by Greig Beck
‘I think I really should get a second opinion,’ Alex was saying. ‘Even another military doc would do. Look, Jack, what happens if we stop the treatments … just for, say, three months? If something started to go wrong, anything, I’d tell you immediately. I give you my word.’
Alex held out one open hand, as though offering something to Hammerson.
Hammerson knew Alex was prepared to take a risk on ending up back in a coma, but he wasn’t. All that would achieve would be to shorten his time to the dissection table — and Hammerson was miles away from allowing that to ever happen. He wasn’t so worried about what Alex would eventually become, or longer-term effects. His concern was that he knew the Medical Division had other, more finite plans for his soldier.
‘A second opinion? Not necessary, son. I know Bob Graham — he’s the best there is. I trust him, and so should you. He saved your life, Alex. I’ve seen the medical data; without the treatments, you know damn well you could lapse back into a coma, or die.’ He sat forward. ‘Is that what you want?’
‘No …’
‘Do you think that’s what Aimee would want?’
‘No.’
Hammerson hated himself for his manipulation of Alex. Fact was, he already knew what Aimee wanted: a second medical opinion for Alex — one not influenced by the military. But he had played this game with Alex before; and he would continue to play it for as long as was necessary.
‘Believe me when I say this, Alex: I understand the changes could slow and uniformity may be regained. You could be back to normal, be—’
‘NO!’
Alex leapt to his feet, his fist raised. He brought it down like a sledgehammer on the edge of Hammerson’s heavy oak desk, shearing off a large chunk.
Hammerson sat immobile, looking at the damage to the thick wood, then back up to his soldier. Alex slowly raised his hand, showing the smashed knuckles and broken metacarpal bones. As Hammerson watched, the skin moved as the bones slid beneath the flesh. The knuckles popped back into place, and Alex flexed his fingers — good as new.
‘Back to normal, Jack? Is that really what you believe?’Alex looked into Hammerson’s eyes and held them.
The colonel knew Alex was trying to read him. He cleared his mind, kept his face impassive, didn’t breathe or even swallow. He just waited.
Alex’s brow furrowed and he dropped his gaze. He sank back down into his chair. ‘Sorry, it’s not your fault. I guess I’m just … not … thinking clearly …’ He trailed off.
Hammerson exhaled and felt a bead of perspiration run down beside his ear. ‘It’s okay, Alex; you’ll be fine. You’re getting the best medical assistance in the world. Just go with it for now. The aggression is being monitored, and your physical capabilities have meant you’ve been able to save a hell of a lot of lives. Think of it as a gift, not a curse.’
Alex nodded slowly. ‘A gift.’ He kept his eyes on the floor.
Hammerson watched him for a second longer. ‘Hunter: focus.’ Alex nodded his acknowledgment and Hammerson went on. ‘You and the team need to be terrain ready. We’ve got some new kit for you. Go and check on the team, then report back at …’ He looked at his watch; it was just after midday. ‘Fifteen hundred.’ He handed Alex the folder and the computer disc. ‘See if there’s anything else you can learn. Dismissed.’
‘Fifteen hundred, confirmed.’
Alex saluted and went out the door. He still hadn’t looked his commanding officer in the eye. Hammerson wondered what Alex was thinking. After a few seconds, he lifted the phone and pressed one of the speed-dial numbers. He was immediately connected to USSTRATCOM’s Research and Development division.
‘I’ll be sending four down for some light suits, and I’ll also want an ice gun prepped.’ Hammerson listened for a few seconds, his teeth grinding as he looked at the damage to his desk. ‘Son, I’m not in a negotiating mood right now. Just have a portable unit ready for demonstration. Out.’
He hung up without a goodbye, and sat with his hand on the phone for another second. He lifted the receiver again and spoke softly. ‘Have First Lieutenant Samuel Reid come to my office.’
He sat staring ahead for a few moments before leaning back in his chair and groaning. ‘Hunter’s not going to thank me for this.’
FIVE
Ramón Reyes brought his blade down again. He and his cousin, Hector, had been struggling through the Paraguayan jungle’s mad tangle of vegetation, slashing with heavy machetes to clear the wrist-thick vines that blocked their path. Their soiled T-shirts and mud-streaked pants were already wet with perspiration, and both had plant debris and insects stuck in the streaks of sweat that ran down their faces.
Ramón stopped to lean against a tree and wondered whether his large cousin was as fatigued as he was. The drilling shutdown had left the men bored, and while most of them were content to play cards, listen to football on radios, or argue, Hector had seen it as an opportunity to explore — he always liked to explore.
He hadn’t told Ramón what he was looking for, but each afternoon, Hector had dragged him along a new quadrant of his compass, and together they had hacked for hours out, and just as many back; each time returning with little more than strained shoulders, and new and more painful insect bites.
Ramón muttered under his breath. Ever since they were small boys, he had done what his bigger and older cousin had told him. One day it would get him into trouble, for sure.
‘How much further?’ Ramón called now, blowing sweat from his upper lip. ‘I’m tired.’
Hector stopped chopping vines and turned to shrug. He pulled a canteen from his rear pocket, unscrewed it, swirled some of the brackish water around his mouth and spat it out. ‘Hour, maybe more.’ He looked at his cousin from under lowered brows. ‘You have somewhere you need to be, Ramón?’
Ramón shrugged in return. ‘Just mindful of the evening coming.’
Hector replaced his canteen and withdrew a small brass compass, flipped its lid up, swivelled on his heel for a few seconds until he must have felt he had his bearings, then snapped the lid closed. He looked above his head, obviously seeing what Ramón had — the setting sun was turning the jungle a burnt orange as it fell towards the horizon. Twilight’s purple wave would catch them soon, along with the mosquitoes.
He looked back at Ramón, and then dipped his hands into his front pockets, replacing the compass in one, and pulling a small plastic bottle from another. He uncapped it and tapped a small mound of white powder onto the back of his hand. He pushed his hand under his cousin’s nose. ‘Sniff. C’mon — for energy.’
Many of the men in the camp used cocaine. Some for fun, others to relieve boredom, and some, like his cousin, to be able to keep working long after others had given up. Ramón shrugged and inhaled hard through his nose — a punch of light almost kicked his head backwards. Immediately he felt warm, hot, horny … and less fatigued. He smiled, and then laughed.
Hector licked the remains from the back of his hand, and smiled back. ‘Okay, just a few more miles. Vamos.’
More hacking, more bites, and then Hector vanished from Ramón’s sight. When Ramón caught up, he found his cousin standing in a clearing, hands on his hips, sucking in long breaths and staring in awe at the sight before him.
‘Santa Madre de Dios,’ Ramón said softly, slowly shaking his head as he saw what held Hector spellbound.
A giant banyan tree held in its titanic embrace an old stone building that looked like a church. The tree’s muscular roots had grown over most of the building, and flowed down from its peripheral limbs to create a hanging curtain effect over the back and sides of the stone structure. The wooden doors must have rotted away long ago, but a black opening was just visible at the top of a few stone steps behind the hanging root screen. Along the ground a long crack zigzagged across the dry clearing towards the building, split the steps, and continued on up in through the dark aperture.
‘The lost church of the Jesuits — it must be,’ said Hector. Trancel
ike, he walked slowly forward in the twilight. ‘At last, we have some luck.’
‘It cannot be possible; it’s just a myth,’ Ramón whispered.
All Latin Americans knew the legend of the lost Church of the Jesuits. It was believed that after the fall of Vilcabamba, the last hidden city of the Incan empire, the ruler, Tupac Amaru, had ordered his people to carry the last treasures of his empire off into the jungle so that the Gold-Eaters — the Incan name for the Spanish invaders — could never feast on his wealth.
Ramón raked his mind for more of the ancient story. According to the legend, the Incan gold and jewels had been moved around for decades, before being either buried or taken in and finally being hidden, in the 1600s, by some priests in the basement of their church. Like most of the Jesuits that marched into the jungle between 1600 and 1750, they disappeared, along with their church, or any record of where it might have been. The missing church was rumoured to contain an underground vault that held something so fantastic; it would surely outshine even the boy king’s tomb in Egypt.
Hector marched forward quickly, and Ramón had to scamper to keep up with his larger cousin’s longer strides. Getting behind the structure was impossible, as the enormous trunk of the tree engulfed the back of the church and extended deep into the thick jungle. It seemed it was the only thing that dared put its roots down into the unusually dry soil around the ruined structure.
Both men threaded their way through the hanging tree roots, ducking below spiderwebs that, judging by the size of the dried corpses hanging within them, had been built by creatures strong enough to capture birds and small animals. Eventually they stood before the black doorway. Hector reached out with his long-bladed machete to drag aside a particularly thick web. As he did so, something scuttled away from his blade into the tangle of roots above the door. Ramón hoped it was a rat; the thought of a fist-sized spider dropping onto his neck made his stomach quiver.
‘Look at this.’ Hector was pointing at some carved writing beside the door. ‘It says something about gold, I think … debajo de … la flor de oro — what is that? “Below” or maybe “beneath the golden flower”. What does it mean, do you think?’
Ramón shook his head and dusted the carving with his fingers. ‘I think it is cuidado debajo de … la flor de oro — “beware below the golden flower”.’ He grinned, satisfied with his improved translation, even though they were no clearer on its meaning.
His smile evaporated when Hector motioned with one hand for him to go first into the dark hole. He looked left and right, trying to think of an excuse, but none came to him. His heartbeat, already speeded up from the powder Hector had given him, leapt again. Ramón reached inside his shirt and pulled free a small gold crucifix on a slim chain. He held the sweat-slicked cross to his lips for a second, then looked quickly at Hector, who nodded and tilted his head towards the opening. Ramón hesitated a moment before ducking under the web-matted vines.
‘Give me the flashlight,’ he said. ‘It is too dark; I can’t see.’
Hector grunted impatiently, sheathed his machete and pulled free the medium-sized axe hanging from his belt. He spent the next few minutes chopping away the roots that hung over the doorway. This, combined with the angle of the setting sun, allowed weak illumination into the building.
This time, Hector followed Ramón inside.
The floor was littered with broken clay tiles, probably from the roof, which had been replaced by a ceiling of massive tree trunk. Its heavy, grey body looked like a living thing, Ramón thought, with coiled, grey-brown muscles just waiting to unwind and drop down upon them.
‘Look here.’ Ramón pointed at a huge slab of granite propped at the wall just inside the doorway. In the dark, a bearded face carved into the stone could just be made out, it’s features almost lost to the gloom.
Hector sighed with approval. ‘One of the Jesuits maybe — God bless you padre.’ He patted the image and then moved ahead into the dark space behind a heavy screen of root fibres, calling to Ramón, ‘Come quickly, amigo, I’ve found something.’
He stood before a waist-high blackened dome that had been toppled from a once finely carved slab of stone split by the recent earth tremor’s crack, and strangely, its two halves slid many feet apart. When he tapped the dark shape with the iron head of his axe, it responded with a deep metallic bong that vibrated the air around them.
‘The golden flower maybe … or perhaps a golden bell?’ he said.
He flipped his axe blade around and chopped at the bell, first at one place then another. It was no use: the metal was hard; too hard to be valuable. Ramón grimaced; he knew that even the lowest grade of gold would have yielded to his cousin’s blade.
Hector kicked the bell, eliciting a duller peal. ‘Mierda! Must be fucking brass.’
Ramón turned his machete blade sideways to scrape the side of the metal, removing a six-inch crust of oxidation and ancient soot. It seemed the bell had been in a fire at some point. Underneath, the brass shone through, reflecting the weakening light from outside back at him.
‘At one time it would have looked golden,’ he said. ‘But not worth anything now, unless you have friends at the museum.’
‘Bastardo!’ Hector kicked out at the bell.
The loud curse in the small tomb-silent room made Ramón jump, and he took a step back as his cousin muttered more profanities, looking like he wanted to hit something else. He lunged at the large bell, grabbing it and tugging savagely, causing it to roll a few feet. Hector moved around behind the solid dome and put his shoulder to it, and grunted. The bell rolled some more, grinding small stones to powder beneath its rim, before picking up speed as the large man gave it one last push.
Ramón expected it to stop there, but instead it kept rolling, out through the opening and into the clearing, where it settled heavily in the dry soil. The movement shook loose centuries of oxidisation to reveal the bell’s golden hue in places.
Hector stared at the path the bell had taken, breathing in loudly through his nose and exhaling through gritted teeth. His noisy breathing suddenly broke off and he clicked his fingers, looking at Ramón with his eyes wide. ‘Not the bell; it’s not the bell — remember the words outside? It was below the bell we needed to look.’ He brought the beam of his flashlight back to the floor, and traced the path of the rolling dome.
The circle of light waved back and forth, and then came to a sudden stop. ‘Oh, gracias Jesús.’ Hector took a few steps and then went to his knees, keeping his light on the object in the ground. ‘A door.’
Ramón stood back and watched as his cousin laid his flashlight on the ground and used one large hand to brush away loose debris. He grimaced at the thought of climbing down somewhere that could be even darker than where they were.
‘Remember there was also a warning outside,’ Ramón said. ‘I think we should come back with some more men … and also maybe in daylight.’
Hector curled his lip in a sneer. ‘What are you afraid of, estúpido? Look, there might be nothing under here but more tree roots, or the graves of the Jesuits. Or it could be something more — something that could make you, me, our families, richer than a Hollywood movie star. Forget about the stupid words outside — every ancient treasure room in history had some sort of warning or curse written somewhere. It’s a good sign — there must be something down there they wanted to keep people away from.’
Hector reached out to take a swipe at Ramón’s thigh. ‘There are no real curses or evil eyes mio amigo, no horn-headed beasts, or devil-demons. Unless you count the ones you’ve seen after too much sangria.’ Hector smiled disarmingly. ‘Now come on and help me, my friend.’
Ramón shook his head as if clearing away his moment of indecision, and took another step forward. ‘All right, I’ll help you. But you are wrong Señor Ignorante. There are bad things in this world; things my mother has told me about. I just wish she was here with us now.’
On his knees, Hector clapped his hands once and waved Ramón ov
er. He motioned to the other side of the door, and finished brushing away debris.
Ramón looked at the square trapdoor with a large metal ring at one end. In the beam of light from the flashlight, he could see the crack running across the stone blocks in the flooring, halting at the door, and then continuing on after the wooden frame once again. He frowned for a second in puzzlement, as the door didn’t carry the patina of age that the surrounding stonework did, and his eyes moved to the large slab that was broken and shoved aside.
Hector grabbed the light and held it up. ‘You pull.’ He pointed the beam of light and waited.
Ramón reached down with one hand and took hold of the ring. He immediately dropped it, and held his hand up to his face, to check his fingers. They were wet with something slick and slightly greasy. He sniffed, and only detected a hint of something salty and metallic. Rust and grease maybe, he thought and wiped his hand, getting ready to try again, when Hector barged him out of the way.
‘Too heavy for you little cousin? Let me.’ Hector spat on his hands and grinned in the dark. ‘There must be a hidden room underneath us. This is it, amigo mio: prepare to be rich.’
He hunched over the trapdoor and pulled on the ring with two hands. Nothing happened. He grunted, invoked the names of several saints, and strained. Still nothing. He changed position, counted three deep breaths and yanked quickly. The trapdoor groaned against the floor’s stone edges and then rose an inch. Hector stood up, pressed his hands into the small of his back, cursed softly, then bent back to his task. With the next tug, the door squealed open, and he let the heavy wooden square drop back flat against the ground. A set of steps led down into the blackness below.