Trunks as big around as telephone poles hurtled past, their rootballs exposed. Erosion was eating away at the soil that had been ripped from the ground when the trees tumbled into the river. At one point Juan had to slew the boat around the drowned body of a water buffalo, its horns coming close enough to brush the boat’s flank before the current carried the pitiable creature away.
Some objects were too low in the water for Cabrillo to see, so he maneuvered the boat by listening to MacD’s shouted warnings. They were forced to cut left and right as the river continued to throw flotsam at them. Juan had reduced power as much as he dared, but still trees and shrubs flew past at dizzying speeds, while the sky continued to rage overhead.
If anything, the storm was intensifying. Along the banks of the river, trees were bent nearly horizontal by the wind, and leaves the size of movie posters were stripped off and tossed through the air. One whipped across Cabrillo’s face and would have gouged out an eye if he hadn’t been wearing the goggles.
If there was a bright side to this, he thought fatalistically, the chances were nil that anyone else would be crazy enough to be on the river with them.
The last of the trees schussed down the river, and the water regained its black-tea color, and all at once the rain stopped. It was as if a tap had been turned off. One second, they were enduring the worst torrent any of them had ever experienced, and, the next, the water that had been pummeling them for so long was gone. Moments later the dark storm clouds cleared away from the sun, and it beat down on them with a mocking cheeriness. The humidity spiked. Steam rose from the forest, creating a fog that was at first eerie and spectral but quickly grew to an impenetrable haze.
“Is everyone all right?” Cabrillo asked. He received nods from three dripping heads. From the storage cabinet under the steering console he grabbed a hand pump and tossed it to Smith. “Sorry, but the mechanical pump was removed to lighten the boat.”
The craft wallowed under the hundreds of pounds of water that sloshed across the deck and filled its bilge. MacD continued to bail with his hat, and Linda made do with her hands, dumping palmful after palmful over the gunwales. The pump was by far the most efficient means of clearing the craft, but its stream seemed insignificant when compared to the volume of rain the boat had taken on.
Twenty laborious minutes later the craft still wasn’t empty, but they had come upon an obstacle that looked like it had doomed the trip before they had really gotten started.
A three-foot-high waterfall spanned the width of the river, its flow a glossy black over the rock. The banks here were high sloping hills of loose gravel and till.
“How far have we come?” Linda asked, her clothes not yet dry.
“We have at least another sixty miles to go,” Juan said without looking at her. He was studying the riverbank behind the RHIB.
“I guess we have to start hoofing it,” MacD said with the eagerness of a prisoner heading for the gallows.
“Not so fast. Linda, did you bring explosives?”
“About two pounds of plastique and some timer pencils. A girl has to be prepared.”
“Excellent. MacD, I want you to reconnoiter at least two miles upstream. Make sure there aren’t any villages within earshot. John, sorry, but you get to keep bailing. We need to get the draft as shallow as possible.”
“Oui,” the taciturn man said, and just kept pumping the handle back and forth, shooting a thin jet of water over the side with each stroke.
MacD grabbed up his REC7, shook water from the receiver, and leapt over the side of the boat. He waded to the right bank, climbed up, using his free hand for purchase on the shifting mound of gravel, and disappeared over the crest at a jog.
“You’re not thinking—” Linda began.
“Oh, but I am,” Cabrillo said.
He had her rummage through her gear for the explosives while he fashioned a shovel out of a carbon fiber oar. They jumped from the boat, Cabrillo with a line in his hand to tie off around a piece of beached driftwood. The bank was steepest about thirty yards behind the RHIB, so they slogged their way there, loose rock sliding and hissing wherever they stepped.
Cabrillo eyed the hill, which rose a good fifty feet above the river even as flooded as it was. He had one shot to get this right or they were looking at a days-long march through the jungle. They were already so far behind Soleil Croissard that her trail was ice cold, and getting colder by the minute.
Satisfied with his decision, he dropped to his knees and started digging. For every awkward shovelful of pebbles he pulled from the hole, half as much tumbled back in. It was frustrating work, and soon his breathing was labored because of the soggy and molten air. He finally reached a depth of about three feet, then moved down the hillside about eight feet and repeated the process, while Linda separated her explosives into five equal measures.
It took nearly thirty minutes to complete the holes. Cabrillo’s pores were like faucets, and he’d drunk nearly a quarter of the camelback water harness he’d had Linda fetch from the boat. He was just getting back to his feet when he sensed movement behind him. He whirled, drawing a pistol in the same motion so that when he completed his turn he had a bead on the man who emerged from the scrub.
He lowered the weapon the instant he recognized MacD Lawless. If anything, the native Louisianan was breathing even heavier than the Chairman.
Juan looked at his watch as Lawless stepped gingerly down the bank.
“Two miles?” he queried.
“I can keep a seven-minute-mile pace for five miles,” Lawless said, blowing like a stallion after the Kentucky Derby. “That slows to ten minutes with a full pack.”
Juan was impressed with both Lawless’s stamina and the fact that he knew his body’s capabilities and limitations. Information like that could one day save an operator’s life.
“Anything up ahead?”
“Just jungle. The good news is, it looks like the worst of the rapids are behind us.” He sucked at the water tube from Cabrillo’s camelback and used a dingy tan bandanna to wipe his face. “Man, it’s thicker out there than the swamps of Lafourche Parish.”
“Get back aboard. We’ll be ready in a minute.”
The Corporation used digital devices rather than chemical timers to set off the explosives. These had an accuracy unmatched by their older brethren and would allow Cabrillo split-second timing. He set the timers and quickly laid the explosive in each hole, frantically shoveling dirt back in to cover the plastique.
He was back aboard the idling RHIB, painter line in hand, with about two minutes to spare. He edged the boat closer to the waterfall to put as much distance as possible between them and the blast. Everyone lay flat on the deck, not even peering over the gunwale because of the debris that would be blown from the beach.
The blasts went off in a sequence that was so tightly controlled, it sounded like one long, continuous explosion. Rock and debris erupted from the earth in fountains of flaming gas that echoed across the river and sent hundreds of birds into startled flight. Seconds later, pebbles peppered the RHIB, bouncing off the inflatable fenders or pinging against the plastic deck. One fist-sized rock gave Smith a charley horse when it hit his thigh. He grunted once but said nothing more.
Before the dust had fully settled, Juan was on his feet, looking aft. The underpinnings of the riverbank had been excavated by the explosion, and, as he watched, the entire mass—nearly forty feet of it—slid ponderously into the river, bulling aside the water, before the leading edge smashed into the far shore with enough force to block the waterway entirely.
“Voilà,” Cabrillo said, obviously pleased with himself. “Instant cofferdam.”
With its outlet cut off by the landslide, the water trapped between it and the falls began to rise. It was now a race to see if the river would erode the temporary dam before the level got high enough to force the boat up and over the falls.
“I’ve got another idea. Linda, take the helm. John, MacD, with me.”
; Cabrillo grabbed up the boat’s painter once again and used hand signals to get Linda to tuck the boat directly below the waterfall. It was barely higher than the RHIB’s bow. The three men leapt atop the falls and found footing on a rock poking up from the water like a tiny island.
The area between the falls and the dam continued to fill. But, at the same time, the downstream current was eating at the cofferdam, exploiting any crack or flaw to tear it away. The RHIB’s bow rose higher still until the front of the keel rested on the rock face of the falls. The men coiled the nylon line around their wrists in the most important game of tug-of-war they’d ever fought. Linda kept the engine revs up, forcing the craft higher and higher. Behind them, a trickle of water worked its way through the cofferdam, rejoining the river’s normal flow. The breach was tiny, no more than a few seeping drops, but would expand exponentially.
To make matters worse, the lowest section of the dam, near the bank opposite of where Cabrillo had set off the explosions, was close to being overtopped by the rising water.
“We’re going to have one shot at this,” Juan said, bunching the muscles in his arms and shoulders as they prepared to pull the boat over the falls. “Linda, watch behind you and tell us when.”
Linda peered at the cofferdam and the riverbanks to make sure the water was still filling their man-made lagoon faster than the earthen dam was letting water pour through. She judged it finely. The water level reached its crest, with the falls being no more than a six-inch riffle, when the dam let go in a gush of mud and debris.
“Now!” she shouted, and firewalled the outboard.
The three men heaved back on the line, their bodies as taut as marble statues, the effort playing across each of their faces. The ten minutes it took to fill the basin was washed away in seconds. As the level dropped, more and more weight pressed the RHIB’s keel into the rock and made the load on the men that much heavier.
The river sluiced out from under the outboard’s prop so that it screamed as the blades met air. And still the men pulled, gaining fractions of inches with every strained heave.
Linda idled the engine and jumped out of the RHIB so that she was standing on the very lip of the falls, inky water rushing past her shins. But that last one hundred and eleven pounds of extra weight was all the men needed removed to do the trick. The boat slid over the rocky bottom and then hit deeper water and began to float. The current turned it sideways against the escarpment and gave it a bad list, but it was now too low in the water to be forced back over the falls.
MacD and John Smith both fell back into the river when the boat lurched forward. They came up sputtering, and laughing that they’d done it. Cabrillo had somehow kept his balance, and when Linda cut the boat across the current and brought it up to his little rock island, he stepped over the gunwale as casually as a commuter gets aboard a train.
In turn, Lawless and Smith hauled themselves out of the river and lay panting on the deck, big grins plastered on their faces.
“That wasn’t so bad,” Juan remarked as he took his place behind the console.
“Like hell,” MacD said when he noticed he had leeches stuck to his arms. “Oh God, there’s nothin’ Ah hate more than leeches.” He fished in his pocket for a disposable lighter.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Linda warned as Lawless worked the little flint wheel to dry it out.
“That’s how my daddy taught me.”
“Oh, the leech will drop off, but it will also regurgitate everything it ate. Which, a, is disgusting, and, b, might carry disease. Use your fingernail and scrape its mouth off of you.”
Following her advice, and making faces that a little girl might make, MacD got four of the bloodsuckers off his arms, and one off the back of his neck with Linda’s help. Smith hadn’t been attacked by the loathsome parasites.
“You must have sour blood, John,” Lawless teased, putting his shirt back on. With a tightened belt and drawstrings closed around his ankles, he wasn’t worried about anything getting into his pants.
Smith didn’t reply. He took up his station at the bows and prepared to act as lookout once again. MacD exchanged a look and a shrug with Linda and Cabrillo, and went to join Smith at the bow.
Because of the waterfall covering their rear, there was no need for Linda to keep watch for anyone overtaking them. And with riverine transportation the only way to negotiate the jungle, Cabrillo drove with the confidence that there wouldn’t be any villages up ahead either. The people wouldn’t have been able to get back upstream once they floated past the falls, and he had seen no indication of portage paths on either side of the cataract.
He kept up a good twenty-five-mile-an-hour pace and slowed only at the truly blind corners as the river meandered deeper into the jungle. Their speed finally dried everyone’s clothes.
As the sun arced its way across the sky, the river remained as tranquil and easy to negotiate as a meandering canal. The rain forest was the other constant. It lined the waterway as dense as a garden hedgerow. Only occasionally would there be a gap, usually when a small stream fed into the main channel, or where the banks were especially gentle and animals coming down to drink had worn away game trails. One of the trails was particularly large. Juan suspected it might have been cleared by some of the country’s estimated ten thousand wild elephants.
Lurking in that impenetrable wall of broad-leaved plants were Asian rhinos, tigers, leopards, and all manner of snakes including the biggest pythons in the world and the most deadly species of cobra, the king cobra. All in all, he thought, not exactly a good place to be lost.
It was nearing early evening when Juan cut the power so that the boat was barely making headway against the gentle current. The dramatic reduction in engine noise left their ears ringing for a moment.
“We’re about ten miles from Soleil’s last-known GPS coordinates. We’ll stay with the motor for maybe another five and then we break out the oars. Everyone, keep sharp. We have no idea what we’re going to find, but Soleil was convinced there was someone else in the jungle with her.”
Cabrillo’s eyes never lingered on any one spot for more than a moment. He scanned the forest ahead and off to the sides, knowing that someone could be watching them with total impunity. If there were rebels, or drug dealers, or an army patrol out here, they wouldn’t know until they had walked into the ambush. He had to resist the urge to glance over his shoulder. He knew Linda was watching their back, but he couldn’t shake the sense that someone was watching him.
A bird screech high in a nearby tree squirted a healthy dose of adrenaline into his bloodstream. Linda gave a little gasp, and he saw MacD jump. Only Smith hadn’t been startled. Juan was beginning to suspect the man had ice water running through his veins.
When they’d covered the allotted five miles, Juan cut the engine and lifted the outboard from the water so it wouldn’t act as drag. With two rowers on each side of the RHIB, they started paddling. Smith had pumped most of the water out of the bilge, but it was still a big boat, and, no matter how mild the current, it was tough going.
In times like these they usually deployed a small electric motor that could power them along silently, but like so much other equipment it had been left back on the Oregon in order to save on weight.
People who have never rowed a boat together before usually go through several awkward minutes as they adjust to one another’s timing. Not so here. Despite the fact that Smith and MacD were virtual strangers, all four set a tempo instinctively and worked the carbon fiber oars with the symmetry of the Harvard crew.
Every few minutes Juan would check his handheld GPS, and when he spotted a rare clearing ahead on the right bank, he knew they had reached the end of their time on the river. It was a natural trail into the jungle, and he suspected this was where Soleil and her companion—Cabrillo couldn’t recall his name—had exited the water.
He steered them toward the small open glade, noting that a thin trickle of water was running through it. Beyond towered a riotous wall of
vegetation. Soleil had last been heard from three miles from this spot.
They edged the boat into some reeds lining the tributary, pushing it as far into cover as possible. No sooner had they stopped than Smith had his machine pistol up high on his shoulder, scanning the area through its scope. There was nothing but the background din of insects and birds and the sound of the water burbling past the RHIB’s transom.
It took just a few minutes to gather up their gear. All of them wore camelbacks for water and lightweight nylon rucks, weighing from twenty-five pounds for Linda to nearly forty for Cabrillo and the other two men.
With luck, they wouldn’t need anything other than the water.
Cabrillo looked back at the RHIB to make sure it was well concealed. He walked a few paces from the others to check from a different angle and that’s when he saw the face. It was watching him through hooded, unblinking eyes. It took him a breathless moment for his brain to comprehend what he was seeing. It was the head of a statue of Buddha that had toppled to the jungle floor just up from the river. Behind it, cloaked in creepers and vines, was a stone building much like the step pyramids at Angkor Wat in neighboring Cambodia, though nowhere near that massive scale.
The structure was maybe thirty feet tall, with the Buddha head once resting on the roof of the tallest tier. It all looked ageless, as if the complex had been here since time immemorial and the jungle grew up around it.
“I think we’re at the right place,” he muttered.
“No kidding,” Linda said. “Look.”
Juan tore his eyes away from the pyramid and glanced over to see that Linda had pulled aside a leafy branch to reveal two one-person plastic kayaks. The sleek craft were commercially available at outfitters all over the world. The pair were dark green in color, and were a logical choice for getting upstream because they could be carried around obstacles by the paddler.