Matthew Reilly - Temple

‘Oh, fuck …’ Schroeder closed his eyes. It would be up to Renee and the American professor now. He hoped they succeeded. He hoped the two American soldiers were far enough ahead of his boat, out of the blast radius. He hoped … Schroeder sighed a final time, and as he did so he let go of the release button and the M 22 isotopic charge went off in all its glory.

The world shook. A massive white hot explosion blasted out from the Rigid Raider and shot out in every direction. It shot into the trees on either side of the river, incinerating them in an instant, blasting them to nothing. It shot under the river’s surface, a bubbling, frothing wall of heat shooting downwards at unimaginable speed, boiling the water on contact, killing anything in its path as it raced downwards like a speeding comet. It shot into the sky, high into the sky, flaring white like the flashbulb on a camera, an all consuming monumental flash that must have been visible from space. Worst of all, the expanding wall of whitehot light shot along the river’s surface, chasing after the remainder of the fleet. Van Lewen’s Scarab and Doogie’s Goose skipped across the water at the head of the fleet out in front of the gargantuan wave of white light eating up the river behind them. To a certain extent, they’d been lucky. They had been a good three hundred yards ahead of Schroeder’s Rigid Raider when the M22 charge had gone off. The other boats the last helipad barge, the two remaining Pibbers and the command boat itself hadn’t.

And now the expanding wall of whitehot light loomed above them like some immense mythological monster, dwarfing them. And then suddenly, in an instant, the gigantic wall of white consumed the helipad barge and the Pibbers, detonating them on contact before swallowing them whole and continuing on its voracious charge forward. Its next target was the command boat. Like a lumbering rhino trying to outrun a runaway Mack truck, the massive catamaran powered forward in a desperate attempt to get clear of the oncoming wall of searing hot energy. But the blast was just too fast, too powerful. As it had done with the barge and the Pibbers before it, the expanding wall of light reached out and snatched the command boat in its clutches, yanking it into its mass, obliterating the enormous craft in a single fiery instant. And then as quickly as it had risen, the massive wall of light began to subside and dissipate. Soon it lost all of its forward momentum and sank back into the distance. Van Lewen took a final look back at the singed and smoking jungle river behind him. He saw a wispy black smoke cloud rising into the sky above the treetops but it was broken up quickly by the sheets of subtropical rain that had just begun to fall. It was then that he looked about himself and realized that his Scarab and Doogie’s Goose were the only vessels left on the river. In fact, the only other remnant of the chase just concluded was a small white speck disappearing over the trees ahead of them. The white Bell Jet Ranger helicopter.

FIFTH MACHINATION

Tuesday, January 5, 1815 hours THE MADRE DE DIOS GOLDMINE

‘Who are you?’ Odilo Ehrhardt demanded in German, slapping Renee hard across her face.

‘I told you,’ she yelled back at him. ‘My name is Renee Becker and I am a special agent with the Bundes Kriminal Amt?

The white helicopter was now flying low over the river, heading east. Race and Renee sat in the rear compartment, handcuffed. Before them sat Ehrhardt, Anistaze and Craterface. A lone pilot was up front flying the chopper.

Ehrhardt turned to face Race. ‘So who, then, are you?’

‘He’s American—’ Renee said.

Ehrhardt hit her again. Hard. ‘I wasn’t addressing you.’

He turned back to Race. ‘Now, who are you? FBI? Or are you Navy? A SEAL team, perhaps hell, you must be SEALs to take out our boats like that.’

‘We’re DARPA,’ Race said.

Ehrhardt frowned. Then he began to chuckle softly. ‘No, you’re not,’ he said, leaning forward, sticking his round fleshy face right in front of Race’s.

Race thought he was going to be sick. Ehrhardt was disgusting, vile, obese to the point of being grotesque, reeking of body odour and possessed of an evil moonlike face. A thin string of saliva smacked between his lips when he spoke and his breath smelled like horseshit.

‘I’m working with Doctor Frank Nash,’ Race said, trying desperately to remain calm. ‘He’s a retired Army colonel working with the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency in conjunction with members of the United States Army.’

‘Frank Nash, eh?’ Ehrhardt said, expelling his foul, rancid breath all over Race’s face.

‘That’s right.’

‘And who, then, might you be, Little Man Trying To Be So Brave?’ he said, as he lifted Race’s Yankees cap off his head.

‘My name is William Race,’ Race said, grabbing his cap with his cuffed hands. ‘I’m a professor of ancient languages at New York University.’

‘Ah,’ Ehrhardt said, nodding. ‘So you are the one they brought along to translate the manuscript. Very good, very good. Before I have you killed, Mister William Race, professor of ancient languages at New York University, I would like to correct a certain misimpression that you appear to possess.’

‘And what is that?’

‘Frank Nash is not with DARPA.’

‘What?’ Race said, frowning.

‘And he most certainly is not a retired Army colonel, either. On the contrary, he is most active indeed. For your information, Colonel Francis K. Nash is the head of the United States Army’s Special Projects Unit.’

‘What?’ Race didn’t get it. Why would Nash say he was DARPA when in fact he wasn’t?

‘Ahha!’ Ehrhardt cackled, clapping his hands. ‘I love to see the look of betrayal on a man’s face just before he is about to die.’

Race was thoroughly confused now. He didn’t know what to think. Even if Nash wasn’t with DARPA, what did it matter? The Supernova was an Army project, and Nash was with Army Special Projects. Unless … Ehrhardt turned to Anistaze.

‘So. The American Army is here, too. What do you say about that?’

‘There must be another mole,’ Anistaze said, ignoring Race and Renee entirely.

‘In DARPA?’ Ehrhardt said.

Anistaze nodded. ‘We know of the link to the American terrorist group, but we didn’t know about this—’

‘Bah!’ Ehrhardt waved his hand dismissively. ‘It is of no importance now, because it is we who have the idol.’

‘What do you hope to achieve by all this?’ Renee asked defiantly. ‘Do you want to destroy the world?’

Ehrhardt smiled at her indulgently. ‘I do not want to destroy the world, Fraulein Becker. Far from it. I want to rebuild it. Reorder it, the way it should be.’

‘With what? One hundred billion dollars. Is that what this is all about? Money?’

‘My dear Fraulein Becker, is that the limit of your vision? Money. This is not about money. It is about what money can do. One hundred billion dollars bah it is nothing. It is but a means to an end.’

‘And what is the end?’

Ehrhardt’s eyes narrowed. ‘One hundred billion dollars will buy me a new world.’

‘A new world?’

‘Brave Fraulein Becker, what do you think I want? A new country, perhaps? To pursue the tired old Nazi goal of establishing an Aryan nation with the Herrenvolk at the head, and the Untermenschen beneath them? Bah!’

‘What is it that you want, then? How can you buy yourself a new world?’

‘By dumping one hundred billion US dollars on world financial markets at the bargain price of one cent apiece.’

‘What?’ Renee said.

‘The American economy is in a most precarious situation, the most precarious situation it has found itself in fifty years. Accumulated foreign debt stands at approximately eight hundred and thirty billion dollars, gross budget deficits occur annually. But what the United States depends on through all of this is a robust currency with which it will repay its debts in the future. ‘But if the value of that currency were to fall dramatically, say, to levels one quarter of its current strength, then the United States would be unable to repay those debts. ‘It would be bankrupt, its dollar worthless. What I intend to do with my hundred billion dollars is cripple the American economy.’