Near the head of the falls, Mercer looked down the valley that opened below them. The river seemed to vanish in the distance as if swallowed by the jungle. If not for the mountain slopes that it had carved over the millennia, it would have been indiscernible against the backdrop of tropical forest. Mercer felt menace from the jungle and what lay unseen under its thick canopy.
The lake that fed the River of Ruin sat in a depression at the top of the volcanic mountain, a perfectly round caldera dimpled by a single tree-covered island near its center. Mercer estimated the lake was about a half mile wide, though there was no telling how deep. Experience told him the lake could be even deeper than the mountain was tall, two hundred feet or more. A strip of sandy beach ran the whole way around the lake except for where it poured down the falls.
Trapped between the lake’s clear surface and the forty-foot-tall ramparts of stone that ringed it, the air remained motionless and sweltering.
“Mr. Gary worked on this side.” Miguel pointed to their right. “He dig many holes into the side of the lake, looking for treasure.”
The party trudged a quarter way around the lake, muscles that had been fresh in the morning beginning to protest after the climb. At the first of the tunnels Gary had excavated into the side of the volcano, they stopped to boil fresh water and rest for twenty minutes. The tunnel was roughly square, un-braced, and had been driven about thirty feet into the soft volcanic rock. Mercer had no idea why his old friend had dug the shaft here, but it was apparent he had found nothing of interest. Other such tunnels were visible all along the arc of the lakeshore.
Including a break for the lunch they’d scavenged from the destroyed camp below, it took seven hours to circle the lake and fully explore all the tunnels Gary had dug. They also climbed up to the rim of the volcano at various points to see what lay on the far slopes. They found nothing of interest, nothing that would have led Gary to believe the treasure he sought was buried along the shores of the lake. All that remained to be explored was the island at its middle.
The rowboat Gary’s team had laboriously dragged up the waterfall was made of heavily dented aluminum. Rather than unload the supplies left in it, Mercer decided to just take Miguel and Lauren to the island. Ruben and his men stayed on the beach next to a fire built to warm their dinner. They would sleep here tonight and climb down in the morning.
Miguel sat at the front of the boat like an animated bowsprit while Lauren rested on the bundle of gear lashed in the stern. Mercer rowed with deep, even strokes. “I feel like I should be singing Italian opera like a gondolier, but I can’t carry a tune.”
Lauren began a chorus of “Row Row Row Your Boat.”
Mercer and Miguel joined her in a round once they found the tempo. Each time they messed up, Miguel dissolved into laughter.
Beaching the boat under the overhang of a sweeping tree, Mercer tied the painter to a log and helped Lauren ashore. Miguel was already off and running. The island rose twenty feet at its center, a misshapen lump of dark rock pocked with patches of vegetation that grew from soil deposits. Five skinny trees rose from exposed roots that clung to the ground like tentacles. The whole area was less than half an acre. Gary had tunneled a single shaft into the island in a natural foldback of rock that formed a partial cave. He had managed only a few feet before returning to the river below to await Mercer’s arrival in Panama. There were tools still waiting at the rock face at the end of the tunnel.
“Looks like you rowed for nothing,” Lauren remarked, wiping sweat from her slender throat.
“Worse,” Mercer said darkly, “it seems Gary and his people died for nothing. Other than the ruins of the dam where the river meets the Rio Tuira, there’s not one shred of evidence that anyone had ever been here before them.”
He imagined Gary Barber would be just as happy dying for his dream. It was the kind of grandiose romantic gesture that would appeal to him and Mercer couldn’t begrudge him that. But Gary’s team had signed on as workers, simple laborers who probably made more money with Gary in a month than they could normally earn in a year. It was the bitterness of their loss that scalded his voice.
“It’ll be dark in an hour.” He glanced at the western horizon, where the sun was sinking toward the lip of the volcano. “We should head back.”
“Um, listen,” Lauren said shyly, “I would love to take a quick dip if you promise not to peek.”
Mercer chuckled. “Gallantry is not solely esteemed by Southern gentlemen.” He changed to an atrocious antebellum accent. “We Yankees know how to avert our eyes when a maiden is at her ablutions.”
“Why thank you, kind sir.” She batted her eyes, thankful the black mood she saw pass over him was just as quickly dispelled. “And if you don’t, this belle packs a 9mm. Make sure Miguel doesn’t get an eyeful either. I bet he’s got the same hot blood as every other man in Panama.”
Even with Ruben camped on shore a quarter mile away, Lauren walked to the far side of the island to strip naked and dive into the lake. As sleek as an otter, she slid through the topmost layer of water. It was warmed by the sun and lifted days of sweat and grime from her pores. Without soap, she could only run her hands over her body, using her neatly trimmed nails where dirt had ground into her skin at knees and elbows. Her legs and underarms prickled from lack of shaving. She hadn’t been to her apartment in Panama City for nearly a week and hadn’t seen a shower in three days.
Lying on her back and filling her lungs so that she floated an easy swim from the island, she reveled in the twin sensations of the dying sun’s warm rays and the water, which now felt cool. Like soldiers had since the very first armies, she took simple pleasures where she could find them. Four days ago she had investigated a filthy shanty outside of La Palma where a low-level drug trafficker had splattered the brains of two of his mules against the mud walls like crimson Rorschach stains. The genitals of the husband-and-wife team had been crudely carved off and stuffed in their spouse’s mouth as a warning. If the trafficker hadn’t yet fled back to Colombia, Lauren considered putting Ruben on his trail when they got back to El Real.
But now she lay in a volcanic lake, and even the bizarre postmortem mutilation of Mercer’s friends couldn’t intrude on her well-being—another trick that every soldier discovered if they wanted to keep their sanity. She didn’t know what to make of Mercer. He had the credentials of an egghead, but moved and thought like a soldier. She doubted he was a veteran—veterans tended to name drop and brag around active-duty military. Though something in Mercer’s demeanor led her to think he wasn’t a braggart about anything.
He was a mystery she wouldn’t mind learning a little more about, a far cry from the embassy types who hit on her in Panama City, or the military men who professed to like her as an equal but usually felt threatened by her. Those, she’d found, either slunk off in humiliation or attempted dominion by date rape. Twice that had happened, the first succeeding and the second, a two-star during her last time at SouthCom headquarters in Miami, having to invent a car accident to cover the injuries she’d inflicted.
That sudden memory soured her tranquility. She exhaled deeply and allowed herself to sink under the water. Scuba diving had given her great lung control and she willed herself to hover under the surface for a slow count of one hundred. Clearing her eyes of water when she surfaced, she saw Mercer standing on the bank fifteen feet from her. A burst of anger prickled her skin and she was about to shout when she heard the sound that had prompted him to search her out.
The steady beat of a helicopter’s rotors.
“Come on,” he called, “I just heard it approaching.”
He tossed her shirt as she stood in the shallows, his concentration completely fixed on the sound of the unseen chopper. The cotton tee absorbed the water beading on her skin, outlining her high breasts and the curve of her rib cage as it swept toward her narrow waist. Temperature change and the sudden tension stiffened her nipples. Mercer had already stepped back to where he’d stashed Miguel in the tunnel. Lauren pulled on her pants. She followed carrying her underwear, boots, and pistol belt.
“Where are they?” She finished dressing in the tunnel. Mercer stood on a promontory of rock just outside the entrance.
“Coming in from the west but they could have circled around the volcano. It looks like a Bell JetRanger. All black.”
“Any markings?”
“Too far away.”
The chopper thundered over the lake as if it had just climbed the waterfall. Mercer assumed it had made a couple passes over Gary’s camp to determine if anyone remained there. He was certain that whoever had shot up the bodies—and ordered the theft of the Lepinay journal in Paris—was likely to be on this helicopter. His hands balled at his sides.
“Do you think—?”
“I know it’s them,” he answered tightly.
Ruben and his men had been caught off guard when the JetRanger appeared. All three had been dozing through the late afternoon. By the time they came fully awake, the chopper had swung into a hover between them and the nearest of Gary’s excavations. The helo’s side door had been removed and without having to watch, Mercer knew what would happen next. This was a well-executed air assault.
A testament to his training and reflexes, Ruben got off the first shot as the chopper hung in the air like a deadly insect. The pops of his M-16 were lost in the thunder of the rotors and the angry bark of a gimbal-mounted light machine gun slung in the open door frame. A wall of sand erupted ten feet in front of the Panamanians. They turned and ran. Eruptions of dirt followed in their wake as the gunner corrected his aim. Lauren had climbed up to stand next to Mercer and made an involuntary sound as the stream of rounds found their first mark.
One of the mercenaries arched his back in an impossible angle and was slammed face-first into the beach, his torn body carving a bloody furrow. The chopper moved sideways to close the range on the remaining men. Another burst caught the second mercenary. His head vanished. Ruben ran on. A long fusillade blew enough sand into the air to swallow him. The firing stopped for a moment. It didn’t matter that both Mercer and Lauren prayed he would appear from the settling dust cloud. It would only mean a temporary reprieve.
Ruben did appear again when the dust cloud settled. He was on his knees, his M-16 at his shoulder. He fired off the remaining rounds in his magazine. He had time to slam home a fresh one but not enough to cock his weapon before the chopper’s machine gun roared again. The sand settled a second time as a shroud over his lifeless figure.
“Get back into the tunnel and make sure Miguel doesn’t come out.” Mercer watched the black helicopter circle the lake, the door gunner alert for more targets.
With no visible marking on the JetRanger, Mercer had to hope he could see the figures within to make some kind of identification. He could tell the black paint had been recently, and carelessly, applied.
At each of the tunnels ringing the lake, the chopper hovered long enough for a pair of armed men in camos to jump down, scout the tunnel for people, and jump back on the helo’s skid. It was too far to tell their ethnicity. After completing its circuit, the chopper swung toward the island.
Mercer scrambled into the cave, timing it so that he could just peek out as the craft roared directly overhead. The smile that creased his face was without warmth. In their haste, whoever had blacked out the chopper hadn’t painted her underhull. He saw shadows of overspray on the helicopter’s normal white paintwork and the neat block letters of her ID number.
“Gotcha, you son of a bitch.”
By the time the Bell JetRanger circled for a few slower passes over the island, Mercer, Lauren, and Miguel were huddled against the far wall of the tunnel, completely screened from view. And with the rowboat hidden under the tree at the water’s edge, there was no reason for the gunmen to suspect the island currently sheltered a trio of temporary residents.
When the sound of the rotors faded, Miguel wouldn’t let go of Mercer so Lauren went out to see what would happen next.
“What do you see?” Mercer asked.
Thinking of the boy in the tunnel, Lauren modified the truth. “Ah, the men in the helicopter are landing to pick up Ruben and his men.” In fact, they were collecting their corpses.
“Are they leaving us?” Miguel cried. He hadn’t heard the gunfire.
“Yes, Miguel. They are going away in the helicopter.”
“Can’t we go with them?” he complained.
“It’ll be a lot more fun climbing down the waterfall,” she said, aghast when the first of the bodies was tossed back out of the chopper over the lake. It had been weighted so it sank like a stone. The two others were also unceremoniously tossed out to an unmarked watery grave.
The scene of the three murders was sanitized. Any trace evidence, like spent shell casings, was easily explained away in a country awash in guns moving from former Nicaraguan rebels to the Colombian drug barons and revolutionaries.
“Is Ruben leaving now?” Miguel piped.
“Not yet. The helicopter is flying across the lake again. They’re . . . it looks like they’re dropping something.”
Hearing that, Mercer ordered Miguel to stay put and scrambled out of the tunnel. He caught a glimpse of the chopper just as what appeared to be a large barrel was rolled out the door opposite the gunner’s station. A moment later another barrel followed the first.
As soon as the barrels cleared the skids, the JetRanger heeled over in a steep turn and powered away from the volcano. In seconds, even the beat of its rotors was lost.
“What was that all about?” Lauren asked, but Mercer was already running to where their boat was hidden.
The first jury-rigged depth charge, containing seventy pounds of dynamite, exploded halfway to the bottom of the lake after sinking for a minute. Its detonative force reached the surface in a fraction of a second. The plume of water rose fifty feet in a writhing froth, cascading back down with a continuous slap that seemed to shake the very air. The second, even more powerful charge, went off a moment later and at an even greater depth. The island vibrated as if caught in an earthquake.