'Unless we decide to trek out of here on foot,' Race suggested.
Captain Scott turned to Nash. 'If we stay, we die.'
'And if we leave, the Nazis get the idol,' Copeland said.
'And a workable Supernova,' Lauren said.
'Not an option,' Nash said firmly. 'No, there's only one thing we can do.'
'What's that?'
'We get the idol before the Nazis get here.'
The three soldiers made their way cautiously up the river side path in the pounding subtropical rain.
Captain Scott and Corporal Chucky Wilson led the way, their M-16s trained warily on the dense foliage to their right. The lone German paratrooper, Graf, now armed with an American M-16, walked along the path behind them, bringing up the rear.
Each man wore a tiny fibre-optic camera attached to the side of his helmet which sent images back to the others in the village.
After a while, the three soldiers came to the fissure in the mountainside the fissure that led to the rock tower and the temple.
Scott nodded to Wilson and the young corporal entered the narrow stone passageway, gun-first.
Back in the village, Race and the others watched on a monitor as Scott, Wilson and Graf made their way through the fissure. The images being sent back from the three commandos were depicted in separate rectangles on the screen, in ghostly black-and-white.
The plan was simple.
While Scott, Wilson and Graf entered the temple and seized the idol inside it, the remaining Green Berets and the other German paratrooper private named Molke— would get to work repairing the remaining Huey. Once the idol was obtained, they would all fly out of Vilcafor before the Nazi terrorists arrived.
'Ah, aren't we forgetting something?” Race said.
'Like what?' Nash said.
'Like the cats. Aren't they the reason we're in this mess in the first place? Where are they?'
'The cats retreated from the village with the onset of daylight,' a voice said from behind Race in perfect clipped English.
Race turned to see the fourth and last German man standing behind him, smiling.
He couldn't have been more different from the other three German males—Schroeder, Graf and Molke. While they were all visibly strong and fit, this man was older— much older, at least in his fifties—and quite obviously unathletic. His most dominant feature was a long grey beard. Race disliked him on sight. His whole stance and posture reeked of pomposity and arrogance.
'At dawn, the cats departed in the direction of the plateau,' the man said uppishly. 'I presume that they returned to their nest inside the temple.' He smiled wryly. 'I imagine that since the last few generations of their species have spent almost four hundred years in pitch darkness, their kind are not very comfortable in daylight.'
The bearded man extended his hand in an abrupt German way. 'I am Doctor Jolann Krauss, zoologist and cryptozoologist from the University of Hamburg. I have been brought along on this mission to advise on certain animal issues raised in the manuscript.'
'What's a cryptozoologist?' Race asked.
'One who studies mythical animals,' Krauss said.
“Mythical animals…'
“Yes. Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, the yeti, the great cats of the English moors, and of course,' he added, 'the South American rapa.'
'You know about these cats?' Race said.
'Only what I have learned from unverified sightings, local legends and ambiguous hieroglyphs. But such is the beauty of cryptozoology, it is the study of animals that can not be studied, because no-one can actually prove they exist.'
'So you think we were attacked by a pack of mythical animals,' Race said. 'They didn't look very mythical to me.'
Krauss said, 'Every fifty years or so, there is a spate of unusual deaths in this part of the Amazon rainforest. At those times, local men who embark on night-time trips between villages are known to just, well, disappear. On rare occasions, their remains are found in the morning. At those times, men are found with their throats wrenched from their bodies or their spines ripped out.
'The local people have a name for the beast that comes in the night to kill without mercy, a name which has been passed down from generation to generation. They call it the rapa.'
Krauss looked at Race closely. 'We should heed this local folklore very carefully, because it can be of great use to us in evaluating our enemy.'
'How?'
'Well, for one thing, we can use it to discern certain things about our feline antagonists.'
'Like what?'
