Sam took the lead on the hike, simply following a handheld GPS, with Billie, Tom and Elise following and Genevieve covering their six. The density of the vegetation required they stay close together. There was no trail, or rather, there were many. Small and large animal trails, tiny rivulets and wider streams all crisscrossed in confusing chaos. For so many, they made surprisingly little noise. Every member of the expedition was trained, proficient with their weapons and in some cases in unarmed combat.
Sam came to an abrupt halt, holding up his hand in a cautionary signal. The others stopped in their tracks.
“We’re here,” he said in a near-whisper. “Billie, now what?”
Billie said, “All right. Follow me.”
A large boulder the size of a small van stood twenty feet back from the edge of the sandstone tabletop. She swept the boulder with the beam of her flashlight. Halfway up, the light reflected something metallic.
There were two large PFH ninety degree climbing bolt plates fixed to the stone. They had been professionally inserted, and designed to hold weights far exceeding the strength of their static abseiling ropes, which were rated to take up to 3600 pounds. The ground between the boulder and the edge of the cliff was well worn, as though hundreds of people had abseiled the spot many times previously.
Three hundred feet of static abseiling ropes were threaded through the bolt hold and secured, while the other ends were dropped over the edge. Two sets of ropes, five people. They would need to take it in turns.
Billie clipped her descender onto the rope, and attached the other end to her carabiner. Sam connected onto the second line, and both cross-checked each other’s equipment.
Sam asked, “Are you ready to return to the temple?”
Billie pulled her night-vision goggles over her eyes and grinned. “I was born ready.”
A moment later, she dropped off the edge of the sandstone cliff-face, and descended into the secret world, far below.
Chapter Two
Billie felt confident as she abseiled quickly down the vertical cliff-face. If there were other climbers out there, they might have thought the expedition had taken a distinctly creepy direction. It resembled a military operation, carried out by Special Forces. But instead, it was privately funded by Sam, who had high standards when it came to people with whom he was prepared to risk his life. The three others who were with them tonight were his top choices from everyone else in the world, Special Forces included.
The black rope ran quickly through her descender.
Two thirds of the way down the rope, Billie locked pressure on the anchor and came to a sudden stop. She glanced at the rope. The blue marker indicated she’d dropped a little less than two hundred feet. She had no idea at what point the entrance was, but felt certain she would simply recognize it when she saw it.
Next to her, Sam stopped, silently.
He leaned out, to get a better view of the entrance, although she doubted very much that he would have spotted it. What appeared to be a single piece of sandstone arenite that ran the full length of the face of the Tepui Mountains, now had a cluster of three smaller fragments — two twenty feet high and one a little under ten.
They were thin. A foot wide at most. A fissure no more than a few inches wide, ran behind the stones and was definitely not big enough for even the smallest in their party to slip through. From the front and the sides, it all looked like one single piece of stone. But it was really three separate pieces, superimposed on one another. In the air, or from any sort of distance, she knew that they became visually inseparable from the rest of the face of the wall, molding together like a mirage.
It was impossible to spot the opening from the air. Even now that she was close to it, Billie wasn’t entirely certain she’d found the opening. The eerie green glow of the cliff face was different in front of her than the way she remembered it, yet still somehow familiar. The identification rock was lighter, almost neon green in the night-vision goggles, where the rest of the cliff face was darker, as if it was in shadow.
The small rock, no larger than her hand and almost perfectly round was impossible to spot by anyone who wasn’t directly upon it. The stone appeared like an innocuous fluke of geometric formations, in an otherwise ordinary piece of geological nature — a round stone among a million vertical ones.
It also appeared as though it were lit by glowing floodlights. Only they weren’t floodlights, they were UV-emitting, fluorescent lichen the Master Builders had placed there to specifically identify the place.
Sam shifted his gaze horizontally along the face of the wall, searching for an opening. He stopped and fixed it on her. “Where’s the entrance?”
She smiled. “You’ll see.”
Billie gently took hold of the round stone in her left hand. Her fingertips could feel the tiny metallic grooves behind the façade of sandstone. They were cold and sharp, like the toothed cogwheel on a bicycle. She increased the pressure, until she was gripping the stone tightly, and then began to turn it clockwise.
It rotated more than a dozen times and then stopped.
Gentle vibrations shook the face of the rock-wall and were followed by the sound of heavy machinery making progress. She imagined the series of intricate mechanisms moving within. The finely-toothed wheels of the sprockets inside, turning multiple roller chains, and multiplying the force of her hand more than a thousand-fold, through a succession of complex gear ratios.
The sound finally ceased, and everything was still once more.
Below her, the two, twenty-foot high by five-foot wide stone fragments had separated. Sliding aside, like an automatic door in any retail store. Directly in the center of the two, was a circular opening. It appeared to be carved by hand using chisels, and was large enough for two persons to walk through standing upright.
Billie turned her gaze toward Sam. “Well?”
He smiled, and said in a voice just above a whisper, “The damned stone doors are on rails!”
Billie released her descender, dropping swiftly another eight feet and swung inside the round, carved tunnel’s entrance. “Exactly.”
Sam followed her down and into the opening. They both unclipped their descenders from the rope. He then radioed the rest of the group to let them know they’d found it and to come down.
His eyes swept the tunnel and the ground in particular. “Are you sure about this, Billie?”
“Yeah. Of course, I am. Why?”
Sam shrugged. “I don’t know. If the floor starts dissolving or rocks start dropping at random, I’m out of here. I’m no Indiana Jones.”
Billie smiled. “No, you’re right. You aren’t that handsome.”
Chapter Three
Sam watched as Elise landed gracefully in the entrance to the tunnel and unclipped. Genevieve’s entrance was more dramatic as she immediately crouched and scanned the tunnel with the night-vision scope of her weapon. Tom unfolded his large body just inside the entrance and reflexively looked up. He needn’t have bothered to watch his head. The cave was at least ten feet in height, and as Sam played his tactical flashlight around, the ceiling appeared to angle upward farther into the tunnel.
He turned to Billie. “Will these doors stay open?”
She nodded. “Until someone closes them from the outside again.”
“All right. Now where do we go?”
“Follow the tunnel. It’s not long.”
Sam asked, “What am I looking for?”
Billie smiled. “You’ll see.”
Sam followed the carved tunnel nearly a hundred feet into the mountain. There it opened to a much wider cavern system. His eyes raked the area, and a moment later he ripped off his night-vision goggles.