“What sort of choppers?”
“Super Stallions. Three of them.”
“Christ,” Nash said. A fully loaded CH-53E Super Stallion could carry up to 55 fully armed troops. And they had three of them. So, Romano had brought firepower, too.
“How long did it take us to get here from Cuzco?” Nash asked quickly.
“About two hours and forty minutes,” Copeland said.
Nash looked at his watch.
It was 7:45 P.M.
“They’ll be quicker in Stallions,” he said, “if they follow the totems correctly. We have to move fast. I’d say we’ve got about two hours before they get here.”
The six Green Berets began hauling the Samsonite trunks out of the choppers and onto the main street of Vilcafor.
Nash, Lauren and Copeland started opening them up at once, revealing a cache of high-tech equipment inside—Hexium laptop computers, infrared telescopic lenses and some very futuristic-looking stainless-steel canisters.
The two academics, Chambers and Lopez, were off in the village proper, eagerly examining the citadel and its surrounding structures.
Race—now cloaked in a green Army parka to protect him against the rain—went over to help the Green Berets unload the choppers.
He got to the riverbank to find Buzz Cochrane addressing the youngest member of their team, a fresh-faced newly-promoted sergeant named Douglas Kennedy. Sergeant Van Lewen and the Green Berets’ leader, Captain Scott, were nowhere to be seen.
“I mean, honestly, Doogie, could she be any more out of your league?” Cochrane was saying.
“I don’t know about that, Buzz,” one of the other commandos said. “I reckon he should ask her out.”
“What a great idea,” Cochrane said, turning to Kennedy.
“Shut up, you guys,” Doug Kennedy said in a broad Southern accent.
“No, seriously, Doogs, why don’t you just walk on up to her and ask her out?”
“I said, shut up,” Kennedy said as he heaved a Samsonite container out of one of the Hueys.
Douglas Kennedy was twenty-three, lean, and handsome in a boyish kind of way, with earnest green eyes and fully shaved head. He was also about as green as they came. His nickname “Doogie” was a reference to the clean-cut and honest nature of the lead character in the old TV show, Doogie Howser, M.D., with whom it was said Doogie shared many characteristics. It was also a “clumsy” kind of name, suggesting some sort of innocence, which made it all the more appropriate for Doogie. He was particularly shy—and especially clumsy—when it came to women.
“What’s going on?” Race said as he arrived next to them.
Cochrane turned—looked Race up and down instantly—then turned away as he said, “Oh, we just caught Doogie here staring at that pretty young archaeologist over there, and we was just giving him a friendly ribbing.”
Race spun and saw Gaby Lopez, the team’s archaeologist, standing over by the citadel with Walter Chambers.
She was certainly very pretty. She had dark hair, a beautiful Latin complexion and a compact curvaceous body. At twenty-seven, so Race had heard, she was the youngest Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology at Princeton. Gaby Lopez was a very intelligent young woman.
Race shrugged inwardly. Doogie Kennedy could do a lot worse.
Cochrane slapped Doogie heartily hard on the back, spat out a gob of tobacco.
“Don’t you worry, son. We’ll make a man out of you yet. I mean, take a look at young Chucky over there,” Cochrane said, indicating the next-youngest member of the unit, a beefy, moon-faced 24-year-old sergeant named Charles “Chucky” Wilson. “Why, only last week Chucky became a fully fledged member of the 80s Club.”
“What’s the 80s Club?” Doogie asked, perplexed.
“It’s tasty, that’s what it is,” Cochrane said, licking his lips. “Ain’t that right, Chucky?”
“Sure is, Buzz.”
“Apples, man,” Cochrane grinned.
“Apples,” Chucky replied, smiling.
As the two soldiers laughed, Race eyed Cochrane cautiously, mindful of what the Green Beret had said on the plane when he had thought Race was out of earshot.
Staff sergeant Buzz Cochrane appeared to be in his late twenties. He had red hair and eyebrows, a thickly creased face and a rough unshaven chin. He was also a big man—bulky across the chest—with thick, powerful arms.
Just from the look of him, Race didn’t like him.
There just seemed to be something mean-spirited about him—the not-so-intelligent school bully who by the sheer virtue of his size had had it over the other kids. The kind of brute who had joined the Army because it was a place where people like him thrived.
“Say, Doogie,” Cochrane said suddenly, “what do you say I go over there and tell that cute little archaeologist that we got ourselves a dumb young soldier over here who’d like to ask her out for a burger and a movie—”
“Nor Doogie exclaimed, genuinely alarmed.
The other Green Berets burst out laughing.
Doogie went red in the face of their laughter.
“And don’t call me dumb,” he muttered. “I ain’t dumb.”
Just then, Van Lewen and Scott returned from the other chopper. The soldiers’ laughter stopped immediately.
Race saw Van Lewen look warily from Doogie to the others, in the way a big brother would glare at his little brother’s tormentors. He got the impression that it was more because of Van Lewen’s presence than Captain Scott’s that the laughter had ceased.
“How’re things progressing here?” Scott said to Cochrane.
“Not a problem in the world, sir,” Cochrane said.
“Then grab your gear and head on into the village,” Scott said. “They’re about to do the test.”
Race and the soldiers came into the village proper. It was still pouring with rain.
As he walked down the muddy street, Race saw Lauren standing with Troy Copeland over by the largest of all the Samsonite trunks.
It was a great big black case, at least five feet tall, and Copeland was unfolding its side panels, transforming it into a portable workbench of some sort.
The lean scientist flipped open the lid of the trunk, revealing a waist-high console made up of some dials, a keyboard and a computer screen. Beside him, Lauren was attaching a silver rod like object that looked like a boom microphone onto the top of the console.
“Ready?” Lauren asked.
“Ready,” Copeland said.
Lauren flicked a switch on the side of the Samsonite trunk and instantly green and red lights lit up all over the console. Copeland immediately set to work typing on the unit’s all-weather keyboard.
“It’s called a nucleotide resonance imager, or NRI,” Lauren told Race before he could ask. “It can tell us the location of any nuclear substance in the surrounding area by measuring the resonance in the air around that substance.”
“Say what?” Race said.
Lauren sighed and then said, “Any radioactive substance—be it uranium, plutonium or thyrium—reacts with oxygen at a molecular level. Basically, the radioactive substance causes the air around it to vibrate, or resonate. This device detects that resonance in the air, and hence gives us the location of the radioactive substance.”
A moment later, Copeland finished typing. He turned to Nash. “NRI’s ready.”
“Do it,” Nash said.
Copeland hit a key on the keyboard and immediately the silver rod mounted on top of the machine began to rotate. It moved slowly, in a steady, measured circle.
As it did so, Race looked about himself and noticed that Lopez and Chambers had returned from their exploring. Now they were staring intently at the machine. Race looked at the rest of the team around him—everyone was staring intently at the nucleotide resonance imager.
And then suddenly it dawned on him.
This was what everything depended on.
If the imager didn’t detect the idol somewhere in the immediat
e vicinity, then they had all wasted their time coming here—
The rod on top of the imager stopped turning.
“We have a reading,” Lauren said suddenly, her eyes locked on the console’s screen.
Race saw Nash let out the breath he’d been holding.
“Where?”
“One second . . .” Lauren typed something on the keyboard.
The rod on the imager was now pointing upriver—toward the mountains—toward the area where the trees of the rainforest met the sheer face of the nearest rocky plateau.
Lauren said, “The signal’s weak because the angle’s not right. But I’m picking up something. Let me see if I can adjust the vector some . . .”
She hit some more keys and the rod on top of the unit slowly began to tilt upward. It had reached an angle of about thirty degrees when suddenly Lauren’s eyes lit up.
“All right,” she said. “Strong signal. Very high frequency resonance. Bearing 270 degrees—due west. Vertical angle is 29 degrees, 58 minutes. Range . . . 793 meters.”
Lauren looked up at the dark rocky mountain face that rose above the trees to the west. It looked like a plateau of some sort. Slanting sheets of rain whipped across its face., “It’s somewhere in there,” she said. “Somewhere up in the mountains.”
Nash turned to Scott. “Get on the radio to Panama. Tell them that the preliminary team has verified the existence of the substance. But also say that we have intel on hostile forces en route to our location as we speak. Tell them to send in a full protective force for extraction as soon as they can.”
Nash spun to face the rest of the assembled group. “All right, folks, saddle up. Let’s go get that idol.”
Everyone started getting ready.
The Green Berets readied their M-16s. The DARPA scientists grabbed compasses and various computer equipment to take with them.
Race saw Lauren and Troy Copeland head inside one of the Hueys, presumably to grab some gear of their own. He hurried after them to see if he could help—and while he was at it, maybe also to ask Lauren what Nash had meant when he’d said that hostile forces were on their way to Vilcafor.
“Hey—” Race said as he arrived in the doorway of the chopper. “Oh . . .”
He’d caught the two of them in a clinch—kissing like a pair of teenagers—hands through each other’s hair, tongues in each other’s mouths. Hot to trot.
Upon Race’s unexpected arrival, the two scientists separated instantly. Lauren blushed. Copeland scowled.
“I’m . . . really sorry,” Race said. “I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s okay,” Lauren said, pushing her hair back into place. “This is just a very exciting moment for us.”
Race nodded, turned away, headed back into the village.
Obviously.
What he couldn’t help thinking about, however, as he walked back to join the others in the village, was the image of Lauren running her fingers through Copeland’s hair as she kissed him. He had seen her wedding ring clearly.
Copeland, on the other hand, hadn’t been wearing one.
The group walked along the remains of a muddy path that ran along the edge of the riverbank. They were heading toward the base of the rocky mountain-plateau, the sounds of the nighttime forest loud in their ears. The sea of leaves around them rippled under the weight of the steady rain.
It was dark now and the beams of their flashlights played across the forest. As he walked, Race noticed some gaps in the dark storm clouds above them—gaps which allowed the odd shaft of brilliant blue moonlight to illuminate the river beside them. Occasionally in the distance he would see the strobelike flash of lightning. A storm was coming.
Lauren and Copeland led the way. Lauren held a digital compass out in front of her. Walking alongside her, his M-16 held across his chest, was her bodyguard, Buzz Cochrane.
Nash, Chambers, Lopez and Race followed close behind them. Scott, Van Lewen and a fourth soldier—the chunky sergeant named Chucky Wilson—brought up the rear.
The last two Green Berets—Doogie Kennedy and the final soldier in the unit, a second staff sergeant named George “Tex” Reichart—had been left back at the village as rear-guards.
Race found himself walking next to Nash.
“Why didn’t the Army send a full protective force here to begin with?” he asked. “If this idol is so important, why did they only send a preliminary team in to get it?”
Nash shrugged as he walked. “There were some people high up who thought this was a pretty speculative mission—following a four-hundred-year-old manuscript to find a thyrium idol. So they stopped short of giving us a full offensive unit and made it a force-on-discovery mission. But now that we know it’s here, they’ll send in the cavalry. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
With that, Nash went forward and joined Lauren and Copeland up front.
Race was left walking at the rear of the line, alone, feeling more than ever like a fifth wheel—a stranger who had no reason at all to be there.
As he walked along the riverside path he kept one eye on the surface of the river beside him. He noticed that some of the caimans were swimming alongside the path, keeping pace with his party.
After a while Lauren and Copeland came to the base of the rocky plateau—an immense wall of vertical wet rock that stretched away to the north and to the south. Race guessed they had come about six hundred yards from the town.
Off to the left—on the other side of the river—he saw a surging waterfall pouring out of the rockface, feeding the river.
On his own side of the river, he saw a narrow, vertical fissure slicing into the face of the massive wall of rock.
The fissure was barely eight feet wide but it was tall—unbelievably tall—at least three hundred feet, and its walls were perfectly vertical. It disappeared into the mountainside. A trickle of ankle-deep water flowed out from it into a small rock-strewn pool that, in turn, overflowed into the river.
It was a natural passageway in the rockface. The product, Race guessed, of a minor earthquake in the past that had shunted the north-south-running rockface slightly east-west.
Lauren, Copeland and Nash stepped into the rocky pool at the mouth of the passageway.
As they did so, Race turned and saw that the caimans in the river had stopped their shadowing of the party. They now hung back a good fifty yards away, hovering menacingly in the deeper waters of the river.
Fine by me, Race thought.
And then, suddenly, he paused and spun around where he stood.
Something wasn’t right here.
And not just the behavior of the caimans. Something about the whole area around the passageway was wrong . . .
And then Race realized what it was.
The sounds of the forest had disappeared.
Except for the pattering of the rain on the leaves, it was perfectly silent here. No droning of cicadas, no chirping of birds, no rusting of branches.
Nothing.
It was as if they had entered an area where the sounds of the jungle just ceased. An area where the jungle animals feared to tread.
Lauren, Copeland and Nash didn’t seem to notice the silence. They just shone their flashlights into the passageway in the rockface and peered inside it.
“Seems to go all the way through,” Copeland said.
Lauren turned to Nash. “It’s going in the right direction.”
“Let’s do it,” Nash said.
The ten adventurers made their way along the narrow rocky passageway, their footfalls splashing in the ankle-deep water. They walked in single file, Buzz Cochrane in the lead, the small flashlight attached to the barrel of his M-16 illuminating the way ahead of them.
The passageway was basically straight, with a slight zigzag in the middle, and it seemed to cut through the plateau for about two hundred feet.
Race looked up as he walked behind the others. The rock walls on both sides of the narrow fissure soared into the sky above him. For a fissure that was so na
rrow, it was unbelievably tall. As Race looked upward, a light rain fell on his face.
And then suddenly he emerged from the passageway and stepped out into wide-open space.
What he saw took his breath away.
He was standing at the base of a massive rocky canyon of some sort—a wide, cylindrical crater that was at least three hundred feet in diameter.
A glistening expanse of water stretched away from, him, rippling silver in a stray shaft of moonlight, bounded on every side by the circular wall of the enormous crater. The fissure that they had just come through, it seemed, was the only entrance to this massive cylindrical chasm. A thin waterfall fell in a steady sheet on the far side of the crater, plunging fully four hundred feet into the shallow lake at the bottom of the wide, circular canyon.
But it was what stood in the center of the canyon that commanded everyone’s immediate attention.
Rising up out of the body of water—in the exact center of the cylindrical crater—was an enormous rock formation.
It was about eighty feet wide and at least three hundred feet tall, a gigantic natural rock tower—easily the size of a medium-rise skyscraper—that soared up out of the glistening moonlit lake into the night sky. Against the backdrop of the light evening rain, the massive black monolith looked absolutely magnificent.
The ten of them just stood there gazing up at the enormous rock tower in awe.
“Jesus Christ . . .” Buzz Cochrane said.
Lauren showed Nash the reading on her digital compass. “We’ve come exactly 600 meters from the village. If we take into account the elevation, I’d say it’s a definite possibility that our idol is sitting right on top of that rock tower.”
“Hey,” Copeland said from the left.
Everyone turned. Copeland was standing in front of a path of some sort that had been cut into the curved outer wall of the canyon.
The path appeared to rise steeply, winding its way up the canyon’s circular outer wall in a spiral-like fashion, hugging the circumference of the cylinder—encircling the giant rock tower in the center of the crater, but separated from it by an enormous moat of empty space at least one hundred feet wide.
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