The assassins’ outboard boat was tied to the dock where the ferry had deposited us. They must have cut their engine in mid river, and rowed the aluminum craft ashore. I had Cizinio’s hand-drawn map to direct us, five kilometers north, he’d said, to the island. Six guards, I think, I recalled him saying, as Izabel and I lowered Nelson and the seized shotguns and ammunition belts into the boat. But Anasasio wasn’t a guard. He must have come upriver to warn his friends. The other attacker had probably been a guard, so if Cizinio was right, there would be at least five guards left.
Above the jungle silhouette came the first red hint of dawn as we chugged into the Madeira. Light would work against us. It gave us less time. The night noises were already easing, as if earth was yawning, preparing for transition. The howler monkey and jaguar sounds were gone, and dawn birds were calling. From the river I looked back to see huge winged bats, swooping against a quarter moon that brushed the treetops, seeking the caves, knotholes, or eaves in which they would sleep away the day, upside down, like logic in this remote place.
Nelson half sat, half supported himself against the gunwale, and made no complaint. His breathing sounded ragged against the engine. He had the inwardly directed attitude of those who have suffered serious injury. He was conserving strength. Izabel Santo had done everything possible for him and let him be, but I knew how hard that was. The two Brazilians were like Eddie and me. Izabel was Uno and Nelson was Dos. My respect for them was enormous. They could have left me alone in New Extrema, but they’d stayed to help.
Somewhere behind us I heard the diesel engine powering the village start up, and a single electric light shone from beneath a door. Good thing I smashed the ham radio. The residents would venture out now and find the dead. Were the people out there the hotel owner’s relatives? His parents or children? No way to know.
But then my mind moved ahead, because a few miles upriver people would be wondering why they had not heard from their killers. Maybe we’ll be lucky. Maybe they’ll be drunk. Or asleep. Or would never think that we would attack.
Cizinio had said, There is a dock on the south side, and always two guards posted.
He’d said, There are no guards on the back side of the island, but there is mud that you sink into.
The stars were out. Two feet of mist covered the river. We seemed to float through the bottom of a twisting canyon, the walls of which were a solid mass of trees. Overhead, a meandering slit of night. We must have gone five kilometers by now, yet there was no island. The river widened, the banks fell back. The smell was rot and vegetation and fresh oxygen so thick that it seemed to clot your lungs. The motor sounded too loud. I experienced the familiar gut clench that came before combat. Nelson’s head sank onto Izabel’s shoulder, not the way a man’s head rested on a woman, but soldier to soldier. She whispered into his ear. Her hair was tied beneath a kufi. He sat up. He had no expression. Nelson had wanted to leave me alone in the hotel. She had made him stay.
“I see it, Joe,” she said, pointing. “There.”
The island was a stiletto-shaped silhouette in the middle of the river. Without being asked, Nelson lay down in the boat, so any guards would see only two figures coming their way. Only two had left.
“Two men on the dock, Joe.”
The faint glow in the sky had been brightening incrementally, but suddenly a crimson streak shot across the water. Mist fell away in patches that I tried to steer jaggedly through, using just enough swerve to look natural but hide our faces. I kept the speed low. Even if the guards had night-vision equipment, the mist might provide us a few more seconds. I’d not asked Cizinio about vision equipment, and I cursed inwardly.
That had been a lapse.
Either way they’d have binoculars.
Now a garish light spread out across the water. I looked back to see the orb tip appearing barely above treetops, liquid red. I needed sun at our backs. I wanted them to see silhouettes, not faces. I wanted them to imagine for a moment what they expected, their assassins chugging back home after a job well done.
Eighty yards. Fifty. Maybe I should have given Izabel the extra day she wanted. I smelled ammonia, urine from Nelson.
Just give us one more minute…
With the shocking suddenness that comes in the tropics, the day flared to life like a silent explosion. There was more heat on the back of my neck. Full dawn. The sun would be directly in their eyes. I saw a long diagonal line emanating off the shoulder of a guard and the arc of the banana clip in his AK-47. The man seemed to be shielding his eyes, trying to see us better.
Thirty more seconds…
A harsh male voice carried over the water, in Portuguese. Probably saying, What the fuck happened to you two? Are you drunk? Why didn’t you call on the ham radio?
They weren’t unslinging the AKs yet. They were moving two-dimensional cardboard cutouts. As in target practice.
I whispered, “Ready?”
I saw, from the corner of my eye, Izabel’s hands down in the bottom of the boat, touching her shotgun. We’d break out of the mist in another second.
“Now!”
I let go of the motor arm and swung up my shotgun. Hers was up, too. BOOM-BOOM-BOOM. The water was flat so there was no bounce, and at our fast moves the guards had reached to unsling weapons.
I heard the snapping sounds of an AK firing. I heard screams from the treetops. Hundreds of bats or birds launched themselves into the air.
The first guard had toppled into the water, firing at the sky, and the second had crumbled before getting a shot off. There was no way that other people on the island would not have heard the fighting. Nelson had forced himself up, his face a rictus of pain, but he held a handgun. He forced out words to Izabel as we reached the dock. “Nelson says he will tie the boat. We must run.”
She was out on the dock first, and I was right behind her. We needed to get into the jungle fast. We’d be dead in seconds if we stayed here. More guards would be coming.
They have cameras in the trees. I remembered Cizinio’s warnings as we pounded onto land.
There! A red light, a round lens catching sunlight, ten feet up. I shot it out and we raced past. Behind us, I could only hope that Nelson remained conscious long enough to tie up the boat, so it would not drift off.
Cizinio’s voice in my head said, The path takes a few minutes to reach the main house. Stay on the path at first.
Floodlights burst on in the trees at the same time that sunbeams shot down through the canopy. They angled down like artillery as I ran past a mist net — a researcher’s tool, mesh so fine it was invisible to animals. It was designed to catch birds. In the net I saw wriggling life, a hand-sized tarantula attached to a bird. Cizinio’s words better be accurate, I thought, as giant fern leaves flapped wetly into my face.
At the second bend leave the path but keep going in the same direction.
I left the path and plunged into jungle, following the upward slope of land, as Cizinio had instructed. I heard the light, quick footfalls of Captain Santo behind me, and now came alarmed shouts ahead, men calling to one another, as their voices spread out. I halted, listening. They were coming straight on. Izabel and I ducked behind the waist-high fan-shaped base of a ceiba tree. The huge trunk disappeared into the canopy one hundred feet overhead. The roots needed to be high to support such an enormous weight. Cizinio had said the guards knew the shortcut, that if they heard shots, they’d skirt the path, too. With the camera shot out, they would, I hoped, think that Izabel and I were still on the path. We waited behind those huge roots like the ambushers in the graffiti drawings back in our hotel.