by Alex Archer
You imagined it, her inner voice told her. You saw the rock from the deck of the ship and your subconscious just added it to your dream. There’s no mark.There never was.
She wasn’t yet convinced of that. She had that gut feeling that it should be here. But where?
She stepped back and stared at the rock for a long minute, trying to see if it was the right one. It looked right, but then again they all pretty much looked the same. Perhaps there was another stone in front of this one that was still concealed by the underbrush.
A quick check assured her there wasn’t.
Annja was about to give up in frustration when she turned back to face the stone she’d previously searched and finally saw it. About halfway down the side of the stone, partially covered in green lichen, was an indentation in the stone that was too straight to be natural.
“Got you!” she crowed as she stepped forward and brushed at it with her hand.
There, plain as day, was the arrow Captain Jeffries had carved into the face of the rock in her dream!
27
Central highlands
Cocos Island
After hearing about Annja’s dream and seeing the mark, the others didn’t need too much convincing that where the arrow was pointing was the direction they should head. They weren’t entirely comfortable with it, and several times during the morning’s march Annja would catch Marcos or Hugo looking at her with an odd expression on their face, but no one suggested that they change their course.
For the first time since arriving on the island, it rained for longer than a brief shower. In fact, Mother Nature seemed to be trying to make up for her lack of precipitation over the preceding days. It didn’t just rain, it poured, hammering down on them like some judgment from above.
Now, more than ever, both Claire and Annja believed time was of the essence, so there wasn’t any talk of waiting for it to pass, as they normally would have. Instead, they pulled on plastic ponchos and continued on their way, moving a bit slower and more carefully.
Their path took them northward, into the slowly rising foothills surrounding Mount Yglesias, the island’s highest peak. They’d been walking for about forty-five minutes when Hugo shouted, “Look!” and pointed to a large boulder off to one side of the trail.
An arrow had been scratched into its surface, pointing northward.
Jeffries.
But even more surprising was the much newer mark scratched beneath it.
A capital letter K.
Jeffries wasn’t the only one who’d come this way. Dr. Knowles had, as well.
The sight of the marker gave them all hope, especially Annja. She had been half-convinced that Knowles and his team had been slaughtered outright, just as the sick among Captain Jeffries’s crew had been killed. As the incident with Marcos and the jaguar had shown, it wasn’t all that difficult to dispose of bodily remains out here in the middle of the jungle. In fact, it was far too easy.
Now, however, they had some evidence, no matter how slim, that Knowles was alive.
She studied the symbol for a few minutes, trying to piece together the puzzle before her. Unlike Knowles’s earlier markers, this one looked as if it had been done by the shaky hand of a kindergarten student. The K was lopsided, uneven and partially on its side. What could he have been doing to cause him to get so sloppy?
Finally she thought she had it worked out.
She imagined Knowles and his crew being taken captive. Hands tied behind their backs with crude rope made from local materials. Being marched north from the excavation site as captives of the natives. When they’d reached this point, the group had taken a break. Knowles’s keen eye had spotted the earlier marker and, after casually strolling over to lean against the same rock, had used something sharp to carve his K into the stone, all the while keeping his hands behind his back and out of sight.
Seemed reasonable to her.
Her respect for Knowles went up a notch and she still had yet to meet the man.
They got back under way, this time trying to keep their eyes on both the trail and the surrounding terrain so they wouldn’t miss any potential markers. If he’d managed to do it once, Knowles had probably found a way to do it again, Annja suspected. The trick was going to be finding the markers amid all the rain.
And unfortunately for them, the rain showed no signs of stopping. If anything, it grew worse. The wind whipped it into the open hoods of their ponchos, until water had drenched their hair and seemed to be running in a continual stream down their backs. Annja felt like a drowned rat and she knew the others must be feeling the same.
With all the water pouring down the slope in front of them, gradual as it was, the footing beneath their feet began to grow less and less reliable. Several times Annja or one of the others had to catch themselves on a nearby bush or branch to keep from having their feet swept out from under them.
When the rain showed no signs of stopping, Annja pulled Claire aside.
“This is getting too dangerous,” she told her. “If one of us slips and breaks a leg or, worse yet, gets swept away by the storm, the entire expedition will be in serious trouble. We need to stop moving and find some shelter.”
But Claire wouldn’t have it. She had grown more eager to press on since they’d found the marker from Dr. Knowles and had no intention of stopping because they were getting wet.
They hadn’t gone another fifteen minutes, however, before Annja heard a steady rumbling in the air. She’d heard it before, she knew she had, but it was hard to place given the loud, thundering rain around them.
Rain...
Annja suddenly understood what was coming toward them, and perhaps more importantly, she understood just how little time they had at their disposal.
“Find the nearest tree and secure yourself to it! Move!” she shouted.
She didn’t wait to see if the others followed suit but raced over to the closest ceiba tree she could find and anchored herself to it with an extra few feet of rope and a pair of carabiners to lock the rope in place.
Perhaps it was because of Annja’s urgency, or perhaps they simply understood the threat headed toward them was like a runaway freight train—whatever the reason, it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that they jumped to follow suit, working frantically as the sound grew louder around them and the ground beneath their feet began to shake.
Annja had just finished securing herself to a tree and was trying to see how the others were doing when the wave of water they’d been hearing headed down the mountainside. Suddenly it broke through the tree line above and rushed toward them with a vengeance.
The wave hit, breaking against the tree trunk in front of Annja with savage force, and she knew if she’d been caught in the open there was no way she would have survived. As it was, she could barely hold on to the tree trunk as the water cascaded around her and swept past on its way down the hill.
A glance showed her both Marcos and Hugo hugging trees similar to the one Annja herself was secured to, but when she sought out Claire, she couldn’t see her anywhere. Annja glanced frantically about, thinking perhaps Claire had fallen back behind them.
A scream to her right caught Annja’s attention over the thunder of the water and she glanced in time to see Claire lose her footing.
“Grab my hand, Claire!” Annja shouted, thrusting out an arm as the other woman came flying toward her.
Their fingers brushed, their hands caught, slipped...and then held.
Unfortunately, that left Claire on her back in the path of the water, bouncing around under the flow and struggling just to find enough air to breathe.
Annja had a death lock on the woman’s wrist, refusing to let go, and afterward knew that doing so had saved Claire’s life.
Thankfully, the muddy slide of water could only last so long, and just a few moments after it started, the deluge began to abate and finally ended.
When she was sure it had passed, Annja released Claire’s hand, letting the woman fall, co
ughing, into the mud while she untied herself. Marcos and Hugo were busy doing the same. The three of them then gathered around Claire.
Their leader was bruised, battered, but Annja’s quick action had kept her from being swept away. For that, they were all thankful.
As if to torment them, the rain began to slow shortly after the flash flood and half an hour later stopped entirely. The clouds parted, letting the sun out to begin baking everything dry in the endless cycle of the tropical rain forest. By the time they stopped for lunch, the world around them was steamy with evaporating rainfall.
They had a cold meal of previously cooked boar meat, which, in Annja’s opinion, wasn’t anywhere near as tasty the second time around. What had been mouthwatering the night before had become tougher than shoe leather and about as flavorful. Still, they needed the protein for the hike ahead and she made sure to down her portion without complaint.
The afternoon brought them into the highlands proper. Rocky ridgelines and miniature canyons began to pop up here and there amid the jungle vegetation, reminding Annja of pictures she’d seen of the South Pacific islands during the Second World War. The jungle rose over and covered everything, it seemed, even knifelike ridgelines that would have made a billy goat nervous.
A fork appeared in the trail early that afternoon, which gave the group a reason to rest for a few minutes as they debated the alternatives. The left-hand path seemed to be less steep, sloping downward slightly as it headed into a valley between two ridgelines. The right-hand path, on the other hand, appeared to be more strenuous, taking them higher into more rugged country.
“Check for a marker,” Annja told them, and they spread out to do so. Fifteen minutes later, however, they had to admit that if there had ever been a marker here, it was gone now.
“What do you think?” Claire asked Annja as she stood eyeing the two alternatives.
Annja wasn’t sure. Her feet were telling her to take the less strenuous path to the left, but her heart was saying to stay with the more difficult path to the right.
She stepped away from the others, closed her eyes and tried to listen to what her senses were telling her. Left or right? Valley or ridgelines?
She couldn’t explain it, but when she opened her eyes a moment later, she knew they had to continue to the right. She felt drawn in that direction, as if there was something waiting just for her around the next corner. She couldn’t leave this place without investigating for herself.
“That way,” she said, pointing.
There was a collective groan from the others, for she’d chosen the harder path, but she’d been right in all of her other decisions for the group and so they had little ground to argue. A few swigs of water to keep them hydrated and they continued on.
Almost immediately they encountered a series of switchbacks, taking them higher into the hills and deeper into the jungle at the same time. There had been no further sign that either Captain Jeffries or Dr. Knowles had taken this route, and Annja was just starting to second-guess her choice of direction when they rounded a final corner and stopped, gaping at the sight before them.
There, rising out of the dense jungle, was a completely intact Incan pyramid.
28
Pyramid of the Stars
Cocos Island
Annja couldn’t believe it. She stood and stared at the structure covered in foliage, drinking in the sight.
The pyramid was about one hundred feet in height and seemed to be in near-perfect condition. It had been built in the traditional Incan style, with large blocks of stone carved so perfectly that they didn’t need mortar to hold them together. Each of its four sides was bisected with a raised staircase that rose directly to an opening on each of the four sides of the temple structure on top. Even from this distance, Annja could see several carved pillars in the doorways of the temple, the colorful pigments that had once decorated so many other Incan monuments still visible on this one.
Without prompting, Marcos left the path they’d been following and headed for the pyramid, using his machete to cut a path through the undergrowth. At the rate he was going, it would only take him a few minutes to reach the base of the structure.
Eagerly, Annja followed.
As they drew closer, they could see that the pyramid rested on a small shelflike plateau that jutted out from the side of the mountain. Vegetation grew over much of the structure, though to Annja’s trained eye it didn’t have the haphazardness of wild growth but seemed to follow specific lines and contours. She tried to imagine what it would look like when viewed from above and realized that the structure would probably be nearly invisible from the air, so cloaked was it in a sea of green.
A sudden thought occurred to her.
Was the structure still being used?
She hurried forward, eager to find out.
They made it to the base of the pyramid without incident and started up the stairs toward the temple on top. They hadn’t gone far before Annja slowed, then stopped. She turned and looked out over the jungle around them, searching for...she wasn’t sure what, actually.
She didn’t see anyone lurking in the trees or hiding along the rocks of the ridge. On the contrary, it looked as if they were the only human beings to have come this way in centuries. And yet the feeling remained.
That feeling of being watched.
“Everything okay?” Hugo asked, and Annja noticed him standing close, his gun in hand, his gaze fixed on the jungle, as well.
She hesitated, her eyes still scanning the trees around them, but eventually she said, “Yeah. It was nothing, I guess. Just nerves.”
“Happens to the best of us,” Hugo said, but he didn’t look any more confident than Annja felt.
The two of them had just turned to continue up the stairwell when a scream split the afternoon air, startling them both.
It was shockingly loud and it hit them at a visceral level, making their guts tighten and their skin crawl. Hugo spun around so quickly that his foot slipped off the step. If Annja hadn’t reached out with lightning-quick reflexes and caught him, he would have fallen.
“Easy there,” she told him, helping him back to his feet and then continuing with him up the next several steps until they reached the others.
“What the heck was that?” Marcos wanted to know, his gaze still on the jungle below and beside them.
Before Annja could answer, it came again—a howling scream that sounded as if something had just been shoved into a buzz saw. Almost as one, the four of them dropped down, instinctively trying to make themselves as small a target as possible.
That time, however, after a moment’s reflection, Annja recognized the sound and laughed in relief when she did.
She stood up. “It’s okay,” she said to them. “It’s okay. It’s a jaguar.”
Hugo disagreed. “That was no cat, Annja.”
The absolute conviction in his voice made Annja want to argue, but she knew it would be the wrong thing to do then. Instead, she put her hand on his arm, trying to get him to lower his gun and calm down.
“Have you ever heard a jaguar scream, Hugo?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know that wasn’t a jaguar?”
He glanced at her, doubt settling into his features. Annja was about to say something soothing when movement below them caught her eye and instead she pointed over his shoulder.
“See? What did I tell you?”
A large cat, most likely the one who had just been making the cries they’d heard, wandered out of the undergrowth and stared up at them from the edge of the brush. Unlike the cat she’d faced off against the other day, this one was a rare specimen, its fur a smoky black instead of orange, giving its spots an oddly hypnotic effect if you stared at them too long. Its yellow eyes followed the group, but it made no move to advance, just settled down beneath an overhanging palm frond and watched them with lazy interest.
“Good kitty,” Hugo mumbled beneath his breath.
Annja would have la
ughed if she hadn’t noticed Marcos lining up his rifle to take a shot at the big cat.
She leaped up the two steps that separated them and knocked the barrel of the rifle up and away in the split second before Marcos pulled the trigger.
The shot went wide and the sound echoed off the mountainside for several long seconds.
Before Marcos could react to her interference, Annja snatched the rifle out of his hands.
“Are you out of your mind?” she said, avoiding shouting in his face only by the thinnest of margins. “Announce our presence to everyone within half a mile, why don’t you?”
Marcos barely heard her. His attention was still on the jaguar, which, oddly enough, hadn’t moved an inch. “Give me that gun!” he told her, trying to grab it from her as he did so. “I’m going to take care of that cat....”
“You’ll do no such thing,” Annja said, and the steel in her voice got his attention. She watched him take in the fact that she’d changed her hold on the weapon and was standing there before him with one hand near the trigger and the other around the forestock. It was a position that would let her bring the weapon to bear quite easily if she chose to do so.
“That cat isn’t bothering you, and you’re going to leave it alone even if I have to break your fingers for you to get the message.”
Marcos sneered. “You go right ahead and give it a try.”
That made Annja smile. “Hold this for me please, Claire,” she said, extending the rifle toward the other woman, her gaze never leaving Marcos’s own.
The fact that she was so clearly unintimidated by him gave Marcos pause and he glanced at Claire in confusion before taking a step backward.
Annja was about to move in, fully prepared to prove her point and not liking the big guy all that much, anyway, when Claire slipped between them.
“All right, that’s enough. Stop acting like children and let’s focus on what we are here for. My husband is still missing, remember?”
With a last glance at the jaguar, which still hadn’t moved from its spot in the shade, Annja continued up the stone steps toward the temple at the top of the pyramid.