Temple (23 page)

The bearded man extended his hand in an abrupt German way. 'I am
Doctor Jolann Krauss, zoologist and cryptozoolo- gist from the
University of Hamburg. I have been brought along on this mission to
advise on certain animal issues raised in the manuscript.'
'What's a cryptozoologist?' Race asked.
'One who studies mythical animals,' Krauss said.
“Mythical animals…'
“Yes. Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, the yeti, the great cats of
the English moors, and of course,' he added, 'the South American
rapa.'
'You know about these cats?' Race said.
'Only what I have learned from unverified sightings, local legends
and ambiguous hieroglyphs. But such is the
beauty of cryptozoology, it is the study of animals that can not be
studied, because no-one can actually prove they exist.'
'So you think we were attacked by a pack of mythical ani mals,'
Race said. 'They didn't look very mythical to me.'
Krauss said, 'Every fifty years or so, there is a spate of unusual
deaths in this part of the Amazon rainforest. At those times, local
men who embark on night-time trips between villages are known to
just, well, disappear. On rare occasions, their remains are found
in the morning. At those times, men are found with their throats
wrenched from their bodies or their spines ripped out.
'The local people have a name for the beast that comes in the night
to kill without mercy, a name which has been passed down from
generation to generation. They call it the rapa.'
Krauss looked at Race closely. 'We should heed this local folklore
very carefully, because it can be of great use to us in
evaluating our enemy.'
'How?'
'Well, for one thing, we can use it to discern certain things
about our feline antagonists.'
'Like what?'
'Well, .first of all, we can safely assume that the rapa is
nocturnal. The remains of local men are found only in the
• morning. And we know from our own experience that these cats flee
from the morning light. Ergo, they are nocturnal.
They hunt only at night and retire for the main part of the
day.'
'If they've been shut up inside that temple for genera tions,' Race
said, 'how could they have survived? What have they been
eating?'
'That I do not know,' Krauss said, frowning seriously, as if he
were pondering a troublesome mathematical equation.
Race looked up at the mountain-plateau that housed the mysterious
temple. A veil of slanting rain covered its rocky eastern
face.
'So what are they doing now?' he said.
'Sleeping, I imagine,' Krauss said, 'in the safety of their
temple. Which is why now is the best time to send our men in to get
that idol.'
Scott, Wilson and Graf emerged from the narrow passageway and
stepped out into the pool of shallow water at the base of the
magnificent crater.
It was unusually dark in the canyon. Any light that there was had
been blocked out by the thick rain clouds in the sky and the dense
canopy of trees that overhung the crater's rim. Every fissure and
crack in the canyon's walls was cloaked in shadow.
Scott and Wilson walked in front. Thin beams of light shot out from
the small flashlights attached to the barrels of their M16s.
'All right—' Scott said into his throat mike.
“—we're heading up the path now,” his voice said over the monitor's
speakers.
Race watched tensely as, on the screen, Scott, Wilson and Graf
stepped up out of the water and onto the narrow pathway that was
cut into the crater's outer wall.
Johann Krauss said, 'What we must also remember about our enemy,
however, is that they are, first and foremost, cats.
They cannot change what they are. They think like cats, they act
like cats.'
'Meaning?'
'Meaning that only one species of great cat—the cheetah-catches its
prey by chasing after it.'
'How do other great cats catch their prey?'
'There are several strategies. Tigers in India are known to lie in
wait covered in leaves, sometimes for hours at a time, waiting for
their prey to arrive on the scene. Once their prey comes close
enough, they pounce.
'On the other hand, lions in Africa employ quite sophisticated
pack-hunting methods—one such technique involves a lioness parading
around in front of a herd of
gazelles while her colleagues sneak up on the gazelles from behind.
It's quite ingenious really, and very effective.
But it is also very unusual.'
'Why?' Race asked.
'Because it implies the existence of some kind of communi cation
between the lions.“
Race turned back to face the monitor.
The three soldiers had made it a short way up the spiralling path,
so that they were now about ten feet above the wide body of water
that covered the base of the crater.
Race was watching Corporal Wilson's camera view as it panned out
over the flat expanse of water when suddenly he saw a flicker of
movement on the water's surface.
It had been a ripple of some sort—from something just
underneath the water's surface.
“What was that?' he said.
'What was what?'
'Wilson,' Race said, leaning close to the microphone.
'Look to your right for a second, at the water.'
Graf and Scott must have heard Race's question too because, at that
moment, all three camera views panned right, out over the
glistening expanse of water that encircled the base of the rock
tower.
“I don't see anything…” Scott said.
'There!' Race said, pointing at another ripple in the water.
It seemed to have been made by the whiplash of an animal's tail. An
animal that seemed to be travelling in the direction of the three
soldiers.
'what the hell… ?' Scott said as he looked out over the wide body
of water before him.
A small bow-wave of water seemed to be cutting across the lake at
an unusually quick speed—-coming right toward him and his
men.
Scott frowned. Then he took a cautious step forward, toward the
edge of the path and the ten-foot drop down to the water's
surface.
He peered out over the edge.
And saw three black cats clawing their way up the sheer stone wall
beneath him!
Scott quickly raised his M-16 but at that exact moment an enormous
black shape burst out from a dark fissure in the rock wall behind
him and slammed into his back, sending him flying off the edge of
the pathway and down into the water below, where a whole cluster of
other black shapes converged on him in an instant.
Race stared at the monitor in stunned awe as he watched the whole
horrific scenefr0m Scott's point of view. All he saw was the blur
of slashing razor-like teeth and flailing human arms, all overlaid
with Scott's own gasps and futile screams.
Then, not a moment later, the camera went under the sur face and
the screen cut to hash and abruptly there was silence.
In the crater, a roar of gunfire shattered the unnatural still ness
as the German soldier Graf jammed down on the trig ger of his
M-16.
But no sooner had a flaring tongue of fire spewed out from the
muzzle of his gun than—smack!—Graf was pounced upon from above, by
a cat that had been lurking on the rock wall high above him!
Further down the path, Chucky Wilson spun instantly to see the
struggle between Graf and the cat, saw that the Ger man paratrooper
was putting up one hell of a fight.
And then suddenly—riiiiippppp!—Graf's throat came
clear of his neck and his body fell instantly limp.
Wilson blanched. 'Oh, luck.'
And at that moment the cat standing over Graf's body slowly looked
up at him and stared into his eyes.
Wilson froze. The big cat stepped ominously forward, over Graf's
immobile body, toward him.
Wilson spun.
Only to see another massive black cat standing on the
path behind him, cutting off his retreat.
Nowhere to run.
Nowhere to hide.
Wilson turned again and saw the fissures and crevices in the rock
wall and for a second thought there might be an escape there. He
looked into one of the shadowy fissures in the rockface—
—and found himself staring at the smiling face of one of the
cats.
And then with a suddenness that was nothing short of horrifying,
the big cat's jaws rushed toward him at phe nomenal speed and in an
instant there was nothing.
Everyone just stared at the monitor in silence.
'Oh my God,“ Gaby Lopez breathed.
'Shit,' Lauren said.
The four remaining Green Berets just gazed at the moni tor,
speechless.
Race turned to the German zoologist, Krauss. 'They only come out at
night, do they?'
'Well,' Krauss said, bristling. “Quite obviously, the dark ness at
the base of the crater allows them to spend the greater part of the
day there—'
'Kennedy,' Nash said sharpl) 'what's the status on that extraction
team?'
'I'm still trying to get through to Panama, sir,' Doogie said
from over by the radio pack. 'Signal keeps dropping out.'
'Keep trying.' Nash looked at his watch.
It was 11:30 am.
“Shit,” he said.
He wondered what had happened to Romano and his team. Last he
heard, they'd taken off from Cuzco at 7:45 pm last night. They
should have been here by now. What had happened to them? Could the
Nazis have shot them down?
Or had they just misread the totems and gotten hopelessly
lost?
Whatever the case, if they were still alive, one thing was certain:
they would find the village eventually.
Which meant he now had two hostile groups on their way to
Vilcafor.
“Shit,' he said again.
Doogie came oven
'The extraction team took off from Panama one hour ago—three
choppers: two Comanches, one Black Hawk.
They estimate that they'll be here by late afternoon, at
approximately 1700 hours. I put up a UHF signal, so they can home
in on that and extract us.'
As Doogie reported his news to Nash, a strange thought hit Race:
Why wasn't the Army extracting them via Cuzco? Why were they
sending choppers down from Panama ?
Surely the easiest way out of here was to go back the same way they
had come.
It was at that moment that a sentence from the Santiago Manuscript
popped into his head.
A thief never uses the same entrance twice.
Nash turned to Van Lewen. 'Do we have access to the SAT-
SN network?' He said it 'Sat-sun'—'the Sat-sun network'.
'Yes, sir, we do.'
'Patch us in. Set a tracking pattern over central-eastern Peru. I
want to know exactly where those Nazi bastards are.
Cochrane.'
'Yes, sir.'
'Get me satellite imagery of Vilcafor. We have to set up a
defensive position.'
'Yes, sir.”
'What's SAT-SN?' Gaby Lopez asked.
Troy Copeland answered. 'SAT-SN is the acronym for the Satellite
Aerospace Tracking and Surveillance Network. It's the aerial
equivalent of SOSUS, the array of hydrophones that the U.S. Navy
has stretched across the north Atlantic to detect enemy
submarines.
'Put simply, SAT-SN is an array of fifty-six geosynchronous
satellites in near-earth orbit that monitor the world's airspace,
airplane by airplane.'
'If that's the simple explanation,' Race said drily, 'I'd hate to
hear the complex one.'
Copeland ignored him. 'Any aircraft has seven different types of
observable characteristics—radar, infra-red, visual,
contrails, engine smoke, acoustics and electromagnetic emissions.
The SAT-SN satellites use all seven of these char acteristics to
record the signature and location of individual aircraft all over
the world—military and civilian.
'What Colonel Nash wants now is a snapshot of central-
eastern Peru so that he can spot every airplane over it—in
particular, those planes outside regular commercial air corri dors.
From those pictures, we'll be able to see where our Nazi friends
are and hopefully calculate how long we've got till they get
here.'
Race looked over at Nash.
He appeared to be deep in thought—as one would expect
from a leader who had just lost three of his best fighting
men.
'What are you thinking?' Race asked.
'We have to get that idol,“ Nash said, 'and soon. Those
Nazis will be here any second now. But there's no way past
those cats. There's no way of knowing how to get past them.'
Race cocked his head.
Then he said, 'There was someone who knew.'
'Who?'
'Alberto Santiago.'
'what?'
'Remember the boulder that was wedged in the doorway
to the temple?'
'Yeah…'
'On it was a warning: “Do not enter at any cost. Death looms
within.” That warning had the initials “A.S.” written under neath
it. Now I haven't read enough of the manuscript yet, but I can only
assume that Santiago and Renco stumbled onto the same problem we
have now—before they arrived at Vilcafor, someone opened up that
temple and let the rapas loose.
'But somehow,' Race said, 'Santiago figured out a way to
get those cats back inside the temple. Then he carved a warning
into that boulder for anyone who would think to open it up
again.
'Now, we used the manuscript to find this village and we
figured that was all it was good forbut the copy I read was only
partially completed. I'll bet my life that the key to getting past
those cats lies in the rest of the Santiago Manuscript.“
'But we don't have any more of the manuscript,' Nash said.
'I'll bet they do,' Race nodded at the four remaining
Germans.
Schroeder nodded with his eyes.
“And I'll bet you didn't translate it beyond the part where
it revealed the location of Vilcafor, did you?' Race said.
'No,' Schroeder said. 'We did not.'
A new look of purpose came over Nash's face. He turned to
Schroeder.
'Get your copy of the manuscript,' he said. 'Get it now.”
A few minutes later, Schroeder handed Race a fat stack of paper
wedged inside a worn cardboard folder. The stack
of paper was a lot thicker than Race's earlier pile had been.
The complete manuscript.
'I don't suppose any of you four are your team's transla tor?' Nash
asked the BKA man.
Schroeder shook his head. 'No. Our language expert was killed
during the cats' attack on the rock tower.'
Nash turned to Race. 'Then it looks like you're it, Profes Sor.
Lucky I insisted on bringing you along.'
Race retired to the ATV to read the new copy of the
manuscript.
Once he was safely ensconced inside the big armoured vehicle, he
opened the folder surrounding the new manu script. He was met by a
Xeroxed cover sheet.
It was an odd cover sheet—markedly different from the overly
elaborate one he had seen on the earlier copy. The main difference
being that this cover sheet was remarkably almost deliberatel
plain.