by WW Mortensen
“I’ll be damned,” Owen said. He removed his glasses, cleaning them on his shirt, no doubt only to find that when he replaced them the view through their newly smudge-free lenses remained every bit as incredible. “Man—what next?” He glanced at Ed and shook his head. “I’ve gotta hand it to you, buddy, this is just… amazing.”
Staring ahead as though it was the first time he’d laid eyes on the scene himself, Ed whispered, “Isn’t it just?”
There was a moment of silence as the newcomers took it in. Owen shifted his gaze from the ruins to Ed and then back again, shaking his head. “Man, this place, this city… it shouldn’t be,” he said at length. “It shouldn’t exist, not here, not in this part of the world. The indigenous people of Brazil and the Amazon basin—the forest people—don’t build complex stone structures like this. They use wood and bone and build palm-thatched huts. Simple things built with simple materials. This is the kind of advanced architecture you might find in the jungles of Central America, or Peru. Not here.”
Jessy removed her digital SLR from her pack and was now madly snapping photos. “Exactly,” she said, her finger clicking away. “Geographically, the nearest civilizations capable of building something like this were probably the Incas or the Moche or the Chacapoyas, but they never penetrated this far into the lowlands.”
Rebecca studied the surprisingly well-preserved pyramid. From what she could tell, the structure was square-based and stair-stepped. Each ‘step’—there were nine in total—was a huge, horizontal, square-shaped platform that, in sitting on top of another, similarly shaped yet even bigger platform, helped create the impression of a huge stairway rising from the jungle floor. Unlike a regular pyramid, though, the steps didn’t rise to a point, ascending instead to a flat, truncated area, as though the tip of the pyramid had been cut off. And on top of this flat, cut-off area, complete with columns and dark, empty doorways, sat a square-shaped building. At this distance it was hard to tell how big it was, yet it was perhaps the pyramid’s most dominant feature and by its very nature had a way of drawing the eye.
To Rebecca, the building seemed to be a temple of some kind.
External access to the temple—if that was what it was—appeared to be gained by a set of regular-sized stairs that ran from the forest floor up the middle of the two sides of pyramid she could currently see. It was logical to assume a set ran up the other two sides as well.
“You know,” Jessy said, “it looks Mayan to me.”
Rebecca knew why that was strange. The Mayan civilization and its uniquely styled pyramids had been based not in South America at all, but throughout Central America and southern Mexico. Just what was a Mayan-like pyramid—and city—doing here, in this part of the world? She was aware of Ed’s take on things, but still…
She felt eyes upon her and turned to find Ed watching her.
“You gotta wonder what the hell happened here,” Owen said. “To the people, I mean. Where did they go? Where are their descendants?”
Jessy snapped more pictures. “While you’re at it, where did the new residents—the builders of that web—come from? More to the point, when did they come? I think it’s safe to presume they weren’t present at the time the city was built.”
“Maybe the city was taken from them,” Enrique said. For long moments, the statement hung without reply in the hot, humid air.
“Jess,” Owen said at last, his voice low. “You mentioned the pyramid appears Mayan.” He wiped at his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. “Interestingly, the Mayans famously vanished from their urban centres, as you’re aware. Gone, without a trace—just like that.” He clicked his fingers to emphasise the point.
The longer they stood there, the less sense it all made. Rebecca wondered how the place was built, where the stone was hauled from. And why out here? Why build a city in the middle of nowhere, so far from anything, and in the bottom of a depression? While the pyramid towered above the jungle floor and over the lip of the smaller bowl, it was positioned in the basin’s deepest point. She noted that many of the surrounding buildings were arranged around the inside of the bowl like spectators in a sports stadium; they looked across to the pyramid, rather than up to it. As it was centrally located within the city, she presumed the pyramid was a sacred hub, probably a religious centre. While unusual, the site’s geographical location was most likely one of spiritual significance.
She was dragged from her thoughts when Ed cleared his throat. “There’s one more thing you need to see. Follow me.”
Rebecca traded glances with Owen and Jessy as Ed disappeared into the gloomy jungle ahead, Sanchez exiting with him. The steadily fading swish of machetes was the only indication the two men hadn’t vanished wholly into thin air.
Rebecca wondered what could be awaiting them now and hurried to catch up. She and her companions reined in the pair, and once more the group moved around the lip of the bowl. Several minutes passed before Ed halted, holding up his hand. Everyone pressed in behind him.
“We didn’t notice this at first ourselves,” Ed began, “but when we did…” He paused, searching unsuccessfully for the right words. “Let’s just say it’s… fascinating.”
Again, Owen, Jessy, and Rebecca looked at each other, confused. Rebecca turned and scanned the pyramid. She couldn’t see what Ed referred to, although she did notice, spearing up through the undergrowth a short distance away, two huge moai, both at least two to three times larger than any she had yet observed. Side by side, the massive statues towered above the lip of the bowl, placed at its edge like sentinels standing to attention. She could see the upper levels of the pyramid and its central steps framed perfectly between them. She couldn’t be sure, but perhaps two such moai guarded each of the pyramid’s four sides.
“Can I borrow those?” Ed asked Jessy, gesturing to the pair of binoculars hanging from her neck, and as he said this Rebecca turned his way again and thought no more about the statues. Jessy passed Ed the binoculars and he lifted them to his eyes, pointing them in the direction of the pyramid, beyond the two moai. Adjusting the focus and keeping them steady, he moved aside so that Jessy could step in behind them.
“Are you going to tell us what this is about, Ed?” Rebecca asked, but Ed ignored her, and went about the same routine for Owen. Then, borrowing Robert’s binoculars, he did it a third time for Rebecca.
She stared in the direction of the web, her field of vision filled with it: a kind of light, silvery greyness. Then she realised she wasn’t meant to be looking at the web; rather, at something suspended within it.
A patch of smooth white, maybe… metallic?
Yes. Something metallic, tangled in the web. Caught in it.
That doesn’t make sense, she thought. She fine-tuned the focus-knob, and gasped.
Ensnared in the silk like a hapless fly, was a small, single-engine floatplane.
THE
RAIN
17
The battered jeep bounced along the potholed road, jolting to a stop amid a billowing swirl of dust. Before it had settled, two guards in khaki-coloured uniforms emerged from the bushes, stepping up to the vehicle with submachine-guns held high. The lead guard reached for the driver’s-side door just as Sandros Oliveira cut the engine and slid from behind the wheel.
Recognising him, they lowered their weapons to let him pass.
Oliveira saw Ramos Juarez not ten yards away, in the middle of the dusty track that cut a path through the dense jungle. Juarez stood with his back to him and was dressed in a white-linen suit that struck Oliveira as hardly appropriate. At the best of times, the jungle was no place for such attire. But Oliveira knew this would be of no concern to his employer. As he made his way through the dust-cloud, heading up the makeshift road, he watched unsurprised as Juarez stood unmoving, his hands clenched behind his back as he indulged in the scene of carnage before him.
Ahead, a large portion of the forest had been levelled. As Oliveira covered the last few steps to Juarez he saw a wide section of bare earth unfold befo
re him, stretching away into the distance. At one end of it, a pile of dead, leafless tree trunks lay heaped upon each other like a mass of pale skeletons. At the other end, the cause of the destruction: three yellow, mud-smeared bulldozers. They rumbled back and forth with singular relentlessness, razing all before them.
“Sandros,” Juarez said in Brazilian Portuguese, a remarkable feat given he hadn’t yet turned. “On time as usual.”
Oliveira stepped beside Juarez, commanding an equal share of the view. As he did, he noticed two of the machines move farther afield, their hunger not yet sated. A few dozen yards away, another huge tree was wrenched free of the ground by the third dozer, groaning in protest as it was torn from its long-held place of residence. Oliveira watched impassively as it crashed to the earth, bringing with it as it fell a host of smaller trees. It hit the ground with a thud so gigantic that underfoot the earth trembled as though in the grip of an electric current.
“Progress has been swift, Ramos,” Oliveira observed, nodding. Indeed, he was pleasantly surprised by just how much headway had been made. Judging by what he’d seen already, there was every chance the new facility would be up and running as early as they had hoped, perhaps sooner. This was good news. With the recent upsurge of surveillance and crackdowns at the behest of the Americans, business had been difficult lately, and a change in operations had been forced upon them. Even their competitors had been feeling the heat: Oliveira had heard of similar facilities springing up elsewhere, in secret jungle locations hidden from prying eyes. Not that that was of any real concern to him, though. All that mattered was that affairs were running smoothly for his employer.
And Oliveira much preferred dealing with his boss when he was in a good mood.
Even so, it was apparent now that Ramos was in no frame of mind for small talk. He was still to turn and face Oliveira. “News, Sandros?” was all he said as he stared into the distance.
“I have spoken with Felipe Cartana,” Oliveira answered.
Now Juarez turned to him.
Oliveira removed his silver aviator sunglasses and met Juarez with a firm yet accommodating stare. Juarez was in his mid-forties, almost a decade older than Oliveira, with relentlessly dark eyes and a strikingly handsome, though uncompromising, face. He wore his shiny, jet-black hair in a tiny, neat ponytail, unlike Oliveira’s own ponytail, which was longer and braided and protruding currently from beneath a khaki headwrap.
“And?”
“He insists it is the same plane,” Oliveira said. “The tail identifying number, Ramos… it matches.”
For some time, Juarez didn’t speak. Slowly, he turned away, staring in the direction of the dozers. An expression passed over his face, barely perceptible, though Oliveira managed to catch it: a slight clenching of teeth, a faint tightening of the muscles around the jaw at a remembered hurt Oliveira himself knew all too well.
“I’d appreciate you having a look, Sandros,” Juarez said at last, softly. “Take as many men as you think appropriate.” As an afterthought, he added, “Take Cartana, too.”
Oliveira lowered his voice to match. “What about the Americans?”
“I don’t care. Do whatever you deem necessary.”
Oliveira nodded and moved to leave, but before he could, Juarez placed a strong hand on his shoulder and fixed him with a stare that stood him firm in his tracks. “Sandros, make no mistake. I want that plane located, and I want that package retrieved.”
Juarez released his hold, and Oliveira retreated, heading back down the road.
18
Rebecca was stunned, silent.
Again, she raised the binoculars to stare at the mangled aircraft.
For some moments, Owen had been shaking his head. Now, he ran a hand through his wild, blond-streaked hair before replacing his Marlins cap. “Ed, seriously? You’re suggesting that web, as big as it is, trapped that plane?”
Ed shrugged. “I can’t say for sure, but it seems that way, don’t you think? I mean, there’s obviously some other explanation as to why it fell from the sky—engine failure, I suppose, as it had to get down here somehow—but in the end… well, you can see for yourself where it came to rest.”
Owen obviously could see, and by Rebecca’s reckoning, that was the problem. By all appearances, and as unlikely as it sounded, Ed was probably right. Instead of crashing into the ground after tearing its way through the forest canopy, the plane had become ensnared—in the web—dozens of feet above the forest floor. Now it dangled nose-down, tail-up, one wing bent around its front and across the cabin and the other, having been almost torn free altogether, trailing precariously earthward. The whole twisted wreck hung only yards from the pyramid, positioned near to its northern face and with perhaps the top third of the huge structure looming high above it.
“There’s no doubt the web is holding it in place,” Rebecca said. “You know, a plane like that… it’s got to be a few tons at least. Can you imagine how strong the silk must be? And to absorb the momentum of an object that size, no matter how much it might have been slowed by the trees, that’s something else again. The construction—the distribution of tension—must be out of this world!” She shook her head at the thought, still studying the web, which was when something else caught her eye and caused her to baulk. Double-checking, she said, “Hell… and more than that… it looks like the plane’s not just hanging there, either.”
Rebecca tried to zoom in, fumbling and squinting through her binoculars before pushing them away and turning to Ed, who had lit a cigarette. “Ed, if that web is deserted, then it was abandoned after the arrival of that plane. The wreckage has been partially wrapped.”
“Wait… cocooned?” Owen said. “Like a captured insect or something?”
“Oh man…” Jessy said, swallowing hard, her perfectly tanned, unblemished features now decidedly ashen. “Please tell me they died on impact.”
A finger of ice shivered down Rebecca’s spine, the thought of what might have transpired simply too unpleasant to contemplate.
Jessy changed the subject. “What kind of plane do you think it is? I mean, those pontoons or whatever that are attached to the underbelly… it’s a seaplane, right?”
“A floatplane, yes,” Ed said, dragging on his cigarette.
Owen peered through his binoculars. “Looks like it’s been there a while. Years, most likely.”
“So why has no-one retrieved it?” Jessy asked. “What about its transmitter… you know… that electronic locator they use to detect downed aircraft?”
“You mean the ELT, the plane’s Emergency Locator Transmitter,” Ed said. “Who knows? Maybe it was destroyed in the crash. Maybe it wasn’t fitted with one. They’re fixed to all aircraft operating in the US, but I’m not sure of the regulations down here.”
Sanchez nodded, said to Jessy, “You’d be surprised, senhorita, at how many aircraft have been lost out here. Most are never found. Others are abandoned. In this part of the world, flight plans are not common.”
Jessy seemed confused. Ed lifted a finger to the sky and traced it over his head. “This isn’t a civilian air corridor. It’s likely used by traffickers.”
“You mean drug traffickers?” Jessy said. “You’re saying this is a drug plane?”
“Drugs, guns, who knows?” Ed said. “If it is a drug plane—and say it crashed due to engine failure—I’m guessing its owners wouldn’t have rushed to alert the authorities. You wouldn’t want it found, at least not by someone else. You’d simply cut your losses.”
“Or search for it yourself.”
“If the ELT was damaged, or not even fitted, where would you start looking?” Ed said. “You might have a general idea but without the exact location, out here…”
Enrique, the earbuds to his iPod dangling around his neck, nudged Rebecca gently with his elbow. “When I first saw this aircraft, it reminded me of a story my older brother told me. He said that one day many years ago, before I was even born, a plane fell from the sky only a few miles out o
f Manaus—my home town, and the largest town in the Amazon forest. My brother, who then was only a boy, and others, too, saw exactly where it fell, yet it took the town ten days to find it.”
“Ten days, and in a heavily populated area, with dozens of witnesses,” Ed said. “Jungle like this rarely gives up its secrets.”
“You know,” Owen said, still staring through his binoculars, “there’s a series of letters and numbers stencilled on the tail assembly. I can make out most of them. It’s probably an identification number.”
“We should copy it down,” Jessy said. “We’ll pass it on to the authorities when we get back.”
Ed shook his head. “Even if it is registered, I don’t think that’s a good idea. We oughtta forget we ever saw it.”
As the last of the words was leaving his mouth, a great crack of thunder snapped above them. Rebecca jumped, and turned her face skyward as cool drops of rain pattered down, bouncing and pinging off the leaves. More thunder followed, but this time it rolled loudly from one horizon to the next. A storm was about to unleash.
Everyone scrambled for ponchos.
As she rifled through her gear, Rebecca said to Ed, “I’m curious about something.” She gestured to the two giant moai she’d noticed earlier, within which the pyramid’s large central set of foliage-covered steps was so perfectly framed. “What’s the story with those two? They’re much bigger than any of the others we’ve seen, and there’s something different again about their posture…”
Jessy, who had retied the blue scarf she’d been using like a bandanna and was tucking her blond pigtails underneath it, out of the rain, added: “Yeah. They look like guards, don’t they? Sentries. Ed, what do you think?”
Ed grinned. “I think you’d be more interested in what I know.” He slipped into his poncho and pulled the hood low across his face. “I can tell you exactly what their story is.”
The rain intensified, falling so forcefully Ed had to raise his voice to be heard. But he seemed pleased the subject had been broached. “Last night, I told you I could prove the city was Intihuasi.” As he spoke, he slipped from the two shoulder packs that hung low at his waist, placing them on the ground. Free of them, he fished inside his shirt pocket and retrieved a tightly wrapped cloth bundle. “If you’re interested in that proof, I can show you.”
