David Golemon - Legend

"Ten feet to bottom, eight feet, six… ease up, Toad," he said, watching the depth gauge and ignoring the picture. The probe slowed.

"Let me tell you, for a dead-end tributary, I'm having one hell of a time keeping this thing trim. Every time I head east, it wants to keep going. There is really one bitch of a current out there," Carl said as he fought the small joystick.

Through the window, Jack could make out some sort of thick vegetation behind the wide waterfall. He then turned his attention to the computer screen.

"Okay, you're at four feet; level her off and come right three degrees. That should put you on top of our rock," the master chief said.

Snoopy banked to the right for a split second and then quickly righted itself on command from Carl. The light was picking up nothing but murky water and a fish now and then.

"Where in the hell is it?" Jenks asked.

The light picked up a darker outline ahead of Snoopy. Carl eased the probe forward, steering into the strengthening current. Finally the light picked out what looked like large teeth. Then the mouth and nose, large pointed ears, and eyes that stared back at them through the monitor. The head was at least ten feet tall and it looked as if there was even more buried under the mud.

"Chief, can we pipe this through the boat into the science labs?"

"Yeah," Jenks said as he pushed a button labeled BOAT MONITORS. "There, now the whole ship can see Toad's future father-in-law," he said, laughing.

Jack pushed the intercom. "Doctors, look at your monitors. Does anyone have any guesses?"

The probe made a complete turn around the huge head, picking out other small details — the feathers coursing along powerful-looking arms, the breast piece which was made up of a different type of stone from the rest of the body. All around its circumference, only half of the stone was above the mud and silt of the river's bottom; the rest disappeared into murk.

"Can you see if the figure is holding something in its right hand?" asked the voice of Professor Ellenshaw over the speaker mounted next to Jack's head.

Snoopy swung down and traveled a few feet. The probe ran along the rather large belly of the statue and protruded above the mud. The images revealed that it was indeed holding something.

"What do you think?" Carl asked.

"A pitchfork?" Jenks suggested, adjusting the brightness on the monitor.

"No, not that, but close," Jack said as he flipped on the intercom. "Professor, we have a trident in the right hand and a battle-ax in the left, crossed over at the midsection; anything else is under the mud."

"Good, good, gentlemen. You have just proven beyond any doubt that at one time at least, the Inca had passed this way. They thought it important enough to leave some strong medicine here. That is the Incan god Supay, god of death and lord of the underworld. Also the lord of all underground treasures," Ellenshaw said in a mysterious voice.

"I also believe this is Supay," Professor Keating said from one of the labs.

"I concur; the likeness etched in stone in front of us is exactly that, Supay," the voice of Professor Nathan agreed. "God of the underworld."

"Nice," mumbled Jenks.

Jack was listening but at the same time studying the cliff walls above them. There were many large ledges, so it was completely possible for the statue to have broken, or have been knocked free from one of those outcroppings by an earthquake perhaps, or just erosion.

"I think that would have been a guide, or at least reason enough, for Padilla's expedition to sidetrack," Carl said, still looking at the monitor.

"But where in the hell did he go?" Jenks wondered. "Maybe they climbed out of here and over the cliffs and picked up the tributary at another point."

Jack didn't say anything; he continued to look at the walls around Teacher . He left the cockpit and returned to the navigation section. There, he brought up other maps, selected the one he wanted, and clicked the mouse on the side of the navigation console. A U.S. Geological Survey map came up and on it Jack located the area where they were, thanks to their global positioning transponder. He traced the small tributary above them, the one that the waterfall was created from, and followed it. It routed right back to the main Amazon, in about a two-mile loop. He electronically sent the map to the console monitor up front and then went back to the cockpit.

"I don't think they climbed any cliffs; the small tributary that is responsible for the falls ahead, the Santos Negron, is nothing but a hundred-milelong tributary that's not even that old. It was created by flooding no more than five years ago. I think Padilla stuck to this tributary; it had to have been the only natural one in existence five hundred years ago."

"How did he and his people go forward, underwater?" Carl asked.

"If not underwater, how about underground, or both?" Jack asked.

Carl and Jenks didn't say anything; they looked straight ahead toward the expanse of ancient and man-made falls.

"But what are the odds that these waters would have covered by accident the very route that Padilla took?"

Jack turned to see Danielle Serrate standing behind him, leaning into the hatchway.

"Fluke," Jack said. "The new tributary would run wherever rainfall had created a trough beyond where the Brazilian government had controlled the flooding. Once it reached this point in unsurveyed and unmapped land, they really didn't care what new tributaries were created."

"I wouldn't care to wager the house on that," Danielle said. "Is that the American phrase, bet the house?"

"Yeah, that's what they say, but that's exactly what I think we should do," Carl said as he took a firm hold on Snoopy's joystick and brought its nose up. The view on the monitor changed and the picture became brighter as the probe emerged from the murkiness of the bottom toward the surface. Jack patted Carl on the shoulder. Snoopy sped up east toward the falls that were now starting to rock the probe left to right with the turbulence of the falling water. Carl directed the probe ten feet deeper as it approached. The monitor was filled with white water and bubbles as the impact of the high-falling tributary struck the flat surface below it. Carl adjusted the trim and sent Snoopy ten feet deeper, still believing the impact of the water would be enough to damage the TRW probe. Suddenly Snoopy was into darker but calmer water, where it snagged on an obstruction as an alarm sounded on the console.

"Whoa, cowboy, you rammed something. See if you can back her up some," Jenks said.

"Chief, how close can you get to the falls?" Jack asked.

"I can take her right under if I want; that little water hose of a falls couldn't dent this composite hull."

On the monitor Snoopy had successfully backed away and rose by fifteen feet to the surface.

"What is that stuff?" Danielle asked.

The master chief fired up Teacher 's engines and started edging the large boat toward the falling water.

"It's bushes, water plants, and vines, a thick curtain of them," Carl described. "It's a wall of them behind the falls; Snoopy was stopped by them. Goddamn, you may be right, Jack."

"Right about what, c'mon, what's he right about?" Jenks said as Teacher slowly drifted toward the turbulence of the water.

"He thinks he knows where and at what point our intrepid Captain Padilla disappeared into history, Chief," Carl said as he brought Snoopy to the surface next to Teacher . "And look at the center there, it's been recently penetrated; see where a lot of new growth has occurred? I suspect that weakened area tells us that Professor Zachary has been this way also."

"Ask Mendenhall to bring the probe aboard; she earned her keep," Jenks said.