Jack Du Brul - River of Ruin

Unconsciously Mercer ducked as he stepped under the turning blades well above his head. “How was your flight?” he asked, accepting Lauren’s bag.

“Screw the small talk,” she said brazenly, “and kiss me.”

She put her arms around his neck and drew his mouth to hers, pressing her body full length against his. The scientists looked away in embarrassment only to glance back. Mercer’s hand had gone up the back of her shirt, hiking her tee enough to reveal one cup of the bikini top she wore underneath. None turned away a second time.

“Oh, hey,” Lauren exclaimed, a little breathless. “I want you to meet the pilot. She was the one flying cover for us. Jean Farrow, this is Philip Mercer.”

The pilot reached out her open window to shake Mercer’s hand. “Pleasure to meet you.”

“The pleasure’s mine,” he replied. “Without you we’d all be a Chinese torturer’s personal pincushions.”

Farrow turned to Lauren. “I’ve got to get back to the McCampbell . I’ll be back for you on Monday at 0800.”

“Roger. See you then.”

The rotors began to beat again as the party trudged to camp dragging their gear. When the chopper vanished over the volcano’s rim, the jungle exploded in its normal chorus of animal screeches, screams, and calls.

A short time later, everyone was settled around the fire pit and beers had been distributed. Harry was there, surly from his nap, but slowly warming as he worked on his first Jack and ginger ale. No one knew where he’d gotten the ice for his drink since the beers came from a gas-powered fridge that barely chilled the brew. The assembly looked more like a picnic than a scientific expedition, which is exactly what Mercer had wanted. He considered this outing as his payment for stopping the Chinese.

Sitting so her chair touched Mercer’s, her hand in his, Lauren introduced the scientists, the leader of whom was named Hernan Parada.

“I knew your friend, Gary Barber,” Parada said in fluent English. “He’d come to me when he first arrived in Panama to discuss the legend of the Twice-Stolen Treasure. After five minutes I knew I couldn’t persuade him not to waste his time on a search.”

“When Gary wanted something, he was like a pit bull.”

“Yes, exactly. We spoke many times after that and I was convinced he wasn’t just another adventurer hoping to strike it rich. He knew the legends better than I and much more of the actual history of El Camino Royal, the King’s Highway.” The middle-aged scientist sucked life into an ornate pipe and combed stray bits of tobacco from his beard. “However I never thought he would actually find it.”

“He didn’t really. He came close but he never saw the last piece of the puzzle.” Mercer paused. “Nor did he understand the geology of this mountain to see the anomaly.”

The word sent a ripple through the circle of people. “Anomaly?”

“The waterfall. It’s artificial.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean that it isn’t a natural geologic feature. It was built, I assume by the Inca warriors, to dam up this lake and completely flood the caldera.”

“Please, you must start from the beginning.” Parada had let his pipe go out.

“Okay, where the River of Ruin meets the Rio Tuira was a shallow falls that prevented idle boatmen from paddling up the tributary to this mountain. Gary discovered that the falls weren’t natural. It was actually a dam constructed of dressed stone that flooded part of the valley and raised the level of the River of Ruin by about ten feet. During the time of the Spanish rule, the only way to move around the jungle was to stay on the navigable rivers. By building a dam like they did, the Incas made sure the conquistadors wouldn’t pay much attention to the little river.

“Gary was sure this trick meant the treasure was buried somewhere below us on the river. He never considered that the Incas, master builders that they were, took their plan one step further. When they discovered this area, they were confronted by a ringlike mountaintop partially filled with water. But a cleft in one side prevented it from filling completely. By my calculations, that fissure was about forty feet wide at the top and nearly fifty feet tall.”

Despite his desire to hear the rest of the story, Professor Parada interrupted. “How did you calculate this?”

“The angle of repose,” Mercer answered. “The downward slope all around this mountain is a constant thirty-four degrees. Same with the valley flanking the River of Ruin. That is the natural angle that these soils settled into after a few million years of erosion. But the waterfall, at least the top fifty feet, is at a much steeper angle, nearly seventy-three degrees if taken in its entirety.”

“How’d you figure that?” Lauren asked.

“Basic trigonometry. It seemed unlikely that when this volcano grew over the course of countless eruptions that a plug of harder, and thus not easily eroded rock, could be perched like that on top of the gentler lower slopes. It had to be man-made.”

“A dam like the one down below,” Roddy exclaimed.

“Only much bigger.”

“So the Incas who raided the gold caravans built these dams to hide their treasure someplace inside this caldera.”

Mercer gave Lauren’s hand a squeeze. “Exactly. Once they’d stored away the gold, they sealed the fissure with their dam and let the lake fill up. No way anyone without modern diving equipment could find it.”

“Once the lake was filled, how would they hide the additional loads of treasure they stole?”

“I’m guessing that at the end of the dry season, when the lake level was already low, they would risk pulling a keystone from the dam to discharge enough water for them to cache it.”

Parada seemed satisfied with the answer to his question. “Once the keystone was replaced and the rains started, their hiding place would be hidden again.”

“And since rain in this country pisses down more regularly than I do,” Harry quipped, “I’d guess the lake filled quickly.”

“So where is it?” Roddy sounded like he’d already caught gold fever.

“The clue came from the journal I bought in Paris.” Mercer retrieved it from the waterproof bag under his chair. “Godin de Lepinay spent several months in Panama as a scout for the French canal effort. One of the things he wrote about was a volcanic lake in the north. It was the dry season and he was fascinated by the warren of caves in the island located in the lake’s center. He’d never seen anything like it. I think our island is also riddled with caves and that’s where the Incas hid their treasure.”

As one, all heads turned to the small island a quarter mile from shore, the spot where Mercer, Lauren and Miguel had spent the night surrounded by suffocating carbon dioxide. “We were camped on top of it,” she breathed.

“What do we do now?” Parada asked through a cloud of aromatic smoke.

“We blow up the dam, let the lake drain down to its natural level, and see if I’m right.” Mercer looked at the faces around him and had never seen such eagerness. “Lieutenant Foch’s men have already planted the explosives and we’ve got authorization from the government to drain the lake. They’ve alerted everyone living downstream on the Rio Tuira to expect a bit of a flood this afternoon.”

“By God, sir,” Parade said, slapping his leg as he too caught the fever, “what are we waiting for?”

“Well, permission from you to blow up a dam built by the Incas. I was afraid you might consider it an important artifact.”

Parada thought about it for a moment and conferred in Spanish with his companions. “Had you come to us a week ago I would have said no. But with the canal out of commission and little money to repair it other than what we can borrow from your country, Panama is going to starve. I think the loss of scientific knowledge is worth the benefits.”