BLACK CITY (Ulysses Vidal Adventure Series Book 2) Page 6

  Luckily, the rainforest banks were about a hundred yards from each side of the plane, so at least there was no risk of bumping into a tree. But the most immediate danger was the rocks that hid right under the surface so that you did not see them until you were right on top of them.

  “Não posso determe!” yelled Getúlio Oliveira over the noise of the engine. “Tenho que desdobrar e tentar aterrissar a contracorrente!”

  I totally agreed with the man and nodded energetically.

  “Yes, yes! Take off again. Please!”

  The pilot moved the flaps and pushed the throttle so that the engine roared and the vibration shook the fragile aluminum structure of the plane.

  I looked ahead at the horizon to make sure we had enough space to take off, but what I saw puzzled me so much that I needed a moment to understand what was in front of us.

  Or to be exact, what was not.

  The river.

  Some two hundred yards away the horizon disappeared abruptly, as if someone had forgotten to finish a backdrop. After a certain point the river, the rainforest, and our future in the world of the living vanished as if we had reached the end of the world and there were nothing else.

  Cassandra, who had seen it too, spelled the truth for me.

  “Oh my God!” she whispered. “It’s a waterfall.”

  Holding on to the handrail on the ceiling as if that could save me, I watched in awe as the edge of the abyss drew rapidly closer and closer.

  Now I could see the clouds of spray surging from the other side of the chasm. At the same time the pilot leaned forward without a word, his eyes fixed on the end of the horizon. His expression was ominous.

  The speedometer needle showed forty knots, but since we had not lifted one single inch from the water I figured it was not enough speed to let us take off.

  The waterfall was less than a hundred yards away and the engine was roaring at maximum power.

  Seventy yards…

  My knuckles were white from holding them so tight.

  Fifty yards…

  Forty-five knots and still no liftoff.

  Thirty yards…

  I heard a voice at my back call my name.

  Twenty yards…

  I turned around and met Cassandra’s eyes.

  Ten yards…

  Her lips moved to say something and I tried to smile.

  Suddenly the vibration and the bumping on the water were gone. When we looked into each other’s eyes it seemed we were suspended in midair as if by a magic trick.

  My mouth opened ready to reply, but the air escaped from my lungs and my heart decided to leap out of my throat at the moment the hydroplane and its occupants fell down the waterfall. Its nose was pointing straight at the rocks which were waiting for us below in a cloud of foam.

  I was violently pushed around like a puppet and closed my eyes, waiting for the impact. I had neither breath left to scream nor time to pray, but I was sure this was to be our end.

  We fell into the void.

  One second.

  Two seconds.

  Three seconds.

  The roar of the engine increased.

  I was still alive. How was that possible?

  I looked up and saw the pilot pulling on the levers with all his might, the veins of his neck on the point of bursting from the effort and his eyes fixed on the windshield. I looked ahead over the dashboard and, as though I were waking from a nightmare, there were the river and the rainforest once again serene below us. Meanwhile the hydroplane leveled and slowly gained altitude with the strength of its six hundred horsepower, the wind on its nose and sighs of relief from its passengers.

  Five minutes later, with our hearts beating normally once again, Getúlio Oliveira faced for the second time the part of the river where we had tried to descend. This time, though, against the current. This meant a couple more bumps when we touched water, but once we were floating it was easy enough to control the plane and prevent it from being dragged by the current.

  The problem was that there was nowhere to go. The river bank was entirely covered with trees nearly a hundred feet tall and thick impenetrable foliage that made it impossible to even think of getting close.

  I realized now that we had not foreseen this obstacle. None of us had thought of bringing an inflatable boat for emergencies like this.

  I checked the GPS and noted that if the professor’s coordinates were accurate, the Menkragnoti settlement should be just a few hundred yards beyond the line of trees.

  I pointed to the right. “This is the place. We must land here.”

  The pilot looked at me and shrugged.

  “Desculpa,” he said, “mas eu não posso chegar mais perto. Há muitas árvores e se estraga na aeronave, se a companhia de seguros que disparou.” Then he pointed at a narrow strip of yellowish dirt and added, “Tudo o que posso fazer é deixa-los no banco de areia logo à frente.”

  I turned to Cassandra with an inquiring look.

  “What do you think? I think he’s saying he doesn’t want to risk going near the bank because of the trees. That all he can do is drop us off on that sand bar.”

  “What can I say…? It doesn’t seem very smart to be dropped in the middle of an unknown river just a couple of hours before dark.”

  “I’m with you there.”

  “But it also looks as if we have no choice,” she added with resignation.

  “Ditto on that too.” I turned back toward the pilot and asked him to take us to the sand bar in front of us so we could disembark there.

  12

  Once the hydroplane was secured with pickets and ropes, it took us very little time to unload our luggage and equipment on the small islet, barely three hundred square feet. The fine ocher sand was strewn with alligator footprints, and the pilot explained that the islet was probably one of the spots where they lay in the morning sun so as to regulate their body temperature. We just had to make sure we were not there the following morning.

  We made the professor as comfortable as we could on top of our backpacks. He was still drowsy but we hoped he would soon wake up. When we shook hands with the pilot, he wished us luck but said no more than that. He agreed he would come back to pick us up as soon as we called him on the satellite phone.

  Then, still looking as much as ever like a Zapatista revolutionary, he climbed into his hydroplane and started the engine. After he had cast off he turned around and accelerated toward the waterfall. At once, carried by the current, the hydroplane took off majestically and flew toward the north until it was no more than a speck on the horizon.

  I remained staring at that speck until it disappeared completely, feeling that small plane was not really a means of transport but a time machine: a time machine that had picked us up in the twenty-first century and dropped us off in a place as remote and inhospitable as it had been five hundred years ago.

  When I lowered my gaze, Professor Castillo was beginning to wake up. He blinked groggily and raised his hand to protect his eyes.

  “Where… where are we?”

  “Very near the coordinates you gave us, on the Xingu River,” Cassie said, sitting beside him. “We’re right in the middle of it, to be precise.”

  “Oh, well,” he said sitting up and discovering there was water all around us. “Er… how did the flight go?”

  “Very smooth, Doc,” I said, looking at Cassie from the corner of my eye. “It was like a dream.”

  “Yeah… a boring dream,” she said sarcastically and shook the sand off her trousers. “But now I have a silly question…” She looked to the far shore and, without turning around, asked, “How on earth are we going to get out of here?”

  After discussing it we decided to wait. We came to the conclusion that if the Menkragnoti were as close as we thought, surely someone would have seen or heard the hydroplane touch down. They would come to investigate and see us, then we would ask for their help, and they would pick us up in their canoes.

  That was the plan. A pretty
poor one, I have to say, but under the circumstances there was nothing else we could do. The turbulent dark waters of the river hardly invited us to swim across, and the mass of alligator prints on the sandbar suggested that a great number of these reptiles was surely not very far away.

  “What will we do if nobody comes?” Cassandra asked as she sat on her backpack and played with a stick on the sand.

  “They will come,” I said, pretending to be more certain than I really was. “I don’t think that many planes fly around here. I’m sure they’ll be curious.”

  The professor, gradually recovering from his particular trip, mopped his sweaty face with a bandana.

  “Well, they seem to be taking it easy. It’s been a while since we got here and nobody has appeared yet.”

  I stretched my arm toward the sun and placed my hand just below it. I counted four fingers between the sun and the horizon.

  “I guess we have one hour of light,” I said, multiplying each finger by fifteen minutes. “Long enough to be seen and rescued before nightfall.”

  “I should hope so,” Cassie said. She pointed at a group of what I would have taken to be trees floating on the edge of the river. “Because there are some others beginning to take an interest in us.”

  I noticed the spot she was looking at and could not help a shiver as I realized that those elongated shapes swaying in the current were not exactly trees.

  Just at that moment of alarmed realization, the professor screamed behind me.

  I turned toward him with my heart in my mouth. “What the…?”

  My father’s old friend seemed to have lost his sanity. He was hopping on the sand with his arm raised.

  “Híjole!” Cassandra exclaimed. “There he is!”

  Then I saw him too.

  Standing on the shore we wanted to reach, naked except for a minimal loincloth, an indigenous man was studying us motionless from the distance without responding to the professor’s cries for help. He was holding a disproportionate long bow, and his skin was covered with intricate designs.

  Cassandra and I immediately joined the professor, hopping and yelling just like the castaways we really were.

  “Hey!” Cassie called waving her hands. “Hello!”

  “Here!” I yelled.

  “Hey, my friend,” the professor bellowed using his hands as a megaphone, “we need you to go for help to get us out of this place before it gets dark.”

  Cassie and I looked at him with a smile.

  “What are you doing, Doc? He probably doesn’t speak English.”

  “Well, I—”

  “Hey, look!” Cassie interrupted. “He’s leaving!”

  Without any sign of acknowledgment or goodbye, the stranger turned around and went back into the jungle, apparently continuing his evening stroll.

  “It can’t be,” I said, annoyed.

  “Didn’t he see us?” the professor asked as he mopped his neck.

  “How could he not have?” replied Cassandra. “He’d have to be deaf and blind!”

  “So?”

  “He’s surely gone back to the village for help,” I suggested.

  Cassandra sat back on her bag.

  “Or perhaps,” she said pessimistically, “visitors aren’t as welcome as we thought.”

  When only two fingers were left between the orange orb of the sun and the tops of the trees, and the thicket that covered the shore had turned blacker and more menacing, I decided we had to do something.

  I stood up. “We must get out of here.”

  Cassie shrugged her shoulders and turned the palms of her hands up.

  “We know that. The question is how.”

  “Any way we can! If we have to swim we swim.”

  “What about the alligators?” the professor asked. “Won’t it be safer to stay where we are?”

  “No, I don’t think so. As far as I know, alligators prefer to hunt at night. If we stay on this ridiculous island we’ll end up being their dinner.”

  Cassie shook her head and gestured around us.

  “Um… I really don’t think we’ll have a better chance in the water,” she said. “Those bastards are right here, cutting us off. As soon as we set foot in the water, they’ll come for us.”

  “Maybe. But I have an idea that should distract them and give us some time.”

  “Are you planning on singing to them?” the professor asked. “With a bit of luck you could scare them off.”

  “No, I’m totally serious,” I said as persuasively as I could. “I’ve thought of something that might just work. But you’ll have to help, because we only have a few minutes of light left.”

  31

  While the professor and Cassandra set up the structure of the tent we had bought in Santarem, I spread out one of our mosquito nets on the ground.

  “Now what?” Cassie said behind me.

  “Bring it over. We’ll put it on top of the mosquito net.”

  When it was in place I tied the fine mesh to the reinforced plastic poles so that it was firmly fixed to the structure.

  The professor looked in puzzlement. “I still don’t understand what you’re doing. Why do you want a camping tent covered with a mosquito net? Do you really think that will stop the alligators?”

  I turned it around so that the roof was on the underside and explained. “It’s not a shelter for us, Doc. We’ve just made ourselves a fishing net.”

  Cassie looked at me visibly worried. “We’re surrounded by alligators. And you want to go fishing?”

  “Exactly! But not the way you’re thinking.”

  “Please explain,” the professor said.

  I took the improvised net, went to the shore, and laid it in the river.

  “The idea is to capture a few small fish and use them as bait to distract the alligators.” I waded into the water up to my knees, holding the net by a corner. “If we manage to lure them to one side of the islet, you see, we could swim from the other.”

  “Are you serious? You’ll attract all the alligators in the neighborhood!” Cassie said.

  “I think it’s a terribly bad idea too,” the professor said. “I can think of a thousand things that could go wrong.”

  “Me too!” I agreed. “But until either of you comes up with a better idea, this is the only plan we have. It’s either this or sit waiting to see what happens, your choice.”

  My friends looked at each other with doubt on their faces. But although they made tut-tutting noises, rolled their eyes, and shook their heads in disapproval, they finally agreed. They got into the water with me, keeping their eyes open for anything bigger than a trout that might come too close.

  “We have to hold the net so that it doesn’t move,” I said over the noise of the river. “The current is pushing the fish toward us. All we have to do is stay alert and raise the net as soon as we feel one falls in.”

  The professor was looking around nervously. “And if they don’t?”

  “They will, don’t worry. You just keep your eyes open so that nothing comes from behind.”

  “You bet!”

  The water, dark as thick black tea, ran between our legs quite strongly, and although it only covered our shins, we had to be careful not to slide on the soapy mud of the bottom. Without anything to hold onto, we could well end up being dragged downriver to the waterfall which was less than five hundred yards away.

  Three minutes later, Cassie began to get impatient.

  “This is a complete pendejada,” she grumbled. “All the fish must be laughing at us.”

  “Have a little patience…”

  “We should all think of something else.”

  “Patience… they will come, don’t worry.”

  “Do you really think that fish are so stu—?”

  The sentence was left unfinished because at that moment something pulled on the net and took us by surprise.

  “There’s one in!” the professor said with enthusiasm. “One fell in!”

  “Pull!” I y
elled. “Pull hard!”

  The professor came to help us by holding a corner, and together we managed to pull the net out of the water.

  “Híjole, it’s heavy!” Cassie said.

  And no wonder, because an enormous catfish was hanging from the bottom of the net. It must have weighed thirty pounds at least.

  It was twitching spasmodically, threatening to break the frail mosquito net. As we started back toward the sandbar with happy cries of triumph, we let our load sink a little to relieve the weight.

  “How lucky we are!” the professor said.

  “We’ve got our bait!” I laughed euphorically.

  But as soon as I said this, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a shadow less than two yards away to my right. As I turned around in surprise, with a smile still on my lips, there came an explosion of water and foam in the midst of the net we were carrying.

  Amid the confusion, while the three of us were still holding our improvised fish trap without realizing what had just happened, a huge repulsive head appeared out of nowhere. It opened monstrous jaws full of sharp yellow teeth and hurled itself on the catfish without giving us time to react. It yanked the net out of our hands with brutal strength. Then with a powerful whip of its tail it sank dragging the net with it downriver.

  Needless to say, two seconds later the three of us were back in the relative safety of the sandbar, breathing heavily with our hearts in our mouths as we recovered from the tremendous fright.

  “Son of a bitch…!” the professor said when he got his breath back. “I didn’t… I didn’t even see it coming!”

  Cassandra had collapsed on the sand, gasping for breath. She raised her head to look at me.

  “I told you it was a bad idea! The worst you’ve had so far, in fact.”

  “Look on the bright side,” I said with my hands on my knees, “Maybe we’ve satisfied its appetite. That makes one less alligator to worry about.”

  Fifteen minutes later we were all standing right at the center of the islet staring in frustration as the sun went down behind the line of trees and the shadows took over the river.