by Alex Archer
With their plan made, the group finished their meal and then settled in for the night, with each of them taking a turn at watch.
Sunrise could not come soon enough for Annja.
* * *
ANNJA WAS CLIMBING high in the rigging of a sailing ship, the rain lashing against her face as she moved upward with every step. She kept her attention on the ropes in front of her, knowing one slip would mean a long fall either onto the deck or into the sea, neither of which would be good for her.
She could hear the captain shouting out orders below, but she had a hard time understanding them over the crack of the thunder overhead and the howl of the wind in her ears. It didn’t matter, really; she knew the orders weren’t for her. She had a job already—cutting down the sail on the main mast—and that took precedence over everything else for one simple reason. If the sail stayed up, they were all dead, anyway.
She planted her feet, gripped the shrouds tightly and turned her head to look out toward the vast ocean. A flash of lightning lit the sky, and for a second, she saw it silhouetted there against the darkness.
The wave that was coming to consume them alive.
Fear raced down her spine and for a moment she was frozen there, knife between her teeth, fingers clenched around the shroud lines like a corpse trapped in rigor, and it was only the realization that she would become exactly that—a corpse—if she didn’t get moving that sent her clambering upward again.
Reaching her destination, she wrapped her hand tightly about the lines, then used the other to take the knife from her mouth and begin sawing through the thick ropes that held the sail to the crossbeam of the mast. The cold rain wasn’t making it easy; her fingers were having a hard time holding on to the knife.
A frantic glance over her shoulder.
The wave was not only closer, but larger, as well.
She began to saw faster....
The scene shifted. The wave was left behind and she found herself in the dimness of the lower gun deck, cutlass in hand as she fought in the half-light against an unknown assailant.
It was the cutlass that clued her in that she was dreaming. There was only one sword she would willingly choose to fight with, and a cutlass certainly wasn’t it. She tried to get herself to wake up, but either her subconscious wasn’t listening or there was something it wanted her to see, for it completely ignored her commands and the dream continued around her, unabated. Unable to stop it, Annja simply went with the flow.
The lanterns had been extinguished earlier, and without them it was hard to see exactly who they were fighting against. What little moonlight there was showed Annja glimpses of men in tunics, carrying shields and spears. They shouted in an unfamiliar language as they charged the line of half-awake sailors....
Another scene shift and this time she found herself standing outside the hull of the Reliant in a light tropical rain, gazing back at the wreckage with a mixture of sorrow and determination. She had the sense she wouldn’t see the old girl again and that saddened her; the Reliant had been her command for the past several years and the two of them had taken care of each other for all that time. She was a sturdy ship and it wasn’t fair that she should end her days marooned in the middle of the jungle on an ignored island like this one, but there was little that could be done about it.
Filled with the sense of abandoning an old friend, she stared out into the jungle, wondering if they were out there, watching, even now. She suspected that they were. Believed, in fact, that they’d been under continuous observation ever since the storm had dumped them in this place.
So be it.
She cast about looking for the ideal spot to affix her mark. Several rocks jutted out of the jungle floor nearby and from this perspective they reminded her of a giant python. She stepped over to the first stone, the head of the snake, so to speak, and, taking out her knife, carved an arrow pointing north onto the surface of the stone. Beneath it she carved the date—1/25.
Satisfied that she’d done what she could to direct anyone who might come after her, she set off into the jungle.
From the bushes, several pairs of eyes watched her go....
* * *
ANNJA AWOKE WITH A START. Her heart was racing and her body was covered with a sheen of sweat, as if she’d just run a mile through the rain.
It was early morning, the sunlight just beginning to filter through the trees. Mists of steam rose from the jungle floor as the heat began to bake away the moisture from the night before. A glance showed Claire and Hugo still in their sleeping bags. For a moment she couldn’t find Marcos, but then spotted him sitting against the hull of the Reliant, looking outward into the trees around him; he’d had the night’s final watch. He nodded in her direction but didn’t make any move to get up, for which Annja was grateful. She didn’t want to make small talk and take the chance of forgetting some of the details from her dream. She had this crazy idea...
Annja slipped out of her sleeping bag, pulled on her boots and walked around to the other side of the Reliant. In her dream she’d been standing with the wreckage of the ship to her left and slightly behind her, so she put herself in a similar position and then began searching for the snakelike rock formation.
It took a few minutes. The rocks had sunk deeper into the earth and were hidden in part by an overgrown patch of ferns, but after some searching she found them. Once she’d located them, she moved to the stone that served as the snake’s head and began examining its surface, looking for the mark. The fact that the stones themselves were here at all had buoyed her confidence that she wasn’t totally crazy for thinking there was even a speck of truth to her dream. Now all she had to do was find the arrow....
But it wasn’t there. She searched the top of the rock, even scraping away the lichen that had grown there, looking for it to no avail.
You imagined it, her inner voice told her. You saw the rock from the deck of the ship and your subconscious just added it to your dream. There’s no mark.There never was.
She wasn’t yet convinced of that. She had that gut feeling that it should be here. But where?
She stepped back and stared at the rock for a long minute, trying to see if it was the right one. It looked right, but then again they all pretty much looked the same. Perhaps there was another stone in front of this one that was still concealed by the underbrush.
A quick check assured her there wasn’t.
Annja was about to give up in frustration when she turned back to face the stone she’d previously searched and finally saw it. About halfway down the side of the stone, partially covered in green lichen, was an indentation in the stone that was too straight to be natural.
“Got you!” she crowed as she stepped forward and brushed at it with her hand.
There, plain as day, was the arrow Captain Jeffries had carved into the face of the rock in her dream!
27
Central highlands
Cocos Island
After hearing about Annja’s dream and seeing the mark, the others didn’t need too much convincing that where the arrow was pointing was the direction they should head. They weren’t entirely comfortable with it, and several times during the morning’s march Annja would catch Marcos or Hugo looking at her with an odd expression on their face, but no one suggested that they change their course.
For the first time since arriving on the island, it rained for longer than a brief shower. In fact, Mother
Nature seemed to be trying to make up for her lack of precipitation over the preceding days. It didn’t just rain, it poured, hammering down on them like some judgment from above.
Now, more than ever, both Claire and Annja believed time was of the essence, so there wasn’t any talk of waiting for it to pass, as they normally would have. Instead, they pulled on plastic ponchos and continued on their way, moving a bit slower and more carefully.
Their path took them northward, into the slowly rising foothills surrounding Mount Yglesias, the island’s highest peak. They’d been walking for about forty-five minutes when Hugo shouted, “Look!” and pointed to a large boulder off to one side of the trail.
An arrow had been scratched into its surface, pointing northward.
Jeffries.
But even more surprising was the much newer mark scratched beneath it.
A capital letter K.
Jeffries wasn’t the only one who’d come this way. Dr. Knowles had, as well.
The sight of the marker gave them all hope, especially Annja. She had been half-convinced that Knowles and his team had been slaughtered outright, just as the sick among Captain Jeffries’s crew had been killed. As the incident with Marcos and the jaguar had shown, it wasn’t all that difficult to dispose of bodily remains out here in the middle of the jungle. In fact, it was far too easy.
Now, however, they had some evidence, no matter how slim, that Knowles was alive.
She studied the symbol for a few minutes, trying to piece together the puzzle before her. Unlike Knowles’s earlier markers, this one looked as if it had been done by the shaky hand of a kindergarten student. The K was lopsided, uneven and partially on its side. What could he have been doing to cause him to get so sloppy?
Finally she thought she had it worked out.
She imagined Knowles and his crew being taken captive. Hands tied behind their backs with crude rope made from local materials. Being marched north from the excavation site as captives of the natives. When they’d reached this point, the group had taken a break. Knowles’s keen eye had spotted the earlier marker and, after casually strolling over to lean against the same rock, had used something sharp to carve his K into the stone, all the while keeping his hands behind his back and out of sight.
Seemed reasonable to her.
Her respect for Knowles went up a notch and she still had yet to meet the man.
They got back under way, this time trying to keep their eyes on both the trail and the surrounding terrain so they wouldn’t miss any potential markers. If he’d managed to do it once, Knowles had probably found a way to do it again, Annja suspected. The trick was going to be finding the markers amid all the rain.
And unfortunately for them, the rain showed no signs of stopping. If anything, it grew worse. The wind whipped it into the open hoods of their ponchos, until water had drenched their hair and seemed to be running in a continual stream down their backs. Annja felt like a drowned rat and she knew the others must be feeling the same.
With all the water pouring down the slope in front of them, gradual as it was, the footing beneath their feet began to grow less and less reliable. Several times Annja or one of the others had to catch themselves on a nearby bush or branch to keep from having their feet swept out from under them.
When the rain showed no signs of stopping, Annja pulled Claire aside.
“This is getting too dangerous,” she told her. “If one of us slips and breaks a leg or, worse yet, gets swept away by the storm, the entire expedition will be in serious trouble. We need to stop moving and find some shelter.”
But Claire wouldn’t have it. She had grown more eager to press on since they’d found the marker from Dr. Knowles and had no intention of stopping because they were getting wet.
They hadn’t gone another fifteen minutes, however, before Annja heard a steady rumbling in the air. She’d heard it before, she knew she had, but it was hard to place given the loud, thundering rain around them.
Rain...
Annja suddenly understood what was coming toward them, and perhaps more importantly, she understood just how little time they had at their disposal.
“Find the nearest tree and secure yourself to it! Move!” she shouted.
She didn’t wait to see if the others followed suit but raced over to the closest ceiba tree she could find and anchored herself to it with an extra few feet of rope and a pair of carabiners to lock the rope in place.
Perhaps it was because of Annja’s urgency, or perhaps they simply understood the threat headed toward them was like a runaway freight train—whatever the reason, it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that they jumped to follow suit, working frantically as the sound grew louder around them and the ground beneath their feet began to shake.
Annja had just finished securing herself to a tree and was trying to see how the others were doing when the wave of water they’d been hearing headed down the mountainside. Suddenly it broke through the tree line above and rushed toward them with a vengeance.
The wave hit, breaking against the tree trunk in front of Annja with savage force, and she knew if she’d been caught in the open there was no way she would have survived. As it was, she could barely hold on to the tree trunk as the water cascaded around her and swept past on its way down the hill.
A glance showed her both Marcos and Hugo hugging trees similar to the one Annja herself was secured to, but when she sought out Claire, she couldn’t see her anywhere. Annja glanced frantically about, thinking perhaps Claire had fallen back behind them.
A scream to her right caught Annja’s attention over the thunder of the water and she glanced in time to see Claire lose her footing.
“Grab my hand, Claire!” Annja shouted, thrusting out an arm as the other woman came flying toward her.
Their fingers brushed, their hands caught, slipped...and then held.
Unfortunately, that left Claire on her back in the path of the water, bouncing around under the flow and struggling just to find enough air to breathe.
Annja had a death lock on the woman’s wrist, refusing to let go, and afterward knew that doing so had saved Claire’s life.
Thankfully, the muddy slide of water could only last so long, and just a few moments after it started, the deluge began to abate and finally ended.
When she was sure it had passed, Annja released Claire’s hand, letting the woman fall, coughing, into the mud while she untied herself. Marcos and Hugo were busy doing the same. The three of them then gathered around Claire.
Their leader was bruised, battered, but Annja’s quick action had kept her from being swept away. For that, they were all thankful.
As if to torment them, the rain began to slow shortly after the flash flood and half an hour later stopped entirely. The clouds parted, letting the sun out to begin baking everything dry in the endless cycle of the tropical rain forest. By the time they stopped for lunch, the world around them was steamy with evaporating rainfall.
They had a cold meal of previously cooked boar meat, which, in Annja’s opinion, wasn’t anywhere near as tasty the second time around. What had been mouthwatering the night before had become tougher than shoe leather and about as flavorful. Still, they needed the protein for the hike ahead and she made sure to down her portion without complaint.
The afternoon brought them into the highlands proper. Rocky ridgelines and miniature canyons began to pop up here and there amid the jungle vegetation, reminding Annja of pictures she’d seen of the South Pacific islands during the Second World War. The jungle rose over and covered everything, it seemed, even knifelike ridgelines that would have made a billy goat nervous.
A fork appeared in the trail early that afternoon, which gave the group a reason to rest for a few minutes as they debated the alternatives. The left-hand path seemed to be less steep, sloping downward slightly as it he
aded into a valley between two ridgelines. The right-hand path, on the other hand, appeared to be more strenuous, taking them higher into more rugged country.
“Check for a marker,” Annja told them, and they spread out to do so. Fifteen minutes later, however, they had to admit that if there had ever been a marker here, it was gone now.
“What do you think?” Claire asked Annja as she stood eyeing the two alternatives.
Annja wasn’t sure. Her feet were telling her to take the less strenuous path to the left, but her heart was saying to stay with the more difficult path to the right.
She stepped away from the others, closed her eyes and tried to listen to what her senses were telling her. Left or right? Valley or ridgelines?
She couldn’t explain it, but when she opened her eyes a moment later, she knew they had to continue to the right. She felt drawn in that direction, as if there was something waiting just for her around the next corner. She couldn’t leave this place without investigating for herself.
“That way,” she said, pointing.
There was a collective groan from the others, for she’d chosen the harder path, but she’d been right in all of her other decisions for the group and so they had little ground to argue. A few swigs of water to keep them hydrated and they continued on.
Almost immediately they encountered a series of switchbacks, taking them higher into the hills and deeper into the jungle at the same time. There had been no further sign that either Captain Jeffries or Dr. Knowles had taken this route, and Annja was just starting to second-guess her choice of direction when they rounded a final corner and stopped, gaping at the sight before them.
There, rising out of the dense jungle, was a completely intact Incan pyramid.
28
Pyramid of the Stars
Cocos Island
Annja couldn’t believe it. She stood and stared at the structure covered in foliage, drinking in the sight.
The pyramid was about one hundred feet in height and seemed to be in near-perfect condition. It had been built in the traditional Incan style, with large blocks of stone carved so perfectly that they didn’t need mortar to hold them together. Each of its four sides was bisected with a raised staircase that rose directly to an opening on each of the four sides of the temple structure on top. Even from this distance, Annja could see several carved pillars in the doorways of the temple, the colorful pigments that had once decorated so many other Incan monuments still visible on this one.
