shook my head to clear it. Medicine man tales, I said to myself. Shaman lies. I’d had a hallucination due to fatigue and stress. I lived in a world of science and technology. The Evil Eye was like the boogeyman, meant to scare and intimidate you into doing what someone else wanted. It couldn’t catch me or keep me. It couldn’t prevent me from going deep into the jungle.
“Let’s get this show on the road!” I called up to Carlos.
He gave me a thumbs-up. The plane jerked twice, then bumped down the strip, gaining speed. Straight brown tree trunks and masses of green leaves flitted by. Carlos pulled back on the stick and abruptly we were up, over the treetops, heading northwest.
Heading to a place where I wasn’t welcome.
But I’d survive.
Scooter’s life depended on it.
Chapter 4
Stuttering. It’s not a good sign at five thousand feet, whether it’s the pilot or the plane. In this case, it was the plane.
The bug nerd’s eyes opened, glared briefly toward Carlos’s broad back, and closed. I knew that look: You’re the tough man, you handle it.
Brilliant emerald treetops fluffed the ground. From above, the canopy shows you a solid-looking mass with an occasional peep-show peek at the really good stuff underneath. To see the real wealth of species—the dozens of monkeys, thousands of birds, bazillions of insects—you have to go in from the bottom.
North-north-west, where we were headed, the canopy abruptly rose and fell with the stubby Guiana Highlands. The high point, Serra do Apiau, was only around 3,300 feet, not even as high as most of the hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. And nothing like the Rockies.
But the terrain wouldn’t make a nice landing pad. By the increased clattering of the engine and the intensity of the frown the bug nerd cast in Carlos’s direction, maybe we were going to need one.
On cue, the Cessna fell several feet, tossing my stomach up around my ears. Carlos’s right hand felt around over his head for some controls. The bug nerd got up, grabbed a steel rib and leaned out the cargo door. His hair whipped his left ear. He held his glasses in place with his free hand. Not a good place to be sick, I thought, but he levered himself back into the plane and headed to the cockpit.
I didn’t catch his first shouted words, but there was no mistaking the pale grimace of fear Carlos shot him in response. Time to be worried, I gathered. I got up and joined them, hanging on to a steel handhold over my head like a professional New York commuter.
“What’s going on?” I yelled over the chatter and chuff.
“Bad fuel!” the nerd shouted. “The engine’s about to quit!”
“Over my dead body!” Carlos spun dials. I could see his feet working some kind of pedals. “She hasn’t let me down yet!”
“If it’s bad fuel, you don’t have a choice!”
“Come on!” Carlos yelled at the plane. “We’re less than thirty miles from the strip!”
An earsplitting screech went off somewhere near my head.
“Shit!” Carlos shouted.
The plane shuddered, nose tipping. Chuff, chuff, a slower chuff, then the prop wound down like a bad dream. The engine spat and quit. The alarm screamed.
“Hold on!”
Carlos kept one hand tight on the W-shaped wheel and flipped some more switches. The one gauge I recognized—the altimeter—confirmed the hard lean pulling me forward. The nerd braced himself where the copilot’s seat should be and grabbed the matching wheel.
Out the window by Carlos’s head, various trees were rapidly becoming recognizable to my naked eye. Another bad sign.
“You’d better get back!” the nerd yelled at me. “We’re going to have to make an emergency landing! Find something to strap yourself down with!”
“Emergency landing?” I shouted back. “Where?”
“Airstrip ahead!”
I looked out the front windshield. A tiny airstrip, much tinier than the tiny airstrip we’d left an hour earlier, had been scraped out of the jungle. To my untrained eye, we looked way too high to land on that little ribbon. Next to it, a bevy of shacks and huts surrounded a huge, muddy gouge in the hillside that spewed brown water down a channel, feeding into a natural stream off the Rio Branco.
A gold mine. Probably illegal. Definitely dangerous. All male, all testosterone, all heavily armed.
“Get back!” the nerd shouted again, his eyes intense behind his lenses.
I hand-over-handed my way back down the twelve feet of cabin space and looked around. No parachutes. Nothing to use as a tie-down. In frustration I kicked my day pack and duffel into the tail area, then settled into my original seat, across from the open cargo door. The wind gushing in smelled greener, more lush, wetter. My shoulder fit snugly against the plane’s rib cage. The plane bucked and wobbled. My only comforting thought was that if I whacked my head good and hard during the crash landing, I’d at least be unconscious during the rape later.
Sudden tears stung my eyes. Dammit. A girl in my position wasn’t supposed to be afraid. Where’s your guff? Scooter’s voice chided gently. No girlie of mine is goin’cry, he had said over countless jammed fingers (softball), skinned knees (tree climbing), and a broken arm (off-road motorcycle). No ladybug I know is goin’ be skeered, he told me during storms (including two tornadoes), as I rode The Demon (his meanest adopted mustang), and after falling fifty feet down Eagle’s Nest while tethered to a threadbare rope (rock climbing).
No, sir. I scrubbed the tears away. I ain’t skeered.
The Cessna skittered sideways and dropped. When my butt made contact with the floor again, I grabbed the nearest tie-down ring. We bore down on the trees. Thick, humid wind flushed the fear stench from the plane. My mind flashed on tree limbs snagging our landing gear to pluck us from the sky.
That was my cue to worry about one thing at a time. No need to wear myself out over everything at once. Worry about the airplane end-over-ending first, a crash landing second, and getting raped third. Got it. I gritted my teeth.
The plane shuddered. Up front, Carlos knelt by an open compartment door, fiddling with something inside. The nerd wedged himself into the pilot’s seat and leaned on a control. I felt a glimmer of hope. Speak immaculate Portuguese and fly a plane? We might get out of this yet. The nerd shook his head, then hit the control again. Out the cargo door, I started seeing branches instead of leaves. We were dropping into the airstrip ribbon way too fast. The engine spat, choked, then rumbled.
Outside, the propeller hitched a couple of times before catching a groove to spin smoothly. The Cessna’s nose picked up just in time for its landing gear to smack the ground with the delicacy of a brick. I lost my grip on the tie-down ring and rolled toward the tail, my ribs grinding over protruding metal bits. The bouncing plane sailed up, fishtailed, hopped sideways, straightened out. We whacked the strip again and started to slow.
I looked up. The forest grew taller and taller and taller toward the windshield. The nerd stood his ground. We’d lose this game of chicken, no doubt about that. I took a deep breath and tried not to panic.
The Cessna abruptly skipped, wheels barking on the dirt, and jerked to a halt. I skidded face-first several feet and stopped where I’d started this trip, near the cargo door.
There was no sound other than the engine’s stutter and the rumble of generators filtering through the trees. From my sprawled landing position, I surveyed the crew. Carlos crouched next to the pilot’s chair, his arms curved over his head. Kinkaid sat in the chair, his hands still locked on the wheel.
The propeller whirred innocently.
Just freakin’ typical.
Kinkaid