Текст книги "Black Rain"
Автор книги: Graham Brown
Соавторы: Graham Brown
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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 27 страниц)
CHAPTER 38
So they would wait. They would wait in the clearing for Kaufman’s helicopter, until it came or until it failed to come. They would turn the camp into a stronghold and take cover in it, avoiding the dark labyrinth of the jungle with its vaporous shadows and infinite blinds. They would dig trenches and build obstacles and horde the weapons and ammunition that both parties had brought. And if their attackers came back for blood, they would have to brave a storm of overlapping fire to get it.
This had been Kaufman’s plan from the beginning, since his very first conversation with the scarred and wounded Jack Dixon. Right away he’d recognized the mistake of entering the jungle, even before he’d listened to the harrowing tale of his trek to the river. But then, Dixon needed to leave and it had always been Kaufman’s intention to stay, to deal with the problem and then find what he was looking for, unhindered by either the animals or the Chollokwan. Now, in the aftermath of the plan’s initial, failed version, the survivors of both camps would attempt a second act, one they hoped would fare better.
It fell to Verhoven to build the new fortress, and he began by throwing out most of what had already been done. He realized that if he and Hawker hadn’t breached Kaufman’s battlements, the animals or the natives soon would have. The network of foxholes was spread too thin, too far from one another to do much good. The arrangement belonged in the world Kaufman’s Eastern European mercenaries had trained for in the past decades: a modern battlefield with its mechanized terror and high explosives, a place where the distance prevented multiple positions from being wiped out by a single missile, bomb or shell.
Verhoven, on the other hand, had spent his life in close combat, in small arms battles on grassy savannahs, in jungles and on tribal lands, fighting against enemies who possessed lesser technology but usually greater numbers. That situation, like the one they were in now, required defenders to be bunched closer together, where a concentration of firepower was the best protection against being overrun.
In his plan, Verhoven would dig a new set of bunkers, shallower out of the necessity of haste, but packed tightly together, like circled wagons in the old American west. With each bunker able to add its weapons to that of its neighbor, they effectively doubled and tripled the available firepower, no matter what direction the threat approached from. It would make their small force seem like a platoon of armed men.
Kaufman’s surviving mercenary, Eric, and the traitor, Devers, were forced to do much of the digging, while Verhoven watched and critiqued. Despite their injuries, they dug for all they were worth.
A short distance away, Danielle conducted an impromptu clinic on firearms with Susan. The young woman had never fired a gun before, and showed little desire to do so now, but Verhoven’s plan and the group’s small numbers required her to at least know how to load. Over the course of an hour she learned to handle a Kalashnikov. Loading, aiming, firing, practicing the removal of jammed cartridges. Through two full clips of ammunition her shots were never accurate, but it almost didn’t matter; she would only fire if the Chollokwan were storming them, and in that case there would be too many targets to miss.
While Susan practiced, Brazos and McCarter used the expedition’s tools to enhance their situation as best they could, augmenting electronic sensors with the most primitive of defenses, cutting the steel pry bars into pieces and wedging them into the ground, with the sharpened ends pointing up and out. They added a phalanx of sticks and piles of loose rock as obstacles, forcing anything that charged them to negotiate a weaving path or to come straight down the line of fire.
While the rest of the group built their defenses, Hawker dragged Kaufman across the camp, retrieving what remained of the weapons cache. They went through crates of neatly stacked equipment and box after box of weapons and ammunition, all carried in from Kaufman’s barge downriver. As he’d boasted to Gibbs, Kaufman’s men were far better equipped than the NRI group had been, and the two battles for control had ended so quickly that much of the equipment had never made it out of storage.
Hawker inventoried the supplies, separating the useful from the merely burdensome, and they began to carry boxes back to the center of the camp. About an hour before dusk, he pulled a tarp off something, and a smile came to his face. Lying before them, nose-up on a tripod, was a massive, heavy caliber rifle with a laser scope attached to the barrel. A Barrett M107: a fifty-caliber monster, accurate at over a thousand yards, firing huge shells that traveled at two thousand miles per hour and could punch through several inches of hardened steel. Against this weapon, the bony armor of the animals would be useless.
Hawker grinned. “This is what I call a problem-solver.”
He turned to Kaufman. “How much ammunition do you have for this thing?”
“I don’t know weapons,” Kaufman replied. “That’s what I hired them for. You’d better check with Eric.”
Hawker brought the radio up to transmit the question, but a sound like paper ripping interrupted him. Behind them, a flare snaked into the sky.
The sound startled Hawker, but he knew what it meant and he spun around, firing, even before he could get his weapon on line. The rifle chattered as a shape launched itself toward him. Shells ripped into the charging beast, but the animal hit him full bore and both of them went tumbling across the ground.
A second creature followed, charging Kaufman, who bolted in the wrong direction, away from the center of camp instead of toward it.
Recognizing his mistake, Kaufman tried to bend his course back toward the heart of the clearing, but the animal cut him off, tripping him with a flick of its front claw. Kaufman went down in a cloud of dust. Before he could recover, a stabbing pain fired through his shoulder and he felt himself being yanked and swung around. He screamed.
Fifty yards away, on his hands and knees, Hawker gasped for air. He was coughing so hard that he thought he might throw up. The force of the blow had been taken on his bruised ribs, and every breath was fire. He looked around in a daze, shocked even to be alive. The animal lay a few feet away in an awkward heap. Several shots to the creature’s head had been fatal, but as it crumbled to the ground its momentum had carried into Hawker like a runaway train.
Seeing only the lanyard of his rifle, Hawker grabbed it and pulled. The weapon came snaking through the dry grass toward him. He snatched it up, racking the slide twice to make sure it wasn’t jammed, and stood. In the distance he could hear Kaufman’s agony.
Out in the trees, Kaufman’s face banged against the rugged ground as the animal dragged him. His shoulder burned and strained as if his arm was being ripped off, and then just as suddenly, he was in the forest and free.
Moving on pure adrenaline, Kaufman scrambled to his feet, only to be slammed back to the ground, dragged another dozen feet and then flipped over onto his back.
“Help me!” he screamed.
The hideous thing pinned him down, crushing the wind out of him. As he struggled to breathe, Kaufman reached for the animal’s throat. But there was no soft windpipe to crush, just bone and a thin joint where the plates slid over one another. He grabbed for its bulbous eye but the head pulled back and the weight on his chest increased.
Unable to move beneath the five-hundred-pound bulk, Kaufman squirmed in horror as the segmented tail rose up above its head and pointed toward him. He watched the spiked tips extend slowly from their sheaths and drops of some clear liquid bead up on the sharpened points.
“No!” he shouted. “No!”
The tail shook slightly, went utterly still and then shot forward.
Hawker arrived seconds later, but he found no trace of either Kaufman or the animal. He saw trampled brush and blood and then freshly cut gouges in the bark of the tree. Up above, the higher branches swayed in the breezeless air and some of the leaves were wet with smears of the animal’s oily secretions. It had taken Kaufman into the trees, like a leopard carrying off its kill.
They’d been vertical in the cave, he thought. Of course they’d be vertical in the forest.
As he scanned the foliage, the sound of gunfire reached him from across the camp. He waited for it to cease, but it continued unabated. Reluctantly, he broke into another run.
By the time he reached the center of camp, the guns had gone silent. He counted heads; everybody was present.
The others looked at him curiously. Bright red blood poured down one side of his face, flowing from the reopened gash below his eye.
“Where’s Kaufman?” Danielle asked.
“Gone,” Hawker said.
“Escaped?”
“I wouldn’t call it that.”
Danielle winced, realizing what that meant.
Hawker popped the clip out of his rifle. “Shells?”
She pointed to one of the storage boxes that he’d brought over earlier and Hawker sat down next to it and began reloading. He gazed out toward the perimeter as he shoved the cartridges into the clip. He wanted to go back for the big sniper’s rifle, but the trees were swallowing the sun whole and the weapon sat too close to the forest to chance it in the failing light. It would have to wait until morning.
If they lived that long.
That night the camp came under siege. The motion trackers picked up movement along the perimeter thirty-nine separate times. At first, the men and women from the NRI took carefully aimed shots, hoping to hit or at least scare off the intruders and conserve ammunition. But as the creatures became more aggressive, the response from the camp’s defenders grew less controlled. Before long, the night was filled with gunfire. Tracers and flares lit up the darkness while the floodlights blazed along with the guns.
“Why are they attacking now?” Susan wondered. “We’ve been here for a week. Why now?”
No one knew. Maybe it had been the continued incursions into the temple or perhaps the blood they’d shed in their own battles and the scent of the dead bodies had drawn the beasts in, but whatever the case, it was clear early on that this night would be far worse than the last. And as the animals grew accustomed to the light and noise, they began charging through the camp in ones and twos, ripping down the tents and smashing equipment, flying past the small stronghold of circled bunkers.
One of them got close enough to slash McCarter’s arm, only to be driven back by a blast from Verhoven’s shotgun. Another, tripped up by the obstacles, tumbled and landed right in front of Brazos. He fired into it from point-blank range but the thing stumbled away, still alive, at least for the moment.
The smaller creatures made faster charges; one of them leaped in the midst of its attack, landing in between the bunkers, right in the center of the circle. No one could fire at it for fear of shooting the others, but the dogs attacked, and in the melee of a vicious animal brawl, the dogs took the worst of it, especially with their nylon leashes hindering them.
Verhoven grabbed a machete, and in one great swing at the stake to which their ropes were tied, he cut them free, but the animal they fought was invulnerable to teeth and claws and the canines were dying all around it.
“Everybody down!” Hawker shouted. A quick burst from his rifle drew a piercing shriek from the beast and it leapt away, tore off into the distance and disappeared into the trees.
In between them, three of the dogs were dead, the other two bleeding and injured. With a look of pain on his face, Verhoven spoke, “We need to clean their wounds when we get a chance.”
Danielle grabbed the medi-kit, but before she could begin, the perimeter alarm went off again, announcing yet another attack.
Two hours past midnight things took a turn for the worse. It was a random occurrence, but to the overtired minds of the NRI team, it didn’t seem that way. In two separate attacks, over a span of five minutes, the animals destroyed the entire lighting system that had so aided the humans’ defense.
In the first attack, one animal crashed headlong into the post that held two of the spotlights. The pole came crashing down and the lights exploded, showering the group with incandescent sparks. Minutes later, a much larger animal got hopelessly tangled in the power cords. The beast twisted frantically, jerking and spinning like a shark caught in a net. In doing so, it yanked down another floodlight and then pulled the entire generator off its blocks, shorting out the system and plunging the clearing into sudden darkness.
With quick hands, Danielle fired off a flare. But the animal had escaped its entanglement and disappeared.
For the next three hours they had only flares to light up the night. They launched dozens of them, some triggered from the control panel, some from flare guns and still others thrown by hand into the clearing.
At some point a drum of kerosene took a hit from one of the rifles. It exploded in a burst of orange light, and the flames soon ignited the drum next to it. The fires crackled and popped as tongues of flame leapt toward the sky half hidden by the oily, black smoke.
By now the survivors were approaching the breaking point. They were exhausted beyond measure, under siege from things they could not have imagined existing just days before, bizarre animals that showed no fear of humans and their guns, nor any real reason to fear them.
In all of the night’s attacks not one of the animals had been definitively killed; they’d been driven off, and many were surely wounded, but not one had fallen in the expanse of the clearing.
Various reasons were guessed at. For one thing, most of these animals were larger than the ones they’d seen in the cave. Danielle guessed that the ones from the cave were juveniles and these had been out feeding and growing. That would make their skeletons proportionately thicker and stronger. Verhoven noted their strange shapes, guessing that the oddly slanting exteriors acted like the armor on a tank, deflecting any projectile that came in at a flat angle, like a stone skipping across the water. Still, no one could be sure.
Worst off were Devers and Eric, the surviving German mercenary. They sat in a foxhole, unarmed, with their hands and feet tied, knowing that their fate depended on the very people who had been their prisoners. A soldier who understood his situation, Eric shouted warnings when he thought it appropriate. Devers, on the other hand, spent the quiet moments between attacks either complaining or protesting his innocence. At least until Verhoven kicked him in the ribs, putting a stop to his whining for the night.
For the others, time and stress began to take their toll. Their minds were soon playing tricks on them, seeing and hearing things that weren’t there. Emotions swung wildly from one extreme to another. McCarter found himself drifting into utter despair at one moment, wishing it would just be over one way or another, then laughing at the absurdity of it all a few minutes later. The others struggled through similar states.
And then, in the last hour before dawn, things got worse.
Another sound began to make its presence known, the hollow, rhythmic voice of chanting men, hidden somewhere within the trees. The Chollokwan had returned.
Soon they could see glimpses of fire through the tangled mesh of the trees, and gray smoke began to fill the clearing. But this time the Chollokwan did not build the inferno they’d created before. They set fires only sporadically, gathering in groups, chanting and shouting in waves once again.
Their voices were coarse and threatening. Haunting the survivors, mocking them and, above all else, reminding them of something no one wanted to recall: they had been warned.
CHAPTER 39
As dawn approached the Chollokwan voices faded, receding into the forest along with the morning mists. But this time, the rising sun brought no feeling of safety or redemption, no false sense of relief, only the stark realization of how bad things really were.
Shell casings littered the ground by the hundreds, scattered like cigarette butts from some mad smokers’ convention. Burned-out flares lay in small heaps of ash amid circles of blackened earth while the piles of stone loomed like rubble between ugly eruptions of sharpened steel. The tents they’d once slept in were little more than shredded lengths of nylon, jagged strips hanging limply from mangled frames. Farther out, the drums of kerosene crackled and burned, belching thick, oily smoke and fouling the air with acrid fumes.
In this harsh morning light, the clearing showed itself for what it was, for what it had always been, a wasteland, a graveyard, a malignant spot in the middle of paradise, where nothing lived and nothing grew. As the Nuree had insisted, it was a place that had been rejected by life itself.
Still, with a respite from the attacks, the survivors took the chance to recover and sleep, dozing in shifts, with their loaded weapons beside them, waiting for the next phase to begin and hoping somehow that it would not. They’d barely survived through twelve hours; most wondered how the hell they would last through sixty more.
At noon the shift changed and Hawker took the lead watch from Verhoven.
“Break time,” Hawker said.
“Uh-hm,” Verhoven replied, as he set the safety on his weapon.
Verhoven wasn’t a man given to deep reflection, things were what they were in his world, but Hawker sensed a thorn in the man’s side somewhere.
“Something wrong?” Hawker asked.
“Been counting ammo,” Verhoven said. “Another night like the last one and we’ll run dry before the sun comes up.”
Hawker hadn’t taken the time to inventory things, but he sensed the same thing. If the animals continued their onslaught unabated, it would be a war of attrition that the humans could not win. “We’ll have to be more sparing in what we use,” Hawker replied.
“They’re wild, Hawk,” Verhoven said. “Even Danielle, who’s a hell of a shot, uses too much ammo. And the others are all over the place.”
“They’re afraid,” Hawker said. “They’ll be a little better tonight.”
Verhoven looked at the ground for a second and then back at Hawker. “If they’re not, I’m taking the guns out of their hands. I don’t care what they say. If it comes to that, you and I will do the firing. No one else. Better they be pissed off and alive than empowered and dead.”
Hawker hesitated a second. He doubted Danielle would give up her gun, but the others would not fight the logic. He nodded, and Verhoven turned and walked off.
A few minutes later Danielle approached him with the medi-kit in her hand.
“I can only hope you’re going to examine me,” he said.
“Much as you’d like me to,” she said. “There’s a lot more wrong with you than I could fix.”
He smiled.
“We do have a problem, though.”
“Really,” he said, looking around, “because I hadn’t noticed.”
“Kaufman,” she explained.
He stared at her for a second. It was like she’d read his mind. “Yeah, Kaufman.”
She explained. “Without that son of a bitch to send up his flare pattern, who knows if his helicopter will land. That means no extraction, no free ride home.”
“I thought about that,” he admitted, “although I wasn’t sure he was telling the truth with that story to begin with. You use flares to draw attention to yourself when someone’s looking for you. Kind of odd to use them for a party that already knows where you are. More likely you’d use smoke. That would keep any distant observers from locking in on the position and it would give the pilot localized info and wind direction as well.”
She nodded. “Seemed a little odd to me as well. My guess is: Kaufman was either lying or he didn’t know, and he made up that story to give himself some type of residual value and reduce the chances of being shot at sunrise. He was a bastard but he was smart.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But now what? If we pop the wrong color smoke, or shoot the wrong flare it could scare off the pilot. It might be better to do nothing, let his curiosity bring him in closer. We can dig up Kaufman’s people and put on their uniforms.” Hawker looked out to where he and McCarter had buried the dead mercenaries. “If the pilot sees us like that, he might land … or he might just strafe us as he flies past and then head off into the distance.”
“I’m not real interested in going through that again,” she said. “But the only alternative is five days in the jungle. Choose your poison.”
After the night they’d just lived through, Hawker had no desire to face even one of those things in the tangled darkness of the rain forest. He guessed that the helicopter would come back, but it was a coin flip as to whether they’d last that long and another question altogether as to what would happen after that. Still, two days in the well-defended clearing and a fifty-fifty shot seemed like better odds than four or five days trudging through the jungle.
Either Danielle sensed this or had come to the same conclusion. “Let’s wait,” she said. “And let’s keep this from the others.”
Hawker nodded, and noticed McCarter walking toward them. The professor had bled through the dressing on his arm. “Looks like you’ve got another patient.”
Danielle turned around. “Sit down,” she said, looking at McCarter. “Let me rewrap that.”
McCarter took a seat and tried to hold still as Danielle cut the gauze from his arm. He seemed distraught to Hawker, almost despondent.
“Rough night?” Hawker asked, trying to lighten his mood.
McCarter did not respond directly. “When my wife was sick,” he said finally, “there were nights, during the chemo, that I would hear her throwing up violently in the bathroom down the hall. Dry heaves for what seemed like hours, and then she’d rest against the closed door, and it would rattle as she shivered.”
He closed his eyes for a second and choked back a lump in his throat. “But she didn’t want my help or my pity,” he said at last. “She just wanted to be well again. And in her mind, as long as I didn’t hear, she could pretend it was working, she could pretend that she was getting better. So I would lie there, hour after hour, fighting every urge in my body to run to her, so we could both pretend she wasn’t dying.
“That’s what last night felt like to me,” he explained. “Like a message being delivered over and over again and we’re all pretending not to hear it, all pretending like we’re not going to die.”
As McCarter finished, he and Danielle exchanged looks and they seemed to make some kind of connection. Hawker didn’t know what it was, but as much death as he’d seen in his life, most of it had been mercifully quick. He was thankful for that.
He looked McCarter in the eye. They needed him to hang on, they needed everyone to hang on. “We’re not dead yet,” Hawker said.
“But tonight will be more of the same,” McCarter replied.
“Maybe,” Hawker said. “Maybe not. In any fight, things always look worse from your perspective. All you see are your own losses but none of your enemies’. Your mind tells you he’s still at full strength, when undoubtedly he’s weakened.”
Hawker pointed out into the jungle. “We didn’t do so bad last night. We’re alive. And we lit those things up pretty good. Some of them are going to die off, others will lick their wounds and stay away, and that means less of them around to bother us tonight.”
That thought seemed to bolster McCarter. “That makes sense,” he said. “But they will be coming back.”
“Yeah,” Hawker said. “I’m guessing they will. We just have to make sure we’re ready for them this time. More ready than we were yesterday.”
“And how do we do that?” McCarter asked.
“First off, we need to do some research,” Hawker said.
McCarter’s face brightened. “Research,” he said. “I like research. What are you thinking?”
“Yeah,” Danielle said suspiciously as she wrapped McCarter’s arm in new gauze. “What are you thinking?”
Hawker pointed toward the forest again. “We have to go out there and poke around in the trees for a bit. Take a look at a few things.”
McCarter’s face showed a negative opinion of that plan. “Did I tell you how much I hate research? Can’t stand the stuff.”
Danielle laughed as she finished taping off his new bandage.
“No, seriously,” he said. “I always have the assistants do it for me.”
“Nice try,” she told him. “But he suckered you on that one.”
A minute later Hawker and McCarter were grabbing two radios. The first one sounded intermittent and weak.
Hawker grabbed a second one and clicked the mike; it seemed to be working. “This one’s good.”
“Try to make it last,” Danielle said. “The charger’s down.”
Hawker clipped the radio to his belt. “Great,” he said. “We’ll be living like the Amish soon.”
Danielle watched as Hawker grabbed his rifle and led a reluctant, but far more positive Professor McCarter across the clearing. Despite his humor she sensed a great weight on Hawker’s shoulders, the weight of expectations put upon him by the others. They looked to him for hope, trusting him to get them home. As long as he believed they could survive, then they believed it too, but if he faltered or hedged his words, they would sense it and their own hearts would fall.
As he walked toward the trees, she found herself thinking about him on a deeper level and wondering how he’d become who he was. And she found herself sitting next to the one person in the world who probably knew the answer.
She turned to Verhoven, who sat on the edge of his foxhole, awkwardly loading clips with his one good hand. “Tell me about Hawker,” she said.
Verhoven looked up briefly and then went back to the task at hand. He didn’t seem interested.
She produced a tin of tobacco, one Kaufman’s people had taken from him. “I’ll make it worth your while.”
Verhoven cut his eyes at her, a sly grin on his face suggesting he appreciated her style of bargaining. “What do you want to know?”
She handed him the container. “You worked together before, right?”
“A long time back.”
“So what happened? How’d you become enemies?”
Verhoven’s leathery face wrinkled as he pulled a wad of dark tobacco from the container and shoved it into the side of his mouth. “I tried to kill him,” he said plainly.
Danielle was shocked. She’d guessed at some type of pride-filled argument, a strategic disagreement, a fight over money or action or even a girl.
“Or so he thinks,” Verhoven elaborated.
“Why would he think that?” she asked.
Verhoven exhaled grumpily before continuing. “At one time Hawker and I were friends,” he said. “Good friends, despite our differences. We were working in Angola, Hawker with the CIA, me with South African Special Forces. Our job was to stir up resistance to the regime that had been oppressing the place for thirty years. It was a hell of a job, it always is out there. Eventually Hawker made some choices that put him in opposition to everyone he knew, including me.”
“I know a little bit of it,” she said. “I know he violated some orders.”
Verhoven spat the first shot of tobacco juice onto the ground. The act seemed to bring him great joy. “There are orders,” he said, “and then there are orders. Some are even given with the expectation that they’ll be disregarded, especially in that world. But others are the law.”
“Hawker disobeyed the wrong kind.”
Verhoven put the can of tobacco into his breast pocket, picked up a new clip to load.
“Yes,” he said. “But it’s not that simple really. To understand what happened, to really understand, you have to first understand Africa.”
He shoved another cartridge into place. “Aside from my country, most of the continent exists in a state of intractable, cyclical anarchy. Show me a nation, I’ll show you a war. Show me another, I’ll show you a genocide or two. Angola was no different. The CIA had been there for decades, most of it spent supporting a lunatic named Jonas Savimbi. By the time Hawker got there they’d realized that the man was no better than a mad killer. So they began to diversify. Hawker and I worked with the smaller groups, the ones not linked to Savimbi. In any other place they would have been allies, united against a common enemy, but reason and logic mean precious little in Africa, and Savimbi saw that as a threat. And so a deal was struck, the kind that leaves certain parties out in the cold.”
“Your parties,” she guessed.
Verhoven nodded. “The money was to stop, the guns were to stop and the tribes Hawker and I had been working with were to be left on their own, to fend for themselves with an entire division of the Angolan army bearing down on them, smelling blood and looking for someone to make an example out of.”
So that was the order Hawker had disobeyed. Of course it wasn’t in the file; it would never be officially written in the first place. “And Hawker kept arming them,” she guessed.
“As best he could,” Verhoven said. “He’d made fast friends with them. Given his word. So he went outside the ropes, buying guns and weapons on the Agency’s account, and stealing them after the Agency cut him off.”
Verhoven paused in the narrative to load a few more shells. “Your government didn’t like that much and they asked us to stop him and bring him in. Well, we did, eventually. And while Hawker sat rotting in one of my camps, the Angolans massacred those people.”
Danielle looked away, feeling ill.
Verhoven continued. “While the CIA tried to figure out what to do with him, a man named Roche walked into Hawker’s cell and shot him in the chest. Hawker thinks I ordered it.”
“Why would he think that?” she asked.
“Officially, Roche was under my command,” Verhoven said. “In reality, he took orders from someone in Pretoria. It seems my people and I had been involved with Hawker for too long to be trusted with the real job of catching him. So Roche and his special team came out to do the job, but for the better part of a year Hawker made them look like fools, hiding, moving, even getting away from a sting Roche had set up with the weapons and the money. As it looked, Roche was about to be replaced when he finally succeeded.”
