Behind Sebastian, floating lazily in the river alongside a long T-shaped 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 elec tronic 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. 'Chop pers 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 load ing 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 snow-capped 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 moun tains, past the Paucartambo River, in the general direction of the three river villages mentioned in the Santiago Manu script: 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 archae ologist, 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 moun tains 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 north-east, 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 clos est thing we'll get to civilisation around here. Just a great big earthen cone sunk into the earth. I'd heard it was aban doned 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 animat edly, 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, Cham bers 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 north-east 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.
