Old Venus Page 4

  They’d barely finished dinner when Ronson discovered the reason why the captain had taken such precautions. From somewhere outside came the sound of wings flapping, punctuated by high-pitched shrieks. Mikhail explained that they belonged to one of Venus’s few avian species: night shrikes, nocturnal raptors not much larger than the pelicans they vaguely resembled but dangerous nonetheless. The shrikes hunted in flocks, seeking prey near the islands where they nested; they had little fear of humans, and had been known to gang up on unwary sailors who ventured out on deck after dark. The nets would keep them away, and if that didn’t work, a Taser shot was sufficient to drive them off. Still, the best defense was to remain inside until daybreak.

  Through the night, long after the three of them had crawled into their bunks, Ronson heard the shrikes prowling around the boat. Distant thunder and lightning flashes glimpsed around the edges of the porthole curtains told of an approaching storm. It came in around midnight, and although it only rocked the boat a bit and threw rain against the portholes, it kept Ronson awake for a while. He lay in his bunk, Taser beneath his pillow, listening to the shrikes and the storm.

  Venus was a dangerous world.

  Yet the morning was calm. The rain had slackened to a mild drizzle, the sun a hot splotch half-seen through the clouds. The frogheads were croaking impatiently beside the boat when Ronson and the others emerged from the cabin. Mikhail gave chocolate bars to two of the aborigines—as before, their leader refused to accept any—while Angelo and Ronson took down the net and hoisted the anchor. Then the captain started the engine and Aphrodite set out again, the frogheads once more taking the lead.

  The floating isles had become bigger and less far apart by then, and for the first time, Ronson saw forests on the larger ones. Slickbark trees looked like palmettos but grew in dense jungle clusters, their broad trunks strangled by vines, their broad, serrated leaves casting shadows across the surrounding water.

  Around midmorning, Aphrodite came within sight of a larger vessel going the other way: a lumber ship the size of a small freighter, its deck loaded with cut and trimmed tree trunks. The lumber ship blew its horn as it went by, but Angelo didn’t respond to the hail.

  “A yaz runner wouldn’t do that,” the captain explained.

  “Yaz runner?” Ronson asked. “You mean, like someone who’s …”

  “Out to purchase yaz, uh-huh.” Angelo gave him a sidelong look. “That’s what we’re going to pretend to be once we get to this place … because, believe me, there ain’t no way they’re gonna let us live if they don’t think we’re here to buy dope.”

  Ronson was still coming to grips with this when the frogheads suddenly turned to the right and started heading for a large island only a kilometer away. As Aphrodite approached the island, the three men spotted thin lines of smoke rising from its forest. Angelo handed a pair of binoculars to Ronson, and through them he saw a couple of boats about Aphrodite’s size tied up at a floating dock.

  “It’s a yaz camp, all right,” Angelo said, then he looked off to the side. “Hey! What the hell are they doing?”

  Ronson followed his gaze. The three frogheads had suddenly turned and were swimming back toward the boat. “I think they want to talk,” Mikhail said.

  Angelo throttled down the engines. “So talk to ’em,” he muttered with an annoyed shrug.

  As the boat came to idle, the Russian walked back to the stern. By then, the frogheads were dog-paddling along the starboard side, their faces visible above the water. The leader warbled something to Mikhail; he listened for a few moments, then turned to Ronson.

  “She says this is the place where we will find the man we are looking for,” Mikhail said, “but they refuse to go any farther. They will remain here until they see us leave, then they will follow us.”

  Ronson was puzzled as to why the Water Folk wouldn’t escort them the rest of the way to the island, but he wasn’t about to argue. As the boat began moving again, he went below, where he found the Taser he’d left beneath his bunk pillow. He had just slid its holster on his belt, though, when Mikhail followed him into the cabin.

  “Leave that behind,” the Russian said. “If the yaz croppers see you wearing it, they’ll think we mean trouble.”

  Ronson stared at him. “Then how the hell am I supposed to rescue the kid?”

  Mad Mikhail hesitated. “We will think of something,” he said at last. “Let me do the talking, yes?”

  Again, Ronson didn’t have a choice. As the boat came closer to the island, though, he came out on deck with the Taser beneath the nylon rain jacket he’d put on. When no one was looking, he carefully hid the weapon behind the net locker where it couldn’t be seen yet could be easily reached.

  Men on the island had seen Aphrodite coming. Two yaz croppers were waiting on the dock as the boat glided up beside it. They grabbed the lines Mikhail and Ronson tossed to them and pulled the fishing boat alongside their own craft, then a thickset man with grey, brush-cut hair rested a foot on Aphrodite’s gunnel, arms folded across his bare chest.

  “Priv’et,” he said, gruff yet not entirely hostile. “Kak vas tibut?”

  “Mikhail Kronow,” Mad Mikhail replied. “Vy gavarti pa angliski?”

  The other Russian looked over at his companion, a younger man with a shaved head and a goatee beard. “I do, mate,” he replied, an Australian accent to his voice. “So who the hell are you, eh?”

  “He is gospodin Ronson, an American friend.” Mikhail barely glanced at Ronson. “Thank you for speaking English … his Russian is very bad.” The Aussie laughed but the Russian remained silent, apparently not understanding a word they were saying. “We are here to do some business, yes?”

  “What sort of business?”

  “I think you know what kind.” A smile and sly wink. “May we speak to your leader? Someone we can … um, how do you say … negotiate, yes?”

  “Vityazka iz kornia,” Ronson said. Mikhail gave him a sharp look, but he saw no need to dance around the subject. There was only one reason why a boat would be all the way out here. “I’m looking to buy yaz.”

  The Aussie looked at the older man and spoke to him in his own language. The Russian cropper studied Ronson and Mikhail for a few moments, dark eyes sizing them up. Then he slowly nodded, and the Aussie turned to the visitors. “Sure, c’mon … this way.”

  Ronson glanced back at the wheelhouse. Angelo was standing at the door. He shook his head, silently telling Ronson that he was going to stay behind. Ronson nodded, then followed Mikhail off the boat. With the two croppers leading the way, they walked onto the island.

  The ground was soft and spongy. Until he reached the crude walkway of wooden boards laid down by the croppers, Ronson’s shoes sank a bit with each step he took, making squishy sounds. The forest closed in around them as he and Mikhail were led away from the dock until they couldn’t see Aphrodite anymore, and he fought an impulse to hold his breath against a pungent reek that permeated the humid, chlorophyll-laden air. It got stronger the farther they walked, and at first he thought it came from the jungle around them, but then they reached the middle of the island and he saw what was causing it.

  A clearing had been hacked out amid the trees and tangled underbrush, and it was here that the croppers had set up camp. Wooden shacks and canvas tents surrounded an open area. Nets were suspended from tall poles erected around the periphery, doubtless to ward off night shrikes but probably also to provide camouflage from any aircraft that might pass overhead. The camp had the basic amenities—a cook tent, a cluster of satellite dishes, outhouses—and might just as well have belonged to a wilderness expedition were it not for what was in its center.

  Vats made from discarded fuel drums had been set up above iron braziers. Brackish water slowly boiled over wood coals, emitting stinking fumes that made his eyes weep. The men and women stirring the vats wore bandanas around the lower parts of their faces, and Ronson wished he’d known enough to take the same precautions. Lumpy brown scum floated
on top of the bubbling water; as he watched, one of the croppers dipped a large, long-handled spoon into a vat, carefully scooped out a dripping mass, and placed it on a tray, which was then carried to a wooden platform set up beneath a tarp and laid out to dry.

  “Yaz,” Mikhail murmured, nodding toward the platform.

  “Yeah, here’s where we make it.” The Aussie—his name was Graham, Ronson had learned during the trek through the forest—proudly pointed to the vats. The Russian, whose name was Boris, had left them as soon as they entered the camp. “We drop the roots in there, boil off the resin, scoop it out, cure it … that’s how we get the good stuff.” His finger moved to an open-sided shed, where a couple of women were using a grocery scale to weigh bundles of vityazka iz kornia before wrapping them in paper and twine. “Each of those is half a kilo,” Graham went on, indicating a nearby shack where a large stack of bricks could be seen through the door. “From this island alone, we’ll probably get … oh, I’d say, five hundred kilos at least.”

  “And then you move on,” Ronson said.

  “Uh-huh … another island, another crop, another big pile of rubles.” Graham laughed, clapped him on the back. “Your pot farmers back in the States got nothing on us. They’re stuck in one place, but we’re a mobile operation.”

  Ronson only half listened to Graham as he searched the faces of the men and women around them, trying to spot David Henry. No one here looked like him, though, even allowing for the bandanas covering the faces of the men stirring the vats. Indeed, no one in the camp looked like they were being forced to do anything. Some smiled and joked as they worked, and there were no armed guards keeping them in line. If anyone here had been shanghaied, they didn’t seem to be upset about it.

  Bulgakov might have been wrong, and the frogheads … Ronson felt annoyance growing in him. How could he have been so stupid as to trust those things? Masters of the World Ocean, his soaked ass. Animals, really, despite what Mikhail claimed. No wonder he was called Mad Mikhail … Someone tapped him on the shoulder. Ronson looked around, saw that Boris had returned. And standing beside him, wearing a jungle hat and a sweat-stained Coldplay T-shirt, was David Henry.

  “Hello,” David said, offering a handshake. “I hear you’d like to buy some yaz.”

  It was only his brief experience working undercover for the NYPD vice squad that kept Ronson from showing the surprise he felt. In an instant, he realized why David Henry had disappeared without a trace. Perhaps he hadn’t come to Venus intending to become a drug lord. Perhaps the opportunity presented itself only after he’d been here awhile. Yet he wasn’t a captive of these yaz croppers; he was their boss.

  “That’s what I’m looking to do.” Ronson shook his hand. “Nice little operation you’ve got here. Never knew how this stuff was made.”

  David grinned, shrugged nonchalantly. “Not many people do until they see it themselves. No harder than weed … or even crack, for that matter. And out here, it’s a little easier to get away with.” He motioned to the nets strung above them. “That’s really just to keep out the birds. The law’s just about given up trying to find us. I don’t think they even give a shit anymore.”

  Ronson silently agreed. Bulgakov had just about told him as such. “Must be a hassle getting the roots, though,” he said, trying to find something to talk about while he gave himself a chance to figure out how to play this. He looked around the camp. “I mean, it doesn’t look like you’re cutting down any trees.”

  “Well, I’ve got my own …” David’s voice trailed off. His gaze had fallen on Mikhail, who stood quietly nearby. “Hey, I know you!” he exclaimed. “You’re”—he snapped his fingers a couple of times, trying to summon a memory—“that guy! The one who hangs out on the docks in Veneragrad and gets the froggies to pose for pictures!”

  “Mikhail Kronow.” Mikhail’s eyes shifted nervously back and forth.

  “Yeah! Mad Mikhail!” David was both surprised and happy to see him. “I guess you don’t remember me. We never talked or anything, but … man, do I remember you! I owe you a lot, dude!”

  Mikhail stared at him. “You do?”

  “Uh-huh.” David looked at Ronson again. “You got him as your translator, right? I mean, he couldn’t have known how to find us, so I guess the dude who’s driving your boat must have done that.”

  “That’s pretty much it, yeah.” Ronson let David make his own assumptions. “Mikhail hooked us up when I told him what I was looking for, so …”

  “Cool.” David returned his attention to Mikhail. “Like I was saying, that trick you have? Getting the froggies to come running for chocolate?” He waved an expansive hand around the camp. “That’s made all this possible. C’mon, lemme show you …”

  Another boardwalk led away from the camp. It ended at a smaller clearing not far away, where two croppers stood around a hole. It appeared to have been cut straight down through the vines and moss that made up the floating island, forming a deep well. A wheelbarrow stood nearby; the two men watched the hole, as if waiting for something to emerge.

  “When I first came here,” David explained, as they approached the hole, “croppers were using roots of slickbark trees cut down by the lumber operators. Which is okay, except that by the time our people got to them, the roots were all dried out, and that meant the yaz they got from them had lost much of its potency. Everyone knew that fresh roots make better yaz, but since slickbark roots grow underwater, you’d have to use scuba gear and trained divers to swim beneath the islands to get to them. And that’s dangerous as hell … something might eat you while you’re down there. Then I had an idea …”

  “Coming up,” said one of the men watching the well.

  The water bubbled for a moment, then a froghead came to the surface. Its silver eyes regarded the men standing around the well for a couple of seconds; they stepped back from the hole to give it room, and the aborigine came the rest of the way up. A nylon bag was harnessed to its chest; once the froghead was standing on dry ground, one of the men unfastened the harness, carried the bag over to the wheelbarrow, and upended it. A couple of wet, fibrous objects that looked like large knots fell into the wheelbarrow: slickbark roots.

  The man who’d collected the bag from the froghead picked up a root, inspected it, then held it out for his boss to see. He said something in Russian; David frowned a little but nodded anyway. The other cropper reached into his pocket, pulled out a Hershey bar, and held it out to the froghead.

  Surprisingly, the aborigine didn’t immediately take it. “Wurgo wogka kroh,” it croaked, looking down at the hole from which it had just emerged. “Krokka kow wok-wokka.”

  Mikhail hissed, an angry sound that only Ronson heard. He didn’t say anything, but from the corner of his eye, he could see that Mikhail’s mouth was drawn into a tight line. “Oh, c’mon,” the man with the candy bar said; he was an American, a Southerner judging by his accent. “Take it and git back down there.” When the froghead didn’t accept the chocolate, he yanked a cattle prod from his belt. “This or this,” he said, holding up both the prod and the Hershey bar. “Your choice.”

  The froghead flinched at the sight of the cattle prod. Ronson realized then that this creature was different from the three Water Folk who’d escorted Aphrodite from Veneragrad. Thinner, its head slumped forward and its eyes dulled, there were dark, bruiselike marks on its flanks that could have only been caused by electrical burns. He was looking at a slave.

  “Kroh,” it said softly, then it reached for the Hershey bar.

  “Yeah, kroh this, you ugly mother.” The cropper broke the bar in half and tossed the froghead the smaller part. “Now git back down there … and next time, make ’em bigger!”

  The froghead put the chocolate in its mouth, swallowed it slowly. Then, as if resigned to its fate, it turned and jumped feetfirst down the hole.

  “Pretty slick,” Ronson said softly. Mikhail remained quiet.

  “I kinda think so.” David grinned, proud of himself. “I mean, it
’s just regular, ordinary chocolate, but they’re totally addicted to it. So all we have to do is find a few froggies, give them a couple of bars, then don’t give ’em anymore until they learn to chew off slickbark roots and bring ’em to us.”

  “Hell, I don’t think they want anything else now but chocolate.” The man with the cattle prod started to take a bite from the other half of the bar, then stopped himself. “Running low, boss,” he added, his voice becoming worried. “I don’t think we’ve got but a few bars left.”

  “Really?” David frowned. “Well, we’re going to have to do something about that. Next time we send someone to Veneragrad for supplies …”

  “We got some on the boat,” Ronson said.

  “Oh, yeah?” David looked at him again, his face brightening again. “How much?”

  “Whole bag full. Couple of dozen bars at least.” Ronson was exaggerating—he knew that Mikhail had brought only a few—but an idea had occurred to him. “C’mon back to the boat, and I’ll give ’em to you. We can work out a deal on the way … I’ve got the cash there, too.”

  A smile stretched across David Henry’s face. “Sounds like a plan.” He turned to walk back toward the camp. “I like a man who comes prepared. Let’s go.”

  Ronson followed him, consciously avoiding Mikhail’s angry glare.

  ______

  Capturing David Henry was almost ridiculously easy. The kid was so confident that the Russian authorities would never catch him, he’d become trustful of anyone who offered to buy yaz from him. He didn’t even take any of his crew with him when he followed Ronson and Mikhail back to the dock.

  Ronson kept up the pretense on the way to the Aphrodite. He had to guess how much a runner might offer for a hundred kilos of yaz, but it appeared that he was close to the mark when he bid 500,000 rubles. David tried to talk him up to 600, and by the time they reached the boat, they’d settled on 550. Plus the bag of chocolate bars, which David laughingly called “a sweetener.”