"Anthony Wall - The Eden Mission (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wall Anthony)

stand a hope in hell. The organization will take care of that."

As the light aircraft began its descent, law officer Miguel Osuna took in a
view he had seen a hundred times before. But each time was like the first.
From 3,000 feet, the bright-green forest treetops reminded him of curly hair,
parted by a straight red road that marched on and on and out of sight. Here
and there parakeets, as common as sparrows, swirled colourfully. Near the
road, water winked in the early morning sunlight. A river. The river, compared
with which most other rivers were mere streams. The Amazon! Four thousand
miles long, two hundred miles from bank to bank at its widest, fed by ten
thousand tributaries. One-fifth of the world's fresh water flowing through a
jungle bigger than Europe.

The plane dipped as it approached the uneven landing strip.

Law officer Osuna checked his revolver and concentrated on the assignment
ahead.

Splutter-splutter ... the aircraft dawdled to a stop. Osuna thanked the pilot.
Jumping to the ground, he gave his colleague the thumbs up sign, then half ran
to a waiting Jeep.

The engine responded immediately. Osuna spun the wheel and headed for an
appointment with Carlos Mendoza, as nasty a piece of work as you were ever
likely to meet. At this moment he was under arrest for killing jaguars,
ocelots and margays and selling their spotted skins. A murderer, gun-runner
and drug smuggler.

Osuna must take him into custody but clever lawyers, themselves as crooked as
criminals, had always managed to save Mendoza's neck. Sometimes Osuna wondered
whether it was worth trying to enforce the law.

On his left, like floating flower petals, a dazzle of butterflies danced. Red
dust spurted from the Jeep's humming tyres. Osuna swerved. An armadillo
scuttled across the road. This place belonged to the old jungle inhabitants,
not to modern men and cars. Osuna had inherited a love of the natural world
from his father and was passing it on to his own children. He found himself
whistling, entranced by the forest's magic tune--whoops, howls, screeches,
chirrups, twitters that rose and fell amid the unending green.

A gentle wind unravelled the last of the mist from the branches of tall trees,
some soaring nearly 200 feet.

Suddenly darkness enveloped him. He looked up. His cheerful mood evaporated.
High above, casting exaggerated shadows, vultures circled on eight-foot wings.
Watchful scavengers, never far from the dead or those about to die.

His mind returned to Mendoza and the animal skins. The Amazon's pretty little
ocelots and still smaller margays face possible extinction--a threat hunters
repeatedly level at jaguars, the top cats here. Brawnier than leopards, swift,