The Pharos Objective by David Sakmyster Read Free Book Online Page A

gone.”
    “Having second thoughts?” He bends down and she climbs on his shoulders.
    “About stealing the glory from George? Not at all. But Mom . . .”
    “She’ll be pissed.”
    “Yeah, but she’ll get over it if we find the treasure.”
    “We’ll find it, you and me. We’re a great team. And we’ll show them we’re just as good, that we saw it when they couldn’t.”
    “We did.” Caleb wobbles, trying to keep her stead. “Jeez, you got heavy.”
    “Shut up, I’m in a growth spurt.”
    “Too many Doritos, if you ask me.”
    “What else are we going to eat down here? Now, hold still, I think I’ve got it.”
    Caleb tries to look up into the shadows where her hands are fumbling around the octagonal stone. Then he has the sudden fear that something bad is about to happen—that Phoebe is going to trigger some trap, like in the Indiana Jones movies, and spring-loaded darts will riddle their flesh before a giant boulder pulverizes their bones.
    “Got it!” she shouts, and Caleb hears something above turn with a grating sound that releases a cascade of dust. Coughing, Caleb lets Phoebe down and drops to his knees, just as the stone slab shakes and slides sideways into a thick groove in the stone wall.
    Phoebe quickly pulls out two flashlights from her backpack and hands the bigger one to Caleb. “Ready, big brother?”
    Caleb glances back, expecting a horde of spear-wielding Mayans to burst from the thicket at any moment, but the trees sway and the cicadas sing and the sun glares with blind ferocity that all but pushes him inside the sheltering darkness after Phoebe.
    They descend a straight, narrow staircase, stepping carefully around rubble where the jungle has found its way inside. Vines and roots hug the walls and smother the ceiling. Further down, the steps seem to grow steeper, and Caleb and Phoebe take their time with their footing, shining their lights ahead and, occasionally, back.
    “Thinking about Dad?”
    Caleb looks up, surprised. She rarely mentions Dad, and barely even remembers him. He was shot down when she was only three, but Phoebe has been watching Caleb intently over the past couple years, sympathetic to the internal conflict her older brother has been struggling with. He continues following, then pulls ahead, shining his light into the gloom, adding his brilliance to Phoebe’s steady beam. “Let me lead.”
    “I think I’ve seen him too.” Phoebe touches his shoulder.
    He pauses. The cool air is musty, a little rank, full of dust, and the walls are cracked where brown vines protrude. The back of Caleb’s neck breaks out in a cold sweat. He turns, shines the light on her face.
    “When?”
    She chews on her lower lip and it reminds him of how, as a baby with two new teeth, she used to nibble on a piece of cheese. “Sometimes I feel, I don’t know, dizzy, and I sit and the world kind of disappears and then I see this bright white room, and this Middle Eastern man walks in, carrying something shiny and I scream . . .”
    Phoebe’s eyes glaze over.
    “. . . and the walls change color. And suddenly I’m in a desert, and there’s a man in a rusty cage and a dirty dish filled with little white worms and there are scorpions and then . . .”
    Caleb’s mouth is dry as sand. He tries to reach for her but can’t move. “What then?”
    She shrugs, blinks. “I don’t know. Sometimes it all just vanishes and I’m back in the present. Other times I look up and I see the sun, except on top of it there’s this bird’s head and a beak and tiny brown eyes looking down at me.”
    Caleb’s fingers go to his mouth. “The eagle and the sun! The same thing I’ve seen, that I’ve drawn! And Dad . . . tortured in that place.” He wants to run screaming to anyone who will listen—to the police, to the American embassy, to anyone but his mother, who won’t hear of it. But then he tells himself to relax. Maybe Phoebe has just been influenced by his vivid descriptions, and