Secret of the Slaves (08) by Alex Archer

Author:Alex Archer [Archer, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-01-12T07:00:00+00:00

It wasn't that easy. She suspected the windscreen hadn't been all that clean to begin with. And after fifty or a hundred miles of Amazon Basin bugs – serious buggage – it was like trying to peer through green jam smeared on the walls of a jar. Between that and the glare of the setting sun, a little off their bow, she wondered how the pilots saw to navigate.

After a moment she made something out – a wide yellow gouge, not just from the jungle's green hide, but from one side of the river itself. For a moment Annja wondered if some giant meteor had struck recently, blasting a crater a mile or more in extent. But no, that was ridiculous; it would have knocked down trees for many more miles all around – not to mention been all over the news for weeks.

Away off on the far end of the gouge she made out big yellow machines gouging at the earth like vast metal insects. Closer by were oblongs that looked like cargo containers, ranked and stacked in thousands. Here and there were clumped wooden buildings and even corrugated Quonset‐style structures inside fences. A high fence seemed to run around the entire perimeter of the gaping yellow wound, as if somehow to contain its infection.

The stink of the place rose up like an invisible wall to smack them. The jungle always stank of tepid water and tannin and green growth and whatever had walked or crawled upon the earth, flown above it, clambered through the trees or delved below and died down there and began rotting away.

But this was different – stronger, harsher and far more revolting. It was the reek of raw human sewage by the liquid ton. It was mixed with a choking smell of burning diesel fuel. Annja realized it didn't just come from the earth‐scraping machines ceaselessly at work on the camp's far side.

Dozens of pillars of black smoke winding into the sky from seemingly random locations suddenly brought to mind the none‐too‐fond reminiscences of Vietnam vets she had known, of the most odious and onerous duty of the whole misbegotten war – shit‐burning detail.

The smell of filth, burned and raw, was not the most horrific thing to assail her senses. Far from it. She thought she might have to shave off her long hair and burn her clothes and shower for an hour to rid herself of the stench.

But she might never rid herself of the nightmares brought on by what she saw.

First was the cage. A huge open box out in the sluggish river, south of the discoloration. Annja's mind at first made no sense of it. Or refused to, until she could no longer deny to herself that it was filled with a score or more people, emaciated men and women dressed in rags the color of the river mud, bent over doing something in the knee‐deep water.

"What is going on here?" she asked the M‐16 guard. He did not speak or meet her eyes.

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