Race looked up as the chopper was pulled slowly inside the big warehouse.
A second later the sky above him abruptly disappeared, replaced by the interior of the warehouse’s roof—a complex latticework of rusting steel girders and dark wooden crossbeams.
Race stared at the warehouse all around him.
It was positively huge—an enormous enclosed space, about the size of an airplane hangar—the whole cavernous space illuminated by cone-shaped halogen lights that were attached to the ceiling’s girders.
The “floor” of the warehouse, however, was quite unusual. It was the river’s surface. A long finger-like deckway stretched out over the water, branching out at about a dozen intervals into smaller decks that ran at right angles to it—mooring slots for the boats and planes that came to the mine to load up with gold.
A long, wide conveyor belt ran at ground level for the length of the central deckway. It rose out of a large square hole in the wall at the landward end of the hangar and looped back at the far end of the deckway.
Race guessed that the landward end of the conveyor belt was to be found somewhere deep within the cone-shaped mine itself, probably on a loading ledge somewhere, or maybe even at the very bottom of the crater.
The way he figured it, gold was loaded onto the conveyor belt down in the mine, then the conveyor belt lifted it up through the long tunnel cut into the earth, until it appeared here in the warehouse and was loaded onto a boat or plane.
The chopper’s slow-moving pontoon came to a halt inside one of the mooring slots, its slowing rotor blades hanging marginally out over the conveyor belt, glinting in the glare of the halogen lights.
From his seat in the back of the chopper, Race saw four men step out from a glass-enclosed office at the landward end of the warehouse.
Three of them wore white lab coats—scientists. The fourth wore combat fatigues and carried a G-11 assault rifle—a soldier.
One of the three scientists, Race saw, was much smaller than the other two, and infinitely older—he was a tiny little man, bent with age, with long silver hair and huge round eyes that were magnified by a pair of thick spectacles. Race guessed that this was Dr. Fritz Weber, the brilliant Nazi scientist Schroeder and Nash had talked about earlier.
Apart from the four men standing in front of the glass-walled office, the rest of the warehouse was completely deserted.
There’s no one else here, Race thought.
The Nazis must have taken everyone they had to Vilcafor to get the idol. The four men here—plus Anistaze, Ehrhardt, Craterface and the pilot—were all they had left.
“Unterscharführer,” Ehrhardt said to Craterface as the chopper beneath them jolted to a halt. “If you would be so kind, please take Agent Becker and Professor Race out to the refuse pit. Then shoot them and bury their remains.”
Race and Renée were shoved down a dirt path that ran westward through the rainforest away from the enormous riverside warehouses.
Behind them, Craterface and the other Nazi soldier—the only other soldier at the mine—marshaled them forward with their G-11s.
“Any idea how we’re going to get out of this?” Race asked Renée as they walked.
“None at all,” she replied coolly.
“I thought you might have a plan or something. You know, something hidden up your sleeve.”
“No plan.”
“So we’re going to die?”
“It looks that way.”
They rounded a bend in the path and Race winced as an overwhelmingly putrid smell assaulted his senses. A moment later, the four of them came to the end of the path and Race saw a pile of garbage scattered among the trees in front of them. It stretched away for about fifty yards—old tires, rotting piles of discarded food and waste, gnarled pieces of metal, even a few animal carcasses.
The refuse pit.
“On your knees, both of you,” Craterface growled.
They dropped to their knees.
“Hands on your heads.”
They laced their fingers behind their heads.
Chick-chick!
Race heard the other Nazi release the safety on his G-11. Then he heard him step forward through the mud behind him, felt him place the barrel of the assault rifle against the back of his head.
This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen! his mind screamed. It’s going too fast. Aren’t they supposed to dawdle or something? Give you a chance . . . a chance to get—
Race faced forward, away from the gun, bit his lip and shut his eyes, and gave in to the hopelessness of his situation, waited for the end.
It came quickly.
Blam!
Nothing happened.
Race’s eyes were still closed.
The G-11 had gone off, but for some reason—some bizarre reason—his head was still where it was supposed to be.
And then suddenly—whump!—a body fell face-down into the mud right next to his kneeling frame.
Race immediately opened his eyes and peered behind him—
—and saw Craterface standing there, with his G-11 aimed at the spot where the other Nazi’s head had been only moments ago.
The dead Nazi now lay face-down in the mud with an ugly soup of blood and brains oozing out from a hole in the back of his head.
“Uli,” Renée said, standing up and running over to Craterface. She hugged him warmly.
Race’s mind spun.
Uli . . .?
Then Renée slapped the big pock-faced Nazi hard on the chest. “Honestly, could you have waited any longer? I was almost jumping out of my skin there.”
“I’m sorry, Renée,” Craterface—Uli—said. “I had to wait until we were far enough from the boathouse. Otherwise the others would have known.”
Race turned suddenly to face the man named Uli.
“You’re BKA,” he said.
“Yes,” the big man said, smiling. “And your good intentions saved your life, Professor William Race of New York University. In your bid to save Renée on the catamaran, you tackled the right man. If I’d been a real Nazi, I would have put a bullet in your brain right away. My name is Special Agent Uli Pieck, but around here I am known as Unterscharführer Uli Kahr.”
And then suddenly in Race’s mind, it all made sense.
“The manuscript,” Race said. “You’re the one who got the BKA their copy of the manuscript.”
“That’s right,” Uli said, impressed.
Race recalled Karl Schroeder telling Frank Nash about the BKA’s plan to beat the Nazis to the idol. He remembered Schroeder’s words clearly: “To do that, we obtained a copy of the Santiago Manuscript and used it to find our way here.”
It was only now, though, that Race realized he should have known from that moment that the BKA had a man inside the Stormtrooper organization.
The BKA’s copy of the manuscript was a Xerox of the actual Santiago Manuscript. But the actual Santiago Manuscript had been stolen from the San Sebastian Abbey in the French Pyrenees several days earlier by the Stormtroopers. Hence, the Xerox of the manuscript that the BKA had in their possession must have been sent to them by someone within the Nazi organization.
A spy.
Uli.
“Come on,” Uli said, hurrying over to the body of the fallen Nazi. He quickly stripped the dead man of his weapons, tossing his G-11 and a couple of conventional hand grenades to Renée, and then throwing the Nazi’s black Kevlar breastplate and Glock-20 pistol to Race. “Hurry, quickly, we have to stop Ehrhardt before he arms the Supernova!”
Heinrich Anistaze and Odilo Ehrhardt were standing in one of the glass-enclosed offices inside the boathouse, surrounded by a bank of radio and communications equipment
In front of them stood Dr. Fritz Weber—the. former member of Adolf Hitler’s atomic bomb project, the Nazi scientist who during World War II had conducted experiments on human subjects and been sentenced to death for it. Although his body was eighty-seven years old, hunchbacked and gnarled, his mind was as alive as ever.
Weber held the Incan idol out in front of him.
“It’s beautiful” he said.
At eighty-seven, Fritz Weber was a decade older than Ehrhardt and two feet shorter. He was a small bespectacled man with hard appraising eyes and a wild Einsteinian mane of hair that flowed all the way down to his shoulders.
“What word from the European and American governments?” Ehrhardt asked him.
“The Germans and the Americans both asked for more time to raise the money. Nothing from the others,” Weber said. “It’s a ruse, a standard negotiator’s stalling tactic. They’re trying to buy more time until they know for sure that their own teams haven’t found the idol first.”
“Then let’s show them who has the idol,” Ehrhardt growled. He turned to face Anistaze. “Make a digital image of the idol now. Time it and date it and then feed it into the computer and send it to Bonn and Washington direct. Tell the presidents that the device has been armed and set to detonate in exactly thirty minutes. It will only be disarmed when we have confirmation of the transfer of one hundred billion dollars into our account in Zurich within that time.”
“Yes, sir,” Anistaze said, crossing the room to switch on a digital camera.
“Doctor Weber,” Ehrhardt said.
“Yes, Oberstgruppenführer ?”
“When the Oberstgruppenführer is finished taking the digital image, I want you to take the idol to the control booth and arm the Supernova immediately. Set a thirty-minute countdown and start the clock.”
“Yes, Oberstgruppenführer.”
Race, Renée and Uli hurried back up the dirt path toward the boathouse.
Uli and Renée carried G-11s, Race the small Glock that Uli had taken from the dead Nazi at the refuse pit.
He also now wore the dead Nazi’s black Kevlar breastplate over his T-shirt. He hadn’t really noticed the Nazis’ body armor before. But now—now that he was wearing it—he looked at it more closely.
First of all, it was incredibly light and easy to wear—it didn’t inhibit his movement at all. Secondly, however, he noticed a strange A-shaped unit attached to the back of the breastplate, covering his shoulder blades. The A-shaped unit was also light, and like a spoiler on a sports car, it had been smoothly incorporated into the design of the Kevlar breastplate so as not to ruin its slick aerodynamic appearance.
As always, and perhaps incongruously with his high-tech body armor, Race was still wearing his damn Yankees cap.
“Digital image is complete,” Anistaze said from over by the bank of radio and electronic equipment. “Sending it now.”
Ehrhardt turned to Weber. “Arm the Supernova.”
Weber immediately snatched up the idol and, with Ehrhardt in tow behind him, quickly headed out of the office.
“Over there!” Renée yelled, pointing at one of the two incredibly long suspension bridges that connected the riverside buildings to the control booth in the center of the crater.
Race looked out over the mine and saw two tiny figures—one large and fat, the other small and dressed in a white lab coat—bouncing across the modern steel-cabled bridge.
The smaller man was carrying something wedged underneath his arm. An object wrapped inside a purple cloth. The idol.
Uli and Renée left the dirt path, plunged into a section of low foliage, heading in the direction of the crater. Race followed them.
Seconds later, the three of them arrived at the rim of the gigantic mine and looked out over it.
“It’s Ehrhardt and Weber,” Uli said. “They’re taking the idol to the Supernova!”
“What do we do?” Race asked.
Uli said, “The Supernova is inside the control booth hanging over the mine. There are only two bridges that lead out to it—that one from the north, and the other one from the south. Somehow we have to get to that cabin and disarm the Supernova.”
“But how do we do that?”
“To disarm the device,” Uli said, “you have to enter a code into the arming computer.”
“What’s the code?”
“I don’t know,” Uli said sadly. “No one knows. No one except Fritz Weber. He designed the device, so he’s the only one who knows the disarming code.”
“Great,” Race said.
Uli turned. “Okay now, listen, this is how I see it. I am the only one of us who can get to the control booth. If they see either of you running down one of the cable bridges, they’ll drop them immediately and isolate the booth. Then, if they don’t get their money, they’ll blow the Supernova.
“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 center 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 downward, the lower one pointing upward—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 lead-lined 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 4.5 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 millimeter, he was extracting a small cylindrical section of thyrium out of 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 done 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 formulas 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 the tiny section of thyrium into a sub-critical 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 FACILITY” a never-ending series of ones and zeroes scrolled downward.
Weber ignored them, began typing on the computer key-board 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 Unterscharführer 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 coat-wearing technicians standing at a computer terminal nearby. “Go to the pit and see what is taking the Unterscharführer so long.”
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