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eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description: In a future of bio-engineering wizardry threatened by drug abuse, sabotage, and bio-terrorism, an undercover DEA agent tracks down an American bio-chemist who disappeared while working on a highly classified project. The renegade scientist carried a stash of genetic tools with him into Colombia, and is hiding out in a jungle fortress laced with lethal bio-chemical boobytraps.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Interzone #78, 1993
Fictionwise Release Date: September 2001

63 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [239 KB], eReader (PDB) [44 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [32 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [29 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [78 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [105 KB], hiebook (KML) [93 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [60 KB], iSilo (PDB) [26 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [33 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [61 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [46 KB]
Words: 8621
Reading time: 24-34 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

The Colombian air force pilot who flew me down from Bogotá didn't seem too thrilled to be risking his life for a DEA bureaucrat. It was seven hundred kilometers to the border, and five different guerilla organizations held territory along the way: not a lot of towns, but several hundred possible sites for rocket launchers.

"My great-grandfather," he said sourly, "died in fucking Korea fighting for General Douglas fucking MacArthur." I wasn't sure if that was meant to be a declaration of pride, or an intimation of an outstanding debt. Both, probably.

The helicopter was eerily silent, fitted out with phased sound absorbers, which looked like giant loudspeakers but swallowed most of the noise of the blades. The carbon-fiber fuselage was coated with an expensive network of chameleon polymers--although it might have been just as effective to paint the whole thing sky blue. An endothermic chemical mixture accumulated waste heat from the motor, and then discharged it through a parabolic radiator as a tightly focused skywards burst, every hour or so. The guerillas had no access to satellite images, and no radar they dared use; I decided that we had less chance of dying than the average Bogotá commuter. Back in the capital, buses had been exploding without warning, two or three times a week.

Colombia was tearing itself apart; La Violencia of the 1950s, all over again. Although all of the spectacular terrorist sabotage was being carried out by organized guerilla groups, most of the deaths so far had been caused by factions within the two mainstream political parties butchering each other's supporters, avenging a litany of past atrocities which stretched back for generations. The group who'd actually started the current wave of bloodshed had negligible support; Ejército de Simon Bolívar were lunatic right-wing extremists who wanted to "reunite" with Panama, Venezuela, and Ecuador--after two centuries of separation--and drag in Peru and Bolivia, to realize Bolívar's dream of Gran Colombia. By assassinating President Marín, though, they'd triggered a cascade of events that had nothing to do with their ludicrous cause. Strikes and protests, street battles, curfews, martial law. The repatriation of foreign capital by nervous investors, followed by hyperinflation, and the collapse of the local financial system. Then a spiral of opportunistic violence. Everyone, from the paramilitary death squads to the Maoist splinter groups, seemed to believe that their hour had finally come.

I hadn't seen so much as a bullet fired--but from the moment I'd entered the country, there'd been acid churning in my guts, and a heady, ceaseless adrenaline rush coursing through my veins. I felt wired, feverish ... alive. Hypersensitive as a pregnant woman: I could smell blood, everywhere. When the hidden struggle for power which rules all human affairs finally breaks through to the surface, finally ruptures the skin, it's like witnessing some giant primordial creature rise up out of the ocean. Mesmerizing, and appalling. Nauseating--and exhilarating.

Coming face to face with the truth is always exhilarating.