Temple

'Well,' Krauss said, bristling. “Quite obviously, the darkness at the base of the crater allows them to spend the greater part of the day there—'

'Kennedy,' Nash said sharply 'what's the status on that extraction team?'

'I'm still trying to get through to Panama, sir,' Doogie said from over by the radio pack. 'Signal keeps dropping out.'

'Keep trying.' Nash looked at his watch.

It was 11:30 am.

“Shit,” he said.

He wondered what had happened to Romano and his team. Last he heard, they'd taken off from Cuzco at 7:45 pm last night. They should have been here by now. What had happened to them? Could the Nazis have shot them down?

Or had they just misread the totems and gotten hopelessly lost?

Whatever the case, if they were still alive, one thing was certain: they would find the village eventually.

Which meant he now had two hostile groups on their way to Vilcafor.

“Shit,' he said again.

Doogie came over.

'The extraction team took off from Panama one hour ago—three choppers: two Comanches, one Black Hawk.

They estimate that they'll be here by late afternoon, at approximately 1700 hours. I put up a UHF signal, so they can home in on that and extract us.'

As Doogie reported his news to Nash, a strange thought hit Race: Why wasn't the Army extracting them via Cuzco? Why were they sending choppers down from Panama ?

Surely the easiest way out of here was to go back the same way they had come.

It was at that moment that a sentence from the Santiago Manuscript popped into his head.

A thief never uses the same entrance twice.

Nash turned to Van Lewen. 'Do we have access to the SAT-

SN network?' He said it 'Sat-sun'—'the Sat-sun network'.

'Yes, sir, we do.'

'Patch us in. Set a tracking pattern over central-eastern Peru. I want to know exactly where those Nazi bastards are.

'Cochrane.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Get me satellite imagery of Vilcafor. We have to set up a defensive position.'

'Yes, sir.”

'What's SAT-SN?' Gaby Lopez asked.

Troy Copeland answered. 'SAT-SN is the acronym for the Satellite Aerospace Tracking and Surveillance Network. It's the aerial equivalent of SOSUS, the array of hydrophones that the U.S. Navy has stretched across the north Atlantic to detect enemy submarines.

'Put simply, SAT-SN is an array of fifty-six geosynchronous satellites in near-earth orbit that monitor the world's airspace, airplane by airplane.'

'If that's the simple explanation,' Race said dryly, 'I'd hate to hear the complex one.'

Copeland ignored him. 'Any aircraft has seven different types of observable characteristics—radar, infra-red, visual, contrails, engine smoke, acoustics and electromagnetic emissions. The SAT-SN satellites use all seven of these characteristics to record the signature and location of individual aircraft all over the world—military and civilian.

'What Colonel Nash wants now is a snapshot of central-eastern Peru so that he can spot every airplane over it—in particular, those planes outside regular commercial air corridors. From those pictures, we'll be able to see where our Nazi friends are and hopefully calculate how long we've got till they get here.'

Race looked over at Nash.

He appeared to be deep in thought—as one would expect from a leader who had just lost three of his best fighting men.

'What are you thinking?' Race asked.

'We have to get that idol,“ Nash said, 'and soon. Those Nazis will be here any second now. But there's no way past those cats. There's no way of knowing how to get past them.'

Race cocked his head.

Then he said, 'There was someone who knew.'

'Who?'

'Alberto Santiago.'

'what?'

'Remember the boulder that was wedged in the doorway to the temple?'

'Yeah…'

'On it was a warning: “Do not enter at any cost. Death looms within.” That warning had the initials “A.S.” written under neath it. Now I haven't read enough of the manuscript yet, but I can only assume that Santiago and Renco stumbled onto the same problem we have now—before they arrived at Vilcafor, someone opened up that temple and let the rapas loose.

'But somehow,' Race said, 'Santiago figured out a way to get those cats back inside the temple. Then he carved a warning into that boulder for anyone who would think to open it up again.

'Now, we used the manuscript to find this village and we figured that was all it was good forbut the copy I read was only partially completed. I'll bet my life that the key to getting past those cats lies in the rest of the Santiago Manuscript.“

'But we don't have any more of the manuscript,' Nash said.

'I'll bet they do,' Race nodded at the four remaining Germans.

Schroeder nodded with his eyes.

“And I'll bet you didn't translate it beyond the part where it revealed the location of Vilcafor, did you?' Race said.

'No,' Schroeder said. 'We did not.'

A new look of purpose came over Nash's face. He turned to Schroeder.

'Get your copy of the manuscript,' he said. 'Get it now.”

A few minutes later, Schroeder handed Race a fat stack of paper wedged inside a worn cardboard folder. The stack of paper was a lot thicker than Race's earlier pile had been.