Amazonia

Nate recognized it as the same one from when he had first seen the man at São Gabriel’s hospital. “Fan?” he asked, pointing to the Boston Red Sox logo.

“And a good-luck charm,” Frank added, then turned to the group. “Let’s set out!”

In short order, the eighteen-man team tromped into the jungle, led for the moment by a small, wide-eyed Indian.

Kelly had never been in a jungle. In preparation for this trip, she had scanned books and articles, but the first sight of the rain forest was not what she had expected.

As she followed the four Rangers in the lead, she craned around in wonder. Contrary to old movies, the understory of the Amazon rain forest was not a clotted mass of clinging vines and overgrown vegetation. Instead, it was more like they were marching through a green cathedral. A dense canopy of woven tree branches arched overhead, absorbing most of the sunlight and casting everything in a greenish glow. Kelly had read that less than 10 percent of the sun’s light pierced through the unbroken green tent to reach the jungle floor. Because of this, the lowest level of the forest, where they walked now, was surprisingly clear of vegetation. Here the jungle was a world of shadow and decomposition, the domain of insects, fungi, and roots.

Still, the lack of green vegetation didn’t necessarily make trekking through the pathless forest an easy journey. Rotted logs and branches lay everywhere, frosted with yellow mold and white mushrooms. Under her boots, a slick mulch of decaying black leaves threatened her footing, while buttress roots that supported the gigantic trees in the thin soil snaked under the leaves and added to the risk of a twisted ankle.

And though the vegetation down at this level was scant, it was not nonexistent. The floor was festooned with fan-tailed ferns, thorny bromeliads, graceful orchids, and slender palms, and everywhere around were draped the ubiquitous ropelike vines called lianas.

The sound of a slap drew her attention around.

Her brother rubbed at his neck. “Damn flies.”

Kelly reached into a pocket and passed a plastic bottle of insect repellent to Frank. “Put more on.”

He doused his exposed limbs and rubbed some on his neck.

Nathan stepped beside her. He had donned an Australian bush hat, and looked like some cross between Indiana Jones and Crocodile Dundee. His blue eyes sparkled with amusement in the jungle gloom. “You’re wasting your time with that repellent,” he said to Frank. “Anything you put on will be sweated off your skin in minutes.”

Kelly couldn’t argue with that. After just fifteen minutes of trekking, she felt damp everywhere. The humidity under the canopy had to be close to a hundred percent. “Then what do you suggest for the bugs?”

Nathan shrugged, wearing a crooked grin. “You surrender. You ignore them. It’s a battle you can’t win. Here it’s an eat-or-be-eaten world, and sometimes you have to simply pay the price.”

“With my own blood?” Frank asked.

“Don’t complain. That’s getting off cheap. There are much worse insects out there, and I don’t just mean the big ones, like bird-eating spiders or footlong black scorpions. It’s the little ones that’ll get you. Are you familiar with the assassin bug?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Frank said.

Kelly shook her head, too.

“Well, it has the unpleasant habit of biting and defecating at the same time. Then when the victim scratches the wound, he drives the feces loaded with the protozoan Tripanozoma crusii into the bloodstream. Then in anywhere from one to twenty years you die due to damage to the brain or heart.”

Frank paled and stopped scratching at the fly bite on his neck.

“Then there are the blackflies that transmit worms to the eyeball and cause a disease called river blindness. And sand flies that can trigger Leishmaniasis, a leprosy type of disease.”

Kelly frowned at the botanist’s attempt to shake her brother. “I’m well familiar with the transmittable diseases out here. Yellow fever, dengue fever, malaria, cholera, typhoid.” She hiked her medical pack higher on her shoulders. “I’m prepared for the worst.”

“And are you prepared for the candiru?”

Her brow crinkled. “What type of disease is that?”

“It’s not a disease. It’s a common little fish in the waters here, sometimes called the toothpick fish. It’s a slender creature, about two inches long, and lives parasitically in the gills of larger fish. It has the nasty habit of swimming up the urethras of human males and lodging there.”

“Lodging there?” Frank asked, wincing.

“It spreads its gill spines and embeds itself in place, blocking the bladder and killing you most excruciatingly in about twenty-four hours.”

“How do you get rid of it?”

By now, Kelly had recognized the little fish’s description and nasty habits. She had indeed read about them. She turned to her brother and said matter-of-factly, “The only cure is to cut the victim’s penis off and extract the fish.”

Frank flinched, half covering himself. “Cut his penis off?”

Nate shrugged. “Welcome to the jungle.”

Kelly scowled at him, knowing the man was only trying to spook them. But from his grin, she could tell it was mostly all in good fun.

“Then there are the snakes…” Nate continued.

“I think that’s enough,” Professor Kouwe said behind them, rescuing the siblings from Dr. Rand’s further lecturing. He stepped forward. “While the jungle must be respected as Nathan has suggested so eloquently, it’s as much a place of beauty as danger. It contains the ability to cure as well as sicken.”

“And that’s why we’re all out here,” a new voice said behind them.

Kelly turned. It was Dr. Richard Zane. Over his shoulder, she noticed Anna Fong and Olin Pasternak deep in conversation. And beyond them, Manuel Azevedo stalked with his jaguar alongside the Rangers at the rear.

She turned around and saw that the grin on Nate’s face had vanished. His expression had hardened at the intrusion by the Tellux representative. “And what would you know of the jungle?” Nate asked. “You’ve not set foot out of the main offices of Tellux in Chicago in over four years…about the time my father vanished, as I recall.”

Richard Zane rubbed his small trimmed goatee and maintained his casual countenance, but Kelly had not missed the flash of fire in the man’s eyes. “I know what you think of me, Dr. Rand. It was one of the reasons I volunteered for this expedition. You know I was a friend of your—”