The Armada Legacy (39 page)

At the same instant that Bracca’s lifeless body hit the ground, Ben saw movement in the foliage. Serrato’s men were on them. He flipped the M4’s fire selector to full auto, braced himself and sprayed bullets into the foliage. There was a short scream, but there were more men coming, from everywhere. Muzzle flashes erupted from the dark forest. A man burst out of the bushes to the left, firing. Bark exploded from the tree right next to Ben. He felt a hard impact through his shoulder and knew the hunting rifle had taken a hit. He rolled. Fired. Saw the man fall back into the greenery.

‘Come on!’ he yelled at Nico. The Colombian staggered to his feet. Bracca’s knife was still stuck deep in his leg and he was bleeding badly. Ben grabbed him and hauled him into the bushes. One glance at his hunting rifle showed him the terminal damage to the bolt from the bullet hit. He tossed the dead weight away.

Bursts of gunfire came thick and fast as he half dragged, half carried the Colombian in the direction of the track and the Ford pickup. Nico screamed out in pain at every step. Bullets whipped all around them, trembling the foliage as they ran.

Ben knew the M4’s magazine was half depleted by now, but if he didn’t drive their attackers back under cover there was no way to outpace them. He turned to let off another short burst. An instant before he squeezed the trigger, he caught a glimpse of one of them. The lean-faced, dark-haired man didn’t look like the others. The suit he was wearing was stained with sweat and dirt, but it was an expensive tailor-made item that nobody would wear in the jungle. In the fraction of a second that Ben locked eyes with the man, he knew he was looking at Ramon Serrato.

He fired. The man dived for cover behind a tree as Ben’s bullets ripped up the greenery. Then it was Ben who had to duck down as a sustained blast of fire came back at him in reply.

Ben’s gun was just about empty. But peering ahead through the trees, he could make out a splash of red behind the green. He realised they’d almost made it to the pickup truck. ‘Come on,’ he grunted, yanking Nico on a few yards more.

‘Leave me,’ Nico gasped.

‘Forget it,’ Ben said. He turned and let off another short burst behind them. The gun chattered and jolted in his hand, and then suddenly stopped. The bolt had locked back: empty magazine.

Ben tossed the weapon away. He grasped Nico with both hands and hauled him the rest of the way to the truck. He ripped open the passenger door. As he bundled Nico inside, the passenger window exploded in a shower of glass fragments. Another bullet punched a silver-edged hole into the red steel of the Ford’s wing.

Ben leaped behind the wheel. He twisted the ignition and prayed the bullet hadn’t penetrated the truck’s vitals. It hadn’t. The engine burst into life and Ben slammed it into drive. The windscreen blew apart, stinging him with glass.

He stamped on the gas and the Ford’s wheels threw up a fountain of dirt as he hurled it into a tight U-turn to head back up the track the way they’d come. Bullets punched through the doors and scored the roof and blew off a side mirror. Ben kept his head down and his foot on the pedal, and the figures of the men bursting out of the trees in their wake and firing at them shrank smaller and smaller in the mirror. He threw the pickup round a bend and the bullets stopped.

Nico was bent double in the passenger seat, crying out in agony at every lurch of the truck over the ruts, clutching at his leg where the bone hilt of Bracca’s knife was protruding from the wound. Even in the dim light of the cab Ben could tell it was a serious one, well beyond his ability to stitch up himself. Blood was all over the seats. Nico’s face was ghostly pale and covered in sweat. ‘The gun didn’t go off,’ he groaned over the engine noise and the crashing of the suspension.

‘You had a duff primer,’ Ben said. ‘It happens.’

‘You should’ve let me kill him, man. He was mine.’

‘He’s dead. That’s what matters.’

‘You ain’t gonna do that to me with Serrato,’ Nico said in a tortured moan. ‘I gotta kill Serrato myself. Gotta! Understand?’

‘Not with that knife in you,’ Ben told him. ‘You’ll be dead yourself pretty fast if we don’t get you to a doctor.’

Nico gasped in pain. ‘Fuck the knife. You promise me, hear?’

‘Fine,’ Ben muttered as the pickup truck hit another rut and the suspension bottomed out with a crash. When he glanced at Nico again, he saw that he’d passed out.

Ben kept driving. He felt the supercharged adrenaline rush of the skirmish with Serrato’s men slowly subside. It left him with nothing but a dead, despairing feeling.

Brooke was still out there somewhere. Lost, frightened, defenceless; totally vulnerable. All alone in the vastness of a jungle it would take a man the rest of his life to search.

There was no way he could possibly find her.

Chapter Fifty-One

The day was already more than half gone. Dark clouds hung over San Tomás. As Ben wandered aimlessly through the town, the first patter of rain quickly ramped up to become another of the region’s unimaginable deluges, until mud rivers ran through the streets and everyone but the blond-haired stranger was driven under cover.

For the last several hours Nico had been under the care of the kindly Dr Rocha, who operated the struggling one-roomed clinic in San Tomás, the only medical facility for miles up and down the river, with his sister Graça. By the time Ben had delivered him into their hands, Nico had lost a great deal of blood and was in a virtual coma. The doctor had found the knife blade’s razor-sharp edge pressing right up against Nico’s femoral artery. Another millimetre of pressure and it could have ruptured. Nico would have bled to death in minutes.

Removing the knife and patching up the deep wound had been a long job that had used up most of the clinic’s medical supplies and left Dr Rocha looking almost as spent as his patient. Graça had changed the dressing on Nico’s arm, frowning a little at Ben’s stitching job but asking no questions. Ben had sat with Nico a while as he slept, then wandered outside to try to get some air and pull his thoughts together. He ambled through the streets, soaked to the skin by the hammering rain. There were a few drops left in his whisky flask. He gulped them down and barely even felt them.

Never before in his career rescuing kidnap victims had he resorted to calling in help from the authorities. It went against all his experience and judgement – but this time he couldn’t see any other way. It was going to take a large-scale operation, both on the ground and in the air, to comb an area of the size he was dealing with.

But then there was Ramon Serrato to consider. If half the things Nico had told Ben were true, the former drug lord had connections at the highest levels of government here. What if a well-organised mass search did succeed in finding Brooke alive? Ben had seen corruption in action plenty of times before, and South America was even more notorious for it than the most volatile and dangerous parts of Africa and the Middle East. He knew how easy it would be for a man of Serrato’s influence to arrange for someone to put a bullet in her head before she ever left the jungle. And Ben’s, too, if he tried to stand in the way. There was a decent chance that if he called in the authorities, he was signing her death warrant. He had to balance that against the virtual certainty that if he didn’t, the end result would be the same. A lose-lose situation.

And all that was assuming she wasn’t dead already.

The rain was pounding more heavily than ever. Ben slowed his pace and came to a standstill in four inches of muddy water. It was the sight of the corrugated-iron shed, San Tomás’s only bar just across the street, that had stopped him. He paused briefly, then headed towards it. He needed something more than those last few drops from his flask to blunt the edge of his anxiety.

The place was almost as empty as it had been before. The same barman was cleaning up using the same dirty cloth. Two drunks were talking loudly in Spanish at a table in the corner. Ben didn’t glance at them as he walked up to the bar and ordered whatever was the strongest drink they had. The barman served him up a fingerprint-covered glass of something that looked like vodka but was about twice as fiery. Ben drained it and asked for another. A double this time.

‘Hey!’ one of the drunks called from across the room. ‘Chief, it’s you! Thought maybe you’d got ate up by a croc.’

Ben turned from the bar and realised that it was Pepe, the riverboat pilot. He and his drinking companion, who looked to be a full-blooded Indian, had been there long enough to amass a large collection of empty beer bottles. Both seemed pretty far gone. Ben was intent on going the same route, and he could do it in a quarter of the time with whatever this clear stuff was in his glass.

‘Come on over, chief,’ Pepe slurred. ‘Have a drink with me and my cousin Cayo here.’

Ben didn’t feel like company. Besides, he could see that both Cayo and Pepe were plainly upset about something. He just smiled and raised his glass, then turned his back and returned to his own thoughts. Talking to the British Embassy in Lima might not be easy with the limited communications from San Tomás. The best way might be to call Jeff Dekker, fill him in on the situation and get him to liaise with them. Amal would have to be told, too …

As Ben struggled with his plans, the inebriated Spanish conversation between Pepe and Cayo went on in the background.

‘This is fucking bad,’ Pepe muttered.

‘Like I said,’ Cayo slurred in between gulps of beer, ‘I’m only telling you what my buddy Angel told me. Word’s spreading up and down the river since this morning.’

Pepe shook his head. ‘Fuck. How many dead they reckon?’

‘Angel says twenty, maybe more. Reckons they were Sapaki people.’

‘Angel’s Murunahua, ain’t he? Then how’d he figure that?’

Cayo shrugged. ‘’Cause a bunch of Sapaki people turned up at his village this morning talking about their relations that’d been killed. Warned the Murunahuas about what’s happening. Whole region’s shit scared.’

‘Fuck,’ Pepe said again. ‘Someone’s got to act, man.’

Cayo gave a snort. ‘Yeah, sure. But who? Cops? Ministry? Forget it, man. Just the way it is. Been going on forever, keep going on forever. Who gonna give a shit about a buncha dead Indians? We ain’t nothing to nobody.’

Pepe stabbed his finger on the table. ‘Fuck that shit, man, there’s gotta be something someone can do. Can’t just take it up the ass like that, it ain’t right.’

‘Indians been taking it up the ass for generations, man,’ Cayo said morosely. ‘What else is there to do, start a war?’

‘They got shotguns, don’t they?’

‘Not these guys, they don’t. Sapaki don’t have nothing to do with that shit. All they got is bows and arrows and blowpipes and shit.’

‘No wonder they got fucked over, man,’ Pepe insisted. ‘Some marauding asshole walks into a faceful of buckshot, he’s gonna think twice before he comes onto your patch again. Darts and arrows? Ain’t gonna cut it. This isn’t the fucking Inca Kingdom no more. You gotta get with the times.’

His cousin made a resigned gesture. ‘So what’s changed? Same old, same old. Oil guys gonna take it all away in the end, just like the Spanish did back in the day. And if it ain’t the oil guys it gonna be the loggers, the beefburger ranchers, whatever. Can’t stop the tide, cuz.’

‘That’s fucked,’ Pepe said, shaking his head. There was a pause as they both reached for their beers. ‘So what’re the Sapaki doing calling on the Murunahuas, anyhow? My father knew some of ’em, said they didn’t like to mix with no-one. I ain’t never heard of them coming that far down the river.’

‘Came to get serum. That’s what Angel told me, leastways.’

‘Snakebite?’

‘No, man, spider. The white preacher, he sent ’em for it in his boat. They’s in a real hurry, too, Angel said.’

‘The preacher? That dried-up old fart still alive?’ Pepe chuckled, and they shared a brief laugh. ‘Since when the Sapaki need serum for a bite? Their own cures don’t work no more?’

‘Sure they work,’ Cayo said. ‘They just don’t reckon on they work for a white person, is all. Goes against their beliefs.’

‘You saying it was the preacher got bit?’

‘Nah, man, nothing bite that old iron-butt motherfucker and live. White woman got bit.’

‘Preacher got a woman now? You kidding me, right?’

‘Nah, man, preacher ain’t got no woman. Talking about the woman they found.’

‘Like a tourist?’

Cayo shrugged. ‘I never asked, Angel never said. All I know is, they found her.’

‘She dead?’

‘Wasn’t dead this morning when they came for the serum, I guess.’

Pepe nodded solemnly. ‘Guess that figures.’

Both of them turned and looked up, suddenly aware of the presence by their table. Neither had noticed Ben leave the bar and cross the room. He was standing there, staring at them.

‘Hey, chief,’ Pepe said with a beaming smile. ‘You come to join us after all?

Chapter Fifty-Two

Nico was awake, propped up against his pillow in the tiny ward at the San Tomás medical clinic, when Ben burst in. ‘Hey,’ Nico greeted him in a faint voice.

‘How’s the leg?’ Ben asked.

‘Hurts like a sonofabitch. Doc says I’ll be okay, though. Guess I have you to thank for that.’

‘Yeah, well, I came to say goodbye. I’m leaving.’

‘Leaving?’

‘I know where she is.’

Nico sat up in bed, blinking. ‘Whoa. Say
what?
’

Ben quickly explained what he’d found out from Pepe and his cousin about the Sapaki tribe’s discovery of a white woman in the jungle. ‘You think it’s her?’ Nico asked in amazement. ‘Is she all right?’

‘I won’t know anything for sure until I get there,’ Ben replied. ‘Pepe’s getting the boat ready right now. We’re setting off in a few minutes.’

‘Where are these Sap—?’

‘Sapaki. Deep in the forest, two or three hours upriver. They keep themselves to themselves.’

‘You know what
that
means. Better pray they don’t stick your gringo ass in a cauldron and boil you up for their dinner.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Ben said. ‘Seems they’re related to the tribe we came across. Those people didn’t look too hostile to me.’