Blood Sun (33 page)

Max gazed up into the huge, frightening cave that awaited him, but after the punishing terror he had experienced, it offered the illusion of a place of safety.

Could his mother and father have traversed this very
route? Somewhere in the amphitheater of these mountains, on the other side of this cave, had they faced danger and death? His mother had died; his father had run. There was only one way to find out the truth.

Max stepped into the darkness and let the serpent’s breath smother him.

Riga was not the kind of man to sit idly by as events unfolded around him. He had studied maps and satellite photos while he waited at the abandoned airfield for word of the missing boy and the likelihood of his survival.

Cazamind’s determination to destroy Max Gordon was such a high priority that, for the first time in his career, Riga wanted to know why a target’s death was so important. Using his own contacts in Russian intelligence and with others who worked like himself, he began to feel the uneasy presence of Cazamind’s shadow world. There were rumored links to a network of power brokers whose secretive global influence was staggering. It was like a huge octopus, with Cazamind sitting squarely between the eyes of the beast. Cazamind knew everything. Riga had never had any sense of self-importance. He knew his place in the world, and as long as no one ever double-crossed him, or gave him incorrect information that
stopped him from doing his lethal work, then Riga had no complaint. He could take his inquiries into Cazamind’s activities only so far without raising suspicions. The Swiss control freak would not like him probing. Riga had been careful, choosing only those men he knew would never mention his query. If he had asked anyone else, his questioning could seep out into the world like blood into sand. There was no sense in jeopardizing his own position just because the fate of a schoolboy had aroused some interest in him.

He had also listened in to the radio chatter of the various people who patrolled the strip zones around the rain forest and forbidden mountain kingdom, and as he heard the sporadic radio calls in the background, he studied air-reconnaissance photos of the area.

Riga looked through a stereoscope’s eyepieces, shifted the photos slightly and saw the aerial images of the sheer mountain walls lose their flat perspective and become three-dimensional.

Now he could identify clefts in the mountains, but he knew that no one would survive going through there, not with the security measures Cazamind’s people had put in place. He scanned the riverbed and saw what looked like smoke but knew it to be the vapor from a waterfall. These photographs had been taken on a clear day some years ago, but the physical features had not changed. Riga heard excited shouting of men on the ground through the radio set. He spun the chair and fine-tuned the channel. The excited shouts were too difficult to follow, and, besides, Riga did not understand Spanish well enough to follow the fast, disjointed speech. He went to the door and called out through the rain
to the pilot, who ran the few steps from his helicopter into the hut.

“What’s going on here?” Riga asked, pointing at the radio.

The pilot listened for a few moments. “There’s some kind of trouble. There’s been shooting; three of the men are missing. The guy’s saying there were strangers down there. They’ve escaped. Something scared him pretty bad.”

Riga turned to a map spread out on the table. “Speak to him. Get his position. I want to know where he is. Exactly.”

The pilot lifted the microphone, thumbed the Call button and spoke quickly in Spanish. He had to shout once or twice to calm the excited man at the other end of the radio link. He moved next to Riga and the map, tracing his finger along the rain forest that nudged against the curved river. He dragged his finger south onto the scarred landscape where the forest had been cleared. “He’s about here.”

Riga could read a map like others could watch a movie. Every line, every mark was a picture in his mind’s eye. He pulled the aerial photographs next to the same area. “Tell him to stay there. Fire up the chopper.”

The pilot looked horrified. The low cloud base obscured the mountain slopes down into the jungle. No one could fly in this. “It’s not possible,
señor!
We would crash into the mountains or the forest. We have to wait until the clouds lift.”

Riga was already pulling a backpack from the floor and picking up his rifle. “We fly between the forest and the mountains, along the river. And we fly low and we fly fast.”

He was already moving out of the door with the pilot
begging at his side. “Señor Riga, I do not have the skills to fly like that. It cannot be done. Please, it will be dark soon; tomorrow will be clear.”

Riga looked at the frightened man.

“Your life is in your own hands.”

The meaning was clear. The pilot had to find the ability within himself to fly the machine in treacherous, almost suicidal conditions—and survive—or disobey Riga and die where he stood. The minuscule odds of survival flying blind in terrifying conditions at least gave him a chance.

He started the engines.

Max gazed upward. The cave looked about a hundred meters high, the limestone bleeding into stalactites that seemed to hang precariously from the roof. Max could not help but think of the needlelike teeth of the boa constrictor. As he looked down toward the darkness at the end of the cave, it felt like he was moving down the creature’s gullet.

There was very little light inside the cave, and the mist added to that made it an eerie, unwelcoming place. Max knew his imagination could be his worst enemy. The mist was being drawn from the river and had penetrated only so far into the gloom. Max reasoned that this had nothing to do with any breeze from outside, but rather that there was air sucking it down the tunnel—so there had to be a way out. It just meant going into the pitch-darkness and feeling his way beneath a mountain. And Max hated confined spaces.

He dropped the various pieces of wood and dried root
he had gathered before moving into the cave. The kindling and resinous branches from an ocote tree would help get him deep under the mountain without darkness smothering him.

Using the panga, he shaved the pine into flakes and wrapped them in the supple roots he had ripped from the forest floor. Slowly but surely, he built a torch, allowing each layer of air to breathe. The dank, sticky atmosphere would smother a flame without these pockets of oxygen. Finally satisfied, he laid the sturdy torch at his side and sat, small and insignificant, in the cathedral-sized cave. He opened the vine-wrapped food Flint had given him at the village and chewed, on what he did not know. Then he unwrapped a pod, like a small egg, licked it and with undisguised delight bit into it. It was pure cocoa—a fast and delicious energy fix that also gave him a psychological boost. Swilling his mouth with water, he held the liquid for a moment, letting it smother his taste buds, hoping it would slake his fear-induced thirst.

Kneeling in the limestone dust, he hit the panga’s blade against the flint-tipped spear. It sparked three or four times, and then the shards of fire found the resin chips. The torch began to burn. Max blew on it, more for luck than necessity, and held the shaft above his head. The flickering flame spluttered in the damp air, but as he moved forward into the darkness, cooler, drier air allowed it to crackle with life. Fire, the most basic of human needs, gave him comfort as he pushed deeper into the cave’s embrace.

The height of the cave did not seem to diminish as he moved farther into the darkness, but then, with the glow
casting giant shadows around him, stalactites bore down as the roof curved and narrowed. Like snakes’ teeth. Easy to see how legends were born. At least, that was what Max hoped.

It was impossible to gauge the depth of this mountain range, or how long it would take to get through to the other side, but as he moved forward, he felt something crunch beneath his feet. Lowering the torch, he saw the dusty outline of bones. He knelt down and gently brushed away some of the dust from the remains. The bones crumbled under his fingertips. Perhaps these were ancient, but as he looked more closely, he could see that the victim had been trying to crawl toward the cave’s entrance and that there was a broken clay pot within reach of the bony fingers. Had this been someone trying to escape? Was the clay pot the last of their provisions? Had they succumbed to the terrifying darkness?

There was no telling whether Max would get so far and no farther, or whether he would be able to return if he got trapped in narrow spaces. It was like a huge tomb, and Max did not want to die alone and in the dark—because sooner or later, the flame of his torch would fail. His mind kept questioning his courage. Could he go on? The heavy silence and limestone-dust floor absorbed the sound of any footfall or movement. He could imagine the fire flickering and dying, leaving him in absolute blackness, being unable to move forward or go back, being forced to curl in the rock face, lost and forgotten, with no one knowing where he was. That was where he would die. And one day an explorer might find
his
bones.

“Shut up!” he yelled at the corrosive voice in his mind. “That’s not going to happen! So do us all a favor and SHUT UP!” It suddenly felt better to have screamed a defiant warning to himself. After all, there was no one else to do it.

The distorted echo bounced off the walls and rock faces, and then there was another sound—muffled at first and then sharper. Someone was calling his name.

Orsino Flint snatched a breath, the exertion from clambering across the rugged cave floor taking its toll. “You move like a damned mountain goat,” he complained, his own fire torch adding to the flickering glow.

“An’ you don’ smell too good, either, cousin,” Xavier said.

Max smiled. “It’s my special jungle fragrance,” he said, his morale boosted now that there were others who would share his dangerous journey. “Things didn’t work out with your mates, then?”

Xavier shrugged. “You can’t trust nobody these days.”

“How did you find me?”

It took only a few minutes for Flint to lay the blame at Xavier’s door. The Latino boy argued as best he could, but it was obvious, from the fact that his brother’s friends back on the road were now working for someone more powerful with more money, that old loyalties no longer existed. The trail of destruction in the forest had not been difficult to follow, and Flint had picked up Max’s trail past the dead gunman crushed to death by the snake. It was obvious that Max had killed it. There was nowhere else Max could go other than the cave, and it seemed that Orsino Flint, as reluctant as he was, had to follow, because he expected the jungle roads to be swarming with gunmen sooner rather than later.

“The man at the truck had a satellite phone. He’ll be calling others,” Flint told him.

Xavier shivered. Max realized it was from more than the cave’s chill. “Let’s keep going while we have light,” he said. “There’s fresh air ahead. I can smell it.” He smiled at Xavier and put his hand on his shoulder. “It’s good to see you again, cousin.”

“You too,” the boy said without much conviction, staring nervously into the encircling darkness.

Flint settled his feathered hat on his head, looking around warily at the cave that carried such frightening legends. “Can we forget the family reunion and try to get out of here?” he said, the grizzled face yielding no sign of humor. “When we crossed the river, I could have sworn I heard a helicopter. They might be bringing people to the cave.”

“You goin’ crazy, old man. That was thunder. No one could fly in conditions like that,” Xavier argued.

“They won’t come after us in here, Flint. They know the legend of the Stone Serpent. They’ll be too scared.”

“I’m scared, and I’m here,” Flint told him. “I’m telling you, someone with more guts than I’ll ever have was flying a chopper down the valley. And there’s only one place they could be heading.”

Riga was not immune to fear. He had taken part in many vicious campaigns where his daring had been tested, but now even he felt a lurch in his stomach as he gripped the steel handrail in the helicopter. The pilot was soaked in sweat, his eyes unblinking as he gazed into the near-invisible way
ahead. He prayed as the helicopter lurched when he threw it to one side, then swore, pushing hard on the rudder pedals and making the helicopter do an almost acrobatic movement it was not designed for. He had just missed the face of a cliff. Riga’s knuckles were white, but he showed no other outward sign of fear. The helicopter’s skids nearly touched the river, the blades thrashing through the tree-hugging clouds and mist. And then suddenly the pilot pulled back on the control stick and the helicopter veered sideways. He had reached a hairpin bend in the river, and he had not seen the trees in time. Riga felt the helicopter shudder as the skids tore at the treetop branches, and the screaming engine, pushed beyond its capabilities, began to falter. By a miracle, it lifted free of the treetops and seemed to dance across the top of the canopy. In the swirling confusion, Riga saw a pickup truck on the ground and a man waving a crimson flare.

It was a hard landing. The helicopter skidded and bounced and finally ran into tree stumps, veered round on its axis and came to a shuddering halt as the pilot fought the twisting impact and switched off engines and fuel supply.