Mutation Read online

  Didn’t do us any good two nights ago when Blackwood tried to have his chupacabra murder us, Marty thought. Not that I’m complaining. If Al had known about our plan, he would have stopped us from going to the Ark, and we wouldn’t have gotten the hatchlings — or the panda cubs.

  “What about Butch and Yvonne?” Marty asked.

  “Al hasn’t caught sight of them yet,” Wolfe answered. “Which is a little worrisome. But he reported that Blackwood went back to the Ark after the interview and was very visible throughout the day.”

  “Butch is probably still licking his wounds,” Ted said. “I did a number on him the other night. I doubt he’ll be moving around much today.”

  Marty hadn’t seen the “number” Ted was talking about, but Grace had told him that Ted was some kind of fiftieth-degree black-belt ninja, as well as a super genius and a hijacker. Ted had managed to rescue them with Blackwood’s own helicopter, which was now stowed away in the back of Wolfe’s converted bomber.

  Wolfe looked at Marty. “I suspect Yvonne isn’t moving around too well today, either, after what you did to her with that pig.”

  Marty grinned. He hadn’t hurt Blackwood’s other trusted employee, Yvonne Zloblinavech, but she was probably still shaken up. He and Luther and Dylan had locked Yvonne in a dark room with a potbellied pig after convincing her it was the chupacabra she had sent out to kill them.

  “I wish I could have seen her face,” Wolfe said, returning his grin.

  “You wouldn’t have recognized her,” Marty said. “She looks a lot different without her fake smile. Kind of scary, actually.”

  One of the pandas wrapped its front paws around Wolfe’s right leg and tried to take a playful bite out of it. He laughed and picked it up. “You’ll get a mouthful of metal, little guy.”

  Years earlier, Wolfe’s right leg had been bitten off by Mokélé-mbembé, the mother of the dinosaur hatchlings, but his injury wasn’t apparent when he walked or ran. Ted had invented a prosthetic leg out of a special metal alloy that Wolfe claimed was better than flesh and blood, but Marty knew his uncle would rather have his real leg back.

  “Do they have a good enclosure for the pandas at the jaguar preserve?” Grace asked.

  Wolfe looked a little confused by the question, which wasn’t unusual. He always looked a little confused when Grace or Marty asked him a question. “I’m not sure,” he finally said. “I haven’t been there before, but it doesn’t matter. The cubs aren’t going to the preserve.”

  “What are you talking about?” Grace cried.

  “The pandas don’t belong to us,” Wolfe said.

  “They don’t belong to Noah Blackwood, either,” Grace said.

  “Exactly. Which is why I asked Phil and Phyllis if they would make a side trip to China after they drop us off in Brazil.”

  Phil and Phyllis Bishop were Cryptos Island’s pilots. The father-daughter team were in the cockpit flying them south.

  “Kind of a big side trip,” Marty said.

  “But necessary,” Wolfe insisted. “We can’t possibly take care of these little guys where we’re going. We’ll have our hands full with the hatchlings. I’ve been in touch with the Chengdu panda research center. They’ve agreed to take the cubs off our hands with no questions asked.”

  “Is it a good place?” Grace asked.

  “The best,” Wolfe assured her. “I’ve been there several times. It’s where the cubs belong, and it’s the best place to keep them out of the clutches of Noah Blackwood.”

  “They belong back with their mothers,” Marty said.

  Wolfe frowned. “I agree, but that’s no longer possible.”

  “Thanks to Butch McCall,” Grace said bitterly.

  They all knew that Butch had shot the mothers to get the cubs.

  “Can’t we have him arrested or something?” Marty asked. “Animal poaching. International wildlife smuggling. Violation of the Endangered Species Act. I bet he’s broken a dozen laws.”

  “He and Noah Blackwood have probably broken thousands of laws,” Ted said. “But we don’t have any solid proof.”

  “What about the files I stole?” Grace asked.

  “It’s fabulous information, but it’s vague,” Ted explained. “We understand what they’re talking about because we know what they’re capable of, but nothing we have here would stand up in court. For one thing, the information’s stolen. For another, Blackwood and Butch have been doing this stuff for decades. They’re very careful with the language they use. These records could be interpreted in several different ways.”

  “And Blackwood’s a very powerful man,” Wolfe added. “He has a lot of money and a lot of influence. Nobody’s going to be eager to prosecute him even if we find something that’s actionable.” He fixed his dark, intense eyes on Grace’s robin’s-egg-blue ones. “And then there is you,” he said quietly.

  “What do you mean?” Grace asked.

  “Noah Blackwood is going to come after you.”

  “Not very likely after I hacked his computer, kidnapped his panda cubs, and stole back the hatchlings,” Grace said.

  “Actually, it’s even more likely now,” Wolfe said. “Noah doesn’t like to be crossed. He doesn’t like to lose. He wants you back.”

  “And he wants the hatchlings back,” Ted added. “And the pandas, although he’ll have a hard time getting them once Phil and Phyllis return them to China. He will be coming after all of us.”

  “What do we do?” Grace asked.

  “We have a good head start,” Wolfe said. “We have eyes on Noah Blackwood. What we do now is take advantage of the time by trying to find Marty’s parents.”

  Wolfe handed Grace the panda cub. PD growled, but Marty held him tight.

  “I’ll put the cubs back in their enclosure,” Grace said.

  “I’ll give you a hand,” Marty said.

  He dropped the tiny poodle in Wolfe’s lap. PD continued to growl.

  Luther and Dylan were covered in blood.

  “Nice timing,” Luther said. “Why do you two always show up when we’re finished?”

  The two Mokélé-mbembé hatchlings were wrapped around each other on a bed of straw, snoring and farting, sleeping off their bloody gluttony.

  “Whew!” Marty said, waving his free hand in front of his nose. “I think Wolfe has a shower in back. It’ll get the blood off, but not the stink.”

  “What stink?” Luther asked.

  “Let’s get this mess cleaned up before we shower,” Dylan suggested. There were bits of meat, guts, and bloody knives strewn all over the food prep table.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Luther said. “Marty and Grace will clean up.”

  “In your dreams,” Marty said. “We have our hands full.” He was carrying one of the pandas. Grace had the other two.

  “We’ll take them,” Luther said.

  “Forget it,” Grace said. “You’ll get them all bloody.”

  She headed through a second bulkhead hatch. Marty followed, but not before giving Luther a victorious grin.

  “When you’re done back there, we need to get moving on our next graphic novel,” Luther called after him. “I have some good ideas, and Dylan does, too.”

  Marty hadn’t even thought about writing and illustrating the next installment of their adventures. Right now, he was focused on getting to Brazil and finding his parents.

  But we do have a long flight ahead of us, he thought. Working on a few pages might get my mind off things.

  “We are staying in Brazil for the duration,” Wolfe had announced before they took off from Cryptos, adding ominously, “one way or the other.” This meant they weren’t leaving until they found out what happened to Marty’s mom and dad — Sylvia and Timothy O’Hara. Sylvia was Wolfe’s younger sister. There was only one way Marty wanted to find his parents, and that was alive and well. But he knew he might not get his wish. His parents had been missing for a long time, in one of the harshest environments on the planet.

  Worrying a
bout them isn’t going to help me find them, Marty told himself.

  He took in his surroundings. Wolfe’s converted bomber was divided into several sections separated by bulkheads. Up front was the cockpit, or flight deck, where the Bishops were handling the controls of the plane. Behind the cockpit was the seating section, where Wolfe and Ted were huddled over their laptops. Behind that was the galley, which had been converted into the hatchling nursery. Behind the galley, where he now stood, was animal holding.

  He put his panda into the cage with the other two cubs and watched as they started to do somersaults in the straw.

  “I’m going to miss them,” Grace said.

  “I’ll bet,” Marty said distractedly. He hadn’t been in this part of the plane since he and Grace had been in the Congo, or more accurately, over the Congo.

  He pointed to a familiar hatch in the floor. The hatch covered the bomb bay that Wolfe used to airdrop supplies for his expeditions. There were two containers in the bay waiting to be dropped before they landed in Manaus, Brazil.

  “Remember that?” Marty asked.

  Grace turned around, looked, and gave a visible shudder. “How could I forget?”

  Marty laughed. Bo, Wolfe’s bonobo chimpanzee, had gotten out of her cage as they’d been flying over the Congo. He and Grace had climbed into the bomb bay to get Bo back at the exact moment Phil Bishop had released the load. At the time, the fall had been the number one most terrifying thing that had ever happened to him. So many other terrifying things had happened to him since that the fall was now down to number six.

  Or maybe number seven, he thought.

  He walked over to another bulkhead.

  “Where are you going?” Grace asked.

  “I want to check out what Wolfe brought along for the trip.”

  Marty had spent their last day on Cryptos Island inside Wolfe’s stone fortress, sleeping, cooking, and eating, and he had missed the loading. He opened the bulkhead hatch and switched on the light. Grace followed him in.

  “Whoa!”

  Marty had expected Wolfe to bring supplies and equipment, but nothing like this. The large section was stacked from floor to ceiling with plastic and wooden crates. They were barely able to squeeze past them to get in.

  “What is all this stuff?” Grace asked.

  Marty didn’t know, but he was certainly going to poke around and find out. The containers were carefully marked. He pointed at a stack marked Freeze-Dried Food.

  “Wolfe has enough grub to feed an army for a year!”

  He continued his poking, discovering medical supplies, four-wheelers, motorcycles, tents, hammocks, two-way radios, rain ponchos, flashlights, batteries, remote-operated cameras, hats, rope, tools, and spare parts for everything.

  “Look at this!” He pointed at two large containers marked Ultralight.

  “What’s an ultralight?” Grace asked.

  “Are you kidding? An ultralight is an airplane … well, more like a go-cart with wings really. I’ve always wanted to fly one. You can bet if Ted’s designed it, it will do things normal ultralights never dreamed of doing.”

  “I doubt Wolfe is going to let you fly it.”

  “He let me fly the dragonspy.”

  “There’s a big difference between flying a bot using a remote control and piloting an airplane from inside the cockpit.”

  “Don’t forget that I was inside the Orb about a million miles beneath the ocean when we captured the giant squid.”

  “Hardly a million miles,” Grace said. “And you forgot to mention you were with Ted, who was the one piloting the Orb when you captured the giant squid.”

  “Minor technicality,” Marty said, but she had a good point. If he wanted a shot at flying the ultralight, he would have to get Ted Bronson on his side. He was going to start working on this as soon as he got back up front. Ted was a lot more reasonable about letting him do stupidly dangerous things than Wolfe was.

  They wove their way deeper into the stacks of stuff.

  “How’s he going to get all of this to the jaguar preserve?” Grace asked.

  “Blackwood’s helicopter, I guess,” Marty said, although they hadn’t seen the helicopter yet.

  “My grand —” Grace turned red. “Noah Blackwood’s helicopter is not that big.”

  “It’s not your fault he’s your grandfather,” Marty said.

  “I know that,” Grace said. “It’s just so … Oh, never mind. It would take a hundred trips on Noah’s helicopter to get this stuff to the jaguar preserve, and some of these containers won’t fit through the door.”

  Marty let the whole Noah-Blackwood-is-Grace’s-grandfather thing go. He’d be sensitive about it, too, if his grandfather was a narcissistic psychopath.

  “Well,” he said. “They have to get all this stuff there somehow.” He opened the final bulkhead door. Blackwood’s helicopter was lashed down to the steel floor on the far side of the cargo hold. The rotors had been removed so it would fit into the hold. He walked over to it for a closer look.

  “I guess that explains it,” Grace said from behind him.

  “Explains what?” Marty asked. He was staring at the helicopter, thinking how weird it looked without rotors, and visualizing it with the rotors back on so he could draw their escape from the Ark with the hatchlings and panda cubs.

  “This thing,” Grace answered.

  “What thing?” Marty turned around.

  Grace was standing next to what looked like a huge boat. Or maybe a gigantic army tank. It was hard to tell in the dim light. Whatever the massive object was, it took up three-quarters of the cargo hold.

  “I guess we know how they’re going to move all the stuff now,” Grace said.

  “The Thing,” Marty said, touching the camouflage-painted hull.

  “Love the name,” Ted Bronson said, stepping through the bulkhead door. “I’m calling it the Rivlan, but I like The Thing.” He walked over to them. “Volkswagen produced a car in the seventies called The Thing. I wanted one, but of course I was too young to drive back then. This thing looks a little like The Thing.”

  “There’s also a horror movie called The Thing,” Marty said. He and Luther had watched it several times.

  “Which was a remake of another movie from the fifties called The Thing from Another World,” Ted said.

  Marty didn’t know Ted was a movie buff, but then again, there was a lot he didn’t know about Ted Bronson.

  “So it’s a boat,” Marty said.

  “Essentially. But it does a couple of things traditional boats can’t do.”

  Marty wasn’t surprised. Ted squatted down beneath the hull. Marty and Grace joined him.

  “It’s made out of the same material as the Orb, although reconfigured a bit for terra firma.”

  The Orb, formally the Oceanic Reconnaissance Bot, was a deep-water submarine, and a fraction of the size of Ted’s boat.

  Ted pointed to the large tires protruding from the hull. “I have it in tire mode at the moment, but there’s also an all-terrain track mode that turns the boat into a bulldozer that will pretty much knock down anything in its path, though I doubt we’ll be using that in the rain forest. That mode is not exactly environmentally friendly. There is also a hover mode. Brings the boat about twenty feet off the surface. It won’t do us much good in the rain forest, but it’ll work well for avoiding flotsam and jetsam on the river.”

  “What’re flotsam and jetsam?” Marty asked.

  “The Amazon River is the second-longest river in the world,” Grace said.

  “What’s the longest?” Marty asked.

  “The Nile,” Grace answered immediately. “But the Amazon is the largest river by water flow. The average discharge is greater than the next seven largest rivers combined. It has the largest drainage basin in the world, almost three million square miles, and accounts for approximately one-fifth of the world’s total river flow. The width of the Amazon varies between one and six miles at the low stage, but expands during the wet s
eason to thirty miles or more. The river flows into the Atlantic Ocean in a broad estuary about a hundred and fifty miles wide. The mouth of the main stem is fifty miles across. The river is sometimes called the River Sea.”

  Marty stared at his cousin in wonder. Grace had changed a lot in the past few weeks, but in other ways she hadn’t changed at all.

  “Thanks for that, Ms. Wikipedia,” he said. “But what I asked originally was, what are flotsam and jetsam?”

  “Sorry,” Grace said. “Flotsam and jetsam refer to debris like logs and garbage. With that much water flowing, the Amazonian version of flotsam and jetsam could be hundred-foot trees. You hit one of those and you’re sunk.”

  “Not with this boat,” Ted said, giving the hull a slap. “It’s impervious to almost everything. Unfortunately, passengers aren’t. If we slam into a hundred-foot hardwood tree at a hundred and twenty-five knots, someone is going to get hurt.”

  Marty did a quick calculation in his head. “That’s almost a hundred and fifty miles an hour!”

  “The upper end is closer to two hundred miles an hour.”

  “That’s faster than a helicopter!” Marty said.

  Ted nodded. “Which is why we’re going to have to do our fast runs at night. We don’t want to attract too much attention, or scare people to death. But chugging along during the day like a regular boat is going to slow us down. The chopper is going to get to the jaguar preserve before the Rivlan does.”

  “I assume you’re driving, or piloting, the boat,” Marty said. “Who’s flying the helicopter?”

  “Wolfe,” Ted said.

  “How long will it take him to get to the preserve?” Marty asked.

  Ted shrugged. “Hard to say. He’ll have to stop and refuel at least once, maybe twice if there’s a strong headwind.”

  “Who’s flying to the preserve with the hatchlings?” Grace asked.

  “That’s what I came back here to talk to you about. The chopper’s going to be kind of crowded. For obvious reasons, Wolfe doesn’t want anyone getting a look at the hatchlings, so he’s flying them to the preserve. That means that Luther will be on the chopper because they seem to have taken to him.”