Matthew Reilly - Temple

As they were doing right now.

The six Nazis arrived at the ATV’s side to find every window shutter closed and every hatch bolted.

Inside the big vehicle, Nash, Schroeder and Renee sat huddled in its various corners, holding their collective breaths.

The Stormtroopers didn’t waste any time.

They immediately crouched underneath the big armoured vehicle and began planting the explosives.

Race ran.

Up and up, round and round, following the long, curving bend of the spiralling path.

Legs pumping. Heart pounding.

He came to the rope bridge. Bounced across it. Hurried up the stone steps that led to the temple.

Race burst through the encroaching fern leaves and abruptly found himself standing in the clearing in front of the portal.

The clearing was completely deserted.

No animal—neither man nor cat—was in sight.

The temple’s portal yawned open before him, looming out of the fog.

The downward-leading steps inside it were cloaked in shadow.

Do not enter at any cost.

Death looms within.

Race held his M-16 out in front of him, flicked on its barrel-mounted flashlight, cautiously stepped toward the portal. He stood inside the great stone doorway—surrounded by the horrific carvings of the rapas and the screaming humans— and peered down into the blackness.

‘Van Lewen!’ he hissed. ‘Van Lewen! Are you in there?’

No reply.

He took a step down into the temple, holding his gun awkwardly out in front of him.

It was then that he heard the reply.

A long, slow growl from somewhere deep inside the temple.

Uh-oh.

Race gripped his gun a little more tightly, held his breath, took another step down into the temple.

Ten more steps and he was standing in a dark stone passageway that spiralled down and around to his right in a wide gentle curve.

He saw a small alcove sunk into its wall, turned the beam of his flashlight into it.

A horribly mangled skeleton stared back at him.

Its skull had been smashed inwards at the back and one of its arms was missing and its mouth was in an open horrified frozen scream. It was also wearing an ancient leather vest.

Race took a horrified step back from the filthy skeletal figure.

And then he noticed the object looped around its neck.

He only just saw it, hidden as it was in the folds of the dirty old skeleton’s vertebrae. He leaned forward to get a better look at whatever it was.

It was a leather necklace of some sort.

Race touched the thin leather strap, worked it round the filthy skeleton’s neck. A few seconds later, a dazzling green emerald appeared from behind the skeleton’s bony neck, attached to the leather necklace.

Race’s heart skipped a beat. He knew of this emerald pendant. Indeed, he had read about it only recently.

It was Renco’s necklace.

The necklace that the high priestess in the Coricancha had given to him the night he had spirited the idol out of Cuzco.

Race looked at the skeleton again in horror.

Renco.

Race lifted the necklace off the skeleton’s head and held it in his hands.

He thought of Renco for a moment—and then suddenly he recalled something that he himself had said to Frank Nash not long ago.

Somehow Renco and Santiago managed to lure the cats back inside the temple, and at the same time put the idol inside it.

Race swallowed hard. Had Renco—-while carrying the wet idol with him—led the cats back inside the temple?

He stared down at the mangled skeleton in horror.

So this was what had become of Renco.

This was what happened to heroes.

He placed the emerald necklace solemnly around his own neck. “Take care, Renco,’ he said aloud.

Just then harsh white light illuminated Race’s face and he turned eyes wide, like an animal caught in the headlights of a car—and found himself staring at the faces of Cochrane, Van Lewen and Reichart as they emerged from the darkness of the temple’s inner depths.

Reichart was holding something wrapped inside a tattered purple cloth.

Cochrane brushed roughly past Race, pushing his M-16 aside as he did so. ‘Why don’t you put that fucking thing down before you kill somebody.’

Tex Reichart stopped in front of Race and smiled as he held up the object in his hands, the object wrapped inside the purple cloth.

‘We got it,’ he said.

Reichart quickly unwrapped the cloth parcel and for the first time, Race saw it.

The Incan idol.

The Spirit of the People.

Like the stone totem he had seen in the rainforest earlier, the Spirit of the People looked infinitely more sinister in real life than it had in his imagination.

It was about a foot tall, and roughly the size and shape of a shoebox.

The front section of the rectangular stone, however, had been carved into the shape of a rapa’s head—the angriest, fiercest rapa Race had ever seen.

It was snarling ferociously, its jaws bared wide, its sharp pointed teeth ready to slash and maim and kill.

What struck Race most about the carving, though, was how alive it looked. Through a combination of skilled craftsmanship and the unusual nature of the stone itself, it seemed as if the rapa had somehow been imprisoned inside the lustrous blackand-purple stone and was now trying— maniacally, ferociously, rabidly—to force its way out of it.

The stone, Race thought as he gazed at the thin veins of purple that snaked their way down the snarling rapa’s face, giving it an extra level of anger and malevolence.

Thyrium.

If only the Incas had known what they were starting when they carved this idol, he thought.

Reichart quickly replaced the cloth over the idol and the four of them hurried back up to the temple’s entrance.

‘What the fuck are you doing up here?’ Cochrane growled as they came to the open portal.

‘Nash sent me to tell you guys that the Nazis are down in the village.

They jammed our radios so we lost contact with you. They’re sending men up here now. Nash said to tell you not to come back down to the village, but rather to get out of here some other way and get in contact with the air support team and get them to pick you up from somewhere in the mountains—’

At that moment, a burst of supermachine-gun fire raked the stone walls of the portal all around them. The four of them ducked quickly as a devastating line of bullets strafed the portal’s frame, shredding its solid stone walls as if they were made of plaster.

Race snapped round instantly and saw about twelve Nazi commandos in the trees at the edge of the clearing, firing hard with their G11s.

Cochrane returned fire from the cover of the portal. Van Lewen did the same. The crack of their M-16s sounded almost pathetic alongside the relentless droning whirrrrrr of the ultra-high-tech G11s.

Race also tried to return the Nazis’ fire, but when he pulled the trigger of his M-16, nothing happened.

Cochrane saw him, reached out and yanked back on a Tshaped handle on Race’s rifle.

‘Christ, you’re about as useless as a priest in a whorehouse,’ Cochrane barked.

Race pulled the trigger again and, this time, a stream of bullets erupted from his M-16, almost dislocating his shoulder with the force of the recoil.

‘What the hell are we gonna do!’ Reichart yelled above their gunfire.

‘We can’t stay here!’ Van Lewen yelled. ‘We have to get back to the rope’

At that moment there came a sudden, resounding voooom! from somewhere above their heads.

Race looked up just in time to see a black MD-500 ‘Mosquito’ light-attack helicopter explode out from the fog above roar over the tower top.

The Mosquito was a nimble little attack chopper—much smaller than any Apache or Comanche—but what it lacked in grunt and firepower, it more than made up for in speed and manoeuvrability.