08 by The Secret Of The Slaves

Author:The Secret Of The Slaves [Slaves, The Secret Of The]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-04-03T23:34:36+00:00

Chapter 18

“Look out there!” Dan shouted.

He had to yell to make himself heard over the whine of the turbines and chop of the rotor blades. The vibration of the machine made itself known both audibly and in alarmingly tactile ways. It felt as if it were in the process of shaking itself to pieces a thousand feet above the verge where river met rain forest.

Dan sat strapped in a seat at the cabin rear. Annja sat in the open port-side door of the helicopter for whatever cooling effect the humid, heavy, stinking breeze of their passage could bring.

For hours she had watched the green of the triple-canopy forest, all but unbroken for mile after mile. The airfield where the de Havilland Canada Twin Otter had deposited them had seemingly been scraped from the forest in the middle of nowhere, with nothing in evidence to justify its existence but a little stream rippling along one side, past some warped plank buildings that constituted whatever facilities the place possessed. Annja and Dan had not entered them. They had been shepherded immediately from the twin-engine passenger plane to the olive-drab helicopter waiting with rotors lazily turning on a single square of warped and melting asphalt twenty yards wide. Without ceremony, or even a word spoken, it had risen into the hot, hard sky and flown away to the west northwest, following the wide brown undulation of the river.

Inside, the chopper stank of grease, of sweat and fear, of lubricant spilled and burned, of old gunsmoke, of hot metal and mildew and dust. The air was so thick with smell and humidity that breathing it was like trying to inhale through a linen cloth. Easier breathing was worth risking sitting in the door that lay open to emptiness, as far as Annja was concerned. She didn’t know a lot about helicopters, but she suspected from the start this one was a UH-1, the famed Huey. Of Vietnam War vintage.

If it was a person, it might have kids old enough to vote, she thought grimly.

The rain forest flowing below was almost hypnotic. It was all but monochromatic, the jungle, but its green had a million shades, if you stared at it long enough. It could absorb you, draw you back into nature, to your constituent raw materials… .

Dan’s cry had broken Annja’s reverie. Maybe that was a good thing. He was leaning to his right in his seat and pointing forward. Two muscular black men in green and tan sat like sphinxes flanking the hatchway to the cockpit, one holding a long black M-16 muzzle up between his knees, the other a stainless-steel-and-black shotgun. They had nodded in polite, if grim, acknowledgment when the two North Americans came aboard. Then they had simply refused, after the fashion of stone statues, to respond to any conversational overtures, in English or Portuguese or Dan’s halting but serviceable Spanish.

Annja wondered if they were there to keep the passengers from rushing the cockpit and hijacking the ancient helicopter.

She rolled back toward the cabin’s center.

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