The Mission

CHAPTER 3

“Where are we going?” the man taking the depth readings asked Ruiz. The expedition had been going up this overgrown river branch for most of the day, and the men were very nervous. Ruiz had watched the sun the entire time, troubled about the direction it told him the boat was going.

“I don’t know where the American is going,” Ruiz said. He was standing on the bow of a beat-up, flat-bottomed riverboat, about forty feet long by fifteen wide. Two fifty-horsepower engines, coughing occasional black clouds, powered the boat.

The man was a peasant, recruited out of the ghetto, like the others. Only Ruiz and Harrison, the American, had any education, but Ruiz also knew that meant little this far inland. What was most important was Ruiz was the only one who had any experience upriver on the Amazon.

The rest of the expedition — six men Ruiz recruited off the streets — were scattered about the deck. Ruiz’s dark scalp was covered with gray hair and his slight frame was tense, ready for action. He was a slight man with dark skin. He wore faded khaki shorts and no shirt, the muscles on his stomach and chest hard and flat. He wore a machete strapped to the left side of his waist, a short, double-edged dagger on the right. An automatic pistol was in a holster that hung off his belt, slapping his right thigh every time he took a step.

Ruiz had been upriver many times, but never on this particular tributary of the mighty Amazon. Given that there were more than 1,100 tributaries to the great river, 17 of them over 1,000 miles long, that wasn’t unexpected. What was unexpected was to be this far to the south and west of the main river. Ruiz knew that very soon they would be in the Chapada dos Parecis, the first of the eastern foothills leading to the mighty Andes. The boat would not be able to go any farther, as they would face rapids and waterfalls in front of them.

He was amazed that the tributary was still navigable. The Amazon was almost a thousand miles away at Itacoatiara. To get from that major river to here, one had to travel on the Madeira for over five hundred miles, then branch south on a tributary.

This morning they had met the American at Vilhena, the regional capital for this part of Brazil, a small city sprawled on the riverbank. A fistful of cash had hired Ruiz’s services and they had headed south and west from the town all day long, going onto progressively smaller branches until Ruiz had no idea where exactly they were and the water was less than twenty-five feet wide, the large trees from either side almost touching overhead and constant depth measuring being needed to prevent them from grounding themselves. The boat drew only two feet, but as the day had worn on, the amount of water between the keel and the bottom had gone from a comfortable five feet to a nerve-racking three. Already they’d had to pull the boat over three sunken logs.

Ruiz looked over his shoulder. Harrison was looking at his map and scratching his head. Ruiz climbed the few wooden steps to what served as the boat’s bridge. He leaned close and kept his voice low.

“May I be of assistance?” The American was a very large and fat man, used to the easy life of the city.

Ruiz was a different breed of man from both the American and the street peasants. He was one of the few who made their living on the upper branches of the Amazon. Sometimes trading to remote outposts, other times guiding various expeditions and tours. Sometimes poaching. Sometimes capturing exotic birds and animals for sale on the lucrative black market for such creatures. Ruiz had also made some money off the illegal recovery and shipping of antiquities, particularly from countries west of Brazil, in the Andean highlands and mountains.

“We are on track,” Harrison said.

“For where?” Ruiz asked.

Ruiz knew little about the American other than that he was from one of the many universities in the United States. He had said he was one of those who studied ancient peoples.

Harrison looked about at the thick jungle that surrounded them. He turned back to his guide. The American had paid good money. He had several plastic cases lashed to the deck, the contents of which were unknown to Ruiz when they were loaded.

“I am looking for something,” Harrison said.

“I could help you if I knew what you were looking for.”

“The Aymara,” Harrison said.

Ruiz kept his face fiat. He had won many a poker hand on the river with that look. “The Aymara are only a legend. They are long dead.”

“I believe they still exist,” Harrison said

“Senor, the ruins of Tiahaunaco, where the Aymara lived, are in Bolivia. Many hundreds of miles from here. Many thousands of meters higher. We can never reach there by boat.”

Despite not knowing exactly where they were, Ruiz was very interested. He knew they only had to turn around and go with the flow of the water and they would eventually reach Vilhena. But one of the reasons he had grown to love the river area were the fantastic stories his grandfather had told him. Of ancient cities hidden under the jungle. Lost cities of gold. Hundred-foot snakes. Strange tribes. And guiding someone like Harrison could lead him to a site to return to and plunder, something Ruiz had done more than once.

“How did Tiahuanaco appear so suddenly?” Harrison asked. He didn’t wait for an answer. “And how did the Aymara disappear so abruptly?”

Ruiz had heard stories about both those events. “Kon-Tiki Viracocha.”

Harrison paused and looked at Ruiz. “Yes. The strange white man who legend says founded Tiahuanaco. Some myths say he was from Egypt. Jorgenson sailed in his boat of reeds across the Atlantic to prove the ancient Egyptians could have made such a journey here to South America. He felt that the pyramids built at Tiahuanaco were so similar to those in Egypt that there had to be an ancient connection.

“And even before that,” Harrison continued, “Jorgenson showed that the people of South America could have populated the Pacific, sailing his raft of balsa wood, the Kon-Tiki, west from Chile to the islands of the southwest Pacific. He speculated a worldwide connection between early civilizations, and he was laughed at despite his evidence and his expeditions. Now that we know about the Airlia, we know that he was right and there was a connection between the earliest human civilizations.”

Ruiz was intrigued. He had read the papers about the aliens, but it had been hard to sort through all the conflicting accounts. “Jorgenson is at Tucume, on the Peruvian coast. He is digging at the pyramids he found there.”

Harrison looked at his guide with more interest. “Yes. And now that we know Atlantis was real, his theories gain even more support. He was right, while those that scoffed at him are now the fools.”

“Kon-Tiki Viracocha could have come from Atlantis?” Ruiz asked.

“It is possible. While others look in Egypt and at the ruins of the cities along the coast, what I am searching for here, deep in the jungle, is evidence of what happened to the people.

“Tiahuanaco is the key, not Tucume. Tiahuanaco once was a thriving city located on a mountain at over twelve thousand five hundred feet in altitude. It has a pyramid over seven hundred feet wide at the base and three hundred feet high. It ruled an empire that extended through the area we are now traveling, hundreds of miles from here to the Pacific Coast. But when the Incan Empire expanded south in A.D. 1200 and came across Tiahuanaco, the city was abandoned, the old empire gone. The people had to have gone somewhere. I think they went into the jungle.”

“Why?” Ruiz asked.

“Why did they go into the jungle or why did they leave the city?” Harrison asked in turn. He didn’t wait for an answer. “Something terrible happened to them. It had to have been very bad for them to give up their magnificent city. And why the jungle?” Harrison waved his hands around. “Where else would you go to hide?”

“Hide from what?” Ruiz asked.

“That I will know when I find the Aymara. But it must have been something very terrible.”

“You think ancestors of the people of Tiahuanaco are still alive?”

“There have been many reports over the centuries of a strange tribe, far up the tributaries of the Amazon — a tribe where the members are white! To me that means they are the ancestors of Kon-Tiki Viracocha.”

Ruiz rubbed a hand through the stubble of beard on his chin. “I have heard stories,” he began, but he paused.

“What kind of stories?” Harrison pressed.

“Of a place. A very strange place. Where white men live. Have lived for a very long time.”

“The Aymara? Their village?”

Ruiz shrugged. “People only speak of it in whispers. They call it The Mission. I have met no one who actually has seen the place. There are only rumors. It is said to be a very dangerous place. That anyone who sees it dies. I do not know where this place is. Some say it is deep in the jungle. Others say it is near the coast. Others say it is high on a mountaintop in the Andes.” “What is this Mission?” Harrison asked.

“It is said that the sun god, Kon-Tiki, lives there.”

“What else?”

“I do not know any more,” Ruiz said abruptly. He glanced down and noticed his fingernails were digging into the wood on the bridge shield.

Ruiz looked upriver. He knew it was just an illusion, but the river appeared to be shrinking, getting narrower every second. “Let me see your map, senor.”

Ruiz took the sheet and stared at it. He placed an aged finger on the paper and traced a forty-kilometer circle east of the border of Bolivia and Brazil. “We are somewhere here.” He shook his head. “There are dangers ahead. The river could close up on us. And there are other dangers. We should go back.”

The last thing Ruiz wanted was to spend the night in this province with a naive American and a crew full of street thugs. They might not even be in Brazil anymore. They were far beyond the reach of civilization, and Ruiz knew that besides the wildlife there were other dangers that lurked in the jungle. Harrison was looking for a legendary white tribe, but Ruiz knew for a fact there were other lost tribes of headhunters and cannibals in this part of the world.

“The river will turn into a stream soon,” Ruiz said. “The land will go up. There will be rapids. We must go back.”

Harrison stared ahead. “I feel we are on the right path.”

“It will be dark in a few hours,” Ruiz said. “We should go back.”

“We go forward as far as we can,” Harrison said. He took the map. He slid his finger from the location Ruiz had them plotted to the west. “I think the Aymara are here somewhere.”

Ruiz bit the inside of his lip but he said nothing, letting the purring of the two engines be answer enough as the boat continued upstream.

A half hour later, they turned a corner in the stream and the helmsman cut the engines. Ruiz reacted instinctively to the tangle of fallen trees that blocked the stream ahead, pulling his pistol out. He knelt behind the small wall, pointing his weapon ahead, searching for the ambush he expected to leap out of the foliage all around as he yelled for the men on the deck to be ready.

Nervous eyes scanned the jungle all around them, waiting for the darts and arrows of the headhunters to come flicking out. But nothing happened.

Harrison was kneeling next to him. “What do you think?”

If there were any headhunters about, there was no doubt in Ruiz’s mind that the boat’s presence had long been detected and whispering was not needed, but he played along. “I do not know, senor.” He peered at the trees. They’d been hacked down and pulled across the stream. Beyond he could see some smoke, maybe from a cooking fire. There was a small patch of thatched roof visible above the fallen trees. “There is a village there.”

“An Aymara village?” Harrison asked.

This was headhunter territory, and Ruiz doubted it would be the Aymara. “I do not know.”

“Can we get through the trees?” Harrison asked.

Ruiz took a deep breath. The stream had been blocked for a reason. Any fool could see that. “I will look, senor.”

He stood and signaled for a couple of men to accompany him. He walked up to the front of the boat, then looked down. The water below was dark brown. He knew from the sounding it was about four feet deep. Ruiz slid over the side of the boat, the warm water embracing him.

The two men he had chosen looked nervous, and he didn’t blame them. Death was all around them in the form of the jungle. The bottom under his feet was muddy. Ruiz pushed forward, holding his pistol above the water, as did the other two men.

They reached the block. Ruiz climbed up the tangled limbs and looked. A small village of about ten or twelve huts was in a clearing on the gentle bank that led down to the stream. There was no one moving about. A pile of smoldering logs on the right side of the village was the source of the smoke. There were also the remains of several huts that had been burned to the ground.

Ruiz frowned. The stream was also blocked on the far side of the village. What had the villagers wanted to stop? And where were they? Who had destroyed the huts?

He signaled for the two men to follow. He climbed along the logs until he was on the same shore as the village. He pushed through the undergrowth until he reached the clearing. Then he caught a scent in the air and stopped in midstep. He didn’t recognize the smell, but it was terrible. He continued on.

Reaching the village, Ruiz first looked more closely at the pile of logs. He gagged as he now saw the cause of the awful smell. They weren’t wood. They were bodies, piled four deep, smoldering.

He heard the two thugs begin praying to the Virgin Mother, and he felt like joining them. Ruiz went to the first hut and used the muzzle of his pistol to push aside the cloth that hung in the doorway. The stench that greeted his nostrils there was even worse than that of the burning flesh. The walls were spattered with blood. There was a body on the floor.

Ruiz had seen many bodies in his time, but this one did not look as if it had been killed by an explosion. However, that was the only thing he could think of that would cause the mangled flesh and the amount of blood splattered all around the interior.

Ruiz moved to the next hut, but paused as he heard Harrison’s voice. “What is going on, Ruiz?”

“I do not know, senor.” He looked back. Harrison was on the shore, walking toward him.

Harrison wrinkled his nose. “What is that stink?”

Ruiz pointed. “Bodies. Burning.”

The American’s eyes narrowed. “What has happened here?”

Ruiz felt fear now, an icy trickle running down his spine and curling into his stomach. He cared nothing for legends right now. He pulled aside the curtain to the next hut.

A family lay huddled together. All dead. Covered in a layer of blood. Ruiz forced himself to stare and take notice. Blood had poured out of all of them. From their eyeballs, their nostrils, ears, mouth, every opening. Skin that wasn’t covered in blood had angry black welts crisscrossing it with open pustules.

Ruiz finally turned away. Harrison was staring. Ruiz grabbed his arm. “We must go, senor! Now!”

“We must look for survivors,” Harrison said.

Ruiz shook his head. “There are none.”

“We must check all the huts.”

Ruiz frowned. “All right. I will do it. Go back to the boat. We must go downriver as soon as I get back.”

Ruiz quickly ran to the next hut. It was empty. The next four held bodies, or what had once been bodies but were now just masses of rotting flesh and blood. In the next-to-last hut there was a person lying on the floor. A young woman. She turned her head as Ruiz opened the curtain. Her eyes were wide and red, a trickle of blood rolling like tears down her cheeks. Her skin was covered with black welts.

“Please!” she rasped. “Help me.”

Ruiz stepped in, every nerve in his body screaming for him to run away. He knelt next to the woman. Her face was swollen and her breathing was coming in labored gasps. From the smell, there was no doubt she was lying in her own feces.

Suddenly the woman’s hands darted forward and she grabbed the collar of Ruiz’s shirt. With amazing strength she half pulled herself off the fouled mat, toward Ruiz’s face. Her mouth opened as if she were going to speak, but a tide of black-red matter exploded out of her mouth into Ruiz’s face and chest. He screamed and slammed his arms up, but couldn’t break her grip. Struggling to his feet, he moved backward to the door, but the woman was still attached to him.

He jammed the muzzle of his pistol into her stomach and pulled the trigger until no more rounds fired. The bullets literally tore the woman in half, but even in death her hands held on. Ruiz threw his gun out the door, then pulled his bloodied shirt up and over his head and left it there, clutched in her dead fingers.

He staggered out into the clearing river, heading toward the block and the boat. “We must go back!” Ruiz screamed in the direction of the boat as he wiped at the blood and vomit on face. “We must go back!”