the northeast for fear of giving up hard-earned ground or sacrificing sleep. He and his friends were in the clear now, but they weren't about to slow for anything in the world.
Damn the money. The half they'd received in advance was more than enough to cover the cost of their time and gas. Besides, Santos knew now that their fare would not be returning to Pomacochas to pay the balance. As long as he and his friends escaped with their lives, that would be more than compensation enough.
While he had forgotten the tales his grandmother had spun in his youth, they had returned in startling clarity upon first sight of the jaguar's savaged carcass. He had thought the old woman mad. Her stories of winged demons in the mountains of her ancestors had always seemed designed to scare him. Even then, though, he had understood that as ridiculous as they had sounded, she had believed them. And after witnessing the carnage in that field, now so did he. There wasn't a man or animal in the entire Andes range that could run down an adult jaguar, overcome it, and tear it to shreds. Perhaps he didn't subscribe to the legend of winged demons, but there was definitely something in the jungle that he didn't want to encounter, especially in the dark.
His companions had felt it too, and the agreement to abandon their party had been struck without reservation.
The youth tripped again. This time when he landed, the shoulder strap of his backpack ripped. Its weight slammed into the back of his head and hammered his face against the ground. Kemen moaned and tried to roll over, his pitiful cries muffled by the loam. Santos stopped to help him. It was then that he noticed how fancy the backpack was. Crouching in the forest, awash with darkness, and running in the lead with the boy at his heels, he hadn't even seen it.
Now they were in real trouble.
'What is wrong with you?' Santos asked in Spanish. He wanted to strike Kemen for his foolishness, but the urge was superseded by the need to keep moving. 'You should not have taken this. Now they will definitely come after us.'
'Mine was falling apart,' Kemen sobbed. He rolled over and blood poured from his nostrils. His nose must have broken when his face struck the earth.
'We leave it,' Santos said. 'When they find it, they will call off the search.'
He wrenched the functional strap off of the boy's shoulder, unfastened the top flap, and dumped the contents onto the ground. Kemen's threadbare canvas satchel was buried in a pile of clothes, notebooks, dehydrated rations, and foil-backed punch-cards of medications and water purification tablets. There was also a brand new digital camera. He held it up and shook his head. The desire to beat some sense into the youth with it was overwhelming.
'This? A camera? You risk our lives so you can steal a camera?'
Tears streamed from Kemen's eyes and he blubbered something unintelligible.
'We are wasting time,' Naldo said. He had to double over to catch enough breath to continue. 'The forest is still too quiet. We can not afford to delay here any longer.'
Santos felt the man's trembling hand on his arm and realized the truth of his words. He dropped the camera onto the clothes, grabbed Kemen's pack, and threw it down onto the boy's chest.
'Get up. We must continue. With or without you.'
He turned and sprinted after Naldo, who was already twenty paces ahead on the path, a silhouette against the shadows. Either Kemen followed them or they would leave him. The boy had jeopardized their flight for a stolen camera that would only bring a handful of nuevo sol. What in the name of God had he been---?
With a crash of breaking branches, a dark shape knifed across the path ahead, and just like that, Naldo was gone.
A scream erupted from the trees off to the left, but only for a split-second before it was cut short. It trailed into a wet gurgle that was swallowed by thrashing sounds from the underbrush. The bushes shook violently.
Abruptly, the noises ceased and the branches shivered back into place.
'What was that?' Kemen cried from behind him.
Santos held up a palm to silence the boy, who only continued to sob. He could hear nothing else. The jungle was still, the night unfettered by even the soft whoosh of a breeze. He drew a deep breath and sifted through the myriad scents: soggy earth, rotting kapok fruits, palm buds and cacao pods, and something else...the almost metallic smell of raw meat, which grew stronger with each passing second.
'Santos...' Kemen whined.
A single crackle of dead leaves to his left and Santos threw himself into a jerunga shrub to his right. He crawled toward the trunk of a massive tree framed by wooden liana vines, slipped between them, and huddled against the base of the trunk.
'Santo---!'
Another crash from the brush, but this time there was no scream. The crunching sounds grew louder, building to a ferocious crescendo, before dying as quickly as they had begun.
Santos closed his hands over his mouth to mute the sounds of his breathing. It was a futile effort. The jungle was so silent that he could still clearly hear his frantic respirations. He pressed backward until the bark bit into the bare flesh on his back. His eyes darted from side to side. He could see only darkness beyond the wooden bars of his prison.
A hawk-like shriek pierced the night from the far side of the path. A heartbeat later it was answered by another, this time from the opposite direction.
He held his breath and waited.
The only sound was the rapid thud of his pulse in his temples.
Craning his ear toward the path, he listened for even the subtle crinkle of footsteps on wet leaves.
A faint breeze caressed his cheek, bringing with it the intensified scent of bloody flesh.
Santos turned toward the source.
He didn't even have time to scream.
VIII
'You have to see this,' McMasters said.
The words snapped Tasker from his slumber. He was instantly awake.
'What is it?' he asked, donning his camouflaged jacket and slipping out through the seam in the mosquito netting over his hammock.
McMasters had already climbed out of the tent and into a small gap they had created between their tents, over which a blind of leafy branches had been constructed. Tasker followed, and found the other four men bickering in whispers. They wouldn't have roused him if it hadn't been important.
Their muddy faces were stained by the weak blue glow of the beacon on the monitor of the tracking device. McMasters looked up at him as he sat, then passed him the handheld unit.
'At twenty-two twenty-three, the beacon began to move at a rate of somewhere in the neighborhood of five miles an hour.'
'Why would they break camp in the middle of the night?' Tasker asked, thinking aloud.
'We're not sure, but here's the kicker. They weren't traveling deeper into the jungle. They were heading straight back toward us.'
'What do you mean 'were'?'
'The beacon's movement subsided at exactly twenty-three fifteen,' McMasters said. 'And it hasn't moved since.'
'Not at all?'
'No, sir.'
'That doesn't make any sense.' Tasker paused while he tried to work it out in his head. His men had surely been trying to do the same, and when they hadn't reached a consensus, the only alternative they had seen was to wake him. 'What could have spurred flight in the middle of the night, and why would they have stopped so abruptly? They sacrificed nearly half a day's progress.'
