The Omicron Legion (7 page)

The jungle smelled fresh, too, in spite of the humidity; not rank like Southeast Asia. You hated Nam before you even knew you were there because the air stank. Here the woods smelled like a fresh salad and were blessed with an incredible diversity of plant and animal species that breathed vitality into the scene. Blaine dared ask himself if war might have been the difference in Nam. Perhaps it was the smell of hate more than anything that sickened him even in memory. Here there was no hate, only life; this land supplied one-third of the world’s oxygen.

Wareagle followed the trail that was invisible to Blaine until they reached a large clearing that contained stray piles of wood and thick leaves.

“A tribe slept here last night,” Johnny said. “Most of them set out at dawn, the rest followed closely behind to provide cover against pursuit. They were restless. Something happened that frightened them.”

“You didn’t tell me the Tupis were nomadic.”

“Because they never were before.”

They came upon the encampment two hours before sunset. Wareagle pointed out perimeter guards so well camouflaged that Blaine could barely discern them even when staring directly at their positions. The Indian then showed him where to silently wait until he returned with safe passage assured. Under the circumstances, the sight of a “white-face” might scare the Tupi guards. Their arrows and blow darts might not be as formidable as machine-gun fire, but death didn’t know the difference.

Blaine watched Johnny disappear into the jungle and did as he was told. One minute dragged into another and he began to ask himself how much longer he would wait before impatience led him to make his own move. The next moments passed as slowly as any he could ever recall; he had very nearly made up his mind to follow in Johnny’s steps when Wareagle’s frame emerged from the brush, followed by a pair of Tupi warriors.

“We were expected, Blainey,” Wareagle announced, bidding him to rise. “They knew I would be coming.”

“What’d you tell them about me?”

“That you are a great white warrior who rescued me so I might rescue them. I called you
cheinama,
which in their language means a stranger who is a friend.”

“Thanks for the recommendation,” Blaine said.

The Tupis had been fortunate enough to find a rare valley in the Amazon Basin. As McCracken hiked down the slope to the hub of activity, he noted it was a uniquely defensible area. By the size of the branches the Tupi braves were hefting, and the way they were being stacked, he also noted that the tribe was not actually building a settlement.

They were building a fortress.

The bulk of the living quarters were being erected a story or more in the air upon sturdy tree branches linked together with tied-down logs. The construction was lean-to style and, once completed, would be accessible only by dangling vines easily pulled up to deny entry. The building of similar structures was underway closer to the rim of the valley, although these were clearly guard towers. The Tupis were developing their own early warning system.

“Looks like they’re digging in,” Blaine commented.

“With good reason. The chief is waiting for us.”

The chief was seated cross-legged in the center of the valley, a vantage point from which he would survey all ongoing work. He was an ancient man, with white hair tied in a ponytail and a mask of wrinkles covering the coppery flesh of his face. He might have been a hundred or seventy, but Blaine could see that the muscles of his wrists and hands were those of a younger man, at least one who had never stopped using them. They protruded from a tribal shawl colored in a simple pattern with a dominant shade of wheat.

The chief spoke to Wareagle without looking at McCracken.

“He bids you welcome,” Johnny translated, “and says he can tell he is in the presence of a great manitou.”

“Tell him the pleasure is all mine.”

Before Johnny could do so, the chief spoke again.

“
O Memeka bu?
”

“He wishes to know what tribe you belong to,” Johnny translated.

“Tell him my own.”

“
Omei,”
Johnny repeated to the old man.

The chief laughed and said something softly to Johnny.

“He says he knew that, Blainey.”

“
Iti omoi reima.
”

“He says you are a strong man.”

“Tell him thanks—and ask him what the hell is going on here!”

“
Nefoteo nia?
”

Wareagle waited patiently for the chief to finish before translating.

“He says they are digging in here to make a stand. He says there is no sense in running because the Spirit of the Dead will find them…like it found them last night.”

Johnny waited for the chief to complete his thought before continuing his translation.

“Blainey, he says two boys were found missing from that clearing we came upon at dawn this morning. He says there were no tracks to indicate they wandered off and no tracks to indicate anyone had come for them. They simply disappeared. “

“Thanks to this Spirit of the Dead?”

Wareagle nodded grimly. “The chief believes it to be a demon capable of appearing and disappearing as it desires. He says it was drawn up from the underworld one full moon ago by a Gift Giver still in touch with the Forgotten Times.”

“In which case the defenses being erected here will prove woefully inadequate.”

“They must make a stand, Blainey. Whatever is killing their people must be made to show itself where their warriors will at least have a chance.”

“Ask him if any of his people have seen the Spirit of the Dead.”

Wareagle obliged, and the chief shook his head methodically before responding.

“He says all that has been seen is the shape of the hatred the enemy leaves,” Wareagle translated. “The enemy sucks the life out of the land, out of the world, and the result is a hollow spot, an empty spot. It is into this hollow spot that the Spirit of the Dead disappears after its work is finished.”

The old man spoke again as soon as Johnny had finished speaking.

“There is more, Blainey. He says signs of the Green Coats were found in their search for the missing boys.”

“Meaning soldiers?”

“Seven of them, their steps orderly and precise.”

“Ben Norseman,” Blaine replied, recalling his meeting with the Green Beret colonel in the lobby of the Caesar Park.

“They do not seem interested in his tribe, but they are out there, too.”

Just then a panting brave rushed up to the chief and sat next to him, whispering. The old man listened calmly, then turned to look up at Wareagle and spoke softly.

“He says the missing boys have been found,” Wareagle translated. “He wants us to come.”

The boys’ bodies swayed in the breeze, suspended from the tree by vines tied around their throats. The instrument of death, though, had been something much worse.

They had been disemboweled while still alive.

Large, jagged holes had been sliced in their abdomens, the contents drained a bit at a time. The pain would have been enormous, and much of it was still frozen on their faces. Blood from their mouths and noses had dripped down to their chests like paint running down a wall. Blaine kept his eyes on it to distract himself from the holes ripped where their stomachs had been. He kept to a distance where the smell was less intense. “What did this, Johnny? What the hell did this?”

Wareagle had ventured closer, eyes cold as marbles. He stared at the corpses and swiped at the flies that had clustered about. The boys’ toes dangled two feet off the ground, so Johnny was looking directly into their dead eyes.

“The vines are knotted in a way that would not bring on suffocation,” he said, eyes lowering. “The initial stomach cuts were made with a sharp object, a knife perhaps, so the skin could be parted and stripped back. The contents could then be pulled out.” He turned to McCracken. “By hand.”

“Jesus Christ….”

Wareagle had leaned over the stinking pile of the corpses’ insides. Blaine drew up even with him, while the chief and Tupi warriors kept their distance.

“What about tracks?”

Wareagle was on his knees now, sliding his callused palms across the ground. “Nothing from the time of these killings. Much from after.”

“I’m listening.”

“Seven men wearing U.S. combat boots.”

“Norseman,” Blaine muttered. “Ben and his goons must have come in to hunt something down.” He looked at Wareagle. “Our Spirit of the Dead maybe.”

Wareagle looked up. “The Green Coats came in from the northeast. I can follow their tracks. They may bring us closer to what we have come to find.”

McCracken gazed up at the last of the day’s light. “Not without sun. We’ll spend the night with the Tupis, help them make their stand, and leave come morning.”

“Something might come before that.”

“Save us a trip, Indian.”

Chapter 7

THE TUPI WARRIORS
patrolled the valley’s perimeter in positions shown them by Wareagle. Blaine hung back through it all; not yet fully accepted by the Tupis, he focused his energies in other directions. Perimeter guards out of contact with one another were too vulnerable to attack, too easy to eliminate one at a time, so Wareagle’s plan had them patrolling in concentric circles that meant one brave would pass another every hundred yards. Still, this left too many easily breached holes in the perimeter. Hell, just the night before the Spirit of the Dead, as the Tupis called it, had made off with two boys without leaving any trace. Couldn’t dare leave it any opening at all in view of that.

What the braves needed was a good set of walkie-talkies. Lacking that, Blaine would have to make do with what was available. He glanced at the tribal chief, still seated in the center of the valley, a small fire burning before him. McCracken smiled.

Thirty minutes later fourteen fires were going around the rim of the valley. Every three minutes the braves tending them would drop a special ash made from tree bark into the flames to produce a noxious white smoke. The white smoke would serve as the all’s-well signal to the spotters in the valley. A missed interval would spell trouble, and the tribe would know where to concentrate their forces.

Wareagle paced into the black hours of the morning. The jungle was louder then; animal and bird sounds seemed to travel farther in the darkness. Blaine approached him with the pump action propped on his shoulder. Johnny regarded the weapon with apparent disdain.

“Come on, Indian, whatever this Spirit of the Dead turns out to be, it’s not bulletproof.”

“But neither does it fear that bullets can stop it.”

McCracken sniffed the air. Maybe, just maybe, a new scent sifted through. The beginnings of something rancid and spoiled. He shook his imagination away.

“We’ve been through this before.”

“Not the hellfire, Blainey.”

“Why not? Guns didn’t always work against Charlie, either. Waving that big M-16 made you feel invincible until you stepped on a mine or a trap or got hit when one of them popped out of a tunnel.”

“The Black Hearts did what they had to. What we are facing here does what it likes.”

McCracken had to bring up what had forced its way into his mind. “You felt something else back where we found those boys, Indian. You didn’t say anything about it, but I could tell.”

Wareagle smiled. “Perhaps it is you the spirits have chosen to speak through this time.”

“I’d welcome anything that helps get us out of here alive, including the whole truth of what you know.”

“Feel, Blainey.”

“Same thing, Indian.”

Bursts of white smoke filled the air along the rim of the valley as another three-minute interval passed.

“The Spirit of the Dead enjoys what it does,” Wareagle told him softly. “It is propelled by a need to kill like an animal that will starve if it doesn’t hunt. The pain and suffering of its victims are its food.”

“Then we’d better find it before it finds us.”

“The daytime belongs to us.”

“So long as we make it through the night.”

McCracken half expected Wareagle to return from a sweep of the perimeter at dawn with a report that all the Tupi braves had been killed during the final three-minute interval. But the look on the big Indian’s face told him all was well.

“The night passed without incident,” he reported. “No sign of the Spirit of the Dead, Blainey, but evidence of the Green Coats was found to the south of us.”

“Norseman?”

“Still seven men, heavily weighed down by equipment and gear. They could have entered the valley at anytime, but chose not to, almost as if, as if…”

“As if what?”

“They saw the valley as a trap.”

“To catch what, Indian? Seems pretty obvious now they’re after the same thing we are. The question is why.”

“The answer may lie only in following the trail they have left us.”

For the better part of the morning, Johnny followed the trail the soldiers had taken from the north through the jungle. The sticky heat of the afternoon sun was just beginning to make itself felt when Johnny stopped and stood pole straight. Blaine could feel the Indian’s energy emanating outward like a strobe light, pins and needles dancing about his flesh and turning into daggers as they took to the air.

“What’s wrong, Johnny?”

No reply.

“Johnny?”

Silence.

“Johnny…”

Wareagle turned. “We’re close, Blainey. There’s something up there, beyond those trees.”

They started on again, Johnny moving like a big jungle cat. Where he walked, Blaine figured, there would be no trail, either. Johnny parted a huge thicket of overbrush and waited for Blaine to draw even. McCracken looked where Johnny was pointing and found himself gazing at the impossible.

There, in the thick of the jungle, was a massive building!

Just as quickly as his eyes had focused on the structure, it fluttered from his vision like a mirage in the desert, thanks to its sloping construction and shading. The lines and colors flowed perfectly with the jungle, as if construction had been carried out without disturbing a single tree or bush. Johnny led the way closer; a tall steel-link fence came into focus, camouflaged with brush that virtually swallowed it. None of this belonged here, yet here, undeniably, it was. Perhaps it held the answer to whatever was happening in the jungle.