He immediately raised his M-16 and aimed it at the rapidly receding tower top above him. Then he jammed his finger down on the second trigger.
With a loud, puncture-like whump! the silver grappling hook shot out from the grenade launcher of his gun, its silver claws opening in mid-air with a sharp snick-snick!
Race fell downwards.
The grappling hook shot upwards, its nylon rope wobbling through the air behind it.
Still falling.
The hook flew over the edge of the tower top.
Still falling..
Race held his M-16 tightly. Then he just shut his eyes and waited—waited for the jolt of his rope or the impact with the lake, whichever came first.
The jolt came first.
In an instant, the grappling hook's rope went taut and Race came to a sudden, jarring halt.
It felt as if his arms had just been wrenched out of their sockets, but somehow he managed to keep hold of the M-16.
Race opened his eyes.
And found himself hanging from the rope about a hundred feet below the edge of the tower top.
He hung there in silence for a full thirty seconds, breathing hard, shaking his head. No Nazis appeared on the ledge high above him. They must have left the embankment as soon as they had seen him fall.
Race sighed deeply with relief. Then he set about the task of hauling himself back up to the tower's peak.
Up on the tower top, Van Lewen was hacking his way through the foliage, using his Bowie knife as a machete.
Moments earlier, he had also seen the Nazis get the idol, and now he was trying desperately to get back to the rope bridge before they did.
It was at the extreme southern edge of the tower's peak, and now he and the wounded Cochrane were making their way toward it, forging a path through the brush on the tower's south-western flank.
The Nazis were taking the more direct route, heading back to the bridge via the clearing and the stone stairway.
Van Lewen hacked away a final branch and abruptly he and Cochrane were met by the sight of the rope bridge, majestically spanning the chasm between the tower top and the outer path.
The great swooping bridge was about fifteen yards away from them—and right now, the dozen or so Nazi troops who had assailed them at the portal were crossing it, arriving at the path on the other side.
Damn it, Van Lewen thought, they'd beaten him to the bridge!
Van Lewen stared at one of the Nazis as he stepped up onto solid ground on the other side of the ravine. He was holding something cradled in his arms—something covered
in a ragged purple cloth The idol.
Shit.
It was then that the Nazis on the other side of the ravine did the one thing that Van Lewen feared the most —the one thing he had intended to do himself if he had reached the rope bridge first.
They unlooped the bridge from its foundations and they let it fall.
The great bridge fell down into the ravine. It was still attached to its foundations on the tower side of the chasm, so it didn't fall all the way down to the bottom, rather it just ended up falling flat against the side of the rock tower, its retrieval rope trailing down into the impenetrable fog beneath it.
Van Lewen stared in a kind of helpless frustration at the squad of Nazis hustling down the path on the other side of the chasm, carrying the idol in their midst.
They had the idol.
While he was now stranded on the rock tower.
Heinrich Anistaze stood in the centre of Vilcafor with his hands on his hips. He was pleased with the way the assault on the village had gone.
The pulse generator had worked perfectly, cutting off any radio communication between the enemy. The Americans in the ATV had been neutralised with ease.
And now he had just heard that his assault squad had successfully retrieved the idol from the Americans up at the temple.
Things were going very well indeed.
There came a shout and Anistaze turned to see the tower squad come charging out from the riverside path.
The leader of the squad immediately came up to him and presented him with a cloth-enwrapped object.
'Herr Obergruppenfuhrer,' the man said formally. 'The idol.'
Anistaze smiled.
