Burial Ground

IV

5:37 p.m.

There was no way in hell that Colton was abandoning a fortune in gold now that it was firmly in his grasp. He had taken command of the situation and had his men running around making the necessary preparations. With the way the level of the river had risen even while they crossed it hours ago, he knew there was no chance the others would make it beyond the engorged banks tonight. Not with the way the rain continued to fall. They would return at any moment, but in the meantime, he and his men needed to ready themselves for the coming night. The fortress was too large and sprawling, and too thick with vegetation to easily patrol, so they needed to fortify a defensible perimeter. But against what were they defending themselves? While he had initially scoffed at Russell's nonsensical blatherings, the evidence was impossible to ignore. The broken and disarticulated skeletons everywhere. The slaughtered remains of Gearhardt's son's party. The feathers, and especially the feces containing human matter.

He couldn't fool himself into thinking that firepower was the solution. After all, Rippeth had been armed to the teeth when he had been torn apart.

How could anything like what Russell proposed have survived so long without being discovered, even this high in the unexplored cloud forest? He thought of Carson's theory, that the primitive Mesoamerican tribes had known about them and had worshipped them as gods. Unfortunately, all of those venerable civilizations---the Aztec, the Inca, the Maya---had all vanished from the face of the planet at the height of their power. Did one correlate to the other?

There was no time for speculation. There was still too much left to do, and night was already falling as the sun vanished behind the peak above them.

The first order of business had been to crack open the case and suitably arm themselves. He and his men had each slung one of the SCARs over their shoulders and grabbed a pair of both incendiary and fragmentary grenades. They now scurried around the site following his commands.

Webber had been dispatched to light fires in all of the columns surrounding the outer fortifications. While the iron cages protected the flames from the rain, they barely burned six inches tall with the limited amount of dry kindling and wood they had been able to find. Tending to them would be a full-time job.

Morton had set to work with the machete, clearing the area immediately surrounding the main stone building. If the former occupants of the village had determined that the domicile was the safest place to take refuge, then who was he to second guess them? There was no time to find a more secure location.

Sorenson was nearly finished reassembling the fallen stone barricades that had once blocked the doorways, and was preparing to move on to his next task.

Leo had managed to light the handful of torches that formed a half-circle around the stone platforms and the front half of the main dwelling between repeated attempts to raise the outside world on the satellite phone. He hadn't even been able to get a signal. Sure, the storm affected their reception, but Colton knew it was more than just that, and he was close to proving it.

The ground-penetrating radar had shown that the paving stones had been laid on a solid foundation of bedrock, as he had expected. Granted, there were varying thicknesses in the strata, but all of it was solid rock to the furthest depths of the sensing device's range. The magnetometer, however, confirmed his hypothesis.

He studied the small monitor on the magnetometer, which looked like a haphazardly assembled vacuum cleaner made of scraps of metal, as he walked in a straight line. The harness strapped to his shoulders allowed him to hold the unit suspended several inches above the ground. Different types of rocks were displayed in subtle shades of gray and black as the signal released by the magnetometer was interpreted and analyzed to determine the magnetic properties of the ground. As he had hoped, capillaries of gold extended from the main vein. Of course, there were also large deposits of quartz and especially magnetite, which composed the bulk of the stone underfoot and appeared nearly black on the monitor. And what was another name for magnetite? Lodestone. In previous centuries, its magnetic properties had been used to polarize needles to create functional compasses. The ground was positively packed with enough magnetic material to interfere with any satellite uplink.

At least now he understood why they had lost contact with Gearhardt's son's expedition. If only he could answer the question regarding how they had been caught unaware and so mercilessly butchered.

All he had to go on was that two of the men had presumably been in the process of bedding down for the night, while the other two had been overcome inside the mountain. Their attackers must have entered the cave via the tunnel from the room filled with feces, where they had killed one man and sent the other running for his life. But what did that imply? Had their assailants descended under the cover of darkness?

And how had Hunter managed to escape? Why hadn't he been similarly ripped apart?

Colton looked again to the sky. The encroaching night was advancing far more quickly than he had anticipated, as though a blanket were slowly settling over the entire region.

He returned the magnetometer to the crate and headed back toward where the others labored. The torches merely cast elongated shadows and did precious little to provide actual illumination. They were going to need more light if they were to properly secure their impromptu compound, but the forest was drenched and there was nothing combustible for miles. They had brought no fuel or---

Colton stopped dead in his tracks. The rain pattered his poncho and the grumble of thunder rolled down the hillside.

A lopsided grin spread on his face as he hurried toward the staircase leading up to the building.

"You're wasting your time," he said to Leo in passing. "The whole area's solid magnetite."

He ducked past Sorenson and through the partially barricaded threshold. He was certain he had seen what he was looking for in here.

The fluttering glow of the torch behind him made his shadow dance on the stone floor in the rectangle of orange light from the doorway. A metallic glint drew his eye to the left side of the chamber, opposite the mess of bones to his right. He approached what at first appeared to be an ancient mound of crumbling bricks, but as he neared, the metal inside of them glimmered, even in the wan glare.

He remembered the pots they had found near the fire pit. Perhaps whoever had holed up in here had used one of them to cook the dead, but the other one, the one with the carbon scoring, had been used to concoct something else entirely.

This was how the survivors before them had held the darkness at bay.

He lifted one of the jagged bricks and appreciated its weight.

Thermite.

They weren't just going to light up the night. They were going to set it on fire.