Treasure Hunters--Quest for the City of Gold Read online

  “Check it out. The Kidd Family Treasure Hunters’ newest piece of exploration gear. A fully loaded and customized Seastar amphibious flying boat!”

  A smiling guy was standing on one of the amphibious aircraft’s wings, waving at me and Tommy.

  “Um, is that our pilot?”

  “Nah. Mom and Dad both have licenses. They’ll handle the flying. That’s just George.”

  “George?”

  “He used to work with Mom and Dad at…” Tommy lowered his voice. “The Agency.”

  “He’s from the CIA? George’s a spy?”

  “Shhh,” said Tommy. “We’re not supposed to use the S word, remember? George will guard the Lost while we’re in Peru.”

  “Can we trust him?” I asked.

  “Totally. Don’t forget, he’s an S word.”

  “So was strange Uncle Timothy!”

  “True,” said Tommy. “But George’s not wearing mirrored sunglasses like Uncle T always did.”

  I nodded like that made sense because it sort of did.

  “Come on,” said Tommy. “We need to hustle.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Tommy and I hauled our personal duffels up to the deck.

  Storm and Beck were already there. Mom and Dad, too.

  George tossed us a line so we could dock the seaplane right next to the Lost. He climbed up onto the deck and saluted Mom and Dad.

  “The cow is in the barn,” he said.

  Dad nodded.

  “The walrus sleeps in the sun,” said Dad.

  George nodded.

  “The sparrows are ready to take flight,” added Mom.

  George and Dad nodded.

  Yep, all the spies and former spies knew what they were saying. Us kids? We had nothing.

  “Don’t worry about your ship, Thomas,” George said to Dad. “I’ll keep an eye on it. So will our CIA satellites.”

  “Appreciate it. You know how to reach us?”

  “Affirmative.” He turned to Mom. “When’s the big confab, Sue?”

  “Soon. I’m waiting for the call. So are our activist allies in the rain forest. Hopefully, we’ll have the rest of the money lined up before the Peruvian president calls all the parties to the table.”

  “What’s your opening bid?”

  “We’re hoping to double whatever the loggers offer,” said Mom.

  “Impressive,” said George.

  “If we find the Lost City of Paititi,” said Dad, “we might be able to quadruple what the lumber boys are willing to pay. We can save several million acres of rain forest from destruction.”

  Beck and I looked at each other.

  It was our turn to nod. Finally, we knew exactly what Mom and Dad were up to.

  We weren’t just going to recover the extremely valuable relics of a long-lost civilization. Nope. As always, Mom and Dad were more interested in saving the most valuable treasure on Earth: Earth itself!

  CHAPTER 18

  Gear loaded and seat belts secured, we zoomed across the rippling waves.

  The huge plane gained speed and gently lifted off the ocean like a Costa Rican pelican heading out on a fishing expedition.

  “We’ll call this amphibious aircraft the Platypus!” said Dad.

  “And why is that a good name?” Mom asked over her shoulder from the copilot seat.

  “Because,” said Beck, “the platypus is a semiaquatic amphibious mammal.”

  “Just like us!” I added. “We’re good on land or in the sea.”

  Everybody laughed.

  By the way, flying in an amphibious aircraft is totally awesome. Especially one with comfy leather seats, computer monitors, and a galley stocked with Peruvian snacks and drinks. Mom called the choice of snacks “cultural immersion.”

  I called it chowing down on roasted salted corn, deep-fried cinnamon-dusted churros stuffed with vanilla cream, and bags of chifles, which, by the way, are banana chips. Delish. We washed it all down with Incan Kola, el sabor del Perú (“the flavor of Peru”), which is bright yellow, very sweet, and tastes like lemon-flavored bubble gum.

  Dad manned the controls and Mom swiveled around in her copilot seat to give us a “quick history lesson” about the Lost City of Paititi legend.

  (I guess that’s the major problem with being homeschooled. Class time can be any time.)

  “In the Quechuan language,” said Mom, “Paititi means ‘Home of the Jaguar Father.’”

  Tommy raised his hand. “Does the big cat still live there?”

  “Doubtful. The legendary city is believed to be hidden in the remote rain forests of southeastern Peru, east of the Andes. The descendants of the Incas, the Quechuans, tell stories of how their hero Inkarri saved a mountain of gold, silver, and sacred jewels from the Spanish conquistadors by fleeing into the jungle and establishing his hidden city behind the towering mountains.”

  “There are other legends,” said Storm, who usually acts as Mom’s teaching assistant. “One tells of a magnificent Incan gold chain, six hundred and fifty feet long, with links as thick as a thumb. Another speaks of a huge golden disk, thirteen feet wide.”

  “Whoa,” said Tommy. “The whole disk was made out of gold?”

  “Completely,” said Storm. “The Incas used it in sacred sun-worshipping ceremonies.”

  “If it’s solid gold, it would make an awesome sun reflector,” said Tommy. “I bet you could get an incredible tan sitting in the center of it!”

  “You wouldn’t want to sit in the middle of the Punchao, Tommy,” said Storm. “It was considered holy. Plus, the Incas sometimes used the big sacred object as an altar for sacrifices. Human sacrifices.”

  “You mean human as in people?”

  Storm nodded. “Including children. And teenagers.”

  “Gotcha,” said Tommy. “Good to know.”

  “And then,” said Mom, “there’s the most horrible legend of them all.”

  “Worse than Tommy’s sunbathing story?” said Beck. “No way.”

  “Oh, it’s much worse. This story is about what happened to Inkarri!”

  CHAPTER 19

  “Actually,” said Storm, because she’s always the smartest kid in the class even when the class is ten thousand feet above sea level, “Inkarri is a phonetic Quechua version of the Spanish words Inca and rey.”

  “That means ‘Incan king’!” said Beck, who’d already done the Spanish homework I probably should’ve done, too.

  “Exactly,” said Mom. “The last king of the Incas, Inkarri, might have saved a lot of his people’s treasure from the Spaniards but he couldn’t save his own life.”

  “They chopped off his head,” said Storm. She even gave us the ol’ finger-across-the-throat gesture with full sniiiick sound effects. Yeah. She can get gruesome. It’s one of the reasons we love her.

  “Worse,” said Mom. “Inkarri’s head was buried in one place while the rest of his body was buried someplace else.”

  “Or,” added Storm, “some places else. A leg here, an arm there, another leg there—”

  “Okay, okay,” said Tommy. “We get the picture.”

  “And it is an extremely grisly picture that you paint,” said Dad from the pilot’s seat.

  Guess Storm’s grisly description was kind of grossing him out, too.

  “In all Inkarri legends,” said Mom, “the final Incan king vows to avenge his death and the mistreatment of the Peruvian people. When his head and body parts are reunited, it will mean the end of the darkness and despair brought to the Incas by the Spanish conquest. When Inkarri is restored, he will rise up from the earth. The Andean people will likewise rise up to reclaim what is rightfully theirs!”

  “You think, when he pulls himself together, Inkarri will want his gold back?” asked Tommy.

  “I would,” said Beck.

  I agreed. “Me, too. Paititi is like his piggy bank.”

  “Except, unlike yours,” said Beck, “his has some coins inside it.”

  “And a big gold chain,” added To
mmy.

  “And jewels,” said Beck.

  “And silver,” I said. “And more gold…”

  Mom laughed. “All those riches are why so many treasure hunters have spent so many years searching for the hidden city.”

  “Many have even lost their lives in their quest for the Lost City of Gold!” said Storm, who was totally in a gross-out-the-sibs mood.

  “But we’ve got the map!” I said. “And the letter explaining how to read the map. So we’ll be fine. Right?”

  “Of course,” said Dad, pushing his control wheel forward. “First stop, the Port of Pisco, one hundred and twenty-seven miles south of Lima.”

  “We’re going to Pisco because there was a bird near a body of water on the leather treasure map!” exclaimed Storm.

  “Well done, Storm!” said Dad. “An excellent display of your mastery of cartography as well as your comprehension of the Quechuan language!”

  “Huh?” I said, and from the look on Tommy’s and Beck’s faces, I could tell they were thinking the same thing.

  CHAPTER 20

  “Cartography is the study and practice of mapmaking,” said Mom, swiveling her copilot seat back around to the front so she could assist Dad in our approach and landing in Pisco.

  “And,” said Storm, “pisco is the Quechua word for ‘bird’!”

  She tapped the screen of her laptop, where our glowing treasure map was displayed. Our dotted-line journey started at a pelican perched on the coast of a rippling body of water with no edge.

  The water was, obviously, the Pacific Ocean. The bird had to be the port city of Pisco. Duh. It all made sense. After, you know, you studied and understood junk.

  “A treasure map is impossible to follow,” said Dad from the pilot seat, “unless you know exactly where to start your trek. Buckle up, everybody. We are beginning our initial descent into the Port of Pisco.”

  “Taking us to five thousand feet,” said Mom, twisting dials on the cockpit instruments.

  “Five thousand,” said Dad, reading the altimeter. “Take us down to three.”

  “Three thousand.”

  While Mom and Dad continued taking us lower and lower, I looked out the window. All I saw was the Pacific Ocean, a bunch of tiny islands, and all sorts of birds.

  “Um, Mom and Dad?” I said. “I don’t see a runway.”

  Dad laughed. “We don’t need one, Bick. This is a seaplane, remember?”

  “Oh. Right. My bad.”

  “They don’t need a runway either!” said Tommy, sounding mad. He was peering out the windows on his side of the plane.

  “What’s wrong, Thomas?” asked Mom.

  “It’s them! The pirates who stole our leather treasure map. I’d recognize their submarine anywhere!”

  CHAPTER 21

  “I suppose even a gang of imbecilic pirates could decipher the first point on the treasure map,” said Dad, tilting his control wheel forward, sending us into a pretty steep dive. “Let’s go pay those pirates a little visit!”

  All those Peruvian snacks I’d been munching on? They were dancing the pukllay in my stomach (that’s a carnival dance widespread among Peruvians that Mom made us learn in homeschool gym class). I was afraid that if we kept nosediving toward the ocean, those same snacks might lurch up into my mouth to dance the puke-lay!

  “We’re descending too rapidly, Thomas. I don’t want them to get away.”

  Suddenly, Tommy was unbuckling his seat belt. “How low can you level off at?” he asked.

  “Why?” asked Dad.

  “I’ll hop out and have a quick word with the pirates!”

  “Thomas?” said Mom. “Sit down this instant.”

  “I can’t,” said Tommy. “I ripped off my seat cushion so I could use it as a flotation device.”

  “Thomas?” said Mom. “This isn’t safe!”

  “Sue, you heard the boy. Tommy doesn’t have a seat to sit in! Nothing’s more unsafe than that! Descend to ten meters. Thirty-three feet.”

  “The official height of an Olympic diving platform,” said Storm.

  “Hurry, you guys!” said Tommy, yanking open a door on his side of the plane.

  A bag of churros went flying out.

  “The first guy’s already down the hatch and in the submarine!”

  “Just ID them, son,” advised Dad. “Don’t try anything heroic or stupid.”

  “Of course not!”

  And then Tommy immediately did something I thought was kind of heroic and stupid.

  He leaped out of our roaring seaplane!

  CHAPTER 22

  Dad banked the plane into a sharp, stomach-churning 180-degree turn so we could swing back and land in the ocean, right next to where Tommy dove in. Beck and I called the play-by-play from windows on opposite sides of the plane. Storm was busy with a barf bag. She’d wolfed down a couple churros, too.

  “The sub is going under!” I announced.

  “They’re getting away!” added Beck.

  “Tommy’s fine,” I said.

  “Floating on his seat cushion.”

  The plane’s pontoons touched down and sliced through the waves.

  “Reverse thrust,” said Dad.

  “Reversing,” said Mom.

  And then they both said a bunch more pilot stuff until the seaplane puttered to a stop right next to our bobbing brother.

  I tossed a line out the open door.

  “You okay, Tommy?”

  “Yeah,” he said, catching the rope and pulling himself over to the plane. “But there was no way to ID them. It’s an unmarked submarine.”

  Storm looked up from her paper puke bag. “They’re pirates. It’s what they do.”

  Beck and I helped Tommy haul himself back into the plane.

  “Sorry about the seat cushion,” he said to Mom. “I think I trashed it. It’s soaking wet.”

  Mom smiled. “So are you.”

  “Chya,” said Tommy with a grin.

  And that’s when a mysterious dugout canoe paddled up alongside our seaplane.

  CHAPTER 23

  A boy, younger than me, was manning the oar.

  A guy, probably in his twenties, decked out in full safari gear with a video camera propped on his shoulder, was perched up in the bow.

  “Bravo, Tommy!” said the guy with the camera. “Awesome action sequence, man! Got it all on tape. We’ll use it in the first episode, fer shure.”

  “Who the heck are you?” Beck shouted out our open seaplane door. “And how did you know Tommy’s name?”

  “Indeed,” said Dad. “I was about to ask the same two questions.”

  While Dad was smiling out the window at our visitors to his left, his right hand was slowly snapping open a secret compartment in the cockpit floor.

  I’m guessing that’s where he’d asked George the spy to stow some kind of defensive weapon in case we encountered hostilities on our hop down to Peru. Dad’s big on hiding stuff in strange places on board all our planes, boats, and motorized vehicles. The main mast on the Lost? These days, that’s where Dad hides his antique jousting lance—just in case.

  “I’m a really big fan,” said the camera guy, bobbing up and down in the bow of the canoe. “Big, big fan. I know all about you Kidds and your treasure-hunting adventures, because I work for my father’s most popular TV show.”

  He ran a hand across the sky like he was reading a billboard and said: “Nathan Collier’s Treasure Trove of Treasure-Hunting Treasure Hunters.” This big hocking class ring he was wearing sparkled in the sun.

  It was a horrible title for a TV show. Not just because it repeated itself. Nope. What made it super-stinky was the first part: Nathan Collier!

  Tommy angrily narrowed his eyes. “Collier.” He choked out the word, especially that K sound.

  “That’s right. I’m his oldest son, Chet Collier.”

  “Collier,” Tommy said again. This time, he spat out the K.

  “Whoa!” said Chet. “Ease up, dude. I know you guys and my dad hav
e had your differences in the past.”

  “That, my friend,” said our father, “would be an understatement.”

  For years, Nathan Collier has been our mom and dad’s number-one nemesis. Their supervillain archrival. Collier is another treasure hunter who is forever trying to snatch their finds out from under them or take credit for their discoveries because he isn’t very good at bringing anything up from a dive besides kelp-covered rubber boots. But Collier looks good on TV—with a slick smile and even slicker hair.

  Nathan Collier hosted a whole bunch of shows on something called the Adventure Channel. It’s one of the lesser-known cable networks. Right up there with the Watching-Paint-Dry Channel.

  “Dad’s turned over a new leaf,” said Chet Collier.

  “Why?” snarled Tommy. “Did he see somebody else under a palm tree turning over leaves and decide to steal their idea?”

  “It’s just an expression, dude. Means he’s changed. He’s not the creepy sleezoid I knew when I was young. He’s mellowed, man. Thinks you Kidds are the world’s greatest treasure hunters.”

  “Is that so?” muttered Dad skeptically.

  “Totally!” said Chet. “That’s why he sent me here to produce our brand-new TV special: The Kidd Family Treasure Hunters!”

  “Wait a second,” said Tommy, his snarl relaxing into something resembling a quizzical smile. “You want to turn us into TV stars?”

  “Exactly. And Tommy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Just between you and me, bro? Chicks dig TV stars!”

  CHAPTER 24

  “Look,” said Chet Collier, still bobbing up and down in the canoe, “Dad knows he can never be as good as the Kidd family.”

  “It’s true,” said Storm. “And I have the statistics to back that up.”