by WW Mortensen
No!
What now? Seconds became minutes. De Sousa didn’t return, but her terror grew.
He’ll come back eventually. I need to get out of here.
The guards fell silent. Jessy decided to peek outside. Maybe she could sneak past them, create a diversion of some kind. She reached for the zip.
A succession of strange sounds made her jump, and she jerked her hand away sharply.
Quick, dull popping sounds, maybe four in total, just outside the cave’s entrance. Half a second later, louder sounds: something hitting the ground?
What the hell?
Jessy stilled, her hand an inch from the zip.
“Hello?” she called cautiously, immediately wishing she’d kept her mouth shut. She got no answer in any case, just the insects chirping in the heat. A couple of birds flew into the clearing, shrieking noisily, and faded into the distance.
Hesitantly, Jessy reached for the zip and raised it quietly, peering beyond the cave’s wide entrance.
Both guards were there, out the front, as expected. But neither was standing, and they weren’t napping, either.
• • •
One of the bodies lay pressed against the flared base of the cave: she could see half of it—the left arm, the left leg—protruding into the dead tree’s entrance. Next to it, sprawled on its back like a discarded doll, lay the other body. She could see that in its entirety.
Jessy raised a hand to her mouth. “Oh my God.” Her heart skipped a beat, and she ducked back behind the tent flap. The two guards were dead. How? De Sousa?
Her thoughts galloped. After a moment, she stuck her head out for another look.
She missed him on the first pass: he was almost imperceptible against the dark foliage. It was only as his voice called across the clearing that she refocused and picked him out.
“Pare imediatamente! Qual é o seu nome?”
It wasn’t De Sousa.
He was about twenty feet away, on one knee, dressed in jungle fatigues, face streaked in broken shades of black, brown and green, perfectly camouflaged with the surrounding vegetation.
Motionless, he looked directly at her, the barrel of his weapon trained at the bridge of her nose.
Jessy froze, her gaze sweeping the length of the weapon to the figure’s own head, and the unique, round, flat cap, olive-green in colour, sitting atop it. A flash at the front of it bore some sort of crest or emblem, yellow in colour.
She knew who wore such a distinctive garment.
Raising her hands, palms out, Jessy said, “Wait, don’t shoot! I’m American!”
She understood the meaning of a green beret.
The US Army Special Forces soldier slowly lowered his weapon, looking her up and down before turning his head into the clearing.
“Captain!” he called across it. “I think you better get over here.”
61
They’d reached the end of the burrow. Its dark outline—an oval on its side—lay just ahead, maybe fifteen feet away.
Rebecca slowed and drew herself up quietly. She inched her head into the cross-tunnel beyond.
As Ed had suggested, the tunnel was indeed man-made. Unlike the earthen burrow, it was constructed of large, stone bricks cobbled together. It looked high enough for her to stand. It, too, was lined in non-sticky silk.
Rebecca looked left and right. Both directions extended into deeper blackness, disappearing beyond the range of her goggles’ IR illuminator. It was deathly quiet.
Gripping the edge of the opening, Rebecca slid awkwardly into the tunnel. Jumping to her feet, she checked both ways again before brushing herself off. It was a relief to be free of the hole and standing once more, although her legs felt like jelly. She pumped them to get the circulation going before helping the others from the burrow.
“You got a reading?” she whispered to Asensi, the first to exit behind her. A foul smell, like stagnant water, hung in the air, thick and suffocating. It was hard to breathe, let alone speak.
Striking an infrared flare, Asensi consulted the receiver in his other hand. “Faint, but si, this way.” He pointed off through the tunnel wall, in a south-easterly direction.
Soon, the rest of them had exited, too. “We’ve got a signal,” Rebecca said to Oliveira. “As we thought, we need to go south. Down there.” She jutted her chin to the right. The floor sloped away gently, downhill and out of sight. The impenetrable blackness beyond was unsettling, foreboding. Once again, Rebecca felt a chill pass through her, despite the humidity.
Ignoring her, Oliveira touched a hand lightly to the wall. After inspecting it closely he knelt and cast his gaze along the floor in both directions.
“This tunnel must have been constructed at the same time as the pyramid,” Rebecca told him quietly. “Jess thinks it’s an access passage, probably to a subterranean chamber—”
“Something has recently been through here,” Oliveira interrupted, raising an index finger to his lips. “Here… look at these drag marks.” He stood, facing south before moving past her, waving to his men.
Rebecca glanced to where he had indicated, searching the barely visible scuff marks in the dust at her feet. As she did, Oliveira whispered back to her without turning. “We should get moving, senhorita. South, as you say.”
Already, Asensi had moved to point. While he would lead from the front, Luis, who was carrying the second FH-9 flamethrower, would bring up the rear.
Rebecca didn’t have to be told twice. Obediently, she slotted in behind Asensi as Oliveira addressed the group. “From now on,” he whispered, “we keep the talk to a minimum. Single file, nice and easy, no sound.” He nodded at Asensi, who set off. As Rebecca moved to join him, Oliveira caught her by the arm, halting her. “Best you keep your eyes peeled, too, senhorita. They are about—I can feel it.”
He released her, urging her forward, and with his words ringing ominously in her ears, Rebecca turned without comment and followed Asensi deeper into the blackness.
62
It seemed to Jessy that Captain John T. Aronsohn was the kind of guy who liked to do things by the book.
She could tell by the way he held himself, the way he talked. He had a habit, she noted, of punctuating his sentences to pause thoughtfully over his words, and she doubted he ever said anything without weighing it in line with standard procedure. Not that she had an issue with that—in fact, she was over the moon about it. He was obviously level-headed, in control.
And his actions had most likely saved her life.
Jessy guessed the Green Beret leader was only marginally older than her—thirty, tops—but he seemed mature beyond his years. Of average height, he was lean and broad-shouldered, with close-cropped, dark brown hair. Although masked by camouflage make-up, his face was scarred, the skin pock-marked, though it didn’t detract from his appearance, and she found him quite good-looking. She was even more taken by his eyes: dark and knowing, understanding. His was an experienced, worldly face, in contrast to that of the young soldier who’d found her.
When she’d followed Sergeant McGinley’s fresh-faced gaze into the clearing, Jessy had been amazed to find up to a dozen soldiers staring back at her. Aronsohn had signalled for his men to establish a perimeter, and upon learning of her injury, called for a medic. She’d been brought gently from the tent to a chair beneath the tarpaulin where the medic had knelt to attend her leg—redressing it, injecting her with painkillers and antibiotics and God knew what else. It seemed only when Aronsohn had felt secure had he spoken to her directly, crouching beside the medic and giving her his name and rank before questioning who she was, and what she was doing here.
Beaming, Jessy had introduced herself, but not before embracing Aronsohn tightly. “Thank God you came! I’m surprised you found us though. I guess Robert must have given you the co-ordinates—”
Aronsohn held up a hand. “Ma’am—just a second. What say we back it up a little—start over, nice and slow.”
Jessy frowned. “Sorry?”
Jessy hesitated, perplexed. “Then just what are you doing here?”
Aronsohn glanced across the clearing and back again. “I’m not at liberty to divulge that, but I can say there’s an operation in this area.” He asked her once more why she was here, but Jessy’s attention was drawn away as two of Aronsohn’s men came in to remove the poncho-covered bodies of the guards still lying on the ground in front of the cave.
“How many did you see?” She nodded at the dead men. “What about the others?”
“The others?”
“The other two. There are two more of them.”
Aronsohn narrowed his eyes and with a series of quick hand signals waved his second-in-command to the edge of the clearing. “Wit, secure it,” he mouthed.
“And there’s four more,” Jessy informed him, “with two of my friends, inside the pyramid.”
At that, Aronsohn froze. Slowly, he turned back to her. “What pyramid?”
63
Rebecca thought it strange.
There’d been no junctions or cross-tunnels, no chambers or passageways feeding off the main shaft—nothing at all. She recalled how Ed had said there was nothing on the way up, either, just the one, long passageway.
Why was that?
They’d been following the foul-smelling, stone-hewn tunnel for several minutes now. It was impossible to tell how deep they were beneath the pyramid. Not that it mattered. Asensi, with no option, had continued to lead them deeper, having long-since put away the receiver in favour of his Kalashnikov.
Fortunately, the weapon hadn’t been needed. Despite Oliveira’s warning, they hadn’t encountered any spiders, or noticed any other burrows. But Rebecca wasn’t complacent. The tunnel itself wasn’t part of the nest proper. That lay ahead. This was just a means of access. Getting carried away with what was a relatively easy entry would be premature at best.
They kept moving, silently following the passageway deeper.
64
Jessy waited for Aronsohn to find the right words. When he had, they passed his lips as little more than a breathless mutter.
Of the twelve-man team, half were still searching for De Sousa and Cartana. Two had stayed behind to guard the camp. The remaining three had accompanied Jessy and Aronsohn to the north-western vantage point, two of them transporting Jessy on a stretcher between them.
And while it was the pyramid they had come to investigate, Jessy guessed it wasn’t the sight of it that had them so awestruck, more the huge web surrounding it.
“Jesus H. Christ,” McGinley said. “What the fuck?”
It was the first time since the attack the day before yesterday that Jessy had herself laid eyes on the pyramid. No spiders were apparent. Had any of the creatures been moving about, she guessed the soldiers would have reacted with even greater incredulity.
Scanning the structure, she was overcome with a sudden rush of longing for Ed. It was so overwhelming she would have burst into tears had a rustling sound behind her not severed her thoughts. She spun as one of the soldiers surged from the bushes: Wittenberg, Aronsohn’s second-in-command. He was a tall man, thin-faced and whippet-like.
“Holy shit…” he said, his gaze on the web.
Aronsohn turned to him, but Wittenberg said nothing more, standing there with his mouth ajar. “Wit!”
Wittenberg blinked. “Sorry, sir. It’s just that…”
“Tell me about it.”
The younger soldier refocused, shaking his head like a boxer in a daze. “Captain, we couldn’t find anyone. Not a trace. If there were men out there, they’re gone now.”
Jessy baulked, a cold dread running through her. “Captain—"
“Keep searching,” Aronsohn said to Wittenberg, who nodded and disappeared. Turning to Jessy, his expression softened. “Don’t worry, we’ll find them. In the meantime—”
“Sir—I’ve got confirmation.” The young, dark-skinned soldier was Harper, one of the men who had accompanied them down here. He was kneeling on the ground a few feet away, in front of the blind, punching commands into a ruggedised laptop. He turned to them with a satisfied grin. “406 MHz beacon, 5-watt signal. That’s it, all right.”
Jessy hesitated. Signal? What did he mean by that? Was there a signal coming from inside the pyramid?
Aronsohn’s expression remained indifferent as he turned to Harper. “Keep on it. Find out what you can. And while you’re at it, jump back on the horn—get us an update on that medevac.” Harper nodded as Aronsohn turned back to Jessy. “Okay, ma’am, I think it’s time we got you out of here, hey? We’re bringing in a chopper, so we can get you to a hospital.” He seemed more urgent now, and glanced again at both the pyramid, and the huge web. “But as I was about to say a moment ago, in the meantime, I think you and I need to have a chat.”
• • •
It didn’t take long to get him up to speed. Throughout the briefing Aronsohn sat quietly on the buttress root of a large kapok, listening without any show of emotion.
Now, at the end of it, he leant back and ran his hand across his forehead to catch the sweat. “Quite a story,” he said. His manner was less formal than before.
Jessy nodded. She was surprised at how readily he could accept it.
“And your two friends are in there as we speak? Inside the pyramid?”
“We can’t leave without them.”
“No, I don’t intend to. What about the other pair—the two who returned to Base Camp?”
“I don’t know what’s happened to them, or how to contact them.”
“We’ll work something out.”
After a long pause, Jessy said, “So why did you kill those men?” She leant closer. “And what was Harper talking about? He said there was a signal.”
For a moment, it seemed Aronsohn hadn’t heard her, but at last he opened his mouth, his tone official again. “I can’t tell you the specifics. What I can say is we were on the trail of people known to us. We were following them when we detected something else, a distress signal. We detoured, tracked it to this vicinity, only to pick up the trail heading into your camp, which is why we ended up there first, rather than here. Now we know the signal we were following is coming from inside that pyramid. Your friends, I presume.”
Jessy could only assume so, too, but wasn’t sure if the presence of a distress signal was good news or bad. She was also confused as to how a signal could have been sent in the first place.
She looked at Aronsohn, remembering Ed’s comment about the US government clamping down on the thriving cocaine trade by actively harassing drug traffickers from the sky. She presumed the CIA, DEA, or maybe the Air Force or State Department were tasked with this. Ed had said that as a result, the drug cartels had been forced to alter their modes of operation, and so now, increasingly unable to smuggle contraband through the air, had resorted to carting it through the jungle, on foot. It stood to reason that to counter this, the US would need to alter its methods too, pursuing smugglers through the jungle, on foot. A counter-narcotics team would be ideal for such an operation. And why not? Who the hell knew what kind of covert ops were undertaken without public knowledge? It wouldn’t have surprised her to learn that Aronsohn and his men were one such team, tasked with hunting down traffickers.
Yet if that were true, Aronsohn hadn’t originally been hunting Oliveira, given he’d said they had ‘detoured’ to follow the distress signal. Furthermore, he’d had no idea of how many men had been guarding the camp. That they had killed the two guards seemed to indicate the mere presence of an armed and unauthorised force out here in the middle of nowhere was all Aronsohn required for a ‘shoot-first-ask-questions-later’ course of action. Again, who the hell knew what happened out in the real world?
Whatever the case, Jessy fi
gured Aronsohn was unlikely to confirm her suspicions. She didn’t pursue it further.
“One other thing,” she said to him. “We think they’re nocturnal, perhaps active in early twilight. That doesn’t leave us much time.”
“We’ll make do,” was all Aronsohn said in reply. He got up to leave, patting her on the knee. “I don’t want you to worry anymore, okay? You’re safe now. We’ll have a chopper here in a couple of hours. Then we’ll get you and your friends out of here.”
With that, he smiled and disappeared. Jessy stared after him, and suddenly, she couldn’t help but worry.
Had he even heard her, listened to what she had said? She glanced at her watch.
A couple of hours?
In a couple of hours, it’d be dark.
65
Several dozen yards beyond the opening Sanchez had found on the other side of the cavern, the passageway split in two.
He paused, hoisting Owen with his good arm, his left holding the torch before him.
Which way now?
He tried to focus. The two natural tunnels looked identical, and like everything down here, both were silk-lined. Sanchez hesitated. The last thing he wanted was to delve deeper into the caves—he needed a way out. But there was no telling which of the two options, if either, would get him there, and presumably, at least one would take him closer to the heart of the nest.
This was a problem.
Sanchez squinted and directed the torch down both shafts. His head swam, and his vision blurred. The venom surging through his bloodstream made it difficult to concentrate. Moments ago, he’d stopped to catch his breath and had popped coca leaves into his mouth to pep himself up. They’d had some effect, but he still felt light-headed.
Come on. Keep it together.
He heard something and spun the torch back to the tunnel on his right.
There! It came again, a faint breath of wind…
