River of Ruin

by Jack Du Brul

  Even after he told her about the attempt to steal the Lepinay diary, she hadn’t seemed concerned over her husband’s continued silence, now stretching past twenty-four hours. Normally, Mercer would have made allowances for Gary’s lack of sophisticated communications gear—he didn’t have the expense accounts Mercer enjoyed when he prospected for some multinational mining company—yet the connection to the journal was so clear that Maria should have shown some anxiety. Considering the changes he saw in her, it was obvious that she was no longer the young girl grateful to Gary for rescuing her from the slums. It was also possible that these changes had effectively nullified their marriage. For all his faults, Gary was an honest worker who enjoyed a simpler way of life. Mercer couldn’t imagine the woman before him spending more than a few hours away from the comforts of a big city.

  Mercer recalled that Maria was Gary’s third wife and that the others had left because the women had wrongly assumed Gary would eventually give up his rough lifestyle. He imagined this marriage heading in the same direction.

  Maria had wanted to wait in David and try to reach Gary again, but Mercer felt time pressing in on him and insisted they immediately take off for the Darien Province. He barely gave her enough time to freshen up in the airport before the charter plane was in the air and headed toward El Real.

  In the riverside town of three thousand people, he’d asked her to hire the boat and guides since his Spanish was nonexistent. The locals knew of Gary and the owner of the boat had set a reasonable price as long as his three cousins—and their M-16s—came along. Most of the narco-guerrilla activity had been far to the north, near the Atlantic coast, but no one took chances with the Colombians.

  El Real was an hour and a half behind them now as they continued to motor deeper into the jungle. The sun was high up in the sky, flashing off the river where it found breaks in the canopy. The water was as black as tea, stained dark by tannins leached from fallen leaves. Only occasionally could they get a look at the banks of the river, sandy shoals and spots where a gentle curve had eroded small ledges. Mostly, though, their view was obscured by the jungle, a riot of intertwined plants, trees, vines and creepers that cut off everything but a ribbon of sky directly above them. The entire color palate was blue sky, black water, and green, a million shades from deepest emerald to mildest mint. And then there would be jeweled flashes. The central Darien Province was one of the premier spots for bird watching on the planet and the jungle sparkled with feathers in a dazzling variety of colors. This deep into the hinterland, only an occasional bird would flutter away from the sound of their passing boat.

  The boatman eased back on the throttle and the bow settled into the water. The wake slapped against the shores. A quick conversation fired between the dark-skinned mestizos.

  “What’s going on?” Mercer asked Maria Barber. The low burbling of the engine was a relief after its choking roar.

  “We are getting closer to what Gary called the River of Ruin. The waters here are unpredictable. They don’t want to run the boat into a shoal.”

  Mercer studied the water. Brown stains wended their way down on the lazy current. This tributary was being fed by another, muddier stream. Conversation over, the boat again picked up its pace, though much slower than before.

  It was amazing, Mercer thought. Less than two days before he was in a city of millions and now the six of them in the boat were the only people for miles. Because his job took him to the remotest corners of the globe, the isolation didn’t bother him. The same couldn’t be said for Maria. She looked miserable.

  “You don’t seem too comfortable out here,” he said.

  She gave him a slow glance. “No.” She went on after a pause. “When I first meet Gary, we would explore together. It was fun for a little while.”

  “But not anymore?” Mercer prompted.

  “Gary has money. He doesn’t need to live in the jungle like an animal. We have an apartment in Panama City, a nice one. A car. I am happier there.”

  “You knew that this is what Gary did with his time, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I knew.” She reapplied a glossy coat of lipstick without use of a mirror. “I just didn’t think it would go on for so long. Why would a rich norteamericano want to live in conditions worse than I had when I was a child? I couldn’t take it.”

  The next logical question was if she still loved Gary, but Mercer decided that not only wasn’t it his business, he honestly didn’t care. Maria had wanted out of the slums and got it and Gary had a pretty wife years younger than him for when he came out of the jungle. Love, he realized, had nothing to do with it. He guessed the lunch date he’d interrupted with his call from David hadn’t been with some girlfriends. Mercer was glad he’d be out of here in less than a week.

  “Do you know what Gary wanted me to see?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure. There is a dead volcano at the head of the River of Ruin. It has a lake in its center that feeds the river from over a tall waterfall. He had been looking up there recently. Maybe he found something. I don’t know.”

  The river valley they’d been traversing had been shallow but soon began to grow steeper, with high hills of thick jungle that hemmed in on the water. The ribbon of sky hadn’t shrunk, yet somehow looked farther away. The river seemed more claustrophobic and the humidity level shot up brutally.

  “We are close,” Maria called.

  The river branched, the spill from the smaller fork completely brown, like the discharge from an industrial outlet. Mercer saw that a number of trees had lost their upstream foliage, as if a storm had raged here recently. The muddy tributary was partially blocked by a set of small rapids, nothing the boat couldn’t negotiate, but they struck Mercer as odd. The boulders in the stream were the first rock he’d seen since leaving El Real. Then he saw partial stone walls on each bank. The artificial breastworks ran from the valley’s flanks right to the water’s edge. They were ancient, worn and near collapse. Sections of the walls had been recently cleaned of vegetation and dirt, exposed to the daylight for the first time in centuries.

  The boat swung into the right branch of the river, powering through the short stretch of cataracts. This part of the river was even narrower than before, darker and more ominous.

  “Those rocks back there made a ten-foot-high waterfall,” Maria said. “They dammed off this whole river until Gary cleared them away. He thinks that the stones were quarried from someplace else and set there so no one could travel farther up this valley by boat. We’re on the River of Ruin now.”

  “Who laid them?” Mercer noted that the valley floor didn’t appear to be as thickly covered with jungle. This area had been underwater until just a short time ago—back-flooded by the ancient dam.

  “Gary believes it was the Incas who robbed the Spanish mule trains of gold and jewels and created what is called the Twice-Stolen Treasure. It was those stones that convinced him the treasure was close by. That is why he called it the River of Ruin, for the ruins of a dam he had discovered.”

  Mercer recalled the fantastic story Gary Barber had pieced together over the past five years that led him to this isolated stretch of water.

  Following the dazzling success of Hernan Cortes against the Aztecs in 1519, Spanish conquistadors turned their attention to South America in pursuit of the massive gold reserves held by the mighty Inca empire. After an earlier exploration that gained him the favor of King Charles I, Francisco Pizarro arrived in Peru in 1531 with 180 men and 27 horses just as a long Inca civil war was coming to an end. He immediately left his coastal garrison of San Miguel to meet with the new ruler, Atahualpa, in Cajamarca. Backed by a thirty-thousand-man army, Atahualpa felt he had nothing to fear from the small Spanish band. He continued to believe that right up to the moment he was taken prisoner. His people paid his ransom by twice filling a room eighteen feet by twenty-two feet with silver and once more with gold, an estimated twenty-four tons of precious metal. The bullion was shipped back to the coast for its journey to Spain a
nd the Inca ruler was murdered anyway on August 29, 1533. Three months later Pizarro completed the conquest by occupying the Inca capital of Cuzco and made Atahualpa’s brother, Manco Capac, a puppet ruler.

  In 1536, Manco Capac finally began a belated revolt against the Spanish, laying siege to Cuzco and eventually burning the city. But he could not maintain his revolt and eventually retreated to the mountain stronghold of Vitcos, where he engaged in a harassment campaign against Pizarro’s soldiers until his murder by the Spanish in 1544. By this time a steady supply of gold, silver and emeralds was being drained from the Inca empire, loaded on ships in the new city of Lima, where it was sent to warehouses in Panama City. From there the treasure was moved to the Caribbean coast trading centers of Nombres de Dios or Porto Bello by pack mule on El Camino Real, the King’s Highway. Once a year, galleons from Spain arrived to take the loot back to Europe.

  As part of his guerrilla campaign against the conquistadors, Manco Capac dispatched a small expeditionary force to Panama in an effort to stem the flood of gold, silver, and gems. Although the Incas did not have Spain’s rapacious hunger for precious metals, they considered gold to be the Sweat of the Sun, the central deity in their religion, and silver to be the Tears of the Moon. Manco’s plan was that this force would attack the mule caravans in the densest part of the jungle as they traversed the isthmus, and recover as much of the treasure as they could. Once taken back from the Spanish, the treasure would then be hidden until such time as the conquistadors were thrown out of Peru and the Inca empire was reestablished.

  With the help of Cimaroons, escaped slaves living as small tribes in the jungle, Manco’s troops established a number of hidden villages in Panama where they prepared to carry out their commando raids. Using information gathered by the Cimaroons, the warriors learned the routes and schedules and began their attacks. The early assaults were small-scale and cautious, netting little in the way of treasure, but teaching the rebels a great deal about Spanish arms and tactics. They would strike quickly and just as quickly flee with what they could carry to their forest redoubts, far from where the Spanish would pursue them. Soon, however, they were attacking the larger mule trains the Spanish sent across the isthmus, wending caravans of three hundred or more animals laden with bullion from the newly opened mines at Potosi and Huancavelica.

  Back in Peru, Manco Capac’s rebellion against Pizarro ended with his assassination. His son Sayri Tupac became ruler, and the Inca warriors in Panama continued to raid the mule trains. Sayri was poisoned in 1561, and still the raids continued. Isolated in the Panamanian jungle, the band of warriors didn’t know that their once mighty empire was dying by degrees. They interbred with Cimaroon women, creating new generations of rebels to maintain their harassment of the caravans. In 1572, the last Inca revolt in Peru, led by another of Manco Capac’s sons, Tupac Amaru, ended with his beheading in Cuzco. What followed was two hundred uninterrupted years of colonial rule by the Spanish, and for much of that time they shipped the riches of the New World back to the Old through Panama. And all that time the descendents of Manco’s original band of soldiers continued to plunder the mule trains.

  While the attacks by pirates such as Henry Morgan and Francis Drake against the Spanish strongholds of Nombres de Dios and Panama City were better known, the secret raids by Incas long cut off from their homeland amassed fortunes far beyond the dreams of even the most bloodthirsty privateers. An estimated billion dollars in silver from just one mine in Bolivia was transported on the King’s Highway, and nearly every shipment across the isthmus was attacked by the rebels. Untold tons of silver and gold and millions of carats of Colombian emeralds were hijacked from the caravans and cached someplace in the Panamanian jungle.

  Gary Barber, like others who’d followed the legend, believed the hoard, stolen once from the Incas and once by them, to be worth hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in today’s market.

  The problem, of course, was that there exists no actual proof that these raids ever took place. Journal entries written at the time were sketchy at best and much of what was known came second- and often thirdhand. Most scholars discounted the idea of a tribe of Incas living in the Panamanian jungle for two hundred years. They felt the tales were merely cover stories told by conquistadors who stole from their own mule trains to avoid turning over the loot to the Spanish crown. Because nothing of the Incas had ever been found, and certainly no trace of a fabulous treasure had ever turned up, they believed the legend likely grew from a single documented Cimaroon raid. This tale was then embellished to hide a systematic looting by the Spanish of their own royal caravans.

  But looking back at the remnants of the ancient dam that once blocked this river from the main channel of the Rio Tuira, Mercer saw that maybe there was something to the story after all. As far as he knew, no pre-Colombian civilization in Panama had constructed such elaborate stonework. In fact the main indigenous tribe, the Kuna, had been left alone by the Spanish because they were a near-Stone Age people with nothing worth plundering. The stone slabs that Gary had excavated were square cut and would weigh between one and two tons. Not something the Kuna could have built, and the design lacked typical Castilian ornamentation, which meant it was unlikely to be the work of the Spanish. Having never seen Inca ruins like Machu Picchu firsthand, Mercer couldn’t say for certain if the dam had been fashioned by those master builders, but he wouldn’t be surprised.

  Once past the rapids that were the remnants of the dam’s foundation, the boatman throttled back his outboard and guided the craft deeper into the jungle, farther up the River of Ruin. Sections of both banks had been dug into recently, showing raw scars of muddy dirt that could only be Gary’s work as he searched for the treasure. After ten minutes the engine was cut altogether.

  Expecting to hear the raucous sounds of the jungle—the birds, and insects, and monkeys—the party was struck by a deafening silence. Mercer’s hearing recovered from the thrum of the outboard and still he could hear nothing except the gentle hiss of the boat through the water as it slowed. The guides shot each other apprehensive glances. This was clearly something they had never experienced before.

  High above, a vulture slashed through the strip of sky.

  The guides jabbered something at the boat’s owner, each reaching for his assault rifle.

  “What are they saying?” Mercer asked.

  Maria ignored him and joined the conversation, her voice rising to a shout that cut off the argument. She finally turned to Mercer. “He wants to head back and call the police. He thinks Gary and his party have been attacked by guerrillas.”

  “Tell him we go on,” Mercer said.

  “I did. We’re only about a half mile from Gary’s camp.”

  The nervous energy was palpable as they threaded through the draped branches of overhanging trees. The three armed men restlessly scanned the jungle, eyes and hands tight, mouths fixed in grim lines. There was no movement except where the boat’s wake splashed against the river-banks.

  The smell reached them before the camp came into sight. On an instinctive level, Mercer knew what it was, as if his olfactory senses had a genetic knowledge of what human death smelled like. Then again, he’d smelled death too many times to ever forget it. It was a scent like that of rotted meat, but somehow much, much worse.

  Gary’s encampment stood on a flat plain on the water’s edge. There were a dozen personnel tents and one larger one Gary must have used for his headquarters. The bodies lay haphazardly throughout the camp. Some were at the riverbank as if they’d died fetching water, while others had fallen half in and half out of their tents. Still others must be still inside the tents, for carrion birds clustered around the open flaps, their plumage streaked with gore. Mercer could see maybe fifteen people, men and women, and several children. All were dead from apparent gunshot wounds.

  The boatman began jabbering again. Mercer flicked his eyes from the carnage and stared at the frightened man. The Panamanian stopped speaking, swallowed on
ce, and was unable to meet the hard gaze. “Tell him to beach the boat,” Mercer said without turning away.

  Maria didn’t need to translate. The boat edged over to the camp and Mercer leapt out with a rope in his hand. He tied it to a stake jammed deep into the mud. He pointed at the leader of guards, motioning the man to follow him and to send out the other two as pickets at the upstream and downstream edges of the clearing. Maria and the boatman stayed in the small craft. As the men entered the camp, their motion startled the scavenger birds to a flight of indignant cries. Mercer tied a bandana around his mouth and nose.

  There were times that he hated being right, absolutely hated it. As he trudged toward the main tent, the sense of urgency that had driven him halfway around the globe washed out of him with each step. The fears he’d harbored since the assault in Paris had been justified. This was no random narco-guerrilla attack. The timing was just too coincidental. Judging by the amount of damage done by the birds, he estimated this group had died at least a day before he bought the Lepinay journal, just after Gary’s final communication with his wife, when he’d said he had something he wanted Mercer to see. Gary had been closer to a major discovery than he’d known and the knowledge had cost him his life.

  Mercer was doing a good job of keeping his emotions in check until he entered the main tent and found Gary’s body. Dressed in shorts, boots, and a filthy T-shirt, Gary lay sprawled on the canvas floor of the tent, a bullet wound like an obscene third eye in his forehead. Despite the savagery of the attack on the camp, his weathered features were composed, as if he’d puzzled about his death rather than fought it. Though not as bad as the others outside, Gary’s corpse had not been spared from the vultures. Mercer thought he’d prepared himself for finding this type of scene, and still his hands shook as he bent to close Gary’s eyes.