The Mayan Secrets fa-5 Page 23

  “Hold on.” Sam handed the phone to Remi, who had their notes in her day pack. She read the coordinates to Bowen, then repeated them. She gave him her satellite phone number and Sam’s. “Tim was going to wait for us about five miles due west of our current position, on a flat space that looked as though it had been recently burned.”

  “And can you be seen from the air?”

  “We’re standing on top of a Mayan pyramid. Tim lowered us on a rescue cable, and he was going to pick us up the same way.”

  “I’m going to come get you myself. But I don’t have a chopper here with that kind of equipment on it right now. Is there a place I can land and get you?”

  “We’ll have to walk to the place where Tim landed. Everywhere else in any direction seems to be covered with vegetation.”

  “If that’s the only option, okay. But do it carefully. Don’t count on the idea that anybody you meet out there is okay. There are a lot of criminals in the wild country, where the police and the army can’t find them. I’m bringing two men with me and we’ll be armed.”

  “Thanks for the warning. We’ll do our best not to make contact with anybody. We’re heading for the landing site right now.”

  “We’ll probably get there about the same time. See you there.”

  As Sam and Remi scrambled down the side of the pyramid, they oriented themselves to the west, where Tim Carmichael had gone to land.

  Remi said, “I hope Tim didn’t catch a rotor on a tree branch or something and crash.”

  “I hope he didn’t either,” said Sam. “I couldn’t see any smoke from up on the pyramid, but there’s no guarantee there would be a fire. Anything could have happened.”

  “I hate to get all worried when we’re too far away to even know what to worry about.”

  “I’m withholding my anxiety,” Sam said. “But only to the extent that I’m leaving the first aid kit in my pack and the safety on my pistol.”

  As Sam and Remi began to be sure of their footing, leaving the base of the pyramid, they sped up. They trotted when the path was clear and walked at a strong, steady pace when the vegetation was thick. They navigated by walking toward the glare of the late-afternoon sun on the tree leaves. They estimated that, over a long period, their walking and trotting probably averaged three miles an hour, and so they kept at it for a half hour before they stopped to check their GPS position.

  They sat on a stone outcropping, drank water, and caught their breath while they reoriented themselves. They had come about halfway, and they agreed that this time they would go for fifteen minutes before they stopped again to check their position.

  They ran steadily in single file, still using the reflected sun to navigate. They concentrated on making progress, but, as time went on, they began to pay more attention to making as little noise as possible. They knew that Tim Carmichael wasn’t the type to simply show up late or to take them into the wilderness in an aircraft that wasn’t well maintained and fueled to capacity. He had a radio in the helicopter as well as a satellite phone. There was no way to know what had gone wrong until they got to the landing spot, but neither imagined the story would be a happy one. Their thoughts centered on the hope that Tim wasn’t dead.

  At the end of their third leg of silent jogging, they were very close to the patch where Tim Carmichael had said he’d land. There was no helicopter sound in the air, which meant that Art Bowen was not yet close with a second helicopter. The silence was thick and ominous.

  Sam and Remi stood cheek to cheek so that they could whisper in each other’s ears to keep their conference silent. They agreed on a plan of approach, drank more water, and moved on.

  They walked, staying low and alert, until they reached the burned land. They peered out of the thick foliage that had been spared by the fire and saw Carmichael’s Jet Ranger. It had landed in the cleared field, far from any trees that could have interfered with its rotors. The land was quite level, and the helicopter sat evenly. There was nothing out of place and there were no bullet holes. But there also was no sign of Tim.

  Slowly, Sam and Remi moved along the perimeter of the cleared area. When they had gone about a hundred yards, they stopped suddenly and listened. There were voices. At first, they wondered if they were hearing the helicopter’s radio. These were male voices speaking Spanish. The voices came from behind them.

  Sam and Remi turned to face the sounds coming from the forest. They were between the grounded helicopter and a group of men. They could see a path that had been trampled in the brush recently. The bent and broken plants still had green leaves.

  Remi gestured to Sam that she would go around the men to the right. Sam nodded and began to make his way to the left so he and Remi would be positioned on both sides of the group. They both stayed well back from the group, where they could not easily be seen and where any noises they made might be lost in the men’s conversation.

  Sam made a ninety-degree arc around the sounds, then stopped and waited. He knew Remi would already be in position. Her sure-footed fencer’s body could move through vegetation better than his. And he knew that when he moved in, he could initiate the most frightening close-in attack while Remi, the pistol champion, could do much more damage from a moderate distance. He took the pistol from his belly and began to crawl toward the voices. It sounded to him like six men and they seemed to be close, arranged in a circle. Maybe they were sitting around a fire — no, he would have smelled a fire. Around a circle anyway. What were they doing way out here?

  And then he saw them. There were actually five men in their twenties, unshaven and wearing jeans, khakis, bits of old military uniforms, T-shirts. On the ground in the center of their circle they had laid out an olive drab plastic tarp. Spread on it were Tim Carmichael’s belongings — his satellite phone, all three sets of earphones, the maps from the helicopter, his wallet, his keys, pocketknife, sunglasses.

  Set on the ground beside each of the five men was a Belgian FN FAL 7.62mm military rifle. Sam moved closer, searching for some sign of what had happened to Tim Carmichael, and then he saw him. Tim was a few feet off, at the edge of the thicker vegetation.

  Carmichael was standing, his hands tied behind his back, his ankles tied. He had a noose around his neck, the rope thrown over a thick limb of the tree above him and then securely tied to the trunk. If he got tired, he still had to stand. If he leaned, the noose tightened around his neck. His left eye was black and swollen, he had scrapes on his face and grass stains on his clothes, and his hair was stuck together on top of his head from drying blood from a blow to the skull.

  Sam worked his way around the clearing at a distance, trying hard to avoid discovery. When he was directly behind Carmichael, he slowly crawled to him through the thick jungle vegetation. Staying hidden by the trees and Carmichael’s body, Sam reached out with his knife and sawed through the rope at Carmichael’s wrists, then his ankles. He took out his second pistol, switched off the safety, and placed it in Carmichael’s right hand. Then he crawled a few feet farther and cut the rope from Tim’s noose where it was secured to the tree trunk. He tucked an inch of the rope end into the remaining loop of rope behind the tree so it would look the same.

  Sam crawled backward, retreating deeper into the brush. He took his time, selecting a spot where he, Remi, and Tim would have the men in a perfect cross fire. Now and then, one of the men around the tarp would turn and glance at Carmichael and see that he was still standing with his hands behind his back and the noose around his neck.

  When Sam judged that he, Remi, and Carmichael were each a hundred twenty degrees apart on the circle, he raised his pistol, stepped close to the circle, placed his body behind the trunk of a tree, and showed only his right eye and his gun hand. “You!” he shouted in Spanish. “Leave those guns on the ground and step away from them!”

  The men were startled and jerked their heads toward Sam’s voice. One started to raise his rifle, but Sam fired, and the man collapsed backward.

  Carmichael shouted, “Dr
op the guns!”

  Some of the men looked and saw he was suddenly free, aiming a gun at them. They set their rifles back down. One man saw this as unacceptable, pivoted with his rifle to aim at Carmichael, but Carmichael was no longer visible. He had slipped into the bushes. The man raised his weapon to aim, but a shot was fired from Remi’s side of the circle. It hit his arm and made him drop the rifle on the ground.

  The remaining men moved back from their rifles and put their hands on their heads. Sam came out from behind his tree, knowing Remi and Carmichael were covering him. He kept his gun on the men as he took each rifle and tossed it to his side of the clearing so they formed a pile.

  When Sam had the rifles, Tim Carmichael showed himself, holding Sam’s second pistol on his captors. Sam said, “Are you hurt?”

  “Just a little. None of these clowns shot me anyway.”

  “Do you know who they are?”

  “They’re as talkative as a bunch of crows, but they never said anything to reveal that. I guess they’re just a bunch of guys who saw the helicopter, knew it was valuable, and tried to take it.”

  “Is your helicopter all right?”

  “It’s fine. I thought I’d get out of it and take a nap in the shade. When I woke up, I had already lost a fistfight.”

  The sound of a helicopter in the distance drew their attention. The roar grew louder, the leaves on trees began to whip back and forth in the wind, and the helicopter hovered. Looking up, Sam and Remi could see through the treetops that there was a man in an open doorway holding an M16 rifle.

  “Maybe you’d better let them see you, Tim,” said Sam.

  Carmichael stepped into the area by his helicopter and waved both arms while Sam and Remi kept their guns on their prisoners. The radio in Tim’s helicopter squealed. “We see you, Tim. You all right?” It was the voice of Art Bowen.

  Tim snatched the microphone. “Yes. The Fargos are here with me. We’ve got five prisoners, two of them wounded.”

  “Sit tight. We’re coming in.”

  The helicopter landed, and three men came running, carrying M16 rifles. The middle-aged, stocky man piloting the helicopter came more slowly, but he was also armed with an M16.

  As Sam and Remi walked with Tim Carmichael to watch Art Bowen and his men load the five prisoners into the helicopters, Remi said, “I’ll bet Tim would like to take a few days off after this.”

  Carmichael climbed into the pilot’s seat and put on his just-recovered sunglasses. “You know, I just might. When I was listening to those five talk, I realized that the only reason I’m alive is that, without me, they couldn’t move the helicopter.”

  Chapter 25

  THE BURNED PATCH IN ALTA VERAPAZ,

  THREE WEEKS LATER

  Sarah Allersby walked from the pair of parked helicopters into the thick Guatemalan forest. The brush had grown over this trail a thousand years ago, so it would be difficult to demonstrate to her guests that this was a Mayan trail, although she was sure it was. She hacked her way along with a machete, watching her feet to find a spot that would be clear enough for the revelation.

  She glanced back along the trail. There were fifteen journalists, all of them carrying complicated camera equipment and recorders and satellite phones. But they were all chattering away with one another about God knows what. They weren’t paying attention to the special place where she had brought them.

  Sarah looked down and stopped, then called for their attention. “Look, everyone. We’re on a Mayan thoroughfare. It’s a paved foot road.” She stepped aside to let the journalists come forward to take pictures of the pavement. A few listlessly snapped the ground, with its layer of whitish cobbles, but more were inclined to take photographs of Sarah hacking through the overgrowth. That, she reflected, was all right too.

  She pushed ahead, then looked back beyond the photographers at the longer line of armed men she had brought into the jungle, carrying their Belgian rifles. It was costing her a great deal of money, but this time she was going to be sure she had the manpower to keep everything under control. After the disappearance of the five men Russell had sent to clear the helicopter landing spot, she had left little to chance. She knew the ruin was only a short distance away now, so she kept moving, hacking at the vines and brush in her way. She finally burst through the bush and stepped onto the great plaza. “There,” she shouted. “There is the city, the lost city I’ve found.”

  She stepped boldly forward on the plaza. Ahead of her, on both sides of the wide-open space, were huge pyramids, and to her side was the biggest one so far. And while the reporters were ignorant about the structure, she had already seen the beautiful paintings on stucco inside the temple at its top. The architecture and art revealed a society that had been rich and complicated, colorful and full of life. And the place had been abandoned before the Normans invaded England.

  There were sure to be hoards of priceless artifacts hidden deep in the royal tombs of a place this size. It was spectacular. She had already found a few things and they had stimulated her appetite. But even more, she wanted these newspeople to see her doing some excavating. A couple of photographs and some actual footage that could be shown on television in Europe and the United States would further the process of her transformation. Right now, she was dismissed as just one more heiress with exotic tastes. When her discoveries were all revealed, she would be a major power in the world of archaeology. Nobody would know her discoveries had all come from her Mayan codex, so she could still stage a “discovery” of it years from now and get full credit for that too.

  She was perfectly dressed in a tailored explorer’s outfit, a tan shirt with epaulets and the sleeves rolled up, tailored pants in the same fabric, and polished boots, and she strode ahead with a kind of heroic energy, moving toward the huge pyramid that dominated the end of the plaza as though it were a beast she was conquering, when she heard a sudden wave of chatter behind her. She stopped and looked over her shoulder.

  The journalists had come about thirty yards into the great plaza. They all seemed to be awed by the enormous size and imposing character of the city’s buildings, all of them partially sheathed in vegetation. Unlike most of the lost cities Sarah had visited, the tallest buildings were not totally obscured by the plants and dirt. Their outlines were fairly clear.

  But something was wrong. They weren’t all rushing after her, elbowing one another to get close and congratulate her, to pepper her with questions about the city. They were all standing in a tight knot, looking down at their telephones and reading text or facing away from the others with their phones held to their ears. Others were facing one another, talking rapidly in their various languages, as though they were discussing some piece of astonishing news.

  The only ones not in the gaggle of chattering writers were the photographers, who stood in a loose circle, filming not the miracle of human accomplishment that towered over them but the reporters and their exclamations and questions and gestures of what seemed to be shock or outrage.

  One of the journalists in particular caught Sarah’s attention. He was Justin Fraker from The Times (London), a classmate of her brother, Teddy, at Eton. He had come because Teddy had promised him something — she suspected it was an invitation to a future reception at No. 10 Downing Street.

  She had high hopes that Justin would make the case for her at home. She stared at him now because he was the nearest of the English speakers and it was easiest for her to read lips in English. He seemed to be saying, “This is insane. She must be joking. She can’t be serious.” She wondered who he could be talking about. She sighed. It would be just her luck if some American actress did something so outrageous that it took their attention away from her.

  She turned and walked back toward the crowd of newspeople. Michelle Fauret, a stringer for Paris Match, had agreed to come because of Sarah Allersby’s reputation as a partygoer in Europe. She hurried toward Sarah, calling out, “Sarah! Sarah!” She was holding a small video camera.

  Sarah All
ersby was reassured. The idea that she was about to become an even bigger celebrity was titillating. She had always liked being the very rich girl, with mysterious holdings in Central America, who would sometimes appear at parties in southern France or the islands of the Mediterranean. She sensed that she was about to go from “interesting” to “fascinating.” She smiled, and said, “What is it, Michelle?”

  “They’re saying that you’re a fraud. They say this site is already registered with all the archaeological organizations — that you didn’t find it. Someone else did.”

  Sarah was not pleased that while Michelle was saying all this, the red light in the front of her video camera was on. She feigned an amused smile. “That’s silly,” she said. “Why would I do such a thing?”

  “Look at this,” said Emil Bausch, the German columnist. He held up an iPad tablet with a photograph of the large pyramid that dominated the plaza. “This is a picture that’s on the website of the Society for American Archaeology. This whole site has already been photographed and charted.”

  Jim Hargrove, an American from National Geographic, said, “How could this happen? Don’t you consult any of the organizations in the field?”

  “Of course I do.” Sarah hadn’t done it lately. She had been so busy.

  “Apparently, not often enough. This set of ruins is on the lists of existing finds.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Sarah Allersby. “Is this some kind of joke? I invited very few reporters here to share in an extremely rare experience. Are you now accusing me of faking something?” She waved her arm in the direction of the ancient buildings around them. “Did I build all this to fool you? These buildings are masterpieces, and the last people here left a thousand years ago.”