Their guards distracted, Castille and di Salvo were already on their feet as Nina and Kari reached them. Nina grabbed Philby and hacked at the twine binding his hands as Kari tugged at Castille’s knots.

“Our guns!” said Castille, indicating their piled-up belongings nearby.

Another of Starkman’s men fell, a poisoned arrow in his neck.

A raging wind tore through the village as the Halo hovered overhead. Spent shell casings clattered down like hail as a six-barreled rotary cannon mounted inside the cabin door opened up, spraying fire into the wildly waving trees.

Philby was free. “Kari!” Nina shouted, throwing her the knife. Kari snapped it out of the air and hacked at di Salvo’s bonds as Castille dived for the rifles. “Get into the hut, get down!” She all but threw Philby into the flimsy structure as an arrow pierced the wood.

One of the Brotherhood’s team threw himself back against another hut to avoid an arrow, and in doing so realized that his prisoners were now free.

The Halo turned in place, raking the trees with Minigun fire. The downdraft from its main rotor was so strong that the huts were blown apart, debris scattering in all directions.

The huge soldier bent down and clamped his hands around Chase’s neck, thumbs pressing hard against his carotid artery.

The pulsing roar of blood in Chase’s ears drowned out even the noise of the helicopter. He could see it almost directly overhead, the rotors a blur behind the sadistic grin of the man strangling him. He raised his arms to strike at the man’s face, but he was too big, his arms longer, and Chase’s clawing fingers fell short.

Blackness swirled at the edges of his sight, his head pounding.

He couldn’t reach the face of the man crushing his chest-but he could reach his body…

The barrage of primitive but effective weapons from the jungle stopped abruptly as the firestorm from the helicopter carved through the attacking Indians. Horrific screams echoed from the trees.

Castille grabbed one of the team’s Colt rifles and brought it around, only to see one of Starkman’s men already aiming at him with a UMP.

The man pulled the trigger-just as di Salvo hurled himself bodily in front of Castille. The three-round burst hit di Salvo in his hip and thigh, blood spurting from the wounds as he crashed screaming to the ground.

Castille fired back. With his target wearing body armor, he aimed for the head. All three of his shots landed on target. The man’s skull blew apart in a gruesome shower.

Another of Starkman’s men heard the shots and turned to confront his new adversary-

A boot heel smashed into his face.

Even as the man reeled, Kari spun around and delivered another crushing kick into his groin. He crashed through a hut wall.

Kari picked up his gun, paused for a fraction of a second to make a decision-then shot him in the head.

Chase felt consciousness, life, slipping away. The commando loomed over him like a demon, the whirling blades of the helicopter a dark halo behind his head.

With the last of his strength, his right hand finally reached the object for which he’d been grasping: the grappling gun on the man’s back.

He pulled the trigger.

The grapple flew out with a loud thump of compressed gas, rocketing almost vertically upwards with a nylon-coated steel cable trailing behind it… into the Halo’s rotors.

The carbon-fiber grapple itself was smashed to pieces by the blades-but the cable was almost instantly drawn into the spinning rotor head, tangling around it.

And winding up.

The commando’s eyes widened in shock as he realized what was about to happen-then he was yanked off the ground so hard that several of his ribs snapped. Flying skywards as if launched by a catapult, the cable dragging him inexorably into the rotors, he burst on impact, gory shredded scraps raining back down onto the village.

The helicopter lurched, out of control. The cable around the rotor shaft was jamming the pitch controls, and now the blades themselves were damaged…

“Cover!” shouted Chase.

Kari looked around. Starkman was sprinting for the side of the temple. Overhead, the huge helicopter began to spin, the roar of its engines joined by the shriek of wounded machinery. There was only one of Starkman’s men now still standing, close to Chase.

She and Castille fired simultaneously, taking the man down.

The Halo continued spinning. A man fell from the cabin door, screaming all the way to earth, where he landed headfirst on the elders’ hut, breaking his neck. Control completely gone, the helicopter rolled towards the temple, losing height.

The pilot of the other Halo saw it coming and frantically jammed his throttle to full power, pulling up on his collective control to increase altitude. The men being winched out through the hole in the temple roof were smashed against the jagged edges and plummeted back to the stone floor beneath.

Smoke pouring from its engines, the spinning Halo hit the temple roof. The curved stone structure, already weakened by the hole blasted in it, collapsed under the impact. The aircraft fell through the ceiling and into the temple itself. Its rotors were dashed to pieces as they hit the unbending stone, huge shards thrown hundreds of feet into the air before arcing back down.

All power lost, the massive aircraft plunged almost vertically to crash at the base of the statue of Poseidon, where it exploded.

A fireball swept through the temple, flames consuming the remaining men. The enormous statue of the god rocked, then fell forward to crush the blazing wreckage, its golden skin already melting in the intense heat.

A heat that reached the thermite charges in the altar room.

They detonated, the temperature inside the chamber flashing in an instant to over two thousand degrees. The gold and orichalcum artifacts within didn’t merely melt-they vaporized, obliterated completely by the searing wave of fire.

Castille turned at the sound of the explosion-and reflexively threw himself backwards as a jagged piece of rotor blade over a meter long stabbed into the ground between his legs like a javelin. “Merde!” he screeched.

“Helicopters!”

The rest of the temple roof gave way, thousands of tons of stone cascading down to bury everything within. A shockwave tore through the other tunnels and chambers, a huge cloud of dust and debris exploding from the temple entrance like an express train. Chase barely threw himself clear as it swept past.

The ancient replica of the Atlantean Temple of Poseidon, hidden in the jungle for thousands of years, was destroyed forever, along with all the secrets it contained.

Nina peered from the hut, shielding her eyes as the dust cloud swept past. “Jesus!”

Chase used the temple wall to pull himself up. He wiped blood from his face with the back of his hand. His broken nose was starting to hurt. Through the dust, he saw Kari and Castille running towards him. “Where’s Starkman?” he gasped.