Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead (15 page)

“It would seem so. I do not recall the meeting, but there is no one else who is powerful enough to ride me without my leave. And a loa would ask.”

“He would have wanted to know about you,” Batiste said. He nodded at Indy and Mac.

Indy looked at Marie again. There was a red mark on her cheek. It looked like a burn.

“I do not think I would have told him anything,” she said. “But I cannot know for sure.”

“What’s to tell?” Mac asked.

She shrugged. “Not much. But with Boukman, any information adds to his power.”

“So we should be worried,” Indy said.

“Yes, though not so much just yet,” she said. “If he had wanted us dead or taken, he would have already had it done—he has
zombis
in the jungle, you may be certain of that. He wants something from us, and I think he doesn’t know exactly what it is. He is waiting to see what we do. After we find the artifact, that will be the time of greatest danger.”

“Maybe they won’t be able to get across the river?” Mac said.

“Oh, they can. Tumbling downstream for a mile means nothing to them. They are already dead.”

“Well . . . swell,” Indy said. “Never a dull moment.”

SIXTEEN

S
UZUKI SAID
, “One of our scouts is missing.”

“Missing?”

“Hai,
Yamada-san. He was due to report back an hour ago.”

“Perhaps his watch stopped.”

Suzuki look to see if Yamada was jesting, which was the case, though Yamada did not grin to give it away.

He shook his head. “My men can tell time well enough from the sunlight to know when they are due back.”

Yamada nodded. The man could have had an accident, of course. This jungle was full of places to trip and fall and wind up with a broken leg or worse. He could have tumbled into a river and been swept away. Quicksand, perhaps. Dangers everywhere.

Well. That was the nature of a military unit. One had to scout the terrain and enemies. And some losses were to be expected, whether by accident or by enemy intent.

Maybe the Germans, though if they thought they were still hidden, probably not. They wouldn’t want to do anything to cause Yamada’s crew to be more alert—and a missing man would certainly be cause for concern.

Before he had seen that creature with the blood dripping down its jaws crouched over one of the imperial army’s finest men, he might have been more apt to believe in an accident, but not now. The scout wasn’t going to be coming back if one of those things had gotten him.

“I will pair the men from now on,” Suzuki said.

That horse was out of the barn and closing the door wouldn’t help him, but Suzuki was right—it might help the others.

Maybe.

“One of our men is gone,” Schäefer said.

Gruber stared at him. “Gone, what do you mean, ‘gone’?”

“I mean he is not with us and cannot be located.”

“Who?”

“Private Grün.”

“Are you sure? How did it happen?”

“He was in the group bringing up the rear. He apparently stepped off the trail to answer a call of nature. Private Schinken waited. When, after a few moments, Grün did not return, Schinken went looking. He did not find him. He marked the spot, and two more of our men went back to look. No sign of the man.”

“Scheisse!”

“My sentiments, as well.”

“The Japanese, do you think?”

“No. Our forward scouts would have certainly seen them heading back along the trail.”

“Then what happened?”

“Perhaps there are larger animals than we know about in these woods.”

“Surely there would have been evidence of an animal attack?”

“I do not know what to tell you, Colonel Doktor. He is gone, and it is as if he vanished into the air.”

“Pair the men,” Gruber said. “Nobody goes anywhere alone, even to answer calls of nature.”

“Already done,” the captain said.

“I do not like this.”

“Nor do I, but done is done. Perhaps he wandered too far, got lost, and he will find his way back to the trail eventually and catch up with us.”

“Do you think so?”

“Not really.”

Gruber sighed. First, they had lost a man to the river. And now this. Turning ugly, this mission.

Ah, well. That had always been a possibility, hadn’t it? They would just have to continue on as best they could, and be more vigilant. They were a crack unit of the German army, men who could shoot a fly off a wall at ten paces or slice a man into bloody ribbons with a pocketknife—there ought not to be anything or anybody in this forest who could stop them from their goal. Nor would he allow that.

“We’re supposed to climb down that?” Mac said.

“Unless you can wave your arms hard enough to fly over it,” Marie said.

Indy looked at the gorge. It was both steep and deep, easily eighty feet of dirt and rock embankment on this side, slightly less on the opposite side. Yeah. He had climbed worse.

Mac said, “Why isn’t there a river at the bottom?”

“There is,” Batiste said. “But there are clefts in the rock—you see? And the river is below, in a natural tunnel through the stone under the ground. Even when it rains, the water does not rise to fill the gorge, but is drained into the river beneath the earth.”

Indy nodded.

Batiste said, “We will anchor ropes here and climb down. If we move slowly and with care, it will not be so bad.”

Indy looked at Marie.

“Do not worry about me,” she said. “I have been climbing trees and ropes since I was a girl.”

“Well, I haven’t done much of that since my last trip to the Schweizer Alpen, in ’34,” Mac said. “I hope I haven’t forgotten how.”

Indy looked at Mac. “The Swiss Alps in ’34? Dufourspitze? That was you?”

Mac grinned.

Marie looked blank.

Indy said, “Leonardo da Vinci had another set of mirror-writing notebooks that disappeared after he died. The story was, somehow those writings wound up in the hands of thieves, who eventually hid them somewhere between Italy and Switzerland. The thieves had a falling-out, some were killed, others arrested and executed, and the location supposedly died with them.

“But in 1934, these notebooks showed up in the British Museum. Found in a cave on the Dufourspitze—so the provenance the English offered said.” He looked at Mac.

“Modesty forbids,” he said, holding his hands palms up.

“Since when did
you
develop any modesty?” Indy shook his head. “The Italians were not happy about those notebooks winding up in British hands.”

“And since when are the Italians ever happy? Besides, they had so many of the great man’s writings already and wouldn’t share them. It was only fair. Leonardo belongs to the world, not il duce Mussolini.”

“Hey, I’m not arguing with you—”

“Messieurs,” Batiste said, “we would probably be wise to cross the ravine while the daylight is still strong.”

The descent wasn’t so bad when you had a rope down which you could rappel. It was hard work in the heat and humidity, but the angle wasn’t so steep that it ever approached vertical, so you weren’t ever just hanging there.

Mac had a bad moment halfway down when something slid under his boot and he nearly lost the rope. He cursed, but managed to stop himself after a couple of feet.

“You okay?” Indy asked.

“Peachy,” Mac said. He didn’t sound peachy, though.

Marie was as good a climber as she claimed.

Indy had done enough of this kind of work that he wasn’t particularly worried, but after Mac’s slip, he paid more attention to his footing.

It took only a few minutes for most of them to reach the bottom of the ravine. Indy saw the fissure in the rock at the bottom before he reached it—the gap was probably three feet on average, narrower here, wider there, and had been there long enough so that the edges of the split had been smoothed by time and weather. He could also hear the subterranean river rushing below the crack in the earth. It was loud—the sound channeled up through the fissure from the enclosure was full of echoes.

Indy peered into the gap. The sunlight from above was just enough to get a glimpse of the roiling water about thirty feet down.

“Careful you do not fall in,” Batiste said. “The Fleuve Caché—the Hidden River—does not surface until she reaches the sea, and there she tumbles down a high cliff into a rocky cove. It is most impressive to see the waterfall from a boat offshore. Much foam and spew, it fills the air with rainbows and mist. You would almost certainly be drowned long before you got there, but if you survived the swim and the tide was out, you would be dashed to death on the rocks.”

Indy took a step back from the edge.

The bearers were already tossing the supplies over a narrowing of the cleft, an easy step for an adult, and slender enough so that it wouldn’t cost you a fall into the river if you slipped.

Up top, one of the bearers undid two of the three ropes, rolled them up, and clambered down the remaining line.

“We will leave a rope for our return,” Batiste said.

“Only one?” Indy said.

Batiste shrugged. “We may need the others between here and where we are going.” He looked up the easier slope ahead of them. “The forest thickens above us, and we will have to hack our way through for at least another half kilometer.”

“And after that?” Mac asked.

Batiste shrugged again. “I cannot say for sure. I have never gone past that myself. I have only the accounts of others. There is a small grassland, supposedly. More streams, other ravines, a few hills. If we get past those, finally the place we seek.”

“Seems like somebody went to a lot of trouble to take the relic there,” Indy said.

Batiste said,
“Oui.
The story my father’s grandfather told him said that of those who went, a score of men, only one returned to speak of it. The others died on the trip, or once they were there.”

“Accidents?”

“The lone survivor would not speak to this. When asked, he would cross himself and go silent, so the story goes.”

Just keeps getting better,
Indy thought.

Boukman looked at the two captives, the German and the Japanese. He would question them and find out what they knew. The German would be easy—he spoke that language, along with a score of others: Spanish, French, Portuguese, English, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, a little Russian, and several Caribbean dialects. Over nearly two hundred years, he had learned a lot of tongues. Unfortunately, he had little opportunity to avail himself of languages from most of Asia, so he had no Chinese, Japanese, or Hindi. But that was not such an impediment—there were many among the loa who knew human speech in all its forms, and Boukman could petition one on such a small matter at little cost.

The two men were bound and blindfolded, sitting there against the outside wall of his hut, and Boukman nodded at two of his servants and pointed at the German. “That one.”

The two Children of the Potion moved. They dragged the German to his feet, removed his blindfold, and held him so that he faced Boukman.

“We must talk,” he said in German.

“I will tell you nothing!” the German said.

Boukman smiled. “You are a soldier, and a brave man, but that does not matter. You cannot resist my questions.”

“Torture?”

“I would not waste my time.” He nodded.

Two more of the Children approached, one of them bearing a vial of the potion. He would have to make some more of it, soon; he was running low.

The German was strong and tried to fight them, but in the end he was forced to swallow enough of the fluid. It was only a matter of minutes after that before he belonged to Boukman. The Japanese soldier would enjoy the same fate, and when he was done with them here, he would send them back out to spy upon their former fellows.

They would be possessed, serving as Boukman’s cat’s paws until they died the True Death. And if he felt like it, they would be his beyond that . . .

Boukman smiled at that thought. It must be terrifying to see a comrade shamble into view and realize he was no longer anything like the man you had known.

Once the elixir took him, the German grew slack in the grips of the others. His face relaxed, his eyes dulled. Who he had been sank deep under the tide of the drug and all but drowned.

Boukman knew the signs well. He had been causing them for nearly two centuries. He waved the others away.

The new slave stood there, swaying slightly, waiting for his master’s voice.

“Now, tell me—what are the Germans doing in my country?”

Like a schoolboy reciting lessons by rote, the German told him everything he knew about that subject. Not that much, but all that he had.

Boukman listened. Ah. Most interesting. He did not see how it really concerned him directly—he already had the secret to the potion; he doubted that an African version, which might require plants and other ingredients from that far continent, could serve him any better. But he would see. Knowledge was power. The more you knew, the more powerful you could become.

He would question the other soldier and see what his group was doing—

On a hunch—the Germans and Japanese were allies in this current war—he said, “Do you speak Japanese?”

“Yes,” the German said.

Boukman smiled again. He would not even have to call upon the loa, making it even easier.

“Bring the other one,” he said.

Gruber looked down the side of the incline. Steep, but not insurmountable. The opposite side was even less of a grade. And the archaeologists had left a rope in place. Gruber had a man test it, to make certain it wasn’t rigged to break or let go.

“Post a guard,” he told the captain. “To make certain nobody fools with the rope as we descend. Two men.”

Schäefer nodded. “Of course.”

It would be a nasty fall if the rope were to part as one descended, and while Gruber didn’t mind losing men if it was necessary, it ought not to happen from inattention. “It will be dark soon,” Gruber said. “Have the scouts find a suitable site for camp. I do not think we wish to try to travel in this jungle after dark.”

Schäefer nodded.