The Seventh Stone (58 page)

“
On the positive side,” said Braydon, “Contreras’s modus operandi is to wait and let us figure out how to find the entrance to the temple, then move in for the kill.”

“
We got your backs,” said Donohue, “but make it fast. Those guerillas might already be in position. And that volcano could blow any minute.” As he banked the chopper, a gust shifted the metal bird sideways. The wash of the rotors fought against the wind that bullied the treetops. The chopper hovered above the dropsite, one hundred meters downhill and due west from the bottom of the Demon’s Wings.

Donohue raised his left hand, pointed his finger, and circled it. Without a word, each man grasped the carabineer attached to the cable that ran above their heads, and checked the rope from the carabineer to their harness, giving it a tug to make sure it was secure. They straightened goggles, clasped helmet chin straps, patted their weapons. As if in one motion, the spine of a creature preparing to strike, they unbuckled their seatbelts and surged towards the sliding door.

“
Go, go, go,” Donohue said, signaling the same command with a pointed wave of his hand. The man nearest the door slid it open. Christa threw up her hand against the blast of searing sunlight. The chopper gasped in hot, sticky air like a drowning man breaching the surface. Without hesitation, the men tossed their ropes out the door, and slid down them backwards, sucked into the belly of the jungle.

No way. She couldn’t even look down there, never mind rappel down. “I can’t do this,” she yelled over the powerful thwump of the chopper blades. Her harness must be caught on something. She couldn’t breathe.

Braydon grasped the sides of her helmet, put his face close to hers. “Look at me, Christa.”

His face was a blur. Gray dots danced in front of her. Damn, she was going to faint. She forced herself to focus, her eyes on his.

“
Christa, we are in this together, all the way,” he said. “You have got to believe that.” He grasped her hands, placed her left one above her harness, the right one below. “Lower yourself down, like I showed you. I’m right beside you.”

She felt other hands on her, strong, confident hands. Leader was guiding her backwards. Out the door. Her butt was hanging in the air. The blue sky was so vivid, it could swallow her whole. She wanted to reach out and grab the sides of the helicopter, hoist herself back into it. And she would have, except she kept a vise grip on the rope that dangled down into the forest below. “Just sit back,” he said.

A hand pressed on her shoulder. Braydon’s. “Keep right beside me,” he said. “This is the fun part.”

For a moment, just a moment, his eyes looked just like Dad’s. Leader, or someone, wrenched her feet off the skids. “Crap!” she screamed into the headset. Falling fast. Grab onto the rope. Slow down. Sky above, then green tree tops. Then bam. Her feet jammed onto the ground. Her knees buckled. Her butt slammed onto a pile of leaves and soft peat.

Braydon rushed to her side. He unhooked the rope from her harness, signaled the helicopter. Donohue banked and ascended towards the crest of the Demon’s Wings as the rappelling ropes were gathered into its belly like recoiling guts.

Her feet and butt hurt, but the surrounding rainforest assaulted her other senses. The greens and browns gave off a primeval odor of life that hadn’t quite sorted itself out. Ferns towered above her head. Leafy bromeliads clung to every branch, flourishing on the humid fecundity of the air alone. The canopy sheltered them from the blow and bluster of the winds that battled in the treetops. Down on the forest floor, the symphony of hundreds of different bird songs, the occasional startled screech of a monkey, the cacophony of millions of insects surrounded her. The air was stiflingly hot, heavy with humidity. It took on the substance of a living being, it was so thick with moisture.

The strike force had scoped out the perimeter and regrouped into their planned formation. Leader checked an electronic GPS, frowned. He exchanged it for an old-fashioned compass. “Colonel Donohue’s mission in the air is to find a viable point of egress out of the canyon,” he said. “Ours is to find that temple and the passage into the Oculto Canyon. This way.”

If he said so. She had lost all sense of direction in the thick jungle. But the adrenaline zinging through her screamed at her to move, now. Leader was happy to oblige. For men weighed down with packs and automatic weapons, they started out at a fast clip. The point man hacked a path with his machete through the tangle of vines and undergrowth.

Braydon came to her side. “You landed pretty hard back there,” he said.

She couldn’t keep her eyes off his. She was falling fast, that was for sure. Nothing like a few near-death experiences to bond two people. “My father has been right all along,” she said. “We’re close, Braydon, to restoring the Breastplate of Aaron, to opening the portal to a life beyond death.” Maybe to Mom. So why did it scare her? Why did it prick like a thorn at the surface of her thoughts, that this was wrong?

“
As long as it’s a portal to the hidden canyon,” said Braydon, “and that antidote. As far as the rest of it, I’m more concerned about life before death.” He looked at her pointedly.

They double-timed it up a sloping hill. She sucked in breaths. Sweat dripped into her eyes. These guys had to be feeling the heat and humidity. Leader held up a closed fist. The men stopped. It was a clearing, more like a domed room, about twenty feet in diameter, with a pounded earth floor. The tree canopy created a ceiling so thick it had been impossible to see the clearing from the air. Across the clearing, the side of the cliff was carpeted in moss, ferns and epiphytes.

Braydon’s hand went to his side, poised by his sidearm like a lawman trying to stare a horse thief out of a shootout. “This clearing isn’t natural. The tribe who made it, and maintains it,” he said, “are not ghosts.”

Leader cocked his gun. “More likely men armed with blowguns and poison darts,” he said. “I don’t like it.”

“
No time for mistakes,” Braydon said. “And no visible sign that a temple exists underneath centuries of dirt and overgrowth. The entrance could be buried anywhere, assuming the whole temple didn’t collapse five hundred years ago.”

Christa fingered the gold pendant around her neck. Like the conquistadors, they weren’t about to give up, thinking, ironically alike, their mission should surmount the natural order. Unlike the conquistadors, she valued the worth of learning from the past. “Like the shaman said, El Dorado will be our guide,” she said. She untied the leather thong that held the pendant. She craned her neck, squinting to see the shoulders of the Demon’s Wings through wrinkles in the leaf canopy. She held up the pendant, shifted it, raised it higher. “Time may change all things,” she said, “but some slower than others. There!” The gold eagle’s wings on the pendant aligned with the curve of the Demon’s Wings rock formation. El Dorado danced below.

Braydon brought his cheek against hers. Squinted. Smiled. “El Dorado marks the spot,” he said.

She refocused her eye on the steep hillside directly beyond the golden man. “That moss,” she said, “exactly where El Dorado’s feet are, it’s a darker green.”

“
Leader, cover us,” Braydon said. He sprinted across the clearing. Leader’s arm held her back. Not that he needed to. She was literally paralyzed with fear. Braydon bounded twelve feet up the steep slope to the green patch of moss.

“
This ghost tribe,” she said. “If they want us dead, we won’t even know it until we are. I’ve seen the poison work. Seizures, pain, convulsions. Kills almost instantly. And they are expert hunters. They won’t miss just because we’re on the edge of the clearing, not in it.” She was saying this more to convince herself than Leader, but he released her.

Leap of faith time. If some divine destiny had brought her this far, and she was almost willing to believe it had, then it wouldn’t end here. Not this close. History and fate didn’t work that way. She tied the pendant back around her neck, sucked in a deep breath of wet air, and bolted across the clearing.

She scrambled up the slippery slope of the canyon wall to Braydon’s side. He tore away at the patchy mosses. She joined in, the soil cool, moist, heavy with the stuff of life. About eight inches down, her fingertips scraped against something hard, a rough surface. “Granite,” she said.

Braydon jabbed his knife into the moss, prying away a clump of it, and tossed it to the bottom of the hill. “I think I see an edge.” They clawed away the soil around the edge, revealing more of it, reaching a corner, then another. “Manmade,” he said. “No doubt about it.” It was a chiseled block of stone, five feet long, nearly one foot tall. “Looks like the lintel.”

“
Which means the open portal to the temple could be right below it.” She cleared away the last layer of soil off the lintel’s far end. An eye, carved into the granite, glared at her. Snap! It was clear, unmistakable, the sound of a branch breaking beneath a footfall. She twisted towards the forest. Braydon pivoted in front of her, shoved her to the ground and drew his pistol. Leader, across the clearing, crouched, aimed. Ready.

A shadow, no, movement trembled the bushy ferns beyond the perimeter. Braydon’s finger hooked the trigger. Louder crashes, crushing leaves. It was big, heading this way, fast.

A tapir bolted into the clearing. It was rotund, squat, like a dark-skinned, pre-evolved pig. Its round eyes were wide with terror, its nostrils flared. It trumbled across the clearing, its belly scraping against the creeping groundcover, then scampered back into the jungle.

Braydon turned and helped her back to her feet. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“
Question is,” she peered deeper into the dark forest, “what scared it?”

“
Ten to one it’s not a phantom. We’re running out of time.” He crouched by the eye she’d uncovered and peeled off a layer of lichen. “Salvatierra talked about geometric carvings, eyes above and on either side of the mouth, the portal, which once poured forth life-giving water.”

They shifted downhill. She grabbed the pilot’s survival knife from its scabbard; thrust it into the soft peat. Braydon did the same. They tore at the soil enmeshed with a multi-layered weave of roots and tendrils. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “This isn’t a free-standing temple,”

“
More like a dam,” he said. He tossed away a chunk of soil, sending it tumbling down the slope. “Built to block the pass through the canyon.”

“
The Demon’s Wings are the crests of the opposing canyon walls.” She pried out a stubborn rock. “The clearing is the barbicon.”

“
Like a fortified entrance to a medieval castle.”

She paused a moment, looked at him. “FBI training kicking in?” she asked. “Infiltrating medieval fortifications 101, in case it ever came in handy?”

“
It is coming in handy.” He yanked away a thorny bush. “Personal interest of mine, infiltrating places that are impregnable.” He looked at her pointedly to press home his double entendre. “Problem is, you’ve got to keep tweaking your approach.”

“
Glad you realize brute force isn’t the answer to everything.” She thrust her hand into the spongy peat, down to the rough texture of the granite below. “I found the right edge of the open portal.”

“
In fact,” Braydon cleared away more dirt from his side, “barbicans were becoming obsolete in Alvaro Contreras’s time because attacking armies had improved their siege strategies and artillery, but it would be an ideal defense in the new world.”

“
It’s brilliant, from a historical standpoint,” she said. “Alvaro Contreras was able to restore the Breastplate of Aaron in Spain and bring it to the new world to call upon its almighty powers. This temple was far removed and easily defended from monarchs and cardinals who would slaughter anyone usurping their rule. Once he was sure of the power of the Breastplate and the poison, he was ready to conquer the world.”

“
I figure from the dimensions of Demon’s Wings and the height and width of this hillside, the temple has got to be a good forty feet deep,” he said. “The chamber must be at the far end, nearest to the hidden canyon. Salvatierra wrote that Contreras had strangled the river that once flowed through here. I’m guessing that’s where we’ll find the retaining wall of Contreras’s dam.”

“
And beyond the dam, the canyon and the antidote plant.”

“
I need you,” he said. His digging revealed a massive boulder blocking the entrance. Christa hooked her arms around it, next to his. Together, they yanked and rocked the boulder. Braydon groaned with the exertion. “When this thing lets loose, stand back.”

They ripped the boulder from the spot it had held for five hundred years. It bashed down the hill like an indignant giant, smashing ferns and mosses, leaving a trail of black soil in its wake. Before them, a dark tunnel gaped open. It exhaled a fetid, ancient breath.

“
Stinks to high heaven,” Braydon said, turning away with a grimace. “Must be the way in.” He stepped forward.

She grabbed his arm. A phantom hand reached out and clutched her throat. “You go in there, and you’re going to die,” she said. “I sense extreme danger.”

“
Anything specific? I mean, other than armed guerillas honing in on us, a ghost tribe with poison blow darts and the erupting volcano?”

“
Something worse,” she said.

He switched on the flashlight. The temple’s passage swallowed the beam of light like a starving animal. “It’s just another underground passageway into the shadowy depths of spirituality,” he said. “More to tell my therapist.”