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Back Jungle Up Save as PDF
Chapters (63)
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  63. Author’s Note

“At the time, I didn’t. I thought it was most likely Goytia and his soldiers, but the lieutenant swears it wasn’t them.”

“What changed?”

“After Roth was killed, a few of us decided we needed a change of scenery. T4, where the lidar showed another pyramid, was only a half mile away and a group of us went there with Rix. We got there a little after one in the afternoon. When we found the pyramid, we found another cache of offerings near its base. A bunch of the artifacts had already been dug up. One of them was a large bowl. I was examining it and lifted it up off the ground.” He turned his phone toward me and said, “This is what I found underneath.”

The photo was of three words scribbled into the soft earth.

Three words that changed everything.

39

39

pyramid ruins
august 14, 1:13 p.m.
days since abduction: 9

Gina squeezed the plunger on the syringe, sending the contents down the archaeologist’s throat. After repeating this process six more times, she crawled to the opening of the tent and poked her head out.

Twenty-four hours earlier they’d been hiking through the jungle, following behind Patrick—who was checking his GPS every thirty seconds—when Patrick stopped.

There was a large break in the canopy overhead, caused by an enormous skyscraper of a tree that had fallen and taken down half the city block with it.

“This is it,” Patrick said to Bill. “These are the exact coordinates.”

A moment later, Bill knelt down and said, “Look.”

Patrick knelt beside him. There was a small hole in the ground. “Someone dug it up.”

“Yeah, but it was here.”

Patrick nodded. He then pulled a folded piece of paper from his back pocket and said, “We are to proceed one point six kilometers at sixty-two degrees.”

As an army brat, Gina knew sixty-two degrees was a compass heading. A compass is broken into three hundred and sixty degrees. Due north is zero degrees; due east, ninety degrees; due south, a hundred and eighty degrees; and due west, two hundred and seventy degrees.

Gina found it curious that Patrick and Bill had transitioned from GPS coordinates to compass headings. It was like going from a digital TV back to analog.

Then she understood why. Compasses have been around for hundreds of years. Whatever directions the duo was now following must have been written down many years ago.

The words rang in Gina’s ears.

Treasure map.

She wondered where her patient, the archaeologist, fit into the plan. Was there a part of the map only he knew?

After following detailed compass headings for over an hour, Patrick again stopped. “It should be around here.”

It took them another three hours to find what they were looking for: a large stone pyramid.