"Alan, wait!"

I started dashing back, but now the main rotor was creating a powerful downdraft, throwing the rain into me like a mon­soon. By the time I managed to fight my way through the spray, the rotor was on full power and Alan Dupre and his Bell were already lifting off. I reached up, and just managed to brush one greasy skid as he churned away straight upward into the rainy night.

"You shit!" I yelled up, but my final farewell was lost in the whine of the engine. My God, I thought, watching him disappear, I've just been abandoned hundreds of miles deep in a Central American rain forest.

Then it all sank in. Whoever had gotten to him was playing a rough game. They didn't want me just to see Baalum, they wanted me delivered here. Probably to secure me in the same place Sarah was. Colonel Ramos, or whoever had frightened Dupre into bringing me, had wanted us both. So what now? Were we both going to be "disappeared"? Staring around at the pyra­mid and the empty square, I could feel my heart pounding.

Then I tripped over the rolled sleeping bag and sank to my knees there in the middle of the rain-swept plaza, soaked to the skin and so angry I was actually trembling. Up above me, Alan Dupre, king of two-timers, had switched off his landing lights, and a few moments later the hum of the Bell was swallowed by the night sounds of the forest—the high-pitched din of crickets, the piercing call of night birds, the basso groan of frogs celebrating the storm.

And something else, an eerie sense of the unnatural. I can't explain it. Even the night songs of the birds felt omi­nous, the primeval forest reasserting its will. It was haunting, like nature's mockery of my desolation. I pounded the sleep­ing bag and felt . . . shit, how did I let this happen?

Get a grip. I finally stood up and looked around. Maybe when God wants to do you up right, She gives you what you want. You used Alan Dupre just like you intended: He got you here. But there's more to the plan of whoever's holding his puppet strings. So the thing now is, don't let yourself be manipulated any more. Get off your soggy butt and start taking control of the situation. . . .

That was when I sighted a white form at the south, forested edge of the plaza. What! I ducked down, sure it was somebody lurking there, waiting to try to beat me to death as they had Sarah. Did Ramos intend to just murder me immediately?

But there was no getting away. If I could see them, they surely could see me. And where would I escape to anyway?

I dug my yellow plastic flashlight out of my backpack and my hand shaking, flicked it on. The beam, however, was just swallowed up in the rain. All right. I strapped on the pack and taking a deep breath, threw the rolled sleeping bag over my shoulder and headed across the slippery paving to­ward the white, which now glistened in the periodic sheets of distant lightning.