Because there was something hanging in the air, permeating everything with foulness. A stench, beyond the inescapable jungle odour of decaying vegetation.
Osterhagen had caught it too. ‘I did my civilian service in the Katastrophenschutz – disaster relief,’ he whispered to Macy, his face grim. ‘I know that smell.’
The scent of death.
They were at their journey’s end.
Macy searched the soldiers’ faces for any hint of mercy. She found none. The four Venezuelans holding them at gunpoint were all cold, dispassionate. They had done this before.
One last lurch over some roots, and the truck clattered to a stop. The jungle canopy was so thick it seemed like twilight beneath, all colour sapped away. A soldier unlocked the tailgate and let it fall open with a gunshot bang. ‘Muévete!’ he said, pointing out of the truck with his AK.
Soto began to shudder. ‘Oh, please no, please, don’t do this, please . . . ’ One of the soldiers roughly dragged her to her feet. She wailed, a keening mewl of helpless despair as he shoved her from the truck.
Valero snarled, about to leap up at him, but received a brutal kick to the head for his trouble. Another soldier threw him out on to the ground.
The two remaining men gestured with their guns. Macy and Osterhagen picked up the semi-conscious Becker and carried him from the vehicle. One of the soldiers plucked the injured man’s hat from his head and put it on, earning sarcastic laughs from his fellows.
The driver was waiting, Kalashnikov in hand. He signalled for the prisoners to advance. The guards pushed them forward. Macy could hardly breathe, the stench of rot clogging her nostrils and fear tightening her chest. She rounded the truck to see . . . the hole.
It was aptly, bluntly named: just a ragged opening in the earth, steep sides littered with decomposing leaves. But as Macy got closer, she saw that it was not empty.
Bodies were piled inside it, a dozen, more. Most were rotted beyond recognition, insects and animals having feasted on the rich flesh and organs. Only the pair on top of the heap remained recognisably human, just a day or two dead, but even these had already lost their eyes and chunks of skin to the relentless scavengers. Insects swarmed from the blackened bullet wounds in their chests. Cayo’s partners, the drug smugglers.
Cayo himself soon joined them. As the other soldiers held the prisoners at gunpoint, two men pulled his corpse from the truck, carted it between them like a sack to the pit, and tossed it in. Flies exploded from the bodies as it thumped down on top of them.
The soldiers repeated the process with Cuff. Macy looked away in horrified disgust. Loretta’s pitiful cries became even louder at the sight of the dead American splayed on the pile, his remaining eye staring dully back at her.
‘Mother of God,’ grumbled one of the soldiers in Spanish, ‘that’s a noise I could live without.’
‘We’ll do her first,’ said another man, before switching to English. ‘Okay, down! On your knees!’
They forced the explorers to kneel at the pit’s edge. Valero muttered a desperate prayer. Macy realised she was crying, tears stinging as she started to hyperventilate. Loretta gave her a pleading look as the soldier stood behind her.
Macy wanted to keep her eyes fixed on the helpless, innocent woman, but her fear forced them shut. A last whimper escaped Loretta’s mouth—
A gunshot, shockingly loud.
There was a soft thump as her body slumped forward. The dull impact of a boot against flesh, and with a slithering thud Loretta’s corpse dropped into the hole.
The soldier moved behind Macy.
She desperately tried to open her eyes again, to take one last look at the world, but they were locked shut by terror.
A rustle of cloth as the soldier raised his gun . . .
And another sound, rising fast—
An engine!
She heard the man behind her turn in surprise. ‘Who’s that?’ Macy opened her eyes and looked back.
A military Jeep charged past the truck. Its driver held the steering wheel with one hand, an AK in the other—
Eddie !
‘Duck!’ he yelled, yanking at the wheel—
The 4×4 skidded in the mud as Eddie pointed the Kalashnikov out of its side and pulled the trigger. He didn’t need to aim – the Jeep’s spinning turn swept the bullets in a swathe above the kneeling prisoners’ heads.
Three soldiers took hits to their chests and faces, dropping dead to the ground. The man behind Macy was caught in the left shoulder, the impact sending him reeling to the edge of the pit. With his good arm, he pointed his AK-103 at the Jeep . . .
Macy sprang up and barged him over the edge. He landed on the heaped corpses, rolling down them into the rotting sludge at the bottom of the hole.
One soldier was left standing, though. Eddie’s wild fire had missed him. He raised his gun—
The skidding Jeep had made a half-turn, and was now pointing backwards. Eddie jammed it into reverse and leaned low across the front seats, stamping hard on the accelerator. Bullets clanged through the bodywork and cracked against the seat backs. He yelled, but held his course.
The Jeep hit the soldier with a bang, scooping him up over its back end. Eddie raised his head, seeing the man bent over the rear seat – still very much alive. In reverse the 4×4 was only doing twenty miles per hour.
The Venezuelan’s eyes met Eddie’s, widening with anger. He swung the AK round—
Eddie twitched the wheel, and dropped again.
The Jeep smashed tail first into a tree, throwing Eddie against the bullet-pocked seats – and mashing the soldier into the wood.
Eddie pushed himself upright. The Venezuelan was pinned against the trunk, mouth open in a silent scream of agony. His gun had been thrown into the undergrowth.
‘Eddie!’ Macy cried. Not in thanks, but in warning. The soldier in the pit was still alive, still armed, climbing up over the corpses.
Eddie restarted the engine and put the battered Jeep into first gear, tearing free of the tree. One of the soldier’s legs came with it, snared on twisted metal. ‘Out of the way!’ he shouted. Valero and Osterhagen dragged Becker away, Macy leaping aside as the Jeep surged forward—
Eddie dived out of the 4×4. It sailed over the edge of the pit - just as the soldier reached the top of the piled bodies and aimed his weapon. The Jeep hit like a giant hammer, pounding him back to the bottom of the hole and crushing him into the ooze of his victims.
Macy ran to Eddie and helped him up. ‘Oh my God! Eddie! Are you okay?’
‘Fucking top,’ he groaned, seeing the three men nearby. ‘Where’s Loretta?’
Macy’s tears returned. ‘They – they killed her. Right before you got here.’
‘Oh, shit,’ he breathed, sagging. If he had arrived just a few seconds sooner. . . ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ he repeated, more loudly, to Osterhagen.
The German’s lips were tight as he struggled to hold his emotions in check. ‘You did all you could. Thank you.’
‘How did you find us?’ Macy asked. ‘How did you even get here?’
‘I ran,’ Eddie told her, standing. ‘Got to the base just as they were driving you away.’
‘You ran? Jesus. You’re . . . you’re amazing. Thank you.’ She embraced him, her tears now of gratitude. ‘Thank you.’
Valero, still supporting Becker, limped over. ‘We have to warn the militia about Callas.’
‘Yeah, we do,’ said Eddie, ‘but then we’ve got to find Nina and Kit. I saw Stikes and Callas put them in a chopper. Where are they taking them?’
‘Stikes said something about a clubhouse,’ Macy remembered.
‘A clubhouse?’ Eddie echoed. ‘What, like a golf club?’
Unexpectedly, Valero laughed, a bitter little bark. ‘Not a golf club – but near one. The Clubhouse. It is the joke name of a house in Caracas,’ he explained to his bewildered audience. ‘It overlooks a golf course in one of the richest parts of the city. The government confiscated it from
a businessman who did not pay his taxes. It was supposed to be given to the people, but the military took it over – temporarily, so they said. But they are still there.’
‘Callas is using it?’ Macy asked. Valero nodded.
‘Then that’s where they’ve taken Nina and Kit,’ said Eddie. He frowned, thinking. ‘Is that Peruvian Hind – the gunship – part of what Callas is doing?’
‘A drug lord called Pachac got it for him,’ said Valero. ‘We heard them talking about it. I don’t know what Callas is planning, but it is why he has been selling the treasures from Paititi – he needs millions of dollars, tens of millions, to pay for it.’
‘He’s an army general doing something he doesn’t want the President to know about, he’s got a helicopter gunship, and he’s hired Stikes for some “conflict resolution”. There’s only one thing this can be about.’ Eddie looked grim. ‘Callas is planning a coup.’ He indicated the truck. ‘Sooner we get moving, the more chance we have of stopping it.’
‘What . . . what about Loretta?’ asked Osterhagen, glancing hesitantly towards the pit. ‘I don’t want to leave her there.’
‘We’ll have to,’ said Eddie. ‘Sorry, but we don’t have time to bury her properly. Once we contact the militia we can tell them how to find this place, but right now we’ve got to get out of here. We’re not far from the base, so it won’t be long before this lot are missed.’
‘I understand,’ Osterhagen said with an unhappy nod. ‘Oscar, help me with Ralf.’
‘Macy, see if there’s a first aid kit in the truck,’ Eddie said as they took Becker to the tailgate. He collected the dead soldiers’ rifles, then searched the bodies, gathering a handful of Venezuelan currency.
Even after the horrors he had witnessed, Osterhagen was still shocked. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Being practical,’ said Eddie. ‘We’ve got no money, and we might need some to make a call. Besides, these bastards don’t need it. Okay, let’s go.’
He retrieved Becker’s fedora and handed it to Osterhagen, then climbed into the driving seat, Macy beside him. The vehicle turned, then rattled away down the path, leaving the dead in silence.
16
Valverde was just beyond a small rise. Eddie stopped the truck and opened the cab’s rear window to speak to the men in the back. ‘Okay, the soldiers in town’ll be looking for us – or at least me. So what do we do?’
‘Can we get to the phone in the hotel?’ Osterhagen asked.
‘That’ll be the top thing on their watch list,’ said Macy. ‘Is there anywhere else we can go?’
‘San Fernando de Atabapo is the next town,’ Valero told her, ‘but to reach it by road we have to drive through Valverde.’
‘How about flying there?’ Eddie suggested.
‘We can – but if we are flying,’ said Valero, an idea striking him, ‘we should get as far from Callas’s men as we can. My plane is fully fuelled. It can reach Caracas.’
‘Can we use its radio to contact the militia?’
‘Yes – yes, we can! I can put an emergency call through to air traffic control.’
‘Okay, so we go for the airfield,’ Eddie decided.
Macy made a pensive face. ‘Hate to be Debbie Downer, but we kinda have to drive through town to get to the airfield.’
It was true. ‘Bollocks! Okay, how about walking? We skirt round town and get to the plane from the jungle.’
‘What about Ralf?’ said Osterhagen. Becker, lying between the German and Valero in the rear bed, had fallen into a state of drifting semi-consciousness. ‘He will slow us down – and we can’t leave him behind. If the soldiers find him, they’ll kill him.’
Osterhagen was right; they couldn’t abandon the injured man. ‘That doesn’t leave us much choice, then. We’ll just have to charge through and hope we’re in the air before they catch up.’ He addressed the two men. ‘Can either of you drive a truck?’
‘I can,’ said Valero.
‘Good. Get in here, then.’
Macy was mildly offended. ‘How do you know I can’t drive the truck?’ she demanded.
‘Can you double-declutch?’ asked Eddie.
‘Can I what?’
‘You can’t drive the truck. Stay in the cab and keep your head down.’ He picked up one of the AK-103s and hopped out. Valero clambered inside and took his place. Eddie climbed into the cargo bed and crouched at the rear window. ‘Okay, Oscar, soon as any soldiers see us we’re in trouble, so gun it through the town.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Macy asked.
He waved the Kalashnikov. ‘Have a guess. Everyone set?’ ‘No,’ she said in a small voice.
He smiled at her, then banged the cab roof. ‘Oscar, let’s go.’
Valero put the truck in gear and set off. The Russian-built vehicle was designed for carrying heavy loads over poor terrain, not speed; it took more than half a minute for it to reach thirty miles an hour. Eddie looked ahead. They were at the top of the rise, Valverde coming into view.
The town’s military presence had increased. A pair of Jeeps was parked at the settlement’s edge – not a roadblock, but certainly a checkpoint.
And they would have to go through it.
‘Two Jeeps,’ Eddie warned Valero. ‘Aim for the one on the left – don’t ram it, it’ll slow us down too much. Just try to smash the front.’
‘What about the other one?’ Macy asked.
Another shake of the gun. ‘Again, guess!’
He checked the road ahead. The soldiers at the checkpoint had seen the approaching truck, but weren’t yet concerned.
That would change when they realised it wasn’t going to stop.
‘Grab on to something,’ Eddie warned Osterhagen, before bracing himself for the impending collision.
The truck bore down on the soldiers. One man stood in the road waving his hands over his head – then dived out of its way. Another unshouldered his rifle.
Eddie readied his own weapon as Valero swerved—
There was a colossal crunch as the truck’s girder-like front bumper smashed into the Jeep, sending it spinning into a ditch. The second soldier brought up his AK—
Eddie fired first, aiming not at the soldier, but at his vehicle. A burst of fire hit the Jeep, ripping into the radiator and engine.
The panicked Venezuelan had dived when the gunfire started, but now he was back on his feet. ‘Get down!’ Eddie shouted, ducking. Osterhagen dropped flat, holding Becker. Bullets cracked against the tailgate, and the rear window shattered. Macy shrieked, Valero sliding as low in his seat as he dared.
Eddie held the AK over his head and sent a couple of shots blindly back down the road, forcing the gunman to take shelter. The firing stopped. The truck roared past the hotel, townspeople running for cover.
Eddie rose again, rapidly turning to search for danger. Most of the soldiers on the streets were more interested in their own safety than in opening fire, and were sprinting out of the truck’s path. Another couple of shots deterred the others from retaliating.
A bend in the street put the troops out of sight behind a building. Eddie looked ahead. They were almost through the little settlement already; a few hundred metres away was the turning to the airfield. ‘Okay, Oscar,’ he shouted, ‘slow down for the turn. Crash the gate and head straight for your plane – I’ll sort out anyone following us.’
Valero complied. The track’s condition was even worse than the main road’s, and everyone was thrown from side to side. Becker cried out in pain.
The airfield came into sight. Across the track was a wooden barrier, but it snapped like a toothpick as the truck thundered through. An angry civilian ran from the terminal hut after the intruders, but the sight of Eddie’s AK made him do an aboutface and flee for the ruined gate instead.
Valero skidded to a stop alongside his plane. ‘Macy, grab the other gun, then help the doc with Ralf,’ Eddie ordered as he jumped down. On foot, at a run, it would only take the soldiers a couple of minutes to catc
h up, and if they had another Jeep it would be even sooner. He took up position behind the truck to watch the airfield entrance. Macy and Osterhagen carried Becker to the plane. Valero, rather than climbing into the cockpit and starting the engine, was examining something on the wing. ‘Oscar, what’re you doing? Get it going!’