The Aztec Prophecy

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Hawke watched Reaper lead his team into the west and disappear in the steaming jungle. Then, with Lea at his side he led the way through the coffee fields toward the hacienda. He’d forgotten how much he hated the jungle, but Mexico was doing its best to remind him. The mosquitoes were bad in the rainy season, especially here in the humid south. The ultimate predators, they had your blood and were long gone by the time you felt the itch. On top of that were the boa constrictors, scorpions and Hobo spiders crawling all over everything… not to mention the cockroaches.

“Just what the hell is that noise?” Lea asked.

“What noise?”

“Sounds like a cheap hedge-trimmer.”

“An ocelot.”

“That’s not a brand of hedge-trimmer, is it?”

“No. It’s a dwarf leopard.”

“A freaking leopard?” she gasped, glancing over her shoulder at the low raspy growling noise.

“You used to be a Ranger. You’ll deal with it.”

“Yeah, but do they eat people?”

Hawke rolled his eyes. “They’re only twice the size of a house cat. Salvador Dalí kept one as a pet. Just relax.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“But look out for the jaguars, because those bastards can get ugly.”

“Oh sure, no problem… wait — what?”

“Forget it — we’re here.”

Hawke pulled apart some undergrowth and now they were able to see the hacienda close-up. They were no more than twenty yards from its north wall now, and close enough to hear some music playing on a radio inside one of the ground floor rooms.

“I can’t see anyone,” he said. “Let’s go.”

They crouch-walked across the north lawn and slipped through a set of Louvre doors to find themselves inside a cool, tiled hall. The radio was louder now, and Hawke peered inside a room to see a man sleeping with a gun on his lap.

“Come on,” he whispered. “Fortune favours the brave.”

They went inside the room and walked over to the man. Hawke grabbed the gun, waking him, but knocked him out with the stock of the weapon before he’d even opened his eyes properly.

Making their way deeper into the property they climbed a sweeping staircase and found themselves facing what looked like Wade’s private quarters. The door to some kind of anteroom was ajar and through the narrow gap he saw a desk littered with papers and a large map of Mexico on the wall behind it.

He turned to Lea. “I think that’s our next stop.”

“We need to hurry,’ Lea said, glancing at her watch. “Not long till Scarlet’s attack and then all hell will break loose.”

Suddenly they heard a floorboard creak and Hawke spun around to see a tall man with a Cold Steel Folder knife in his hand. Seeing he was rumbled, the man lunged forward with the knife. With no room for a roundhouse and no time to think, Lea powered a stunning switch kick into his lower right jaw and snapped his neck back so fast he never saw it coming.

“Nighty night,” she said, but the noise of the fight alerted someone in the room and a second later the door slammed shut.

Hawke took a step back and piled into the door with a chunky shoulder-barge. The heavy panel door gave way just enough to give him some hope before smacking back into the frame. He gave another shoulder-barge and this time it gave way some more but not enough.

Lea sighed. “You want to take a rest while I do that?”

Hawke glanced at her but made no reply. Inside the room he could hear that his work was raising a panic. He launched a third attack and this time the bocote panel splintered and popped out of the frame.

A young man with a shiny neck knife jumped forward from behind the door. He was lean but while his physical body was up for a fight, Hawke saw in his eyes that his mind wasn’t so sure. Behind him he saw the second door was also closed now.

He gestured for the man to come forward. “Bring it on then.”

Neck Knife threw the blade from one hand to the other and licked his lips with fear as he sized up the enormous Englishman now facing him. Behind him was a second heavy bocote door that obviously led to where they wanted to go, so Hawke padded closer to the young man.

Neck Knife moved back, but then thought better of his cowardice and what the Boss might think about it. He moved forward and took a swing at Hawke with the blade. Hawke moved his head to the side and dodged the attack as the steel whistled past his chin. Neck Knife had come in close for the failed attack, and Hawke now used that proximity against him to lay a devastating shovel hook on the side of his head. The young man crumpled like a sack of garbage and fell down on his backside.

The shock of the punch made him release the knife and it tumbled out of his trembling hand onto the floor. Hawke flicked it out of his reach with the toe of his boot and then grabbed the front of his shirt to haul him back up again, this time without the weapon.

“Is that door locked too?”

“No hablo inglés!”

“No problem,” Hawke replied. “Se cerró la puerta?”

The man looked shocked at the unexpected Spanish, albeit delivered with an Argentinean accent. “No, man… that door’s open.”

Hawke narrowed his eyes. “I thought you couldn’t speak English?”

“I… well…” he looked at Hawke sheepishly, but the Englishman ended his sentence for him with a speedy, violent sucker punch and lowered his unconscious body to the floor.

“Ah,” Lea said softly. “Don’t you just love it when the kids go off to sleep nice and early and give us some much needed Us Time?”

“Funny,” Hawke said, and opened the second door.

The study was as opulent as Hawke had speculated, with double French windows at either end of the room. They both opened onto the second floor veranda and the warm breeze outside was gently blowing the voile panels into the room. Another window on the adjacent wall looked out over Wade’s courtyard.

Above their heads an ornate ceiling fan was circulating the sticky air and a pedestal fan was whirring beside a leather wingback. In the far corner behind the desk was a strange stone object around half the size of a bath. Hawke looked at it with uncertainty before raising his eyes again. A view of the sprawling coffee fields lay beyond the windows but Hawke’s interest was much closer to home. He moved toward the desk where Wade had used paperweights and old books to pin down a large map of the jungle.

“Wade’s nowhere in sight but we got the next best thing,” he said.

Lea nodded. “What are we looking at, Joe?”

Hawke frowned and traced his finger along the surface of the map. “If this is the coffee plantation right here, and these are the ruins where Ben and other others were killed, then what the hell is this over here? The mark around this other location is several weeks old. There’s something not right about all of this. ” He pointed to an area in the deep jungle that someone had marked with a roughly drawn circle.

“Congratulations,” said the Texan twang. Hawke and Lea spun around to see Morton Wade in the door. Behind him were Silvio Mendoza and Aurora Soto. “You seem to have found my new temple.”

Scarlet Sloane was in her element. Crouched low now, and with a well-oiled Heckler & Koch MP5 complete with suppressor in her hands, she moved through the jungle like a jaguar, her face hidden behind a thick layer of camo paint. To her right, Reaper looked equally relaxed, but she knew Lexi, Alex and the BDS-CIA team weren’t at home in this environment.

The Mexican rainforest was as harsh as it got, and yet it supported thousands of species of plant and animal life. Ryan had regaled her with the details on the chopper journey. According to him, this was all part of what was named the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor because it facilitated the migration of so much flora and fauna between the two continents of North and South America. Its ecosystem was staggering in the diversity of its many biomes, or at least that’s what the boy had told her. Not only that, but it had also been home to the Olmec, Mayan and Aztec civilizations for countless centuries and all over the area was the evidence in the form of overgrown archaeological sites.

She pressed on, leading her team closer to the battle. A few hundred yards ahead, a break in the tropical undergrowth opened to reveal the flapping canvas shanty huts that made up Wade’s disgusting, fly-blown favela. It was going to be a pleasure smashing up Wade’s empire and freeing these people, not to mention avenging the deaths of the murdered ECHO team and Agent Doyle.

Scarlet Sloane could hardly wait to start, but orders were orders and hers were to wait until precisely midday before launching the assault.

She looked at her watch and sighed. 11:45.

Fifteen minutes to go and not even the chance of a cigarette as she waited.