The Orchid Hunter

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“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 reached out, killed the engine. The prop wound down and stopped. Its three blades cast a shadow of the peace sign onto a copse of rubber trees inches away.

“Are you okay?” Kinkaid asked me over his shoulder.

I sat up. The ribs hurt, but didn’t move when I pressed them with my palm. I also took comfort from the fact I could stand and hadn’t thrown up yet. “Yeah. Nice landing.”

He unwedged himself from the pilot’s chair. “You all right?” he asked the floor, where Carlos was starting to unfold himself.

“Yes.”

Carlos and I looked at each other for a long moment.

“You’re fired,” I said.

I could hear shouts in the distance, growing closer. Time to start worrying about staying alive. I grabbed Kinkaid’s arm as he staggered to the tail section to check his gear.

“We’re scientists,” I said. “We’re just going to the research station. We are not journalists.”

“What?” He picked up his camera case.

“That stays here,” I said.

“No, it doesn’t—”

“If they think you’re a journalist, they’ll kill you.” When he stared at me, I added, “Don’t provoke anything. We’re going to the research station. That’s it. Nothing else.”

“Why would they kill us?”

“Because the mine is illegal,” Carlos answered from the cockpit. “This is Yanomamo land, and the miners have dug without government permission.”

“They’re paranoid about being stopped,” I said to Kinkaid. “Or robbed.” The voices outside grew louder. The distinctive, heavy, shung-clunk of a shotgun being racked made me lower my voice. “Don’t be stupid and we might get out of this alive.”

He nodded.

“That means keep your mouth shut,” I clarified.

He nodded again, shoving his glasses back onto his nose.

I shrugged into my day pack, ignoring my tender ribs. Showing weakness to a dog pack just feeds the frenzy. I needed to get out of this with Harrison’s ashtray, my forged CITES certificate, one cardboard tube for storing a Death Orchid, and my life.

Everything else was negotiable.

A strong brown hand gripped the door and a short man stuck his head through the cargo door. “Saia do avião!” Behind him, the shotgun’s nose beckoned us.

We climbed out and lined up beside the plane. Four men with rifles slung over their shoulders clambered in. In a moment, I heard my duffel unzipping and my stuff being pulled out. The short guy who’d spoken to us appeared to be in charge, probably the head donos, the mine foreman. Security would be part of his job. A much younger man held the shotgun on us, his face pasted with a “just doing my job” expression.

The donos smiled, revealing an archetypical gold front tooth. “You have come visit us,” Goldtooth said in English.

I felt Carlos tense beside me. “Bad fuel,” he replied. “We were lucky.”

Not quite as lucky as we might have been, I thought. The donos studied Carlos for a moment.

“We took bets whether you crash.” He slapped one broad hand into the other and grinned. “I lost!”

A tinkling bang inside the plane heralded the end of Kinkaid’s camera. In my peripheral vision, I saw Kinkaid’s jaw tense, but he kept his mouth shut. The donos shrugged. “Accident,” he said. “Too bad.”

When Goldtooth turned his attention to me, I dropped my gaze to his feet. I’m proud, but I’m not stupid. I’d save the I Am Woman tirade for when I was the one holding the shotgun.

“What you doing here?” Goldtooth asked. “What a woman need here?”

“I’m a scientist,” I replied. “Científico.” No, dammit, that was Spanish. “Cientista.”

I let my eyes wander from his muddy boots up worn work pants to his stout white cotton shirt. A few wiry hairs sprouted from the shirt’s open neck. “Studying plantas.” I chanced a glance at his face.

His black eyes had narrowed. I was starting to feel pretty good about those eyes not looking like a snake’s when I realized his nonviper gaze had settled below my neckline. Never mind my bulky, buttoned-up canvas-shirt look. This guy was interested in what lay beneath, which was a white cotton muscle tee, a white cotton sports bra—a not-too-shabby C—and a lot of sweat. Bugs buzzed my ear, but the deet kept them at bay. Too bad they didn’t make lech-repellant.

His fingers twitched. Abruptly he grinned. “Come to office!” he said. “You need Coca-Cola!”

The sullen young guy with the shotgun waved us down the airstrip toward the collection of hovels that served as mine headquarters. As we trudged along the airstrip’s rutted surface, the clatter of generators rose over the sheet-metal buildings. Now, at around ten in the morning, the sun was ready to bake us into crispy bits. I shrugged off the stray notion that we were descending into hell. I hadn’t been searched, I’d been allowed to keep my day pack, and the worst they’d done to my person was ogle.

All things considered, things were looking up.

The shotgun-toting guy stopped at an outlying building beside the airstrip. Beside the building, three Yanomamo women wearing brightly colored T-shirts and bowl-cut hairdos loitered in the shade, one holding an infant in her arms. A Yanomamo boy who looked about twelve chased a toad, aiming boy-sized arrows at it from his boy-sized bow.

The Shotgun Kid swung open the door and waved us inside the building. I’m glad I wasn’t expecting a blast of cool air because I didn’t get one. If anything, the heat was worse. Goldtooth motioned for us to move on through a small anteroom to the large office and sit down on the floor, then he disappeared.

A large metal utility desk sat square in the middle of the room with a wide wooden chair squatting behind it. A neat stack of papers held down one edge of the desk. A two-drawer metal filing cabinet hunched in the corner. Overhead, a ceiling fan vigorously flung stale air onto our heads.

I took the corner where I could see the door and the Shotgun Kid filling it. A third Brazilian lingered just outside the door. Kinkaid settled cross-legged next to me. For the first time I noticed he’d brought his own day pack with him. Good Boy Scout. Too bad his camera hadn’t made it. A thin trickle of sweat slid down his temple but he seemed calm. I wasn’t surprised. Landing the little plane the way he had took more nerve than I had.

Carlos hunkered down next to Kinkaid like he was sitting around a campfire. He looked a little too at ease for my peace of mind. Of course, he wasn’t one of two Americans in the room. Or a woman. My guess was that before this was over, he’d end up cutting a deal with the miners to make some of their supply runs into Boa Vista.

Goldtooth returned with three open glass-bottled Cokes. Refrigeration was too much to hope for, but a wet drink was a wet drink. He handed them out, let his thick, rough fingers scrape mine when I took the bottle from him. His grin, stretching through a fleshy face, made me think twice about taking a sip. I set the bottle’s warm butt on my knee.