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 submachine- gun 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. Some thing'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 obstruc tions 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.
