Temple

by Matthew Reilly

  “You should be proud of what you do,” she said. And then she smiled at him. “It’s good to see you again, Will.”

  Race smiled back as best he could.

  Then she stood and looked about herself. “Well, anyway, I’d better be getting back. Looks like we’re about to land.”

  It was late in the afternoon when the Galaxy landed heavily on a dusty private airstrip at the edge of the Cuzco valley.

  The team disembarked the plane on board the troop truck that had made the journey to South America in the big plane’s belly. The massive truck rumbled out of the forward loading ramp and immediately headed north along a badly paved road toward the Urubamba River.

  It was a bouncy ride. Race sat in the back of the truck next to his bodyguard, Sergeant Van Lewen.

  The other members of the team—the three DARPA people, Nash, Lauren and the hawk-faced physicist, Copeland; Chambers, the anthropologist; and Gaby Lopez, a striking young Latin-American woman who was the team’s archaeologist—all sat with their own Green Beret bodyguards.

  At one point in the trip, the truck drove along a rise and Race was able to see down the length of the Cuzco valley.

  On the left-hand side of the valley, situated on a grassy green hill, lay the ruins of Sacsayhuaman, the mighty fortress he had so recently read about. Its three gargantuan tiers were still discernible, but time and weather had robbed them of their majesty. What four hundred years ago had been a magnificent and imposing fortress fit for the eyes of kings was now a crumbling ruin fit only for the eyes of tourists.

  To the right, Race saw a sea of terracotta roofs—the modern-day city of Cuzco, its surrounding wall having long since been removed. Beyond the rooftops lay the barren southern mountains of Peru—brown and harsh, as desolate as the snow-capped peaks of the Andes to the north were spectacular.

  Ten minutes later, the truck arrived at the Urubamba River, where it was met by a thirty-something man dressed in a white linen suit and a cream Panama hat. His name was Nathan Sebastian and he was a lieutenant in the United States Army.

  Behind Sebastian, floating lazily in the river alongside a long T-shaped jetty, were two military helicopters.

  They were Bell Textron UH-1Ns—“Hueys.” But these two Hueys had been modified slightly. Their long thin landing struts had been removed and replaced with longer pod-like pontoons that floated on the surface of the river. One of the choppers, Race saw, had a complex-looking array of electronic devices suspended beneath its froglike nose.

  The troop truck skidded to a halt near the jetty and Race and the others piled out of it.

  Lieutenant Sebastian walked straight up to Nash. “Choppers are all set, Colonel, just as you requested.”

  “Well done, Lieutenant,” Nash said. “What about our competitors?”

  “A SAT-SN scan was conducted ten minutes ago, sir. Romano and his team are currently flying over Colombia, en route to Cuzco.”

  “Jesus, they’re already over Colombia,” Nash said, biting his Up. “They’re gaining on us.”

  “Their estimated time of arrival in Cuzco is three hours, sir,” Sebastian said.

  Nash looked at his watch. It was 5:00 P.M. exactly.

  “Then we don’t have much time,” he said. “Let’s get these choppers loaded and into the air.”

  Even as Nash said it, the Green Berets were already loading six large Samsonite trunks onto the two Hueys. Once they were stowed, the twelve team members split up into two teams of six and climbed aboard.

  The two choppers took off from the river, leaving Nathan Sebastian standing on the jetty, holding onto his stupid hat.

  The two Hueys soared over the snow-capped mountain peaks.

  Race sat in the back of the second chopper, staring in awe at the spectacular mountain gorges that raced by beneath them.

  “All right, everyone,” Nash’s voice said over their headsets. “I figure we’ve got about two hours of daylight left. And I’d like to do as much of this as 1can in the light. The first thing we have to do is find that first totem. Walter? Gaby?”

  Nash had Chambers and Gaby Lopez with him in the lead chopper. The two Hueys were heading out over the mountains, past the Paucartambo River, in the general direction of the three river villages mentioned in the Santiago Manuscript: Paxu, Tupra and Roya.

  According to the manuscript, they would find the first totem near the last-mentioned town, Roya. Now it was up to Chambers and Lopez, the anthropologist and the archaeologist, to deduce the exact modern-day location of that riverside town.

  And so, Race mused, what had taken Renco Capac and Alberto Santiago eleven days to accomplish, they did in fifty minutes. After soaring over the jagged pointed peaks of the Andes for almost an hour, suddenly—gloriously—the mountains slid away beneath them and Race saw a spectacular expanse of flat green foliage stretching away from him for as far as he could see. It was an amazing sight. The beginning of the vast Amazon River Basin.

  They flew north-east, low over the rainforest, the rotor blades of the two helicopters thumping loudly in the silent afternoon air.

  They flew over some rivers, long fat brown lines that snaked their way through the impenetrable forest. At times, they would see the remains of old villages on the riverbanks, some of them with stone ruins in the center of their town squares, others just overgrown with weeds.

  At one point in their journey, Race saw the faint yellow glow of electric lights peeking up over the darkening horizon.

  “The Madre de Dios goldmine,” Lauren said, leaning over him to look at the glow herself. “One of the largest open-cut mines in the world, also one of the most remote. It’s the closest thing we’ll get to civilization around here. Just a great big earthen cone sunk into the earth. I’d heard it was abandoned sometime last year. Guess it’s been re-op—”

  At that moment, there came a flurry of excited voices over the radio. Chambers and Lopez were speaking animatedly, saying something about the village immediately beneath the two Hueys.

  The next voice Race heard belonged to Frank Nash. He was ordering the choppers to land.

  The two Hueys landed in a deserted clearing by a riverbank, flattening the long grass with their downdrafts. Nash, Chambers and Lopez all stepped out of their chopper.

  Several moss-covered stone monuments stood in the middle of the grassy clearing. After a few minutes of examining the monuments and comparing them to their notebooks, Chambers and Lopez agreed that this was almost certainly the site of the village of Roya.

  After the identity of the village was confirmed, Race and the rest of the team disembarked their choppers and a search of the surrounding jungle ensued. Ten minutes later, Lauren found the first stone totem about five hundred meters to the north-east of the town.

  Race stared at the giant stone totem in awe.

  It was infinitely more frightening in real life than he had imagined it to be.

  It was about nine feet high and completely made of stone. And it was covered in vandalism—crucifixes and Christian symbols that had been scratched into it by God-fearing conquistadors four hundred years ago.

  The stone carving of the rapa, however, was like nothing he had ever seen. It was absolutely terrifying.

  It was covered in moisture, dripping with it. And this layer of wetness had a truly strange effect on the carving—it really made it seem as if the stone carving was alive.

  Race swallowed hard as he stood before the decrepit old totem.

  Jesus.

  With the first totem found, the team hurried back to their choppers and lifted off quickly.

  Nash’s chopper led the way, flying low over the jungle, in the direction of the rapa’s tail.

  Over his headset, Race heard Nash’s voice: “—fire up the magnetometer. Once we get a reading on the next totem, we’ll revert to spotlights—”

  “Got it—”

  Race frowned. He wanted to ask someone what a magnetometer was, but he didn’t want to look any more ignorant in front of Lauren than
he already did.

  “It’s a device used by archaeologists to detect relics buried underground,” Lauren said, smiling wryly at him.

  Damn it, he thought.

  “They’re also used commercially by resource exploration companies to detect subterranean reserves of oil and uranium ore,” she added.

  “How do they work?”

  “A caesium magnetometer like the one we’re using here detects minute variations in the earth’s magnetic field—variations that are caused by objects interrupting the upward flow of that magnetic field. Archaeologists in Mexico have been using magnetometers for years to find buried Aztec ruins. We’re using ours to find the next stone totem.”

  “But the totems are on the surface,” Race said. “Wouldn’t there be a problem with the magnetometer picking up trees and animals?”

  “It can be a problem,” Lauren said. “But not here. Nash will have set his reader to detect only objects of a certain density and depth. Trees have a density of about 0.85 grams per cubic centimeter, and animals, since they’re made of flesh and bone, are only a little higher. Incan stone, however, is about ten times as dense as the thickest tree in the rainforest—”

  “All right, people,” Nash’s voice said suddenly. “I’ve got a reading. Dead ahead. Corporal, the spotlight”

  And so it went.

  For the next hour, as the light faded and the shadows from the mountains grew longer and colder, Race listened as Nash and Chambers and Lopez spotted totem after totem. After the magnetometer found each totem, they would hover their Huey over it and illuminate it with the chopper’s blinding white spotlight. Then, depending on which totem they had spotted, they would either go in the direction of the rapa’s tail or to the creature’s left, in the direction of the Mark of the Sun.

  The two helicopters flew north, alongside the massive step-like tableland that separated the mountains from the rainforest.

  Just as dusk was setting in, Race heard Nash’s voice again.

  “All right, we’re coming up on the tableland,” he said. “I can see a large waterfall flowing over it . . .”

  Race got up from his seat and moved forward, looked out through the forward windshield of his helicopter. He saw Nash’s Huey rise up over a magnificent waterfall that marked the edge of the tableland.

  “All right . . . Following the river now . . .”

  The day grew darker and soon all Race could see were the red taillights of Nash’s helicopter in front of him, banking and tilting as the Huey followed the path of the wide, black river beneath them, the beam of its spotlight playing over the wavelets on the water’s surface. They were heading west now, toward the wall of mountains that towered above the rainforest.

  And then abruptly Race saw Nash’s chopper bank sharply to the right and around a thickly forested bend in the river.

  “Wait a second,” Nash’s voice said.

  Race peered forward through the windshield. Nash’s chopper began to hover above the riverbank to his right.

  “Wait now . . . I see a clearing. It seems to be covered over with grass and moss but . . . Wait, there it is. Okay, people, I can see it. I can just make out the ruins of a large pyramid-shaped building . . . Looks like the citadel. All right, stand by. Stand by for landing.”

  At the very same moment that Nash’s Hueys were landing at the town of Vilcafor, three other—much larger—military aircraft were arriving at Cuzco airport.

  They were airplanes—one giant C-17 Globemaster III cargo plane and two small F-14 fighters, the big cargo plane’s escorts. The three planes taxied quickly to a halt at the end of the landing strip, where they were met by a cluster of other aircraft that had arrived at Cuzco only minutes earlier.

  Three massive CH-53E Super Stallion helicopters stood at the end of the runway, waiting for the Globemaster. The Super Stallions made for an imposing sight—big and strong, they were the most powerful heavy-lift helicopters in the world.

  The transfer was made quickly.

  Three shadowy figures immediately leapt out of the Globemaster and ran across the tarmac toward the choppers. One of them—he was smaller than the other two and black, and he wore a pair of gold-framed spectacles—carried something under his arm, an object that looked like a large leather-bound book.

  The three of them leapt aboard one of the Super Stallions. No sooner were they on board than all three choppers lifted off the tarmac and headed north.

  But they did not leave unobserved.

  Standing at a distance from the airport, watching the choppers through a pair of high-powered binoculars, was a man dressed in a white linen suit and a cream Panama hat.

  Lieutenant Nathan Sebastian.

  Frank Nash’s two Hueys landed gently on the river beside the ruins of Vilcafor in the fading light of dusk, in a downpour of torrential rain.

  After they came to rest on the river’s surface, the two pilots maneuvered their birds around so that their pontoons ran aground on the soft mud of the riverbank.

  The Green Berets leapt out onto the shore first, their M-16s up and ready. The civilian members of the team stepped up onto the mud after them. Race came out last of all and stood at the river’s edge—gunless—staring in awe at the ruins of the citadel town of Vilcafor.

  The village was essentially comprised of a grass-covered central street that ran for about a hundred yards away from the river. It was lined on both sides by roofless stone huts that were overgrown with weeds and moss. The whole town, in fact, was covered in foliage—it was as if the rainforest surrounding it had come alive and consumed it whole.

  At Race’s end of the street was the river and the rickety remains of an old wooden jetty. At the other end of the street—looking down over the little town like some kind of protective god—were the ruins of the great pyramidlike citadel.

  In truth, the citadel was no bigger than a two-story suburban house. But it was made of some of the most solid-looking stones Race had ever seen. It was that same precise Incan masonry he had read about in the manuscript. Giant square-shaped boulders that had been pounded into shape by Incan stonemasons and then set perfectly in place alongside other, similarly fashioned boulders. No mortar was necessary and none had been used.

  The citadel was made up of two tiers, both of them circular in shape—the upper level a smaller concentric circle that rested atop the larger lower one.

  The whole structure, however, looked weathered and worn, beaten and decrepit. The once intimidating stone walls were now laced with green vines and a network of forked cracks. The whole upper level was broken and crumbling. The lower level was still largely intact, but completely overgrown with weeds. A large doorstone sat at an odd angle inside the building’s main entranceway.

  Aside from the citadel, there was one other dominant feature of the village.

  The town of Vilcafor was surrounded by a huge dried-up moat—an enormous horseshoe-shaped ditch that ran around the entire town, starting at the riverbank and ending at the riverbank. Two great stone dikes prevented the water in the river from rushing into the moat.

  It must have been at least fifteen feet across and just as deep. Tangled thorny thickets of brush snaked their way along its waterless base. Two old wooden log-bridges spanned its width on either side of the village. Like the rest of the town, they too had been overcome by the encroaching rainforest. Their wooden beams were laced with sprawling green vines.

  Race stood motionless at the end of the old Incan street, the pouring rain running off the brim of his cap.

  He felt like he was entering another world.

  An ancient world.

  A dangerous world.

  “Don’t stay near the water too long,” Lauren said as she strode past him.

  Race turned, not understanding. Lauren clicked on her flashlight and pointed it at the river behind him.

  It was as if someone had just flicked on a light switch.

  Race saw them instantly. Glinting in the light of Lauren’s flashlight.

&n
bsp; Eyes.

  No less than fifty pairs of eyes, protruding from the inky black water, stared back at him from the rain-spattered surface of the river.

  He turned quickly to Lauren. “Alligators?”

  “No,” Walter Chambers said, coming over. “Melanosuchus niger. Black caimans. Largest crocodilian on the continent. Some say, the largest in the world. They’re bigger than any alligator, and in biology more like a crocodile. In fact, the black caiman is a close relative of Crocodylus porosus, the giant Australian saltwater crocodile.”

  “How big are they?” Race asked. He could only see the eerie constellation of eyes before him. He couldn’t tell how big the reptiles in the water actually were.

  “About twenty-two feet,” Chambers said cheerfully.

  “Twenty-two feet. How much do they weigh?” Race asked.

  “About 2,300 pounds.”

  Great, Race thought wryly.

  The caimans in the darkened river began to rise in the water and Race saw their armored crocodilian backs, saw the pointed plates of their tails.

  They looked like dark mounds just hovering in the water. Great big massive mounds.

  “They’re not going to come out of the water, are they?”

  “They might,” Chambers said. “But probably not. Most crocodilians prefer to grab their victims by surprise at the water’s edge, from the coyer of the water itself. And although black caimans are night hunters, they rarely stray out of the water in the evening, for the simple reason that it’s too cold. Like all reptiles they have to watch their body temperature.”

  Race stepped away from the water’s edge.

  “Black caimans,” he said. “Great.”

  Frank Nash stood at the end of the main street of Vilcafor with his arms folded across his chest, alone. He just stared intently at the decrepit old village before him.

  Troy Copeland appeared at his side. “Sebastian just called from Cuzco. Romano just went through the airport there. He arrived in a Globemaster under Tomcat escort. He then liaised with a few choppers and headed off in this direction.”