Thief (40 page)

Dokken paused, but then put the leaves in his mouth. A few moments later, he cocked an eyebrow, said, “Who needs coffee?”

“Right?” Monarch said. “The leaves in my pocket are what you're after, Jason, or a good part of it in my opinion. So why don't you turn this helicopter around and get us the hell out of the jungle and go get your money? I figure what I'm offering has gotta be worth twelve years in jail. We call it good, turn around, and go home.”

“I'm with you,” the pilot said.

“Not happening,” Dokken said. “We're going in and making sure these leaves are the real deal.”

They flew on in silence, weaving back and forth across the deviation of four degrees once they were fifty miles beyond the border of the forbidden zone. But with the mist, they were seeing little if any relief in the jungle canopy.

Then Monarch spotted big black boulders through openings in the canopy, and realized they were close. Behind him in the hold, several of the mining guys saw the boulders and began jabbering to one another in Portuguese. He didn't know exactly what they were saying, but he understood the rocks made them excited.

A few minutes later, out of the mist Monarch saw the stream and the bank where they'd been darted, and where he'd awoken a few days before. He even spotted what looked like the paratrooper's rifle lying in some high grass well downstream.

“In this mist, you'll want to land down there, cover the rest on foot,” Monarch said. If he could get to that gun, he had a chance.

“I've got the ridge on radar,” the pilot said, swinging them away.

The visibility dropped and the copter slowed.

“I'd get some altitude if I were you,” Monarch said a second before the cliff work appeared out of the fog, no more than forty yards off the nose of the chopper. Up close like this, he could see an intricate matrix of vines that covered much of that section of the tiger-striped wall. But then they gained altitude, and reached the sheerest section of the palisades where the rock was fully exposed. The mining men exploded into cries and shouts of astonishment

“What's got their dick all twisted?” Dokken asked Pearl.

The pilot spoke in Portuguese, and the men replied.

Pearl said, “The rock formation makes no geological sense.”

“Explain that,” Dokken said.

The pilot and the two men in the back, geologists, spoke rapidly.

“This was once all under water, a great sea,” Pearl said. “Millions of years of shellfish dying created a limestone crust at the bottom. When the sea dried, the limestone almost immediately began to erode, except here.”

“Okay?” Dokken said.

“They'll have to test the dark material, but…”

The helicopter bucked a few times and through the windshield, the waterfall appeared out of the mist. Monarch got a good look down into a jagged V cut in the rock ten feet deep. At the bottom, there was a slot perhaps twenty-four inches long and ten wide out of which pressurized water fountained six feet and fell in two directions before spilling off the near and far cliffs. As they passed over the top of it, the thief saw something else, something that surprised him.

Then the geologists began jabbering again, and Pearl said something that surprised Monarch even more. “See those ribbons of black ore in the limestone there, how it becomes all black?”

“Yeah,” Dokken said.

“It doesn't make sense unless you think…” the pilot said, and then stopped, looking dumbstruck.

“Unless you think what?” Dokken demanded.

“Asteroid,” Pearl said in awe. “An asteroid hit this ridge a millennia ago or more, gouged out the canyon.”

Monarch flashed on that cave painting that depicted the beginning of Ayafal time, thought of that boulder field back there in the jungle, and looked at the canyon from the air as if seeing it for the first time. Of course that was how this place was formed. It just made sense.

“That good for mining?” Dokken asked.

“Depends on what the asteroid was made of,” Pearl said. “But based on a previous sample they've seen, this could be a very, very good thing.”

Previous sample? Monarch thought.

He was no longer looking at the miraculous geology of the canyon, he was staring down into its bottom, the jungle and the clearing by the waterfall, and the lanes cut in the vegetation. But try as he might, he couldn't make out any of the settlements, at least not from that height, and he understood how this place could have been overlooked for so long. The canyon was under hung. The dwellings were back under the cliff. Everything else was brilliant camouflage.

“This doesn't look like where I was taken,” the thief said.

The words were no sooner out of his mouth than a group of Ayafal warriors, led by Augus and Naspec, came out of the jungle into the waterfall clearing to brandish their Stone Age spears. Fal-até, the old shaman woman, followed them, arms raised at the helicopter as if she meant to curse it out of the sky.

Laughter seized the interior of the hold.

“Like taking candy from a caveman,” Pearl said, provoking more chuckles.

“Do me a favor?” Dokken said. “Before you land, take us out over the trees on the rim. I want to give the Flintstones a show.”

Pearl veered off toward the rim. Dokken grabbed Monarch by the collar of his shirt and put the gun to his head again. “Easy now, I want you back in the hold, partner.”

“Why?” Monarch said, turning in his seat.

“I want you to be the first thing Santos and the other scientists see,” Dokken said. “I want them to know it was you who betrayed them.”

Monarch scowled, but got up out of the seat, spotting the Ka-Bar knife Dokken had strapped to his thigh. He moved with his captor as Dokken hauled him toward the open bay door. The thief faked a stumble, causing Dokken to grab him by his shoulder. Monarch had been a fine pickpocket as a teen, and he unsnapped the sheath, and got hold of the knife as his old comrade stood him up.

Dokken smiled. “Now that we've found this place, Monarch, you have no value other than as a source of pleasure to me. And you know what? As brief as this is gonna be, it will please me very, very much.”

Then he shoved Monarch away from him just as the thief sliced upward with the Ka-Bar, missing Dokken's belly by centimeters.

The mercenary kicked, caught Monarch in the chest, and blew him backward out the side of the helicopter.

*   *   *

Five minutes earlier, Dr. Estella Santos had been down in the clearing by the waterfall, taking the last of her DNA samples from Augus and his clan, the last of the Ayafal to submit to her study. She'd cleverly enticed the tribal elder by noting that his family boasted some of the oldest living people in the Canyon of the Moon, and adding that it would be a shame not to have them singled out for high praise in her research.

With what we've got, Santos thought, we could be ready to leave in the morning. She was saddened by the idea, yet also looked forward to returning to her lab in Rio. She wondered whether Monarch would ever come back into her life. She hoped not, but knew all too well that she'd given him the first rights to her research.

But that could be easily fought in court. At least, Santos thought so. It would largely be, like all difficulties, a function of money. If the samples substantiated her theory, there would be no shortage of people willing to back her continuing research—

Up on the cliffs, high in those vine-choked trees, howler monkeys began to bellow and roar. How the hell had they gotten up—?

Santos heard the helicopters then over the howling. She was instantly pulsing with fear and regret because the Ayafal were about to see something truly modern, a flying machine, something that might shake them to their core.

“Run into the trees!” she yelled at the dozens of people in the clearing and the members of her expedition. “Demons are coming in the sky!”

Naspec and Augus had hesitated, but then looked up, awestruck at the sight of the two mechanical birds. Several tribesmen fell on their bellies, screaming that the Moon God had returned.

The rest sprinted into the jungle with their family members and the shaman right behind them. Rousseau, Carson, and their assistants hurried into the vegetation after Santos. She dug out the binoculars she'd taken from Monarch's things. She peered up through the branches and leaves at the helicopters, seeing the SJB logo on the big one. Its bay door was open. Hard men with guns were looking out the side.

Then Augus, Naspec, and six or seven other warriors, broke out into the clearing, screaming at the helicopter with Fal-até chanting some kind of spell to strike the demon dead. Santos could see the men in the bigger helicopter laughing at the Ayafal before the bird veered over trees growing on the rim and hovered.

The chopper was now more than four hundred feet above the scientist and back three hundred more, but she saw a struggle inside the hold before a man pitched out backward, twisted as he fell, and disappeared into the trees.

 

54

I'M SCREWED, MONARCH THOUGHT
after he'd turned over in space and saw the jungle canopy rushing at him from thirty feet below. The thief instinctually curled up into a ball just before he smashed into the upper branches of several intertwined trees. He crashed down through leaves and smaller branches before he hit bigger limbs that blew the breath out of him and slowed his fall before snapping and breaking. He fell again.

He bounced off a bigger branch, felt a crunch high in his left arm before hanging up in a tangle of branches. Then the tangle gave way and he dropped a third time, ten or twelve feet, before slamming sideways into what felt like a cargo net.

Monarch lay shaking, trying to get his breath back, eyes closed, sure that whatever held him was going to unravel and he was going to plunge yet again, this time all the way to the ground. Then the howling began, louder than speeding locomotives blaring their horns. He opened his eyes, and saw that he was caught up in one of those high matrixes of vines the howler monkeys seemed to like.

The lesser apes were all around him, screaming at him from the edge of their nests twenty feet away, and from the branches of the trees that supported the vine system. The noise was overwhelming, as if hammers were striking his eardrums and he raised his bound hands to try to cover his ears.

It was only then Monarch realized that he'd managed to hold on to Dokken's Ka-Bar as he fell through three stages of jungle canopy. He tried to get the knife turned, but his left arm was numb and useless, and the sheer volume of the howling kept destroying his ability to think. Finally, in utter desperation, the thief screamed back at the monkeys with every bit of energy he had left.

*   *   *

Down in the bottom of the canyon, the howling of the monkeys and Monarch's scream of rage and desperation were swallowed whole by the throbbing of the helicopters' engines and rotors as they came in for a landing.

Naspec, Augus, Fal-até, and the other Ayafal who'd been brandishing their spears and spells finally broke ranks, and disappeared into the jungle opposite a shocked and sickened Estella Santos.

She'd realized it was Monarch who'd been thrown from the helicopter. She had no love for the thief, but she had not wished him dead.

“They threw him out!” Carson shouted. “Did you see that?”

“And they've got guns,” Rousseau said. “Lots of them.”

Santos looked at the members of her expedition, and almost told them she was sorry that she'd ever started them all on the long path that had led them to this moment. But then the scientist felt her fear turn to rage.

Santos broke from the jungle as the helicopter set down. She stomped forward, stood there, hands gathered to fists as the rotors died and Dokken and Pearl came out the side of the big chopper with two heavily armed men in tow.

“You are breaking Brazilian federal law!” the scientist shouted. “This is a restricted zone! Landing is prohibited!”

“So is coming in on foot, Dr. Santos,” Dokken said.

Meanwhile, a huge white guy with bandages on his face and a cast on his arm climbed out of the smaller helicopter carrying a pump-action shotgun. He headed toward the waterfall with two other men who had gear bags and sidearms in holsters.

“Who are you?” Santos demanded. “How do you know my name?”

“That's irrelevant,” he said. “You saw what happened to the thief?”

Her head retreated several degrees.

“I hope you all saw it,” Dokken shouted. “Because if I don't get what I want, I will start throwing cavemen, women, and children out of that bird.”

Santos started to say, “You wouldn't…”

“Oh, but I would,” Dokken promised. “So the way it's going to work, Doc, you help me out, I leave, simple as that. You don't help me, they take a…”

Augus and Naspec charged from the jungle, spears up, shouting in Ayafal, “Go back to the sky, bird demon. Or we kill you!”

Before Santos could intervene, Dokken pulled a Sig-Sauer and put a nine-millimeter round through the Ayafal chief's forehead, and another through the throat of the tribal elder. Both men collapsed like puppets sheared of string. Blood poured from Naspec's wound, streamed across the red mask around his eyes. Augus's blood ran down his chest.

Screams of shock and grief went up back in the jungle, followed by the sounds of crashing as many in the tribe began to flee. Kiki, followed by Fal-até, however, burst from the rain forest and went to the dead men's side, keening and weeping.

“Tell them they can run, but they can't hide,” Dokken said.

The scientist barely heard him.

“They've never seen guns,” Santos sobbed. “They didn't know what—”

“I don't give a shit,” Dokken said. “But I will start hunting the others if you don't start cooperating and answer my questions.”

Kiki was trembling head to toe before she lunged up off her knees away from her father's body toward Dokken, scratching at his face with her nails, and screeching at him in Ayafal. She ripped his cheeks open before he could backhand her to the ground with such force that she lay there stunned as he aimed at her head.