The Argentine side was almost identical, except there were at least five hundred soldiers garrisoned there, and they had strengthened their position by deploying search lights on spidery towers to sweep the black river, and strung thickets of concertina wire on the dirt road connecting the two towns. The satellite pictures showed two slim boats tied to the pier near where it looked like the military was headquartered. To Juan’s eye they appeared to be Boston Whalers, and, if he had to guess, they were probably armed with machine guns and possibly grenade launchers. They would be a problem if things got hairy.
Keeping close to the bottom, but not touching it so the hull didn’t disturb the silt and leaves and kick up a telltale wake, the men swam through the formidable gauntlet. They knew they had reached the Argentine position when a shaft of light pierced the dark water. They were too deep and the river too muddy for anyone on shore to see them, but they steered away from the silvery glow anyway. On the surface, the two men in the tower watched whatever the beam revealed—empty water slowly flowing southward.
Cabrillo and the team remained submerged for another hour, only coming up when the border was miles behind them. It took another hour of drifting silently to reach a nameless tributary seen earlier from the satellite pictures. This time, the men had to work against the current, wrestling the unwieldy craft against the flow. Twenty minutes of struggle gained them only a hundred yards, but Juan called a halt, judging they were far enough upstream to keep them from potentially prying eyes.
He sighed as he stripped off the heavy Draeger set and laid it into the half-sunk boat. “That feels good.”
“My fingertips look like white prunes,” Mark complained, holding them up to the moonlight.
“Quiet,” Juan admonished in a whisper. “Okay, boys, you know what’s next. The quicker we get it done, the more shut-eye we get.”
The steel plates used to lower the RHIB’s profile weighed fifty pounds each, a not-unreasonable load for men in peak physical condition, but there were hundreds of them that had to be lifted over the gunwale and dumped into the river. The men worked like machines, Jerry Pulaski especially. For every plate Murph or Mike Trono got over the side, he moved two. Slowly, so slowly, the boat began to emerge like some slimy amphibian from the primordial ooze. Once the sides cleared the surface, Murph engaged a battery-powered pump. The steady stream of water sounded like a babbling brook.
It took an hour, and when they were finished all four rolled onto the still-wet deck and lay like dead men.
Juan was the first to rouse himself. He told his men to sleep, and let Jerry know he would have second watch. The night sounds of the jungle were punctuated by the occasional snore.
Two hours later, shortly after dawn, the RHIB left the small tributary and returned to the river proper. The air cells they had emptied remained limp, but on such smooth water, and with such a light load, it wouldn’t affect the boat’s capabilities.
The four men now wore Argentine combat fatigues with the insignia of the Ninth Brigade and their trademark maroon berets. The Ninth was a well-trained and -outfitted paramilitary unit that answered only to General Corazón. In other words, a death squad.
Pretending to be a Ninth Brigade officer, Cabrillo knew he would be able to talk them into or out of any situation that could arise.
He stood at the RHIB’s helm, wearing aviator-style glasses favored by members of the Ninth, his beret at a cocky angle on his head. Behind him, the twin outboards threw up a volcanic wall of white froth while the bow planed over the still surface like a rocket. Mike and Murph stood at his sides, Heckler and Koch machine pistols, a Ninth Brigade staple, slung across their backs. Jerry was still curled up on the fiberglass floorboards like a dog, somehow able to sleep despite the motor’s roar.
The speedometer quivered just below forty miles per hour.
Twenty minutes downriver, they came to their first village. It was impossible to tell how long ago it had been destroyed—the amount of vegetation creeping into the burned-out shells of thatched huts led Juan to think months rather than weeks. Land behind the village that had been cleared for agriculture was also succumbing to the jungle’s intractable advance.
“I know what those guys must have felt going upriver in Apocalypse Now,” Mike said.
There were no bodies lying on the ground—animals had seen to that shortly after the assault—but the savagery was still in clear abundance. The hamlet’s score of cement-block buildings had been destroyed by high explosives. Chunks of concrete had been blown as far as the river’s edge, and the few remaining sections of wall were riddled with machine-gun holes. There were countless impact craters from the mortar fire used to drive the frightened people into their fields, where the Argentines would have set up a perimeter picket of men. The villagers would have raced into a slaughter.
“Good God,” Murph gasped as they continued past. “Why? Why did they do this?”
“Ethnic cleansing,” Juan replied, his mouth a tight, grim line. “This far north the villagers were probably Indians. Intel reports I’ve seen say the government in Buenos Aires wants to eradicate the last few pockets of natives remaining in the country. And to give you an idea of the characters we’re impersonating”—he nodded in the direction of the little town—“that’s most likely Ninth Brigade handiwork.”
“Lovely,” Mike spat. He’d tucked his beret into a shoulder epaulet, so his fine hair blew free around his head.
“Same thing’s going on in the cities and towns. Anywhere they find natives, they drag them out and ship them off to either labor camps here in the Amazon or they just simply disappear. This place is a mix of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.”
“How many Indians are left?”
“There were about six hundred thousand before the coup. God only knows how many have already been killed, but if this regime stays in power for a few more years, they’re all going to end up dead.”
They passed a ferryboat, lumbering its way slowly upstream. It was big enough for eight vehicles, and maybe forty passengers on its upper deck. The trucks aboard were all painted in camouflage colors, and the men lining the rail were soldiers. They waved over at the speeding RHIB, shouting greetings in Spanish. Keeping in character, the three men standing at the helm didn’t deign to respond. When the Argentine soldiers were close enough to recognize the maroon berets, their happy calls fell to instant silence, and most of them suddenly had the need to see what was happening on the other side of the old craft.
There was little other traffic on the river, mostly hand-built pirogues with single paddlers working along the bank in search of fish. Juan felt bad when they were caught up in the RHIB’s churning wake, but slowing down would have been the last thing a Ninth Brigader would do. Truth of it was, they probably would have aimed for the dugout canoes and rammed their occupants under the water.
Two and a half hours of hard running down the river brought them to a tributary about half the size of the main branch, the Rio Rojo, and because of the high iron content in the soils upstream the water was indeed a reddish brown, like a bloody stain that spread into the current. Pulaski was awake by now, and he and Mike had been scanning the river for any sign that they were being watched. There was nothing but the river and the jungle, which was a solid wall of intertwined vegetation.
“Clear,” Mike called over the engines’ growl.
“Clear,” Jerry echoed at the bow, and lowered his binoculars.
Juan cut power just enough to make the sharp turn, and opened the throttles again as soon as the bow pointed upstream. The Rio Rojo was less than fifty yards wide, and the towering jungle seemed to meet overhead, filtering the sunlight with a greenish tinge. It was like they were making their way up a tunnel. Their wake caromed off the dirt banks, eroding clots of mud that fell into the water and dissolved.
They started upstream, keeping the speed down because, in less than five minutes, they came across an expected towboat hauling logs down from the highlands. The boat was a wooden
-hulled, bow-heavy scow with black smoke belching from its exhaust and more smoke coiling from the engine housing at the stern. The tree trunks were left floating in the water with the perimeter logs chained together to keep the whole mass intact. Cabrillo estimated there were at least two hundred twenty-foot lengths of what looked to him to be mahogany. He figured a larger load would be too cumbersome in such a narrow river.
“No radio mast,” Mark Murphy said.
“Probably has a sat phone,” Juan replied. “But I’m not worried about them reporting us. He can tell we’re Ninth Brigade, and he won’t want any trouble from us.”
They stayed far to the right side of the channel as they passed the lumber boat. Neither crew made any gesture of greeting. In fact, the tug’s three-man crew kept their eyes pointed decidedly downstream the entire time.
Once clear, Juan opened the throttles further, but had to slow again just moments later. Another nearly identical boat appeared ahead. This one was making its way around a tight bend and was well into Cabrillo’s side of the river. Tradition would be for Juan to idle his boat until the floating logjam made its turn and straightened out. But arrogant soldiers of an elite paramilitary group wouldn’t care one bit about riverine customs.
In Spanish, Juan shouted, “Stop where you are and let us pass.”
“I cannot,” the boat’s captain yelled back.
He hadn’t bothered to look to see who was addressing him. He was watching the shifting mass of logs edging closer and closer to the inside bank. If they rammed into the shore, it was possible that his boat wouldn’t have the power to pull them free. It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence, and it could take hours for the crew to unchain some of the logs from the bundle in order to free themselves and hours more to set the load right again.
“I’m not asking, I’m telling,” Juan said, letting anger drop his voice to a snarled hiss.
One of the deckhands tapped the boat’s captain on the shoulder. The man finally looked over at the RHIB, with its crew of armed soldiers in maroon berets. He went a little pale under his two days’ growth of beard.
“Okay, okay,” he said with the resignation of the powerless in the face of oppression. He throttled back, and the current immediately slammed his load into the riverbank. A dozen logs as thick around as oil barrels were thrown onto shore. The impact snapped a section of chain, hurling bits of its rusted links through the air. The oily workboat slowly came across the current, pressing its load deeper into the bank while at the same time opening the channel for Cabrillo and the RHIB. Logs that had broken free were already drifting downstream.
Keeping in character, Juan threw the hapless men a mocking salute and firewalled the throttles.
Murph said, “It’s going to take the better part of the day to clean that up.”
“Had we waited for him to clear the corner, he would have been suspicious,” Mike Trono countered. “Better them inconvenienced than us questioned. Juan speaks Spanish like a native, but I get lost with the menu at a Mexican restaurant.”
They continued upstream, passing one more boat towing a mass of timber, before the handheld GPS said they were as close to the crash site as the river would take them. After cruising for another quarter mile, they found a small feeder stream, and Juan backed the boat into it. There was barely enough room for the RHIB’s hull, and the jungle scraped against the vessel’s rubber sides.
Jerry Pulaski tied a line around a moldering stump, and Juan cut the engines. After so many hours of their throaty roar, it took several seconds for Cabrillo to hear jungle sounds through the ringing in his ears. Without being told, the men set about camouflaging the boat, hacking fronds and leaves from different trees and bushes and creating an intricate screen over the RHIB’s bow. When they were done, the craft was all but invisible from five feet away.
“Well, boys,” Juan said as they gathered their communications equipment and other gear together, including a specially made harness for Jerry to carry the plutonium power cell, “our leisurely cruise downriver is over. Now the real slog begins. I’ll take point. Mike, you’ve got the drag slot. Keep low and quiet. We have to assume the Argies have their own teams out here looking for the debris, or at least investigating. Stay sharp.”
The men, their faces smeared with camouflage greasepaint, looking as fearsome as any native warrior, nodded silently as they stepped from the boat onto the spongy shore. They started inland, following a game trail that ran roughly parallel to the small stream. The temperature was a solid eighty degrees, with the humidity a few notches higher. In just a few minutes, their pores were running like faucets.
For the first mile, Cabrillo felt every muscle cramp and ache from their time in the river, but as they forged on the countless laps he’d swum over the course of his life began to show. He moved more lithely, his boots merely brushing the loamy soil. Even his stump was feeling good. He’d always been more accustomed to wide-open spaces—the sea or the desert—but his other senses were making up for what his eyes could not see. There was a faint trace of woodsmoke in the air—from the logging operation, he knew—and when a bird’s startled cry carried down from the jungle canopy, he paused and waited to learn what had disturbed it. Was it startled by a predator or by something it saw walking the same path as Juan’s team?
The mental acuity required for jungle stalking was as physically taxing as the effort to slide through the dense foliage.
Something off to his left caught Juan’s eye. He immediately dropped to a knee, hand-signaling the men strung out behind him to do likewise. Cabrillo studied the spot that had attracted his attention through his machine pistol’s iron sights. The quick squirt of adrenaline into his veins seemed to heighten his vision. He perceived no movement, not even a breeze rustling the leaves. This far below the canopy, air movement was a rarity. He cautiously swayed back, changing his angle of view in minute increments.
There.
A dull flash of metal. Not the slick black sheen of a modern weapon trained on him but the pewter shimmer of old aluminum left out in the elements. According to the GPS, they were still several miles from where the power cell was projected to have landed, and he wondered for a moment if this was other debris from the doomed satellite.
Still in a crouch, and with the MP-5 tucked hard against his shoulder, he moved off the trail, confident that what he was taking away from his own peripheral vision would be covered by his men. He approached with the patience of one of the jungle cats. Five feet away, he saw the outline of something large through the undergrowth. Whatever this was, it wasn’t part of the doomed orbiter.
He used his weapon’s barrel to move aside a clump of vines hanging from a tree and grunted in surprise. They had discovered what looked like the cockpit of a downed plane. The windshield was long gone, and creepers had infiltrated, snaking around seats and bulkheads like a cancerous growth. But what really held his attention was what lay in the copilot’s seat. There was little left of the body, just a brown-green skeleton that would soon dissolve into its chair. Its clothing had long since rotted away, but lying in the pelvic girdle and shining brightly in the diffused sunlight was a brass strip that Juan knew had been the guy’s zipper.
He whistled softly, and seconds later Mark Murphy and Jerry Pulaski approached. Mike would remain near the trail, watching their six.
“What do you think?” Juan asked quietly.
“Looks like this plane’s been here awhile,” Jerry said, swatting at a mouse-sized bug that had landed on his neck.
Mark’s expression was thoughtful for a moment, and then his eyes widened. “This isn’t a plane,” he said with awe in his voice. “This is the Flying Dutchman.”
“Forgive my ignorance, but wasn’t the Dutchman a ghost ship?” Pulaski replied.
“The Flying Dutchman was a blimp,” Mark told him, and pointed. “Look between the seats. See that big wheel. That’s for controlling a blimp’s pitch. Rotate it forward, it engages the elevator on the fin assembly, and she goes nose down.
Move it back, and the nose rises.”
“What makes you think this is the Flying Dutchman and not some lost Navy patrol from World War Two?”
“Because we’re a thousand miles inland from both the Atlantic and the Pacific, and the Flying Dutchman went missing while looking for a lost city in the jungle.”
“Okay,” Juan said. “Go back and tell it from the beginning.”
Mark couldn’t tear his eyes off the airship’s shattered gondola. “When I was a kid, I kind of had a thing for blimps and zeppelins. It was just a fad, you know, a hobby. Before that, it was locomotives from the Steam Age.” Seeing the expressions staring at him, he added, “Look, I admit it. I was a geek.”
“Was?” Jerry deadpanned.
“Anyway, I read a lot of books about airships, their history. Like the story of the L-8, a Navy patrol blimp that took off from San Francisco in August of 1942. A couple of hours into a routine patrol, the two-man crew reported seeing an oil slick. A couple hours after that, the blimp floated back over the coast, minus the men. The only clue was that two life jackets were missing.”
“What’s that got to do with this?” Juan asked a little impatiently. Mark Murphy was the smartest guy Cabrillo had ever met, but with that came his tendency to go off on tangents that highlighted his near-photographic memory.
“Well, another lost-blimp story is the Flying Dutchman. I hope I am remembering this right. After the war, a former Navy blimp pilot and some of his buddies bought a surplus airship to use as an aerial platform to fly over the South American jungle in search of an Incan city, most likely El Dorado. They converted the blimp to fly on hydrogen, which is insanely explosive, but it was something they could make themselves using electrolysis.