Matthew Reilly - Temple

Race hit the water hard, backfirst. He kicked up a spectacular spray of wash as he bounced wildly on the speeding surface, skipping over it at phenomenal speed, trying desperately to keep his grip on the anchor rope. Occasionally his entire body would spring up off a wave and bang against the side of the Pibber’s bow as it carved knifelike through the water beside him. He bit down firmly on the brim of his cap, held onto the rope as hard as he could. It was a rough ride, bruising, belting, battering, but he knew if he didn’t do one more, thing, it was about to get a lot worse. He heard the heavy thump, thump, thump of Nazi boots on the foredeck above him. If they saw him hanging from the bow, he was a dead man for sure. They would shoot him where he hung. Do it, Will!

All right, he thought. Let’s do it. Race steeled himself against the speeding waves beneath him, squeezed his eyes shut against the spray that assaulted his face. Then he adjusted his grip on the anchor rope and stiffened all of his muscles at once. And then he allowed himself to sink into the water, under the speeding bow of the Pibber! His legs went under first. Then his waist, then his stomach, then his chest. Slowly, his shoulders edged under, followed by his neck. Then, with a final, deep breath, Race allowed his head to go under the surface. The world went eerily silent. There was no roar of outboard motors, no thumping of choppers, no clatter of automatic gunfire. Just the constant vibrating hum of boat engines echoing across the underwater spectrum. The steeply slanted grey hull of the Pibber filled Race’s field of vision. Small specks of God only knew what rushed past his face at a million miles an hour, disappearing into the murky green darkness that lay beyond his flailing feet. Slowly, deliberately, hand over hand, Race lowered himself down the length of the anchor rope, heading aft along the hull of the Pibber, holding his breath for dear life, while still holding onto his cap with his teeth. He was about a third of the way down the length of the hull when the first reptilian shape materialized from the green darkness around him. A caiman. It swooped in alongside the speeding Pibber, opening its mouth right next to his flailing feet, and with a rattlesnake quick snapping motion, lunged viciously at his sneakers. Race lifted his legs up just as the caiman’s jaws came crunching together, catching nothing but water, and the big reptile, unable to keep up with the speeding Pibber, shrank prizeless into the hazy green darkness behind him. Race desperately needed air. His lungs burned. He felt bile crawling up the back of his throat. He quickened his pace down the rope until, finally, he found what he was looking for. The diver’s hatch. Yes! He reached into the hatch and punched upwards with his fist, knocking its interior lid off. Then he shoved his head through it. He broke the surface inside the lower cabin of the Pibber. Race quickly spat his Yankees cap out of his mouth and sucked in every ounce of air that he could. Then, when he had got his breath back, he hauled himself up through the boxlike hatch and fell in a clumsy heap onto the floor of the cabin, battered, bruised and absolutely breathless, but glad as hell to be alive. Doogie Kennedy ran across the open deck of the last helipad barge with a trail of sparks strafing the deck behind him.

As soon as he had seen Race go under the bow of the Pibber, he had opened fire on the four Nazis in its wheelhouse. Now they were returning his fire as he made a break for the seaplane being towed behind the big helipad barge. He came to the stern edge of the barge and quickly unlooped the rope that secured the Goose to it. Then he leapt across onto the bow of the seaplane and yanked open the small entry hatch situated on top of its nose. He dived headfirst down into the hatch, rising several seconds later inside the cockpit of the plane. Doogie punched the ignition switch and the Goose’s two wing mounted propellers immediately kicked into gear, at first rotating slowly, and then abruptly snapping into rapid blurring circles. The seaplane pulled away from the helipad barge, the Nazis’ bullets pinging against its bodywork. In response, Doogie rotated the Goose on the river’s surface so that it pointed at the deck of his recently abandoned Pibber. Then he jammed down on the trigger of his control stick. Instantly, a deafening burst of 20mm machinegun fire spewed out from the Gatling gun mounted on the side of the Goose. Three of the Nazis on the Pibber dropped immediately, hit square in their chests by the Goose’s powerful fire. The fourth one fell too, but of his own accord, dropping quickly out of the line of fire.

‘God, I love these twenty millimetre guns,’ Doogie said.

On the Pibber, Race had been standing just behind the small metal doorway that led back up to the wheelhouse when Doogie’s gunfire had assailed the boat. When at last the firing stopped, Race peered out of the doorway to see that only one of the original four Nazis was still alive. He was lying on the deck of the Pibber, reloading his Beretta. It was his chance. Race took a moment to steel his nerves. Then he threw open the door, levelled his SIG Sauer at the surprised Nazi, and pulled the trigger. Click! The SIG’s slide was racked back into the empty position. No bullets! Race threw the gun down in disgust and then, seeing the Nazi jam a new magazine into the grip of his own pistol, did the only thing he could think of doing. He took three bounding steps forward and hurled himself at the man. He hit him hard and both men went sliding along the deck of the speeding Pibber, towards the stern They got to their feet, and the Nazi swiped at Race backhanded, but Race ducked and the Nazi’s fist went sailing over his head. Then Race was up in the commando’s face, rushing at him with an angry right. The punch connected and the Nazi recoiled at the blow, his head flailing backwards. Race hit him again, and again, and again yelling with each punch as the Nazi staggered backwards.

‘Get—’

Punch.

‘—off—’

Punch.

‘—my—’

Punch.

‘—boat!’ With the final blow the Nazi slammed into the stern railing of the Pibber and tumbled over it, falling off the back of the boat, splashing down into its wake.

Race, his chest heaving, his knuckles bleeding, stared out after the fallen Nazi and swallowed hard. After a few moments, he saw a familiar pack of ripples converge on the soldier and he turned away as the Nazi began to scream.

Renee was creeping cautiously down a narrow corridor of the command boat, leading with her gun, when all of a sudden she heard voices coming from a room to her right. She stepped forward, peered around the doorframe. And saw a man she recognized standing in the centre of an ultra hightech laboratory. He was an older man, but huge, obese, with a fat bull-like neck and an enormous girth, his white wash and wear shirt stretched tight across his enormous belly. Renee held her breath as she stared at the old man. It was Odilo Ehrhardt. The leader of the Stormtroopers. One of the most feared Nazis of World War II. He must have been, what, seventy-five years old now, but he didn’t look a day over fifty. His classically Aryan features were still apparent, if worn with age. His white blond hair was thinning on top, revealing a series of ugly brown lesions. And his blue eyes sparkled, glistened with madness as he barked orders to his men.

‘—then find that generator and turn it off, you imbecile!’ he bellowed into a radio. He jabbed a pudgy finger at one of his commandos. ‘You, Hauptsturmfuhrer! Get Anistaze in here right now!’

The laboratory around the Nazi general was a mix of glass and chrome. Cray YMP supercomputers lined its walls, vacuum sealed chambers sat on workbenches. Lab technicians in white coats ran about in every direction. Commandos with pistols hustled out through the main glass doors that led onto the boat’s rear helipad deck.