Inquisition

by David Gibbins

  He shifted his legs to a new position, feeling the pain in his thigh where he had impacted with the reef. It had taken twenty stitches to close up the wound and two further hours for the doctor to pick out the fragments of coral from the surrounding graze, but now it was just a matter of antiseptic and bandaging. The local anesthetic had worn off long ago, but he was reluctant to take one of the codeine pills the doctor had given him; he needed to keep his head as clear as possible over the next few hours.

  When he had called them from the beach, he had kept the extent of his injury from Costas and Rebecca, but had impressed on them the need to make arrangements immediately for him and Costas to meet up with Maria’s contact at Potosi before any of the Altamanus realized that he had survived the storm. His first call, though, had been not to them, but to IMU security; Ben and an armed team had already landed at Kingston airport and taken everyone from the Port Royal site away to a secure location in central Jamaica for the duration. Jack was prepared to take another risk with his own life to see this through, but not to risk the lives of his daughter or his friends, and knowing that they were in safe hands had been his one precondition for the plane taking off for Bolivia the night before.

  He felt dehydrated, but did not feel like drinking. He knew that it was an effect of the altitude, and he forced himself to sip from one of the little plastic bottles that had been wedged below the dashboard. He looked back at Costas, who was leaning half asleep on a pile of woven blankets in the backseat, his fleece done up to his neck and wearing a multicolored woolen hat with flaps over his ears. Costas had suffered unexpectedly from altitude sickness an hour earlier, and they had stopped while he threw up. The driver had insisted that he chew a wedge of coca leaves, and that had put Costas into something of a trance. Already, Jack thought, being at this place had taken its toll, and they had not even reached the mountain yet.

  The truck jumped, and came down with a bone-crunching crash. Costas lolled awake, and Jack thrust an open bottle of water into his hand, watching while he blearily drank. The driver, a small, swarthy Incan with a cheekful of leaves, gave him a cheerful nod, gestured outside, and switched off the engine. As it shuddered to a halt, Jack felt an overwhelming sense of relief. He pulled down the latch of the door, kicked it open, and dropped out, feeling the throb in his leg and then quickly leaning back to avoid falling farther down the vertiginous drop below.

  He made his way around to the front of the vehicle, stretching his arms and arching his back. The sky was a brilliant speckle of stars, just about the clearest he had ever seen, with the Milky Way cutting a dense swathe overhead, and near the horizon the seven stars of the Pleiades, the constellation that the Incas associated with harvest and regeneration. He had not realized how cold it was outside, and he rubbed his hands together, walking back to the rear door to get out his bag with his gloves and other gear.

  Costas came out groggily from the side, staggered slightly, and then bent down with his hands on his knees, spitting into the darkness. “Those leaves definitely help,” he said. “But right now what I need is a big drink of water and a couple of hours’ proper shut-eye.”

  “Amen to that,” Jack said, pulling out both of their bags. “By the look of it, this is our stop.”

  The driver came back from where he had disappeared up the road, made a sleeping gesture with his hands, and pointed to a low building just visible in the gloom ahead. Jack put his hand under Costas’s shoulder and raised him up, and they both trudged behind the man, passing a llama munching unconcernedly at some scrub.

  Inside the building, the man switched on a flashlight, pointed to a table with bottles of water and some bread and then at a room with two mattresses and sleeping bags on the floor. Jack opened a bottle and passed it to Costas, then opened another one himself, drinking as much as he could. He went into the other room, slung their bags on the floor, dropped down onto one of the mattresses and rolled over, instantly and dreamlessly asleep.

  * * *

  He awoke before Costas did, feeling the cold, and pulled the sleeping bag up for more warmth, but then realized that there was little point; with the light of dawn already shining through, they were going to be woken up shortly anyway. He heaved himself up, gave Costas a shake, and then went into the next room, smelling coffee and pouring himself a cup from the flask on the table. Costas followed him, half asleep, and did the same, and they both sat down and ate some bread. Jack looked at Costas’s weather-beaten face, stubbly and lined beneath his hat. “You look really great,” he said.

  Costas peered at him. “You don’t look so good yourself. You look like you’ve been through a wind tunnel.”

  “I did have a little swim in the Caribbean.”

  “How’s your leg?” Costas said, swallowing his bread and draining his coffee.

  “Okay. How’s your head?”

  “Bad. I’m going to take some more of those leaves. They can’t make me feel worse. Before that, I need to find the men’s room.”

  Jack pointed to the open door. “Welcome to the Andes.”

  The view when they got outside was stunning, something that had been impossible to appreciate the night before. Five hundred meters below them in the valley, the city of Potosi lay spread out over undulating hills, its colonial-period streets and alleys following the natural contours of the land. Jack could see the main church, and the cluster of courtyard buildings that he knew was the site of the mint that three hundred years ago had made this place one of the economic engines of the world.

  * * *

  The horizon all around was marked by the jagged line of the Cordillera de Potosi, the local range of the Andes, but what dominated the scene was the peak directly in front of them: Cerro Rico, the Mountain of Riches, the end of a continuous slope that rose some eight hundred meters from the nearest point in the city, broken only by the plateau they were on now. It was like a volcano, blasted and lifeless, the rock gray-blue below and red-brown above, the plateau and the slopes strewn with the spoil and tailings of almost five hundred years of mining. Jack knew that the mountain was riddled with tunnels and shafts, some extending a thousand meters deep and more; somehow he and Costas were going to get in there, into one of the deepest shafts, and get out with the extraordinary treasure they had come this far to find, a prospect that in the cold light of dawn seemed as daunting as anything they had ever undertaken.

  He followed Costas to the edge of the slope, then went back and splashed water from one of the bottles over his hands and face, thinking about the history of this place, once the heart of the Spanish viceroyalty of Peru. More than half the silver that was mined in the world before modern times had come from here, along with huge quantities of tin and zinc. He also knew that millions of people were estimated to have died working this mine in the centuries following its discovery by the Spanish in the mid-sixteenth century, with upward of fifty thousand Inca and African slaves toiling here at any one time. This truly was El Dorado, the fabled fount of riches that the Conquistadors had sought, a place where the ore could yield fifty percent silver and millions of ounces could be refined every year—yet also where the dark side of European exploitation of the New World was visible like nowhere else, a hell on earth where it had been estimated that every hundred wheelbarrow-loads of ore had cost a human life.

  A battered truck came bouncing over the potholes on the road behind, coming to a halt in a cloud of dust beside Jack. The door opened and a tall young man wearing a down jacket and baseball cap and sunglasses got out, chewing gum. He spat the gum out beside the road, then saw Jack watching and walked over, his hand outstretched. “Apologies for that,” he said, his accent American. “I’m trying to kick the coca leaf habit, and chewing gum helps. I’m Marco Henley, from the mission. Father Pereira sent me. I’m a good friend of your friend Maria. You’re Jack Howard, and you must be Costas. Welcome to Cerro Rico.”

  They all shook hands, and Marco pointed to the mine entrance ahead of them. “I’m going to give you a quick tour bef
ore we get down to business. I trust the driver we sent was okay for you? You need to meet the boy who’s going to take you into the mine. I want to get that done now, at the start of the day, so that we can avoid prying eyes later on. I know the backstory and I know about the Altamanus. But there are a lot of people here keeping a watch on our behalf, too.”

  “Where are you from?” Costas asked, as they walked along toward the mine entrance. “I’m Greek, but I grew up mainly in Brooklyn.”

  “Yeah? I’m half-Colombian, but I grew up mainly in Rhode Island. I was one of those privileged kids whose parents had a colonial clapboard on the seafront. Went to NYU, majored in architecture, got bored with planning skyscrapers for tycoons, joined the Marines, two tours in Afghanistan. After that, I came down here looking for something to do, figuring that since my mother is Colombian and I can speak the lingo, I might be of some use. I met Maria while I was hanging out in Potosi thinking of becoming an artist, and after she found out about my background she invited me to meet Father Pereira, who eventually invited me up to the mission. That was four years ago, and I’ve been there ever since. The place was in a bit of a state, and I’ve put my building skills to some use. Also, though they were pretty well on the ball about the Altamanus and that whole history, their security arrangements needed a little tweaking. Basically I provide that. I remember reading about you; you were in the navy, right?”

  “A long time ago,” Costas said. “Engineering, submersibles, pretty technological, but I did see some active service in the Gulf. Jack was a diver with UK Special Forces.”

  “I read that too.”

  They reached a large dusty plateau in front of the entrance, a gaping rocky hole reducing to a narrow shaft that descended out of sight. The slope of the mountain reared high above that, covered with scree from which rocks of all sizes had tumbled onto the plateau, some of them then rolled by miners into rough walls to form sleeping and cooking places for their families. “One of the many hazards of this place,” Marco said, putting his hand on a boulder as they walked by. “Every once in a while someone gets crushed by a falling boulder, or hit on the head and killed by something as small as your fist. But you won’t see anyone wearing hard hats here. It wouldn’t make a difference, and they would just see it as tempting fate.”

  The plateau was teeming with people, perhaps two hundred of them, all shrouded in dust and engaged in some form of labor. A line of boys pushed wheelbarrows of ore out of the entrance, dumping their contents in a pile by the road, where others were shoveling it into the back of a battered old dump truck. Several men carried a crate labeled DYNAMITE off the back of a pickup truck, and women stood behind rickety stalls along the path of the barrow boys with jugs of water and piles of flatbreads on the tables in front of them. “Those are their mothers and sisters,” Marco said. “I want you to meet Juan, who’s going to be taking you down the shaft tonight.”

  A teenage boy had detached himself from the group around the dump truck and walked hesitantly toward them, a younger boy following. He was taller than most, with dark eyes and high cheekbones, more Inca than Spanish in origin. His nose and mouth were caked in dust, and he quickly wiped them with the back of his hand as he came up to them, waving at the other boy to stay back.

  “Juan, this is Jack and Costas,” Marco said, then tapped his watch. “Medianoche, correcto?”

  Jack smiled at him. “Habla usted Inglés, Juan?”

  “A little, señor.”

  “Call me Jack. We’ll see you inside the mine entrance at midnight, right?”

  The boy nodded, and hurried back to the barrows. “He’s a good boy, intelligent,” Marco said. “He wants to be a doctor, so he can tend to his older brother, who is slowly dying from silicosis. But it’s very hard for him. They live with their mother in that cavern by the entrance. And you can already see the look in his eyes that they get when they’ve breathed in too much dust, when the mountain has taken them over.”

  “How old are they, the younger ones?” Costas asked. “Looks like child labor to me.”

  “They start as young as eight,” Marco said. “They work five-hour shifts, usually at night so they can go to school during the day, pushing out thirty or forty wheelbarrow-loads on each shift. The dust means that they’ll all eventually suffer from silicosis, where the lungs basically turn to rock. It debilitates most of them by the time they’re in their twenties. The doctors chart their decline, and it’s not uncommon to see lung capacity dropping below fifty percent by the time they’re eighteen. In addition to that, they suffer from mal de miner, headaches and weakness of the legs caused by breathing in the toxic gases that linger in the tunnels after dynamite has exploded. Whole sections of the mine, especially the deep parts, are fragile honeycombs of passageways, and can collapse at any moment. About twenty people a month die in accidents. The average life expectancy is less than forty. It’s no wonder they call the place la montaña que come a los hombres—the mountain that eats men.”

  “That eats boys, more like,” Costas said, coughing and spitting on the ground, and then taking out a few more of the coca leaves that the driver had given him. “Thank God we brought our breathing masks with us.”

  “You can go ahead and thank God here outside the mine, but make sure you don’t mention him in there. God doesn’t hold much sway in that mountain.”

  Just before the entrance lay a pit about eight meters long by three meters wide, and covered by a line of dust-caked planks. As he passed by, Jack looked into the cracks between the planks, then stopped, stunned. “Am I seeing human skeletons?”

  “Correct,” Marco said. Costas joined Jack and stared open-mouthed into the hole. It was filled with a dense jumble of human bones, some of them articulated skeletons, others crushed and jammed together, with hundreds of skulls packed at one end. “There are lots of these mass burials around, but this one was uncovered when a boy with a barrow fell into it. An anthropologist came up from the university in La Paz and determined that they were all African slaves. The Inca were favored for underground work, because of their small stature and their stamina, just like their descendants here today, but the Africans with their larger size and musculature were put to work in the mint, pushing around the stone mills that ground the ore. They even had a name for them: acémilas humanas, human donkeys. They rarely lasted more than a few months, but there were always more to be had in the slave markets of Port Royal and elsewhere in the Caribbean.”

  Jack stared at the skulls, remembering Maurice only two days before on the stone dais of the courtyard at Port Royal, chains and shackles in hand, explaining in somber terms what he had uncovered. Jack had found it difficult then to populate the image in his mind’s eye with the human traffic that had filled that place, but now the reality of it was laid out starkly before his eyes, and it filled him with horror. He looked up at the mountain and hesitated, suddenly filled with revulsion for this place, wishing he was not here. But then he looked at the line of boys who trundled beside him, covered in sweat and dust. He had to go on; he could not give up now. He took a deep breath, and followed Costas and Marco the final few steps to the entrance.

  “You’ll see under the dust that the rock is smeared with blood,” Marco said. “They sacrifice a llama here every week to propitiate the god of the mountain, and use the meat to feed the boys. At this point we are literally standing on the border between the Christian world and something dark and forbidding beyond, as if this were the entrance to the underworld. Father Pereira will go no further than this when he visits here to minister to the boys.”

  He walked through the cavern and stooped as the tunnel lowered, the way ahead lit dimly by wobbling electric bulbs attached to the ceiling, powered by a generator outside. “Those finish pretty soon,” he said, his voice muffled. “After that, it’s headlamps and torches. We won’t go further than that.”

  Jack coughed, feeling the dust catch in his throat. Ahead, it was like mist, billowing around the jagged rocks where the tunnel had been
crudely hacked out of the mountainside. Costas suddenly sprang back, clutching at the rock. “What the hell is that?” Jack came up behind him and saw what he had seen. Leaning against the side of the tunnel was a lurid life-sized idol made of papier mâché and cloth, with horns on its head and eyes made of marbles. It was dressed in multicolored paper streamers, and had burned-out cigarettes and cigars in its mouth and opened cans and bottles in its hands.

  “That’s El Tío, the Uncle,” Marco said. “The Lord of the Underworld, a devil-like spirit that the miners worship, leaving him gifts of coca leaves and tobacco and alcohol. Once you get deeper into these tunnels, you’ll see more of them, and they get more frightening. Years ago the missionaries tried to turn the miners from El Tío, but to no avail. The ominous thing is that he’s a god of both protection and destruction. The miners know perfectly well that no amount of placating will save them from what the mountain has ordained for them, so they accept that El Tío may only be bent on their destruction. It’s a kind of fatalism that allows them to go deep into the mine every day without breathing protection, despite seeing what silicosis has done to virtually everyone who works here.”

  The ground shook, and a rumble came up from the depths, followed by a dull glow and a waft of hot dust. They all began coughing, and quickly moved back to the entrance, shifting aside to let a line of boys with wheelbarrows get through. “Jesus,” Costas said. “That really is like the exhalation of the devil.”