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Peru—one week earlier
“You really should consider carrying a pistol.”
Jade Ihara glanced over at the lanky, sandy-haired man who had just growled at her, and frowned. “That’s what I have you for,” she retorted.
Pete “Professor” Chapman shook his head wearily. “I’m not Rambo. Even I need back-up once in a while.”
Jade didn’t have any real objection to guns, and had used them once or twice in particularly sticky situations—situations a lot like this, actually—but there were some very good reasons why she chose not to make a habit of carrying, not the least of which was that most of the countries where she operated—Jade was an archaeologist specializing in pre-Columbian American cultures—took a dim view of visiting scholarly types walking around packing heat. It was true; Professor wasn’t Rambo, and she wasn’t Indy-anna Jones or Angelina what’s-her-name... The Tomb Raider chick. Actually, if anyone was Indiana Jones, it was Professor in his Explorer fedora, a lucky charm he’d picked up in Costa Rica during one of their adventures together. But headgear or no, running around the jungle, looting temples and blasting away the bad guys wasn’t her standard operating procedure.
“In case you haven’t no—”
She broke off as another volley of automatic rifle fire tore into the sandstone right above her head, spraying them with chips of stone and hot lead fragments. The gunmen were shooting from multiple locations, closing in on them like a noose.
Jade ducked reflexively, even though she was already ducking just about as low as was humanly possible. Professor calmly stabbed his semi-automatic pistol in the direction from which the fire had come, squeezed off several shots in rapid succession.
Professor was actually a lot more Rambo-like than he cared to admit. Despite his nickname, he wasn’t really a college teacher—not at the moment, anyway—and hadn’t been when he’d earned the nickname early on in his first career as a Navy SEAL. His teammates had started calling him that because of his encyclopedic knowledge of just about any subject imaginable and because of his tendency to lecture. He was currently working for a highly-classified elite US government task force called the ‘Myrmidons’ and more specifically, acting as Jade’s bodyguard-slash-assistant, which was why he had no compunction about carrying unregistered weapons wherever Jade’s work took her. In truth, Jade wasn’t even sure how he was able to smuggle the weapons into the various destinations they visited, but she trusted that he would always be ready to face down whatever threat presented itself.
Sometimes—this time, in fact—the threat was more than he could reasonably handle, but Jade really didn’t see how the situation would be that much different if she was armed, too.
“I’ll think about it,” she said, but before she could say any more on the topic, Professor grabbed her arm and dragged her away from the sloping stone face, and toward the nearly impenetrable jungle. A hail of bullets tore into the rock wall, right where she had been crouching a moment before.
Another burst from a rifle raked the jungle canopy as the two of them plunged headlong into the underbrush. Roots and vines snagged Jade’s feet and would have tripped her up, but the tangle of ferns and thorny branches kept her upright, even as they lashed her face and arms. Professor had traded his pistol for a machete, but with the gunmen behind them, there wasn’t time to do much more than swing wildly and hope for the best. There was a perfectly good trail, not fifty yards away, but Jade knew they’d never reach it, and even if they did, it would only make it easier for the gunmen to find them.
After just a few seconds of crashing through the brush, Professor seemed to get the hang of moving through the dense rainforest, finding the path of least resistance, but Jade could hear shouts and movement in the jungle all around them. The gunmen were still close, and probably closing in.
“This way,” Professor whispered, pulling her along as he ducked through a gap in the thicket that looked barely wide enough for a cat to slip through. Jade did her best to move stealthily, but the rustling noise she made as she pushed forward sounded to her like a jet taking off. Something snagged her hair and jerked her head back. Just a branch, but it was enough to stop her in her tracks. She wrapped a hand around her ponytail, gripping it like she would a length of rope to keep her hair from being torn out by the roots, and then drove forward again, hastening after Professor.
The site they were visiting, located in the remote jungles of Manu National Park, a biosphere reserve with few roads and only a handful of permanent occupants—all indigenous natives from the friendly Matsigenga tribe—was supposed to be safe; safe of course being a relative term in the jungle.
They had come here to investigate the so-called “pyramids” of Paratoari, a series of sandstone formations in the Peruvian jungle, first noticed in satellite photographs taken in 1976. Seen from space, the formations—at least eight uniformly shaped and sized objects arranged in evenly-spaced parallel rows—appeared too symmetrical to be the work of geological forces, and for at least twenty years thereafter, they were believed to be evidence of an undiscovered archaeological site, perhaps even the lost Incan city of Paititi. The first on-site investigation in 1996 however not only confirmed the alternative and boringly-plausible hypothesis that the so-called structures were in fact naturally occurring rock formations but also revealed that they were not as perfectly symmetrical as they appeared in the satellite photographs. This revelation however had not dampened the enthusiasm of fringe archaeology enthusiasts—the sort of people who believed that ancient civilizations were influenced by extraterrestrial visitors.
While Jade did not doubt the accepted truth—that the “pyramids” were just truncated ridge spurs—there was some evidence of an Inca presence in the area, including ancient paved roads, platforms, and petroglyphs, all of which raised the possibility that the Inca might have revered the naturally occurring pyramid-shaped rocks, possibly even excavating passages and interior chambers in which to hide the long-sought legendary gold of Paititi, passages which had subsequently been hidden by the dense jungle foliage. If Paititi did exist, and there were several compelling lines of evidence to suggest that it did, it was almost certainly located somewhere in the region, so why not under the “pyramids”?
It was a longshot of course, but the only way to rule it out definitively was with an on-site survey, which was why Jade and Professor had flown to Cuzco, high in the Andes mountains, and then driven a rented Land Rover down the treacherous and winding primitive roads into the Amazon Basin to a spot near the native settlement of Shintuya on the banks of the Madre de Dios River. The Paratoari site was just a few miles to the west, but getting to it required crossing the river and then bushwhacking through the dense forest. After an hour or so of hacking a path through the foliage, they had stumbled onto what they assumed was a trail cut by some previous expedition. It was only when they neared the pyramid-shaped rocks that they realized who was actually using the trail.
Jade was both physically and mentally prepared—as prepared as anyone could ever really be—for the ordinary dangers common to tropical rain forest ecosystems: animal predators, snakes, spiders and other bugs, toxic plants, mosquito- and water-borne diseases. But she had not anticipated stumbling across a camp of armed men living in the woods.
They were probably drug smugglers, shuttling cocaine from a processing plant hidden in the jungle to an illegal airfield for transport out of the country, or possibly anti-government Shining Path guerillas—or more likely some combination of the two. There weren’t supposed to be any drug smugglers or guerillas in the area, but then those people didn’t exactly advertise their presence in Trip Advisor.
Bottom line, there were a lot of bad guys, maybe as many as a dozen, and one more pistol between herself and Professor wasn’t likely to tip the odds.