Black Sun

“You will be met in Mexico City,” Ropa added. “The men will take orders from you, but you will not be free to leave them. Do you understand?”

Of course he understood. The men would be FSB, from the ninth directorate, assassins with orders to kill whomever he asked them to kill. And then to eliminate Saravich himself if they did not bring the boy home, or perhaps even if they did.

“You may think you have nothing to lose,” Ropa told him, “but you still have nephews, nieces. These people will suffer if you do anything less than what’s necessary.”

Saravich stared at Ropa, but the Mountain did not blink. The threat was real. He tucked the envelope in his jacket and glanced out the window. They were approaching Moscow International. He would be boarding a plane without ever going home.

Apparently there would be no rest for the wicked.

CHAPTER 28

The thirty-foot V-hulled fishing boat sliced across the Gulf of Mexico with surprising grace; surprising because the boat itself was a battered veteran of twenty years, with dents, peeling paint, and saltwater corrosion plainly visible on every surface. Even the engines had sputtered and coughed when Danielle had started them, sounding like old tractor motors as the boat traveled at low speed.

But once she’d coaxed the throttles forward, the twin outboards had begun to sing. And now, cruising across relatively flat seas, with a long wake trailing out behind them, Danielle had begun to feel a sense of confidence and of freedom. Those feelings seemed to be mirrored on the faces of at least two of her three passengers.

Beside her, McCarter looked familiar again, smiling and shaved. Two days of proper dressings and mega-doses of antibiotics seemed to have broken the back of his infection. Sleeping pills had granted him some rest and he now looked like the man she remembered instead of a lunatic who’d escaped the asylum.

Yuri seemed happier as well, much as he had on the freighter to the Philippines. She wondered about him. If he could really see or sense energy fields as the Russian captain had claimed, even a sleepy town like Puerto Azul might be something in the way of overstimulation.

It was true that autism created similar feelings of sensory overload in those who suffered from it, but for Yuri it was worse. He could be in a silent, darkened room and the waves of electromagnetic energy others could not see or feel would bombard him.

Appliances, cellphones, power lines, anything that used electricity created a small magnetic field. If one could see these things or hear them or sense them, as Yuri supposedly could, the modern world might feel like a room where everyone was shouting, blowing trumpets, and banging cymbals, all at the same time.

But out here there was little of that and it seemed that the open sea brought him peace.

And that left only Hawker to be unhappy. He stood near the bow, digging through the various boxes of equipment, looking more and more disappointed with each new find. He reached for a spot of corrosion on the metal hull, snapping off a flake of rust.

“Is this really the best we can do?” he said, tossing the flake overboard.

“It matches our jeep,” she replied.

“Where are the missiles?” he asked. “The machine guns and the mini-torpedoes?”

“Couldn’t afford any options,” she said. “Just basic transportation. At least it’s a fast boat. They normally rent these things out to chase after wahoo.”

Hawker’s eyebrows went up. Apparently he wasn’t a fisherman. “A wahoo?” he asked. “What the hell is a wahoo?”

“A fish,” she said. “An extremely fast fish. This boat is set up to catch them.”

Looking out over the horizon, he grunted his approval. “I guess that’s something.”

She motioned toward one of the lockers he’d been through. “At least the dive gear is first-rate,” she added. “That’s what we’re going to need.”

“If we find anything,” he said, looking at the control panel. “Only we would look for a sunken city with a fishfinder.”

Danielle followed his gaze. The only pieces of additional equipment were a GPS receiver and a cheap sonar depth sounder. But they had checked and rechecked McCarter’s calculations. If he was right, the Tip of the Spear was a spot seven miles offshore, in the relatively shallow water of the Campeche plain. The underwater data from that area was limited, but it was a sedimentary plain, relatively shallow and flat. If a ruin of some type was present, it should stick out like a sore thumb.

Danielle looked to McCarter. “I think he doubts us,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” McCarter insisted. “We’ll prove him wrong.”

Hawker shook his head. “I just don’t see how the Maya built something out here underwater.”

“There are two possibilities for that,” McCarter said. “The first is that they didn’t build anything underwater. They could have built something on an island only to have it sink over time.”

He waved his hand around. “The gulf is a very active zone of currents and plate tectonics. Not only that, but much of the underlying rock is sedimentary, so relatively soft. Islands can rise or fall on a human scale. A thousand years can create quite a change. As far as we can tell, the Maya and their predecessors were active in this area for two or three times that length.”

“We’re not talking Krakatau or anything, right?” Hawker asked.

“No,” McCarter said. “More like a deflating cake or a home dropping into a sinkhole.”

Danielle was glad to see McCarter acting more like himself again.

“And the other option?” Hawker asked.

“We believe the natives we found in Brazil had assistance and training from whoever brought these stones back. That’s how they built the temple down there. That’s why it’s still standing. It’s not too hard for me to imagine them building an underwater structure. Concrete hardens in a chemical reaction. Use the right forms and it can set up and cure underwater. Especially when using volcanic ash as an ingredient.”

McCarter looked her way. “Our trip to the Island of the Shroud showed that these people were traveling to the volcanic regions. It was a long trek, one that I doubt they would have made without an important reason. We thought it was to create a temple to house the new stone, and in a way it might have been, but maybe we had it backward. The effort was related to housing the stone, but they weren’t going there to place the stone. Instead it was to get the ingredients they needed to do the job down here.”

That sounded about right to Danielle. She could imagine trains of burros loaded down with volcanic ash, trouping down the slopes of Mount Pulimundo. She checked the GPS. “I guess we’re going to find out soon enough,” she said. “We’re almost there.”

She backed off the throttles and the boat slowed to a calmer pace.

Their plan was simple: enter the area, cruise a grid pattern for an hour or two, and dive on anything that looked suspicious. Twenty minutes in, they hadn’t found anything, but the depth had remained almost constant.

“That’s a good sign,” Danielle said.

“I’ve been thinking about what we’re looking for,” McCarter said. “The stone we found in Brazil was hidden but in a monument of some presence. And it was guarded. As if the people who put it there wanted it to be protected, but also in a known position.”

“Hard to get at, but easy to find,” she paraphrased.

“Not necessarily easy to find,” he said. “After all, it was in the middle of the Amazon. But if ‘easy to find’ is the wrong description, how about ‘impossible to lose.’”

That seemed apt.

Hawker nodded. “Those animals defended the temple in Brazil like a nest.”

Danielle thought she understood. “Hard to lose, but well defended,” she said. “You’re saying this is the same kind of thing. Put a temple out here and it’s even more inaccessible.”