One Rough Man (7 page)

 

 

IT HAD BEEN ALMOST SEVEN MINUTES, and I was growing a little antsy. Maybe I should have had Knuckles confirm his plan. I was itching to break radio silence but wouldn’t, mainly because I’d never hear the end of it from Knuckles. I knew better than to bug the team. He would do the right thing. I hoped. Finally, I got the call.

“Pike, Pike . . . this is Knuckles . . . Jackpot. I say again, Jackpot.” Knuckles spoke in a calm monotone, as if he had just awakened from a nap.

I knew this was an act. He was probably hyperventilating when he put the handset down. I matched his cadence, because that’s what cool commandos do, and replied, “I copy Jackpot. What’s your ETA to my location?”

“Two minutes.”

“Roger. Standing by.”

I cranked the car and waited. Two minutes and fourteen seconds later they pulled up, not that I was looking at my watch. Knuckles was grinning like a teenager who had just egged the principal’s house. He gave me a thumbs-up, and we pulled out of the parking lot with me in the lead. My car would now be a buffer vehicle for any contingencies that might happen en route.

Within minutes we were out of Tbilisi proper and headed toward a warehouse the support team had rented, not a single bit of evidence left that anything at all had occurred.

I called in the mission, alerting the reception team we were en route. Twenty minutes later, the car and van pulled into a vacant warehouse, the rolling door closing behind us.

I left the packaging of the terrorist to the support team, knowing he wasn’t being flown out until tomorrow. In the meantime, he would be given a complete physical to make sure he wasn’t on the verge of a heart attack, then sedated for the trip. My part of the mission, the fun part, was over. I grinned when I saw Blaine Alexander come out of the small office we were using for a tactical operations center.

“Another good one. No issues whatsoever.”

I noticed that Blaine’s face was grim.

“What’s up? Did something go bad on the Chechen hit?”

“No. It’s personal. Can I see you alone?”

My first thought was that he was pissed that I had altered the plan and taken Azzam without talking to him. I followed him into the office. “Yeah. Sure. What’s up?”

Blaine closed the door. “Pike, I don’t know how to tell you this. It’s about your family.”

After the first sentence I could no longer hear him. All I could hear was my daughter saying I kept the bad men away.

 

P
rofessor John Cahill gave an exasperated sigh and sat down, sinking into the fetid jungle soil. Sometimes he felt like he was trying to run a race in knee-deep mud. He was deep within Guatemala’s Reserva de la Biosfera Maya—the Maya Biosphere Reserve—in the northeastern department of El Petén, and for some reason his workforce had decided to quit. He had been doing this sort of excursion into the heart of the Yucatán going on thirteen years now, all in a quest for his mythical Temple of Priests. He had been robbed by bandits, contracted malaria, and almost killed by an asp, but never had his workforce refused to continue.

Once a rising star in the Latin America department of the University of North Carolina, he was now teaching undergrads basic anthropology theory at the College of Charleston, his fall from grace complete. The school itself was a pretty good liberal arts college, but it didn’t have a major in archaeology and didn’t give a rat’s ass about his theories of the Mayan demise, forcing him to fund these expeditions out of his own pocket.

As always, he had hired local Mayan laborers without going through the required steps with the Guatemalan government. Nobody had cared before, and surely nobody would now, but an unhappy labor force could bring unwanted scrutiny. The Biosphere, one of the last remaining uncharted rain forests on earth, was dotted with Mayan archaeological treasures. Because of this, his activities would not be looked upon as a prank. Disgusted, he called over the native leadership, determined to find out what on earth could cause his hires to give up a new set of thirty-cent rubber sandals.

The natives themselves couldn’t articulate to the professor exactly what it was they feared, only that they wouldn’t go any farther on this specific route. In the end, they were torn between their instinct and the bounty the professor represented. They weren’t stupid. They still wanted a new set of rubber sandals. They just didn’t want to pay for it with their lives.

 

 

WHILE THE PROFESSOR ARGUED WITH THE LEADERSHIP, Eduardo and Olmec, two of the younger members of the expedition, were having their own parley. Eduardo, a spindly nineteen-year-old, was sure this halt was an opportunity not to be missed. All he had to do was convince his partner.

“Olmec, now’s our chance! The Elders still believe in the old ways too much. We can find this temple, take something of value, then get back here before dark. Tomorrow, at least we’ll have something to show for it besides the professor’s quetzals.”

Olmec, one year younger than Eduardo, but rooted in a much earlier time, responded, “We don’t even know where it is. Only the professor knows. He never tells anyone more than the next hundred meters. There’s no way we’re going to find that temple by ourselves. If we could, why has our village signed on for these trips every year? We’d have done it by ourselves a long time ago. I’ll tell you why—because there is no temple. There’s only the curse.”

Unlike Olmec, Eduardo had lost all semblance of Mayan instinctual heritage and saw such hesitation as complete idiocy. He was one of the few from his village who had made the trek as a migrant worker to the fabled United States. Some said that he did more than simply make the trek, but was in reality tied in to the illegal transport of workers into the United States.

“There is no curse. It’s just an old wives’ tale used to keep kids from wandering away in the jungle. Have you ever heard of anyone dying from some strange ailment out here or disappearing completely? Anyone at all?”

Olmec didn’t say anything, prompting Eduardo to continue. “I saw the map on the professor’s computer with the markings showing where the temple is. You could read the map and lead us to it.”

Two years ago, while Eduardo was away, working in the U.S., a Presbyterian church from Santa Fe, New Mexico, had sent a “mission” to their village, spending a month building houses, wells, and sewage. One of the gringos was a scoutmaster. He loved his scouting job, and spent his evenings teaching the village boys scouting skills such as using a map, compass, and GPS. Olmec had paid attention.

Eduardo knew he was close to hooking his superstitious friend. All he needed to do now was convince him of the simplicity of the idea.

“I’ve been watching where the professor puts his GPS. I’ll go take it. He won’t miss it now, since we aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. The maps too. He doesn’t keep a good watch on either, because he thinks nobody knows how to use them.”

Olmec sighed, then said, “If you get the equipment, I’ll lead the way.”

Eduardo slipped off, returning in minutes with a map, compass, and GPS.

Olmec reluctantly turned on the GPS and took a little time orienting the map.

“According to this, we’re only five hundred meters from the temple, basically due north.”

Eduardo said, “Let’s get going. We’ve got about an hour of daylight left.”

With Olmec leading, the young men slipped into the jungle. After thirty minutes of fighting through the foliage, Olmec called a halt. He had been diligently keeping his pace count, a method to measure distance by counting the number of times his left or right foot hit the ground, and had hit four hundred meters.

“We’re pretty close to the professor’s spot on the map,” Olmec said. “Keep your eyes open from here on in. If the temple’s here, we could walk right over it and never know.”

They continued for no more than five minutes when Olmec hissed at his friend. He saw something in the jungle. A hump that didn’t fit. A tangle of vines and shrubs that didn’t seem natural. The gathering gloom was making him jumpy, like a child in bed at night who imagines the towel on the rack is a burglar. He was ready to return to the camp.

“We’ve gone far enough,” he said. “Let’s go back.”

Eduardo nodded in agreement. “Okay. Let’s just fan out a little and see if we can find anything.”

Olmec had walked less than ten feet when he heard Eduardo trip and fall. He saw him sitting down next to a rectangular stone.

“Look!” Eduardo said. “This is man-made. The temple is here!”

Olmec, once reluctant to continue, became infected with the thought of discovery. He quickened his pace toward the hump he had seen. It was about eight feet tall and appeared to be a solid mass of earth. As he got closer, he saw that draping vines gave an illusion of mass, but that it was actually some sort of cave. Setting down the GPS and map, he moved the vines aside. A few meters inside the opening, just at the edge of light, was a gallon-sized sack made of woven grass encased in stucco.

“Eduardo! Get over here! I think we’ve found what we were looking for!”

“What is it? Is it gold? Jade? What?”

Olmec moved toward the sack, sure that it contained something of wealth.

T
he professor grew tired of the back-and-forth discussion among the men in the local Mayan dialect.

He addressed the shaman, who acted as the villager’s spiritual leader. “Speak in Spanish. What’s the problem?”

“There is no problem. We simply will not go any farther. The area you’re leading us into is full of blackness and death.”

This was the third time the shaman had made such a statement, without any elucidation of what he meant. The professor was about to explode into a tirade when it struck him that this could be proof of the temple’s existence. He wished he had asked thirteen years ago where they didn’t want to go.

He had always been fascinated by the Mayan civilization, and was convinced that all theories of their demise were incorrect. The Maya had reached their height at about 900 A.D., and had a civilization that rivaled any in Europe, the Middle or Far East. For reasons known only to Maya ghosts, they had simply ceased to exist. It was one of the enduring mysteries of human existence, and many theories attempted to explain their downfall, ranging from outlandish alien invasions to the more mundane. The professor thought that everyone was looking at the problem backward. In his mind, it wasn’t outside influences that had caused the people to disappear, but something in the cities themselves that caused them to leave.

The professor’s theory revolved around his interpretation of a fairly new Maya codex called the Grolier Codex. The last of four known Maya codices, it was found under suspicious circumstances in 1965 and was considered by many to be a fake. Others had determined it to be authentic and maintained that it detailed the Maya calendar as it related to the planet Venus.

The professor had reached an altogether different conclusion. At the time of the Mayan decline there were two ruling elites in competition with each other: the political royalty and the religious shamans. Both continually fought for control of the population of the Mayan city-states, and both were equally bloodthirsty. He believed the shamans had developed a weapon, mystical in the eyes of the average Mayan, which was used to seize power. He extrapolated that this weapon had somehow gotten out of control and had caused one or two dramatic wipeouts of various cities, which in turn led to an evacuation of other cities in a superstitious panic, and a wholesale destruction of the civilization.

He was convinced that the Grolier Codex detailed the location of a temple, restricted to shamans alone, that housed this weapon. He had no idea what the weapon could have been, and cared only about finding the temple. He dealt in a world of history, of dangers long since dead. It never entered Professor Cahill’s mind that, if his theory were true, he was trying to find a weapon that the world was ill prepared to deal with.

 

 

EDUARDO REACHED THE ENTRANCE OF THE CAVE in time to see Olmec pick up the sack. A fine cloud, not unlike flour, puffed out, encircling Olmec.

“This isn’t worth anything,” Olmec said. “It’s a bag of dirt.”

Eduardo began to dig through some scattered pottery, looking for something else of value, when he heard Olmec trip and fall. He was about to ask if Olmec was all right when what he saw caused him to stumble back and fall himself. Olmec had dropped the sack and was thrashing around as if hooked to an electrical generator. His head was growing lumpy and distorted and his breathing sounded as if he were drawing air through a swizzle stick. As his metamorphosis continued, he began to froth at the mouth, gasping for air. All of his exposed skin appeared to be rippling, as if a band of cockroaches were running through his veins. Before Eduardo could recover from his initial shock, Olmec’s eyes bulged obscenely, his mouth cranked open farther than any human’s should, and he ceased to move. Eduardo screamed, finding that deep in his soul he was still a Mayan, and ran out of the temple.

He sprinted about fifty feet and stopped, torn between helping his friend and getting the hell out of there. He decided that his friend was beyond help.

 

 

THE PROFESSOR ASKED THE SHAMAN if he could speak to the men as a group, intent on overcoming their superstition with gold, like an age-old explorer from Spain. As the men gathered around they heard an awful shriek to the north of their position, then a desperate thrashing sound. They began to rumble, looking at each other as if their neighbor could explain the noise.

The racket grew in strength until it appeared to be just outside the camp itself. The men began backing up, moving away from the sound, like a herd of antelope one step removed from full-scale panic, tenuously waiting to see who would be the first to start the stampede.