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.”