Secret of the Slaves

by Alex Archer

  “What is it?” Dan asked. “Some kind of theme park for ecotourists?”

  “Only as envisioned by Hieronymus Bosch, my lad,” Publico said. “It’s a gold camp. Or put another way, a blight on the face of the Earth. Or put yet a third, a wee taste of Hell on Earth.”

  “You know about it?” Annja asked.

  The leonine head nodded heavily, as if weighted with sorrow and world-weariness. “Aye. Too well. The world as a whole does not. There are interests far more powerful than I who prefer it that way.”

  He put a hand each on Annja’s and Dan’s shoulders. “But there you must go, if you are willing. You must find this injured person, aid them if you can. But you must find out what he or she knows.”

  “I’m in,” Dan said promptly.

  “I didn’t come this far to back out now,” Annja said, a little more emphatically than she intended. She wondered if she herself had some kind of secret agenda—secret from herself, as well.

  “What about you, Publico?” Dan asked. Annja noticed that when he called his employer “Sir Iain” it was always with a slight edge of irony. When he used the name “Publico” he sounded almost worshipful.

  Moran shook his head. “I’ll see travel arrangements made for you, of course,” he said. “You must go by air—time presses, and a riverboat moves too slowly. As for me, my responsibilities, you know, are wide, as well as vast. I’m called overseas on business that cannot wait. Even for such as this.”

  He patted their shoulders. “But I know whatever must be done, the two of you are right to do it. None better in all the world.”

  18

  “Look out there!” Dan shouted.

  He had to yell to make himself heard over the whine of the turbines and chop of the rotor blades. The vibration of the machine made itself known both audibly and in alarmingly tactile ways. It felt as if it were in the process of shaking itself to pieces a thousand feet above the verge where river met rain forest.

  Dan sat strapped in a seat at the cabin rear. Annja sat in the open port-side door of the helicopter for whatever cooling effect the humid, heavy, stinking breeze of their passage could bring.

  For hours she had watched the green of the triple-canopy forest, all but unbroken for mile after mile. The airfield where the de Havilland Canada Twin Otter had deposited them had seemingly been scraped from the forest in the middle of nowhere, with nothing in evidence to justify its existence but a little stream rippling along one side, past some warped plank buildings that constituted whatever facilities the place possessed. Annja and Dan had not entered them. They had been shepherded immediately from the twin-engine passenger plane to the olive-drab helicopter waiting with rotors lazily turning on a single square of warped and melting asphalt twenty yards wide. Without ceremony, or even a word spoken, it had risen into the hot, hard sky and flown away to the west northwest, following the wide brown undulation of the river.

  Inside, the chopper stank of grease, of sweat and fear, of lubricant spilled and burned, of old gunsmoke, of hot metal and mildew and dust. The air was so thick with smell and humidity that breathing it was like trying to inhale through a linen cloth. Easier breathing was worth risking sitting in the door that lay open to emptiness, as far as Annja was concerned. She didn’t know a lot about helicopters, but she suspected from the start this one was a UH-1, the famed Huey. Of Vietnam War vintage.

  If it was a person, it might have kids old enough to vote, she thought grimly.

  The rain forest flowing below was almost hypnotic. It was all but monochromatic, the jungle, but its green had a million shades, if you stared at it long enough. It could absorb you, draw you back into nature, to your constituent raw materials….

  Dan’s cry had broken Annja’s reverie. Maybe that was a good thing. He was leaning to his right in his seat and pointing forward. Two muscular black men in green and tan sat like sphinxes flanking the hatchway to the cockpit, one holding a long black M-16 muzzle up between his knees, the other a stainless-steel-and-black shotgun. They had nodded in polite, if grim, acknowledgment when the two North Americans came aboard. Then they had simply refused, after the fashion of stone statues, to respond to any conversational overtures, in English or Portuguese or Dan’s halting but serviceable Spanish.

  Annja wondered if they were there to keep the passengers from rushing the cockpit and hijacking the ancient helicopter.

  She rolled back toward the cabin’s center. She wasn’t prone to fear of heights, but somehow moving away from the open door and that next long step made her stomach roll and the skin between her shoulders creep. Trying not to bump into one of the long-gun guards, she came to a three-point stance and peered out the front windscreen.

  It wasn’t that easy. She suspected the windscreen hadn’t been all that clean to begin with. And after fifty or a hundred miles of Amazon Basin bugs—serious buggage—it was like trying to peer through green jam smeared on the walls of a jar. Between that and the glare of the setting sun, a little off their bow, she wondered how the pilots saw to navigate.

  After a moment she made something out—a wide yellow gouge, not just from the jungle’s green hide, but from one side of the river itself. For a moment Annja wondered if some giant meteor had struck recently, blasting a crater a mile or more in extent. But no, that was ridiculous; it would have knocked down trees for many more miles all around—not to mention been all over the news for weeks.

  Away off on the far end of the gouge she made out big yellow machines gouging at the earth like vast metal insects. Closer by were oblongs that looked like cargo containers, ranked and stacked in thousands. Here and there were clumped wooden buildings and even corrugated Quonset-style structures inside fences. A high fence seemed to run around the entire perimeter of the gaping yellow wound, as if somehow to contain its infection.

  The stink of the place rose up like an invisible wall to smack them. The jungle always stank of tepid water and tannin and green growth and whatever had walked or crawled upon the earth, flown above it, clambered through the trees or delved below and died down there and began rotting away.

  But this was different—stronger, harsher and far more revolting. It was the reek of raw human sewage by the liquid ton. It was mixed with a choking smell of burning diesel fuel. Annja realized it didn’t just come from the earth-scraping machines ceaselessly at work on the camp’s far side. Dozens of pillars of black smoke winding into the sky from seemingly random locations suddenly brought to mind the none-too-fond reminiscences of Vietnam vets she had known, of the most odious and onerous duty of the whole misbegotten war—shit-burning detail.

  The smell of filth, burned and raw, was not the most horrific thing to assail her senses. Far from it. She thought she might have to shave off her long hair and burn her clothes and shower for an hour to rid herself of the stench.

  But she might never rid herself of the nightmares brought on by what she saw.

  First was the cage. A huge open box out in the sluggish river, south of the discoloration. Annja’s mind at first made no sense of it. Or refused to, until she could no longer deny to herself that it was filled with a score or more people, emaciated men and women dressed in rags the color of the river mud, bent over doing something in the knee-deep water.

  “What is going on here?” she asked the M-16 guard. He did not speak or meet her eyes.

  She looked back through the hatch into the cockpit, out through the stained windscreen. Just outside the perimeter fence she saw a line of X’s. Annja frowned, puzzled. As the helicopter got closer she realized they must be steel I-beams crossed with ends buried in the yellow earth. On each of them hung a twisted, wizened shape.

  “I can’t be seeing this.” Annja choked, clamped her mouth on a sour surge of vomit.

  “Sure, you can,” Dan said in a dreamlike voice. “It’s what the world’s really like. Not our white-bread existence back home.”

  The guards took up station in the open doors.

  The helicopter swept over the perime
ter wire. Annja could clearly see the razor-tape spirals that topped it. As they passed one open area Annja gasped at the sight of a dozen or more raggedly dressed men kicking a figure lying on its side in a fetal curl. Others struck at the victim with long rods of wood or possibly lengths of metal pipe.

  Some distance away to starboard a group of six or seven men in camouflage battle dress patrolled a winding alley between shanties and containers with long guns in their hands. Most of their faces were pale beneath boonie hats. Beyond them, as the chopper clattered heedlessly toward the center of the great compound, two groups of men in different-colored camouflage shot at each other across a patch of water. The water’s surface showed a rainbow sheen of oil to the morning sun. A body lay in the midst of it, a person facedown, wearing a blue shirt and shorts and not moving. On the far side a pair of men in gray-and-black urban-looking camo dragged a prostrate comrade by the collar to the dubious shelter of stacked plastic drums, some blue, some yellow.

  The guard in the door by Annja put his M-16 to his shoulder and fired down into the camp. If the noise of the helicopter’s slow suicide was loud, the reports of the burst were freakish, more like being swatted in the sides of the head with metal paddles than sounds.

  “Yow!” Dan yelped. He clapped hands over his ears and fell sideways out of his seat.

  Wide-eyed Annja stared up at the guard. A shiny brass spent case shaped like a little bottle rolled against her left shoe.

  “Aimed at us,” the guard explained in Portuguese in a bass rumble that was audible beneath rather than above the helicopter’s general cacophony.

  Hanging on to the seat, Dan had picked himself halfway off the floor. “What’d he say?” he screamed.

  “Somebody down in the camp was aiming a gun at us,” she shouted back.

  “Jesus Christ! They shoot at random aircraft coming in? They shoot at them?”

  “Apparently so.”

  “What if it’s the mail? What if it’s bringing medical supplies?”

  “Evidently someone doesn’t much care.”

  Annja looked up at the rifleman. His stone reserve seemed to have cracked, if only slightly.

  “It’s a bad place you go to, missy,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  At the heart of the camp stood the largest concentration of actual buildings. This was surrounded by another high fence topped with razor tape. Just inland of it lay a second square compound perhaps fifty yards square. Its walls were irregular and multicolored. As the chopper approached, descending and slowing at last as if reluctantly, she saw they were made of random sheets of painted metal. They might have been hammered out of old metal car bodies. Improvised or not, they were also topped with the inevitable razor tangles.

  A paved square in the barren yellow yard inside had been painted with a big yellow circle. The chopper sank toward it.

  Crouched behind Annja and craning to look between her and the M-16 guard, who stood tensely with black rifle shouldered and leveled, finger on the trigger, Dan pointed to a gateway through the sheet-metal fence. It was high and wide enough to admit a single big vehicle, maybe even a semitrailer. Above it arched a sign of what looked like inexpertly welded wrought iron.

  “What’s that say?” he yelled. “That doesn’t look like Portuguese.”

  Annja read. “It’s Italian. It means, ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here.’ Somebody’s got a sense of humor.”

  “Isn’t that from—?”

  “It’s from Dante’s Inferno,” she said. “The sign above the gates to Hell.”

  “Oh God,” Dan moaned.

  For all his hard-edged street-activist manner he cursed scarcely more than Annja did. She shared the sentiment, though.

  A flabby middle-aged man in a white suit was running toward them bent over, clutching a white Panama hat to his head. The chopper came to a stop. Annja had felt no impact of landing, however slight. Looking down she saw the skids still hovered six inches above the black pavement.

  Dan glared at the guard. “Aren’t you going to at least land?”

  “You go,” the guard said.

  Annja hastily shouldered the rucksack she had brought. Still holding the fore-grip of the rifle in his left hand, the guard took his big right hand off the pistol grip to grab the collar of Dan’s shirt and heaved him out of the helicopter as if he were a bag of puppy chow. To his credit Dan landed on his feet and balanced, although his posture was that of an alley cat dumped in the middle of a Rottweiler run. Which, Annja thought as she leaped down as gracefully as she could in turn, was just about right.

  The guard thoughtfully pitched Dan’s backpack out after him. It just missed the young activist. Twin turbine engines whined. The rotor chop increased in speed and pitch. The helicopter jumped into the cloudless blue sky. Rotating around its central axis it tipped its blunt snout down and shot back the way it had come at the best acceleration its aging power plants could give it.

  The plump man stopped twenty feet from the bewildered Americans. He straightened up, dusting himself off. Despite frequent rains—those went without saying hereabouts—the surface of the landing field beyond the asphalt apron managed to accrete a yellow scum of dust, which the fleeing Huey had duly kicked up into a yellow cloud. The man might have saved himself the effort. The suit, once presumably bright white, now looked like a Jackson Pollock canvas of many-colored stains.

  “You are Dan Seddon and Annja Creed?” he asked in English. He had bulging dark eyes and a mouth-fringing black beard. Frizzy black hair stuck out beneath his hat brim to either side of his face, which ran with sweat in sheets.

  “We are,” Annja said.

  “I am Gustavo Gomes,” he said. “Welcome to Feliz Lusitânia.”

  An explosion shattered the heavy air.

  19

  “Forgive my laughter, my friends,” Gomes said to Annja and Dan, who lay on their bellies on the packed yellow dirt just beyond the black asphalt landing apron. “You look so comical there hugging the ground.”

  “That explosion—” Annja said.

  “It is nothing. A shot for the mining operation, nothing more. Probably they clear big fallen logs. We are not under attack here.”

  Gomes drew a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped sweat from his face. It struck Annja as being like taking a mop to a beach with the tide coming in. “If you will please follow me, and not dawdle,” he said, “I’ll see you inside the citadel.”

  He gestured toward the gate. Beyond it lights blazed into life against the rapidly advancing tropical twilight, up on towers inside the inner perimeter. Annja and Dan shouldered packs and followed their guide.

  A fenced-in passageway fifteen yards long and maybe twenty feet wide ran from the landing pad to the citadel. A chain-link gate swung open before them. Annja realized that machine guns in a pair of towers flanking it were tracking them as they approached.

  Annja’s shoulders tensed and her stomach crawled as if she’d swallowed a nestful of millipedes. She found little to love about being entirely at the mercy of the men behind the weapons, and the steadiness of their nerves and their trigger fingers.

  Our lives depend upon the goodwill and judgment of men who’d guard a place like this, she thought.

  They passed through the inner gate. A pair of men in mottled-green-and-brown camouflage battle dress waited inside. They carried Brazilian-made IMBEL MD-2 assault rifles. They stared at the newcomers with a blend of contempt and disinterest before turning away to close and secure the gate.

  A rattle of gunfire sounded from somewhere outside the wire. Annja winced and forced her mind not to envision what the sounds might mean.

  “So,” Dan said conversationally, “was that more stump clearing?”

  Gomes frowned. “Please don’t make such jokes, Mr. Seddon. Your employer, Sir Publico, understands the realities of what goes on in here.”

  It was as if a fire hose suddenly blasted ice water between Annja’s shoulder blades. “He does?” Her voice sounded half-strangled to her o
wn ears.

  Dan looked thoughtful. “He knows about this place,” he said in carefully metered tones. “I suspect he does what he can to mitigate things.”

  “Oh, yes,” Gomes said with a wide, oily smile. “Of course he does. He tries to help. He sends us the medical supplies!”

  Annja kept one eyebrow raised. “You mean those shipments I saw in Manaus might have been his all along?”

  Dan shrugged. He looked honestly embarrassed—and honestly befuddled. “I don’t really know. I know he knows about this place—just like he told us. But that doesn’t mean he knows everything that goes on here.”

  The sky had gone indigo overhead, shading into black downriver. Off to the west the last of the day lay in bands of sour lemon and ochre. Their guide led them between the neat pitched-roof structures that made up most of the buildings inside the interior wire perimeter. Annja decided they were some kind of prefab housing. People moved back and forth between them rapidly, with their heads down and shoulders hunched. The place hummed with activity, but it was spiritless—more like a kind of barely controlled frenzy than enthusiasm.

  Gomes ran on about showing them their quarters and then taking them to eat in the commissary. “There is little to do here in the evenings, I’m afraid, although you will have satellite television in your rooms.”

  “What exactly do you do here, Mr. Gomes?” Annja asked as he led them to one of the khaki-colored prefab buildings with the green trim.

  “I am a bureaucrat,” he said artlessly enough. “An administrator. I help to run things. I have no real power here, of course. No one does, except the directors.”

  AFTER THEY HAD DEPOSITED their packs in their adjacent rooms, which were surprisingly neat and comfortable, they joined Gomes in the nearly empty commissary.

  “We use both open-pit and sluicing methods here at Feliz Lusitânia,” he said over a meal of beans, sausage and rice that made Annja feel suddenly homesick for New Orleans. “There are rich alluvial deposits present, both on land and in the river sediment. We extract much gold.”