The Man of Bronze (22 page)

Speaking of birds, Urdmann flipped me one. Then, not stopping for a cheap shot at Lord H. or me, he sprinted in the direction of his own boat.

I was tempted to follow. His force field would last only a minute. If I was there when the shield went away, I could pound Urdmann’s smug face into eel food.

But the moment Urdmann jumped from the trireme to the next vessel—a World War II patrol boat—the galley’s hull gave a groan. As I’d feared, only the bronze leg’s magic kept this ship afloat. Now that the leg had departed, two thousand years’ worth of leaks were opening. If I abandoned the unconscious Lord H. to pursue Urdmann, Britain would lose a viscount to the Sargasso. If I ran after Urdmann with Lord H. slung over my shoulder, I’d never catch the villain in time.

The most humiliating part was that Urdmann must have planned it this way. Protected by the Silver Shield, he could have killed Lord H. . . . but he’d left the lord alive to handicap me.

“Blast you!” I shouted at Urdmann’s retreating back. “This isn’t over! I’ll . . . I’ll . . . I’ll think up some less hackneyed dialogue and crush you the next time we meet!”

Beneath me, the galley was sinking. On the deck, four commandos lay dead. I reminded myself this was not some game of one-upmanship.

Good people had died. Lancaster Urdmann was still alive.

That appalling situation must be remedied.

11

CAPE YORK PENINSULA,
QUEENSLAND: THE PENNABONG RIVER

When you think of Australia, the first thing that comes to mind is the outback: the vast semidesert filled with sheep, kangaroos, and venomous beasties. But Australia is larger than the continental United States and has wide geographic diversity. In the far northeast, Cape York Peninsula—called the Tip—encompasses mountains, swamp, dry lands, and thick stands of tropical rain forest . . . all barely inhabited. Untouched wilderness stretches for hundreds of square miles: no roads or permanent villages, just a few Aborigine camps.

A handful of visitors come every year for rugged expeditions into the highlands or jungle, but even the most adventurous stay away from the Tip in December. That month marks the start of the Australian summer
and
the local monsoon season. North Australia’s monsoon rains are more irregular than the near-constant downpour of India; but when the rains finally come, they do so in abundance. Rivers flood, and the land turns to boot-clogging muck.

It wasn’t actually raining beside the Pennabong River—in fact, it was sunny enough to merit my darkest sunglasses—but we’d suffered a deluge the night before and our camp had become a pig wallow. Ilya, Lord Horatio, and I sulked in our tents, inventing excuses for not venturing outside. The Sargasso was two days behind us.
Unauthorized Intervention
was ten thousand miles away, transporting the bodies of fallen comrades back to Britain. Lord H. had anguished whether to stay with his ship or to help me deal with Lancaster Urdmann. His crew had made the final decision: “Go get the bastard, Captain.”

So here we were in Queensland. The morning was already steaming hot. My view out the tent flap showed not one, not two, but three crocodiles smiling on the far bank of the river. An equal number likely lived on the near bank, but they were hiding in hopes of catching some leg of Lara for lunch.

Speaking of legs, somewhere up the Pennabong lurked the final bronze fragment: the missing left foot. I told my companions, “I shudder to think what bronze mutation will do to crocodiles.”

“Ah, Larochka,” said Ilya, “don’t worry about giant mutant crocodiles. Those are too obvious . . . too
expected.
The bronze foot will set its sights higher: giant mutant spiders and snakes, dripping with weapons-grade venom.”

“Indeed,” said Lord H. “Rude of the Australian government not to let us bring in rocket launchers. But maybe Teresa will have some.”

“Not a chance,” I said. “Teresa might own a cheap hunting rifle, but more likely, she’ll just have a tranq gun.”

Teresa Tennant was a zoologist I’d met years earlier in the outback. At the time, she was surveying reptile species around Alice Springs; I was being fed to some of those same reptiles. (Long story short: a Cambodian war criminal was hiding on a cattle station. He had several jade artifacts not rightfully his. He also had a fondness for dumping intrepid archaeologists into death traps. The death trap he chose for me featured tiger snakes, an unusually lethal type of cobra. Teresa had previously tagged several snakes with radio trackers; she showed up to see why they’d all chosen to congregate in an abandoned tungsten mine. High jinks ensued.)

Now Teresa’s herpetology survey had moved to Cape York. Though she’d been working in a different part of the Tip, she was close enough to where we wanted to go that she could reach us in reasonable time. When I’d contacted her, she said she had all the equipment we’d need to go in country and she’d be happy to serve as our guide. Now we were waiting for her at the agreed-upon rendezvous. It was hot, wet, and sticky . . . the waiting got on my nerves . . . and I found myself wondering why I hadn’t chosen a job that conducted its business in air-conditioned offices.

A cockroach the size of a ferret poked its head into my tent. “Oh, push off,” I snapped, and kicked it out the door.

Teresa arrived just before noon. We heard her approach long before she came into sight: a white noise that grew to a hum, then a roar. Overcome by curiosity, we slogged our muddy way to the riverbank to see what was coming toward us.

It was an airboat: one of those wonderful watercraft with a huge fan mounted behind the driver’s seat. This was the superdeluxe size, with room for four people and even a small amount of space to store equipment. It was loud, dangerous, and calling my name.

“Bogemoi,”
Ilya muttered. “That’s worse than a snowmobile.”

“Buck up, old chap,” Lord H. replied. “At least it won’t be Lara driving. This Teresa is surely a sensible woman who’d never trust Lara with . . .”

His voice trailed off.

Five minutes later, I was gunning the airboat’s throttle, wondering how fast this bad little tyke could go. I took back every sullen thought about Cape York, mud, and jobs without air-conditioning.

Teresa didn’t quite give me a free hand at the airboat’s helm. She sat beside me on the driver’s seat. The look on her face said she might wrestle the controls out of my grip if I got too carried away.

In any such wrestling match, she stood a good chance of winning. She wasn’t tall but was wide and muscular: seven-eighths Aborigine, very dark, dressed in khaki safari gear. Teresa was one of the many Aborigines who combined modern and traditional lifestyles. She possessed a Ph.D. from the University of Sydney but spent most of her time in the untamed wilds. I had no idea what part of the country she considered home; she’d lived in every state and territory, spoke a dozen different Aboriginal dialects, and seemed comfortable in any environment from desert to jungle to downtown Brisbane.

Teresa was more than just smart and adaptable. Somehow she’d also become rich—not rich as in owning the ten biggest skyscrapers in Melbourne, but rich as in buying an airboat with cash if she thought it would come in handy. When she bought the boat, she also picked up four pairs of ear protectors to block out the din of the fan. Even better, she’d purchased top-of-the-line equipment, with short-range radios in the ear sets and sweet little button microphones like the ones pop singers wear when they’re pretending to sing at concerts. The earphones and mikes let us talk without shouting, despite the gale-force winds blowing behind us.

We’d traveled some distance upstream—the river fat and swollen, the banks snarled with driftwood from recent flooding—when Teresa finally asked the burning question. “When do you explain why you’re here? Or are you just going to keep playing mysterious. ‘Ooo, can’t talk on the phone—never know when the line’s tapped.’”

“Ooo,” I said, “can’t talk on your little radios. Never know when someone is listening.”

“The sets have a range of fifty feet, Lara. Unless we’re passing some croc with a scanner, privacy is not an issue.”

I laughed, then launched into a lengthy account of all things bronze and bestial. At the end, Teresa sat back and looked at our surroundings. The river—more of a creek by now, given how far we’d traveled while I told my story—was the width of a two-lane street, with trees growing up to the banks on either side. No birds or animals were visible; the noise of the airboat’s fan sent them fleeing. While the sun was still high enough to shine down hot on the water, the forest lurked under its own green shadows.

“You really think your piece of bronze is here?” Teresa asked.

“Reuben’s notes say the foot lies up the Pennabong River.”

“Lara,” Teresa said, “
nothing
lies up the Pennabong River. I have maps and aerial photos of the entire Tip. This area is pure wilderness—not even a tribal campsite.”

“That’s a good sign,” I answered. “The Pennabong is a perfectly good freshwater river. Why doesn’t anybody live here? What do the locals know that we don’t?”

“Perhaps that the fishing is bad. Or there are patches of quicksand. Or aggressive army ants. Lots of perfectly natural things could persuade people to give the Pennabong a miss. Cape York has plenty of other rivers . . . and it’s not like this region has millions of people fighting over every inch of land.”

“You’re being too rational,” I told her. “When it comes to hunks of bronze, rationality doesn’t apply. For example,” I said, pointing into the forest, “what do you make of
that
?”

I brought the airboat to a halt while Teresa and everyone else looked. In the shadows of the forest, draped with vines and moss, stood a stone statue ten feet tall. Half of that height was the statue’s head: square featured with deeply sunken eyes, a long sloping nose, and prominent chin. I recognized the artistic style immediately, and so would anyone who’s ever subscribed to
National Geographic.
The statue was a
moai
—an exact duplicate of the famous stone heads of Easter Island.

Except that Easter Island was eight thousand miles to the east, with no obvious connection between there and here.

“What in the world is
that
doing here?” Teresa exclaimed.

“It’s likely a marker,” I said, “saying either,
You’re in the right place, welcome!
or
You’re in the wrong place, go away!
Don’t you just hate ambiguity?”

“Statues like that aren’t Australian. The people on Easter Island were Polynesian.”

“Didn’t Polynesians trade with the Aborigines?”

“Once in a while,” Teresa said. “It was rare—both groups were habitually unfriendly to strangers. But Polynesians did visit the Tip now and then. And you could just barely get an outrigger canoe up the Pennabong this far.”

“But not much farther.” I pointed upstream; the river ahead continued to narrow until it disappeared around a bend.

Teresa nodded. “Maybe that statue means
Here’s the best place to get out and walk.
”

“I know a hint when I hear one,” I said.

Landing the airboat was easy: I turned off the fan and the current pushed us into shore. Lord Horatio leapt onto the bank and tied a mooring rope to a tree using some seafarer’s knot whose history he explained at torturous length. Teresa jumped after Lord H., while I helped Ilya clamber out; the bullet wound in his leg was healing, but he wouldn’t be competing in track and field events any time soon.

Once we were all on solid ground, I let Teresa lead the way to the statue. She was the natural person to put in front, because she knew this type of country better than the rest of us. More important, she carried a Crocodile Dundee–style machete; the tropical undergrowth was so thick, we never moved more than three steps without stopping to hack at the foliage. I would have taken my fair turn chopping greenery, but I preferred to keep my pistols in hand. Lord H. had his Walther PPK and Ilya his AK-47. Teresa made snide remarks about what Freud would think of so much firepower . . . but she hadn’t seen the woolly mammoth or the giant eel.

By the time we reached the statue, we were sodden with sweat from the heat and sticky green juices that dripped on us from plants cut by the machete. I gingerly touched the statue’s carved stone. Nothing happened; it was just normal rock. The statue’s creators had probably cut stone from the inland mountains and floated it down the river on a raft.

“Did you know this would be here?” Teresa asked.

“Reuben predicted the possibility, based on a combination of Polynesian and Aboriginal legends.”

“What kind of legends?”

I had Reuben’s notes in my backpack, but I didn’t bother getting them—I remembered the gist. “Long ago in this region, the Ancestors held a gambling match with the Python. The snake lost everything he owned, and eventually he had nothing left to wager except his feet. He bet them too, and lost . . . which is why snakes no longer have legs. The Ancestors kept one of Python’s feet for their own purposes, but they gave the other foot to human beings. A village of Aborigines kept the foot as a sacred object for many years. Then they foolishly boasted about the foot’s mystic power to Men from the Sea, who stole the foot for themselves.”

“In other words,” said Teresa, “your android’s bronze foot came into the possession of a Cape York Aborigine tribe. The tribe used the foot’s powers in some flashy way that attracted the attention of Polynesian sailors. Eventually, the Polynesians mounted a raid to seize the foot.”

“Exactly,” I replied. “But even though the Polynesians grabbed the foot, they couldn’t get it home. Every time they tried to leave in their canoes, they’d run into ghosts or monsters and have to turn back. Eventually, the Polynesians decided their gods wanted the foot to stay in Australia. They established a permanent Polynesian settlement on the Pennabong River, where they built the foot a shrine.”

Teresa made a face. “That must have gone over well with the locals. Thieving strangers steal your great talisman, then try to steal your land too.”

I nodded. “The Aborigines declared war on the Polynesian invaders. It was low-key to begin with—just skirmishes in the jungle. Meanwhile, the Polynesians sent canoes across the Pacific, all spreading the same message:
We’ve got this wonderful treasure but the mean old Australians want to take it.
Holy men and women from many islands made pilgrimages to the shrine. They built a temple and carved
moai
statues as tributes to the gods.”

“Which came first?” Teresa asked. “The
moais
here or the ones on Easter Island?”

“
Moais
started here. The ones on Easter Island were copies, made much later. Some priest or priestess probably visited the Pennabong temple, then went home and created duplicates. Not full-size, just miniatures—carvings that were passed down from one generation to the next, with a story saying the originals were much larger. Eventually some Easter Islander decided, ‘Hey, let’s sculpt big ones again so we can really impress the gods.’”

Teresa glanced at the stone statue . . . and at the vines, leaves, weeds, and moss clotted around it. “Doesn’t seem as if the gods found this one impressive. It looks completely ignored.” She idly lifted a vine with the tip of her machete. “No surprise the statue doesn’t show on aerial photographs.”

“The temple is likely in similar condition,” I said. “Completely overgrown. It’s been centuries since the Polynesians did all this. In their heyday they had a good-sized community, with everything centered around the bronze foot. But they never came to terms with the Aborigines. When outrigger canoes sailed up or down the Pennabong, there’d be surprise attacks. The priests at the temple struck back with ‘strange magics’ . . . but unfortunately for the Polynesians, things backfired on them. The Aborigines told Reuben a lot of vague stories about ‘creatures sent by the Ancestors to drive out the foreign invaders.’ After what we saw in Siberia, I think I can guess what happened. The priests had learned how to exploit the foot’s power, and they used it against any native Australian who caused trouble. In the long run, though, no one who plays with bronze radiation can keep it under control. Eventually, it gets out of hand . . . and, presto, you get monsters. The mutants in this region killed as many Polynesians as Aborigines. Destroyed almost everyone in the settlement. People told Reuben a few surviving priests sealed themselves into the temple . . . and it became their tomb.”