Burial Ground (16 page)

"Then it could be anywhere," Leo said.
"Hell, with as thick as this jungle is, we could be walking past it
right now for all we know."

"True," Sam said. "All I'm saying is that we
need to be prepared for the possibility that we might stumble right
into it, or come close enough that we could invite aggression."

"Or we could be walking away from it, and
soon enough our company will grow weary of watching us do nothing
and return to report back to their elders or whatever," Colton
said.

"You could be absolutely right. I still
think we should have a plan in place should we encounter the
village, though. They may not ordinarily be hostile, but a bunch of
strangers---especially
white
strangers---wandering into their
midst could startle them to action."

"Who's to say they wouldn't welcome us with
open arms?"

"Is that a chance you're willing to take?"
Sam asked, looking first at Leo, then at Colton, emphasizing the
question with her raised eyebrows.

"We're prepared for anything that comes our
way," Colton said.

"We'd better be," Sam said. She glanced back
over her shoulder into the dark jungle. "Can't you feel it?
Something's wrong. The rainforest is too still, too quiet. There's
something out there. Something's going to happen and all of the
animals know better than to be around when it does."

10:07 p.m.

The sun had nearly set by the time they
reached a suitable spot to pitch camp, although under the nearly
impenetrable canopy, darkness had settled over them long before.
Had there been enough light to continue stumbling through the
snarls of shrubbery and vines, even at a snail's pace, they would
have gladly done so. An uneasy pall had descended over the lot of
them. They could all feel it. Merritt was out of his element here,
but even he had quickly recognized it, and once he had, the feeling
became impossible to shake. The entire tropical rainforest had
grown silent. No longer did strikingly-colored birds dart from tree
to tree. No monkeys cavorted in the upper reaches of the branches.
Even the occasional white-tailed deer failed to bound across their
path. Eyelash vipers still dangled like vines from above them, and
tegus and whiptails still popped up from time to time, though in
nowhere near the same numbers. Only the mosquitoes and flies
appeared unfazed, their ranks swelling with each passing mile.

Merritt was not one to be swayed by
superstition, despite the genuine fear he could see in the eyes of
their guides, but he trusted his instincts. And right now they were
telling him that something definitely was not right.

They had found another light gap, though
this one was only a fraction of the size of the last. The tree that
created it must have fallen quite some time ago. The saplings were
already taller than he was. Soon enough, they would close off the
welcome view of the waxing moon and constellations. There was a
small section where the trees had been hacked away to make room for
a campfire. The trunk of a ceiba tree had been carved with Hunter's
initials and the date that Leo had last spoken to him, which meant
that they were only a few days away from their ultimate
destination.

Merritt wondered if Gearhardt's son had felt
a similar preternatural disquiet when he camped here.

Gearhardt and Colton sat apart from the
others, conspiring in whispers. They scrutinized their maps,
compared their current position to the GPS data on the handheld
unit, and plotted the course ahead. Their four associates patrolled
the overgrown perimeter, no longer maintaining the charade of being
simply the hired excavation help. They didn't carry their weapons
out in the open, but neither did they allow their hands to stray
far from their holsters. He had seen one of the automatic pistols
they carried. They weren't the kind one could pick up at a sporting
goods store. SIG Sauer only dealt such heavy artillery to law
enforcement agencies and the military. Considering he was armed
with nothing more threatening than a Swiss Army knife, he drew a
measure of comfort from the fact that someone had his back, even if
he didn't trust them in the slightest. There was definitely more to
the situation than any of them was willing to admit. Merritt sensed
there were ulterior motives in play here. He had a pretty good
grasp on the force driving Leo, but what was in it for Colton and
his men beyond a simple paycheck? There had to be something else up
there in those peaks, more than just the missing members of
Hunter's party. What had that expedition originally been dispatched
to find?

The wind shifted directions and assaulted
him with smoke from the fire. He coughed and scooted down the
fallen log toward the fresh air. Twenty-four hours ago, he would
have reveled in the smoke, regardless of how badly it burned in his
chest, but now that he had smeared Sam's concoction over every
uncovered inch of his skin, he no longer had anything to fear from
the mosquitoes. He smelled like he'd rolled in his grandmother's
herb garden and the tackiness on his flesh took some getting used
to, yet it was a small price to pay for a respite from the
pain.

The birdman sat beside him, twirling a
feather by the quill. All of his concentration was focused on the
feather and his lips moved along with his unvoiced thoughts. His
brow furrowed and he gnawed unconsciously on the inside of his
lower lip. The campfire reflected from his glasses.

"Aren't you going to name the species for
me?" Merritt asked.

Galen obviously didn't pick up on the
sarcasm.

"I wish I could," he whispered, still
turning it over and over as though the answer could be ascertained
from motion.

"I was beginning to think you knew
everything there was to know about every bird in the
rainforest."

"No chance of that. I could probably
identify just about every genera, and half of the thousands of
species. Except this one. And raptors are my specialty."

"What makes this one so unique then?" Merrit
asked. Not that he was genuinely intrigued, but he figured the
opportunity to razz the birdman might momentarily amuse him.

"Everything about it. The background color,
the strange iridescence. Even the calamus has an unusual tapered
shape. There are no downy barbs, and one would expect to see a
small amount of skin surrounding the proximal umbilicus where the
feather plugs into the wing, but in this case, there isn't
any."

"All feathers look alike to me. Some are
obviously longer and more colorful than others. I don't understand
why you're beating yourself up over this. It's just a feather after
all."

"Just a feather? I found this near the
remains of the jaguar. It's from the exact same species as the
feathers that were in Hunter Gearhardt's possession when he died.
This bird had been standing precisely where I stood, and I'm still
no closer to identifying it than I was when we left."

"I'm sure you'll get it," Merritt said. He
rose and clapped the man on the shoulder. The pudgy little guy was
getting himself way too worked up. It was starting to make Merritt
uncomfortable.

He walked away from the fire and toward his
tent. The exhaustion set in with a dull ache that he could feel all
the way into his bones. Perhaps it was time to call it a day. He'd
just slip off behind a tree, drain his bladder, and pass out for a
few hours until they roused him before sunrise to put him to work
again.

On the other side of a tree with roots that
formed a skeletal teepee around the trunk, he unzipped and sighed.
Fluid trickled through the leaves. He leaned his head back and
looked up toward the night sky. A single star twinkled through a
tiny gap between the rustling branches. Something skittered over
his right shoe. He flinched and hosed down his left shin in his
hurry to flick it away.

"Son of a---" he started, but his words died
when he caught a hint of movement through the trees.

He could clearly see the silhouette of a man
against the foliage.

Merritt held perfectly still while he
weighed his options. If the man had wanted to kill him, he'd be
dead already. So what did that mean? He slowly zipped up his pants
and continued to face straight ahead while he monitored the shadow
from the corner of his eye. Was it the same native Jay had captured
on film earlier? If so, and they had nothing to fear from this
silent watcher, then perhaps the time had come to make contact.

Cautiously, he turned until he faced the
man, raised his hand in greeting, and took a step toward the
silhouette.

The man retreated deeper into the darkness.
Merritt caught the faint reflection of firelight from the whites of
two narrowed eyes.

"I'm not going to hurt you," Merritt said.
He walked forward, both hands where they could be easily seen.

Another step and he was nearly close enough
to reach out and grab the man, who shrunk back into a cluster of
shrubs. The outline of a bow protruded from behind the man's right
shoulder like the broken wing of an angel. He could barely discern
the feathered ends of the arrows in the quiver over the opposite
shoulder.

In one swift motion, the native sprinted
toward the jungle to Merritt's right.

Instinctively, Merritt lunged for the man,
but only managed to grab a handful of wool from his skirt.

A rustle of leaves and a few soft footsteps
on the detritus, and the native was gone, a ghost vanishing into
the ether.

No, definitely not a ghost.

Merritt brushed the wiry wool from his right
palm and walked toward the clump of saplings through which the man
had disappeared. His left foot kicked something on the ground. With
one final glance at the jungle, he stooped, picked up the object,
and headed back toward the campfire.

As he neared, he studied what appeared to be
a leather satchel cinched closed by a drawstring. He opened it and
fished around in the contents until his fingers settled over
something hard and metallic.

He stepped from the forest into the
firelight and held up what looked like a miniature pickaxe. One end
was sharp, the other blunted.

A rock hammer.

He caught Leo's stare from where the older
man sat on a log by the flames in time to see the expression of
pain wash over his face.

10:32 p.m.

Colton turned the satchel over and over in
his lap. It was the dried stomach of some large animal, easily
identifiable by the telltale horn shape and the coarse rugae lining
the inside. He couldn't bear to look at Leo, who stared helplessly
between the small hammer and the shadowed wilderness, where the
hired crew tromped through the underbrush in search of tracks they
would never find. Dahlia and Jay followed them in hopes of
capturing the native on film, which saved him the trouble of having
to run them off for attempting to memorialize Leo's suffering.
There were probably consolatory words that should be said, but he
didn't know any of them. Instead, he scrutinized the remaining
contents of the native's bag. There were several arrowheads, dried
lengths of jerked meat, and two irregular clumps of what he had at
first erroneously believed to be clods of mud. He broke one open
and inspected it more closely. At the center of the sphere was a
small chunk of something metallic. It was an amalgam of some sort,
part reddish and flaking, the remainder a smoky gray. The outer
portion that had been packed around the odd core was composed of
clay that had been mixed with metal shavings. He brought it closer
to the fire. The flecks glinted of silver and copper.

"Well, what do you know?" he said out
loud.

"What is it?" Galen asked from behind him.
Colton didn't realize he had drawn an audience.

"See this outer layer? Those metal shavings
are copper and magnesium." He pinched off some of the clay and
carefully set it on one of the branches in the fire. After a
moment, a fierce greenish-white glare enveloped the clay like a
birthing star. It faded quickly to nothing again. "And this chunk
of metal in the center? The red portion is iron oxide, more
commonly known as rust. The grayish part is aluminum. Together they
form an incendiary compound called thermite." He crumbled off a
section and threw it into the flames.

"Nothing happened," Galen said after a long
moment.

"Right. That's because the temperature
required for the auto-ignition of thermite is higher than the fire
can generate alone. But throw in the magnesium as a fuse..."

He wadded up the ball again and dropped it
into the fire.

It smoked and smoldered before the magnesium
flare blazed again. A heartbeat later, the thermite ignited with a
brilliant expulsion of light and heat. The logs in the campfire
incinerated and the blinding glow eclipsed the flames.

Galen stumbled backward and fell onto his
rear end with a gasp.

Colton chuckled and moved away from the
fire. His shins already ached from the searing heat.

Powdered rust and aluminum combined to form
a flash powder that burned extremely hot and fast. He had never
experimented with them in this rock-like form. Was it created
through come sort of metallic precipitation process?

"You could have at least warned me," Galen
said. He picked himself up and dusted off his backside.

Colton smirked.

The thermite continued to burn.

They were dealing with some very smart
natives. And while that in itself didn't trouble him, something
else did. Why in the world did an aboriginal tribe in the middle of
nowhere need incendiary devices?

10:44 p.m.

Once the intense heat and flames had
diminished enough to comfortably approach, Leo had taken a seat on
the fallen trunk by the fire. He clung to the rock hammer as though
his life depended on it. Whatever semblance of control he had once
maintained over his emotions was now gone. Tears rolled down his
cheeks and his hands trembled, yet he refused to allow this
development to break him. Instead, he poured all of his sorrow and
pain into a burbling cauldron of rage. He squeezed the miniature
hammer so hard his knuckles cracked. He had finally discovered what
happened to his son. Rather than this newfound knowledge allowing
for even a small measure of closure, it widened the chasm that had
been torn inside of him.