Black Sun

CHAPTER 24

Walking down to the sand, McCarter thought about the way he’d stumbled upon the beach. He and his wife had often traveled by car, and among the joys of those travels were the countless times he’d gotten them lost and she’d eventually gotten them back on track.

He wasn’t sure he could chalk this up to some kind of spiritual intervention, but if there was anyone who knew he wouldn’t stop and ask for directions, it was his wife.

“If that was you,” he said, “thanks.”

The sand near the top of the beach was soft and loose. McCarter stumbled a little as he walked in it. But he made his way past it, down closer to the surf. He stopped just beyond the reach of the waves, where they peaked and exhausted themselves before falling back toward the Gulf of Mexico once again.

The sand there was firm and he was soon drawing lines in it with his staff.

He started with what he knew from the statue that had been stolen out from under them. Its sculptors had been among the earliest Mayan artisans of the area and McCarter had connected them with the tribe that had emigrated here from Brazil. The glyphs on the statue had been confusing to him when he’d viewed them. The vast majority were numbers, a long series of them that made no sense to him at the time.

Of course, the Maya had been obsessed with numbers; their calendars were only the most visible result of that. They had also been among the first cultures to discover and understand the importance of zero. They’d used mathematics in laying out their cities and building their pyramids. And some calculations, inscribed on stone at various cities, appeared to have been done for the sole purpose of proving they could do it. It was an ancient equivalent of trying to find the largest known prime numbers or calculate pi to more decimal points than anyone had done before.

A mathematician friend of his had once suggested that perhaps the Maya were numerologists and that the elite among them truly worshipped numbers in and of themselves. McCarter could not go that far, but he knew that a calculation of some kind held the answer to his current question.

He liked to work on the problem at night. So far he’d tested various theories and discarded them. The numbers did not seem to represent any specific place, or stand in for a name. Nor were they indicating time in years or months or some other permutation of the various Mayan calendars. They were just numbers, a long series of them without commas, he noted.

Then, in one of his sleepless nights, McCarter had stumbled to the bathroom, where he kept an antiseptic lotion he used to fight the lingering infection in his leg. The antiseptic was concentrated and designed to be mixed with fresh water to form a solution. With the infection lingering, McCarter had decided to make the concentration stronger. He looked at the bottle for instructions.

What he’d found was a series of numbers designating specific mixing strengths: one for ophthalmic use in the eyes, another for topical use on the skin, and a third for treating broken skin or other open wounds.

The numbers had been in a series, in a ratio of water to medicine. It was 50:1 for use in the eyes, 30:1 for use on the skin, 10:1 for use on wounds.

McCarter had then mixed it at about 2:1, poured it into the festering bullet wound, and grimaced in agony as it burned. But as he flushed out the foaming mixture and the pain subsided, the truth had suddenly hit him.

The numbers on the statue were written in the same manner. They were ratios, with the second number always being the same: 90. And as he thought about them he suddenly realized what they were trying to tell him.

The first of the number sets stood for the east-west demarcation line. The other two were angles off it, angles that could be drawn from certain ruins and places the Maya considered holy. If he was translating things correctly, the lines would converge in an arrowlike shape. The Tip of the Spear — which would lead them to the Temple of the Warrior.

On the beach with his printouts and the numbers burned into his mind, McCarter had only to figure out which ruins, of the dozens in the area, the lines were to be drawn from.

Looking at his papers, McCarter continued to make his marks in the sand. He drew an east-west line as straight and accurately as he could and then began to fill in the surroundings. He used small piles of pebbles and shells for the bigger ruins that could be seen with the naked eye, and then scooped out divots of sand with his hand for the ruins that could only be seen on the IR scan and were still buried beneath the jungle.

He worked like this for an hour. Back and forth he went, hobbling around his diagram, crawling here and there to make changes. A couple walked by casting a disparaging look at McCarter and his masterpiece, but he didn’t care; he wasn’t building sand castles.

He drew in a river, and then adjusted the positions of certain landmarks until he was certain he had everything in the right place and in the right scale.

Stepping back, McCarter looked down on the layout and had to smile. To an onlooker it might be the scribbling of a madman, but to him it was the same as the satellite photo, and better yet, one that he could draw on and then erase.

Looking around to make sure he was still alone, McCarter began to work on the next stage of his project: deciding which ruins to draw the lines from.

The first line was to begin at the Great City by the Mouth of the Well. McCarter knew this to be the Yu-catec Mayan name for Chichen Itza.

He found that particular spot on his beach map and tried to estimate the angle. For a moment he wished he had some type of protractor, but after erasing the line twice he came up with what he thought was a close approximation. He drew his line to the north, out toward the gulf and the foam of the lapping waves.

The origination point for the second line was harder to figure. His own translation told him it was the Temple of the Sunrise, but there might have been fifty sites in the Yucatan that had a connection with the rising sun. So that didn’t exactly narrow it down.

A second line of description had called this temple the Place of the Wasp Star, Xux Ek, which to some Maya was another term for Venus. As McCarter considered the connection, the first temple that came to mind was the coastal ruins of Tulum.

He couldn’t be sure, but what did he have to lose? He found the small pile of shells that represented Tulum and then measured his angle. Grabbing his staff, he began to trace the line to the northwest, cutting back across the Yucatan peninsula. The new line was angling toward his first line, as he’d hoped. And then finally they crossed.

He found only one problem: There was nothing on his makeshift diagram anywhere near the crossing of the lines. No stones or divots of scooped-out sand.

Disappointed, McCarter sat and checked his math and then his angles and then he studied the photographic printouts. Not only were there no ruins in the area of his crossed lines, but there was nothing on the Landsat photo, either. No hidden limestone signature, not even a smudge to hint that something might have been built in that vicinity. Nothing but miles of jungle-covered coastline.

McCarter exhaled in frustration. He rubbed his forearm across his brow to wipe the sweat away and only succeeded in covering his forehead with sand.

Aggravated and dejected, he looked out over the sloping beach. It was a little past noon and the warm sun bathed his back, while the sound of the small waves rumbling in toward the beach soothed his mind.

As McCarter sat there wondering what the hell he was trying to prove by staying on in Mexico, a speedboat zoomed out from the dock a half mile down. It accelerated noisily, running parallel to the beach a hundred feet out.

As McCarter watched it move off into the distance, its bow wave came ashore, merging with the smaller, natural wave on its way in.

Together they flowed up over the sand, surging higher onto the beach and cascading over the point where his two lines crossed. The water swirled for a moment, foam and silt frothing a few inches deep. And then it slid back, retreating to the gulf, leaving only a smooth canvas of sand where McCarter’s lines had crossed to form the tip of the spear.

“Erasing my blackboard,” McCarter mumbled. “Does this mean I have to start over?”

He stood wearily, guessing that it did. And then he noticed that nothing else on his diagram had been touched by the waves. A thought occurred to him. McCarter looked at his printouts once again.

He checked the photo and then the lines he’d drawn in the sand. He realized that he hadn’t drawn anything to represent the coastline. But with the scale he’d chosen, the high point of the larger, boat-assisted wave was a fairly accurate equivalent of where that coastline should have been drawn.

He gazed out over the shimmering waters of the gulf. The Tip of the Spear pointed in that direction. The Temple of the Warrior was out there hidden somewhere beneath the waves.