Temple

by Matthew Reilly

  Like a missile shooting up into the sky, the Rigid Raider lifted completely out of the water as it rushed up the steeply slanted wings of the seaplane!

  The assault boat raced up the reinforced wings of the Goose, its exposed silver hull screeching loudly as it shot along the seaplane’s heavily banked wings, using them as a launching ramp, and then—shoom!—the Rigid Raider launched itself off the end of the right-hand wing and out into the air beyond it where it smashed into the canopy of the Mosquito helicopter that was hovering in front of the sharply turned Goose!

  The Mosquito lurched backward—reeling like a boxer punched square in the nose—as the Rigid Raider plowed into its bubble at incredible speed. Its canopy shattered in an instant and a split second later, the whole helicopter exploded into an enormous billowing fireball.

  Doogie stared back at the carnage behind him; saw the blackened shell of the torpedoed Rigid Raider sinking slowly into the water; saw the charred remains of the Mosquito and the other Rigid Raider crash down into the river with an enormous splash.

  “Eat that, you Nazi bastards,” he said softly.

  Dazed, confused and possessed of one hell of a headache, William Race was marched at gunpoint out onto the rear deck of the Nazi command boat.

  Renée walked along beside him, shoved forward by the extraordinarily ugly Nazi Race now thought of as “Crater-face.”

  No sooner had he and Renée been subdued by Craterface up on the bow than the big Nazi had called upon his comrades at the other end of the starboard passageway to cease their fire. Then he had marched his two captives down the passageway and out onto the rear helipad, where the pristine white Bell Jet Ranger helicopter was on the verge of taking off.

  Anistaze saw them instantly, kicked open the side door of the helicopter.

  “Bring them to me!” he shouted.

  Van Lewen was racing across the river’s surface out in front of the fleet.

  He sat at the helm of the Scarab, shooting across the river with only the rear third of the boat’s bullet-shaped hull touching the water, the sound of its twin 450-horsepower engines thundering in his ears.

  He turned in his seat to see the white Bell Jet Ranger helicopter lift off from the stern deck of the command boat.

  “Damn it,” he breathed.

  Karl Schroeder was in a world of trouble.

  His Rigid Raider was near the back of the fleet, shooting across the river’s surface in between the last two Nazi Pibbers, being pummeled by their relentless fire.

  Schroeder tried desperately to duck their bullets, but they were too close, too fast.

  And then suddenly—smack-smack-smack—a line of bullet holes raked his Rigid Raider, cutting across his right leg, opening up three jagged red holes in his thigh.

  He fell, clenching his teeth, stifling a scream.

  Somehow he managed to get up on one knee and keep driving the boat, but it was no use. The Nazi Pibbers were all over him.

  He looked forward, caught sight of what was left of the fleet—the command boat, the Scarab, the Goose seaplane and one of the helipad barges—speeding off into the distance a good hundred yards ahead of him.

  He also saw the white Bell Jet Ranger helicopter as it flew away from the command boat Only minutes earlier, he had seen Race and Renée get thrown into it—

  At that moment, another wave of gunfire assailed Schroeder’s boat, strafing a line of holes across his back, puncturing his bulletproof vest as if it were made of tissue paper. Schroeder roared in agony, fell to the deck.

  And in that instant he knew he was going to die.

  His wounds burning, his nerve ends screaming, his entire body on the verge of going into shock, Karl Schroeder looked desperately about himself for anything he could use to take as many of the Nazis down with him as he could.

  His gaze fell upon the Kevlar box that he had seen earlier on the floor of the Rigid Raider. It was only now, however, that he saw that it had words stenciled on its side in English.

  Slowly, Schroeder read the markings on the side of the box.

  When he had finished reading them, his eyes went wide.

  Schroeder’s Rigid Raider drifted further and further behind what was left of the fleet, with the two Nazi Pibbers crowding in on either side of it.

  Karl Schroeder now lay on his back on the deck of his assault boat, gazing up at the storm clouds that rolled by overhead, darkening the late-afternoon sky, the life slowly draining from his body.

  Abruptly, the face of a rather sinister-looking Nazi cut across his view of the sky and Schroeder realized that one of the Pibbers had come alongside him.

  But he didn’t care.

  Indeed, as the Nazi calmly raised his AK-47 to his shoulder, Schroeder just looked up into the barrel of the man’s gun, uninterested, resigned to his fate.

  And then, strangely, he smiled.

  The Nazi hesitated.

  Then he looked slightly to the side—at the Kevlar box that lay to Schroeder’s left.

  The box’s lid was open.

  Inside it, he saw five small chrome-and-plastic vials, each filled with a small amount of shiny amber liquid. Each vial sat snugly inside a foam-lined pocket.

  The Nazi knew what they were instantly.

  M-22 isotopic charges.

  But there was a sixth foam-lined pocket in the box.

  It lay empty.

  The Nazi’s eyes snapped left to see the last vial sitting in Schroeder’s blood-smeared hand.

  Schroeder had already broken the rubber seal on top of the charge, had already uncocked the red safety latch that covered its release mechanism.

  Now he had his thumb pressed down on the release button. He held it down as he gazed calmly into space.

  The Nazi’s eyes went wide with horror. “Oh, fuck . . .”

  Schroeder closed his eyes. It would be up to Renée and the American professor now. He hoped they succeeded. He hoped the two American soldiers were far enough ahead of his boat, out of the blast radius. He hoped . . .

  Schroeder sighed a final time, and as he did so he let go of the release button and the M-22 isotopic charge went off in all its glory.

  The world shook.

  A massive—massive—white-hot explosion blasted out from the Rigid Raider and shot out in every direction.

  It shot into the trees on either side of the river, incinerating them in an instant, blasting them to nothing.

  It shot under the river’s surface—a bubbling, frothing wall of heat shooting downward at unimaginable speed, boiling the water on contact, killing anything in its path as it raced downward like a speeding comet.

  It shot into the sky, high into the sky, flaring white like the flashbulb on a camera, an all-consuming monumental flash that must have been visible from space.

  Worst of all, the expanding wall of white-hot light shot along the river’s surface, chasing after the remainder of the fleet.

  Van Lewen’s Scarab and Doogie’s Goose skipped across the water at the head of the fleet—out in front of the gargantuan wave of white light eating up the river behind them.

  To a certain extent, they’d been lucky. They had been a good three hundred yards ahead of Schroeder’s Rigid Raider when the M-22 charge had gone off.

  The other boats—the last helipad barge, the two remaining Pibbers and the command boat itself—hadn’t.

  They had been closer. And now the expanding wall of white-hot light just loomed above them like some immense mythological monster, dwarfing them. And then suddenly, in an instant, the gigantic wall of white consumed the helipad barge and the Pibbers, detonating them on contact before swallowing them whole and continuing on its voracious charge forward.

  Its next target was the command boat Like a lumbering rhino trying to outrun a runaway Mack truck, the massive catamaran powered forward in a desperate attempt to get clear of the oncoming wall of searing-hot energy.

  But the blast was just too fast, too powerful.

  As it had done with the barge a
nd the Pibbers before it, the expanding wall of light just reached out and snatched the command boat in its clutches, yanking it into its mass, obliterating the enormous craft in a single fiery instant

  And then as quickly as it had risen, the massive wall of light began to subside and dissipate. Soon it lost all of its forward momentum and sank back into the distance.

  Van Lewen took a final look back at the singed and smoking jungle river behind him. He saw a wispy black smoke cloud rising into the sky above the treetops—but it was broken up quickly by the sheets of subtropical rain that had just begun to fall.

  It was then, however, that he looked about himself and realized that his Scarab and Doogie’s Goose were the only vessels left on the river.

  In fact, the only other remnant of the chase just concluded was a small white speck disappearing over the trees ahead of them.

  The white Bell Jet Ranger helicopter.

  FIFTH MACHINATION

  Tuesday, January 5, 1815 hours

  “Who are you!” Odilo Ehrhardt demanded in German, slapping Renée hard across her face.

  “I told you!” she yelled back at him. “My name is Renée Becker and I am a special agent with the Bundes Kriminal Amt.”

  The white helicopter was now flying low over the river, heading east. Race and Renée sat in the rear compartment, handcuffed. Before them sat Ehrhardt, Anistaze and Crater-face. A lone pilot was up front flying the chopper.

  Ehrhardt turned to face Race. “So who, then, are you?” “He’s American—” Renée said.

  Ehrhardt hit her again. Hard.

  “I wasn’t addressing you.” He turned back to Race. “Now, who are you? FBI? Or are you Navy? A SEAL team, perhaps—hell, you must be SEALs to take out our boats like that.”

  “We’re DARPA,” Race said.

  Ehrhardt frowned. Then he began to chuckle softly.

  “No, you’re not,” he said, leaning forward, sticking his round fleshy face right in front of Race’s.

  Race thought he was going to be sick.

  Ehrhardt was disgusting, vile—obese to the point of being grotesque, reeking of body odor and possessed of an evil moonlike face. A thin string of saliva smacked between his lips when he spoke and his breath smelled like horseshit.

  “I’m working with Doctor Frank Nash,” Race said, trying desperately to remain calm. “He’s a retired Army colonel working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in conjunction with members of the United States Army.”

  “Frank Nash, eh?” Ehrhardt said, breathing his foul, rancid breath all over Race’s face.

  “That’s right.”

  “And who, then, might you be, Little Man Trying To Be So Brave?” he said, as he lifted Race’s Yankees cap off his head.

  “My name is William Race,” Race said, grabbing his cap with his cuffed hands. “I’m a professor of ancient languages at New York University.”

  “Ah,” Ehrhardt said, nodding. “So you are the one they brought along to translate the manuscript. Very good, very good. Before I have you killed, Mister William Race, professor of ancient languages at New York University, I would like to correct a certain misimpression that you appear to possess.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Frank Nash is not with DARPA.”

  “What?” Race said, frowning.

  “And he most certainly is not a retired Army colonel, either. On the contrary, he is most active indeed. For your information, Colonel Francis K. Nash is the head of the United States Army’s Special Projects Unit”

  “What?”

  Race didn’t get it. Why would Nash say he was DARPA when in fact he wasn’t?

  “Ah-ha!” Ehrhardt cackled, clapping his hands. “I love to see the look of betrayal on a man’s face just before he is about to die.”

  Race was thoroughly confused now.

  He didn’t know what to think.

  Even if Nash wasn’t with DARPA, what did it matter? The Supernova was an Army project, and Nash was with Army Special Projects.

  Unless . . .

  Ehrhardt turned to Anistaze. “So. The American Army is here too. What do you say about that?”

  “There must be another mole,” Anistaze said, ignoring Race and Renée entirely.

  “In DARPA?” Ehrhardt said.

  Anistaze nodded. “We know of the link to the American terrorist group, but we didn’t know about this—”

  “Bohr Ehrhardt waved his hand dismissively. “It is of no importance now, because it is we who have the idol.”

  “What do you hope to achieve by all this?” Renée asked defiantly. “Do you want to destroy the world?”

  Ehrhardt smiled at her indulgently. “I do not want to destroy the world, Fraulein Becker. Far from it. I want to rebuild it. Re-order it, the way it should be.”

  “With what? One hundred billion dollars. Is that what this is all about? Money?”

  “My dear Fraulein Becker, is that the limit of your vision? Money. This is not about money. It is about what money can do. One hundred billion dollars—bah—it is nothing. It is but a means to an end.”

  “And what is the end?”

  Ehrhardt’s eyes narrowed. “One hundred billion dollars will buy me a new world.”

  “A new world?”

  “Brave Fraulein Becker, what do you think I want? A new country, perhaps? To pursue the tired old Nazi goal of establishing an Aryan nation with the Herrenvolk at the head, and the untermenschen beneath them? Bah!”

  “What is it that you want, then? How can you buy yourself a new world?”

  “By dumping one hundred billion U.S. dollars on world financial markets at the bargain price of one cent apiece.”

  “What?” Renée said.

  “The American economy is in a most precarious situation, the most precarious situation it has found itself in in fifty years. Accumulated foreign debt stands at approximately eight-hundred and thirty billion dollars, gross budget deficits occur annually. But what the United States depends on through all of this is a robust currency with which it will repay its debts in the future.

  “But if the value of that currency were to fall dramatically, say, to levels one-quarter of its current strength, then the United States would be unable to repay those debts.

  “It would be bankrupt, its dollar worthless. What I intend to do with my hundred billion dollars is cripple the American economy.”

  Ehrhardt’s eyes gleamed as he raved. “Since the Second World War this world has been an American world—has been force-fed American culture, made to endure American trade dominance and the ruthless policy of economic slavery conducted and condoned by the American government. I have determined that the dumping of one hundred billion U.S. dollars on world markets would be enough to cripple the American dollar beyond recoverable limits. American corporations will be worth nothing. The American people will not have the purchasing power to buy anything, because their currency will not be worth the paper it’s written on. The United States will become the world’s beggar and the world will start anew. That is what I am doing, Fraulein Becker. I am buying myself a new world.”

  Race couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “You can’t possibly be serious—” he said.

  “No?’ Ehrhardt said. “Look at George Soros. In 1997, the Prime Minister of Malaysia publicly blamed Soros for causing the Asian economic crisis by dumping vast sums of Asian currencies. And this was one man—one man—and he didn’t even have a tenth of the wealth that I am willing to utilize. But then, of course, I am going after a much bigger fish.”

  “What if they won’t give you the money?” Renée said. “They will. Because I am the only man on earth who possesses an operational Supernova.”

  “But what if they don’t?”

  “Then I will detonate the device,” Ehrhardt said simply.

  The Nazi general turned in his seat and peered out through the forward windshield of the chopper. Race and Renée followed his gaze.

  A trul
y spectacular sight met them.

  They saw the Amazon rainforest stretching away to the horizon, a vast blanket of limitless unending green.

  In the near distance, however, there was a break in the blanket of green—an enormous brown cone-shaped crater buried in the earth.

  It was situated right on the river, and it was absolutely massive—at least half a mile in diameter. Long gently sloping truck trails wound their way down to the bottom of the gigantic earthen crater. Huge floodlights stood on its rim, illuminating it like a football stadium in the dim early-evening light.

  In the center of the crater, suspended high above it by a web of tightly stretched cables, was a large white box-shaped cabin—a control booth of some sort—possessed of wide oblong windows on all four of its sides.

  The only route of access to the control booth was via two long drooping suspension bridges that spanned the crater from opposite ends—from the north and the south. Each bridge was at least four hundred yards long and constructed of thick steel cables.

  It was the gold mine.

  The Madre de Dios gold mine.

  The Bell Jet Ranger helicopter landed on a pontoon-mounted helipad that floated on the river’s surface not far from the edge of the massive open-cut mine.

  The mine itself lay directly to the south of the Alto Purus River, and it was connected to it by a collection of decrepit old buildings—three hulking warehouse-like structures that were dreadfully worn with age.

  The largest of the three buildings jutted out over the river, resting on stilts. A series of wide garage-style doors lined its length, enabling boats and seaplanes to be stored inside it In years gone by, Race guessed, this must have been where the mining company’s boats and planes had come to be loaded up with gold.

  Today, however, it performed a different task.

  It allowed the Nazis to hide their armada of boats, helicopters and seaplanes from the prying eyes of America’s spy satellites.

  No sooner had the chopper landed on the floating helipad than the pilot hit a switch.

  Immediately, the rusty garage door to the helicopter’s left opened, and the square pontoon on which the chopper sat began to be pulled across the water toward it by some underwater cable mechanism.