“I guess now we know why the Spaniard didn’t leave,” Professor said, his voice barely above a whisper.
Just a few steps into the passage, the perfect symmetry was marred by a wall of loose dirt and rock that could only be the result of a catastrophic cave-in. A second entrance to the cavern did exist, just a Jade had known it would, but it would do them no good. The way out was completely blocked.
SEVEN
Hodges admired the precision with which the soldiers of the Mexican Army deployed across the Teotihuacan archaeological preserve, establishing a secure perimeter. Because it was after hours — nearly midnight in fact — there were no tourists to evacuate, only a small staff of guards and caretakers who had been quickly escorted away. None of the soldiers had ventured near the Pyramid of the Sun or made any effort to establish contact with him. He wondered if any of them had the faintest idea what was going on at the center of the ancient city, or more precisely, under it. They had arrived swiftly, seemingly within minutes of his decision to make the call and take pre-emptive action, just as the protocols demanded.
When he had joined the cause, just a few short weeks before, he had secretly wondered if those protocols were not overly alarmist in nature. An Alpha level event seemed about as likely as an alien invasion or a zombie apocalypse. Even when Chapman had warned him that Jade Ihara had a way of finding “weird stuff,” even when he had secretly wired an improvised explosive device into Shelob’s thorax, he had not believed things could escalate so quickly, or that he would be at the center of the storm.
He would never have believed that he would have to make a decision that would result in the deaths of five people.
He had joined the cause to save lives, not take them.
The sound of another helicopter approaching snapped him out of his dark mood. He watched from the shelter of the passage entrance as it passed over the outer cordon and settled to the ground nearby, so close that he had to blink away the grit stirred up by its rotor wash. He saw that it was a civilian bird, not one of the UH-60s used by the Mexican troops. He took a moment to compose himself, and then headed out to meet it.
Hodges didn’t recognize the face of the man who stepped down from helicopter, but he knew his name — Andres Gutierrez, oil billionaire and the second wealthiest man in Mexico — and he knew, in a general sense who the man was. All senior leadership of the cause might have been cast from the same mold; intelligent, driven, richer than God, and a control freak. Gutierrez’s very presence was evidence that he did not believe in delegating authority.
“Hodges?” the man shouted from beneath the still turning rotors.
“Yes, sir.” He broke into a jog, and reached the man a few seconds later.
Gutierrez was tall and lean, and to Hodges’ surprise, looked about as Mexican as Brad Pitt. In fact, Hodges thought, he looked a lot like Brad Pitt — blond hair, blue eyes and the best rugged movie star good looks money could buy. He did not offer his hand, but looked past Hodges at the massive pyramid behind him. “Piramide del Sol is a symbol of my country,” he said, gesturing expansively. His English was as perfect as his appearance, with only his accent betraying which country he was referring to. “This had better not be a false alarm.”
“Yes, sir. I mean no, sir, it’s not.”
Gutierrez finally looked at him. “An Alpha event? You’re sure?”
Hodges briefly recounted what he knew of the discovery, realizing that all he really knew about the mysterious floating spheres was what Chapman and Jade Ihara had reported back to him. What if he had overreacted?
Gutierrez however just nodded. “You made the right decision.” He turned and waved to someone in the helicopter. A man wearing combat fatigues with three stars on his epaulets and carrying an olive drab duffel bag, got out and moved to join them.
“What’s that?” asked Hodges, eyeing the officer’s pack.
“I believe it is called a thermobaric device,” Gutierrez said. “It is a very powerful explosive device.”
Hodges knew exactly what a thermobaric device — sometimes also called a fuel-air bomb — was, and what it would do when it was detonated. The device functioned in two stages, the first blast scattered a cloud of fuel, usually some kind of reactive metal, into the air where it quickly mixed with oxygen to become extremely volatile. The fuel mixture permeated the target area; there was no defense against it, nowhere to take shelter. A second detonation would ignite it in a massive explosion that could collapse a hardened bunker, and set the very air on fire. Anyone surviving the blast would quickly suffocate, and if they survived that, the resulting vacuum created at the center of the blast could literally suck a person’s lung out through their mouth.
“If you use that down there, it could very well destroy the pyramid.”
Gutierrez gave him a cold stare. “I think now you understand just how serious we are about this. We must ensure that no trace of this discovery remains, and that there be no one left to tell the world about it.”
Hodges felt a surge of panic shoot through him. Had he overreacted?
Then he thought about Norfolk, and everything that he had lost, and knew that Gutierrez was right. He had made the right call.
Despite Jade’s insistence that even a blocked exit was better than nothing at all, and that the only way to win their freedom was to start digging, the mood quickly devolved.
In reality, it was mostly Acosta, trumpeting a litany of pessimism. Was it even possible to move so much earth? What if there was another cave-in right behind it and another? What it the entire passage back to the surface had collapsed? But his defeatism was spreading to the others. Sanchez was the first to succumb; Jade noticed that instead of actually moving dirt and rocks out of the way, the normally effusive scholar seemed to be pushing his burden around, like a child trying to conceal the fact that he wasn’t eating his vegetables by scattering them across a plate. Dorion, too started flagging after just twenty minutes of work.
The atmosphere of negativity just made Jade angry, which was almost as counterproductive. She kept her emotions at bay only by contemplating how she would gloat when she led them all to freedom. Only Professor seemed immune to the pervasive attitude of failure, working at the top of the earthen mound, using his knife to loosen the packed soil. Jade suspected his relentless industriousness was his own way of coping with Hodges’ evident treachery, but there was nothing to be gained by pointing that out.
Professor made a triumphant sound. “Just broke through.”
Jade climbed up behind him and peered into the small cavity he had created. He continued hacking with the knife, pushing the loose dirt forward into the hole where it disappeared. She was just turning back to let the others know when she heard Acosta cry out.
“They’ve come to rescue us!”
The administrator was pointing into the darkness behind them, except it was no longer dark. A light was shining in the distance, reflecting Jade assumed, from the polished golden sphere in the center of the cavern. Acosta immediately started running toward it, waving his arms and shouting. Sanchez took a few tentative steps after him.
Jade slid down to the bottom of the rock pile. “Dr. Acosta, I’m not sure that’s such a good idea…”
Professor was right beside her. “Come back here, you fool. They tried to kill us. No one is coming to rescue us.”
His words stopped Sanchez, but Acosta was beyond the reach of his voice, figuratively if not also literally.