THE EXTRACTOR

by J. T. Brannan

  “You see anyone strange about town?” Lee asked. “Around the time of the murder?”

  “There are always some strange people in Feijó, my friend, hey?” At this, the man started to roar with laughter; Lee just waited for it to subside. “Yes, always strange people. But lately, yes. Americans.”

  “Americans?” Lee asked, his interest piqued. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I am sure, I make my living flying American tourists around. Sometimes European, sometimes Chinese or Russian, but mainly American. So yes, I am sure.”

  “Who were they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What were they doing?”

  “I don’t know, but the day after Guzman went missing, so had they – although I think one of my competitors at the airfield might have taken them somewhere, you know?”

  “Out over the rainforest?”

  “Maybe,” Silva allowed. “He didn’t want to talk about it, either been paid too much, or was too scared. Anyway, I had a bad feeling since Guzman went missing, so I spent most of my time in that bar you found me in, I didn’t hear much else about it. But yes, I think they were taken into the forest.”

  “How many of them?” Lee asked, thinking that drawing information out of Silva was like getting blood from a stone. A minute ago, he had no idea who could have killed Guzman. Now, it seemed like he had might have some real answers.

  “I am not sure, but in town, I noticed maybe four or five, I do not know if there were more.”

  “You sure they weren’t tourists?” Lee asked.

  “They were not tourists, my friend. They pretended to be perhaps, but they were not. Again, after so many years, I have a . . . nose for these sorts of things, yes?”

  “What did they look like?”

  “Tough,” was all Silva offered.

  Lee’s heart was racing, despite himself. Who were they, and what were they doing here? Was it another team, after the same thing as the Chicago academics? Was it private contractors, hired by some company with a vested interest? Or was it an intelligence agency, maybe the CIA itself?

  It could also have something to do with drugs, Lee knew; perhaps some assistance in tackling the cartels’ drug routes, from SOF “advisors”?

  And yet the timing was too much of a coincidence, and he knew that although such coincidences did happen, they were rare things indeed, and his gut told him that everything was connected.

  “Phoenix,” he said, turning to the rear of the plane. “Did you hear that?”

  “Already on it,” she said, tapping away at her secure laptop. “I’ll try and access airport records, pull passport data and see if I can learn anything.”

  She was good, Lee had to admit, and her brilliance was one of the things that attracted him to her, although he rarely told her. He didn’t tell her this time either, instead turning back to look out of the cockpit window, deep in thought as the green carpet rushed by below them at one hundred and forty miles per hour. Dunford had been right, there was no way you could see anything on the ground through that canopy, and he marveled at the sheer scale of the Amazon. Deforestation might have been happening at an alarming rate, but for Lee, all he could see – in front, to the left, to the right – was rainforest, everywhere, covering every inch of earth around them.

  From this vantage point, he could well imagine the impossibility of knowing everything there was to know about this wilderness, so hidden from the view of the outside world. How many unknown tribes – perhaps entire civilizations – had lived and died under the protection of its vast canopy? It covered 3.4 million miles, which was more than half the size of the United States. What, Lee wondered, if half of the United States was covered by such a canopy? It was nearly unthinkable. What secrets would that canopy cover? And what secrets lay beneath them now?

  Could there be a tribe down there somewhere, immune to illnesses of every kind? And if there were, then what were the ramifications of such a find? He could see why the university was so keen to send a team here, despite the risks – such a discovery could revolutionize medicine, in ways unprecedented.

  He checked the heavy watch he’d been given by Sylvia Darrow – and which he’d pledged to pass over to a woman named Lisa Garfield – then the map that lay in front of him, then the cockpit’s GPS locator, and looked at Silva. “How long?” he asked.

  “We’ll be over your destination in about . . . twenty minutes,” Silva replied. “You sure you want to do this?”

  “It’s my job,” Lee told him as he started to climb over his seat to the rear, reaching for the parachute. “This is what I do.”

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  The wind whipped at Lee’s body as he fell through the sky, battered and buffeted as the incredible emerald landscape raced upward to meet him.

  He’d just left the aircraft, having taken a visual of the exact spot he wanted to land in before jumping; he could still hear the plane above him, carrying on toward Cruzeiro do Sul, where Phoenix and Marcus would set up her secondary headquarters.

  The jump wasn’t too hard, on a technical level; he’d been parachuting for fun since he was a teenager, and had received the best tactical jump training that the US military had to offer – HALO, HAHO, low-level jumps, night insertions, he’d done them all, and had gone onto make many operational jumps too. But it was the landing that made things dangerous – if he made any sort of mistake when he entered the canopy, broken legs would be the best he could hope for. A rope-insertion might have been preferable into a forest environment, but that required a helicopter, which they didn’t have here.

  The aim was to pull the chute almost immediately, once clear of the plane, and then drift comfortably to his chosen position while releasing the heavy equipment pack that he carried, so that it hung beneath him, secured by a line; it would enter the canopy first, breaking a way through for him, and then he would follow, legs stiff and toes pointed as he penetrated the tree tops in the area with the thinnest covering he could identify.

  He knew he had space now, and pulled the chute, felt the reassuring pull as it was released from the pack on his back, the wind entering the silk chute and arresting his fall violently.

  But not violently enough, he realized, and he looked up quickly, saw that the main canopy was tangled in the lines, was failing to fill properly with air, the silk billowing but collapsing as it began to wrap around itself, and Lee felt the lurch in his stomach as he continued to fall.

  His hands worked fast, born of years of practice, and he quickly went for the lines, trying to untangle them as he fell through the sky toward the treetops below, still coming up fast; too fast, he realized, knowing if he left it too late, he’d have no time left to deploy the reserve.

  He went for the three-ring release on his shoulder strap, the handle that would disconnect the main canopy from his harness, calculating that he would still have time to pull the reserve and make the landing comfortably.

  He pulled the handle and waited for the sensation of total freefall to occur again as the canopy detached; but the feeling never came, and he realized that the release had failed too, that the lines and canopy were still attached, twisting worse than ever now, turning him with them, and his stomach lurched once more as he thought the rig might wrap itself around his body, which was plummeting ever faster to the forest below.

  His hand, resisting the fierce wind, went to his leg and grabbed the hook knife attached to his leg strap, reaching upward and hooking it into the lines, cutting them one by one, the blade shearing through them cleanly, until the whole thing was finally released, sailing through the sky away from him.

  He looked down, saw the rainforest canopy close now, so close, rushing up to meet him, to crush him, and he realized he would have no time to release the equipment he carried onto its wire; he was too low now, the pack might hit the trees before he’d even got the secondary chute open, and if it got caught in the canopy and then the canopy opened, his back might get broken by
the snapping action, like a breadstick.

  His pulled the release anyway, then cut through the wire as soon as it left his body, disconnecting it from himself entirely; and then, with the treetops almost within reach beneath him, he pulled the secondary chute, praying that it would work, and his body wouldn’t be smashed to pieces by the rainforest.

  But then the chute filled with air and arrested his descent with the exact violence that had been missing from the first, and when he looked up and checked the canopy he saw it was intact; but he had no time to breathe a sigh of relief, as he saw he was about to hit the treetops.

  Five seconds . . .

  He scanned for a break in the trees, all too aware that the equipment was no longer there to break its way through first.

  Four . . .

  He saw nothing, just an expanse of wild green, coming up fast, too fast . . .

  Three . . .

  He saw something, instinctively steered the chute toward it.

  Two . . .

  He identified the small gap he’d seen and tensed his legs, pointed his toes, and hoped for the best.

  One . . .

  He hit the treetops hard, the impact tearing through his body, but he kept as tight as he could, like a diver entering the water and suddenly he was through the canopy, heading for the ground below.

  And then his rate of descent slowed even more as the chute hit the canopy too, and started to get snarled and snagged on the branches above, until – finally – he came to a stop, dangling eighty feet above the rainforest floor.

  Chapter Two

  Lee felt his body swinging gently between the huge trees, and took a deep breath, calming himself after the highly adrenalized drop while he started to assess the situation.

  He was alive, which was the first thing he had to recognize. Always the positives first. He checked himself over as he dangled in the air, glad to find that he had no significant injuries, in terms of broken bones, at least. But he had some open wounds, scrapes and gashes where the treetops had cut him on the way in, and he knew that such minor wounds could turn into life-threatening conditions in the rainforest if they weren’t quickly treated and covered. Bacteria was rife here, in the hot, moist conditions; and so was every other form of life, Lee reminded himself as he started along the nearby branches for snakes or other animals which might be dangerous.

  Jaguars were the apex predators of the Amazon, but he knew they wouldn’t be found so high up in the trees. They could climb, but not like the leopard, and this was because it was forest’s apex predator; whereas the leopard had to climb in order to hide its kills from larger predators such as the lion, the jaguar had no such competition. The shortness of its tail in comparison indicated that climbing wasn’t as important. But there was always the exception that proved the rule, Lee reminded himself as he scanned the branches for the well-camouflages jungle cat; because if here was one up here, it would make his day go downhill real fast, even more than it already had done. With a bite strength more than twice that of a lion, the jaguar didn’t have to latch on to the throat to suffocate an animal – it just bit straight through the skull.

  Snakes were a lot more likely to be close by though. The real giants, like the Anaconda and Boa Constrictor, were found closer to the ground, and often near or in the water; but up here, the Emerald Tree Boa and the Amazon Tree Boa were both common, and highly dangerous. Many monkey species could be highly aggressive too, and meeting a group of them could well prove fatal. And then there were poisonous spiders, and a host of horror-inducing insects, as well as the highly-toxic tree frogs.

  But after a long period of quiet observation, there was nothing he could see; and in fact, there was silence in the area directly around him, which was strange for an environment like this, which normally burst forth with sound. If it wasn’t monkeys howling, or insects chirping, it was birds calling or predators growling. Further out, Lee could hear the sounds, and realized that his crash landing must have scared away all of the animals close by.

  He thought about the equipment he’d released, wondered if he’d find it; even with everything else that had been going on, he’d made a mental note of where it had fallen, so that he could retrieve it after landing. But that view had been from above, and he knew things would be much harder from the ground, where things looked very different. The major first aid kit was in the pack, but he had stashed a smaller one in the cargo pocket of his combat pants, and after getting out of the harness and getting to ground level, he would treat the cuts before they got infected, and then spend thirty minutes trying to find his equipment. After that, he would go it alone, with what he had with him. He knew how easy it was to fixate on something you thought you needed; he could start searching for the pack, lose track of time, and be caught out in the pitch darkness, with no idea where he was. And there was nothing in the pack – although the rest of his team would surely disagree – that he couldn’t live without.

  He didn’t want to stay hanging in the trees forever, wanted to get moving, but he reached for the short-range radio he carried with him, knowing that getting through to Phoenix would be a lot more likely in the treetops than on the ground.

  He noticed that it was turned off – maybe during the fall – and hit the switch, to immediately hear Phoenix’s voice coming through.

  “Echo-One,” she said, “do you read me, over? Echo-One, do you –”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I read you.”

  “Oh, thank heavens you’re okay, what are you doing?”

  “Just hanging around,” Lee responded, with half a smile.

  Phoenix laughed nervously. “So, you’re caught in the trees, right?”

  Lee laughed too. “You got me.”

  “Anything broken?”

  “No, but I lost the pack. I’ll search for it when I get down, but I might not find it.”

  “You need to find it, you need –”

  “I’ll search for thirty minutes, and that’s it. If it’s not there, I’ll just do this thing the old-school way, belt and braces. Did you see where I landed?”

  “Yes,” she said, giving him the estimated grid reference. He had a map and compass with him, and would check once he was down.

  “We should come and get you,” she said. “You can’t possibly survive out there without that equipment, it’s impossible for –”

  “Phoenix,” he said gently, “trust me. Like I told Silva, this is what I do.”

  “Okay, John. Be careful.”

  “You too,” he said, before turning the radio off to conserve the battery.

  He looked around him, from his vantage point suspended eighty feet above the forest floor.

  Now all he had to do was find some damn way of getting down.

  It was over twenty minutes before Lee was half way down the massive tree, secured to the trunk by the reserve parachute, which he’d adapted into a climbing rig.

  He’d swung from the tangled lines of the reserve, back up in the tree canopy, getting enough momentum until he’d managed to reach the nearest branch that looked as if it could support him; and once he’d latched on, he’d cut himself free from the chute, then set about retrieving it from the treetops – which had taken a lot of time and energy, but could well prove life-saving. If he didn’t find the pack, then the silk canopy and the lines would make a welcome substitute, as they were able to be used for a variety of purposes – climbing, protection, accommodation, the list was endless.

  He’d made his way down through the branches and then – when the branches ran out, and it was just a long, straight trunk all the way to the ground – he’d used the parachute to get down the rest of the way, making a huge loop with the lines, which went around the trunk, and his back, the silk of the canopy adding some welcome padding. He’d leaned back into the rig, then walked down the tree, stopping every few steps to lower the loop. It had made the process of coming down much faster, and safer, than it would have been without, and he was happy that he would be safely down within the
next few minutes.

  But then he heard a noise, and stopped still. Voices, several of them, coming from below, further off into the rainforest.

  Quickly, he shifted around the trunk, until his body was out of view from the direction he was hearing the voices come from. He knew that if anyone looked up, and was observant enough, they might see the white of the lines contrasted against the tree trunk; but they’d been darkened and dirtied after the climb, and were fairly thin, and he knew it would take a good eye to spot them.

  He listened more closely as he sat there, leaning back into the rig, and thought he could pick up the sounds of Spanish.

  Drugs gang, he thought immediately, presumably from the Peruvian side of the nearby border if they were speaking Spanish. Were they looking for him? He knew that such gangs operated a system of lookouts for planes and drones that might have been out searching for their labs, or drug smuggling routes, and had heard of more than one aircraft being brought down by rocket-propelled grenades or even surface-to-air missiles. They took their security seriously, that was for sure; and if they’d seen him parachuting into the forest, and happened to be close by, they would surely come looking for him.

  He could hear their passage through the undergrowth now, and started to be able to make out some of the words. He wasn’t fluent in Spanish, but knew enough to get by, and could certainly identify the gist of what the men were saying.

  They were looking for him; and they were pissed off with being sent out to find him. The anger might work either way – on the one hand, it would take their mind off the job at hand, they were simply too busy complaining to one another to concentrate on actually finding him; but on the other, if they did find him, their anger would be instantly focused on him, and they were almost certainly armed with automatic weapons. And like anyone would tell you, anger and automatic weapons were not a good mix.