Matthew Reilly - Temple

Race faced forward, away from the gun, bit his lip and shut his eyes, and gave in to the hopelessness of his situation, waited for the end. It came quickly. Blam! Nothing happened. Race’s eyes were still closed. The Gll had gone off, but for some reason, some bizarre reason, his head was still where it was supposed to be. And then suddenly whump! a body fell facedown into the mud right next to his kneeling frame.

Race opened his eyes and peered behind him and saw Craterface standing there, with his Gll aimed at the spot where the other Nazi’s head had been only moments ago. The dead Nazi now lay face down in the mud with an ugly soup of blood and brains oozing out from a hole in the back of his head.

‘Uli,’ Renee said, standing up and running over to Craterface. She hugged him warmly.

Race’s mind spun. Uli… ? Then Renee slapped the big pockfaced Nazi hard on the chest.

‘Honestly, could you have waited any longer? I was almost jumping out of my skin there.’

‘I’m sorry, Renee,’ Craterface Uli said. ‘I had to wait until we were far enough from the boathouse. Otherwise the others would have known.’

Race turned suddenly to face the man named Uli. ‘You’re BKA,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ the big man said, smiling.

‘And your good intentions saved your life, Professor William Race of New York University. In your bid to save Renee on the catamaran, you tackled the right man. If I’d been a real Nazi, I would have put a bullet in your brain right away. My name is Special Agent Uli Pieck, but around here I am known as Unterscharfuhrer Uli Kahr.’

And then suddenly in Race’s mind, it all made sense. ‘The manuscript,’ Race said. ‘You’re the one who got the BKA their copy of the manuscript.’

‘That’s right,’ Uli said, impressed.

Race recalled Karl Schroeder telling Frank Nash about the BKA’s plan to beat the Nazis to the idol. He remembered Schroeder’s words clearly: ‘To do that, we obtained a copy of the Santiago Manuscript and used it to find our way here.’ It was only now, though, that Race realized he should have known from that moment that the BKA had a man inside the Stormtrooper organization. The BKA’s copy of the manuscript was a Xerox of the actual Santiago Manuscript. But the actual Santiago Manuscript had been stolen from the San Sebastian Abbey in the French Pyrenees several days earlier by the Stormtroopers. Hence, the Xerox of the manuscript that the BKA had in their possession must have been sent to them by someone within the Nazi organization. A spy. Uli.

‘Come on,’ Uli said, hurrying over to the body of the fallen Nazi. He quickly stripped the dead man of his weapons, tossing his G11 and a couple of conventional hand grenades to Renee, and then throwing the Nazi’s black Kevlar breastplate and Glock20 pistol to Race. ‘Hurry, quickly, we have to stop Ehrhardt before he arms the Supernova!’

Heinrich Anistaze and Odilo Ehrhardt were standing in one of the glass enclosed offices inside the boathouse, surrounded by a bank of radio and communications equipment. In front of them stood Dr Fritz Weber, the former member of Adolf Hider’s atomic bomb project, the Nazi scientist who during World War II had conducted experiments on human subjects and been sentenced to death for it. Although his body was seventy-nine years old, hunchbacked and gnarled, his mind was as alive as ever. Weber held the Incan idol out in front of him.

‘It’s beautiful,’ he said. At seventy-nine, Fritz Weber was two years older than Ehrhardt and two feet shorter. He was a small bespectacled man with hard appraising eyes and a wild Einsteinian mane of hair that flowed all the way down to his shoulders.

‘What word from the European and American governments?’ Ehrhardt asked him.

‘The Germans and the Americans both asked for more time to raise the money. Nothing from the others,’ Weber said. ‘It’s a ruse, a standard negotiator’s stalling tactic. They’re trying to buy more time until they know for sure that their own teams haven’t found the idol first.’

‘Then let’s show them who has the idol,’ Ehrhardt growled. He turned to face Anistaze. ‘Make a digital image of the idol now. Time it and date it and then feed it into the computer and send it to Bonn and Washington direct. Tell the presidents that the device has been armed and set to detonate in exactly thirty minutes. It will only be disarmed when we have confirmation of the transfer of one hundred billion dollars into our account in Zurich within that time.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Anistaze said, crossing the room to switch on a digital camera.

‘Doctor Weber,’ Ehrhardt said.

‘Yes, Oberstgruppenfuhrer?’

‘When the Obergruppenfuhrer is finished taking the digital image, I want you to take the idol to the control booth and arm the Supernova immediately. Set a thirty minute countdown and start the clock.’

‘Yes, Oberstgruppenfuhrer.’

Race, Renee and Uli hurried back up the dirt path towards the boathouse. Uli and Renee carried Glls, Race the small Glockthat Uli had taken from the dead Nazi at the refuse pit. He also now wore the dead Nazi’s black Kevlar breastplate over his Tshirt. He hadn’t really noticed the Nazis’ body armour before. But now, now that he was wearing it, he looked at it more closely. First of all, it was incredibly light and easy to wear. It didn’t inhibit his movement at all. Secondly, however, he noticed a strange A shaped unit attached to the back of the breastplate, covering his shoulder blades. This was also light, and like a spoiler on a sports car, it had been smoothly incorporated into the design of the Kevlar breastplate so as not to ruin its slick aerodynamic appearance. As always, and perhaps incongruously with his high tech body armour, Race was still wearing his damn Yankees cap.

‘Digital image is complete,’ Anistaze said from over by the bank of radio and electronic equipment. ‘Sending it now.’

Ehrhardt turned to Weber. ‘Arm the Supernova.’

Weber immediately snatched up the idol and, with Ehrhardt in tow, quickly headed out of the office.

‘Over there!’ Renee yelled, pointing at one of the two incredibly long suspension bridges that connected the riverside buildings to the control booth in the centre of the crater. Race looked out over the mine and saw two tiny figures one large and fat, the other small and dressed in a white lab coat bouncing across the modern steelcabled bridge. The smaller man was carrying something wedged underneath his arm. An object wrapped inside a purple cloth. The idol. Uli and Renee left the dirt path, plunged into a section of low foliage, heading in the direction of the crater. Race followed them. Seconds later, the three of them arrived at the rim of the gigantic mine and looked out over it.

‘It’s Ehrhardt and Weber,’ Uli said. ‘They’re taking the idol to the Supernova.’

‘What do we do?’ Race asked.

Uli said, ‘The Supernova is inside the control booth hanging over the mine. There are only two bridges that lead out to it that one from the north, and the other one from the south. Somehow we have to get to that cabin and disarm the Supernova.’

‘But how do we do that?’

‘To disarm the device,’ Uli said, ‘you have to enter a code into the arming computer.’

‘What’s the code?’

‘I don’t know,’ Uli said sadly. ‘No one knows. No one except Fritz Weber. He designed the device, so he’s the only one who knows the disarming code.’

‘Great,’ Race said.

Uli turned. ‘Okay now, listen, this is how I see it. I am the only one of us who can get to the control booth. If they see either of you running down one of the cable bridges, they’ll drop them immediately and isolate the booth. Then, if they don’t get their money, they’ll blow the Supernova.