Temple
Page 18
“And then, three days ago—the same day as the raid on the French monastery—our surveillance team in Chile picked up this.”
Schroeder pulled out a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket and handed it to Nash.
“It’s a transcript of a telephone conversation that was made from a cellular phone somewhere in Peru to the main laboratory at Colonia Alemania three days ago,” Schroeder said.
Nash showed the German transcript to Race, who translated it aloud.
VOICE 1: —ase of operations has been established—rest of the—will be—mine—
VOICE 2: —about the device?—ready?
VOICE 1: —have adopted hourglass formation based on the American model—two nuclear detonators mounted above and below a titanium-alloy inner chamber. Field tests indicate that—device—operational. All we need now—the thyrium.
VOICE 2: —don’t worry, Anistaze’s taking care of that—
VOICE 1: What about the message?
VOICE 2: —will go out as soon as we get the idol—to every Prime Minister and President in the EU—plus the President of the United States via internal emergency hotline—ransom will be one hundred billion dollars U.S.—or else we detonate the device . . .
Nash stared at the transcript in shock.
Everyone else was silent.
Race gazed at the words: one hundred billion dollars U.S., or else we detonate the device.
Jesus H. Christ
Nash turned to Schroeder. “So what have you done about all this?”
“We have executed a two-pronged plan,” the German said. “Two separate missions, each designed to reinforce the other should either of them fail.
“Mission One was to get the thyrium idol before the Nazis did. To do that, we obtained a copy of the Santiago Manuscript and used it to find our way here. And as it happened, we beat the Stormtroopers—but we never expected to find those things inside the temple.”
As he listened to Schroeder speak, something twigged in the back of Race’s mind, something about what the German agent had just said. Something that wasn’t quite right
He shook it off, put it to the back of his mind.
“And the second part of the mission?” Nash said.
“Take out Colonia Alemania,” Schroeder said. “After we intercepted that telephone conversation three days ago, we opened entreaties with the new Chilean government for a warrant that would allow BKA agents to search Colonia Alemania in co-ordination with Chilean authorities.”
“And?”
“We got it If everything has gone according to plan, BKA agents and the Chilean National Guard are right this minute storming the grounds of Colonia Alemania and seizing the Stormtroopers’ Supernova. I’m hoping to receive a radio update from them any minute now.”
At that very same moment six hundred miles away, a ten-ton truck owned by the Chilean National Guard exploded through the gates of Colonia Alemania.
A stream of olive-skinned Chilean soldiers rushed through the gates behind the rampaging truck. A dozen German agents dressed in blue assault helmets and SWAT gear hurried into the compound after them.
Colonia Alemania was a large estate, easily twenty hectares in size. Its grassy green pastures contrasted sharply with Chile’s barren brown hills. Its Bavarian-style cottages and idyllic blue lakes were an oddly peaceful sight in what was an otherwise harsh and dry land.
Doors were smashed open and windows exploded inward as the National Guardsmen entered every building in the estate. Their main target was the Barracks Hall—a large, hangarlike building in the center of the compound.
Minutes later, the doors to the Barracks Hall were blasted open and a horde of National Guardsmen and BKA agents rushed into the building.
And then they stopped.
Row upon row of empty bunk beds stretched away from them for the length of the enormous hall. Each bed was crisply made and perfectly aligned with the bunk next to it. It looked like an army barracks.
The only problem was, it was empty.
Reports came in quickly from the rest of the compound.
The whole compound was empty.
Colonia Alemania was completely deserted.
In one of the laboratory buildings adjoining the Barracks Hall, two German tech agents waved small Geiger counter wands in front of them, measuring the radioactivity in the air. Their small detection units clattered loudly.
The two agents entered the compound’s main laboratory and their Geiger counters instantly went into the red.
“All units, this is Lab Team, we are detecting high trace quantities of uranium and plutonium in the primary laboratory—”
The first agent came to a door that opened onto a glass-walled office of some kind.
He pointed his wand at the closed door—
—and his Geiger counter went off the charts.
He exchanged a quick look with his partner. Then he pushed open the door, tripping the wire.
The explosion that ripped through Colonia Alemania was absolutely devastating.
It rocked the world.
A pulse of blinding white light shot out laterally in every direction, obliterating everything in its path—whole barns blew out instantly into a billion matchsticks, concrete silos were shattered in a millisecond, everything within a five-hundred-yard radius of the Barracks Hall was vaporized—including the one hundred and fifty Chilean National Guardsmen and the twelve BKA agents.
When they were interviewed about it in the days to come, the inhabitants of the surrounding villages would say that it had looked like a sudden flare of lightning on the horizon, followed by an enormous plume of black smoke that rose high into the sky in the shape of a gigantic mushroom.
But they were simple folk, peasants.
They didn’t know that they were describing a thermonuclear explosion.
Back in Vilcafor, Nash ordered the Green Berets to bring the German team’s radio satellite equipment out onto the main street.
“Let’s see what your people in Chile have got to say,” he said to Schroeder.
Schroeder popped the lid on the portable radio console and began typing something quickly on its all-weather keyboard. Nash, Scott and the Green Berets crowded around him, watching the console’s screen intently.
Race stood outside the circle, excluded yet again.
“How are you feeling?” a woman’s voice said suddenly from behind him.
He turned, half-expecting to see Lauren, but instead found himself looking into the dazzling blue eyes of the German woman.
She was small, petite—and seriously cute. She stood with her hands resting lazily on her hips and a smile that disarmed Race completely.
She had a small button nose and short blond hair, and liberal doses of mud splotched all over her face, T-shirt and jeans. She wore a bulletproof vest over her white T-shirt and a black synthetic holster on her hip—identical to the one Schroeder wore. Like Schroeder’s, her holster was now empty.
“How is your head feeling?” she asked. She had a slight German accent. Race liked it.
“It hurts,” he said.
“It should,” she said, coming over and touching his brow. “I think you suffered a minor concussion when your Humvee crashed into that helicopter. All of your subsequent acts of derring-do on top of the chopper must have been the work of pure adrenaline.”
“You mean I’m not a hero?” Race said. “You’re saying it was just the adrenaline talking?”
She smiled at him, a beautiful smile. “Wait here,” she said, “I have some codeine in my medicine pack. It’ll help your headache.”
She moved off toward the ATV.
“Hey . . .” Race said. “What’s your name?”
She smiled at him again. That cute, nymphlike smile.
“My name is Renée Becker. I am a special agent with the BKA.”
“I’ve got it” Schroeder said suddenly from over by the portable radio.
Race went over to the small group gathered arou
nd the radio console.
Looking over Nash’s shoulder, he saw a list printed on the screen in German. He translated it in his head. It read:180
COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITE TRANSMISSION LOG 44-76/BKA32
NO.
TIME
DATE
SOURCE
SUMMARY
1
4:1.99
1930
BKAHQ
PERU TEAM REPORT STATUS
2
4:1.99
1950
EXT SOURCE
SIGNATURE UHF SIGNAL
3
4:1.99
2230
BKAHQ
PERU TEAM REPORT STATUS
4
5:1.99
0130
BKAHQ
PERU TEAM REPORT STATUS
5
5:1.99
0430
BKAHQ
PERU TEAM REPORT STATUS
6
5:1.99
0716
FIELD (CHILE)
ARRIVED SANTIAGO, HEADING
FOR COLONIA ALEMANIA
7
5:1.99
0730
BKAHQ
PERU TEAM REPORT STATUS
8
5:1.99
0958
FIELD (CHILE)
HAVE ARRIVED COLONIA
ALEMANIA; BEGINNING
SURVEILLANCE
9
5:1.99
1030
BKAHQ
PERU TEAM REPORT STATUS
10
5:1.99
1037
FIELD (CHILE)
CHILE TEAM URGENT SIGNAL;
CHILE TEAM URGENT SIGNAL
11
5:1.99
1051
BKAHQ
PERU TEAM REPORT
IMMEDIATELY
Race frowned.
It was a list of every communication signal that had been picked up by the BKA’s Peruvian field team.
By the looks of it, they had received “status update” requests from BKA headquarters every three hours from 7:30 last night, plus a few intermittent messages from the other BKA team in Chile.
The tenth message, however—one of the messages from the other team in Chile—seized Race’s attention. It screamed with the German word dringendes—“urgent.”
Schroeder saw it too.
He quickly tabbed down to the tenth message and hit ENTER.
A full-screen message came up. Race saw the words in German, translated them:
MESSAGE NO: 050199-010
DATED: 5 JANUARY 1999
RECEIVED AT: 1037(LOCAL TIME—PERU)
RECEIVED FROM: FIELD TEAM (CHILE)
SUBJECT: CHILE TEAM URGENT SIGNAL;
CHILE TEAM URGENT SIGNAL
MESSAGE IS AS FOLLOWS:
ATTENTION PERU TEAM. ATTENTION PERU TEAM.
THIS IS CHILE SECOND UNIT. REPEAT. THIS IS CHILE SECOND UNIT.
FIRST UNIT IS DOWN. REPEAT. FIRST UNIT IS DOWN.
15 MINUTES AGO FIRST UNIT ENTERED COLONIA ALEMANIA IN
CONCERT WITH CHILEAN NATIONAL GUARD. REPORTED ENTIRE COMPOUND DESERTED. REPEAT. FIRST UNIT REPORTED ENTIRE COMPOUND DESERTED.
PRELIMINARY TESTING REVEALED HIGH TRACE LEVELS OF
URANIUM AND PLUTONIUM ORE, BUT BEFORE FURTHER DATA COULD BE OBTAINED A DETONATION OCCURRED INSIDE THE COMPOUND.
DETONATION APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN NUCLEAR. REPEAT.
DETONATION APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN NUCLEAR.
ENTIRE FIRST UNIT HAS BEEN LOST. REPEAT. ENTIRE FIRST UNIT
HAS BEEN LOST.
MUST ASSUME STORMTROOPERS ARE ALREADY EN ROUTE TO
PERU.
Race looked up from the message in horror.
Colonia Alemania had been empty at the time the BKA team had arrived. It had also been booby-trapped, set to explode as soon as someone set foot on it.
A silver of ice ran down Race’s spine as he looked at the final line of the message again:
MUST ASSUME STORMTROOPERS ARE ALREADY EN ROUTE TO PERU.
Race looked at his watch.
It was 11:05 .A.M.
“How long till they get here?” Nash asked Schroeder. “It’s impossible to say,” Schroeder said. “There’s no knowing how long ago they left the compound. They could have left it two hours ago or two days ago. Either way, the trip from Chile to here is not a long one. We must assume that they are very close.”
Nash turned to Scott. “Captain, I want you to get on the horn to Panama and find out when that damned extraction team is going to get here. We need firepower and we need it now.” " “Got it.” Scott nodded to Doogie who dashed off toward the radio unit.
“Cochrane,” Nash said. “How’s the situation with the surviving Huey?”
Buzz Cochrane shook his head. “It’s shot. It took a hammering when that Apache went wild during the cats’ attack. Stray gunfire damaged both the tail rotor and the ignition ports.”
“How long will it take to fix?’ ‘With the tools we’ve got here, we can fix the ignition ports, but it’ll take time. As for the tail rotor, well, you can’t fly without it, and it’s a bitch to repair. I guess we could strip some of the secondary systems and use them, but what we Really need are brand-new axles and rotary switches, and we ain’t gonna find them here.”
“Sergeant. Get that Huey ready to fly again. Whatever it takes,” Nash said.
“Yes, sir.”
Cochrane left the circle, taking Tex Reichart with him.
There was a long silence.
“So we’re stuck here . . .” Lauren said.
“With a group of terrorists on their way . . .” Gaby Lopez added.
“Unless we decide to trek out of here on foot,” Race suggested.
Captain Scott turned to Nash. “If we stay, we die.”
“And if we leave, the Nazis get the idol,” Copeland said.
“And a workable Supernova,” Lauren said.
“Not an option,” Nash said firmly. “No, there’s only one thing we can do.”
‘What’s that?”
“We get the idol before the Nazis get here.”
The three soldiers made their way cautiously up the riverside path in the pounding subtropical rain.
Captain Scott and Sergeant Chucky Wilson led the way, their M-16s trained warily on the dense foliage to their right. The lone German paratrooper, Graf, now armed with an American M-16, walked along the path behind them, bringing up the rear.
Each man wore a tiny fiber-optic camera attached to the side of his helmet which sent images back to the others in the village.
After a while, the three soldiers came to the fissure in the mountainside—the fissure that led to the rock tower and the temple.
Scott nodded to Wilson and the young sergeant entered the narrow stone passageway, gun-first.
Back in the village, Race and the others watched on a monitor as Scott, Wilson and Graf made their way through the fissure. The images being sent back from the three commandos were depicted in separate rectangles on the screen, in ghostly black-and-white.
The plan was simple.
While Scott, Wilson and Graf entered the temple and seized the idol inside it, the remaining Green Berets and the other German paratrooper—a private named Molke—would get to work repairing the remaining Huey. Once the idol was obtained, they would all fly out of Vilcafor before the Nazi terrorists arrived.
“Ah, aren’t we forgetting something?” Race said.
“Like what?” Nash said.
“Like the cats. Aren’t they the reason we’re in this mess in the first place? Where are they?”
“The cats retreated from the village with the onset of daylight,” a voice said from behind Race in perfect clipped English.
Race turned to see the fourth and last German man standing behind him, smiling.
He couldn’t have been more different from the other three German males—Schroeder, Graf and Molke. While they were all visibl
y strong and fit, this man was older—much older, at least in his fifties—and quite obviously unathletic. His most dominant feature was a long gray beard. Race disliked him on sight. His whole stance and posture reeked of pomposity and arrogance.
“At dawn, the cats departed in the direction of the plateau,” the man said uppishly. “I presume that they returned to their nest inside the temple.” He smiled wryly. “I imagine that since the last few generations of their species have spent almost four hundred years in pitch darkness, their kind are not very comfortable in daylight.”
The bearded man extended his hand in an abrupt German way. “I am Doctor Johann Krauss, zoologist and crypto zoologist from the University of Hamburg. I have been brought along on this mission to advise on certain animal issues raised in the manuscript.”
“What’s a cryptozoologist?” Race asked.
“One who studies mythical animals,” Krauss said.
“Mythical animals . . .”
“Yes. Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, the yeti, the great cats of the English moors, and of course,” he added, “the South American rapa”
“You know about these cats?” Race said.
“Only what I have learned from unverified sightings, local legends and ambiguous hieroglyphs. But such is the beauty of cryptozoology, it is the study of animals that cannot be studied, because no one can actually prove they exist.”
“So you think we were attacked by a pack of mythical animals,” Race said. “They didn’t look very mythical to me.”
Krauss said, “Every fifty years or so, there is a spate of unusual deaths in this part of the Amazon rainforest. At those times, local men who embark on nighttime trips between villages are known to just, well, disappear. On rare occasions, their remains are found in the morning. At those times, men are found with their throats wrenched from their bodies or their spines ripped out.