“Nineteen … eighteen …”
Suddenly he was unable to move. He looked back, straining to see through his swollen eye.
Stecker was standing on the tail of his coat, looking down at him like an owner who had caught the leash of a disobedient hound.
“You’re too late,” Stecker said. He yanked the coat from Moore’s grasp as the doors ahead of him slammed shut with a monstrous metallic clang.
Stecker opened Moore’s coat but found nothing inside.
“Fifteen … fourteen …”
“Nothing in here!” one of the guards yelled from the cab of the overturned truck.
“Where is it?” Stecker shouted.
Moore stared up at him, battered and shaking. “I don’t have it,” he said simply.
Stecker’s face betrayed utter confusion, but suddenly he seemed to understand. He looked back down the tunnel.
“Ahiga.”
In a distant part of the Yucca Mountain, at the top of a ventilation shaft that served as an escape route should something go wrong, Nathanial Ahiga heard the alarm go critical. He pushed upward, slamming against the hatch.
“Three …”
His mind reeled from the darkness and the fear of falling that gripped him. He pushed again, barely moving the heavy door.
“Two …”
Shouting a Navajo curse, he forced the hatch open. The blazing Nevada sunset burned his eyes and he tumbled out onto the mountainside holding the stone aloft.
“One …”
Hawker lunged for the handle.
“I believe,” he whispered as his hand slammed onto the lever.
The counterweights released. Heavy stones dropped into tunnels on either side of the well and the ropes spooled out over metal pulleys at tremendous speed. Something came racing up the tunnel toward him. The blocks slammed home and the fourth stone was jammed into position.
Hawker saw it for an instant. Then the world went still. His hearing shrank to nothing. And everything vanished in a blinding flash of white.
CHAPTER 68
Hawker became aware of being conscious, and by extension alive, when the pounding in his head became too much to bear. He woke with his back to the stony ground and some type of wet cloth over his eyes.
The quiet around him seemed complete—the exact opposite of all he remembered.
He tried to move but found it too painful.
“Hawker?” a voice called to him. “Can you hear me?” The voice was kind but worried. He recognized it as Danielle’s.
He managed to move his hand, trying to bring it up toward the cloth, but he lacked the strength even to do that.
Danielle pulled the cloth from his eyes.
At first he saw only shadows, blurs of light, and the outline of her face. But slowly his eyes focused and the details appeared. She was a mess, but God she was beautiful.
“What happened?” The words croaked from his throat, dry as dust.
“You put the stone into place,” she said. “The blast knocked you a hundred feet, and you landed in the water.”
He looked at her. Her clothes were damp, and muddy in places instead of dusty. “You end up in the water, too?”
“I didn’t want you to drown.”
He was thankful for that. He tried to prop himself up. She helped him.
“How long have I been out?”
“Two hours,” she said. “I thought I’d lost you.”
They were up on the mesa. It was completely dark. “Aside from getting my ass kicked, did anything happen?”
She smiled for the first time, but there was still a sense of sadness in her eyes. “See for yourself.”
She helped him turn around.
Out over the cenote, against the backdrop of the night, he could see ghostly filaments of light rising upward. They poured from the island at its center, a twisting, almost invisible column of light.
He followed the strands upward, into the dark of the sky, where they spread into a shimmering curtain of white and blue. The display moved in a curious fashion, flowing and bending back in upon itself. At times it seemed to flicker and fade, as if it might be a mirage, but then the brightness would grow once again and the color would become more intense than it had been before.
“What is it?” Hawker asked.
“Charged particles in the atmosphere, channeling along the magnetic lines and funneling themselves harmlessly into space,” she said.
“How do you know that?”
“It’s an aurora,” she said. “I’ve seen one before, although normally the charged particles are coming down into the planet.”
“Shield of the Jaguar,” Hawker said.
She nodded, but the sad look returned.
Suddenly he remembered about Yuri.
He looked around. Back toward the cenote he saw a man whose features he couldn’t make out sitting and staring at the curtain of light in the sky. Beside them a smaller figure lay draped beneath a jacket.
“Please tell me …,” he began.
She shook her head. “It was too much for him,” she said.
Hawker closed his eyes, choking back a wave of emotion.
“He fell limp the instant it happened,” she said. “The soul stone flew out of his hands toward the well at the same moment you were being flung away from it.”
Danielle paused, trying to control her own sadness. “There was a trickle of blood near the base of his skull. A tiny hole like he’d been hit by a dart. I think the sliver was pulled from his body in the same way.”
A wave of numbness flowed through Hawker’s body. He’d known, even before he released the counterweights. He’d known what was going to happen to Yuri, but in that moment he realized that something far worse was going to happen if he didn’t. The only comfort he could find was that Yuri had given his life for many, perhaps for billions around the globe.
Sacrifice of the Body.
It was a Mayan belief, a Christian belief, a Jewish and Muslim belief as well. Innocent blood, shed for the rest of us. To make the rains come, to make the crops grow. To save the world.
Four days before Christmas, on the turning point of the Mayan calendar, a day known as 4 Ahau, 3 Kankin, the story found truth once again.
CHAPTER 69
Bethesda Naval Hospital, Bethesda, Maryland
Forty-eight hours later, Hawker, Danielle, and McCarter arrived back in the United States aboard an air force transport. For Hawker it was the first time he’d set foot on American soil in over a decade, though so far none of them had seen much of it. Lingering problems with Hawker’s eyes, official secrecy, and a tight security cordon meant waiting in ambulances at Edwards Air Force Base and several days in the confines of the Bethesda Naval Hospital.
During that time, Hawker’s eyesight returned to normal, Danielle was treated for low-level radiation poisoning, and McCarter’s leg was operated on and his infection finally, adequately addressed.
With those efforts winding down, Danielle found herself growing frustrated. Aside from the treatment and long debriefing sessions, she and the others had been confined to their individual rooms. She wanted to talk with Moore, to check on McCarter, and mostly she wanted to speak with Hawker. But so far she’d been unable to either sneak past the guard at her door or convince him to look the other way.
Arnold Moore arrived on her fourth day in “captivity.” He looked like he’d been fifteen rounds with a prize fighter.
“What the hell happened to you?” she asked.
“Took a wrong turn at Albuquerque,” he said, before explaining the truth, his theory of twisted magnetic lines and how close they had come to Armageddon. “The wave still affected the world,” he said. “The three stones and whatever energy was created from the shard Yuri carried had acted to dampen it and channel the excess, but there were blackouts all over the country and across the Pacific, from Kamchatka to Mumbai. It would have been far, far worse had we not succeeded.”