01-01-00 (24 page)

Joao spotted another fish approaching and readied himself for a strike when he heard the whop-whop sound of a helicopter. Puzzled, he tiptoed over several rocks and a large root from a nearby rubber tree, reaching the shore. He picked up his sack and headed in the direction of the noise.

3

Cameron exited the Sea Stallion, then helped Susan, who hauled a backpack as large as his. The SEAL unit had already formed a protective circle by the tree line of the small clearing, weapons held with both hands, reminding Susan of some old CNN footage.

They raced away from the craft, under the downwash from the main rotor, reaching the jungle just as the chopper took off, disappearing in the night.

Darkness surrounded Susan Garnett as a sudden sense of abandonment filled her when the helicopter noise faded in the distance. She inspected the small patch of rocky brush in the middle of the jungle, just barely large enough for the helicopter to drop them off, but still a few miles from their objective, just as Lobo had planned it to avoid telegraphing their position.

Telegraphing it to whom?

She shook her head, closing her eyes, wondering what in the world she was doing here. But things had happened too fast for the computer engineer. The moment she had found indisputable evidence of the connection between the virus and Mayan mythology, she had rushed to the phone to contact Cameron Slater, who had arrived at the FBI headquarters within the hour. By then Reid had gotten ahold of the FBI director, who'd agreed to send a search party to the region. Somewhere along the way the White House had found out and had militarized the operation, sending the SEALs along for protection, especially after the mysterious murders surrounding Susan's investigation. Bloodaxe had been the latest victim of this killing spree, found by a busboy emptying the trash from a Washington-area restaurant. His body was missing both eyeballs, all fingernails, the tongue, and the genitals. Plus it had been further maimed by rats. Autopsy results, however, attributed the cause of death to internal bleeding due to a small caliber bullet fired up his rectum. The report indicated the likelihood that the hacker had been alive when dumped in the trash. Rats had fed on him while he slowly bled to death.

Susan shook the thought away, in a strange way feeling sorry for him, even after everything he had done to her. She also got a sudden appreciation for Lobo's extremely cautionary behavior, like the night insertion at a distance far enough from their objective to avoid flying into an ambush.

And here you are now, in the middle of nowhere.

She frowned. Everything seemed surreal, like it belonged in some dream. Susan watched the SEALs moving across the clearing under the dim moonlight, weapons ready, intensity in their motions as they surveyed the surrounding jungle.

Her boots sank in soggy mud. She felt the warm humidity and the wetness of leaves by the edge of the clearing. Mosquitoes buzzed around her face.

She reached down and unfastened the small night-vision goggles that Lobo had given her on the way over. The battery life would be enough to get them to the objective before dawn.

“Are you all right?”

Susan turned to face Cameron Slater, his grin relaxing her. He wore a chocolate-brown floppy hat and the same weathered light jacket she had seen hanging in his Georgetown brownstone. His goggles hung from his neck.

“Just need to get acclimated, I guess.”

“These sudden changes in environment can be intoxicating at times, particularly if you don't have much time to prepare. Give it a day or so and you'll get the hang of it.”

She shrugged. “I just hope it's all worth it. I hope we find something of substance that helps us understand what's going on.”

Cameron leaned closer, whispering, “If you're dissatisfied with the trip, you don't have to tip the tour guide.” He motioned toward Lieutenant Jason Lobo, inspecting a handheld global positioning system unit.

She elbowed him lightly in the ribs.

“You're point,” Lobo told one of his men, a bulky African-American.

The soldier nodded as Lobo continued to examine the LCD screen.

Cameron put on his goggles and switched them on. Susan did the same. The night suddenly changed to palettes of green as the small units amplified the available light.

“That way,” the SEAL commander said before addressing the rest of his platoon. “Move out. Single file. Five feet spread. I'm covering the rear.”

Seven soldiers disappeared in the jungle. Then Lobo nodded at Susan and Cameron.

“Relax,” Cameron whispered as he led her into the thick bush, past towering trees heavily draped with moss and twisted vines. “One way is by listening to the natural sounds of the jungle.”

Susan Garnett inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with the moist and fresh fragrance of the tropics while listening to it. The sounds of birds chirping or squawking from the high branches rang in her ears–along with a dozen other sounds adding to the choir; ceiba trees with wide leaves grazing against the trunks of rubber trees; the noise made by crawlers of some sort dragging themselves over the leaf-covered terrain; the peaceful splashing sound of the Rio San Pedro in the distance; monkeys screeching and howling while jumping from limb to limb.

Susan continued to move through tangled brush, the goggles showing her the way in the pitch-black jungle. She kept her distance with the soldier in front of her, occasionally glancing over her shoulder to make certain that Cameron was behind her. The archaeologist had warned her about some of the local wildlife, particularly caimans, jaguars, wild boars, and eyelash vipers—the most poisonous snake in the region.

Susan suddenly felt demoted to the bottom of the food chain, carefully scanning the flanks for anything that remotely resembled a predator. At least she had her Walther PPK.

The Walther PPK.

Susan sighed at the irony. The gun that she had used in her failed suicide attempt was the same gun upon which she now relied to preserve her life in an emergency.

In addition to the danger posed by the local wildlife, she also had to worry about the possibility of encountering those responsible for the recent assassinations. Troy Reid now suspected that Bloodaxe had not escaped but was abducted from prison. There was a greater than average chance that the hacker had told them everything under torture, before being killed. And even if he had not, someone still had managed to break into the FBI network and stolen her E-mail records, which contained information on the origin of the virus.

The group kept on the march for two straight hours, crossing ravines filled with knee-deep muddy water, across shallow streams, up rocky hills covered with hanging vegetation, and through twisted vines. Totally drenched in sweat, Susan followed the soldiers upstream in a parallel course with the shores of the river, which flowed almost a hundred feet to their right. Relief swept through her when Lobo allowed them to have a brief water break.

Sitting down over the leaf-littered ground, she set the backpack next to her, resting her back against a fallen log, which had flowers growing out of its decayed bark. She couldn't tell their color because everything looked green through the goggles.

“Goggles off,” ordered Lobo.

Cameron sat next to her and removed his goggles. Susan did the same, the jungle turning pitch-black for a moment, before a glowing stick in Lobo's hand painted the surroundings green again.

The archaeologist sighed while removing his boots. She noticed some of the SEALs doing the same.

“What's wrong?”

Reaching inside one of many pockets on his fatigues, Cameron produced a pack of Camels and a lighter.

“I didn't know you smoked.”

“Used to.”

She narrowed her eyes at him.

He lit one up and offered the pack and lighter to a pair of SEALs to his left. One of them accepted his offer. The other had already produced his own cigarettes.

Cameron applied the burning tip to a black spot on the instep of his left foot. The black object jumped off his foot and into the cushion of leaves.

“Tick check,” he said, removing a second one, and a third, before working on his right foot.

Susan made a face.
“Ticks?”

He nodded. “Forgot to tell you.”

“Ticks?” she repeated. “That's just great. Don't you get Lyme disease from ticks?”

In the green glow, Cameron grinned, eyes filled with dark amusement. “If you survive that long.” One of the SEALs grinned, his gleaming white teeth contrasting sharply with his dark olive war paint.

“I don't find that funny.”

“Take off your boots,” he said in a voice that conveyed both amusement and authority. “Let's see how many visitors you have in there.”

She did, and the sight of a half-dozen quarter-inch parasites sucking on her feet, ankles, and lower calves made her sick.

“Don't move,” he said, lifting one of her feet and setting it on his lap. “The trick to removing new ticks consists in applying the red-hot end of the cigarette right on the head, not the body of the parasite, which, sensing the life-threatening heat with its antennae, will immediately release its grip on the host's skin and jump off … just like this one. See?”

“Little bastards,” mumbled Susan, reaching down with her fingers to pull one off her other foot.

Cameron stopped her, putting a hand over hers. “If you try to peel them off, the head will break off the body and eat its way into your skin, where it'll grow a new body.”

“That's comforting to hear.”

“Relax. I'll take care of you.” He winked.

Susan crossed her arms, watching as he rubbed his fingers over her ankles, carefully applying the tip of the cigarette just to the tick. His movements were fluid, practiced, hard hands against the soft skin of her calves, of her ankles. Susan's mind began to wander, imagining Cameron in the jungles of Peru doing the same thing by himself, surviving off the land.

Embarrassment suddenly prompted her to pull her foot away, but he seemed to have anticipated her discomfort and gently released it while smiling. “I'll bill you.”

She said nothing, watching him put the cigarette to his lips and take a drag, eyes closed, drawing obvious pleasure before exhaling through his nostrils. A sudden craving awoke inside of her, dormant since the years before Tom, when she had smoked regularly, eventually giving it up under his constant criticism. But the feeling passed. Cameron took a second drag and passed it on to her, pointing at a pair of ticks on her other leg.

“You'd better hurry,” Cameron whispered, pointing at a fat parasite feasting on her lower calf.

She nodded and focused on ridding herself of ticks.

A few minutes later and a few dozen ticks lighter, night goggles back on, they marched through dense foliage. The soldiers abruptly stopped. Something was whispered from the point back through the single file.

“Black palms,” the SEAL in front of Susan whispered.

Cameron extended an index finger at a cluster of waist-high palms to their immediate right. “Careful with those,” he told Susan. “Their foot-long spikes are quite capable of impaling any creature unfortunate enough to accidentally bump against them.”

“That's right,” said Lobo from behind. “During training exercises at Fort Sherman, in the Canal Zone, some of my men had to be airlifted because of close encounters with those deadly palms. Not a pretty sight.”

Great,
Susan Garnett thought.
Just great.

4

Joao Peixoto was puzzled. He couldn't understand what the English-speaking strangers, less than fifteen feet away, were doing in his land. From their accents he knew they were not British.

While standing behind a thick rosewood covered with moss—some of which he had pulled off and wore like a long cape–Joao felt fortunate to remember enough of the English the missionaries had taught him to follow most of the conversation. The soldiers moved toward the secret temple of Kinich Ahau, protector of the Sun, a place still to be discovered by the wave of archaeologists and tourists crowding the region near the coast and around the highly commercialized Tikal. Aside from the secret ruins, and the small village an hour's walk away, there was nothing but wildlife there, plus the traps the seasoned native hunter set up to complement his village's corn, beans, yucca, and fish diet.

Have they spotted the sacred temple with one of their airplanes?
Joao could not imagine how. The entire site was under the protection of the jungle's canopy, as it had been for a very, very long time, certainly long before his father and grandfather had protected the high priests.

Why, then, were those strangers here, marching toward the secret site carrying those weapons and moving as if trying to make little noise? Joao found the latter question actually amusing. He could hear them coming from a hundred feet away, but they could never hear him, even as he closed the gap to ten feet.

5

An hour later they reached a small sandy clearing bordered on one side by the wide Rio San Pedro. Susan felt a bit queasy from the heat and the humidity, but otherwise she had endured the long trek fairly well—though not without a fair amount of effort on her part to keep up with the SEALs, and also with Cameron, who seemed to be in excellent shape.

Perspiration filmed her face. A cool breeze coming from the river swept the small beach. Susan closed her eyes, welcoming it.

Lieutenant Jason Lobo decided to stop for a water break. They removed their night goggles and the SEAL commander cracked another light bar, its greenish glow diffusing across the small beach.

Susan felt the canteen strapped to her waist. It was nearly empty. Following Lobo's instructions, each member had been steadily sipping water to avoid dehydrating.

She glanced at the spring-fed Rio San Pedro's crystalline waters. Moonlight reflected off its rippling surface.