Twelve passages. One of them leading from the cenote. And eleven others leading God only knew where.
Maddock didn’t know a great deal about Maya cosmology and traditions, but he knew their reputation as astronomers, and knew also that their architecture reflected their knowledge of the heavens.
He closed his eyes, trying to visualize the orientation of the passage to the cenote.
North, he decided, though he was far from confident.
The side of the altar with the golden disk had been facing the opposite direction — south. Was south an important or sacred direction for the Maya?
Jade would know, he thought darkly. Jade Ihara, his ex-girlfriend, was a renowned archaeologist specializing in pre-Columbian cultures. In fact, Miranda Bell reminded him a lot of Jade, and in more ways than just that.
But Jade wasn’t here, and regardless, it made sense that the main entrance to the cavern would be on the side facing the front of the altar.
Here goes nothing, he thought, kicking off the wall and swimming to the opposite side of the cavern.
There was a wide passage, sloping gently upward, directly opposite the front of the altar. Maddock thought it definitely felt more like a main entrance than the tunnel back to the cenote, but tried to temper his urgency with a little more caution than he had shown during his earlier explorations.
A hundred feet or so up the passage, the beam of his light hit a shimmery flat plane, like a mirror floating face down in the water. It was the surface.
He kicked furiously to reach it, and a few seconds later, was standing on an inclined ramp with his head and shoulders above water. He sniffed the air cautiously before taking his first full breath. It smelled faintly of mildew and damp, and he kept the mouthpiece ready, just in case he started to feel lightheaded.
A few more steps brought him fully onto dry stone. He slipped off his fins and left them on the ramp, and then decided to leave the rest of his SCUBA equipment there as well.
He clicked off his light and stared ahead into the darkness, searching for the glow of daylight, straining for a hint of a breeze or a whisper of sound.
Nothing.
He clicked on the light and started forward again in a jog, but after going only another fifty feet or so, hit a dead end. A pile of stones, most as big as beach balls, completely blocked the passage. It looked like a cave in.
Maddock played his light on the rocks, contemplating his choices. This felt like the original entrance to the cavern. It was likely that the outside world lay just beyond the collapsed section. Maybe he would only need to move a few of the stones to clear a space big enough to crawl through.
“Nothing ventured,” he murmured, and scrambled up the rock pile. He chose one of the smaller stones to start with, gripping it with both hands and pulling it toward him. It moved with surprising ease, releasing a small avalanche of loose dirt and pebbles. He cleared another stone, widening the gap, and as he let the rock tumble down, he saw a glimmer of daylight.
He scooped away more of the dirt, widening the hole and savoring the rush of fresh air from the outside world, then froze when he caught the sound of voices on the wind.
“Crap! It slipped.”
“Sorry, dudes. We’ll have to go back down for it. Might take a few minutes.”
The first voice was female, almost certainly Miranda, and the second belonged unquestionably to Bones, but both voices had a hollow quality, as if they were speaking from inside a bottle.
The next voice was unfamiliar, but clear as a bell. “Are you kidding? That was a big mistake.”
The anger in the man’s tone galvanized Maddock. He scrambled forward, squirming through the hole with no idea what would await him on the other side. The earthen barrier crumbled beneath him and he spilled out onto a gentle slope covered with green vegetation. As he tumbled down, Maddock found the hilt of his dive knife. He drew the blade and came up in a crouch, ready to engage any enemy.
But he was alone.
“It was an accident!” Miranda’s protest sounded louder, but not by much. “I’ll dive down and get it. Don’t shoot.”
Shoot? Maddock thought. So they… whoever they are… have guns.
He recalled the old line about bringing a knife to a gunfight, but it was that or nothing. The voices were coming from behind the hill, which was between him and the cenote, and explained why his exit had gone unnoticed. That would give him a slight advantage, but only if he acted immediately. He scrambled back up the hill, knife at the ready.
From the hilltop, Maddock had an unobstructed view of the cenote that was about fifty yards away. There were four men, all holding pistols, though only one of them looked like he was ready to use his. That man was standing at the edge of the cenote, gripping Angel’s hair with one hand, but aiming a heavy caliber revolver down into the hole. Another figure — Charles Bell — lay prone on the ground, unmoving.
Maddock charged down the back slope at a full sprint, covering ten, fifteen, almost twenty yards before any of the men by the cenote noticed his approach. Two more bounding steps brought him to the halfway point even as gun barrels began rising and shifting toward him.
Crap!
He adjusted his grip on the knife, holding it in a hammer grip with his thumb resting on the back of the blade, and then without breaking stride, brought his arm around in an overhand motion and hurled the knife forward with all his might.
The blade shot forward, rotating slowly as it arced through the air. Maddock kept running, chasing after the knife. His target was the gunman holding Angel hostage. It was a risky choice. If his aim was off by even a degree, he might hit her instead of the bad guy, but of the four men, Angel’s captor was the most immediate threat.
Maddock’s aim was true, but as the knife reached the end of its journey, rotating completely around so that its point was leading again, the man flinched. Instead of striking home, piercing the man’s left eye socket, the point merely sliced a bloody furrow in the man’s cheek as the knife sailed past.
Maddock kept running, acutely aware of the fact that he was now completely unarmed and facing four enemies with guns. The element of surprise was gone, but he still had one ace up his sleeve: he wasn’t alone.
Angel reacted even faster than the gunman. She twisted around to face her captor, caught hold of his shoulders, and rammed her knee up into his solar plexus. The man curled over the point of impact like a worm on a fishhook, his gun and Angel’s ponytail both falling from nerveless fingers. Still gripping him, she pivoted around, sling-shotting the man into one of his confederates, flattening both of them. And just like that, the odds were even.
Almost.
The men still had their guns.
As he reached the fray, Maddock saw Angel squaring off against one of the remaining gunmen. He also saw the man’s pistol lining up for a center-mass shot.
There was nothing Maddock could do. The man was too far away, beyond Angel’s reach, too. Maddock did the only thing he could think of, lowering his stance and tackling Angel to the ground.
In the instant that he did, something erupted out of the cenote. Maddock caught a glimpse of gold — Miranda’s blond head — and both the gunman and Miranda went down in a tangle of limbs.
Maddock spotted the large-frame revolver lying where it had fallen and made a grab for it, but at the edge of his vision, he saw the remaining gunman line him up in the sights of his semi-automatic, and reversed course, twisting the other direction as the pistol discharged. A patch of ground near the discarded weapon — and right where Maddock had been just a millisecond earlier — erupted in a spray of dirt. The gun roared again, and again, and Maddock kept rolling, barely staying ahead of the bullets that stitched the ground in his wake.