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.