Canyon of the Sphinx (38 page)

“Don’t play coy,” she said. “From
the look I saw Chris give you earlier, I would hazard to say that you were in
someone’s bed this morning, just not your own. Care to comment?”

Debra Jo’s cheeks flushed. “He’s
very sweet, Kat.”

“And?”

“I’m not going to kiss and tell
if that’s what you’re driving at.”

“Ha!” Kathlyn sat up in bed. “I
knew it! You
did
him! Oh, Debra Jo, for shame, for shame.”

Her tone was overly dramatic. It
was all meant in good-natured fun with a hint of happiness. Debra Jo pursed her
lips threateningly. “Do you remember when you and Marcus first got together?”

“Of course.”

“Do you remember when I tried to
pump you for information?”

“I do.”

“And what did you tell me?”

“To back off, bitch... I mean,
back off.”

“That’s exactly what I say to
you.”

“Okay, but can I ask one
question?”

“Just one. And not a dirty
question.”

“Is he going to do the right
thing and marry you? Or are we in for a shot-gun wedding?”

“Kat!”

“Just kidding.”

Kathlyn lay back down, grinning
at her friend. Debra Jo pretended to pick up the magazine and resume the
article.

“He really was amazing,” Debra Jo
couldn’t keep her mouth shut. She was so excited she was about to burst.

Kathlyn sat bolt upright again.
Forgotten for the moment were the round-faced creatures and bloody massacres.
Life was here, and it was real, not dead and buried those long centuries ago.
She had to remember at times to make that division.

“Tell me everything,” she
commanded.

It all came spilling out between
gasps and giggles. Tony, seated outside the cracked cabin door, had awoken to
the chatter. Then he got an earful. And they call men bad, he thought before he
drifted off to sleep once again.

CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN

There were three primary test
digs going on at Site B; the avenue of the sphinxes, the main courtyard, and
the great mound of earth and overgrowth called the Pyramid of Dreams.

Fortunately, Christopher had
enough student help from UIR. Twenty-two graduate students had committed to his
dig for summer credits, but he would lose them come mid-August. He had
world-class archaeological assistance in the form of Kathlyn Trent, Marcus
Burton and their related teams of super-scientists, but they were only
consigned to his dig for the next ten days, and Burton for only the next three
days. At the moment, he was thrilled with the aid. But ten days would pass too
quickly and he tried not to panic. He wanted to make the most of the time they
had left.

They began test holes into the
pyramid at dawn the next day. A pre-flight had been laid out the night before
with Christopher giving them lessons on the usual construction of Mesoamerican
pyramids. Based on his diagram and description, they established their first
areas of test excavations. Burton took the west-facing façade while Christopher
took the east façade. The north and south slopes were narrower than their
east/west counterparts, indicating to the archaeologists that any entrances or
staircases would be found on the wider sides. It was just a guess on
Christopher’s part, but an educated one.

The GPR hadn’t been much help
with the establishment of test hole areas, since the sled was only designed to
work on horizontal surfaces. Kathlyn’s other high-tech gadget, the GDT, was
back in Egypt. Kathlyn considered sending for it, but by the time it arrived,
their days on the site would essentially be ended. They would have to make due
with what they had.

So they relegated the GPR to the
avenue of the sphinxes with Mark, Larry and Kathlyn taking readings from the
area around the images. They were looking for anything that appeared to be a
void in the ground, indicating a possible tomb. Several of the UIR students
went with them, eager for a look at Kathlyn Trent in action.

While they were occupied with
that, Marcus and Otis drilled test holes into the west slope with Tony’s help.
Boring was physical work and required muscles and steady hands, and Tony
provided brawn to the operation. Though he had wanted to remain with Kathlyn,
she had insisted he help Marcus. Since Marcus hadn’t yet told her the real
reason for Tony’s presence, all he could do was comply with her wish. Marcus
assured him that he could go back to shadow Kathlyn in a reasonable amount of
time so she wouldn’t get suspicious.

Kimberly supervised the careful
brush-and-trowel clearing of the courtyard, while Christopher, Adam and Andy
excavated their boring holes on the eastern slope of the pyramid. When the
teams were separated for the morning’s work, it was the first time Kathlyn
could ever remember that the two youngest members of her team, Andy and Larry,
had been separated. They always worked in a pair. She wondered aloud to Marcus
if they would survive the day.

 They had survived this far, well
into the morning. Debra Jo, the only member of Kathlyn’s team that wasn’t a
digger but was completely able to maintain the computers and read the
extrapolated data coming from the GPR, huddled over her monitor as Mark and
Kathlyn pulled the GPR over sections of the avenue. The UIR students, eleven of
them, stood around and watched with baited breath. It was sweaty work and
Kathlyn was sopping from the humidity and exertion as she helped Mark drag the
deadhead along. They would pull, stop, download, and read. The process had been
repeated at least eight times so far. By the end of the eighth read, Kathlyn
was spent.

“You know,” she wiped the sweat
running off her forehead. “When I think of Mexico, I think of clubs, tequila,
warm nights on the beach, and sex. I don’t think of sauna-bath jungles.”

Debra Jo grinned, her blue eyes
focused on the monitor as the data was downloaded. “So bail out and head up to
Cancun. Marcus is leaving for Egypt in a couple of days, anyway. You two
deserve some time alone.”

“Every time we have time alone, I
get pregnant,” Kathlyn grumbled, low enough so the students couldn’t hear her.
She threw herself down on the nearest folding chair and stretched out. “I can’t
believe we haven’t found anything yet. I’m telling you, there is something
under these statues.”

Debra Jo and Mark were studying
the screen. “The GDT is only scanning vertically. It doesn’t scan peripherally.
Unless we scan over the top of the statues, I’m not sure what we’re going to
find.”

Kathlyn half lay, half sat on the
chair another moment before forcing herself to her feet. She leaned on Debra
Jo’s back as she, too, studied the screen. After a while, she shook her head.

“Nothing,” she muttered. “Not a
thing. But we’re still not getting any readings under the statues.”

Mark straightened up, stretching
his back. He had been doing most of the heavy labor and thought he’d pulled a
muscle. “Then the only way to find out if there is something underneath is to
excavate. We need Murphy’s permission to do a test hole. They were going to do
that yesterday until you had an episode.”

Kathlyn stood up straight as
well, taking her eyes off the computer monitor. She gazed over at the sphinx.
Then she walked to it, laying her hands on the warm, moist stone. She received
most, if not all, of her sensations from the courtyard, yet there was something
here as well. A buzz rang in her head, like a low-voltage current. It was her
Intuition sensing something. Yesterday, the State had come on her full-bore.
She still hadn’t quite recovered, but that didn’t stop her from trying to get a
feel for the sphinxes and what lay beneath.

She abruptly dropped her hands
from the image. “Let’s go find Murphy and see if he’ll let us begin a test
dig,” she said.

Leaving Larry and the star-struck
UIR students with the GDT to extrapolate whatever remaining data they could
from the information gleaned from the unit, Kathlyn, Mark and Debra Jo walked
towards the activity at the distant mound. Kathlyn had to grin at Kimberly,
driving her students at the courtyard site like a slave-driver. Even if the
woman wasn’t an archaeologist by education, she sure acted like one. She knew
her stuff. Taking her attention away from the courtyard and focusing on the
pyramid, she saw Marcus and several others working on the western slope’s test
dig.

She picked up a rock and threw it
at him. It hit several feet away. Picking up another rock, she managed to hit
him on the shin. He glanced up from the boring instrument he had in both hands,
his cobalt blue eyes prepared to strike with his laser stare. But his
expression softened when he saw his wife, strolling with Mark and Debra Jo
towards the eastern side of the pyramid. She stuck her tongue out at him and he
lifted his chin in her direction. They acknowledged each other as only the two
of them could, one expression conveying a thousand words. She looked so good
that he let his gaze linger on her for another moment before turning back to
his test dig.

 And that was when the bottom
dropped out.

Marcus’ next move opened up a
landslide of mud and debris. It had also apparently tapped into a burrow of
snakes. The entire group that had been working on the test hole jumped back,
well out of the way, as the writhing mess of black slithering bodies began to
spill out all over the slope.

 Marcus didn’t panic, nor did
Tony or Otis; they used their shovels to push the snakes away. But the students
that had been working with them shrieked and began to scramble for safety.
Kathlyn and the others hadn’t quite moved out of earshot; when they heard the
screams, they came running.

Marcus was concentrating on
keeping the reptiles away from him, but he saw his wife running full-bore from
the corner of his eye. He held out a hand to her.

“Stop,” he commanded. “We’ve hit
a nest of some kind of snake and I don’t want you anywhere near here. Stay
back.”

Kathlyn’s instinct was to find
something to climb on to, but she held her ground. She’d never been afraid of
snakes before and wasn’t about to start. She could see the undulating mass
spilling down along the slope, about a fifteen-foot drop from the test hole to
the overgrown courtyard below.

“Can you tell what they are?” she
called up to him.

“Yeah, they’re snakes,” he said
sarcastically, watching them spill to the growth below. “The head is rounded.
Maybe some kind of field or gopher snake. Where’s Murphy? He would know.”

As if on cue, Christopher rounded
the corner on the south side of the mound at a dead run. He had heard the
screams, too. He jogged up beside Kathlyn, coming to rest beside her and
watching the waterfall of reptiles.

 “Oh…nice,” he commented dryly,
edging toward the mass. “They don’t look poisonous. It looks like a fairly
common rat snake we have around the camp.”

The shrieking students seemed to
relax with the exception of a couple of the girls. Gingerly, some people edged
closer to take a better look, including Kathlyn. But a second or two was all
she needed before she hiked up the side of the mound to where her husband
stood. He smiled at her, wiping the sweat on his forehead with the back of his
hand.

 “A little excitement,” he said.

 She wrinkled her nose in
distaste. “I’d be very happy if I could go the rest of my life without running
into any more snakes,” she said. Her attention turned to the hole behind him,
in the side of the hill where the creatures had erupted. “So how’s your test
hole going, other than the snake surprise?”

He leaned on his shovel. “Given
the growth and erosion pattern of the area, Murphy thinks we’ll have to dig
through three or four feet of this stuff to find anything. So far, nothing.”

Kathlyn squatted down, peering
into the void where the last few snakes were slithering. It was a pitch-dark
hole, about two feet in diameter. When the last snake was pushed away by Tony,
she crept closer to gaze into the abyss.

“Do you have a flashlight?” she
asked Marcus.

He handed over his small MagLite
without a word. She engaged the power and shined it into the hole. Marcus
glanced away for a second to watch Tony shelve his shovel and lower himself
down to the courtyard below. He was nearly the only person not squeamish about
the snakes and he helped Murphy scoop them out of the way. By the time Marcus
looked back at Kathlyn, all he saw were her legs disappearing into the snake hole.

 “Hey!” Startled, he grabbed her
by the left ankle. “Kathlyn, where the hell are you going?”

He could hear her muffled voice.
It sounded like she was suffocating. Panicked, he took hold of her leg and gave
a long, steady tug and yanked her right out of the hole.

 Filthy, not to mention peeved,
Kathlyn pushed her hair out of her eyes and glared up at him.

“Why did you do that?” she
demanded. “I told you I could see an entry!”

He reached down and grabbed her
slender waist, pulling her to her feet. “Jesus Chr…  if that’s really the case,
what in the hell are you doing going in there like that? Let me clear away more
of this mud and we’ll all take a goddamn look.”