Alpha Force: Fault Line Read online

  Finally, the area was clear. A pile of wood remained in the middle for the fire, laid out in the shape of a giant letter H, for signalling to the heli as it went over. Alex went round touching a flaming torch to it. The others sat at the edge on the three packed bergens, exhausted.

  ‘What if one bit of it goes out?’ said Li. ‘Then it won’t say H, it’ll look like a chair.’

  ‘Or a swastika,’ said Hex. ‘Hope the pilot won’t get the wrong idea about us.’

  When the H was fully ablaze, Alex came back and joined them.

  ‘Hombre,’ said Paulo, ‘I have to hand it to you. You don’t mess up very often, but when you do, you do it in style.’

  ‘I’m sorry, guys,’ said Alex. ‘Really sorry.’

  The heli sounded different without the canopy. The first they heard was drumming in the air, then a high-pitched whine that increased imperceptibly, as though it had always been there. Then they saw it, a black torpedo in the sky with a circular blur of rotor blades like a halo. It circled away and came back.

  Alex looked up. The pilot was waving.

  Alex understood. He jumped up. ‘He’s seen us. Let’s put the fire out, then he can come back.’

  The heli circled away.

  They seized the water still purifying in the containers. Alex started sloshing it on the fire. They’d spent so long fetching and carrying it and trying to conserve it that pouring it on the ground felt ridiculously naughty. He looked round and realized there were four containers aiming towards him, caps off. He only had time to yell as Li, Amber, Hex and Paulo gave him a good soaking. His energy levels soared like a sugar rush and he retaliated. Soon the five friends were all haring around the H as it sizzled and died, joyfully dousing it and each other with water.

  Still laughing, they kicked the ashy debris out of the way so the heli could land.

  11 BELIZE CITY

  Airborne at last, the five friends strapped themselves in and relaxed. As the heli pulled away over the vast expanse of green, Amber put on the noise cancel headphones and used the satellite phone to call her uncle.

  ‘Hi, Uncle . . . Yeah, yeah, we’re all right. Sorry I couldn’t send a postcard. Had a great time though.’ A pause. ‘Oh you know, we were just trekking and stuff. Now listen, we’ve got this mask. Great big gold thing; bit like Tutankhamen but Mayan – you know what I mean? Looks quite valuable.’ Another pause. ‘Oh no, how we got it was quite boring really. A local gave it to us for saving his life. Anyway, we wondered if you know anywhere safe to drop it off because it’s probably a national treasure.’ Another pause. ‘Oh. Right. Can you call someone?’ Another pause. ‘OK, great. Bye.’

  She ended the call and took the headphones off. Immediately she was deafened by the noise of the heli – the high-pitched whine and heavy rhythm of the rotors. Li and Alex were looking out of the window at the jungle receding below. Paulo was checking on the patient. Hex was also wearing noise cancel headphones and checking his e-mail on his palmtop. He was completely absorbed, the blue glow of the screen the whole extent of his world. Amber reached over and pulled one of the headphone cups aside.

  Hex’s world was suddenly penetrated by the shrill engines and hammering rotors. It shocked him out of his pleasant reverie like a drill in his left ear. He looked around angrily and saw Amber’s grinning face. He knew he should just laugh along with her but the noise was too loud and intrusive. Plus he was knackered; he needed his downtime with his palmtop. He snatched the headphone back and put it back on his ear. The beat of the rotors and the sound of the engine dwindled to a far-off rumble, as though he was going underwater. Blissful quiet again.

  Paulo was checking Alex’s splinted fingers, feeling them gently.

  Amber looked out of the window. What an exhausting couple of days it had been. They’d planned a straightforward exercise and what had they got? Night terrors, mad monsters, tombs, treasures, tremors – and too many trees. These friends of hers could turn a quiet stroll into a rollercoaster. It would be sheer pleasure to chill out for a while.

  In two hours they were approaching Belize City. It was still green, but there were roads, which was a big change, and buildings – greying wooden houses with roofs of rusty corrugated iron, white adobe colonial-style houses roofed with red clay tiles, washing lines with colourful clothes drying in the twilight – all surrounded by deep green foliage, as though the jungle was trying to invade the city. It started to look more industrial: a cluster of corrugated iron buildings stood next to a big ravine that ran across the land like a scar.

  Amber leaned forward and looked down. The sides of the ravine bristled with trees and undergrowth. A bridge had been built over it, but a grey ribbon of tarmac headed straight down into it, its surface cracked as though it was very old. Obviously there’d been a quake, the road had been rebuilt and the old piece left in the hole.

  High-rise banks and offices reflected the setting sun in their windows like a giant fire. They passed over the silvery blue ribbon of Haulover Creek, the branch of the Belize River that cut the city in two. Traffic was queuing to get over the bridge, the waiting cars sending blue clouds of smog into the air. People were driving home after work. It was strange to see such normal modern things going on when they had been living such a basic, simple life barely a hundred kilometres away.

  The heli continued north, over houses and then a stadium. Now the Caribbean Sea was visible, glittering in the twilight, and, on the shore, the concrete runways of the Municipal Airport.

  The heli circled out over the sea and came back in to hover over a slab of tarmac with a letter H painted on it. Amber thought of their flaming H in the jungle. That seemed far better. Much as she had been itching to get out – literally – there was part of her that wanted to stay out in the wilds, just her and her friends.

  They touched down. Paramedics ran towards the heli with a stretcher, crouching low to stay clear of the rotors. Next to the ambulance a police car and a black police heli were waiting.

  The door was pulled open. Two paramedics in green overalls got in. They bent over the injured man and checked his pulse, respiration and other vital signs. One of them yelled to Paulo over the heli engines, ‘What happened?’

  ‘He was crushed by a large piece of stone.’

  ‘Have you given him any drugs?’

  ‘No. We splinted the leg but didn’t try to put it in traction,’ said Paulo.

  The medic patted Paulo on the arm. ‘You did a good job stabilizing him. We’ll take him now.’

  Li and Paulo helped them unload the robber. They laid their makeshift stretcher on top of the hospital trolley that was waiting. Their sharpened stakes and dirty, ragged bandages looked like something the Flintstones had made next to the clean steel. The medics ran it away across the concrete runway to the waiting ambulance.

  Alpha Force climbed out of the heli, heaved their bergens out and followed. Behind them the heli engine wound down and the rotors slowed, became visible.

  The robber was loaded into the ambulance and a policeman got in behind. A doctor in white coat and green scrubs saw Alex with his splinted fingers. He looked at Paulo. ‘More of your handiwork?’

  ‘Afraid so,’ said Paulo.

  The doctor put a hand around Alex’s shoulders and guided him to the open tailgate. ‘Sit down and let’s have a look.’

  One of the paramedics came up to Amber, Hex and Li. ‘Anyone else need a doctor? Any injuries, cuts, abrasions?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Amber rolled up her trouser leg. The scratches from the wait-a-while plant showed as red weals on her dark skin. ‘These are driving me mad. I’m a diabetic, by the way.’

  The medic squatted down and examined them. ‘Leave your trouser leg rolled up and let the sun get to them. Now you’re out of the jungle they should clear up by themselves. The bite as well.’ He looked around at the others. ‘Anyone else? All been taking your anti-malarials? All feeling well? No food poisoning?’

  The doctor finished rebandaging Alex’s hand. The ragged s
ling and boy-scout splints were in a rubbish bag and he now wore a proper splint and white bandage. ‘I don’t need an X-ray, then?’ said Alex.

  ‘No point. It’s swollen like a ham and nothing will show up. It’s all straight so if there’s a break it will heal fine – just keep it splinted.’ Alex remembered the crooked mess his hand had been after the accident and silently thanked Paulo for his finger-bending torture.

  The doctor dropped a pack of pills into his hand. ‘Use these painkillers. Now I think you’d better go – they’re waiting for you.’

  Alex hefted up his bergen with his good arm and stepped out of the ambulance. The black police heli was starting up and his friends were getting in it. Out of habit, he checked their expressions. No distress signals, good. Apart from the pilot there was another guy getting in with them, a man in a suit with dark Timberland boots. Funny combination. Someone who wasn’t completely comfortable in formal clothing? He didn’t look dangerous, though. Alex smiled to himself as he ran over. Call me paranoid, he thought, but I just can’t easily accept lifts from strangers.

  Amber and Li grabbed his bergen and put it with the others on the floor. Paulo and Hex hauled him in.

  ‘This is Felipe,’ said Amber, as Alex buckled himself in.

  ‘Hi,’ said Alex. ‘Are we going to the police?’ The heli wound up to full power and lifted off.

  ‘No,’ said Felipe. ‘The museum. We didn’t want to waste any time.’ The heli drew away from the airport and swung away towards the city.

  ‘Is this something to do with your uncle?’ shouted Hex to Amber.

  ‘Suppose so,’ she yelled.

  ‘He works fast,’ said Li.

  Below, rush-hour crowds queued in a fug of smog to get over the bridges from one side of the city to the other. It didn’t look any different from when they’d come over fifteen minutes before.

  ‘It’s always gridlocked at this time,’ shouted Felipe. ‘We thought it was better to bypass all that.’ He pointed at his ears. ‘I’ll explain more when it’s quieter.’

  The flight lasted only minutes. In no time they were coming down again, landing on a flat lawn in front of a long low modern building about the size of a football pitch. Beside it was a sign carved in stone: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF BELIZE.

  ‘I would have thought it would be in Spanish,’ said Li.

  Felipe unbuckled his belt. ‘No. English is the official language of Belize. Most of our street names are English.’ He opened the door. ‘Come in.’

  He led them in through a marble entrance. In the lobby stood a startling monolith, twice the height of a man. A female face peered out from two-thirds of the way up. The features were fine and oriental. Around the face was an elaborate construction of Mayan hieroglyphs and symbols.

  ‘Wow,’ said Li, ‘that is so beautiful.’

  ‘It’s a stele from Lubaantun in the south,’ said Felipe. ‘We’ve excavated there but we haven’t had the funds to restore it so it’s just a jungle. We brought the best treasures here to save them. There are two more behind you but they’re not as spectacular.’

  As one, they turned round. Two more giant figures flanked the door. But there was no time to linger. Felipe was already hurrying through a vast hall to the right. This room contained a long, painted frieze.

  Amber recognized the style: cross-legged figures in tall headdresses surrounded by more of the bubble-like hieroglyph symbols. ‘We saw something like this in the tomb in the jungle.’

  ‘Very probably,’ said Felipe. ‘There are undiscovered sites all over central America, but the jungle makes exploring difficult. It’s often special forces who find them, on exercise.’

  If Felipe had looked round he would have seen that his five guests were trying to hide enormous smiles.

  ‘And when we do get there,’ he continued, ‘we find many of them have been plundered anyway.’

  He led the way past glass cabinets. Alpha Force caught glimpses of old axes; needles made from slivers of bone; pottery decorated with the bubble hieroglyphs in fine brushwork.

  To the left was a swing door marked PRIVATE. Felipe pushed against it with his back and ushered them into an office. After the vastness of the museum it seemed small and homely. A desk overflowed with papers; a kettle stood on a side shelf next to a couple of mugs and a small reproduction of the stele in the lobby. Around the room were photos of Felipe – mostly next to overgrown tombs like the one they’d just left. Only one photo showed him wearing a suit – a formal picture of him shaking hands with some mayor. Alex decided the rugged boots were Felipe’s more normal attire – so why was he wearing a suit today?

  ‘Take a seat,’ said Felipe. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got. John Middleton said it was gold.’ He sounded a little sceptical.

  Hex opened the top of his bergen and pulled out the object wrapped in his T-shirt. He unfolded the material, removed the top layer of cotton wool and laid it carefully on the desk.

  Felipe gasped. For a moment he just sat there, looking at the golden object on the black material, the white cotton wool poking through on the underside. Then he reached for it with both hands, lifting it on the T-shirt, as if he didn’t want to touch the object itself.

  ‘Hey, it looks rather cool, doesn’t it?’ said Paulo. He’d forgotten how impressive it was.

  ‘Is it all right?’ said Amber to Felipe.

  Felipe seemed to come to from a dream. ‘Have you any idea how rare this is?’ He slowly turned it over, letting the black material fall away as he inspected the back of the mask. He picked up an eye glass to examine it more closely.

  ‘How do you know my uncle?’ said Amber.

  ‘John Middleton? He’s had connections with the museum for a few years.’

  ‘Like what?’ said Amber. She knew he had a lot of powerful friends but it wasn’t often that she came across one in the flesh.

  ‘Oh I don’t know. It was in the days before they gave me this desk job.’

  A phone rang. Felipe pushed papers around the desk and uncovered the receiver. He lifted it. ‘Yes?’ He still wore the black-rimmed eyeglass. With his heavy black Hispanic brows it made him look deranged. ‘They’re here already. Good. We’ll be right out.’ He opened his eye wide and dropped the eyeglass onto the papers. ‘Are you guys ready to go on TV?’

  12 CELEBRITIES

  Felipe led them into a further gallery. They were expecting to see the TV crew – but what took them completely by surprise was the looming skeleton of a dinosaur. The huge gallery was home to a tyrannosaurus rex. The bones were dark brown, the skull, ribcage and forelimbs looming above them like struts in the nave of a cathedral. The bones of the spine snaked down and away to the back of the room like a rollercoaster track. In the distance, behind the dinosaur, the wall had been painted with a prehistoric jungle scene, punctuated by plaster sculptures of smaller dinosaurs.

  ‘Come on, they need you over there.’ A woman with cropped red hair and a museum official badge on her jacket was trying to move them on. Felipe was already a little further down the gallery, watching a man with a shoulder-mounted camera film a glamorously groomed woman in front of a three-metre-high stone carving.

  Alpha Force went closer. They weren’t the only audience. A small group of schoolchildren and teachers were watching her as she talked into a microphone and looked earnestly into the camera.

  ‘I’m here in the capital at the National Museum, to hear how five backpackers made the archaeological find of the century.’

  The five friends looked at each other. The find of the century?

  Alex muttered, ‘No wonder Felipe had to put a suit on.’

  Li looked at their ripped, stained clothes. ‘Damn, should we have dressed up?’

  The glamorous woman finished her piece and the cameraman gave her a thumbs up. She turned to Felipe, who had been adjusting his tie over and over again. He only stopped because she grabbed his hand and shook it briskly. ‘Felipe, nice to meet you. I’m Carmela Hernandez, Channel Five News, Great Belize TV
. Are these the heroes?’

  Carmela didn’t wait for a reply. She had already decided how to stage-manage the situation. She took Amber by the shoulders, put her decisively in front, and set Paulo and Li on either side. ‘If you two get as close behind the others as possible,’ she said to Alex and Hex. ‘No sneaking out of the side of the picture.’

  Alex and Hex exchanged a look. They were trapped. No ambush could have been more professional. Sneaking out of the side was exactly what they’d had in mind. Alex felt himself blushing to his roots and Hex looked down at his boots; they were caked in jungle mud.

  Carmela positioned herself beside Paulo. ‘Right, stay where you are and I’ll just ask you a few questions.’ She nodded at the cameraman. ‘Ready to roll?’

  The cameraman gave her a thumbs up. Carmela thrust her microphone towards Amber. ‘So tell me how you found the mask.’

  Amber responded with natural confidence. ‘We were camping in the jungle, about a hundred kilometres away from here. We came across this overgrown tomb.’

  Carmela took back the microphone. ‘And you had to fight off a tomb robber to get it, didn’t you?’ She thrust the microphone at Paulo this time.

  Paulo wondered how she knew that, but he answered smoothly, ‘Not exactly. We went in because we heard someone in trouble. A man had got trapped. While we were helping him I saw this mask looking at me.’

  ‘And we’ve got the mask right here, haven’t we?’

  Li felt something tap her on the hand. Felipe was on his hands and knees, holding out the mask. Li took it, brought it up and smiled at the camera as though she had been holding it all the time. The cameraman panned to her just as Felipe scooted out of the way on all fours.

  There was an audible gasp of ‘Ooh’ from the schoolchildren, followed by shushings.

  Carmela, ever the pro, smiled into the camera. ‘Well, you can probably hear what a stir it’s caused here; and I can tell you that it’s an awesome sight. Felipe Gomez is the curator here – I’d like to bring him in now.’ She turned away from Paulo to where Felipe had been positioned ready for her. ‘Felipe, we can all see it’s a beautiful work; would you like to tell us why the mask is so historically important?’