Burial Ground (12 page)

And from there the real trek would
begin.

Merritt hunkered down in the boat with his
poncho over his head, using the man in front of him as a screen
from the brunt of the rain, now more of a blowing mist then an
actual storm. At first, listening to the birdman naming every
species of avian that poked its beak out of the trees had amused
him, but over the last three hours it had grown monotonous, and he
currently enjoyed fantasies of casting the man over the side in
hopes he might have the opportunity to identify the various species
of crocodilians and carnivorous fish. Merritt shifted in his seat
to get some feeling back into his rear end. His knees bumped the
birdman's back, silencing his Latin recitation between genus and
species. He couldn't hide his grin.

What was he doing here anyway? He had
allowed himself to be bullied and bought, neither of which sat well
with him. While the old man hadn't come right out and said that he
would go directly to the Army with news of his whereabouts, the
threat had certainly been implied. There was more to it than that,
though. He had lied. The money would be a godsend and would buy him
several more years of anonymity, but that wasn't the true reason he
had agreed to come along either, if he were being completely honest
with himself.

He peered over the birdman's shoulder toward
the lead boat. His eyes immediately settled on Sam's back. She
turned to look at the forest and he studied her profile. What was
it about her? It wasn't as though she had shown any interest in
him. In fact, quite the opposite. She hadn't missed an opportunity
to be condescending, and her personality was really quite
maddening, but there was simply something about her...something more
than just her outward beauty that drew him inexorably to her. Of
course, he could justify his presence here in any number of ways,
but truth be told, he was here because he had sensed the aura of
danger surrounding them. He imagined rolling over the body he had
found by the river, only instead of Gearhardt's son's face, he saw
Sam's, her wide blue eyes reminiscent of another pair already
scarred into his soul, and quickly chased the image away. He
couldn't allow that to happen to her. That was the reason he now
sat in this boat, shivering and stinking like a wet dog, listening
to the litany of scientific names for random birds, staring at a
woman whose skin crawled at the thought of him.

And he couldn't have been more content.

Perhaps he would find his decision a poor
one, yet for the first time in years, he felt like himself again.
Even the sensation of the cool rain on his skin was
invigorating.

He shifted again and prodded his right knee
into the birdman's kidney. Just for fun.

Sam turned around and caught him looking. He
offered a guilty smile and averted his gaze. Even soaked to the
bone and wrapped in an unflattering poncho, she was positively
stunning.

He tilted his face to the sky and reveled in
the caress of the elements. The clouds had settled into the upper
canopy and clung to the leaves like smoke...
billowing from the
mouth of the dark tunnel. The red rock blackened in the aftermath
of the explosion. They enter the charnel cloud single file. The man
in front of him is swallowed by the smoke, and a moment later, so
is he. Detail resolves from the murk. Bodies. Everywhere. His
breathing grows rapid, echoing inside his mask, but it still isn't
enough to drown out the sounds of wailing and sobbing. Cooked skin,
split away from weeping burns. Flames burning from charcoaled
skin.

The pitiful screams of the dying.

Then the gunfire.

A crawling man, crying and shaking. The
barrel of an automatic rifle against his temple. An explosion of
blood and gray matter. The thump of the body against the stone
floor.

A woman. Lying on her back. Bleeding.
Burning. She opens her startlingly blue eyes and whimpers. Extends
a trembling hand through the smoke. Beseeching help, relief from
the pain, compassion. She finds only the smoldering steel eye of
darkness thrust into her face.

A gloved hand grabs the rifle and jerks it
aside. Before he can question whose hand has stayed the woman's
execution, he feels the heat in his palm, and sights down the
barrel of his Heckler & Koch HK416 at the surprised face of his
friend and brother behind the plastic shield of the rebreathing
mask.

The man's eyes widen behind the dim
reflection of flames.

"There!" the birdman said. He pointed up at
a high branch where an ugly bald bird perched. The sagging pink
skin on its head reminded Merritt of an old man's, the body too
large and fat with slick black feathers. It had a white ring around
its neck and a floppy fin of flesh between its eyes. A swarm of
flies buzzed around the mangled remains of what once might have
been a capybara on the shore below it. "
Vultur gryphus
. The
Andean condor."

The condor spread its wings as wide as a
grown man's embrace and dropped to the ground. Wings still fanned,
it half-walked, half-hopped toward the carcass. Its movements were
fascinating. It raised the first toe of each foot high, bearing its
weight on its outer digits, and held its neck and stiff tail
feathers parallel to the ground. When it reached the remains, it
flapped its wings to stir the flies and speared the meat with its
sharp beak. It was a hideous sight. The bird ducked in, ripped away
straps of dead flesh, and raised its head to choke them down its
gullet.

There was one thing for which to be
thankful, Merritt supposed. At least if something happened to them
in the jungle, they would be long gone before having to confront
such a horrible monster up close and personally.

8:38 p.m.

They raced the darkness. The setting sun had
cast long shadows from the steep peaks over the river hours ago,
but the ambient light that diffused through the canopy had provided
a wan twilight aura. Now, even that was fading, and the night had
begun to close in around them. With its descent, the forest had
come to life with screeching, cawing, and howling, as dark forms
knifed through the branches and darted between the trees. They had
even heard the husky growl of a jaguar and glimpsed a flash of its
golden fur from time to time as it mirrored their progress from the
bank before it eventually lost interest. The sky continued to
drizzle, yet the insects appeared unaffected, their numbers
swelling in anticipation of their evening meal. Leather-winged bats
shot out of the darkness, whistling between the passengers in the
boats and just over their heads before vanishing back into the
trees. The river had taken on a pale gray cast, and would soon be
as black as the night.

The motors had been throttled down to give
the guides extra time to maneuver around the obstacles in their
way, yet still the resounding thuds of the hulls bouncing from
unseen boulders echoed around them. Prudence suggested they should
make camp for the night and finish the remaining leg in the
morning, but they were so close now. Too close to simply give
up.

The overgrowth of trees no longer merely
towered over them. Instead, the forest rose above them, ascending
the steep mountains to either side in tangles of vegetation that
seemed to cling to the slopes by sheer will alone. Vertical basalt
cliffs, formed by distinct volcanic columns and smoothed by eons of
running water, crowded the river before finally relenting and
falling away as they passed through the first wave of the
Andes.

Leo felt the journey in a spiritual sense.
His son was all around him here, as though his soul were preserved
by the very jungle itself. He could feel the same excitement, the
same sense of anticipation Hunter must have experienced, the same
awe at the majesty of his surroundings and the secrets they kept.
He had been in dozens of locations similar to this one over the
course of a life spent in pursuit of both natural and manmade
treasure. This time was different, though. This time it was
intimately personal, not just because he was following in the
footsteps that had led his son to a premature grave, but because he
knew this would be his final expedition. In losing his son, he had
lost a part of himself as well. Where once his lust for adventure
had resided, there was now only rage. The life that had given him
so much through the years had in the end stolen back more than it
had ever offered, leaving the scales tipped in cruel life's favor.
He was here to restore the balance.

Sheer limestone embankments pressed in from
either side, narrowing the river by half and increasing the speed
of the current. The outboards wailed and the bow rose and fell
roughly on the choppy waves. For the first time, Santos had to hop
down from his perch. He used his pole to keep the boat from
slamming into the rock walls, which showed a watermark of
discoloration a full five feet above its current level. Roots and
lianas trailed down the smooth stone like so many serpents, their
shifting shadows imitating movement.

After several minutes, during which Leo
feared they might capsize, the cliffs fell aside and opened into a
deep valley reminiscent of a volcanic crater. Lush green mountains
rose on all sides and reached up into the clouds. Streams cascaded
down their faces, alternately hidden behind dense vegetation and
then revealed in series of waterfalls that stepped down from the
mist and thundered into the lake onto which they now motored. It
was as though they had passed into an Eden of sorts, a great bowl
of virgin rainforest surrounding a seasonal lake perhaps two
hundred yards wide, fed by streams from what appeared to be the
entire Andes range.

The sight was positively breathtaking.

They skirted ceiba trees that grew
miraculously from the middle of the lake on unseen crests of land
on their way to the southwestern shore, where a dense fog was
trapped in the thin passage separating two steep mountains. Groves
of ceibas interspersed with the dominant Brazil nut behemoths
encroached all the way to the edge of the water, and down the slope
to where only their leafy canopies remained above the surface.
Branches scraped against the underside of the hull as Santos again
stood and steered them toward dry land. A riot of birds exploded
from the trees with a near deafening cacophony of cries, black
bodies against the night sky, swirling overhead before alighting
deeper in the valley. A shimmer of scales traced a squiggle across
the water and vanished into the night. The cough of a jaguar echoed
in the distance.

Killing the motors, they slid silently to
the muddy shore. Santos hopped down into the shallows with a splash
and dragged the bow up onto solid ground. Leo rose and jumped out
onto the earth for the first time in hours. His legs wobbled and
the ground seemed to shift beneath his feet. He walked into the
trees as his body adjusted, and found a little privacy behind the
tented roots of a tree. With a prolonged sigh, he relieved the
pressure in his bladder and was just about to rejoin the others
when something on the trunk caught his eye. A series of marks
scarred the gray wood. Not marks, but letters, and they appeared to
have been recently carved. Leo traced the sap-crusted edges in the
darkness. There were three rows: two letters on the top, two
numbers in the middle, and two more letters on the bottom.

HG

10/7

SW

He flattened his palm over the carvings. A
tentative smile spread across his lips and tears welled against his
lashes.

Hunter Gearhardt had passed through here on
October 7
^th
on his way to the southwest.

Just under three weeks ago, his son had
stood in this very spot, preparing to head out into the great
unknown, wide-eyed and naïve. Had he sensed somewhere, deep down,
that he wouldn't be making the return trip?

Leo was inclined to think so, for with each
passing mile, the feelings of impending doom intensified and he
couldn't help but worry that he wouldn't be leaving this jungle
alive, either.

11:28 p.m.

The fire had dwindled to smoldering coals.
Colton had thrown a pile of waxy green leaves onto the embers to
create a thick cloud of smoke that would hold the bloodthirsty
insects at bay for a little while, if only long enough for the
others to fall asleep inside their tents beneath the lower canopy.
Rain still fell as a mist and dripped in swollen droplets from the
tips of the leaves, creating a sound like invisible creatures
scampering across the detritus. The others needed to rest while
they could. The journey ahead would be perilous and physically
demanding. Colton would have been more than happy to join them were
it not for the tingling sensation in his gut. He trusted it
implicitly in the way an arthritic trusts his aching joints to
predict an imminent storm, and right now it felt as though an
electrical current had formed a circuit in his bowels.

His men must have sensed it, too. They
prowled the darkness with feigned curiosity, but Colton knew they
were looking for something. The same thing he was. It was
gratifying to know that they felt it as well. However, the
validation was also unnerving.

They had grown a tail.

He had first noticed it earlier in the
morning. There were many variables within a man's control, even in
the rainforest, but he could never influence or predict nature's
response to his intrusion. There had been one bend in particular
where their boats had startled a flock of red-masked parakeets to
flight. The green and crimson birds had swirled overhead until all
three boats had passed before finally returning to their roosts.
Roughly two hours later, he had witnessed the same flock rise from
the canopy, mere dots through the wavering branches against the
pale gray sky in the distance. Later in the day he had seen that
same ugly black condor take to the skies far behind them. It had
circled the meal it had already claimed for some time before
dropping back down out of sight. And every now and then, like the
spectral mooning of the wind across a Scottish moor, he could have
sworn he heard the faint echo of an outboard motor.