Hunt at The Well Of Eternity gh-1 Read online

  Gabriel understood now what had happened. Hector had known a shortcut of his own and gotten a small group of Esparza’s men to the gorge ahead of Gabriel and his companions. These men crossed the bridge to the eastern side and concealed themselves there. It had been a trap, all right, and Gabriel had walked into it.

  With a desperate heave, he finally lifted Cierra onto the bridge. “Grab the rope and hang on,” he told her. Then he swung around to face the man who was almost on top of him.

  Gabriel hadn’t had a chance to use his Colt yet, and he didn’t get that chance now. The man’s hand chopped down in a vicious blow. The side of it caught Gabriel’s wrist and knocked the gun loose. The Colt fell and landed on the planks at Gabriel’s feet.

  He didn’t have time to try to retrieve it. Instead he swung a fist at the man’s head, knocking him backward. As the bridge swayed to the side and the man almost pitched off of it into nothingness, he flung out a hand in desperation and grabbed the guide rope. He swung his foot up in a kick that landed in Gabriel’s stomach and knocked him back against Cierra, who screamed again as she hung on to the guide rope for dear life. Her torn shirt hung open, her breasts barely covered beneath it in a red bra. The sight caught the eye of Esparza’s man; he only hesitated a split second, but it was enough for Gabriel to bring his right fist up in a sizzling uppercut that landed solidly on the man’s jaw.

  This time the man didn’t have a chance to grab the guide rope. The punch propelled him back and to the side, and suddenly there was nothing under him but air. He shrieked in terror as he fell, tumbling for a few seconds before he reached the bottom of the gorge and the fading screams abruptly stopped.

  Gabriel glanced one way, saw that the second man had succeeded in dragging Mariella off the bridge. He looked the other way and saw Cierra still clinging to the guide rope. Escalante had finally been able to pull himself back onto the bridge, but he was still bleeding as he lay on the planks, breathing heavily.

  At the western end of the bridge, Podnemovitch had gotten up after being knocked down by Tomás, who still lay there on the grassy verge. With his already ugly face made even uglier by the rage contorting his features, Podnemovitch stood over Tomás and pumped three more rounds into him, the shots slamming out and echoing back from the walls of the gorge.

  Gabriel’s Colt still lay on one of the rough-hewn planks, its muzzle lodged against a large splinter. That was all that had kept it from falling off while the bridge was swaying beneath them. Escalante reached out with a bloodcovered hand and closed his fingers around the revolver’s grip. He lifted it and fired at Podnemovitch, who ducked back toward the jungle. Over the echoing roar of the gun, Escalante shouted to Gabriel, “Take Cierra and go! I’ll hold him here!”

  Even if the bandit hadn’t been wounded, Gabriel didn’t think he would have been any match for the big Russian. He knew that Escalante was offering himself up as a sacrifice.

  But that was Escalante’s decision to make. He knew how badly he was hurt, knew he probably wouldn’t make it anyway. Gabriel couldn’t let that gesture go to waste, so he grabbed Cierra’s arm and urged her toward the eastern end of the bridge.

  “No!” she cried. “Paco!”

  “Go!” Escalante told her.

  Cierra sobbed as Gabriel dragged her toward the end of the bridge. There would still be Esparza’s other man to deal with once they got there, but for now the important thing was to get off this perilous span.

  As they approached the end of the bridge Gabriel saw that Mariella was still struggling with her captor. She landed a round house punch as Gabriel and Cierra stumbled off the bridge. Solid ground had seldom felt as good under Gabriel’s feet as it did at that moment.

  As Cierra slumped to her knees, he let go of her arm and lunged forward to grab the shoulder of the man Mariella had just punched. The man was off balance from that blow, and Gabriel was able to jerk him around and throw a right cross that slammed into his jaw and put him down, out cold.

  More shots blasted. Gabriel saw that Escalante had managed to pull himself to his feet. The bandit stood on the bridge shooting at Podnemovitch, who was returning the fire as he advanced, striding deliberately from plank to plank as he approached. Escalante’s wound had weakened him to the point that his aim was shaky and his shots missed Podnemovitch.

  Not so the slugs fired by the big Russian. They pounded into Escalante and slewed the bandit around. Escalante grabbed the rope with his free hand and looked back at Gabriel, Cierra, and Mariella.

  “Cut the ropes!” he cried with fading strength. “Cut the ropes, Gabriel!”

  Gabriel looked down at the man he had just knocked out, saw a sheathed machete at his waist. He bent and yanked the big blade from its sheath, spun toward the bridge. “Head for the jungle!” he told Cierra and Mariella as he slashed at the anchor ropes.

  Podnemovitch roared something in Russian that sounded like a curse. He fired past the sagging Escalante at Gabriel, who brought the machete chopping down on the rope again. One of Podnemovitch’s bullets chewed splinters from the anchor post. Gabriel thought one more strike might part the rope, which would cause the bridge to twist and throw Podnemovitch off into the gorge.

  Before the machete could fall, though, Cierra and Mariella both cried out in alarm. A new voice called, “Drop the machete, Señor Hunt, or my men will kill you and the women both.”

  Gabriel recognized those arrogant tones. He looked behind him and saw that Vladimir Antonio de la Esparza had emerged from the jungle on this side of the bridge, along with a dozen heavily armed men who had rifles trained on him.

  So much for a small group having reached the bridge before them. All of them had made it here and crossed over the gorge, leaving only Podnemovitch and a few other men to follow behind and set up the ambush.

  He wasn’t ready to drop the machete just yet, though. He said, “Back off, Esparza. You can’t have me gunned down fast enough to stop me from cutting this rope, and if I do, Podnemovitch better know how to fly.”

  The threat didn’t appear to ruffle Esparza. “If you do that, Señor Hunt,” he said as he brought up a pistol and pointed it at Cierra, “I will kill Dr. Almanzar and then have my men shoot you.”

  “Do it, Gabriel!” Cierra cried. “I don’t care what happens to me! Just do it!”

  Gabriel glanced along the bridge at Podnemovitch, who now stood over Escalante’s motionless body with a tensely expectant look on his face. He had to know that he didn’t have time to make it back to the other end of the bridge before Gabriel could chop through the final strands of the rope.

  But Gabriel couldn’t do it. Slowly, he lowered the machete, then let the handle slip through his fingers. The big knife fell to the ground at his feet.

  “Very wise, Señor Hunt,” Esparza said. “More wise than you know. You see, I’ve decided that I’m going to let you live for the time being. I want you to witness my triumphant entry into Cuchatlán.”

  Gabriel didn’t say anything. Cursing wouldn’t help matters.

  He looked back out onto the bridge and saw Podnemovitch reach down to pick up the Colt Escalante had dropped. As Podnemovitch did so, Escalante’s hand came up and caught feebly at his arm, as if the bandit were trying to throw him off the bridge. That surprised Gabriel a little, since he had thought that Escalante was already dead.

  Escalante was too weak to budge Podnemovitch. The Russian laughed harshly, straightened, and said, “Old fool.” He hooked a toe under Escalante’s shoulder and rolled him off the bridge. Cierra screamed in horror as Escalante fell, but not a sound came from the bandit himself.

  Gabriel looked away, not wanting to see the end of Escalante’s plunge into the gorge. He saw that Mariella had put her arms around Cierra and turned her away from the chasm as well. Whatever friction there had been between the two women was gone; they had worse enemies to face than each other now.

  “Bring all three of the prisoners,” Esparza snapped at his men.

  Podnemovitch reached the ea
stern end of the bridge. The traitor Hector limped across after him. Podnemovitch said, “When the time comes for Hunt to die, Vladimir, I want to be the one to kill him.”

  “Of course, Alexei,” Esparza replied with a smile. “I think you’ve earned that right. Señor Hunt has proven hard to kill, though.” His voice hardened slightly. “Next time, make certain that he’s dead.”

  With that he turned to stalk onto a trail through the jungle, and his men surrounded Gabriel, Cierra, and Mariella and prodded them along after him.

  Gabriel thought bitterly about the turn events had taken. He would soon see the ruins of Cuchatlán for himself…but not the way he had intended.

  Chapter 21

  The valley was beautiful, no doubt about that, Gabriel thought as the group topped a small rise that gave them a good view of the land spread out before them. Lush and green, stretching for miles between the gorge known as the Blade of the Gods on the west and a wall-like range of cloud-wreathed mountains to the east, the valley gave every appearance of being, as Mariella had said, paradise.

  What looked, at first glance, like several small hills rose from the valley floor about a mile away. Gabriel looked closer and realized that instead of hills, they were Mayan pyramids that were so covered with the vines that had grown over the centuries they looked like natural formations rather than man-made structures. A shorter, squatly built hump near the pyramids was probably some sort of ancient palace.

  “I don’t believe it,” Cierra said as she trudged along beside Gabriel. “Why has this place never been discovered before now?”

  “Think about how inaccessible it is,” Gabriel said. “If you came up to that gorge and didn’t know there was a bridge over it, you might just turn back. And Mariella said there are no passes through those mountains to the east, so nobody could get in that way.”

  “Yes, but it should have been spotted from the air,” Cierra insisted. “That’s the way some of the other lost Mayan cities have been found, by people searching with planes and helicopters.”

  “Again, the mountains probably have something to do with it. They’re high enough so that an approach from that direction wouldn’t be easy. Not impossible, mind you, but not easy, either. And even if somebody flew over the valley, what would they see? Some hills?”

  Mariella was walking in front of them, flanked by two of Esparza’s men. Esparza was up ahead, striding along with Podnemovitch beside him. Mariella turned to look at Gabriel and Cierra, and it was obvious she had been listening to their conversation as she said, “Cuchatlán was abandoned by the Maya earlier than any of their other cities. The vegetation has had more time to cover the old ruins. That’s why they’re so well hidden. You would have to know it was there, like Granville did, to have much of a chance of finding it.”

  “You still insist that fantastic story about the Well of Eternity is true?” Cierra wanted to know.

  “Of course it’s true. Would so many people have died because of it if it was only a legend?”

  Gabriel refrained from reminding her how full history was of men dying because of legends.

  Mariella stumbled a bit as she turned toward the front of the group again, caught herself, and passed a hand wearily over her face. Gabriel thought she looked more fatigued, more haggard, than she had earlier.

  Almost like she was starting to show those more than one hundred fifty years she claimed to possess.

  Gabriel moved up beside Mariella. Esparza’s men watched him closely but didn’t try to stop him. “Who exactly lives here now?” he asked. “You said the Maya abandoned the city when they began moving northward into Chiapas and the Yucatan.”

  She nodded. “Other Indians in the region moved in once the Maya were gone. When Granville and his men—and I—reached Cuchatlán…I think it was in 1866, though of course it was hard to keep track of dates here in the jungle…the Indians who had established a village near the ruins welcomed us. They shared the waters of the Well with us, though we didn’t understand yet what they could do. Granville’s men liked it here, and so did I. We persuaded him to stay for a time, to let the men rest. He’d been talking about taking samples of the water overseas, offering it to Queen Victoria if Great Britain would throw all its power and influence behind a new Confederacy.” Mariella smiled. “But he’d been talking about it less and less as time went on, and he talked about it less still once we were here. Finally the beauty of this place seduced Granville, just as it did the rest of us. He has never left. His men married into the tribe. Over the decades we have all become one people, the people of Cuchatlán.”

  “Wait a minute,” Cierra said. “If this is true, if all of you who live in this valley are well over a hundred years old, the population should have increased exponentially until there were thousands and thousands of you…perhaps hundreds of thousands.”

  Mariella shook her head. “The waters of the Well do not confer invulnerability, just immunity to aging. It’s true that they allow us to recover quickly from illness or injury, but if someone is hurt badly enough, he dies. Accidents happen. People are crushed by snakes or mauled by jaguars. They have falls. Such things keep the population down.” A sad smile came over her tired face. “And truly, everything comes with a price. People who drink from the Well of Eternity…have very few children.”

  “It causes sterility,” Gabriel said.

  “Not in everyone. But the women of the valley have a hard time getting with child. And when they do, the pregnancies are difficult. The babies often do not survive.”

  “It sounds like something in the water causes genetic mutations,” Cierra muttered reluctantly, realizing, Gabriel figured, that this admission on her part was tantamount to an admission that everything Mariella had told them might be true.

  “The gods give with one hand and take away with the other,” Mariella said.

  Esparza looked back at them. He had evidently been listening, too. “Once my scientists have analyzed the water and unlocked its secrets, something will be done about the side effects. The water will be perfected by the time I am ready to share it with the world.”

  “You mean sell it to the world, don’t you?” Gabriel asked.

  “Anyone who brings such a boon to mankind as eternal life deserves to be rewarded, don’t you think?” Esparza chuckled. “And with more than mere wealth. How does…emperor sound to you?”

  “Of Cuchatlán?”

  “Of the world, Mr. Hunt.”

  “It sounds like the ravings of a madman,” Gabriel said.

  Esparza’s mouth tightened into an angry line, but he didn’t say anything else to the prisoners. Instead he turned to Podnemovitch and ordered, “When we get there, have them taken to the palace with the others.”

  “The others?” Mariella repeated. “My husband! Where is my husband?”

  “Don’t worry about General Fargo,” Esparza said. “He’s alive, merely a prisoner now, like the rest.”

  Gabriel wondered how Esparza had managed to conquer the whole valley with only a handful of men, but he got the answer to that question a few minutes later when they entered the village and he saw the machine guns. Previously mounted on the trucks, they had been taken loose from their mounts, hauled all the way here, and set up to rake the village’s wooden huts with deadly .50-caliber fire. Several of the huts had been shot practically to pieces. General Fargo must have ordered his men to surrender rather than have all the people of Cuchatlán slaughtered.

  “Didn’t you have any modern weapons to defend yourselves?” Gabriel asked Mariella in an undertone. “Your people must have some money if they travel out of the valley from time to time, like you said. You could have bought some.”

  “Granville gave up war when he decided not to leave the valley,” she said. “He said the weapons his men had were enough to protect us from wild animals and for hunting. He said he had had enough of killing.”

  That was an admirable attitude, thought Gabriel…but only if everybody else you were likely to encounter shar
ed it. If they didn’t, then sooner or later you were in for a lot of trouble. As General Fargo had discovered today.

  Though it had worked for him for a long time. Gabriel had to admit that much. Fargo had had almost a hundred and fifty years in these idyllic surroundings, with a beautiful, intelligent woman at his side. That was way more than any normal man could hope for.

  The three pyramids formed a rough triangle, with the palace sitting along one leg of the triangle between two of them. In the center of the triangle was a broad, round plaza made of intricately interlocking flat stones. The stones had been painted subtly differing shades of green and brown and tan, so that from the air they would look like a clearing in the jungle, but not necessarily a man-made one. A large, flat, circular stone sat in the middle of the plaza. It was probably ten feet in diameter, a couple of feet thick, and must have weighed at least a thousand pounds. It wasn’t so heavy that it couldn’t be moved if enough men were pushing it, though. That was obvious from the markings on the flagstones where it had been shoved aside.

  The circular stone was a well cover, Gabriel realized as he saw the four-foot-wide hole that had been revealed when the rock was moved. “The Well of Eternity,” Esparza said in a voice that betrayed a touch of awe as he came to a stop beside it.

  “The Maya used to sacrifice virgins by throwing them in wells like that,” Cierra said. “They were considered entrances to the realm of the gods.”

  Esparza smiled at her. “Don’t worry, my dear. Such a fate won’t befall you. As I’m sure Mr. Hunt can attest, you would hardly qualify anyway.”

  Cierra’s eyes narrowed angrily, but she didn’t say anything else. Esparza motioned to his men, and the prisoners were prodded on toward the palace.

  Although it was a lot shorter than the nearby pyramids, no more than thirty or forty feet tall rather than a hundred feet or more, its base shared the same sort of construction. A series of terraced steps, only rising to a long, columned building instead of continuing on up to tiny temples.