“So what do you think?” asked Mitchell, standing on the aft of the boat.

  “What is it?” said Julia, squinting in the gray light of dawn.

  “I’ll let Yuri answer that.”

  Yuri stopped what he was doing and wiped his greasy hands with a rag. “Ladies, what we have here is a Vietnam-era river patrol boat with some major modifications to it. Instead of being all green, this ship has been painted gray.”

  Jen canted her head. “Yuri, that’s hardly a major mod.”

  “True,” replied Yuri. “This vessel is twice as long as those used in Vietnam, making it twenty meters. She has a new engine, and her fuel capacity is twice that of what it once was, allowing us to travel farther without having to stop for fuel.”

  “What if we can’t find a gas station in the middle of the jungle?”

  “I have a friend in Boa Vista who has a helicopter. He can fly fuel out to us, if need be.”

  Jen ran her eyes over the hull. “Our ride looks like a cross between a fishing boat and something thrown together with pieces found at a scrapyard. I take it you’ve added some special touches?”

  Yuri grinned. “Da, pretty lady. Hidden from prying eyes are two fifty-cal machine guns.”

  “I don’t see any guns,” said Julia.

  Sam flipped up a switch in the small captain’s cabin. A hatch at the front of the vessel slid open, and a pair of machine guns inside a steel turret popped up.

  “Oh…now I do.”

  “We have GPS, satellite comms, and night-vision gear all stored below decks,” added Jackson.

  “Not to mention enough firepower to repel a small army,” added Cardinal.

  Julia stood there with her mouth agape. “Do you always go out this well armed?”

  Mitchell smiled at her. “I wish we always had this level of support. Most times, we make things up as we go along. Your brother’s money and Yuri’s contacts have made all of this come to fruition. Now, as the sun is rising on the horizon, I say we get going.”

  Sam went to place her hands on the ship’s controls.

  “I don’t think so, my dear,” said Yuri. “My job in this team is to get you from point A to point B and home again. Since I don’t have a helicopter this time out, I get to drive the boat.”

  “Steer, Yuri,” corrected Sam. “You get to steer the boat.”

  Once all of the passengers were aboard, Yuri turned on the power, steered their vessel out into the middle of the river, and applied power to the engines. Water flew up from the stern as the craft picked up speed and vanished from sight into a wispy, gray fog bank covering the river.

  29

  Salazar stared at the men sent to meet him at the Boa Vista airport. Between his plane being forced to sit on a grass runway in the middle of nowhere for six hours while a mechanic repaired a problem with the engine, and the fact that Cruz’s airship had landed without Mitchell’s people being onboard, Salazar’s temples throbbed with each heartbeat. He was minutes away from a full-blown migraine.

  “Please tell me you have an idea where Mitchell was dropped off?” said Salazar to a man with a smooth-shaven head and broad shoulders.

  “Si, patron,” replied the man. He removed a map from his car, opened it up on the hood, and pointed to a spot on the river about thirty klicks west of the city. “They were dropped off here at around two in the morning.”

  Salazar studied the map. It was an ideal location. Close to the river, yet far enough from the city so they couldn’t be observed. “How did you get this information?”

  “A man claiming to have offloaded a boat and a couple of containers sold it to me.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “The informant told me there were three women and four men who got onto the boat. The man in charge was a gringo.”

  A crooked smile crept across Salazar’s lips. He checked the map and tried to predict how far down the river the other team had gone since being dropped off.

  “Is there a problem?’ asked Lang in English.

  “No, Herr Lang,” replied Salazar. “In fact, I have a reasonably good idea of where Mitchell is. Or more importantly, where he will be later tonight.”

  “Can we catch up with them?”

  “If my colleagues in Venezuela are ready to move, by nightfall we can get within a couple of kilometers of them without them ever knowing we are there.”

  “Señor Salazar, give the order. I don’t want us to waste another minute sitting here in this backwater city when we could be following our prey.”

  “Relax. Mitchell is still two to three days away from the area where your flower is reputed to grow. Take a seat in my associate’s car while I make a few calls.”

  Lang started to say something. Instead, he closed his mouth and walked off, shaking his head.

  Salazar spoke into his phone. “Colonel, I need enough men to man two riverine boats sent to my location, ASAP. They need to be able to survive in the jungle for up to one week without being resupplied. Have them bring along some surveillance equipment.”

  “That won’t be a problem,” replied the colonel. “And what about the rest of the team?”

  “Keep them with you until we find what we’re looking for.”

  “Very well, Salazar. We can use the time to train.”

  “Gracias, Colonel.” Salazar hung up and slipped the phone into a pocket on his vest. He glanced at his wristwatch. With a cruising speed of two hundred and fifty kilometers an hour, the earliest he could expect the MI-26 to arrive was two and a half hours from now. Salazar reached over and pulled his knapsack toward him. He opened a pouch and pulled out a Cuban cigar in a tube. Salazar lit the cigar and took a couple of puffs before inhaling. He leaned back against the side of the car and savored the heady taste of the cigar. It was the one ritual Salazar had never given up after leaving the Colombian Army. Before going into combat against the drug cartels, he and his fellow officers would smoke a cigar and wish each other good luck. Nowadays, Salazar didn’t expect anyone to wish him good luck. He made his own. With odds of more than ten to one in his favor, Salazar expected things to go his way. If this miracle flower did exist, there was no way in hell Gerhardt Lang was walking out of the jungle with it. Salazar intended to steal it and sell it to the highest bidder. He smiled to himself. In a matter of days, he would be a very rich man.

  30

  Yuri and Cardinal finished topping up the boat’s fuel tank from a derelict-looking, floating gas station. While Yuri paid for the gas, Mitchell slipped the attendant a hundred dollar bill to forget they were ever there.

  “How come we stopped for fuel?” Julia asked Sam. “I thought we had plenty of gas onboard the boat.”

  “We do, but only a fool would pass up the opportunity to fill up when we can,” replied Sam. “According to the map, there is only one more place to get gas on this stretch of the river. Better to be safe than sorry.”

  Mitchell jumped back into the boat. He helped Yuri and Cardinal climb aboard, before unraveling the rope tying them to the gas station. Sam powered up the engines and steered their vessel back into the middle of the river. Mitchell waved at a couple of young kids running along the water’s edge as they sailed past them.

  “It looks like it’s going to rain,” said Jackson to Mitchell, as he looked up at the gray, cloud-covered sky.

  Mitchell checked the time. “We should be able to go for about another hour before stopping for the night. Hopefully, the heavens won’t open up on us before we get comfortable.”

  “That’s wishful thinking. I bet we’ve got twenty minutes, tops, before it starts to rain.”

  “You may be right, but we’re still going to continue upriver for another hour.”

  The downpour came thirty minutes later, drenching anyone not fortunate enough to get under cover.

  “Ryan, it’s starting to get dark, and I can’t see a thing in this rain,” said Yuri. “I say we pull over for the night before I plow into something and rip a hole in the hull.”

  “Okay, do it,” replied Mitchell.

  Yuri steered their boat to the shoreline. Jackson and Cardinal grabbed some rope and tied it around the base of a tall tree.

  “I can’t see a decent spot to set up camp anywhere near the boat,” said Jackson.

  “Okay then, I guess the boat will be our home for the night,” announced Mitchell to his friends. “As we don’t know who or what is lurking in the jungle, I think we’ll be safer where we are.”

  “How long will this rain shower last?” Jen asked Julia.

  “It could end minutes from now, or go on for a couple more days,” replied Julia. “This part of the Amazon regularly gets one hundred centimeters, or a yard of rain, this time of the year.”

  “Rain or not, it’s suppertime,” said Cardinal, breaking open a box of rations.

  Jen ate a warmed up packet of macaroni and tomato sauce, while her husband munched on a chicken stew.

  “This meal is lacking something,” said Mitchell, pouring two packets of hot sauce into his ration pack.

  “Glad we’re sleeping outside, and not in a hotel tonight,” said Jackson, when he saw the Tabasco packets in his friend’s hand.

  Yuri kept watch while everyone ate.

  By six-thirty in the evening, the jungle was pitch black. The rain had let up, but the clouds still covered the night sky. The heat of the day was replaced by a damp fog, which blanketed the jungle. All around the boat was a symphony of frogs croaking, insects buzzing, and wild animals calling out to one another in the trees. Something large dove into the river near the boat. Yuri picked up a flashlight and shone it on the dark water. A pair of eyes popped up from beneath the water and reflected back the light.

  “It’s probably a crocodile,” explained Julia. “They can get up to five meters in length in this part of the Amazon.”

  “And yet another good reason not to get out of the boat,” said Jackson.

  Mitchell chuckled and placed his empty dish down on the floor beside him. He looked at Jen and said, “Can I see the route we’re going to be following tomorrow?”

  Jen handed him her tablet. “Yuri said that we’ve stopped here.” She brought up a picture of the river on the screen. “If tomorrow goes as smoothly as today, we should arrive at the mouth of the river Fernando Cruz wrote about in his journal. After that, it’s another day’s journey by boat before we come to a valley where the tribe is reputed to live.”

  “After that it’s a day, to a day and a half, on foot,” added Julia.

  “That’s if the map and Fernando’s memory are correct,” said Mitchell. “So many things could have changed over the centuries,”

  “I guess we’ll find out when we get there,” said Julia.

  “I never thought to ask, but if we do bump into any natives will you able to speak to them?”

  “I hope so. If they speak a form of the Tupian language family, which is prevalent among the northern tribes in Brazil, I should be able to get my point across to them. Given enough time, I’m sure I could learn enough of their language to be conversant with them.”

  Jackson patted Mitchell on the shoulder. “How do you want to work the sentry duties?”

  “You’re the ex-NCO, what do you recommend?” asked Mitchell.

  “The sun doesn’t come up until six tomorrow morning, so we should each pull a two-hour shift. Yuri can go on first until twenty-two hundred hours. Sam and Gord can take the next shift, and so on.”

  “Sounds fair enough.”

  “So where do we sleep?” Julia asked.

  “We’ll set up some waterproof hammocks,” said Mitchell. “You and Jen won’t be on sentry, so you’ll both be able to get a good night’s rest.”

  Julia yawned. “Sounds wonderful. I’m beat.”

  “We’ll set them up,” said Sam, pushing Cardinal to his feet.

  “I don’t know if you know this little trick, but you should change out of your wet clothes into dry ones when you’re ready to go to bed, and then back into the wet ones when you get up in the morning,” Mitchell said to Julia.

  “We did that the last time I was down here,” replied Julia. “I don’t want to get a rash from my skin constantly rubbing on wet and dirty clothes any more than you do.”

  “Just checking,” said Mitchell with a smile.

  Sam and Cardinal took over from Yuri at midnight and took a seat on the stern of the boat looking out into the dark. Their M4 rifles rested on their laps.

  “I thought my days of sitting and staring into the night were long gone,” moaned Cardinal.

  “Same crap just a different pile, my love,” said Sam. “Besides, this job pays a hell of a lot better than the old ones we used to have.”

  “Yeah, there is that.” Cardinal placed a hand over one of Sam’s. “How are you doing?”

  “I could bitch that I’m tired of people asking me. But I know you love me, so I’ll tell you the truth. I’m doing okay. Getting back into the field was exactly what I needed. Brooding about what had happened wasn’t going to help me recover.” Sam looked over at Cardinal and saw he wasn’t paying attention to her. His face was turned up toward the sky. “Goddamn it, Gord, I’m trying to tell you how I feel.”

  Cardinal brought up a finger to his lips.

  The hair on the back of Sam’s neck went up. She went silent and listened. At first, she couldn’t hear it over the racket coming out of the jungle. Then, ever-so-slowly, she picked up the sound of a propeller-driven engine flying around in the night sky.

  “Do you hear it?” asked Cardinal.

  “Yes. What is it?”

  Cardinal brought up his night vision binoculars to his eyes and scanned the sky. He swore when he spotted a dark shape hovering just above the top of the trees on the other side of the river. “Wake up Ryan and Nate, we’ve got company.”

  “A drone?”

  “Yeah, and it’s looking straight at us.”

  Twenty kilometers away, two riverine boats sat silent in the water. On the lead craft, a drone operator moved his finger on his computer’s touchpad and zoomed the thermal camera onto Mitchell’s boat.

  “Patron, I think I’ve been spotted,” reported the technician.

  “Why do you say that?” asked Salazar.

  “Because the two people on sentry are waking everyone up. I’m sorry, I must have gotten too close.”

  Salazar bent down and examined the picture in the screen. The people scrambling about on the deck of the boat looked like bright white ghosts. Salazar wasn’t mad at the UAV operator. He had pushed him to find Mitchell’s team, and he had. “It’s okay. You’ve done your job. Bring it back.”

  The man nodded and placed his finger on the pad. Just then, there was a bright flash from the boat, and then darkness. The technician pushed a couple of keys on the computer. His screen remained black. He looked over at Salazar and said, “Uh, patron, I think they just shot my drone out of the sky.”

  “Good shooting, Gord,” said Mitchell, patting Cardinal on the back.

  “It was so close I couldn’t miss,” replied Cardinal as he placed his weapon on safe.

  “Well, at least we know the opposition is following us,” said Jackson.

  “Are they nearby?” asked Julia with a quiver in her voice.

  “It looked like a military drone,” said Cardinal. “So they could be anywhere from around the bend in the river, to fifty kilometers away.”

  “If they wanted to take us, they could have kept on coming up the river and attacked us while we slept,” pointed out Mitchell. “I suspect for now, they’re not going to do that. If they had better information than we do on the location of the native village, they’d already be there. No, they’re counting on us to lead them to the valley.”

  “So what do we do?” asked Julia.

  “For now, we let them follow us,” replied Mitchell. “Until we know the size and the composition of the force we are facing, we need to carry on as normal. I’ve got a few ideas percolating between my ears.”

  “Lord help us,” mumbled Jackson. “An officer with an idea is as dangerous as the enemy.”

  31

  “Take it slow,” Mitchell said to Yuri, as he navigated his way around a couple of sunken logs sticking out of the water.

  “We should have waited for the sun to come up before carrying on,” replied Yuri, trying to see in the dark.

  “No one was sleeping, and besides, it’ll be light in less than an hour.”

  Jackson sat on the bow of their boat with a powerful flashlight, looking for any impediments in the water.

  A phone rang. Jen picked it up and answered the call. “Ryan, it’s for you. It’s General O’Reilly.”

  “Thanks,” said Mitchell, taking the phone. “You’re up early, General.”

  “I thought I should give you a call to see how you are doing,” said O’Reilly. “Fahimah and Mike are tracking your progress via the GPS in your satphone. You’re on the speakerphone in my office. Mike and Fahimah are here with me.”

  “Morning to you two as well.” For a couple of minutes, Mitchell described their run-in with the UAV.

  “That’s another reason why I called,” said O’Reilly. “Two things have happened recently that you need to be aware of. First off, I was called by Alexander Lang, the brother of Gerhardt Lang, and he told me what his brother is up to. Apparently, Alexander didn’t trust his brother very much, and had him tailed by a private detective. He confirmed all of our suspicions that Gerhardt Lang is after the flower, and will do whatever it takes to get his hands on it.”

  “Did he pass this information onto the German authorities?” asked Mitchell.

  “His lawyer did, and they have begun an investigation into the allegations. The problem is that he’s not in Germany anymore, he’s somewhere in Brazil.”