Moon Mask (24 page)

King nodded his agreement.

They waited until the rustling in the leaves was gone, and then Raine led them in the opposite direction. They kept low and moved fast, trying to disturb the undergrowth as little as possible.

The jungle grew darker as the blood-red rays of the dying sun sank below the western horizon. The rainforest grew more alien, the noises more terrifying. Then again, he had just survived a rollercoaster ride through hell so he wondered if he could ever be terrified again.

After some time, Raine slowed, holding out a hand to stop him. After checking the vicinity for signs of the enemy, he crept forward again.

“What the hell is that?” he whispered in the gloom.

King peered beyond him at the odd construction in the jungle.

Encrusted with snaking vines and draped in a blanket of rotting vegetation was an alien shape.

King recognised it instantly. “It’s a ship,” he gasped.

To call it a ship was an exaggeration. In truth, little remained of the ocean-going vessel, merely a handful of metal fittings, pulleys and fallen canon, all encrusted with vegetation. The towering masts and their massive sails had been claimed by the jungle, as had much of her wooden hull. But, before her body had rotted away in the humid damp of the rainforest, the jungle had grown over her, encompassing her hull. Vines had snaked and coiled and wrapped themselves around her masts, the undergrowth had, in turn, decayed and rotted upon her hull, leaving behind a hollow, crusted shell.

A glint of tarnished metal reflected up from the jungle floor not far from the stern of the vessel. King ran to it.

“Benny,” Raine warned, but he ignored him, picking up and rubbing the plaque clean. Beneath the centuries of jungle muck, crude, engraved letters could still be seen.

Hand of Freedom.

“This was Kha’um’s ship,” he realised.

“Bit of a leap, isn’t it?”

King shot him an angry look. “I can’t explain it . . . I just
know
this was his ship.”

“But I thought Nadia said our bony friend was Caucasian?”

King’s mind worked it all through, pulling the pieces of the jigsaw together. “He was a competitor,” he realised. “Someone else after the Moon Mask too. He followed Kha’um here, they fought-” Then it hit him. “It was Pryce! The remains that we found. He must have defeated Kha’um, found the Xibalban mask but got trapped in the tunnels and died.” Then he realised something else. “If Kha’um’s body is still on this ship, it would prove everything!” He turned and ran around the vessel’s hull, excited as a school boy.

“Benny,” Raine called after him, trying to keep his voice low. “We’ve got to keep moving.”

But it was no use. King found a crack in the crusted shell of the ship and squeezed inside. Almost all of the wood had rotted away over the centuries, including the dividing decks. Before it had done so, however, the jungle had claimed the wreck, clawing out with snaking limbs to coat the entire structure with plant life. By the time the ship’s hull had rotted away, a carbon-copy shell had replicated its shape. It reminded King of making paper mâché models of the earth by plastering the paper mâché over a balloon. Once the paper mâché set hard, the balloon was pierced with a needle, popping to leave behind only the outer shell.

The undergrowth squelched beneath his feet as Raine pushed inside behind him.

“Ben,” he whispered but King ignored him. A scurry of small mammals, insects and reptiles hastily evacuated, disturbed by the intruders as King switched on his torch, bringing the muted details of the interior into stark focus. The carpet of plant-life swept like a meadow over the fallen rubble of the ship, metal cannons and tar-hardened barrels presumably filled with loot and other less-degradable materials.

But King’s eyes were focussed on one thing only.

The sole occupant of the ghost ship.

“Benny,” Raine hissed angrily. “We’ve gotta go. The soldiers could be here any second.”

But King wasn’t listening. “It’s him,” he said reverently. He knelt down in front of an obscure mound of vegetation and began to carefully peel back the growth. Gently, layer by layer, King peeled back the living cocoon of jungle life to reveal the skeletal remains of a large man beneath. Just as he had expected, the tarnished remains of a brass sword and dagger hung from rotten scabbards around its waist. “It’s him,” he repeated. “It’s Kha’um.”

A noise whipped Raine’s attention around to the hole they had entered through. The flash of red feathers revealed a bright parrot taking flight.

“That’s great,” he said through clenched teeth. “Now it’s time to-”

“He’s holding something,” King interrupted. Raine’s keen eyes scanned their surroundings, searching for danger, while King’s expert fingers uncovered the skeleton’s hands.

Raine did a double take when he saw what he was holding. “Another mask?”

King carefully extracted the second mask from the dead man’s grip and examined it. He removed the first from the purse he had hastily tied back together and compared the two.

“It’s very similar to the one we found in the temple,” he explained and sure enough Raine could make out the similarities- the distorted, near-human shape, the large eye holes, the bared teeth. The colour, however, was quite different. Instead of the blood-red glow of the mask found in Xibalba, the second mask’s metallic composition was a much more subtle, slightly ochre tint. It was also composed out of a single piece of metal, rather than a composite of two.

“It’s a fake,” King realised. “A copy of the real mask. The Xibalbans must have fashioned it to use as a decoy, in public ceremonies or when it was a risk of being damaged.” He glanced sadly at Kha’um’s remains. “He came all this way to find the final piece of the mask, only to steal a fake.”

Raine shrugged. “You can’t win ‘em all,” he said and started for the exit.

“Hang on, what’s this?”

“Now what?!” Raine snapped, swinging around. His irritation was lost on King as he pulled free the skeleton’s other hand. In it, he grasped a single, flat piece of bone, polished smooth. It was roughly four inches in length but both edges had been cut into a knobbly shape.

“What is that?” Raine asked.

“It’s a map,” King said wondrously.

Raine frowned, unconvinced. “Looks like a hair-comb if you ask me.”

“It’s a tactile map,” he explained, closing his eyes and feeling the contours of the bone. “These edges are carved to depict a coastline. A number of cultures use them for navigating in the dark. Trust me, it’s a map.” He opened his eyes and stared at the piece of bone, noting a slight circular depression on what he assumed to be the bottom edge. A metaphoric X. “It’s a treasure map.”

Raine raised a sceptical eyebrow, but before he could utter a response a definite crunch of underbrush sounded from the far side of the ship’s hull. Both men spun to face the sound and saw a human-shaped shadow dash down the ship’s length.

“Now it’s really time to go,” Raine told King and this time the archaeologist did not protest.

They crept low and fast towards the hole and Raine went through first, wary, watching, scanning the jungle. Deciding it was all clear, he gestured for King to follow.

They stepped out of the ship’s shadow and-

Six men in jungle-camouflaged NBC suits burst out of cover from behind the trees and from beneath the underbrush, weapons raised. They shouted at them to raise their hands and, totally surrounded, they had no choice but to comply.

“United States Special Forces!” one of the masked soldiers declared. “Identify yourselves.”

A wave of almost uncontrollable relief washed over King. “Thank god,” he sighed, noticing the iconic Stars and Stripes of his country’s closest ally’s flag on the man’s arm. “I’m Doctor Benjamin King, part of the Sarisariñama Expedition.”

“Where’s the mask, Doctor?” he demanded brusquely. For a moment, King thought about resisting but, totally surrounded, what could he do? Slowly, he removed the lady’s purse from over his shoulder, suddenly feeling very conscious of the less-than-masculine shade of pink, and handed it to one of the soldiers.

The soldier efficiently ran a radiation detector over the
two
masks he discovered within and the oddly shaped map. The fake mask and the map produced little more than a bleep from the handheld device, but the original mask sent it crazy, a constant clicking noise reverberating out. “Over five hundred thousand Curies,” he said to the leader. Another soldier stepped forward and dropped a black, hard-shell rucksack from his back. He unclipped the air-tight seal and placed the irradiated mask into the padded interior.

“Bag the whole lot,” the leader ordered, just to be on the safe side.

As the team hastily packed away all of the materials, the soldier with the detector scanned Raine and King. He looked back at the leader, his expression hidden behind his NBC’s hood, but the confusion in his voice was evident. “I’m only picking up about thirty Rads in each of them. That’s not possible. Most of the science team has sustained a dose of about
six hundred
Rads.”

Without being requested, another soldier double-checked the first’s readings. “I concur. No more than thirty Rads. They’re clean.”

The leader nodded and proceeded to remove his suit’s hood to reveal an ugly face with puckered skin and a nose broken many times. “We’ve been searching everywhere for you, Doctor King. The expedition base camp is secure. Medical teams are attending to the sick and evac choppers are on their way.”

It’s over,
King sighed, his mind suddenly catching up with the messages of pain and exhaustion his body had been trying to feed it for hours. It was all he could do not to crash upon the ground and weep.

The leader turned to Raine. “Identify yourself, mister.”

King snapped his head around to look at the man he had just faced life and death with.
We’ll find somewhere secure for you to hide until they arrive. Then I’m out of here,
his words repeated in King’s head.

But Raine had never had the chance to get away.

He kept his head down, staring at the ground, his face lost in shadow.

“I asked you a question!” the soldier shouted, unused to his orders being ignored.

Slowly, Raine raised his head. King heard a gasp of surprise and then another soldier stepped forward, ripping his own hood off his head to reveal the smooth, handsome features of a young African-American.

“Boss?” the man asked, shocked.

“Boss?” King repeated, glancing at Raine.

At that moment, the team leader slammed the butt of his rifle into the side of Raine’s head, knocking him out cold.

21:

It’s All Politics

United Nations Headquarters,

New York City, U.S.A.

There
was chaos in the United Nations Security Council chamber as the Chinese Permanent Representative fought off the indignant attacks from the other fourteen member states.

Alexander Langley kept his silence, trying to hide the bemused expression which twitched at the corners of his mouth.

His nation’s actions, the Chinese representative argued, differed in no way to the actions that any other nation, having intercepted the information the Sarisariñama Expedition had sent to UNESCO, would have taken.

“How convenient was it then,” Ambassador Chal Chan had said at one point, “that the United States happened to have a Special Forces team within range of the beleaguered scientists when their mayday came through?”

All eyes had turned to Langley. Tall and lean, his dark skin betraying his African ancestry, Alexander Langley had a kind face and an ever-ready, wry grin. Just into his fifties, there was no denying that there was more salt than pepper in his close-cropped hair. Crows-feet seemed to wander at will around his eyes and a couple of pale ‘age spots’ had appeared on his cheeks in recent years.

Of course, the Chinese representative was right. The U.S. Special Forces team was
very
conveniently located to be the first rapid response team on site.

He had known the moment he had stepped into the Oval Office two days ago that far more was going on upon the summit of Sarisariñama than an outbreak of Weil’s Disease. He had listened with a mixture of shock, fear and interest as the CIA Director had, at the President’s request, told him about the tachyon radiation that had been detected in Karen Weingarten’s body.

Emitted from an ancient artefact which the expedition had unearthed only the previous day, the tachyons, he was told, had the potential to unleash an uncapped amount of energy.

A bomb, the likes of which the world had never seen.

Of course, Langley wasn’t naive enough to think that the U.S. Government, especially if the Agency was involved, didn’t want this technology for itself. He had been on the ground in enough missions the world over to know that the morals of Washington were no higher than Moscow’s or Beijing’s. But the United Nations had been alerted to the situation, and that meant they couldn’t just swoop in and steal the mask without creating the same international crisis that the Chinese had managed to stir up.