by David Wood
The man shook his head, then shifted his aim, training the big pistol on Miranda. “You. Climb up with the rope.”
“Do it,” Bones said under his breath. “Play along. Buy us some time.”
“For what?”
“Now!” shouted the gunman. “Move.”
Miranda threw up her hands. “Okay. I’m moving.”
She swam closer to Bones and gripped the mesh bag with the gold disk. She could feel its heaviness, its solidity. Getting out of the cenote with it wasn’t going to be easy, but that gave her an idea.
As she paddled over to the rope ladder, she slid her hand up a few inches, letting her fingers curl around the spring-loaded locking bar of the carabiner that connected the mesh bag to the yellow balloon. She reached up, gripped one of the rungs, and pulled herself up, and as she did, she gave the carabiner a squeeze and a twist.
Suddenly, the lift bag was light as air in her hand.
“Crap!” she said, feigning frustration. “It slipped.”
Bones was quick to catch on. “Sorry, dudes. We’ll have to go back down for it. Might take a few minutes.”
The gunman leaned forward, his face growing dark with rage. He stabbed the gun down at Miranda. “Are you kidding?” he hissed. “That was a big mistake.”
Miranda saw his finger tightening on the trigger, and decided that he was probably right about that.
CHAPTER 7
Maddock plunged into the passage, swimming like the world’s biggest bull shark was nipping at his flippers. While he didn’t know for sure what had prompted Bones to wave him off, two things were certain: he couldn’t surface, and he couldn’t stay under indefinitely. That left him with only one viable option: Find another way out, and fast.
Air wasn’t going to be a problem, or at least, not the most urgent one. He had at least an hour’s worth of air in his main tank, which was plenty of time to explore the passages in the other cavern, but it was doubtful that his friends had that long.
He emerged into the cavern with the altar, and immediately turned to the right, and then turned again, plunging into the next passage. It was narrower than the other tunnel, and just a few yards in, it began sloping down. Maddock’s first impulse was to stop and head back, but there wasn’t enough room for him to turn around, so he kept going, praying the passage would eventually widen out enough for him to reverse course.
It didn’t, and the slope remained constant, taking him deeper. Deeper underground was bad because it took him further from the people who needed his help, but deeper underwater was a lot worse because of the increasing risk of decompression sickness. He finally stopped, unbuckled his harness and shrugged out of it, letting it fall. He kicked forward a few more feet then rolled over and did a half-somersault that ended with him facing back up the passage.
Except now the passage was filled with an impenetrable cloud of sediment.
Maddock resisted the impulse to waste breath on a self-directed curse, and instead angled his body down and plunged headlong into the blinding murk. After a second or two, his groping hands encountered the rough stone floor of the passage. He swam forward, fighting back the almost overwhelming urge to freak the hell out.
His SCUBA gear was close by, right where he had dropped it, and he could hold his breath for a good two minutes.
Plenty of time.
His hand snagged something that wasn’t unyielding stone. After a few seconds of patient probing, he realized that it was one of the supply hoses attached to his regulator, and after a few more seconds, he found the mouthpiece, bit down on it and took a much-needed breath. His sense of relief however was fleeting. He was no closer to helping his friends, and the clock was still ticking relentlessly forward.
He kicked forward, deeper into the gloom, one hand extended to the wall of the passage, the other dragging the SCUBA rig along with him. The silt cloud diminished a little and soon his field of view was clear again, but he waited until he was back in the main cavern to slip back into the harness.
One down. Ten more to go.
He shook his head. Trial and error wasn’t going to cut it. There was no guarantee that any of the passages would lead him back to the surface. He couldn’t afford any more dead ends or worse, risk getting lost in a submerged maze. If he couldn’t find some way to reduce the uncertainty of his choices, he would have to take his chances with the front door.
Except, the passage back to the cenote didn’t feel like a front door. If anything, it felt more like an afterthought; a way to drown the underground temple or crypt to hide its existence.
Twelve passages. One of them leading from the cenote. And eleven others leading God only knew where.
Maddock didn’t know a great deal about Maya cosmology and traditions, but he knew their reputation as astronomers, and knew also that their architecture reflected their knowledge of the heavens.
He closed his eyes, trying to visualize the orientation of the passage to the cenote.
North, he decided, though he was far from confident.
The side of the altar with the golden disk had been facing the opposite direction—south. Was south an important or sacred direction for the Maya?
Jade would know, he thought darkly. Jade Ihara, his ex-girlfriend, was a renowned archaeologist specializing in pre-Columbian cultures. In fact, Miranda Bell reminded him a lot of Jade, and in more ways than just that.
But Jade wasn’t here, and regardless, it made sense that the main entrance to the cavern would be on the side facing the front of the altar.
Here goes nothing, he thought, kicking off the wall and swimming to the opposite side of the cavern.
There was a wide passage, sloping gently upward, directly opposite the front of the altar. Maddock thought it definitely felt more like a main entrance than the tunnel back to the cenote, but tried to temper his urgency with a little more caution than he had shown during his earlier explorations.
A hundred feet or so up the passage, the beam of his light hit a shimmery flat plane, like a mirror floating face down in the water. It was the surface.
He kicked furiously to reach it, and a few seconds later, was standing on an inclined ramp with his head and shoulders above water. He sniffed the air cautiously before taking his first full breath. It smelled faintly of mildew and damp, and he kept the mouthpiece ready, just in case he started to feel lightheaded.
A few more steps brought him fully onto dry stone. He slipped off his fins and left them on the ramp, and then decided to leave the rest of his SCUBA equipment there as well.
He clicked off his light and stared ahead into the darkness, searching for the glow of daylight, straining for a hint of a breeze or a whisper of sound.
Nothing.
He clicked on the light and started forward again in a jog, but after going only another fifty feet or so, hit a dead end. A pile of stones, most as big as beach balls, completely blocked the passage. It looked like a cave in.
Maddock played his light on the rocks, contemplating his choices. This felt like the original entrance to the cavern. It was likely that the outside world lay just beyond the collapsed section. Maybe he would only need to move a few of the stones to clear a space big enough to crawl through.
“Nothing ventured,” he murmured, and scrambled up the rock pile. He chose one of the smaller stones to start with, gripping it with both hands and pulling it toward him. It moved with surprising ease, releasing a small avalanche of loose dirt and pebbles. He cleared another stone, widening the gap, and as he let the rock tumble down, he saw a glimmer of daylight.
He scooped away more of the dirt, widening the hole and savoring the rush of fresh air from the outside world, then froze when he caught the sound of voices on the wind.
“Crap! It slipped.”
“Sorry, dudes. We’ll have to go back down for it. Might take a few minutes.”
The first voice was female, almost certainly Miranda, and the second belonged unquestionably to Bones, but both voices had a hollow qualit
y, as if they were speaking from inside a bottle.
The next voice was unfamiliar, but clear as a bell. “Are you kidding? That was a big mistake.”
The anger in the man’s tone galvanized Maddock. He scrambled forward, squirming through the hole with no idea what would await him on the other side. The earthen barrier crumbled beneath him and he spilled out onto a gentle slope covered with green vegetation. As he tumbled down, Maddock found the hilt of his dive knife. He drew the blade and came up in a crouch, ready to engage any enemy.
But he was alone.
“It was an accident!” Miranda’s protest sounded louder, but not by much. “I’ll dive down and get it. Don’t shoot.”
Shoot? Maddock thought. So they... whoever they are... have guns.
He recalled the old line about bringing a knife to a gunfight, but it was that or nothing. The voices were coming from behind the hill, which was between him and the cenote, and explained why his exit had gone unnoticed. That would give him a slight advantage, but only if he acted immediately. He scrambled back up the hill, knife at the ready.
From the hilltop, Maddock had an unobstructed view of the cenote that was about fifty yards away. There were four men, all holding pistols, though only one of them looked like he was ready to use his. That man was standing at the edge of the cenote, gripping Angel’s hair with one hand, but aiming a heavy caliber revolver down into the hole. Another figure—Charles Bell—lay prone on the ground, unmoving.
Maddock charged down the back slope at a full sprint, covering ten, fifteen, almost twenty yards before any of the men by the cenote noticed his approach. Two more bounding steps brought him to the halfway point even as gun barrels began rising and shifting toward him.
Crap!
He adjusted his grip on the knife, holding it in a hammer grip with his thumb resting on the back of the blade, and then without breaking stride, brought his arm around in an overhand motion and hurled the knife forward with all his might.
The blade shot forward, rotating slowly as it arced through the air. Maddock kept running, chasing after the knife. His target was the gunman holding Angel hostage. It was a risky choice. If his aim was off by even a degree, he might hit her instead of the bad guy, but of the four men, Angel’s captor was the most immediate threat.
Maddock’s aim was true, but as the knife reached the end of its journey, rotating completely around so that its point was leading again, the man flinched. Instead of striking home, piercing the man’s left eye socket, the point merely sliced a bloody furrow in the man’s cheek as the knife sailed past.
Maddock kept running, acutely aware of the fact that he was now completely unarmed and facing four enemies with guns. The element of surprise was gone, but he still had one ace up his sleeve: he wasn’t alone.
Angel reacted even faster than the gunman. She twisted around to face her captor, caught hold of his shoulders, and rammed her knee up into his solar plexus. The man curled over the point of impact like a worm on a fishhook, his gun and Angel’s ponytail both falling from nerveless fingers. Still gripping him, she pivoted around, sling-shotting the man into one of his confederates, flattening both of them. And just like that, the odds were even.
Almost.
The men still had their guns.
As he reached the fray, Maddock saw Angel squaring off against one of the remaining gunmen. He also saw the man’s pistol lining up for a center-mass shot.
There was nothing Maddock could do. The man was too far away, beyond Angel’s reach, too. Maddock did the only thing he could think of, lowering his stance and tackling Angel to the ground.
In the instant that he did, something erupted out of the cenote. Maddock caught a glimpse of gold—Miranda’s blond head—and both the gunman and Miranda went down in a tangle of limbs.
Maddock spotted the large-frame revolver lying where it had fallen and made a grab for it, but at the edge of his vision, he saw the remaining gunman line him up in the sights of his semi-automatic, and reversed course, twisting the other direction as the pistol discharged. A patch of ground near the discarded weapon—and right where Maddock had been just a millisecond earlier—erupted in a spray of dirt. The gun roared again, and again, and Maddock kept rolling, barely staying ahead of the bullets that stitched the ground in his wake.
Then the gun went silent. Maddock rolled a couple more times just in case, then scrambled to his feet in a fighting stance. Only there weren’t any enemies left standing. Angel was kneeling over the man who had just tried to shoot Maddock, hammering him mercilessly with her fists, and Miranda was straddling the man that had tried to shoot Angel, pinning him down in a classic front-mount position.
Somebody taught her how to fight, Maddock thought, absently.
That left the two men that Angel had flattened during Maddock’s initial charge. One of them—the guy with the big Magnum revolver—was down for the count, but the other man was struggling to rise. Maddock pounced, flattening the man with a two-handed hammer blow.
Another flash of movement from the cenote caught Maddock’s attention. He whirled around, ready to meet this new threat, but it was just Bones, crouching over in a fighting stance and gripping his dive knife, ready for combat.
Maddock let out the breath he hadn’t even realized he was holding, then grinned at his friend. “Perfect timing.”
CHAPTER 8
As Bones and Maddock secured the four attackers with zip-ties and heavy tape, Miranda and Angel tended to Charles Bell. He had a one-inch gash in his right temple, courtesy of a savage pistol-whipping administered by the thug with the big gun. The blow had knocked him out cold, but he roused easily and reported none of the worrisome symptoms that would indicate a concussion. The wound was shallow but bloody. Fortunately, Angel knew a thing or two about wound care. She cleaned the laceration with bottled water and closed it with butterfly sutures from the first aid kit they had packed in.
Miranda glanced over at the row of captives, and pointed to one of them. “This is the guy that was running away when you showed up.”
“His buddies made it here awfully fast,” Maddock remarked.
Although they were only about ten miles from the coastal resort city of Tulum, the cenote was in a remote corner of the archaeological preserve, accessible only by primitive Jeep trails and a two-mile cross-country hike.
“What are we supposed to do with them?” Miranda asked.
Bones fixed one of the men—the one that had earlier menaced Angel and was presumably their leader—and nodded his head toward the cenote. “I say we just make ‘em disappear.”
Maddock knew that his friend wasn’t seriously proposing cold-blooded murder, but their captives didn’t know that. The local man went pale and shouted something into the strip of tape that covered his mouth.
“Not a bad idea,” Maddock said, playing along, “but first, we should find out what they’re doing here and who they’re working for.”
“What makes you think they’re working for anyone?” Miranda countered. “Maybe they’re just banditos.”
“Banditos,” Bones echoed, savoring the word. He reached out and yanked the tape away, unleashing a stream of curses from the captive, all in Spanish.
Bones glanced over at Angel. “You must have hit him pretty hard. He completely forgot how to habla Ingles.”
He pressed the tape back into place, then drew his knife and held the blade close to the writhing man’s eye. “Now, let’s try again, bandito. I’m going to take the tape off, and then you’re going to tell us what you’re doing here and who you’re working for. Comprende?”
The man glowered at him for a moment, but then nodded.
Bones ripped the tape away again, eliciting another curse, but then the man spoke in English. “It’s like she said.” He nodded at Miranda. “We are bandits. We saw them diving for treasure in the cenote. The treasure belongs to us, not some gringos.”
“How did you find us out here?” Miranda asked.
Maddock shot her a
warning glance, hoping she would get the message. Let Bones handle this.
“Two gringos driving out in the forest? It wasn’t hard to find you.”
As the man spoke, Bones kept the knife in his view, testing the edge of the exposed blade with his thumb. Now he lowered the knife and picked up the big revolver the man had dropped. “This is a nice gun,” he said.
He wasn’t wrong. It was a Smith & Wesson Model 686, an L-Frame revolver with a six-inch barrel, chambered for .357 Magnum ammunition. It was a hefty gun, too, though in Bones’ massive hands, it didn’t look quite so intimidating.
“I think I’ll keep it,” Bones continued. “You don’t mind, do you?”
The man said nothing.
“But what I can’t figure is how a piece of crap hoodlum like you managed to get his hands on a piece like this. Makes me think you’re more than just a...” He grinned. “Bandito. So, let’s try again. Who are you working for?”
The man set his jaw, pursing his lips together to signal that he was done talking.
Bones regarded him for a few more seconds, then let his gaze drift to the other men. “All right, I didn’t want to have to do this, but it looks like you’re not giving me a choice. Maddock, I’m gonna need a quart of motor oil and four sticks about seven inches long. You know, twice the length of your....”
“Yeah, we get it,” Maddock said quickly, cutting him off. He rose and headed over to where they had stacked their gear, pretending to look for the items.
“What are you going to do with those?” Miranda asked, feigning innocent curiosity. She knew exactly what Bones was doing, and didn’t seem the least bit appalled by it.
Something about that bothered Maddock. He thought about how she had fearlessly and efficiently taken down one of their assailants, and decided there was more to Miranda Bell than was apparent at first glance.