Black Rain: A Thriller (16 page)

Kaufman paused. Whatever had happened, Dixon
seemed to believe it. And for certain the NRI had taken preparations against the possibility of a native attack. Perhaps he could turn Dixon’s fear to his advantage. “Then maybe you want revenge?”

Dixon looked up at Kaufman. “What?”

“Take me back there,” Kaufman said. “I’ll bring an army with us. And we’ll wipe those natives from the face of the earth.”

Dixon blinked a few times but remained silent. “I’m not going back,” he said finally.

“If you want a big check, you will,” Kaufman said.

“No. I’m not going back,” Dixon repeated, sounding more like a man admitting to a newly discovered reality than one making a conscious decision.

“You’ll be safe. I promise you. We’ll all be well protected.”

Dixon started to laugh, but it was a sad laugh, a nod to the irony of life. He looked Kaufman in the eye and shook his head: the shipwreck survivor, unwilling to reenter the sea.

“I hope you understand what you’re throwing away,” Kaufman said.

The emotion drained from Dixon’s face and when he spoke again his voice had dropped. “Most people are born afraid,” he said. “But some of us only learn how to fear along the way. I spent half my life spitting on the weak and gutless. But now … it’s worse for me than it is for any of them, because I remember what it was like to be different, I remember a time when I didn’t know what it was like to be afraid.”

He choked back the lump in his throat once again. “I don’t eat much and I never sleep. And sometimes, even
when I’m wide awake, I hear those things calling to one another, stalking us.” He shook his head emphatically. “I’ll sell you what I have, the crystals and the rest of the artifacts. But it don’t matter how much money you got. It ain’t enough to get me back out there.”

Frustrated, Kaufman glared at the man. “Then you can give me the location,” Kaufman said. “The spot on the map. That might be good enough for a partial payment.”

Dixon hesitated for a moment and then turned his gaze to the floor and Kaufman began to realize the truth. “You don’t know,” he said. “Do you?”

“It’s not clear,” Dixon whispered. “The natives took us there. The GPS went out.”

As Dixon answered, he seemed like a different man from the one who’d greeted Kaufman so glibly from the doorway. Kaufman sensed overwhelming disappointment from him, directed mostly at himself, at what he’d become: fearful, weak.

“I can give you the general area,” he offered.

“How general are we talking about?”

Dixon did not quickly reply and Kaufman knew it would be all but worthless. Perhaps it was the fever, the blood loss and the trauma; and if not the physical pain, then perhaps the mental damage he’d incurred had done the trick. But it seemed as if the facts had been erased from the man’s brain.

Kaufman pitied him, but also focused on his own concerns. He felt the opportunity slipping away. Despite all his efforts, despite having two moles in the NRI’s operation, despite hacking into their database and now
grilling one of their former employees who had actually been there, the temple’s location still eluded him.

Time was running out. If the new NRI field team was on the right track they would soon find the temple and the prize, if it existed. And in that case all of Kaufman’s efforts would be for naught.

He stared at Dixon and realized there was only one option left to try, one that would be far more dangerous than any move he’d made yet.

T
he NRI discovery of the Wall of Skulls had been the result of information combined with hard work. The discovery of the pit had been pure luck, a result of Hawker and Verhoven chasing the natives through the jungle. Both proved fruitful.

The Wall appeared to be a natural stone embankment with shelves carved out for the skulls and other bones that had been wedged and cemented into place. Glyphs and decorative markings populated its base and capstone.

And while it was true that the Wall matched Blackjack Martin’s description aesthetically, his calculations of its dimensions left something to be desired. At ninety feet in length and seven feet tall, the Wall was almost exactly one fifth of Martin’s boast. It made McCarter laugh. In Martin’s business, in the early twentieth century, a little exaggeration went a long way.

As he dangled over the gaping pit, suspended in a harness, McCarter wondered what Martin would have written about it. It was almost thirty feet from the ground level to the surface of the muck at the bottom, but McCarter guessed that Blackjack would have claimed a
depth of at least fifty feet, or a hundred, or perhaps even called it bottomless.

Twisting on the rope and looking down, he decided it didn’t matter, thirty feet was enough.

“Lower me down,” he said, “before I change my mind.”

The porters released some of the tension on the rope and McCarter began to drop. This was his fifth trip to the bottom. In fact, he’d spent more time down there than anyone, but he had yet to get used to the voyage in or out.

As the pulley creaked and he dropped below ground level, McCarter’s attention was drawn to the stone slab that made up a large portion of the pit’s eastern wall. A great face, five feet across, dominated the slab. It had sad, round eyes from which stone tears ran, highlighted by dripping condensation. Its thin lips were closed tight and a spiked barb passed through each ear, drawing rivers of blood. Stylized torches burned on either side of the face, while beneath it, what appeared to be a massive crocodile head had been carved, complete with something bloody lying in its open jaws.

Danielle and Susan waited beneath it, looking silly in their oversized fishing waders.

McCarter touched down in the cloying muck, his feet stretching for the bottom. Never a fisherman himself, he hadn’t gotten used to the odd feeling of cold mud and water pressing against him through the thin rubber skin of the waders.

He released the harness, sloshed his way over to Danielle and Susan and pulled two printed photographs from his breast pocket, handing one to each.

“It’s a match,” he said to Susan.

The photos contained an image from the database of Mayan glyphs. The image was a representation of a name.

Danielle and Susan examined the photo, comparing the image to the glyph on the stone wall above them.

“I think you’re right,” Susan said.

“I’m not sure what I’m looking at,” Danielle said. “How about a little help?”

McCarter pointed out the matching sections. “This is Seven Macaw,” he said. “The name of an exalted being from Mayan prehistory. From a time even before Tulan Zuyua.”

“Before?” Danielle asked. “I thought Tulan Zuyua was their Garden of Eden.”

“It is,” McCarter said. “In a manner of speaking. But their version of Genesis runs differently than ours.”

She gave him a sideways glance, which he took as a request for more information.

“Let me put it this way,” he said, “in the Judeo-Christian version of Genesis, we begin with God creating the heaven and the earth. The second and third verses tell us that the earth was in darkness and then God created the light. By verse twenty-six, we’re on the sixth day and God creates man. But there was nothing before this, nothing before these six days.

“Now,” he said, “in the Mayan version, history stretches back from the creation of man as well as forward. It goes back to a time before Tulan Zuyua, before mankind even existed, to a race that preceded us, a race the Maya called the wooden people.”

Danielle’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve heard the name. How do they relate to this?”

“In the Mayan view of creation, it took the gods four tries to successfully create the human race. On the first attempt they ended up with things that squawked and stuttered but didn’t speak. Seeing some value in these things the gods kept them around, letting them become the animals of the forest and going back to the drawing board once again. The second time, they used mud as the medium and it was more or less a complete failure. The creation kept dissolving into sludge and muck. So they let it die and tried again. On their third try, they used wood to create with and they brought forth the wooden people: a sort of a prototype for mankind.”

McCarter paused to make sure she was with him. “Now, the wooden people looked something like humans,” he explained. “They were intelligent, ambitious, they could count and talk and reason, but they were odd in many ways. The Mayan manuscript
Popul Vuh
describes them as having no muscle in their arms or legs, no fat on their bodies. They were said to be able to speak but had stiff, masklike faces and ungainly deformed shapes—like stick people, I suppose.”

Susan chimed in. “Basically they needed a good makeover, some time in the gym and about ten thousand collagen injections.”

“Right,” McCarter said, smiling. “But even in this somewhat decrepit state, they were viable, and according to the legend they grew prosperous and even powerful.”

“And this Seven Macaw,” Danielle said, pointing to
the glyph on the slab. “He was one of the wooden people?”

“Absolutely,” McCarter said. “Their leader, in a sense. He was described as having eyes and teeth that shined like jewels. He had a throne or a nest made of metal, and the power to create light in the darkness. He boasted that he could light up the whole earth. But the Mayan writings also tell us he was a fraud, and though he could create brilliant light, it didn’t reach out into the great distance of the whole world, but only lit up his immediate surroundings. Despite this, Seven Macaw exalted himself, holding himself out as a god, forcing the others to worship him as if he were both the sun and the moon.”

Danielle seemed to understand. “I’m thinking the gods didn’t like that much,” she said.

“Not good to anger the gods,” McCarter replied. “Not in any culture. The outcome is predictable.”

“The wooden people were destroyed,” she guessed.

McCarter nodded. “The gods sent vicious beasts to attack them and even turned their own animals against them. And as if that weren’t enough, the sky god, Hurricane, sent a massive rainstorm to drown them like the sinners in Noah’s day.
‘Rain through the day and rain through the night. A rain of black resin that poured from the sky,’”
McCarter said, quoting the Mayan text.
“‘And the Earth was blackened beneath it.’”

“Burning rain?” Danielle asked.

“I’ve heard it described as a rain of fire,” McCarter said, “like hot oil or ash or napalm. And because the earth was blackened some think it might represent a volcanic
event, with hot ash and fire falling from the sky, but the
Popul Vuh
definitely describes it as rain.”

“And Seven Macaw died in this rain?”

“Actually, he disappeared prior to the Black Rain,” McCarter said. “But the mythology of the work seems to suggest it was necessary to get rid of him to allow the rain to fall, as if his power could challenge the gods and prevent it.”

“I see,” Danielle said. “So what happened to him?”

“Two demigods were sent for him. They shot Seven Macaw with a blow dart when he was up in a tree, and after he fell to the ground, they removed the metal from his eyes and his teeth and took all his jewelry—the things he used to light up the night. Without these items he lost the power to light up anything, even the immediate surroundings. He went into hiding and never bothered anyone again. And then, with Seven Macaw vanquished, the gods sent the rain.”

She understood. “So the heroes killed Seven Macaw and then the rain came to destroy the rest of the wooden people. Take out the leader and then finish off the troops.”

“That’s one way of putting it, yes.”

She was gleeful. “This is good news. The slab certainly proves the Mayan connection,” she said. “No computer inkblots required.”

McCarter chuckled. “It does more than that,” he insisted. “It proves that these people were intimate with the particular mythology of the Mayan creation, a fact that not only connects them with all the other Mayan tribes, but suggests they were very early in the Mayan
cycle.” He raised his eyebrows. “You may just be right,” he added. “Tulan Zuyua may be down here after all.”

Danielle smiled confidently and then turned back to the slab embedded in the wall. She looked at the other symbols—the big sad face, the dashes and swirls of the glyphs around it and the angry crocodilelike head with its bloody meal. “What about that one?” she asked.

McCarter’s eyes crinkled as he smiled. It was an important discovery. “That one is Zipacna,” he said. “The Destroyer.”

Later that night, sitting beside a flickering Coleman lantern, Danielle was pressing McCarter and Susan for more details. Hawker had joined them.

McCarter began by explaining the obstacles. “One problem we face is the condition of the find.” The glyphs on the Wall are in terrible shape, for the most part unreadable. The ones found on the great stone in the pit are better off, perhaps because they’ve been buried and protected from the elements for much of their life. The exposed tree roots and steep incline of the vertical walls suggest the pit to be quite a recent excavation.”

This response concerned her. She wondered if their adversary had somehow gotten here before them. McCarter, unknowingly, assuaged that fear.

“For whatever reason, the natives seem to be using it as a trap.”

“With all the bones we had to fish out of there, you wonder if they ever came back to check it,” Hawker said.

“Apparently, we’re not the only ones that can be wasteful,” McCarter said. “But from the look of things, it seems to have been dug with fairly primitive tools. And almost without regard for the relics it uncovered. In many places we see chips and scratches from their digging that have damaged the wall. My guess is that they knew of the slab and chose to excavate there to make specific use of having one solid, steep wall.”

Hawker rubbed his sore shoulder. “The sheer face makes for a better trap,” he said, ruefully. “You don’t see the drop coming.”

“And the glyphs in the pit,” Danielle asked, bringing the conversation back on track. “You were going to tell me something good.”