Black Rain

The others …

Hawker began to wonder what had become of them. If their enemy knew Hawker and Polaski’s route across the jungle, it meant they had to know where it originated: the closely guarded location of the temple. Surely they would not wait long before moving in on the clearing. In all likelihood the attacks had come simultaneously or nearly so.

“God help us,” he whispered, covering Polaski with more of the dark Amazonian soil. “God help us all.”

Hawker finished burying Polaski in complete silence, his mind growing numb as it churned in circles. He tamped the soil down and said a short prayer, concluding with a verse that he thought about often, one that seemed appropriate for both Polaski and himself. “And the Lord sayeth, Come to me all ye who labor and are heavy burdened. I will give you rest.”

He smoothed the dark earth of Polaski’s grave with his hand. “Rest well, Polaski,” he said.

Standing, Hawker was now forced to grapple with a larger decision. He had to get moving, had to try to get help to his friends. But how?

The smart bet was to head for the river and take it east. Sooner or later a boat would pick him up and he could make a radio call. He could reach someone in the NRI. Moore or Gibbs or someone who knew of the operation and could coordinate a response, one with sufficient numbers and equipment to deal with whoever had done this thing. But even with the best of luck, it might be a week or so before someone picked him up and another week before help arrived.

Too much time.

By then their enemy would be gone and the rest of the NRI team missing or dead. They might be already. He thought of McCarter and Susan and the porters hired for a hundred bucks a day. He thought of Danielle and closed his eyes.

With a fire in his heart stoked by bunkers of anger and guilt, Hawker grabbed his survival pack, checked to be sure his gun was present and heaved the pack over his shoulder. He took a deep breath, set his jaw and turned to the west, heading back toward the clearing instead of away from it.

He would not abandon the others to a callous and murdering enemy, not when his own part in the deception weighed so heavily on his mind. He would make his way back to the clearing on foot, an action that would bring about another war and great shedding of blood—something he’d spent years trying desperately to avoid.

It had become unavoidable now. The darkness had made a home in his soul once again and it drove him on. He would return to the clearing and save his friends or he’d bury their killers, one by one.

CHAPTER 29

As Kaufman’s men turned the clearing into an armed camp, digging foxholes and bunkers, and unloading crates of weapons and ammunition from the helicopter, Norman Lang conducted his ultrasound tests, which confirmed a cavern beneath the temple and a tu

Closer investigation revealed a fissure between two of the stones. Kaufman’s men forced the stone upward with a pair of crowbars, raising it an inch at a time, until it jammed against something and would budge no farther.

Lang wedged a two-by-four into the exposed space to brace the stone and then supervised the building of a makeshift bridge above the maw of the pit. He crawled across and peered into the tu

It was a narrow space, perhaps five feet high, but not much wider than a man’s shoulders. It fell away steeply, looking more like a slide than a walkway, and he saw evidence of a pulley and counterweight system for the stone, but whatever flaxen rope it might have once used had disintegrated long ago.

Minutes later, Lang was back in the tu

For several years he’d been Kaufman’s go-to man for risky projects, and in that time he’d come to realize that Kaufman sometimes used questionable methods to gather information, but he had never expected the events that he’d now become part of: shooting and killing and the taking of hostages. Lang was well aware that his own ego, greed and lack of discernable ethics had made him an easy mark, but this was far more than he’d bargained for.

Still, at this point, what choice did he have? No doubt any attempt to back out would result in an unpleasant end. No, he thought, crossing Kaufman outright would be foolish, especially out here in the jungle, surrounded by killers and thugs. Lang was a realist, at least in the sense of knowing what had to be done to survive, and for now that meant doing as he was ordered, trusting in the fact that Kaufman needed him to study and break down whatever items this project recovered. Once he made it back to the States, his approach might change, but for now he would do what was necessary—and if bodies were left behind, that would be okay as long as his wasn’t among them.

He turned to Susan. “How much farther?”

She stared at him blankly through the plastic of the gas mask. “How would I know?”

Of course she wouldn’t know. It was a stupid question. Why the hell was he even talking to her? He pushed on, sliding and crouching and feeling the burn in his legs—until he stepped out into an open space, a massive chamber where the ceiling pulled up and out of view and the edges ran away from them on either side. It was a deep and echoing place, like a darkened, empty stadium. Words of awe wafted through the air, echoing back at them while their lights skated dimly over distant walls.

They stood far beneath the temple. Directly ahead them lay a wide pool of utterly still, crystal-clear water: a small lake that stretched across the cave for perhaps a five hundred yards. There appeared to be additional land on the far side.

Lang pulled an ELF radio from his belt. ELF stood for Extremely Low Frequency, which was far more adept than standard frequencies at penetrating resistance. The Navy used a similar system to communicate with submarines a thousand feet below the surface. Lang and Kaufman hoped the orange radio with the long ante

Kaufman’s reply came back garbled. “Understand you … a large … filled with … -ter.”

“Affirmative,” Lang replied. There was no answer. He wasn’t sure if Kaufman had received or not. It didn’t matter; they would proceed, complete their preliminary search and then head back out.

As part of that search Lang filmed the area with his camera, repeating his black-light test and performing a few tests with a battery of other devices he carried. Finding nothing of interest, he looked across the water. On the far side of the lake he saw what appeared to be a raised area. Their lights barely reached it but it looked flat and level, unlike the rest of the cave. “We’ve got to find a way across,” he said. “Either that or we’re going to need a boat.”

A quick search revealed a pathway ru