Matthew Reilly - Temple

‘But they’re expecting me back soon, believing that I have killed the two of you. When I get back, I will try to get to the control booth. Then I will try to … persuade … Weber to disarm the device.’

‘What do we do in the meantime?’ Race asked.

‘For this to work,’ Uli said, ‘I must be able to deal with Weber alone. I need you two to take out Anistaze and the remaining men in the boathouse.’

Exactly seven hundred feet above the floor of the mine, Dr Fritz Weber was punching buttons on a computer console. Beside him, a laser cutting device was carefully going to work on the thyrium idol inside a vacuum sealed chamber. Behind Weber stood Ehrhardt. And behind Ehrhardt, standing in the exact centre of the control booth, stood a very imposing, six foot tall silver and glass device. Two thermonuclear warheads, each approximately three feet in height and roughly conical in shape, were positioned inside a clear glass cylinder. They were arranged in what was known as an ‘hourglass formation’, the upper warhead pointing downwards, the lower one pointing upwards, so that the whole device looked like an enormous egg timer. In between the two warheads, at the throat of the hourglass, sat a skeletal frame made of titanium into which a subcritical mass of thyrium would be placed. It was the Supernova. A pair of cylindrical leadlined containers each the size of an ordinary garbage bin sat beside the device. They were warhead capsules monumentally strong, radiation proof containers that were used to transport nuclear warheads in safety. Now, as Weber knew, a conventional nuclear weapon required about four and a half pounds of plutonium. The Supernova, on the other hand, according to his calculations, would require much less than that, only a quarter of a pound of thyrium. Which was why now, with the aid of two Cray YMP supercomputers and a high-powered laser beam that could cut to within a thousandth of a millimetre, he was extracting a small cylindrical section of thyrium from the idol.

Nuclear science had come a long way since J. Robert Oppenheimer’s masterwork at Los Alamos in the 1940s. With the aid of multi tasking supercomputers like the two Crays, complex mathematical equations regarding the size, mass and force ratios of the radioactive core could be finished in minutes. Inert gas purification, proton enrichment and alpha-wave augmentation could all be done simultaneously. And the mathematics of it all the crucial part, the part that had taken Oppenheimer and his band of masterminds six whole years to master with the aid of the most primitive computers could be done by the YMPs in seconds. In truth, the hardest part for Weber had been the actual construction of the device itself. Even with the aid of the supercomputers, it had still taken him more than two years to build. While the laser cut through the stone in accordance with a preset weight for volume ratio based on the atomic weight of thyrium, Weber entered some complex mathematical formulae on one of the nearby supercomputers. Moments later, the laser cutter beeped loudly and reverted to standby mode. It was done. Weber came over, flicked off the laser cutter. Then, using a robotic arm, human arms being too inexact for such a task, he extracted the small cylindrical section of thyrium from the base of the idol. The section of thyrium was then placed inside a vacuum sealed chamber and bombarded with uranium atoms and alpha waves, turning it into a subcritical mass of the most potent substance ever to have existed on earth. Moments later, the robotic arm carried the entire chamber over to the Supernova where with the utmost precision it slid the chamber, with the subcritical mass of thyrium inside it, into the titanium frame that was suspended in between the two thermonuclear warheads. The Supernova was complete. The subcritical mass of thyrium now sat horizontally in its vacuum sealed throne between the two warheads, looking for all the world as if it contained the power of God. The thing was, it did. Screens all around the control booth scrolled out massive amounts of data feed. On one screen, under the heading DUAL AXIS RADIOGRAPHIC HYDRODYNAMIC TEMPLE FACILITY a never ending series of ones and zeroes scrolled downwards. Weber ignored them, began typing on the computer keyboard that was attached to the front of the Supernova. A prompt appeared on the screen: INSERT ARMING CODE. Weber did so.

SUPERNOVA ARMED. Weber typed: INITIALIZE TIMER DETONATION SEQUENCE. TIMER DETONATION SEQUENCE INITIALIZED.

INSERT TIMER DURATION.

Weber typed: 00:30:00. The screen changed instantly. YOU NOW HAVE 00:30:00 MINUTES TO ENTER DISARM CODE. ENTER DISARM CODE HERE Weber paused as he gazed at the screen, took a slow, deep breath. Then he slammed his finger down on the ENTER key.

00:29:59

00:29:58

00:29:57

‘Where is Unterscharfuhrer Kahr?’ Heinrich Anistaze asked nobody in particular as he peered out from the boathouse office at the immense earthen crater outside. ‘He should have been back by now.’

Anistaze turned. ‘You,’ he said, tossing a radio to one of the two lab coatwearing technicians standing at a computer terminal nearby. ‘Go to the pit and see what is taking the Unterscharfuhrer so long.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Renee and Race slammed into the boathouse wall together. Only moments earlier, Uli had left them. He had headed off down the side of the massive boathouse in the direction of the crater and the northern cable bridge. Renee peered round the wide garage door next to her. The interior of the enormous boathouse was clear, in particular, the wide section of floor between the glass offices to her right and the mooring slots on her left. Nothing stirred. There wasn’t a soul in sight. She nodded to Race. Ready? Race acknowledged her signal by gripping his Glock a little more tightly. Ready. Then without a word Renee quickly ducked around the doorway, her Gll held high, pressed against her shoulder. Race made to follow her, but as he did so, another door behind him suddenly burst open and he dropped to the ground in an instant, taking cover behind an old oil barrel. A young Nazi technician, dressed in a white lab coat and holding a radio awkwardly in his hand, rushed out through the newly opened door and hurried off down the path towards the refuse pit. Race’s eyes went wide. He was going to the refuse pit, where he would find one dead Nazi and nothing else.

‘Shit,’ Race said.

‘Uli . . ‘ Decision time. He could go after the technician and then do what? Kill him in cold blood? Despite all that he had been through so far, Race wasn’t sure if he could actually do that, kill a man. On the other hand, he could warn Uli. Yes, that was better, much better. And so at that moment, instead of following Renee into the boathouse, Race headed off down the side of the big warehouse like building in the direction of the crater and Uli. Uli came to the northern cable bridge. It stretched away from him into the distance, swooping fearlessly over the vertiginous seven hundred foot drop, its steel threaded handrails converging like a pair of railroad tracks disappearing into the distance, ending as tiny specks at the doorway to the control booth four hundred yards away.

‘Unterscharfuhrer,’ a voice said suddenly from behind him. Uli spun. And found himself standing before Heinrich Anistaze himself.

‘What are you doing?’ Anistaze demanded. ‘I was going to see if the Oberstgruppenfuhrer and Doctor Weber required any assistance over in the control booth,’ Uli answered, perhaps a little too quickly.

‘Have you eliminated the two prisoners?’

‘Yes, sir, I have.’

‘Where is Dieter?’ Anistaze asked.

‘He, uh, had to go to the WC,’ Uli lied.

At that exact moment, the lab technician Anistaze had sent to the refuse pit arrived there. He saw Dieter’s body immediately, lying face down in the mud, blood and brains seeping out from the hole in the back of its head. No Americans. No Uli, either. The lab technician lifted his radio to his lips.