It was the goldmine;
The Madre de Dios goldmine;
The Bell Jet Ranger helicopter landed on a pontoon- mounted helipad that floated on the river's surface not far from the edge of the massive open-cut mine.
The mine itself lay directly to the south of the Alto Pufus River, and it was connected to it by a collection of decrepit old buildings—three hulking warehouse-like structures that were dreadfully worn with age.
The largest of the three buildings jutted out owe the river, resting on stiits A series of wide gate-style doors lined its length, enabling boats and seaplanes to be stored inside it. In years gone by, Race guessed this must have been -where the mg company's boats and planes had come to be loaded up with gold
Today, however, it performed a different task.
It allowed the Nazis to hide their armada of boats; helicopters and seaplanes from the prying eyes of America's spy satellites.
No sooner had the chopper landed on the floating helipad than the pilot hit a switch;
Immediately, the rusty garage door to the helicopters left opened and the square pontoon on which the Chopper sat began to be pulled across the water toward it by some underwater cable mechanism.
Race looked up as the Chopper was pulled slowly inside the big Warehouse.
A second later the sky above him abruptly disappeared, replaced by the interior of the warehouses roof—a complex latticework of rusting steel and dark wooden beams.
Race stared at the warehouse all around him.
It was positively huge an enormous enclosed space, about the size of an aeroplane hangar—the whole cavernous space illuminated by cone-shaped halogen lights that were attached to the ceiling's girders;
The 'floor' of the warehouse, however, was quite unusual. It was the river's surface. A long finger-like deck- way stretched out over the water, branching out at about a dozen intervals into smaller decks that an at right angles to it—mooring slots for the boats and planes that came to the mine to load up with gold.
A long, wide conveyor belt ran at ground level for the length of the central deckway. It rose out of a large square hole in the wall at the landward end of the hangar and looped back at the far end of the deckway.
Race guessed that the landward end of the conveyor belt was to be found somewhere deep within the coneshaped mine itself, probably on a loading ledge somewhere; of maybe even at the very bottom of the crater.
The way he figured it gold was loaded onto the conveyor belt down in the mine then the conveyor belt lifted it up through the long el cut into the earth, until it appeared here in the warehouse and was loaded onto a boat or plane.
The chopper's slow-moving pontoon came to a halt inside one of the mooring slots, its slowing rotor blades hanging marginally out over the conveyor belt, glinting in the glare of the halogen lights.
From his seat in the back of the chopper, Race saw four men step out from a glass-enclosed office at the landward end of the warehouse.
Three of them wore white lab coats—scientists. The fourth wore combat fatigues and carried a G-11 assault rifle - a soldier.
One of the three scientists, Race saw, was much smaller than the other two, and infinitely older. He was a tiny little man, bent with age, with long silver hair and huge round eyes Chat were magnified by a pair of thick spectacles, Race guessed that this was Dr Fritz Weber the brilliant Nazi scientist Schroeder and Nash had talked about earlier.
Apart front the four men standing in front of the glass-walled office, the rest of the warehouse was completely deserted
heres no-one else heine, Race thought.
The Nazis must have taken everyone they had to Vilcafor to get the idol. The four men here - plus Anistaze, Ehrhardt, Cratefaee and the pilot—were all they had left.
'Untersharfuhrer,' Ehrhardt said to Craterface as the chopper beneath them jolted to a halt, 'if you would be so kind, please take Agent Becker and Professor Race out to the refuse pit; Then shoot them and bury their remains'
Race and Renee were shoved down a dirt path that led westward through the rainforest away from the riverside warehouses.
Behind them, Craterface and the other Nazi soldier - only other soldier at the minmafshalled the foatd with thei G11s,
'Any idea how we're going to get out of this.' Race asked Renee as they walked,
'None at all,' she replied coolly.
'I thought you might have a plan or something, you know, something hidden up your sleeve,'
'No plan'
'So we're going to die?'
'It looks that way.'
They followed the bent path and Race winced as overwhelmingly putrid smell assaulted his nose. A moment later, the lot of them came to the end of the and Race saw a pile of garbage scattered among the fofit of the; it stretched away for about fifty yaidid 4g; of piles of discarded food and waste,
piedeg of etfii evefi a few animal carcasses,
