by David Wood
She doubted he could survive until nightfall.
After a while, more patients were brought in, all of them feverish and coughing blood, some babbling incoherently. At first, Maria ignored their ravings, but then she realized that all of them kept repeating the same phrases, or at least making the same incomprehensible sounds.
On an impulse, she took a closer look at the symbols scribbled on the floor by the other patients. They weren’t identical, but the similarities were nonetheless astonishing. They also looked familiar, though she couldn’t say where she had seen them before. As she attempted to sketch a rough facsimile of the symbols, it occurred to her that she was now doing the same thing as the infected.
The sickest man let out a long, rattling exhalation that seemed to go on forever, like a balloon deflating completely. His head lolled to the side and dark blood dribbled from his mouth and nose. Maria knew he was dead. She crossed herself, and then rose to check his vitals just to be sure but before she could, the woman standing guard on the porch called out to her.
“Curandera, someone is coming.”
For a moment, Maria thought the woman meant more infected patients were being brought in, but then she heard the noise of helicopter rotors beating the air.
She ventured outside and saw, not one but several large dual rotor helicopters approaching from the south. Four of them had what appeared to be military-style Humvees dangling beneath them.
Evidently the president had not wasted any time mobilizing the army.
Within just a few minutes, the first of the helicopters—one that was not carrying a slung vehicle—settled on the road. Even before it was down, a squad of men—presumably soldiers—wearing full environment suits and carrying assault rifles jumped from a lowered cargo ramp in the rear of the aircraft. The helicopter took off quickly, making room for the next aircraft to perform a similar touch-and-go landing.
The Humvees came next. The vehicles were painted black, like the helicopters, with no markings. Maria watched, dumbfounded, as hazmat-suited soldiers climbed into the Humvees and drove off down the mountain road in both directions. When the road was clear, the helicopters began setting down, one in front of another, like a line of school buses. Their rotors continued to spin, hot exhaust pouring from their turbines. The rest of the soldiers, too many for Maria to count, fanned out through the village in small groups. One of the groups seemed to be heading straight for her.
She stepped forward to identify herself, but the soldiers brandished their rifles at her and she froze. A suited figure stepped out of the group, but it was only when the person was standing right in front of her that Maria saw it was a woman—a light-skinned woman with red hair.
“Are you in charge?” the woman asked. She spoke Spanish, but her accent marked her as from somewhere outside Honduras.
“I don’t know if I’m in charge,” Maria said, “but I am a doctor with the Ministry of Health. I called for the quarantine.”
Behind the Perspex face shield, the woman’s expression was unreadable. She nodded to the house behind Maria. “Are there infected inside?”
“Yes. One just died. Three more are in an advanced stage. The others are less advanced but still critical.”
The woman turned away without acknowledging Maria, and addressed the soldiers. “We’ve got multiple subjects in here. Secure them for transport.”
Maria gasped in surprise when she heard the woman speak in English. “Are you from the American CDC?” she asked haltingly in the same language.
“Something like that,” the woman turned away as the soldiers pushed past Maria, moving into the house.
Further down the road, the soldiers were rounding up groups of villagers by the roadside even though they did not appear to be showing any signs of infection. Maria knew she ought to feel relieved by the swift and overwhelming response, but instead she was frightened, and not just because of the strange disease.
After a few minutes, a pair of soldiers emerged from the house, carrying one of the late-stage infected patients on a litter between them. The woman in the hazmat suit stopped them and after a quick assessment, signaled for them to continue. The soldiers took the patient to the helicopter and disappeared inside. One by one, the rest of the infected were brought out on litters, along with the body of the recently deceased man.
Maria approached the woman again. “Where are you taking them?”
The woman held up a hand to silence her, and Maria realized she was speaking to someone using a telephone or radio headset. Maria couldn’t hear either side of the exchange, but after the last of the patients was transferred to the waiting helicopter, the woman called out to one of the soldiers. “We've got what we need. Clean it up.”
CHAPTER 6
Xibalba was a name Maddock did recognize. It was the ancient Maya version of hell—the afterlife, land of the dead, etc. It wasn’t a real place, and he had told Charles Bell as much.
“That may be true,” Bell had replied with the same solemn tone. “But the City of Shadow is real. The golden plate Miranda found in the cenote proves it.”
Maddock had not pressed for more information. The artifact was real enough. He’d seen it in the video footage from Miranda’s GoPro. Whether it proved the existence of the City of Shadow or Xibalba or anything else was ultimately irrelevant. Tam Broderick had asked him to assist Bell, and right now, that meant helping the archaeologist recover the golden disk from the cenote, which was why he and Bones were now geared up and ready for a plunge into the depths. Unfortunately, Bell’s daughter had insisted on joining them.
“I know exactly where it is,” she had told them. “Honestly, you don’t even need to go. Just loan me a tank and I’ll bring it back inside of twenty minutes.”
“Why do you need one of our tanks?” Bones asked. “Come to think of it, why didn’t you bring it out on your first dive?”
“He’s right,” Maddock said. “Diving alone was foolish. You’re lucky you made it back. Be grateful for that gift and don’t push it.”
“Fine,” she snapped. “I’ll let you tag along.”
“You’ll let—”
“I know where it is. The longer we’re up here arguing about who goes, the more likely it is that those thugs will come back to finish what they started.”
That was something that weighed heavily on Maddock’s mind. He had only gotten a glimpse of one man of the pair that Bell and his daughter claimed had threatened them. The guy hadn’t looked particularly threatening—he had been in full retreat mode before Maddock and this friends had shown up—but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t be back.
He turned to Bones. “Maybe one of us should stay topside. Just in case.”
Angel broke in. “I think I can handle things for twenty minutes without a bodyguard.”
“I didn’t mean...” Maddock felt his cheeks go hot in embarrassment.
“Pretty sure you did, bro,” Bones chimed in.
Maddock sighed. “I suppose I did at that.” He moved closer. “Don’t take any chances. If there’s trouble...”
“I’ll deal with it,” she said, her voice brimming with confidence.
Lord save me from strong independent-minded women, though in truth, that was one of the things he loved about Angel Bonebrake.
He looked over at Miranda, who appeared to be holding back laughter, and shook his head. “We’ll let you tag along,” he told her, “but you’re going to play by our rules. Gear up. Make sure you have three sources of light. And we’re not going to rush. You cause a silt-out in those passages, and we’ll be swimming blind. Once you show us where the entrance to the side passage is, Bones will take the lead and set a guide line.”
Bones tilted his head toward his friend. “Maddock used to teach kindergarten. Can you tell?”
Miranda’s smile twitched into a frown. She pulled on her dive harness, now outfitted with one of the tanks Maddock had carried in.
“Bones will take the lead,” Maddock went on, “because anywher
e his fat butt can fit, you and I will have no trouble getting through.”
“I got it.” Miranda snapped. Then she turned to the edge of the cenote and stepped forward, taking the plunge.
Bones raised his hands in a defeated gesture, then followed her into the pit.
Once he was in the water, head down and breathing from his supply line, Maddock felt a little better. This was his element; he felt much more at home in the water and under it. There was something dream-like about the quiet solitude and weightlessness that both comforted and energized him. The crystal clear water of the cenote only enhanced the experience.
It was a pity they were going to have to rush the dive.
Miranda was about twenty feet away, waving her dive light to get his attention. She was floating beside a tangle of roots, which partially covered a shadowy opening in the cavern wall. Bones flashed a thumb’s up, and swam over and began pulling at the roots. When he had cleared a space large enough for him to pass through, he pulled a double-arm length of monofilament from the reel attached to his harness, tied it off on one of the roots, and then wriggled through. Miranda seemed to take that as permission to follow, and before Maddock could reach the passage, she disappeared from view.
Maddock kicked over to the opening, took hold of the line and went in after her. He could see Miranda, silhouetted in the cone of illumination cast by her dive light. She was moving faster than he would have like, as evidenced by the fine motes of silt that now fogged the passage. It wasn’t enough to jeopardize the dive, and he knew that Miranda was not solely to blame since Bones was setting the pace, but it nevertheless irritated him. Cave diving was generally considered the most dangerous recreation sport, as measured by the fatality rate among participants—arguably even more dangerous than high-altitude mountaineering or BASE jumping. There was no such thing as “too careful” when it came to cave diving, especially here where the surface was so deceptively close.
But maybe Bones was right; maybe he was too much of a mother hen.
He soon emerged from the passage into the cavern he had seen on Miranda’s video. Bones had left the reel of monofilament at the mouth of the tunnel, with a couple bright green chemlights to increase its visibility. Maddock took note of all the other passage openings around the circumference of the cavern. Twelve of them, all more or less evenly spaced like the numbers on a clock face. It was unlikely that they were all naturally occurring which suggested that the cenote had served some very important purpose in the ancient past. He regretted that there wasn’t more time to carry out a comprehensive survey of the entire system, but the carpet of human remains on the floor below made that an impossibility. Once they had the disk in their possession and were safely away from the cenote, he would have to leave an anonymous tip with the Mexican authorities. Hopefully, once the police investigators were done, they would turn the site over to an archaeological team.
Bones and Miranda were just visible behind the carved stone altar in the center of the chamber. Maddock swam over to them to observe the recovery of the artifact. The disk had dropped into the bone pile, which he now saw was at least a couple layers deep. There were dozens of corpses in the cavern. Most were almost certainly sacrificial victims offered up by the ancient Maya, their bones slowly but surely dissolving away. But, as Miranda had told them, many of the skeletons were clearly recent additions.
The gold disk had landed atop the chest on an older skeleton, hitting with sufficient force to smash through the ribs, leaving what looked like a blast crater in the surrounding sediment layer. Bones was meticulously picking out the splinters of bone that covered the shiny yellow disk, careful not to stir up the silt again.
Maddock knew that if the disk was really made of gold it would be a lot heavier than it looked. He guessed it to be in the neighborhood of ten pounds, which didn’t sound like much, and wouldn’t have been if they could have walked out. Swimming with that much weight however was a little trickier, and simply trying to pick it up without causing a silt-out would be especially challenging.
Once the artifact was completely exposed, Bones produced a mesh dive bag and began working it under and around the heavy disk. Once it was safely inside the bag, he attached a small yellow lift balloon and used his octopus to inflate it. The lift bag swelled slowly and the line went taut, but the artifact remained where it was, as if anchored to the cavern floor, for several more seconds. Bones kept adding more air until the bag with the disk finally began to rise, then he drew it up effortlessly like a kid holding a helium balloon at a circus, and turned to give Maddock a thumb’s up.
While Bones had been occupied with recovering the artifact, Maddock had been busy snapping pictures of the carved glyphs with the camera in his waterproof phone. The cavern had almost certainly been dry when the altar was put here, and given the local water table, that meant the ancient Maya had probably found a way to pump the water out, but evidently only long enough to set up the altar with the golden artifact. Why they had done that was a mystery that Maddock was keen to solve, especially if the answer was somehow related to Bell’s search for the City of Shadow.
Maddock returned the signal, then gestured to the exit. They would go out in the same order they came in, with Maddock bringing up the rear and recovering the guideline as he went. Bones went through first, pushing the inflated lift bag ahead of him, and Miranda followed close behind—a little too close for Maddock’s liking—kicking up silt in her eagerness. He rapped the hilt of his dive knife against his tank to get her attention, and then made a patting gesture.
Slow down.
Behind the glass of her mask, Miranda gave him a narrow-eyed glare of irritation, but the brief interruption gave Bones a little breathing room.
As Maddock pushed through the screen of roots at the end of the passage, he saw Bones rising up into the azure circle of daylight in the center of the cavern, with Miranda, once again, close on his heels. Maddock shook his head in irritation and was about to turn to untie the monofilament line when he saw Bones abruptly drop his left arm, his hand extended flat like the blade of a knife, slashing the water around him.
Maddock had no difficulty interpreting the message. Stay back. Something’s wrong.
He let go of the still-tied safety line and kicked hard to catch up to Miranda. He snagged her harness, stopping her just a few feet shy of the opening, and hauled her back. As he did, he bled off some air from his buoyancy compensator to drag them both away from the surface.
Miranda however had other ideas. She twisted around, fixing him with another Medusa glare, and then kicked her legs hard, fighting the downward drag. One of her sweeping flippers struck his arm, breaking his grip, which not only caused her to jet away like a torpedo, but caused Maddock to sink like a stone.
He spat out his regulator, calling a warning into the water, but Miranda never looked back.
Miranda had no idea why Maddock had gone mental and attacked her. Maybe he had gotten his tanks mixed up and was breathing some exotic gas mixture. Maybe he had just panicked.
Or maybe he and his friends are going to try to steal the disk.
She doubted that was the case, but couldn’t think of a better explanation to explain the former SEAL’s outrageous behavior.
She broke the surface, and immediately kicked back, trying to put some distance between herself and Bones. The big Native American was grinning like a crazy man.
“What the hell?” she shouted.
But then she realized he wasn’t grinning exactly. It was more of a grimace. Through his clenched teeth, he said. “We’ve got company.”
It was like déjà vu all over again. A rough-looking local—not one of the pair she had run off earlier, but someone new—loomed above her and Bones. The only difference this time was that the man had a big Magnum revolver pointed down at them.
She had badly underestimated both the resolve and the resources of the local hoodlums.
“Stop wasting my time,” the man shouted. He spoke English with onl
y a slight accent. “Give me what you found, or we’ll kill your friends.”
With that ominous threat, the man drew back, but reappeared a moment later, gripping Angel’s ponytail with one hand. The other held the muzzle of the pistol to Angel’s jaw.
Miranda gasped involuntarily. Where was her father? Dead already?
Bones brought his hands out of the water. “Whoa. Slow your roll, homeboy. You got the pistol, so you keep the pesos. Does that seem fair?”
The man jabbed the pistol at Bones again. “The treasure you found. Bring it up.”
“What this?” Bones poked a finger at the yellow lift bag. “I got a keg of beer on the other end of this. Mucho cerveza, comprende? The cenote’s the perfect place to keep it cool.”
Miranda gaped at him. Bones was a cool customer, she had to give him that, but his bravado was going to get them all killed.
Speaking of which, where was Maddock?
“I’m not going to tell you again!” The man shook Angel again.
“Good. ‘Cause I’m tired of listening to you repeat yourself.”
“What the hell are you doing?” Miranda hissed.
Bones threw her a sidelong glance and spoke through his teeth again. “What do you think I’m doing? I’m stalling.”
He looked back up at the man with the gun pressed to Angel’s neck. “Okay, you win. But this thing’s heavy as hell. I’m not going to be able to pull it up the ladder. So either you let me come up there first, or you’re going to have to pull it up.”