Empire of Gold_A Novel

by Andy McDermott

  “On the ground, and that’s good enough for me. Are you hurt?”

  “Only bruised, I think. But my neck is very painful.”

  “Whiplash, but I doubt you’ll get the chance to sue anyone for it. Okay, you and Macy get Ralf out of the plane. I’ll get Oscar.”

  They released the injured men from their seats and hauled them through the main hatch. The reason for the plane’s relatively soft landing became clear: They were in a marsh, boots sinking inches deep into the soft muck. Eddie looked at the plane, seeing smoke curling from the tail, then searched for more solid ground. There was a broad hump of earth not far away. “Lie them down on that,” he said. “Then I’ll—”

  A deep rumble shook the rain forest. The Mirage. It was still out there.

  Hunting for them.

  Osterhagen searched the patches of sky visible through the canopy. “Where is it?”

  Eddie turned, listening. The jet growl was loudest back along the channel gouged out of the jungle by the careering plane.

  And still getting louder …

  He glimpsed movement above the trees to the southeast. The Mirage was circling. But not overhead. He realized why: The exploded port wing had sent up a column of thick black smoke.

  And from a fire that large, the pilot might assume that the entire plane had blown up.

  The Mirage came around for another low, slow pass. Even something the size of the Cessna slashing through the all-encompassing canopy would only have left a small scratch; the pilot wouldn’t be able to spot more than a few scraps of wreckage through the trees.

  Or so Eddie hoped. He waited, the engine roar growing louder. Another brief flash of something large and deadly above …

  And gone. The thunder faded as the Mirage accelerated away, heading northwest. Back to the airbase.

  “Think they’ll come back?” Macy hesitantly asked.

  “Not in a jet,” said Eddie. He carefully lowered Valero. Macy and Osterhagen put Becker beside him. “They might send a chopper or a foot patrol, but I reckon that pilot thinks we’re dead. The wing made a pretty big bang. And speaking of which, better grab what I can before the rest of the plane catches fire.” He hurried back into the wreck, reemerging with a handful of charts, Becker’s hat, a flashlight, and a plastic bottle of water. “Couldn’t find the first-aid kit—it must have been sucked out of the hatch.”

  “So what can we do to help Ralf?” Osterhagen asked. “And Oscar?”

  “I still think Ralf’ll be fine if we get him to a hospital,” said Eddie. “Oscar, though …” Even a cursory glance told him that things did not look good for the Venezuelan. The deep head wound needed sterilizing, stitches, and bandages—none of which he could provide.

  He lifted Valero’s hand to get a better look at his broken fingers—and the man jerked awake with a scream. Macy jumped back, startled. Valero cried out in Spanish, writhing. Eddie tried to hold him down. “Oscar! Oscar, stay still. You’re hurt. Don’t try to move.”

  He tried to wash a little water over the gash above Valero’s ear, but he flinched away. “Eddie, you’ve got to get to—to Caracas. Tell militia about …” His face twisted in pain. “Callas. Tell them about Callas.”

  “We can’t leave you behind,” Eddie insisted. “We’re not far from Puerto Ayacucho. We can get you to a hospital.”

  Valero shook his head, the movement clearly causing him great suffering. “No,” he said, his voice falling to a hoarse whisper. “In my head, I can—I can feel it. Something hurts, it hurts so bad. You have to—” The tendons in his throat pulled tight as he convulsed in agony, a strangled moan escaping. “Clubhouse, Callas is at—the Clubhouse. Stop … him …” Another spasm, mouth open wide in silent torment … then he relaxed, his final breath softly leaving his body.

  Eddie, Macy, and Osterhagen stared at him in silence. Macy was the first to look away, eyes brimming with tears. Osterhagen rubbed his head with a shaking hand. “A burst blood vessel, perhaps … I don’t know.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Eddie stiffly. He reached down to close Valero’s pain-stricken eyes. “We know who caused it. Callas. And Stikes. All of this is because of them. Oscar was right—we’ve got to stop them.” He stood.

  “Can we really get to this Puerto place?” Macy asked quietly.

  “Yeah. We’re maybe seven or eight miles away as the crow flies—but if we go due west, we’ll get to a main road a lot quicker.” He unrolled a chart and showed her. “About four miles, a bit more. We can hitch a lift.”

  “What about Ralf?” Osterhagen asked.

  “I’ll carry him.”

  “All the way?” Macy exclaimed.

  “I can manage. You take this.” He tossed her the flashlight. “Once we’re out of this swamp, the chart says there’s no rivers and the terrain’s pretty flat, so it shouldn’t be too bad. We’ve got less than half an hour of light left, so we need to get moving. Doc, give me a hand.” Osterhagen helped him hoist Becker in a fireman’s lift. The injured man moaned faintly, but didn’t fully wake up. “Okay, let’s get going.”

  Time in the cell blurred past as if in a fever dream, the aftereffects of the poisoning lingering like a sickness. Nina drifted in and out of consciousness, unsure whether moments or minutes had passed each time she closed her eyes.

  She felt the swirling, clammy darkness rising to swallow her again, and shifted her head, resting it against the metal bars for the coolness they provided. But it didn’t last long. The awful weariness pulled at her once more …

  A noise startled her into wakefulness. Two soldiers dragged Kit into the room and dumped him back in his cell before slamming its door and leaving. Nina pushed herself upright. “Kit,” she said, her voice weak. “Kit, are you okay?”

  The bruises on his face revealed that Stikes had used old-fashioned interrogation techniques in addition to his vile little pet. One eye was blackened, the lower lid puffy and swollen, and there was a smear of blood down his chin from a split lip. “I’ve had better hospitality,” he croaked. “I …” His face suddenly twisted with pain, and he let out a choked scream as he clutched his chest.

  “Kit?” said Nina, alarm rapidly turning to fear. “Kit! Oh my God!” She tried to stand, but her legs still felt rubbery. “Hey!” she shouted at the guard. “Do something, help him!”

  The guard gave her an uncomprehending look, apparently not understanding English, before turning his gaze back to the convulsing Indian … and doing nothing.

  Horrified, Nina rattled the door. “He’s dying! Help him!” But the soldier’s expression remained dispassionate. Appalled, she realized what that meant: Now that he had been interrogated, Kit was expendable. She tried to reach across the empty middle cell to him, but he was too far away. “Kit!”

  His moans stopped, and he slowly raised his head to give her a pained wink with his swollen eye. “It was worth a try,” he rasped.

  Nina glanced back at the guard, who still showed no signs of understanding what was being said, before lowering her voice. “You were faking?”

  “If he had opened the door, I could have found out how well I remembered my unarmed combat training.”

  The guard was younger and considerably beefier than Kit. “As much as I want to get out of here,” said Nina, “I’m kinda glad you didn’t put it to the test.”

  Kit managed a look of mock affront. “Are you saying I couldn’t have taken him down?”

  “I’m saying that I know how I feel right now. I’d guess that you probably feel worse.”

  “You’re probably right.” He slumped on the concrete floor, sweat beading his forehead.

  “What did Stikes want from you?” Nina asked, hoping that conversation would help him—and her—stay awake.

  A hesitation. “He … asked me lots of questions about Interpol. He wanted to find out how much I had told headquarters about Callas.” He moved his arm to display a reddened scorpion sting. “He believed me when I said that they knew nothing. Eventually. But what about you?”
he went on before Nina could ask another question. “What did he want from you?”

  “El Dorado. How to find it.”

  “And did you tell him?”

  She looked away, shamefaced. “Yeah. All about the statues, earth energy, how I used them to find Paititi … everything.”

  With visible strain, Kit sat up. “Nina, you did nothing wrong. Nobody can stand up to torture, however strong they think they are.”

  “Eddie probably could.” The thought of her husband filled her with sudden guilt; her own suffering had pushed him from her mind. “Oh God, I hope he’s okay. I don’t even know what happened to him at Paititi.”

  “I think he is still alive. Stikes seems to be the kind who would enjoy telling you if he wasn’t.”

  Despite her efforts to stay focused, the sickening tiredness was rising to swallow Nina again. “I hope you’re right,” she whispered, slumping against the bars.

  The trek westward was not difficult physically; the thick jungle canopy actually made movement easier by starving the undergrowth of light. Eddie and the others made steady, if plodding, progress.

  What made it unpleasant were the humid heat, which refused to lessen even after the sun had set, and the insects. They were bad enough in daylight, but once the twilight gloom forced Macy to switch on the torch they swarmed around the light. “You know what?” she complained after a particularly huge and loathsome bug batted her in the face with its wings. “Screw the rain forest! They can bulldoze the whole place into strip malls for all I care!”

  Eventually, to everyone’s relief, the jungle thinned, giving way to open ground that had been subjected to slash-and-burn cultivation. Before long they found themselves on a road—not a glorified dirt track like those found in the rain forest, but an actual paved highway. It was only one lane in each direction, but to the exhausted group it seemed like an eight-lane freeway. “Oh, thank God!” Macy cried. “Civilization! Kinda.”

  There was no sign of traffic. Eddie checked his watch; it was coming up to nine pm. “Let’s hope somebody’s out at this time of night. And that Venezuela doesn’t have laws against hitchhiking!”

  They laid Becker down beside the northbound lane, and waited. After a few minutes, headlights appeared to the south. Eddie stood in the road and waved for the approaching vehicle to stop. Macy joined him. “What?” she said, to his look. “If the driver’s a guy, he might be more likely to stop for a hot babe, right?”

  She was covered in dirt and sweat, clothes torn, hair a ratty, tangled mess. “Right now you look about as hot as I do. But maybe he likes it dirty …”

  “Shut. Up!”

  The vehicle, a beaten-up pickup truck, stopped. Macy did the talking, explaining that they had been in a crash—she left out that it had involved a plane to avoid awkward questions—and forced to walk through the jungle. The driver, an elderly man, chided the yanquis for lacking both caution and survival equipment before agreeing to take them to Puerto Ayacucho. Osterhagen rode up front with Becker, while Eddie and Macy sat in the rear bed.

  The drive along the empty road didn’t take long. They passed the airport, Eddie keeping a wary eye open for military patrols, and entered the city. The driver pulled up outside the hospital. “Eddie,” said Osterhagen as the Englishman climbed from the truck, “I am going to stay with Ralf.”

  “You sure? They might still be looking for us. Two gringos in the hospital … they could make the connection.”

  Osterhagen looked at the wounded man. Becker had drifted in and out of consciousness through the entire trek, but had never been lucid enough to do more than mumble in German. “He will need someone to tell him what has been going on. Besides …” He regarded the hat he was holding. “He is my friend. I should be with him.”

  Eddie put a hand on the older man’s shoulder. “I can’t argue with that. Just be careful, okay?”

  “I will. And you be careful too.” They lifted Becker from the truck. “What about you and Macy? What are you going to do?”

  “Rescue Nina and Kit. And kill Stikes and Callas. Not necessarily in that order.”

  Osterhagen’s face suggested that he thought the latter objective a dangerous step too far, but he said nothing. He and Eddie carried Becker into the hospital. Macy gave a modified version of her story to a nurse to account for Becker’s wound, the “crash” now happening while fleeing armed robbers. The story seemed to be accepted, and Becker was taken away for treatment.

  Osterhagen shook Eddie’s hand. “Thank you. For keeping us alive.”

  “Shame I couldn’t do it for everyone,” Eddie replied glumly. “But look after Ralf. And yourself. Hopefully see you both again soon.”

  “Thank you,” the German repeated before following his friend.

  “So how are we going to rescue Nina and Kit?” Macy asked once they were outside.

  The pickup driver had waited for them, keen to learn Becker’s condition in the hope of adding a happy ending to his tale of Samaritanism. “We need to get to this Clubhouse place,” said Eddie. “I doubt this bloke’ll take us all the way to Caracas, but ask him how we can get there—if there’s a bus or something.”

  Macy did so, learning that there was an overnight bus between Puerto Ayacucho and the capital, with still enough time for them to catch it. “Ew, I hate using buses,” she added after reporting this to Eddie. “There’s always some really gross guy trying to check me out.”

  “You want to walk three hundred miles?”

  “Depends how gross the guy is.”

  “Can’t be as gross as those bugs. Ask if he’ll give us a lift to the bus station. Oh, and if there are any pay phones there.”

  “Yes, and yes,” she said after posing both questions. “Who are you planning on calling? Someone in the government we can warn about Callas?”

  “I would if I knew who to call, but I don’t—and I don’t know who we can trust either. If Callas is planning a coup, he’ll need more than just the military on his side. He’d have to have people in the militia too. They’re the biggest threat to him.”

  “Except for you.”

  Macy had meant it as a joke, but the smile Eddie gave her had a very hard edge. “Yeah. Except for me.”

  They got back into the pickup and set off. “So who are you going to call?” Macy asked.

  His smile this time was somewhat warmer. “An old friend.”

  NINETEEN

  Nina jerked awake, a fierce cramp burning in her arm. For a nightmarish moment she thought the antivenin had worn off, letting the Gormar’s toxin continue its work, but as she scrambled to sit up she realized it was only the result of her uncomfortable sleeping position on the hard floor.

  She rolled her shoulder to ease the stiffness. The wallowing nausea had subsided, leaving just a hangover queasiness. Examining her wrist, she saw that the swollen sting had gone down, though it was still an angry red.

  “Nina? Are you all right?”

  She looked around to see Kit sitting against the wall of his cell. “I’m … not great,” she admitted. “But better than I was.” A glance told her that the guard had been replaced by another man. “How long was I asleep?”

  Kit checked his watch. “Quite awhile. It’s after eleven in the morning.”

  She had been out for something like fourteen hours while her body did its best to expunge the poison from her system. “Jesus. How long have you been awake?”

  “About an hour. I didn’t want to wake you.”

  Another look at the guard. This one apparently understood English, his eyes flicking between them as he followed their conversation. “We’ve got a new watchman—did I miss anything else?”

  “No, he was there when I woke up. I’ve been spending the time wondering how on earth I ended up in this situation. It seems destiny works in strange ways.”

  Nina made a sarcastic sound. “You think being tortured with scorpions was our destiny?”

  “I prefer that to it being nothing more than bad luck.”

&
nbsp; “Huh. I kind of see your point. Just hope that our destinies don’t end in here.”

  “So do I. But … I do think that things happen for a reason, even if we can’t always see it at first. There is order in the universe, but it has to be maintained—whether by the gods, or by our actions. Part of our purpose is to keep that order.”

  “Interesting,” said Nina with a faint smile. “I’m not used to philosophical discussion in the morning. But then, I do live with Eddie.”

  Kit grinned back through his puffy lips. “Not bad for a humble policeman, no?”

  “So is that why you became a cop? To maintain order?”

  He nodded. “In some ways. Growing up in India, I saw a lot of corruption, a lot of greed that caused others to suffer. I wanted to do what I could to stop it—to make sure that people who took more than they deserved were punished.”

  “Sounds like a good motivation to me.”

  The Interpol officer gave her an appreciative look, then sighed. “It did not always make me popular. Even among my colleagues.”

  “Yeah, I know what that feels like,” Nina told him sympathetically.

  “But then, this is what I mean about destiny. If I had been the kind of cop who looked the other way when I saw others taking bribes, I probably wouldn’t have been ‘encouraged’ to move from regular police work into more specialized areas like art theft. And if I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have been offered a position at Interpol, which means I would not have investigated the Khoils, I would not have met you and Eddie … and I would not be here right now.”

  Nina raised her eyebrows. “And you’re still upbeat about it? If I’d thought about the course of my life like that, I’d be going Oh God, where did it all go so wrong?”

  He smiled. “I’m a very upbeat person. And I don’t regret my decisions. Even though at the moment they seem to have brought me to a rather dark place.”

  “You’re not kidding.” She tapped the bars. “Any ideas how we can get out into the light?”

  “A few. Unfortunately, they all begin with us being outside these cells.”