"Another day shot to hell,'' Bates complained, wiping sweat from his face with a sleeve.
"Don't worry," Crowley told his partner. "There's a lost city somewhere."
"Hi Hickenlooper's somewhere too," Bates shot back. "I'm worried about him beating us to it."
"I told you, he's in Argentina. Quit worrying."
" 'Quit worrying,' hell. He'll be back."
The mild-mannered Crowley had to laugh. "Hi Hickenlooper," he pointed out, "has never found anything.''
"That makes it worse," Bates griped. "He's overdue. He's been around. He knows where not to look. And you know what bugs me the most? He's rich. He doesn't have to find anything."
They both drank some water from their canteens. "Lot of bats coming out," Crowley noted, watching bats flit about overhead. Bates looked up at the little flying mammals. Their seemingly coordinated behavior puzzled both men. And these bats didn't seem all that little.
"Jefes! Vengan!" yelled a Peruvian assistant whom Bates had sent to scout a thick line of undergrowth to the west. Such heavy undergrowth was not typically found in the heart of the rain forest. Its presence suggested a nearby clearing or some other break in the canopy, which ordinarily blocked out too much light for dense plant life to grow. But Bates, tired and frustrated, didn't expect the Peruvian to find anything of significance.
Bates, Crowley, and the rest of the team followed the excited Peruvian back through the dense undergrowth to see his discovery. "Miren!" he said, as they emerged on the other side of the thick vegetation.
In an extensive clearing before them the explorers saw four large, thatch-roofed wooden buildings, well spaced with cleared ground between them. They saw no one about in the gathering darkness.
Bates was curious but not impressed. This was no lost city. "Big deal," he said bitterly.
"Whose place do you reckon this is?" asked the fascinated Crowley.
"Who cares?" Bates muttered.
Crowley was particularly intrigued by the far building facing them, a two-story structure with a balcony, from the railing of which hung a large scarlet banner. On the banner was a swastika, emblazoned in black.
"Nazis?" Crowley said wonderingly. "What the hell are they doing out here?"
"What's that word there over the balcony?" Bates asked. He had grudgingly taken interest in that building too.
"Looks like German," Crowley said. The word was impressively embossed on a plaque in Gothic script. Crowley tried to read it aloud, though ignorant of its meaning: "Neu . . . an . . . fang?"
Bates, Crowley, and the others began walking forward, looking over this mysterious jungle compound for some sign of life. None of them noticed that several of those odd-acting, somewhat oversized bats, virtually invisible against the darkening sky, had begun hovering over them. Finally the men heard the flutter of wings behind them. They stopped and turned with alarm, as the bats descended to the ground between them and the wall of vegetation. By the time the creatures touched ground, they were not even bats anymore. Bates, Crowley, and the others found themselves confronted instead by a frightening group of pale but strapping men wearing jackboots, black shirts and breeches. They looked like something straight out of Nazi Germany, if not out of hell itself.
The explorers stared in silent terror at these menacing beings. The explorers were startled again by a voice from behind them, saying, "Velcome!"
The explorers turned to look. Walking toward them from the compound, followed by more menacing uniformed Nazis with Mauser rifles, was a lean, pale, fiftyish SS Obergruppenführer with the meanest smile they had ever seen. The officer stopped, to look them all over in what now was virtually the darkness of evening.
"I am Obergruppenführer Kegel," the officer said, in German-accented English. "Blood is hard to go find. It is so nice when the blood comes to you. Thank you for being so nice."