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Chapters (95)
  1. Title Page
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. 4
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  8. 7
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  10. 9
  11. 10
  12. 11
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  48. 47
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  50. 49
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  90. 89
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  94. Also by DAVID KLASS
  95. Copyright Page

Insects are fleeing. Rodents are evacuating, rats and mice and capybaras as big as goats are leaping into the river like lemmings. Ground birds take wing and rise in riotous throngs. Traumatized monkeys climb skyward, seeking the security of the very highest branches.

A slow tide of red-brown mud is oozing out of the jungle, squeezing and shifting, and slowly covering everything in its path. Except that mud doesn’t change course willfully. Mud can’t flow uphill, or use tactical skill to find hidden soldiers and then chase them down.

Ants! Millions of them. Marching in columns in their own highly disciplined army. Eating leaves. Scattering rodents. Putting to flight birds and beetles. And surrounding and devouring the colonel’s soldiers.

I see one man directly across the river jump from his concealed lair in a tree, shrieking pitifully. He manages to rip off all his clothes, and runs for the river stark naked, swatting at his body. But he is cut off by a moving carpet of ants. They crawl up his legs and swarm over his genitals. They reach his face and cover his eyes. Blinded, he trips and falls, and instantly disappears beneath the swarm, as if drowning in a low tide.

His shrieks continue for a few moments, and then stop.

The whole rain forest is silent again. The colonel’s men who lay in ambush now lie dead on the bank. The ants pull back, receding like an outgoing tide. I can’t bear to even look at some of their victims, almost completely stripped of flesh.

Kidah waves from a rock on the bank, and a hundred or so canoes come into view. I realize that most of our flotilla stayed back, out of reach of the enemy guns. Kidah anticipated that the gun emplacements were a ruse, and that the real attack would come from the opposite bank.

Did he play along, using a calculated risk to set an even cleverer and more deadly trap? Check and mate.

The hundred or so surviving canoes don’t continue upriver. They pull over to the bank near Kidah, and the Indians get out.

The warriors I’m with join them, and I follow along. I guess we were too exposed on the river, so Kidah has decided to press on overland. We start hiking through the thick brush, forging our own trail through the green wilderness. It’s late afternoon, and we’re soon deep in the dark rain forest, safely beneath the seamless canopy. The colonel may know we’re coming, but he’ll never be able to track us, even with air surveillance.

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