Titanoboa Page 16

  He dropped the pack and began throwing things out. No weapons were inside, and most of the supplies were unnecessary for getting through the jungle as fast as possible. He kept the water, the food, and the night-vision goggles. He strapped the goggles to his wrist and tucked a canteen in the front of his trousers and an MRE in the back. Millard did the same, and they left the pack on the trail as they started again.

  “We have no idea how long snakes can live,” Millard said. “Can you imagine how old something like that might be? With no natural predators, it could be hundreds of years old.”

  Mark stopped and turned to him, looking him in the eyes. “Craig, I don’t want to hear about that thing anymore. All I want to hear is if you have any idea how the hell to get us out of this jungle. If you don’t, then keep it to yourself.”

  Millard looked hurt, and Mark instantly felt bad. Millard had been kind to him, and he didn’t deserve that.

  “Look, I’m sorry. This is all just too much for me. I’m not handling it well.”

  “It’s okay. I’m sorry, too. I get excited about it. I’ve devoted my life to studying snakes, and the granddaddy of them all just appeared in front of us. It’s like a paleontologist finding a live T-Rex or something.”

  “I know, and I’m sure you’ll have plenty of time to study them later. But for now, let’s just focus on staying alive.”

  35

  By midmorning, the heat had returned. Not that it ever really left, but with the addition of the sun, the jungle became a boiling caldron. They drained the water in the canteens fairly quickly, and Millard asked if there were any rivers with clean water nearby.

  “I don’t know,” Mark said. “I’ve never been in this far.”

  The more they walked, and the more they sweat, the more exhausted they became. Mark’s muscles tightened up, and each movement grew more difficult because of the dehydration. His lips were dry and would soon crack and bleed, releasing even more of his precious moisture. He could take these conditions a couple of days, maybe even one more than that, but if they were lost for too long, the snakes would be the least of their concerns.

  The snakes.

  As soon as Mark thought that word, it sent a small shiver up his spine. He had momentarily, in the pain and fatigue of forced exertion, forgotten about what he had seen. With that single word, it came back to him. The man’s pale flesh as his brains spattered out as though being shot from a small cannon, the blood that splashed on the snake’s slick black flesh, the fangs like butcher knives, and the enormous murky gullet of which Mark only caught a glimpse when it opened its mouth and took the man in.

  The scene was so gruesome, so outside the bounds of anything Mark had ever expected to see, he would never be the same. Something had happened that changed the way he saw the world and his place in it. He wondered if people with post-traumatic stress disorder felt that way.

  “What’s that smell?” Millard said.

  “I don’t know.”

  Mark had picked up the scent a long time ago. Like a tangy exhaust in the air. Almost citric.

  Millard stopped by the side of the trail, his gaze on the trees. Mark glanced over and at first didn’t see anything out of place then noticed what Millard was glaring at. The trees appeared pale. The leaves were a light green in splotches, white in others, as though losing their color. The bark was falling off in small pieces, like chipping paint.

  “Are you looking at the trees?” Mark said.

  “These flora are all sick. They’re dying.”

  “From what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They stood in front of the trees a while, and the more Mark watched them, the more he understood what Millard meant. The trees’ pallor, in any living creature, meant only one thing: impending death.

  “Let’s keep going,” Mark said.

  “I’m not sure we should go in this direction. The smell’s coming from this way.”

  The only other option was to turn around. That meant backtracking almost two days and passing that… thing again. “We’ve got no choice. I’m not turning around.”

  Millard breathed for a bit before answering. “Yeah, me neither.”

  The trail widened as they progressed, and the undergrowth thinned. The trees appeared paler the farther they went, until many were just withered, dying husks.

  As they approached an open clearing, the smell in the air became nearly unbearable. Mark had never smelled anything like it before, but it had a familiarity to it. Like the black exhaust that had hung over Los Angeles in the ’80s.

  As they approached the clearing, they came across a rocky hill, what could’ve been a small mountain with a flat top. Around the base crews of workers operated heavy machinery. And just off from the base, workers occupied a large pit. About six inches of dirty water filled the bottom, and the workers had formed a line, sifting through the water and passing things back along the line. They loaded whatever it was they had found onto the backs of utility trucks.

  “Gold,” Millard whispered.

  Mark ducked low to avoid being seen. Millard remained standing, wiping the sweat from his brow, and Mark grabbed him and pulled him down. “A gold mine?” Mark said. “In the middle of the jungle?”

  “Some of the best gold mines in the world are in jungles. Look at that, though.” He pointed to the outskirts of the mine. “All the vegetation is dead.”

  Mark followed the perimeter of the mine with his eyes. All the trees, the shrubs, vines, bushes, flowers, and grass were dead. Nothing but brown matter covering bare dirt.

  “That’s from cyanide,” Millard whispered. “It’s called gold cyanidation. It’s the most efficient technique for extracting gold, but it releases cyanide into the air. It gets into the plants and water, the animals eat the plants, and the people eat the animals. Cyanidation is illegal in most countries. I’ve fought it in the Brazilian rainforests because it was killing off the local amphibian life.”

  Mark was quiet a moment. “This is what they’re hiding. It’s not about oil at all. The oil was a distraction.”

  Millard shook his head. “Clever. They’re gonna pull as much gold as they can and in the process kill this entire jungle. I’ve seen it before. The inhabitants, even on the shores, won’t be able to use the jungle for anything. It’ll just become mounds of dirt. Even the soil gets poisoned and won’t grow anything.”

  Mark was mumbling, more to himself than Millard. “This is why they couldn’t let me or Riki know about—”

  Riki.

  She was back at camp by herself. Mark couldn’t even guess as to how much money VN could make on an illegal gold mine where they paid no taxes or import/export fees. He had already seen to what lengths they would go to protect their interests here.

  “We have to get back to camp,” Mark said.

  “Are you nuts? We gotta get outta here and alert someone about this.”

  “Who?”

  “The UN and then Interpol. I bet there are people in the Fijian government that would flip out if they knew all this gold was being taken and no taxes were being paid.”

  “I don’t care about that right now. Riki’s at the camp by herself. If they tried to kill me, they’ll try to kill her.”

  Millard wiped his nose with the back of his finger. “We can’t walk back. I don’t have it in me.”

  “These workers aren’t walking. There’s gotta be some Jeeps or something nearby.” Mark scanned the mine. “But I don’t see anything.”

  “I think the workers were picked up every day.”

  Mark sat down onto the dirt. “Then we’ll wait here for our ride.”

  36

  Other than lack of conversation, the administrative tent wasn’t the worst place Riki had been forced to spend time. Once, while on assignment in North Korea—an assignment she’d only taken because she was young and stupid enough to believe her government would actually do anything if she were caught and arrested—the police had detained her.

  They figured
out she was a reporter when she had been asking a nearly blind man a series of questions. The medical facilities in North Korea were non-existent, a fact that Kim Jong Il had blamed on the West, using propaganda to inform his people the West had blockaded North Korea and was not letting in medical supplies. An accusation whose opposite was actually true. The United States tried desperately to donate medical supplies and medicines, which Kim Jong Il refused.

  The nearly blind man had had surgery recently. A British doctor had been allowed into the country to perform several glaucoma and other eye surgeries. At his own expense, of course.

  The operation restored the man’s vision, and when Riki asked him how he felt about the British doctor who had risked his life and spent his own money to help him, the man replied that he hoped the doctor had been arrested and put on trial for being a Western spy. Then he praised his leader and thanked him for the marvelous gift bestowed upon him.

  Riki had never seen that kind of blind devotion, and it frightened her to her core. Everything human about the man, his compassion, his reason and independence, had been taken away from him. He was a slave. A man that had submitted to a slavery machine very willingly and accepted his lot.

  Her questions prompted the man’s wife to call the police. They arrested Riki and held her in detention for nearly a week. They gave her a room of bare cement walls with bars and nothing else. Not even a toilet or sink. They brought food to her, all stale or rotten of course, and allowed her to use a rank bathroom once every other day. At night, she heard the screams of other women held in the facility as they were raped or beaten.

  When they finally released her, due more to the efforts of the Los Angeles Times than the United States government, she took a hiatus from her career. She wasn’t certain she was willing to endure the horrible things journalists went through for a story. One journalist she knew had been gang raped by nearly two hundred men in Egypt’s Tahrir Square. They were shouting that she was a Jew and she deserved it. She only survived because a non-profit group that had been there to attempt to reduce the number of sexual assaults used flamethrowers on her attackers to get them to back down.

  Riki did not believe that any story could possibly be worth that risk, and since then, she had gone to freelance and investigative journalism, rather than covering anything to do with geopolitics or war, the two fields in which most reporters liked to specialize.

  Given all that, her circumstances here at the camp were not that bad, and she was at least grateful for that. Though whether she was going to survive or not still hadn’t been determined.

  By evening, she was thoroughly bored. They’d brought her food once, but other than the two guards stationed inside the tent with her, they left her alone.

  “Could I at least get a deck of cards to play solitaire or something?”

  The men glanced to each other but didn’t respond, and she realized they didn’t speak English. Riki sighed and sat down in a chair, leaning her head back. At least Mark and Steven would be back in a few hours, and that would—

  “Hello, Riki.”

  Steven stepped inside the tent. Dirt covered him, with stains on his neck and face. He set down on a desk the rifle he was holding before he took off his canvas vest and slung it over a chair. He sat down as he exhaled loudly and closed his eyes.

  “Boy I tell ya, if you’re on your feet all day, nothing feels quite as good as just sitting your ass down in a chair for a minute.”

  “Where’s Mark?”

  “Well, here’s the thing, Mark got some crazy ideas in his head. I don’t know what exactly, something about us being an evil corporation and violating laws or something. Damn fool just ran off into the jungle.”

  Riki swallowed. “Is he dead, Steven?”

  “I just told you he ran off into the jungle. You got shit in your ears or something?”

  “Where in the jungle? Is he alive?”

  “I doubt it. You see, these snakes, they’re getting more active. Have been the past few weeks. Think it might have something to do with the blasts we’re doing in the center of the island. The damn snakes have been coming closer and closer to camp. We even had a few people taken right outta their tents, though I hid that up pretty well. So I don’t think lover boy’s chances of surviving out there without any weapons are very good.”

  She shook her head. “Why? Why are you doing this?”

  He slipped out a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. He lit one, inhaled, and let the smoke billow out of his nose. “Because I’m paid to protect certain people and certain things. Protection doesn’t just involve physical protection; it involves protecting information, too. Information that you want to take.”

  “I don’t want anything from you. I just want to go home.”

  He exhaled another puff. “See, now that’s where we have a problem. I know you know something, but the only way to ensure you tell me is to get it out of you.”

  “What’re you talking about? I don’t know anything. I told what’s-his-name last night everything I knew.”

  He took out a hunting knife from his boot and placed it on the desk before leaning back in the seat. “Lemme finish this cigarette, and I guess we’ll find out.”

  37

  Evening fell quickly over the jungle. Mark and Millard hadn’t really spoken. Small talk about jobs or where they’d grown up seemed ridiculous, so they remained quiet and watched the workers.

  The labor was backbreaking. Mark couldn’t imagine working like that day in and day out. The men seemed to take it stoically, barely stopping even to take a drink of water. Mark watched them until he grew bored, then he closed his eyes and lay back in the dirt. He stared at the sky as it changed from blue, to gray, to black. When night had nearly fallen, he heard a whistle and the work stopped.

  Mark got to his feet. Millard was snoring loudly, and Mark lightly kicked at him. “Let’s go. Quitting time.”

  They trudged down a hill, careful to go down the farthest side to avoid being seen. Once they were near the pit, they simply melded in with the crowd and followed them out to a loading zone where large trucks allowed them to climb into the beds. Mark climbed into one and helped Millard up. They sat on the side in silence, neither one with the strength left even to speak. Mark felt like he was dying a slow death from exhaustion and knew he could’ve fallen asleep right there. It took everything he had to fight that urge.

  Mark hadn’t seen the road they traversed. It was smooth, not paved over but almost like the dirt had been flattened to allow for easier travel. The road led straight through the jungle but never narrowed and was never bumpy. It had taken some time and effort to clear out this path.

  As the jungle canopy enveloped them, Mark simply couldn’t fight anymore. He was about to ask Millard to help him stay awake, but the professor’s mouth was open, and he was snoring again.

  Mark closed his eyes and was gone.

  38

  Steven finished his cigarette in silence, and Riki realized it was packed with marijuana. The pungent smoke filled the tent, giving everything a gray haze. She knew the smell well from college, but she had forgotten about it. A scent buried deep in her mind somewhere that brought up memories of running to classes she was always late for and awkward fumblings with boys in her dorm room.

  When he finished the cigarette, he put it out then stood up and stretched from side to side. He picked up the knife and let it dangle in his fingers. He had changed. He’d seemed friendly before, almost kind. Now his eyes held something completely different. Something akin to a hungry animal staring at food.

  “You don’t need to do this,” Riki said. “I’ve already told you everything.”

  He nodded but still took a step forward.

  “Steven, stop. Stop it, you’re scaring me.”

  He grinned, his eyes bloodshot and glassy. He stood over her, the knife at his side. The blade reflected the lights in the tent and glimmered brightly. Riki couldn’t take her eyes off it. No matter how much she tried to look up at
the red-rimmed eyes, to reason with them, to buy herself more time, she couldn’t do it. Her gaze refused to move from the knife.

  “Steven…”

  “You know, I killed only one woman before. In the Sudan, back there ’bout five years ago. She was giving us a helluva time, ’cause we’d killed her husband. She even slapped me. Right there in front of my men.” He chuckled. “Ten of us standing there armed to the teeth, and she thought she could get away with it. Anyway, I shot her in the face. Point blank, closer than you are to me now. I saw that light go out of her eyes and her body crumpled, kinda like puppets do when the puppeteer leaves. I tell you, girl, killin’ a woman is a lot different than killin’ a man. No matter what they tell you.” He held up the blade. “But you’re the first I’m gonna be real up close and personal with.”

  He took a step forward, and Riki’s heart dropped into her stomach.

  Before he could make a move, a scream tore through the air. It was coming from outside. Steven turned around, staring out the flap of the tent. He hesitated a moment then walked over.

  In a flash, Riki was on her feet. She grabbed the rifle he’d laid down on the desk and swung it at him like a baseball bat. The butt of the rifle slammed into the back of his head. He flew forward, collapsing against the entrance flap. Half his body lay outside and half in. She hadn’t knocked him unconscious, but he was disoriented. Riki jumped over him. He reached up, his right hand catching her calf. She kicked him in the face. His grip loosened, and she pulled away then ran.

  The camp was in chaos, men running with no method to what they were doing. No dash for an exit. Everyone was just sprinting, and it didn’t seem to matter which direction.

  She raced past the tents so quickly she fell. She caught herself, and gravel stung as it cut into her palms. As she stood up, she wiped her palms on her pants and ran again. Some of the tents looked familiar, and she realized she was running by her own tent. She didn’t know what was happening. The chaos was such that no one would’ve told her anyway. Panic had taken hold, like a herd of cattle in a stampede.