Sinkhole

by Deborah Jackson

  “Give me one good reason to let you live,” said Jorge.

  Chapter Twelve

  Jorge smiled. His finger twitched on the trigger of the revolver. What could give a man greater satisfaction than this? Confronting his enemy in the flesh—and wiping the man’s face in his own greed.

  The doctor blanched, but he didn’t flinch. His body went shock-still. “Why?” he asked. “Why bring me all the way out in the jungle just to kill me? You could have done it long ago.”

  Jorge chuckled. He couldn’t help himself. It almost made him giddy to have this man at his mercy. But what would it accomplish at this point, anyway? He might gain a sweet moment of satisfaction, but his people would continue to suffer. He lifted the gun and let the moment fade.

  “I could,” he said. “But that will help neither me nor your wife.”

  “Why do you want to help my wife?” asked Mark.

  “I have my reasons.” Jorge wasn’t about to divulge them, especially to this man. “Just another mile. Into the valley.” He pointed to the tangled growth below the hill—a stretch of shrubs and vines that festooned a series of mounds.

  The doctor sighed deeply. But he didn’t question anymore. If anything, he’d been somewhat of a surprise to Jorge. Soft, yes. Certainly naïve and rather pitiful at first. But he’d stood his ground in the face of a gun. He’d actually turned the tables on the paramilitary before Jorge and his men could react. He wasn’t fearless—especially noted after his encounter with the snake—but he wasn’t gutless either.

  Jorge couldn’t believe his luck when he’d overheard the doctor speaking at the new caving shop in Tapijulapa. A wealthy Canadian searching for his wife in this location, of all places. Well, he couldn’t let the opportunity slip through his fingers. He’d had to offer his services. How often had he pondered the secret of this site? After his first visit, it had become an obsession. There was so much more to it than met the eye. This was a golden chance to explore further with someone who possessed a certain expertise, and a rich man at that. He hadn’t expected it would be so much fun, though.

  “Looks like rough country,” said Mark, standing beside Jorge as if nothing had happened. A slight tremor fluttered through his voice, but that faded with his next question. “Is that why so few people have investigated the cave?”

  “Partly.”

  Mark cocked an eyebrow at him, probably waiting for a more complete answer. He would wait a long time before he would hear it. But Jorge would be happy to show it to him.

  “Come,” he said.

  He strode down the dense path, swallowing the lump that always developed when he approached the site. The doctor stumbled behind, gasping occasionally as he tried to keep pace. He had some extra padding around the middle; obviously he ate well in his cushioned life. Jorge had tasted that life, but only briefly. It was during his time in Mexico City, when he’d made a fruitless attempt to rectify the injustices that his people had suffered since the Spanish invasion. He’d tried to influence politicians, change discriminatory laws, and create an equal playing field for all classes and races in Mexico. That was what the revolution of 1910 had been about. But it had altered absolutely nothing. One hundred years later, the upper class still ruled in Mexico, and would continue to do so unless something drastic was done.

  He’d watched his people suffer. He’d watched them die or be slaughtered. How desperately he’d tried to help them using diplomacy, but to no avail. There was only one other direction to go. That was where this place came in, this cave, this doctor. A change in tactics.

  Jorge glanced behind to check on the man’s reaction, but Mark continued down the path, oblivious, as the site loomed closer and closer. Didn’t he see it? Couldn’t he feel it? The very air here was thick with ghosts. But then it was clear he was blind to just about everything. His wealth could be directly connected to the oppression of Jorge’s people, but he claimed ignorance. He saw none of the magnificence of the forest as he tripped through it, and knew nothing of its plunder by voracious pharmaceutical companies.

  From the bottom of the hill ahead of them, the formation rose out of the jungle, crumbling and lichen-crusted, buried under a sea of vines. The doctor still didn’t notice. He was too busy swatting mosquitoes and scanning the ground for snakes. Or perhaps he was finally searching his soul. Eventually, though, he looked up and stopped.

  “What the hell is that?” he asked.

  “It’s where the mighty have fallen,” said Jorge.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “The air is coming from that tunnel,” said Kat, explaining why she thought it was the way out.

  Ray grinned, grabbed her face, and kissed her merrily on both cheeks, French-style. “Excellente! We shall be back on the surface in no time.”

  Kat smiled, but she didn’t feel the same exuberance. The tunnel looked very tight, and if they had to drag all their equipment through . . . “I’ll go first and check it out.”

  “And leave me behind?” said Ray. “No way.”

  “Ray.” She chastised him with her eyes. “You’re bigger than me.”

  Ray crossed his arms and pouted, but she knew he wouldn’t argue. If this tunnel was tight, she didn’t want anyone to get stuck. Ray had been stuck before—tightly ensconced in a womb of rock—and it had taken a day’s worth of maneuvers to get him out. As the slimmest team member and a world-champion wriggler, she was the only logical choice.

  Kat peeled the pack from her shoulders and started rigging for the climb. “I’ll need your helmet,” she said to Megan, since hers had been irreparably damaged. Megan handed it over without a word. Kat shimmied into the leg-hugging harness, set her rope and anchors ready, and slid her arms through the straps of her pack. She could probably free-climb this short distance without the rig, but experience had taught her never to get too cocky. When she had done so, she’d broken her leg.

  “All right, wish me luck,” she said.

  “Break a leg,” said Ray, grinning. He always said this after the fall. She scowled, slapped his arm, and focused on the slick wall of karst. Kat slipped her digits into the first finger-hold and lifted her foot onto a narrow ledge. She climbed, arms reaching, legs spread apart to find difficult cracks and friction bulges, spiderlike. She placed her hands in fist jams and various vertical and horizontal seams. At seven meters she wedged her first anchor and clipped the rope to it with a carabiner, an aluminum-gated connector. Then she pushed upward, digging her toes into a narrow pocket and flattening them to create another anchor in her climb. After a couple of slips, which she rescued herself from by dangling from a crack and regaining her footing, she swung over the lip and confronted the archway.

  She took an extra moment to slip some tubular nylon webbing—cavers’ first choice of material for anchors, to minimize damage to cave formations—around a large stalagmite and attach it with a sling and carabiner to the rope.

  “It’s set to climb,” said Kat. “But wait until you hear back from me whether this tunnel is passable.”

  The others murmured agreement, but she could see the tilt of Ray’s head—an idiosyncrasy that meant no damn way. He’d be waiting for her at the tunnel entrance, ready to jam in to help her in case she got into a tight spot. That was Ray. She couldn’t always rely on him to listen to her, but she could always rely on him to watch her back.

  He was so different in the outside world. They’d met on one of her first caving expeditions into Lechuguilla in New Mexico. The cave was unique in that it hadn’t formed from surface runoff. Water hadn’t leached into the ground; instead the cave had grown like the branches of an aragonite crystal from the bottom up, from rising springs rich in hydrogen sulfide. This, in turn, had converted to sulfuric acid and eaten away at the rock. Kat had been one of the first scientists to pull microbes from the cave, organisms that fed on chemical energy instead of using photosynthesis. Ray had linked with their team because of his fascination with this spectacular cave. She was surprised to learn that he was Canadian, like
Mark, a native of Montreal who’d spent half his life thrill-seeking and the other half dodging bullets in the hotbeds of Iraq or Iran. He was a freelance reporter, not a very profitable profession, but he’d managed to finance his treks by dipping into a trust fund established by his father, a wealthy banker. When she’d met him above the capped entrance to the cave, his face was slack-jawed with boredom. But when they slipped down between Lechuguilla’s massive columns, stacked like mushrooms of melted wax on top of one another, and entered the Chandelier Ballroom, bedecked with branching selenite crystals, his eyes seemed to radiate the sun itself. Undoubtedly the way she looked too, when underground. Why hadn’t she been able to let that shared fascination grow into shared . . . everything?

  She thrust the thought aside. She needed to get the team out. A gentle gust reminded her that this tunnel had some access to the surface, convoluted or not. As she trained Megan’s helmet light, fixed with fresh batteries, at the crescent-shaped crack, she noted how it belled out at the beginning but contracted farther down—a bottleneck. Oh well. She’d been in tighter squeezes. It was going to be a belly-crawl, no doubt about it.

  Kat eased off her pack, prepared to shove it ahead of her. She crouched down and slunk in. After only a meter she was reduced to caterpillar motion. After another meter, the space shrank down to a claustrophobic sewer pipe, complete with the distinctive earthy odor of bacterial processes at work. Her helmet clapped against the ceiling every twenty-five centimeters, and the only way to move anymore was simply to ooze through the confined space. She was almost there, though. She could see a gap opening up. She had to crawl another meter and a half, but the walls of the narrowing tunnel were almost touching now. Maybe if she exhaled. With a full breath, the air in her lungs expanded her rib cage, but if she blew it out that might give her an additional three or four centimeters of wiggle room. She slid forward another thirty centimeters, but then her shoulder got hung up on a projecting node of rock and she was stuck.

  Damn! She couldn’t believe it. Half a meter more and she would have squeezed out. Of course, it was still too tight for the other cavers, but she might have found a passage to the radio relay and called for help. Now she was jammed in a space even a newborn would find confining, and she didn’t know if she could back out. To call for Ray would be even worse, because he would certainly leap to her rescue and become impossibly corked as well. She tried to wriggle backward, but couldn’t budge. She was attached to the rope, just in case, but didn’t want to think of the consequences of Ray hauling her out. It would probably dislocate her shoulder and rip her nose off in the process.

  “Kat,” she heard him calling. “Are you out yet?”

  “No,” she yelled back, although her voice was undoubtedly muffled by the plug of her body.

  “Do you need help?”

  Kat tried to wriggle backward again with little luck.

  “No,” she said again, and rested her head against the rock.

  Visions swam around her as she lay in the rock stenosis, barely able to breathe. Images of Floyd Collins, the famous Kentucky caver of 1925. The man wasn’t famous for his caving prowess, which was exceptional, but the manner of his death. In tiny, unspectacular Sand Cave, Floyd was looking for a link to the longest cave system in the world—Mammoth Cave—when a 27-pound rock fell on his foot in a tight vertical passage and trapped him. He couldn’t reach down to loosen the rock, and when friends found him, they couldn’t get around the tight squeeze to help him, nor could they pull him up. As the earth shifted, even the minor aid of food and heat they were supplying to him was cut off. Engineers sank a 55-foot shaft into the earth, but still couldn’t reach him. His peril became a tourist attraction, and as reporters and gawkers milled around above the cave for two weeks, Floyd finally died.

  “Really, Kat, do you need help?” called Ray again.

  “Yes,” she whimpered and scrunched up her face in despair.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Mark gaped. Right in front of him, a giant eye peered through a lattice of vines, its elongated pupil and amber sclera wreathed in moss. Sweat beaded his brow despite the caress of a cooling breeze. He knew it couldn’t be real, but it was so lifelike. He walked forward and drew aside the dangling liana curtain, exposing a carved stone snake’s head poised to strike. He stripped away more vines that were clinging to the sculpture and uncovered a wall, plastered with limestone and festooned with glyphs and images. At first the images were hard to discern, as lichen and moss obscured good portions of them, but by standing back a bit, Mark could make out more detail. Around another image of the undulating snake, native warriors danced, adorned with feathered headdresses, loincloths, and jaguar skin.

  “What is this?” he asked Jorge again. “An undiscovered ruin?”

  “The city of my ancestors,” said Jorge. “The City of the Serpent.”

  “But how—” Mark frowned and walked along the stone wall. Mounds like hillocks hemmed them in on all sides. “How could it be undiscovered? Wouldn’t someone have stumbled upon it? Wouldn’t surveyors in aircraft or helicopters have seen the patterns from the sky? Or even satellite images . . .”

  “No one would have stumbled upon it,” said Jorge, “because the Maya avoid this place and would not lead others here. Most people do not venture into the Mexican forest, near the dangerous Chiapas highlands, without a guide, and,” Jorge shrugged, “the only guides around here are Maya.”

  “Why do they avoid it?” asked Mark, feeling even more unsettled.

  Jorge shrugged again. “Superstition.”

  Mark studied the Maya’s blank face. It couldn’t be just simple superstition that had kept this place secret for over a thousand years. “So why hasn’t it been spotted by any planes?”

  “It has,” said Jorge. He abruptly turned and began climbing a pile of rubble on the path.

  Mark couldn’t believe this. Another half-answer. He shouldered his backpack and marched after the man, although soon he was stumbling on the scree of the crumbling constructions. “I don’t understand.”

  “What could be more clear than that?” asked Jorge.

  “Then where are all the people? Tourists, treasure-hunters, archaeologists?”

  “They were with your wife, weren’t they?”

  Mark clenched his fists, frustration burning inside his head. He knew the indomitable caver Ray Cascades would be pinned to Kat’s side like another appendage, just as he was on every one of her expeditions. Harding had mentioned an archaeologist and a microbiologist who was affiliated with a pharmaceutical company.

  “I know there was an archaeologist, but what about the others? Would you put them in the category of tourist or treasure-hunter?”

  “What do you think, doctor?”

  Every time Jorge mocked him by pronouncing his title in Spanish, Mark got a little more annoyed. But as he pondered Jorge’s answer, prickles of fear erupted all over his body. Kat might be in even more trouble than he’d imagined. But Jorge had side-stepped his original question.

  “Okay, if this place was spotted by planes, what people have come here besides my wife and her companions?”

  “You may see them,” said Jorge.

  Mark came to a dead halt. His body was now slick with sweat, yet he felt chilled to the marrow. The man was contradicting himself, or maybe he wasn’t, and that was even more frightening. A slight chuckle disturbed the silence behind him. Mark turned and tracked the movement of Jorge’s companions. Manuel reached out and dusted moss from a glyph with a sly grin. Another reptile face emerged. He pointed and met Mark’s eyes, then he winked and walked on. Why was this place adorned with snakes? Why was it named after snakes? Was it infested with them? Was that why people avoided it?

  He mulled this over until he felt the ground beneath him smooth out as he walked. This was even stranger after all the roots, ruts, and rubble in the jungle. The reason was evident after a quick glance. He was standing on a square stone plaza. Around him on all sides were constructions of massive p
roportions, crumbling blocks feathered with vines and bromeliads. The ruins dwarfed tall trees and, in the center, even the sacred ceiba couldn’t compete with an enormous stepped pyramid.

  “My God,” he said. “This is incredible.”

  “Larger and more magnificent than Palenque,” said Jorge.

  “How could this be undiscovered? It must be visible from the air. Surely archaeologists should be drooling over this place.”

  “Surely,” said Jorge enigmatically. “Would you like to see the temple?”

  “I—” Mark wasn’t here on a sight-seeing tour, but he had a feeling Jorge wasn’t a tour guide either. There was something the Maya wanted to show him. If he didn’t oblige, he might feel the muzzle of the gun against his head again. “Okay,” he said.

  Jorge turned and plodded across the square. It must have been pristine white in its heyday, but now it was tarnished brown and yellow, seamed and cracked. Invasive roots grew beneath, and the stems of saplings sawed through the stone. Jorge led Mark off the plaza and down through a narrow path that was barely passable for all of the deadfall and leaf debris. Spiders and beetles scuttled away at each footfall. Creepers dangling from the ruins brushed Mark’s shoulders, making him jump and reflect again on the name of the city. Finally the Maya climbed out of the thick vegetation and up onto a solid platform. Stepped stone walls that looked eerily like the bleachers of a football stadium rose above two sides.

  “What is this?” Mark asked. “Some sort of outdoor theater?”

  “Ball court,” said Jorge.

  Mark halted in the middle of the platform. “A ball court? The Maya played ball?”

  “Of a sort,” said Jorge. “The balls were created from our rubber trees and they were much larger than your football or even soccer ball. Heavy, too. And the rules were different.”

  “Such as?” asked Mark. He couldn’t suppress his curiosity. As an avid football fan, he wondered what sort of game the ancient Maya played. Did the present-day games stem from the ancient ones?