Black Sun

Onscreen the president looked surprised and then glanced off to the side, exchanging words with someone outside the frame. Moore guessed it was his chief of staff.

“I’ll take that under advisement,” he said finally.

“Maybe they’ll understand,” Moore added, feeling suddenly proud of himself. “Hell, they might even have a few ideas as to what we should do about it.”

An aide came up to the president. A folder was placed in front of him. A few words whispered in his ear. The feed was muted but the look on his face became increasingly strained. He turned back to the screen, to Moore.

“We have another problem,” he said. “The Russians have just shot down a pair of Chinese spy planes.”

Moore turned his attention back to the UN screen, cringing at this latest development. The Chinese ambassador had apparently gotten the word and was already railing at the Russian delegation, and worse yet, he was threatening retaliation.

Things were begi

CHAPTER 41

McCarter had spent most of the night and all morning focused on the photographs that Danielle had taken in the submerged temple. Some of them were strikingly clear and others less so. They were low-resolution shots, taken in poor light, but with what he already knew, they gave him enough to piece together a larger part of the legend.

He began explaining it to Danielle, but she held him up. “I think Hawker needs to hear this,” she said solemnly.

They exchanged a look and McCarter offered a resigned nod. Danielle had a good point, though it was something he didn’t want to think about. There were reasons Hawker might be more important in the decision-making process than either of them.

So far, however, Hawker had asked for little in the way of information about what they were studying. He understood the basics and he’d pressed them on details related to Kang and the threats they might face, but as for details of legends they were mining, he seemed less than interested. McCarter guessed that would have to change.

Danielle called him over. “We’re making progress,” she said to him. “But you should be part of it.”

A suspicious look flashed over Hawker’s face and it left McCarter feeling like he was back in the classroom or on the lecture circuit.

“Do you remember our time in Brazil?” he asked Hawker.

“Of course,” Hawker said. “Angry natives, mutated animals, people trying to kill us. Great fun. We should do it again sometime.”

The joke put McCarter at ease. “Right,” he said. “Well, if you remember, we went down there looking for Tulan Zuyua. A place we compared to the Mayan Garden of Eden, because in their legends it was the first place that humans gathered and it was also where the different Mayan tribes were given their gods.”

“I remember something like that,” Hawker said.

“The thing is,” McCarter said, “in the story, the Mayan tribes are given their own patron gods. And some of them, including the Quiche people, left Tulan Zuyua carrying the essence and power of these gods in special, glowing stones.”

Hawker clearly understood the significance. “Like the one we just found.”

“And the one we found in Brazil,” Danielle added.

“When Moore and I first spoke, a year and a half ago, we talked about the Mayan culture, the Mayan religion, and the Mayan prophecies. He wanted me to explain the 2012 prophecy and what it meant to the Mayan people and culture as a whole.

“I had to remind him—and myself—that there is no ‘one’ Mayan culture, religion, or specific set of prophecies. Just like there is no ‘one’ Christianity, Islam, or any other religion. There are schisms and divisions and differences of opinions. Just like you have Catholic, Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, just like you have Shiite and Su

“And each state has its own interpretation of things,” Danielle added.

“Exactly,” he said. “They worshipped the same gods in general, but each nation had its own take on things. Different philosophies, different rituals.”

He needed to make the point clear because it would color everything he was about to tell them. “Unification of any religion is difficult if not impossible. In Christian faith, we have the church getting together in the fourth century to decide which books would be part of the official canon. The rest become apocryphal. But despite their official ex parte status they still exist and some believers still put faith in them. Other documents that are part of the official body are less accepted than the rest. Martin Luther considered the books of James to be heresy because they required acts—not just faith—as an instrument of salvation. The Eastern Orthodox Church rejects the Book of Revelation for different reasons. So you can see the difficulty in creating uniform religion even when you try. But in the Mayan world, you have no canonical gathering to unify the code. And the cultural and religious differences are widespread.”

“Each to his own,” Hawker said, grasping the concept easily. “Why does that matter to us?”

“Because this concept of 2012 being the end of time, the end of civilization or existence, did not ever gain widespread acceptance anywhere in the Mayan world.”

Hawker looked surprised. “It seems to have gained widespread acceptance now,” he said.

McCarter had to laugh. Indeed it had, mostly because it was interesting, exciting, and mystical in a safe way. Few of the people talking about it believed in the slightest that anything might occur.

“To us it’s a ghost story,” he said. “Good conversation around the campfire. But to them, the Maya of that time, it was not a popular idea. Nor, I might add, one that leads to productively motivating the troops. If all is for naught, then who wants to work? Who wants to build temples or carve idols or glyphs?”

Hawker nodded.

“So it was marginalized,” Danielle said.

“Almost to the point of extinction,” McCarter added.

“But not quite,” Hawker guessed.

“Precisely,” McCarter said. “And that’s where it becomes interesting. What we’ve found is a broken trail of evidence, linking the stones and the prophecy. It seems like this trail was created on purpose, most likely by a group of true believers who were savvy enough to keep themselves from being discovered and stable enough to pass the knowledge on without destroying themselves in an effort to prove their point.”

“Destroying themselves?”

“Doomsday cults rarely last more than a few years,” McCarter said. “Both because it’s hard to attract followers to such an idea—sane followers anyway—and because even when you do attract them, it’s awfully hard to keep them around and interested for any length of time without performing the act of self-destruction.”

“Makes sense,” Hawker said. “I’m guessing you guys haven’t found that anywhere.”

“No,” McCarter said. “But what we have found is this.” He pointed to places on the map that was spread out before him. “On a stone at the monument of Tohil, the oldest structure in the city of Caracol, we find reference to the 2012 prophecy and a group referred to as the Brotherhood Behind the Smoke, this means the hidden brotherhood. From there we tracked them to Ek Balam, city of the Jaguar, where they took the name Brotherhood of the Jaguar. Here we found glyphs that talk of them building temples and structures to protect and house the Sacrifices, which I think is a reference to the stones. That led us up into the mountains to the Island of the Shroud, where they quarried their volcanic ash to use in building the underwater temple.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’m with you.”

McCarter nodded his approval. “Now, the ultimate end of this trail is a site referred to as the Mirror. We originally guessed this was another reference to the god of fire, Tohil, since he was often depicted with a mirror in his forehead. The problem is, since the first structure we’ve found nothing of Tohil, as if that particular iconography had been left behind, in exchange for something new.”