“Maybe we could get back to reality for a second,” Decker said. “Where is the entrance to this Xibalba place?”
Atticus said, “According to this, it’s in a cave inside Flower Mountain.”
“Flower Mountain?” asked Diana.
“It’s a sort of Maya paradise,” Acosta said. “I thought it was mythical… that it didn’t really exist, until now.”
“Where is this place?” Decker asked.
Atticus squinted at the map. “If my understanding is right, then I would say north of Lake Miramar.”
“And where might that be?” Charlie asked.
“It’s in the Lacandon Jungle,” said the old English professor. “One of the most untouched areas of Middle America. Talk about the middle of nowhere!”
“Then we’d better get moving,” Decker said. “Someone get a picture of that damned seal.”
Charlie leaned forward and snapped a picture with his phone. “All done.”
“Then it’s time to go,” Selena said.
“I don’t think so!”
The voice shattered the silent darkness, a cold, hard voice with a rich Yucatan Spanish accent.
“What the hell?” Decker said.
The armed men rushed into the far end of the chamber with their guns raised. As their shadows bobbed about in the gloom, Decker reached for his weapon. “Are we all ready for some CQB?”
“For what?” Diana asked.
“Close quarter battle,” he said with a shrug.
“It won’t come to that, surely!” she said.
Before he could answer, the men opened fire on them.
13
Bullets traced through the chamber’s dusty air, forcing the team to drop to the floor and find somewhere safe out of the line of fire. As the team scattered, Diana scrambled behind the altar and tucked up in a ball at the base of the stone sculpture of Huracan, cradling her head in her arms and holding her breath.
Not for the first time, the gunfire frightened her so much she felt like crying. Unlike the rest of her friends in the Avalon crew, with the exception of Selena, her background was not military or secret service. She led the simple and safe existence of an academic in her homeland of Portugal. As a specialist in ancient languages and palaeography, she had looked forward to a stable and rewarding life in the academy, but then her old friend Selena Moore had called her up and asked her to help find the mythical Tibetan kingdom of Shambhala.
After that, everything changed.
A bullet struck the pillar at the head of the Huracan statue, ricocheting inches from her head and spraying her with stone fragments. She screamed and tucked herself even tighter into a ball, suddenly overwhelmed with the fear she was about to get shot. What would it feel like? She imagined a red hot piece of lead tearing through her body and shuddered at the thought. She didn’t know how the rest of the crew felt about it, but she wasn’t about to get used to getting shot any time soon.
“You okay, Di?”
Riley’s voice. She peeked through her arms and saw the young Australian firing a burst of rounds from a nasty-looking handgun. He was scrambling over to her through the dust. The noise of his gun was deafeningly loud, not to mention all the smoke and the smell of ignited gunpowder. It made her feel sick.
“I’m okay, thanks.”
He was next to her now. “Keep your head down, mate. I mean it.”
The former SASR corporal was a kidder with all his jokes and gags, but in business hours he was the most serious man she had ever known. With a look of stern concentration on his lean, tanned face and the gun cradled in the classic two-handed hold, Riley Carr twisted his upper body and fired another peal rounds into the head of a man trying to run toward them.
With each shot, Diana jumped, but this time kept the impulse to scream in check. The killing business was violent and bloody. A man shot in the head was not a good thing to see or hear, and these were sights and sounds she could live without. Skulls did not break apart easily, and watching brain matter spraying over a stone wall was something you never forgot.
She hated it.
The attackers took cover but kept fighting with the intensity of men who were days away from the discovery of their lifetimes, and the unlimited wealth and power that would come with it. She guessed these were hardened criminals and thugs, but they were not stupid men, nor were they cowards. Like the rest of the crew, she knew they would fight to the death to beat them to Montesino’s ancient secret and the doomsday device he had described in his Codex.
She was suddenly aware of Decker’s voice. The American was closer to the entrance, firing on other men and now diving for cover behind what looked like a boulder. It was hard to see in the smoke, and chaos now reigned supreme in the chamber. Then, the men charged toward them once again and began fighting in an even greater explosion of rage.
Riley aimed and fired but his weapon was out of rounds. He wasted no time. No curses, no complaints. He tossed the gun to the floor and snatched at a hand shovel in one of their packs at his feet. He weighed it in his hands and then spun it across the chamber at the men running toward them. The cutting edge of the dusty sheet steel blade gouged a rugged gash in one of their throats. He was dead before he hit the floor.
At the same moment, Charlie made a running jump to the altar and used its smooth stone surface to launch himself at the rest of the men as they fanned out into the chamber. Atticus and Acosta were sheltering in an alcove with Selena, each looking more terrified than she had ever seen them before. Selena made a break for Decker
