Black Sun: A Thriller Read online

  Akula, murdering his crew. He had never heard of such a thing.

  The Star tilted farther and items came pouring out of open cabinets. He pulled himself through the doorway and stood on what had been the bridge’s side wall. It began dropping away beneath his feet. The ship was rolling. A rush of air came up through the water.

  He jumped.

  Landing hard on the pack ice, he tumbled. Yuri was flung free of his grasp, sliding and sprawling on the ice.

  A thunderous crash erupted behind him and Petrov turned to see his boat plunging toward the depths of the sea. Pockets of air exploded as the vessel went down; concussions echoed through the frigid air and waves of debris came rushing to the surface.

  And then it was quiet.

  Roiling black water, floating wreckage, and small chunks of ice swirled where the ship had been, but the noise of the struggle had ceased.

  He looked to the south. The survival boat was gone and the only sign of the crew was a pair of empty life-jackets. In places he saw the sharks crossing back and forth, searching for anything they might have missed. Only he and Yuri remained.

  Somehow they had landed on the edge of the ice pack. Three feet thick and as hard as concrete, it might as well have been solid ground.

  He turned to look at the boy.

  Their cargo, paid for at a cost of ten million dollars, with the lives of his crew taken for interest. Did he even know what he was? What he could do? Did it even matter anymore?

  Already shivering, Petrov stood. He raised his eyes to what lay beyond them: a shelf of brilliant white, the barren wasteland of the ice pack, floating on the salt water of the sea. It was a continent in all but name, with only two citizens to inhabit it. And in all likelihood, they would be dead before the sun rose again.

  CHAPTER 1

  Southern Mexico, December 2012

  Danielle Laidlaw scrambled up the side of Mount Pulimundo, sliding on the loose shale and grabbing for purchase with her hands as much as her feet. The frenetic pace of the ascent combined with the thin mountain air had her legs aching and her lungs burning. But she could not afford to slow down.

  Thirty-four years old, attractive, and athletic, Danielle was a member of the National Research Institute, a strange hybrid of an organization, often considered a science-based version of the CIA. That they were currently searching for the truth behind an ancient Mayan legend seemed odd, but they had their reasons. The fact that another armed group was trying to stop them told Danielle that those reasons had leaked.

  She glanced back to one of the men climbing with her. Thirty feet downslope, Professor Michael McCarter struggled. “Come on, Professor,” she urged. “They’re getting closer.”

  Breathing heavily, he looked up at her. Imminent exhaustion seemed to prevent a reply, but he pushed forward with renewed determination.

  She turned to their guide, a twenty-year-old Chiapas Indian named Oco. “How much farther?”

  “We must get over the top,” he told her, in heavily accented English. “It is on the other side.”

  A few minutes later they crested the summit. McCarter fell to his hands and knees, and Danielle pulled a pair of binoculars from her pack.

  They stood on the rim of a volcanic crater. A thousand feet below lay a mountain lake with a small, cone-shaped island bursting upward at its center. The island’s steep sides were thickly wooded but unable to disguise its volcanic nature. Yellowish fog clung to it, drifting downwind from vents and cracks.

  “Is this it?”

  Oco nodded. “Isla Cubierta,” he said. Island of the Shroud.

  Danielle studied it through the binoculars. If Oco was right, this place would be the key to finding what they were searching for: a Mayan site that legends referred to as the Mirror, a reference to Tohil, the Mayan god of fire, who wore an obsidian mirror on his forehead. It was a symbol of power and might, and if Danielle, McCarter, and the NRI were correct, a symbol of far more than that. But so far the Mirror had remained hidden. To find it they needed help, help that supposedly existed on the Island of the Shroud.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “The statue is there,” he insisted. “I saw it once. When I came with the shaman. He told me that the time was coming, the time when all things would change.”

  Danielle scanned the terrain. To reach the lake required a hazardous descent, down a steep embankment of loose and crumbling shale on the caldera’s inner cone. It would be rough, but much easier physically than the climb they’d just completed.

  She tied her hair into a ponytail to let the breeze cool her neck, then settled her eyes on McCarter. He’d managed a sitting position now, though his chest still heaved and fell. His loose linen shirt was open; the T-shirt he wore underneath was drenched in perspiration. Sweat poured down his face, leaving brackish, salty trails on his dark skin.

  McCarter was in good shape for a sixty-year-old university professor. And they’d brought only small packs and limited supplies, having discarded all else in the name of speed. But three days of constant hiking and climbing had taken its toll.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  He looked up, clearly in a state of unreadiness.

  “It’s all downhill from here,” she promised.

  “I’ve been hearing that load of tripe since I turned forty,” he said, between breaths. “And so far nothing has gotten any easier.” He waved her on. “Go. I’ll try to catch up.”

  McCarter and Danielle were an unlikely team, but they’d formed a bond two years earlier, when Danielle had recruited him for an expedition to the Amazon. Things had started well enough, but in the depths of the jungle everything had gone horribly wrong. By the thinnest of margins, the two of them and a very few others had survived.

  In the aftermath of that mission, Danielle had quit the NRI and McCarter had gone back to New York to teach. At the time, he had seemed far more likely to sue the organization than to ever work for it again, but in answering to his own curiosity he’d agreed to do just that. Despite her own reasons not to, Danielle had rejoined as well, in hopes of protecting him. The way she figured it, she owed him that much. He would never have heard of the NRI if she hadn’t recruited him. After eight months in the field and several close calls, including a car bomb and two shootings, she wasn’t about to leave him now.

  Besides, her only chance of returning to Washington, D.C., and the semblance of a normal life she’d been building was to finish this job and deposit McCarter safely back in New York.

  “We stick together,” she said. “Besides, you’re the expert here. You’re the one who needs to see this. All we have to do is get down there before them, learn what we need to know, and follow the lake out.”

  “And what happens when they catch us?”

  “They want the statue. They’re not going to chase us.”

  She extended a hand, which McCarter eyed suspiciously before reaching out and grasping.

  She helped him to his feet and the three of them went over the side, skidding and sliding and running where they could. As they reached the bottom, she could hear shouting far up above. Their pursuers had come to the crest.

  “Hurry,” she said, racing across the last ten yards of solid ground and diving into the cold mountain lake.

  When they were halfway across, gunfire began cracking from the ridge. Shots clipped the water around them and she dove under the surface and kept kicking until she could no longer hold her breath.

  She came up shrouded in the sulfurous mist. McCarter and Oco surfaced beside her.

  The gunfire had ceased but another sound caught her attention: a distant rhythmic thumping reaching out across the mountains. It was the staccato clatter of helicopter blades, somewhere to the east. Apparently their enemies had a new trick in store.

  “Where is it?” she asked Oco.

  He pointed toward the summit. “At the top,” he said. “Hidden in the trees.”

  They climbed the steep angle of the island’s slope, using the trees a
s handholds. They found the statue at the dead center. A great block of stone with the outline of a man carved into it, a Mayan king in full regalia. In his right hand he carried what looked like a net holding four stones. In his left was an orb of some kind. Hieroglyphic writing was scrawled across the bottom and a great snake twisted across the top, with its large open mouth stretching down as if to devour the king with a single bite.

  “Ahau Balam,” McCarter said, reading the title glyphs. “The Jaguar King. Spirit guide of the Brotherhood.”

  Oco, who was of Mayan descent, fell silent in awe. McCarter did likewise.

  Danielle was more concerned with the danger closing in on them. From the sound she guessed that the helicopter was no more than three minutes away and that the men behind them had to be scrambling down the cliff by now.

  “We need to get this information and disappear,” she said. “What do you see?”

  McCarter studied the writing, eyes darting here and there. He touched one glyph and then another. He seemed confused.

  “Professor?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said.

  The sound of the helicopter lumbered closer, growing into a baritone roar.

  “We have two minutes,” she said. “Maybe less.”

  He shook his head in disbelief. “There’s no story here. No explanation. It’s mostly just numbers.”

  “Dates?”

  “No. Just random numbers.”

  Her mind reeled. She couldn’t believe what he was saying.

  “Maybe if I—”

  She cut him off. “No time.”

  She pulled out her camera, snapped off a shot, and then checked the screen. The stone was so weathered that the glyphs didn’t come out clearly. She took another from a different angle, with a similar result. There just wasn’t enough definition.

  The helicopter was closing in. She could hear the men on foot shouting as they came down the caldera’s embankment.

  “It’s not clear enough,” she said.

  McCarter stared at her for a second and then tore off his shirt, dropped to the base of the statue, and pressed it up against the raised hieroglyphs. Holding it there with one hand, he began rubbing fistfuls of the volcanic soil against the surface of the shirt. Oco helped him.

  The helicopter thundered by overhead. Slowing and turning. Looking for a place to land. She thanked the heavens that there wasn’t one to be found.

  She dropped down beside him to help. The shapes of the carving began to emerge, the edges and the details. It looked like a blurry charcoal drawing, but it was working.

  As they worked, pine needles, leaves, and chaff began to swirl around them. The helicopter was moving in above, its downwash blasting everything about.

  “That’s it,” she said. “No more time.”

  McCarter rolled up the shirt and tucked it into his backpack while Danielle grabbed a large stone and began smashing the surface of the statue. The glyphs of the priceless work crumbled under the blows, shards flying like sparks from a grinding wheel.

  Suddenly, weighted ropes dropped through the trees, unfurling like snakes.

  “Run!” she shouted.

  McCarter and Oco took off. Men clad in midnight blue slid down the ropes, crashing through the trees.

  Danielle wheeled around, pulling out a Glock 9mm pistol. Before she could fire, two metal prongs hit her in the back, penetrating her shirt. A shock racked her body. She fell forward unable to move or even shout, crashing hard like a sack of flour and convulsing from the Taser.

  Lying on her side, she saw Oco go over the edge and McCarter running after him, wires from the Taser darts trailing after him. He managed to dodge them, then lurched suddenly at the hammering of a submachine gun. A spatter of blood flew and he went tumbling over the steep embankment.

  The next moments were a blur. She tried to move, only to have another jolt from the Taser rack her body. As she was rolling on the ground, men surrounded her and zip-tied her wrists behind her back. All around the trees bent and whipped beneath the thunderous symphony of the helicopter’s downwash.

  She glanced up. A dark shape filled a gap in the trees. It was a Sikorsky Skycrane, a huge beast, shaped like a hovering claw, with an empty space for a belly where it could secure incredible payloads. Tractor trailers and small tanks could be suspended beneath it. The thing would have no trouble with the stone monument.

  Heavy chains dropped from the monster and were secured. The whirling blades roared, the chains snapped taught, and the statue was pulled free.

  The man beside her grabbed a radio from his hip. “We have one of them,” he said.

  He looked toward the rim over which McCarter and Oco had flown.

  “The local boy got away. But the other one’s dead.”

  Danielle’s heart fell; the words left her sick.

  “Take her out past the mist,” she heard the guard say. “They’re going to drop a basket for her.”

  Danielle was forced to stand and then dragged off. As she was pulled past the spot where McCarter had fallen, her legs nearly gave out. McCarter lay unmoving on his side, thirty feet down the steep slope, wrapped awkwardly around a tree. His back was bent at an impossible angle and his eyes remained open, staring lifelessly into the distance. His T-shirt was soaked with blood.

  She hesitated, her legs feeling as if they might give out. A shove in the back sent her moving again.

  Five minutes later she was in the cabin of the giant helicopter, the carved relic secured in the bay, with McCarter, Oco, and the Island of the Shroud disappearing far behind her.

  CHAPTER 2

  Professor McCarter lay unmoving on the black volcanic slope. His eyes were open and fixed, staring forward at the oddly tilted landscape. He’d tumbled down the slope of the wooded island, slamming the base of his spine against the tree. The backpack had flown out of his hand, disappearing farther down into the mist. McCarter himself had come to rest looking up the hill, watching as both Danielle and the statue were hauled away.

  He lay motionless but not by choice. His body was numb and cold. He couldn’t feel his feet or legs or anything below his waist. He could barely feel the tips of his fingers. He could barely breathe. He couldn’t have called out for help, even if he’d wanted to.

  Alone now, fear had begun to grip him. McCarter guessed that he was paralyzed, and to the men up the steep slope from him it must have looked as if he were dead.

  He’d been hit in the leg. And though the flow had slowed quite a bit, McCarter had never seen so much blood.

  And now he could feel nothing, even as blood followed the course of gravity and seeped from his elevated leg up his torso and soaked his shirt. It was a strange thing to him: The mind worked, the mind attempted to make the limbs work, and when nothing happened the mind made its conclusions and rendered its report.

  For several minutes he lay like that, wondering if his fate or Danielle’s was worse. But instead of his breathing growing weaker and coming to an end, he began to feel a dull sensation in his legs. It wasn’t pain, but an uncomfortable buzzing, like pins and needles.

  It grew in shapeless waves and he soon found that he needed to attempt moving, just to fight against it. He rolled to his left and a tactile sense began returning to his hands.

  With great effort he managed to untangle himself from the tree. The fact that he was not paralyzed was a great relief; the fact that he was in considerable and growing pain was the opposite. Stiff and weak, he crawled a few feet and then collapsed. He lay there for another minute, face pressed into the soil of the sloping ground, before finally raising his head.

  Looking up the hill, he thought he saw a shape standing above him, the outline of a person, a woman.

  He blinked to try and focus and the shadow was gone.

  He tried to put the image down to his injured state, but it seemed real to him. Real enough that he attempted to scale the hill.

  Crawling, he struggled upward, making progress for a few yards. But the slope was too s
teep for his weakened body, the footing too loose. It crumbled under his hands and he began to slide, first to his original position and then farther down into the mist. A tumbling, unstoppable descent brought him down to the flatland at the water’s edge, right beside the backpack he’d lost half an hour before.

  He looked at the pack tentatively and then pulled it to him, zipping the compartments shut and trying to thread an arm through its straps. Before he could succeed, the sound of movement in the water reached him.

  It was Oco wading toward him.

  “They took the statue,” Oco said. “In the helicopter. I saw them.”

  “I know,” McCarter said. “We need to get help.”

  With Oco’s assistance, he wrapped and dressed his wound and then pulled a satellite phone from its watertight container in his pack. He powered it up, giving thanks for the green light that told him the signal was getting through.

  In his clouded mind, McCarter tried to remember what he was supposed to say, the acronyms Danielle had briefed him with over and over again. Terms and contingencies he didn’t want to think about, the worst of which had now come true.

  He pressed the initiate button and waited for the satellite to link up. An answering voice came on the line, a staff member in a secured communications room in Washington, D.C.

  McCarter needed someone of higher authority.

  “This is Professor Michael McCarter,” he said. “Attached to Project Icarus. My code is seven, seven, four, tango, foxtrot. We’ve been attacked. Our status is Mercury. Now get me Arnold Moore.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Twenty-four hours and five thousand miles from where Professor McCarter had called, Arnold Moore, director of the NRI, waited. For the second time this day, he had bad news to deliver.

  The first time had been to a former operative of his named Marcus Watson, who had left the NRI years prior. He now taught at Georgetown and was rumored to be engaged to Ms. Danielle Laidlaw.