“Wait here!” Riley said.
He got to his feet just in time to see Selena delivering a brutal kick right into the center of the man’s face. After the strike, she rotated around one-eighty degrees, bringing her foot back down to the floor and putting her hands on her hips. “Nicely done, even if I do say so my—”
Her words were cut short when one of the other bandits hurled himself at her and tackled her to the floor. She hit the flagstones with a hefty thump and cried out in pain, alerting Decker to what had just happened. He turned to see her struggling with the man and called out to her.
“Are you okay?”
“Never… better…”
A man with a long black ponytail rushed Decker and shoulder-barged him to the floor. He threw a punch and Decker dodged it. The American forced him back with his knees but the two men were quickly embroiled in a brutal fist fight and Selena was still fighting for her life.
“I’m on my way!” Riley yelled, still running across the chamber under a hail of bullets.
Charlie watched him from across the chamber. “You’re one crazy, jacked-up, adrenaline-pumped, maverick, Riley!”
“I am not crazy!” Riley yelled back. “I’ll give you a pass on the rest.”
Decker delivered a savage uppercut to his opponent’s face, smashing the man’s jaw shut and knocking him out on the spot before rushing over and grabbing hold of the man attacking Selena.
“You took your sweet time,” she said between breaths.
Riley arrived at the same time. “Sorry I’m late!”
“Job’s taken, Riley,” Decker said.
With a chunky fistful of sweat-streaked flannel shirt in his hands, the former US Marine heaved the heavy man away from Selena and pulled him to his feet. He recoiled his fist and aimed it in the center of his face. “Son…of…a…”
Smack!
The punch spread the man’s nose all over his face and sent him tumbling backwards into Selena. She was still trying to get to her feet, and now the man tripped over her body and fell back onto the flagstones.
Decker padded over to him, ready to finish the job, but Selena was now back up and running and stopped him. “Please, allow me.”
“You think you can handle it?”
As the man crawled up to his hands and knees, blood pouring from his splattered nose, Selena shut one eye and aimed squarely between his legs. After a short run-up to gather some forward momentum, she planted her right boot right where it counted most. The man’s squeals filled the chamber, but were silenced when she ran around to his head, lifted it from the floor and cracked it back down again on the hard tiles.
“There,” she said, dusting her hands off. “You can count him out for the rest of the day’s play.”
Decker looked at the man with something approaching pity. “I guess you could handle him.”
She walked past him and winked. “You betcha, Mitch.”
“Why is it so quiet in here?” said Riley. “I was just getting warmed up!”
“Because the fight is over,” Atticus said, his voice thin in the smoky darkness.
“What do you mean?” Selena asked.
“I mean the other men have gone.” His voice grew dark. “And they took the jade seal with them. They have the map of Flower Mountain with them.”
Decker ached and rubbed his jaw where one of the men had punched him. “Ain’t that just fantastic.”
“So, what now?” Diana asked.
“It’s obvious,” Selena said. “As of this moment, we are officially in a race with those thugs to find Flower Mountain and secure the Stormbringer.”
“And we’re going to need to know who we’re up against,” Charlie said. “I can help with that. I have a lot of good friends in the intel community. Let me make some calls when we’re back on the surface.”
“All right,” Decker said. “Let’s go back to the plane.”
14
They reached Maya Flats after sunset and walked across the airfield in silence. Above their heads, a rich Egyptian blue canvas littered with tropical stars stretched down to the horizon, but none of them saw it. Each of the crew members made their way over to the shining silver hull of the Avalon with a heavy heart, their heads roiling with the gunfight back at the ruins.
Climbing up inside the aircraft, they each slumped down on a seat and did whatever they could to get their heads together. After a few seconds, Charlie’s phone bleeped and alerted him to an incoming message. He opened it and read it. Then, with everyone sitting and watching him with bated breath, he told them what his old friend at MI5 had just sent him.
“The good news first,” he began. “Thanks to the security camera here at the airfield, my contacts in MI5 managed to get an ID on some of the men who attacked us at the ruins.”
“Great!” Selena said. “Who are they?”
“That’s the bad news,” he said with a frown. “First, the boss is a man named Ramon Morales. Originally from Acapulco, he now lives in Cancún. He goes by the moniker Tarántula, earned because of his obsession with the spider. Runs one of the biggest drugs cartels in Mexico and trails a body-count as long as a freight train behind him.”
“Sounds nasty.”
“And he doesn’t work alone. His bodyguard is a serious criminal named Diego Novarro – he was the guy with the ponytail and tattoos. Others in his gang are Carlos and Miguel Mercado, two brothers from Mexico City heavily involved in the smuggling trade. In their case, that means mostly class A narcotics, but they’re not fussy. They use their black market contacts and criminal network to smuggle anything into anywhere.”
“Cripes,” Riley said. “They sound like real meanies.”
“They are,” Charlie continued. “They’re known to MI5 because of
