His last posts contained information that had shaken them to their souls.
At his Chiapas meeting place—an unexplored site deep in Apachurero country—he believed they’d find their missing codex.
Coop allowed herself another quiet sigh. Working her way up to the cliff’s rim, she pulled herself up over the boulder-strewn, outwardly jutting cliff top. Crawling over rocks, through brush, over fallen trees toward the ruin, she surveyed the terrain, looking for intruders.
Until a blast of harsh laughter stopped her.
Hiding behind a log, she spotted the source—a group of raucously drunken bandits.
She counted at least ten of them.
Grizzled inebriated Apachureros in phony federales uniforms, they were armed to the teeth with automatic weapons and pointing at Jack Phoenix’s partially excavated temple.
Waiting for Jack Phoenix to emerge from the subterranean tunnel entrance he had written them about.
Waiting for their friend.
2
Beneath the half-buried temple ruins, Jack Phoenix crawled on his belly through an endless labyrinth of dank sandstone tunnels barely three feet in diameter. More than one thousand years old, the dark narrow passageways hid both deceased royalty and their personal treasures from grave-diggers. The designers had done their job well. With a Mini Maglite clenched between his teeth, Phoenix worked his way through the maddening maze, coughing and gagging on the dust—just as he’d done every day for the last three months—still finding nothing. Every inch of the labyrinth appeared undisturbed. Phoenix saw no indication anywhere that anything or anyone had trespassed those depths during the past ten centuries.
Nor had he discovered the skillfully concealed wall compartment that, he believed, contained Quetzalcoatl’s final prophecy.
According to the codex—which he had tracked down in Guatemala, then smuggled into Mexico—it did.
While Phoenix was rounding a sharp turn—which he’d probed and combed at least a hundred times before—his flashlight suddenly went dead, the tunnel turning dead black. Cursing his Juárez knockoff Duracells, he searched for two more AAs in his cargo pockets. After locating the positive and negative tips by touch, he shook out their predecessors and fumbled the new ones into the Mini Maglite.
He was about to twist the light’s handle and turn it on, when the high-pitched buzz of Crotalus atrox—otherwise known as the diamondback—froze him to his marrow.
He did not need the Maglite to see it. Even in the tunnel’s total dark, the viper’s eyes blazed, vicious and yellow, its vertically distended pupils stopping him cold.
When he twisted the Maglite’s head, its beam detonated in his eyes like a thousand suns, and for several interminable seconds all he could see was searing fire.
When his vision returned, he was sorry it had.
He was now staring into the snake’s gaping jaws—at its two dripping, five-inch fangs lazily unfolding from the roof of its mouth, its thin bifurcated tongue flicking in and out, in and out. Thick as Phoenix’s forearm, the scaly reptile’s ten-foot body twisted and undulated toward him with infinite lassitude and indolent grace.
Until the snake abruptly halted and coiled . . . two short feet from his face.
Paralyzed with terror on the tunnel floor, Phoenix could only stare fixedly into its fiery orbs—at the bony humps protruding above the sockets, at the spade-shaped head levitating above the writhing coils, and at the segmented tail banging against the tunnel floor . . . all the while shuddering at its vibrating whirrrr! Zig. Zig. Zig. Zig-zig. Zig-zig. Zizzz. Zizzz. Zzzzzzz. Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Do something!
Phoenix kept a Randall Bowie with a thirteen-inch blade in his boot, but how do you knife-fight a diamondback in a three-foot-wide tunnel? Even worse, the Maglite in his teeth—as if taking on a life of its own—was now bobbing up and down, mesmerized by the snake’s own levitating head.
Christ, the damn thing is charming me.
Get with it. Shake off your stupor, you somnambulant bastard.
Suddenly the beam from his Mini Mag began to flicker, dim, fade.
Those goddamn Juárez batteries.
He kept a small flat .32-caliber Beretta shoved beneath his belt in the small of his back. Phoenix had to reach for it. He had no other options—even though a pistol shot in these close confines could easily blow out his eardrums.
His hackles horripilated at the thought.
Quit whining. You’ll probably miss the son of a bitch. What are your choices, anyway? You miss it, you die. You don’t shoot, you die? If you kill it and live, maybe you go deaf.
So what? You never hear anything worth listening to, anyway.
Do it!
His gaze still locked on the burning orbs, he slipped the automatic from the back of his pants and the bowie out of his boot. As nonthreateningly as he could, he gripped the knife blade between his teeth and leveled the pistol at the snake’s weaving head. Easing back the slide, he gingerly pressed the trigger just as the snake hissed, reared back, and—and—and—sprang!
At his face.
3
Crawling up one at a time, Coop’s friends joined her at her new observation post behind two massive boulders. Behind a V-shaped crevice where the two rocks touched, Jamesy immediately positioned himself with a pair of binoculars.
“I count ten of them,” he said.
Taking Jamesy’s place in the crevice between the two boulders and peering through the binoculars, Hargrave said: “In uniform.”
“In fake federales uniforms,” Coop pointed out.
“With automatic weapons,” Jamesy added.
“I spotted two outliers,” Coop said. “Sentries, maybe . . . though they seem more focused on their friends than on their perimeter.”
“Friends who are waiting for Phoenix by the tunnel,” Reets said.
“They have AKs and sidearms,” Hargrave said, handing the binoculars back to Jamesy.
“They’re better armed than the ones in the Chiapas canyons,” Jamesy said, focusing the field glasses. He was referring to their last Apachurero firefight.
“And there’s more of them here,” Coop said.
“Too many,” Reets said.
Putting down the binoculars, Jamesy turned to her and stared. “You want your friend walking away from that ruin?” he asked.
Now it was Reets’ turn to stare.
“I assume you still want that codex?” Hargrave said. The question was rhetorical.
“Reets has a point,” Coop said, taking up for her friend. “They have a lot of firepower.”
“This time we have grenades, and except for the two sentries, they aren’t spread out,” Hargrave said.
“Sentries,” Jamesy said contemptuously.
At the word sentries, he slipped the Gerber Mark II combat knife from the sheath strapped to his outside right calf. He was staring absently at its 7.5-inch, dagger-shaped blade; its knurled, foil-molded grip; its two-inch-wide oval cross-guard; and the rounded ball at the butt’s tip—then he resheathed it.
“Jamesy and I will work our way around,” Hargrave said, “and flank them on the side.”
Hargrave took the two combat shotguns out of the packs at his feet—both of them SPAS 12-bore semiautomatic Franchis, each with the short illegal eighteen-inch barrel and the folding stock, which could be locked at a right angle and braced under the forearm. The stock then allowed the shooter—if he was strong enough—to fire it from behind cover with only one arm exposed. Their bodies—obviously much larger targets—would still be concealed behind cover.
Which, given the Apachureros’ superior firepower, might prove to be the decisive factor—their final margin of survival.
“The ones we don’t get will position themselves behind the deadfall,” Hargrave said, pointing to some fallen trees.
“They’ll also head toward that stump to the deadfall’s right,” Jamesy said.
Hargrave studied the bandits’ prospective cover, then separated out a box
of hot-loaded 000 depleted uranium shells out of the backpack.
“That DU buck is titanium hard,” Hargrave said.
“Harder,” Jamesy said.
“Shoots straight through engine blocks,” Hargrave agreed.
“And hits like a .90 caliber,” Jamesy added.
“After we hammer them with the grenades,” Hargrave said, “we’ll come in close with the triple-aught.”
“After mounting the spreaders on the muzzles,” Jamesy said.
Spreaders were devices that, when screwed onto the shotgun muzzles, would scatter the 000 in a pattern several feet across almost as soon as it left the barrel.
What do they need us for? Coop wondered to herself.
Hargrave then took two gun-launched grenades out of his own backpack—one of them fragmentation, the other flashbang. The two men then began shoving their hot-loaded DU triple-aught buckshot into shotgun magazines.
“Position yourself slightly to the left so you can see us. When we reach that clump of trees,” Jamesy said, pointing to a stand of pines seventy-five yards away, just to their left, “we’ll give you a sign. Then you two distract them.”
“We’ll waltz right up to them and ask if they’ve seen our friend,” Reets said.
“But don’t get too close,” Hargrave said, his eyes fixing them intently. “Those grenades throw a lot of shrapnel.”
“And the shotguns will spread like claymore mines.”
“Got your gear?” Jamesy asked.
Coop was already digging automatic person defense weapons out of their bag. Made by the Knight’s Armament Company, the KAC PDW was popular among bodyguards and other mercs who relied on concealed weaponry. Less than twenty inches long, weighing only 4.5 pounds, it was easily hidden under sport coats and fatigue jackets. Coop planned on stowing them beneath tan wool ponchos, which they’d used as sleeping bags and which Hargrave had fortuitously fireproofed before the trip.
The two men helped them load their box magazines, each one taking thirty 6 × 30mm rounds. They then loaded four extra magazines.
The women slung their PDWs from their right shoulders. Even as the two men were on their knees, crawling toward the tree stand, Coop and Reets were slipping the ponchos over their shoulders and pushing their heads up through the center holes.
4
Jack Phoenix had a high pain threshold. . . . Two decades of digging through ruins in the third world’s most depraved danger zones had tested his capacity for physical suffering all too many times, from his point of view. Nothing, however, had prepared him for this. His problem was not so much the throbbing ache in his ears and skull—that agony was slowly subsiding.
Now he faced something far more menacing—imminent death.
True, the bullet—which hit the diamondback just below the head—had killed the snake’s body. The brain, however, had lived long enough to drive five inches’ worth of venom-dripping fangs into Phoenix’s left shoulder muscle. Jack knew enough about diamondback neurotoxins to understand that a bite that close to the heart and head—while perhaps not instantly lethal—had to be promptly cut open, the venom sucked out, and diamondback antitoxin vaccine immediately administered . . . if the victim were to survive.
His only hope was Reets and Coop. He prayed they would arrive in time to treat him. Otherwise, he was a dead man.
That contingency filled Phoenix with a wall-banging, head-butting rage so all-consuming, he could not contain himself. Roaring like a gored water buffalo, driven mad by feral fury, he hammered the butt of the .32-caliber semiautomatic against the right side of the tunnel.
Three times.
With the third blow, the tunnel wall, to his eternal surprise . . . shattered.
One thousand years’ worth of stale air rushed out.
He pointed the flickering Maglite into the gaping cavity, now swirling with dust. The foul haze slowly dissipated, and Phoenix was staring at the compartment’s single occupant—an oblong ceramic urn, its wide stoppered mouth tightly sealed, its crimson surface embellished with a brilliantly painted, jet black likeness of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent. His coiled, plumed body scintillated surreally in the whirling dust motes and in the Maglite’s eerily flickering beam, his gaped blood-dripping jaws fearsomely fanged.
It was the most stunning rendition of the great Mayan god Phoenix had ever seen.
Unfortunately, the portentous portrait also reminded Phoenix of his recent encounter with Quetzalcoatl’s featherless cousin, the thought of which caused Phoenix to shudder convulsively.
Still, he could not take his eyes off the urn nor could he contain his awe. He was staring at the greatest archeological find perhaps of all time and the fulfillment of his life’s work.
The codex, which he’d “appropriated” in Chiapas, had described everything in detail—the vermilion urn, the lurid depiction of the Feathered Serpent, the location of the ruins, and the entrance to the subterranean tunnel maze.
The urn could contain only one thing:
The last of the 2012 Codices—Quetzalcoatl’s final revelation of the Mayan End Time.
As he wrestled the urn out of its crypt, his shoulder shrieked agonizing hymns of hell’s horrors, as if all Hades’ demons were now trapped inside it and kick–clawing their way out. Pulling the urn under his chest, he commenced his long, torturous crawl to the first stope, where he stopped and turned around. He then began dragging himself back through the tight, cramped tunnels toward the opening.
On that return route, he had to crawl back through the passageway where he’d fought the snake. Picking up the dead diamondback by its bloody head, he dragged it through the tunnel with him.
After all, the serpent was Quetzalcoatl’s cousin—for all he knew, his bastard son—and it had located the urn for him.
True, he was taking his life, but what was that compared to the incomparable, imperishable gift he had given him in return?
A mere pittance.
Even dead, Quetzalcoatl Jr. deserved his day in the sun. The pinioned snake had given life for the sacred codex as well.
With the red ceramic oblong urn clutched under his arm and the divine diamondback in his fist, Jack Phoenix crawled up the tunnel.
PART I
1
“Tell us a story, Pakal,” my friend Cuat said.
I shook my head and kept hacking at the brush. My friend knew the time for storytelling was at night around the meal fire, in those hours before sleep, when the Sun God had returned to his cave on the other side of the Great Western Waters.
All daylight hours were spent in work, whether in the women’s gathering and preparation of food, or the men’s stonecutting labors. Only after our stomachs were warm from maize and beans did the storytellers entertain us.
Gray Dawn, our village headman, gave Cuat a warning look. This was not a time for frivolity. A great lord from Mayapán, the city of the king, had come to our village of stonecutters, and we must ensure our worthiness in his eyes.
Lord Janaab was the king’s architect. He must approve all buildings, palaces, temples, and even city walls and roads, including the stone we cut, which was the primary building material for those projects.
My people worked the stone—that was their central task—and this day we were clearing brush in order to show the king’s architect an unusually colored outcrop. If the stone pleased Lord Janaab, we would dig below and exhume it in slabs.
We cleared a path to the site in the dense jungle brush, so the lord with many quetzal feathers could walk freely to the outcrop. We then cleared more brush, so he examined another section.
The builder wanted not only the brush cleared, but the snakes and black spiders also removed. Eyo! If he were bitten by one of the Death Lords’ poisonous pets, everyone in our village would be painted red and turned over to priests to be sacrificed.
I had never seen a great lord before, though as the village storyteller, I told many tales about them. I assumed my position as the tale-teller after the old man who
had told tales since before I was born passed to Xibalba, the Place of Fear.
Though I had never journeyed more than an hour’s walk from my village, I learned many tales of kings and wars, gods and demons from him and others who had come to the village. For reasons I could not fathom, Itzamná, the God of Maize and Cacao, who also gives us the gift of remembering tales, gave me the ability to recall more stories than anyone else in the village.
All of us villagers, except for the headman, were barefoot and wore a single loincloth—a strip of cotton as wide as a hand, wound around the waist and passed between the legs. The headman wore a cotton cape over his shoulders and a loincloth and told us what to do rather than clearing the brush himself.
Lord Janaab’s loincloth was of the finest, softest cotton—dyed green and embroidered with feathers at the edges. His pati, shoulder cape, was yellow, and his sandals were of the finest deerskin while my “sandals” were the soles of my own bare feet.
The great lord wore the most stunning accoutrement of all—his magnificent headpiece. Bearing the jade face of the Creator God, Cacoch, it was festooned with the feathers of blue and gold macaws as well as the golden green and scarlet plumage of the prized quetzal.
Even the lord’s servants and guards were garbed in finer loincloths, capes, and sandals than the headman of our village. The tips of the spears carried by his four guards were flint, and each man carried an obsidian-bladed dagger.
I was lifting a thick stout tree limb, with which to strike and clear the brush, when the roar of a startlingly close jaguar froze me. It crouched in a tree no more than twenty paces from where I stood, its torso almost as long as a man’s but more massive.
And it was white.
Incomprehensibly rare, it was the most sacred of all the beasts of the jungle.
We stood perfectly still for the briefest moment—until panic drove our feet.
Then we ran—all of us, racing in full rout from the great beast, which weighed twice as much as a grown man and could kill with a single blow.