by John Bolin
Gator sat steady on the stern of the boat, his hands glued to the throttle stick as he strained to navigate the craft up through the rushing, churning rapids. It was dizzying. The boat careened off rocky walls and spun end around end, losing ground and then regaining it. Alex held on as the water crashed down in successive waves. When it didn’t seem possible for the rolling water to continue, it kept coming.
Finally, the boat eased and lulled as the whitewater subsided.
They’d made it up the river.
No one spoke for a few moments. Gator eased his grip on the paddle in his hands. Diego lay on the bottom of the boat, one hand covering a bleeding wound. Linc sat in the boat wiping water from his face.
Alex looked toward the shore and excitedly got the attention of the other guys. They’d found the fishing village.
Ten huts, situated on stilts, stood in a semicircle. There were no overhead wires, and the river appeared to be the only source of running water. The whole village looked as though it could be picked up and moved at any time, disassembled and stuffed into the back of a truck and put together again somewhere else. Two wooden boats, made of hollowed-out logs, were pulled up on the muddy bank.
A dozen or so men and women were standing on the edge of the water, pointing at the strangers in the boat. A few others sat by small fires smoking or cooking. A handful of women had been washing clothes in the river but now retreated back to the others. A few dogs barked, and Alex could see three burros tied to a tree. There were no cars, trucks, or equipment of any kind.
Something about the primitiveness of the place made Alex feel uneasy. Even so, she pushed aside the sense of caution. Maybe one of the village people would know where Tima had come from. Maybe they’d even help them find the city in the mist. That was it, she decided. Everything was going to start to work out. They’d talk to the villagers and make a plan. Things would improve from here.
Chapter 12
Peter hadn’t spoken for ten minutes. It was his fault. He should have turned around and tried to help her. He lifted his body as high as he could while staying on his knees. He scanned the river for a sign of Alex or the other Zodiac. The setting sun seemed to be perfectly situated in the gorge so that it blinded Peter’s eyes, hurting his head. He put his sunglasses on.
Only then did he notice the black raft bobbing in the water, a hundred yards upstream. He held his breath and strained his eyes. There were people in the boat: four of them. They’d picked up Alex. His breath escaped him fully for the first time in ten minutes.
He was surprised at his own reaction. He was relieved, of course, but something else, too. The thought of losing Alex was more than simply a reflex from his dereliction of duty. There was something about her, a feeling that drew him to her.
Was he falling for her?
Linc was videotaping Peter as Gator steered the other raft forward.
“What took you so long?” Gator shouted.
Peter shook his head and chuckled.
“We even had to pick up one of your stragglers,” Gator said, nodding toward Alex, who smiled weakly.
“Glad you’re all right,” Peter said to Alex as he navigated the boat closer. He noticed that the fabric on both rafts was ripped and shredded. One of the inflatable pontoons on his boat seemed to be sagging, like they had stopped just in time, before it sank.
Peter looked at the ramshackle cluster of huts. A gaggle of semi-naked tribesmen stood on the shore, twenty feet away, looking half wary and half bored.
He turned to Alex. “Ask Tima if this is the place.”
Alex leaned across both boats and spoke to Tima, who was sitting wide-eyed next to her in the boat. She gestured to the huts and spoke in Tima’s language.
Tima looked at the village, then nodded and leaned back. “Yes,” she said in English. “Here now.”
“Well, let’s get moving,” Linc said. “I can’t get off this bronco soon enough.”
“Not yet,” Peter said. “Let’s drop anchor here for a few minutes and get a plan.” He looked over at the village. Five men had gathered on the bank, staring at them. One of the men had a gun in his hand. Another two held bows and arrows.
Immediately, Peter had second thoughts about the village.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
* * *
They anchored the two rafts and bobbed in the water while they attended to each other’s injuries for a few minutes. Diego and Alex were the worse off. Everyone else just had a few bumps and bruises. Linc was fiddling with one of the cameras.
“So who are these guys?” Gator said.
“My bets are on the Shining Path,” Peter said. “It would make sense for them to kidnap the girl—Tima,” he said, correcting himself. “After all, if the Smithsonian is willing to write a blank check in order to find a few lost Indians, no telling what they’d offer as a ransom.”
“But the Shining Path are Peruvians,” Gator said. “Half those guys were Caucasian.”
“It wasn’t the Shining Path,” Alex said.
Everyone turned.
“Tima told me that the men who took her, this White Shaman guy’s men, were white. White ghosts, she called them. They took her to a place hidden in the jungle.”
“The city in the mist,” Gator said. “You mentioned that.”
Alex swatted a bug from her face and pulled her hair back, tucking it behind her ears. “She told me that they did things to her—experiments. She said that they poked her with needles and drew her blood. There’s more going on here than just a kidnapping.” Alex looked at the huts on the shore. “Somebody is playing God with these people.”
“And whoever it is doesn’t want us interfering,” Gator said.
“Well, then, they killed the wrong guy,” Peter said. “Because as soon as Bogart went down, they pretty much signed their death certificate.”
Alex shut her eyes and shook her head but didn’t say anything.
“I say we get to the village and get going,” Gator said.
“The question is whether or not they’re going to come after us tonight,” Peter said.
Gator glanced at his watch. “It’s getting late,” he said. “Are we going to have enough time to get into the jungle and set up camp?”
Peter shook his head. The question he was debating was whether or not the nut jobs in the boats back there would find them here. Certainly, they’d have radios and sat phones and, given the high-dollar boats they’d been commanding, they could probably send in a chopper and drop a team of guys to assassinate Peter’s group any time they wanted.
Maybe they needed to get as far away from the village as possible. Lose the boats and follow Tima into the trees, far away from the river. On the other hand, Peter admitted that he felt a certain sense of justice and satisfaction taking out the guys in the boat. Either way, considering the shape of his team and the condition of their equipment, there wasn’t really much of a choice.
“We need to rest,” Peter said. “We’re going to have to go on foot from here, anyway. We’ll follow Tima’s path through the jungle. Let’s head toward the village, but be careful. No way to know if those guys or their friends have beaten us here. Could be heading into an ambush.”
At Peter’s signal, the group lifted the anchors and beached the rafts. As they approached the shore, the Indians seemed to disappear, cowering back into the shadows of the huts and ducking into doorways. Only three men stood at the center of the village by the time the group got out of the rafts. Two of them appeared to be younger, thirties maybe, bare chested. They wore old shorts, stained with dirt and grime. The other man was old with white hair and a white beard. He stood naked except for a cloth around his waist. All the men had bright red and blue tattoos on their faces and chests.
Two chickens clucked and scampered around the village, and a skinny white-haired dog greeted them at the shore, barking incessantly, ears raised and tail taut. The animal’s fur was dirty and matted, and patches were missing. It stopped to urin
ate near one of the rafts, smelling the scent of the strangers and leaving its own. One of the younger Indian men shouted something, and the dog stopped barking. It dropped its ears, tucked its tail, and waddled back to one of the huts.
Peter looked back at Skins, waving him forward to talk to the village leader. The others flopped onto the beach, catching their breath, passing water bottles back and forth, seemingly unaware of the oddity of the now quiet camp. Linc came toward Peter with the video camera recording.
Peter and Skins approached the men, with Linc capturing the whole thing on video. None of them was smiling. In fact, the old man was frowning and pointing at the two women gathered on the beach. It seemed to Peter that he was pointing specifically at Tima. One of the younger men, a short, broad-shouldered man, said something to Skins in Quechua. Peter assumed the man was asking what they wanted and why they had come back to their village with the girl. Skins responded to the man in the same language. The two men exchanged conversation for a few minutes.
Peter watched the old man. Up close, the tattoos were more distinct. They appeared to be a series of lines and dots, like a map, that followed the line of what at one point in the old man’s life had been muscular curves and lines. Now, they started and stopped as the zigzagged lines fell into his wrinkled skin. A leather rope was looped around the man’s neck and what looked to be a wrinkled piece of fruit dangled below his collarbone. Something about the fruit was oddly familiar.
A shrunken head.
The old man spoke then, gesturing with his hands, lifting them rhythmically as he seemed to be arguing with Skins. The man listened but was not friendly and showed no sign of warming to the strangers. At one point, the old man turned away with the other two men, waving his hands at the strangers as if to say the discussion was finished and whatever Skins had proposed was out of the question. Skins didn’t give up though, and five minutes later the old man was nodding and slightly smiling. Finally, he said, “Okay,” turned back to the huts, and barked out a few orders in Quechua.
Instantly, the other villagers emerged from their hiding places and fanned out across the village. A group of women ran down to the women in Peter’s group, waving them toward the camp. Men approached Gator and Linc and offered to help with the luggage.
“What happened?” Peter asked Skins. “What did he say?”
“He said that ever since they found the girl, their village has been cursed.”
“What do you mean ‘cursed’?”
Skins rubbed his chin. “The burro they used to bring girl here died when it came back. A few days ago, a young boy and his mother . . . attacked by black caiman. Other bad things happen, too. He say demon spirits come every night for two weeks. He think girl bring evil spirit of caiman to them. He no want her here. He think you part of problem.”
Peter was confused. He furrowed his eyebrows and looked over Skins shoulder at the villagers eagerly helping the others. His eyes glanced over to four large caimans lounging in the sun on the beach. “What did you tell him to change his mind?”
“I told him about black jaguar,” Skins said, smiling. “They already heard of you here. They very happy you come.”
“They think I’ll protect them from the caiman or something?”
“No,” Skins said, “I tell them you kill jaguar and that you will kill bad spirits, too.”
* * *
It sure wasn’t what he was used to, but it would do.
Peter leaned against a log and sipped beer made from fermented maize called chichi. Alex told Peter it had been used by Amazonian shamen for hundreds of years as a means to communicate with the spiritual realm. Skins told Peter it was used to get high. Either way, Peter wasn’t exactly looking forward to it, but he knew better than to refuse, especially since he needed a relatively safe place for his team to stay the night.
The sun had already set, and darkness settled over the village. Children giggled and peeked out from behind their mothers’ loincloths. The burros bleated in the darkness. Peter inhaled, taking in the aroma of food cooking.
Dinner had consisted mostly of white corn, squash, and a potato-like vegetable called manioc. They had also been offered meat that was supposedly some sort of monkey. Peter and Alex ate slowly, without complaining. Linc barely touched his meal, and Gator inhaled his in three minutes flat. After the meal, the Indians were amused to offer the Americans live grubworms for dessert—a delicacy, according to Skins.
Gator had been assigned the first shift of guard duty and was already walking the perimeter between the huts and the jungle itself, his rifle slung over his shoulder. Diego had been treated by the village shaman and was resting in one of the huts. Alex and Skins were talking to the village chief.
Linc was sitting on a log next to Tima. He was playing a word game with her. Since they’d left the city, Linc had taken to Tima as to a little sister. The two of them had spent hours going back and forth, exchanging words and phrases. Besides Alex, Linc was the one other person on the team whom Tima seemed to trust.
“Fire,” Linc said, pointing at the flames in front of him.
“Fire,” Tima repeated slowly, smiling widely.
Peter couldn’t help but notice how much better the girl looked. Her eyes looked clear and focused. Her entire physique seemed to be stronger, healthier. If it weren’t for the purplish veins and occasional migraine headaches, he would have thought she was as healthy as could be.
“Yeah, yeah,” Linc said, nodding.
The girl pointed to the fire and said something that sounded like aw-han-ah.
“Aw-han-ah,” Linc said, his brows furrowed in concentration.
“I’m impressed, Linc,” Alex said, easing back onto a log by the fire. Skins sat down next to her. “You’re a born anthropologist.”
Linc turned. “Always wanted a sister, especially one that laughed at my jokes and liked my music.”
“Music,” Tima said recognizing the word. She pointed to the harmonica hanging from Linc’s neck and started giggling.
“Don’t even think about it,” Peter said. “I’ll take every moment of peace and quiet I can get.”
Beyond the ring of fire, a dozen curious Quechua Indians sat in the shadows of the flickering light, watching the strangers.
“I’m afraid this is about the last peace and quiet we may have for a while,” Alex said. “The chief told me that the shaman has predicted what he calls big rain for the next few days . . . beginning tonight.”
“Oh, come on, now we’re taking the weather forecast from a shaman,” Peter said.
Alex ignored him.
“What’s he mean by ‘big rain’?” Linc asked.
“Big rain,” Tima repeated.
“The Amazon receives more rainfall than any other place on the planet,” Alex said. “Over six feet a year. When he says ‘big rain,’ he means that once it begins to rain, it will probably pour for the next forty-eight hours.” Alex took a deep breath. “Nonstop.”
High above the trees that leaned in over him, Peter could see dark clouds passing in front of a new moon. In the distance, he could hear the rumble of thunder. Maybe the shaman was right.
“So, what’s the plan for tomorrow?” Alex asked Peter.
“That’s up to Tima. Does she think she can take us through the trees to the place where the White Shaman had been keeping her?”
Alex turned to Tima and talked to her for a moment in the girl’s dialect. She turned back to the others. “Yes. She says she knows which way to go. She says the city in the mist is not far from here, maybe a day’s journey into the jungle.”
The firelight lit up Tima’s face, revealing a series of delicate lines of tattoos that ran from her ears to forehead. Tattoos.
Something clicked in Peter’s memory. “The man on the boat and the guy driving the boat had the same tattoo.”
Everyone turned to him.
“Huh?” Linc said. “That’s sort of out of the blue, boss.”
“On the inside of their wrists,�
� Peter said. “They both had identical tattoos on their wrists. There’s got to be some connection between the tattoo and the group that took Tima and killed Bogart.”
“What did it look like?” Alex asked. “Do you remember how it looked?”
Peter picked up a stick lying near the fire. He drew the symbol he’d seen on the man, like a letter H. “There was more, but I don’t remember.”
Alex stood and took the stick from Peter, finishing the drawing, adding what looked like a greater than symbol. “Did it look like this?”
