Matthew Reilly - Temple

A stream of olive-skinned Chilean soldiers rushed through the gates behind the rampaging truck. A dozen German agents dressed in blue assault helmets and SWAT gear hurried into the compound after them.

Colonia Alemania was a large estate, easily twenty hectares in size.

Its grassy green pastures contrasted sharply with Chile’s barren brown hills. Its Bavarian-style cottages and idyllic blue lakes were an oddly peaceful sight in what was an otherwise harsh and dry land.

Doors were smashed open and windows exploded .inwards as the National Guardsmen entered every building in the estate. Their main target was the Barracks Hall—a large, hangar-like building in the centre of the compound.

Minutes later, the doors to the Barracks Hall were blasted open and a horde of National Guardsmen and BKA agents rushed into the building.

And then they stopped.

Row upon row of empty bunk beds stretched away from them for the length of the enormous hall. Each bed was crisply made and perfectly aligned with the bunk next to it.

It looked like an army barracks.

The only problem was, it was empty.

Reports came in quickly from the rest of the compound.

The whole compound was empty.

Colonia Alemania was completely deserted.

In one of the laboratory buildings adjoining the Barracks Hall, two German tech agents waved small Geiger counter wands in front of them, measuring the radioactivity in the air. Their small detection units clattered loudly.

The two agents entered the compound’s main laboratory and their Geiger counters instantly went into the red.

‘All units, this is Lab Team, we are detecting high trace quantities of uranium and plutonium in the primary laboratory.’

The first agent came to a door that opened onto a glasswalled office of some kind.

He pointed his wand at the closed door—

—and his Geiger counter went off the charts.

He exchanged a quick look with his partner. Then he pushed open the door, tripping the wire.

The explosion that ripped through Colonia Alemania was absolutely devastating.

It rocked the world.

A pulse of blinding white light shot out laterally in every direction, obliterating everything in its path—whole barns blew out instantly into a billion matchsticks, concrete silos were shattered in a millisecond, everything within a five-hundred-yard radius of the Barracks Hall was vaporised—including the one hundred and fifty Chilean National Guardsmen and the twelve BKA agents.

When they were interviewed about it in the days to come, the inhabitants of the surrounding villages would say that it had looked like a sudden flare of lightning on the horizon, followed by an enormous plume of black smoke that rose high into the sky in the shape of a gigantic mushroom.

But they were simple folk, peasants.

They didn’t know that they were describing a thermonuclear explosion.

Back in Vilcafor, Nash ordered the Green Berets to bring the German team’s radio satellite equipment out onto the main street.

‘Let’s see what your people in Chile have got to say’ he said to Schroeder.

Schroeder popped the lid on the portable radio console and began typing something quickly on its all-weather key board. Nash, Scott and the Green Berets crowded around him, watching the console’s screen intently.

Race stood outside the circle, excluded yet again.

‘How are you feeling?’ a woman’s voice said suddenly from behind him.

He turned, half-expecting to see Lauren, but instead found himself looking into the dazzling blue eyes of the German woman.

She was small, petite—and seriously cute. She stood with her hands resting lazily on her hips and a smile that disarmed Race completely.

She had a small button nose and short blonde hair, and liberal doses of mud splotched all over her face, T-shirt and jeans. She wore a bulletproof vest over her white T-shirt and a black Gore-Tex holster on her hip—identical to the one Schroeder wore. Like Schroeder’s, her holster was now empty.

‘How is your head feeling?’ she asked. She had a slight German accent. Race liked it.

‘It hurts,’ he said.

‘It should,’ she said, coming over and touching his brow.

‘I think you suffered a minor concussion when your Humvee crashed into that helicopter. All of your subsequent acts of derring-do on top of the chopper must have been the work of pure adrenalin.’

‘You mean I’m not a hero?’ Race said. ‘You’re saying it was just the adrenalin talking?’

She smiled at him, a beautiful smile. ‘Wait here,’ she said, ‘I have some codeine in my medicine pack. It’ll help your headache.’

She moved off toward the ATV.

‘Hey…’ Race said. ‘What’s your name?’

She smiled at him again. That cute, nymph-like smile.

‘My name is Renee Becker. I am a special agent with the BKA.’

‘I’ve got it,’ Schroeder said suddenly from over by the portable radio.

Race went over to the small group gathered around the radio console.

Looking over Nash’s shoulder, he saw a list printed on the screen in German. He translated it in his head. It read:

COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITE TRANSMISSION LOG 44-76/BKA32

NO.

DATE TIME SOURCE SUMMARY

1 4.1.99 1930 BKAHQ PERU TEAM REPORT STATUS

2 4.1.99 1950 EXT SOURCE SIGNATURE UHF SIGNAL

3 4.1.99 2230 BKAHQ PERU TEAM REPORT STATUS

4 5.1.99 0130 BKAHQ PERU TEAM REPORT STATUS

5 5.1.99 0430 BKAHQ PERU TEAM REPORT STATUS

6 5.1.99 0716 FIELD (CHILE) ARRIVED SANTIAGO, HEADING FOR COLONIA ALEMANIA

7 5.1.99 0730 BKAHQ PERU TEAM REPORT STATUS

8 5.1.99 0958 FIELD (CHILE) HAVE ARRIVED COLONIA ALEMANIA; BEGINNING SURVEILLANCE

9 5.1.99 1030 BKAHQ PERU TEAM REPORT STATUS

10 5.1.99 1037 FIELD (CHILE) CHILE TEAM URGENT SIGNAL; CHILE TEAM URGENT SIGNAL

11 5.1.99 1051 BKAHQ PERU TEAM REPORT IMMEDIATELY

Race frowned.

It was a list of every communication signal that had been picked up by the BKA’s Peruvian field team.

By the looks of it, they had received ‘status update’ requests from BKA headquarters every three hours from 7:30 last night, plus a few intermittent messages from the other BKA team in Chile.

The tenth message, however—one of the messages from the other team in Chile—seized Race’s attention. It screamed with the German word dringendes—‘urgent’.

Schroeder saw it, too.

He quickly tabbed down to the tenth message and hit ‘ENTER’.

A full-screen message came up. Race saw the words in German, translated them:

MESSAGE NO: 050199010

DATED: 5 JANUARY 1999

RECEIVED AT: 1037 (LOCAL TIME PERU)

RECEIVED FROM: FIELD TEAM (CHILE)

SUBJECT: CHILE TEAM URGENT SIGNAL;

CHILE TEAM URGENT SIGNAL

MESSAGE IS AS FOLLOWS:

ATTENTION PERU TEAM. ATTENTION PERU TEAM.

THIS IS CHILE SECOND UNIT. REPEAT. THIS IS CHILE SECOND

UNIT,

FIRST UNIT IS DOWN, REPEAT, FIRST UNIT IS DOWN.

15 MINUTES AGO FIRST UNIT ENTERED COLONIA ALEMANIA IN

CONCERT WITH CHILEAN NATIONAL GUARD, REPORTED ENTIRE

COMPOUND DESERTED. REPEAT. FIRST UNIT REPORTED ENTIRE

COMPOUND DESERTED.

PRELIMINARY TESTING REVEALED HIGH TRACE LEVELS OF

URANIUM AND PLUTONIUM ORE, BUT BEFORE FURTHER DATA COULD BE OBTAINED A DETONATION OCCURRED INSIDE THE COMPOUND.

DETONATION APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN NUCLEAR. REPEAT.

DETONATION APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN NUCLEAR.

ENTIRE FIRST UNIT HAS BEEN LOST. REPEAT. ENTIRE FIRST

UNIT HAS BEEN LOST.

MUST ASSUME STORMTROOPERS ARE ALREADY EN ROUTE TO

PERU.

Race looked up from the message in horror.

Colonia Alemania had been empty at the time the BKA team had arrived. It had also been booby-trapped, set to explode as soon as someone set foot on it.