Matthew Reilly - Temple

Ehrhardt’s eyes gleamed as he raved. ‘Since the Second World War this world has been an American world, has been force fed American culture, made to endure American trade dominance and the ruthless policy of economic slavery conducted and condoned by the American government. I have determined that the dumping of one hundred billion US dollars on world markets would be enough to cripple the American dollar beyond recoverable limits. American corporations will be worth nothing. The American people will not have the purchasing power to buy anything, because their currency will not be worth the paper it’s written on. The United States will become the world’s beggar and the world will start anew. That is what I am doing, Fraulein Becker. I am buying myself a new world.’

Race couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘You can’t possibly be serious—’ he said.

‘No?’ Ehrhardt said. ‘Look at George Soros. In 1997, the Prime Minister of Malaysia publicly blamed Soros for causing the Asian economic crisis by dumping vast sums of Asian currencies. And this was one man, one man, and he didn’t even have a tenth of the wealth that I am willing to utilize. But then, of course, I am going after a much bigger fish.’

‘What if they won’t give you the money?’ Renee said.

‘They will. Because I am the only man on earth who possesses an operational Supernova.’

‘But what if they don’t?’

‘Then I will detonate the device,’ Ehrhardt said simply.

The Nazi general turned in his seat and peered out through the forward windscreen of the chopper. Race and Renee followed his gaze. A truly spectacular sight met them. They saw the Amazon rainforest stretching away to the horizon, a vast blanket of limitless unending green. In the near distance, however, there was a break in the blanket of green an enormous brown coneshaped crater buried in the earth. It was situated right on the river, and it was massive, at least half a mile in diameter. Long gently sloping trucktrails wound their way down to the bottom of the gigantic earthen crater. Huge floodlights stood on its rim, illuminating it like a football stadium in the dim early evening light. In the centre of the crater, suspended high above it by a web of tightly stretched cables, was a large white boxshaped cabin, a control booth of some sort, possessed of wide oblong windows on all four of its sides. The only route of access to the control booth was via two long drooping suspension bridges that spanned the crater from opposite ends from the north and the south. Each bridge was at least four hundred yards long and constructed of thick steel cables. It was the goldmine. The Madre de Dios goldmine.

The Bell Jet Ranger helicopter landed on a pontoon mounted helipad that floated on the river’s surface not far from the edge of the massive open cut mine. The mine itself lay directly to the south of the Alto Purus River, and it was connected to it by a collection of decrepit old buildings three hulking warehouse like structures that were dreadfully worn with age. The largest jutted out over the river, resting on stilts. A series of wide garage style doors lined its length, enabling boats and seaplanes to be stored inside it. In years gone by, Race guessed, this must have been where the mining company’s boats and planes had come to be loaded up with gold. Today, however, it performed a different task. It allowed the Nazis to hide their armada of boats, helicopters and seaplanes from the prying eyes of America’s spy satellites. No sooner had the chopper landed on the floating helipad than the pilot hit a switch. Immediately, the rusty garage door to the helicopter’s left opened, and the square pontoon on which the chopper sat began to be pulled across the water towards it by some underwater cable mechanism. Race looked up as the chopper was pulled slowly inside the big warehouse.

A second later the sky above him abruptly disappeared, replaced by the interior of the warehouse’s roof, a complex latticework of rusting steel girders and dark wooden crossbeams.

Race stared at the warehouse all around him. It was positively huge an enormous enclosed space, about the size of an aeroplane hangar, the whole cavernous space illuminated by coneshaped halogen lights that were attached to the ceiling’s girders. The ‘floor’ of the warehouse, however, was quite unusual. It was the river’s surface. A long fingerlike deck way stretched out over the water, branching out at about a dozen intervals into smaller decks that ran at right angles to it mooring slots for the boats and planes that came to the mine to load up with gold. A long, wide conveyor belt ran at ground level for the length of the central deck way. It rose out of a large square hole in the wall at the landward end of the hangar and looped back at the far end of the deck way. Race guessed that the landward end of the conveyor belt was to be found somewhere deep within the coneshaped mine itself, probably on a loading ledge somewhere, or maybe even at the very bottom of the crater. The way he figured it, gold was loaded onto the conveyor belt down in the mine, then the conveyor belt lifted it up through the long tunnel cut into the earth, until it appeared here in the warehouse and was loaded onto a boat or plane. The chopper’s slowmoving pontoon came to a halt inside one of the mooring slots, its slowing rotor blades hanging marginally out over the conveyor belt, glinting in the glare of the halogen lights. From his seat in the back of the chopper, Race saw four men step out from a glass enclosed office at the landward end of the warehouse. Three of them wore white lab coats scientists. The fourth wore combat fatigues and carried a Gll assault rifle a soldier. One of the three scientists, Race saw, was much smaller than the other two, and infinitely older. He was a tiny little man, bent with age, with long silver hair and huge round eyes that were magnified by a pair of thick spectacles. Race guessed that this was Dr Fritz Weber, the brilliant Nazi scientist Schroeder and Nash had talked about earlier. Apart from the four men standing in front of the glass walled office, the rest of the warehouse was completely deserted. There’s no one else here, Race thought. The Nazis must have taken everyone they had to Vilcafor to get the idol. The four men here, plus Anistaze, Ehrhardt, Craterface and the pilot, were all they had left.

‘Unterscharfuhrer Ehrhardt said to Craterface as the chopper beneath them jolted to a halt, ‘if you would be so kind, please take Agent Becker and Professor Race out to the refuse pit. Then shoot them and bury them.

Race and Renee were shoved down a dirt path that ran westward through the rainforest away from the enormous riverside warehouses. Behind them, Craterface and the other Nazi soldier, the only other soldier at the mine, marshalled them forward with their G1 Is.

‘Any idea how we’re going to get out of this?’ Race asked Renee as they walked.

‘None at all,’ she replied coolly. ‘I thought you might have a plan or something. You know, something hidden up your sleeve.’

‘No plan.’

‘So we’re going to die?’

‘It looks that way.’

They rounded a bend in the path and Race winced as an overwhelmingly putrid smell assaulted his senses. A moment later, the four of them came to the end of the path and Race saw a pile of garbage scattered among the trees in front of them. It stretched away for about fifty yards old tyres, rotting piles of discarded food and waste, gnarled pieces of metal, even a few animal carcasses.

The refuse pit. ‘On your knees, both of you,’ Craterface growled. They dropped to their knees.

‘Hands on your heads.’ They laced their fingers behind their heads. Chick, chick! Race heard the other Nazi release the safety on his Gll. The reset EMP having sunk with Schroeder, the Glls were now fully operational again. Then he heard him step forward through the mud behind him, felt him place the barrel of the assault rifle against the back of his head. This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen, his mind screamed. It’s going too fast. Aren’t they supposed to dawdle or something? Give you a chance … a chance to get—