Matthew Reilly - Temple

He snapped out of his trance, hurried over to examine the fallen Nazi leader. Ehrhardt was still alive, but barely. Blood dribbled out from his mouth, bubbled out from his chest. But his eyes still glimmered, glaring up at Race with a kind of mad delight, as if Ehrhardt were thrilled to have left him in this position—alone in a control booth in a foreign country, with nothing but a dying Nazi, a ticking Supernova, and eight drums of explosive hypergolic fuel that would kill him for certain even if he did manage to disarm the main bomb. All right, Will, stay calm.

00:02:30 00:02:29 00:02:28 Twoanda half minutes to the end of the world. Stay calm, my ass! Race scrambled across the floor to the Supernova, peered at the screen on its arming computer. YOU NOW HAVE 00:02:27 MINUTES TO ENTER DISARM CODE. ENTER DISARM CODE HERE Race stared in dismay at the timer. Sprinkler rain pounded against his head. What are you gonna do, Will? It wasn’t like he had a choice now, was it? He could die along with the rest of the world or he could try to figure out how to stop the Supernova—and die that way, too. Damn it! he thought. He wasn’t a hero. People like Renco and Van Lewen were heroes. He was just a nobody. A guy. A university professor who was always late for work, who always missed his train. Jesus, he still had outstanding parking fines to pay, for God’s sake! He wasn’t a hero. And he didn’t want to die like one either. Besides, he wouldn’t know the first thing about cracking the code on the Supernova’s arming computer. He wasn’t a hacker. No, the simple fact of the matter was that Fritz Weber was dead, and he was the only one who knew the code that would disarm the Supernova. 0002:01 00i02:00 00i01:59 Race shut his eyes, sighed. Might as well die like a hero. And so he sat up straight in front of the Supernova, and stared at its display screen with a fresh mind. All right, Will, deep breaths. Deep breaths. He looked at the screen, at the line that read: ENTER DISARM CODE HERE Okay. Eight spaces to fill. To fill with a code. Okay, so who knows the code? Weber knows the code. He was the only one who knew the code. Just then a voice exploded in Race’s ear and he almost jumped out of his skin. “Professor. What’s happening?’

It was Renée.

‘Jesus, Renée. You scared the shit out of me. What’s hap peg? Well, Ehrhardt shot Weber and then I shot Ehrhardt and now I’m sitting in front of the Supernova trying to figure out how to disarm it. Where are you?’

‘I’m back in the office overlooking the crater. Ehrhardt cut my bridge!’

‘Got any ideas on how to disarm this thing?’

“No. Weber was the only one—”

‘I know that already. Listen, I’ve got eight spaces to fill and I need to fill ‘em fast.’

‘Okay. Let me think…’

00:01:09 00:01:08 00:01:07

‘One minute, Renée.’

‘All right. All right. They said in that telephone transcript that their Supernova is based on the US model, right? That means the code must be numerical.’

‘How do you know that?’

“Because I know that the American Supernova has a numerical code.’ She must have heard his silence. “We have people inside your agencies.’

‘Oh, okay. Numerical code it is then. Eight digit code. That leaves us with about a trillion possible combinations.’

00:01:00 00:00:59 00:00:58

‘Weber was the only person who knew the code, right?’ Renée said. ‘So it has to be something to do with him.’

‘Or it could be a number that’s completely random,’ Race said dryly.

‘Unlikely,’ Renée said. ‘People who use numerical codes rarely use random numbers. They use numbers that have significance to them, numbers that they can recall by thinking of a memorable event or date or something like that. So what do we know about Weber?”

But Race wasn’t listening anymore. Something had twigged in the back of his mind as he’d been listening to Renée something about what she had just said. ‘

All right,’ Renée was saying, thinking aloud. “He was a Nazi during the Second World War. He performed experiments on human subjects.’

But Race was thinking about something else entirely. They use numbers that have significance to them, numbers that they can recall by thinking of a memorable event or date… And then it hit him. It was the New York Times article that he had read on his way to work yesterday morning—before he had arrived at the university to find a team of Special Forces troops waiting for him in his office. The article had said that thieves were finding it easier to break into people’s bank accounts because 85 per cent of people used their birthdays or some other significant date as their ATM number.

‘When was his birthday?’ Race said suddenly.

“Oh, I know that,’ Renée said. ‘I saw it in his file. It was in 1914 sometime. Oh, what was it? That’s it. August 6. August 6, 1914.”

00:00:30 00:00:29 00:00:28

‘What do you think?’ Race yelled over the roar of the indoor rain.

“It’s a possibility,” Renée said. Race thought about that for a second. He scanned the room around him as he did so— saw Ehrhardt sitting with his back up against the wall, cackling through his bloodfilled mouth.

‘No,’ Race said decisively. ‘That’s not it.’

“What?”

00:00:21 00:00:20 00:00:19

For some reason, Race was thinking with crystal clarity now.

‘It’s too simple. If he used a date at all, it would be a significant one, but one which would be in some way clever or smug. Something which shoved it to the rest of the world. He wouldn’t use something as inane as his birthday. He would use something with meaning.’ “Professor, we don’t have much time. What else is there?” Race tried to remember everything he had heard about Fritz Weber earlier. He had performed experiments on human subjects.

00:00:15 He had been tried at Nuremberg.

00:00:14 And sentenced to death.

00:00:13 And executed.

00:00:12 Executed. Executed… That’s it, Race thought.

00:00:11 But when was the date?

00:00:10 ‘Renée. Quickly. What was the date of Weber’s supposed execution?’

00:00:09 ‘Oh… November 22, 1945.’

00:00:08 November 22, 1945.

00:00:07 Do it.

00:00:06

Race leaned forward, punched in the numbers on the Supernova’s keyboard: ENTER DISARM CODE HERE 11221945 Once he had entered the code—with the sprinkler rain pounding down around him and the timer in front of him rapidly counting down to zero—Race slammed his finger down on the ‘ENTER’ key. Beep! Ehrhardt’s cackling stopped as soon as he heard the beep. Race’s face broke out into a wide grin. Oh my God, I did it… And then suddenly the Supernova’s screen changed:

DISARM CODE ENTERED. DETONATION COUNTDOWN TERMINATED AT

00:00:04 MINUTES. ALTERNATE DETONATION SEQUENCE ACTIVATED.

Alternate detonation sequence? ‘Oh, damn…“ Race breathed. His eyes flashed over to the other timer—the one that sat on top of the hydrazine drums on the other side of the room—the timer that was set permanently at 00:00:05. The second timer activated, ticked over to 00:00:04. Ehrhardt’s eyes went wide with surprise. Race’s went even wider. ‘Oh, man,’ he said. Exactly four seconds later, at the expiration of the abbreviated countdown, the hypergolic fuels in the drums mixed and the walls of the control booth blew out with shocking force.

Its windows shattered as one, blasting out into the sky in a million fragments, closely followed by a roaring, billowing, blasting ball of flames. Debris shot out in every direction—doors, pieces of the Supernova, torn segments of wooden benches, sections of floor—all dispatched with such monumental force that some of them even managed to clear the rim of the crater, landing in the thick foliage that surrounded the giant earthen mine. The cracked pieces of the two thermonuclear warheads that had comprised the Supernova landed harmlessly on the floor of the crater—the hypergolic blast far too crude to split the atoms inside them. In a moment, all that was left of the control booth was a blackened skeletal frame charred beyond recognition, hanging loosely above the mine its walls gone, its windows gone, its floor and ceiling also gone. William Race was gone too.