Matthew Reilly - Temple

‘All right—’ Scott said into his throat mike.

“—we’re heading up the path now,” his voice said over the monitor’s speakers.

Race watched tensely as, on the screen, Scott, Wilson and Graf stepped up out of the water and onto the narrow pathway that was cut into the crater’s outer wall.

Johann Krauss said, ‘What we must also remember about our enemy, however, is that they are, first and foremost, cats. They cannot change what they are. They think like cats, they act like cats.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning that only one species of great cat—the cheetah-catches its prey by chasing after it.’

‘How do other great cats catch their prey?’

‘There are several strategies. Tigers in India are known to lie in wait covered in leaves, sometimes for hours at a time, waiting for their prey to arrive on the scene. Once their prey comes close enough, they pounce.

‘On the other hand, lions in Africa employ quite sophisticated pack-hunting methods—one such technique involves a lioness parading around in front of a herd of gazelles while her colleagues sneak up on the gazelles from behind. It’s quite ingenious really, and very effective. But it is also very unusual.’

‘Why?’ Race asked.

‘Because it implies the existence of some kind of communication between the lions.’

Race turned back to face the monitor.

The three soldiers had made it a short way up the spiralling path, so that they were now about ten feet above the wide body of water that covered the base of the crater.

Race was watching Corporal Wilson’s camera view as it panned out over the flat expanse of water when suddenly he saw a flicker of movement on the water’s surface.

It had been a ripple of some sort—from something just underneath the water’s surface.

“What was that?’ he said.

‘What was what?’

‘Wilson,’ Race said, leaning close to the microphone.

‘Look to your right for a second, at the water.’

Graf and Scott must have heard Race’s question too because, at that moment, all three camera views panned right, out over the glistening expanse of water that encircled the base of the rock tower.

“I don’t see anything…” Scott said.

‘There!’ Race said, pointing at another ripple in the water.

It seemed to have been made by the whiplash of an animal’s tail. An animal that seemed to be travelling in the direction of the three soldiers.

‘What the hell…?’ Scott said as he looked out over the wide body of water before him.

A small bow-wave of water seemed to be cutting across the lake at an unusually quick speed—-coming right toward him and his men.

Scott frowned. Then he took a cautious step forward, toward the edge of the path and the ten-foot drop down to the water’s surface.

He peered out over the edge.

And saw three black cats clawing their way up the sheer stone wall beneath him!

Scott quickly raised his M-16 but at that exact moment an enormous black shape burst out from a dark fissure in the rock wall behind him and slammed into his back, sending him flying off the edge of the pathway and down into the water below, where a whole cluster of other black shapes converged on him in an instant.

Race stared at the monitor in stunned awe as he watched the whole horrific scenefr0m Scott’s point of view. All he saw was the blur of slashing razor-like teeth and flailing human arms, all overlaid with Scott’s own gasps and futile screams.

Then, not a moment later, the camera went under the surface and the screen cut to hash and abruptly there was silence.

In the crater, a roar of gunfire shattered the unnatural stillness as the German soldier Graf jammed down on the trig ger of his M-16.

But no sooner had a flaring tongue of fire spewed out from the muzzle of his gun than—smack!—Graf was pounced upon from above, by a cat that had been lurking on the rock wall high above him!

Further down the path, Chucky Wilson spun instantly to see the struggle between Graf and the cat, saw that the Ger man paratrooper was putting up one hell of a fight.

And then suddenly—riiiiippppp!—Graf’s throat came clear of his neck and his body fell instantly limp.

Wilson blanched. ‘Oh, luck.’

And at that moment the cat standing over Graf’s body slowly looked up at him and stared into his eyes.

Wilson froze. The big cat stepped ominously forward, over Graf’s immobile body, toward him.

Wilson spun.

Only to see another massive black cat standing on the path behind him, cutting off his retreat.

Nowhere to run.

Nowhere to hide.

Wilson turned again and saw the fissures and crevices in the rock wall and for a second thought there might be an escape there. He looked into one of the shadowy fissures in the rockface—

—and found himself staring at the smiling face of one of the cats.

And then with a suddenness that was nothing short of horrifying, the big cat’s jaws rushed toward him at phenomenal speed and in an instant there was nothing.

Everyone just stared at the monitor in silence.

‘Oh my God,’ Gaby Lopez breathed.

‘Shit,’ Lauren said.

The four remaining Green Berets just gazed at the monitor, speechless.

Race turned to the German zoologist, Krauss. ‘They only come out at night, do they?’

‘Well,’ Krauss said, bristling. “Quite obviously, the darkness at the base of the crater allows them to spend the greater part of the day there—’

‘Kennedy,’ Nash said sharply. ‘What’s the status on that extraction team?’

‘I’m still trying to get through to Panama, sir,’ Doogie said from over by the radio pack. ‘Signal keeps dropping out.’

‘Keep trying.’ Nash looked at his watch.

It was 11:30 am.

“Shit,” he said.

He wondered what had happened to Romano and his team. Last he heard, they’d taken off from Cuzco at 7:45 pm last night. They should have been here by now. What had happened to them? Could the Nazis have shot them down?

Or had they just misread the totems and gotten hopelessly lost?

Whatever the case, if they were still alive, one thing was certain: they would find the village eventually.

Which meant he now had two hostile groups on their way to Vilcafor.

“Shit,’ he said again.

Doogie came over.

‘The extraction team took off from Panama one hour ago—three choppers: two Comanches, one Black Hawk.

They estimate that they’ll be here by late afternoon, at approximately 1700 hours. I put up a UHF signal, so they can home in on that and extract us.’

As Doogie reported his news to Nash, a strange thought hit Race: Why wasn’t the Army extracting them via Cuzco? Why were they sending choppers down from Panama?

Surely the easiest way out of here was to go back the same way they had come.

It was at that moment that a sentence from the Santiago Manuscript popped into his head.

A thief never uses the same entrance twice.

Nash turned to Van Lewen. ‘Do we have access to the SAT-SN network?’ He said it ‘Sat-sun’—‘the Sat-sun network’.

‘Yes, sir, we do.’

‘Patch us in. Set a tracking pattern over central-eastern Peru. I want to know exactly where those Nazi bastards are. Cochrane.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Get me satellite imagery of Vilcafor. We have to set up a defensive position.’

‘Yes, sir.”

‘What’s SAT-SN?’ Gaby Lopez asked.

Troy Copeland answered. ‘SAT-SN is the acronym for the Satellite Aerospace Tracking and Surveillance Network. It’s the aerial equivalent of SOSUS, the array of hydrophones that the U.S. Navy has stretched across the north Atlantic to detect enemy submarines.

‘Put simply, SAT-SN is an array of fifty-six geosynchronous satellites in near-earth orbit that monitor the world’s airspace, airplane by airplane.’