‘I can’t see the airfield, so we’ll have to land on top of the trees,’ Krueger observed matter-of-factly, peering out of the windscreen. ‘Airspeed?’
Muller, white-faced, glanced at the airspeed indicator. ‘One hundred and five miles an hour.’
‘Flaps, ten degrees,’ Krueger ordered.
‘That exceeds the limit, Herr Oberst,’ Muller replied nervously.
Krueger smiled and turned to his young co-pilot. ‘It would be most helpful, Leutnant Muller, if you could forget about what they taught you in flying school and give me ten degrees of flap. I don’t fancy hitting the trees any faster than is necessary.’
Muller nodded and reached for the flap lever. The aircraft slowed, although Krueger knew their airspeed was still way too fast.
‘What was the forecast wind direction this morning?’ Krueger already knew the answer, but he also knew this was the young man’s first forced landing, and he was subtly teaching him what every good pilot needed in a crisis: an ice-cool calm and a methodical, ordered approach.
‘Fifteen miles an hour, from the north-east.’
Krueger pulled back on the big control column and gently turned the wooden flight wheel, his foot lightly on the rudder pedal.
‘Flaps, twenty-five degrees.’
Muller moved the flap lever instantly and the aircraft slowed further, the wind whistling eerily past the cockpit.
Levi Weizman stared out the window at the jungle rushing towards them, still silently mouthing the Shema.
‘Two o’clock! Two miles! The airstrip!’ Leutnant Muller shouted and pointed through the windscreen.
‘I see it,’ Krueger replied calmly, altering the falling aircraft’s course slightly towards the break in the jungle. ‘Airspeed?’
‘Ninety miles an hour.’
Krueger grunted. It would be touch and go. On the one hand, he’d need around forty degrees of flap to land, but applying that much flap at anything above seventy-five miles an hour might tear the wings from the airframe. On the other hand, he needed to maintain speed to make the clearing, and if he allowed the Junkers’ speed to fall below sixty miles an hour with flaps down, they would stall and head nose first into the trees.
‘More flap, Herr Oberst?’ Muller queried anxiously, his hand on the flap lever.
‘Wait.’ Oberst Krueger mentally fixed the glide path and adjusted the aircraft’s heading. ‘Wait,’ he commanded again, sensing the young co-pilot’s nervousness. ‘Now!’
Muller immediately adjusted the lever and the aircraft shook violently as the big flaps bit hard.
‘Scheisse!’ Krueger swore as the aircraft’s nose came up too fast. He pushed the control column forward to maintain airspeed and aimed at a point just beyond the trees at the start of the clearing. At the last moment he pulled back on the column and flared the aircraft. It shuddered as the tailplane clipped the top of a big ceiba tree. Krueger braced himself as the aircraft slammed onto the makeshift airstrip and bounced. He calmly kept the control column forward and they bounced twice more before he could bring the Junkers to a halt near the end of the dirt strip.
‘Everyone okay?’ Krueger asked, turning in his seat to look into the cabin.
Von Hei?en turned and made a quick check of the cabin. ‘ Alles gut, Herr Oberst! ’ he replied.
Levi said a silent prayer of thanks and followed von Hei?en down the steps propped against the ribbed fuselage. A Catholic priest was waiting to meet them.
‘Welcome to Tikal, Sturmbannfuhrer von Hei?en.’
‘Father Ehrlichmann, how good to see you again. And this is Professor Weizman. Father Ehrlichmann is an expert on craniometry and the cephalic index,’ von Hei?en explained to Levi. ‘He’ll be in charge of the preliminary classification of any skulls before they’re shipped back to Wewelsburg.’
‘Guten Tag, Herr Professor.’
‘Guten Tag, Father Ehrlichmann.’ Levi shook hands, immediately wary.
The next morning Levi woke just before dawn. He dressed in a light safari suit and quietly pulled back the dirty brown canvas tent flap. The expedition tent lines had been pitched along the eastern side of the airstrip, and Levi’s tent was just two down from von Hei?en’s.
The stars were fading as Levi made his way towards the thick jungle at the north-west corner of the airstrip. He knew from his previous visits that the narrow jungle-track led to the Central Acropolis, the sacred heart of the great Mayan city. The air was cool, and already the jungle was coming alive in the soft pre-dawn light. Suddenly, a series of enraged roars pierced the foliage. Levi looked up to see a group of howler monkeys, the biggest nearly a metre tall, their squat black faces staring down at him from the tops of massive, buttressed strangler figs. The killer trees started life as a tiny seed. Eventually, the seed’s tendrils wrapped around a host tree, strangling it, as the crown of the fig tree soared above the canopy. Figs were a favourite of the howler monkey. The troop moved on, noisily alerting the rest of the jungle to Levi’s presence. Further into the rainforest, Levi spotted two keel-billed toucans, croaking and barking in the half-light, their bright-yellow hooked beaks contrasting with their jet-black feathers, but it was the large paw marks and droppings nearby that made him proceed more cautiously. Levi recognised them instantly; a jaguar was on the prowl. He moved silently on the forest floor of decaying leaves, peering through the low-lying ferns, orchids and mosses that grew in abundance alongside the balsa, chicle and myriad other trees and vines growing thickly around the ancient city.
Twenty minutes later Levi emerged into a clearing, surrounded by moss-covered limestone pyramids. The jungle was noisier now. The howler monkeys competed with the chirps and trills of the hummingbirds, the hoot-oot of the blue-crowned motmot, the insistent kyowh-kyowh of the orange-breasted falcon and the squark-squark of the brilliantly coloured macaws and parrots.
Levi moved through the East Plaza, skirting the sacred court where the Maya had played humanity’s oldest and most brutal ball game. He reached the Great Plaza and the base of Pyramid I, built by Jasaw Chan K’awiil, the twenty-fifth ruler of the ancient city. Levi looked up. The limestone steps of the huge pyramid connected nine separate levels, culminating in the roof comb, nearly forty-six metres above the plaza.
Breathing hard, Levi at last reached the summit and turned to survey the jungle below. A heavy white mist drifted through the tops of the thirty-metre-high ceiba trees, sacred to those who had once occupied the ancient city. Huge mahogany, cedar, chicle and ramon trees towered over the smaller copal trees and escobo palms, forming a thick green carpet as far as Levi could see. To the west stood the imposing Pyramid II, and to the south-west of the Great Plaza he could see Pyramid III. Further west the roof comb of Pyramid IV thrust defiantly through the mists, while to the south, the top of Pyramid V was also visible, as was the Pyramid of the Lost World. Levi walked to the east side of Pyramid I. The mists on the horizon were tinged with a brilliant orange-red glow. A fiery sun rose slowly and majestically, bathing the ancient city in its light.
Levi felt a sense of awe as he reflected on the ancient Maya. To the east of the Great Plaza the jungle had taken over the magnificent paved causeways that once controlled the entry of traders into a bustling marketplace. The pyramid temples of a mighty city that had glimmered in a brilliant shade of salmon pink had now eroded to reveal a dirty limestone, covered here and there in a dank, dark moss. Levi shivered. The sudden fall of the Maya was an eerie reflection of humankind’s vulnerability and mortality. He turned towards Pyramid IV, pulled a compass from his pocket and took a bearing, then a second bearing on the Pyramid of the Lost World.
Far below, von Hei?en adjusted his binoculars. He stood in the shadows of the ball court and watched as Professor Weizman put the compass to his eye.