Perilous Skies (Stony Man)

by Don Pendleton

  The new structures were not as well engineered as Structure 31. Instead of stone, they were made mostly out of cheap lumber and drywall. Instead of being used for religious ceremonies, their intended functions was to sell tacos and coconut ice cream and Coca-Cola to the mass influx of tourists expected to begin arriving at Chilan within a year.

  Of course, that depended on how quickly the road was done. The Mexican government had moved its heavy equipment to the jungle and begun to clear more trees to provide space for a new highway that would bring in tourist buses—only to discover more ruins. They had moved the equipment two hundred feet to the west and begun to clear again. More ruins. It happened a third time. Manning suspected that the developers would normally have plowed over any such ruins and denied they ever existed. This was where the developers’ own publicity worked against them. The constant media attention on the site made every discovery news on some scale, and made it impossible to conveniently ignore ancient sites that were in the way of fresh asphalt.

  There had even been talk about providing access points through Guatemala, which was about four hundred feet away from where Manning now stood, on the other side of the Usumacinta River. But the whole point of this development was to bring tourist dollars into Mexico. They weren’t letting any of it leak into Guatemala if they could help it.

  Manning’s boredom evaporated when his eyes spotted the small aircraft drifting over the jungle. The thing seemed to be moving too slowly even to stay in the air, and he heard no sound. It had simply popped into existence over the jungle and floated over the heads of Calvin James and T. J. Hawkins in Structure 33, and floated down over the central plaza. Now Manning could hear some noise coming from the thing, a rush of turbulent air like a fan. He heard the radio message from Calvin James and it occurred to him that the tiny jet was moving pretty quickly after all—and wondered at the wisdom of stationing himself in Structure 30, at the far end of the plaza.

  The small jet was using the central plaza as a landing strip. Manning knew for a fact that this aircraft was untested at best, and it seemed like an awfully short distance to bring a jet of any size to a halt.

  Manning’s forehead creased as he watched the jet touch down, throwing up dust and gravel. If that aircraft was incapable of making the ridiculously abrupt landing it was supposed to be capable of, it was going to barrel directly into Structure 30. It would be a shame to smash a jet into this archaeological marvel. But mostly, he thought, it would be a shame to smash a jet into Gary Manning.

  He could hear the gravel under the wheels. That distracted him momentarily. A jet, even a small one, should be making enough noise that he wouldn’t be able to hear the gravel under the wheels as it landed.

  It lost momentum quickly, and when the pilot stepped on the brake, the back end fishtailed slightly, throwing up more gravel as the aircraft did a neat one-eighty. The ass end of the small jet, and the hot breeze from the twin tail-mounted engines, were pointed at Gary Manning. The jet pulled off the gravel and into the grass. The pilot parked it under the shade of a nearby tree—one of the few jungle giants that had been left standing along the gravel plaza.

  A cloud of dust drifted away.

  Manning touched his headset and said quietly, “Everybody seeing this?”

  “Seeing it, mate,” answered a male voice with a British accent. “I thought for a second that it was going to mow you over.”

  “Yeah, me, too,” Manning said. “You ever hear a jet like that? Came in like a glider.”

  “My bathroom fan is louder,” the Briton answered.

  Manning was quietly getting himself settled in to position with the sniper rifle, covering the small, gray-camouflaged jet, which seemed to absorb the shadow of the great tree and disappear. The way it absorbed colors had a camouflage effect.

  In a moment, he had another surprise. The hatch opened and the man he presumed was the pilot stepped out. Followed by a copilot. Followed by three more men, one after another, each of them carrying heavy packs. All of them were armed with automatic weapons.

  “Christ,” Manning said under his breath, then he touched his headset. “It’s a damned clown car.”

  One more man had stepped out of the jet, also armed, also carrying a heavy pack. There had been six men with packs inside that little plane.

  Manning heard the voice of T. J. Hawkins come through his earpiece.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but from down here it looked like six guys piled out of that little toy plane.”

  “You got that right,” Manning replied, then went silent as the men began to disperse in pairs. Two went left, west, cutting across the open plaza and heading for the acropolis, which included Structures 19, 20 and 21. The partially rebuilt acropolis was positioned to face the rising sun, and it was one of the most impressive piles of rock on the site. Once restored, it would be magnificent.

  A second pair headed directly up the center of the open plaza, toward the huge honeycomb wall, where Calvin James and T. J. Hawkins were waiting for them.

  But the last pair headed directly toward Gary Manning, in the impressively vaulted Structure 30.

  “Manning?” asked David McCarter, the Briton, over the headset.

  Manning responded quietly. “Changing position,” he said.

  “Coming to help you out, friend,” another voice announced in a low growl.

  Manning did not respond. The pair from the tiny jet were hustling up the short flight of stairs, and would be entering one of the three doors momentarily. Manning had, of course, planned for such a contingency. He shouldered the sniper rifle, snatched up the automatic rifle that he had leaned against the wall, and moved quickly to the rear of the center room. At the rear was a hallway that connected all three rooms together. In one of those alcoves was a niche formed by the crumbling of rotting rock, and leaving a tight, dark niche that barely fit a man as big as Gary Manning. He stepped into it, maneuvered his body for an unrestricted position and waited in blackness.

  * * *

  ALL THAT WAS LEFT NOW of the small Structure 14 was a pile of broken rock, and the stocky Cuban had convinced himself it was the remains of an ancient mystical Mayan outhouse. There was no place to hide in it, so he crouched behind it and even that was hardly adequate. But Rafael Encizo had gone unseen by the six—count them, six—occupants of that little jet.

  The Cuban-born commando didn’t want to think what it was like inside that little plane with six guys. And all of their cargo.

  He crept up alongside Structure 30 as the pair entered, and he was keeping an eye on the other two pairs. The two across the plaza disappeared inside Structure 21, on the south side of the acropolis. The final pair was headed up the central plaza, in plain sight, and Encizo was going to have to chance that they would not turn around and glimpse him. He stepped up the stone stairs and slipped into door one. The pair from the jet had gone through the central door, door two, so Encizo had room one all to himself. He and Manning had scoped out the structure carefully, and Encizo was confident that he knew what he was doing.

  The bright morning Mexican sun gave way to the cool, dark interior of room one. Encizo followed the route he had already mapped out, and walked carefully, making his way against the wall, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dim light, and listening. He could hear the voices of the pair from the jet. They were not trying to be quiet. They assumed they had this site completely to themselves.

  Encizo heard the noise of flimsy metal being manipulated—the intruders were making use of one of the aluminum ladders stacked in the central room, left over from the archaeological staff, which had still been rushing accumulated dust from the ceiling just a few days ago.

  Encizo came to the corner, and peered into the alcove at the back end of the room. He saw the figure of Gary Manning ensconced in his dark niche. Manning gave him a brief wave. Encizo waited.

  * * *

  IN STRUCTURE 15 THE British commando named David McCarter was the commander of the team called Phoenix Force. />
  It might seem unusual to have a British national commanding a commando group from the United States—but that wasn’t the most unusual aspect of Phoenix Force. Phoenix was one of the enforcement arms of the highly secretive Sensitive Operations Group, which was headquartered at Stony Man Farm in Virginia.

  Team commander McCarter had made Structure 15 his headquarters. It was small but solidly built, and had survived the centuries far better than most of the other buildings at the Chilan site. The building was accessed via a steep stairway and was high enough to give the Phoenix Force commander a good view up and down the central plaza, and all of the major structures of the Chilan site.

  Despite the strangeness of this probe, it appeared that Stony Man Farm instincts had been on target. They had guessed that the site would be a target to vandals—if not total destruction. A drug lord’s way of paying back the Mexican government for enforcing its laws too vigorously, which had a direct impact on the drug lord’s bottom line.

  A bloody shame to see the site damaged, yes, but it wasn’t McCarter’s job to stop the vandalism or even to apprehend the vandals; the real goal of Phoenix Force today was to take possession of the vandals’ little toy plane.

  McCarter had deduced that the vandals would target the acropolis, with its impressive trio of structures, as well as Structure 33, the distinctive honeycomb wall at the far end of the plaza. He had also guessed they might go after the bridge foundation, almost eight hundred feet away from his current position and on the shore of the Usumacinta River. The government had been busily restoring part of the bridge foundation. There were even plans to rebuild the entire Mayan suspension bridge. The government was promising that it would show just how impressive and ahead of their time the rare, large-scale Mayan suspension bridges actually were.

  But McCarter had been mistaken about the bridge. Instead of heading for the suspension bridge foundation, the last pair of vandals were headed into Manning’s building, Structure 30. Encizo and Manning could handle that situation quite well.

  McCarter waited until the final pair had made its way inside Structure 33, where T. J. Hawkins and Calvin James awaited. Then McCarter stepped out of building 15. He moved down to the edge of the central plaza and covered the entrance to the acropolis from a distance.

  “Take action, mates,” he ordered.

  * * *

  FINALLY, THOUGHT GARY Manning. He stepped out of his niche and into the alcove that opened into the central room. Room two. He saw what he had expected to see. One of the men had climbed onto one of the aluminum ladders and was hammering nails into the crevices of the rock near the ceiling.

  The second man was holding the pack and standing at the bottom of the ladder. It was just Manning’s luck the one on the ladder was looking in his direction at the moment he stepped inside. The man gave a shout.

  Gary Manning could have very easily cut both of them down in the moment it took them to get their bearings, but that wasn’t what this probe was about. He hit both men with their secret weapon: in the darkness of the ancient stone building, the brilliant bluish-white LED flashlight stabbed them in the eyes and blinded them momentarily. That was long enough for Gary Manning to cross to them and deliver a savage kick to the legs of the wobbly aluminum ladder. It collapsed, sending its occupant plummeting on top of his companion.

  Rafael Encizo had materialized in the room and knocked the radio away from the man with the pack—but he wondered if it was too late. A signal may already have been sent. The radio clattered across the stone floor as Gary Manning struck the man with the pack. Manning’s pal bounced the man’s head into the stone floor and the man went limp. The man from the ladder was trying desperately to roll himself over. He got some help. Gary Manning snatched him off the floor, twisted him savagely and sent him back to the floor face-first. The impact was enough to knock the wind out of the vandal. His consciousness wavered and he groaned feebly as his hands were twisted behind him and bound in plastic cuffs.

  The unconscious man was similarly secured, and then Gary Manning patted them down. He disposed of their handguns, sending them across the room without their magazines, and the job was done.

  Encizo was talking to David McCarter.

  “They made some noise and they had a radio. See any sign of alert?”

  * * *

  THERE WERE THREE ANCIENT jungle trees that had been spared during the clearing of the central plaza, and David McCarter had taken up a position behind one. In the quiet, hot Mexico morning, the sound of the brief battle in Structure 30 had reached him. It seemed unlikely that the pair that had entered the acropolis buildings would have heard it. But maybe. Even if they didn’t get the message over the radio.

  McCarter triggered his mike. “T.J.? Cal? Talk to me.”

  * * *

  WITH ONLY A SMALL SECTION of the roof intact, and with three walls missing, Structure 33 offered no dark alcoves for hiding commandos, but there were other kinds of hiding places. Hawkins and James had identified it as the perfect place to go unseen if needed. Many of the alcoves that made the wall so dramatic still contained life-size stone statues, presumably the kings and the heroes of the ancient city state of Chilan. Most of the statues had disintegrated over the years, but a few were virtually intact.

  The first row of alcoves above ground level contained the best-preserved statues. Calvin James took a position directly above the entrance from the plaza. He was standing maybe fifteen feet above the spot where the vandals would enter the building, if they did indeed come up the stairs. Hawkins found a good niche on the same level, maybe twenty feet to the west of James’s position.

  James had exploited the easy hand- and footholds in the decaying rock face and now stood in an alcove behind the statue of a king. The statue had big hooded eyes and seemed to be holding a chunk of something in one hand and a sort of a block with holes and pegs in the other. To James it looked like a snack and a game board. But he wasn’t an archaeological expert like the scientists who made the Ancient Aliens TV show. They would probably determine with a high level of confidence that the figure was holding a remote control and a ray gun.

  Whoever the figure was, he was a barrel-chested character, built broad enough to make easy cover for Calvin James. He stood behind the king’s statue and peered around the king’s space helmet to watch the figures make the long march of the central plaza. He could have taken them both out and they never would have seen him. It would’ve been easy to wipe those two off the face of the earth.

  And Calvin James would have liked to have done it. These men were high-value drug runners. Dope peddlers on a continental scale. They worked for one of the biggest coke-running organizations in Mexico. They kidnapped innocent tourists, they corrupted the government and they would not hesitate to murder civilians in the interest of furthering their business interests.

  But he wasn’t supposed to be doing that. Not today. This was not about stopping the drug trade.

  Today their job was to get their hands on that aircraft.

  That need was the currency by which this pair was buying their lives. This pair seemed pretty confident that they were alone. They should be. There was a small security force employed at the Chilan site, but they’d been scared off or lured away. Or maybe they were dead in the jungle. Calvin James and his companions had found no evidence of the security team on-site. The guard shack had been empty. The pot of coffee on the low electric cooktop was half full and just barely warm when they’d arrived.

  The pair of vandals was going to make it easy on Calvin James. They came to the top of the stairs and ensconced themselves in the entrance almost directly below James’s feet. They began to work, unzipping their pack and removing the contents. Those would be explosives, and they would be timed to go off in an hour or so. Or perhaps be remotely detonated. The blast would take out the stones and bring the entire wall down—an interesting method of payback against the Mexican government that had been too meddlesome in the business of drug running lately. The de
struction would send a very clear message: you meddle in our profit-making initiatives and we will meddle in yours. If the Mexican government was so determined to stop the drug trade, then the drug trade would stop the business of the Mexican government. And right now, after years of negative publicity, with tourist revenues in the toilet, Mexico needed every good vacation draw it could come up with. The new archaeological site at Chilan was going to be the star attraction of the coming winter travel season. Mexico hoped to bring in wannabe Indiana Joneses from the United States by the thousands.

  But that certainly wouldn’t happen if there was violence in Chilan. That certainly wouldn’t happen if the magnificent king’s wall was turned into rubble.

  Calvin James intended to give the vandals a few more minutes to become absorbed in their work, then he and T.J. would step down and take them out.

  Then the plans changed.

  “Trouble, mates,” said David McCarter in James’s headset. “The alert might’ve gone out.”

  Sure enough, James detected a change in the pace of the work below. It seemed as if something had been dropped; he heard the clank as a steel tool hit the ground. There were quiet discussions. Calvin James looked down at the entranceway below him and saw one of the men emerge, scanning the rubble that had once been Structure 33’s missing three walls. He then scanned the jungle, covering it with his automatic weapon and hissing words that James could not understand.

  James stepped around the statue of the king and looked out the front of the building. There was another man there, also with an automatic weapon, glaring out at the central plaza and peering into the distance at Structure 30. There was nothing to see. David McCarter was out there somewhere, but he was hidden from view. The man took a radio off his belt and spoke into it quickly. He got the answer he expected. He radioed again; it was some sort of a brief response. That must be the pair in the acropolis.