The Vilcabamba Prophecy: A Nick Randall Novel (12 page)

Richter
scrambled forward up the trail like a frightened jackrabbit, glancing back over
his shoulder as he went. Randall remained silent, moving by Sauder and jogging
to catch up with Richter.

“Kraus, slow
down.”

Randall could
see his counterpart was in a state of panic. His breathing was fast and shallow
and he was perspiring far worse than even the humidity dictated. Randall
grasped his arm and pulled him to a stop.

“Look, I
understand how you feel. You just had the rug pulled out from under you, but
you have to remember, they need our help to find the medallion. As long as they
need us, we’re safe,” Randall said as Sauder pulled up alongside them.

“I don’t know
where you two think you’re going but…”

“We weren’t
going anywhere except to find the tomb. You have your expertise and we have
ours. Let Dr. Richter and me do our
jobs,
otherwise
your boss will never get what he wants. Think about that for a minute. Do you
really want to disappoint
Kristoph
? Somehow, I don’t
think that would be a wise career move,” Randall said.

The two men
faced each other, silently staring each other down. Sauder scowled at Randall,
his breathing hard and throaty. Randall’s face, on the other hand, was
expressionless. Sauder blinked first.

“Find the damn
tomb,” the captain said.

The group
resumed their trek along the path, rounded a turn and found a small opening on
the north side of the trail. Randall was the first to enter, followed closely
by Richter and then the mercenaries. Unlike the arched pathway they had been
following, the clearing was round, and the overhead vegetation had been pruned
back higher than the path itself. Over time, the jungle had slowly reclaimed
the once open clearing, but remnants of the opening were still visible.

“Spread out and
look for the entrance. It will look like a large stone set into the side of a
hill,” Randall said, scanning the area.

The team
dispersed and searched the clearing. After a short time, Randall heard the
distinct voice of his fellow scientist.

“I think I
found it!” Richter shouted.

Randall located
him in front of a large mound on the east side of the clearing. Framed in logs
taken from nearby trees, a large stone rested to the left of the open entrance.
Someone had already been there. Randall and Richter exchanged glances, the
latter man’s hands trembling with fear.

“What are you waiting
for,” Sauder said, pushing his way past them as he entered the earthen mound.
Randall was the next to enter followed by Richter.

The tomb was
dark, except for a shaft of light coming from the entrance and from the beam of
Sauder’s gun mounted flashlight. Despite being open, the air inside was stale
and musty. Randall clicked on his own light and surveyed the interior. The
shaft fed into a main chamber approximately six to eight feet from the
entrance. Large ceremonial jars, used for washing, flanked the entrance to the
main chamber that was adorned with a small altar in the center. The altar was
constructed of rock and was completely bare. To the rear of the chamber,
another entrance led deeper into the mountain.

Randall entered
the passage with Richter close behind. The tunnel ended and opened into another
chamber, smaller than the first. Directly in the back, cut into the dirt, was a
large rectangular opening with a stone sarcophagus. Randall and Richter moved
toward it and immediately realized it was open. The heavy stone cover lay on
the dirt floor, propped against the side of the coffin.

Richter
approached slowly with Randall by his side. They peered into the stony tomb and
found the remains of the old woman from the legend. Long bony fragments of what
were once her arms were neatly folded, hands clasped near her waist. Her rib
cage lay exposed and appeared to have a roughly circular indentation near the
sternum, but the medallion was missing.

“It’s not
here,” Richter said.

Randall shined
his light into the coffin, searching for additional contents. He spied a small
rectangular item wrapped in cloth
laying
near the
skeleton’s feet. He reached for it.

“What did you
find?” Sauder said, shining his light at the Professors.

Randall snapped
his hand back out, just as Sauder arrived by his side. The captain’s sudden
appearance kept him from retrieving the article.

“Just skeletal
remains. Someone else must have gotten here before us,” Richter replied.

Sauder shoved
him aside roughly and walked up to the sarcophagus. Shining his light into the
stone coffin, he confirmed that the medallion was missing. He turned to face
Richter.

“You said it
would be here. Where the hell is it?”

“It was
here…someone must have found it before us,” Richter stammered.

Without fanfare,
Sauder raised his weapon and shot Richter directly in the chest.

“No!” Randall
yelled, catching Richter as he fell backwards. He gently set him on the ground,
blinking in disbelief.

“Let’s go,”
Sauder said, swinging his weapon in front of him and walking out into the main
chamber.

Randall shone
his light into Richter’s
face which
was contorted in
pain. Tears rolled from the dying man’s eyes as he looked at Randall.

“All I wanted
was to keep my job,” Richter whispered.

“It’s okay,
we’ll get you out of here. Just hang in there.”

Richter’s eyes
drooped close, and he stopped breathing. Randall felt for a pulse but found
none. He sat on the floor holding him, his mind refusing to believe what had
just happened. The shock of seeing Richter die was overwhelming. Nothing in his
life had prepared him for a moment like this, and he sat in the cold dirt
holding the now lifeless body.

Sauder
reappeared in the doorway. “Come on, we need to get back to the ship,” he said
coldly.

“You son of a
bitch! You didn’t have to kill him!” Randall yelled. He set Richter’s body on
the ground and strode towards Sauder’s figure, which was outlined by the light
on his gun. He heard a loud clicking noise as the light raised, pointing
directly at his head.

“Better think
twice Randall or you’re next.”

Randall was
dumbstruck at the sudden turn of events. Slowly, sanity crept back into his
consciousness. He turned away from Sauder and knelt down beside Richter’s body.

“What the hell
are you doing?”

“I’m sure he
has family that might want his belongings,” Randall said, finding Richter’s
wallet and removing a ring he had on his right hand. “Unlike you psychopaths,
most of us have loved ones who would want to have something to remember us by.
The very least I can do is try to give them that.”

Sauder snorted,
“You’re wasting your time. If I were you, I would be more worried about my own
future.”

“Yeah, well
maybe I know something you don’t,”
Randall
said,
rising to his feet. He walked directly towards Sauder. “I know
Kristoph
doesn’t have a goddam thing except for me. If he
wants to beat
Dumond
, he needs my help. That means
you and your men can’t do shit to me until
Kristoph
finds the medallion.”

Randall saw the
light swing up, felt something hard come back down on his head, and everything
went black. When he awoke, he was back on
Kristoph’s
ship, lying on a bunk in a cell.

Randall sat up,
rubbing his head, which ached terribly. He quickly searched for Richter’s
possessions, but they were gone. He was alone in the empty room. Randall tried
to make sense of the surreal turn of events that had ended with Richter’s
death, but his thoughts were a jumbled mess. He was jarred back to reality by
the sound of the door unlocking.

“Get ready,
we’re leaving,” a soldier said, walking over to Randall and jerking him to his
feet.

“Where are we
going now?”

There was no
reply.

Chapter twenty

The two
Aerospatiale SA 341 Gazelle helicopters flew in formation, carrying the 12
members of
Dumond’s
party to a landing zone near the
ruins. Sam had been happily surprised to see Phil, again, when she arrived back
at the compound. Phil had explained to her how he, Mike and her father had
found the chamber room and fallen through the trap door. He also told her how
Mike had broken his leg, and how her father had left them with all of his
supplies while he looked for help. Not surprisingly,
Ackers
had found him with Mike and had taken Mike somewhere, but Phil had not seen
Mike, since he was lifted from the cavern.

The
odd part of the story was the way Phil and
Ackers
had
followed Dr. Randall’s footprints until they had come to a chasm deep within
the mountain. The footprints had ended near a sheer rock face on the other side
of the chasm, but they couldn’t find Dr. Randall. Sam’s heart sank into her
chest when she heard this news. It seemed that her father must have fallen into
the chasm. It was hard to tell who had taken the news worse, Phil or Sam. Sam
realized that her dad was a father figure to both Phil and Mike, and the pain
she felt at his loss was reciprocated by both of his favorite graduate
students. With the elder Dr. Randall now gone, all hopes of finding
Vilcabamba
rested with Sam.

“Do
you think we’ll find the city, Sam?”

“I’m
not sure. If dad couldn’t find it, I don’t see why I would have any better
luck. He’d been researching this for years and knew where to look, better than
anyone.”

“It’s
okay, we’ll be fine,” Phil said with feigned confidence.

“We
will be fine, and we’ll find Mike, I promise.” Sam looked straight into Phil’s
eyes, and he immediately saw the same look of determination he had so
frequently seen in her father’s eyes. It was hard not to get emotional thinking
of the Professor.

The
two helicopters landed, and three mercenaries disembarked. The fourth pointed
his gun at Sam and Phil and motioned for them to exit the helicopter.

“Watch
the props!” came the warning from one of the soldiers on the ground.

Ackers
and
Dumond
had been on the lead helicopter and were already on the ground waiting for
them. The group of twelve waited as the helicopters shut down their engines.

Ackers
signaled to two of his men to stay
and guard the helicopters. “I want radio silence, unless there are signs of
Kristoph’s
men,” he barked.

“Who’s
Kristoph
?” Phil asked.

“Apparently
he and
Dumond
are in some secret organization. From
what I can gather, they’re the ones who funded my dad’s research and this
expedition to find the temple.”

“If
they’re working together, then why are they fighting?”

“It
sounds like
Kristoph
is trying to steal the power
source away from
Dumond
.”

“Great,
so we have two groups of psychopaths trying to find this thing. That’s
comforting.”

Sam
couldn’t help but smile at Phil’s honesty. “We’d better stay focused; things
could turn nasty in a hurry.”

“What
do you mean, Sam?”

“Something
tells me that
Kristoph
and his men aren’t giving up
so easily.”

Phil
sighed. “They really don’t prepare you for this type of stuff in grad school.”

The
group pushed on through the jungle.

The
Amazon Rainforest contains an incredible diversity of both plant and animal
life, and it seemed like they had encountered every variety of the former and
many of the latter. From her perspective, the jungle was a nearly impenetrable
wall of vines, plants and trees. Sam wasn’t entirely sure if her captors really
knew where they were going, a thought that was reinforced when the group
stopped near yet another solid wall of vegetation.

“Why
are we stopping?” Samantha asked.

“We’ve
arrived at our destination,”
Dumond
replied.

Sam
stared at
Dumond
, who was at the front of the group
conversing with
Ackers
. At first, she didn’t see it,
but as she shifted slightly and continued to look, the entrance to the ruins
came into view.

“That’s
amazing,” she said.

“Indeed
it is, Professor. Now, I need the two of you to stay close by as we go in.”
Dumond
motioned to
Ackers’s
men
to bring them forward.

As
Sam walked through the entrance into the ruins, she was amazed at the
incredible sight that befell her eyes. Looking at the passageway head on, it
was a nearly perfect square. As she walked through it, she ran her hand along
the smooth wall.

“How
did they build this with the crude tools they had?”

“That’s
what your dad asked,” Phil replied, grinning at yet another similarity between
daughter and father.

The
group walked on and finally arrived at the chamber room. Sam immediately noted
the bluish glow of the wall and the way it curved away from the center. The
glowing color of the wall seemed to match the glowing color of the jewel in the
medallion. Sam wondered if there was a correlation. When she saw the carvings on
the wall, she recognized immediately that it matched the writing in the tablet
room at
Paititi
. Then she saw the hole in the floor
of the room where
Ackers
and his men had blasted
their way into the underground cavern. As an archaeologist, the blatant disregard
that
Dumond
and his men showed for this antiquity
angered her to no end. She could feel hatred rising inside of her.

“We’ll
rappel in,”
Ackers
said, pushing Sam aside. “Set up
the equipment here,” he barked to his men, who quickly responded by opening
their equipment bags and removing the nylon ripcord used by mountain climbers.
In a quick and fluid movement, one of
Ackers’s
men
disappeared into the blackness, while another belayed his line.

“Ladies
first.”
Ackers
held the line out to Sam.

“Clip
in your carabineer here, walk to the edge, and let your weight carry you over,”
another mercenary instructed Sam.

Without
hesitation, Sam followed the instructions perfectly and soon found
herself
being lowered into complete darkness, except for the
light from the halogen headlamp of the soldier who had gone before her. As she
touched the ground, Sam realized that the vertical descent was fifteen to
twenty feet. Now she understood how Mike had broken his leg. The rest of the
members of the team followed suit with one soldier remaining in the chamber
room.

Ackers
shined his light in the direction
that he and Phil had previously traversed, and Sam immediately saw the
footprints. Her father had been down here a day ago and now she was literally
following in his footsteps. The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on her.

“This
way.”

There
was
an eeriness
to the cavern, the only sound being
that of shuffling boots, and the only light came from the headlamps worn by the
mercenaries. Sam thought that it would be very easy to become disoriented in
this environment.

“Stay
in formation,”
Ackers
barked.

Almost
as if to confirm her thinking, Sam occasionally saw an arrow drawn in the dirt
floor, pointing back toward the opening in the floor of the chamber room. Her
father, never one to leave something to chance, must have drawn them, in case
he became disoriented and needed directions back to Mike and Phil. She smiled
at the connection she felt with her father at that moment. The group continued
on in silence, occasionally passing a tunnel, which crossed their path and
veered off into the darkness.

Suddenly,
they came to a stop.

“Why
are we stopping?” Sam whispered to Phil.

“It’s
the chasm,” Phil replied.

At
Phil’s reply, Sam was overcome with a wave of emotion. The thought of her
father falling into this dark, seemingly endless pit was almost too much to
bear. She had to fight back the tears and control her breathing. Now wasn’t the
time or place to show emotions.

“Dr.
Randall, where should we go from here?”
Dumond
asked
in a sickeningly sweet tone.

“I
don’t know. There’s nothing from my father’s research that explains how to find
the city.”

“That’s
not the answer I want to hear, Professor.”
Dumond
walked over to one of
Ackers’s
men, snatched the HK
MP5 sub-machine gun from his hand and chambered a round as he walked over to
Samantha. “If you want your friend to live, you had better start coming up with
some better ideas.”
Dumond
stopped next to Phil and
pointed the barrel of the gun at the side of his head. “The next move is yours,
Professor.”

Sam’s
heart raced, and her stomach churned. “My father found these ruins, so I know
the city must be here, we just need to look more to find it.”

Dumond
pushed the gun into Phil’s cheek. “I
could search the caverns without you and your friend here. You need to give me
a good reason to keep you both alive.”

“Wait,
there is something.” Sam had hesitated at first, but she had no choice now. “My
father found this.” She unbuttoned the top two buttons of her shirt and removed
the medallion from around her neck. In the darkness, she could clearly see the
deep blue glow of the medallion. It was growing brighter. Almost like a beacon,
letting her know that their destination was much closer than before.
Dumond
walked over and snatched it from her.

“What
is this?”

“It’s
a medallion that was taken from the underground city. I’m not sure what it’s
for, but I believe it may be some kind of key.”

“A
key? For what?”

“I
don’t know.”

“Dr.
Randall, you disappoint me. You expect me to believe that your father didn’t
tell you what this medallion is for?”
Dumond
walked
back over to Phil. “Unfortunately, you leave me no choice.” He raised the gun
and took aim.

As
he did, a single bullet grazed his cheek.
Dumond
spun
on his heel in the direction of the gunfire. The shot had come from the tunnel
veering to the left of the chasm.

“Put
your guns down!” barked a deep male voice from the darkness.

Kristoph’s
men had fanned out in
the darkness and cut off
Ackers
and his men from the
main shaft of the cavern.

“
Kristoph
?”

“Yes,
Dumond
, and you had better put your dogs on a leash
now, or I’ll have you all killed.”

“So
Kristoph
, decided you didn’t want to share the spoils
with the rest of us? Well, not to worry, one less person means more for the
remaining members.”

Unseen
in the darkness,
Ackers
and two of his men had turned
off their headlamps and taken offensive positions to lay cover fire for their
group. The cavern burst into an orgy of sound, light flashes, and dust, as
Ackers
and his men unleashed full automatic fire on
Kristoph
and his team. Instinctively, Sam grabbed Phil by
the arm and dragged him to the ground. Without headlamps, the two were
concealed in the darkness of the cavern. Sam could hear the whizzing of bullets
passing near her and Phil, as she shimmied to the side of the cavern, taking
cover behind a large protruding boulder. Phil followed closely behind and
arrived by Sam’s side, out of breath and terrified.

“Are
you okay? What are we going to do? These guys are trying to kill each other and
we’re caught in the middle.”

Peering
out from their rocky protection, Sam viewed the unbridled
chaos
taking
place in the cavern. The utter darkness of the cavern served as a
backdrop to the mayhem, punctuated by bursts of flames emanating from the
various weapons discharged by both groups and from the flailing headlamps and
gun-mounted flashlights. The near deafening echo of the gunshots and the waves
of dust and dirt kicked up by bullet impacts further muddied the situation.
Shrieks of pain and cursing dotted the chaos, creating a perfect storm of
anarchy. Trying to focus on finding a way out, Sam realized that she was able
to locate the mercenaries by the burst of flames from their guns, and suddenly
she was struck by a thought.