Ramsey's Gold

Chapter Thirty-Six

Vadim swallowed another antibiotic pill with boiled water and tested his weight on his leg. One of the rounds exchanged during the raid on their camp had hit the exterior of his left thigh, and while the wound wasn’t life-threatening, it was certainly painful enough, although mending. His leg twinged when he walked, but was much improved, and while he wouldn’t be playing soccer anytime soon, he was ambulatory.

Sasha looked up from his position under a tall tree as Awa, one of their native guides, stepped into the camp. He shook his head as he approached, toting his Kalashnikov in one hand with a walking stick in the other — good for probing the ground in front of him while moving through the jungle to ensure he didn’t step on a surly snake.

“No sign of him,” Awa said in barely understandable English.

“What do you make of that?” Sasha asked, looking at Vadim.

When they’d caught up to the trio, Awa’s tracking ability having proved invaluable, the three were now two, camped beside a waterfall, with the Ramsey boy nowhere to be seen. At first they’d believed he was out exploring, but after watching the site in shifts, they realized that wasn’t the case. The remaining man, whom they didn’t recognize, and the girl left the camp every morning to root around in the jungle, presumably looking for Paititi, but Drake had yet to reappear.

And Vadim had no interest in the pair beyond their ability to lead him to Ramsey.

“This I do not understand, Sasha: why would he go off on his own? That makes no sense.”

“Perhaps he met with some kind of misfortune?” Sasha suggested.

“Anything is possible in this hellhole, but you had better pray his good fortune still remains. The Ramsey boy is the only connection to the journal, and if it was all in his head, we have a big problem if he fails to materialize. This is a big jungle, and he was our best chance. Without him, we could spend ten lifetimes looking for the city and never find it.”

Sasha knew better than to continue the discussion. When Vadim became enraged, he could lash out unpredictably, as they’d discovered twenty years earlier when the older Ramsey had steadfastly refused to share his knowledge. Sasha could still remember it like it was yesterday. Ramsey had been beaten and burned with cigarettes, and through it all, had remained silent, refusing to reward them with even a word. When he had spoken, it had been to utter a Russian curse involving Vadim’s mother and her son, and he’d punctuated it by spitting a bloody tooth in Vadim’s face.

Sasha had tried to stop Vadim, but by the time he’d reached him, it had been too late. The point-blank shot to Ramsey’s head killed him instantly.

Sasha had also seen that brutal streak when they’d been in the gulag together in Siberia. Any prisoner who crossed him would be in mortal danger, and more than one body had been found over the years, stabbed dozens of times, frozen in the snow. Vadim was wildly bright, but as with so many who had served in the KGB on its secret wet teams, unbalanced; his anger could flare to the surface without warning, with deadly consequences.

Vadim took several cautious steps toward the stream they’d camped beside and stared into the underbrush, as though the plants held a solution to the quandary he faced. When he returned, sweat beading down his unshaven face, his mood had darkened further. He glowered at Awa and barked an order.

“We continue watching and waiting. We have no choice. They are our only option.”

“Maybe we should take them and interrogate them,” Sasha said.

“If we do that, we lose the chance to catch Ramsey. No, for now, we wait.”

Sasha waved off an ever-present mosquito and nodded with an enthusiasm he didn’t feel. He despised the infernal jungle, with its never-ending parade of poisonous insects, deadly reptiles, diseases, heat, and rain. Always rain, and the mud it created. He would gladly have traded it for the icy climes of Siberia. At least there were no bugs there.

Awa moved to one of his men and had a hushed discussion in their native tongue. The man rose and walked soundlessly to the trail to take up the surveillance of the pair a scant mile away.

Awa watched his subordinate go without expression. The crazy Russians were paying a king’s ransom for their services, and if they wanted someone watching the two gringos by the waterfall as they blundered around in the surrounding jungle, then that’s what they would get. Round the clock. Pointless or not.

It was all the same to him.

Spencer leapt to his feet from his position by his tent, AK-47 in hand, when the bushes near him rustled from something large moving through the undergrowth. Allie fumbled for her weapon as he flipped the firing selector to active mode, and gasped when Drake emerged, supporting himself on a staff, the cuts on his face healing and his black eye now faded to a dull purplish yellow. Spencer slowly lowered his gun, an expression of astonishment widening his eyes before his face resumed its usual unreadable set.

“What’s wrong? You’d think you’ve never seen someone come back from the dead before,” Drake said with a smile. Allie rose and rushed to him. She gave him a long hug before standing back and studying him.

“You look like you fell off a cliff or something,” she said.

“Yeah. Remind me not to do that again. It’s a lousy way to see the sights.”

“What happened?”

Drake dropped his backpack onto the ground and sat down stiffly, not completely recuperated from his injuries after a week, and filled them in on his near-death experience and his time among the natives. They both listened to him with rapt fascination as he described his salvation and fever, ending with his trip from the tribal longhouse and into the jungle, escorted by the chief’s daughter.

“That’s amazing, Drake. An incredible story,” Allie said.

“Yeah. I was lucky. If you call falling off a cliff lucky.”

Spencer moved to the circle of river rocks where he’d stacked some wood. He spread petroleum jelly on the pile and ignited it with his lighter, refraining from commenting on Drake’s ordeal.

“I caught some fish for dinner. Luckily, big ones, so more than enough to go around,” he said.

“That’s good. I have a feeling we’re going to work up an appetite over the next day or two,” Drake said, noting Allie’s body language, which was becoming more distant by the minute. He wondered vaguely whether, in her grief, she had turned to Spencer in his absence, and realized that he didn’t care with the same burning urgency he’d had before his fall. Something had changed inside him, as if the placid calm of the shaman and his daughter had somehow seeped into him.

“Oh yeah? I have to tell you, we’ve been looking since you went for your swim, and haven’t found anything,” Allie said, her voice resigned.

Drake nodded. “I’m not surprised.”

Something about Drake’s inflection or tone caused Spencer’s antennae to quiver, and he stopped what he was doing and stared at Drake.

“Yeah? Why’s that?” he asked.

Drake walked over to where the gathered branches were crackling, the fish waiting to be skewered and broiled whole over the fire, and kicked at the leaves on the ground before looking up at Spencer and meeting his eyes.

“Because you’re looking in the wrong place.”

Allie moved over to where the two men were facing each other. “What? What are you talking about, Drake?”

He sighed and touched the scab over his eye. “It’s not here. It’s about three miles from here. Nearer a smaller waterfall to the southwest.”

“How do you know?” Allie exclaimed.

Drake offered a small smile.

“Easy. Someone drew me a map.”