He glanced at Yuri. “Let’s not make those your first English words.”
The boy did not react, and McCarter turned his attention back to the boats, hoping to see a pyramid of water skiers behind them.
He didn’t. And though the boats could have been anything, he had a terrible suspicion as to what they were and who they were interested in.
He grabbed Yuri, strapped him into the passenger chair, and then started the engines.
Hawker and Danielle reached the top of the stairs. The body lay there in a sarcophagus of some type, wrapped in simple gauze. The setup was nothing elaborate, just simple wood, with carved notches on the sides, like handles for pallbearers.
Danielle peeled the strips of fabric back. The skull was human, barely. Its smooth bone was covered in tiny pores. A filament of wire ran from the empty eye sockets back into the brain cavity. The deformed ribs, the overlarge eyes, all the same defects they had seen on the body in Brazil. Another descendant of man, who’d died several thousand years before he or she would be born.
She looked at Hawker. There was only silence. Respect.
He aimed his light past the body. In the alcove beyond loomed a statue of a Mayan king in full ceremonial dress. It reminded Danielle of the monument taken from the Island of the Shroud, but its arrangement was different. Here the king was holding out his hands the way one might cup falling water. In those hands and protruding into his chest lay a smooth, glasslike object. The stone looked to be the same construction as the one they’d found in Brazil, but it was a different shape and smaller. About the equivalent of a large grapefruit.
Danielle reached over and switched off Hawker’s flashlight. As their eyes adjusted they could see a ghostly white glow coming from the stone.
Hawker walked toward it and reached for it.
“Don’t,” she snapped.
He pulled his hand back, staring at her.
“Just give me a second,” she said, looking around as if there might be a booby trap or two waiting to be sprung on them.
Trying to ignore the concern in his eyes, she stepped toward the stone and pulled it free. It was heavy in her hands, incredibly smooth and warm to the touch. It brought a tingling sensation in her fingers, a wave of energy coursing through her body. She felt a type of elation holding it.
“You all right?” Hawker asked.
His voice brought her back to the present.
“Yeah,” she said. “I just can’t believe we actually found it.”
Carefully she secured it in a pouch, which she zipped shut and clipped to her belt. Following that, she pulled out what looked like an old film camera and began taking pictures.
“Is this part of our retro look?” Hawker said, noting the old-fashioned snap-and-click camera. “To go with the jeep and the boat?”
“Remember how all our electronic equipment went down in Brazil?”
He nodded.
“I figured we’d better have something that wouldn’t be affected.”
She advanced the film with her thumb, asked Hawker to direct his light onto the surface she was shooting, then clicked off the next shot. She took pictures of the statue, the stairwell, and the hieroglyphics there. She took pictures of the ceiling and the walls and the fading murals they contained. She aimed her camera at the body on the altar and then lowered it without snapping the shutter.
Hawker seemed to agree. “Let the poor fellow be,” he suggested.
She finished up and put the camera away. When she was done she thought of destroying the carvings as she and McCarter had done at the Island of the Shroud, but there were no loose stones around and they carried no hammers or other heavy tools. Even the knives, which had been useful against the brittle coral, would be ineffective against the heavy stone of the temple.
She let it go. They didn’t have much time anyway. They still had to get back out and up to the surface within twenty minutes or they’d need a decompression stop, something she didn’t want to do in a shark-infested area.
While she put the camera away, Hawker dove back into the tunnel and retrieved both sets of air tanks. As he swam back in, he perched on the top of the ramp, as if he were sitting on the side of the pool. She climbed up beside him, her eyes settling on the air tank with the split hose.
“Those are yours,” Hawker said.
“You really are hard on equipment,” she said.
“I was trying to save you at the time,” he said.
There wasn’t much she could say to counter that. She crouched down and checked the pressure gauge. The tank’s reserve air feature had activated. Designed to keep all the air from being expended in the event of an accident, it closed an inner valve and reserved a small portion of the mixture to be used only if the diver manually switched to reserve. She disconnected the hose that Hawker had cut and turned the valve so the reserve air would only feed to the spare hose.
“I should have about fifteen minutes on this,” she said. “That ought to be plenty.”
“If not, we can buddy-breathe on this tank,” he replied. “But let’s not waste any more time down here.”
She agreed and slipped over the rim and back into the tunnel.
Just as Hawker had done on the way in, she pushed the tanks ahead of her. In a few seconds she’d made it through and back out in the open sea, thrilled beyond belief to be bathed in the clear blue light once again.
The brief second of euphoria died as her earpiece cackled. Her transceiver had picked up a call from McCarter, one that had been blocked during their time in the temple.
“… coming toward us from the southwest. Do you hear me? Two boats headed right for us at high speed.”
CHAPTER 33
Danielle had her tanks secured by the time Hawker exited the cave. By the haste of his actions, he’d heard the call, too, and was rapidly strapping his own harness back into place. He pulled it onto his shoulders and they dove for the DPVs they’d left at the entrance to the tunnel.
She grabbed hers by the handle and twisted it to full throttle. The propeller spun and Danielle kicked with her feet to assist the acceleration. In seconds she was cruising as fast as she could possibly move, with Hawker only a few yards behind her.
Together they raced away from the sunken temple, climbing gradually as they did. Fortunately, they hadn’t been down deep enough or long enough to require a true decompression stop, but rocketing to the surface was never a good idea.
They would ascend at a constant angle, giving their bodies time to reabsorb any dissolved nitrogen, and when they spotted McCarter in a minute or two they would drop the scooters and surface.
Suddenly Hawker yelled, “Look out!”
At Hawker’s shout she turned her head. A shadow flashed over, one of the hammerheads buzzing them. A second one followed, brushing her and twisting violently to the right as it passed. It raced into the distance and disappeared, but others were streaming their way, rocketing toward them like underwater missiles.
On the surface, McCarter couldn’t take his eyes off the boats flying toward them.
He grabbed the transmitter. “If you guys can hear me, you need to hurry. They’re only two miles away at most.”
If he wanted to be safe he would have to go to full throttle soon and start heading west. That was the plan, go west, call the Mexican coast guard, and hope a few helicopters were enough to scare off whoever was attacking them.
It seemed the prudent thing to do, but McCarter couldn’t stand the thought of leaving his friends behind. He bumped the throttle down, wheeled the boat around until it pointed back toward the dive zone, and then grabbed the transmitter once more.
“I’m a half mile north of where we dropped you,” he said. “I’ll wait as long as I can.”
Suddenly Yuri dropped the sunglasses, stood up, and began staring trancelike at the water ahead of them.