The Quest: A Novel

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,