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.