Matthew Reilly - Temple

‘With a heaving grunt, Race got his elbows up onto the ledge and hauled himself onto it and looked up just in time to see Van Lewen—with Cochrane draped over his shoulder-hurrying off into the stand of trees to his right.

He also saw the Nazis—all twelve of them, all armed with G-11s—as they came swarming around the temple from both sides in perfect unison.

They saw the idol instantly, sitting on its side halfway down the steep muddy slope.

They fanned out quickly, taking up covering positions while a single man cautiously sidestepped his way down the embankment to retrieve the idol from its resting place.

The Nazi arrived at the idol. Grabbed it.

Race could have sworn.

But he never got the chance to, because at that precise moment one of the Nazis looked up and saw him—hanging half-off the ledge, staring up at them with wide frightened eyes.

The Nazis brought their G-11s up as one, all aimed squarely at Race’s forehead, and as they all reached for their triggers, Race did the only thing he could think to do.

He let himself fall.

Race fell.

Fast.

Down the side of the rock tower.

He saw the uneven surface of the tower’s wall rushing past him at phenomenal speed. He looked up and saw the ledge that he had fallen off receding into the grey sky even faster.

His mind reeled.

I can’t believe I just did that! Stay calm, stay calm, you did it because you knew you could get out of this.

Right.

As he fell, Race quickly brought his M-16 round in his hands.

You are not going to die.

He tried to recall how Van Lewen had fired his grappling hook across the chasm earlier. Now how had he done it? He had pulled a second trigger on his gun to fire the hook, a trigger that had been situated underneath his M-16’s barrel.

Still falling.

Race peered frantically at his weapon, searched for the second—

There!

He immediately raised his M-16 and aimed it at the rapidly receding tower top above him. Then he jammed his finger down on the second trigger.

With a loud, puncture-like whump! the silver grappling hook shot out from the grenade launcher of his gun, its silver claws opening in mid-air with a sharp snick-snick!

Race fell downwards.

The grappling hook shot upwards, its nylon rope wobbling through the air behind it.

Still falling.

The hook flew over the edge of the tower top.

Still falling..

Race held his M-16 tightly. Then he just shut his eyes and waited—waited for the jolt of his rope or the impact with the lake, whichever came first.

The jolt came first.

In an instant, the grappling hook’s rope went taut and Race came to a sudden, jarring halt.

It felt as if his arms had just been wrenched out of their sockets, but somehow he managed to keep hold of the M-16.

Race opened his eyes.

And found himself hanging from the rope about a hundred feet below the edge of the tower top.

He hung there in silence for a full thirty seconds, breathing hard, shaking his head. No Nazis appeared on the ledge high above him.

They must have left the embankment as soon as they had seen him fall.

Race sighed deeply with relief. Then he set about the task of hauling himself back up to the tower’s peak.

Up on the tower top, Van Lewen was hacking his way through the foliage, using his Bowie knife as a machete.

Moments earlier, he had also seen the Nazis get the idol, and now he was trying desperately to get back to the rope bridge before they did.

It was at the extreme southern edge of the tower’s peak, and now he and the wounded Cochrane were making their way toward it, forging a path through the brush on the tower’s southwestern flank.

The Nazis were taking the more direct route, heading back to the bridge via the clearing and the stone stairway.

Van Lewen hacked away a final branch and abruptly he and Cochrane were met by the sight of the rope bridge, majestically spanning the chasm between the tower top and the outer path.

The great swooping bridge was about fifteen yards away from them—and right now, the dozen or so Nazi troops who had assailed them at the portal were crossing it, arriving at the path on the other side.

Damn it, Van Lewen thought, they’d beaten him to the bridge!

Van Lewen stared at one of the Nazis as he stepped up onto solid ground on the other side of the ravine. He was holding something cradled in his arms—something covered in a ragged purple cloth The idol.

Shit.

It was then that the Nazis on the other side of the ravine did the one thing that Van Lewen feared the most—the one thing he had intended to do himself if he had reached the rope bridge first.

They unlooped the bridge from its foundations and they let it fall.

The great bridge fell down into the ravine. It was still attached to its foundations on the tower side of the chasm, so it didn’t fall all the way down to the bottom, rather it just ended up falling flat against the side of the rock tower, its retrieval rope trailing down into the impenetrable fog beneath it.

Van Lewen stared in a kind of helpless frustration at the squad of Nazis hustling down the path on the other side of the chasm, carrying the idol in their midst.

They had the idol.

While he was now stranded on the rock tower.

Heinrich Anistaze stood in the centre of Vilcafor with his hands on his hips. He was pleased with the way the assault on the village had gone.

The pulse generator had worked perfectly, cutting off any radio communication between the enemy. The Americans in the ATV had been neutralised with ease.

And now he had just heard that his assault squad had successfully retrieved the idol from the Americans up at the temple.

Things were going very well indeed.

There came a shout and Anistaze turned to see the tower squad come charging out from the riverside path.

The leader of the squad immediately came up to him and presented him with a doth-enwrapped object.

‘Herr Obergruppenfuhrer,’ the man said formally. ‘The idol.’

Anistaze smiled.

Once he had managed to climb back up his grappling hook’s rope, Race dashed across the now-deserted clearing in front of the temple, searching for the Green Berets, if any of them were still alive.

He found Van Lewen and Cochrane at the ledge which had once held up the rope bridge.

‘Son of a bitch,’ he said as he saw the yawning chasm in front of them.

‘They cut the bridge.’

‘There’s no way off this thing,’ Van Lewen said. ‘We’re stuck here.’

Just then the black Mosquito helicopter came roaring past them again, its sidemounted cannons blazing. The Nazis must have left it behind to finish the job.

Race and the others immediately dived for cover in the brush. Leaves exploded above their heads, tree trunks shattered into splinters.

‘Fuck a duck!’ Cochrane yelled over the roar of the gunfire.

Race peered out at the Mosquito chopper as it hovered above the chasm, long tongues of fire spewing out from its guns, its long spindly landing skids dangling beneath its body.

The landing skids.., he thought.

And at that moment, something inside Race clicked—a kind of fierce determination that he had never known he possessed.

‘Van Lewen!’ he called suddenly.

‘What!’

‘Give me some cover fire!’

‘What for?’

‘Just get that chopper to hover a little higher, will you!

But don’t scare it off!’

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m getting us off this rock!’

‘That was good enough for Van Lewen. A second later, he snapped out from behind the foliage and loosed a volley of fire at the hovering black chopper.

The Mosquito responded by rising a little higher in the air and firing back.