Текст книги "Inca Gold"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 34 страниц)

    On the western slopes of the Andes the Spanish had already created colonies of large estates, now worked by the once-proud Incas, who were enslaved and greatly reduced in numbers by inhumane treatment and infection from measles and smallpox. Cuttill crept through the estates under cover of darkness, stealing food at every opportunity. After two months of traveling a few short kilometers each night to elude the Spanish and remain out of sight of any Indians who might give him away, he crossed over the continental divide of the Andes, through the isolated valleys, and descended into the green hell of the Amazon River Basin.

    From that point on, Cuttill's life became even more of a nightmare. He struggled through unending swamps up to his waist, fought his way through forests so thick every meter of growth had to be cut away with his knife. Swarms of insects, snakes, and alligators were a constant peril, the snakes often attacking without warning. He suffered from dysentery and fever but still struggled on, often covering only 100 meters (328 feet) during daylight. After several months, he stumbled into a village of hostile natives, who immediately tied him with ropes and kept him imprisoned as a slave for five years.

    Cuttill finally managed to escape by stealing a dugout canoe and paddling down the Amazon River at night under a waning moon. Contracting malaria, he came within an inch of dying, but as he drifted unconscious in his canoe he was found by a tribe of long-haired women who nursed him back to health. It was the same tribe of women the Spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana had discovered during his futile search for El Dorado. He named the river Amazonas in honor of the Amazon warriors of Greek legend because the native women could draw a bow with any man.

    Cuttill introduced a number of labor-saving devices to the women and the few men who lived with them. He built a potter's wheel and taught them how to make huge intricate bowls and water vessels. He constructed wheelbarrows and waterwheels for irrigation, and showed them how to use pulleys to lift heavy weights. Soon looked upon as a god, Cuttill made an enjoyable life among the tribe. He took three of the most attractive women as wives and quickly produced several children.

    His desire to see home again slowly dimmed. A bachelor when he left England, he was sure there would be no relatives or old shipmates left to greet his return. And then there was the possibility that Drake, a stern disciplinarian, would demand punishment for losing the Concepcion.

    No longer physically capable of suffering the deprivations and hardships of along journey, Cuttill reluctantly decided to spend the remaining years of his life on the banks of the Amazon. When the Portuguese survey party passed through, he gave them his journal, requesting that it be somehow sent to England and placed in the hands of Francis Drake.

    After Perlmutter finished reading the journal, he leaned back in his swivel chair, removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Any doubts he might have had in the back of his mind about the authenticity of the journal had quickly evaporated. The writing on the parchment showed strong, bold strokes, hardly the work of a madman who was sick and dying. Cuttill's descriptions did not seem fabricated or embellished. Perlmutter felt certain the experiences and hardships suffered by Francis Drake's sailing master truly occurred, and that the account was honestly set down by someone who lived what he wrote.

    Perlmutter went back to the heart of his quest, Cuttill's brief mention of the treasures left on board the Concepcion by Drake. He resettled his glasses on his imposing red nose and turned to the final entry of the narrative:

Me mind is as set as a stout ship before a narth winde. I shalle not retarn to mye homelande. I feare Captaan Drake was maddened for me not bringen the achant tresures and the jaade boxe withe the notted stringe to England soos it cud be preezentid to guude Queen Bess. I left it withe the wraaked ship. I shalle be baryed heer among the peapol who have becume my famly. Writen bye the hande of Thomas Cuttill, sailing mastere of the Golden Hinde this unknown day in the yeare 1594

    Perlmutter slowly looked up and stared at a seventeenth-century Spanish painting on his wall, depicting a fleet of Spanish galleons sailing across a sea under the golden orange glow of a setting sun. He had found it in a bazaar in Segovia and took it home for a tenth of its real value. He gently closed the fragile journal, lifted his bulk from the chair and began to pace around the room, hands clasped behind his back.

    A crewman of Francis Drake had truly lived and died somewhere along the Amazon River. A Spanish galleon was thrown into a coastal jungle by an immense tidal wave. And a jade box containing a knotted cord did exist at one time. Could it still lie amid the rotting timbers of the galleon, buried deep in a rain forest? A four-hundred-year-old mystery had suddenly surfaced from the shadows of time and revealed an enticing clue. Perlmutter was pleased with his successful investigative effort, but he well knew that confirmation of the myth was merely the first enticing step in a hunt for treasure.

    The next trick, and the most perplexing one, was to narrow the theater of search to as small a stage as possible.

    Hiram Yaeger adored his big supercomputer as much as he did his wife and children, perhaps more, he could seldom tear himself away from the images he projected on his giant monitor to go home to his family. Computers were his life from the first time he looked at the screen on a monitor and typed out a command. The love affair never cooled. If anything it grew more passionate with the passing years, especially after he constructed a monster unit of his own design for NUMA's vast oceans data center. The incredible display of information-gathering power at his beck and call never ceased to astound him. He caressed the keyboard with his fingers as though it were a living entity, his excitement blossoming whenever bits and pieces of data began coming together to form a solution.

    Yaeger was hooked into a vast high-speed computing network with the capacity to transfer enormous amounts of digital data between libraries, newspaper morgues, research laboratories, universities, and historic archives anywhere in the world. The "data superhighway," as it was called, could transmit billions of bits of information in the blink of a cursor. By tapping into the gigabit network, Yaeger began retrieving and assembling enough data to enable him to lay out a search grid with a 60 percent probability factor of containing the four-century-old landlocked galleon.

    He was so deeply involved with the search for the Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion that he did not notice nor hear Admiral James Sandecker step into his sanctum sanctorum and sit down in a chair behind him.

    The founder and first director of NUMA was small in stature but filled with enough testosterone to fuel the offensive line of the Dallas Cowboys. A trim fifty-eight, and a fitness addict, he ran five miles every morning from his apartment to the imposing glass building that housed two of the five thousand engineers, scientists, and other employees that formed NUMA, the undersea counterpart of the space agency NASA. His head was covered by straight flaming red hair, graying at the temples and parted in the middle, while his chin bristled with a magnificent Vandyke beard. Despite his addiction to health and nutrition, he was never without a huge cigar made from tobacco personally selected and rolled for him by the owner of a plantation in Jamaica.

    Under his direction NUMA had taken the field of oceanography and made it as popular as space science. His persuasive pleas to Congress for funding, supported by twenty top universities with schools in the marine sciences and a host of large corporations investing in underwater projects, had enabled NUMA to take, great strides in deep sea geology and mining, marine archaeology, biological studies of sea life, and studies of the effects of oceans on the earth's climate. One of his greatest contributions, perhaps, was supporting Hiram Yaeger's huge computer network, the finest and largest archive of ocean sciences in the world.

    Sandecker was not universally admired by all of Washington's bureaucracy, but he was respected as a hard driving, dedicated, and honest man, and his relationship with the man in the Oval Office of the White House was warm and friendly.

    "Making any progress?" he asked Yaeger.

    "Sorry, Admiral." Yaeger spoke without turning around. "I didn't see you come in. I was in the midst of collecting data on the water currents off Ecuador."

    "Don't stroke me, Hiram," Sandecker said, with the look of a ferret on a hunt. "I know what you're up to."

    "Sir?"

    "You're searching for a stretch of coastline where a tidal wave struck in 1578."

    "A tidal wave?"

    "Yes, you know, a big wall of water that barreled in from the sea and carried a Spanish galleon over a beach and into a jungle." The admiral puffed out a cloud of noxious smoke and went on. "I wasn't aware that I had authorized a treasure hunt on NUMA's time and budget."

    Yaeger paused and swiveled around in his chair. "You know?"

    "The word is knew. Right from the beginning."

    "Do you know what you are, Admiral?"

    "A canny old bastard who can read minds," he said with some satisfaction.

    "Did your Ouija board also tell you the tidal wave and the galleon are little more than folklore?"

    "If anyone can smell fact from fiction, it's our friend Dirk Pitt," Sandecker said inflexibly. "Now what have you dug up?"

    Yaeger smiled wanly and answered. "I began by dipping into various Geographic Information Systems to determine a logical site for a ship to remain hidden in a jungle over four centuries somewhere between Lima and Panama City. Thanks to global positioning satellites, we can look at details of Central and South America that were never mapped before. Maps showing tropical rain forests that grow along the coastline were studied first. I quickly dismissed Peru because its coastal regions are deserts with little or no vegetation. That still left over a thousand kilometers of forested shore along northern Ecuador and almost all of Colombia. Again, I was able to eliminate about forty percent of the coastline with geology too steep or unfavorable for a wave with enough mass and momentum to carry a five-hundred-and-seventy-ton ship any distance overland. Then I knocked off another twenty percent for open grassland areas without thick trees or other foliage that could hide the remains of a ship."

    "That still leaves Pitt with a search area four hundred kilometers in length."

    "Nature can drastically alter the environment in five hundred years," said Yaeger. "By starting with antique maps drawn by the early Spaniards, and examining records of changes that occurred in the geology and landscape, I was able to decrease the length of the search grid another hundred and fifty kilometers."

    "How did you compare the modern terrain with the old?"

    "With three-dimensional overlays," replied Yaeger. "By either reducing or increasing the scale of the old charts to match the latest satellite maps, and then overlaying one upon the other, any variations of the coastal jungles since the galleon vanished became readily apparent. I found that much of the heavily forested coastal jungles had been cut down over the centuries for farmland."

    "Not enough," Sandecker said irritably, "not nearly enough. You'll have to whittle the grid down to no more than twenty kilometers if you want to give Pitt a fighting chance of finding the wreck."

    "Bear with me, Admiral," said Yaeger patiently. "The next step was to conduct a search through historical archives for recorded tidal waves that struck the Pacific coastline of South America in the sixteenth century. Fortunately, the occasions were well documented by the Spanish during the conquest. I found four. Two in Chile in 1562 and 1575. Peru suffered them in 1570 and again in 1578, the year Drake captured the galleon."

    "Where did the latter strike?" Sandecker asked.

    "The only account comes from the log of a Spanish supply ship on its way to Callao. It passed over a `crazy sea' that swept inland toward Bahia de Caraquez in Ecuador. Bahia, of course, means bay."

    " `Crazy sea' is a good description of water turmoil above an earthquake on the seafloor. No doubt a seismic wave generated by a movement of the fault that parallels the west coast of the entire South American continent."

    "The captain also noted that on the return voyage, a village that sat at the mouth of a river running into the bay had vanished."

    "There is no question of the date?"

    "Right on the money. The tropical rain forest to the east appears to be impenetrable."

    "Okay, we have a ballpark. The next question is, what was the wave length?"

    "A tidal wave, or tsunami, can have a length of two hundred kilometers or more," said Yaeger.

    Sandecker considered this. "How wide is the Bay of Caraquez?"

    Yaeger called up a map on his monitor. "The entrance is narrow, no more than four or five kilometers."

    "And you say the captain of the supply ship logged a missing village by a river?"

    "Yes, sir, that was his description."

    "How does the contour of the bay today differ from that period?"

    "The outer bay has changed very little," answered Yaeger, after bringing up a program that depicted the old Spanish charts and the satellite map in different colors as he overlaid them on the screen. "The inner bay has moved about a kilometer toward the sea due to silt buildup from the Chone River."

    Sandecker stared at the screen for a long moment, then said slowly, "Can your electronic contraption do a simulation of the tidal wave sweeping the galleon onto shore?"

    Yaeger nodded. "Yes, but there are a number of factors to consider."

    "Such as?"

    "What was the height of the wave and how fast was it traveling."

    "It would have to be at least thirty meters high and traveling at better than a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour to carry a five-hundred-and-seventy-ton ship so far into the jungle that she has never been found."

    "Okay, let's see what I can do with digital imagery."

    Yaeger typed a series of commands on his keyboard and sat back, staring at the monitor for several seconds, examining the image he produced on the screen. Then he used a special function control to fine-tune the graphics until he could generate a realistic and dramatic simulation of a tidal wave crossing an imaginary shoreline. "There you have it," he announced. "Virtual reality configuration."

    "Now generate a ship," ordered Sandecker.

    Yaeger was not an expert on the construction of sixteenth-century galleons, but he produced a respectable image of one rolling slowly on the waves that was equal to a projector displaying moving graphics at sixty frames per second. The galleon appeared so realistic any unsuspecting soul who walked into the room would have thought they were watching a movie.

    "How does it look, Admiral?"

    "Hard to believe a machine can create something so lifelike," said Sandecker, visibly impressed.

    "You should see the latest computer-generated movies featuring the long-gone old stars with the new. I've watched the video of Arizona Sunset at least a dozen times."

    "Who plays the leads?"

    "Humphrey Bogart, Lionel Barrymore, Marilyn Monroe, Julia Roberts, and Tom Cruise. It's so real, you'd swear they all acted together on the set."

    Sandecker laid his hand on Yaeger's shoulder. "Let's see if you can make a reasonably accurate documentary."

    Yaeger did his magic on the computer, and the two men watched, fascinated, as the monitor displayed a sea so blue and distinct it was like looking through a window at the real thing. Then slowly, the water began convulsing into a wave that rolled away from the land, stranding the galleon on the seabed, as dry as if it were a toy boat on the blanket of a boy's bed. Then the computer visualized the wave rushing back toward shore, rising higher and higher, then cresting and engulfing the ship under a rolling mass of froth, sand, and water, hurling it toward land at an incredible speed, until finally the ship stopped and settled as the wave smoothed out and died.

    "Five kilometers," murmured Yaeger. "She looks to be approximately five kilometers from the coast."

    "No wonder she was lost and forgotten," said Sandecker. "I suggest you contact Pitt and make arrangements to fax your computer's grid coordinates."

    Yaeger gave Sandecker a queer look indeed. "Are you authorizing the search, Admiral?"

    Sandecker feigned a look of surprise as he rose and walked toward the door. Just before exiting, he turned and grinned impishly. "I can't very well authorize what could turn out to be a wild goose chase, now can I?"

    "You think that's what we're looking at, a wild goose chase?"

    Sandecker shrugged. "You've done your magic. If the ship truly rests in a jungle and not on the bottom of the sea, then the burden falls on Pitt and Giordino to go in that hell on earth and find her."

    Giordino contemplated the dried red stain on the stone floor of the temple. "No sign of Amaru in the rubble," he said with an utter lack of emotion.

    "I wonder how far he got?" Miles Rodgers asked no one in particular. He and Shannon had arrived from the sacred well an hour before noon on a helicopter piloted by Giordino.

    "His mercenary buddies must have carried him off," Pitt surmised.

    "Knowing a sadist like Amaru might still be alive," said Rodgers, "is enough to cause nightmares."

    Giordino gave a mechanical shrug. "Even if he survived the rocket attack, he'd have died from loss of blood."

    Pitt turned and stared at Shannon, who was directing a team of archaeologists and a small army of workers. They were numbering the shattered blocks of stone from the temple in preparation for a restoration project. She seemed to have discovered something in the debris and was bending down for a closer examination. "A man like Amaru doesn't die easily. I don't think we've heard the last of him."

    "A grim prospect," said Rodgers, "made worse by the latest news from Lima."

    Pitt raised an eyebrow. "I didn't know we received CNN this deep in the Andes."

    "We do now. The helicopter that landed about an hour ago belonged to the Peruvian News Bureau. It brought in a team of television reporters and a mountain of equipment. The City of the Dead has become international news."

    "So what did they have to report?" pressed Giordino.

    "The military and police have admitted their failure to capture the army renegade mercenaries who flew into the valley to slit our throats and remove the artifacts. Nor have investigators tracked down any of Amaru's grave looters."

    Pitt smiled at Rodgers. "Not exactly the sort of report that will look good on their resumes."

    "The government tried to save face by handing out a story that the thieves dumped the artifacts over the mountains and are now hiding out in the Amazon forests of Brazil."

    "Never happened," said Pitt. "Otherwise why would U.S. Customs insist we provide them with an inventory of the artifacts? They know better. No, the loot is not scattered on a mountaintop. If I read the brains behind the Solpemachaco correctly, they're not the kind to panic and run. Their informants in the military alerted them every step of the way, from the minute an assault force was assembled and launched to capture them. They would have also learned the flight plan of the assault transports, and then plotted a safe route to avoid them. After quickly loading the artifacts, they flew to a prearranged rendezvous at an airstrip or seaport where the stolen riches were either transferred aboard a jetliner or a cargo ship. I doubt whether Peru will ever see its historical treasures again."

    "A nice tight scenario," said Rodgers thoughtfully. "But aren't you forgetting the bad guys only had one helicopter after we stole their backup?"

    "And we knocked that one into a mountain," added Giordino.

    "I think if we knew the full truth, the gang of second-rate killers ordered in by the boss who impersonated Doc Miller was followed later by a couple of heavy-lift helicopter transports, probably the old model Boeing Chinooks that were sold around the world. They can lift almost fifty troops or twenty tons of cargo. Enough mercenaries were left on the ground to stow the artifacts. They made their getaway in plenty of time after our escape and before we alerted the Peruvian government, who took their time in mounting an aerial posse."

    Rodgers stared at Pitt with renewed admiration. Only Giordino was not impressed. He knew from long years of experience that Pitt was one of that rare breed who could stand back and analyze events as they occurred, down to the finest details. It was a gift with which few men and women are born. Just as the greatest mathematicians and physicists compute incredibly intricate formulas on a level incomprehensible to people with no head for figures, so Pitt operated on a deductive level incomprehensible to all but a few of the top criminal investigators in the world. Giordino often found it maddening that while he was attempting to explain something to Pitt, the mesmeric green eyes would focus on some unseen object in the distance and he would know that Pitt was concentrating on something.

    While Rodgers was pondering Pitt's reconstruction of events, trying to find a flaw, the big man from NUMA turned his attention to Shannon.

    She was on her hands and knees on the temple floor with a soft-bristled paintbrush, gently clearing away dust and tiny bits of rubble from a burial garment. The textile was woven from wool and adorned with multicolored embroidery in the design of a laughing monkey with hideous, grinning teeth and coiled snakes for arms and legs.

    "What the well-dressed Chachapoyan wore?" he asked.

    "No, it's Inca." Shannon did not turn and look up at him but remained absorbed in her work.

    "They did beautiful work," Pitt observed.

    "The Inca and their ancestors were the finest dyers and weavers in the world. Their fabric weaving techniques are too complicated and time-consuming to be copied today. They are still unrivaled in interlocking tapestry construction. The finest tapestry weavers of Renaissance Europe used eighty-five threads per inch. The early Peruvians used up to five hundred threads per inch. Small wonder the Spanish mistakenly thought the finer Inca textiles were silk."

    "Maybe this isn't a good time for pursuing the arts, but I thought you'd like to know that AI and I have finished sketching the artifacts we caught sight of before the roof fell in."

    "Give them to Dr. Ortiz. He's most interested in what was stolen."

    Then lost in her project, she turned back to the excavation.

    An hour later, Gunn found Pitt standing beside Ortiz, who was directing several workers in scraping vegetation from a large sculpture of what appeared to be a winged jaguar with a serpent's head. The menacing jaws were spread wide, revealing a set of frightening curved fangs. The massive body and wings were sculpted into the doorway of a huge burial house. The only entrance was the gaping mouth, which was large enough for a man to crawl into. From the feet to the tip of the raised wings, the stone beast stood over 6 meters high (20 feet).

    "Not something you'd want to meet some night in a dark alley," said Gunn.

    Dr. Ortiz turned and waved a greeting. "The largest Chachapoyan sculpture yet found. I judge it dates somewhere between A.D. 1200 and I300."

    "Does it have a name?" asked Pitt.

    "Demonio del Muertos," answered Ortiz. "The demon of the dead, a Chachapoyan god who was the focus of a protective rite connected with the cult of the underworld. Part jaguar, part condor, part snake, he sank his fangs into whoever disturbed the dead and then dragged them into the black depths of the earth."

    "He wasn't exactly pretty," said Gunn.

    "The demon wasn't meant to be. Effigies ranged in size from one like this to those no larger than a human hand, depending on the deceased's wealth and status. I imagine we'll find them in almost every tomb and grave in the valley."

    "Wasn't the god of the ancient Mexicans some kind of serpent?" asked Gunn.

    "Yes, Quetzalcoatl, a feathered serpent who was the most important deity of Mesoamerica, beginning with the Olmecs in 900 B. C. and ending with the Aztecs during the Spanish conquest. The Inca also had sculptures of serpents, but no direct connection has yet been made."

    Ortiz turned away as a laborer motioned for him to examine a small figurine he had excavated next to the sculpture. Gunn took Pitt by the arm and led him over to a low stone wall where they sat down.

    "A courier from the U.S. Embassy flew in from Lima on the last supply copter," he said, removing a folder from his briefcase, "and dropped off a packet that was faxed from Washington."

    "From Yaeger?" Pitt asked anxiously.

    "Both Yaeger and your friend Perlmutter."

    "Did they strike pay dirt?"

    "Read for yourself," said Gunn. "Julien Perlmutter found an account by a survivor of the galleon being swept into the jungle by a tidal wave."

    "So far so good."

    "It gets better. The account mentions a jade box containing knotted cords. Apparently the box still rests in the rotting timbers of the galleon."

    Pitt's eyes lit up like beacons. "The Drake quipu."

    "It appears the myth has substance," Gunn said with a broad smile.

    "And Yaeger?" Pitt asked as he began sifting through the papers.

    "His computer analyzed the existing data and came up with grid coordinates that put the galleon within a ten-square-kilometer ballpark."

    "Far smaller than I expected."

    "I'd say our prospects of finding the galleon and the jade box just improved by a good fifty percent."

    "Make that thirty percent," said Pitt, holding up a sheet from Perlmutter giving the known data on the construction, fittings, and cargo of the Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion. "Except for four anchors that were probably carried away during the impact of the tidal wave, the magnetic signature of any iron on board would be too faint to be detected by a magnetometer more than a stone's throw away."

    "An EG&G Geometrics G-8136 could pick up a small iron mass from a fair distance."

    "You're reading my thoughts. Frank Stewart has a unit on board the Deep Fathom."

    "We'll need a helicopter to tow the sensor over the top of the rain forest," said Gunn.

    "That's your department," Pitt said to him. "Who do you know in Ecuador?"

    Gunn thought a moment, and then his lips creased in a grin. "It just so happens the managing director of the Corporacion Estatal Petrolera Ecuatoriana, the state oil company, is indebted to NUMA for steering his company onto significant deposits of natural gas in the Gulf of Guayaquil."

    Then they owe us big, enough to lend us a bird."

    "You could safely say that, yes."

    "How much time will you need to put the bite on them?"

    Gunn held up his wrist and peered through his glasses at the dial of his trusty old Timex. "Give me twenty minutes to call and make a deal. Afterward, I'll inform Stewart that we'll drop in and pick up the magnetometer. Then I'll contact Yaeger and reconfirm his data."

    Pitt stared blankly at him. "Washington isn't exactly around the corner. Are you making conference calls with smoke signals or mirrors?"

    Gunn reached into his pocket and held up what looked like a small, portable telephone. "The Iridium, built by Motorola. Digital, wireless, you can call anywhere in the world with it."

    "I'm familiar with the system," Pitt acknowledged. "Works off a satellite enhancement network. Where did you steal a unit?"

    Gunn glanced furtively around the ruins. "Bite your tongue. This is merely a temporary appropriation from the Peruvian television crew."

    Pitt gazed fondly at his little bespectacled friend with deep admiration and wonder. It was a rare event when shy Gunn slipped out of his academic shell to perform a sneaky deed. "You're okay, Rudi, I don't care what the celebrity gossip columns say about you."

    In terms of artifacts and treasures, the looters had barely scratched the surface in the City of the Dead. They had concentrated on the royal tombs near the temple, but thanks to Pitt's intrusion, they did not have time to do extensive excavation on most of the surrounding tombs. Many of them contained the remains of high officials of the Chachapoya confederation. Ortiz and his team of archaeologists also found what appeared to be untouched burial houses of eight noblemen. Ortiz was overjoyed when he discovered the royal coffins were in pristine condition and had never been opened.

    "We will need ten years, maybe twenty, to conduct a full excavation of the valley," said Ortiz during the customary after-dinner conversation. "No discovery in the Americas can touch this one for the sheer number of antiquities. We have to go slow. Not even the seed of a flower or one bead of a necklace can be overlooked. We must miss nothing, because we have an unparalleled opportunity to gain a new understanding of the Chachapoyan culture."

    "You have your work cut out for you," said Pitt. "I only hope none of the Chachapoya treasures are stolen during shipment to your national museum."

    "Any loss between here and Lima is the least of my worries," replied Ortiz. "Almost as many artifacts are stolen from our museums as from the original tombs."

    "Don't you have tight security to protect your country's valuable objects?" asked Rodgers.