Panama Gold (A Neal Fargo Adventure #2)

by John Benteen

  The ants, he knew, would stop Buckner for a time, but not for long. Buckner would attack them with fire, the only thing that could dismay and check that greedy horde. He’d burn a path through, but it would take a while. He would not be fool enough to believe that Fargo had perished with the horse; not without the proof of a skeleton and the weapons that Fargo would give up only when dead. And he would not dare let Fargo reach Colon.

  But the growth along this trail was heavier now, and a man on foot could, in all probability, make as good time, maybe better, than men on horseback. With his head start and jungle knowledge gained through hard experience, Fargo at least now had a fighting chance.

  As he trotted along, though ceaselessly alert, he busied one part of his mind with laying out a plan of action when he reached Colon. Goethals; he had to see Goethals, the Commander. Then they had to search out the dynamite charges at Culebra Cut, secretly, before Buckner’s spy could blow them. Guards would have to be tripled, quadrupled, at all vulnerable points, and then Marines sent against Buckner’s camp. But first, he had to make Colon. And even if he’d eluded Buckner, a savage, terrible journey lay ahead of him. His only hope was the San Bias Indians. If he could make their camp, get food and shelter, a little rest, help along the trail ... But, at best, they were two days away.

  At nightfall, Fargo had to stop. He wormed his way off the trail, into the jungle, and climbed a tree, hoping it wasn’t already occupied by a boa constrictor or a poisonous snake. He buckled his bandoliers together into a sort of safety belt and lashed himself to the trunk. Then he tried to get some rest.

  It was not easy. By now, his face was a swollen parody of a human countenance, but still the insects came, with probes and stings that pierced the wet fabric of his clothes as if it were not there. Only his boot covered calves and feet were safe from them; but he knew what was already at work down in there; leeches and ticks. Their bites could not be felt, but they would be draining him of blood even now.

  With sleep an impossibility, he listened to the night noises of the jungle—the jaguar’s cough, the owl’s cry, the scream of a monkey in the coils of a boa. Life and death, the jungle seethed with both, an enormous battlefield on which the struggle was endless.

  As soon as there was light enough to see, Fargo came down, drank from a vine, ran on. He was hungry, but he dared not shoot anything to eat or build a fire to cook it. He ignored the hunger; he knew his body was tough enough to go two days without food without weakening more than a little. He kept his eyes open for fruit and coconuts; found a few mamei and sapodilla; they only whetted his appetite. Then he rounded a bend in the trail; there an iguana sunned itself in a single ray of light that somehow pierced the foliage overhead. Fargo whipped out the Batangas knife, threw it, and the creature writhed on the forest floor, pinned to the dirt.

  Fargo pounced on it, gutted it, skinned it, and ate the white flesh raw as he ran. It almost gagged him, but it would give him nourishment and he got it down. So far, there had been no sign of pursuit behind him, but he did not slow; he was not fool enough to think Buckner had given up so easily.

  Then he came to a river. He dared not try to swim it, though it was shallow and only fifty, sixty feet wide. He knew what was in it, as in all streams through here—piranha. And this time he had no way to distract them and he himself was bleeding from cuts, rakes, scrapes, and leech-wounds. They would be on him in an instant, devour him as the ants had the horse.

  There was nothing for it but to make a raft. The jungle was rank with heavy bamboo, but it was hard as iron. Now he cursed again his lack of a machete. He slammed and hacked with the Batangas knife, but it was slow going, even for its keen blade. Presently, though, after what seemed an agonizing length of time, he had three or four thick tubes of bamboo, each tube a series of buoyant watertight compartments. He lashed them tightly together with vines, cut a pole, and, balancing himself on his tiny raft, which was perhaps two feet wide and six feet long, shoved off.

  His weight pressed it down until water sloshed around his insteps. Silvery fish, tiny and fierce, nipped hard at the leather of his boots, ripped it in places. He saw thousands more like them in the murky water beneath. If the unstable little raft rolled … No man who had not served time as a lumberjack, who had not mastered the art of riding a log in a spring freshet, could have kept his balance on that tricky footing. But Fargo had worked more than one season in the woods in his time, and he was nimble as a cat. Nevertheless, when the raft finally grounded on a sandbar opposite, and he leaped off, the sweat that poured from him was cold.

  He ran on the rest of that day. Still no sign of pursuit. That worried him; it wasn’t right. He was getting away too easily. He made a conscious effort to redouble his caution, though fatigue made it hard.

  It was not through lack of caution that they finally caught him. It was because they knew the terrain better. They had lived in it longer.

  Fargo trotted around a bend and they were there, waiting for him. Eight of them, mounted, with guns trained on him; and this time there was no hope of escape or fighting back. They had him cold.

  He knew them all, knew they were picked men. The one in the lead, Marsh, was tall, thin, cadaverous, with a cruel face. The weapon he held trained on Fargo was a double-barreled sawed-off, and he grinned. “Don’t twitch, Fargo. You do, you’re splattered all over the landscape. Two can play at that shotgun game.”

  Fargo stood motionless and slowly raised his hands.

  “So the driver ants didn’t eat you,” Marsh said, swinging down. “Well, the ones in the hill back at camp are still hungry.” He walked up to Fargo, careful not to interfere with the others’ field of fire. “Drop that hardware. Do it slow, easy, and no false moves.” He watched the guns fall, then scooped them up; the knife, too. “God,” he said, “I wouldn’t be in your shoes for anything, Fargo. Buckner’s like a madman. It’ll take you two weeks to die, the way he’s got things planned for you.” He slung Fargo’s gear on his own horse and brought up one that was led. “Climb on.”

  Fargo did, wordlessly. Defeat was bitter in his mouth, like the taste of brass. They lashed his hands to the saddle horn, tied his ankles to the stirrups. Marsh kneed his own mount alongside, keeping the shotgun trained.

  “This time, there won’t be any little magic tricks, Fargo. You’ve had it good.” Then he gave the command: “Move out,” and they filed back along the trail in the direction from which Fargo had come.

  Presently Fargo asked: “How did you get out in front of me?”

  “There’s another trail, a shortcut. It swung us around you. We figured we’d cut you off. Now, no more talking.”

  The hooves of the horses made dull sounds on the forest floor. Monkeys and parrots cursed them from the treetops as they went along. Fargo tested his bonds subtly, secretly, found them as he knew they would be—expertly tied, unbreakable. He tried not to think of what lay ahead of him. The anthill—tough as he was, he supposed he would scream, too, when the time came. But that was not what troubled him most, He had failed the Colonel. That was the real bitterness.

  They rode for a half hour. Then Marsh broke his own rule of silence. “Buckner’s got it figured out what you’ve been up to all along. A damn secret agent, right? A lousy dick, a spy ... Well, you’d better bet that—” He broke off, swore, swatted at his right thigh, as if there’d been a terrific insect bite. Then he made a curious sound in his throat and pitched from the saddle. He landed face down on the forest floor and did not move.

  The detail halted. The men stared. “Hey, Marsh, for God’s sake,” one said. “You—” He clawed at his throat, let out a gurgle. Then Fargo saw the tiny, feather-tipped bamboo dart embedded in it. He let go the reins of Fargo’s horse and fell over the rump of his own mount; and after one more frozen instant, the detail panicked.

  “Indians!” somebody yelled and began to shoot into the jungle. At the first explosion, the air was full of feathery whispers. Fargo, helpless, sat his frightened, curveting mount as da
rts whished past his face. An arrow embedded itself in a man’s chest with a solid thunk. Another of Buckner’s men, spurring his horse, galloping down the trail in terror, clawed at his back as an arrow caught him between the shoulder blades. It did not matter how far it went in: the curare on its tip was fatal. He grabbed at the saddle horn, fell, his foot caught in the stirrup, and he was dragged around the bend.

  Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over; and only Fargo was still in the saddle.

  He sat motionless, trying to betray no fear. “Nihara,” he yelled. “Nihara!”

  Then the jungle came subtly alive. Like fog, like mist rising, the Indians were there. A dozen of them, six from either side of the trail. Fargo stared at the squat man in the plumed headdress, his body still scarred with the marks of jaguar claws. Nihara looked at him and grinned. He said, in halting Spanish, “Hello, friend;” then, with his machete, began to saw Fargo’s bonds. Meanwhile, the others chopped off the heads of the dead men lying on the jungle floor. As they loped along the trail through the jungle, Nihara trotting by the head of Fargo’s horse, they carried the heads proudly in bags of coconut fiber netting.

  There would, Fargo thought grimly, be a big celebration in Nihara’s village tonight.

  There was. Fargo gorged himself on deer and iguana, drank deeply of the beer, as fires flared and dark forms shuffled around them in dances, and the beat of hollow-log tom-toms filled the night. Then, exhausted, Fargo made his way to the same hut he had occupied the time before. When he entered it, he found that he was not alone; lying naked on the bed of skins was the same girl. She smiled up shyly at him.

  His whole body ached with fatigue and the bites of insects. He was dizzy with weariness and beer as he sank down beside her. But when her hand touched him and he felt the warmth of her flesh against him, some of the fatigue vanished.

  Enough. He took her, and then he slept.

  Communication with Nihara and the San Bias was no easy matter. They were a proud people, too proud to have bothered to learn more than a few simple words of Spanish. But Fargo had dealt with Indians many times before, and though these did not understand the sign language of the plains, before long he and Nihara found mutual communication in gestures.

  Nihara and the other hunters had been trailing the strange men who’d encroached on their territory and had been astounded when Fargo had appeared. Now the Indian was delighted that he had been able to pay his debt, and reluctant for Fargo to leave. But somehow, Fargo got across to Nihara and his father the urgency of his getting back to the Zone. When he left the village, it was on horseback, well supplied with food and water, and with Nihara trotting in front or riding behind the saddle as a guide. Buckner would be combing every trail and path, but the Indians knew paths that Buckner had never heard of.

  They made quick time, with Fargo and Nihara both hacking at the jungle that barred their way, and Fargo pushed himself and the San Bias with equal lack of mercy. He could have lost track of a day in his wild pilgrimage; surely, it could not be more than three or four before the attack was scheduled. Already Buckner’s army, according to plan, would be moving into position. Fargo raged against everything that slowed him down; he was thinking of the hundreds of unsuspecting men working in the bottom of Culebra Cut.

  Then, on the morning of the second day, as they crested a ridge all grown over with cane, Nihara halted, raised his hand for silence. Fargo stood in the stirrups, listening. Then he caught it, too, and felt sudden exultation: far in the distance, the thin, lonesome piping of a train whistle. “Come on!” he snapped in English; in Spanish, “Andale!” He lashed the mount, wielded his machete with new fervor; in another half-hour, they were out of the jungle and Fargo looked down the slope at a work train rumbling along the track of the Panama Railroad.

  Although he felt like yelling, he only tipped back the campaign hat, grinning broadly, and clapped Nihara on the shoulder. But Nihara was not grinning; his face was grave. He put out a hand. “Amigo!” He shook Fargo’s hand three times. Then, before Fargo could speak, Nihara had, like a wraith, vanished into the cane. Fargo never saw him again, after the brush had closed behind him.

  But there was no time for goodbyes, anyhow. The man in the battered campaign hat and torn and sweaty khakis spurred the horse and put it down the hill to intercept the train.

  The engineer stared at the armed and gaunt apparition on the step of the locomotive’s cab. “Goethals?” he said. “Goethals? Sure, his headquarters is in Cristobal, outside of Colon. But ain’t you heard? Where you been, man? Goethals just left for Washington for consultation with the bigwigs there.”

  Fargo’s teeth showed white in his sun blackened face. “All right, goddammit,” he said. “Who’s the next man? Who should I see?”

  The engineer was not pleased at having been flagged down by what looked like a train robber. “Hell, I don’t know. I guess, Kane. Major Kane.”

  “Major Kane?”

  “Yeah, he just got a promotion. He’s Goethals’ second in command, now.”

  “He’s in Colon?”

  “Yeah, they moved him there from Panama City.”

  “All right,” Fargo said. He threw the saddle on the floor of the cab. “I’ll ride up here with you.” The horse had already galloped off.

  The engineer, dumpy and older than middle-aged, frowned. “Mister—”

  “Up here with you,” Fargo said, and he caressed the shotgun. “I don’t want to be back there with a lot of working stiffs asking questions. Now you get this rattler into Colon, and you get it there quick, with no stops along the way.”

  “I got to stop at Gatun. We got a pay car to spot there.” He broke off, as if afraid he’d already said too much.

  “You spot it later. I want to get to Colon.” Fargo thrust the shotgun forward.

  The engineer bit his lip. “You’ll have to deal with the authorities there, believe me. Nobody—”

  “Shut up,” Fargo said, “and get rolling.”

  The engineer grunted something. Then he opened the throttle and the train lurched ahead.

  Fargo stood with feet braced and shotgun ready as it roared around bends and over trestles. He cursed his luck: Goethals gone, that stupid, pigheaded Kane in command. And Kane already with a grudge against him. Well, he’d have to make Kane understand, believe. If necessary, a wireless message to the Colonel, if they had such modern equipment here. He robbed the fireman of cigarettes, smoked one after the other as the train rocketed on.

  From the cab, Fargo watched the panorama of the Canal whiz by. It was, along here, mostly the waters of the enormous Gatun Lake, backed up by the huge dam. Then they passed the bee swarm of workers busy on the giant locks. After that, they slowed, pulling into Colon. Its outskirts went by, slums, shanties: Fargo readied himself. Then, without warning, he said harshly: “Thanks.” Suddenly he jumped from the moving train, landed running. He had to run for a long way to regain his balance. The engineer shouted something behind him. Then Fargo had vanished into the narrow alleys of the dreadful slums of Colon.

  When, much later, he staggered into the Cantina San Leon, Angel Vargas gaped at him. “Fargo! Ay, Dios, what do you do back here? The Military Police still want you!”

  “The hell with them,” Fargo rasped. “Gimme the coldest beer in the place. Did you pick up my trunk from the livery stable, like I told you?”

  “It’s stored in the back room.” Vargas pushed the beer to him. Fargo drank long, greedily, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “All right, Angel,” he said. “Is there a telephone anywhere in this end of town?”

  “Only one, in the whorehouse of Senora Cintron, down the street. Senora Cintron is very rich—”

  “Yeah. Well, you go down there and ring up American military headquarters, right? Find out where I can locate Major Ward Kane.”

  “You are calling the Army yourself?’ Vargas blinked incredulously.

  “Goddammit, go do what I told you,” Fargo said. “Lock the cantina until you come bac
k.”

  Vargas looked dubious, but he nodded. “Very well, if it is a matter of such importance ...”

  “It is.” Fargo drank the rest of the beer, got himself another one, and went to the store room. He unlocked the trunk, took out clean clothes. Then he washed himself down, rubbed his insect-chewed body with alcohol, having touched a match to the last of the ticks embedded in his flesh. By the time Vargas got back, he looked and felt human again.

  “Much better,” Vargas said, looking him over. Then he said, “The Major has just left Gatun. He will not return to headquarters today. Within the hour, he can be reached at his quarters in Cristobal.”

  “All right,” Fargo said. “Thanks, Angel.” He strode quickly out of the cantina, leaving Vargas blinking. On the street, he hailed a hack. The driver whipped his horse; soon they had crossed from Colon into the suburb, the sister city, of Cristobal, dominated by Americans. Fargo made inquiries; a half hour got him to a pleasant, palm-shaded street of new houses with screened windows and porches; the largest, at the corner, was that of Major Ward Kane. Fargo hurried up the steps, through the screen door, then knocked hard on the glass of the front door.

  Footsteps within: then Myra Kane opened the door. She stared at him, eyes widening. “Fargo!” Her hand went to her breasts. “What are you doing here?” Then, as her surprise faded, fear replaced it. “Darling, it’s wonderful to see you again, but Ward will be home any minute.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” Fargo said; and he shoved on past her. The living room was pleasant, showing the nice touch of a feminine hand. “Get me something to drink.”