Inca Gold

Dr. Shannon Kelsey: A respected archaeologist, a woman of fierce independence and beauty, her passion for the great ancient mysteries has brought her to the mountains of Peru, where she stands on the threshold of an astounding discovery-- and on the verge of death. . .

Joseph Zolar: Within a labyrinth of legitimate business enterprises, he has created a vast international empire built on illegal trade in antiquities. Now he has set his sights on the ultimate prize-golden antiquities worth almost a billion dollars-- and from his lavish headquarters he coolly signs the death warrant of anyone who dares to challenge him. . .

Cyrus Sarason: Zolar's brother and partner, he takes a more personal, up-close approach to the family business. And when fortunes are at stake, he prefers to get his hands dirty-- often putting them to lethal use. . .

Tupac Amaru: Feared as a revolutionary but driven by greed, he has cut a swath of destruction throughout the hill country of the Amazonas, his cruel black eyes as empty as his heart-- but after a savage encounter with DIRK PITT, Amaru dreams only of vengeance. . .

David Gaskill: An agent for U.S. Customs, he specializes in tracking down smugglers of art and artifacts. Living only for hot jazz and a hot case, he loves the game and the intrigue-- and now has the opportunity of a lifetime-- a chance to penetrate and smash a powerful crime family. . .

Congresswoman Loren Smith: Stylish and seductive, with knockout violet eyes, she has happily succumbed to the mesmerizing charm of DIRK PITT. But she becomes hostage to Zolar's greedy scheme-- a pawn in a brutal game that threatens to turn deadly. . .

THE MYSTERIOUS INTRUDERS

A.D. 1533

A Forgotten Sea

They came from the south with the morning sun, shimmering like ghosts in a desert mirage as they slipped across the sun-sparkled water. The rectangular cotton sails on the flotilla of rafts sagged lifelessly under a placid azure sky. No commands were spoken as the crews dipped and pulled their paddles in eerie silence. Overhead, a hawk swooped and soared as if guiding the steersmen toward a barren island that rose from the center of the inland sea.

The rafts were constructed of reed bundles bound and turned up at both ends. Six of these bundles made up one hull, which was keeled and beamed with bamboo. The raised prow and stern were shaped like serpents with dog heads, their jaws tilted toward the sky as if baying at the moon.

The lord in command of the fleet sat on a thronelike chair perched on the pointed bow of the lead raft. He wore a cotton tunic adorned with turquoise platelets and a wool mantle of multicolored embroidery. His head was covered with a plumed helmet and a face mask of gold. Ear ornaments, a massive necklace, and arm bracelets also gleamed yellow under the sun. Even his shoes were fashioned from gold. What made the sight even more astonishing was that the crew members were adorned no less magnificently.

Along the shoreline of the fertile land surrounding the sea, the local native society watched in fear and wonder as the foreign fleet intruded into their waters. There were no attempts at defending their territory against invaders. They were simple hunters and foragers who trapped rabbits, caught fish, and harvested a few seeded plants and nuts. Theirs was an archaic culture, curiously unlike their neighbors to the east and south who built widespread empires. They lived and died without ever constructing massive temples to a race of gods and now watched in fascination at the display of wealth and power that moved across the water. As one mind they saw the fleet as a miraculous appearance of warrior gods from the spirit world.

The mysterious strangers took no notice of the people crowding the shore and continued paddling toward their destination. They were on a sanctified mission and ignored all distractions. They propelled their craft impassively, not one head turned to acknowledge their stunned audience.

They headed straight for the steep, rock-blanketed slopes of a small mountain making up an island that rose 200 meters (656 feet) from the surface of the sea. It was uninhabited and mostly barren of plant life. To the local people who lived on the mainland it was known as the dead giant because the crest of the long, low mountain resembled the body of a woman lying in wakeless sleep. The sun added to the illusion by giving it a glow of unearthly radiance.

Soon the lustrously attired crewmen grounded their rafts on a small pebble-strewn beach that opened into a narrow canyon. They lowered their sails, woven with huge figures of supernatural animals, symbols that added to the hushed fear and reverence of the native onlookers, and began unloading large reed baskets and ceramic jars onto the beach.

Throughout the long day, the cargo was stacked in an immense but orderly pile. In the evening, as the sun fell to the west, all view of the island from the shore was cut off. Only the faint flicker of lights could be seen through the darkness. But in the dawn of the new day, the fleet was still snug on shore and the great mound of cargo was unmoved.

On top of the island mountain much labor was being expended by stone workers assaulting a huge rock. Over the next six days and nights, using bronze bars and chisels, they laboriously pecked and hammered the stone until it slowly took on the shape of a fierce, winged jaguar with the head of a serpent. When the final cutting and grinding were finished, the grotesque beast appeared to leap from the great rock it was carved upon. During the sculpting process the cargo of baskets and jars was slowly removed until there was no longer any trace.

Then one morning the inhabitants looked across the water at the island and found it empty of life. The enigmatic people from the south, along with their fleet of rafts, had disappeared, having sailed away under cover of darkness. Only the imposing stone jaguar/serpent, its teeth curved in a bed of bared fangs and with slitted eyes surveying the vast terrain of endless hills beyond the small sea, remained to mark their passage.

Curiosity quickly outweighed fear. The next afternoon, four men from the main village along the coast of the inland sea, their courage boosted by a potent native brew, pushed off in a dugout canoe and paddled across the water to the island to investigate. After landing on the little beach, they were observed entering the narrow canyon leading inside the mountain. All day and into the next their friends and relatives anxiously awaited their return. But the men were never seen again. Even their canoe vanished.

The primitive fear of the local people increased when a great storm suddenly swept the small sea and turned it into a raging tempest. The sun blinked out as the sky went blacker than anyone could ever remember. The frightening darkness was accompanied by a terrible wind that shrieked and churned the sea to froth and devastated the coastal villages. It was as though a war of the heavens had erupted. The violence lashed the shoreline with unbelievable fury. The natives were certain the gods of the sky and darkness were led by the jaguar/serpent to punish them for their intrusion. They whispered of a curse against those who dared trespass on the island.

Then as abruptly as it came, the storm passed over the horizon and the wind died to a baffling stillness. The brilliance of the sun burst onto a sea as calm as before. Then gulls appeared and wheeled in a circle above an object that had been washed onto the sandy beach of the eastern seashore. When the people saw the unmoving form lying in the tide line, they approached warily and stopped, then cautiously moved forward and peered down to examine it. They gasped as they realized it was the dead body of one of the strangers from the south. He wore only an ornate, embroidered tunic. All trace of golden face mask, helmet, and bracelets was gone.

Those present at the macabre scene stared in shock at the appearance of the corpse. Unlike the dark-skinned natives with their jet black hair, the dead man had white skin and blond hair. His eyes were staring sightless and blue. If standing, he would have stood a good half-head taller than the astonished people studying him.

Trembling with fear, they tenderly carried him to a canoe and gently lowered him inside. Then two of the bravest men were chosen to transport the body to the island. Upon reaching the beach they quickly laid him on the sand and paddled furiously back to shore. Years after those who witnessed the remarkable event had died, the bleached skeleton could still be observed partly embedded in the sand as a morbid warning to stay off the island.

It was whispered the golden warriors' guardian, the winged jaguar/serpent, had devoured the inquisitive men who trespassed its sanctuary, and no one ever again dared risk its wrath by setting foot on the island. There was an eerie quality, almost a ghostliness about the island. It became a sacred place that was only mentioned in hushed voices and never visited.

Who were the warriors in gold and where did they come from? Why had they sailed into the inland sea and what did they do there? The witnesses had to accept what they had seen, no explanation was possible. Without knowledge the myths were born. Legends were created and nurtured when the surrounding land was shaken by an immense earthquake that destroyed the shoreline villages. When, after five days, the tremors finally died away, the great inland sea had vanished, leaving only a thick ring of shells on what was once a shoreline.

The mysterious intruders soon wove their way into religious tradition and became gods. Through time, stories of their sudden manifestation and disappearance grew and then eventually faded until they were but a bit of vague supernatural folklore handed down from generation to generation, by a people who lived in a haunted land where unexplained phenomena hovered like smoke over a campfire.

CATACLYSM

March 1, 1578

West Coast of Peru

Captain Juan de Anton, a brooding man with castilian green eyes and a precisely trimmed black beard, peered through his spyglass at the strange ship following in his wake and raised his eyebrows in mild surprise. A chance encounter, he wondered, or a planned interception?

On the final lap of a voyage from Callao de Lima, de Anton had not expected to meet other treasure galleons bound for Panama, where the king's wealth would be packed aboard mules for a journey across the isthmus, and then shipped over the Atlantic to the coffers of Seville. He perceived a trace of French design in the hull and rigging of the stranger trailing his wake a league and a half astern. If he had been sailing the Caribbean trade routes to Spain, de Anton would have shunned contact with other ships, but his suspicions cooled slightly when he spied an enormous flag streaming from a tall staff on the stern. Like his own ensign, snapping tautly in the wind, it sported a white background with the rampant red cross of sixteenth-century Spain. Still, he felt a trifle uneasy.

De Anton turned to his second-in-command and chief pilot, Luis Tomes. "What do you make of her, Luis?"

Tomes, a tall, clean-shaven Galician, shrugged. "Too small for a bullion galleon. I judge her to be a wine merchantman out of Valparaiso heading for port in Panama the same as we."

"You do not think there is a possibility she might be an enemy of Spain?"

"Impossible. No enemy ships have ever dared attempt the passage through the treacherous labyrinth of the Magellan Strait around South America."

Reassured, de Anton nodded. "Since we have no fear of them being French or English, let us put about and greet them."

Torres gave the order to the steersman, who sighted his course across the gun deck from under a raised trunk on the deck above. He manhandled a vertical pole that pivoted on a long shaft that turned the rudder. The Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion, the largest and most regal of the Pacific armada treasure galleons, leaned onto her port side and came around on a reverse course to the southwest. Her nine sails filled from a swift, easterly offshore breeze that pushed her 570-ton bulk through the rolling swells at a comfortable five knots.

Despite her majestic lines and the ornate carvings and colorful art designs painted on the sides of her high stern and forecastle, the galleon was a tough customer. Extremely rugged and seaworthy, she was the workhorse of the oceangoing vessels of her time. And if need be, she could slug it out with the best privateers a marauding sea nation could throw at her to defend the precious treasure in her cargo holds.

To the casual eye, the treasure galleon looked to be a threatening warship bristling with armament, but surveyed from the inside she could not conceal her true purpose as a merchant ship. Her gun decks held ports for nearly fifty four-pound cannon. But lulled by the Spanish belief that the South Seas were their private pond, and the knowledge that none of their ships had ever been attacked or captured by a foreign raider, the Concepcion was lightly armed with only two guns to reduce her tonnage so she could carry heavier cargo.

Now feeling that his ship was in no danger, Captain de Anton casually sat on a small stool and resumed peering through his spyglass at the rapidly approaching ship. It never occurred to him to alert his crew for battle just to be on the safe side.

He had no certain foreknowledge, not even a vague premonition that the ship he had turned to meet was the Golden Hind, captained by England's indefatigable seadog, Francis Drake, who stood on his quarterdeck and calmly stared back at de Anton through a telescope, with the cold eye of a shark following a trail of blood.

"Damned considerate of him to come about and meet us," muttered Drake, a beady-eyed gamecock of a man with dark red curly hair complemented by a light sandy beard that tapered to a sharp point under a long swooping moustache.

"The very least he could do after we've chased his wake for the past two weeks," replied Thomas Cuttill, sailing master of the Golden Hind.

"Aye, but she's a prize worth chasing."

Already laden with gold and silver bullion, a small chest of precious stones, and valuable linens and silks after capturing a score of Spanish ships since becoming the first English vessel to sail into the Pacific, the Golden Hind, formerly named the Pelican, pounded through the waves like a beagle after a fox. She was a stout and sturdy vessel with an overall length of about 31 meters (102 feet) and a displacement tonnage of 140. She was a good sailor and answered the helm well. Her hull and masts were far from new, but, after a lengthy refit at Plymouth, she had been made ready for a voyage that was to take her 55,000 kilometers (over 34,000 miles) around the world in thirty-five months, in one of the greatest sea epics of all time.

"Do you wish to cut across her bow and rake the Spanish jackals?" Cuttill inquired.

Drake dropped his long telescope, shook his head, and smiled broadly. "The better part of courtesy would be to trim sail and greet them like proper gentlemen."

Cuttill stared uncomprehending at his audacious commander. "But suppose they've put about to give battle?"

"Not damned likely her captain has a notion as to who we are."

"She's twice our size," Cuttill persisted.

"According to the sailors we captured at Callao de Lima, the Concepcion carries only two guns. The Hind boasts eighteen."

"Spaniards!" Cuttill spit. "They lie worse than the Irish."

Drake pointed at the unsuspecting ship approaching bow on. "Spanish ship captains run rather than fight," he reminded his feisty subordinate.

"Then why not stand off and blast her into submission?"

"Not wise to fire our guns and run the risk of sinking her with all her loot." Drake clapped a hand on Cuttill's shoulder. "Not to fear, Thomas. If I scheme a crafty plan, we'll save our powder and rely on stout Englishmen who are spoiling for a good fight."

Cuttill nodded in understanding. "You mean to grapple and board her then?"

Drake nodded. "We'll be on her decks before her crew can prime a musket. They don't know it yet, but they're sailing into a trap of their own making."

Slightly after three in the afternoon, the Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion came about on a parallel course to the northwest again and ranged toward the Golden Hind's port quarter. Torres climbed the ladder to his ship's forecastle and shouted across the water.

"What ship are you?"

Numa de Silva, a Portuguese pilot Drake had appropriated after capturing de Silva's ship off Brazil, replied in Spanish, "San Pedro de Paula out of Valparaiso." The name of a vessel Drake had seized three weeks earlier.

Except for a few crew members who were dressed as Spanish sailors, Drake had hidden the mass of his men below decks and armed them with protective coats of mail and an arsenal of pikes, pistols, muskets, and cutlasses. Grappling hooks attached to stout ropes were stowed along the bulwarks on the top deck. Crossbowmen were secretly stationed in the fighting tops above the mainyards of the masts. Drake forbade firearms in the fighting tops where musket fire could easily ignite the sails into sheets of flame. The mainsails were hauled up and furled to give the bowmen an unobscured line of vision. Only then did he relax and patiently wait for the moment to attack. The fact that his Englishmen numbered eighty-eight against the Spanish crew of nearly two hundred bothered him not at all. It was not the first time nor the last he would ignore superior odds. His renowned fight against the Spanish Armada in the English Channel was yet to come.

From his view, de Anton saw no unusual activity on the decks of the seemingly friendly and businesslike ship. The crew looked to be going about their duties without undue curiosity toward the Concepcion. The captain, he observed, leaned casually against the railing of the quarterdeck and saluted de Anton. The newcomer seemed deceptively innocent as it unobtrusively angled closer to the big treasure galleon.

When the gap between the two ships had narrowed to 30 meters (97 feet), Drake gave an almost imperceptible nod, and his ship's finest sharpshooter, who lay concealed on the gun deck, fired his musket and struck the Concepcion's steersman in the chest. In unison the crossbowmen in the fighting tops began picking off the Spaniards manning the sails. Then, with the galleon losing control of its steerageway, Drake ordered his helmsman to run the Hind alongside the bigger vessel's high sloping hull.

As the ships crushed together and their beams and planking groaned in protest, Drake roared out, "Win her for good Queen Bess and England, my boys!"

Grappling hooks soared across the railings, clattered and caught on the Concepcion's bulwarks and rigging, binding the two vessels together in a death grip. Drake's crew poured onto the galleon's deck, screaming like banshees. His bandsmen added to the terror by beating on drums and blaring away on trumpets. Musket balls and arrows showered the dumbfounded Spanish crew as they stood frozen in shock.

It was over minutes after it began. A third of the galleon's crew fell dead or wounded without firing a shot in their defense. Stunned by confusion and fear they dropped to their knees in submission as Drake's crew of boarders brushed them aside and charged below decks.

Drake rushed up to Captain de Anton, pistol in one hand, cutlass in the other. "Yield in the name of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth of England!" he bellowed above the din.

Dazed and incredulous, de Anton surrendered his ship. "I yield," he shouted back. "Take mercy on my crew."

"I do not deal in atrocities," Drake informed him.

As the English took control of the galleon, the dead were thrown overboard and the surviving crew and their wounded were confined in a hold. Captain de Anton and his officers were escorted across a plank laid between the two ships onto the deck of the Golden Hind. Then, with the characteristic courtesy that Drake always displayed toward his captives, he gave Captain de Anton a personally guided tour of the Golden Hind. Afterward he treated all the galleon's officers to a gala dinner, complete with musicians playing stringed instruments, solid silver tableware, and the finest of recently liberated Spanish wines.

Even while they were dining, Drake's crewmen turned the ships to the west and sailed beyond Spanish sea lanes. The following morning they heaved to, trimming the sails so that the ship's speed fell off but they maintained enough headway to keep the bows up to the seas. The next four days were spent transferring the fantastic treasure trove from the cargo holds of the Concepcion to the Golden Hind. The vast plunder included thirteen chests of royal silver plate and coins, eighty pounds of gold, twenty-six tons of silver bullion, hundreds of boxes containing pearls and jewels, mostly emeralds, and a great quantity of food stores such as fruits and sugar. The catch was to be the richest prize taken by a privateer for several decades.

There was also a hold full of precious and exotic Inca artifacts that were being transported to Madrid for the personal pleasure of His Catholic Majesty, Philip II, the King of Spain. Drake studied the artifacts with great astonishment. He had never seen anything like them. Reams of intricately embroidered Andean textiles filled one section of the hold from deck to ceiling. Hundreds of crates contained intricately sculpted stone and ceramic figures mingled with highly crafted masterpieces of carved jade, superb mosaics of turquoise and shell, all plundered from sacred religious temples of the Andean civilizations overrun by Francisco Pizarro and succeeding armies of gold-hungry conquistadors. It was a glimpse of magnificent artistry that Drake never dreamed existed. Oddly, the item that interested him most was not a masterwork of three-dimensional art inlaid with precious stones but rather a simple box carved from jade with the mask of a man for a lid. The masked lid sealed so perfectly the interior was nearly airtight. Inside was a multicolored tangle of long cords of different thicknesses with over a hundred knots.

Drake took the box back to his cabin and spent the better part of a day studying the intricate display of cords tied to lesser cords in vibrantly dyed colors with the knots tied at strategic intervals. A gifted navigator and an amateur artist, Drake realized that it was either a mathematical instrument or a method of recording dates as a calendar. Intrigued by the enigma, he tried unsuccessfully to determine the meaning behind the colored strands and the different disposition of the knots. The solution was as obscure to him as to a native trying to interpret latitude and longitude on a navigational chart.

Drake finally gave up and wrapped the jade box in linen. Then he called for Cuttill.

"The Spaniard rides higher in the water with most of her riches relieved," Cuttill announced jovially as he entered the captain's cabin.

"You have not touched the artworks?" Drake asked.

"As you ordered, they remain in the galleon's hold."

Drake rose from his worktable and walked over to the large window and stared at the Concepcion. The galleon's sides were still wet several feet above her present waterline. "The art treasures were meant for King Philip," he said. "Better they should go to England and be presented to Queen Bess."

"The Hind is already dangerously overladen," Cuttill protested. "By the time another five tons are loaded aboard, the sea will be lapping at our lower gunports, and she won't answer the helm. She'll founder sure as heaven if we take her back through the tempest of Magellan Strait."

"I don't intend to return through the strait," said Drake. "My plan is to head north in search of a northwest passage to England. If that is not successful, I'll follow in Magellan's wake across the Pacific and around Africa."

"The Hind will never see England, not with her cargo holds busting their seams."

"We'll jettison the bulk of the silver on Cano Island off Ecuador, where we can salvage it on a later voyage. The art goods will remain on the Conception."

"But what of your plan to give them to the queen?"

"That still stands," Drake assured him. "You, Thomas, will take ten men from the Hind and sail the galleon to Plymouth."

Cuttill spread his hands in anguish. "I can't possibly sail a vessel her size with only ten men, not through heavy seas."

Drake walked back to his worktable and tapped a pair of brass dividers on a circle marked on a chart. "On charts I found in Captain de Anton's cabin I've indicated a small bay on the coast north of here that should be free of Spaniards. You will sail there and cast off the Spanish officers and all wounded crewmen. Impress twenty of the remaining able-bodied seamen to man the vessel. I'll see you're supplied with more than enough weapons to preserve command and prevent any attempt to wrest control of the ship."

Cuttill knew it was useless to object. Debating with a stubborn man like Drake was a lost cause. He accepted his assignment with a resigned shrug. "I will, of course, do as you command."

Drake's face was confident, his eyes warm. "If anyone can sail a Spanish galleon up to the dock at Plymouth, Thomas, you can. I suspect you'll knock the eyes out of the queen's head when you present her with your cargo."

"I would rather leave that piece of work to you, Captain."

Drake gave Cuttill a friendly pat on one shoulder. "Not to fear, my old friend. I'm ordering you to be standing dockside with a wench on each arm, waiting to greet me when the Hind arrives home."

At sunrise the following morning Cuttill ordered the crewmen to cast off the lines binding the two ships. Safely tucked under one arm was the linen-wrapped box that Drake had directed him to personally give to the queen. He carried it to the captain's cabin and locked it inside a cabinet in the captain's quarters. Then he returned to deck and took command of the Nuestra Senora de la Conception as she drifted away from the Golden Hind. Sails were set under a dazzling crimson sun the superstitious crews on both ships solemnly described as red as a bleeding heart. To their primitive way of thinking it was considered a bad omen.

Drake and Cuttill exchanged final waves as the Golden Hind set a course to the northeast. Cuttill watched the smaller ship until she was hull down over the horizon. He did not share Drake's confidence. A deep feeling of foreboding settled in the pit of his stomach.

Several days later, after dumping many tons of silver ingots and coins off Cano Island to lighten her draft, the sturdy Hind and the intrepid Drake sailed north. . . to what would be known more than two centuries later as Vancouver Island. . . before turning west across the Pacific on their epic voyage.

Far to the south the Conception tacked and headed due east, making landfall and reaching the bay marked on the Spanish chart by Drake sometime late the next evening. The anchor was dropped and the watch lights set.

Daylight brought the sun shining down over the Andes as Cuttill and his crew discovered a large native village of more than a thousand inhabitants, surrounded by a large bay. Without wasting time, he ordered his men to begin ferrying the Spanish officers and their wounded to shore. Twenty of the best seamen among the survivors were offered ten times their Spanish pay to help sail the galleon to England where they were promised to be set free upon landing. All twenty gladly signed on.

Cuttill was standing on the gun deck overseeing the landing operation just after midday when the ship began to vibrate as though a giant hand were rocking it. Everyone immediately stared at the long streamlike ensigns tied to the top of the masts. But only the ends of their tails fluttered under a slight whisper of wind. Then every eye turned to shore where a great cloud of dust rose from the base of the Andes and appeared to be moving toward the sea. A frightening thundering sound increased to deafening proportions along with a tremendous convulsion of the earth. As the crew gawked in stunned fascination, the hills east of the village seemed to rise and fall like breakers rolling on a shallow shore.

The dust cloud descended on the village and swallowed it. Above the uproar came the screams and cries of the villagers and the crashing sounds of their rock and adobe mud houses as they shook apart and crumbled into ruin. None of the crew had ever experienced an earthquake, and few were even aware of such a phenomenon. Half the Protestant English and every one of the Catholic Spaniards on the galleon dropped to their knees and began praying fervently to God for deliverance.

In minutes the dust cloud passed over the ship and dispersed out to sea. They all stared uncomprehendingly at what had been a thriving village bustling with activity. Now it was nothing but flattened ruins. Cries came from those trapped under the debris. A later estimate would show that less than fifty of the local inhabitants survived. The Spaniards on shore ran up and down the beach in panic, shouting and begging to be brought back to the ship. Collecting his senses, Cuttill ignored the pleas, ran to the railing and scanned the surrounding sea. Beyond showing a mild chop, the water appeared indifferent to the nightmare tragedy in the village.

Suddenly desperate to escape the cataclysm on shore, Cuttill began shouting orders to get the galleon underway. The Spanish prisoners cooperated wholeheartedly, working alongside the English to unfurl the sails and pull in the anchor. Meanwhile, the survivors from the village crowded the beach, imploring the galleon's crew to return and help them rescue their relatives from the shattered wreckage and carry them aboard the ship to safety. The seamen turned deaf ears to the pleas, concerned only with their own preservation.

Suddenly, another earthquake shook the land, accompanied by an even more thunderous roar. The terrain began to undulate as if some monster were shaking a giant carpet. This time the sea slowly rolled back, stranding the Concepcion and exposing the floor of the sea. The seamen, none of whom knew how to swim, possessed an unnatural fear of what was under the water. Now they stared wonderingly at the sight of thousands of fish flipping about like wingless birds amid the rocks and corals where they had been left high and dry by the retreating sea. Sharks, squid, and a rainbow of tropical fish all mingled together in their death throes.

A constant flow of tremors moved the earth as the submarine quake caused crustal fracturing, collapsing the seafloor and creating a vast depression. Then it was the sea's turn to go crazy as it swept in from all sides to fill the hole. The water piled up in a gigantic countersurge with incredible speed. Millions of tons of pure destruction rose higher and higher until its crest reached 40 meters (157 feet) high, a phenomenon that would later become known as a tsunami.

There was no time for the helpless men to clutch a solid object for support, no time for the devout to pray. Paralyzed and speechless in fear of the green and frothwhite mountain of water rising before their eyes, they could only stand and watch it rush toward them with the ungodly sounds of a thousand hells. Only Cuttill had the presence of mind to run under the protecting deck over the tiller and wrap his limbs around its long wooden shaft.

Bow on to the colossal wall of water, the Conception arched and soared vertically toward the curling crest. Moments later she was engulfed in a boiling turbulence as nature ran berserk.

Now that the mighty torrent had the Concepcion in its grasp, it hurled the galleon toward the devastated shore at tremendous speed. Most of the crew on the open decks were snatched away and never seen again. The poor souls on the beach and those struggling to free themselves from the wreckage of the village were inundated as if a sudden gush of water had rushed over an ants' nest. One second they were there, the next they were gone, mere bits and pieces of smashed debris being hurled toward the Andes.

Buried under the towering mass of water for what seemed an incredible length of time, Cuttill held his breath until his lungs turned to fire and gripped the tiller as if he were a mutated branch that had grown from it. Then, with every one of her beams howling and creaking at their joints, the tough old ship battled her way back to the surface.

How long she was swept through the swirling vortex, Cuttill could not remember. The violent surge totally erased what was left of the village. The few drenched men who somehow remained alive on the battered Conception were even further terrorized by the sight of centuries-dead mummies of the ancient Incas rising to the surface and surrounding the ship. Torn by the wave from their graves in some long-forgotten burial ground, the amazingly well-preserved bodies of the dead stared sightlessly at the horrified sailors, who were certain they were being cursed by creatures of the devil.

Cuttill attempted to move the tiller as if steering the ship. His was a useless gesture as the rudder had been ripped off its pintles soon after the wave struck. He clung tenaciously to life, his fear heightened by the mummies that swirled around the galleon.

The worst was far from over. The mad swirl of the tidal current caused a vortex that spun the galleon with such force the masts went crashing over the sides and the two guns broke their lashings and tumbled about the deck in a wild dance of destruction. One by one the fear-crazed seamen were swept away by the gyrating avalanche of water until only Cuttill was left. The enormous surge smashed and ravaged its way 8 kilometers (5 miles) inland, uprooting and shredding trees until over 100 square kilometers (36 square miles) were utterly devastated. Massive boulders were scattered ahead of the wave's force like small pebbles thrown by a boy's sling. Then at last, as the leviathan of death met the foothills of the Andes it began to lose momentum. Its fury spent, it lapped at the foot of the mountains and finally began to recede with a great sucking sound, leaving in its wake a swath of destruction unknown in recorded history.

Cuttill felt the galleon become motionless. He stared across the gun deck covered with fallen rigging and timbers, unable to see another living soul. For nearly an hour he huddled under the tiller, fearing a return of the murderous wave, but the ship remained still and silent. Slowly, stiffly, he made his way to the top of the quarterdeck and surveyed the scene of devastation.

Astoundingly, the Conception sat upright, high and dry in a flattened jungle. He judged her to be almost three leagues from the nearest water. Her survival was due to her rugged construction and the fact she was sailing into the wave when it struck. If she had been sailing away the watery force would have smashed into her high sterncastle and ripped her to kindling. She had endured, but she was a wreck that would never feel the sea beneath her keel again.

Far in the distance, the village had disappeared. All that remained was a wide beach of sand swept free of wreckage. It was as if a thousand people and their homes had never existed. Corpses littered the drenched jungle. To Cuttill they seemed to be scattered everywhere, in some places over 3 'meters deep (10 feet). Many were hanging grotesquely in the twisted branches of the trees. Most had been battered into almost unrecognizable shapes.

Cuttill could not believe he was the only human to survive the cataclysm, and yet he failed to see another living soul. He thanked God for his deliverance and prayed for guidance. Then he took stock of his situation. Stranded fourteen thousand nautical miles from England, deep in a part of the world controlled by the Spanish, who would gladly torture and execute a hated English pirate should they lay hands on him, his odds of living a long life were slim indeed. Cuttill saw absolutely no hope of returning home by sea. He decided his only course, one with little probability of success, was to trek over the Andes and work east. Once he reached the Brazilian coast there was always the possibility of meeting up with an English marauder that was raiding Portuguese shipping.

The following morning he made a litter for his sea chest and filled it with food and water from the ship's galley, bedding, two pistols, a pound of gunpowder, a supply of shot, flint, and steel, a sack of tobacco, a knife, and a Spanish Bible. Then with nothing else but the clothes on his back, Cuttill set off with his litter for the mists hovering over the peaks of the Andes, taking one final look at the forlorn Conception and wondering if perhaps the gods of the Incas were somehow responsible for the catastrophe.

Now they had their sacred relics back, he thought, and they were damned welcome to them. The antique jade box with its strange lid came to mind, and he did not envy the next men who came to steal it.

Drake returned triumphantly to England, arriving at Plymouth on September 26, 1580, with the Golden Hind's holds bulging with spoils. But he found no sign of Thomas Cuttill and the Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion. His backers received a 4700 percent profit on their investment and the queen's share became the foundation for future British expansion. During a lavish party on board the Hind at Greenwich, Queen Elizabeth conferred knighthood on Drake.

The second ship to circumnavigate the world was made a tourist attraction. For three generations she remained on view until finally she either rotted away or burned to the waterline. History doesn't know for certain how it happened, but the Golden Hind vanished into the water of the Thames.

Sir Francis Drake continued his exploits for another sixteen years. On a later voyage, he seized the city ports of Santo Domingo and Cartagena and became Her Majesty's Admiral-of-the-Seas. He also served as mayor of Plymouth and a member of Parliament. And then there was his bold attack on the great Spanish Armada in 1588. His end came during an expedition to plunder ports and shipping on the Spanish Main in 1596. After succumbing to dysentery he was sealed in a lead coffin and dropped in the sea near Portobelo, Panama.

Before his death, hardly a day passed when Drake didn't puzzle over the disappearance of the Conception and the enigma of the mysterious jade box and its knotted cords.

BONES AND THRONES

October 10, 1998

Andes Mountains of Peru

The skeleton reclined in the sediment of the deep pool as if resting on a soft mattress, the cold unwinking eye sockets of the skull staring upward through the liquid gloom toward the surface 36 meters (120 feet) away. There was a horrible vindictive grin set in the teeth as a small water snake thrust its evil head from under the rib cage, and then slithered away, leaving a tiny cloud of silt to smudge its trail. One arm was held in an upright position by an elbow imbedded in the muck, the bony fingers of the hand as if beckoning the unwary.

From the bottom of the pool to the sun above, the water gradually lightened from a dismal gray-brown to a pea-soup green from the pond scum that flourished under the tropical heat. The circular rim stretched 30 meters (98 feet) across and the sheer walls dropped 15 meters (49 feet) to the water. Once in, there was no way a human or animal could escape without help from above.

There was an ugliness about the deep limestone sinkhole, or cenote as it was technically called, a repugnant menace that animals sensed, refusing to approach within fifty meters of its perimeter. A grim sense of death hung about the place, and rightly so. The place was more than a sacred well where men, women, and children had been thrown alive into the dark waters as sacrifices during times of drought and harsh storms. Ancient legends and myths called it a house of evil gods where strange and unspeakable events occurred. There were also tales of rare artifacts, handcrafted and sculpted, along with jade, gold, and precious gemstones, that were said to have been cast into the forbidding pool to appease the evil gods who were inflicting bad weather. In 1964 two divers entered the depths of the sinkhole and never returned. No attempt had been made to recover their bodies.

The sinkhole's early history began in the Cambrian era when the region was part of an ancient sea. Through the following geological eras, thousands of generations of shellfish and coral lived and died, their skeletal carcasses forming an enormous mass of lime and sand that compressed into a limestone and dolomite layer two kilometers thick. Then, beginning sixty-five million years ago, an intense earth uplifting occurred that raised the Andes Mountains to their present height. As the rain ran down from the mountains it formed a great underground water table that slowly began dissolving the limestone. Where it collected and pooled, the water ate upward until the land surface collapsed and created the sinkhole.

In the damp air above the jungle surrounding the cavity, an Andean condor banked in great lazy circles, one emotionless eye fastened on a group of people working around the edge of the cenote. Its long, broad wings, measuring 3 meters (10 feet), arched stiff to catch the air currents. The huge black bird, with its white ruff and bald pinkish head, soared effortlessly as it studied the movement below. Finally, satisfied that no meal was in the offing, the vulture ascended to a greater height for distant observation and drifted eastward in search of carrion.

A great deal of unresolved controversy had surrounded the sacred pool, and now archaeologists had finally gathered to dive and retrieve artifacts from its enigmatic depths. The ancient site was located on a western slope beneath a high ridge of the Peruvian Andes near a great ruined city. The nearby stone structures had been part of a vast confederation of city-states, known as the Chachapoyas, that was conquered by the renowned Inca empire around A.D.1480.

The Chachapoyan confederation encompassed almost 400 square kilometers (150 square miles). Its metropolitan spread of farms, temples, and fortresses now lay in mostly unexplored heavily forested mountains. The ruins of this great civilization indicated an incredibly mysterious blend of cultures and origins that were mostly unknown. The Chachapoyan rulers or council of elders, their architects, priests, soldiers, and ordinary working people in the cities and on the farms left virtually no record of their lives. And archaeologists had yet to fathom their government bureaucracy, justice system, and religious practices.

As she stared down at the stagnant water through big, wide, hazel eyes under raised dark brows, Dr. Shannon Kelsey was too excited to feel the cold touch of fear. A very attractive woman when dressed and made up, she possessed a rather cool and aloof self-sufficiency that most men found irritating, particularly so since she could gaze into their eyes with a teasing boldness. Her hair was straight and soft blond and tied in a ponytail by a red bandanna, and the abundance of skin that showed on her face, arms, and legs was richly tanned. The inside of her one-piece black Lycra swim suit was nicely filled by an hourglass figure with an extra twenty minutes thrown in for good measure, and when she moved it was with the fluid grace of a Balinese dancer.

In her late thirties, Dr. Kelsey had enjoyed a ten-year fascination with the Chachapoyan cultures. She had explored and surveyed important archaeological sites on five previous expeditions, clearing the invading plant growth from a number of the major buildings and temples of the region's ancient cities. As a respected archaeologist of Andes culture, following in the footsteps of a glorious past was her, great passion. To work where an enigmatic and obscure people had flourished and died was a dream made possible by a grant from the Archaeology Department of Arizona State University.

"Useless to carry a video camera unless the visibility opens up below the first two meters," said Miles Rodgers, the photographer who was filming the project.

"Then shoot stills," Shannon said firmly. "I want every dive recorded whether we can see past our noses or not."

A year shy of forty and sporting luxuriant black hair and a beard, Rodgers was an old pro at underwater photography. He was in demand by all the major science and travel publications to shoot below-the-sea photos of fish and coral reefs. His extraordinary pictures of World War II shipwrecks in the South Pacific and ancient submerged seaports throughout the Mediterranean had won him numerous awards and the respect of his peers.

A tall, slender man in his sixties, with a silver gray beard that covered half his face, held up Shannon's air tank so she could slip her arms through the straps of the backpack. "I wish you'd put a hold on this until we've finished constructing the dive raft."

"That's two days away. By doing a preliminary survey now we can get a head start."

"Then at least wait for the rest of the dive team to arrive from the university. If you and Miles get into trouble, we have no backup."

"Not to worry," Shannon said gamely. "Miles and I will only do a bounce dive to test depth and water conditions. We won't run our dive time past thirty minutes."

"And no deeper than fifteen meters," the older man cautioned her.

Shannon smiled at her colleague, Dr. Steve Miller from the University of Pennsylvania. "And if we haven't touched bottom at fifteen meters?"

"We've got five weeks. No need to get antsy and risk an accident." Miller's voice was quiet and deep, but there was a noticeable trace of concern in it. One of the leading anthropologists of his time, he had devoted the last thirty years to unraveling the mysteries of the cultures that had evolved in the upper regions of the Andes and spilled down to the jungles of the Amazon. "Play it safe, make a study of water conditions and the geology of the pool walls, then get back to the surface."

Shannon nodded and spit into her face mask, smearing the saliva around the inside of the lens to keep it from misting. Next she rinsed the mask from a canteen of water. After adjusting her buoyancy compensator and cinching her weight belt, she and Rodgers made a final check of each other's equipment. Satisfied everything was in place and their digital dive computers properly programmed, Shannon smiled at Miller.

"See you soon, Doc. Keep a martini on ice."

The anthropologist looped under their arms a wide strap that was attached to long nylon lines, gripped tightly by a team of ten Peruvian graduate students of the university's archaeology program, who had volunteered to join the project. "Lower away, kids," Miller ordered the six boys and four girls.

Hand over hand the lines were paid out as the divers began their descent into the ominous pool below. Shannon and Rodgers extended their legs and used the tips of their dive fins as bumpers to keep from scraping against the rough limestone walls. They could clearly see the coating of slime covering the surface of the water. It looked as viscous and about as inviting as a tub of green mucus. The aroma of decay and stagnation was overwhelming. To Shannon the thrill of the unknown abruptly changed to a feeling of deep apprehension.

When they were within 1 meter (about 3 feet) of the surface, they both inserted their air regulator mouthpieces between their teeth and signaled to the anxious faces staring from above. Then Shannon and Miles slipped out of their harnesses and dropped out of sight into the odious slime.

Miller nervously paced the rim of the sinkhole, glancing at his watch every other minute while the students peered in fascination at the green slime below. Fifteen minutes passed with no sign of the divers. Suddenly, the exhaust bubbles from their air regulators disappeared. Frantically Miller ran along the edge of the well. Had they found a cave and entered it? He waited ten minutes, then ran over to a nearby tent and rushed inside. Almost feverishly he picked up a portable radio and began hailing the project's headquarters and supply unit in the small town of Chachapoyas, 90 kilometers (56 miles) to the south. The voice of Juan Chaco, inspector general of Peruvian archaeology and director of the Museo de la Nacion in Lima, answered almost immediately.

"Juan here. That you, Doc? What can I do for you?"

"Dr. Kelsey and Miles Rodgers insisted on making a preliminary dive into the sacrificial well," replied Miller. "I think we may have an emergency."

"They went into that cesspool without waiting for the dive team from the university?" Chaco asked in a strangely indifferent tone.

"I tried to talk them out of it."

"When did they enter the water?"

Miller checked his watch again. "Twenty-seven minutes ago."

"How long did they plan to stay down?"

"They planned to resurface after thirty minutes."

"It's still early." Chaco sighed. "So what's the problem?"

"We've seen no sign of their air bubbles for the last ten minutes."

Chaco caught his breath, closed his eyes for a second. "Doesn't sound good, my friend. This is not what we planned."

"Can you send the dive team ahead by helicopter?" asked Miller.

"Not possible," Chaco replied helplessly. "They're still in transit from Miami. Their plane isn't scheduled to land in Lima for another four hours."

"We can't afford government meddling. Certainly not now. Can you arrange to have a dive rescue team rushed to the sinkhole?"

"The nearest naval facility is at Trujillo. I'll alert the base commander and go from there."

"Good luck to you, Juan. I'll stand by the radio at this end."

"Keep me informed of any new developments."

"I will, I promise you," Miller said grimly.

"My friend?"

"Yes?"

"They'll come through," offered Chaco in a hollow tone. "Rodgers is a master diver. He doesn't make mistakes."

Miller said nothing. There was nothing more to say. He broke contact with Chaco and hurried back to the silent group of students, who were staring down into the sinkhole with dread.

In Chachapoyas, Chaco pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his face. He was a man of order. Unforeseen obstacles or problems irritated him. If the two stupid Americans drowned themselves, there would be a government inquiry. Despite Chaco's influence, the Peruvian news media were bound to make an overblown incident out of it. The consequences might very well prove to be nothing less than disastrous.

"All we need now," he muttered to himself, "are two dead archaeologists in the pool."

Then with shaking hands he gripped the radio transmitter and began sending out an urgent call for help.

One hour and forty-five minute had passed since Shannon and Miles had entered the sacrificial pool. Any attempt at rescue now seemed an empty gesture. Nothing could save Shannon and Miles now. They had to be dead, their air used up long ago. Two more victims added to the countless number who had disappeared into the morbid waters through the centuries.

In a voice frantic with desperation, Chaco had informed him that the Peruvian navy was caught unprepared for an emergency. Their water escape and recovery team was on a training mission far to the south of Peru near the Chilean border. It was impossible for them to airlift the dive team and their equipment to the sinkhole before sundown. Chaco helplessly shared Miller's anxiety over the slow response time. But this was South America and speed was seldom a priority.

One of the female students heard it first. She cupped her hands to her ears and turned back and forth like a radar antenna. "A helicopter!" she announced excitedly, pointing in a westerly direction through the tops of the trees.

In an expectant hush everyone around the rim of the pool listened. The faint thumping sound of a rotor blade beating the air came toward them, growing louder with each passing moment. A minute later a turquoise helicopter with the letters NUMA painted on its sides swept into view.

Where had it come from? Miller wondered, his spirits rising. It obviously didn't have the markings of the Peruvian navy. It had to be a civilian craft.

The tops of the surrounding trees were whipped into a frenzy as the helicopter began its descent into a small clearing beside the sinkhole. The landing skids were still in the air when the fuselage door opened and a tall man with wavy black hair made an agile leap to the ground. He was dressed in a thin, shorty wet suit for diving in warm waters. Ignoring the younger people, he walked directly up to the anthropologist.

"Dr. Miller?"

"Yes, I'm Miller."

The stranger, a warm smile arched across his face, shoved out a calloused hand. "I'm sorry we couldn't have arrived sooner."

"Who are you?"

"My name is Dirk Pitt."

"You're American," Miller stated, staring into a craggy face with eyes that seemed to smile.

"Special Projects Director for the U.S. National Underwater and Marine Agency. As I understand it, two of your divers are missing in an underwater cave."

"A sinkhole," Miller corrected him. "Dr. Shannon Kelsey and Miles Rodgers entered the water almost two hours ago and have failed to resurface."

Pitt walked over to the edge of the pool, stared down at the stagnant water, and quickly determined that diving conditions were rotten. The pool went from slime green at the outer edges to pitch black in the center, giving the impression of great depth. There was nothing to indicate that the operation would prove to be anything more than a body recovery. "Not too inviting," he mused.

"Where did you come from?" queried Miller.

"NUMA is conducting an underwater geological survey off the coast due west of here. The Peruvian naval headquarters radioed a request to send divers on a rescue mission and we responded. Apparently we're the first to arrive on-site."

"How can oceanographic scientists carry out a rescue and recovery operation in a hellhole?" Miller snapped, becoming suddenly angry.

"Our research ship contained the necessary diving equipment," Pitt explained unemotionally. "I'm not a scientist but a marine engineer. I've only had a few training sessions in underwater recovery, but I'm a reasonably good diver."

Before a discouraged Miller could reply, the helicopter's engine died as the rotor blades slowly swung to a stop, and a short man with the broad shoulders and barrel chest of a dock worker squeezed through the exit door and approached. He looked the complete opposite of the tall lean Pitt.

My friend and associate, Al Giordino," Pitt said, introducing him.

Giordino nodded under a mass of dark, curly hair and said simply, "Hello."

Miller looked behind them through the windshield of the aircraft, and seeing the interior held no other passengers, groaned in despair. "Two of you, only two of you. My God, it will take at least a dozen men to bring them out."

Pitt wasn't the least bit annoyed by Miller's outburst. He stared at the anthropologist with tolerant understanding through deep green opaline eyes that seemed to possess a mesmeric quality. "Trust me, Doc," he said in a tone that stopped any further argument. "Al and I can do the job."

Within minutes, after a brief planning session, Pitt was ready to be lowered into the pool. He was wearing a full EXO-26 face mask from Diving Systems International with an exothermic air regulator good for polluted water applications. The earphone sockets were connected to an MK1-DCI Ocean Technology Systems diver radio. He earned twin 100-cubic-foot air tanks on his back and wore a buoyancy compensator with an array of instruments indicating depth, air pressure, and compass direction. As he geared up, Giordino connected a thick nylon Kermantle communications and safety line to Pitt's earphone and an emergency release buckle on a strap cinched around Pitt's waist. The remainder of the safety line wound around a large reel mounted inside the helicopter and connected to an outside amplifier. After a final check of Pitt's equipment, Giordino patted him on the head and spoke into the communication system's microphone.

"Looking good. Do you read?"

"As though you were inside my head," Pitt answered, his voice audible to everyone through an amplifier. "How about me?"

Giordino nodded. "Clear and distinct. I'll monitor your decompression schedule and dive time from here."

"Understood."

"I'm counting on you to give me a running account of your situation and depth."

Pitt wrapped the safety line around one arm and gripped it with both hands. He gave Giordino a wink from behind the lens of the face mask. "Okay, let's open the show."

Giordino motioned to four of Miller's students who began unwinding the reel. Unlike Shannon and Miles who bounced their way down along the sinkhole walls, Giordino had strung the nylon line over the end of a dead tree trunk that hung 2 meters (over 6 feet) beyond the edge of the vertical precipice, allowing Pitt to drop without scraping against the limestone.

For a man who was conceivably sending his friend to an untimely death, Miller thought, Giordino appeared incredibly calm and efficient. He did not know Pitt and Giordino, had never heard of the legendary pair. He could not know they were extraordinary men with almost twenty years of adventuring under the seas who had developed an unerring sense for assessing the odds of survival. He could only stand by in frustration at what he was certain was an exercise in futility. He leaned over the brink and watched intently as Pitt neared the green surface scum of the water.

"How's it look?" asked Giordino over the phone.

"Like my grandmother's split pea soup," replied Pitt.

"I don't advise sampling it."

"The thought never entered my mind."

No further words were spoken as Pitt's feet entered the liquid slime. When it closed over his head, Giordino slackened the safety line to give him freedom of movement. The water temperature was only about ten degrees cooler than the average hot tub. Pitt began breathing through his regulator, rolled over, kicked his fins, and dove down into the murky world of death. The increasing water pressure squeezed his ear drums and he snorted inside his mask to equalize the force. He switched on a Birns Oceanographics Snooper light, but the hand-held beam could barely penetrate the gloom.

Then, abruptly, he passed through the dense murk into a yawning chasm of crystal clear water. Instead of the light beam reflecting off the algae into his face, it suddenly shot into the distance. The instant transformation below the layer of slime stunned him for a moment. He felt as if he were swimming in air. "I have clear visibility at a depth of four meters," he reported topside.

"Any sign of the other divers?"

Pitt slowly swam in a 360-degree circle. "No, nothing."

"Can you make out details of the bottom?"

"Fairly well," replied Pitt. "The water is transparent as glass but quite dark. The scum on the surface cuts the sunlight on the bottom by seventy percent. It's a bit dark around the walls so I'll have to swim a search pattern so I won't miss the bodies."

"Do you have enough slack on the safety line?"

"Maintain a slight tension so it won't hinder my movement as I go deeper."

For the next twelve minutes Pitt circled the steep walls of the sinkhole, probing every cavity, descending as if revolving around a giant corkscrew. The limestone, laid down hundreds of millions of years earlier, was mineral stained with strange, abstract images. He planed horizontally and swam in languid slow motion, sweeping the beam of light back and forth in front of him. The illusion of soaring over a bottomless pit was overwhelming.

Finally, he leveled out over the floor of the sacrificial pool. No firm sand or plant life, just one uneven patch of ugly brown silt broken by clusters of grayish rock. "I have the bottom at slightly over thirty-six meters. Still no sign of Kelsey or Rodgers."

Far above the pool, Miller gave Giordino a dazed look. "They must be down there. Impossible for them to simply vanish."

Far below, Pitt kicked slowly across the bottom, careful to stay a good meter above the rocks and especially the silt, which might billow into a blinding cloud and reduce his visibility to zero within seconds. Once disturbed, silt could remain suspended for several hours before settling back to the bottom. He gave an involuntary shudder. The water had turned uncomfortably cold as he passed into a cool layer suspended beneath the warmer water above. He slowed and drifted, adding enough lift from his compensator for slight buoyancy, achieving a slight head-down, fins-up swimming position.

Cautiously, he reached down and gently sank his hands into the brown muck. They touched bedrock before the silt rose to his wrists. Pitt thought it strange the silt was so shallow. After countless centuries of erosion from the walls and runoff from the ground above, the rocky subsurface should have been covered with a layer at least 2 meters (over 6 feet) deep. He went motionless and floated over what looked like a field of bleached white tree limbs sprouting from the mud. Gripping one that was gnarled with small protrusions, he eased it out of the bed of silt. He found himself staring at a spinal column from an ancient sacrificial victim.

Giordino's voice broke through his earphones. "Speak to me."

"Depth thirty-seven meters," Pitt answered as he flung aside the spinal column. "The floor of the pool is a bone yard. There must be two hundred skeletons scattered around down here."

"Still no sign of bodies?"

"Not yet."

Pitt began to feel an icy finger trail up the nape of his neck as he spotted a skeleton with a bony hand pointing into the gloom. Beside the rib cage was a rusty breastplate, while the skull was still encased in what he guessed was a sixteenth-century Spanish helmet.

Pitt reported the sighting to Giordino. "Tell Doc Miller I've found a long-dead Spaniard complete with helmet and breastplate down here." Then, as if drawn by an unseen force, his eyes followed in the direction a curled finger of the hand pointed.

There was another body, one that had died more recently. It appeared to be a male with the legs drawn up and the head tilted back. Decomposition had not had time to fully break down the flesh. The corpse was still in a state of saponification, where the meaty tissue and organs had turned into a firm soaplike substance.

The expensive hiking boots, a red silk scarf knotted around the neck, and a Navajo silver belt buckle inlaid with turquoise stones made it easy for Pitt to recognize someone who was not a local peasant. Whoever he was, he was not young. Strands of long silver hair and beard swayed with the current from Pitt's movements. A wide gash in the neck also showed how he had died.

A thick gold ring with a large yellow stone flashed under the beam of the dive light. The thought occurred to Pitt that the ring might come in handy for identifying the body. Fighting the bile rising in his throat, he easily pulled the ring over the knuckle of the dead man's rotting finger while half expecting a shadowy form to appear and accuse him of acting like a ghoul. Disagreeable as the job was, he swished the ring through the silt to clean off any remnant of its former owner, and then slipped it onto one of his own fingers so he wouldn't lose it.

"I have another one," he notified Giordino.

"One of the divers or an old Spaniard?"

"Neither. This one looks to be a few months to a year old."

Do you want to retrieve it?" asked Giordino.

"Not yet. We'll wait until after we find Doc Miller's people-" Pitt suddenly broke off as he was struck by an enormous force of water that surged into the pool from an unseen passage on the opposite wall and churned up the silt like dust whirling around a tornado. He would have tumbled out of control like a leaf in the wind by the unexpected energy of the turbulence but for his safety line. As it was he barely kept a firm grip on his dive light.

"That was a hell of a jerk," said Giordino with concern. "What's going on?"

"I've been struck by a powerful surge from nowhere," Pitt replied, relaxing and allowing himself to go with the flow. "That explains why the silt layer is so shallow. It's periodically swept away by the turbulence."

"Probably fed by an underground water system that builds up pressure and releases it as a surge across the floor of the sinkhole," Giordino speculated. "Shall we pull you out?"

"No, leave me be. Visibility is nil, but I don't seem to be in any immediate danger. Slowly release the safety line and let's see where the current carries me. There must be an outlet somewhere."

"Too dangerous. You might get hung up and trapped."

"Not if I keep from entangling my safety line," Pitt said easily.

On the surface, Giordino studied his watch. "You've been down sixteen minutes. How's your air?"

Pitt held his pressure gauge in front of his face mask. He could barely read the needle through the maelstrom of silt. "Good for another twenty minutes."

"I'll give you ten. After that, at your present depth, you'll be looking at decompression stops."

"You're the boss," Pitt came back agreeably.

"What's your situation?"

"Feels like I'm being pulled into a narrow tunnel feet first. I can touch the walls closing around me. Lucky I have a safety line. Impossible to swim against the surge."

Giordino turned to Miller. "Sounds as if he may have a lead on what happened to your divers."

Miller shook his head in anger. "I warned them. They could have avoided this tragedy by keeping their dive in shallow depths."

Pitt felt as though he was being sucked through the narrow slot for an hour when it was only twenty seconds. The silt cloud had faded slightly, most of it remaining in the deep pool behind. He began to see his surroundings more clearly. His compass showed he was being carried in a southeasterly direction. Then the walls suddenly opened out into one enormous, flooded room. To his right and below he caught the momentary flash of something glinting in the murk. Something metallic vaguely reflecting the silt-dimmed beam of his dive light. It was an abandoned air tank. Nearby was a second one. He swam over and peered at their pressure gauges. The needles were pegged on empty. He angled his dive light around in a circle, expecting to see dead bodies floating in the darkness like phantom demons.

The cool bottom water had drained away a measure of Pitt's strength and he could feel his motions becoming sluggish. Although Giordino's voice still came through the earphones as clearly as if Pitt was standing next to him, the words seemed less distinct. Pitt switched his mind off automatic and put it on full control, sending out instructions to check data gauges, safety line, and buoyancy compensator as if there were another Pitt inside his head.

He mentally sharpened his senses and forced himself to be alert. If the bodies were swept into a side passage, he thought, he could easily pass them by and never notice. But a quick search turned up nothing but a pair of discarded swim fins. Pitt aimed the dive light upward and saw the reflective glitter of surface water that indicated the upper dome of the chamber contained an air pocket.

He also glimpsed a pair of white feet.

Trapped far from the outside world in a prison of perpetual silence, breathing in a small pocket of air millions of years old and lying smothered in total blackness deep under the earth is too alien, too terrible to imagine. The horror of dying under such terrifying conditions can provide nightmares on a par with being locked in a closet full of snakes.

After initial panic had passed and a small degree of rationality was retrieved, any hope that Shannon and Rodgers had of surviving vanished when the air in their tanks became exhausted and the final spark of life in the batteries of their dive lights gave out. The air in the small pocket soon became foul and stale from their own breathing. Dazed and lightheaded from lack of oxygen, they knew their suffering would only end when the watery chamber became their tomb.

The underground current had sucked them into the cavern after Shannon had excitedly dived to the bottom of the sinkhole after glimpsing the field of bones. Rodgers had faithfully followed and exhausted himself in a frantic effort to escape the surge. The last of their air had been used up in a vain attempt to find another passage leading out of the chamber. There was no exit, no escape. They could only drift in the blackness, held afloat by their buoyancy compensators, and wait to die.

Rodgers, for all his guts, was in a bad way, and Shannon was just hanging on by a thread when suddenly she noticed a flickering light in the forbidding water below. Then it became a bright, yellow beam stabbing the blackness in her direction. Was her numbed mind playing tricks? Did she dare entertain a glimmer of hope?

"They've found us," she finally gasped as the light moved toward her.

Rodgers, his face etched and gray with fatigue and despair, stared blankly down at the approaching light beam without reaction. The lack of breathable air and the crushing blackness had left him in a near comatose state. His eyes were open and he was still breathing, and, incredibly, he still tightly grasped his camera. He felt a vague awareness that he was entering the tunnel of light described by people who returned from death.

Shannon felt a hand grab her foot, and then a head popped out of the water less than an arm's length away. The dive light was beamed into her eyes, momentarily blinding her. Then it moved onto Rodgers's face. Instantly recognizing who was the worse off, Pitt reached under one arm and took hold of an auxiliary air regulator that was connected to the dual valve manifold of his air tanks. He quickly slipped the mouthpiece of the regulator between Rodgers's lips. Then he passed Shannon a reserve pony bottle and air regulator that was attached to his waist belt.

Several deep breaths later, the revival in mood and physical well-being was nothing short of miraculous. Shannon gave Pitt a big bear hug as a renewed Rodgers pumped his hand so vigorously he nearly sprained Pitt's wrist. There were moments of speechless joy as all three were swept away in a euphoria of relief and excitement.

Only when Pitt realized that Giordino was shouting through his earphones, demanding a situation report, did he announce, "Tell Doc Miller I've found his lost lambs. They are alive, repeat, they are alive and well."

"You have them?" Giordino burst through Pitt's earphones. "They're not dead?"

"A little pale around the gills but otherwise in good shape."

"How is it possible?" muttered a disbelieving Miller.

Giordino nodded. "The Doc wants to know how they stayed alive."

"The current swept them into a chamber with an air pocket in its dome. Lucky I arrived when I did. They were minutes away from using up the oxygen."

The crowd grouped around the amplifier was stunned by the announcement. But as the news sank in, relief spread across every face, and the ancient stone city echoed with cheers and applause. Miller turned away as if wiping tears from his eyes while Giordino smiled and smiled.

Down in the chamber Pitt motioned that he could not remove his full face mask and converse. He indicated they would have to communicate through hand signals. Shannon and Rodgers nodded, and then Pitt began to describe visually the procedure for their escape.

Since the lost divers had dropped all of their useless dive gear, except for face masks and buoyancy compensators, Pitt felt confident the three of them could be pulled back through the narrow shaft against the current and into the main pool by his phone and safety line without complications. According to the manufacturers' specs, the nylon line and phone cable could support up to almost six thousand pounds.

He signaled Shannon to wrap one leg and one arm around the line and lead off, breathing through her pony bottle. Rodgers would repeat the step and follow, with Pitt bringing up the rear close enough for the spare regulator to reach Rodgers's mouth. When Pitt was sure they were stable and breathing easy, he alerted Giordino.

"We're positioned and ready for escape."

Giordino paused and stared at the young archaeology students, their hands gripping the safety line, poised as if ready for a tug-of-war. He studied their impatient expressions and quickly realized he would have to keep their enthusiasm and excitement in check or they might haul the divers through the rock passageway like so much meat through a jagged pipe. "Stand by. Give me your depth."

"I read slightly over seventeen meters. Much higher than the bottom of the sinkhole. We were sucked into a passage that sloped upward for twenty meters."

"You're borderline," Giordino informed him, "but the others have exceeded their time and pressure limits. I'll compute and advise you of decompression stops."

"Don't make them too long. Once the pony bottle is empty, it won't take long for the three of us to use up what air I have left in my twin tanks."

"Perish the thought. If I don't hold these kids by the collar, they'll jerk you out of there so fast you'll feel like you were fired from a cannonball."

"Try to keep it civilized."

Giordino held up his hand as a signal for the students to begin pulling. "Here we go."

"Bring on the jugglers and the clowns," Pitt answered in good humor.

The safety line became taut and the long, slow haul began. The rush of the surge through the shaft was matched by the gurgling of their exhaust bubbles from the air regulators. With nothing to do now but grip the line, Pitt relaxed and went limp, allowing his body to be drawn against the flow of the underground current that gushed through the narrow slot like air through a venturi tube. The lighter silt-clouded water in the pool at the end of the passage seemed miles away. Time had no meaning, and he felt as if he'd been immersed for an age. Only Giordino's steady voice helped Pitt keep his grip on reality.

"Cry out if we haul too fast," ordered Giordino.

"Looking good," Pitt replied, hearing his air tanks grinding against the ceiling of the shaft.

What is your estimate of the current's rate of speed?"

"Close to eight knots."

Small wonder your bodies are causing severe resistance. I've got ten kids up here, pulling their hearts out."

"Six more meters and we're out of here," Pitt informed him.

And then a minute, probably a minute and a half, struggling to hold on to the safety line as they were buffeted by the diminishing force of the torrent, and they broke free of the shaft into the cloud of silt swirling around the floor of the sacrificial pool. Another minute and they were pulled upward and clear from the drag of the current and into transparent, unclouded water. Pitt looked up, saw the light filtering through the green slime, and felt a wondrous sense of relief.

Giordino knew they were free of the suction when the tension on the safety line suddenly diminished. He ordered a halt to the ascent operation as he rechecked his decompression data on a laptop computer. One stop of eight minutes would take Pitt out of any danger of decompression sickness, but the archaeology project divers would need stops of far longer duration. They had been down over two hours at depths ranging from 17 to 37 meters (67 to 122 feet). They would require at least two stops lasting over an hour. How much air was left in Pitt's tanks to sustain them? That was the life-or-death dilemma. Enough for ten minutes? Fifteen? Twenty?

At sea level, or one atmosphere, the normal human body contains about one liter of dissolved nitrogen. Breathing larger quantities of air under the pressure of water depth increases the absorption of nitrogen to two liters at two atmospheres (10 meters, or 30 feet of water depth), three liters at three atmospheres (30 meters, or 90 feet), and so on. During diving the excess nitrogen is rapidly dissolved in the blood, carried throughout the body, and stored in the tissues. When a diver begins to ascend, the situation is reversed, only this time far more slowly. As the water pressure decreases, the overabundance of nitrogen travels to the lungs and is eliminated by respiration. If the diver rises too quickly, normal breathing can't cope and bubbles of nitrogen form in the blood, body tissue, and joints, causing decompression sickness, better known as the bends, a condition that has crippled or killed thousands of divers over the past century.

Finally, Giordino set aside the computer and called Pitt. "Dirk?"

"I hear you."

"Bad news. There isn't enough air left in your tanks for the lady and her friend to make the necessary decompression stops."

"Tell me something I don't know," Pitt came back. "What about backup tanks in the chopper?"

"No such luck," moaned Giordino. "In our rush to leave the ship the crew threw on an air compressor but forgot to load extra air tanks."

Pitt stared through his face mask at Rodgers, still clutching his camera and shooting pictures. The photographer gave him a thumbs up sign as though he'd just cleared the pool table at the neighborhood saloon. Pitt's gaze moved to Shannon. Her hazel eyes stared back at him through her face mask, wide and content as if she thought the nightmare was over and her hero was going to sweep her off to his castle. She had not realized the worst was far from over. For the first time he noticed that she had blond hair, and Pitt found himself wondering what she looked like in only her swim suit without the diving equipment.

The daydream was over almost as soon as it was begun. His mind came back on an even keel and he spoke into his face mask receiver. "Al, you said the compressor is on board the chopper."

"I did."

"Send down the tool kit. You'll find it in the storage locker of the chopper."

"Make sense," Giordino urged.

"The manifold valves on my air tanks," Pitt explained hastily. "They're the new prototypes NUMA is testing. I can shut off one independently of the other and then remove it from the manifold without expelling air from the opposite tank."

"I read you, pal," said an enlightened Giordino. "You disconnect one of your twin tanks and breathe off the other. I pull up the empty and refill it with the compressor. Then we repeat the process until we satisfy the decompression schedule."

"A glittering concept, don't you think?" asked Pitt with dark sarcasm.

"Fundamental at best," grunted Giordino, artfully concealing his elation. "Hang at six-point-five meters for seventeen minutes. I'll send the tool kit down to you on the safety line. I just hope your plan works."

"Never a doubt." Pitt's confidence seemed genuine. "When I step onto firm ground again, I'll expect a Dixieland band playing `Waiting for the Robert E. Lee'."

"Spare me," Giordino groaned.

As he ran toward the helicopter, he was confronted by Miller.

"Why did you stop?" the anthropologist demanded. "Good God, man, what are you waiting for? Pull them up!"

Giordino fixed the anthropologist with an icy stare. "Pull them to the surface now and they die."

Miller looked blank. "Die?"

"The bends, Doc, ever hear of it?"

A look of understanding crossed Miller's face, and he slowly nodded. "I'm sorry. Please forgive an excitable old bone monger. I won't trouble you again."

Giordino smiled sympathetically. He continued to the helicopter and climbed inside, never suspecting that Miller's words were as prophetic as a lead dime.

The tool kit, consisting of several metric wrenches, a pair of pliers, two screwdrivers, and a geologist's hammer with a small pick on one end, was tied loosely to the safety line by a bowline knot and lowered by a small cord. Once the tools were in Pitt's hands he gripped the air tank pack between his knees. Next he adroitly shut off one valve and unthreaded it from the manifold with a wrench. When one air tank came free, he attached it to the cord.

"Cargo up," Pitt announced.

In less than four minutes, the tank was raised by willing hands on the secondary cord, connected to the throbbing gas-engine compressor and taking on purified air. Giordino was cursing, sweet talking, and begging the compressor to pump 3500 pounds of air per square inch into the 100-cubic-foot steel tank in record time. The needle on the pressure gauge was just shy of 1800 pounds when Pitt warned him that Shannon's pony bottle was dry and his lone tank had only 400 pounds left. With three of them sucking on one tank, that did not leave a comfortable safety margin. Giordino cut off the compressor when the pressure reached 2500 and wasted no time in sending the tank back down into the sinkhole. The process was repeated three more times after Pitt and the other divers moved to their next decompression stop at three meters, which meant they had to endure several minutes in the slime. The whole procedure went off without a hitch.

Giordino allowed an ample safety margin. He let nearly forty minutes pass before he pronounced it safe for Shannon and Rodgers to surface and be lifted to the brink of the sacrificial pool. It was a measure of his complete confidence in his friend that Pitt didn't even bother to question the accuracy of Giordino's calculations. Ladies went first as Pitt encircled Shannon's waist with the strap and buckle that was attached to the safety and communications line. He waved to the faces peering over the edge and Shannon was on her way to dry land.

Rodgers was next. His utter exhaustion after his narrow brush with death was forgotten at the sheer exhilaration of being lifted out of the godforsaken pool of death and slime, never, he swore, to return. A gnawing hunger and a great thirst mushroomed inside him. He remembered a bottle of vodka that he kept in his tent and he began to think of reaching for it as though it were the holy grail. He was high enough now to see the faces of Dr. Miller and the Peruvian archaeology students. He had never been as happy to see anyone in his life. He was too overjoyed to notice that none of them was smiling.

Then, as he was hoisted over the edge of the sinkhole, he saw to his astonishment and horror a sight that was completely unexpected.

Dr. Miller, Shannon, and the Peruvian university students stepped back once Rodgers was on solid ground. As soon as he had unbuckled the safety line he saw that they all stood somberly with their hands clasped behind their necks.

There were six in all, Chinese-manufactured Type 56-1 assault rifles gripped ominously by six pairs of steady hands. The six men were strung out in a rough semicircle around the archaeologists, small, blank-faced, silent men dressed in wool ponchos, sandals, and felt hats. Their furtive dark eyes darted from the captured group to Rodgers.

To Shannon, these men were not simple hill-folk bandits supplementing their meager incomes by robbing visitors of food and material goods that could be hawked in public markets, they had to be hardened killers of the Sendero Luminoso ("Shining Path"), a Maoist revolutionary group that had terrorized Peru since 1981 by murdering thousands of innocent victims, including political leaders, policemen, and army soldiers. She was suddenly gripped by terror. The Shining Path killers were notorious for attaching explosives to their victims and blasting them to pieces.

After their founder and leader, Abimael Guzman, was captured in September 1992, the guerrilla movement had split into unorganized splinter groups that carried out haphazard car bombings and assassinations by bloodcrazed death squads that achieved nothing for the people of Peru but tragedy and grief. The guerrillas stood around their captives, alert and watchful, with sadistic anticipation in their eyes.

One of them, an older man with an immense sweeping moustache, motioned for Rodgers to join the other captives. "Are there more people down there?" he asked in English with the barest trace of a Spanish accent.

Miller hesitated and cast a side glance at Giordino.

Giordino nodded at Rodgers. "That man is the last," he snapped in a tone filled with defiance. "He and the lady were the only divers."

The rebel guerrilla gazed at Giordino through lifeless, carbon black eyes. Then he stepped to the sheer drop of the sacrificial pool and peered downward. He saw a head floating in the middle of green slime. "That is good," he said in a sinister tone.

He picked up the safety line that descended into the water, took a machete from his belt and brought it down in a deft swing, severing the line from the reel. Then the expressionless face smiled a morbid smile as he casually held the end of the line over the edge for a moment before dropping it into the unescapable sinkhole.

Pitt felt like the chump in a Laurel and Hardy movie who yells to be saved from drowning and is thrown both ends of a rope. Holding up the severed end of the safety and communications line, he stared at it, incredulous. Besides having his means of escape dropped around his head, he had lost all contact with Giordino. He floated in the slime in total ignorance of the hostile events occurring above the sinkhole. He unbuckled the head straps holding the full face mask securely around his head, pulled it off, and stared up at the rim expectantly. Nobody stared back.

Pitt was half a second away from shouting for help when a roaring blast of gunfire reverberated around the limestone walls of the sinkhole for a solid sixty seconds. The acoustics of the stone amplified the sound deafeningly. Then, as abruptly as the automatic weapons' fire cut the quiet jungle, the harsh clatter faded and all went strangely silent. Pitt's thoughts were hurtling around in an unbreakable circle. To say he was mystified was a vast understatement. What was happening up there? Who was doing the shooting, and at whom? He became increasingly apprehensive with each passing moment. He had to get out of this death pit. But how? He didn't need a manual on mountain climbing to tell him it was impossible to climb the sheer ninety-degree walls without proper equipment or help from above.

Giordino would never have deserted him, he thought bleakly. Never-unless his friend was injured or unconscious. He didn't allow himself to dwell on the unthinkable possibility that Giordino was dead. Heartsick and mad from the desperation welling up inside him, Pitt shouted to the open sky, his voice echoing in the deep chamber. His only answer was a deathly stillness. He couldn't conceive why any of this was happening. It was becoming increasingly obvious that he would have to climb out alone. He looked up at the sky. There was less than two hours of daylight left. If he was to save himself, he had to start now. But what of the unseen intruders with guns? The nagging question was would they wait until he was as exposed as a fly on a windowpane before they blew him away? Or did they figure he was as good as dead? He decided not to wait to find out. Nothing short of the threat of being thrown in molten lava could keep him in that hot, scummy-layered water through the night.

He floated on his back and examined the walls that seemed to reach to a passing cloud, and tried to recall what he'd read about limestone in what seemed a centuries-old geology course in college. Limestone: a sedimentary rock composed of calcium carbonate, a sort of blend of crystalline calcite and carbonate mud, produced by lime-secreting organisms from ancient coral reefs. Limestones vary in texture and color. Not bad, Pitt thought, for a student who pulled a B - in the course. His old teacher would be proud of him.

He was lucky he wasn't facing granite or basalt. The limestone was pockmarked with small hollow cavities and lined with tiny edges. He swam around the circular walls until he was under a small outcropping that protruded from the side about halfway to the top. He removed his air tank pack and the rest of his diving gear, except for the accessory belt, and let it drop to the floor of the sinkhole. All he kept were the pliers and the geologist's pick hammer from the tool kit. If for some unfathomable reason his best friend and the archaeologists above the ledge had been killed or wounded, and Pitt had been left to die in the sacrificial pool with only the ghosts of previous victims for company, he was damned well going to find out why.

First, he pulled a dive knife from a sheath strapped to his leg and cut off two lengths of safety line. He tied one section of the line tightly to the narrow section of the pick hammer's handle close to the head so it wouldn't slip over the wider base. Then he tied a step-in loop at the free end of the line.

Next he rigged a hook from the buckle of his accessory belt, bending it with the pliers until it resembled a C. He then fastened the second section of line to the hook with another step-in loop. When he was finished, he had functional, though rudimentary, climbing tools.

Now came the tough part.

Pitt's climbing technique was not exactly that of a veteran mountaineer. The sad truth was that he had never climbed any mountain except on a beaten trail by foot. What little he'd seen of experts scaling vertical rock walls came from public service television or magazine articles. Water was his element. His only contact with mountains was an occasional ski trip to Breckenridge, Colorado. He didn't know a piton (a metal spike with a ring in one end) from a carabiner (an oblong metal ring with a springloaded closing latch that hooks the climbing rope to the piton). He vaguely knew rappelling had something to do with descending a rope that wrapped under a thigh, across the body, and over the opposite shoulder.

There wasn't an expert climber in the business who would have given five hundred to one odds Pitt could make it to the top. The problem with the odds was that Pitt was too stubborn to even consider them. The old diehard Pitt came back on balance. His mind felt clear and sharp as a needle. He knew his life, and perhaps the lives of the others, hung on an unraveling thread. Cold, self-possessed inner resolve took hold as it had so many times in the past.

With a commitment bred of desperation, he reached up and stuck the belt hook into a small protruding edge of limestone. He then stepped into the loop, grasped the upper end of the line and pulled himself out of the water.

Now he lifted the hammer as high as he could reach, slightly off to one side, and rapped the pick end of the hammer into a limestone pocket. Then he placed his free foot in the loop and pulled himself to a higher stance up the limestone wall.

Crude by professional standards, Pitt mused, but it worked. He repeated the process, first with the C hook, then with the pick hammer, moving up the steep wall with his arms and legs articulating like a spider. It was exhausting effort even for a man in good physical condition. The sun had vanished below the tops of the trees as if jerked to the west by a string when Pitt finally climbed onto the small outcropping halfway up the steep wall. Still no sign from anyone above.

He clung there, thankful for the resting place, even though it was barely large enough to sit one of his buttocks on. Breathing heavily, he rested until his aching muscles stopped protesting. He could not believe the climb had taken so much out of him. An expert who knew all the tricks, he presumed, wouldn't even be breathing hard. He sat there hugging the sheer side of the sinkhole wall for almost ten minutes. He felt like sitting there for another hour, but time was passing. The surrounding jungle was quickly turning dark once the sun was gone.

Pitt studied the crude climbing tool that had taken him this far. The hammer was as good as new, but the C hook was beginning to straighten from the constant strain of supporting the dead weight of a human body. He took a minute to recurl the hook by beating it against the limestone with his pick hammer.

He had expected the darkness to shroud his vision, forcing him to scale the limestone by feel only. But a strange light was forming below him. He turned and stared down into the water.

The pool was emitting an eerie phosphorescent green light. No chemist, Pitt could only assume the strange emission was caused by some sort of chemical reaction from the decaying slime. Thankful for the illumination, however dim, he continued his grueling climb upward.

The last 3 meters (10 feet) were the worst. So near, yet so far. The brink of the sinkhole seemed close enough to touch with his outstretched fingertips. Three meters, no more. Just ten feet. It might as well have been the summit of Mount Everest. A high school track star could have done it in his sleep. But not Pitt. A few months on the low side of forty, he felt like a tired old man.

His body was hard and lean, he watched his diet and exercised just enough to maintain a steady weight. There were the scars from numerous injuries, including gunshot wounds, but all the joints still functioned in a reasonably satisfactory manner. He'd given up smoking years ago, but still indulged himself occasionally with a glass of good wine or a tequila on the rocks with lime. His tastes had changed through the years from Cutty Sark scotch to Bombay gin to Sauza Commemorativo tequila. If asked why, he had no answer. He met each day as if life-was-a-game and games-were-life, and the reasons for doing certain things were hermetically sealed and buried inside his head.

Then, when he was within reach of the sinkhole's edge, he dropped the loop attached to the C hook. One moment stiffening fingers were tugging it from the limestone, the next it was falling toward the water where it entered the weirdly glowing algae layer with hardly a splash to mark its entry. In combination with the pick hammer, he began using the pockets of limestone as toe- and handholds. Near the top he swung the hammer in a circle above his head and hurled it over the edge of the sinkhole in an attempt to implant the pick end into soft soil.

It took four tries before the sharp point dug in and remained firm. With the final reserve of his strength, he took the line in both hands and pulled his body up until he could see flat ground before him in the growing darkness. He lay quiet and studied his surroundings. The dank rain forest seemed to close in around him. It was dark now and the only light came from the few stars and a crescent moon that breached the scattered clouds and the intertwined branches of the crowded trees. The dim light that filtered down illuminated the ancient ruins with a ghostly quality that was equaled by the sinister, claustrophobic effect of the invading walls of the forest. The eerie scene was enhanced by the almost complete silence. Pitt half expected to see weird stirring and hear ominous rustling in the darkness, but he saw no lights or moving shadows nor heard voices. The only sound came from the faint splatter of a sudden light rain on the leaves.

Enough laziness, he told himself. Get on, get moving, find out what happened to Giordino and the others. Time is slipping away. Only your first ordeal is over. That was physical, now you have to use your brain. He moved away from the sinkhole as fleetingly as a phantom.

The campsite was deserted. The tents he'd observed before being lowered into the sacrificial well were intact and empty. No signs of carnage, no indications of death. He approached the clearing where Giordino had landed the NUMA helicopter. It was riddled from bow to tail by bullets. Using it to fly for help was a dashed hope. No amount of repair would put it in the sky again.

The shattered rotor blades hung down like distorted arms twisted at the elbow. A colony of termites couldn't have done a better job on a decaying tree stump. Pitt sniffed the aroma of aviation fuel and thought it incredible the fuel tanks had failed to explode. It was too painfully obvious that a group of bandits or rebels had attacked the camp and blasted the craft into scrap.

His fears lessened considerably at discovering the gunfire he'd heard in the sinkhole was directed against the helicopter and not human flesh. His boss at NUMA's national headquarters in Washington, D.C., Admiral James Sandecker, wouldn't take kindly to the write-off of one of the agency's fleet of aircraft, but Pitt had braved the feisty little sea dog's wrath on numerous occasions and lived to tell about it. Not that it mattered what Sandecker would say now. Giordino and the archaeology project people were gone, taken captive by some force unknown to him.

He pushed aside the entry door that sagged drunkenly on one hinge and entered, making his way to the cockpit. He groped under the pilot's seat until he found a long pocket and retrieved a flashlight. The battery case felt undamaged. He held his breath and flicked on the switch. The beam flashed on and lit up the cockpit.

"Score one for the home team," he muttered to himself.

Pitt carefully made his way into the cargo compartment. The hurricane of shells had torn it into a jagged mess, but nothing seemed vandalized or removed. He found his nylon carry bag and pulled out the contents. His shirt and sneakers had escaped unscathed but a bullet had pierced the knee of his pants and caused irreparable damage to his brief boxer shorts. Removing the shorty wet suit, he found a towel and gave his body a vigorous rubdown to remove the sinkhole's slime from his skin. After pulling on his clothes and sneakers, he then rummaged around until he came upon the box lunches packed by the chef on board their research ship. His box was splattered against a bulkhead, but Giordino's had survived intact. Pitt wolfed down a peanut butter sandwich and a dill pickle and drained a can of root beer. Now, he felt almost human again.

Back in the cockpit, he unlatched a panel door to a small compartment and pulled out a leather holster containing an old .45-caliber automatic Colt pistol. His father, Senator George Pitt, had carried it from Normandy to the Elbe River during World War II and then presented it to Dirk when he graduated from the Air Force Academy. The weapon had saved Pitt's life at least twice in the ensuing seventeen years. Though the blueing was pretty well worn away, it was lovingly maintained and functioned even more smoothly than when new. Pitt noted with no small displeasure that a stray bullet had gouged the leather holster and creased one of the grips. He ran his belt through the loops of the holster and buckled it around his waist along with the sheath of the dive knife.

He fashioned a small shade to contain the beam of the flashlight and searched the campsite. Unlike the helicopter, there was no sign of gunfire except spent shells on the ground, but the tents had been ransacked and any useful equipment or supplies that could be carried away were gone. A quick survey of the soft ground showed what direction the exodus had taken. A path that had been hacked out by machetes angled off through the dense thickets before vanishing in the darkness.

The forest looked forbidding and impenetrable. This was not an expedition he would have ever considered or undertaken in daylight, much less nighttime. He was at the mercy of the insects and animals that found humans fair game in the rain forest. With no small concern the subject of snakes came to mind. He recalled hearing of boa constrictors and anacondas reaching lengths of 24 meters (80 feet). But it was the deadly poisonous snakes like the bushmaster, the cascabel, or the nasty fer-de-lance, or lance-head, that caused Pitt a high degree of trepidation. Low sneakers and light fabric pants offered no protection against a viper with a mean streak.

Beneath great stone faces staring menacingly down at him from the walls of the ruined city, Pitt set off at a steady pace, following the trail of footprints under the narrow beam of the flashlight. He wished he had a plan, but he was operating in the unknown. His chances of dashing through a murderous jungle and rescuing the hostages from any number of hard-bitten bandits or revolutionaries were plain hopeless. Failure seemed inevitable. But any thought of sitting around and doing nothing, or trying somehow to save himself, never entered his mind.

Pitt smiled at the stone faces of long-forgotten gods that stared back in the beam of the flashlight. He turned and took a last look at the unearthly green glow coming from the bottom of the sinkhole. Then he entered the jungle.

Within four paces the thick foliage swallowed him as if he'd never been.

Soaked by a constant drizzle, the prisoners were herded through a moss-blanketed forest until the trail ended at a deep ravine. Their captors drove them across a fallen log that served as a bridge to the other side where they followed the remains of an ancient stone road that wound up the mountains. The leader of the terrorist band set a fast pace, and Doc Miller was particularly hard pressed to keep up. His clothes were so wet it was impossible to tell where the sweat left off and the damp from the rain began. The guards prodded him unmercifully with the muzzles of their guns whenever he dropped back. Giordino stepped beside the old man, propped one of Miller's arms over his shoulder, and helped him along, seeming oblivious to the pummeling provided by the sadistic guards against his defenseless back and shoulders.

"Keep that damned gun off him," Shannon snapped at the bandit in Spanish. She took Miller's other arm and hung it around her neck so that both she and Giordino could support the older man. The bandit replied by kicking her viciously in the buttocks. She staggered forward, gray-faced, her lips tight in pain, but she regained her balance and gave the bandit a withering stare.

Giordino found himself smiling at Shannon, wondering at her spirit and grit and untiring fortitude. She still had on her swimsuit under a sleeveless cotton blouse the guerrillas had allowed her to retrieve from her tent, along with a pair of hiking boots. He was also conscious of an overwhelming sense of ineffectiveness, his inability to save this woman from harm and degradation. And there was also a feeling of cowardice for deserting his old friend without a fight. He'd thought of snatching a guard's gun at least twenty times since being forced away from the sinkhole. But that would only have gotten him killed and solved nothing. As long as he somehow stayed alive there was a chance. Giordino cursed each step that took him farther and farther away from saving Pitt.

For hours they fought for breath in the thin Andes air as they struggled to an altitude of 3400 meters (11,000 feet). Everyone suffered from the cold. Although it soared under a blazing sun during the day, the temperature dropped to near freezing in the early hours of morning. Dawn found them still ascending along an ancient avenue of ruined white limestone buildings, high walls, and agricultural terraced hills that Shannon never dreamed existed. None of the structures looked as though they were built to the same specifications. Some were oval, some circular, very few were rectangular. They appeared oddly different from the other ancient structures she had studied. Was this all part of the Chachapoya confederation, she wondered, or another kingdom, another society? As the stone road followed along raised walls that reached almost into the mists rolling in from the mountain peaks above, she was astounded by the thousands of stone carvings of a very different ornamentation than she had ever seen. Great dragonlike birds and serpent-shaped fish mingled with stylized panthers and monkeys. The chiseled reliefs seemed oddly similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics except that they were more abstract. That unknown ancient peoples had inhabited the great plateau and ridges of the Peruvian Andes and constructed cities of such immense proportions came as a thrilling surprise to Shannon. She had not expected to find a culture so architecturally advanced that it erected structures on top of mountains as elaborate or extensive as any in the known ancient world. She would have given the Dodge Viper that she bought with her grandfather's inheritance to have lingered long enough to study these extraordinary ruins, but whenever she paused, she was roughly shoved forward.

The sun was showing when the bedraggled party emerged from a narrow pass into a small valley with mountains soaring on all sides. Though the rain thankfully had stopped, they all looked like rats who had barely escaped drowning. They saw ahead a lofty stone block building rising a good twelve stories high. Unlike the Mayan pyramids of Mexico, this structure had a rounder, more conical shape that was cut off at the top. It had ornate heads of animals and birds carved into the walls. Shannon recognized it as a ceremonial temple of the dead. The rear of the structure merged into a steep sandstone cliff honeycombed with thousands of burial caves, all with ornate exterior doorways facing onto a sheer drop. An edifice on the top of the building, flanked with two large sculptures of a feathered jaguar with wings, she tentatively identified as a palace of the death gods. It was sitting in a small city with over a hundred buildings painstakingly constructed and lavishly decorated. The variety of architecture was astonishing. Some structures were built on top of high towers surrounded by graceful balconies. Most were completely circular while others sat on rectangular bases.

Shannon was speechless. For a few moments the immensity of the sight overwhelmed her. The identity of the great complex of structures became immediately apparent. If what she saw before her was to be believed, the Shining Path terrorists had discovered an incredible lost city. One that archaeologists, herself included, doubted existed, that treasure seekers had searched for but never found through four centuries of exploration-the lost City of the Dead, whose mythical riches went beyond those in the Valley of the Kings in ancient Egypt.

Shannon gripped Rodgers tightly about one arm. "The lost Pueblo de los Muertos," she whispered.

"The lost what?" he asked blankly.

"No talking," snapped one of the terrorists, jamming the butt of his automatic rifle in Rodgers's side just above the kidneys.

Rodgers gave a stifled gasp. He staggered and almost went down, but Shannon bravely held him on his feet, tensed for a blow that mercifully never came.

After a short walk over a broad stone street, they approached the circular structure that towered over the surrounding ceremonial complex like a Gothic cathedral over a medieval city. They toiled up several flights of an extraordinary switchback stairway decorated with mosaics of winged humans set in stone, designs Shannon had never seen before. On the upper landing, beyond a great arched entrance, they entered a high-ceilinged room with geometric motifs cut into the stone walls. The center of the floor was crammed with intricately carved stone sculptures of every size and description. Ceramic effigy jars and elegant ornately painted vessels were stacked in chambers leading off the main room. One of these chambers was piled' high with beautifully preserved textiles in every imaginable design and color.

The archaeologists were stunned to see such an extensive cache of artifacts. To them it was like entering King Tut's tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings before the treasures were removed by famed archaeologist Howard Carter and put on display in the national museum in Cairo.

There was little time to study the treasure trove of artifacts. The terrorists quickly led the Peruvian students down an interior stairway and imprisoned them in a cell deep beneath the upper temple. Giordino and the rest were roughly thrown into a side room and guarded by two surly rebels who eyed them like exterminators contemplating a spider's nest. Everyone except Giordino sank gratefully to the hard, cold floor, fatigue etched in their drawn faces.

Giordino pounded his fist against the stone wall in frustration. During the forced march, he had watched intently for a chance to fade into the jungle and make his way back to the sinkhole, but with at least three guards taking turns training their automatic weapons at his back with cold steadiness the entire trip, the opportunity for escape never materialized. He didn't need any convincing that they were old hands at rounding up hostages and driving them through rugged terrain. Any hope of reaching Pitt now was slim indeed. During the march he had smothered his characteristic defiance and acted meek and subjugated. Except for a doughty display of concern for Doc Miller, he did nothing to invite a torrent of bullets to the gut. He had to stay alive. In his mind, if he died, Pitt died.

If Giordino had the slightest notion that Pitt had climbed out of the sinkhole and was pounding over the old stone trail only thirty minutes behind, then he might have felt the urge to attend church at his earliest opportunity. Or at the very least, he might have given the idea brief consideration.

With the flashlight carefully hooded to prevent being seen by the terrorists, and its beam angled down at the indentations in the compost covering the soft earth that traveled into the darkness, Pitt plunged through the rain forest. He ignored the rain with utter indifference. He moved with the determination of a man outside himself. Time meant nothing, not once did he glance at the luminous dial of his watch. The trek through the rain forest in the dead of night became a blur in his mind. Only when the morning sky began to brighten and he could put away the flashlight did his spirits take a turn for the better.

When he began his pursuit, the terrorists had more than a three-hour start. But he had closed the gap, walking at a steady gait when the trail ran steeply upward, jogging on the rare stretches where it leveled briefly. He never broke his stride, never once stopped to rest. His heart was beginning to pound under the strain, but his legs still pumped away without any muscle pain or tightness. When he came on the ancient stone road and the going became easier, he actually increased his pace. Thoughts of the unseen horrors of the jungle had been cast aside, and throughout that seemingly perpetual night, all fear and apprehension became strangely remote.

He paid scant notice to the immense stone structures along the long avenue. He rushed on, now in daylight and on open ground, making little or no attempt at concealment. Only when he reached the pass into the valley did he slow down and stop, surveying the landscape ahead. He spotted the huge temple against the steep cliff approximately a half kilometer (a third of a mile) distant. One tiny figure sat at the top of the long stairway, hunched over with his back against a wide archway. There was no doubt in Pitt's mind this was where the terrorists had taken their hostages. The narrow pass was the only way in and out of the steep-walled valley. The fear and anxiety that he might stumble across the bodies of Giordino and the archaeologists were swept away in a wave of relief. The hunt was ended, now the quarry, who did not yet know they were quarry, had to be quietly canceled out one by one until the odds became manageable.

He moved in closer, using the fallen walls of old residential homes around the temple as cover. He crouched and ran soundlessly from one shelter to the next until he crawled behind a large stone figure displaying a phallic design. He paused and stared up at the entrance to the temple. The long stairway leading to the entrance presented a formidable obstacle. Unless he somehow possessed the power of invisibility, Pitt would be shot down before he was a quarter of the way up the steps. Any attempt in broad daylight was suicidal. No way in, he thought bitterly. Flanking the staircase was out of the question. The temple's side walls were too sheer and too smooth. The stones were laid with such precision a knife blade could not fit between the cracks.

Then providence laid a benevolent hand on his shoulder. The problem of creeping up the stairs unseen was erased when Pitt observed that the terrorist who was guarding the entrance to the temple had fallen hard asleep from the effects of the exhausting march through the jungle mountains. Inhaling and exhaling a deep breath, Pitt stealthily crept toward the stairway.

Tupac Amaru was a smooth but dangerous character, and he looked it. Having taken the name of the last king of the Incas to be tortured and killed by the Spanish, he was short, narrow-shouldered, with a vacant, brown face devoid of expression. He looked as though he never learned how to express the least hint of compassion. Unlike most of the hill-country people whose broad faces were smooth and hairless, Amaru wore a huge moustache and long sideburns that stretched from a thick mass of straight hair that was as black as his empty eyes. When the narrow, bloodless lips arched in a slight smile, which was rare, they revealed a set of teeth that would make an orthodontist proud. His men, conversely, often grinned diabolically through jagged and uneven coca-stained bicuspids.

Amaru had cut a swath of death and destruction throughout the jungle hill country of Amazonas, a department in northeastern Peru that had more than its share of poverty, terrorism, sickness, and bureaucratic corruption. His band of cutthroats was responsible for the disappearance of several explorers, government archaeologists, and army patrols that had entered the region and were never seen again. He was not the revolutionary he seemed. Amaru couldn't have cared less about revolution or improving the lot of the abysmally poor Indians of the Peruvian hinterlands, most of whom worked tiny plots to eke out a bare existence. Amaru had other reasons for controlling the region and keeping the superstitious natives under his domination.

He stood in the doorway of the chamber, staring stonily at the three men and one woman before him as if for the first time, relishing the defeat in their eyes, the weariness in their bodies, exactly the state he-wanted them.

"I regret the inconvenience," he said, speaking for the first time since the abduction. "It is good that you offered no resistance or you would have surely been shot."

"You speak pretty good English for a highlands guerrilla," Rodgers acknowledged, "Mr.-?"

"Tupac Amaru. I attended the University of Texas at Austin."

"What hath Texas wrought," Giordino mumbled under his breath.

"Why have you kidnapped us?" Shannon whispered in a voice hushed with fear and fatigue.

"For ransom, what else?" replied Amaru. "The Peruvian government will pay well for the return of such respected American scientists, not to mention their brilliant archaeology students, many of whom have rich and respected parents. The money will help us continue our fight against repression of the masses."

"Spoken like a Communist milking a dead cow," muttered Giordino.

"The old Russian version may well be history, but the philosophy of Mao Tse-tung lives on," Amaru explained patiently.

"It lives on, all right," Doc Miller sneered. "Billions of dollars in economic damage. Twenty-six thousand Peruvians dead, most of the victims the very peasants whose rights you claim to be fighting for-" His words were cut off by a rifle butt that was jammed into his lower back near the kidney. Miller sagged to the stone floor like a bag of potatoes, his face twisted in pain.

"You're hardly in a position to question my dedication to the cause," Amaru said coldly.

Giordino knelt beside the old man and cradled his head. He looked up at the terrorist leader with scorn. "You don't take criticism very well, do you?"

Giordino was prepared to ward off a blow to his exposed head, but before the guard could raise his rifle butt again, Shannon stepped between them.

She glared at Amaru, the pale fear in her face replaced with red anger. "You're a fraud," Shannon stated firmly.

Amaru looked at her with a bemused expression. "And what brings you to that curious conclusion, Dr. Kelsey?"

"You know my name?"

"My agent in the United States alerted me of your latest project to explore the mountains before you and your friends left the airport in Phoenix, Arizona."

"Informant, you mean."

Amaru shrugged. "Semantics mean little."

"A fraud and a charlatan," Shannon continued. "You and your men aren't Shining Path revolutionaries. Far from it. You're nothing more than huaqueros, thieving tomb robbers."

"She's right," Rodgers said, backing her up. "You wouldn't have time to chase around the countryside blowing up power lines and police stations and still accumulate the vast cache of artifacts inside this temple. It's obvious, you're running an elaborate artifact theft ring that has to be a full-time operation."

Amaru looked at his prisoners in mocking speculation. "Since the fact must be patently apparent to everyone in the room, I won't bother to deny it."

A few seconds passed in silence, then Doc Miller rose unsteadily to his feet and stared Amaru directly in the eye. "You thieving scum," he rasped. "Pillager, ravager of antiquities. If it was in my power, I'd have you and your band of looters shot down like--"

Miller broke off suddenly as Amaru, his features utterly lacking the least display of emotion and his black eyes venting evil, removed a Heckler & Koch nine-millimeter automatic from a hip holster. With the paralyzing inevitability of a dream, he calmly, precisely, shot Doc Miller in the chest. The reverberating blast echoed through the temple, deafening all ears. One shot was all that was required. Doc Miller jerked backward against the stone wall for one shocking moment, and then dropped forward onto his stomach without a sound, hands and arms twisted oddly beneath his chest as a pool of red oozed across the floor.

The captives all reflected different reactions. Rodgers stood like a statue frozen in time, eyes wide with shock and disbelief, while Shannon instinctively screamed. No stranger to violent death, Giordino clenched his hands at his sides. The ice-cold indifference of the murderous act filled him with a savage rage that was tempered only by maddening helplessness. There was no doubt in his mind, in anybody's mind, that Amaru intended to kill them all. With nothing to lose, Giordino tensed to leap at the killer and tear out his throat before he received the inevitable bullet through the head.

"Do not try it," said Amaru, reading Giordino's thoughts, aiming the muzzle of the automatic between the eyes that burned with hate. He inclined his head toward the guards, who stood with guns level and ready, and gave them orders in Spanish. Then he stepped aside as one of the guards grabbed Miller around the ankles, and dragged his body out of sight into the main room of the temple, leaving a trail of blood across the stone floor.

Shannon's scream had given way to uncontrollable sobbing as she stared with bleak, unwavering eyes at the bloody streak on the floor. She sagged to her knees in shock and buried her face in her hands. "He couldn't harm you. How could you shoot down a kindly old man?"

Giordino stared at Amaru. "For him, it was easy."

Amaru's flat, cold eyes crawled to Giordino's face. "You would do well to keep your mouth closed, little man. The good doctor was supposed to be a lesson that apparently you did not comprehend."

No one took notice of the return of the guard who had dragged away Miller's body. No one except Giordino. He caught the hat pulled down over the eyes, the hands concealed within the poncho. He flicked a glance at the second guard who slouched casually against the doorway, his gun now slung loosely over one shoulder, the muzzle pointing at no one in particular. Only two meters separated them. Giordino figured he could be all over the guard before he knew what hit him. But there was still the Heckler & Koch tightly gripped in Amaru's hand.

When Giordino spoke, his voice wore a cold edge. "You are going to die, Amaru. You are surely going to die as violently as all the innocent people you've murdered in cold blood."

Amaru didn't catch the millimetric curl of Giordino's lips, the slight squint of the eyes. His expression turned curious, then the teeth flashed and he laughed. "So? You think I'm going to die, do you? Will you be my executioner? Or will the proud young lady do me the honor?"

He leaned down and savagely jerked Shannon to her feet, took hold of her flowing ponytail, and viciously pulled her head backward until she was staring from wide, terrified eyes into his leering face. "I promise that after a few hours in my bed you'll crawl to obey my commands."

"Oh, God, no," Shannon moaned.

"I take great pleasure in raping women, listening as they scream and beg--"

A brawny arm tightened around his throat and choked off his words. "This is for all the women you made suffer," said Pitt, a macabre look in his intense green eyes, as he cast aside the poncho, jammed the barrel of the .45 Colt down the front of Amaru's pants, and pulled the trigger.

For the second time the small confines of the room echoed with the deafening sound of gunfire. Giordino hurled himself forward, his head and shoulder driving into the startled guard, crushing him against the hard wall, causing an explosive gasp of pain. He caught the distorted look of horror and agony on Amaru's face, the bulging eyes, his mouth open in a silent scream, a fleeting glimpse of the Heckler & Koch flying through the air as his hands clutched the mushrooming red stain in his groin. And then Giordino punched the guard in the teeth and tore the automatic rifle from his hands in almost the same movement. He swung around in a crouched firing position, muzzle aimed through the doorway.

This time Shannon didn't scream. Instead, she crawled into a corner of the room and sat motionless, like a waxen effigy of herself, staring dumbly at Amaru's blood splattered over her bare arms and legs. If she had been terrified earlier, she was now merely numb with shock. Then she stared up at Pitt, lips taut, face pale, specks of blood in her blond hair.

Rodgers was staring at Pitt too, with an expression of astonishment. Somehow he knew, recognized the eyes, the animal-like movements. "You're the diver from the cave," he said dazedly.

Pitt nodded. "One and the same."

"You're supposed to be back in the well," Shannon murmured in a trembling voice.

"Sir Edmund Hillary has nothing on me." Pitt grinned slyly. "I scramble up and down the walls of sinkholes like a human fly." He shoved a horrified Amaru to the floor as if the terrorist were a drunk on a sidewalk and placed a hand on Giordino's shoulder. "You can relax, Al. The other guards have seen the light of decency and virtue."

Giordino, with a smile as wide as an open drawbridge, laid aside the automatic rifle and embraced Pitt. "God, I never thought I'd see your gargoyle face again."

"The things you put me through. . . A damned shame. I can't go away for half an hour without you involving me in a local crime wave."

"Why the delay?" asked Giordino, not to be outdone. "We expected you hours ago."

"I missed my bus. Which reminds me, where is my Dixieland band?"

"They don't play sinkholes. Seriously, how in hell did you climb a sheer wall and trail us through the jungle?"

"Not exactly a fun-filled feat, believe me. I'll tell you over a beer another time."

"And the guards, what happened to the other four guards?"

Pitt gave a negligent shrug. "Their attention wandered and they all met with unfortunate accidents, mostly concussions or possible skull fractures." Then his face turned grim. "I ran into one pulling Doc Miller's body through the main entrance. Who carried out the execution?"

Giordino nodded at Amaru. "Our friend here shot him in the heart for no good reason. He's also the guy who dropped the safety line down around your head."

"Then I won't bother myself with remorse," Pitt said, staring down at Amaru, who was clutching his groin and moaning in agony, fearful of looking to ascertain the damage. "Kind of makes me warm all over knowing that his sex life just went dysfunctional. Does he have a name?"

"Calls himself Tupac Amaru," answered Shannon. "The name of the last Inca king. Probably took it to impress the hill people."

"The Peruvian students," Giordino said, remembering. "They were herded down a stairway underneath the temple."

"I've already released them. Brave kids. By now they should have the guerrillas tied up and neatly packaged until the government authorities arrive."

"Not guerrillas, and hardly dedicated revolutionaries. More like professional artifact looters masquerading as Shining Path terrorists. They pillage precious antiquities to sell through international underground markets."

"Amaru is only the base of a totem pole," added Rodgers. "His clients are the distributors who make the bulk of the profits."

"They have good taste," observed Pitt. "From what I glimpsed, there must be enough prime merchandise stashed here to satisfy half the museums and private collectors in the world."

Shannon hesitated a moment, then stepped up to Pitt, put her hands around his neck, pulled his head down and kissed him lightly on the lips. "You saved our lives. Thank you."

"Not once but twice," Rodgers added, pumping Pitt's hand while Shannon still clung to him.

"A lot of luck was involved," Pitt said with uncharacteristic embarrassment. Despite the damp, stringy hair, the lack of makeup, the dirty and torn blouse over the black swimsuit, and the incongruous hiking boots, he still saw a sensual lustiness about her.

"Thank God you got here when you did," said Shannon with a shiver.

"I deeply regret I was too late to save Doc Miller."

"Where have they taken him?" asked Rodgers.

"I stopped the scum who was disposing of the body just outside the temple entrance. Doc is lying on the landing above the steps."

Giordino gazed at Pitt, inspecting him from head to toe, observing the multitude of cuts and scratches on his friend's face and arms from his race through the jungle in the dark, seeing a man who was all but dead on his feet. "You look like you just finished a triathlon and then fell on a roll of barbed wire. As your resident medicine man, I recommend a few hours rest before we hike back to the sinkhole campsite."

"I look worse than I feel," Pitt said cheerfully. "Time enough for a snooze later. First things first. Me, I don't have the slightest inclination to play Tarzan again. I'm taking the next flight out of here."

"Madness," muttered Giordino half in jest. "A few hours in the jungle and he goes flaky."

"Do you really think we can fly out of here?" inquired Shannon skeptically.

"Absolutely," Pitt said. "In fact I guarantee it."

Rodgers stared at him. "Only a helicopter could come in and out of the valley."

Pitt grinned. "I wouldn't have it any other way. How else do you think Amaru, or whatever his name is, transports his stolen goods to a coastal port for shipment out of the country? That calls for a communications system, so there must be a radio around we can appropriate to send out a call for help."

Giordino gave an approving nod. "Makes sense, providing we can find it. A portable radio could be hidden anywhere in one of the surrounding ruins. We could spend days looking for it."

Pitt stared down at Amaru, his face expressionless. "He knows where it is."

Amaru fought off the pain and stared back at Pitt with black malignant eyes. "We have no radio," he hissed through clenched teeth.

"Forgive me if I don't take you at your word. Where do you keep it?"

"I will tell you nothing." Amaru's mouth twisted as he spoke.

"Would you rather die?" Pitt queried dryly.

"You would do me a service by killing me."

Pitt's green eyes were as cold as a lake above timberline. "How many women have you raped and murdered?"

Amaru's expression was contemptuous. "So numerous I've lost count."

"You want me to fly into a rage and blow you away, is that it?"

"Why don't you ask how many children I've slaughtered?"

"You're only kidding yourself." Pitt took the Colt .45 and placed the muzzle against the side of Amaru's face. "Kill you? I fail to see the percentage in that. One shot through both eyes would be more appropriate. You'll still live, but along with your other recent impairment you'll also be blind."

Amaru put on a show of arrogance, but there was unmistakable fear in his dead eyes, and there was a noticeable trembling of his lips. "You're bluffing."

"After the eyes, then the kneecaps," Pitt described conversationally. "Perhaps the ears next, or better yet the nose. If I were you, I'd quit while I was ahead."

Seeing that Pitt was stone-cold serious, and realizing he was at a dead end, Amaru caved in. "You'll find what you're looking for inside a round building fifty meters west of the temple. There is a monkey carved above the doorway."

Pitt turned to Giordino. "Take one of the students with you to translate. Contact the nearest Peruvian authorities. Give our location and report our situation. Then request they send in an army unit. There may be more of these characters lurking in the ruins."

Giordino looked thoughtfully at Amaru. "If I send a Mayday over an open frequency, this homicidal maniac's pals in Lima might very well pick it up and send in a force of goons ahead of the army."

"Trusting the army can be touch-and-go," added Shannon. "One or more of their high-ranking officers could be in on this."

"Graft," Pitt stated philosophically, "makes the world go round."

Rodgers nodded. "Shannon's right. This is tomb robbery on a grand scale. The profits could easily match the take of any top drug smuggling operation. Whoever the mastermind is, he couldn't conduct business without paying off government officials."

"We can use our own frequency and contact Juan," suggested Shannon.

"Juan?"

"Juan Chaco, the Peruvian government coordinator for our project. He's in charge of our supply headquarters at the nearest city."

"Can he be trusted?"

"I believe so," Shannon replied without hesitation. "Juan is one of the most respected archaeologists in South America, and a leading scholar on Andean cultures. He's also the government watchdog on illegal diggings and smuggling of antiquities."

"Sounds like our man," Pitt said to Giordino. "Find the radio, call him up and ask for a chopper to airlift us the hell back to our ship."

"I'll go with you and notify Juan of Doc's murder," offered Shannon. "I'd also like a closer look at the structures around the temple."

"Take along weapons and keep a sharp eye," Pitt warned them.

"What about Doc's body?" asked Rodgers. "We can't leave him lying around like a road kill."

"I agree," said Pitt. "Bring him inside the temple out of the sun and wrap him in some blankets until he can be airlifted to the nearest coroner."

"Leave him to me," Rodgers said angrily. "It's the least I can do for a good man."

Amaru grinned hideously, actually grinned through his agony. "Fools, crazy fools," he sneered. "You'll never leave the Pueblo de los Muertos alive."

"Pueblo de los Muertos means city of the dead," Shannon translated.

The others glanced in disgust at Amaru. To them he seemed like an impotent rattlesnake too injured to coil and strike. But Pitt still saw him as dangerous and was not about to make the fatal mistake of underestimating him. He didn't care for the eerie expression of confidence in Amaru's eyes.

As soon as the others hurried out of the room, Pitt knelt beside Amaru. "You act pretty sure of yourself for a man in your position."

"The last laugh will be mine." Amaru's face contorted in a sudden spasm of pain. "You have blundered into the path of powerful men. Their wrath will be terrible."

Pitt smiled indifferently. "I've blundered up against powerful men before."

"By lifting a tiny piece of the curtain you have endangered the Solpemachaco. They will do whatever necessary to prevent exposure, even if it means the elimination of an entire province."

"Not exactly a sweet-tempered group you're associated with. What do you call them again?"

Amaru went silent. He was becoming weak from shock and the loss of blood. Slowly, with much difficulty, he lifted a hand and pointed a finger at Pitt. "You are cursed. Your bones will rest with the Chachapoyas forever." Then, his eyes went unfocused, closed, and he fainted.

Pitt stared at Shannon. "Who are the Chachapoyas?"

"Known as the Cloud People," Shannon explained. "They were a pre-Inca culture that flourished high in the Andes from A.D. 800 to 1480, when they were conquered by the Incas. It was the Chachapoyas who built this elaborate necropolis for the dead."

Pitt rose to his feet, removed the guard's felt hat from his head and dropped it on Amaru's chest. He turned and walked into the main chamber of the temple and spent the next few minutes examining the incredible cache of Chachapoyan artifacts. He was admiring a large clay mummy case when Rodgers rushed up, looking disturbed.

"Where did you say you left Doc Miller?" Rodgers asked, half out of breath.

"On the landing above the exterior steps."

"You'd better show me."

Pitt followed Rodgers outside the arched entrance. He stopped and stared down at a bloodstain on the stone landing, then looked up questioningly. "Who moved the body?"

"If you don't know," said an equally mystified Rodgers, "I certainly don't."

"Did you look around the base of the temple? Maybe he fell--"

"I sent four of the archaeology students down to search. They found no sign of the Doc."

"Could any of the students have moved him?"

"I checked. They're all as bewildered as we are."

"Dead bodies do not get up and walk off," said Pitt flatly.

Rodgers looked around the outside of the temple, then gave a shrug. "It looks as if this one did."

The air conditioner whirred and circulated cool dry air inside the long motor home that served as the archaeology project's headquarters in Chachapoya. And the man reclining on a leather sofa was a great deal less fatigued than the men and women in the City of the Dead. Juan Chaco rested languidly while maintaining a firm grip on his well-iced gin and tonic. But he sat up in full wakefulness almost instantly when a voice came over the radio speaker mounted on a wall behind the driver's compartment.

"Saint John calling Saint Peter." The voice came sharp and distinct. "Saint John calling Saint Peter. Are you there?"

Chaco moved quickly across the interior of the plush motor home and pressed the transmit button on the radio. "I am here and listening."

"Turn on the recorder. I don't have time to repeat myself or explain the situation in detail."

Chaco acknowledged and switched on a cassette recorder. "Ready to receive."

"Amaru and his followers were overpowered and taken prisoner. They are now being held under guard by the archaeologists. Amaru was shot and may be badly wounded."

Chaco's face suddenly turned grim. "How is this possible?"

"One of the men from NUMA, who responded to your distress call, somehow escaped from the sinkhole and pursued Amaru and his captives to the valley temple where he managed to subdue our overpaid cutthroats one by one."

"What sort of devil could do all this?"

"A very dangerous and resourceful devil."

"Are you safe?"

"For the moment."

"Then our plan to frighten the archaeologists from our collection grounds has failed."

"Miserably," replied the caller. "Once Dr. Kelsey saw the artifacts awaiting shipment, she guessed the setup."

"What of Miller?"

"They suspect nothing."

"At least something went right," said Chaco.

"If you send in a force before they leave the valley," explained the familiar voice, "we can still salvage the operation."

"It was not our intention to harm our Peruvian students," said Chaco. "The repercussions from my countrymen would spell the end to any further business between us."

"Too late, my friend. Now that they realize their ordeal was caused by a looting syndicate instead of Shining Path terrorists, they can't be allowed to reveal what they've seen. We have no choice but to eliminate them."

"None of this would have occurred if you had prevented Dr. Kelsey and Miles Rodgers from diving in the sacred well."

"Short of committing murder in front of the students, there was no stopping them."

"Sending out the rescue call was a mistake."

"Not if we wished to avoid serious inquiry by your government officials. Their drownings would have appeared suspicious if the correct rescue measures hadn't been taken. We cannot afford to expose the Solpemachaco to public scrutiny. Besides, how could we know that NUMA would respond from out of nowhere?"

"True, an event that was inconceivable at the time."

As Chaco spoke, his empty eyes gazed at a small stone statue of a winged jaguar that was dug up in the valley of the dead. Finally he said quietly, "I'll arrange for our hired mercenaries from the Peruvian army to drop in the Pueblo de los Muertos by helicopter within two hours."

"Do you have confidence in the commanding officer to do the job?"

Chaco smiled to himself. "If I can't trust my own brother, who can I trust?"

"I never believed in resurrection of mere mortals." Pitt stood gazing down at the pool of crimson on the landing above the near-vertical stairway leading to the floor of the valley. "But this is as good an example as I've ever seen."

"He was dead," Rodgers said emphatically. "I was standing as close to him as I am to you when Amaru put a bullet through his heart. Blood was everywhere. You saw him lying here. There can be no doubt in your mind Doc was a corpse."

"I didn't take the time to do a postmortem examination."

"Okay, but how do you explain the trail of blood from the interior chamber where Doc was shot? There must be a gallon of it spread from here to there."

"Closer to a pint," said Pitt thoughtfully. "You exaggerate."

"How long would you guess the body rested here from the time you knocked out the guard and then released the students who arrived and tied him up?" asked Rodgers.

"Four, maybe five minutes at the outside."

"And within that time a sixty-seven-year-old dead man bounds down two hundred tiny, narrow, niched steps laid on a seventy-five-degree angle. Steps that can't be taken more than one at a time without falling, and then he vanishes without shedding another drop of blood." Rodgers shook his head. "Houdini would have flushed with envy."

"Are you sure it was Doc Miller?" Pitt asked pensively.

"Of course it was Doc," Rodgers said incredulously. "Who else do you think it was?"

"How long have you known him?"

"By reputation, at least fifteen years. Personally, I only met him five days ago." Rodgers stared at Pitt as if he were a madman. "Look, you're fishing in empty waters. Doc is one of the world's leading anthropologists. He is to ancient American culture what Leakey is to African prehistory. His face has graced a hundred articles in dozens of magazines from the Smithsonian to the National Geographic. He has narrated and appeared in any number of public service television documentaries on early man. Doc was no recluse, he loved publicity. He was easily recognizable."

"Just fishing," Pitt said in a patient explaining tone. "Nothing like a wild plot to stir the mind-'

He broke off as Shannon and Giordino sprinted into view around the circular base of the temple. Even at this height above the ground he could see they appeared agitated. He waited until Giordino was halfway up the stairs before he shouted.

"Don't tell me, somebody beat you to the radio and smashed it."

Giordino paused, leaning against the sheer stairway. "Wrong," he shouted back. "It was gone. Snatched by person or persons unknown."

By the time Shannon and Giordino reached the top of the stairs they were both panting from the exertion and glistening with sweat. Shannon daintily patted her face with a soft tissue all women seem to produce at the most crucial times. Giordino merely rubbed an already damp sleeve across his forehead.

"Whoever built this thing," he said between breaths, "should have installed an elevator."

"Did you find the tomb with the radio?" Pitt asked.

Giordino nodded. "We found it all right. No cheapskates, these guys. The tomb was furnished right out of Abercrombie & Fitch. The best outdoor paraphernalia money can buy. There was even a portable generator providing power to a refrigerator."

"Empty?" Pitt guessed.

Giordino nodded. "The rat who made off with the radio took the time to smash nearly four sixpacks of perfectly good Coors beer."

"Coors in Peru?" Rodgers asked dubiously.

"I can show you the labels on the broken bottles," moaned Giordino. "Someone wanted us to go thirsty."

"No fear of that with a jungle just beyond the pass," Pitt said with a slight smile.

Giordino stared at Pitt, but there was no return smile. "So how do we call in the marines?"

Pitt shrugged. "With the tomb robbers' radio missing, and the one in our helicopter looking like a lump of Swiss cheese-" he broke off and turned to Rodgers. "What about your communications at the sinkhole site?"

The photographer shook his head. "One of Amaru's men shot our radio to junk the same as yours."

"Don't tell me," Shannon said resignedly, "we have to trudge thirty kilometers back through the forest primeval to the project site at the sinkhole, and then another ninety kilometers to Chachapoya?"

"Maybe Chaco will become worried when he realizes all contact is lost with the project and send in a search party to investigate," Rodgers said hopefully.

"Even if they traced us to the City of the Dead," Pitt said slowly, "they'd arrive too late. All they'd find would be dead bodies scattered around the ruins."

Everyone glanced at him in puzzled curiosity.

"Amaru claimed we have upset the applecart of powerful men," Pitt continued by way of explanation, "and that they would never allow us to leave this valley alive for fear that we would expose their artifact theft operation."

"But if they intended to kill us," Shannon said uncertainly, "why bring us here? They could have just as well shot everyone and thrown our remains into the sinkhole."

"In order for them to make it look like a Shining Path raid, they may have had it in their mind to play the hostage for ransom game. If the Peruvian government, your university officials in the States, or the families of the archaeological students had paid enormous sums for your release, all the better. They'd have simply considered the ransom money as a bonus to the profits of their illegal smuggling and murdered all of you anyway."

"Who are these people?" Shannon asked sharply.

"Amaru referred to them as the Solpemachaco, whatever that translates into."

"Solpemachaco," Shannon echoed. "A combination Medusa/dragon myth from the local ancients. Folklore passed down through the centuries describes Solpemachaco as an evil serpent with seven heads who lives in a cave. One myth claims he lives here in the Pueblo de los Muertos."

Giordino yawned indifferently. "Sounds like a bad screenplay starring another monster from the bowels of the earth."

"More likely a clever play on words," said Pitt. "A metaphor as a code name for an international looting organization with a vast reach into the underground antiquities market."

"The serpent's seven heads could represent the masterminds behind the organization," suggested Shannon.

"Or seven different bases of operation," added Rodgers.

"Now that we've cleared up that mystery," Giordino said wryly, "why don't we clear the hell out of here and head for the sinkhole before the Sioux and Cheyenne come charging through the pass?"

"Because they'd be waiting when we got there," said Pitt. "Methinks we should stay put."

"You really believe they'll send men to kill us?" Shannon said, her expression more angry than fearful.

Pitt nodded. "I'd bet my pension on it. Whoever made off with the radio most certainly tattled on us. I judge his pals will soar into the valley like maddened hornets in. . ." he paused to glance at his watch before continuing, ". . . about an hour and a half. After that, they'll shoot down anyone who vaguely resembles an archaeologist."

"Not what I call a cheery thought," she murmured.

"With six automatic rifles and Dirk's handgun I reckon we might discourage a first-rate gang of two dozen cutthroats for all of ten minutes," muttered Giordino gloomily.

"We can't stay here and fight armed criminals," Rodgers protested. "We'd all be slaughtered."

"And there are the lives of those kids to consider," said Shannon, suddenly looking a little pale.

"Before we're swept up in an orgy of pessimism," said Pitt briskly, as if he hadn't a care in the world, "I suggest we round up everyone and evacuate the temple."

"Then what?" demanded Rodgers.

"First, we look around for Amaru's landing site."

"For what purpose?"

Giordino rolled his eyes. "I know that look. He's hatching another Machiavellian scheme."

"Nothing too contrived," Pitt said patiently. "I figure that after the bushwhackers land and begin chasing around the ruins searching for us, we'll borrow their helicopter and fly off to the nearest four-star hotel and a refreshing bath."

There was a moment of incredulous stillness. They all stared at Pitt as if he'd just stepped out of a Martian space capsule. Giordino was the first to break the stunned silence.

"See," he said with a wide grin. "I told you so."

Pitt's estimate of an hour and a half was shy by only ten minutes. The stillness of the valley was broken by the throb of rotor blades whipping the air as two Peruvian military helicopters flew over the crest of a saddle between mountain peaks and circled the ancient buildings. After a cursory reconnaissance of the area, they descended in a clearing amid the ruins less than 100 meters (328 feet) from the front of the conical temple structure. The troops spilled out rapidly through the rear clamshell doors under the beating rotor blades and lined up at rigid attention as though they were standing for inspection.

These were no ordinary soldiers dedicated to preserving the peace of their nation. They were mercenary misfits who hired themselves out to the highest bidder. At the direction of the officer in charge, a captain incongruously attired in full dress uniform, the two platoons of thirty men each were formed into one closely packed battle line led by two lieutenants. Satisfied the line was straight, the captain raised a swagger stick above his head and motioned for the officers under his command to launch the assault on the temple. Then he climbed a low wall to direct the one-sided battle from what he thought was a safe viewpoint.

The captain shouted encouragement to his men, urging them to bravely charge up the steps of the temple. His voice echoed because of the hard acoustics of the ruins. But he broke off and uttered a strange awking sound that became a fit of gagging pain. For a brief instant he stiffened, his face twisted in incomprehension, then he folded forward and pitched off the wall, landing with a loud crack on the back of his head.

A short, dumpy lieutenant in baggy combat fatigues rushed over and knelt beside the fallen captain, looked up at the funeral palace in dazed understanding, opened his mouth to shout an order, then crumpled over the body beneath him, the sharp crack of a Type 56-1 rifle the last thing he heard before death swept over him.

From the landing on the upper level of the temple, flat on his stomach behind a small barricade of stones, Pitt stared down at the line of confused troops through the sights of the rifle and fired another four rounds into their ranks, picking off the only remaining officer. There was no look of surprise or fear on Pitt's face at seeing the overwhelming mercenary force, only a set look of determination in the deep green eyes. By resisting he was providing a diversion to save the lives of thirteen innocent people. Merely firing over the troops' heads to momentarily slow the assault was a futile waste of time. These men had come to kill all witnesses to a criminal operation. Kill or be killed was a cliché, but it held true. These men would give no quarter.

Pitt was not a pitiless man, his eyes were neither steel hard nor ice cold. For him there was no enjoyment in killing a complete stranger. His biggest regret was that the faceless men responsible for the crimes were not in his sights.

Cautiously, he pulled the assault rifle back from the tight peephole between the stones and surveyed the ground below. The Peruvian mercenaries had fanned out behind the stone ruins. A few scattered shots were fired upward at the temple, chipping the stone carvings before ricocheting and whining off into the cliff of tombs behind. These were hardened, disciplined fighting men who recovered quickly under pressure. Killing their officers had stalled but not stopped them. The sergeants had taken command and were concentrating on a tactic to eliminate this unexpected resistance.

Pitt ducked back behind the stone barricade as a torrent of automatic weapons fire peppered the outside columns, sending chips of stone flying in all directions. This came as no surprise to him. The Peruvians were laying down a covering fire as they crouched and dashed from ruin to ruin, moving ever closer to the base of the stairs leading up the rounded front of the temple. Pitt moved sideways like a crab and edged into the shelter of the death palace before rising to his feet and running to the rear wall. He cast a wary eye out an arched window.

Knowing that the round walls of the temple were too smooth to scale for an attack and too steep for the defenders to escape, none of the soldiers had circled around to the rear. Pitt could easily predict that they were gambling their entire force on a frontal assault up the stairway. What he hadn't foreseen was that they were going to reduce a lot of the palace of the dead on top of the temple to rubble before charging up the stairway.

Pitt scurried back to the barricade and let loose a long burst from the Chinese automatic rifle until the final shell spit across the stone floor. He rolled to one side and was in the act of inserting another long, curved ammo stick in the gun's magazine when he heard a whoosh, and a forty-millimeter rocket from a People's Republic of China Type 69 launcher sailed up and burst against one side of the temple 8 meters (26 feet) behind Pitt. It detonated with a thunderous explosion that hurled stone like shrapnel and tore a huge hole in the wall. Within seconds the ancient shrine to the death gods was clogged with debris and the evil stench of high explosives.

There was a loud ringing in Pitt's ears, the reverberating roar of the detonation, the pounding of his own heart. He was momentarily blinded and his nose and throat were immediately filled with dust. He frantically rubbed his eyes clear and gazed down at the surrounding ruins. He was just in time to see the black smoke cloud and bright flash produced by the rocket's booster. He ducked with his hands over his head as another rocket slammed into the ancient stone and exploded with a deafening roar. The vicious blow pelted Pitt with flying rubble and the concussion knocked the breath out of him.

For a moment he lay motionless, almost lifeless. Then he struggled painfully to his hands and knees, coughing dust, seized the rifle, and crawled back into the interior of the palace. He took a last look at the mountain of precious artifacts and paid a final call on Amaru.

The grave looter had regained consciousness and glared at Pitt, his hands clutching his groin, now clotted with dried blood, the murderous face masked in hate. There was a strange coldness about him now, an utter indifference to the pain. He radiated evil.

"Your friends have a destructive nature," said Pitt, as another rocket struck the temple.

"You are trapped," Amaru rasped in a low tone.

"Thanks to your staged murder of Dr. Miller's imposter. He made off with your radio and called in reinforcements."

"Your time to die has arrived, Yankee pig."

"Yankee pig," Pitt repeated. "I haven't been called that in ages."

"You will suffer as you have made me suffer."

"Sorry, I have other plans."

Amaru tried to rise up on an elbow and say something, but Pitt was gone.

He rushed to the rear opening again. A mattress and pair of knives he had scrounged from living quarters inside the cliff tomb discovered by Giordino and Shannon sat beside the window. He laid the mattress over the lower sill, then lifted his legs outside and sat on it. He cast aside the rifle, gripped the knives in outstretched hands, and glanced apprehensively at the ground 20 meters (65 feet) below. He recalled an occasion when he bungee-jumped into a canyon on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Leaping into space, he mused, went against all human nature. Any hesitation or second thoughts abruptly ended when a fourth rocket smashed into the temple. He dug the heels of his sneakers into the steep slope and jammed the knife blades into the stone blocks for brakes. Without a backward glance, he launched himself over the side, and slid down the wall, using the mattress as a toboggan/sled.

Giordino, with Shannon and the students trailing behind him and Rodgers bringing up the rear, cautiously climbed a stairway from an underground tomb where they had been hiding when the helicopters landed. Giordino paused, raised his head slightly over a fallen stone wall, and scanned the landscape. The helicopters were sitting only 50 meters (164 feet) away, engines idling, the two-man flight crews calmly sitting in their cockpits watching the assault on the temple.

Shannon moved beside Giordino and looked over the wall just in time to see a rocket bring down the arched entrance of the upper palace. "They'll destroy the artifacts," she said in grief.

"No concern over Dirk?" Giordino spared her a brief glance. "He's only risking his life for us, fighting off an army of mercenaries so we can steal a helicopter."

She sighed. "It pains any archaeologist to see precious antiquities lost forever."

"Better yesterday's junk than us."

"I'm sorry, I want him to escape as much as you. But it all seems so impossible."

"I've known the guy since we were kids." Giordino smiled. "Believe me, he never passed up an opportunity to play Horatius at the bridge." He studied the two helicopters that sat in the clearing in a slightly staggered formation.

He selected the one in the rear as a prime candidate for escape. It was only a few meters from a narrow ravine they could move in without being seen, and more important, it was out of easy view of the crew seated in the forward craft. "Pass the word," he ordered over the sounds of battle, "we're going to hijack the second chopper in line."

Pitt shot uncontrollably down the side of the temple, like a plummeting boulder on a path that took him between the stone animal heads protruding from the convex sloping walls with only centimeters to spare. His hands gripped the knife handles like vises, and he pushed with all the strength in his sinewy arms as the braking blades began to throw out sparks of protest from the friction of steel against hard stone. The rear edges of the rubber heels on his sneakers were being ground smooth by the rough surface of the wall. And yet he accelerated with dismaying speed. His two greatest fears were falling forward and tumbling head-first like a cannon ball into the ground or striking with such force that he broke a leg. Either calamity and he was finished, dead meat for the Peruvians who wouldn't treat him kindly for killing their officers.

Still fighting grimly but hopelessly to arrest his velocity, Pitt flexed his legs a split second before he struck the ground with appalling force. He let loose of the knives on impact as his feet drove into the ooze of rain-soaked soil. Using his momentum, he rolled over on one shoulder and tumbled twice as required in a hard parachute landing. He lay in the mud for a few moments, thankful he hadn't landed on a rock, before rising experimentally to his feet and checking for damage.

One ankle slightly sprained, but still in working condition, a few abrasions on his hands, and an aching shoulder appeared to be the only damage. The damp earth had saved him from serious injury. The faithful mattress was in shreds. He took a deep breath, happy at still being intact. Having no time to waste, Pitt broke into a run, keeping as much of the ruins as possible between him and the troops massing for an assault up the temple stairs.

Giordino could only hope that Pitt had survived the rockets and somehow made it safely down the wall of the temple without being spotted and shot. It seemed an impossible act, Giordino thought. Pitt was seemingly indestructible, but the old faceless man with the scythe catches up to us all. That he might catch up with Pitt was a prospect Giordino could not accept. It was inconceivable to him that Pitt could die anywhere but in bed with a beautiful woman or in a nursing home for aged divers.

Giordino crouched and ran into a blind position behind the trailing helicopter as a squad of troops began charging up the precipitous temple steps. The reserve squad remained below while pouring a covering storm of rifle fire at the now shattered palace of the dead.

Every one of the Peruvians had his attention focused on the attack. No one saw Giordino, clutching an automatic rifle, steal around the tail boom of the helicopter and enter through the rear clamshell doors. He hurried inside and dropped flat, his eyes taking in the empty troop carrier and cargo compartment and the two pilots in the cockpit with their backs turned to him, intently watching the one-sided battle.

With practiced stealth Giordino moved with incredible quickness for a man built like a compact bulldozer. The pilots did not hear him or feel his presence as he came up behind their seats. Giordino reversed the rifle and clubbed the copilot on the back of the neck. The pilot heard the thud and twisted around in his seat, staring briefly at Giordino more from curiosity than dread. Before he could blink an eye, Giordino rammed the butt of the steel folding rifle stock against the pilot's forehead.

Quickly he dragged the unconscious pilots to the doorway and dumped them on the ground. He frantically waved to Shannon, Rodgers, and the students, who were hiding in the ravine. "Hurry!" he shouted, "for God's sake hurry!"

His words carried clearly above the sounds of the fighting. The archaeologists needed no further urging. They broke from cover and dashed through the open door into the helicopter in seconds. Giordino had already returned to the cockpit and was hurriedly scanning the instruments and the console between the pilots' seats to familiarize himself with the controls.

"Are we all here?" he asked Shannon as she slipped into the copilot's seat beside him.

"All but Pitt."

He did not reply, but glanced out the window. The troops on the stairway, becoming more courageous at encountering no defensive fire, surged onto the landing and inside the fallen palace of the dead. Only seconds were left before the attackers realized they'd been had.

Giordino turned his attention back to the controls. The helicopter was an old Russian-built Mi-8 assault transport, designated a Hip-C by NATO during the Cold War years. A rather ancient, ugly craft, thought Giordino, with twin 1500-horsepower engines that could carry four crew and thirty passengers. Since the engines were already turning, Giordino placed his right hand on the throttles.

"You heard me?" said Shannon nervously. "Your friend isn't with us."

"I heard." With a total absence of emotion, Giordino increased power.

Pitt crouched behind a stone building and peered around a corner, hearing the growing whine of the turboshaft engines and seeing the five-bladed main rotor slowly increase its revolutions. An hour previously, it had taken no little persuasion for him to convince Giordino that he must take off whether Pitt arrived or not. The life of one man was not worth the death of thirteen others. Though only 30 meters (98 feet) of open ground, completely devoid of any brush or cover, separated Pitt from the helicopter, it seemed more like a mile and a half.

There was no longer any need for caution. He had to make a run for it. He leaned down and gave his bad ankle a fast massage to knead out a growing tenseness. He felt little pain, but it was beginning to tighten up and grow numb. No time left if he wanted to save himself. He plunged forward like a sprinter and raced into the open.

The rotors were beating the ground into dust when Giordino lifted the old Hip-C into a hover. He gave one fast scan of the instrument panel to see if it showed any red lights and tried to sense any strange noises or weird vibrations. Nothing seemed wrong, as the weary engines of an aircraft badly, overdue for an overhaul responded in a businesslike manner as he dipped the nose and increased power.

In the main compartment, the students and Rodgers saw Pitt launch his dash toward the gaping clamshell doors. They all began shouting encouragement as he pounded over the soft ground. Their shouts turned urgent as a sergeant happened to glance away from the battle scene and saw Pitt chasing after the rising helicopter. He immediately shouted for the men of the reserve squad who were still waiting for the order to advance up the stairway.

The sergeant's shouts-- they were almost screams carried over the last echoes of the firing from atop the temple. "They're escaping! Shoot, for the love of Jesus, shoot them!"

The troops did not respond as ordered. Pitt was in a direct line of fire with the helicopter. To fire at him meant riddling their own aircraft. They hesitated, unsure of following the frantic sergeant's commands. Only one man lifted his rifle and fired.

Pitt ignored the bullet that cut a crease in his right thigh. He had other priorities than feeling pain. And then he was under the long tail boom and in the shadow of the clamshell doors, and Rodgers and the Peruvian young people were on their stomachs, leaning out, reaching out to him in the opening between the doors. The helicopter shuddered as it was buffeted by its own downdraft and lurched backward. Pitt extended his arms and jumped.

Giordino bent the helicopter into a hard turn, putting the rotor blades dangerously close to a grove of trees. A bullet shattered his side window and sprayed a shower of silvery fragments across the cockpit, cutting a small gash across his nose. Another round plunked into the rear frame of his seat, missing his spinal cord by a whisker. The helicopter took several more hits before he yanked it over the grove and below the far side, out of the line of fire from the Peruvian assault force.

Soon out of range, he went into a left climbing turn until he had enough altitude to pass over the mountains. At almost 4000 meters (13,000 feet) he had expected to find barren, rocky slopes above a timberline, but was mildly surprised to find the peaks so heavily forested. Once clear of the valley, he set a course to the west. Only then did he turn to Shannon. "You all right?"

"They were trying to kill us," she said mechanically.

"Must not like gringos," Giordino replied, surveying Shannon for damage. Seeing no signs of punctures or blood, he refocused on flying the aircraft and pulled the lever that closed the clamshell doors. Only then did he shout over his shoulder into the main cabin. "Anyone hit back there?"

"Just little old me."

Giordino and Shannon twisted in their seats in unison at recognizing the voice. Pitt. A rather exhausted and mud-encrusted Pitt, it was true, a Pitt with one leg seeping blood through a hastily tied bandanna. But a Pitt as indefatigable as ever leaned through the cabin door with a devilish smirk on his face.

A vast wave of relief swept over Giordino, and he flashed a smile.

"You almost missed your bus again."

"And you still owe me a Dixieland band."

Shannon smiled, knelt in her seat facing backward, threw her arms around Pitt and gave him a big hug. "I was afraid you wouldn't make it."

"I damn near didn't."

She looked down and her smile faded. "You're bleeding."

"A parting shot from the soldiers just before Rodgers and the students pulled me on board. Bless their hearts."

"We've got to get you to a hospital. It looks serious."

"Not unless they were using bullets dipped in hemlock," Pitt said facetiously.

"You should get off that leg. Take my seat."

Pitt eased Shannon around and pressed her back into the copilot's seat. "Stay put, I'll sit in coach with the rest of the peasants." He paused and looked around the control cabin. "This is a real antique."

"She shakes, rattles, and rolls," said Giordino, "but she hangs in the air."

Pitt leaned over Giordino's shoulder and examined the instrument panel, his eyes coming to rest on the fuel gauges. He reached over and tapped the instrument glass. Both needles quivered just below the three-quarter mark. "How far do you figure she'll take us?"

"Fuel range should be in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty kilometers. If a bullet, didn't bite a hole in one of the tanks, I'd guess she'll carry us about two hundred and eighty."

"Must be a chart of the area around somewhere and a pair of dividers."

Shannon found a navigation kit in a pocket beside her seat and passed it to Pitt. He removed a chart and unfolded it against her back. Using the dividers, careful not to stick the points through the chart paper and stab her, Pitt laid out a course to the Peruvian coast.

"I estimate roughly three hundred kilometers to the Deep Fathom."

"What's Deep Fathom?" asked Shannon.

"Our research ship."

"Surely you don't intend to land at sea when one of Peru's largest cities is much closer?"

"She means the international airport at Trujillo," explained Giordino.

"The Solpemachaco has too many friends to suit me," said Pitt. "Friends who have enough clout to order in a regiment of mercenaries at a moment's notice. Once they spread the word we stole a helicopter and sent the pride of their military to a graveyard, our lives won't be worth the spare tire inside the trunk of an Edsel. We'll be safer on board an American ship outside their offshore limit until we can arrange for our U.S. Embassy staff to make a full report to honest officials in the Peruvian government."

"I see your point," agreed Shannon. "But don't overlook the archaeology students. They know the whole story. Their parents are very influential and will see that a true account of their abduction and the pillaging of national treasures hits the news media."

"You're assuming, of course," Giordino said matter-of-factly, "that a Peruvian posse won't cut us off at any one of twenty passes between here and the sea."

"On the contrary," replied Pitt. "I'm counting on it. Care to bet the other assault helicopter isn't chasing our tail rotor as we speak?"

"So we hug the ground and dodge sheep and cows until we cross over water," acknowledged Giordino.

"Precisely. Cuddling with low clouds won't hurt matters either."

"Forgetting a little something, aren't you?" said Shannon wearily, as though reminding a husband who neglected to carry out the trash. "If my math is correct, our fuel tanks will run dry twenty kilometers short of your ship. I hope you aren't proposing we swim the rest of the way."

"We solve that insignificant problem," said Pitt calmly, "by calling up the ship and arranging for it to run full speed on a converging course."

"Every klick helps," said Giordino, "but we'll still be cutting it a mite fine."

"Survival is guaranteed," Pitt said confidently. "This aircraft carries life vests for everyone on board plus two life rafts. I know-- I checked when I walked through the main cabin." He paused, turned, and looked back. Rodgers was checking to see all the students had their shoulder harnesses on properly.

"Our pursuers will be on to us the instant you make contact with your vessel," Shannon persisted bleakly. "They'll know exactly where to intercept and shoot us down."

"Not," Pitt replied loftily, "if I play my cards right."

Setting the office chair to almost a full reclining position, communications technician Jim Stucky settled in comfortably and began reading a paperback mystery novel by Wick Downing. He had finally gotten used to the thump that reverberated throughout the hull of the NUMA oceanographic ship, Deep Fathom, every time the sonar unit bounced a signal off the seafloor of the Peru Basin. Boredom had set in soon after the vessel began endlessly cruising back and forth charting the geology 2500 fathoms below the ship's keel. Stucky was in the middle of the chapter where a woman's body is found floating inside a waterbed when Pitt's voice crackled over the speaker.

"NUMA calling Deep Fathom. You awake, Stucky?"

Stucky jerked erect and pressed the transmit button. "This is Deep Fathom. I read you, NUMA. Please stand by." While Pitt waited, Stucky alerted his skipper over the ship's speaker system.

Captain Frank Stewart hurried from the bridge into the communications cabin. "Did I hear you correctly? You're in contact with Pitt and Giordino?"

Stucky nodded. "Pitt is standing by."

Stewart picked up the microphone. "Dirk, this is Frank Stewart."

"Good to hear your beer-soaked voice again, Frank."

"What have you guys been up to? Admiral Sandecker has been erupting like a volcano the past twenty-four hours, demanding to know your status."

"Believe me, Frank, it hasn't been a good day."

"What is your present position?"

"Somewhere over the Andes in an antique Peruvian military chopper."

"What happened to our NUMA helicopter?" Stewart demanded.

"The Red Baron shot it down," said Pitt hastily. "That's not important. Listen to me carefully. We took bullet strikes in our fuel tanks. We can't stay in the air for more than a half hour. Please meet and pick us up in the town square of Chiclayo. You'll find it on your charts of the Peruvian mainland. Use our NUMA backup copter."

Stewart looked down at Stucky. Both men exchanged puzzled glances. Stewart pressed the transmit button again. "Please repeat. I don't read you clearly."

"We are required to land in Chiclayo due to loss of fuel. Rendezvous with us in the survey helicopter and transport us back to the ship. Besides Giordino and me, there are twelve passengers."

Stewart looked dazed. "What in hell is going on? He and Giordino flew off the ship with our only bird. And now they're flying a military aircraft that's been shot up with twelve people on board. What's this baloney about a backup chopper?"

"Stand by, Stewart transmitted to Pitt. Then he reached out and picked up the ship's phone and buzzed the bridge. "Find a map of Peru in the chart room and bring it to communications right away."

"You think Pitt has fallen off his pogo stick?" asked Stucky.

Not in a thousand years," answered Stewart. "Those guys are in trouble and Pitt's laying a red herring to mislead eavesdroppers." A crewman brought the map, and Stewart stretched it flat on a desk. "Their rescue mission took them on a course almost due east of here. Chiclayo is a good seventy-five kilometers southwest of his flight path."

"Now that we've established his con job," said Stucky, "what's Pitt's game plan?"

"We'll soon find out." Stewart picked up the microphone and transmitted. "NUMA, are you still with us?"

"Still here, pal," came Pitt's imperturbable voice.

"I will fly the spare copter to Chiclayo and pick up you and your passengers myself. Do you copy?"

"Much appreciated, skipper. Always happy to see you never do things halfway. Have a beer waiting when I arrive."

"Will do," answered Stewart.

"And put on some speed will you?" said Pitt. "I need a bath real bad. See you soon."

Stucky stared at Stewart and laughed. "Since when did you learn to fly a helicopter?"

Stewart laughed back. "Only in my dreams."

"Do you mind telling me what I missed?"

"In a second." Stewart picked up the ship's phone again and snapped out orders. "Pull in the sonar's sensor and set a new course on zero-nine-zero degrees. Soon as the sensor is secured, give me full speed. And no excuses from the chief engineer that his precious engines have to be coddled. I want every revolution." He hung up the phone with a thoughtful expression. "Where were we? Oh yes, you don't know the score."

"Is it some sort of riddle?" Stucky muttered.

"Not at all. Obvious to me. Pitt and Giordino don't have enough fuel to reach the ship, so we're going to put on all speed and meet them approximately halfway between here and the shore, hopefully before they're forced to ditch in water infested with sharks."

Giordino whipped along, a bare 10 meters (33 feet) above the tops of the trees at only 144 kilometers (90 miles) an hour. The twenty-year-old helicopter was capable of flying almost another 100 kilometers faster, but he reduced speed to conserve what little fuel he had left after passing over the mountains. Only one more range of foothills and a narrow coastal plain separated the aircraft from the sea. Every third minute he glanced warily at the fuel gauges. The needles were edging uncomfortably close to the red. His eyes returned to the green foliage rushing past below. The forest was thick and the clearings were scattered with large boulders. It was a decidedly unfriendly place to force-land a helicopter.

Pitt had limped back into the cargo compartment and begun passing out the life vests. Shannon followed, firmly took the vests out of his hands, and handed them to Rodgers.

"No, you don't," she said firmly, pushing Pitt into a canvas seat mounted along the bulkhead of the fuselage. She nodded at the loosely knotted, blood-soaked bandanna around his leg. "You sit down and stay put."

She found a first aid kit in a metal locker and knelt in front of him. Without the slightest sign of nervous stress, she cut off Pitt's pant leg, cleaned the wound, and competently sewed the eight stitches to close the wound before wrapping a bandage around it.

"Nice job," said Pitt admiringly. "You missed your calling as an angel of mercy."

"You were lucky." She snapped the lid on the first aid kit. "The bullet merely sliced the skin."

"Why do I feel as though you've acted on General Hospital?"

Shannon smiled. "I was raised on a farm with five brothers who were always discovering new ways to injure themselves."

"What turned you to archaeology?"

"There was an old Indian burial mound in one corner of our wheat field. I used to dig around it for arrowheads. For a book report in high school, I found a text on the excavation of the Hopewell Indian culture burial mounds in southern Ohio. Inspired, I began digging into the site on our farm. After finding several pieces of pottery and four skeletons, I was hooked. Hardly a professional dig, mind you. I learned how to excavate properly in college and became fascinated with cultural development in the central Andes, and made up my mind to specialize in that area."

Pitt looked at her silently for a moment. "When did you first meet Doc Miller?"

"Only briefly about six years ago when I was working on my doctorate. I attended a lecture he gave on the Inca highway network that ran from the Colombian-Ecuador border almost five thousand kilometers to central Chile. It was his work that inspired me to focus my studies on Andean culture. I've been coming down here ever since."

"Then you didn't really know him very well?" Pitt questioned. '

Shannon shook her head. "Like most archaeologists, we concentrated on our own pet projects. We corresponded occasionally and exchanged data. About six months ago, I invited him to come along on this expedition to supervise the Peruvian university student volunteers. He was between projects and accepted. Then he kindly offered to fly down from the States five weeks early to begin preparations, arranging permits from the Peruvians, setting up the logistics for equipment and supplies, that sort of thing. Juan Chaco and he worked closely together."

"When you arrived, did you notice anything different about him?"

A curious look appeared in Shannon's eyes. "What an odd question."

"His looks, his actions," Pitt persisted.

She thought a moment. "Since Phoenix, he had grown a beard and lost about fifteen pounds, but now that I think of it, he rarely removed his sunglasses."

"Any change in his voice?"

She shrugged. "A little deeper perhaps. I thought he had a cold."

"Did you notice whether he wore a ring? One with a large amber setting?"

Her eyes narrowed. "A sixty-million-year-old piece of yellow amber with the fossil of a primitive ant in the center? Doc was proud of that ring. I remember him wearing it during the Inca road survey, but it wasn't on his hand at the sacred well. When I asked him why it was missing, he said the ring became loose on his finger after his weight loss and he left it home to be resized. How do you know about Doc's ring?"

Pitt had been wearing the amber ring he had taken from the corpse at the bottom of the sacred well with the setting unseen under his finger. He slipped it off and handed it to Shannon without speaking.

She held it up to the light from a round window, staring in amazement at the tiny ancient insect imbedded in the amber. "Where. . . ?" her voice trailed off.

"Whoever posed as Doc murdered him and took his place. You accepted the imposter because there was no reason not to. The possibility of foul play never entered your mind. The killer's only mistake was forgetting to remove the ring when he threw Doc's body into the sinkhole."

"You're saying Doc was murdered before I left the States?" she stated in bewilderment.

"Only a day or two after he arrived at the campsite," Pitt explained. "Judging from the condition of the body, he must have been under water for more than a month."

"Strange that Miles and I missed seeing him."

"Not so strange. You descended directly in front of the passage to the adjoining cavern and were sucked in almost immediately. I reached the bottom on the opposite side and was able to swim a search grid, looking for what I thought would be two fresh bodies before the surge caught me. Instead, I found Doc's remains and the bones of a sixteenth-century Spanish soldier."

"So Doc really was murdered," she said as a look of horror dawned on her face. "Juan Chaco must have known, because he was the liaison for our project and was working with Doc before we arrived. Is it possible he was involved?"

Pitt nodded. "Up to his eyeballs. If you were smuggling ancient treasures, where could you find a better informant and front man than an internationally respected archaeological expert and government official?"

"Then who was the imposter?"

"Another agent of the Solpemachaco. A canny operator who staged a masterful performance of his death, with Amaru's help. Perhaps he's one of the men at the top of the organization who doesn't mind getting his hands dirty. We may never know."

"If he murdered Doc, he deserves to be hanged," Shannon said, her hazel eyes glinting with anger.

"At least we'll be able to nail Juan Chaco to the door of a Peruvian courthouse-" Pitt suddenly tensed and swung toward the cockpit as Giordino threw the helicopter in a steeply banked circle. "What's up?"

"A gut feeling," Giordino answered. "I decided to run a three-sixty to check our tail. Good thing I'm sensitive to vibes. We've got company."

Pitt pushed himself to his feet, returned to the cockpit and, favoring his leg, eased into the copilot's seat. "Bandits or good guys?" he asked.

"Our pals who dropped in on us at the temple didn't fall for your artful dodge to Chiclayo." Without taking his hands from the controls, Giordino nodded out of the windshield to his left at a helicopter crossing a low ridge of mountains to the east.

"They must have guessed our course and overhauled us after you reduced speed to conserve fuel," Pitt surmised.

"No racks mounting air-to-air rockets," observed Giordino. "They'll have to shoot us down with rifles--"

A burst of flame and a puff of smoke erupted from the open forward passenger door of the pursuing aircraft, and a rocket soared through the sky, passing so close to the nose of the helicopter Pitt and Giordino felt they could have reached out the side windows and touched it.

"Correction," Pitt called. "A forty-millimeter rocket launcher. The same one they used against the temple."

Giordino slammed the collective pitch into an abrupt ascent and shoved the throttles to their stops in an attempt to throw off the launcher team's aim. "Grab your rifle and keep them busy until I can reach those low clouds along the coast."

"Tough luck!" Pitt shouted over the shrill whine of the engines. "I tossed it away, and my Colt is empty. Any of you carry a gun on board?"

Giordino made an imperceptible nod as he hurled the chopper in another violent maneuver. "I can't speak for the rest of them. You'll find mine wedged in a corner behind the cabin bulkhead."

Pitt took a radio headset that was hanging on the arm of his seat and clamped it over his ears. Then he struggled out of his seat and clutched both sides of the open cockpit door with his hands to stay on his feet during a sharp turn. He plugged the lead from the headset into a socket mounted on the bulkhead and hailed Giordino. "Put on your headset so we can coordinate our defense."

Giordino didn't answer as he mashed down on the left pedal and skidded the craft around in a flat turn. As if he were juggling, he balanced his movements with the controls while slipping the headset over his ears. He winced and involuntarily ducked as another rocket tore through the air less than a meter under the belly of the helicopter and exploded in an orange burst of flame against the palisade of a low mountain.

Grabbing whatever handhold was within reach, Pitt staggered to the side passenger door, undogged the latches, and slid the door back until it was wide open. Shannon, her face showing more concern than fear, crawled across the floor with a cargo rope and wrapped one end around Pitt's waist as he was reaching for the automatic rifle Giordino had used to knock out the Peruvian pilots. Then she tied the opposite end to a longitudinal strut.

"Now you won't fall out," she exclaimed.

Pitt smiled. "I don't deserve you." Then he was lying flat on his stomach aiming the rifle out the door. "I'm ready, Al. Give me a clear shot."

Giordino fought to twist the helicopter so that Pitt would face the blind side of the attackers. Because the passenger doors were positioned on the same side of both helicopters, the Peruvian pilot was faced with the same dilemma. He might have risked opening the clamshell doors in the aft end to allow the mercenary rifleman to blast away with an open line of fire, but that would have slowed his airspeed and made control of the chopper unwieldy. Like old propeller-driven warbirds tangling in a dogfight, the pilots maneuvered for an advantage, hurling their aircraft around the sky in a series of acrobatics never intended by their designers.

His opponent knew his stuff, thought Giordino, with the respect of one professional for another. Outgunned by the military mercenaries, he felt like a mouse tormented by a cat before becoming a quick snack. His eyes darted from the instruments to his nemesis, then down at the ground to make certain he didn't pile into a low ridge or a tree. He yanked back the collective and broadened the pitch of the rotor blades to increase their bite in the damp air. The chopper shot upward in a maneuver matched by the other pilot. But then Giordino pushed the nose down and mashed his foot on the right rudder pedal, accelerating and throwing the craft on its side under his attacker and giving Pitt a straight shot.

"Now!" he yelled in his microphone.

Pitt didn't aim at the pilots in the cockpit, he sighted at the engine hump below the rotor and squeezed the trigger. The gun spat twice and went silent.

"What's wrong?" inquired Giordino. "No gunfire. I run interference to the goal line and you fumble the ball."

"This gun had only two rounds in it," Pitt snapped back.

"When I took it off one of Amaru's gunmen, I didn't stop to count the shells."

Furious with frustration, Pitt jerked out the clip and saw it was empty. "Did any of you bring a gun on board?" he shouted to Rodgers and the petrified students.

Rodgers, tightly strapped in a seat with legs braced against a bulkhead to avoid being bounced around by Giordino's violent tactics, spread his hands. "We left them behind when we made a break for the ship."

At that instant a rocket burst through a port window, flamed across the width of the fuselage, and exited through the opposite side of the helicopter without bursting or injuring anyone. Designed to detonate after striking armored vehicles or fortified bunkers, the rocket failed to explode after striking thin aluminum and plastic. If one hits the turbines, Pitt thought uneasily, it's all over. He stared wildly about the cabin, saw that they had all released their shoulder harnesses and lay huddled on the floor under the seats as if the canvas webbing and small tubular supports could stop a forty-millimeter tank-killing rocket. He cursed as the wildly swaying aircraft threw him against the doorframe.

Shannon saw the furious look on Pitt's face, the despair as he flung the empty rifle out the open door. And yet she stared at him with absolute faith in her eyes. She had come to know him well enough in the past twenty-four hours to know he was not a man who would willingly accept defeat.

Pitt caught the look and it infuriated him. "What do you expect me to do," he demanded, "leap across space and brain them with the jawbone of an ass? Or maybe they'll go away if I throw rocks at them-" Pitt broke off as his eyes fell on one of the life rafts. He broke into a wild grin. "Al, you hear me?"

"I'm a little busy to take calls," Giordino answered tensely.

"Lay this antique on her port side and fly above them."

"Whatever you're concocting, make it quick before they put a rocket up our nose or we run out of fuel."

"Back by popular demand," Pitt said, becoming his old cheerful self again, "Mandrake Pitt and his deathdefying magic act." He unsnapped the buckles on the tiedown straps holding one of the life rafts to the floor. The fluorescent orange raft was labeled Twenty-Man Flotation Unit, in English, and weighed over 45 kilograms (100 pounds). Leaning out the door secured by the rope Shannon had tied around his waist, both legs and feet spread and set, he hoisted the uninflated life raft onto his shoulder and waited.

Giordino was tiring. Helicopters require constant hands-on concentration just to stay in the air, because they are made up of a thousand opposing forces that want nothing to do with each other. The general rule of thumb is that most pilots fly solo for an hour. After that, they turn control over to their backup or copilot. Giordino had been behind the controls for an hour and a half, was denied sleep for the past thirty-six hours, and now the strain of throwing the aircraft all over the sky was rapidly draining what strength he had in reserve. For almost six minutes, an eternity in a dogfight, he had prevented his adversary from gaining a brief advantage for a clear shot from the men manning the rocket launcher.

The other craft passed directly across Giordino's vulnerable glass-enclosed cockpit. For a brief instant in time he could clearly see the Peruvian pilot. The face under the combat flight helmet flashed a set of white teeth and waved. "The bastard is laughing at me," Giordino blurted in fury.

"What did you say?" came Pitt.

"Those fornicating baboons think this is funny," Giordino said savagely. He knew what he had to do. He had noticed an almost indiscernible quirk to the enemy pilot's flying technique. When he bent left there was no hesitation, but he was a fraction of a second slow in banking right. Giordino feinted left and abruptly threw the nose skyward and curled right. The other pilot caught the feint and promptly went left but reacted too slowly to Giordino's wild ascending turn and twist in the opposite direction. Before he could counter, Giordino had hurled his machine around and over the attacker.

Pitt's opportunity came in just the blink of an eye, but his timing was right on the money. Lifting the life raft above his head with both hands as easily as if it were a sofa pillow, he thrust it out the open door as the Peruvian chopper whipped beneath him. The orange bundle dropped with the impetus of a bowling ball and smashed through one of the gyrating rotor blades 2 meters (about 6 feet) from the tip. The blade shattered into metallic slivers that spiraled outward from the centrifugal force. Now unbalanced, the remaining four blades whirled in ever-increasing vibration until they broke away from the rotor hub in a rain of small pieces.

The big helicopter seemed to hang poised for a moment before it yawed in circles and angled nose-first toward the ground at 190 kilometers (118 miles) an hour. Pitt hung out the door and watched, fascinated, as the Peruvian craft bored through the trees and crashed into a low hill only a few meters below the summit. He stared at the glinting shreds of metal that flew off into the branches of the trees. The big injured bird came to rest on its right side, a crumpled lump of twisted metal. And then it was lost in a huge fireball that erupted and wrapped it in flames and black smoke.

Giordino eased back on the throttles and made a slow circular pass over the column of smoke, but neither he nor Pitt saw any evidence of life. "This has to be the first time in history an aircraft was knocked out of the sky by a life raft," said Giordino.