Matthew Reilly - Temple

It was so large, Doogie figured, that its movement must have set off the motion sensor.

‘What is it?’ Reichart said, coming alongside him.

‘It’s nothing,’ Doogie said. ‘Just a sna—’

And then abruptly, Doogie whirled back around to face the snake.

The snake couldn’t have set off the motion sensor. It was cold-blooded and the motion sensor operated on a thermal-imaging system. It relied on picking up heat signatures—

Doogie whipped his gun up again and played his flashlight beam over the forest floor in front of him.

And he froze.

A man lay in the wet brush in front of him.

He was lying flat on his belly—looking up at Doogie through a black porcelain hockey mask—not ten yards away.

So good was his camouflage, he was barely distinguishable from the dark foliage around him.

But Doogie hardly noticed the man’s camouflage.

His eyes were locked on the silenced MP-5 submachinegun that the man held, aimed right at the bridge of Doogie’s nose.

Slowly, the camouflaged man raised his index finger to his masked lips, miming the word “Shhh’, and as he did so, Doogie noticed a second man—identically dressed—lying in the brush alongside him, and then a third, and a fourth, and a fifth.

A whole team of black wraiths lay in the underbrush all around him.

‘What the fuck—’ Reichart said as he caught sight of the commandos on the forest floor in front of them. He immediately reached for his gun, but a series of loud clicks—the sound of about twenty safeties being released in the darkness—made him think again.

Doogie shut his eyes in disgust.

There must have been at least twenty men hidden in the brush in front of them.

He shook his head sadly.

He and Reichart had just lost the village.

‘Death lies within.’ Nash frowned as he looked at the boulder wedged inside the temple’s portal.

Race stood beside him, staring at the graphic images carved into the stone walls of the temple, the horrific scenes of the monstrous cats and the dying people.

‘Actually, it’s more literal than that,’ he said, turning.

‘Asomarse literally means “looms”, “Death looms within.”’

‘And Santiago wrote it?’ Nash said.

‘It looks that way.’

At that moment, Captain Scott returned to Nash’s side° ‘Sir, we have a problem. I can’t get through to Reichart.’

Nash didn’t turn when he spoke, he just continued to gaze at the portal. ‘Interference from the mountains?’

‘The signal’s fine, sir. Reichart’s not picking up. Something’s wrong.’

A frown creased Nash’s face. ‘They’re here…’ he breathed.

‘Romano?’ Scott said.

‘Damn it,’ Nash said. ‘How did they get here so fast?’

‘What do we do?’

‘If they’re in the village, then they know we’re here.’

Nash turned quickly to face Scott. ‘Call the base at Panama,’ he said. ‘Tell them we had to go to Plan B and had to head into the mountains. Tell them to radio the air support team and instruct the pilots to home in on our portable beacons.

Come on. We have to move fast.’

Lauren, Copeland and a couple of the Green Berets hurriedly began to attach some wads of Composition-2 explosive to the boulder lodged in the portal.

C-2 is a soft-detonating brand of plastique explosive used by archaeologists around the world to blast away obstructions in ancient structures without destroying the buildings themselves.

While the others went quickly about their work, Nash decided to investigate the area behind the temple, in case it revealed another way in. With nothing else to do, Race took off after him.

The two of them walked around behind the squat cube-like structure, sticking to a flat stone path that skirted its way around the tabernacle like a rail-less balcony.

They came to the rear of the building and immediately saw a steep muddy embankment that sloped sharply away from them, down to the very edge of the tower top.

As he stood at the top of the muddy hill, Race looked down at the tightly-packed arrangement of rectangular blocks that made up the path beneath him.

Amid all the sharply cornered, squareshaped blocks he saw a very odd-looking stone.

It was a round stone.

Nash saw it, too, and the two of them bent to examine it more closely.

It was about two-and-a-half feet in diameter—about the width of a broadshouldered man—and it lay flush against the surface of the path.

Indeed, it looked to Race as if it had been slotted perfectly into a cylindrical hole within the path itself, a hole that had been carved into the squareshaped blocks around it.

‘I wonder what it was used for,’ Nash said.

“Who is Romano?’ Race asked, catching Nash completely off guard.

Race remembered Nash telling him earlier about the team of German assassins who had slaughtered those monks in their monastery in the Pyrenees—remembered the picture Nash had shown him of the leader of that group of assassins, a man named Heinrich Anistaze.

But Nash had never mentioned anyone named Romano.

Who was he and what was he doing down in the village?

More importantly, why was Nash running from him?

Nash looked up sharply at Race, his expression darkening.

‘Professor, please…’

‘Who is Romano?’

‘Excuse me,’ Nash said, brushing roughly past him, heading back toward the front of the temple.

Race just shook his head and followed at a distance. He came back around to the front of the temple and sat down on its wide stone steps.

He was so tired, his mind was feeling like mush. It was just after nine now, and after travelling for nearly twelve hours, he was feeling absolutely exhausted.

He leaned back against the steps of the temple and pulled his Army parka close around himself. A sudden, over whelming fatigue had come over him. He rested his head on the cold stone steps and shut his eyes.

As he did so, however, he heard a noise.

It was a strange noise. A sharp scratching sound.

It was quick, insistent—almost impatient—but oddly muffled. It seemed to be coming from within the stone steps beneath his head.

Race frowned.

It sounded like claws scraping against stone.

He sat up instantly and looked over at Nash and the others.

He thought about saying something to them about the scratching noise but he didn’t get the chance to, because at that moment—at that precise moment—two hawk-like attack helicopters exploded through the veil of rain above the rock tower with their rotors roaring and their guns blazing, illuminating the tower top with powerful beams from their spotlights.

At exactly the same instant, deafening automatic gunfire rang out all around Race and a series of bullet holes smacked into the stone wall inches above his head.

Race dived for cover behind the corner of the temple and looked back just in time to see a small army of shadowy figures burst out from the treeline at the edge of the clearing, long tongues of fire spewing forth from the muzzles of their guns, dark wraiths in the night.

THIRD MACHINATION

Monday, January 4, 2110 hours

VILCAFOR AND SURROUNDS

VILCAFOR

Race covered his head as another volley of automatic gun fire slammed into the stone wall next to him.

And then suddenly—shockingly—another source of gunfire exploded out from somewhere right above his head.

Somewhere very, very close.

Race opened his eyes and looked up and found himself staring directly into the spotlight of one of the choppers. He squeezed his eyes shut, saw spots, reeled from the blinding light.

As he shielded his eyes with his forearm, slowly his vision returned and it was then that he realised that the source of this new gunfire was someone standing over his own prone body, firing up at the light.