Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead (2 page)

Well. In an odd, technical sort of way he was a colonel . . .

The engine coughed again.

This time, Indy managed to keep from cursing.

In Spanish, Raul said, “Not far now, señors, only a couple of miles to the coast there.”

Indy had to lean to his right to see through the windshield, and the act of doing so caused the little plane to bank.

He didn’t say anything, but Raul must have noticed how quickly he leaned back the other way.

Raul—or maybe it was Indy—straightened the plane out. “Rosita is very sensitive, señor.”

Sensitive? A plane that you could turn by
leaning
? Indy shook his head. At least they had made it this far. They had taken off from Santiago, Cuba, flying to Guantanamo, then to a landing strip hacked out of a sugarcane field outside Baraco. They had refueled and then started over the Windward Passage, the strait that connected the Atlantic and the Caribbean, heading toward Mole Saint-Nicolas in Haiti. There was supposedly a runway and a fuel tank there at which they could gas up for the hop into Saint-Marc, and yet another fuel stop, before the final leg to Port-au-Prince. Maybe somebody would want to see a passport or visa, but Raul didn’t think it likely. The war and all, who had time to stand around waiting because a plane
might
land?

The J-2 had a range of only a couple of hundred miles, but it was what Mac had found. The “war and all” had sucked up a lot of available aircraft, along, apparently, with border patrolmen.

Indy looked at Mac. “I don’t know why I let you talk me into this. We need the rest. It’s why they gave us the furlough.”

Mac smiled. “Because, Jonesy, you are a dedicated archaeologist, right? How could you pass up a chance like this? What if the Nazis or the Japanese got there first? Then that bloody giant black pearl would be buying jackboots for Adolf or maybe a sub for the emperor.”

Indy didn’t want to say it but couldn’t stop himself: “Haiti is tropical. Crawling with snakes.”

“Actually, old chum, they aren’t any of them poisonous in these parts, you know.”

“Well, yippee for that. It’s not the poison, Mac, it’s the . . .
snakiness.”

Mac laughed again.

“You wouldn’t think it so funny if it was rats,” Indy allowed.

Mac’s smile disappeared. “Bloody Germans!”

Gotcha,
Indy thought. Mac was like Indy’s father—he hated rodents. He felt pretty good about that comeback. That thing with the rats in the Nazi castle—

The plane’s little engine went
sput-sput-sput!
and died.

It got very quiet.

The engine didn’t come back on.

The plane started to drop.

Raul began praying to the Virgin Mary.

Laden as the craft was, the glide pattern suddenly seemed more like that of a brick than a plane.

Indy tightened the tie holding his whip onto his belt, made sure his Webley’s holster was snapped shut. “Where’s my hat?” he said, looking around—

The sea, which had been a comfortable two thousand feet below, rushed toward them. It was only a hundred yards or so away now and coming up fast. They were, if they were lucky, going to ditch. If not, they’d go straight in and blow apart on impact.

“If I die and you don’t, I’m coming back to haunt you, Mac.”

He braced himself.

The plane hit the water—

The jolt clacked Indy’s teeth together as his body snapped forward against the seat belt. The plane skipped once, like a rubber ball bouncing off concrete. The right wing tore loose, the pilot’s door ripped away, and Indy saw the windshield shatter as Raul’s belt broke and his head went through the glass.

They bounced and jostled over the water like a skipped stone, hard enough to break up more of the plane—

Finally, they stopped moving foward. The water rushed in, filling the little craft, which began to sink.

“Out!” Indy yelled.

Mac was already moving.

TWO

T
HE TROPICAL SEAS
under the bright sunshine were clear enough that Indy could easily see the shark as it cruised lazily past them. Fourteen, fifteen feet long, at least, and doubtlessly wondering if they were worth the trouble it would take to eat them.

Go away. We taste bad. Really. Worst thing you ever ate.

“Blacktip, you think?” Mac said. “I didn’t know they got that big.”

They were only a couple of hundred yards away from shore.

“Classify it later—swim!”

Indy put his face into the water in an American crawl. You couldn’t see as well as when doing the Australian stroke, but it was faster, and speed was preferable at the moment. Fortunately, he was a strong swimmer, having spent far too much time in ponds, lakes, ditches, rivers, and oceans around the world.

Mac, whose style was more unorthodox, made more noise and bigger waves, but he wasn’t far behind.

It seemed as if it took forever, but eventually Indy achieved shallower water, enough so he could stand on the sandy bottom with the waves lapping just under his chest.

Whew. The shark was too big to risk water this shallow. He wouldn’t follow them.

Mac was right behind him.

And right behind Mac? There was a big fin—

Mac must have seen it in Indy’s eyes. He turned, said, “Bloody hell!” and started a high-knee run toward the shore.

Indy was already moving, but Mac blew past him, churning the water into white foam. He wouldn’t have thought the man could run that fast on land, much less in the ocean . . .

They stumbled onto the gray sand beach and fell prone.

Once he recovered his breath, Mac said, “They aren’t supposed to do that, go into water that shallow.”

“Send him a telegram explaining it to him,” Indy managed.

After a moment, Mac said, “Pity I don’t have a dry cigarette. All this exercise is terrible for my lungs. The smoke would calm them.”

Indy said nothing. Everybody knew cigarettes cut your wind. As much running as he seemed to do, he sure didn’t need that.

After a moment, Mac said, “Too bad about Raul.”

“Yeah, well, if he had taken better care of Rosita, we’d still be in the air.” It was a poor joke, but—what were you going to do? Raul was probably feeding that shark’s cousins by now, and bits and pieces of the shattered plane would likely be washing ashore for weeks. Done was done. The Cuban must have known how dangerous flying that overloaded aircraft was. It was part of the risk he took. Some you won, some you lost . . .

“Hello? Have a look.” Mac pointed.

At first, Indy wasn’t sure what he was seeing, but then he was.

“My hat!”

He managed to get to his feet, and to the hat. He picked it up, shook the sand off it, and put it on. He suddenly felt better. Things could be worse. Yeah, they had crashed into the sea, but they were alive, he had his whip, his revolver, and his
hat.
That was a good sign. Nothing was broken. The day was definitely looking up.

Mac said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you—how have you managed to keep that blasted hat in one piece? You’ve had it as long as I’ve known you.”

Indy grinned. “I’ve had it a lot longer than that.”

Mac raised an eyebrow.

“I was . . . thirteen? Almost fourteen. It involved the Cross of Coronado.”

“I’ve heard of that. Gold, precious stones, supposedly had a sliver of Christ’s cross tucked away in it?”

Indy nodded. “Yeah. If every sliver of wood that’s supposed to have come from that cross got piled up together, it would be bigger than a giant sequoia. Anyway, I swiped the artifact from some tomb raiders, but Fedora outfoxed me.”

“Fedora?”

“I never knew his name. This hat was his. I think he took a shine to me after we went ’round. He gave me some good advice, and this hat, as a consolation prize.”

“What was the advice?”

“Essentially, you can’t win ’em all. Sometimes you have to wait for another day. He was right. Eventually, I did collect Coronado’s Cross and got it to the university’s museum.”

“And you still have the hat.”

“Yeah, I get it blocked and dry-cleaned when I’m back in civilization, use a hat jack when it’s in the closet. Had the sweatband replaced eight or nine times. And there are hatmakers who can repair a tear or hole in felt, though it costs an arm and a leg. For what I’ve spent on this fedora over the years, I could have bought my own haberdashery.”

Mac shook his head.

“Hey, everybody has to be someplace,” Indy said. “And when I’m there, I want my lucky hat.”

“Lucky?”

“I’m still breathing, aren’t I?”

Mac grinned.

“What say we go and find some locals and see where we are?” Indy said.

Where they were, it turned out, was not far from a dirt road whereupon a large and ancient flatbed truck was passing. Indy waved it down.

The driver, a dark-skinned native, had a cabful of passengers—three adults, two children, a dog, and a small pig, maybe a couple of chickens, which Indy heard but didn’t see. The cab was missing the windshield, side windows, and most of the roof, over which a dirty sheet had been draped to provide shade.

“Bonjour,”
the driver said.

Indy could get by in various dialects of French, from Paris to New Orleans, and he asked if they could get a ride. The driver agreed. They’d have to sit on the back, which was piled high with bales of long, sword-shaped green plant stalks, but it would be better than walking. The driver was heading south to Saint-Marc, he said, a few hours away. That was the direction Indy and Mac needed anyhow.

“Merci beacoup, mon ami.”

The back of the truck had a fresh, peppery smell from the cut plants.

“What’s this lot, then?” Mac asked. He waved at the plants.

“Sisal. They use it to make rope. Not generally as good as the best hemp, but since many of the countries where that grows are still in Japanese or German hands, there’s a demand for it. It’s named for the Yucatan port where most of it used to be shipped from, though they don’t actually grow it there. In the New World, it’s believed to have originated in Chiapas, in southern Mexico. They raise it in tropical countries around the globe—South America, Asia, and the best grades come from Africa. Historically speaking, the crops are about—”

Mac cut him off: “Thank you, Professor Jones, for that
fascinating
lecture. Will there be an examination on Monday?”

“Hey, you asked.”

“No, I asked what the plant was, not for its bloody life story!”

“That’s your trouble, Mac—you have no depth. You need to expand your education beyond grave robbing. Learn some sociology, biology, anthropology. A little history would be good.”

Both of them smiled.

Indy stretched out, exhausted. He pulled his hat down over his face. It was warm, and the rutted road and bouncing ride were less than ideal, but it took only a few minutes for him to drift off to sleep. He had been looking forward to getting back to the States and taking it easy for a while, after all the long days and nights island-hopping in the Pacific and then the weeks behind the lines in Germany, but sometimes you just had to go where the trail led . . .

THREE

Port-au-Prince, Haiti

C
OLONEL
D
OKTOR
E
DWIN
G
RUBER
sat at a rattan table outside a ratty little café off the Ruta de Delmas, half a mile from the sea, drinking bad schnapps. The afternoon was warm, the breeze had died, and the shade of the half-rotten canvas umbrella jutting up from the table was little help against the heat. His ice-cream linen suit was damp with sweat and humidity. A few miles offshore, a rain shower seemed to be forming. If it came this way, the umbrella wouldn’t stop much of the rain, either.

He hated the tropics.

That they had any schnapps, even low quality, was amazing. They called it
eau-de-vie
here, using the French name, but it was the same thing. Mostly, they drank rum, which was hardly a fit beverage for an educated European. Paint remover.

Indeed, he detested this island in particular even more than the tropics in general. Still, one did one’s duty; and in this case, Gruber, formerly of the Waffen-SS Medical Corps, one of the first officers to wear the serpent on his patch, as well as a founding member of Röntgensturmbann SS-HA, the beloved Hauptamt X-Ray Battalion, was certainly one to do his duty, wherever it led him.

It had, alas, led him a long, long way from good schnapps and Berlin . . .

But Gruber had been sent by the Führer Himself, and if Herr Adolf deemed it necessary, Gruber would march through Hell without question—which was good, since this spot surely wasn’t so far removed from that region. Gruber was perhaps not as good a Nazi as some, though he agreed with most of the party’s goals—there needed to be a German Reich ruling the world, and keeping the race pure was necessary. So many mongrels—all you had to do was look around, wherever you happened to be. First, they would clean up the Fatherland, then the rest of the world . . .

Of course, after the war was over and the Third Reich ran things, a man who had the Führer’s favor? Well, such a man would do very well indeed. At least he wasn’t off at the Russian front patching up wounded. If there still
was
a Russian front . . .

He looked up to see Henri approaching, a fat glass tumbler of amber-colored rum in hand. Henri was a local, and his loyalty was not to the Reich but to money; since Gruber had enough of that to spread around, Henri’s loyalty was his, at least as long as he continued to pay him well. The rum he could smell from ten feet away. The vile stuff was strong enough to etch the plate on a battleship.

“Henri.”

“Monsieur.”

They spoke French, since that was the local language. Haiti was aligned with the Allies and not the Axis, and Gruber’s cover was that he was a Dutch businessman here to facilitate export of sisal and assorted spices. Few, if any, of the savages on this island could tell the difference between a Dutch and German accent, and he spoke perfect if somewhat idiomatic Dutch, since his grandfather had often used that tongue at home, having taken a Flemish wife.