Temple

by Matthew Reilly

  It would stop a moment later at the same time as I heard a distant, sickening splat.

  I arrived back in the clearing some time later, the idol in my hand.

  The sight which greeted me was like a glimpse of the underworld itself.

  In the flickering light of the torches that littered the clearing, I saw the rapas kneeling over the ranks of dead conquistadors, gorging themselves on fresh human flesh. Pointed silver helmets lay strewn everywhere, glinting in the firelight.

  It was then that I saw Renco and Lena and three of the Incan warriors standing over by the portal, holding swords and muskets in their hands—the only survivors of the carnage, thanks largely to their fighting skills and the layer of monkey urine that covered them. They appeared to be searching for something. The idol no doubt.

  “Renco!” I called. “Lena!”

  I regretted it as soon as I did it.

  One of the rapas lying on the ground in front of me immediately looked up from his feasting, disturbed by my shout.

  The massive beast rose to its feet, glared at me.

  Another cat beyond it did the same.

  Then another, and another.

  The pack of giant cats formed a wide circle around me. They held their heads low, their ears pinned back.

  I saw Renco turn and see my predicament. But he was too far away to be of any help.

  I wondered why my own layer of monkey urine was no longer keeping the cats at bay. Perhaps it had been scraped away during my scuffle with the wily old conquistador inside the temple or maybe it had rubbed off when I had fallen to the ground after being shot by Hernando.

  Whatever the case, I thought, this was it, this was the end.

  The lead rapa tensed its whole body, prepared itself to pounce. And then—

  —the first drop of water hit the top of my head with a loud smack. It was closely followed by a second drop and then a third, then a fourth.

  And then, like a gift from God himself, the skies parted and the rain came tumbling down.

  Oh, how it rained! It came down in sheets—thick drenching sheets—big fat drops of water hammering down on the rock tower with tremendous force, smacking down against my head, smacking down against the idol.

  And at that moment, thank the Lord, the idol began to sing.

  Its song becalmed the cats instantly.

  They all just peered at the dripping idol in my hands, their heads cocked to one side in response to its melodious high-pitched hum.

  Renco, Lena and the three warriors came over to where I stood, shielding their torches against the rain, skirting around the pack of entranced rapas.

  I noticed that Renco held Bassario’s fake idol in his hand.

  “Thank you, Alberto,” said he, taking the singing idol from me. “I think I shall take that now.”

  Beside him, Lena smiled at me, her beautiful olive skin sparkling in the rainstorm. “So, you defeated the big gold-eater to save our idol,” she said. “Is there anything you cannot do, my brave little hero?”

  As she said these words, she suddenly leaned forward and kissed me softly on the lips. My heart almost skipped a beat as her lips pressed themselves firmly against mine. My knees felt weak. I almost fell over, so delightful was the touch of her lips.

  As Lena was kissing me so beautifully, however, a voice from somewhere behind me said: “Come now, monk. I thought that wasn’t allowed for men of your ilk.”

  I turned to see Bassario standing on the stone steps behind me, his longbow slung over his shoulder, his face creased into a broad smile.

  “We reserve the right to make exceptions,” said I.

  Bassario laughed.

  Renco turned to face him. “Thank you for returning to help us, Bassario. Your arrows saved our lives. What made you return?”

  Bassario shrugged. “As I reached the waterfall at the end of the quenko, I saw the gold-eaters approaching from the other side of the river. Then I supposed that if by some miracle you survived all of this, people would sing songs about you. I decided that I wanted to be a part of those songs. To be remembered for something other than disgracing my family name, and at the same time, to restore that name to honor.”

  “You succeeded on both counts,” said Renco. “You truly did. Now, however, may I beg your indulgence one more time and ask of you one final favor.”

  As he spoke, Renco—holding a torch in one arm and both idols in the other—began to back away from the rest of us and headed through the rain toward the portal. On his way, he picked up the llama’s bladder from where it had been dropped during the battle and allowed it to fill with the pouring rain.

  The cats immediately began to follow him—or rather, follow the singing idol in his hands.

  “Once I am inside the temple,” said Renco as he walked, “I want you all to shut the boulder behind me.”

  I looked from Renco to the three remaining Incan warriors beside me.

  “What are you going to do?” said I.

  “I am going to ensure that no one ever gets this idol,” said Renco. “I will use it to lure the cats into the temple. Then, when they are all inside, I want you to push the boulder back into the portal.”

  “But—”

  “Trust me, Alberto,” he said, his voice calm as he moved slowly toward the portal with the pack of rapas slinking along behind him. “We shall see each other again, I promise.”

  And with that, Renco stepped up into the open mouth of the temple. The cats crowded in all around him, oblivious to the pouring rain.

  Lena, Bassario, the three warriors and myself hastened over to the boulder.

  Renco stood in the entrance to the temple and gave me one final look.

  He smiled sadly.

  “Take care, my friend,” said he.

  And then he was gone, disappearing into the darkness between the boulder and the great stone portal.

  The cats followed him into the temple one by one.

  When the last cat disappeared inside the portal, Bassario called, “All right, heave!”

  The six of us leaned on the massive boulder, pushed against it with all our might

  The big boulder rumbled loudly against the stone floor. It was fortunate that we did not have to push it very far—only a couple of paces—otherwise we might not have been able to do it with only six people.

  But Bassario and the Incan warriors were strong. And Lena and I pushed with all the strength we had, and slowly, very slowly, the boulder began to fill the square-shaped portal.

  As we proceeded to seal the temple with the great stone, I heard the song of the idol inside it growing softer and softer.

  Then abruptly the boulder sealed the portal fully, and as it did so, it stifled the song of the idol completely, and with the ceasing of that song, a great sadness came over me, for I knew then, in that moment, that I would never see my good friend Renco again.

  Before I left that dreadful rock tower, I would perform one final act.

  I grabbed a dagger from one of the fallen conquistadors and I scratched a message into the surface of the great boulder now lodged in the portal. I inscribed a warning for all of those who might contemplate opening the temple again.

  I wrote:

  No entrare absolute.

  Muerte asomarse dentro.

  AS

  Do not enter at any cost. Death looms within.

  It has now been many years since those events transpired.

  Now I am an old man, withered and frail, seated at a desk in a monastery, writing by the light of a candle. Snow-covered mountains stretch away from me in every direction. The mountains of the Pyrenees.

  After Renco entered the temple with the two idols and the rapas, Bassario, Lena and I returned to Vilcafor.

  It was not long before word spread throughout the empire of our deeds—word of Hernando’s death, and of the idol being laid to rest inside a mysterious temple in the presence of a pack of deadly rapas.

  Typically, the Spanish colonial government created
some sham tale about the death of the Governor’s brother, Hernando. They said that he died honorably at the hands of an unknown tribe of natives while he had been bravely navigating some uncharted jungle river. If only my countrymen knew the truth.

  I also understand that the Incas did indeed sing songs about our adventure—and, yes, those songs mentioned Bassario’s name—and the singing of those ballads continued even after the Spanish conquest of their lands.

  The gold-eaters, they said, could seize their land, burn their houses, torture and murder their people.

  But they could not take their spirit.

  To this day, I do not know what Renco did inside that temple with the two idols.

  I can only assume that in his wisdom, he anticipated the rumors that would spread after our victory over Hernando. Like Solon, he knew that people, hearing of the idol inside the temple, would seek it out.

  I imagine that he placed the fake idol at some location nearer to the entrance of the temple, so that if someone did open it up in search of the idol they would come upon the wrong idol first.

  But I speculate. I do not know for sure.

  I never saw him again.

  For my own part, I could no longer endure living in the horror that was New Spain. I decided to return to Europe.

  And so after bidding farewell to the beautiful Lena and the noble Bassario, with the help of several Incan guides I embarked upon a trek through the mountains of New Spain, heading north.

  I walked and walked, through jungles, mountains and deserts until finally I came to the land of the Aztecas, the land that Cortez had conquered in the name of Spain but a few years previously.

  There I managed to bribe my way aboard a merchant ship, laden with stolen gold, bound for Europe.

  I arrived in Barcelona some months later and from there I traveled to this monastery high in the Pyrenees, a place far away from the world of the King and his bloodthirsty conquistadors, and it was here that I grew old, dreaming every night of my adventures in New Spain and wishing every moment that I could have spent just one more day with my good friend Renco.

  Race turned the page.

  That was it. That was the end of the manuscript.

  He looked forward through the cabin of the Goose. Beyond the windshield of the little seaplane he saw the sharp peaks of the Andes towering in front of him.

  They would arrive back at Vilcafor soon.

  Race sighed sadly as he thought about the tale he had just read. He thought of Alberto Santiago’s bravery, and of Renco’s sacrifice, and of the friendship that had developed between the two of them. He also thought about two idols resting inside the temple.

  Race pondered that for a moment.

  Something about it wasn’t right.

  Something about the way the manuscript had ended—so suddenly, so abruptly—and also, now that he thought about it, something he had seen yesterday, back when Lauren had done the original nucleotide resonance test to determine the location of the real thyrium idol. Something about the result of that test that wasn’t quite right.

  The thought of Lauren and Frank Nash’s expedition gave rise to a whole other set of thoughts in Race’s mind.

  How Nash wasn’t with DARPA. How he was actually in charge of an Army unit trying to beat the real Supernova team—a Navy team—to the thyrium idol. And how he had deceived Race into coming along on the mission.

  Race shook the thoughts away.

  He was going to have to figure out how he would deal with Nash when he arrived back at Vilcafor—should he confront him, or would he be better served remaining silent and not letting Nash know just how much he knew?

  Whatever the case, he would have to decide soon, for no sooner had he finished reading the manuscript than the seaplane tilted gently beneath him, dropping its nose.

  They were beginning their descent.

  They were returning to Vilcafor.

  Special Agent John-Paul Demonaco walked carefully through the vault room examining the scene of the crime.

  After the Navy captain, Aaronson, had gone off to give the green light to an assault on the suspected Freedom Fighter locations, the other Naval investigator—Commander Tom Mitchell—had asked Demonaco if he would take a look at the crime scene. Maybe he would notice something they hadn’t.

  “Aaronson’s wrong, isn’t he?” Mitchell said as they wandered through the vault room.

  “What do you mean?” Demonaco said as he scanned the heavily sealed lab facility. It was a very impressive laboratory. In fact it was one of the most high-tech labs he had ever seen.

  “The Freedom Fighters didn’t do this,” Mitchell said.

  “No . . . no, they didn’t.”

  “Then who did?”

  Demonaco was silent for a moment.

  When at last he spoke, however, he didn’t answer the question. “Tell me more about the device that the Navy was building here. This Supernova.”

  Mitchell took a deep breath. “I’ll tell you what I know. The Supernova is a fourth-generation thermonuclear weapon. Instead of splitting the atoms of terrestrial radioactive elements like uranium and plutonium, it creates a mega-explosion by splitting a subcritical mass of the non-terrestrial element thyrium.

  “The blast caused by the splitting of a thyrium atom is so powerful that it would rip out nearly a third of the Earth’s mass. Put simply, the Supernova is the first man-made device capable of destroying the planet we live on.”

  “This element thyrium, you say it’s non-terrestrial” Demonaco said, “If it doesn’t come from Earth, then where does it come from?”

  “Asteroid impacts, meteorite landings. Segments of rocks that survive the journey through the Earth’s atmosphere. But so far as we know, no one’s ever found a live specimen of thyrium.”

  “I think you’ll find,” Demonaco said, “that someone has now. And I might just know who.”

  Demonaco explained.

  “Commander, for the last six months, my unit at the Bureau has been hearing rumors of an inter-militia war between the Oklahoma Freedom Fighters and another terrorist group calling themselves the Republican Army of Texas.”

  “The Republican Army of Texas—aren’t they the ones who skinned those park rangers up in Montana?”

  “They’re the prime suspects,” Demonaco said. “We told the media that those two rangers stumbled on some hillbillies shooting illegal game, but we actually think it was worse than that We think they stumbled on a secret Texan training camp.”

  “A training camp?”

  “Uh-huh. The Texans are a much larger group than the Freedom Fighters, and much better fighters—in fact, you can’t even join the Texans unless you’ve been a member of one of the armed forces.

  “They’re also exceptionally organized for a terrorist group, more like an elite military unit than a weekend hunting club.

  “They have a rigidly defined chain of command, with severe penalties for any member who breaks that hierarchy, a system that has been attributed to the influence of their leader, Earl Bittiker, a former Navy SEAL who was dishonorably discharged for the 1986 sexual assault of a female lieutenant who gave him an order he didn’t like. He raped her both vaginally and orally.”

  Mitchell winced.

  “Apparently, Bittiker was one of the SEALs’ best men—a totally remorseless killing machine. But like a lot of those types, he lacked certain civilizing virtues. Apparently in 1983, three years before the rape incident, he was diagnosed as being clinically psychotic, but the Navy allowed him to remain on active duty anyway. So long as his aggression was directed at our enemies, they figured it didn’t matter. Great logic.

  “After the rape, Bittiker was discharged from the Navy and sentenced to eight years in Leavenworth. When he got out in 1994, he founded the Republican Army of Texas with a couple of other disgraced ex-servicemen he’d met in jail.

  “The Texans train constantly,” Demonaco said. “In the desert, in the badlands of Texas and Montana, and sometimes, up in the moun
tains in Oregon. They figure that when the time comes to launch a full-scale war against the United States government—or the U.S. government in conjunction with the United Nations—they want to be ready to fight in all kinds of terrain.

  “What makes it worse is that they have money too. After the government screwed him on an oil deal, the Texan oil tycoon Stanford Cole left Bittiker and the Texans something in the vicinity of forty-two million dollars and a note that said, ‘Give ’em hell.’ It’s no surprise then that Bittiker and his cronies are often seen at black market arms bazaars in the Middle East and Africa. Hell, last year, they bought eight surplus Black Hawk helicopters from the Australian government”

  “Christ” Mitchell said.

  “Still,” Demonaco went on, “that doesn’t stop them stealing some heavy-duty hardware every now and then. For example, although we can’t prove it, we believe that the Texans are responsible for the theft of an Abrams M-l Al main battle tank while it was—”

  “They stole a tank?” Mitchell said, incredulous.

  “Off the back of a semi-trailer while it was being transported from the Chrysler plant in Detroit to Tank and Automotive Command in Warren, Michigan.”

  “Why do you suspect them?” Mitchell asked.

  “Because two years ago, the Texans bought an old Antonov An-22 heavy-lift cargo plane from an arms market in ban. The An-22 is a damn big plane, the Russian equivalent of our biggest lifters, the C-5 Galaxy and the C-17 Globe-master. Now if you wanted a regular cargo plane, you’d go and buy yourself a smaller An-12 or a C-130 Galaxy, not an An-22. You’d only need a -22 if you were intending to move something big. Something really, really big. Something like a 67-ton tank.”

  Demonaco paused, shook his head. “But that’s the least of our worries now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because lately we’ve been hearing some disturbing rumors about the Texans. It seems that they’ve found something of a soulmate in the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan, the group who released sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995. After the Tokyo attack, some members of the cult came to America and infiltrated a few of our militia groups. We have reason to believe that several members of Aum Shinrikyo joined the Texans.”