Matthew Reilly - Temple

PROPERTY OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY ORDNANCE ISSUE K/56005/C/DARPA 6 X M22 CHARGES

Race opened the box and saw six futuristic looking chrome and plastic vials sitting snugly inside separate foamlined pockets. Each vial was quite small, about the size and shape of a tube of lipstick, and they were all filled with a strange kind of lustrous amber liquid. Race shrugged, grabbed the Kevlar box, and carried it and the crate of regular grenades up to Doogie in the wheelhouse.

‘Ah, Professor,’ Doogie said when he saw the Kevlar box. ‘I … uh … wouldn’t go throwing those babies too quickly if I were you.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you’ll kill us too.’

‘What?’

‘They’re M22s. High temperature explosive charges. Serious shit. See the amber liquid inside ‘em. Isotopic liquid chlorine. One ounce of that stuff’ll vaporize everything within a two hundred-yard radius, including us. These Nazi assholes must have been the ones who stole that shipment of M22s from that truck in Baltimore a few years back.’

‘Oh,’ Race said. ‘We won’t be needing that much firepower,’

Doogie smiled, grabbing one of the more conventional L2A2 hand grenades. ‘This should be all we need.’

Not a moment later, the Mosquito above them made another pass, pummelling the walls of the Pib with bullet holes. But this time, as it shot by overhead Doogie pulled the pin on his grenade and threw it baseballstyle with his good arm up at the chopper’s open side door.

The grenade shot through the air like a missile and then it disappeared inside the Mosquito’s door. A second later the Mosquito’s walls blasted out as one and the little attack chopper pitched wildly forward, crumpling over on itself and bursting into flames before slamming down nosefirst into the speeding water beneath it.

‘Nice throw,’ Race said.

Van Lewen and Renee raced down the wide starboard side passageway of the command boat, their Ml6s pressed firmly against their shoulders. They moved quickly, sweeping their guns from side to side, until suddenly they burst out into open space, out onto the aft helipad deck of the big catamaran. Van Lewen immediately saw the white Bell Jet Ranger chopper sitting on the deck before them, with its pilot standing beside it. The man saw them instantly, reached for his gun. Van Lewen dropped him, turned right just in time to see a squad of six more Nazi commandos come charging out from the interior of the catamaran, their Glls up and firing. Supermachine gun fire raked the deck all around them, splintered the wooden handrail behind them. Van Lewen ducked, saw Renee dive back behind the corner they had come from. He, however, was too far gone. He looked back at the Nazis coming towards him.

They were about fifteen yards away with their futuristic machine guns spewing forth a shocking wave of bullets and in the face of their onslaught, with absolutely nothing else to call on, Leo Van Lewen did the only thing he could think to do. He leapt over the side.

From the helm of his Rigid Raider speeding along the river behind the command boat, Karl Schroeder watched in horror as he saw Van Lewen go sailing off the side of the big catamaran. But Schroeder didn’t have time to gawk. At that moment, a hailstorm of Gll fire came his way as two Nazi Rigid Raiders swooped in on him from either side, assailing his boat’s flanks with gunfire, forcing him to dive for cover. He hit the deck hard, and immediately scanned the floor of the boat for something he could use to fight off the two Nazi Rigid Raiders. The first thing he saw was a Gll, lying on the deck next to a Kevlar box of some sort. Good start. But then, beyond the Gll, he saw something else. And he frowned. Van Lewen flew through the air, waited for the impact with the speeding river beneath him. It never came. Rather he landed on something hard, something solid, something that felt like plastic or fibreglass. He looked about himself and found that he was lying on the deck of the Scarab speedboat that was secured to the rear right-hand rail of the command boat. Not a second later, three Nazi commandos snapped their Glls over the command boat’s rail and drew a bead on the bridge of his nose and in that moment, as he looked up into their eyes, Van Lewen knew that his battle was over. The three Nazis jammed down on the triggers of their guns. At first, Schroeder hadn’t realized what it was. It was an odd looking, backpack-sized device roughly rectangular in shape, with a series of digital gauges on it, variously measured in kilohertz, megahertz and gigahertz. Frequency measurements … And then it had dawned on him.

It was the Nazis’ jamming device, the device that they had used to neutralize the Americans’ communications systems when they had arrived at Vilcafor. Stuck to the front of the device was a strip of grey electrician’s tape, on which was written in German the words:

WARNING! DO NOT SET EMP LEVELS ABOVE 1.2 gHZ.

Schroeder’s eyes had gone wide at the sight of the word ‘EMP’. Jesus. A pulse generator. The Nazis had an electromagnetic pulse generator. But why would they set a limit on the level of the pulse at 1.2 gigahertz? And then it had hit him. Schroeder immediately snatched up the Gll next to him and looked at the specifications marked on its body.

HECKLER & KOCH, DEUTSCHLAND 50 V.3.5 MV: 920 CPU: 1.25 gHZ

In the nanoseconds in which the mind operates, he quickly recalled the theory of electromagnetic pulses: EMP nullified anything with a microprocessor in it computers, radio transmitters, televisions. And also, Schroeder realized, Gll assault rifles, since the Gll was the only gun in the world to use a microprocessor, the only gun complex enough to require one. The Nazis didn’t want their men to set the levels on their EMP generator too high, because if they did, the electromagnetic pulse would knock out their Glls. Schroeder smiled. And then, at exactly the same moment as Van Lewen looked up into the barrels of the Nazis’ Gll assault rifles from his position on the deck of the Scarab, Karl Schroeder had flicked on the pulse generator and turned the gigahertz dial to 1.3. Click. Click. Click. Van Lewen’s look of resignation turned to one of complete bewilderment as each of the three Glls above him failed to fire.

The Nazis seemed even more bewildered. They didn’t know what the hell was going on. Van Lewen didn’t miss a beat. In a second, he had his M16 raised in one hand and his SIGSauer in the other. He pulled both triggers at the same time. Both guns blazed to life. All three Nazis were hit instantly and they flopped back behind the rail, their heads exploding in identical fountains of blood. Bullets pinged off the rail itself, ricocheting in every direction, one of them slicing through the rope that held the Scarab to the command boat. The speedboat immediately fell away from the big catamaran and all the Nazis on the command boat could do was hold their useless Glls in their hands and stare at the Scarab as it receded into the wash behind them. On the other side of the river, Doogie Kennedy sat in the swivel chair of his Pibber’s forward gun turret, creating all manner of hell with the patrol boat’s double barrelled 20mm cannon. He spun the turret around and let fly with a hailstorm of fire, turning one of the Rigid Raiders speeding across the river to his left into Swiss cheese. Then he turned his sights onto one of the helipad barges in front of him, the one with a Mosquito helicopter still on it, and pummelled it with 20mm gunfire, rupturing its fuel tanks, causing the entire boat and chopper combination to erupt into a billowing ball of fire.

‘That’s right, take that, you Nazi sunzabitches!’

Three yards behind him, in the wheelhouse of the Pibber, Race drove hard, scanning the river as he did so. Just then the third and last Mosquito attack chopper made another low pass, its side mounted cannons blazing. Race ducked quickly. On the forward deck in front of him, Doogie swung the revolving gun turret around and loosed a deafening burst of 20mm gunfire at the chopper, but the Mosquito just banked away sharply as his red hot tracers hit only air around it.