Will Staeger - Public Enemy

They camped beneath some willow trees, then set out before dawn. Two hours into a climb in the Defender up a muddy road, Cooper said, “Assuming your tomb raiders were as good as you say, and this is the easiest way to the site, then I’ve got a question.”

“Shoot,” Borrego said, lolling back and forth, belted into his throne as the Land Rover tossed them around.

“How the hell did they get eight crates of gold artifacts out of here-at maybe half a ton each?”

Borrego smiled and those yellow teeth gleamed.

“That’s the trick, isn’t it?” he said.

Cooper waited. Madrid steered around a rut but hit another one and Cooper had to struggle to avoid taking a dashboard to the chin.

“To be honest,” Borrego said, “I’m not entirely sure. I’ve done my share of digs in the area-at least the general vicinity-and the places you usually find something, it tends to be the case that nobody else has been where you’re going. Lot of the undiscovered ruins are in the middle of an active volcanic range, spots that were once populated by Mayans, or whichever native set you’re pillaging-but these places have seen a few thousand landslides, earthquakes, even volcanic eruptions since. People move away, nobody goes back in but some recreational hikers, the rain forest overtakes the village, and anything of value the former inhabitants kept takes some hard labor to pull out.”

Even with the four-wheel drive, Madrid was losing traction on the muddy slope. The road had become so steep that Cooper felt as though he were reclined in a business class airline seat.

“You still haven’t answered my question.”

“Getting there,” Borrego said. “Point I’m making is, nobody’s going up sheer cliffs or scaling the edge of a volcanic crater with the two or three trucks of equipment it takes to excavate the goodies, so, like us, the tomb raiders take their equipment in on the low road. But once you get your hands on the statues, or the mummies, or the bags of gold-whatever-you’re usually not too far from some pretty steep slopes. Hell-in these parts, it can sometimes be-literally-a thousand-foot sheer cliff.”

Cooper held on for his life as Madrid rolled them around a bend at the peak of a particularly steep incline.

“Anyway, when you’re talking slopes like that,” Borrego said, “it winds up being a lot easier going down than up.”

When they came around the turn, Cooper observed they were now faced with a hill that looked to him the way it might if he’d been looking up an Olympic ski jump. At the two or three miles an hour Madrid was doing, there was no way they could generate enough speed to climb the hill.

“Hang on,” Madrid said, then jerked the wheel hard left and, flooring it, sped madly for all of ten or fifteen yards before wedging the Defender into a thicket of ferns and short, stubby trees. Then he flicked off the ignition and locked the parking brake.

“End of the line,” he said.

The Polar Bear unlatched himself from the throne and leaped deftly, even lightly, out onto the muddy ground. Once he got his feet under him, he looked at Cooper. Even with Borrego standing on the ground and Cooper high up in his seat, Cooper had to glance up to look the Polar Bear in the eye.

“If I read that map right,” Borrego said, “we’ve got this tall hill, some mountain climbing up above it, and maybe six or seven miles of jungle to go before X marks the spot.” He grinned. “Feel like a hike?”

Cooper took another look up the slope. It looked to be one hell of a long way before the incline eased-and that was all in advance of the “mountain climbing,” which he didn’t really want to think about.

“Piece of cake,” he said.

Cooper’s feet were blistered silly by noon, and it wasn’t until two-fifteen that they crested the lip of the crater to observe, beyond its edge, a short downward slope and what looked to Cooper like an endless ocean of jungle.

Borrego scrambled nimbly up behind him and stood beside Cooper to take in the view.

“An unnamed rain forest plateau,” he said. “One of a few thousand such gardens of Eden found here.”

There were mountain peaks on every side of the forest, and Cooper realized the plateau was part of a volcanic crater, or possibly a few of them decayed and overgrown together. There seemed to be two main patches of green-the first being a larger circle of forest closer to them, the second another, higher plateau. The two regions, taken together, formed a sort of figure eight. He wondered how many archaeologically important ruins, Mayan or otherwise, were buried in vines and rot in this plateau alone-then thought again, considering it would be strange for anyone to live up here, now or ever.

Madrid arrived, hauling a little more than the others in his backpack, and stood up straight to take in the view.

“For you history buffs,” Borrego said, “this is the kind of place Mayan Indian culture thrived for as long as a thousand years beyond the period in which they have traditionally been declared extinct. Up here, you didn’t get any visitors until recently-not for six or seven hundred years at a time. And if you know how to do it, you don’t need more than what you’ve got in that jungle out there to live as long as you want. Forever, even-except for the continued encroachment of the rest of us human beings into all corners of the planet, and the diseases we bring with us.”

Borrego pulled the map the chop-shop laborer had given them and examined it for a while. Then he looked out at the jungle plateau, scratched his head, and pointed to what Cooper believed to be the northwest corner of the woods.

“If his sketch is legit,” Borrego said, “that’s where we’re going.”

Cooper shuffled his aching feet on the rocky earth of the crater’s edge.

“So that’d be the six or seven miles you were talking about,” he said, shaking his head.

“Yeah,” Borrego said. “Only it looks more like ten to me.”

“Christ.”

“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Borrego said.

“What’s that?”

The big man pointed again toward their destination.

“That the answer to who the hell your ‘snuffer-outers’ are, and why the hell they’re doing their dirty work, might actually lie out there. In the goddamn jungle.”

Cooper let his tired mind roam to thoughts of Cap’n Roy, and Po Keeler, and the frozen corpse buried beneath the Alaskan king crabs-seemingly so vastly distant from the time and place they’d flown, driven, and climbed to. A world away from this-how had Borrego put it?-garden of Eden. Planted square in the middle of a mostly irrelevant third world country-geopolitically speaking.

Even the original Eden wasn’t rumored to have been all peanuts and popcorn, and he expected no different here. In fact, there was something out in that rain forest crater the chop-shop laborer and part-time tomb raider had seen that convinced him this place, and anyone who visited it, was cursed.

Cooper didn’t really want to think much more about what they were about to find. At least not yet. He reached up-way up-and offered Borrego a friendly whack on the shoulder.

“Let’s see what there is to see,” he said.

They found the village just before dusk.

Cooper encountered the first of the structures, an overgrown rectangle made of clay and dark hardwood timbers that had barely rotted at all. He almost missed it, mainly since it wasn’t the kind of ruin he was expecting to find. Not that he should have expected one type of ruin or another-but where were the Mayan stones, crumbling into dirt as the jungle overtook them?

Soon he saw another such structure. Then another. The three of them had been working about fifty yards apart, covering as broad a swath as possible while still remaining within earshot, if not within eyesight. Cooper whistled.