Heart of Fire (12 page)

The howlers began their serenade, and as if on cue everyone swung into action. While breakfast was being cooked, Kates came over to the lead boat, with Rick right on his heels.

"That was some firelight last night," Rick said excitedly, still caught up in the rehashing of the event.

Ben sighed. He tended to take it personally when someone shot at him, but Rick had obviously built the skirmish up in his head until it was on the same level as the Battle of the Bulge. Ben wasn't in the mood to listen to it again. His head was still hurting where Jillian had pulled his hair, and frankly he was pissed.

"It was minor," he growled. "Except to the bastard I shot. With a wound like that in this climate, he might not make it back to Manaus to see a doctor, even if there is one willing to treat scum like him."

"Will you have trouble about that when we get back?" Kates asked with a concern that Ben didn't believe for a minute.

He gave him an incredulous look. "For shooting a river pirate? This isn't the first time it's happened and won't be the last." Irritated, he turned away. "Breakfast is almost ready. Let's get moving."

Kates smirked as he and Rick went back to the second boat. "The bastard's worried," he half whispered, "and trying not to let us see it. That's why he's so touchy this morning. He probably killed that man, river pirate or not."

Rick paused and looked at Lewis standing in the bow of the lead boat, studying the river. "I don't think that's it. Joaquim said last night that Lewis is famous on the river for handling these problems, and that the authorities steer clients to him because he'll take care of 'em. That don't sound like he gets in trouble for it."

Kates's cold eyes flicked at him. "You're spending a lot of time with the greasers," he said. "They're filling you full of hot air." He boarded the boat, blond hair gleaming in the soft morning light. He couldn't tolerate it when an idiot like Sherwood contradicted him.

They were soon continuing upriver. Ben was satisfyingly surly, and Jillian knew he was still smarting. It served him right. If she hadn't pulled his hair, he probably would have done something extremely embarrassing.

He was in such a fit of pique that she hadn't properly appreciated his gesture of admiration that he scarcely spoke for the next several days. Ben, she decided, was a sulker. He would instantly turn sunny again if she approached him and cuddled up to show how sexy she found him, but for now he was behaving as if he had offered her his favorite toy—come to think of it, he had—and she had spurned it. She bit her lip so often to keep from snickering that it became sore.

But even though he was pouting, he was still protective of her. She thought some of it was show for Kates's benefit. He wasn't always around, but the men talked to one another whenever they halted, so presumably those on the second boat knew that Ben kept a sharp eye on her. He always warned her away from the railing well before they hit any even slightly rough spots in the water, he slept between her and the other men at night, and he made certain none of them bothered her when she was bathing or attending to other functions in the closet-sized toilet cubicle.

She knew the interpretation the others would put on his behavior, but her own view was more cynical. She was the only one who knew how to get to the Stone City, Ben would take very good care of her for that reason alone.

By the tenth day on the river, Jillian began paying very close attention to the passing jungle and studying the course of the river. Sometimes she retired to a corner by herself, pulled out some papers, and worked at her indecipherable notes. They had to be getting close to the place where they should put ashore. It might take them another two to four days to reach it, but she wanted to make certain they didn't pass it by due to carelessness on her part.

"Tell me if you want to slow down so you can study a particular place," Ben said, abandoning his sulk in favor of taking care of business. He had immediately noticed the change in her behavior now that they were so far upriver. They had to be getting close to the point where they would leave the boats and continue by land. It had been two days since they had passed the last settlement, and they had seen only one raft in the same length of time. The jungle was pressing in closer as the river narrowed, and the air, if anything, was even hotter and more humid. At noon it was almost impossible to breathe. By his reckoning, they were dead on the equator.

They were also heading toward the mountains. The great Amazon basin was mostly flat, but the Rio Negro rose out of mountains that extended into Colombia and Venezuela. Green, mysterious mountains, largely unexplored. The Ya-nomami tribe had been discovered in those mountains not so many years ago, after living isolated for centuries in Stone Age conditions.

Jillian didn't look away from the jungle. "The river forks again not too far from here, doesn't it?"

He laughed. "According to the aerial maps. I've never been this far up, sweetcakes. Nothing up here except isolated Indian tribes, who may or may not have ever seen a white man before and who may or may not be headhunters."

She ignored that last comment. "Take the left fork."

"Yes, ma'am. And then what?"

"I'll tell you when I see it."

When he thought about it, he realized that she hadn't been exactly straight with him when she indicated on the map the area that they would be going into, the distrustful little wench. But she was smart; he had to give her that. With the information she
had
given him, he had laid in sufficient supplies to get them to where they really were going.

An hour later they reached the fork, and Ben took the left one. Navigation was trickier now that the river was getting shallower and narrower with every passing mile, and he cut the engines back until they were barely making headway. Jillian stood in the bow, leaning over the rail in mingled anxiety and eagerness, searching for the landmark. Ben said sharply, "Don't lean over like that. If we hit a snag you'll go overboard."

Obediently she moved back, but it was difficult to restrain herself. She was afraid she would miss the sign, afraid she hadn't decoded the professor's notes correctly, even though she had repeated the process several different times to check herself.

Ben appeared beside her, and she looked back to see that Pepe had taken the wheel. Immediately she jerked her head back around. What if she had missed it, in that split second when she looked at Pepe?

"Tell me something," Ben drawled. "If Carvajal went up the Amazon and found the Anzar, why are we going up the Rio Negro? I realize you haven't told me the truth about anything so far, but there's no reason now not to tell me, is there?"

"I just didn't go into all the detail when I was telling you about Carvajal's journal. Orellana and the men on his expedition had a brief skirmish with the Tapua tribe, and the Indian women fought alongside their men. Carvajal called them Amazons."

He sighed. "So you made up all of that about the Anzar?"

"No. There are more sources for it than just Carvajal. There's the incident with the Tapua, which most people think is how the name came about. But there were other sources, other tales, about a separate tribe of warrior women deep in the interior. The Anzar. The names, Anzar and Amazon, are similar. It's easy to see how the tales about the Anzar would be discounted as Amazonian myth."

"It's still pretty damn easy to discount them," he muttered.

She smiled, her eyes on the horizon. "Don't you see? It doesn't matter. What matters is that if the Stone City exists, then I've proven Dad right. It doesn't matter if the tribe was made up of warrior women or a normal mix of male and female. What's important is that I'll have found proof of a lost city, a lost civilization."

"So an army of one-eyed bandits could have lived there for all you care?"

"Exactly, though that would bring to mind the old myths about Cyclopes."

"I think I have all the myths I can handle here. Forget about the one-eyed bandits."

She straightened abruptly. "Here!" she said.

"Here?"

"Yes,
here
!" She whirled toward him. "Here, damn it!"

He gave a quick, disbelieving look at the impenetrable tangle on the banks and said, "My opinion exactly," before he yelled a command to Pepe, who instantly turned the boat toward shore.

There wasn't a good place to leave the boats, but Ben hid them as best he could, pulling them into a cove and securing them with chains to sturdy trees. Even so, he was well aware that the boats were just as likely as not to be missing when they returned. It was a problem he'd foreseen, though, so they dragged two large, inflatable rafts about fifty yards inland and hid them, too.

The tangle of vegetation was always thickest on the riverbanks, where more sunlight was available; they had to hack their way off the boats, but once they were in the dimness under the triple canopy, they found it much easier to move around. Plant life didn't linger on the jungle floor; it had to reach upward, toward the sunlight, to survive. It was a different world under the canopy, a world of climbing orchids and still, humid air. Giant buttressed roots anchored trees whose limbs stretched far overhead, lost in a sea of green. The brightest noon became a twilight in this dim world where vegetation reigned; thick liana vines trailed from overhead, sometimes swaying with the invisible movements of monkeys far above. Occasionally a ray of sunlight would dapple the leaves. Sound seemed to flatten and die; though they could hear the chirping and chattering of the jungle denizens, it had a muted, faraway quality to it. The jungle had the same hushed expectancy as a cathedral.

Jillian worked with the men to unload the boats. Each of them would carry a pack that included their own lightweight tent, a foam sleeping pad, their personal belongings, and some of the general supplies. The remaining supplies would be loaded onto four two-man litters, to be carried by the eight helpers. Ben had also left enough supplies with the rafts to get them back to Manaus.

It took most of the remaining hours of daylight to unload the boat and divide the supplies, so rather than push on, Ben decided they'd spend the night there. They set up the tents in their first inland camp and built a fire. They would leave the alcohol stoves behind, as they added too much weight. Henceforth, they would cook on a campfire.

Late in the afternoon Kates left the camp to attend to a call of nature. Less than two minutes later they heard his hoarse scream. Ben grabbed his shotgun and plunged in the direction of the screams, with everyone else streaming behind him.

The vegetation was so dense that Kates hadn't gone far. Jillian plainly heard Ben say, "It isn't poisonous."

"Goddammit, don't tell me it isn't poisonous!" Kates was screaming when they all got there. "It's a coral snake!"

"False coral," Ben said patiently. "It's a river snake. Unless you're small enough for it to swallow, you aren't in any danger. Just calm down, and from now on carry a stick with you."

The Brazilians were already heading back to camp, trying to hide their smiles. Jillian turned to do the same, and bumped into Dutra.

Instantly she jumped back, her stomach roiling with distaste at having touched him. She hadn't realized he was standing so close behind her, though as his rank smell rose to her nostrils she wondered how she could have missed him. He didn't say anything, just grinned at her, showing his stained teeth. The long incisors made a chill prickle her spine. His eyes were flat and malevolent as he stared at her breasts; Jillian had the sickening intuition that he was thinking of biting them.

She started to hurry back to the camp, but then halted. Though the tents were only about twenty yards away, the thick vegetation would hide her from view for most of the way. With Dutra so close, there was no way she would take the chance of being caught alone even for those few steps. Instead, she deliberately stepped close to Ben's side. He gave her a surprised look; then his gaze slid to Dutra, and she saw instant understanding replace the surprise.

He slipped his arm around her waist. Jillian thought wryly that she should have expected that. Ben Lewis wasn't one to let any opportunity pass.

Leaving Kates there to accomplish what had been interrupted by his sighting of the snake, they turned back to the camp. Dutra was nowhere in sight, and she was surprised at how silently he could move.

Ben squeezed her waist. "All right?" he asked in a low voice.

"Sure," she replied, giving him a grateful smile. "I was just being cautious."

"Smart girl."

He halted when they could just see the tents through the foliage, holding her in place beside him. "I'm going to kiss you," he murmured, already bending his head. "Play along."

Play along, indeed. Caught in his strong arms before she could react, she didn't have much choice. She tried to protest, but then his lips were on hers, and he slipped his tongue into her mouth before she could prevent it.

A wild shudder of pleasure racked her, and she had the disjointed thought that it should be against the law for anyone to kiss the way Ben Lewis did. She knew she should push him away, but couldn't resist the temptation to let herself enjoy the moment. She wound her arms around his brawny neck and sank against him, reveling in the hardness of his muscled body.

He made a rough sound of surprise and satisfaction in his throat and gathered her even closer, adjusting her hips to fit his. One hand slipped down to squeeze her buttocks.