Matthew Reilly - Temple

He turned to face Race. ‘Sorry, Professor. Looks like you’re staying with us. Lauren, seal up the citadel.”

Over at the citadel, Lauren and Copeland grabbed hold of the fortress’s big six-foot doorstone and rolled it into a groove that had been cut into the floor of the structure’s doorway.

The doorstone was roughly rectangular in shape, but with a curving rounded base that allowed it to be rocked easily in and out of its groove inside the doorframe. The fact that it was set in a groove on the inside of the fortress’s walls meant that any external enemies couldn’t hope to budge the great stone from the outside.

The stone rolled into place—although Lauren and Copeland deliberately left a small crack of air between it and the doorframe. It was important to the plan that the cats be able to detect them inside the citadel.

After all, they were the bait.

Inside the ATV, everyone stared intently at the live satellite image on the viewscreen.

The cats came in two distinct ‘teams’—one team coming directly from the plateau to the west, the other swinging up and around from the north.

Race felt a chill as he watched their bodies—glowing white on the infrared—their tails curling and uncurling slowly behind them.

It was disturbing, he thought. Disturbingly coordinated behaviour for a pack of animals.

The cats crossed the moat at various locations. Some went over the western logbridge, others just leapt softly onto the fallen tree trunks that littered the dry moat-bed and then hopped effortlessly up onto the other side.

They entered the village.

Most of the rapas, Race saw, headed straight for the citadel and the scent of the people inside it.

Just then, however, he saw a lone, white blob on the screen appear alongside the stationary ATV.

Race spun instantly to his right—and saw the enormous black whiskers of one of the cats right outside the slitlike window next to him!

The rapa snorted once, registered the foulsmelling monkey excrement that had been smeared on the sill of the slit.

Then it ambled off to join the others at the citadel.

‘Okay,’ Nash said. ‘All of the cats appear to be converging on the citadel. Lauren, what’s happening over there?’

‘They’re all over here. They want to get in, but the citadel’s sealed tight.

We’re safe in here for the moment. You can send the boys out now.’

Nash turned to the three Green Berets beside him. ‘You ready?’

The three soldiers nodded.

‘Then get to it.’

And with that, Nash pushed opened a pop-up hatch in the rear of the ATV and Cochrane, Van Lewen and Reichart—their helmets and clothes smeared all over with the putrid brown monkey shit—climbed up and out through it. As soon as they were out, Nash quickly shut the hatch behind them.

‘Kennedy,“ he said into his mike. “Anything on the SAT-SN?”

“There’s nothing within a hundred miles of here, sir,” Doogie’s voice came in from the citadel.

As Nash talked, Race stared intently at the satellite image of the village.

He saw the pack of cats gathered around the citadel. Saw their slithering tails, their cautious, inquisitive movements.

At the same time, however, on the bottom of the screen, he saw three new blobs sneak out from the ATV and race westward, across the western logbridge and away from the village, toward the dark mountain-plateau.

Cochrane, Van Lewen and Reichart.

Going after the idol.

The three Green Berets burst through the veil of mist that covered the riverside path and raced toward the fissure.

They were running fast, breathing hard. All three of them wore helmet-mounted cameras.

They came to the fissure.

It too was cloaked in a thick grey mist. The three soldiers didn’t miss a step. They dashed into it at full speed.

In the ATV, Nash, Schroeder and Renee were all watching the video monitors intently, watching the feed coming in from the three soldiers.

On the monitors, they saw the walls of the fissure streaking by at phenomenal speed. On the wall-mounted speakers, they heard the three soldiers’ heavy panting breaths.

Race stood a few paces away from the video monitors.

He didn’t want to get in the way.

It was then, however, that he noticed that Nash and the two Germans were now watching only the pictures coming from the three helmet cameras. Their interest in the soldiers’ mission was paramount, and as such, they were completely ignoring the satellite image screen.

Race turned to look at the satellite picture.

And then he frowned.

‘Hey’ he said. ‘What the hell is that?’

Nash glanced around idly at Race and the satellite monitor. But when he saw the image on the satellite screen, he suddenly stood bolt upright.

‘What the fuck?’

On the far right-hand side of the satellite image on the eastern side of the village—was another cluster of blurry grey hash that represented more rainforest, the forest that led to the edge of the tableland and the greater Amazon Basin.

Nobody had paid it much attention before because nothing had been in it.

But there was something in it now.

The section of blurry grey hash of the right-hand side of the village was now littered with tiny white blobs easily thirty of them in total—all of them converging quickly on the village.

Race felt his blood run cold.

Each blob was distinctly human in shape, and every single one of them was carrying what appeared to be a gun.

They came out of the rainforest silently, with their machineguns pressed firmly against their shoulders, ready to fire but not firing yet.

Race and the others were now watching them intently through the ATV’s slitlike windows.

The intruders were all dressed in black ceramic body armour, and they moved with precision and speed, covering each other smoothly as they leapfrogged forward in perfect, silent unison.

The rapas gathered around the citadel turned as one as they caught sight of their new enemy. They tensed to attack and then they—Didn’t move.

For some reason, the rapas didn’t attack these new intruders. Rather, they just stopped where they stood and stared at them.

And then just then—-one of the intruders opened fire on the rapas with an assault rifle that looked to Race like something out of a Star Wars movie.

An unbelievable amount of bullets flared out from the gun’s rectangular muzzle and ripped one of the cats’ heads to shreds. One second the cat’s head was there, the next it just erupted in an ugly splash of exploding flesh and blood.

The cats scattered in an instant just as another one of their number was torn to pieces by the savage hail of gunfire.

Race peered out through his window, tried to get a better look at the gun in the intruder’s hands.

It looked remarkable, space-age even.

It was completely rectangular in shape, with no apparent gunbarrel.

Indeed, the barrel must have been concealed somewhere within the gun’s long rectangular body.

Race had seen these guns before, but only in pictures, never in real life.

They were Heckler & Koch G11s.

According to Race’s brother Marty, the Heckler & Koch G-11 was the most advanced assault rifle ever built.

Designed and built in 1989, even now—ten years on—it was still twenty years ahead of its time. It was the Holy Grail of firearms as far as Marty had been concerned.

It was the only production weapon in history to fire a caseless cartridge. Indeed, it was the only hand-held firearm in the world known to contain a microprocessor—principally because it was the only firearm in the world complex enough to require one.

Due to the fact that it fired a caseless bullet, the G-11 was not only able to fire at the unimaginable rate of 2300 rounds per minute, it was also able to store in its body some 150 rounds—five times the number of bullets held in the clip of a regular assault rifle like the M-16. And even then it was only half the size of an M-16.