Burial Ground (25 page)

"He didn't return from his patrol detail at
the scheduled rendezvous time," Morton whispered. "There was no
answer on his com-link, so we initiated a search of the camp. The
first thing we noticed was that his backpack was gone. The second
thing we discovered was this..."

Morton walked over to the pile of supplies
and pointed down to the wooden crate attached to the carrying
poles. A smear of blood covered the edge of the lid on the right
side near the latch, where someone would have grabbed it in the
process of opening it. Someone with a bleeding right hand.

"Damn it," Colton whispered. "Has anyone
inventoried the contents yet?"

"All of the sensing equipment appears to be
accounted for," Webber said. "However, we're missing several items
from the private stock underneath."

Colton felt a sinking sensation. He raised
his eyebrows to encourage Webber to continue. The man looked away
when he spoke.

"One each of the fragmentary and incendiary
grenades, and one of the SCARs."

"He deserted us." Colton fumed. This was
entirely unacceptable. The man had been paid an inordinate amount
of money in advance. Even with the remaining half due upon
successful completion of their mission, it was still more than
enough to live comfortably for several years.

"No," Sorenson snapped. He lowered his tone
again. "Rippeth was no coward. He would have seen the expedition to
the end or died trying. There's no way he would slink off in the
middle of the night."

"Minus the tent you men shared, all of his
personal belongings are gone, in addition to close to twenty
thousand dollars worth of military-grade firepower."

"I'm telling you," Sorenson said through
bared teeth, "he
did not
desert us."

Colton studied the other two men from the
corner of his eye. They appeared considerably less convinced.

"Then if you're right, he can't be far from
here," Colton whispered. "And there had better be a damn good
reason as to why he's not here right now."

Colton forced down the images of the
slaughtered jaguar and the terrified alpacas in their
fully-enclosed stone pen. They held no province here. Already three
men had absconded with supplies under the cover of darkness.
Regardless of what Sorenson thought, he was certain that Rippeth
was the fourth. But he couldn't afford a mutiny right now. The
former soldiers pledged allegiance to their bank accounts, but
every man had his personal loyalties, which was obvious in
Sorenson's case. He was going to have to indulge them an all-out
search of the surrounding jungle if he hoped to keep them on his
side.

"Then we need to divide the area into
quadrants," Colton whispered. "We can safely rule out the lake.
Morton, you head southeast along the shoreline and work your way
back into the forest. Webber, you and Sorenson strike off to the
east and then split up. One of you go north, the other south. I'll
follow the bank to the northwest and search the surrounding area.
We meet back here in thirty minutes. Any questions?"

"Are we going to arm ourselves from the
crate?" Webber asked.

"Not until it's absolutely necessary. We
don't want to panic the civilians. We still need them focused to
reach our goal." Colton paused to gauge their reactions. They
seemed momentarily appeased by his plan. "All right then. You have
your orders." He held up his wristwatch. "On my mark." The other
three similarly raised their watches, and synchronized the time in
unison.

Colton turned and strode through the camp
and along the shoreline. He fished his communications gear out of
his pocket and plugged the earpiece into his left ear. The rotten
smell accosted him from the jungle to his right. He wasn't
especially looking forward to revisiting the clearing filled with
festering carcasses, but someone had to do it, and none of the
other men had objected when he assigned it to himself. He didn't
blame them in the slightest.

After another hundred yards, he ducked out
of the moonlight and into the darkness beneath the canopy. He could
barely see a thing, even with his penlight, which he held against
the barrel of his pistol in a two-handed grip as he pressed back
the shadows in slow sweeps. There was no reason to be leading with
his weapon, but it provided a measure of comfort. He wasn't the
kind of man prone to allowing himself to be spooked. After a decade
as a SEAL, he had seen men die in just about every possible way,
and he had survived with little more than cuts and contusions.
Bosnia, Chechnya, Iraq. He had done things he chose not to remember
and things he would never forget. And since then, he had handled
more of these private expeditions than he could count. From the
Nile basin and the deserts of Africa to the polar ice caps and the
thousands of feet of water beneath the Seven Seas to the smallest
of uncharted islands and war-torn Third World nations. And through
them all, his gut had never felt like it did now.

The jungle dictated his wending course,
turning him this way and that, around massive trunks and through
screens of shrubbery. Mosquitoes sang around his head in the
absence of birdsong and the chatter of monkeys. Now that he truly
thought about it, with the exception of the stinging cloud that
escorted him through the foliage and the din of flies off to his
right, there didn't seem to be any animals in the vicinity. That
observation did little to settle his rising unease.

He checked his watch. Fifteen minutes had
already passed. Time to start working back toward the camp.

Veering back to the south, he wound through
a maze of trees and vines, ducking, climbing, crawling. The drone
of flies grew louder with each step. He must be closer to the
clearing than he thought, or perhaps the forest had steered him
toward it. Either way, it meant that his navigational instincts
were off, which unsettled him even more. As he closed in on the
buzzing sound, he realized that his instincts hadn't failed him.
The trees were all wrong. Even coming in from the opposite
direction, he would have recognized them.

He willed his heart rate to slow, and
softened his tread on the damp leaves and kindling. The darkness
shifted through the branches of a ceiba tree ahead. He raised his
flashlight beam toward the gaps between the leaves. Thousands of
bloated flies roiled and buzzed beyond. The smell wasn't as
atrocious as it had been in the clearing they had stumbled upon
earlier, but it wasn't a naturally recurring scent either. It was
the damp reek of the inside of something never meant to be opened,
tainted by the scents of freshly chopped meat and bowels.

Colton eased through the branches and
steeled himself against the sight. Arcs of black blood covered a
cluster of tree trunks. Several heliconia bushes had been ripped
from the disheveled ground and shredded amid tatters of clothing.
He identified the rifle in the dirt first, for it was the one
object not covered with insects. An FN-SCAR-L/ Mk. 16.
Disarticulated remains were spread through the underbrush, seething
with black flies. Even the backpack was covered with insects trying
to draw blood from the fabric.

Breathing fast, he retreated from what was
left of Rippeth, and hurried back toward the lake. The unobstructed
shore would be the fastest route back to camp.

He pressed the transmitter button on his
communications device and prepared to speak into the microphone,
and then thought better of it. What would happen if he called for
backup? The other men would come running, but what would be the
consequences to the expedition if they found their brother-in-arms
butchered in such a ghastly fashion? He had to determine how to
proceed very carefully. They couldn't afford to scrap their plans
now. Too much money had been advanced, too many man-hours expended.
And he would not tolerate failure, especially with the potential
payoff being so enormous. This one mission could provide him with
enough cash to finance a luxurious retirement.

But the first order of business was saving
his own skin. Lord only knew what kind of creatures could butcher a
heavily-armed soldier without allowing him to squeeze off a shot.
That SCAR fired six-hundred rounds per minute. A gentle tap of the
trigger, just the slightest application of pressure, would have
easily expelled several rounds. And he hadn't heard a single
report.

He stumbled out of the trees and nearly fell
into the lake before regaining his balance and sprinting through
the mud toward the camp. Webber and Sorenson were already waiting
beside the fire, watching him approach. Morton appeared from the
far side of the tents at the same time.

Colton slowed his pace and struggled to
regain his composure. He slid his pistol back under his waistband
and clenched his hands into fists, willing his heart to slow. How
was he going to handle this?

"Report," he said, and sat on the log they
had rolled over beside the campfire.

"No sign of Rippeth," Sorenson said.

"Not a single fresh track," Webber
added.

"Nothing in the jungle," Morton said. "And
the path has too many sets of footprints already to tell if there
was a recent set headed in the opposite direction."

Colton studied their faces. They appeared
less certain that their comrade hadn't abandoned them now.

He thought of how savagely Rippeth had been
torn apart. Even if he did say something, would it guarantee their
safe return to Pomacochas? Rippeth had been alone, perhaps an
eighth of a mile from anyone else. Whatever attacked him had chosen
to isolate him in the bush rather than in the camp itself, where
even more prey slept unaware. Perhaps safety was in numbers. If
that was the case, then what would sharing the details change?

"I think we need to face the grim truth,"
Colton said. "Rippeth deserted us, and we must proceed. With or
without him."

8:08 a.m.

The mood when Galen awakened was somber. One
of the men, who no longer maintained the pretense of simple hired
excavation help, had abandoned them during the night. The man with
the dragon tattoo on his neck had made him uncomfortable, but he
looked like the kind of man one would want to have beside him when
one's life was on the line. Those that remained were grumpy and
impatient. Their red eyes and the bags beneath them suggested that
the previous night hadn't been remotely restful. They didn't chat
amongst themselves as usual, and pressed the group harder to reach
its goal, which contributed to Galen's overall sour disposition.
After being awakened well before the designated hour and forced to
pack at an absurd rate, the morning had started out poorly. Add the
fact that he'd been denied even the comfort of a single cup of
coffee filled with floating grounds, and the day was already
shot.

They had passed around the far shore of the
lake under the light of the moon, and witnessed the sunrise as a
weak dilution of the shadows beneath the canopy as they continued
to the west into the jungle. Where the bottom of the valley met the
steep slope of a mountain, they had encountered a thin path that
switchbacked up toward the low-lying clouds. It was barely wide
enough to scale single-file, and seemed to only service whatever
animals used it to reach the lake from the high country. Often it
grew steep enough that they were forced to crawl, using the roots
that poked out of the hillside for leverage. At those points, it
took four men to haul the crate of sensing equipment.

He was amazed that so many trees could grow
so densely on the nearly vertical hillside, especially where the
side of the path occasionally turned into a pitfall over the
treetops far below. Such moments granted stunning views of the
shimmering lake way down in the valley, a small mirror set into an
infinite forest of green. Even from this vantage, he could barely
see the blue pinpoint of Laguna Pomacochas on the horizon and the
linear depression in the trees where the river that had brought
them to the foot of the Andes flowed. The fortress they had been
steered through the day before was invisible from above. Even
knowing where to look didn't help. It was no wonder the tribe had
avoided discovery until now.

They took frequent breaks wherever the trail
was wide enough to allow them to gather and pass around one of the
water bladders. Conversation had been limited to heavy breathing as
they acclimated to the exertion at the increasingly higher
altitudes. Dahlia and Jay had seized every opportunity to capture
the panoramic view since they were unable to film while they
climbed. Leo and Colton had begun to consult the map more and more
often, and agreed that they needed to be on the southeastern face
of the peak on the other side of the one they currently ascended.
Already they had encountered two tree trunks marked with Hunter
Gearhardt's initials and the date he had carved them, which caused
Leo to shorten their breaks and drive them ever faster.

At the end of an especially challenging
section of the trail, the world fell away to the right. He stood on
a sheer limestone cliff, shaded by the omnipresent ceiba trees, and
finally saw what he had come here to see. A large nest constructed
from broken sticks had been built onto a ledge below, from which
the gnarled remains of dead, gray trees protruded. Bluish dots
spotted the feather- and down-lined nest, remnants of the Andean
condor eggs that had hatched there through the seasons.

Galen felt a swell of hope. If these raptors
could successfully procreate in the wild, then surely there was a
chance that the California condor could return to its former glory.
He wondered what might happen if some of their captive-bred
juveniles were to be released somewhere like this. The problem was
they weren't producing hatchlings in large enough numbers to
experiment with their lives. Perhaps someday...