Chase Baker and the Golden Condor: (A Chase Baker Thriller Series No. 2)

by Vincent Zandri

  “What are the usual cautionary measures?” Leslie asks.

  “If something or someone tries to kill you, try and kill them first.” The big man assumes a delighted expression, exposing his gold-capped tooth.

  We all chew on that thought for a moment until I say, “Let’s move, people, while we have a few more hours of daylight left.”

  Cocking his weapon, Rodney spits more tobacco juice to the green vegetation-covered floor and begins the trek into the thick Amazonian jungle.

  I follow, with Leslie my literary agent on my tail.

  19.

  The forest is dark, damp, and unrelenting in its humidity. The walking is slow and difficult, even with the guides cutting away the thick vegetation that stands in our way. Between the tall tree canopy that blocks out the sun and thick weeds and vines, you can’t see more than a few feet in front of you. The feeling is claustrophobic and, although no one will admit it, more than a little frightening.

  We move ahead in silence, the packs on our backs as heavy as our not-so-altitude-adjusted breathing. As I walk, I’m reminded of my dad. As a child I’d beg him to take me along on a jobsite he might be working on. Something that required his special talent for digging unusually deep without causing a cave-in.

  Once, he allowed me to join him on a special Saturday dig. He was manning the controls on one of his heavy-duty tracked excavators while I looked on mesmerized at the action from a safe distance. The blueprints called for a depth of more than twenty feet in sandy soil. Such a deep dig combined with the precariousness of sandy soil meant that cave-ins would be a major danger. Or so my dad informed me prior to starting the dig.

  At one point, the steel teeth on my dad’s excavation bucket hit bedrock on an area where bedrock was not expected. Under normal conditions, he would have had one of his men take a look at the obstacle with a pair of binoculars. But this was a Saturday and my dad was the only man from his crew on site.

  “I have to head down in the hole, Chase,” he told me while wrapping a rope around his waist, and tying it off to one of the cleats on the excavator. I remember feeling my heart enter into my throat as he grabbed a shovel and made the descent into the narrow pit. Knowing that at any moment, the sides might cave in on him, I stood paralyzed with fear. But I said nothing about it. I didn’t want to show my fear in front of my dad. I could only trust him for what he was: a magician of a digger.

  Minutes passed while he inspected the pit’s bottom, stabbing so hard at the rock with the tip of the spade he was producing sparks. He mumbled grumpily about having to blast the rock out, which was something he never anticipated in his original bid. But now he’d have no choice but to do it. To my dad, a contract might be a contract, but a man’s word was a man’s word, and a man’s word was sacred.

  “C4 is expensive, goddammit,” he groused out loud. Then, “Oops. Sorry, Chase.”

  I couldn’t quite make out his face from where I was standing, and I was far too close to the pit’s edge, but I knew he had to be smiling. But when he looked up and saw me standing there, he most definitely wasn’t smiling.

  “Get back, Chase,” he barked. “It’s too dangerous.”

  Tossing the shovel out of the trench, he tugged on the rope to make it taut and began the climb out. He wasn’t halfway when both sides of the trench began to give way.

  I remember seeing the earth caving in on him from the top down. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. It was as if someone had cut out my voice box. I stood there beside the excavator shivering in fear as the red-brown sand began to pour down on him until no sign of him existed anymore. There was only the rope which was trembling and buzzing like a guitar string wound too tight from bearing the sudden weight of the sand. I shifted my eyes to where it was knotted on the cleat. I knew that if the knot came loose or worse, the rope snapped, my dad would be buried alive.

  But then suddenly, through the tears in my eyes I saw a head emerge from the sand, then a pair of shoulders, and finally a torso and legs. Using the strength in his powerful arms, my dad leapt up onto the solid ground, landing on his knees. He coughed and choked for a full minute before he looked up at me with a sand-covered face and said, “Son, don’t ever do what I just did. You got that?” Then he laughed and took me in his arms, and held me tightly.

  With every step I take into the jungle, I can’t help but feel that same anxiety I felt when my dad entered into that deep trench all those years ago. Only difference now is, I don’t have a rope to pull myself out should the sides start caving in on us all.

  We trek for more than an hour, until something catches my attention underfoot. It might not be entirely noticeable at first, but there’s no denying that we are entering onto something that resembles a foot path. It tells me the guides know precisely where they are going. The path can’t be more than one foot across in width, but the length seems to go on forever through brush that now is thankfully thinning out with each step we take. Rodney must notice it too because for the first time since we entered into this dark, almost impenetrable jungle, he turns to me.

  “Here it is,” he whispers. “One of the paths Keogh’s father was hired to find.”

  “My guess is that the natives have been using these paths for hundreds of years as roads between settlements.”

  “Maybe for hunting too. There are probably thousands of veins that break off into the wilderness. Getting lost must be pretty damn easy.”

  “Thank God for the guides,” I point out.

  “Thank God for GPS,” he says. “And our fearless literary trailblazer.”

  “The things I’ll do for money,” I say.

  That’s when Rodney stops dead in his tracks.

  “What is it?” I say.

  “You hear that, Chief?” he says. “Listen.”

  I watch him as his dark eyes stare off into the thick forest while he tries to make out something that’s happening up ahead of him. I hear it then. One of the guides sounds like he’s crying. Another is shouting at him, as if ordering the crying man to hold himself together.

  “What’s happening?” Leslie begs, the fear in her voice as plain as the dew that drips from the thick vines.

  “Don’t know yet,” I forcefully whisper. “Sit tight.”

  I hear running. I turn and see Carlos coming up on Leslie from behind, his video camera in hand.

  “The porter behind me,” he says, while sucking breath, “he won’t go any further, Chase. My hearing isn’t as good as it used to be, but I swear he keeps mumbling something about the great death being upon us. The death in the jungle. He is positively catatonic.”

  I lean into Rodney.

  “Lock and load,” I whisper.

  Rodney shoulders his AR-15, begins making sweeps with the short black barrel—ten o’clock/three o’clock, ten o’clock/three o’clock. I draw my .45 and thumb the safety off. Carlos shoulders his video camera, begins filming the stillness which isn’t exactly still, and the silence which isn’t entirely silent.

  “Chase,” Leslie whispers, “I’m afraid. Maybe this was a bad idea after all.”

  “Shhh,” I say, bringing the index finger on my free hand to my lips. “Don’t say a word.”

  That’s when the arrow whips through bush and pierces Carlos’s neck.

  20.

  Rodney shoots at will, his thick index finger pumping the trigger of an AR-15 switched on automatic mode. But the high velocity rounds that blast into the surrounding bush are about as effective as spitting in the ocean.

  “Hold your fire, Rodney!” I bark. “Hold your damned fire!”

  He stops, smoke oozing from his barrel while the drops of damp that drip onto it sizzle from its intense heat. Down on the ground, Carlos is grasping at his neck where the arrow has pierced it, blood oozing out of the wound. Leslie seems to be in shock as she stands beside me, stiff as a statue, her eyes locked on what appears to be a mortally wounded Carlos.

  “Hang tight, Carlos,” I whisper forcefully, but my gut is telling me t
hat his is a lost cause.

  Then it comes. A wave of arrows flying through the bush, some of them embedding into the trees, others cutting into the earth at our feet, a few zipping by our heads.

  “Get down!” I order, grabbing Leslie’s collar, pulling her down with me. “Get the hell down!”

  My .45 in hand, I search for a face or faces to go with the arrows. But all I see are trees and vines. Until a half dozen hostiles emerge from the thick stuff about fifty yards out and sprint directly for us, banzai charge style.

  From where I’m positioned I can see that they’re dressed only in leather thongs, everything else exposed including their feet. Their hair is long and greased back against their heads while their arms, legs, chests, and faces are tattooed with colorful images. Their bows now slung diagonally over their chests, pouches of arrows slung over their backs, they’re coming at us with spears that might pass for state of the art in prehistoric times.

  “I got the three on the right,” I shout to Rodney.

  “I got left,” he confirms, sending a blast into his three men, dropping them on the spot.

  At the same time, I trigger three shots, aiming from right to left, dropping the remaining three hostiles.

  “Sit tight,” I insist, as the hot, humid air goes quiet. “There could be another team in reserve waiting to ambush us.”

  Rodney changes out the clip on his AR-15.

  “I need to make a check on the guides,” he says.

  “Get them up on the radio,” I say.

  He presses the broadcast button on his chest-mounted walkie-talkie, speaks some Spanish into it. When he releases the button, we both wait for a reply. But all we can make out is dead air.

  “Try again,” I demand.

  He does it.

  More dead air.

  “Shit.”

  “What do we do, Chase?” Leslie says, speaking for the first time since the attack began.

  I plant my eyes on Carlos. He’s no longer struggling to remove the arrow from his neck. His soul has clearly left his body.

  “We go back the way we came,” I say.

  “Not a chance,” Rodney says. “Carlos knew the risks. You know the risks. We all know the fucking risks. Keogh didn’t send us all the way out here to quit at the first sign of trouble.”

  “Case no one’s noticed,” I say, “we got a man down.”

  Propping myself up onto my hands and knees, I crab my way over to the wounded man, press my fingers against his jugular, my left ear over his mouth. Then, lifting my head, I add, “Correction: We’ve got a very dead man down. And now it’s possible our guides are dead, or at the very least, run off.”

  “I’m surprised at you, Chase,” Rodney says, as he climbs back up onto his feet. “From what I’ve heard, you’re not the squeamish type. I should think you’d want to find the cave and the aircraft as much as we do. More so, even. Casualties of war or no casualties.”

  I didn’t know we were at war…

  He’s right and he knows it. I feel my heart beating in my chest, and I feel the sweat that soaks my skin and clothing. But I also smell fresh blood and gunpowder. Turning to Leslie, I place my hand on her shoulder.

  “You okay, Agent?” I say. “You want me to lead you out of this death trap, say the word. Rodney might be expedition leader, but he is not my boss.”

  She assumes a sitting position, brushes the soil from her arms. Swatting a mosquito from her face, she inhales and exhales.

  “I live with dead men and dead women in the fiction manuscripts I read every day,” she says. “But I’ve never seen a real man killed before my eyes. One as nice as Carlos anyway.”

  I instantly recall him pointing a knife at me back in New York, but I quickly dismiss the thought. That was prior to our getting to know one another, so to speak.

  Leslie gets up.

  “Do you want to leave?” I repeat.

  She wipes her face, takes a drink from her water bottle, and exhales profoundly. “This might surprise you. But my vote is to keep going, Chase. Rodney’s right. You came here to do a job. Let’s keep on doing it. My guess is that Carlos would have wanted it that way. And besides, we have a book to write.”

  But this expedition is far more than simple research for a new novel. This is about uncovering a relic that, if it’s real, will not only turn history onto its back, it will prove once and for all that mankind has not only been the beneficiary of help from ancient aliens, but that humankind is indeed derived from ancient aliens. The enormity of locating the Golden Condor is almost too great to contemplate since it will challenge our everyday notions about God and religion, and it will force us to accept the fact that we are not the isolated species we once thought ourselves to be, and therefore, not the most important life in the universe.

  There’s no question in my mind about the course of action we must take. And that course is to keep on going no matter what or who stands in our way. The chase for the Golden Condor is why I was put on God’s earth. And something else too: if we weren’t close to finding it, the hostiles wouldn’t be trying to kill us.

  I pull myself up onto my feet. “Rodney, call Keogh, tell him what’s happened. Let him know we’re proceeding as planned. We’re going to find the Condor even if we die trying.”

  “Consider it done,” Rodney says, pulling his cell phone out. He walks on ahead of us, his phone pressed against his ear.

  “I can’t stop shaking,” Leslie says, her eyes still locked on Carlos.

  I strip the deceased man of his wallet, passport, cash, and cell phone, toss them to the side.

  “Come on,” I say to Leslie. “Take hold of his feet while I grab his hands.”

  Working together, we shove the surprisingly heavy, dead-weight body off the path and into a section of thick brush.

  “The ground is filled with roots,” I say. “It’ll be impossible to bury him here.”

  “The insects will get him,” Leslie points out. “So will the animals. In this heat he’ll rot away almost immediately.”

  “Let’s at least cover him up.”

  Pulling his sleeping bag from his pack, I drape it over his body. We then cover the body with leaves and brush. For a brief moment, Leslie and I stand over the mound that conceals Carlos’s body.

  “Shouldn’t we say something?” she says. “You know, like a prayer?”

  I catch a quick glimpse of Rodney standing about thirty paces up trail. He’s still on the phone. The expression on his face isn’t exactly unhappy or anxious. I’m guessing a team member’s death doesn’t mean a whole lot to the big man. At least, not in terms of the broader picture…the big prize to be uncovered up inside a mountain.

  “Rest in peace, Carlos,” I say, after a time. “Pleasure sharing a cab ride with you.”

  “Amen,” Leslie whispers.

  “Amen,” I say.

  Retrieving Carlos’s AR-15, I hand it to Leslie, who straps it over her shoulder. I grab his passport and the rest of his personals and stuff them into the pockets on my bush jacket. The last item to salvage is his video camera.

  “How would you like to do the honors now?” I say, holding out the camera for her. “After all, media is your specialty.”

  She grabs hold of the camera, fiddles with its buttons and controls like she knows what she’s doing. And as a former Columbia film school student, she does.

  “Good. It will take my mind off Carlos,” she says. Then, while shouldering the camera, “What about the guide who was behind us?”

  “He’s gone,” I say. “My guess is he ran off at the first sign of trouble.” But what I’m thinking on the inside is that he’s probably as dead as Carlos.

  “Wasn’t he carrying food?”

  “We’ll have enough in our packs. After all, we won’t need as much now and we’re only here for forty-eight hours.”

  “Let’s hope so,” she says.

  Rodney whistles to get our attention.

  Leslie and I turn, focus our eyes on him.


  “We got a go from Keogh,” he barks.

  I nod, knowing full well that the danger we just encountered is not a one-time-only deal.

  “Let’s go get this thing done and then get the hell out of here,” I say. “Keep your eyes and ears open, everyone.”

  “Open wide,” Leslie says, her confidence brewing despite the death that weighs heavy in the air, like the thick jungle humidity.

  21.

  We walk for another two uneventful, but tense, hours. The path beneath our feet is widening while, at the same time, the tree-lined canopy above our heads is getting taller and thicker, so that what’s left of the late afternoon sun is almost completely blocked out, like an unexpected partial eclipse. But then, just like that, the darkness is replaced with bright sunlight as the canopy is suddenly broken by an unexpected opening in the jungle.

  Rodney stops, turns.

  “You hear that?” he says, his voice soft but strong at the same time.

  I stop, listen.

  I hear water. Water flowing. Taking another step forward I confirm my suspicion. What lies before me is a deep gorge. At the bottom of the gorge is a high, swift-moving river that’s filled with rapids. Leslie stands beside me. Carlos’s video camera pressed to her shoulder, she’s filming the river.

  Rodney adjusts the Giants baseball cap on his head, catcher style, so the brim goes around the back.

  “There’s our access across the gorge,” he says.

  A few feet before us is the entry to a long arcing rope bridge, the floor of which is constructed from thin wood panels that, to the naked eye, appear older than my long-deceased grandfather.

  Leslie slowly lowers the camera, runs her forearm over her sweaty brow.

  “You want to cross that,” she says like a question.

  Rodney retrieves his water bottle, takes a deep drink.

  “I’ve seen worse,” he says.

  “Where?” I say.

  The big man replaces his water bottle on his hip.