by Graham Brown
Susan Briggs and the last of the mercenaries remained at the site of the first attack, out on the plaza at the edge of the dam. Susan was on her knees, gasping for air, in the grips of an asthma attack, while the remaining mercenary pulled the blood-covered ELF unit from the lower half of Lang’s torso. He shouted into the device. “We are having an emergency!”
He waited for a reply, and then tried again, holding the switch down with all his might, as if that would somehow boost the signal. “Lang is dead, only me and the girl are left. We have been attacked. We need help.”
He heard nothing. It was hopeless. They were too deep. The signal could not get through.
The mercenary stopped transmitting and switched off his flashlight, backing deeper into the cave, farther from the dam and the lake and directly across the smooth stone from where Susan was struggling.
From this position he scanned the cave, now eerily lit by the unmoving flashlights of the fallen men. At the lake’s edge, a bulky shape was pulling itself free of the water.
Across the plaza, the girl remained on her knees, coughing and wheezing, unaware of the danger. It would go for her and, once it had committed, he would open fire. He placed the radio on the ground beneath his feet and brought both hands to his rifle.
In the shadowy light, the bony, angular thing stalked her. It moved with its belly pressed against the ground, its long limbs folded awkwardly beneath it, its claws quietly clicking with each step. It seemed to move with deliberate caution now, pausing at one point, holding a limb off the floor as if the ground were hot to the touch. It lowered its head to sniff the spot, and then moved around the area for reasons unknown.
A moment later the beast stopped again. The girl had somehow managed to stifle her coughing. The resulting silence seemed to confuse the creature. The head lifted slightly, turning from one direction to another, rotating like a turret.
The mercenary clenched his jaw as the hideous thing crouched; the girl had her back to it, she wouldn’t see it coming. He raised his weapon. From this distance he would not miss.
“… re you st … here? … ay … gain … what … ppened.”
The soldier glanced at his feet. The radio was squawking in a scratchy, electronic tone. He looked up as the animal hit him.
A blur of teeth and claws slashed him, his own blood splattered across his face. It whipped him to the side and his foot kicked the orange radio, sending it flying across the stone. The rifle was gone; he grabbed his knife and swung it upward, but it was jarred from his hand as if it had impacted solid rock. He kicked at the thing and tried to pull free, but the creature’s claws dug into his gut and it pulled him closer and then sunk its teeth into his neck. His mouth opened, as if to scream.
Susan watched in horror, backing away as the animal stood above the lifeless body. Strangely, it did not damage him further. It just stood there, eyeing him, its jaws opening and closing, its bony exterior glistening in the dim light. It sniffed the dead man. In the space behind its neck, a row of short, bristly hairs waved back and forth, swaying and parting like reeds in the wind. A gurgling noise resonated from deep within its throat and its segmented tail rose up above its head like a scorpion’s stinger. As the tail shot forward, the animal’s head tilted back and it released a hideous, inhuman cry.
It would be more than thirty minutes before any help arrived. The leader of Kaufman’s mercenaries brought six of his men, half the remaining force. They’d come ready to fight, but encountered nothing that would force them to do so. The only man they found was far beyond help.
One of the soldiers bent close to the body. The smell of sulfur was intense; the acid was still eating away at him. A trail of blood led to the pool next to them.
He picked up the man’s discarded shirt and threw it in. The water foamed up and the shirt quickly sprouted holes. “The water. It’s acid.”
Another soldier suggested a possibility. “Perhaps the girl pushed him.”
“Then what happened to the rest of them?” someone else asked.
Their leader looked around, aiming his flashlight into the corners of the cave. He spotted Lang’s camcorder and two more great swaths of blood. There was no acid smell at these sites, but there were marks in the blood, two-pronged tracks that led away from each site.
As the soldiers examined them, a piercing call echoed from the depths of the cave. The soldiers froze. It was a haunting sound.
Guns raised in all directions, the leader made a quick decision. “We’re going.”
“What about the others?” one man asked, remembering that there were still two soldiers unaccounted for. “And the girl.”
The leader motioned to the swaths of blood. “You won’t find them,” he replied, “not alive anyway.” He turned around and began heading for the exit.
————
Kaufman waited on the roof of the temple for his mercenaries to return. As the minutes ticked by, the tension grew. Devers approached him in the silence.
“I need to talk to you,” he said.
“Now is not the time,” Kaufman warned him.
“When the hell is the time?” Devers asked. “You said I’d be out of here as soon as you took the camp. First flight out, you said. Well, your helicopter is gone but I’m still here.”
“Plans have changed slightly,” Kaufman said. “The natives might come back and I’ll need you for that.”
“Well, maybe I don’t want to be here if they come back,” Devers said, more loudly than he should have.
Kaufman stood up, glaring at Devers, but it was not enough to stop the complaints.
“It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” Devers insisted. “No one was supposed to get hurt.”
The temptation to have one of his men beat a lesson of humility into Devers coursed through Kaufman’s veins, but he decided it would be more important to straighten Devers out himself, rather than give the man something else to sulk about.
Kaufman glared at him. “You are embroiled in a web of self-deception, Mr. Devers. You have no rights here. I own you. Not just because of the money I paid you but because you’re now an accomplice to multiple homicides. What did you think was going to happen when two groups of armed men went after the same thing?”
Devers was silent. The first silence Kaufman had heard out of him since the day they’d met, since the day Devers and another member of the NRI, a man who had died with the first team, had volunteered to funnel information to Kaufman on various NRI initiatives, culminating in a project Devers had been asked to interpret for: the Brazil project. Even then, it was not until Kaufman had hacked the NRI’s files that he’d realized the importance of what they were looking for.
“This was more than I expected to do,” Devers said. “It was just supposed to be information.”
Kaufman understood his thinking; it was always the same. As if a little traitorous behavior was somehow less offensive than a lot. “In for a penny,” he explained, “in for a pound.”
Devers stared at him.
“Now get out of my sight until I need you again.”
Devers skulked away just as the mercenaries began to emerge from the temple. “Where’s Lang?” Kaufman asked as they reached him. “Where are the others?”
“They were killed,” the group’s leader told him. “Attacked. The animal you were told about is real. It’s down in the cave. I heard it.”
Kaufman had made the soldiers aware of Dixon’s ranting out of prudence, but he’d been more worried about the natives than anything else. “Are you sure?”
“Tracks in their blood,” the mercenary told him. “Two claws.”
Just as Dixon had described. “Dixon saw them in the forest,” Kaufman said. “Not the temple.”
“Then there must be more of them,” the head mercenary said, holding up his weapon. “We should get ready.”
Kaufman was momentarily shocked. Not only by the loss of Lang, but by the attack itself. It had happened inside the temple, a place he’d assumed woul
d be safe. It had been safe for Dixon. It had been safe for the NRI group.
“We should seal the tunnel,” Vogel said.
Kaufman wasn’t listening. He had come to the error in his thinking. The attack hadn’t occurred in the temple, it had occurred in the cave beneath it. Those places were not one and the same; a miscalculation.
He turned back to the soldiers and spoke to their leader. “The real danger is out here,” he said, meaning the forest. “Dixon said there was more than one, even then. He heard them calling to one another, running with the natives. They came after nightfall.”
Kaufman looked out over the trees; dusk was almost upon them. “Seal the tunnel,” he said. “And get ready for a fight.”
CHAPTER 31
Darkness returned to the Amazon basin. In the Mayan view of things the spirit world had inverted itself, the heavens of the daytime and their powerful lords had fallen beneath the earth, replaced in influence and position by the spiritual forces of the underworld: the Xibalbans and the Nine Lords of the Night.
For the members of the NRI team, however, night arrived with no discernable change from that which preceded it. They remained chained to the tree at the edge of the clearing, watched casually from a distance but mostly unguarded and ignored.
They had struggled and schemed through half a dozen hopeless plans of escape. Verhoven and Danielle had worked the cuffs until their wrists bled, trying desperately to slip their hands free. Whenever one of Kaufman’s soldiers approached, their emotions surged with hope and fear, hope that they might be released and fear that they would be shot and left for dead. But neither event occurred, and as the night arrived they fell into various forms of fitful, uncomfortable sleep.
After dozing for an hour or so, Professor McCarter awoke with a cramp in his leg, tight like twisted bands of steel. He shifted his weight and tried to stretch it, grunting in pain and waiting for the pins and needles.
The air around him was cool and still, the clearing quiet and the skies as lucid as any he’d ever seen. The unseasonably dry air meant hotter days and cooler evenings, and it left the night skies brilliantly clear. The camp ahead of him was black. And as he looked around, the others appeared to be asleep, except for Danielle and Verhoven, who were talking quietly.
As he watched them, a sense of anger welled up inside. They’d led Susan and him here under false pretenses, endangering them without their knowledge or consent.
It seemed so obvious now: armed security, guard dogs, coded satellite transmissions. Of course they’d been in jeopardy, right from the very beginning. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t noticed, but he’d written it off to a general sense of prudence and a healthy fear of the Chollokwan. He stared at Danielle.
“Anything happening?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
Verhoven added, “Not yet anyway.”
There was something ominous about Verhoven’s statement, but before McCarter could say anything he heard voices: the disembodied shouts of hidden soldiers. In the distance, a flashlight came on and then went off again. There was hurried movement, more commands and metallic noises like guns being loaded and readied. In the stillness of the air, it seemed as if he could hear every footfall. “God, it’s quiet.”
“Too quiet,” Verhoven said. “Too quiet, for too long.”
McCarter glanced at the South African. “What do you mean?”
There was a sliver of a grin on Verhoven’s face. “Trouble’s coming.”
McCarter’s hands tingled. He didn’t like the sound of that. “What kind of trouble?”
“Visitors,” Verhoven said, nodding toward the trees. “Been around for a while, but these fools are only just figuring it out.”
McCarter craned his head around and looked out into the darker void beneath the trees. He sensed something, though he wondered if it was a result of Verhoven’s suggestion. “The Chollokwan?”
“They came for us after we went into the temple,” Danielle reminded him. “They’ve left us alone ever since. But these guys have been banging around in there all day long. I fear they may have struck a nerve.”
Staying out of the temple hadn’t been a conscious decision, but the timing of the two events had escaped no one. McCarter looked back to the forest. The thought of being chained to a tree when an attack came horrified him. He remembered the chanting and the fires.
“Where does that leave us?”
“Stuck at the table,” Verhoven said. “With a very bad hand.”
McCarter’s face wrinkled.
Danielle looked over at him; her eyes suggested defiance. “We’re not done yet,” she said. “Stay sharp. We might get a chance, somewhere in all the madness.”
McCarter understood the situation. He’d questioned their odds before, but now he knew what it meant to cling to even the thinnest ray of hope. They couldn’t hold out for a good chance or for even a fair one. It seemed prayers would be wasted on such grand requests. But a hundred-to-one shot, the smallest mistake by their captors, perhaps it was less foolish to ask fate for that, perhaps they’d get that type of chance before it was over.
McCarter tried to stretch his legs. He stared up at the night sky once more. The stars were so ridiculously bright that they seemed to be mocking him.
“The Mayan people cut holes in the jungle like this one,” he said. “Just to see the stars. They aligned their temples with the Equinox and the Solstice and even the very center of our galaxy—though no one knows how they determined that. They carved whole sections out of the rainforest, just to study the heavens, the realm of their gods.”
McCarter continued to scan the sky above the clearing. “Over time, the jungle crept in and swallowed the other places whole. But the land is still barren here, the stars still shine. A small refuge for the old gods, I guess.”
McCarter glanced at Danielle and then Verhoven, waiting for a derogatory comment or some quip about useless philosophy. But despite what McCarter thought, Verhoven actually smiled. “Then let’s hope the old gods favor us,” he said.
Out in the clearing the activity had stopped.
McCarter let his body grow still. His own quiet seemed to heighten his senses and he soon recognized a soft glow at the center of the camp and the dimly lit outline of a face, bathed in a strange, fluctuating glow. It took a moment before he understood: the soft light came from the perimeter warning system. The screen was flashing.
Verhoven saw it too. “Our friends are here.”
His voice was low, but loud enough to wake the only other survivor from his team: Roemer.
McCarter thought to wake Susan, only to remember that she was gone. Another loss he hadn’t come to grips with.
“Things could get ugly,” Verhoven said. “If you see them, don’t move. If they realize that we’re prisoners, they might take pity on us. Or they might attack anyway. But if we fight, they’ll slaughter us.”
“And if they set the trees on fire?” McCarter asked, voicing his earlier fear.
“Then hope they kill you first.”
As McCarter tried to block out the possibility, he looked toward the command center. He could make out Devers’ face now; he was pointing into the distance.
A flare shot off directly to the west. It carried a half mile into the sky before deploying a small parachute and beginning a gentle float across the camp to the south.
“White flare,” Verhoven said. “Trip-wire flare, not from the console. Something’s in the forest out there.”
The burning flare illuminated the camp. “I see eight soldiers,” McCarter said.
“I counted eight as well,” Danielle said.
“There are more,” Verhoven said. “I know it. They just have their heads down, waiting for the attack.
“Any sign of the Chollokwan?” Danielle asked.
Verhoven twisted around for a better view of the forest behind them. “Not yet.”
McCarter’s eyes went from the clearing to the forest and then back again, as another flare sho
t upward to the north. This time a red one, triggered by the sensors, or manually from the laptop. A rifle cracked, shattering the silence. A second later other weapons joined in, opening up at full tilt.
Things looked bad, and a minute later, when one of the Germans came bounding over to them, McCarter wondered if they were about to get decidedly worse.
The soldier who approached them had been sent at Kaufman’s bidding. With an attack from the natives or the animals likely, the prisoners had suddenly become a problem for him. Kaufman didn’t want to leave them at the tree, but he had nowhere else to secure them, and he didn’t want them causing any problems in the middle of the battle. He’d chosen a compromise: leave them where they were, but send protection. This soldier had drawn the short straw and the unenviable task of guarding them during whatever was about to occur.
He walked up and kicked McCarter’s legs.
“I’m awake,” McCarter said, pulling his legs back.
“Good,” the guard said. “Now be still.” He waved the barrel of his rifle at the others. “All of you.”
McCarter’s eyes tracked the soldier. He was sick of being a prisoner, sick of being afraid. Verhoven had said something earlier about bringing one of them down to the ground, and from that point, a solid kick to the neck or temple would finish him. Maybe now was the time.
In the distance, Kaufman’s men began firing again, staccato bursts here and there, probing, searching. The soldier guarding them glanced back toward the center of camp, and as he did, McCarter lunged at him, hoping to tackle him and pin him down.
The move surprised the guard, and also Danielle and Verhoven, but it came with too little thought. The chain and the weight of the others slowed him, and McCarter could only inflict a glancing blow. The soldier fell backward, but got up quickly, angrily.