The Lost City of the Monkey God Page 8

  The most unforgettable member of the group was Bruce Heinicke, Elkins’s longtime fixer par excellence. I had been curious to meet him for years, after hearing Steve’s vivid descriptions of him and his adventures. I found him under the palapa bar before dinner, a morbidly obese man wearing a Panama hat, unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt displaying gold chains, a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other. He had a terrific scowl on his face. He told me he had returned from the airport, “where I just handed out a fucking Kansas City roll” to get the expedition’s equipment through Roatán’s customs office—computers, video and film cameras, sound gear, tripods, and all the rest. Even with the blessing of the president, people needed to be taken care of. “They wanted a ‘deposit’ of a hundred eighty thousand dollars,” he said, his jowls trembling at the outrage of it. “Said they would give it back when the equipment left the country. I told them, ‘No, no, that’s not fucking gonna happen.’ But a lot of grease went to a lot of different people.” When I started taking notes, he said, “You can’t print a fucking word I tell you unless I say so specifically.” He had a trove of tales, but at the end of almost every story, he turned his watery eyes on me, jabbed his finger, and said: “You can’t write that down. It’s off the record.”

  Finally, in frustration, I asked him: “Isn’t there a way I can tell at least some of these stories?”

  “Oh sure,” he said, “absolutely. No problem. After I’m fucking dead!”* He snorted with laughter and almost choked on an eruption of phlegm.

  I asked Bruce about his relationship with Steve Elkins and how their partnership worked.

  “Lemme tell you a story. I was in a restaurant and some guys were mouthing off. I could see trouble coming. So I put a gun at this guy’s head and said, ‘Get the fuck out of here or you’ll see all your fucking brains all over the fucking wall behind you.’ That’s the way I get things done. You gotta be that way down here. Don’t fuck with that gringo, he will fucking kill you. When you’re dealing with people like that, they got no respect for anybody, human life’s not important, so you have to treat them that way or you will get walked all over. Steve thinks everybody is his friend. He wants to be their friend. And he doesn’t understand that some people, they’re just looking for a chance to rob you and maybe kill you. Steve trusts everybody and down here you just can’t.”

  Heinicke had a bum knee from a gunshot wound, which he was happy to explain. Back before he met his wife, he’d dated a Colombian woman and become close to her father, who ran one of the major drug cartels in Colombia. Heinicke did some business for the father, transporting drugs and collecting money. He was caught by the DEA, who demanded he work for them as an undercover informant, to avoid prison. But he said he continued to work for the cartel boss and kept the DEA satisfied by giving up some low- and mid-level people from the cartel. “I was smuggling coke out of fucking Colombia,” making a cocaine delivery from Colombia to Nicaragua for his boss, he said. He went to Cartagena to pick up the “product” in a small duffel bag, to carry to the contact, who was supposed to pay $75,000 for it. He went to a shuttered restaurant, where he was surprised to see not one man, but two. One man had a bag full of money. “I told him to show me the money. He started to walk over and I told him to stop and just open the bag and slide it over,” which he did. As the man stepped back, both men pulled guns and started shooting at Heinicke. “They were only ten feet from me when I pulled my .45 and shot one in the right shoulder, the other in the face, and before the one I shot in the shoulder hit the ground I split his head like a watermelon. The whole gunfight took two to three seconds. I caught a round in the right knee.” He collected all the guns, money, and drugs. He was in terrible pain, so he snorted some lines and packed cocaine powder into the bullet wound, which made him feel better.

  “I had seventy-five thousand dollars cash in a fucking backpack, five kilos of cocaine, and two pistols,” he said. “This friend in La Ceiba flew down. I said, ‘Get me out of here, I got a bullet in me.’ Later, X [I have removed here the name of a well-known American writer and ex-soldier] set me up with the US Embassy out of Honduras—they sent me to Nicaragua to take pictures of Sandinista encampments and get GPS locations.”

  After dinner, Elkins led the team in a planning meeting. The first item on the agenda was getting our cover story straight for the locals. Only a few people in the Honduran government knew what we were doing. There was to be no loose talk of Ciudad Blanca or the Lost City of the Monkey God. We were, Elkins explained, merely a bunch of nerdy scientists doing an aerial survey of Mosquitia using a new technology, to study the ecology, rainforest, flora, and fauna. The legend had grown to the point where many Hondurans were convinced the White City hid an immense treasure in gold; it would not be safe if our actual activities became known.

  Before launching the plane, the lidar team had to find secure locations for three fixed GPS units to be erected on the ground. These units would communicate with the GPS unit in the plane during flight. Each unit had to have a power source and, ideally, an Internet connection to upload the data. Juan Carlos Fernández had worked out the geometry of the system, which was difficult to do since most of the ground area was either impassable or too dangerous. He finally mapped out an almost linear arrangement for placement of the units: one on Roatán Island, the second forty-five airline miles away in Trujillo (the coastal city near where Cortés wrote his letter to Emperor Charles V), and the third in a tiny village called Dulce Nombre de Culmi, at the edge of Mosquitia, a hundred miles distant. The first unit was erected at the end of the beach that formed the artificial lagoon at the Parrot Tree. The second went onto the roof of the Christopher Columbus Hotel in Trujillo.

  Placing the third—and most crucial—receiver in Dulce Nombre de Culmi posed a greater challenge. Culmi was the closest you could reasonably get to the Mosquitia interior. The town lay a dangerous sixteen-hour drive from Trujillo, on roads infested with drug smugglers and bandits. The team decided to bring the GPS unit in by helicopter and set it up at a farm outside Culmi owned by a cousin of Mabel and Mango’s.

  But hours before the flight, the helicopter Elkins had reserved for the trip to Culmi was expropriated by the US DEA for an antidrug operation. Bruce was tasked with borrowing a helicopter and pilot on short notice from the Honduran government, which he was—astoundingly—able to do. (“Who else could get a fucking helicopter in fifteen minutes in a country like Honduras? These guys here don’t appreciate what I do.”) While flying in, Mango couldn’t recognize his cousin’s farm from the air so the chopper had to land in the village’s soccer field to ask directions, causing a sensation. Fernández erected the GPS in a pasture on the farm, where its very remoteness would keep it secure, powered by a solar panel and deep-cycle battery. Because there was no Internet connection, Mango had to physically retrieve the data every day on a USB stick and drive it to Catacamas, the closest town with an Internet connection, several hours south on a dirt road, and upload it to NCALM in Houston. This was no simple task. The drive was risky, as Catacamas was ruled by a drug cartel and had one of the highest murder rates of any city in the world. But, as Mango explained, the narcotraffickers stuck to their own business as long as they weren’t bothered. After he uploaded the data to Houston, Michael Sartori could then download it to his laptop on Roatán Island.

  For three days we waited for the plane to complete its final leg from Key West to Roatán. We lounged around the resort, subjected to an enforced vacation, eating, drinking beer, and—luxury be damned—getting ever more irritable and impatient for the search to begin.

  Every day, around noon, the peculiar figure of Bruce Heinicke would appear in the shade of the palapa, where he ensconced himself in a fanback wicker chair like Jabba the Hutt, beer and cigarettes at hand. He would remain parked there for most of the afternoon and evening, unless something happened that required his attention, in which case he could be heard swearing into his cell phone in Spanish or English. With nothing else to do, I got in the habit
of buying him a beer and listening to his stories.

  He talked openly about his days looting archaeological sites in Mosquitia. (I was surprised he’d be so forthcoming about these activities, given the nature of his employment with Steve, but he was never concerned by contradictions.) “In the early nineties,” he said, “I had a friend, Dimas, we used to go out and dig up gravesites and steal artifacts, and I was smuggling those to the States.”

  Somewhere far up an unnamed river, while on one of these looting expeditions, Bruce shot a tapir for dinner. They had camped on a sandbar and built a fire. Bruce cut the meat into strips, but as he laid it on hot stones to cook, he “heard a loud screaming growl.” He grabbed his M16 and turned just in time to see an animal charging them; he had the weapon on full-auto and sprayed it with “at least twenty rounds”; it dropped five feet from him: a huge, seven-foot jaguar. He and Dimas rolled it into the river. “I hated to kill the jaguar,” Bruce said. “It was such a beautiful animal.”

  The next day, they reached a fork in the river and went up a small tributary, wading in the shallow, fast-running stream. After two days they reached the site. About forty feet up the steep embankment, sticking out, was the side of a huge, carved stone table. They climbed out of the river and, in the benchlands above, found piles “of what used to be stone structures all over the place.” Bruce scrambled down the embankment to the table and cleared some dirt away, exposing a vivid, snarling, carved jaguar. The table was too large to remove whole, so they spent three days chiseling the jaguar from it. Then, poking among the piles of stones for an entrance into the underground structures or tombs, they exposed a hole. Bruce stuck his head in and spied pottery on the floor about five feet below. He squeezed through and dropped down, but landed awkwardly on the floor, twisting his leg and tearing the tendons in his knee, which was still weak from the shootout at the drug deal.

  He tried to stand up but couldn’t, and he called to Dimas to get him a stick to use as a crutch. While he was waiting, his eyes adjusted to the darkness, and that was when he saw that the “floor was alive with spiders, scorpions, and a few snakes for good measure.” But the same survey revealed that the walls were pockmarked with niches, inside of which sat gorgeous painted pots and marble bowls. Hobbling gingerly around the creatures at his feet, he collected the treasures and handed them up to Dimas. As he worked his way farther into the underground room, he spied a bright yellow object on the floor. He picked it up, stunned: It was a solid gold statue, about two and a half inches wide and five inches tall, “the most beautiful gold art I’d ever seen.” He said it “looked like some kind of king with a feather headdress and a shield on his chest. It was very thick.” He found more items, including hundreds of polished jade beads. “Anything that wasn’t perfect I didn’t fuck with.”

  After clearing out the room, they made their way back downriver to civilization, and headed for the States. They got the loot through customs in their carry-on bags by mixing the artifacts in with a lot of “tourist junk” bought at a gift shop, putting fake prices on everything, and wrapping them in newspaper.

  The next day, Bruce was at the bar in the Metropolitan Club in New York City, drinking Chivas on the rocks. “I used to meet X there”—this was that same writer—who had previously helped him sell looted antiquities. “X had buyers.” When X arrived, Bruce took him to his hotel room and showed him the loot. “He said, ‘Son of a bitch, this is great. Bruce, old boy, you’ve topped it all!’”

  But Bruce had no idea what he had, and neither did X. And so X contacted “a gal” he knew who worked at an auction house I will call Y. “She would take a look at stuff and tell us what we had.” The woman met the two of them in Bruce’s room, with all the artifacts spread out on the bed. When she saw them, her mouth fell open and she exclaimed, “You’re fucking crazy!” She told them what the pieces were and what they were worth, although she couldn’t positively identify the culture they came from, because they were so unusual. She also helped connect them with buyers. They sold the artifacts a few pieces at a time, so as not to flood the market. “We were making a ton of money, I’m not shitting you. That gold statue, it sold for two hundred forty thousand dollars back then—that was in the early nineties.” The looted objects disappeared into the vast black market of the Central American antiquities trade, probably never to be seen again.

  I continued to buy Bruce beers, and the stories continued to roll out. Despite his foul language and alarming appearance, he had a certain rough charm and charisma, conveyed by a pair of deep blue eyes. As he talked, I found myself again amazed that Steve would team up with a man with this history to locate what could be one of the most important archaeological sites in Central America. I recalled his aside to me earlier about having to “dance with the devil” at times to make things happen. It was undeniably true that Bruce’s help was crucial to the success of the effort.

  “There’s two ways to get in there [into Mosquitia],” Bruce told me, “the Río Plátano and the Río Patuca. I had had some problems up the Río Patuca. I was buying gold from some Indians who panned for gold up in that area. I bought some gold, maybe eight ounces total. The guys who were taking me up there decided they were gonna rob me. I got up where the Wampu and the Patuca meet. The Wampu heads west toward the Río Plátano. As I got in the boat, they hit me with an oar, knocked me into the water. I came out of the water with my .45. The other guy was coming at me with a machete. I shot him in the face, and shot the other guy. Tied them together and towed them to where the alligators are and cut them loose. I would never go back up that river. That’s the most dangerous place on the planet, that river. When I got back to Brus Lagoon, I had to call in and get a private plane to pick me up. I had to hide in the bushes by the airstrip until the plane got there. After that I avoided that area up the Río Patuca like the plague. Life has no meaning up there.”

  CHAPTER 11

  It’s uncharted territory: You’re out there on your own, out in the middle of nowhere.

  On May 1, the weather finally cleared on Key West. The plane carrying the lidar machine took off, refueled in Grand Cayman, and arrived in the Roatán airport at 2:00 p.m. Everyone rushed out to the airport to meet it, applauding and cheering when it finally touched down. Now our search for the lost city could begin.

  The Skymaster is a twin-engine aircraft driven by what aviators call a push-pull configuration, with the two engines mounted in-line, one on the nose and the other at the rear of the fuselage. The plane’s most distinctive features are two struts or booms that extend behind the wings. Once a cheerful red and white, the paint job on this plane was full of patches and strips that had peeled off, and an ugly streak of oil ran down the fuselage from the forward engine. A big green lidar box almost filled the interior of the plane. This sleek, advanced, and costly piece of technology, so top secret that it had to be guarded by soldiers, was being schlepped around in a shabby flying tin can—or so it seemed to my inexpert eye.

  After it landed, seven Honduran soldiers with M16s escorted the plane to a far corner of the airport, away from the public areas, where it could be kept secure. Nobody seemed to be paying attention anyway; the airport was small and the military was ubiquitous. The six soldiers, most barely older than teenagers, and the commanding lieutenant had been hanging around the airport, bored, for three days. They were excited at the plane’s arrival, and they marched around it, posing with their weapons while Elkins’s film crew shot footage.

  The pilot, Chuck Gross, was a large, soft-spoken man from Georgia who addressed everyone as “sir.” He had recently returned from Iraq, where he had been flying classified lidar missions for the US military. He couldn’t disclose much, but I gathered that they involved, among other things, lidaring areas along patrol routes multiple times to detect tiny changes in topography. A new heap of trash or a fresh dirt pile suddenly appearing next to a route would often indicate the placement of an IED.

  Gross mentioned he had a Cuban overflight number, which allowed
him to fly through Cuban airspace. I asked him what would have happened if he’d had engine or weather trouble and had been forced to land in Cuba. After all, the plane carried classified military hardware, and relations with Cuba were at that time still in a deep freeze.

  “First, I would have torched the plane on the runway.” This was, he explained, the standard protocol with airborne lidar. “In the desert, that’s what we would have done too: immediately destroy the equipment.” He added, “You should have seen the paperwork I had to do to get that Cessna out of the US.”

  The technology of lidar was developed soon after the discovery of lasers in the early 1960s. Put simply, lidar works like radar, by bouncing a laser beam off something, capturing the reflection, and measuring the round-trip time, thereby determining the distance. Scientists quickly realized its potential as a mapping tool. Both the Apollo 15 and 17 missions carried a lidar machine on the orbiter, which mapped swaths of the moon’s surface. The Mars Global Surveyor, a satellite orbiting Mars, also carried a lidar machine, which bounced laser beams off the surface of Mars ten times per second. Over its ten-year mission, from 1996 to 2006, the Surveyor created a prodigiously accurate topographic map of the Martian surface, one of the supreme mapping projects of human history.