Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead Read online

  INDY’S IN DEEP—

  AND ON THE RUN FROM

  THE WALKING DEAD.

  There’s no rest for the weary treasure hunter, but that’s how Indiana Jones likes it. Fresh from spying for the Allies in the thick of World War II Germany, the globe-trotting archaeologist doesn’t need much persuading to join his cohort “Mac” McHale in searching for one of the most coveted of artifacts: the fabled black pearl known as the Heart of Darkness. But the partners in adventure are not alone on their foray into the mysterious jungles of Haiti. German and Japanese agents are in hot pursuit, determined to possess the ebony artifact—and its secrets—for their own sinister purposes. And shadowing them all is an infamous voodoo priest, with powers of both diabolical science and black magic at his command.

  On a treacherous odyssey across the Island of the Dead, where the legend of the zombi looms large, spiders, snakes, and booby traps will prove the least of Indy’s challenges. And capturing the prize will be child’s play compared to confronting an enemy unlike any other, whose numbers are legion and nearly impossible to kill—because they’re already dead . . .

  BY STEVE PERRY

  The Tularemia Gambit

  Civil War Secret Agent

  The Man Who Never Missed

  Matadora

  The Machiavelli Interface

  The 97th Step

  The Albino Knife

  Black Steel

  Brother Death

  Conan the Fearless

  Conan the Defiant

  Conan the Indomitable

  Conan the Free Lance

  Conan the Formidable

  Aliens: Earth Hive

  Aliens: Nightmare Asylum

  Aliens: The Female War (with Stephani Danelle Perry)

  Aliens vs. Predator: Prey (with Stephani Danelle Perry)

  Spindoc

  The Forever Drug

  Stellar Rangers

  Stellar Rangers: Lone Star

  The Mask

  Men in Black

  Leonard Nimoy’s Primortals

  Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire

  The Trinity Vector

  The Digital Effect

  Windowpane

  Tribes: Einstein’s Hammer

  The Musashi Flex

  Titan AE (with Dal Perry)

  Isaac Asimov’s I-Bots: Time Was (with Gary Braunbeck)

  Chris Bunch’s The Gangster Conspiracy (with Dal Perry)

  Predator: Turnabout

  Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead

  BY STEVE PERRY WITH TOM CLANCY

  & STEVE PIECZENIK

  Net Force

  Net Force: Hidden Agendas

  Net Force: Night Moves

  Net Force: Breaking Point

  Net Force: Point of Impact

  Net Force: CyberNation

  Net Force: State of War (also with Larry Segriff)

  Net Force: Changing of the Guard (also with Larry Segriff)

  BY MICHAEL REAVES & STEVE PERRY

  Sword of the Samurai

  Hellstar

  Dome

  The Omega Cage

  Thong the Barbarian Meets the Cycle Sluts of Saturn

  Star Wars: MedStar I: Battle Surgeons

  Star Wars: MedStar II: Jedi Healer

  Star Wars: Death Star

  Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A Del Rey Mass Market Original

  Copyright © 2009 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or ™ where indicated.

  All Rights Reserved. Used Under Authorization.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-345-50698-6

  Printed in the United States of America

  www.indianajones.com

  www.delreybooks.com

  For Dianne, naturally;

  and in fond memory of the

  Saturday morning matinees with serials

  at the Paramount Theater in Baton Rouge,

  in the halcyon summer of 1957

  Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, is stranger than we can imagine.

  —SIR ARTHUR EDDINGTON

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The writer carries much of the load, of course, but there are always others who do some of the lifting to get a novel from an idea to the bookstores. Thanks this time go to Shelly Shapiro, Sue Rostoni, and Leland Chee, as well as Jennifer “Mom” Weltz and Our Ladies of the Jean Naggar Lit’ry Agency. Fine and professional folk all.

  Masters of the silver screen George Lucas and Steven Spielberg hardly need my thanks, but they have them. Always fun to get to play in their yards, they have such cool toys.

  My resident zombi authority is Bobbe Edmonds.

  A special acknowledgment to Harrison Ford, my generation’s Cary Grant, and an actor who is underappreciated for his expertise. Because it is fast or funny does not mean it is easy, and nobody does it better than Ford. Did you see those stunts in The Crystal Skull? Here is a man, who when asked about his movie success during an interview, once said, “Oh, it’s the writers . . .” Find me one of those who doesn’t love an actor who says that. Give him an Academy Award—he’s earned it. (And my apologies to him for the first line of the novel, even though it is a joke.)

  Readers familiar with the Caribbean islands will notice I have taken some liberties with local geography. I made up all the events and the people I put there. Have fun—it’s just another of Indy’s adventures . . .

  ONE

  In the Air over the Windward Passage,

  Eight Miles West of Haiti

  Summer 1943

  INDY HATED small airplanes.

  Yes, yes, planes were necessary evils, he knew. If there was going to be a race to collect an ancient treasure in the modern world of 1943, the winner wasn’t going to be the guy who sailed ’round the Horn on a clipper ship to find it. Flying was a sharp knife in any field archaeologist’s tool chest—but because planes were necessary didn’t mean he had to like the blasted things. Or trust them. Oh, sure, mostly they flew just fine. Sometimes they didn’t. After the third or fourth time one came down hard enough to blow out the tires or break the undercarriage, he was less trusting. Yeah, you did what you had to do to get where you needed to get. Someday your number was going to be up no matter what you did. No point in worrying about it too much, but . . . flying around like a bird?

  Because of his OSS training, Indy knew more about aircraft than he wanted to know, and this one—a Taylor/Piper J-2 that looked a lot older than it could possibly be—seemed to be held together with baling wire and prayer. It was noisy, underpowered—a forty-horsepower engine was stock, it weighed a little over 500 pounds empty, and with Mac, who had to go 210, and Indy at about 190? That was the maximum cargo capacity right there. Raul, the little Cuban pilot, was small, but even he had to go 140, and that didn’t count the weight of the fuel and what luggage they had, and all that meant this plane ought not to be able to get off the ground. Yet here they were, cruising two thousand feet above the Caribbean, at all of sixty miles an hour. Yeah, Raul said he had rebuilt the engine and perked it up a fair bit, but even so, that it had taken off three times with them so far? That was still amazing—

  They say that bad thoughts draw the devil’s attention.

  The engine sputtered, was silent for what seemed like a thousand years but was probably only a second, and Indy’s belly roiled as if it contained a m
ost unhappy lizard trying to get out. The imaginary creature wasn’t too choosy about its exit route, trying to go up and down at the same time . . .

  Indiana Jones said a word that would have gotten his mouth washed out with soap in polite family circles.

  Mac laughed.

  The pilot said something in rapid Cuban Spanish, and he laughed, too.

  “He said—” Mac began.

  “I heard him,” Indy said. “I’m sitting right here, third guy in a two-seater, and since I know there is no aerodynamic way this thing can stay up, he better have an in with the Virgin Mary.”

  “You worry too much.”

  “And you don’t worry enough.”

  Mac—George McHale—was British to the core, and MI6. He and Indy had been paired on a dozen secret assignments for either His Majesty’s government or Uncle Sam, mostly in Europe, a couple in the Pacific, and while Mac was a good man to have covering your back, he was also prone to recklessness. Indy had saved Mac’s bacon more often than the other way around, though he did have Mac to thank for keeping him alive a few times—and his recent increase in rank. That latter was a mixed blessing. Indy hadn’t even wanted to be in one army, much less two of them, and he had just gotten used to being “Major Jones” in one of them, and now he was a light colonel.

  Well. In an odd, technical sort of way he was a colonel . . .

  The engine coughed again.

  This time, Indy managed to keep from cursing.

  In Spanish, Raul said, “Not far now, señors, only a couple of miles to the coast there.”

  Indy had to lean to his right to see through the windshield, and the act of doing so caused the little plane to bank.

  He didn’t say anything, but Raul must have noticed how quickly he leaned back the other way.

  Raul—or maybe it was Indy—straightened the plane out. “Rosita is very sensitive, señor.”

  Sensitive? A plane that you could turn by leaning? Indy shook his head. At least they had made it this far. They had taken off from Santiago, Cuba, flying to Guantanamo, then to a landing strip hacked out of a sugarcane field outside Baraco. They had refueled and then started over the Windward Passage, the strait that connected the Atlantic and the Caribbean, heading toward Mole Saint-Nicolas in Haiti. There was supposedly a runway and a fuel tank there at which they could gas up for the hop into Saint-Marc, and yet another fuel stop, before the final leg to Port-au-Prince. Maybe somebody would want to see a passport or visa, but Raul didn’t think it likely. The war and all, who had time to stand around waiting because a plane might land?

  The J-2 had a range of only a couple of hundred miles, but it was what Mac had found. The “war and all” had sucked up a lot of available aircraft, along, apparently, with border patrolmen.

  Indy looked at Mac. “I don’t know why I let you talk me into this. We need the rest. It’s why they gave us the furlough.”

  Mac smiled. “Because, Jonesy, you are a dedicated archaeologist, right? How could you pass up a chance like this? What if the Nazis or the Japanese got there first? Then that bloody giant black pearl would be buying jackboots for Adolf or maybe a sub for the emperor.”

  Indy didn’t want to say it but couldn’t stop himself: “Haiti is tropical. Crawling with snakes.”

  “Actually, old chum, they aren’t any of them poisonous in these parts, you know.”

  “Well, yippee for that. It’s not the poison, Mac, it’s the . . . snakiness.”

  Mac laughed again.

  “You wouldn’t think it so funny if it was rats,” Indy allowed.

  Mac’s smile disappeared. “Bloody Germans!”

  Gotcha, Indy thought. Mac was like Indy’s father—he hated rodents. He felt pretty good about that comeback. That thing with the rats in the Nazi castle—

  The plane’s little engine went sput-sput-sput! and died.

  It got very quiet.

  The engine didn’t come back on.

  The plane started to drop.

  Raul began praying to the Virgin Mary.

  Laden as the craft was, the glide pattern suddenly seemed more like that of a brick than a plane.

  Indy tightened the tie holding his whip onto his belt, made sure his Webley’s holster was snapped shut. “Where’s my hat?” he said, looking around—

  The sea, which had been a comfortable two thousand feet below, rushed toward them. It was only a hundred yards or so away now and coming up fast. They were, if they were lucky, going to ditch. If not, they’d go straight in and blow apart on impact.

  “If I die and you don’t, I’m coming back to haunt you, Mac.”

  He braced himself.

  The plane hit the water—

  The jolt clacked Indy’s teeth together as his body snapped forward against the seat belt. The plane skipped once, like a rubber ball bouncing off concrete. The right wing tore loose, the pilot’s door ripped away, and Indy saw the windshield shatter as Raul’s belt broke and his head went through the glass.

  They bounced and jostled over the water like a skipped stone, hard enough to break up more of the plane—

  Finally, they stopped moving foward. The water rushed in, filling the little craft, which began to sink.

  “Out!” Indy yelled.

  Mac was already moving.

  TWO

  THE TROPICAL SEAS under the bright sunshine were clear enough that Indy could easily see the shark as it cruised lazily past them. Fourteen, fifteen feet long, at least, and doubtlessly wondering if they were worth the trouble it would take to eat them.

  Go away. We taste bad. Really. Worst thing you ever ate.

  “Blacktip, you think?” Mac said. “I didn’t know they got that big.”

  They were only a couple of hundred yards away from shore.

  “Classify it later—swim!”

  Indy put his face into the water in an American crawl. You couldn’t see as well as when doing the Australian stroke, but it was faster, and speed was preferable at the moment. Fortunately, he was a strong swimmer, having spent far too much time in ponds, lakes, ditches, rivers, and oceans around the world.

  Mac, whose style was more unorthodox, made more noise and bigger waves, but he wasn’t far behind.

  It seemed as if it took forever, but eventually Indy achieved shallower water, enough so he could stand on the sandy bottom with the waves lapping just under his chest.

  Whew. The shark was too big to risk water this shallow. He wouldn’t follow them.

  Mac was right behind him.

  And right behind Mac? There was a big fin—

  Mac must have seen it in Indy’s eyes. He turned, said, “Bloody hell!” and started a high-knee run toward the shore.

  Indy was already moving, but Mac blew past him, churning the water into white foam. He wouldn’t have thought the man could run that fast on land, much less in the ocean . . .

  They stumbled onto the gray sand beach and fell prone.

  Once he recovered his breath, Mac said, “They aren’t supposed to do that, go into water that shallow.”

  “Send him a telegram explaining it to him,” Indy managed.

  After a moment, Mac said, “Pity I don’t have a dry cigarette. All this exercise is terrible for my lungs. The smoke would calm them.”

  Indy said nothing. Everybody knew cigarettes cut your wind. As much running as he seemed to do, he sure didn’t need that.

  After a moment, Mac said, “Too bad about Raul.”

  “Yeah, well, if he had taken better care of Rosita, we’d still be in the air.” It was a poor joke, but—what were you going to do? Raul was probably feeding that shark’s cousins by now, and bits and pieces of the shattered plane would likely be washing ashore for weeks. Done was done. The Cuban must have known how dangerous flying that overloaded aircraft was. It was part of the risk he took. Some you won, some you lost . . .

  “Hello? Have a look.” Mac pointed.

  At first, Indy wasn’t sure what he was seeing, but then he was.

  “My ha
t!”

  He managed to get to his feet, and to the hat. He picked it up, shook the sand off it, and put it on. He suddenly felt better. Things could be worse. Yeah, they had crashed into the sea, but they were alive, he had his whip, his revolver, and his hat. That was a good sign. Nothing was broken. The day was definitely looking up.

  Mac said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you—how have you managed to keep that blasted hat in one piece? You’ve had it as long as I’ve known you.”

  Indy grinned. “I’ve had it a lot longer than that.”

  Mac raised an eyebrow.

  “I was . . . thirteen? Almost fourteen. It involved the Cross of Coronado.”

  “I’ve heard of that. Gold, precious stones, supposedly had a sliver of Christ’s cross tucked away in it?”

  Indy nodded. “Yeah. If every sliver of wood that’s supposed to have come from that cross got piled up together, it would be bigger than a giant sequoia. Anyway, I swiped the artifact from some tomb raiders, but Fedora outfoxed me.”

  “Fedora?”

  “I never knew his name. This hat was his. I think he took a shine to me after we went ’round. He gave me some good advice, and this hat, as a consolation prize.”

  “What was the advice?”

  “Essentially, you can’t win ’em all. Sometimes you have to wait for another day. He was right. Eventually, I did collect Coronado’s Cross and got it to the university’s museum.”

  “And you still have the hat.”

  “Yeah, I get it blocked and dry-cleaned when I’m back in civilization, use a hat jack when it’s in the closet. Had the sweatband replaced eight or nine times. And there are hatmakers who can repair a tear or hole in felt, though it costs an arm and a leg. For what I’ve spent on this fedora over the years, I could have bought my own haberdashery.”

  Mac shook his head.

  “Hey, everybody has to be someplace,” Indy said. “And when I’m there, I want my lucky hat.”

  “Lucky?”

  “I’m still breathing, aren’t I?”

  Mac grinned.

  “What say we go and find some locals and see where we are?” Indy said.