by Steve Perry
Yamada might not rank among the top German scientists who had ever lived, but he was an educated man who served his emperor and, like all the Japanese, was willing to die for him without a second’s hesitation if that was required. A man who was smart and didn’t care if he died? He could be most formidable. You did not wish to give such a man anything sharp to use against you.
Schäefer could not understand that, but Schäefer was not in command. Gruber was, and he would keep what he had learned in mind. It was all well and good to laugh at the Orientals over a stein of good dark beer with your friends at the Hofbrau; it was another thing to be roaming in a foreign jungle with the wily Dämonen skulking around the rain forest with you. Spilled beer was of no importance, a joke. German blood on the ground? Not so funny.
FOURTEEN
MAC SAID, “MY. Quite the stream.”
Indy nodded. The muddy water gurgling past in the channel slightly downhill from where they stood did so in a rush. And it was more like what he’d call a river than a stream, carrying branches and even an entire downed tree by them in the roiling brown flow. Wouldn’t think you could get that kind of flow on an island this small, but—there it was.
They weren’t going to be wading across that. How were they going to get past it?
As if reading his thoughts, Batiste said, “The water is too deep, the current too strong to try to ford here. There is a bridge around that bend.”
They followed the edge of the waterway for several hundred yards, rounded the curve, and came to the bridge.
Or rather, what was left of it.
The bridge was a narrow, planked affair, affixed to thick ropes at the base, with thinner lines strung above it as handholds. The four ropes, upper and lower, were laced together with thinner twine, and the lines all looked as if they had been coated with some kind of preservative, creosote or somesuch, to prevent rot. A clever, well-designed, useful construct.
Unfortunately, the big tree to which the ends on their side of the river had been attached had toppled over into the water. The first fifteen feet of the bridge was under the rushing current, along with half the tree’s crown, and the tree had been turned and rolled by that current to point downstream, enough so that the bridge was also twisted to almost a right angle at the nearer end. The fallen tree looked recently felled, probably during one of the storms. The leaves on its canopy were still green.
If you could get to the bridge without being washed away, you’d have to be a fly to walk on it until you were almost all the way across to the other side.
Indy didn’t see a boat anywhere.
“It seems we shall have to make repairs to the bridge,” Batiste said.
“No kidding,” Indy said. “Can’t we find another place to cross?”
“Non. The rains have swollen all the streams, and many of them wind back and forth over most of the island. Too deep to ford during this season, and swimming is risky. One of my men might make it across here with a rope.” He pointed at the far shore. “And we could then tie a dragline, onto which we could hand-over-hand our way against the current, but our supplies would suffer from the immersion. A slip of the hand, and one would be carried away. A strong swimmer might eventually make it to shore, but maybe not. There are logs and brush being carried downstream that might ram into anybody crossing on a dragline, too. The bridge is better.”
“How do we fix it?”
“We have had some experience with such matters. It is not complicated, though also not easy.”
Indy said, “Story of my life.”
Marie smiled at him. “We shall have some time while the bridge is being repaired. Perhaps you can tell me some of your story?”
He returned her smile. He had a weakness for smart and capable women, always had been that way.
He’d never dated a witch before, though.
Well, at least not to his knowledge.
“Maybe,” he said, “we could trade stories.”
Batiste and his men had apparently come equipped for stream crossings.
Indy and Marie watched as one of the men, four coils of rope over his shoulders and chest like bandoliers, scurried along the top of the downed tree and into the branches.
“Moves pretty good,” Indy observed.
“The children here learn to climb trees as soon as they can walk. That is the easy part,” she said.
They watched as the man made it to the straining ropes holding the bridge. He uncoiled one end of one of the ropes and began to make it fast to one of the base lines. Because he was curious as to just how much Marie knew about such things, he asked: “What kind of knot is he using?”
“A sailor’s grip hitch,” she said, without hesitation. “Better than a constrictor hitch for attaching a small rope to a larger one. Harder you pull, the tighter it gets.”
She looked at him. “You know about knots?”
“I got the merit badge when I was in the Boy Scouts,” he said.
The man finished the first knot. He moved to the handhold rope and used a thinner line to connect to it.
The third and fourth connections were going to be trickier, since the nearest bits of rope on that side not under the water were at least fifteen feet from the tree. He’d have to work his way out on the high side, then reach across—
But—no. Instead, the rope man slid down, took a deep breath, and, hooking one leg through a gap between planks, allowed his upper body to sink into the muddy water.
“He can tie that underwater? Upside down?”
“Can’t you?”
“It’s been more than thirty years since I was a Scout,” he said. “I couldn’t remember how to tie that knot in an air-conditioned lecture room with all day to practice it. If you want a nice clove hitch or a bowline, I’m your man.”
She laughed. He enjoyed the sound of it. Been too long since he had made a beautiful and smart woman laugh. Especially one who hadn’t tried to kill him several times, like Elsa and Rosita both had . . .
A few seconds later, the rope man emerged from the water and clambered up into the tree. He tied the fourth and final line then worked his way back toward the shore, uncoiling the rolls behind him.
A second man, bearing a machete, climbed past the rope man and into the branches.
Meanwhile, behind Indy and Marie, Batiste was fifteen feet up a large hardwood tree fifty or sixty feet back from the fallen bridge anchor, hammering spikes into the wood. Below him on the ground, Mac stood talking to one of the other men.
Mac caught Indy’s gaze and sauntered over.
“D’you see the little contraption they have?”
“I did.” Indy said. “Clever device. A kind of ratchet and triple-pulley system, see, there? Not very large, but mechanically efficient. One estimates how much slack there is going to be. A loop is tied into the rope a way along, where they figure it will be made most effectively taut, and the rope is run into the pulleys. The ratchet is tied to the tree, and the loop is cranked toward it until they can snag it over one of those spikes, which are a foot long each. This is done with all four of the ropes, and the ends of each are wrapped around more spikes for added security. Batiste says it won’t be quite as strong as the original, but it will be more than enough to allow our party to cross the river.”
“And the guy with the machete is there to cut away any branches that might tangle and keep the bridge from being raised,” Mac said.
“Precisely. It will take a while to tighten all the ropes. Once the first line is pulled taut, the others have to be adjusted properly.”
Mac nodded, though he looked bored. “Fascinating, right. Anyway, Batiste says we should be able to leave in an hour or so.”
Mac headed back to the tree where Batiste continued to drive spikes into the thick trunk.
“So, you were a Boy Scout?”
He looked at Marie. “Yeah. In Utah.” He took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He smiled at the hat.
“You remembered something amusi
ng,” she said.
“This hat,” he said, as he put it back on. “It was a . . . gift from somebody I met in the Boy Scouts. Sort of.”
She raised an eyebrow, so Indy told her the story.
She listened, laughing in all the right places, looking grave as she considered the plight of a young teenager running from possible death, falling into a nest of snakes, and even a lion’s cage.
“Already an adventurer as a teenager?”
“My father is a retired professor of medieval history,” Indy said. “And something of an authority on . . . religious artifacts. How I got interested in archaeology and history.”
He didn’t mention that his father was alive after being fatally shot only because he had drunk water from what was the Holy Grail . . .
“What happened to it? Coronado’s Cross?”
He grinned. “Took me until 1938 to find it and get it again,” he said. “Now it’s in a museum where it belongs.”
“Not a man easily deterred, are you?”
“Not once I’ve made up my mind to do something, no.” He smiled at her.
She smiled back. How lovely that was.
“And what about you, Marie? How does a nice girl with a degree in history and comparative religion wind up in the jungle with a creaky old archaeologist looking for a hidden treasure?”
“Not so old and creaky,” she said.
He felt his heart beat faster.
“And you asked me to go, remember?”
“Speaking a little more broadly than that?”
She paused a moment, as if reflecting on her answer. “My mother was a mambo. She was a doctor of traditional medicine in her village as a young woman. She hungered for knowledge. She managed to find her way to Cuba in the mid-1920s, and to a most progressive medical school. The place was destroyed in a hurricane in ’28 or ’29, but not before she learned enough to become a doctor of Western medicine, too. She came home and started a clinic. She had hoped I would follow in her footsteps and also become a doctor. She was teaching me how, along with other things.
“That was why I went to the United States, to eventually go to medical school. But my mother died in 1939—a fire, the clinic burned down. I had to come home, to sort things out. And then there was the war . . .”
She shook her head. “C’est la vie,” she said.
Such is life. But trust the French to make it sound so much more profound.
Indy was still basking in the warmth of that not-so-old-and-creaky comment. Hope springs eternal . . .
There came a grinch! noise, and he looked up to see one of the new ropes connected to the old bridge stretching tighter as Batiste cranked on the handle of the ratchet Mac had mentioned. The man in the downed tree over the water was carefully hacking away at small branches in the crown to free the bridge from the tree’s grasp as the rope grew more taut.
“Ever think about going back? To the States? The war won’t last forever. Another couple of years, it will probably be over.”
“I have considered it. But I have responsibilities here now. I know enough to treat many of my mother’s patients—with either Western medicines or our own. And there are other things that require my attention. If the war goes on for another few years and then I must leave for four or five more past that? It would not seem to be in the cards. But—who can say what the future will bring.”
They smiled again.
The bridge was now clear of the water on the right side, not by much, but a few feet, and Batiste was starting to tighten the lower rope on the opposite side. They’d be leaving soon. Maybe they could get back to this conversation later. Indy hoped so. He really liked Marie. He definitely wanted to get to know her better.
Suzuki said, “The natives have managed to repair an old bridge that spans the stream ahead of us. According to our scouts, there is no other way across this stream—it is deep and beset with a strong current.”
“So we shall have to follow them over the bridge,” Yamada said.
“Yes. But once on the other side, if we cut the ropes . . . ?”
Yamada nodded. Yes. That would greatly slow Gruber’s pursuit, if not stopping it altogether. Especially if the supports were not entirely parted, but only weakened enough so that they would give way once a load was put upon them. It was an amusing and gratifying thought to envision Gruber and his men tumbling into the raging waters . . .
It did not happen that way, though.
When, an hour after their quarry had crossed the repaired bridge, Yamada and his men arrived there, they beheld an incredible sight:
There were two men across the river. Well. Not men, Yamada knew, but things. Each of them had, with its teeth, attacked the bridge support ropes.
They were hunched over the cables.
Chewing . . .
Suzuki said, “Shoot them!”
“No!” Yamada counter-ordered. “The noise will reveal us! Besides, it is too late, look!”
As they watched, the rope on the right parted and the bridge canted vertically that way. A few seconds later, the other rope snapped, and wooden planking fell into the water. It drifted downstream, still attached on Yamada’s side of the river, fluttering in the water like a flag in a hard wind.
The two things stood and, without looking back, shambled off into the forest.
Yamada frowned. “The attackers at the village. Like the one that killed our soldier.” He paused a beat. “I do not like this.” He paused again. “Do we have a good swimmer?”
All of the men stepped forward.
Of course.
“The strongest man will carry a rope across and we will use it as a dragline,” Suzuki said.
Yamada shrugged. They would get wet. There were worse things.
Some of which he had just seen chew through a rope.
Another time, Yamada would have been intrigued enough to chase down and collect one of these man-creatures, to see what made him tick. But the mission was too important.
Gruber listened to the report the scout offered. There had been a bridge, but it had been cut on the other side of the river. There was a fresh rope spanning the crossing, a foot above the water. Though he had not seen it, the scout reckoned that Jones and McHale’s party had crossed via the bridge, which had been repaired on the west side of the river, and then felled it behind them, requiring that the Japanese devise other means to cross.
“That would only make sense if they knew they were being followed,” Gruber said.
“Perhaps they spotted the Japanese.”
Gruber nodded. “Well. Nice of them to leave it for us,” he said.
“Pragmatic,” Schäefer said. “The Japanese no doubt intend to use it again when they come back this way. We shall probably see other such lines.”
“Point taken, Captain.”
Once they arrived at the crossing, Schäefer ordered one of his men to inchworm his way across the river. If the Japanese had done it, they certainly could.
The soldier did so, his body flagging downstream as he slid his hands along the rope, left, then right, then left. It took him only a few minutes to achieve the far shore.
“Not so bad,” Gruber said. “I’ll go next.”
“You have gloves?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Best you wear them. The hemp will be rough on your hands.”
“I am not made of sugar, Captain. I believe I can manage it.”
Halfway across, Gruber wished he had taken Schäefer’s advice, for the wet rope was harsh against his fingers and palms, and the pull of the water was strong enough so that it was not easy work to support one’s weight with one hand while the other slid forward. Nonetheless, he managed to make it at the cost of a small blister on his left palm, no more. Once there, he stood and sluiced off as much water as he could. Being wet in the jungle was uncomfortable, but hardly unusual. One had to get used to it.
Schäefer crossed next, and then the rest of the men. The last man to cross was Heinrich Wagner, the do
ubting Thomas private. He was but a third of the way along when another of the men said, “Gott!” and pointed upstream.
Gruber turned to see, and beheld a log as big around as a man and thrice the length, with several broken, jagged-end branches jutting from the trunk, floating toward the crosser at a good rate.
“Schnell, schnell!” somebody yelled. “Heinrich, go back, go back, hurry, go back!”
But Wagner thought he could make it. He began moving his hands faster—
The log looked like it would miss him—
But—no. The log twisted, just a bit, just enough so that it hooked a branch under the rope. That slowed the front end almost to a stop, but the tail end came around—
—and slammed into Wagner, rolling over the top of the rope where his weight pulled the line below the surface. The log hit him on the head—
The scream he tried to get out turned into a gurgle and he lost his grip on the rope and sank.
The rope stretched . . . but held. The log rolled and floated on.
There was no sign of Wagner.
Soldiers ran along the bank but were stopped by a tangle of brush a few meters downstream. They cursed and attacked the brush with machetes, but Gruber knew that Heinrich was almost certainly drowned, if the impact had not been enough to fracture his skull.
He looked at Schäefer and shook his head. “He is a dead man.”
Schäefer nodded. “Yah.”
“He died for the glory of the Third Reich,” Gruber said. “Our report will reflect that. But we must move on.”
Schäefer nodded again. He didn’t like leaving one of his men floating down a stream in this godforsaken jungle, but dead was dead, and he had his orders. The mission was all that mattered, even if all of them died for it. So ist Lieben—such is life.
FIFTEEN
BOUKMAN SMOKED the sacred herb and mushroom blend in his pipe, which had been carved from the thighbone of a long-dead bokor. The smoke, pungent and acrid and potent enough to drop flying insects in the small hut, shrouded his head and hung low, no breeze to stir it as the power of it suffused his mouth and nose and lungs, the drogue bringing to him the state called pensée fraîche, cool thought.
