by J A Kellman
“Anything particular bothering you?” Dr. Gomez asked as she closed the door.
“No,” I said, though flickering images of me beating the guy with a mano had been appearing at odd moments. I didn’t tell her that, and I didn’t tell her about turning homicidal in the first place. It wasn’t like me at all. And then there were the sacrifices. I could still see the flashing blade as it descended to slice open the men’s chests.
By the time she had disinfected the scrape on my forehead and checked my vitals, Dr. Gomez was satisfied that I was just stiff, tired, and hungry; she let me join the group in the briefing room.
~ * ~
“Ríos wants us out of here as soon as possible,” Bill said as soon as I joined the table where he was having coffee with Luis, Zoila, and Pat. “The park’s a battleground, and as we’ve learned, the hotel isn’t safe. The Nuevo’ve got people everywhere, including the inn’s staff.
“Ochoa’s mother-in-law has a farm just outside Santa Elena. She lives with her youngest daughter and son-in-law, so she has plenty of room except on the holidays when the other kids come home. Pat, Ann, you and Zoila and Luis will stay with her. I’ll be live-in security. Jaime and Ochoa will arrange for additional guards. Once we’re through with coffee, we are getting you out while it’s still dark.”
“Wasn’t Santa Elena where Los Zetas held Enrique?” I asked, envisioning a leap from the frying pan into the fire.
“Yeah, but Ochoa thinks it’ll be okay. His mother-in-law doesn’t have close neighbors. Besides, nobody is going to think a little old indigenous lady and her family, people who have lived there forever, would be harboring fugitives.”
“If Miguel thinks it will work, it probably will,” I said. “But I want to know what the hell is going on.”
“It’s complicated. Captain Ríos is planning an all-out assault on the cartels with the help of the military. And, since the Nuevo have blossomed into a full-fledged armed insurrectionist group with the help of Los Zetas, they’ll have to be eradicated as well, or at least driven out of the Petén. The military is sending the Kaibiles—specialty forces who are trained in jungle warfare—to clear the perimeter of the park, as well as mop up inside. Then they’ll move into the rest of the Petén.”
“This has gotten too big for the Tikal Park Rangers to handle, and the Kaibiles are the only force small and nimble enough to do the job,” Ochoa said as he took the seat across from Bill. “The military would be like using a tank battalion to kill ants.”
“Jesús y María! The Kaibiles,” Luis said. “They like to call themselves a killing machine. Jesús.”
“I know it sounds like letting jaguars into the spider monkey enclosure, but let me explain Ríos’s thinking,” Ochoa said. “Kaibiles aren’t going to tear the park apart like the army: They work in squads of nine. They don’t use heavy weapons. The buildings and the site itself won’t suffer the same damage as if the army moved through. Think of what has happened in the Middle East…all those priceless World Heritage sites damaged or destroyed. Ríos wants to avoid that, even if that means he has to bring in Special Forces. Besides, who else is there?” Ochoa paused for a moment and then answered his own question. “Nobody.”
“What about the Nuevo?” I asked.
“The Nuevo are a whole other story,” Ochoa said. “During the action at the Bajo, four were eliminated and a dozen captured; we got the museum curator and two lieutenants, including the one Ann took out. They’re in custody in Guatemala City.”
“How’s the guy I clubbed?”
“Unconscious, under guard in the hospital. He isn’t going to be out any time soon.”
At least he isn’t dead. I couldn’t have stood that.
“Kan’s disappeared, though,” Ochoa continued, stirring more sugar into his coffee. “Vanished. No surprise after the sacrifices you witnessed. He probably feels he needs to lie low till the excitement dies down. Human sacrifices! If we catch up with him—
“The rest of the picture is fluid as well.” Ochoa stopped to sip his coffee. “As far as we know, Los Zetas were originally based in the Lacandon Reserve. We knew they had a foothold there, but it turns out it’s more than that: it’s a military base. Once they started talking, according to the Nuevo, their former allies Los Zetas or Nortes, as they call themselves now, planned to destroy the Sinaloas, then take over—rebuild the shipping complex in the Maya Gold factory, over the border in Mexico; turn the Lacandon into a drug processing center; and control the Petén drug traffic to the States.”
“Where does that leave the Nuevo?” Bill asked.
“They have other ideas. Now the Sinaloas are out of the picture, they want to drive out Los Zetas, too, since they aren’t Maya, and they’re defiling the Mayan heartland with drugs.”
“But where’s Kan?” Luis asked.
“No idea. It’s not likely anyone is going to rat him out, either. He’s got fanatical people around him, determined to create a new kingdom.
“There’s talk he’s moving further into the jungle till things blow over. Find a place to regroup, plan another campaign, this time against Los Zetas.”
“And, don’t forget, he isn’t done with us either,” Bill added. “He needs the vulture pectoral to cement his position as lord. That means Luis and Ann are still on the hot seat.”
Ochoa nodded in agreement. “Kan’s taking this lord business seriously; people are saying that he was the one who sacrificed those men.”
“Oh, God,” Pat said. “Time’s doubled back on itself. Heart excisions on Temple One. Drug wars. Kaibiles. The Vulture Lord. It seems to have started with Ruston and his stele—” She shook her head.
I’d been watching Luis. Tired or not, he was up to something. He was looking elsewhere, his eyes distant, as if he were peering over the far edge of time, and he was talking softly to someone, someone I couldn’t see.
Santa Elena, Guatemala
Two hours later, as we settled into Esperanza’s mother’s kitchen, a small building at the back of the farm compound, the storm, which had been threatening since sundown, finally broke. Thunder shook the scattered farm buildings, driving the chickens squawking into their coop, or under building overhangs and the dog under the porch. Raindrops as big as pullet eggs hammered the tin roofs at the same time the wind tried to tear the corrugated metal off. Through the open kitchen door, lightning strobed as it cut the sky into jagged fragments, silhouetting the farmstead with fierce light. The air smelled of ozone, mud, rain. The farmyard ran with water.
“It’s Hurakan,” Zoila said with satisfaction. “Nobody is going to be sneaking around tonight with that Ancient on the prowl. We can sleep without worry.”
~ * ~
The next morning, by the time the great red disk of the sun pushed over the horizon, dissipating the thick morning mist and throwing distant neighbors’ roosters into increasing frenzies of competition, Hurakan was gone.
I’d been beyond tired when I lay down; this morning I felt worse, if that was possible. Everything hurt. My back. My head. The scrapes and bruises that seemingly appeared in the night. Between the sizzling storm and fragmentary nightmares of sacrifice and dismemberment and near homicide, I’d only snatched a few minutes of rest at a time.
Then there was the yet unexamined sense of who I am nibbling at the edges my consciousness. Mild-mannered archivist? Retired professor? Killer? I groaned as I sat up.
“What time is it?” Pat asked, her voice muzzy with sleep.
“I don’t know. My watch stopped sometime in the Bajo, but whatever time it is, señora has been up for hours, and Bill’s long gone,” I said, inspecting the haphazard pile of garments next to my bed.
Pat sighed as she wrapped herself in her blanket and lowered her legs over the edge of her mattress. “I’m afraid the real trick this morning is going to be getting back in my filthy clothes. I don’t think I’ve had anything clean in days.”
I gave her the beady eye. “Put yourself in my place,” I said as I pulled on my mu
ddy cotton pants. “At least you didn’t spend days hiking in the jungle, on top of everything else.”
“Still,” Pat said, slipping into her slacks, “I smell like something in the zoo.”
“A mandrill, maybe,” I said, smelling myself as I dragged on my crusty shirt.
“Thanks a lot. Female, I hope.”
“Of course,” I said, as I stabbed my feet into my sandals, thinking of the brightly colored, notably smelly males. “What else?”
Pat stuck out her tongue.
~ * ~
The mud between the several farm’s structures was inlayed with silver pools and braided with still trickling runnels from last night’s pounding rain. Small rocks formed islands in the twisting patterns left by the water; tiny rivulets sparkled in the sun.
Half a dozen slightly disheveled brown chickens, their feathers not yet smoothed after a night in the rafters, pecked at corn scattered near the kitchen porch. The scent of wood smoke and coffee mingled in the still cool damp morning air.
Once we left the comfort of our room in a small building near the front gate, the swampy expanse to the kitchen made conversation difficult.
I picked my way through the mire. “We’re going to have to get everyone together. Talk about what comes next, what we’re going to do about the pectoral, find out when the airport reopens and flights resume.” I said as I tried to balance on a small flat rock surrounded by water.
“Logistics, you mean,” Pat said, pulling her sandaled foot out of the mud.
“Yes, but first, coffee.”
We left our shoes on the kitchen porch near the dog who was basking contentedly in the thin morning sun after his night under the porch. Inside the dim space, breakfast had been laid on the table near the hearth. A fire hissed and popped, as the youngest of Esperanza’s sisters plied us with coffee and rolls. Outside the building, the chickens fretted over the remaining corn, but otherwise the meal was quiet. I sipped my coffee, too tired to chat. Pat wasn’t doing much better.
Suddenly, the drowsing dog lunged to his feet, barking wildly; the chickens squawked as they fled across the yard.
“It’s all right. Good boy. Remember me? I’m a friend,” Bill said as he stepped onto the porch. The dog, after he assured himself that he’d met Bill before, settled again in his patch of sun with a soft snort.
“I’ve got some news,” Bill called through the door. He dropped his clotted boots near a bench piled with rusty farm implements and entered the room. “I took off before sunrise to patrol the perimeter of the farm and check in at headquarters.” He slid into a chair next to me.
“Coffee? Rolls?” Esperanza’s sister asked.
“Both, please,” Bill said, as he accepted a steaming mug.
“What’s happening?” I asked, too impatient to wait for him to eat.
“Your bags have been moved from the inn to headquarters,” Bill said, taking a sip of coffee. “They’ll be shipped home when the airport opens. If we bring them here, it will lead anyone who is interested in your whereabouts right to your door.
“According to the night officer, Ríos feels if things go according to plan, the Flores airport should open on Monday. If it’s quiet we probably can get out Tuesday.” Bill took a roll from the servietta-lined basket.
“But between now and then, things are going to be intense. The Kaibiles arrived last night and are deploying inside and outside the park. Los Zetas seem to have pulled back into the Lacandon, and there’s no sign of the Nuevo. It’s early days, though. Someone is bound to spot them. They aren’t invisible.
“There’s another tricky part, though. The pectoral. We either go for it now before something else happens, or we leave it where it is and hope no one discovers it. Oh, and something else, one side of the reservoir collapsed from all this rain. Looks like there might be an opening behind the rubble.”
“Huh,” Luis said as Zoila pushed his chair through the doorway. “We go for the pendant.”
Twenty-six
Tikal National Park, Guatemala
The morning following the storm, the sun turned the mist to floating tissues of gold as it rose slowly above the miles of jungle that stretched in all directions. In the woodsman’s shack hidden deep below the jungle canopy, Kan woke slowly, stiff, unfocused.
The night had been broken with difficult dreams—his grandfather’s stories of long ago: how Great-grandmother had been taken as a bride to a flat land where corn grew in searing summers and winter’s cold locked the dried brown stubble in ice as the sun grew feeble and pale; how Great-grandmother’s husband ignored her loneliness; how she escaped with her children and return to Flores. She died a short time later, grandfather would say, but at least we children were here.
There was another story his grandfather told, too, an older one from a more distant cycle of time, of a young man named K’in Kan, a Tikal lord’s son, and his journey to the distant coast to a city where he found a bride and brought her home.
Like Great-grandmother, Grandfather said, the woman grew sad in the young lord’s city. She, too, pined for a place where she could raise her children away from the foreign town where people laughed at her accent and made fun of her unfamiliar ways.
One night, the lord, moved by his wife’s endless misery, led his young family away from the city of stone temples, endless ceremonies, strict rules, stucco plazas, and sprawling buildings to begin life deep in the jungle with a small group of companions similarly eager to build a world free from the restrictions of Tikal.
Now, time had replayed itself again. Kan, too, had found a partner from another world, but she had been taken by the enemy, and he would never see her again—her hair like golden sparks, her eyes the color of birds’ eggs, her skin as pale as moonlight.
Kan shifted on his pallet in the small building in the Nuevo compound, considering time’s fierce repetitions. He wanted the vulture pectoral with all his being, but tonight as Hurakan raged, he wanted the woman with bright hair more, and he swore he would kill the little Mayan man who was responsible for his loss.
As he lay, eyes closed, listening to Hurakan recede to the north, he replayed his frantic escape from the farm house, his flight through the jungle night, and the hasty bivouac here, wherever the hell here was, till he could figure out what next. He had to take stock, call in more fighters, find a camp where it would be safe to regroup, and most of all, finally snatch the jade vulture from the hands of that stringy gringa and the smug little Mayan prick in a wheelchair. Only then would he be the lord of the Petén with no questions asked, only then could he reign over Tikal as he was destined to do both by blood and by right.
Kan pushed himself to his feet, knotting his tangled hair in a bun on top of his head as he shoved aside the ragged curtain into the next room. The dozen men sprawled on the floor were only beginning to stir, their guns still stacked out of the way against the water-stained walls. Other Nuevo could be seen through the door, standing guard outside the opening, or watching the jungle from the edges of the clearing.
“Get up,” Kan said, savagely kicking the closest man’s foot. “We have work, much work, to do. And we don’t have time.”
The men groaned.
“Skip the coffee,” Kan ordered as he stepped into the mass of sleepy Nuevos. “I want people down at the park office watching Ochoa now. He’s been in the middle of this thing since the beginning. He’s friendly with the Americans; he was their guide, and he’s pulled his wife into it, too. She was dragging that nosy gringa around Flores not that long ago. I even talked with them down by the boats—”
He kicked a man in the posterior who was too slow to rise.
Twenty-seven
Santa Elena, Guatemala
Luis started talking as soon as he got inside the kitchen. “During the last twenty-four hours, I’ve had lightning under my skin—my back, my front, my sides—and during the rainstorm last night, Hurakan sent me a sign in the lightning as well.
“It’s clear. We’ve got to wrest Tikal f
rom all these lunatics—cartels, nativist groups, whomever. And we got to keep the Vulture Lord jade out of the hands of idiots, otherwise there will be no end to killings like Ruston’s, no end to kidnappings like Polop’s, no end to public sacrifices, no end to stupid plans to reestablish a world gone for a thousand years.
“The Kaibiles will take care of Los Zetas, but the jade is our problem and ours alone.”
Despite the effort to talk, Luis continued. “It seems to me we have three things to accomplish: We’ve got to retrieve the pectoral. We’ve got to deposit it where it belongs. Then we’ve got to get the hell out of here.”
The talk of returning the pectoral made me wonder. “So,” I said, “all we know about the pectoral is that it was likely connected to the original K’in Kan during the period when Tikal was just a village. Who does it belong to now? We can’t go back in time—”
Luis gave me one of those looks, as if he could see through me into a place I couldn’t comprehend. It gave me the willies.
“All these storms so early in the year, the battles, the murders, are signs that something is wrong. There’s a tear in the fabric of time, and nothing, nothing, will go back to normal until its pattern is reestablished. One cycle has bled into another; unfinished business from long ago has erupted into our lives.
“Ann, you know where the pectoral is, and I can guess where the portal into that earlier world might be. You have to get the pectoral. Then we return to the reservoir behind Temple One.
“We have to be like las hormigas, the ants, when their nest is kicked. We have to scatter, scatter in daylight when people don’t expect us to move, and each of us do something to achieve our goals. If we just sit here—”
Luis’s speech gave me a boost. He was right. The only hope was to return this place to the state it was in before Ruston fell over that damned stele. Then we could go home.
“Makes sense,” Bill said, “Your story about the hormigas got me thinking—”
By the time we finished breakfast, we had a plan.
