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

by Vincent Zandri

  “Fuck you doing?” Rodney whispers in my direction.

  “Trust me,” I say. Then, to Long Hair. “Would you like to see it?”

  “Yes,” he says, “I would.”

  Lowering my left hand, I pull the map out and toss it at his feet. Keeping his eyes on me, he squats, picks the map up, unfolding it with one hand. When he glances down at it, his eyes light up.

  “This is it, Juan,” he cries. “This is the way to the aircraft. In a matter of hours, the world will stand still in shock over our discovery, and they will fear us.”

  “Now that we have the map, Pedro,” Juan/Military Man says, “shall we shoot the gringos?”

  “Bad idea,” I say.

  “Why is it a bad idea?” Pedro giggles. “You are worthless to me now.”

  “The map doesn’t tell you everything.”

  He squints at me. “How do you mean, everything?”

  “What isn’t written down are the many booby traps and obstacles that will not only prevent you from entering into the cave more than ten feet, they will terminate your life in a most painful way. Trust me, I did my research.”

  “You are bluffing, of course.”

  “Okay, I’m bluffing. Go ahead. Take your chances.”

  Rodney lowers his hands.

  “Hey, you need someone to fly the damned thing, right?” he says.

  The long-haired Pedro shoots a glance at Military Man Juan.

  “¿Qué te parece?” he says. “What do you think?”

  Stepping up to Leslie, rubbing her back with his hand, Juan says, “They lead us to the aircraft. We keep them alive for as long as we need them.” He grins, revealing brown, crooked teeth. “That includes this luscious little lady. She will come in handy later on when we enjoy a drink or two, and a smoke.”

  Leslie locks eyes on me. I wink at her like, Try not to worry.

  “Okay then,” Pedro shouts, while waving the barrel of his weapon at us. “The big negro man cuts away the vegetation while you and the perra follow. Understand?”

  “I understand,” I say.

  “Vamos!” demands the revolutionary.

  Prisoners of the unknown, we walk.

  34.

  The hiking is getting harder, the angle of the climb steeper. The vegetation is also getting thicker so that the machete-swinging Rodney is soaked with sweat after only an hour of bushwhacking. I try to get a look at Leslie, who is walking so close behind me I can almost feel her hot breath on my neck. I know she needs water. We all need water. But the bandits want nothing to do with keeping us hydrated. They want us to show them the way to the mountain, but they also want to keep us as weak as possible. It’s standard operating procedure for a revolutionary band like Tupac, just as it was for Castro’s bandits many decades ago.

  I always chuckle to myself when I see some kid walking the streets of Manhattan or Florence wearing a mayday-red T-shirt that bears the black-stenciled image of a beret-wearing Che Guevara, the bearded revolutionary’s black eyes poised upwards at the heavens. These days The Motorcycle Diaries author is supposed to be cool, but what most people don’t know is the former medical student’s penchant for torturing his prisoners and bleeding them to near death in order to build up his own blood bank. Revolution is a bloody business. Che could have told you all about it. So could Pedro and Juan.

  I can’t see them exactly, but I sense them behind me. Sense their guns. They’re laughing, and speaking rapidly in Spanish so that it’s difficult for me to understand. I’m somewhat fluent in Italian since I spend almost half my time in Florence, and the language is not all that different from Spanish. But when it is spoken too quickly, I am easily lost.

  One thing I know for sure, however: If Rodney, Leslie, and I can stay healthy long enough, I will find a way to kill these men. Exactly how remains a mystery. But this is the jungle and the jungle poses many dangers. The key will be to capitalize on just one of them.

  We walk for another hour.

  “I need to stop,” Leslie whispers from behind. “I can’t go on.”

  “Are you sure?” I say, surprised to find my own voice a hoarse whisper.

  Rodney must be able to make out our conversation, because he stops swinging at the vegetation, which earns him the ire of long-haired Pedro.

  “Hey you, stupido!” the rebel shouts, running uphill toward us with his AK-47 out front. “Why you stop?”

  “We need rest and water,” Rodney says, his hand clutching the machete, the long metallic blade bouncing gently off his khaki-covered knee.

  “He’s right,” I say, feeling the sweat pouring off my body. “We need water. Especially the woman.”

  Military Man Juan comes up on us.

  “We keep moving,” he insists. “No stopping.”

  “The ladies want water,” Pedro mocks. “Isn’t that right, ladies?”

  “Sure,” I nod. “Whatever you say, jefe.”

  Pedro pokes the gun barrel in my gut—a gut that’s still sore from the gun butt he jammed in it not too long ago.

  “You call me, boss, huh?” he says. “I like it when you call me boss. Let me show you what your boss is capable of, gringo.” Raising his weapon, he takes aim at Rodney, fires, hits him square in the chest. Then, turning fast, he grabs Leslie by the head of her hair. He shoves her down to the ground, pulls her T-shirt up and over her breasts, yanking her bra off with it. Stuffing his face into her face, he tries to kiss her.

  “Stop, you son of a bitch!” I shout.

  That’s when Military Man Juan raises up his AK-47, triggers a bullet that whizzes past my head like a hornet.

  To the left of me, Rodney is struggling to stay alive, a small geyser of arterial blood pouring forth from the center of his chest. To my right, Military Man Juan is aiming the black barrel of his assault weapon at my head while hungrily watching his partner commit rape. Directly before me, Leslie is on her back, struggling to stave off Pedro’s bearded face and hands.

  “Give it to her,” Juan chants, the smile on his face wide and beaming. “Give it to her and then I give it to her.”

  Leslie lifts her head, opens her mouth, and chomps down on Pedro’s bottom lip. The lip explodes in blood. Pedro screams, raises his right hand high, and brings it swiftly down, slapping Leslie hard. She lets loose with a high-pitched scream that rattles my bones. Then she spits in his face. Once more raising his right hand while holding her to the jungle floor with his left, he makes a tight fist which he uses to punch her square in the face.

  “I’m going to kill you for this!” Leslie shouts.

  My heart beating in my throat, I am helpless to do anything about it.

  Or am I?

  Out the corner of my left eye, I spot Rodney’s machete. It’s lying in the grass only a few feet to the left of me. With Pedro entirely occupied and Juan absorbed in the action, it might be possible to shift myself to the left. I don’t hesitate to do it. Sliding my booted feet on the damp grass, I inch my way toward the machete. Juan might be aiming the gun at me, but thus far he has no idea what I’m doing. It takes maybe thirty seconds for me to cover the few feet to the blade, but I manage it without drawing the attention of either two bandits.

  I drop down onto my belly, reach out, grab hold of the blade’s grip.

  Juan turns to me.

  “Stupid fucking gringo!” he snaps, shouldering his weapon, firing off a burst that hits the ground only a half inch before my head, sending dirt flying up into my face.

  Pulling myself up to my knees, I bark, “Leslie!”

  Then I toss the blade into the earth directly beside her right hand. As if anticipating my every move, she grabs the machete grip with her right hand, yanks it out of the ground, swings the blade against Pedro’s left elbow. The blade impales itself halfway into his arm, causing him to shriek like a monkey while jerking his torso up and off of Leslie. She pulls the blade out of his elbow and swings it again, taking his left hand clean off at the wrist.

  Military Man Juan fires at me again
, but the bullets shoot wildly into the trees. He makes the mistake of pouncing on Leslie, while a crying and screaming Pedro rolls off of her onto his back, his nub of an arm spurting dark arterial blood like a fire hose. Juan lifts the stock of his rifle and brings it down towards the center of Leslie’s forehead. But she manages to shift at precisely the right moment, the butt landing instead into the soft earth.

  “Eat this, asshole!” Leslie barks, as she whips the blade across the base of Juan’s neck. The blade impales itself into the meat, bone, and cartilage, until the furious Leslie pulls it back out and swings once more, severing his head entirely. Leaning herself up onto her left elbow, she stares down into the still alive face on the amputated head. Juan is trying to speak, his dark eyes bulging and wide and fully aware that he’s been decapitated. With a smile on her face, she puckers her lips, and as a final gesture of her disgust for the Tupac revolutionaries, spits in his eyes.

  I crab my way over to Leslie.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “I’m good,” she says. “Watch out for asshole number two.”

  Locking eyes onto Pedro, I see him turn onto his stomach. He’s crawling away from us on an empty patch of brown earth. Raising himself up awkwardly onto his feet, he tries to run away. But something stops him dead. He turns to us, his stub gripped in his right hand, the blood still spilling out. It’s not hard to see that he is sinking. The area of brown earth he’s stepped into isn’t stable soil.

  It’s quicksand.

  By the looks of it, clay quicksand, which is not uncommon for this part of the jungle. The look on Pedro’s scraggily bearded face is one of horror and shock.

  Eyes wide, he pleads, “Help me! Please!”

  Leslie turns to me.

  “Should we shoot him?”

  I glance back at him just as his legs disappear.

  “What the hell,” I say.

  Taking hold of Juan’s AK-47, I plant a bead on him. I’m just about to fire a life-ending burst into him when something extraordinary happens. I make out a large commotion in the vegetation as a jaguar jumps out, impaling its fang-filled jaws into Pedro’s neck. The rebel’s screams are muted as the cat’s long teeth enter into his neck, piercing his voice box. The five-foot-long, muscular, black-spots-on-gold-furred cat must have smelled his blood. The cat somehow manages to yank him out of the quicksand without sinking into it herself. The last vision we have of Pedro the revolutionary is of his being dragged off into the brush, his wide black eyes locked onto us the entire way.

  Dropping the AK-47, I roll onto my back beside Leslie.

  “There’s gotta be an easier way of doing book research,” I say.

  35.

  There’s no time to waste as we pull ourselves back up onto our feet and go to Rodney’s aid. But as soon I lay eyes upon him…upon his chest…I can see that he’s already gone. The flow of blood coming from the entry wounds in his sternum has abated, all movement ceased, any signs of breathing a historical fact. I take a knee, place my fingers to his jugular, and confirm his death.

  Running my open hand gently over his eyes, I close his lids.

  I stand.

  “It’s just you and me now, Leslie,” I say. “Still want to go on?”

  She’s pulling down her shirt and straightening out her hair with both her hands.

  “Everyone has been killed but us,” she says. “We stop now it wouldn’t be like giving up on us. It would be like giving up on our team.”

  I nod.

  “I agree and I love you for that.” I pause for a moment while glancing up at the treetops and the rays of brilliant sunshine pouring through them. It’s as if I’m looking directly into heaven itself. Then, lowering my head, refocusing my gaze on my agent’s beautiful face, “Whatever’s out there, Leslie…Whatever it is that is protected inside some cave that’s been bored of some unknown mountain, it is so important and so precious that men are willing to murder for it.”

  Leslie exhales, wipes the beaded perspiration from her brow with the back of her hand, a hand still stained with the blood from the savage who tried to rape her. “I’m sure that whatever is out there deep inside this unforgiving jungle is so incredibly priceless that whoever takes possession of it will be wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.”

  I shake my head.

  “It’s more than that, Leslie,” I say, setting both my hands on her shoulders. “Way more. The Condor is not just a priceless antiquity. If it is a golden aircraft and it’s operational…if it actually flies…then we are about to uncover something that’s going to pretty much turn the world upside down.”

  “But will people believe us? Believe in the Condor? And is it something we should expose to the world? An object that challenges not something as simple as the history of aviation but the fucking foundations of western civilization and its religion. This isn’t about an old plane, Chase, it’s about God. The existence of this plane will destroy him if we let it.” My agent, inhaling, shakes her head. “Just what the hell is it we’re about to pull the lid off of?”

  “Leslie,” I say, raising my eyes back up at the sun, “what we’re about to uncover is nothing less than a portal that leads directly to our makers.”

  “God,” she states.

  “Maybe God,” I say. “Or maybe something else entirely. Something we’ve been confusing with God for centuries.”

  Before we move on, I dig through Rodney’s pockets, find his wallet and his unsecured cell phone. I look at the face of his cell, and I can see that for as many times as he’s called Keogh III there have been no return calls. I search his texts, and I can see it’s the same story. Flipping over to his Gmail, the story of one-sided communications repeats itself yet another time.

  I store the phone and wallet inside one of my cargo pants’ pockets.

  “Are you going to alert your employer about the recent deaths?” Leslie says, while picking up Rodney’s AR-15 from off the ground. “He really should know.”

  I shake my head. “He’s been oddly if not disturbingly out of reach so far. And I’m not sure why.”

  “One would think he’d be in touch with you every step of the way.”

  “True that. But there’s something about his lack of communication that bothers me more than his simply not returning our calls or texts.”

  “And that is, Chase?”

  “Something tells me that going in search of this ancient aircraft, as out of this world important that it is, is not the walk in the park it was originally made out to be.”

  “There are Rodney’s and Carlos’s dead bodies to prove it, not to mention three crucified guides and one badly decapitated revolutionary.”

  “And that’s just a partial list of casualties, which tells you what?”

  She places the AR-15 strap over her shoulder.

  “I think I know what you’re getting at, Chase,” she says, her dark eyes wide and unblinking. “This is a suicide mission, isn’t it?”

  Me, exhaling. “Keogh never had any intention of our returning. He only wanted to use us to confirm that the Golden Condor does indeed exist inside a cave in an uncharted mountain.”

  “So what the hell should we do now?”

  “We do what we came here to do. We find the plane and then we fly it out of here. After that, you’re going to get me paid, per my signed agreement with Peter Keogh the Third.”

  “Fly it how? Rodney’s dead.”

  “We’ll think of something.” I smile. “After all, I’m the Man in the Yellow Hat. Now, let’s walk.”

  With me in the lead, we make for the mountain where Peter Keogh II was last seen alive more than three-quarters of a century ago.

  36.

  Luck is on our side.

  The thick vegetation that plagued us for miles thins out the closer we come to the base of the mountain. For some inexplicable reason, my mind wanders. Almost like it were yesterday, I can still recall working side by side with my dad. I was the young digger right out of college and he was the seasoned p
ro who, at that time, was maybe two or three years younger than I am now. His idea of on-the-job training was to toss me behind the sticks of an old yellow Caterpillar backhoe with the order of, “Just do it.” Even now I think Nike stole their ad campaign from him.

  But my dad’s philosophy was a simple one.

  Digging wasn’t a matter of placing a big shovel into the ground and coming up with a pile of dirt. It was all about the feel, the instinct, the gut you developed over time for making the right moves. Excavating was like sex. One required gentility, passion, and the entire giving over of one’s self in order to make the earth move. And there was no better way for that to happen than to simply get digging, and to learn from your mistakes along the way.

  In the end, Dad was right. After two or three busted gas lines that nearly blew me up along with them, and four or five severed electrical lines and one or two serious cave-ins, you learn to develop a sixth sense about precisely where your big hard shovel is supposed to go and where it’s not meant to go.

  Later on, when we put our digging talents to use in the sandhogging/archeological trade, we also developed a gut for knowing the best productive places to dig as opposed to those that would surely turn up empty. You learn to recognize that little voice inside your head that says, “X marks the spot.” Right now, as we exit the jungle and come upon the giant rock of a mountain, I hear that voice loud and clear.

  “My God in heaven,” Leslie whispers.

  “He would most definitely have had something to do with this,” I say, as I slowly raise my head to take in the entirety of the colossal wall of black stone which stands before me. “He or a race of ancient beings who were not of this earth anyway.”

  “Maybe God and these so-called ancient beings are one and the same.”

  “Maybe.”

  The cliff face must top off at one thousand vertical meters, past the tree line, its summit hidden behind thick gray-white clouds. What’s immediately apparent is that the stone face hasn’t formed naturally, but like many of the rock carvings on Machu Picchu, have been chiseled out by someone or something. “Stone face” isn’t an indiscriminate term, as the cliff has been carved to resemble a man. But not just any man. This man is most certainly wearing a headdress of sorts. Only, not a true headdress. More like a helmet that covers the entire head and face with a glass visor for protection. Projecting from out of the top of the helmet is something that resembles a hose. A hose for transporting oxygen to the helmet, much like an astronaut would require.