Uncontacted, page 16
Still, the warrior in the middle yelled as he was thrust over the edge of the pit, his voice growing hollow as it echoed on the way down until it was suddenly cut short. Antonio would not have been able to handle the remaining two mercenaries, there was no doubt about that. But the six oncoming tribesmen meant that they had to devote their attention to protecting themselves rather than throwing Antonio to his death.
Three tribesmen landed on the unknown soldier to the left, shifting and bending as they dragged him to the edge. He wasn’t going down without a fight, though, and managed to get off two rounds from his handgun as he flew over the lip to his messy death below. One of those rounds struck a tribal man in the neck, which he clutched with both hands as he gurgled softly into suffocation amid the remainder of the melee.
The surviving mercenary, now faced with a six-on-one fight, recognized that even with a machine gun he was woefully out-forced at such close quarters. He turned and attempted to leap across part of the open pit in order to reach an open patch of ground from which to either stage an automatic fire attack or run away. His jump came up short, however, and his lead foot missed the edge, causing his head to slap into the side of the pit while his hands grasped the edge. He started to pull himself back up but a tribe member reached him far too soon, eyes wide while he stamped on the man’s hands with his bare heel until he dropped away forever.
Antonio looked around but saw no one else coming. He could hear the helicopter hovering nearby. How many more men could have been deployed from it? He shook his head. Four mercenaries killed, plus one tribal warrior in this battle. There was no going back from this now. He had to operate on the assumption that more mercenaries were coming. What to do? He racked his brain for a plan while looking around the area until an idea sparked.
He picked up one of the large rocks that they had deposited on the edge of the pit. It was approximately the same size as the sacred stone, and Antonio made a show of running with it. He picked up another rock and showed the tribe how they should each get one. By the time they had each gathered a (non-sacred) stone, Antonio heard the helo suddenly become louder. He looked up to see it directly over the pit clearing, three more soldiers fast-roping out of it. Antonio at least had a plan—for each of them to carry a fake rock into the jungle and split up, so that the mercenaries wouldn’t know who had the real stone. But their physical skills were about to be put to the test. Of that he had little doubt.
“Go! Go!” He waved both hands outward while turning in a circle.
The tribe took off running as instructed and then Antonio started, but halted, realizing that he forgot to pick up his own dummy stone. He snatched it up off the ground and ran off in one of the more dangerous routes toward the helicopter, wanting to draw attention away from the real ‘keeper of the stone’ as Antonio thought of him now, who ran in the opposite direction.
He began to run himself, to the right, along the game path. The rock slowed him down considerably and he had to fight his very strong instinct to simply ditch it and run faster. But he suppressed that urge and told himself to carry out the plan as his brain had logically made it a few minutes ago, under comparably less stress.
The next thing he heard was the chopper lifting off again. It didn’t fly away, though, but hovered above the canopy, no doubt providing an eye in the sky for its foot soldiers, pointing out where their targets were going. Antonio ran into the jungle, knowing he was making a lot of noise as he crashed through plants and pounded his feet on the earth, but figuring the helo noise for now would cover him until his pursuers got very close.
He lamented that he didn’t have time to communicate a plan with the tribe as to when and where they would meet up again, but as bursts of machine gun fire reverberated through the jungle, he knew he’d done the best thing by getting them moving right away. These people from the helicopter, whoever they were, were not messing around.
Antonio stayed within the heaviest jungle cover, lugging his decoy rock. After a few minutes during which he heard sporadic gunfire and the occasional guttural yell, he decided to head in the direction the tribal man with the genuine stone had run off in. But as he spun around in frantic circles, leaves and branches smacking his face, he saw that he had no idea of which way to go. Looking up, he saw a tree that would be easily climbable. If he set down the fake stone, that is.
He dropped the rock at the base of the tree and started to climb. He tried to disturb the branches as little as possible so as not to give away his position, but some motion was inevitable. As he climbed he blocked out the stress of wondering whether a volley of automatic weapons fire would cut him down at any moment, by thinking about where the keeper of the sacred stone would be taking the artifact.
He had seen him run toward the mountain, toward the waterfall basically, but that was it. He had nothing more to go on. He kicked himself for not taking the time to work that out better, but then his head was poking through the leaves and he had a partial view of his surroundings. The canopy ceiling was still much farther above him, but this was enough to see that the mountain was off to his left, and right now that was all he needed. He could hear the helo hovering somewhere in the vicinity, but couldn’t see it.
Antonio spider-monkeyed his way down the tree, making sure not to land on the ground with a loud thump. He scooped up his decoy rock and set out through the thick jungle toward the mountain. It seemed like a long time that he pushed his way through the tangle of greenery, and after a while he heard no more sounds of battle. He wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad sign, but he kept on making his way to the verdant cliff where the keeper of the stone had gone.
He fell back on his thoughts while he trudged through the snarled rain forest, pausing here and there to swat at a massive insect or part thorny vines. Where would the tribal man take the sacred stone now that it was out of the pit? Antonio envisioned the tribe’s surroundings as if he was an eagle flying above. The jungle, the waterfall, the mountain…any of those places could offer numerous hiding places, Antonio, knew. But which one to check first? And would the man stay with the stone where he brought it? Not likely, Antonio thought. He’d probably stash it somewhere and then return to his village.
The village!
That’s where he should go to rendezvous with the tribe, to get an update of where the stone was taken. He had no better idea than that, at any rate. He took stock of his position, the mountain on his right, the waterfall some distance behind him, and the thick rain forest off to his left. The village was in front of him, a three day hike away. Three days of travelling the jungle with no gear by himself. But he could think of no better alternative, so he started moving in that direction, smiling when he came across some landmark he recognized from the trip up here, because it meant he was going the right way.
Chapter 30
Three days later
Andaman Islands
Antonio splashed his face with stream water before standing and surveying his surroundings. Only another mile or so and he would reach the tribal village. On his trek here, he’d seen no other humans. He did hear a chopper once, far in the distance, but had no idea where it was going or even if it was one of Stel’s. He’d thought a lot about Stel, too, especially while sleeping in the same treetop campsites, reliving their conversations. And to think he’d thought they’d almost become friends. It made him angry with himself, but all he could do at this point was to move on; there was no point in second-guessing things now.
As Antonio walked briskly toward the village, it occurred to him that he hadn’t actually been to it before. He and Stel had landed by helicopter on the mudflat (he was good at procuring helo’s wasn’t he?), and then immediately trekked past the village to the place of the sacred stone. He now recognized many sights, specific groupings of trees, rock formations, branching footpaths, however, and so he knew he was almost to the tribe’s home.
For some reason he also thought of his father’s final home, in a village not unlike this one, but on the other side of the world, with a pang of sadness. His father had helped that tribe guard this same secret, though, and so it gave Antonio pride to be helping to safeguard it from Stel’s outside forces. For whatever reason they wanted the artifacts, it was contrary to what his father had wished.
Antonio rounded a clump of trees and felt a swelling of anticipation as he laid eyes on the final approach to the village. He could see a wide path leading to an open area, a few huts grouped inside. He’d made it! He started to run, anxious to see if the bearer of the stone had made it here. He’d seen no sign of his passage along the way, but he knew the tribal people usually didn’t leave much trace of their passing. It did seem odd to him that he hadn’t seen any villagers yet, since usually they kept sharp lookouts, and tribe members would be out nearby foraging and going about their daily business. But so far he’d seen absolutely no one. Maybe they’re all inside the village listening to stories from the stone bearer. It must be quite a shock for the rest of the tribe to suddenly see their sacred object exposed in the middle of their settlement, after all. And how long could the tribal man have gotten here ahead of me, Antonio thought? He supposed most of a full day.
But as Antonio entered the village, his heart sank.
The bodies lay everywhere. Each had been riddled with bullets. It was obvious they’d been laid to waste from above, riddled with machine gun fire from the helicopter. Antonio suppressed the urge to vomit as long as he could because he wanted to run to each person and see if there were any survivors, but after he reached the first one—a man who had been in the prime of life—he knelt in the dirt and vomited.
Although he was sure what he would find, Antonio checked the pulse of every single slaughtered man, woman and child in that village. It took nearly an hour, and there were no survivors. He walked around a long house, hoping to find survivors hiding behind it, but there was no one. He had no doubt the mercenaries would have taken no chances, shooting up the entire community to eradicate the living.
Walking back around to the front side of the longhouse, Antonio came across an area he’d missed, an enclosed area cordoned off by bamboo fencing. It was to keep livestock animals inside, but the gate had been opened and whatever had been inside—probably boars or goats, Antonio speculated, had already left. Inside, however, were two more mangled bodies.
Antonio checked the pulse of the first and found him dead of obvious gunshot wounds. The second had succumbed to massive trauma, too, but when he flipped him over to feel for a pulse nonetheless, he nearly had a heart attack on seeing the man’s face.
The runner he’d entrusted with the sacred stone!
He was dead, but then….Antonio whirled around as he looked about the space.
Where is the stone?
He rolled the body completely over to make sure he couldn’t be laying on top of it somehow, but no, only smooth dirt lay beneath him. Antonio probed the dirt with a stick to make sure it hadn’t been buried right where he lay, a last act of defiance before being ripped apart by a hail of lead, but only Earth lay below. Could he have brought the stone all the way here only to have it taken from him while his entire village was slaughtered? Antonio hung his head in shame and sorrow, racked with grief over the senseless violence the artifact had brought down upon them.
He stepped out of the enclosure, not wanting to wallow in the defeat, needing to move in order to think straight. The facts were clear: unless the tribal stone carrier had deposited the stone in some other hiding spot before he had come here, then Stel’s team had taken it in violently spectacular fashion. Antonio wiped a tear from his eye as he looked about the destroyed village. For all their fierceness, their unconventional ways, he remembered how ultimately accepting this uncontacted tribe had been to him, doing their best to explain things about their world to Antonio and Stel despite the language barrier. His gaze roved over them as he flashed on his interactions with the villagers, sleeping in the trees, hiking along the paths, coming to the sacred stone in the pit…
And then his gaze alighted on a hut with a vine-framed doorway in the middle of the communal open space. There was something about that building, but what was it? Antonio walked slowly towards it while he recollected. By the time he reached it, he knew what to check.
He entered the crudely hewn structure, cringing at the dead woman inside. He had already checked her pulse and found her dead. It was a feature of the space itself he was interested in at the moment. Antonio gently dragged the woman’s dead body away from the center of the floor, eyeing the woven grass mats that covered the dirt. He pulled the mats aside and gasped as a crude trapdoor made of thin logs was revealed.
He opened the door and caught his breath.
Just like that, there it was. Sitting in the center of the space, the half-meteorite was not glowing.
Instantly, he understood what must have happened when the runner they had all entrusted to hide the stone had reached the village. He must have known that attack was imminent, possibly watching with terror as the helicopter raced past him looking for his village, and so had sought a quick hiding place. So he had stashed the stone in the hidey-hole beneath the mat, no doubt the tribe’s equivalent of a safe for valuables.
And the move had worked, for the stone was still here.
Antonio reached out and put a hand on it. It began to glow a dull orange, like the dying embers of a doused campfire. He shrugged off his backpack and, once again, loaded the sacred stone into it. He was all too aware that carrying this artifact around was a death sentence now, but at the same time, so many people had already died for it that he felt a duty to the tribe—to both tribes, really-- to protect it.
He shouldered his loaded pack and stood in the doorway to the hut, looking out. Now what? He needed to get out of here, off the island and back to…to America, he supposed. With the artifact. He could use his satellite phone to call the boat for pickup, as had been the plan, but because the boat service had been arranged by Stel, he no longer trusted it. He would have to get himself off of the Andaman Islands and to the Indian mainland, first, then to America after that, on his own.
Regardless of how that happened, Antonio mused, he would need to hike from here to the beach and the mud flats--that much was true no matter what happened after that. So he walked out of the hut, took one last look at the dead villagers, bowed his head in a moment of prayer, and then left the village.
Chapter 31
By the time Antonio had trekked about halfway from the village to the beach, he was ready to make his first phone call. He’d been moving at a good clip, nearly a jog the entire way, and so he was satisfied enough with his progress to take a rest. Not to mention he had arrangements to make. He found a slanted tree trunk to sit on while he drank water from cup-shaped leaves that had collected during the last rain. He looked around at the forest while he thought about who to call, listening to the twittering of birds, the drone of insects and the unseen activity that caused branches to crack and leaves to crackle. To his practiced ears, it sounded similar to the Amazon, and yet he was sure that if he closed his eyes while listening to recordings of both forests, that he would be able to distinguish them.
You knew you were an ecologist when you could tell apart the different forests by sound alone, Antonio thought with a sigh. You knew you’d been in the game a long time when you got to that point. Maybe it was time to hang it up after this, he considered with a twinge of sadness. Or at least cut back to teaching only, no more field research. After this he wasn’t sure he could ever handle visiting the jungle again, especially seeing a tribe.
But those were things to think about later. Right now he still had a situation to deal with, notably getting off this island with an artifact that someone was willing to commit what was tantamount to genocide for. He turned his sat-phone over in his hands as he thought about his next move. He decided that he’d rather get to the beach before trying to arrange transportation. He wasn’t entirely sure his phone calls couldn’t be tracked, if not the conversation itself, then simply the radio signals which could be used to triangulate his position as they bounced around various satellites and receivers.
But the stickier problem was what to do with the artifact in his backpack. He couldn’t very well keep this thing forever. Stel’s hit men would seek him out when they did make it down to the pit and couldn’t find it. He imagined them torturing him to pry the whereabouts of the stone from him, thinking maybe that he knew where the tribe had hidden it. Shivering, he scrolled through the pitifully short contact list in his sat-phone. A few work colleagues, mostly, including Stel, he noted with a sour frown. He needed some sort of serious help with this, maybe even government intervention.
Government…He had a few Brazilian government contacts, including President Rocha now, but he was in India, and he knew absolutely no one here. It was Stel’s domain, not his. Then there was his government, but why would it be the U.S. government’s problem? Why would they care? He thought about this while watching the sun’s rays filter through the trees. The artifact represented unknown technology. As such, it was something they’d want to learn from. Not only that, it came embedded in a meteorite, which meant it could have originated from space. If they wanted an inside track into obtaining a first look at what might possibly be alien technology, then they would need to help Antonio locate Stel and the half-rock device he stole.
Antonio nodded to himself as his eye caught on one of the names in his contact list.
James Duncan.
Duncan was his main grant administration contact with the National Science Foundation. He was the guy Antonio dealt with whenever he had to apply for a new grant. They’d worked together in that capacity for most of the last ten years. Antonio tried to think of who else he knew in government, but after another minute of searching both his phone and his brain, he had to conclude that Duncan was it.
