THE MAYAN GLYPH

by Larry Baxter

  "I was about to get into that. Washington is fully engaged; they're getting reports twice a day. Unfortunately, the reports are now simply mortality counts. Our liaison with Washington is the senior executive field epidemiologist from the Centers for Disease Control, Mr. George Hapwell Theslie. Mr. Theslie would like to say a few words." Spender sat down in a metal chair.

  A large, ruddy-faced man with a wrinkled sweat-stained lightweight beige suit and a black-on-yellow tie stood up and took the microphone. "Hi, everybody. I'm George Hapwell Theslie. I'm the senior federal epidemiologist for CDC, and I'll be your official liaison with Washington. I'm here to make sure you get everything you need. Whatever you want, just let me know.

  "Here's the story. The organization here will be military style. The discipline also has to be military style. Dr. Spender is the commander, you do what he says. I'll be working with CDC to handle the big picture. Since most of you are not military personnel, we can't court-martial you. If you can't take it, you can desert.

  "But if you do bail out, if we lose too many troops to hold this thing, you will not be safe anywhere in the world. Think of it. There's our team, and nearly a hundred other teams worldwide, but this is the front line. We've got to hold the line right here, everybody is counting on us. We must not underestimate the task, it's not going to be easy. It's going to be the toughest thing any of you will ever have to do. What you all have to remember, it could go either way. Either way. And we have to make it go our way."

  "Got it," said a listener.

  Theslie continued. "OK, let's go over the rules of engagement. The key is isolation and quarantine. We're setting up three zones of isolation and we have armed guards patrolling the borders. You people will handle quarantine, and administer painkillers. Volunteers in biosuits will work behind the lines helping the folks that do not yet have the disease to move into quarantine. I will be monitoring your activities so we can estimate our probability of success. If we slip under 90%, we will be pulling back and reconsidering our options. We don't want to have to reconsider our options."

  He droned on for a few minutes before handing Spender the microphone. "Thank you, Mr. Theslie, for that clarification. People, we'll be breaking up into groups of ten; your instructions are on the printed sheet that you're holding. Breakfast tomorrow is at seven A.M. Get some sleep, you'll need it. Thanks, and good night."

  The words replayed in his mind: "Zero or near zero infiltration." Near zero. Christ. He wondered if the Maya, with their genetic resistance, would be the only race to survive the epidemic.

  Spender walked to the recreational vehicle where he lived in close quarters with Carla and his daughter. Carla had moved most of their household goods to a basement room and purchased the old Winnebago.

  She took the lab coat off his shoulders and looked at his midsection critically. "You missed lunch again. And dinner. You probably weigh ten pounds less than I do. I'll make you a tuna sandwich and some soup."

  "Thanks, love. That sounds good."

  "How's the battle today?" she asked from the tiny kitchen.

  "We got a new batch of cannon fodder today. I feel like a general with a battalion of rookies. I think we will have many casualties."

  "You take care of yourself, Gary. Don't be a hero. Be really careful."

  He nodded. "Stick around tomorrow. And the kid. I think we'll be moving again." He closed his eyes.

  Chapter 16

  * * *

  Tulum, Mexico, November 1, present day

  The trip from Uxmal, on the northwest corner of the Yucatán, to Tulum, on the southeast coast, was almost five hour's difficult driving. They bumped along at forty miles an hour, avoiding a deep pothole every thirty seconds. Every half hour or so they passed a small settlement, with palm-thatched huts, walls made from close-spaced saplings, and occasionally a satellite TV antenna dish. The clutchless VW held up well despite its age and afflictions, even though Robert could have used a little air conditioning.

  They had asked Artoz if he knew anything about Tulum, and he had told them that he taught in the university at Mérida, Maya studies and archaeology, except for summer vacation and sometimes when he had no classes. He of course had studied Tulum. And he had spent much time there as a guide. They brought him along, shoehorned into the small rear seat.

  They checked a guidebook for accommodations and selected Akumal, a little north of Tulum, as it appeared as though Tulum was a park area without hotels. Akumal was perfect, with inexpensive low-rise tourist hotels on the water and a couple of small restaurants serving Mexican food. They checked in at one of the hotels, in separate rooms.

  In the morning Robert awoke to his wristwatch alarm at 6:30. He dressed in shorts and running shoes and ran for an hour on the beach, in the band of dark sand left by the receding waves where the soft sand was firmed by the water. He cooled off with a quick dip in the ocean.

  As he walked up the beach to the hotel, a piercing whistle stopped him. Teresa, reclining in a beach chair, smiled prettily, set a large hardback book down in her lap, and looked up at him through dark glasses.

  "Wow, nice body! Do you pump iron or something? Come here often? What's your sign?"

  "Ha, the Schwartzenegger pills are working. Nice, huh?" He flexed his triceps. "You putting moves on me? Armand dump you?"

  "Naaah, I was just hoping you'd buy breakfast."

  They breakfasted with Artoz on huevos rancheros in the hotel restaurant, packed their cameras and their bottled water, and rattled thirty miles down the coast road to Tulum. At Tulum they parked the VW, tightened up the fenders a little, and checked in with Dr. Teppin. He said he would like to visit Tulum with them and Robert put the camera backpack on.

  Tulum was a small town compared to Uxmal, set on a beautiful piece of coastline, on a headwall fifty feet high that sloped steeply down a coral-limestone rock face to a curved white sand beach. The town was inhabited only by tourists and it was surrounded by shops selling film, serapes, carved chess sets, pottery, and "Life's a beach" T-shirts.

  The entrance was guarded by the usual collection of guides eager to educate the uninformed. They greeted Artoz, "Hola, Artoz, you maybe wish to learn about Tulum?" and laughed.

  In the city, Robert asked Artoz where the virus glyphs might be found. "Well, let's walk around town," he said. "I don't think I have seen these, but I may be mistaken. And it's a small city, it won't take too much time to look at all the glyphs here; half a day, I think."

  They entered the gate and stood on a flat treeless rectangular area where the entire city was visible, less than half a mile in its longest direction and surrounded by a low wall. There were no massive pyramids, the largest structures were rectangular stone buildings just two stories tall. They began looking at glyphs carved into the buildings, with Robert taking pictures, more out of reflex than in the hope anything was worth recording.

  "Dr. Teppin?" he asked. "Are you still there?"

  "Off and on. On, right now. Gary Spender is conferenced in, for some reason he thinks your approach is his best hope. We've been chatting, I filled him in on progress or the lack thereof."

  "Hi, Gary."

  "Hello, Robert. Please, be lucky."

  "Anything positive to report from Austin?"

  "Austin is off the map. We now refer to our location as 'the Austin area.' Next week, we may refer to our location as 'the Texas area.'"

  "I'm sorry. You must be stretched thin."

  "Actually, no, we're getting all the help we need. The CDC and the Feds are throwing all the Armed Forces medics at us and strong-arming a lot of civilians. But we sure are getting frazzled."

  "We're praying for you. Dr. Teppin, are you recording the video we're sending up?"

  "Yes, I've got it all."

  "OK, I won't bother taking pictures. It's pretty uninteresting, so far." He signed off and looked around for Teresa without finding her. "Artoz, have you seen what happened to Teresa?"

  "Not for an hour or so. She cannot be too far."

/>   They quartered the area and found her snapping close-up pictures inside a small round building. "Teresa," said Robert. "Find something?"

  "Well, sort of. This looks like the hand-in-the-eye icon you can find in ancient Chinese sites. It's just the kind of thing I need for my paper."

  Robert was quiet for a moment. "A lot of people could be depending on us. Could we track down the Austin virus glyph first?"

  "That looks like kind of wishful thinking right now, and I need these pictures."

  "Teresa, please, we need to play this out all the way. No diversions. No side issues. The stakes are too big for a half-ass effort."

  "Oh, poo, slave driver. Tell me when you give up and I'll get the rest of my pictures."

  "Deal," he said, and stuck out a hand for a high five.

  * * *

  During the lunch break, Teresa asked, "Artoz, in the books Tulum is described as a fortress and a port town. But it isn't much of a fortress, the walls are only fifteen feet high, and there's no particular structure that looks like a port. No warehouses, no docks, no place to tie up a boat."

  "Yes, you are right. Many guides here think the town was more of a vacation place, people would come here to swim or enjoy the beach, and the sea breeze here keeps it cooler than inland."

  "But it's so small, maybe a thousand people. With fourteen million Maya, it couldn't hold many vacationers."

  "¿Quién sábe?" asked Artoz, squeezing a lime into his beer.

  They were lunching on enchiladas and Dos Equis from one of the snack bars near the town's entrance, sitting on a block of stone on the outside of the city wall. Robert noticed faint carving on the nearby city wall, brought into relief at just this time by the grazing angle of the sun. He peered closer.

  "Hey, that rock has a glyph on it."

  Teresa turned and looked and walked over to the wall. Artoz joined her, and they had soon brushed dirt and grass away from the base of the wall and from several stones, which appeared to have fallen from the city wall.

  "Shoot this, Robert," she said. He got the camera out again and took pictures.

  "What is it?"

  "It looks like a geographical reference, a place," she said. "It shows a cenote, or maybe an underground cave."

  "Quite close, to the south," said Artoz.

  "How close?" asked Robert.

  Artoz studied the inscription. "A man can walk this distance twenty times in a day."

  "There's the diving god, again." Said Teresa. "Artoz, the diving god symbol is found in just about all Maya cities, but nowhere with anything like the frequency it appears in Tulum, right?"

  "Sí. One man said the diving god was a sign that the alien invaders came down right here in Tulum."

  "Maybe not alien invaders, maybe the Maya used to dive. This section certainly seems to describe a sacred underwater something-or-other, and how would they get there without diving?"

  "They didn't have SCUBA gear, did they, those old Maya?" asked Robert.

  "I wouldn't put it past them," said Teresa.

  "It would be like Uxmal, the interesting stuff is underground. Did you ever do any diving?"

  "WHAT? You mean underwater?"

  "No, huh?"

  "I did try snorkeling, actually. That went pretty good. Heck, I'll go diving with you if you want."

  Robert felt a chill of premonition. He was a good SCUBA diver with some cave experience, and he knew he should not take a novice anywhere near an underwater cave. Diving was dangerous enough, and caves were right up at the top of the dangerous scale even for experienced cave divers. But this business had changed quickly, from a long-shot research project to a long-shot archaeology trip to maybe the best chance to save the lives of many thousands of people. They had to take chances. He'd play it by ear, see if she seemed to be comfortable in the water. But there was a prickling in the back of his neck, a little warning tickle.

  Chapter 17

  * * *

  Playa del Carmen, November 3, present day

  Robert fought the wheel as the VW bucked over the dirt road, over waves of packed earth like a congealed ocean storm. Main street in Playa del Carmen, ten miles north on the coast, bisected this regional center of commerce and industry. Low clapboard and adobe buildings lined the street, which was shared by vehicular traffic, dogs sleeping in the gullys, goats, bicyclists, and pedestrians.

  He glanced at Teresa, cool and pretty, her hair swept up into a red bandanna, looking more like a female pirate than a scientist. She was so casual, so alive, so unlike any other woman he had met. He felt a flash of concern, should they be doing this, cave diving? But what else? The virus was still uncontrolled. There could be clues he would not understand.

  Then he thought of the tenuous chain of logic that had led them this far—Maya microscopes, mysterious glyphs, diving gods—and the whole thing seemed beyond sanity. He should get back to Houston, grab his kid, and head for Greenland. But he drove on.

  He located a small dive shop on the ocean. The dive shop proprietor, a dark young man who said he once lived in Montreal before getting it together, told her that SCUBA was just like snorkeling except you didn't get water in your snorkel. She looked apprehensive but let him outfit her with a full set of equipment.

  "Hey, how much more of this do I get?" she complained. "This weighs about two hundred pounds. I'll sink like a rock, if I make it to the water."

  "That's about it, except if you do any deep diving you might want a wet suit to keep warm."

  "Do the natives wear 'em?"

  "They do, in the winter."

  "Is this the winter? I guess it is. Gimmee one."

  She emerged from the changing room and checked the fit of the green skin-tight wet suit, along with Robert and the proprietor. "Where will you be diving?" he asked.

  "Just past Tulum," said Robert. "We're doing a little archaeology."

  "Watch yourselves. That's not a healthy place to dive."

  "Sharks?" asked Teresa.

  "Sharks won't bother you," said the proprietor. "Unless maybe you cut yourself and thrash around a lot. But there have been a few people that were diving near there that got their anchor lines cut, or got a mysterious hole in their boat. Nobody's ever seen anything, though. Supposed to be haunted by a shipwrecked sailor from a hundred years ago."

  A block down the street, Robert found an electronics store where he bought an old fashioned analog ohmmeter. Then at a hardware store he bought copper sheet, silicone glue, and plastic bags. He connected the meter to the copper through holes in the bag, sealed the holes with glue, and sealed the bag around the meter.

  "OK, Mr. Science, I'll bite," said Teresa. "What is that supposed to be?"

  "Here's the way I figure it," he said. "We'll be diving in the salt water looking for an underwater cave entrance, right?"

  "Right."

  "And ten to one the underwater cave has a fresh water underground river, since as you pointed out earlier, they don't do surface rivers in the Yucatán peninsula, right?"

  "Right again. Ten to one."

  "So we could either swim around for years checking out each little hole or we could use the Little Dandy Underwater Salinity Detector, here." He grabbed both electrodes and watched the meter swing to the right.

  "Say no more, Mr. Science. I think I get it. When we swim through a fresh water flow the resistance goes up."

  "Yep. Not only that, I also got extra plastic bags we can use for lunch."

  "Underwater? Wait a minute, I draw the line…"

  "No, ma'am, not underwater, too salty. Lunch on the beach. You'll love it."

  * * *

  Driving south to Tulum they checked in with Dr. Teppin, but they had to tell him again they'd be out of range, as the high frequency radio would not penetrate the salt water. He told them the latest fatalities in Austin, seven hundred fifty dead. The medical community had no confidence that the virus could be checked, and successively larger circles of state and federal government were trying to figure out how to help.<
br />
  "Dr. Teppin," said Robert. "I'm worried about my daughter."

  "She is in Houston, right?"

  "Yes, Houston. I've talked to my ex, but they won't move."

  "If you give me their address, I can have a CDC representative track the situation. If it even begins to look dangerous, we'll talk to Spender. We will encourage local police to enforce an evacuation."

  "Excellent, thanks a lot. That should do it."

  * * *

  In Tulum, they parked in the same lot and walked south past high dunes to the beach. After some instruction Teresa looked comfortable underwater and they crisscrossed back and forth at different distances from shore watching the salinity meter. At two hundred yards out, they drifted near the reef, surrounded by brightly colored reef fishes and rocked gently back and forth by the low waves. On the ocean side a sea turtle five feet across paddled slowly south. Teresa grabbed Robert's arm and pointed up.

  At the surface, she said, "Wow! Did you see that big mother turtle? And those fish? The colors are incredible. The blue flat one, it looked like it's lit from inside. That bunch of little silver guys, they looked like somebody just polished 'em. It's like swimming in an aquarium. I wouldn't have believed it. My God. What was that big gray job that smiled at us?"

  "Barracuda."

  "Will he bite?"

  "No, he thinks you're probably dangerous because you're so much bigger than him. If the fish ever find out we're helpless we'll all be fish bait. Smile back at him. Show him your teeth. Pretend you're going to eat him if he gets in range."

  "Right. Smile. Teeth. What's the little bright blue one eating rocks? He crunches on 'em. You can actually hear him crunch."

  "Parrotfish. Eating the coral, actually. The outside layers are still alive. It's probably pretty tasty, try some."

  "No thanks. Gotta get back to work."

  They swam over a few dozen black fissures in the coral with no indication from the meter, and then got a strong response from a fairly large hole. Robert marked the spot by tying a ribbon on an elkhorn coral and they swam further, locating another hole. Robert pointed down, checked their remaining air, handed Teresa an underwater light, fired up one of his remaining three lights, and tied off one end of his thin safety line. They entered the hole, unreeling the line to mark their exit route.