody vomiting, unconsciousness and death.
Bolan’s first-aid kit included two syringes of antivenin, one to combat the neurotoxic venom common among coral snakes around the world—including at least four species found in Brazil—the other for the hemotoxic venom injected by most New World vipers.
Bolan scrambled down the vast tree trunk, sweating inside his insulated jumpsuit. On touchdown, he would shed the suit and bury it with his entrenching tool to avoid tipping off enemy patrols.
Would they be out in force? He couldn’t say, but training and experience had taught him not to take unnecessary chances. Bolan’s targets would be conscious of his presence in their backyard soon enough. There was no need to telegraph the blow before it landed.
Hit and git. That was the plan. Grimaldi would be waiting to collect him at a preselected landing zone, a pinnacle of sorts amid the brooding forest, where a helicopter could land—or hover, at the very least—to take on passengers. It might be a hot LZ, if anything went wrong, but Grimaldi had plans to deal with that eventuality, as well.
Don’t borrow trouble, Bolan thought. But planning for worst-case scenarios was part of waging any war. The fewer rude surprises a soldier faced, the longer he’d survive. The last thing Bolan needed, when he had a private army almost in his sights, was a bite from some stray reptile or arachnid.
At last the ground was visible and his descent accelerated. Ten more minutes and his boot soles touched solid ground for the first time since liftoff that morning, from Marechal Rondon International Airport in Várzea Grande. Bolan quickly shed his pack and combat gear, unzipped his jumpsuit and removed it, feeling cooler instantly. His combat webbing needed minor readjustment, with the thicker layer of clothing gone, but that was just a moment’s work.
Keeping his Steyr close at hand, Bolan got busy with the Glock entrenching tool, digging a square grave for his jumpsuit and helmet. He kept the goggles pushed up on his forehead, as a hedge against flies, and buried the gear he was leaving behind. Once the shovel was folded and stowed, Bolan drank from one of his canteens, then donned his pack again.
Ready.
He knew where he was going, courtesy of satellite photography and the intelligence reports he’d received before departing from the States. His target wasn’t secret in the normal sense. Brazil’s army, its Federal Police and Mato Grosso’s Civil Police Department knew the site’s location and what it represented, but they made no moves against it.
Why? The answer might be corruption, preoccupation with domestic terrorism or simple fear of finding themselves outgunned. Most likely, Bolan thought, it was a combination of all three. He’d never seen a truly “clean” police force yet and was convinced he never would, since every agency on earth had to recruit its members from the human race.
Enter the Executioner, to do what these groups could not or would not bring themselves to try.
Bolan marked his path using the GPS and took off through the forest, rifle slung over his shoulder, bolo knife in hand. The animals he met were small and quick to clear out, in most cases before he could identify their species.
Perfect.
Then some twenty minutes in, he crossed a newly broken trail where something like a dozen men had passed in single file. Their destination seemed to be approximately the same as his, so he fell in step behind them.
Why not?
If he could trail the as-yet unknowns to the target, that was fine. If they began to deviate or stopped to rest along the way, Bolan could determine who they were, evaluate their strength and then decide whether they were a threat.
If they were enemies, as Bolan surmised, there was no point in letting this group rejoin their comrades, strengthening the hostile ranks. A dozen guns or so eliminated early in the game could only help Bolan later on.
Pleased with the turn of circumstance, he sheathed his bolo and unslung the Steyr AUG.
The Executioner was on the hunt.
Chapter 2
Abner Cronin said a silent prayer of thanks when the raiding party stopped to rest. Two of the gunman shoved him and Mercy against the base of a towering tree and muttered something in Portuguese that he didn’t catch. He’d learned the language fairly well—beginning his study when they’d hatched the plan to start a mission in Brazil—but there were many slang terms that eluded him, along with most of the profanity.
Why bother learning filth, when his intent was sharing scripture?
Sitting down was too much trouble with his hands bound tight behind his back, so Abner knelt to rest, and Mercy followed his example. The apparent leader of the kidnappers—a man who’d visited their mission once before and had warned them to move on—came over, frowning.
“You’re praying now?” he asked them. Abner took his tone for curiosity, not outright mockery.
“Just resting,” he replied. “Kneeling is recommended for prayer, but not required.”
“Praying won’t help you,” said the gunman. “When you meet o chefe...” The guerrilla shook his head. “He is the last god you will ever see.”
O chefe. That translated as “the boss.” Abner decided he could take a chance, under the circumstances.
“No man is a god,” he said.
“Maybe,” the gunman answered. “But out here, he is the next best thing.”
“Who is o chefe?” Abner asked. “And how have we offended him?”
“You don’t know? Honestly?” Their captor croaked a laugh. “You never heard of Joaquim Braga?”
Abner frowned. The name did sound familiar, but—
Then it hit him. “The narco-trafficker?” he asked.
“Ah, so you do know him.”
“We’ve heard of him,” he answered, Mercy nodding in agreement. “But we’ve never met him. Certainly we’ve never interfered with any of his business.”
“No?” The gunman shrugged. “Maybe he doesn’t like you preaching Jesus to the natives, filling their heads with fairy tales.”
“They aren’t—”
“Or maybe he just wants you out of here. He don’t like people snooping in his territory, running back to the police with stories, eh?”
“We don’t know anything about his operation, and we have no dealings with police,” Abner replied.
Their captor shrugged. “Is not for me to say. O chefe tells me, ‘Go and bring the preachers back.’ I bring you to him. Simple.”
Abner was afraid to ask the next question but could not stop himself. “And so? What happens then?”
The gunman’s smile was feral, verging on reptilian. “You talk to him, if he allows it. Maybe yes or no. You think it helps, try praying to him. Me, I think your time is running out.”
A little sob came from Mercy, then quickly stifled. She was brave, and Abner loved her for it.
“We do not pray to any man,” Abner replied.
Another lazy shrug followed. “It makes no difference to me. Do what you want, eh? But o chefe don’t like people who stand up to him. They have a hard time crossing over.”
Abner hoped it didn’t show that he was trembling. “We are not afraid,” he lied.
“That’s good. It makes a better show,” the gunman said. “And maybe at the end, you get to meet your Jesus, eh?” He took some dried meat from a pocket of his cargo pants and offered it to them. “You hungry?”
“What is that?” Mercy asked.
“Monkey meat. We dry it like your jerky. Pretty good.”
“No. Thank you,” Mercy said.
“No last meal, eh?”
Although he was hungry, Abner bit his tongue and shook his head.
“Ho-kay.” The gunman put his offering back in his pocket and retreated, huddling with his soldiers farther up the trail.
Amazon Impunity Page 2