Donald Westlake - High Adventure

“It will be along here,” Vernon said, the van moving slowly as he watched the right-hand verge. The jungle was deep and green and moist, tumbled and piled up high on the right. Behind him, the journalists started gathering their paraphernalia.

“Yes, there it is.”

Vernon braked to a stop, then turned the van very slowly off the road and onto an up-tilted patch of eroded rutted ground, cleared barely as wide as the vehicle, with stones and dirt and roots under its wheels. Engine roaring, the van struggled up the slope, branches and vines scraping both sides. Vernon clutched hard to the steering wheel, as boulders tried to deflect the wheels and drive him into tree trunks or ditches. Even at two or three miles an hour, the van jounced so badly that everybody in it had to hold on.

Too narrow; too steep; impossible. Vernon stopped the van, switched off the engine. In the sudden humming silence, he said, “We have to walk from here.”

“Hold on, chum,” Scottie called. “The idea was, this place is accessible.”

“It’s just up ahead there,” Vernon said, pointing out the windshield. “We just walk up to it.”

“Accessible by vehicle, old son.”

“Not past here.”

Tom, the American photojournalism leaned forward to look past Vernon’s shoulder, saying, “A Land Rover would make it.”

“Too many of us for a Land Rover.” Vernon’s eyelids were fluttering, he was aware of black-and-white pinwheels at the extreme edges of his peripheral vision.

Scottie, all jollity gone, called, “There’s no villages easier to get to than this ?”

“Oh, come along, Scottie,” Morgan Lassiter said. “Work some of that lard off your gut.” And she slid open the van door to climb out.

That did it. With a woman to lead the way, the men all sheepishly followed, climbing down out of the van, pushing past the leaves and branches, hanging their canvas bags of equipment on their shoulders.

“This way,” Vernon said. His legs were trembling, his knees were jelly, but none of it showed. “This way,” he said. Soon it will be over. “This way.” He started up the hill.

Why am I doing this? Kirby wondered. Of all the brainless things I have ever done in my life, this has to rank right up there among the best of them. Buying Innocent’s land, for instance; this could conceivably be even dumber than that.

In the first place, there’s no reason on Earth for this stunt to work.

In the second place, the woman I’m helping, this Valerie Greene riding along with me on this rescue mission, is the primary cause of all my recent trouble, and is someone I dislike so intensely I’m amazed I’m not at this moment shoving her out of the plane.

In the third place, whether the stunt works or not, the end result of trying it must be that the temple scam is blown permanently and forever. Innocent already knows too much about it, Valerie Greene is going to figure things out any minute now, and even the people on the ground are likely to catch on, once the fun is over.

In the fourth place, some of those people on the ground have machine guns and could possibly even shoot Cynthia out of the sky.

In the fifth place, it isn’t my fight.

Valerie, busily tying knots, said, “I really appreciate this, Mr. Galway. I don’t know how to thank you.”

“It’s nothing,” Kirby said.

The Quiché Indians of western Guatemala are not among the tribes who speak some variant of Kekchi. It was in a different language entirely — mixed with some Spanish — that the people welcomed the Gurruh soldiers, smiling at them, nodding, gesturing for them to sit a moment, offering them water.

The Gurruh looked around, not seeming to know what to do. They talked to one another in their-incomprehensible tongue, they smiled rather meaninglessly at the people, and they wandered around the outsides of the three huts, gazing at things. One of them picked up the female piglet and held it high with one hand around its neck, the piglet squeaking and its pink hoofs thrashing the air as the Gurruh said something to the other soldiers and laughed. Then he put the piglet down again.

There was some strangeness about these Gurruh, all the people sensed it. They weren’t like the first two groups, they didn’t exude the same air of self-sufficiency and disinterested amiability. One of them went into a hut uninvited, picked up an orange without asking, and came out eating it.

A young man of the village, an Alpuche, had been looking toward the trail that led down to the road. “Someone else is coming,” he said.

“Can you circle just once more!” Valerie Greene asked. She was tying nooses now.

Kirby, a bit annoyed, banked Cynthia hard and made a gliding swooping turn over the tumbled land below. “You’re the one says it’s urgent.”

“I just want to be sure.” Noose in hand, she peered down at that disorderly maze of greens and browns. “Yes! There’s the stream where I— That’s the stream from this morning. See it?”

Kirby rolled Cynthia over and came back, while Valerie clung open-mouthed to her seat. “Got it,” he said. “Due north from there they said?”

“One—” Silence.

Kirby looked over and saw her distress. “Sorry,” he said, and turned Cynthia right side up. “One hour north,” he said. “On foot.”

“Yes,” Valerie said.

The false Gurkhas saw the people looking toward the trail up from the road, and unlimbered their Sterling submachine guns. The villagers, already sensing something wrong about these soldiers, now drew back, wide-eyed, and everybody in the small clearing grew silent, except the female piglet, still squealing and shrilling about the indignity that had been done her.

High above, the sky was clear and blue. Thick brush and great trees surrounded the clearing, arching high overhead, and smaller trees had been left to stand beside the huts for shade. Except in the very center, where steady sunlight shone on their plantings, the settlement was dappled with rays reaching through the trees, angling down to touch with creamy light this person, that hut, that finger resting gently on a trigger. At the narrow end of the clearing, a patch of hotter, brighter light backed by fuzzy greens and yellows showed the top of the trail up from the road.

An Espejo girl, eight years old, picked up the piglet and cradled it in her arms. Her thudding heartbeat calmed the piglet, which grew quiet.

A straggling group of eight people, hot and sweaty and sun-dazzled, appeared at the end of the silent clearing and came slowly in, looking around themselves.

Vernon saw the Gurkhas, saw them holding the machine guns, and moaned as he dropped to his knees, unaware of the journalists staring at him in astonishment. “No,” he said, too late.