THE EXTRACTOR Page 4

  “Illegal loggers,” Darrow added, “drug traffickers, coca farmers, they all use the area, vast as it is. The tribe – if it exists – is in danger, even if they don’t know it. We’re interested in the medical applications, sure – but we also have humanitarian concerns too. If we hadn’t sent a team, the tribe could just end up massacred like so many others, and then whatever secrets they held would go to the grave with them.”

  “But you don’t really trust the Brazilian government either,” Lee observed. “Professor Guzman certainly didn’t.”

  Bakula shrugged. “Where there’s money to be made, who can you really trust? That’s another reason we wanted to be involved – we figured if a prestigious American university was involved, the Brazilians would be more likely to act honorably. Especially because the next stage would have been to contact the State Department about the discovery, if it was verified.”

  Lee nodded, and drank some more of his tea as he thought about the matter. He wasn’t sure if contacting the US State Department was the best thing to do, but he supposed they might just be a little less corrupt than their Brazilian and Peruvian counterparts, so perhaps the involvement of the university research team was the lesser of several potential evils.

  “If this tribe does exist,” Lee said eventually, “and those anecdotal reports are true, then there might be another reason for their perceived immunity.”

  “That they have been contacted before?” Darrow asked. “And have built up their immunity in the normal way?”

  Lee nodded his agreement, the logical side of his brain arguing that this was the most likely explanation for the whole thing.

  “It’s possible,” Darrow continued, “and that’s another reason we want to investigate, to find out if it is true. And then, there were other things said about the tribe too, that might indicate their immunology is something unique.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like perfect teeth, above average height, great eyesight, little to no degenerative diseases, living to an unusually old age . . . the list goes on.”

  “A tribe of supermen,” Lee commented, wondering if any of it could be true. “Or maybe aliens?”

  “You don’t believe it?” Bakula asked, slightly irritated.

  Lee shrugged, coming to a conclusion about something. “Look,” he said, “it doesn’t matter if I think it’s true or not. It’s interesting, I’ll give you that, but it’s clouding the real issue. You sent in a team of researchers to find this tribe, and now they’re missing. The rest is just window dressing.”

  “That’s fair enough,” Dunford said, before Bakula could respond again. “We’re not asking you to believe in the exceptional properties of this tribe. We just want our team back.”

  “How many people are there on the team?” Lee asked, glad to be getting back to business.

  “Six,” Dunford said, extracting a manila envelope from his desk drawer and sliding it across to Lee. “All the details are in there, personnel files on all of them.”

  “There are others too,” Darrow said. “Locals. We’ve got three guys from other tribes, ones who have only recently made contact with the outside world, they’re acting as translators and guides. One of them is featured in Guzman’s report as actually having had contact with the tribe in question before. And there’s two more, professional trackers from Manaus.”

  “Protection?” Lee asked.

  Dunford shook his head. “We considered contacting a private security firm,” he said, “but we’d have been forced to explain ourselves, and we hardly wanted the word to spread. The tribespeople knew the score anyway, and the guys from Manaus were willing to go, without asking questions.”

  “Did they have weapons with them?”

  “Our people didn’t,” Dunford said, “at least not so far as we were aware. Unless you include machetes and camp knives, of course. The trackers had rifles and handguns, and the tribesmen might have had a couple of short spears, and a bow and arrow, from the team’s reports.”

  “You have information on these other people?”

  “Not a great deal, but you’ll be given whatever we have.”

  “Communications,” Lee asked next, “how were they contacting you?”

  “Satellite phone,” Dunford answered.

  “How many did the team have?”

  “Two. The main, and a backup.”

  “Radios?”

  “Everyone had a personal radio, as well as their own cellphones, for what they were worth in the middle of the Amazon.”

  “And you’ve not been able to raise them at all for the last week? Nothing whatsoever?”

  Darrow shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s been terrible, we keep trying everything, but all the lines are dead, we’re getting nothing.”

  “And just to confirm,” Lee said, “it is everyone that has gone missing, yes? The trackers haven’t been seen anywhere else, a tribesman hasn’t turned up in another village?”

  “As far as we know, it’s the entire group,” Dunford said. “All gone.”

  Lee finished his tea and sat back in the chair, thinking. “What route did they use? Which bit of the rainforest are we actually looking at?”

  Dunford entered some keystrokes onto the computer in front of him, and then turned the large flat-screen monitor around so that Lee could see it. It was a Google Earth image of South America, and Lee knew that Dunford had chosen the wide shot to give some perspective before zooming in. Sure enough, the image soon began to enlarge as Dunford zoomed in toward a region within the northwest section of the continent, a huge swath of the Amazon rainforest that straddled the border between southeast Peru and western Brazil.

  “This is the area,” Dunford said. “Thirty thousand square miles of mixed land use, with all sorts of conflicting laws and regulations. Sometimes it’s referred to as one big ‘reserve’, but it’s a lot more complex than that – you’ve got a communal reserve, indigenous lands, native communities, national parks, and ‘reserves for indigenous peoples in isolation’, which are prohibited to outsiders; although as we’ve mentioned before, that’s widely ignored on the Peruvian side.”

  “So where did they go?”

  “Flew into a small airfield in a place called Feijó,” Dunford told him, pointing to the place on the screen, “then hired jeeps and went west along the main road – the 364, you can see it there – past Tarauacá, all the way until it meets the Juruá River, a tributary of the Amazon, right here.” Dunford tapped the screen, and Lee saw where the highway was interrupted by the river. “Ferry boats are used to get vehicles across to the other side. Nothing fancy, mind, just a flat little boat that’s about big enough to hold one car at a time. But they didn’t cross the river, they met a boat there that they’d arranged, and it took them downriver.”

  “You know the people on the boat?” Lee asked.

  “The actual police investigation did at least get that far,” Bakula said. “They took our guys downriver, then returned – no funny business to report, if that’s what you were thinking.”

  Lee nodded; that was what he’d been thinking. “How far downriver?” he asked.

  Dunford tracked down the screen with his finger, and Lee watched as the river curved and spiraled to the southwest, before turning more directly southward, cutting through the thick vegetation of the surrounding rainforest. Dunford’s finger stopped by the side of the river, just after a large horseshoe-shaped bend.

  “Seringal Simpata,” Dunford said. “Took them several days to navigate that damn river, and this is the last sign of known habitation in this particular area, it doesn’t even really show up on here – I mean, it’s literally just a few huts by the side of the river.”

  “And that’s where they stopped?”

  “Yeah,” Darrow said. “The guides knew the area from there, and so they left the boats there and started making their way overland, to the west, into the really thick stuff.”

  “How many days ago was this?”

&nb
sp; “That was a little less than three weeks ago,” Darrow said. “Twenty days.”

  “So they were walking through there for nearly two weeks?” Lee asked. “What kind of supplies were they carrying?” From personal experience, he knew there was no way that anyone could carry two weeks’ worth of provisions on their backs, while hiking through the sweltering rainforest.

  “Supply drops,” Bakula said, “provisions were carried in by airplane, then dropped over specific grid points every three days.”

  “And who arranged that?” Lee asked.

  “Getting suspicious again, huh?” Bakula asked with a laugh. “It was Guzman who organized it, kept everything really sweet. Until we stopped hearing from them, that is.”

  “Where was the last message received from?”

  “Last grid reference we have for them was right about there,” Dunford said, pointing to a spot in the Serra do Divisor National Park that was less than ten kilometers from the Peruvian border. “Guzman’s flights have been going over the area for days now, along with a couple of choppers from the police. But they’ve not seen anything at all, no sign of anyone. That rainforest is so thick though, it’s probably a waste of time anyway – it’s impossible to penetrate the canopy in that area, the only way to do it is to get eyes on the ground.”

  “Close to Peru,” Lee commented. “Maybe they even crossed into Peru, at some point.” He looked up at the three academics. “You think they might have stumbled across someone?” Hidden tribes, oil prospectors and illegal loggers were all contenders, but if the team had been murdered – and Lee had to grudgingly accept that this was a very real possibility – then drug gangs were the most likely culprits. The area was notorious for hidden drugs labs, and the rainforest was used as a secure route to smuggle cocaine from Peru and Columbia, into Brazil. If the team had stumbled into something they shouldn’t have, then their prospects for survival weren’t good at all. Snakes and jaguars, crocodiles and piranhas, and all the other assorted dangers of the Amazon, were concerns on an individual level, but were unlikely to have taken out an entire group of twelve people. Illness was likewise unlikely to have incapacitated them all. And why were all of the comms down?

  Lee thought about the situation. Maybe the sat phone had broken – been dropped, or destroyed by water – and maybe the backup hadn’t worked in the first place. No cellphone reception, and lousy personal radios that would struggle to get a signal very far. They wouldn’t be able to log in their destination, and then wouldn’t be able to get their resupplies. Hunger would result, even starvation eventually; but the real danger would have come from the lack of drinking water, which – in that heat – would have rendered them incapable within a single day. And yet the tribesmen would have known how to get water, and food if necessary. The trackers too, if they were any good. They’d have made a signal somehow too, used smoke to show Guzman where they were.

  It was a mystery, but Lee’s money was on some sort of human involvement. And if he was a betting man, he would have put his money on it being a drugs gang.

  “I don’t want to be too pessimistic about things,” Lee said gravely, “but you need to understand the reality that – given the situation here – one of the best outcomes we can expect is for me to find their bodies, figure out what happened, and bring them home for burial.”

  They looked openly shocked at Lee’s bluntness, but eventually, as one, they all nodded slightly. Of course they’d considered this; they were all highly educated people, how could they not? They must have known what the chances were of bringing this team back alive.

  But if there was a chance – any at all – then damn it, Lee was going to be the man to do it.

  “I’m gonna want to speak to this Professor Guzman guy,” Lee said, focusing on the positives once again, trying to establish a workable plan of action.

  Nervous glances were exchanged around the table once again, and Lee knew that another problem was about to come up.

  “Professor Guzman,” Dunford said eventually, “has . . . ah . . . gone off the radar too, let’s say.”

  “Guzman’s gone missing too?” Lee asked in surprise. “When?”

  “Two days ago,” Dunford confirmed. “It was the final push we needed to make us draft in some additional help.” He smiled cagily at Lee. “Hence our call to you.”

  “Where was he last seen?” Lee asked, wondering how much worse the scenario could get.

  “Feijó airport,” Bakula answered. “Landed with the pilot after one of their search flights, called us from the airport, and that was the last we heard from him. According to the pilot, the guy went into the restroom, and didn’t come out.”

  “The police chasing up on this?”

  “Not seriously,” Darrow said with obvious disgust.

  “Okay,” Lee said. “One more thing to contend with.” Damn, he thought, Alex had said this was something I could really get my teeth into, but what the hell am I getting involved in here?

  “Mr. Lee,” Darrow said, getting his attention immediately with her sudden politeness. “This team, it’s my team, I’m not sure if you understand, but I really need you to find them, I can’t imagine never seeing them again, never even hearing from hem again.”

  “I do understand,” Lee said, and it was true; bringing your people back was something that all military men and women understood perfectly. “You’ve heard that motto?” Lee asked. “‘No Man Left Behind’?”

  Darrow nodded. “Yes,” she said.

  “Well, Ms. Darrow, I live and breathe that motto. I base my life on it, my very existence.”

  Darrow’s eyes moistened, and she bit her lip. “That’s good to know,” she said. “It is.” She wiped her eyes, and looked at Lee. “I have a . . . personal stake in this too,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  Darrow nodded. “Yes. One of the women on the team, Lisa Garfield, she and I . . . well, we have a relationship.”

  Tears did well up in her eyes now, and Lee’s heart went out for her, imagining how terrible she must feel.

  Darrow’s hand went to her opposite wrist, and pulled off the watch that lay there. She put it on the table and pushed it across to him.

  “Pick it up,” she said, “look at the inscription.”

  Lee did as he was asked, turning the timepiece – which was surprisingly heavy-duty for a lady’s wristwatch – over in his hands.

  To Sylvia, the inscription read. With love, always - LG

  Lee looked back up at her, saw the pleading in her eyes.

  “Please take it with you,” she said. “If you find her – when you find her – please give this to her, so she knows . . . she knows . . . that I’m thinking of her . . .”

  Darrow started to sob in earnest then, and Bakula took her head and let her bury it in his shoulder.

  Lee, seeing the depth of her feeling, took off his own watch and passed it across to Darrow, putting hers on his wrist in its place. The strap was on the last hole, but it fit.

  “Ms. Darrow,” he said. “I’ll take my watch back when I return with your team. And you can rest assured,” he continued, “that when you next see Lisa, she’ll be wearing this.”

  Darrow nodded and blinked her appreciation, unable to speak, but the action spoke more than words could ever have done, and he resolved to do everything he could to successfully complete this seemingly impossible mission.

  “Going back you your earlier point,” Dunford said seriously, getting things back on track, “about the likelihood of . . . survival, as it were . . . well, we recognize that time is of the essence. Every day that goes by, without word from them, makes that survival less likely.” Here, he glanced nervously at Darrow, hoping he wasn’t upsetting her. “We know that. And we’re also painfully aware of how long it took the team to get on-site in the first place – between flying, driving, boating and hiking, it was literally weeks. And I fear we just don’t have this time. Do you think –”

  Lee held up his hand, cutting Dunford off. “That’
s something you don’t have to worry about,” he assured them. “If we can sort out a plane from Feijó airport, I’ll be onsite of their last known grid reference within an hour of take-off.”

  “You’re going to parachute into the rainforest?” Dunford asked in open surprise.

  “Well, we aren’t called pararescue jumpers for nothing,” Lee replied, smiling widely at the thought – despite the dangers, and the seeming impossibility – of what was to come.

  Chapter Three

  John Lee breathed in the hot, humid air as he looked around at the town of Feijó, from his position underneath the main gates. The warm, damp, fetid atmosphere reminded him of the jungles of northern Thailand, and his time in the monastery there.

  Involuntarily, he thought momentarily about the reason he escaped into his self-imposed exile, saw the last few seconds of his wife’s and daughter’s lives flash before him; then he remembered Phoenix, ensconced in the hotel with Marcus Hartman, and the spell was broken.

  Why the hell had he agreed to bring her? It wasn’t safe here, his gut told him. And yet she was the team’s technical specialist, and monitoring Lee’s mission from nearby – relatively, at least – made sense, on a practical level. Mabuni had provided him with certain toys that he actually might make use of for this job, and Phoenix would act as his eyes and ears as she remotely monitored the information he sent back. Finding the team was still going to be one hell of a task, but he welcomed all the help he could get. And yet . . .

  “She shouldn’t be here,” Lee muttered to himself, as he walked down the dirty, mud road that ran through the center of town, scanning a crowd that consisted of a handful of backpacker-tourists and plenty of locals, dressed in the ubiquitous shorts and sandals, whatever their age. Nearby, a stream of old cars and puttering scooters ran past them in both directions, diesel fumes mixing with the hot air, making him choke.

  Trying to forget about Phoenix, Lee reminded himself of the directions to the local police station, where he’d arranged to meet Emmanuel Rodrigues, the deputy commander.