Libby looked up just in time to see something come thrashing through the foliage toward her. She didn't have time to do anything but shrug her head away from the thing that struck her neck. She glimpsed a hand with a wedding ring. It tumbled off her hip and kept falling.
She watched the dismembered arm spinning down like the leaf she dropped a minute earlier. Perry’s arm bounced on the leaf litter. Libby touched her face. Blood. Perry’s blood.
'It's eating him,' Joel hissed again, clinging upside-down and sloth-like to a tree limb, staring immobile at the spectacle above.
'What is it?' yelled Libby.
'Shut up,' hissed Joel.
'Perry!' yelled Libby.
Joel's face screwed up. 'Shut up, Libby. I think it heard you.'
Libby stopped calling out. She peered around herself, spinning slowly, trying to see where Joel was looking.
Without taking his eyes off whatever was happening above, Joel warned, 'It knows you're there, Libby. It's turning toward you. We need to get down, right now. Shit — it's coming! Now, Libby, now. Go, Libby, get down right now!'
Libby hit the release switch on her harness descender. She dropped fast, but looking up it didn't seem fast enough. Joel was right. Something was tracking her descent, wildly disturbing the foliage. Large branches shook. Walls of leaves thrust aside.
All she could see were leaves. She should be able to see something, but there was nothing but leaves.
Libby hit the forest floor, frantically unclipping her descender. Joel hit the forest floor twenty feet away. He snapped off his descender and yelled, 'Run, Libby, run!'
Libby ran.
Ethan March sprinted for all his life was worth.
Pieces of ruined Plaza masonry whipped through his peripheral vision. Thankfully, his safety officer wouldn’t catch him running. From any point among the ruins, a dozen different angles of architecture obscured a person's line of sight. Steps leading nowhere. Dangerously leaning half-arches. Rows of columns supporting invisible ceilings of open air. Ethan wasn't sure if the Plaza resembled some monumental piece of abstract artwork or the result of a god-child's gravity-defying tantrum.
In fact, he remained largely unconvinced that anything more substantial than jungle vines held the place together.
He shouldn't be running, but some things were worth running for. Like gold coins emerging on the last dive of the season.
Even as he ran, his mind raced faster. It operated three steps ahead of his body. According to his wife, Maria, this was not an uncommon state of affairs for him.
Gold coins? It didn't make sense. Metal currency wasn't used by early post-classic Mesoamerican cultures. And certainly not gold coins. But Claire's radio message sounded emphatic. Marco had found gold coins in the submerged bunker. He was bringing them to the surface right now.
A crowd waited on the bunker steps. Faces from both the dig and the dive teams. In fact, it looked like everybody. How could he be the last to arrive? He wasn't that far away.
Ethan skidded to a pace more suitable to his position as site leader. He managed to maintain the slower pace for all of three seconds. Who am I kidding? He started running again. Reaching the crowd at the bunker’s entrance, he tried to regain what dignity a breathless man could muster. Very little, as it happened.
'Make a hole!' someone yelled, noticing Ethan’s approach. A human-lined passageway parted ahead of Ethan, down, down, down the steps into the flooded bunker.
More people crowded at the bottom. Yep, everyone was here. Volunteers, staff, security people, his safety officer…only one person was missing. Ethan searched the faces for Joanne, but she was either still on her way or lost in the crowd.
Watching his step over the power cables, Ethan reached where the narrow stairwell fanned out into the first antechamber. The only dry chamber in this underground section of the bunker was usually one-third filled with lighting and diving equipment. On the last dive of the season, most of the equipment was already packed up. The twenty-five or so people on the stairs could have squeezed into the antechamber, but they held back. After three years, something about these underground chambers still made people uneasy.
Arms crossed, feet apart, intently watching the water's surface, only Claire Hudnell shared the antechamber with Ethan. Claire had called Ethan on the radio.
Of all the serious faces searching the water, hers watched most intently.
‘Does anyone have a camera?' Ethan called back up the stairs.
'Here.' A digital video camera came hand-over-hand forward.
'There!' declared Claire. She pointed to the first little disturbance on the surface. A bubble.
A second later, bubbles patterned the surface in overlapping ripples.
Marco and Patrick were emerging from their penetrative dive.
Claire picked up the diving log, checking her watch as she ran her eye down their dive plan.
Ethan said, 'Tell me they're not making an emergency ascent. I don't care if he's found the Holy Grail, they still need to decompress.'
Murmurs rippled up the stairs behind Ethan.
Claire checked the bezel on her Seiko Orange Monster dive watch. Under the peak of her Red Socks baseball cap, green eyes calculated the three 'D's: depth, duration and decompression. 'No, they’re well within our safety limits. They've not been down that long. Marco's a pro. We'll hear his dive computer holler if he screws his ascent.'
Blunt as ever. That's what Ethan liked about his safety officer. She radiated an aura of practical self-confidence that perfectly suited her job. She never complained about living in a tent. In fact, she seemed to thrive on camp life. Her attractively freckled face was tanned from endlessly striding around the Plaza. Tall and broad-shouldered, the constant physical activity kept her lithe and muscular. Her straight blond hair was always under a cap.
And she was right about the divers. There was no hyperbaric chamber in the middle of the jungle, no way of effectively treating a case of the bends, so there was no margin for error. Claire Hudnell ran a very tight shift, including longhand dive plans to manually check her computer simulations. If anyone got the bends, it was because they weren't listening to Claire. No one would be that stupid.
She nodded to the water. 'Heads up, Prof. We’ve got divers on the surface. I think they want you.'
Ethan crossed to where six hundred years ago the now submerged stairs would have led deeper underground. This was the only entry point into the flooded bunker. The divers, Marco and Patrick, were emerging up a section of flooded stairwell. Reaching halfway up the top stair, the water lapped under Ethan's sneakers.
Marco emerged first, hands cupped, lifting his arms. Although Ethan couldn't read the expression behind his dive mask, Marco's body language was crystal clear.
Take this from me.
Ethan cupped his hands under Marco's and felt several small objects patter down into his palms. The golden color was unmistakable. The size and shape were right. Ethan held his breath. It can't be. This just doesn't make sense. Gold was one of the few items that didn't need immediate treatment after recovery. The inert metal wouldn't react with the air in any detrimental way anytime soon. It was one of the few artifacts they could find underwater and bring straight to the surface without a chemical preservation bath standing by.
It should also be heavy.
After studying the objects in his hands for a few seconds, Ethan dropped his chin to his chest and laughed quietly. When he looked up, Marco's dive mask was off. He was finning slowly in the water with a massive grin.
Finning behind Marco, Patrick raised one eyebrow and winked mischievously. 'So, are we rich, boss?'