“Only the nobles and rich could afford body armor,” she said. “And Spain wasn’t about to subsidize fortune seekers who were likely to wind up dead. These guys were required to pony up their own clothing and weapon, or they wouldn’t get paid. And a knife didn’t count. That was considered a tool. Usually their “armor” was a thick leather tunic at best. The term conquistador wasn’t even coined until 1830.”
“This guy had chain mail,” Braydon said, pointing to the skeleton nearest him. The linked metal pieces forming his tunic were stiff and brown with rust.
“One of the lucky ones,” she said, “so to speak.”
The muted raps of gunfire echoed around the chamber. Leader’s team wouldn’t be able to hold their attackers off much longer.
She grabbed Braydon’s hand. “Salvatierra wrote that he buried the Breastplate of Aaron under the pile of heads,” she said. They leaped over the corpse, and crossed to the pyramid of skulls. They crouched by it.
“History is not going to repeat itself,” she said. “Not here, not now.” She reached for a skull. This guy was dead, long dead. It was bone, that’s all. “Not under my watch. Contreras’s men were mad to think they’d draft the tribesmen into their new army by poisoning their families.” She set it aside. Next one would be easier, maybe.
Braydon picked up a skull with massively decayed teeth. “Poor sap,” he said. “You should see the cavities. I’d feel sorry for him,” he tossed away the skull, “if he hadn’t committed genocide. Hold on.”
Christa leaned in closer. “Gold.” It glinted in the sunlight, a wink through a hollow eye.
He tossed away the cranium and hastily pushed aside two skulls.
She grasped his arm. This was no dream. The Breastplate of Aaron. It was real. It was there. Within reach. “It’s magnificent,” she whispered, her throat dry. The Breastplate was square, hammered out of gold, attached by golden filaments to a tunic finely woven of threads that were ghosts of their former bright blues and reds. On the gold square, the mounts for the gems were equally spaced in four rows of three. It was intoxicating. She struggled to stay focused. She had to remember every detail. For Dad. “Five of the gems are still intact.”
“The agate, amethyst, beryl, onyx and jasper. The first seven mounts are empty. Simple bezel setting,” he said. “Bent from Salvatierra’s rushed extraction of the gems, but the gold should be pliable enough to reset the stones.” The boom of an explosion blasted through the tunnel from the valley. The concussion rocked the chamber.
“Time for a leap of faith,” she said.
“Wait. This fabric will disintegrate the minute we pick it up.”
“No, Braydon, it won’t.”
She grabbed the tunic by the shoulders and lifted it. A jawbone clattered off one corner. A whistle of wind spiraled around the chamber. Just wind, that’s all. The tunic stayed completely intact. It looked like it had been preserved in a climate-controlled museum case.
The earth rumbled. Braydon flinched as a chink of rock popped out of the far wall and crashed at his feet. “God’s telling us to either get the hell out or to hurry the hell up,” he said. “You get those seven stones back in the Breastplate. I’ll work on getting us out of here.”
Right. Stay focused. She crossed to the platform. The tunic was heavy, awkward with the weight of the golden Breastplate. She laid it on the platform.
Braydon moved to the perimeter of the room. “Something’s wrong,” he said.
“You mean besides being surrounded by headless bodies and being chased by guys who want to kill us.” She shrugged off her pack.
“The way their bodies are placed. It’s not natural.”
She looked around her as she unzipped her pack. He was right. The bodies formed a crude ring, the pyramid of skulls forming the ring’s “stone.” And she was in the center. “This is the platform Contreras was standing on when Salvatierra found him,” she said. “Where he wore the Breastplate. They were defending him.”
“Two swords, rusty, two pikes, only three knives in what must have been leather sheaths before being eaten away,” Braydon said. “All by their sides. Hard to believe that the poison darts killed them so quickly that not a single one of these trained killers had a chance to swing a pike.”
“Not pikes,” she said, “halberds, those long shafts with the nasty-looking metal ax. Very deadly, still used by the Vatican guard today. But I’m not letting live guys scare me off restoring the Breastplate, and certainly not dead ones.” First out, the linen napkin from the Waldorf Hotel. She opened it, revealing the diamond and sapphire. Magnificent. Mesmerizing. Her hands trembled. It wasn’t just the extraordinary history compressed into their facets, the fact that these two gems had altered the fates of sultans, kings, killers and saints. They actually glowed. And that humming in her ear, it wasn’t an aftereffect of the deafening gunshots. She laid flat the napkin, from the room where Jared Sadler had been left to bleed to death. She placed the Kohinoor Diamond and Edward’s Sapphire on it. These gems altered fates. She had to respect that, fight not to fear it.
“One thing I learned mountain climbing,” he said, “the summit is only halfway there. Getting down is what kills a lot of people. Or, in this situation, getting out of this temple. The Breastplate is a means to an end. Our primary mission is to retrieve the antidote.” He pivoted towards the skylight. Thick, furry roots twisted down from the overgrowth above, like fingers reaching into a coffin. The ceiling was a good twenty feet up. He jumped up, just catching the end of the longest root dangling down. He yanked on it. Soil tumbled down. The vine snapped. He ducked as it coiled onto the floor.
She fished out the silver box, opened the lid. The five sacred stones glimmered and winked. It was a miracle, yet a feeling of dread nudged at her consciousness. These stones had caused thousands of deaths. What made her think they could save lives, too? Open a portal to her mother? Bring her father home?
Braydon stepped over the corpses to check out the far wall. It looked Incan, finely carved granite blocks, fitted perfectly together. Solid, apparently impenetrable. He flicked on his flashlight.
As her eyes adjusted, the details became distinct. Three words were painted, actually smeared by hand, in red, on the far wall. Ipse venena bibas.
“A local dialect?”
Christa swallowed hard. “Latin,” she said. “Salvatierra’s language of choice, but the locals must have written it later. According to his letter, Salvatierra barely escaped with the seven stones when the temple started collapsing.”
Braydon sniffed it. “Much later,” he said. “Smells and looks like some kind of berry juice.” He turned towards her. “It’s still fresh.”
“It’s a line from a Catholic exorcism in the middle ages, addressing Satan” she said. “Ipse venena bibas. May you drink the poisons yourself.”
“I was hoping for This Way Out,” he said. “I smell sulfur, and this wall is granite.”
“Brimstone,” she said. “In Biblical times, sulfur was called brimstone.”
“As in fire and brimstone?” He extracted his Eagle Scout knife from his pocket, opened the blade, and jimmied it between two of the tightly fitted stones in the wall. He showed her the blade. A yellow powder tipped it.
“The kind of sermon that reminds sinners that hell awaits those who don’t repent.”
He dipped his finger in the yellow powder, placed it on the tip of his tongue. “The kind of sulfur that’s mixed with gunpowder to make an explosive,” he said.
“You remember Contreras’s last words?”
“Something about breaking your neck.”
“No, I mean Alvaro Contreras, to Salvatierra,” she said. “The gems of the Breastplate reveal the secret to my domination. Don the Breastplate. Stand upon this platform. Call God’s light to shine upon you. You will hold the powers of the Heavens in the palm of your hand. I’m no Eagle Scout, but I know how to start a campfire with a magnifying glass focusing sunlight on dry tinder.”
“I’d rather us
e C-4, but if it’s brimstone we got, then we’d better remember the Bible.” He came to her side.
“You shall make the Breastplate of judgment,” she said. “And you shall put settings of stones in it, four rows of stones: The first row shall be a sardius, a topaz, and an Emerald.”
“The sardius is the ruby, the Urim,” said Braydon, “from the Hebrew, to see light, flame.” She snugged the Urim into the first empty setting. It fit perfectly. Braydon helped her bend the gold bezel around the stone, locking it into place. Her fingers tingled again, as if electrified. “The golden topaz is the Thummim, for completion, integrity.” As she set the Thummim into the next setting, the ethereal voices grew louder, more realistic. It wasn’t wind through a crack in the wall. It sounded like a cross between a human’s wail and an animal’s howl. The sound was wafting into the chamber like the beam of light from the opening above them. Monkeys? The spat of gunfire echoed through the passageway from the clearing. She quickly placed the Tear of the Moon Emerald.
Braydon handed her the Yikaisidahi Turquoise. “The second row shall be a Turquoise, a sapphire, and a diamond,” he said.
She placed the Turquoise. As he fitted the gold setting around it, she drank in one last look at the Kohinoor Diamond sparkling in her palm. She didn’t want to let it go. She fit it into its mount, and quickly did the same with the Sapphire.
He handed her the Abraxas. “The third row, a jacinth, an agate, and an amethyst; and the fourth row, a beryl, an onyx, and a jasper. They shall be set in gold settings. The Abraxas has got to be the jacinth. The rest of the stones are still intact.”
The voices grew louder, an edge of terror and might to the glory. “Braydon, do you hear them?”
“I’m more concerned about what I don’t hear.” He was shouting, over the voices. He had to hear them, too. “The shooting has stopped. Might not be a good sign,” he said. “The Breastplate had better work the way I think it will.
“Stand on the platform wearing the Breastplate,” she pointed up, “and the gemstones will focus the sunlight coming through that skylight to the far wall.”
“The beam will ignite the sulfur, and, with any luck, blow a hole through to the hidden canyon.”
“State of the art technology, for the sixteenth century,” she said. She fit the Abraxas into its setting, wrapped the gold around its perimeter to hold it in place. She grasped his hand, pulled him close. “We’ve done it, Braydon. We’ve restored the Breastplate of Aaron.”
He embraced her, tight. Before she realized it, they kissed. She was infused with love and joy, drunk, giddy. From Heaven? From more earthly desires? She didn’t give a damn. The room grew brighter, the air clearer. The golden Breastplate, alive with the twelve precious stones, emitted a light and energy that blocked out the world outside the two of them.
He leaned back, unbuttoned the top button on her camouflage shirt. His fingers touched her neck, emitting a tingle like she felt from the gems. He lifted the El Dorado pendant, made sure it was visible. “I’m not one to believe in ghost tribes,” he said, “but a man in my position, restoring a lost Biblical artifact with legendary, mystical gems, shouldn’t question matters of faith and history.”
“El Dorado changed the fate of the world before,” she said.
A gunshot blasted through the chamber, gashing the wall behind them. Braydon drew his his Glock from his hip holster. Rambitskov spun Braydon away from her, shoving him across the chamber. Contreras grabbed her by the collar, yanked her up against him. He pressed a knife to her throat, the pilot survival knife Donohue had given her. Somehow, her twenty-two pistol was gone, too. Rambitskov backed away to the entrance, his pistol smoking.
CHAPTER 66
Braydon stopped himself from drilling Rambitskov through the forehead with his Glock. Contreras could retaliate by piercing Christa’s carotid artery with the knife he held against her throat. She was still alive. He had to work with that. The ethereal voices had vanished, sucked out of the chamber like light into a black hole. He’d been a fool, mesmerized by the Breastplate while Contreras infiltrated the chamber without resistance. Braydon didn’t need God’s choir to tell him that Rambitskov wanted nothing more than to do unto Braydon what Braydon wanted to do unto him, except the man’s overkill M16 semi-automatic assault rifle would obliterate his brain in seconds. Same result, just messier.
Rambitskov was outfitted in U.S. military issue jungle fatigues. It was a disgrace to Donohue’s strike force, each one a proven war hero, who, by the sound of the spattering gunfire, still engaged in a fierce fight in the clearing against Contreras’s guerillas. Contreras was head to toe in some crazy Old Testament getup, a long white gown beneath a multi-hued, brocade, short sleeve tunic. Sandals on his feet. The man was clearly insane, but that didn’t make him any less deadly.
Christa looked small against Contreras’s bulk, but she didn’t look scared. If anything, she looked angry, on the verge of trying something very brave, and probably fatal. Contreras tightened his grip on her. “Agent Fox,” he said. “Let’s not start off with a cliché. You know what to do.”
“Kill them,” Christa said, her hands clawing at Contreras’s arm crushing her chest. “Get the antidote.”
Contreras grinned. “This is your chance at redemption, Fox,” he said. “Or will you be responsible for this partner’s death as well?” He pressed the tip of his knife against Christa’s skin. She grimaced. A drop of blood trickled down her neck.
Braydon crouched, laid his Glock on the ground, raised his hands. He mentally placed the weapons in the room. The swords and halberds were his best bet, but only if he could get the jump on Rambitskov’s M16. Even then, the bastard had a good fifty pounds and four inches on him and the cold blood of a gang fighter.
Rambitskov kept his weapon trained on Braydon’s chest. “Kick over the Glock,” he said. Braydon complied. It skidded across the gravel on the pounded earth floor. “And the Ka-Bar.” Braydon expected that, too. He unsheathed the survival knife and, denying the impulse to throw it into the fleshy part of the bastard’s throat, he tossed it just in front of his army boots.
Rambitskov shifted the M16 to his left hand, crouched and picked up the Glock with his right. He stood, licked his lips, and smiled. They had nicknamed him Rambo. He certainly looked the part. He stuck the Glock in his belt, pulled a device from his shirt pocket. A C4 remote detonator.
“We would not want any interruptions,” said Contreras, “and your little strike force is putting up more of a fight than expected. We lost four of our bodyguard detail just getting us to the entrance of the passageway. The only way out of here,” he grunted as Christa squirmed, “will be through the Oculto Canyon.” Without taking his eyes off Braydon, he nodded.
Rambitskov flipped open the yellow safety at the top of the black box. He placed his thumb over the red button, and pressed down.
The explosion blasted into the inner chamber with a deafening roar. The concussion knocked Contreras off balance. Christa gouged her elbow into his middle. Braydon lunged forward, tackling Rambitskov with all his might. The man’s M16 fired wildly as he flailed back. Braydon snatched the weapon from his grasp. He barely had purchase on it as Rambitskov swung around, slamming into his side with doubled fists. The M16 clattered into the tunnel as a cloud of smoke and dust billowed out of it into the chamber. Braydon quickly closed his mouth and narrowed his eyes against the onslaught of debris.
Rambitskov, gasping for breath, convulsed in a fit of choking coughs. He cried out as one hand flew up, too late, to shield his eyes from the stinging smoke. He reached blindly for Braydon’s Glock. As he pulled the pistol from his belt, Braydon kicked it away.
The dust cloud billowed through the chamber, snuffing out the daylight coming from the hole in the ceiling. The M16 was unreachable, buried in the black smoke of the tunnel. His Glock had clattered a few feet to his right. Contreras pushed Christa aside to grab for it. Braydon dove for the Glock. A force bowled him backwards, pounding him against the wall. Ra
mbitskov. Braydon tumbled away as Rambitskov’s fist pounded into the air where his face had been. With the survival reflexes of a streetfighter, Rambitskov pulled back before slamming his knuckles into rock. Braydon tucked and rolled towards the nearest skeleton. He grabbed the hilt of the conquistador’s sword. Its leather scabbard disintegrated as he snatched it away from the skeleton. The weapon was heavy, its blade dulled and jagged with rust.
Rambitskov was quick to respond, grabbing a halberd and swinging it around, slicing through the air. Braydon ducked and rolled. Only his agility and training would save him. Christa was in trouble. Contreras shoved her mightily into the far wall. She banged her head on the granite, staggered.
Contreras swept up a sword from the nearest skeleton. He advanced towards Christa. “Live by the sword! Die by the sword!” he screamed.
“Christa!” Braydon yelled. He tossed her the sword. She caught it by the hilt, parried Contreras’s thrust.
Rambitskov’s halberd came at his ribs from the side. He leaped back. The point of the halberd slashed across his torso. It tore through the fatigues, and sliced his skin. It hurt like hell, but he blanked out the pain. Christa had taken the advantage, slashing, thrusting, their sword clangs echoing against the granite walls. Contreras, surprised, was on the retreat. But it wouldn’t be long before his strength outmatched her agility.
The smoke was dissipating. The sunbeam, thick with dust, penetrated the chamber. Its light glinted on the golden Breastplate, flat on the stone platform. The sun was moving past its zenith. Soon, the beam would not be focused on the platform. Salvatierra wrote that the sun had to be shining on the Breastplate for it to reveal its power, including the secret to finding the canyon.
Braydon doubled over. He clutched at his wound, grimacing in pain. A man like Rambitskov would relish the chance to take advantage of an opponent’s weakness. Rambitskov raised the halberd above his head, building up energy for the final, decapitating blow.
The Seventh Stone Page 44