Temple

MOUNTAINOUS REGION

Chambers looked up at Race.

‘Ah, Professor,’ he said. ‘Just the man I was looking for. A point of clarification. These notes here, “Paxu, Tupra and Roya’, he pointed to Race’s notes. ‘These are in order, aren’t they? I mean, in the order Renco visited them.’

‘They’re in the same order as they appear in the manuscript.’

‘Okay, good.’

‘Hey, Walter,’ Race said, sitting down next to Chambers.

“There was something I was hoping I could ask you.’

‘Yes?’

‘In the manuscript, Renco mentions a creature called the titi or the rapa. What exactly is that?’

‘Ah, the rapa; Chambers nodded. ‘Hmmm, yes, yes. Not really my field, but I do know a little bit about it.’

‘And?’

‘Like many other South American cultures, the Incans had an unusual fascination with the great cats. They built statues to them, both large and small, and sometimes they carved huge has reliefs of them into entire mountain rockfaces. Why, the city of Cuzco was even built in the shape of a puma.

‘This fascination with the great cats, however, is really quite a strange phenomenon, since South America is known for its lack of great cats.

The only large cats indigenous to the continent are the jaguar—or panther—and the puma, which are actually only medium-sized felines.

They’re not even close in size to the tiger which is the largest of all the great cats.’

Chambers shifted in his seat. ‘The rapa, however, is another story altogether. It’s more like the South American version of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. It’s a legendary creature, a great big black cat.

‘As with Bigfoot and Nessie, you hear of sightings every couple of years—farmers in Brazil complain about cattle mutilations; tourists on the Inca Trail in Peru claim to see big cats running around at night; and occasionally, local men are found brutally killed in the lowlands of Colombia. But no-one ever gets proof. There are a couple of photos, but they’ve all been discredited—just blurry, out-of-focus shots that could be anything from an ordinary old panther to a spectacled bear.’

‘So it’s a myth,’ Race said. ‘A giant-cat myth.’

‘Don’t dismiss giant-cat myths so quickly, Professor Race,’

Chambers said. ‘They are quite common throughout the world. India.

South Africa. Siberia. Why, it might surprise you to learn that the most vehement beliefs in giant-cat myths come from England.’

‘England?’

‘The Beast of Exmoor, the Beast of Bahn. Giant cats that prowl the moors late at night. Never caught. Never photographed.

But their prints are often found in the mud.

Goodness, if the sightings are true, chances are that the Hound of the Baskervilles was not a dog, but actually a giant cat.’

Race snuffed a laugh at that and left Chambers to his work. He returned to his seat. No sooner had he sat down, however, than he felt someone sit down next to him. It was Lauren.

‘Ah, the lucky cap,’ she said, looking at Race’s battered blue Yankees cap. “I don’t know if I ever told you this, but I always hated that damned cap.’

‘You told me.’ Race said.

‘But you still wore it.’

“It’s a good cap.’

Lauren’s eyes wandered appraisingly over his T-shirt, jeans and Nikes.

Race noticed that she was dressed in a thick khaki shirt rolled up at the sleeves, khaki trousers and a sturdy-looking pair of hiking boots.

‘Nice outfit,’ she said, before he could say exactly the same thing.

‘What can I say?’ he replied. ‘When I packed for work today I wasn’t expecting to go to the jungle.’

Lauren threw her head back and laughed. It was the same laugh Race remembered from the old days. Totally theatrical and of utterly dubious sincerity.

‘I’d forgotten how dry you were,’ she said.

Race smiled weakly, bowed his head.

‘How have you been, Will?” she asked gently.

‘Good,’ he lied. ‘And you? You’ve obviously done well for yourself. I mean, geez, DARPA…’

‘Life is good,’ she said. ‘Life is very good. Listen, Will…“ And there it was. The transition. Lauren had always been good at getting down to business. ‘… I just wanted to talk with you before we landed. I just wanted to say that I don’t want what happened between us to get in the way of what we’re doing here. I never meant to hurt you—’

‘You didn’t hurt me,’ Race said, perhaps a little too quickly. He looked down at his shoelaces. ‘Well, nothing that didn’t mend after a while.’

Not exactly true.

It had taken him a lot more than a while to get over Lauren O’Connor.

Their relationship had been a classic sort of affair: the all-American college mismatch. Race was smart, but had no money. Lauren was brilliant, and her family had money to burn. Race went to USE on a half sports scholarship. In return for playing football for them, they paid half his tuition. He’d scraped together the other half by working nights behind the bar at a local nightclub. Lauren’s parents had paid all her fees in full, in one up-front payment.

They were together for two years. The footballer with decent but not spectacular grades in languages, and the tall, beautiful science major who was acing everything.

Race had loved it. Lauren was all he’d ever wanted in a companion—

intelligent, outgoing, acidly funny. At football parties, she’d stand out like the sun on a cloudy day. And when she’d search the room for him and find him and smile, he’d melt.

He fell in love with her.

And then Lauren won a scholarship to study at MIT for a year, doing theoretical physics or something like that. She went. He waited. Now it was the classic long-distance relationship.

Love over the phone. Race was faithful. He lived for their weekly phone call.

And then she came back.

He was at the airport, waiting for her. He had the ring in his pocket.

He’d practised the speech a thousand times, got it just right so that he’d drop to one knee at precisely the right moment and ask her.

But when she came through the Arrivals gate that day, she already had a diamond ring on her ring finger.

‘Will. I’m sorry,’ she’d said. ‘But… well… I’ve met someone else.’

Race never even got the ring out of his pocket.

And so he’d spent the rest of his time in college nose-down in the books, resolutely single and unimaginably miserable.

He’d graduated fourth in his class in ancient languages and, to his complete surprise, got an offer to teach at NYU.

With nothing else he wanted to do except maybe slashing his wrists—he took it.

And now, now he was a humble language professor working out of an old clapboard office in New York City while she was a theoretical physicist working at the cutting edge of the United States military’s most esteemed high-technology weapons department. Hmmm.

Race had never expected to see her again. Nor, he thought, did I want to. But then, when Frank Nash had mentioned her name earlier that morning, something inside of him had clicked. He’d wanted to see what she had made of herself.

Well, he had seen that now and what he saw was clear— she’d made a hell of a lot more out of herself than he had.

Race blinked, snapped out of it.

He came back to the present and found that he was staring at her wedding ring.

Jesus, get a grip, he thought to himself.

‘Frank said you did a good job with the manuscript,’

Lauren said.

Race coughed, clearing his throat as well as his mind. ‘As much as I could do. I mean, hey, it isn’t theoretical physics, but, it’s.., well, it’s what I do.’

‘You should be proud of what you do,’ she said. And then she smiled at him. ‘It’s good to see you again, Will.’

Race smiled back as best he could.

Then she stood and looked about herself. ‘Well, anyway, I’d better be getting back. Looks like we’re about to land.’

It was late in the afternoon when the Hercules landed heavily on a dusty private airstrip at the edge of the Cuzco valley.

The team disembarked the plane on board the troop truck that had made the journey to South America in the big plane’s belly. The massive truck rumbled out of the rear loading ramp and immediately headed north along a badly-paved road toward the Urubamba River.

It was a bouncy ride. Race sat in the back of the truck next to his bodyguard, Sergeant Van Lewen.

The other members of the team—the three DARPA people, Nash, Lauren and the hawk-faced physicist, Copeland; Chambers, the anthropologist; and Gaby Lopez, a striking young Latin-American woman who was the team’s archaeologist-all sat with their own Green Beret bodyguards.

At one point in the trip, the truck drove along a rise and Race was able to see down the length of the Cuzco valley.

On the left-hand side of the valley, situated on a grassy green hill, lay the ruins of Sacsayhuaman, the mighty fortress he had so recently read about. Its three gargantuan tiers were still discernible, but time and weather had robbed them of their majesty. What four hundred years ago had been a magnificent and imposing fortress fit for the eyes of kings was now a crumbling ruin fit only for the eyes of tourists.

To the right, Race saw a sea of terracotta roofs—the modern-day city of Cuzco, its surrounding wall having long since been removed.

Beyond the rooftops lay the barren southern mountains of Peru—brown and harsh, as desolate as the snowcapped peaks of the Andes to the north were spectacular.

Ten minutes later, the truck arrived at the Urubarnba River, where it was met by a thirtysomething man dressed in a white linen suit and a cream Panama hat. His name was Nathan Sebastian and he was a lieutenant in the United States Army.

Behind Sebastian, floating lazily in the river alongside a long Tshaped jetty, were two military helicopters.

They were Bell Textron UH-1Ns—‘Hueys’. But these two Hueys had been modified slightly. Their long thin landing struts had been removed and replaced with longer pod-like pontoons that floated on the surface of the river. One of the choppers, Race saw, had a complex-looking array of electronic devices suspended beneath its frog-like nose.

The troop truck skidded to a halt near the jetty and Race and the others piled out of it.

Lieutenant Sebastian walked straight up to Nash. ‘Choppers are all set, Colonel, just as you requested.’

‘Well done, Lieutenant,’ Nash said. ‘What about our competitors?’

‘A SAT-SN scan was conducted ten minutes ago, sir.

Romano and his team are currently flying over Colombia, en route to Cuzco.’

‘Jesus, they’re already over Colombia,’ Nash said, biting his lip.

‘They’re gaining on us.’

‘Their estimated time of arrival in Cuzco is three hours, sir,’ Sebastian said.

Nash looked at his watch. It was 5:00 pm exactly.

‘Then we don’t have much time,’ he said. ‘Let’s get these choppers loaded and into the air.’

Even as Nash said it, the Green Berets were already loading six large Samsonite trunks onto the two Hueys. Once they were stowed, the twelve team members split up into two teams of six and climbed aboard.

The two choppers took off from the river, leaving Nathan Sebastian standing on the jetty, holding onto his stupid hat.

The two Hueys soared over the snowcapped mountain peaks.

Race sat in the back of the second chopper, staring in awe at the spectacular mountain gorges that raced by beneath them.

‘All right, everyone,’ Nash’s voice said over their headsets.

“I figure we’ve got about two hours of daylight left. And I’d like to do as much of this as I can in the light. The first thing we have to do is find that first totem. Walter? Gaby?’

Nash had Chambers and Gaby Lopez with him in the lead chopper.

The two Hueys were heading out over the mountains, past the Paucartambo River, in the general direction of the three river villages mentioned in the Santiago Manuscript: Paxu, Tupra and Roya.

According to the manuscript, they would find the first totem near the last-mentioned town, Roya. Now it was up to Chambers and Lopez, the anthropologist and the archaeologist, to deduce the exact modern-day location of that riverside town.

And so, Race mused, what had taken Renco Capac and Alberto Santiago eleven days to accomplish, they did in fifty minutes. After soaring over the jagged pointed peaks of the Andes for almost an hour, suddenly—gloriously—the mountains slid away beneath them and Race saw a spectacular expanse of flat green foliage stretching away from him for as far as he could see. It was an amazing sight. The beginning of the vast Amazon River Basin.

They flew northeast, low over the rainforest the rotor blades of the two helicopters thumping loudly in the silent afternoon air.

They flew over some rivers, long fat brown lines that snaked their way through the impenetrable forest. At times, they would see the remains of old villages on the river banks, some of them with stone ruins in the centre of their town squares, others just overgrown with weeds.

At one point in their journey, Race saw the faint yellow glow of electric lights peeking up over the darkening horizon.

‘The Madre de Dios goldmine,’ Lauren said, leaning over him to look at the glow herself. ‘One of the largest open-cut mines in the world, also one of the most remote. It’s the closest thing we’ll get to civilisation around here. Just a great big earthen cone sunk into the earth. I’d heard it was abandoned sometime last year. Guess it’s been re-op—’

At that moment, there came a flurry of excited voices over the radio.

Chambers and Lopez were speaking animatedly, saying something about the village immediately beneath the two Hueys.

The next voice Race heard belonged to Frank Nash. He was ordering the choppers to land.

The two Hueys landed in a deserted clearing by a riverbank, flattening the long grass with their downdrafts. Nash, Chambers and Lopez all stepped out of their chopper.

Several moss-covered stone monuments stood in the middle of the grassy clearing. After a few minutes of examining the monuments and comparing them to their notebooks, Chambers and Lopez agreed that this was almost certainly the site of the village of Roya.

After the identity of the village was confirmed, Race and the rest of the team disembarked their choppers and a search of the surrounding jungle ensued. Ten minutes later, Lauren found the first stone totem about five hundred metres to the northeast of the town.

Race stared at the giant stone totem in awe.

It was infinitely more frightening in real life than he had imagined it to be.

It was about nine feet high and completely made of stone. And it was covered in vandalism—-crucifixes and Christian symbols that had been scratched into it by God-fearing conquistadors four hundred years ago.

The stone carving of the rapa, however, was like nothing he had ever seen. It was absolutely terrifying.

It was covered in moisture, dripping with it. And this layer of wetness had a truly strange effect on the carving— it really made it seem as if the stone carving was alive.

Race swallowed hard as he stood before the decrepit old totem.

With the first totem found, the team hurried back to their choppers and lifted off quickly.

Nash’s chopper led the way, flying low over the jungle, in the direction of the rapa’s tail.

Over his headset, Race heard Nash’s voice: ‘—fire up the magnetometer. Once we get a reading on the next totem, we’ll revert to spotlights—”

‘Got it’

Race frowned. He wanted to ask someone what a magnetometer was, but he didn’t want to look any more ignorant in front of Lauren than he already did.

‘It’s a device used by archaeologists to detect relics buried underground,’ Lauren said, smiling wryly at him.

Damn it, he thought.

‘They’re also used commercially by resource exploration companies to detect subterranean reserves of oil and uranium ore,’ she added.

‘How do they work?’

‘A caesium magnetometer like the one we’re using here detects minute variations in the earth’s magnetic field— variations that are caused by objects interrupting the upward flow of that magnetic field.

Archaeologists in Mexico have been using magnetometers for years to find buried Aztec ruins. We’re using ours to find the next stone totem.’

‘But the totems are on the surface,’ Race said. ‘Wouldn’t there be a problem with the magnetometer picking up trees and animals?’

‘It can be a problem,’ Lauren said. ‘But not here. Nash will have set his reader to detect only objects of a certain density and depth. Trees have a density of only a few thousand megabars, and animals, since they’re made of flesh and bone, are even less than that. Incan stone, however, is about five times as dense as the thickest tree in the rainforest—’

‘All right, people,“ Nash’s voice said suddenly. ‘I’ve got a reading. Dead ahead. Corporal, the spotlight.’

And so it went.

For the next hour, as the light faded and the shadows from the mountains grew longer and colder, Race listened as Nash and Chambers and Lopez spotted totem after totem.

After the magnetometer found each totem, they would hover their Huey over it and illuminate it with the chopper’s blinding white spotlight.

Then, depending on which totem they had spotted, they would either go in the direction of the rapa’s tail or to the creature’s left, in the direction of the Mark of the Sun.

The two helicopters flew north, alongside the massive step-like tableland that separated the mountains from the rainforest.

Just as dusk was setting in, Race heard Nash’s voice again.

“All right, we’re coming up on the tableland,’ he said. ‘I can see a large waterfall flowing over it…’

Race got up from his seat and moved forward, looked out through the forward windshield of his helicopter. He saw Nash’s Huey rise up over a magnificent waterfall that marked the edge of the tableland.

“All right… Following the river now…”

The day grew darker and soon all Race could see were the red tail-lights of Nash’s helicopter in front of him, banking and tilting as the Huey followed the path of the wide, black river beneath them, the beam of its spotlight playing over the wavelets on the water’s surface. They were heading west now, toward the wall of mountains that towered above the rainforest.

And then abruptly Race saw Nash’s chopper bank sharply to the right and round a thickly-forested bend in the river.

“Wait a second,’ Nash’s voice said.

Race peered forward through the windshield. Nash’s chopper began to hover above the riverbank to his right.

‘Wait now… I see a clearing. It seems to be covered over with grass and moss but… Wait, there it is. Okay, people, I can see it. I can just make out the ruins of a large pyramid-shaped building…

Looks like the citadel. All right, stand by. Stand by for landing.’

At the very same moment that Nash’s Hueys were landing at the town of Vilcafor, three other—much larger—military aircraft were arriving at Cuzco airport.

They were aeroplanes—-one giant C-17 Globemaster III cargo plane and two small F-14 fighters, the big cargo plane’s escorts. The three planes taxied quickly to a halt at the end of the landing strip, where they were met by a cluster of other aircraft that had arrived at Cuzco only minutes earlier.

Three massive CH-53E Super Stallion helicopters stood at the end of the runway, waiting for the Globemaster. The Super Stallions made for an imposing sight—big and strong, they were the fastest and most powerful heavy lift helicopters in the world.

The transfer was made quickly.

Three shadowy figures immediately leapt out of the Globemaster and ran across the tarmac toward the choppers.

One of them—he was smaller than the other two and black, and he wore a pair of gold-framed spectacles—-carried something under his arm, an object that looked like a large leatherbound book.

The three of them leapt aboard one of the Super Stallions.

No sooner were they on board than all three choppers lifted off the tarmac and headed north.

But they did not leave unobserved.

Standing at a distance from the airport, watching the choppers through a pair of highpowered binoculars, was a man dressed in a white linen suit and a cream Panama hat.

Lieutenant Nathan Sebastian.

Frank Nash’s two Hueys landed gently on the river beside the ruins of Vilcafor in the fading light of dusk, in a downpour of torrential rain.

After they came to rest on the river’s surface, the two pilots manoeuvred their birds around so that their pontoons ran aground on the soft mud of the riverbank.

The Green Berets leapt out onto the shore first, their M16s up and ready. The civilian members of the team stepped up onto the mud after them. Race came out last of all and stood at the river’s edge—gunless—staring in awe at the ruins of the citadel town of Vilcafor.

The village was essentially comprised of a grass-covered central street that ran for about a hundred yards away from the river. It was lined on both sides by roofless stone huts that were overgrown with weeds and moss. The whole town, in fact, was covered in foliage—-it was as if the rainforest surrounding it had come alive and consumed it whole.

At Race’s end of the street was the river and the rickety remains of an old wooden jetty. At the other end of the street—looking down over the little town like some kind of protective god—were the ruins of the great pyramid-like citadel.

In truth, the citadel was no bigger than a two-storey suburban house.

But it was made of some of the most solid-looking stones Race had ever seen. It was that same precise Incan masonry he had read about in the manuscript. Giant squareshaped boulders that had been pounded into shape by Incan stonemasons and then set perfectly in place alongside other, similarly fashioned boulders. No mortar was necessary and none had been used.

The citadel was made up of two tiers, both of them circular in shape—the upper level a smaller concentric circle that rested atop the larger lower one.

The whole structure, however, looked weathered and worn, beaten and decrepit. The once intimidating stone walls were now laced with green vines and a network of forked cracks. The whole upper level was broken and crumbling.

The lower level was still largely intact, but completely overgrown with weeds. A large door stone sat at an odd angle inside the building’s main entranceway.

Aside from the citadel, there was one other dominant feature of the village.

The town of Vilcafor was surrounded by a huge dried-up moat—an enormous horseshoe-shaped ditch that ran around the entire town, starting at the riverbank and ending at the riverbank. Two great stone dikes prevented the water in the river from rushing into the moat.

It must have been at least fifteen feet across and just as deep. Tangled thorny thickets of brush snaked their way along its waterless base. Two old wooden logbridges spanned its width on either side of the village. Like the rest of the town, they too had been overcome by the encroaching rainforest. Their wooden beams were laced with sprawling green vines.

Race stood motionless at the end of the old Incan street, the pouring rain running off the brim of his cap.

He felt like he was entering another world.

An ancient world.

A dangerous world.

‘Don’t stay near the water too long,’ Lauren said as she strode past him.

Race turned, not understanding. Lauren clicked on her flashlight and pointed it at the river behind him.

It was as if someone had just flicked on a light switch.

Race saw them instantly. Glinting in the light of Lauren’s flashlight.

Eyes.

No less than fifty pairs of eyes, protruding from the inky black water, stared back at him from the rain spattered surface of the river.

He turned quickly to Lauren. ‘Alligators?’

‘No,” Walter Chambers said, coming over. “Melanosuchus niger. Black caimans. Largest crocodilian on the continent.

Some say the largest in the world. They’re bigger than any alligator, and in biology more like a crocodile. In fact, the black caiman is a close relative of Crocodylus porosus, the giant Australian saltwater crocodile.’

‘How big are they?’ Race asked. He could only see the eerie constellation of eyes before him. He couldn’t tell how big the reptiles in the water actually were.

‘About twenty-two feet,’ Chambers said cheerfully.

‘Twenty-two feet.’ Race did the calculations in his head.

Twenty-two feet equalled seven metres.

‘How much do they weigh?’ he asked.

‘About 2300 pounds. What’s that, about a thousand kilograms.’

A thousand kilograms, Race thought. A metric ton.

Wonderful.

The caimans in the darkened river began to rise in the water and Race saw their armoured crocodilian backs, saw the pointed plates of their tails.

They looked like dark mounds just hovering in the water.

Great big massive mounds.

‘They’re not going to come out of the water, are they?’

‘They might,’ Chambers said. ‘But probably not. Most crocodilians prefer to grab their victims by surprise at the water’s edge, from the cover of the water itself. And although black caimans are night hunters, they rarely stray out of the water in the evening, for the simple reason that it’s too cold. Like all reptiles they have to watch their body temperature.’

Race stepped away from the water’s edge.

‘Black caimans,’ he said. ‘Great.’

Frank Nash stood at the end of the main street of Vilcafor with his arms folded across his chest, alone. He just stared intently at the decrepit old village before him.

Troy Copeland appeared at his side. ‘Sebastian just called from Cuzco. Romano just went through the airport there. He arrived in a Globemaster under Tomcat escort. He then liaised with a few choppers and headed off in this direction.’

‘What sort of choppers?”

‘Super Stallions. Three of them.’

‘Christ,’ Nash said. A fully-loaded CH-53E Super Stallion could carry up to 55 fully-armed troops. And they had three of them. So, Romano had brought firepower, too.

‘How long did it take us to get here from Cuzco?’ Nash asked quickly.

‘About two hours and forty minutes,’ Copeland said.

Nash looked at his watch.

It was 7:45 pm.

‘They’ll be quicker in Stallions,’ he said, ‘if they follow the totems correctly. We have to move fast. I’d say we’ve got about two hours before they get here.’

The six Green Berets began hauling the Samsonite trunks out of the choppers and onto the main street of Vilcafor.

Nash, Lauren and Copeland started opening them up at once, revealing a cache of hightech equipment inside— Hexium laptop computers, infrared telescopic lenses and some very futuristic-looking stainless-steel canisters.

The two academics, Chambers and Lopez, were off in the village proper, eagerly examining the citadel and its surrounding structures.

Race—-now cloaked in a green Army parka to protect him against the rain—went over to help the Green Berets unload the choppers.

He got to the riverbank to find Buzz Cochrane addressing the youngest member of their team, a fresh-faced corporal named Douglas Kennedy.

Sergeant Van Lewen and the Green Berets’ leader, Captain Scott, were nowhere to be seen.

‘I mean, honestly, Doogie, could she be any more out of your league?’ Cochrane was saying.

‘I don’t know about that, Buzz,’ one of the other commandos said. ‘I reckon he should ask her out.’

‘What a great idea,’ Cochrane said, turning to Kennedy.

‘Shut up, you guys,’ Doug Kennedy said in a broad Southern accent.

‘No, seriously, Doogie, why don’t you just walk on up to her and ask her out?’

‘I said, shut up,’ Kennedy said as he heaved a Samsonite container out of one of the Hueys.

Douglas Kennedy was twenty-three, lean, and handsome in a boyish kind of way, with earnest green eyes and fully shaved head. He was also about as green as they came. His nickname ‘Doogie’ was a reference to the clean-cut and honest nature of the lead character in the old TV show, Doogie Howser MD, with whom it was said Doogie shared many characteristics. It was also a “clumsy’ kind of name, suggesting some sort of innocence, which made it all the more appropriate for Doogie. He was particularly shy—and especially clumsy when it came to women.

‘What’s going on?’ Race said as he arrived next to them.

Cochrane turned—looked Race up and down instantly— then turned away as he said, “Oh, we just caught Doogie here staring at that pretty young archaeologist over there, and we was just giving him a friendly ribbing.’

Race spun and saw Gaby Lopez, the team’s archaeologist, standing over by the citadel with Walter Chambers.

She was certainly very pretty. She had dark hair, a beautiful Latin complexion and a compact curvaceous body. At twenty-seven, so Race had heard, she was the youngest Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology at Princeton. Gaby Lopez was a very intelligent young woman.

Race shrugged inwardly. Doogie Kennedy could do a lot worse.

Cochrane slapped Doogie heartily hard on the back, spat out a gob of tobacco.

‘Don’t you worry, son. We’ll make a man out of you yet.

I mean, take a look at young Chucky over there,’ Cochrane said, indicating the next-youngest member of the unit, a beefy moon-faced 23-year-old corporal named Charles

‘Chucky’ Wilson. ‘Why, only last week Chucky became a fully fledged member of the 80s Club.”

‘What’s the 80s Club?’ Doogie asked, perplexed.

‘It’s tasty, that’s what it is,’ Cochrane said, licking his lips.

‘Ain’t that right, Chucky?’

‘Sure is, Buzz.’

‘Apples, man,’ Cochrane grinned.

‘Apples,’ Chucky replied, smiling.

As the two soldiers laughed, Race eyed Cochrane cautiously, mindful of what the Green Beret had said on the plane when he had thought Race was out of earshot.

Corporal Buzz Cochrane appeared to be in his late thir ties. He had red hair and eyebrows, a thickly creased face and a rough unshaven chin. He was also a big man—bulky across the chest—with thick, powerful arms.

Just from the look of him, Race didn’t like him.

There just seemed to be something mean-spirited about him—the not-so-intelligent school bully who by the sheer virtue of his size had had it over the other kids. The kind of brute who had joined the Army because it was a place where people like him thrived. It was no wonder he was almost forty and still a corporal.

‘Say, Doogie,’ Cochrane said suddenly, ‘what do you say I go over there and tell that cute little archaeologist that we got ourselves a dumb young soldier over here who’d like to ask her out for a burger and a movie—’

“No!” Doogie exclaimed, genuinely alarmed.

The other Green Berets burst out laughing.

Doogie went red in the face of their laughter.

‘And don’t call me dumb,’ he muttered. ‘I ain’t dumb.’

Just then, Van Lewen and Scott returned from the other chopper. The soldiers’ laughter stopped immediately.

Race saw Van Lewen look warily from Doogie to the others, in the way a big brother would glare at his little brother’s tormentors. He got the impression that it was more because of Van Lewen’s presence than Captain Scott’s that the laughter had ceased.

‘How’re things progressing here?’ Scott said to Cochrane.

‘Not a problem in the world, sir,’ Cochrane said.

‘Then grab your gear and head on into the village,’ Scott said. ‘They’re about to do the test.’

Race and the soldiers came into the village proper. It was still pouring with rain.

As he walked down the muddy street, Race saw Lauren standing with Troy Copeland over by the largest of all the Samsonite trunks.

It was a great big black case, at least five feet tall, and Copeland was unfolding its side panels, transforming it into a portable workbench of some sort.

The lean scientist flipped open the lid of the trunk, revealing a waist-high console made up of some dials, a keyboard and a computer screen. Beside him, Lauren was attaching a silver rod-like object that looked like a boom microphone onto the top of the console.

‘Ready?’ Lauren asked.

‘Ready,’ Copeland said.

Lauren flicked a switch on the side of the Samsonite trunk and instantly green and red lights lit up all over the console.

Copeland immediately set to work typing on the unit’s all-weather keyboard.

‘It’s called a nucleotide resonance imager, or NRI,’ Lau-ten told Race before he could ask. ‘It can tell us the location of any nuclear substance in the surrounding area by measuring the resonance in the air around that substance.’

“Say what?’ Race said.

Lauren sighed and then said, ‘Any radioactive substance—be it uranium, plutonium or thyrium—reacts with oxygen at a molecular level. Basically, the radioactive substance causes the air around it to vibrate, or resonate. This device detects that resonance in the air, and hence gives us the location of the radioactive substance.’

A moment later, Copeland finished typing. He turned to Nash. ‘NRI’s ready.’

‘Do it,’ Nash said.

Copeland hit a key on the keyboard and immediately the silver rod mounted on top of the machine began to rotate. It moved slowly, in a steady, measured circle.

As it did so, Race looked about himself and noticed that Lopez and Chambers had returned from their exploring.

Now they were staring intently at the machine. Race looked at the rest of the team around him—everyone was staring intently at the nucleotide resonance imager.

And then suddenly it dawned on him.

This was what everything depended on.

If the imager didn’t detect the idol somewhere in the immediate vicinity, then they had all wasted their time coming here—

The rod on top of the imager stopped turning.

‘We have a reading,’ Lauren said suddenly, her eyes locked on the console’s screen.

Race saw Nash let out the breath he’d been holding.

‘Where?’

‘One second…’ Lauren typed something on the keyboard.

The rod on the imager was now pointing upriver— toward the mountains—toward the area where the trees of the rainforest met the sheer face of the nearest rocky plateau.

Lauren said, ‘The signal’s weak because the angle’s not right. But I’m picking up something. Let me see if I can adjust the vector some…’

She hit some more keys and the rod on top of the unit slowly began to tilt upwards. It had reached an angle of about thirty degrees when suddenly Lauren’s eyes lit up.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Strong signal. Very high frequency resonance.

Bearing 270 degrees—due west. Vertical angle is 29 degrees, 58 minutes. Range… 793 metres.’

Lauren looked up at the dark rocky mountain face that rose above the trees to the west. It looked like a plateau of some sort. Slanting sheets of rain whipped across its face.

‘It’s somewhere in there,’ she said. ‘Somewhere up in the mountains.

Nash turned to Scott. ‘Get on the radio to Panama. Tell them that the preliminary team has verified the existence of the substance. But also say that we have intel on hostile forces en route to our location as we speak. Tell them to send in a full protective force for extraction as soon as they can.’

Nash spun to face the rest of the assembled group. ‘All right, folks, saddle up. Let’s go get that idol.’

Everyone started getting ready.

The Green Berets readied their M-16s. The DARPA scientists grabbed compasses and various computer equipment to take with them.

Race saw Lauren and Troy Copeland head inside one of the Hueys, presumably to grab some gear of their own. He hurried after them to see if he could help—and while he was at it, maybe also to ask Lauren what Nash had meant when he’d said that hostile forces were on their way to Vilcafor.

‘Hey—’ Race said as he arrived in the doorway of the chopper. ‘Oh…’

He’d caught the two of them in a clinch—kissing like a pair of teenagers—hands through each other’s hair, tongues in each other’s mouths. Hot to trot.

Upon Race’s unexpected arrival, the two scientists separated instantly. Lauren blushed. Copeland scowled.

‘I’m… really sorry,.’ Race said. ‘I didn’t mean to’

‘It’s okay,’ Lauren said, pushing her hair back into place.

‘This is just a very exciting moment for us.’

Race nodded, turned away, headed back into the village.

Obviously.

What he couldn’t help thinking about, however, as he walked back to join the others in the village, was the image of Lauren running her fingers through Copeland’s hair as she kissed him. He had seen her wedding ring clearly.

Copeland, on the other hand, hadn’t been wearing one.

The group walked along the remains of a muddy path that ran along the edge of the riverbank. They were heading toward the base of the rocky mountain-plateau, the sounds of the nighttime forest loud in their ears. The sea of leaves around them rippled under the weight of the steady rain.

It was dark now and the beams of their flashlights played across the forest. As he walked, Race noticed some gaps in the dark storm clouds above them—gaps which allowed the odd shaft of brilliant blue moonlight to illuminate the river beside them. Occasionally in the distance he would see the strobelike flash of lightning. A storm was coming.

Lauren and Copeland led the way. Lauren held a digital compass out in front of her. Walking alongside her, his M-16 held across his chest, was her bodyguard, Buzz Cochrane.

Nash, Chambers, Lopez and Race followed close behind them. Scott, Van Lewen and a fourth soldier—the chunky corporal named Chucky Wilson—brought up the rear.

The last two Green Berets—Doogie Kennedy and the final soldier in the unit, another corporal named George ‘Tex’ Reichart—had been left back at the village as rearguards.

Race found himself walking next to Nash.

‘Why didn’t the Army send a full protective force here to begin with?’ he asked. ‘If this idol is so important, why did they only send a preliminary team in to get it?’

Nash shrugged as he walked. ‘There were some people high up who thought this was a pretty speculative mission—following a four-hundred-year-old manuscript to find a thyrium idol. So they stopped short of giving us a full offensive unit and made it a force-on-discovery mission. But now that we know it’s here, they’ll send in the cavalry. Now, if you’ll excuse me.’

With that, Nash went forward and joined Lauren and Copeland up front.

Race was left walking at the rear of the line, alone, feeling more than ever like a fifth wheel—a stranger who had no reason at all to be there.

As he walked along the riverside path he kept one eye on the surface of the river beside him. He noticed that some of the caimans were swimming alongside the path, keeping pace with his party.

After a while Lauren and Copeland came to the base of the rocky plateau—an immense wall of vertical wet rock that stretched away to the north and to the south. Race guessed they had come about six hundred yards from the town.

Off to the left-on the other side of the river—he saw a surging waterfall pouring out of the rockface, feeding the river.

On his own side of the river, he saw a narrow, vertical fissure slicing into the face of the massive wall of rock.

The fissure was barely eight feet wide but it was tall—unbelievably tall—at least three hundred feet, and its walls were perfectly vertical. It disappeared into the mountain side.

A trickle of ankle-deep water flowed out from it into a small rock-strewn pool that, in turn, overflowed into the river.

It was a natural passageway in the rockface. The product, Race guessed, of a minor earthquake in the past that had shunted the north-south-running rockface slightly east-west.

Lauren, Copeland and Nash stepped into the rocky pool at the mouth of the passageway.

As they did so, Race turned and saw that the caimans in the river had stopped their shadowing of the party. They now hung back a good fifty yards away, hovering menacingly in the deeper waters of the river.

Fine by me, Race thought.

And then, suddenly, he paused and spun around where he stood.

Something wasn’t right here.

And not just the behaviour of the caimans. Something about the whole area around the passageway was wrong…and then Race realised what it was.

The sounds of the forest had disappeared.

Except for the pattering of the rain on the leaves, it was perfectly silent here. No droning of cicadas, no chirping of birds, no rustling of branches.

Nothing.

It was as if they had entered an area where the sounds of the jungle just ceased. An area where the jungle animals feared to tread.

Lauren, Copeland and Nash didn’t seem to notice the silence. They just shone their flashlights into the passageway in the rockface and peered inside it.

‘Seems to go all the way through,’ Copeland said.

Lauren turned to Nash. ‘It’s going in the right direction.’

‘Let’s do it,’ Nash said.

The ten adventurers made their way along the narrow rocky passageway, their footfalls splashing in the ankle-deep water. They walked in single file, Buzz Cochrane in the lead, the small flashlight attached to the barrel of his M-16 illuminating the way ahead of them.

The passageway was basically straight, with a slight zigzag in the middle, and it seemed to cut through the plateau for about two hundred feet.

Race looked up as he walked behind the others. The rock walls on both sides of the narrow fissure soared into the sky above him. For a fissure that was so narrow, it was unbelievably tall. As Race looked upwards, a light rain fell on his face.

And then suddenly he emerged from the passageway and stepped out into wideopen space.

What he saw took his breath away.

He was standing at the base of a massive rocky canyon of some sort—a wide, cylindrical crater that was at least three hundred feet in diameter.

A glistening expanse of water stretched away from him, rippling silver A glistening expanse of water stretched away from him, rippling silver in a stray shaft of moonlight, bounded on every side by the circular wall of the enormous crater. The fissure that they had just come through, it seemed, was the only entrance to this massive cylindrical chasm. A thin waterfall fell in a steady sheet on the far side of the crater, plunging fully four hundred feet into the shallow lake at the bottom of the wide, circular canyon.

But it was what stood in the centre of the canyon that commanded everyone’s immediate attention.

Rising up out of the body of water—in the exact centre of the cylindrical crater—was an enormous rock formation.

It was about eighty feet wide and at least three hundred feet tall, a gigantic natural rock tower—easily the size of a medium-rise skyscraper—that soared up out of the glisten ing moonlit lake into the night sky. Against the backdrop of the light evening rain, the massive black monolith looked absolutely magnificent.

The ten of them just stood there gazing up at the enormous rock tower in awe.

‘Jesus Christ…” Buzz Cochrane said.

Lauren showed Nash the reading on her digital compass.

“We’ve come exactly 600 metres from the village. If we take into account the elevation, I’d say it’s a definite possibility that our idol is sitting right on top of that rock tower.’

“Hey,’ Copeland said from the left.

Everyone turned. Copeland was standing in front of a path of some sort that had been cut into the curved outer wall of the canyon.

The path appeared to rise steeply, winding its way up the canyon’s circular outer wall in a spiral-like fashion, hugging the circumference of the cylinder encircling the giant rock tower in the centre of the crater, but separated from it by an enormous moat of empty space at least one hundred feet wide.

Lauren and Nash went first, stepping up out of the ankle-deep water at the base of the crater and onto the path.

The group made its way up the path.

The rain was lighter here, the clouds above the great canyon thinner, allowing shafts of blue moonlight to penetrate them more easily.

Up and up they went, following the narrow curving path, all of them staring in a kind of silent awe at the magnificent rock tower in the centre of the crater.

The sheer size of the tower was incredible. It was enormous. But it was curiously shaped: it was slightly wider at the top than it was at the bottom. The whole formation gradually tapered inward to the point where it met the lake at the bottom of the crater.

As they climbed higher and higher up the crater’s spiralling pathway, Race began to make out the peak of the rock tower. It was rounded in shape—dome-like and it was completely covered in dense green foliage. Gnarled, waterlogged branches leaned out from its edges, unfazed by the vertiginous three-hundred-foot drop beneath them.

The group was nearing the top of the crater when they came to a bridge—-or rather the makings of a bridge that connected the outer, spiralling path to the rock tower.

It was situated just below the lip of the canyon, not far from the thin waterfall that cascaded out over the rim and plummeted down the western wall of the canyon.

Two flat stone ledges faced each other on opposite sides of the chasm, a hundred feet apart. On each ledge sat a pair of stone buttresses, presumably the foundations from which a rope bridge of some kind once hung.

The two buttresses on Race’s side of the chasm were pit ted and worn but they looked sturdy beyond belief. And they looked old. Really, really old. Race had no doubt that they easily dated back to Incan times.

It was then that he saw the rope bridge itself.

It was hanging from the ledge on the other side of the chasm, the tower side. It hung vertically from the two but tresses on the far ledge so that it fell flat against the tower’s rocky wall. Attached to the bottom end of the rope bridge, however, was a long length of frayed yellow rope that drooped in a wide arc across the chasm, over to Race’s ledge, where it had been tied to one of the buttresses.

Walter Chambers examined the frayed yellow rope.

‘Dried grass rope. Interlocking braid formation. This is classic Incan rope construction. It was said that a whole Incan town, working together, could build an entire rope bridge in three days. The women picked the grass and braided it into long thin lengths of string. Then the men braided those lengths of string into thicker, more sturdy segments of rope like this.’

‘But a rope bridge couldn’t possibly survive the elements for four hundred years,” Race said.

‘No… No, it couldn’t,’ Chambers said.

‘Which means somebody else built this bridge,’ Lauren said. ‘And recently, too.’

‘But why the elaborate set-up?’ Race said, indicating the length of rope that stretched out across the ravine to the lowest point of the rope bridge. ‘Why attach a rope to this end of the bridge and drop the whole thing down on the other side?’

‘I don’t know,’ Chambers said. ‘You’d only do something like that if you wanted to keep something trapped on the tower top…’

Nash turned to Lauren. ‘What do you think?’

Lauren peered over at the tower, partially obscured by the veil of lightly falling rain.

‘It’s high enough to match the angle on the NRI,’ she looked at her digital compass. ‘And we’re exactly 632 metres horizontally from the village. Factoring in the elevation, I’d say it’s a good bet the idol’s over there.’

Van Lewen and Cochrane hauled the rope bridge up and looped its ends around the two stone buttresses on their side of the ravine. Now the great swooping rope bridge spanned the chasm, linking the skyscraper-like rock tower to the spiralling path that ran around it.

The rain continued to fall.

Jagged forks of brilliant white lightning began to illuminate the sky.

‘Sergeant,’ Captain Scott said. ‘Safety rope.’

Van Lewen immediately brought a strange-looking object out from his backpack. It was a shiny silver grappling hook of some sort. Attached to it was a coil of black nylon rope.

The tall sergeant quickly jammed the shaft of the grappling hook into the M-203 grenade launcher attached to the barrel of his M-16. Then he aimed his gun across the chasm and fired.

With a gaseous shoosh! the grappling hook shot out from Van Lewen’s grenade launcher and arced gracefully over the chasm, its sharp silver claws snapping out into position as it flew, its black rope wobbling through the air behind it.

The hook landed on the tower top on the other side of the chasm and dug its claws into the base of a thick tree there. Van Lewen then secured his end of the rope to one of the stone buttresses on their side of the chasm so that now the nylon rope spanned the gorge just above the drooping suspension bridge.

‘All right, everyone,’ Scott said, ‘keep one hand on the safety rope as you cross the bridge. If the bridge drops from under you, the rope will keep you from falling.’

Van Lewen must have seen Race go pale. ‘You’ll be all right. Just keep a hold of that rope and you’ll make it.’

The Green Berets went first, one at a time.

The narrow rope bridge rocked and swayed beneath their weight as they walked, but it held. The rest of the group followed behind them, holding onto the nylon safety rope as they crossed the long swooping suspension bridge in the constant subtropical rain.

Race crossed the rope bridge last of all, holding onto the safety rope so hard his knuckles went white. As such, he crossed the bridge more slowly than the others, so by the time he stepped onto the ledge on the other side, they had already gone on ahead and all he saw was a damp stone stairway leading up into the foliage. He hurried up it after them.

Dripping green leaves crowded in on either side of him.

Wet fern fronds slapped against his face as he climbed the watersoaked stone slabs after the others. After about thirty seconds of climbing, he burst through a large set of branches and found himself standing in a small clearing of some sort.

Everyone else was already there. But they just stood there, motionless. At first Race didn’t know what had made them stop, but then he saw that they all had their flashlights pointed up and to the left.

His gaze followed their flashlight beams and he saw it.

‘Holy Christ,’ he breathed.

There, situated on the highest point of the rock tower— covered in hard-packed mud and moss, concealed by weeds all around it, and glistening wet in the ever-falling rain— stood an ominous stone structure.

It was cloaked in shadow and wetness, but it was clear that this was a structure that had been designed to exude menace and power. A structure that could have had no other purpose than to inspire fear, idolatry and worship.

It was a temple.

Race stared at the dark stone temple and swallowed hard.

It looked evil.

Cold and cruel and evil.

It wasn’t a very big structure. In fact, it was barely even one storey tall.

But Race knew that wasn’t really the case.

He guessed what they were seeing was only the very top of the temple —the tip of the iceberg—because the ruined section of it that they now saw finished too abruptly. It just disappeared into the mud beneath their feet.

Race presumed that the rest of the enormous structure lay buried in the mud beneath them, consumed by four hundred years of accumulated wet earth.

What he saw, however, was frightening enough.

The temple was roughly pyramidal in shape—two wide stone steps led up to a small cube-like structure that was no larger than the average garage. He had an idea what the cube-shaped structure was—it was a tabernacle of some sort, a holy chamber not unlike those found atop Aztec or Mayan pyramids.

A series of gruesome pictographs had been carved into the walls of the tabernacle—snarling catlike monsters wielding scythe-like claws; dying humans screaming in agony. Cracks of age littered the stone walls of the temple.

The unending subtropical rain ran in rivulets down its carved stone walls, giving life to the characters in the horrific scenes on the walls—generating the same effect that running water had produced on the stone totem earlier.

In the centre of the tabernacle, however, lay the most intriguing aspect of the whole structure—-an entrance of some kind. A squareshaped portal.

But this portal had been stopped up. At some time in the distant past someone had wedged an enormous boulder into it, blocking it. The boulder was absolutely huge. Race guessed that it must have taken at least ten men to move it into place.

‘Definitely pre-Incan,’ Chambers said, as he examined the carvings.

‘Yes, absolutely,’ Lopez said.

‘How do you know?’ Nash asked.

‘Pictographs are too closely spaced,’ Chambers said.

‘And much too detailed,’ Lopez said.

Nash turned to Captain Scott. ‘Check on Reichart back at the village.”

‘Yes, sir.’ Scott stepped away from the circle and pulled a portable radio from his pack.

Lopez and Chambers were still talking shop.

‘What do you think?’ Lopez said. ‘Chachapoyan?’

“Possibly,’ Chambers said. “Could be Moche. Look at the feline images.’

Gaby Lopez cocked her head doubtfully. “It could be, but that would make it nearly a thousand years old.’

‘Then what about the spiralling path around the crater and the stairs here on the tower?’ Chambers said.

‘Yes… yes, I know. Very peculiar,’

Nash cut in. “I’m glad you both find it so fascinating, but what the hell are you talking about?’

‘Well,’ Chambers said, “it appears that we have a slight anomaly here, Colonel.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you see, the spiralling path that runs around this crater and the steps on this tower were without a doubt constructed by Incan engineers. The Incans built all sorts of tracks and trails through the Andes and their construction methods are well documented. These two examples bear all the hallmarks of Incan trail construction.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning that the path and the steps were constructed roughly four hundred years ago. This temple, on the other hand, was built long before then.’

‘So?’ Nash said irritably.

‘So, that’s the anomaly,’ Chambers said. ‘Why would the Incans construct a pathway to a temple that they didn’t even build?’

‘And don’t forget the rope bridge,’ Lopez said.

‘No,’ Chambers said. ‘Quite right. Quite right.’ The bookish little scientist looked up fearfully at the rim of the crater.

‘I would suggest we hurry.’

‘Why?’ Nash said.

‘Because, Colonel, it is highly likely that there exists in this area a tribe of natives who will probably not take too kindly to the fact that we have intruded upon their sacred site.’

‘How do you know that?’ Nash said quickly. ‘How do you know that there are natives around here?’

‘Because,’ Chambers said, ‘they are the ones who built the rope bridge.’

‘As Professor Race pointed out earlier,’ Chambers explained, ‘suspension bridges made out of rope decay very quickly over time. A grass-based rope bridge will disintegrate, say, within a few years of its being built. The bridge that we crossed to get to this temple could not have existed four hundred years ago. It was built recently, by someone knowledgeable in Incan bridge-building methods, in all likelihood a primitive tribe of some sort through whom this knowledge has been passed down through the generations.’

Nash groaned audibly.

‘A primitive tribe,’ Race said flatly. ‘Here. Now?’

‘It’s not that improbable,’ Gaby Lopez said. ‘Lost tribes are discovered all the time in the Amazon Basin. As recently as 1987, the Villas Boas brothers made contact with the lost Kreen Akrore tribe in the Brazilian rainforests. Hell, as the Brazilian government even has a policy of sending explorers into the jungle to make contact with Stone Age tribes.

‘As you can imagine, though, a lot of those primitive tribes are extremely hostile to Europeans. It is not unknown for state-sponsored explorers to come home in pieces. Some, like the famous Peruvian anthropologist Dr Miguel Moros Marquez, don’t come back at all—’

‘Hey!’ Lauren said suddenly from over by the portal.

Everyone turned. Lauren was standing in front of the boulder that was wedged inside the squareshaped doorway.

“There’s something written on this.”

Race and the others came over to where she was standing.

Lauren brushed away some chunks of mud that clung to the boulder and Race saw what she was looking at.

Something was engraved in the surface of the great stone.

Lauren scraped away some more mud, revealing something that looked like a letter from the alphabet.

It was an ‘N’.

‘What the hell… ?’ Nash said.

Words began to take shape.

No entrare…

Race recognised them.

‘No entrare’ was Spanish for ‘Do not enter’.

Lauren scraped away some more mud and a whole sentence appeared in the centre of the boulder, crudely scratched into the surface of the stone. It read:

No entrare absoluto.

Muerte asomarse dentro.

Race translated the words in his head. Then he swallowed hard.

“What does it say?’ Nash said.

Race turned to face him. At first, he didn’t say anything.

Then at last he said, ‘It says, “Do not enter at any cost. Death lies within.”’

‘What does “AS” mean?’ Lauren said.

‘I would guess,” Race said, ‘that “AS” stands for Alberto Santiago.’

Back in the village, Doogie Kennedy kicked away a loose rock restlessly. It was dark now and the rain was still falling and he was pissed at having been left back in the village when he really wanted to be up in the mountains with the others.

‘What’s the matter, Doogs?’ Corporal George ‘Tex’

Reichart asked from over by the moat on the eastern side of the village. Reichart was a tall, lanky beanpole of a man. He hailed from Austin and was a genuine, grass-chewing cowboy—hence his nickname. ‘Not gettin’ enough action?’

‘I’m awright,’ Doogie said. ‘I’d just rather be up there in them mountains findin’ whatever it is we’re here to find, than down here babysitting a goddamned village.’

Reichart chuckled softly to himself. Doogie was good value. A bit on the dim side, but keenlkeen as mustard.

What Tex Reichart didn’t know, however, was that behind his small-town Southern drawl, Doogie Kennedy was in fact an exceptionally intelligent young man.

Preliminary testing at Fort Benning had revealed that Doogie had an IQ of 161—which was odd, because he had only just barely graduated high school.

It was soon discovered that, throughout his school years in Little Rock, Arkansas, young Douglas Kennedy’s quiet, God-fearing accountant father had beaten him senseless every evening with a leather strap.

Kennedy Sr had also refused to buy school books for his son and on most nights he would make the boy stand in a dark, three-by-four-foot closet as punishment for serious misdemeanours such as slamming the door too loudly or overcooking his father’s steak.

Homework never got done and young Doogie only managed to complete high school through his extraordinary ability to take in mentally what was said in class.

He joined the Army the day he graduated and he would never return home. What school administrators had seen as just another shy young kid scraping through high school, one sharp old recruiting sergeant had seen as the mark of a determined and brilliant mind.

Doogie was still shy, but given his intelligence, his willpower and the support network of the Army, he soon became a hell of a soldier. He swiftly made Ranger grade, majoring in sniping. The Green Berets and Fort Bragg had followed soon after.

‘Guess I’m just itchin’ for some action,“ Doogie said, as he came over to where Reichart was laying an AC-7V ‘Eagle Eye’ sensor by the eastern moat.

‘I wouldn’t go getting your hopes up,’ Reichart said, flicking on the Eagle Eye’s motion-activated thermal-imaging system. ‘I don’t think there’s gonna be much excitement on this trip—’

There came a loud beep from the motion sensor.

Doogie and Reichart exchanged a quick look.

Then both of them snapped around to scan the dense section of rainforest in front of the motion sensor.

There was nothing there.

Just a tangle of crisscrossing fern fronds and empty forest.

Somewhere nearby a bird whistled.

Doogie snatched up his M-16 and cautiously stepped over the logbridge that spanned the eastern section of the moat. He moved slowly forward, toward the suspect section of jungle.

He reached the edge of the rainforest, flicked on his barrel-mounted flashlight—

—and he saw it.

Saw the glistening, speckled body of the largest snake he had ever seen in his life! It was a thirty-foot anaconda, a monster of a snake, slinking lazily around the gnarled branches of an Amazonian tree.

It was so large, Doogie figured, that its movement must have set off the motion sensor.

‘What is it?’ Reichart said, coming alongside him.

‘It’s nothing,’ Doogie said. ‘Just a sna—’

And then abruptly, Doogie whirled back around to face the snake.

The snake couldn’t have set off the motion sensor. It was cold-blooded and the motion sensor operated on a thermal-imaging system. It relied on picking up heat signatures—

Doogie whipped his gun up again and played his flashlight beam over the forest floor in front of him.

And he froze.

A man lay in the wet brush in front of him.

He was lying flat on his belly—looking up at Doogie through a black porcelain hockey mask—not ten yards away.

So good was his camouflage, he was barely distinguishable from the dark foliage around him.

But Doogie hardly noticed the man’s camouflage.

His eyes were locked on the silenced MP-5 submachinegun that the man held, aimed right at the bridge of Doogie’s nose.

Slowly, the camouflaged man raised his index finger to his masked lips, miming the word “Shhh’, and as he did so, Doogie noticed a second man—identically dressed—lying in the brush alongside him, and then a third, and a fourth, and a fifth.

A whole team of black wraiths lay in the underbrush all around him.

‘What the fuck—’ Reichart said as he caught sight of the commandos on the forest floor in front of them. He immediately reached for his gun, but a series of loud clicks—the sound of about twenty safeties being released in the darkness—made him think again.

Doogie shut his eyes in disgust.

There must have been at least twenty men hidden in the brush in front of them.

He shook his head sadly.

He and Reichart had just lost the village.

‘Death lies within.’ Nash frowned as he looked at the boulder wedged inside the temple’s portal.

Race stood beside him, staring at the graphic images carved into the stone walls of the temple, the horrific scenes of the monstrous cats and the dying people.

‘Actually, it’s more literal than that,’ he said, turning.

‘Asomarse literally means “looms”, “Death looms within.”’

‘And Santiago wrote it?’ Nash said.

‘It looks that way.’

At that moment, Captain Scott returned to Nash’s side° ‘Sir, we have a problem. I can’t get through to Reichart.’

Nash didn’t turn when he spoke, he just continued to gaze at the portal. ‘Interference from the mountains?’

‘The signal’s fine, sir. Reichart’s not picking up. Something’s wrong.’

A frown creased Nash’s face. ‘They’re here…’ he breathed.

‘Romano?’ Scott said.

‘Damn it,’ Nash said. ‘How did they get here so fast?’

‘What do we do?’

‘If they’re in the village, then they know we’re here.’

Nash turned quickly to face Scott. ‘Call the base at Panama,’ he said. ‘Tell them we had to go to Plan B and had to head into the mountains. Tell them to radio the air support team and instruct the pilots to home in on our portable beacons.

Come on. We have to move fast.’

Lauren, Copeland and a couple of the Green Berets hurriedly began to attach some wads of Composition-2 explosive to the boulder lodged in the portal.

C-2 is a soft-detonating brand of plastique explosive used by archaeologists around the world to blast away obstructions in ancient structures without destroying the buildings themselves.

While the others went quickly about their work, Nash decided to investigate the area behind the temple, in case it revealed another way in. With nothing else to do, Race took off after him.

The two of them walked around behind the squat cube-like structure, sticking to a flat stone path that skirted its way around the tabernacle like a rail-less balcony.

They came to the rear of the building and immediately saw a steep muddy embankment that sloped sharply away from them, down to the very edge of the tower top.

As he stood at the top of the muddy hill, Race looked down at the tightly-packed arrangement of rectangular blocks that made up the path beneath him.

Amid all the sharply cornered, squareshaped blocks he saw a very odd-looking stone.

It was a round stone.

Nash saw it, too, and the two of them bent to examine it more closely.

It was about two-and-a-half feet in diameter—about the width of a broadshouldered man—and it lay flush against the surface of the path.

Indeed, it looked to Race as if it had been slotted perfectly into a cylindrical hole within the path itself, a hole that had been carved into the squareshaped blocks around it.

‘I wonder what it was used for,’ Nash said.

“Who is Romano?’ Race asked, catching Nash completely off guard.

Race remembered Nash telling him earlier about the team of German assassins who had slaughtered those monks in their monastery in the Pyrenees—remembered the picture Nash had shown him of the leader of that group of assassins, a man named Heinrich Anistaze.

But Nash had never mentioned anyone named Romano.

Who was he and what was he doing down in the village?

More importantly, why was Nash running from him?

Nash looked up sharply at Race, his expression darkening.

‘Professor, please…’

‘Who is Romano?’

‘Excuse me,’ Nash said, brushing roughly past him, heading back toward the front of the temple.

Race just shook his head and followed at a distance. He came back around to the front of the temple and sat down on its wide stone steps.

He was so tired, his mind was feeling like mush. It was just after nine now, and after travelling for nearly twelve hours, he was feeling absolutely exhausted.

He leaned back against the steps of the temple and pulled his Army parka close around himself. A sudden, over whelming fatigue had come over him. He rested his head on the cold stone steps and shut his eyes.

As he did so, however, he heard a noise.

It was a strange noise. A sharp scratching sound.

It was quick, insistent—almost impatient—but oddly muffled. It seemed to be coming from within the stone steps beneath his head.

Race frowned.

It sounded like claws scraping against stone.

He sat up instantly and looked over at Nash and the others.

He thought about saying something to them about the scratching noise but he didn’t get the chance to, because at that moment—at that precise moment—two hawk-like attack helicopters exploded through the veil of rain above the rock tower with their rotors roaring and their guns blazing, illuminating the tower top with powerful beams from their spotlights.

At exactly the same instant, deafening automatic gunfire rang out all around Race and a series of bullet holes smacked into the stone wall inches above his head.

Race dived for cover behind the corner of the temple and looked back just in time to see a small army of shadowy figures burst out from the treeline at the edge of the clearing, long tongues of fire spewing forth from the muzzles of their guns, dark wraiths in the night.