The Aztec Prophecy

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

In the chopper behind Wade’s, Miguel Garza stared down at Ryan and Maria. He nodded slowly as a greasy shit-eating grin spread on his face at the sight of the two helpless prisoners. There they were, on the floor of the helicopter, bound and gagged. Sure they looked pretty angry, but there was nothing they could do about it. Garza studied Maria one more time. This was even better than Alena Sobotka, he thought.

He manhandled his assault rifle until the barrel was pointing down at the two ECHO members and then traced the muzzle of the weapon up Maria’s leg. She tried to kick back but her restraints held her in place. “You like it, no?” he grinned down at her. “I don’t want you to think I don’t care, blondey.”

Ryan squirmed on the floor with his hands bound. He tried to yell something but the gag muffled it to pathetic nonsense and Garza roared with laughter.

Garza put his boot on Ryan’s face and pushed down hard. “You be quiet, Iron Man or we’ll see if you can fly like in the movies.” He swung open the chopper’s side door and the steamy jungle air rushed into the cabin. Then he moved the muzzle over to Maria for a second time but a heavy hand wrapped around the barrel and forced it away. He looked up to see Delgado staring hard at him.

“They’re for the Boss, you asshole. Leave them alone or I’ll throw you out into the jungle and we’ll see how well you can fly.”

Garza stared into the other man’s eyes with nothing but pure hatred, but turned away when Delgado didn’t blink. Garza knew his place in the pecking order, and the truth was he was more comfortable when it came to bullying and intimidating women than facing up to other men, especially men like Delgado. But then what the others didn’t know about…

When Delgado lit a cigarette and returned to his conversation with one of the Jaguar Knights, Garza cautiously returned his gaze to Maria. Keeping one eye on the other men, he smirked at the Russian spy and mouthed the words: You’re mine.

After an hour of frustration, two Mexican Air Force Pumas thundered over the canopy to the west of the coffee plantation and swooped down on the lawn. Hawke, Lea, Reaper and Lexi climbed into the first one, and watched as Scarlet, Alex, Kim and Jack Camacho climbed into the second.

Hawke was furious about the delay, but there was no point in dwelling on it. Their plan now was clear enough — he would lead an assault team on the temple to rescue Ryan and Maria and put an end to Wade and his cult once and for all. Meanwhile, Scarlet and the Americans would lead the assault on Alcatraz and deactivate the cobalt bomb before it took out Jack Brooke, the Californian Primary, the City of San Francisco and eight million people across the Bay Area. Alex had unsettled everyone even more by mentioning the risk of the bomb triggering the San Andreas Fault and sending northern California into the Pacific, so there was no time to waste.

The former SBS man looked around the helicopter’s cabin as it raced deeper into the jungle. The Puma was a heavy utility chopper with a capacity of up to sixteen passengers, and thanks to the connivance of Richard Eden, Jack Brooke and their Mexican counterpart Enrique Valles they were now joined by a dozen members of the Cuerpo de Fuerzas Especiales, or the Special Forces Corps of the Mexican Army. They were led by a Sergeant Gonzalez who had been selected because of his knowledge of Aztec culture.

They flew for hours, crossing the Oaxaca Mountains and heading into wild jungles untouched by man for millennia. A sense of deep helplessness washed over him as he thought about Wade’s crazy underlings getting their hands on Ryan and Maria.

He clenched his jaw when he thought about what the Texan was planning to do to his friends — and probably just to get to him and punish him for pursuing the Order of the Sixth Sun. His mind raced with thoughts about the torture his friends would undergo if he didn’t get to them fast, but he quickly snapped back into the moment and started to organize weapons and tactics for the team along with Sergeant Gonzales, a man of considerable experience in both military insertions and the Lacandon Jungle.

As they went deeper into the jungle, the chopper climbed higher into the sky to avoid the undulating contours of the Mexican ranges. Below them now acres of jungle slipped past in a blur. Vincent turned around to face Hawke and gave him a knowing nod of the head. Words were not necessary… both men knew what was coming, and after what seemed an eternity, the pilot called over the comms that the temple was in sight. Hawke’s memory of the map was good, and they had found Wade.

The twin Turbomeca turboshafts rumbled as the pilot reduced speed and flared the nose ready for the landing. Hawke looked through the open door across the canopy of the jungle and saw in the distance a strange stone structure protruding slightly from the top of the canopy. Unless you knew where to look, you would never be able to find it, he thought. The thick tropical rainforest obscured it almost totally from sight and the section he could see was only visible because Wade had cleared the jungle away. Broken roads connected plazas to crumbling pyramids in an enormous complex centred on the first structure he had seen — the massive central pyramid complete with two sacrificial temples on its upper plaza.

And somewhere in all that were two of his closest friends.

The chopper approached the clearing and the pilot slowed to a hover fifty feet above the jungle canopy. After what had happened to the two choppers back at the plantation the Government weren’t taking any chances and seconds later Hawke rappelled down from the Puma into the jungle below. The others followed behind him.

When they were on the ground, Gonzalez gave a signal and the Puma rose into the air, beating the canopy and anyone still underneath it with the chunky downdraft of the four powerful composite rotor blades.

With the sketchy information they had about the complex layout, the ECHO team and the Mexican Special Forces had planned their assault as best as they could, and now Hawke led the first wave against the complex’s western perimeter.

He stepped over the crumbling ruins of the outer wall and drew his gun, ready for the battle ahead and was suddenly aware how different this had now become to a regular ECHO mission. This time both the Mexican and US Governments were actively involved in the pursuit of Wade, and he felt the heavy eye of international scrutiny weighing on his shoulders as he led the soldiers forward into the complex. He knew Eden preferred to keep things under the radar, and even to this day Hawke still didn’t know exactly how much the British Government knew about Elysium, but this mission had changed when Jack Brooke got involved. Now a mistake could mean international disaster.

Moving across what had been a wide courtyard at the front of the main temple, they emerged from the jungle into the area Wade had ordered his men to clear and Hawke almost took a step back when he saw the temple up close for the first time. Its sheer size staggered him, and he was amazed to think such a structure could hide in the jungle, evading the eyes of the world for so long.

Jungle vines and plants clasped at the base of the monument and wound up its stone steps on their way to reach more light. Hawke crunched on them as he began to climb the steps on his way to the top, joined at his side by his friends and the Mexican soldiers.

“That’s what used to be the sacred precinct,” Gonzalez said. “You can tell because the outer wall is decorated with serpent heads. Those steps leading up the side of the main pyramid lead to the Great Plaza. At the top will be the shrines to the House of the Jaguar and the House of the Eagle.”

“Where they sacrificed people?” Hawke asked.

Gonzalez’s brief nod was the only reply.

Climbing the steps, he was able to see that the actual Temple of Huitzilopochtli was situated at the very top behind an expansive flat square. This is where Ryan had told him people would gather to watch the sacrifices.

Hawke glanced at his flanks to ensure all the forces were in position and then ordered the assault to move forward. At first, their passage across a second, smaller courtyard was uninterrupted, with Hawke leading the way closer to the ancient temple. He smiled inwardly as he pulled the slider on the Sig and moved closer to danger, but then he saw the piles of bones littered at the bottom of the pyramid.

“What the hell?”

“There must be dozens of skeletons here,” Reaper said, staring in disbelief at the sun-bleached bones, picked clean by the incessant teeming of tropical insects.

“Oh my God…” Lea said sadly. “The missing people…”

Lexi covered her mouth in horror. “All dead.”

“Wade’s sacrifices,” Hawke said. “He must have killed them up there and kicked their corpses down the steps like the Aztecs used to do. Let’s get this bastard.”

Less than halfway up the structure Delgado and Garza appeared at the top of the steps with the Jaguar Knights. It looked like they had replaced their blow pipes with carbines and wasted no time in opening fire on them.

Hawke and Lea dived for the cover of a stone ledge which ran around the sides and rear of the temple, while Reaper, Lexi and the Mexicans followed suit but on the other side of the steps.

Delgado, Garza and their men took advantage of the situation and the superiority offered to them by their elevated position and fanned out before advancing slowly toward them. They kept up their barrage of fire, blasting stone chunks out of the masonry all around the ECHO team’s defensive position.

“This ain’t gonna be easy, Joe,” Lea screamed as she dodged a bullet.

Hawke had a feeling she was on the money.