Orinoco

by Dan Pollock

  But Arquimedeo knew something else. Like David, he would not give up without a battle. For Cerro Calvario was certainly the archaeological opportunity of a lifetime—his lifetime. There would never come another, any more than Schliemann had found another Troy, Carter another tomb of Tutankhamen, Arthur Evans another Knossos.

  The slight man squared his narrow shoulders, turned from watching the Jeep’s dust trail and began to climb back up his iron mountain, prepared, if need be, to defend it against the world.

  Chapter Four

  It so happened that Venezuela’s president, foreign and finance ministers were all off in Jakarta attending a three-day conference of something called the Group of Fifteen—but referred to by one commentator as basically a Third World pep rally. The resulting power vacuum in Caracas had played perfectly into the hands of the environmental and cultural ministers, as well as those opposed to what they saw as a flood tide of foreign-controlled industrial schemes. It was a hasty alliance of these several factions that had shut down the Cerro Calvario mining operation.

  Sam learned this vital information from Proteus staffers while en route to his afternoon meetings and realized at once that those meetings would be pointless.

  “Screw the schedule,” he told the keen young man crouched in the facing jumpseat. “Let’s cut through the bullshit, Eric.” He gestured at the car phone. “Call Jakarta and get me El Jefe. I don’t care what time it is.”

  There was a slight problem with that idea, Sam was told. It seemed D.W. had already tried it—had in fact been patched through from his yacht now on the Orinoco. The Venezuelan president had informed D.W. that he was keeping abreast of all developments regarding Cerro Calvario, but categorically refused to make any decision or even offer a comment until his return.

  “You mean we’re supposed to wait three days?”

  “No, Sam, at least a week.” On the way back from Indonesia, he was told, the Venezuelan delegation was stopping off first in Egypt, then in Senegal.

  “What the hell for?”

  “Reciprocal photo ops. They’re all members of the Group of Fifteen.”

  His staffers pleaded with Sam to keep his afternoon appointments. Canceling at the last minute, they said, would be taken as a major insult. Besides, they said, he might learn something.

  So Sam went along, shook hands, slapped shoulders, dusted off his Spanish—and learned little he didn’t already know. Over the years he had attended many such meetings with Venezuelan officialdom, under the obligatory Napoleonic portrait of El Libertador, Simón Bolívar. In the course of the long afternoon he found himself frequently gazing out the nearest window, for the view from Caracas high-rises, while familiar, was invariably spectacular.

  Ever-present clouds wreathed the surrounding peaks, trailing purple shadows over greenclad slopes. Lower down, but inching higher and higher every year, were the mountain-clinging ranchitos, the shantytowns of adobe brick in the cinturón de miseria, the misery belt. And finally, winding through the long, narrow cityscape of concrete and steel, was el pulpo, “the Octopus,” the network of arterial expressways, clogged at all hours with traffic, much of it composed of low-end muscle cars from Detroit’s past, all enjoying flatulent Latin American afterlives. Whatever else was endemically wrong with the Venezuelan economy, gas was still cheaper here than anywhere else on the planet.

  Sam exited his last meeting at five-thirty, after pumping hands and declining dinner invitations. A government car took him back through a steeply twisting maze of streets and crumbling neighborhoods to the Ávila, where he did thirty laps in the pool beside a cocktail crowd of twittering academics. He dined on room service, watched CNN, read a chapter of Xenophon’s Anabasis, and nodded off around eight.

  An hour before dawn he was back in a Proteus Mercedes, heading down the autopista, past hillsides spiderwebbed with flickering ranchito lights, to Maiquetía and the airport. His Cessna was refueled and ready, its security tape undisturbed (it would have changed color had it been tampered with). The world was still gray when Sam completed his checklist, got his final clearance and hurtled down the runway. Then, as he climbed into the eastern sky, the sun flared over a ridge dead ahead, showering him with light. Sam pulled on Serengeti sunglasses and plowed into the fireball, following the shoreline and gaining height on the wall of mountains to his right.

  His flight plan took him eastward beside the mountains another half-hour to Puerto Píritu, where the coast range dropped away. Then he turned right, south by southeast, along a corridor served with radio direction aids, three hundred miles down to Ciudad Bolívar. In the pastel early light Sam found himself flying over blue jungle toward a pink-streaked horizon. But as the sun lifted and the cockpit warmed, variegated greens and earth tones began to show below.

  Sitting back and letting the avionics do their intricate work, Sam found himself for some reason replaying his son’s twelfth birthday party—more than twenty years before. Sam had arranged to fly Tony and his entire Little League team up to the Lazy S from Dallas, where the boy was living with his mother. Caroline and her new husband, thank God, had declined to come along. There was swimming, horseback riding, a barbecue—and a couple innings played against a local Little League squad on a regulation diamond Sam had laid out.

  Standing behind the backstop, Sam had watched his son play a scrappy second base, but fail to connect in his only time at bat. After the last out, Sam turned and noticed his Mexican housekeeper, María Elisa, watching from the pool terrace with her two-year-old daughter, Teresa. Sam felt an odd twinge—both pride and queasiness—suddenly seeing his two children in such proximity. For the Indian-dark toddler was also Sam’s, a fact at that point confided only to his lawyers, and Chick Hooper, the Lazy S’s foreman. María Elisa had sworn to tell no one—until she and Sam decided Teresa herself was old enough to know the truth.

  But the incident stirring in memory all these years later didn’t concern the children. It was what Sam himself had done that day. After the game, a skinny redhead kid from Dallas had taken the mound and challenged the Oklahomans. He threw impressive heat for a twelve-year-old and struck out several boys in a row. Then Sam had grabbed the biggest bat he could find and come around the backstop, asking if he could take a cut. His son Tony had shouted a protest from second base, but the redhead kid on the mound only grinned and waved Sam to the plate.

  Sam had been thirty-seven then, in fair shape, though he hadn’t played baseball since high school, where he’d been an all-state shortstop. And he’d never handled a bat like this tapering aluminum pipe, cold and spindly in his big hands. But, as the first pitch sailed in, he realized the kid wasn’t really that fast. What he ought to do, Sam told himself, was swing wild at the next one and walk away, making a joke about a bad back. Instead, old instincts keyed in. Thigh and arm muscles bunched, wrists cocked, the chin nestled atop the left shoulder. As the ball spun toward him, Sam waited confidently, then shifted his hips as he whipped the bat-head around. The ball rocketed off the metal bat, still climbing as it passed over the motionless left fielder to land far out in the pastureland. Sam remembered the stunned look on the redhead’s young face.

  Sam yelled out an apology: “Honest, I just shut my eyes and swung. I never figured on hitting the dang thing.” He made another apologetic gesture to the boys still waiting to take their cuts, then made a hasty escape. But up on the terrace, he walked into one of María Elisa’s hard glares.

  “Now come on, Ellie, it wasn’t that bad,” he said. “I was just fooling around with the kids.”

  “¡Qué vergüenza, Samuel!”—Shame on you!

  Her use of his given name instead of her pet name for him, Blanco, underlined her seriousness. And, of course, she was right. He’d made a competitive fool out of himself. Like an old zoo ape he’d once seen pushing the females and younguns out of his way to get first grab at some tossed peanuts. Sam had not only shown off, but stolen the game from the kids. And if María Elisa had seen it so clearly and was disgusted by it
, what must Tony and his friends be thinking?

  Okay, so he was ashamed.

  Should he apologize to Tony and all the rest of the boys, or just pretend the damn thing never happened? Sam had opted for the latter—and the rest of the party went off fine. Except here the incident was again, surfacing all these years later, an insoluble turd in the punchbowl of memory.

  Why now?

  Well, Sam knew the answer to that. It was pretty obvious that he was doing the same thing again—flying down here, in defiance of Hardy Eason and the whole Proteus team, to take the play away from D.W. It had been no sweat to let his president run the show in Indonesia, Alaska, off the Siberian coast, a lot of other places. None of those projects had posed a territorial threat. But Sam regarded Venezuela as his back yard, his personal fiefdom.

  And what was so wrong about that?

  Sooner or later, of course, it would drive D.W. away, just as it had the last two hand-picked successors. But no matter what he said for corporate consumption, Sam didn’t want a successor, never had. He liked scaling back, and he was willing to delegate as it pleased him. But he still reserved the right to play head ape, ready at the drop of a peanut to abandon his comfy, swinging tire and run the cage.

  Okay, maybe he was ashamed—a little. And maybe he was even a little afraid D.W. could handle things down here without him. Whatever it was, from that first phone call he’d gotten at the ranch, Sam had been unable to rein himself in. Whether he should or shouldn’t stay out of it was for sure debatable, but dammit, he just couldn’t. Here he was, for better or worse, strapped in and speeding over jungle greenery at nearly two-hundred knots per hour toward the Orinoco. There was just no way in the world he could think of to stop himself. Once the bat was in his hands, Sam was by God going to get his swings.

  On approach to Ciudad Bolívar he passed over the red-orange gas flare of an Anaco oil field. Moments later, under a low cloud fleet ahead, he sighted the long silver sweep of the Orinoco. Here, two hundred seventy miles from the Atlantic, the river was only two-thirds of a mile wide, tending to its business calmly and quietly. But its sinuous, sixteen-hundred-mile journey to the interior and its vast tributary system made it second on the continent only to the Amazon.

  Still north of the Orinoco, as the tin roofs of Soledad flashed sunlight beneath him, Sam got his landing clearance and lowered his airspeed to a hundred knots, dropping flaps and gear. Then he was banking sharply left over the river and the twin white towers of the Angostura Bridge and, as the city wheeled below, lining up for a straight-in approach at ninety knots to Aeropuerto Ciudad Bolívar. Once down on the concrete, he taxied over to the beige-block terminal and was guided to a parking spot near an Aereotuy DeHavilland Twin Otter revving its turboprops.

  As Sam climbed down the Cessna’s retractable steps, a stocky man in slacks and sport shirt hurried out of the terminal, shielding his ears from the Twin Otter’s engine shriek. Sam recognized Owen Meade, the bright young man in charge of local mining operations. A half-dozen strides off, Owen extended his hand and came on with a big smile creasing his soft, heavily freckled face.

  “Bienvenido, Sam. A real pleasure.”

  “Bienvenido, Owen. Ray’s always telling me good stuff about you.” Owen Meade reported directly to Ray Arrillaga in New Orleans.

  “Not lately, I bet.”

  “Hey, none of this crap is your fault, Owen. Just standard South American politics. Anyway, we’re gonna fix it.”

  “I sure hope so, Sam. Hell, with you and D.W. both on the scene, how can we lose?”

  Sam halted in midstride. “D.W.’s already here?”

  “Last I heard he was still on the river, around Ciudad Guayana. Nice flight, Sam?”

  “No complaints.”

  “I took care of your landing fee and arranged for tie-down. Here, let me throw your stuff in the Land Cruiser, then we’ll grab a bite at the hotel across the street and head south.”

  Owen reached for the black satchel, but Sam pulled it away, preceding the younger man inside the terminal. “Thanks, I’ll keep it with me. And no need for a tie-down, Owen, just a quick refuel. I’ll be taking off again right after lunch.”

  Owen frowned. “I thought you came down to see Cerro Calvario.”

  “That’s where I’m going.”

  “Sam, there’s no landing strip down there—unless you’re thinking of the one in the artist’s rendering of our future workers’ city.” Owen allowed himself a little chuckle at the boss’ mistake. “I guess you’ll have to settle for a bumpy ride with me.”

  “Actually, Owen, there’s a twenty-five-hundred foot dirt strip down there, maybe ten, twelve miles southwest of Cerro Calvario.”

  “You must mean that cattle ranch—Hato La Promesa? I know it, sure. But no one told me Proteus was connected with it.”

  “It isn’t, but I own a little chunk of it. We’re going to be selling a lot of beef to the mine workers once we get this show on the road. I’d invite you along, Owen, but I’d rather you go separate. I want to show up at the mountain and poke around some without calling attention to myself.”

  The two men had come to a halt amid the airport’s drab, bus-station-like waiting room. “How you going to do that, Sam? You can fly down to your ranch, but you’re still going to have to drive in from the main road.”

  Under his tilted ranch hat, Sam grinned his widest. “You want to make a small wager on that?”

  Chapter Five

  Arquimedeo Laya López found himself not only at the center of political controversy, but suddenly in command of a large-scale logistical operation. Over his portable transceiver from the slopes of Cerro Calvario, he was now routinely being patched through to top-level bureaucrats in Caracas, as well as to leaders of several scientific and cultural organizations. In the course of these conversations he found himself making decisions so rapidly he had trouble recording them all in his field notebook.

  In one early aftershock of the mining shutdown, Arquimedeo learned he had lost his funding from Proteus Industries. This was a blow, if hardly a surprise. What Arquimedeo had not expected was the swiftness with which others rallied to his defense. Universities and scientific foundations came forward with pledges of support, financial and otherwise. Within twenty-four hours he was accepting offers of camp trailers, tents, generators, refrigerators, freeze-dried food, computers, microscopes, plus much-needed electronic surveying equipment—metal detectors, soil-resistivity meters and photon magnetometers.

  As far as staffing, Arquimedeo’s office fax machine at Simón Bolívar University had turned overnight into a full-time resumé printer. In fact, job requests were coming in from all over the globe as a result of CNN rebroadcasting a Venevisión interview from Cerro Calvario. Many applicants were trained field archaeologists, but most were amateur enthusiasts, students or volunteers from archaeological societies. Arquimedeo arranged for a departmental colleague to screen candidates, then began drawing up an organization chart for his excavation team. He put himself as director, Félix Rosales as field supervisor, then drew little tributary boxes labeled diggers, assistant diggers, recorder, photographer-artist and volunteer labor. He stopped at fifteen boxes. As results justified it, he could easily expand.

  He also decided to lower his media profile—as rapidly as possible. The initial dose of publicity had obviously been a benefit; beyond that, he felt, it would quickly become counterproductive. What they needed to be doing here was archaeology, an arduous and exacting process, not wasting time handling drop-ins from reporters or tourists.

  In fact, Arquimedeo was already paying a nuisance price for his unaccustomed visibility. His mother in Caracas had been contacted by a half-dozen relatives asking to be hired on the project as unskilled laborers. Arquimedeo would have liked to oblige, especially in light of the country’s horrendous unemployment—as high as forty percent in some estimates—but he simply could not. That level of funding was definitely not available. Of course, archaeological excavations involved large amo
unts of back-breaking manual work, but that was what volunteers were for.

  In one case, however, Arquimedeo had yielded to family pressure. It had happened just that afternoon, while the two archaeologists were laying out a grid for more trial trenches. Félix, holding the surveyor’s rod, had suddenly pointed downslope. “Arqui, better check this guy out. Tell me if I should get my shotgun.”

  Arquimedeo glanced up from his transit and squinted down into glaring sunlight. There was a shadow-black figure on the dusty access road. Arquimedeo swiveled the twenty-five-power surveyor’s scope on the visitor. The first focus was on the elaborately soiled crotch of once-gray workpants. Next he tracked over a venerable polo shirt, sun-bleached pink with crimson sweat stains. Finally he arrived at a long, hangdog face behind a grizzled beard and mustache, surmounted by a red headband. The general effect was of an old pirate down to his last doubloon.

  “Mierda!” Arqui exhaled.

  “What’s he look like?”

  “Like my Uncle Oscar.”

  Félix nudged him aside, sliding behind the eyepiece. “That old bandit’s your uncle?”

  “It’s not my fault. My mother’s sister is the one who married him. Don’t worry, Félix. He may look villainous, but he hasn’t killed anybody in years.”

  “That’s a joke, right?”

  “Of course it’s a joke. Uncle Oscar was a revolutionary, though. Back in the early Seventies. My mother told me he knew Carlos.”

  “Carlos who?”

  “Carlos the Jackal. The famous Venezuelan terrorist.”

  “You forget, Arqui, if it happened much after the Bronze Age, I probably don’t know about it. So what’s he want, your uncle?”

  “Have a beer, Félix, while I go down and find out.”

  *

  Despite his disreputable appearance, Oscar Rivilla Azarias carried himself with great dignity, befitting one who had lived many hard years in many hard places, and had come through them all, where many others had not. This dignity was very much on display as he sat on a camp stool in the bluish shade of Arquimedeo’s tentfly, a leathery hand wrapped around a cold can of Cerveza Polar. The angular old man was plainly waiting for his nephew to begin the conversation.