Countdown

by Natalie Standiford

  Amy breathed a quick sigh of relief.

  “Thank goodness goons can’t fly,” Dan said. “Not even serum-enhanced goons.”

  The boys settled into their seats behind the pilot and buckled up for the ride to Tikal. It was a big helicopter with two rows of three seats facing each other behind an enclosed two-seat cockpit. Amy poked her head into the cockpit to make sure the pilot knew where they were going and to thank him for his quick thinking.

  “My pleasure,” he said in a thick accent, nodding but not meeting her eye. “Please sit down and buckle your seat belt, miss. The ride to Tikal can be bumpy. We’ll be flying over active volcanoes.”

  Amy sat down and buckled up. Something was bothering her; something about the pilot didn’t look right. His torso was thick and lumpy under his jacket. “Did you notice anything strange about the pilot?” she whispered to Dan.

  “Like what?” he asked coldly, as if it took super­human effort just to respond to her.

  “Never mind.” Amy pressed her forehead against the window, frustrated.

  The helicopter rose and left Guatemala City behind. Far below, a blanket of brown volcanic mountains rippled.

  She shifted her leather bag to the floor and heard a tiny clink. She couldn’t resist another glance at Dan, who was now engrossed in a computer game. His straight brown hair fell into his eyes, and he had to keep reaching up to sweep it out of his way. Amy tried to stifle a surge of tenderness for him, but the sight was enough to make her heart sting like skin recovering from frostbite. It sometimes was easy to forget that he was only thirteen. If they were still in Attleboro, the biggest thing they’d be fighting about would be haircuts and homework, arguments she’d likely lose because Dan was the most stubborn person she’d ever met.

  No wonder they were barely speaking to each other.

  Dan was sick of the whole Cahill thing. “I’m out,” he’d told her. Once they finally took down Pierce, no more Cahill stuff for him. He planned to disappear and live out the rest of his life quietly and anonymously, with as little mystery, action, and adventure as he could manage.

  Amy remembered a time, not so long ago, when Dan would have dismissed a life like that as boring. That’s the kind of damage the Clue hunt had done to him. A boy whose life had been so stressful he was ready to retire at thirteen.

  Atticus sat next to Dan, his wiry body curled in his seat, poring over Olivia’s Codex, his older brother, Jake, beside him, reading over his shoulder. He’d been fixated on a page of weird, unfamiliar glyphs that he couldn’t figure out. They were lined up in neat rows, each one a rounded square with a design inside, and between each one was a set of letters and numbers. Amy had looked at the symbols but couldn’t make much of them. Sometimes she saw something that looked like a face or a tongue or a monster. Sometimes they were just dots and lines and circles, almost decorative. They were complex shapes, not letters, exactly, but almost like rough drawings . . . though of what?

  They had left the seat next to Amy empty. No one wanted to sit next to her. Jake least of all. Her heart cramped as the ghost of her cruel lie echoed in her head. I don’t love you . . . . You think there’s this thing between us, but there never was, and there never will be.

  They didn’t understand what it was like, being in charge. They didn’t know how it felt to send someone you love off on a mission so dangerous that death was nearly certain. She refused to be the reason her little brother never got another haircut. One more mishap, and she’d be staring at his shaggy brown hair against the lining of a casket. From now on, she’d do what was necessary to keep her family — and the world — safe from Pierce.

  If that makes them angry, then too bad. She’d rather have them angry and alive than dead. She put her backpack under her seat and heard the clink again. It had been made by a small flask of Cahill serum. No one knew she had it. She hated the idea of having a full, undiluted dose of the serum near her. It was like keeping something radioactive next to your skin, like Superman carrying around Kryptonite.

  Atticus was working on decoding the formula from Olivia Cahill’s Codex. Lately he’d been obsessed with a recipe in the book for “Crystal Sugar Candy.” “If you want some candy so badly, Atticus, I’ll buy you some when we land,” Amy joked, mostly to try to jolt one of them into acknowledging her presence.

  “It’s not that,” Atticus said. “Rock crystal candy is very simple to make. This recipe is ridiculously complicated. There’s something else going on here.”

  “Crystal . . .” Amy mused. “Maybe there’s a connection to riven crystal.”

  “Maybe,” Dan said. “But what is riven crystal?”

  “Read the description again, Jake,” Amy said.

  Atticus handed the Codex to Jake. Olivia’s description of the crystal was written in Latin, and Amy’s Latin was poor-to-nonexistent.

  Amy’s phone buzzed. “Finally,” she said with relief. They’d been out of cell range and out of touch with their base in Attleboro for several hours, and it made her nervous. “It’s Ian. Hang on a sec, Jake.”

  She could sense Jake stiffening from across the aisle and caught the annoyance — or was it anger? — that flashed across his face.

  “Ian?”

  “Amy.”

  “It’s good to hear your voice.”

  “Yes, we’ve been trying to reach you since you left US airspace,” Ian said. “Did you make the chopper we set up for you?”

  “Yes.” No point in going into how they’d barely made it out of the airport alive. “Thanks for your help, Ian.”

  Out of the corner of her eye she could swear she saw Jake wrinkle his nose and mutter, “Thanks for your help, Ian” under his breath. Typical. Jake could barely look at her without grimacing, yet watching her talk to a boy she’d once had a crush on turned him from dark and brooding into prickly and childish.

  “How’s Ian?” Jake asked when she got off the phone. He straightened his spine, buttoning the top button of his shirt and sticking his nose into the air. “Tip-top shape, I hope?” he added in a terrible, exaggerated British accent. “All’s jolly well in old Attleboro, is it? Or as I call it, Yankee Purgatory? I do hope I’ll be able to leave this blasted land of rubes and return to civilization one of these days.”

  Dan and Atticus snickered in their seats. Amy crossed her arms, annoyed. “Just read me Olivia’s description of the ingredient, please.”

  “I say, it says here that she used flakes of a riven crystal chipped off a stone from a Mayan temple in Tikal.” Jake was still using his fake Ian accent.

  “Thank you. You can drop the accent now.”

  “Jolly good. Funny, I thought you liked British accents.”

  “Jake —”

  “My mistake.”

  “Yes. It is your mistake. What else does Olivia say? In your regular accent, please.”

  Jake frowned at the book. “Basically, Olivia looked at the rock under a magnifying glass and saw that its crystals had an unusual zigzag structure, as if it had been deformed by some great pressure.”

  “That sounds like shocked quartz. I saw it on Weird But True,” Dan said. “It’s found in places where nuclear devices have been set off, but also in places where a meteor crashed to earth.”

  “Chicxulub!” Atticus said.

  “Gesundheit,” Dan said back.

  “No, the Chicxulub crater,” Atticus continued. “A meteor hit the earth there about sixty-five million years ago. It caused giant tsunamis and sent up so much dust it almost caused an artificial ice age — like a nuclear winter. Some scientists think that meteor is responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs.”

  “I’m a fan of the volcanic theory myself,” Dan chimed. “That volcano dust wiped them out.”

  “Whatever, a meteor landed there,” Atticus said. “They’ve found shocked quartz in that spot, deformed by the impact of the meteor. But i
t’s in the Yucatán, in Mexico, not in Guatemala.”

  “The Maya traded all over Central America,” Jake said. “They could easily have traded for stones from the Yucatán.”

  “If all we need is a piece of shocked quartz, we can buy it off the Internet,” Dan said. “We don’t need to fly all the way to Guatemala.”

  “The book specifically calls for a ‘riven crystal from Tikal,’ ” Jake said. “It must have some special properties.”

  “Did the Maya build temples out of it?” Dan asked.

  “I checked into that,” Amy replied. She was grateful that, at least when they were discussing the antidote, the others dropped the silent treatment. “The temples are built of local limestone. But they might have put special stones at the altars of the temples, maybe something they traded for, something unique.”

  Tikal was a national park and archaeological treasure. The ruins of a great ancient city — a fallen empire — had been hidden by centuries of jungle growth, but in 1956 archaeologists began to excavate and were amazed at what they found: whole cities made of stone, huge Mayan pyramids and temples, miles and miles of ancient buildings.

  “Just as I thought,” Atticus announced, waving the paper he’d been using to decode the candy recipe.

  “It won’t make candy?” Dan asked.

  “Not unless you like candy so hard it will break your teeth,” Atticus said. “It’s a coded message. Sugar, or sucrose, has a chemical formula of C12H22O11, but when I decoded this ingredient list, the formula for ‘sugar’ reads SiO2. That’s the chemical formula for quartz. But it goes on to describe a molecular structure that’s a little off, not quite right for quartz. Once I applied the molecular structure for riven quartz to the code, I figured it out. The antidote requires a special piece of riven rock, which has certain molecular properties. One of those special pieces is embedded in the ruins of a Mayan temple in Tikal. The piece Olivia used was broken off from that crystal.”

  “But Tikal is full of ruined temples,” Amy said.

  “And it’s gigantic,” Jake added. “How will we know which temple holds the crystal we need?”

  “Let me have the book back, Jake,” Atticus said. He opened it to the page covered with weird glyphs.

  “Check it out.” Dan nodded at the window. “That volcano is spewing ash.”

  Just then the chopper blew through a brief black cloud. Everything went dark outside the windows. For a second, Amy had the feeling she was suffocating. But the black cloud — the ash Dan had just been talking about — disappeared quickly.

  The chopper swerved to the right, then veered sharply to the left. It lurched up and down.

  “What’s going on?” Jake asked.

  Another lurch, and Amy felt her stomach drop to her knees.

  “Whoa!” Atticus shouted.

  “This is better than a roller coaster!” Dan said.

  “This isn’t good.” They were far from Guatemala City now, flying over mountains and jungle that looked like the middle of nowhere. Amy opened the partition dividing the cockpit from the passenger seats and caught the pilot quickly sitting down.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  The pilot didn’t look at her. “No English.”

  No English? Hadn’t he told her to sit down and buckle her seat belt? She noticed his coat on the seat next to him. She leaned farther into the cockpit and immediately realized why the pilot had looked like he had a lump under his coat. He had a parachute strapped to his back.

  A wave of anxious nausea washed over Amy. “What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded. The pilot refused to meet her eye. The chopper lurched again, just missing the side of a mountain.

  “He’s wearing a parachute!” she told the others. “I think he’s going to jump!”

  “Pierce must have gotten to him,” Dan said.

  The pilot jerked on the handle of the cockpit door to his left, trying to open it and throw himself out. “Grab him!” Jake shouted.

  Amy ducked out of the way. Jake dove through the partition and grabbed the pilot before he could open the outside door. “Dan, help me!”

  Dan reached through the partition door and helped Jake drag the pilot into the passenger area. The chopper immediately began to drop.

  “Amy — take the controls!” Jake barked.

  Amy crawled over Dan and Jake, who were wrestling the pilot, into the front seat and grabbed the controls. She panicked. Now what?

  “Steady this thing!” Jake shouted.

  “How?” Amy shrieked back at him.

  “I don’t know!” Jake called back.

  The chopper nosed down toward the trees. She pulled on the control stick in front of her and the nose tilted up. The chopper didn’t rise, but it stopped falling. It leveled and moved forward — straight for the side of a volcano.

  “AMY!” Dan screamed.

  “I’m trying!” She found a lever on the floor to her left. She hadn’t tried that one yet. She yanked on it, praying it would do something good.

  The chopper rose. It lifted over the volcano. Amy looked down into the dark abyss at the top and thought she saw a puff of smoke.

  The pilot escaped from Jake’s hold and threw his upper body into the cockpit, trying to knock her hand away from the controls. “Get him out of here!” she shouted.

  Jake, Dan, and Atticus dragged the pilot back to the second row of seats. The chopper dropped fast, down toward a green valley. “Pull up! Up!” Jake shouted.

  “I know!” Amy yanked on the lever again with all her might. The chopper rose up toward the sky, pulling out of the valley and almost shaving off the top of a hill. It wobbled. She straightened out and the chopper steadied, but then it started spinning, circling around in the air. Amy frantically tugged at the control stick again, and the chopper nosed forward.

  The boys struggled to subdue the pilot, but he wasn’t going down without a fight. He managed to unlatch the passenger door. Amy felt the change in pressure. She looked back to see what was happening, and the chopper swerved a deep left. Everyone tumbled over to that side.

  “Amy, watch it!” Dan shouted.

  Amy concentrated on keeping the chopper steady. The pilot had grabbed Atticus by the arms as a kind of hostage.

  “Let him go!” Jake yelled.

  Amy didn’t dare turn away from the controls — one slip and the chopper would crash, or tip and knock Atticus out. Behind her she heard thumping, grunting, and shouting. But when Jake cried out desperately, “No! No!” she had to turn to see what was happening.

  The pilot was leaning out of the helicopter with Atticus clutched in one arm. He was going to jump and take Atticus with him. But the pilot had a parachute, and Atticus didn’t.

  Dan threw all his weight on one of the pilot’s legs, and Jake tugged on his arm, trying to reel him back into the chopper. Suddenly, the pilot screamed.

  Amy turned her attention to the front of the chopper. She was about to fly straight into a cliff. She pulled the cyclic up and the chopper rose over the cliff, nearly scraping off its landing skids. Sweat broke out on her forehead. It dripped into her eyes, but she didn’t dare release the controls to wipe it away.

  “We’ll handle this, Amy!” Jake yelled. “Just fly this thing!”

  Amy concentrated on the control panel and tried not to look back to see what was happening behind her. But it was hard. The sounds coming from the backseat — grunts, groans of pain, heavy thuds — terrified her. She couldn’t see, but she felt each thud like a punch in the stomach.

  Dan felt every muscle in his body exert itself, from his straining eyeballs to the toes that curled around the leg of a seat. The pilot hung out the cabin door, bent at the waist, head dangling, still clutching Atticus. Jake was tugging on the pilot’s legs and Dan held Att’s feet, bracing his legs against a seat. Atticus’s eyes were huge with terror as
he strained to grab Dan’s hand. He was panting, his breath fast and shallow like a terrified rabbit’s.

  The pilot gave Jake a mighty kick in the chin, knocking him backward. “Ugh!” Jake’s grip loosened, and the pilot tumbled out the door.

  “Att!” Dan screamed. Atticus’s little body seemed to float out into the air over the jungle below. Dan clutched Att’s foot, but his sneaker slipped off in his hand. Jake lunged for his brother and caught him by the torso. With a huge effort he heaved his body back into the cabin, Atticus in his arms. They collapsed on the floor.

  Dan looked down just before yanking the cabin door shut. The pilot’s chute opened as he floated into the jungle and disappeared among the treetops.

  The chopper was flying a little steadier now that no one was dangling out the open door, but it swerved left and right. Amy had no idea how to keep it going straight.

  “Is everyone all right back there?” she screamed.

  Atticus rubbed his legs as if they hurt, but he swallowed and nodded. “I’m okay.”

  “Amy, can you fly this thing?” Dan asked.

  “No!” She scanned the control board in a panic. She knew they were supposed to head north toward Tikal. But which way was north? “Which one of these things is the compass?”

  Jake jumped into the copilot’s seat. “That’s it. I think.”

  “Maybe we can talk to a control tower or something?” Amy said. “And they could tell me what to do?”

  Jake strapped on the pilot’s mic and headphones and toyed with the controls until he made radio contact with someone speaking Spanish.

  “It’s the control tower at Tikal!” said Jake. He fired off something in Spanish to them. They answered back with something that sounded like a question, and disbelief. Jake replied. Over the radio came shouts of shock and horror.

  “What are they saying?” Amy asked Jake.