David Dun - Unacceptable Risk

"Goddamn it," the man said. "I didn't want to hurt her." The accent was French.

The howler monkeys increased their already raucous calls. Michael was losing consciousness.

"I wonder what's coming now," someone said. "Let's get back."

Minutes passed, he had no idea how many.

"Those monkeys will do that over a jaguar, or all the shooting, or just because they feel like it." A new man had arrived and spoke in Spanish. "We're a little late," a big, dark- haired man spoke in English, with an American accent. He came to Bowden. Quickly he put a tourniquet on the thigh and put Bowden's fingers on the shoulder wound. "Press," he said before moving out of sight. "We'll be back. You'll make it."

The other man followed him. The pain began to mount; Michael wanted to scream. He could barely think.

More time passed and then he heard cursing and swearing and crashing in the bushes. The big man with black hair had hold of a dirty, frightened man. He shoved him into the fire light, where the man stumbled to the ground, his face pour ing blood. Michael saw shackles on the man's wrists and legs.

"Don't mess with a Tilok or a cat man," the big man said, stepping back into the jungle.

A shot came from the forest and the captive man's head exploded.

A flurry of shooting followed. It sounded like a war. Then a long silence. The next Michael knew, the dark-haired man was bending over him.

"It's morphine. It'll help," he said. "We're going to get you to a hospital."

Next to the dark-haired man Michael saw a beautiful young blond woman in the soft light. She looked terribly concerned. He knew he must look worse than dead.

"Marita," he said, hoping someone would help her. He saw pain on the blond woman's face and knew it wasn't good.

Cat-man seemed to have departed. Sam pumped his only living captive, John, full of morphine, but not so much that he went off to la-la land.

"Your leader shot you."

"Fuck you. And him." He coughed deep and ugly. Things were breaking loose inside.

"He killed another of your men, right in front of me. Why protect him? Girard-is that what he's called?" No response. "You're gonna die. You're bleeding inside. You have a few seconds to do something right, but maybe it isn't in you. I hope it is."

He retched and coughed "Yes, we called him Girard. He's from France."

"He was here tonight?"

The man nodded.

"Beard?"

He nodded again, choking.

"Uses a knife?"

He nodded hard and fluid rattled in his lungs when he tried to speak. Turning nearly purple, he rolled his eyes back and his bowels let go.

Sam kept his eyes locked on the dying man's, and for just a second they flickered.

"You want to go after him, don't you?" Grady asked.

"Just a minute," Sam said, still watching the man. He leaned over to the man's ear. "In the end you did good." Once again the man's eyes rolled and Sam knew he was gone.

Sam nodded. "The three of you can haul Michael back to Galvez." Bowden had wavered on the edge of consciousness since being shot. "It's close. Michael, you've got a fast boat?"

"Very fast. But others, my friends, might have used it to take my journals. Doubt they've returned it."

"Let's hope Gaudet doesn't know about your boat-as suming it's even there."

"He wouldn't find it. Can't start it anyway. Needs an elec tronic chip." Michael was breathing deeply from the pain and trauma. "Ramos my friend has one and the other's in my pack."

"Good. I doubt he wants to try to drift a speedboat all the way to the Amazon even if he does find it."

"He'll go to the Tapiche."

"He could go down the Galvez," Javier said. "But once again he'd have no boat and I can't see him paddling a stolen dugout through Matses country. They don't kill people anymore, but a thief, a murderer, and a white man might be dif ferent."

Although Sam could tell Grady hated the idea, she wasn't going to stop him. It wasn't her way to wimp out in the clutch. And she trusted Yodo as much as Sam did.

Sam took out his GPS before starting off into the dark. He had to take a chance that Gaudet would head for the Tapiche. He struck off through the jungle, trying to walk something of a straight line. Looking ahead was surreal. It felt like passing through an underwater kelp bed. Aerial roots came down from branches like taut rope and small sacropia grew up with stems twice as thick as a man's thumb. It was hard to find a foot-wide space anywhere in the first few hundred feet of the trek. Interspersed among the growing saplings and aerial roots were the giants such as ficus, saeba, ironwood, kapok, and the feathery-leafed aca cia whose branches gave an appearance similar to an ever green softwood tree. At their bases some of the large trees had a splayed root system that had formed triangular-shaped wedges in the vertical plane so that the lower trunk of the tree looked something like the foot of a coat rack.

Traveling in a straight line turned out to be impossible and dangerous, so he risked using his flashlight, hoping he wouldn't walk into an ambush. On the forest floor wet leaves made for quiet steps, but the brush rubbing on his body and pack was noisy. On any incline the clay mud beneath the leaves made the footing tenuous and every slime-covered log was a hazard. Ants and other insects were crawling over him; attempts to brush them off seemed futile. He went after the little tickles on his skin, squishing anything that got under his clothing. Anytime he paused, the raucous sound of mosquitoes filled his ears with their mind-scalding wing- beat. He had spread repellent liberally over the exposed skin and wore typical UV-screening jungle clothes designed to cover most of his body.

The heat burned into him with the exertion of traveling fast through the tangles of vegetable matter that clung and slowed him. He couldn't spend a lot of time attempting to cir cumvent thickets. Every couple of minutes he glanced at the GPS and observed the gnarled track that he was leaving on the incandescent screen. Sweat dripped down onto the screen like rain as the heat squeezed everything but blood from his pores. On his feet he could feel the start of blisters as he con tinuously worked to keep his footing on the jungle floor.

After traveling a couple of miles he came to a sizable black-water stream that barely moved. It was a tributary of the Tapiche and it meant he might be slightly to the north of where he imagined. Or the map was wrong, which was very possible because it was made before GPS was available. He ran his light along the banks, illuminating pairs of eyes of a number of black caiman. Swimming at night was not ap pealing. There were more gruesome parasites and diseases in this part of the world than he cared to think about. And, having eaten piranha the prior day, it occurred to him that in some sort of cosmic justice the fish might want to return the favor.

He sighed. Without waiting any longer he stepped down into the muddy water and began walking. He removed his pack, threw the strap of his rifle across his back, then re placed the pack. It was a poor choice if he wanted to shoot from the river, but it freed both hands for swimming without fear of losing the rifle. Soon it was deep and he began the breaststroke. A caiman flung his tail and splashed, surprising him and causing him to pick up the pace. He tried not to think about the stickleback fish that had a bad habit of crawl ing up assholes and urethras, or the leeches that in some parts of the Amazon grew to eighteen inches. He told him self the sticklebacks were probably farther north.

He was halfway across when he sensed that something was wrong. He studied the far bank and saw a six-foot shadow by a big tree. And there was movement. He went limp and quiet, then turned and began swimming back to near where he started.