“Badly enough,” Cutter said. “We got back to the Land Rovers and were heading back to civilisation when this car came out of nowhere. It nearly ran us off the road, then disappeared into the fog. As we caught up to it, a figure threw a belt of nails beneath the wheels of our Land Rover. We lost control and crashed. Nando was hurt, and our attackers came out of the trees then, smashed the windows, and snatched Jenny.
“Everyone else is fine. The rest of our crew were five miles down the road by the time they realised we weren’t with them.
“Okay, Prof., Chaplin being dead isn’t such a bad thing. Put it this way, it saves me from killing the bastard when I catch up with you guys.”
“What do you mean?”
“He sold us out, Cutter. Sir Charles’ man on the ground took his thirty pieces of silver and snuggled up nicely in the back pocket of the poachers, notably a guy named Eberhardt — nasty piece of work from Germany. To make a long story short, Eberhardt knows about the creatures. He has to. That’s the only thing that explains this. He’s looking to profit on trading these supposedly extinct treasures to some greedy collectors, and you guys are slap bang in the middle, threatening to screw everything up for him.”
“Are you sure this Eberhardt has got Jenny?”
“I’d bet the farm on it. He’s probably using her as bait, to bring you to him, then he’s going to kill her, along with the rest of you.”
“Oh, Jesus. Please tell me you know where she is?” Cutter’s voice strained with the need to hope.
“I’m heading there right now,” Stark said. “Eberhardt’s got a compound in the Río Huepetue region. You leave Miss Lewis to me. I’ll bring her home in one piece, you have my word. You do what you have to do your end. I really want to get the hell out of Dodge, and sooner rather than later. The minute I go in there, the crapola is well and truly going to hit the fan.
“When Eberhardt realises we’re on to him, things are going to escalate rapidly. Especially given that I fully intend to go in all guns blazing. We aren’t exactly in Boreham Wood, Cutter. A full frontal assault is going to blow the lid right off the top of this pressure cooker. These jokers are going to strike back hard and fast. We don’t want to be around to give them the chance. That’s assuming there are any left when I’m finished with them.
“Right now I’m thinking about a war of total extinction.”
“I don’t care how many of them you kill,” Cutter said. “Just bring her back.”
He didn’t need to say anything else.
TWENTY-THREE
He checked the co-ordinates on the map a final time. Left with no alternative, the SAS man abandoned the Escalade and continued the journey on foot. As he did, the mist thinned, until it was gone altogether.
There was a reason Sir Charles had selected him for this mission. Before joining the Regiment he had served with the British Army in Brunei and trained with the Gurkhas for seven years, immersing himself in their culture and ethic, learning all there was to know about jungle combat. There was no one more attuned to the environment than him. He didn’t talk about it much because there were things he had done, especially in Cambodia, that he never wanted to remember again.
Still, running through the jungle at night brought the memories back to him. The crunch of deadfall beneath his feet was the same crunch he had heard entering the monastery, the rustle of leaves was the same rustle of leaves that he had heard as he ghosted around the outside of the orphanage, all of these sounds were the same sounds he had heard as he approached places of death.
There would be death here today, he knew.
He knew because he brought it with him.
He always did.
Stark moved quickly, running fast and breathing hard as he shuttled from point to point, no more than twenty metres between each, then pressed his back up flat against the tree trunks, scanning the line of trees ahead. He wasn’t about to make a mistake when lives were on the line.
The night was still, the chill creeping into his bones as he in turn crept though its dark heart. The ground crunched beneath his feet as he ran, pushing his way through the thick tangle of weeds and creepers that seemed to smother the undergrowth like a spider’s web.
He crouched down, close to an imposing shadow-trunk, to check the compass bearings. The compound was no more than two klicks to the east of him, which meant he ought to be running into security right about now. Distant early warning systems were designed primarily to be early warnings, not last-minute he’s-right-on-top-of-us warnings. Stark pulled the thermal-imaging goggles down over his eyes and scanned the shadows, looking for any heat sources. There were no tell-tale oranges or reds to betray man or beast. He pushed the goggles back and repeated the scan, looking with the naked eye for anything suspicious: cameras, listening devices, tripwires.
Just because he couldn’t see them didn’t mean they weren’t there.
He grunted at his own paranoia. He was beginning to think like those nut-jobs who posted their idiot theories on the Internet: aliens, secret government bases, rifts in time and genetically-engineered dinosaurs roaming the Earth.
He still found it hard to believe the stuff Lester and Cutter had told them during the debriefing in the ARC. It was the stuff you expected from crackpots and cryptozoologists, not serious scientists. And yet...
Just because they’re paranoid, delusional muppets doesn’t mean they’re wrong, Stark thought, pushing himself to his feet and racing — hard, fast, legs and arms pumping as he kept low. He made himself as small as he could, dropping into a crouch twenty yards deeper into the trees. Again he repeated the procedure, then set off once more, aiming for a huge black trunk thirty yards ahead.
As he hit the tree, Stark felt the hairs on the back of his neck begin to prickle. It was an instinctive thing; his soldier’s sense. He dropped to one knee and pulled the thermal goggles back down over his eyes. With the world changed to one of hot and cold spots, he swept a quick three-sixty, and midway through the circuit he spied the phosphorescent glare of a man walking cautiously through the undergrowth, directly toward him.
Stark licked his lips.
He had two choices: one, avoid the watcher, which would be easy enough, since he knew exactly where he was and there was plenty of thick cover to mask his passage. Or two, disable him. Stark chose the second. He had no wish to leave a potential enemy at his back. Getting back out meant having a clean run back to the Escalade. A lone sentry prowling the jungle didn’t fit into that picture.
Creeping forward, Stark slowed his breathing. He slipped a saw-toothed blade from its boot-sheath and waited, listening to the blundering of the sentry. The man was no more than twenty yards away, his submachine gun held lazily down at his side. His boots crunched through the deadfall, making enough noise for a small herd of wildebeest to stampede over his head without him being able to hear it. Stark eased himself slowly to the standing position, keeping the bulk of the tree between him and the approaching sentry.
He counted to sixty, inserting “one thousand” between each integer. One, one thousand, two, one thousand, three, one thousand... just to make sure he didn’t rush the count and move too soon.
As the sentry passed his hiding place, Stark stepped soundlessly out behind him and clasped a hand across his mouth. Before the man could scream he drew the serrated edge of the blade across his throat. He waited a moment, to make certain the man didn’t utter a sound, and stepped back, letting him fall. He bent down to retrieve the sub-machine gun — a compact MP5. He knew the gun well — it was the staple of law enforcement and tactical squads, as well as standard-issue military.
That was the worst thing about the modern world. Death, the great leveller, had found its way into the hands of the bad guys. It was the escalation of killing potential that unnerved him; it wasn’t that the villains had never had access to guns — he’d grown up with images of Dick Tracy with his Tommy guns. It was that Desert Eagles, MP5s, CS gas, C5, all of these military grade weapons made for pea
cekeeping were being used to shatter that same peace. But then, the notion of fighting for peace was an oxymoron.
The dead man had a small short-wave walkie-talkie fastened to his belt. Stark took it from him and headed off toward the compound.
Stark lay in the long grass.
Beyond the chain-link fence he could make out the first of two large buildings, and six prefabricated huts. The larger of the two was probably some sort of storage barn, the other most likely their base of operations.
He saw four main high-power security lights, post-mounted at each of the cardinals, north, south, east and west from the main buildings. No doubt they were rigged up to some sort of motion detectors. There was only one point of ingress, a security gate on the east side manned by a solitary guard who had his head in a paperback book. There were three all-terrain vehicles parked close to the second building, reinforcing the idea that this was the command centre.
Power lines were rigged up overhead, arcing back to a generator located behind the storage barn. As he was looking at the wires, a plan began to ferment in his mind. What would Rambo do? he thought grimly. Then he dismissed the idea as near suicidal. Only fools changed their plan mid-execution.
Fools, in his game, had a nasty habit of winding up dead.
He needed to find the back door.
He tried to remember the bleeding German’s directions to the ruined temple, and compared them against what he could see in front of him. Using the gate and the barn to orient himself, Stark decided that the way down into the ruin ought to be about 400 yards off to his left, and if the man was to be trusted, it would provide him with a series of tunnels that linked in with the compound’s subterranean level.
There’s only one way to find out, he thought. Then he set off, keeping low, and grateful for the thick canopy of leaves which kept out most of the moonlight, giving him plenty of darkness to cling to.
The German had been telling the truth.
The spectre of the ruined temple rose up out of the forest like something out of mythology. He could feel the history of the place, the vibrant worship. He could almost taste the vital energies of those poor souls who no doubt had been put to death on this site, in worship of one god or another. He had no way of telling if it was Viracocha, his son Imaymana Viracocha, Inti, Mama Quilla or Manco Capac. This place could have been holy to any of them, or all of them. Peering at it, shrouded in darkness — and at what looked disturbingly like skulls lined up above the main portal — he found himself thinking of Supay, the god of death, with his insatiable hungers.
Until the assault, conversations with Cameron had yielded amazing little nuggets of history, facts the average tourist would never bother to uncover. For instance, the Incas had given hundreds of children a year to Supay in the hopes that he would leave them alone. Yet for some reason, the death god never did.
Stark sprinted across the open ground.
He looked over his shoulder once, as he took the last step before disappearing inside. The change in the air was immediate; it went from clear and cold and crisp, to stagnant, stale and syrupy. Five steps beyond the keystone of the arch, and the darkness was absolute.
He pulled the Maglite from his belt and clicked it on. The thin light played over the contours of the passage, fixing them in his mind before he lowered it so the beam only illuminated a small circle around his feet as he strode confidently forward. The floor of the temple was littered with the mulch of the forest and alive with beetles and insects picking over that thick, black muck. There were plenty of tracks in the mulch; enough to suggest that Eberhardt’s crew came this way every bit as often as they used the main gate into the compound, which meant he had to be on his guard.
The walkie-talkie he had taken from the sentry crackled to life loudly in the dark, and the sudden burst of noise sent a slither of panic deep into Stark’s heart.
“Jorgensen, zurückberichten,” the voice demanded in German. Stark’s German wasn’t particularly fluent but he knew the word: report.
He pushed on, sweeping the beam forward again. Spider’s webs clogged the ceiling, draping down over the narrow, twisting passageway. He had paid plenty of attention when they were briefing them about the poisonous spiders of the region, just as any arachnophobe would. There was Amaxonyan Rectilae, almost certainly the most poisonous of all venomous creatures in the world; then there was the Murderess, the Brazilian wandering spider, almost ten times more venomous than the Black Widow; and the Panama Blonde. Plenty enough to have the sight of the thick web clot his courage.
Stark baulked. He lowered the thermal goggles, looking for any significant heat sources, then wondered sickly if the spiders weren’t cold blooded, like reptiles. He wished to God — Christian or Incan, it didn’t matter to him — that Cutter or one of his crew were here to deal with the arachnids.
“Jorgensen, report,” the German voice demanded again. Jorgensen was almost certainly the man with whom he had played The Demon Barber of Fleet Street a few minutes earlier. He pressed down on the transmitter and said gruffly in his best German, “All clear.”
Fortunately that seemed to convince whoever was listening, and the radio went quiet.
He stared at the thick webs. He really didn’t want to push his way through them. A torch was all well and good with light, but what he really wanted was something that would burn. A flame-thrower, hell, even a bottle of deodorant and a lighter would do. Few spiders were flame retardant, after all.
The best he could manage was pulling his shirt up over his head and plunging through the tangled webs. He felt the furry touch of what had to be a spider up against his cheek and flinched, pulling away from it as he tore through its barrier. With the Maglite between his teeth he started to run and didn’t stop until he hit a dead-end of cracked and broken stones.
There was nothing to suggest any hidden passage or entrance that led down into the crypts — if the temples of the Incas even had crypts.
His skin was clammy.
He dug his fingernails into his palm.
He felt his heart in his throat, his pulse erratic. Cold sweat peppered on his brow and dribbled down his temple to his cheek, merging with the stubble. His breathing was shallow, nostrils flaring as he exhaled. He closed his eyes, focusing on the shallow inhalation, slowing it down, regulating it.
Breathe in. Hold. Count to ten. Breathe out. Count to ten. Breathe in. Hold.
He shivered as he turned to look back the way he had come, seeing the seething shadows that seemed to swarm toward him. Stark tried to remember what the German had said, but he hadn’t given any clues. He’d just said that there was a back way in through the tunnels.
He needed to think.
The tracks that traipsed into the temple suggested that the poachers used the hidden entrance pretty frequently. The thick spiders’ webs growing across the passageway disputed that truth. The arachnids could spin their elaborate constructions quickly, but not that quickly, so logic dictated that he’d taken the road less travelled — and in this case, it was the wrong one. He needed to push his way back through the ruined web and find the place where two passages diverged in the ruin.
He tracked his way back, swallowing down the bile that rose in his throat as the fine filaments of web brushed up against his skin. He didn’t dare look left or right. His heart hammered in his chest, trying to burst free of the bones.
It was ridiculous, really; a man capable of snapping the neck of an enemy soldier without a second’s thought, scared of a bunch of creepy crawlies.
Poisonous creepy crawlies, he amended.
Then the bulbous body of an enormous spider crossed his path, its furry legs moving through the circle of torchlight. Stark brought his thick-soled desert microlite boot down on its bloated abdomen. The arachnid ruptured.
Stark moved on, back the way he had come, finding the divergent passage he had missed on the way down. It was no surprise that he had; it was little more than a crack between the immense building blocks of the old tem
ple.
He wriggled through, his shoulder blades and chest dragging against both sides of the stone as he forced himself through the gap. It opened up on the other side, leading to a short set of steps carved into the base rock. He followed them down.
The air beneath the surface was old. He was struck by the notion that perhaps a dozen people had breathed this air in 500 years. It was a humbling thought about the nature of time, and his own place as a mote in its eye.
You’ve been hanging around with Cutter for too long, he thought, chuckling to himself as he shone the light into the deeper darkness, though not far enough that it might give him away. The passage disappeared into the vanishing point, a straight walk on a shallow decline. He clicked off the Maglite and put the thermal goggles on once again. There were no noticeable heat sources, but the cold walls showed up starkly, allowing him to move through the darkness with confidence. He checked to make sure the MP5 was locked and loaded, then moved on down the passage.
If Eberhardt was the kind of anal retentive paranoid most Bond villains were, he probably had a dozen heat-sensitive cameras recessed into the walls, as well as motion sensors, pressure pads set in the floor, and some sort of lethal gas trap waiting to fug up around his face and knock him out cold. These thoughts were hardly reassuring, but in Stark’s experience the real world contained few Bond villains.
Most were anaemic little individuals who craved the power money could buy. They didn’t have secret schemes of world domination; they watched the Stock Exchange, the Dow Jones and the Hang Seng. They golfed at St Andrews and holidayed in the Maldives. They were, in other words, entirely banal, boring businessmen in suits with two point four children and very little in terms of a flair for the theatrical.
That was the nature of the new evil in the world, it walked the streets of polite respectability, essentially invisible because the gun runners, drug smugglers and crime lords looked just like accountants, computer programmers and government scientists.
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