“What’d you tell them about me?”
“That you are a great white warrior who rescued me so I might rescue them. I called you cheinama, which in their language means a stranger who is a friend.”
“Thanks for the recommendation,” Blaine said.
The Tupis had been fortunate enough to find a rare valley in the Amazon Basin. As McCracken hiked down the slope to the hub of activity, he noted it was a uniquely defensible area. By the size of the branches the Tupi braves were hefting, and the way they were being stacked, he also noted that the tribe was not actually building a settlement.
They were building a fortress.
The bulk of the living quarters were being erected a story or more in the air upon sturdy tree branches linked together with tied-down logs. The construction was lean-to style and, once completed, would be accessible only by dangling vines easily pulled up to deny entry. The building of similar structures was underway closer to the rim of the valley, although these were clearly guard towers. The Tupis were developing their own early warning system.
“Looks like they’re digging in,” Blaine commented.
“With good reason. The chief is waiting for us.”
The chief was seated cross-legged in the center of the valley, a vantage point from which he would survey all ongoing work. He was an ancient man, with white hair tied in a ponytail and a mask of wrinkles covering the coppery flesh of his face. He might have been a hundred or seventy, but Blaine could see that the muscles of his wrists and hands were those of a younger man, at least one who had never stopped using them. They protruded from a tribal shawl colored in a simple pattern with a dominant shade of wheat.
The chief spoke to Wareagle without looking at McCracken.
“He bids you welcome,” Johnny translated, “and says he can tell he is in the presence of a great manitou.”
“Tell him the pleasure is all mine.”
Before Johnny could do so, the chief spoke again.
“O Memeka bu?”
“He wishes to know what tribe you belong to,” Johnny translated.
“Tell him my own.”
“Omei,” Johnny repeated to the old man.
The chief laughed and said something softly to Johnny.
“He says he knew that, Blainey.”
“Iti omoi reima.”
“He says you are a strong man.”
“Tell him thanks — and ask him what the hell is going on here!”
“Nefoteo nia?”
Wareagle waited patiently for the chief to finish before translating.
“He says they are digging in here to make a stand. He says there is no sense in running because the Spirit of the Dead will find them…like it found them last night.”
Johnny waited for the chief to complete his thought before continuing his translation.
“Blainey, he says two boys were found missing from that clearing we came upon at dawn this morning. He says there were no tracks to indicate they wandered off and no tracks to indicate anyone had come for them. They simply disappeared. “
“Thanks to this Spirit of the Dead?”
Wareagle nodded grimly. “The chief believes it to be a demon capable of appearing and disappearing as it desires. He says it was drawn up from the underworld one full moon ago by a Gift Giver still in touch with the Forgotten Times.”
“In which case the defenses being erected here will prove woefully inadequate.”
“They must make a stand, Blainey. Whatever is killing their people must be made to show itself where their warriors will at least have a chance.”
“Ask him if any of his people have seen the Spirit of the Dead.”
Wareagle obliged, and the chief shook his head methodically before responding.
“He says all that has been seen is the shape of the hatred the enemy leaves,” Wareagle translated. “The enemy sucks the life out of the land, out of the world, and the result is a hollow spot, an empty spot. It is into this hollow spot that the Spirit of the Dead disappears after its work is finished.”
The old man spoke again as soon as Johnny had finished speaking.
“There is more, Blainey. He says signs of the Green Coats were found in their search for the missing boys.”
“Meaning soldiers?”
“Seven of them, their steps orderly and precise.”
“Ben Norseman,” Blaine replied, recalling his meeting with the Green Beret colonel in the lobby of the Caesar Park.
“They do not seem interested in his tribe, but they are out there, too.”
Just then a panting brave rushed up to the chief and sat next to him, whispering. The old man listened calmly, then turned to look up at Wareagle and spoke softly.
“He says the missing boys have been found,” Wareagle translated. “He wants us to come.”
The boys’ bodies swayed in the breeze, suspended from the tree by vines tied around their throats. The instrument of death, though, had been something much worse.
They had been disemboweled while still alive.
Large, jagged holes had been sliced in their abdomens, the contents drained a bit at a time. The pain would have been enormous, and much of it was still frozen on their faces. Blood from their mouths and noses had dripped down to their chests like paint running down a wall. Blaine kept his eyes on it to distract himself from the holes ripped where their stomachs had been. He kept to a distance where the smell was less intense. “What did this, Johnny? What the hell did this?”
Wareagle had ventured closer, eyes cold as marbles. He stared at the corpses and swiped at the flies that had clustered about. The boys’ toes dangled two feet off the ground, so Johnny was looking directly into their dead eyes.
“The vines are knotted in a way that would not bring on suffocation,” he said, eyes lowering. “The initial stomach cuts were made with a sharp object, a knife perhaps, so the skin could be parted and stripped back. The contents could then be pulled out.” He turned to McCracken. “By hand.”
“Jesus Christ….”
Wareagle had leaned over the stinking pile of the corpses’ insides. Blaine drew up even with him, while the chief and Tupi warriors kept their distance.
“What about tracks?”
Wareagle was on his knees now, sliding his callused palms across the ground. “Nothing from the time of these killings. Much from after.”
“I’m listening.”
“Seven men wearing U.S. combat boots.”
“Norseman,” Blaine muttered. “Ben and his goons must have come in to hunt something down.” He looked at Wareagle. “Our Spirit of the Dead maybe.”
Wareagle looked up. “The Green Coats came in from the northeast. I can follow their tracks. They may bring us closer to what we have come to find.”
McCracken gazed up at the last of the day’s light. “Not without sun. We’ll spend the night with the Tupis, help them make their stand, and leave come morning.”
“Something might come before that.”
“Save us a trip, Indian.”
Chapter 7
The Tupi warriors patrolled the valley’s perimeter in positions shown them by Wareagle. Blaine hung back through it all; not yet fully accepted by the Tupis, he focused his energies in other directions. Perimeter guards out of contact with one another were too vulnerable to attack, too easy to eliminate one at a time, so Wareagle’s plan had them patrolling in concentric circles that meant one brave would pass another every hundred yards. Still, this left too many easily breached holes in the perimeter. Hell, just the night before the Spirit of the Dead, as the Tupis called it, had made off with two boys without leaving any trace. Couldn’t dare leave it any opening at all in view of that.