Blue Gold

There was a strange ululating cry, and a ghastly blue-and white face appeared in the bushes. Then another, and within seconds the masklike faces seemed to be everywhere. More arrows filled the air. More Indians fell. Torches dropped or were thrown to the ground in panic.

In the darkness and confusion Paul's long arm reached over and grabbed Gamay by the wrist, shocking her out of her trance. Ducking low, they ran toward the river with the same thought. Get to the boat. In their frantic haste they almost bowled over the slender figure who stepped out of the shadows and stood in their way.

"Stop!" she said firmly.

It was Dieter's wife, Tessa.

"We're going to the boat," Gamay said. "Come with us."

"No," she said, and pointed to the river. "Look!"

In the light of the torches they carried, dozens of blue-faced men could be seen swarming ashore from large canoes.

The woman tugged at Gamay's arm. "This way is safer."

She led the Trouts out of the clearing, and they plunged into the dark forest. Bushes and thorns whipped at their legs and faces. The ululation grew fainter. They could have been at the center of the earth as far as they knew. It was just as hot and dark.

"Where are you taking us?" Gamay said, stopping to catch her breath.

"Can't stop now. Chulo come soon."

Sure enough, the strange war cry began to increase in strength. They kept moving until Dieter's wife stopped after several minutes. They were in a grove of trees, dwarfed by the huge, misshapen trunks that soared for more than a hundred feet. Tessa was barely visible in the moonlight streaming down from openings in the tree canopy. She had raised her hand. The Trouts lifted their eyes to the treetops. They saw only darkness broken here and there by the silver-gray night sky.

The woman detected their confusion, and like a teacher working with blind children, she opened their hands and placed something in them that felt like dead snakes. Thick nylon ropes. Paul remembered the belts Arnaud and his pal wore and Dieter's comment about the zeppelin. He quickly fashioned a loop around Gamay's thin waist. She hauled on the other end of the line and began to rise above the ground. Paul looked around. Dieter's wife had vanished. They were on their own.

"Keep going," he said. "I'm right behind you." He rigged an other rope around his own waist and with several strong pulls was yards off the ground. By the hard sound of breathing, Gamay was just ahead.

From below came a burst of the strange warbling cry. The torches of the Chulos appeared. The Indians threw the torches into the air, where they arced and fell like exhausted comets.

Gamay and Paul expected to be skewered by oversized arrows that could easily reach them, but they kept pulling.

Just as they thought they were out of range they looked down and saw two of the Indians lift off the ground. Of course, Paul thought. If there were two hauling ropes, there would be others as well.

Gamay yelled from above his head. "I'm at the top!"

Paul kept climbing and felt his wife's hand reach down to help him clamber onto a branch thicker than a man's waist. Grunting with effort, he pulled himself onto the limb and reached for another branch. His hand touched a smooth, rubbery surface. The pewter light from a half moon was diffused by a mist that hung over the trees, but he could see a large plat form of mesh and tubing draped like a giant spider's web over the canopy. It was an ingenious working platform, Trout thought, but he would have to save his admiration for later. Heavy breathing was coming from under their feet. Paul grabbed for his hunting knife and remembered that one of the Indians had taken it from him at the same time he was relieved of the Colt.

Gamay yelled and pointed at the rotund silhouette of a small blimp floating above their heads. There was a crack of twigs from just under their feet. The Chulos were seconds away. Paul detached himself from the lifting line and walked with some difficulty across the spongy mesh until he reached a mooring rope. He gripped the line and used his weight to pull the blimp down to where Gamay could clamber into the seat hanging under the gas bag. With her weight holding the blimp down, he climbed in next to her.

"Do you know how to operate one of these things?" Gamay said.

"Can't be too hard. Think of it as a boat. First thing you do is cast off."

Gamay had sailed the Great Lakes as a child, so the comparison was reassuring even if she didn't believe it. They quickly untied the other mooring lines. The blimp hesitated, then made

up its mind and rose slowly above the trees. They looked down and saw shadows leaping to grab the dangling lines, but the blimp was safely out of reach.

They rose high above the fog-filled valleys that stretched off in every direction and began to drift like a milkweed seed, wondering if they had simply exchanged one set of dangers for an other.

Chapter 11

"Senor? Senor?"

Austin's eyes blinked open to see a white stubble of whiskers covering leathery cheeks and a gap-toothed mouth stretched wide in a jack-o'-lantern grin. It was the face of the Mexican fisherman he and Joe had met on the cliffs the day before. Austin lay on his back in an open wooden boat, his head cushioned by a coil of rope. He was still in his wet suit, but his scuba gear was gone. He pushed himself upright with his hands, a task of no small difficulty because his joints were sore and he was sprawled on a slimy pile of fish.

A fisherman who strongly resembled the first man, right down to the cleft in his dental work, sat at the other end of the boat keeping watch over Zavala. Joe's hair, normally so neatly combed, sprouted in a hundred different directions, and his shorts and T-shirt were dripping wet. He looked dazed but awake.

"You okay?" Austin called out.

A fish flopped onto Zavala's lap. He carefully picked up the creature by the tail and tossed it with the others. "No broken bones. Now I know what it's like to be shot out of a ca

"A few aches and pains." Austin rubbed the throbbing muscles of his shoulder, then went to work on his legs. "I feel like I've gone through a car wash and a telephone keeps ringing in my ear."

"Your voice sounds like it's still coming over an underwater communicator. Do you know what happened? I was coming to get you in the Brogan when all hell broke loose."

"There was an underwater explosion." Austin glanced at the mirror-flat sea. The boat lay off the cove entrance. The Sea Robin was nowhere in sight. Austin couldn't figure it. Contos and his crew would have heard the blast. Why hadn't they come out to investigate?

He turned his attention back to their own predicament. "Would you ask our friends how we got here?"

Zavala questioned the fishermen in Spanish. One of them did most of the talking, speaking in rapid fire as his brother nodded in agreement. Zavala thanked him and translated the ex change.

"This man's name is Juan," Zavala said. "He remembers us from yesterday up on the cliffs. The other guy is his brother Pedro. They were fishing when they heard a big muffled roar and the water bubbled and foamed in the inlet."

"Si, si, la bufadora," Juan said. He threw his hands expansively into the air like an orchestra conductor calling for a crescendo.

"What's with the theatrics?" Austin asked

"He says the noise was like the blowhole outside Ensenada where the sea comes into a cleft in the rocks and makes a big boom. Only it was many times louder. The cliff split away be hind the tortilla factory. There were big swells, and the boat al most capsized. Then we popped out of the water. They pulled us in like a couple of overgrown sardines, and here we are."