The Goddess Legacy

Chapter 51

“What do we do now?” Reynolds asked.

Roland gave him a sour glare. “I’m going to have a cigarette.”

Spencer shook his head. “I wouldn’t do that. There could be explosive gas nearby. Be a bad way to test for it.”

Drake moved to the rubble and sat on a rock. Allie joined him and put her hand on his shoulder. “So close,” she said softly.

“We don’t even know to what. But man, is that going to be a long hike back.”

Spencer set his rifle down and climbed the debris. He was near the top when he sniffed several times, like a dog tracking a scent.

“What is it?” Allie asked, catching his expression.

“Fresh air,” Spencer said, reaching for the nearest rock. His fingers wrapped around it and he sent it tumbling down the slope. Drake and Allie leapt aside as it crashed near where they had been sitting. “Sorry. But more to follow.”

“You really think we can dig our way through?” Reynolds called.

“I’m sure as hell going to try,” Spencer replied, and worked another stone loose.

Twenty minutes later he’d created an aperture two feet square — just wide enough to accommodate them. He motioned to Drake. “Bring me the rifle. Looks like the passage continues for another dozen yards, and then there’s an opening.”

“Spencer, you’re a genius,” Allie said. Drake climbed the pile, rifle in his arms, and when he reached Spencer, handed him the weapon before he withdrew his flashlight from where it jutted from his pocket and flipped the power on. He shined it through the hole and grinned at Spencer.

“I see leaves.”

“I’ll go first. Keep your lights under control, just in case there’s something waiting for us that isn’t friendly,” Spencer warned, and then switched his flashlight off and crawled into the gap. Allie followed, and then the rest of them were through, only Allie’s light remaining on.

“Turn it off,” Drake whispered. She did, and with the chamber darkened they could begin to make out detail from a wash of twilight seeping through the plants at the cave mouth.

“At least it’s still light out,” Spencer said, checking the time. “Not for much longer.”

“Let’s see if there’s anything out there while we can,” Allie said, and followed Drake and Spencer to where dusk was spilling into the cave.

They emerged through a tangle of vines into a rocky clearing surrounded by mountains. The air was crisp from the high altitude, the sky bruised with the fading light of twilight. Allie turned back to face the cave, and if Reynolds and the Frenchman hadn’t been stepping from the mouth, she would have been hard-pressed to find it again, so covered by overgrowth was the opening.

“Where are we?” Reynolds asked.

Allie removed the handheld GPS from her bag and powered it on. The screen blinked as it acquired a signal and then a color map popped up, indicating their location with a pulsing red dot. They gathered around it and she slowly zoomed out, and Reynolds shook his head. “There’s nothing here, according to that.”

Drake looked around and nodded slowly. “Judging by what I can see, it got that part right.” He paused. “Although…”

“What?” Allie asked.

“Over there,” Drake said, pointing. “Looks like rubble, doesn’t it?”

Spencer stared at the rise Drake was indicating and began marching toward it. “The script said something about a holy of holies. Want to bet that’s a temple or a shrine?”

They joined him and crossed the clearing, and soon were in the midst of an obviously man-made structure that had collapsed long ago and was now piles of stone blocks, with walls still faintly identifiable among the debris. “It was fairly big,” Drake commented, eyeing the spread of stones. “Wonder what happened to it?”

“There are earthquakes in the area,” Reynolds said. “A stone structure without modern reinforcement wouldn’t fare too well in those. There are plenty of temples in the region that have been destroyed by seismic activity.”

“The script ended with the word beneath. Maybe there’s a subterranean vault below the complex?” Allie said. “That’s the obvious conclusion.”

“I don’t know. It’s a fairly big area. And it looks like there were outbuildings,” Drake said, and then stopped, concentration lines furrowing his forehead. “What do you think that is?” he asked, gesturing at a pole standing at the edge of the main area, pointing straight at the sky.

Allie shook her head. “It’s going to be dark soon, and it’ll probably get pretty cold. Let’s do a lap around the area and see if we can find anything that might be an entrance to an underground chamber.”

Spencer nodded. “I’ll take this section. You see what’s over there,” he said, pointing at another ruin nearby.

Reynolds stood with his hands on his hips. “But nothing about this explains why my man disappeared.”

“We didn’t promise you miracles, just that we would follow through on whatever Carson was after. This is us doing that. It’s up to you to figure out how it ties into whatever the DOD is interested in,” Spencer said, and then walked off toward a partially standing wall. Reynolds and Roland remained in the clearing, watching Spencer disappear into the rapidly descending gloom.

“Might as well tag along. There’s nothing to see here,” Reynolds said, and picked his way along a fallen row of blocks.

At the other ruins, Drake and Allie stopped at the remains of what looked like an altar carved from native stone. “This looks promising,” Allie said, kneeling to inspect the characters etched into the base. “Looks like Sanskrit to me.”

Drake took several steps closer to an ornately crafted depiction of Kali’s head, her tongue lolling out in an obscene manner. “Here’s our old friend the goddess. So this is the right place.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Allie said. “But obviously a lot’s happened since the script pointed the way. Time’s wiped the place off the face of the earth.”

“Maybe not all of it,” Drake said, and then froze when a sound reached him from a nearby wall: metal on stone.

“Spencer?” Allie called, rising from the altar and moving to Drake’s side. Drake unholstered his pistol and flipped the safety off, peering into the shadows at the far edge of the ruins.

Drake shushed her with a finger to his lips and then ducked down when he caught sight of a turbaned man with a rifle moving their way from the underbrush. Six more followed, carrying their assault weapons like they knew how to use them.

Allie shifted beside Drake and freed her weapon as well, but nicked the corner of a rock with the barrel in the gloom. The men spun at the sound, and then the clearing exploded with noise as they opened fire on the ruins.

Drake and Allie kept their heads down as ricochets whined around them, the gunmen firing largely blind in the dim light. Rock chips showered them as they ducked as low as they could. Drake murmured in her ear as they cringed in their hiding place, “It’ll be too dark for them to see us within another five minutes.”

“We don’t have five minutes,” she said over the sound of the shooting, the gunmen no more than fifty yards away, and flipped off the safety on her pistol with a resolute expression.

Spencer twisted toward the explosion of gunfire from the far ruins, his AKM trained on the distant muzzle flashes. “Get down,” he yelled, and Reynolds dropped to the ground as Spencer took cover behind a crumbling wall. “Drake and Allie are over there,” Spencer said, pointing at the ruins. “You can see where the shooters are, over by the tree line. They haven’t seen us, so we should be able to flank them and take them out before they know what hit them.”

Reynolds nodded and was reaching for his weapon when Roland’s voice called from behind them.

“Drop the guns,” he ordered, his pistol pointed at them.

“Roland! What the—” Reynolds exclaimed.

“You heard me. Drop them or I’ll shoot.”

“Have you lost your mind?” Reynolds demanded.

Spencer slowly set the rifle down and raised his hands. “No, he hasn’t. You set us up, didn’t you? That’s why the gunmen were waiting for us, isn’t it?”

Roland spat to the side, his eyes never straying from them. “Very good, genius,” he said dismissively. “Your pistol, too. And you as well,” he warned Reynolds.

Spencer slowly reached for his holstered weapon and withdrew it with two fingers. He tossed it aside as Reynolds’s face clouded with anger.

“You filthy bastard,” Reynolds snarled. “It was you all along!”

“Shut up and lose the gun. Last warning,” Roland called out over the chatter of gunfire from the assault rifles hammering at Drake and Allie’s position.

Reynolds flipped his holster up and made to comply, and then threw himself to the side and fired at Roland, narrowly missing him. Roland’s aim was better, and his round caught Reynolds in the shoulder, sending his pistol flying.

Roland’s smile of triumph turned to one of confused pain as he looked down at where blood was spreading from the center of his chest. He coughed pink foam and tried to raise his gun, but Spencer fired again, Helms’s Beretta barking in his hand, still warm from its hiding place at the small of his back. Spencer’s second shot sent the Frenchman spinning, but he still gripped his weapon, and Spencer fired again, this time vaporizing part of Roland’s head.

Roland dropped like a sack of rocks, and Spencer scrambled to retrieve his rifle and the other pistol as Reynolds gasped in pain. When Spencer had rearmed himself, he crouched down by Reynolds’s side.

“How bad is it?” Reynolds asked. Spencer did a quick inspection of the damage.

“Bad enough. I can do a pressure bandage that should stop the worst of the bleeding. Looks like it missed your lung, so you got lucky, but it shattered your shoulder blade on the exit.”

“I can’t believe he sold me out.”

“Hard way to learn that lesson. Did he know your operative was headed into this area?”

“Yes.”

“Another mystery solved.”

“But who are they? And why is a private army ambushing us?”

“Beats me.” Spencer looked over the rocks, but it was now too dark to make much out. “So much for flanking the shooters.”

“You still going to try?”

“One against, what, six or eight, maybe more on their way? Sounds like a great way to get killed.” Spencer paused. “You have your sat phone?”

“Of course.”

“Let’s retreat back to the cave and you can call your headquarters. I’d say we’ve got enough for them to mobilize some people, wouldn’t you?”

“What about Drake and Allie?”

Spencer peered down to where the gunfire was slowing. “Nothing we can do to help them now, other than call in the cavalry and pray.” He checked the time and then helped Reynolds to his feet. “Let’s get moving. I’ll do the triage in the cave. We’re sitting ducks out here if more of them come to the party.”

A lull in the shooting gave Drake the opportunity he had been waiting for. He could see that they were far outgunned, a pair of pistols no match for a half dozen assault rifles, and when there were no more gunshots, he called out at the top of his lungs, “Don’t shoot. We give up.”

Another couple of shots answered his cry, and then silence returned to the area and a male voice called to him from the trees, heavily accented but intelligible.

“Throw out your weapons.”

He and Allie had discussed their options and she’d agreed that their best choice was to surrender and live rather than be cut to pieces by automatic rifle rounds, which was a guarantee given the number of gunmen and the intensity of the inbound fire. Drake nodded to her and tossed his pistol onto the rocks on the other side of the rubble, and Allie followed suit.

“That’s it. Two pistols,” Drake yelled.

“Stand with your hands up,” the voice answered, and Drake took a deep breath and rose, Allie by his side.

Robed figures surrounded them in the dark, rifles trained on them as one of the gunmen looked them up and down. He snapped at the fighter next to him, and the man searched them for hidden weapons. Finding none, he stepped away and nodded to the leader.

“Where are the others?” the leader demanded.

Drake shook his head. “I don’t know. We split up. They probably took off when the shooting started. That would be the smart move.”

The leader had a hushed discussion with his men that Allie and Drake didn’t understand, and then he raised a small two-way radio to his lips and spoke into it. A terse response crackled from the device and he turned to face them. “Come,” he said, and barked an order. Two of the gunmen sauntered over to Drake and Allie and lashed their hands behind their backs, and then led them up a trail toward the top of a small ridge.

“Where are you taking us?” Allie asked. The man next to her pushed her roughly in the small of the back, and she almost tumbled face forward. The leader laughed, the sound ugly and mean.

“To pay the devil his due.”