Temple

by Matthew Reilly

  Immediately, the tank’s monstrous AVCO Lycoming engine roared to life, the throb of its powerful engine reverberating throughout the enormous cargo bay.

  Bittiker was jolted off balance by the sudden roar of the tank’s engine. Up on the catwalk in front of the tank, Troy Copeland also looked up in surprise.

  Inside the driver’s hatch, Race looked around for anything he could—

  Oh yeah. That’s nice.

  He found a control stick, complete with trigger, on which was written the words “MAIN GUN.”

  Race grabbed the stick and squeezed the trigger and hoped to God that there was a round inside the Abrams’ main cannon.

  There was.

  The boom of the tank’s 105mm cannon going off inside the cargo bay of the Antonov was perhaps the loudest thing Race had ever heard in his life.

  The entire cargo plane shuddered violently as the Abrams’s mighty cannon went off in all its glory.

  The 105mm shell blasted through the plane like a runaway asteroid. First, it sheared Troy Copeland’s head off—cleanly, quickly—removing it in an instant, like a bullet taking off the head of a Barbie doll, decapitating Copeland in a nanosecond, leaving his body standing for a full second after his head had been removed.

  But the shell just kept on going.

  It shot like a missile through the steel wall behind Copeland’ s body, rocketing up into the passenger deck of the Antonov, plowing at colossal speed into the cockpit walls, exploding right through the pilot’s chest before it blasted out through the plane’s windshield in a spectacular shower of glass.

  With its pilot now well-and-truly dead, the Antonov banked wildly, entering the first stages of a nosedive.

  In the cargo bay, the world tilted crazily. Race saw the damage that he’d done, saw where this plane was going.

  While I’ve still got one second left, I’m going to try to disarm that bomb.

  Bittiker was still standing on the skirt of the tank, still holding his Calico pistol, but he’d been thrown wildly off balance by the discharge of the cannon.

  Race crunched the tank’s gears, found the one he wanted.

  Then he jammed his foot down on the accelerator, slamming it against the floor.

  The tank responded immediately—its tracked wheels leaping into motion—and the massive steel beast shot off the mark like a racing car. The only thing was, it shot back-ward—out along the loading ramp, shooting off its edge, tipping over it and falling out into the clear open sky.

  The Abrams tank fell.

  Fast Really, really fast.

  Indeed, no sooner had it dropped off the loading ramp of the Antonov than the cargo plane—gutted by the blast of the tank’s cannon—just banked away into a nosedive and exploded in a gigantic, billowing ball of flames.

  The Abrams fell through the sky—rear-end first—at phenomenal speed. It was so big, so heavy, it just cut through the air like an anvil, a screaming 67-ton anvil.

  Inside the tank, Race was in a world of trouble.

  Everything was tilted on its side and the whole tank shook violently as it was buffeted by the friction it created with the air outside.

  For his part, Race lay awkwardly in the middle of the command center, having been thrown there when he had re-versed the tank off the loading ramp. Next to him was the Supernova. It now sat horizontally, wedged firmly in between the ceiling and floor.

  Race saw the timer on its display screen counting down:

  00:00:21

  00:00:20

  00:00:19

  Nineteen seconds.

  About the same time he had before the tank smashed into the ground from a height of 19,000 feet.

  Screw it—he’d done this once before. He could do it again.

  Maybe.

  He stared at the computer screen:

  YOU NOW HAVE

  00:00:16

  MINUTES TO ENTER DISARM CODE.

  ENTER DISARM CODE HERE

  --------

  Sixteen seconds . . .

  The tank screamed through the sky.

  Race looked forlornly at the timer as it counted inexorably downward.

  And then suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement. He snapped to look up—and saw Earl Bittiker crawling in through the driver’s hatch up at the top of the falling tank, his Calico pistol in his hand!

  Oh fuck!

  00:00:15

  Forget about him!

  Just think!

  Think? Christ, how the hell is a guy supposed to think inside an Abrams tank that’s plummeting to earth at about a hundred miles an hour, with a guy climbing in through the driver’s hatch carrying a gun?

  00:00:14

  Race tried to clear his mind.

  All right, last time he had known that Weber had set the disarm code. But this time, he didn’t have the first clue who had set the code, principally because he didn’t know who had designed the device’s ignition system.

  00:00:13

  Ignition system . . .

  Those were Marty’s last words, the words he had spoken as he lay dying in Race’s arms.

  00:00:12

  The Abrams hit terminal velocity, began to emit a shrill screaming sound like that of a falling bomb.

  Bittiker was halfway through the driver’s hatch now. He saw Race, fired his pistol at him.

  Race dived out of the way, ducked behind the Supernova, grabbed the cellular phone from his pocket as more bullets slammed into the steel wall of the tank beside him.

  “Demonaco!” he yelled over the din of the falling tank.

  “What is it, Professor?”

  ‘Tell me quickly! Who designed the ignition system on the Navy’s Supernova?”

  Three thousand miles away, John-Paul Demonaco snatched up a nearby sheet of paper. It was the list of the members of the Navy-DARPA Supernova team.

  His eyes zeroed in on one line.

  RACE, Martin E.

  Ignition system design engineer

  DARPA

  D/3279-97A

  “A guy named Race. Martin Race!” Demonaco shouted into the phone.

  Marty, Race thought.

  00:00:11

  Marty had designed the ignition system. That’s what he’d been trying to tell him before he died.

  Therefore Marty had set the disarm code.

  00:00:10

  Eight-digit numerical code.

  Bittiker was fully inside the tank now.

  What code would Marty use?

  00:00:09

  The tank was still falling, screaming through the air at a thousand feet per second.

  Bittiker saw him, raised his Calico again.

  What code did Marty always use?

  00:00:08

  Birthday? Significant date?

  No. Not for Marty.

  If he had something that required a numerical code, an ATM card or a PIN number, he always used the same number.

  Elvis Presley’s Army serial number.

  00:00:07

  Bittiker leveled the Calico at Race.

  Christ, what was it!

  It was on the tip of his brain . . .

  00:00:06

  Race ducked behind the Supernova—Bittiker wouldn’t dare shoot him through it—found himself standing in front of the device’s arming computer.

  God, what was the number?

  533 . . .

  Think, Will! Think!

  00:00:05

  5331 . . .

  . . . 07 . . .

  . . . 61 . . .

  53310761!

  That was it!

  Race started punching the keys on the arming computer, typed: 53310761 and then he slammed his finger down on the ENTER key.

  The screen beeped.

  DISARM CODE ENTERED.

  DETONATION COUNTDOWN TERMINATED AT:

  00:00:04

  MINUTES.

  But Race didn’t bother to stay and look at the screen.

  Rather, he just clambered quickly away from Bittiker�
��shielded by the now-disarmed Supernova—and headed along the short ladder that led to the tank’s turret hatch.

  He didn’t know why he headed that way. It was just a completely illogical notion that if he was on the outside of the tank when it hit the ground,” he might have a better chance of surviving the impact.

  They must be close to impact now.

  On his way across the horizontal ladder, he came across the idol—now with a hole in its base—and scooped it up as he crawled.

  He came to the hatch, pushed it open. Speeding wind assaulted his face instantly—wind that moved so fast it blinded him.

  Clutching onto the now-vertical roof of the Abrams, he quickly kicked the hatch shut behind him, shutting Bittiker inside, just as the steel hatch itself was assailed by a barrage of automatic fire from inside.

  Race looked down, into the face of the onrushing wind, as it pounded against his glasses—

  —and saw the green rainforest rushing up at him at about a million miles per hour!

  The tank screamed toward the earth.

  Two seconds to impact.

  This was it.

  One second.

  The earth rushed up toward him.

  And in that last second before the Abrams tank slammed into the earth at incredible speed, William Race shut his eyes and offered up a single, final prayer.

  And then it happened.

  Impact.

  The tank’s impact with the earth was absolutely stunning in its force.

  The world seemed to shudder as the 67-ton tank slammed into it at terminal velocity. The tank imploded on contact with the ground, flattening in a millisecond, sending whole sections of it shooting out in every direction.

  Earl Bittiker had been inside the Abrams when it hit the ground. As the giant steel tank slammed into the earth, its walls came rushing in toward him at shocking speed, sending a thousand jagged corners of metal shooting into his body—penetrating him from every side in the nanosecond before he was crushed into nothing. One thing was for sure, Earl Bittiker had been screaming when he died.

  William Race, on the other hand, hadn’t been anywhere near the tank when it hit the ground.

  In that second before the tank smashed into the earth—when it was about eighty feet above it—Race had experienced the strangest sensation.

  He had heard a sound not unlike a sonic boom come from somewhere very close behind him and then suddenly, out of nowhere—shoom!—he had felt himself get yanked up into the sky by some powerful unseen force.

  But the yank had not been rough or whip-like—rather it had been abrupt but smooth, as if he had been connected to the heavens by some invisible bungee cord.

  So as the tank—and Bittiker—hit the ground in a smashing, blazing heap, Race had hovered thirty feet above the explosion, safe and sound.

  And then he looked over his shoulder and saw what had happened.

  He saw two plumes of white gas shooting out from the bottom of the A-shaped unit that was attached to the back of his unusual Kevlar breastplate. In fact, the twin puffs of propellant shot out from two small exhaust ports situated at the base of the “A.”

  Although Race didn’t know it, the black Kevlar breast-plate that Uli had given him at the refuse pit was in fact a J-7 jet pack, the cutting-edge aerial insertion unit created by DARPA in conjunction with the United States Army and the 82nd Airborne Division.

  Unlike the Army’s current MC1-1B parachutes, which allowed their wearers to be suspended in ftdl view of the enemy for at least several minutes before landing, jet packs allowed their wearers to free-fall to within eighty feet of the ground before swooping to a sudden stop just above the landing zone, in much the same fashion as a bird landing.

  Like parachutes, however, all J-7 jet packs were equipped with altimeter switches—altitude-triggered safety mechanisms that engaged the pack’s propulsion systems in the event that the wearer failed to engage them himself before he fell below eighty feet. As Race had just faded to do.

  There was no way he could have known that on December 25, 1997, at the same time as forty-eight chlorine-based isotopic charges had been stolen from a DARPA truck traveling along the Baltimore beltway by agents of the Stormtroopers, also stolen were sixteen J-7 jet packs.

  Slowly, gently, the jet pack lowered Race down to earth.

  He sighed, breathless, and allowed his body to go limp as he descended into the canopy of lush rainforest trees.

  Seconds later, his feet touched the ground and he just fell to his knees, exhausted.

  He looked at the rainforest around him and in a distant corner of his mind wondered how the hell he was going to get out of here.

  Then he decided that he didn’t care anymore. He had just disarmed a Supernova wlrile falling from a height of 19,000 feet inside a 67-ton main battle tank.

  No, he didn’t care in the slightest.

  And then suddenly the solution to his problem revealed itself in the form of a small seaplane swooping in low over the trees above him. A man’s hand waved happily from the pilot’s window.

  It was Doogie and the Goose.

  Beautiful.

  Thirty minutes later, thanks to a conveniently placed stretch of river nearby, Race was back on board the Goose with the others, soaring through the clear afternoon sky high above the rainforest.

  He rested his head against the cockpit window, stared vacantly through it as they flew. He was absolutely exhausted.

  Beside him, Doogie said, “You know what I think, Professor? I think it’s high time we got the hell out of this damned country. What do you think?”

  Race turned to face him. “No, Doogie. Not yet. There’s still one more thing we have to do before we go.”

  SEVENTH MACHINATION

  Wednesday, January 6, 1730 hours

  The Goose touched down on the river next to Vilcafor shortly before sunset on January 6, 1999.

  After dousing themselves in monkey urine again, Race and Renée headed back to the upper village. They left Doogie and Gaby in the Goose, to allow Gaby to tend to the young Green Beret’s many wounds.

  As the two of them trudged through Vilcafor, tired and exhausted, Race saw that there were no bodies lying on the street.

  Despite the fact that about a dozen Navy and DARPA scientists—plus Marty, Lauren, Nash and Van Lewen—had been killed here only a few hours previously, no bodies remained.

  Race looked at the empty street sadly. He had an idea where the bodies had gone.

  He and Renée entered the upper village just as dusk was beginning to settle over the Andean foothills.

  The natives’ chieftain, Roa, and the anthropologist, Miguel Moros Marquez, met them at the moat at the edge of the village.

  “I think this belongs to you,” Race said, holding the idol out in his hands.

  Roa smiled at him. “You truly are the Chosen One,” he said. “My people will sing songs about you one day. Thank you, thank you for returning our Spirit.”

  Race bowed his head. He didn’t think he was any kind of Chosen One at all. He’d just done what he had thought was right.

  “Just promise me this,” he said to Roa. “Promise me that when I am gone, you will leave this village and disappear into the forests. Men will come searching for this idol again, of that I am certain. Take this idol far away from here, where they will never find it.”

  Roa nodded. “We will, Chosen One. We will.”

  Race still hadn’t actually handed the idol to Roa yet.

  “If you will permit me, sir,” he said, “there is one more thing I have to do here, and to do it, I will require the use of the idol.”

  The tribe of natives assembled on the spiraling path that en-circled the rock tower.

  Night had fallen and they were all thoroughly doused in monkey urine.

  The rapas, Marquez said, unable to return to their lair inside the temple, had spent the day hiding in the heavy shadows at the base of the crater.

  Race stood on the spiraling path, looking out
across the ravine that had earlier been spanned by the rope bridge.

  The rope bridge still hung flat against the side of the tower, in the same place the Nazis had left it when they had unlooped it from its buttresses twenty-four hours ago.

  One of Roa’s nimblest climbers—doubly soaked in monkey urine—was sent down to the base of the canyon where he embarked upon a skillful climb up the rock tower’s near-vertical wall.

  After a while, he came to the long retrieval rope that dangled from the bottom of the rope bridge. He tied it to another rope that was held by natives standing on the spiraling path and they then pulled the retrieval rope over to their side of the ravine.

  The rope bridge was quickly secured back into place.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Renée said to Race as he gazed across at the tower top.

  “There’s a way out of that temple,” he said. “Renco found it. I will, too.”

  Then, with the idol in one hand and a torch in the other and a leather satchel slung over his shoulder, Race led the way across the swooping bridge.

  A team of ten of Roa’s strongest warriors followed him, bearing flaming torches of their own.

  Once they were all on the rock tower, Race led them up to the clearing in front of the temple. There he pulled a water bladder out of his leather satchel and used it to douse the thyrium idol.

  The idol hummed instantly. A pure, mesmerising sound that cut through the night air like a knife.

  Within minutes, the first rapa arrived at the clearing.

  Then a second, and a third.

  The massive black cats gathered around the clearing, forming a wide circle around him.

  Race counted twelve of them in total.

  He doused the idol again and it emitted its even harmonic tone with renewed vigor.

  Then he took a step backward, entering the temple.

  Ten steps down and he was surrounded by blackness.

  The rapas—big, black and menacing—followed him in-side, blocking the shafts of blue moonlight that entered the tunnel from without.

  Once all the cats were fully inside the temple, the ten Indian warriors outside began to heave on the boulder—as Race had instructed them to do.