“You should know not to accept strange things from strange people by now, Ry,” Lea said.
“Spit it out if you don’t like it,” Scarlet said.
Ryan closed his eyes and carried on chewing. “No, you’re all right.”
“Get some rest, everyone,” Hawke said. Thankfully they listened to him and quietened down. He was losing focus and the squabbling of his team as they slowly unwound wasn’t helping him get things back together one little bit. Any thoughts he’d vaguely circled about quitting ECHO were destroyed the second Eden went into the coma.
How could he walk away from his friends and leave them without a leader? But the truth was he wasn't sure he could lead them, at least not back on the island. His skills were all in the field. He had no idea of how Eden funded ECHO, or who or what the Consortium was. He looked around the cabin and realized he didn’t even know how Eden paid for jet fuel.
The fact Eden took care of the strategic level while he focussed on tactics in the field was why it all worked so well, not to mention Ryan’s brilliant polymath mind that was so adept at finding patterns in the chaos. The truth was the team had been smashed but he still had to pick up the pieces and try and move forward.
He used the new peace to focus on the mission again. The Lost Inca Gold was probably the greatest missing hoard in the world. No other treasure was so infamous and so cloaked in mystery and the lust for wealth and power. People had been searching for it for hundreds and hundreds of years, and dozens of expeditions had been commissioned into the jungles of Peru, Bolivia and Brazil just in the last century. While these things excited him, they also highlighted just how unrealistic it was that they were going to have any more luck than all the previous failures.
At least they had decoded the cryptic inscription and symbols on the Mask of Inti. This alone meant they had a better chance than most of the treasure hunters who had gone before. He thought about Professor Balta now in Kruger’s hands, and what they might have done to him to make him spill the beans on the location. He prayed Balta was still alive and decided to try and get some sleep before they touched down at Cusco Airport. From there he would be piloting a hired chopper into the foothills of the Andes.
Lexi Zhang was dreaming. She was sitting in the back room of her parents’ home and watching her mother grind ink. She had just finished washing the tea inkstick and was now ready to grind the inkstone. First she poured some water into the grindstone and then unwrapped the block of tea ink and began to grind it into the water.
How many times she had watched this didn’t matter, because in this dream it was happening now, and she was just a child. She watched as the black tea-stained pigment pushed out into the water, slowly getting thicker as her mother pushed the stick around the small green Duan inkstone.
The sunlight illuminated dust motes as they danced around her mother’s face but she was concentrating too much on the ink’s consistency to notice any distraction. Outside in the yard she heard the gentle call of a hawfinch as it hopped around their neighbor’s pear tree. She loved that tree. It reminded her of morning walks around Xiangshui Lake.
When the ink was ready, her mother selected a soft calligraphy brush and began to write the poem on the paper.
It was so peaceful, she thought.
What happened to my life?
Her mother began to fade, and she was suddenly aware of her surroundings on board the Gulfstream. The gentle grinding of the inkstone and the hawfinch’s song now replaced by the hum of the air-conditioning and the white noise roar of the air outside as the plane cut through it at a thousand kilometres per hour. She wanted to go back to sleep, but she yawned and stretched her arms over her head instead. Real life never went away just because you wanted it to, and somewhere down there Dirk Kruger had to be stopped.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Hawke flew the team from Alejandro Velasco Astete Airport in Cusco through the meandering valleys of the Urubamba River. At the end of the flight he increased altitude to fly over the top of a high peak to the south of the small town of Aguas Calientes and then they were all shocked to see the incredible site of Machu Picchu, perched on the backbone of a mountain ridge in the middle of the mountains.
It was unlike anything any of them had ever seen before — a magnificent citadel of ancient ruins in the total isolation of the Urubamba Mountains. Clouds drifted in the valleys below and the whole site was bewitchingly timeless as they drew closer to its crumbling walls and plazas.
He flew on, overpassing the Gate of the Sun and then descended over the southern slopes which lead to the ancient city. Its honey-colored ruins shone in the bright Peruvian sun, highlighted in stark contrast to the luscious emerald greens of the mountainous jungle enveloping it on all sides.
He flew over the top of the ancient guardhouse, the main gate, the sacred plaza and finally intiwatana, the old astronomic clock, before flaring the chopper’s nose and bringing the machine down to the north of the ancient Inca citadel, a few yards away from the Sacred Rock.
After hovering the chopper above the ruins — and more than a few bemused tourists — Hawke found his landing place, and lowered the collective, reducing power to the rotor engine. He brought the helicopter to a gentle touchdown in a plaza at the northern end of what five hundred years ago had been the urban sector and moments later they were jumping out and emerging into an ancient world.
They cleared the slowing rotors and gathered once again to read the compass before heading off due north, just as the markings on the Mask of Inti had told them to. As they had expected from another study of Google Earth on the way, the mask was leading them out of the citadel itself and into the jungle to the north of it.
A thin white mist floated up from the valley and began to shroud some of the lower reaches of the citadel and then formed into full clouds.
“We’re above the clouds,” Lexi said.
Far across on the mountain to the south they watched yet another group of tourists as they ambled around the Gate of the Sun with their cameras before heading back down to Cusco with their memories and their photos.
Lea tried to take it all in but it was like nothing she had ever seen before in her entire life. The air was indescribably fresh, and the sensation of the clouds moving through the valley below her almost made her feel as if it were the mountains moving and the clouds were nothing more than a static sea.
She linked her arm through Hawke’s. “Can’t we give up all of this and just stay here forever?”
“I would, but you do realize there’s no TV up here?”
“What?”
Hawke nodded. “Sad but true.”
“Maybe it’s not such a great idea in that case.”
She glanced over her shoulder at the tourists who were now walking up through the ruins to get a closer look at the helicopter. Following up behind them were a couple of workers from the tourist center. “We’re drawing some attention, guys.”
“When do we not draw attention?” Scarlet said, casually pulling a cigarette from her pocket and firing it up.
Hawke glanced back and took in the tourists once again, amazed by the number of people who had made the laborious trek via trains and hiking to get up here. They swarmed all over the mountain, but for the most part maintained a respectful silence as they took it all in.
He turned and surveyed the ruined citadel from up close and was instantly struck by how much larger it was in reality compared with the many pictures and films he had seen of it over the course of his life. It seemed to tumble and stretch all over the mountain in whatever direction he looked. Here, enormous stone steps leading up to a ruined temple, there, a smooth plaza covered in páramo grass, and at every turn another huddle of tourists in sun hats taking selfies of themselves in front of the incredible citadel.