CHAPTER 9

It was something that nobody had done.

The more Elkins studied lidar, the more he was convinced that, if the lost city existed and he had the fortitude to resume the search, lidar would find it. His excitement, however, was tempered by the thought of trying to get the permits from the Honduran government, which had been a nightmare the previous time around. The government had changed hands several times and undergone a military coup, and the permitting process looked more daunting than ever. “I wondered,” Elkins told me, “if I wanted to go through all that bullshit again.” Mosquitia in the dozen intervening years had become extremely dangerous, an outlaw region controlled by violent drug cartels and criminal gangs. Even to fly a plane in Mosquitia airspace was perilous, as it was the prime flight corridor of cocaine smugglers, where unidentified planes might be shot down by either the US or Honduran military.

Then came one of those crazy coincidences that a novelist wouldn’t dare put in a book. As Steve Elkins was pondering what to do, he got a call from his old friend and fixer in Honduras, Bruce Heinicke.

Bruce and his Honduran wife, Mabel, had moved to St. Louis in 1996 after Mabel’s sister had been murdered in Honduras. Bruce gave up his drug smuggling and looting career and settled down to more mundane pursuits. But he, like Elkins, couldn’t shake his obsession with finding the White City.

At the end of 2009, Mabel returned to Tegucigalpa, without Bruce, to attend her father’s funeral. At the time, the country was recovering from a military coup. The coup had taken place earlier in the year, when the current leftist president, José Manuel Zelaya, had launched a heavy-handed effort to hold a referendum to rewrite the Constitution so that he could try to gain a second term of office. The Supreme Court ruled the attempt illegal; Zelaya defied the court; and the Honduran Congress ordered his arrest. Early on a Sunday morning, the military disarmed the presidential guard, rousted Zelaya from bed, and put him on a plane to Costa Rica, where, in the airport, he gave a fiery speech of defiance still wearing his pajamas. The press reported that Zelaya had been forced out of the country so quickly he wasn’t allowed to dress, but Honduran officials privately told me later that he had been allowed to dress and take some clothes with him; in a moment of wily stagecraft, he had changed back into his pajamas on the airplane in order to garner more sympathy and outrage.

The military turned power back over to the civilian sector, and elections were held five months later. Those bitterly contested elections brought into power Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo Sosa. While Mabel was in the church for the funeral, she heard that Pepe, the new president-elect, would be attending services in the same church the following Saturday with his cabinet, to get God’s blessing for his upcoming four-year term.

She mentioned this in a phone call to Bruce, who urged her to seize the opportunity. Mabel told me in an interview: “Bruce kept bringing it up all week. ‘You get close with this guy,’ he said ‘and explain to him about the White City. Just leave the rest up to me.’”

On the day of the president’s visit, she went to the church with her brother, Mango, a Honduran soccer star, to try to buttonhole the president. The place was jammed. The president arrived late, with twenty bodyguards and a contingent of local police with rifles.

After the service, Mango told Mabel to stay in her seat and he would arrange everything. He went up to talk to the pastor, but as their conversation dragged on, it became clear to Mabel that he was getting nowhere. Meanwhile, the president and his entourage got up to leave, and Mabel realized she was about to lose the opportunity. She rose from her seat and barreled through the thronging crowds, shoving people aside. She drove toward the president, who was surrounded by a chain of bodyguards with arms linked. She called out his name—“Pepe! Pepe!”—but he ignored her. Finally she rammed her way to the ring of guards, reached over them, and grabbed the president’s arm. “I said, ‘Pepe, I need to speak to you!’”

“Okay,” he replied, resignedly turning toward her, “you got my attention.”

“I said to the bodyguards, ‘Excuse me, let me through.’ And they shook their heads no. The bodyguards put their hands on their guns. They were holding their hands very strong and I was trying to push them around. Pepe was laughing and I told him, ‘Can you tell them to let me through?’ They did, then they closed the circle around me holding hands again, very tight.

“I ask him if he had heard about Ciudad Blanca. He says yes. I say my husband tried to find this city twenty years ago. He says, ‘This sounds kind of interesting, keep going.’ I say he’s been there.* He says, ‘Can your husband go there again?’ And I say, ‘That’s why we need your permission.’”

Lobo looked at her and finally answered: “Okay, you made it through here. You got to me, God only knows how. I’ve heard about this city but I’ve never heard of anyone who’s been there physically. I trust you and I want you to trust me. I will introduce you to a member of my cabinet. He will speak for me, and he will be able to get all your permits and everything you need to get this done. His name is Áfrico Madrid.”

So Mabel went to where the cabinet had gathered and found Áfrico. “I start talking with him about the project. He said, ‘Wow, that does sound interesting.’ He said, ‘If the president told you we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it. I’m going to get you everything you need.’”

They exchanged e-mail addresses.

As Mabel was leaving, she saw the president getting into his car and rushed over to him, asking to have a selfie taken with him on her cell phone. He obliged and then asked for the phone, saying he wanted to speak to her husband. She gave it to him and he called Bruce Heinicke in the States.

“I’m sitting in St. Louis, and here comes this call,” Heinicke said to me. “It’s the president of Honduras on the phone. He asks me, ‘You really know where it’s at?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ He said, ‘I want to do this. It will be good for the country.’”

The president hung up the phone and gave it back to Mabel, saying, “Now can I go?”

“Yes, Pepe,” she said, “you can go.” Mabel recalled: “He took off like I was going to chase him down and ask for something else!”

Elkins was astounded and skeptical when he heard this bizarre story, which happened to coincide with his reading the article on lidar. But when he followed up with Bruce and the new Honduran government, he discovered it was true. President Lobo was enthusiastic about the project, seeing the advantages such a discovery would offer his country as well as its potential to bolster his own shaky popularity.

With the president’s blessing and his permits assured, Elkins flew to Houston to meet with the staff at the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping, which had mapped Caracol, to try to persuade them to take on his scheme. NCALM is a joint project of the University of Houston and the University of California, Berkeley, funded by the National Science Foundation, and its mission is confined to academic and scientific research, not raw exploration for lost cities that probably don’t exist. The co–principal investigator and chief scientist at NCALM is a man named William Carter, one of the fathers of lidar. As a graduate student, Carter had worked on the Apollo missions and helped design and operate one of the first lunar laser ranging stations, able to measure the earth–moon distance to an accuracy of a few centimeters.

Elkins spent the day trying to convince Carter and Ramesh Shrestha, director of NCALM, and their team to join in the search for the lost city. It was an eccentric proposal, unlike anything NCALM had done in the past. With Caracol, they were mapping a world-renowned site with guaranteed results; Elkins’s project was a crapshoot that might be a waste of time and a scientific embarrassment. Lidar had never been used before as a tool of pure archaeological exploration—that is, to look for something nobody could be sure even existed.

“We don’t really know if there’s anything there,” Shrestha said. “The question is: Can we find anything at all?” But Carter was impressed that Elkins had earlier enlisted NASA in the hunt for the city. He looked over Ron Blom’s images of T1 and felt there was enough there to take a chance.

It was a risky project on many levels. Shrestha remembered their debate. “It was something that nobody had done. It had the potential to find something and have a significant impact in the archaeological field. I said explicitly to Steve: ‘Look, this is an experimental project. We will do the best we can. We can’t promise it will work—and we can’t take the blame if it doesn’t!’” Shrestha and Carter were both, however, attracted to the challenge of trying to map terrain under the densest rainforest on earth. If lidar worked in Mosquitia it would work anywhere. It would be the ultimate test of the technology.

A few members of the NCALM team were more skeptical. “There were some on my staff,” said Shrestha, “who said we cannot do this” because the rainforest is too thick. “‘Without trying it,’ I said, ‘you can’t tell me it’s not doable.’”

Others were troubled that no archaeologists were involved. “Steve Elkins is a film guy,” Michael Sartori, the chief mapping scientist at NCALM, said to me later. “Many times, I told my coworkers that this was a bad idea, that this is not the kind of project we should be doing. This is not the normal mode of supplying quality data to academics in the field of archaeology.”

Elkins first proposed to NCALM that they survey all of Mosquitia with lidar. But when he learned it would cost millions of dollars, he whittled down the search area to about fifty square miles. Mapping that would run to about a quarter million dollars in direct costs and a similar amount in supporting costs.

T1 was only twenty square miles. In case T1 came up empty, Steve chose three other unexplored areas to survey. He called these T2, T3, and T4. T2 was a deep valley surrounded by white limestone cliffs that had also been rumored to contain the White City. T3 was an area like T1—difficult to get to, scientifically unexplored, a gentler landscape with large open areas, locked in by mountains. T4 was the valley where Elkins believed Sam Glassmire had found his ruin.

Elkins did intensive research into the four target areas to see if any recent exploration had been done, archaeological or otherwise. He pulled together the latest maps of all the known archaeological sites in Mosquitia. He combed the archives of the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History looking for unpublished reports, and he searched the official Honduran register of archaeological sites.

Over the course of the twentieth century, archaeologists had identified about two hundred archaeological sites in Mosquitia. This is almost nothing when compared to the many hundreds of thousands of sites recorded in the Maya region, or the 163,000 registered archaeological sites in my home state of New Mexico. These two hundred Mosquitia sites ranged from some large settlements with massive earthworks to many smaller sites, cave burials, rock art, and artifact scatters that all appeared to belong to the same widespread culture. Many of these sites, unlike in the Maya area, were simply dots on a map that had never been accurately surveyed, and virtually none had been fully excavated. A century of archaeology in Mosquitia had produced few answers, and much that had been done was limited, superficial, or of poor quality. Archaeologists so far had not been able to answer some of the most basic questions of this culture—who they were, where they came from, how they lived, and what happened to them. Without doubt, Mosquitia harbored many, many undiscovered sites that would yield essential secrets.

Elkins could find absolutely no archival evidence that anyone had ever explored T2, T3, or (aside from Glassmire) T4. With no record of human entry, they were blank, unknown to science. But were they also uninhabited? The archives wouldn’t document indigenous use of the areas for hunting and gathering.

Elkins ordered the latest satellite imagery of the four target areas. When the imagery came in, he had a shock. The most recent satellite photography of T4, the valley containing Glassmire’s White City, showed that it was pockmarked with several recent clear-cuts from illegal deforestation. Deforestation and archaeological looting go hand in hand; Glassmire’s ruin, if it existed, would have been uncovered and quietly looted, its movable artifacts likely dispersed into the black market or hauled off by locals. But Elkins also knew that there were many big ruins in Mosquitia, known and unknown, any one of which might be the legendary White City, if it indeed existed in its described form, which was at the time an open question. Elkins eliminated T4 from the list.

Sadly, T4’s fate was far from unusual. The Honduran rainforests are disappearing at a rate of at least 300,000 acres a year. Between 1990 and 2010, Honduras lost over 37 percent of its rainforest to clear-cutting. All of Elkins’s targets of interest lie within or close to the nominally protected Tawahka Asangni Biosphere and Río Plátano Biosphere Reserves, but protection and law enforcement are weak. The remoteness, the rugged mountains, and the hostility of the jungle are no match for the profits to be gained from logging and cattle grazing. Archaeology is in a race against deforestation; by the time archaeologists can reach a rainforest site to survey it, it may well be gone, fallen prey first to the logger’s ax and then the looter’s shovel.

The permits to lidar the Mosquitia rainforest were granted in October of 2010. They came with the blessing of the president and the minister of the interior and population, Áfrico Madrid, along with the full support of the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia (IHAH) and its chief, Virgilio Paredes. The new government of Honduras was squarely behind the search.

President “Pepe” Lobo was taking office after a contested election at one of the lowest points in Honduran history. The Honduran economy was the second poorest in the Americas. Large swaths of the countryside, towns, and parts of some large cities had been taken over by narcotraffickers. Gangs had sprouted up and were running brutal extortion and kidnapping rackets. The murder rate, already the highest in the world, was skyrocketing. Corruption was rampant. The judicial system and law enforcement were in collapse. The people were impoverished, adrift, cynical, and restive. The 2009 coup had left the country, including the archaeological community, bitterly fractured. Honduras was a country desperately in need of good news. The discovery of the White City, President Lobo told me later, would be that good news.