“You tell me.” Selene thrust the fragment at him. “My father believed it has amazing properties. He was sure that when all the pieces were back together, this artifact—device,whatever you want to call it—could be the key to an energy source that would make filthy petroleum companies as obsolete as woodcutters from the Middle Ages.”
“Frik runs an oil company. Why would he want it so badly?”
“Because he wants to make sure nobody else gets it.”
“Nowthat sounds like Frik.”
The coffee tasted bitter in Keene’s mouth. He added even more sugar than the Venezuelan norm. He didn’t like Frik; never had. The Afrikaner was pushy and self-centered, with an abrasive personality. But a cold-blooded killer…?“So what do we do now?” he asked Selene.
“We?”
Keene thought of what Frikkie Van Alman had told them—the lies and the innuendos. If Selene was telling him the truth, then Frik already had plenty of blood on his hands, and he didn’t seem worried in the least about consequences. “Yes,” he said. “We.”
“Well, to begin with, theValhalla is an abomination,” Selene said.
He pictured the huge structure of the rig’s production platform. The first time he had seen the monolith, it had looked to him like an elephantine skyscraper of concrete and steel, bristling with tall derricks, piping, and tubes, belching flames and smoke. Little had he known that the pair of bright pilot flares burning at the edge of the extended derricks would become a funeral pyre for his friend Terris McKendry.
Selene looked at him, her eyes bright and intense. “Even before I found out from my father what that bastard was trying to do, I knew that it was screwing up the ecosystem here in the Serpent’s Mouth—spilled oil and solvents, natural leakage, ‘acceptable losses’ of toxic chemicals and lubricants. It raises the temperature of the water, killing some fish, attracting others, messing with the entire balance.”
She leaned closer to him. “And the sharks. The population has increased three- or fourfold. That’s not natural.”
The mention of sharks brought a new flood of memories, beginning with his game, a stunt, preparation for the confrontation to come later that night. He envisioned four concrete legs thrust downward all the way to the sea bottom, where a honeycomb of holding tanks were filled with the fresh crude oil, and remembered his fears during the swim from the tanker over to the production platform.
Green Impact had proven far more deadly than any aquatic predator.
“What do you think will happen as the drilling continues?” Keene asked.
“I can only guess,” Selene said, “Who can say for sure what sort of global chaos might follow? Oilstar is producing from one of the bore-holes now, draining out a lot of crude oil, but other crews are still exploring. Frikkie wants to find the rest of that artifact. He needs to see if there’s anything else down below at the Dragon’s Mouth site. There have to be checks and balances.”
“And Green Impact is one of those checks?” Anger and uncertainty replaced Keene’s usual good humor.
“Yes we are.” Selene got up and motioned him to follow. “Come on. Let me show you around.”
At Green Impact’s hideout in the jungle, the group had its supply cache, canned food and propane gas tanks brought in by flatboat, and what remained of its stockpile of weapons.
Automatically, his mind started cataloging the remnants and planning what would be needed to make a real attack against Oilstar. By Keene’s estimates, there was barely enough ammunition left after the assault on theYucatán to defend the compound if it was discovered. It would take months to pull together enough explosives and ammunition to have a real chance at another assault, even if Frikkie did little to improve security on the rig.
Selene explained to him that they traded with the Warao Indians, who went to trading posts and small villages on the larger waterways to surreptitiously pick up items the ecocrusaders needed. No one noticed the Indians, who came and went as they pleased, like jungle shadows, but the trading post owners would certainly pay attention to a group of white strangers. Once or twice, Selene explained, she and her friends could pass themselves off as German bird-watchers or Canadian eco-tourists, but as time went by, suspicions would grow. They would have to move on.
Three days later, Selene took Keene out in one of Green Impact’s small motorized boats. As they moved through narrow caños into broader streams, following the tributaries of a diffused Orinoco to the sea, they passed half-naked Warao fishermen standing at the riverbanks, in search of birds or fish or eggs, the day’s catch. Keene looked at some of the dark-skinned Indio children who hid beside their bare-breasted mothers. He smiled at them, but they didn’t wave back.
When they reached the end of the jungle and the open waters of the Gulf of Paria, Selene brought the boat to a halt, letting the outboard putter into a low purr as if catching its breath. Keene looked up to watch a flock of scarlet ibises take wing from the muddy shallows.
“Amazing, aren’t they?”
Keene nodded, watching the ibises fly off to find other feeding grounds, like matadors waving their capes in the humid air.
Selene turned the boat around and headed back upriver, winding in the direction of the Green Impact encampment. As they approached, she shut off the Zodiac’s motor and drifted, turning into a small caño, brushing past reeds. She startled a cluster of small yellow frogs, which plopped and splashed into the brownish water.
“This isn’t the way back,” Keene said.
She smiled at him. “You have a good memory. This is a special side trip just for you and me.”
She took the black rubber raft as far as the little stream would allow, then beached it in the mud. When she climbed out, the soft ground squished under her boots. “We’re just a stone’s throw from the camp. This is my retreat. No one else knows about it.”
She reached back to take Joshua’s hand. After he climbed out of the boat, she didn’t release it, but led him through the grasses to a little dry patch, a hummock raised above the water level and filled with flowers and sweet grasses. Small birds fluttered and twittered, as if incensed at the human intrusion into what appeared to be a perfect, cozy meadow in the middle of the Orinoco Delta.
Selene took his other hand. Keene found himself helpless, as if his grip had turned to water. Her faded, loose shirt hung partially open. She raised his hand and slid it between the opening in her shirt, cupping it against her left breast. Keene tried to reclaim his hand. She pressed it tighter and he felt her nipple stiffen.
“Don’t pull away,” Selene said. “Feel my skin, feel my heart pumping, the blood beneath my flesh. I’mreal, Joshua Keene, just as everything I have told you is real.”
“Why me?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “Maybe it’s just that I’ve been in the jungle for too long.”
“What about the men in your group?”
“I’m their leader,” she said. “It’s tough enough for them to obey a woman without any other…complications.”
“I’ve wanted you since the moment I saw you,” Keene said. “Even when I thought you were the enemy.”
She took his face in her hands and kissed him, gently at first, then with increasing passion. “I have wanted you too, Joshua Keene,” she said. “I could love you, I think.”
They undressed each other slowly, taking turns, one article at a time. Then they made love in the soft grass under the open tropical sky, laughing as the bugs flew around and the grass tickled and scratched their naked skin.
Keene’s body still felt tired and a little shaky, but enough of his wounds had healed. He lay beside Selene, watching the glow of the sun as it filtered through the overhanging branches, slipping toward afternoon and the western horizon. He wanted to stay this way, without cares, ignoring the future, but he could not remain in an endless present. He knew he had other obligations to face, and decisions to make.