Black Rain

She stopped next to McCarter at the bottom of the stairs, pointing her flashlight in various directions. Despite their lights it was hard to see any details. The sulfur in the air had condensed into a yellowish fog and was scattering the light from their torches.

Hawker spoke. “Twenty steps. Mean anything to you, Doc?”

“Not particularly,” McCarter replied. “But there are twenty named days in the Mayan Short Calendar. Then again, that might have been how many stairs they needed to reach the top.”

Danielle shined her light along the floor. It was made of the same gray stone as the exterior, cut and laid in precise blocks. “Amazing,” she said. As she stepped past McCarter and into the darkness beyond, her foot hit something and sent it rolling across the floor. The object came to a stop near the far wall and one of the flashlight beams soon found it: a skull, weathered and discolored with time, now laying beside a large pile of similar skulls. There were dozens of them, perhaps fifty or more, some intact, others smashed and broken.

McCarter walked up to the jumbled pile, set his lantern down and picked up one of the skulls. He examined the damage then placed it down, exchanging it for another.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“Trauma on all of them,” he said. “Damage from heavy blows and edged blades.” He held up another skull and shined his light on it. “I could be wrong but these look like teeth marks to me. Makes me wonder just what kind of rituals were being practiced here.”

“Let’s not dwell on that thought,” she said.

McCarter stood and the three of them continued on through a wide doorway and into an apparently empty room. The new room wasn’t entirely dark, however. A thin ray of light filtered in from somewhere up above. Danielle strained to see the source of the light but it was hard to make out. In the dust the beam of light resembled a curtain.

“Crack in the structure,” McCarter guessed.

“We’re on the north side now,” Hawker said.

They proceeded through the curtain of light and back into the darkness. Another doorway took them to the left through a small foyer to a much larger rectangular room. The shafts of their flashlights cut through the haze and darkness and touched on a platform centered at the far end. It appeared to have markings on its face.

Danielle crossed the room to the platform and bent to inspect it. Impact marks from some heavy object were visible all along the platform’s face, repeated strikes that had destroyed and distorted much of what had once been carved there. Crumbled bits of stone rested in a pile of sloping dust at the base of the platform.

“It looks like vandalism,” McCarter said. “I wonder if grave robbers have been in here.”

She scooped up a handful of dust and fragments and let them slide off her hand and back onto the pile. As McCarter continued to examine the ruined markings, Danielle stood up and studied the platform: ten feet wide with a shallow depth, it seemed to be an altar of some kind. Its front edge and sides were straight, but the back line curved inward where it formed part of the circular rim at the edge of a deep well.

She placed her torch on the platform, scaled it and gazed into the pit beyond. “Look at this,” she said.

McCarter climbed up beside her.

They directed their flashlights into the well and the beams were partially reflected.

“Water.”

Hawker peered over the edge. “Why would they have a well down here?”

McCarter spoke reluctantly. “More sacrifices, I’m afraid. The ancient Maya had a nasty habit of drowning people too.”

“I hate to say this,” Hawker replied, “but I’m kind of glad they’re gone.”

In the darkness it was hard to judge the depth of the well. At least a hundred feet to the water’s surface, Danielle guessed. She picked up a small stone and released it over the edge.

“One thousand one, one thousand two, one thous—”

The splash interrupted her, but it was the next occurrence that surprised them. A moment after the impact, bright, phosphorous foam began to bubble up and the odor of sulfur became instantly more pungent.

“It looks like …” Danielle began.

“Acid,” McCarter said, finishing the sentence.

“Acid?” Hawker asked.

McCarter turned to him. “The sulfur in the air had to come from somewhere. Looks like it’s coming from down there. The gasses are bubbling up through the water like the carbonation in a soda can. Sulfuric acid.”

Hawker’s face wrinkled. “Do I even want to know what they used that for?”

“Probably,” McCarter said, “to get rid of the bones.”

As Hawker looked into the pit, Danielle turned to McCarter.

He spoke her thoughts aloud. “Bitter water,” he said. “Bitter water, indeed.”

CHAPTER 21

That night, a wailing call echoed across the clearing, a human voice, rising and falling in a wavering chant. It was a hollow and haunting sound. And one Pik Verhoven had been expecting.

Danielle turned to her left where Verhoven sat, his coffee mug on hold in front of his mouth. He’d told her earlier that something would happen, he’d told her it would happen tonight. Movement in the trees had given it away. Voorloopers, he said: scouts.

In the hours since, he and his men had made a sweep into the trees looking for the natives, hoping to chase them off. They’d found only footprints, strange gouges in the trees—like some kind of territorial markings—and tracks with only two claws. Nearby, they’d found the remnants of two animals, butchered horribly, covered in mud and the same open blisters they’d seen on the body in the river. “More warnings,” he’d told her.

In response, Danielle had chosen not to sleep. She ran a battery of tests on the ring of motion sensors they’d placed around the clearing and made sure the laptop on which their inputs displayed was close at hand.

For his part Verhoven had positioned his men at various points in the clearing and had brought one of the German shepherds to sit beside him at the table. As the eerie chanting wafted through the air, the canine stiffened and put itself between Verhoven and the source of the call.

Danielle watched as Verhoven patted the dog proudly and glanced her way. She turned back to the laptop. The motion sensors had yet to register an alarm.

When a wailing cry drifted in on the night air, Verhoven put his mug down and grabbed a walkie-talkie. “What do you see?”

“Nothing out here,” came one reply.

“Clear on this side,” came a second report.

“Well, open your damn eyes,” he said, “because you’re missing something.”

Danielle had heard enough. “I’m waking the camp.”

There was no need. Stirred by the chanting, the other members of the team were already in motion, peering out of their tents or making their way to spots beside the fire, near her and Verhoven.

Polaski was one of the first to reach her. “What is that?”

“Sounds like a cat in heat,” Devers said.

The porters gathered together. McCarter and Susan arrived by the fire with Hawker right behind them.

Danielle stepped nearer to Devers. “Is that the Chollokwan?”

He did not reply immediately, seeming startled by the echoing voice.

“Of course it is,” Verhoven replied.

She wanted confirmation. “Come on, yes or no?”

“I think it is,” Devers said. “It sounds like their language but …”

As Devers strained to listen, Hawker stepped past, taking a seat on a wooden crate. “Time to see if this plan of yours works.”

The plan was simple: they’d create a secure area at the center of the camp in case of attack. The area was ringed with smoke canisters and a group of tripods holding metal halide flood lamps, like those used in the Olympic stadiums.

If they faced a daylight raid, the smoke canisters would pump out thick volumes of dark smoke, obscuring the group in seconds from any onrushing attackers. But the smoke would not interfere with the infrared scopes attached to Verhoven’s rifles and they could fire at will from this hidden spot.