“Like I was saying,” his mother said more sharply, “maybe we’d better get off this path.”
With a tug on Mutt’s arm, his mother dragged him off the trail and down a steep, narrow cut. Jones and Oxley skidded after them. They slipped and scooted to the bottom. The ravine emptied into a dense copse of giant trees with a clearing in the middle.
Jones pointed.
They hurried toward the clearing. His mother and Jones, Oxley still in tow, ducked behind some tall thorny bushes and hid.
Mutt hung back and returned a few steps higher, so he could spy on the upper trail through the jungle. He sheltered behind the bole of a giant tree. Shouts, threats, and an occasional rifle blast echoed to them. A moment later a squad of Russian soldiers trampled into view. Mutt froze. The soldiers slowed—then continued past and away. After half a minute the voices faded, smothered by the thick jungle.
Sighing with relief, Mutt turned and headed back to the clearing. He kept his voice low. “I think we lost—”
But no one was there, only a thick wall of underbrush.
He hurried down. “Mom?” he called in a low voice and pushed into the clearing.
Oxley had settled to the ground and was picking thorns off the bushes. Beyond him stood his mother and Jones in the middle of the clearing, but they were sunk into the sandy floor up to their knees, arms out as if unbalanced.
It made no sense.
He took a step toward them.
“Stop!” Jones growled.
“Keep back!” his mother warned.
As he watched, Jones and his mother sank farther into the sand, now up to their thighs.
Jones spoke between clenched teeth, whispering urgently. “Don’t move, Marion. The motion makes space, and space makes you sink.”
Mutt hovered at the edge, not sure what to do.
His mother scowled at their predicament. “I think I can get out if I just—” She tried to pull one leg up but only managed to sink deeper.
“Stop it already!” Jones warned. “You’re pulling against a vacuum. It’s like trying to lift a car. Just stay calm.”
“Don’t move, Mom!” Mutt called to her.
She stood still, arms out, motionless. She barely moved her lips. “Okay. I’m calm.” She slipped deeper. “I’m calm, and I’m still sinking.
Mutt searched around. “What is it? Quicksand?”
Jones answered, exasperated. “What are they teaching you in school nowadays?” He waved his hands over the sucking sand. “This is a dry sandpit. Quicksand is viscous mud, clay, and water, and because of its fluidity, it’s not as dangerous as you might—”
Marion shoved him in the shoulder. “Jones! For pete’s sake, we’re not in school here!”
“Just stay still, Marion. There’s nothing to worry about, unless there’s a—”
A geyser of sand exploded between them, showering Mutt at the bank of the pit. He spit sand and cleared his eyes. His mother and Jones had now sunk almost to their chests.
“—void collapse,” Jones explained sourly. “A pocket of space in the sand.”
Mutt could stand it no longer. He thought quickly and knew the pair had only one chance of getting out of that trap alive. He hated leaving his mother, but he had no choice. “Hold tight! I’ll find something to pull you out with!”
He tore off into the shadowy jungle.
“Kid!” Indy called out. “Get back here!”
But Mutt vanished through the foliage. Indy heard his stomping, ripping passage fade away. What was the kid thinking? Besides the Russians, there were a hundred ways to get yourself killed out there. Even experienced explorers could get lost in the dense jungle, turned around, confused. And the kid didn’t have a compass.
Indy mumbled under his breath and glanced to the woman trapped at his side. “He’s definitely your son, Marion. Always flying off half-cocked.”
He didn’t give Marion a chance for a retort. Instead, he called over to Oxley, who stood at the edge of the sandpit chewing on a thorn, staring off blissfully. “Ox, for God’s sake, don’t just stand there! We need help!”
The professor’s bleary gaze focused back on them. He tugged his feathered hat more firmly on his head. “Help?”
That’s right, Ox . . . you understand.
“Harold, I need you to—”
Without another word, Oxley turned, shoved straight through the thorn bush, and disappeared.
Great.
Indy heard him stomp and rip his way through the jungle, heading off in the opposite direction from the kid. He shook his head as he slipped another inch into the sand. Why wouldn’t people listen to him?
“Okay,” Marion said, drawing back his attention. She wore a slightly guilty expression and waved in the direction that the kid had vanished. “I’ll admit, Mutt can be a little impetuous.”
She turned more fully to face Indy and arched an eyebrow toward him. “Maybe like someone else I know.”
He straightened the fedora on his head. “Well, I guess it’s not the worst quality in the world,” he admitted. “He could—”
Another geyser erupted, shattering sand into a coughing flume. Indy coughed and choked. As it cleared, he saw that they were now buried up to their armpits. The sand squeezed hard around his chest, making it difficult to breathe. From Marion’s strained expression, she was suffering the same. Her eyes teared from all the stinging sand.
Indy didn’t know what to do, what to tell her. He gasped out what reassurance he could amid the crush of the pit. “Keep your arms . . . above the surface . . . the kid comes back, grab on . . .”
She turned to him. He saw something in her expression, a tenderness. He suddenly realized the tears were not from the sting of sand in her eyes. “Indy, Mutt’s—”
“—not a bad kid, Marion . . . I know . . . you should get off his back about school . . .”
“. . . what I meant . . . Mutt, he’s . . .”
“It’s okay, Marion . . . not everybody’s cut out for school . . .”
The tenderness in her eyes flashed into annoyance. “Indy!” she snapped, gaining his full attention. “Mutt’s name . . . it’s Henry.”
Indy forced his neck to crane around to view her fully. “Henry?”
“He’s your son, Indy.”
He felt a sinking sensation that had nothing to do with the sand pit. “My son?”
“Henry Jones the third.”
Indy looked away. He felt a fury build in his chest. He couldn’t stop it. Now was not the time to lash out, especially about this, but there was no stopping it.
He turned back to her. “Why the HELL didn’t you make him finish school?”
Before she could answer, something long, brown, and heavy landed between them. The impact sent fresh sand up into Indy’s face. Coughing and spitting, he struggled to get the sand out of his burning eyes. He could barely keep his eyelids open. Tears streamed, blurring his vision.
Did a tree branch crash down from the canopy?
“Grab on!” a voice yelled from the edge of the pit.
He recognized the kid’s voice . . . his son’s voice. He’d made it back! Then again, he shouldn’t be so surprised. Mutt was his kid, a chip off the old block.
Marion had already grabbed onto the blurry tree limb, hugging tightly to it. Indy struggled to lift his arms high enough to reach the limb. His hands reached for it—when the limb’s end reared up and hissed in his face.
He yanked his arms back. “Ack!”
Not a tree limb.
A giant snake!
“Are you crazy!” he hollered toward Mutt.
Panic cleared his vision. The massive snake was as thick around as his forearm. It undulated and slowly writhed in front of him. It extended all the way across the pit to Mutt. Black eyes stared back at Indy with all the menace of its entire genus. A long venom-red tongue flickered a full foot from its scaly maw.
Marion hugged it farther along its coils. “Indy, just grab on!”
“It’
s a SNAKE!”
Mutt heard him. “Don’t worry! It’s just a rat snake!”
Indy tried to point at it, but he didn’t dare get any closer. “Rat snakes aren’t that huge!”
“Well, this one is! You should’ve seen the size of some ants I saw; big as my hand.”
Giant ants? The kid was full of wild stories.
“Besides, it’s not even poisonous!” Mutt assured him.
Indy kept his arms well away from the snake. “Go get something else!”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know . . . some rope or something!”
“Man, this ain’t no Sears and Roebuck, just grab ahold!”
Indy tried to move his leg. “Maybe I can touch bottom.”
Marion shifted and stared back at him as if he were crazy. “There is no bottom. Now do what Mutt says . . . and grab it!”
“I think I can feel it with my toe.”
Marion and Mutt both screamed at him. “JONES!”
THIRTY-ONE
MUTT WATCHED the man’s face scrunch up with distaste. Jones reached out toward the brown rat snake, closing his eyes and turning his head away.
Mutt still had his end of the snake slung over his shoulder. He crouched with his legs braced against a tree trunk. He remembered the professors description of the sand’s vacuum hold.
Like trying to lift a car.
He might not be able to drag them out, but he could keep them from sinking deeper. In the center of the pit, Jones gave one final cringe and snatched the snake into his arms. It coiled around his forearms. He visibly shuddered.
Now all Mutt could do—
—Ka-phooom!
Another massive geyser, bigger than the others, erupted out of the pit with a plume of sand as high as the canopy.
Void collapse.
In that instant Mutt remembered another lesson from the professor. A void was a pocket in the sand.
A gap.
Mutt took advantage of it. As sand rained down, he shot out with his legs and yanked hard on the snake’s body. His shoulders burned with strain, his knees shook—then suddenly the resistance gave way. He backpedaled using rocks and trees for footing.
As the sand cleared, he saw his mother and Jones beached up on the bank of the pit, limbs entangled. Mutt dropped the snake and rushed up to their side.
His mother sat up and patted the snake’s scaly trunk. Jones opened his eyes and jerked away from it. He rubbed his hands vigorously on his pants, his face screwed up with horror and revulsion.
The snake, freed now, rolled and writhed its way toward the jungle, vanishing back into the undergrowth.
Mutt stood over Jones. “You have no problems with tarantulas and scorpions . . . but one little snake . . .”
Jones pointed a trembling arm toward the vanished serpent. “That was no little snake, kid.”
Mutt shook his head. “You are a crazy old man.”
A sudden snap of branches froze them all.
Oxley burst through the thorn bushes, wearing a big grin.
“Ox!” Mutt said.
Then behind the professor, soldiers appeared, bristling with rifles. The soldiers parted to allow Spalko and the guy with the British accent and broken nose to step forward.
Snuffling around his broken nose, the man straightened his Panama hat and asked, “Why do you wanna do everything the hard way, Indy?”
Oxley matched the man’s pose a bit proudly, adjusting his own feathered cap. “Help!”
Jones eyed Oxley. “Yeah, that’s great, Harold.”
Spalko stared over them all with a dispassionate expression. She waved the soldiers to drag them to their feet. “Enough delays,” she said and pointed back toward the encampment. “We must get going. We will now see if your suppositions about the map were correct, Dr. Jones.”
Jones scowled back at her.
Spalko eyed first Mutt, then his mother. “And for their sakes, you’d best pray that they are.”
As the convoy was being organized for their departure into the jungle, Colonel Dovchenko watched the woman practice with her sword.
Irina Spalko stood apart from everyone else, stripped to a tight-fitting shirt and loose pants. She had cleared an area behind her tent, where she thought she had full privacy. But Dovchenko had a good vantage point from the side, shadowed by the forest fringe. He leaned an arm on the trunk of a tree. The heat here was oppressive, the forest too dense—nothing like the birch forests and frost of his Siberian home—but at the moment, Dovchenko wished to be nowhere else.
Spalko lifted the rapier to her nose in a silent salute, hips angled parallel to the attack line, square with her shoulders. She danced a step forward and lunged out with the sword in a flash of steel. It was so rapid that the blade became more mirage than real. Without stopping even for a beat, she darted, turned, leaped, and slashed. She had the grace and balance of the finest Russian ballerina, and the fierceness and cunning of an experienced warrior.
Dovchenko held his breath, both frightened by and drawn to her.
She sparred for a full ten minutes, never stopping, changing sequences, flowing from one to another. Dovchenko knew little about fencing. She had attempted to instruct him once, to train him as a dueling partner, but he had given up. He could not tell a coup d’arrêt from a moulinet.
Still, at the moment, he did appreciate the sport.
Truly appreciated it.
Sweat soaked her shirt tight, gave her skin a molten sheen. It outlined every curve and swell. Her lean muscles rippled and shivered.
She continued sparring, fighting empty air.
But Dovchenko knew the space was not truly empty. It was full of ghosts from her past. He saw it in the fiery set to her eyes. Dovchenko also knew she challenged a shadow of herself, expending her frustration, needing to prove something to herself. It was motion and purpose given physical form.
Ultimately, he knew what she was doing.
She was readying herself for what was to come.
Dovchenko turned away and stared across the breadth of the convoy to the dark jungle beyond. It would be a difficult trek.
And they had their orders.
They must not fail.
THIRTY-TWO
Deep in the Amazon
IRINA SPALKO sat in the front passenger seat of the lead jeep as it rocked and bumped through the jungle. The driver was a young Ukrainian, dark-haired, dark-eyed, and not much older than she’d been when she had fled her small mountain village home.
The entire Russian convoy trailed behind her. It consisted of a dozen vehicles and sixty men. The only vehicle in front of hers was the jungle-cutter, nicknamed the mulcher. Trundling forward on tank treads, it went ahead of them all, its two massive horizontal saw blades screaming and smoking as they cleaved a path through the rain forest, cutting through underbrush and trees, choking up clouds of diesel smoke. Its operator sat high in a cab at the rear.
A trail of fallen trees and trampled mud was left behind in the convoy’s wake, but in the jungle, any trace of the convoy’s passage would be erased within the space of a couple of seasons. The jungle was a living thing, consuming all within its dark heart, swallowing the footsteps of human intruders.
Or at least that was what Irina hoped.
Somewhere out there, buried under vine and leaf, must lie the fabled city of Akator. It was the convoy’s goal but—more importandy—it was her own.
As they moved slowly forward, Spalko returned her attention to the burlap sack in her lap. She had retrieved it from a lockbox secured in the bed of the jeep. Though it was safer under lock and key, she could not leave it there. She wanted it close to her at all times. She undid the ties and opened the sack. With great reverence, she freed the crystal skull and cradled it between her palms.
In the dappled light the crystal sparked with brilliance, an electrical storm under glass. She raised it high enough to stare into its eyes. She remembered the EEG readings done on Dr. Jones: a neural stimulation of incalc
ulable strength. She also recalled the flow of bloody tears down his cheeks.
Still, she felt no fear. Both Oxley and Jones had untrained, unsophisticated minds. To handle that power, to open the gateway to vast knowledge, would require a supremely disciplined and orderly mind.
An arm reached from the backseat and over her shoulder, straining for the skull. She knocked the hand away. Dr. Harold Oxley sat in the back with George McHale. Like her, Dr. Oxley was drawn to the skull’s power. But unlike her, he had been broken by it—overwhelmed.
Lifting the skull before her eyes, she stared deeply into it again, trying to tap into that power. She tuned out the revving engines, the squealing brakes, the popping gears, and the constant scream of the jungle-cutter. She sank into a half trance. She had attempted every meditative state, every cognitive exercise. She had studied with master yogis, trained with the best parapsychologists. But when she stared into the skull’s eyes, all she saw was translucent crystal and flickering fractal patterns of light.
Why won’t you speak to me?
The truck hit a stump and bumped high. The crystal skull hobbled in her fingers, and she almost dropped it. She clutched it to her belly, her heart thudding. She quickly slipped it back into the burlap sack and snugged the ties, cursing her foolishness. The skull must not be damaged. Not when they were so close. It had been imprudent to handle it now—but the skull’s mystery nagged at her, whispered to her.
Even now she wanted to open the sack again.
A voice spoke behind her, at her shoulder. “Skull’s got a mind of its own, eh?”
She turned to face George McHale. The Brit had scooted forward on the jeep’s backseat. Behind him, a short flatbed extended, crowded with soldiers.
McHale nodded to the burlap sack in her lap. “It’s bloody choosy about who it talks to, isn’t it?”
“Apparently not that choosy.” Spalko glanced at the pitiful skeleton of the professor next to him. Dr. Harold Oxley seemed to have lost interest in the skull and now craned upward, watching the dance of morning sunlight through the canopy.
She clenched a fist in frustration. So much power. She stared at the half-demented professor. Why choose him? All the skull needed was someone stronger, someone with a trained mind.
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