As the men began to shift out of the way, Parrish got his first good look at his surroundings. As he had surmised, they were indeed outdoors, but he was unprepared for the sight that greeted his eyes.
Instead of an open field, he found himself standing in what appeared to be a courtyard or plaza, surrounded by walls of well-weathered stone. At one end of the plaza, a steep stone stairway rose up, and after a moment’s scrutiny, Parrish realized he was looking at a step pyramid. The plaza, pyramid and everything else around him were the ruins of a pre-Columbian civilization—probably Aztec if Beltran’s earlier comment was to be believed. In the torchlight, Parrish could see that the flank of the pyramid facing the courtyard was stained with large splotches that glistened wetly in the torchlight.
The men did not ascend the stairs, but instead gathered at the base of the structure, collecting around large clay pots. The smell of cooking food wafted over the plaza, something spicy and sweet—pork in a mole sauce, Parrish decided—and under any other circumstances, he probably would have found it appetizing, but at that exact moment, it just made him feel nausea.
What the hell? These guys are having a midnight snack?
It was all Parrish could do to keep silent as he watched Beltran reach into the pot nearest the staircase. With his bare hands, he plucked out a dripping morsel the size of a golf ball, put it in his mouth with a dramatic flourish and began chewing with almost obscene vigor. “Buldog, you should have some.”
“I ate on the plane. Look, I really don’t mean to offend you and your ancient traditions, but shouldn’t you save the victory celebration until after you win?”
“Believe me, we will feast. But this meal is not a celebration. This is a communion with Huitzilopochtli. We share a meal with our god so that he will be in us when we fight our enemies.”
Parrish held his tongue. He had known from the outset that Beltran was not somebody who could be reasoned with, but whatever was happening here went beyond mere machismo and obstinacy. The men, all of them, were deep into what could only be described as a religious trance. They attacked the repast with a strange mixture of gusto and reverence, and as they savored their portions, they seemed almost to transform, like something from a superhero movie. Their muscles swelled, some of them actually seemed to grow taller before his eyes. Parrish could almost feel the aggression boiling off their bodies. If he interfered now, there was not a doubt in his mind that the outcome would be fatal.
He shook his head, convinced that there had to be some kind of hallucinogen in the food, or maybe in the smoke from the torches or the cooking fires. Something that he was inhaling for a contact buzz. If Beltran wanted to get his guys all cranked up before the fight, that was none of Parrish’s business. His part in this was nearly done.
Beltran shouted something in the Nahuatl tongue, and a moment later the sound of drums filled the courtyard, beating out a fast rhythm. The men continued to eat, but Beltran was evidently finished, for he took hold of one of the torches and motioned for Parrish to join him as he began ascending the steps. Parrish had to jog to catch up to him, and as he stepped across the dark stains on the stairs, he could smell the metallic tang of fresh blood.
They must have slaughtered the pigs up here, Parrish thought, and he was very glad that he hadn’t eaten.
The pyramid was not very tall, only about sixty feet high, but Parrish was winded by the time he reached the platform at the top. Beltran was waiting at the entrance to a squat structure. The man led the way into the dark interior with his torch. The room was empty but for a single stone slab—possibly a sacrificial altar, judging by the veritable sea of blood that drenched it. Sitting atop it, looking completely out of place, was a small microwave oven.
“We collected all their phones,” Beltran said. “And put them in here, just as you instructed.”
Parrish nodded. “The oven is designed to contain electromagnetic radiation, so it’s blocking the cellular signals. When your men are in position, we’ll open the door and allow the phones to start looking for a network. They’ll immediately become visible to anyone looking for them, and anyone with a computer will be able to pinpoint the GPS coordinates.”
“Won’t they suspect a trap?”
“They might, but it won’t matter. They have to go where the signal leads them. Which means you need to decide where you want them to go.”
Beltran extended his arms over the altar, palms down. “Right here. They will be offered to Huitzilopochtli.”
Parrish tried not to think about what that might mean. “I’ll show your men how to use the TOW system I brought. But first, we need to talk about the hostages.”
Beltran made a dismissive gesture. “I’ve taken care of them.”
“You were supposed to turn them over to me. That was our deal.”
“I don’t make deals,” Beltran said with a sneer. In the torchlight, with his ritual garments and tattooed body, he looked more like a beast than a man. “You should have figured that out by now, Buldog.”
“Where are they? What did you do with—” The chill returned suddenly. His gaze was drawn magnetically to the blood on the altar. It seemed to be moving. The whole room was moving. “What have you done?”
“I told you. I took care of them.” And then, with a maniacal grin, Beltran reached for the microwave oven and opened it.
23
The Chess Team flew through the sky on their own wings. Unseen and virtually invisible to both the naked eye and radar, they soared like raptors, four miles above the night-dark landscape.
On their previous visit, just twenty-four hours ago, they had HAHO jumped—high-altitude, high-opening—using their parachutes like hang-gliders, cruising several miles to a point near the El Sol facility, but this time they were using a slightly different method to approach the target zone undetected by both the cartel and Mexican air defenses.
The Gryphon Attack Glider Mark II was, King thought, about as close to flying like a super-hero as a person could get. The Gryphon was similar in design to a wingsuit, but it was made of rigid carbon fiber, which provided even more lift and maneuverability at high altitudes. That was a necessity since they each carried nearly a hundred extra pounds of gear and ammunition. The Gryphon had a fall ratio of about three-to-one, which meant that for every foot of vertical descent, they moved three feet closer to their destination.
The blast of frigid air that permeated King’s insulated coveralls was like a double-shot of espresso after hours of sitting in the cargo bay of Crescent II. Despite his earlier assurance, Aleman had been unable to pin down a location for the hostages before they reached Mexican airspace, so they had diverted to an aerial refueling tanker over the Caribbean Sea to extend their mission time. However, as the stealth transport headed back toward the mainland, the tech expert made good on his promise. A phone belonging to one of the missing tourists had briefly made contact with a cellular tower, giving Aleman a precise GPS fix. There was no guarantee that they would find the hostages there, but the remote area—about fifty miles northeast of Mexico City and more than a hundred miles from the coast—was reason to hope that the phone had merely been overlooked by the kidnappers. Chess Team had immediately started pre-breathing in anticipation of a high-altitude depressurization, while Crescent cruised in circles above the drop zone, taking infra-red pictures of the target location.
The real-time aerial surveillance imagery was now super-imposed on the display of King’s glasses, a ghostly outline on the ground, some ten miles away, with a bright red dot at the center. The site was in a field, accessible only by a barely discernible road. That connected to an only slightly better dirt track that ran for several miles, before connecting to a paved, but still evidently remote country road. Unlike Mano’s compound in Quintana Roo, there was no evidence of human habitation, or more precisely, no recent occupation. The road ended at what appeared to be the ruins of an ancient city, and the red dot marking the location of the GPS signal was centered on a square structure that l
ooked very much like a step pyramid. The nearest modern structure was a small factory complex a few miles away—also evidently abandoned.
Aleman’s research verified that the site was not a registered archaeological ruin, which was not altogether a surprise. The region had hosted numerous civilizations in the thousands of years before contact with European explorers. New sites were being discovered all the time by farmers clearing fields, and not all of those farmers were keen on having government officials and scholars tramping around their land—especially those who were engaged in illicit activities. The unregistered sites were also a trove of antiquities that could be sold on the black market, providing additional revenue for the property owners.
Given the reputation of the El Sol cartel, King was not at all surprised that the hostages were being kept in the ruins, but what did concern him was the complete absence of activity. There were no cars, no lights, no patrols roaming the perimeter of the site. That meant either the cartel had moved on, or there was a lot more to the ruins than met the eye.
He picked a spot a full mile to the north of the pyramid and marked it in the virtual display. “Let’s put down there,” he murmured, knowing the words would be easily heard by the others and that the same yellow marker had appeared in their glasses as well. “That will be our rally point. We’ll hump it in nice and slow. Get a feel for the place.”
“You think it’s a trap?” Bishop asked, putting into words what King and surely the rest of them were already thinking.
“We’ll treat it like it is.” King said nothing more, but concentrated on the numbers ticking away in the head’s-up display. When he was still a thousand feet up and about two miles from the objective, he deployed his parachute.
The nine-celled ram-air chute snapped up out of its pack and filled with air, dragging him abruptly to what felt like a dead stop. He was still sailing through the skies, the taut canopy overhead giving him the power of flight much like the glider, but compared to the rush of free-flight, drifting under the canopy was about as exciting as lounging on a pool float after a ride in a jet boat. The Gryphon, which had only moments before given him the power to soar like an eagle, now felt like an anchor, dragging him earthward.
Using the toggles, he steered toward the designated landing site and corkscrewed around it until the ground was just below his feet. At the last second, he pulled on the toggles again, braking, and came almost to a complete stop in mid-air, just inches above the loose dirt.
As soon as he was down, he quickly hauled in the chute, stuffing it into a nylon pouch, and then he shrugged out of the Gryphon’s multi-point harness. Within seconds of touchdown, he was kneeling, readying his FN SCAR-L rifle—a step up in firepower from the more discreet MP5s they had used the night before. He scanned the area for any sign of activity. “Sound off,” he said.
One by one, the team checked in with their callsign and the color code: “Green.” All had made it down safely and were fully mission capable.
With Queen and Rook providing security, King and the others began deploying the equipment stored in the Gryphons’ wings, after which they stacked the gliders along with their chutes and overalls. Bishop rigged the cache with an incendiary grenade, equipped with a multi-function detonator—time delay, anti-tamper and remote activation.
King turned a slow circle, surveying the landscape in all directions. The field appeared to be open range, with large patches of knee-high grass and shrubs that masked the gentle rise and fall of the terrain. The nearest high ground, aside from the pyramid itself, was more than three miles away, too far to be of any use in establishing an overwatch position. “Knight, it looks like you’re gonna get to stay with us for a change. Echelon Black, Rook take the lead.”
Echelon Black was their own variation on the infantry tactical marching formation. They lined up in order, corresponding to the starting positions their respective chess pieces would have occupied on the game board, separated by a ten-yard interval. At the order to move, Rook headed out, and when he had gone about fifteen paces, Knight started forward, and then Bishop, King and Queen in turn. The formation was ideal for moving across open terrain toward a target since it gave them maximum forward visibility, and put both Rook’s machine gun and Knight’s sniper rifle at the forefront, ready to lay down suppressive fire in the event of contact. The trade-off was that they would risk greater exposure to enemy forces, but that danger was significantly reduced with their chameleon suits.
“Got a couple of hot spots,” Knight reported.
With his implant, equipped with a thermal scope, Knight could see a lot more than the rest of them.
“Tangos?” King asked, employing the common military jargon that could mean either ‘terrorists’ or ‘targets,’ depending on the situation.
Knight scanned the terrain silently for a moment. “I can’t tell. There’s a heat source at the base of that pyramid, but there are too many walls in the way. Too hot to be human though. Might be the coals of a fire.”
“Could mean they’ve already bugged out,” Rook said.
“It could,” King agreed. He was more concerned by Knight’s grim tone, a definite change from just a few minutes earlier when they had all reported green. “But let’s just assume that they haven’t. We’ll hold up a hundred yards out. Stop, look and listen.”
They crossed the open ground silently, checking in all directions for any sign of activity, but the field and the ruined city appeared to be abandoned. King was not sure whether to hope that was the case. If the cartel had indeed moved on, then the mission was a bust and their only lead a dead end. But the alternative—an enemy force that was dug in, and perhaps expecting an intervention—might be a lot worse.
They halted just outside the perimeter of the ruins, looking for some indication of what awaited within. A faint smell of wood smoke and cooking meat hung in the air, but there was something else, too: a familiar musky odor.
“I know that smell,” Rook said. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget it.”
“Boars,” King confirmed. “Could be a wild herd roaming nearby.”
“Not with our luck.”
King was inclined to agree. “Knight, you got anything on thermal?”
“Nothing new. If there’s anything living here, it’s covered up.”
King weighed the assessment for a few seconds. “This isn’t right.”
Deep Blue joined the conversation. “Crescent is about ninety minutes to bingo, but that doesn’t factor in pick up.”
King knew that the process of landing the VTOL used a lot of fuel, which meant that if they couldn’t find the hostages and get them to the pick up zone soon—an hour at the outside—Crescent would have to leave for another refueling rendezvous.
“We can’t leave without at least checking,” Queen said. “Even if they’re gone, they might have left a clue to where they’re headed.”
“It’s your call, King,” Deep Blue said.
“Let’s walk the perimeter. Knight, if it flickers, I want to know about it.”
They resumed their trek, maintaining a hundred-yard standoff distance from the outermost edge of the ruins. The circuit took another fifteen minutes but yielded no meaningful results. The site was completely dark.
King’s gut was telling him to walk away, but he shared Queen’s earlier sentiment. They had come too far to just walk away without knowing for sure. “All right, we’re going in. Castle and move in, single file.”
Just as in chess, ‘castle’ meant that Rook and King would switch places. In the game it was a tactic designed to protect the king and get the rook into the open, but for the team, this maneuver made King the point man. Standard military doctrine discouraged a unit commander from taking point for the simple reason that, if the shit hit the fan, he would be the first to die. The rest of the unit would be left leaderless at a time when leadership was needed most. But with their experience and the long-distance guidance from Deep Blue, that possibility was less of a consideration
for the Chess Team. Still, it took the team a moment to grasp what King was telling them to do. He didn’t wait, but started forward into the ruins.
Despite the complete absence of heat signatures, King scanned each structure he passed. The broken walls showed no sign of any recent activity, but there were enough of them to form a veritable maze, which was almost certainly the intent of the city’s original architects. Fortunately, Crescent’s aerial surveillance revealed the most direct route to the center, but as King pushed deeper into the labyrinth, the distinctive animal scent grew stronger as did his sense of foreboding.
When he entered an open courtyard near the center of the site, a short distance away he could see twin spots of brightness near the base of the pyramid—the dying embers of the fire Knight had earlier spotted. The pyramid itself was a steeply built succession of tiers, with a staircase running up the middle of the side facing the courtyard. King did not fail to notice the dark smear that stained the steps, and despite the lack of color in the night vision display, he knew exactly what it was.
He had seen enough.
“We’re done here. Blue, have Crescent waiting for us at the rally point. Queen, take us out.” King’s tone indicated that the matter was not open to debate.
There was none. Queen set a brisk pace that brought them out of the ruins in less than a minute. King could see the icon marking their goal, the designated pick up zone where they had cached the Gryphon wings, two miles out. It had taken them more than half an hour to make a cautious, stealthy approach. At their current pace, they would cross the distance in half that time.
Too long, King thought. If this is a trap, we’re already in it. “Double time.”
Despite their heavy combat loads, there was not a single protesting groan. Queen broke into a near-sprint and everyone else followed suit, matching her pace.
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