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“Wait a minute, Dutch,” said Dillon, and the blond man paused in the doorway, the big muscles in his shoulders rippling with tension. “I think the man said we gotta get there first. Then I can start fuckin’ up.”

  And with a grin he moved past Schaefer and gripped the cable and bulleted out the door. Dutch was clearly startled by the show of respect—and just as clearly pleased. Lunging out into the wet night air himself, with the engine shrieking three feet from his ear. he started to think maybe Dillon hadn’t turned completely flab after all.

  “You don’t know how much I missed this, pal!” Dillon exclaimed as the two men swung down the twin cables. “Once you get it in your blood, you’re hooked!”

  Schaefer shouted back: “Man, you been readin’ too many Marvel comics!”

  As the two of them dropped to the jungle floor they hunched up, crashing through a tangle of ferns and elephant leaves, then thumping the earth as their heavy boots dug into the spongy ground. As soon as they let go of the cables the automatic winch in the chopper began to reel in the lines.

  Redbird didn’t waste a second. It whapped away into the darkness, its brother chopper following. Suddenly the soldiers were severed from their airborne lifeline, alone in the wildness of the jungle, their bridge to safety disappearing like a rumble of distant thunder.

  T H R E E

  The predawn sky was streaked in the east with mackerel clouds. The zing of insects and the rush of water in the swollen stream were deafening. As the seven men gathered their gear they began to distinguish the outlines of towering rubber trees. A light shower had left a glistening veneer of fine mist on the lush foliage and a slick humid edge to the air. Even as the mosquitoes hummed around their heads the first morning birds began to trill, signaling the start of the day’s chorus. It would shortly become a cacaphony of clicking, warbling, and screeching as everything from hummingbirds to prowling cats let loose their shimmer of sound effects through the course of the tropical day.

  As the sky turned pearl and then pale rose the temperature began to inch up as if the jungle were having a fever dream about the midday heat. Slowly the sky broke clear as the first pulse of the sun evaporated the cloak of mist on the landscape. The commandos loaded their packs on their backs, surveying their surroundings cautiously, peering close at the seemingly limitless screen of jungle.

  Triggered by a command from Schaefer the team began to move out, the pace set medium-brutal by Ramirez as pointman, They were synchronized perfectly about fifteen feet apart, each man carrying eighty or ninety pounds as they headed into the trees. It was mostly weapons and ammo. On a mission like this they didn’t eat except what they could scavenge in the field, and they didn’t need tents because they wouldn’t be sleeping. Everything extraneous had been eliminated from their gear. There wasn’t a toothbrush among them.

  Well, maybe Dillon had a toothbrush.

  As they came through the rubber trees and started downhill they encountered an even denser growth of jungle, so thick the seven were visually parted most of the time, though they held to a strict five meters between. Their highly tuned instincts and combat expertise kept them moving in unison, beginning now to work up a heavy sweat. The only sound of their progress was Ramirez hacking away up ahead with his machete, lopping off bush leaves and breaking vines. Otherwise they moved like prowlers, creeping down the makeshift trail, not letting so much as a twig crack.

  After half an hour of arduous downhill hiking, Schaefer stopped for a compass check. Then he whistled a signal to Ramirez—one long and two short—to set a new direction, west/southwest. As they resumed marching the slope leveled out and they found themselves in a marshy area, slogging through mud to their ankles, smacking at black flies that left their arms and necks bloody. It was nearly an hour before they reached solid ground again, with tree ferns waving over their heads and a smell like ripe peaches.

  At last they broke through into a clearing. Blain went up to the head of the column and crouched in a defensive position, scanning the area with his MP-5 at the ready. About a hundred yards away in a circle of stony ground he spotted the wreckage of the army UH-1H chopper. It was hanging upside down, wedged in an enormous stand of century cactus ten feet above the ground. The rotors were bent and twisted, the canopy mangled badly, and the tail section completely severed, thrown clear of the wreck and on the ground, fifteen feet from the nest of cactus. Except for the distant grate of parrots the setting was quiet, as after a bomb.

  Cautiously they approached the gnarled tail, collapsed like a fallen kite, the metal burned to ash as thin as paper. At an order from Schaefer, Mac moved forward into the shadow of the cactus. It was more like a grove than a single plant, its myriad spiked arms shooting as high as thirty feet, as if spurred by some genetic flaw that ran rampant through the jungle terrain. Now and then out here a thing got so gigantic it grew unearthly—an orchid, a grasshopper, sometimes a frog. The dead chopper lay in the twisted arms of the cactus like a fly in a Venus trap.

  Playing loops of sturdy rope lightly over one hand, Mac hurled up a grappling hook and snagged the chopper’s cargo hold. The hook went thunk and quavered along the bare metal of the cabin. Ramirez shinnied up the rope quick as a monkey and cautiously ran his knife around the chopper’s doorway, inspecting for trip wires. Then, satisfied that the wreck hadn’t been booby-trapped by the guerrillas, he pulled himself over the edge of the shattered door. Facing him were two bodies, pilot and co-pilot, dangling upside down and still strapped into their seats, arms above their heads as if surrendering. Ramirez didn’t blink. Methodically he glanced around, visually inspecting every square inch of the cabin, then rappeled back down the rope to the ground.

  Meanwhile. Dillon had secured a second line and gone up. He was the only one authorized to go through the dead men’s uniforms, and he’d been instructed to take out all flight plans and records.

  “The pilots each got one round in the head,” Ramirez told Schaefer. “And whoever hit it stripped the shit out of it.”

  Schaefer, his eyes constantly darting around the clearing, turned and looked up at the chopper. A curl of distaste was on his lips.

  “Took ’em out with a heat seeker,” he said tightly.

  “There’s something else. Major,” Ramirez added quietly.

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t think she’s no ordinary army taxi.”

  Schaefer looked at the younger soldier, his gaze level and slightly quizzical, as if to dare Ramirez to hit him with something unpleasant.

  “Looks more like a surveillance bird to me,” sniffed Ramirez, nodding slightly, a trifle cocky.

  Just then, Dillon came hurtling back to the ground and strode over to Schaefer and Ramirez. Oh, Jesus, thought Schaefer, he’s got a real bug up his ass now.

  “You picked up their trail yet?” Dillon asked curtly.

  “Billy’s on it,” Schaefer replied, motioning Ramirez away so he could talk to Dillon privately. Pointing up at the chopper, he drawled, “Heat seeker. Pretty sophisticated for half-ass mountain boys, don’t you think?” He smiled thinly. “They’re getting better equipped every day. Thank you, Miss America.”

  But Schaefer was more puzzled than he showed. He was startled at the level of technology the rebel forces had managed to obtain. A gnawing sense that something was “off” began to creep between his shoulders as Billy came trotting across the clearing.

  “Major, looks like there were ten, maybe twelve guerrillas. They pulled some prisoners from the chopper,” he said, pointing to a set of tracks nearby. Then, with an odd turn in his voice: “I don’t know what them other tracks are.”

  “What other tracks?”

  “ ’Bout six of ’em, I think,” Billy replied carefully. “U.S.-issue jungle boots. They come in from the north, out of them bushes, then they seem to follow the guerrillas. I don’t know . . .”

  Schaefer, more confused with every detail, turned to Dillon brusquely. “Mean anything to you?” he asked, just short of an accusation.
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br />   “Probably another rebel patrol,” said Dillon with a shrug. “They operate in here all the time. The whole fuckin’ country’s crawlin’ with ’em.”

  “It’s the weirdest thing,” Billy said softly, half to himself.

  Schaefer shot him a look. “What is?”

  “Those tracks from the north. It’s like . . .” Billy seemed to be at a total loss for words. He knew tracks like a bloodhound. “It’s like all these six guys have the same size shoes. And they all weigh . . . about one sixty. Every print is perfect.” He shook his head, bewildered, as if he couldn’t understand himself what he was trying to say. “They march like a fuckin’ machine,” he added lamely.

  “Go up ahead,” said Schaefer, cutting him off, impatient with the vagueness. “See what you can find.”

  Ramirez trotted after Billy as the latter crossed the clearing, eyes to the ground and sifting every inch. From his Sioux ancestors Billy had hawk’s eyes, hooded and black and very old. He could probably pick up an ant’s tracks.

  As if to put Dillon on notice for the next phase of the mission, Schaefer turned to his commanding officer and spoke precisely: “We don’t want any accidents. Sir.”

  By now it was eight in the morning and felt like noon. The heat seemed to grab a man by the throat, hanging on tor the kill like a razorback. Grimly, without another word, the two men joined the others. Then they all pushed ahead, lumbering like dinosaurs under the weight of their heavy gear, following the trail Ramirez carved out of the dense undergrowth.

  About twenty yards north of the clearing a red and ochre spotted butterfly flew in among the prickly vines that hung like high-tension wires from the gray-barked cottonwood trees. Randomly, as if it needed to pause to get its bearings, the vivid creature landed on a cottonwood branch, still flexing its wings lightly even at rest, its feet hardly touching the gnarled bark. A moment later the insect flew off, leaving a curious imprint on the bark like a shadow of itself, almost like an X-ray.

  Up close in fact, the bark didn’t look like wood matter at all. It seemed made up of microscopic scales, as if this one tree were fashioned out of some kind of synthetic. Then the printed shadow of the butterfly seemed to bleed into the bark itself, and finally the image disappeared, swallowed into the tree. The branch was moving slightly now, but not as if rustled by any breeze. It almost appeared to be breathing. Then it quivered and began to withdraw toward the trunk of the tree, silent as a boa constrictor.

  Now what had seemed to be just smother cottonwood tree began to ripple with color, iridescent as a chameleon. Some weird flow of force was making its way through the molecules of the tree, groping toward the roots. For all anyone knew, this sort of transformation happened all the time in the Usamacinta jungle. Perhaps it was only more of the same force that grew the six-inch orchids and the grasshoppers big as mice.

  For all anyone knew, that is. But no one knew. No one had even the first glimmering of an idea.

  For the tree creature breathed the jungle differently from those who had evolved there. In reality it was no more a cottonwood branch than it was anything else on earth. It somehow discerned living tissue from inanimate objects by picking up the heat patterns of living cells. It saw the outlines of all living creatures shaded with a sort of liquid color that was the pulse of the heat of life. But “saw” is very imprecise, for it only had eyes when it felt like having eyes. It was like a lost soul searching for a form in which to flower. And now suddenly it had focused its yearnings on the most developed creature in the world it had come to visit—man.

  As the team struggled through the brush, the creature followed them like an obsession beneath the jungle floor, rippling from root to root. It drove forward like a mad scientist consumed by his own curiosity. It still required a thousand clues to what made a man tick. Since it needed no earthly form of its own beyond what it chose to assume, it was incapable of feeling emotion toward any of the earthling tribes. It knew no pity and no remorse. It was the war and the warrior all in one.

  It was the sweltering height of day now, and the jungle was blaring with the white noise of insects and birds, all the raw life in the rough terrain screaming without reason.

  Schaefer by now had consulted his map and compass and outlined another change in course. He passed a hand signal down the line—voices might alert the guerrillas—and the group followed him obediently. Dillon, for all his seniority, was content to let Dutch do the navigating. His own inner compass was rusty, and he knew it.

  About an hour later the team broke through a screen of black-leaf palmetto and hit up at the base of a hillside, deeply grooved by the porous volcanic rock and veiled with tree ferns more suited to the higher altitude than the ground hugging tangle that grew in the heat-trapped valley. A hundred yards up they could see Ramirez standing on a boulder, scouting the valley. He signaled down to the cluster of men that he sighted nothing and they should come ahead.

  Billy had left Ramirez and climbed down into a wide crevasse, following the slope of the hill in a gradual curve. He kept stepping on frogs, and twice he had to squeeze through narrow openings in the eroded black rock. Within a couple of minutes he couldn’t hear Ramirez whistle from the perch behind him, because his own breath came so heavy in the steep-walled passage.

  He stopped for a moment, his mouth and throat parched. He looked up and singled out a curling vine with tiny orange blossoms. He pulled his knife from his shoulder scabbard as he yanked the vine down from its grip on the rock wall and severed its midsection. A thin stream of yellow fluid leaked out, and he sucked it into his thirsty gullet.

  Suddenly, alerted to the sense of a suspicious presence, he dropped the vine aside and the yellow liquor trickled out over the ground. He brought his M-203 to attention, aiming it along the tunnel of the crevasse to where it turned a blind corner. His instincts told him something was wrong. He strained his eyes to penetrate the dense canopy of tangled vines and leaves above him, searching for a sign.

  It wasn’t a sighting, or even a sound that alerted him. In his thirteen years of combat duty he’d learned to freeze at any sudden change in his field of focus, even when there was no identifiable evidence. Billy was possessed of a keen sixth sense, and his hunches were seldom wrong. In the wild, faced with the possibility of encountering an enemy who would kill you as easily as swat a fly, you never ignored even faint, unconfirmed warnings. Sometimes Billy would find himself overcome with an aura of death. As soon as you felt it you had to be ready to kill. There was no second shot in the jungle.

  Complicating Billy’s perceptions were the deafening sounds of the midday scree of wildlife. The clicks and buzzings, the cries of tropical birds and the gabble of monkeys, all were magnified a hundredfold by the relentless heat. Even down here in the dark tunnel there wasn’t a breath of cool. It was like being in a pressure cooker about to burst.

  Realizing there was nothing immediate, Billy relaxed slightly and began to move again, the two rock walls on either side barely as wide as his shoulders. He came to the blind corner and peered around it, startled to see the crevasse open out to the hillside. He felt a rush of relief as he stepped away from the cavelike recess, feeling again the beat of the sun on his neck.

  Still he couldn’t see ten feet ahead through the ferns, and as he started across the slope he forced himself to be totally alert, paying special attention to the new terrain. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he wasn’t at all satisfied that nothing beyond the natural interplay of the jungle was at work. There was something out there ticking, even if he couldn’t hear it yet.

  A few minutes later Billy crouched and stared at the ground in front of him. He looked confused as he traced a bootprint in the mud, then another. He looked up and combed the trees with his keen eyes, ears perked for any sound that didn’t fit in the flow of things. What was it, he wondered, about these bootprints? Why did they seem too perfect?

  Hearing a faint rustling, he sprang to his feet. He moved forward through the ferns, finger on the doub
le trigger of his gun. Ahead he could see a heavy curtain of moss hanging among the trees. As he got closer he saw the moss was swarming with hundreds of flies buzzing like a chainsaw. Had that been the sound that was out of synch? Cautiously he stepped forward, cutting a spider web out of his path with the barrel of his cocked gun. A queer smell made his nostrils flare, but he wasn’t thinking absolutely clearly all of a sudden. His mind seemed to skip a beat, as if he thought for a moment he was back in Louisiana, hunting coon with his brother.

  Reaching forward, Billy touched the slick tendrils of moss with his free hand. He saw something rustling behind the curtain and a weird shifting of dark forms. He shuddered slightly as he stared at his hand where it stroked the trailing tree moss. Then, holding his breath, with a swift movement of his gloved hand he swept the moss aside.

  Instantly an explosion of fluttering black wings blinded him as vultures erupted in ten directions. They shrieked past Billy, enraged at his intrusion, wingtips and claws batting him about the face and arms as he stood there stunned. Their blood cry churned his belly like an old Sioux war call.

  Then, as the black cloud of carrion scavengers disappeared, Billy’s face froze into a mask of horror. His eyes bulged and his mouth went slack as he fell into a state of raw shock. A curl of disgust gurgled in his throat as he stared transfixed at the horror inches from his ancient eyes.

  It was the leering death-grin of a human face completely stripped of skin, glistening with newly exposed muscle tissue and dripping with blood. The body was hanging upside down like a side of beef, every inch of skin methodically flayed, precise as if a team of demented surgeons had been at work. Some muscles still twitched as the body swayed in the humid breeze.

  In shock. Billy stumbled backward and lost his footing, then hugged the trunk of a tree and let the vomit come. As he stood quaking in a cold sweat, a little distance now between him and the horrible face, he took in the rest of the gruesome scene. Suspended from branches above, vines threaded through their Achilles tendons, hung the bodies of three dead men. Each was completely gutted and skinned. Thousands of insects beat the air as they attacked the carcasses in a crazed, exultant mass feeding.