Billy Yuma knelt beside Loren and gently patted her bare shoulder. "If no one else can, perhaps God will help."
Giordino was heartsick. No longer feeling his own injuries, he stared into the darkness, his eyes unseeing. "A hundred kilometers," he repeated slowly. "Even God can't keep a man alive with a broken wrist, cracked ribs, and a bullet hole in the shoulder through a hundred kilometers of raging water in total darkness."
After making everyone as comfortable as he could, Yuma hurried back up to the summit where he told his story. It shamed his relatives into entering the mountain. They fabricated stretchers out of material left by the army engineers and tenderly carried Gunn and Giordino from the river cavern up the passageway.
An older man kindly offered a grateful Loren a blanket woven by his wife.
On Giordino's instructions, Gunn and his stretcher were strapped down in the narrow cargo compartment of the stolen NUMA helicopter abandoned by the Zolars. Loren climbed into the copilot's seat as Giordino, his face contorted in torment, was lifted and maneuvered behind the pilot's controls.
"We'll have to fly this eggbeater together," Giordino told Loren as the pain in his legs subsided from sheer agony to a throbbing ache. "You'll have to work the pedals that control the tail rotors."
"I hope I can do it," Loren replied nervously.
"Use a gentle touch with your bare feet and we'll be okay."
Over the helicopter's radio, they alerted Sandecker, who was pacing Starger's office in the Customs Service headquarters, that they were on their way. Giordino and Loren expressed their gratitude to Billy Yuma, his family, and friends, and bid them a warm goodbye. Then Giordino started the turbine engine and let it warm for a minute while he scanned the instruments. With the cyclic stick in neutral, he eased the collective pitch stick to full down and curled the throttle as he gently pushed the stick forward. Then he turned to Loren.
"As soon as we begin to rise in the air, the torque effect will cause our tail to swing left and our nose to the right. Lightly press the left foot pedal to compensate."
Loren nodded gamely. "I'll do my best, but I wish I didn't have to do this."
"We have no choice but to fly out. Rudi would be dead before he could be manhandled down the side of the mountain."
The helicopter rose very slowly less than a meter off the ground. Giordino let it hang there while Loren learned the feel of the tail rotor control pedals. At first she had a tendency to over control, but she soon got the hang of it and nodded.
"I think I'm ready."
"Then we're off," acknowledged Giordino.
Twenty minutes later, working in unison, they made a perfect landing beside the Customs headquarters building in Calexico where Admiral Sandecker was standing beside a waiting ambulance, anxiously puffing a cigar.
In that first moment when Amaru forced him beneath the water and he could feel the jaws of the current surround his wrecked body, Pitt knew instantly that there was no returning to the treasure cavern.
He was doubly trapped-- by a killer who hung on to him like a vise and a river determined to carry him to hell.
Even if both men had been uninjured, it would have been no contest. Cutthroat killer that he was, Amaru was no match for Pitt's experience underwater. Pitt took a deep breath before the river closed over his head, wrapped his good right arm around his chest to protect his fractured ribs and relaxed amid the pain without wasting his strength in fighting off his attacker.
Amazingly, he still kept his grip on the gun, although to fire it underwater would probably have shattered every bone in his hand. He felt Amaru's encircling hold slide from his waist to his hips. The murderer was strong as iron. He clawed at Pitt furiously, still trying for the gun as they spun around in the current like toy dolls caught in a whirlpool.
Neither man could see the other as they swirled into utter darkness. Without the slightest suggestion of light, Pitt felt as though he was submerged in ink.
Amaru's wrath was all that kept him alive in the next forty-five seconds. It did not sink into his crazed mind that he was drowning twice-- his bullet-punctured lung was filling with blood while at the same time he was sucking in water. The last of his strength was fading when his thrashing feet made contact with a shoal that was built up from sand accumulating on the outer curve of the river. He came up choking blood and water in a small open gallery and made a blind lunge for Pitt's neck.
But Amaru had nothing left. All fight had ebbed away. Once out of the water he could feel the blood pumping from the wound in his chest.
Pitt found he was able, by a slight effort, to shove Amaru back into the mainstream of the current. He could not see the Peruvian drift away in the pitch blackness, observe the face drained of color, the eyes glazed in hate and approaching death. But he heard the malevolent voice slowly moving into the distance away from him.
"I said you would suffer," came the words slightly above a hoarse murmur. "Now you will languish and die in tormented black solitude."
"Nothing like being swept up in an orgy of poetic grandeur," said Pitt icily. "Enjoy your trip to the Gulf."
His reply was a cough and a gurgling sound and finally silence.
The pain returned to Pitt with a vengeance. The fire spread from his broken wrist to the bullet wound in his shoulder to his cracked ribs. He was not sure he had the strength left to fight it. Exhaustion slightly softened the agony. He felt more tired than he had ever felt in his life. He crawled onto a dry area of the shoal and slowly crumpled face forward into the soft sand and fell unconscious.
"I don't like leaving w
ithout Cyrus," said Oxley as he scanned the desert sky to the southwest.