Another sound began to make its presence known, the hollow, rhythmic voice of chanting men, hidden somewhere within the trees. The Chollokwan had returned.
Soon they could see glimpses of fire through the tangled mesh of the trees, and gray smoke began to fill the clearing. But this time the Chollokwan did not build the inferno they’d created before. They set fires only sporadically, gathering in groups, chanting and shouting in waves once again.
Their voices were coarse and threatening. Haunting the survivors, mocking them and, above all else, reminding them of something no one wanted to recall: they had been warned.
CHAPTER 39
As dawn approached the Chollokwan voices faded, receding into the forest along with the morning mists. But this time, the rising sun brought no feeling of safety or redemption, no false sense of relief, only the stark realization of how bad things really were.
Shell casings littered the ground by the hundreds, scattered like cigarette butts from some mad smokers’ convention. Burned-out flares lay in small heaps of ash amid circles of blackened earth while the piles of stone loomed like rubble between ugly eruptions of sharpened steel. The tents they’d once slept in were little more than shredded lengths of nylon, jagged strips hanging limply from mangled frames. Farther out, the drums of kerosene crackled and burned, belching thick, oily smoke and fouling the air with acrid fumes.
In this harsh morning light, the clearing showed itself for what it was, for what it had always been, a wasteland, a graveyard, a malignant spot in the middle of paradise, where nothing lived and nothing grew. As the Nuree had insisted, it was a place that had been rejected by life itself.
Still, with a respite from the attacks, the survivors took the chance to recover and sleep, dozing in shifts, with their loaded weapons beside them, waiting for the next phase to begin and hoping somehow that it would not. They’d barely survived through twelve hours; most wondered how the hell they would last through sixty more.
At noon the shift changed and Hawker took the lead watch from Verhoven.
“Break time,” Hawker said.
“Uh-hm,” Verhoven replied, as he set the safety on his weapon.
Verhoven wasn’t a man given to deep reflection, things were what they were in his world, but Hawker sensed a thorn in the man’s side somewhere.
“Something wrong?” Hawker asked.
“Been counting ammo,” Verhoven said. “Another night like the last one and we’ll run dry before the sun comes up.”
Hawker hadn’t taken the time to inventory things, but he sensed the same thing. If the animals continued their onslaught unabated, it would be a war of attrition that the humans could not win. “We’ll have to be more sparing in what we use,” Hawker replied.
“They’re wild, Hawk,” Verhoven said. “Even Danielle, who’s a hell of a shot, uses too much ammo. And the others are all over the place.”
“They’re afraid,” Hawker said. “They’ll be a little better tonight.”
Verhoven looked at the ground for a second and then back at Hawker. “If they’re not, I’m taking the guns out of their hands. I don’t care what they say. If it comes to that, you and I will do the firing. No one else. Better they be pissed off and alive than empowered and dead.”
Hawker hesitated a second. He doubted Danielle would give up her gun, but the others would not fight the logic. He nodded, and Verhoven turned and walked off.
A few minutes later Danielle approached him with the medi-kit in her hand.
“I can only hope you’re going to examine me,” he said.
“Much as you’d like me to,” she said. “There’s a lot more wrong with you than I could fix.”
He smiled.
“We do have a problem, though.”
“Really,” he said, looking around, “because I hadn’t noticed.”
“Kaufman,” she explained.
He stared at her for a second. It was like she’d read his mind. “Yeah, Kaufman.”
She explained. “Without that son of a bitch to send up his flare pattern, who knows if his helicopter will land. That means no extraction, no free ride home.”
“I thought about that,” he admitted, “although I wasn’t sure he was telling the truth with that story to begin with. You use flares to draw attention to yourself when someone’s looking for you. Kind of odd to use them for a party that already knows where you are. More likely you’d use smoke. That would keep any distant observers from locking in on the position and it would give the pilot localized info and wind direction as well.”
She nodded. “Seemed a little odd to me as well. My guess is: Kaufman was either lying or he didn’t know, and he made up that story to give himself some type of residual value and reduce the chances of being shot at sunrise. He was a bastard but he was smart.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But now what? If we pop the wrong color smoke, or shoot the wrong flare it could scare off the pilot. It might be better to do nothing, let his curiosity bring him in closer. We can dig up Kaufman’s people and put on their uniforms.” Hawker looked out to where he and McCarter had buried the dead mercenaries. “If the pilot sees us like that, he might land … or he might just strafe us as he flies past and then head off into the distance.”
“I’m not real interested in going through that again,” she said. “But the only alternative is five days in the jungle. Choose your poison.”
After the night they’d just lived through, Hawker had no desire to face even one of those things in the tangled darkness of the rain forest. He guessed that the helicopter would come back, but it was a coin flip as to whether they’d last that long and another question altogether as to what would happen after that. Still, two days in the well-defended clearing and a fifty-fifty shot seemed like better odds than four or five days trudging through the jungle.
Either Danielle sensed this or had come to the same conclusion. “Let’s wait,” she said. “And let’s keep this from the others.”
Hawker nodded, and noticed McCarter walking toward them. The professor had bled through the dressing on his arm. “Looks like you’ve got another patient.”
Danielle turned around. “Sit down,” she said, looking at McCarter. “Let me rewrap that.”
McCarter took a seat and tried to hold still as Danielle cut the gauze from his arm. He seemed distraught to Hawker, almost despondent.
“Rough night?” Hawker asked, trying to lighten his mood.
McCarter did not respond directly. “When my wife was sick,” he said finally, “there were nights, during the chemo, that I would hear her throwing up violently in the bathroom down the hall. Dry heaves for what seemed like hours, and then she’d rest against the closed door, and it would rattle as she shivered.”
He closed his eyes for a second and choked back a lump in his throat. “But she didn’t want my help or my pity,” he said at last. “She just wanted to be well again. And in her mind, as long as I didn’t hear, she could pretend it was working, she could pretend that she was getting better. So I would lie there, hour after hour, fighting every urge in my body to run to her, so we could both pretend she wasn’t dying.
“That’s what last night felt like to me,” he explained. “Like a message being delivered over and over again and we’re all pretending not to hear it, all pretending like we’re not going to die.”
As McCarter finished, he and Danielle exchanged looks and they seemed to make some kind of connection. Hawker didn’t know what it was, but as much death as he’d seen in his life, most of it had been mercifully quick. He was thankful for that.
He looked McCarter in the eye. They needed him to hang on, they needed everyone to hang on. “We’re not dead yet,” Hawker said.
“But tonight will be more of the same,” McCarter replied.
“Maybe,” Hawker said. “Maybe not. In any fight, things always look worse from your perspective. All you see are your own losses but none of your enemies’. Your mind tells you he’s still at full strength, when undoubtedly he’s weakened.”
