Ethan hauled himself up off a final terrace and into the main plaza, Lopez alongside him as the two escorts behind hauled Jarvis up the ridge and onto the lawned plaza. Voices shouted out, Russian accents sharp against the night air and a series of flickering flashlight beams sweeping this way and that as the Russians began ascending the terraces from below.
Ethan looked up at the almost invisible figures descending on parachutes, black against blackness and barely a hundred feet above the surface of the terraced lawns.
‘This way, quickly!’ he whispered.
He turned to Lucy, but she had stopped in the centre of the complex and was staring at the towering mountain opposite Macchu Picchu.
‘Huayna Picchu,’ she murmured as though recalling something.
‘We need to get out of sight,’ Ethan snapped harshly. ‘We’re sitting ducks out here.’
Lucy appeared lost in thought, staring up at the jagged peak that was now a dark and foreboding presence against the faint dawn sky, rising far higher than Macchu Picchu. ‘It means young pyramid in Quechua,’ she said.
‘So what?’ Ethan asked impatiently.
‘Macchu Picchu is well documented and excavated,’ Lucy explained. ‘It holds no further secrets, but Huayna Picchu is less well known and contains remains of the Inca’s city too. If I were a royal Incan priest hoping to conceal the remains of what they believed were the children of the gods, then I’d hide their remains up there.’
Ethan stared up at the peak of the mountain. It soared over a thousand feet above Macchu Picchu, and was some eight thousand feet above the depths of the gorges surrounding it.
‘Can you get up there?’ he asked.
‘The Incas built a trail, Sendero a Huayna Picchu, but it’s very exposed and dangerous,’ Lucy said. ‘I can make it, but it’s at least half an hour even if I run at it.’
‘Go, now,’ Ethan said. ‘We’ll hold them all off for as long as we can.’
Lucy set off across the plaza toward Huayana Picchu as Ethan glanced up one last time at the descending parachutists. Ethan knew that they would be wearing night vision goggles or at the very least infrared heat sensors that would pick out the hot bodies of Ethan and his companions as well as the Russians. But those sensors would be unable to differentiate between friend and foe, and Ethan could only hope that the Russians voices were as audible to the descending Americans as they were to him.
Ethan ran toward a building opposite the Temple of the Three Windows and the Central Plaza and clambered up the steps, the stone cold to the touch as he ascended toward a dark and cavernous archway leading into the interior. He recalled from Lucy’s description that this was where Hiram Bingham had reputedly found the remarkable remains that had affected the rest of his entire excavation of this incredible site, not to mention his life.
He turned and waved Lopez and Jarvis inside along with the two escorts, and then he saw the shadowy figures of the parachutists landing on the palace lawns. A Russian voice yelled at him and a torch pointed directly at the palace, and then suddenly the American parachutists opened fire. A deafening clatter of machine-gun fire rattled out across the lawns and the Russians suddenly split and began dashing for cover, two of them crying out in pain as they collapsed. A chaotic flare of AK-47 fire was returned across the lawns and Ethan ducked out of sight into the temple entrance as the Americans laid down a controlled and lethal hail of fire against the Russians before they began retreating towards the Palace.
‘They’re shooting at Vladimir’s men,’ Jarvis observed with delight. ‘They’re covering us!’
Lopez shook her head. ‘They’re doing their job. If we get in their way they’ll kill us just as soon as they will the Russians. Get inside and undercover.’
Lopez unceremoniously shoved Jarvis further into the shadows and then took shelter either side of the temple entrance with Ethan and watched as the Americans fired controlled bursts against the Russians, keeping their heads down and controlling them. Pinned against the Artisan’s Wall alongside the Main Plaza, the Russians began retreating toward the temple steps.
‘Clever,’ Ethan uttered grimly as he watched the battle unfold. ‘They’re directing the Russians toward us.’
‘Two birds, one stone,’ Lopez replied and then ducked back out of sight as a salvo of shots smashed into the temple’s stone masonry around her.
Ethan watched as two of the Russians fired several shots out across the lawns of the Plaza against the Americans, and then they panicked and fled up the steps for the safety of the temple and higher ground, their rifles pointed out into the darkness.
Ethan looked at Lopez, who nodded from her hiding place in the shadows.
The first two Russians backed into the temple entrance, each of them turning into the same area of shelter as Lopez and Ethan, no doubt preparing to cover their colleagues as they retreated toward them.
Ethan wasted no time. He lifted his left boot and then hopped down onto it as he pulled his right knee up into the Russian’s side while dropping both of his elbows down in the opposite direction in order to place the maximum amount of weight and power behind his knee. The solid bone of his knee impacted at the base of the Russian’s ribcage and Ethan felt the bones snap like dried twigs as the Russian let out a garbled cry of agony and crumpled sideways into the wall as he tried to turn and bring his AK-47 to bear.
Ethan grabbed the stock of the rifle with his right hand as he brought the knuckles of his left crashing down across the Russian’s temple with every ounce of force he could muster. The gunman’s head snapped to one side and smacked into the stone wall of the temple and he slumped unconscious as Ethan yanked the rifle from his grasp and looked up to see Lopez in the process of driving her right knee into the other Russian’s groin and head-butting him as he folded over the blow. The soldier crumpled at the knees as a breathless wheeze of pain escaped from his lips, and Lopez swung a rock she held in one fist across his face to send him sprawling unconscious onto the cold stone floor.
Ethan checked the AK-47 in his grasp and was both surprised and pleased to see it well cleaned and maintained, a spare clip in the gunman’s jacket pocket. As he reached down his hand caught on something, and he realized that the Russian was wearing a parachute.
Lopez frowned down at it. ‘What the hell are they doing wearing those?’
Ethan pulled at the unconscious man’s arm and beneath it he saw a large, webbed fabric as though the man were wearing a bat costume. A quick check of the other arm revealed a similar web of rubber-like fabric.
‘It’s not a parachute,’ Ethan said as he realized what the man was wearing.
‘We can’t hold out here for long,’ Lopez pointed out as another round of gunfire smashed across the walls, two stray rounds entering the temple and causing Jarvis to duck down. ‘Two guns against many,’ she added as she rifled through the fallen Russian’s pockets.
‘We have to hold out for as long as we can. The more time we can give Lucy, the better.’
Lopez looked about her as though suddenly she realized that Lucy was no longer with them.
‘Where the hell has she gone?’
Ethan kept a watch on the gunfight raging outside, the noise of the shots deafening as though amplified by the temple’s narrow confines.