Authors: Matthew Reilly
The three SEALs had hunkered down behind some trees near the shrine
and their MP-5s, when used in coordination, were proving a good
match against his lone G-11. Then abruptly the SEALs' fire stopped
as they were overwhelmed from behind by a horde of Indians bearing
axes, arrows, sticks and clubs.
Van Lewen winced.
'Where are you going?' he yelled when he saw Race and Ren6e run
past him.
'We're going after Nash! He stole the real idol!'
'He what—?'
But Race and Ren4e were already hurrying off into the trees. Van
Lewen took off after them.
Gaby Lopez was running too. Only she was running for her
life.
As soon as the Navy Super Stallions had appeared, she had hurried
off behind the nearest set of trees. But she had gone the wrong
way. Everyone else had gone south while she had gone north and now
she was racing through the chest-high foliage to the north-east of
the upper village— alone—ducking as she ran, trying desperately to
avoid the bullets that smacked against the branches around her
head.
The two remaining Navy SEALs were somewhere behind her, firing hard
with their MP-5s as they crashed through the undergrowth.
Gaby looked behind herself as she ran, searching fear fully for her
pursuers. Then, as she turned to look behind her one more time, she
abruptly felt the ground beneath her feet just fall away.
She dropped like a stone.
A second later, she hit water.
Muddy liquid flew everywhere. When it settled, Gaby opened her eyes
and found that she was sitting on her butt in the moat that
encircled the upper village! She leapt quickly to her feet and
found that she was standing in a sec tion of ankle-deep
water.
The thought suddenly occurred to her: caimans.
She looked about herself desperately. She saw that the moat was
roughly circular in shape, saw that it bent away from her in both
directions like a road disappearing around a curve. Its sheer muddy
walls towered above her, their rims a good ten feet above her
head.
Suddenly submachine-gun fire raked the water all around her and on
an instinct Gaby dived forward and the bullets shot over her head,
smacking into the earthen walls of the moat.
Then abruptly she heard more gunfire—different gunfire this time,
G-11 gunfire—and in an instant the first set of bul lets stopped
firing and there was silence. Gaby was still lying on her chest in
the shallow water of the moat. A long
silence followed. After a few seconds, she cautiously raised her
head.
And found herself staring into the smiling face of a caiman.
Gaby froze.
It was just sitting there in the mud in front of her, watch ing
her, its tail slinking slowly back and forth behind it. It had her.
Had her dead to rights.
Then with a loud grunting roar, the giant reptile charged, baring
its jaws savagely, lunging at her—
Splat !—something landed right on top of the caiman from above.
Gaby didn't know what it was. It had looked like an animal of some
sort and now it and the caiman were rolling around together in
front of her in a splashing heap of mud and water.
Her jaw dropped when she realised what the animal was.
It was a man. A man in combat uniform. He had jumped down from the
rim of the moat, tackling the caiman at the exact moment that it
had lunged at her.
The caiman and the man rolled as they wrestled, the reptile bucking
and snapping, the man gasping for air whenever he could.
And then Gaby saw who it was.
It was Doogie.
Doogie and the caiman fought, rolling and wrestling, grunt ing and
thrashing. The caiman snapped wildly at Doogie while the injured
Green Beret grappled desperately with its snout, trying to keep it
closed as he had seen alligator wrestlers do when he was a
child.
He still had his G-11, but it was useless now, empty. He'd
reluctantly used his last few rounds to drop the two Navy SEALs who
had been firing on Gaby. Then when he had seen the caiman appear in
front of her and lunge, he had done the only thing he could think
to do—he had leapt down on top of it.
Just then the caiman jerked its snout free from Doogie's
grasp, bared its jaws and launched itself at his head. Out of sheer
desperation, Doogie swung his G-11 around and without even
thinking, wedged it inside the big crocodilian's mouth,
propping it open, right in front of his own face!
The caiman grunted in surprise.
Its jaws were now propped wide open, like the bonnet of a car. The
big creature couldn't close its mouth!
Doogie seized the opportunity and quickly unsheathed his Bowie
knife.
The caiman stood stupidly in front of him, its long snout held open
by the vertical G11.
Doogie tried to get around the big reptile—behind it—so that he
could drive his knife into its skull and kill it, but the caiman
saw him move and it swung quickly sideways, bowling into him,
knocking him off his feet, sending him splashing into the muddy
water.
The caiman then stomped quickly forward, stepping on top of
Doogie's legs with its stubby forelimbs, causing them to sink down
into the mud.
“Arggghhh!' Doogie yelled as the weight of the caiman came down on
his shins. The big reptile took another slow step forward, stepping
onto his wounded left thigh. Doogie roared with pain as his legs
sank further into the mud.
The caiman's propped-open mouth yawned before his face, two feet in
front of his nose, held open by his G-11.
Fuck it, Doogie thought as, with a quick lunge, he reached deep
inside the caiman's enormous jaws and wedged his Bowie knife in
behind the G-11, positioning it vertically so that the knife's butt
sat on the caiman's tongue while its blade rested up against the
roof of the big beast's mouth.
'Eat this,' Doogie said as he swung his arm sideways,
swiping the G-11 out of the giant reptile's mouth.
The response was instantaneous.
With the G-11 gone, the caiman's mighty jaws came rushing back
together, the upper jaw chomping downwards, right on top of the
Bowie knife in the back of its mouth, forcing it up into its
brain.
The blood-stained blade of the knife burst up out of the
reptile's massive head and the caiman's body went instantly
limp, the life rushing out of it.
Doogie stared at it for a moment, stunned at what he had
just done. The massive animal was still standing half on top of
him, groaning involuntarily, expelling large amounts of air that it
no longer needed.
'Whoa…' Doogie breathed.
Then he shook his head and pulled himself out from
under the enormous creature and clambered over to where Gaby was
still lying in the mud, completely dumbstruck at his act of
chivalry.
'Come on,' he said, taking her hand. 'Let's get out of
here.'
Frank Nash raced through the dense foliage between the upper
village and the crater, holding the idol under his arm like a
football.
Lauren and Copeland ran behind him, SIG-Sauer pistols in their
hands.
Amid all the confusion of the aerial attack on the upper village,
he and Lauren and Copeland had quickly laid one of the log-bridges
over the moat and bolted across it into the dense underbrush.
'This is Nash! This is Nash!' he yelled into his throat microphone
as he ran. “Aerial team, come in!'
He looked up at the sky behind him, saw the surviving Army Comanche
helicopter hovering over the smoking remains of the village. Behind
it, he saw another chop- pr—a third helicopter that was fatter and
stockier than the Comanche. It was a Black Hawk II, the third Army
chopper.
'Colonel Nash—is Captain Hank Thompson—read you,' a static- ridden
voice said over his earpiece. 'Sorry—took so long—lost your signal
in—overnight electrical storm—'
'Thompson, we have the prize. I repeat, we have the prize.
I am currently about fifty metres due east of the village, head ing
eastward toward the crater. I need immediate extraction.'
“Negative on that, Colonel—nowhere to land up here—too
many—trees.'
'Then meet us down in the other village,' Nash yelled.
'the one with the citadel. Just head due east, straight over
the crater, and look down. You can't miss it. It's got plenty
of room to land.'
'Ten-four, Colonel—see you there.”
The two surviving Army choppers immediately banked
in the air above the upper village and thundered over
Nash's head, heading toward Vilcafor.
Not a minute later, Nash, Lauren and Copeland came to
the crater and took off down its spiralling pathway.
Race, Ren6e and Van Lewen dashed through the dense sec tion of
foliage between the upper village and the crater, chasing after
Nash and the idol.
The rapas were nowhere to be seen.
They must have retired to the depths of the crater with the onset
of dawn, Race thought. He hoped to hell that the monkey urine on
his body still worked.
The three of them hit the crater's path running.
As Race, Ren6e and Van Lewen were starting down the path, Nash,
Lauren and Copeland were arriving at its base.
They came to the fissure, ran down its length, their feet kicking
up water with every step. They never noticed the dark feline heads
pop up lazily from the shallow lake as they ran by.
The three of them burst out onto the riverside path to be met by a
thin morning mist, but they didn't stop to admire it. They just
kept moving forward, heading toward Vilcafor and the thumping sound
of the choppers.
Another couple of minutes and they reached the moat on
the western side of the village.
And they stopped.
Stopped dead in their tracks.
Before them—standing in the middle of Vilcafor, with their hands
clasped behind their heads and the soft mist curling around their
feet—stood a group of about a dozen men and women. They all stood
motionless, oblivious to the
whump-whump-whump of rotors that filled the
helicopter
morning air.
A couple of them were Navy SEALs. They were dressed in full combat
attire. But they weren't holding any guns.
Others wore blue Navy uniforms. Others still wore ordinary civilian
clothing—the DARPA scientists.
And then Nash saw their helicopter. It was standing
behind the small crowd of people.
A lone Super Stallion.
The third Navy chopper.
It sat in the centre of the village, silent, motionless, its seven
rotor blades still. Nash saw the word 'NAVY' plastered across its
side in bold white lettering.
And then he looked upwards, searching for the source of
the loud whurnping sound that filled the air above the
village.
And he saw them.
Saw the two Army helicopters—the Comanche and the Black Hawk
I]—that he had sent down from the upper village.
They were hovering over Vilcafor, with their twin-barrelled Gaffing
guns and their fearsome-looking missile pods aimed squarely at the
hapless Navy-DARPA team on the ground.
Race and the others emerged from the riverside path a couple of
minutes later.
By the time they arrived at the main street of Vilcafor, the two
Army choppers had landed and Nash was strutting around like a
peacock in front of the Navy men, holding the gleaming idol in one
hand and a silver SIG-Sauer pistol in the other.
The crews of the Army choppersMsix men in all, two from the
Comanche, four from the Black Hawk—held M16s levelled at the
Navy-DARPA crowd.
'Ah, Professor Race, nice of you to join us,' Nash said as Race and
the others stepped out onto the main street of the village, staring
at the odd mix of Navy men and civilians standing with their hands
clasped behind their heads.
Race didn't answer Nash. His eyes just swept over the dozen or so
Navy people, searching for someone.
He figured if they were Romano's team, the real Supernova team,
then maybe…
He froze.
He saw him.
Saw a man, a civilian, standing among the group of Navy men,
dressed in ordinary hiking clothes and boots. Despite the fact that
he hadn't seen him in almost ten years, Race recognised the dark
eyebrows and the stooped shoulders instantly.
He was looking at his brother.
'Marty…' Race breathed.
'Professor Race—' Nash said.
Race ignored him as he strode over to his brother. They stood
before each other—no embrace—two brothers but two vastly different
men.
For one thing Race was a mess. While he was covered in mud and
stank of monkey urine, Marty was perfectly groomed, his clothes
pristine clean. He stared wide-eyed at Race—at his filthy clothes,
at his battered, mud-stained cap—as if he was the creature from the
Black Lagoon.
Marty was shorter than Race, stockier. And while Race always wore a
very open, easy expression, Marty's face was perpetually set in a
deathly serious frown.
'Will…' Marty said.
“ 'Marty, I'm sorry. I didn't know. They tricked me into coming
along. They said that they were with DARPA and that they knew you
and that—'
And then, abruptly, Race cut himself off as he saw
another member of the Navy team whom he recognised.
He frowned.
It was Ed Devereux.
Devereux was a short, bespectacled black man, and at forty-one was
one of the most highly-regarded ancient lan guages professors at
Harvard. Some said he was the best Latin scholar in the world. At
the moment, he stood silently in the line of Navy and DARPA people,
holding a large leather-bound book under his arm. Race guessed
it
was the Navy's copy of the manuscript.
It was then that Race remembered meeting Frank Nash in
his own office two days ago, at the very beginning of all
this—remembered recommending to Nash that he take Devereux on the
mission instead of himself since the Har vard professor was much
better at medieval Latin than he
was.
But now.., now Race knew why Nash had insisted on
taking him and not Devereux.
It was because Devereux had already been taken. By the
real DARPA team.
'You'll never get out of this alive, Nash,' one of the older
Navy-DARPA men said. He had a completely bald head
and the bearing of a man in charge—Doctor Julius Romano.
'Why do you say that?” Nash said.
'The Armed Services Committee will hear about this,'
Romano said. 'The Supernova is a Navy project. You have
no business being here.'
'The Supernova ceased to be a Navy project the moment it
was stolen from DARPA headquarters two days ago,' Nash said. 'Which
means that now the Army is the only armed force
in the United States with a Supernova in its possession.'