Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead (18 page)

A woman pretty much narrowed it down.

His mouth felt suddenly dry. Marie. Dancing naked in the dark?

He was dreaming, must be . . .

When he awoke, Indy’s back hurt from sleeping on his belly. Resting on the hard ground, something that hadn’t bothered him when he’d been young, was a lot less comfortable these days. Might have to start carrying a pad or something . . .

He remembered a dig, years ago, when he had been doing some work for the Smith. It had been in North Africa, Arabia, maybe. He recalled the archaeologist in charge, a professor from one of the Ivy League schools—Harvard? Yale? He’d been an old fossil, as Indy remembered him, but he realized that the man he’d thought ancient had probably been no older than he was now.

Normally, on an excavation that would be worked for months, the tents were high-walled, and people slept on canvas cots, which were considerably more comfortable than the ground. But because this site had been halfway up a rocky hill with almost no flat spots on it to set up camp, smaller tents had been the main shelters. Not much room for a cot, which would have had to be packed in, so Indy, like most of the students and other workers, had slept on the ground. But the professor . . . what had his name been? Dr. Lucas? Something like that. Twenty-five years, he could be forgiven for not remembering the man’s name. Anyway, he’d had the damnedest thing with him. The ground cloth normally used under a bedroll or sleeping bag had in his case been some kind of rubberized pad with what looked like fat tubes or hoses in it. There was a tire valve on one end, and the professor had one of the laborers hook up a tire pump to it. After fifteen minutes or so, there was a enough air in the thing that it looked like a small raft.

Indy and the other students had laughed at the old man for that. An . . . air mattress? Whoever heard of such a thing? How sissified was that?

Didn’t sound so bad now . . .

When he crawled out of his tent, dawn had just arrived. Others in the camp were already up, including Marie. She saw Indy and nodded at the small campfire. “Hot coffee this morning,” she said.

He nodded. He thought about saying something.
Say, was that you I thought I saw dancing naked out here in the wee hours of the morning?

No, he decided.

But for the coffee, small favors were gratefully appreciated. Indy fetched a cup and poured himself some of the brew. It smelled better than it tasted, but it was hot and strong and he wasn’t complaining. It wasn’t that bad, and even bad coffee was better than no coffee . . .

As he sipped, Mac crawled out of his tent, stood, shook himself like a wet dog trying to get rid of water in his coat. “I thought I smelled coffee. Any plain hot water, by chance?”

Marie smiled. “As it happens, the blue kettle.”

Mac grinned. After he had doused the tea leaves he produced from somewhere with hot water, he said, “I don’t suppose we have cream and sugar?”

Indy shook his head. “Still no kippers, either. Might be able to find a rat to roast if you look hard enough.”

“Ah, yes, next to fresh eggs and sausage, stale tea and roast rat is my favorite breakfast.”

“No rats,” Marie said. “This ground is warded. No animals from the forest will come here.”

Mac sipped at his tea. “And you know this how?”

She shrugged. “I can feel it the same way you can feel the sun on your face. This clearing is aswirl with power. It is old, but still potent. It lies over the ground like a shroud—it hides that which we seek, and it repels at the same time. It must be why Boukman has not found it before.”

“Yeah, I wondered about that,” Indy said. “If he’s been around for so long, surely he must have heard the stories. Wouldn’t he have been curious before now?”

Marie shrugged again. “I cannot say what moves Boukman. He might have discounted the tales because his magic did not reveal anything—he would trust that more than tall stories told around the cooking fires. It might be that the gods or the loa were not ready for him to find it. I cannot say.”

“Well,” Mac said, “we’re here and he doesn’t seem to be at the moment. Best we get searching for our little item. I don’t suppose your—ah—magic can help us?”

“I think not. Whoever laid this spell upon the land was skilled far beyond anything I can do. I can sense it, but I cannot break it.”

“So, we do it the old-fashioned way,” Indy said. “We look for clues, we set a zero point, we lay out a grid.”

“That might take some time,” Marie said. “It’s a pretty large area.”

Indy grinned. “Maybe not. This is what I do. I have a few tricks.”

“I am sure that you have,” she said, matching his smile.

Of a moment, Indy knew there was no need for him to speak about what he had thought he’d dreamed in the night. It had been real. It had been her.

And she had known he was watching . . .

NINETEEN

“S
CHNAPPS
?” G
RUBER OFFERED
.

“A bit early, but—I wouldn’t say no,” Schäefer said.

It was half past six in the morning. The two men sat in the doctor’s tent, a walled and floored affair tall enough to stand upright without hitting your head on the roof, if you did so in the middle. It had canvas walls that could be rolled down to reveal mosquito nets that would allow a breeze to flow through, but not insects. Inevitably, some bugs did manage to slip inside, and there hadn’t been any breeze to speak of, save that accompanied by heavy rain. Here, it remained damp, hot, and uncomfortable for any except some native born to it, Gruber reckoned. The chairs were simple folding things, of wood and cotton, and the table of like construction. Serviceable gear, under the circumstances.

In the distance, thunder rumbled softly. Some other part of this miserable and hellish island was being drenched by a storm grown angry in the unabated heat of the night, and now spewing its fury in the morning’s humid light.

Gruber produced a pair of silver cups from his kit and into these poured some of the schnapps. He had brought three bottles, carefully packed to avoid breakage. The locals in Port-au-Prince had assured him it was the best available, but that meant little in this part of the world. This liquor was cheap, likely made from apples or pears, possibly even plums, but certainly not cherries. The best of those brews, sometimes called
Kirschwasser,
had a refined, complex, delicious taste, and were quite expensive.

Someday, he would drink from such bottles. After the war.

In the New World, they drank
peppermint
schnapps, a thing that was so vile the very thought of it made Gruber want to shudder.

“Sieg Prachtvoller,”
Schäefer said. He raised his cup in salute.

“Yes, glorious victory,” Gruber echoed, lifting his own cup.

Both men downed the liquor in one long swallow. Not great, but at least it wasn’t
rum.

Gruber poured two more.

“So, do you think it was the Japanese who collected our man?”

“No, sir. Perhaps they killed him and hid the body, but there is no sign of him with their party, and where else would they keep him? Our scouts say that the Japanese party seems to be short a soldier—they are not sure, the Nipponese could be out in the jungle following the
Engländer
and
Amerikanisch.”

“Perhaps he and our man met and and ran off hand in hand to live in the forest together.”

Schäefer laughed, a full-throated bray. The idea was beyond silly.

The loss of a man meant nothing against their mission. Nor would the loss of them all.

“And you believe that our quarry has reached their destination?”

“Jawohl.
Half a kilometer past where they are camped is the sea, according to our outwalkers. It is possible they could turn west and continue that way, but that would make little sense, given the route so far. They have made no moves to pack up their camp this morning.”

“And have our watchers seen anything else useful?”

“Nein.”
He sipped at his schnapps. “No ruined temples or anything like that. Of course, it was growing dark when they arrived, and the conditions were not the best for spying. We’ll learn more today.”

Gruber nodded. “Yes. We shall see what is what soon enough. To victory.” He raised his cup.

“To victory!”

Both men upended their cups again.

Yamada, practicing with his wooden sword, saw the scout return to camp. He turned his attention back to his form. One could not allow distractions in one’s practice.

A few moments later, Suzuki approached.

Suzuki stood quietly until Yamada had finished his martial dance. Greetings were offered and returned. Suzuki commented on the excellence of Yamada’s sword work.

Finally, he got to the main business at hand. “Our quarry has arrived at its destination, Yamada-san.”

“Good.”

“Our men will watch them and see what transpires.”

“Also good.”

Suzuki paused, seeming to reflect. “We should perhaps consider what we need to do about . . . the Germans.”

“Our stalwart, round-eyed, pale-skinned, bosom friends?”

Both men grinned at that.

Suzuki said, “Either the Englishman and American will find that which we seek or they won’t. If they do, we will relieve them of it. I believe that the Germans might not be content to allow us to retain possession of the item.”

Yamada nodded. The enemy in your camp, if you had marked him, could be much less of a threat than one outside. At his first wrong move, you could lop off the head of a man in reach.

The Germans were nominally on the same side as the empire, but Yamada trusted them less than the distance he could walk on water. It was not just that they were treacherous, it was that the treaties that kept them joined in this war were worthless. Everybody on both sides knew this. As soon as the Allies were defeated, the Germans would turn on the empire. There was no room in their hearts for little yellow men; their entire philosophy was racist.

Not that Yamada believed for an instant that his own people were kinder to the notion of foreigners.
Gaijin
—outlanders—were tolerated for many reasons, but no Japanese worth his own sweat believed that
any
of them were
equals.
The notion was absurd. Japan’s living god resided in a palace, here on earth—Yamada had seen him more than once. Germany’s god lived in the sky, invisible, and not all of the Deutsch even believed there
was
a god. They were savages, the Germans. When the Japanese had been creating bonsai and the art of arranging flowers, the Germans had still been painting themselves green and running naked through the countryside like animals.

If a man was your enemy, it was not wrong to stab him in the back if you could—a samurai expected such things. Once it was known where you stood, not only were surprise attacks acceptable, they were smart. A man slain in his bed was less dangerous than one awake with his sword in hand. Honor was sometimes complex, but if a man who knew you were his enemy was not prepared to deal with you, day or night, front or back? That was
his
failure.

Sooner or later, the empire and the Reich would find themselves at odds. There could be only one world power, and the empire had no intention of ceding the title to pale-skinned barbarians whose culture, such as it was, was crude and wrongheaded. It was not Yamada’s decision to make as to when and where that eventual split would take place, but he knew it would happen, as certain as the sun rose each day.

Here and now, however, he did have a choice. His mission was of the utmost importance. His honor lay in fulfilling his task. Nothing less would do. And nothing and no one could be permitted to stand in the way of his task.

“Once the archaeologists find what we came for, we will take care of the Germans before they can become a problem,” Yamada said.

Suzuki gave him a slow military bow, and a slight smile to go with it. They were of like mind on the subject. The Germans would have to be neutralized in such a way that they could offer no threat to his mission. Killed to a man would do the trick nicely.

Suzuki bowed and left, and Yamada went into his tent. He had a duty to which he needed to attend.

As was his custom when traveling, Yamada now and then took time to write a letter to his wife and children. Often there was no way to send such missives, as was the case now, but eventually, he would find a way to post them, and eventually, such mail would wend its way home. It might take weeks or months, and more than once he had actually arrived home before a letter he had written and sent weeks earlier did, which was amusing, but the nature of the mail during war.

His calligraphy in this case was much less formal, though he did strive to keep his pen’s strokes clean and sharp.

There were constraints—he could not offer any information that if the letter was somehow intercepted by enemies, would give them aid. Thus there were few specifics, save those that would mean nothing to a nonfamily reader, and many generalities that could be taken to mean a hundred things, none of them militarily useful:

My Dear Fujiko—

As I write this, I am in a forest so thick that the sun’s light has difficulty finding me even at noon. The climate here is unlike that of home, and I miss the breezy summer evenings we would be enjoying were I there.

I am fine, in good health, and I hope that you, our daughter Isoko, and our son Jiro are well and happy.

None of the names he used in his letters were the actual names of his family, nor would he use his own for the signature. His wife’s real name was Fukiyo, not Fujiko, and they had played this game for so long that it had become a family joke. Sometimes after dinner, when the sake was warm and flowing and the children abed, she would tease him: “Ah, Hajime, and how is your mistress Fujiko these days . . . ?”

They would laugh at that together.

Eventually, this war would be over, and it was Yamada’s intention to return to his family and cease roaming the world. The constant sound of hammering from the shipyards, dawn to dusk and back again, from all the vessels being frantically built there, that would ease somewhat. Perhaps even be limited to the daytime, so the nights would once again be peaceful. Their house was half an hour’s winding walk from the main construction, but the sound did carry after the sun went down.