Locating the camp had been easy, for the men had been grilling some poor creature they had shot out of the trees, and the woodsmoke and smell of cooking meat had carried far down the flooded valley. Bell had pulled to shore a good quarter mile from Talbot’s men and went in on foot, moving at a snail’s pace so as not to give away his presence. He’d watched them share their meal, noting it was a small forest pig they’d killed. Afterward, one man stayed awake to clean and oil his rifle while the others had rolled into their hammocks for an afternoon siesta.
Bell kept an eye on the sentry, fearing he would patrol the boat. But he didn’t. As soon as his weapon was reassembled, he pulled his hat over his eyes and fell asleep on the low camp chair.
These men were thirty miles from the nearest town, nestled in some of the densest jungle on the planet, so it came as no surprise they hadn’t worried about an ambush. The isolation made them feel comfortable.
Too comfortable, Bell thought.
He left them to their naps and crawled over to the dock. There he found a cache of five-gallon metal cans. Most were empty, but the smell of the gasoline they’d contained tainted the air. Bell filled three of the containers with river water and screwed on their caps. He swapped out these with three of the neatly lined-up cans still filled with gas in case anyone took inventory. Two of these he set aside and the other he carried onto the workboat. He gained access to the engine compartment from a hatch under the crew’s quarters.
It took just a few minutes to plant his makeshift bomb. He cut a narrow strip of cloth from the hem of his shirt and soaked it in gasoline. He then used it as a wick, from the motor’s open ignition point down to the gas can he’d been able to conceal in the bilge space under the engine’s mounting bracket. The space was dark, and even with a flashlight it would be difficult to see his booby trap. And the compartment reeked so strongly of fuel already, he wasn’t concerned that the smell would betray the open can of gas.
He crawled out and closed the hatch. He stayed low and peered over the workboat’s gunwales to see if anyone at the camp had gotten up. He saw no movement, so he legged over the gunwale and made his way off the dock, picking up the two fuel cans he’d set aside for himself. He returned to his canoe and stashed the thirty-pounders in the footwell.
It would be awkward paddling back to the plane but essential if he was going to follow the Essenwerks airship. He recalled seeing the cans on Talbot’s boat the day he interviewed Raul pretending to be Rinaldo and had factored their presence into his plan. He returned and found a spot close enough to the camp and dock to hopefully glean some information as to their actual intentions.
Since he didn’t see anything around that looked like it had been delivered from the giant Zeppelin, he assumed they were smuggling matériel into the Canal Zone. Learning what, exactly, was one of the reasons he was here.
He waited, without moving, as the sun went down and the moon rose. The men had roused themselves at dusk, finished eating their bush pig, and talked and joked until a sound emerged amid the background hum of insects. It was the beat of four large propellers thrashing the air as the massive dirigible wended its way up the valley, and when one of the pirates shined a flashlight into the night sky, it came to hover over the camp, and two thick ropes fell from the craft’s conical nose.
Bell felt a small sense of triumph at deducing that Otto Dreissen had used an airship to abduct his wife. It had been a wild theory but correct nevertheless.
Once the mooring lines were tied down, Court Talbot was lowered to the ground. Bell heard him say a few words to his men, but he was speaking in Spanish, leaving the detective frustrated and no closer to the solution to this mystery. The only thing he recognized was “Viboras Rojas.” Then from the airship’s black belly came the steel box. It was perfectly square, and featureless in the uncertain light, roughly six feet to a side. Bell didn’t know its function and finally settled on it being a cargo container. He followed that mental thread, which made him consider that the Viboras were real after all, and the Germans were supplying them with weapons smuggled in aboard the airship.
He crept from his hiding spot. He had time to speculate later. With Talbot and his crew occupied, Bell slipped into their camp to search for clues, unconcerned about any sounds he made because the the airship’s props filled the sky with noise.
Bell was well aware that someone approached the camp as he was halfway through what felt like a fruitless search, but he didn’t have time to hide. He pulled his boot knife moments before the man rushed into the camp.
Raul charged straight at him, machete held high for a chopping sweep that could sever Bell’s head from his neck as cleanly as a farmer chopping the head off a chicken. Bell reversed his grip on the knife and threw it when Morales was four long paces away. The blade sank hilt-deep under his right arm where the pectoral muscles met the rib cage. The arm dropped instantly, but momentum carried Raul another two steps before he fully realized something was very wrong.
His arm wouldn’t move, so he quickly grabbed the machete with his left before it dropped to the ground. He felt no pain.
Raul saw his opponent was no longer armed and leapt for him, sweeping with the razor-sharp machete so that Bell had to
