Around lunchtime, lulled by the boat’s movement and the early-June heat, Keene dozed off. When he awoke, in the midafternoon, he noticed a succession of Indians looking out at them from the sides of the water. Without signaling to his Warao guide, they hauled up fishing baskets and nets and disappeared into the jungle.
“Why are they so skittish?” he asked, hoping for an answer.
His guide pointed at the sky ahead.
Tendrils of smoke stained the fluffy low thunderheads brewing deeper over the delta jungle.
A hot dread and certainty told Keene that the source of the smoke was the Green Impact camp. “Faster!” he yelled to the Indian, who urged the outboard motor to a quicker pace. But the guide was cautious as he looked around, apparently searching for assassins in the underbrush.
As the boat came up against the narrow streams that led to the palafitos, the Indian slipped over the side and sprinted barefoot into the jungle away from the camp. He didn’t wait to be paid, didn’t help to unload supplies, didn’t even glance at Keene’s stricken face.
Setting aside his personal fear, Keene raced toward the camp. What he saw pumped him full of adrenaline. Carnage, bloodstains, and a handful of bodies left lying in and around the ruins of the huts. Some of the wet green trees were smoldering, but most of the wood and thatch huts in the encampment had burned themselves out, leaving mounds of white ash and charcoal poles. The dry palm fronds and lashed twig walls must have gone up like tinder.
He stumbled around in a daze, calling out Selene’s name. The compound’s weapons cache was in splinters. A crater sat where the lockers full of explosives had been detonated. He found seven corpses. Two looked like Venezuelans, mercenaries he guessed from their nondescript fatigues, which lacked the insignia of any legal or military organization. The remaining bodies were Green Impact members, five of the twelve robust men and one woman he had left behind.
There was no sign of the others. This was no jungle raid by robbers intent on grabbing supplies for a black-market sale; this was a planned operation, well executed, with no intent other than to wipe out Green Impact.
Desperately he rechecked the dead, searching for the woman to whom he had become so attached. She was not among the recognizable bodies. There was no skeleton in the charred shell of the palafito the two of them had shared.
Praying that she had gotten away, knowing that to be as much a fantasy as hoping Terris McKendry was still alive, Keene vomited on the ground. Trembling, he sat up and spat at the unknown perpetrators of this new crime. There is one place, he thought. One infinitely small possibility.
He jumped back into the small boat and motored it as quickly as it would go. In the ever-narrowing caños, he repeatedly got caught up in mud banks and overhanging bushes. Relentlessly, he pushed on toward the place where he and Selene had made love that day, the little meadow surrounded by tall grass and trees.
This is my retreat,she’d said. If she’d made it out of the camp, it was where she would have gone.
Keene found the sheltered jungle clearing, and in it he found Selene. She was propped against a mound of dry grasses. Scarlet and yellow birds fluttered around, but she didn’t move as he approached.
“Selene!”
He thought he saw her shoulders twitch.
Reaching her side, he knelt down in the damp earth. He took her hand and stroked her cheek. Her skin was gray and clammy, her lips dry. He kissed them, but it did nothing to awaken her. She made small sounds, and he heard a rattle within her chest and throat. Blood was congealing on her shirt and abdomen and on the ground around her. The blood was leaking from beneath her hands, which were clutched under her right breast.
Beside her, he found a blade: Venezuelan military issue, with the initials J.R. scratched into the rubber grip.
Keene had enough experience with battlefield injuries that he didn’t try to think about how to save her; not here, far from even so much as a well-stocked first-aid kit. He felt tears moisten his cheeks.
“Can you hear me, Selene?”
She seemed to know he was there beside her. Without opening her eyes, she roused herself enough to lift her left hand, stretching it toward him. In her fingers, she gripped the artifact.
Keene could not have cared less about the mysterious piece of technology that had been scraped up by Oilstar’s test drill in the Dragon’s Mouth. As far as he was concerned, it was the cause of all of the death around him. McKendry, the members of Green Impact, and now Selene.
She pushed harder. “Take it,” she said, and he did. “Up to you now,” she whispered. “Oilstar’s fault. Stop—”
Then she did stop: breathing and living.
Keene felt the sharp edges of the object in his left hand, felt the temperature of his palm drop as it sucked the heat from his skin. He wanted to fling the damned piece of junk into the steamy jungle, where it would sink into a caño or be overgrown with weeds. But to Selene it had been worth dying for…and Frikkie seemed to believe it was worth the price of murder.
With his right hand, Keene picked up the knife that had killed the woman he had begun to love. “Rest in peace, Selene,” he said, testing its weight in his hand. “I promise I’ll take care of Oilstar.”
34
On her way to The Traffic Light, Peta’s pager buzzed.
She ignored it at first.
The restaurant where she’d been headed was so named because the owners had imported and erected what had, until recently, been the only traffic light on the island. The traffic light didn’t work, nor was it meant to do so. It was a curiosity, intended for no other purpose than to direct people to stop and sample the food. Of course, the truth was that the place was already so popular with the locals that they had all the customers they could handle.
After months of eating only because it was mealtime, finally, tonight, Peta had been looking forward to stopping in at The Traffic Light and eating Maggie’s oildown. She had never been good at making the Grenadian national stew of breadfruit cooked in coconut milk with salted meat and vegetables, mostly callaloo, and lots of seasoning, but she loved to eat it. Especially now, in early August, when lobster season was in full swing and Maggie could be persuaded to throw in the occasional tail.
That was the way Arthur had liked it best too.
The two of them had shared oildown at The Traffic Light once a month. The meal was followed by a monthly evening of poetry. Since Maggie would not accept payment from either of them, they submitted to the poetry in exchange for the meal. Arthur didn’t mind. In fact, he occasionally read some of his own scribbles to an enthusiastic audience. Peta only half listened, dreaming on a full stomach about Captain Bligh enduring a mutiny because he had used essential water for his breadfruit saplings instead of giving it to his crew.
The pager buzzed again insistently.
Peta pulled to the side of the road and checked the number. It was her service. Everyone’s service, really, since it was the only halfway efficient one on the island.
Hoping it was something that could be taken care of over the phone, she grabbed the cell phone from her purse and called in.
“One of your patients called. A girl. Patty Grant. She says a man’s been knifed in her house. Something to do with Carnival. Says the house is in the bushes and hard to find, so she’ll send her brother out to the road to flag you down.”
Though she didn’t recognize the name, Peta made a note of the address, apparently a shanty in the rain forest, on the road to the Grand E´ tang, the island’s dormant volcano.
She sighed heavily. So much for oildown.
The whole island was only twenty by twelve miles. As the crow flies, the house was probably no more than six or eight miles away, but it would take her the better part of an hour to get there. The road through the rain-forested mountain was far and away the best on the island. The problem was getting to it. Most of the secondary roads barely deserved the name. They were often unpaved, and those that were had more potholes than pavement. They wound like coiled vipers through the countryside, almost as if to make up for the fact that there were no poisonous snakes on the island.