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“I don’t suppose there’s any way of arguing for going back to our nice, safe hotel and picking this up tomorrow?” Leonid asked. “You have the waypoints.”
“We’re on the hunt now, my Russian friend. We have the scent. We keep pushing,” Sam said, ending the discussion.
The streambed of loose gravel was at first a welcome relief from the endless mud of the trails, but after a short time it proved the more difficult path as the slope steepened. After an hour of hiking along the bank, the stream widened and then forked, one tributary stretching to their left, the other to their right. They stopped and eyed the two choices. Sam turned to Leonid. “Which do you like?”
“Neither.”
“Come on, choose one,” Lazlo said. “Be a good sport.”
They waited while Leonid studied the two branches, and he eventually grunted and pointed at the one on the right. “That goes more eastward.”
“Well, there you have it,” Remi said. “But perhaps now it’s more obvious why the colonel didn’t simply write ‘Follow the stream.’”
After a brief rest, Sam led them along the stream as it climbed into the mountains. The sun was beginning to sink into the trees behind them when they arrived at the base of a steep expanse of sheer rock that the stream cut through. They stopped to catch their breaths, and Sam looked up into the mist.
“No way they climbed that. I think we might be on the wrong path here.”
Remi nodded. “He’s right. They were hauling heavy crates. They must have followed the other branch.”
Sam looked to the sky. “We should be able to make it back to where it forked before dark. We can set up camp in that little clearing and take this up tomorrow.”
Lazlo eyed Leonid. “No shame in guessing wrong, old boy. Happens to the best of us.”
“That’s why I try to avoid guessing about anything important.”
They made it back to the clearing with just enough time to set up the tents. Building a cooking fire was out of the questi
on, given the waterlogged soil and moist vegetation, so they settled in for a dinner of energy bars, electrolyte-replacement tablets, and tepid water, silently consumed in the ghostly glow from their LED flashlights.
As night fell, the mosquitoes swarmed them. They retired early, liberally doused with insect repellant, serenaded by the hoots and squawks of night creatures beneath the stars.
The following day they were up at dawn, trudging up the second stream, trying to get a head start before the heat of the day hit with full force. The jungle was blanketed with a hazy mist and visibility was down to twenty meters, the humidity heavy in the air even in the relative cool of morning. The only sound was their breathing and the crunch of gravel beneath their boots as they marched determinedly upward toward the distant, fog-enshrouded peak.
Sam stopped at a bend and held up a hand. The group paused behind him as he stood listening, his head cocked.
“There. You hear that?” he whispered to Remi beside him.
She shook her head. “No. What?”
“I thought I heard splashing.”
Lazlo pushed past them and strode farther up the stream. “You aren’t imagining things. I think we’ve found our waterfall,” he called from around the bend.
They hurried to join him, where he was gazing at the white froth at the base of another steep rise, this one a cliff with water rushing over its edge, forming a waterfall easily twenty feet wide. Off to their right, another, smaller waterfall tumbled into a small pond. A ridge stretched eastward, jutting through the jungle that covered as far as they could see.
“Look. That feeds into at least two more streams,” Remi said, indicating the pond.
“Now the question is which waterfall Kumasaka was referring to when he said that the way lay beyond the fall,” Sam said.
“How will we know?” Lazlo asked.
Sam eyed the various falls and grinned. “That’s the tricky part, isn’t it?”
Leonid grunted as he stared at the tumbling water. “We’re looking for a cave, right? Unless I’m seeing things, there’s a cave over there by those boulders,” he said, pointing to their right, past the smaller waterfall.
“‘Beyond the fall . . .’” Remi whispered.
“Leonid, I don’t care what they say about you, you aren’t all bad,” Lazlo said, clapping him on the back. The Russian looked at him disdainfully and took a step away from the Englishman.