Текст книги "The Mayan Secrets"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

Chapter 21

BELIZE

Sam and Remi could not tell how much influence Sarah Allersby might have with the authorities in Guatemala, but they decided she was unlikely to have anyone watching Belize for their arrival. They flew into Punta Gorda on a private jet and took a bus down the coast to Livingston, then paid a fisherman to take them upstream on the Río Dulce to Lago de Izabal, across the border in Guatemala. A visitor could enter any of the four countries of the region and deal with customs officials only once, then pass freely to the others.

They hired a second boat to take them the length of the lake. It was a vast expanse of blue-gray under a layer of clouds, and in the distance, beyond the shore, there was a wall of blue mountains. The trip was beautiful, and standing on the deck of the boat was a relief after so many miles on the road.

Sam and Remi were better prepared for their trip into the high country of central Guatemala. They had enlisted in advance the cooperation of like-minded officials: Amy Costa at the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City, and Commander Rueda of the Guatemalan national police. If the Fargos were to find any evidence that Sarah Allersby was violating the laws of the country regarding the transporting of antiquities, or had possession of the codex from the Mexican volcano, Rueda would arrest her. If necessary, he would fly in a squad of rangers to a remote area to do it.

Sam had spoken to Amy Costa on a conference call. “He agreed to that? What caused the change of heart?”

“It’s always hard to know,” said Amy Costa. “We ask for cooperation and we always hope to get it. This time we will.”

After Sam and Remi hung up, Remi rolled her eyes. “You really didn’t notice?”

“Apparently not. Notice what?”

“She walked us past about thirty offices full of old married cops and went right into the office of this handsome guy about her age who couldn’t keep his big brown eyes off her.”

“You’re saying our State Department official is fraternizing with a Guatemalan cop?”

“No, I’m saying she’s every bit as smart as she looks.”

Now they were back in Guatemala, and both of their satellite phones were programmed with the embassy number and the office of Commander Rueda. The lake was thirty-one miles long and sixteen miles wide, and as they reached the end at El Estor, Sam and Remi both felt good. Sometimes covering thirty miles in the highlands could take several days of hard climbing.

At El Estor, they hired a small boat to take them up the Polochic River, which fed the lake from the west side. It was one hundred fifty miles long, a winding, narrow stream bordered by jungle that came all the way down to the water like a green wall. It was navigable upstream as far as the town of Panzós, with an unpaved road to take them on from there.

As they moved up into the heart of the region, the forest was deeper and thicker, and the few settlements they saw seemed random, like places where people’s gasoline or enthusiasm had run out and they had decided to build shelters and stay.

Once again, Sam and Remi had come armed. They still had their Guatemalan carry permits, and Selma had arranged to have four semiautomatic pistols purchased and waiting for them in Punta Gorda. As they had on their first trip, they carried one each in their packs and the others in bellybands under their shirts. They brought considerably more nine-millimeter ammunition, including ten loaded magazines each.

Now that they were in central Guatemala, whatever they had brought in their packs would have to do. There was no going back to pick up one more item. The closest place where Selma could have anything delivered was far away in Guatemala City. When Sam and Remi reached the end of the navigable section of the river at Panzós, they saw a loaded coffee truck parked along the dirt road above the river and pointed west. They asked their boatman to serve as interpreter to ask the driver for a ride, and learned that he was the boatman’s friend. They arranged to pay him a few Quetzales in exchange for a ride to the end of the road.

The ride lasted for two days. Their host had an iPod, with all of his favorite songs on it, and a cable that connected the iPod to the truck’s radio speakers. His playlist began with songs in Spanish and then a few in English, and soon the three of them were singing loudly in whichever language came up as they bounced along the rough, rutted road westward through the forest.

At midday on the second day, they pulled into a depot where their dirt road met a larger dirt road. Trucks from other parts of the region were there unloading their coffee sacks onto a conveyor to be weighed, counted, and reloaded onto tractor-trailer trucks that drove on along the larger road. They bid an affectionate good-bye to the driver, who would soon get his turn at the scale, get paid, and go home.

When they walked off to the west, they checked their position on the GPS screens on their satellite phones. They were within twenty miles of their first-choice destination. They walked the rest of the day, heading straight for it. In the late afternoon, they crossed a game trail, and that made walking easier, although the trail angled a bit north of their destination. The vegetation was thick, and the tops of the trees stood over the trail like a line of umbrellas. There was little breeze, but the shade kept them from suffering under the sun.

They checked their position frequently and continued on the game trail. As they moved farther from the road and closer to the place they were looking for, they walked in near silence. When they needed to talk, they would stop to rest on a fallen log or a low, twisted limb, put their heads close, and whisper. They listened to the calls of birds and the screeches of the troops of howler monkeys passing overhead, trying to discern whether they’d been disturbed by human beings somewhere up ahead.

Sam and Remi had trekked through wilderness together many times, so they were comfortable moving through the Guatemalan highlands. The rhythms of the forest immediately became their rhythms. They got up as the sun was beginning to restore colors to the world, but it would not be above the horizon for another hour. They ate simply and broke camp so they could get in three or four hours of hiking before the day grew hot. They stopped when the sun was beginning to sink so they could select a site and set up their camp while they could still see. They used each opportunity to replenish their water supply by boiling and treating springwater or the water from streams. Their fires were small, made in shallow pits that Sam dug. If the wood was damp enough to smoke, they would go without the fire and eat preserved food from packets.

On the morning of the third day, the Global Positioning System on their satellite phones showed that they were close to the ruined city. They used Remi’s phone to call Selma in San Diego.

“Good morning,” said Selma. “How is it going so far?”

“We’re getting very close, so we’re calling now and then expect to be texting for a while to maintain silence,” Remi said.

“Have you seen anyone yet?”

“Not since we left the road three days ago,” said Remi. “Even then, we were the only truck on the road. Are you tracking our phones’ GPS signals?”

“Yes,” Selma said. “Very clearly. I know right where you are.”

“Then we’ll text you if we learn anything.”

“Please do,” Selma said. “I’m getting a huge e-book bill and a ghostly pallor because I don’t want to leave the office to go to a bookstore and miss your calls.”

“Sorry,” said Remi. “Kiss Zoltán for me.”

“I will.”

“Bye.”

They hung up, and the next sound they heard was so shocking in the silence that they both swiveled their heads to locate its source. There was the faint thrum of a helicopter in the distance. They tried to spot the helicopter, but they were in a low dale beneath a thick canopy of leaves that obscured the sky. The engine grew louder until its roar overwhelmed all of the natural sounds of the forest.

They knew better than to stand and climb up to see it. After a minute, the helicopter passed overhead, and Sam and Remi looked up at it, seeing the wind from its rotors whipping the leaves of the upper tree branches around wildly before it swept on to the north and out of sight. They could hear the engine at about the same decibel level for another two minutes, and then the sound stopped entirely.

“I think it landed,” said Remi.

“So do I,” said Sam. “Ready to take a closer look?”

“Going to find them is probably better than letting them find us.”

Sam and Remi put their packs in order. They loaded their spare pistols and moved them to a zippered outer compartment of their backpacks and hid Sam’s phone in another compartment. They took with them only one pistol each, under their shirts, and Remi’s phone. They hid their backpacks under thick foliage, marked the nearest tree, then moved off up the game trail.

As they walked, they did not speak, just directed each other’s attention with a nod or a simple hand gesture. They would stop every twenty yards to listen but heard only the sounds of the forest. On the fourth stop, they heard human voices. Several men were talking loudly in Spanish, their voices overlapping and interrupting in cascades of words too fast for the rudimentary Spanish Sam had begun to learn.

And then the forest ahead of them brightened. Beyond the rank of trees was a large clearing. A group of men unloaded equipment from the helicopter and carried it to a place where a sun awning had been erected. There were several aluminum cases, a couple of video cameras, tripods, and unidentifiable accessories.

They could see the pilot, standing beside the open door of his helicopter, with earphones on and a wire connecting him to the instrument panel. He spoke to someone on the radio.

Sam and Remi moved cautiously inside the forest, venturing closer to the edge. Suddenly Remi raised her eyes and pointed. At the right side of the large open area of low weeds and grasses, a high wooded hill that had been only partially visible looked different from this angle. From this side, Sam and Remi could see a stone stairway, straight and uninterrupted, running from the ground to the apex. The partial excavation of the steep hill revealed that what had seemed to be natural irregularities were layers of the pyramid. They were flat, with trees and brush growing on them, but in places the roots had dislodged stones from the structure and collapsed a corner from one level to the level below, making the profile more like a hill than a building.

This was unquestionably the step pyramid that had been depicted on the codex map and had appeared in the aerial photograph. A crew of about a hundred workmen were attacking the structure with axes, picks, mattocks, shovels, and buckets to clear the pyramid of about a thousand years of accumulated leaves, humus, dirt, and living plants. They moved quickly and swung hard, more like a demolition crew than archaeologists. They hacked away at the debris covering the pyramid. Other workers were cutting and burning brush in different parts of the complex. Their labor was baring stone structures in all directions. Sam reached to Remi’s hand, took her phone, and began to take pictures.

Remi whispered, “If David Caine could see the way this place is being pounded and abused, it would kill him.” After a minute, she noticed a platoon of armed men moving single file out of the jungle, on the far side of the complex. There were about twenty of them, all carrying rifles on slings. There were a few other armed men stationed on the upper levels of the buildings. A couple of them waved to the men just arriving.

Sam was busy taking photographs with Remi’s phone. He reviewed the shots, then sent them to Selma. He put away the phone and tapped Remi on the shoulder. They stayed low and slowly edged away from the cleared area. When they could, they stood and walked back up the game trail until they judged they were out of earshot. Sam pressed a number on Remi’s phone and then the call button.

“Policía federales.”

“Hello. This is Sam Fargo.”

“And this is Commander Rueda,” said the voice. “I’ve been keeping this line clear for your call.”

“Thank you, Commander. We’re at the coordinates we gave you before we left home. As the Mayan codex indicated, what’s here is a large city with a temple complex. We’ve been watching a crew of around a hundred men clearing away dirt and vegetation as fast as they can. There are also armed guards. A little while ago, a helicopter landed with what looks like a film crew.”

“Are they doing anything criminal?”

“They’re uncovering the buildings with picks, mattocks, and shovels without much regard to the damage they do to what’s beneath. But I’d say that the main problem so far is the one we’ve told you about. The only way that Sarah Allersby could have found this place is if she has the stolen Mayan codex from the University of California, San Diego.”

“If I send a squad of men to that location, will they find anything to charge her with?”

“I think they’ll find notes that indicate where she learned the location, or even a photocopy of the codex page, which would prove it’s been in her possession,” Sam said. “Either way, maybe police can get the workers to excavate properly and not destroy what they’re uncovering.”

“All right. I’ll send a helicopter with soldiers to check on the excavation. That’s all I can promise.”

“That’s good enough for me. Thank you.” He handed Remi her phone.

Remi called Selma. “Hi, Selma. We’ve been to the site. Have you seen the pictures? You can tell David it’s as big as he thought. Sam just called the cops to come and take a look at the terrible job they’re doing on this dig. We’re hoping they’ll also find evidence that she used the map in the codex.”

“Don’t let the police forget that it could be in a computer or her phone, or it could be disguised as something else.”

“Don’t worry. It’s a fishing expedition, and we know fish don’t all look the same.”

“Good luck.”

“Thanks. We’re on our way back to the site.”

Sam and Remi moved up the trail again to the clearing. As they crouched in the brush, looking at what must have been the great plaza of the ancient Mayan city, they heard the distant chop of another helicopter. This one came from the south like the other, but its engine sounded different. The helicopter came straight in over the jungle, hovered above the center of the plaza, and then came down not far from the first helicopter.

The four-man camera crew that had been loitering under the sun awning snatched up their equipment and trotted to the helicopter, where the rotors were just slowing down, and began to film. Among them were a soundman, carrying a microphone on a long pole, a cinematographer with a video camera on his shoulder, a lighting man with battery-operated lights and a white umbrella on a tripod, and a fourth man with a large pack who paid out a length of insulated cord that led to a box under the awning.

The helicopter’s engine stopped, and a door on the side opened. The first one out was Sarah Allersby’s security guard, who looked like a cage fighter. He was broad and muscular, wore olive drab pants and a khaki shirt, and carried a small weapon on a sling that looked like a machine pistol. He stood by with the open door at his back while the main occupant of the helicopter stepped down.

Sarah Allersby’s golden blond hair was tied straight back in a ponytail that shone on the back of her handmade, light blue cotton work shirt. She wore a pair of slacks of tropical khaki, but they were tailor-fitted. She wore tie boots designed like combat boots but made of a soft brown, polished leather. Her costume looked perfect for an adventure but would not have stood up to a strenuous hour in this jungle.

As Sarah Allersby stepped away from the helicopter, the cameraman and his assistant sidestepped along beside her, recording her arrival as if she were General MacArthur stepping off the landing craft onto the beach at Leyte. As she walked, men in jungle gear, who had been waiting for her, approached and spoke to her with exaggerated respect, bowing, and then joined her entourage as she advanced, pointing out parts of the pyramid that towered above them.

The group walked all the way to the bottom of the great stairway and climbed a few steps upward. The cameraman said something, and Sarah Allersby stopped. She conferred with the man. Then they all walked back to the helicopter.

Once again, the crew filmed Sarah Allersby, swinging her legs and hopping out of the helicopter, then chatting knowledgeably with the overseers of her excavation crew, as she walked with heroic determination to the foot of the pyramid. The cameraman stopped the action, talked to Sarah Allersby, played back some of the tape for her, and pointed out various aspects of it. They all returned to the helicopter, and the drama was repeated once more.

After the first scene, in which she took symbolic ownership of the pyramid, had been perfected, there were a few other scenes. Sarah Allersby sat at a table under the awning. She and her supposed colleagues had a large paper, unfolded and spread on the table, with stones from the nearby temple holding down the corners. She pointed at various spots on the map, or diagram, as though she were explaining her plan of attack to a group of lieutenants.

Sam and Remi could not hear what was being said, and they assumed it was beyond their Spanish comprehension, but they watched, fascinated, as Sarah Allersby documented her discovery of the ancient Mayan city.

The filming took a couple of hours. Between takes, a woman Sam and Remi had assumed to be an archaeologist when she’d followed Sarah Allersby from her helicopter, would open a large black chest and redo Sarah Allersby’s makeup and hair. At one point, the two of them entered a tent and returned a half hour later. Sarah had changed into a different outfit, a pair of designer jeans and a silk blouse. The cameraman filmed her pretending to excavate a shallow hole that had been dug before she arrived and divided into squares with strings on stakes. There were close-ups of her using a brush to clean dirt off a set of obsidian tools that had been planted in the hole for her to find.

During this process, Sam and Remi took their own brief movies of the action. But as Sam was aiming Remi’s telephone in the direction of the false dig, he saw in the viewfinder the head of one of the guards across the plaza suddenly turn toward him. The guard pointed and shouted something to his companions. Sam covered the phone. “I’m afraid that guy caught a reflection off the phone,” he whispered.

Sam took Remi’s arm and began to back away into the jungle. They could easily outrun the men, who were hundreds of yards away, but others on the pyramid repeated the alarm, and men who were only a few yards from Sam and Remi heard and dashed toward them.

“Ditch your gun,” said Sam, and they both dropped their guns in the brush and covered them with a thick layer of leaves.

“Now what?” asked Remi.

“Now we can arrive for a peaceful surprise visit with our pal Sarah instead of a shootout with thirty guards.”

Sam and Remi walked out of the jungle and onto the ground that was once the great plaza. They walked toward the pyramid with open, smiling faces, pointing up at various features and commenting to each other. Remi said, “So what do we say to them?”

“Whatever comes to mind. We’re taking up time until the cavalry arrives.” He pointed up the long staircase, and said, “That temple really is incredible, though, isn’t it?”

“Maybe we can arrange to be sacrificed instead of shot and improve next year’s harvest.”

Just as they were approaching the shallow dig, Sarah Allersby glanced up at the commotion and saw them. She threw down her brush, bobbed to her feet, and stood with her hands on her hips, her face contorted with rage. She stepped up out of the dig just as the armed men arrived to surround Sam and Remi.

The Fargos simply stopped and waited for Sarah Allersby to push through the ring of men from the other side.

“You two!” she said. “What does it take to make you leave me alone?”

Sam shrugged. “You could give back the codex or we could surrender it to the Mexican government with your good wishes. That would probably do.” He turned to Remi. “How about you? Would you be satisfied if she gave the codex back?”

“I think I would,” Remi said. “Of course I don’t agree that we’ve been bothering you, Miss Allersby. How could we possibly know in advance that you would be here today?”

The armed men who were standing by were exchanging dark looks. It wasn’t possible to be sure which ones understood English, but they seemed to see that whatever Remi had said had enraged their employer.

Sam said, “Since we’re all here, would you like to show us around the site? We’d be interested in seeing what your men have uncovered so far. Since you’re busy filming, maybe we could just walk along behind the crew.”

Sarah Allersby was so angry that her jaw muscles seemed to be flexing over and over. She stared down at the ground for a second, raised her head, and shouted, “Russell!”

From somewhere behind her, among the film people, came a voice. “Yes, Miss Allersby?”

The man who appeared had a bright red face. From the roots of his hair to the neck of his shirt, his outer layer of skin had been removed. It seemed so tender and inflamed that it hurt to look at it. Over the red skin was a thick, shiny layer of Vaseline. He wore a hat with a wide brim to keep any hint of direct sunlight off his face.

Sarah Allersby said, “These visitors want to be taken on a tour. Can you please take them on a tour?”

“I’ll be happy to, Miss Allersby.”

The man turned and gave Sam a hard push on the back to send him stumbling toward the jungle across the plaza. As a second man took a step toward Remi, she turned and caught up with Sam. The second man called out something in Spanish, and about ten of the armed men came along too.

The man with the red face wore a .45 pistol in a holster and he kept his right hand beside it as he walked, occasionally brushing the handgrip with his thumb as though to reassure himself that it was always in reach.

One of the armed escorts spoke in Spanish to the red-faced man’s companion. The man called to his friend, “Hey, Russ? He said they’re bored. If you don’t want to do it, they will.”

“Thanks, Ruiz. Tell them they can go back now. I’d like to finish this ourselves.”

“What for?”

“There are some things I like to do myself. If you don’t feel up to this, why don’t you go back with them?”

“No, I’ll stick with you.” Ruiz turned and dismissed the others in Spanish. One of the men handed him an entrenching tool, a short handle with a shovel blade. He took it, and said, “Gracias.”The group went back toward the pyramid while Sam, Remi, and their two captors continued walking.

“Maybe you should have let those guys do it,” said Sam. “It’s a lot easier to rat out two men than ten.”

“What are you talking about?” said Russell.

“You just got Sarah’s permission to kill us,” said Remi. “Once you do, then anybody who knows about it owns you. That includes all of those men who just left.”

“No,” said Russell. “They own you if they seeyou do it.”

“Oh come now,” said Sam. “You march us off, they hear gunshots, and only you come back. Not exactly the perfect crime.”

“Keep walking,” said Ruiz.

Remi said, “We’re a bit too well prepared to be the sort of people you can just kill and nobody asks questions. The United States Embassy knows the exact GPS position where we were going to be today.”

“Don’t worry about us,” said Russell. “We’ll manage.”

“By the way, what happened to your face?”

“You did.”

“Really?” said Sam. “How did I do that?”

“Your little booby trap in Spain. The blue ink didn’t come off, so I had a chemical peel.”

“Does it hurt?” asked Remi.

“Of course it hurts. But it’s feeling better every second. Pain is easier to take when other people feel it with you.”

He led them into the jungle, and they walked on a path that took them through thick stands of trees and across a couple of ditches that must have been streams during the rainy season. When they were a mile or more from the archaeological site, they reached a secluded valley with a dry streambed at the center of it. Russell said to Ruiz, “Give him the shovel.”

Ruiz kept his distance and tossed the small olive drab tool at Sam’s feet.

“Dig,” said Russell.

Sam looked at Russell and Ruiz, never at Remi. He was beginning the process of getting them to forget about her. Sam and Remi had, for some years, known that when they were in dangerous places, they were always possible targets of kidnapping, robbery, or other violence. They had discussed and practiced a number of different tactics to use in tight situations and many of them involved getting opponents to underestimate Remi.

She was a slim, delicately beautiful woman. She was also very smart. Now Remi was waiting for the proper moment to do what she had always done in athletic competitions: match her superior reflexes, speed, balance, flexibility, and coordination against an opponent who didn’t dream that her advantages even existed and who was – only for the moment – living under the mistaken impression that all the advantages were his.

Sam dug. He was right-handed, and he pushed the shovel’s blade in with his right boot, lifted the dirt and tossed it to his left, the side where their captors stood. He didn’t look directly at them or at Remi, but he could see that she had already picked out the right kind of stone. It was at her feet, and she had worked it free as she’d sat there, looking weak and weepy.

As he dug, Sam thought he heard the faint sound of a helicopter. No,he thought. It’s more than one this time.The sound was deeper and throatier, and, as they approached, he became sure they weren’t Sarah Allersby’s helicopters.

Ruiz looked up in the air, but the tall trees formed a roof above them. Ruiz observed, “That noise could help cover a gunshot.”

As Sam and Remi both instantly knew he would, Russell reflexively turned to look in their direction while he considered Ruiz’s suggestion.

Sam moved his shovel in exactly the same arc as he had fifty times before, except faster and higher, and propelled a few pounds of fine, sandy dirt toward Russell’s raw, wounded face. Then he charged out of the shallow hole, swinging the shovel toward Ruiz’s legs.

Russell raised both hands and forearms to fend off the dirt flying toward him. That kept his hands up and far from the pistol in its holster at his belt, and it kept his eyes closed as Remi hurled the stone at him and leapt.

The stone hit the side of Russell’s head and knocked him off balance. Remi leapt forward and, as Russell toppled, she was already plucking the pistol out of his holster.

Sam completed his swing, slicing the shovel in hard at Ruiz’s right leg. The fear made Ruiz jump to avoid it, and the impact brought him to the ground. As Ruiz reached for the pistol stuck in the front of his belt, Sam jabbed that hand with the shovel blade, dropped his knees on Ruiz’s chest, snatched the pistol and stepped backward, aiming at Ruiz.

The helicopter rotors beat harder and louder as Sam and Remi stood over their two injured opponents.

“Now that we’ve got them, what do we do with them?” asked Remi.

“Hold this.” Sam handed her his pistol so she now had one pistol aimed at each fallen enemy. Sam knelt, tugged off the two men’s boots, then pulled the long leather laces out and used them to hog-tie the two. He stood. “I guess that’s the best we can do for the moment,” he said. “We’ve got to get back to the site while they search. We’re the only ones who’ve seen the codex.”

Sam walked up the jungle path, carrying the two pairs of boots. Remi looked back once at the two incapacitated men, then hurried after him.