“I was trying to tell you,” Fabian said. It was as if he was talking to a young child. The words came out very slowly. “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.”
“Where is he?” Matt demanded.
“At the place of Qolqa. He has a mobile laboratory. He’s in control. Look…”
Miraculously, the plasma screen with the stars hadn’t been damaged. The black dots were still there. And the single dot was still moving. It had travelled 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 told them. “But I told you. It was always true. You could never win.”
His head fell sideways and Matt knew that he was dead.
“What does he mean?” Atoc asked.
“It’s not over yet,” Matt said. “Salamanda is in the desert. He’s controlling the satellite.” He pointed. The dot had only half a metre 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 few 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 centre 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 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 launch pad only to discover the bad news. Although the keys were in the ignition and Atoc knew how to fly it, the helicopter could take only 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.”
Pedro stepped forward too. 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 got into his throat. “You can’t do this on your own.”
“We’ve always been on our own,” Matt said. He smiled wanly. “It 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 ten 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. Eventually the rotors were whipping up the sand and the whole thing 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. He looked more serious, more determined than Richard had ever known him. The helicopter rocked on its axis, once, then again.
Then suddenly it rose and soared over the wire.
There was only one hour left.
THE GATE OPENS
It was Pedro who saw it first. From the air it looked like a silver 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 tyres gouging out a track in the soft earth. It was now parked in front of the place of Qolqa. There could be no doubt at all who was 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 mid-air. They were twelve thousand feet above the ground and suddenly Matt was horribly aware of every single one of them. His stomach churned as they dropped. Pedro, squeezed up beside him, cried out in alarm. Atoc pulled desperately at the controls and the helicopter recovered, lurching in the air like a drunken man.
“What is it?” Matt demanded.
“I don’t know!”
A single, stray bullet back at the compound 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 helicopter 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 towards them. Atoc was shouting in his own language, perhaps a final prayer. All the instruments on the dashboard had gone mad, needles 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 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 something but he spoke in his own language and Matt would never find out what it meant. The helicopter, travelling 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 earth. 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 disintegrated. He could smell burning. Sparks were leaping from the control panel and there was a brilliant light, just above his head, flashing on and off. He thought he was falling forward. It was as if the helicopter was 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 paralysed. Then he realized it was the seatbelt, 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.
“Matteo…”
Pedro dragged himself from underneath Matt and wriggled out of the cockpit, onto the desert floor. Matt followed him. There was something wet and sticky on his cheek and the side of his neck. He smeared it with his finger, then brought it up and examined it. It was blood. He didn’t yet know if it was his own.