“Did they win?” Another ball bounced against the far side and almost slammed back into King’s shoulder, missing by an inch.
“Uh . . . not really. They allowed themselves to be defeated and eventually killed, so that they could return to life and trick the Lords.”
“So, you’re saying we’ve got to die to win?”
King frowned, not liking what he was saying any more than Raine.
“How was the game played?”
A bouncing ball nearly took out Raine’s leg as King answered. “No one knows for sure. There were probably two teams who had to stick to their own side of the court. If it was anything like the modern day descendant, uluma, it was a bit like volley ball, only without the net. The teams had to bounce the ball to one another using only their hips until one team didn’t return it.”
“So it doesn’t always involve shooting razor-sharp balls jettisoned from holes in the wall?”
“No.”
Raine cursed, unsure of how King’s knowledge benefited them after all. He considered trying to block the holes on the ground, but even if they could prevent the balls from shooting at them, they would still be trapped within the fiery gates with half a dozen pissed off Chinese soldiers!
But then, gazing up, he noticed a further series of holes in the Bench Walls, again six to a side, only these were almost at the top, twenty feet above the ground.
“What are they for?” he asked.
King looked. While the holes shooting the balls were designed to look like the mouth of a snarling jaguar, the higher holes were worked into carvings of snakes.
“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “On several ruined courts, archaeologists have found protruding stone rings. Theoretically, if a player got the ball through the ring – almost impossible considering they were twenty feet off the ground – then it would be an instant win.”
Raine stared at the holes for several more seconds. “It’s not volleyball,” he realised. “Its basketball.”
Then, before King could protest, Raine rose to his full height, spinning the assault rifle he carried so that he held the barrel. Like a baseball bat, he swung the rifle’s stock at a ball as it hurtled towards him.
The ball and the rifle struck with a metallic clang, before the rubber bounced off the weapon and hit the wall. It came back at Raine and he changed his position, ducking as another ball rushed at him from behind-
The hilt of the sixteenth century cutlass struck the second ball and sent it rebounding back. King felt the jar of impact shudder through his muscular shoulders and then stood back to back with Raine, each of them parrying against the flying balls of death.
“Are they insane?” Lieutenant Xan muttered in Mandarin as he watched the two men play the ancient ball game.
“Yes,” Ming said thoughtfully. “A little.” And then the colonel was on his feet, barking at his men to rise also. He flipped his QBZ-95 around, just like Raine, and used it like a bat, slapping at the balls as they came near.
“Down!” Raine and King both shouted at the same time. Leaning against one another’s back, they dropped to the ground as the two balls, one from either side, flew above them, hit the far walls-
“Up!”
Again, bracing each other, they rose to their feet just in time to smack the balls back. This time, Raine managed to get under his and hit it from beneath, increasing its altitude. It hit the wall, only two feet away from one of the holes, bounced back-
He ran and leapt at it, swinging his rifle like a club. He smacked the ball at the centre of its gravity and it flew towards the hole. For a second he thought he had missed again, but then it slipped inside the wall, vanishing.
Almost instantly, to the rumble of stone, one of the jaguar heads spewing out oil into the Ball Court’s exit, choked and died. The raging fire at either end of the avenue diminished ever-so-slightly.
Spurred on, caring now more for their own lives than the mission, the Chinese soldiers ‘upped’ their game, throwing themselves into their swings.
Ming struck home first, followed by Xan.
One of the soldiers hit a ball. It slammed into the wall, bounced back. He ducked. It missed him. But a second ball, rebounding off of one of his comrades, slammed into his back in an explosion of blood and a cry of agony.
King struck home on the next one, his ball slipping inside a serpent’s mouth. Each time one of them scored, another jaguar head ceased belching flame and the curtain of fire shrank a little more.
But there were still eight balls left, firing out constantly now, bouncing back and forth, and all the men, Raine and King included, grew weary from hitting the heavy rubber.
“Benny!”
Two balls hurtled towards the archaeologist at the same time. He hit one and tried to duck the other but Raine hit it just in time. It hit the wall and came back at him forcing him to dive to the side. Its airborne momentum spent, it hit the floor and rolled down the incline, into one of the holes on the ground. Water pressure pushed it back into ‘firing’ position and only seconds later it was shooting towards them again.
One of the Chinese soldiers scored. The fire dimmed.
“Benny,” he called. “Back up towards the fire.” He knew that as soon as they were safe from the balls and the flame, the Chinese commander would be back on them in seconds.
King did so, smacking at another ball. On the rebound, he scored. Seconds later, so did Raine. He glanced at him, too much enjoyment twinkling in his blue eyes.
“You’re actually enjoying this, aren’t you?” he accused.
“Blows baseball out of the water!” he said, avoiding decapitation by a fraction of an inch.
Down the avenue, Ming scored again, then so did one of his subordinates.
Four balls left.
Raine looked at the fire. It was about six foot high now, still too much to jump. The heat rolled off of it, stinging his eyes with its oily perfume. He almost missed another ball, the rubber and metal glancing off his rifle’s stock.
Lieutenant Xan scored another.
Three balls. Five feet.
Ming glanced in his direction, eyes narrowed. He began to advance towards him, swinging at a ball that came too close.
King scored another hit!
Two balls. Four feet. Still too high.
With only two balls flying through the air, the danger had now diminished enough for Ming to reverse his rifle and take aim.
“Benny, when I say jump . . .”
“Jump?” King asked sarcastically.
A red laser sight trained itself on Raine’s chest just as a ball flew towards him. But, instead of hitting it towards one of the goals, he shifted his feet and threw his full weight into the blow, hurtling it down the length of the Ball Court, directly towards Ming.
Panicked, the colonel barely had time to move, rolling to the left but the razor-edged ball nevertheless sliced across his cheek, ripping out a wad of flesh and blood.
He howled in agonised fury but forced himself to stay focused, grasped his weapon, reacquired his target just as Xan slammed another ball into the goal.
The flames dropped another two feet.
“Jump!” Raine bellowed.
Ming fired.
16:
Pyramid of Death
Xibalba,
Sarisariñama Tepui,
Venezuela,
The onslaught of bullets blasted apart the stone steps on the other side of the wall of fire as Raine and King touched down, their clothing singed, their nerves frayed.
With the entire city now illuminated by the conduits of fire, King didn’t have to rely on Raine to guide him. In an instant, they both found their feet and hurdled up another steep set of three foot high stairs to a wide platform, cut in half by a wide and surprisingly fast flowing aqueduct. An ornately carved bridge, now half crumbled and all-but ruined, spanned the water and on the far side a number of one and two story temples littered the base of t
he pyramid.
They were entering the sacred district of Xibalba.
“Get over the bridge,” Raine ordered and King didn’t need to be told twice.
“What’s the plan now?” he asked through a ragged breath as they scrambled onto the far bank.
“Beats me,” Raine admitted as a hailstorm of bullets erupted from behind. He turned to see the seven surviving Chinese soldiers running towards him, crossing the bridge.
“Get to the top of the pyramid,” he told King, hoping the archaeologist realised that the high point would be the most defensible position. “I’ll hold them off for a second.”
He dived behind the cover of a low wall, rolled, hurled his torso over the top and fired his stolen QBZ-95 at his pursuers. He hit one squarely in the neck who gurgled and groaned as he rolled over the side of the ruined bridge and splashed into the water. The other soldiers scattered, three of them on this side of the bridge, three on the other.
They moved to out-flank him.
Benjamin King ran through the streets of Xibalba’s temple district, keeping the purse containing the Moon Mask tucked snugly beneath his arm.
He hurdled toppled masonry and ducked beneath collapsed arches, rounding the final corner which led directly towards one of the pyramid’s steep stairways.
He hit it running, hauling himself on all fours as fast as he could up the ancient structure.
Gunfire suddenly came at Raine from a different angle as he failed to prevent the Chinese soldiers from slipping around his flank. He dropped down, allowing the crumbled wall to take the brunt of the weapons fire. The remaining soldiers crossed the bridge, the one with the torn cheek bellowing at another. A second later, the soldier ran off in the direction of the pyramid while the others focussed on Raine.
King was only a third of the way up the pyramid’s face when the bullets began to chase him, chipping the ancient stone work. Flecks of rock bit his skin, stinging, but he ignored the pain as he continued to climb the steep slant.
Realising he was out of range, the soldier gave up firing and began to climb also.
Raine’s keen eyes picked out the distant shapes of King and his pursuer on the face of the pyramid.
Damn it!
His cover was slowly pummelled to pieces by an endless barrage of bullets but then he heard the tell-tale click of a magazine running empty, the clang as it hit the floor and the soldier efficiently reloaded.
Raine took his shot, pushing up out of cover and firing a burst at the soldier. He dropped in a plume of red, the remorseless attack momentarily surprising the other soldiers and giving Raine his chance to dash from cover and sprint around the street corner.
It was a desperate race for his life as King charged up the pyramid faster and faster, adrenaline pushing him far past the limits of endurance. He had gone beyond exhaustion, beyond fear. He worked now purely on instinct, knowing that the moment he gave up would be the moment he died.
With that thought, his palm hit the surface of the platform at the top of the pyramid and he hauled himself up. Dominating the summit was a pillared temple, its walls covered with carvings but he ignored the archaeologist in him and turned away from the visage, pulling the Norinco handgun Raine had given him from his waistband. He crept back to the ledge of the pyramid and aimed the handgun down the vertiginous slope.
It was empty.
Where the hell?
He felt the hot muzzle of a gun jam itself into the delicate flesh just behind his right ear.
He froze, petrified, yet also irritated that he hadn’t considered the possibility of the soldier switching to another face of the pyramid and beating him to the summit.
Idiot!
He suddenly found it difficult to breath. His heart pounded so heavily that he feared it might actually break through his ribcage.
So this is how I’m going to die.
He didn’t know how long it had been since his mad dash from the summit of Sarisariñama had brought him face to face with death in so many forms, but this was the most intimate moment of death he had yet faced. It was silent and drawn out. A rifle at his head, a moment of dread and terror instead of the adrenaline of being shot down during the chase, ripped apart by hungry crocs or sliced open by a Mayan ballgame.
He feared he might break down into tears, sobbing, pleading for his life, urinating his pants while screaming like a school girl.
So it surprised him as much as the soldier when, as the other man squeezed the trigger, King spun, knocking the rifle away with his own gun while slamming his shoulder into his opponent’s stomach, throwing them both backwards into the temple in a spray of bullets.
Raine zigzagged his way through the ruins as machine gun fire blew them apart around him. Orders were barked in Mandarin and he watched as two soldiers raced up a parallel street, trying to cut him off. They spun around the corner and fired down at him just as he jolted to the side, leaping through a vacant window frame and rolling into a gutted building.
The soldiers swept in after him but he hauled himself back out of the opposite window just in time.
Machine gun fire rattled from the summit of the pyramid and he glanced up to see the orange strobe of muzzle flash from within the temple. He tried heading towards the pyramid again, but once again, the soldiers outflanked him, forcing him back towards the aqueduct-
A leg slammed into his groin with agonizing force, doubling him over. He cried out as he staggered, all of his training trying to resist the reflex to drop his weapon and grasp his genitals.
Nevertheless, winded, he staggered and dropped to the ground, sprawling beside the narrow alleyway where the man with the torn face had been hiding.
Before he could regain his wits, the Chinaman’s foot smashed into the side of his head. His neck jarred. His vision blurred. And then, his eyes seething with fury, the colonel hauled him to his feet. Raine took a swing at him but the other man blocked his weak attempt and punched him in the nose, splattering them both with a spray of blood.
Staggering, Raine nevertheless had the sense to freeze when a Norinco M-77B handgun was planted firmly against his forehead.
“Where is the mask?”
King was lucky.
He landed on top of his attacker, accidentally knocking the wind out of him. He didn’t waste a second in driving his fist into the man’s face, pulverising his nose, cracking his jaw-
The soldier heaved, bucking beneath him and flipping him over so that he was on his back, on the defensive, and it was all King could do now to block one blow after another, fending off the trained killer.
A lucky, glancing blow bounced off the soldier’s head but a fierce one caught King’s jaw in return.
White hot pain flashed through him, his arms fell limply to his side-
And his fingers instinctively wrapped themselves around the soldier’s fallen rifle.
He had no time to work out how to use it - he didn’t even know what part of it he was holding – but he nevertheless brought it up and swung it like a club. It smashed into the soldier’s head once, twice, three times. On the fourth savage blow, King watched the man’s eyes roll up and his head loll to one side. Then, exhausted, he pushed the man off of him, scrambled onto all fours and scuttled away, sucking in deep breaths of air.
For several long moments he simply stared at the corpse, his mind as numb as his battered body. He felt bile rise and fought it back down.
“You killed those men,” his accusing words to Raine echoed through his mind. “How can you be so flippant about killing? Like it was easy or something.”
“It gets easier every time.”
A deep shudder trembled through him. He closed his eyes, rubbed them hard, glanced up-
And immediately forgot about the dead man as his eyes took in the fire-lit carvings dancing on the façade of the temple.
“Incredible.”
Colonel Ming’s face felt as though it was on fire. The razors on the ba
ll the American had flung at him had torn apart the right side of his face. Now his cheek flapped as he spoke and he could not hear out of his right ear. Nevertheless, his orders to his men still rung true in his head.
Whatever the cost.
“Eat my shorts,” the man snarled in reply to his question.
He slammed the butt of his pistol against the American’s forehead again, cracking the skin and drawing blood.
“Where is the mask?” he repeated.
“I lost it,” the American growled, icy eyes glaring at him. Xan and the three surviving soldiers had circled the dangerous man now and had their weapons trained on him.
“When I went over the waterfall,” the prisoner elaborated. “Go check if you don’t believe me. And, if you don’t mind skinny-dipping with the crocs.”
Enough! The American didn’t have the mask, which meant his accomplice did. As much as he wanted to make the smug, blue-eyed man pay a painful price for his injury, Ming knew he was running out of time. He had lost contact with his team on the summit and-
“Colonel Ming,” a voice called over Ming’s radio, loud enough for the American to overhear. It was the soldier he had left guarding the hole leading into the crocodile chamber in the Labyrinth. “I’m under attack-”
The call was cut short by the crackle of gun fire, followed by static.
Ming glanced at the American, expecting to see a cocky, smug grin at the knowledge of the U.S. Special Forces arrival. Instead, the American seemed just as concerned as he was.
He tried to say something, his throat gurgling on his own blood.
“What did you say?”
The American leaned in closer, speaking softly into his good ear. “I said, catch.”
Ming frowned. “Catch?”
Then the prisoner head butted him in the nose and, as a spray of blood obscured his vision, Ming saw the grenade which the man had somehow concealed in his hands. He pulled the pin and tossed it vertically above the group. While Ming’s soldiers stood, confused, the American pushed between them and ran for the water’s edge. Ming turned and followed, running fast. Behind them, Xan and the three soldiers took a second too long to register what was happening. It was not until the grenade’s rate of ascent peaked and it began its fall back down to earth that any of them caught up with their senses and moved.
Moon Mask Page 16