BLACK CITY (Ulysses Vidal Adventure Series Book 2)

  BLACK CITY

  Fernando Gamboa

  First Digital Edition: December, 2015

  First Printed Edition: December, 2015

  © Fernando Gamboa, 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the author, including reproductions intended for renting or public lending.

  www.gamboabooks.com

  Original Title: Ciudad Negra

  Translated from the Spanish by Christy Cox and Peter Gauld

  Edited by Carmen Grau

  “Something hidden. Go and find it.

  Go and look behind the Ranges—

  Something lost behind the Ranges.

  Lost and Waiting for you. Go!”

  Rudyard Kypling

  Z

  January 6, 1926

  Xingu River basin, Amazon

  “Run, Dad! Run!”

  “Don’t stop, Jack!” he yelled as he fired at the undergrowth where the roars were coming from. “Keep going and don’t look back!”

  “No!” begged his son dragging on his arm. “I won’t leave without you!”

  A slim shadow rushed by very near. They were getting closer and closer. Once again they could smell the nauseating scent of rotting flesh.

  “I must stop them!” he cried back.

  A few months before, Jack Fawcett had begun that adventure in the Amazon jungle with his father, Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, with all the enthusiasm of his youth. Now he was the shadow of a human being, wounded, his clothes torn and his eyes open wide with terror.

  “For the love of God!” he cried. “What on earth are those beasts?”

  A hair-rising howl exploded in the night.

  “Come out here and show your faces, you damned devils!” cried the colonel, his face contorted by rage. He aimed at the impenetrable jungle and fired his old Springfield.

  “Please, Dad! Let’s get out of here!” begged Jack once more. “They’re going to get us!”

  The colonel looked back. Instead of a hardened soldier like those he had fought beside in the trenches a few years ago at the Western Front, in the Great War, he saw his son, only a young boy, terrified by an impending horrible death.

  “Damn!” He realized this was a battle he could not win. “Leave the equipment, Jack! Leave everything!” He pointed in the opposite direction and cried, “Follow me! To the river!”

  They dropped the shoulder bags with the food and ammunition, and launched into a frantic race through the thicket. Their skin got scratched by the mess of lianas and thorny branches they swept apart with their bare arms in a desperate flight. Jack dragged his wounded leg while his father reloaded the rifle and fired his remaining cartridges without bothering to aim.

  Two days before they had found Raleigh’s body–or what was left of it–all covered with flies and maggots. His four limbs had been brutally torn off. His abdomen was open like a can, showing an empty bloody hole from which all the organs had been removed.

  The suspicion of being watched had been confirmed in the most fearsome manner, and from that moment on they had been running for their lives.

  Jack made his way through the thicket swinging his arms, tearing, biting, holding onto their slim chances of escape. He was driven by the encouraging cries of his father, telling him not to stop, to go faster, to live in order to return some day to their beloved England.

  Then, suddenly, the river appeared after one last curtain of lianas. Desperately, he realized that their hopes of survival ended right there.

  What he saw, illuminated by the cold light of the full moon, was a powerful river of turbulent waters that broke against rocks and trees with such violence that the noise drowned even the howling of their pursuers.

  “By all the stars in heaven…” the young man murmured. The other bank was more than a hundred yards away. But it might have been one thousand or ten thousand for all the difference it made. To survive that whirl of water and mud was as unlikely as swimming up the Victoria Falls.

  At that moment Colonel Fawcett burst through the thicket, still carrying his little leather sack on his back. He fired one last bullet into the dark and dropped the rifle, then faced his son.

  “What the hell are you waiting for?” he cried. “Jump!”

  “We’ll never manage to cross it!” Jack replied pointing at the water, his pupils dilated with fear. “It’s suicide!” “May God forgive us, then,” the colonel said, “because there’s no other way.”

  Before Jack had time to react, he pushed him into the current and jumped after him into that chaos of foam, rock, and mud.

  Knocked over by the irrepressible force of the river, both father and son struggled to keep afloat, with feet forward in an effort to avoid being crushed against a rock or skewered by one of the trees that sailed by like sharpened missiles.

  With each breath the precious air mixed with the muddy water that entered their lungs. The simple act of breathing meant a titanic effort they could not keep up for long.

  The colonel gathered his strength to call his son, but the roaring of the rapids drowned any other sound but that of its own fury. A few seconds later, Jack’s head disappeared under the boiling current.

  He yelled desperately as he fought uselessly against that murderous river. Finally, he realized in shock what had really happened.

  Ahead of him the horizon ended just as if he had reached the end of the world. It took Percy Harrison Fawcett only an instant to understand that in a way, it was so.

  He was on the brink of falling down a gigantic waterfall.

  During that last moment of his life, as he experienced a brief lapse of weightlessness before diving into the void, he prayed to God that one day the world might know of the unbelievable secret they had uncovered in that devilish haunted jungle.

  He prayed that their deaths would not be in vain. That he and the two young men who had come with him to that tragic end would be acknowledged some day as the authors of what, without a doubt, was the most extraordinary and transcendental discovery in the history of humankind on the face of the Earth.

  1

  One cold November morning, eighty-five years later.

  My hands were so stiff from the cold inside the thick neoprene gloves that I could barely move my fingers.

  I had been underwater for more than an hour at a depth of about twenty feet. I was frozen in spite of the two-inch-thick wetsuit, and the suspended mud was making the visibility so bad that I could not have recognized the keel of a ship even if it had hit me on the head. In fact, I had to stick the magnetometer to the glass of my diving helmet to see that the hand was already below the thirty atmosphere mark, right in the red zone.

  I did not have much time. As usual.

  With the help of the powerful Excalibur 1000 magnetometer on my wrist, I had already found about a dozen objects of no value buried in the spongy slime. That sea bed had the texture of watered-down porridge and without being able to trust my eyes it was hard to guess what was water and what sea bed. I was forced to literally sink into the bottom to retrieve the things my metal detector indicated. They were building up in the net I was carrying fastened to my weight belt.

  I calculated that at that depth I still had enough air for another five or ten minutes. So, although I was on the brink of hypothermia and my body was screaming to get out of the water and find the nearest heater, I decided to adjust the detector to maximum sensitivity and do a last search, even though I knew that it would make the damn thing ring for the iron core of the planet.

  I tried to regulate the power dial on the body
of the detector, but what with the lack of sensitivity caused by the cold and the thick neoprene, it was like trying to thread a needle with my toes.

  “A cat in gloves catches no mice,” I said to myself.

  I removed my right glove taking care not to lose it, and felt my way through that brown soup until I found the little wheel and turned it to maximum.

  At once, as I had expected, the gadget began to signal hysterically that it had found some kind of remotely metallic garbage below me. I could not waste my time with that so I ignored the ringing and waited instead for that peculiar sound that indicates the unmistakable presence of denser metal.

  The cord I had tied around a dead weight and which served me as reference felt tight. I was spiraling around it widening the area of search. At the same time I pricked my ears for that signal I was hoping for. I also looked every now and then at the magnetometer. As I did so I noticed that the hand was below twenty and that drawing air from the regulator was becoming increasingly difficult.

  One more minute and that’s it, I thought.

  And just then, there seemed to be a deeper, further buzz coming from the detector.

  Surprised, I turned around to get on top of the signal. It sounded like a hundred-pound fly at about thirty-five feet. Without a doubt, there it was again.

  I let the magnetometer hang from my wrist and took out a small rake from my vest pocket. Head first I dived to the bottom hoping the object was not sunk too deep in the slime. I took my gloves off again for a more sensitive touch and buried my naked fingers in the disgusting mud. In the process I raised a cloud of sediment that engulfed me completely. I was past caring; there was nothing to see down there and I just wanted to get it all over with.

  I emptied the remaining air from the vest so as to sink as far as possible. I scratched ever deeper into that soup but I could not touch anything solid with my frozen fingers. There was practically no air coming through the mouthpiece, and I was beginning to think I had suffered from a hearing hallucination when I felt something with the fingertips of my left hand. I discarded the rake and stretched my right hand to stop whatever it might be from slipping through the mud.

  I grabbed fast to it, as if it were the most precious treasure. When I looked at it closely I was pleased to see it was what I had been looking for all morning. Inside the gold ring I could clearly read a date and the words: “M. and J. Together forever.”

  The cold made me shiver inside the wet suit but I managed to climb stiffly up the last rungs of the rusty ladder that led to the concrete wharf.

  When I reached the top I threw my flippers up in front of me and stood up on the wooden pier with a final heave… The ponderous diving bottle, now totally empty, was still on my back. Then I dropped the metal detector, and with relief I got rid of the diving helmet, vest, bottle and weights. Finally, glad to be breathing fresh air again, I closed my eyes and filled my lungs as deeply as I could inside the tight wetsuit.

  A light drizzle was falling lazily from the low leaden clouds while a band of seagulls screeched overhead. I guessed they were complaining about the horrible day, just like me.

  Then, as I was unzipping the suit, a black Mercedes coupé broke the silence and came to a halt a few feet away from me with a squeal of brakes.

  A man about my own age—late thirties–got out of the car. Neon tie, fashionable gray suit, and greased hair as if a cow had licked it.

  “Do you have it?” he asked as he approached without bothering to say hello.

  I raised my right arm, showing him the golden ring around my gloved little finger.

  “It took you a long time,” he said as he stepped forward and grabbed it from me. He looked closely at the inscription.

  “Is it the one… your wife lost?” I asked with unconcealed sarcasm.

  The man took off his sunglasses—incongruous on a day like that—and put his hand inside his breast pocket.

  “Looks like it,” he said. “Here’s your pay.” He threw me an envelope without looking. If I had not been paying attention it would have flown straight into the water.

  Without waiting for me to check the contents, he turned around and opened the door of the car. But before getting in, he looked at me and said mockingly,

  “Watch out and don’t catch cold. Seems like a pretty wet day.”

  I stared at him as he started the three hundred horsepower of his sports car, and I could only think of one word.

  “Asshole!”

  Dripping water all over I went to my old second-hand white Land Rover, got the key from under the bumper, opened the back door, threw the envelope onto the passenger’s seat, and began to undress.

  For sure, this did not seem much like the bohemian life I had led until about a year ago: diving lessons for tourists wherever the waters were warm, beautiful women, and cheap beer.

  Well, at least I was still diving. But there was quite a difference between doing it in the Caribbean or Thailand, among coral reefs and many-colored fish, and doing it in a harbor of oily water, cleaning other people’s yacht hulls, or looking for pissed off wives’ gold rings.

  I had been working for five months as a freelance professional diver. I accepted any type of underwater work that paid enough to get by, and I was fed up. But that was how the cookie crumbled. Although, I missed the palm trees and the white sand beaches turning gold in the sunsets of other latitudes, ever since she left I was so unmotivated that I had even lost my physiological need to change scenery every few months.

  At any rate, it still felt weird to come out from a dive and see the statue of Christopher Columbus pointing his accusing finger at me from the distance. The mountain of Montjuic was unmistakably present as a backdrop for my beloved (and on days like today loathed) Barcelona.

  2

  I had left the heavy air bottles and the weight belt in the car, but carrying the rest of the equipment two blocks from where I had parked to my building had drained me of my last strength.

  At last I opened the door to my small penthouse on Paris Street—Grandma’s inheritance. I dropped the heavy canvas bag by the entrance, undressed on my way to the bathroom, and stood in the shower under the hot stream, trying to get rid of the cold that had got into my very bones.

  After a while of thoroughly sponging myself until I was totally sure that I had removed all trace of the filth of the harbor waters, I closed the tap and wrapped myself in a towel. I stood in front of the mirror. A tanned man, neither handsome nor ugly, fit but looking tired, with deep lines under his eyes and a week-old salt-and-pepper beard looked back at me with a question I did not want to answer.

  The brown eyes were asking, “Man… what the heck do you think you’re doing?”

  Ignoring him as usual I dried myself, then with the towel wrapped around my waist I slumped on the bed as if I had been shot.

  “Five minutes,” I said with my face stuck to the pillow. “Five minutes and I’ll get up and prepare lunch.”

  Needless to say it was not so. Two hours later I was still in the same position, dreaming about tropical colorful nudibranchs showing off their wedding rings.

  Jason Marz had been singing I’m yours for a while before I realized it was my cell phone and not a part of my dream.

  Reluctantly I stumbled from the bed and searched inside the diving bag which was still lying on the floor. I checked the screen before answering and saw the word “Mom.”

  For one moment I considered not taking the call. I didn’t feel the energy to have one of our mother-son conversations. But I realized that if I didn’t, she would go on insisting till the end of time, and if it should occur to me to disconnect the phone, she would appear at my door in no time all fussy and worried. That was her.

  Finally I pressed on the green hands-free symbol on the screen. “Hi, Mom,” I said.

  “Where are you?” she asked directly, with a tinge of reproach.

  I walked back to the bedroom without making any attempt to conceal my annoyance. “At home, trying to catch
some sleep.”

  “At this hour?”

  “I’ve had a rough day and I needed… never mind.” I put the phone on the bedside table and threw myself back onto the bed. “What do you want?”

  “What do I want ? Am I bothering you by calling?” Now it was she who sounded annoyed.

  “No, Mom…” I said rubbing my eyelids. “You’re not bothering me. I was just asking why you were calling. Don’t be so touchy.”

  I could hear her huff at the other end of the line.

  “All right. I’m calling to ask if you’re coming for dinner one evening this week.”

  “Well…”

  “You promised.”

  “Did I?”

  “Last Tuesday.”

  “I’d forgotten.”

  “What a surprise.” There was the reproach again.

  “Okay, fine. I give you my word that I will come this week.”

  “When?”

  “Is Friday all right?”

  “Better make it Saturday, around eight. And come well-groomed. Not like last time. You looked like a tramp.”

  “But, what do you care how…? Wait a second, is this another blind date with the daughter of a friend of yours?”

  An unmistakably guilty silence ensued…

  “Come on, Mom!”

  “It’s time you met other people,” she argued. “You’ve been living like a hermit far too long. Lara is a great girl and is looking forward to meeting you. She even likes to travel around, just like you.”

  “Mom, you promised you wouldn’t play matchmaker again. I am perfectly all right and I don’t need to meet any other woman. No matter how great she is. I’ve told you often enough.”

  This time there was a deep sigh at the other end.

  “Okay…” she gave up too easily. “I won’t invite Lara. But still, come well-dressed and clean-shaved. I don’t approve of the way you’ve been looking lately.”