The Orchid Hunter

Hell, why not let him play gentleman and throw out his back? Maybe I’d make this trip alone after all. But he easily swung the heavy duffel bag into the cargo bay with one arm. Then he hopped into the plane after it, holding out his broad hand for my day pack and smiling at me like this was a Boy Scout jaunt to Camp Okefenokee.

“I got it.” I kept my day pack and climbed into the plane. I settled down across from the open cargo door and hoped he wouldn’t start talking.

Up front, Carlos flicked switches and turned dials. A few minutes later, the Cessna’s single engine fired up. The bare metal wall I leaned against vibrated from my neck all the way to my butt. Even my ankles tingled from the jarring.

The bug nerd shoved his gear against one of the plane’s exposed steel ribs and scrambled up to the cockpit.

“The engine doesn’t sound right to me,” he shouted over the guttering noise.

Carlos shook his head. “This plane is safe, my friend. Go take a nap.”

“But the mechanical clatter—”

“It’s nothing!”

The nerd’s firm jaw tightened, then he yelled, “So where are the parachutes?”

Carlos flashed the nerd a dark look and jerked his head toward the cargo bay. Get out of my face. I could read the message from halfway down the plane. Carlos might be a good guy as far as illicit dealings in the jungle go—meaning he wouldn’t kill anyone without a good reason—but, like me, he was a mercenary who needed to eat. Mouthy pip-squeak “experts” got tossed out the cargo door at seven thousand feet.

Besides, the bug nerd had given him the full payment up front. Dumbass.

The nerd flopped down again across from me, mindless of the open cargo door to his left. He closed his eyes, apparently taking Carlos’s nap suggestion seriously. He wore pristine trekking gear that looked like it’d been ordered out of a Whole Earth Catalog: heavy canvas pants, a shirt a size too big for him, what had to be day-hiking boots made by Birkenstock. His dark brown hair lay longish on his collar, highlighting prominent cheekbones, a strong jaw and chiseled lips. I wondered briefly what he’d look like with a ponytail but decided “tasty” wasn’t a word a woman like me should use. The wire frames slipped a half inch down his nose. He didn’t move.

I turned my attention to the shed. The Brazilian who apparently acted as the local air-traffic controller was nowhere to be seen. Nothing out there but trees and bugs and already-intense heat.

The plane lurched forward. The Cessna stuttered and jerked toward the dirt runway. Deep jungle green rolled by. Workers’ arms rose and fell, blades slashing and hacking. Carlos turned the plane’s nose due west and the shed came into view again. A very dark man, maybe half Negro, half Indian, stood beside the shed, staring at us. Carlos stopped the plane to check something.

The staring man strode toward us purposefully, his gaze unwavering. A chill shot through my veins. Carlos fidgeted with controls, and still the man walked, unhurried and deliberate. How could someone stare so long without blinking?

Then the man grasped the open cargo doorway and leaned in. Twin puckered scars etched his face, neck, and the part of his collarbone I could see beneath his ragged shirt. Around his neck, a leather cord held a single jaguar tooth—a canine. His huge hands gripped the doorway with such strength I had no doubt he could bend the metal if he chose. Black eyes stared at me.

Directly at me.

The chill in my veins dropped to a freeze. He didn’t glare; his eyes were as emotionless as those of the jaguar he’d killed for its tooth.

Endless darkness welled up in my periphery. The plane’s metallic clatter heightened into deafening howls and screams and roars. The world dropped away from my feet, leaving me standing in utter blackness, alone. I no longer hunkered down in a Cessna waiting to go into the jungle. The jungle had come for me, and what hunted me breathed hot and heavy on my neck. I spun. Nothing. I spun again. Nothing. Panicked, I struck out with both arms, swinging wild. If I could just see.

As if in answer to a prayer, a dim yellow light grew near my feet, filling the darkness with itself, illuminating nothing. A single sound cut through the cacophony: a slithering hiss that singed my spine with fear and brought bile into my throat. I knew what it was. The yellow light sharpened into two flat, slitted, alien eyes. Pit viper. The kind of venomous snake whose head would chase you after you’d severed it from the body. Low words, words I didn’t understand but whose meaning I knew instantly, told me to leave this place. What waited for me in the trees was hissing death.

Abruptly, the vision disappeared.

The empty cargo-bay door yawned. Outside, trees and undergrowth lurked behind the sagging shed. The shaman—if that’s what he was—had disappeared.

Once the Evil Eye has its grip, you’re lost. The open cargo door tempted me to leave. I could jump out now before my curse found me. Jump out, go home, save myself. My fingers itched for my day pack.

I 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 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.

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