Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead (19 page)

The war would end and there would be no more worries about the possibility of Allied planes dropping bombs on the city. They had been lucky in that respect. Even though his home was in a major seaport, and the industrial sites there produced much ordnance and many ships, thus far such attacks had been few. That far south on the China Sea in Kyushu, far from Tokyo, had largely been spared. With luck, it would continue to be safe.

I cannot say for certain when I shall return, but I hope it is in time to see the flowers in our garden still in bloom.

Those would be the hydrangeas, which ran to pinks and whites in their garden. The Chinese tallow trees would have already lost their flowers, and the acrid, waxy seeds would be turning dark and almost ready to be made into oil, which was great for cooking fish and tempura. Perhaps the cherry trees would bear more fruit this year, as well. If he were home by fall, he would know.

Our mission is proceeding well, and I anticipate success. I hope that this letter finds you and our children and your parents well. I look forward to our meeting with much pleasure. Your loving husband . . .

Yamada signed the letter “Hanshiro,” the false name he had selected for himself. Another source of humor—when his wife would tease him about his “mistress,” he would draw himself up to an indignant pose and say, “Oh,
my
mistress? What of
your
lover, Hanshiro, eh? A young and strong man, is he?”

He set the letter aside for the ink to dry. When that was done, he would fold it carefully and address it—no specifics connected to him there, either, of course. There was a military address in Tokyo to which all such letters went, and a record there showing where they were to be forwarded. Eventually, his posts would make their way south, away from the clutter of Tokyo to his more peaceful and beautiful city made from wood and silk at the southern end of the beautiful land of Japan.

To his wonderful home in Nagasaki . . .

TWENTY

W
HEN THE ANGLE
of the morning light was as good as it was apt to get, Indy stretched out on the mossy ground, his left cheek touching it. He closed his right eye and scanned the ground using his left eye, looking . . .

“What is he doing?” Batiste asked.

Mac said, “Searching for innies or outies—dips or bumps. At ground level, with the light at an angle, the smallest distortion in the surface will be visible. Something buried for a century might have caused the dirt to settle. Or perhaps a hundred years might not be enough for a slight mound to flatten out. People always leave traces unless they are trying very hard to avoid it.”

Indy got up, moved a few feet to the north, and lay back down again. With his eye only an inch or so above the moss carpet, he shifted his gaze slowly back and forth as if reaching out and sweeping crumbs from a tabletop.

He moved for a third observation. Nothing . . . nothing—wait, there—

“Mac, move west, twenty paces, then north about three.”

Mac stepped off the distance.

“A little more . . . right there, mark it.”

Mac pulled out a small pocketknife, opened it, and bent to stick it into the soft ground. He was perhaps ten yards away from the northern edge of the clearing.

Indy stood, brushed himself off. He looked at Marie.

“A slight declivity,” he said. “Now we dig.”

Batiste nodded at a couple of his men.

“No,” Indy said, “Mac and I will have to do it.”

Batiste looked at him.

Indy said, “Tell them, Mac.”

Mac explained. “There is a certain amount of . . . finesse required. One cannot simply thrust a shovel into the ground and risk damaging a priceless artifact. It’s more like . . . peeling an onion than digging a latrine.”

Batiste shrugged. No skin off his nose.

Using the folding shovels, Indy and Mac outlined a square patch about five feet on a side. Carefully, they scraped the moss from the area, revealing the bare and damp ground beneath it. Both of them stood back and observed the result carefully.

“Now what?” Marie asked.

“We are looking for differences in color, texture, any bits that seem as if they don’t belong.”

“And what do you see?”

Indy shrugged. “Plain old jungle dirt. Humus. All the same.”

Indy and Mac bent to their task again, using the shovels as scrapers rather than diggers. After half an hour, they had another layer of soil exposed, a couple of inches deeper.

The color was somewhat lighter. Indy, in professorial mode, didn’t wait for the question, but delivered the lecture:

“Soil is formed by many things,” he said. “It’s a combination of climate, whatever animals or plants or bacteria are around, the slope of the land, what the underlying parent material might be—clay, rock, sand, and so forth. And time, of course. It can take a few thousand years to build up. The Russians have done a lot of work on the subject—Dokuchaev’s text is the old standard. Jenny’s most recent book,
Factors of Soil Formation,
takes it to another level. Milne uses the term
topo-sequence.”

Marie nodded.

Batiste looked at him as if he were speaking gibberish.

Mac said, “Dirt is made from the rock or clay and whatever lands on it and rots.”

Batiste laughed. “Lot of big words to say what everybody knows.”

Indy grinned. “That, my friend, is science in a nutshell.”

Mac said, “We’ve removed about a hundred years’ of topsoil, give or take. We will keep doing it this way until we find something or become convinced there is nothing there to find.”

“That could take a while,” Batiste allowed.

“Yeah. But that’s how it’s done.”

The man shrugged.

After two hours of patient scraping, they were down a foot and a half.

“I think we’ve come a cropper,” Mac said.

Indy nodded.

Marie didn’t understand. “But surely they would have buried it deeper,” she said.

“Yeah, but when you dig a hole and then fill it back up with the same dirt, there are usually signs of mixing in the earth. It’s hard to put it back exactly the same way—some of the newer material gets put lower, some of the older winds up closer to the surface. If there were layers of dirt that were completely different colors—red, blue, green—and you dug, piled up the loose soil, and then tried to shovel it back into a hole, it would be almost impossible to do it so that somebody who knew how to look couldn’t tell.”

“Ah.”

“If we don’t spot any signs, chances are nobody has dug here,” Mac said. “And we haven’t seen any indications that they have.”

“So now what?”

“We look for another likely spot and try again.”

It was well past noon when Mac and Indy gave up on the second dig, having excavated another five-foot square to a depth of almost two feet.

Both men were sweating, and certainly Indy was tired.

“Perhaps some of Batiste’s men could dig,” Marie said. “Now that they have seen how you do it. You could oversee their efforts.”

Normally, Indy would be less than enthusiastic about such an offer of untrained diggers, but at the moment it sounded like a pretty good idea.

Batiste snorted.

Indy looked at him. “What?”

“It would still take forever that way,” he said. “We could be digging here for months.”

“You have a better idea?” Mac asked.

Batiste gave them one of his frequent shrugs. “Who were the people who buried this thing?”

“I don’t know their bloody names,” Mac said. “And it doesn’t matter.”

“Wait. Wait. He has a point,” Indy said. He wanted to whack the heel of his hand against his forehead. How stupid was he? He should have known!

“And his point is, pray tell . . . ?”

“They wouldn’t have just picked a spot at random and dug,” Indy said. “These were people being driven to hide something of great value to them. Something dangerous. They probably expected they’d return for it—or that somebody else would.”

“And . . . ?”

“They’d have to know exactly where to dig, or give directions to somebody who’d never been here. There’d have to be a map, or it would have to be something oral that would be easy to remember.”

“Ah,” Mac said. “Yes, I see. Some kind of marker.”

“Assume that this clearing was here then,” Indy said. “How would you do that? Mark it?”

“So many paces from a certain tree, in a certain direction,” Marie offered.

Indy shook his head. “Too risky. The storms that blow through here could take down any of these trees. It would have to be a more permanent landmark.”

Mac looked around. “I don’t see anything. No rocks, no rises, nothing but flat ground. Pointer shadows or beams, you’d have the same problem.”

Batiste said, “Shadows? Beams?”

Indy said, “Certain time of day, certain time of year, a shadow cast by a tree or rock spire, or a beam of light shining through a hole drilled in a wall, like that. It’s very common in ancient religions to use such things, because the sun and moon are constants. Meatball astronomy.”

Mac glanced up. “The night sky would be visible here. A certain star, perhaps?”

Indy said, “Maybe if they had a sextant and a compass or somesuch. But that would make the time to find the right spot critical. Maybe even a certain day—solstice, perhaps.”

Batiste laughed.

“Something funny?” Indy said.

“Oui.
You make things too complicated,
mon ami.
The men who came here through the forest, who found this spot? They would not be scientists, to calculate such things. They would not be bearing instruments to observe the sun or moon or the stars.”

Indy considered that. Probably true. But they would have known enough about the land to know that a tropical storm could take out what landmarks were available. If the tree you used was gone, then what?

“All right,” Indy said. “If you had come here to bury a treasure, what would you have done to mark it? So that ten or fifty or a hundred years later, you or your grandson could come here and dig it up, without digging holes for days?”

“Nobody would know this was the clearing where I chose to hide it,” Batiste said, “so there would be no reason for them to come here and know it was here.”

“Yeah. So . . . ?”

“So it is simple. I would remember where it was, and if I had to tell my son or grandson, it would be easy:

“Go stand in the middle. Dig there.”

Indy and Mac looked at each other.

“Stone the bloody bleeding crows,” Mac said. “Of course!”

Indy nodded. Sometimes being the most educated guy in the room wasn’t an advantage. You tended to overthink things . . .

TWENTY-ONE

E
NSCONCED IN
the form of his
zombi
, Boukman watched through dim and fuzzy eyes. They dug holes in the ground. One there. A second one. Then they started a third one. Ah. They did not know exactly where it was. Interesting.

Gruber looked at the scout. “You came back to report that they are digging holes?”

“Yessir.”

“Amazing. And have they found anything?”

“No,
mein
Colonel.”

“Then return and keep watch. I don’t care how many pits they excavate, only if they come up with something from one of them.”

Yamada finished another scroll, this one with the
kanji
for “success” inked upon the paper. Suzuki waited outside the tent.

“They have begun digging. They are on the third hole.”

Yamada nodded. “It might take them a while. It does not seem as if they know the location of the object.”

“Hai.”

“Continue our surveillance.”

“Hai.”

Two feet down, and when Indy and Mac stepped back to look, they could both see it.

“Different stratum, just there.”

Indy nodded. “Yes.”

Marie, who had been talking to Batiste, walked over. “Something?”

“That mixing of the dirt we talked about,” Indy said. He felt a surge of excitement.

He and Mac returned to their digging.

It was almost four thirty in the afternoon and four feet deep when Indy felt the edge of his shovel scrape something. “Gotcha,” he said quietly.

Mac, sitting on the edge of the hole, drinking from a canteen and taking a break, said, “What?”

Indy grinned up at him.

It took another hour to reveal the outline of the crypt and to dig deep enough to see the way into it, a stone box whose top was about the size of a steamer trunk stood on end. The top had been fitted to the box and the edges sealed with some kind of resin. Indy worked the point of the small folding shovel into the sealant, which cracked and allowed him to get the blade between the top and the rest of the box. Mac put his shovel into the opposite side. The two of them worked their way around the perimeter, carefully chipping the resin away.

“I think that’s got it,” Mac said.

Indy nodded. He put the shovel down, pulled his machete out, and, again moving with great care, sawed the edge of the big knife between the top and bottom all the way across, as if slicing bread.