'Therefore,' he said,
632
X .
cos30°
He punched some numbers into the calculator Copeland “ had given him.
'Now, according to this calculator, the cosine of 30° is 0.866.
Therefore, x equals 632 divided by 0.866. And that is… 729.'
Race amended his drawing accordingly, writing fever ishly. Lauren watched him in astonishment. Renee just watched him, beaming.
632m
'Anybody see a problem here?' Race said.
Everyone was silent.
Race amended his drawing one last time, finishing with a flourishing 'X'.
632m
'We made a mistake,” he said. 'We assumed that because of its height the temple was 793 metres from the village and hence, that the idol was inside it. It was a good guess but it was a wrong guess. The real idol isn't inside the temple at all. It's beyond it, up on the plateau somewhere.“
'But where?' Nash said.
'I would imagine,' Race replied, 'that the idol is to be found in the village of the tribe of natives who built the rope bridge up on the rock tower, the same tribe of natives that attacked our German friends here when they we about to open the temple.'
'But what about the manuscript?' Nash said. 'I thought that it said both idols were inside the temple.'
'The manuscript doesn't tell the full story,' Race said. 'I can only guess that Alberto Santiago doctored the ending so that no-one reading it later would know the true resting place of the idol.'
Race held up the sheet of paper with his drawing on it.
'That's where the idol is. Your NRI says so, so does the math.'
Nash pursed his lips, thinking. Then at last he said, 'All right. Let's go get it.'
The two monkeys that Race and the others had caught down by the river had gladly—or perhaps angrily— obliged them with an ample supply of urine, urine which the two screaming primates had sprayed throughout the plastic bags that Race had lined their boxes with.
Put simply, the monkey urine reeked. Its sharp foul odour—the smell of ammonia—pervaded the interior of the citadel. It was no wonder the rapas despised it, Race thought as he and the others applied the warm stinking urine to their bodies.
When they were all done, Van Lewen handed out weapons. Since he and Doogie were the only Green Berets left—so far as anyone knew, Buzz Cochrane was still up on the tower top—they took the two G-11s. Nash, Race and Renee were given M-16s, complete with grappling hooks.
Race, still dressed in his black Nazi breastplate and his blue baseball cap, hung his grappling hook from his belt.
Copeland and Lauren were each given SIG-Sauer P228 semiautomatic pistols. Krauss and Lauren, the ordinary scientists, went gunless.
Once everyone was ready, Van Lewen stepped through the doorway of the citadel and into the ATV. Then he made his way to the rear of the all-terrain vehicle and opened the pop-up hatch.
His G-11 emerged first.
Then slowly, Van Lewen peered out from the open hatch and scanned the area. Immediately, his eyes went wide.
The big eight-wheeled vehicle was surrounded by rapas.
Their tails coiled and uncoiled behind their massive bodies.
Their yellow eyes bored into him, hard and cold.
Van Lewen counted twelve of them, just standing there in the street, watching him.
Then all of a sudden, the nearest cat snorted—smelled the urine—and immediately reeled away from the ATV.
One after the other, the other cats did the same, turning away from the armoured vehicle and forming a wide circle around it.
Van Lewen stepped out onto the street, his gun up. One by one, the others came out behind him, Race among them.
Like everyone else, he moved slowly, cautiously, staring at the cats while he kept his finger poised on the trigger of his M16.
It was a truly bizarre sensation, a kind of stand-off. Men armed with guns, the cats armed with sheer natural aggression.
Despite their rifles and their pistols, Race was certain that the rapas could take them all down easily if they
