31
THE AMAZON
C ould you please land this thing?” Harry pleaded.
“What? I can’t hear you!” cried Saladin Hassan, who was bouncing around up front, doing the driving.
No surprise Hassan couldn’t hear. Between the bellicose roar of the airborne Toyota’s unmuffled engine and the howl of wind and driving rain, you couldn’t really have a normal conversation. Harry Brock cupped his hands round his mouth.
“I said, try to stay on the goddamn ground!”
“Okay! Sorry!”
Harry sat back and tried to wipe away the rainwater streaming from both eyes and running like a river into his mouth. Unlike Saladin and Caparina, he had not thought to bring along a pair of swimmer’s goggles. He leaned forward and screamed again this time directly into the driver’s ear.
“I. Said. Slow! Down!”
They hit a ditch and launched again and Harry was once more hurled sideways against the thinly padded rear seat.
“Too slow and we get stuck in the mud!” Saladin Hassan shouted over his shoulder.
“What about the fucking mines?” Harry screamed, trying to hold on. “You said a lot of these unmarked trails are land-mined!”
“I don’t think this one is,” Caparina shouted over her shoulder.
“Really? You don’t think so? That’s good, Caparina,” Harry shouted back, “very reassuring!”
Harry was sitting, occasionally, on the narrow bench seat in the back of the mud-spattered Toyota Land Cruiser. This was definitely not your father’s Land Cruiser. There were no windows, no doors, and no damn top. About six inches of water was sloshing around his ankles, one foot in each of the rear foot-wells.
Saladin explained he had cut the roof off years ago. Who needs it? he said. For protection there was only a heavily padded roll-bar overhead. Harry was clinging to it now in hopes of remaining more or less inside the vehicle each time it left the ground. Colonel Hassan, Harry had learned the night before, was with an elite Brazilian spec ops group known as Halcon 4. It means Falcon, Saladin had said. Brock had heard of them. A secret government anti-terrorist unit working this region of the Amazon right now.
“You’re not on the road!” Harry yelled, palm fronds whipping across his face. “The road is to our fucking left!”
Saladin cranked the wheel hard left and they bounced back into the rut. Hassan, his beautiful ex-wife Caparina, and the American spy Harry Brock were careening down a twisting muddy trail full of unpleasant surprises. But at least none of them had been lethal so far.
Unlike Harry, Caparina, who was sitting shotgun and clinging to a grab handle on the dash, seemed to find this mad experience life-affirming and fairly amusing.
Brock tried hard to be philosophical. Be in the moment, Harry, as one of his old girlfriends used to tell him. One of the advantages of this rain was the effect it had on Caparina’s faded red T-shirt with the word Jamaica emblazoned across her lovely breasts in big black letters. He thought Saladin must be crazy. How could a man ever leave a woman like this?
Apart from the distinct possibility that this narrow twisting road was land-mined, you had to take it on faith there was no oncoming traffic from the opposite direction. Every turn was blind, with towering leafy green walls on either side. Every two minutes or so they’d hit another deep rut or streaming gully and go airborne for an eternity, returning to earth with a great splash of mud in all directions.
Caparina had a soggy, disintegrating map of the Mato Grosso region of Brazil in her lap. Periodically, she would try to show it to Harry, looking for some direction as to which way they should go. But, since the twisting gash in the rain forest they were currently following didn’t appear on any maps, it was tough. They’d been driving all morning and Harry was more confused now than when they’d started out.
The driving rain and the mud-splashed windshield didn’t help your visibility either.
“Does any of this look familiar?” Caparina said, turning in her seat to smile at Harry. She put her finger on the map, “This area here?”
“How can you tell?” Harry said, leaning forward to give the map a cursory glance.
“What?”
“I mean, Caparina, that everything looks familiar here! Everywhere you go looks exactly like this!”
“Good point,” she said smiling at him.
The three comrades, who had only recently decided to join forces, had talked into the wee hours over a late supper and many drinks the previous evening. They decided the first thing was to try and relocate the airstrip where Harry’s shot-up airplane had put down three weeks earlier. Harry estimated that, after his capture, he’d been transported over about five miles of rough jungle road, then crossed a river. He’d been taken to one of the many “detention centers” located around the perimeters of the terror training camps. Harry, along with a bunch of rural youths, was there for his “political indoctrination.” Harry listened politely, but it didn’t take. That’s why Top had ordered him shot.
Saladin Hassan was convinced that if they successfully located the secret airstrip, as identified by Brock, they’d be that much closer to finding Harry’s former detention center; and, thus, that much closer to finding Top. Saladin, in his undercover role as one of Papa Top’s henchmen, had never been allowed to visit these sensitive places without first being blindfolded.
“There should be a river around here somewhere,” Saladin said, slowing down and peering over the steering wheel.
“I think we’re in it,” Harry said, kicking his feet and splashing water forward beneath Caparina’s seat.
“I like him,” Caparina said to her ex. “He’s funny.”
Saladin said, “Wait, what’s that up there?”
Brock leaned forward. He saw a dark mass a hundred yards ahead, moving left to right across their path.
“What the hell is that?” Harry said.
“Water buffalo,” Saladin said.
“That’s got to be your river,” Caparina said. “Stop!”
Hassan stood on the brakes and they fishtailed to a halt just shy of the swollen torrent. He raised the little fish-eyed goggles up on his forehead and smiled at Harry.
“See? We made it!”
“Made what? I don’t recognize this. I don’t have a fucking clue where we are!”
“Calm down, Harry,” Caparina said.
EVERYBODY CLIMBED out of the Toyota into slushy mud that came up to their knees. Saladin led the way forward to check out the river. Harry, bringing up the rear, could barely make out the small herd of water buffalo moving away along the flooded bank.
Ahead, Harry saw, the road plummeted and seemed to disappear, dead-ending in a muddy brown river some two hundred yards wide. The heavy rains of the past few days had caused the thing to overflow its banks. The raging stream was churning with submerged kapok logs, most likely from a logging station upriver. Logs and other debris were flowing by from left to right. The rain, mercifully, had subsided a little. For a few moments they were able to speak more or less normally above the sound of the rushing river.
“Take a look at this, Harry Brock,” Caparina said. She had flattened the rain-soaked map onto the hood of the Toyota.
“I think we’re here,” she said, putting her index finger on a small tributary. The unnamed river ran west to east through an area of floodplain and flooded forest.
“Yes,” Saladin said, studying the map. “That makes sense. What’s this larger river over here called?”
