Titanoboa (14 page)

24

The cot was surprisingly comfortable to sleep on. It dipped lightly like a hammock and at times
felt as though it weren’t touching his skin at all. Mark slept well past shower time and even breakfast. He was still soundly snoring when Riki poked her head into his tent and said, “Mark? You getting up?”

“Yeah,” he grumbled. The camp, considering how many people were around, had been quiet most of the night with the exception of the
Jeeps that occasionally rumbled by.

He swung his feet over the cot and rubbed his eyes
then twisted his back from side to side. Riki was dressed in canvas shorts and a button-front shirt.

“What’s the plan?” Mark said.

“Steven wants you to help him in selecting the hunting parties. He thinks you’ll be able to tell him who’s lazy and who’s not.”

“Considering I don’t know ninety-nine percent of the people they’ve hired, I don’t think I’ll be much help.”

“Well, at least act like it. Don’t forget you’re on the clock.”

That’s right
, Mark thought. He hadn’t remembered they were paying him hourly through the night. The only time he wouldn’t be billing them was on his days off. Hell, for two hundred fifty bucks an hour, he would skip rope for them if they wanted him to.

Mark stepped outside and took i
n the camp for the first time in daylight. The tents seemed to spread out for miles, like some ancient army camped out before their enemy’s walls. Dense jungle surrounded them on every side. The morning fog still hung in the air like ghosts, drifting away as the sun rose.

He looked one way then the other.
A small line had formed in front of the latrines. He waited behind some men speaking French. They were grizzled men, hands permanently blackened from a lifetime of labor in oil fields. Their beards were scruffy, and redness tinted their skin. Probably from too much sun or exposure to chemicals.

When his turn came, he was expecting something disgusting, but the latrines were actually clean. He urinated
then found a station of disposable toothbrushes set up with toothpaste dispensers. He brushed his teeth, washed his hands with a hard, industrial soap, and went back to his tent and changed his clothes. He wore old jeans and a long sleeved shirt with a Dodgers baseball cap. He tied a black bandana around his neck then coated the exposed parts of his skin with the insect repellent.

By the time he was through, his stomach was growling
, and he wondered if he could still find something to eat. He walked the opposite direction from the latrines. Steven directed a crowd of men around the camp. He appeared a natural leader, confident and strong. Steven looked like the kind of guy people wanted in charge. The kind that could make the tough calls without flinching. Mark had always lacked that quality. He felt too softhearted for leadership positions like that.

“Hey,” Mark said.

“
Ne sa bula
,” he said with a smile. “I say it right?”

“People just say
‘
bula
’ for hello. ‘
Yandra
’ is good morning.”

“
‘
Yandra
’,” he mumbled a few times. “Anyway, you ready to go?”

“Sure. Where?”

“We’re gonna be setting up hunting parties of four men. That seems to be the ideal number here. We’ll have twelve of the four man parties out at all times, twenty-four hours a day.”

Mark looked
at some men dumping supplies out of Jeeps. “You want to hunt at night?”

Steven grinned and reached down to the pile of equipment. He picked up a pair of binoculars with an elastic cap attached and tossed them to Mark. It was light and sturdy.

“Night vision goggles,” Steven said. “Be as bright as day.”

“What exactly are we going to be hunt
ing these things with?”

Steven lifted what looked like a black machine gun. He held it up like a trophy and said, “This here’s the POF P-415 in Spec Two. It is one of the best hunting rifles ever made. Running just a little over ten thousand dollars. You ever fired one?”

“No.”

“It’s like c
oming, brother. Wait ’til you try it.”

Mark stood by as Steven ordered more men around. It appeared they were gathering together the equipment the twelve teams would need then loading them into packs.
They’d thought of everything to carry with them: knives, mace, an MRE, sticks of honey, canteens of water, flares, flashlights… Just about anything anyone needed for the jungle, except insect repellent.

“You got insect repellent, don’t you?” Mark asked.

“We got some in the camp, yeah.”

“No, you have to have it with you in the jungle
, and it’s gotta be constantly applied. You’ll sweat it off in less than twenty minutes.”

Steven wiped sweat off his forehead. “We’ll get some more
, then.”

After the men packed up the supplies, Steven informed him they would be going to the administration tent to interview the candidates they’d selected for the hunting parties.
The hunting parties were being paid time and a half with a thousand dollar bonus for every snake killed.

Mark sat in one of the cushioned chairs on a panel that consisted of him, Steven
, and someone he’d never seen before. Possibly an interpreter. One man stood at the door with his hands in his pockets, staring outside the flap of the tent.

“Bring in the first one, would
ya, Hank?” Steven said.

The man at the entrance came back with a local Fijian. The local was thin and older, with a wrinkled face and hands. The interpreter asked him something akin to
“What experience do you have hunting?”

T
he man replied with, “I’ve been doing it since I was a child.”

“
What’dya think?” Steven asked.

“Never met him before,” Mark said. “But he seems a little old for this, doesn’t he?”

“That’s what I thought. Bring in the next one, Hank.”

H
ours passed like this. Hank brought in one at a time, and Steven asked a few questions then said, “What’dya think?” and Mark gave his impression. Almost every time, he had no impression but felt he had to say something to justify his hourly wage.

After three
hours, they had chosen ninety-six men. Enough for two twelve-person shifts in teams of four.

Though he’d spoken on almost every man, Mark had never felt so useless in his life and again questioned why in the hell they would pay him for this. Maybe it was just a bribe for his silence
, but they didn’t want to make it seem like a bribe. He guessed he would probably never know the real reason. But it didn’t matter. As long as he had enough to fight for his daughter, he wouldn’t ask too many questions.

Lunch was an enormous undertaking. The camp ate in shifts, though the majority of the workers were out in the oil fields
and ate bagged meals there. A mess hall was set up complete with buffet representing every nationality of food, from Indian and Nepalese to Mexican and Greek. Mark got the impression the company wanted to do everything possible to keep their workers happy.

“Got some business to attend to,” Steven said. “Catch you later.”

Standing in the mess hall by himself suddenly transported Mark back to junior high school. The worst moment of lunch every day was when he’d gotten his food and had to find a place to sit. Most of the time, it was by himself. He had a feeling this wouldn’t be much different.

Settling on a burrito and side salad, he picked up his food then scanned the massive tent. Only when he was looking around did he see rafters. This wasn’t a tent at all but a hastily thrown together building covered with canvas wrapping to appear like a tent.
Something potentially long-term that wanted to appear short-term.

As he inhaled
deeply and walked to an empty bench, someone waved to him. Millard was sitting by himself as well. He looked so happy to see him, Mark couldn’t possibly have said no. He sat down across from him.

“Nice, huh?” Millard said.

“It actually is. When Steven said ‘camp,’ I was expecting tents in mud.”

“That’s not the way they do things. VN’s one of the top ten companies in the world that no one’s heard of.
A major Indian corporation. The really big corporations, the powerful ones, no one really knows who they are. But they might know their subsidiaries. I read once that eighty percent of companies that make more than a hundred million a year are owned by only seven corporations.”

Mark took a bite of the burrito. The meat was tender and juicy. “That is a damn good burrito.”

“Everything’s good here, told you.”

“
Lemme ask you something, Craig, do you have any idea why the hell I’m here? I feel like I’m spinning my wheels, and Steven couldn’t be happier.”

He shrugged
and took another bite of his bloody pink steak. “Who knows? Some jobs here that one man can do have five people doing them. I think they’re covering their asses. Maybe they can say you’re their liaison to the native population or something.”

They ate in silence a moment before Mark noticed something on the man’s neck. “What is that? On your neck.”

“This?” he said, lifting the symbol on his necklace. “It’s Nehebkau. He’s the two-headed snake god they worshipped in ancient Egypt. They thought he guarded the entrance to the underworld. The name literally means the ‘harnesser of souls.’ So it has something to do with my profession, but honestly I just think it’s cool.”

“You’re really into your field, aren’t you?”

“Snakes? Oh, yeah. I love them. They’re the most worshipped animals in history. And the most mysterious. We don’t know as much about them as we like to think. You could have two people standing around talking and have a venomous snake, like a king cobra or a rattler, come by. They could completely ignore the closest person, slither right past them, and bite the other one. We don’t know why. The secret’s in their tongues, we think, but we just don’t know a lot about the tongue. There have been some suggestions in the literature that snakes can actually pick up on diseases, like cancer and HIV, just from licking the air around a sufferer. But again, it’s all conjecture. We just don’t know as much about them as we’d like. Like why they lost their limbs in the first place. It doesn’t make any sense.”

He took another bite of steak and chewed thoroughly before continuing.
“Even in our own mythology, they’re mysteries. In Genesis, the snake tricks Eve into eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but nowhere in Genesis does it actually say Satan was the snake. That’s inferred from some things in the Book of Revelations, which was written centuries later. So in our founding myths we have the snake responsible for our fall and temptation, not Satan. Every culture has the same types of myth. The snake as something entirely unknowable.”

“Mark, I was wondering where you went.”
Riki sat down next to him with a cola. She was wearing a hat with the VN logo emblazoned on the front and tilted up just slightly, revealing the features of her angular face.

“The doctor was just telling me about the mythology of snakes.”

She cringed. “Well, maybe I can convince you guys to talk about something else.”

“It’s not all bad,” Millard said with
a mouthful of meat. “All our medical symbols are associated with snakes, too. From the time of the staff of Hermes and Asclepius from ancient Greece. We’ve seen snakes having healing properties in the labs, too. Some of the venom was once used to treat broken bones, and the bones actually healed faster with the venom than in the control group. Pretty impressive stuff.”