Jack felt the engine go, and then the control panel in front of him went with a shower of sparks. Still, by sheer momentum alone, Teacher sped along through the opening, hitting the stone wall again, knocking Jack into the center console. Then he felt the keel strike solid bottom and her nose rose into the air as Teacher hit the first of the stone steps on the right side of the ancient dock. She glanced off at first and then the weight of her flooded sections turned her again, slamming her bottom into the steps. This time her momentum sent her violently up and out of the water. For a moment Jack thought the twenty-one-ton Teacher was going to shoot out over the top of the stone steps and onto the dock, but when she slammed back down she slid backward fifty feet to finally lodge onto the steps with only her stern section in the water.
“Oh, that’s going to leave a mark,” Carl said as he removed his harness.
Jack sat back to catch his breath; as he did, he felt a cool draft coming through the torn window frames on the right side.
“The chief and navy can take it out of my check,” he said as he reached down and unbuckled his seat harness. “Come on, Commander Everett; let’s see how many people I killed with my driving.”
Farbeaux had just entered the falls when he heard the two explosions underwater. He dove deep until the water had calmed, and then he surfaced. Now he, Mendez, and the Colombian’s fourteen men watched from above as the American boat came to rest on the steps that led from the canal at a point just beneath the mammoth statue. He gritted his teeth and knew exactly what had happened.
“When your man Rosolo arrives, I am going to kill him,” he said as he slowly brought up a nine-millimeter pistol and pointed it at Mendez.
His men saw this and brought up their own weapons.
“Please, please,” Mendez said, holding his hands out from both sides of his rotund body. “There is no need for this. If my man Rosolo did this thing, you can have him, but we can only fail to do what we came here for if we can’t think clearly,” he lied. He turned to his men, “Lower your weapons. That is an order.”
Farbeaux kept his pistol up. “You cannot tell me he acted without orders from his master.”
“I believe killing them would have to have been done eventually. But I did not order it at this time. Besides, the Americans are finished; they will now be far too busy just surviving to interfere with us.”
Farbeaux saw from their high vantage point that the American boat still had some power. He holstered his handgun and then reached down and picked up a small satchel, angrily kicking his wetsuit against his rebreathing unit.
“Follow me, and keep strict noise discipline until we are well within this upper shaft. No flashlights until I say so. I have to discover if we need to go down into the mine, or up.”
As Farbeaux turned his back, Mendez sneered and then waved his men forward. Rosolo would have to find them on his own. But then again, if Mendez knew his man, he would finish the job he had started, possibly before he met up with them again.
For now, El Dorado waited and Mendez could not wait for his just rewards.
20
PANAMA CITY, PANAMA
Ryan took the offered phone from one of the Delta operatives who were now assigned as security for Operation Spoiled Sport.
“This is Ryan.”
“Lieutenant, we’ve had a major problem with the expedition; they no longer appear to be in the lagoon. Boris and Natasha is picking up an empty space where Teacher had been. She also picked out those fifty-plus men making their way past the rapids. It looks like they intend to enter the lagoon. Listen, Mr. Ryan, Jack did manage to get the heat emitters placed before this happened, so you will have an illuminated target area. Is your team ready to deploy?” Niles asked.
“Sir, we really should consider sending our team in on the ground. There’s glitch after glitch with this billion-dollar boondoggle.”
“Get it to work, Ryan. The president says absolutely no ground incursion, so it’s Spoiled Sport or nothing. We have got to keep this unknown ground element off their back.”
“Yes, sir,” he replied.
“Now look, CIA has confirmed that there are no Peruvian or Brazilian units out there, so they have to be bad guys headed their way. Zap ’em, Mr. Ryan, you hear me? Protect our people. Get in the air!” Niles hung up.
Ryan handed the phone back and looked at the Delta sergeant. And then he jumped when he heard an alarm sound. Two men ran up the stairway and into the converted 747, carrying fire extinguishers.
“Goddammit, what now?” he asked as smoke started billowing out of the large double doorway of the aircraft.
EVENT GROUP CENTER NELLIS AFB, NEVADA
Niles sat at his desk and rubbed his temples. He removed his glasses and then slammed his hand on the table.
“Are you sure you heard an explosion just before communications were lost?” Pete Golding asked.
Niles didn’t look up. He just nodded, not caring to use his voice. He took a deep breath and shoved the still picture of the giant statue and its graffito-marked belly toward Pete, whose eyes widened.
“This whole thing is a hoax?” “Pete, we need Europa to do some digging, and I mean dig. Someone knows about Padilla’s lagoon, and I want to know who lied to us and why. Can you help me?”
Pete studied the photo from Teacher once again and then something clicked in his mind about the familiar caption on the cartoon that everyone who had looked at the still had missed. He looked up. “Yeah, I can help.”
“I have a man flying out to interview the lone survivor of the 1942 expedition. He should be able to at least tell us what it was they were after out there.”
“Then let’s get to it; we can cover a lot of ground until he checks in.”
Niles jumped at the chance to be doing something, anything. But the feeling remained that an ancient trap had been set, and that Jack and the others had walked right into it.
Teacher was sitting high on the stone steps. Her flooded compartments were draining due to the fifty-degree lean to her port side as she had come to rest on the staircase. The towering statue loomed above the diminutive boat that lay broken at its feet.
The major crawled out of the cockpit through the broken windowframe and then helped Carl through. They climbed slowly down the nose and slid to the stone beneath. Jack turned on his flashlight and shined it around. Carl did the same as they hurried back toward the stern. Their light was seemingly absorbed by the blackness surrounding Teacher. As they looked around, an unfamiliar rustling noise sounded from what seemed a great distance, and could be heard even over the waterfall that fell in the center of the pyramid.
“What’s that?” Everett asked as he shined his flashlight into the air.
“Uh-oh,” Jack said.
Suddenly the air was alive around them. Giant bats had decided the intrusion of noise and vibration Teacher had made was quite enough. They swarmed like angry bees as they circled Jack and Carl, who dove for their lives, hitting the wet steps and covering their heads as bats grazed them in their frenzy. If just one of the large animals struck them solidly, it would have been bone crushing. Then as suddenly as the raid had started, the bats were gone.
“I can live without that!” Carl said as he stood up again. “Where did they go,” he said as he shined his flashlight upward once more.
“The falls, I guess. There must be another opening up there that comes out through the river that creates the falls. Come on; let’s get our people out of Teacher.”
When Jack shined his light into the communications section, he saw that Stiles was on his feet, trying to revive the clearly unrevivable Jackson. He shook his head and moved on silently. Carl flashed his own light on the glass and looked in and cursed when he saw the dead navy man. He then followed Jack down the row of windows. No one appeared to be in the navigation section, as they suspected there wouldn’t be. Then they came to the lounge. Their lights immediately picked out three bodies floating in the waist-high water. Jack recognized Keating imme
diately. He was floating faceup and was actually in a slow spin as the water drained from the damaged section. By the looks of his body he had been caught dead center of the explosion; his right arm was missing, and half of his head. Jack moved the light and saw that Dr. Waltrip was lying crumpled on top of Sergeant Larry Ito, who looked as if he had tried to shield her. But the explosion had killed them both. Jack swallowed hard when he didn’t see Sarah. He hoped she was with the master chief and others who had made it out.
Carl looked inside the lounge and cried out when he saw the bodies. He shined the light around, hoping to see someone else, or someone breathing.
“We’re one hell of a rescue team, Jack.”
The major didn’t respond. His light was now trained on the opening of the mine. The water churned and rolled in the violence of the falls, and in that maelstrom of foam he saw no one. The survivors from Teacher were alone and in the dark.
Sarah awoke and immediately started choking. She fought her way back through a dark unconsciousness that threatened to overwhelm her just like an induced coma. She rolled over and threw up a stomachful of water, then heaved and then vomited more foul-tasting fluid. She tried to push herself up from the overly hot and wet floor but fell back down. She knew she was hurt somewhere but couldn’t for the life of her think straight enough to find out where. Then she pushed up again and collapsed, screaming in pain, when she realized her right wrist was broken. It was then that she thought clearly enough to remember it hadn’t been broken in the initial violence of whatever it was that had happened in the boat; it had snapped as she was being pulled down through the water.
She used her other hand to push herself up off the hot stone. As she peered around in the darkness she could barely make out long, hot wisps of steam coming through the stone floor and the walls. Some strange luminescence was also emanating from those walls, providing enough light that she could see her hand as she held it up, almost as if she were viewing things through the green-tinted lense of a night scope. She brought her wrist closer to her face; the damaged section was already swelling. It was broken, all right.
Then she noticed she could hear running water and smell fresh vegetation. Then she heard a hoarse growl. She shot back against a wall using her ass and good hand, the fingers of which touched an object not made of stone. She grasped it; it was a pole of some kind. But as she tried to use leverage against it to stand, it started to tilt off balance. She let go but too late, the pole crashed to the ground with a loud clang and the sound of breaking glass. She looked down and did a double take. Unless Padilla was centuries ahead of his time, someone had indeed beaten even Helen Zachary to El Dorado. Lying at her feet was a light stand. Old, rusty, and three legged, with six high-powered lamps. Her eyes followed a power cord to another stand, this one upright. The cord led from that to still another.
“What the … ?” she mumbled as she saw in the unnatural green light that there were six stands in all. They had been arranged in a semicircle facing inward from the ninety-foot perimeter they had been placed in. Now the graffito picked up by the camera on Snoopy 3 was starting to make sense.
Sarah glanced around her but could see no generator that the light stands had been connected to. She followed one thick cable to a wall, and from there to an opening that was about seven feet in diameter. It looked as if it had been burrowed out of solid rock. She tentatively reached out with her foot and touched a raised step, then another and another. She slowly backed down the several steps she had taken, not knowing if she wanted to head that way in the darkness. At least here she had that strange phosphorescence to see by. Curious, she ran her hand along the wall and then brought it to her face. Her fingers were covered in some sort of natural tritium. Her entire hand glowed softly as she quickly wiped it on her pant leg.
“What in the hell is going on here?” she blurted out.
She looked closer and could see that the glowing particles were actually ancient writings of some kind; indeed, the whole wall was imbedded with the mineral but only parts of it were carved, creating a relief. Possibly an ancient people had spelled out their history. She wondered if the writings were Incan.
Her eyes caught on a darker object that had been stuck into one wall. As she approached she could see that it was a torch. She felt it and determined that it was made of some kind of metal, a rough iron perhaps. She tried to pull it free of its mounting but it was stuck with hundreds of years of grime. She doubled her efforts. As it finally came loose she almost lost her balance with the sudden change of momentum. Some sort of fuel substance was still embedded in its end. She felt in her pockets and found the lighter she always carried for the one chance, she had always joked, where she might find herself deep in an underground cave with no flashlight. She used her thumb to bring the lighter to life and she raised it to the tip of the old iron torch. It flamed to life. She held the torch away from her and examined her surroundings more fully.
All around her were strange images and hieroglyphs. Drawings of animals lined the walls, and images of small people. She could see the people were in chains as they toiled, bearing heavy loads on their heads and shoulders, while Incan taskmasters stood by with menacing whips and clubs. Far more menacing were the skulls. They lined the entire chamber at about head height. There were at least a thousand that had been inlaid into the solid rock. The torchlight also revealed stone slabs, like bunks, covering the floor. The cavern held room upon room with large seating areas. Around her, ancient chains lined the walls, most broken but a few looking as if they had been used only yesterday. Sarah picked out evidence of fire pits, long dead, in the center of the cavern, lining a deep grotto. The ancient stone flooring was worn smooth by the countless footsteps of slaves long dead.
Sarah moved the torch around, following the long history along the walls of what had to have been the Sincaro Indians and their Peruvian slave masters. Some images depicted load upon load of gold being mined from this site. Others were pictographs of strange green minerals being pulled from the depths of giant pits. She was studying one such rendering when a burst of steam erupted from the wall twenty feet to her right. She leaned down and felt the wet floor, and was amazed at how hot it was. She pulled her hand back and then touched the floor again, this time lightly. She knew then that, indeed, there was underground seismic activity here. That explained the difference in water temperature the deeper into the lagoon one went.
She held the torch up once again to examine the walls. There were depictions of many of the creatures she had seen in the diving bell. They stood like guards before the images of small men and women. These must be the Sincaro, she thought as she lightly touched one of the reliefs.
A clear picture was emerging: The beasts were trained in these lower levels to watch and feed the Sincaro. Whatever was mined here was too dangerous for the Inca to supervise. So they trained these beasts to be the Sincaro’s overseers.
Sarah turned her attention to the skulls lining the walls. Not only were they small, presumably of the Sincaro, but there were also larger bones and skulls belonging to the strange creatures. So the fate of the overseers was the same as slave. Death.
Turning from the wall, she shined the torch along the center canal. It, too, was carved from the stone and looked to be twenty or thirty feet deep. Sarah suspected that these canals ran from the top of the pyramid, originating from the river that fed the interior falls, all the way through from level to level, transporting the ore from one level to another. She even saw crumbling block and tackle used to fight the gravity of the canal as ore was shipped up, indicating that she was in the very deepest part of El Dorado. The whole mine must have been inundated with these canals. It was the most ingenious method of moving ore from place to place that she had ever heard of.
Something grunted in the darkness beside the moving water and Sarah held up the torch in that direction. Her eyes widened when she saw the large creature rise from the man-made canal and swim easily into the large grotto that took up the entire cent
er of the huge cave. It came to shallow water and stood, fully eight feet tall. The large, powerful-looking arms were laid easily at its side.
Sarah swallowed and looked up at the creature. She remembered its huge black eyes from the diving bell incident. She winced as she moved her broken wrist and then a memory returned.
“You pulled me out of the boat, didn’t you?”
The beast moved its legs as it shifted weight from one leg to the other. Its gills on either side of it jawline moved in and out as its mouth opened and closed, obviously trying to breathe in enough air to have strength on land. She realized that although the creature was amphibious at the very least, its underdeveloped lungs must not be capable of sustaining it for long periods out of the water.
“Wouldn’t Ellenshaw love to get a look at you? I think he would crap himself,” she muttered.
Viewing the animal close up, without the color-deluding dark waters of the lagoon interfering, she could see that it was really just an enormous mutation of a freshwater cichlid, a mild-mannered species one could buy in any aquarium-supplies store in the States.
Sarah studied the swaying creature as it studied her, more than just intrigued, but that still didn’t mean that this magnificent being didn’t scare the hell out of her.
The beast barked hoarsely twice and then slowly began to move off toward the deeper water. Trusting it not to attack her, Sarah turned back to the pictures that seemed to glow against the light, and reexamined the ancient drawings. She looked closely at the mineral that the creatures brought from deep in the mine and wondered what it was. Emeralds, maybe? She held the torch closer to the wall and saw the spot that depicted the area where the dead were placed. She saw that both Sincaro and the creatures were buried side by side, as if they were equals in their misery and finally their deaths.
Legend: An Event Group Thriller Page 38