Secret of the Slaves (21 page)

Away off in the night, a sudden nova flamed. Aircraft-engine whine turned to the scream of tortured metal as the plane plunged out of control. A comet of yellow flame arced down behind black trees to the east. A flash lit the sky. A column of cloud rose, underlit by a dancing orange glow.

“Attack airplane,” Xia said. “They're flying out of a base near Lake Aiama.”

The forest and fields were quiet. The rumble of nearby battle had suppressed the normal nocturnal sounds. The Promessans and their Indian allies fought a hit-and-run battle against the Brazilian forces Publico had brought in. Even the bugs were quiet, except for the irrepressible buzzing of the small, and not so small, biting insects. Nothing except the city limits of Promessa daunted them, Annja had found.

I wonder what this war will do to Publico's peace-activist image, she thought. Probably nothing, she had to admit. If word of his involvement ever got out, which was doubtful in itself, Sir Iain Moran employed phalanxes of expert spin doctors. For evidence she had only to recall the news broadcasts Xia had shown her several days earlier. Never had she heard mention of his name.

“That sounded like a propeller plane,” Annja said, puzzled.

“It was,” said Xia.

“You're kidding. I thought Brazil had a pretty modern air force.”

“It's the very latest thing in the Brazilian air force,” Xia said. “Embraer ALX, light attack fighter variant of the Super Tucano.”

“You sound like an enthusiast.”

Crouching there at the verge between jungle and another abandoned rubber field, Xia shrugged and grinned. “A girl has her hobbies. Even in Promessa.”

“Don't they use jets?”

“They're mostly too fast,” Patrizinho said. “Prop planes can fly slow enough to really see and hit smaller ground targets.” He shrugged. “Like us. This aircraft is designed to murder helpless native people on the ground, such as so-called insurgents, guerrillas and bandits,” he said.

She cocked an eyebrow at him. “Helpless? You shot it down! What was that, some kind of death beam?”

The dozen or so Promessans of the infiltration force laughed. “You want them to nuke us, outsider?” Isis asked. Her voice, not surprisingly, was not friendly.

“Shoulder-launched modern man-portable air-defense missile. Russian made. We tweak the nitrogen-cooled indium antimonide seeker head to give it all-aspect tracking capabilities against reciprocating engines—meaning, prop planes. They run lots cooler than jets. Another reason they're better for close air support,” Burt, a young Asian-looking man who was one of their team of twelve, said.

“Our capabilities, advanced as they are, aren't anywhere near sufficient for us to take on the whole world,” Xia said. “Not even the U.S., which still boasts a big chunk of the world's military capacity. We're using our energy hand weapons sparingly, because they're not really anything that couldn't be duplicated and we don't want to announce to the world that, here we are, lost city with supertechnology, just waiting to be plundered. It'd be a feeding frenzy.”

“And that,” said Burt, “would be why we're off on a good old-fashioned decapitation strike.”

A
NNJA WAS UNSURE
how far they had hiked. She knew Promessa lay well inland of the main river, although lesser streams skeined the land as they did most of the whole basin. She guessed it was at least twenty miles away; she didn't know the
quilombo
's full size. Xia and Patrizinho and the others she had met the past few days had smilingly refused to answer questions about specific locations.

Along with Annja and Xia and Patrizinho the group included Burt, stocky and round faced with his hair in a long queue down his back, and a pair of young women, Lys and Julia. Lys was blond and slender, a few inches shorter than Annja. Julia was average height, sturdy and broad shouldered, brown skinned and eyed and with short black hair. Everyone spoke English around Annja. Lys spoke with what sounded to Annja like a Midwest American accent.

Everyone was dressed in practical combat gear. She was told the specially developed fabric used the wearer's own metabolic energy to optimize their body temperature. It was also waterproof, as the diminutive and very dark armorer explained as they were fitted for the suits. Likewise the combat suit resisted cuts and bullets—though was far from bulletproof—as well as fire. The clothing reduced the wearer's heat signature, although since the team wasn't using any kind of face masks or shielding, infrared detectors would see their heads as bright balloons bobbing above the ground. No one else seemed bothered by that, so Annja didn't worry about it.

A lot was not being explained to her, she knew. Some was because she didn't have the referents for it. Some was because what she didn't know she couldn't tell. She had not been taught the willed-suicide technique of the Promessans—her head had been stuffed too full of knowledge in too short a time as it was, and she wasn't even sure how she felt ethically about using it.

For the same reason she had also refused any kind of suicide pill. She hoped she didn't regret it. If Publico thought she had any information that might serve him, she didn't doubt he was capable of handing her over to his local allies for torture.

She also refused the treatment some Promessans going out in the world took. The chemical injection turned their bodies into incendiaries or bombs in case of death. Hoatzin Nest, Isis's lover whom Annja had killed, had taken the former route. Upon his death, his body had spontaneously combusted and burned Mafalda's shop to the ground. Annja had to admit part of her found that idea appealing. But she'd never be able to rest for fear the stuff would accidentally go off while she was still alive. Or even cause her to die of some horrid hitherto-unknown cancer ten or fifteen years down the line.

“A
ND HERE
I
WAS THINKING
you two were otherworldly spiritual types,” Annja said once they started moving again. All of the team wore harnesses of some dark, tough synthetic over their midnight suits, with light packs on their backs. Each carried a weapon that vaguely resembled a modern bullpup carbine. Over each Promessan's shoulder rose the hilt of a short sword.

What seemed to be a derelict field turned out to be a bog. Warm water squelched to just above Annja's ankles. It made her very glad for their special suits. She knew what kind of things lived in Amazon waters. Not that the creatures crawling through the leaf litter ubiquitous on more solid land were any friendlier or more reassuring.

“Did we give that impression the last couple of days?” Patrizinho said. He chuckled. “Forgive it, please. The spiritual part of what we had to teach you in such short time was the greater. Your physical skills are already superb.”

“Haven't you figured it out yet?” Xia said. “We're in the same business as you, Annja—defenders. Physical combat in all its aspects is only part of our jobs. But it is a major part. And like anyone you're likely to encounter among us, the jobs we do are the ones we're most attuned to.”

The sky lit with a flickering white glare to the accompaniment of a snarling thunder. Though Annja, like the others, wore small buds in her ears to dampen the supersonic harmonics of gunfire and explosive blasts, she could tell the noise was savagely sharp.

“Twenty millimeter machine cannon,” said one of Isis's team they had joined up with on the ground. He looked like a pure Amazonian Indian, short, spare built but broad across the shoulders, with long black hair tied back from his handsome face.

They advanced into more dense forest. The two squads walked roughly parallel, staggered so that no one walked exactly behind the person in front, apparently to reduce the likelihood of a single burst of gunfire that would take them all out at once. Annja, in the middle of her group with Patrizinho's comforting presence behind her and Lys in front, tried to walk as soundlessly as the others. She didn't find it as easy as the others seemed to not squelch in muck, rustle in leaf-litter or swish and crackle through branches.

Each of the midnight suits had a small panel on the breastbone and between the shoulder blades that glowed faintly, a different color for each team member. The others had laughed at Annja's vocal alarm at having an illuminated target right over her heart, front and back. No one not on the team, Burt explained, could see the panels. How that was even possible Annja had no clue. The Promessans offered no explanation.

Isis led the second group. Despite her barely shielded enmity toward Annja, Annja had to admit she seemed quietly competent.

The chief of the strike team was named Marco. Instead of the harness the others wore, he sported a web utility belt heavily loaded-down with instruments.

Xia held up her hand. The two squads came to a halt in the midst of a particularly thick stand of underbrush. A small figure materialized soundlessly as a shadow right by her left elbow. He grinned at her with teeth bright white in a black-painted face. He was no taller than Annja's shoulder, with a bowl haircut and a skimpy loincloth. He also had a Kalashnikov assault rifle almost as long as he was tall.

Xia conversed in low, fluid syllables with the small, nearly naked man who suddenly crouched beside her. Annja couldn't understand a word. It was obviously a local Indian dialect. The crouching man answered softly, nodded, stood. Then he simply became one with the night.

Xia turned back, beckoning the others to gather near. “We've got our allies passing word we're coming through so they don't bushwhack us,” she told the team. “They say the invaders are patrolling very aggressively.”

“Aren't they bushwhacking
them?
” Burt asked.

Xia nodded. “The commander is showing the degree of regard for human life you'd expect. They care about their own troops only a little more than they do about us. The only real difference is, they actively want us dead.”

“So it is in the Third World,” Patrizinho told Annja softly. “Life isn't cheap to the people. It's the rulers who don't value the people's lives.”

“They're getting ready to make a big push,” Isis predicted.

“At night?” Burt shook his head. “No way.”

Xia held up a hand. “Not our concern. We just have to be ready for anything.”

They moved on again. Twice they stopped and crouched immobile as enemy patrols crashed by. The first spoke in semimuffled Portuguese. The second was mostly being harangued in English by somebody with an unmistakable American accent. Annja wondered if it was one of Publico's mercenaries.

In both cases the patrols blundered within a few feet of Annja and her friends without showing any evidence of suspecting they were there. Annja could smell the sweat soaking their fatigues—and smell the fear in that sweat, as well as traces of the alcohol and tobacco they'd recently consumed.

The noise and glare of battle increased as the team proceeded. Mortars and grenades sounded. Automatic weapons popped and snarled. Tracers arced against the sky. Annja couldn't tell how much, if any, fire came from the defenders. The invaders let off rounds in truck-loads, whether against actual targets, or to suppress suspected enemies or simply to make themselves feel better, she couldn't tell. It occurred to her that her group risked getting hit purely by accident.

Gradually they moved beyond the sound and light show of the ongoing firefight. The invaders pushed to the west-northwest, angling inland from the river. Xia had led her infiltration team north and east, swinging wide around the main thrust.

Now they turned back toward the river and the headquarters the Brazilian commander shared with Sir Iain and his men. They began to advance by impulses. One squad hunkered down, rifles ready, covering as the other moved. Then the group that had just advanced would go to cover and keep watch while their comrades leapfrogged out ahead of them.

Xia raised her hand. Her five followers sank into a stand of brush. Annja raised her rifle and snugged its padded butt to her shoulder as Isis got her people up and led them forward.

Annja peered through her sights. She had been checked out with the weapon at the armory that afternoon. It fired semi-or full-automatic, quite silently. It reloaded from the top with blocks of fifty projectiles. The chief armorer told Annja the rifles used electromagnetism, whatever that meant in this context.

Atop her rifle, conventional night sights glowed ghostly in the darkness. With a pressure of her right thumb she was provided with infrared vision.

At once she saw big blobs of yellow so bright they were almost white, right ahead. “Isis, get down!” she hissed, knowing the communicator woven into the fabric of her suit would transmit the warning.

The night was ripped apart by white fire and horrific noise.

Helpless, Annja watched as a pair of Isis's squad members, silhouetted against a colossal muzzle-flare, were shredded by a burst from a machine cannon. The rest of the armored car's 20-mm shells cracked over the heads of Annja's squad to rake the jungle line forty yards behind them.

Lesser flashes lit the night as soldiers fired their assault rifles. A second armored car opened up from thirty yards or so to the left of the first.

“Stay down,” Isis seemed to whisper in the back of Annja's skull. “They're not shooting at us.”

She was right. The shots all passed over the heads of the now totally prone Promessan team. Isis's two people had been blown away by a cruel accident, by a foe who had no idea they were even there.

Diesel engines throttled up with a noise like dragons clearing their throats. The armored cars rumbled forward.

A curious buzzing sound passed over Annja from behind. A brilliant flash lit the wedge-shaped snout of the vehicle that had shot up Isis's team. The vehicle stopped. A moment later orange flame roared from the driver's and cupola hatches. A figure wrapped in flames climbed screaming from the cupola, fell to the ground and rolled. Smaller white flashes started strobing through the black smoke pouring from the stricken machine like firecracker strings as the ammo storage went up.

“Here they come,” came Patrizinho's voice in Annja's skull. It soothed her back from panic's raw edge. “Stay low and don't move unless you have to.”

Two vehicles rolled on, a dozen yards to either side of the wreck. In the garish light of the flames Annja saw soldiers coming toward her, heads hunched forward beneath their camo-mottled boonie hats, prodding the night before them with their rifles.

The skirmish line passed. One man came so near to Annja she might have grabbed his right ankle as he went by. Not daring to breathe, keeping her eyes slitted, she tried to remember the lessons Xia and Patrizinho had given her the past two days on stealth, among a myriad subjects. Try to think as little as possible. Envision yourself a part of the landscape—a fallen log, a bush. Breathe shallowly but remember to breathe. Never look directly at an enemy. He'll sense you.

Men she had known who had seen combat, especially special-operations troopers, had told her exactly the same thing, about trying to think like a bush and never looking straight at anyone.

The hardest part, she found, was remembering to breathe.

Then the oblivious enemy was past, shouting and shooting. But to Annja's renewed terror a fourth armored car appeared, swerving around the blazing wreck. It headed straight for her.

She stared at it. It got bigger, big as a moving mountain. Its three independently suspended right tires would all roll over her in series if she didn't move. Yet she was terrified of moving prematurely, lest the crew spot her.

The metal monster loomed above. She tried to roll left, out of its path, only to fetch against the stout central stem of a bush. Panic blasted through her. The bush refused to yield. The cleated front tire crunched toward her face. With a desperate heave she rolled to her right.

The backward-sloping lower plate of its snout brushed her shoulders. She moaned aloud in fear as the car rolled over her, blotting the stars. Its tires crunched deafeningly mere inches to either side of her.

After it passed, Annja lay quivering. She felt a touch on her shoulder and gasped. She struggled to bring up her rifle.

A strong, gentle hand caught her arm. “Easy, easy,” said Patrizinho, kneeling beside her. “You're okay, yes?”

She drew in a deep breath. Then she nodded convulsively.

He touched Annja's shoulder again. “Let's go. “We're almost to the real danger.”

The uproar of the Brazilian advance or patrol or whatever it was, receded as the strike team's surviving members moved on. The Indians who had ambushed the soldiers with an antitank rocket and rifle fire had long since melted into the jungle.

After the Promessans had gone twenty or so yards a pair of explosions behind them, unnoticed by anyone else in the awful night's battle sounds, marked the self-destruction of their dead friends' bodies.

As they crouched they could see the nimbus of light above the trees cast by the base camp the invaders had established near the ruined plantation house. It marked their objective. There waited Publico and the Brazilian army officer in command. And there also lay tents and trailers containing the invaders' command and communications gear, as well as stations monitoring the enemy's sensors.

If the Promessans and Annja could destroy that equipment and kill the leaders, the whole invasion would lose momentum and quickly mire down. Annja didn't believe that could win them any more than a temporary reprieve. But her friends assured her that a little breathing room was all they needed to secure the safety of their city and its tribal allies. All she could do was swallow her doubts and do her best.

To Annja's surprise the invaders had not occupied the plantation buildings. The main house she could understand—it was a wreck. But surely with all that manpower they could have cleaned out the largely intact chapel?

“They fear ghosts,” Julia matter-of-factly said when they halted in the scrub near the empty buildings, still a hundred yards from the enemy perimeter, when Annja voiced the question in her mind.

She was a bit surprised at the Promessans' seeming cold-bloodedness. They had just seen two of their comrades torn apart. Yet no one showed any reaction.

“Remember,” Xia said softly to her, crouching down at her side, “we have fought for centuries for everything we have—starting with our lives and freedom. There'll be forever to mourn afterward. For those who make it back.”

“I
TELL YOU
,” the Brazilian commander said, “we should wait until the assistance promised us by the North Americans gets here.” He was a tall, fat, sweating man.

“Surely your men can handle a few naked natives, Colonel Amaral,” Publico said.

“These natives whom you call ‘naked' have modern antitank and antiaircraft missiles, as well as automatic weapons and apparently endless supplies of ammunition. Savages they are, but naked they are not!”

The billionaire rock star half turned toward Amaral. “You command a regiment. That should be ample to crush any resistance you're likely to face.”

“Only half of my troops are on the ground,” Amaral reminded him. “And we are far, far up the Amazon. It will be days before my regiment is up to strength. That being the case, why not wait for the Americans?”

Publico slowly smiled. “Because an unimaginable treasure awaits us up ahead, Colonel. You know that.”