seen.
It was snarling ferociously, its jaws bared wide, its sharp pointed teeth ready to slash and maim and kill.
What struck Race most about the carving, though, was how alive it looked. Through a combination of skilled crafts manship and the unusual nature of the stone itself, it seemed as if the rapa had somehow been imprisoned inside the lustrous black-and-purple stone and was now trying— maniacally, ferociously, rabidly—to force its way out of it.
The stone, Race thought as he gazed at the thin veins of purple that snaked their way down the snarling rapa's face, giving it an extra level of anger and malevolence.
Thyrium.
If only the Incas had known what they were starting when they carved this idol, he thought.
Reichart quickly replaced the cloth over the idol and the four of them hurried back up to the temple's entrance.
'What the fuck are you doing up here?' Cochrane growled as they came to the open portal.
'Nash sent me to tell you guys that the Nazis are down in the village. They jammed our radios so we lost contact with you. They're sending men up here now. Nash said to tell you not to come back down to the village, but rather to get out of here some other way and get in contact with the air support team and get them to pick you up from somewhere in the mountains—'
At that moment, a burst of supermachine-gun fire raked the stone walls of the portal all around them. The four of them ducked quickly as a devastating line of bullets strafed the portal's frame, shredding its solid stone walls as if they were made of plaster.
Race snapped round instantly and saw about twelve Nazi commandos in the trees at the edge of the clearing, firing hard with their G11s.
Cochrane returned fire from the cover of the portal. Van Lewen did the same. The crack of their M-16s sounded almost pathetic alongside the relentless droning whirrrrrr of the ultra-high-tech G11s.
Race also tried to return the Nazis' fire, but when he pulled the trigger of his M-16, nothing happened.
Cochrane saw him, reached out and yanked back on a T-shaped handle on Race's rifle.
'Christ, you're about as useless as a priest in a whorehouse,'
Cochrane barked.
Race pulled the trigger again and, this time, a stream of bullets erupted from his M-16, almost dislocating his shoulder with the force of the recoil.
'What the hell are we gonna do!' Reichart yelled above their gunfire.
'We can't stay here!' Van Lewen yelled. 'We have to get back to the rope'
At that moment there came a sudden, resounding voooom! from somewhere above their heads.
Race looked up just in time to see a black MD-500 'Mosquito' light-attack helicopter explode out from the fog above roar over the tower top.
The Mosquito was a nimble little attack chopper—much smaller than any Apache or Comanche—but what it lacked in grunt and firepower, it more than made up for in speed and manoeuvrability.
Its nickname came from its resemblance to certain members of the insect world. It had a round split-glass bubble that resembled the wide hemispherical eyes of a bee, and two long spindly landing struts that looked like the elongated legs of a mosquito.
The Mosquito above the tower top loosed a burst of gunfire from its two side-mounted cannons, chewing up a pair of long unbroken lines in the mud in front of the temple.
'This is getting worse!' Race yelled.
Down in the village, the explosives that the Nazis had placed underneath the ATV went off.
A billowing fireball erupted beneath the big eight-wheeled vehicle—lifting it fully ten feet off the ground, flipping it in mid-air—and the massive ATV came crashing down on its side.
Inside it, the world went crazy.
As soon as they had heard the Nazis attaching their explosives to the bottom of the vehicle, Nash, Renee and Schroeder had strapped themselves into some seats and braced themselves for the explosion.
Now they hung perpendicular to the ground, still strapped into their seats, their world turned completely sideways.
But the important thing was that the ATV had held.
For the moment.
Doogie Kennedy peered out fearfully from the roof of the citadel.
He saw the village laid out before him, shrouded in mist and fog—saw about a dozen Nazi commandos standing at regular intervals in the cloudy grey soup, their G11s pointed outwards.
He had just seen the ATV get blasted and he thanked God that the Nazis hadn't realized that there were more members of Nash's team inside the citadel. Its walls wouldn't be able to survive such a ferocious blast.
And then suddenly he heard a shout—someone barking orders in German.
Doogie didn't know much German, so nearly all of the words meant nothing to him. But then, strangely, amid all the gabble, he heard two words that he did know: 'das Sprengkommando'.
