Explosions ripped the jungle floor, sending plumes of dirt and green debris skyward. Gunfire was his perpetual soundtrack. The guns never stopped. At night, when the prisoners had their weekly bath at the river, he saw tracer rounds arc across the sky, and shells bloom and thud, hammering the air. He never knew why. He didn’t know who was shooting. Nor who was being shot. Nor, after a while, did he much care.
The cannons shattered the insect hum of nature. The jungle thrummed with background music of an inspired composer, punctuated by gunfire.
There were guerilla soldiers everywhere. They trained at jungle warfare day and night. They used huge flaming torches mounted atop bamboo poles to continue firing rounds into the small hours. He’d once caught a glimpse of a small village of hollow buildings and fake-fronted houses. He saw men firing from empty windows and leaping over walls. The soldiers were training for urban warfare as well.
His work gang was dedicated to road construction. The gang was constructing a simple limestone causeway in the jungle. A road to nowhere. This rough-hewn road had no beginning and no end. It just was. It simply disappeared into the jungle. No one knew where the highway led. And no one, except he himself, seemed to care.
The highway meant something. It was part of a plan. He wanted to know. He meant to find out.
He was a natural spy. And, being curious by nature, the man kept his eyes and ears open, day and night. He had no end of material to record. He would have killed, truly, for a pencil stub, a secret journal, even scraps of paper. But of course there were no pencils and no paper available to him. He watched and listened and tried to retain what he could in the faint hope that he might survive.
He had heard it whispered that his section of limestone road eventually led north past the great falls at Diablo Blanco. Before his capture, he had been in Africa. These Amazonian waterfalls, it was said, made the towering Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe look like a spring torrent. The local Indian laborers he sometimes worked alongside called White Devil Falls “the smoke that thunders.” Sometimes, when the roaring guns went silent, you could hear that thunder.
One talkative prisoner, a young Belizean named Machado, told him of plans to escape upriver to an outpost river town called Barcelos. Machado had a beautiful, open face, with startling green eyes. His strange looks reflected the remarkable ethnic mix of his native country. Machado told him that he was Garifunas, a blend of African slaves and indigenous Caribbean islanders. Also in his family tree, he said, were Spaniards, British, and Asians.
One night in the camp pits, when the guard had left them alone, Machado confided that this outpost was the most dangerous place on earth. But, if you could reach it alive, you could make your way down river to Manaus. He was naturally curious about such a place and wanted to ask Machado more about it. One day he found himself breaking rock next to the young fellow who planned to escape to Barcelos.
“Why is it so dangerous there?” he whispered in his broken Spanish to the boy, taking a chance while the guards snoozed in the midday heat. Machado proudly wore a ragged T-shirt that said You Better Belize It!
“It’s the crossroads of evil, senor,” the boy whispered. “The Black Jungle.”
“Someone stands at this crossroads?” he asked.
“The Devil.”
“Who is this devil?”
“The devil himself, I tell you, or his representative.”
“Does this devil have a name?”
“Devil. That’s all.”
“Where can I find this fellow, whoever he is?”
“You desire an intercession with the dead?”
“Something like that.”
“You will find the devil standing at the crossroads where the spirits cross over into our world.”
The boy would say no more.
He knew, he had learned the hard way, that it was unwise to be caught speaking and he surely didn’t care to draw attention to himself. So, after this exchange with Machado, he kept his head down and his mouth shut. He cleared jungle with his machete and he built his bloody road all day and silently planned his own escape. In this, he knew he was by no means unique.
He was but one of numberless hundreds, maybe thousands, of unwilling captives, an enslaved workforce at work in the service of some unseen and unknown power. All he knew for certain now was that another universe existed here in this green hell, a complex hive of relentless activity, at least a thousand miles inland from the mouth of the Amazon. And all of it lay hidden from civilization’s prying eyes.
Roads were being built. Airstrips too. Armies were being trained here and the gunfire was incessant. Everyone lived and worked and died under the canopy. From what little he’d seen, he doubted this was a force for good.
He’d seen horrible things. Slow starvation. Wanton punishment. Men shot on the spot for no reason. A hand or a foot chopped off on a whim. An untouchable, crashing through the jungle, his naked body a mass of blood blisters. He was still screaming when he disappeared into the vast green hills. No one would come near him. The virus, someone said, they were working on a new virus.
The untouchables lived in the white building across the river. The medical compound. He’d never seen it but he heard about it. Patients who checked in never checked out. Terrible things were said to happen across the river. At night, when it was still, you could hear things. Things you didn’t want to hear.
All this, he imagined, somehow led directly to the man who stood at the crossroads. The devil the boy had spoken of. It was he who had arranged the ambush of the expedition, killed his companions, and captured him. He knew the monster’s true identity. His name was Muhammad Top. Top, who made sure there were many days when he wished he’d been lucky and gone down with his friends.
That night, it was whispered in the pits that a boy had been shot trying to escape. He asked the name, but he already knew it. The one friend he’d made. Machado.
Many days he felt so alone he dropped to his knees on the jungle floor and prayed to God to let him die.
1
H e had never expected to survive the sinking of his boat. The river had been a quiet mirror that morning, meandering through the endless jungle. Just before the explosion, the leafy green walls on either side of the river had fallen silent. Then a lone bird cried a shrill warning and the peace was suddenly shattered. A sea mine blew the bow off of his beautiful black-hulled wooden yawl. The powerful explosion rocked the jungle; the sky above the river suddenly went dark with birds taking wing.
He knew his lovely Pura Vida was finished before he drew a second breath.
Pura Vida, the pretty yawl he’d fitted with a retractable keel, had shuddered to a stop, down by the head. She instantly began taking water. She had sunk with nearly all hands in minutes. Small-arms fire erupted from the forest. The river was alive with death. Unseen forces began spitting bullets from both banks. A chorus of fear rose from those choking and dying in the water. The machine gun attack killed everyone clinging to overturned life rafts or desperately scrambling up the muddy banks.
He himself had been fishing off the stern, his legs dangling over the gunwale. When he heard the explosion for’ard, and felt the yawl stagger and founder, he dove for a semi-automatic rifle kept loaded and stowed in the cockpit. Water rising round his legs, he emptied the thirty-round banana clip into the forest. When it was empty, he slammed in another mag and repeated firing off the port side.
He threw life rings, cushions, whatever he could grab. It was useless. He saw his colleagues in the water, many already dead or dying in a rain of lead. The ship was engulfed in flames and listing violently to port. Staying aboard another second was suicide.
He dove off the sharply angled stern and swam hard downriver, until his lungs, too, were afire. He surfaced and heard that the firing had stopped. Many riddled bodies were floating downstream toward him. That was when he heard the drums for the first time.
He saw painted faces atop long brown legs sprinting madly through the tangled undergrowth along the banks. He submerged once more and grabbed someone whose arm he’d seen flailing weakly minutes earlier. He pulled her
