Black Rain

He turned to Susan. “How much farther?”

She stared at him blankly through the plastic of the gas mask. “How would I know?”

Of course she wouldn’t know. It was a stupid question. Why the hell was he even talking to her? He pushed on, sliding and crouching and feeling the burn in his legs—until he stepped out into an open space, a massive chamber where the ceiling pulled up and out of view and the edges ran away from them on either side. It was a deep and echoing place, like a darkened, empty stadium. Words of awe wafted through the air, echoing back at them while their lights skated dimly over distant walls.

They stood far beneath the temple. Directly ahead them lay a wide pool of utterly still, crystal-clear water: a small lake that stretched across the cave for perhaps a five hundred yards. There appeared to be additional land on the far side.

Lang pulled an ELF radio from his belt. ELF stood for Extremely Low Frequency, which was far more adept than standard frequencies at penetrating resistance. The Navy used a similar system to communicate with submarines a thousand feet below the surface. Lang and Kaufman hoped the orange radio with the long antenna would be powerful enough to send a signal through the rock. “We’re at the opening of the main cave,” Lang said, holding down the talk switch, “a good part of which is filled by water.”

Kaufman’s reply came back garbled. “Understand you … a large … filled with … -ter.”

“Affirmative,” Lang replied. There was no answer. He wasn’t sure if Kaufman had received or not. It didn’t matter; they would proceed, complete their preliminary search and then head back out.

As part of that search Lang filmed the area with his camera, repeating his black-light test and performing a few tests with a battery of other devices he carried. Finding nothing of interest, he looked across the water. On the far side of the lake he saw what appeared to be a raised area. Their lights barely reached it but it looked flat and level, unlike the rest of the cave. “We’ve got to find a way across,” he said. “Either that or we’re going to need a boat.”

A quick search revealed a pathway running along the right-hand shore of the lake, and they followed it, sticking to the edge of the water for the first part of the route, with a detour between a forest of stalactites and a formation of what looked like giant mushrooms made of wet stone. Past this outcropping, the path turned back toward the lake and became a narrow strip pinned between the water and the cavern wall. Finally, near the other side at last, it turned outward and crossed the very corner of the lake on what appeared to be a man-made dam. On the right side of the dam lay a group of small pools, arranged in a honeycomb formation. On the left side was the lake.

Lang taped the area with the camcorder. “I count seven of them.”

The circular pools measured about ten feet across. They were divided from one another by retaining walls of the same height as the dam. The water level was identical in each of the pools, though it was several inches higher than that of the lake. Lang wasn’t sure what that meant beyond the fact that the water must flow freely between the group of pools but not between the pools and the lake.

He filmed the formation but the unmoving, black waters gave away little.

“Some kind of construction,” Lang said for the video. “The same type of stone as the dam,” he noted. “Polished stone. Almost ceramic, or volcanic perhaps. No indication as to what they’re for.”

One of Kaufman’s hired soldiers looked at Lang with a smile, then turned to his friends. “Jacuzzi,” he said.

As the others laughed, Lang spotted a more promising site, a recessed area with a wide expanse of flat, smooth stone, a plaza of sorts that had clearly been worked and leveled with tools. “That’s where we need to go,” he said.

Lang traversed the dam with Susan and the mercenaries trailing out behind.

One of the soldiers stopped. “Wait,” he said, training his flashlight more closely on one of the pools. “There is something in there.”

“What do you see?” Lang asked, quite sure it would be nothing of consequence.

“A reflection,” the man said. “Something shiny.”

One of the other mercenaries came up beside the first one. “Munzen,” he said. “Gold munzen.” German for gold coins.

Lang looked at Susan for an explanation.

“The Maya often dumped things in wells,” she told him. “Sacrifices to their spirits. The sinkholes in Mexico are full of offerings. But those are deep, natural structures, not little pools like these.”

“What kind of things did they dump?” one of the soldiers asked.

Lang began to answer but Susan spoke first. “Jewelry and pottery, for the most part, sometimes even people.”

“What about gold?”

“The Maya didn’t have much gold,” Susan said.

The two mercenaries chuckled at that. “Gold, for sure,” the first one said. “Why else would we be here?”