Chapter Nine
Sam turned to meet Tom’s hard and steely gaze.
“Maybe we took a wrong turn?” Tom said.
Sam swallowed. “You think we were supposed to go right back there?”
“No. But it is looking more like a possibility.” Tom shrugged, as though he was indifferent to having to fight his way back through hundreds of attackers.
Sam faced the precipice, searching for another option. Something that didn’t involve killing more than a hundred Pirahã guards who were most likely being used as slave-workers by the Master Builders.
His eyes focused on the sandstone ledge. It narrowed as it reached the end, before disappearing completely. Above and below, the vertical cliff was smooth with no indents carved into it to form hand holds, or metal climbing rungs, like those he’d seen along the Via Ferrata in the Dolomite Mountains of Italy. Heck, there were so few natural cracks in the rock that he doubted many professional rock-climbers could scale the wall.
Then he stopped. Because something silver flickered in the early sunlight. It was so small his eyes had skimmed past it multiple times before.
Sam grinned. “Would you look at that!”
Tom asked, “What?”
“At the end of the ledge, about five feet high – there’s the eye of a climbing bolt.”
“So there is… too bad we didn’t bring about eight hundred feet of rope.”
Sam put vertigo aside and carefully walked along the narrow ledge until he reached the end of the sandstone precipice. He touched the climbing bolt. It was hot. A certain sign that someone had only very recently run a lot of rope through it very quickly.
He leaned over the ledge.
A hundred feet below, someone was pulling the excess rope into a separate tunnel. The man glanced up at him. Despite the distance, Sam met his eyes. There was something sinister and evil about the stranger’s look.
He could just make out the man’s smile.
Sam withdrew his MP5 from his shoulder. With reckless abandon, he aimed the weapon, as though he might still get to kill his attacker before he most certainly became overrun by the Pirahã guards. He aimed the submachine gun and squeezed the trigger.
The small burst of bullets fell harmlessly several feet short of his intended target. The stranger smiled, amused by Sam’s audacity, and then disappeared inside the separate tunnel.
Sam swore.
Tom said, “At least now we’re only a hundred feet short.”
Sam looked down at the small opening in the cliff far below. “It may as well be a mile.”
A strange humming sound resonating from the crevasse behind them changed its pitch. Both of them swung around with their weapons aimed at the hidden entrance. Something had changed. Despite the difficult and narrow climb, they had no doubt the army of temple guards would eventually overcome the unique route.
With the distant rumble of the combined war cry in the background, a new, higher pitched wail suddenly shot out of the opening. The obsidian blade was the first thing Sam saw. It jabbed forward toward the ledge, before its owner ran out at full speed – and over the cliff.
The warrior continued to scream his strange war cry as he fell. His voice became distant until they could no longer hear him, and he eventually disappeared into the canopy of the jungle far below.
Tom said, “That poor man simply ran to his own death. He didn’t even stop his war cry after he’d gone over the edge!”
Sam’s heart pounded in his chest. He swallowed hard. “What a horrible waste of life.”
There was no time to discuss a plan, or the morals of killing innocent people from the Pirahã tribe who’d been enslaved by the Master Builders using a combination of hallucinogenic drugs and extremely high-frequency radio waves to persuade the Pirahã to follow their every order. Instead, another attacker came through.
This one had a spear in his hand.
Tom grabbed the weapon as the guard approached the opening. He pulled on the shaft with such sudden ferocity that it slid out of its owner’s hand.
“Stop! Stop!” Tom shouted, as though he might be able to somehow get through to the man, and protect him from blindly following the orders of the Master Builders.
The man looked at him, his eyes fixing upon Tom’s.
Sam shouted. “That’s it! You don’t have to do this. You don’t want to fight us…”
“Look at me!” Tom continued. “We don’t want to fight you…”
The warrior focused on Tom’s face and ran forward. Tom lowered the spear – and the Pirahã guard impaled himself on his own weapon.
The man looked up at them, his eyes filled with confusion, as though whatever magic spell he’d been under had now passed.
Tom said, “I’m sorry.”
And the man fell forward into the jungle eight hundred feet below.
Tom fired a few short bursts into the cavern, trying to stop the next set of attackers from following. His eyes glanced at Sam. “Why don’t they stop?”
“They never will. It’s not that they don’t want to. They simply can’t. They have no more free-will than a puppet.”
Tom checked his last magazine. “I’m nearly out!”
Sam removed the magazine from his MP5 and glanced at the bullets housed inside. “I have four shots left.”
“Great. So, we have about ten shots between us. We’d better make them count. How many Pirahã do you think there are?”
“Billie said there were around four hundred in the Maici River of the Amazon when she was there. Inside the temple earlier, she thought the entire tribe must have been moved here recently to guard the temple.”
“Okay. Now that’s ten shots for about three hundred eighty Pirahã warriors, taking into account the twenty or so who might have gotten stuck or killed trying to reach us. What are our odds?”
“Impossible.”
“Exactly.”
Another warrior slipped through the narrow gap, and Tom shot him in the head. He turned to Sam. “Have you got any other ideas?”
“None that come to mind, presently.” Sam continued to search the sandstone rock face for any cracks or openings through which they could somehow escape. “You hold them off… and I’ll see what I can find.”
Tom laughed. “All right. You want me just to hold the army here while you do your thing?”
“That would be good.”
Fifty seconds later, the best solution Sam could work out was that they might have a better chance at defending themselves at the narrowest section of the ledge. It was then that he heard the distinct sound of the tiny hammer inside Tom’s MP5 clicking as it struck an empty cartridge.
Tom said, “I’m out.”
Sam removed his own magazine and threw it. “Take this.”
Tom inserted the magazine into his weapon. A moment later, Sam heard the sporadic shots get fired, until the last round was finally released.
Sam raced to help Tom.
Tom and a Pirahã warrior became entangled in a death struggle. The warrior gripped Tom by the throat.
The loud report of a sniper rifle filled the ancient valley.
And a red mist defiled the sandstone face of the Tepui Mountains. The strong and wiry frame of the Pirahã warrior spasmed, and then relaxed, before the entire body slumped to the ledge. Tom stepped back, quickly, and teetered briefly at the edge.
Sam turned to the open expanse, where a dark experimental stealth helicopter silently approached.
Chapter Ten
The shadow of the Black Hawk shrouded the golden wall of sandstone.
Sam looked up. With its long rotor blades turning overhead, the Black Hawk couldn’t get close enough to the vertical wall to throw them a rope. Instead it circled overhead and fired a short burst of several hundred rounds via its Gatling style heavy machinegun into the opening through which the Pirahã were now swarming out. A few moments later, the helicopter banked away from the cliff and increased its altitude, before finally landing on the sandstone t
abletop high above.
Two ropes were then dropped right next to them.
Sam smiled. “I told you something would turn up!”
Tom matched his grin as he tested that the rope was secure. “So you did.”
Neither of them had to be told to hurry up. The next group of attackers would swarm out through the crevasse any minute, and by that stage they both needed to be out of the range of even the best spear thrower.
Sam looped his pre-tied harness prusik around the static rope and then through his harness with one hand and hauled himself upward to rest on it while he drew his knees upward. He secured his foot prusik to the rope and slipped his feet into the loops at the bottom, then stood upright close to the static rope while moving the harness and foot prusiks up. He repeated the move, inching up the static rope like a caterpillar.
Tom looped onto the second rope and started to climb quickly. Despite his weight, Tom was able to ascend remarkably quickly.
Fifteen feet above the ledge, Sam spotted a single Pirahã warrior climbing out of the crevasse. The warrior ran his eyes along the ledge, down and then up. An instant later, he threw his spear.
“Watch out!” Sam yelled, and quickly shimmied another few feet up the rope.
Next to him, Tom made a slight grunt sound.
“You okay, Tom?” he yelled.
“Just a scratch. But I’d like to put some more distance between us and any of the Pirahã guards before they get another lucky shot in.”
“Agreed!”
Adrenaline fueled their efforts, and Sam and Tom soon reached the top.
Genevieve looked at Tom’s leg wound. “That looks painful.”
Tom smiled. “I’ve had worse.”
Sam glanced at his friend. There was blood oozing out of a small wound to his left thigh. “That looks like more than a scratch.”
Tom shrugged. “I’ll get a tetanus shot, antibiotics, and some stiches and it’ll be fine.”
Veyron stepped forward. “Are you sure you’re all right? You look pretty pale.”
Sam studied Tom for a second. His face was ashen, and small beads of sweat had formed on his forehead. “Okay, let’s get him into the back of the Black Hawk.”
Sam looked over his shoulder. “Genevieve, are you alright to fly us back to the Maria Helena, while Elise stiches up Tom’s leg?”
“Yeah, I’m on it,” she replied.
Sam waited until Veyron climbed into the navigator’s seat and then closed the side door.
In the back of the Sikorsky helicopter, Elise was already in the process of opening the suturing kit. She looked at Tom, “This might hurt a bit…”
Billie studied the stone tablet without looking up, either unaware that Tom had been injured, or indifferent. She smiled broadly, as she studied the ancient map, waiting for its secrets to be revealed.
Genevieve climbed into the cockpit and switched on the main power. The rotors started to turn. She waited until they built up take-off rotation, and then pulled up on the cyclic collective and took off over the tabletop.
Chapter Eleven
The helicopter flew low and silently north.
Its dark shadow whipped across the tops of the ancient jungle canopies, which made up much of Venezuela. In the cockpit, Genevieve and Veyron were focused, but now settled into their flightpath. In the back, Tom slept well. Elise had cleaned the thigh wound and then sutured it shut. A small drip containing antibiotics and some colloidal fluids slowly ran down a small priming line into his vein. He would be sore for a few days, but he’d recover well. Elise and Sam both attempted to rest sitting up, but their constant subtle movements, and intermittent opening and darting of their eyes, suggested neither was capable of achieving it.
Despite being awake for nearly twenty-four hours now, Billie didn’t even attempt to rest. Instead, she spent the flight back to the Maria Helena poring over the ancient stone tablet under the beam of a small flashlight, unable to look away from the mysterious inscriptions.
The tablet was made from a single piece of pitch-black jet lignite. The soft rock only scored a three out of ten on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness, making it easy for the ancient Master Builders who worked on it to carve into its soft mineral. It had been polished and cut precisely into the shape of a rectangle.
There was no written description on the surface. A series of fine lines were precisely engraved into the ebony-colored piece of stone, so fine that they were more easily felt than seen against the darkness. They ran both horizontally and vertically, giving it the appearance of a map showing the parallels of latitude and the meridians of longitude.
The Greek symbols for Theta, Sigma, Phi, and Omega were etched in gold, with one at each corner. Below each of those were the four horses, intricately carved out of stone or ivory to represent the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
She studied the first one. It was made of ivory, and its rider carried a sword and wore a crown of thorns. Billie noted the reference to the White Horseman – AKA the Conqueror. The second one was made of pure obsidian. Its rider was carrying a set of scales carved from solid gold, which represented the changing value of barley during the reign of Famine. The third was made of a solid piece of red garnet, which was expertly crafted into the shape of a horse and rider. In the rider’s right hand was a broadsword, identifying him as the biblical reference to War. The last horse was made of jade. Its rider carried a scythe. And although some people believed that he rode a pale horse, ashen, or black horse, of all the horsemen his purpose was undisputed – he was the harbinger of Death.
Despite the terrifying meaning behind the biblical references to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the sight brought reassurance to Billie. Eight weeks ago, when Sam and Tom were trying to track her down and rescue her, Sam uncovered a series of temples, and an ancient covenant based on the Four Horsemen. The covenant dated back to 286 A.D. when Grigori the Illuminator made a pilgrimage to Mount Ararat. What he discovered high up in the twin volcanic peaks, was enough for Armenia’s then King Tiradates III to have him thrown into the deep dungeon of Khor Virap, and left to die in solitude where his story could never be told.
Billie thought about that story…
A great harbinger of Death was slowly approaching Earth. Left unhindered, the evil fire from the sky would burn its way through all life on Earth. But the Gods had left the Four Horsemen to protect mankind.
The constant whine of the helicopter’s engine softened, and she felt the Black Hawk descend at the northern end of the Tepui Mountains. The nose of the helicopter dipped, and they descended into the valley below, where the dense vegetation of the Amazon jungle ran by at eighty knots, in a mirage of deep green.
Her mind returned to the stone tablet.
Within the inky black canvas were a scattering of identical blue sapphires. Despite the morning’s light, which now filtered through the helicopter’s windows, she used her flashlight to examine the precious gemstones. They sparkled wickedly under the beam of her flashlight, like a series of stars in the night’s sky.
She switched off the flashlight and stared at the stone tablet in the natural light. A curious grin filtered across her open mouth. The entire image looked like a giant constellation of stars. There was a total of twenty-two sapphires.
But what constellation is it?
Her eyes flicked across the rest of the tablet. In addition to the twenty-two precious blue gemstones, there were five empty indentations, where she suspected previous sapphires were once fixed. She brought the stone tablet up to her face so that she could examine one of the empty indents. It looked as though something had once been there. She could even make out the remnant of some sort of cement most likely used to glue the radiant gems in place.
The discovery hit her like a bomb.
There had once been a total of twenty-seven sapphires.
Five were now missing.
Billie looked up. Sam’s breathing was deep and irregular. The previously taut expression in his face was
now relaxed, as though he’d finally slipped off into a peaceful dream.
She nudged him with her leg. “Sam. Wake up!”
Sam’s eyes shot open, and he sat upright. “Did you find something?”
“Maybe.” Her voice wasn’t certain. More prying, instead. “How many of the ancient Master Builder temples do you know for certain have been destroyed?”
Sam blinked his eyes, still trying to wake from his sleep inertia. “What?”
“The Builder’s temples. How many do we know for certain have been destroyed in recent years?”
Sam’s blurry eyes darted across to the other crew, all resting in the back of the helicopter. “Three. Atlantis sunk. The one in the Mediterranean Sea was swallowed by the incoming tide. And the one beneath the Gulf of Mexico imploded.”
“That’s all of them?” she asked.
With her eyes still firmly closed, Elise said, “No. There have been five destroyed, although there may have been others that we don’t know about. Including the three that Sam listed, there were also the one in Tunguska in the Siberian Taiga, which was bombed from above. And the one in the Khyber Pass, in Afghanistan, which was destroyed by militants shortly after Sam first investigated it all those years ago.”
An engaging smile formed on Sam’s lips. His piercing blue eyes were now wide awake with interest. “All right. So, there’s five. Why do you ask?”
Billie handed him the tablet. “There are twenty-two stones implanted in small indents within the jet lignite.”
“And?” Sam asked.
“There are an additional five indents without stones. When you examine them closely, you will see a small bit of silvery powder, the remnants of a very old form of glue.”
“It looks like someone has gone to the effort of removing the gems?” Sam asked.
Billie nodded. “Exactly.”
“Or it’s just a coincidence, and five stones were randomly lost from the ancient artifact.”
“That’s always a possibility,” she acknowledged. “You want to hear a more likely theory?”
“Shoot.”
“This is a map of the world. Each of these gems represents a temple constructed by the Master Builders and interconnected by the strange power of the looking-glass. There were originally a total of twenty-seven indents filled with blue gems. Now there are twenty-two. Someone’s been removing a corresponding gem every time a temple has been destroyed.”
Code to Extinction Page 7
