Titanoboa (19 page)

33

Riki noticed two guards near the entrance and one around back of the administration tent. As the men escorted her there, she ran through different scenarios in her mind. They could offer her money to keep quiet, which would be the ideal. Or they might want to kill her. It was also possible they intended to do something in between. Maybe send her away, have her fired, sued, something like that. She just didn’t know, and the men that brought her to the administration tent weren’t speaking.

The man from last night
gently nudged her inside. He told the others to wait outside. He stepped into the tent with her and said, “Have a seat.”

Riki
did as he asked. She sat down, her back straight, and tried to appear as confident as possible, though inside she was a mess. If they knew how afraid she really was, they would use it against her.

“Tell us what you were doing in the tent last night?” the man said,
sauntering to a table and pouring a glass of water out of a clear jug.

“I was just trying to check my email. I don’t have phone service out here.”

“Bullshit.” The man sipped his water. “You’re not gonna like how I get information that I need, Ms. Howard. And I need that information. I need to know what you were doing in this tent.”

The man was calm and collected, speaking smoothly and without
apprehension. She imagined he had done this a thousand times and knew what she was going to say before she said it.
So
, Riki thought,
what would throw a man like that off?

The only thing she could think of was the truth.
It might buy her some time until Steven and Mark got back. Maybe even allow her to get back to her tent, at which point she would slip away in the middle of the night. Mark had been right. Better to take chances with the animals in the jungle.

“I was looking for information about what your company is doing on the island. I’m a reporter for the
Los Angeles Times
. My bosses know I am here, by the way, and with your company.”

The man looked surprised
for a moment. Just a flash that came into his eyes then quickly faded away. “Reporter, huh? Well, what exactly do you think is going on that is so important you came out into the middle of this jungle for?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?
Your company hired me.”

He smirked and finished his water. “See
, here’s the thing, Ms. Howard, there are no police here. There’s nothing here but my men. Men we pay that are loyal to us. So I think you should probably just answer my questions and save the attitude for the mainland.” He paced around her, settling on a desk against the wall. He leaned against it and stared at her before speaking. “What exactly did you find out?”

She shook her head. “Nothing yet.”

“You’re lying.”

“No, really. I know you have some instant messages set up to various executives
, and that’s it. I was going to try to find out more tonight.”

“
Give me your phone.” She handed it to him, and he flipped through it before slipping it into his pocket. “I’ll be hanging on to this for a while.” As he walked out of the tent he said, “You may want to get comfortable. Might be a while before we decide what to do with you.”

34

The trudging had turned to the most grueling exercise Mark had ever done. Before this, he had always thought he could walk forever. It didn’t strain anything and was pleasurable. Now, each step caused his muscles to light on fire. He pushed for as long as he could then needed to rest. Millard stayed with him, though Mark got the impression he was happy to rest as well. Every inch of jungle looked the same as the last, and neither one knew where they were going. If they had been walking in circles, Mark wouldn’t have been able to tell.

As the sun rose, it painted the clouds pink. The sky was a layered texture of blue and
pink, stunningly beautiful. Mark wished he could focus on it instead of his situation. They were lost in a jungle with no food or water, and he was injured. The chances of making it out were remote, to say the least.

H
e was grateful for the trail. Without a path already cut out of the dense shrubbery, he would’ve collapsed a long time ago.

“Can you go any farther?” Millard asked.

Mark nodded. Millard had to help him up each time, and he did so now. The man, despite Mark’s impression of a sheepish professor, was kind and calm under pressure. Not at all like the first impression he had given.

They hobbled along the path, slowly but with few stops
. Mark watched the sky as much as he could. He’d lived on the island for over four years, and he’d never seen the sky like this. Not that the sky was different from any other morning. The difference was his appreciation that he had lived to see another day.

“What’s that?” Millard said.

Mark looked forward, a slight jolt of anxiety gripping his guts. But no one else was around. Millard was looking at the jungle floor up ahead of them. He hurried over and bent down. It was a pack, one of VN’s.

A single thought hit Mark, and suddenly nothing else was important. “Check for canteens.”

Millard opened the pack and ruffled through. “Jackpot!” He threw one canteen to Mark and kept another for himself. Mark tried to restrain himself, only taking a few gulps, but it was as though he were fighting his own biology. His body screamed for water and didn’t stop screaming until the warm liquid doused his tongue and slid down his throat.

He drank a third of the canteen
. Millard had drunk nearly all of his. Millard flipped through the pack again and found the MRE. He ripped it open. Mark sat down next to him, and they ate the powdery, dry food. It was chicken enchilada. Mark had once heard a serviceman he knew call MREs “three lies for the price of one: they weren’t meals, they weren’t ready, and you couldn’t eat them.” But no meal had ever tasted quite so good.

They scarfed down the meal and finished it
with some water. As they were lying back, enjoying the sense of food in their stomachs, they heard a wet crunch, loud and echoing, from slightly behind and off to the side. Millard rose to his feet.

At first, Mark could
see nothing but jungle. Then something came into focus between two large trees not twenty feet away from them, like one of those paintings where one sees something if they stare at it long enough.

H
e noticed the scales first.

Black and slick, they looked like obsidian. Shimmering in the light,
quaking with each contraction of the enormous muscles underneath.

Mark’s breath quickened, and his heart
beat in his ears. As his gaze followed the colossal body, he came to loops. The snake had coiled itself around something.

The
something
was a man.

The coils were like massive pipes, each much thicker than the width of the man. The man was completely horizontal
and exposed only from the chest up, the rest of his body wrapped in the snake’s blackness. The man was still alive. He was blinking, blood pouring out of his eyes and nose.

The coils tightened. It was little more than a shudder, but the force crushed the man to pulp. The pressure exploded
his skull, causing brains and blood to eject over the jungle floor.

T
hen Mark saw it.

The head was about
three feet wide, with black eyes the size of melons. The snake moved gracefully through the air as its tongue flicked several times. In a flash, it closed around the man’s lifeless corpse.

It began to swallow the corpse whole.

Millard was breathing so heavily, Mark was scared the snake could hear it. Millard shook his head several times then finally stammered, “It didn’t even need to unhinge its jaw.”

Mark
slowly stepped away, but Millard was frozen. He either couldn’t or wouldn’t move. Mark had to grab his shoulder and physically pulled him away. Once Millard was moving up the trail, Mark picked up the pack, slung it on his shoulders, and followed.

The pain in his body suddenly didn’t bother him
, and his pace was quick. He kept up and even overtook Millard. When they were far enough away, the men looked at each other but didn’t say anything for a long time. Not until they had walked for so long that what they had seen seemed like a distant memory.

“I never…” Millard mumbled. “I mean, I knew they’d be large, but I mean, that thing couldn’t fit through a doorway. I had no idea.” The fear in his voice
faded, and excitement replaced it. “I mean, what does a creature that size eat? What’s its natural food source? Even the biggest rodents would just be snacks. I bet it eats crocodiles and giant turtles. I mean, a thing like that could eat anything it wants.”

“There
are no crocodiles in Fiji.”

“Then it’s
gotta go somewhere where there’s larger prey. The ocean, maybe. Can you imagine an animal that size in the ocean! Think what it could eat! It would be the top predator in these waters. And what about—”

“Craig,” he said, cutting him off, “my only concern right now is that we’re on that thing’s menu. So let’s just focus on getting the hell outta here.”

They managed to walk maybe a hundred feet before Millard began again. “It’s been undetected all this time. One of the biggest animals on the planet, and it’s been hiding in the middle of an island. I wonder if you were right? If maybe it’s evolved over the past fifty-eight million years and has something resembling basic reasoning. Intelligence. I mean, how else could something like that remain hidden from us?”

Mark ignored him and kept walking. The shock of what he had seen hadn’t worn off. He had no words, no explanations
, other than man wasn’t meant to see something like that. Because every time he blinked, the image was there. Like it had burned itself on the insides of his eyeballs.

After
a good hour, the weight of the pack finally got to him and the adrenaline had worn off. The pain returned, and Mark found every step a struggle. But he’d be damned if he was going to stop and rest here.

He dropped the pack and began throwing things out. No weapons were inside, and most of the supplies were unnecessary
for getting through the jungle as fast as possible. He kept the water, the food, and the night-vision goggles. He strapped the goggles to his wrist and tucked a canteen in the front of his trousers and an MRE in the back. Millard did the same, and they left the pack on the trail as they started again.

“We have no idea how long snakes can live,” Millard said. “Can you imagine how old something like that might be? With no natural predators, it could be hundreds of years old.”

Mark stopped and turned to him, looking him in the eyes. “Craig, I don’t want to hear about that thing anymore. All I want to hear is if you have any idea how the hell to get us out of this jungle. If you don’t, then keep it to yourself.”

Millard looked hurt, and Mark instantly felt bad. Millard had been kind to him
, and he didn’t deserve that.

“Look, I’m sorry. This is all just too much for me. I’m not handling it well.”

“It’s okay. I’m sorry, too. I get excited about it. I’ve devoted my life to studying snakes, and the granddaddy of them all just appeared in front of us. It’s like a paleontologist finding a live T-Rex or something.”

“I know, and I’m sure you’ll have plenty of time to study them later. But for now, let’s just focus
on staying alive.”

35

By midmorning, the heat had returned.
Not that it ever really left, but with the addition of the sun, the jungle became a boiling caldron. They drained the water in the canteens fairly quickly, and Millard asked if there were any rivers with clean water nearby.

“I don’t know,” Mark said. “I’ve never
been in this far.”

The more they walked,
and the more they sweat, the more exhausted they became. Mark’s muscles tightened up, and each movement grew more difficult because of the dehydration. His lips were dry and would soon crack and bleed, releasing even more of his precious moisture. He could take these conditions a couple of days, maybe even one more than that, but if they were lost for too long, the snakes would be the least of their concerns.

The snakes.

As soon as Mark thought that word, it sent a small shiver up his spine. He had momentarily, in the pain and fatigue of forced exertion, forgotten about what he had seen. With that single word, it came back to him. The man’s pale flesh as his brains spattered out as though being shot from a small cannon, the blood that splashed on the snake’s slick black flesh, the fangs like butcher knives, and the enormous murky gullet of which Mark only caught a glimpse when it opened its mouth and took the man in.

The scene was so
gruesome, so outside the bounds of anything Mark had ever expected to see, he would never be the same. Something had happened that changed the way he saw the world and his place in it. He wondered if people with post-traumatic stress disorder felt that way.

“What’s that smell?” Millard said.

“I don’t know.”

Mark had picked up
the scent a long time ago. Like a tangy exhaust in the air. Almost citric.

Millard stopped by the side of the trail, his
gaze on the trees. Mark glanced over and at first didn’t see anything out of place then noticed what Millard was glaring at. The trees appeared pale. The leaves were a light green in splotches, white in others, as though losing their color. The bark was falling off in small pieces, like chipping paint.

“
Are you looking at the trees?” Mark said.

“These flora are all sick. They’re dying.”

“From what?”

“I don’t know.”

They stood in front of the trees a while, and the more Mark watched them, the more he understood what Millard meant. The trees’ pallor, in any living creature, meant only one thing: impending death.

“Let’s keep going,” Mark said.

“I’m not sure we should go in this direction. The smell’s coming from this way.”

The only other option was to turn around. That meant backtracking almost two days and passing that…
thing
again. “We’ve got no choice. I’m not turning around.”

Millard breathed for a bit before answering. “Yeah, me neither.”

The trail widened as they progressed, and the undergrowth thinned. The trees appeared paler the farther they went, until many were just withered, dying husks.

As they approached an open clearing, the smell in the air became nearly unbearable. Mark had
never smelled anything like it before, but it had a familiarity to it. Like the black exhaust that had hung over Los Angeles in the ’80s.

A
s they approached the clearing, they came across a rocky hill, what could’ve been a small mountain with a flat top. Around the base crews of workers operated heavy machinery. And just off from the base, workers occupied a large pit. About six inches of dirty water filled the bottom, and the workers had formed a line, sifting through the water and passing things back along the line. They loaded whatever it was they had found onto the backs of utility trucks.

“Gold,” Millard whispered.

Mark ducked low to avoid being seen. Millard remained standing, wiping the sweat from his brow, and Mark grabbed him and pulled him down. “A gold mine?” Mark said. “In the middle of the jungle?”

“Some of the best gold mines in the world are in jungles. Look at that
, though.” He pointed to the outskirts of the mine. “All the vegetation is dead.”

Mark followed the perimeter
of the mine with his eyes. All the trees, the shrubs, vines, bushes, flowers, and grass were dead. Nothing but brown matter covering bare dirt.

“That’s from cyanide,” Millard whispered. “It’s called gold
cyanidation. It’s the most efficient technique for extracting gold, but it releases cyanide into the air. It gets into the plants and water, the animals eat the plants, and the people eat the animals. Cyanidation is illegal in most countries. I’ve fought it in the Brazilian rainforests because it was killing off the local amphibian life.”

Mark was quiet
a moment. “This is what they’re hiding. It’s not about oil at all. The oil was a distraction.”

Millard shook his head. “Clever. They’re
gonna pull as much gold as they can and in the process kill this entire jungle. I’ve seen it before. The inhabitants, even on the shores, won’t be able to use the jungle for anything. It’ll just become mounds of dirt. Even the soil gets poisoned and won’t grow anything.”

Mark was mumbling, more to himself than Millard.
“This is why they couldn’t let me or Riki know about—”

Riki
.

She was back at camp by herself. Mark couldn’t even guess as to how much money VN could make on an illegal gold mine where
they paid no taxes or import/export fees. He had already seen to what lengths they would go to protect their interests here.

“We have to get back to
camp,” Mark said.

“Are you nuts? We
gotta get outta here and alert someone about this.”

“Who?”

“The UN and then Interpol. I bet there are people in the Fijian government that would flip out if they knew all this gold was being taken and no taxes were being paid.”

“I don’t care about that right now.
Riki’s at the camp by herself. If they tried to kill me, they’ll try to kill her.”

Millard wiped his nose with the back of his finger. “We can’t walk back. I don’t have it in me.”

“These workers aren’t walking. There’s gotta be some Jeeps or something nearby.” Mark scanned the mine. “But I don’t see anything.”

“I think the workers were picked up every
day.”

Mark sat down onto the dirt. “Then we’ll wait here for our ride.”