Temple (14 page)

It was dark now and the beams of their flashlights played across
the forest. As he walked, Race noticed some gaps in the dark storm
clouds above them—gaps which allowed the odd shaft of brilliant
blue moonlight to illuminate the river beside them. Occasionally in
the distance he would see the strobe-like flash of lightning. A
storm was coming.
Lauren and Copeland led the way. Lauren held a digital compass out
in front of her. Walking alongside her, his M-16 held across his
chest, was her bodyguard, Buzz Cochrane.
Nash, Chambers, Lopez and Race followed close behind them. Scott,
Van Lewen and a fourth soldier—the chunky corporal named Chucky
Wilson—brought up the rear.
The last two Green Berets—Doogie Kennedy and the final soldier in
the unit, another corporal named George 'Tex' Reichart—had been
left back at the village as rearguards.
Race found himself walking next to Nash.
'Why didn't the Army send a full protective force here to begin
with?' he asked. 'If this idol is so important, why did they only
send a preliminary team in to get it?'
Nash shrugged as he walked. 'There were some people high up who
thought this was a pretty speculative mission—
following a four-hundred-year-old manuscript to find a
thyrium idol. So they stopped short of giving us a full offen sive
unit and made it a force-on-discovery mission. But now
that we know it's here, they'll send in the cavalry. Now, if
you'll excuse me.'
With that, Nash went forward and joined Lauren and
Copeland up front.
Race was left walking at the rear of the line, alone, feeling
more than ever like a fifth wheel—a stranger who had no
reason at all to be there.
As he walked along the riverside path he kept one eye on
the surface of the river beside him. He noticed that some of
the caimans were swimming alongside the path, keeping
pace with his party.
After a while Lauren and Copeland came to the base of
the rocky plateau—an immense wall of vertical wet rock
that stretched away to the north and to the south. Race
guessed they had come about six hundred yards from the
town.
Off to the left-on the other side of the river—he saw a
surging waterfall pouring out of the rockface, feeding the
river.
On his own side of the river, he saw a narrow, vertical fis sure
slicing into the face of the massive wall of rock.
The fissure was barely eight feet wide but it was tall—
unbelievably tall—at least three hundred feet, and its walls
were perfectly vertical. It disappeared into the mountain
side.
A trickle of ankle-deep water flowed out from it into a
small rock-strewn pool that, in turn, overflowed into the
river.
It was a natural passageway in the rockface. The product,
Race guessed, of a minor earthquake in the past that had
shunted the north-south-running rockface slightly east-west.
Lauren, Copeland and Nash stepped into the rocky pool
at the mouth of the passageway.
As they did so, Race turned and saw that the caimans in
the river had stopped their shadowing of the party. They
now hung back a good fifty yards away, hovering menacingly in the
deeper waters of the riven
Fine by me, Race thought.
And then, suddenly, he paused and spun around where he stood.
Something wasn't right here.
And not just the behaviour of the caimans. Something
about the whole area around the passageway was wrong…
and then Race realised what it was.
The sounds of the forest had disappeared.
Except for the pattering of the rain on the leaves, it was
perfectly silent here. No droning of cicadas, no chirping of
birds, no rustling of branches.
Nothing.
It was as if they had entered an area where the sounds of the
jungle just ceased. An area where the jungle animals feared to
tread.
Lauren, Copeland and Nash didn't seem to notice the silence. They
just shone their flashlights into the passageWay in the rockface
and peered inside it.
'Seems to go all the way through,' Copeland said.
Lauren turned to Nash. 'It's going in the right direction.'
'Let's do it,' Nash said.
The ten adventurers made their way along the narrow rocky
passageway, their footfalls splashing in the ankle-deep water. They
walked in single file, Buzz Cochrane in the lead, the small
flashlight attached to the barrel of his M-16 illuminating the way
ahead of them.
The passageway was basically straight, with a slight zigzag in the
middle, and it seemed to cut through the plateau for about two
hundred feet.
Race looked up as he walked behind the others. The rock walls on
both sides of the narrow fissure soared into the sky above him. For
a fissure that was so narrow, it was unbelievably tall. As Race
looked upwards, a light rain fell on his face.
And then suddenly he emerged from the passageway
and stepped out into wide-open space.
What he saw took his breath away.
He was standing at the base of a massive rocky canyon of some
sort—a wide, cylindrical crater that was at least three hundred
feet in diameter.
A glistening expanse of water stretched away from him, rippling
silver in a stray shaft of moonlight, bounded on every side by the
circular wall of the enormous crater. The fis sure that they had
just come through, it seemed, was the only entrance to this massive
cylindrical chasm. A thin waterfall fell in a steady sheet on the
far side of the crater, plunging fully four hundred feet into the
shallow lake at the bottom of the wide, circular canyon.
But it was what stood in the centre of the canyon that commanded
everyone's immediate attention.
Rising up out of the body of water—in the exact centre of the
cylindrical crater—was an enormous rock formation.
It was about eighty feet wide and at least three hundred feet tall,
a gigantic natural rock tower—easily the size of a medium-rise
skyscraper—that soared up out of the glisten ing moonlit lake into
the night sky. Against the backdrop of the light evening rain, the
massive black monolith looked absolutely magnificent.
The ten of them just stood there gazing up at the enor mous rock
tower in awe.
'Jesus Christ…” Buzz Cochrane said.
Lauren showed Nash the reading on her digital compass.
“We've come exactly 600 metres from the village. If we take into
account the elevation, I'd say it's a definite possibility
that our idol is sitting right on top of that rock tower.'
“Hey,' Copeland said from the left.
Everyone turned. Copeland was standing in front of a path of some
sort that had been cut into the curved outer wall of the
canyon.
The path appeared to rise steeply, winding its way up the canyon's
circular outer wall in a spiral-like fashion, hugging the
circumference of the cylinder encircling the giant rock
tower in the centre of the crater, but separated from it by an
enormous moat of empty space at least one hundred feet wide.
Lauren and Nash went first, stepping up out of the ankle- deep
water at the base of the crater and onto the path.
The group made its way up the path.
The rain was lighter here, the clouds above the great canyon
thinner, allowing shafts of blue moonlight to pene trate them more
easily.
Up and up they went, following the narrow curving path, all of them
staring in a kind of silent awe at the mag nificent rock tower in
the centre of the crater.
The sheer size of the tower was incredible. It was enor mous. But
it was curiously shaped: it was slightly wider at the top than it
was at the bottom. The whole formation gradually tapered inward to
the point where it met the lake at the bottom of the crater.
As they climbed higher and higher up the crater's spi ralling
pathway, Race began to make out the peak of the rock tower. It was
rounded in shape—dome-like and it was completely covered in dense
green foliage. Gnarled, waterlogged branches leaned out from its
edges, unfazed by the vertiginous three-hundred-foot drop beneath
them.
The group was nearing the top of the crater when they came to a
bridge—-or rather the makings of a bridge that connected the outer,
spiralling path to the rock tower.
It was situated just below the lip of the canyon, not far from the
thin waterfall that cascaded out over the rim and plummeted down
the western wall of the canyon.
Two flat stone ledges faced each other on opposite sides of the
chasm, a hundred feet apart. On each ledge sat a pair of stone
buttresses, presumably the foundations from which a rope bridge of
some kind once hung.
The two buttresses on Race's side of the chasm were pit ted and
worn but they looked sturdy beyond belief. And they looked old.
Really, really old. Race had no doubt that they easily dated back
to Incan times.
It was then that he saw the rope bridge itself.
It was hanging from the ledge on the other side of the chasm, the
tower side. It hung vertically from the two but tresses on the far
ledge so that it fell flat against the tower's rocky wall. Attached
to the bottom end of the rope bridge, however, was a long length of
frayed yellow rope that drooped in a wide arc across the chasm,
over to Race's ledge, where it had been tied to one of the
buttresses.
Walter Chambers examined the frayed yellow rope.
'Dried grass rope. Interlocking braid formation. This is clas sic
Incan rope construction. It was said that a whole Incan town,
working together, could build an entire rope bridge in three days.
The women picked the grass and braided it into long thin lengths of
string. Then the men braided those lengths of string into thicker,
more sturdy segments of rope like this.'
'But a rope bridge couldn't possibly survive the elements for four
hundred years,” Race said.
'No… No, it couldn't,' Chambers said.
'Which means somebody else built this bridge,' Lauren said. 'And
recently, too.'
'But why the elaborate set-up?' Race said, indicating the length of
rope that stretched out across the ravine to the low est point of
the rope bridge. 'Why attach a rope to this end of the bridge and
drop the whole thing down on the other side?'
'I don't know,' Chambers said. 'You'd only do something like that
if you wanted to keep something trapped on the tower top…'
Nash turned to Lauren. 'What do you think?'
Lauren peered over at the tower, partially obscured by the veil of
lightly falling rain.
'It's high enough to match the angle on the NRI,' she looked at her
digital compass. 'And we're exactly 632 metres horizontally from
the village. Factoring in the eleva tion, I'd say it's a good bet
the idol's over there.'
Van Lewen and Cochrane hauled the rope bridge up and looped its
ends around the two stone buttresses on their side of the ravine.
Now the great swooping rope bridge spanned the chasm, linking the
skyscraper-like rock tower
to the spiralling path that ran around it.
The rain continued to fall.
Jagged forks of brilliant white lightning began to illumi nate the
sky.
'Sergeant,' Captain Scott said. 'Safety rope.'
Van Lewen immediately brought a strange-looking object out from his
backpack. It was a shiny silver grappling hook of some sort.
Attached to it was a coil of black nylon rope.
The tall sergeant quickly jammed the shaft of the grap pling hook
into the M-203 grenade launcher attached to the barrel of his M-16.
Then he aimed his gun across the chasm and fired.
With a gaseous shoosh! the grappling hook shot out from Van Lewen's
grenade launcher and arced gracefully over the chasm, its sharp
silver claws snapping out into position as it flew, its black rope
wobbling through the air behind it.
The hook landed on the tower top on the other side of the chasm and
dug its claws into the base of a thick tree
there. Van Lewen then secured his end of the rope to one of
• the stone buttresses on their side of the chasm so that now the
nylon rope spanned the gorge just above the drooping suspension
bridge.
'All right, everyone,' Scott said, 'keep one hand on the safety
rope as you cross the bridge. If the bridge drops from under you,
the rope will keep you from falling.'
Van Lewen must have seen Race go pale. 'You'll be all
right. Just keep a hold of that rope and you'll make it.'
The Green Berets went first, one at a time.
The narrow rope bridge rocked and swayed beneath their weight as
they walked, but it held. The rest of the group followed behind
them, holding onto the nylon safety rope as they crossed the long
swooping suspension bridge in the constant subtropical rain.
Race crossed the rope bridge last of all, holding onto the safety
rope so hard his knuckles went white. As such, he crossed the
bridge more slowly than the others, so by the time he stepped onto
the ledge on the other side, they had already gone on ahead and all
he saw was a damp stone stairway leading up into the foliage. He
hurried up it after them.
Dripping green leaves crowded in on either side of him.
Wet fern fronds slapped against his face as he climbed the
watersoaked stone slabs after the others. After about thirty
seconds of climbing, he burst through a large set of branches and
found himself standing in a small clearing of some sort.
Everyone else was already there. But they just stood there,
motionless. At first Race didn't know what had made them stop, but
then he saw that they all had their flashlights pointed up and to
the left.
His gaze followed their flashlight beams and he saw it.
'Holy Christ,' he breathed.
There, situated on the highest point of the rock tower— covered in
hard-packed mud and moss, concealed by weeds all around it, and
glistening wet in the ever-falling rain— stood an ominous stone
structure.
It was cloaked in shadow and wetness, but it was clear that this
was a structure that had been designed to exude menace and power. A
structure that could have had no other purpose than to inspire
fear, idolatry and worship.
It was a temple.
Race stared at the dark stone temple and swallowed hard.
It looked evil.
Cold and cruel and evil.
It wasn't a very big structure. In fact, it was barely even one
storey tall. But Race knew that wasn't really the case.
He guessed what they were seeing was only the very top of the
temple—the tip of the iceberg—because the ruined section of it that
they now saw finished too abruptly. It just disappeared into the
mud beneath their feet.