'Not by beating me, they didn't. Hell, they degraded themselves, not me. It's what they made me feel that was so damn humiliating. It's what was going around in my brain while I was zoned out. You know what they made me feel? Hatred, man; hatred like I've never felt before. Hatred for all the cruel, unfeeling, unthinking sons of bitches in this world, and I wanted to kill them. I mean, I actually wanted to take a gun and kill the bastards because they were enjoying it. I could see it in their faces, kind of grinning while they kicked me, Suarez most of all. Hell, it was like a trip to Disney World for that buggy fucker. Hatred does a number on the bladder, I found that out. But I didn't tell them a thing, not one damn word. '
'That's why you feel humiliated?'
'Sure.'
'You feel bad because of the way you reacted. ' Incredulous, as if Tomlinson were a cross between Audie Murphy and E.T.
'Yeah. You know why? 'Cause I still got that feeling in my head. I can't get rid of it. I close my eyes and I see Suarez grinning and kicking, and I want to take a gun and give him one right here.' Tomlinson, looking miserable, touched an index finger to his nose and pressed his thumb down.
* * *
Once they were in the mountains, the caravan made several stops, pulling off the road near clusterings of thatched-roof huts on the hillsides. At each stop, a couple of soldiers came straggling down, Maya teenagers, mostly, looking too small for their camouflage fatigues and shiny AK-47 Soviet assault rifles. These boys were the substance and sustenance of war in Central America, leaving their mothers to carry weapons made in countries they knew nothing about and would probably never see; fighting battles against their own kind in which each side functioned as little more than mercenaries on their own land. The young guerrillas would swing up onto the already overloaded trucks, neither smiling nor speaking; resigned to something, but Ford had never quite understood what was at the core of that resignation. He doubted if he ever would. Then someone would whistle and the caravan would rumble onward again as the teenage soldiers blinked stoically in the wind.
Two hours from Utatlan, they reached the peak of the lowest pass and there was the lake, God's Eye, bright blue and almost perfectly round from that distance, glittering like a mirror amid the dark hills which surrounded it. Beyond a vent in the hills was another pale-blue void that Ford knew was the Pacific Ocean.
Tomlinson was looking, too. 'Boy, there's no describing that, is there? Like a picture you see on a calendar, only you hate to see something like this on a calendar because it spoils it some way.'
Ford said, 'See that village? It's Tambor. I used to live down the shoreline from there, about a mile. I had a little lab set up.'
'Where you studied the sharks.'
'Right. For about eight months.'
'I'd like to get a look at ol'
'Just don't get in the water to do it.'
'Man-eating fish, huh?'
'They're not as quick to attack as the Maya say, but they can be pretty aggressive. They act differently than sharks in saltwater, too. For one thing, their growth's been stunted, possibly because of overpopulation, possibly because of the fresh water, but mostly because of the limited food supply. The lake's more than a thousand feet deep in some places, but the sharks have to feed near the surface because that's where the food is: fish, birds, turtles, stuff like that. They take what they can get.'
'I'd feel safer in the water than I would with that bastard driving.'
'Yeah, well, you probably would be safer. Once I watched these guys trying to row a horse across the lake on a makeshift bamboo ferry. The ferry dumped and the horse went in the water. I was in a boat, so I got a good look. I hadn't seen a shark all morning, but within a minute of that horse hitting the water, they were all around. The water's so clear you can see them from a long way off.'
'Goddamn, they ate a whole horse?'
'No. That's the point. They never touched it. The horse made it clear to shore with these five-footers cruising all around. But the way those fish vectored in the instant that horse hit the water was impressive. I don't believe in the legends, but I don't want to test them either. '
Tambor was bamboo, thatch, plywood, and tin, too rustic to be tacky, too well traveled to be quaint because it was the only village on the lake built on the main road. Ford looked to see if he recognized anyone as they drove through, thinking that, if they stopped, he might somehow be able to get a message to . . . who? Rigaberto Herrera, maybe. Ford couldn't think of anyone else who could help.
He didn't recognize anyone on the street, though. And the caravan didn't stop. It turned east up a mud logging trail, the trucks grinding along in low gear, twisting and sliding for nine or ten miles past a series of camouflaged bunkers. They were following the perimeter of the lake tpward the sea, and, at each checkpoint, guerrillas stood with their machine guns and made sloppy, bored salutes. Finally the forest thinned and they ascended onto a broad plateau a hundred feet or so above the lake and about a mile from the Pacific, but still hidden by the hills behind and the forest beside. Then they came to a clearing: Zacul's main camp, almost directly across the lake from Tambor.
Ford had spent time on this section of shoreline, but he didn't recognize what he now saw. What was once thick jungle had been cleared and pushed back. Zacul had installed a permanent camp, using fiberglass housing shells that were camouflaged to blend with the high green forest canopy. There was a big open cook house, kettles boiling. There were open-air messes and a parade ground, too. Ford guessed there were facilities for five hundred or more men. The rest of Zacul's forces, as were Rivera's, would be spread around the country as a sort of civilian militia. Sitting not far from the parade ground beneath gray webbing was a Soviet gunship, its blades folded like wilted petals, rockets clinging to its underbelly like eggs on a gravid crab. There were artillery bunkers, too— antiaircraft ordnance, Ford guessed, but the artillery was covered and he couldn't see it clearly. The whole camp had a sterile look; a place of raw earth and fresh paint, as if the bulldozers had only recently finished their work.
Protruding from the jungled hillsides, in stark contrast, were wedges of gray stone blocks buried beneath earth and vines that were now being torn away by men working on scaffoldings.
Tomlinson noticed and nudged him, excited. 'Those are pyramids, man. Even covered by that hill, you can see the shapes.'
Ford said, 'Yeah, I think so.'
'I thought an earthquake supposedly took all that stuff. Look at it, man. It's not supposed to be here.'
Ford did not reply. He had suspected that this was where he would find Zacul, suspected it when he heard that Pilar Balserio's archaeological camp had been attacked by robbers.
Zacul and his men had been the robbers and it was here they must have assaulted Pilar and taken the book that Rafe
Hollins would later steal from them, the
When the trucks stopped, they waited for the soldiers to get out; then Ford jumped to the ground. He took a few steps, looked to see if anyone was watching, then squatted and picked up something small and black, as shiny as quartz. He handed it to Tomlinson.
'What's this, man? An Indian arrowhead? Naw, it's a—'
'It's a shark's tooth,' Ford said.
Tomlinson was staring at the ground. 'Hey, they're all over the place. There's one; there's another one. A big one, too—'
'Don't pick it up. Just keep walking.'
'What are sharks' teeth doing up here, man? We must be a mile from the ocean and at least a half mile from the lake. A lot higher, too.'
'It's because we're standing where the lake used to be.'
'Huh?'
'The earthquakes didn't cover the lake, they moved it. That's why no one ever found anything looking in the lake.'
'I'll be damned!' Tomlinson couldn't resist, and picked up another shark's tooth. 'Yeah, right—I get it. The
