Black Rain: A Thriller (13 page)

As she stared at the round face, she thought of Dixon and his missing squad. They were well trained and heavily armed but still missing. She wondered if they’d find those men floating and mutilated farther upriver somewhere. She hoped not, for every reason under the sun.

Even as Danielle considered this, the others were overcoming the initial shock of the discovery and giving way to a morbid curiosity. Various theories began flying back and forth. After several minutes even Hawker came forward. He appraised the body for only a moment.

“Wonderful,” he said sarcastically, and then turned to Devers. “Can you tell what tribe he’s from?”

The dead man was naked, with no identifying marks or jewelry of any kind. “No,” Devers said. “Why?”

Hawker nodded into the distance ahead of them. “Because they seem to be as interested in him as we are.”

Danielle looked up to see a trio of native canoes being rowed frantically toward them. There were two men in each boat, paddling furiously and shouting as they approached. Their pace was almost panicked and their voices were filled with a mad fury, every ounce of it directed toward the
Ocana
and its spellbound passengers.

D
anielle watched the approaching canoes. Six men in small boats were not much of a threat. But they were incensed, and caution dictated that she be prepared. “Start the engine,” she said.

“Should I get us away?” the boat captain asked.

“No. I want to talk to them, but be ready.” She looked to Verhoven, who was still holding the body to the side of the
Ocana
. “Let it go.”

Verhoven gave the body a shove and it carried slowly out behind the stern of the boat and then on downstream with the peaceful flow of the current. Ahead of them, the canoes were closing in, and neither the intensity of the shouting nor their paddling had diminished.

“Make sure your weapons are handy,” Danielle said.

Verhoven grinned. “They’re always handy.”

She turned to Devers. “Are they Chollokwan?”

Devers hesitated for only a moment. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Some of the words are Portuguese. The Chollokwan only speak Chokawa. Plus, this is Nuree territory.”

Danielle relaxed a bit. The Nuree were not a threat
like the Chollokwan could be. They were a tribe in transition, caught halfway between the old world and the new. They still hunted with blow guns and spears, yet at times they would paddle downriver to trade, selling pelts and buying clothing, fish hooks and cigarettes. They weren’t known to be violent. And with the right form of persuasion they might even be helpful.

The canoes slowed as they approached and the shouting ceased, perhaps because the floating body had been released, or more likely because the natives had spotted Verhoven and his men holding rifles.

“Find out what they want,” Danielle said.

Devers stepped to the prow of the boat and addressed the men in the Nuree language. They shouted back, a menagerie of voices.

“They ask why we touch the dead,” Devers translated. “They say this one is cursed, and he is to be left alone.”

“Ask them who he is.” Danielle said. “Why was he killed?”

Devers translated the question, and as one of the Nuree men responded, he explained the answer. “He says they did not kill him.”

“Why is he in the river, then?” Danielle asked. “Why is he tied up like that?”

This time a different tribesman spoke.

“The man is a relative of some kind,” Devers said, translating, “a nephew, I think. They went upriver ten days ago on a hunt. He says they found no game, so they continued until they reached the place they should not have gone. A forbidden place. The uncle warned his
nephew, but the boy wouldn’t listen and he continued on while the uncle came back.”

Another of the tribesmen spoke.

“It is the forsaken place,” Devers said. “Forsaken by life. To go there is to invite death. Most who are foolish in such a way do not return. Some have come back like this—floating in the river, their spirits ripped out.” The native man clutched his chest where the two great holes had been seen in the dead man. “They drag the stones to keep them from the shore. They hold the reed to show their punishment. We have even seen animals this way. It is the spirits that send them back. Cursed and abhorred. Even the birds and piranha will not eat them.”

As she listened to the translation, it occurred to Danielle that the body had not been touched by the scavengers of the forest or river. A strange thought, because there was so much competition for food in the rainforest. Odder still, because if the man was telling the truth the body had been in the water for several days, not less than twenty-four hours as she’d guessed.

Beside her, Verhoven laughed. “Right, then. The spirits are using twine these days, ay?”

Danielle ignored him. “What else?”

Devers replied, “He says only the Shadow Men go to this land. I think he might mean the Chollokwan. He says that they kill all who go there, or that they make the animals do it for them. Something like that. Either way, he says, once they parted, he knew his nephew would not come back alive. He went looking for him every day. This morning, one of the boys from the village spotted the body floating down the river. No one is to touch it.”

Danielle considered the situation. They had to be
close to the right area. She took a chance. “Ask him if he can take us to where he left his nephew. Tell him we are looking for the place of these spirits.”

Through Devers’ translation, the tribesmen continued to speak. “Death lingers there,” one of them insisted. “Accursed things come out from the shadows of that place. They should be left undisturbed.”

Another, older tribesman added, “If you go there you will be taken. You will not return, except as a warning, punished like this one. This is why the body appears today,” he added, pointing accusingly at the NRI group. “It is a warning. Sent for you. To choose another way.”

With that the natives began talking among themselves. Excited words flashing back and forth between the small canoes, all of it too quick and overlapping for Devers to intercept, but after a moment the result was clear: the Nuree were moving on. They dug in with their paddles, powerful strokes that swirled the water into deep eddies. They moved around the
Ocana
and headed downstream in the direction of the floating body.

Danielle asked for an explanation.

“It seems that we’re already cursed,” Devers said. “Or maybe just too foolish to waste any more time on.”

Behind them one of the porters laughed. He’d heard it all before. “To the Nuree, everything is cursed,” he said. “The trees, the foam on the water, a log that floats with the wrong end down—all deadly, all cursed.”

Danielle turned back to her interpreter. “What do you think really happened?”

Devers shrugged. “The place we’re looking for is somewhere upriver from here. That’s where Blackjack Martin ran into the Chollokwan. I told you they were
violent. It’s probably their territory that these guys are afraid of. Truth be told, I’d think the place was cursed too, if every time one of my people went up there they came back looking like this.”

“The Chollokwan,” Danielle repeated. She looked upriver. Somewhere ahead they would enter their territory.

“As the man said, it’s a warning,” Devers added. “And as strange as it sounds, I think we should take it that way.”

“I didn’t come here to worry about native superstitions.” She gave the order, “Let’s get moving.”

A moment later, as the engine began to rumble beneath the deck, McCarter came up beside her. “It seems like the day for warnings, apparently.”

“What do you mean?”

“Susan and I have been studying the stone you gave us, the one that the logger brought back from out here. And we think we know what the other glyph represents. It’s a one-legged owl, a great deformed bird that struck terror into the Mayan hearts.”

“Why would they be afraid of an owl?” Danielle asked. “What does it mean?”

“It’s the herald of the underworld,” McCarter said. “The messenger of destruction.”

T
wo hours later, they came to an area where the character of the river began to change. The larger trees receded from the banks, replaced by a rocky shoreline of great smooth-sided boulders, the first they had seen in hundreds of miles. It was as if they’d suddenly been transported to a different place and, geologically speaking, they had, for the heavy granite they saw was rare in the Amazon, except in the far north near the Guyana Shield, the well-worn remnants of an ancient mountain range. Farther on they began to hear a sound that was as foreign to their ears as the stones were to their eyes: the tumbling chorus of white water, where a smaller stream joined up with the Negro.

“The rapids,” Danielle noted. Blackjack Martin’s notes described these rapids, as did the logger who’d sold her the stone. This was the marker. If the information was correct, they would come to a small tributary in just over a mile, where they would exit the main river and travel due north.

Danielle turned to the captain. “Take the next stream on the starboard side.”

A mile later the stream appeared just as promised,
joining the Negro at a wide intersection with a small island in the middle. An island that the logger had described as a sandbar.

As Hawker joined her at the bow she said, “The water’s low here.” She looked around, thinking about the wide sandy beaches they’d camped on downriver. “Low everywhere right now.”

“The rainy season’s late,” Hawker said.

Danielle nodded. Even out over the western Amazon where they were headed, there had been less precipitation in the supposedly wet month of January than in the months of the drier season. Everywhere the beaches were wide, the sand bars high and the water low.

The captain agreed. “El Niño,” he explained. “Few clouds but nothing more. In Matto Grasso there is no rain at all. El Niño.”

For South America, El Niño meant the dry winds of the Patagonian plateau, high desert air that swept down across the Amazon and stole the moisture away, reeking havoc with the normal weather pattern of daily and weekly rains. It meant dying fish in lakes and ponds and failing crops on the plains. For a month, forecasters had been suggesting an El Niño was forming, but as yet no official announcement had been made. Looking around, Danielle realized she wouldn’t need one.

“Can you get us through?”

The captain nodded. “Slowly.”

Slowly meant three or four knots, with Hawker at the bow watching for trouble. Fortunately the wide-bottomed
Ocana
only drew a foot or two of water and progress was adequate. Twenty miles upriver lay the
spot that the logger claimed to have seen the stone. They would make that in just over five hours. With a little luck, they would find the Wall soon after.

As it turned out,
a little luck
had not been forthcoming, and the NRI group searched the banks of the river for a week after passing the rapids.

McCarter knew the problem. “The jungle swallows things,” he said. “A hundred years ago cities like Palenque, Copán and Tikal were so covered in vegetation that the monuments looked like rugged green hills. Dirt piles up and the weeds and trees grow out of it. Eventually the place is covered from head to toe. Left alone, the jungle creeps in and simply takes the land back.”

He explained how they should proceed. “One thing you have to avoid looking for is the finished product, a monument or a temple of some kind. You won’t find that out here. It’ll be something subtle—a small hill that doesn’t flow with the land the way it should, or a bit of rock sticking out where it shouldn’t.”

These had been McCarter’s instructions five days before. Since then, they’d split into teams, scouring different sections of the river’s bank on foot, hiking and slashing their way through the tangled foliage, moving slowly upriver in a systematic search. It was all to no avail, until Polaski discovered a squared-off stone at the edge of the river. McCarter and Susan stared at it with approval.

McCarter smiled as he inspected it, then turned to
Susan. “The two of us experts out here, and he finds the first clue.”

“Beginner’s luck,” she said, smiling. “And thank God for it.”

McCarter looked around. “Luck” was the word. A month earlier the stone would have been submerged in ten feet of water.

“Not bad for a systems nerd,” Polaski proclaimed.

“No,” McCarter said. “Not bad at all.” He looked skyward. Dusk was approaching fast. He considered calling the others but they were spread out along the river’s edge, and in the fifteen minutes it would take them to gather he would lose the remaining light.

McCarter gazed up the sloping bank. It was quite steep. “It probably tumbled down in a deluge at some point.” He looked at Susan and Polaski. “We have to go up,” he said. “Straight up.”

Susan went first. Younger, lighter and more athletic, she outclimbed both McCarter and Polaski as they struggled to scale the steep, tangled embankment. She paused on a flattish section, pointing to something.

As McCarter reached her he was gasping but energized, especially as Susan directed his attention to another jumble of stones. A few feet away they found a second pile, uneven and dislodged, but it seemed as if they might have once been a flight of stairs. With his hands on his hips, McCarter took a deep breath and then began to climb again. “Up,” he said.

This time he led the assault, pushing forward, tripping and stumbling on the steep ascent, almost causing a minor avalanche at one point. Near the top, he arrived at a tangled spread of vines that hung over the bluff like
falling water. With the light fading around them, McCarter swung his machete and the vines fell. In their place, two empty eye sockets stared back at him from the mottled brown countenance of an ancient human skull. He stepped back.

“Well, this is something,” Polaski said, wide-eyed.

“Isn’t it?” Susan said. “Can you believe
we
found it?”

McCarter looked at her. He had begun to think it was all just a waste of time. “And to think, you could have been in Paris instead.”