“My men will never surrender,” Major Jakes shouted back, and more gunfire rang out. “Not to cowardly snipers, and not to terrorists.”
“I always wanted to be in a real Mexican standoff,” Mulder said.
Scully knew that the covert American commando group might be able to outgun and outfight the Liberación Quintana Roo rebels in a standing battle—but they could not escape or retreat with so many snipers hidden in the jungles. They were trapped at Xitaclan.
The phosphorous flare fizzled and faded out, and the second arc light shattered, plunging the site back into a darkness broken only by occasional gunfire and afterimages on Scully’s eyes.
“You two will stay next to me,” Major Jakes said. “I realize you are both noncombatants—though I’m not sure there’s a satisfactory way to resolve this.”
“Then could we have our weapons back, sir?” Mulder asked. “Since it’s already come down to a fight.”
“No, Agent Mulder. I don’t believe that would be in your best interests.” Major Jakes turned his night-vision goggles toward the forest.
As she lay on the flagstones, wincing every time bullets whined over her head, Scully felt the ground tremble, building to a vigorous vibration, as if even more heavy machinery were rolling toward them—then she realized that this tremor originated from deeper within the earth. Another rumbling came, a quaking, as volcanic pressure built up beneath the limestone crust.
“Scully, hang on,” Mulder said. He grabbed her arm, though Major Jakes and his men did not understand what was happening.
The ground bucked and shook as seismic forces writhed beneath them. The great pyramid of Xitaclan rattled and trembled. Blocks of loosened stone tumbled down the steep steps. From the jungle, some of the snipers wailed in terror, while Jakes’s commandos scrambled about in equal confusion.
The more distant of the plaza’s two feathered serpent stelae groaned, then toppled over onto the flagstones. The ancient obelisk crumbled into broken rubble. The trees danced and waved.
Steam blasted from small openings in the plaza flagstones. Little fumaroles split through the ground, releasing tremendous pressure.
“Come on, Scully, let’s get out of here!” Mulder shouted, tugging at her arm. “We can run—use this as a diversion, get to shelter.” He stood and staggered away, the ground leaping like a carnival ride beneath his feet.
Scully rose to join him, but Major Jakes stood next to her, blocking the way. “Not so fast, you two. You’re staying here.”
Angry shouts rang out from the forest, and Scully could hear trees toppling, uprooted by the tremors. She tried to stare down Major Jakes as he held his weapon at her, and she knew from the expression in his eyes that she couldn’t flee. Mulder had already crossed half of the plaza, ducking and weaving, trying to get to the cover of one of the low temple ruins. Mulder turned back to her, an anguished expression on his face. He paused as if he meant to come running back, to surrender to Jakes in order to stay beside her.
“Just go, Mulder!” she said. “Get out of here!”
He took that to heart and put on more speed, dashing toward the cover of the pyramid’s lower platform. Gunfire splattered against the uneven flagstones near his heels, bullets ricocheting into the night—she couldn’t tell if the shots had come from the guerrillas in the jungle or from Major Jakes’s commandos.
The ground lurched with one titanic jolt, and Scully heard a sound like muscles tearing, as if the ground below were giving birth. A giant pillar of steam exploded from behind the Pyramid of Kukulkan, water boiling away and draining into the ground.
She realized the steam explosion came from the cenote—a crack in the earth had split the bottom of the intensely deep well, dumping water into a volcanic cauldron.
Scully caught only a glimpse of her partner’s silhouette, but she knew with a dismay that made her chest ache that Mulder was running straight toward it, as if drawn.
27
Xitaclan ruins
Wednesday, 1:31 A.M.
By the time Mulder reached meager cover, the ground had stopped swaying and hic-coughing beneath his feet. A few snipers took potshots at him, but most of them seemed concerned more with their own safety. Before the gunfire could pick up again, he took advantage of the stunned motionlessness around the ruins and ran on, taking shelter at the edge of the immense pyramid.
He felt dismayed at leaving Scully behind, a prisoner of—or perhaps “under the protection of”—Major Jakes and his commando squad. But she had told him to run, told him to get away. Her last words piercing through the volcanic tremors had cut him free, as if a leash holding him back had suddenly snapped. If he could solve the mystery, find the answers that Barreio’s guerrillas and the American soldiers both wanted, perhaps he could use it to gain Scully’s freedom.
Now he plunged in a single direction, for better or worse. He knew that he, one man—unarmed, since Jakes had relieved him of even his handgun—could do little against two opposing military forces. Mulder hoped to approach the problem from a different direction, finding an unexpected solution from left field.
He needed to discover the secret of the great pyramid of Xitaclan. What had Cassandra Rubicon found there?
The abortive eruption and tremors had failed to produce gushing lava and ash, but as Mulder staggered toward the abrupt edge of the sacrificial sinkhole, he came to a quick stop—and stared down, awestruck.
Somewhere deep in the basement of the Earth the ground had cracked, splitting open the bottom of the sacrificial well. The limestone sinkhole had dumped its contents into a smoldering pit of volcanic heat—all the cold, quiet water of the cenote, the still depths that had cradled the sunken bodies of Cassandra Rubicon’s team as well as the broken old archaeologist himself. As he ran, Mulder had watched the mushroom cloud of stinking steam pour into the sky as if from a boiler explosion….
Now the sinkhole lay empty, dripping and crackling, like a dry, wide-open mouth. Its limestone walls remained slick and lumpy. Steam still curled up with a sour biting stench of volcanic gases.
Mulder looked down into the gasping cenote, a pit into hell like the legendary entrance into Hades from Greek mythology. Deep below, he saw a faint glow. The haze of illumination was unlike firelight, unlike the smoldering glare of volcanic heat. This seemed more of a cold glow, a shimmer that throbbed and pulsed like a beacon shouting silently into the bottomless shaft.
Scully had told him she’d seen a similar unsettling glow during her diving expedition, like distant heat lightning, far below the depth where she had discovered the bodies of the research team. Phosphorescent algae growing far from the touch of sunlight, she had speculated. As Mulder stared at the faint haze, watching the flickering light, he could not accept his partner’s scientific explanation. This rising and falling glitter seemed too orderly, too regular, a pattern…some kind of a signal.
He thought of the major’s claim that the Xitaclan ruins were the source of some mysterious encrypted signal, a transmission whose code the U.S. military presumably could not break…. But what if the transmission was not encrypted or encoded in any way, but simply in a language that Major Jakes could not understand, that no human had ever learned?
Vladimir Rubicon had gently chided Mulder for his imaginative interpretation of the carvings atop the temple…for his explanation that the wise god Kukulkan, who had come in a silver ship trailing fire, might have been an ancient astronaut, an extraterrestrial come to Earth at the dawn of human civilization. But now, observing the eerie glow deep down in the drained cenote, Mulder felt certain this must be some kind of SOS beacon.
Mulder saw the tangled ropes still lashed to the gnarled trees, dangling along the side of the now-empty sacrificial well. He stared down at the steep curving limestone walls. With the knobs and handholds and sloping ledges, plus the support of the old ropes, he could make the descent. Probably.
The glow called to him. He had to go down there. No question about it.
He grasped
the ropes, wet and warm and slick in his palm. They must have been cooked like vegetables in the noxious vapors that had boiled up out of the sacrificial well—but the cables appeared undamaged. They would hold his weight…he hoped.
He tugged, securing the knots firmly above, and lowered himself backward over the edge, digging the heels of his shoes into the damp limestone. As he expected, he found sufficient lumps and footholds to assist his descent—but the drop seemed impossibly far down.
Straining his arm muscles, Mulder picked up speed as he gained confidence, making his way from ledge to ledge, working himself downward. He grasped the rough rope, but frequently used it only as a crutch and not for actual support.
Mulder’s head began to spin from the foul odors hissing up from below like the fetid breath of a dragon. He couldn’t imagine how deep the sinkhole actually went. Luckily, the beckoning glow did not arise from the absolute depths, but only partially down.
Razor-sharp cracks of gunfire rang out across the air again. Mulder froze, plastering himself in the darkness under an overhang as the blasts reverberated in the hollow chamber of the cenote, but he realized that no one had shot at him intentionally. The fighting had started again, now that the hidden assailants had recovered from their fear and confusion after the violent tremors.
“Guess I better pick up the pace,” he muttered. He wasn’t going to let anything as trivial as a minor Central American revolution distract him from learning what he needed to know.
Mulder dropped down to another ledge, and the color of the limestone changed from faded white to a darker, browner shade, stained with slimy residue. He was now below what had been the surface of the water.
Another shot rang out far above, and he heard thin voices in Spanish or the back-of-the-throat Maya derivative the local Indians had spoken. He wondered if Fernando Aguilar and his native helpers had returned, bumbling into the conflict…or perhaps Aguilar was somehow in league with Barreio and his Liberación Quintana Roo movement.
He and Scully now had another set of murder suspects. Evidently, Barreio’s group of violent rebels might have chosen to assassinate a team of American archaeologists defiling their national treasures. The price of revolution.
But…if Mulder’s suspicions about the fantastic origin of this ancient Maya city proved to be true, then the relics of Xitaclan belonged to no nation on Earth.
It had always bothered him—why had the Maya people abandoned this lush, isolated site, and so many of their grand cities? Why had they built Xitaclan here at all, far from trade routes or rivers or roads? What had fostered the birth of their entire great empire? Why did the Maya develop such an interest in astronomical knowledge, calendrical cycles, planetary orbits?
The Maya had been obsessed with time and the stars, the passage of the Earth around the sun. They had kept meticulous track of days and months, like a child crossing off dates on his calendar in the month before a birthday.
He had a feeling all the answers lay below, in the light.
Underneath the water’s former surface, the cenote’s ledges and outcroppings were thicker, knobbier, unweathered. He climbed down, his heart beating faster, his curiosity burning.
Then he ran out of rope.
Mulder looked at the frayed end, the long dangling strands that clung to the cenote wall, all the way to the rim above. He had no choice but to continue downward, unaided.
The glow grew brighter around him now, colder. He sweated from the thick volcanic heat, the leftover steam, the sauna of vapors around him in the empty cenote pit. But the light grew whitish-blue and cold, pulsing through the surrounding rock. The walls seemed barely able to contain the energy seeping out.
Finally, working his way the rest of the distance, his fingers clenching slippery handholds and knobby outcroppings of limestone, Mulder arrived panting at a wide ledge, an arched opening…exposing a smooth rectangle of metal.
More gunfire rang out in the night, but Mulder didn’t hear it.
The alloy frame was encrusted and corroded, but remarkably clean after centuries of submersion in the cold cenote waters. The shape and appearance of the portal was unmistakable, and Mulder reached out to touch it, his fingers trembling.
The exposed opening was clearly some kind of door.
The door to a ship.
28
Xitaclan ruins
Wednesday, 2:15 A.M.
The ancient metallic hatch opened with a drawn-out hissing breath of equalizing air pressure—a sound, Mulder suspected, similar to what a feathered serpent might make just before it attacked….
Despite his desperate curiosity, Mulder turned away and held his breath, afraid of what toxins he might inhale inside the newly opened chamber. In other investigations he had been overcome after catching a whiff of the noxious blood from decomposing alien figures. Whatever lay beneath the Xitaclan ruins had been entombed for centuries, and he had no way of knowing just what might lie inside this long-abandoned…craft?
His eyes stung from the fumes still rising from volcanic cracks in the unseen floor of the cenote. He hoped the ground didn’t spasm again anytime soon.
But hearing the faint popcorn sound of gunfire above even louder than the dripping echoes trickling down the curved limestone walls, Mulder knew he could not spare any time or energy to worry about his own safety. He had to get his answers, and then get back to Scully.
For that, he needed to go inside.
He planted his foot one step through the doorway, feeling the solidity of the floor. The entrance corridor was smooth-walled and womb-like, the walls a polished metallic substance that absorbed the light and reflected it back. Mulder could not see any source to the glare. It was a blinding harshness, clearly designed, he thought, for eyes adapted to the light of a different sun.
The Maya had never been skilled metalsmiths, had no smelting capabilities to create the materials he saw around him. He proceeded farther down the corridor, as if drawn. The walls hummed with a high-pitched throbbing sensation, like alien music. He felt it deeply within his bones, his teeth, the back of his skull. Mulder wanted to tell someone, share his amazement. But that had to wait until he escaped again.
He recalled a far more mundane scenario out at the jogging track near FBI Headquarters, when he had finished a long, exhilarating run, the second time he had encountered the man he came to call “Deep Throat.” When Mulder had questioned him about alien visitations, hard evidence of conspiracies locked away in secret government vaults, Deep Throat had given his usual answers that weren’t answers.
“They’re here, aren’t they?” Mulder had said, sweating from his run, demanding to know.
With his calm, unassuming smile and his knowing voice, Deep Throat had raised his eyebrows. “Mr. Mulder, they’ve been here for a long, long time.”
But could it have been as long as thousands of years?
Now Mulder stepped deeper down the armored corridor, exploring the remains of what must be an ancient derelict, the ship of an alien visitor who had landed—perhaps crashed—in the Yucatán Peninsula centuries and centuries before, here at the birthplace of the Maya civilization.
“Talk about illegal aliens,” Mulder muttered.
The winding passages opened up, revealing dark, half-collapsed chambers, what had been other metal-walled rooms. Where corroded alloy plates had tumbled to the floor, the holes had been repaired with pieces of carved stone. Little of the original ship itself remained, barely a metal framework patched up with limestone blocks.
Mulder imagined Maya priests entering the “sacred” pyramid long after the alien visitors had vanished, still attempting to be caretakers but not knowing how. Generations and generations of awestruck visitors would have worn the floor smooth.
Perhaps the missing equipment and girders had been cannibalized from the main structure to be used in other Maya temples…or perhaps they had been stripped and destroyed by treasure seekers…or cast away by religious zealots such as Father Diego de Landa.
&n
bsp; A sense of wonder engulfed him, coursed through his veins as he continued to explore. Never before had he seen such overwhelming evidence, such incredible remains of an extraterrestrial construction.
The corridors in the derelict ship reflected the same blueprint that Mulder had encountered while moving through the labyrinth of the pyramid above in his search for Vladimir Rubicon the day before. Up there, Mulder had explored the dark tunnels until stopped by the strange sealed passage. Perhaps, he thought, it was an upper entrance to the entombed ship.
Mulder wondered if the craft itself had crashed, plowing a crater in the middle of the jungle. When the local, uncivilized people had come to investigate, Kukulkan, the “wise god from the stars,” had taught them immense knowledge, fostering the birth of a great civilization.
He ran his fingers along the gaps in the metallic walls, touching the polished limestone. More than anything, he wished Vladimir Rubicon could have lived long enough to see this.
Over the millennia the Maya—or later treasure seekers—had stripped the derelict to the bone, leaving only this skeleton of the original ship. But it was enough. Mulder knew this proof could not be denied.
If only he could bring Scully down here, where she could see.
With a pang he hoped she was still all right, that Major Jakes had at least protected her against a resurgence of the guerrillas, as a hostage if nothing else.
If only he and Scully could get out of here alive. She had told him once before, during their frantic escape from the radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, “Evidence is worthless if you’re dead.”
He came to an ascending, spiraling ramp, and followed the bright, pulsing glow steeply upward. He had no idea how deep underground he still was.
His amazement doubled when he reached the next level. He had arrived at the chamber from which the glowing beacon emanated. He had to shield his eyes from the light, which burned so brightly that his skull hurt. This must be the control bridge, he thought. He slowly scanned the entire room.
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