But all she could come up with was a series of mountains that didn’t match any known locations anywhere near the Maici River. As the days went on the dreams became more vivid, she knew she had to get back. There was something vitally important she had to do, but couldn’t for the life of her remember what it was.
That’s when Sam Reilly contacted her and showed her the image of the four stones found inside the megalithic Death Stone discovered in Göbekli Tepe. The instant she saw the strange Greek letters of Theta, Sigma, Phi, and Omega branded below each of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and she knew where she’d seen the image before. Inside the King’s Chamber of the newly constructed temple.
With the cataclysmic event prophesied by the Death Stone fast approaching, she contacted Elise, who scanned the strange images she’d drawn and uploaded them into a huge database of satellite images. A few minutes later, Elise had shown her the Tepui Mountains, and it had all flooded back to her, as though she were reliving a waking dream.
She breathed heavily at the image in front of them. Even in the dark, she recognized the steep cliff line as the one from her dream – but dreams can be mistaken.
“We’re here. Wherever the hell here is,” Tom said, as he brought the Black Hawk into a hover directly over the coordinates.
They’d all find out soon enough. Night-vision goggles made out tree-tops and tangled vines below. There was no place to land.
Sam said, “I saw a clearing a couple clicks back. See if you can find anything closer. A clearing or even the beach along a stream.”
Tom nodded and flew concentric circles over the edge of the mesa. That side wouldn’t do. About two miles from the edge, an outcrop presented them with a landing spot clear of trees. They’d have to hike.
Leaving Veyron to hold down the fort with a U.S. military grade M134D Gatling gun and no expectation of using it, the others set out on their two-mile hike to the edge of the mesa. Billie’s coordinates were for somewhere 100 feet below.
In addition to their night-vision goggles, each of the five carried military grade respirator masks, personal climbing equipment, and Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns. Each also carried a Ka-Bar knife and various non-lethal weapons according to their expertise.
Sam took the lead on the hike, simply following a handheld GPS, with Billie, Tom and Elise following and Genevieve covering their six. The density of the vegetation required they stay close together. There was no trail, or rather, there were many. Small and large animal trails, tiny rivulets and wider streams all crisscrossed in confusing chaos. For so many, they made surprisingly little noise. Every member of the expedition was trained, proficient with their weapons and in some cases in unarmed combat.
Sam came to an abrupt halt, holding up his hand in a cautionary signal. The others stopped in their tracks.
“We’re here,” he said in a near-whisper. “Billie, now what?”
Billie said, “All right. Follow me.”
A large boulder the size of a small van stood twenty feet back from the edge of the sandstone tabletop. She swept the boulder with the beam of her flashlight. Halfway up, the light reflected something metallic.
There were two large PFH ninety degree climbing bolt plates fixed to the stone. They had been professionally inserted, and designed to hold weights far exceeding the strength of their static abseiling ropes, which were rated to take up to 3600 pounds. The ground between the boulder and the edge of the cliff was well worn, as though hundreds of people had abseiled the spot many times previously.
Three hundred feet of static abseiling ropes were threaded through the bolt hold and secured, while the other ends were dropped over the edge. Two sets of ropes, five people. They would need to take it in turns.
Billie clipped her descender onto the rope, and attached the other end to her carabiner. Sam connected onto the second line, and both cross-checked each other’s equipment.
Sam asked, “Are you ready to return to the temple?”
Billie pulled her night-vision goggles over her eyes and grinned. “I was born ready.”
A moment later, she dropped off the edge of the sandstone cliff-face, and descended into the secret world, far below.
Chapter Two
Billie felt confident as she abseiled quickly down the vertical cliff-face. If there were other climbers out there, they might have thought the expedition had taken a distinctly creepy direction. It resembled a military operation, carried out by Special Forces. But instead, it was privately funded by Sam, who had high standards when it came to people with whom he was prepared to risk his life. The three others who were with them tonight were his top choices from everyone else in the world, Special Forces included.
The black rope ran quickly through her descender.
Two thirds of the way down the rope, Billie locked pressure on the anchor and came to a sudden stop. She glanced at the rope. The blue marker indicated she’d dropped a little less than two hundred feet. She had no idea at what point the entrance was, but felt certain she would simply recognize it when she saw it.
Next to her, Sam stopped, silently.
He leaned out, to get a better view of the entrance, although she doubted very much that he would have spotted it. What appeared to be a single piece of sandstone arenite that ran the full length of the face of the Tepui Mountains, now had a cluster of three smaller fragments – two twenty feet high and one a little under ten.
They were thin. A foot wide at most. A fissure no more than a few inches wide, ran behind the stones and was definitely not big enough for even the smallest in their party to slip through. From the front and the sides, it all looked like one single piece of stone. But it was really three separate pieces, superimposed on one another. In the air, or from any sort of distance, she knew that they became visually inseparable from the rest of the face of the wall, molding together like a mirage.
It was impossible to spot the opening from the air. Even now that she was close to it, Billie wasn’t entirely certain she’d found the opening. The eerie green glow of the cliff face was different in front of her than the way she remembered it, yet still somehow familiar. The identification rock was lighter, almost neon green in the night-vision goggles, where the rest of the cliff face was darker, as if it was in shadow.
The small rock, no larger than her hand and almost perfectly round was impossible to spot by anyone who wasn’t directly upon it. The stone appeared like an innocuous fluke of geometric formations, in an otherwise ordinary piece of geological nature – a round stone among a million vertical ones.
It also appeared as though it were lit by glowing floodlights. Only they weren’t floodlights, they were UV-emitting, fluorescent lichen the Master Builders had placed there to specifically identify the place.
Sam shifted his gaze horizontally along the face of the wall, searching for an opening. He stopped and fixed it on her. “Where’s the entrance?”
She smiled. “You’ll see.”
Billie gently took hold of the round stone in her left hand. Her fingertips could feel the tiny metallic grooves behind the façade of sandstone. They were cold and sharp, like the toothed cogwheel on a bicycle. She increased the pressure, until she was gripping the stone tightly, and then began to turn it clockwise.
It rotated more than a dozen times and then stopped.
Gentle vibrations shook the face of the rock-wall and were followed by the sound of heavy machinery making progress. She imagined the series of intricate mechanisms moving within. The finely-toothed wheels of the sprockets inside, turning multiple roller chains, and multiplying the force of her hand more than a thousand-fold, through a succession of complex gear ratios.
The sound finally ceased, and everything was still once more.
Below her, the two, twenty-foot high by five-foot wide stone fragments had separated. Sliding aside, like an automatic door in any retail store. Directly in the center of the two, was a circular opening. It appeared to be carved by hand using chisels, and was large enou
gh for two persons to walk through standing upright.
Billie turned her gaze toward Sam. “Well?”
He smiled, and said in a voice just above a whisper, “The damned stone doors are on rails!”
Billie released her descender, dropping swiftly another eight feet and swung inside the round, carved tunnel’s entrance. “Exactly.”
Sam followed her down and into the opening. They both unclipped their descenders from the rope. He then radioed the rest of the group to let them know they’d found it and to come down.
His eyes swept the tunnel and the ground in particular. “Are you sure about this, Billie?”
“Yeah. Of course, I am. Why?”
Sam shrugged. “I don’t know. If the floor starts dissolving or rocks start dropping at random, I’m out of here. I’m no Indiana Jones.”
Billie smiled. “No, you’re right. You aren’t that handsome.”
Chapter Three
Sam watched as Elise landed gracefully in the entrance to the tunnel and unclipped. Genevieve’s entrance was more dramatic as she immediately crouched and scanned the tunnel with the night-vision scope of her weapon. Tom unfolded his large body just inside the entrance and reflexively looked up. He needn’t have bothered to watch his head. The cave was at least ten feet in height, and as Sam played his tactical flashlight around, the ceiling appeared to angle upward farther into the tunnel.
He turned to Billie. “Will these doors stay open?”
She nodded. “Until someone closes them from the outside again.”
“All right. Now where do we go?”
“Follow the tunnel. It’s not long.”
Sam asked, “What am I looking for?”
Billie smiled. “You’ll see.”
Sam followed the carved tunnel nearly a hundred feet into the mountain. There it opened to a much wider cavern system. His eyes raked the area, and a moment later he ripped off his night-vision goggles.
The active infrared night-vision worked by emitting infrared. But in the cave he’d just entered, that light had simply reflected back at him, magnified greatly.
He switched on his hand held flashlight, and waited for his eyes to adjust. Tiny specks of quartz glittered off the walls of the new cave like diamonds.
Genevieve switched on her own light. “Our night-vision’s going to be useless in here. And with these on, our presence here is going to be pretty obvious to whoever’s guarding the temple.”
“Agreed.” Sam looked at Billie. “How confident are you that they specifically wanted you to return for the stone tablet?”
“Reasonably,” Billie confirmed.
“How confident?” Sam persisted.
Billie held her breath. “I guess I’m willing to bet all our lives on it.”
Sam shined his flashlight at a series of openings up ahead. “All right. We continue. Billie, do you have any idea which of these tunnels we should follow?”
“Not really. But we’ll know when we see it.”
“See what?” he asked.
She pointed her flashlight down, revealing a floor scattered with sand, and in the sand, thousands of bare footprints. Billie’s eyes followed the light. “These. We need to follow them.”
Sam wasn’t at all certain they should, but in this location, five people with semi-automatics ought to be able to hold their own against a small army of barefoot temple guards. “Sure.”
He switched on his headlamp, and turned off the flashlight. With his hands now free, he unshouldered his Heckler and Koch submachine gun, and entered the tunnel. Billie might have been confident that the Master Builders wanted her to return, but he wasn’t convinced.
Sam continued along the tunnel and through a narrow opening into a wonderland of speleothems – stalactites and stalagmites – unlike any he had ever seen. It looked like they had melted out of the ceiling of the cave and flowed into fantastic, smooth-sided shapes.
The height of the tunnel slowly decreased until the ceiling was just under four feet, and he was forced to climb through on his hands and knees. Between the thousands of pillars of stalactites and stalagmites, was a grand maze of crystals. The light from Sam’s headlamp reflected throughout the labyrinth, highlighting its extreme size.
Sam said, “Lucky we’ve got this trail to follow. Without it, we’d need days and days to follow each of these small tunnels before we found what we were after.”
Billie smiled. “Pity each one of these imprints in the sand represents another pyramid warrior, whose entire purpose it is to protect the temple.”
Sam returned her smile. “You said you didn’t think they would attack us? That they wanted you to return for the stone tablet?”
“That’s what I do think,” she said. “But I have been wrong before.”
“Great. Let’s just hope that was the last time.”
It took close to thirty minutes to scramble through the crystal labyrinth. When he emerged between two pillars into a large space, the powerful light from his headlamp was swallowed by the giant, seemingly endless, grotto. He turned on his more powerful hand-held flashlight and shined it toward the ceiling. The faint shimmer of light was the only confirmation they were still underground. Although, for a moment, Sam questioned whether it was merely cloud cover.
He turned to Billie. “Where are we?”
“Follow the footsteps, and you’ll see,” she replied.
Their voices didn’t echo, but instead, simply vanished mysteriously into the distance. Sam paused and listened. If there were still others inside whatever type of subterranean chamber they’d entered, Sam suspected he would have heard their breathing, shuffling of feet, or something at least.
But he heard nothing.
He stepped forward, slowly following the path of footprints in the sand, where Billie had told him hundreds of temple guards had once traveled to take their place.
Behind him, Tom swore loudly. “Sam, you’d better see this.”
“What is it, Tom?” Sam asked. “Do we have company?”
Tom unclipped the Armasight digital night-vision scope from the top of his weapon and handed it to him. “Not yet, but you’re gonna want to have a look through this.”
Sam nodded and took the scope.
He slowly placed it up against his right eye, and looked through its telescopic digital lens. Sam held his breath as he studied what he saw, his eye and his mind competing to rationalize what he was viewing.
A wry and incredulous grin formed on his lips. “Billie, where have you taken us?”
“I told you that you wouldn’t believe me until you saw it for yourself,” Billie said.
Sam increased the digital magnification and brought the lens back up to his eyes. He shook his head, as he stared through it.
“I don’t believe it…” he said.
There in front of him were thousands of six foot high, solid quartz sandstone, square blocks stacked upon one another to form an exact pyramid, every bit as large as the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Chapter Four
Billie climbed the first sandstone block at the base of the pyramid.
It felt more like the world’s biggest bouldering room than the grand staircase to the entrance to a temple. To scale each tier, she needed to reach above and perform a partial pull-up, before being able to dig her toes into the rock and shuffle herself forward and over the edge. It wasn’t too difficult, but she didn’t revel in the idea of completing the process another fifty or more times to reach the entrance to the main descending passage.
She was tall, with an athletic and lithe frame. Despite the heavy backpack she carried, Billie was still the fastest in the group. By the time she reached the triangular entrance to the main descending passageway, she’d gained an advantage of nearly five entire sandstone blocks ahead of Sam, who was the next fastest in their group. Elise moved quickly, too, but she was shorter and consequently had to climb farther to overcome each stone. No one could have ever called Genevieve or Tom’s progress slow, but instead of racin
g ahead, they concentrated on the defense of the team and maintaining a possible exit strategy if needed.
Billie fixed the beam of her flashlight into the entrance of the descending passageway. No light or sound returned. She didn’t expect any. It stood to reason that everything of value inside the temple was within the king’s chamber. If there were still hundreds of Pirahã temple guards inside, they would be waiting for them at the Grand Gallery.
Confident no one was approaching from within the pyramid, Billie turned to face Sam. In a stage whisper, she called down, “Well, Sam, are you coming?”
“I’m right behind you,” he replied.
Spurred on by her taunt, Sam completed the remaining four blocks in under two minutes. He stopped before entering and took a deep breath. They waited until the rest of the team was at the entrance step and ready to go again.
Sam stepped up beside her. “Are you ready for this?”
“You mean after being enslaved here for nearly two years?” Billie replied.
“Yeah.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Billie unshouldered her submachine gun, and descended into the entrance passageway. She was certain the Master Builders had brought her, specifically, back to this place for a reason. But there was no rational reason she should feel so confident about it. Instead, it simply felt like a hidden purpose, or some sort of missing information was stored in the darkest depths of her cerebellum, and that once she returned, it might all be revealed to her.
She swallowed hard, and took another step closer. That didn’t mean she would necessarily like what she discovered. Besides, she might have got this entire thing wrong. Instead of coming back because she was a special part of the Master Builder’s grand plan, maybe she was simply the fly that got away and was now stupidly returning to the web?
A hundred and fifty feet in and she spotted the ascending passage above her head. She clambered up onto the first step of the ascending tunnel and waited until Sam and the rest of the group reached the same location.
Code to Extinction Page 4