Matthew Reilly - Temple

A sliver of ice ran down Race’s spine as he looked at the final line of the message again:

MUST ASSUME STORMTROOPERS ARE ALREADY EN ROUTE TO PERU.

Race looked at his watch.

It was 11:05 am.

‘How long till they get here?’ Nash asked Schroeder.

‘It’s impossible to say,’ Schroeder said. ‘There’s no know ing how long ago they left the compound. They could have left it two hours ago or two days ago. Either way, the trip from Chile to here is not a long one. We must assume that they are very close.’

Nash turned to Scott. ‘Captain, I want you to get on the horn to Panama and find out when that damned extraction team is going to get here. We need firepower and we need it now.’

‘Got it.’ Scott nodded to Doogie who dashed off toward the radio unit.

‘Cochrane,’ Nash said. ‘How’s the situation with the surviving Huey?’

Buzz Cochrane shook his head. ‘It’s shot. It took a hammering when that Apache went wild during the cats’ attack. Stray gunfire damaged both the tail rotor and the ignition ports.’

‘How long will it take to fix?’

‘With the tools we’ve got here, we can fix the ignition ports, but it’ll take time. As for the tail rotor, well, you can’t fly without it, and it’s a bitch to repair. I guess we could strip some of the secondary systems and use them, but what we really need are brand-new axles and rotary switches, and we ain’t gonna find them here.’

‘Sergeant. Get that Huey ready to fly again. Whatever it takes,’ Nash said.

‘Yes, sir.,’

Cochrane left the circle, taking Tex Reichart with him.

There was a long silence.

‘So we’re stuck here…’ Lauren said.

‘With a group of terrorists on their way…’ Gaby Lopez added.

‘Unless we decide to trek out of here on foot,’ Race suggested.

Captain Scott turned to Nash. ‘If we stay, we die.’

‘And if we leave, the Nazis get the idol,’ Copeland said.

‘And a workable Supernova,’ Lauren said.

‘Not an option,’ Nash said firmly. ‘No, there’s only one thing we can do.’

‘What’s that?’

‘We get the idol before the Nazis get here.’

The three soldiers made their way cautiously up the river side path in the pounding subtropical rain.

Captain Scott and Corporal Chucky Wilson led the way, their M-16s trained warily on the dense foliage to their right. The lone German paratrooper, Graf, now armed with an American M-16, walked along the path behind them, bringing up the rear.

Each man wore a tiny fibre-optic camera attached to the side of his helmet which sent images back to the others in the village.

After a while, the three soldiers came to the fissure in the mountain side the fissure that led to the rock tower and the temple.

Scott nodded to Wilson and the young corporal entered the narrow stone passageway, gun-first.

Back in the village, Race and the others watched on a monitor as Scott, Wilson and Graf made their way through the fissure. The images being sent back from the three commandos were depicted in separate rectangles on the screen, in ghostly blackand-white.

The plan was simple.

While Scott, Wilson and Graf entered the temple and seized the idol inside it, the remaining Green Berets and the other German paratrooper private named Molke— would get to work repairing the remaining Huey. Once the idol was obtained, they would all fly out of Vilcafor before the Nazi terrorists arrived.

‘Ah, aren’t we forgetting something?” Race said.

‘Like what?’ Nash said.

‘Like the cats. Aren’t they the reason we’re in this mess in the first place? Where are they?’

‘The cats retreated from the village with the onset of daylight,’ a voice said from behind Race in perfect clipped English.

Race turned to see the fourth and last German man standing behind him, smiling.

He couldn’t have been more different from the other three German males—Schroeder, Graf and Molke. While they were all visibly strong and fit, this man was older— much older, at least in his fifties—and quite obviously unathletic. His most dominant feature was a long grey beard. Race disliked him on sight. His whole stance and posture reeked of pomposity and arrogance.

‘At dawn, the cats departed in the direction of the plateau,’ the man said uppishly. ‘I presume that they returned to their nest inside the temple.’ He smiled wryly. ‘I imagine that since the last few generations of their species have spent almost four hundred years in pitch darkness, their kind are not very comfortable in daylight.’

The bearded man extended his hand in an abrupt German way. ‘I am Doctor Jolann Krauss, zoologist and cryptozoologist from the University of Hamburg. I have been brought along on this mission to advise on certain animal issues raised in the manuscript.’

‘What’s a cryptozoologist?’ Race asked.

‘One who studies mythical animals,’ Krauss said.

“Mythical animals…’

“Yes. Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, the yeti, the great cats of the English moors, and of course,’ he added, ‘the South American rapa.’

‘You know about these cats?’ Race said.

‘Only what I have learned from unverified sightings, local legends and ambiguous hieroglyphs. But such is the beauty of cryptozoology, it is the study of animals that cannot be studied, because no-one can actually prove they exist.’

‘So you think we were attacked by a pack of mythical animals,’ Race said. ‘They didn’t look very mythical to me.’

Krauss said, ‘Every fifty years or so, there is a spate of unusual deaths in this part of the Amazon rainforest. At those times, local men who embark on nighttime trips between villages are known to just, well, disappear. On rare occasions, their remains are found in the morning.

At those times, men are found with their throats wrenched from their bodies or their spines ripped out.

‘The local people have a name for the beast that comes in the night to kill without mercy, a name which has been passed down from generation to generation. They call it the rapa.’

Krauss looked at Race closely. ‘We should heed this local folklore very carefully, because it can be of great use to us in evaluating our enemy.’

‘How?’

‘Well, for one thing, we can use it to discern certain things about our feline antagonists.’

‘Like what?’

‘Well, first of all, we can safely assume that the rapa is nocturnal. The remains of local men are found only in the morning. And we know from our own experience that these cats flee from the morning light. Ergo, they are nocturnal. They hunt only at night and retire for the main part of the day.’

‘If they’ve been shut up inside that temple for generations,’ Race said, ‘how could they have survived? What have they been eating?’

‘That I do not know,’ Krauss said, frowning seriously, as if he were pondering a troublesome mathematical equation.

Race looked up at the mountain-plateau that housed the mysterious temple. A veil of slanting rain covered its rocky eastern face.

‘So what are they doing now?’ he said.

‘Sleeping, I imagine,’ Krauss said, ‘in the safety of their temple. Which is why now is the best time to send our men in to get that idol.’

Scott, Wilson and Graf emerged from the narrow passageway and stepped out into the pool of shallow water at the base of the magnificent crater.

It was unusually dark in the canyon. Any light that there was had been blocked out by the thick rain clouds in the sky and the dense canopy of trees that overhung the crater’s rim. Every fissure and crack in the canyon’s walls was cloaked in shadow.

Scott and Wilson walked in front. Thin beams of light shot out from the small flashlights attached to the barrels of their M16s.