Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead (28 page)

Gruber moved back to the downed man. Already the morphine was starting to take effect. “Hurst,” Gruber said. “Can you hear me?”

“Jah,
Colonel.”

“We are going to knock you out, to keep you from feeling the pain when we move you. When you wake up, you will be in a better place, do you understand?”

“Jawohl,
Herr Doktor. I understand.”

“You’re a good man, Hurst.”

The man closed his eyes.

After another minute, Gruber said, “Move him off the trail.”

Gruber’s soldier and one of the Japanese men did so.

Yamada nodded at Gruber. “War forces us to make hard choices, Doctor,” he said.

Gruber nodded. “It does.” He was down to one man and himself now. Not looking good, but it was what it was.

They moved out.

To the man, whatever was left of him in there, Indy said, “I hope you know another way to get up this cliff, because if we fall and die, Boukman probably won’t be real happy with you.”

The big man, who wore only a pair of ragged green pants, appeared to be about forty, with long and tangled black hair and dull brown eyes. He said, “Wait.”

Indy and Mac exchanged glances. “For what?”

“Wait.” He looked out into the still-roiling sea.

Indy looked that way, too. Nothing to see but waves and—

Hold on a second—

There was a dark spot on the surface of the water, a hundred yards out. It looked like a coconut or some-such floating there, but as Indy watched, it rose from the water, and attached to it was, was—it took a couple of seconds for it to register.

It was a man. Walking toward the shore, his head and shoulders rising from the water as it got shallower.

When the water was only waist-deep on the figure, Indy saw that he was carrying a large rock clasped to his belly, the size of a suitcase; it must have weighed a hundred pounds or more.

Indy looked at Mac, who got it at the same time. “Ballast,” Indy said. “So he doesn’t float away. Amazing. He’s using the rock so he can walk on the bottom.”

A moment later, a second figure began to rise from the sea.

If there had been any doubt before that they were dealing with living humans, this would have erased it.

Another couple of minutes, and the two
zombis
arrived on the shore. They dropped the rocks they were carrying and stood still and silent, looking at the one who had spoken to Indy and Mac.

“We must climb up,” Green Pants said to the
zombis.
“Make us a way.”

As they watched, the first
zombi
—a man who had probably been in his twenties when alive, dressed in a blue jacket and cutoff shorts—picked up another stone, this one the size of a softball and pointed on one end. He walked to the cliff, reached up to eye level with the hand holding the stone, and began to hammer at the porous and friable rock face. With four or five strikes, he gouged out a depression deep enough to stick a foot into. He reached higher, and chipped out another hole. He climbed up the rock, put his left foot in the first hole, his right in the other, and hammered away at a third spot.

“My Lord,” Mac said. “He’s making a stairway. Handholds and footholds!”

The
zombi
was fifty feet up, just a little under halfway, when one of the hand- or footholds crumbled under his weight, and he fell.

He felt straight backward, landing on a pile of rocks with a sound that made Indy want to heave his long-past breakfast.

After a moment, the fallen
zombi
got up. He seemed . . . crooked, somehow, as if something in his spine or hip had broken, but he went back to the rock face and began to climb. When he reached the spot where he had fallen, he chipped out another depression to replace the crumbled one.

He continued his task, climbing higher.

He was eighty feet up the second time he fell, only this time he landed head-down. His skull split open on the rocks, and he didn’t move.

After a few seconds, Green Pants nodded at the second
zombi,
who picked up his fallen comrade’s pointed stone and ascended the rock wall. In a few minutes, he was at the top. He clambered over and out of sight.

Green Pants said, “I will go. I am heavy. If I do not fall, it will be safe for you.”

With that, he began to climb.

Indy and Mac looked at each other. “Don’t say it,” Mac said.

“What?”

“That this can’t be good.”

“Yeah. Well. Long as you know.”

Indy began to climb.

There came a scream, the sound of branches breaking, and Yamada’s sword was in his hand without conscious thought. He and Suzuki were first to round the curve in the trail—

A big tree, weakened by the storm, had fallen. Yamada’s scout was pinned to the ground by it; actually,
smashed to the ground
would be a better term. He was dead—Yamada could see that ten meters away.

So. Two Germans, Gruber and one soldier; and three of the Empire’s force—Suzuki, one soldier, and himself—remained out of a score of men sent to collect the formula. Which they had thus far failed to do. Worse, they had lost contact with the men who had the item, and their only hope was to try to head them off before they left this hellish island. A smart gambler would not risk much on their chances, Yamada knew. Of course, a samurai would take such a wager, for he would know the determination to succeed that Yamada felt. And that failure was simply not an option, as long as Yamada had one breath left in his body.

A quick examination confirmed what they already knew.

“He was a good soldier,” Yamada said, rising from his squat next to the dead man. “He did his duty.”

That was as good an epitaph as a man needed.

THIRTY-TWO

L
ATE IN THE AFTERNOON
, they had to take a break, and Gruber and Suzuki took the watch so that the others could try and catch a bit of sleep. Even though the rain had stopped and the wind died down, that would be difficult, given the sodden ground, but the conditions were what they were, nothing to be done for it.

Gruber considered his next action. He had been thinking about it for a while, and it seemed to be a good idea every time he examined it. Yes. Do it.

“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”
he said to Suzuki.

The Japanese shook his head.

“Speak English?”

Another negative shake. Apparently not.

Well, it would have to be Nihongo, then. Not the best, but he could make himself understood, he had a fair grasp of the language. In slow Japanese, he said, “What part of Japan are you from?”

Suzuki’s eyes widened a hair. He was surprised that Gruber spoke his language, but after that initial clue he hid it well. “Tokyo.”

Gruber nodded and smiled. “Family?”

“A wife, no children yet. My father and mother and grandmother. A brother, two sisters.”

Gruber nodded again. “I hope the conflict has not been bad for them.”

Suzuki shrugged. War was war, the gesture seemed to say.

“It will not last forever. What will you do after?”

Another shrug. “Who can say? Probably stay in the army.”

“Pardon me for being impolite, but is your family well-off?”

Suzuki didn’t understand the question. “Well-off?”

“Wealthy?”

Suzuki chuckled. “Wealthy? Ah, no. Soldier’s pay.”

Here came the moment of choice. Up until now, it was just idle, if nosy, conversation. “Would you like to be? Wealthy?”

“No chance of that.”

“What if there was? A chance, I mean.”

Suzuki, who had been mostly avoiding eye contact, looked directly at Gruber.

“Fortunes are lost during war,” Gruber said. “But also gained. Some become poor. Some become rich. A man who—” He faltered, trying to think of the words he needed. “—was in the right place at the right time might come into money,
hai?”

Suzuki gave him a small nod. “Stranger things have happened, I suppose.”

“The Reich has earmarked a certain amount of funding for . . .” What was the word? “. . .
guzen no koto.”

“And what
contingency
are we talking about?”

Gruber took a deep breath. “Helping the Reich’s agents to accomplish certain goals.”

“By which you mean yourself?”

“Hai.”

“And what would this help require?”

“Not much, really. More of an . . . inaction on your part than anything you would need to do.”

“An inaction.”

“Yes. Perhaps if you heard a certain noise, saw something in the jungle, you might ignore it.”

“Look the other way.”

“Precisely.”

“I see. And how much would such . . .
inaction
be worth to the Reich, exactly?”

What was the value of the yen to a Deutschmark or British pound these days? Twenty-to-one for the pound? Four or five yen to an American dollar? Well, it didn’t really matter, did it? “Five million yen.”

Suzuki didn’t blink. “That much. That would make a man most wealthy in my country.”

“The Reich values its friends.”

“So you say. But by my . . . inaction, might I not be found derelict in my duty to the empire?”

“Not if the empire did not know. I would not tell them.”

The unspoken inference here was that anybody who might make such a report could . . . have an accident and be unable to do so.

“Ah. I see.”

“Think on the matter,” Gruber said. “We could speak of it again later.”

“Yes. We could.”

After the others roused themselves, it was Gruber’s turn to try to rest a bit. He didn’t think he’d be able to sleep, but he did smile as he closed his eyes. If he had Suzuki figured correctly, the man wouldn’t be able to wait to lay out his conversation with Gruber to Yamada. That the stupid Kraut would think he could
bribe
an imperial Japanese officer, for any amount? The European savages had no concept of honor whatsoever! But as it happened, Gruber did know a bit about that, having learned it with the language, and he was, he hoped, using it to his advantage.

Whatever Suzuki said? He couldn’t be trusted. He was a dead man, sooner or later; however, if he believed that he could gull Gruber into thinking they were allies, even for a few hours, it might lull the Japanese into a false sense of confidence. It might provide Gruber with an opportunity to strike when least expected. There were just two of them now, and three of the Nipponese. The time was not ripe, but it would be eventually. And any advantage he could get, he wanted . . .

“Yamada-san,” Suzuki said. “A few words in private?”

Yamada nodded. “There, by the fallen tree. We will not be overheard.”

The two men edged that way.

“What is it?”

“The German colonel speaks passable Japanese.”

“I suspected such. And . . . ?”

“He has offered me a bribe to aid him.”

“Really? How much?”

“Five million yen.”

“Ah. He thinks your honor worth that much?”

“That little,” Suzuki said. He spat on the wet ground.

Yamada smiled. “This is useful information, Suzuki-san. It would serve us to have Gruber believe that you will enter into such a bargain,
hai?”

Suzuki nodded.
“Hai.
If he believes that I have become his agent, it could be to our advantage. He might turn his back at the right moment.”

Yamada nodded. “For now, there are but five of us, and we might need every man to survive and win our goal. A man chased by wolves might need to run with dogs. After we obtain our object, the Germans will no longer be our allies here on this island, nor do we need to treat them as such.”

“I understand.”

“Contrive to speak to him again on the trek. Let him think your greed is stronger than your sense of duty. We will show him that the Japanese know how to deal with treachery . . .”

Both men grinned.

Boukman waited. Victory was almost his. He had Marie—she was on the way—and with her, the key to the
imen blan.
They valued women, the whites did. They would not let her come to harm if they could help it.

Victory was almost his. He could almost taste it.

Green Pants was thirty feet ahead of them, wending his way through the forest. The
zombi
was behind them. It had gotten its foot caught in a fallen branch a way back and broken its ankle. It was continuing to walk, but the foot was crooked and its progress had been slowed. It was falling farther behind as they went.

“We have to hide the artifact,” Mac whispered.

“He’s got Marie,” Indy said. “It’s what he wants.”

“Yes. And if we march right into his hands, he’ll
have
what he wants and no reason to let her—or us—go.”

Indy considered that. Yes. Mac was right. They needed something with which to bargain. If they hid the wooden box with the pearl somewhere that only they could find it, maybe they could get Boukman to release Marie to learn where the treasure was. There was a chance that way.

Of course, he could try to torture it out of them, which wasn’t a particularly pleasant thought; still, just handing it over to the voodoo man and trusting to his sense of fairness didn’t seem like a particularly wise idea. They already knew he was ruthless enough to have men killed. Two more wouldn’t bother him.

At some point, they would have to slip away from Green Pants and the crippled
zombi
trailing them and find a spot to hide the box. That might be tricky.

Indy whispered as much to Mac.

“Don’t worry about that—I have a plan,” Mac said.

“What?”

“Well—” He stopped. Ahead of them, Green Pants had come to a halt, waiting for them to catch up. “Later,” Mac said.

The two of them moved on, stepping over fallen trees, skirting puddles that were probably hip-deep. Now and then, something would scuttle across the animal trail, small creatures still trying to deal with the aftermath of the hurricane. Indy saw a long green snake slithering past once.

Snakes!

Indy had been offered teaching fellowships across the length of his career, from various universities around the world. He was considering the idea of taking a couple of these: one in New Zealand, the other in Ireland. The two countries had some things in common. They mostly spoke English, which would make teaching easy. But, more importantly, there were no snakes in either country. None. Not even itty-bitty garter snakes.