by David Wood
He got out, taking along a small backpack with food and water, and a machete knife, and headed into the surrounding forest. There was a faint smell of smoke in the air, a reminder of the fire that had destroyed the mountain village of Opalaca—Rodrigo’s home. The government was calling it an unfortunate accident, a wildfire caused by an ember from an untended cooking fire. How the flames had ignited the thoroughly drenched vegetation was not something the authorities were willing to address, but the area was nonetheless off limits pending further investigation.
The foliage was thick but pliant, allowing him to simply push through without hacking it down. Blazing a trail might have been faster, but it would also be noisy, and if the police decided to investigate the seemingly abandoned vehicle on the roadside, he didn’t want them to know where he had gone. After about fifteen minutes however, he encountered what looked like a game trail winding through the jungle. He studied the faint trail carefully until discovering the distinctive hoof-shape of a boot heel. A smile of satisfaction touched his lips.
There was no guarantee that the boot print belonged to Rodrigo, or his rival, Diego, but he felt certain that both men had probably utilized the trail at some point in their search for treasure and Maya relics to sell on the black market.
He pushed cautiously down the trail, heading deeper and deeper into the forest, exploring other trails and sidings. Here and there, he found evidence of exploratory excavations, and even weathered stones that might once have formed the walls of ancient Maya homes, yet despite these seeming successes, Hector’s sense of the futility of his search grew with each new discovery.
After surfacing briefly, el Guia was going to disappear once more into the jungle. The curse—maldición de la sombra—would return to its slumber, perhaps for decades or even centuries, awaiting rediscovery by some new hapless victim who would unleash the terrible disease once more.
Hector checked his watch. It was already past noon. He sighed, stabbed the machete into the soft ground, and unslung his pack. He was hungry, but food was not the first priority. He took out his satellite phone and punched in Isabella’s number. He had just hit the send button to initiate the call when he spied something just a few more steps up the trail. Still holding the phone to his ear, he started forward to investigate.
Now he could see it clearly, a tiny stone hut, just big enough to shelter one or two people from the weather. The thatched roof appeared to be in good repair, a recent addition, but the walls were ancient.
Isabella’s voice sounded in his ear. “Tio?”
“Just a moment,” he murmured, continuing forward. The hut had no windows, only an opening just big enough to allow a man to enter if he was bent over nearly double. The interior was dark.
Still holding the phone in one hand, he took a flashlight from the pack and shone it inside, not daring to hope that this might be the place he sought.
The hut was empty.
He sighed and was about to stand when a voice rang out from behind him.
“Looking for something, mi padre?”
Hector whirled, almost losing his footing on the soft loamy ground. Both phone and flashlight fell from hands that were groping for a weapon he did not have. Not that any blade or gun would have helped him. The woman who had called out to him—an exotically beautiful redhead, whose nearly naked body was covered in a tattooed pattern that resembled the scaled skin of a forest viper—was not alone. Six more men, similarly adorned with body art that almost perfectly blended in with the surrounding landscape, stood in a loose circle around him. Some had long blowguns raised to their lips, while the rest hefted traditional war clubs. A sheathed obsidian dagger hung from a string belt around the woman’s waist, but she was otherwise unarmed. Two more men, wearing ordinary street clothes—gringos by the look of them—stood to either side of her. One of them was big, with a close-cropped haircut that suggested military service. The other was small, effete in appearance and bearing, but with a cruel face.
After regaining his balance with one outstretched hand, Hector rose, maintaining eye contact with the woman. “Carina. What are you doing here?”
A faint smile lifted the corners of her mouth. “Isn’t it obvious? I’m doing what you ought to have done long ago.”
“Searching for el Guia? I didn’t know where to look until—”
“I’m not talking about the dog,” Carina hissed. “I’m talking about your sacred duty as the high priest of the feathered serpent.”
The ferocity of the accusation felt like a physical blow. “My duty?”
“As gatekeeper, you were charged with letting the Shadow go forth into the world at the dawn of Baktun thirteen as the gods willed. You failed that duty. You are weak. Not fit to lead the Brothers, much less preside over the new age of mankind.”
Hector stiffened. “You are a mere acolyte. How dare you presume to dictate the will of the gods?” He turned his gaze to the other painted snake-men. He recognized every one of them, some he counted as friends. Their treachery stung like venom. “You speak of sacred duty, yet you would allow a mere acolyte to lead you in a rebellion against the anointed chosen one of Kukulkan?”
His rebuke elicited only another smile. “Kukulkan has blessed my efforts. He has led me to el Guia.”
“Then you have it? It’s not too late for you to make the right choice, Carina. End this rebellion now, and I will forget what you have done.”
“This has grown tiresome,” she said with a flick of her hand. “I have tolerated your rudeness only because I need you to tell me how to reach Ciudad de Sombre.”
Hector shook his head. “You have not earned that knowledge. In time, perhaps, but—”
“There are other ways of finding it.”
Hector raised an eyebrow. “Do you mean to follow the path of el Guia, yourself then? I won’t help you.”
“And what of your sacred duty?” she sneered. “The Serpent Brothers exist for the sole purpose of guiding those who have been touched by the Shadow into the realm of the Lords of Xibalba. You taught us that. If you refuse, then you have already abjured your sacred oath, and are not fit to lead us.”
Hector gritted his teeth. Carina had outmaneuvered him. Everything she had said was true. For centuries, the Serpent Brothers had kept the terrible Shadow curse at bay by guiding those who were touched by it into the Underworld where, provided they could survive the tests of the Lords of Xibalba, they would, if the legends were true, be restored to health and even imbued with god-like immortality. Some were incidental victims, but most who followed the Serpent Path did so intentionally, offering themselves as a sacrifice to the old gods. The Shadow—the strange substance that contained the very essence of the Lords of the Xibalba—not only compelled those who were afflicted to begin the journey, but revealed ancient knowledge as well, though the physical symptoms often prevented full expression of those revelations.
Of course, that had not happened in recent memory. The guidestones had fallen from memory, and the vessels that held the Shadow dust, like el Guia, which had once been kept in holy temples, had been scattered and lost with the arrival of the Spanish invaders with their new God.
Hector had never imagined that he would be called upon to fulfill that obligation, or that it would be used against him in a power play to control the Serpent Brotherhood.
He tried a different tack. “This is the 21st Century, Carina. We may honor the traditions of our ancestors, but we must also blaze our own path into the future. The Shadow is a terrible thing. It cannot be controlled.”
“Leave that to me,” said the cruel-looking man.
Carina gave the man a sidelong glance but immediately returned her gaze to Hector. “Where is the City of Shadow? Tell me, and I may let you live.”
“Kill me, and you will never know.”
Carina narrowed her gaze at him. With her garish body art, she appeared more reptilian than human, a viper poised to strike.
And then an electronic trilling sound filled the air, br
eaking the spell.
Carina tried to maintain her intense stare, but the tone sounded again, and a hint of frustration crept into her expression.
“That’s me,” said the cruel man, taking out a satellite phone, identical to the one Hector had brought with him. He opened it and held it to his ear. “Hello?”
He listened for a moment, and then his beady black eyes lit up. “That’s fantastic. Where is that?” Another pause. “We can be there in an hour.”
He snapped the phone shut with a flourish. “Good news, Carina. I know where it is.”
Hector’s breath caught in his throat. “Ciudad de Sombre?”
“Naw, screw that. We get to skip ahead a few steps. I know where Xibalba is. It’s at a place called Naj Tunich.”
Hector tried, and failed, to hide his reaction.
Carina focused her serpentine gaze on him once more. “It’s true, isn’t it? Too bad, Hector. Now I don’t need you anymore.”
She turned to the nearest of her minions and nodded.
Four hundred miles away, Isabella Beltran’s knuckles went white as her fist tightened around her phone. She had to fight the urge to shout into the phone, to demand that her uncle’s tormentors stand down or face her wrath.
Her wrath.
She had never felt more helpless in her entire life.
She had, almost single-handedly, wrestled control of the Gulf Cartel from men whose reputation for cruelty would have made the Lords of Xibalba quake. She commanded a veritable army of lieutenants and foot soldiers, and what she could not take by force, she could always buy. But there was not a single thing she could do to help her uncle.
Carina!
Isabella recognized the name immediately. Carina Rivera, a few years her junior, was one of Hector’s acolytes. Isabella recalled how, as a young girl, Carina had been singled out for persecution because of her red hair—a visible sign of mixed blood—but once she had embraced the ancient religion of her ancestors, joining the Serpent Brotherhood, that had all changed. She had become part of an honored tradition among the people of Maya heritage, even those like Isabella who mostly only paid lip service to the old ways.
Evidently, the prestige of being part of the Serpent Brotherhood was not enough for Carina. She wanted more. Power. Revenge, perhaps against the world that had tormented her.
Her motives did not matter to Isabella. The bitch would pay for what she was doing.
After Carina’s cold declaration, there was silence for a few seconds, and then the sickening crunch of someone—Isabella’s beloved uncle—being beaten to death. The sound of blows falling went on for a while, and she again heard the male voice—almost certainly an American—shouting, “Seriously? What’s with you people? He’s dead, and we’ve got places to go.”
“Bastante!” Carina shouted in Spanish.
The blows ceased immediately. For a few seconds, Isabella heard muffled voices, then all was silent.
Isabella’s eyes clouded over with tears as she stared at the screen of her phone. It displayed the elapsed time of the call, ticking forward relentlessly, one second at a time. She kept expecting the call to drop, but after a full minute, she realized that Carina and the others had gone, evidently unaware of the open phone line. Now there was nobody left to hang up.
It occurred to Isabella that, she would have to be the one to end the call, but she couldn’t bring herself to sever that final connection to her father’s brother.
Then she heard something. A rustling sound, movement, and then, a rasping voice. “Bella.”
The word sent a chill down her spine. “Uncle!” she sobbed. He was still alive!
“Bella. Shadow.” The words trickled out, separated by agonizingly long gaps as Hector fought to draw the breath to keep talking.
“Hang on, Uncle,” she cried out. “I’m going to call for help.”
“Too late. Stop her. Only you can. Priestess.”
“No, Uncle. Don’t say that.”
She listened as he struggled to breathe, waiting for him to tell her something more, to assure her that everything would be all right, but then he gave a long sigh and the silence returned.
CHAPTER 24
As Kasey set the helicopter down near the gravel runway of the Poptun Airport, Maddock spied a beat-up Toyota Land Cruiser emblazoned with the logo of a regional adventure-tour company. The vehicle would normally have been driven by a guide in the employ of the company, but it seemed wise to keep involvement with the locals to a minimum. Naj Tunich was a tour destination, but the cave itself was off limits to the public. Trying to arrange for permission to explore the cave would have been time-consuming and expensive, not to mention very public, so the best option was sneaking in. Not surprisingly, for the right price the tour company operator had been willing to negotiate a “self-guided tour” option. As long as Kasey and the CIA were picking up the tab, Maddock wasn’t going to complain.
Kasey stayed behind with the helicopter, standing by in the event that Maddock and the others needed a quick extraction. The cave was only about ten miles away—on the map at least—but it still took more than an hour of navigating rugged dirt roads up into the Maya Mountains to reach their destination, which was marked with a blue sign that read “Bienvenido. Sita Arqueologico: Cuevas Naj Tunich.” Because the site was relatively close to a populated area, flying directly there would have attracted unwanted attention, so driving in seemed a prudent decision, especially since their cover as Red Cross aid workers wouldn’t stand up to rigorous scrutiny. The wisdom of this decision was manifest when, as they were making the short hike into the forest to the cave entrance, Maddock heard the distinctive thump of helicopter rotors beating the sky overhead. The jungle canopy blocked his view of the sky, but he paused to listen as the sound grew louder and then gradually diminished as the aircraft passed by and continued on its way.
“That sounded close,” Angel said.
“And big,” Bones added. “Like a Chinook.”
Maddock had been thinking the same thing. Chinook was the NATO designation for the Boeing CH-47 military cargo helicopter. The two former SEALs had taken more than a few rides in the back of Chinook helicopters which were frequently used to ferry troops to and from their mission objective. With a fuselage that looked a little like a city bus under its tandem rotors, the bird had enough room for fifty passengers, and could even transport vehicles if the situation demanded.
“There’s a Guatemalan special forces training facility near Poptun. That’s probably all it is.”
Yet, despite this seeming dismissal, Maddock’s thoughts kept going back to Copán, and the red-haired woman who had somehow arrived there ahead of them. It seemed likely that she was working for Alex Scano, and Tam’s revelation that ScanoGen was operating in Honduras, at least partially explained her presence at the site, but it still seemed a little too coincidental.
The entrance appeared abruptly, rising out of the forest floor with almost no warning, a gaping shadowy fissure in the limestone, a hundred feet high and about five times as wide. Millennia of tropical rain had eroded the stone into freestanding pillars that seemed to erupt from the ground, and the hanging wall above was studded with thousands of dangling stalactites, all of which gave the impression of teeth in the gaping jaws of an enormous leviathan.
This similarity was not lost on any of them.
“The Serpent’s Maw,” Bell murmured.
Bones just shook his head. “Here we go again.”
The helicopter that had passed overhead was not technically a Chinook, but a civilian variant—with the rather prosaic designation of Model 414—one of several leased to ScanoGen Pharmaceuticals for use in their “humanitarian” mission to Honduras. The 414 was a workhorse, with none of the luxury that Alex Scano was accustomed to, but there wasn’t enough room in the executive helicopter for everyone, so just this once, Alex was riding coach. It wasn’t an experience he wanted to repeat.
The security contractors were okay, if a bit intense. Carina�
��s men, with their teeth filed to points and their tattoos gave him the heebie-jeebies, but what was really going to give him nightmares was the way they had tenderized that old Maya dude in the jungle.
Carina had the tattoos as well, though they were mostly covered by her blouse and military-style cargo pants, but at least she hadn’t filed her teeth down. He kind of dug chicks with ink and piercings, but a mouthful of shark teeth would have been a bridge too far.
The rear cargo ramp was down, which not only allowed air to circulate through the cabin, keeping them relatively cool, but also gave the passengers a panoramic view of the landscape as it passed beneath them. For the most part, it had been an unbroken sea of green, but as they approached their destination, Alex noted a patchwork of fields and roads, and then as the helicopter made its approach to the airport, the neighborhoods of Poptun.
As the airstrip came into view, Carina jumped up and ran to open door. She lingered there for only a moment, then ran over to one of the crewmen, shouting something. Alex was content to let her take charge until, without any warning, the helicopter banked and began rapidly moving away from the airfield.
“What’s going on?” he demanded.
“They’re already here,” Carina replied, her eyes flashing dangerously.
“They who?”
“Maddock’s group. The people traveling with your contact.”
Alex glanced out the open back end of the transport aircraft and saw the smaller helicopter parked at the airport, shrinking into the distance. He knew all about Dane Maddock, the man that helped the treacherous Tam Broderick take down his father, nearly destroying ScanoGen in the process. So far, Dane Maddock’s activities hadn’t posed a real threat to the endeavor. In fact, the treasure hunters helping Charles Bell had unknowingly blazed the trail for ScanoGen, but with the goal in sight, they might prove more of a hindrance.
So?” he asked, returning his gaze to Carina. “All the more reason for us to set down now.”