The active infrared night-vision worked by emitting infrared. But in the cave he’d just entered, that light had simply reflected back at him, magnified greatly.
He switched on his hand held flashlight, and waited for his eyes to adjust. Tiny specks of quartz glittered off the walls of the new cave like diamonds.
Genevieve switched on her own light. “Our night-vision’s going to be useless in here. And with these on, our presence here is going to be pretty obvious to whoever’s guarding the temple.”
“Agreed.” Sam looked at Billie. “How confident are you that they specifically wanted you to return for the stone tablet?”
“Reasonably,” Billie confirmed.
“How confident?” Sam persisted.
Billie held her breath. “I guess I’m willing to bet all our lives on it.”
Sam shined his flashlight at a series of openings up ahead. “All right. We continue. Billie, do you have any idea which of these tunnels we should follow?”
“Not really. But we’ll know when we see it.”
“See what?” he asked.
She pointed her flashlight down, revealing a floor scattered with sand, and in the sand, thousands of bare footprints. Billie’s eyes followed the light. “These. We need to follow them.”
Sam wasn’t at all certain they should, but in this location, five people with semi-automatics ought to be able to hold their own against a small army of barefoot temple guards. “Sure.”
He switched on his headlamp, and turned off the flashlight. With his hands now free, he unshouldered his Heckler and Koch submachine gun, and entered the tunnel. Billie might have been confident that the Master Builders wanted her to return, but he wasn’t convinced.
Sam continued along the tunnel and through a narrow opening into a wonderland of speleothems — stalactites and stalagmites — unlike any he had ever seen. It looked like they had melted out of the ceiling of the cave and flowed into fantastic, smooth-sided shapes.
The height of the tunnel slowly decreased until the ceiling was just under four feet, and he was forced to climb through on his hands and knees. Between the thousands of pillars of stalactites and stalagmites, was a grand maze of crystals. The light from Sam’s headlamp reflected throughout the labyrinth, highlighting its extreme size.
Sam said, “Lucky we’ve got this trail to follow. Without it, we’d need days and days to follow each of these small tunnels before we found what we were after.”
Billie smiled. “Pity each one of these imprints in the sand represents another pyramid warrior, whose entire purpose it is to protect the temple.”
Sam returned her smile. “You said you didn’t think they would attack us? That they wanted you to return for the stone tablet?”
“That’s what I do think,” she said. “But I have been wrong before.”
“Great. Let’s just hope that was the last time.”
It took close to thirty minutes to scramble through the crystal labyrinth. When he emerged between two pillars into a large space, the powerful light from his headlamp was swallowed by the giant, seemingly endless, grotto. He turned on his more powerful hand-held flashlight and shined it toward the ceiling. The faint shimmer of light was the only confirmation they were still underground. Although, for a moment, Sam questioned whether it was merely cloud cover.
He turned to Billie. “Where are we?”
“Follow the footsteps, and you’ll see,” she replied.
Their voices didn’t echo, but instead, simply vanished mysteriously into the distance. Sam paused and listened. If there were still others inside whatever type of subterranean chamber they’d entered, Sam suspected he would have heard their breathing, shuffling of feet, or something at least.
But he heard nothing.
He stepped forward, slowly following the path of footprints in the sand, where Billie had told him hundreds of temple guards had once traveled to take their place.
Behind him, Tom swore loudly. “Sam, you’d better see this.”
“What is it, Tom?” Sam asked. “Do we have company?”
Tom unclipped the Armasight digital night-vision scope from the top of his weapon and handed it to him. “Not yet, but you’re gonna want to have a look through this.”
Sam nodded and took the scope.
He slowly placed it up against his right eye, and looked through its telescopic digital lens. Sam held his breath as he studied what he saw, his eye and his mind competing to rationalize what he was viewing.
A wry and incredulous grin formed on his lips. “Billie, where have you taken us?”
“I told you that you wouldn’t believe me until you saw it for yourself,” Billie said.
Sam increased the digital magnification and brought the lens back up to his eyes. He shook his head, as he stared through it.
“I don’t believe it…” he said.
There in front of him were thousands of six foot high, solid quartz sandstone, square blocks stacked upon one another to form an exact pyramid, every bit as large as the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Chapter Four
Billie climbed the first sandstone block at the base of the pyramid.
It felt more like the world’s biggest bouldering room than the grand staircase to the entrance to a temple. To scale each tier, she needed to reach above and perform a partial pull-up, before being able to dig her toes into the rock and shuffle herself forward and over the edge. It wasn’t too difficult, but she didn’t revel in the idea of completing the process another fifty or more times to reach the entrance to the main descending passage.
She was tall, with an athletic and lithe frame. Despite the heavy backpack she carried, Billie was still the fastest in the group. By the time she reached the triangular entrance to the main descending passageway, she’d gained an advantage of nearly five entire sandstone blocks ahead of Sam, who was the next fastest in their group. Elise moved quickly, too, but she was shorter and consequently had to climb farther to overcome each stone. No one could have ever called Genevieve or Tom’s progress slow, but instead of racing ahead, they concentrated on the defense of the team and maintaining a possible exit strategy if needed.
Billie fixed the beam of her flashlight into the entrance of the descending passageway. No light or sound returned. She didn’t expect any. It stood to reason that everything of value inside the temple was within the king’s chamber. If there were still hundreds of Pirahã temple guards inside, they would be waiting for them at the Grand Gallery.
Confident no one was approaching from within the pyramid, Billie turned to face Sam. In a stage whisper, she called down, “Well, Sam, are you coming?”
“I’m right behind you,” he replied.
Spurred on by her taunt, Sam completed the remaining four blocks in under two minutes. He stopped before entering and took a deep breath. They waited until the rest of the team was at the entrance step and ready to go again.
Sam stepped up beside her. “Are you ready for this?”
“You mean after being enslaved here for nearly two years?” Billie replied.
“Yeah.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Billie unshouldered her submachine gun, and descended into the entrance passageway. She was certain the Master Builders had brought her, specifically, back to this place for a reason. But there was no rational reason she should feel so confident about it. Instead, it simply felt like a hidden purpose, or some sort of missing information was stored in the darkest depths of her cerebellum, and that once she returned, it might all be revealed to her.
She swallowed hard, and took another step closer. That didn’t mean she would necessarily like what she discovered. Besides, she might have got this entire thing wrong. Instead of coming back because she was a special part of the Master Builder’s grand plan, maybe she was simply the fly that got away and was now stupidly returning to the web?