Wade could barely conceal his delight as he ordered them to turn it, and a terrible, low grounding sound emanated from inside the wall.
“That’s as far as it goes,” one of them said.
“Push on the wall!” Wade screamed.
As they pushed against the stone the wall moved a few inches. The strain on their faces showed it was almost impossible to move, stuck in place for millennia, but after a few seconds it began to slide forward at an angle.
“It’s on hinges,” another cult member said.
“It’s a gate, not a wall,” Wade added.
When the gate was open, it revealed an empty darkness like none of them had ever known before, and a cold, damp air rushed over them. How long since this air had been trapped down here, Maria wondered as a wave of nausea overtook her. The burned-out American technology mogul snapped his fingers at a member of the cult. “Give me the map.”
The man reached around into a canvas sack slung over his shoulder and handed Wade the map from the Codex Borgia and the multispectral reflectographic images that Maria had seen Professor Pavoni use in Rome before Mendoza had murdered her.
The Texan snatched the map from the man and spun it around a few times as he tried to make sense of it. “This must be where we are now — the entrance to Mictlan.”
“La puerta del infierno,” Mendoza muttered, and made the sign of the cross over his face and chest. He took a step back and swallowed hard as the fear rose in his throat.
“Your god won’t help you in here, Silvio,” Wade said with a sneer. “This is a very different kind of kingdom… a very different kind of kingdom indeed. Bring the prisoners!”
Morton Wade took a deep breath, stepped through the gate and led the group into the darkest heart of Mictlan.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Hawke dived into a high-velocity parkour shoulder roll and dodged the M2’s lethal bullets as they sprayed out across the plaza. Reaper was at his side, his trusty PARAS drawn and raised into the aim at Garza and the other men behind the M2. Thundering forward through the smoke, firing their guns as they ran, the two men had become an awesome unstoppable force.
Neither man was in the least concerned about preserving the archaeological integrity of complex, and the salvos loosed from their weapons were savage in their failure to discriminate between man and woman. They were all cartel thugs or Sixth Sun cultists committed to supporting Wade in his insane venture to bomb San Francisco back into the Dark Ages and resurrect human sacrifice and cannibalism as a new religion.
“Kill them, you cowards!” Garza barked as the ECHO alliance drew closer.
“You’ll have to kill me ten times over to save your arse!” Hawke yelled.
He fired again, this time striking one of the cultists in the throat. The man toppled back from the mouth of the temple and fell over the edge of the upper square. He was dead by the time he hit the steps but tumbled all the way to the jungle floor, leaving a streak of blood behind him.
“You’ll die here, Hawke!” Garza screamed, but he looked panicked and was starting to move backwards toward the steps which led down inside the complex below the temple.
“You guys tried that back in London, remember?”
Hawke immediately moved the gun to Garza and fired another series of shots, peppering the masonry around his hiding place and only just missing his head. “So you can go to hell!”
With a look of panic on his face Delgado stood up to flee and Hawke took the shot, blasting a bullet through his back right in between his shoulder blades. The velocity of the bullet blasted the gangster forward and he crashed down the temple’s internal stairs.
Garza saw his colleague’s death and turned on his heel to flee down the steps, his eyes wide with terror. Hawke watched his battered Dakota hat bobbing up and down as he jogged down into the dark interior of the temple.
Reaper looked at Hawke. “Crazy bastard did exactly what you told him to do…”
Hawke wiped the back of his hand across his face, leaving a smear of gun grease and blood. “I should have put a bullet in his back.”
“So let’s get after him!” Lexi said.
Hawke turned to see Lexi and Lea. Gonzalez and the rest of his men were pursuing the fleeing cultists into the jungle.
They wasted no time in jogging down the steps and going deep inside the temple where Garza had fled a few moments ago. Skipping over Delgado’s dead body they raced down into the temple, but at the bottom of the steps the atmosphere changed fast. The only light was provided by the glow-sticks left behind by Morton Wade, and now a ghostly green glow emanated around them. Hawke saw movement and turned his head to look down one of the many tunnels. He saw a green light bobbing about, and the sound of footsteps receding into the distance.
“Garza — he went down there,” Reaper said.
Hawke thought fast. “All right. Lea and I will take Wade, you and Lexi go after Garza.”
“Let’s do it,” Lexi said.
“And when you find that bastard,” Hawke said. “Make sure to thank him properly for me.”
Reaper nodded grimly and Lexi smirked. They both knew how Hawke thanked people who had crossed him.
“Right,” Hawke said, reloading the Sig. “Time to get our people back.”
The map from the Codex Borgia proved invaluable as Wade pushed deeper inside the complex. Mictlan turned out to be the craziest labyrinth Ryan Bale had ever seen, with tunnels twisting in every direction — left, right, up and down — as they moved further inside.
Wade gasped when they reached a low archway, and as they stepped inside their glow sticks revealed a large chamber that looked artificial but had clearly been carved from some kind of aquifer. At the far end was a carved plinth that was obviously used as the sacrificial altar. On the wall behind it was a series of small head-height alcoves. Inside the central one was a small golden idol.
As Wade forced everyone closer, Ryan suppressed a gasp of shock when he saw it.
“Oh my God…”
Maria looked at him and lowered her voice to a whisper. “What is it, Ryan?”
“That idol over there in the alcove — it’s Tanit… from Carthage.”
“Carthage?”
He nodded, unable to take his eyes off the idol. “The old Phoenician Empire in North Africa.”
“I know what Carthage was! I meant what the hell is it doing in here?”
Ryan shook his head. “Europeans didn’t arrive in this part of the world for hundreds of years after the time this tomb was sealed, Maria. The likeness of Tanit just cannot be in here unless our entire understanding of history is all wrong.”
“So what the hell is going on?”
“I don’t know, but I have a bad feeling it might have something to do with Aztlán after all.”
“Atlantis?”
Ryan nodded, but before he could reply, Wade ordered the cult members to grab Maria and drag her to the altar. Maria resisted but they were too strong and she started to get nervous for the first time since the mission started.
The Russian Federal Security Service had trained Maria Kurikova for all eventualities. All, she thought, except for being sacrificed inside an Aztec temple deep in the Mexican jungle. She had fought a contract killer to the death in Kiev, played dead for Chechen terrorists in a filthy safe house, and even assassinated the occasional government official, but there was something about this that terrified her and she knew what it was.
All the other challenges she had faced might have been difficult, bloody or even unethical, but there was some semblance of political logic to them. This, on the other hand, was pure madness and the point was underlined when she saw Morton Wade lurking in the shadows, his face still painted black and blue. She recoiled with horror at the sight of him as he approached her.