Seated in front of her, Smithson, one of her hired guns, leaned back, let his arm hang over the edge, and trailed his fingers in the water.
“Don’t do that!” Her tone was harsh. He jerked his hand back immediately and gave her a look that was a mix of annoyance and embarrassment. “You can lose a finger that way, or worse. There are piranha, caiman, snakes, even electric eels in these waters. Unless you want to lose your trigger finger, keep your hand inside the boat.”
Smithson lost the annoyed look, nodded, and turned around to face forward. At least the security guys were willing to take orders from her. Rather, they had been willing up to this point. She worried that Kennedy would insinuate himself in-between her and the men. She would just have to deal with that as it came.
Shafts of late afternoon sun bathed the river in a burnished orange glow when they finally spotted it. The river twisted sharply to the left, and directly in front of them loomed the arched outline of a dark cave. Its façade resembled a macabre face. The cave was the mouth, a stone jutted out directly above the opening, forming the nose, and jungle growth hung like thick hair up above it.
“If that’s our landmark,” Kennedy said, “where’s the side channel?”
“I think we’re supposed to go inside the cave.” A deep sense of foreboding filled Tam. She didn’t like the look of this cave, but she knew she was right. She could tell by the flow of the water that the cave was not a dead end, but a passage leading… somewhere.
Kennedy turned to her. “Have the third boat take the lead.”
She understood his thinking. The third boat held supplies, a security agent, a guide, and Andy, the professor of whom she was to dispose since he had no useful information to offer. To Kennedy’s way of thinking, they were the most expendable.
To her mind, however, she was at least a little more certain of the loyalty of her handpicked members of the expedition than that of Cy or Kennedy, though the guides frequently gave her dark looks, and muttered under their breath when she gave them orders. Besides, it wasn’t his place to give orders to her, even if he had almost made it seem like a suggestion. At least he hadn’t given the order outright, a sign that he, too, thought the guides and security men might properly acknowledge her as leader.
She decided to split the difference. She wasn’t expendable, but Cy was. She instructed the guide piloting his boat to take the lead. Cy probably should have been annoyed, but he quickly rummaged for a flashlight, drew his side arm, and crouched over the bow like an eager pirate ready for plunder.
Kennedy gave her a dirty look, which she met with a smirk. “You know what Salvatore’s instructions are in regard to our friend Cyrus,” she said softly. “Maybe something in there will do the job for us.”
Kennedy looked, for a moment, like he was about to argue, but he held his tongue. He turned around and fixed his eyes on their destination.
The cool, moist air of the cave was a welcome relief from the oppressive heat on the river. Nonetheless, Tam did not relax. Weapon in hand, she played her light back and forth in the darkness, wondering what might lay in wait. Her mind conjured images of vampire bats, or the glowing eyes of a jaguar lying in wait.
Her pulse quickened as they penetrated deeper into the darkness. The low ceiling gave her the feeling that the world was pressing down upon her. As they passed through the tunnel, the water was filled with sharp rocks that had to be carefully skirted, lest they damage their boats. Several times the boats hung up on the shallow bottom, and they were forced to get out and drag them, all the time worrying about the dangers that might lurk in the dark water just out of sight.
She breathed a deep sigh of relief when they finally emerged unscathed into a mist-shrouded lagoon. It was nearly sundown; the waning light and the thick canopy of the jungle cast the place in sinister shadows.
She spotted a clearing on the far side of the lagoon and directed them to go ashore there to set up camp. The jungle was silent here, and when they cut the engines and let the boats glide the last few feet to shore, the discomfort she felt in the cave filled her again.
Her grandmother had taught her that some places were “just bad,” and were to be avoided. She hadn’t meant dangerous places, like bad neighborhoods, but wicked places, places where evil resided so strongly that one could literally feel it. Tam had never believed her, but now she did. This was a bad place.
It happened in the blink of an eye. There was a sudden blur of motion as something sprang up from underneath a low-hanging branch. The guide in the lead boat had only a moment to cry out in surprise and pain before something clamped down on the back of his neck. Tam’s mind registered only a flash of olive and yellow before the man was snatched down into the water.
“Anaconda!” she cried, springing to her feet and almost capsizing their boat. Her Makarov was in her hand and her head was on a swivel, searching for a target.
Kennedy, cursing like a sailor, fired blindly into the water. The lagoon was filled with shouts as the two remaining guides called their friend’s name, while Cy cried out in panic and dove for the unattended motor. All the boat engines suddenly roared to life as everyone tried to get to shore as fast as human possible.
Tam wobbled as their boat struck ground, but she kept her feet and sprang nimbly onto shore. Their guides scrambled out of their boats and fled blindly into the jungle. Everyone else stood watching and waiting.
“Over there!” Cy shouted as, on the far side of the lagoon, the water roiled and a mass of coils surfaced for an instant. Only the man’s left arm was visible, desperately tugging at one of the coils. Cy and the two agents sent a flurry of bullets in the anaconda’s direction, but if they hit it, there was no sign.
“Stop!” Tam shouted. “You’re wasting ammunition. There’s nothing we can do for him now, and we don’t know what else we might run into.” Deep in her bones, she knew her words to be prophetic. Something told her their troubles had only just begun.
Chapter 18
This place was wrong. Everything about it sent up warning flares in Dane’s subconscious mind. He scanned the shore of the lagoon, but saw no obvious threats. Of course, in the Amazon, the unseen threat was often more dangerous than the one you saw coming.
“I don’t know, dude.” Bones was searching the trees with the same intensity as Dane. “There’s some serious wrongness here. It’s too quiet, and I don’t know what else, but I feel it.”
“Man, check out that snake.” From the other boat, Willis pointed to a spot along the bank where the biggest anaconda Dane had ever seen lay sunning itself.
Bones cursed and reached for his Glock, but Dane grabbed him by the wrist. “Don’t bother. Looks like it’s already eaten.”
Bones’s eyes went wide when he saw what Dane had already noticed. The middle of the snake’s body was swollen and distended almost beyond recognition, but it was evident that its last meal had been a human being.
“He won’t be going after anyone for a while. He’ll be too slow, and won’t have much of an appetite. What we need to do is make certain there are no brothers and sisters ready to make a meal out of us.”
All eyes went to the surrounding trees, scanning the branches for the giant predators. Matt hefted his Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine gun and his expression made it clear he was ready to shred anything that moved. Willis kept his Mossberg trained on the sunning anaconda, his finger on the trigger. He despised snakes, and all manner of what he termed, “squiggly things.”
“Come on Maddock! Let me take care of this thing.” In the shadowed lagoon, Willis’s eyes seemed to glow against his dark skin. “It ain’t hungry now, but it just might be by the time we come back this way.”