Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead

INDY’S IN DEEP—
AND ON THE RUN FROM
THE WALKING DEAD.

There’s no rest for the weary treasure hunter, but that’s how Indiana Jones likes it. Fresh from spying for the Allies in the thick of World War II Germany, the globe-trotting archaeologist doesn’t need much persuading to join his cohort “Mac” McHale in searching for one of the most coveted of artifacts: the fabled black pearl known as the Heart of Darkness. But the partners in adventure are not alone on their foray into the mysterious jungles of Haiti. German and Japanese agents are in hot pursuit, determined to possess the ebony artifact—and its secrets—for their own sinister purposes. And shadowing them all is an infamous voodoo priest, with powers of both diabolical science and black magic at his command.

On a treacherous odyssey across the Island of the Dead, where the legend of the
zombi
looms large, spiders, snakes, and booby traps will prove the least of Indy’s challenges. And capturing the prize will be child’s play compared to confronting an enemy unlike any other, whose numbers are legion and nearly impossible to kill—because they’re already dead . . .

B
Y
S
TEVE
P
ERRY
The Tularemia Gambit
Civil War Secret Agent
The Man Who Never Missed
Matadora
The Machiavelli Interface
The 97th Step
The Albino Knife
Black Steel
Brother Death
Conan the Fearless
Conan the Defiant
Conan the Indomitable
Conan the Free Lance
Conan the Formidable
Aliens: Earth Hive
Aliens: Nightmare Asylum
Aliens: The Female War
(with Stephani Danelle Perry)
Aliens vs. Predator: Prey
(with Stephani Danelle Perry)
Spindoc
The Forever Drug
Stellar Rangers
Stellar Rangers: Lone Star
The Mask
Men in Black
Leonard Nimoy’s Primortals
Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire
The Trinity Vector
The Digital Effect
Windowpane
Tribes: Einstein’s Hammer
The Musashi Flex
Titan AE
(with Dal Perry)
Isaac Asimov’s I-Bots: Time Was
(with Gary Braunbeck)
Chris Bunch’s The Gangster Conspiracy
(with Dal Perry)
Predator: Turnabout
Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead

B
Y
S
TEVE
P
ERRY WITH
T
OM
C
LANCY
&
S
TEVE
P
IECZENIK
Net Force
Net Force: Hidden Agendas
Net Force: Night Moves
Net Force: Breaking Point
Net Force: Point of Impact
Net Force: CyberNation
Net Force: State of War
(also with Larry Segriff)
Net Force: Changing of the Guard
(also with Larry Segriff)

B
Y
M
ICHAEL
R
EAVES &
S
TEVE
P
ERRY
Sword of the Samurai
Hellstar
Dome
The Omega Cage
Thong the Barbarian Meets the Cycle Sluts of Saturn
Star Wars: MedStar I: Battle Surgeons
Star Wars: MedStar II: Jedi Healer
Star Wars: Death Star

Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead
is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

A Del Rey Mass Market Original

Copyright © 2009 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or ™ where indicated.

All Rights Reserved. Used Under Authorization.

Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

D
EL
R
EY
is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

ISBN: 978-0-345-50698-6

Printed in the United States of America

www.indianajones.com

www.delreybooks.com

For Dianne, naturally;
and in fond memory of the
Saturday morning matinees with serials
at the Paramount Theater in Baton Rouge,
in the halcyon summer of 1957

Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, is stranger than we
can
imagine.

—S
IR
A
RTHUR
E
DDINGTON

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The writer carries much of the load, of course, but there are always others who do some of the lifting to get a novel from an idea to the bookstores. Thanks this time go to Shelly Shapiro, Sue Rostoni, and Leland Chee, as well as Jennifer “Mom” Weltz and Our Ladies of the Jean Naggar Lit’ry Agency. Fine and professional folk all.

Masters of the silver screen George Lucas and Steven Spielberg hardly need my thanks, but they have them. Always fun to get to play in their yards, they have such cool toys.

My resident
zombi
authority is Bobbe Edmonds.

A special acknowledgment to Harrison Ford, my generation’s Cary Grant, and an actor who is underappreciated for his expertise. Because it is fast or funny does not mean it is easy, and nobody does it better than Ford. Did you see those stunts in
The Crystal Skull
? Here is a man, who when asked about his movie success during an interview, once said, “Oh, it’s the writers . . .” Find me one of those who doesn’t love an actor who says that. Give him an Academy Award—he’s earned it. (And my apologies to him for the first line of the novel, even though it is a joke.)

Readers familiar with the Caribbean islands will notice I have taken some liberties with local geography. I made up all the events and the people I put there. Have fun—it’s just another of Indy’s adventures . . .

ONE

In the Air over the Windward Passage,
Eight Miles West of Haiti
Summer 1943

I
NDY HATED
small airplanes.

Yes, yes, planes were necessary evils, he knew. If there was going to be a race to collect an ancient treasure in the modern world of 1943, the winner wasn’t going to be the guy who sailed ’round the Horn on a clipper ship to find it. Flying was a sharp knife in any field archaeologist’s tool chest—but because planes were
necessary
didn’t mean he had to like the blasted things. Or trust them. Oh, sure, mostly they flew just fine. Sometimes they didn’t. After the third or fourth time one came down hard enough to blow out the tires or break the undercarriage, he was less trusting. Yeah, you did what you had to do to get where you needed to get. Someday your number was going to be up no matter what you did. No point in worrying about it too much, but . . . flying around like a bird?

Because of his OSS training, Indy knew more about aircraft than he wanted to know, and this one—a Taylor/Piper J-2 that looked a lot older than it could possibly be—seemed to be held together with baling wire and prayer. It was noisy, underpowered—a forty-horsepower engine was stock, it weighed a little over 500 pounds empty, and with Mac, who had to go 210, and Indy at about 190? That was the maximum cargo capacity right there. Raul, the little Cuban pilot, was small, but even he had to go 140, and that didn’t count the weight of the fuel and what luggage they had, and all that meant this plane ought not to be able to get off the ground. Yet here they were, cruising two thousand feet above the Caribbean, at all of sixty miles an hour. Yeah, Raul said he had rebuilt the engine and perked it up a fair bit, but even so, that it had taken off three times with them so far? That was still amazing—

They say that bad thoughts draw the devil’s attention.

The engine sputtered, was silent for what seemed like a thousand years but was probably only a second, and Indy’s belly roiled as if it contained a most unhappy lizard trying to get out. The imaginary creature wasn’t too choosy about its exit route, trying to go up and down at the same time . . .

Indiana Jones said a word that would have gotten his mouth washed out with soap in polite family circles.

Mac laughed.

The pilot said something in rapid Cuban Spanish, and he laughed, too.

“He said—” Mac began.

“I heard him,” Indy said. “I’m sitting right
here,
third guy in a two-seater, and since I know there is no aerodynamic way this thing can stay up, he
better
have an in with the Virgin Mary.”

“You worry too much.”

“And you don’t worry enough.”

Mac—George McHale—was British to the core, and MI6. He and Indy had been paired on a dozen secret assignments for either His Majesty’s government or Uncle Sam, mostly in Europe, a couple in the Pacific, and while Mac was a good man to have covering your back, he was also prone to recklessness. Indy had saved Mac’s bacon more often than the other way around, though he did have Mac to thank for keeping him alive a few times—and his recent increase in rank. That latter was a mixed blessing. Indy hadn’t even wanted to be in
one
army, much less
two
of them, and he had just gotten used to being “Major Jones” in one of them, and now he was a light colonel.