"It was a lot rougher then. The court is paved with stone and lined with stone walls. They put two stone hoops sticking out of the walls, high up. The idea was to get the ball through a hoop without touching it with your hands. No holds barred."
"What happened if you won? The king give you a trophy or something?"
"You were a hero, lots of feasting. Gifts from the king. The games were religious."
"And if you lost?"
"You got sacrificed to the gods. It made for pretty spirited competition."
"I'll bet there's some coaches in the NFL who wish they could do that. Talk about motivation, that would do it."
They gassed up at Pisté and turned south. The road was in poor shape. They turned east for twenty minutes, then south again at a cluster of shacks. The road became a rutted, muddy track, barely wide enough for the vehicle. The jungle closed in on either side. They drove in an eerie green tunnel filled with shifting shadows.
Nick kept the truck in four wheel drive as they bumped along.
Selena looked at her GPS. "Almost there," she said.
The dirt track broke out of the jungle into a wide clearing with a half dozen huts. The walls of the huts were of mud and cinder blocks. The roofs were thatched with jungle fronds and grasses that hung down around the eves. Children in ragged clothes stared at them and ran inside. Scrawny chickens scattered out of the way. A one-eyed goat watched them from a patch by one of the houses.
Two women chatted by a circular stone well. They looked up in astonishment as the truck rolled slowly past. Beyond the village, the track disappeared into the green.
"I don't think they get many visitors," Ronnie said.
"Wonder what happens on a Saturday night?" Lamont watched the women staring after them. Then they were past and back in the jungle.
"Not much," Nick said. "Selena, how much farther?"
"Not far. The road ends a half mile ahead."
Ten minutes later the road petered out in an overgrown clearing. The jungle was already taking it back.
Nick stopped and turned off the ignition. A glint of chrome shone through the greenery from something hidden in the dense growth. A blue Toyota SUV.
They got out. Nick took out his pistol and listened. The sounds around him were the endless sounds of the jungle, birds, rustlings in the thick undergrowth. The ticking of the engine in the Suburban was the only thing out of place.
He put the pistol away and walked over to the concealed truck, touched the hood. Cold. A narrow trail had been hacked out through the greenery, leading away from the truck.
Ronnie came up beside him and knelt down. Nick was quiet, waiting for Ronnie to do his thing. In Recon, he was legendary for his tracking skills. After a minute he stood.
"Five men. One big man. They're all carrying gear. Looks like they're headed where we are. Not today. Yesterday or the day before."
Nick looked at the makeshift path.
"Let's get the gear out."
"Complicates things."
Nick gestured at the narrow trail chopped into the growth. "But they saved us a lot of work."
They opened the aluminum cases. There were four packs with rations, extra ammo, a med kit, shelter halves. A water filter that could suck clean water out of a cesspool. It took a lot of hand pumping, but it worked.
"Where are the vests?" Ronnie said.
"What do you mean?"
Nick looked at the open cases. No vests. Then he felt a headache begin. He knew where they were.
Back in Virginia.
He'd screwed up. He'd been about to get the vests out of the equipment room in the Project when he'd gotten a call from his sister in California.
"Nick, you have to come home."
Shelley always thought of Palo Alto as home, where they'd been brought up. It sure as hell hadn't been much of a home for him.
"I can't come to California. What's the matter?"
"You're never around when you should be. It's Mom. She's had a stroke. I'm at the hospital. If you'd listened to me and let us put her in a home this wouldn't have happened."
Shelley was always on him about their mother, how he didn't do enough, how she had to take care of everything. In reality, she didn't have to do anything. His mother had Alzheimer's. He'd arranged for full time, live-in care for her. It let her stay at home. As long as there was someone to look after her, she was better off at home, where she still remembered a few familiar things. But she usually didn't know who he was when he called.
Shelley was mad at him for blocking her attempt to put their mother in a home and sell off her house. She was mad at him for being angry at their father. She refused to understand it. It had always been Nick and his mom who bore the brunt of his father's drunken rages, not Shelley. Shelley was Daddy's Little Girl. She still defended the son of a bitch.
Now she was telling him it was his fault his mom had a stroke. He felt his blood pressure rising, a tight band across his forehead.
"Shelley, drop the martyr act and the accusations and tell me how she is."
"That's just like you," his sister had said. "You can't take any responsibility for her, you just want to keep George and me from getting our share. You won't even come out when your mother needs you."
That was when he'd lost it. "Goddamn it, Shelley!" He'd shouted into the phone. "Just tell me how she is! You think you can do that?"
His sister's voice was cold over the phone. "She's alive. I suppose that's all you need to know." She'd hung up.
Nick had wanted to hurl the phone across the room. For a short time after Jerusalem, Shelley had been a little more understanding, a touch more willing to see him as her brother instead of an obstacle in her path. It hadn't lasted long.
He'd put the phone away. He'd been so angry he'd forgotten about the vests.
"The damn vests are back in Virginia."
Ronnie looked at the cases. "Not much we can do about it. We probably won't need them. Plenty of times, we didn't have 'em."
"Yeah." It didn't make him feel any better.
They still wore the light civilian clothes they'd had on the plane. They changed for the jungle into heavy boots and camouflaged outfits that would blend into the greenery. Selena stripped with the others. No one except Nick paid attention. She was wearing red underwear. He remembered the dream of Selena wearing a red bikini.
Don't go there, he thought. It doesn't mean anything.
"Let's get the paint on," Nick said. They took turns covering their faces and hands with green and black and brown.
Ronnie looked at Selena. "Now you look right."
"Ready for Vogue," she said.
No helmets, only soft brimmed covers. Aside from their packs, each carried a knife, an H-K pistol and an MP-5N. Both guns were chambered for the .40 S&W round.
"Weapons check. Lock and load."
The clacking sound of the weapons sent a flurry of birds into the air.
He looked them over. His team. His family.
"We'll stay with the trail at first," Nick said. "There might be traps, so pay attention. Ronnie, you take point, then me, then Selena. Lamont, you bring up our six."
They headed into the jungle.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The Nimb Hotel was an architect's elaborate misconception of a Moorish palace, a five star monument to the craze for historical architecture that had swept the European continent at the turn of the twentieth century. The hotel featured an ornate facade of high Moorish arches fronting a covered veranda. Arched windows repeated the theme on the second story. An onion shaped dome topped with the crescent of Islam towered over the entry way. Six smaller towers suggested minarets.