Free The Fifth Harmonic by F. Paul Wilson

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    I'll be all right, he told himself. This is just a bump in the road. Things will turn out fine. Don't let this get in the way of the adventure.
    Movement on the ground caught his eye. Pieces of green leaf were walking across the gully. He bent for a closer look. No, the leaf bits weren't walking, they were being carried. By ants. A whole line of them . . .
    Will squatted and saw another line of ants heading the other way, hundreds, thousands of little leafcutters traveling an invisible twolane highway that crossed the floor of the gully. The burdened ants headed west, the empty-handed ones traveled east for another load.
    Rising, he closed his eyes and sniffed the air. He found it ripe with the effluvia of life and death, the perfume of flowers, the musk of decay.
    He listened. Since his arrival his ears had been jammed with man-made noise—the roar of the Cessna's motor, the purr of the Jeep's engine, Ambrosio's chatter. Now they were silent and the sounds of the jungle filled the air around him. The splats of leftover rainwater dropping lazily from leaf to leaf on its way to the ground, the high sharp calls of birds, the staccato chitter of monkeys, the cheeps of tree frogs, all set against the high-tension buzz of flies and cicadas.
    Rain forest Muzak.
    The quotidian rhythm of jungle life continued uninterrupted, taking no notice of him.
    Will slapped at a stinging spot on his neck, and his hand came away with a dead mosquito on his palm. Well, something was taking notice of him. Maybe it would be a good idea to close up the Jeep now.
    He stepped around to the rear and found the door flaps under his duffel. He also found an extra machete. He pulled it out and hefted it. The handle was cheap plastic, the long flat blade a dull black except for the steely glint along its honed edge, but somehow he felt better knowing he had it. He gave it a few practice swings, then slipped it through his belt.
    The door flaps snapped into place easily, and he zipped the rear panel closed. There. That should keep out the bugs very nicely.
    Just for the hell of it, he slipped behind the wheel and tried the ignition. No luck. The damn engine still refused to turn over.
    The enclosed Jeep was hot and stuffy now, so he stepped out again. He considered pulling out his laptop and putting down the events of the day, but he was thirsty. He had a machete; all he had to do was find a coconut and chop it open as Ambrosio had.
    He strolled up the gully, looking for a coconut palm. After a few dozen paces, the sound of running water caught his ear. It seemed to be coming from somewhere ahead and to the right.
    A stream or a river maybe. Even better than a coconut.
    As he moved on, looking for a break in the brush, he thought he saw a patch of sunlight beyond the roadside trees. That could only mean some sort of clearing. He found a narrow path into the undergrowth, probably an animal trail, climbed up the bank, and followed it in.
    The going was slightly uphill and fairly easy for a couple of hundred feet. Along the way he noticed a dark brown, two-foot mound to his right. The ants moving in and out of the hole atop their hill were a good ten times larger than the leafcutters he'd seen before. He shuddered at a brief nightmare image of tripping and falling into that , and moved on.
    Another twenty feet or so and he came to a thick tangle of bush and vine. Whatever had made the trail apparently squeezed underthe tangle. Will wasn't about to try that, but he sensed that the clearing was just beyond.
    He pulled out his machete and began hacking. It wasn't easy work, and his shirt was soaked with sweat by the time he broke through. He grinned. He'd made it to the clearing. But what he saw straight ahead brought him up short.
    A pyramid.
    It sat in the center of the clearing, basking in a pool of sunlight angling in over the treetops. Will had read up on the Maya in the past week, and had seen pictures of the temples and pyramids at Tulum and Chichen