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

by Vincent Zandri

“I lied,” he says. Then, turning to me, his white-knuckled hands holding tightly to his AR-15, “I guess as team trailblazer, you get the honor of going first.” Then, grinning, “Age before balls.”

  “You’re one hell of a nice guy, Rodney, you know that?”

  “So my mother tells me anyway.”

  Making my way to the bridge entry, I’m able to look down into a gorge that must be two hundred feet deep. The power of the rapids is so intense, I feel the cool mist of the clean river water rising up into my face, coating it.

  “Chase, I’ve got a lot invested in you,” Leslie says. “Be fucking careful.”

  “Thanks for the kind words,” I say. “I think.”

  Taking hold of the thick ropes on either side of me, I take a step out onto the first, damp-soaked wood plank, distribute maybe half my weight onto it. The slippery plank holds. Swallowing a breath, I take a second shaky step onto the same board. Releasing some of the tension in my arms, I bear almost my entire weight onto the board. That’s when I hear a sharp crack, and the bottom drops out from under me.

  22.

  Leslie lets loose with a scream.

  Rodney shouts, “Chase, hold on!”

  He doesn’t have to tell me twice, as I grip the ropes tightly while flexing my arms to support my entire body weight, preventing my body from falling through the bridge. As luck would have it, only a portion of the first board has split off. Maybe one-third of the entire three-by-one-foot-long piece. If I place my feet on the still intact portion, it seems strong enough to hold me.

  Glancing at what’s left of my team over my left shoulder, I bark, “Wait until I’m in the center of the bridge. Then you two follow. Leslie, you’re next. Rodney, you follow. Wait until she gets to the center before you even think of proceeding. We need even distribution on this thing.”

  I take another step onto another board. It holds. Then another step and another. The bridge begins to sway and rock with my weight. It feels as though it might capsize entirely, spilling me out into the chasm. But this isn’t my first trek across a rope bridge and I know that the sensation of impending doom is mostly psychological.

  I wave my right arm over my right shoulder.

  “Let’s go!” I demand, knowing in my gut that at any moment, a team of hostiles could wage a second attack on us, especially when we’re so vulnerable. At least, that’s the way I’d do it if I were them.

  I don’t see Leslie enter onto the bridge so much as I feel her. The new weight distribution on the rope bridge is causing the center to bounce up and down, but not severely so. Leslie can’t weigh more than one hundred twenty pounds. It’s Rodney I’m more worried about. He easily tips the scales at two hundred twenty-five pounds. In truth, I should make him wait until Leslie and I are safely across, but time is of the essence.

  “You okay, Les?” I shout.

  “Right behind you, Chase.”

  “You’re not filming, I hope. I just want you to concentrate on your balance.” I turn to catch a glimpse of her. I’ll be damned if she isn’t filming the entire walk across the bridge, while she grips the rope on her left with her free hand. Guess I never realized just how brave my literary agent is. Now I know.

  I’m closing in on the opposite side of the bridge as Leslie reaches the very center, where she aims the camera down at her feet in order to shoot the river rapids hundreds of feet below her. What a show that is going to make; that is, if we survive to produce the tale.

  “Okay, Rodney, you’re next!” I insist, my voice mixing with the roar of the rapids below while echoing off the solid rock gorge walls.

  The big man gingerly steps onto the first plank, then the second. He’s slowly making his way toward the center of the bridge when a wave of razor-sharp-tipped arrows fly directly for us.

  “Holy shit, we’re sitting ducks!” Rodney shouts.

  He picks up his pace as the arrows shoot past his head.

  I turn completely around to eye the opposite bank we just came from, and see another band of hostile natives emerge from the bush, poising themselves before the bridge, combat position. Leslie turns and aims the camera at them in order to get the shot. She’s not only brave. She’s crazy.

  Pulling my pistol from the shoulder holster, I trigger off a burst of rounds that don’t connect with flesh and bone, but hopefully will make them think twice about chasing us over the bridge. Another volley of arrows fly, one of them coming so close to Rodney’s head, he flinches. A few seconds later I can tell by the trickle of blood that the arrow actually nicked his right ear lobe. Anger gets the best of him. He turns, points his AR-15, fires from the hip. He drops the first hostile on the far right.

  The bridge is bobbing up and down.

  Leslie is doing all she can to maintain her balance and shoot the action with Carlos’s camera. I could easily take the few steps to the safety of the bank, but my gut is telling me to help Leslie.

  I don’t take two steps in her direction before the board beneath her feet crumbles.

  23.

  Leslie falls but manages to catch herself with both her arms wrapped around the bottom bridge support ropes. The video camera slips out of her hands, dropping down into the gorge where it’s swallowed up by the rapidly moving water.

  “Chase!” she screams.

  “Leslie, don’t move!”

  Another volley of arrows whip past my head. Rodney shoots at the hostiles again, but what was just a small handful of natives is now turning into an entire army that is not only gathering on the opposite bank, but entering onto the bridge.

  “I can’t hold them,” Rodney shouts.

  “Get out of there. Just get the hell off the bridge.”

  I holster my .45 and arrive to the place where Leslie is hanging. She’s supporting herself by having tucked the bottom rope under both armpits, while her feet dangle in mid-air.

  “Leslie,” I say, holding out my left hand. “You have to take my hand and I will pull you up. Do you understand?”

  She nods.

  “Am I going to die, Chase? What the hell was I thinking by trying to be Robert Capa when I should have been saving my skin?”

  “You’re not going to die. Not on my watch, Les. Now grab on.”

  She goes to lift up her right hand, but the rest of her body slips away. She screams, and once again grabs hold of the rope with both her hands.

  “I can’t do it,” she cries.

  I steal a glance at Rodney. He’s making his way toward us while the hostiles follow. I know there’s no way the bridge is going to support our entire weight, plus the weight of the hostiles. As if to prove it, I see the top rope to my right growing taut, its individual twines beginning to unravel. With each up and down and sideways movement of the bridge, another piece of twine snaps and unwinds, further weakening the rope.

  “You can do it, Leslie. You have to do it.” Once more holding out my left hand. “Now grab hold. I promise I won’t let go. You ready? On three.”

  “On three,” she repeats.

  “One, two …”

  “Three,” she screams, shooting up her left hand, taking hold of mine.

  I pull with all my strength. It’s as if Leslie weighs nothing at all, as her entire torso emerges from beneath the bridge and then sets itself onto the wood plank that’s also supporting my weight.

  The plank cracks. I feel the crack more than I hear it. In a matter of seconds, it too is going to disintegrate and send us both to the bottom of the gorge.

  Another volley of arrows passes.

  Rodney shoots until he can’t shoot anymore.

  “I’m out!” he yells.

  He’s running toward us now, the wood planks snapping and breaking beneath him with each thunderous step. He’s nearly upon us when, to my right, the top rope begins to rapidly unravel at its weakest point, causing the bridge to begin listing dramatically to the right.

  “Chase!” Leslie screams. “We’re going over.”

  “Go!” I shout. “Get to the bank. Crawl
on all fours if you have to.”

  From down on all fours, Leslie speed crabs the final twenty feet to the bank opposite the hostiles. I follow on foot, with Rodney on my tail only a few feet behind me.

  “Jump for it!” Rodney cries.

  I jump.

  He jumps.

  The top rope snaps, causing the bridge to capsize.

  We all fall down.

  24.

  Rodney lands on top of me, knocking the air out of my lungs. He rolls off of me, his AR-15 still gripped in his hands, miraculously.

  “Are we dead?” he says.

  “Yes,” I say, through gasps of breath, “we’re in heaven. Can’t you tell?”

  I manage to get myself back up onto my feet and go to Leslie. She’s standing only a few feet away, her eyes focused on what’s left of the now empty bridge.

  “All those poor people just fell to their death,” she says, through wide, almost shell-shocked eyes.

  “You got a problem with that?” Rodney quips. “They were trying to kill us first, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “We most definitely do not have a problem with it,” I say. “But what I do have a problem with is that it’s going to be mighty tough to find a way back across this gorge.”

  “You’ll think of something,” Leslie says. “You are the fantastic Man in the Yellow Hat.”

  Rodney unclips his rifle, stuffs a new clip into the chamber, slaps it home.

  “No worries, people,” he says, shouldering his weapon. “We’re going to be flying out of this place.”

  I lock eyes onto him.

  “You go with that,” I say. Then, “Okay, let’s mount up and keep going. The light is getting low and we need to find a suitable place to camp before sundown.”

  Together, the three of us enter back into the jungle. A dark and most hostile place.

  25.

  The jungle is so dark in the late afternoon, we’re forced to utilize our LED flashlights to illuminate the narrow path. While Leslie and I grip our flashlights in our respective hands, Rodney uses a headlamp that’s been belted above the brim of his baseball cap.

  The jungle truly comes alive when the sun dies for the day.

  Spider monkeys are hopping from one branch to another, coming close enough to get a good look at us, then scampering off into the leafy cover. All manner of insects crawl up and down the thick trees located on both sides of the trail, while up ahead, Rodney spots a red and black snake, kicking it back into the bush with his boot.

  We move slowly, quietly, careful to listen for any further sign of trouble from hostile natives. But a half hour into the mostly level hike, we encounter nothing other than the symphony of sounds created by birds, monkeys, and insects. When we come upon a clearing where the rooftop canopy gives way to the shine of a waxing moon, I know we’ve found a decent spot to make camp for the night.

  What I’m not aware of until Rodney searches the perimeter of the small square-shaped area, is that the guides beat us here already, and died because of it.

  I reach out and pull Leslie into me, pressing her face against my chest so that she is blinded to the sight of our three guides who have been stripped naked and nailed to three separate trees by their wrists and ankles. Their tongues have been cut out and their bellies have been sliced open below the bellybutton, their intestines having spilled onto the ground. Red army ants have swarmed, gathering all around the raw, sickly purple and yellow intestines, not only devouring the portion that’s on the ground, but also utilizing the hanging pieces of organ as ladders in order to gain access to the tortured men’s eviscerated insides.

  “Holy Christ,” Rodney spits, his voice thick and sick. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. Not even in Iraq. Fucking hostile natives will pay for this. You can count on that.”

  “This isn’t the work of hostile natives,” I say, swallowing something dry and bitter. “They’re trying to kill us simply because we’re trespassing on their territory, simple as that. This here…This is a bit more complicated and it’s the work of someone or something else.”

  “You mean we’re not alone out here?” Leslie says. I feel her shivering and trembling against me. Then, “What I mean is, there’s other people out here than just a bunch of angry men in leather thongs?”

  “What the hell do they want?” Rodney poses.

  I shrug my shoulders. “Could be they want the same thing we want.”

  “But how? No one knows about the aircraft but us.”

  “You don’t know that. But whoever did this knows all about the tortures of war. I used to work with Vietnam vets back in my sandhogging and excavating days. This here … these men crucified to the trees here … it’s an old trick the Communist North Vietnamese used to great effect to warn American GIs to stay away from their territory. The Cuban revolutionaries under Fidel Castro used the same exact tactic against Batista loyalists. It’s their way of warning us to stay away from whatever it is we’re going to find up on that jungle mountain.”

  “You call this a warning?” Rodney says. “I call this cold-blooded murder.”

  “What did these guides ever do to hurt anybody?” Leslie asks.

  “Their only sins are having been in the wrong place at the wrong time,” I say. “The killing is entirely impersonal … a means to an end.”

  Rodney flashes his light on their faces—on their bloodied, tongue-severed, gaping mouths and at facial skin that was once richly dark, but that now has turned pale white. That’s when I can see that the eyes on all three of them are moving.

  “Rodney,” I swallow. “They’re still alive.”

  Gently, I push Leslie away.

  “Turn around,” I demand.

  “Why? What are you going to do?”

  “Just do it, Leslie.”

  Then, pulling out my .45, I take aim and put a bullet apiece into each of their foreheads.

  Things seem to move in slow motion after that, as the sounds of the jungle go silent, and the flash of the discharged bullets burns black holes into our retinas. We just stand there waiting for something to happen. But nothing more can happen, because the guides are now mercifully very dead and very gone. Like a great writer once said, “The dead look so terribly dead when they’re dead.” These three men are no exception.

  “Do we at least cut them down?” Leslie asks, tears running down her face.

  “No,” I say. “For now we leave them and find another spot to camp, closer to the river. We’re exposed and my guess is they’re watching us right now.”

  “You’re really going to just leave them?” Rodney asks, a painful tension in his voice.

  “They’re dead. In the morning we’ll come back, cut them down, and give them a proper burial. For now, staying in one place for too long is just too damned dangerous. I just discharged my weapon three times. That in itself is enough of a giveaway, don’t you think?”

  Rodney bobs his head, runs an open hand up and down his face, as if it’s possible to simply wipe away the fear and disgust he is surly feeling. “What about their supplies?”

  “Leave it,” I say. “We’ll survive on what we have in our packs.”

  He just stands there, looking at me like I’m as evil as the men who truly killed these three guides.

  “Let’s move, Rodney,” I say. “I mean it.”

  “Yes, sir,” he barks, brushing past me so hard, I nearly fall to the ground.

  Rodney goes silent for the next half hour while we trek on through the black jungle, until we come to another clearing where I decide to make camp for what will surely be a long night of no sleep.

  26.

  With our tents gone, along with our sleeping bags, we have to improvise, which means we’ll sleep in our clothing on bare ground made softer by piles of dead leaves and vegetation that we gather up by hand. We make a fire and proceed to boil water in one of the small aluminum cooking pots that Rodney is carrying with him. Once the water is boiled, we pour it into three freeze-dried packe
ts of beef stroganoff.

  Sitting around the fire, we eat in silence. Rather, we force our food down.

  While I stare into the fire, the events of the day haunt me. I go back to the beginning. Flying into the Sacred Valley, spotting two long-haired men sitting in a Jeep. Men who were armed and observing us as we left the landing strip in the truck. That’s when an idea, if not a revelation, hits me.

  “Listen,” I say, after a time. “The attack by hostiles today might not have been the work of the natives themselves.”

  Leslie turns to me, her food still resting in her lap, barely touched.

  “But we witnessed them attacking us. How could it not have been them?”

  “It might have been the work of the Tupac Amaru loyalists who fed a pack of lies to the natives.”

  “Tupac Ama what?” Leslie says. “I thought Tupac was a rapper who died.”

  “The original Tupac was an ancient Incan who resisted the Spanish conquistadors led by Pizarro. His name has been borrowed by a group of Peruvian terrorists who backed a communist, Castro-like revolution in the country. Tupac is a band of butchers who will stop at nothing to get what they want. Or, at least, they used to be. They usually make money by kidnapping wealthy tourists and demanding a huge ransom in exchange for his or her release.”

  “Why doesn’t somebody stop them?” Leslie says. “The army? The government?”

  “The government did stop them for a while, back in the 1990s. But they’ve made a resurgence in recent years along with the rise of ecotourism and all those rich, green, and sustainable tourists who spend thousands to camp out in the rainforest in order to make themselves feel a hell of lot less guilty about crapping up the environment with their SUVs.”

  “I’ve heard of Tupac,” Rodney says, after a time. “They live in the jungle. They are always on the move. Never in one place for very long.”