Uncontacted, page 1
UNCONTACTED
By Rick Chesler.
Copyright © 2017 Rick Chesler
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the authors' imagination or are used fictitiously and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For more information e-mail all inquiries to: rick@rickchesler.com
Cover art by J. Kent Holloway
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Epilogue
Chapter 1
Brazilian Amazon, near the Peruvidan border
The Huntair Pathfinder Mark 1 ultralight aircraft banked over a group of treetops that themselves towered above the rest of the rain forest canopy. The single-occupant plane carried a man who had devoted his entire professional career to studying the world’s rain forests, and the Amazon in particular. Dr. Antonio Medina, a professor of ecology and a researcher working out of a major Texas university, had outfitted his little craft with state-of-the-art scientific equipment to within an inch of its already low weight capacity.
He checked his array of sensors, grinning at the row of green lights indicating everything was A-OK. Antonio was extremely proud of his “air-based sensory observation platform (ABSOP),” which had cost him countless late nights applying for grants and seeking corporate backing to fund. But here he was, counting the trees and gauging the thickness of individual branches, collecting all manner of environmental data including temperature, wind speed, humidity, barometer, albedo, as well as taking high resolution photographs and video of everything he flew over.
He brought his plane in low over a sun-dappled river, its brown surface meandering through the green like a snake through a field. He grinned ear to ear as he followed the waterway’s course, threading the needle between the banks of thick trees on either side. He’d used the Huntair for many research trips before this one, but the thrill never got old. He had trained a couple of other members of his expedition team to be able to fly it, just in case the need arose, but it rarely did. This was one job Antonio was more than happy to handle on his own.
He heard a squawk and turned his head left in time to see a black-collared hawk come very close to his aircraft before veering away and dropping low out of sight. But it wasn’t only the joy of flying, the sense of freedom it provided, he knew. It was deeper than that. It made him feel closer to his father, Diego Medina, who had been born in Brazil before moving to the United States as a boy and becoming a citizen there.
Like Antonio, Diego had been a rain forest researcher. Also like Antonio, he had pioneered the use of ultralight aircraft as a research tool to study the jungle. In his day, the craft were even more precarious than they were now, and it simply wasn’t possible to carry the bulky scientific instruments of that time. Nevertheless, by utilizing the frail contraptions to conduct aerial surveys from areas that were inaccessible by any other means—including helicopter—he had demonstrated unequivocally that the ultralight had a rightful place in cutting edge rain forest research. And in the process, he had shown his son that studying the rain forest could be very “cool” indeed.
His father had flown his Pterodactyl Ascender over these same Amazonian jungles, exploring the mysteries of the rain forest until one day…the crash. Twenty years ago. Antonio remembered the fateful trip well, because he was on it. To then twenty-six year old Antonio, having earned his own PhD only a few months earlier, the opportunity to work with his father had seemed like a dream come true.
The winds had been a little higher than normal that day and the members of the expedition team had urged him not to go up. Regretfully, Antonio recalled, he had not cautioned him to stay on the ground. It was his first research trip with his father, who had set the expedition up –his first professional expedition at all, for that matter—so who was he to tell him what to do? So he had said nothing, and even though the other team members had cautioned against it, his father had gone aloft, pointing out they had only one more field day before needing to begin the multi-stage return trip home.
Diego Medina’s ultralight would be discovered wrapped around one of the canopy trees, about halfway up. Hopelessly mangled, and a total loss. The wreck didn’t seem survivable for any mortal man, that was for sure. The impact alone should have killed any passenger who wasn’t superhuman. And then there was the sobering thought that, even if he had survived the impact, that the fall to the ground almost certainly would have been fatal.
But his body wasn’t in the wreckage and it wasn’t on the ground at the base of the tree. Or anywhere nearby. The expedition had mounted a thorough search on their own for the next twenty-four straight hours, but no sign of him turned up. After that, Brazilian authorities had mounted their own recovery mission, but they, too, had come up empty. Perhaps his body was carried away by predators, they had offered. Or, they had added in response to the doubting looks, maybe he fell out of the plane before it crashed, and that’s why it lost control. Heavy turbulence, wind pockets, or simply reckless flying? It was a windy day, they had noted. Was he in the habit of wearing the seatbelt? (Yes). Did he drink? (Sometimes, but he was never under the influence while flying). All these questions and more were bandied about, but none of them changed the end result. Twenty years on, Dr. Diego Medina’s body was still missing.
Antonio could still recall the last words his father had ever said to him: “There’s still more data to collect—a lot more!” They haunted him to this day. He was right, of course. But that wasn’t it. The lack of closure was no doubt one factor that kept him returning to the Amazon all these years—decades—later. It made him feel closer to his father, and what’s more, there was always that hope against hope that he would hear something from a villager or expeditioner. But no word ever came.
But he had to work, too, like anyone else, and so that also kept him coming back. Still, he knew that the entire Amazon was much larger than the sector in which his father had disappeared. If he was to view a plot of his research study areas on a map, they would be mostly concentrated in the area near where his father went missing. On this trip, though, he’d ventured farther afield, so that was something. Branching out, moving on, learning, expanding…
Antonio pulled up on the stick of the craft and rose above the wall of trees that was rapidly approaching, rather than follow the river’s tightly winding course down low. His own research was going fairly well, he thought, once again eyeing his extensive (and expensive) on-board instrumentation. He was slowly but surely putting together the most comprehensive, data-rich map of the Amazon ever produced. And then would come the real work, he knew--analyzing the data, studying how it all fit together, and explaining what made this unique environment tick.
His thoughts were interrupted by the bleating of his air band radio. The voice was in Portuguese, a language he was familiar with but not fluent in. He had always told his father, who had been fluent, being born in Brazil, that he wished he would have taught it to him. But Diego had blamed it on his mother’s early death from cancer, on how being a widower and single Dad uncomfortable with the dating scene while trying to move forward with his career had left him with little time. Still, Antonio caught the gist of the words, “have urgent communication for you from the Office of the President of Brazil,” and raised an eyebrow.
Probably just want to hassle me about inspecting my permits again. He had a pretty good working relationship with the government of Brazil—he had to in order to conduct his research here—but like any bureaucratic system, there was no small amount of red tape to deal with. And because he used an airplane, that just added to the rigmarole. He sighed and glanced at his fuel gauge. Time to head back to base camp, refuel and get some lunch, then head back out for a late afternoon pass.
He consulted his GPS unit and made a minor adjustment to his ultralight’s heading. Even to an experienced Amazon traveler, the forest looked much the same in every direction from the air. His landing strip (and even that phrase implied more grandiosity than the bare minimum clearing that had been hastily hacked out of the jungle by his team) wasn’t far away. As he always did, Antonio blocked out all other thoughts as he prepared for the landing. All it took was one tricky updraft as he pas
Antonio shoved the uncomfortable thought aside and gripped the stick. He spoke into his radio transmitter to inform his team he was coming in for a landing so that they could make sure it was clear, and be standing by to render assistance should his landing be less than perfect. He heard the copy that response and then committed fully to bringing the ultralight down.
Thankfully, no surprises awaited him and the touchdown was as smooth as could be. A couple of bounces on the landing gear and he was rolling across the cut clearing, no sticks larger than a twig in his way on the ground. He braked to a stop mere yards before the strip emptied out into the river, but that was nothing new. It was a lot of work to clear the jungle, so they gave him what the plane’s specs said it needed, and not much more. Antonio killed the engine and hopped down from his cockpit while three members of his dozen-person team ran up to greet him.
Two of them were graduate student research assistants whom he had specially trained on flight operations, so he wasn’t surprised to see them. They would take over the plane’s handling on the ground, wheel it over to the makeshift fuel station and get it ready for the next flight. But he was a little taken aback to see his colleague, Dr. Peter Richards. Richards was a U.S. researcher from a different university, but a close collaborator and co-author on many of his research papers. He would have thought he’d be hunched over a laptop in the lab tent, examining the ultralight’s telemetry data as it streamed in.
Richards towered over Antonio’s own nearly six-foot frame, his bald dome in contrast to Antonio’s thick head of black curly hair. He was out of breath from running out to greet him. He spoke breathlessly to Antonio while the assistants fussed over the ultralight and its post-flight checklist.
“Antonio, the Brazilian government says they’ve been trying to reach you via air band, did you—“
“I heard them, I figured it could wait ‘til I got back on the ground. I mean geez, the paperwork is all in order, we triple-checked it before we left, what do they—“
But Richards shook his head emphatically. “No, Antonio, it’s not routine. Some kind of situation has come up and they’re requesting your assistance.”
Antonio frowned. “Did you offer to help?”
“Of course, but they said they need aerial assistance. They wanted to talk to you personally, since you’re the one with the actual flight permit.”
Antonio nodded and waved toward the jungle camp. “Let’s go have a chat with them.”
They walked away from the gurgling, brown river onto a barely discernable footpath that led them through a thick stand of thorny foliage a short distance until it opened into a natural clearing where a multitude of tents had been erected. Other members of the team bustled about here, one working on getting a cook fire going, another sitting at a folding table and working with some camera equipment, while others could be heard conversing in the larger work tents.
It was into one of these that Antonio and Richards walked, the one that served as their Communications Tent. In it they had a series of folding tables supporting rows of laptop computers, radio equipment and satellite telephones. A thirty-ish American man with long, dirty-blond hair tied back in a ponytail waved them over without looking up from his workstation.
“Office of the Brazilian President on a VHF channel. His people are annoyed you haven’t responded yet.” He got up from the chair and indicated for Antonio to have a seat in front of the radio’s microphone. Antonio thanked the technician and spoke into the mic.
“Dr. Antonio Medina, speaking.” He released the transmitter button and waited for the reply, which was not long in coming.
“Dr. Medina, this is Olivia Clara, from the Brazil Office of Cultural Affairs,” the female voice over the radio came back in accented English. “Do you make it a habit of not responding to urgent air band requests?”
Antonio looked at Richards, who grimaced before motioning to the mic. Antonio replied into it. “I apologize, Senhora Clara. I did hear part of the request, but at the time I was—“
“Never mind that now, Doctor. We have an urgent request, and I am going to put President Rocha on now to convey it.”
Antonio and Richards exchanged puzzled glances. The president of Brazil wanted to talk to Antonio? Certainly this was no permitting snafu or work visa inquiry. He responded over the radio.
“Of course, standing by.”
A few seconds passed during which light static was heard, and then an elderly male voice, also in accented English, emanated from the tinny speaker. “Dr. Medina, thank you for taking the time to speak with me. We haven’t yet had the pleasure of meeting in person, although our Ministry of Scientific Research has made me aware of your activities—in a most positive way, I can assure you. Let me add that I am also aware of the high quality research your father conducted in our country, and I do of course offer my condolences on his accident, even though much time has passed. Forgive me, senhor, but time constraints demand that I move our conversation along. I trust your research is going well?”
Richards winked at Antonio and gave him the thumbs up sign. So far so good. At least it didn’t seem like they were about to be personally ordered to leave the country by the president himself. The technician stood at the entrance to the tent, as if standing watch, expecting a national guard platoon to come rolling up at any moment.
Antonio continued with the radio. “Very well, Mr. President, thank you for asking, and thank you for your condolences. To what do I owe the pleasure of your radio call to our humble jungle camp?”
Richards nodded. Get right to the point. The president answered.
“A situation has developed that you may be able to assist us with. I understand it would take up your valuable research time, but in return I am of course prepared to extend your visa for as long as necessary, as well as providing reasonable, though not extravagant, financial compensation.”
“My team and I are happy to assist your government, senhor. Please let me know what you need.”
“Thank you, Dr. Medina. There has been an unfortunate event that is soon to hit the news wires. Even from your humble jungle camp, as you call it, I am certain that you will hear of it over the radio. So let me give you the news first.” The president paused.
“Listening, Mr. President.”
Brazil’s leader continued to transmit. “Less than an hour ago, hundreds of people were killed in several of my country’s jungle cities, as well as at least one in Peru: Iquitos, Santarém, Belém, Manaus, and Macapá. At latest count, the death toll stood at 484 people all told; men, women and children.”
Shocked silence reigned for a moment until the president asked if the connection was still good.
“Yes, we are here,” Antonio transmitted. “Just stunned, trying to process the terrible news. What happened to these people? Has there been a terrorist attack?” At the door, the technician glanced up to the sky, as if expecting an air raid of some sort at any second.
The president’s voice came back over the speaker. “We are not yet certain, but if it is, it is the strangest terror attack the world has ever seen.” He paused without elaborating, so Antonio voiced the question on his and Richards’ minds.
“How did these people die?”
The president cleared his throat before answering. “We’re still not exactly sure—autopsies are being conducted as we speak—but it appears as though they all literally dropped dead of natural causes. Their hearts simply stopped beating, their brain activity ceased, and they died. One observer in Manaus said it was as if the people simply ‘expired’ without warning.”
Antonio and Richards traded looks, during which Richards mouthed the word, poison?
“Do you suspect a terror attack by poison, Mr. President?” Antonio was beginning to wonder why the president wanted to speak with him about this matter that seemed more suited for the military.
“We have no reason to think as such at this time.”
“Perhaps the water supply has been poisoned in the Amazon basin?” Antonio threw out.
