"I would normally agree, except for one additional oddity." O'Brien shuffled through the dossier's ream of papers and pulled out two photo-graphs. He handed over the first one. "This was taken just a few days before he departed on his mission:"
Fielding glanced at the grainy photo of a man dressed in Levi's, a Hawaiian shirt,
and a safari hat. The man wore a large grin and was hoisting a tropical drink in hand. "Agent Clark?"
"Yes, the photo was taken by one of the researchers during a going-away party." O'Brien passed him the second photograph. "And this was taken at the morgue in Manaus, where the body now resides:'
Fielding took the glossy with a twinge of queasiness. He had no desire to look at photographs of dead people, but he had no choice. The corpse in this photograph was naked, laid out on a stainless steel table, an emaciated skeleton wrapped in skin. Strange tattoos marked his flesh. Still, Fielding recognized the man's facial features. It was Agent Clark-but with one notable difference. He retrieved the first photograph and compared the two.
O'Brien must have noted the blood draining from his face and spoke up. "Two years prior to his disappearance, Agent Clark took a sniper's bullet to his left arm during a forced recon mission in Iraq. Gangrene set in before he could reach a U.S. camp. The limb had to be amputated at the shoulder, ending his career with the army's Special Forces."
"But the body in the morgue has both arms:'
"Exactly. The fingerprints from the corpse's arm match those on file prior to the shooting. It would seem Agent Clark went into the Amazon with one arm and came back with two:"
"But that's impossible. What the hell happened out there?"
Marshall O'Brien studied Fielding with his hawkish eyes, demonstrating why he had earned his nickname, the Old Bird. Fielding felt like a mouse before an eagle. The old man's voice deepened. "That's what I intend to find out:"
ACT ONE - The Mission
CURARE
FAMILY: Menispermaceae
GENUS: Chondrodendron
SPECIES: Tomentosum
COMMON NAME: Curate
PARTS USED: Leaf Root
PROPERTIES/ACTIONS: Diuretic, Febrifuge,
Muscle Relaxant, Tonic, Poison
CHAPTER ONE
Snakes Oil
AUGUST 6, 10:1 1 A.M.
AMAZON JUNGLE, BRAZIL
The anaconda held the small Indian girl wrapped in its heavy coils, dragging her toward the river.
Nathan Rand was on his way back to the Yanomamo village after an early morning of gathering medicinal plants when he heard her screams. He dropped his specimen bag and ran to her aid. As he sprinted, he shrugged his short-barreled shotgun from his shoulder. When alone in the jungle, one always carried a weapon.
He pushed through a fringe of dense foliage and spotted the snake and girl. The anaconda, one of the largest he had ever seen, at least forty feet in length, lay half in the water and half stretched out on the muddy beach. Its black scales shone wetly. It must have been lurking under the surface when the girl had come to collect water from the river. It was not unusual for the giant snakes to prey upon animals who came to the river to drink: wild peccary, capybara rodents, forest deer. But the great snakes seldom at-tacked humans.
Still, during the past decade of working as a ethnobotanist in the jungles of the Amazon basin, Nathan had learned one important rule: if a beast were hungry enough, all rules were broken. It was an eat-or-be-eaten world under the endless green bower.
Nathan squinted through his gun's sight. He recognized the girl. "Oh, God, Tama!" She was the chieftain's nine-year-old niece, a smiling, happy child who had given him a bouquet of jungle flowers as a gift upon his arrival in the village a month ago. Afterward she kept pulling at the hairs on his arm, a rarity among the smooth-skinned Yanomamo, and nick-named him Jako Basho, "Brother Monkey."
Biting his lip, he searched through his weapon's sight. He had no clean shot, not with the child wrapped in the muscular coils of the predator.
"Damn it!" He tossed his shotgun aside and reached to the machete at his belt. Unhitching the weapon, Nathan lunged forward-but as he neared, the snake rolled and pulled the girl under the black waters of the river. Her screams ended and bubbles followed her course.
Without thinking, Nathan dove in after her.
Of all the environments of the Amazon, none were more dangerous than its waterways. Under its placid surfaces lay countless hazards. Schools of bone-scouring piranhas hunted its depths, while stingrays lay buried in the mud and electric eels roosted amid roots and sunken logs. But worst of all were the river's true man-killers, the black caimans-giant crocodilian reptiles. With all its dangers, the
Indians of the Amazon knew better than to venture into unknown waters.
But Nathan Rand was no Indian.
Holding his breath, he searched through the muddy waters and spotted the surge of coils ahead. A pale limb waved. With a kick of his legs, he reached out to the small hand, snatching it up in his large grip. Small fingers clutched his in desperation.