Countdown (4 page)

Tikal National Park, Petén,
Guatemala

“Where are we?” Atticus asked. They'd landed in the narrow field near a temple. Surrounding the field were rows of steps, sort of like bleachers. Set into one of the walls high overhead was a strange stone hoop covered in glyphs. Dan tried to think of a joke about ancient PE classes, but his brain still felt like it was sloshing in his skull from the crash.

“Wow!” Atticus ran right up to the ring.

“Atticus, how can you care about Mayan ruins at a time like this?” Dan asked wearily. “We just escaped death by a nose hair.”

“But this is amazing!” Atticus said.

Dan, Jake, and Amy rested and caught their breath while Atticus ran his hands over the stone glyphs. Dan was glad Att seemed to recover quickly, but he didn't trust this sudden enthusiasm. He knew Atticus was coping in his typical way — by immersing himself in history. Maybe that was why he'd become such a prodigy. His life had had its share of trauma, but he found safety in knowledge, the more obscure, the better.

“Dan, look!” Atticus waved at him. “I've always wanted to see one of these with my own eyes.”

When his head stopped spinning, Dan sat up. They seemed to have crashed in some ancient stadium.

“Reminds me a little of a tennis court,” Jake said.

“It is,” Atticus told them. “It's a
pok-a-tok
court.”

“A what?” Dan asked.

“A
pok-a-tok
court,” Atticus repeated, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Dan tried to walk, but his legs were wobbly. He let himself plop down on the grass. “I know you're saying something important, Att, but forgive me if I have trouble caring right now.”

Sirens blared in the distance, gradually getting closer. “I hope that's an ambulance,” Amy said.

Jake shot a piercing glance at her. “Are you hurt?”

“I can't tell. I don't think so, but my arms and legs are numb, and I want you all to be checked out for injuries, too.”

The ambulance arrived, followed by a jeep full of Guatemalan soldiers in camouflage uniforms, with green berets on their heads and rifles strapped over their shoulders. “The army?” Dan whispered. “Isn't that overkill?”

“We did crash a helicopter in a national park,” Amy reminded him.

Two medics jumped out of the ambulance and checked the kids for injuries. One of them spoke English, and the army captain who oversaw the examinations did, too. “Where is the pilot?” the captain demanded.

“He jumped,” Amy explained.

“And he tried to take the little one with him,” Dan added, gesturing toward Atticus.

The captain's eyes narrowed in disbelief. “He jumped? Why would he do that?”

“You tell us,” Jake said. Dan caught the dirty look Amy flashed him. They knew why the pilot had jumped — he'd taken a bribe from Pierce to let the Cahills die in an “accidental” helicopter crash.

But letting the Guatemalan army in on their troubles wouldn't help. For all they knew, Pierce had an in with them, too. His long arm of evil reached all over the world. “We don't know why he jumped,” Amy said. “You can ask him if you can find him out in the jungle.”

The captain stared dubiously into the thick forest. Dan knew that it grew so fast it could cover a crashed plane in a matter of days.

The medics finished checking Dan, Amy, Jake, and Atticus for broken bones and signs of concussion. “Some bumps and bruises, but they're okay,” one reported to the captain.

“Good. You may go.” The captain dismissed the ambulance and crossed his arms over his chest. Dan eyed the pistol in his belt. These guys didn't fool around. “Now, may I ask what you children are doing here in Tikal?”

“We're tourists,” Amy said as the ambulance drove away. “We just want to see the ruins, that's all. We have a reservation at the hotel.”

As if to confirm Amy's statement, a Tikal park ranger drove up in an SUV. He got out, stared at the crashed helicopter, shook his head, and whistled. “I didn't believe it when the airport called and said you'd landed a helicopter in the
pok-a-tok
court.” He shook his head again. “I still don't believe it.”

“We're investigating the crash site,” the captain told the ranger. “You may take these people to their hotel. We'll be in touch if we need more information.”

“All right,” Amy said. “You know where we are.”

The captain gave her a grim look. “Yes,
señorita
, we do.”

The ranger collected the Cahills' bags and loaded them into the SUV. The kids piled into the backseat and let the ranger have the front seat to himself. He started the car, then turned and stared at them as if trying to figure out what kind of strange creatures they might be. “You are alive.” It was not a question but an astonished statement. “It is hard to believe.”

Dan didn't know how to answer that. Jake said, “Strange but true. And we'd really like to get to the hotel and recover.”

But the driver still watched them. “You are the Cahills, yes?” Amy nodded. “
Those
Cahills?”

Obviously, this guy read the tabloids. Dan saw Amy open her mouth wearily as if to answer, but Jake cut her off. “We don't know what you're talking about, dude. Can we get going?”

The driver finally turned toward the steering wheel and put the SUV into drive. “You crash a helicopter on a
pok-a-tok
court, you must expect a few questions.”

“What's this
pok-a-tok
everybody's going on about?” Dan asked Atticus in a low voice.

“It was a complicated ball game played by the Maya about four thousand years ago. The goal was to get a ball through this stone hoop without using your hands or feet,” Atticus said. “We don't know much about it, other than that.”

Dan turned and looked out the back window at the ring receding into the distance. It must have been about twenty feet off the ground. “That seems impossible.”

“It was so hard that games went on for days with no score,” Atticus said. “Historians think that the losing team was often executed.”

“And I thought dodgeball was rough,” Dan said.

“Why were they executed?” Amy asked.

“The players might have been prisoners of war,” Atticus said. “They were offered as sacrifices to the gods.” He looked thoughtful.

“What is it?” Dan asked. When his friend got that look on his face, it meant his brilliant mind was working on something important, like pondering the origins of the universe, or programming a whoopee cushion app.

“Nothing . . . just that the carvings on that stone hoop looked familiar somehow.”

The ranger turned down a jungle road, pointing out a tall Mayan pyramid in front of a plaza or town square. Unlike the Egyptian pyramids built of large blocks of cut stone with flat, smooth sides, or the ones in Angkor Wat that looked as if they'd been made of poured wet sand, these were step pyramids, small cut stones forming tall steps that led to the top.

“Can we walk to the top of one of those pyramids?” Dan asked. The sooner they started looking for the crystal, the better.

“Certain ones are open to tourists, yes,” the ranger replied. “Tikal was one of the prime centers of Mayan civilization,” he told them, “inhabited from the sixth century
B.C.
to the tenth century
A.D.
The ancient city has been mapped out. It covered over six square miles and was comprised of over three thousand structures. The whole park area is about two hundred twenty-two square miles. A lot of archaeological treasures are still buried under vegetation.” The ranger waved his hand at a dense green grove with a few piles of stone just visible through the brush. “There are thousands of ancient structures buried in this jungle, and we've only excavated a fraction of them.” Dan's spirits sank. How were they supposed to find one piece of quartz in all of that?

They drove through lush green jungle. Suddenly, the trees parted and a beautiful ancient city appeared before them. A step pyramid rose two hundred feet at one end, with a long gray staircase up the front. It was surrounded by what looked like houses or palaces around a green village square. “It looks like another planet,” Jake said.

“It looks like Yavin,” Dan said. “You know, like from
Star Wars
?”

“That's right,” the ranger told them. “George Lucas filmed scenes from the first Star Wars movie here in 1977.” He drove on. In the distance, the gray stone tops of other ancient temples poked up through the green, and beautiful exotic birds chattered in the treetops. Dan spotted a funny-looking animal with raccoon eyes and a long, ringed tail scampering down a jungle path.

“A coati!” Atticus said.

“Very good, little boy,” the ranger said to Atticus's obvious annoyance. “You'll see coatis all over the place here.”

They passed a very tall tree — maybe one hundred feet tall — with large thorns covering the trunk. The upper branches spread over the road like a canopy. “A
ceiba
,” the ranger told them. “Sacred tree of the Maya. They believed its roots reached into the underworld and its branches held up the sky. The souls of the dead climbed its branches to get to the heavens.”

A truck passed by with four men riding in the back, axes and shovels over their shoulders. The ranger frowned. “Tikal is also an important rain forest reserve for protected plants, birds, and animals.” He glanced at the truck as it disappeared in his rearview mirror. “We patrol the area as well as we can, but unfortunately a few poachers manage to slip in from time to time.”

“Poachers? What do they steal?” Amy asked.

“They hunt crocodiles, pumas, and jaguars for their skins, harvest endangered flowers, or chop down rare trees for the valuable wood,” the ranger replied. “Sometimes we find secret poacher logging camps deep in the forest. They're almost impossible to spot under the cover of the jungle.”

“Have you ever heard of a riven rock, or riven crystal, being found in one of these temples?” Amy asked.

“Or shocked quartz?” Jake added.

The ranger shook his head. “The temples are made of local limestone. Not much quartz is found in this area, unless the Maya traded for it.”

They spent the rest of the drive in silence.

They checked into their hotel and headed for their rooms. Amy opened her backpack to make sure the serum flask had survived the crash. She held the flask to the light. The poison-green fluid — undiluted, full-strength — was as deadly as it looked. It imparted awesome power to the person who drank it — for a week. And then it killed them. She shuddered and put the vial back inside her pack.

She took a shower and changed, then went next door to meet the others in Dan and Atticus's room. Jake was there, hanging out with the other boys. Dan was losing to Atticus at chess. The TV was on, tuned to an international news channel. Dan's T-shirt was smudged from the bumpy trip, a big footprint stamped on the front.

“What's that footprint on your shirt?” Amy asked.

Dan glanced down at it. “Must have been from that dirtbag pilot, when I was holding his leg trying to keep him from bailing on us.”

Amy sighed. “Aren't you going to take a shower? Or at least change?”

“Why? Are we meeting with the queen of England or something?” Dan asked.

“Speaking of the queen . . .” Jake turned up the volume on the TV. The footage showed a handsome man shaking hands with Queen Elizabeth, his airbrushed blond wife curtsying beside him.

“American media mogul J. Rutherford Pierce met with Queen Elizabeth at a reception yesterday on the last leg of his European tour,” the news announcer reported. “Pierce has been meeting with world leaders in a clear indication that he's preparing to run for political office. Pundits are expecting him to throw his hat into the ring in the race for US president very soon.”