Orinoco Read online

  A World of Intrigue and Adventure...

  ORINOCO

  By Dan Pollock

  Tusitala Press

  Text copyright © 1994 and 2013 by Dan Pollock

  All rights reserved

  Orinoco is a work of fiction, set in a fictitious Venezuela circa 1993, before the rise of Hugo Chávez. Cerro Bolívar, Venezuela’s famed mountain of iron, is a principal landmark of the savanna south of the Orinoco River. Cerro Calvario exists only in the following pages.

  (Note: This book was first published by Pocket Books in 1994 under the title Pursuit Into Darkness.)

  Acknowledgments (from the Pocket Books edition)

  “Many people helped me gather information for this novel: Scott Swanson of Lost World Adventures in Marietta, Georgia; in Caracas, Argimiro Araujo, Jesús Ivan Blanco and Francisco Da Costa; in Ciudad Bolívar, Guillero Rodriguez of Aerotuy Airlines. For additional assistance I wish to thank Arlene Worwa, Lee Barr, RAmira and Robert Commagere, Dudley Frasier, Dan O’Toole, Russ Parsons, Larry Spears and G.J. Berger.

  “My deepest bow goes, as ever, to my wife, Connie, who shared the entire adventure, from walking through waterfalls to proofing galleys.”

  By the same author:

  Lair of the Fox

  Duel of Assassins

  Precipice

  The Running Boy

  The author welcomes comments and questions on his blog: http://danpollock.blogspot.com

  Or email: [email protected]

  Map and cover design: Dan Pollock

  “I never give quotes for fiction books, but Dan Pollock is a writer of talent and drive.

  His ORINOCO is a riveting read.”

  —Len Deighton

  “The mining of iron ore in the jungles of Venezuela is hampered by archaeological finds, and we have the ingredients of a good old-fashioned action-adventure story. Dan Pollock brings the reader right into the exotic locale and peoples his story with interesting characters. A well-written and obviously well-researched novel; classical escape reading.”

  —Nelson DeMille

  “Vivid and unforgettable…”

  —Liz Smith, syndicated columnist

  “What a ripping read! ORINOCO is a rapidly moving, thoroughly satisfying opus, good for a winter’s night or a summer’s day.”

  —Thomas M. Keneally, author of Schindler’s List

  To David, my big brother,

  who led the way

  “Thus does the Great Orinoco divide Venezuela…”

  —W. H. Hudson, Green Mansions

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Epilogue

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO AVAILABLE ON KINDLE

  Chapter One

  New Orleans, 1993

  The ranch hat and hand-tooled boots were pretty much standard, but Sam Warrender didn’t usually show up at corporate headquarters in faded blue jeans and a dusty chamois shirt. He had come to New Orleans on a hurry-up because of an emergency call he’d taken on horseback that morning on his Oklahoma ranch. The company had a new problem in Venezuela, a major one.

  Before holstering his cellular phone, Sam had called a neighbor and canceled afternoon plans to fly over and check out some breeding stock. Then, without bothering to change clothes, he’d packed his black satchel for South America and hustled his twin-prop Cessna off the end of his ranch strip and out across the Panhandle haze toward the Crescent City. He’d parked the plane about eight hundred miles away and four hours later at the municipal airport beside Lake Ponchartrain, arranging to have oversize tail numbers affixed for Caribbean customs, a life raft and vest stowed aboard and the long-range fuel tanks topped off. Then he grabbed a taxi for the central business district and the Proteus Industries building on Lafayette.

  Inside, the security guard greeted him warmly and ushered him into the private elevator serving the skyscraper’s three top floors. Sam’s fifty-nine years showed far more in close-up, under the bright elevator gridlights, than they had in his ambling stride across the vaulted lobby. Considerable history was stamped in the rough-hewn features, in the hollowed, stubbled cheeks and hooded, wolf-gray eyes, and on the weathered brown hide and prominent veins of his large hands. The thinning, silvery hair, however, was deceptive. Sam’s hair had actually darkened a bit over the decades from the dazzling snowcap of childhood. It had been a comfortable stretch of years, thank God, since anyone had invoked his schoolyard name of “Whitey.”

  A chime bonged, and the mirror-polished brass doors opened on the thirty-first floor. Evangeline Birdette, corporate receptionist, stood welcome with her benign, schoolmistress smile. Behind her, under the atrium skylight, water trickled discreetly from a welded-sculpture waterfall.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Sam. Another short retirement?”

  “What the hell, Birdy. You know I hate golf.”

  “They’re all waiting for you inside, Mr. Sam. LuEllen just sent out to Copeland’s for your favorite red beans and rice.” She made a grab for the ranch hat, but he whisked it behind him.

  “I hope she got it to go, Birdy. I’m not staying long.”

  *

  A full-fledged war council was assembled around the oval slab of black marble, a panoply of top corporate management and divisional vice presidents. Among the missing was the company’s new president, D.W. Lee, who was off vacationing on his private yacht somewhere in the Caribbean. And several faces along the window wall were blotted out by the afternoon panorama of the great river basking in the Delta sun. On the wall opposite, Proteus’s global operations had been rendered as chromium tentacles embracing a Mercator spread of hammered copper continents, from Alaska to Antarctica, and from South America to Siberia.

  Sam made a quick social circuit of the room—it had been several weeks since his last flying visit—then turned to Hardesty Eason, a big red-faced man with a square-cut jacket, who had just cleared his throat. As Proteus’ chief financial officer and a company director, Hardesty ranked second only to Sam among those present.

  “If you’re ready now, Sam, we can start.”

  “Hold your fire, Hardy. Let’s keep this real simple. Ray, why don’t you just show me the situation on one of t
hose maps you got there?”

  Ray Arrillaga, head of South American mining operations, came around the table. He was a small bronze man with steel spectacles and doctorates in engineering and geology. He had been executive vice president of one of Proteus’ major competitors when Sam had hired him away. Arrillaga unfolded a large geological survey map of Venezuela’s Bolívar State and placed a manicured finger on the site of the company’s recent iron-ore find, Cerro Calvario, a hundred miles south of the Orinoco River and Ciudad Bolívar.

  Sam grimaced. “That bad, Ray? Right on top of us?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “So some academics stumble on a bunch of broken pottery on our land, and now we got a cultural minister threatening to shut down our entire operation?”

  “Not threatening, Samuel,” Hardesty cut in. “We’re dead in the water as of this morning.”

  “Temporarily dead,” Arrillaga suggested. “Our friends at the Ministry of Energy and Mines are on the case.”

  “Well, shit! Did anyone think about just roping off this archeological site and working around it?”

  “Their site survey shows artifacts scattered all over the mountain, in a pattern roughly coextensive with the high-grade ore.”

  “Goddammit, Ray, sounds like someone’s seeding the dig, just to stop us. Who are these guys, and what the hell are they doing on Cerro Calvario?”

  Arrillaga hesitated.

  Hardesty Eason spoke up: “You okayed their presence, Samuel. In fact, you arranged it.”

  “I don’t remember doing a damn-fool thing like that!”

  “It was when we were down in Caracas last spring, after we agreed to help fix up their Natural Sciences Museum in that rundown park beside the Hilton. You gave your big hemispheric speech, Sam, then threw money at a couple of scientific groups. One of them, as I’ve been reminded this morning, was an outfit doing archaeological research along the Orinoco. Apparently you also gave them access to our sites.”

  “Jesus Christ, Hardy! You mean we’ve been paying these assholes to shut us down?”

  “That is exactly what we’ve been doing, Sam. In fact, we still are.”

  “Well, stop the damn checks!”

  Sam glared at the assembly, as if daring anyone to even smile. When the room tension reached an uncomfortable level, he gave a low chuckle—a cue for general laughter.

  “Now, Sam, nobody’s blaming you. Exactly.” Parry Joyce was old and harmless enough to get away with this bit of lèse majesté, having recently been eased out as CEO of a Proteus subsidiary and given the meaningless post of chairman of the executive committee.

  “Maybe not, Parry. But next time any of you high-paid wazirs hears me shooting off my mouth for a bunch of Third-Worlders, shut me up quick, okay?”

  “Want me to cut a memo on that, Sam?” deadpanned Rowland McCall, vice president of public relations.

  “Good idea, Rollo. And while you’re at it, put something in there on how you probably just got fired, okay?” Sam flashed a predatory grin, then nodded to Ray Arrillaga. “Ray, I’d like to take along copies of your relevant maps.”

  “They’re in your office, packed to go.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Hold on now, Sam,” Hardesty interrupted. “You don’t need to go rushing off to South America like an old fire horse.”

  “The hell I don’t. I’m sure not solving anything up here, staring out this wonderful big picture window, waiting for the sunset.”

  “Sam, you’re forgetting about D.W.”

  “You’re forgetting, Hardy. The man’s on vacation.”

  “A working vacation.”

  Sam squinted across the table at the speaker, visible only as a broad-shouldered silhouette against the afternoon glare. Ex-Marine Dave Twyman was general manager of the company’s South American petroleum and liquid natural gas operations. “I was on the phone with D.W. this morning, Sam. He was a little north of Tobago, en route to Venezuelan waters to check on our LNG operations in the Gulf of Paria. When I gave him the news, he changed course for the mouth of the Orinoco. I think he gets around fifteen, sixteen knots.”

  “D.W. wants to handle this mess all by himself?”

  “With our help, Samuel,” Hardesty said. “He is president, after all, and, like Dave says, he’s already down there. And look at the job he did for us in Indonesia.”

  “Hardy, I’m not saying anything against D.W. Hell, I picked him for the job. But Indonesia—that’s more D.W.’s neck of the woods.” A naturalized American citizen, D.W. had been born in South Korea; the initials stood for Duk-Won. “He doesn’t exactly speak the lingo down south.”

  “He’s going to need our help, Sam. That’s why we’re having this meeting. While you were flying down from the Lazy S, the rest of us have been drafting our strategy ideas.”

  “That’s fine, Hardy. Let D.W. run the show, you folks back his play every way you know how, and I’ll do the same. You might just tell him I’m on my way down—and bringing my old machete, just in case the red tape gets kinda thick.”

  “Dammit, Sam!” Hardesty exclaimed.

  “Hardy, relax. Gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me. I’ve got a plane to fly.”

  Sam wheeled and strode out of the conference room. After the heavy door latched behind him, the executives traded uneasy glances. All were aware that though the meeting would now continue, it had just been rendered, along with their carefully drafted memos, utterly irrelevant.

  Chapter Two

  By the time Sam had his Cessna aloft and banking sharply over Lake Ponchartrain, the Gulfstream IV that had preceded him down the runway was only a smudge of vapor and wink of gunmetal on the eastern horizon. Sam chuckled. He’d recognized the fancy logo when the sleek bizjet had swung around on the taxiway. It belonged to an Atlanta industrial contracting firm Proteus had almost gobbled up the year before, kind of a throw-in of a larger deal Sam had eventually walked away from. He pictured an executive team hurtling home in the G4’s plush cabin, strapped into their big-butt lounge chairs, clinking highballs or fiddling with their laptops, while the hired help did the driving—just like that old Greyhound bus motto.

  Sam preferred it his way, logging his solitary stick time. He seemed to think more creatively up here, whether occupied with visual or instrument navigation, or just sitting back and letting the plane fly itself while the globe unrolled below. By the time the Big Muddy fanned out into the blue Gulf, he had reached a cruising altitude of five-thousand feet, leaned out his engines and plugged in the first set of coordinates on his LORAN.

  The afternoon ahead promised plenty of contemplative time—a thousand nautical miles over water, south by southeast through the Yucatán Channel, then a short dogleg left past Cuba to Grand Cayman Island where he’d refuel and spend the night. The late October weather was achingly clear, with a ten-knot tailwind. He figured to pick up the VOR-DME beacon at Owen Roberts Airport on Grand Cayman in about three hours and be on the ground in a little over four. Jamaica was only a short hop beyond, but some recent pilot warnings had prejudiced Sam against parking his plane overnight at either of that island’s airports.

  Off to his right, a few cloud shreds drifted over the sun-lacquered surface, casting paltry shadows. Sam scanned the horizon, checked the gauges, watched the LORAN tick off ground speed and distance remaining to the first coordinate—and thought back to his first trip to Venezuela.

  It had been in 1958, the first year of his marriage and his third at the University of Oklahoma. Sam had taken a reduced load that spring in order to work for Standard Oil, replenishing his bank account at the cost of delaying his petroleum engineering degree. The company wanted to loan him south for two weeks to their Venezuelan subsidiary, Creole, as part of a team preparing bids for exploration concessions on Lake Maracaibo. Sam had talked Caroline into joining him in Caracas for the first week as a sort of delayed honeymoon.

  It had been a complete disaster. Caroline had gotten airsick on the flight down from Miami and
endured with mute protest the careening taxi ride from the seaside airport up the new autopista to the three-thousand-foot-high capital city. She had hated Caracas on sight, considering it noisy, filthy and squalid. Sam would have understood her being appalled by the sprawling shantytowns on the encircling mountains or even the teeming streets below. But Caroline’s reaction seemed to go no deeper than simple disgust. The kaleidoscopic sensory barrage, the sheer vitality of Latin culture, had no appeal for his offended bride. Sam found himself constantly apologizing for everything, and trying to cope with her increasing rigidity and brittleness, caricatures of her familiar poise and delicacy.

  Once installed in the Àvila, a rambling, Spanish-style hotel with a spectacular city overlook built during World War II by Nelson Rockefeller, Caroline all but refused to venture beyond its parklike perimeter. In the event, it had taken a state occasion to pry her loose. On the third day of their trip, Vice President and Mrs. Nixon had swung into Caracas on an extensive South American good will tour. Sam and Caroline had taxied down from the hotel to the nearby Panteón Nacional to watch the Nixons lay an honorary wreath on the tomb of Simon Bolívar. At least that had been the plan.

  While several blocks away, their cab was caught in sudden gridlock. Over a bedlam of honking and shouting from angry motorists, they began to hear rhythmic chanting, followed by a many-voiced roar. These crowd sounds were definitely of the street, not any plaza de toros. And they grew swiftly louder—and thus nearer.

  Sam used his crude, oilfield Spanish to quiz their driver, a villainous-looking caraqueño with bad teeth and a magnetized Blessed Virgin on the dashboard. The man was clearly apprehensive. There had been much anti-American talk, he said, apologizing that he was unable to turn around and drive them to safety, and that the locks on his doors did not work too well. He advised them to get out and find another cab; or better, to return on foot to their hotel—and quickly. They took his advice.