“I helped decipher the pillar in Izapa,” Peet added. “I think I can help you with this one.”
Chac shot him a warning glance as Peet stepped by him, but it was too late. Another cry from the cave steeled Peet’s resolve. He was committed to whatever horrors waited in that cave. He had to decode the last pillar for Lori’s sake. He wasn’t about to lose her again.
“Maybe you’re right,” Abe said, snatching Peet by the arm and training the tip of his knife against his throat. “I wouldn’t want to risk losing the power of God to that Zapatista anyway.”
He paused to bark at his men, ordering them to make sure Chac didn’t escape. Then, finally, he snatched his radio and in an almost regrettable tone, he called Sonjay and Rafi off of Lori. The cries from the cave reduced to a pitiful moan—
Then silence.
The tightness in Peet’s chest eased with relief, but Abe’s blade pressed more threateningly against his throat. Abe leaned in close enough for his whitewashed breath to linger within Peet’s nostrils.
“Remember one thing,” he warned. “If you don’t crack this code, I will kill you and throw Lori to the wolves.”
Part V
Baktun
“The Christians will go to holy heaven, guarded by their holy faith, and the Itzaes and the Balams will stop being lost...”
-Chilam Balam
Traps
Chac cursed beneath his breath. The morning had started out on a sour note that had progressively rotted as the day wore on. His attempts to stop Abdullah had failed miserably. In fact, it was he who had been so easily taken out of the battle. It was truly a dark day, but he knew there was still room to get worse. Much worse.
And it all began with the call from Sabino. There’d been a mistake, his friend explained. They’d targeted the wrong plane. A wedding party, it seemed.
A wedding party?
Yes. A man, a woman and a priest. Abdullah was not on board, but the three captives were no doubt associated with his group because they escaped with the aid of a man wielding an FN Scar. That was Abdullah’s weapon of choice, certainly, but the scenario didn’t fit his mode of operations, even if the trio were his decoy as Sabino speculated. No, the downed plane and its crew sounded more like The Ladybug.
That would explain the strange readings from the tracking device Chac had inserted into the sole of Peet’s boot before he departed from Chichen Itza. That was how he came to locate Peet in the middle of the dense jungle just hours ago. It was his bad luck that Abdullah and his men were right behind. Chac had hoped to get himself and Sabino’s group into position before Abdullah arrived. Everything had been planned out and ready for execution, except for one thing.
He hadn’t accounted for Matt Webb’s efficiency.
Now Chac sat a captive, silently cursing as he watched Abdullah escort Peet through the mouth of the cave and disappear into the dark interior of the ancient lava flow. He feared the professor’s impulse may be the end of him, but there was no way to warn the man against it. As foolish as it was, Chac couldn’t blame him for his reaction. Peet wasn’t a man wizened by years of trickery, espionage and battle. His life had not been forged by a cunning and patient foe.
Dr. Anthony Peet was a simple anthropologist and for that, Chac envied him.
Chac longed for a life focused on the simple concerns of living. He also longed for an unhindered study of his distant ancestors; to learn the forgotten secrets of the Maya without the distraction of constantly protecting them. His desire to learn had grown so strong over the years that he supposed it was solely to blame for his lack of caution when Matt Webb came along.
Matt had provided an opportunity to learn from a practicing expert. At least, that’s what Chac wanted from the BYU professor and it was that expectation that had clouded Chac’s judgement. He had no idea Matt was working for Abdullah, though in hindsight he should have suspected it. But all of that was in the past. Chac had learned a valuable lesson and in the present situation, it did him no good to linger on actions that couldn’t be changed.
The curses Chac now muttered beneath his breath were not self-criticism for his inexcusable mistake. No. It was for the mistake Peet was now making. The last Chac saw of him were his hands, bound behind his broad, sturdy back, marching into the darkness of the cave. He didn’t expect to see the anthropologist again.
There’d been no way of stopping him without triggering some rash reaction. Simply put, Peet had fallen into Abdullah’s trap. Chac had been wary of it. Peet wasn’t. And all it took was the bait.
Lori.
There was no chance Lori had survived the collapsed cenote. To use her as bait was a desperate tactic and Chac had called Abdullah’s bluff. Could he have really found her body? Possibly. But he wouldn’t need the body to use her. Abdullah had the money and resources that would make any military envious. He always found access to some of the most impossible information. To learn that Lori had gone to the cenote with him and Peet would have only taken an appropriately placed spy, camera or tracking equipment. In fact, it had been a piece of Abdullah’s captured devices that Chac had slipped into Peet’s boot. And no doubt Matt had reported the location of the cavern to Abdullah when he first discovered it, so it was very likely the place was being closely monitored by the time Chac led Peet and Lori into it.
If only he had suspected something…
Curses.
Chac glanced at Father Ruiz. The priest’s face had paled when the screams started coming from the cave and he had yet to regain his color. Peet and Father Ruiz may have been convinced by the desperate cries, but Chac wasn’t. He doubted any woman was in the cave. It wouldn’t be beneath Abdullah to have a recording on hand to use at such a necessary time. The sounds of a distressed woman were enough to tug at any man. Chac had learned long ago not to fall for that trap. Besides, Chac already knew not to enter the cave no matter what the cost.
He’d managed to avoid that. Now, for plan B…
* * * *
Tarah paced impatiently, feeling Sonjay glaring at her from his post at the pillar. She was aware of the stone he now rolled within his fingers, possibly waiting for an opportunity to bean her with it. She’d be ready if he tried.
As good of a militant leader as he was, Sonjay was continually impatient for action and when he and Rafi entered the chamber, she could tell they’d been sent on a mission. Sonjay wasted no time. They pounced on Lori, throwing her to the ground and roughing her up in the ways of ruthless men—anything to get her to make some noise.
Tarah had seen this tactic before, even participated a time or two herself. It meant something wasn’t going as planned. As Tarah watched the men work, she knew someone wasn’t cooperating outside and now Abe was trying to appeal to the humane side of the resistance. The only problem was, Lori must have figured that out too for the harder the men pressed the more resistant she became. Even a broken finger brought little more than a sniffling whimper out of her.
To the girl’s credit, she wasn’t about to give them what they wanted.
“Enough of this,” Tarah snapped as she planted a foot on Lori’s abdomen, prohibiting Sonjay from removing the girl’s clothes. If this was the way Abe intended to reward his men, there would be time for that later. But they were getting no further ahead on their agenda this way.
Sonjay was clearly unhappy with the intercession, but he was loyal enough to recognize when his own self-glory might hinder the success of the larger mission. Disappointed, he relented and after Tarah ordered the men to secure Lori back in the chamber, she took matters in her own hands. It would require a little acting on her part, but luckily, she didn’t have to scream for very long.
* * * *
As Peet’s eyes adjusted to the darkness surrounding the light beam emitting from Abe’s flashlight, he mentally counted his footsteps. It was more out of habit than necessity. It was just the way his mind worked, always calculating data regarding the ways of ancient civilizations.
It wasn’t until he was a hundred feet
in and who knew how many feet deep (for the tunnel had taken an immediate and consistently gradual descent) that he’d come to realize his calculations were nothing more than a mental exercise. Although the tunnel was clearly man-made, it wasn’t at all ancient. The proof lay beyond the layers of lava where the tunnel builders came across granite intrusions. There, the tunnel walls were grooved, even ribbed in some of the hardest areas—the remnants of the chisel and dynamite used to bore through the rock.
The tunnel couldn’t have been made by pre-Columbian Maya, or Izapans.
Suddenly doubting they would find the original Long Count Calendar at the end of this dark underworld, Peet began to worry if he’d find anything he’d come for. The tunnel had fallen eerily quiet since he had stepped inside. What did that mean? Was Lori still alive? Reason reminded him that she couldn’t possibly have survived the cenote collapse and yet, hope kept moving his feet down the tunnel.
The dark air grew heavy with hot humidity. Peet’s clothes clung to him, whether dampened by air or his own sweat, he couldn’t really tell. He began to worry about deadly gases. They were, after all, burrowing into the side of a volcano.
That’s when he heard the steady trickling of water and noticed the light up ahead. It was the soft glow of filtered or indirect light, but it was light nonetheless. And it wasn’t artificial. He was wondering how this could be when the tunnel opened up into an enormous chamber that bottle-necked toward the top. Its only source of light came from the sunlight slipping down a large vent hundreds, maybe thousands of meters above. The darkness of the cavern seemed to distort the true height and size of the opening overhead, but given the dim, gray heaviness of the light that made it down to the chamber floor, the distance was considerable. Whether the vent was natural or man-made seemed unimportant.
Peet had never seen anything like the volcanic chamber, but it was what he saw through the dim light inside that he found most astonishing. Directly across the chamber and beneath the outlet of an underground spring stood an enormous wooden waterwheel. The wheel was broken, or at least the water catch was rotted out, suspending the contraption beneath a trickling baptismal flow.
As large as the waterwheel was, it was the second wheel, a horizontal behemoth easily ten times the size of the first, that caught him by surprise. It filled the interior as though it had carved the chamber itself, spanning from the waterwheel, reaching far out over the pool of water just beneath and looping all the way around to the tunnel where there was just enough room for two men to stand around one woman.
And she wasn’t Lori.
The woman smiled triumphantly at Abe who returned the gesture by gently lifting her chin to his face and kissing her squarely on the lips. Peet’s heart sank to the deepest depths of his stomach. He’d been duped. He was suddenly afraid he’d never make it out of this chamber alive as Abe pulled away from the woman and said, “Good work, Tarah.”
Calendar Wheel
Abe had never seen anything like the monstrous wheel that filled the volcanic chamber. Its size alone was enough to boggle the mind, and then to consider the amount of wood that had been crafted together into one massive piece was stunning. And yet, its primitive appearance rivaled the impressive simplicity of Stonehenge. He couldn’t even take it all in with a single glance. To really get a feel for the panorama of the piece he had to pull away from Tarah to allow his eyes to sweep across the dim chamber.
“Can this be it?” he whispered more to himself than to anyone in prticular.
Tarah answered anyway. “Judge for yourself,” she offered, placing her hand on the edge of the mahogany wheel. That’s when Abe realized the wheel was notched along its edge, like the ridges around the edge of a dime. There must have been hundreds of thousands of them and within each little notch there was carved a small glyph.
A Mayan glyph.
“As best I can tell, there’s a notch for every day on the Long Count Calendar,” Tarah said.
“So each notch represents a Kin,” Abe said thoughtfully. “But what about the groupings? Where are the Uinals and the Tuns? The Katuns and the Baktuns?”
“I haven’t figured all that out yet but there are thirteen arms on the wheel. I imagine all the Kins that run between two arms amount to a Baktun. If this wheel represents the very first Long Count Calendar, then maybe the other groupings came later.”
Abe’s excitement was building with every word that came out of Tarah’s mouth. Of course the sophistication of the Long Count would have evolved over time. But the very first representation of the calendar would have been primitive and simple, a mere barometer of days.
Even still, the giant calendar wheel was more than anything he had ever expected.
“The ancient Maya must have used the waterwheel to turn the calendar wheel,” he observed. Just above the waterwheel he realized the outlet of the spring had been modified with stone. “They must have regulated the spring’s flow to perfectly rotate the calendar one Kin per day.”
“I noticed the notches align with this hole in the floor,” Tarah added, pointing out a hole roughly two inches in diameter. “I suppose a rod or a staff could have stood here, clicking off the days as they turned by.”
Abe smiled. “Tarah, you’re a genius!”
But it took the scientist to rob Abe of his excitement. “If that’s the case, then your calendar is off,” Peet said.
Abe scowled. “How do you know that?”
“Simple. If today marks the arrival of the thirteenth Baktun, and assuming the spokes of the wheel represent the first day of each Baktun, then shouldn’t the day marker be set in line with a spoke?”
Abe frowned. The scientist was right. As the calendar sat right now, it appeared to be set to a day somewhere between two arms of the wheel. In other words the calendar rested somewhere in the middle of a Baktun.
It was set to the wrong day!
Heat rose around Abe’s collar. All these years he’d been searching for this place. He’d spared no expense getting there and even managed to find it on the one day that the calendar had been created for, only to find the very item of his obsession incorrectly dialed.
And he had the broken waterwheel to thank for it.
Who knew how long ago the waterwheel stopped working and thus stopped the calendar from keeping time. The calendar could have been out of order two Baktuns ago, for all he knew. Suddenly this marvel of primitive engineering sat before him like a heap of useless trash.
Unless he could salvage something from it.
“Sonjay!” he ordered. “You and Rafi grab hold. We’ll turn this damn thing to the right day ourselves!”
“Why bother?” Tarah asked.
Abe groaned irritably. “The calendar must be set to the correct date for the cross to work.”
The cross—another miracle to have this day, and another necessary instrument to pull off his plans. It was ironic really. Back home he’d have been shot for having a cross in his possession, but that was exactly the sort of radical religious thinking he’d turned his back on long ago. He came to despise the religions as a teen when he realized they were central to the constant unrest that plagued his world. The way he saw it, the three great religions were to blame for some of the world’s greatest injustices in human history, and he wanted nothing to do with any of them.
Matt may have believed there was truth hidden within all religions but Abe wouldn’t place faith in the Five Pillars of Islam anymore than the Cross of Jesus or the Star of David. Their holy books may have been inspired by a perfect God, but they’d been written, edited, translated and surely corrupted by fallible men. Simply put, the religions all fell short of representing the true creator and their main fault lay in theologies that looked behind themselves. They all tried to interpret God’s divine plan through past events. But human destiny lay beyond the future eschaton. That revelation thus sparked Abe’s study of the end times. Understanding God’s plans for the future could only provide a guidepost for preparations in the present. And Abe wan
ted to be prepared.
Perhaps that was why the Long Count Calendar appealed to him so much. It had been inspired by its last day, the end, and worked backwards. How did the Maya have such insight? How could they have known to orchestrate their lives by centering the present around the end? Abe knew. Surely the Maya had received instruction straight from the creator’s mouth, and they had such direct access through the Talking Cross.
Unfortunately, Mexico was a half-world away from his little Afghan village. As a young man yoked by Muhammed and struggling to survive each abysmal day, it seemed the last thing he had time to concern himself with was an inaccessible tropical civilization.
But that was before he fell in with a powerful Afghan Mujahedin.
Abe’s involvement couldn’t have been better timed. He’d received the finest training and the most powerful firearms he’d ever seen, courtesy of the United States who’d pawned the mujahedin in their own agenda against the Soviet occupation. It was then that fortune found Abe when he was selected as an arms gopher, a middle-man in the backdeals between the mujahedin and their financial supporters—the Taliban.
And the Taliban paid well. So well, in fact, that Abe was able to afford Mexico where he could finally practice Jihad under his own restrictions. But his ties to the mujahedin could not be severed so easily. The Taliban took advantage of Abe’s position in the western hemisphere, using him to negotiate with the drug lords in Mexico who also profited from their own arms deals in America. Over the years, Abe became his home country’s top weapons supplier, via Mexico. Now, his popularity had spread to Al-Qaeda who was feverishly padding his pockets, not for weapons, but for access to the United States through Abe’s Mexican ties.
But that wasn’t his war. He only profited from the affairs of men. He never followed them. While the world battled over their social, economic and theological concerns, Abe concentrated on his own eschatological Jihad. He revered himself as a true mujahid, constantly struggling to find the true path to God. And now he had followers, his own troop of mujahedin who wanted nothing more than to obey God by receiving His commands first hand.
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