Уильям Мейкл: Operation: Amazon

“I’ll give you this much, Cap,” Wiggins said from the belly of the flat-bottomed boat, “you sure know how to show a girl a good time.”

Captain John Banks swiped half a dozen lazy black flies away from his face, wiped sweat from his brow for the fourth time in as any minutes, and turned his gaze away from the river. Wiggins and McCally were in the process of brewing up a pot of tea on the portable solid fuel stove from the private’s kit bag.

“What are you moaning about this time, Wiggo? I promised you something warmer, didn’t I? It doesn’t get much hotter than this.”

“Warm shite is still shite,” Wiggins said.

Banks laughed.

“Aye, I can’t argue with that logic.”

The flight into the Amazonian interior from the coastal airport had promised verdant greenery, shining waters, and a profusion of wildlife at first glance, but the bay they’d landed in had given Banks the first hint of what was in store for them on their trip upriver. Thick cloying mud banks lined the shores on both sides, choking the green out of the vegetation and leaving it gray and dead as far as 10 to 15 yards into the canopy. The river water was the color of milk chocolate — or warm watery shite as Wiggins would have it — as far as you could see. They’d transferred at the village from seaplane to fishing boat and now, with two river guides, were heading up the Amazon to their destination, slowly, through increasingly murky waters.

“I hope this shite doesn’t get any thicker,” McCally said, and once again Banks had to agree.

Like Wiggins, Banks had hoped for something warmer after Siberia.

“How do you fancy a jaunt to Brazil?” the colonel had said back in Lossiemouth almost 48 hours earlier, and Banks had almost bitten his superior’s hand off to snatch at the job, before he’d even asked the nature of it. He had beaches and sun and Pina Colada in mind, and so had the squad when he’d gathered them for their briefing.

“I’ll pack the sun-tan lotion and the Speedos,” Wiggins had said, and Banks hadn’t dissuaded them of their hopes of a cushy, warm, trip.

Instead, here they were in the depths of the Amazonian jungle, heading far upstream into the interior. They’d been motoring for hours, painfully slowly through what appeared little more than slurry, beset by all manner of flies, and sweating under thin camo-suits that were the only thing keeping them from being eaten alive by said insects.

“All in all, I’d rather be on a beach,” Banks said, talking to himself, but Hynd heard him, and laughed.

“You and me both, Cap. So, it’s a rescue mission, then?” the sergeant asked. He had a cigarette clamped in his mouth, and spoke with minimal movement of his lips. Smoke got in his eyes, causing them to water and giving him a squint, but it seemed to be keeping the worst of the flies away from him and, not for the first time, Banks considered returning to the old habit, if only for the relief from the biting flies.

“Maybe aye, maybe no,” he replied, waving more of the black flies away from right in front of his nose. “I told you what the colonel told me — folks — engineers mainly — have been going missing from a dredging operation upriver; and some of them are British subjects. So we’ve got permission to go in and have a shufti. Whether anybody actually needs rescuing, we won’t know until we get there and see what’s what.”

“And maybe we’re only here to throw our weight around a bit, make a show to see if that puts a stop to any nonsense?” the sergeant said, smiling.

“Maybe aye, maybe no,” Banks replied. “It wouldn’t be the first time the colonel’s had us resort to a bit of gunboat diplomacy.”

“Why us, though, Cap?” McCally said from the belly of the boat. “There’s any number of guys as well suited for a heavy mob job, and closer than we were.”

Banks had held this last bit of info back for as long as possible, not having mentioned it in the briefing or on the long trip south, but they deserved to know.

“We’ve got form. There’s talk that it might be some kind of animal attack. The colonel said he’d heard a rumor about a thing coming out of the jungle.”

“Not more big fucking beasties,” Wiggins said. “They should have sent for fucking Schwarzenegger and left us in peace.” The private waved a hand out over the prow of the boat to the river. “And all this warm shite is coming downstream from the dredging operation? That’s what we’re here to protect?”

Banks nodded.

“Looks like you’re shite monitor this week, Wiggo.”

“What, again?” the private said. That got a laugh from the two guides behind them on the bench behind the small wheel on a pedestal that passed as the pilot’s cabin area. The locals hadn’t spoken much at their meeting in the village, only enough for Banks to know that they were getting well paid for the trip up river, and that they were father and son. On the boat trip so far, the two of them had stayed at the wheel at the rear of the long, low, boat under a tented canopy, smoking black cigarettes that even Hynd, a 40-a-day man given the opportunity, had turned down as too noxious.

The elder of the two and the owner of the boat, Giraldo, addressed Wiggins.

“You are Scottish, no?”

“I am Scottish, yes,” Wiggins replied.

Giraldo’s smile got broader.

“1982, World Cup. We kicked your boys in the ass. I watched it with my father and my uncles.”

“That was a wee bit before my time,” Wiggins replied. “But I’ve seen the highlights. At least we scored first.”

“David Narey. Great goal,” Giraldo replied. “But you just made my boys angry.”

“You’re a fitba’ man then, Giraldo?” Wiggins asked.

“Man and boy,” the guide replied. “And it is a great shame, but your football team is shit now, no?”

Wiggins laughed loudly.

“Our football team is shite now, yes,” he said.

He moved up the boat and passed the guides each a mug of tea. He got some local smokes in reply, and Banks tuned the conversation out as it turned to the merits or otherwise of the respective national football teams. At least Wiggins was making friends though, for within minutes, the private and the two guides were thick as thieves.

“How long until we reach the dredging operation?” Wiggins asked.

“Two hours,” Giraldo said, smiling. “Much more shite to see before then.”

“Same as it ever was,” Wiggins muttered.

Giraldo was spot-on in his estimation, although Banks knew they were getting close to their destination some time before they reached it; the water turned murkier, darker and thicker, until it both looked and felt like they were motoring through melted chocolate. The mud along the banks looked fresher here, wetter and still oozing but that only made it even less welcoming somehow.

Soon after the water turned thicker, they negotiated a wide bend in the river, and finally saw the full scale of the dredging operation laid out on the river ahead of them.

“It is a great blight,” Giraldo said, sadness plain in his voice. “This used to be the perfect spot to catch enough fish for a month. But then these men with more money than sense came, and my fellow villagers could not refuse a pay that was many times more than they could make from the fishing. But look at the cost. Just look at it.”

The main machine was housed on a flat structure the length and width of two football fields joined lengthwise. It seemed to be composed primarily of two parts — one machine for sucking up the riverbed, and another for filtering it, and throwing the resultant slurry wide across the river on either side. A dozen men worked on the flat deck, carting buckets to and from a deep pit of ooze for further filtering, at a guess, in trestles and tables that lined the center of the structure. The back end of the deck nearest to their approach housed a squat cube some 20 feet on a side that Banks guessed were the living quarters.