Temple (48 page)

'It's beautiful,' Nash said wondrously.
'It's a fake,' Race said flatly.
'What?'
'It's a fake. It's not made of thyrium. If you turn on your
nucleotide resonance imager again, you'll find that there is still
a source of thyrium is this area. But this idol isn't it.'
'But… how?'
'During his escape from Cuzco, Renco Capac got the criminal
Bassario to craft an exact replica of the Spirit of the People.
Renco planned to surrender to Hernando and hand over the fake idol
to him. He knew Hernando would kill him, but he also knew that so
long as Hernando got an idol, he would never suspect that it might
be the wrong idol.
'As it happened, however, Renco and Alberto Santiago killed
Hernando and his men, and Renco—-so the manu script says—proceeded
to hide both idols inside the temple.'
Nash turned the idol over in his hands and saw for the first time
the hollowed-out cylindrical section in its base. He looked up at
Race.
'So the real idol is still somewhere inside the temple?“
'That's what Santiago says in the manuscript,' Race said.
'But… ?”
'But I don't believe him.'
'You don't believe him? Why not?'
'Does your NRI machine still work?' Race asked Lauren.
'Yes.'
'Set it up and I'll show you what I mean.'
They all moved to the open-topped roof of the citadel, where Lauren
began setting up the nucleotide resonance imager.
While she went about setting up the machine, Race looked out over
the village. It was dark, still raining lightly.
He caught a glimpse of a large feline shadow peering up at him from
behind one of the smaller buildings of the town.
After a few moments, Lauren had the NRI machine ready. She flicked
a switch and the silver rod mounted on top of the console began to
rotate slowly.
Thirty seconds later, there came a shrill beep! and the rod stopped
abruptly. It was not, however, pointing at the idol in Nash's
hands. Rather, it was pointing away from Nash, up at the
mountains.
'I'm getting a reading,' Lauren said. 'Strong signal, very high
frequency resonance.'
'What're the co-ordinates?' Race said.
'Bearing 270 degrees. Vertical angle 29 degrees, 58 minutes.
Range 793 metres. Same as it was last time, if I remember it
right,' she said, giving Race a look.
'You are remembering it right,' he said. 'You'll also
remember that we thought it was inside the temple.'
'Yes…' Lauren said.
Race looked at her hard—harder than usual. He won dered if she had
been party to Nash's deception, decided
that she probably was. 'Do you remember why we thought it was in
the temple?'
Lauren frowned. “Well, I remember we climbed up the crater and saw
the temple. Then we figured that the tem ple's location matched the
trajectory of the NRI. Ergo, the idol was in the temple.'
'That's right,' Race said. 'That's exactly what we did. And that's
exactly where we went wrong.'
They all came back inside the citadel.
Race grabbed a pen and a piece of paper from inside the ATV that
was still parked flush against the doorway to the citadel.
'Copeland,' he said to the tall humourless scientist. 'Do you think
that with all this technological gadgetry you've got here, you
could find me a regular calculator?'
Copeland found one inside one of the American contain ers, handed
it to him.
'All right,' Race said, allowing the others to crowd around him and
watch.
He drew a picture on the sheet of paper.
'Okay,' he said. 'This is a picture of Vilcafor and the
plateau to the west of it as seen from the side. Okay?'
'Okay,' Lauren said.
Race drew some lines across the drawing:
'And this is what we deduced yesterday from the reading that we got
from the nucleotide resonance imager: 793 metres to the idol. Angle
of inclination 29 degrees, 58 min- utes-but I'll just use 30
degrees to keep it simple. The point is, when we climbed up the
crater and saw the temple, we immediately thought that the temple
must have matched the reading. Right?'
'Right…' Nash said.
'Well we were wrong to do that,' Race said. 'Do you remember when
we were climbing up that spiralling path around the rock tower and
Lauren took a reading from her digital compass?'
“Vaguely,' Nash said.
'Well, I remember it. When we were level with the rock tower,
standing on the outer ledge of the rope bridge, Lauren said that we
had come exactly 632 metres horizontally from the village.'
He added another line to the drawing and changed the words '793 m”
along the hypotenuse—the longest side of the triangle—to 'x
m'.
632m
'Anybody remember doing trigonometry at school?' he asked. All the
theoretical physicists in the citadel around
him shrugged bashfully. 'Granted, it isn't nuclear physics,'
Race said, 'but it does still have some uses.'
'Oh, I see it…' Doogie said suddenly from the back of the small
crowd gathered around Race. Clearly the others didn't.
Race said, 'Using simple trigonometry, if you know one angle of a
right-angled triangle and the length of one of its sides, you will
be able to determine the lengths of the other two sides by using
the concepts of sines, cosines and tangents.
'Don't you guys remember 'SOHCAHTOA'? The sine of an angle equals
the length of the side opposite the angle divided by the length of
the hypotenuse. The cosine equals the length of the side adjacent
to the angle divided by the hypotenuse.
'In our example here, to find x—the distance between us and the
temple—we would use the cosine of 30o.' Race then wrote:
cos30o = 632
x
'Therefore,' he said,
632
X .
cos30°
He punched some numbers into the calculator Copeland “ had given
him.
'Now, according to this calculator, the cosine of 30° is
0.866.
Therefore, x equals 632 divided by 0.866. And that is… 729.'
Race amended his drawing accordingly, writing fever ishly. Lauren
watched him in astonishment. Ren6e just watched him, beaming.
632m
'Anybody see a problem here?' Race said.
Everyone was silent.
Race amended his drawing one last time, finishing with a
flourishing 'X'.
632m
'We made a mistake,” he said. 'We assumed that because of its
height the temple was 793 metres from the village and hence, that
the idol was inside it. It was a good guess but it was a wrong
guess. The real idol isn't inside the temple at
all. It's beyond it, up on the plateau somewhere.“
'But where?' Nash said.
'I would imagine,' Race replied, 'that the idol is to be found in
the village of the tribe of natives who built the rope bridge up on
the rock tower, the same tribe of natives that attacked our German
friends here when they we about to open the temple.'
'But what about the manuscript?' Nash said. 'I thought that it said
both idols were inside the temple.'
'The manuscript doesn't tell the full story,' Race said. 'I can
only guess that Alberto Santiago doctored the ending so that no-one
reading it later would know the true resting place of the
idol.'
Race held up the sheet of paper with his drawing on it.
'That's where the idol is. Your NRI says so, so does the
math.'
Nash pursed his lips, thinking. Then at last he said, 'All right.
Let's go get it.'
The two monkeys that Race and the others had caught down by the
river had gladly—or perhaps angrily—obliged them with an ample
supply of urine, urine which the two screaming primates had sprayed
throughout the plastic bags that Race had lined their boxes
with.
Put simply, the monkey urine reeked. Its sharp foul odour—the smell
of ammonia—pervaded the interior of the citadel. It was no wonder
the rapas despised it, Race thought as he and the others applied
the warm stinking urine to their bodies.
When they were all done, Van Lewen handed out weapons. Since he and
Doogie were the only Green Berets left—so far as anyone knew, Buzz
Cochrane was still up on the tower top—they took the two G-11s.
Nash, Race and Ren6e were given M-16s, complete with grappling
hooks.
Race, still dressed in his black Nazi breastplate and his blue
baseball cap, hung his grappling hook from his belt.
Copeland and Lauren were each given SIG-Sauer P228 semiautomatic
pistols. Krauss and Lauren, the ordinary scientists, went
gunless.
Once everyone was ready, Van Lewen stepped through the doorway of
the citadel and into the ATV. Then he made his way to the rear of
the all-terrain vehicle and opened the pop-up hatch.
His G-11 emerged first.
Then slowly, Van Lewen peered out from the open hatch and scanned
the area. Immediately, his eyes went wide.
The big eight-wheeled vehicle was surrounded by rapas.
Their tails coiled and uncoiled behind their massive bodies.
Their yellow eyes bored into him, hard and cold.
Van Lewen counted twelve of them, just standing there in the
street, watching him.
Then all of a sudden, the nearest cat snorted—smelled the urine—and
immediately reeled away from the ATV.
One after the other, the other cats did the same, turning away from
the armoured vehicle and forming a wide circle around it.
Van Lewen stepped out onto the street, his gun up. One by one, the
others came out behind him, Race among them.
Like everyone else, he moved slowly, cautiously, staring at the
cats while he kept his finger poised on the trigger of his
M16.
It was a truly bizarre sensation, a kind of stand-off. Men armed
with guns, the cats armed with sheer natural aggression.
Despite their rifles and their pistols, Race was certain that the
rapas could take them all down easily if they dared to fire a
shot.
But the cats did not attack.
It was as if the humans were protected from them by some kind of
invisible wall—a wall which the rapas simply refused
to cross. Rather, they just followed Race and the others at a safe
distance, paralleling them as they made their way toward the
riverside path.
Christ, they're huge[ Race thought, as he made his way through the
ranks of massive black cats.
The last time he had seen them up close he had been on the other
side of the Humvee's glass windows, but now— now that they were all
around him, with no windows or doors separating them from him—they
looked twice as big.
He could hear their breathing. It was just as Alberto Santiago had
described it—a deep-chested braying sound like that of a horse. The
sound of a powerful beast.
'Why don't we just shoot them?' Copeland whispered.
'I wouldn't go doing that too quickly,' Van Lewen replied. 'At the
moment, I think their dislike of monkey urine overrides their
desire to kill us. If we open fire on them, I think it's likely
that their desire to survive will override their dislike of monkey
urine.'
The eight of them made their way up the riverside path and into the
narrow fissure in the plateau, the rapas following them at a
distance.
They emerged from the passageway at the bottom of the crater and
saw the shallow lake stretching away from them, with the rock tower
soaring into the sky from its centre and the thin but incredibly
tall waterfall pouring down from the south-west corner of the
canyon.
For once it wasn't raining, and the full moon shone down on the
crater with all its strength, bathing it in a kind of mystical blue
light.
Led by Van Lewen, they climbed the spiralling path, up into the
night.
The rapas slunk their way up the spiralling path behind them. With
their dark black heads and high pointed ears, they looked like
demons climbing up out of Hell itself, ready to yank Race and his
companions down into the depths of the earth should any of them
make one false step.
But ultimately they just kept their distance, put off by the smell
of the monkey urine.
At last the group came to the two buttresses that had once held up
the rope bridge.
The rope bridge itself now lay flat against the wall of the tower
on the other side of the ravine, exactly where the Nazis had left
it.
Race looked across at the tower top. There was no sign of Buzz
Cochrane anywhere.
Then, however, instead of crossing over onto the rock towerqwhich,
at present, they couldn't do anyway—Van Lewen led them further up
the spiralling path, toward the rim of the crater.
The path slid around and behind the thin waterfall at the
south-western corner before it rose dramatically, arriving at the
rim of the crater.
Race stepped up onto the rim and looked westward— and saw the
majestic peaks of the Andes towering above him, dark triangular
shadows superimposed on the night sky. Off to his left, he saw the
small river that fed the thin waterfall and alongside it, a section
of dense rainforest.
A narrow muddy path—created by constant use rather than any
deliberate design—ran away from him into the thick green
foliage.
But it was what sat on either side of the slender path that seized
his immediate attention—a pair of wooden stakes, driven into the
mud.
Impaled on each stake was a fearsome-looking skull.
Race felt a chill as he shone his barrel-mounted flashlight onto
one of the skulls.
It looked utterly horrific—an effect magnified by the copious
amounts of fresh blood and rotting flesh that dangled from its
sides. It was oddly shaped too—definitely not human. Rather, both
skulls were strangely elongated, with sharp canine teeth, inverted
triangular nostrils and wide eye sockets.
Race swallowed hard.
They were feline skulls.
They were rapa skulls.
“A primitive “Keep Out” sign,' Krauss said, looking at the
two filthy skulls impaled on the stakes.
'I don't think they're meant to keep people out,' Gaby Lopez
said, sniffing one of the skulls. 'They've been drenched in monkey
urine. They're designed to keep the cats away.'
Van Lewen stepped past the skulls and pressed on into
the dense foliage. Race and the others followed him, guided
by the beams of their flashlights.
About thirty yards beyond the two skulls, Van Lewen
and Race came to a wide moat not unlike the one that sur rounded
Vilcafor.
The only differences between the two moats were, firstly,
that this moat wasn't dried up—rather, it was filled with .water,
the surface of which lay about fifteen feet below the rim of the
moat. And secondly, it was inhabited by a family of very large
caimans.
'Great,' Race said as he watched the giant crocodilians