Seven Wonders (13 page)

“I’m going to see what’s inside,” he said.

Getting to the door of the cockpit proved more difficult than it looked. He had to climb over two sets of rock outcroppings to get to the closest wing, and as he put his boot against the metal, he nearly stepped right through; because of the heavy humidity in the air, the alloy had rusted through to the point of near collapse, and there was a good chance that if he wasn’t careful, the whole thing would crumble beneath him.

But he wasn’t going to turn back now. Using his hands, he slid himself onto the wing and pulled himself along the rusted surface, careful to keep his weight as balanced across his body as possible. By the time he made it to the cockpit door, he was breathing hard.

The door came open easily, two of the hinges snapping off and clanging to the cavern floor. When the first hinge hit, Jack noticed a strange echo—a sort of skittering sound that lasted long after the hinge had stopped bouncing against the granite. But he was too busy clambering inside the aging cockpit to give it much thought.

The interior of the cockpit was cramped and full of what felt like cobwebs; there was a thick, oily smell in the air, and the ceiling was peeling, strips of rubbery material hanging down so close it brushed against his hair. The control console looked ancient—two steering columns, lots of dials and switches. Most of the buttons and knobs had rotted away, and the glass windshield was shattered, a web of cracks extending from nose to roof.

Jack was about to climb back out of the cockpit when he caught site of something on the floor beneath the pilot’s seat, jammed right up beneath the control console. He immediately dropped to his knees, aiming the flashlight.

In front of him was an iron crate, about the size and shape of a small briefcase. And on top of the crate, a leather-bound flight manual.

Jack crawled forward, grabbing the crate and flight manual, and dragged the objects back to the center of the cockpit. He flipped through the manual, glancing at the pages of notations, flight maps, longitudes and latitudes, and placed it on the floor. Then he turned his attention to the crate.

There was a lock on one side, covered in rust. Jack quickly retrieved his iták from the long holster in his jacket. The first swing only nicked at the rusted metal, but the second swing made a noticeable groove. Jack began swinging harder, the sound of the blade against the lock ringing in his ears.

As he worked, he again noticed the strange echo—a skittering, clacking sound that seemed to be reverberating all around him—lasting well after he stopped swinging the iták. And the sound seemed to be growing louder. Jack was about to take a look out the cockpit door, see what the hell was making the noise, when the lock suddenly came apart.

Jack forgot about the sound, slid the bolo back into the holster, and then opened the iron crate.

“My god,” he whispered.

He reached into the crate, digging through a bed of straw to an object wrapped loosely in cloth. He tore the cloth away to reveal a stone tablet, about the size of a hardcover book, which he instantly recognized. It was remarkably similar to the tablet he had seen in the pit beneath the Temple of Artemis: the tablet in the painting, though apparently a smaller version of the one the Amazonian warriors were carrying out of the forest. Flat, with an image of a seven-segmented snake carved into its center. But on this tablet, Jack saw what appeared to be a tiny pictogram next to the first of the seven segments.

Jack looked even closer, holding the flashlight in two fingers, his face only inches from the stone.

The pictogram appeared to have been added to the stone; the rock itself appeared to be much, much older than the colored carving next to the snake segment. Though he wasn’t sure what it meant, the image was clear: a drawing of a human head, bearded, with long, flowing hair. Even stranger, one of the eyes on the head had been painted metallic gold.

Jack stared at the pictogram, his heart pounding in his chest. Then he coughed.

“I think I know what this is,” he said, aloud. “I think this is a clue—”

“Doc,” Andy’s voice burst through his ear. “Do you hear that? Is it interference? Because it seems to be getting a lot louder.”

Jack blinked. He could hear it too, now—the scratching, clicking, skittering sound was bouncing through the canopied area, so loud the entire cockpit felt like it was trembling. Jack leaned forward and stuck his head a few inches out the cockpit door, extending the flashlight out in front of him.

Then he froze.

The ground around the airplane seemed to be shifting. He shined his
flashlight farther back, but it was hard to see through the humid air. He made a quick decision, placing the flashlight back in his pocket and reaching for a second flare. He pulled the cord and then held the flare over his head.

“Shit,” he gasped. “It’s moving.”

“Doc? What’s moving?”

“Everything.”

The floor, the vegetation running up the sides of the cavern, the wall, the canopy above—all of it was pulsating, moving.
Alive
.

“Spiders,” Jack said.

Brazilian whiteknee tarantulas—Jack could instantly recognize them from their size, and from the bands of white across their long, pointed legs. He’d seen a few before, in previous visits to the rainforest, but never anything like this. There were thousands of them, covering nearly every inch of the cavern, and as he watched through the orange light of the flare, he saw hundreds more bubbling up through holes in the granite floor, climbing over each other until the entire floor was ankle deep.

And then Jack felt something touch his shoulder. He looked to his left and saw a tarantula clinging to his jacket. He swiped it away with the flare, sending it spinning toward the surging floor. Then something whizzed by his face, missing him by inches. He looked up and saw them dropping from the canopy, dozens of them, like a squirming rain.

Jack leaped back into the cockpit, slamming what was left of the door behind him. He was breathing hard, trying to think. Brazilian whiteknees weren’t particularly poisonous, but they were damn big, with ridiculously large fangs. The puncture size of one whiteknee bite could cause serious problems. A thousand bites? Jack didn’t want to find out.

He felt a sting against his wrist and nearly shrieked—and realized it was just a spark from the now dying flare. Watching the flame as it shrank to a bare, dull glow, he had a sudden, crazy, stupid thought.

He let the flare die and then leaped forward, grabbing the stone tablet and leather flight diary, tucking both objects into his jacket. Then he climbed on top of what was left of the pilot’s chair and pressed his hands against the cockpit roof.

The rusted metal gave way on the second push. He used the metal as a shield against the spiders still raining from the ceiling and climbed up out onto the top of the plane. His first step went right through—his boot disappearing for a perilous moment before he yanked it back up—but then the roof held as he carefully stepped forward, kicking spiders out of the way as he went.

He focused his attention on the airplane’s tail, extended about fifteen feet in front of him. Then he looked past the tip of the tail, into the hanging vines and twisted tree limbs. It was going to be close—but he didn’t see another choice.

Still holding the metal above his head, he reached into his jacket and pulled out a third flare. He yanked the cord with his teeth and watched as the flame spit upward, again filling the cavern with orange light. Then he leaned a few inches over the side of the airplane, looking at the cavern floor.

The spiders were knee deep now, a churning carpet of fur, legs, and fangs. Hundreds were now working their way up the side of the plane, toward Jack’s feet.

Now or never
.

He searched the floor for a spot where the spiders were packed a little less deep—where he could see glimpses of floor, and the dark stain against the granite. Then he took aim and tossed the lit flare at the spot.

By the time it hit, he was already running forward at full speed. He heard the dried fuel ignite just as his boots hit the tail and then he was hurling himself upward, buoyed by the blast beneath him, his arms outstretched. He caught the bottom of the vegetation with his fingers, one hand grasping a stretch of vine, the other a rough twist of bark. And then he was
lifting himself upward with all of his strength.

The heat hit him just as he was clawing through the first level of the canopy, a burst so hot he feared his jeans were going to go up in flames. There was a strange screeching sound—a thousand spiders burning simultaneously—and then, just as suddenly, the heat started to dissipate as the layer of fuel burned off and the thick humidity controlled the conflagration.

By the time Jack had reached the top of the canopy, delicately balancing himself against limbs that seemed big enough to support him, all he saw beneath him were wisps of dark smoke, working through gaps in the green.

He took a moment to make sure the stone tablet and the leather flight diary were still against his body, and then he began to make his way to the edge of the canopy and the short five-foot free climb up the cliff to where his rope was waiting. As difficult a climb as that would be, Jack knew that it was only the beginning. The stone tablet—and the strange pictogram next to the head of the snake—had told him exactly where he needed to go next.

In his mind, he was already on his way there: far above the canopy of green and the burning remains of the twin propeller plane.

CHAPTER NINE

Jack was fighting a battle against gravity. Hand over hand, fingers clenched white against the soapstone, he was nearly blind in the pitch black darkness, wind ripping like talons across his back, tearing at his jacket, threatening to pull him away from the statue and toss him, spinning like a rag doll, toward the city a half mile below. The rope tied tight around his waist dangled like a tail that was now limp and useless, leading back into the narrow access tunnel twelve feet below, halfway up the Wonder’s chest. If he fell, the rope would catch him; but he was not at all certain that his grapple would hold against the floor of the tunnel that had let out to the exterior of the monument. Still, there hadn’t been anywhere else to place it—unless he had been willing to dig the claws right into the soapstone exterior itself, and he was pretty sure he’d committed enough blasphemic acts already, without digging a grapple into Christ the Redeemer’s flesh.

Getting inside the statue had actually been easier than Jack had expected. By the time he’d made the arduous climb back up Corcovado and scaled the wall in front of the light panel up to the viewing platform, it had been well after dark; the tourists and worshippers and wedding parties had been sent home. Andy had stayed behind, hiding in the brush right where
Jack had first made his descent; but after Jack had handed him the stone tablet and the leather flight manual, he had eventually gone as well, accompanying Dashia back to their hotel. This was something Jack had to do on his own.

Now a hundred feet up, so high the lights of the city were like Techni-colored pinpoints, Jack clenched his jaw against the wind and worked one leg over the statue’s collarbone, one hand beneath the bearded chin. Jack’s biceps cried out as he pulled himself the last few feet, placing his body flush with the iconic face. Though most of Christ’s features had been blasted away by the elements over the past near century, Jack had no trouble recognizing the symbol from the pictogram. The nose, lips, eyebrows, and ears were mostly gone, but the long hair, the beard, the high cheekbones—Jack believed the image in front of him was built to last a thousand years, not just a hundred.

It hadn’t taken him long to decipher the pictogram. He’d considered waiting until he’d time to digest what he’d found, to try and understand how a version of the stone tablet, which he had seen depicted beneath the Temple of Artemis had ended up in a crate beneath Christ the Redeemer—but he’d quickly realized that the late hour, and the fact that he was already on site, were opportunities he couldn’t pass up.

Before he’d begun his own trek down the tourist-friendly side of the mountain, Andy had helped Jack find the access panel to the interior of the hollow statue, a small door directly above a corner of the black granite pedestal, carved into Christ’s right heel. Although there hadn’t been any security guards on the viewing platform, they could hear Portuguese drifting up from nearby the escalators; they decided against taking the time to break into the chapel to find a ladder and had instead used a combination of Andy’s shoulders and a judicial toss of the grappling hook over a crook in the black granite to hoist Jack up the twenty-five feet between the platform and the heel.

It hadn’t been hard to pry the door open with his iták. Andy was gone before Jack shut the door behind him, leaving him alone in the vast interior of the Wonder, staring up at the huge framework of concrete and reinforced iron that held the separate pieces of the great statue in place. Jack knew the construct had been refurbished a number of times since it had been delivered by the French engineers in the late 1920s; at some point, thankfully, the workers had added a metal staircase leading up the interior to about Christ’s chest level, maybe seventy-five feet above.

Jack had taken the stairs fast, careful not to make too much noise as he went. The stairs ended in what first appeared to be a sheer wall of soapstone and concrete; but as Jack got closer, he saw the seams to another small door, which led into a tight, narrow tunnel, three feet tall and barely as wide. Down on his hands and knees, he’d crawled the last few yards to another opening—and leaned out into blackness, the wind nearly pushing him back onto his heels.