by Hugo Navikov
The others, not so much.
Theodore of Toyota Town said, “I can’t match any of that stuff. I mean, I’ve gotten deer and such in season, but this is my first … um, real hunting trip.”
He got slaps on the back and gestures of support from his two fellow poachers. Jefry and I just watched.
“All right, then. I was looking for anything you guys knew specifically about hunting crocodiles, but no worries. We’ll head out this morning,” I said, looking at my waterproof and shockproof diving watch, “because the heat of the day is the only time you’re going to find a Caiman sunning itself on the riverbank. It’s relaxed and, most importantly, out of the water. If you try to wrestle a croc in the water, you’re doomed.
“But let’s say we find one sunning itself. Peter is right that you go for a headshot, because that will usually immobilize them. But the killshot is here”—I indicated the base of my skull—“where it’s little brain is. Otherwise, shooting them only makes them slip back into the water and disappear.”
Everybody nodded sagely. We ate breakfast, loaded the poachers’ gear into the SUV, then drove through the slums of Bélen to start two hunts: They had theirs and I had mine, and the twain were about to meet.
***
All five of us got outfitted with shoulder GoPro cameras—an edited video of the hunter’s triumphs was included in the package price— and we set the three men in different spots along the river, giving each instructions to hide in the bodacious flora and watch for a Black Caiman (or any croc) to come out of the muddy water to get warm in the sun. Crocodiles need to do this to keep their temperature high enough, since they’re cold-blooded—O, the irony—and a nap in the blazing South American sun kept them going through the day and chilly nights in the water.
Dan, Ted, and Peter were each in sight of the others, rifles wrapped in towels on the mud and walkie-talkies in their hands to alert everyone of any potential targets, but Jefry and I convened just out of view and out of earshot to discuss our own hunt.
“If I went on a hunt that took ten days, I’d need a good divorce lawyer,” Jefry joked quietly in Spanish.
“I said it might take up to ten days. Besides, that’s to bag an Amazon crocodile. We don’t need to wait that long,” I said, and checked my sidearm to make sure it was loaded and the safety was on. Jefry did the same with his weapon, or whatever the correct procedure was with a freaking crossbow. I laughed as quietly as possible and said to Jefry, “What the hell is that?”
He did his best to look like his male pride was under attack. “This is muy macho, my white brother. It intimidates. It also delivers a shot that can pierce a crocodile’s hide to get at that tiny cerebro.”
“We’re not hunting crocodiles.”
He looked at the highly, lovingly polished wood of his weapon and smiled. After a moment of admiration, he said, “This works even better against people. They see a gun, they know in their minds it’s a gun and they could die. But they see ol’ la ballestai here, man, they see that arrow pointing at their neck or their gut … they don’t know if they’ll die, but they know that whatever happens, it’s going to hurt.”
We both grinned at that truth, but then came the unmistakable crack of a rifle shot.
I had my walkie-talkie to my mouth in less time than it took me to round the corner of foliage and see Peter the Pecker-Checker standing on the bank with his weapon pointed at a spot in the water. “Stand down!” I shouted as I stomped toward the skinny poacher. “What the hell are you doing, man?”
“I saw one!” he said, still looking gleeful but also confused at my anger. “I could see a little yellow blob in the water right after I shot. It must be fat or something, right, oozing out of the wound? I really think I might have hit him. ”
“I really think I might hit you, you dumb son of a bitch,” I snarled before remembering we had to be quiet in order to lull a Caiman into climbing up onto the mud. In a much-lowered voice I said, “What happened to waiting until one came out, then alerting Jef and me, so we can make sure you do this shit correctly?”
Peter’s set his weak chin and puffed up his concave chest in defiance. “I paid a lot of money for this—I’m going to do it my way. I am the hunter here. You’re just my backup.”
I said to Jefry in Spanish, “I think I see what went wrong on the emu hunt.” Spanish for “emu” is “emú,” so to prevent Peter figuring out what I was saying, I used “avestruz,” the word for “ostrich.”
“What are you saying? Hey, I paid you—you speak English so I know what you’re saying.”
The other two men had walked silently up behind Jefry and me. They didn’t say anything in support of their comrade when we turned to see them there, but they didn’t seem to disagree with him, either.
“Ted, Dan, I’m right, right? Fifty thousand dollars means we can hunt however we want, right? Back me up here, guys.”
Ted mumbled noncommittally, scratching his belly and looking down at the mud.
Dan gave Peter a hard stare and said as calmly as possible, “We paid these men to help us bag giant crocodiles. We have to follow their advice if we want the kill.”
Jefry and I nodded, trying to agree with Dan while not making Peter feel like the assclown he obviously was. “I’m just trying to help y—” I said, stopping short as something caught my eye several hundred yards behind the game-hunting urologist.
Peter must have seen the look in my eye, because he pivoted 180 degrees in the mud to look at whatever I was looking at. In seconds, all of us saw a huge crocodile—huge, like 14 feet and almost half a ton of ravenous predator—creeping out of the water and onto the bank. It stopped before going into the jungle. It was sunning itself.
Peter whipped his rifle up and would have pulled the trigger if I hadn’t slapped the safety on before Peter could get his eye against the scope. Then he did pull the trigger, but of course nothing happened. I whispered and shouted in his ear, “DO NOT FIRE!”
“We’re too far away for a decent shot,” Jefry added in his own whisper.
When I forced Peter’s rifle down and turned to instruct the others, Dentist Dan was gone. I started to say “Where did—” but then I saw the muddy bootprints Dan left behind as he stealthily made his way to the riverbank opposite the sunning croc, where the best shot would be. Except now the animal was perpendicular to the water from crawling out and stopping, there was no angle to fire off either a stopping shot or a killshot.
I brought the walkie-talkie up to my mouth as slowly as I could and pressed the red button. “Come in, Dan. This is Brett. Hold your fire. You’re just going to piss it off from that position. Do you read me?”
As slowly as I had gotten my walkie-talkie in position, so did Dan look at the rest of us and hold up his own. Not up to his mouth, but all the way up so we could make no mistake about what it was. He then brought it back down and pitched it like a softball into the Amazon. Then he raised his middle finger to us.
The Caiman—and that is definitely what this beast was, a Black Caiman that was snatching animals and scaring the villagers into thinking it was the mythical Yemisch come for their children—noticed the plop in the water and used its short legs to turn 90 degrees to see what, if any, danger was being posed. It noticed Dan.
I could hardly believe that an actual crocodile of any kind, let alone this monster, had come out of the water as if on cue. I’ve waited a week for my party to see one, and half the time it slipped back into the water once it heard any activity. Luckily for us, however, this one had gotten up the bank on the opposite side of the river and wouldn’t be spooked away so easily.
“Call the evac copter,” I whispered to Jefry. “Get it out here now or we’re going to have a serious mess on our hands.”
Jefry immediately switched the band on his walkie-talkie to summon the waiting helicopter from the airport five and a half miles away. (Over half an hour by car, but three minutes by chopper. That’s why we had an airlift on standby, to get where we were now,
before somebody could die.)
Dan was taking his time—I could see now how he had killed so many skittish and rare creatures. He was fluid in his movements, and even how he tossed the walkie-talkie into the water was calculated to make just enough noise to make the Caiman move but not flee back into the water. It was impressive, but the animal was on the other side of the Amazon River. We had no boat to cross and it was too deep to wade through. You couldn’t swim across without soaking your rifle, and even if you could, the whole reason we were in Iquitos was that this stretch of the river had an abundance of man-eating goddamn crocodiles in it.
Dan checked his footing in the mud and braced himself for the recoil from the loaded rifle I had given him. He very slowly raised the rifle.
I could hear the helicopter now, homing in on my GPS signal.
Dan very carefully lifted the weapon so the scope met his eye, and he aimed slowly, so slowly. I wondered why he even needed my services. Of course, killing an endangered animal was one thing; smuggling it home was quite another.
Chopchopchopchopchop, the ’copter getting louder every second. Soon it would be visible over the—
KAPOW! Peter’s rifle went off. My ears rang like he had put his bullet through my eardrums.
Chapter 2
Unlike Dan, Peter hadn’t taken the time to set himself and aim carefully before he took a potshot at the crocodile. He fell back into the mud like a cartoon … but somehow his shot was true.
Bink! A small yellow spatter appeared on the center of the croc’s body. The giant animal started forward a foot or two, but otherwise remained motionless. Waiting.
“What the hell? Peter, crocs have yellow blood?” Theodore spurted, and raised his rifle and shot without even aiming at all. Bink! A splotch of green pocked the Caiman’s hide. I was amazed—these morons were crack shots or extremely lucky ones.
“And green?”
Peter seethed from where he sat in the mud. “No, they don’t,” he said, and pointed his rifle directly at my chest.
“Whoa, whoa!” Ted shouted, and tried to get his footing enough to knock Peter’s weapon aside. He couldn’t do it fast enough, though, and Peter squeezed off another round.
POW! A splash of yellow exploded against my camos, stinging like a bitch at this distance.
“These are paintball guns,” Peter said in disgust.
Theodore looked at me like I had just slapped his mother. He raised his own rifle.
POW! Now a green pellet from his rifle struck me point-blank and painfully, popping against my jacket. Both men now dropped their hugely expensive paintball-modified rifles into the mud like they were ten-dollar Nerf guns and moved toward me, murder in their eyes.
I hadn’t noticed before how Ted’s bulk looked awfully muscular under the fat. Or how much Peter resembled a sweaty tweaker about to pull out a switchblade.
I put my hands out. “Okay, fellas, just calm down,” I started, but was interrupted by a big fist slamming into my jaw. I spun and fell to the mud on my back, then raised myself up onto my elbows to try to get up before I received more abuse. I brought my teeth together and clacked a few times to make sure they were still in my mouth. I could tell that I had come within a chin hair of getting my jaw broken. “Ted, Peter—”
Now Peter hissed, “Son of a bitch!” and kicked me in the hip while I was prone in the mud. Who kicks a person in the hip? Peter, obviously, and while it may have been a weird choice, it was a good one—it hurt like holy hell and made me yelp as I brought myself up on all fours and then stood before either of them could kick me in the head.
“Who are you, anyway?” Ted grumbled at me as he came in for another shot. “Greenpeace? PETA? Goddamn ASPCA—”
Whoomp! He didn’t complete his thought, being interrupted by my boot heel slamming into his breadbasket. He wheezed and fell into the muddy bank, his head almost striking the water. He was lucky no crocodile was waiting for a splash to find his next meal.
At least, not yet.
Now Proctologist Peter lunged at me, trying to tackle me and bring me down like I was John Elway at Mile High. But I had the weight advantage and stopped him cold—making my bruised hip scream out in shock—but the little weasel unleashed Plan B and reached up and yanked on my goddamn balls.
I retched but kept enough of my wits to bring my knee up to his chin with a sharp crack that shut off his lights like I had kicked a pasty-faced switch. He stayed where he fell. I made sure his oxygen paths were clear of mud before doubling over and puking my breakfast and most of last night’s dinner right on the back of his head.
I didn’t have much chance to enjoy my new artwork before I saw that Theodore has gotten the wind back in his system and was marching toward me like a Sherman tank. Enough was enough now—I pulled my gun from its holster under my jacket and leveled it at Ted’s face. “All right, time to—”
The big man slapped the gun out of my hand like it was a toy—even paintballs could have partially blinded him or broken a cheekbone at point-blank range, and these were for-real bullets in my weapon—and grabbed the front of my jacket, yanking me up for a headbutt or maybe to bite off my nose. My feet left the ground.
And stayed there as Theodore froze, a loaded crossbow pointing its arrow tip right at the center of his eyeball. “Put my friend down, pendejo, and put your hands up.”
The big man returned me to the ground as gently as a snowflake falling, his unmoving gaze fixed on Jefry’s crossbow. He put his hands behind his head and plopped down onto his knees when Jefry told him to. Still green but so happy not to have a cracked skull, I moved Ted’s hands to behind the small of his back and fastened plastic restraints around his wrists.
This was when Peter made his move, apparently having awakened during our defeat of his fellow poacher. With a thin but loud yell, he barreled right at Jefry, who whipped that magical goddamn crossbow right into his face.
“Back off, estupido,” he said through bared teeth.
Peter, transfixed with terror at the crossbow and arrow, knelt down and assumed the position as I cuffed him as well.
I said to Jefry, nodding at his medieval weapon, “I’m man enough to admit when I’m wrong. Now let’s go get—”
I was cut off by two things happening simultaneously:
One, so “in the zone” was Dentist Dan that he had taken no notice whatsoever of the fight a hundred yards away. No, the dedicated, maybe obsessed, hunter had kept his aim on the Black Caiman, even though the huge animal had jumped forward a bit at each paintball strike. Now, his patience rewarded, he squeezed the trigger on his expensive-as-hell modded rifle and a SHOOP! sounded simultaneously with the giant croc rocking like a ship hit by a wave. It started to move toward getting back into the water, but the tranquilizer dart Dan’s rifle had delivered must have hit the animal right in the nerve bundle behind the skull.
A perfect shot, I had to admit. But Dan, the poacher with the most experience, could tell the difference between a pow and a shoop coming out of his weapon. He immediately held it out and looked at it with confusion, then consternation … then anger. He yanked open the magazine and, I knew, saw that it was loaded not with the hollow-point, high-power ammunition he expected, but with tranq darts weighted to keep them on target like real bullets and to make the weapon feel as heavy as it would if it were loaded with real cartridges.
Boy, he was not happy. He glared at Jefry and me, chucked the $10,000 rifle into the river, and started toward us like the two of us were 12-point bucks ready to be field-dressed and our meat put into coolers. To extend my hunting metaphors into the culinary realm, our geese would have been cooked if the second thing didn’t happen at the exact same time that he was examining his traitorous weapon.
That second thing was the five-seater helicopter, the same that had ferried the three would-be poachers from Peru to Iquitos, finally appearing over the tops of the trees and into full view. The black chopper, that had no doubt looked extremely cool to the hunters the evening before, now lo
oked sinister, especially as the pilot and his armed front-seat passenger—our guys from the start—set down right between the stomping Dan and the rest of our party. Fatty and skinny remained cuffed on their knees in the mud, but both managed to sneak confused glances at the helicopter’s arrival.
“We just shot the croc,” Ted said. “How’d the pickup get here so fast?”
Peter rolled his eyes. “It’s not a pickup for the croc, dumbass,” he seethed, then looked with fury at me. “It’s a pickup for us.”
I grinned. “Give that man a dollar! You’re gonna need it for the Coke machine in prison.”
The chopper pilot jumped out and ordered Dentist Dan to the ground, his AK-47 probably not loaded with paintballs or sleepy-time darts. Like his two fellows, Dan sank to his knees and put his hands behind his head, but that didn’t stop our pilot from continuing to shout. Maybe reading him his rights, if they did that in Peru. Maybe explaining what he was in trouble for. Maybe just saying things to hurt the hunter’s feelings, I don’t know. But I enjoyed seeing the fit and tan poacher dentist getting reamed, then cuffed and led our way.
The chopper passenger, a tower of muscle wrapped in flak gear that read WWF, came our way with his own Kalashnikov, keeping it pointed at the two poachers even though they had been neutralized. Then he lowered his weapon, trapped me in a bear hug and shook Jefry’s hand. We had worked in tandem for almost a decade and relied on each other, but I still knew him only by his moniker “The Punisher” (the stylized skull on the front of his vest showing the inspiration), and he knew me only as “Brett Russell,” my operational pseudonym.
We always kept our identities secret, even from one another, because “plausible deniability” was essential when we were poaching poachers, seeing as how our clientele was made up of pissed-off rich Americans who would be most interested in dispensing lots of revenge when they got out of Peruvian prison. (Peru liked to hold on to its foreign prisoners for transgressions committed on their soil. I admired that.)