by Rob Jones
Blanco kicked some of the smaller rocks and they tumbled over the edge into the black. He followed their passage with his flashlight beam. Fifty meters below them was a rugged cleft, channelling down toward a deep inner gorge.
At the bottom, they got a better look at the unmistakable outline of a vast and awe-inspiring pyramid. As they searched the area with their flashlights, more details started to emerge from the gloom. Four stone edges trailed away from the pyramid’s apex and stretched down into a dusty and barely visible network of streets and alleys.
“Damn,” Amy said. “Would you look at that?”
“That thing has to be bigger than the Great Pyramid at Giza, right, Max?”
But Hunter was speechless. His eyes crawled all over the confusing images he was seeing below, lit periodically by the random sweeping patterns of the team’s flashlight beams.
“You okay, Max?” Amy asked, touching his elbow.
Startled, he looked across at her. “Yeah, sure. I just can’t believe we found it. It’s the most incredible thing I ever saw.” He passed the beam up over the dense latticework of tropical plants knitted over the top of them where the sky should be. Vines and bromeliads twisting and writhing and hiding the entire lost city from the rest of the world for endless centuries. “No wonder we never found it with any sodding satellites.”
Blanco jabbed a meaty finger down at the pyramid. “We need to get down there, Max. Your old army buddy is right on our asses, but if we get the statue, I still think we’ve got a chance to get out of here alive.”
“He’s right.” Hunter removed his hat and wiped sweat from his brow. Slapping the hat back down he took a deep breath. “Brodie’s getting more insane by the year. I honestly think he’ll murder us all if it means getting the statue.”
“Exactly,” Fidel said. “Look what he did to Gerardo. We need to move.”
Hunter peered over the ledge. Sweeping his flashlight from right to left he found what looked like their only chance – a narrow crumbling path twisting down into the darkness. Looking back over his shoulder he saw six faces looking back at him, scared yet full of hope and excitement.
“We all good?” he asked.
“Never felt better,” Amy said.
“Don’t worry about me,” said Blanco. “I’m always up for a challenge.”
“Me too,” said Fidel.
Lewis, Jodie and Quinn looked less certain until they heard the eerie echo of McCabe’s voice barking orders at his men back in the tunnel.
“Let’s do this,” Lewis said.
Quinn shuddered. “You twisted my arm.”
Jodie’s eyes sparkled. “There could be treasure down there, right?”
“Once a thief, always a thief,” Quinn said.
“Probably,” Hunter said, leading them down. “Unless it’s already been looted.”
A few minutes later, the path became clearer and wider and took them straight to the base of the pyramid. Towering above them, it dominated the entire space. From down here at street level they were able to see that most of the roads in the lost city led to one of the four sides of its base.
“Is that the entrance?” Lewis asked.
Hunter looked to where he was shining his flashlight and nodded. “I think so. Let’s take a closer look.”
When he brought his foot up and finally stepped on the lowest step at the pyramid’s base, he felt something like a jolt of electricity go through him.
“What is it?” Amy asked.
“Just nerves, I think,” he said. “I feel like Neil Armstrong or something.”
He led the team up the steps to a rectangular slab built into the side of the giant edifice’s south side. Moss grew in the interstices at the edge of the slab, but when he slid his hand over the smooth stones in the center, he saw the same carved symbols he had discovered back inside the tomb under the Gates of Nineveh.
“We’re in the right place,” he said, blowing a thick layer of dust from the symbols. “And the good news is I can read what’s written here because I’ve seen it before, back in Iraq.”
Amy stepped closer to him until they brushed shoulders. “Really?”
“Uh-huh. If I push them in the correct order this slab should move away and reveal an entrance. Ra, Osiris, Set…”
“Wait, aren’t they Egyptian gods?” Quinn asked.
As the slab ground open, Hunter looked over his shoulder at her. “Sure, didn’t you hear what I just said? I saw these same symbols in Iraq. Clearly they’re not just Egyptian gods, but much older than that. Those names are just the Egyptian words for them. No doubt the people who built this pyramid had other names for them.”
“But how the hell can a picture of Osiris be carved into a stone slab on a pyramid in the middle of a ravine in El Salvador?” Quinn asked. “I know enough to know that is just plain old crazy.”
Jodie rolled her eyes. “That ship sailed when we found the world’s biggest pyramid hidden here, dude.”
“No time for this,” Hunter said. “I haven’t got all the answers, but I know a big deal when I see one. We need to get in here and get the statue before McCabe. The Q and A session is at the hotel if we get out alive.”
“Please say when we get out alive,” Quinn said.
“Fine, when we get out alive. Let’s move.”
The short tunnel from the entrance opened into a landing at the top of a flight of stone steps. Hunter led the way to the bottom, where he was shocked to see a perfectly flat pool of water stretching out into the shadows of a stone antechamber. Dotted across them were thirteen steppingstones.
“Did not expect that.”
“What is it?” Fidel asked.
“We have to cross them to get to the other side, I guess.”
Amy looked at him. “And you were top of your class?”
He turned and sighed. “You want to go first?”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Holding on to the wall, Hunter stepped down onto the first stone. It instantly gave way and he grabbed hold of the wall to stop himself tumbling in. At the same time, darts fired out of the ceiling above them and punctured the surface of the water where the steppingstone had been.
“That was uncalled for,” he said. “And very unwelcoming.”
“So what now?” Quinn asked.
“We go through the water,” he replied. “No other way.”
Taking care not to tread on any more of the steppingstones, Hunter led them cross the pool, knee-deep in the freezing, muddy water. Amy was right behind him, at the head of her team, her legs slowly going numb.
“I see another antechamber,” Hunter called back. “It looks natural.”
“I really should not be in a place like this,” Quinn mumbled. “I’m just not built for it. I bet there isn’t even any Wi-Fi down here.”
“Are you kidding?” Hunter said. “This place is hundreds of feet inside a ravine and —”
“She’s kidding, Max,” Amy said.
“Ahh.”
They made it through the final antechamber and found a larger chamber with stone walls covered in bas-relief depictions of various gods from ancient Egypt and Sumer. There were others even Hunter didn’t recognize. With no time to study them, they quickly crossed the chamber to a door on the other side and opened it onto what looked like some sort of treasury.
“Whoa,” Quinn said. “You got your treasure, Jodie.”
Hunter struggled to process what he was seeing. Endless piles of gold and silver ornaments and jewellery sparkled in their flashlight beams. As they moved the beams around the room and tried to take it all in, the beams threw shadows from the mysterious cache up on the walls, adding to the eerie atmosphere.
Hunter walked deeper into the room. Amy saw his eyes were staring at something, unblinking and almost wild. When she called out to him, he didn’t hear her.
“And there it is,” he muttered. “The third Winged Guardian.”
Sweeping his flashlight be
am up through the treasure onto what looked like an altar, he illuminated the strange peachy-silver angel for all to see. As he reached up and took hold of it, a low, hideous howling noise filled the chamber.
Fidel made the sign of the cross over his chest and head. “I don’t like this, Dr Hunter. I think we should get of here. I think we have angered something ancient and dark.”
“Relax, Fidel,” Hunter said. “This angel was sitting on some sort of hole. When I picked it up, I broke a kind of seal and allowed air to flow from the main entrance to whatever the hell is down there.”
“Sure,” Amy said. “But what is down there?”
Hunter shrugged and angled his beam down into the hole. “Beats me. Maybe we should check it out?”
“Well I’m not stupid enough to stick my hand in that thing, that’s for damn sure.”
Hunter could hardly blame her for that. He stared back inside the hole and scratched at the stubble on his chin. “Yeah.”
“It’s still howling,” Jodie said. “Not liking that.”
“We need to go, Max!” Blanco called out. “We got what we came for.”
“Okay,” Hunter said, turning. “We should be able to…”
He froze.
“What is it?” Amy asked.
Hunter said nothing, but raised his flashlight higher on the wall behind the altar. When they saw it, everyone gasped.
“Holy crap,” Lewis said. “Is that a statue of an Egyptian pharaoh?”
“Hunter?” Amy asked.
He was walking toward it, his boots crunching on uncut emeralds and diamonds. “Yes, it is. Ramesses X to be exact, and he seems to be in front of a model of some sort of landscape. Get some pictures right away.”
“Is that significant?” Jodie asked as Blanco took photos of the statue from every angle.
“We just found a statue of an Egyptian pharaoh in El Salvador, nutsack,” Quinn said. “What do you think?”
Jodie squared up to her and pushed hard against her shoulders, forcing the young goth to step back and regain her balance. “I think you should shut your stupid little vampire face.”
“Enough!” Amy said.
“What’s that in its hand?” Blanco walked over and pulled a papyrus from its stone fingers. He handed it to Hunter who unrolled it. “This is way over my head. I’m no expert on Egyptology, guys,” he said, scanning through even more indecipherable hieroglyphs. “But I know a man who is. We need to take this to him. Finding references to gods is one thing, but Ramesses X was only three thousand years ago. This means whoever built this place was travelling to and from Egypt as recently as then.”
“I want to leave,” Quinn said, still scowling at Jodie. “Right now. I joined this team – correction – I was blackmailed into joining this team for my computer skills. How the hell I ended up in the freaking land that time forgot, I neither know nor care.”
“She’s right,” Lewis said. “We should go. We have what we want. At least this way we can get away before McCabe gets here.”
Amy’s face fell as she pointed to the entrance. “We’re too late.”
Hunter turned and saw the face of Brodie McCabe move into the light of one of his team’s lanterns, cold and blue. As he moved into the chamber, a dozen men armed with submachine guns scrambled into the room and flanked him.
“Brodie, you just keep turning up like a bad penny. How many more times, I ask myself?”
“This will be last, Max. Put the statue and the papyrus down on the ground, raise your hands and turn around.”
Hunter shuffled to his left, inching closer to the Ramesses statue’s outstretched arm. “Like I said in Mosul, you bastard – if you want to kill me, then have the balls to look into my eyes. Go ahead and shoot.”
“Whoa there chief,” Jodie said. “You save that shit for when you’re on your own.”
“Have it your way,” McCabe sneered. “Kill them all.”
The men raised their guns but Hunter moved faster, heaving down on the statue’s arm and triggering a secret exit. The chamber rumbled and shook and McCabe and his men took a few steps back. Just behind Hunter, a stone block slid aside to reveal the entrance to a secret tunnel.
“Don’t just look at it!” he yelled to the team. “Get going!”
No one on the team hesitated or asked him how he knew about the hidden passageway behind the statue. In a hail of bullets, they raced into the tunnel and vanished into the darkness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
At the end of the tunnel, Hunter broke through the undergrowth and emerged into a thick mist. It enveloped him like steam in a sauna, and then Fidel tumbled out of the split in the rock and crashed into his back. Behind them inside the hidden ravine, they heard more gunshots echoing in the tunnels and the sound of McCabe’s ranting.
“He doesn’t sound very pleased, amigo,” Fidel said.
“He never does.”
“How did you know about the hidden tunnel?” he asked.
“I saw the exact same statue in Iraq,” Hunter said. “Only difference was the head. It was Nergal there, and Ramesses here, but the hand was clearly a lever in both places. Never mind that, Fidel – which way back to where we saw the choppers?”
The El Salvadorian guide pointed into the mist just off to their left. “I think if we go this way we can get to that position in a few minutes, but what about the guards?”
“We’ll deal with that when we get there.”
Amy and Quinn climbed out of the hole, reaching up to the rugged edges of the rocks with trembling hands as they heaved themselves out into the jungle. Jodie and Lewis were next with a puffing red-faced Blanco at the rear.
“Those damn guys nearly shot my ass off!” he said.
Quinn leaned back and looked at his behind. “Maybe if you didn’t leave them such a big target area…”
“Enough with the funny,” Amy said as Blanco crunched down into a swathe of mist-cloaked ferns.
“Yeah,” the big man said. “I’m very proud of my ass.”
“And now back to reality,” Hunter said. “Be in no doubt, when McCabe catches up with us, he will kill us all.”
“Reassuring,” Lewis said.
“And if he gets this.” Hunter waved the statue. “He gets the hat-trick – all three Winged Guardians – so can we make tracks over to the chopper and get the fuck out of here?”
Quinn squinted at him. “I object to the profanity, Dr Hunter. Seriously. I’m putting in a written complaint about you to UNESCO.”
“Anything that makes your motor hum, honey,” he said, “but you have to be alive to write your little complaint, right?”
“Sure.”
A bullet pinged off the rock behind her head and cut up into the misty canopy with a tinny whistling sound. Quinn started and nearly jumped out of her skin. “Holy fuck!”
“Now can we go?” Hunter said, grabbing her by the hand and yanking her away from the hole. “And by the way, I’ll be putting in a written complaint about your language to Director Gates.”
They sprinted down the length of the ravine, vanishing like ghosts in the ancient cloud forest by the time McCabe reached the tunnel entrance. As his men piled out behind him, he ordered them to open fire along the path they had beaten in the jungle.
As soon as he heard the gunfire, Fidel darted off to his left. “This way my friends!”
With McCabe and his crew on their tails, they followed the guide deeper into the trees until pulling up in a small clearing. “I think we lost them,” Amy called out, her chest rising and falling with the effort of the run.
“No way,” Blanco said, desperately scanning the trees. “They’re out there somewhere and we need to get to the other side of this clearing or we’re sitting ducks.”
They heard a sustained burst of gunfire chattering in the trees to their west. Disoriented by the mist and their desperate flight from Scorpion Ravine, even Hunter was confused. “I thought they were on our other side.”
“No, that’s right,�
�� Blanco said. “They should be over there.”
More gunfire, closer now.
“Get down,” Hunter warned.
Hunter drew his pistol and threw himself to the jungle floor. Landing with a soft thud in the moist, loamy dirt, he wiped the sweat from his eyes and tried to work out where the men had gone.
“You see them?” Jodie whispered. She had landed beside him and was holding her pistol in both her hands.
“Not yet, anyone?”
A gun exploded off to their right and a bullet ripped through the undergrowth surrounding them. They reacted fast, rolling around to face the direction of attack.
“Still can’t see the bastards,” Blanco said.
Fidel carefully got to his knees. “If I was a little higher I might just be able to see them.”
“No! Get down!”
Hunter reached out for him but it was too late. A short crackle of gunfire and some tracer lines in the mist and then a line of bullets exploded out of their guide’s back and blasted him off his feet. He crashed down into the dirt on his back, facing the canopy with wide, staring eyes. He started to mumble a Spanish prayer but died with the words on his lips.
Jodie gasped. “Someone’s running away into the jungle!”
Hunter and Blanco fired into the trees at the fleeing man. Their rounds tore through tropical ferns and orchids and buried themselves in the trunk of a giant forest oak, but the man got away.
“Damn it!” Hunter said.
“Son of a bitch took Fidel out,” Jodie said, respectfully closing the dead man’s eyes. “Now we don’t have a guide.”
“We know where the choppers are,” Amy said. “I’m more interested in how these guys are always one step ahead of us. Oh, and just who the hell they are!”
“We know who they are,” Blanco said grimly.
To underscore the bleak comment, the croaky call of a toucan echoed in the dripping canopy high above them.
“Let’s not go there,” Amy said, starting to walk again. “It’s not what we need right now.”
“That’s because it’s a crock,” Jodie said.
