They lingered in the noonday heat, reveling in the exquisite intimacy. All of their previous heated lovemaking had only prepared them for this, for the slow ecstasy that caught them in its grip and wouldn’t let go. Her senses were almost painfully heightened. Every brush against her skin made her moan with delight; he lazily licked her nipples and her wild, strained cry sent birds fluttering skyward in alarm. Time meant nothing. She wanted this moment never to end.
But it did. It had to; it was too intense to be sustained for long. Afterward he lay beside her, relaxed and drowsy, his hand rubbing absently on her stomach as if, she thought wryly, she were an alligator to be soothed into sleep.
She didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to ask why. She was afraid she would cry if she did. Emotion swelled in her chest until it was difficult to breathe. She loved him so much.
She thought perhaps they dozed, one of those periods of deep unconsciousness from which she awoke feeling as if no time had passed, though she knew it had. The sun had slipped from its zenith, the burning rays angling to reach beneath the roof. Ben stirred and stretched, then rolled to his knees and pulled up his pants.
She expected one of his provoking, smart-ass remarks, or at least a certain smugness, but his expression, though relaxed now, was still somber. He lifted her to her feet with that effortless strength of his and held her locked in his arms for a long minute, his cheek resting on top of her head. Then he kissed her, hard, and said, “Let’s get you dressed before someone comes by.”
“We haven’t seen anyone since we passed that shack, and we haven’t seen another boat all day.”
Now that familiar grin showed itself again. “I thought you had a streak of exhibitionism in you, prancing around the way you did in front of the Yanomami.”
She burst into laughter. “That was your idea.”
“Yeah, but I thought you’d keep your undershirt on.”
“It needed washing, too.”
She dressed while they bantered back and forth, and then they decided they were hungry. She made a quick fish stew, simply stirring together the canned ingredients and bringing the mixture to a boil. Their appetites were easily satisfied these days, for they had become accustomed to a sparse, plain diet. Probably a full restaurant meal would have made them both sick. Their stomachs would have to be reaccustomed to civilization, too.
Ben started the engine and backed the boat away from the bank, then carefully turned it around and began idling out of the cove into the river channel. He saw another boat coming downriver and pushed the throttle out of gear so it could pass by ahead of them.
Jillian stared at the oncoming boat, shading her eyes with her hands. “That boat’s built just like ours,” she said. “It looks like our other boat.” She narrowed her eyes and focused on the boat pilot, noting the massive shoulders and too-little head. “Dutra!” she gasped, in mingled horror and disbelief.
Ben shoved the throttle all the way forward and the boat surged in response, the motor roaring. At the same time Dutra must have realized whom he was overtaking, for he too pushed the throttle to full power.
“Get down,” Ben said automatically. “And slide my pistol up here to me.” Damn it, he was almost never without that pistol within reach whenever he was on the river, but this was one of those rare times. Violently he wished for a rifle.
Dutra fired, but he was too far away for accuracy and the bullet zinged overhead.
Jillian got Ben’s pistol and crawled on her hands and knees, staying well below the sides of the boat, out of sight, until she could reach up and place it in his outstretched hand. “Get back. He’ll shoot at me, since I’m the only one he can see.”
“Then you get down too, idiot,” she snapped, tugging at his pants.
The boats were surging toward each other at an angle, at full power. Ben spun the wheel sharply to the right, hoping to save a few precious seconds, if only they didn’t run aground on one of the numerous snags. The movement slung Jillian off balance, and she rolled into the boxes of supplies. Dutra fired again, and this time the bullet splintered the wood railing.
Ben lifted the pistol and fired, but Dutra dodged to the side. Ben shot once more, swiftly adjusting his aim. It would be pure luck if he hit anything, with both the target and his shooting platform bouncing across the water like broncos, but he could keep Dutra down.
Jillian struggled to her knees. Two bullets pierced the wooden side of the boat, and she hurled herself flat on the deck.
Ben returned fire, the shots cracking on the water. The stench of gunpowder drifted to her nostrils.
They swung into the river channel only twenty yards ahead of Dutra. Ben went down on one knee and turned to face the stern, which was open except for the toilet facility taking up roughly the same amount of space as a phone booth. Dutra was directly behind them, the other boat so close that it was inside their propeller wash, and gaining on them in the smoother water. Ben fired and hit the wheel, but Dutra had ducked again.
Ben looked forward just in time to swerve around a big log; Dutra, following in the propeller wash, had an easier time of it as the wash pushed the log away from him. He pulled even closer.
Ben swore violently. He couldn’t steer the boat at top speed and at the same time trade gunfire with Dutra behind them. He had to get the son of a bitch before a lucky shot hit him in the middle of the back, and Jillian was left to face Dutra alone.
“Jillian, you’ll have to steer the boat! Can you do it?”
She didn’t hesitate, but crawled forward. “Be careful!” she yelled over the roar of the motor.
“You be careful! Stay down as much as possible, and to the side so you aren’t in his direct sights.”
She did as he said, crouching to the side with one hand on the wheel, her head lifted just enough to peer over the bow. Ben swiftly crawled to the stern of the boat, staying behind the cover of the toilet housing.
A shot made him go flat on his belly, and he felt the boat shudder beneath him. He rose to his knees and fired three quick shots. Dutra screamed and fell to the side, but instinct told Ben it hadn’t been a solid hit. He’d just grazed him. He waited, nerves stretching, and was ready a few seconds later when Dutra popped back up, his arm outstretched and steady, pistol muzzle flashing. Ben fired simultaneously. Dutra screamed again, holding his shoulder, and slumped to the side.
The boat shuddered wildly, and the motor’s rhythm caught. The son of a bitch had been shooting at their motor instead of at them! The other boat kept coming, throttle locked forward, wheel secured so it didn’t veer.
“Hold on!” Ben roared, lunging toward the bow. “He’s going to ram us!”
Jillian cast a frantic look over her shoulder, feeling the wheel trying to tear out of her grip as the motor coughed and locked with metal grinding against metal. Desperately she pulled on the wheel with all her might, trying to turn out of Dutra’s path. Sluggishly the boat swung to the side, without power, and almost immediately the other boat slammed into them. She was sent sprawling across the deck, her head crashing hard into the side. She saw Ben grab a roof pole at the last second, and that was all that saved him from going overboard.
She had turned the boat enough that it wasn’t a head-on collision. The other boat plowed into them from the right rear, violently swinging them around. The stern of Dutra’s craft swung forward, the motor still churning, still driving. Wood splintered; the bow of the other boat and the stern of their boat ground together, collapsing the structures, combining the two watercraft like two clumps of clay jammed together. The force shattered the wheel and throttle of the second boat, and the engine died.
The sudden silence was so complete, so nerve-racking, that it was only then she realized how loud the crash had been. Dazed, she tried to stand up, but everything was swimming around her and she sagged to her knees.
All of the supplies had been scattered over the deck. Ben had dropped the pistol on impact, but luckily it hadn’t gone overboard. He snatched it up, whirling towa
rd the stern of the boat, every muscle tense. “Are you okay?” he asked tersely.
“Yes,” she said, though she wasn’t sure. She would manage.
He struggled toward the rear of the boat, where the other boat had overridden their craft and smashed it to splinters. Black water was beginning to lap up over the deck toward the bow. Both boats were taking on water.
“Get the raft and inflate it,” he called over his shoulder.
She fought off her dizziness and scrambled across the sloping deck toward the raft. The degree of list increased almost by the second, it seemed. They would have only a few minutes, at most, to get off the boat.
Water lapped over Ben’s boots. He pushed a section of wrecked bow aside. Where was Dutra? If he had been in the bow, he should be dead, because that entire section was in splinters. He’d been tagged, twice. There was a piece of wood with blood on it.
But there was no Dutra, dead or alive. No sign of movement, no sound other than the creaking of wood as the boats rose and fell on the waves.
The impact could have thrown him overboard. If he had been unconscious, he was now dead. Could he have made it to shore, unnoticed, in that short length of time? Ben looked closely at the bank, searching for a fern frond waving with slightly more force than it should, signaling that something had brushed by it. But everything looked normal; the butterflies were flitting undisturbed.
He turned back to the wreckage, but the boats were so splintered, so ground together, that it would be impossible to search it in the few minutes they had left before the whole thing went under. He knew there was a possibility that Dutra was clinging to the wreckage on the other side, but he simply didn’t have time to find out. They had to get the raft inflated, load supplies, and get off the boat.
The water was at mid-calf now. He sloshed through it up the steeply slanting deck to where Jillian had dragged the raft out onto the bow where she could have room to inflate it. There was a pressurized air tank attached to the side of the boat for just that purpose; she had undamped the tank and dragged it forward, also, and attached the nozzle to the raft.
Ben helped her to brace the raft and she opened the valve. Air spewed into the raft with a violent hiss, swelling it to plump proportions in less than thirty seconds. It was big enough to hold six people, and it was all they could do to hold on to it. Quickly she shut off the valve and Ben closed the plug. Swiftly he looped the attached rope around the roof pole and shoved the raft overboard.
“Get in,” he said, and Jillian scrambled over the rail and into the raft.
Ben gave her the pistol. “Keep a sharp eye,” he said. “I couldn’t find Dutra. He may have drowned, but we don’t know for sure.”
She nodded, holding the raft close to the boat with her left hand on the railing, while the pistol was in her right.
Ben grabbed his backpack and tossed it into the raft. He sure as hell wasn’t going to leave the diamond behind, and they’d need the tent again. He handed the small outboard motor over the railing to her. It weighed a good fifty pounds, but she managed it even without letting go of the pistol. Damn, what a woman! He got the gas tanks, loaded them, then began grabbing boxes of supplies and tossing them over the railing, while Jillian set the motor into the brackets made to hold it.
The boat lurched, and tipped sharply upward. “That’s enough,” she said. “Come on.”
“Oars,” he said, and tossed them aboard.
She gave him a furious look. “The oars and the motor should have been first. Come on, now.”
Figuring he had better obey, he unlooped the rope from the pole, then swung his legs over the rail and slipped into the raft.
Swiftly he moved to the stern and attached the gas tanks to the motor, squeezing the bulb to pump the gas. Over his shoulder he said, “Get a fresh clip from my pack. My gun’s almost empty.”
Jillian moved cautiously to the pack so she wouldn’t rock the raft.
“In the front pocket, the one fastened with Velcro,” he instructed. Praying, he pulled the cord and the motor coughed. He pulled again, three times in rapid succession, and the little motor fired, caught, then settled into rhythm.
Jillian found the fresh clips and took one out, but her searching fingers had felt something curious in the middle section.
Gurgling, the two smashed boats settled deeper into the water. Ben shoved them away, and used the tiller to guide the raft to a safe distance. As they pulled away, he sharply surveyed the wreckage, but there was still no sign of Dutra. He swung the craft in a complete circle around the boats, to no avail. Probably Dutra was on the bottom of the river, already being added to the food chain.
He settled next to the tiller, his thoughts already turning to the chore of getting them down this big river all the way to Manaus in a raft.
Jillian was searching through his backpack. He bit off a curse as, with a puzzled expression, she lifted out something wrapped in a handkerchief. The cloth fell away, and the sun was caught and splintered into a thousand bloodred rays.
She lifted dazed eyes to him. “It’s the Empress,” she blurted. “You found it.”
21
Why didn’t you tell me?” she babbled. “It makes sense that you would hide it from everyone else, but why didn’t you tell me?”
Swiftly he cut the power down to idle and locked the tiller in place. She was still sitting there, holding the diamond on her lap. Even as roughly shaped as it was, it was gorgeous. The size of it still stunned him, and evidently Jillian was just as stunned because all she could do was stare at it.
Moving quickly, he retrieved his pistol and the extra clip, shoving the weapon into his waistband and the clip in his pocket. Then he took the diamond from her unresisting hands and rewrapped it in the handkerchief before placing it once more in the backpack. Still without speaking, he carried the pack with him when he returned to the tiller and resumed his seat.
Jillian was no dummy. Far from it. She looked at the pack and at him, and her eyes narrowed. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“You know what’s going on. I found the diamond,” he said flatly.
“Kates saw you with it that morning, didn’t he? That’s why he started shooting.”
“Yes.”
He increased the throttle and they picked up speed. The noise made conversation impossible. Jillian sat in the bow, the wind whipping her hair around, and silently watched the river for a while. Ben began to hope she was going to leave well enough alone, but then she stirred herself and moved to sit close enough so that he could hear her.
“I had to leave the film and all my notes behind,” she said. “I have no proof of the Stone City or the Anzar. The diamond is a way of convincing people that the Anzar really existed. It’ll get their attention, force them to listen to me. They’ll send in another expedition, at least, and Dad will be vindicated. And maybe I’ll be able to retrieve Rick’s body.”
“I’ll take you back,” he said impatiently. “You don’t need the diamond to prove anything.”
She just looked at him, those green eyes unwavering. “And I suppose you’re going to finance the trip.”
“Yes.” He jerked his head toward the pack. “I’ll have plenty of money from that thing.”
“No, thanks,” she said. “I won’t use that kind of money.”
Fury boiled in him. “What do you mean, ’that kind of money’? It isn’t blood money. The diamond itself isn’t proof of anything, except that Brazil has some damn big diamonds. I can use it to finance an expedition back to the Stone City and still make myself a big profit. You want to use it to convince a bunch of stuffed shirts to mount an expedition, and to benefit yourself at the same time by clearing your old man’s name. I may be stupid, but I don’t see a whole hell of a lot of difference there, except my idea is a lot smarter!”
“The diamond belongs to the Brazilian people,” she said, “just as the pyramids belong to the Egyptians. Or do you think it was all right for grave robbers to loot the burial chambers in th
e pyramids? For history to be destroyed?”
“There’s a slight difference here, sweetheart. The diamond is the least important part of the Stone City. The temple, those damn eerie statues, the city itself, even that damn bowl it’s in—that’s what’s important, what people like you will be studying for the next hundred years. The diamond is meaningless.”
“It’s a priceless artifact.”
“Artifact!” He gave her an incredulous look. “It’s a shiny rock that people like to wear in jewelry. Put a garnet in the niche above the tomb and it would have the same meaning. What do you say that’s what we do? Even a garnet the size of an ostrich egg wouldn’t put a dent in what the diamond will sell for.”
Her face was stony, unyielding. “Taking it is stealing.”
“Ah, shit,” he said in disgust. “Damn it, Jillian, do you think I went to all the trouble to get the damn thing just to turn it over to someone who didn’t lift a finger to retrieve it? We risked our lives to find that place.”
“You were paid to do exactly what you did,” she pointed out. “And you couldn’t have found it without me. In fact, I would have found it instead of you, if you hadn’t talked me into playing decoy while you sneaked off.”
“I didn’t expect to find anything.”
“Why not? Everything else was where I’d said it would be.”
“I’m not handing over the diamond,” he said coldly. “Give it up.”
“Are you going to throw me overboard?” she demanded. “All I have to do is contact the authorities when we get to Manaus.”
“How are you going to prove I have it?” His blue eyes were icy.
Jillian subsided in impotent rage. She knew exactly what would happen if she went to the authorities. They would check into it, and turn up the information that her father had been full of wild schemes, and that she was a chip off the old crackpot. They wouldn’t take her seriously. They would assume she had made the story up in order to attract publicity for a wild-goose chase that would, like all of her father’s adventures, turn up exactly nothing.