Ballistic (4 page)

He did not know what it was; never in a million years would he have been able to guess. Only when the tall, fat lump crashed to the earth, virtually enveloping the first two men in the column in some sort of dark cloud, did he shout out a confused and nonspecific warning to his team.

And only after the first screams, only after the first jolting burn on his forearm just above where his glove ended and his exposed skin began, only after the exploding, swarming, darkening fog surrounded his men in front of him—only after all this did he know.

Bees. Thousands—no,
tens
of thousands of enraged bees covered his screaming, writhing, frantic soldiers. In seconds guns began to fire wildly in the sky in a pathetic and futile act of desperation; well-trained soldiers ran into the thick woods along the trail and fell and kicked and swatted the air like maniacs.

The comandante was stung on the face, on the neck, again on the arm, and he stumbled and then turned to run back up the trail, back up the hill, through the outskirts of the mad swarm of livid lit cigarettes stabbing at him from all sides, the steady downpour of caustic acid rain, the viscous cloud of tiny fireballs of molten lava.

He screamed, pushed the button on the walkie-talkie, and screamed some more, and then he fell, and the stings dug deeper into his skin.

He almost made it back up to his feet, but his fleeing men—each battling panic and agony and the near-zero visibility caused by the swirling, swarming insects—knocked him back down on his chest as they retreated back in the direction of the creek.

The comandante slid a knee under his body to push himself up again, but the dark cloud enveloped him; every nerve ending in his body ignited, and he grabbed at his pistol to fight off ten thousand attackers.

Court ran on, away from the screams and the disjointed gunfire in the jungle behind him. He pictured a dozen men, but that was conjecture. He'd not once looked back at his attackers. He based the number on the fact that the helicopters' distinctive sound told him they were Hueys, and everyone in Court Gentry's world knew that a Huey could carry fourteen geared up gun monkeys.

The cries of agony backed up his guesstimate. The howls of human suffering sounded like they came from about a dozen men. Which meant the other chopper would likely have the same number. Why vary the size of your fire teams?

The two helicopters circled high above; they'd dropped off their men, and they would wait for the order to come and collect them.

Gentry made it out of the thick jungle and onto the main road, turned to the south, and slowed to a jog. He had no idea where the other team was now; if they'd gotten out of the marsh, they could be on this very road, but if they were, they'd be at least a kilometer back.

He allowed himself a moment to relax as he jogged, but the moment ended abruptly as he heard a truck approaching from behind. There was only one truck in the village; it was an old flatbed owned by one of his coworkers and was used only to bring the salvaged iron up this road from the wreckage site to the dock for transport back to Fonte Boa.

Court slowed and turned, expecting to see Davi behind the wheel.

But no, one hundred yards back he saw Davi's truck, but it was full of armed men in bush hats, and as Gentry turned back to run for his life, he heard the pops of rifles.

“Fuck!” shouted Gentry as he dashed off the road, back into the thick jungle, digging his way through vines and bush and palm fronds the size of truck tires, desperate to make himself small, fast, and slippery.

As he pushed his way into the tangle of undergrowth, he worked on a new plan. His old plan had been simple. He had a canoe stowed under the little bridge just a hundred and fifty yards ahead. He'd planned on running up the road, sliding down the bank, and then making his escape via the little boat, being careful to dodge the choppers by staying under the trees that hung out over the river's edge.

But now he'd have to approach the bridge from upriver, which presented one extraordinary obstacle. Or a dozen or more obstacles, depending on how you looked at it.

Both sides of the riverbank north of the bridge were literally covered with crocodiles.

Huge fucking crocodiles.

As Court powered through the nearly impenetrable growth, he settled on his new plan—a plan that would require skill he was not sure he possessed, execution he was not sure he could pull off, and luck he was not sure he could count on.

But it was better than dancing down the road ducking rounds from a truck full of rifles.

He heard the men entering the vegetation behind him. A few fired their guns into the trees and bushes. Court knew his trail would close itself as soon as he moved through; he was not worried about the men any longer. Their eyes could not see him and their guns could not reach him.

But he
was
worried. He was worried about the damn crocodiles ahead.

The rifle fire picked up. It was as if the men were trying to tear their way through the jungle with lead. It would not work, not before Court made it clear. But that was not to say that one lucky bullet fragment couldn't crash its way through and bury itself into the back of the American's head.

Court ducked down lower, pushed through on his hands and knees, scraping them raw in the process. He ripped down spiderwebs the size of fishing nets and used the barrel of his shotgun to knock a boa constrictor from a low hanging branch so he could limbo under it without fear of having the angry snake wrap around his neck.

Soon he broke out of the jungle and onto a hill above the riverbank. Forty yards to his left the wooden bridge sat invitingly in the sun. His little boat bobbed in the shade under it, a canvas tarp tight as a drum over it for protection. Below him, and for at least twenty-five of the forty yards along the water's edge, a dozen crocs ranging in size from six to sixteen feet basked in the mid-morning rays.

Gentry found a thick vine that shot out from the bank in a diagonal off to his left, ran over the riverbank, and connected to the highest, most outstretched limb of a two-hundred-foot-tall kapok tree that hung over the river like a great arm.

It might not take him all the way to the bridge, but it
would
get him to the bank right next to it. That was far enough from the crocs, and that would be just fine.

He'd tossed his machete ten minutes earlier, so he pointed the wide barrel of his shotgun just above where the vine entered the hard earth.

And then he hesitated. Panting from the exertion, stinging from the abrasions on his hands and knees and the scratches and insect stings he'd picked up along the way, he just stood there, his shotgun poised to fire. He had swung on vines many evenings with the boys in the village; he trusted their strength and their ability to get him from here to there. But in his mind's eye he saw this plan of his going very, very wrong. In fact, he could not even conjure a mental image of the next fifteen seconds going off without a hitch.

A long, angry burst from an automatic rifle thirty yards behind him in the jungle helped him focus on the task at hand. He fired the pump shotgun at the vine, it split and frayed beautifully, and he caught it with his free hand before it swung away. Hurriedly, he refastened the shotgun to his backpack one-handed and leapt into the air to take the vine at the highest point he could reach. His sore red hands gripped hard, his legs wrapped around tight, and he began swinging off the hill and over the massive reptiles below.

The vine shot him above the near bank; he passed over sleepy crocodiles warming themselves at the water's edge. Many of the crocs lay with their toothy mouths wide open, cooling their bodies with the intake of air and presenting an especially ominous image to swing over.

His grip was secure; he grimaced with the effort but held firm as gravity took him out over the water now, his legs jutted in front of him, his knees cinched tight against the vine, and his eyes focused on his landing area on the bank by the bridge.

The vine was supple and green and healthy; he could count on it to get him across.

But not so the high tree limb from which it hung. Termites had nested along the crook where it separated from a larger branch, weakening the joint. Without Gentry's acrobatics the limb would have held for another year, until the rainy season pushed winds across the continent and the brittle wood snapped in a storm.

But this limb did not have another year. It would fail now.

Gentry's worst-case scenario came to pass in two stages.

The first was more of a slip of the vine at the tree branch; there was a lurching and a catch. Court was well out away from the land, easily ten feet above the water and sailing fast. He kept his grip but jacked his head off of his intended destination and up towards his lifeline's connection with the tree.

He just managed to focus his wide eyes on the distant point as the tree limb cracked and broke.

Gentry's momentum, with his legs out in front of him, sent his body spinning backwards one full revolution through the air, twenty feet up. He found himself facedown as gravity took over, and he dropped towards the water emitting a primordial scream of terror.

Gentry let go of the vine; it was only in the way now.

He crashed through the black surface in a belly flop, well aware that the crocodiles on both sides of the bank would all be awake, alert, and pissed.

Sinking in the black with the wind knocked from his lungs, it took him longer than he wanted to get the backpack off. With it he sank into the muck; the river was only seven or eight feet deep here. After he removed the backpack, he yanked the shotgun free. Swimming while wielding a 12-gauge shotgun would be ridiculous, but leaving it down here in the mud while reptiles the size of four-man canoes roamed above would be insane.

After grabbing his weapon Gentry pushed off the bottom to shoot to the surface and lost one of his shoes in the process. He kicked the other off as his head popped out of the water. He shook his long wet hair from his eyes and turned back to the nearest bank, twenty-five yards away.

Two big crocs slid into the water before his eyes, heading in his direction. Next to where they entered the river, he noticed the bank empty. He was certain he had swung over a monstrous sixteen-footer in that spot just seconds before.

Court lay on his back in the water and kicked frantically while his head remained up and his pistol-grip weapon pointed in the direction of the bank. It was an uncoordinated half backstroke that derived no speed from its efficiency but much from its intensity.

Crocodiles do not normally eat meals that are alive. Instead they kill their prey by biting down with their clamplike jaws to take hold and then spinning it in the water in order to drown it.

But Court knew that he, as a fragile human being, would not be drowned. The bite would not kill him outright, but the spinning and the flailing and the whipping tail would shatter his neck and break his body, turn him into a lifeless rag doll, even before his lungs filled with the river's hot black water.

He had twenty yards to go to his boat; he would head straight to the bobbing canoe and avoid the bank now, as crocs were even faster on land than in the water. Panic threatened to overtake him; he knew he had not even looked at the far side of the river to see how many of the hungry fuckers over there were coming out for a quick and easy one-hundred-seventy-pound lunch of fresh meat.

Instead he focused on the white water churned up by his pounding bare feet.

There it was. The first big beast was upon him; it looked like a fat gray tree trunk through the foam until his big mouth opened, inches from the tips of Gentry's toes. With a scream of terror Court spread his legs apart and raised the shotgun.

He had not pumped another shell into the chamber after using the shotgun to sever the vine.

The reptile was on him now.

He jabbed the inside of its mouth with the muzzle of the gun.

In the two seconds since he'd stopped kicking he'd begun to sink in the water, and he felt the fore claws of the animal against his leg as they sank. The smack in the mouth caused the croc to flail back for a brief instant, and Gentry used that instant to charge a fresh shell into the chamber of his 12-gauge as he sank deeper, faceup, into the river.

He went under fully now, pushed his weapon up until he felt the neck of the reptile above him, and pulled the trigger one-handed.

The recoil pushed him deeper, deep enough to avoid the spinning animal's huge tail as it thrashed near the surface. Court turned and swam quickly down and away, along the bottom of the river for a moment as he neared his boat. He shot back to the surface and jacked a fresh shell into the breach as he spun back around, found a new croc on him, its mouth just beginning to open to initiate the death grip. This beast was no more than ten feet long but still quite deadly. Gentry shot the gray monster between the eyes.