This Green Hell

Aimee’s eyes slid away from the small dapper man, and though she seemed to look out at the jungle her vision was focused on something a lot further away. ‘Yes, a man, and no, not so old.’

A yell from the edge of the jungle and the sound of sloshing feet brought Aimee’s head around quickly, causing the seed pods strung around her face to clack together. It was the security detail, yelling in rapid Spanish to the foreman and Francisco. Even from a hundred or so feet away from where she sat, she could see their faces were pale and their eyes were as wide as those of startled horses.

Francisco walked across the gantry to meet the men, holding up one hand to slow them down. Though Aimee had undertaken a crash course in basic Spanish before departing, all she could make out was something that sounded like ‘un jaguar muerto’. A dead jaguar? she thought. What’s the big deal? She got to her feet, and strained to hear more.

After a few minutes, Francisco returned and explained that the security detail had found something at the edge of the jungle that they believed might be the result of an attack by a jaguar.

‘It would be best if you stayed here for a while, Dr Weir. Just until we make sure the animal is not still in the vicinity.’

Francisco seemed slightly embarrassed to be so solicitous towards her, especially as Aimee was nearly half a head taller than most of the Paraguayan site workers and taller again than himself.

Aimee smiled and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Francisco, an old friend taught me how to shoot, throw a knife and a good punch. He also took me to places a lot more dangerous than a jungle with a few big pussycats hanging from trees. I’ll be fine, you’ll see. I may even be able to help.’

There’s that old friend again, she thought and couldn’t help a lurch deep inside as she recalled the times she had spent together with Alex Hunter. Even if they were over, the memories, and the skills he had taught her, would stay with her forever.

Francisco shrugged. ‘Somehow, I knew you would want to come. Just be aware that this area of the jungle is very dense and very dark. People rarely venture into its depths; for that reason it has been known for hundreds of years as La oscuridad verde … the Dark Green.’

Aimee pulled a comic spooky face. ‘I’m not afraid of the dark, so lead on.’

Her face grew serious again as she followed the small doctor off the platform and into the red mud. And believe me, I know dark. Despite the intense humidity, she shivered as she recalled the dangers she and Alex Hunter had faced deep under the ice of Antarctica.

Alfraedo’s security men led the way through the dense jungle to a clearing. Even before pushing through the last of the foliage, Aimee could hear the mad zum of millions of insects in the open area. The security men stood back to allow her, Francisco and Alfraedo to enter first — and she noticed none of them looked in a hurry to follow.

The clearing, little more than twenty feet across, was a riot of colour and movement: the ground crawled and the air seethed with an insect horde in a feeding frenzy.

Aimee almost gagged. What she smelled wasn’t just decomposition, it was also the smell of torn-apart bodies, viscera, urine and faeces. In the humidity of the jungle, odours got trapped and concentrated in small areas — like this clearing. She couldn’t just smell the stench; she almost tasted it.

‘Jesucristo!’ Francisco crossed himself, then turned to one of the men and spoke in hurried Spanish before pulling an immaculate handkerchief from his pocket and folding it over his nose and mouth. The man nodded and raced back along the trail.

In a few moments, he returned with a small chemical fire extinguisher and sent a freezing white cloud into the clearing. The insects disappeared instantly, even the scavengers on the ground heading for the cover of the underbrush.

With the insects gone, the raw carnage was laid out before them. To call it a massacre would imply some force had overcome these humans, beaten them into submission and then to death. But this went beyond anything one human could possibly inflict on another, Aimee thought; it was complete physical annihilation. The bodies had been obliterated in a mad frenzy.

Francisco was the first to step forward. As he did so, his boot squelched, not in the ever-present mud but in a carpet of shredded flesh and bone.

‘Dios Padre Todopoderoso — oh my.’

He looked around, obviously unsure of where to start — there was no single body left intact to examine. It was impossible to tell if there were two or ten bodies in the mess. Even the skulls had been cracked and opened, pieces of cranial bone thrown around like shards of broken pottery. Francisco used a stick to lift a lump of flesh, his eyes narrowing at the strange marks at its edges.

Whoever the men were, they had been armed. Aimee could see guns flung around the clearing; several were bent nearly in half. Her eyes traced a line of bullet holes up the trunk of a particularly broad tree — and stopped at a pale flap plastered against the wood about ten feet up from the ground. She frowned and stepped a little closer. It was a square piece of flesh, still streaked with blood, but intact, and showing a tattoo of a crude blue crucifix. Aimee felt acidic liquid rise at the back of her throat. She knew that tattoo — she had seen it on the bicep of the big Green Beret. She remembered the self-assured Captain Michaels and the almost cocky thumbs-up he had given her. Was he here too? Had he also been reduced to … this mess? She closed her eyes and held her breath for a moment.

When she opened them, Francisco was beside her. His eyes had found the scrap of skin in the tree too, and when he looked into her face again, Aimee could tell he was probably thinking the same thing she was. That fragment and its placement was no accident. It was … what? A warning, a trophy? She shuddered.

‘Could your Green Berets be this savage, Dr Weir?’

Aimee backed up a step as the insects started to descend once again. She shook her head. ‘No, Francisco, this is the Green Berets. And I don’t think any human being could inflict this … this insanity on another.’

Francisco looked back at the chaos, his pallor telling her that he was finally seeing it for what, and who, it was.

Together, they backed out of the clearing, the doctor’s eyes bulging slightly above the handkerchief that he held over his nose and mouth as a barricade against the returning swarms of insects. For the first time, Aimee noticed that his permanently immaculate trousers were stained red to the knees.

* * *

The short trek back to the rig was made in silence. Aimee pushed her new hat to the back of her head so she could dab at the greasy perspiration on her forehead. The deep background thrum of machinery reminded her of the hurricane of insects that had boiled over the pile of flesh in the small clearing. She felt sick, and a long, long way from Connecticut.

Francisco appeared beside her and held a silver flask under her nose, the top already unscrewed. The peaty smell of whisky rose up and Aimee took the ornate little bottle from his hand with a whispered ‘Thank you’. She took two good gulps of the fiery liquid, feeling it burn a path down her throat to settle in her stomach with a warm, pleasant bloom.

She handed the flask back. ‘What could have done that to those men, Francisco? I don’t believe it was a jaguar.’

Francisco took a small sip of whisky himself and carefully screwed the crested lid back into place. He pursed his lips before responding, his perfectly trimmed silver moustache bunching at its centre.

‘I’ve never seen, or even heard of, such butchery, Dr Weir, and I also find it hard to believe sane men were responsible. Even brutal torture could not inflict such damage. I also do not think a jaguar was responsible.’ He paused. ‘It is known that some of the drug dealers from the north keep tigers and bears as pets, and sometimes free them into the jungle when they tire of them. Even so, the creatures would have had to find their way through a lot of jungle; and besides, I think there was too much … anger in the attack for it to be an animal.’ He sighed and rubbed the silver lid of the flask with his thumb before holding it out to her again.

‘Will you send the men’s remains home?’ Aimee asked after taking another sip.

He shook his head without looking at her. ‘Impossible — little will remain in a day or so. The jungle is very good at cleaning up after itself.’