I was glad we had been honest with him. "Thank you very much."

Sabrina went a step further. She gave him a quick hug. "Thank you, Paulo."

Well that certainly cemented their relationship. I was going to have to pry him off her with a crowbar from that point on.

We stowed the guns in our bags and went back out on deck. Ten minutes later Paulo cast off as Luis put the boat in gear. As we motored into the river Sabrina said quietly, "Del, look back at the dock. Who do you see?"

It took me a minute, but then I saw them, the goons from the hotel in Wahoo.

"How the hell …?"

"Do you think they followed us down here?" she asked.

"Or did they assume we were coming and came down before us?"

"Maybe they were watching the flights from the states. Could they have followed us from the airport?"

"I suppose they could have," I answered. "We weren't really looking for anyone."

"Do you think they know where we're going?"

"If they followed us from the states, then they might not know. But if they were waiting for us, then they have to. Either way, we have to assume that we won't be alone when we reach Fordlandia."

"I guess that's not a total surprise."

"If we were right and the guys in the hotel were Mario's men, I don't think they're the ones we should be most afraid of."

"So the question is," said Sabrina, "where are the Russians?"

Chapter 30

We were pretty sure that for the trip anyway, we wouldn't have any trouble—an assumption we almost came to regret—so we tried to settle down and enjoy the scenery.

The head of the Amazon was busier than I expected, and many of the boats were tour boats. We passed several that had dozens of brightly-colored hammocks covering the deck. I had read that many of the tours gave the option of private cabins or hammocks. Each time we passed one of these boats was just a confirmation that we had made the right choice in hiring Luis and Paulo. We appreciated the privacy of a smaller boat, and somehow felt a little safer in their presence.

Luis, probably because of his lack of English, kept to himself piloting the boat. Yet despite that, we felt a closeness to him. Paulo, on the other hand, was gregarious and informative, spending much time narrating our trip in his broken English. Most of the tour boats kept to the center of the river. Luis, maybe at the suggestion of Paulo, brought us closer to shore to get a better feel of the jungle. The farther we went, the fewer boats we saw.

There were long stretches of unspoiled jungle, full of some of the most beautiful plants we had ever seen. But as gorgeous as it was, it was the animal life that blew us away. We had never seen such brightly-colored birds. And they were everywhere. It was like passing through the world's largest zoo. And it wasn't just the birds that filled the color spectrum. Millions of butterflies of all sizes and hues dotted the shoreline, often coming out to the boat and flying around our heads.