***
Three days in, we switched boats and captains, starting a seven-day journey down the Cuiabá, São Lourenço and Paraguay rivers.
On July 16, we reached Corumbá. From there, we began our land journey, aiming for Porto Cercado. It was in that region we began to see some of the “rape of the land” that had been perpetrated by the gold miners.
Construction had also begun on a highway intended to connect Cuiabá to Corumbá. When they finished that sucker in some as-yet-unknown year or perhaps century, I thought Höttl and many other Nazis’ jungle hidey-holes would be severely compromised.
I picked up a local paper from an adjacent table and read that Francisco Franco had finally named a successor. Hell, if I survived this thing, maybe I could at last revisit Spain before I turned tits up.
We spent the night in an un-air-conditioned hotel, then pushed on a bit further, no more than seven miles now from Höttl’s jungle sanctuary by my reckoning.
Indications were it would be a hellish last trek. After all, this was country where hundreds of men died to lay those four miles of go-nowhere railroad tracks.
I reckoned that traversing seven miles in the Brazilian interior might be a little like crossing the Sonoran Desert back home.
The patch of ground between Höttl and us was a kind of mosquito and caiman infested bottomland with no paved roads; a boggy trail through the woods or a risky run via river.
Looking over the maps, Jonny said, “If we leave early, say, five, six in the morning, we can maybe be sure to reach there by mid-afternoon. That’s if we go in on foot.”
Jésus said, “There’s another option?”
“Horses,” Charles said. “But we would have to hire at least five. We’d have to give some sense of where we meant to take them. And in a small place like this—”
“Word would maybe get back to Höttl,” Bud finished for him.
Jésus said, “For all we know, everyone in this place might be on this German’s payroll. Paid to protect him or to warn him. There’s that river approach we might take, but so many of us in a boat, and with all the guns we’d have to load in?”
“It’d be another eyebrow-raiser indeed,” I said. “On the way in here I saw a dune buggy for sale. Figure three of us and most of the weapons can fit in that. And it looks narrow enough to pass through that jungle-cut path. Tires on the sucker shouldn’t bog down in that soup, either.”
Charles said to me, “Then you suggest we should split up, Grand Capitaine?”
“Exactly,” I said. “Jésus and Bud will go in by boat. We’ll set up Bud as some kind of naturalist on camera safari. Jésus, you get a boat big enough for the five of us to flee in. Once this is done, one way or another, I think we’re going to be on the hard-hunted run back to civilization. Boat will be a lot faster means of de-assing these evil environs.”
***
Bud went with me to close the deal on the dune buggy. While we waited for the papers to be drawn up, Bud said, “Sending me in that boat—you’re still worried I can’t cut it, aren’t you, Hector? You’re just trying to keep me out of harm’s way.”
I gripped the back of his neck, got in close and looked into Bud’s one good eye. I lied and said, “You know how to steer a boat. I know you know, because I taught you. If something should happen to me, and to Jésus, you’re the only one left to get those men out of there. I really don’t think a land retreat’s going to be even a remote possibility. When Höttl knows he’s in trouble, if he learns before I put him down, he may have a radio and call in local law. Maybe even American muscle if our government’s still keeping close tabs on him. Even if Höttl’s dead, those cocksuckers may be vengeful.”
Bud wasn’t buying in, yet. I said, “And there’s the fact I don’t trust you to control yourself. You want that man dead as much as I do. So I can’t risk you putting Höttl down before I get my shot at him. He’s mine to kill, Bud.”
“That’s bullshit,” Bud said. “Just like that nonsense of wanting a boat big enough to carry all five of us out. You know we all won’t come back from this. After all these years, know one thing. I know you, Hector, and I know when you’re lying.”
I didn’t contradict what he’d deduced. Instead I said, “At very least, we certainly need a boat big enough to stretch out our wounded.” A beat. “Or our dead.”
63
The morning of the raid.
Bud and Jésus were going to set off a couple of hours behind us. Barring attack from the banks by mercenaries, thieves or some stray, lost tribe of Amerindians, they were apt to make much better time. They were taking along two walkie-talkies, a couple of machine guns, spare ammo drums, two forty-fives and a flare gun in case we needed help finding the river and our get-away ride through all that tangled jungle.
Charles, Jonny and I slathered on mosquito repellant, then finished loading the dune buggy. Jonny wedged a long, oil-cloth wrapped something into the back where he was planning to sit. I said, “What’cha got in there, Jon?”
“My bow.”
I smiled. “Bow as in arrows? Are you joking?”
“You want to have a chance at surprising that German in his house?” Jonny patted the wrapped-up bow. “Only way to kill quiet and from a distance.”
***
The path to Höttl’s place was hardly more than that—a weedy, boggy swath cut through jungle already threatening to grow closed.
Stray branches swatted arms and nicked cheeks scarlet. Snakes nested in overhead branches. Charles, our driver, had to brake several times as caiman lumbered across the trail.
“These alligators, they unsettle me,” Charles said.
Jonny, apparently unfazed, said, “Not alligators.”
Charles nodded, said, “Crocodiles, then.”
“Caiman,” I said.
Charles arched an eyebrow. “What’s the difference?”
“Hell if I know,” I said. “Croc, gator or caiman, they’re all just luggage with teeth to me.”
We heard the growl of another jaguar. I was beginning to lean Charles’s way. Men with guns were one thing—a bloody but familiar prospect. Something one had experience with. Exotic animal ambush, on the other hand? That was terrifying.
Perhaps four miles in, Jonny put a hand on Charles’ shoulder. “Stop,” he said. I saw he’d gotten out his bow; already strung an arrow, in fact.
Jonny squinted up into the canopy, drew back and let fly with a basso thwang.
I heard limbs crack. Leaves rustled and low branches whipped wildly.
A body fell onto the path about fifteen feet in front of us. Jonny had put his arrow through the man’s heart, coming in under the sternum.
The dead mercenary—he had knives thrust down each of his boots and a carbine was still strapped around his torso—had landed on his back.
“We should probably go in on foot from here,” Jonny said, leaping off the back of the buggy. He put a foot to the dead man’s neck to brace the body, then pulled out his arrow. He looked it over, said, “Good to go again. It’s going to be a fine day, I can tell.”
***
Charles and I exchanged uneasy glances as Jonny pulled an arrow from a third body Charles said, “I feel recumbent.”
“Redundant,” I corrected. “Ditto.”
Jonny whipped the arrow once, flinging red droplets into the red dust. He pointed: “The roofline. I’ll cover you two to the door. I’ll keep the outside clear. You two kill everybody inside.” He made it sound so simple.
I nodded. “Right. But first let me see if Bud and Jésus are in position yet.” I reached for my radio.
“Be quiet about it,” Jonny said. “That man, the second one I killed, he had a radio, too. If signals should cross…?”
But I couldn’t get a signal, not even radio crackle to speak of.
Frustrating. Troubling.
I stowed my walkie-talkie and we crept through the undergrowth until we reached a clearing and could see the house. It was a kind of bastardized, two-
story colonial. The graying white paint was peeling off in strips. It looked like a haunted house, but for the noise: somewhere, a generator was working overtime to power the big central air conditioning unit at the side of the house. That sucker looked newish.
About twenty yards off the house was a separate unit, a kind of uneasy compromise between a massive garage and a smallish barn.
On the moldering front porch of the house, two men with shotguns stood talking. Not Germans—Brazilians, chatting in Portuguese. Both men were toting rifles.
Jonny whispered, “I can get one, no problem. But I’m not certain of getting both before one or the other gets a shot off.”
“And there would go the element of surprise,” I said.
For just a moment, I thought we’d caught a break.
The guards split—one stayed at the front door, in the shade of the porch. The other began to make his way around the house to check the back. When that one turned the corner, Jonny shot him in the back—an oblique shot that missed the spinal column but again found the man’s heart.
The skewered guard fell face-first into the red dust. His falling gun didn’t discharge. I sighed, said, “Very nice work, Jon.”
The dead guard’s buddy heard the fall of the body. With a puzzled expression, he raised his gun and moved along the wall, preparing to sneak a look around the corner. He was about to lean around when Jonny’s arrow killed him.
“Hell, this might not be hard at all,” I said.
Stupid. Of course such cockiness always invites disaster.
As we were about to step from cover, gunfire broke out from somewhere to the right of our position. A voice that sounded like Jésus’ yelled, “Sons of putas!”
More gunfire, then what sounded like a grenade going off.
Several of the upstairs windows of the house were opened; gun barrels poked out. I grabbed Jonny and jerked him over behind a fallen tree. I rolled over the trunk behind him. Charles crashed onto the ground behind me as the first slugs slammed into the tree’s trunk.
64
Charles and I returned fire. Jonny put a couple of arrows through windows. We heard high-pitched screams; saw some guns withdrawn or dropped, sliding down the roof of the porch and tumbling into the crimson dust. Blood spritzed window sashes and glass.
Several men darted from behind the house. They put down covering fire for the men running behind them—two big boys half-leading, half-carrying a white haired old man with a nasty scar down the side of his face. Old fella seemed to have trouble walking on his own. Good.
They were making for that garage-barn. We killed or felled at least five but the rest made it inside the big garage. I tried mightily to put a slug into Höttl or one of the men carrying him, but the big bucks up front fouled all my shots.
Sounded like several engines were turning over inside the barn. Then those engines were gunned. Jonny kept his attention focused on those upstairs windows while Charles and I fired into the front of the barn. Through a rear door, three motorcycles with attached sidecars tore off down the path, disappearing into the overgrowth behind the house.
One of us—either Charles or I—killed the driver of the rearmost bike. The motorcycle veered rightward and slammed into the corner of the house, nearly decapitating the sidecar rider.
But near as I could tell, Höttl was in the sidecar of the first motorcycle—now well out of my gun’s range.
I said, “There might be another motorcycle in that garage.” Jonny was out of arrows. I handed him a forty-five and some clips to handle anyone he couldn’t get close enough to kill with all those knives he’d carried in. I snarled, “Cover me, because I’m going for the garage.”
Charles said, “I’m with Grand Capitaine.”
The two of us ran for the barn, firing up at the second floor windows of the house as we went. There were two more motorcycles in the barn. One had a sidecar, the other didn’t. I said, “All the things I’ve done in my life, I’ve never been on one of these things damned bikes. But how hard can it be?”
Charles pointed at the sidecar. “You sit in there, Grand Capitaine. “From there you can fire on the German. I can drive these. You see to the killing.”
We tore out of the garage, sputtering black smoke and whipping through low-hanging foliage. To protect my eyes, I got out my Ray-Bans and put them on. I commenced to looking for a way to steady a shot at the back of the driver of the rearmost motorcycle that was quickly coming into range.
The other two bikes had a pretty good head start on us, but those fellas seemed intent upon staying alive. Seemed to me Charles had no similar ambitions. He was running flat out, sending us briefly airborne as we struck protruding tree roots and small, unknown critters dashing across our path; some kind of animals that squealed as the tires broke their backs or crushed their skulls.
“Christ’s sake,” I yelled over the roar of our own engine, “we can’t kill this bastard if you kill us first.”
The man in the sidecar of the last motorcycle was trying to twist around in that little tube to take shots back at us. But he was a husky lad and couldn’t quite get himself turned around enough in the cramped sidecar to take clean shots.
And the bumpiness of the ride made any kind of competent targeting something of a pipedream. I aimed at the back of the sidecar rider’s head and instead struck him in the neck. My shot maybe severed the man’s spine. He slumped forward, his arm hanging out the side of the car and hand trailing the ground. He lost his grip on his gun and it bounced along in their wake, eventually striking the bottom of my car. I got lucky and the thing didn’t discharge and shoot me in the ass or the like.
I screamed at Charles, “Better ease up a little, just for a minute. I’m going to shoot at the driver. If he loses control, all that metal is maybe going to come rushing back at us just like that gun did.”
Charles slowed a bit, putting some more ground between us and buying himself more reaction time.
It took three shots, but I finally put one in the biker’s lower back. He twisted as he took the hit and the motorcycle veered rightward off the path, crashing through brush and spindly trees. There was a splash, then some thrashing; seemed some body of water was just off to our right. Thinking that, I realized now I could smell water and figured it was probably the river.
As I was thinking that about that river, as Charles was increasing our speed to gain on the last of the bikes—the one with Höttl in the sidecar—a caiman ran across our path. He was a big enough son of a bitch, probably six-feet long and all of him one big and armored muscle.
Snarling, Charles did the best he could to steer toward the lower, backend of the giant lizard—to go over him at the hindquarters and tail where the bastard was closest to the ground.
It was still a hellish bump. We were pitched forward, then sideways. There was a sound of twisting metal and I nearly lost my gun. Charles managed to stay on the bike and to keep us on the trail, but now the front end of the sidecar was twisted away from the bike at a rightward angle. I looked down and saw the metal bond between me and the bike was twisted, nearly sheared through.
Though he tried to close the distance on Höttl’s bike, the damage done our ride was slowing us down. I took a couple of shots at Höttl’s back, frustrated by the notion of maybe killing him before he knew who’d done it to him.
The old man pitched something over his shoulder. It bounced along the path behind them, wobbling our way. I thought maybe Höttl had lost his grip on his gun, just like the other boy who was now in the river had before him.
Then I figured out what it was. Before I could yell “Grenade!” it was under us. Charles had seen it, too—given our bike all the kick he could to get us away before the detonation. The grenade slammed against the bottom of the sidecar. I figured at that point I was going to lose my legs, my plumbing and probably my life. My remains would end up in some caiman’s belly.
Then the grenade was somewhere behind us. The shrapnel from a rearward explosion could still
be plenty lethal to Charles and I, I figured.
But the grenade bounced off trail. A tree dampened most of the explosion’s force. Yet it was still enough concussion to lift Charles’s bike up off the ground. I closed my eyes against a pelting of branches and severed foliage.
Instead of rolling us over, the force of the explosion put more stress on the already damaged umbilical between the bike and the sidecar. There was again the sound of twisting, shearing metal, and then branches were slapping me in the face. I couldn’t see Charles or the bike, just heard a big splash.
Realizing I was rolling out of control toward the river, I struggled to get up out of the sidecar, to make a leap before I hit the water teeming with all those caiman and ravenous, razor-tooth piranha.
I became tangled in the low-hanging brush and was ripped from the sidecar.
There was a last crash of metal through foliage and then another big splash as the sidecar slammed into the river water.
I was dangling in the branches, seeing spots and amazed to be alive. I shook my head and lowered myself to the ground. I found no sign of Charles or the bike. I had this terrible vision of him being torn apart by predators somewhere under the surface of that stinking river.
And Höttl?
That bastard was long gone, leaving me behind to try and follow that treacherous path back to his house, easy prey for the caiman I now knew were lurking in the river just a few yards from where I stood.
***
I’d walked—well, limped, because I’d wrenched a knee being jerked from the sidecar—perhaps two hundred edgy yards through snake and caiman infested boggy overgrowth when I heard a motorcycle engine. The sound of its approach was coming from the direction of Höttl’s house. I’d lost my gun in the wreck. I had a knife and a few grenades, but that was all.
But the bike was moving slowly, just a hair above an idle. A voice called, “Hector? Charles?”
It was Bud Fiske, bumping along the path in the last of the motorcycles we’d left behind us in the barn when Charles and I had torn off after Höttl and company. The bike Bud was on had no sidecar. I stepped out into the path, waved a hand, said, “Thank God for you, Bud.”
Roll the Credits: A Hector Lassiter novel Page 31