Xibalba

CHAPTER 3

Fighting back her panic, Miranda groped for the supply line for the small pony bottle attached to her main tank. The pony bottle was her emergency reserve — her “seatbelt,” she called it, because like the seat belt in a car, it was something she used even though she truly believed she would never need it. And like a seat belt, she knew there was no guarantee it would save her life. The bottle held only a few minutes of air, and if she didn’t choose a passage — and choose right on the first try — all it would do for her was prolong the experience of dying.

She let the regulator mouthpiece fall away, replacing it with the one from the “octopus” regulator attached to the pony bottle. This time, she did not indulge her desire for a deep, calming breath, but merely drew in enough to quiet the burn of excess carbon dioxide in her bloodstream.

Think, Miranda.

She closed her eyes, trying to remember exactly what the cavern had looked like when she had emerged from the passage.

The altar, she thought. The golden disk had been on the opposite site.

Miranda opened her eyes again and saw the settling cloud of silt at the base of the carved stone altar. She swam over it, positioning herself against the wall of the cavern, and turned around, trying to match what she now saw with what she remembered. When she thought she was correctly positioned, she turned to the wall and was confronted by three possibilities.

Her first impulse was to pick the center passage, but something about it looked wrong. It was narrower than the passage she remembered, barely wide enough to pass through without scraping her shoulders. She took another breath from the octopus and contemplated the remaining choices, searching her memory for other details about the passage that had brought her here.

She remembered that the passage had sloped down at the end, but unfortunately, so did both of these, the one to the left at a steeper angle. She swept both openings with her light, kicking herself for not leaving marks on the limestone walls or stringing a guide wire.

I screwed up, she told herself. Rookie mistakes. I knew better.

Her lungs started to burn again. She blew out the breath she had been holding and took another, deeper this time. There was no point in rationing her air now, and maybe a clear head would increase her chances of making the right choice.

Get over it. Make a choice. Trust your instincts. She almost laughed at the thought. Trusting her instincts had gotten her in this mess.

The light revealed nothing to uncomplicate her decision. She was wasting time and wasting air.

At least conserving battery life in the flashlight wasn’t something she would have to worry about.

The answer came to her. Light!

She switched the dive light off and closed her eyes.

True darkness was a rare thing in the modern world. Even on the darkest night there was always some source of artificial illumination close by — light pollution from distant cities and street lamps, the faint glow of electronic devices in sleep mode. It was palpable, something that could be felt even blindfolded. True darkness, the kind of darkness that inspired absolute terror, was reserved for places like this. Underground. Underwater.

But not completely sealed off.

Miranda opened her eyes to the blackness and waited.

A faint blue glow was visible in the passage to the right. Daylight, filtering down through the entrance to the cenote, reflected by the dull white limestone and refracted through the water to reach her here.

The darkness wasn’t absolute after all.

She triggered the light switch again and kicked forward into the passage, taking steady breaths from the pony bottle. It seemed to take forever, and for a few seconds, she almost thought she had misread the signs, chosen the wrong passage despite the glow of distant daylight, but then she rounded a bend and saw the roots partially barricading the mouth of the tunnel.

She wriggled through and saw the shimmering blue circle of light fifteen feet away and just a few feet above her head.

She disconnected her buoyancy compensator from the main line and attached the octopus to it, filling it up so there would be nothing dragging her down, and then kicked out for the center, but something held her fast. Her flipper was caught in the tangle of roots.

Miranda felt like screaming. She thrashed for a moment, trying to tear her foot loose, but then stopped herself. Maybe she didn’t need the flipper to reach the surface, but then again, maybe she would.

She willed herself to a calm state once more and used her arms to propel herself backward, until the pressure on her ankle lessened. A slight twist of the foot was all it took to slip free, allowing her to kick herself away, shooting through the water like a torpedo.

As she neared the shimmering plane that marked the transition from one environment to another, the image of the surface world came clearly into view. She could see her father, leaning out over the edge, staring anxiously into the depths, even though he surely must have seen her.

Miranda broke through the surface and spit out the mouthpiece of the octopus, sucking in fresh air greedily, even though the pony bottle wasn’t empty.

“Dad,” she gasped. “I’m okay.” She pushed the mask up onto her forehead and gasped down another breath. “You won’t believe what I found.”

His expression did not change, and as she gazed up at him, she could tell from the set of his jaw that he was not merely worried, but in pain. “That’s great, honey,” he said, his voice barely a whisper, as if merely speaking intensified his agony.

“Dad, what’s wrong? Is it your lungs?”

Despite being a non-smoker and leading a healthy active life, Charles Bell had been diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which was why Miranda, and not Bell himself, had made the dive into the cenote. She felt a pang of guilt at the thought that her solo dive and the fact that she had clearly pushed well beyond the limits of safety might have induced a stress-related flare-up.

He was breathing fast, breathing hard, but without difficulty. Whatever was causing him distress, it wasn’t his COPD.

“Dad?”

Another face came into view, a man with a swarthy weathered complexion and the distinctive broad facial features of someone of Maya ancestry. “Si, señorita,” the man said, and then continued in broken English. “Come up out of there and show us what you found.”

And then he pushed Charles Bell forward, just enough to show Miranda the knife pressed to her father’s throat.

Miranda’s blood froze in her veins. She took a deep breath, and raised her hands out of the water. Her buoyancy compensator kept her from sinking. “Hey, take it easy. Don’t hurt him.”

“Come out of there,” the man said again, giving Bell an emphatic shake.

Miranda lowered her hands into the water and dog-paddled over to the rope ladder hanging down from the edge of the cenote. She held herself in place with one hand, and with the other reached down to remove her flippers. Her plan was to also draw the knife sheathed to her right calf, but before she could do this, the man with the knife leaned out to keep an eye on her. She decided to leave the knife where it was. With one thumb hooked around the ankle straps of the fins, she began pulling herself up the ladder.

When she cleared the edge, she saw that the man holding a knife at her father’s throat was not alone. A second man stood behind them, a few paces away, machete held loosely in his right fist. Miranda was careful not to make eye contact with either man, or do anything else that might be interpreted as threatening behavior. That was the only way she and her father were going to survive this.

She raised her left foot to the next rung, settled all her weight onto that limb, and then stood up with an explosion of energy. As she straightened, she hurled the dive fins at the man with the machete.

The flippers looked like bat wings as they flew through the air. The man reacted, predictably, by slashing at the fins, knocking them out of the air with his blade. Even before he made contact though, Miranda landed in a crouch a few inches from the edge of the cenote, right beside her father.

The man holding Charles Bell also reacted predictably. Instead of threatening Bell, he focused on the immediate threat. He shoved his hostage away, and swiped his knife at Miranda.

But Miranda was already gone, twisting out of the way. As she came back up, she slipped out of her dive harness, gripped it with both hands, and then spun around like an Olympic hammer-thrower, gathering momentum. The empty 80-liter bottle whooshed through the air and slammed into the man’s arm, knocking the knife away.

She struck again. The SCUBA tank arced around and slammed into the man’s shoulder with enough force to topple him over the edge, into the cenote.

Miranda planted her foot and hurled the tank at the man with the machete. The projectile struck the raised blade, and although the man did not drop the weapon, the impact staggered him back.

He recovered and got the long knife back up again, but Miranda had her dive knife out and was stalking forward like a panther about to strike. Her fearless aggression must have been too much for the man. He turned and bolted toward the trees.

Miranda started after him, but halted after a few steps. She was barefoot, and if the man changed his mind and decided to take his chances in a knife fight, the reach of his machete would give him the advantage. Besides, she wasn’t about to leave her father.

She turned back just as the other man hauled himself out of the cenote. He looked at Miranda and the blade in her hand, then past her at the retreating back of his accomplice, and then he too was running, fleeing the area down the same trail Miranda and Bell had used to reach the cenote.

Miranda sprang forward, trying to block his escape, but she was a half-second too slow. Yet, as he slipped past her, he stopped suddenly, rebounding as if he had just collided with a tree.

No, not a tree, Miranda saw, but something… someone rather, almost as unyielding. It was a man — a local she guessed, judging by his complexion, but he was just about the biggest Mexican she had ever seen. He stood well over six feet tall, with his long black hair pulled back in a ponytail. He wore dark gray cargo shorts and an open Hawaiian floral-print shirt over a black T-shirt, emblazoned with the message “I’m not saying it was aliens… ” The tight fitting T-shirt accentuated a broad, muscled chest, and his powerful arms, clutching dive tanks, were as thick as Miranda’s legs.

“Whoa, amigo,” the big man quipped in a voice that was deep and sonorous. “Donde esta el fuego?”

His accent, not to mention his choice of words, told Miranda he wasn’t a local after all, but an American. A second glance told her he was, in fact Native American.

The soaking wet would-be assailant popped back up and tried to slip around the big man, only to come face to face with another man. There was no mistaking the second fellow for a local. He had blond hair and eyes the color of a stormy sea. He stood about half a head shorter than the first man, but was built just as broadly.

The fleeing man turned and bolted away, crashing frantically through the vegetation beneath the trees.

Miranda advanced on the newcomers. “Why the hell didn’t you grab him?”

The big man raised an eyebrow then turned to the shorter man. “Yeah, why the hell didn’t you grab him?”

The fair-haired man ignored his companion’s clearly disingenuous question and stepped forward. “Sorry about that. I guess our timing could have been a little better.”

“I’ll say.” She put her hands on her hips, placing herself directly in their path. “You must be the so-called dive experts my father hired.”

The big man’s lips twitched into a smile. He cast a mock-accusatory stare at his friend. “Hired? You mean we’re getting paid for this gig? You holding out on me, Maddock?”

The other man maintained his patient expression. “I think we got off on the wrong foot. I’m Dane Maddock. This buffoon is Bones.” He gestured to a third person behind them on the trail. “And this is Angel.”

Miranda’s retort died on her lips. Angel, the third member of the party, was a strikingly beautiful Native American woman, tall and lean. She wore a white halter top that laid bare the chiseled shoulders and taut biceps of an athlete.

Miranda shook her head, trying to regain her composure. “That’s great, Mr. Maddock—”

“Just ‘Maddock’ is fine.”

“Mr. Maddock,” she said again, emphatically. “Thanks for coming out, but as it happens, we don’t need your help after all, so you might as well turn around and head back to the resort or whatever.”

“Miranda!”

She flinched. Even though she was a grown woman in her early-thirties, her father’s stern voice was as powerful now as it had been when she was just a little girl.

Bell stepped forward. “You’ll have to forgive my daughter, Mr. Maddock. She’s very independent. Maybe a little too independent for her own good.”

Miranda turned to her father. “Dad, we really don’t need them. I’ve got this.”

“I’m sure you do,” Bell said. “But I asked these men to come here. It’s not your decision.”

She frowned and leaned in close, whispering. “Dad, I found something down there. Something… ” She flicked her eyes meaningfully. “That we probably shouldn’t talk about in front of strangers.”

“They’re not strangers,” Bell replied with a paternal smile. “And they aren’t just a couple guys I hired off the boat. They’re Navy SEALs.”

Miranda raised an eyebrow, then turned and cast a dubious eye at the two men. “Navy SEALs, huh? Sure you are.”