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Back Jungle Up Save as PDF
Chapters (63)
  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
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  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
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  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
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  58. 58
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  62. 62
  63. Author’s Note

“Fine.” He waved her to the jungle. “Guillermo,” he said, pointing at the tall soldier whose wrist Gina nearly broke at the village. “Make sure she doesn’t try anything.”

Gina pushed twenty meters into the jungle, making sure to stay as close to the path they’d forged as possible, and squatted. Guillermo seemed only too happy to watch Gina relieve herself.

“Do you mind?” she shouted in Spanish.

He smiled but didn’t take his eyes off her.

There was no way she could leave it here without him noticing. She finished, stood, then headed back to camp. As she neared the long-dead ashes of the fire they’d built to cook dinner the previous evening, Gina’s foot caught on a small exposed root in the ground.

She fell chest first into the ash, her hands underneath her body and slightly bracing her fall. With a slight groan, Gina pulled her hands out of the ash and pushed herself up.

“You okay?” Benecio asked in Spanish.

Gina dusted off the front of her shirt and tried to hide her embarrassment. “I’m fine,” she told him.

She glanced up and saw that Patrick was staring at her. Gina held her breath, exhaling only after he nodded at his feet where the bamboo gurney was holding his boss and said, “Pick him up. Let’s move.”

17

17

jungle
august 15, 2:14 p.m.
days since abduction: 10

“Someone made camp here,” Diego said, knocking his hand against the bamboo lean-to, then inspecting it more closely. He squatted near it, shook one of the bamboo supports, then ran one of his hands through his buzzed black hair.

I’d been in enough interrogation rooms and sat through enough body language seminars to know this wasn’t a good sign.

“What’s the problem?” I asked Diego.

“The lean-to . . . and the fire . . . It looks Yanomina.”

Although we hadn’t encountered any other villages or villagers outside of the Tibióno, according to Diego there were several other tribes who lived in the jungle. They were constantly hunting for food, and sometimes they traveled wide distances.

I asked, “You think this is a Yanomina camp?”

Diego scratched his head once more and said, “Sí, sí. I think so.”

Vern said, “So we’ve been following a bunch of Yanomina this whole time?”

Diego nodded.

Vern let out a sigh, then looked at me. “Sorry, Thomas.”

I was trying to comprehend what this all meant, when Diego summed it up for me: “We must go back.”

“Go back?” I asked. “Go back where?”

“To the village.”

I blinked my eyes several times, trying to fight back my rising frustration. “You’re telling me that we have to backtrack the ten miles we just walked?”