Kruger turned to leave. “Sadly, it is now time to leave you in the charming company of the Paititi Tribe. I gave them that name because they were only discovered by me a few hours ago. Luckily they seem to speak a dialect of Takana or I would probably be in as much trouble as you are all in right now. As you saw, they are already smitten with me.” He gave a cruel laugh and shouted at the warriors.
They leaped into action, pulling their blowpipes out and loading them up.
“What the hell’s going on?” Lexi screamed.
“They’re poison darts,” Hawke yelled. “Look up there on the ridge about a third of the way up the volcano wall behind the shrine.”
“Shit, they really are blowguns!” Scarlet said.
“Oh for fuck’s sake!” Lea said. “Not more bloody blowguns and poison darts. Did we not get enough of those in friggin’ Mexico?”
“Why don’t you go and complain about it to them,” Scarlet said. We know they’ve had zero contact with Western civilization so I’m sure it will all go very well. Do you know the sign language for ‘please make it quick because I don’t like pain’?”
“Oh, piss off, Cairo!”
Hawke’s mind raced. He’d heard rumors about lost Indian tribes in the Amazon when he was training in Belize, and they weren’t all that reassuring. Many people had claimed to have discovered the last lost tribe — the Mashco Piro tribe being the most recent, but like many, Hawke had his suspicions that there were plenty more out there who wished to stay lost. The Amazon rainforest was a mostly uninhabited jungle half the size of Europe so the prospect of it concealing other lost tribes wasn’t exactly mind-blowing, and now they had the proof.
And it was with that thought that he turned to watch even more warriors now gathering on the upper level. They were wearing some kind of reddish clay-colored paint and held a variety of weapons besides the blowpipes.
Kruger beamed. “My new friends are going to ensure you stay where you are while we load up the choppers with the finest pieces of this wonderful treasure, and then when they see their new gods fly away, they are ordered to kill you. They tell me it is their tradition to cannibalize their dead, so you will end your days as lunch for these fine warriors.”
They watched Saqqal and Kruger, still in NBC suits and flanked by Jawad, Rajavi and Corzo, as they ambled up the hill into the northern part of the city. They filled their bags with various pieces Kruger selected from the heaps of gold and gems scattered all over the city, and then they began to shuffle toward the lava tube in the southern part of the city.
Kruger called out a command which echoed through the dormant volcano and the warriors raised their blowpipes to their mouths. A second command from Kruger and they began firing the poison darts at the ECHO team.
“Run for it!” Hawke yelled.
“You think?” Scarlet said.
They clambered up the bank and dived over the wall they had used for cover but the darts kept on coming, clattering all around them as they sprinted through the deserted streets of gold.
They saw the antechamber they had used as an entrance to the Lost City as it slowly came into view and pounded their way toward it with the darts flying all around their heads and bouncing off the dirt near their boots.
“Faster!” Hawke yelled.
They finally reached the antechamber at the entrance to the lava tunnel and charged inside only to find the opposite door was shut firm.
“Bastard wedged it shut somehow,” Scarlet said.
“Go back?” Ryan said.
“Er… poison darts?” Lea said.
“Oh yeah.”
Reaper pulled on the handle but instead of it opening the door they had used to enter the room on their way in, the door behind them slammed shut and now they were trapped. “A booby-trap,” he said, looking unusually rattled.
“All right,” Hawke said. “At least we’re away from those sodding darts for a second. That gives us time to think.”
Above their heads they heard a grinding sound and looked up to see some kind of rigging slowly descending toward them.
Lea looked at Hawke and sighed. “You had to say it, didn’t you?”
And then Lexi interrupted them. “Guys… Are there spikes on that thing?”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Hawke looked up and saw she was right. The rigging that was slowly making its way toward them was some kind of bronze framework with at least two dozen razor-sharp spikes on it. Long vines hung down like tentacles and made it look even grimmer. “This is not good,” he said.
Lea searched the antechamber for anything that might indicate a way out as the rigging above their heads slowly worked its way toward them. The grinding sound of the grille as it scraped against the cooled lava was ear-piercing, and with every second the sharpened bronze spikes grew ever-closer to their heads. “Maybe we can use the vines to escape?” she said.
The liana vines covering the spike-frame were now low enough to be dangling over them. The liana was a type of woody vine that thrived in the canopies of the Amazon rainforest and some could grow over three thousand feet long. These ones had grown in through cracks in the roof the chamber.
“Possible,” Ryan said glumly. “It’s where they get rattan for rope and stuff.”
“Well it’s gross,” Lea said, pulling some away from her shoulder.
“Don’t worry about it,” Hawke said, helping to pull the liana away from her.
Another vine slid over her back and she screamed.
“Just calm down,” Hawke said.
“I am being calm, Josiah…”
“If this is your idea of calm I’d hate to see how you react when something serious happens, like burning the toast.”
“Stop being a smartarse and just get the thing off me. It’s… gross.”
“Hey!” Ryan said. “I think I found something — look.”
They joined him by the door they had used on their way into the volcano. He was studying a stone panel in the floor, positioned like a doormat and covered in strange lines.
“What is it, mate?”
“Some kind of Inca puzzle, I think. I’m not sure.” He got down on his knees and blew the dust and dirt out of the cracks in the puzzle stone.
“Time to get sure, Ry,” Lea said casting a panicked glare upwards. “Can’t be more than a couple of minutes till that thing’s turning us all into kebabs.”
“I’m going as fast as I can,” he said. “These are not easy to read. They’re very badly deteriorated for one thing, and the meanings seem to be obscured… almost cryptic.”
“That’s great, Ryan,” Lexi said, joining Lea now and staring up at the descending framework of razor-sharp spikes. “But in about ninety seconds we’re going to be pinned to the dirt like butterflies on a piece of card.”
“I believe,” Ryan said, turning to face her. “That the term you’re searching for is mounting board.”
“Yes, I believe it may be,” Lexi said. “Oh and by the way — why are you looking at me and not the symbols?”
“She has a point, mate.”
Ryan conceded the matter and returned to the symbols. “I’ve been looking at these all wrong. This isn’t a series of degraded symbols at all — this is a depiction of a yupana.”
“And that’s what?”
“It’s basically an Incan abacus.”
“Oh, crap,” Scarlet said. “A maths problem.”
Ryan turned to her, his face more weary now, but the faintest glimmer of the man he used to be still in his eyes. “Thank God I’m here then, eh?”
“Yes,” she said, crossing her arms. “Quite.”
“So let me get on with it, then.”