It was a three-hour chopper ride aboard an aging Russian MI-8 from a military airbase in Belize into the impenetrable jungle. There were 12 of us, technicians and specialists employed by the company, mostly, but only one contractor. Me.
The crew chief recited the crash procedures from memory, eyes glazed, not listening to himself, just as we were not. We all knew that a crash in the jungle, if it didn't kill us, would leave us stranded hundreds of miles from the nearest road or river. If we survived a crash, the jungle would finish the job.
I thought back to Wilson's voice on the phone. "Mr. Smith," he said, for we were not on a first-name basis; I had no first name that I wished to share with anyone. "Mr. Smith, we need you in northern Guatemala."
"What for?" I said. "I'm on vacation. I need a vacation after that business of yours in Colombia."
"Yes, well," he stammered, "we do sincerely appreciate your services, of course, and although a war between Venezuela and Colombia would of course be a shame, the company will benefit greatly from such a conflict."
"Mmhmm, so if you're so grateful, why don't I get my vacation?" I asked, flipping channels on the television with my feet on the ottoman and a half-empty bottle of pinot grigio on the side table. "Northern Guatemala hasn't been much of a hot spot since the fall of the Mayan civilization."
"True, Mr. Smith. But the company has... interests... in the region, and one of our exploration teams has failed to report in for the past three days."
"Mmmm? So?"
"So we need you to go find out what's wrong. We're sending you in with a backup team. They are going to complete Team One's mission. You are going along to find out what happened to Team One, and if possible, to bring them back. Normal hazard pay, of course."
"Of course," I said, with a sigh. "When do I leave?"
"Now."
****
The chopper set us down in a clearing a few hundred feet wide that smelled of high-explosive, littered with giant trees tossed outward like matchsticks in a radial pattern, sliced off with razor precision at their bases, only a few feet above the ground. Some smoldered. The jungle canopy at the edges was tattered and filled with ragged holes. I shot an inquiring glance at the chopper's crew chief. He shrugged. "Daisy cutter bomb," he said. "500 kilos." I whistled. I hadn't seen one of those used recently, not since some unpleasantness in Chechnya. "This is the closest we could get to the target site using aircraft and still obtain a good landing zone. Any closer, and you would have had to parachute in. Most company folks don't like parachutes." I agreed. I never liked jumping out of a perfectly good airplane myself, though I had done it many times in the Rangers, and several times more for mercenary ventures.
The techs and the company lead, Morrison, leaped to the ground while the rotors were still turning, and hauled their gear out of the chopper. Another chopper approached behind us and dropped off a fair-sized yellow bulldozer at the end of a cable, only this bulldozer was like none I had ever seen. Instead of a blade, it had four large arms protruding from the front. The two upper arms had blunt steel blades like an eggbeater, made to turn on a vertical axis. The bottom two arms had short black, blunt-nosed tubes mounted on gimbals, with heavy electrical cables snaking back to a power pack on the bulldozer's back. One of the techs stepped up into the cab and fired up the diesel engine. I walked over to Morrison, intending to ask what the plan was with the bulldozer, when the operator wheeled the dozer around and drove it directly at the trees edging the clearing. Before he reached the trees, though, the blunt-nosed tubes lit up with a fierce green fire, and began tracing an intricate pattern on the trees ahead. At first nothing happened, and then clouds of birds rose into the air, shrieking their indignation. The trees began to slide apart, sliced into two-foot chunks. The eggbeater arms on the dozer began spinning slowly, and the dozer nudged its way into the treeline, shoving a path through the trees, which fell apart at its touch. Unseen animals bounded away in the underbrush.
"Come on," said Morrison with a grin, shouldering his pack. The rest of us fell in behind him, picking our way through the debris of fallen trees and burned and slashed underbrush. Every minute or so the bulldozer would emit an unpleasant electronic shriek above the rumble of the engine and the grinding of the treads. "Scares the animals away," said Morrison. "Wouldn't do to irritate the environmentalists. It's bad enough that we're clearing a path through the jungle. Can't be killing the animals too." We trudged on through the heat and the humidity and the bugs, slogging onward through an endless green canyon, covered with a cloud bank that descended toward us as we watched. Then it began to rain. "Figures," I said to no one, under my breath.
An interminable, muddy, wet two hours later, the dozer pulled out into another clearing and ground to a halt. Ahead, looming out of the mist, was a huge stone building, a pyramid with giant stair steps. Mayan, if I wasn't mistaken, circa 800 B.C. Moss and trees grew on it and out of the sides of the gigantic stone blocks that formed its shape, each block as large as a one-story house. The stone was streaked with mold and lichen. A cloud of brightly-colored parrots screamed out of the trees near the bulldozer, chittering their dismay at being disturbed. They circled above the pyramid in the rain, then disappeared into the trees beyond. The team stood in awe, staring at the ancient building.
Morrison unhooked the radio from his belt, keyed the mike. "Jackson."
Static.
"Dr. Vance Morrison, company Team Two to Dr. Don Jackson of Team One, come in."
Static was his only answer.
"Come on," said Morrison. "This is our target. Team One should be inside. They probably can't hear us through the stone walls." We picked up our packs again while the dozer operator secured his machine and stepped down to join us. We set off to find an entrance.
We worked our way around the building, hacking with machetes and laser saws through the underbrush that grew right up against the pyramid's base, until we found a long, low opening, almost like an airport hangar's entrance. We hacked our way inside, grateful to be out of the rain. In the musty gloom, punctuated only by the drip of water from the stone ceiling, we could see that this opening was akin to a veranda, a wide space with a stone ceiling above, a stone floor, and huge pillars made of stone blocks holding up the pyramid above us. Ahead of us was a rectangular hole in the wall, man-height.
"There," said Morrison.
*****
We snaked our way through what seemed like endless passages, some of which were blocked with rubble, others which appeared to have been walled up on purpose for no discernable reason. Morrison led the way with an inertial tracker that seemed to have some sort of satellite uplink, though how it could get a signal through 500 feet of solid limestone above, I have no idea. One of the techs bringing up the rear carried a nail gun. With it, he shot a bolt into the seam between two stones in the wall, every 20 feet. From the bolt, he hung a glow-stick, which would shed a soft white glow for up to 80 hours. The glow lit the passage with a soft, even light. It was as if we were at the head of a glowing snake that was working its way through the bowels of the pyramid, eating the blackness ahead, leaving glowing light behind.
Eventually the passageway widened and debouched into another wide stone-roofed veranda, this one apparently on the other side of the pyramid, higher up. Below us, a valley stretched away from us beneath the brooding pyramid. A solid gray blanket of cloud hovered above us, and the mountains to either side stretched up and disappeared into the grayness. Below us, hints of ruined buildings poked up among the trees, up to a mile away. This had been a fair-sized Mayan metropolis in its heyday. I keyed my radio, called to Dr. Jackson of Team One, not expecting a reply. I was not disappointed. I walked along the veranda, keying the mike, hoping that if the team was in our pyramid, or in the city below, someone would hear me.
I thought I could hear an answering chirrup when I keyed my radio. Was it birds chirping in the jungle below? I pressed the key again.
Chirrup.
It echoed down the veranda, echoing off the stone floor and the ceiling, acquiring a strange timbre as it traveled, a ghostly distortion.
Chirrup. It seemed to be coming from the jungle outside, off to the right of where we were standing.
"Mr. Smith!" One of the techs gestured to me. "Over here!"
I jogged over to where the tech was standing, looking over the edge of the stone platform. There, twenty feet below at the base of the wall, was a pile of brightly-colored garbage. Tents, rain slickers, computer equipment, a folding satellite antenna, rucksacks in the company's colors, even pieces of a shattered blaster rifle. Team One's equipment, obviously. I pressed the mike key on the radio again.
Chirrup. The sound came from the pile of shattered equipment.
I called Morrison over. His lips tightened when he saw the mess, but he said nothing. "We know they got here," I said, under my breath, so that the other techs would not overhear. They were already nervous. "Their equipment is here. They wouldn't have gone far without it. That means that they're still here. We need to keep searching the building." He nodded, silently. He pointed to another rectangle in the wall behind us, a different one than the one we came out of.
I unholstered my blaster, flicked on the flashlight, trained it on the doorway and walked forward into the blackness, with five techs and Morrison in tow. The remaining techs stayed behind on the veranda to take radar measurements of the ruined city below. One pulled a frisbee-shaped device from his rucksack while another fiddled with joysticks on a radio. The frisbee suddenly hummed and leaped out of the tech's hand, hovered, then lurched over the edge of the veranda and shot up into the sky. An aerial image of the ruined city appeared on the other tech's radio. She twiddled the joysticks and the view shifted as the frisbee slid, humming, across the ruins. The other techs watched silently.
***
The passageway slanted upward, moving in roughly a concentric square toward the top of the pyramid, according to Morrison's tracker. After about 20 minutes, the passageway leveled out and widened, with shallow alcoves twenty feet long on either side of the passageway, punctuated by huge stone pillars. The rock that comprised the alcove walls seemed to be a slightly different color in the flashlight beams. A strange dark rust stained the seams of the stone blocks where they fit together. Mayan pictograms lined the walls, occasionally punctuated with horrible faces with their eyes bulging and their tongues sticking out. I mentally kicked myself for not reading up on the pictogram language of the Mayans, but I had figured that the tech team would have a linguist among them to do any necessary translation.
One of the techs unlimbered a thick metal book-shaped instrument with a flat panel on both sides, which he said was a radar sounder. He flipped it on and studied the ghostly shapes that flickered on the display. "This wall is hollow," he said. "There's a chamber behind it." He moved down the passageway, pressing the box against each recessed wall. Each wall had a hollow chamber beyond, he said. The passageway continued onward into the blackness. I set up a torch, aimed into the blackness, and turned back to the group.
Morrison pulled the radio off of his belt and keyed the mike. "Tech squad B, report."
"Just finished a rough map of the city, sir," a woman's voice crackled back through heavy static.
"Pitch camp on the veranda. Follow the lighted path up the interior of the pyramid, and bring the gamma sounding gear. Join tech squad A up here in 40 minutes."
"Yessir," came the crisp reply.
Thirty-three minutes later, tech squad B came huffing and puffing up the well-lit passageway, their breathing echoing weirdly off the walls. They set up their sounding gear in the passageway while I hung back and watched. One of the female techs set up a thick cylinder like a stubby telescope on a tripod, aimed at the wall, then set up a laptop computer next to it on a folding stool. We watched as the display lit up. The screen was yellowy-white, and pulsed slowly in vertical waves.
"It's a gamma sounder," said Morrison, answering my unasked question. "It gives us a three-dimensional picture of rock, or hollow spaces, up to 100 meters through solid granite. Of course, you wouldn't want to stand in front of it - you might glow in the dark after a scan. But it works well for looking through mountains. Or pyramids," he added.
Over thr course of a few minutes, shapes gradually became apparent in the yellowish haze on the screen, as the gamma sounder scanned the chamber on the other side of the wall and built up a three-dimensional image. Slowly the image of a large room, like a raquetball court, became apparent. We were standing in a passageway that, had the chamber actually been a a racquetball court, would have been the observation gallery, high above the floor.
Down on the floor of the "court" was a large pyramid-shaped pile of stones, said the female tech, but they gave strange density readings. They were strangely light, she said. And they were all of a similar, uniform size and shape.
"How big are they?" I asked, leaning over her shoulder to look at the wavering, ghostly images on the screen.
"About so big," she said, holding her hands apart in the shape of a volleyball.
"Those aren't stones," I said. "They're human skulls." I had seen piles of them in the killing fields of Cambodia, in the mass graves in Bosnia, in the burned-out villages of Rwanda. It was only natural, in the vacant, empty monuments of the Mayans, a culture known for bloody human sacrifice, that I would see them again here.
She paled but said nothing. Morrison stepped closer to listen.
"What's with the wavy image?" I asked. "Can't you sharpen it up?"
"Yes sir, normally there's a little bit of waviness because of diffraction of the gamma beam through the crystalline matrix of the stone," she said. "But this is a bit fuzzier than usual. Almost like... almost like the chamber is filled with some sort of liquid."
Morrison and I shot a sharp look at each other.
"Technician?" I said to one of the chemistry technicians standing next to me. "Khalid, sir," he smiled, helpfully. "Yes, I'm sorry, Technician Khalid," I said. "Can you please take a sample of this stain on the wall and analyze it for me?"
"Of course, sir," he said, producing a small glass tube. He proceeded to scrape a bit of the rust off the wall into the tube with a pocketknife, and, flipping open the lid of his metal case that he carried, inserted it into a receptacle. He flipped on the analyzer and tapped out a few commands on its small keypad. The machine hummed and beeped.
"Iron oxide," he said, studying the numbers on the display. "Phosphorus. Calcium. High concentrations of iron."
"What percentage?" I asked, perhaps too sharply.
"Fourteen percent," he said.
"Blood," I said, grimly. "The chamber on the other side of this wall is filled with blood." Morrison sighed. Khalid looked as if he were going to throw up. "This is some sort of storage silo for blood," I said. "Filled long ago, and sealed so tightly that it couldn't coagulate or evaporate." Now Morrison was looking unsettled.
"Jameson," he snapped at one of the other technicians. "Start scanning these pictograms and see if the translator program can make sense of them. I want to know what kind of place this is, and why the builders of this pyramid would fill a whole room with blood."
"Yessir," said Jameson, looking positively ill.
*****
The technicians checked the other chambers in the passageway, a total of six chambers. Each one was identical, and each one was filled, floor to ceiling, with blood. The technicians estimated the age of the rust on the walls to be more than a thousand years old. Somehow, the ancient Mayans had slaughtered enough animals (no, they were probably people, I figured, given the piles of human skulls inside those chambers) to fill the spaces inside the pyramid. Where were the rest of the skeletons, I wondered? Probably somewhere else in the pyramid. I shuddered to think of what THAT find would be like.
We left tech squad B behind to analyze the chambers further, and we advanced upward along the passageway, with me leading the way. I hoped that we would find Team One at the end of the passageway, but my hope was fading.
Up ahead, a dim light seemed to reflect down the passageway toward us. The light grew brighter until the passageway emptied into the corner of a huge cubical room, perhaps fifty feet from floor to ceiling, and fifty feet on a side. About twenty glow sticks lit the room, jammed into crevices in the walls, glowing off the stone ceiling. Some had burned out, but most were still lit. The room was an ampitheatre, a "theatre in the round," with bleachers rising from the floor several rows up to meet the walls. A few instrument cases lay scattered about, along with a couple of halogen lights on tripods, and the shattered casing of another gamma sounder. A technician's tool vest lay discarded on the floor, amid the dust of centuries.
One of the technicians gasped and dropped her instrument case, and her hand went to her mouth as she pointed, wide-eyed, at the bleachers that lined the walls. My stomach lurched as I realized that the "bleachers" were actually stacks of bones; arm bones, leg bones, ribs, all stacked neatly, interlocking, to form tiers of rigid benches. The benches were covered with sheets of leather to provide a more uniform surface, which upon closer inspection, I realized were made of skin. Human skin.
In the center of the room were several rows of skulls, lined up on the floor, all facing our side of the room, where the bleachers rose slightly higher from the floor than the other three sides.
Morrison grabbed my arm and pointed to the last row of skulls. These weren't skulls. They were severed human heads, with flesh. They were faces... some with blond hair, some with dark hair. Several men. Two women. Some of them seemed peaceful; others had their lips parted in a final, wordless scream. All of them had had their eyes gouged out.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something moving. It was the last head on the far left end. It was moving, rocking, as if it had just been placed there, and was slowly settling into its final resting place. The sightless eye sockets stared emptily. Blood seeped from the stump of the neck. The stain grew in the dust around the severed head as we watched.
The female technician screamed. I flipped the safety off my blaster.
"I think we've found Team One," I murmured to Morrison.
Then I woke up.
I really hate nightmares like that.
