The Heaven Trilogy (119 page)

Behind him a second airborne chopper began firing, its slugs tearing through the foliage ahead of him. He shifted course once, then twice, knowing that at any second one of those projectiles would smack into his back—like that,
Smack!—
and fill his spine with burning steel.

A tree just ahead and to his left trembled and splintered under a barrage of lead. He dove to his right and rolled into the forest before the gunner corrected his aim. Then Shannon was under the heavy jungle canopy, his heart slamming in his chest, sweat running down his face, but out of their reach.

Mom's in the house.

He spun back to the colonial beyond the trees. A figure inside suddenly ran past one of the rear windows, was gone for a moment, and then reappeared. It was his mother and she was wearing her favorite dress, the one with yellow daisies. Another obscure detail.

His mother's face was wrinkled with panic, lips down turned, eyes clenched. She was fumbling with the window latch.

Shannon ran four steps toward the edge of the forest and pulled up. “Mom!” he screamed.

His voice was lost in the helicopter's whine overhead.

Shannon bolted for the house.

CHAPTER FOUR

TANYA QUAKED in the corner of the box, her mind slowly crawling from a dark dream about chain saws chewing through a bed surrounded by all of her stuffed animals, scattering white cotton fibers as it sawed. But then her parents were among the animals leaking red.

She was having difficulty knowing if her eyes were open or closed—either way she saw nothing but blackness. The memories fell into her mind, like Polaroids suspended by threads. Her glass of lemonade shattering in her hand; holes popping in the ceiling; her father crouched in the hall; her mother crawling behind on her belly; the trapdoor descending overhead.

Then darkness.

She was here, in the crate where her father had led her. He and Mother were—

Tanya snapped upright and immediately regretted it. Pain throbbed over her crown. She ignored it for a moment and reached for the ceiling. She felt the trapdoor and she shoved, but it refused to budge. It had been bolted, or something very heavy held it in place.

“Father?” she said, but the crate seemed to swallow the sound. She tried again, screaming this time. “Dad!” A breath. “Mom!”

Nothing. Then she remembered the sounds out there, before she had torpedoed into the ceiling. Smacking bullets, her mother's scream, her father's grunt.

Tanya slumped back, sucking at the stale air. “Oh, God!” she groaned. “Please, please, God.”

She started breathing hard, sucking rapidly in and out like an accordion gone berserk. She clenched her eyes even tighter against the thoughts. Mucus ran from her nostrils—she could feel the trail. Tears mingled and fell on her folded forearms. Something else was wet there too, on her right arm.

She began to whisper, repeating words that seemed to still the panic. “Get a grip, Tanya. Get a grip. Get a grip.”

She suddenly shivered, from her head down through her spine. And then it became too much once again and she started screaming. She arched her neck and shoved the air from her lungs, past taut vocal cords. “Help! Help!”

But nobody was listening up there because everybody was dead up there. She knew it. She groaned loudly, only it sounded more like a snort. She scrambled to her knees, gathered what strength she had, and launched herself toward the trapdoor again.

Her muscles were already thickening and she slammed into the hard wood like a sack of rocks. Tanya collapsed onto her belly.

Things went dark again.

SHANNON CLEARED the tree line, headed pell-mell for his mother who had just smashed the glass with her elbow in a frenzied attempt to escape the house. She was a bloody mess.

Shannon's vision blurred and he groaned with panic. His foot caught something—a rock—and he sprawled on the edge of the lawn.

The tree at the forest edge just behind him splintered with a hail of bullets. But it didn't matter—he was down now and they could pick him off easily.

He clambered to his knees and looked skyward. The helicopter's cannon was lined up on him, ready to shoot.

But it didn't shoot. It hung there facing him.

Shannon stood slowly, quaking. Fifty meters to his right, his mom had one leg out the window, but she had stopped dead and was staring at him.

“Shannon!”

Her voice sounded inhuman—half groan, half bawl—and the sound of it sent a chill down Shannon's back. “Run, Shannon! Run!”

“Mom?”

The helicopter turned slowly in the air, like a spider on a string. Fire filled Shannon's throat. He'd seen the thing do this trick with his father and uncle. His feet wouldn't move.

He had to save his mother—pull her from that window, but his feet wouldn't move.

A streak suddenly left the helicopter. The wall above Mom's head imploded for a split second. And then the room behind his mother erupted in a thundering ball of flame.

A wave of heat from the detonation struck Shannon broadside. He stared in the face of the blast, unbelieving. The window his mom had been in was gone. Half of the house was gone; the rest of it was on fire.

Shannon whirled around and ran for the jungle, barely aware of his own movement. He ran into a tree and his world spun in lazy circles, but he managed to get back up and run on. This time he made it without a single shot. But this time he didn't care.

SHANNON RAN under the canopy, his mind numb, every sense tuned to raw instinct now. He leapt over fallen logs, dodging thorn-encrusted vines, planting each foot on the surest available footing despite his pace. He cut sharply to his right within a hundred meters. In his mind's eye, Tanya called to him from the mission, her lips screaming, stricken and pale.

Behind him, shouts rang through the trees. A sapling suddenly split in two and he jerked to the left, ducking. The staccato reports of automatic-weapon fire echoed through the jungle and he ran forward, toward the south—toward Tanya.

What if they had taken the mission out as well? How could Americans do that?
CIA, DEA.
His father's words about America's evils echoed through his mind. But Father was dead.

To his right, beyond the jungle's border, voices carried to him and he realized his pursuers were running along the edge of the forest, following him on even ground. They were yelling in Spanish.

Whoever they were, they were well organized. Military or paramilitary. Guerrillas possibly. They'd come intent on killing everyone on the plantation. And now he had escaped. He should turn into the jungle and run for the black cliffs. From there he could get to the Orinoco River, which snaked to the Atlantic. But he couldn't leave Tanya behind.

Then the realization struck him again—his mother and father were dead!

Tears leaked past his eyes. His vision swam and he drew a palm across his wet cheeks as he ran, barely missing a stump jutting from the forest floor. He shook his head and steeled himself against the tears.

To his right, the voices fell away and then grew again. A shot snapped through the canopy and he realized that running parallel with them was stupid. He veered to his right, leapt over a large log, threw himself to the earth, and rolled into the log's crease until his face was plastered with rotting wood and earth.

Ten seconds later they rushed by, breathing heavily. These were jungle-trained soldiers, Shannon thought, swallowing. He stood to his feet and cut straight for the mission clearing. He ran to the jungle's edge, knelt by a towering palm, and wiped his eyes again.

The mission house lay a hundred yards directly ahead. Soldiers skirted the perimeter to his far left, yelling back and forth to the others who crashed through the underbrush. He rose, intent on running across the open field to the house when he saw them: soldiers hauling several bodies through the door.

Shannon froze. He couldn't see the faces of the victims dragged to the porch, but he knew their identities already.

Shannon moved forward slowly, aware that a buzz droned between his ears. His vision blurred and he took another step.

The tree beside him smacked, and he jerked his head to the left. A slug had splintered the bark. Shouts filled the air and Shannon spun to see soldiers along the perimeter running toward him. One had dropped to his knee and was firing.

Shannon leapt back into the trees, looked back to the house once, and ground his molars. A lump filled his throat and for another brief moment he thought it might be better if they just killed him.

CHAPTER FIVE

ABDULLAH AMIR stood in what was left of the Richtersons' plantation house and stared at the smoldering hole where the bedrooms had been a few minutes earlier. He picked up a blue-and-white china bell from an end table and shook it delicately. It chimed above the crackling flames—
ding, ding, ding
. So pretty and yet so delicate.

He hurled it against the wall, shattering it.

“The Americans have no shame.”

“These were not American. They are from Denmark.”

He turned to see his brother, Mudah, walk through the front door. His brother had made the trip from Iran for this occasion. It made sense—the future of the Brotherhood rested in this one plan they had hatched. “God's Thunder,” they had dubbed it. And it was by all measurements a plan worth a thousand such trips.

“They might say the same about you. You've just destroyed one of their trinkets without reason,” Mudah said.

“And you've just killed
them
,” Abdullah said.

“Yes, but for
good
reason. For Allah.”

Abdullah's lips lifted in a small grin. In many ways, they were different, he and his brother. Mudah was happily married, with five children—the youngest, a two-year-old daughter, and the eldest, an eighteen-year-old son. Abdullah had never married, which was one reason he had been chosen to spearhead this mission into South America. He wasn't as devout as his brother. Mudah lived for Allah, while Abdullah lived for political reasons. Either way, they had their common enemy. An enemy both would give their lives to destroy. Materialism. Imperialism. Christianity. America.

“Yes, of course. For Allah.” He looked out the window. “So now this jungle will be my home.”

“For a while, yes.”

“A while. And how long is a while?”

“As long as it takes. Five years. No more than ten. Worth every day.”

“If it doesn't kill me first. Believe me, this jungle can drive a man mad.”

Mudah smiled. “I do believe you. What I have more difficulty believing is that the CIA actually cooperated with us.”

“You don't know the drug trade. I gave them enough information to indict two drug cartels in Colombia in exchange for this one small plantation. It's not so hard to believe.”

Mudah was silent for a moment. “One day
they
will find it hard to believe.”

Abdullah let the comment pass. They would indeed.

“Have they found the other one?” Mudah asked.

The question brought Abdullah back to their immediate concern. “If not, they will. He killed one man. And if they don't find him, I will. We can't afford survivors. It wouldn't serve any of us.”

Mudah paused and looked at Abdullah. “You make Father proud, Brother. You will make all of Islam proud.”

WHEN TANYA found consciousness again, it was to the sound of
clunking
above her. She sat up groggily, thinking the night had ended with morning—the nightmare passed. But when she opened her eyes, darkness remained and she knew with a sinking dread that she had dreamt nothing.

The clunking though, that was new. She opened her mouth to scream out when muffled voices drifted into her box. Strange voices muttering foreign words. Her heart bolted and she closed her mouth.

Her body began to quake again. She grabbed her knees and willed it to stop. The boots paused very near, maybe in the hall, and then they dragged something away, into the living room. She shuddered at the images the sound evoked and began to sob under her breath.

For long minutes she crouched, still, drifting between abstract thoughts. At one point the ache on her skull grew like a boulder in her mind, and she put her fingers into a gash along her crown. A sticky wetness she thought must be blood drenched her hair. She wondered what would happen if a spider laid its eggs in that gash up there. Mother had warned her a hundred times, “An insect's eggs can be much more dangerous than its bite, Tanya. You be careful in those rivers, you hear?”

Yes, Mom, I hear. But now I don't hear. I don't hear a thing 'cause you're dead,
aren't you, Mother? They killed you, didn't they?
She cried after that thought.

Her mind cleared slowly. A pain gnawed in her arm, and she ran her fingertips down to a deep cut below her elbow. Now the spiders would have two places to plant their eggs. Tanya sucked deep, suddenly aware that the air in her hole was stuffy, maybe recycled already. She could suffocate—drown in her own carbon dioxide.

She reached for the ceiling again and pushed. It might as well have been a brick wall.

Her head ballooned with pain. If she had to die, a quick death would be good. But she wasn't ready to die, and the thought of dying slowly in this black box made her cry again.

A voice called from her memory—her father in his deep, confident way, “Tanya! Tanya, where are you, honey? Come to the hall; I want to show you something.” It was her first week in the jungle. She'd been ten then. Father had come ahead of her and Mother to build the house. Now, after three months they'd joined him. Three months of waiting and explaining to her American friends that yes, she was leaving them for a very long time, but not to worry, she would write. She'd written three times.

“Come here, honey.” She found her father looking into the hall closet and smiling proudly.

“What is it, Papa?” He'd ushered her to the spot and squatted next to her. “It is a secret storage place,” he'd said, beaming. “Think of it as a place we can hide things.”