Hell's Gate(8)

“Well, they couldn’t have gotten too far,” MacCready ventured. “What about a trail? They must have cut a pretty wide swath through the forest.”

“Our scouts found no trail. No abandoned cargo, either, and no reports of Jap seaplanes.” Hendry hesitated, watching MacCready. If he could hook him in through his insatiable curiosity, the major could forgo the inevitable order to send his friend on yet another suicide mission. “Who knows? Maybe they hauled it off with porters and covered their tracks.”

“Porters? I don’t care how clever these guys were. They would have left some trace.” MacCready turned to Hendry. “Something . . . ?” he added, hopefully.

“There was nothing. It’s like they levitated out of there.”

“Well then, forget porters,” MacCready said, turning back to the map. “They must have used the river—rafts, maybe.”

Hendry, who had never cared for real fishing, began to reel in his catch. “You think so, huh?”

MacCready nodded his head, very slowly, and the major saw a glimmer of excitement rising in the man, something of the delight one might see on a child’s face if he had been given a new puzzle to solve.

“If that sub’s as big as you say it is—”

“It is,” Hendry emphasized.

“With enough storage capacity to hold planes?”

“That’s right.”

“Damn! That’s a handy toy to have in your arsenal. And not the sort of thing you’d want to lose.” MacCready was talking to himself as much as he was to Hendry. “So what the hell were they doing so far upriver? They must have known that they’d never get back out of there. And what were they carrying that was so risk-worthy?”

“Good questions, Mac. And like you said, whatever it was, it was important enough for them to sacrifice a world-class submarine. Hell, it was too damned important to risk leaking in their own coded messages.”

MacCready turned from the map. “So, we’ve broken their latest code?”

Hendry looked away; suddenly interested in a gecko that was stalking a cockroach across the ceiling.

MacCready didn’t take the hint. “Who was it? Not those Limeys at Bletchley Park?”

Ignoring the question, Hendry drew hard on his cigar. Exhaling, he pointed to a spot on the map. “Working on your theory that the sub was brought within range of a few days’ rafting, and taking into account the most likely river routes, we think they were headed here: Port?o do Inferno.”

MacCready smiled. “My theory, huh?” Squinting at the location on the map, he continued, “Hell’s Gate. Where that British explorer went in the twenties, looking for El Dorado, or whatever he was calling it?”

“That would be Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett and his City of Z,” Hendry answered, a little too quickly.

The zoologist continued. “There never was any city, and Fawcett and his men never came out.”

“Right,” Hendry said finally, and blew a puff of smoke at the map. “Well, this ‘Hell’s Gate’ is actually a canyon below the Mato Grosso Plateau. The cliffs are roughly two thousand feet high and the valley floor is perpetually shrouded in mist. That’s where I’d be if I wanted to hide something from Allied recon.”

MacCready remained silent, his eyes focused at a small point along the river.

“So . . . what do you think, Mac?”

MacCready cleared his throat. “Great effect with the cigar smoke.”

Hendry let the remark pass without comment, and especially without showing any signs of bristling. It was something he’d learned to do with his friend: try, try, and try never to let him know if he’s scored.

Mac turned back to the map. “Perpetual mist, two-thousand-foot cliffs, sounds about right. Have you got anybody in there?”

“Three weeks ago, we sent in a squad of Rangers. Tough f*ckers.”

“And?”

“We haven’t heard a word from them. Nothing.”

MacCready remained silent.

Hendry picked up a lead paperweight from his desk. It was shaped like a stack of cannonballs, and the major flipped it slowly from one hand to another. “I realize now . . . maybe it wasn’t Rangers we needed to send in there.”

“And what? Now you want me to go in there?”

Hendry banged the paperweight down like a gavel. “First guess, Mac. Not bad!”

MacCready never flinched and his eyes never left the map. He shook his head. “I can’t believe you guys,” he said, quietly and to himself.

As Hendry puffed more smoke, he opened a file cabinet and withdrew a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a pair of shot glasses. “You know, I remember talking to this fellow a couple of years ago. He was going on and on about how the Age of Adventure was dead.” The colonel paused, taking his time as he unscrewed the bottle. “Guy sound familiar to you?”

MacCready finally turned toward the other man. “Yeah, I know him. Damn fool.”

Hendry poured a pair of stiff shots, then offered one to his friend. “Big pain in the ass, too. But still, I’d never ask him to do something like this if—”

“—if it wasn’t absolutely necessary,” MacCready said, and took the glass.

“You got it.” Hendry tossed back the sour mash and MacCready followed.