Hemingway - Zoe Dawson Page 0,98

were out of the house in five minutes. Mad Max hefted him over his shoulder, and they ran back to the extraction point. The helo dropped down and after fitting Said with a harness, he was attached to the rope.

Hemingway was next to last in the order, with Mad Max and Jugs last. The helo took off, clipping the edge of the jungle before heading back to the military base in Asunción. Just as the chopper banked, gunfire emitted from the dense overgrowth. Hemingway saw a muzzle flash red and the helo dropped. Had they been hit? But then righted itself. That was a head rush, Hemingway thought, then looked down, expecting Mad Max to be looking up at him with a grin.

All he saw was empty air and a frayed rope beneath him.

“Max!” Hemingway called, alerting Fast Lane through his comm. “He and Jugs are gone, LT! They fell!”

Dr. Renata Cavalcante woke sleepily in her tent. She had to pee, so she grabbed her flashlight, unzipped the opening and slipped out into the jungle, her pathway spilling with moonlight, then squatted and did her business. Suddenly, she heard a chopper in the distance. Walking a few feet, she peered up into the sky, but she couldn’t see anything. The moon was directly over her and it felt almost warm in the darkness, a cool breeze pushing at the treetops. She stood for a few more minutes, then the unmistakable popping of gunfire cut through the night.

Yards before her, the water of the Paraguay river was mirror flat, the trees reflecting as if under the surface. The breeze shifted the bushes. Her heartbeat, which had sped up when she’d heard the gunshots, now evened out.

She was a newly minted anthropologist, and at the behest of her mentor, internationally renowned anthropologist, Dr. Carlos Benitez, she was out here in the dense jungle searching for the possibility of discovering Spanish galleons who were reported to have sunk in the river. She had just come from Capiatá, where she had been interviewing the locals about the treasure that was reported to be lost in the area.

The government had a stake in anything that was discovered, and Renata was happy to make sure anything monetary would be returned to the state coffers, and anything cultural to their museum.

She thought she heard something in the distance, but after listening for a bit, there was nothing but the chittering and chirping of the jungle. She headed back to her tent. An American with Brazilian roots, Renata was comfortable in South America, speaking the language and understanding the culture. She was well provisioned by Benitez and the Universidade de São Paulo, located on the east coast of Brazil on the South Atlantic Ocean.

He’d promised her a position there if she were interested, and it was a generous offer, as USP was the highest ranked university in Brazil. But she was also holding an offer from the University of San Diego. She’d have to decide within the month, but that gave her time. She zipped the enclosure closed and snuggled back into her sleeping bag, unconcerned with the gunfire and the outside world.

She slipped into sleep, dreaming about finding one of the galleons and exploring all it had to say about the history of this area and the conflict that had sent the Spanish here in the first place.

When the sun woke her, she slipped out of the tent and washed up. Getting dressed, she filled a knapsack with some power bars, a compass, and a change of clothes. Heading toward the shore, she started to walk along its edge. She turned into the jungle and spent a better part of the morning looking for anything significant.

Finding nothing, she broke for lunch, then resumed her search. As the sun dipped down, she started back for camp, but tripped. Once she’d regained her balance, she suspected it was a stone, but when she looked down, something dark and flat glinted.

She crouched down and dug around the metal object with her fingers, her heart caught, and she hastily pulled off her backpack and dug deeper. It was a helmet, or more accurately, a morion, a type of open helmet originally from Spain, with a flat brim and a crest from front to back. She was sure of it. She pulled out her bottled water and poured it over the object.

Renata worked until she’d excavated the artifact and, walking over to the river, she ducked it in to clean it off.