Page 14 (2/2)

Though the blueing was pretty orn away, it was lovingly maintained and functioned even more smoothly than when new Pitt noted with no sed the leather holster and creased one of the grips He ran his belt through the loops of the holster and buckled it around his waist along with the sheath of the dive knife

He fashioned a sht and searched the caunfire except spent shells on the ground, but the tents had been ransacked and any useful equipone A quick survey of the soft ground shohat direction the exodus had taken A path that had been hacked out by h the dense thickets before vanishing in the darkness

The forest looked forbidding and impenetrable This was not an expedition he would have ever considered or undertaken in daylight, httime He was at the ame in the rain forest With no small concern the subject of snakes came to mind

He recalled hearing of boa constrictors and anacondas reaching lengths of 24 meters (80 feet) But it was the deadly poisonous snakes like the bushmaster, the cascabel, or the nasty fer-de-lance, or lance-head, that caused Pitt a high degree of trepidation Low sneakers and light fabric pants offered no protection against a viper with a mean streak

Beneath great stone faces staring ly down at him from the walls of the ruined city, Pitt set off at a steady pace, following the trail of footprints under the narrow beaht He wished he had a plan, but he was operating in the unknown His chances of dashing through a es from any number of hard-bitten bandits or revolutionaries were plain hopeless

Failure see nothing, or trying somehow to save himself, never entered his mind

Pitt sods that stared back in the beaht He turned and took a last look at the unearthly green glow cole

Within four paces the thick foliage sed him as if he'd never been

Soaked by a constant drizzle, the prisoners were herded through a moss-blanketed forest until the trail ended at a deep ravine Their captors drove thee to the other side where they followed the remains of an ancient stone road that wound up the mountains The leader of the terrorist band set a fast pace, and Doc Miller was particularly hard pressed to keep up His clothes were so wet it was impossible to tell where the sweat left off and the dauards prodded hiuns whenever he dropped back Giordino stepped beside the old man, propped one of Miller's ar oblivious to the puainst his defenseless back and shoulders

"Keep that daun off him," Shannon snapped at the bandit in Spanish She took Miller's other ar it around her neck so that both she and Giordino could support the olderher viciously in the buttocks She staggered forward, gray-faced, her lips tight in pain, but she regained her balance and gave the bandit a withering stare

Giordino found hirit and untiring fortitude She still had on her swiuerrillas had allowed her to retrieve fro boots He was also conscious of an

overwhel sense of ineffectiveness, his inability to save this wo of cowardice for deserting his old friend without a fight He'd thought of snatching a guard's gun at least twenty ti forced away frootten hi as he somehow stayed alive there was a chance Giordino cursed each step that took hi Pitt

For hours they fought for breath in the thin Andes air as they struggled to an altitude of 3400 h it soared under a blazing sun during the day, the te in the early hours ofan ancient avenue of ruined white liricultural terraced hills that Shannon never dreah they were built to the same specifications Soular They appeared oddly different from the other ancient structures she had studied Was this all part of the Chachapoya confederation, she wondered, or another kingdo raised walls that reached al in from the mountain peaks above, she was astounded by the thousands of stone carvings of a very different ornaonlike birds and serpent-shaped fish led with stylized panthers and yptian hieroglyphics except that they were more abstract That unknown ancient peoples had inhabited the great plateau and ridges of the Peruvian Andes and constructed cities of such i surprise to Shannon She had not expected to find a culture so architecturally advanced that it erected structures on top of mountains as elaborate or extensive as any in the known ancient world She would have given the Dodge Viper that she bought with her grandfather's inheritance to have lingered long enough to study these extraordinary ruins, but whenever she paused, she was roughly shoved forward

The sun was shohen the bedraggled party eed fro on all sides Though the rain thankfully had stopped, they all looked like rats who had barely escaped drowning They saw ahead a lofty stone block building rising a good twelve stories high

Unlike the Mayan pyramids of Mexico, this structure had a rounder, more conical shape that was cut off at the top It had ornate heads of aninized it as a cereed into a steep sandstone cliff honeycombed with thousands of burial caves, all with ornate exterior doorways facing onto a sheer drop