Dead in the Water (24 page)

Damn it. This is not why he came out. He wanted time to reflect, time to himself, time to think about how to go about contacting the Suzie woman without alerting the security services. He thinks about buying a new mobile phone from a kiosk, then, feeling rather foolish, realises that if he’s going to have any kind of meaningful conversation with her he’ll need to identify himself, and her phone will be tapped.

On his way back, he calls in to the House of Commons. He’s due make a report to the Environmental Audit Committee on Thursday and needs to check some details with the Committee secretary; and would rather do it in person than over the phone. He’s on his way out, when Andrew Linden calls over from the other side of the lobby and persuades him to join him for a quick drink in the Members’ Bar. Andrew is as amiable as he had been on Sunday. But after his encounter with the bonehead boy at
One World
, Mark feels a shiver of guilty excitement about associating with Andrew, as if they were having an affair. Their talk is animated. Thank goodness Andrew hasn’t succumbed to the cloud of gloom shrouding Cowley Street.

“
You live out in Oxfordshire somewhere, don’t you?”

“
Clifton Hamden. A little village about five miles South of Oxford.”

“
On the Thames? Am I right? Isn’t that a bit worrying?”

“
We’re well above the flood plain, but friends of ours have been flooded before now.” As he says it, Mark is caught by a pang of regret that he’s not there in the community; he, Joanna, Stephen and Rachel, doing what they can to help out.

“
And how’s your daughter? Still in Venezuela?”

“
Rachel. The last I heard she was on her way to Esmerelda. Somewhere on the upper reaches of the Orinoco.”

“
Well out of trouble then.”

“
I’ll drink to that,” says Mark. They raise their glasses.

“
I had a word with a friend in the Embassy. Tell her to call when she gets to Caracas. From what you say, I’m sure she can find her own way back home; but just in case, we can grease the wheels – which, in my old fashioned opinion, is what the consular service is for.”

Linden offers him another drink, which Mark turns down. “Quite right too. Us sitting here nattering while half the country is clearing up the unholy mess. Looks like you were right. All your warnings about climate change.”

Mark colours slightly, and finds himself shading towards apology: “I’m sure there are still people arguing that it’s got nothing to do with carbon emissions.”

“
More fool them.” Linden’s charm is beguiling, but much though Mark would love another drink, he should get back to work. As he gets up to go, Linden suggests: “Hardy. It’s just come to me. Thomas Hardy. It’s a short story by Thomas Hardy. That’s where your dog story originates.”

For all Sullivan’s many thousands of hours of experience as a pilot, he makes no attempt to conceal his almost naïve enthusiasm for flying; but by the time they’ve struggled back up to five thousand feet, after refuelling in Puerto Ayacucho, his well of stories seems to have run dry; and for a while neither he nor Jeremy tries to talk above the noise of the engine.

With about forty miles and twenty minutes of flying time to go, a great bank of dark cloud becomes visible ahead of them. “It’s OK,” says Terry. “It’s not a thundercloud. The air’ll be pretty stable in that.”

“
Can we land in that?” yells Jeremy.

“
Cloud’s not an issue. It’s what falls out of it that bothers me. The landing field at La Esmerelda is a rough grass strip. After the rain that cloud’s gonna drop we might as well stick the bloody wheels in setting cement as land on grass. We’re going to land on the river, Jez. That’s why she’s got water wings. You’ll love it. Best kind of flying, this, where you know you’ve done a job of work at the end of the day.”

“
I’m sure,” says Jeremy weakly.

Terry smiles; he’s warmed to Peters over the past few hours. “Got to get down below that bugger of a cloud first though. Can’t land on a river unless you can see the fucker.”

At a couple of hundred feet above the forest treetops, ninety knots feels frighteningly fast.

“
Just watch the river, Jez.”

“
What am I looking for?”

“
Logs.”

“
Logs?”

“
I need to know where we can put down safely. We need a straight stretch, an
estirón
they call ‘em; but we don’t want to pitch into a fucking log flume. Save that for the theme park, Jez. Just shout out when you see anything chunky. Right?”

“
Right.” Jeremy is pleased to have something to do and Terry’s tree hugging, as he calls it, is less terrifying than the turbulence had been a couple of hours before. For ten minutes they fly like this; Jeremy occasionally calling out a warning about logs, Terry skilfully following the curves of the river and noting every
estirón
where he might be able to put
The Tin Duck
down safely. Then the settlement of La Esmerelda comes in to view, the grass strip clearly visible with pools of water lying on it. They will indeed have to land on the river.

“
OK, Jez?”

“
Fine.”

“
Good man. Right, I’m going to drop right down now and fly upstream for a few miles. The river’s high, so she’ll be flowing fast. I want to know what we got in store for us. I can put
The Duck
down in less than two hundred metres; but with this much weight on board we might need three or four times that to get airborne again. You with me?” Jeremy nods; and Terry throttles back again, lowers the flaps and drops the Cessna down until they’re flying in ground effect just above stall speed about six feet above the water.

“
Having fun, Jez? This is what I call flying.”

“
I saw something. I saw something. Something floating. I don’t know if it was a log.”

“
Doesn’t matter what it was, Jez. You see anything floating – dead or alive – you just shout out.”

They fly on for another ten minutes, about fifteen miles upstream of La Esmerelda, Jeremy occasionally shouting out as he sights possible hazards; but Terry’s concern that there might be some illegally felled timber on its way downstream, proves unfounded. “OK Jez? You ready for this? This your first water landing?” Jeremy nods. It’s hard to feel excited about the prospect, but he no longer feels dread – until Terry adds with teasing sing-song lilt: “Up and around we go then, friend.” He pushes the throttle forward to maximum and, as their speed begins to build again, pulls up out of the river basin, driving into the heavy layer of cloud to gain height. For a few seconds they are immersed in the grey void as Terry, now dependent upon his instruments, banks the plane sharply and turns back towards La Esmerelda. For Jeremy, these moments with no visual frame of reference outside of the cockpit induce a kind of sensory deprivation that takes him back to a hideous childhood nightmare, a dream of an abstract nothingness in which there was no contact with any thing or any person, an existential angst which he had found impossible to describe to his mother when she came to comfort him, an impossibility which made the dream all the more real.

“
Know the wind direction, Jez?”

“
Sorry.” They are still in the cloud.

“
You not see the smoke over La Esmerelda?” Jeremy had been too busy watching the river for logs to notice. “Still a north-easterly by my reckoning. But there ain’t much of it, so we’re going to go round again and land against the current.”

The engine burbles like a baby blowing through its lips, while trees race by and they speed over the dark waters of the Orinoco, smooth as black velvet from a hundred feet up, rippled from fifty… “Thirty feet, twenty feet, ten….” And then water roaring, spray fountaining in long arcs behind them as the floats skim the surface; rapid deceleration as the water drag begins to take effect.

Terry throttles back, allowing the plane to come to a stop, before putting enough power back on to hold still in the current, and then slowly manoeuvring over to a small jetty about a hundred metres to their right.

“
The Duck
turns into a boat now, J P. You up for this?” J P, who has had plenty of experience with small boats, is pleased to feel useful at last, climbing nimbly down onto the starboard float and jumping onto the jetty with a rope to moor.

There’s nobody in the FPA office. No Chimo, no Ronaldo; and no sign that Rachel or José Dias have turned up. Despite some difficulty in making himself understood, Jeremy persuades a cocky young boy sporting a Manchester United football shirt several sizes too big for him and a San Francisco Giants baseball cap, one of several young children who have gathered around, to take them to a makeshift medical centre, where the lad thinks there’s someone who’ll know Chimo’s and Ronaldo’s whereabouts. ‘Someone’ is a French doctor, a tall, woman in her late twenties with dark hair tied off her face and striking green eyes, who inspires awed trust amongst the children. When they arrive she’s showing a Piunave woman how to use the medicine for the sickly looking child in her arms. Terry and Jeremy have to wait their turn. Although no more than a couple of years older than Rachel, she treats them with calm, if rather severe, self-possession, insisting on dressing the wound on Jeremy Peters’ head and looking closely into his eyes for signs of concussion. The young boy was right to bring them here: most gossip and rumours in La Esmerelda pass through this medical centre; and once she’s confident that Jeremy is not in any immediate danger, she tells them about the two Americans who arrived in town late yesterday afternoon. Nice guys, though she doesn’t know anything about them except that they were looking for Chimo and Ronaldo. Apparently, they stayed the night in the
FPA
office, playing poker. Their pick up truck is now parked down by the river. But where they all are now, who knows? She assumes they’ve all gone off looking for the young English woman who was here about three weeks ago.

She’s more concerned about the wound on Jeremy’s head than speculating why so many people are looking for Rachel. She’d like him to rest for at least twenty four hours, fearing that he might suffer delayed concussion.

“
Your call, J P,” says Terry when the doctor leaves to attend to another patient. “You want to rest up a while or what?”

“
I’m not giving up on her now, Terry. I’ve got to find her.” But the disappointment that Rachel has not reached Esmerelda, weighs heavily; and he cannot conceal his despondency: “You go back to Caracas. You’ve got me down here. I’m grateful to you for ––”

“
Fuck off Jez. Who do you think I am? You want to find her? Good. Because I didn’t fly the fucking
Duck
down here just to see you moping around like a whingeing teenager.” Jeremy’s eyes are heavy and his head is dropping. …

Terry has gone over to talk to the doctor…. Why is he so damned sleepy? …

He’s woken by the sharp pain of a needle in his arm, and the scowling face of the young French woman who clearly resents doing this.

“
Get on you feet, J P. We’re outta here. I’ll explain later.”

* * *

In the battered canoe, Rachel is struggling to keep her eyes open; exhaustion beginning to numb the ache in her back and the blisters on her hands, rubbed raw by the rough-hewn paddle. She’s tried several times to get through to Jeremy, but there’s not even a dialling tone on the number she’s got for the office in Caracas and he isn’t returning the messages she’s left for him on his mobile. Bastard.

She’s confident enough about getting to Esmerelda to have left an upbeat message for her dad, and she wouldn’t be bothered about making any more calls, except that José has been unconsciousness for an hour or more. And there’s nothing she can do about it, except moisten his lips. With the heavy rain that’s been falling for most of the day, they do at least have fresh water.

She’s more or less given up hoping that the guys at the FPA outpost might come out to meet them when from downstream she hears the sound of an engine. A rigid hulled inflatable with large outboard motor rounds the bend in the river. She would shout and scream and dance – except that she’s too weak. So she waves, thinks a crazy thought, and gets the video camera out to record their rescue. Shit. The battery’s out. But the satphone has a built in camera.

* * *

It had been a fantasy. He recognises that now. All the way down to Esmerelda, a fantasy: that he’d be travelling back to Caracas with Rachel, sitting together, affectionate banter. In unguarded moments, he even allows himself the promise of kisses…

“
Sorry, Terry. Say that again.” He’s trying to focus on Terry’s explanations about water take-offs, and his concentration’s shot to pieces.

“
Don’t apologise, JP. You’re fizzing ‘cos that gorgeous French tart back there pumped you full of God knows what. Either that or leave you there with her. If you’ve got concussion, then I’ve got anorexia. I reckon she fancied you, JP. Needed a good seeing to, ask me. Told her you were spoken for. She could have me. Didn’t want to know. You jammy sod, Jez. Whatever it is you got for the ladies, you got it in spades.” In spite of himself, Jeremy grins. “I should’ve left you there. You could’ve given her one for me. Life is short, Jez. In my book you take what you can get when you can get it.”