With her eyes shut, Jillian imagines the view from the jungle floor. She pictures the man standing down there in the mud with ferns and leaves brushing against his legs, looking up at the torn remains of the aircraft. She pictures both her father and the pilot taking turns in the shadows. She imagines what it must look like to see the long, slender, tubular cabin of the Gulfstream, its sloping wings, the tail and the engines all suspended a hundred feet in the air. She visualizes the way the aircraft is caught in the trees, dangling over the forest floor. She pictures the way sunlight breaks through the leaves in the canopy, causing shadows to dance over the slick metal. She imagines the way the paint must have been scraped away during the crash. She pictures fuel dripping from the fuselage and the pungent smell of aviation gas, knowing it would be like standing on the taxiway at the airport, waiting to board a private jet.

  Jillian doesn’t have any answers, but her heart rate is slowing, and she knows her therapist would tell her that she’s winning, that merely taking charge of her mind is victory in itself. Her therapist would tell her that being at peace allows answers to emerge, making the impossible possible.

  Without moving from her seat, Jillian imagines watching herself from the jungle floor as she clambers down toward the torn edge of the fuselage. In her mind’s eye, she can see herself reaching the sharp metal edges and descending down the tree trunk, grabbing at branches, using the sheets tied together as a rope. She sees herself drop the backpack, throwing it clear of both the wreckage and the branches, watching as it plummets to the undergrowth. She pictures herself reaching one of the lower limbs, still easily eighty feet from the jungle floor, and the tied sheets coming to an end. From there, she has to risk a fall and climb down the slick tree trunk, but it’s easy to imagine getting stuck, and that causes her heart to race. Anxiety wells up within her. In her mind, she looks up at the sheets dangling above her and realizes that she’ll give up. She won’t go on because she can’t. She’ll simply climb back up. She’ll tell herself she tried, but that’s a lie. She only tried to the point where she got stuck and couldn’t see any other options. She tried until the point it became impossible—that’s what she’ll tell herself. But impossible is a perspective, not a truth. It’s impossible only because she’s limited to her vantage point. What’s impossible to her might be easy for someone else, like a mountain climber. Jillian may not be a mountaineer, but she doesn’t need to be; what she needs is persistence.

  If only she could free the sheets from where she tied them to the base of a chair. If she could somehow loosen the sheets once she was resting on a tree limb, she’d be able to loop them over one of the lower branches and continue down the trunk of the tree. And that’s when it hits her. That’s when the impossible becomes possible. If she can’t free a tied sheet, then the solution is obvious: don’t tie the sheet. But she’ll fall if the sheet isn’t tied to something, or will she?

  “It needs to be shorter,” she says against all possible reason.

  It’s all so clear to her now. Instead of focusing on what she can’t do, she’s finally thinking about what she can do. Mentally, she traverses the torn fuselage again. This time, she doesn’t tie the sheets in place. She shortens them. Instead of trying to go down as far as she possibly can, she loops the sheets over the base of one of the chairs, doubling them on themselves, holding the two ends together. Then she climbs down, but in her mind, she doesn’t get far. She only reaches the closest branches and a gnarly old limb just a few feet below the torn fuselage, but that’s okay. She doesn’t need to reach the ground. What she needs is a reusable rope. By not tying the sheets to the chair, she can let go of one end and tug on the other. The sheet will then slide free and tumble down toward her, and she can ‘rinse and repeat.’ She can loop the sheet over the branch she’s on, lower herself another ten to fifteen feet, clinging to both ends of the sheet as though they were a single rope. And then she can let go of one end, tug on the other, and draw it back down to her yet again.

  “I can do this,” she says, feeling a rush of excitement surge within her.

  Before she climbs down, Jillian throws anything loose into the jungle, including the mattress. She has no idea what, if anything, will actually be useful down there, but there’s no sense leaving anything up in the canopy.

  And then she commits to her plan. Just as she pictured. She climbs down the sheets she’s tied together, doubling them over rather than tying them off, and then repeats the process time and again, slowly but confidently working her way to the jungle below. She’s not in a rush, being painstakingly careful, knowing one poor handhold or accidentally slipping on the wet bark could end her life. For once, Jillian’s not giving up; she’s not relying on anyone else; she’s not falling back on her parents; she’s making her own decisions.

  “I’m coming,” she calls out to whoever is down there, not thinking about exactly who might be waiting for her on the jungle floor. Rather than being quick, her process is slow and repetitive, but it’s safe. When she reaches a branch, she lets go of one end of the ∩-shaped knotted sheets, lets them fall down to her, loops them over the branch she’s on, and climbs down to the next branch. It’s not long before her arms ache. Her fingers are sore from carrying her body weight, but she persists. If there’s one trait she’s inherited from her father, it’s stubborn persistence.

  When her shoes finally sink into the mud and leaves on the ground, she feels an immense sense of relief. Jillian is lost, stranded in the middle of the jungle, but she’s alive. That’s all that matters.

  Ants scurry across the ground. A centipede climbs the tree beside her. Birds rush through the air, swerving with their wings to avoid branches. High above her, she can still see the monkey that inspired calm in her. She smiles.

  And then she sees him. A naked man stands in the shadows. Dark mud is caked on his body. Cracks run through the dried dirt, revealing the outline of his muscles.

  “El Diablo,” she whispers.

  The devil faces her. He has the head of a crocodile. Black scales line his face, forming channels and grooves in the bumpy hide, leading down to a pair of broad nostrils. Beady eyes watch her. He snarls. Gnarled, yellow teeth torment her.

  Jillian freezes.

  He steps toward her with a spear in his hand, stepping over the twisted roots on the ground. With muscles clenched, he raises the spear.

  She turns and runs.

  Her heart pounds within her chest as she pushes through the ferns. Branches scratch her skin, but on she runs. She can hear the warrior behind her, trampling the undergrowth. Within seconds, the man is on top of her, crash-tackling her and sending her sprawling into a cluster of ferns. Jillian rolls over to see the devil straddling her body, raising the spear like a club, holding it high above him and bringing it down, striking her on the side of her skull. And with that, pain surges through her head as the world around her goes dark.

  Base Javari

  The flight to Base Javari on the edge of the Boca do Ituí region deep within the Amazon rainforest takes less than an hour in a helicopter. As per standard operating procedure over the jungle, they cruise at a thousand feet, allowing Lisa to see the way the Itaquai River twists and turns on itself like a brown snake in green grass. The bends and curves come close to touching. In those places where they do connect, the old curl is starved of water, and trees spring up, desperate to claim whatever land they can, and the river finds a new course through the jungle. S-curves unfold one after the other, making navigation by landmarks impossible. GPS guides them to Base Javari at the confluence of two tributaries.

  For Lisa, it’s nice to have a pair of noise-canceling headphones on, along with some dark shades, as she stares out at the jungle she’s come to love. From on high, it’s stunning for its sheer size. On the ground, it is impenetrable. If the Americans spot where the Gulfstream crashed, they’ll travel up the river to the closest point and then beach their boats and march inland. The US Rangers have machetes, axes and a few chainsaws. Lisa doubts it will be enough to let them penetrate more than half a mile into the Vale do Javari. When she was following drug smugglers on the border with Colombia, the locals would use deer trails, and even then, the going was slow. They’d do well to cover more than a couple of miles in a day, and they were moving between already established villages and rivers. They had clear destinations. Here, there’s nothing but forest.

  The helicopter banks, circling the land that’s been cleared in the Y-shaped fork between the two rivers. A couple of Amazonian long boats sit at a wooden dock on the muddy water. It might be sunny today, but their rusting, corroded iron roofs are a reminder of how much it rains in this region. Raised wooden walkways have been built between the dock and the various huts. They’re set on poles reaching over fifteen feet above the grassy ground, reminding Lisa of how often the river overflows its banks. There are barracks and a command center, along with an observation tower. The broad river is serene, with barely any motion on its surface, but like so many of the tributaries leading into the Amazon River, an astonishing amount of water flows along these waterways every day. There are a couple of boats lying on their side near the command center, on the flanks of the central hill, well away from the river, providing a stark reminder of how high the water can reach.

  A long, narrow wooden boat approaches from the River Itui. Armed militia sit on either side, sheltered from the harsh sun by a rusting corrugated iron roof. Rifle barrels point lazily in all directions. They’re returning from a patrol further up the river.

  A dust storm is kicked up as the helicopter sets down on the grassy bank in front of the main house, staying well clear of the guy wires holding up a radio mast on the edge of the clearing. With wheels on the ground, the Rangers jump out, hauling absurdly large canvas bags along with their packs and weapons.

  Lisa’s not sure how she feels being this deep in the Vale. To the untrained eye, the Brazilian jungle is indistinguishable from the region in Peru around Iquitos and the border towns of Colombia and Ecuador, but the Amazon is deceptive. The jungle mocks civilization. Lisa’s seen the disdain of villagers caught up in drug wars they don’t understand. No one in Colombia knows what an addict looks like on the streets of New York. To them, skyscrapers are alien structures. The subway is monstrous. A single train carries more people than they’ve seen in an entire lifetime. And then there’s the Vale. Even the locals fear the Vale. Out here, the world comes to an end. Time reverts tens of thousands of years into the past. Nothing is what it seems. They might as well be on another planet.

  Lisa hops down, following Major McCallum and Captain Hugo Cincao as they jog away from the helicopter, keeping their heads low as the rotor blades slice through the air above them. Typical fucking military leaders. They’re in a rush for no reason whatsoever. The soldiers know. They stack their gear in the shade of one of the walkways and get out of the sun. McCallum and Cincao, though, make for the main building. Orders must be issued. Plans need to be discussed. Action has to be taken. Apparently.

  “Take this, will you?” Lisa says to her guide, Gabriel, handing him her pack.

  “Sure.”

  Like the soldiers, Gabriel avoids running under the blistering hot sun. Unceremoniously, he dumps both of their packs with the soldiers’ gear and gets into the shade. Against her better judgment, Lisa jogs after the officers, catching them as they climb a ladder onto the T-shaped walkway.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” a scrawny man dressed in camo-fatigues says in broken English from the rickety walkway. He points at himself as though he were teaching a child to speak. “I am Cristóvão. Cristó—vão. Welcome to Base Javari.”

  The officers introduce themselves. It’s at that point Lisa notices Cristóvão offering a slight nod to Gabriel under the far branch of the T-shaped walkway. With missing teeth, Gabriel responds with a thumbs-up that goes unnoticed by the officers.

  “Please. Come,” Cristóvão says. “There is much to discuss.”

  As they march along the boardwalk, they pass under a sign that reads: Ministerio Da Justica—Terra Indigena Vale do Javari. The Brazilian army might not have any direct involvement with the militia, but they are operating under government oversight.

  Cristóvão leads them out of the sun and into the shade of a building without walls. Pillars support a large, pitched corrugated-iron roof. Lisa wouldn’t have thought it possible, but it’s even hotter in the still air beneath the hut. The iron roof seems to act as a radiator. Much to Lisa’s relief, Cristóvão starts a fan, but all that does is drive hot, humid air at them.

  “Water?” Cristóvão asks. “You must drink much water out here. More than normal.”

  “Yes, thank you,” Major McCallum says as Cristóvão pours four large glasses.

  “How do you get fresh water out here?” Lisa asks, looking at a thin layer of silt settling on the bottom of her glass.

  “Solar still,” Cristóvão replies, pointing at the roof. “Run by solar power.”

  She sips the water. It tastes like the weakest tea she’s ever had in her life. It’s beyond tepid, being as warm as a cup of coffee that’s cooled with a drop of creamer, but it’s lacking taste and, importantly, caffeine. Back in Piura, on the coastal plains of northern Peru, the coffee is exquisite. Inland cities like Iquitos sell coffee as a luxury item, as the locals prefer to chew coca leaves. Lisa was surprised to learn the leaf itself isn’t narcotic. It takes a stupid amount of coca leaves to make cocaine, at a ratio of something like 400 kg of leaves to a single kilo of coke—that and copious amounts of gasoline and cement. If the high society cocaine users she knows back in New York could see cocaine being made in a grubby factory in the middle of the steaming hot jungle, they’d think twice about snorting a line in the bathroom. Sipping the water, she figures it could do with a few coca leaves, or perhaps a handful of tea leaves and some sugar.

  Cristóvão shows them a map laid on a wooden table. It’s similar to the one Major McCallum has of the Vale do Javari, only Cristóvão has used a pen to mark a grid over several sections of the river.

  “These are the areas we patrol.”

  “And the crosses?” the major asks.

  “Blue crosses mark where we’ve caught poachers.”

  “And the red crosses?”

  “Engagements. Deaths. Both ours and theirs. And these. The circles. We know of at least two illegal settlements in the region.”

  “Settlements?” Captain Cincao asks.

  “Criminals on the run. They get recruited by the drug lords. Sent to work out here.”

  Lisa’s surprised by this last point. She asks, “There are drug factories this deep in the forest?”

  “No, not factories. Stores. The lords—they hedge their bets. Keep everything in one place, and you can be shut down with a single raid. Spread your product wide, and you can absorb the hits. If Peru cracks down, you ship through Brazil. If the army approaches, you send your cocaine north through Colombia. It’s all about limiting losses.”

  Lisa raises her eyebrows, making a mental note to include this point in her exposé.

  “But we control the river mouth,” Cristóvão says. “It keeps the lords to the north. Some. A few venture into the Vale, crossing west of us through the jungle, but if our patrols don’t get them, the caiman will.”

  Major McCallum asks, “And the storm? Did you or your men hear the aircraft that came down in the storm?”

  “No. No aircraft.”

  The major taps the map, focusing on an area between the rivers, deep into the Vale. “This is where we think they went down.”

  Lisa is curious. Her brow narrows. The major is quite insistent on this particular spot. He’s unusually precise. He’s pretending to be vague, speaking in general terms, but this is the same ridge he pointed at back in the airport hangar. He hasn’t picked a random spot.

  “This is not good,” Cristóvão says, shaking his head.

  “Why?”

  “You see the rivers. The V-shape they form. How they divide into the valleys, becoming ever wider apart the further you move into the Vale. Here, there are easily forty, perhaps fifty kilometers of dense jungle between them. This region. It is impassible.”

  “But your men could—”

  “No, no. Not my men. We stick to the river. We venture maybe a hundred yards. Two hundred into the jungle. Not miles. Not ten miles.” He sweeps his finger between the two rivers. “You cannot cross this jungle.”

  “Why not?”

  “You do not understand,” Cristóvão says. “This is the lost world. You go in. You don’t come out.”

  The major taps the same spot on the map again. “That’s where we think they are.”

  “Why do you think that?” Lisa asks, narrowing her brow. “How do you know where they are?”

  The major is quiet. Lisa turns to Captain Cincao of the Brazilian Army, asking, “You’ve searched this area from the air, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And nothing. You’ve found nothing at all.”

  “No.”

  Lisa turns back to the major. She taps the map, saying, “So why do you want to go there?”

  The major looks angry in a way only military personnel can. His eyes narrow slightly. His jaw clenches. His cheeks rise. It’s rage hidden behind professionalism.

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Bullshit.”

  The others might be used to military command and the need to defer to authority, but not Lisa. “You already know where they are, don’t you? What the hell are you waiting for?”

  The major’s lips pull tight. The skin on his upper lip goes white as the tendons in his neck flex. His nostrils flare. It’s slight, but Lisa doesn’t care.

  “You might fool them, but you don’t fool me. I’m not one of your lackeys. I don’t give a damn about the Special Reconnaissance Ranger unit or whatever the hell it’s called. You know something. Spit it out.”

  He takes a deep breath.

  Lisa goads him. “This is a safe space. You’re among friends.”

  He shakes his head and laughs, which takes her off guard. “You… They warned me about you.”

 

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