by Weston Ochse
“Jack, I—”
“I asked if you understood.”
She nodded, then added, “Yes.”
She began to attach it to her thigh in a drop-down holster as Walker had done, but her hands were shaking. He took it from her and attached the two straps, adjusted them to her leg, then slid the 9mm into place.
Damn it all to hell, Holmes, he wanted to shout. Wasn’t there any other way? Why couldn’t she be topside with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? But Walker knew the answer. She’d made herself a known quantity by going operational with him. She’d already been part of their distraction. It wouldn’t be long before the Zetas investigated the operation of the seismic alarm to see if a drill had been scheduled. If the Zetas decided to roll everyone up, she’d be in danger. She’d been necessary to help them identify some of the players and now because she’d been seen, she’d be sought out, interrogated if she was caught, and probably even killed. No, her coming with them was the best choice. Perhaps even the only one.
So instead of shouting at the moon, he squeezed her shoulders gently and stared into her eyes. Behind the mask his own eyes were twisted into pools of emotion. “Keep low. Keep cool. Everything will be okay.”
She nodded, the look in her eyes trying to work itself into something he’d find reassuring but failing miserably.
He placed her Pro-Tec helmet on her head, then slid into his own. He pulled out the QuadEye and slid it into a pouch in his vest. The night lights inside the building were functioning well enough so that he wasn’t going to need it.
“Ready,” Walker said as Yank was finishing gearing up Hoover.
Yank and the dog had originally traversed the area as a blind man with his guide dog. The ruse no longer needed, they were the epitome of combat-ready. Yank was dressed much like Walker, except that he wore a fuchsia-colored mask, as opposed to Walker’s bloodred-colored mask. Hoover, on the other hand, had undergone a makeover. Gone was her usual tactical harness, replaced by a K9 Storm Intruder. Custom fitted, the Intruder was a high-tech multifunctional body-armor harness that protected the dog’s sternum, as well as her central body. An integrated camera periscope rose from the dog’s back, providing night vision and IR up to a thousand meters, which could be remotely fed. An antenna allowed for communications to the dog in the event that she became separated from the team. Hoover wore green-lensed IR goggles, giving her a bug-eyed appearance. Storage pockets held grenades and a first aid kit, as well as several vials of holy water, a cross from the Second Temple of Solomon, and two blue blankets.
Walker leaned down and scratched Hoover behind one ear.
The dog stepped backwards and stared at him as if to say, How dare you touch me!
Walker whispered, “Don’t be a prima donna.”
Hoover gave him a long blank look, then shook his hand away.
Walker laughed on the inside. He supposed it was a good thing that the dog thought of herself as a badass.
Yank nodded and began to pad down the side of a maintenance hallway. Walker and Jen followed after him. Walker and Yank held their HKs at tactical ready. Jen’s hands were free, held out beside her as if they could give her some balance in this new combat universe. They arrived at a door.
“Team One, ready,” Yank said.
“Team One, proceed,” came Holmes’s voice.
Yank placed an electronic surreptitious entry device (ESED) over the security pad, depressed the red button on the side, and let the device do its business. Ten seconds later they heard a click; that was followed by the red light on the slide flipping to green.
After placing the device back inside a vest pocket, Yank opened the door and nudged the barrel of the HK through. He followed it, checking left and right. “Clear.”
Walker and Jen joined Yank as they began to edge down the left hallway. They passed several rooms on the left. On the right were dioramas showing Mexico City in stark relief, Aztec pyramids rising from a bloodred floor with the Popocatépetl volcano commanding the background.
They came to a bend in the hallway and Yank pointed to a camera, a green LED signaling it was on.
“Team Two, first checkpoint reached,” Walker asked.
“Roger, One. Remain in place,” said Guildenstern, which meant Laws and Holmes had already moved out and were heading to their mission start point.
They’d patched into the museum security system and were tracking the guards. Additional signals had gone out, running an interval deletion loop that would ensure that no recordings were made of their time inside the museum.
Walker glanced back at Jen, whose gaze was on the floor. When she caught him looking, she met his eyes. He couldn’t read her. He couldn’t even smile reassuringly. But she nodded. She was doing okay.
After twenty seconds, they heard, “Team One, advance to Checkpoint Two.”
The three of them moved down the left side of the hall at a half jog. They passed a gift shop, then came to a foyer that boasted a large staircase made from marble and polished silver. They moved to a door that had a black silhouette of a woman on the front and slipped through it.
“Team One at Checkpoint Two.”
“Hold.”
Another thirty seconds passed; then came the words they hadn’t anticipated. “Oh, shit.”
“Report,” Walker said, wondering about the depth of trouble they were in now.
“Guard is coming your way.”
“Female?”
“No, male.”
Yank motioned for Walker, Jen, and Hoover to find a stall. While they did so, Yank used the knob and the transom to climb to the ceiling, where he wedged himself between the edge of the transom and the corner of the room.
The sound of a man whistling grew louder and louder.
Guildenstern counted down from ten, leaving the last three numbers for the team to count beneath their breaths. Walker did so, and as he got to zero, the door opened and a museum security guard strolled in, whistling. He carried a thirty-eight in a holster on his waist. Keys and a flashlight dragged down the other side, leaving his stomach pressing precariously at the beltline. He was about the same height as Jen, but twice the weight. He entered the room oblivious to Yank hovering in the corner above him. The guard selected the stall at the end and spent several minutes doing his business. All the while he whistled, the sound reverberating off the tiles in the bathroom. No one dared say anything, much less shift their stance.
The whistling stopped for a moment. By the jangling of the keys, they knew he was tucking his shirt in and cinching his belt. As he exited the stall, he began to whistle again.
The man washed his hands, then went to the door. This was the moment that made Walker the most nervous. Heading straight to the door, all the guard had to do was look up and he’d see Yank. The problem was, what would they do if he saw him? The guard was a noncombatant and none of them wanted to see him harmed. Thankfully he opened the door and went back into the foyer.
Everyone breathed a sigh of relief … until the whistling suddenly stopped.
Yank leaped from his perch, landing on the bathroom floor. He hurried to the stall the man had used. Jen and Walker were already there. Walker hissed for Hoover, who tore around the corner and joined them. They closed the door. Walker got up on the porcelain and squatted. Yank and Jen climbed up on either side of him, counterbalancing with their weight. Yank and Jen lifted Hoover off the floor by grasping either end of the dog’s vest.
The bathroom door swung open.
“Qué aquí?” the guard asked.
He shuffled around the entry for a moment, then opened the first three stall doors. Each time the slam of the door against metal made Jen jump. When he was at the final door, he stopped. They heard him laughing to himself. Then he turned, his keys jingling in his wake as he resumed whistling.
50
MUSEUM SUBBASEMENT.
They’d reached the subbasement and were poised before a bright and shiny steel door. Once more the ESED gained them entrance.
Walker and Yank attached QuadEyes to the front mounts of their helmets and set them in place. He told Jen to hold on to his rear vest. Then all three of them stepped through the door. Walker closed it behind them, plunging them into a completely new environment. Gone was the antiseptic cleanliness and stark smell of the museum, replaced by the heady scent of old earth and animal musk.
The darkness was absolute. Both Walker and Yank keyed their AN/PEQ-2s on their HK416s to the fifth setting, sending high-power illumination with the targeting laser, and their universe turned bright green in their QuadEyes. Jen placed her own AN/PNS-7s on her helmet and turned it on, just as she’d been shown. All four stared into the green.
They’d passed through the Museum of Natural History and into its subbasement. Part of it was situated over the underground complex, but the rest was directly beneath the Templo Mayor Museum, which was situated over much of the underground complex, and included many original icons as well as some of the monoliths that had been unearthed beneath the Zócalo. The museum was adjacent to the surface excavations, but through vicissitudes of five hundred years of earthquakes, cave-ins, and poor construction, much of the temple area still remained buried. Several hundred meters beneath the museum was a different story. Although the excavations were continuing, these weren’t visible to the public, nor would they be. Rumor from Laws’s sources was that the Catholic Church had become involved and was unwilling to provide the old iconography for possible worship. Whatever the reason, much of the excavation was carried out in secret, and in secret was where archeologists made some of their greatest discoveries.
Rosencrantz had revealed that in 2008 the funding for the excavation had changed from public sources to private, the largest of which was a charity that, after being traced back through several shell corporations, led to Lee Treviño Morales, aka Z-1, the leader of the Los Zetas. The team could only figure out one reason why a narco-criminal drug cartel was funding a public undertaking: Whatever had been discovered beneath the city was of such importance and such power that the Zetas were willing to pour billions of pesos into the endeavor.
Twenty minutes earlier, according to the reports from Rosencrantz, the Zetas who’d been gathered in the hotel had marched across the plaza, and had entered the Templo Mayor Museum, probably taking the archeologists’ route into the main excavation site nearly a hundred meters beneath the surface. The earth above was supported by metal beams and wire mesh and the area was lit by phalanxes of halogen lights. Triple Six wouldn’t know what was down there until they saw it for themselves, but if it was something worth keeping secret, it was something worth their time.
Their chosen route was through the subbasement in the Museum of Natural History. Early in the excavation there had been a second entry-exit point in the event something happened to the other. By all reports, this avenue of egress hadn’t been used since 2008. The newness of the lock on the door said otherwise.
Walker took point. They tried to check in with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but their location beneath the surface wouldn’t allow it. Neither would it let them contact the other team, which meant they must still be in the sewers. The path, about five meters wide and ten meters high, wound down and past foundations and pipes. The walls were hand-cut from stone and dirt. Lights dangled from wires running the length of it, but they weren’t activated.
They moved inexorably down for about five minutes before Walker began to experience an odd feeling. The exhilaration of the mission was being replaced by something else, something he had felt on a mission only once or twice. Butterflies began to crash-land in his stomach. The feeling worked its way outward until tingly fingers had grabbed hold of his torso, his legs, and his arms. He found himself not moving and looked down at his own arms.
“What’s wrong?” Jen asked.
He wanted to say that he couldn’t feel his own body anymore, but he found that he couldn’t speak.
Hoover growled low.
Jen whispered, “Is that—”
Yank moved up beside Walker.
Walker fought to look up. It was as if his head were traveling a hundred miles and the effort it took was like trying to shrug free from the gravity of irrational fear. When his gaze came level, he saw what the others saw—an apparition.
Ice water showered his nerves. A ghostly woman stood on the path. Her body was turned away, but her head was facing in their direction as she looked back at them. She wore a single piece of fabric that could have once been a dress. Her hair hung long and had beads at different intervals. Her feet were bare and the toes were implausibly long. But it was her hands that were the most disturbing. They were wrong, nothing like a woman should have. Instead of five fingers, she had talons like those on the feet of a crow; instead of arms, she had black-ridged bones, like the legs of a crow.
Walker was finally able to look upon her and felt his skin burn with her gaze. Her nose was twice the length of a human’s and curved like a beak. Even in the green universe of IR, her eyes were twin black balls of greedy hate that dug into him and urged him to step forward so she could feed.
He wasn’t alone.
Both he and Yank began to step drunkenly toward her.
Behind them Hoover growled louder.
“Oh no, you don’t,” he heard Jen say. But Walker paid no attention. His body was locked into the apparition’s vise of black hatred and his entire being vibrated with the need to touch her, to be with her, to give himself to her.
It blinked at him with its black eyes, the motion undeniably avian.
Jen pushed her way past Yank and Walker and stepped in front of them. She held a cloth in front of her, much as a toreador would to a charging bull.
The apparition turned fully toward them. The cloth she had been wearing was ripped down the middle and her stomach had been opened, revealing a wet, black mess where her womb should have been. She reached out with bird-claw hands and snapped her talons together.
Jen began to speak in a powerful voice. “Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary of Guadalupe, that in thy celestial apparitions on the mount of Tepeyac, thou didst promise to show thy compassion and pity toward all who, loving and trusting thee, seek thy help and call upon thee in their necessities and afflictions. Protect us, La Morenita. Protect us from this demon. Protect us from this thing that would take men’s souls.”
The apparition made a sound for the first time, halfway between a hiss and a whine.
Jen repeated the prayer twice more, advancing step by step toward the thing as she did so. The apparition turned away, brought its arms to its body, and hugged itself, the long taloned fingers stark against the light of its dress.
By the end of her third recitation, Jen was close enough to throw the cloth on top of the apparition. When it hit, the cloth caught fire and as it burned it fell, until there was nothing left of the apparition.
When the last spark of cloth disappeared, Walker felt a release. He staggered back and fell against the side wall.
Yank did the same. They stared at each other for a long moment.
“What the hell was that?” Yank asked in a trembling voice.
“It was a Cihuateteo, I think. The data pack said that they are spirits of women who died in childbirth and turned into vampires,” Jen said. “As a follower of Cihuacoatl and related to Itzpapalotl, she seeks men to establish her revenge.”
“Jesus,” Yank gasped.
“No,” Jen corrected. “Mary.”
“That was one of the cloths we got from the catacombs?” Walker asked, remembering the side mission he and Laws had taken. “They didn’t look like much.”
Jen nodded. “Sometimes it’s the simplest things.” She rubbed her hands together.
Walker put an arm around her. “So she’s gone?”
“Yes.”
“And the blanket?” Yank asked.
“It was consumed in the process,” Walker said.
“Do we have any more?” Yank asked.
“One more. Want one?” When Yank held out his hand, Walker took it from Hoover’s pouch and passed it to the other SEAL.
While Yank stuffed it into a side pocket, Walker breathed for a few moments as he once again regained control of his body. He could take zombies and chupacabra and qilin and any number of creatures that could be destroyed through the liberal use of firepower, but he hated things that couldn’t. Things like the grave demon that had once inhabited him. Like this apparition that had taken control of them. If Jen hadn’t been there, he and Yank would be dead. Like the thing that inhabited YaYa and refused to release him.
“Weren’t you scared?” Yank asked, inspecting the place where the apparition had been.
Jen smiled tightly. “Not really. According to the research, a Cihuateteo won’t harm a woman. Still, it was the first time I’d seen one.” She shook visibly for a moment, then seemed to pull herself together. “Now that’s just stupid, to be scared after it happened.”
“Nerves,” Walker said, grinning as he pushed himself away from the wall. “Happens to me all the time.”
“So when you shake, you’re not afraid?” she asked, laughter on the edge of her question.
“Exactly. Just bleeding off adrenaline.”
“Well, you were sure bleeding off a lot of adrenaline there, Mr. U.S. Navy SEAL.”
He nodded. “I sure was. Glad that’s fucking over.”
51
TUNNEL UNDER ZÓCALO.
They reached a point where there’d been a cave-in. It looked like the ceiling had reached down to hug the floor. For several long minutes they thought they might have to retreat and find a different way. But Hoover began to dig about halfway up the fall, her claws moving aside the dirt. Soon she had made a hole the size of her head.