Into the Jungle

by David M. Salkin

  Raman Qasim felt his way through the total darkness. He couldn’t even see his own hand directly in front of his face. Hakim held his shirt tail and stumbled along behind him, crying and annoying Raman.

  “Stop crying like a woman, Hakim!” he finally screamed, “Or I swear I’ll leave you here by yourself!” He was bluffing, of course. The idea of being completely alone in the jungle was terrifying; he just needed Hakim to get a grip on himself before Hakim’s panic became his own.

  “I’m trying,” he whined. “I can’t help it—did you see what they did to Vega? They will eat us if they catch us!”

  “Shut up or they will catch us!” snapped Raman. “We have to keep moving. Those savages don’t like moving at night. We must get as far away as possible before the sun comes up.”

  “We don’t even know where we are going,” whined Hakim. “We might be headed straight for them for all we know.”

  Raman stopped and guessed where Hakim would be behind him, and tried to slap him in the dark. He was only intending to snap him out of his panic, but accidentally popped his nose hard enough to make it bleed and knock him down. As he fell, he still held Raman’s shirt and pulled him down with him. The two of them tumbled a few feet into some animal that was startled from its sleep and took off through the underbrush, scaring the shit out of both of them. The hair on their arms was standing up and they both screamed out loud.

  A hundred yards behind them, Earl Jones held up his hand and everyone stopped. He whispered into his throat mic.

  “I heard something. Up ahead to our right. Slow and easy—advance.”

  The team fanned out to their right and moved ahead in total silence. When they were close enough to see their two targets, it was all they could do not to laugh. Several peacocks where fluttering around them, having been rousted from their sleep, and the half-dozen birds had evidently terrified the two men who were blind in the dark. One of them was crying out loud and hugging the other one, who was desperately trying to beat him off of him and stand up. The team fanned out around the two of them and watched in silence, completely entertained by these two idiots.

  Cascaes was standing there grinning, with Julia next to him holding his arm. Her other hand was over her mouth as she tried not to laugh at the terrified men rolling around with the fluttering birds. Cascaes finally signaled to Moose and Ripper who handed their machine guns to the men next to them and advanced with their knives, still in the sheathes. They didn’t want to kill them unless they had to.

  Moose and Ripper advanced in complete silence, with Jones and Koches right behind them holding plastic ties that would serve as handcuffs.

  Moose and Ripper were able to walk right up on the two men, who finally had managed to separate themselves and start to stand up. It was obvious that they were completely blind in the dark, and the one man was desperately trying to hang on to the other, who was obviously agitated. He was speaking in harsh Arabic to the man as the two of them got to their feet. Moose and Ripper approached them from behind and each placed the tips of their knife sheathes at the base of each man’s skull.

  “Do not move!” said Moose in a steady firm voice. “I know you speak enough English to know that I will rip your fucking head off and feed it to the Guaranis if you move a fucking muscle.”

  Each of the Arabs slowly raised their hands. With a heavy accent, the one called Raman said, “Do not shoot.”

  The other man praised God for being rescued from the Guaranis. He was chattering a hundred miles an hour, obviously thrilled to be captured by Americans. The electric chair was better than another minute in this jungle.

  “Shut up!” commanded Ripper, but the man kept praising God. Moose pushed the sheathed knife against Raman’s neck. “Tell him to shut up!”

  Raman repeated that in Arabic and English, but the man was almost hysterical. “I have been telling him to shut up for two hours,” he said in his broken English.

  “Tell him if he doesn’t shut up, I am going to kill him right now. I mean it,” said Moose. And he really did mean it.

  Raman repeated in Arabic several times, and the man finally stopped his chattering. Jones and Koches grabbed the men by their arms and told them that they would be handcuffed in front of them. They used the heavy duty plastic ties to secure their wrists together, and then used rope to tie the two of them to each other around their waists. Mackey walked up the two of them and grabbed Raman by his shirt.

  “Raman Qasim, you are under arrest. We are going to bring you to fair trial and a fair firing squad you piece of shit. Personally, I would much rather just tie you to a tree and leave you here for the animals or the Guaranis to eat, so don’t fuck with me. If you try and escape, if you touch any of my people, if you piss me off in any way—I will leave you here to die slowly, do you understand me?” He smacked his face hard enough to fill the quiet jungle with the noise.

  Raman spit blood and quietly said he understood. “Tell him,” said Mackey.

  Raman repeated it in Arabic to Hakim, who understood most of what had been said, but was not very fluent in English. Cascaes ordered them to sit, which they did, and then gave them water when they asked for it. They set up the phone again, told Darren Davis they had two presents for him, and they would start to figure out a way out of the Godforsaken jungle as fast as possible.

  Cascaes checked his map and had the team assembled single file, with the two prisoners in the middle of the line. They headed straight for the river, now only about a mile ahead of them, and walked briskly in total silence.

  A few miles away, terrified Guaranis huddled in their tiny shelters, praying for the morning sun to come as fast as possible.

  Chapter 38

  The River

  It took forty minutes to travel the one mile to the river. The team only had one extra set of night vision goggles, which had belonged to Santos, and they gave them to the sobbing Hakim to try and calm him down. Raman, still totally blind in the dark, stumbled along, slowing them down. Eventually, Moose had Raman grab hold of his shirt and hang on to him to avoid falling down. Jones, scouting up ahead, called back to the team when he reached the river, and they doubled timed it as best they could with the two prisoners in tow.

  The team assembled on the bank of the river. In the dark, it was hard to tell what color the water was, but debris in the water that floated by told of a strong current.

  “Okay, listen up. My SEALs, you remember how we got out of that little jam in Africa back in ’09? Grab some det cord and get busy! Everybody else, pull your packs apart. We need to travel light and be as invisible on the water as possible. There are mosquito nets with the bedding. Cut them open into large sheets and start jamming leaves and twigs into them to make tarps like giant Ghilly suits. We are going to cover ourselves with it, understand? Camouflage, so get busy.”

  As he spoke, the SEALs that had served under him for years, Ripper, Moose, Jensen, McCoy, Cohen and O’Conner, had jogged off towards a stand of trees. They wrapped det cord around the base of the trees and attached it to a detonator. “Fire in the hole!” yelled McCoy as he hit the detonator, and the explosion dropped six very large trees.

  “Okay, ladies and gentlemen, our chariot awaits! Help get these trees stripped down until the middles are mostly trunk, then we’ll lash them together as best we can. Leave some branches and leaves for cover, though. When we have them put together, we will straddle this sucker and cover up with our camo-sheets, understand? We’ll use branches and leaves as oars, but the current will mostly move us along. Looks like five to eight knots judging from the debris, so we should make decent time. The river should get faster as we head downstream. Okay, people, move! I want to be as far away from these Indians as possible when the sun comes up!”

  The team moved quickly, some of them ripping apart the netting and making camouflage out of it as others stripped the trees and then used ropes, bungee cords and vines to try
and hold the mess together. The two prisoners sat in the grass helplessly, thanking Allah the merciful that they had been plucked from the hands of the savages. The Americans had rules. A jail cell was nothing compared to being ripped apart and eaten alive.

  In less than an hour, the makeshift raft was pushed into the water. The trees sank halfway into the water, and as the team climbed aboard, they sank even further. Mackey whispered to Cascaes, “You sure this thing is gonna float, Chris?”

  “I traveled eighty miles on a raft like this once, you’re gonna’ have to trust me on this one.”

  “Chris, you guys are part fish—you have my total trust, believe me.”

  They pulled the Arabs aboard, placing them again in the center of the raft where they could keep an eye on them. Cascaes was up front, and Julia had nonchalantly managed to get behind him where she could wrap her arms around his waist.

  “You think you’re riding a motorcycle?” he whispered to her.

  “More like a log flume. I’m pretty impressed, Chris,” she whispered into his ear.

  Moose and Ripper, the team strong-men, pushed the raft into the current, and then climbed on board. As they straddled the raft, they others helped pull what amounted to several large blankets over them. While it didn’t cover them completely, unless you were really looking for them, they looked like a bunch of tress that had washed into the river and were simply floating downstream. There were plenty of other debris on the water, and they weren’t out of place. Under the tarp, each man had an MP-5 across his lap, except for Hodges, who had his sniper rifle out with his night scope on and a condom over the end of his rifle to keep out any moisture. He babied his rifle, but it was his best friend in the field.

  The nineteen of them sat single file straddling the trees, holding branches and trying not to move so the raft wouldn’t roll too much. The mosquito nets covered them as much as possible, but it was still pitch black, so it wouldn’t matter for a few hours.

  Cascaes whispered for the team to try and grab some sleep in intervals, starting with even numbers. He was number one, in the front of the raft.

  “Does that mean I get to take a nap?” whispered Julia.

  “Sure does,” said Chris.

  “But you’ll still respect me in the morning, right? I mean if we sleep together on only our second date.”

  “I’m not actually sleeping, so I don’t think it counts. Grab some sleep if you can without falling overboard.”

  She laid her head against his back, her arms around him, thinking about how much she liked this man, and actually managed to fall into a light sleep. The raft moved along silently, without incident for the rest of the night. They were on the Rio Uruguay now, which split off the Rio Parana and headed east towards Brazil before bending south and draining a couple of hundred miles away at the Uruguay – Argentine border. The river continued to get wider and faster, and another float of logs actually caught up to theirs and offered some extra protection. It tangled into theirs, and made their float look even less like a manmade object.

  By the time the sun started to break off to their left, most of them had managed at least two hours of sleep. They were soaked from the waist down, and not particularly comfortable, but at least they were away from the Guaranis and headed in the direction of home. Julia lifted her head off of Chris’s back and arched and stretched her neck. She let out a small groan as she tried to loosen up. Her arms were still around Chris’s waist.

  “I think I actually slept,” she said to him quietly.

  “Julia, you were snoring so loud I thought the Guaranis would find us.”

  “No way!” she said with a smile, and smacked his thigh playfully.

  The team began taking off their night vision equipment and sealing it up in the packs that were acting as pillows and headrests on top of their boat. Orange and pink streaks spread across the morning sky, and birds began to wake up and flutter out of the trees. The morning sounds of the jungle woke up the last of the sleeping crew.

  Those that weren’t awakened by the birds where awaken by Cascaes.

  “Feet out of the water!” he screamed, as he pulled his feet up in front of him on top of the log and grabbed Julia’s legs, wrapping them around his waist.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Julia, taken by surprise.

  The fish answered her. A school of piranhas jumped out of the water in front of them, some of them actually sailing across the raft in their excitement.

  “Piranhas!” yelled Cascaes, “Feet out of the water!”

  The rest of the team began screaming about the piranhas and lifting up their feet. Only Hakim Bin-Salaam, not understanding English so well, was slow to react. As the team members tried to get their own legs repositioned without falling overboard or knocking anyone else over by accident, no one paid attention to the prisoners. At least, that is, until Hakim started screaming. The school of piranhas had been chasing a few larger fish and had begun their usual feeding frenzy when the raft happened to float into them. While the fish were not really after human flesh, Bin Salaam’s legs were in the water, and his many cuts from the night before put the smell of blood around him. It didn’t take long for dozens of hungry, razor sharp tooth-filled mouths to find his lower legs to feed on.

  Hakim had no idea what was happening to him, and he panicked. As the school of fish tore into his flesh, he began flailing wildly, almost knocking Raman, who was in front of him, overboard. Raman, who had already had all that he could take of Hakim’s hysteria, turned around.

  “Get off of me! You are going to knock me off!” he screamed and shoved Hakim with his cuffed hands. Hakim, unable to grab anything with his hands cuffed together, slid off over the side backwards, even as Jones, who was behind him, tried to grab him. Hakim, who couldn’t swim very well at all to begin with, and now had his hands cuffed together, disappeared into the brown water. The splashing of hundreds of fish engulfed the raft. Jones, who was going to try and jump in after him, leaned away in horror as the water turned red with blood and dozens of large red bellied piranhas leapt out of the river. Their mouths snapped open and closed, showing the hundreds of teeth as they tried to bite at anything they could find. Theresa, who was sitting behind Jones, starting shrieking, and pulled Jones back towards her so he couldn’t go after him. Smitty, who was sitting behind her, put his hand over her eyes and said, “Don’t look,” as the cloud of killer fish shredded the body in the water.

  The raft continued to float, thankfully away from the school of feeding fish. Hakim never broke the surface, to the relief of the horrified onlookers, who were waiting to hear his screaming. Instead, the only noise was the splashing of over-excited fish having their morning feeding.

  Jon Cohen, who was sitting in front of Raman, turned around and looked at him with disgust. “That was your buddy, huh? You pussy. That’s how you guys look out for each other? You’re a fucking coward. I ought to throw you in after him.”

  Mackey, who was in front of Jon, leaned back and told him to shut up.

  Cascaes, half-way turned around, was holding Julia, who had buried her head in his shoulder. “Everybody stay quiet. Keep your feet out of the water for a while. The fish are most active at sunup for their first feeding. Keep your eyes open for gators, too. Not everything that looks like a log is a log. Stay sharp and keep your weapons ready. I’m going to try and figure out where the hell we are. Keep an eye on Raman back there, too. I want to bring him back alive, but if he tries anything funny, Jones you slit his fucking throat and throw him to the fish.”

  “Aye-aye, Skipper. It would be my pleasure,” replied Jones

  Raman, humiliated, sat crossed legged on the raft, his hands in his lap, aware of the warm urine he was sitting in. Evidently, he had been more terrified than he knew.

  Chapter 39

  Exit Plans

  Cascaes sat on the world’s most primitive raft with one of the world’s m
ost sophisticated computers. He was looking at their position on his GPS map. They had traveled over fifty miles since they had gotten on the river the night before. They were far, far away from the Guaranis, who were probably still terrified from the spirits in the night. The river had been swift, and had taken them much further than they had anticipated. They were many miles away and hadn’t heard the single gunshot that echoed through the jungle when Carlos, Vega’s last surviving man, blew his own brains out in the dark of night.

  Cascaes set up the satellite phone with some help from Julia, and called Davis again. Davis answered, sounding groggy after sleeping on his office couch. He refused to go home until his team was out of danger. “Wolf here,” he croaked—his throat dry and eyes bloodshot.

  “Wolf, this is Jimmy. We’re fifty miles south of last night’s location and have taken the east fork. We’re still on a float. Lost one package, I repeat, we lost Rag Three. Rag One still here for unwrapping at home. We will need help with that special delivery. Do we have a mailbox location yet?”

  “Negative at this time, Jimmy. Cross the big border where mailboxes are easier to come by. When you are over the line, call back and we will find a location, out.”

  Chris hung up and disassembled the phone with Julia, then packed it in his watertight bag. He turned back to his men. “Okay, listen up. Best I can make out with my little toy here, we have the Argentinean border on our right and the Brazilian border on our left. A pickup in Paraguay was impossible, but once we get back into Brazil, life is a little easier. I like the water as much as the next guy, but I’m getting tired of being wet. I’ll track our position and we’ll exit to the left bank which should be Brazil. Then we’ll move overland and try and arrange an exit. Some bad news, I’m afraid. We moved a lot further last night than I planned. We way overshot Raul. I’m afraid Santos stays where he is. I’m sorry fellas. I’ve never left anyone behind. There’s nothing I can do about that now. We’re forty miles downstream now. I’ll see his parents myself when we get home. This is on me, not you guys. I’m sorry.”