“Which is . . . ?” Abel asked.
Elaine nodded to Ron, who continued.
“He runs a small-time drug cartel with his family. His territory’s up and down the coast for about fifty miles or so. His main thing is keeping North American tourists happy, if you know what I mean. That’s why so many of us here have such a good rapport with him. He knows American tourists will flock to a town that has a high-quality American food place in it, for example, so he leaves us alone, and we leave him alone. In fact, we even get bonuses and reduced taxes and stuff once in a while because our soda brings in who he needs to make his dough.”
“Soda?” questioned Abel.
“That’s what the locals call little food places like this,” Ron explained.
“Huh,” said Abel. “Interesting. Anyway, it sounds like he must be pretty out in the open about what he does if you guys know so much about it.”
“He can afford to be,” replied Elaine. “He’s got a deal with the DEA. As long as he gives them intel about his drug buddy contacts in Costa Rica, and with the big dons in Colombia, they let him slide. They even conduct fake raids every once in a while to make it look like he’s legit and not an informant. Can you believe that?”
Abel just shook his head. You’d be surprised what I’d believe, he thought.
“It’s not like we’ve got billboards up advertising ‘Cocaine, three kilometers on the right’ up on the highway or anything, but we don’t pretend we don’t know either,” said Ron. “It’s just the way it is around here. We keep him happy by helping bring in tourists, and then he keeps us happy by sharing the wealth and making this a really nice, livable community.”
“He even pays some of us to be on the community patrol. It’s kind of like a community-based security force,” said Elaine. “Ron’s one of the commanders.” Ron smiled and embraced his wife.
“What would happen if someone got on his bad side somehow?” asked Abel.
The couple looked at each other with confused, worried looks.
“To be honest,” said Ron, “we’ve never seen anything like that happen personally. Not that it hasn’t, but—”
“I doubt if we’d hear much about it even if it did happen,” added Elaine. “But I bet it wouldn’t be pretty. Whoever it was would probably get made an ‘offer they couldn’t refuse’ or something, you know, like in The Godfather, and if we knew, we might all have a new opinion of King Monti. No one talks about Monti like that around here, though. I don’t think anyone wants to know.”
“I can understand,” said Abel, and everyone was silent for a minute. Finally, he rose. “Well, thanks for the meal. It was stellar. I haven’t forgotten about breakfast either.” He tipped his hat, handed them a fistful of bills, told them to keep the change, then left.
As the sun set over the Pacific and Abel strolled back down the road to the Rio Palma bridge and his beach house, all he could hear in his head was Elaine’s comparison of life if you were on Monti’s bad side, similar to the words Faviola had used to describe his million-dollar extermination deal with Monti that morning. He wondered if that offer, at some point, might turn into a Godfather sort of offer instead of the ticket to instant riches he thought he’d been given.
15
—
The next day started with an extreme disappointment for Abel.
He couldn’t find his monocular.
He’d unpacked his backpack to repack it with fresh food and put his rain poncho in a more accessible location when he noticed it wasn’t in the mesh pocket near the bottom of the left side where he’d stowed it the day before. Further searching showed that it wasn’t in any pocket, and neither was it anywhere else among the things he’d taken with him the day before. Calming himself, he surmised it was probably on the island, and he remembered he’d last used it at the end of the path he’d hacked through the meadow grass. Since the island was basically deserted, it should be where he’d left it, or dropped it, and it wouldn’t take long to find.
Once again, he walked through town with his backpack, dressed in a different camo outfit along with his hat and combat boots. His versatile Mk 16 assault rifle was collapsed and stuffed in the pack to avoid causing a stir while walking along the road. On the way, he stopped in at Ron and Elaine’s diner just to say hi, and they wondered at his outfit.
“Just doing a little work for Monti. He’s got this really remote area he wants to be explored and cleared out so it can be used as a new site for something or other. Not sure what. I use one of his boats to get there and spend my day hacking.” He indicated his long machete. “Joyful work, huh?”
“Better you than me,” called Ron as he served up Belgian waffles to a family of tourists.
As he passed by Monti’s throne room, the king greeted him cheerfully. “Happy fishing!” he called.
“We’ll see if we can catch a big one today,” Abel said dryly. He wanted to be on his way because that’s precisely what he hoped he could accomplish that day. There was something strange about the odd areas of the rainforest that he’d seen from the volcano the day before, the ones where the rainforest had been smashed or plowed over by something. His objective for the day was to check them all out, starting with the smashed area of meadow grass, then continuing to the river, which he’d either swing across using a grappling hook attached to a hundred-foot cable or simply wade across or swim if Monti hadn’t filled his boat with more “surprises” this morning. Then he’d hack his way through the shrubbery to the area where he’d seen new-growth trees surrounded by logs and see what was at the end of it. He was sure there would be, at the very least, more clues as to what happened on the island in its past, and hopefully a lot more.
Once on the boat, Abel checked and was ecstatic. Surprises indeed! There was the portable grappling hook and cable arrangement.
No sloshing around in wet clothes for half the day, he thought.
Along with it was a sniper kit for his Mk 16. These parts gave the compact assault weapon a telescoping shoulder stock that would give it a more stable, rifle-like feel for aiming, a barrel extension to provide a bullet more spin and an accurate range of over six hundred meters, and a range-finding telescopic gunsight to enable pinpoint accuracy. If Monti couldn’t get an actual sniper rifle for him, this was the next best thing. Perhaps now he’d solve the mystery of the zinging sounds in the trees and the purpose of the nests he’d seen.
***
Once on the island, he first followed his previously hacked meadow trail to where he thought he’d lost his monocular the day before. Alas, the monocular wasn’t there. What was there Abel found to be highly intriguing. A stump of wood was propped up on the dirt at the edge of the rainforest. On it was a device that looked something like his monocular, but it had only the tiniest opening for a lens, and no place to put his eye. The stubby machine looked sturdy, as well as shiny and new.
Abel picked it up and examined it curiously. He noted a switch on one side. He flipped it, and suddenly a somewhat magnified holographic image of the ground around him appeared above the machine right at eye level. Confused, Abel soon discovered that the holographic image was of a spot of ground that the device’s lens was pointed at. What is this thing? he thought. It did not seem possible that this was his monocular, but he couldn’t think of another explanation. He changed the angle of the lens, pointing it at the trees, and the holograph became a three-dimensional view of the forest in front of him. Abel toyed some more with the device, finding that its small shaft could be turned, like turning the focus barrel of a camera lens, and that turning it one way gradually magnified the image before him, and turning it the other gave a more macro look. He turned the lens up at the nest structure above his head and not only saw a holograph of it up close and in extreme detail, but he also heard that zinging again. He moved the lens over the treetops that led away from the nest but saw no one.
He did see a curiou
s reflection, though: the sun glinting off something in a place where there was apparently nothing but empty space. It was gone in an instant, though, and try as he might, Abel couldn’t see whatever it was a second time. Completely confused about the object—and the apparent disappearance of his own monocular—yet needing to start his plan for the day, he flipped the switch on the holographic device, pocketed it, then hustled back to the beach. He pulled out the map he’d made the day before and began once again hacking through meadow grass, this time in what he hoped was the direction of the flattened grass area on his map. Ten minutes of chopping later, he smiled with satisfaction as he suddenly came to the blighted place. His Navy SEAL-ingrained sense of direction was as sharp as ever.
Examining the area, he quickly discovered why it was so visible from high up and far away. The first thing he noted was that it was not actually blighted, but it was depressed, and dramatically so. The ground here had apparently been punched or slammed, as though some giant fist or object had hit it in the same fashion as a person punching a feather pillow. A broad and deep indentation was left in the soft ground, perhaps thirty feet across and as much as seven feet deep. New grass had obviously been growing in the hole for years but was nowhere near as tall as the surrounding grass, or at least not in appearance, since it was growing in such a sunken bowl. He also noted that the edges of the indentation were clearly delineated. It was like someone had drawn a rough circle and pushed the ground down, making pronounced edges all along the indented zone.
Abel hacked his way to the bottom, which was well over his five-foot-nine-inch stature. He gazed at the edges. He couldn’t imagine what could have done this, save some heavy machinery of some kind, and Monti had told him that the men he’d sent to this place were only heavily armed, not equipped with earthmoving tractors. He also ruled out an explosion. While a bomb or artillery shell could have made a hole this deep, the perfection of the rim made that unlikely. Also, there was no significant debris field in the grass around the depression. In fact, the only things that came to Abel’s mind that could have made such an isolated, perfectly shaped hole were things not of earth: a small meteorite, perhaps, or a falling satellite or other space junk. And even that would have had to strike from straight above and been of a perfectly round shape.
Venturing out of the hole and once again hacking away at the tall meadow grass, Abel set out toward the rainforest in the direction where his map said he’d find the long slash through the jungle and the small clearing at its far end. Interestingly enough, he hadn’t proceeded far at all when he ran into considerable unevenness in the ground.
Well, there is some debris, he thought. Clumps of earth that were two and three feet high were strewn here and there as he moved along. He guessed that, if everything wasn’t covered with grass, there could be dozens of such clumps, especially in this direction from the depression. Whatever had made the perfectly round indentation would have entered at an angle from the western side of the island.
Continuing on once he made it to the edge of the rainforest, the going became faster. The shrub layer was not so thick as it was around the volcano, probably because the clouds around the volcano were the rainforest’s source of, well, rain, and this was a good half mile from that. With such a microclimate, this would be a significant difference.
It wasn’t long before Abel came to the stream, which flowed slowly here and was about eight meters wide. He hacked out a spacious spot bordered by the river so some snake or crocodile couldn’t leap up and surprise him. He searched for a sturdy branch to hang his grappling hook on. He was amazed again at how high the forest canopy was, and how the trees arched over the stream. Whoever had named the island La Catedral Verde before it got its more infamous name was undoubtedly inspired.
Unfortunately, on the most likely branch of the understory trees to toss his grappling hook over, there was an audience of several capuchin monkeys, watching him intently. When he threw his hook toward the branch, they squealed and chattered, then ran out to the part of the branch he was aiming for. Apparently, they thought he was trying to throw the grappling hook to them! On his third attempt to get the hook onto the branch, one of the monkeys swooped down and caught it. The monkey held it above his head as the others screeched and grabbed for it. Abel was beside himself.
Stupid imps! Why can’t they just go and do their monkey business somewhere else?
Another one of the creatures finally got the hook and started to run away with it. Grimacing, Abel pulled hard, hoping to knock the monkey off the tree and make him drop the hook. No such luck. The monkey did fall off, but he caught himself with his tail, then tossed the hook to one of his buddies. Abel yanked again and pulled that monkey off, but the third monkey grabbed the second, and they both pulled back so hard that Abel almost lost the cable.
Fed up, Abel held the cable with his left hand while reaching for his Glock with his right. Suddenly, the very distinct birdcall he’d heard two days before burst forth from somewhere. The three monkeys stopped, then the two with the hook took it out to a part of the limb that was directly over the river, looped the cable a couple of times around the limb as the hook took hold, and then they all left the area, swinging from tree to tree as they went.
Abel looked around to see where the birdcall had come from but saw nothing other than the usual colorful array of birds coursing through the understory, which, he thought was stunning.
He prepared for his swing across the river, took a running start, and leaped. He swung across, finding that the monkeys had placed the hook in a near-perfect spot. He secured the cable to a low-hanging branch on a tree near where he’d landed, then proceeded on.
Though the jungle was thicker on this side of the stream, it was only perhaps another hour before his hacking brought him to the area where it appeared as if many trees, even high canopy trees, had been flattened by some great force. There were, to be sure, more trees growing, and some were quite tall, but as he had seen from above, the forest was littered with dozens and dozens of incredibly long and also very dead logs in various states of decay. They all had fallen in the same direction, the direction he was moving in, and the blighted area went on for at least several hundred yards. Abel found himself doing a lot of walking on logs, then hopping from one to another to make headway through this most bizarre plain of destruction. Not wanting to divert back into the jungle and miss any clues along the debris field that might help explain this carnage, he continued to log-hop, but the logs seemed to go on and on, and Abel, weighted down by his backpack, had to slow his pace.
Finally, after nearly an hour spent going less than a half mile, and no wiser as to why this destruction had happened, he came to the end, and the little clearing shaded by the canopy he’d seen from afar the day before.
What he saw there made his jaw drop.
There, in the middle of the clearing, not even fifty yards away, was a giant mound of earth, perhaps thirty feet high. It was covered with shrubbery, which hid the back half of what had made Abel’s jaw drop: a giant, circular-shaped sphere of shiny metal and translucent material that sat firmly in the center of the clearing.
Abel hopped off the log he was on and just stood, gazing at the object. Seeing it now made everything he’d seen so far make perfect sense, yet the thing itself made no sense at all. Abel couldn’t even fathom what it might be. The first thing that came to mind was some fallen satellite, but he’d never seen a metal that looked so shiny, especially after penetrating the atmosphere. And a fallen satellite would look like a wreck and have left debris. This was a perfect, sparkling sphere, and at no point, while climbing all those logs, had Abel seen anything even sort of resembling satellite debris.
Any other ideas that came to mind after that were so unthinkable that Abel dismissed them instantly. He was curious beyond words and approached the shining ball half-buried in the mud of the rainforest floor.
Suddenly, menacingly, three black pumas like
he’d seen his first day on the island hopped up onto the ball from the other side and stood silently guarding. Abel stopped, then tried to approach, but low growls emanated from all three. Abel started to reach for his Glock, but one of the pumas let out a loud roar and advanced as if to leap. Abel stopped on a dime. If this was the way things were going to be, he’d need a plan, and today, there was no time to come up with one. He backed toward the jungle. The pumas jumped down from the ball, spread out protectively in front of it, and advanced.
Abel turned and began to follow the side of the log field, hacking away at shrub when necessary. He stopped a couple of times to look back, and the three pumas were always there, spread out so he had no way to go except back the way he came.
Abel went back to the stream and swung across on his cable, back to the edge of the meadow. The pumas easily swam across the stream in slow pursuit. There, he diverted back to his original trail through the grass rather than to the depression. The pumas allowed this, keeping their distance, but escorting him out of the rainforest nonetheless.
When Abel finally came to his original meadow trail at the edge of the rainforest, he remembered the strange device he’d found there and put in his pocket. Rather than give it back, he took a pen and put it on the stump where he’d found the strange holographic device earlier. The pumas watched him but didn’t seem to care. Then he turned, followed his meadow trail, motored back out to his trawler, and left, just as the rains began again on the sides of the volcano.
***
Leaving his boat at the pier in Playa de Palma, Abel hiked back toward the road, his mind still on that baffling round object sunken into the rainforest floor. He wasn’t what you’d call a fanciful guy. There wasn’t much room in his mind for imagination. Yet, the only explanations he could come up with seemed like science fiction: a shiny ball of pure silver or magnesium, or something, that had been ejected by the volcano years ago in some eruption—or the result of some failed attempt to build and launch a bizarre new kind of spacecraft that had resulted in the thing crashing. And, of course, there was the obvious but also most imaginative thought: an extraterrestrial craft that had crashed on the island. Abel’s head spun.
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