Blood Sun dz-3

by David Gilman

  Riga was nearly out of the deadly traps, but one of the poles twisted from the vibration, and like a cog in a wheel, it shifted into its normal stationary position. The bladed arm swung in a lethal curve from behind Riga’s right shoulder down toward his left leg.

  “Behind you! Look out!” Max yelled, desperately keeping his own balance, eyes darting left and right, hoping none of the blades was shifting toward him.

  Riga’s reactions were remarkable. Keeping his feet firmly planted, he twisted from the waist, raised his left arm above his head and turned himself clear of the cutting blade. The tip caught his shirt, ran beneath his ribs and bit into the shoulder holster. Max heard the clean ripping cut as the blade severed it from the shoulder strap. Max’s warning, Riga’s fast reaction and the shoulder holster had saved the killer from a lethal wound. The chrome-plated semiautomatic tumbled away beneath the blades.

  Riga was clear. He caught his balance and turned back to watch Max’s progress through the last few meters. “Come on, kid, that lever might not hold. Hurry!”

  Max could hear the poles creaking and saw the blades quivering. Another earth tremor snaked beneath his feet. He almost fell. And then he heard a sound from the other end of the building. It was metal scraping against rock. The rifle was being forced along the rock wall under pressure.

  Riga watched Max trying to move more quickly. It was like observing a fly trying to escape from a spiderweb. Sometimes the fly got lucky.

  “Come on! Do it!”

  And then they both heard the crash of the lever breaking free of the rifle’s restraint; the sound of rushing water echoed through the chamber. The poles groaned back to life. Behind him the blades were already turning, and Max felt the exertion force itself out of his lungs. He gasped as he tried to get through the last couple of meters before the teeth around him spun into life and devoured him.

  He was not going to make it. And he knew it. He raised his head to look into Riga’s eyes less than a meter away-but the blades spun. Riga snatched at one of the moving arms, jammed his foot onto another and threw his weight backward. The sudden counterbalance on one of the poles slowed the blades that had not yet reached full speed.

  Max saw the narrow space between the blades, like a gap through a bramble hedge. Throwing himself forward, he felt them nick his clothing. He hit the earth floor, rolled and came quickly to his feet. Even Riga’s strength could not have held back the blades any longer, and Max saw them wrench free of the assassin’s grip.

  Max looked at him. How did you thank a killer who had just saved your life but had promised to kill you later? You didn’t. It was already a debt repaid.

  “Where now?” Riga demanded.

  Max saw the location of the satellite dish in his mind’s eye. He turned and ran for the opening that led into a green umbrella covering of forest. “This way!”

  They were no sooner clear of the claustrophobic building than they could hear the muted staccato of what sounded like firecrackers somewhere in the distance, the harsh sounds swallowed by the dense jungle.

  “Gunfire,” Riga said. “AKs, M16s, others. Two or three clicks away.”

  Max kept running and noticed Riga kept pace despite his injured leg. He was one of those unstoppable guys, Max thought. People like him will keep coming for you until they die. Max had never wished anyone dead before, but Riga was different.

  It was a world away from the stark, heat-seared ball court. No blue sky penetrated the overhanging tree branches and vines.

  It seemed like an artificial corridor of foliage, as if a gardener had created a massive tunnel out of the greenery.

  “Camouflage,” Riga said. “Deliberate. This whole area is hidden from view.”

  “There has to be another way in here,” Max said. “The Razor House kept everyone out from that side.”

  The ongoing gun battle came no closer, but one or two echoes became more dominant. Who was doing the shooting? It wouldn’t be the warriors fighting, so it had to be police or army. Were they coming here? Max heard the roaring cries of howler monkeys moving away and sensed rather than saw birds’ alarm as the air beat somewhere above the green tunnel. He had no idea how far they had run, but the ground was clear of any major obstacles. It looked as though it had been cleared by machinery. Then it dropped away, and a vine-covered stone building, most of it below ground level, was just about visible through the undergrowth.

  Riga ran his hands over the limestone blocks, then edged round to the side, trying to find the line of the building, but there was nothing else. This wall was all that existed. Anything else must be underground. Max rubbed his hands across a stone lintel. He gazed at the shapes and figures of mountain monsters that had been cut into the building, probably more than a thousand years ago. He did not have to bluff now.

  “It’s a temple. An ancient temple,” he said.

  “How do you know that?” Riga said.

  “It’s in one of my mum’s photographs.” He looked around. “None of this camouflage was here then. There’s an entrance somewhere.” Max’s heart felt a squeeze of regret. The photographs in his pocket were his insurance against Riga killing him. He dared not look at his mother smiling in front of the old temple. She had been right here. On this spot. He could almost feel her.

  Max traced his hands along the wall. Behind where his mother had stood, there should have been a small entrance. He thrust his hands into the dense undergrowth.

  “Here, pull this away.”

  Riga unsheathed his machete and hacked at the ropelike vines that dropped down the temple walls. A small window-sized opening was visible, recessed into the depth of the stone. It was covered in steel mesh.

  “I don’t know too much about Mayan culture, but I know they didn’t have windows like that.”

  Riga looked at him. “All right. So you know where you’re going. Good.”

  He pulled Max out of the way and kicked hard and fast against the corners of the mesh. It gave way on three sides, and Riga pushed his weight against it. The corner snapped, the mesh window dropped, and they heard it clatter onto stone. Riga climbed in. There were steps going down. They were in a dark corridor of an ancient temple, which was obviously unused and which had been sealed to stop anyone clambering through the small window. Riga moved forward, the back of his hand running along the wall to guide him. Max followed. The fetid air made their labored breathing the only sound in the heavy atmosphere. The passageway angled left and right and then opened out into an antechamber. It would have been pitch-black this deep inside the building except for a hairline crack of light seeping around what appeared to be a door. Max reached out and his palms met the smooth texture of a wooden covering.

  “Can you smell that?” Max asked.

  “Chemicals,” Riga said. “OK. We’re out of options. This is where we go in.” He rammed the tip of the machete’s blade between the wood and stone, forced it back, felt the wood ease slightly. He kept the pressure on it. “Kick it!”

  Max twisted his body, balanced on one leg, grunted with effort, side-kicked the door and heard wood splinter.

  “Again! Come on! Harder, kid!”

  Max put all his power into the kick, and, with Riga’s shoulder aiding his efforts, the wood gave way.

  They gazed down three meters into what looked like a hospital laboratory. A polyethylene tent took up most of it, but Max and Riga could see the main room had a sliding metal door opening to the outside. In the enclosed area, two men in biohazard suits were loading spill-proof vials of blood-colored liquid into specially padded containers.

  Half a dozen suitcase-sized boxes were being manhandled outside the tent by two men wearing jeans, T-shirts and bandannas. AK-47s were slung across their backs. This was some kind of cleanup operation. Like flash photography, it was a frozen picture of shock and fear as Riga and Max smashed through into the room and jumped down. Then the gunmen dropped the containers, and one of the men in biohazard suits screamed at him. His voice was muted by the visor, but clea
rly they did not want whatever was in those cases to be damaged. Their reaction was a natural response to something terrifying.

  One of the gunmen leveled his AK-47. Riga shoved Max aside and pounded toward the two men. Rolling on the ground, he dived beneath the spray of gunfire. For a moment Max thought thunder was reverberating across the valley. It was no gathering storm Max had heard: the other gunman had fled outside and hauled the metal door closed behind him, trapping them all inside.

  A man yelled, then screamed. By the time Max got to his feet, the remaining gunman was down on the ground and unmoving. Riga sheathed the bloodied machete and reloaded the dead man’s weapon. He yanked one of the doors-padlocked. There was no way out.

  “Get out here,” Riga commanded the laboratory workers. The men stepped out of their polyethylene tent, zipped the area behind them and pulled off their head covers. The clatter of gunfire from outside grew closer as Riga grabbed one of the bareheaded men. “How toxic is this stuff?” It was obvious Riga was wary of getting too close to the containers. And it was obvious to Max that he thought it was something that demanded enormous respect.

  Max lifted a line of cord off the ground. He let it slip through his fingers as he moved forward; then he saw the packed blocks of plastic explosive. “They’re going to blow the place up!” he yelled at Riga. “We have to get out of here!”

  Riga threatened the men. “What is it back there?”

  “Genetically modified bacteria,” one of them said nervously.

  Riga looked at Max. “That’s what your friend died of; it has to be some kind of slow incubator.” He turned back to the men. “High voltage or fire destroys it, right? That’s why this place is wired.”

  The men nodded. Riga raised the submachine gun.

  “Don’t kill them!” Max yelled. “My mother was here! Years ago. Was she infected? Did this stuff kill her?”

  The man babbled, desperate to save his life. “It’s nothing to do with us! Mr. Cazamind took everything. He has all the data.”

  “Cazamind is here?” Riga demanded. He grabbed the man. “Where?”

  The scientist could barely speak for fear. “Helipad. A kilometer north of here.”

  Max barely listened. His attention was fixed on the metal doors as he desperately tried to yank them open. The man had barely finished speaking when a shock wave threw them all to the ground. This was the most severe yet. The unstoppable force of nature whiplashed the room. Part of the wall collapsed. The metal doors buckled and screeched as they were torn from the walls. The lab men ran for their lives. Riga let them go-he was looking at the damaged laboratory. Even high-security containers could not withstand that kind of tremor. One had fallen from its cradle and was spilling liquid. Just how lethal was it? Riga backed away. Aftershocks made the ground shudder.

  Max was almost shoulder to shoulder with Riga as they made a break for the open door. Explosions followed almost immediately as a chain reaction of powerful detonations came from somewhere in the jungle, ricocheting toward them. The timed demolition ripped the forest apart. A vast area of hillside erupted, dirt exploded, trees disintegrated-the shock wave sucked the moisture from their throats, pounded their ears and flung them to the ground. A ten-meter wall of fire raced down the tree line and reached the temple, which erupted in a massive explosion. There must have been other chambers below, because as the temple disappeared in the debris, the ground collapsed and absorbed most of the shock wave. If it had not, Max and Riga would have died then and there.

  Riga was getting to his feet, searching groggily for the AK-47, but it had been blown out of sight. Max choked and spat out soil; his eyes stung, and his eardrums hurt. Deafened by the blast, he staggered uncertainly for a couple of steps, then fell again. Like an old man, he managed to get himself onto his knees. They had been lucky. Ash and dirt caked their skin, and rivulets of sweat tracked through the grime on their faces, creating grotesque masks. Their shirts, already snagged and ripped by the flint blades, now snared fragments of earth and leaves. They looked like creatures from hell, and the inferno that swirled around them was the devil’s playground.

  The explosive chain reaction had wrenched the ground apart, exposing a long wall of mountainside. Even Riga stood momentarily stunned at what came pouring down the sheer rockface toward them. A lava flow had erupted from beneath the surface and was incinerating everything in its path.

  Max’s ears popped. His hearing came back. That was when he heard the unmistakable sound of a helicopter’s blades starting up. But he was almost too exhausted to care. The air thundered with a raging fire that swept across the edge of the forest. Smoke and dirt swirled; it felt as though the world were ending.

  Riga yelled at him above the firestorm. “You want the man who let your mother die? He’s getting away. Get up!”

  Max could not move. There was no strength left to fight with. The explosions had battered him. He tried to drag himself to his feet.

  Riga grinned. “You know you won’t make it out of here.”

  “If you don’t stop me, I will.”

  “You just never give up, do you, boy? OK. It’s not over yet,” Riga said. “Here. You need a weapon.” And he tossed the machete toward Max.

  Max stared at the man paid to kill him. He was giving him the final piece in the puzzle about his mother’s death. “I want him; you want him. And he’s here,” Riga said.

  The assassin extended his hand to help him up. Max knocked it away and staggered to his feet unaided.

  He had to see this through.

  Riga looked meaner than Max had ever seen anyone look before. There was a beastlike quality to his face. It scared Max more than he thought possible. Riga nodded at Max in unspoken admiration for his determination.

  “Payback time, kid.”

  26

  Cazamind sat in the helicopter, with the pilot waiting nervously to see which way the flames would turn in the wind that blew unpredictably from different directions. Two muscular bodyguards, men from eastern Europe, stacked the last of four sample cases into the helicopter’s hold. These were Cazamind’s own people, brought in to make sure that he had the best chance of survival should those in power doubt his ability to keep matters under control.

  Cazamind’s chewed and torn fingernails hurt. He had no idea whether Max Gordon had reached the ancient Mayan site or whether he had perished in the jungle. But he had every reason to be fearful. Riga was still on the loose. Between him and the boy, Cazamind’s life had taken a turn for the worse. He had ordered the usual thugs from the City of Lost Souls to secure the area, had offered them a huge bonus to kill anyone who tried to get through the supply route. He could hear that the gun battle was now little more than sporadic gunfire, a mopping-up operation. But who were the attackers? And who had won the battle?

  The slightest breach of security, or even the threat of such a breach, had demanded a complete shutdown of the operation. These were the orders given to Cazamind by his “people.” The faceless men in power were not sitting here in the shuddering helicopter in the stinking heat, soaked in sweat, while an inferno raged around them. And he knew, even as he recovered the blood source material from the jungle laboratory, that others were searching his own private databases and bank accounts, in fact every scrap of his personal life, in case he had made copies of what he knew to be as explosive as that huge tree that had just disintegrated. The pilot yelled at the men to hurry the hell up because they had to get out of here. Now!

  Cazamind felt the handcuff bracelet bite into his skin. The slim aluminum briefcase, barely the size of a small notebook computer, held half a dozen sheets of facts and figures and the breakdown on a computer disk of those he knew to be involved in this massive conspiracy. It was no use trying to hide it in electronic databanks-those people would root it out. Even if they only suspected that their loyal servant had covered his back, then he would stay alive as long as nothing was discovered. When it came down to good old-fashioned safety nets, handwritten testimony was alway
s the best bet. He hugged it to him.

  Another explosion made him wince. The charges had gone off prematurely because of the unexpected volcanic activity, and now the whole world seemed to be on fire. The helicopter had been hidden in one of the caves, and when they brought it out onto the plateau where the small helipad was located, the ground was already shuddering, threatening to plunge them down into the scalding valley. Cazamind wiped the sweat from his face. The storage compartment door banged shut; the men were getting into the helicopter. He would soon be safely away.

  And then he saw the apparitions.

  Two filthy, sweat-streaked creatures powered up the edge of the plateau as if they had risen from the underworld. One of them he recognized as his rogue killer, Riga. The other was a boy whose tattered clothes clung to him like a second skin. The flickering light from the wall of fire behind him made his ash- and dirt-covered body look like a jungle cat, head down, muscles rolling in a seemingly effortless movement of attack. Cazamind wiped his eyes and looked again. It was no jaguar; it was Max Gordon. And Riga had let him live. That meant they shared one purpose. They were coming for him. One of the bodyguards was still trying to clamber aboard when Cazamind screamed the command to take off. The man fell to the ground; the other slammed the doors closed. Survival was the main thought on all their minds.

  The heat was intense, but Cazamind felt as cold as if he were on the ice face of a Swiss mountain. The helicopter lifted slowly and hovered momentarily as the pilot fought the gusting wind. Cazamind allowed a sigh of relief. But there was something wrong. The helicopter lurched.

  Riga was stronger and faster than Max and had pushed ahead, but his injured leg meant he was less agile, and Max could see that they were not going to reach the helicopter before it lifted off. The man who had tried to climb aboard had fallen badly, tumbling down the slope. Riga shouted for Max to be careful of the rotor blades, but Max was already beneath the swirling dust. He could have reached up and clung to the helicopter’s skids, but instead he looped a wrist-thick ground vine round its leading edge, yanked hard and twisted it round itself, so, at least for a few seconds, the helicopter would not be able to take off. It was up to Riga to do something.