"Precisely. Cuddling with low clouds won't hurt matters either."
"Forgetting a little something, aren't you?" said Shannon wearily, as though reminding a husband who neglected to carry out the trash. "If my math is correct, our fuel tanks will run dry twenty kilometers short of your ship. I hope you aren't proposing we swim the rest of the way."
"We solve that insignificant problem," said Pitt calmly, "by calling up the ship and arranging for it to run full speed on a converging course."
"Every klick helps," said Giordino, "but we'll still be cutting it a mite fine."
"Survival is guaranteed," Pitt said confidently. "This aircraft carries life vests for everyone on board plus two life rafts. I know-- I checked when I walked through the main cabin." He paused, turned, and looked back. Rodgers was checking to see all the students had their shoulder harnesses on properly.
"Our pursuers will be on to us the instant you make contact with your vessel," Shannon persisted bleakly. "They'll know exactly where to intercept and shoot us down."
"Not," Pitt replied loftily, "if I play my cards right."
Setting the office chair to almost a full reclining position, communications technician Jim Stucky settled in comfortably and began reading a paperback mystery novel by Wick Downing. He had finally gotten used to the thump that reverberated throughout the hull of the NUMA oceanographic ship, Deep Fathom, every time the sonar unit bounced a signal off the seafloor of the Peru Basin. Boredom had set in soon after the vessel began endlessly cruising back and forth charting the geology 2500 fathoms below the ship's keel. Stucky was in the middle of the chapter where a woman's body is found floating inside a waterbed when Pitt's voice crackled over the speaker.
"NUMA calling Deep Fathom. You awake, Stucky?"
Stucky jerked erect and pressed the transmit button. "This is Deep Fathom. I read you, NUMA. Please stand by." While Pitt waited, Stucky alerted his skipper over the ship's speaker system.
Captain Frank Stewart hurried from the bridge into the communications cabin. "Did I hear you correctly? You're in contact with Pitt and Giordino?"
Stucky nodded. "Pitt is standing by."
Stewart picked up the microphone. "Dirk, this is Frank Stewart."
"Good to hear your beer-soaked voice again, Frank."
"What have you guys been up to? Admiral Sandecker has been erupting like a volcano the past twenty-four hours, demanding to know your status."
"Believe me, Frank, it hasn't been a good day."
"What is your present position?"
"Somewhere over the Andes in an antique Peruvian military chopper."
"What happened to our NUMA helicopter?" Stewart demanded.
"The Red Baron shot it down," said Pitt hastily. "That's not important. Listen to me carefully. We took bullet strikes in our fuel tanks. We can't stay in the air for more than a half hour. Please meet and pick us up in the town square of Chiclayo. You'll find it on your charts of the Peruvian mainland. Use our NUMA backup copter."
Stewart looked down at Stucky. Both men exchanged puzzled glances. Stewart pressed the transmit button again. "Please repeat. I don't read you clearly."
"We are required to land in Chiclayo due to loss of fuel. Rendezvous with us in the survey helicopter and transport us back to the ship. Besides Giordino and me, there are twelve passengers."
Stewart looked dazed. "What in hell is going on? He and Giordino flew off the ship with our only bird. And now they're flying a military aircraft that's been shot up with twelve people on board. What's this baloney about a backup chopper?"
"Stand by, Stewart transmitted to Pitt. Then he reached out and picked up the ship's phone and buzzed the bridge. "Find a map of Peru in the chart room and bring it to communications right away."
"You think Pitt has fallen off his pogo stick?" asked Stucky.
Not in a thousand years," answered Stewart. "Those guys are in trouble and Pitt's laying a red herring to mislead eavesdroppers." A crewman brought the map, and Stewart stretched it flat on a desk. "Their rescue mission took them on a course almost due east of here. Chiclayo is a good seventy-five kilometers southwest of his flight path."
"Now that we've established his con job," said Stucky, "what's Pitt's game plan?"
"We'll soon find out." Stewart picked up the microphone and transmitted. "NUMA, are you still with us?"
"Still here, pal," came Pitt's imperturbable voice.
"I will fly the spare copter to Chiclayo and pick up you and your passengers myself. Do you copy?"
"Much appreciated, skipper. Always happy to see you never do things halfway. Have a beer waiting when I arrive."
"Will do," answered Stewart.
"And put on some speed will you?" said Pitt. "I need a bath real bad. See you soon."
Stucky stared at Stewart and laughed. "Since when did you learn to fly a helicopter?"
Stewart laughed back. "Only in my dreams."
"Do you mind telling me what I missed?"
"In a second." Stewart picked up the ship's phone again and snapped out orders. "Pull in the sonar's sensor and set a new course on zero-nine-zero degrees. Soon as the sensor is secured, give me full speed. And no excuses from the chief engineer that his precious engines have to be coddled. I want every revolution." He hung up the phone with a thoughtful expression. "Where were we? Oh yes, you don't know the score."
"Is it some sort of riddle?" Stucky muttered.
"Not at all. Obvious to me. Pitt and Giordino don't have enough fuel to reach the ship, so we're going to put on all speed and meet them approximately halfway between here and the shore, hopefully before they're forced to ditch in water infested with sharks."
Giordino whipped along, a bare 10 meters (33 feet) above the tops of the trees at only 144 kilometers (90 miles) an hour. The twenty-year-old helicopter was capable of flying almost another 100 kilometers faster, but he reduced speed to conserve what little fuel he had left after passing over the mountains. Only one more range of foothills and a narrow coastal plain separated the aircraft from the sea. Every third minute he glanced warily at the fuel gauges. The needles were edging uncomfortably close to the red. His eyes returned to the green foliage rushing past below. The forest was thick and the clearings were scattered with large boulders. It was a decidedly unfriendly place to force-land a helicopter.
Pitt had limped back into the cargo compartment and begun passing out the life vests. Shannon followed, firmly took the vests out of his hands, and handed them to Rodgers.
"No, you don't," she said firmly, pushing Pitt into a canvas seat mounted along the bulkhead of the fuselage. She nodded at the loosely knotted, blood-soaked bandanna around his leg. "You sit down and stay put."
She found a first aid kit in a metal locker and knelt in front of him. Without the slightest sign of nervous stress, she cut off Pitt's pant leg, cleaned the wound, and competently sewed the eight stitches to close the wound before wrapping a bandage around it.
"Nice job," said Pitt admiringly. "You missed your calling as an angel of mercy."
"You were lucky." She snapped the lid on the first aid kit. "The bullet merely sliced the skin."
"Why do I feel as though you've acted on General Hospital?"
Shannon smiled. "I was raised on a farm with five brothers who were always discovering new ways to injure themselves."
"What turned you to archaeology?"
"There was an old Indian burial mound in one corner of our wheat field. I used to dig around it for arrowheads. For a book report in high school, I found a text on the excavation of the Hopewell Indian culture burial mounds in southern Ohio. Inspired, I began digging into the site on our farm. After finding several pieces of pottery and four skeletons, I was hooked. Hardly a professional dig, mind you. I learned how to excavate properly in college and became fascinated with cultural development in the central Andes, and made up my mind to specialize in that area."
Pitt looked at her silently for a moment. "When did you first meet Doc Miller?"
"Then you didn't really know him very well?" Pitt questioned. '
Shannon shook her head. "Like most archaeologists, we concentrated on our own pet projects. We corresponded occasionally and exchanged data. About six months ago, I invited him to come along on this expedition to supervise the Peruvian university student volunteers. He was between projects and accepted. Then he kindly offered to fly down from the States five weeks early to begin preparations, arranging permits from the Peruvians, setting up the logistics for equipment and supplies, that sort of thing. Juan Chaco and he worked closely together."
"When you arrived, did you notice anything different about him?"
A curious look appeared in Shannon's eyes. "What an odd question."
"His looks, his actions," Pitt persisted.
She thought a moment. "Since Phoenix, he had grown a beard and lost about fifteen pounds, but now that I think of it, he rarely removed his sunglasses."
"Any change in his voice?"
She shrugged. "A little deeper perhaps. I thought he had a cold."
"Did you notice whether he wore a ring? One with a large amber setting?"
Her eyes narrowed. "A sixty-million-year-old piece of yellow amber with the fossil of a primitive ant in the center? Doc was proud of that ring. I remember him wearing it during the Inca road survey, but it wasn't on his hand at the sacred well. When I asked him why it was missing, he said the ring became loose on his finger after his weight loss and he left it home to be resized. How do you know about Doc's ring?"
Pitt had been wearing the amber ring he had taken from the corpse at the bottom of the sacred well with the setting unseen under his finger. He slipped it off and handed it to Shannon without speaking.
She held it up to the light from a round window, staring in amazement at the tiny ancient insect imbedded in the amber. "Where. . . ?" her voice trailed off.
"Whoever posed as Doc murdered him and took his place. You accepted the imposter because there was no reason not to. The possibility of foul play never entered your mind. The killer's only mistake was forgetting to remove the ring when he threw Doc's body into the sinkhole."
"You're saying Doc was murdered before I left the States?" she stated in bewilderment.
"Only a day or two after he arrived at the campsite," Pitt explained. "Judging from the condition of the body, he must have been under water for more than a month."
"Strange that Miles and I missed seeing him."
"Not so strange. You descended directly in front of the passage to the adjoining cavern and were sucked in almost immediately. I reached the bottom on the opposite side and was able to swim a search grid, looking for what I thought would be two fresh bodies before the surge caught me. Instead, I found Doc's remains and the bones of a sixteenth-century Spanish soldier."
"So Doc really was murdered," she said as a look of horror dawned on her face. "Juan Chaco must have known, because he was the liaison for our project and was working with Doc before we arrived. Is it possible he was involved?"
Pitt nodded. "Up to his eyeballs. If you were smuggling ancient treasures, where could you find a better informant and front man than an internationally respected archaeological expert and government official?"
"Then who was the imposter?"
"Another agent of the Solpemachaco. A canny operator who staged a masterful performance of his death, with Amaru's help. Perhaps he's one of the men at the top of the organization who doesn't mind getting his hands dirty. We may never know."
"If he murdered Doc, he deserves to be hanged," Shannon said, her hazel eyes glinting with anger.
"At least we'll be able to nail Juan Chaco to the door of a Peruvian courthouse-" Pitt suddenly tensed and swung toward the cockpit as Giordino threw the helicopter in a steeply banked circle. "What's up?"
"A gut feeling," Giordino answered. "I decided to run a three-sixty to check our tail. Good thing I'm sensitive to vibes. We've got company."
Pitt pushed himself to his feet, returned to the cockpit and, favoring his leg, eased into the copilot's seat. "Bandits or good guys?" he asked.
"Our pals who dropped in on us at the temple didn't fall for your artful dodge to Chiclayo." Without taking his hands from the controls, Giordino nodded out of the windshield to his left at a helicopter crossing a low ridge of mountains to the east.
"They must have guessed our course and overhauled us after you reduced speed to conserve fuel," Pitt surmised.
"No racks mounting air-to-air rockets," observed Giordino. "They'll have to shoot us down with rifles--"
A burst of flame and a puff of smoke erupted from the open forward passenger door of the pursuing aircraft, and a rocket soared through the sky, passing so close to the nose of the helicopter Pitt and Giordino felt they could have reached out the side windows and touched it.
"Correction," Pitt called. "A forty-millimeter rocket launcher. The same one they used against the temple."
Giordino slammed the collective pitch into an abrupt ascent and shoved the throttles to their stops in an attempt to throw off the launcher team's aim. "Grab your rifle and keep them busy until I can reach those low clouds along the coast."
"Tough luck!" Pitt shouted over the shrill whine of the engines. "I tossed it away, and my Colt is empty. Any of you carry a gun on board?"
Giordino made an imperceptible nod as he hurled the chopper in another violent maneuver. "I can't speak for the rest of them. You'll find mine wedged in a corner behind the cabin bulkhead."
Pitt took a radio headset that was hanging on the arm of his seat and clamped it over his ears. Then he struggled out of his seat and clutched both sides of the open cockpit door with his hands to stay on his feet during a sharp turn. He plugged the lead from the headset into a socket mounted on the bulkhead and hailed Giordino. "Put on your headset so we can coordinate our defense."
Giordino didn't answer as he mashed down on the left pedal and skidded the craft around in a flat turn. As if he were juggling, he balanced his movements with the controls while slipping the headset over his ears. He winced and involuntarily ducked as another rocket tore through the air less than a meter under the belly of the helicopter and exploded in an orange burst of flame against the palisade of a low mountain.
Grabbing whatever handhold was within reach, Pitt staggered to the side passenger door, undogged the latches, and slid the door back until it was wide open. Shannon, her face showing more concern than fear, crawled across the floor with a cargo rope and wrapped one end around Pitt's waist as he was reaching for the automatic rifle Giordino had used to knock out the Peruvian pilots. Then she tied the opposite end to a longitudinal strut.
"Now you won't fall out," she exclaimed.
Pitt smiled. "I don't deserve you." Then he was lying flat on his stomach aiming the rifle out the door. "I'm ready, Al. Give me a clear shot."
Giordino fought to twist the helicopter so that Pitt would face the blind side of the attackers. Because the passenger doors were positioned on the same side of both helicopters, the Peruvian pilot was faced with the same dilemma. He might have risked opening the clamshell doors in the aft end to allow the mercenary rifleman to blast away with an open line of fire, but that would have slowed his airspeed and made control of the chopper unwieldy. Like old propeller-driven warbirds tangling in a dogfight, the pilots maneuvered for an advantage, hurling their aircraft around the sky in a series of acrobatics never intended by their designers.
His opponent knew his stuff, thought Giordino, with the respect of one professional for another. Outgunned by the military mercenaries, he felt like a mouse tormented by a cat before becoming a quick snack. His eyes darted from the instruments to his nemesis,
then down at the ground to make certain he didn't pile into a low ridge or a tree. He yanked back the collective and broadened the pitch of the rotor blades to increase their bite in the damp air. The chopper shot upward in a maneuver matched by the other pilot. But then Giordino pushed the nose down and mashed his foot on the right rudder pedal, accelerating and throwing the craft on its side under his attacker and giving Pitt a straight shot.
"Now!" he yelled in his microphone.
Pitt didn't aim at the pilots in the cockpit, he sighted at the engine hump below the rotor and squeezed the trigger. The gun spat twice and went silent.
"What's wrong?" inquired Giordino. "No gunfire. I run interference to the goal line and you fumble the ball."
"This gun had only two rounds in it," Pitt snapped back.
"When I took it off one of Amaru's gunmen, I didn't stop to count the shells."
Furious with frustration, Pitt jerked out the clip and saw it was empty. "Did any of you bring a gun on board?" he shouted to Rodgers and the petrified students.
Rodgers, tightly strapped in a seat with legs braced against a bulkhead to avoid being bounced around by Giordino's violent tactics, spread his hands. "We left them behind when we made a break for the ship."
At that instant a rocket burst through a port window, flamed across the width of the fuselage, and exited through the opposite side of the helicopter without bursting or injuring anyone. Designed to detonate after striking armored vehicles or fortified bunkers, the rocket failed to explode after striking thin aluminum and plastic. If one hits the turbines, Pitt thought uneasily, it's all over. He stared wildly about the cabin, saw that they had all released their shoulder harnesses and lay huddled on the floor under the seats as if the canvas webbing and small tubular supports could stop a forty-millimeter tank-killing rocket. He cursed as the wildly swaying aircraft threw him against the doorframe.
Shannon saw the furious look on Pitt's face, the despair as he flung the empty rifle out the open door. And yet she stared at him with absolute faith in her eyes. She had come to know him well enough in the past twenty-four hours to know he was not a man who would willingly accept defeat.
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