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only slightly.
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"It's a bad place you go to, missy," he said. "I'm sorry."
At the heart of the camp stood the largest concentration of actual buildings.
This was surrounded by another high fence topped with razor tape. Just inland
of it lay a second square compound perhaps fifty yards square. Its walls were
irregular and multicolored. As the chopper approached, descending and slowing
at last as if reluctantly, she saw they were made of random sheets of painted
metal. They might have been hammered out of old metal car bodies. Improvised
or not, they were also topped with the inevitable razor tangles.
A paved square in the barren yellow yard inside had been painted with a big
yellow circle. The chopper sank toward it.
Crouched behind Annja and craning to look between her and the M-16 guard, who
stood tensely with black rifle shouldered and leveled, finger on the trigger,
Dan pointed to a gateway through the sheet-metal fence. It was high and wide
enough to admit a single big vehicle, maybe even a semitrailer. Above it
arched a sign of what looked like inexpertly welded wrought iron.
"What's that say?" he yelled. "That doesn't look like Portuguese."
Annja read. "It's Italian. It means, 'All hope abandon, ye who enter here.'
Somebody's got a sense of humor."
"Isn't that from  ?"
"It's from Dante's Inferno," she said. "The sign above the gates to Hell."
"Oh God," Dan moaned.
For all his hard-edged street-activist manner he cursed scarcely more than
Annja did. She shared the sentiment, though.
A flabby middle-aged man in a white suit was running toward them bent over,
clutching a white Panama hat to his head. The chopper came to a stop. Annja
had felt no impact of landing, however slight. Looking down she saw the skids
still hovered six inches above the black pavement.
Dan glared at the guard. "Aren't you going to at least land?"
"You go," the guard said.
Annja hastily shouldered the rucksack she had brought. Still holding the
fore-grip of the rifle in his left hand, the guard took his big right hand off
the pistol grip to grab the collar of Dan's shirt and heaved him out of the
helicopter as if he were a bag of puppy chow. To his credit Dan landed on his
feet and balanced, although his posture was that of an alley cat dumped in the
middle of a Rottweiler run. Which, Annja thought as she leaped down as
gracefully as she could in turn, was just about right.
The guard thoughtfully pitched Dan's backpack out after him. It just missed
the young activist. Twin turbine engines whined. The rotor chop increased in
speed and pitch. The helicopter jumped into the cloudless blue sky. Rotating
around its central axis it tipped its blunt snout down and shot back the way
it had come at the best acceleration its aging power plants could give it.
The plump man stopped twenty feet from the bewildered Americans. He
straightened up, dusting himself off. Despite frequent rains  those went
without saying hereabouts  the surface of the landing field beyond the
asphalt apron managed to accrete a yellow scum of dust, which the fleeing Huey
had duly kicked up into a yellow cloud. The man might have saved himself the
effort. The suit, once presumably bright white, now looked like a Jackson
Pollock canvas of many-colored stains.
"You are Dan Seddon and Annja Creed?" he asked in English. He had bulging dark
eyes and a mouth-fringing black beard. Frizzy black hair stuck out beneath his
hat brim to either side of his face, which ran with sweat in sheets.
"We are," Annja said.
"I am Gustavo Gomes," he said. "Welcome to Feliz Lusitânia."
An explosion shattered the heavy air.
Chapter 19
"Forgive my laughter, my friends," Gomes said to Annja and Dan, who lay on
their bellies on the packed yellow dirt just beyond the black asphalt landing
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apron. "You look so comical there hugging the ground."
"That explosion  " Annja said.
"It is nothing. A shot for the mining operation, nothing more. Probably they
clear big fallen logs. We are not under attack here."
Gomes drew a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped sweat from his face. It
struck Annja as being like taking a mop to a beach with the tide coming in.
"If you will please follow me, and not dawdle," he said, "I'll see you inside
the citadel."
He gestured toward the gate. Beyond it lights blazed into life against the
rapidly advancing tropical twilight, up on towers inside the inner perimeter.
Annja and Dan shouldered packs and followed their guide.
A fenced-in passageway fifteen yards long and maybe twenty feet wide ran from
the landing pad to the citadel. A chain-link gate swung open before them.
Annja realized that machine guns in a pair of towers flanking it were tracking
them as they approached.
Annja's shoulders tensed and her stomach crawled as if she'd swallowed a
nestful of millipedes. She found little to love about being entirely at the
mercy of the men behind the weapons, and the steadiness of their nerves and
their trigger fingers.
Our lives depend upon the goodwill and judgment of men who'd guard a place
like this, she thought.
They passed through the inner gate. A pair of men in mottled-green-and-brown
camouflage battle dress waited inside. They carried Brazilian-made IMBEL MD-2
assault rifles. They stared at the newcomers with a blend of contempt and
disinterest before turning away to close and secure the gate.
A rattle of gunfire sounded from somewhere outside the wire. Annja winced and
forced her mind not to envision what the sounds might mean.
"So," Dan said conversationally, "was that more stump clearing?"
Gomes frowned. "Please don't make such jokes, Mr. Seddon. Your employer, Sir
Publico, understands the realities of what goes on in here."
It was as if a fire hose suddenly blasted ice water between Annja's shoulder
blades. "He does?" Her voice sounded half-strangled to her own ears.
Dan looked thoughtful. "He knows about this place," he said in carefully
metered tones. "I suspect he does what he can to mitigate things."
"Oh, yes," Gomes said with a wide, oily smile. "Of course he does. He tries to
help. He sends us the medical supplies!"
Annja kept one eyebrow raised. "You mean those shipments I saw in Manaus might
have been his all along?"
Dan shrugged. He looked honestly embarrassed  and honestly befuddled. "I
don't really know. I know he knows about this place  just like he told us.
But that doesn't mean he knows everything that goes on here."
The sky had gone indigo overhead, shading into black downriver. Off to the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]