Operation: Amazon

- 5 -

Banks almost applauded; the man had put everything into the story, and Banks had been rapt and lost in it as if he too had been a child in the village at the knees of an elder. Giraldo smiled in return and lit another cigarette. Banks waited to see if more was coming, but the guide fell quiet, watching the river ahead.

“You said there was more?” Banks said when it was clear the man would need prompting.

Giraldo wasn’t smiling when he replied.

“There is more, yes. But that part of the tale is not a story I want to tell on this stretch of the river, in the dark, Captain,” he replied. “There is only a certain amount of tempting fate with which I am comfortable, and I believe I have reached my limit for the night. Besides, the river can get tricky around these parts, and I need my full concentration on the water. If we are still here, still alive in the morning, when the sun is full, I shall share a beer and my story with you, so you can count that as a promise.”

“I will hold you to it,” Banks replied, then left the man alone to do his job.

The squad still sat in the middle of the boat, smoking and brewing up a pot of tea on the camp stove. Banks squeezed past them, carefully making his way forward so as not to set the vessel rocking, and went up front to join Wilkes where the big man sat beside a pair of large floodlights that showed the way ahead. A myriad of small white fish roiled and leapt at the prow as if trying to catch the light, and moths the size of Bank’s palms fluttered and swarmed around the lamps. Every so often a dark shape, bats as big as crows, would swoop among the insects and carrying one off in the black as quickly as it had come. Over by the left-hand bank, a pair of large, pale-yellow eyes blinked twice, but the boat had motored past before Banks properly recognized them as belonging to an alligator that had to be at least 10 feet long nose to tail. Now that the heat of the day was fading, the jungle and its inhabitants were much more alive.

It was almost full dark now, and the light showed only 10 to 15 yards ahead of them on the water. Everything else was mostly deep blackness and thick shadows; Banks had no idea how Giraldo was navigating, but he was rapidly developing a sense of admiration for the man’s skill, and not only in his storytelling ability.

“How do you like our river now, Captain?” the big man said.

“I like this boat. It’s better than paddling, I’ll give you that,” Banks said, and Wilkes laughed.

“Then again, anything’s better than paddling,” the big man replied. “But we’re making good time. We should be near the highlands in an hour or so. Do you have a plan?”

It was Banks’ turn to laugh.

“To quote my private, the plan’s as simple as shite. We go in, we find our man, we get out, and we shoot the fuck out of anything that gets in our way.”

“Works for me,” Wilkes said. He patted at his hip, and for the first time, Banks noted that the man had a handgun holstered there. He resolved to make sure Wilkes was kept far away from any possible action. The last thing he needed was for an amateur to get involved in any firefight.

Wilkes’ prediction of their arrival time proved to be right, almost to the minute. After an hour of cruising in the dark, Giraldo took them in a sharp turn to the left into an inlet and a minute after that the lights picked out a stone quay directly ahead of them, high enough that it loomed above their heads, even when they stood up. As the boat slowed to approach the structure, the lights brought it into sharp relief. Banks saw that the stones from which the quay was built were ancient in the extreme. They had been badly corroded by the river and weather and smoothed to a polish by the current in places, encrusted with freshwater barnacles and algae up to two feet above the water line in other spots. But the whole thing was built with such precision that the wall itself had stood obdurate against the Amazon for centuries, perhaps millennia.

As Giraldo brought the boat around to moor parallel to the wall, Banks also saw that each brick was so tightly packed against its neighbors that there was no sign of any mortar. He’d seen such work before, in megalithic tombs on Orkney and Malta, and in the great temples of Egypt. He had not expected to find it here, in the upper reaches of the jungles of the Amazon.

It seemed, however, that Giraldo knew the place, for he brought the boat to a halt tight up close to a ledge and a set of stone steps that led directly up to the top of the wall of the quay. He cut the engine and quickly tied them up to a stone pillar set on the steps.

“I stay here with the boat,” Giraldo said. It wasn’t a question, and in truth, Banks was glad he didn’t have to persuade the guide otherwise.

“Wilkes will stay with you,” Banks replied. “I’m not leaving you here alone.”

The big man looked like he might argue, but one look from Banks was enough to keep him quiet.

“I’m trusting you here, Wilkes,” Banks said. “We might need to make a quick getaway, so you’re our backup plan. Just hang out here, and don’t do anything stupid. We’ll be back before you know it.”

That seemed to be enough to mollify any resentment Wilkes had been carrying, and the big man threw Banks a mock salute in reply.

“You’ve been here before?” Banks asked Giraldo.

“Only this far and no more,” the guide said. “I did not go ashore, and I did not stay long.”

There was more to it, Banks saw it in the guide’s eyes and his manner, but he didn’t have time to probe any deeper. It would have to wait. He waved a hand above the quay, away from the river and under the tall canopy of foliage.

“How far will we have to walk?”

Giraldo shrugged.

“The ground rises quickly, I remember that much. And there is a building, a tower of a sort, higher up on the hill. But as to where they might be holding Mister Buller? That is anyone’s guess.”

“So, a walk in the jungle, at night, with no idea where we’re headed?” Wiggins said. “This shite gets thicker by the minute.”

Banks turned back to Giraldo while the squad got geared up.

“Do you have a flare gun?”

The guide nodded.

“In a box under the wheel.”

“If there’s any sign of trouble, send one up. Hopefully we’ll see it, and come running.”

Banks checked his gear; he had his rifle, spare magazines of ammo in a vest over his jacket, and a pair of night goggles that he pulled down and set to full intensity as he stepped out of the boat and up the steps onto the quay. A quick look around told him he was alone, with a wall of jungle ahead of him. A stone walkway, little more than a yard wide, led off to his left away from the river, through a gap in the foliage.

“All clear. Move out, lads,” Banks said. “Remember, we’re going in hard and fast. Don’t fuck up.”

He turned to wait for the squad to come out of the boat and up the steps to join him.

“Give us four hours, tops,” he said to Wilkes and Giraldo. “After that, feel free to head back down river; if we’re not back by then, we’re probably not coming any time soon.”

The squad all stepped up onto the quay, awaiting orders. Banks pointed them toward the stone track leading into the jungle.

“Looks like we go that way,” he said. “Sarge, you take point. Wiggo, watch our backs. Move out.”

Hynd led them away toward the track. Banks had a last look back; the lamps of Giraldo’s boat were blinding bright in the night goggles, but he saw the man’s wave clear enough. He waved back, then followed Hynd and McCally into the jungle.

The goggles made the surrounding jungle appear even greener, almost luminescent. Foliage hemmed them in and it felt like walking inside a vast glistening tube, the intestine of a green fleshy giant. The humidity was stifling, and heavy with a dampness that made breathing a chore. Every step moved a film of sweat around under kit, and the eye goggles slid as moisture ran down his forehead from his hairline. Small animals scurried in the dark just out of sight, and overhead, parakeets fluttered noisily at their passing.

We might as well have rung the fucking doorbell.

Banks was glad when the track took a turn to the right and they climbed upward, out from under the canopy. The parakeets settled quickly back in their roosts and the night once again fell quiet save for the pad of their footsteps on the stone underfoot.

The path now made its way up the side of a rocky hill. The growth was less luxuriant here, and a light breeze, although warm, meant that the humidity fell to an almost acceptable level, and every so often they got a view back downward, to where the canopy seemed to stretch off endlessly. The river snaked away to their right, shimmering green and silver. The quay they’d left behind was hidden under the canopy, and Banks could only hope that it was a quiet enough spot that Giraldo and Wilkes would not need to use their emergency flares.

And with that, he put the boat and the other two men out of his mind; his focus now had to be on the path ahead, and the mission. He looked up instead of down. The path was climbing, slowly, around the outside of a long hill whose top was lost in the dark somewhere higher up.

They passed more stone workings as they climbed, more proof as to the antiquity of the builders. At first, it was only small rounded dwelling huts, long since collapsed into ruin and overgrown with moss, lichen, and vine, making them almost appear as natural aspects of the landscape rather than anything built by man. As they went higher, and after 10 minutes of strenuous climbing, the ruins became less sporadic. After a short, steeper set of worn steps, they passed through what had obviously been a gateway at one long lost time, and the path widened and flattened out, becoming more of a street, wending its way, still upward, through the tumbled ruins of an ancient town.

The rounded design of the dwellings was still evident here, but here they were more tightly packed together, almost butting right up against one another. The doorways were dark, in deep shadow, and the tumbled ruins jutted into the sky like shattered teeth. There was no sign of any life save a pair of pale doves that fluttered up and away in panic at their approach.

Once they were sure that the sudden flight of the birds hadn’t alerted anyone to their presence, McCally slowed to let Banks catch him, and spoke in a whisper.

“Who the fuck built all of this, Cap? I thought it was nowt but jungle around here?”

Banks had been thinking the same thing. His knowledge of ancient peoples was sketchy at best; he knew the names, Aztec, Inca, and one other.

“It’s probably Mayan, at a guess,” he said. “But don’t quote me on that, as I think we’ve fucked up enough already. Look around, Cally. This is bloody ancient. Nobody’s lived here for centuries. I think we’ve come to the wrong place. Our man’s not here.”

The next few minutes only seemed to harden Bank’s belief that they were on a wild goose chase. The path flattened out as they walked onto the hilltop, a plateau where the bulk of the town had been. Although the buildings were of a larger scale up here on the ridge, the whole site looked to be mostly a jumble of tumbled, overgrown ruin and Banks was losing hope. Then Hynd stopped abruptly and motioned them into cover behind a partially fallen wall before waving Banks forward.

“Light ahead, Cap,” the sergeant whispered when Banks joined him at the wall.

Banks lifted his goggles up onto his brow and chanced a quick look round the edge. There was just about enough light by the stars to give him a clear view. They were at one end of a long causeway that ran all the way along the ridge. Buildings lined either side of a main thoroughfare that must have been grand and monumental at one time, but was now mostly a tumble of ruins and crawling vines. The largest structure of note that still stood complete faced him at the far end of the ridge, some 100 yards away, a squat, stepped pyramid. The light Hynd had mentioned came from an entrance way atop the line of steps, a yellow-gold flickering that Hynd guessed must be firebrands or some kind of lantern.

And now they had stopped, he heard something that had not been audible earlier, having been masked by their footsteps. There was a rush of water in the distance, coming from the same direction as the pyramid. He remembered Buller’s video message, and the mention of a cascade and his hope rose again; perhaps they had come to the right spot after all.

He turned back to Hynd and spoke softly.

“Up the center of the main drag,” he said. “Two by two, eyes on each flank. You and Cally go first. If we make it that far without any fuss, we go up the steps and see where that light’s coming from. Everybody got it?”

The three other men replied in the affirmative.

Hynd and McCally moved them out.