He stared down at her with wide, deranged eyes.
“Say hello to Mictlantecuhtli for me.”
Maria kicked out against him but her legs were lashed down to the sacrificial altar as tightly as her arms. “Fuck you, you mad bastard!”
“Yeah,” Ryan yelled. “Fuck you!”
Wade ignored them as he concentrated on his work. He traced the tip of the volcanic blade along Maria’s stomach and then savagely tore open her top with it.
Mendoza looked at the obsidian blade and then down to Maria’s pounding chest, stripped back to her underwear. He swallowed hard with terror and took a step back away from the altar, but the other cultists held him in place. “You’re not going anywhere, Silvio, you god-damned traitor. You’re next, boy… so pay attention.”
Maria could see the very same fear she felt rising in Ryan’s young eyes as he struggled to comprehend the insanity unfolding around him.
And then Wade began to chant from the text he had stolen from the Codex Borgia. The words were alien to Maria — a strange mantra calling from the world’s deep past — and she shivered with fear as he continued to chant them, moving ever closer with the obsidian blade… summoning Mictlantecuhtli.
She strained against the ropes but it was no good, and her brain flooded with cortisol and made her thoughts irrational and wild. Her eyes bulged with fear as she looked around the temple and saw the same carved walls countless thousands of human sacrifices had seen just before their hearts were cut out of their chests. It was here that this nightmare had happened, she told herself. Right here, on this altar… and the stone font to her right was where they had placed those hearts after holding them aloft to the gods… still beating.
The fear grew inside her and she tried to swallow but her mouth was now completely dry with the terror of what was about to happen. Would she be conscious to witness the whole, terrible thing? Would her last sight be that of Morton Wade holding her own beating heart above her while he recited his insane chanting? She stared up at his crazed face, still a terrifying mess of black and blue paint, greasy with chia oil and flower dyes. She could smell the fear and excitement on him as he flicked her hair away from her face.
“Let me go, you bastard!” she screamed.
“Silence… silence.” His voice was distant, and cold.
“You won’t get away with this!”
His reply made her blood run cold. “Who says I want to get away with it?”
Through the black face paint she saw a smile on his face as he licked his lips and stared at her, unblinking. Gently he drew the obsidian blade up her body toward her heart that was now pounding like a jackhammer inside her chest.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Jack Camacho strapped himself into the front of the chopper as Kim Taylor, Scarlet Sloane, and the others piled in the back. Seconds later the pilot lifted the collective and the Venom powered up into the air. Thanks to the possibility of accidentally detonating the cobalt bomb, President Grant had refused to authorize an air-strike on the island, and instead instructed Jack Brooke to order a helicopter assault followed by an incursion on the ground. Despite his strong protests, Jack Brooke himself had been rushed by his Secret Service detail back to his plane and flown to DC as soon as the nature of the threat had been learned. He never even knew Alex was in California.
Now, Camacho smacked the magazine into the housing of his submachine gun and breathed out slowly to calm himself as his eyes drifted over San Francisco’s evening skyline. Market Street was buzzing as usual, and then they were over California Street and Broadway. The peninsula sloped down at Russian Hill to reveal the Marina District and beyond it the famous Palace of Fine Arts Theater and the Presidio. All those people, he thought, shaking his head with disbelief at just how much shit could hit the fan tonight if they failed to retake Alcatraz and stop Wade’s Hummingbird.
But he had no time to dwell on it. At less than two miles from the mainland, they were approaching the notorious prison island before they knew it. If there were any doubts about Wade’s commitment to destroy the city they were wiped out when several of the Sixth Sun cultists opened fire on the Venoms with an RPG. The pilot jerked the chopper hard to the right and Camacho whistled as the grenade shot past them and arced down into the gray water of the bay.
Ahead of them now, Alcatraz Island rose up out of San Francisco Bay. From this distance it looked peaceful enough in the hour or so before sunset. The island was world-famous for its isolation, and although there were some controversial escape claims, the official story was that no one had ever escaped from Alcatraz. The same thing that made it impossible to escape from also made it so difficult to attack.
“What if they just set the damned thing off?” he said, almost to himself.
“Unlikely,” Alex said. “This is a cult, remember. These people are brainwashed to believe anything Wade tells them, and he’s made it clear the bomb is to go off at a precise time — when the sun sets in Mexico.”
“Unlikely?” Lexi said. “That’s just the sort of reassurance I would need if I ever had to storm a prison island full of insane cultists about to set off a nuclear bomb.” She turned to face Alex. “Oh, wait… I do.”
An accompanying Viper covered the two Venoms as they descended over the southern section of the island and the teams prepared to exit and start their assault.
Camacho and the rest of his squad jumped from the choppers. Their boots crunched on the broken asphalt of the old parade ground to the south of the island’s main complex. They sprinted through the rotorwash toward the safety of the cliffs and their rides spun around and headed back to the peninsula, but before they could get away the Sixth Sun blew one of them out of the sky with an RPG. What ten seconds ago had been a fully-functioning US Army Bell Venom was now a gnarled heap of useless metal which streaked out of the sky leaving a grim trail of flames and black smoke in its wake.
The shockwave of the explosion blasted over them but Camacho never flinched. He craned his neck up and saw the targets gathering in strength in front of the Warden’s house, and some had even broken into the lighthouse and were setting up an M2 on the gallery deck.
“It’s nearly six o’clock, Jack!” Kim shouted. “That means nearly sunset in Mexico!”
Camacho nodded grimly. Wade had chosen sunset as the time for his ritual slaughter of the eight million people in the Bay Area. “Exact time?”
Scarlet glanced at her watch and frowned. “Five forty-five, Jackie Boy. We have fifteen minutes to save the world.”
Camacho heard the words and visualized San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area getting nuked. Not on his watch, he thought.
Then Aurora Soto ripped the pin from a grenade and tossed it down the ridge. It exploded yards from Alex Reeve on the left flank to the north of the island. She flew through the air and landed with a heavy smack on the broken tarmac of the parade ground. She cried out as the jagged asphalt dug into her back but knew she had only seconds to get to cover. She rolled over and staggered to her feet, joining Camacho and the rest of the team at the guard block.
The grenade explosion had blasted a massive hole in the dirt wall of the cliff and killed two of the SWAT guys. She reloaded her gun and gave Camacho the signal that she was good to go, but there was that pain again, like a lightning bolt in her legs, and a strange numb feeling a second later.