The Doomsday Cipher (An Avalon Adventure Book 3)

by Rob Jones

  Decker was surprised to see a smile on Selena’s face which she had tried to hide by turning away and pulling her pack out of the pile. No matter what she said, he knew there would always be a special place in her heart for Riley Carr.

  Decker waded back into the lake and started examining the aircraft’s control surfaces. After a short search, he laughed bitterly in the night. “Son of a bitch! I was right – someone definitely shot us. These are gunshots. Unmistakable.”

  “But how can that be?” Diana said. “No one can possibly know we’re here.”

  “Local tribes?” Riley asked.

  Acosta shrugged. “Perhaps, but highly improbable. The local tribes in this area are certainly some of the most remote in all of Middle America, but they are not known to be hostile.”

  Decker was wading back to the shore. “Well, someone sure as shit is hostile. My goddam plane is trashed. That’s going to take hours to repair, and that’s presuming I have the necessary parts in the back of the plane.”

  “Damn it,” Selena said. “This is really going to slow us down.”

  Atticus said, “If you ask me, it was Tarántula and his men. They took the seal, and someone has clearly translated it for them. They got here before us because they left Xunantunich before us. The rest is history.”

  “Agreed,” Decker said. “And that means they’re already here and ahead of us.”

  “How the hell did they get out here?” Riley asked.

  “There are some locations where a chopper can land,” Acosta said. “Not many because of the density of the forest. There have been calls to make new clearings but there are many regulations about deforestation here. This is a very special ecosystem and each clearing takes a long time to justify. So, I guess they flew out on a chopper and landed in a clearing somewhere.”

  “So, how far away is Flower Mountain?” Diana asked.

  “Can I see the picture of the seal you took, Charlie?” Selena said.

  He handed it over and she frowned. Then, Atticus and Acosta gathered around her and all three of them studied the picture in the beam of a flashlight. “Unfortunately, quite far away,” Acosta said at last. “We need to head in this direction.”

  A gunshot ripped through the night.

  “Everyone take cover!” Decker said. “Looks like whoever shot the plane out of the sky isn’t done with us yet!”

  17

  The sound of gunshots cracked in the night, sending countless scarlet macaws flapping out of the canopy above their heads. Decker and Riley had already drawn their weapons and were firing back, but blindly. There was no way to tell where the shooting’s point of origin.

  Charlie drew his gun and pulled up beside the Australian. “You know where they are yet?”

  “Not a clue, mate.”

  Decker cleared some foliage away from his face and searched the dark jungle. “And now they seem to have stopped shooting.”

  Riley nodded. “They don’t want to give their position away.”

  “So what now?” Selena said. “We can’t just wait here all night waiting to get shot at. They might be surrounding us or something.”

  Diana stared into the trees. “I don’t like this at all.”

  “We can’t wait here,” Riley said. “We might not know their position, but they know ours. We should get the packs and get started into the jungle. Keep quiet and put some distance between us and this place as fast as poss.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Decker said. “Let’s get the rest of the packs.”

  The journey south through the Lacandon Jungle punished the crew members hard. Pathways through the jungle were hard to find and the last three miles of track was pitted with ruts and grooves and other scars of the unforgiving tropical climate. Hours passed and dawn broke quickly, shattering the black night with soft rays of golden sunlight.

  They marched on. Most of the way, the jungle closed in over the track, but now they broke through into an exposed section. The difference in temperature was stark. Gone was the humid, cloying grip of the jungle, replaced instead by the merciless torture of a white hot sun, already high in the sky. It pitched down on them with an intensity that felt personal, and Selena began struggling with it straightaway.

  “This is as hot as hell.”

  “Why do you think they call the place Tabasco?” Charlie said.

  She face him and rolled her eyes, making sure he felt her disdain. “Tabasco is miles away, Valentine.”

  “Oh, is it?”

  “Yes. Believe me, yes.”

  Acosta’s boots crunched on the track. “Everywhere is miles away.”

  “We’re nearly there, Lena,” Riley said. “Hang in there.”

  “It’s easy for you to say. You probably grew up with worse, right?”

  He laughed and gave her a smile. His eyes were shaded by a battered wide-brimmed hat he’d picked up in Mexico City. “You could say that.” He gave a low whistle and looked out across the canopy of the forest to their right. In front of him, Acosta was carefully navigating an incline in the track and their new elevation allowed a great view across to a hazy western horizon.

  Riley watched him go as he replied to Selena’s question. “When I was a kid out on the station, it was so hot it could lift up a dead man’s dick.”

  Charlie laughed, but Selena slapped his leg. “Stop being so disgusting.”

  The Australian SAS corporal gave an innocent shrug. “Hey, welcome to Riley.”

  “Tell me about it,” Selena said. “Haven’t heard that one before though.”

  Acosta had apparently missed the joke, staring hard at the seal and wandering down another incline leading back into the darkness of yet more jungle. The breathtaking view was gone again, and now they were surrounded by endless layers of some of the most ancient and ruthless jungle anywhere on the planet. Exhausted after hours of hiking, the team stopped to remove their packs and drink some water.

  “This place really is remote,” Diana said.

  “Still, look on the bright side,” Riley said, pulling his pack up his shoulder and raising his voice. “We could be wherever you came from, Mitch.”

  Selena laughed. “He’s already asleep, you berk.”

  “Asleep?” Charlie said, amazed.

  “Yes, and in this jungle, too,” Selena said. “How does he do it?”

  Riley was shocked, too. “If there’s one thing I’ve learnt about Mitch Decker, it’s that he could sleep even if he was on a rollercoaster with his arse on fire.”

  Charlie chuckled. “I’m loving the imagery.”

  Leaning up against a tree trunk, Decker’s face was obscured totally by his Akubra hat, but now he grunted, refolded his arms over his chest and twisted to get more comfortable.

  Acosta got up, rearranged his pack and started walking, gingerly avoiding a pothole caused by the tropical downpours. “We must go. We have no idea where these men are. They could be on our tail, or they might already have found Flower Mountain.”

  Selena woke a grumbling Decker and they got to their feet and started walking back up the foothills of a mountain range. By the time they caught up with Acosta, he had left the track and wandered down to another lake, this one much smaller than Miramar. When he reached the shore, the Mexican professor started scanning the far side of the lake with a pair of Riley’s heavy duty ex-army field glasses.

  Leaving Atticus, Charlie, Diana and a yawning Decker behind them, Selena and Riley walked over to him down on the lake’s northern shore. The shocking density of the jungle had made the latest leg of their journey go on much longer than any of them had expected, and now it was well after noon. At its zenith now, the sun’s relentless beating sapped their energy as they made the short walk over Pepe Acosta.

  Reaching a short stretch of pure white sand, Selena pulled up beside him, removed her hat and wiped the sweat from her forehead. Replacing the hat, she blew out a long, weary breath. “So, we got this far, at least.”

  The academic nodded, but didn’t turn to fac
e her. Instead his eyes remained glued to the binoculars as he spoke. “Si, but is it far enough?”

  She stared out across the enormous freshwater lake and tried to take it all in. Surrounded on all sides by the same dense tropical rainforest they had spent the morning hiking through, an enormous mountain rose up on its southern shore. It was a spectacular sight that impressed even Riley.

  “That’s one fuckin’ beautiful lake,” he said. “Talk about untouched. I bet it’s looked like this since the dawn of time itself.”

  “Then you’d lose your money,” Selena said.

  “How so?”

  “We know from both quality primary and secondary sources that during the Mayan era this wasn’t a lake but a simple lowland valley.”

  Riley regarded the lake’s smooth surface. “You’re shitting me?”

  “I am not shitting you, no,” she sighed. “There was once a fabulous city built here, where all this water is right now. A city built at the base of Flower Mountain. As we said earlier, up until now I believed these stories to be mere legends, but now it looks like they were real.”

  “Get outta town.”

  “Historical fact, Carr,” she said. “Apparently.”

  “Well, do me sideways and call me Mother Theresa. I never knew that.”

  “For God’s sake, will you stop talking like that!”

  “Sorry. I learnt to talk in the army. Late developer.”

  “You can say that again. Anyway, look over there.” She raised an arm and pointed off to the right. When she had the attention of both men, she said, “If you look really closely, you can see something protruding just above the surface of the lake.”

  Acosta swivelled the binoculars over to the location and whistled. “Los cojones! I see something! It looks like stone ruins, but they are barely visible above the surface.”

  “Precisely,” she said. “You are looking at the ruins of the aforementioned ancient Maya city.”

  Riley shoved his hand under Acosta’s face and made a quick beckoning gesture with his fingers. “Let’s have the bins, mate.”

  The Mexican handed them over and wandered off toward a rise leading up into the foothills beyond the lake. Seconds later Riley was scanning the lake for himself. “That, my friends, is absolutely bloody amazing.”

  “It’s why I love archaeology,” Selena said. “Who knows what we would find, if we could dive down and search?”

  Riley leaned in close and lowered his voice. “Not Pepe’s personality, that’s for sure.”

  “Stop it!”

  “That baby’s MIA.”

  Over their heads, a brightly colored parrot squawked and screeched and flapped its way out of a tree. Another followed, then dozens more flew up into the bright blue sky. The water lapped at the shore, breaking on the mangroves to their west, and they all heard the familiar cry of a troop of howler monkeys coming from deep inside the rainforest behind them.

  “This place could be paradise,” Selena said.

  “A paradise with crocodiles.” Riley handed the binoculars to her. “And that ain’t much of a paradise, if you ask me.”

  “Gosh,” she gasped. The crocodile was swimming halfway between the shore where they were gathered and the ruins out in the lake. “You don’t get those on Bond Street.”

  “No, you get a different kind of predator there,” he said. “Still, he looks hungry.”

  She laughed. “How the hell can you tell that?”

  “Just something about his eyes.”

  “I found something!” Acosta called out. “A small cave in the side of the Flower Mountain foothill. It must be Xibalba!”

  “Cool,” Riley said. “We found hell. Excellent. Wait till I tell my mum – she’ll be stoked.”

  “It’s not hell,” Selena said. “Do try and grow up.”

  The rest of the crew walked over to them, weary but eyes full of anticipation. Charlie wiped the sweat beading on his forehead with his arm. “Sure feels like hell.”

  They turned their backs on the lake and walked over to Acosta. The Mexican academic had already disappeared inside the cave. By the time they reached the entrance, he stepped back out with a frown on his face.

  “I’m sorry, but it looks like someone else has already beaten us to it…”

  Decker took a step forward and saw a hole inside the cave. He reached for his flashlight but when he got to the edge of the abyss, he noticed a glowstick already nestling down in the dirt. Its soft green glow lit the bottom of the shaft and revealed another slightly larger cave.

  “Must be the guys who shot us down,” he said, pushing his hat up a little. “Damn.”

  18

  The Snake King fought hard to control his temper. They had been down inside the cave system for an hour already and still they had not found the Stormbringer. Worse, he knew they had company in the jungle. Last night, they had shot down the Avalon and tried to crash it, but its crew had survived an emergency landing on the lake. They had shot back at his men, so he knew they were alive and kicking. Now, they could be anywhere. If they met again, they would have to be killed.

  He heard one of Tarántula’s men calling up from a dark abyss and turned to see the younger Mercado brother leaning on the handle of a pickaxe. He looked irritated and tired.

  “What did he just say?” the Snake King said.

  Tarántula looked at Carlos then back to Miguel.

  “Qué?”

  “It’s another slab!”

  “Another of the slabs?” Tarántula said.

  Novarro and Diablo also stopped their work and faced the boss. They were standing on a large slab of carved rock blocking further access into the cave system.

  “Yes, it’s another stone slab,” Miguel called up. “But big, much bigger than the other one we found earlier.”

  “How big?” the Snake King said, his frustration rising.

  “Hard to say, but judging from the thickness, I’d say maybe fifty square feet.”

  “Which means we’re not getting through it with these.” Novarro gave his pickaxe a contemptuous kick with his boot. “Not in a million years.”

  Diablo spat a wad of chewing tobacco on the edge of the slab and sniffed. “This is wasting our time.”

  “Then break out the explosives,” the Snake King said. “I want this slab out of the way now and no delays! This is the only entrance into Xibalba that we know of. Clearly someone a very long time ago made the decision to stop anyone getting down inside this cave system. This tells me we’re in the right place. The Stormbringer is here, I can sense it. Now, blow it open!”

  “Boss.”

  Miguel scrambled up out of the hole, walked over to their gear and pulled out a bag packed with C4 explosives. Glancing at his older brother, he closed the pack and marched back over to the gorge with the bag slung over his shoulder.

  As he climbed down and positioned the C4, the Snake King almost felt dizzy. So, the old friar had been right all along! His memoirs weren’t just the deranged ramblings of an old fool whose mind had been warped by too much tropical heat. It was all true! Right here, right now, he was about to discover what he had spent half his life searching for.

  The terrifying powers of the ancient Maya god, Huracan. All those years of searching had been worth it. All his blood, toil and sweat was about to reap terrible and unimaginable dividends.

  Miguel wiped some sweat away from his forehead. “We’re nearly there, boss!”

  The Snake King and Tarántula gave each other an anxious look as the men finished carefully placing the plastic explosives in strategic locations around the more exposed sections of the stone slab.

  Watching the work come to a finish, the Snake King shook his head in astonishment. “Good God! They buried it under hundreds of thousands of kilos of sandstone. Think of how much it must have terrified them! More than the wrath of God himself!”

  Carlos and Miguel caught each other’s eye. The two close brothers already knew what the other was thinking. They didn’t have to
say anything. Tarántula saw the look on his men’s faces but turned away. Now was not the time to get nervous.

  The last to finish deploying the explosives was Diablo. He had used his pickaxe to widen a channel at the northern edge of the slab and was stuffing the C4 deep inside it. When he finished, he laid down his pickaxe once again and slowly climbed up out of the hole. “All done.”

  “Then take cover and detonate the explosives!” the Snake King ordered.

  The enormous explosion achieved the result they needed, blowing the second slab into smithereens all over the cave floor. When the dust settled, it revealed a gaping hole in the sandstone and beneath it, another long passageway receding into the darkness below. A dozen large black bats flapped and fluttered out of the darkness and buzzed around them for a few seconds before flying away up the entrance tunnel.

  “What the hell?” Tarántula said.

  Novarro made the sign of the cross. “Camazotz!”

  The Snake King’s face hardened. “Death bats. I expected them. We are venturing now into their world, the Underworld.” The men mumbled and grew restless. Before any of them could speak, the Snake King shouted, “Move on!”

  They walked down the passageway for a few moments until reaching a large cavern, inside which were more treasures than any of them had ever seen before. Gold and silver, emeralds and diamonds, golden trays, necklaces, earrings. It went on forever. Tarántula was mesmerized by the hoard and couldn’t stop his mind running wild with the thought of the power so much wealth could buy. He turned to speak to the Snake King but he was already gone.

  Scanning the cavern, he found him in the far corner, standing in silence on his own beneath a large colony of black bats hanging off the rocky ceiling. He was in front of an alcove carved into the cave wall, mumbling to himself and trembling with fear. When Tarántula saw what had mesmerised his boss, he felt his heart skip a beat.

  Resting on a raised stone slab, he saw a large metallic capstone. It looked like nothing he had ever seen before. Silver, but not silver. Copper, but not copper. Metal yes, but since when did the surface of metal swirl and move around like it was made of water? At its apex was some sort of cap, carved into the shape of Huracan’s angry face.