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 realized 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 wide-open 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 in a stray shaft of moonlight, bounded
