Panama Pursuit

by Andreas Oertel

  I knew we had to leave, but Ben and I continued to watch the stranger. Whatever we were seeing might be important—might be linked to Rudi and the missing artifacts.

  But then the guy observing the boat swung his binoculars our way.

  Chapter 4

  SEEING THAT TWO people were now watching him, he ducked behind the big tree.

  “YOU BOYS HAD BETTER HURRY!” Anna yelled, her voice already sounding distant.

  Ben didn’t respond to Anna, and instead cried, “Whoa! Did you see that?”

  “What?” Eric demanded. “What happened?”

  “He saw us!” I shouted. “And then he hid.”

  “You’re kidding,” Eric said.

  “No.” Ben backed me up. “It was really freaky. He was totally trying to hide from us.”

  I would have loved to stick around and figure out what that guy was up to, but right now we had bigger problems—we had to hurry and catch up to our group. And our group was almost out of sight. Yikes! It would be a terrible start if the camp director had to yell at us on the first day for getting lost and not following instructions.

  Eric and Ben slipped on their packs, and I led the way through the half-cleared jungle. Before I’d even walked twenty steps, I was saturated with sweat. It was unbelievably humid and I felt like I was jogging in a sauna. It had been comfortable on the Balboa because we were all in the shade and there was a nice breeze from the boat’s movement. But this was crazy hot.

  We jogged along the path with our backpacks bouncing awkwardly behind us. The sweat pouring from my forehead stung my eyes and blurred my vision, and I had to really concentrate as I ran. There were stumps, roots, and people everywhere, and I was terrified I was going to trip on something or slam into someone.

  Most of the people we passed seemed to be clustered together in archaeological teams comprised of kids and adults. And everyone seemed pretty focused on whatever project they were working on. I don’t know why, but the adults we passed didn’t look pleased with us. Maybe it was a rule that you couldn’t run through an archaeological dig with a backpack when it was a million degrees outside. A few kids, however, did look up as we trundled by, and some even gave a friendly wave.

  As we scurried across the jungle ridge, I saw a lot of collapsed, ancient brick structures. The site must have been a village at some point in the past. The forest had tried pretty hard to swallow up and hide the whole place, but there were still plenty of interesting ruins. I was looking forward to rooting around for an unbroken crystal skull after we got Rudi released.

  Finally, we caught up to everyone near a cluster of large canvas tents. They looked like old army-style tents, with ten-foot posts in the middle and guide ropes stretched and pegged into the jungle floor. I felt like collapsing to the ground in a heap, but I didn’t want to let on how far we’d lagged behind or how much we’d had to run to catch up.

  Sofia stopped, turned around, and indicated with her hands that we should all form a semi-circle around her. “As you saw from the walk from the boat,” she began, “the site covers a large area—approximately five hectares. The portion of archaeological interest is that section we passed through. Your living quarters and the rest of the camp are here behind me.” She pointed over her shoulder with a thumb.

  “I think I’m going to die,” Eric whispered to Ben and me. His face looked like a ripe tomato—a wet, ripe tomato.

  Ben nodded, but he was still huffing too much to talk. He dropped his backpack on the ground, found a water bottle, and poured it over his head.

  Sofia frowned at the three of us.

  “I saw a lot of big earth-moving equipment on the hill,” the tall man from the other team said. “Did they get all that here using the canal?”

  The camp director shook her head. “The first step in widening the canal here was building an access road through the mountainous jungle. That allowed the contractors to begin bringing in the large machinery you saw.”

  “So we could have driven here on a road?” one of the other boys asked, sounding annoyed. I guess he didn’t like boat rides.

  Sofia laughed. “You wouldn’t want to use that road. It would take a whole day just to get here from Paraiso. The canal is much more efficient.”

  “Was it the road builders who discovered this site?” Rachel asked.

  “No, it was one of the surveyors for the logging company. He had been marking the areas to be cleared when he began finding interesting artifacts among the old brick structures. We saw some of those structures on the way here.

  “It looks like it was a village,” someone said.

  Sofia nodded. “Yes, perhaps a very special village. I will explain that later.”

  Murmurs of intrigue passed through the group.

  Ben jabbed Eric and me with his elbows. “Crystal skulls,” he said quietly. “That’s why the place is special.”

  “Anyway,” Sofia went on, “the surveyor suggested that logging be stopped until the area could be evaluated. And here you are—ready to evaluate.” She laughed awkwardly at her own attempt to be funny, which prompted everyone to laugh awkwardly.

  She explained a bunch of other stuff, but I found my brain was too excited—or maybe overheated—to stay focused. I kept thinking about Rudi, the crystal skulls, the captain, and the guy with the binoculars. It was certainly possible that we were imagining clues. But it was also possible there was a connection between the recently stolen crystal skulls, the captain, and whatever the person on the other side of the canal was up to. Eventually, I drifted back to the present and to whatever the camp director was saying.

  “... So please ensure you dispose of all garbage properly and stay away from the compost area at the south-west end of camp. The food scraps there attract rodents, and those rodents attract the dangerous snakes I just mentioned.”

  Whoa!

  I’d obviously missed something important and immediately wished I’d been paying more attention.

  “WHAT?” Eric cried. I guess he wasn’t listening either.

  “SNAKES?” Ben shouted. “You got poisonous snakes here? What—like rattlers?”

  Scratch that. Three of us weren’t paying attention.

  Sofia—and everyone else—looked at us like we were zombies with malaria. She ignored Ben’s rattlesnake question and said, “I’ll show you to your tents now, and you can all get settled in. Dinner is at 5:30, and at 6:30 each evening we have a presentation on the day’s finds.”

  The first tent was assigned to us. Each tent had six beds, so to balance the teams Sofia asked if one of the American boys would be willing to join our group. Ben probably knew us better than he knew his own team, and he was quick to raise his hand. So our official team from England now had members from Germany (Anna), Canada (Eric, Rachel, and me), and the United States (Ben), and no delegates from England. Anna pointed out how weird that was and we had a good laugh.

  Bruno held open the tent door—actually just a big flap of canvas—and we all went inside what would be our home for the week. It was bright enough inside the tent because each wall had a large square screen window and an awning. The awnings—again, more flaps of green canvas—were also stretched out and staked to provide shade and deflect rain.

  Bruno quickly claimed the bed closest to the door by throwing his bag on the cot. “I am going to find out where they’re keeping Rudi,” he announced, heading right back to the door. “Hopefully they will let me speak with him, and hopefully he can shed some light on this... this misunderstanding.”

  “Can we come with you, Papa?” Anna asked.

  “Yeah,” Eric said, “I wouldn’t mind meeting him.”

  Bruno stopped at the tent flap and turned around. “I think it would be best—for now at least—if you children are not seen with Rudi. The other kids here may be more likely to share information with y
ou if they believe you are not connected with the person accused of stealing artifacts. Do you understand?”

  Anna looked pretty upset that she couldn’t see her uncle, but she joined the rest of us and nodded. I mean, after all, it did make sense what her dad said. Why would anyone want to tell us anything if they thought we were buddies with the culprit who stole the crystal skulls?

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Bruno said.

  When he was gone, we all just stood around for a minute not saying anything.

  Finally, Eric said, “I guess we have to sleep in these mini-tents, huh?” He ran his fingers over one of the fine white nets that hung over each cot.

  Anna nodded. “Unless you want to get yellow fever, or West Nile virus, or—”

  “Okay, okay,” Eric held up his palm, “I get your point. They just look kind of creepy—like some sort of veil a monster would wear if it was getting married.”

  “I don’t like the look of those either,” I said, indicating the binders placed on each of our beds.

  Ben lifted the binder from his cot and read the cover out loud. “Kids Dig It—Participant Workbook.” He tossed the binder on the bed again without opening it.

  Rachel and Anna claimed the two beds at the rear of the tent. A curtain could be stretched across the tent, separating our sleeping space from theirs.

  “I think this is going to be a really interesting week,” Ben said.

  “Yeah,” Eric agreed, “except for the homework stuff.” He helped himself to a water bottle from a case of water bottles near the door.

  Rachel glared at Ben and Eric for being insensitive.

  Ben quickly turned to Anna and said, “Sorry. What I meant was it’ll be interesting to work with you guys to get your uncle out of trouble.”

  “Yeah,” Eric said, “that’s what I meant too. But I do hate homework.”

  Not sure what we were supposed to do next, Ben, Rachel, Anna, and I all grabbed our own water bottles and sat down around the folding table near the entrance.

  “What the heck took you guys so long back there, anyway?” Rachel asked Eric.

  Eric sat down on a plastic chair. “We saw something very curious,” he said.

  “What was it?” Anna asked, looking up from the workbook she was flipping through.

  So we told the girls all about the guy who was spying from the other side of the lake. Ben ended our summary by saying, “It was really weird how that dude dove for cover as soon as he spotted us watching him.”

  “That’s exactly the way it looked to me too,” I said. “He was crouched down one minute, spying on the dock or the boat or the camp. And the next minute—when he noticed us—he vanished.”

  “Perhaps he was watching the Balboa,” Anna said, closing her workbook, “because he plans on stealing her.”

  “Could be,” I said.

  “Or maybe,” Rachel suggested, “he stole the crystal skulls and now he’s waiting to move them or hide them or sell them.”

  “Exactly,” Ben said. “Anyone who knows anything about crystal skulls would know that an authentic skull is worth a ton of money—millions of dollars, maybe.”

  Eric grinned. “We now officially have two suspects—the captain and the guy we saw spying.”

  “We need to tell someone about that person.” Rachel opened her water bottle and began drinking.

  Eric and I just looked at each other. Ben didn’t say anything either.

  “Yes,” Anna said. “If someone is planning to steal the boat or has the stolen artifacts, we must report it.”

  “We could,” Eric said slowly. “Or...”

  Rachel choked on her water. “What do you mean, ‘We could’? We have to!”

  Eric shook his head and lowered his voice. “We don’t have to tell anyone anything—not right away, at least. Remember, our assignment is to gather information and that’s what we’re doing.”

  “Please tell me you’re joking!” Rachel begged. “Please. After everything that’s happened to us this summer, do you really want to run into more trouble?”

  “What happened to you guys this summer?” Ben asked curiously.

  “It’s a long story,” I said. “I’ll tell you about it later.”

  A group of kids neared our tent, and we waited for them to disappear around the corner.

  “Listen,” Eric said quietly. “If we tell the camp director what we saw, the only thing that will happen is it will put the focus on us. Rudi’s locked up, Bruno is his brother, and we’re his delegation. How’s that going to look when an hour after we arrive we claim we saw the skull thief across the canal? We’ll look like dummies making outrageous accusations.”

  I nodded. “He’s right. Even if Sofia believes us and sends someone to take a look... then what? They’d come back from the dock, say they saw nothing, and then accuse us of being troublemakers, or jokers, or worse.”

  “But what you saw cannot be ignored,” Anna said. “What do you propose we do instead?”

  I wasn’t planning on proposing anything, so I didn’t know what to say. But I lucked out because Bruno suddenly returned to report his findings.

  “It seems,” he began, “that after the crystal skulls vanished, someone came forward and identified Rudi as the thief.”

  “You mean, like an eyewitness?” Eric asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “One of the cooks said he saw Rudi leaving the artifact tent early yesterday morning—”

  “They actually saw him?” I interrupted.

  “No,” Bruno said. “But he described the thief so exactly—size, height, hair colour—they assumed it was Rudi. He is the only person of that unique description in camp.”

  We didn’t know what Rudi looked like, so Anna quickly explained that Rudi was a giant of a man.

  “He sounds more like a bodybuilder than an archaeologist,” Ben said.

  “That might prove to be a useful clue,” I said.

  “In what way?” Eric asked.

  Anna nodded. “If we find a man of similar description in or around Camp Gatun, that person may be the real thief.”

  Bruno began digging though his bag for a clean shirt. I think he was so distracted he wasn’t really listening to us. “A lawyer will be arriving soon,” he said. “I have asked for my meal to be brought to the tent where they are keeping Rudi. We will wait there for the lawyer. It may be a late night for me, so please do not wait up. Go to dinner in the big tent and then observe what you can observe.”

  We told him we would find out what we could.

  Bruno stripped off his sweaty shirt and slipped on a dry shirt. “The police will be here tomorrow some time,” he said, heading for the door again. “We must work fast, because we don’t know what they’ll do when they get here.”

  And like a flash, he was gone again.

  Eric, Ben, and I quickly copied Bruno and took off our clammy, sweaty T-shirts and changed into clean T-shirts. Anna and Rachel drew the curtain divider thingy across the tent and changed as fast as us. Six minutes later we all headed to the dining tent.

  •

  “What a spread!” Ben said, taking his tray to the next station. “This is almost like the Mexican buffets we have back home.”

  “Yeah,” Rachel agreed. “I think even Eric will approve of the food here.”

  I have to admit, I was a bit worried at first that we wouldn’t like the food we’d be eating. But not anymore. As soon as we walked into the giant dining tent, I relaxed. The food smelled yummy, and the sixty or seventy other kids already eating seemed pretty happy with stuff piled high on their plates.

  “It’s nice to see familiar-looking grub,” I said.

  “No kidding,” Eric said. “And even the stuff I’ve never seen before doesn’t look revolting. Like this stew here.” He
pointed at a tray of veggies and meat mixed together.

  “That’s called sancocho,” Ben said. “My mom makes it sometimes. It’s great.”

  “Are those French fries over there?” Anna asked Ben.

  “No,” Ben said. “It’s fried yucca root, but it does taste like a tropical French fry.”

  Satisfied with this explanation, Eric pinched a thick stack with the tongs and piled them on top of the sancocho.

  The self-serve food line ended with a variety of colourful fruits. The girls stayed and added pineapple slices to their trays, but we ignored the fruit and went to find an empty table. I looked around the dining hall at all the people. Most of the kids looked like they were between twelve and sixteen years old. Anyone older than that was probably a real archaeologist or some kind of team leader or chaperone.

  When we were all done eating we took our dirty dishes and sorted them into bins. But we didn’t have to wash the dishes. Yahoo for that! Several Panamanian ladies hauled all the utensils into a dishwashing area. The kitchen and dishwashing area, I suddenly realized, were actually mobile kitchen trailers that were dragged right into the enormous tent.

  We all sat back down and waited for the day’s briefing—or was it a debriefing?

  Anna noticed that I was still staring at the kitchen. “Papa said this camp was meant to be a work camp for the contractors,” she said. “But when the artifacts were found, the men were sent back to work on the Miraflores Locks. It didn’t make sense to dismantle the camp again, so the Canal Authority asked the archaeologists if they wanted to use the place while they were evaluating the site.”

  The sun had disappeared behind the jungle hills, and it was getting kind of dark in the tent. Someone switched on the lights and a big cheer went up. Like I said, everyone was in a good mood. Well, maybe everyone except Rudi. A few of the men helped rearrange tables, and then the older boys began carrying in boxes. A hush fell over the people in the tent. I guess they knew what was about to happen.

  “Those must be the artifacts from the site,” Rachel whispered.

  “This is going to be sort of like a show and tell, huh?” Eric said.