The pilot surveyed the area. He didn’t need the helicopter spotlights to see the general area, not with the glow from the crater and the illumination of the newly risen moon, but the searchlight gave detail to the immediate ground surface. “I can’t tell how hot it is, particularly with all the charred vegetation, but there’s a clear spot over there about a kilometer from the crater that looks like good, solid rock. It’s not raining now; you might just get lucky if it’s cool enough.”
“I don’t see why it wouldn’t be,” Lori responded. “The immediate area was burned quickly in the firestorm.”
The pilot set the helicopter down gently. Terry cautiously opened the door, looked down, grabbed a large flashlight, and then stepped out onto the surface. Fine dust and ash blew around from the backwash of the rotor blades, but she reached down and felt the soil and nodded. “Slightly warm, but no big deal,” she shouted back into the cabin.
They all got out now except the pilot and Campos, who handed down the three large silver suitcases containing the portable dish unit to Gus. The three quickly moved away so that the helicopter could lift off. They all had their canteens, first-aid kits, and sufficient rations for the short time they would be there.
They watched the chopper rise, hover a moment as if reluctant to leave, then head out to the west toward the Campos compound. It was quickly swallowed up in the clouds and night. The blowing ash settled, and when they moved back in to retrieve the equipment, they were startled to see a form standing there.
“I decided to remain with you,” said Juan Campos. “Even under these conditions, this is a dangerous place for two senoritas and one unarmed man.”
All three of them had an uneasy feeling about the man, but there wasn’t much they could do. Forty minutes, Terry thought frantically. Maybe less, each way, with maybe twenty on the ground. Not even two hours. He has to know that. But the animal lurking under that civilized veneer of his wasn’t buried very deep, and it might not think that far ahead.
“I thought you had to guide the helicopter back and forth,” Terry said aloud to him.
“Oh, he does not have any equipment in the helicopter. It is ours, after all. He will have no trouble finding his way back, either—he is a good pilot—and there is little for him to see until dawn. It is safe enough for now.”
She sighed. “Well, then, help us lug this stuff over to a reasonably flat, stable area and help us set it up.”
There was the sound of not so distant thunder. “Is all that waterproof?” Lori asked. “I think it might well get rained on, and us, too.”
“Oh, it’s pretty well sealed,” Gus assured her. “Just keep the control box lid down tight and latched in a direct downpour. The big problem is stabilizing the dish, particularly in a heavy wind, along with the fact that ku-band signals are real bad in rain and heavy weather.”
“We better think of some shelter for ourselves, too, just in case,” Lori said. “This place looks pretty blasted, but over there the trees seem scorched but still standing.”
“You can take the small flashlight and have a look-see,” Gus told her, “but I wouldn’t go too far ’round here. There’s all sorts of mean, nasty critters live in these places, and it’s pretty damn sure not all of ’em got blown to hell or had the sense to run.”
“Thanks a lot,” she came back sarcastically. What she really wanted to do was have a look at that crater, but until they were set up, there wasn’t much she could do about that. She could see it, though, so tantalizingly close, with its eerie yellow glow and its strange, regular pulsing. It might be irresistible after a while.
From the jet, the whole region had looked more like the landing zone, but here, on the ground, it was much different. A surprising amount of the jungle was intact, although it showed the effects of blast and fire. Huge areas had been uprooted almost instantly, the giant trees lying there, all pointing away from the crater. Still, even here, the roots of some were so deep, and the underbrush was so thick below them, that large stands survived, and it appeared that the blast had affected barely another kilometer or two of the jungle beyond their camp. It indicated that the blast had been far less powerful than she’d originally thought and that the firestorm had occurred not on impact but ahead of it, not destroying the jungle but burning away the top instead.
She suddenly thought she saw something moving in the darkness and swung the flashlight toward it. The beam fell on an enormous, hairy multicolored spider standing atop one of the blasted trees. For a moment she couldn’t tell if it was dead or alive, but then, suddenly, it jumped out of the beam and to her right.
She decided that she’d had enough exploring for the night and hurried back to the others.
“Find anything?” Gus asked as he finished the assembly of the main dish with a socket wrench. “Jumping spiders,” she told him nervously. “Bird spider,” Campos elaborated, helping Gus mount the dish into the suitcase console. “Very common here. They will attack if threatened but will try to run away if they can. So something did live through all this, then?”
Gus was a little more worried. “Sounds like we was talkin’ sense up there. I bet there’s more life still around here than anybody’d thought.”
“Perhaps you are right, senor,” Campos agreed. “In which case it will be a very good idea to stay away from the trees unless we must use them for shelter. The spiders and most insects are not big problems, but the snakes can be very dangerous, and if anything would survive all this it would be la anaconda and her kin.”
The satellite dish was mounted into the main suitcase unit; Gus took out a small sledgehammer, pounded stakes into the rock and anchored the dish to them with a strong wire. He jiggled the thing a few times, then seemed satisfied.
“Next thing we do is see if we have juice from the battery pack, and then I’ll try and align this sucker,” he said.
One whole suitcase, it appeared, was a battery. “How long does that thing last?” Lori asked him.
“Oh, about an hour at full power, maybe more at a lower setting.” He used a small electronic device to take a preliminary sighting, then switched on the unit and plugged in a tiny Watchman-style television that showed only snow. Checking the instrument often, he turned a few cranks on the dish mount, and suddenly a very snowy test pattern came in. It was somewhat distorted, weak, but it was there.
Terry plugged in a headset and threw a small switch. The television went black, but she paid no attention and instead said, “Hello, Atlanta. Hello, Atlanta. This is Terry at the crater. Do you receive us? Over.” She toggled the switch down.
“Audio is fair,” a tinny voice in her ear responded. “No video. Over.”
Toggle. “We don’t have a camera plugged in yet. Because of power limits and distance to the crater, we are unable to do live shots from the rim, but as soon as John gets here, we’ll go out with the hand-held and then immediately feed tape. Over.”
“Understood. There is a storm over the base at the moment delaying everything. Best guess is that it’ll be about two hours until it clears and they can get to you. Advise you use the time for pickup shots if the weather is still clear there. If Sutton is up to it, try her in a standup. Feed what you get when you get it, but leave at least fifteen minutes. Over.”
Two hours! “Uh—we might have a problem before that,” she said low into the mike. “We have the nonteam member present and armed. Over.”
“Can’t do much about it. Handle it the best you can. We are advised of the situation from the pilot at base. Do whatever you have to. Suggest you shut down now until you are ready to feed. Over.”
When you make deals with the devil, make sure it is you making the deal.
“All right. As you said, nothing much can be done about it. Out.” She looked over at the cameraman. “Shut it and seal it, Gus,” she told him. “They want us to do pickups at the crater if the weather holds.”
The thunder rumbled across the ghostly landscape.
“That storm is toward the rancho,” Campos noted. “I can tell. The storms do not last all that long, but they are fierce and they can be a problem. I think perhaps the helicopter will be late.”
Damn it! Terry thought sourly. At least he could have been a little less clever. “It’s raining there now,” she admitted to him. “But they don’t think it’ll be a serious problem unless it comes this way.”
There was a sudden, extremely bright bolt of strobo-scopic lightning close by, and then a very loud explosion of thunder.
“I hate to say it,” Gus yelled, “but I think we got that serious problem!”
Before anyone could reply, there was a sudden rush of wind and the heavens opened with a vengeance. It wasn’t like any storm Lori had ever known; the rain was so heavy and dense, it was nearly impossible to see, and the roaring sound was deafening. Campos and the two women grabbed the flashlights and Gus snatched up the portacam unit, fortunately still in its case, and they headed for the shelter of the trees, spiders and snakes be damned. There was no hope of staying dry; as Lori ran toward the jungle, she was soaked through in an instant, and she could feel the intensity of the downpour as it pounded her through her clothing.
The trees were not the shelter they would have been only hours before, but there were places where the rain was deflected by higher foliage in spite of the fire damage. Surrounded by gushing waterfalls of runoff from the tree tops, the spot she found was fairly well protected.
She’d been afraid that she would slip and fall on the rock or trip over some wreckage of the destroyed forest, but somehow she’d managed to make it without mishap. Now, sheltered and catching her breath, she was aware of a series of sharp, thundering explosions that reverberated through the jungle. In a moment she realized that they were all coming from the same direction—the crater!
Either it was still extremely hot or some sort of reaction was taking place the nature of which she couldn’t guess. She suddenly worried that it might somehow explode and take them all out, or shatter, or who knew what?
She wondered where the others were. Not far, surely, in spots just like this. There wasn’t any sense in going looking for them in the incessant rain, and a few attempts proved the futility of trying to yell over the constant roar.
A crazy thought came to her of Gus’s fears of a live rerun of The War of the Worlds. The repeated explosions from the crater certainly did sound very regular, like something, well, venting. Nerves, she told herself. Just nerves.
Terry, too, had found shelter, leaning against the tree and gasping for breath. She had fallen, and it felt like she’d bruised and skinned her knee. It hurt like hell.
God! This is one I’m gonna remember for an awfully long time, she told herself. Like all the rest of my life. I been shot at, chased, slapped around, and treated like shit, but this may be the worst. And all for a damned hole in the ground! Maybe this is it. Maybe this is God telling me that it’s time to pack it in, demand a studio job, or find something else. And those damned explosions! Bang! Bang! Bang! Like some kind of ghostly war.
She had just decided that it couldn’t be much worse when she felt something press against the side of her head. She started; powerful hands pushed her back, and there was a gun right in her face.
“Go ahead!” Campos yelled at her in Spanish with angry satisfaction. “Yell your head off, bitch! They could be five meters away and not hear you!”
He grabbed her, and she tried to kick him in the balls, but he sidestepped her attempt, which was weak because of the pain in her knee and her general state of near exhaustion. He twirled her around and pinned one of her arms behind her back, twisting it painfully as he drew her to him.
“Try anything more like that and I will break it! I will break your arms and your legs.”
“My God, Campos! What do you want? You can’t get away with this!” she yelled back defiantly.
“You know what I want, you whore!” he snapped. “And what if you do not turn up when the rain stops? They will suspect, but they will not know. Do you not remember where you are? Your friends come at our invitation and leave at our demand, and if they reject our story of your disappearance, they can do nothing. We are already on the wanted lists of a dozen countries. Your only hope is to do what I say and pretend you like it. If you convince me, then maybe, just maybe, I will let you live!”
He pushed her back against the tree and grabbed with his free hand for her rain-soaked khaki safari shirt, the other hand still holding the pistol, now pointed at her abdomen.
“Why? You’re gonna kill me anyway. You must! And we both know it.”
He grinned evilly. “Perhaps the rain will stop. Perhaps then they will hear us, no? You can never tell.”
And, with that, he ripped the shirt, almost literally tearing it off her.
She closed her eyes and sank down, resigned now to her fate at the hands of this monster. She waited and waited, and nothing came.
Finally she opened her eyes and frowned, then her eyes grew wide in amazement.
Juan Campos had collapsed in a heap and was lying there facedown, more in the rain than out of it. The pistol had fallen from his hand, and she moved painfully to retrieve it, not comprehending what sudden miracle had saved her. Gus? But where was he? A falling branch? It didn’t look like anything like that.
And then, only a few meters beyond, she saw shapes. She was so shaken that for a moment she imagined they were Gus’s Martians or some other kind of creatures from the crater, and they did look like nothing on Earth. Their faces were tattooed with elaborate designs, with great earrings of wood or bone. Small, dark, and threatening in their own right, each figure held a small blowpipe in its hand, eyes wide but fearfully flinching with the sound of each small explosion.
She made a movement for the pistol, and the pipes went up. She stopped, backed away into the tree, and the pipes came down. Primitive, yes, like out of some National Geographic special, but they knew what guns could do.
Terry tried to think of how to say “friend” in every language that she knew, but only English and Spanish came to mind. She tried them, but only blank stares were returned.
And then, as dramatically as it had started, the rain stopped, as if someone had turned off a faucet.
Quickly, almost without sound, a trio of the primitives moved in toward Juan Campos’s body, first turning him over, then going through his clothing with a thief’s skill.
Inanely, Terry could only think, If only I had a camera here! What a story this would make!
With sudden amazement coming over her, she realized that the three stripping Campos were all girls—no, women, and, from the look of them, ones that had already lived rough lives. Their faces and bodies were decorated with well-worn designs, and they wore that primitive jewelry but not a stitch of clothing. Their black hair was long but obviously not without attention; it was shoulder-length on some, waist-length on others, and trimmed at the ends. Nor was it matted or tangled; much attention was clearly paid to keeping it groomed. Their awareness of how things connected on the clothing and of the gun and its purpose showed some knowledge, but everything about them said that they, if not ignorant of anything beyond the Stone Age, rejected all such things totally.
They were, however, thorough, and before two minutes had passed they had extracted from Campos’s body an incredible assortment of weaponry, from two more small pistols to an assortment of knives and other instruments of violence. One of the women in the rear brought up a thick tray of woven straw, onto which all the weapons were carefully placed. By the time they were through, Campos was nude, his clothing put in a heap, and signs of various wounds and scars could be seen all over the man’s body. Clearly his life hadn’t always been one of idleness and ease.