‘Keep moving,’ Ethan insisted. ‘If Vladimir and his goons get up there before we do they’ll hold the high ground and we’ll never get into the city.’
As if on cue, a light down on the hillside caught his eye and he turned to see several vehicles climbing the mountain side, their headlight beams sweeping left and right as they negotiated the hazardous switchbacks.
‘That’s got to be him,’ Lopez said.
‘He’ll have brought friends,’ Ethan agreed. ‘Our only bet is to get up there first and get this done before he arrives.’
Lucy did not hesitate and immediately began marching with even greater determination towards the ruined city. Jarvis followed wearily as Ethan hurried alongside the old man.
‘Maybe you should sit this one out,’ he suggested.
‘I didn’t come all this way to just sit on the side of the mountain and watch you get shot at,’ Jarvis pointed out as he laboured forward.
‘No,’ Lopez agreed, ‘you normally do that from Washington.’
‘Will you cut it out?’ Ethan said to her.
Lopez shrugged and kept moving as Ethan turned to Jarvis. ‘There’s nothing to be gained by coming up here. Either we’re going to pull this off or we’re not, and I don’t think that you being there is to make much difference.’
‘Thanks for the vote of confidence.’
‘You know I don’t mean it like that,’ Ethan said. ‘We were unable to bring our guns with us from Berlin so we’re unarmed. We have little chance of success against Vladimir’s men, and I have no idea how long it’s going to take Lucy to figure out where these remains are buried.’
‘You need all the hands you can get then,’ Jarvis said with a finality that brooked no argument. ‘I’m not sitting on my arse and letting you take all the flak.’
Ethan relented and walked faster as he left Jarvis behind and came up alongside Lopez. ‘Any bright ideas?’
‘Quit, and get out alive.’
‘There’s a little girl in Chicago relying on us to pull this off.’
‘I know that now,’ Lopez shot back, having learned of Bethany’s plight on the flight from Berlin. ‘But what use are we going to be to her if we’re dead? There’s no way we can defeat Vladimir in an open fight, we’re not even armed.’
‘We’ve gotten out of situations as tight as this before,’ Ethan replied. ‘We’re going to have to improvise.’
‘Excellent,’ Lopez said. ‘Improvise away then, captain.’
Ethan winced at Lopez’s sarcasm and was about to reply when a faint droning noise rolled across the mountains. Ethan instinctively turned one ear to the noise and slowed as he looked over his shoulder and up into the blackened sky above them. Ribbons of cloud obscured the heavens and a sprinkling of stars that twinkled as he spotted the source of the engine noise. He could just make out a set of navigation lights as they appeared red and green from behind a bank of cloud. It took Ethan a few moments of observation to identify that the aircraft was climbing and turning as it did so, probably something that had lifted off out of Cusco’s international airport.
‘It’s just an aeroplane,’ Lopez said, ‘nothing to do with us.’
Ethan squinted at the aircraft. The airport was probably forty miles away from the mountain, and any aircraft taking off on the airport’s zero-eight runway would have turned long before it and reached Macchu Picchu. Ethan recalled that most airports had a standard departure procedure which was followed rigidly by all aircraft, especially in mountainous countries such as Peru, to avoid unwanted collisions with the terrain.
‘Then what’s it doing all the way out here at night?’ he asked.
The aircraft was almost directly overhead now and passing above banks of rippled cloud. Its high altitude meant that it was glinting as it reflected the light from a sun that had yet to breach the distant horizon, the dawn a pale streak of light between the mountains. Ethan kept his gaze fixed upon it and moments later he identified tiny specks spilling from the aircraft as though its baggage were being deliberately ejected in flight, bathed in the sun’s distant glow.
Ethan needed only a moment more to be sure that it wasn’t baggage that was spilling from the aircraft.
‘It’s a HALO deployment,’ Ethan said as he identified freefalling parachutists rocketing towards the clouds above. ‘High Altitude Low Opening deployment, we used it in the Marines in Iraq.’
‘You think they’re American?’ Jarvis asked as he looked up at the aircraft departing to the north.
‘I don’t know, but even if they are they may not be on our side. We need to move fast!’
Ethan picked up the pace and joined Lucy and Lopez as they climbed the last few hundred yards toward the city. ‘This could be the distraction we were hoping for,’ he said to Lopez.
‘You think? Now we have two armed groups opposing us instead of one. How is that going to help?’
Ethan looked at Lucy. ‘Whatever happens, you just keep your head down and do what you do. As soon as you find what you’re looking for, you get the hell out of here no matter what happens and you get back to Cusco, understood?’
Lucy nodded, and Ethan looked over his shoulder again and craned his neck back to see the specks plummeting through the clouds and emerging beneath them, faintly illuminated by the glow of the moon. The parachutists were leaving their chutes closed until the last possible instant, and extremely dangerous but highly effective tactic if performed correctly. He realized that it was doubtful that the parachutists were anything other than expert soldiers, almost certainly American and almost certainly members of the Specialist Tactics Squadron they had narrowly avoided death at the hands of in Cambodia.
‘When the shooting starts it’s going to be chaos,’ Ethan said. ‘Let’s make sure it’s not us being shot at.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Just follow my lead,’ Ethan said to Lopez as they reached the walls of the city.
He looked up above him one more time, and this time he saw parachutes billow open like black petals against the darkening sky, could hear the cracks as they filled abruptly with air and slowed the jumpers to prepare them for landing. Even in the low light he could spot the rifles in their grasp, Bergens dangling beneath them on cords.
Twelve men, highly trained and heavily armed.
‘Let’s go, move!’
One by one, Ethan and the team scaled the city’s outer wall and dashed inside.
XXXII
Ethan dashed in pursuit of Lucy as she ran into the darkness towards the vast blackened silhouette of Macchu Piccu. The aircraft was already departing to the north and Ethan realized with certainty that it would not be returning: the men who had been dispatched from the aircraft would not be returning home without their mission being accomplished, and had been deployed without the permission of the Peruvian government.
‘This way!’
Lucy’s whisper was harsh in the darkness, Ethan running hard behind her and trying to see ahead in the near pitch-black. The city was enshrouded in darkness, but the sky was beginning to glow with the first faint light of dawn, and Ethan could see both the city’s larger temples silhouetted against the dawn and a large wedge-shaped mountain soaring even higher than Macchu Picchu to the north.
Lopez ran alongside him and behind was Jarvis and his two escorts, the old man jogging along as best he could. To the right, a series of bright headlight beams swept by the visitor centre that was nestled at the base of the old city, the sound of car engines growling as the drivers pulled in and the sound of car door slamming in the darkness.
‘Hurry it up, keep moving!’ Ethan whispered.
The city was divided into terraces that Ethan presumed were once used to grow crops to feed the city’s inhabitants, the terraces descending away toward the sheer faces of the mountainside that plunged toward deep gorges far below. To either side of the great plaza around which the city was centred were ranks of buildings and temples, each with names like the Royal Palace and Tombs on the left of the plaza, the Sacred Rock at the far end of the plaza, and the Artisan’s Wall on the right, behind which were ranks of houses that ended abruptly in the sheer face of the mountain’s eastern flank.