The Spirit Banner. Alex Archer

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      S EVERAL HOURS LATER Curran sat in a cave that was deep enough to filter out the winds howling outside. There had been a few sticks lying just inside the entrance. He combined them with some of the extra clothing from his pack, and made a small fire to keep them warm. It was still cold, though not as bad as it would have been had they been trapped outside. It would serve to keep them from freezing to death.

      At least until the fuel ran out, he thought, and then just as quickly pushed the image away. The Lord will provide, he told himself. The Lord will provide.

      At least we won’t starve to death, Curran thought, with a glance at the corpse of his horse where it lay just within the entrance tunnel. The poor beast had collapsed after carrying so much weight through the freezing cold weather without rest. Curran hadn’t yet managed to get up the nerve to start carving up the carcass. He didn’t mind eating horseflesh. He’d been forced to do so during other missionary journeys he’d been on and it hadn’t been all that bad. It was just that this particular horse had been instrumental in saving his life and it felt disrespectful to treat its remains in such a fashion.

      Still, when the time came, Curran had little doubt that his reticence would quickly vanish. Starving to death wasn’t on his list of endings to this saga.

      The dead horse was proof of what they had endured to reach this point. The trail had been difficult to find without the Mongols to guide him. The ever-increasing fury of the storm had cut their already-slow pace to a crawl, as did the times that Curran lost his grip and toppled off his patient mount. Thankfully, the horse had traveled this way before, and when he finally stopped trying to control it and just gave it its head, it took him where he wanted to go.

      With the help of the firelight, Curran had cleaned Tamarak’s head wound and had broken off the jutting ends of the arrows to keep the wounded man from accidentally driving them deeper into his body.

      After that, there wasn’t anything to do but wait.

      The snow had continued to fall and the entrance to the cave was half-covered from the heavy accumulation. Curran didn’t mind, as it served to keep the heat from the fire trapped in the cave, warming him and his unconscious companion, while still allowing the smoke to escape.

      Unable to sleep, Curran took out his worn leather journal and began to write, recording the events of the past several days in as much detail as possible to ensure that there was some record of what had happened to him should he not make it back to Karakorum. He’d been doing the same thing since his mission had started many months before, and what had once been an annoying chore had turned into a soothing balm for his spirit.

      At the very least, it gave him something to think about other than the pain in his injured leg, he thought ruefully.

      It wasn’t long before Tamarak, delirious with fever and pain, began raving aloud. At first Curran ignored it, knowing there was little he could do for the man, but then something Tamarak said caught his attention and he listened more carefully.

      What he heard amazed him.

      If it was true, he was being given the secret of the ages!

      I really need a miracle now, Lord, he prayed, as he turned to a clean page of his journal and began writing frantically, trying to get it all down just in case the good Father decided to deliver on his request.

       2

       Mexico

      Annja Creed was knee-deep in sacrificial victims when the shooting started.

      At first, there was only a single gunshot, which was easy enough for her to ignore. After all, the sound of isolated gunfire was relatively common at a dig site this deep in the jungle. Someone fired off a weapon at least once a week. The reasons for doing so varied, but they usually had something to do with the local wildlife. Just last week, Martinez had found a twelve-foot python in his bed and had fired off four shots before he managed to hit the thing. A few days before that, the cook—a guy by the name of Evans—had used his shotgun to drive off the howler monkeys he’d caught raiding the food larder. The monkeys still managed to get away with the chocolate bars he’d been hording.

      But when the first couple of shots were followed by an entire volley of gunfire from several different weapons, Annja knew something was seriously wrong.

      For the past three weeks, Annja and the rest of the dig team working on behalf of the Bureau of Cultural Studies had been carefully excavating the ruins discovered at Teluamachee, about a hundred and fifty miles outside of Mexico City. A recent earthquake had cut a swath through the jungle, knocking down trees and natural earth formations with equal abandon, exposing a set of long forgotten ruins hidden in a narrow valley deep in the jungle. A scout for a local logging company had discovered the site and, thankfully, had enough respect and admiration of his heritage to report the location to the bureau rather than selling that information on the black market. The bureau wasted no time in assembling a team of experts—including Annja—asking them to come down and take a look at what they had found.

      Annja had been in between assignments when the call had come in and she’d wasted no time in agreeing to join the team.

      The main dig site consisted of a large three-story temple complex in the standard step pyramid formation, with several smaller buildings lining the east and west sides of the courtyard extending south from the base of the pyramid itself.

      A few hundred yards to the west of the main structures was the site’s cenote, a deep, water-filled sinkhole that the Mayans considered a link to the rain gods, or Chaacs. Sacrificial victims and precious objects had been tossed into the sacred well as offerings during the site’s heyday as a way of protecting the populace and bringing good fortune. To the dig team’s delight, the earthquake that had uncovered the primary dig site had also drained the cenote, exposing its secrets to the light of the sun for the first time in centuries.

      Annja was down in “the hole,” as they had come to call it, erecting a grid made of nylon rope and stakes across the entire area. This would allow them to record the precise depth and location of every object they removed from the muck-covered bed at the bottom of the sinkhole. That information would then be fed into a 3-D simulation program that would provide them with a computer model to work with in analyzing the artifacts.

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