Lost Empire (30 page)

They got to work, slowly dismantling the pile until they cleared a path to the rear wall. They knelt before the four-foot-tall gap. A shallow runnel trickled past their boots and across the grotto before joining the waterfall proper.

Sam jammed his branch into the opening and rattled it about. Again, nothing moved. He pulled the Webley from his pocket, leaned forward, pressed his face to the rock, and panned his headlamp from right to left. He straightened up and gave Remi the OK sign.

“Once more into the breach,” she yelled.

“We two, we happy two,” Sam answered in kind.

“Nothing like a little bastardized Shakespeare to set the tone.”

 

 

THEIR ENTRY WAS THANKFULLY SHORT. AFTER FIVE FEET OF hunched walking, they saw that the rock ceiling abruptly sloped upward and found themselves standing in an elongated oval cavern a hundred feet wide with a thirty-foot-tall, stalactite-riddled ceiling. Their headlamps weren’t strong enough to penetrate more than thirty feet ahead, but from what they could see the space appeared to be loosely divided into “rooms” by mineral columns that shone pearlescent gray and butter yellow in the beams of their lamps. The quartz inclusions in the walls winked and sparkled. The floor, a mixture of jagged rock and silt that crunched under their boots, was split by a narrow, winding creek.

“Seems like a natural place to start,” Sam said, and Remi nodded.

Using the creek’s path as a guide, they began moving into the cave.

 

 

“SOMEWHAT ANTICLIMACTIC,” Remi said after a few minutes.

“I know. The day is young, though.”

Their last spelunking adventure had ended with not only the solution of the mystery of Napoleon’s lost cellar but also a discovery that was helping rewrite parts of ancient Greek history.

They continued on, covering a hundred feet, then two hundred. Sam’s headlamp picked out a wedge-shaped wall ahead from whose base the creek gushed. On either side of the wall, a tunnel curved back into darkness.

“Your pick,” Sam said. “Left or right?”

“Right.”

They hopped over the creek and started down the right-hand tunnel. After twenty feet the floor sloped down, and they found themselves standing in calf-deep water. Sam shined his beam over the surface; there was a slight eddying current. They kept walking.

Remi stopped and put her index finger to her lips.

She clicked off her headlamp. Sam did the same.

Then, following ten seconds of silence, a sound: something moving in the darkness ahead. Like leather scraping against stone. More silence, then another sound: like a heavy wet towel striking rock.

Sam and Remi looked at each other and, in near unison, mouthed:
Crocodile
. The leather was scaled skin rubbing on rock; the wet towel, a heavily muscled tail slapping stone. Splashing.

Heavy feet plodded through water. Sam drew the Webley and pointed it into the darkness. Together, he and Remi clicked on their headlamps.

Twenty feet away and sloshing directly toward them was a crocodile snout; just behind the snout a pair of heavy-lidded eyes staring back at them. Farther back, at the edge of their headlamp beams, they could see a half dozen scaly bodies writhing about, eyes flashing, mouths agape, tails whipping.

“Flare,” Sam said.

Remi didn’t hesitate. With a hiss, the tunnel filled with flickering red light. Remi lowered the flare to knee level and waved it before the oncoming crocodile, which stopped, opened its mouth, and let out a low hiss.

“The Kid was right,” she said. “They don’t care for it.”

“For now. Start backing up. Slowly. Don’t turn your back on it.”

In lockstep, with Remi’s eyes fixed on the approaching crocodile, they began retreating. Sam glanced over his shoulder. “Another ten steps and we’re at the ramp, then the narrow part.”

“Okay.”

“When we get there, plant the flare in the sand. We’ll see how they like that.”

When they reached the spot, Sam patted Remi’s shoulder. She knelt down, jammed the flare into the silt, then stood up and kept back-stepping, with Sam’s hand still on her shoulder. Halfway up the ramp, the crocodile stopped six feet before the hissing flare. It scrabbled first to the left, then to the right, then stopped again. It let out another hiss, then backed down the ramp and into the water. After a few seconds it disappeared from view.

“How long do flares last?” Remi asked.

“That kind? Ten or fifteen minutes. With luck, long enough for us to check the other tunnel.”

“And if not?”

“Then we get to see how good I am with the Webley.”

 

 

PAUSING TO LISTEN every ten paces or so, they proceeded down the left-hand tunnel. After forty feet the tunnel suddenly broadened out into a roughly circular chamber. Remi’s headlamp swept over a dark elongated object on the floor. They both started and backpedaled ten steps, their feet skidding in the sand.

Remi whispered, “Was it—”

“I don’t think so.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “Enough to get my heart going, though. Come on.”

They moved forward until their beams again found the object.

“Looks like a rotted telephone pole,” Remi said.

And it did. But almost immediately Sam noticed what looked like a trio of wooden cross braces affixed to the pole, then bindings of some kind, mostly crumbled to dust but intact enough to retain their basic shape.

“It’s an outrigger,” Remi whispered.

Sam nodded and kept panning his headlamp along the cross braces to a point where they merged with an elongated heap of partially rotten wood, this one a few feet longer than the “telephone pole,” and four to five times its diameter.

“Sam, that’s a canoe.”

He nodded. “A big one. At least thirty feet long.” Together, they sidestepped around the craft to the other side, where they found a corresponding cross brace/outrigger setup. The body of the canoe was five feet wide, and four feet tall from keel to gunwale, with a tapered bow and jutting bowsprit and a squared-off stern. At midships, rising eight feet from the hull, was what looked like a shattered mast; the upper part, about ten feet long, lay on the ground, its end propped up on the gunwale. Ahead of the mast the hull was topped by a shallow, double-pitch roof.

“Sam, step back,” Remi whispered.

He followed her back a few paces. She pointed at the ground beneath the vessel. What they’d taken for simply a high point in the floor was in fact a two-foot-high platform constructed of carefully placed stones.

“This is an altar,” he said.

 

 

AFTER A QUICK CHECK on their anti-croc flare, which had burned down to the halfway mark, they got busy examining the outrigger, Remi taking in situ pictures for scale and design before moving in for close-ups. Using the tip of his Swiss Army knife, Sam took trace samples of the wood and the bindings.

“Everything’s coated in some kind of resin,” he told Remi, sniffing the material. “It’s thick. At least an inch.”

“That would explain its remarkable condition,” she replied.

Sam stepped over the starboard side outrigger, walked to the gunwale, and peered inside the craft. Lying around the base of the mast was a mound of what he could only describe as decomposed canvas. Mottled brown and gray, the material had partially congealed into a gelatinous mass.

“Remi, you need to see this.”

She joined him at the gunwale. “Big sail,” she said and began taking pictures.

Sam unsheathed his machete and, with Remi hanging on to his belt lest he fall in, leaned forward and gingerly slid the blade into the pile. “It’s like onion skin,” he muttered. He lifted free a tattered section of the material. Remi was ready with an empty Ziploc bag. As he slid the sample inside, it broke into three sections. Remi sealed the bag and walked back to her pack to deposit it with the other samples.

Sam stepped around to the stern. Jutting from the transom was a bulbous wooden object, like a gnarled football leaning forward on a kickoff tee. Like almost everything else about the outrigger, it took Sam several seconds and several tilts of his head before he realized what he was seeing. Remi came up behind him.

“Our mystery bird,” she said.

Sam nodded. “From the Orizaga Codex and Blaylock’s journal.”

“What did he call it? The ‘great green jeweled bird,’” Remi mused. “Though I don’t think this is what he was talking about.”

She took a dozen pictures of the carving with her digital camera.

“Let’s check the bowsprit,” said Sam. “When it comes to boats, these kinds of things often come in pairs.”

They walked to the bow. As Sam had guessed, the bowsprit also bore a carving, this one in better condition than its counterpart. In fact, the bowsprit itself was the sculpture: a serpent, its mouth agape, feathered plumes streaming backward from its head.

“Sam, do you know what this resembles?” Remi asked.

“No. Should I?”

“Probably not, I suppose. It’s less elaborate and stylized, but it’s the near spitting image of Quetzalcoatl, the Great Plumed Serpent God of the Aztecs.”

 

 

“CRAZY LIKE A FOX,” Sam muttered after a few seconds.

“Pardon?”

“Blaylock. Crazy like a fox. Clearly, he hid the Moreau map and the codex together in his walking staff for good reason. He was obsessed with something all right, but it was about more than the
Shenandoah
or the
El Majidi
.”

“Maybe it started out with them,” Remi agreed, “but somewhere along the line he must have found something, or learned something, that changed his focus. The question is, how did whoever brought this canoe here get it in the cave?”

“Unless there’s another entrance beyond croco-ville down there, they must have dismantled it, brought it in through the waterfall, then reassembled it.”

“That’s a lot of work. We’re two miles from the beach, and it weighs a couple thousand pounds.”

“Sailors tend to get attached to their vessel, especially if it’s seen them through rough seas and a long voyage. We might know more once we get these samples tested, but if we’re buying into Blaylock’s odyssey this could be an Aztec boat. Which would make it what? At least six hundred years old?”

“We’re talking about rewriting history, Sam. There are no accounts of the Aztecs traveling beyond Mexico’s coastal regions, let alone across the Pacific and around the Cape of Good Hope.”

“We’re thinking at cross-purposes, my dear.”

“How so?”

“You’re thinking west to east and the sixteenth century. I’m thinking east to west and much earlier than that.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Remi, you said it yourself: Historians aren’t entirely sure where the Aztecs originated. What if we’re standing in front of a Proto-Aztec migration ship?”

 

 

REMI WAS ABOUT TO OPEN HER MOUTH TO REPLY WHEN THE crack of a gunshot echoed through the cave. To their left they heard something plunk into a stalagmite. They doused their headlamps and dropped to the ground. Perfectly still, barely breathing, they waited for more shots. None came. At the mouth of the right-hand tunnel the flare was sputtering, almost consumed. Red light flickered over the wall.

“Do you see anything?” Remi whispered.

“I think it came from outside. Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

Sam got to his feet. Hunched over, he dashed to a mineral column, stopped to look and listen, then moved on, zigzagging from cover to cover until he was pressed flat against the wall beside the entrance. He drew the Webley and ducked into the entrance.

Crack!

A bullet struck the floor beside him and ricocheted off into the cavern. Hurrying now, he ran out into the grotto, then sidestepped left until he reached the spot where they’d entered. He fell to his belly and crawled between a pair of boulders until his head slipped beneath the cascade. Eyes squinted against the torrent, he peered ahead until the lagoon came into view.

Six men, all armed with assault rifles, stood on the beach. They were dressed in torn jeans, ratty T-shirts, and combat boots. To a man, each wore a white bandanna with red-dyed corners tied around his forearm. Two of them knelt beside Sam and Remi’s packs, sorting the contents into piles. Sam scanned the lagoon area and surrounding trees but saw no sign of the Kid.

One of the men—the leader, Sam assumed, based on his mannerisms and the semiautomatic pistol he wore on his belt—barked something to the others, then pointed toward the waterfall. The five subordinates began picking their way around the lagoon.

Sam back-crawled, holstered the Webley, and hurried back into the cavern. He found Remi where he’d left her. He said, “Six men, all armed—the rebels the Kid mentioned.”

“Did you see him?”

“No, I think he got away.”

“Good.”

“They’re coming in to investigate. We’ve got a minute, maybe two.”

“How many?”

“Five.”

“Bad odds for a gunfight. I’d suggest we go down the other tunnel and look for an exit, but I’m not in the mood to be devoured.”

Sam grinned. “I’m sure our visitors will share your sentiment. You look for a better hiding spot, and I’ll go stir up some trouble. Be back in a flash.”

Sam dashed across the cavern, hopped the creek, then started down the right-hand tunnel. After snatching the flare from the sand he dashed down the ramp to the water’s edge, stopped, and clicked on his headlamp. Twenty feet away he saw a jumble of scaly tails, clawed feet, and fanged snouts. He counted at least three crocodiles. They hissed and thrashed as the light panned over them.

“Sorry about the intrusion,” Sam murmured.