Despite the amenities of civilization, he felt less com-fortable this way.
The halls of the Pentagon provided as difficult a challenge as any highland wilderness, though, because each corridor in the labyrinthine headquarters was symmetric and unmemorable. The giant building's geo-metric shape made it easy to become disoriented and lost. One could emerge from a familiar-looking doorway out to a parking lot ... only to find oneself on the wrong side of the immense fortress.
But Major Jakes did not find it an insurmountable tac-tical obstacle. He looked at the succession of office doors, most of them closed, the interior lights shut off. On Saturday the Pentagon offices closed down, the civil ser-vants and military personnel sent home for their routine weekend activities. Normal civilians worked their regular forty-hour weeks, filling out the appropriate forms, pass-ing them from office to office for the appropriate stamps, signatures, and file copies.
But for a career officer like Major Willis Jakes, the civilian time clock meant nothing. He did not punch in or punch out when he went to work. His services were available on demand, all day long, all year long, when-ever duty might call. He took his vacation and his relax-ation time when circumstances permitted. He would have had it no other way.
The fact that he had been called here on a Saturday for a high-level briefing meant that an important mission must be in the works. Before long, Jakes would find him-self in some other far-flung corner of the world, perform-ing another series of tasks clearly defined by his superiors. Serving rules he had sworn by, the major unquestioningly took actions his country would almost certainly deny.
Jakes was tall and lean, clean-shaven, his skin the color of mahogany from deep Egyptian blood. His fea-tures were angular and Semitic, never rounded and soft.
Jakes followed the office numbers to the end of the corridor and turned left, passing door after door until he reached another darkened room, nondescript, closed— apparently as vacant as the other rooms. He did not hesi-tate, did not double-check the number. He knew he was right.
He precisely rapped three times on the wire-reinforced glass window. The name on the door said "A. G. Pym, Narratives and Records." In the regular day-to-day activi-ties of the Pentagon, Major Jakes doubted other workers ever called to visit the office of Mr. Pym.
The door opened from inside, and a man in a dark suit stood back in the shadows. Jakes stepped into the dim room. His expression remained stony, emotionless—but his mind spun at hyperspeed, seeing details, sensing options, scanning for threats.
"Identify yourself," the suited man said, his voice dis-embodied in the shadows.
"Major Willis Jakes," he answered.
"Yes, Major," the shadowy man answered, remaining out of sight. He extended his hand, holding a silver key. "Use this to unlock that door in the rear of the office," he said. "Take the key and close the door behind you. It will lock by itself. The others are waiting for you. The briefing is about to begin."
Major Jakes didn't thank him, simply followed the instructions, opening the back door to find a half-lit con-ference room. Banks of fluorescent lights alternately flick-ered white or remained dark. At one end of the wall hung a white projection screen.
Three men dressed in suits and ties sat in chairs, while another man fiddled with the carousel of a slide projector. Major Jakes had never seen any of the men before, nor did he expect ever to see them again.
A man in a charcoal-gray suit with wire-rimmed glasses said, "Welcome, Major Jakes. Right on time. Would you care for some coffee?" He gestured to an urn in the back of the room.
"No, sir," Jakes said.
Another man with a maroon tie and a jowly face said, "We have some Danishes, if you'd like those."
"No, thank you," Jakes answered the man.
"Okay, we're ready, then." A young man fiddled with the projector. A glare of yellow-gold light splashed in a square across the screen, unfocused.
While curiosity was not part of his duty, sharp atten-tion to details and an unfailing memory remained crucial to his work.
The last man, who had steel-gray hair and a white dress shirt, leaned back in his chair, rumpling the brown suit jacket draped behind him. "Show the first slide," he said.
"Major Jakes, please pay attention," said the man with the maroon tie. "All of these details may be important."
The slide-projector operator focused quickly to show a satellite image of a dense jungle, in the middle of which a circular area had been absolutely flattened, a crater excavated with almost perfect symmetry. The ground around it looked like slag, glassy and molten, as if some-one had stubbed out a gigantic cigarette there.
"This used to be a private ranch in Mexico. Do you have any idea what might have caused this, Major Jakes?" the man in the charcoal suit asked.
"A daisy cutter?" Jakes suggested, citing one of the fragmentation bombs used to knock down trees in the jungles for the purpose of clearing helicopter landing pads. "Or a napalm burst?"
"Neither," said the man with steel-gray hair. "The scale is half a kilometer in diameter. Our seismic sensors revealed a sharp pulse, and our distant radiation detectors pinpointed a significant rise in residual radioactivity."
Major Jakes perked up. "Are you suggesting this is the result of a small nuclear strike?"
"We can think of no other explanation," the second man said, straightening his maroon tie. "A tactical nuclear device, such as an atomic artillery shell, could provide such a precise yield. This type of ordnance was recently developed by our nation and, we presume, by the Soviets, in the final years of the Cold War."
"But who could have used such a weapon in Central America, sir? What would have been the provocation?"
The man with steel-gray hair, who seemed to be the leader of the meeting, laced his fingers behind his head and leaned back against his suit jacket.
"There is no small amount of political turmoil in this portion of the Yucatan.
We know of numerous terrorist acts, minor squabbles with a small group of militant separatists— but we feel that an action such as this would be beyond their meager capabilities. There are also many rival drug lords in the area whose tactic of choice has been to elimi-nate their rivals through the use of assassination—car bombs and the like."
"This is no car bomb, sir," Major Jakes pointed out.
"Indeed not," said the man in the charcoal suit. "Next slide, please."
The slide-projector operator clicked to a higher-resolution image that showed the trees knocked down, the edge of the crater almost perfectly circular, as if a fireball had arisen so quickly that it vaporized the forest, turned the ground to glass, and then faded before the surrounding forest fires could propagate.
"Our working assumption is that at least one and possi-bly many more of these tactical nuclear warheads have trickled out following the collapse of the former Soviet Union. In the chaos of the breakup of the socialist republics, many of the sovereign states laid claim to the nuclear stock-piles left behind by the central Communist government. Many of those warheads have been...
misplaced. That ord-nance has been on the open market for international thugs and terrorists. It's the only thing we know of that could have come close to that kind of high-energy devastation. Such a device could have come from Cuba, for instance, across the Caribbean Sea to the Yucatan Peninsula, and from there to the drug lords in this area of Mexico."
"So, you suspect this may only be the first strike. There could be more."
"It's a possibility," said the man with steel-gray hair. "If other such weapons exist."
The next slide displayed a map of the Yucatan show-ing the states of Quintana Roo, Yucatan, and Campeche, as well as the small Central American countries of Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.
"We need you to take a team in and find the source of these weapons, then confiscate or destroy them. We can-not allow nuclear terrorists to run free, even if they are just murdering each other."
The man with the maroon tie smiled, and his jowls jiggled. "It sets a bad example."
"My usual commandos?" Jakes said.
"Whatever you desire is at your disposal, Major Jakes," said the man with steel-gray hair. "We know our investment in your efforts will be worth every penny."
"Or every peso," said the slide-projector operator.
The others ignored the joke.
"I presume this will be a covert insertion, a search and destroy mission? But how am I to locate the target? What intelligence do we have that there are additional tactical warheads?"
"We have a strong suspicion," said the man in the charcoal suit. "There seems to be a military base located in one of the more isolated portions of the Yucatan. We've picked up a powerful transmission, encoded with an encryption scheme unlike any we have ever seen before. The signal suddenly appeared a little more than a week ago, so powerful it could not be hidden. We sus-pect the transmitter indicates a secret military base there."
"Does the target correspond to any known location?" Major Jakes said, leaning forward, drinking in the image on the screen.
The slide-projector operator clicked to the next image—a high-resolution satellite photograph with the lines and contours of a map overlaid upon it.
"It is apparently the site of isolated Mayan ruins. When we cross-referenced our records with those of the State Department, we found that a team of American archaeologists disappeared there at about the same time the signal began, and only a few days before this detona-tion occurred.
"We suspect our enemies have taken over the ruins as their own secret military base. As no ransom demands or hostage threats have been forthcoming, the status of our American citizens remains unknown ... and, for the pur-poses of your mission, low priority."
"I understand," Major Jakes said. He squinted to see the site on the map. He saw nothing that even remotely resembled a road anywhere in the vicinity.
The slide-projector operator twisted the focusing ring around the lens to bring the photo into crystal clarity.
"Xitaclan," Major Jakes muttered, reading the label.
At least it sounded better than the cold mountains of Afghanistan.
Xitaclan ruins Sunday, 4:23 p.m.
The diligent trailblazers began to mutter quickly and quietly among themselves in their own language, excited or uneasy— Scully couldn't tell which. For the past two days her entire energy had been focused on tak-ing step after step, proceeding deeper into the jungle ... farther from civilization, comfort, and safety.
Fernando Aguilar picked up his pace. "Come quickly, amigos," he said and spread ferns aside. He leaned against a tall ceiba tree and gestured.
"Behold—Xitaclan!" Sweaty and exhausted, Mulder stood beside Scully, his eyes suddenly bright with interest. Vladimir Rubicon sprang forward with renewed energy, as if he had been jump-started.
Catching her breath, Scully shaded her eyes and looked out at the ancient, decaying city that might have cost the lives of Cassandra Rubicon and her team. Gray clouds hung in the sky, casting the site in a cool gloom, but the broken edifices still towered like hulking shapes in a storm.
The shadow of the vast ancient city could be easily seen, like an afterimage on the eyes. In the center of a broad plaza, spindly trees pushed up through cracks in the flagstones. A towering, stair-stepped pyramid domi-nated the abandoned metropolis, overgrown with vines. Smaller shrines and elaborately decorated stelae lay col-lapsed, unable to withstand time and natural forces.
Intricately carved glyphs poked out from the moss and vines.
"This is astounding," Rubicon said, pushing past Fernando Aguilar. He stepped out into the broad plaza, scratching his yellow-white goatee. "Look at the size of the place. Imagine the number of people who came here." He turned to look at Scully, then Mulder, desperate to explain.
"Maya slash-and-burn agriculture never could have supported a large population center like this. Most major cities such as Tikal or Chichen Itza were probably inhab-ited only during, uh, religious ceremonies, ball games, and seasonal sacrifices. For the rest of the year, the cities were abandoned, left to the jungle until it was time for the next festival."
"Sounds like an Olympic village," Mulder said. He and Scully came out to stand next to the old archaeolo-gist, while the native guides hung back, talking ner-vously with Aguilar in some Indian dialect.
"You said ball games, Dr. Rubicon?" Scully asked. "You mean they had spectator sports?"
"There, I believe, was their stadium." He gestured across the clearing at a broad sunken space walled in with carved bricks. "The Maya played, uh, sort of a cross between soccer and basketball. They hit a hard rubber ball with their hips, thighs, and shoulders—they were not allowed to touch it with their hands. The object was to knock it through an upright stone ring on the wall."
"Cheerleaders, pennants, and everything," Mulder said.
"The losers of the tournament were usually sacrificed to the gods," Rubicon continued, "their heads cut off, their hearts cut out, their blood spilled on the ground."
"I suppose you couldn't say it was an honor just to make the playoffs," Mulder said.
A deeply troubled look crossed Rubicon's face as he walked forward, turning from side to side. He tugged at his grimy goatee, leaving a mud-streaked fingerprint across his chin. "I don't see much sign of Cassandra and her team here, no ambitious excavation work." He looked around, but the jungle seemed very vast, very oppressive. "I suppose I should give up hope that her problem was something so innocuous as a broken radio transmitter."
Scully indicated where the frees and underbrush had been hacked away. Piles of discarded branches and uprooted creepers lay in a mound half burned, as if some of the missing team had fried to make a bonfire to get rid of the debris
... or to send some kind of desperate signal.
"They were here not long ago," she pointed out. "I would imagine all scars of their work would be obliter-ated and swallowed up by new growth within a month."