“That’s the short of it. What you don’t know is the ex-president is back from exile. Rumor is he’s back and has set up shop in Maroantsetra, up the coast. If he manages to put together enough men and guns, there’ll probably be a civil war; if he doesn’t, it’ll be a massacre. Either way, it’s not the best time to be a white face on the island. Around the cities you’re okay, but out here . . .” The Kid shrugged. “Might want to keep a sharp eye out.”
“For what?” asked Remi.
“Mostly guys with AK-47s riding around in pickup trucks.”
“So we should hope we see them before they see us.”
“That would be the idea. Even if not, if you look like you’re more trouble than you’re worth, they might move on. Whenever politics get stirred up like this, the underdogs sometimes look at kidnapping as an income-and-leverage opportunity.”
Sam said, “With luck we’ll be back in Antananarivo before nightfall.”
The Kid smiled. “After you’ve found whatever there is to find.”
“Or find that there’s nothing to find,” Remi added.
SHORTLY BEFORE EIGHT they packed up their gear, trudged up the hillock, took a bearing on 315, then set out single file across the savanna with the Kid in the lead, Remi in the middle, and Sam bringing up the rear with his handheld GPS, which he’d calibrated to bearing/ countdown mode: 1,442 spans of Blaylock’s 7-foot-tall walking staff, which would equal 10,094 feet or 1.91 miles.
“Here’s hoping Blaylock’s staff hasn’t shrunk or expanded in the last hundred thirty years,” Sam called.
“Or that he was no good with a tape measure,” Remi added.
They hadn’t crossed half the savanna before their boots and pant legs were soaked with dew. By the time they reached the edge of the rain forest, the sun’s lower rim had broken free of the eastern horizon; they felt its heat on their backs.
The Kid stopped before the wall of jungle, said, “Wait a moment,” then walked the tree line, first north for fifty yards, then south. “This way,” he called. Sam and Remi joined him. Not surprisingly, he’d found a trail.
Ten feet inside the trees the sun dimmed behind them, leaving only faint stripes and splotches on the foliage around them.
“Fifty-five hundred feet down, forty-six hundred to go,” Sam announced.
They walked on. Soon the grade increased as the terrain began its climb toward the highlands. The trail narrowed, first to shoulder width, then to a foot, forcing them to sidestep and duck in places. The razor-sharp leaves and prickly stalks returned with a vengeance.
The Kid called a halt. “Do you hear that?” he asked.
Sam nodded. “A stream. Somewhere to the left.”
“I’ll be right back.” The Kid ducked off the trail and was swallowed by the forest. He returned ten minutes later. “It’s about thirty yards south. I think it’ll roughly parallel your course. How far to go?”
Sam checked the GPS. “Three thousand feet.”
“Nine thousand on the Madagascar scale,” Remi added with a game smile.
“The stream will be easier going. Just watch out for crocs.”
“You’re kidding,” Remi said.
“Nope. You’ve heard of the Madagascar cave crocodiles?”
“We weren’t sure if they were a wives’ tale or not,” Sam replied.
“Not. Madagascar’s the only place on earth that has them. See, alligators and crocodiles are ectothermic: They rely on the environment to regulate their body temperatures—sun for warmth, water and shade for cool. Our crocs don’t need that. National Geographic was out here a few years ago to look into them, but it’s still a mystery. Anyway, sometimes in the morning they’ll use underground streams to come out to hunt before the sun gets too hot.”
“And we’ll spot them how, exactly?” Remi asked.
“Look for logs floating in the water. If the log’s got eyeballs, it’s not a log. Make a lot of noise, look big. They’ll take off.”
THE STREAM WAS CALF DEEP and sand bottomed, so they made rapid progress, slowly winding down the GPS’s screen until it read 400 feet. The stream curved first south, then back north, then west again, before broadening out into a boulder-lined lagoon. On the west side of the pool a forty-foot-wide waterfall crashed onto a rock shelf, sending up a cloud of spray.
Sam checked the GPS. “Two hundred feet.”
“Bearing?” Remi asked.
In answer, Sam pointed at the waterfall.
AFTER A FEW MOMENTS of silence, Remi said, “Do you see it?”
“What?” replied Sam.
“The lion’s head.” She pointed at the point where the water tumbled off the rock ledge. “The two outcrops are the eyes. Below them, the mouth. And the water . . . If you watch it long enough, some of the streamers look like fangs.”
The Kid was nodding. “I’ll be darned. She’s right, Sam.”
Sam chuckled. “She usually is.”
“Maybe your Blaylock isn’t crazy after all.”
“We’ll see.”
Sam dropped his pack, stripped to the waist, and donned a waterproof headlamp. He clicked it on, pointed the beam at his palm, and clicked it off.
“Just an exploratory probe, right?” said Remi.
“Right. Five minutes, no more.”
“Hold on a second,” the Kid said. He dug into his pack and came out first with a marine flare—“Crocs hate these”—then another revolver, this one similar to his own Webley. “Crocs hate these even more.”
Sam hefted the weapon, studied it. “I don’t recognize it. Another Webley?”
“The Webley-Fosbery Automatic Revolver. One of the first and only wheel-gun semiautomatics. Break-top design, .455 caliber, six rounds. Not much good past fifty yards, but whatever you hit goes down.”
“Thanks,” Sam said. “Exactly how many Webleys do you have?”
“Last count, eighteen. Kind of a hobby.”
“Antique revolvers and rare truffles,” Remi replied. “You are an interesting man.”
Sam shoved the flare into one of his shorts’ cargo pockets, the Webley into the other, then began picking his way around the lagoon’s edge, hopping from boulder to boulder and doing his best to avoid wet patches, a task that became harder the closer he came to the waterfall. When he was within arm’s length of the cascade, he turned, gave a short wave to Remi and the Kid, then ducked into the deluge and disappeared.
Four minutes later he reappeared, hopped onto a nearby boulder, shook the water from his hair, then made his way back to the beach.
“There’s a shallow grotto behind the falls,” he announced. “It’s about twenty feet deep and fifteen wide. It’s clogged with backwash—branches, rotting logs, heaps of grass that’ve formed into a loose dam—but behind all that I found an opening. It’s a horizontal gap, really, like a stone garage door that didn’t close all the way.”
“There goes our streak,” Remi replied with a smile.
“Pardon me?” asked the Kid.
Sam said, “So far on this particular adventure, we haven’t had to go subterranean, which is rare, given what we do. Before there were barable doors and lockable vaults, if you wanted to keep something safe or a secret you had only two reliable choices: bury it or hide it in a cave.”
Remi added, “Still pretty common today. Might have something to do with genetic memory: When in doubt, burrow.”
“So you’ve never had a completely aboveground adventure?”
Sam shook his head. Remi said, “It’s why we stay current on our climbing and spelunking skills.”
“Well, caves are far down my list of favorite places,” the Kid said. “So if you don’t mind, I’m going to let you two have all the fun. I’ll mind the fort.”
Ten minutes later, armed with the appropriate gear, Sam and Remi returned to the waterfall and ducked behind it into the grotto. The sunlight dimmed behind the curtain of water. They clicked on their headlamps.
Sam stepped close to Remi and said over the rush, ??
?Stand to one side. I’m going to see if we’ve got any company. Be ready with a flare.”
Remi stepped to the other side of the grotto while Sam selected a long branch from the dam pile and pulled it free. Systematically, he began probing the debris, jamming the branch’s tip into holes and gaps and wiggling it about. He got no reaction; nothing moved. He spent another two minutes heel-kicking the larger logs, trying to illicit a response, but fared no better.
“I think we’re okay,” Sam called.
They got to work, slowly dismantling the pile until they cleared a path to the rear wall. They knelt before the four-foot-tall gap. A shallow runnel trickled past their boots and across the grotto before joining the waterfall proper.
Sam jammed his branch into the opening and rattled it about. Again, nothing moved. He pulled the Webley from his pocket, leaned forward, pressed his face to the rock, and panned his headlamp from right to left. He straightened up and gave Remi the OK sign.
“Once more into the breach,” she yelled.
“We two, we happy two,” Sam answered in kind.
“Nothing like a little bastardized Shakespeare to set the tone.”
CHAPTER 31
MADAGASCAR, INDIAN OCEAN
THEIR ENTRY WAS THANKFULLY SHORT. AFTER FIVE FEET OF hunched walking, they saw that the rock ceiling abruptly sloped upward and found themselves standing in an elongated oval cavern a hundred feet wide with a thirty-foot-tall, stalactite-riddled ceiling. Their headlamps weren’t strong enough to penetrate more than thirty feet ahead, but from what they could see the space appeared to be loosely divided into “rooms” by mineral columns that shone pearlescent gray and butter yellow in the beams of their lamps. The quartz inclusions in the walls winked and sparkled. The floor, a mixture of jagged rock and silt that crunched under their boots, was split by a narrow, winding creek.
“Seems like a natural place to start,” Sam said, and Remi nodded.
Using the creek’s path as a guide, they began moving into the cave.
“SOMEWHAT ANTICLIMACTIC,” Remi said after a few minutes.
“I know. The day is young, though.”
Their last spelunking adventure had ended with not only the solution of the mystery of Napoleon’s lost cellar but also a discovery that was helping rewrite parts of ancient Greek history.
They continued on, covering a hundred feet, then two hundred. Sam’s headlamp picked out a wedge-shaped wall ahead from whose base the creek gushed. On either side of the wall, a tunnel curved back into darkness.
“Your pick,” Sam said. “Left or right?”
“Right.”
They hopped over the creek and started down the right-hand tunnel. After twenty feet the floor sloped down, and they found themselves standing in calf-deep water. Sam shined his beam over the surface; there was a slight eddying current. They kept walking.
Remi stopped and put her index finger to her lips.
She clicked off her headlamp. Sam did the same.
Then, following ten seconds of silence, a sound: something moving in the darkness ahead. Like leather scraping against stone. More silence, then another sound: like a heavy wet towel striking rock.
Sam and Remi looked at each other and, in near unison, mouthed: Crocodile. The leather was scaled skin rubbing on rock; the wet towel, a heavily muscled tail slapping stone. Splashing.
Heavy feet plodded through water. Sam drew the Webley and pointed it into the darkness. Together, he and Remi clicked on their headlamps.
Twenty feet away and sloshing directly toward them was a crocodile snout; just behind the snout a pair of heavy-lidded eyes staring back at them. Farther back, at the edge of their headlamp beams, they could see a half dozen scaly bodies writhing about, eyes flashing, mouths agape, tails whipping.
“Flare,” Sam said.
Remi didn’t hesitate. With a hiss, the tunnel filled with flickering red light. Remi lowered the flare to knee level and waved it before the oncoming crocodile, which stopped, opened its mouth, and let out a low hiss.
“The Kid was right,” she said. “They don’t care for it.”
“For now. Start backing up. Slowly. Don’t turn your back on it.”
In lockstep, with Remi’s eyes fixed on the approaching crocodile, they began retreating. Sam glanced over his shoulder. “Another ten steps and we’re at the ramp, then the narrow part.”
“Okay.”
“When we get there, plant the flare in the sand. We’ll see how they like that.”
When they reached the spot, Sam patted Remi’s shoulder. She knelt down, jammed the flare into the silt, then stood up and kept back-stepping, with Sam’s hand still on her shoulder. Halfway up the ramp, the crocodile stopped six feet before the hissing flare. It scrabbled first to the left, then to the right, then stopped again. It let out another hiss, then backed down the ramp and into the water. After a few seconds it disappeared from view.
“How long do flares last?” Remi asked.
“That kind? Ten or fifteen minutes. With luck, long enough for us to check the other tunnel.”
“And if not?”
“Then we get to see how good I am with the Webley.”
PAUSING TO LISTEN every ten paces or so, they proceeded down the left-hand tunnel. After forty feet the tunnel suddenly broadened out into a roughly circular chamber. Remi’s headlamp swept over a dark elongated object on the floor. They both started and backpedaled ten steps, their feet skidding in the sand.
Remi whispered, “Was it—”
“I don’t think so.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “Enough to get my heart going, though. Come on.”
They moved forward until their beams again found the object.
“Looks like a rotted telephone pole,” Remi said.
And it did. But almost immediately Sam noticed what looked like a trio of wooden cross braces affixed to the pole, then bindings of some kind, mostly crumbled to dust but intact enough to retain their basic shape.
“It’s an outrigger,” Remi whispered.
Sam nodded and kept panning his headlamp along the cross braces to a point where they merged with an elongated heap of partially rotten wood, this one a few feet longer than the “telephone pole,” and four to five times its diameter.
“Sam, that’s a canoe.”
He nodded. “A big one. At least thirty feet long.” Together, they sidestepped around the craft to the other side, where they found a corresponding cross brace/outrigger setup. The body of the canoe was five feet wide, and four feet tall from keel to gunwale, with a tapered bow and jutting bowsprit and a squared-off stern. At midships, rising eight feet from the hull, was what looked like a shattered mast; the upper part, about ten feet long, lay on the ground, its end propped up on the gunwale. Ahead of the mast the hull was topped by a shallow, double-pitch roof.
“Sam, step back,” Remi whispered.
He followed her back a few paces. She pointed at the ground beneath the vessel. What they’d taken for simply a high point in the floor was in fact a two-foot-high platform constructed of carefully placed stones.
“This is an altar,” he said.
AFTER A QUICK CHECK on their anti-croc flare, which had burned down to the halfway mark, they got busy examining the outrigger, Remi taking in situ pictures for scale and design before moving in for close-ups. Using the tip of his Swiss Army knife, Sam took trace samples of the wood and the bindings.
“Everything’s coated in some kind of resin,” he told Remi, sniffing the material. “It’s thick. At least an inch.”
“That would explain its remarkable condition,” she replied.
Sam stepped over the starboard side outrigger, walked to the gunwale, and peered inside the craft. Lying around the base of the mast was a mound of what he could only describe as decomposed canvas. Mottled brown and gray, the material had partially congealed into a gelatinous mass.
“Remi, you need to see this.”
She joined him at the gunwale. “Big sail,” she said and
began taking pictures.
Sam unsheathed his machete and, with Remi hanging on to his belt lest he fall in, leaned forward and gingerly slid the blade into the pile. “It’s like onion skin,” he muttered. He lifted free a tattered section of the material. Remi was ready with an empty Ziploc bag. As he slid the sample inside, it broke into three sections. Remi sealed the bag and walked back to her pack to deposit it with the other samples.
Sam stepped around to the stern. Jutting from the transom was a bulbous wooden object, like a gnarled football leaning forward on a kickoff tee. Like almost everything else about the outrigger, it took Sam several seconds and several tilts of his head before he realized what he was seeing. Remi came up behind him.
“Our mystery bird,” she said.
Sam nodded. “From the Orizaga Codex and Blaylock’s journal.”
“What did he call it? The ‘great green jeweled bird,’” Remi mused. “Though I don’t think this is what he was talking about.”
She took a dozen pictures of the carving with her digital camera.
“Let’s check the bowsprit,” said Sam. “When it comes to boats, these kinds of things often come in pairs.”
They walked to the bow. As Sam had guessed, the bowsprit also bore a carving, this one in better condition than its counterpart. In fact, the bowsprit itself was the sculpture: a serpent, its mouth agape, feathered plumes streaming backward from its head.
“Sam, do you know what this resembles?” Remi asked.
“No. Should I?”
“Probably not, I suppose. It’s less elaborate and stylized, but it’s the near spitting image of Quetzalcoatl, the Great Plumed Serpent God of the Aztecs.”
“CRAZY LIKE A FOX,” Sam muttered after a few seconds.
“Pardon?”
“Blaylock. Crazy like a fox. Clearly, he hid the Moreau map and the codex together in his walking staff for good reason. He was obsessed with something all right, but it was about more than the Shenandoah or the El Majidi.”