The Aztec Heresy (2 page)

Friar Bartolome looked back toward the stern but saw only the dark. Struggling to his knees, he began tearing at his black cassock, realizing that if he was thrown into the water the drenched fabric would doom him, dragging him down to the bottom. He managed to relieve himself of the heavy robe, and then the next wave struck with no warning at all.

Without the anchor chain to hold him the monk was immediately swept up, turned head over heels and thrown toward the snarled rigging at the bow, striking his head on the rail and feeling a piercing tear at his throat as a splinter of wood slashed into him. Then he was overboard, pushed down so deeply within the wave that he felt the rough touch of the coral bottom as it smashed into his shoulders and back. Crushed by the huge weight of water, he felt the remains of his clothing being torn away and he tumbled helplessly within the wave across the seabed. He forced himself to hold his breath and pushed toward the surface, his arms windmilling underwater, his face upturned.

Finally he broke free of the wave’s terrible grip and gulped in huge gasping lungfuls of air, retching seawater, then felt the tug of the next wave as he was swept forward and down again with barely enough time to take a breath before the deluge swallowed him. Once more he was pressed down to the bottom, the rough sand and coral tearing at his skin, and once more, exhausted, he clawed his way to the surface for another retching breath.

A fourth wave took him, but this time instead of coral there was only sand on the sloping bottom, and he barely had to swim at all before he reached the surface. His feet stumbled and he threw himself forward with the last of his strength, staggering as the sea sucked back from the shore in a rushing rip current strong enough to bring him to his knees. He crawled, rose to his feet again and plunged on, knees buckling, in despair because he knew in some distant corner of his mind that another wave as strong as the first could still steal his life away with salvation and survival so tantalizingly near.

He staggered again in the treacherous sand that dragged at his heels and almost toppled over. He took another step and then another, blinking in the slanting, blinding rain. Ahead, farther up the broad strip of shining beach, was a darker line of trees, fan palms and coconuts, their trunks bent away from the howling wind and the lashing rain. Unripe fruit tore away and crashed into the forest like cannonballs. His breath came in ragged gasps and his legs were like deadweights, but at least he was free of the mad, clutching surf that broke behind him now like crashing thunder.

He struggled higher up the sandy slope and finally reached a point above the wrack and turned back to the sea. He sank down exhausted to his knees, naked except for the ragged remnants of his linen stockings and his undershift. He was still badly frightened, but he wept with relief as he stared into the shrieking night. By the grace of God and by the continuing miracles of the most secret and terrible Hounds of God, he had survived.

Through the rain he could see the heaving broken line of frothing white that marked the reef the ship had run aground on, but nothing more. Somewhere out there, invisible in the darkness, the
Nuestra Señora de las Angustias
was dying, breaking apart on the teeth of the coral shore, her crew and captain gone to their fates, leaving Friar Bartolome alone in this terrible place. Remembering suddenly, he fumbled under his remaining clothing and felt for the oilskin-wrapped parcel and its precious contents, which had been strapped securely around his waist. He screamed in frustration against the howling wind. The Codex and the last and greatest secret left by the fiendish heretic and enemy of God, Hernán Cortéz, Marqués del Valle de Oaxaca, was gone.

2

Monday, December 24, 1962
MacDill Air Force Base, Tampa, Florida

Sometimes, like the massive explosion of a hydrogen bomb, two small events, innocuous on their own, can combine to create a terrible result. In this case the two events were a pre-Christmas party at the base, resulting in Major Buck Tynan’s pounding hangover, and a corroded turbine pin valve in the port-side outer engine nacelle of the B-47 strategic bomber known as
Mother’s Goose.

It was Tynan’s job as aircraft commander and pilot to ‘‘box the square,’’ flying the
Goose
in a set pattern from MacDill west to a map coordinate off the Yucatán Peninsula, then southeast to another coordinate off Kingston, Jamaica, a jog east to the Turks and Caicos Island, just barely hitting Cuban airspace at Guantánamo. From the Turks and Caicos he’d then guide
Mother’s Goose
back to her nest at MacDill just in time for breakfast. Two eggs, poached, with bacon and home fries.

The whole flight took roughly five hours and at no time was the sleek swept-wing bomber ever more than ninety minutes from its main target in the event of war: Havana. Tynan and a dozen other B-47 crews had been flying the same picket patterns twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, since the crisis in October, when Kennedy and Khrushchev went nose to nose over the Russian missiles. Between the B-47s at MacDill and the U-2s out of Edwards in California, they had Castro covered.

From the outside
Mother’s Goose
was a perfectly streamlined aerodynamic beauty. From the inside she was as cramped as the inside of a washing machine; certainly no one had thought about the crew when the bird was being designed. The whole cockpit was slightly offset to the right with an eighteen-inch-wide passage along the left. According to people he trusted, the aircraft had been put together over a weekend in a hotel room in Glendale, California, and the original design had been carved out of a chunk of balsa wood from a local hobby shop.

The seating was in tandem, the navigator-bombardier crammed into the nose, the copilot above and behind him, and the pilot behind him, with only the pilot and the copilot under the heavy plastic canopy. In the event of an emergency the navigator ejected downward, which was fine if the aircraft had enough altitude, while the pilot and the copilot ejected upward.

There were no toilet facilities, so the men used makeshift urinals. Coffee in a thermos and wax-paper-wrapped sandwiches were the order of the day as far as food went. The ordnance consisted of two automatically operated cannon in the tail; not much use against Fidel’s surface-to-air-missile batteries or anything else you were likely to meet at thirty-nine-thousand feet.

The bomb load was something else again: two twelve-foot, six-inch B-43 MOD-1 thermonuclear devices, each with a one-megaton yield. One of the bombs would turn Havana into a crater. Two would turn the top end of Cuba into a sheet of molten glass. Tynan rarely thought about that sort of thing; his job was to fly the pattern, then go for breakfast. Taking off that night, he was thinking about the party and his splitting headache. The last thing he wanted to do was fly.

For the first hour out of MacDill everything was as usual. Dick Baumann, the navigator, was singing an endless round of ‘‘Duke of Earl’’ while he kept one eye on the compass and the other on his charts. Wally Meng, the copilot, was actually flying the
Goose,
and Tynan was dozing, waiting to take over once they’d made the first leg. Outside was pitch darkness. It was two o’clock in the morning and the joint was definitely not jumping. The only sounds other than Baumann’s dubious version of ‘‘Duke of Earl’’ was the monotonous droning roar of the six J-47 engines and the whisper of air passing over the canopy at four hundred and fifty miles an hour. Tynan sighed behind the thick rubber of his mask. He might as well have been on a bus.

The first dark cloud on the horizon was just that—a dark cloud on the horizon. Baumann caught it first on his pint-sized radar screen.

‘‘Major, we got us a storm system dead ahead,’’ said the navigator, his Tennessee drawl crackling in Tynan’s headset.

‘‘Did the Met report mention it?’’

‘‘No, sir, nuh-huh.’’

‘‘Idiots.’’

‘‘That’s a roger, Major—it surely is.’’

‘‘What’s it look like?’’

‘‘Big. Tropical storm maybe, thirty miles out,’’ said Baumann.

Tynan glanced at the glowing dial of his airspeed indicator: four hundred and twenty miles per hour. Seven miles a minute. Maybe four minutes before they ran right into it. God damn.

‘‘Bit late in the season, isn’t it?’’

‘‘Sure enough, but that doesn’t make it go away, Major.’’

‘‘Can we get over it?’’

‘‘Doubt it. She’s a tall one, yes siree.’’

‘‘Electrical?’’

‘‘Most likely,’’ grunted Baumann uneasily. ‘‘These Mexican whirligigs usually are.’’ The B-47 was known for its finicky electronics. The last thing Tynan or the others wanted was to ride the
Goose
through a lightning storm with a couple of megaton nucks in the basement.

‘‘Give me a plot that cuts the corner a little, we’ll see if we can sneak by.’’

‘‘Yessir,’’ answered Baumann.

Tynan pressed the channel switch on his throat microphone and spoke to Wally Meng, sitting in front of him in the copilot’s chair. ‘‘I’ll take her, Wally,’’ he said. He took the yoke in his left hand. There was a sudden stiffening of the wheel as Meng relinquished control of the big jet.

‘‘You got her,’’ said the copilot.

‘‘Confirmed.’’ Tynan could feel the sweat starting to form under his helmet. Not a bus anymore. A hundred tons of steel and aluminum going half the speed of sound toward a giant light socket in the sky.

‘‘Plot,’’ crackled Baumann from the navigator’s compartment in the nose. ‘‘Gonna take us ten degrees off course and then we’ll have to do a comeback. Cut into our fuel a bit.’’

‘‘To hell with that. Input the plot.’’

‘‘Yessir.’’

Suddenly they were into the outer edges of the storm, rain streaming off the canopy in a sheeting haze that made any kind of visibility impossible. The autopilot had taken the plot and Tynan could feel the oversized pedals moving under his booted feet. The sky lit up as lightning exploded directly in front of them, and Tynan felt a shock of pain lance through his forehead as the sound wave hammered them. The jet shook like a leaf.

At which point the needle valve in the outer port-side nozzle cracked and then disintegrated. The result was instantaneous. The engine exploded, tearing away from its reinforced pylon, releasing a blossoming cloud of high-octane jet fuel and immolating twenty feet of the
Goose
’s left wing.

Loss of power, usually on takeoff, was one of the unsolved problems with the B-47’s otherwise excellent stability record. According to the operating handbook for the bomber, a sudden loss of power, especially in the catastrophic way
Mother’s Goose
was experiencing, required a 1.7-second response from the pilot to apply full opposite rudder in an effort to prevent the aircraft from cartwheeling, a result of the unequal thrust of the engines on the undamaged wing; 1.7 seconds was well beyond the performance capabilities of Major Buck Tynan’s alcohol-soaked mind at the critical moment. By the time he slammed his right foot down on the rudder pedal almost a full three seconds had passed.

He fought for control but it was no use; gravity and physics were having their way with
Mother’s Goose.
The end result was inevitable and everyone on the bomber knew it. All three members of the crew reacted instinctively.

In the nose section Baumann grabbed the bicycle brake levers on the right side of his seat and squeezed. The powder charge under the seat blew out the hatch beneath the seat’s swivel mechanism and the navigator was sucked out into the darkness.

Unfortunately the harness mechanism on the ejection seat’s parachute was torn out of place as the seat was sucked downward. Baumann, screaming all the way down, hurtled thirty seven thousand feet into the dark coastal waters a mile or so off the Yucatán Peninsula without anything to slow his descent. By that time the seat, and Baumann strapped securely into it, had reached terminal velocity. The water’s surface had the consistency of granite, and Baumann disintegrated on impact.

Wally Meng didn’t fare much better, even though he followed emergency ejection procedures to the letter. He made sure his safety harness was tight, checked to make sure the shoulder harness lock connector was secure, then reached across with his right hand to hit the quick disconnect on the air and communication cables.

Finally he gripped the catapult firing initiator and squeezed. The three powder charges blew in sequence and the chair rocketed upward at eighteen g’s of force. His only mistake was his quick reaction. The unlucky copilot assumed that Tynan had already ejected, which was not the case.

The canopy over Wally Meng’s head was still intact and in place above him—a curving sheet of high-impact plastic. Meng’s helmet smashed into the canopy, cracking both canopy and helmet, the force of impact fracturing Meng’s skull like an egg splitting on the side of a cast-iron frying pan. Meng’s head, held together now by nothing more than the ruined helmet, was forced up through the canopy and into the four-hundred-mile-an-hour winds that raged across the plastic cowling.

Meng’s virtually unprotected neck was bent back by the force of the wind and sawed against the shattered plastic, sending the severed head out into the darkness of the night, spinning away like a gleaming bowling ball and disappearing into the slashing rain.

Tynan eventually came to his senses, getting the jet into some kind of vague control, fighting the pedals and staring at instruments on his panel that were either blinking red or flickering out as the heavy rains swept in through the shattered canopy and shorted everything out.

Things were made even worse by the thick smoke from the ejection-seat charges and the pumping blood spraying up from Wally Meng’s headless corpse, still strapped into the smoldering chair. His last glimpse of the altimeter showed that the
Goose
was down to less than two thousand feet and the artificial horizon was showing an amazingly shallow dive.

The engine fire was out but there was no hope for the bomber. The
Goose
was cooked no matter what. At two thousand feet, shallow dive or not, they were going to impact in the next few seconds. He checked his harness, blew the canopy, closed his eyes, and said one extremely dirty word that would definitely have shocked his wife if he’d had one. Then he squeezed the trigger and flew up into the dark, rain-filled sky above the jungles of the Yucatán.