The Aztec Heresy (10 page)

Arkady let a small simmering hint of his exasperation reveal itself. ‘‘I have a large submarine waiting for me offshore, Señor Guzman. My men are breathing canned air and keeping silent to avoid detection by the sonobuoys the Americans scatter around the coastal waters of the Yucatán to stop men like you from plying your trade.’’

Guzman ignored the not so thickly veiled insult. The smile remained. He leaned forward on the couch and crooked a meaty forefinger at Arkady. The Cuban leaned forward.

‘‘I have something to show you,’’ the drug lord whispered. ‘‘Come with me.’’

Guzman put his empty cup on the floor and stood, still carrying the brandy bottle. He grabbed a battered and stained red beret from the desk, jammed it on his head at a rakish angle, and went outside again. Arkady followed him. They went down the steps to the jungle buggy, and Guzman dismissed the driver with a flick of his hand and a grunted order.

‘‘I’ll drive,’’ he said to the Cuban. Cruz climbed into the passenger seat once again. Guzman fired up the Jeep, jammed it into four-wheel drive and roared off through the camp, leaving it through the far gate. He slewed onto an almost invisible track and battered his way into the jungle.

‘‘In 1962 I was a young boy living in a village near here called Nohcacab. It was a small place of no account in the middle of the jungle. Once, in the nineteenth century, some Dutch and German settlers tried to farm the land. Most were slaughtered in the Caste Wars in 1848, but there was some small amount of intermarrying of which my family was the result.’’

‘‘You seem to know a lot about it.’’

‘‘It is my heritage, my legacy. I did a great deal of research, Capitaine.’’ He took a sharp turn onto an even narrower track, underbrush pressing in on either side of the Jeep as it bullied its way through the jungle.

‘‘In 1962, you were a young boy,’’ Cruz reminded the man.

‘‘In 1962, on Christmas Eve there was a terrible storm in the skies above our village. The elders thought it was a bad omen. We were Catholics, but in the jungle the old ways survived under the surface. Somehow Chac, the god of thunder and lightning, had been offended. To confirm this there was a sudden blaze directly above the village, clearly visible. An explosion. I saw it myself. I remember it clearly. We all thought it was the end of the world.’’

‘‘What happened?’’

‘‘The burning man,’’ said Guzman. ‘‘A figure hurtling from the sky wreathed in fire, like a comet coming to earth. He struck one of the houses, igniting the roof thatch even though it was soaked with rain. For a moment the people of the village did nothing, but eventually an elder stepped forward and went into the hut where the burning man had struck. I remember that everyone was very frightened but no one looked away.’’

A burning man,
thought Arkady;
he really is out of his mind.
The Jeep came out into a clearing in the jungle. It seemed like it was a natural formation, a sloping meadow leading down to a narrow crease in the forest floor. Just at the head of the crease was a mound, fifty or sixty feet high, and a long cigar-shaped uplift of foliage behind it like a vine- and earth-covered trail left by some enormous digging animal. After Guzman’s little speech Arkady had imagined they were going to the remains of Guzman’s old village, but there was no sign of that here. The mound was regularly shaped, four-sided, and impossibly abrupt: the classic pattern of a small buried Aztec pyramid, obviously untouched by the curious hands of modern archaeologists. The mound was a blaze of golden blossoms and large leathery leaves, almost obscenely glossy, that grew on long trailing vines, thousands of them twisted together to form a woody, impenetrable barrier.

‘‘They are called yellow allamanda,’’ said Guzman as he pulled the Jeep to a stop. ‘‘
Allamanda cathartica
is the Latin name.’’

‘‘
Cathartica,
as in laxative?’’ Arkady guessed.

‘‘The whole plant is poisonous. You’d swell up like a balloon if you were stupid enough to eat it. Then you’d foul your trousers for a day or two. Not fatal, though.’’

‘‘You didn’t bring me out here to look at flowers,’’ said Arkady.

‘‘No,’’ said Guzman. He walked down through the grasses of the sloping meadow to the cigar-shaped hump of risen earth at the base of the pyramid. He extended a hand dramatically. ‘‘I brought you here to show you this.’’

Arkady joined him. He looked.

‘‘It looks like the grave of the giant in the beanstalk story,’’ said the Cuban skeptically.

‘‘Funny, yes, but partially true.’’ Guzman stepped forward and pulled back a section of camouflage netting. Beneath the netting was a jagged opening. The edges of the opening were shining silver. Aluminum. Guzman eased himself through the opening and disappeared. Hesitantly, Arkady followed. Guzman switched on a hissing Coleman gas lantern. It was like being inside the belly of a metal monster, steel ribs curving left and right. Wires, heavy with mold, hung everywhere. Guzman crept forward, his back hunched in the cramped space.

‘‘There,’’ he said, lifting the lamp so Arkady could see clearly.

The object was almost fifteen feet long, tubular with stubby wings, held in some kind of heavy metal cradle at either end.

‘‘What is this?’’ asked Arkady, his voice low, fearing that he already knew the answer.

‘‘This is the midsection of the fuselage of a B-47 bomber, the one they used to call the Stratofortress. The item in front of you is one of Saddam Hussein’s hidden weapons of mass destruction. It was here all the time! Imagine that! Your president Bush was right all along!’’ Guzman bellowed with laughter, the sound tinny in the enclosed space.

‘‘It’s a bomb,’’ Arkady murmured.

‘‘It is more than that, Capitaine Cruz,’’ said Guzman. ‘‘It is a lever big enough to move the world. It is the future of your country, if you wish it.’’ The lunatic paused for effect. ‘‘It is a Mark 28 free-fall B28RN model 5, 1.45-megaton thermonuclear device. A hydrogen bomb.’’

‘‘Pizda na palochke,’’
whispered Arkady. ‘‘We’re in trouble now.’’

11

The
Hispaniola
made the run from Nassau to Bimini in an easygoing fifteen hours, arriving just before dawn and anchoring off North Rock in twenty-three feet of crystal-clear water. Miami wasn’t even a smudge on the horizon fifty miles to the east. The day was a jewel. There wasn’t much traffic except for a few overeager tourists and their guides in flat-boats looking for bonefish in the shallows, and no one seemed to pay them much attention.

On the other hand, Finn and Billy knew that word of their arrival would get around the little community on the fishhook-shaped island within hours. Bimini, like any small town, lived and breathed gossip.

‘‘It’s a bit like a dream,’’ said Billy, leaning on the main deck rail. ‘‘All this larking about, looking for ancient treasure maps and haring after Aztec gold. Not the sort of thing my father would have called honest labor.’’

‘‘What did your father do?’’

‘‘He was a member of parliament.’’

‘‘That’s honest labor?’’ Finn scoffed. ‘‘That’s like saying politicians never lie.’’

‘‘Still . . .’’

‘‘My father and my mother both spent their lives digging up the past. They made history live again.’’

‘‘Most people think history is a waste of time.’’

‘‘Then most people aren’t thinking straight. Everything we are now is the result of an accumulation of things we’ve done in the past. By examining what we did we can figure out what to do or not to do in the future. By looking for trade routes to the East the Spaniards discovered the West. Without them and the technology that allowed people like Cortéz to get here, there wouldn’t be a Miami over there.’’

‘‘That might be a blessing.’’

‘‘If we didn’t study the Aztecs and why they suddenly vanished, we wouldn’t understand modern ecology—they died out because of overfarming and famine, not wars. It’s all tied together, and it certainly is honest labor.’’

‘‘Is that what this is, or is it just a bunch of greedy sods looking for adventure?’’

‘‘You’re certainly in a mood,’’ said Finn, glancing at her gloomy friend.

‘‘I guess I’m having one of those ‘what is the meaning of life?’ moments,’’ murmured Billy.

It was Finn’s turn to sigh.

‘‘If we’d never met what would you be doing right now?’’ she asked.

‘‘Trying to sell some piece of the family estate so that I could buy a new bilge pump for my boat.’’ He snorted. ‘‘The one the buggers blew up almost under our feet in Amsterdam a while ago.’’

‘‘And that’s honest labor? Is that the meaning of life? Who says you can’t have some fun along the way? Who says the world doesn’t need a little more adventure these days?’’

‘‘I suppose it’s my Calvinist background,’’ said Billy. ‘‘Nose to the grindstone and all that.’’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘‘I suppose I thought I was going to mess around in boats until I noticed the first gray hair, then get down to serious business.’’

‘‘Doing what?’’

‘‘Something meaningful, I suppose.’’

‘‘You’ve got a postgraduate degree in Spanish literature from Oxford and you did your dissertation on the thrillers of John D. Macdonald. How meaningful is that . . . Dr. Pilgrim?’’

‘‘I suppose I’d have been a teacher.’’

‘‘Teaching other people how to be teachers,’’ said Finn. ‘‘I was brought up to believe it was the journey, not the destination.’’

‘‘I suppose you think I’m being silly.’’ Billy sighed.

‘‘No,’’ said Finn, ‘‘I
know
you’re being silly.’’

Eli Santoro stepped out of the deckhouse a few feet away.

‘‘We’ve got something on the side scan coming in,’’ said the one-eyed man. ‘‘Right where you said it would be.’’

Finn and Billy followed him back into the long low-ceilinged cabin. It was crammed with every possible kind of electronic device from monitor screens for the robot television cameras to GPS displays, weather radar, the magnetic anomaly ‘‘fish-finder’’ echo-sounding array and the side-scanning sonar.

Guido Derlagen sat in front of the color screen of the side-scan unit and tweaked the dials on the image. It looked like the print of an old hobnail boot, slightly wider in the center and narrower at one end.

‘‘Three masts. High at bow and stern. A
nau,
a carrack. About eighty or ninety feet long,’’ said the Dutchman. ‘‘Thirty feet down on a sandy bottom.’’

‘‘Aye,’’ commented Run-Run McSeveney from where he was perched on a counter by the door and sipping from an old enamel cup. ‘‘Or it could verra well be naught but a blodgy bit o’ coral where it oughtn’t ought to be.’’ His face screwed up. ‘‘Why hasn’t anyone seen it before if it was that easy?’’

‘‘It’s right there on the charts,’’ said Eli Santoro. ‘‘Shifting sandbars. It’s an undersea sand river. There’s been a lot of hurricane activity the last few years. Al Gore weather. It was probably buried before.’’

‘‘And it still could be a blodgy bit o’ coral.’’

‘‘You really are a sour old bugger, aren’t you?’’ Billy laughed.

‘‘I’m a Scot. We’re sour by nature. It’s the bluidy winters in Auld Reekie,’’ answered the skinny little man with a gold-capped grimace. ‘‘But I’m philosophical about it, which is the Chinee in me.’’

‘‘You’re all crazy,’’ said Finn. ‘‘Now, who wants to dive?’’

She moved through the water smoothly, arms at her sides. The big Dacor fins pumped in a smooth slow rhythm, propelling her through the warm clear depths, the tanks on her back a comforting weight as she swam down the wreck site. The position on the side scan had been five hundred yards or so from where the
Hispaniola
was anchored, and they were using the twelve-foot Zodiac 420 they kept as a tender on the chart room roof for a dive boat.

Being in the water was a relief after the long jet trip from Heathrow and the journey across England and half of Europe that had gone before. Sometimes it seemed to Finn that she’d spent half her young life in some kind of academic surroundings, like universities and archives like the one in Spain, and while she enjoyed the challenge of research, sometimes she craved the adventure of being on-site. Her father and mother had been the same way: when they were annotating finds back in Columbus they were yearning for the jungle, and vice versa. Archaeology was like that: half the time spent looking and the other half spent studying what you found.

She smiled to herself around the silicone mouthpiece she had gripped between her teeth. Study was over, the hunt had begun, and the first scent of the quarry was right below her in the glowing sand at the bottom of the Florida Straits.

Briney Hanson stood at the rail on the flying bridge of the
Hispaniola
smoking one of his clove cigarettes and occasionally peering through the pair of binoculars that hung around his neck, a vintage Zeiss instrument he had owned for years and his last link with the old
Batavia Queen.
He smiled, squinting in the sunlight as he looked out to the Zodiac bobbing in the small waves a quarter of a mile away.

He’d come a long way from the little Danish coastal town of Thorsminde. He was the son of a herring fisherman by way of the South China Sea, and had spent his adult life piloting old rust buckets like the
Queen
on their tramping routes from one fly-blown island port to another, going nowhere slowly and calling no place home.

And now here he was, riding the tide off Miami Beach and master of a ship outfitted with everything except a hot tub. His home port was an island paradise, and except for occasional groups of Colombians in superfast cigarette boats trying to outdo
Miami Vice,
it was all relatively peaceful. It was almost enough to make him feel guilty.

He took a last puff on the Djarum cigarette and snuffed it out in the makeshift ashtray he’d duct-taped to the bridge rail—a coffee tin filled with beach sand, another holdover from his days on the
Batavia Queen.
Finn was forever giving him lectures about his nicotine habit, but he was a stubborn advocate. One of these days he was going to find himself being the last smoker on the planet.