BLACK CITY (Ulysses Vidal Adventure Series Book 2)

by Fernando Gamboa

  “Then… that would mean that she’s here, somewhere close at hand,” he said. He was looking minutely at his surroundings as he spoke as if Valeria might be hiding behind a tree, waiting to surprise him.

  “Or maybe it’s just a lucky coincidence.”

  “Or maybe,” I hinted, “there’s a third possibility we haven’t thought about.”

  They both turned to me at the same time, surprised.

  Cassie raised her eyebrows. “And what might that third possibility be?”

  “I’ve no idea,” I confessed. My gaze strayed toward the seven uniformed men who were already making their way to the foot of the pyramid. “But something tells me we’ll find out soon enough.”

  Ten minutes later we touched level ground again. The man who appeared to be the leader of the group immediately stepped forward with his hand out and a smile on his lips. The smile contradicted his general appearance and that of his men. All seven were in camouflage gear and carrying bulky backpacks, guns, and machetes at their waists. What surprised me the most was their assault automatic guns, like the ones commandos sport in movies, hanging nonchalantly across their shoulders. And that is exactly what they looked like: a small combat unit, rather than a rescue team.

  The leader was as tall as I was, with rather more white hair in his crew cut, a square jaw, and an unmistakable military demeanor. He shook my hand a little too hard, then introduced himself formally with an attempt of a smile.

  “Bom dia. Eu sou teniente Ricardo Souza, e este de aqui,”—he said pointing behind him—“es meu equipe de salvamento de la Unidade Central du Rescate.” He turned toward the men behind him. “Sargento Gerais,” he said pointing at the man closest to him, a lean soldier with a sullen look. “Cabo Nazario,”—a short thickset man who kept looking all around suspiciously—“e o resto da equipa são companheiros Daniel, Fabio, Thiago e Luiziao.”

  The men nodded in acknowledgement as they were named: from wiry, redheaded Daniel; the mountain of muscles that was dark-skinned Luiziao; Fabio and his Mohawk and thick beard; and heavily tattooed Thiago whose nose and mouth were both pierced.

  Regardless of their individual looks, all of them, including Lieutenant Souza himself, were weathered and athletic. They did not strike me as the kind of men who laughed easily.

  I was looking at the initials UCR embroidered in yellow on Souza’s right shoulder when he asked me,

  “E voçe e…?”

  “Ulysses Vidal,” I replied with a big smile, doing my best to ignore his military appearance. “And these are Cassandra Brooks and Eduardo Castillo.”

  The officer took out a small notebook and opened it. He seemed to be checking our names against a list.

  He looked up and realized I was staring at their weapons with distrust.

  “The rainforest is dangerous,” he said with a smile, switching to English as he patted his gun, “and this region is known for its hostile tribes.”

  “A Heckler & Koch MP5,” I quoted from memory. “Isn’t that a bit too much? You look like you’re going to war.”

  “I see you know your weapons,” he said, without answering my question. “Are you a soldier?”

  “Me, a soldier? No, not at all.” I grinned and looked at Cassie guiltily. “I’ve just spent too many hours at the Playstation.”

  He squinted his eyes and said, “As we were coming down I thought I saw a fourth person.”

  “Oh, yes. It’s a Menkragnoti who’s guided us here. For some reason he didn’t want to come down. Natives, as you know—”

  “Will you please ask him to come down?” Souza interrupted.

  The three of us looked back at the top of the pyramid, but to our surprise Iak was nowhere to be seen.

  We called him several times, but he either was not listening or else had decided to ignore us.

  “Don’t worry too much about him, Lieutenant,” Cassie said. He knows how to take care of himself, and he was adamant that he didn’t need to be rescued. If he doesn’t want to come out for the moment, you might as well forget about him.”

  Souza gave her an evaluating look.

  “I can’t do that. My orders are to pick up everybody.”

  “But—”

  He raised his hand to interrupt her. Then, without lowering it, he held up two fingers and pointed at the pyramid.

  Two of the men dropped their backpacks at once, then ran up the pyramid stairs, quickly and with no apparent effort.

  “Excuse me, Lieutenant,” I said. “May I ask you a question?”

  He was standing with his hands behind his back now. “Sure, go ahead.”

  “We’re really surprised and happy that you found us but, how did you do it?” I remembered the possibility Cassie had suggested and added, “Did you receive a call giving our position?”

  “A call?” He leaned forward, obviously interested. “Do you have a satellite phone with you?”

  “We did but we lost it in the river days ago. That’s why we supposed someone else might have called.”

  “Someone else? Does anybody else know you’re here?”

  “Well…We think my daughter’s expedition is somewhere close, and we assumed—” There was desolation in the professor’s voice.

  “Your daughter’s… expedition?” Souza sounded now genuinely surprised. “We had no knowledge of anyone other than you three.”

  “Yeah, sure. Well… we were supposed to be… the rescue team.”

  The lieutenant looked at us with utter disbelief. I was gaunt and bearded, my clothes were torn, and there was so much mud on me that it was difficult to tell where it ended and where my skin began. Cassie and the professor didn’t look much better. In his eyes we must have appeared like three hungry hobos.

  “You’re… the rescue team?” He turned toward his men for a moment, with a tinge of scorn on his lips. His answer was a chorus of stifled chuckles.

  I crossed my arms over my chest in a feeble attempt to recover some dignity. “Then if no one called to tell you where we were, how the hell did you find us?”

  “I was only told your possible coordinates. We came following the established protocol,” he replied formally. “It’s not my business to know how the alert is raised. Just like my team, we only follow orders.”

  “What orders are those?”

  The lieutenant threw his head back. He was about to reply when a metallic voice came out of the walkie-talkie at his belt.

  “Ninguem aqui en cima,” said the voice with a touch of confusion. “O índio está desaparecido.”

  51

  “Let’s see…” Souza said. He joined the tips of his fingers as he sat down on the third step of the stone stairway. “Let’s do an inventory. There’s you three, plus the missing Indian… only one?”

  The professor nodded. “Yes, only one. In fact the rest of his tribe don’t even know we’re here.”

  “Really?

  “It’s a long story…” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “They think we’re on our way downriver, toward civilization.”

  “I see…” He gave a quick look at his men, who had formed a semicircle around us. “And there’s also your daughter, right?”

  “Well, she’s part of an anthropological expedition which we suspect is also here.”

  “Have you seen her?”

  The professor shook his head despairingly. “We haven’t been that lucky.”

  “In that case, why do you think she’s near?”

  “Because of this,” Cassie said. She showed Souza the remains of the yellow raincoat. “We found it in a cave nearby, and we assume it belonged to one of the members of the expedition. And we also found some footprints around.”

  Souza looked at the torn raincoat, tightened his lips, and bowed his head in thought. He seemed to be counting to ten under his breath.

  “Okay…” he muttered. “It’s not what we were expecting, and it’s going to complicate things. Even so, we have no choice but to adapt to these new variables in the operation
.”

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked hesitantly. “Are you going to help us look for the professor’s daughter?”

  The lieutenant raised his gaze and gave us a wide smile. It was something I guessed he did not practice very often.

  “But of course,” he said, and got to his feet. “From now on that’s our main priority.”

  The sun was already climbing high up in the sky as we followed Lieutenant Souza through the scant vegetation, looking for a good place to set up camp. The flood level had gone up during the night, and the lower areas were now under a few inches of water. I decided not to inform my friends about this. I was sure they were already aware of it, and in case they weren’t, there was no point worrying them about something which was beyond our control.

  Souza had taken the lead, followed by one of his men. We came next, with two other soldiers closing the line. The other three had gone scouting in different directions, searching for traces of the other expedition.

  A couple of times I tried to make conversation with Corporal Nazario, but either he was deaf, he did not understand a word of Spanish or English, or he had strict orders not to talk to us. I could not manage to get a single word out of him.

  I heard someone call my name in a whisper. I turned around. Cassandra, who was walking right behind me, immediately motioned me to keep looking ahead.

  “Don’t turn around,” she whispered again.

  I didn’t, but spread my hands in a mute question.

  “I think there’s something wrong here,” she whispered almost inaudibly. “Don’t you think these guys are too… calm?”

  I nearly turned around again to ask what she meant, but restrained myself and shrugged my shoulders instead.

  “They must have seen the whole city from the air,” she said, “and they’ve landed right in front of the monolith. Now we’re walking through an unknown city… and these pendejos are as calm as if they were taking a stroll in the park, as if this were the most normal thing in the world.”

  Like an electric charge, Cassie’s words activated the few neurons I could sometimes lay claim to. I wondered why I had not noticed that little detail before.

  Suddenly it seemed obvious that this particular rescue team did not appear in the least surprised by our surroundings. They barely glanced at buildings that left us breathless, but most of all, none of them— not even Lieutenant Souza—had made any comments about the nature of that awesome archeological site, or its origins.

  As I followed this line of thought, I could only come up with two possible explanations.

  The first one was that they were such good professionals (or dimwits) that they did not allow anything to distract them from their goal. Not even an environment as extraordinary as the one around us.

  And the second one… The second one was so unthinkable that I did not even want to contemplate it.

  I was going over this in my head when the lieutenant gave the order to stop at an area surrounded by trees. It was slightly elevated and hence still free of water. It was not until I caught up with him that I saw a mass of granite which rose in front of us. There was a hollow opening at its base which went further into the rock and lost itself in darkness.

  Souza turned to us, arms akimbo. “This place is perfect. We’ll set up our base camp here. Then we’ll comb the whole area in search of the other expedition.”

  He immediately gave his men a string of orders that might almost have been telepathic. They set to work at once, marking out a perimeter and clearing the land thoroughly. This done, they took out some small packets from their backpacks and, as if it were choreographed, threw them at the ground one by one.

  Like butterflies emerging from their cocoon, the packets opened up and inflated. In a matter of seconds four inflatable fluorescent orange tents occupied the center of the area as if they had just sprouted from the earth. With the addition of a touch of smoke, it seemed to me, it would have made a great magic trick.

  In about ten minutes a whole campsite was all set up before our astonished eyes. In the center they had made a circle of stones, and in this they were rapidly piling wood for a fire.

  Souza bent over one of the bulky backpacks they had brought with them. He opened it, then like a conjuror produced a bulky aluminum envelope. He read the details on the outside, then turned to us. He shook it like a rattle and asked with a sharp grin, “Would anybody care for some macaroni napolitana?”

  52

  We ate our fill. Until that moment I had not realized how hungry I was, and that simple macaroni with dehydrated tomato sauce tasted better than lobster layered with caviar. My two friends were leaning against a tree beside me, satiated and happy, joking about Iak’s chewy dried meat and the roasted snake I had had to carry for miles.

  It was a long time since I had seen them laughing so wholeheartedly. It showed what an ordeal we had gone through during the past few days. Professor Castillo was sitting in the lotus position. He was keeping up a calm, relaxed attitude, trusting that everything was going to be fine now that the rescue team was here. Cassie had also recovered that enthusiastic spark in her eyes and her good humor showed in the form of occasional laughter that drove away the oppressive silence of the forest like a ray of sunlight in the dark.

  Even Souza seemed to have put aside his innate military instincts and had sat down with us. He asked about our adventures and about how we had ended up in that situation, amazed at some of the events and laughing at others when we described certain unfortunate situations we had found ourselves in.

  At that moment, which from the sun’s height I calculated as noon, we were alone with the lieutenant and one of his men. The others had already dispersed through the city, searching for traces that might help us locate Valeria’s team.

  “By the way,” I said to Souza, “there’s a couple of things about you that surprise us.”

  The lieutenant straightened up, making an effort to keep smiling. “Go ahead and ask,” he said. “I’ll try to clear up any doubts you might have.”

  “Okay. First, I can’t stop wondering how you plan on getting us out of here. Parachuting down is relatively easy, but going back up… I can’t imagine how you think you’re going to do that.”

  Souza smiled benignly. With a wave of his hand he dismissed my doubts as he looked at the three of us. “You don’t need to worry about details like that. It’s not the first time we’ve carried out an operation like this. I can assure you, everything’s under control.”

  “But—”

  “Relax,” he interrupted. “It’ll be a sort of surprise.”

  “Okay,” I said, deciding to trust him. “There is one more thing, though.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I was wondering…” I looked at Cassandra briefly. “We were wondering about the fact that you don’t seem at all surprised by everything around us. Do you realize we’re in an unexplored archeological site, and we may be the first people to tell the rest of the world that it exists?”

  “Oh, really?” he said, and looked around as if suddenly noticing where he was for the first time. “I honestly had no idea. None of us know anything about archeology or things like that. I just thought that Inca ruins were something very common all over South America.”

  “This isn’t Inca,” the professor said. “This is a civilization that has remained unknown until now, and its historical value is incalculable. Machu Picchu or Tenochtitlan are nothing more than hamlets compared to this place.”

  “You don’t say?” he said. He got to his feet and brushed down his pants, clearly uninterested. “It’s all fascinating, but if you don’t mind, I’d rather carry on with this subject at some other time. I must get on with organizing my team. You go on and rest, we’ll take care of everything.” He pointed at the enormous mulatto who was keeping watch a short distance away and added, “I’m leaving you with Luizao, so feel safe. I’ll come back before nightfall.”

  He turned away, picked up his weapon, clipped his ra
dio onto his belt, and went into the forest without another word.

  I stood up once Souza was out of sight. “So…” I said. “What are we going to do now?”

  Cassie yawned exaggeratedly, lay down on her lemon-yellow raincoat, and put our little backpack under her head.

  “I could sure use a nap. This is the first time in more than a week we’ve been able to relax without worrying. I’m going to make the most of it.”

  “Don’t you want to go on exploring?”

  “The ruins will still be here in an hour.” She closed her eyes, bringing the conversation to an end.

  “What about you, Doc? Do you also want to lie down and do nothing?”

  He looked at me wearily. “You know, Ulysses… I’m getting old, and these past few days have been exhausting. I think the most sensible thing to do now is to leave the search for my daughter in the hands of professionals. In the meantime we can try to get our strength back.”

  “Well,” I said, pretending to give in as I sat back down on the ground. “If the archeologist isn’t interested in investigating the mysterious Black City, and the grieving father isn’t interested in looking for the daughter who’s lost in the rainforest, who am I to—”

  “Why don’t you shut up for a while?” Cassie said.

  “I only wanted to—”

  “You only wanted to screw around.”

  “Well, baby, affection’s important too.”

  “Fuck off,” she said as she showed me her middle finger and turned over in her raincoat.

  “What… what did you have in mind?” the professor asked, dragging the words out.

  I must have stared at him for a while in surprise. Cassie was right. I had just wanted to tease them a little. I was really just as tired as they were and did not expect either of them to accept. So, I improvised. “Well, I don’t know. Maybe we could go for a walk around, you know, searching and such.”

  The professor clicked his tongue and sighed. He stood up and began to stretch. “You win,” he snorted. “Well then, let’s go. Where shall we start?”