Authors: Matthew Reilly
Race presumed that the rest of the enormous structure lay buried in
the mud beneath them, consumed by four hundred years of accumulated
wet earth.
What he saw, however, was frightening enough.
The temple was roughly pyramidal in shape—two wide
stone steps led up to a small cube-like structure that was no
larger than the average garage. He had an idea what the cube-shaped
structure was—it was a tabernacle of some sort, a holy chamber not
unlike those found atop Aztec or Mayan pyramids.
A series of gruesome pictographs had been carved into the walls of
the tabernacle—snarling cat-like monsters wielding scythe-like
claws; dying humans screaming in agony. Cracks of age littered the
stone walls of the temple.
The unending subtropical rain ran in rivulets down its carved stone
walls, giving life to the characters in the horrific scenes on the
walls—generating the same effect that running water had produced on
the stone totem earlier.
In the centre of the tabernacle, however, lay the most intriguing
aspect of the whole structure—-an entrance of some kind. A
square-shaped portal.
But this portal had been stopped up. At some time in the distant
past someone had wedged an enormous boulder into it, blocking it.
The boulder was absolutely huge. Race guessed that it must have
taken at least ten men to move it into place.
'Definitely pre-Incan,“ Chambers said, as he examined the
carvings.
'Yes, absolutely,' Lopez said.
'How do you know?' Nash asked.
'Pictographs are too closely spaced,' Chambers said.
'And much too detailed,' Lopez said.
Nash turned to Captain Scott. 'Check on Reichart back at the
village.”
'Yes, sir.' Scott stepped away from the circle and pulled a
portable radio from his pack.
Lopez and Chambers were still talking shop.
'What do you think?' Lopez said. 'Chachapoyan?'
“Possibly,' Chambers said. “Could be Moche. Look at the feline
images.'
Gaby Lopez cocked her head doubtfully. “It could be, but that would
make it nearly a thousand years old.'
'Then what about the spiralling path around the crater
and the stairs here on the tower?' Chambers said.
'Yes… yes, I know. Very peculiar,'
Nash cut in. “I'm glad you both find it so fascinating, but what
the hell are you talking about?'
'Well,' Chambers said, “it appears that we have a slight anomaly
here, Colonel.'
'What do you mean?'
'Well, you see, the spiralling path that runs around this crater
and the steps on this tower were without a doubt con structed by
Incan engineers. The Incans built all sorts of tracks and trails
through the Andes and their construction methods are well
documented. These two examples bear all the hallmarks of Incan
trail construction.'
'Meaning?'
'Meaning that the path and the steps were constructed roughly four
hundred years ago. This temple, on the other
hand, was built long before then.'
'So?' Nash said irritably.
'So, that's the anomaly,' Chambers said. 'Why would the Incans
construct a pathway to a temple that they didn't even build?'
'And don't forget the rope bridge,' Lopez said.
'No,' Chambers said. 'Quite right. Quite right.' The book ish
little scientist looked up fearfully at the rim of the
crater.
'I would suggest we hurry.'
'Why?' Nash said.
'Because, Colonel, it is highly likely that there exists in this
area a tribe of natives who will probably not take too kindly to
the fact that we have intruded upon their sacred site.'
'How do you know that?' Nash said quickly. 'How do you know that
there are natives around here?'
'Because,' Chambers said, 'they are the ones who built the rope
bridge.'
'As Professor Race pointed out earlier,' Chambers explained,
'suspension bridges made out of rope decay very quickly over time.
A grass-based rope bridge will disintegrate, say, within a few
years of its being built. The bridge that we crossed to get to this
temple could not have existed four hundred years ago. It was built
recently, by someone knowledgeable in Incan bridge-building meth
ods, in all likelihood a primitive tribe of some sort through whom
this knowledge has been passed down through the generations.'
Nash groaned audibly.
'A primitive tribe,' Race said flatly. 'Here. Now?'
'It's not that improbable,' Gaby Lopez said. 'Lost tribes are
discovered all the time in the Amazon Basin. As recently as 1987,
the Villas Boas brothers made contact with the lost Kreen Akrore
tribe in the Brazilian rainforests. Hell,
AS
the Brazilian government even has a policy of sending explorers
into the jungle to make contact with Stone Age tribes.
'As you can imagine, though, a lot of those primitive tribes are
extremely hostile to Europeans. It is not unknown for
state-sponsored explorers to come home in pieces. Some, like the
famous Peruvian anthropologist Dr Miguel Moros Marquez, don't come
back at all—'
'Hey!' Lauren said suddenly from over by the portal.
Everyone turned. Lauren was standing in front of the boulder that
was wedged inside the square-shaped doorway.
“There's something written on this.”
Race and the others came over to where she was standing.
Lauren brushed away some chunks of mud that clung to the boulder
and Race saw what she was looking at.
Something was engraved in the surface of the great stone.
Lauren scraped away some more mud, revealing something that looked
like a letter from the alphabet.
It was an 'N'.
'What the hell… ?' Nash said.
Words began to take shape.
No entrare. . .
Race recognised them.
'No entrare“ was Spanish for 'Do not enter'.
Lauren scraped away some more mud and a whole sentence appeared in
the centre of the boulder, crudely scratched into the surface of
the stone. It read:
No entrare absoluto.
Muerte asomarse dentro.
Race translated the words in his head. Then he swallowed
hard.
“What does it say?' Nash said.
Race turned to face him. At first, he didn't say anything.
Then at last he said, 'It says, “Do not enter at any cost. Death
lies within.”'
'What does “AS” mean?“ Lauren said.
'I would guess,” Race said, 'that “AS” stands for Alberto
Santiago.'
Back in the village, Doogie Kennedy kicked away a loose rock
restlessly. It was dark now and the rain was still falling and he
was pissed at having been left back in the village when he really
wanted to be up in the mountains with the others.
'What's the matter, Doogs?' Corporal George 'Tex'
Reichart asked from over by the moat on the eastern side of the
village. Reichart was a tall, lanky beanpole of a man. He hailed
from Austin and was a genuine, grass- chewing cowboy—hence his
nickname. 'Not gettin'
enough action?'
'I'm awright,' Doogie said. 'I'd just rather be up there in them
mountains findin' whatever it is we're here to find, than down here
babysitting a goddamned village.'
Reichart chuckled softly to himself. Doogie was good value. A bit
on the dim side, but keenlkeen as mustard.
What Tex Reichart didn't know, however, was that behind his
small-town Southern drawl, Doogie Kennedy was in fact an
exceptionally intelligent young man.
Preliminary testing at Fort Benning had revealed that Doogie had an
IQ of 161—which was odd, because he had only just barely graduated
high school.
It was soon discovered that, throughout his school years in Little
Rock, Arkansas, young Douglas Kennedy's quiet, God-fearing
accountant father had beaten him senseless every evening with a
leather strap.
Kennedy Snr had also refused to buy school books for his
son and on most nights he would make the boy stand in a dark,
three-by-four-foot closet as punishment for serious misdemeanours
such as slamming the door too loudly or overcooking his father's
steak. Homework never got done and young Doogie only managed to
complete high school through his extraordinary ability to take in
mentally what was said in class.
He joined the Army the day he graduated and he would never return
home. What school administrators had seen as just another shy young
kid scraping through high school, one sharp old recruiting sergeant
had seen as the mark of a determined and brilliant mind.
Doogie was still shy, but given his intelligence, his willpower and
the support network of the Army, he soon became a hell of a
soldier. He swiftly made Ranger grade, majoring in sniping. The
Green Berets and Fort Bragg had followed soon after.
'Guess I'm just itchin' for some action,“ Doogie said, as he came
over to where Reichart was laying an AC-7V 'Eagle Eye' sensor by
the eastern moat.
'I wouldn't go getting your hopes up,' Reichart said, flicking on
the Eagle Eye's motion-activated thermal-imaging system. 'I don't
think there's gonna be much excitement on this trip—'
There came a loud beep from the motion sensor.
Doogie and Reichart exchanged a quick look.
Then both of them snapped around to scan the dense section of
rainforest in front of the motion sensor.
There was nothing there.
Just a tangle of criss-crossing fern fronds and empty forest.
Somewhere nearby a bird whistled.
Doogie snatched up his M-16 and cautiously stepped over the
log-bridge that spanned the eastern section of the moat. He moved
slowly forward, toward the suspect section of jungle.
He reached the edge of the rainforest, flicked on his barrel-
mounted flashlight—
—and he saw it.
Saw the glistening, speckled body of the largest snake he had ever
seen in his life! It was a thirty-foot anaconda, a monster of a
snake, slinking lazily around the gnarled branches of an Amazonian
tree.
It was so large, Doogie figured, that its movement must have set
off the motion sensor.
'What is it?' Reichart said, coming alongside him.
'It's nothing,' Doogie said. 'Just a sna—'
And then abruptly, Doogie whirled back around to face the
snake.
The snake couldn't have set off the motion sensor. It was
cold-blooded and the motion sensor operated on a thermal- imaging
system. It relied on picking up heat signatures—
Doogie whipped his gun up again and played his flashlight beam over
the forest floor in front of him.
And he froze.
A man lay in the wet brush in front of him.
He was lying flat on his belly—looking up at Doogie through a black
porcelain hockey mask—not ten yards away.
So good was his camouflage, he was barely distinguishable from the
dark foliage around him.
But Doogie hardly noticed the man's camouflage.
His eyes were locked on the silenced MP-5 submachine- gun that the
man held, aimed right at the bridge of Doogie's nose.
Slowly, the camouflaged man raised his index finger to his masked
lips, miming the word “Shhh', and as he did so, Doogie noticed a
second man—identically dressed—lying in the brush alongside him,
and then a third, and a fourth, and a fifth.
A whole team of black wraiths lay in the underbrush all around
him.
'What the fuck—' Reichart said as he caught sight of the commandos
on the forest floor in front of them. He immediately reached for
his gun, but a series of loud clicks—the sound of about twenty
safeties being released in the dark- ness—made him think
again.
Doogie shut his eyes in disgust.
There must have been at least twenty men hidden in the brush in
front of them.
He shook his head sadly.
He and Reichart had just lost the village.
'Death lies within.' Nash frowned as he looked at the boul der
wedged inside the temple's portal.
Race stood beside him, staring at the graphic images carved into
the stone walls of the templethe horrific scenes of the monstrous
cats and the dying people.
'Actually, it's more literal than that,' he said, turning.
'Asomarse literally means “looms”, “Death looms within.”'
'And Santiago wrote it?' Nash said.
'It looks that way.'
At that moment, Captain Scott returned to Nash's side° 'Sir, we
have a problem. I can't get through to Reichart.'
Nash didn't turn when he spoke, he just continued to gaze at the
portal. 'Interference from the mountains?'
'The signal's fine, sir. Reichart's not picking up. Some thing's
wrong.'
A frown creased Nash's face. 'They're here…“ he breathed.
'Romano?' Scott said.
'Damn it,' Nash said. 'How did they get here so fast?'
'What do we do?'
'If they're in the village, then they know we're here.'
Nash turned quickly to face Scott. 'Call the base at Panama,'
he said. 'Tell them we had to go to Plan B and had to head into the
mountains. Tell them to radio the air support team and instruct the
pilots to home in on our portable beacons.
Come on. We have to move fast.'
Lauren, Copeland and a couple of the Green Berets hurriedly began
to attach some wads of Composition-2 explosive to the boulder
lodged in the portal.
C-2 is a soft-detonating brand of plastique explosive used by
archaeologists around the world to blast away obstruc tions in
ancient structures without destroying the buildings
themselves.
While the others went quickly about their work, Nash decided to
investigate the area behind the temple, in case it revealed another
way in. With nothing else to do, Race took off after him.
The two of them walked around behind the squat cube- like
structure, sticking to a flat stone path that skirted its way
around the tabernacle like a rail-less balcony.
They came to the rear of the building and immediately saw a steep
muddy embankment that sloped sharply away from them, down to the
very edge of the tower top.
As he stood at the top of the muddy hill, Race looked down at the
tightly-packed arrangement of rectangular blocks that made up the
path beneath him.
Amid all the sharply cornered, square-shaped blocks he
saw a very odd-looking stone.
It was a round stone.
Nash saw it, too, and the two of them bent to examine it more
closely.
It was about two-and-a-half feet in diameter—about the width of a
broadshouldered man—and it lay flush against the surface of the
path. Indeed, it looked to Race as if it had been slotted perfectly
into a cylindrical hole within the path itself, a hole that had
been carved into the square-shaped blocks around it.
'I wonder what it was used for,' Nash said.
“Who is Romano?' Race asked, catching Nash completely off
guard.
Race remembered Nash telling him earlier about the team of German
assassins who had slaughtered those monks in their monastery in the
Pyrenees—remembered the picture Nash had shown him of the leader of
that group of