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After finding the loot, we gathered up our stuff and headed back to Bagram airfield while Farrokh headed back to Iran.

Along the way, a predator drone started tracking us, to our great annoyance. The first night, though, we stopped and George managed to take control of the drone. He used it to do a bit of scouting ahead and before crashing the thing into the ground near a group of people he was able to spot with the drone. In order not to have the US armed forces bugging us for crashing their toy, we decided to pick up and move out, traveling at night to get away from the area where we'd taken control of it.

Jack scouted ahead as our trucks rumbled carefully through the darkness. Presently he discovered some suspicious rocks with wires coming out of them. Several yards a way, a pack of terrorists sat in wait for someone to pass by and get blown up. Jack followed the wires away from the IED for several yards and cut them, disabling the device. He gave us the all clear so we rumbled on toward the obvious ambush area.

As we got to the point where the IED was buried, Jack radioed that the terrorists were on the move with assault rifles and such. We simply kept going. As we got within range of the IED, the terrorists tried pushing down the plunger for the IED but nothing happened. They tried again and again. After we were long past, they approached the IED and fiddled with it. Jack snuck back to the point where he'd cut the wires and spliced them back together again. In the distance we heard a bomb go off behind us. Jack radioed saying the area was all clear now.

Days later, we rolled up to Bagram after having dispatched and paid our escort, and at the gate I requested my Lt buddy who'd gotten us the vehicles in the first place. He showed up and sponsored us back into the base. We put the vehicle up and I thanked him, giving him some extra cash for his assistance. We hopped on George's privately chartered plane and flew back to the USA without further incident.

Once back, we met BOOBS at the starbucks and debriefed. He took the owl and the harp (I had bought a case for the harp), and left the xiphos and tiara with us. It turns out that all of the item's we'd found (all six) were supernatural in some way or other. I was really curious about the purpose of the owl statue I thought as BOOBS whisked it away into his briefcase.

We mentioned that the giants had been painting on the cave walls a fake mural and the villagers had been chanting a senseless line at us. This piqued his interest and he made a quick phone call to verify his suspicions. Once he hung up he told us there was a small town called Acatlan in south Mexico right on the border that some other people had been sent to investigate some ruins, and never returned. But before they disappeared, the had contacted his friend and relayed the poem that the villagers chanted, which began with the line _our_ villagers in Afghanistan had been chanting:

On a hill, a sheep that had no wool saw horses,
one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly.
The sheep said to the horses: “My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses”.
The horses said: “Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool”.
Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.

We agreed to go check out this Mexican town to see if we could figure out the connection between these two wildly different places. Again we acquired a flight via George, and landed in a very rural airstrip a few hours away from the town by truck. The Mexican police, corrupt as always, necessitated a little something-something from myself to get us out of the airport without hassle. No biggie.

So we hopped in our truck and headed out to the town of Acatlan.

We arrived and decided to try the local cantina. We talked to the bar tender, who was nice and helpful, saying that the people who'd come here before us had been here about 6 mos ago and had never returned from the ruins of Oxtotitlan. He told us we shouldn't go there, it's dangerous. He was very insistent about it being dangerous. Clearly, he thought we were nuts because we kept pushing the issue.

We decided to wait until evening when more people showed up and try to hire someone to take us there. Once enough people were present I stood up and spoke loudly, saying in Spanish that these gringos were looking for a guide out to the Olmec ruins if anyone was brave enough to take them. One guy stood up and said he could take us, he'd been there several times. For a price. $1000 US dollars. We told Cuauhtemoc him we'd pay him $500 now and $500 upon our return. He agreed.

And so the next morning, machetes newly purchased, we set off into the jungle.

We traveled for several hours by truck and then finally we got to an area where we couldn't take the truck anymore. We left the truck and headed up a footpath with an Olmec head next to it. I got my spear ready just in case we were to run into trouble.

After traveling for an hour or two, several of us noticed we were being followed in the trees. We kept moving until we felt they were converging upon us and then initiated battle when Niko conked our guide in the head to knock him out during the proceedings.

With that, I summoned my catboys in preparation for combat. Interestingly, the enemies were a lot like my catboys, only black-themed. And even more interesting were their differences: when “killed,” their forms evaporated into shadow.

Niko was the only one making really good progress on them. Unfortunately, there was only one Niko and eighteen of the shadow catboys. So it ended up taking us forever to cut them down to size. Jack was able to disable them pretty well but not do so much in the way of damage. Me or my catboys either, at least it was slow going to coordinate against one every so often, which just wasn't often enough.

In the end, they really laid the beatdown on me and my catboys (three of them died… until tomorrow). Eventually, Niko's thinning of the ranks made them flee and we licked our wounds and brought Cuauhtemoc back to the waking world. Cuauhtemoc was confused but not adverse to heading on. We needed to with him, unfortunately, because he was the only one who could get us to the site of Oxtotitlan, and he had said (just before Niko conked him out) that it was still a couple of hours away yet on foot.

After hacking and slashing and trudging and sweating slowly through the dense jungle, we eventually emerged from the trees into a clearing. To the back of the clearing stood cliffs that angled sharply up from the flatness of the clearing. In the middle of the clearing set a small pyramid, odd for Olmecs, suspicious.

We stood there in silence staring at the pyramid for a few moments, each pondering our next moves.