Antonio was going crazy near me. He wanted to fire and I kept holding him back. Elicia had seen the guerillas and had made a dash for the jungle off to her right. She was temporarily out of danger.
"Wait, Antonio," I said, watching the guerillas murder the now unarmed Indians. "Our only chance is surprise. They don't know we're here."
I signalled for him to move up the right side of the clearing. The guerillas had stopped and were watching the warriors who were all on their bellies in the high grass. I counted six guerillas, all armed, then set off up the left side of the clearing.
As I was easing back into a clump of bushes halfway up the slope, I saw that Antonio was doing the same across from me. The guerillas were still near the top of the slope, eyeing the fallen Indians for signs of life. I felt a sick feeling at the pit of my stomach and was convinced that all twelve, plus Pico and Purano, had been killed in the withering gunfire.
Slowly, the guerillas began to edge down the slope to inspect their kill. I raised my rifle and signalled to Antonio to hold off firing. All six guerillas advanced down the slope. Just as I was considering that a stupid move and was ready to open fire, four more guerillas came rushing down from the rocks, firing madly.
If they had waited one second more, they would have caught Antonio and I in a trap.
I opened fire when all ten guerillas were together. Antonio, across the clearing, did the same. The guerilla band split, some running in all directions. Two came down the slope, firing from their hips. I picked them off cleanly, then went after three who were running back up the slope, toward the safety of the rocks.
But four of the guerillas stood their ground.
Crouching just above the fallen Indians, they singled out Antonio and began blasting away at him. I knew I was next. I ducked into the jungle wall and started upward, hoping to come out at a better vantage point. It was then that I heard Elicia scream out Antonio's name.
There was more screaming and yelling in that clearing as I struggled against the heavy vines and underbrush. I couldn't make any headway in the jungle, so I found a new opening to the clearing and went rushing through.
Four of the Indian spearchuckers were up. They were struggling with the guerillas in hand-to-hand combat. Below, I saw Antonio lying flat on his face in the grass. Elicia was dashing down the slope to him.
I looked back toward the struggling warriors and guerillas and knew that the automatic weapon was useless here. If I opened fire, I would kill friends and enemies alike. I reached back and snaked Wilhelmina from the tape.
Kneeling, I singled out a guerilla and took careful aim. The luger boomed and seemed to shake the trees around the clearing. But a guerilla went down. One by one, I picked off five guerillas and made a quick count in my head. Of ten guerillas, we had killed seven. Three were missing.
Worse yet, of the twelve Indian warriors Botussin had sent with us, eight were dead. Purano had been shot in the shoulder and Pico had slight wounds in his thigh and left arm. Both could walk, but they would never be able to climb that chimney to Alto Arete.
While Pico and Purano rallied the four surviving spearchuckers to go look for the three guerillas who had got away, I went down the slope to check on Antonio. Elicia was hovering over him, hugging his head to her bosom, crying softly. I could see from ten paces away that he was dead.
He was. His body was full of holes from the rain of bullets. I shuddered to think that, if I hadn't plunged into the forest wall when I did, my body would look much like his.
"We'll come back for him," I said gently to Elicia. "When it is over, we'll take him to the Indian camp for a proper burial."
She got up and went into the jungle. I waited, watching the minutes flip past on my digital watch. It was twenty minutes past four. We had just ten minutes to find the caves and begin our climb up that chimney.
But death has a way of stalling time, of making it stand still. I could do nothing but wait for Elicia's grief to run its course.
To make matters worse, the four warriors returned and told Purano in stilted whispers that they had lost the three guerillas they had been sent to dispatch. I calculated the distance to the nearest guerilla camp and figured we had plenty of time to be out of here before the alarm went out in any effective manner. Of course, there were the red-shirted guerillas of Don Carlos Italla's elite corps parading about and they could be here in minutes, but I decided not to let that worry me. Not much, anyway.
After five minutes, Elicia came back into the clearing, her eyes dry. In her hands was a cluster of wild roses she had found in the thicket.
She crossed her dead brother's hands over his chest and lay the roses on his hands. Then, she looked up at me.
"We will go now and kill the beast on the mountain."
The three guerillas who had escaped death in the battle in the clearing were still nowhere to be seen. Pico and I led the way to the rocks and then all of us began tossing the stones aside. Even Purano worked with his one good arm and rolled huge boulders down the slope and into the jungle.
It took ten minutes to clear away enough rocks so that we could see the top of the well. A very precious ten minutes.
The well was covered with a cut stone slab about the size of the top of a pool table. It took all of us to nudge it aside, inch by inch, until there was a big enough opening for one of us to slip inside. Pico took a small rock and dropped it into the well.
Less than a second later, we heard the splash. Pico shook his head.
"No good," he said. "The map was right, although I'm certain there was no water here thirty years ago. There must be a system for draining and filling it at will, but it would take us days to learn the key to that system. The cave entrance, the tunnel I recall crawling through after going down many steps, is filled with water. Perhaps even the cave itself is full of water."
We stood there on that pile of stones and peered into the darkness of the water-filled well, and thought of so many deaths that had come for nothing.
And of all the deaths to come.
Chapter Eight
It was 4:30. In four hours, more or less, Don Carlos Italla would fire his flare gun from the top of Alto Arete and the war masterminded from the clouds would commence. The only hope of stopping that signal was through the cave and up through the chimney. Even if we had had a military escort up the regular trail to the mountaintop, we still couldn't have made it on time.
We were at one end of the shortest distance between two points. And there was water in the way.
All right, I thought. Water certainly isn't impenetrable.
"Let's move the slab all the way off the well," I said, "and get some light into the damned thing. I'm going down."
"It is hopeless," Pico said. "We should spend our energies in returning to the tribal camp, in convincing Chief Botussin that we must move the camp farther into the hills, in…"
"Let Senor Carter go down," Purano said.
We all turned to look at him. He hadn't spoken five words during the whole of the afternoon, not even when the guerillas had attacked. When he had been shot in the arm and thigh, he hadn't uttered a sound.
I stared at his dark eyes and wondered if he wanted me to go down to a certain death, or if he really held out hope. I couldn't read a thing in those eyes, in that deadpan face.
Five minutes later, we had the slab removed from the well and I was tying the thin, strong rope around my chest, just under my armpits.
"How far down did you climb before you came to the entrance?" I asked Pico.
"I don't remember how far," he said. "There were steps, but I don't remember it being an ordeal."
"Okay," I said, picking up a heavy rock to use as a weight. "Let me down as fast as I can sink. Play out no more than a hundred feet of rope, though. If I'm not up in sixty seconds from the time my head goes under water, pull me up, fast."