Danielle checked the computer screen—there were targets all around them, too many to count. She turned to Devers.
“White Faces,” he said, catching her glare.
“What does it mean?”
“The White Face is a spirit. The ghost. The bringer of death.”
Before long, the shouting voices began to seem like a roll call. One after another the Chollokwan were announcing themselves. Bellowing at the top of their lungs, working themselves into a frenzy. Danielle guessed their number in the fifties, and then the seventies, and then more.
Beside her, Hawker stood up. He stepped forward to where Verhoven was about to hand over the last rifle. “Better give that one to me,” he said.
Verhoven held back for a second and then slapped the rifle into Hawker’s outstretched hand.
Danielle gazed at Hawker once again, but this time she found no comfort in his eyes. They were cold and grim. He was amused no more.
One of Verhoven’s men spoke. “There’s a hell of a lot of them out there. A hundred at least, maybe more.”
Verhoven disagreed. He glanced at the screen and its multiple flashing dots. “Less by far. Certainly less than they want us to believe.” He glared at the man.
“Maybe,” Devers said, “but this sounds like a war party, these guys consider themselves the spirits of death. They cover themselves in white paint and they go out on raids. They believe the paint makes them invincible like the White Face, the one they consider already dead. They believe it protects them, because if they’re already dead then they can’t be killed.”
As if in response to what Devers had said, the voices stopped cold. Danielle looked around: no one had charged yet. The bolos still burned where they’d fallen and thin wisps of smoke drifted across the camp. But the air was still.
Danielle saw the movement on the screen and looked up. She saw a shape in the tree line, silhouetted by small fires. In seconds, a dozen or more were burning, blazing up into the trees, with new fires being lit all along the perimeter. The end result was like a fuse running slowly around the edge of the clearing, tracking along the trees in a clockwise motion, down to the south and up along the east.
The undergrowth crackled and burned as the fires merged and the flames tracked up the eastern perimeter. With the naked eye, she could see the silhouette of runners with torches in their hands, sprinting past the fires, the flames trailing out behind them. Before long, the clearing was encircled in a rapidly growing conflagration.
“My God, they’re going to burn us,” Polaski whispered.
Hawker tried to calm him. “There’s nothing to burn in here.”
Danielle took a breath. That was true. The clearing was barren of any major source of fuel, but smoke was another problem. The fires surrounding them were oily and the smoke hung thick and heavily. It quickly became difficult to breathe. With one eye on the perimeter, she broke into the first-aid kit, pulling out a stack of thin paper respirators. With only a half dozen, she gave one each to Susan, Polaski, McCarter and the porters.
One of Verhoven’s men dropped his night-vision goggles. “We’re blind now. They’ve made the scopes useless.”
“They don’t know that,” Hawker said.
Aside from Verhoven and Hawker, everyone had become jumpy. She sensed it even in herself. She needed information and turned to Devers. “Come on. What the hell do they want?”
“I don’t think they
“What do you mean?”
“They just keep repeating the same words over and over again. Fire for fire, fire for the plague.” He shouted to be heard above the crackling flames now surrounding them. “They’re either telling us something or telling themselves. Winding each other up.”
In places, the merging tongues of flame had reached an inferno stage, climbing up into the trees, creating their own wind, spinning in wicked little vortexes like whirling genies unleashed from their bottles.
“That’s it,” Danielle said. She glanced at Verhoven.
“Turn on the damn lights and hit them with a few flares. We’re not waiting anymore.”
Verhoven smiled and pressed the switch. The lights blazed instantly and the generator cranked to life. A blinding glare reflected back at them as the swirls of white and gray smoke lit up like a fog of overlapping ghosts. In truth, the visibility got worse.
Verhoven pressed another key and began firing flares from the canisters pre-positioned in the forest. Two flares went off to the north and then two more in the west; he fired more in the south and the east, flares from canisters that were behind the Chollokwan warriors.
Danielle hoped the sound of the flares launching would startle the natives. And as she looked to the computer screen, she saw holes in the Chollokwan lines where groups of them backed off, but they weren’t leaving en masse, and in a moment the lines began to reform. She turned back to Verhoven, eyes burning from the smoke. “Now what?”
Verhoven was silent for a moment; he turned to one of his men and then looked past him to Hawker. “What do you think? Are they coming in?”
Hawker shook his head. He pointed the rifle toward the towering fires around the edge of the clearing. “If they come in now, they’re silhouettes against the flames; a good way to die, even if you are a White Face.”
Verhoven turned back to Danielle. “You see, they know better. We watch for now. But they’re not coming in. Not tonight.”
Danielle sighed, more convinced because Hawker and Verhoven had actually agreed. “So this is a warning, then. I suppose we won’t get another.”
Devers coughed. “They’re not known for giving one in the first place.”
For the rest of the night, the group watched the flames burn in the circle around them. Occasionally there were new waves of chanting, especially when the higher branches burst into flame, but at no point did the Chollokwan attempt to enter the clearing. As dawn approached, they drifted back into the forest and disappeared.
The jungle around the clearing continued to burn. But though the forest was dry by Amazonian standards, it wasn’t the type of parched brush that lent itself to an inferno. The flames could not reach the critical temperature required to become self-sustaining, especially as it reached the wetter foliage back from the clearing’s edge.
With the cool mists of the dawning hours, the fires began to die. The layer of ash and smoke thinned throughout the morning, and by late afternoon all that remained were the smoldering hunks of burnt and blackened trees and the trepidation of what the next encounter might hold.
CHAPTER 22
A bitterly cold morning arrived in Washington, D.C., a morning of cloudless blue skies and plumes of steam on the horizon. The glaring sun lingered, low and bright, but for all its piercing brilliance, it remained a harsh and distant companion, a mere candle on the mantel of the world.
No warmth could be felt on this day, not in the sunlight or in the air. To Stuart Gibbs it seemed appropriate for a day on which the NRI was burying one of its own.
Gibbs had stood in the frigid air, giving the eulogy, keeping it short for the sake of those who had gathered. He’d offered his personal condolences and then moved respectfully away, watching as others stepped forward to console the widow of Matthew Blundin.
He watched as they spoke to her, hugged her and held her hand. He guessed at their words—kind words, no doubt, words of sorrow for her loss and praise for the job her husband had always done. No one would mention that he’d been found on the wrong side of town, shot and robbed on a street known for its drug dealers and prostitutes. No one would ask if his penchant for alcohol or late nights had led to their separation and pending divorce, or if either vice might have had a hand in his demise. They would think these things of course, but such thoughts would not be spoken, for death was not only the great equalizer but also the great eraser of misdeeds. In its wake, Blundin’s errors and habits would be forgotten, his wit and wisdom raised into legend.
