Evil Star (32 page)

Rodriguez took aim at Matt a second time.

And then there was an explosion, much louder than the gunshot, but outside the room. Matt looked up.

The Incas had blown up the radio mast. How they had done it he would never know, but it was clear that they had come to the compound with more than bolas, spears, and the rest of it. One of them must have brought a quan-tity of plastic explosives. Matt saw it quite clearly through the glass dome. There was a great flash of light as the steel mast was cut in half. Flames leaped up. And then the top of the mast came loose, separating from the bottom. Taking three of the satellite dishes with it, it keeled over to one side. And suddenly the very top of the mast, where it tapered to a point, was traveling down like a spear thrown from the sky. As Richard and Matt dived to one side, it smashed through the glass and kept coming. All of Rodriguez's con-centration had been on Matt. He had been perhaps half a second away from shooting him. He hadn't seen what was happening until it was too late.

Half a ton of steel girders, cables, and satellite dishes crashed into the room. Rodriguez was directly underneath the dome. He didn't even have time to scream as a massive pile of metal and glass slammed into him, obliterating him utterly. Matt hit the floor and kept sliding. It seemed to him that the whole room had exploded.

The noise was deafening. A hundred splinters sprayed into his shoulders and back. He could smell burning. Everything had gone dark.

Silence.

Weakly, he tried to stand up and found that his leg wouldn't obey him. For a moment he was terrified. Had he been crushed under the Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star weight of the radio mast?

"Richard . . . !" he shouted.

"Over here!" Richard sounded a long way away.

Matt slowly picked himself up. Apart from a few super-ficial cuts and scratches, he hadn't been hurt. Richard was also getting to his feet. He was covered in glass. It was in his hair and on his shoulders and there was a cut on his fore-head. But he was all right, too.

The door opened and Pedro came running in. He had his slingshot in one hand. There was a ferociousness in his face that Matt had never seen before. Atoc was with him. Matt was relieved to see that both of them were uninjured.

"It is over," Atoc said. "Salamanda's people have run. The mast is down. There is no more they can do from here."

"Then we did it!" Matt said.

"We have won!" Atoc smiled tiredly.

“You're wrong. ..."

The voice came from the middle of the wreckage. Matt looked past the dead body of the police captain and saw Fabian, painfully trying to ease himself into a sitting position. He was very pale. It was impossible to say how much blood he had lost, but most of his suit was crimson.

"I was trying to tell you," Fabian said. It was as if he were talking to a very young child. The words came out very sim-ply. Perhaps he knew that he had only moments to live. “You were wrong from the start," he went on. "The swan ..." He gulped for breath. "They controlled it from here to start with. But when it came in range . . .

Salamanda took over."

Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star

"Where is he?" Matt demanded.

"At the place of Qolqa. He has a mobile laboratory. He's in control.

Look. . . ."

Miraculously, although the plasma screen had been damaged, the black dots were still there. And the single dot was still moving. It had traveled almost halfway across the screen. Soon it would be at the bottom. The digital clock showed 22:24:00. Ninety-six minutes until midnight.

"I'm sorry," Fabian whispered. "But I told you. It was always true.

You could never win."

His head fell sideways, and Matt knew that he had died.

"What does he mean?" Atoc asked.

"It's not over yet," Matt said. "Salamanda is in the des-ert. He's controlling the satellite." He pointed. The dot had only half a meter to travel. How many miles? Matt could imagine it edging ever closer to its destination between the mountains.

"We must be able to stop it," Richard said. "We can't have done all this for nothing. ..."

"How far is he from here?" Atoc demanded.

"I don't know. A hundred miles. Not more than that.. ."

"There's a helicopter. ..."

• • •

The helicopter was a two-seater.

Richard, Matt, Pedro, and Atoc had emerged from the control center Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star to find that a new sort of silence had descended on the compound. It was the silence of death. There were bodies everywhere, some of them Inca, but the majority were Salamanda's men. The smell of burning hung in the air. Above them, the radio mast had been blown in half, the bent and broken steelwork shrouded in smoke. There were loose bricks and broken pieces of metal everywhere. The walls were pitted with bullet holes. All the lights had been extinguished, but the Incas had brought oil lamps and were using them to examine the wounded and the dead.

Forcing themselves to ignore the devastation, they had run over to the launchpad only to discover the bad news. The keys were in the ignition. Atoc knew how to fly it. But it could only take one passenger. Atoc and one other would face Salamanda at the place of Qolqa. Which one of them would it be? There was no time for negotiation.

"I'll go," Matt said.

"Matt. . ." Richard began.

"This is my fight, Richard. I began this. It's all because of me. I'll go with Atoc."

"I go, too." Pedro stepped forward. He was still holding his slingshot. He reminded Richard of a Peruvian David, about to take on Goliath.

Matt nodded. "The two of us can fit into one seat," he said. "Pedro's right. He must come, too."

"But you're just kids!" Richard cried. His voice was hoarse. The smoke seemed to have gotten into his throat. "You can't do this on your own."

"We've always been on our own," Matt said. He smiled tiredly. "It Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star has to be this way, Richard. The
amauta
said it would happen like this. It seems he was right."

"We have no time," Atoc said.

It was twenty to eleven. Very soon, the satellite would be in position. Matt nodded. He and Pedro moved forward.

The helicopter took almost five minutes to achieve full power. By the end, the rotors were whipping up the sand and the whole thing had disappeared in a cloud of dust. Richard tried to watch but his eyes were raw. His arm was folded across his face. He could hardly breathe.

The engine increased in volume. The helicopter rose clumsily off the ground. Squinting, Richard could just make out Matt with Pedro squeezed next to him. Matt looked more serious, more determined than Richard had ever seen him look before. The helicopter rocked on its axis, once, then again.

Then suddenly it rose and soared over the wire.

There was only one hour left.

Chapter 20 The Gate Opens

It was Pedro who saw it first. From the air it looked like a sil-ver matchbox, glinting in the moonlight, sitting on its own in the great emptiness of the Nazca plain. It could have been a trailer or some sort of mobile home. But it had been driven into the middle of the desert, its tires gouging out a track in the soft earth, and parked in front of the place of Qolqa. There could be no doubt at all who was Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star inside it. This was the laboratory that Fabian had warned them about. Salamanda was controlling the satellite from here.

The journey had taken half an hour. There were just thirty minutes until midnight.

"Something wrong . . ." Atoc said.

The words were no sooner out of his mouth than Matt felt it. The helicopter shuddered and seemed to come to a halt in midair. They were twelve thousand feet above the ground and suddenly Matt was horribly aware of every sin-gle one of them. His stomach churned as they dropped. Pedro, squeezed into the seat beside him, cried out in alarm. Atoc pulled desperately at the controls, and the heli-copter recovered, tottering in the air like a drunken man.

"What is it?" Matt demanded.

"I don't know . . . !"

A single, stray bullet had done the damage. It had slammed into the side of the helicopter, severing one of the main hydraulic cables, and although it had held for a while, the truth was that they should never have taken off. The power to the rotors had been cut and now the helicop-ter went into free fall. It was like being sucked into a black hole. The entire universe seemed to twist around them and — in a blur of silver and yellow and black — Matt caught sight of the desert floor rushing toward them. Atoc was shouting in his own language, perhaps a final prayer. All the instruments on the dashboard had gone mad, nee-dles spinning, counters turning, warning lights flashing uselessly. Pedro grabbed hold of him. The entire cabin was vibrating crazily. Matt was seeing three of everything. His eyeballs felt as if they were being torn out of his Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star head.

Atoc did the best that he could. Even without power, there was enough energy left in the spinning blades to bring the helicopter down in some sort of controlled landing. At the last moment, he shouted out something but he had spoken in his own language —

Matt would never find out what he meant. The helicopter, traveling far too fast, slammed into the ground at an angle and began to topple over. Matt was thrown on top of Pedro. Then the rotors came into contact with the ground. There was a hideous screaming sound as metal stanchions were ripped apart and one of the blades shattered.

Matt wasn't quite sure what happened next. The air was full of spinning pieces of metal and one of them must have hit the cockpit, because the glass disin-tegrated. He could smell burning. Sparks were leaping out of the control panel and there was a brilliant light, just above his head, flashing on and off. He thought he was fall-ing forward. It was as if the helicopter were somersaulting. But then it lurched back again. There was a crash as the tail hit the ground. At last everything was still.

Matt looked around him and saw nothing. They were surrounded by dust; it hung over them like a shroud. Part of the cockpit had buried itself in the desert floor. The helicopter was lying on its side. He couldn't move! For a few, horrible seconds, he thought he was paralyzed. Then he realized it was the seat belt, pinning him down.

Slowly, he forced his hand down and released it. He could smell petrol, and somewhere in the back of his mind he had to fight back a murmur of pure terror. The helicopter was about to blow up. He and Pedro were going to be burned alive.

"Pedro . . . ?" he called out, suddenly wondering if the other boy
was

still alive.

Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star

"Matt. . ."

Pedro dragged himself from underneath Matt and wriggled out of the cockpit, onto the desert floor. Matt fol-lowed him.

His entire body was in pain. He knew that he must have suffered whiplash injuries to his neck and spine. It was a miracle he could still move. He pushed with his feet and felt the cool earth underneath him. The rotors, mangled and broken, hung over him. The tail of the helicopter had been snapped in half.

He dragged himself over to Pedro. "We need to move away," he said. He sniffed the air. "The helicopter could still blow up. The fuel..."

"Atoc .. . ?" Pedro asked.

Atoc was slumped in the front seat, and Matt saw at once that he was dead. The Inca had fought hard to save the two boys, but he hadn't been able to save himself. Look-ing at him, Matt felt a great wave of sadness descend on him. First there had been Micos, killed at the hacienda at lea. And now Atoc. Two brothers, both in their twenties and both of them dead. Why? Did they really believe that Matt and Pedro were so important that it was worth giving up their lives to help them? Matt felt his eyes watering — but at the same time, with the sadness came a sense of anger and hatred for Salamanda, for Fabian, for Rodriguez and all the other adults with their greed and their ambi-tion . . . their desire to change the world.

They were the ones who had drawn him into this. Why couldn't they have just lived their lives and left him alone?

Pedro glanced at him questioningly. The look in his eyes was obvious.
What now ?

"We find Salamanda," Matt said. "We stop him."

Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star But Pedro wasn't going anywhere. Matt looked down and saw the horrid truth. Pedro hadn't complained and he hadn't shown any sign of pain, but his leg was stretched out and his ankle was obviously broken. The foot was turned at a dreadful angle and there was already a massive swelling that went halfway up his leg.

For a long minute, Matt didn't say anything.

One boy will stand against the Old Ones and alone he will fall.

The words of the
amauta
seemed to whisper back to him in the midnight breeze. So this was how it was meant to happen. It had all been neatly arranged. A helicopter crash. Atoc killed. Pedro too injured to move. Matt on his own. Just as predicted.

Matt smiled grimly.
"Adios,
" he said.

"No. Matteo . . ."

"I have to go." Matt stood up. The wreckage of the heli-copter had begun to cool down. There wasn't going to be a fire or an explosion.

He could leave Pedro here. "Richard and the others will be on their way," he said. “You won't have to wait too long."

He didn't know how much Pedro understood. It didn't matter anymore.

He turned and walked away.

He felt nothing. He might have done some damage to his neck and his back, but otherwise he hadn't been injured in the crash. It was late, but he wasn't tired. He didn't run but walked quickly, listening to the soft contact of his feet with the earth. It seemed to him that the breeze had died down. There was an extraordinary stillness in the desert, as if the whole world were holding its breath. He looked up.

The sky was very black and littered with stars. He could make out Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star the rise and fall of the mountains in the distance, nothing more than a single brushstroke on the great canvas that was this night. Briefly, he wondered about the condors that had attacked him the last time he was here. Well, let them come. He was ready for them. He could feel the power welling up inside him. He hadn't been chosen for this because he was an ordinary boy. He had been chosen because he was one of the five. He knew what he had to do.