Ballistic(2)

Mauro sat in the shade, waiting for his father to return with the morning’s catch. At ten years old Mauro normally went out with his father to collect the nets, but today he’d stayed behind to help his uncle with some chores and had only just arrived at the dock when the canoe with the white man appeared. He watched the old man make his way up the hill, stop in front of the drunkard, and engage the man in conversation. The white man pulled a white paper from his breast pocket and showed it to the drunk, then handed him some cash.

Mauro stood slowly. Hesitated.

The white man nodded, headed back to the canoe, and pulled a radio up to his mouth.

Young Mauro walked towards a narrow trail that led away from the docks, away from his village. Once inside the dark protection of the jungle canopy, the boy began to run as fast as his calloused bare feet would take him.





TWO



Court Gentry pulled on his umbilical cable for a bit more slack then turned back to the wreckage in front of him. He reached out with a gloved hand and felt his way forward to the hulking iron wheelhouse of the sunken steamboat. Visibility in the murky river was no more than twelve inches at this time of late morning, thirty feet below the ochre surface of the warm water. Finding his place, he adjusted the angle of the flashlight on his helmet, lifted his welding torch back up, and narrowed the flame to little more than a glowing spike. Then he slowly applied the white-hot fire to the iron to begin a new cut.

A series of three strong tugs to his line pulled him off his mark.

“Dammit,” he said aloud, his voice reverberated in his brass helmet. The dive helmet’s radio wasn’t working so the team communicated through tugs. Three short, hard pulls meant “surface immediately,” which meant it would take him, at a minimum, ten minutes to get back down here through the algae and oily film to find his spot again.

But he did not wait. “Surface immediately” wasn’t a message to ignore. It could be nothing, but it also could mean there was a problem with the equipment, which could be dangerous, or it could mean snakes or crocs or a school of piranha had been spotted close to his dive site, which could be downright deadly.

He broke the surface four minutes later; his gear and his weights made it impossible to tread water, so he pulled himself along his line towards the shore. When he was waist-deep, he wiped green goo off the acrylic faceplate of his helmet, but only when he unfastened the latches and lifted off the heavy headgear could he see his way forward through the thick reeds and tall grasses on the riverside. Above him stood his two coworkers, Thiago and Davi; both men were experienced salvage divers, but neither was fitted to go down today. Only one compressor was operational, so they split the time between the three of them. One man on the bottom, and two men on crocodile/ anaconda/piranha watch.

“What is it?” Court called out to them. His Portuguese was not half as good as his Spanish, but it was functional. One jerked a thumb to the other side of a tiny lagoon that swelled off of the river like a tumor, and Court saw young Mauro standing there on the trail that led towards the dock. The boy wore a red and black Barcelona soccer jersey emblazoned with the name of a Bulgarian player who had not taken the pitch for that club since the mid-nineties, and he was barefoot. Court had never once seen the dark-skinned kid in shoes.

Gentry was surprised that he’d been called to the surface to talk to the boy—still he waved and smiled. But his smile dropped in an instant. The kid’s eyes were wide, and his body was tight.

Something was wrong.

Court trudged along the marshy bank that rimmed the lagoon, his feet sucked down by mud. He climbed up to the young Brazilian, led him down the trail a few yards before asking, “What’s up?”

“You told me to come if I ever saw a white man.”

“Yes, I did.” Court’s own body stiffened.

“An old man. Alone. At the dock.”

“Did he talk to anyone?”

“Yes, he asked Amado a question. Showed him a sheet of paper. Gave him some money. Then the white man talked into his radio.”

“His radio?” Gentry’s eyes were off the kid, on the trail back to the dock, a kilometer distant through dense rain forest. His hands had already begun removing his old tattered wetsuit, stripping himself down to his underwear.

Thiago called out to Gentry from behind, probably telling him it wasn’t time for lunch, but he ignored Thiago.

“Where is he now?”

“He left. Got back in a launch and headed upriver.”

Court nodded. Spoke in English to himself. “The manhunter.”

“¿Quál?” What?

“Good. You did real good, Mauro. Thank you.”