Black Rain

With a dearth of rainfall over the interior, the animals should have been plentiful near the streams that still flowed. This wasn’t Africa, where the herds crowded water holes until the monsoons arrived, but the principle was the same: lack of rain brought animals to the water, concentrating them in a restricted area. They should have found tracks and droppings and heard them day and night at the riverbanks and in the areas of forest around them. But the jungle had been strangely vacant and muted. Plenty of birds, along with fish in the streams and reptiles on the banks, but the animals seemed to be missing, the mammals in particular. Verhoven had seen nothing much larger than a rat. Maybe the rainforest was dying, like all the tree-huggers said. A shame if it was, but not really his problem.

Verhoven put a thermal scope to his eye and scanned the broad swath of jungle that lay ahead of him. Little blips of heat could be seen here and there in the undergrowth, phosphorescent flares in the red tint of the eyepiece; more rodents and other tiny mammals. He panned along a wide arc and saw nothing more. As he lowered the device something rustled the trees.

He brought the scope back up. Deeper in the forest, almost at eye level, he saw a spread of branches swaying in a vertical recoil, the way they did when a monkey launched itself from them. He scanned across an arc, looking up into the trees and then back down. Nothing. No sign of anything that might have bent the branches in such a manner.

He heard a sound to the right and swung in that direction, bringing his rifle up as he turned.

A figure held out a hand in warning: Hawker.

Verhoven lowered the rifle slightly, staring at his old acquaintance. He spat a shot of tobacco juice onto the dirt an inch from Hawker’s feet. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

Hawker stared back at him for a long moment. “I was once.”

Verhoven lowered the rifle the rest of the way. “Walk up on me like that again and you’ll be dead for good.”

Hawker stopped a few feet from Verhoven and searched the forest himself. “Any particular reason that you’re so jumpy?”

Verhoven didn’t like the question, nor did he like the fact that Hawker was armed, carrying a black pistol: a PA-45—a big gun, forty-five caliber, fourteen shots. “What the hell are you doing out here?”

Hawker nodded toward the trees. “Something didn’t feel right.”

Verhoven turned back to the forest. Hawker had always been slightly paranoid, but that sixth sense had saved him more than once. Verhoven remembered a time when he and Hawker had been targeted for a mortar round that ended up hitting the spot they’d been standing in only a minute before, a spot they’d left because of Hawker’s paranoia. “You’re hearing things again, mate. There’s nothing out there.”

“You sure about that?”

In all honesty, Verhoven wasn’t sure, but he didn’t like the question, or having Hawker poking around. He held out the scope. “Take the watch, if you want. I’ll go catch some rest.”

Hawker declined the offer and Verhoven began to wonder what Hawker was really doing out there, both in the immediate sense and in general. “So you’re with the NRI now.”

Hawker shook his head. “Hired hand, just like you.”

“Odd coincidence, that.”

“Very odd,” Hawker said. “Almost like fate.”

Verhoven believed in fate, but he knew Hawker didn’t. Do everything right and you can live forever, Hawker had once said. Verhoven disagreed. When your number’s up, it’s up. Maybe one of their numbers was about to be up, a long-standing debt about to be paid. Maybe Hawker had even recommended him for the mission in order to draw him out, to finally settle the old score. He laughed at the thought. Who sounded paranoid now?

He checked the trees and then looked back at Hawker. “So why’d you take the job, then? Find the Queen’s shilling in the bottom of your flask?”

“Something like that,” Hawker said.

Verhoven moved the ever-present tobacco wad around in his mouth, forcing it back into place and spitting out some of the excess. He looked over at Hawker. They hadn’t spoken on the boat or in the jungle for the past week, doing their jobs and ignoring each other, and it was a strange, almost surreal feeling to be holding a conversation with him now. Old friends and old enemies who’d spent two years working together in Angola a decade ago, when Hawker was with the CIA and Verhoven was still with the SASF.

The alliance had worked well, until new orders came down from the CIA, orders that Hawker had chosen not to follow. That decision divided them, setting Hawker on a collision course with everyone he knew, making enemies out of friends. Verhoven had even played a small part in Hawker’s capture, but then things had spiraled out of control, leading everyone to anguish, and eventually to what had seemed like Hawker’s death.