09-Twelve Mile Limit (35 page)

I walked into the hangar to take a closer look. The place smelled of dust, diesel fuel, and paint. The chopper’s large cargo doors were open, showing khaki bench seats inside and a single M-60 machine gun fixed in its harness on the starboard side.

I walked to the front of the craft and touched my hand to the landing light, knelt, and read the black and gold crest above it: BUSHRANGER.

I turned and looked at Martinez. “Jesus Christ! This is an old Australian Huey. It’s got to be thirty, forty years old.” I reached for the satellite phone in my pocket—Harrington could certainly find us something safer than this.

The young commando was nodding, not pleased. “I know, I know. Let’s hope we can get the damn thing started this time.”

Above, through the Huey’s open cargo door, the sky was a current of stars. Beneath us was an ocean of blue mist afloat upon canyons of shadow.

We were flying over jungle, the top strata of forest canopy awash in moonlight. The moon was at eye level, through the starboard door. It was huge, pocked by geologic cataclysm, white as winter ice. As we traveled at close to 130 miles an hour, there was the illusion that the moon was sailing along with us, gliding over the rain forest in pursuit, ghostly in its silence.

We had to stop and refuel at a military base near some large city in the mountains—I guessed it to be Bogotá. As the aircraft banked away, nose down, and gathered speed in the darkness, flying south, I watched the lights of the city fade, then disappear. After that, there were only small pockets of light: jungle villages, fires burning, the night strongholds of rural people linked by darkness, aglow like incremental pearls, bright and solitary from half a mile high.

In the air a second time, I began to relax a little. Yes, I hated flying in helicopters, but the fact that we had now lifted off safely twice had increased my level of confidence.

Even Lieutenant Martinez seemed to noticed the difference. He slapped me on the shoulder and smiled, “You are not so sick-looking this time, Commander. Not so pale!”

I doubted if he was serious about my coloring—the cabin’s interior was lighted with two overhead red bulbs. Very dim. The human eye contains two types of photoreceptors, rods and cones. Rods do not respond to red light, thus red lights do not alter our night vision.

I didn’t doubt, however, that he and his crew perceived that I was a lot happier on the ground than off. Now, though, in the rare moments I wasn’t worrying about Amelia and what Kazan’s people might be doing to her, I could actually look out onto the jungle and take some small pleasure in the vastness of it, the pure wilderness that it implied.

I knew that we had crossed into the rim of rain forest and rivers that is the beginning of the Amazon Valley, one of the earth’s last remaining wild regions. Below, there were many hundreds—perhaps thousands—of plants, insects, and even fish that had yet to be discovered or described scientifically. People, too—there were still dozens of isolated tribes that had had little or no contact with the outside world.

The thought of doing fieldwork here, of doing a fish count and finding a new species, made me long for my little lab back on Sanibel. I wanted to be back there. I wanted Amelia with me. I liked the image that played in my head: The two of us alone—her doing her work, me doing mine—joined by our proximity, but more than that, too. I liked the idea of the two of us creating our own isolated tribe and reducing our contact with the outside world. Maybe for a couple of months. Maybe a couple of years—or more.

That would be a good thing, too.

The thought that was always with me, though, was much darker. What if Kazan or Stallings had touched her? What if they’d done something to her?

The prospect made me nauseous.

If they had, I’d help put it behind her. She was one of the strong ones. Amelia would be okay. We’d be okay once we got back to Florida.

Before I could take her home, though, I had to find her.

When we were far away from civilization, we dropped down low, probably only five hundred feet or so above the tops of the trees, the pilot following the contour of the jungle.

Through the open cargo door, I could feel the temperature drop as we followed, for a time, the course of a river. I could smell the musk of rotting wood and vine, the quarry scent of fresh water.

One of Tomlinson’s favorite assertions is that for a certain type of person—both of us included—an external association with water is as important as internal consumption. Oddly, just knowing I was over water made me feel better.

But the feeling didn’t last long.

From the cockpit, I heard the pilot shout Shit, a word that, in Spanish, has an ironic, musical sound. Then he yelled, “Those sons of bitches!” as the chopper twisted suddenly to port.

I knew then that we were in trouble.

The helicopter was equipped with some kind of a radar-detection system. As the craft turned, I began to hear a steady beeping noise. I leaned to look into the cockpit and could see a flashing red light on the control panel. If I hadn’t known what the noise was, I could have guessed what it meant when the pilot began jinking wildly, making hard lefts and rights, as if trying to do evade.

The beeping alarm meant that something on the ground was tracking us.

For the Anfibios, it wasn’t so bad. Except for the commando belted to the M-60 machine gun, the rest were strapped tight onto the bench seat across from me. From old habit, though, I chose to add an extra layer of protection between my butt and the chopper’s thin armor. Any kid with a rifle can shoot up through the belly of a helicopter. From what I knew about Colombia, there were bound to be a lot of people down there with rifles. Probably eager to use them, too.

I was sitting on the briefcase that Harrington had provided me. I, too, wore a seat belt, but the surface of the briefcase was slick, and I began to slide violently one way, then the other, as the chopper jinked. I kept myself steady by holding on to the nylon strap overhead until, during a unbelievably sharp turn, the strap broke.

The fuselage of the chopper wasn’t the only thing that was outdated.

From the flight deck, the beeping horn changed to a loud, high-pitched warble, as I heard the pilot yell, “They’re firing at us, those sons of bitches just fired!”

And I thought to myself: Stinger missile.

You’re dead, Ford. Dead.

The Stinger is a man-portable, shoulder-fired, infrared, heat-seeking guided missile that travels faster than the speed of sound. It weighs less than forty pounds and comes with a disposable firing tube.

In Afghanistan, mountain people used Stingers to shoot down a couple hundred Russian MIG fighter jets. For a computer-controlled missile sufficiently sophisticated to discriminate between background clutter and an actual aircraft, this old chopper wasn’t much of a challenge.

Our door gunner had opened fire: a deafening staccato clatter, tracers streaming through the darkness, and spent brass casings ringing bell-like against the fuselage.

There was no way the gunner had a target. No way he could see what he was shooting. When the adrenaline is in you, when you’re scared, you squeeze the trigger. That simple.

Chaos.

In the cockpit, the radar alert had changed again, this time to a loud and steady shriek. I knew the missile had locked on to us and was vectoring toward the exhaust pipes of the craft’s overhead engines. There was now no escape.

We went into a steep dive, then the cabin began to rotate wildly beneath the rotor. It was a sickening replay of my previous crash landing in a helicopter. Now the nightmare was repeating itself. Could this really be happening?

I held tight to the handle of the briefcase, trying to stabilize myself, knowing that I was about to die, the realization of it roaring in my ears, feeling it as a weight on my chest.

“Hail Mary, full of grace! Hail Mary, full of grace!”

Across from me, one of the commandos was saying his catechism by rote, and I could see Lieutenant Martinez, wide-eyed, gripping his rifle for support, the centrifugal force tremendous. He held my eyes briefly: Bad, very bad.

Which is when my seat belt broke. I was ripped free, weightless, and clawed the air wildly as the velocity of my own body carried me backward, somersaulting, out the open cargo door.

Then I was tumbling in darkness … then in space, falling, falling, beneath an explosion so close that I could feel the heat, could feel the shock wave like an expanding bubble, my body tensing for impact when I would soon hit the earth.

Impaled on a tree.

That image was in my mind …

Then I did hit, crashed into a blackness, cement-hard, that crushed the wind out of me and nearly knocked me unconscious.

I came up splashing, spitting, completely disoriented until I realized what had happened: water. I was in water. I was swimming.

To my left and ahead of me, I watched the old Huey, already aflame, auger itself into the jungle. It disappeared momentarily behind a silhouette of trees, then exploded, creating a bright halo of flame.

It took me several long, bewildered seconds before I realized what had happened. When my seat belt broke, I’d been dumped out the chopper’s cargo door. I’d fallen a hundred feet or so and landed in the river we’d been following.

The river seemed to be one of those deep and narrow, slow-moving rivers. The moon had drifted toward the horizon, but there was still enough light to see that the watercourse was fifty or sixty yards wide and was bordered by a high, abrupt canyon of forest.

Deep jungle has a density that muffles sound and magnifies odor. This was deep jungle, a biosphere of vine, limb, earth. It was cellar-cool, and the river created a narrow corridor of light through the mountainous tree canopy.

Drifting there, I heard a second loud explosion, then a series of smaller explosions: ordnance going off.

The silence that followed the explosions seemed a reflective pause.

It did not last long. Soon the night was filled with sound, wild with peeping, croaking frogs, humming insects, and the howling of monkeys from distant trees. The jungle’s reply to an unusual intrusion.

I straightened my glasses, glad for the fishing line I’d used to tie them in place. Then I began to swim toward the bank where the chopper had crashed. As I did, my brain sent out the careful little search requests: Did I feel pain? Were all my body parts in place? Had I suffered some terrible injury that I was still too stunned to realize?

My left shoulder hurt like hell. I’d probably banged it on something when my seat belt broke. And my right ear was adding a tinny, roaring effect to any noise it processed.

I’d probably broken an eardrum when I hit the water.

Not the first eardrum I’ve broken.

Other that those few aches and pains, though, I felt pretty good.

As I moved toward the bank, I congratulated myself—I’d been damn lucky to survive.

The sense of good luck didn’t last. I remembered that a day from now, I had to be in the village of Remanso with a couple hundred thousand dollars in cash, or they’d kill Amelia, and the others, too—if Janet, Michael, and Grace really were still alive.

I had no idea where I was or how far I had to go to get help.

I began to swim faster.

The briefcase had been catapulted out the door with me. I found it drifting high and dry, only a few dozen yards downstream.

I used it as a float, pushing it ahead of me toward shore.

The riverbank was steep, a congestion of roots and overhanging limbs. At one place, I grabbed a low branch and tried to pull myself out. As I did, I felt what seemed to be a heavy sprinkling of sand on my face … but then the sand began to burn like tiny hot coals.

Fire ants. I was covered with them.

I dropped back into the water and submerged until they were gone.

Finally, I found an opening, and crawled out. The first thing I did was take the satellite phone from my pocket and try it—maybe Harrington had equipped me with some new generation of indestructible communications system.

But no. It didn’t work.

I tried taking out the battery and drying it. No luck.

Tossing the phone into the river seemed to underline how completely cut off I now was from what I considered the civilized world. I watched water-rings created by the phone expanding in darkness, then I walked toward the orange glow that I knew was the burning helicopter.

As I did, the sky above me disappeared. No more moonlight, no more stars. I was in a cavern of trees, the ceiling a hundred feet overhead. The canopy was so tangled that light could not penetrate, so nothing grew below. The ground was springy with rot, and slippery, too.

Yet I could still see. It was as if the jungle generated a very low-voltage luminescence. The blanket of forest overhead was black, but the trunks of individual trees were gray or pewter.

It allowed me to walk fairly quickly.

Within a few minutes, I was close enough to the crash site to hear the roar of burning aviation fuel and the crackle of burning wood.

But then I heard something else, and stopped, frozen where I stood.

I heard voices speaking a loud, drunken Spanish.

Of course. The guerrilla troops or drug runners, whoever had shot us down, would be converging on the crash site, too.

How was I going to get around them?

There were six of them: five men and a young Indio girl. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen.

The men were older, in their twenties, a couple probably in their late thirties to forties. They wore mismatched military fatigues and carried both M-16s and old Soviet-designed AK-47 assault rifles.

The girl’s skin was earthen, and she had thick black hair tied in a ponytail that hung to the middle of her back. She had a rough blanket folded over one shoulder and wore a copper-colored traditional blouse I’d seen before in South America, a garment known as a huipil. Her skirt was short, sarong-like, blue, and showed her thick legs. She was barefooted and wore bracelets on her wrists and around both ankles. On her ankles were also black decorative tattoos.