Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead (6 page)

There was an old saying on the islands: If your daughters are pretty or your sons handsome, best hide them away, lest Boukman claim them for his own . . .

He grinned. It was true—he liked them attractive. Many of the young and beautiful had died suddenly, for no apparent reason, and come back to serve as Boukman’s slaves. That was the way of things when you were a bokor. You took what—and who—you wanted.

Later, after he was rested, he would be ready to deal with the white men and whatever it was they had been sent to bring him.

In the dream, Boukman was running, and his steps were slow, as if his bare feet were sunk deep in a thick mire. As hard as he tried, he could only manage a pace akin to a slow walk.

Something was behind him, unseen, and it was coming for him.

Though he could not see it, he knew it was a monster beyond measure, a thing of such vile composition that to behold it would curdle your blood. To be touched by it would be infinitely worse, a horror beyond any a sane man could imagine. Gibbering madness for ten times ten million years.

In the dream, Boukman was seventeen again, a man, but not one of enough strength to stop the terror chasing him. His machete was made of rubber, his gun held only cotton bullets, and his powers were small. What use was a love potion against the thing that wanted his soul? How could he possibly survive?

Even though he knew it was a dream, he felt the fear.

And the answer, he knew, was that as he stood, he could not.

But: There was hope, a faint ray that shined down supernally from the heavens. There was a way. A way to become more than he was, and it was in front of him, just . . . there, ahead . . .

Like the monster behind him, what lay before was unseen, and he could not fathom what it was, only that it was his salvation. If he could get to it before the thing chasing him, if he could steep himself in whatever it was, he would have the power to stop it, to defeat it, and to become more than a man—more than any man had been or would ever be . . .

He pushed himself to move faster, his lungs laboring, his muscles aching, his heart pounding close to its bursting point—

—to no avail. He was a fly in hardening amber, wading through glue, and the evil behind him kept gaining. He felt it well over him, a malignant black wave about to crash down and engulf his soul—

Boukman awoke with a start, sitting up with a yell stillborn on his lips, sweat soaking the thin sheet upon which he lay.

The Dream. Come to warn him. Come to tell him there was something for him to find that would help, as it always did when he heeded it. Attention must be paid, and if it was done properly, it would reward him.

It had to be Marie and her white men—her
imen blan.
Nothing else was new.

He would have to examine it as a boy did an ant under a magnifying glass. And he would have to take care that he did not focus the sun’s light into a burning ray that would destroy the insect before he learned its secrets . . .

SEVEN

M
ARIE HAD BEEN
right about the place being a jungle. There was a strip of beach, a few palm trees, and then a wall of rain forest that looked like, well, a wall. Most of Haiti had been logged, Indy knew; the Spanish, the French, the natives, whoever, had cut down trees to build houses, ships, churches, even sidewalks. But this looked to be old growth, towering trees little bothered by axes or saws. Odd. You’d think somebody would be in there harvesting this valuable timber like gangbusters.

Marie spoke to her cousin, and this time Indy was pretty sure he caught a couple of the Creole words, one of which meant “home.”

“He’s leaving us here?” Indy asked.

It was an unnecessary question, since André had already walked his boat around and pointed it nose-out toward the mainland. As they watched, he waded it out, rode it over the first waves, which weren’t much, and then hopped in and cranked the engine. He turned and waved good-bye.

The trip over had been fine. The water had been calm, the little two-cycle motor ran merrily along, putt-putting and burbling to itself, the burnt smell of gasoline-and-oil mix mostly blown away by a slight cross-breeze. That it was not the greatest boat in the world didn’t lessen Indy’s desire to have it stay close at hand.

“He will be back in a few days. There are other boats on the island if we need them. Come. The store is this way, only a kilometer or so, and slightly inland.”

Indy didn’t think that any kind of permanent structure would do well only “slightly inland,” given the storms that raked this part of the Caribbean every year or two. He’d been in typhoons, and the hurricanes in this hemisphere were every bit as nasty as the typhoons in the Pacific. Winds at 130 or 140 miles an hour, tidal surge going halfway across the island? That would make living here risky, and the summer brought the storms . . .

Mac stood looking at the jungle.

“Something?”

“Well, I don’t see anything but greenery, but it feels as if somebody just walked across my grave. Rather a creepy sensation.”

Mac stuck his hand into his jacket pocket, and Indy knew he was checking to make certain his gun was still there. Indy carried an English revolver, a Webley, a big, clunky, hard-hitting old piece. Mac had a thing for Italian weapons, and he favored a Beretta, a little .32 semi-automatic, the like of which he had been carrying since the early 1930s. He preferred the extra rounds, he said, eight in the magazine and one in the pipe, for a total of nine. Indy argued that the little 7.65mm round was anemic—you needed to shoot somebody two or three times to get the same effect as the Webley .455—but Mac was obstinate about such things.

A lot of folks had their talismans . . .

One of the first things they had done when they’d reached a town after the plane crashed was buy a little can of oil to deal with their guns’ immersion in the sea. Salt water was bad for blued steel.

Mac’s pistol was better than no gun, though, and a lot of guys had been killed with Berettas. Not for much longer, though. The Italians were on the run, and he’d be surprised if they stayed in the war until the end of the year.

“I don’t see anything,” Indy said.

Mac nodded. “Probably nothing to see. Getting spooked in my old age.”

“Old? You aren’t any older than I am.”

“Look at that sweet young woman walking ahead of us, Indy. Compared with her, we are ancient.”

“Speak for yourself, pal. I don’t feel a day over thirty.”

“And you don’t
look
a day over sixty.”

“Hey, forty-four—!”

Mac laughed. “Come along. We don’t want to be huffing and puffing to keep up with her. I pray this store has some cigarettes. My nerves are entirely too jittery.”

“I’d settle for a bottle of beer and a couple cans of beans.”

Yamada was not a field agent, in the sense of tromping around in the woods and enjoying it, but he wanted to see these men for himself. Suzuki and his eight troops were equally at home in a jungle, in the desert, or upon an ice floe, so it didn’t matter to them. Spread out here in the thick forest, denser than any Yamada had seen, even in Borneo, coated in mosquito repellent that kept them from sweating where it covered their pores, it felt like an oven, but with steam mixed into the heat. Through the set of Zeiss 6/30 binoculars, courtesy of their allies the Germans, Yamada got his first glimpse of the four who came ashore, right where their local contact had said they would. Something to do with a reef that made it the best place to land for half a mile in either direction, apparently.

A small, dark, pretty woman led them—that would be Arnoux. According to the description he had gotten, the heavier of the men was George McHale, the Englishman. The thinner one, Dr. Henry Jones, called himself Indiana. Yamada had radioed the sub and asked about them, and a coded message had been sent in return. There was not much information on the two since 1939. Jones worked for an American university, teaching and doing fieldwork recovering ancient artifacts. McHale seemed to have no permanent address or job, but several of his exploits involved working for the British Museum. Nothing on either man specifically for the last four years, though one notation claimed that they had been in certain of the occupied territories in the South Pacific, and there was some speculation they might be spies, of a sort. Documentation was spotty regarding this.

Nothing to spy on here, though, unless insects had joined the war.

No, they were here in their capacity as treasure hunters.

Once their quarry were well away from Yamada’s position, he said to Suzuki, “We are done. Let us return to the campsite.”

“Shall I have men follow them?”

“No need. They will be going to the village store.”

“How can you be sure?”

“If they plan to tramp around in the interior searching for something, they will need supplies, and somebody to guide them. There is no place else to get such. Have a man watch the store, so that we know when they are outfitted and ready to go.”

“Hai,
Yamada-san.”

The blade was drawn. The edge glittered in the tropical sun.

The first cut was already in motion . . .

“Eh?” said one of the men.

“What is it?”

“Your pardon, Yamada-san, I heard something behind us.”

“A pig,” Suzuki said.

“It did not sound like a pig, Captain-san.”

“Really? Do you know what a pig sounds like?”

The man lowered his gaze to the thick humus that was the jungle’s floor.
“Hai.
I was raised on a farm outside Hiroshima, Captain-san. We had a few swine.”

“Well, then, go and see what it is and report back!”

“Hai!”

But when the soldier returned, there was nothing for him to report. Whatever it was had departed.

Port-au-Prince

There was a war on, but you could hardly tell it in Haiti. A curious question to the man behind the desk at the
Flughafen
—the airport—was all it had taken:

“Pardonnez-moi,
monsieur, I was wondering if my friend the Chinese scholar and his party have left yet?”

And without blinking: “Ah,
oui,
they left only half an hour ago.”

“For Jacmel?”

“Non,
for Marigot.”

“Ah, yes, I forgot. Well, we’ll meet them there.”

But of course Gruber knew better than that. Another two planes bearing foreigners landing at the same dirt strip so soon? Too easily remembered. His crew, led by SS captain Schäefer, should have already been in the air by the time Gruber achieved this airport.

Gruber was an excellent pilot. Once he was aloft in his chartered plane, a Blériot Aéronautique two-seater about five years old, he sent a radio message on the agreed frequency, consisting of one word: “Jacmel.”

In French, the two-word reply:
“Je comprends.”

So, they were in accord.

The flight, only thirty-five or so kilometers in a straight line, needed some zigzagging to avoid the mountaintops. The craft was not pressurized, nor did the heater seem to work. At more than ten thousand feet, breathing the thin air was most uncomfortable. Fortunately, the French plane came equipped with a heavy leather jacket and gloves, so it was not an altogether miserable flight, and it was less than an hour from the time he took off until he landed.

In another hour, Schäefer and his men arrived in a more substantial and much faster twin-engine, all-metal Douglas DC-2.

Schäefer, dressed in planter’s clothes—a wide-brimmed white hat and colonial-white linen trousers and jacket—but still obviously a military man by his bearing, marched over to Gruber. For a horrible second, Gruber was afraid the captain would offer him a Sieg Heil extended-arm salute, but he only nodded.

In Dutch, he said,
“Mijnheer.”

Gruber smiled. “Good to see you again, Hans. Shall we go?”

Jacmel was at least forty kilometers from the final destination by boat—but Yamada was perhaps wily enough to have left a guard with his airplane, and Gruber did not want the Japanese doctor to know he was going to have company on the Insel der Toten—the Island of the Dead. Forewarned was forearmed, and while Gruber had no doubt that in a fight, his elite SS warriors would be more than a match for whatever the Japanese imperial army had dispatched, he would rather avoid such a thing. Best was to get there, find the two
Archäologen,
follow them, collect what they found, and depart. It was obvious they were after the same thing, and they seemed to know where they were going. Gruber had heard that the formula was supposedly somewhere on the island, but nothing further. That the American and Brit were here meant they thought so, as well, and that was some kind of a confirmation. They
must
be after the formula, and the clues regarding it? From what little he knew, the information about this couldn’t have been too hard to uncover, else how would the Japanese have found it at almost the same time?

He was willing to sacrifice his troops if need be, but there were times when stealth was smarter than force. This might be one of those times.