by Jack Du Brul
“I tried to get her out a few times, but she never wanted to leave her village again.” Lost in the past, his voice caught. “I went back when genocide swept Rwanda in 1994. I was too late.”
Lauren’s hand came out of the gloom beyond the fire’s reach and rested on his. “I’m sorry.”
He finally stripped the wrapper off the neck of the Rémy Martin bottle and uncorked it. He gave Lauren a sip and took a small one for himself. “Knowing her for even a day was worth the pain of losing her.”
Unexpectedly, the melancholy that usually descended after thinking of that day did not come. He felt the first stir-rings of anger instead. Mercer felt an emotion stronger than simple revenge for wanting to discover what had happened to Gary and the others. He wanted to give Miguel’s loss some measure of meaning. Something that he had never been able to do for his own parents’ murder, something that haunted him still.
“So what do we do with him?” Lauren asked into the lengthening silence.
“I assume he has family in El Real or someplace close. We’ll send one of Ruben’s men back to the town with him tomorrow and continue our original plan.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
Mercer had no answer.
They were woken the next morning by the jungle. Birds that had already reclaimed the once-poisoned valley were joined by a few other animals, including a monkey that screeched at the rising sun as if defending its territory. The thick canopy of vegetation emerged from the darkness, colors resolving themselves with remarkable speed. Blacks morphed to grays and then to greens. Shapes appeared, first like phantom shadows, then detailing into individual trees and resolving up to separate branches and leaves. With each passing moment, the jungle became louder and louder as nocturnal animals scampered for cover and the early-morning hunters sought them out.
Mercer must have fallen asleep long before Lauren, for when he woke he found she had erected mosquito netting around them and filled a shallow trench around their camp with water to keep away crawling insects. He woke flat on his back. Miguel was pressed as tightly to him as a just-weaned puppy and Lauren Vanik lay on his other side, her hand cupped around his biceps. Her face was turned to him. With her extraordinary eyes closed, her face didn’t lose any of the character he found so appealing. As he watched, they fluttered open, their curious coloring giving the impression that she greeted each day with anticipation rather than resignation. Her dark hair was a fan against the soft sand where it spilled off the folded shirt she used for a pillow. All three had shared a single blanket through the night. On the far side of the dead fire, Ruben and his men coughed and scratched themselves awake. A pair of cigarettes were lit amid more coughing and spitting.
She smiled. “I love how men come awake like they’re hibernating bears.”
“Not me. I just roll out of bed ready to face the day.”
“Oh, you did your bear impersonation last night. My God, you can snore.”
He shot her a look of mock indignation. “I do not. And if I did, you should know that a loud snore is considered a sign of manly prowess.”
“Then you should be proud of yourself. I’d say your snoring makes you quite the stud.” She spoke with more sentiment than she’d intended.
To cover her embarrassment at so openly flirting under these inappropriate circumstances, Lauren rolled out from under the blanket before Mercer could see her blush. She went beyond the jungle edge to find a little privacy while the Panamanians lustily urinated in the river.
Mercer untangled himself from Miguel and left the boy sleeping as he went to find some breakfast from the remains of Gary’s camp. The look Lauren had just given him and the glassiness of her eyes after hearing his story remained fresh in his mind. He wasn’t sure how he felt about her knowing his most intimate secret. Strangely comfortable was as close as he could come to an accurate description.
He returned to their camp with tins of stew, a pot for boiling water, mugs, and a half-empty jar of instant coffee. Lauren had folded away the mosquito netting and the fire was burning cheerily. Miguel was just wiping sleep from his eyes and sand from his hair. He held Mercer’s limp bandana as if it were still shaped like a rabbit. Before allowing Mercer to concentrate on the food, he asked for the puppet to be reformed on his outstretched hand. He’d already named the rabbit Jorge, after a cartoon he’d seen.
As Mercer cooked, Lauren took the reluctant boy to the edge of the river, stripped him naked and ordered him to bathe. Protesting in wailing Spanish, Miguel finally relented when Mercer shot him a stern look from the fire. Lauren and the boy chatted easily as he washed in the warm water.
When they approached the fire, Mercer had coffee and stew ready and Lauren had a worried frown on her face. “We’ve got ourselves a problem. Miguel doesn’t have any family in these parts. His parents were living in Panama City when your friend Gary hired them. He says he only has one uncle who moved to Miami years ago.”
“He’s got nobody?”
“Seems like it.”
“Damn.” Panama was a Catholic country, noted for large extended families. That Miguel was completely alone in the world was a complication Mercer hadn’t expected. “What do we do?”
Lauren studied the child as he wolfed his breakfast. “I can make some inquiries once we’re back in the city. Until then I suggest we keep him with us. You only need a day up at the lake, right?”
“Yeah, we can be back in the capital by tomorrow. He should stay with us when we go up to the lake rather than leave a man in camp with him. I don’t want us to split up.”
“Agreed.”
Having seen children treated worse than animals in Third World countries on two continents, Lauren asked Miguel what he wanted to do. She knew well the emotional devastation wrought in refugee children who were shuffled from camp to camp without being given a say in their own future. The trick was to make the child think that what you wanted them to do was also what they wanted. She gave Miguel the option of exploring a waterfall and a lake with her and Mercer or returning to El Real with one of Ruben’s men. The answer was as quick as it was expected.
“I would like to stay with you.” Ruben had given the boy his floppy bush hat and Miguel had to tilt his head back to see out from under it. His grin made his face come alive.
Two hours later, the skiff that had originally brought Mercer up the River of Ruin reached the base of a series of waterfalls and steep cataracts. The falls fell from about two hundred feet up a sloping mountainside, dropping from pool to pool with almost unnatural uniformity. There was little mist rising from the water, as each individual drop was no more than eight or ten feet. Mercer studied the falls, then examined the two sides of the box valley, which were noticeably less steep than the stone massif in front of him.
After tying the boat under cover, Ruben and his men took up positions around the base of the falls while Lauren kept an eye on Miguel as he cavorted in the dancing water. Mercer had recovered some equipment from Gary’s camp and set off up the side of the valley with a shovel. He found a small clearing cloaked with vegetation where the ground was littered with fallen and rotting leaves. He had to chop through countless intersecting roots to reach the underlying soil. The humidity built as rapidly as the temperature and sweat flew with each mechanical motion.
Filling a plastic bag with dirt, he returned to the riverbank to drop off his prize and climbed partially up the mountain next to the falls, reveling in the occasional spray of cool water that landed on him. Again he dug a two-foot-deep hole in the ground, cutting down through layers until he reached the underpinnings of sand beneath the richer topsoil. In a calm little inlet back at the river, he floated a shallow pan on the water to create a level surface and carefully poured in one sample of sand so it formed a pyramid. He measured the pyramid’s slope with a protractor he’d found among Gary’s personal gear. He dumped out the sand and did the same with the sample dug from near the waterfall. Both piles had a natural angle of thirty-four degrees.
The next experiment he wanted to perform needed a laser range finder, an altimeter and trigonometry tables, none of which he had. He emptied the second sample of sand into the river, watching it melt away, and returned to the base of the falls.
“What was that all about?” Lauren asked when he rejoined the party.
“A waste of time,” Mercer admitted. “We set for a little climbing?”
“Sí, sí,” Miguel cried excitedly. He was already standing at the edge of a rocky pool ten feet over their heads. “I know the way. I help men when they drag a boat up to the lake.”
They found the climb much easier than expected. Though water fell in twenty-foot-wide sluices from pool to pool, there were rock formations next to each channel, so it was as simple as climbing an enormous set of stairs. Once they ascended above the height of the jungle, the humidity dropped noticeably and the air tasted sweeter. Still it was hot as the sun rose higher in the sky. Dark spots of perspiration appeared like dappled camouflage on Lauren’s faded olive-green T-shirt.
Near the head of the falls, Mercer looked down the valley that opened below them. The river seemed to vanish in the distance as if swallowed by the jungle. If not for the mountain slopes that it had carved over the millennia, it would have been indiscernible against the backdrop of tropical forest. Mercer felt menace from the jungle and what lay unseen under its thick canopy.
The lake that fed the River of Ruin sat in a depression at the top of the volcanic mountain, a perfectly round caldera dimpled by a single tree-covered island near its center. Mercer estimated the lake was about a half mile wide, though there was no telling how deep. Experience told him the lake could be even deeper than the mountain was tall, two hundred feet or more. A strip of sandy beach ran the whole way around the lake except for where it poured down the falls.
Trapped between the lake’s clear surface and the forty-foot-tall ramparts of stone that ringed it, the air remained motionless and sweltering.
“Mr. Gary worked on this side.” Miguel pointed to their right. “He dig many holes into the side of the lake, looking for treasure.”
The party trudged a quarter way around the lake, muscles that had been fresh in the morning beginning to protest after the climb. At the first of the tunnels Gary had excavated into the side of the volcano, they stopped to boil fresh water and rest for twenty minutes. The tunnel was roughly square, un-braced, and had been driven about thirty feet into the soft volcanic rock. Mercer had no idea why his old friend had dug the shaft here, but it was apparent he had found nothing of interest. Other such tunnels were visible all along the arc of the lakeshore.
Including a break for the lunch they’d scavenged from the destroyed camp below, it took seven hours to circle the lake and fully explore all the tunnels Gary had dug. They also climbed up to the rim of the volcano at various points to see what lay on the far slopes. They found nothing of interest, nothing that would have led Gary to believe the treasure he sought was buried along the shores of the lake. All that remained to be explored was the island at its middle.
The rowboat Gary’s team had laboriously dragged up the waterfall was made of heavily dented aluminum. Rather than unload the supplies left in it, Mercer decided to just take Miguel and Lauren to the island. Ruben and his men stayed on the beach next to a fire built to warm their dinner. They would sleep here tonight and climb down in the morning.
Miguel sat at the front of the boat like an animated bowsprit while Lauren rested on the bundle of gear lashed in the stern. Mercer rowed with deep, even strokes. “I feel like I should be singing Italian opera like a gondolier, but I can’t carry a tune.”
Lauren began a chorus of “Row Row Row Your Boat.”
Mercer and Miguel joined her in a round once they found the tempo. Each time they messed up, Miguel dissolved into laughter.
Beaching the boat under the overhang of a sweeping tree, Mercer tied the painter to a log and helped Lauren ashore. Miguel was already off and running. The island rose twenty feet at its center, a misshapen lump of dark rock pocked with patches of vegetation that grew from soil deposits. Five skinny trees rose from exposed roots that clung to the ground like tentacles. The whole area was less than half an acre. Gary had tunneled a single shaft into the island in a natural foldback of rock that formed a partial cave. He had managed only a few feet before returning to the river below to await Mercer’s arrival in Panama. There were tools still waiting at the rock face at the end of the tunnel.
“Looks like you rowed for nothing,” Lauren remarked, wiping sweat from her slender throat.
“Worse,” Mercer said darkly, “it seems Gary and his people died for nothing. Other than the ruins of the dam where the river meets the Rio Tuira, there’s not one shred of evidence that anyone had ever been here before them.”
He imagined Gary Barber would be just as happy dying for his dream. It was the kind of grandiose romantic gesture that would appeal to him and Mercer couldn’t begrudge him that. But Gary’s team had signed on as workers, simple laborers who probably made more money with Gary in a month than they could normally earn in a year. It was the bitterness of their loss that scalded his voice.
“It’ll be dark in an hour.” He glanced at the western horizon, where the sun was sinking toward the lip of the volcano. “We should head back.”
“Um, listen,” Lauren said shyly, “I would love to take a quick dip if you promise not to peek.”
Mercer chuckled. “Gallantry is not solely esteemed by Southern gentlemen.” He changed to an atrocious antebellum accent. “We Yankees know how to avert our eyes when a maiden is at her ablutions.”
“Why thank you, kind sir.” She batted her eyes, thankful the black mood she saw pass over him was just as quickly dispelled. “And if you don’t, this belle packs a 9mm. Make sure Miguel doesn’t get an eyeful either. I bet he’s got the same hot blood as every other man in Panama.”
Even with Ruben camped on shore a quarter mile away, Lauren walked to the far side of the island to strip naked and dive into the lake. As sleek as an otter, she slid through the topmost layer of water. It was warmed by the sun and lifted days of sweat and grime from her pores. Without soap, she could only run her hands over her body, using her neatly trimmed nails where dirt had ground into her skin at knees and elbows. Her legs and underarms prickled from lack of shaving. She hadn’t been to her apartment in Panama City for nearly a week and hadn’t seen a shower in three days.
Lying on her back and filling her lungs so that she floated an easy swim from the island, she reveled in the twin sensations of the dying sun’s warm rays and the water, which now felt cool. Like soldiers had since the very first armies, she took simple pleasures where she could find them. Four days ago she had investigated a filthy shanty outside of La Palma where a low-level drug trafficker had splattered the brains of two of his mules against the mud walls like crimson Rorschach stains. The genitals of the husband-and-wife team had been crudely carved off and stuffed in their spouse’s mouth as a warning. If the trafficker hadn’t yet fled back to Colombia, Lauren considered putting Ruben on his trail when they got back to El Real.
But now she lay in a volcanic lake, and even the bizarre postmortem mutilation of Mercer’s friends couldn’t intrude on her well-being—another trick that every soldier discovered if they wanted to keep their sanity. She didn’t know what to make of Mercer. He had the credentials of an egghead, but moved and thought like a soldier. She doubted he was a veteran—veterans tended to name drop and brag around active-duty military. Though something in Mercer’s demeanor led her to think he wasn’t a braggart about anything.
He was a mystery she wouldn’t mind learning a little more about, a far cry from the embassy types who hit on her in Panama City, or the military men who professed to like her as an equal but usually felt threatened by her. Those, she’d found, either slunk off in humiliation or attempted dominion by date rape. Twice that had happened, the first succeeding and the second, a two-star during her last time at SouthCom
headquarters in Miami, having to invent a car accident to cover the injuries she’d inflicted.
That sudden memory soured her tranquility. She exhaled deeply and allowed herself to sink under the water. Scuba diving had given her great lung control and she willed herself to hover under the surface for a slow count of one hundred. Clearing her eyes of water when she surfaced, she saw Mercer standing on the bank fifteen feet from her. A burst of anger prickled her skin and she was about to shout when she heard the sound that had prompted him to search her out.
The steady beat of a helicopter’s rotors.
“Come on,” he called, “I just heard it approaching.”
He tossed her shirt as she stood in the shallows, his concentration completely fixed on the sound of the unseen chopper. The cotton tee absorbed the water beading on her skin, outlining her high breasts and the curve of her rib cage as it swept toward her narrow waist. Temperature change and the sudden tension stiffened her nipples. Mercer had already stepped back to where he’d stashed Miguel in the tunnel. Lauren pulled on her pants. She followed carrying her underwear, boots, and pistol belt.
“Where are they?” She finished dressing in the tunnel. Mercer stood on a promontory of rock just outside the entrance.
“Coming in from the west but they could have circled around the volcano. It looks like a Bell JetRanger. All black.”
“Any markings?”
“Too far away.”
The chopper thundered over the lake as if it had just climbed the waterfall. Mercer assumed it had made a couple passes over Gary’s camp to determine if anyone remained there. He was certain that whoever had shot up the bodies—and ordered the theft of the Lepinay journal in Paris—was likely to be on this helicopter. His hands balled at his sides.
