For several seconds, all he could do was lie there and breathe, trying to bring his heartbeat back down to something resembling its normal pace and hoping no one decided to show up and jam a spear into him while he lay there gasping like a gaffed bass. He slowly rolled over and raised himself to his hands and knees, adrenaline pulsing in his aching limbs and readying him for yet another fight. But nothing happened. There weren’t any guards around, only two old women and one young girl, the one he’d seen when they’d entered the village; she sat alone, working on stringing a long necklace of seedpods and bone beads. The two old women sat side by side about ten feet away from her, next to what looked like a crude well, and were concentrating on grinding some sort of wild grain. One was cracking open the thick outer husks and placing the softer grains into a hole in the ground while the other was lifting and dropping a heavy wooden post to crush the grains to flour. None of the three were paying any attention to him. Gabriel was about to slip away and quietly hunt for something that might help him get Millie out of the pit, but the sight of the old woman cracking the husks made him do a double take. The implement she was using—it was the butt of a gun. Not just any gun, either. Gabriel’s Colt.
“Hey!” he said. All three of the women looked up at the specter before them, a nearly naked man covered with rock dust and streaks of mud and angry red scrapes and swollen bite marks. The two older women fled like startled pigeons, the wooden post and gun left lying where they’d fallen from their hands.
The young girl stood unmoving, gaping at him wideeyed. The paralysis was only momentary, though. When Gabriel took a step toward her, open hands held out in a nonthreatening display, she bolted, too, leaving him alone in the center of the village.
Where was everyone else? Were they all guarding Rue? Or were some in the tall central building, watching unwittingly while Velda turned their god machine against innocents in their ancestors’ homeland?
Gabriel walked over to the primitive grain mill and picked up his Colt. It didn’t seem obviously worse for wear, other than a dusty coating of cracked hull fragments clinging to the grip. It was an antique that had once belonged to one of the Old West lawmen, either Wyatt Earp or Bat Masterson; it had been through worse. He brushed it off and slipped it under the waistband of his bark kilt. The gun wasn’t loaded, but its familiar weight still felt reassuring.
The structure next to the grain mill was indeed a well, and Gabriel swiftly hauled up the large hollow gourd that served as a bucket, greedily sucking down massive gulps of the cold, clean water. Then he filled the gourd again and untied the sturdy rope from the wooden post from which it hung. He brought the gourd to the edge of the pit and set it down while he anchored the rope to one of the support poles of a nearby hut. The rope was damp but seemed flexible and strong. He hoped it would hold Millie’s considerable weight.
“Hey, Millie,” he called, lifting the water-filled gourd and carefully lowering it into the pit. “Room service.”
Gabriel saw Millie pull himself up on his good leg and reach for the lowering gourd. When it landed in his hands, he drank deeply, emptying it in a single gulp.
“Damn,” he said. “It ain’t Abita, but it’ll do.” He gripped the rope and gave it an experimental yank. “This anchored?”
“Yes,” Gabriel said. “Do you need me to rig some kind of pulley system to get you up or do you think you can make the climb?”
“My arms ain’t broke,” he replied and immediately started climbing, fist over massive fist.
In thirty seconds, Millie was up, sitting on the lip of the pit, bathed in sweat, teeth clenched tight from his obvious pain.
” We’ve got a choice,” Gabriel said. “We can go in there—” Gabriel nodded toward the tall central building “—and deal with Velda, or we can see if we can spot the plane first.”
“You’re the one who’s always saying to have an escape route planned out before you go in somewhere,” Millie said, wincing as he got to his feet.
“True enough.” Gabriel walked to the tallest nearby tree. “You stay put, rest that ankle.” He jumped and grabbed hold of a low-hanging branch, chinned himself on it and got one leg up and over. From there he was able to make his way up, a branch at a time, to the upper regions of the tree. When he neared the top, he could see the plane. It was in a slightly different location than the first time they’d seen it and was surrounded by what looked like nearly the entirety of the village’s ablebodied population. Everyone wanted to see what Rue was doing with the Father Bird, apparently—or maybe all hands had been needed in order to move it.
Either way, the plane had been moved and uncovered; the encroaching vines and brush had been cleared away, revealing not just the plane but also a makeshift runway before it. The plane itself was a curious-looking antique, with far too many wheels along its belly and four huge propellers lined up in a row along the wings, two on either side of the cage-style cockpit. The long skinny tail ended in a broad, H-shaped fin that was decorated with a pair of black swastikas outlined in white. The body was battered and rusted but looked intact. Gabriel was pretty sure that he was looking at an Arado Ar 232 transport aircraft. Built to transport heavy cargo, including vehicles, it would have been an obvious choice to carry the bulky Untergang device. But why had a plane equipped with wheels rather than skis been chosen for an Antarctic mission? Could the Nazis have somehow known in advance about this warm tropical anomaly? How, when even modern satellite imaging had been unable to detect it? And if they had, why was there no record of the discovery found among Nazi papers at the war’s end?
Gabriel had no answers to these questions. And he knew there was no time for pondering them, not now. The plane had been moved, the runway cleared. And as he watched, he saw two of the propellers cough into motion, slowly at first, then faster. A moment later, they cut out—but in Rue’s hands they’d be going again, he knew that. And then the other two would. With Rue working on it, that plane was going to take off, with or without them on board.
And that meant there was no time to spare.
Chapter 25
“The good news,” Gabriel said, “is that most of the village is over there, meaning there can’t be more than a few people guarding Velda.”
“From what you described,” Millie said, “I’m not surprised. She’s not gonna want a lot of witnesses to what she’s up to—someone might figure out what she’s doing and try to stop her.”
“The bad news,” Gabriel said, “is that I’m sure the ones she’s kept around her—or, what may be more likely, the ones who refused to leave her side—are the diehards, the ones who’ll fight the hardest to protect her.”
“You really think they’ll fight for Velda the way they did for Uta? They never even met her before a day ago.”
“It’s not Velda they’re fighting for,” Gabriel said. “It’s the queen of Kahujiu.”
Millie threw up his hands. “So what do you suggest, boss? We haven’t got any spears, that gun of yours is empty—”
“They might not know that,” Gabriel said.
“Maybe not the locals,” Millie said. “But I’m pretty sure Velda can count to six.”
Gabriel pulled it from his waistband anyway. “She might have forgotten.”
“And I’m limping like Long John Silver. Won’t be much help in a fight.”
“Then we’ll just have to try and take her without a fight, won’t we?” Gabriel said, and stepped through the skull-framed archway, gun held high.
The first room they came to, with the pools and the flickering oil flames, was empty, the surface of the water in each pool still. They passed through to a short corridor and from there could see around the edge of a hanging animal hide into the room where Gabriel had been staked to the floor. The furs were still there, and the stakes, too, and the spherical machine at the far end atop its tall metal frame. Velda was crouched by its base, facing away from the doorway, peering at what looked like the yellowed pages of a notebook lying spread open on the ground. Anika stood beside her, waiting for a command, while two young huntresses, each gripping the wooden shaft of a spear in both hands, flanked them and kept an eye on the entrance.