The 2012 Codex (Aztec) - Hardcover

Jennings, Gary; Gleason, Robert; Podrug, Junius

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0765322609 ISBN 13: 9780765322609

Publisher: Forge Books, 2010

Synopsis

In the arid canyonlands of Mexico the race is on for the ultimate end-of-the-world codex—the final 1000-year-old prophesy of the god-king, Quetzalcoatl, who ruled Mexico 1000 years ago. Rita Critchlow and Cooper Jones hunt for that sacred codex in those scorching desert canyons, while 500 years ago, Pacal, a young slave-scholar, sets out on the same deadly quest.  He too must find those apocalyptic writings, knowing that his era—the Age of the Aztecs—may well come to an end if he does not find them. 

For Pacal, the End-Time is at hand.  Montezuma has built a vast empire based in what will one day be Mexico City.  Now however he faces war, disastrous drought, death-cult priests, who rip the hearts out of thousands of people atop their pyramids . . . and the arrival of red-bearded horse-borne conquistador, bearing preternaturally powerful weapons and catastrophic plagues, sowing pandemic death wherever he goes.

America’s leaders are also staring into an apocalyptic abyss.  Their own time mirrors that of Quetzacoatl’s and the Aztec’s in shocking detail. Convinced that Quetzalcoatl’s codex holds the key to humanity’s survival—that he is warning them of a global, planet-killing threat—the two women battle broiling desert canyons and drug-cartel warlords to track it down and decipher it. 

Moreover, earlier glimpses of his prophesy foreshadow uncanny similarities to those of John’s Book of Revelation.  Are Quetzalcoatl’s and Revelation’s prophesies one and the same?  Can they crack the 2012 code and save their world from their deadly fate?  The countdown is on.

About this title

About the Author

Gary Jennings was known for the rigorous and intensive research behind his books, which often included hazardous travel—exploring every corner of Mexico for his Aztec novels, retracing the numerous wanderings of Marco Polo for The Journeyers, joining nine different circuses for Spangle, and roaming the Balkans for Raptor. Born in Buena Vista, Virginia in 1928, Jennings passed away in 1999 in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, leaving behind a rich legacy of historical fiction and outlines for new novels.

Robert Gleason was Gary Jennings’ editor for a number of years. He lives in New York City.

 

Junius Podrug is an accomplished writer of both fiction and nonfiction. He lives on Cape Cod.

Reviews

In Gleason and Podrug's undistinguished fourth entry in the Jennings franchise (after Apocalypse 2012), set mostly in 16th-century Mexico, Pakal the Storyteller saves the life of the king's architect by killing a rare white jaguar. This heroic act leads to Pakal's getting an assignment to track down the Dark Rift Codex, a document crucial to the survival of Mayan society. In the present, covert U.S. operatives search for the codex, believed to contain details about how the world will end in 2012. At tedious length, the American president receives lectures on the growing signs of ecological catastrophe. Overwrought prose doesn't help (e.g., "Reets... took out a fleeing bandit herself, Coop still doing the heavy work, the hard precision shooting, firing that weapon like she and the PDW were born together, conceived together in the same uterus, her eyes unblinking over its iron sights, empty and expressionless as the Martian moons, cold and compassionless as her violent moonshiner youth").
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In this sequel to Apocalypse 2012 (2009), two female archaeologists battle against time, nature, and the forces of human ignorance and greed in an effort to unearth and decipher the 2012 codex. Believing that this ancient prophecy might be the key to averting almost certain Armageddon, Rita Critchlow and Cooper Jones zigzag across Mexico in a fast-paced effort to save the day. Encountering all manner of natural and human obstacles along the way, they work at a breakneck pace as the tension ratchets up. In a parallel story, 500 years in the past, a young stonecutter with a gift for storytelling also searches for the missing codex as the Aztec empire begins to crumble. The authors do an imaginative job of interweaving the dual narrative threads without sacrificing either pacing or timing. With 2012 quickly approaching, the Mayan prophecies are hot, so expect demand for this timely thriller. --Margaret Flanagan

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

LAND OF THE MAYA: PRESENT DAY
1
From a high escarpment just below the cliff’s rim, Cooper Jones studied her team resting on the trail below: Rita “Reets” Critchlow—a fellow archeolinguist—flanked by Hargrave and Jamesy. All three wore dusty fatigues, camouflage T-shirts with the sleeves cut off, heavy boots, and sweat-stained dirty-white baseball caps. Reets’ and Coop’s caps bore the Diablos Rojos del México’s team logo, while Jamesy’s and Hargrave’s caps rooted for the Leones de Yucatán.
Mexico City Red Devils and Yucatán Lions, Coop thought grimly. Right now I feel more like a heat-sick Gila monster.
No shade protected them from the blistering sun, and Jamesy was pulling his shirt off. Both men’s bodies were graphic studies in macabre violence—specifically, knife and gunshot wounds—but Jamesy’s chest and back scars were an unnervingly turned-out oeuvre. The first time she stumbled on him bathing in a stream with his shirt off—and had seen the knife slash diagonally traversing his chest, the barely healed bullet hole entering and exiting his broad right shoulder, and the wide white stripes of some long-forgotten prison hellhole disfiguring his back—she’d understood the kind of men he and Hargrave were.
Not that she’d needed scars to garner that insight. Their eyes said everything—eyes that neither asked nor gave, and stares hard enough to crack concrete.
“Eyes that diced at the foot of the cross,” she’d once told Reets.
“And slogged the long road back from Stalin grad,” Reets had said.
“Hard enough to crack concrete,” Coop had concluded.
Then, of course, there were the mirthless grins that never reached those eyes.
Men she and Reets now trusted with their lives.
… Reets had summed up their situation two nights before:
“We’re hunted by the most sadistic, pistol-whipping, water-boarding mercenaries north of the Rio; by Mexico’s most sadistic, gonad-electrocuting, mordida-stealing, child-pimping federales; by the most sadistic, prodigiously powerful drug cartel in two continents—the Apachureros.”
“You mean we’re hunted by… sadists?” Hargrave asked.
“No,” Reets said, “cloistered nuns.”
“We’re not in some kind of trouble, are we?” Jamesy asked.
“Not unless you call drawing and quartering, hot coals and knives, followed by death of a thousand cuts … trouble.” Reets replied.
“They have their side of it,” Hargrave countered.
Reets nodded her assent. “After all, we’ve stolen some of their homeland’s most historically important, preposterously priceless relics.”
“The ‘2012 Apocalyptic Codices,’ as our intrepid president describes them,” Hargrave said. “You can understand why they want them back and us dead?”
“I blame the president,” Jamesy said. “Some hijo de puta on his staff’s ratting us out.”
“Telling the Apachureros, what those codices are worth and where to find us,” Hargrave said.
“Codices we now control,” Coop said.
“And which our bandit buddies want,” Jamesy said.
“There’s also those dozen or so of their bullet-riddled friends we so carelessly left on our back-trail,” Hargrave threw in.
“Someone in Washington put a bounty on us,” Jamesy said coldly.
“Those Pach want us muy malo,” Hargrave said.
“So they can steal the stuff we stole,” Reets said….
… Well, onward and upward, Cooper Jones thought. At the top of the jungle-shrouded cliff waited a man who she hoped had the last of the Quetzalcoatl codices.
The inestimable Jack Phoenix.
The bravest, cleverest, most outrageous archeologist the gods ever made—his detractors often added psychopathic to those adjectives—Jack Phoenix was also one of Coop’s and Reets’ two closest friends.
“One of our two only friends,” Reets once remarked after eight tequila shooters.
They’d begun pooling resources almost a decade ago and they now trusted him with their most confidential findings. Through a covert communications network of seemingly innocuous weblogs, they passed information critical to their work and careers—so much so, they encrypted their e-mails to keep other archeologists from ripping off their findings.
Phoenix typically sought her and Reets’ help in translating indecipherable pre-Columbian glyphs, knowing that Coop, in particular, was preeminently, almost preternaturally gifted in such linguistics. In exchange, he passed data on to them, describing unpublicized digs and sites, which he himself had often uncovered but kept secret.
His last posts contained information that had shaken them to their souls.
At his Chiapas meeting place—an unexplored site deep in Apachurero country—he believed they’d find their missing codex.
Coop allowed herself another quiet sigh. Working her way up to the cliff’s rim, she pulled herself up over the boulder-strewn, outwardly jutting cliff top. Crawling over rocks, through brush, over fallen trees toward the ruin, she surveyed the terrain, looking for intruders.
Until a blast of harsh laughter stopped her.
Hiding behind a log, she spotted the source—a group of raucously drunken bandits.
She counted at least ten of them.
Grizzled inebriated Apachureros in phony federales uniforms, they were armed to the teeth with automatic weapons and pointing at Jack Phoenix’s partially excavated temple.
Waiting for Jack Phoenix to emerge from the subterranean tunnel entrance he had written them about.
Waiting for their friend.
Excerpted from The 2012 Codex by Gary Jennings.
Copyright © 2010 by Gary Jennings.
Published in September 2010 by A Tom Doherty Associates Book.
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.

Edition details

• Publisher: Forge Books
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0765322609
• ISBN 13: 9780765322609
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 448