Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead (7 page)

So now, in the boat Kapitän Schäefer had procured, a stout fishing craft ten meters long with a good engine, manned by a local who knew a spot to put ashore where they would be unlikely to run into anybody else—they made best speed for the island, bearing all the supplies they would need to stay for two weeks, if necessary.

The sea was calm, the day bright and hot, and even though he was running somewhat late, Gruber had every hope that he could make up for lost time. He was, after all, a German. In such matters, his natural superiority would shine through. The Japanese were superficially clever, but they had less depth. The prize would be his. It was a matter of when, not if.

And how glorious it would be when he returned to Berlin in triumph. How glorious indeed . . .

EIGHT

Zile Muri-yo

W
HEN
I
NDY SAW
the local store, he nodded to himself. Of course.

The place sat nine feet off the ground on a platform mounted on eight thick tree trunks. These supports looked to be covered with some kind of grease, probably to protect the wood from moisture and insects, and to keep rats and whatnot from climbing the poles.

Big storm surge managed to wash this far inland? It would pass right under the building. Smart.

Of course, if the wind was strong enough to get through the heavy forest and blow the place off its platform, it would be a nasty fall to the ground.

The stairs looked kind of rickety, lashed together rather than nailed, and it appeared they could be raised using a crank and ropes. The steps—indeed, much of the whole place—seemed to be constructed of bamboo. It was easy to see that there were ongoing repairs—new, green canes were woven into older brown mats. Even so, the steps were more solid than they looked.

Inside, the store was stocked with the usual kinds of items one might expect at an outpost shop. Tools, basic staples—rice, flour, beans, sugar, rum, tobacco—and shelves stacked with work clothes, canvas, and all manner of gear: tents, ropes, water or fuel cans, like that. Should be no problem gathering decent camping supplies.

There was a long rack of blades along one wall, some short, most of them longer—cane knives, machetes, bolos, hatchets, axes, and the like. If you were going to be hacking your way through vines and branches or felling trees, you’d need those.

Pretty well stocked for a small island store. Indy wondered how many people actually lived around here.

Marie approached an old man sitting in a rattan rocking chair—there was no counter per se—and began speaking to him in a dialect totally unfamiliar to Indy.

Indy glanced at Mac, who shook his head. He didn’t know it, either.

Didn’t sound anything like French or Creole. Amazing how many languages there were, and how small the pool of speakers for some of them. Indy had been in places in South America where a village of fifty or sixty were the only people in the world who spoke their particular patois. If they were suddenly wiped out by some natural disaster, the language would vanish with them.

Indy wandered around, mentally shopping. Shelter, food, those were important—

Hello?

He came to a lane on the floor under a shelf that was six or seven feet long and maybe a foot and a half deep, stacked with boxes of firearm ammunition. All kinds—rifle, shotgun, pistol, a lot of different calibers. Several thousand rounds.

Here was a stroke of luck. All Indy had was what was in his Webley, plus a few tarnished and half-corroded cartridges in his pant pocket—twelve, fifteen in all. While good ammo was more or less waterproof, when it was your neck on the line, you wanted to be sure. The two loudest sounds in the world, so the old joke went, were
click!
when you were expecting
bang!
And
bang!
when you were expecting
click!

Fresh, undunked-in-the-sea ammunition would be good.

Heck, they even had some for Mac’s puny little .32 auto. How unlikely was that?

Mac, who had been looking around, drifted over.

Indy said, “Hey, check it out. We can grab a box of ammo for your peashooter and one for my more manly revolver.”

Mac blinked. “Might want to grab more than one box each.”

Indy turned to look at Mac. “What are you talking about?”

“Think about it, Jonesy.” He held his right hand out, palm up, in the direction of the ammo.

Indy did.

“Uh-oh . . .”

“Right,” Mac said.

They were on a small island. Mostly jungle or not, it wouldn’t be big enough to support many large predators. Could be some game here, but again, it wouldn’t be in the rhino/elephant size range. Pigs, maybe, or even some cattle; deer, birds, squirrels, like that. If there weren’t many big cats or wolves or bears, things dangerous to humans, then why all the ammunition?

Who would be buying it?

What would they be shooting at?

“I don’t think I like this,” Mac said.

Indy shrugged. “We are here now. We’ll just have to be vigilant.”

“Yeah? What are we looking out for?”

He shrugged again. “Marie might know.”

“We should ask her.”

Indy collected four boxes of ammo for each of their guns. Just to be on the safe side . . .

Forty-five minutes in the store gave them everything they needed. Mac went to dicker with the old man, who apparently spoke enough French to bargain. Marie approached Indy.

“I have hired a local man, Batiste, and some porters.”

“Do we need porters?”

“Unless you want to haul our gear and chop our way through whatever forest it takes to reach wherever we are going?”

“I see your point. Porters would be good.”

“Batiste will meet us here shortly and take us to Efreye, his village. We’ll stay there tonight and get started in the morning.”

Indy nodded. “Got a question for you. Seems like an awful lot of ammunition for a little country store.” He nodded in the direction of the ammo aisle.

“It is harder to get such things with the war,” she said. “Armies shooting at each other and all, takes a lot of bullets. Père Ours stocks up on such whenever he can.”

“Still, there are rounds for shotguns, rifles, pistols, two dozen different calibers. Seems like a bit much for such a small island.”

She gave him a small shrug. “Men want guns and they like variety.
C’est la vie.”

She was right and it made a certain sense; still, something didn’t quite ring true about her answer. She had been quick to agree to help them. Maybe she had an ulterior motive? But—what would it be? She couldn’t have known they would show up.

A mosquito buzzed him, and Indy shooed it away. “Come dark, these things will drain us dry. I hope Papa Bear here has 6-12.”

“There is a bathhouse in the village,” she said. “After we get cleaned up, the locals have a lotion that keeps the insects at bay. Much better than the commercial stuff. Lets your skin breathe.”

Indy nodded. He liked that idea.

What the professors didn’t tell you when you were a freshly minted graduate student all eager to travel to exotic places in search of archaeological wonders were the small things: the heat, cold, dust, the sand. The lack of drinkable or bathing water. They didn’t talk about the mosquitoes, chiggers, and ticks; the spiders and scorpions and leeches.

He recalled a time in some tropical outpost once after a hard rain. Had that been India? The Malay Peninsula? Hard to say, the way these adventures ran together. What he wouldn’t forget was the lawn in front of the house where he was staying, which seemed to be undulating after the daylong downpour—and the moment he realized it was because there were thousands of
slugs
oozing across it . . .

You learned to live with such things if you were going into the field; it was part of the business. Finicky archaeologists didn’t last long. They stayed home and taught full-time.

Not that he was finicky, but there were days when the lecture hall had a great deal of appeal. No dust. No broiling sun.

No snakes . . .

Whatever Marie was keeping to herself, it wouldn’t matter if they could find the Heart of Darkness and get on their way. Let her have her secrets. Everybody deserved a few. Lord knew he had plenty of his own. The Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, and the Peruvian werejaguars, even that Chinese tomb and its black pearl, just to consider the first few that came to mind . . .

Boukman listened to the speech from his slaves who could still talk, the potioned ones, and frowned at what he heard. The white men had people watching them, followers from the mainland. The Japanese who pretended to be Chinese, and the German who passed himself off as Dutch, and this was not at all to Boukman’s liking, oh, no. Somehow these people had fastened on to his two white men, and that would not do. They were his, they had been sent for him, and no one was going to get
between
him and them.

He pondered his options as he sat in his hut. As long as the white men with Marie were running around loose in the jungle, they might be at risk from these new threats. What the Germans and the Japanese wanted was of no importance, but that they might interfere with whatever it was Boukman was supposed to do with the
imen blan
?
Non.
Not to be allowed.

The Dream had come for a reason, it always did, and while he didn’t immediately know what that reason was, eventually it was revealed.

The white men were here for a purpose, and
they
knew what it was. He had intended to watch them and allow them to lead him to whatever it was. But accidents happened, especially when men with guns were involved, and what if the
imen blan
were injured or killed before he could reap their secrets? Perhaps a mistake on his part.

So. A new idea:

He would ask them. They would tell him. And then he could see exactly how it concerned him.

His slaves, standing silently and with infinite patience, were awaiting his command.

Boukman gave it to them.

NINE

“J
UST AS YOU SAID
, Yamada-san. They went to the island store. They are now on their way to the village near the largest of the sisal plantations.”

Yamada nodded. “Keep them under observation. They will not leave this late in the day. Have the men set up the camp here. No fires, we must stay invisible.”

“Hai,
Yamada-san.”

As the evening drew near, the insects were already swarming, kept from alighting upon them only by the oily lotion that covered every inch of their exposed flesh. The buzzing of tiny wings was constant, and Yamada had learned to tune it out long ago, enough so that he was not bothered by it. It was a part of the tropics, where mosquitoes sometimes grew so large that even a shirt was no protection against their bites, were it not of a thick and heavy weave. He had seen the bloodsucking insects clustered so thick on comrades’ clothes that it looked as if they were wearing fur . . .

“Suzuki-san, please also to post a sentry. I should not like to be joined in my tent by a . . . pig in the middle of the night.”

Suzuki grinned. He gave Yamada a slow, military bow, no more than a nod. They were not really speaking of pigs.

Of Gruber, there had been no sign—with luck, Henri’s avowal that he would not tell the German of the archaeologists’ departure would hold, and Gruber would not be a factor. A wise man did not depend on luck, however, and the German could not be entirely discounted. Yamada had heard of his exploits. He was intelligent, and while too much of that could be a handicap, just enough was most dangerous. Best to keep one’s guard up.

In
Bushido,
the samurai’s code of behavior, sneak attacks were allowed—and should be expected. If an enemy leaped out of the bushes and cut you down, you had no one to blame but yourself. You knew you had an enemy, and you knew a bush could conceal him. Until he was no longer among the living, he was always a threat, and even gone he might have family or comrades who would avenge him.

Death was not a concern—the way of the samurai was found there—but being caught unprepared? Dishonorable, that, and worse than mere death.

Efreye Village, Zile Muri-yo

The village was bigger than Indy would have guessed. Forty, forty-five small huts, bamboo with palm-thatched roofs, along with a couple of larger communal structures of sturdier wood, one of which was the bathhouse. In the tropics, the heat, humidity, and sweat combined to make you feel pretty grubby even after one day, and a wash would feel good.

The villagers had cooking fires going. They didn’t rush over with enthusiasm to greet the new arrivals, but neither did they start shooting, and Indy saw several shotguns leaning against walls or trees.
Subdued
was the word that came to mind.

Of course, it was getting near dark, and subsistance villagers generally had long days just to keep food on the table, so maybe they were all tired. Indy was tired, for certain.

Marie introduced them to Batiste, a tall, well-built man of perhaps thirty with dark skin and a very white smile, who wore old but clean and mended khaki trousers and shirt, with a bandanna tied around his forehead. He sported a machete as long as his arm and a holstered pistol on his belt as well as a short lever-action rifle. Batiste spoke French, Creole, English, and whatever the locals mostly used, which seemed to have a lot of glottal stops and a definite singsong tonality to it. African roots, to be sure.

“Bathe or eat first?” Marie asked.

“I’m good either way,” Mac said.

Indy shrugged.

“I think I will use the bathhouse,” Marie said. “Batiste will provide you with food and show you a hut for the night.”

Marie headed off, and Batiste said, “Gentlemen, this way please.”

They followed him to a hut. There was a kerosene lamp inside, short-wicked but bright enough to reveal a circular room sufficient for four or five people to bed down. The floor was of packed earth, no furniture save for some rolled-up sleeping mats. The door was heavy bamboo, and there was a hardwood bar on the inside that slid into hoops on the wall to keep company from walking in unexpectedly.