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an SUV. He got out, stared at the crashed helicopter, shook his head, and whistled. “I didn’t believe it when the airport called and said you’d landed a helicopter in the
pok-a-tok
court.” He shook his head again. “I still don’t believe it.”
    â€œWe’re investigating the crash site,” the captain told the ranger. “You may take these people to their hotel. We’ll be in touch if we need more information.”
    â€œAll right,” Amy said. “You know where we are.”
    The captain gave her a grim look. “Yes,
señorita
, we do.”
    The ranger collected the Cahills’ bags and loaded them into the SUV. The kids piled into the backseat and let the ranger have the front seat to himself. He started the car, then turned and stared at them as if trying to figure out what kind of strange creatures they might be. “You are alive.” It was not a question but an astonished statement. “It is hard to believe.”
    Dan didn’t know how to answer that. Jake said, “Strange but true. And we’d really like to get to the hotel and recover.”
    But the driver still watched them. “You are the Cahills, yes?” Amy nodded. “
Those
Cahills?”
    Obviously, this guy read the tabloids. Dan saw Amy open her mouth wearily as if to answer, but Jake cut her off. “We don’t know what you’re talking about, dude. Can we get going?”
    The driver finally turned toward the steering wheel and put the SUV into drive. “You crash a helicopter on a
pok-a-tok
court, you must expect a few questions.”
    â€œWhat’s this
pok-a-tok
everybody’s going on about?” Dan asked Atticus in a low voice.
    â€œIt was a complicated ball game played by the Maya about four thousand years ago. The goal was to get a ball through this stone hoop without using your hands or feet,” Atticus said. “We don’t know much about it, other than that.”
    Dan turned and looked out the back window at the ring receding into the distance. It must have been about twenty feet off the ground. “That seems impossible.”
    â€œIt was so hard that games went on for days with no score,” Atticus said. “Historians think that the losing team was often executed.”
    â€œAnd I thought dodgeball was rough,” Dan said.
    â€œWhy were they executed?” Amy asked.
    â€œThe players might have been prisoners of war,” Atticus said. “They were offered as sacrifices to the gods.” He looked thoughtful.
    â€œWhat is it?” Dan asked. When his friend got that look on his face, it meant his brilliant mind was working on something important, like pondering the origins of the universe, or programming a whoopee cushion app.
    â€œNothing . . . just that the carvings on that stone hoop looked familiar somehow.”
    The ranger turned down a jungle road, pointing out a tall Mayan pyramid in front of a plaza or town square. Unlike the Egyptian pyramids built of large blocks of cut stone with flat, smooth sides, or the ones in Angkor Wat that looked as if they’d been made of poured wet sand, these were step pyramids, small cut stones forming tall steps that led to the top.
    â€œCan we walk to the top of one of those pyramids?” Dan asked. The sooner they started looking for the crystal, the better.
    â€œCertain ones are open to tourists, yes,” the ranger replied. “Tikal was one of the prime centers of Mayan civilization,” he told them, “inhabited from the sixth century B.C. to the tenth century A.D. The ancient city has been mapped out. It covered over six square miles and was comprised of over three thousand structures. The whole park area is about two hundred twenty-two square miles. A lot of archaeological treasures are still buried under vegetation.” The ranger waved his hand at a dense green grove with a few piles of stone just visible through