Vivian did not take photographs and she turned away from the Plexiglas.
Henry, of course, had nothing to say, but Purcell would have liked to know what he was thinking.
Purcell circled around toward the plateau between the two camps. To their left he spotted the ridgeline that they’d all climbed to get away from the Gallas, and the peak where Henry and Colonel Gann had picked the wrong time to take a nap. He banked to the right, and the wide grassy plateau spread out before them between the hills.
Vivian asked him, “Is that where we were?”
“That’s it.”
“It looks very nice from up here.”
“Everything does.” He pointed. “That’s the ridge we climbed to go get help from General Getachu.”
It sounded funny in retrospect and Vivian laughed. “What were we thinking?”
“Not much.”
He turned east and flew the length of the plateau between the hills where the armed camps had once been dug in.
Something caught his eye in the high grass ahead: a dozen Gallas on horseback riding west toward them.
Mercado saw them, too, and said, “Those bastards are still here.” He suggested to Purcell, “Fire your rockets at them.”
“They’re not my rockets. And they’re only smoke markers.”
“Bastards!”
Henry, Purcell thought, was recalling Mount Aradam, where the Gallas had almost gotten his balls.
The Gallas saw the aircraft coming toward them, and Purcell was about to bank right to get out of rifle range, but he had a second thought and put the Navion into a dive.
Vivian asked, “What are you doing? Frank?”
Mercado called out, “For God’s sake man—”
Purcell got as low and slow as he dared, and the Gallas sat placidly on their horses, staring at the rapidly closing airplane. They must have seen the rocket pod, Purcell thought, because they suddenly began to scatter. A few horses reared up at the sound of the howling engine, and a few riders were thrown off their mounts.
Purcell got lower and gunned the engine as he buzzed over them. He banked sharply to the right to avoid giving them a retreating target, then flew over the Royalist camp and dropped lower toward the valley to put the hills between himself and the line of fire of the very angry Gallas.
Mercado shouted above the noise of the engine, “What the hell are you doing?”
“Looking for my Jeep.”
“Are you insane?”
“Sorry. I lost it.”
Vivian took a deep breath. “Don’t do that again.”
Purcell headed southeast along the jungle valley and said, “We will look for Prince Theodore’s fortress.”
He reduced his airspeed and his altitude as he followed the valley, which widened into a vast expanse of green between the neighboring hills.
Mercado leaned between the two seats with the map of the area and said, “Here is incognita.” Purcell glanced at the map, then looked through the surrounding Plexiglas to orient himself. He made a slight right turn and said, “Should be coming up in a few minutes at about one o’clock.”
He pulled back on the throttle and the airspeed bled off, and the Navion sank lower above the triple-canopy jungle. He was starting to recognize the warning signs of a stall in this aircraft, but its flight characteristics were still unpredictable.
He got down to two hundred feet and Vivian said, “It’s all going by too fast.”
He explained, “If we go low, we can see things in better detail, but everything shoots by fast no matter how slow I go. If we go high, the ground looks like it’s going by slower, but we can’t see smaller objects.”
“Thank you, Frank. I never realized that.”
“I’m telling you this because you are in charge of photography. What do you want?”
“I need altitude for the wide-angle lens. I’ll get the photos enlarged and we can go over them with a magnifier.”
“Okay. Meanwhile, if you’ll look to your one o’clock position, I see something.”
Henry learned forward and they all looked to where Purcell was pointing. He picked up the nose to slow the aircraft, and up ahead, to their slight right, they could see a break in the jungle canopy, and inside the clear area were broken walls and burned-out buildings. If they hadn’t known it was intact five months before, they’d have thought it was an old ruin — except that the jungle had not yet reclaimed the clearing.
Purcell thought of the priest. He’d escaped death here, then walked out of his prison into the jungle. And something — God, memory, or a jungle path — led him west, to the Italian spa. But he wasn’t heading for the spa. It hadn’t been built when he’d been captured, according to Gann and to the map, which did not show the spa. So what was it that took him west to that spa and to his rendezvous with three people who themselves did not know about the spa? Probably, Purcell thought, a jungle path, or a game trail. If he asked Vivian or Henry, the answer was simple: God led Father Armano to them. Purcell thought he’d go with the game trail theory.
Vivian shot a few photos as they approached, then the ruined fortress shot by and she said, “Can we come around higher?”
“We can.” He climbed as he began a wide, clockwise turn.
In a few minutes, the fortress came into view again off their right side at about a thousand feet.
As Vivian took photos, she asked, as if to herself, “Can you imagine being locked in a cell in the middle of the jungle for forty years?”
Purcell wanted to tell her that if they found the black monastery, she might find out what that’s like.
More importantly, he had confirmed another detail of Father Armano’s story. Also, they’d fixed a few points of this tale — the east shore of Lake Tana, the spa, and the fortress. Now all they had to do was find the black monastery which they believed was in this area.
He looked at the thick, unbroken carpet of jungle and rain forest below. He’d once ridden in an army spotter plane in Vietnam, and the pilot had told him, “There are enemy base camps under that triple canopy. And thousands of men. And we can’t see anything.”
Right. Which was why the Americans defoliated and napalmed the jungle. But here, there were hundreds of thousands of acres of thick, pristine jungle and rain forest, and there could have been a city under that canopy and no one would ever see it. Also, they had only a vague idea where to look.
Mercado was having similar thoughts and said, “This is a rather large area of jungle.”
“You noticed?”
“A clue might be that old map we saw in the Ethiopian College.”
“Henry, please.”
“And the stained glass window at the Hilton.”
“You’re sounding oxygen-deprived.”
“What they have in common is that they show palm trees. And if you look, you won’t see many clusters of palms down there.”
Purcell glanced out the canopy. True, there weren’t many palm trees, but… that wasn’t a very solid clue. He said, “Okay, we’ll keep an eye out for palms. Meanwhile, we have about a half hour before we need to head for Gondar, so I’ll make ascending corkscrew turns and Vivian will begin shooting everything below as we climb.” He suggested to her, “Try to overlap a bit—”
“I know.”
“Good. Up we go.” He pushed in the throttle and the Navion began to climb. Purcell said to Mercado, “Use the field glasses, and if you see any abnormalities below, bring it to my and Vivian’s attention.” He told them, “I’m going to slide open the canopy so Vivian can get clear shots.” He unlatched the canopy and slid it open a few feet, and the roar of the engine filled the cabin.
Vivian unfastened her seat belt, leaned forward, and pointed her camera through the opening.