THE MAYAN GLYPH

by Larry Baxter

  "While I was checking to see if any other researcher had come up with the same thing, I found a picture of a Maya inscription on a stela in Uxmal, engraved about 1,200 years ago. Here it is. You can also see a column of glyphs that may represent the structure of an antiviral. There's not enough there for us to synthesize an antiviral, but it looks as if the Maya may have built the same kind of microscope and used it to help find cures for disease. We're looking for more records the Maya may have left, with pointers to an antiviral."

  "Not possible," said Gabor, loudly, "I think."

  "Well, we found photographs of the stela made eighty years ago that showed the identical glyph. And carbon dating of some of the pigment puts the inscription in the eighth century or earlier."

  "What does the stela say? We can pretty much read Maya now, hey?"

  "Most of the glyphs are known," said Teresa. "We have a translation, as good as we can come up with for now." She handed him a paper from her case. "We poked around in Uxmal for a few days. It looks as if the Maya cities were more specialized than we had thought. Uxmal was the accounting and administrative center; it handled the exact requirements of the various gods, making sure that the sun god, for example, was adequately rewarded for producing the sun every morning."

  "Good, that's an important job."

  "Tulum was quite small but powerful, as the academics were concentrated there. It was the university town of the Maya empire. The stela in question seems to have been a thank-you note from Uxmal to Tulum for a powder of some kind that helped the crops. And look down here; this group with the matching glyph describes what may have been a plant derivative that cured a sickness. And here, clearly, is the glyph for Tulum."

  "You believe this?" Bela whispered to Bartok. Bartok whistled a few notes in a minor key.

  Robert took over. "Apparently the research center of the Maya empire was in Tulum, in an undiscovered laboratory. And they may have built a charge microscope, back in the year 822 or so, and used it to analyze the Austin virus. They may have been facing destruction by the virus, in fact that may have been the reason that the Maya abandoned the cities and were decimated in population in the next few decades. But they may also have found a cure. They didn't completely die out. They knew a lot more than we do about plant cures, natural cures, and they lived in the rain forest—the best pharmacology lab in the world. This is all incredibly speculative, of course, but nobody is anywhere near a way to control the virus with conventional medicine."

  Sarah leaned into the room. "Two white! Two red!" she barked.

  Bela said, "Got it," opened a cabinet door and grabbed two bottles of Gewürztraminer from a refrigerated compartment and a bottle of Bordeaux and a California Cabernet from another compartment.

  "The Alsatian Gewürz is OK with everyone?" he asked. "Much more interesting than the sweet California version. And we can see if Mondavi's solid Opus One is a match for the '61 Mouton."

  Bartok looked at the guests for their reaction. "Gracious living in the tropics," he explained.

  Bela located a carafe of ice water, wine glasses and water glasses, extracted a cork and poured Bartok a taste of the Gewürztraminer with an accomplished flourish. He held the bottle so he could read the label.

  "Unexpectedly flinty for the vintage," announced Bartok. "But we think that you will find it aggressively contoured, with the typical varietal spicy overtones. The house would recommend waiting for the appetizer course before tasting it; you will find that it is more of a team player than an individual contributor."

  "I was hoping for steely, not flinty," complained Bela.

  "Don't kid me. You want Rolling Rock, not wine," said Bartok. "No tannic aftertaste, no tricky corks to remove."

  Gabor poured the white wine for everyone. "So, then, off to Tulum?" he asked, ignoring his children.

  "Off to Tulum," agreed Robert. "We spent two days wandering around the ancient city along with ten thousand tourists, fifty guides, and two hundred serape vendors. There was nothing we could learn above ground, so we checked underground."

  "Underground radar?" asked Goldstein.

  "Not at twenty-five thousand a pop," said Robert. "We're not that well financed. They're working on a bigger government subsidy, back home, but it'll be a few more days. We found a few glyphs that pointed us underground. We looked for fresh-water outflow off the nearby beach and found a large underground river half a mile south. It comes up out of several big holes, about five hundred feet offshore, hidden by a coral reef.

  "Where did it go? How much current?" yelled Gabor.

  "Maybe eight knots, peak," said Robert. "More than we could handle; we got turned back. The main passage was maybe eight feet by twenty feet at the narrowest spot, and it seemed to run almost horizontal at a depth of fifty feet or so.

  "After we, um, resolved a discussion with the local police, we headed inland up the headwall and found a small cenote that looked like it connected with the main flow where the passage was wider. We dived in and worked our way up the river, figuring we were boldly going where no man had boldly gone before. But we spotted shiny new stainless steel rungs leading upwards. So we headed on up. And then these scruffy-looking Hispanic types with guns found us, tied us up, and beat on us. They put us in a storeroom with a dozen torpedo shaped things, maybe twenty feet long. One of the torpedoes was open at the top and full of white powder wrapped in clear plastic."

  "Robert untied himself like a gigantic rope trick," said Teresa. "It was maybe the most amazing thing I have ever seen in my life."

  Robert smiled inside and looked again, Teresa seemed to be lit from within tonight. Or maybe it was the wine.

  "They called somebody named Lopez on the phone, in another room full of guns and communications equipment.

  "Druggies." said Bela.

  "Seemed to be," said Robert. "They had all the earmarks."

  "Hey, guns and everything," said Bartok. "So, what did you do? Beat 'em up?"

  "Not exactly," said Robert. "We beat up a couple of them, then we found out we were pretty well outnumbered, so we tried to sneak out. But they saw us and started shooting. I got hit, we fell into an underground stream and got carried out to sea."

  "Wow, way cool," said Bela. "Same way you came in?"

  "I wish," said Teresa. "We took the high speed express lane out. It was another underground river, quite a bit smaller and faster and twisty, and we had no aqualungs. Luckily, I got Robert to batter through the rocks with his head. We both were pretty well busted up and concussed. We must have surfaced well out to sea, near the reef, and we got picked up by a fisherman and his son just before we got picked up by the sharks."

  "So!" screamed Gabor. "Very bad guys! Did you try the Federales?"

  "The Federales were a little slippery. I think that they know all about it, but they will do nothing. Baksheesh. They're getting paid off."

  "The drug trade is a pretty important component of the economy here," said Kiraly in a quiet voice, almost a whisper. "The cargo is black tar heroin, opium resin, cocaine, and marijuana. The normal path is from the fields in Columbia up the coast to Mexico, then it fans out to border crossings for the western U.S. markets and hops to Florida for the east coast markets."

  "Can you trust any of the Mexican agencies?" asked Robert.

  "The SDN, the National Defense Secretariat, and PGR, the Federal Attorney General's office, mostly. Although even here you will probably see a little shrinkage in any confiscated cash. The local police are usually not as reliable."

  "Yes," said Robert.

  Sarah whistled from the galley, "Wait staff! Front and center!"

  Bela and Bartok jumped up and ran to the galley, returning with a huge pile of grilled foccacia with tomato and rosemary and mesclun salad with warm goat cheese, fresh basil, and croutons.

  They dug in. Gabor asked, rhetorically, if anyone had any idea how difficult it was to find fresh basil in the Caribbean.

  During the pasta course, Robert broke the silence, "Gabor, we nee
d your help, but we can't pay you anything, and it will probably be dangerous, unless the heavies we ran into last time have left town."

  "We like dangerous. But why bother these guys, hey? Can you just find another way in?"

  "Maybe, but we'll be working pretty close to the cave. We may run into them by accident. Or they could spot us aboveground, and then realize we weren't killed in the cave, and then they'd have to try to protect their secret."

  "How about the D.E.A.?"

  "No help. Dr. Teppin checked through Washington. They're working with the government in Mexico City, but it could take weeks."

  "Weeks? With a deadly virus breakout?"

  "They're pushing at the highest levels, but the Mexican government is sending a fact finding mission to Texas. And I guess there's an excavation near Uxmal that got sealed off, but it doesn't seem to have any active viruses, that's the priority right now. They hope the situation can be resolved in a few days, but who knows."

  "The government in Mexico City may be making too much money from the drug business. How about the local police?"

  "We got some help with the local cops. We found a displaced American named Schwartz who lives near Playa del Carmen; he helped bribe the local colonel. He said that the police were probably taking money from the drug smugglers. He said the druggies could put much more pressure on the cops than we could, so we had to take what they gave us. And the police didn't want to hear about our encounter in the caverns."

  Gabor nodded, frowning, pulling on his short beard. "Suppose we send them a nice letter? Put a note near the cave? Tell them we are coming at them with the Marines, the policia, the D.E.A.? Then do they think they cannot continue in Tulum and move out?"

  "Maybe, but if they have the local police bought off and if they know the D.E.A. is unwelcome, maybe they laugh at us. Or sucker us in and clobber us."

  Kiraly spoke. "No matter how it goes, say you want a few days alone in the caves. If you sucker punch the druggies, you are going to get clobbered later. They don't like to lose, and they have all the manpower and the firepower they need. They're tough, smart, and well equipped. And they're killers."

  Robert finished his wine. "We need one day, maybe two at the most, then we're out of town."

  "It will take them two days minimum to get reinforcements, if they're from South America," said Kiraly. "They're not local or they wouldn't need a warehouse on the coast, it would be inland. Probably Medellin or Calí. If you want us to buy you two days, we can go in armed, look to find another way to your cave, and hope to miss 'em. But we can also have a contingency plan in case they show up shooting."

  "Sounds good to me," said Gabor happily. "I like contingency plans. I haven't gotten my gun off since Dubrovnick. But, Kiraly, I thought you were getting out of the mercenary business."

  "This is different."

  Robert shook his head. "We can't ask you to put your lives in danger. It's not your fight."

  "Hey," said Gabor. "Life is short. We like to make it interesting. This is by plenty the most interesting thing I've heard of so far this year. And we owe Teppin one, too. So, crew, what do you think?"

  "You bet," said Bela.

  Bartok nodded agreement, a broad smile on his face.

  "You guys aren't going," said Gabor.

  "Gotta go," said Bela. "I've never gotten my gun off. Bartok, you ever get yours off? In public?"

  "Uh-uh, me either. No discussion. We're going. We have our reputation to consider."

  Kiraly slapped a big hand on the table. "Just guns, right? No flame throwers, no grenades?" Robert nodded. Kiraly went on, "If we plan it right it should be OK. Not safe, but only a five or ten percent chance of getting killed."

  The others nodded, and Gabor shouted, "OK, that's done, we're in. So, you know the terrain. How do we discourage a nest of angry drug smugglers with automatic weapons?"

  Robert said, "We don't necessarily have to fight fair. I bet the military planning types haven't written the book about fighting in caves. Suppose, for instance, you put grease in the right place on the rocks? There's a passage with a narrow, sloping ledge and the river just below. Anybody stepping on the grease would get a free ticket to the Caribbean Sea. Or a little sleeping gas, that should work really well in a cave."

  Sarah excused herself and came back in a minute or two with plates of Saga and smoked Gruyere cheese and a bottle of Offley's 1972 Vintage Port. Bela poured himself a generous glass and said, "Oh, good, it's the Offley's."

  Bartok said, "Offley, Offley good," and poured a large glass for himself.

  Gabor turned to Robert, shrugged, and said, "Disobedience. Lack of discipline. God knows I tried."

  Robert drew a rough map of the area:

  "Here's the layout. You can see the three fresh water outflows we found in the ocean. We ignored the escape tunnel, because it didn't look as if the tunnel was big enough for us with our tanks. We tried the north passage first, from the ocean, and did fine until we hit that narrow spot. Then we tried the south passage and ran into a similar narrowing, with current we couldn't swim against. We think they must bring the torpedoes through the north passage, using a minisub capable of eight knots. The torpedoes themselves don't have propellers."

  "So then you tried that cenote. Does it have an obvious entrance?" asked Kiraly.

  "No, it's a natural crevice in the limestone, small, hidden by scrub brush. I doubt that we were the first to find it, but it probably wouldn't be discovered unless you knew what you were looking for. From the cenote, we swam upstream against light current and entered the north passage through that small cut. We drifted downstream, found the ladder, and got our clocks cleaned."

  "They may have been protected from downstream, gates or alarms or something, but they couldn't have been expecting visitors from upstream," said Kiraly. "Then that escape tunnel is where you got bruised up as you were leaving."

  "Oh, yes, something else. There was a forklift truck in the entrance cave. I can't imagine anybody hauling that in a submersible, so there may be another dry land entrance. But it may be pretty well camouflaged; the locals don't know about it."

  "They did say something about nets—in the cave—the drug smugglers," said Teresa.

  "Robert, how do you think we should plan our visit?" asked Kiraly.

  "I don't think they expected us to survive. They fired a lot of rounds at us, and they probably thought we'd taken serious hits. And even healthy, we were long odds against getting through that tunnel alive."

  "Then they may not have even discovered the cenote entrance, and we can catch them by surprise again?" said Kiraly.

  "Maybe. What do your think?" asked Robert.

  Kiraly studied the sketched map for a minute. "The north entrance has got to be well defended; that's out. We could use the south underwater entrance or the cenote entrance. They were guarding at least five million dollars worth of drugs—wholesale, from your description—so they would probably look around to see if they could backtrack your route. They had three possibilities to look at, upstream, cenote, or south passage. How big is that cut between the north and south passages?"

  "Just about big enough for us, we had to take our tanks off to get through the hole."

  "Good. Do you think you could see any light from the cenote if you looked back into the hole from the north passage?"

  "No. It's too far away, there are too many twists in the passage."

  "Excellent. Our best chance is that they missed finding the cut. So it's a crapshoot whether they'll keep an eye out underwater or aboveground. Or both. How well is the south passage entrance concealed?"

  "It's hidden under a coral reef. If you didn't have a salinity detector, it's like any of hundreds of dark crevices in the reef."

  "That's how I'd go in, then. With personal minisubs; ours can handle eight knots easily. We can take a pass with the robot minisub. Mount the low-light video camera to check for bad guys. And also make sure the current doesn't get too high for us."

  "We onl
y have four minisubs. One's only putting out half power, we can't use it for this. Do we go in with three people?" asked Gabor.

  "Me, you, Robert?" asked Kiraly.

  "No way," said Bela, Bartok and Goldstein simultaneously.

  "Todd, you have to stay with the ship to run the comm and the robot. Let's see. We could either try to tow people with the subs or use the rock climbing gear to run a line back."

  "Too far," said Gabor, loudly.

  "I got it, I got it," said Bela. "We can let two unmanned subs drift back on the current."

  "Hey, yeah, neat!" said Bartok.

  "Should work," said Robert. "The walls are pretty smooth."

  "And those subs can survive a direct hit from a nuclear weapon," said Goldstein.

  "Let's do it," said Gabor. "Make a list of what we need. Goldstein, write this down."

  Goldstein found a notebook and the group produced a list of equipment:

  Available:

  Wetsuits and Scuba gear

  Crampons

  Night vision underwater goggles, with flash protection

  Inertial navigation unit, LCD readout

  5 Browning 9 mm automatic pistols, 4 extra 13-shot magazines

  Kevlar vests, level IIIA

  Radio intercom, headsets

  Map

  Personal minisubs

  Needed:

  AK-47 assault rifles (3)

  30-round magazines (6)

  Smoke grenades (10)

  Flash-bang grenades (10)

  Pitons, caribiners, braided 3/8 in. nylon line

  "Kiraly," shouted Gabor. "Can you get hold of those things in a day or two?"

  Robert was startled. What was wrong? Gabor's voice sounded strange. What happened? Oh, yeah, no ringing in the ear. No sloshing noise. He moved his head, still nothing. Blessed silence. What a relief.

  Kiraly answered, "Shouldn't be too much trouble." He left the room to make a phone call. He came back in a few minutes, "On the way. Arrival scheduled for tomorrow afternoon."

  Robert gazed at the list. Small armies could be supplied for a full-scale war with this stuff. Were they getting in over their heads?