Minutes to Burn (2001) (27 page)

of the forest? Get the lay."

Savage looked up. Spit. "Why us?"

"Because I'm the ranking officer and I don't feel like doing it," Szabla said. She flashed a dead grin. "Move your shit."

Savage and Tucker walked side by side to the front rank of Scalesias. As they rose, the trees seemed to spread to bouquets, green, intertwining sprays that resembled broccoli tops. Vines twisted their way down the thin, scrubby trunks as if seeking out Amazonian waters. Small pepper plants waved in the breeze. Savage stopped.

Tucker rotated his Iron Man watch around his wrist to clear the sweat from beneath it. "What is it?"

Savage closed his eyes. Behind them, the wind hummed through the watchtower. Two dragonflies zoomed together in a crazed dance, and a cow mooed somewhere in the distance. The heat came off the ground in waves. Opening his eyes again, he stared into the forest, seeing how it grew dense and claustrophobic just a few paces in.

"Nothing," he said. He stepped forward, and Tucker fell in behind him. Though they'd never called wind for each other, and though they were both years from their last mission, they fell into a recon step by force of habit, patrolling about fifteen meters apart--the distance of a frag grenade's casualty radius.

The trunks leaned and bent; one even swooped in a loop-de-loop before rising up and sprouting branches. In places, the bark was overrun by bright, red-orange lichen. Thick with yellow butterfly leaves, passion-fruit vines hung from the trees like scarves. Where they'd died, they were thin and brittle, holding the trunks in fragile embrace.

Savage made his way through the dense terrain, assessing the wilder-ness around him. Elsewhere on the island, the creatures were curious and unafraid, having evolved to lounge in safety. Marine iguanas could be picked up by their tails; hawks could be pushed from trees with shovel handles; turtles could be piggybacked to deeper waters. There was even something frank about the vegetation of the other zones; the solitary sil-houette of the cactus against the sky, the vulnerable stands of man-grove, the exposed dots of the palo santos spaced like trees in an orchard.

The forest alone held secrets. Treetops dusted with mist. Strange calls from unseen birds. Large rocks that rumbled and walked away on tor-toise legs.

A vermilion flycatcher swooped between the leaves, a bright red dart in the shady understory, and Tucker grinned, pointing and looking over at Savage. But Savage wasn't there. Tucker spun to his right, where he'd last seen him. Savage let out a high-pitched whistle and Tucker turned again. His reddish beard shaped in a smile, Savage stood five yards off behind him. A tiny star spider scurried across a leaf inches from his face.

Tucker ran his tongue along the inside of his lip. "Didn't see you walk over there."

"I didn't. I floated." Savage shot him a quick wink. "Why don't I take point for a while?" Tucker nodded his consent, but Savage had already turned and headed off into the foliage. Tucker followed him into the shadows.

Not a trace remained of their casual, off-duty attitudes. They moved like two legs of a single animal--always maintaining space and close-ness, forging ahead with a consistency of pace and movement. Savage's shirt was soaked through with sweat, the sleeves clinging to his biceps when he swung his arms. He fell into a trance of sorts, letting his eyes blur so they took in the plants and birds and dappled shadows.

The parts of the creature's mouth bristled eagerly in anticipation. She sensed the presence of something living with her antennae and from the subtle vibrations of the ground. She rotated her head so that she could view her surroundings directly through the center of her compound eye, where her vision was sharpest. Her binocular vision enabled her acute depth of field perception.

The approaching prey triggered special receptors in her head, and she sent out nerve impulses, expertly gauging the distance and angle of her impending strike.

Underfoot, the clay gave way to mud, Savage's boots making a wet sucking noise when he pulled them free. He slowed, the span of his shoul-ders a green stroke against the cooler green of the forest. His hand flickered out to his side. It moved just three inches in the dim light, but Tucker halted immediately. Lowering his foot, Tucker eased his weight down gradually, even after his boot struck the mud.

They stood in perfect stillness for a long time before even daring to turn their heads and look around. Savage gazed at the line of trees, his eyes fighting to adjust to the shadows and small patches of intense sun-light. He backed up to Tucker, his blade out and hanging loose at his side. He moved slowly, making no sound save the brush of his cammies. He halted next to Tucker. They waited, listening in the breeze.

"There's something there," Savage said softly. His face was slick with the humidity, dark with sweat at the sides of his head along the edge of the bandanna.

He and Tucker stood side by side, breathing in unison. They stared ahead at the shadows, the trunks of the trees, the waving leaves. Some-thing wasn't right up ahead, but Savage couldn't put his finger on it.

The sky cracked with lightning, followed quickly by thunder. They heard the rain before they saw it, pattering atop the leaves of the canopy. It filtered down to them slowly, trickling through the network of tree-tops and branches. The air around them split in several narrow falls of water. "What do you think?" Tucker whispered.

Savage looked ahead again, but the surroundings were losing focus. "The rain's gonna cut visibility and the ground'll go to shit. Even more."

"Any bears or anything like that?"

Savage shook his head. "No predators. Just a hawk or two, a harmless snake. Nothing dangerous in here."

Tucker shook off a chill. "Guess we just spooked."

Savage reached out a hand, letting a stream splash onto his palm. "Been known to happen," he said. He glanced back into the forest, the air gray and heavy with rain. "Let's see if those slippers made it back to base yet."

He kept the lead on the way back.

Chapter
32

B
ase camp was set by the time Cameron, Derek, and Rex returned, the five tents spotting the pasture. The sky over the forest was clear now; the rainfall had stopped as quickly as it had begun, never straying beyond the high altitude side of the transition zone. The grass around the base camp and the canvas tents were wet.

Since they were short on white fuel for the hurricane lamps, Tucker, Diego, and Justin cleared a fire pit. There was plenty of wood to burn, and in addition to providing light, a fire would make a good gathering site. Finding a few trees that had fallen in the recent earthquake, they'd rolled over the broken segments of trunk to serve as benches. Then, they'd torn up the grass within the ring of logs to ensure the fire wouldn't spread, leaving only a circle of dirt.

Tank had fallen asleep sitting on the tortoise, which was now walking slowly toward a mud wallow. His boots dragged along the ground, his head lolling with each of the tortoise's tedious steps. He'd accidentally left an empty cruise box open beside his tent during the rainfall; it had caught the water running off the tent roof in its waterproof liner, filling with water.

Szabla shadowboxed behind her tent. Savage whittled something into the bark of a nearby quinine tree. He didn't bother to look over as Cameron, Rex, and Derek approached. Though she'd been looking for-ward to seeing him, Cameron shot Justin a stern glance as he approached, to stop him from greeting her warmly.

The team circled up around the fire pit, pulling out their meals, ready to eat. Sealed in thick brown plastic bags, the MREs were high-energy, high-protein, and easy to prepare. Savage sliced the top of the tough plastic with his Death Wind and slid the contents out onto the ground-- a plastic spoon, a vacuum-sealed cookie bar, a tiny Tabasco bottle, apple jelly in a tube, cocoa beverage powder, vacuum-sealed crackers and tube cheese, cardboard boxes holding pouches of potatoes au gratin and ham omelet, and a packet containing gum, coffee grounds, matches, sugar, salt, and a few pieces of toilet paper for when the need arose, as Justin often put it, to "take a squeeze."

A long, thin plastic heat bag warmed up when exposed to water. Sav-age filled it from his canteen, slid the omelet pouch inside, stuffed the whole thing back into the cardboard casing, and set it at a tilt against a nearby rock.

Tank lay flat to rest his intercostals, his hands laced across the back of his neck. Justin was already digging into his meal, spooning mushy bar-becue pork into his mouth. Rex watched him with disgust until Szabla tossed him a heated MRE pouch.

Rex glanced at the carton. "Tuna with noodles? You expect me to eat this?"

"Sorry, princess," Szabla said, squeezing a tube of cheese onto a cracker. "We're outta lobster."

"What chemicals are used to heat this crap?" Rex asked angrily, reaching for Szabla's heater bag. Szabla slapped his hand, and he withdrew it, surprised.

"Doubt they're biodegradable, Doc, if that's your concern," Savage said through a mouthful of cookie bar.

"Heaters and processed food." Rex shook his head. "So much waste. Did you know geothermal energy sources could provide the world's energy twenty times over?"

"Fascinating," Szabla said.

"But what do we have instead? What legacy do we leave? Ozone depletion, acid rain, anthropogenic emissions, industrial pollution, nuclear waste, urban smog, high-altitude cooling, increasing global mean surface temperature, fossil fuel combustion, biomass burning, defor-estation. We're like children. Stupid, vicious children." Rex paused, exas-perated. "What's next?"

"The Red Sox'll win the World Series." Szabla leaned forward, forked a hunk of tuna noodles from Rex's pouch, and ate it. Tank grabbed the pouch from Rex and tilted it back over his open mouth, emptying it.

Derek stuck his spoon into his apple jelly tube and turned it upside down like a Popsicle before throwing it aside. Cameron eyed the tube in the grass. "Diet?" she asked.

Derek ran a hand over his stubble, and Cameron noticed how gaunt he looked. "Yeah," he said. "Need to slim down for swimsuit season."

Diego stood quietly and picked up the discarded tube, setting it in a trash bag. Cameron watched him, but the others didn't seem to notice. Rex picked up another MRE and turned it upside down, searching for the opening.

Pale yellow tinged faintly with green, a sulfur butterfly flew a lurching figure eight overhead. It lit on Rex's shoulder, but he did not notice it. Diego reached over, trapping the butterfly's wings between the lengths of two fingers. Ever so delicately, he grasped the butterfly's fragile body with his other hand, then blew gently on the wings so they parted, revealing their full span. With a graceful flick of his wrist, he released the butterfly to the air, and it fluttered off. He glanced over at Cameron and smiled.

"Justin," Derek said, "After lunch, I want you to swim out and retrieve your trauma bag and the other gear we discussed. See if you can figure some way to anchor closer to shore for when we take off in four days. Get back here by 1500. That give you enough time?" Justin snapped his head down in a nod. He was the best swimmer on the squad, and he prided himself on his specialty.

"The rest of us'll break into buddy pairs and sweep the island. Once we find the other five sites, then we can focus on setting those last GPS units, getting the water samples Rex needs, and clearing out."

Grabbing the thin cardboard box, Savage slid out the contents, then pulled the warm omelet pouch from the heater. He sliced the top open and dumped in the cocoa powder, then the Tabasco, stirring the whole concoction together. He raised a spoonful of the mush, white shot through with red and chocolate swirls, to his mouth. "We gonna make it back for New Year's?" he asked. "I got a stripper name of Mary Anne, said she'd get me firing both pistons if I can swing through Boseman."

Justin caught Cameron's eye and made a jacking-off gesture with his fist.

Rex stood, picking up another antenna. "You can consider that your incentive."

Rex took Savage and Tucker to sweep the northwest quadrant of the island. Between the dark lava beach, the 103-meter rift, and the wide lava plain, he hoped to locate at least two sites. The hike from the Scalesia zone down the western coast was a gradual one. The transition zone slowly faded into the parched browns and grays of the arid zone--the stout plugs of Candelabra cacti, the dry, chalky ground underfoot.

At one turn, a land iguana lay across the trail. Rex stepped carefully over it, but as Savage passed, he flipped it over with the toe of his boot. It landed on its back and squirmed over to find its feet before beating a sluggish retreat. Tucker laughed, and Rex turned and looked at Savage angrily.

Rex signaled Savage forward, and Savage came, tossing the Death Wind at a cactus. It stuck with a thunk, and he pried it out, twisting it and sending a chunk of spines flying.

"What the hell was that?"

Savage lifted the bandanna off his head and used it to mop his brow. "Survival of the fittest," he said. He flexed, curling an arm up Popeye-style.

Rex could feel anger flushing his face, and he fought to keep his voice steady. "That animal is the most magnificently adapted creature on this island."

Savage cleaned beneath his thumbnail with the end of the blade, tracing it gently along the darkened line. "Not anymore," he said.