The Azteca Stone

By G Wayne Hacker

The Azteca Stone
A Novel by G. Wayne Hacker

Texas businessman Eduardo Gomez was exploring a cave in Northern Mexico where he inadvertently set free the seven-hundred-year-old spirit of Moctezuma IIIwho would have been the next ruler of the enslaved ancient Aztecs if he had not been secretly abducted and buried by a Spanish priest and his followers. Once Moctezumas life force is released from the underground crypt, he displaces the soul of Eduardo. And with the help of the dark angel Abaddon, he uses the millionaires wealth and human form to reestablish one of the bloodiest and most powerful nations the world has ever known. He was well on the road to success when he had a chance encounter with Alejandra Santiago, a young attorney of Columbian heritage, and her US Marine Corpstrained boyfriend, police detective Free Varner. The couple, along with the help from the detectives rookie partner, Louisianan Francine Gilbeau, rises up to the challenge. But will their actions be enough to thwart the advancing forces of evil? And if so, at what cost?

The Azteca Stone is an original work that has no equal in todays contemporary marketplace. It is an action-packed thriller filled with bizarre rituals, human sacrifices, and an all-out assault on humanity by an army of genetically engineered half-human and half-beast gargoyles. The Azteca Stone will keep the readers gasping for air while at the same time crying out for more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524588618

G Wayne Hacker

The Azteca Stone is a supernatural thriller written by G Wayne Hacker, author of the nonfiction Gauchos. Although Mr. Hacker studied literature with an eye on writing books during his colligate years, all of his works prior to Gauchos were of a technical nature for Fortune 500 Telecommunications firms. Since the publication of Gauchos, he has written a bi weekly column for The Bandera Bulletin, a local weekly newspaper, and a quarterly two page article for the Heart of Texas magazine. The Azteca Stone is his first foray into the world of fictitious novels. As an added note of interest, Mr. Hacker is currently working on a soon to be completed prequel to The Azteca Stone titled Wasn’t That a Song. Today Mr. Hacker lives with his wife Margie, seven dogs and three cats in the West Texas county of Bandera - seven miles from the small town of the same name. The city limit sign on Bandera’s outskirts states that the population is 957. As a matter of reference, the tiny community is 2303 miles from the steamy jungles of Colombia and 248 miles from Houston, the nation’s fourth largest city, which serves as the two major backdrops for the exciting and provocative saga of The Azteca Stone.

Book preview

Chapter One

Winter is the monsoon season in Houston and it is not uncommon for the bayou city to receive over a half foot of rain whenever an artic cool front makes its way down from the north and collides with the dense gulf coast humidity.

The downpour in progress was no exception. The cascading sheets of rain was causing street flooding - which in turn had brought the city’s commerce to a screeching halt.

As an added result, the rainstorm had caused the normally busy telephone at the law office of Alejandra Marisol Santiago to fall eerily silent. The young attorney sat in the subsequent solitude studying the rainfall through a window on the far wall. When she became bored of watching, her attention shifted to the glass trophy case sitting underneath the windowsill. It was filled with game balls and awards from significant soccer matches she participated in during her colligate years. The centerpiece of the display was the crystal soccer ball she received for being the nation’s top scorer while leading the Mid State University women’s team to a national title. In a real oddity, there was an egg shaped American football sitting on a rubber tee in the middle of all the spherical soccer balls. When she caught sight of the pigskin, it carried her thoughts back to a late November afternoon in Austin from nearly a decade earlier.

The central Texas community was still struggling with the leftover heat of an exceptionally torrid summer. Without the seasonal drop in temperatures that usually accompany late fall, the only noticeable sign of autumn was the tapestry of gold and amber foliage blanketing the hills that encircle the west side of the city.

Classes at the state’s namesake university had been suspended for the Thanksgiving holiday - leaving the forty acre campus abnormally silent. Abnormal, in that on a typical fall day the grounds would be swarming with fifty-five thousand students scurrying to make their classes on time.

The same could not be said for the school’s colossal football stadium that sat on the edge of the campus. It was there that a large crowd had gathered to watch the Red River Bobcats square off against the Pedernales Raiders for the state 3A high school football championship. Since the university’s own team was playing away that weekend - it was the only game in town.

The hard fought contest was in its waning moment with the Bobcats holding a one point advantage over their west Texas opponents. Their boisterous supporters were counting down the final seconds in unison.

The coach of the Raiders watched the clock tick down to the final five seconds, and then interrupted the victory chant by calling his team’s last timeout. Keeping in mind that anything short of a miracle wasn’t going to reverse the outcome, he sent Alejandra in to attempt a fifty yard field goal. He was aware of her low completion rate from that distance during practice sessions. He was also aware that she had never attempted one from anywhere near that far out under game conditions. Even still, he felt her chances of success were better than that of his only other viable option - which was to have his quarterback toss a Hail Mary pass into an end zone full of defenders in hopes that one of his own outnumbered teammates could somehow wrestle it away from them.

Alejandra listened attentively as her coach gave her some final pointers. The moment he was finished, she secured her chinstrap and headed out onto the field to join her teammates.

Except for the members of the Pedernales band and a handful of diehard supporters, everyone else was already making their way for the exits to get an early jump on the traffic. It was quite obvious that the departing crowd felt that the coach was doing little more than prolonging the inevitable by sending in his diminutive placekicker.

As Alejandra went jogging across the field of play toward the huddle, her mind raced back to memories of her childhood days in her home country of Colombia, where she learned to strike a soccer ball shortly after she learned to walk. Then she recalled moving to the United States and how hard she worked to master kicking the egg-shaped pigskin used in American football. Once she was proficient at it, she tried out for her high school team and impressed the coaches with her accuracy. After some deliberation about her gender, she was finally handed all of the team’s placekicking responsibilities. However, she could not have imagined in her wildest dreams that one day she would be asked to kick a football half the distance of a playing field with a state championship riding on the results.

The Raiders quarterback was Billy Weatherly - a gangly youngster with sandy colored hair and freckles that towered over everyone else in the huddle. He watched as Alejandra joined the group and began to study her eyes for any signs of nervousness. When he saw little, he offered up an apology, Sorry Ale. I couldn’t get you in any closer. I simply ran out of time Then he did a quick check of the flags at the end of the stadium and added, Listen, if it’s of any help - there’s a slight wind at your back. Then he quizzed her, Are you ready?

Alejandra looked him straight in the eyes and gave an affirmative nod.

Billy then directed his conversation to the entire group, Okay fellows, did y’all happen to get a good look at the trophy sitting on that table over there? What do you say that we keep everybody off Ale long enough for her to make this field goal so that we can take it back to Padernales with us? Then after a quick glance around the huddle to see that everyone was pumped and ready, he lowered his voice and instructed, Let’s do it on three.

With that final command, everyone clapped their hands and broke from the huddle. The linemen and the running backs formed a protective pocket on the Bobcats forty-six yard line.

While Billy was kneeling to position the rubber kicking tee, Alejandra started stepping off the distance for her approach to the ball. First, she took two large steps back and then two lesser ones to her left. After visually gauging how far it was to the goal post, she came up with the trajectory she would need to get the ball there, and then nodded to Billy that she was ready.

The quarterback then pointed his open hands toward his center and flicked his fingers three times to signal that he wanted the pigskin. When the center snapped the ball back to him, he set it on the tee and held it in position with his left index finger while at the same time using his right hand to turn the laces away from the point of contact.

Timing is of essence when kicking a long field goal and Alejandra had begun her approached while Billy was still centering the ball on the tee. She started uncoiling her right leg just as he was removing his right hand from the area of impact.

A crush of humanity was taken place just a few yards in front of the ball as the Bobcats defenders were trying to gain penetration and block or divert her kick. Just as her protective wall was starting to show signs of collapse, she struck the ball with the instep of her right foot.

The heretofore-boisterous crowd of thirty thousand fans went silent the moment the pigskin left the tee and started its long arcing flight down the field.

Because of the distance it had to travel, the ball had lost most of its momentum by the time it reached the goalpost and ticked the crossbar. The tip sent it tumbling end-over-end high into the air.

The large gathering gasped as they kept their eyes glued to the erratic movement of the ball. Then the drama came to an abrupt end when it finally fell through the uprights into the end zone.

Alejandra’s game ending kick had won the game and secured the coveted championship for her hometown - for the first time in its one hundred year history. The significance of it wasn’t lost on the people from the small west Texas community as pandemonium began to rein on their side of the stadium.

Alejandra recalled how some of the Raider players hoisted her upon their shoulders for a victory lap around the field. In the background she could hear the public address announcer informed the crowd that she had just set a new record for the longest field goal in prep school playoff history and as a side note, had become the first female player to ever participate in a championship high school football game in Texas.

Alejandra began to scan the stands for her parents as she was making the journey around the perimeter of the stadium from atop two of her teammates. In due time, she spotted them jumping up and down ecstatically in front of their seats along the fifty yard line.

After the celebration had played out in the stadium, Alejandra recalled boarding the school bus with her fellow teammates for the two hour journey back to Pedernales. The first leg of the trip was filled with jubilant laughter and song, but as the veil of darkness started to descend upon the caravan and the adrenaline rush all the players had been experiencing began to subside, sleep became the order of business.

Chapter Two

The state of Texas is a vast land that is often depicted as barren desert. That could not be further from the truth. Actually, only ten percent is desert with the rest of the state being made up of piney woods, coastal grasslands and rolling hills interlaced with over eighty thousand miles of rivers and streams. For the obvious reasons of transportation, food and drinking water, it was commonplace for the early settlers to build their communities along the banks of these meandering waterways. Alejandra’s hometown of Pedernales - which was pronounced Perd’nales by the locals - was named after the river that runs through the heart of it. The city limits sign shows the town to have a population of one thousand forty-one, but when you threw the people living on the nearby ranches into that number, it increased to over twelve hundred. Since it was location on the edge of the searing west Texas desert, and nowhere near the coast to coast interstate, there was little reason for that figure to ever change by any great degree. The land around Pedernales was dry and sun parched - a far cry from the South American rainforest where Alejandra spent her earlier years.

Her father was Ramon Santiago, a federal magistrate from one of the most powerful and influential families in Colombia. Her bloodline was actually rooted in sixtieth century Spain. It was there that her ancestors borrowed enough money from the queen to purchase a vessel with which they could deliver goods to the new world. The venture was named, The Americana de Sur Transporte Compañía. From that modest beginning, the Santiago family began to expand the fleet. Today the shipping company owns hundreds of oil tankers and cargo vessels that transport fuel and goods to ports of call all over the world.

In contrast, Alejandra’s mother, Pilar, came from a family of physicians whose linage could also be traced back to pre-Colombian Spain. Dr. Arturo Guzman was the first of her ancestors to reach the new world. He crossed the ocean as the medical officer for a group of explorers in the early 1500’s and set up practice in a tent along the beach where they landed. Dr. Guzman was a strong humanitarian, who in addition to maintaining the health of the Spanish conquistadors began treating the Kuna Indians as well.

The conquering Spaniards showed little tolerance toward the indigenous population of the new world, and often treated them with indifference and extreme cruelty, so it was only natural that they were leery of the foreign doctor’s motives and medicines when he first arrived - but when they started dying from alien diseases that the Europeans had brought with them, they had no recourse but to accept his help.

The Spanish named the settlement Sabastian de Uaba, while the indigenous people referred to it as Necocli.

Dr. Guzman had taken a lady from the local tribe to be his wife and decided to stay behind and continue his practice when the Spanish garrison move on. In the years to follow, he fathered eight off springs - of which the oldest followed in his footsteps to become the second in a long line of medical physicians. Pilar’s father was the latest to maintain the family’s century’s old practice on the same spot in what had become a modern day barrio known as Cana flechal.

Pilar had a gifted voice and was able to secure a job singing vocals for a cumbia band called, La Maestra Rítmica. It was during one of the band’s nightclub engagements in the capital city of Bogotá that she caught the eye of her husband to be.

Ramon and Pilar had a traditional Colombian wedding at the Cathedral Primada in Bogota, which was the largest church in Colombia, and the only one large enough to accommodate the crowd. The women showed up wearing lace coverings on their heads and the men in Guayaberas, which are the traditional Colombian wedding shirts.

Once the wedding service was complete, everyone assembled at a local hotel for a sit-down dinner followed by a night of dancing and celebration.

As the hours passed, young Ramon and Pilar grew more and more impatient to be alone. Finally, they ducked into a broom closet where Alejandra was conceived during a moment of unchecked passion.

Pilar developed complications during the early stages of pregnancy and consequently, Alejandra would be her only child.

Because of Pilar’s difficulties giving birth, Ramon viewed Alejandra as a gift from God and spared no expense when it came to her wellbeing and happiness. He hired a live-in nursemaid to cater to her every need, and when she showed a penchant for animals, he bought her a menagerie of exotic birds, household pets and a Shetland pony.

The country of Colombia was a dangerous place during those times. It was due in part to the insatiable thirst that the people in the United States had developed for cocaine. The number of users in the U.S. had soared to over ten million which translated into a mind-boggling thirty-one billion dollar underground industry for the South American country’s drug Cartels.

Normally, Judge Santiago was a conservative man that preferred to keep a low profile, but in light of the escalating war that the cartels were waging against society and the people’s duly elected government, he felt it was no longer feasible to do so. Therefore, when asked by a reporter during a news conference, he vowed to vigorously prosecute any cartel members that were brought before his court. It was a warning that the drug kingpins wouldn’t take lightly.

Alejandra’s was turning four that same year and until then her life had read like a fairytale. She lived with the entire Santiago family in a heavily guarded compound in the middle of a large sugar cane plantation. The isolation kept her well shielded from the armed conflict that was raging in the rest of the country. Unfortunately, that was all about to change. It was as if the gods that had have always been watching over her, suddenly turn their heads and looked the other way.

For Alejandra’s birthday, the judge took her and the rest of his family to a restaurant in town to celebrate the occasion. Following the meal, the waiter brought forth a large birthday cake adorned with four candles.

Alejandra was excited and prepared to blow out the candles when a band of cartel heavies entered the restaurant toting AK47 automatic weapons and began spraying the crowded room with bullets.

The judge was always accompanied by a four man security detail that upholstered their weapons and began to return fire. Unfortunately, the federal agents were so heavily outmanned and outgunned their response was of little consequence.

Young Alejandra began to cry out when she heard the loud roar of the gunfire and the beelike sound of the bullets as they went tracing by her head.

When Ramon saw his daughter screaming out from fear, he pushed her to the ground and covered her body with his own.

The exchange of gunfire raged on for over ten minutes and by the time it was over; twenty-two people had been killed with a similar number injured. Alejandra and her mother had escaped with little more than superficial wounds, but both her father and nursemaid had been slain.

An unnamed source called a local television station and informed them that Judge Santiago was the primary target. The attack had been staged in response to his vow to crackdown on members of the drug cartels. Then he went on to warn all officials to tread lightly or face a similar fate.

Chapter Three

Pilar mourned her husband’s death for over a year before deciding to resume her former career as lead singer for La Maestra Rítmica Cumbia Band. The group’s music soared to the top of the charts in Colombia with Pilar’s return and caught the attention of the organizers of an international music festival in Miami. The band was scheduled to perform on the second evening, but because of the continuous demand for second and third curtain calls, the starting times of the later performances kept getting moved back. It was during that back stage wait that Pilar met Zachary Taylor Blades, a renowned music composer and guitarist from Texas. He was playing with a band that was biding their time as well. The pair began to talk to pass the time and discovered during the course of their conversation that they both had recently lost someone they care for. Before the night was through, they would form a romantic bond that would have them spent the next two-year flying back and forth between two continents and two vastly different cultures. Finally, the separation became too exasperating, so they decided to marry.

The couple discussed having a large public wedding, but since Pilar had already walked down the aisle once before, they both agreed that it would be better to keep the service small and intimate.

In their search to find a quaint, but memorable, place to have the ceremony, they stumbled upon Polly’s Chapel, a rugged one room frontier church that had somehow managed to avoid the changing times. It sat in solitude along the cedar covered bank of a small creek in the Texas hill country. The rustic structure was named for its legendary founder, Jose Policarpo Polly Rodriquez, who was born in Zaragoza, Mexico in 1829. His family migrated to San Antonio soon after that.

Polly’s first job was that of a camel herder for the United States Army at Camp Verde Texas. As odd as that might sound, the dromedaries were actually brought to the states from North Africa as part of an experiment. After acquiring much of the southwest from Mexico, the US Calvary found the barren land near impossible to traverse. On excursions into the desert, their horses and mules would consume over half of all the water they could carry, vastly reducing the distance they could travel. The camels were brought in because they could go days without water and as an added bonus, they could carry twice the load of an army pack mule. That was all well and good, but they soon learned there was a down side. The humped back creatures had disagreeable dispositions and seemed to enjoy taunting the troops that had to ride them. In addition to their strange appearance, they had a peculiar sound that spooked the horses and mules that shared the corral space with them.

The camel experiment was abandon after a short three year run because of the outbreak of the civil war. What happened to the camels? Some were sold to individuals, while others wandered off into the desert to eventually turn feral. The last time one was spotted in the wilds of America was on the Texas plains in 1941.

After the Army shut down the camel experiment, Polly drifted between jobs - first as an Indian scout, then a frontier fighter and finally, a Texas Ranger. He retired from public service in 1858 and purchased a three hundred sixty acre tract along the northern bank of Privilege Creek, which is located thirty-six miles from San Antonio. In the years that followed, Polly became an ordained Methodist preacher and then constructed a one room church out of native limestone and hand cut oak timbers on his land. He died in 1914 and was buried in a small graveyard next to the chapel. The inscription chiseled into on his tombstone reads, "By nature - strong, fearless, and daring. By grace - an apostle to his people."

In keeping with the desire to keep the wedding intimate, Zach invited his friend of many years, Chad Best, to fly down from his ranch in Wyoming to be his best man. Zach and Chad’s friendship began back in the fifties when the Grammy winning singer/songwriter hired Zach to fill in for his regular guitar player who had been hospitalized. Zach was a struggling college student back then, and welcomed the opportunity to earn some much needed cash.

Chad became so impressed by Zach’s enormous talent with a guitar; he not only put him on fulltime with his band, but hired him to become the operations manager and studio guitarist at his state of the art recording facility in Austin. Their friendship grew from there and they eventually recorded a box set of their combined music that went platinum. A vocal written specifically for the set by Zach and sung by the pair titled, Sixth Street reached the top of the charts. While Chad was a professional singer, it was the only time in Zach’s illustrious career that he sang anything but backup harmony.

The wedding was a closed service with only the members from their immediate families, band members and a handful of close friends attending.

After they were wed, Zach and Pilar purchased a twelve hundred acre horse ranch that ran alongside the banks of the Pedernales River. They had a five thousand foot native limestone ranch house built atop a tall bluff overlooking the river near the center of the spread. Once construction was completed, Zach retired from the advertising firm he wrote jingles for in Houston, and the couple set up residence in their new home.

Alejandra was seven at the time of her relocation from Colombia and it take long for her to adapt to her new lifestyle. She had mastered the English language and developed strong ties to her stepfather and the Lone Star State by the time she reached the age of ten.

Chapter Four

Alejandra’s law office was located on the top floor of a four-story building that had been constructed during the storied oil boom era of Houston’s past by one of the famous wildcatters of the times. Unfortunately, the neighborhood had taken a downward turn since that era and the old structure was on its last lap. Alejandra was the only occupant on the top floor and her office was at the far end of a long corridor which looked like something right out of a nineteen thirties movie. The walls were paneled in dark mahogany and the floor was covered in posh floral carpet. Both were worn badly, but with a little imagination, it wasn’t hard to visualize just how luxurious the hallway must have looked in its heyday.

The entrance to Alejandra’s office was the only one on the floor that wasn’t boarded over with plywood. The upper half had a frosted glass panel that displayed her name and title in bold black print.

The building’s elevator was circa early to mid-nineteen hundreds and didn’t work most of the time. While many of the tenets were constantly complaining about having to use the stairs, Alejandra didn’t seem to mind. She would always take them in the same manner that she did the bleachers at her school stadium during her soccer career. She was convinced that if she ran them every time she left or returned to her office, the activity would keep her trim and fit. Therefore, she carried a pair of socks and training shoes in her backpack and whenever she had to traverse the staircase, she would switch from heels to sneakers and run them with pace.

While the old building may have lacked many of the amenities offered by the nearby mirrored glass covered high-rises, it had a quaint charm to it and more importantly, the rent was affordable for a young lawyer that had just recently began her practice.

Alejandra had done a lot of work for the public defender’s office, and because she spoke Spanish fluently and took all of the people she defended to heart, she had gained a reputation as a defended of the beleaguered with the large Latino population in South Texas. They nicknamed her La Pantera, which is Spanish for The Panther.

Some of the families she helped were so strapped for cash they would offer the young lawyer chickens and goats in payment for her services. When she tried to explain how she lived in a loft in the city and didn’t have any place to keep livestock, they would continue insisting until she finally gave in. Anytime she received living payments, she would transport them up to the family ranch in the hill country.

Alejandra was a natural beauty with coal black hair and an impeccable complexion. In concert with that, she spent a great deal of time working out at the gym to maintain a trim body. She had one glaring difference that distinguished her from most of the other young professional women in Houston, and it was most noticeable when she put on one of her tropical weight suits to go to work. Although she didn’t have any trouble slipping on a petite size two jacket; her skirts had to be tailored to fit over her massively overdeveloped thigh muscles – an abnormality that she acquired from playing a lifetime of soccer.

Alejandra’s mother Pilar was a gifted singer, but as is so often the case, none of her natural ability was passed down to her daughter. Alejandra’s voice was deeper in tone and lacked any of the quality that made her mother famous. However, thanks to her stepfather, she wasn’t a total washout musically. He taught her how to play a six string guitar at a young age and she could sit in and pick with the best – which she often did when a group of his friends showed up at the ranch for one of their Sunday afternoon jam sessions.

Alejandra treasured her Martin guitar just about as much as she did her 1967 indigo blue Shelby Mustang fastback, which Zach found in mint condition during a trip to California and presented to her on her eighteenth birthday. Up until then, she had always driven the ranch’s one ton dually with the Circle ZTB logo on the door. The old truck was powered by a noisy diesel engine which all of her friends teased her about. The teasing stopped the first time she pulled into the local Dairy Queen in her souped-up Mustang with a Chad Best CD blaring on the radio. She broke into a smile and turned up the volume so that everyone could hear her stepfather cut loose on his electric guitar during the middle eight bridge of one of the tunes.

Chapter Five

Alejandra was putting the final touches on her summation for the trial of a robbery suspect she