“I’m turning on my light,” he said, frantically trying to find the switch.
“No! We will never find our way through if we give into our fears.”
Alex growled in frustration and kept his hand poised above the switch. “You’d better hurry. We need to keep moving.”
As the seconds ticked by, his other senses became hyper-aware. The sounds of the men around him breathing, sniffing the air, coughing, passing gas. He could definitely smell that, too. The air was a rank mixture of sewage and something like cat piss.
“Enough!” he shouted. “You had your chance, Carina.”
“No, wait. I see something—”
Alex ignored her plea and hit the switch, unleashing a focused but nonetheless blinding shaft of light into the cave depths. He winced, squinting against the painful but welcome brilliance, and brought light around toward their captive.
Except Isabella wasn’t there anymore, and the two men who had been holding her between them lay motionless on the cavern floor, with blood streaming from slashed throats. The other men from the security team immediately went to work trying to assist their fallen comrades, but it was plainly evident that the men were already beyond help.
Alex could barely form words through his rage. “Where is she? Find her.”
“Forget her,” Carina snapped. “You’ll never find her in here. You’ll only get more of your men killed.”
Alex rounded on her. “And I suppose you’ve got a better idea?”
“I do. There’s a map on the ceiling. It’s phosphorescent, so you can’t see it with the lights on, but I saw where it was leading.” She took a few confident steps forward, then shone her own flashlight down onto the floor. “I didn’t notice this earlier, but look. These marks on the floor here… ”
She shifted the light, following a series of smudges on the rough limestone. “That’s mud, left behind by someone crawling on hands and knees. It perfectly follows the map on the ceiling.”
“Who? Isabella?”
“No. There wouldn’t have been enough time for her to kill your men and crawl out. More likely, it was Maddock’s team. They’re helping us and they don’t even know it.” She knelt and dragged a fingertip across one of the smudges. “It’s still wet. We’re close. We can catch them.”
Alex stared at her for a moment, then looked back at the two dead men. His private army was dwindling fast. Part of him couldn’t help but wonder if that had been Carina’s intention all along.
With the last of the rope, Bones anchored Maddock for an exploration of the fog-shrouded bottom of the hill. The vapor was like evaporating dry ice, and as he slid down the frozen slope, Maddock had a feeling the air inside would be just about as cold, too.
Up close, he had a couple feet of visibility, just enough to see what looked like a narrow protrusion — barely wider than his hand — extending horizontally from the slope. To either side of it, there was an abrupt vertical drop into the impenetrable cloud.
“Hold up!” he shouted, barely able to get the words out through chattering teeth.
Bones immediately locked down the rope which kept him more or less at the edge of the freezing cloud.
“Gi… Give me… a foot.”
Bones played out a few inches of rope, just enough for Maddock to plant his feet on the protrusion, which he now saw continued out across the gap, like a bridge.
A very narrow bridge.
Covered in an inch of solid ice.
With painstaking care, he eased himself down until he was straddling the span. The cold knifed up through his body. The ice stuck to the fabric of his clothes, and the exposed skin of his palms as he began shuffling himself forward.
“More!”
The rope slackened, allowing him to scoot out a little further. Now he could see all the way across the gap to the hidden ledge at the end of the bridge. There was another doorway there.
He slid the rest of the way across, frantic for any respite from the bone-chilling cold. The ledge, as expected, was thick with ice, but the doorway was close enough to give him something to hold onto as he got back to his feet. Even better, he could feel warm air — relatively speaking at least — flowing through the opening.
He turned and looked back but couldn’t see anything except white mist.
“Made it across,” he shouted, finally able to catch his breath.
“Cool,” Bones shouted back.
Maddock tried to think of a suitable rejoinder, but his brain was still partly frozen. “Yeah. There’s a really narrow bridge down here, and door on this side of it. But the bridge is slippery and it’s really cold. I think we might be better off to rig a Tyrolean traverse.”
“I’ll take care of things on this end,” Bones replied. “Let me know where you’re ready to start catching.”
It took only a few minutes for the two to anchor the line at both ends, forming a zip-line across the chasm. Once the line was secure, the others began sliding down, one at a time. Bones slid the pack with the SCUBA gear along, and then followed.
When he was finally across, he hugged his arms across his chest. “Man, I’m glad there are no babes around to see my package right now.”
“Don’t use shrinkage as an excuse,” Angel quipped. “I’ve talked to enough of your exes.”
“Let’s focus.” Maddock nodded to the open doorway. “Any idea what we’re going to find in there?”
“We’ve made it past Dark House, Blade House, and Cold House,” Bell said. “If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say we’ve reached the House of Jaguars.”
“Literal actual jaguars?” Bones shook his head. “That makes no sense. How could a population of big cats survive down here, closed off from the outside world? What would they even eat?”
“Hopefully not us,” Maddock said, and stepped through the doorway.
The jaguars that waited for them were not literal flesh and blood animals, but rather larger-than-life carved stelae, dozens of them, arranged in haphazard rows on the floor of a large natural cavern. The layout was somewhat reminiscent of Dark House, only with statues instead of stalactites and pitfalls.
“That’s a jaguar?” Bones remarked, shining his light on the nearest stylized image. “How can you tell?”
“Easy,” Angel said. “It’s got spots.”
“So does a Dalmatian.”
“When you’ve studied the Maya as long as I have, it’s obvious,” Bell replied. “But these aren’t all jaguars.” He shone his light onto one of the other figures. “That’s a monkey. And there’s a rabbit.”
“If you say so. They remind me of the terra cotta warriors in the Emperor’s Tomb in China.”
“Or the chess game in that Harry Potter movie,” Angel added.
“Obviously we don’t have to worry about them eating us,” Maddock said. “But must be some other kind of threat here. A booby trap, maybe.”
“That would seem a logical assumption. I would recommend giving them a wide berth.”
“I’m not sure that’s going to be possible. Any hints in the Popol Vuh?”
“The Hero Twins kept the jaguars at bay by giving them bones to chew on instead. I’m not sure how that helps us.”
“Could be a weight activated trap,” Bones suggested. “Like the River of Blood.”
“We’ll go with that for now,” Maddock said. “Dr. Bell, keep calling out the animals as we get close. Everyone else keep a look out for the trigger mechanisms.”
They moved out single-file, heading toward the stelae that Bell identified as a monkey. As soon as they were past it, Bell excitedly pointed to another stelae. “There. Those two. They’re dogs. And they’re facing each other. That’s the way we should go.” Before anyone could respond, the archaeologist pushed past Maddock and strode out to prove his theory.