River of Ruin

Gary Barber’s Camp on the River of Ruin

Police Colonel Sanchez and his troopers spent a total of thirty-eight minutes at the camp before the last of the bodies was stowed on the largest boat and they were ready to leave. The officials wanted to be in El Real as soon after sunset as possible. He tried to order Captain Vanik back with him, but Mercer got the impression that no one but a direct superior officer could order her anywhere. She’d made her decision to remain behind and that was it. Sanchez boarded his launch, warning her about guerrillas and saying that he had no desire to return in the morning to pick up more gringo corpses. She threw his retreating party a mocking salute, cursing them in a frustrated breath. Ruben tossed in a few choice phrases of his own and then they were alone—Mercer, U.S. Army Captain Lauren Vanik, and three Panamanian mercenaries.

Sundown was an hour away and already the light was diffused, ruddy and deeply shadowed. They quickly established a smaller camp upstream from the ruins of Gary’s bivouac. The prevailing wind swept away the coppery smell of blood, but none wanted to remain near the site of so much death. They tolerated the hordes of insects that swarmed their campfire because its cheery glow dispelled the superstitious chills that struck them all.

“You’re sure we’re not in any danger from another wave of gas bursting from the lake?” Lauren asked as Mercer heated cans of spaghetti he’d taken from the camp kitchen.

Mercer used a bandana as a pot holder to retrieve one can and set it next to her. “The CO₂ needs to build to a critical level before it can erupt. It may never reach that level again, and even if it does, it’ll take months, maybe years.”

“So we’re safe?” She savored the hot food.

Mercer imagined she’d spent part of her military career where this meal would be a luxury. The Balkans was his guess. “From the gas, yes, and I don’t think the gunmen will be back for a few days at least. They’ll wait until local interest dies down entirely.”

She gave him an appraising glance. “You seem to understand something about tactics.”

“Isn’t that what you would do?” Mercer asked innocently.

“Absolutely, but most civilians don’t think that way. Fact is, most civilians would be in Panama City right now waiting for a flight to Miami.”

There was an invitation in that statement to further explain his motivations. Mercer was about to tell her how it was he knew terrorist tactics probably better than she did when a single rifle shot cracked from the jungle where Ruben was collecting firewood.

Lauren Vanik’s reactions were like electricity, sharp and fast. She kicked at the fire, scattering the logs to create a curtain of dense smoke, then rolled away, her Beretta coming out of her holster. She racked the slide, fingered off the safety and had the area where the shot had originated covered in a prone, two-handed position. In the time it took her to do all that, Mercer had barely thrown himself flat. Ruben’s two men remained seated on the far side of the fire, their guns just now coming up when there was a crash of tree limbs followed by a high-pitched scream.

Twenty seconds ticked by before Ruben shouted from the bush and Lauren safed her weapon.

“What is it?” Mercer whispered, still marveling at how fluidly she moved.

Before she answered, Ruben stepped into the clearing holding a boy by the back of his T-shirt. His M-16 was on his shoulder. He spoke in quick Spanish and Lauren laughed.

“Says he caught the kid in your friend’s camp looking for food. The shot was over the kid’s head and he says he tried to bury his head in the dirt.”

The boy was about ten or twelve, rail thin and exhausted. His dark eyes dominated the smooth planes of his face. They were wide with shock and fear, like a caged animal’s. His hair was as long as a girl’s, dirty now, but so black it would probably shimmer after a proper bath. His eyelashes too were long and made his face a thing of delicate beauty. Once he spotted the can of spaghetti near where Mercer stood brushing sand off his clothes, he had attention for nothing else.

Lauren holstered her Beretta and got down on her haunches when Ruben dragged the boy closer. The mercenary went to the far side of the fire to rejoin his men. Lauren spoke in melodic Spanish, her Southern accent transmitting the care of a mother soothing her own child. The change from combat readiness to such tenderness was remarkable. Mercer wondered again if she had been a peacekeeper, a job that demanded equal measures of ferocity and sensitivity. That she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring didn’t mean she didn’t have a child of her own, either.

“I speak English,” the boy said after a moment’s conversation. “My name is Miguel.”

“I’m Lauren.” She shook the boy’s hand. “And this is ... I’m sorry, I forgot your first name.”

“It’s Philip, but everyone calls me Mercer.” Getting down to the boy’s eye level, he also shook Miguel’s hand. “What are you doing out here?”

“Mi mama and papa, they work for Mr. Gary. They went to sleep two days ago and I couldn’t wake them.”

Mercer handed over his canned meal and a spoon. “Where were you when they went to sleep?”

From around a mouthful of food he said, “I was playing up the hill.” Miguel pointed to the top of the ridge flanking the valley. “I hear a big wind that tore up the jungle and when I come down everyone was asleep. And then ... a day later ...”

A shadow settled behind his eyes, dimming them.

“We know what happened,” Lauren said. “Men came, didn’t they?”

The boy nodded, his meal forgotten.

“They did bad things?” Another nod. “Do you know how many?”

He held up four grubby fingers.

“You were very smart to hide in the jungle when they came, Miguel. That was the bravest thing to do.” She intuitively knew he felt like he’d let his parents down by not preventing the desecration of their bodies. “Your mama and papa would have wanted you to stay away from the bad men.”

“I wanted to come out, but I saw guns. I’m not supposed to be near guns.” His gaze flicked to her pistol peeking out the back of its holster. “You are a soldier so it’s okay you have one.” He looked at Mercer. “Are you a soldier too?”

“No. I’m a friend of Mr. Gary’s.”

The name seemed to bring out the boy’s natural resilience and his voice brightened. “I like Mr. Gary. He is funny. Can you be funny?”

Mercer was at a loss, uncomfortable in the child’s presence. How can you entertain a boy who just lost his entire family, but desperately needed reassurance that all adults weren’t butchers who shoot up corpses? “I’m not funny,” he said, pulling his bandana from a pocket. “But I can make a rabbit poop chocolate.”

Miguel giggled. “No, you can’t.”

The Snickers bar was half melted from the heat and misshapen from being in Mercer’s pocket. He’d found it earlier in the camp. He palmed the candy bar before the boy saw it and tucked one side of the bandana in the creases between his three middle fingers. By pulling the cloth’s tails through his fingers he created long floppy ears, and when he wiggled his middle finger, it looked like a rabbit sniffing the air. Miguel’s wary expression became wonder at the transformation. Mercer blew a wet raspberry and let the candy fall from inside the rabbit to his other hand. Miguel screamed with delight.

“Told you so.” He gave the chocolate to Miguel.

The boy petted the rabbit before tearing open the wrapper. “Can he do it again?”

“He needs to eat first.”

“I’ll go find some leaves for him. I’d like another candy bar.”

“Not so fast, young man.” Lauren grabbed his arm before he could run off into the jungle. “I think you should stick with us.”

It was only fifteen minutes before the effects of warm food and human contact had the desired effect on Miguel. Some instinct pushed him more toward Mercer than Lauren, a need for the protection he thought only a man could offer. He curled up next to Mercer, his head resting on Mercer’s outstretched leg. Lauren touched Miguel’s smooth cheek as she covered him with a clean blanket from the destroyed camp. Mercer had reformed the rabbit puppet in the boy’s tiny hand, though it had wilted between his sleep-loosened fingers. Miguel hugged it to himself like a teddy bear.

“I think you’ve made a friend.” Lauren sat on Mercer’s other side. “You have children of your own?”

Reaching for the carryall he’d bought, trying not to disturb the lad, Mercer extracted a bottle of duty-free brandy. “I don’t even have nephews or nieces.”

“Well, you’re a natural.”

Mercer was surprised. He had always been uneasy around kids. He found the responsibility of forming a child into an adult to be unimaginable. He feared that saying or doing the wrong thing during even a casual meeting could somehow cause irreparable harm. Knowing that belief was irrational didn’t change the fact that he avoided children whenever he could. He’d heard kids were supposed to pick up on things like that so he was at a loss to explain Miguel’s quick attachment to him.

Then again maybe there was a bond after all.

The jungle had darkened so that the greens of the bush had merged into an impenetrable black deeper than the star-strewn sky overhead. A distant bird cried. The only other sound was the swish of the river and an occasional rustle of wind. How different was this night from one many years ago? The continents were separated by a thousand miles, but weren’t the jungle and the sounds so similar as to be indistinguishable? Wasn’t he about the same age as Miguel when he watched those he loved get wiped out?

Mercer was about to take a long pull from the brandy bottle as the memories overran him, but stopped his hand before he lifted it from the sand.

Driven by the same wanderlust that would infect his son a generation later, David Mercer had gone to central Africa in the early 1960s to hire out his geologic knowledge and mining expertise to various companies. Over the course of several years he built a solid reputation as a competent prospector who could also navigate through the tangled and often corrupt bureaucracies that formed in the wake of independence. It was in the Congo that he met his wife, who had come to Africa from Brussels as an inexperienced fashion model. Caring little for her profession, she’d only come on the trip to get a free ticket to Africa in order to pursue her true passion, animal rights. Two weeks after their chance meeting during one of David’s rare trips to Leopoldville, they were married. Their only child, Philippe, named for Siobahn’s long-dead father, was born at a mining camp in the Katanga Province a couple years later.

Wherever his work took them, Siobahn established small conservation groups among the locals who serviced the mining sites. It was a vagabond existence in which young Philippe flourished, learning a trade from his father and an understanding of the natural world from his mother. Despite the ethnic strife that engulfed the region from time to time, they found a rare happiness among friends, white, Hutu or Tutsi.

Prospecting for alluvial gold in the highlands near Goma, Zaire, where dozens of streams fed Lake Kivu, one more in a long string of violent rampages flared up when Philippe was twelve. Like many before it, the cause dated back centuries, when the Tutsis first entered the pastoral lands held by the majority Hutu, and was flamed further by inept colonial rule. As he’d done before, David sent his wife and son to the house of a Belgian plantation owner the couple had befriended. The man, Gerard Bonneville, was an old Africa hand whose family had built generations of respect in the region. Also he had a private airstrip and a C-47 behind the rambling stone house he shared with his own wife and six children if things got too bad. For a week, Philippe and Siobahn waited anxiously as David worked to organize defenses for isolated villages from machete-wielding mobs. Then word reached the banana plantation that David had been wounded.

Knowing her son was safe, and that if she did nothing her husband would die either from the wound or infection, Siobahn borrowed a farm truck from Bonneville and went to bring him back. Mercer could recall her words as she left with dawn’s light filtering into the bedroom he shared with the four boys.

“Do you remember when you were six and went swimming in the Kasai River and the current pulled you toward the rapids below our camp?” Still fogged with sleep, Mercer nodded. “And I jumped in to grab you because none of the natives knew how to swim, even Nanny, who loves you as much as I?”

Philippe’s nanny was a Tutsi woman named Juma who had been with the family from the day he was born. From his father he’d learned to love the land, from his mother he’d learned to love animals, but it was Juma, with her round face and quick laugh, who’d taught him how to love people.

“I have to do the same for your father,” his mother continued. “No one is willing to go out to bring him home. I will be back soon and Mr. and Mrs. Bonneville will take care of you when I’m gone, but remember to obey them if they decide to fly out to the capital. Do you understand me, Philippe?”

“Yes, Mother.” The idea that she was leaving was more terrifying than his father being wounded, but he knew that she had to do this. “I will obey.”

She hugged him so fiercely that he felt his chest would collapse and he wanted only for her to hug him harder. Their tears mingled on his cheek.

Young Philippe spent the next day and a half on the second-story balcony that overlooked the rolling lawn and the rough dirt track that led toward Goma, his eyes straining into the humid air to see a feather of dust or a pair of headlights that meant his parents were returning. Nanny stayed with him, holding him to her warm body under a blanket during the long night. Neither slept.

At noon the second day, with rebel guns crackling in the jungle surrounding the long rows of banana trees, Gerard Bonneville decided it was time to get his family out. Except for the house staff of five, all his workers had fled into the bush and experience told him that this uprising wasn’t going to end any time soon. He’d heard nothing from Siobahn over the truck’s short-wave radio.

Yvette Bonneville came out onto the balcony, her normal skirts and blouses replaced with sturdy khaki. Though only a few years older than Siobahn, her skin was dried and darkened by the tropical sun to the color of tobacco. Stress had formed purple circles under her eyes. Her youngest child, a pigtailed girl of six, clung to her leg with her thumb plugged in her mouth. “Juma, Gerard is prepping the Dakota now. The other children are with him. We have to get to the airfield.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the African answered. “We’re ready.”

Yvette turned away, taking her daughter’s hand. In the other she carried her husband’s Holland and Holland twelve gauge with determination. Mercer remembered it was the only time he’d ever seen her show fear.

Bitter but obedient, he took one last look down the road before preparing himself to leave.

The exact sequence of events that followed was forever lost in Mercer’s memory. He didn’t know if he heard the horn from the farm truck grinding up the road before or after a massive explosion erupted behind the house. Either way, he knew his scream would forever echo in his head. Moments after the truck appeared, it jerked to a stop. White circles like spider webs appeared on the flat windscreen. One second he could see his mother’s dark hair, and in the next she vanished behind a cloud of red mist. Two armed men stepped from the jungle flanking the road. From inside the house came a crash of glass as a window was knocked in and then Yvette Bonneville’s shotgun roared like a cannon. Mercer saw dark figures in ragtag uniforms with blood-smeared pangas crab across the lawn to his left. A second sun bloomed from the airstrip as the C-47’s main fuel tanks exploded and the rising corona of fire climbed above the house’s tile roof.

“No!” he heard Mrs. Bonneville scream from downstairs. And then came a wet smack like a club striking rotted fruit. Silence.

Thinking back now, Mercer realized Juma must have been in her mid-fifties and he would have weighed eighty pounds or more. She lifted him as though he were a toddler and tossed him off the right side of the balcony. Landing in a bed of rhododendrons that Mrs. Bonneville kept trimmed flat and full, he had only a moment to recover before Nanny fell into the shrubs next to him.

“Say nothing,” she cautioned, peering into the first rows of bananas across twenty yards of lawn. Satisfied that there was no one lurking there, she took his hand and began running, her great breasts slapping against her belly with every frantic step.

Not breaking stride as they reached the towering wall of trees, Mercer managed to take one more look down the lawn to where his mother’s truck sat just beyond the metal culvert that diverted an irrigation stream under the drive. Two men with distinctively shaped AK-47s stood next to the vehicle. As he watched, they raked the cab and the bed of the pickup with bullets. Through the smoke puffing from each weapon, an arc of spent casings glittered in the sun. A hot round ignited the gasoline spilling from the punctured fuel tank. Flames engulfed the truck, forcing the men to scramble back.

Mercer staggered, falling slack at what he’d witnessed. Nanny yanked on his arm to get his attention and slapped him full across the face. “We mourn later.”

Having spent several summers with the Bonnevilles, Mercer knew their plantation even better than the farm’s Hutu overseer. Yet as they crashed from row to row of banana trees, he had no idea where he was. His mind had left him. He wanted nothing more than to collapse. Juma led them on, maintaining their bearings by watching the pillar of black smoke that rose from the Bonnevilles’ plane.

“Where next, Philippe?” she asked when they broke out of the first cultivated field. “We need to lose ourselves in the jungle. Which way is closest?” Across a fallow area thick with wild grass, more ranks of trees ran to the horizon. The prattle of machine-gun fire had faded in the distance.

The boy said nothing, the sting of the slap having nothing to do with the tears that greased his cheeks.

Juma lowered herself to her knees so that she was looking up into his face. “In my village, when a boy reaches a certain age, he goes through an initiation to become a man. It is a time of great joy for everyone as he leaves his childhood behind. You have just left your childhood but there is no joy for either of us.” Her voice was steadying, solemn. “When the village boys take that first step into manhood, they also take a new name. It is the warrior name they will forever use in the tribe. After today, it is time that you take your warrior name too, even if your people don’t choose them like we do.

“To honor your father’s strength and your mother’s courage, you can no longer be Philippe.” She thought for a second. “You will be called Mercer from now on, do you hear me? This is the name you will use when you reach your tribe again. Your warrior name.” Her eyes bored into his, soft brown meeting frightened gray. “Tell me, Mercer, which way do we go to reach the jungle quickest?”

Without word or hesitation, he pointed to their right.

He had no idea how many days it took to reach Juma’s village on the Rwandan side of Lake Kivu. They lived off the land using her intimate knowledge of the jungle and took circuitous detours around the pockets of fighting. He stayed with her for almost six months before a Red Cross worker came to the village. It would be another three weeks until Mercer’s identity was verified and his grandfather in the United States alerted to come to the Rwandan capital of Kigali to collect the grandchild he’d never met. A mistake by a harried clerk at the U.S. Mission in Rwanda anglicized his first name to Philip, though he barely cared. He had become Mercer.

Mercer looked down at the sleeping Panamanian boy on his lap, his face glowing in the embers of the dying fire. Even if he hadn’t felt it, maybe the boy had sensed the commonality of their experience. Both were orphans, forced to live in the jungle and denied the time to grieve. He stroked Miguel’s hair.

“What happened to Juma?”

“What did you say?” he asked, startled.

“Your nanny?” Lauren prompted. “What happened to her?”

Mercer swallowed. He thought the memory had unfolded silently in his head, as he allowed it to do a few times each year, the details so vivid he could still smell the rhododendron blossoms from the hedge. Not even Harry knew the details of how he lost his parents and he’d just accidentally told the story to a complete stranger. Looking at how Lauren watched him, the vulnerability he feared failed to appear. He’d always thought his story would elicit pity, an emotion he detested, but in her voice he heard respect. The jackhammer blow to his heart he’d felt when she’d asked about Juma eased into a sort of warmth.

“I tried to get her out a few times, but she never wanted to leave her village again.” Lost in the past, his voice caught. “I went back when genocide swept Rwanda in 1994. I was too late.”

Lauren’s hand came out of the gloom beyond the fire’s reach and rested on his. “I’m sorry.”

He finally stripped the wrapper off the neck of the Rémy Martin bottle and uncorked it. He gave Lauren a sip and took a small one for himself. “Knowing her for even a day was worth the pain of losing her.”

Unexpectedly, the melancholy that usually descended after thinking of that day did not come. He felt the first stir-rings of anger instead. Mercer felt an emotion stronger than simple revenge for wanting to discover what had happened to Gary and the others. He wanted to give Miguel’s loss some measure of meaning. Something that he had never been able to do for his own parents’ murder, something that haunted him still.

“So what do we do with him?” Lauren asked into the lengthening silence.

“I assume he has family in El Real or someplace close. We’ll send one of Ruben’s men back to the town with him tomorrow and continue our original plan.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

Mercer had no answer.

They were woken the next morning by the jungle. Birds that had already reclaimed the once-poisoned valley were joined by a few other animals, including a monkey that screeched at the rising sun as if defending its territory. The thick canopy of vegetation emerged from the darkness, colors resolving themselves with remarkable speed. Blacks morphed to grays and then to greens. Shapes appeared, first like phantom shadows, then detailing into individual trees and resolving up to separate branches and leaves. With each passing moment, the jungle became louder and louder as nocturnal animals scampered for cover and the early-morning hunters sought them out.

Mercer must have fallen asleep long before Lauren, for when he woke he found she had erected mosquito netting around them and filled a shallow trench around their camp with water to keep away crawling insects. He woke flat on his back. Miguel was pressed as tightly to him as a just-weaned puppy and Lauren Vanik lay on his other side, her hand cupped around his biceps. Her face was turned to him. With her extraordinary eyes closed, her face didn’t lose any of the character he found so appealing. As he watched, they fluttered open, their curious coloring giving the impression that she greeted each day with anticipation rather than resignation. Her dark hair was a fan against the soft sand where it spilled off the folded shirt she used for a pillow. All three had shared a single blanket through the night. On the far side of the dead fire, Ruben and his men coughed and scratched themselves awake. A pair of cigarettes were lit amid more coughing and spitting.

She smiled. “I love how men come awake like they’re hibernating bears.”

“Not me. I just roll out of bed ready to face the day.”

“Oh, you did your bear impersonation last night. My God, you can snore.”

He shot her a look of mock indignation. “I do not. And if I did, you should know that a loud snore is considered a sign of manly prowess.”

“Then you should be proud of yourself. I’d say your snoring makes you quite the stud.” She spoke with more sentiment than she’d intended.

To cover her embarrassment at so openly flirting under these inappropriate circumstances, Lauren rolled out from under the blanket before Mercer could see her blush. She went beyond the jungle edge to find a little privacy while the Panamanians lustily urinated in the river.

Mercer untangled himself from Miguel and left the boy sleeping as he went to find some breakfast from the remains of Gary’s camp. The look Lauren had just given him and the glassiness of her eyes after hearing his story remained fresh in his mind. He wasn’t sure how he felt about her knowing his most intimate secret. Strangely comfortable was as close as he could come to an accurate description.

He returned to their camp with tins of stew, a pot for boiling water, mugs, and a half-empty jar of instant coffee. Lauren had folded away the mosquito netting and the fire was burning cheerily. Miguel was just wiping sleep from his eyes and sand from his hair. He held Mercer’s limp bandana as if it were still shaped like a rabbit. Before allowing Mercer to concentrate on the food, he asked for the puppet to be reformed on his outstretched hand. He’d already named the rabbit Jorge, after a cartoon he’d seen.

As Mercer cooked, Lauren took the reluctant boy to the edge of the river, stripped him naked and ordered him to bathe. Protesting in wailing Spanish, Miguel finally relented when Mercer shot him a stern look from the fire. Lauren and the boy chatted easily as he washed in the warm water.

When they approached the fire, Mercer had coffee and stew ready and Lauren had a worried frown on her face. “We’ve got ourselves a problem. Miguel doesn’t have any family in these parts. His parents were living in Panama City when your friend Gary hired them. He says he only has one uncle who moved to Miami years ago.”

“He’s got nobody?”

“Seems like it.”

“Damn.” Panama was a Catholic country, noted for large extended families. That Miguel was completely alone in the world was a complication Mercer hadn’t expected. “What do we do?”

Lauren studied the child as he wolfed his breakfast. “I can make some inquiries once we’re back in the city. Until then I suggest we keep him with us. You only need a day up at the lake, right?”

“Yeah, we can be back in the capital by tomorrow. He should stay with us when we go up to the lake rather than leave a man in camp with him. I don’t want us to split up.”

“Agreed.”

Having seen children treated worse than animals in Third World countries on two continents, Lauren asked Miguel what he wanted to do. She knew well the emotional devastation wrought in refugee children who were shuffled from camp to camp without being given a say in their own future. The trick was to make the child think that what you wanted them to do was also what they wanted. She gave Miguel the option of exploring a waterfall and a lake with her and Mercer or returning to El Real with one of Ruben’s men. The answer was as quick as it was expected.

“I would like to stay with you.” Ruben had given the boy his floppy bush hat and Miguel had to tilt his head back to see out from under it. His grin made his face come alive.

Two hours later, the skiff that had originally brought Mercer up the River of Ruin reached the base of a series of waterfalls and steep cataracts. The falls fell from about two hundred feet up a sloping mountainside, dropping from pool to pool with almost unnatural uniformity. There was little mist rising from the water, as each individual drop was no more than eight or ten feet. Mercer studied the falls, then examined the two sides of the box valley, which were noticeably less steep than the stone massif in front of him.

After tying the boat under cover, Ruben and his men took up positions around the base of the falls while Lauren kept an eye on Miguel as he cavorted in the dancing water. Mercer had recovered some equipment from Gary’s camp and set off up the side of the valley with a shovel. He found a small clearing cloaked with vegetation where the ground was littered with fallen and rotting leaves. He had to chop through countless intersecting roots to reach the underlying soil. The humidity built as rapidly as the temperature and sweat flew with each mechanical motion.

Filling a plastic bag with dirt, he returned to the riverbank to drop off his prize and climbed partially up the mountain next to the falls, reveling in the occasional spray of cool water that landed on him. Again he dug a two-foot-deep hole in the ground, cutting down through layers until he reached the underpinnings of sand beneath the richer topsoil. In a calm little inlet back at the river, he floated a shallow pan on the water to create a level surface and carefully poured in one sample of sand so it formed a pyramid. He measured the pyramid’s slope with a protractor he’d found among Gary’s personal gear. He dumped out the sand and did the same with the sample dug from near the waterfall. Both piles had a natural angle of thirty-four degrees.

The next experiment he wanted to perform needed a laser range finder, an altimeter and trigonometry tables, none of which he had. He emptied the second sample of sand into the river, watching it melt away, and returned to the base of the falls.

“What was that all about?” Lauren asked when he rejoined the party.

“A waste of time,” Mercer admitted. “We set for a little climbing?”

“Sí, sí,” Miguel cried excitedly. He was already standing at the edge of a rocky pool ten feet over their heads. “I know the way. I help men when they drag a boat up to the lake.”

They found the climb much easier than expected. Though water fell in twenty-foot-wide sluices from pool to pool, there were rock formations next to each channel, so it was as simple as climbing an enormous set of stairs. Once they ascended above the height of the jungle, the humidity dropped noticeably and the air tasted sweeter. Still it was hot as the sun rose higher in the sky. Dark spots of perspiration appeared like dappled camouflage on Lauren’s faded olive-green T-shirt.

Near the head of the falls, Mercer looked down the valley that opened below them. The river seemed to vanish in the distance as if swallowed by the jungle. If not for the mountain slopes that it had carved over the millennia, it would have been indiscernible against the backdrop of tropical forest. Mercer felt menace from the jungle and what lay unseen under its thick canopy.

The lake that fed the River of Ruin sat in a depression at the top of the volcanic mountain, a perfectly round caldera dimpled by a single tree-covered island near its center. Mercer estimated the lake was about a half mile wide, though there was no telling how deep. Experience told him the lake could be even deeper than the mountain was tall, two hundred feet or more. A strip of sandy beach ran the whole way around the lake except for where it poured down the falls.

Trapped between the lake’s clear surface and the forty-foot-tall ramparts of stone that ringed it, the air remained motionless and sweltering.

“Mr. Gary worked on this side.” Miguel pointed to their right. “He dig many holes into the side of the lake, looking for treasure.”

The party trudged a quarter way around the lake, muscles that had been fresh in the morning beginning to protest after the climb. At the first of the tunnels Gary had excavated into the side of the volcano, they stopped to boil fresh water and rest for twenty minutes. The tunnel was roughly square, un-braced, and had been driven about thirty feet into the soft volcanic rock. Mercer had no idea why his old friend had dug the shaft here, but it was apparent he had found nothing of interest. Other such tunnels were visible all along the arc of the lakeshore.

Including a break for the lunch they’d scavenged from the destroyed camp below, it took seven hours to circle the lake and fully explore all the tunnels Gary had dug. They also climbed up to the rim of the volcano at various points to see what lay on the far slopes. They found nothing of interest, nothing that would have led Gary to believe the treasure he sought was buried along the shores of the lake. All that remained to be explored was the island at its middle.

The rowboat Gary’s team had laboriously dragged up the waterfall was made of heavily dented aluminum. Rather than unload the supplies left in it, Mercer decided to just take Miguel and Lauren to the island. Ruben and his men stayed on the beach next to a fire built to warm their dinner. They would sleep here tonight and climb down in the morning.

Miguel sat at the front of the boat like an animated bowsprit while Lauren rested on the bundle of gear lashed in the stern. Mercer rowed with deep, even strokes. “I feel like I should be singing Italian opera like a gondolier, but I can’t carry a tune.”

Lauren began a chorus of “Row Row Row Your Boat.”

Mercer and Miguel joined her in a round once they found the tempo. Each time they messed up, Miguel dissolved into laughter.

Beaching the boat under the overhang of a sweeping tree, Mercer tied the painter to a log and helped Lauren ashore. Miguel was already off and running. The island rose twenty feet at its center, a misshapen lump of dark rock pocked with patches of vegetation that grew from soil deposits. Five skinny trees rose from exposed roots that clung to the ground like tentacles. The whole area was less than half an acre. Gary had tunneled a single shaft into the island in a natural foldback of rock that formed a partial cave. He had managed only a few feet before returning to the river below to await Mercer’s arrival in Panama. There were tools still waiting at the rock face at the end of the tunnel.

“Looks like you rowed for nothing,” Lauren remarked, wiping sweat from her slender throat.

“Worse,” Mercer said darkly, “it seems Gary and his people died for nothing. Other than the ruins of the dam where the river meets the Rio Tuira, there’s not one shred of evidence that anyone had ever been here before them.”

He imagined Gary Barber would be just as happy dying for his dream. It was the kind of grandiose romantic gesture that would appeal to him and Mercer couldn’t begrudge him that. But Gary’s team had signed on as workers, simple laborers who probably made more money with Gary in a month than they could normally earn in a year. It was the bitterness of their loss that scalded his voice.

“It’ll be dark in an hour.” He glanced at the western horizon, where the sun was sinking toward the lip of the volcano. “We should head back.”

“Um, listen,” Lauren said shyly, “I would love to take a quick dip if you promise not to peek.”

Mercer chuckled. “Gallantry is not solely esteemed by Southern gentlemen.” He changed to an atrocious antebellum accent. “We Yankees know how to avert our eyes when a maiden is at her ablutions.”

“Why thank you, kind sir.” She batted her eyes, thankful the black mood she saw pass over him was just as quickly dispelled. “And if you don’t, this belle packs a 9mm. Make sure Miguel doesn’t get an eyeful either. I bet he’s got the same hot blood as every other man in Panama.”

Even with Ruben camped on shore a quarter mile away, Lauren walked to the far side of the island to strip naked and dive into the lake. As sleek as an otter, she slid through the topmost layer of water. It was warmed by the sun and lifted days of sweat and grime from her pores. Without soap, she could only run her hands over her body, using her neatly trimmed nails where dirt had ground into her skin at knees and elbows. Her legs and underarms prickled from lack of shaving. She hadn’t been to her apartment in Panama City for nearly a week and hadn’t seen a shower in three days.

Lying on her back and filling her lungs so that she floated an easy swim from the island, she reveled in the twin sensations of the dying sun’s warm rays and the water, which now felt cool. Like soldiers had since the very first armies, she took simple pleasures where she could find them. Four days ago she had investigated a filthy shanty outside of La Palma where a low-level drug trafficker had splattered the brains of two of his mules against the mud walls like crimson Rorschach stains. The genitals of the husband-and-wife team had been crudely carved off and stuffed in their spouse’s mouth as a warning. If the trafficker hadn’t yet fled back to Colombia, Lauren considered putting Ruben on his trail when they got back to El Real.

But now she lay in a volcanic lake, and even the bizarre postmortem mutilation of Mercer’s friends couldn’t intrude on her well-being—another trick that every soldier discovered if they wanted to keep their sanity. She didn’t know what to make of Mercer. He had the credentials of an egghead, but moved and thought like a soldier. She doubted he was a veteran—veterans tended to name drop and brag around active-duty military. Though something in Mercer’s demeanor led her to think he wasn’t a braggart about anything.

He was a mystery she wouldn’t mind learning a little more about, a far cry from the embassy types who hit on her in Panama City, or the military men who professed to like her as an equal but usually felt threatened by her. Those, she’d found, either slunk off in humiliation or attempted dominion by date rape. Twice that had happened, the first succeeding and the second, a two-star during her last time at SouthCom headquarters in Miami, having to invent a car accident to cover the injuries she’d inflicted.

That sudden memory soured her tranquility. She exhaled deeply and allowed herself to sink under the water. Scuba diving had given her great lung control and she willed herself to hover under the surface for a slow count of one hundred. Clearing her eyes of water when she surfaced, she saw Mercer standing on the bank fifteen feet from her. A burst of anger prickled her skin and she was about to shout when she heard the sound that had prompted him to search her out.

The steady beat of a helicopter’s rotors.

“Come on,” he called, “I just heard it approaching.”

He tossed her shirt as she stood in the shallows, his concentration completely fixed on the sound of the unseen chopper. The cotton tee absorbed the water beading on her skin, outlining her high breasts and the curve of her rib cage as it swept toward her narrow waist. Temperature change and the sudden tension stiffened her nipples. Mercer had already stepped back to where he’d stashed Miguel in the tunnel. Lauren pulled on her pants. She followed carrying her underwear, boots, and pistol belt.

“Where are they?” She finished dressing in the tunnel. Mercer stood on a promontory of rock just outside the entrance.

“Coming in from the west but they could have circled around the volcano. It looks like a Bell JetRanger. All black.”

“Any markings?”

“Too far away.”

The chopper thundered over the lake as if it had just climbed the waterfall. Mercer assumed it had made a couple passes over Gary’s camp to determine if anyone remained there. He was certain that whoever had shot up the bodies—and ordered the theft of the Lepinay journal in Paris—was likely to be on this helicopter. His hands balled at his sides.

“Do you think—?”

“I know it’s them,” he answered tightly.

Ruben and his men had been caught off guard when the JetRanger appeared. All three had been dozing through the late afternoon. By the time they came fully awake, the chopper had swung into a hover between them and the nearest of Gary’s excavations. The helo’s side door had been removed and without having to watch, Mercer knew what would happen next. This was a well-executed air assault.

A testament to his training and reflexes, Ruben got off the first shot as the chopper hung in the air like a deadly insect. The pops of his M-16 were lost in the thunder of the rotors and the angry bark of a gimbal-mounted light machine gun slung in the open door frame. A wall of sand erupted ten feet in front of the Panamanians. They turned and ran. Eruptions of dirt followed in their wake as the gunner corrected his aim. Lauren had climbed up to stand next to Mercer and made an involuntary sound as the stream of rounds found their first mark.

One of the mercenaries arched his back in an impossible angle and was slammed face-first into the beach, his torn body carving a bloody furrow. The chopper moved sideways to close the range on the remaining men. Another burst caught the second mercenary. His head vanished. Ruben ran on. A long fusillade blew enough sand into the air to swallow him. The firing stopped for a moment. It didn’t matter that both Mercer and Lauren prayed he would appear from the settling dust cloud. It would only mean a temporary reprieve.

Ruben did appear again when the dust cloud settled. He was on his knees, his M-16 at his shoulder. He fired off the remaining rounds in his magazine. He had time to slam home a fresh one but not enough to cock his weapon before the chopper’s machine gun roared again. The sand settled a second time as a shroud over his lifeless figure.

“Get back into the tunnel and make sure Miguel doesn’t come out.” Mercer watched the black helicopter circle the lake, the door gunner alert for more targets.

With no visible marking on the JetRanger, Mercer had to hope he could see the figures within to make some kind of identification. He could tell the black paint had been recently, and carelessly, applied.

At each of the tunnels ringing the lake, the chopper hovered long enough for a pair of armed men in camos to jump down, scout the tunnel for people, and jump back on the helo’s skid. It was too far to tell their ethnicity. After completing its circuit, the chopper swung toward the island.

Mercer scrambled into the cave, timing it so that he could just peek out as the craft roared directly overhead. The smile that creased his face was without warmth. In their haste, whoever had blacked out the chopper hadn’t painted her underhull. He saw shadows of overspray on the helicopter’s normal white paintwork and the neat block letters of her ID number.

“Gotcha, you son of a bitch.”

By the time the Bell JetRanger circled for a few slower passes over the island, Mercer, Lauren, and Miguel were huddled against the far wall of the tunnel, completely screened from view. And with the rowboat hidden under the tree at the water’s edge, there was no reason for the gunmen to suspect the island currently sheltered a trio of temporary residents.

When the sound of the rotors faded, Miguel wouldn’t let go of Mercer so Lauren went out to see what would happen next.

“What do you see?” Mercer asked.

Thinking of the boy in the tunnel, Lauren modified the truth. “Ah, the men in the helicopter are landing to pick up Ruben and his men.” In fact, they were collecting their corpses.

“Are they leaving us?” Miguel cried. He hadn’t heard the gunfire.

“Yes, Miguel. They are going away in the helicopter.”

“Can’t we go with them?” he complained.

“It’ll be a lot more fun climbing down the waterfall,” she said, aghast when the first of the bodies was tossed back out of the chopper over the lake. It had been weighted so it sank like a stone. The two others were also unceremoniously tossed out to an unmarked watery grave.

The scene of the three murders was sanitized. Any trace evidence, like spent shell casings, was easily explained away in a country awash in guns moving from former Nicaraguan rebels to the Colombian drug barons and revolutionaries.

“Is Ruben leaving now?” Miguel piped.

“Not yet. The helicopter is flying across the lake again. They’re ... it looks like they’re dropping something.”

Hearing that, Mercer ordered Miguel to stay put and scrambled out of the tunnel. He caught a glimpse of the chopper just as what appeared to be a large barrel was rolled out the door opposite the gunner’s station. A moment later another barrel followed the first.

As soon as the barrels cleared the skids, the JetRanger heeled over in a steep turn and powered away from the volcano. In seconds, even the beat of its rotors was lost.

“What was that all about?” Lauren asked, but Mercer was already running to where their boat was hidden.

The first jury-rigged depth charge, containing seventy pounds of dynamite, exploded halfway to the bottom of the lake after sinking for a minute. Its detonative force reached the surface in a fraction of a second. The plume of water rose fifty feet in a writhing froth, cascading back down with a continuous slap that seemed to shake the very air. The second, even more powerful charge, went off a moment later and at an even greater depth. The island vibrated as if caught in an earthquake.

“Mercer, what are they doing?” she shouted when he came back from the rowboat dragging the heavy bundle of supplies Gary Barber had left in it.

“Get to the highest point on the island and you’ll see,” he answered without pausing from his work. “Keep Miguel close to you.”

Taking the boy’s hand and somehow trusting Mercer, Lauren climbed up the twenty-foot-high peak on the island’s southern point and looked out over the lake. Near where the first of the explosions occurred, the water seemed to be boiling like a cauldron and she heard a steady jet of sound like a distant aircraft engine. As she watched, the patch of boiling water grew like a spreading slick of acid. In just a few seconds it had doubled in size and doubled again. She had no idea what it meant until she looked to the beach, where Ruben’s cooking fire still burned.

As if a gas fireplace was starving for fuel, the flames began to shrink, dimming down until she could barely see a flicker of yellow before it was gone altogether. Then she knew. The fire hadn’t starved for fuel. It had starved for oxygen! The twin explosions had created a chain reaction to release the last of the deadly carbon dioxide from the lake. The heavy CO₂ was forcing all the air from the mountain’s summit.

Odorless, tasteless, and invisible, a minute-long exposure was as deadly as any poison gas in military stockpiles and it was coming for them.

Not even when a faulty road map had led her HUMMV into a minefield in Bosnia had Lauren tasted the fear that slackened her muscles now. The trust she’d put in Mercer evaporated. Miguel sensed it and took her hand. Together they raced back to the cave.

“Mercer, what are you doing?” She hated that she couldn’t keep the panic from her voice. “The lake bed is going to be filled with CO₂ in no time. We have to row back to shore and get out of here.”

He continued to unroll a sheet of clear plastic Gary used as a ground cloth. “We’d never make it,” Mercer answered, finally looking up at her. “We’d all be dead long before we reached land.”

“Don’t you understand what’s happening out there? The gas? We’ll suffocate. We can’t stay.”

“The problem is,” he replied with more calm than he had any reason to possess, “we can’t leave either.”