Matthew Reilly - Temple

‘I’m getting a reading,’ Lauren said. ‘Strong signal, very high frequency resonance.’

‘What’re the coordinates?’ Race said. ‘Bearing 270 degrees. Vertical angle 29 degrees, 58 minutes. Range 793 metres. Same as it was last time, if I remember it right,’ she said, giving Race a look.

‘You are remembering it right,’ he said.

‘You’ll also remember that we thought it was inside the temple.’

‘Yes…’ Lauren said. Race looked at her hard—harder than usual. He wondered if she had been party to Nash’s deception, decided that she probably was.

‘Do you remember why we thought it was in the temple?’ Lauren frowned.

“Well, I remember we climbed up the crater and saw the temple. Then we figured that the temple’s location matched the trajectory of the NRI. Ergo, the idol was in the temple.’

‘That’s right,’ Race said. ‘That’s exactly what we did. And that’s exactly where we went wrong.’ They all came back inside the citadel. Race grabbed a pen and a piece of paper from inside the ATV that was still parked flush against the doorway to the citadel.

‘Copeland,’ he said to the tall humourless scientist. ‘Do you think that with all this technological gadgetry you’ve got here, you could find me a regular calculator?’ Copeland found one inside one of the American containers, handed it to him.

‘All right,’ Race said, allowing the others to crowd around him and watch. He drew a picture on the sheet of paper.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘This is a picture of Vilcafor and the plateau to the west of it as seen from the side. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ Lauren said. Race drew some lines across the drawing: ‘And this is what we deduced yesterday from the reading that we got from the nucleotide resonance imager: 793 metres to the idol. Angle of inclination 29 degrees, 58 minutes but I’ll just use 30 degrees to keep it simple. The point is, when we climbed up the crater and saw the temple, we immediately thought that the temple must have matched the reading. Right?’

‘Right…’ Nash said.

‘Well we were wrong to do that,’ Race said. ‘Do you remember when we were climbing up that spiralling path around the rock tower and Lauren took a reading from her digital compass?’

“Vaguely,’ Nash said.

‘Well, I remember it. When we were level with the rock tower, standing on the outer ledge of the rope bridge, Lauren said that we had come exactly 632 metres horizontally from the village.’ He added another line to the drawing and changed the words ‘793 m” along the hypotenuse—the longest side of the triangle—to ‘x m’. 632m

‘Anybody remember doing trigonometry at school?’ he asked.

All the theoretical physicists in the citadel around him shrugged bashfully.

‘Granted, it isn’t nuclear physics,’ Race said, ‘but it does still have some uses.’

‘Oh, I see it…’ Doogie said suddenly from the back of the small crowd gathered around Race. Clearly the others didn’t.

Race said, ‘Using simple trigonometry, if you know one angle of a right angled triangle and the length of one of its sides, you will be able to determine the lengths of the other two sides by using the concepts of sines, cosines and tangents. ‘Don’t you guys remember ‘SOHCAHTOA’?

The sine of an angle equals the length of the side opposite the angle divided by the length of the hypotenuse. The cosine equals the length of the side adjacent to the angle divided by the hypotenuse. ‘In our example here, to find x—the distance between us and the temple—we would use the cosine of 30o.’ Race then wrote: cos30o = 632 ‘Therefore,’ he said, 632 X . cos30° He punched some numbers into the calculator Copeland had given him. ‘Now, according to this calculator, the cosine of 30° is 0.866. Therefore, x equals 632 divided by 0.866. And that is… 729.’ Race amended his drawing accordingly, writing feverishly. Lauren watched him in astonishment. Renée just watched him, beaming. 632m ‘Anybody see a problem here?’ Race said. Everyone was silent. Race amended his drawing one last time, finishing with a flourishing ‘X’. 632m ‘We made a mistake,” he said. ‘We assumed that because of its height the temple was 793 metres from the village and hence, that the idol was inside it. It was a good guess but it was a wrong guess. The real idol isn’t inside the temple at all. It’s beyond it, up on the plateau somewhere.’

‘But where?’ Nash said.

‘I would imagine,’ Race replied, ‘that the idol is to be found in the village of the tribe of natives who built the rope bridge up on the rock tower, the same tribe of natives that attacked our German friends here when they we about to open the temple.’

‘But what about the manuscript?’ Nash said. ‘I thought that it said both idols were inside the temple.’

‘The manuscript doesn’t tell the full story,’ Race said. ‘I can only guess that Alberto Santiago doctored the ending so that no one reading it later would know the true resting place of the idol.’ Race held up the sheet of paper with his drawing on it. ‘That’s where the idol is. Your NRI says so, so does the math.’ Nash pursed his lips, thinking. Then at last he said, ‘All right. Let’s go get it.’

The two monkeys that Race and the others had caught down by the river had gladly—or perhaps angrily—obliged them with an ample supply of urine, urine which the two screaming primates had sprayed throughout the plastic bags that Race had lined their boxes with. Put simply, the monkey urine reeked. Its sharp foul odour—the smell of ammonia— pervaded the interior of the citadel. It was no wonder the rapas despised it, Race thought as he and the others applied the warm stinking urine to their bodies. When they were all done, Van Lewen handed out weapons. Since he and Doogie were the only Green Berets left—so far as anyone knew, Buzz Cochrane was still up on the tower top—they took the two G11s. Nash, Race and Renée were given M16s, complete with grappling hooks. Race, still dressed in his black Nazi breastplate and his blue baseball cap, hung his grappling hook from his belt. Copeland and Lauren were each given SIGSauer P228 semiautomatic pistols. Krauss and Lauren, the ordinary scientists, went gunless. Once everyone was ready, Van Lewen stepped through the doorway of the citadel and into the ATV. Then he made his way to the rear of the all terrain vehicle and opened the popup hatch. His G11 emerged first. Then slowly, Van Lewen peered out from the open hatch and scanned the area. Immediately, his eyes went wide. The big eight wheeled vehicle was surrounded by rapas. Their tails coiled and uncoiled behind their massive bodies. Their yellow eyes bored into him, hard and cold. Van Lewen counted twelve of them, just standing there in the street, watching him. Then all of a sudden, the nearest cat snorted—smelled the urine—and immediately reeled away from the ATV. One after the other, the other cats did the same, turning away from the armoured vehicle and forming a wide circle around it. Van Lewen stepped out onto the street, his gun up. One by one, the others came out behind him, Race among them. Like everyone else, he moved slowly, cautiously, staring at the cats while he kept his finger poised on the trigger of his M16. It was a truly bizarre sensation, a kind of standoff. Men armed with guns, the cats armed with sheer natural aggression. Despite their rifles and their pistols, Race was certain that the rapas could take them all down easily if they dared to fire a shot. But the cats did not attack. It was as if the humans were protected from them by some kind of invisible wall—a wall which the rapas simply refused to cross. Rather, they just followed Race and the others at a safe distance, paralleling them as they made their way toward the riverside path. Christ, they’re huge! Race thought, as he made his way through the ranks of massive black cats. The last time he had seen them up close he had been on the other side of the Humvee’s glass windows, but now— now that they were all around him, with no windows or doors separating them from him—they looked twice as big. He could hear their breathing. It was just as Alberto Santiago had described it—a deep chested braying sound like that of a horse. The sound of a powerful beast.