Hawke narrowed his eyes and moved closer to Perez. “Spill the beans.”
“Wade was searching for the missing Temple of Huitzilopochtli, and he found it.”
“I know he did. He told me that. What’s the big secret?”
“What he found underneath it. It’s inhuman.”
Hawke and the others shared a glance before he returned his attention to Perez. “What the hell does that mean?”
“He found the entrance to Mictlan.”
“The Aztec Underworld?”
Perez nodded grimly. “Yes. That was why he needed the other half of the fragment in London. It goes with what he found here in the jungle to make a keystone. It’s very elaborate. He says it will unlock the underworld and release Mictlantecuhtli, the god of the dead.” Perez paused to throw up on the lawn. He was shaking with fear. “The god of the dead! He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s playing with fire. He thinks…”
“What?”
“He thinks he must appease Mictlantecuhtli with human sacrifice, and…”
Camacho tightened the grip on his collars. “And what?”
“And cannibalism…”
Camacho pushed him back to the grass and wiped his hands as he shared a look of concern with Lea and the others.
“And who’s he having for dinner, darling?” Scarlet said.
“He’s been taking people there from this plantation. Coffee pickers, mostly, but also workers from his sweatshops.”
“We have to get moving,” Hawke said flatly. “When does this bomb get to San Francisco, Perez?”
“Around nightfall. Wade says it’s important that the New Age is ushered in at a precise time — midnight at the temple here in Mexico.”
“All right,” Hawke said, assuming command again. “We need to break into two teams if we’re going to bring this insanity to an end. One team goes to San Francisco and works with the City to locate and deactivate the bomb, and the other goes into whatever nightmare Wade has built in the jungle.”
Then Lea raised her hand and pointed at the tree line just beyond the lawn. “Guys — there’s someone coming.”
Hawke spun around and raised his gun, but quickly saw it was one of the pilots who had brought them to the plantation. He was wounded and bleeding heavily. His face ashen white.
“What’s the matter, Johnson?” Hawke asked, a bad feeling rising inside him.
“They got the guys from your team…” His voice was weak, and dry. “I’m so sorry, but they jumped us. They killed the other pilot but I got into the jungle.”
“Wait a minute,” Lea said. “They took Ryan and Maria?”
The pilot nodded as Kim helped him drink some water. “They sure did, and they wrecked the choppers too. We’re stranded here.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
In the chopper behind Wade’s, Miguel Garza stared down at Ryan and Maria. He nodded slowly as a greasy shit-eating grin spread on his face at the sight of the two helpless prisoners. There they were, on the floor of the helicopter, bound and gagged. Sure they looked pretty angry, but there was nothing they could do about it. Garza studied Maria one more time. This was even better than Alena Sobotka, he thought.
He manhandled his assault rifle until the barrel was pointing down at the two ECHO members and then traced the muzzle of the weapon up Maria’s leg. She tried to kick back but her restraints held her in place. “You like it, no?” he grinned down at her. “I don’t want you to think I don’t care, blondey.”
Ryan squirmed on the floor with his hands bound. He tried to yell something but the gag muffled it to pathetic nonsense and Garza roared with laughter.
Garza put his boot on Ryan’s face and pushed down hard. “You be quiet, Iron Man or we’ll see if you can fly like in the movies.” He swung open the chopper’s side door and the steamy jungle air rushed into the cabin. Then he moved the muzzle over to Maria for a second time but a heavy hand wrapped around the barrel and forced it away. He looked up to see Delgado staring hard at him.
“They’re for the Boss, you asshole. Leave them alone or I’ll throw you out into the jungle and we’ll see how well you can fly.”
Garza stared into the other man’s eyes with nothing but pure hatred, but turned away when Delgado didn’t blink. Garza knew his place in the pecking order, and the truth was he was more comfortable when it came to bullying and intimidating women than facing up to other men, especially men like Delgado. But then what the others didn’t know about…
When Delgado lit a cigarette and returned to his conversation with one of the Jaguar Knights, Garza cautiously returned his gaze to Maria. Keeping one eye on the other men, he smirked at the Russian spy and mouthed the words: You’re mine.
After an hour of frustration, two Mexican Air Force Pumas thundered over the canopy to the west of the coffee plantation and swooped down on the lawn. Hawke, Lea, Reaper and Lexi climbed into the first one, and watched as Scarlet, Alex, Kim and Jack Camacho climbed into the second.
Hawke was furious about the delay, but there was no point in dwelling on it. Their plan now was clear enough — he would lead an assault team on the temple to rescue Ryan and Maria and put an end to Wade and his cult once and for all. Meanwhile, Scarlet and the Americans would lead the assault on Alcatraz and deactivate the cobalt bomb before it took out Jack Brooke, the Californian Primary, the City of San Francisco and eight million people across the Bay Area. Alex had unsettled everyone even more by mentioning the risk of the bomb triggering the San Andreas Fault and sending northern California into the Pacific, so there was no time to waste.
The former SBS man looked around the helicopter’s cabin as it raced deeper into the jungle. The Puma was a heavy utility chopper with a capacity of up to sixteen passengers, and thanks to the connivance of Richard Eden, Jack Brooke and their Mexican counterpart Enrique Valles they were now joined by a dozen members of the Cuerpo de Fuerzas Especiales, or the Special Forces Corps of the Mexican Army. They were led by a Sergeant Gonzalez who had been selected because of his knowledge of Aztec culture.
They flew for hours, crossing the Oaxaca Mountains and heading into wild jungles untouched by man for millennia. A sense of deep helplessness washed over him as he thought about Wade’s crazy underlings getting their hands on Ryan and Maria.
He clenched his jaw when he thought about what the Texan was planning to do to his friends — and probably just to get to him and punish him for pursuing the Order of the Sixth Sun. His mind raced with thoughts about the torture his friends would undergo if he didn’t get to them fast, but he quickly snapped back into the moment and started to organize weapons and tactics for the team along with Sergeant Gonzales, a man of considerable experience in both military insertions and the Lacandon Jungle.
As they went deeper into the jungle, the chopper climbed higher into the sky to avoid the undulating contours of the Mexican ranges. Below them now acres of jungle slipped past in a blur. Vincent turned around to face Hawke and gave him a knowing nod of the head. Words were not necessary… both men knew what was coming, and after what seemed an eternity, the pilot called over the comms that the temple was in sight. Hawke’s memory of the map was good, and they had found Wade.
The twin Turbomeca turboshafts rumbled as the pilot reduced speed and flared the nose ready for the landing. Hawke looked through the open door across the canopy of the jungle and saw in the distance a strange stone structure protruding slightly from the top of the canopy. Unless you knew where to look, you would never be able to find it, he thought. The thick tropical rainforest obscured it almost totally from sight and the section he could see was only visible because Wade had cleared the jungle away. Broken roads connected plazas to crumbling pyramids in an enormous complex centred on the first structure he had seen — the massive central pyramid complete with two sacrificial temples on its upper plaza.