The Hunt for Atlantis (18 page)

Kari examined the neighboring bodies, more curious than repulsed. “From the state of these other corpses, they seem to have died at the same time. But there’s only four of them? That seems small for an expedition. The Ahnenerbe would send dozens of men on such a mission.”

“Maybe this lot didn’t run fast enough,” said Chase, with gallows humor. “So what’re we going to do? Whoever’s out there, they don’t want us around.”

“We have to go on,” Kari said, determined. “We haven’t come all this way just to be frightened off by a tribe of savages and their … scarecrows.”

“Ah, ah, you see?” said Hamilton, waving an admonishing finger at her. “You’re betraying your dominator culture prejudices there with your choice of words. These people have been living in perfect harmony with their environment for thousands of years—isn’t it possible that by comparison, we’re the real savages?”

Kari looked as irritated as Nina had ever seen her. “Oh, shut up, you stupid little man.” Di Salvo barely contained a laugh at Hamilton’s affronted gawp. “Mr. Chase, can you see anywhere we can get ashore?”

Chase peered into the drifting mist. “Hard to tell… there might be something on the right bank.” He started rowing again, di Salvo joining in to propel the boat away from the grisly warning signs.

There was indeed a gap in the dense vegetation along the bank, and a few minutes later the Zodiac was tied up. Once everyone was on solid ground, the equipment was unloaded—and weapons handed out, to Nina’s discomfort and Hamilton’s outrage.

“You’re seriously proposing that we make first contact with these people at gunpoint?” he shrilled as Chase passed compact automatic rifles to Castille and di Salvo.

“From the state of those bodies, I’d say they were met at spearpoint, so yeah,” Chase replied. There was another rifle in the pack: after a moment’s consideration, he took it out and offered it to Kari. “Do you know how…”

She took it from him. “Colt Commando M4A15.56-millimeter assault rifle, magazine load thirty rounds, maximum effective range three hundred and sixty meters.” Keeping her eyes fixed on his, she ejected the magazine, pushed down on the exposed bullet with her thumb to check that it was fully loaded, reinserted it and chambered the first round, never once looking down at the weapon.

Chase was impressed. “Okay, I’m adding that to my list of things I want in a woman …”

“You don’t want me anymore? I’m heartbroken,” Nina told him.

“Heh. Okay, we’ve got …” he checked his watch, “three and a half hours to sunset, so no matter what happens, whatever we find, we’re back here at the boat in three. Until we find out more about our pole-up-the-jacksie friends out there, we’re not going to be doing any camping. Me and Agnaldo, we’ll take point, Hugo’ll watch our arses. Everyone else, keep between us—stay close, but don’t bunch up too tight. Nina, you stick with Ms. Frost. It’s funny, but I’m starting to think she could have a decent second career as a bodyguard.” Kari smiled and adopted a military pose, making Nina giggle. “All right! Let’s go find this lost city!”

“What lost city?” asked Hamilton, as everyone followed Chase and di Salvo. “Wait, is there something I haven’t been told?”

It took them close to an hour to reach the first of the four potential sites for the city, and another twenty minutes of exploration before it became obvious there was nothing there. What on the aerial photos had seemed like hints of former civilization were, on the ground, revealed as nothing more than exposed rocks, fallen trees and tricks of the light.

“Oh well, can’t expect to hit it on the first try,” Chase reassured Nina as he took a compass reading and checked his map. Beneath the trees, getting line of sight on a GPS satellite was problematic at best. “Still got three more to go.”

“How far away’s the next site?” she asked.

Chase pointed. “Mile or so that way. If we shift, we might have time to check out the third site before we go back to the boat. Or we could just head back now. I bet Julio’s got something nice in the oven for us …”

Nina smiled. “Tempting, but no.”

“Tchah. Okay,” he said, raising his voice, “everyone, we’re moving out!”

The group reassembled and set off behind di Salvo and Chase. Di Salvo slung his rifle over one shoulder and wielded a machete. After about ten minutes, the undergrowth thinned out noticeably. Occasionally he swung the blade to hack at some obstructing branch, but most of the time the route was clear, the party able to move at a faster pace than before.

“Yeah, I thought this seemed a bit too good to be natural,” Chase said to him.

“What do you mean?” Nina asked. She and Kari were following ten feet behind, heeding his warning not to bunch up.

“We’re on a path. That’s why we don’t need to cut through much.” He indicated the thicker vegetation off to each side.

Nina looked around warily for any signs of movement. “So we might run into the Indians coming the other way?”

“Christ, I hope not. I don’t want to miss my dinner!”

They kept moving through the jungle, ducking under low branches. The mist was still drifting between the trees, reducing visibility to at most fifty feet even when the view wasn’t blocked by vegetation. Suddenly di Salvo stopped, holding up a warning hand for everyone else to do the same. “Footprint,” he said, crouching.

Chase squatted next to him. “How old?”

“Less than a day. Definitely an Indian.”

“How can you tell?” Nina asked. She could just about make out the faint outline of a bare foot in the dirt and fallen leaves.

“The toes are splayed, from walking barefoot all the time.” Di Salvo stood and squinted through the mist. “Even if we don’t find your lost city, this is still a previously uncontacted tribe. Another reason for the loggers and farmers to hate my guts.”

“No, this is incredible!” said Hamilton, pushing past Nina and Kari. “We really will be the first people to make contact with this tribe! Once we establish peaceful communication, there’s so much we’ll be able to learn from them—”

A spearhead burst through the front of Hamilton’s chest, his bright red shirt darkening with blood.

Nina screamed. Hamilton’s eyes widened in shock as he sagged to his knees. Then he keeled over, the wooden shaft of the spear protruding over four feet out of his back.

Chase and Castille whipped up their rifles and aimed in the direction from which the spear had come. Kari grabbed Nina and pushed her to the ground as she lifted her own gun.

An arrow hit di Salvo in his right arm, the carved obsidian head slicing deep into his bicep. He dropped his machete, yelling in agony as he stumbled back and fell over Hamilton’s body.

At the same moment, something whirled through the air and cracked against Chase’s head—then wrapped around it.

A bola.

Chase staggered and dropped to the ground, clutching at the weighted cords digging into his flesh.

Behind her, Nina heard Castille let out a choking gasp. Another bola had caught him around the neck, squeezing his throat with the grip of a maniac.

Philby threw himself flat on the ground next to Kari and Nina. Another spear flew overhead, passing barely a foot above them.

Kari desperately looked for a target—but saw nothing except trees and mist.

Fleeting glimpses of shapes darted between the towering trunks. She brought the gun around, tracking one of the ghostly figures—

Crack!

Something hit her on the back of her head. Not a bola, not even a spear. The crudest of all weapons, just a rock—but thrown with great precision and force. It wasn’t enough to knock her out, but it dropped her to the muddy ground, stunned and disoriented.

The rifle fell from her hands. Nina stared at it for a moment, frozen by fear. Then she reached for it.

But too late.

Where a second before there had been nothing but jungle, now there were people, springing into view as if they had been spat out of the ground.

Dark hair, dark skin, faces fierce behind their primitive but deadly weapons.

All of them aimed at her.

Nina hardly dared breathe.

The Indians closed in, treading silently over the moist earth. Ahead, Chase groaned. She could still hear Castille choking.

The nearest Indian was now barely ten feet away, a black-tipped spear held unwaveringly in his hand, poised to strike.

Nina glanced at Kari’s gun … then looked away. Instead, she very slowly slipped her pack off her back, opening the top flap.

“What are you doing?” hissed Philby. “Get the gun! They’re going to kill us!”

She ignored him, her eyes fixed on the man with the spear. Six feet away now. Another couple of steps and he would be able to impale her without the spear even leaving his hand.

Her fingers touched soft cloth wrapped around heavy metal. Still not taking her eyes off the Indian, she slipped the sextant arm out of the pack, letting the cloth fall away. Bowing her head in an unmistakable gesture of submission, she held up the orichalcum bar, offering it to him.

Silence.

She raised her eyes slightly, seeing the man’s feet now barely a yard away. Splayed toes, the analytical part of her mind noted pointlessly. If he was going to kill her, it would be within the next few seconds …

Instead, he excitedly shouted something, the language completely foreign. One of the other Indians replied, sounding puzzled. Languages varied, but emotional tones were a human constant anywhere in the world.

He snatched the bar from Nina’s hands. She flinched as the spear tip entered her field of vision, inches away. The Indians closed in and she was pulled roughly to her feet. At least twelve men now stood in a ragged circle around her. The other members of the group were likewise hauled upright. Kari gasped in pain, her eyes still unfocused, and di Salvo let out a strangled growl of agony as the Indians grabbed his injured arm.

They knew what guns were, Nina realized. Clearly they’d had enough contact with the outside world to recognize modern weapons. The rifles were quickly whisked away, and Chase and Castille were deprived of their sidearms before the bola cords around their heads were unwound.

“Nina! Kari!” Chase called. “Are you okay?” An Indian held the tip of an obsidian knife to his neck. Chase glowered at him, but fell silent.

“Kari’s hurt,” Nina said.

“No, I’m okay,” Kari told her woozily. “What happened?”

“I gave them the artifact.”

That brought Kari’s eyes back into focus, staring in disbelief at Nina. “What?”

“I think it saved our lives. Look.”

Kari followed her nod, seeing one of the Indians holding the sextant arm up to the light, examining it almost with reverence. The others looked on with similar astonishment, occasionally glancing suspiciously at their captives as they exchanged questions.

“Agnaldo,” Nina whispered. “Can you understand them?”

“Some of it,” di Salvo grunted, face tight with pain. “They know what it is, but… I don’t think any of them have ever seen it before.”

“Can you talk to them?”

“I can try.”

“Tell them… tell them we’re bringing it back to them,” Nina said. “Tell them we’ve brought it back to—to the city of the water god.”

Through his pain, di Salvo managed an incredulous look. “That might be hard to translate.”

“Just do it!” she ordered.

Both Kari and Chase gave her glances of mixed surprise and admiration as di Salvo followed her order and began talking haltingly. The Indians listened, still suspicious—and confused whenever the Brazilian lost something in translation—but they apparently got the message. The man holding the artifact said something back to di Salvo.

“What’d he say?” Nina asked.

“I think they’re going to take us to their village. Something about the tribal elders … I couldn’t make it all out.”

“They’re not going to kill us?” said Philby. “Oh thank God!”

“Yeah,” Nina told him grimly. “Too bad about Hamilton.” Philby’s face fell.

“I wouldn’t start celebrating just yet, Prof,” added Chase. “If these tribal elders don’t like us, we’re going to end up as the new ‘keep out’ signs on the river.”

After tying their prisoners’ hands behind their backs, the Indians led them deeper into the jungle.

“Can’t believe we got ambushed like that,” Chase said almost apologetically to Nina and Kari. “No way that would have happened if I’d still been in the SAS. God, I must be going daft.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Nina tried to reassure him. “This is where these people live. They know the terrain. And they’re obviously big on keeping out visitors.”

“That’s not the point! The SAS has never been successfully ambushed on jungle patrol.”

“None of us saw them, Edward,” said Castille, his voice still raspy from being choked.

“Yeah, but…”

“Eddie,” said Nina, “we’re still alive, that’s the main thing. If you’d started shooting, more of us might be dead. Maybe even all of us.”

“The day’s not over yet,” he reminded her.

The trail began to rise, a low hill cautiously peeking above the great flat expanse of the Amazon basin. Nina noticed more signs of human presence, other paths joining the one they were traveling, converging on one location.

The hill became steeper, the path zigzagging towards the top and the trees thinning out.

“My God,” Nina gasped as they reached the summit.

The hill was not tall, but it was high enough to give a spectacular view of what lay below. Greenery dominated the landscape, a branch of the river winding through it, but between the gaps in the trees she could make out the ruins of ancient buildings, the tumbledown remains of what must at one time have been an expansive settlement.

There was one building that was not in ruins, though. And she couldn’t take her eyes off it.

From the air it would be mostly shielded by the overhanging jungle, little more than a broken shadow. But from this angle Nina could see it clearly, a brooding, menacing structure. And huge, around sixty feet high, four hundred feet long and about half as wide.

No, she thought. It’s exactly half as wide.

She remembered a line from Critias: “Here was Poseidon’s own temple, which was a stadium in length and half a stadium in width, and of a proportionate height, having a strange barbaric appearance.” The dark stone structure before her certainly fitted the bill, the ancient Greeks considering “barbaric” just about anything that wasn’t Greek. If anything, to Nina it seemed more like an Incan or Mayan structure, large blocks of carved stone carefully slotted together with almost unnatural precision. Jagged spires rose from its corners, foliage entangled around them, further camouflaging its shape. The lower parts of the walls were stepped like a ziggurat, but the curve of the roof resembled something more modern, like an aircraft hangar.

She was looking at the Temple of Poseidon, god of the sea.

Or rather a replica of it, a copy. The original, according to Plato, had been sheathed in precious metals, whereas this was just raw stone, covered in moss and vines. It was also smaller, well short of the length of a Greek stadium, 607 feet.

Unless she had been right all along—and an Atlantean stadium was smaller than a Greek one. Which would make a profound difference to the search for the island’s location …

Nina didn’t have a chance to think any further on the subject, the Indians driving them down the slope. She could now see that while the city was in ruins, it hadn’t been abandoned. At the nearest end of the temple was a village of wood and stone huts. She counted fifteen of the circular structures. Either the tribe was spread out in more than one location, or their numbers were very small. It didn’t seem likely that there could be many more than a hundred people.

The group was led into the village, the face of the temple looming over everything. Other Indians—young and old men, women, children—emerged from the huts to watch them pass, suspicion clear in their dark eyes. Near the base of the temple wall was a hut larger than any of the others.

“They’re calling for the elders,” said di Salvo, listening to the Indians’ excited chatter. The animal skin covering the hut door was pulled aside, and three men emerged. Ancient, faces wrinkled beneath headbands adorned with feathers, but still strong and vital.

“Amazing,” Kari whispered, more to herself than to Nina. “The genetics … With a population this small and this isolated, inbreeding would normally have caused clear genetic abnormalities by now. But there’s no sign of it in any of these people. A superior genome … I’d love to get a DNA sample for the foundation to analyze.”

“Let’s convince them not to stick us on spikes before we ask if we can drain their blood, eh?” said Chase.

The Indians prodded the group into a ragged line before the elders, who regarded them with cold scorn as they listened to the leader of the hunting party. Their expressions changed as the hunter produced the Atlantean artifact. Awe … mixed with anger.

One of the elders asked a sharp question, the hunter pointing at Nina. The elder advanced on her, scowling as he examined her face closely. She tried not to show the fear racing through her body. After an agonizing moment, he made a slightly dismissive sound and turned his attention to Kari. His stern expression became more like fascination as he stared into her blue eyes, then reached up to touch her blond hair. She raised an eyebrow, but submitted.

Then he turned back to Nina, asking something. She glanced helplessly at di Salvo.

“He’s asking about the artifact,” di Salvo told her. “I think he wants to know where you found it.”

“You think?” Nina said, her voice rising a couple of octaves. “If I say the wrong thing, he might kill me!”

“Just tell him what you know! I’ll do the best I can to translate. The dialect’s similar to those of tribes from much farther north.”

“Similar’s not the same as identical!” Nina pointed out. The elder was still watching her coldly. “Okay, okay! Tell him we took it from a thief in another land, that we followed the map on it to return it to its people.”

Di Salvo began the translation. “You sure it’s from here?” Chase asked quietly.

“It has to be. They know what it is.”

The elder spoke again, di Salvo listening intently before translating. “He says it was stolen by white men in the time of his great-grandfather. They punished some of the white men, but the others escaped.”

“The Nazi expedition,” said Kari. “It must be.”

Chase grimaced. “Sharp stick up the arse—now that’s punishment.”

Di Salvo looked confused. “Now he’s asking about… I don’t understand it. He wants to know if Ms. Frost is one of … the old ones?”

Kari and Nina exchanged glances. “Ask him what he means,” said Nina.

“The old ones who built the temple,” di Salvo translated. “He says they had hair like … white gold.”

“Tell them that’s why we came here,” Kari said, authority returning to her voice. “To find out.”

“You sure that’s a good idea?” Chase muttered. “If they think you’re lying, you’ll be the first one on the pole!”

The elder spoke again, his two companions joining in with additional declarations. Di Salvo struggled to keep up. “They’re saying that the artifact—they call it the ‘pointing finger’—must be returned to its home in the temple. They want you to do it, Ms. Frost.”

“Me?” Kari chewed her lip.

“He says that putting it back will prove if you’re really one of the old ones—no, a child of the old ones.”

“And what happens if she’s not?” Nina asked.

Chase made an aggrieved noise, tipping his head to indicate the sharp weapons still aimed at them. “Come on, Doc. Keep up.”

“Oh…”

Di Salvo continued. “They want you to go into the temple and face … three challenges. The Challenge of Strength, the Challenge of Skill and the Challenge of … of Mind, I think.”

Nina gave him a frozen grin. “Again! Thinking not the same as knowing!”

“If you beat the challenges, you will have proved yourself worthy to enter the temple. If you lose …” Di Salvo pursed his lips. “What Eddie just said. For all of us.”

Chase winced. “Anyone else just pucker?”

Kari took a deep breath. “Tell them I accept the challenge.”

“You do what?” Nina yelped.

“Really?” asked di Salvo, shocked.

“Yes. But tell them that I want my friends to come with me.” She indicated Chase and Nina.

“Oh, bollocks,” said Chase as di Salvo relayed her request.

“Are you insane?” Nina hissed.

“You’ll be safer in there than out here,” Kari said. “At least we have a chance inside the temple. And I can’t read their language—I suspect I’m going to need someone who can, and I don’t think Professor Philby is quite up to the challenges.”

For a moment, offense almost overcame fear on Philby’s face. “Well actually, I think that—”

The elder interrupted him, one of the hunters giving him a warning jab in the back. Di Salvo continued to translate. “He says yes,” he said, surprised. “The challenges are for two people. Because you’re a woman, he’ll let you have more help.”

Kari nodded. “Hmm. I never thought I’d say this, but thank God for sexism.”

“You have until nightfall. If you haven’t returned by then, the others will be …” di Salvo paled, “put to death. And so will you, if you emerge.”

Castille looked up at the sky. “Sunset is only an hour away. Maybe even less.”

“In that case,” said Kari, giving the elder an imperious look, “we’d better get started, hadn’t we? Tell him to cut us free so we can go. And ask him what we can take with us.” She looked over at the team’s packs, which had been dumped in a pile nearby.

“Explosives, ropes, a crowbar or two …” Chase suggested quietly.

The hunters untied their wrists. “He says all you can take in with you are your clothes, and torches,” di Salvo told them. “That’s all you’ll need if you’re worthy of the challenge.”

“I think this is a bad idea,” Nina told Kari, rubbing her stiff arms.

“Then help me make the best of it,” Kari replied.

“How are you staying so damn calm?”

“I’m not. I’m absolutely terrified. But I’m not going to show it in front of these people. And nor should you.” Kari took Nina by the shoulders. “I know you can do this, Nina. Trust me.”