The Codex

18

At three o’clock that morning they took their places, Sally by the door and Tom braced at the back wall. He whispered a three-count and they both kicked simultaneously, Sally’s assault on the door masking the sound of Tom’s kick to the boards on the back wall. The combined blows sounded like one, ringing loudly in the confined space. The shabby board popped off, just as Tom hoped.

Dogs began to bark in the village, and one of the soldiers cursed. “What are you doing?”

“I have to go to the bathroom!” Sally cried.

“No, no, you must go in there.”

Tom whispered the countdown again, one, two, three, kick. Sally gave the door another blow while he kicked out a second board.

“Stop!” said the soldier.

“But I have to go, cabrón!”

“Señorita, I am sorry, but you must take care of it in there. I am under orders not to open the door.”

One, two, three, kick!

The third board popped off. The opening was now big enough to squeeze through. The dogs in town were barking hysterically.

“One more kick and I call the teniente!”

“But I have to go!”

“There is nothing I can do.”

“You soldiers are barbarians.”

“It is our orders, señorita.”

“That’s just what Hitler’s soldiers said.”

“Sally, let’s go,” hissed Tom, gesturing to her in the dark.

“Hitler was not such a bad man, señorita. He made the trains run on time.”

“That was Mussolini, you idiot. You two will end up on the gallows, and good riddance.”

“Sally!” Tom called.

Sally came back. “Did you hear what those Nazis just said?”

He pushed her through the hole and handed out their sleeping bags. They ran at a crouch down the jungle track toward the town. The town had no electricity, but the sky was clear and moonlight bathed the empty streets. The dogs were already barking, and they were able to pass through without creating a further alarm. Despite the noise nobody was stirring.

These people have learned to mind their own business, Tom thought.

In five minutes they were down by the boats. Tom flashed the light over the army dugout, the one with the eighteen-horse engine. It was in good order, with two large plastic tanks of gasoline, both full. He began untying the prow. Suddenly he heard a voice, speaking low, from the darkness.

“You no want that boat.”

It was the man they had hired earlier that day.

“We sure as hell do,” hissed Tom.

“Let stupid army mans take that boat. Water going down. At every bend in river they get stuck. You take my boat. You no get stuck. That way you escape.” He leapt like a cat onto the dock and untied a slender dugout with a six-horsepower engine. “Get in.”

“Are you coming with us?” Sally asked.

“No. I tell stupid army mans you rob me.” He started unhooking the gas tanks from the army boat and loading them into the back of their dugout canoe. He also gave them the gas tank from the other boat. Tom and Sally climbed in. Tom fished in his pocket and offered the man some money.

“Not now. If they search me and find money, I get shot.”

“How can we pay you?” Tom asked.

“You pay me million dollar later. My name Manuel Waono. I always here.”

“Wait a minute. A million dollars?”

“You rich American, you easy pay me million dollar. I, Manuel Waono, save your life. You go now. Fast.”

“How do we find Pito Solo?”

“Last village on river.”

“But how do we know—”

The Indian wasn’t interested in making any more explanations. He pushed them off with a big bare foot, and the boat slid into the blackness.

Tom lowered the engine into the water, primed it, choked it, gave it a pull. Instantly it roared into life. In the silence, the sound was high pitched and loud.

“Go!” said Manuel from shore.

Tom threw the boat into forward. He turned the throttle as far as it would go, and the tinny engine whined and shuddered. The long wooden canoe began to move through the water. Tom steered while Sally stood in the bow, probing the river ahead with the flashlight.

Not a minute later, back at the dock, Manuel began shouting in Spanish: “Help! I am robbed! My boat, they stole my boat!”

“Christ, he didn’t wait long,” Tom muttered.

Soon a cacophony of excited voices came drifting toward them over the dark river. Then the bright light of a gas lantern came bobbing down the embankment, along with flashlights, illuminating a knot of people gathering on the makeshift dock. There was some angry and confused shouting and then a sudden hush. A voice rang out in English: the voice of Lieutenant Vespán. “Turn around or I order my men to shoot, please!”

“He’s bullshitting,” said Sally.

Tom didn’t feel quite so sure.

“Do not think I am joking!” the teniente shouted.

“He’ll never shoot,” said Sally.

“One… two…”

“It’s a crock,” said Sally.

“Three…”

There was a silence.

“What did I tell you?”

There was a sudden burst of automatic-weapons fire coming across the water, shockingly loud and close.

“Shit!” Tom yelled, throwing himself down. As the boat began to yaw, he quickly reached up with one hand and steadied the engine handle.

Sally was still standing in the prow, unconcerned. “Tom, they’re shooting into the air. They’re not going to risk hitting us. We’re Americans.”

There was a second burst of gunfire. This time Tom distinctly heard the slap of bullets hitting the water around them. Instantly Sally landed on the floor of the dugout next to him. “Jesus Christ, they are shooting at us!” she cried.

Tom reached up and shoved the tiller sideways, sending the dugout into a sharp evasive maneuver. There were two more short bursts of gunfire. This time he heard the whine of bullets overhead and to the left, like bees. They were evidently aiming for the sound of the engine, raking the water back and forth with their automatic weapons. And they were most definitely shooting to kill.

He steered the boat on a zigzag course, trying to throw the shooters off their aim. At each lull, Sally raised her head and shined the light ahead so they could see where they were going. They would be safe, at least for the moment, once they got around the bend in the river.

There was another burst, and this time several rounds nicked the gunwale, showering them with splinters.

“Shit!”

“We will come and get you!” rose up the voice of the lieutenant, fainter now. “We will find you, and then you will be very sorry for the very short remainder of your very miserable lives.”

Tom counted to twenty and risked another look ahead. Slowly the boat came around the bend, out of the line of fire. Tom steered as close to the wall of vegetation as he dared. As they went around the bend, the lights at the little landing flickered through the leaves and then were gone.

They had made it.

There was another halfhearted burst of gunfire. Tom heard a snipping and cracking in the jungle to their left as the bullets were stopped by the trees. The sounds echoed away and the river fell silent.

Tom helped Sally up. Her face looked white, almost ghostly, in the dim light. He shined the flashlight around. Two walls of trees rose up on either side of the dark river. A single star burned for a moment in a patch of exposed sky, then blinked and flickered through the canopy as they moved. The little engine whined away. For now they were alone on the river. The dark, humid night enfolded them.

Tom took Sally’s hand. He found it was shaking, and then he realized his own hand was shaking, too. The soldiers had shot at them, trying to kill them. He had seen it a million times in the movies, but to actually be shot at was something else entirely.

The moon was setting behind the wall of jungle, and darkness suffocated the river. Tom flicked on the flashlight to see what lay ahead, guiding the boat around snags and riffles. A growing cloud of mosquitoes whined around them. They seemed to be sweeping up thousands as they traveled.

“I don’t suppose you have a can of bug repellent in one of those pockets of yours?” Tom asked.

“As a matter of fact, I did manage to snag my fanny pack in the jeep. I shoved it in my pants.” She fished the small pack out of an enormous pocket on her thigh and unzipped it. She began rummaging through, pulling out a miscellany of things — a bottle of water-purification tablets, some packs of waterproof matches, a roll of hundred-dollar bills, a map, a chocolate bar, a passport, some useless credit cards.

“I’m not even sure what’s in here.”

She began sorting through the jumble of items while Tom held the flashlight. There was no bottle of bug stuff. She swore and began putting everything back. As she did so, a photograph fell out. Tom shined the light on it. It showed a strikingly handsome young man with dark eyebrows and a chiseled chin. The grave expression that furrowed his dark eyebrows, the firm full set of his lips, the tweed jacket, and the way he tilted his head all showed him to be a man who took himself very seriously indeed.

“Who’s that?” Tom asked.

“Oh,” said Sally. “That’s Professor Clyve.”

“That’s Clyve? Why, he’s so young! I imagined him to be some dotty old man in a cardigan puffing on a pipe.”

“He wouldn’t be happy to hear you say that. He’s the youngest full professor in the history of the department. He entered Stanford at sixteen, graduated at nineteen, and had his Ph.D. by the time he was twenty-two. He’s a true genius.” She carefully tucked the photo back into her pocket.

“Why are you carrying around a photo of your professor?”

“Why,” said Sally lightly, “we’re engaged. Didn’t I tell you?”

“No.”

Sally looked at him curiously. “You don’t have a problem with that, do you?”

“Of course not.” Tom felt his face flushing and hoped the darkness would hide it. He was aware she was glaring at him in the dim light.

“You seemed surprised.”

“Well, I was. After all, you’re not wearing an engagement ring.”

“Professor Clyve doesn’t believe in those bourgeois conventions.”

“And it was okay with him that you just come on this trip with me—?” Tom broke off, realizing he had said exactly the wrong thing.

“You think I have to get permission from ‘my man’ to go on a trip? Or are you somehow implying that I’m not to be trusted sexually?” She tilted her head, looking at him with narrowed eyes.

Tom looked away. “Sorry I asked.”

“So am I. Somehow I thought you were more enlightened than that.”

Tom busied himself driving the boat, hiding his embarrassment and confusion. The river was silent; the swampy night heat flowed past them. A bird cried in the darkness. In the silence that followed, Tom heard a noise.

Tom immediately switched off the engine, his heart pounding. The sound came again, the sputter of an outboard starter being pulled. A hush fell over the river. The boat coasted.

“They found some gas. They’re coming after us.”

The boat was starting to drift back down with the current. Tom unshipped a pole from the bottom of the boat and stuck it in the water. The boat swung a little to the current and steadied. Holding the boat still in the current, they listened. There was another sputter and then a roar. The roar subsided into a hum. There could be no doubt: It was the sound of an outboard.

Tom went to restart their engine.

“Don’t,” said Sally. “They’ll hear it.”

“We can’t outpole them.”

“We can’t outrace them either. They’ll be on us in five minutes with that eighteen-horse.” Sally flashed the light along the wall of jungle on either side of the water. The water extended into the trees and spread out, drowning the jungle. “We can hide instead.”

Tom poled the dugout toward the edge of the flooded forest. There was a small opening — a narrow lane of water that looked like it might have been a stream in drier times. He poled up it, and the boat promptly bumped into something: a sunken log.

“Out,” Tom said.

The water was only a foot deep, but underneath it was another two feet of mud, which they sank into with a flurry of bubbles. A foul stench of marsh gas rose up. The back of the boat was still sticking out into the river, where it would be instantly spotted.

“Lift and push.”

They struggled to get the nose of the boat up on the log and then, heaving together, pushed the boat across. Then they scrambled over it themselves and climbed back in. The sound of the Evinrude grew louder. The soldiers’ boat was coming up the river fast.

Sally picked up the second pole, and they both poled forward, deeper into the flooded forest. Tom switched off the flashlight, and a moment later a powerful light came blinking through the trees.

“We’re still too close,” said Tom. “They’ll see us.” He tried to pole, but the pole sank into the muck and stuck. He jerked it out and laid it in the bottom of the boat, grabbing some hanging vines instead and using them to pull the boat deeper into the forest, halfway into a thicket of ferns and bushes. The Evinrude was almost on them. The spotlight flashed through the forest just as Tom grabbed Sally and pulled her down to the bottom of the dugout, and they lay side by side, his arm around her. Tom prayed that the soldiers wouldn’t see their engine.

The sound of the motorboat grew very loud. The boat had slowed down, and the spotlight was probing the forest where they were hidden. Tom could hear the crackle of a walkie-talkie, the murmur of voices. The spotlight lit up the jungle around them like a movie set — and then slowly moved on. Blessed darkness returned. The sound of the engine passed and grew fainter.

Tom sat up in time to see the flash of the spotlight in the forest up ahead as the boat went around a bend. “They’re gone,” he said.

Sally sat up, brushing her tangled hair out of her face. The mosquitoes had gathered around them in a thick, whining cloud. Tom could feel them everywhere, in his hair, crawling into his ears, trying to get up his nose, crawling down his neck. Each blow killed a dozen, instantly replaced. When he tried to breathe, he breathed mosquitoes.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Sally said, slapping.

Tom began pulling dry twigs off the bushes around them.

“What are you doing?”

“Building a fire.”

“Where?”

“You’ll see.” When he’d collected a pile of twigs, he leaned over the side and scooped up some mud from the swamp. He patted it into a pancake on the bottom of the dugout, covered it with leaves, and then built a small teepee of sticks and dry leaves on top.

“Match.”

Sally handed him a match, and he lit the fire. As soon as it was going well, he added some green leaves and twigs. A curl of smoke drifted up and gathered in the still air. Tom plucked a large leaf from a nearby bush and used it as a fan to wave the smoke over Sally. The furious cloud of mosquitoes was driven back. The smoke had a pleasant smell, sweet and spicy.

“There’s a nice trick,” said Sally.

“My father showed it to me on a canoe trip in northern Maine.” He reached up, yanked some more leaves off the bush, and added them to the fire.

Sally took out the map and began examining it by flashlight. “It looks like there are a lot of side channels to the river. I think we should stick to those until we reach Pito Solo.”

“Good idea. And I think we’ll have to pole from now on. We can’t risk using the engine.”

Sally nodded.

“You tend the fire,” said Tom. “I’ll pole, and then we’ll switch off. We won’t stop until we reach Pito Solo.”

“Right.”

Tom pushed the boat back into the river and poled close to the flooded forest, listening for the motorboat. Soon they came to a small side channel winding away from the main one, and took it.

Tom said, “Somehow I don’t think Lieutenant Vespán had any intention of bringing us back to San Pedro Sula. I think he planned to have us fall out of his helicopter. If it weren’t for that missing part, we’d be dead.”