Aaron Elkins - Little Tiny Teeth

Phil backed him up. “And how could they know that he’d be standing there in plain sight right at that moment? They couldn’t, it’s impossible.”

John chimed in too. “Yeah, and how would they know exactly where the boat would be passing at that exact time? How would they know to station somebody right there with a spear?”

“Yes,” said Duayne, throwing in his sensible two cents’ worth as well. “How could they possibly know we’d be close enough to shore for a spear to reach the boat? For most of the time, we would have been way out of range.”

“That’s right,” Gideon said. “The only reason we were that close is that I asked Captain Vargas to move us in so that we could see some wildlife.”

“Yes, that’s so,” Vargas concurred.

“So whatever the hell it was about,” John said, “it wasn’t because anybody was laying in wait, specifically trying to get Scofield.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Cisco said, unimpressed, and coming within a millimeter of burning himself as he scratched one bare leg with the hand that held the cigarette. “I’m not saying they did or they didn’t, but I tell you this: I been here a long time now, and I spent a lot of time in the jungle, and I seen a lot weirder stuff than this. These people – I don’t just mean the Chayacuro, I mean, you know, a lot of the indigenous jungle people – well, our laws of physics, and motion, and even the material world, they don’t apply. We think there’s no way they could know he’d be coming back, but they have ways of knowing things that science doesn’t even begin to understand. Let me ask you… um…?” With his chin he gestured questioningly at Gideon.

“Gideon,” Gideon told him.

“Okay, let me ask you, Gideon. You want to know, how could they know you would ask Vargas to bring the boat close at that exact point, right?”

Gideon nodded. “I sure do.”

“But I see the question a different way. Why did you ask him to bring the boat close at that exact point? Where did the idea come from? Ideas don’t come from nowhere. What was it that made you do it right then and not some other time? What made the other guy, Scofield, stand right there, out in the open, in full view, at that exact second? Isn’t it possible that forces beyond anything we-”

“Nothing made me do it,” Gideon retorted with heat. “Look, Cisco, I have a pretty well-integrated belief system regarding causality myself, and in this case you can take it from me that no jungle witch doctor” – he winced at his own highly unanthropological choice of words, but phrases like “ways of knowing things that science doesn’t begin to understand” tended to buzz irritatingly in his ear, like a cloud of little mosquitoes, and made him cranky and argumentative – “put the idea in my head. I assure you, I’m quite capable of coming up with it all by myself.”

Before the words had left his mouth he was ashamed of himself. Snapping so pompously at a human wreck like Cisco was contemptible. “On the other hand,” he said in a lame attempt at making amends, “of course you’re right: nobody really can say where his ideas come from.”

Cisco’s reaction only made him feel worse. He’d hurt the poor guy’s feelings. The gaunt, gray-bearded man dropped his eyes and held up his hands in submission. “I’m just saying,” he mumbled around the half-inch, burning butt still in his mouth. “No offense, buddy.”

At that point, one of Vargas’s Indian crew – the cook, obviously, inasmuch as he was carrying a wooden ladle and wearing a gravy-stained apron tied at the waist, an equally grubby white undershirt, and a villainous black bandanna tied around his head – came out of the kitchen with fire in his eyes.

“ Se va enfriar la cena,” he told Vargas sourly.

Dinner was getting cold.

Another unexpectedly tasty meal was waiting for them on the buffet table: warm potato and carrot salad, white rice, stewed bananas, chicken and vegetables over spaghetti, and beans, with caramelized bread pudding for dessert. As with lunch, there was no wine served, only water. Everyone seemed hungry, going at the food with gusto. And with rice, potatoes, and spaghetti all in the same meal, the carbohydrate-deprived John looked like a man who’d died and gone to heaven.

But conversation was subdued. Some people feared that the trip was over and done, that Arden might call it off and have Vargas turn the boat around. Those who knew Arden best, however – Maggie, Tim, and Mel – were confident that with a night to sleep on it he would see things as they now did; that is, that the spear attack, whatever its cause, could not have had anything to do with him personally. Despite Cisco’s metaphysical mumblings, the evidence against it was inarguable, and Arden, a scientist through and through, would understand that once he’d gotten over his initial shock.

So what, then, was the attack about? Vargas, at his station behind the buffet, professed to have no idea. In his six years on the river he’d never heard of anything like it.

“This is your first passenger trip, isn’t it?” Mel asked him between forkloads of spaghetti. “You usually ship cargo, right? So is it possible that the Chayacuro, or whoever, don’t want you bringing people – tourists – in? That this is a warning to you? You know, ‘Don’t screw up our pristine rainforest’?”

No, it wasn’t possible, Vargas told him. There were two other ships out of Iquitos already in the tourist trade. The Dorado and the Principe de Loreto both had every-other-week cruises to Leticia and back, and such a thing had never happened to them. So why pick on his poor Adelita? What was special about this trip? No, no, there was nothing – He frowned momentarily, as if an answer, and not a very welcome answer, had crossed his mind, but he only opened his mouth, shut it, and shook his head. No.

Tim, like everyone else, had seen the shadow cross his face. “Captain, you don’t think we’ll be attacked again?”

“Again? No, no, of course not. Well, I don’t think so…”

The answer, half-baked at best, didn’t appear to do much to ease Tim’s mind. He cleared his throat. “I know it’s not up to me, everybody, but I think that if there’s any possibility of future attacks, well, it might be better to call the whole thing off and go back. Who needs this?”

“I think Tim has a point,” Duayne said. “It grieves me to say it, but perhaps we’d better call it a day. We’re agreed that we have no idea what this is all about, so how can we know they won’t try again? Maybe next time we won’t all be so lucky.”

“Oh, that’s totally ridiculous,” Maggie barked. “Whoever it was, we’ve already left him forty miles behind. There are no roads out there. How is he supposed to keep up with us? In a dugout canoe?”

“But we don’t know that there’s only one of them. He was waiting for us, wasn’t he? How do we know there won’t be others waiting for us?”

“Well, for Christ’s sake, we’re traveling down the middle of the river, aren’t we?” Maggie said. “We’re miles from shore. What’s some Indian with a spear going to do, shoot it out of a shoulder-mounted missile launcher?”

“And how do we know it’ll just be some guy with a spear?” Duayne demanded. “Somebody obviously doesn’t want us here, that’s the only thing we know for sure. Maybe it will be a missile-launcher next time. Maybe-”

“Oh, ridiculous,” Maggie said again, this time with a snort. “Don’t get carried away, take a deep breath.”

“It is not ridiculous,” Duayne said, flaring up. “I’ve done my research on the area, Dr. Gray. We’re quite near the Colombian border. This region of the jungle is a well-known route for getting coca paste out of Peru into-”