“Why do you think they call the place Tabasco?” Charlie said.
She face him and rolled her eyes, making sure he felt her disdain. “Tabasco is miles away, Valentine.”
“Oh, is it?”
“Yes. Believe me, yes.”
Acosta’s boots crunched on the track. “Everywhere is miles away.”
“We’re nearly there, Lena,” Riley said. “Hang in there.”
“It’s easy for you to say. You probably grew up with worse, right?”
He laughed and gave her a smile. His eyes were shaded by a battered wide-brimmed hat he’d picked up in Mexico City. “You could say that.” He gave a low whistle and looked out across the canopy of the forest to their right. In front of him, Acosta was carefully navigating an incline in the track and their new elevation allowed a great view across to a hazy western horizon.
Riley watched him go as he replied to Selena’s question. “When I was a kid out on the station, it was so hot it could lift up a dead man’s dick.”
Charlie laughed, but Selena slapped his leg. “Stop being so disgusting.”
The Australian SAS corporal gave an innocent shrug. “Hey, welcome to Riley.”
“Tell me about it,” Selena said. “Haven’t heard that one before though.”
Acosta had apparently missed the joke, staring hard at the seal and wandering down another incline leading back into the darkness of yet more jungle. The breathtaking view was gone again, and now they were surrounded by endless layers of some of the most ancient and ruthless jungle anywhere on the planet. Exhausted after hours of hiking, the team stopped to remove their packs and drink some water.
“This place really is remote,” Diana said.
“Still, look on the bright side,” Riley said, pulling his pack up his shoulder and raising his voice. “We could be wherever you came from, Mitch.”
Selena laughed. “He’s already asleep, you berk.”
“Asleep?” Charlie said, amazed.
“Yes, and in this jungle, too,” Selena said. “How does he do it?”
Riley was shocked, too. “If there’s one thing I’ve learnt about Mitch Decker, it’s that he could sleep even if he was on a rollercoaster with his arse on fire.”
Charlie chuckled. “I’m loving the imagery.”
Leaning up against a tree trunk, Decker’s face was obscured totally by his Akubra hat, but now he grunted, refolded his arms over his chest and twisted to get more comfortable.
Acosta got up, rearranged his pack and started walking, gingerly avoiding a pothole caused by the tropical downpours. “We must go. We have no idea where these men are. They could be on our tail, or they might already have found Flower Mountain.”
Selena woke a grumbling Decker and they got to their feet and started walking back up the foothills of a mountain range. By the time they caught up with Acosta, he had left the track and wandered down to another lake, this one much smaller than Miramar. When he reached the shore, the Mexican professor started scanning the far side of the lake with a pair of Riley’s heavy duty ex-army field glasses.
Leaving Atticus, Charlie, Diana and a yawning Decker behind them, Selena and Riley walked over to him down on the lake’s northern shore. The shocking density of the jungle had made the latest leg of their journey go on much longer than any of them had expected, and now it was well after noon. At its zenith now, the sun’s relentless beating sapped their energy as they made the short walk over Pepe Acosta.
Reaching a short stretch of pure white sand, Selena pulled up beside him, removed her hat and wiped the sweat from her forehead. Replacing the hat, she blew out a long, weary breath. “So, we got this far, at least.”
The academic nodded, but didn’t turn to face her. Instead his eyes remained glued to the binoculars as he spoke. “Si, but is it far enough?”
She stared out across the enormous freshwater lake and tried to take it all in. Surrounded on all sides by the same dense tropical rainforest they had spent the morning hiking through, an enormous mountain rose up on its southern shore. It was a spectacular sight that impressed even Riley.
“That’s one fuckin’ beautiful lake,” he said. “Talk about untouched. I bet it’s looked like this since the dawn of time itself.”
“Then you’d lose your money,” Selena said.
“How so?”
“We know from both quality primary and secondary sources that during the Mayan era this wasn’t a lake but a simple lowland valley.”
Riley regarded the lake’s smooth surface. “You’re shitting me?”
“I am not shitting you, no,” she sighed. “There was once a fabulous city built here, where all this water is right now. A city built at the base of Flower Mountain. As we said earlier, up until now I believed these stories to be mere legends, but now it looks like they were real.”
“Get outta town.”
“Historical fact, Carr,” she said. “Apparently.”
“Well, do me sideways and call me Mother Theresa. I never knew that.”
“For God’s sake, will you stop talking like that!”
“Sorry. I learnt to talk in the army. Late developer.”
“You can say that again. Anyway, look over there.” She raised an arm and pointed off to the right. When she had the attention of both men, she said, “If you look really closely, you can see something protruding just above the surface of the lake.”
Acosta swivelled the binoculars over to the location and whistled. “Los cojones! I see something! It looks like stone ruins, but they are barely visible above the surface.”
“Precisely,” she said. “You are looking at the ruins of the aforementioned ancient Maya city.”
Riley shoved his hand under Acosta’s face and made a quick beckoning gesture with his fingers. “Let’s have the bins, mate.”
The Mexican handed them over and wandered off toward a rise leading up into the foothills beyond the lake. Seconds later Riley was scanning the lake for
