“Gary believes it was the Incas who robbed the Spanish mule trains of gold and jewels and created what is called the Twice-Stolen Treasure. It was those stones that convinced him the treasure was close by. That is why he called it the River of Ruin, for the ruins of a dam he had discovered.”
Mercer recalled the fantastic story Gary Barber had pieced together over the past five years that led him to this isolated stretch of water.
Following the dazzling success of Hernan Cortes against the Aztecs in 1519, Spanish conquistadors turned their attention to South America in pursuit of the massive gold reserves held by the mighty Inca empire. After an earlier exploration that gained him the favor of King Charles I, Francisco Pizarro arrived in Peru in 1531 with 180 men and 27 horses just as a long Inca civil war was coming to an end. He immediately left his coastal garrison of San Miguel to meet with the new ruler, Atahualpa, in Cajamarca. Backed by a thirty-thousand-man army, Atahualpa felt he had nothing to fear from the small Spanish band. He continued to believe that right up to the moment he was taken prisoner. His people paid his ransom by twice filling a room eighteen feet by twenty-two feet with silver and once more with gold, an estimated twenty-four tons of precious metal. The bullion was shipped back to the coast for its journey to Spain and the Inca ruler was murdered anyway on August 29, 1533. Three months later Pizarro completed the conquest by occupying the Inca capital of Cuzco and made Atahualpa’s brother, Manco Capac, a puppet ruler.
In 1536, Manco Capac finally began a belated revolt against the Spanish, laying siege to Cuzco and eventually burning the city. But he could not maintain his revolt and eventually retreated to the mountain stronghold of Vitcos, where he engaged in a harassment campaign against Pizarro’s soldiers until his murder by the Spanish in 1544. By this time a steady supply of gold, silver and emeralds was being drained from the Inca empire, loaded on ships in the new city of Lima, where it was sent to warehouses in Panama City. From there the treasure was moved to the Caribbean coast trading centers of Nombres de Dios or Porto Bello by pack mule on El Camino Real, the King’s Highway. Once a year, galleons from Spain arrived to take the loot back to Europe.
As part of his guerrilla campaign against the conquistadors, Manco Capac dispatched a small expeditionary force to Panama in an effort to stem the flood of gold, silver, and gems. Although the Incas did not have Spain’s rapacious hunger for precious metals, they considered gold to be the Sweat of the Sun, the central deity in their religion, and silver to be the Tears of the Moon. Manco’s plan was that this force would attack the mule caravans in the densest part of the jungle as they traversed the isthmus, and recover as much of the treasure as they could. Once taken back from the Spanish, the treasure would then be hidden until such time as the conquistadors were thrown out of Peru and the Inca empire was reestablished.
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Back in Peru, Manco Capac’s rebellion against Pizarro ended with his assassination. His son Sayri Tupac became ruler, and the Inca warriors in Panama continued to raid the mule trains. Sayri was poisoned in 1561, and still the raids continued. Isolated in the Panamanian jungle, the band of warriors didn’t know that their once mighty empire was dying by degrees. They interbred with Cimaroon women, creating new generations of rebels to maintain their harassment of the caravans. In 1572, the last Inca revolt in Peru, led by another of Manco Capac’s sons, Tupac Amaru, ended with his beheading in Cuzco. What followed was two hundred uninterrupted years of colonial rule by the Spanish, and for much of that time they shipped the riches of the New World back to the Old through Panama. And all that time the descendents of Manco’s original band of soldiers continued to plunder the mule trains.
While the attacks by pirates such as Henry Morgan and Francis Drake against the Spanish strongholds of Nombres de Dios and Panama City were better known, the secret raids by Incas long cut off from their homeland amassed fortunes far beyond the dreams of even the most bloodthirsty privateers. An estimated billion dollars in silver from just one mine in Bolivia was transported on the King’s Highway, and nearly every shipment across the isthmus was attacked by the rebels. Untold tons of silver and gold and millions of carats of Colombian emeralds were hijacked from the caravans and cached someplace in the Panamanian jungle.
Gary Barber, like others who’d followed the legend, believed the hoard, stolen once from the Incas and once by them, to be worth hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in today’s market.
The problem, of course, was that there exists no actual proof that these raids ever took place. Journal entries written at the time were sketchy at best and much of what was known came second- and often thirdhand. Most scholars discounted the idea of a tribe of Incas living in the Panamanian jungle for two hundred years. They felt the tales were merely cover stories told by conquistadors who stole from their own mule trains to avoid turning over the loot to the Spanish crown. Because nothing of the Incas had ever been found, and certainly no trace of a fabulous treasure had ever turned up, they believed the legend likely grew from a single documented Cimaroon raid. This tale was then embellished to hide a systematic looting by the Spanish of their own royal caravans.
But looking back at the remnants of the ancient dam that once blocked this river from the main channel of the Rio Tuira, Mercer saw that maybe there was something to the story after all. As far as he knew, no pre-Colombian civilization in Panama had constructed such elaborate stonework. In fact the main indigenous tribe, the Kuna, had been left alone by the Spanish because they were a near-Stone Age people with nothing worth plundering. The stone slabs that Gary had excavated were square cut and would weigh between one and two tons. Not something the Kuna could have built, and the design lacked typical Castilian ornamentation, which meant it was unlikely to be the work of the Spanish. Having never seen Inca ruins like Machu Picchu firsthand, Mercer couldn’t say for certain if the dam had been fashioned by those master builders, but he wouldn’t be surprised.
Once past the rapids that were the remnants of the dam’s foundation, the boatman throttled back his outboard and guided the craft deeper into the jungle, farther up the River of Ruin. Sections of both banks had been dug into recently, showing raw scars of muddy dirt that could only be Gary’s work as he searched for the treasure. After ten minutes the engine was cut altogether.
Expecting to hear the raucous sounds of the jungle-the birds, and insects, and monkeys-the party was struck by a deafening silence. Mercer’s hearing recovered from the thrum of the outboard and still he could hear nothing except the gentle hiss of the boat through the water as it slowed. The guides shot each other apprehensive glances. This was clearly something they had never experienced before.
High above, a vulture slashed through the strip of sky.
The guides jabbered something at the boat’s owner, each reaching for his assault rifle.
“What are they saying?” Mercer asked.
Maria ignored him and joined the conversation, her voice rising to a shout that cut off the argument. She finally turned to Mercer. “He wants to head back and call the police. He thinks Gary and his party have been attacked by guerrillas.”
“Tell him we go on,” Mercer said.
“I did. We’re only about a half mile from Gary’s camp.”
The nervous energy was palpable as they threaded through the draped branches of overhanging trees. The three armed men restlessly scanned the jungle, eyes and hands tight, mouths fixed in grim lines. There was no movement except where the boat’s wake splashed against the river-banks.
The smell reached them before the camp came into sight. On an instinctive level, Mercer knew what it was, as if his olfactory senses had a genetic knowledge of what human death smelled like. Then again, he’d smelled death too many times to ever forget it. It was a scent like that of rotted meat, but somehow much, much worse.
Gary’s encampment stood on a flat plain on the water’s edge. There were a dozen personnel tents and one larger one Gary must have used for his headquarters. The bodies lay haphazardly throughout the camp. Some were at the riverbank as if they’d died fetching water, while others had fallen half in and half out of their tents. Still others must be still inside the tents, for carrion birds clustered around the open flaps, their plumage streaked with gore. Mercer could see maybe fifteen people, men and women, and several children. All were dead from apparent gunshot wounds.
The boatman began jabbering again. Mercer flicked his eyes from the carnage and stared at the frightened
