“But what you’re saying is impossible,” Raine said. “The largest meteorite ever discovered was in Namibia in the 1920s. It was about nine feet square by three deep and weighed something like sixty tons.”
Almost collectively, everyone’s voice came over the com-link at once. “How do you know that?”
Raine, for his part, ignored their surprise. Nadia had realised that despite his shoot-first-ask-questions-later gung-ho attitude to life, her new lover was anything but the dumb ex-soldier he liked to portray.
“What did you say this thing was, Benny? Almost five hundred feet long, one hundred and fifty wide and ninety deep?”
“A bit less,” King replied. “But, yeah, more or less.”
“There’s no way a meteorite that size would survive entry through the atmosphere without breaking up.”
“I believe it did break up,” Nadia replied. “Hence the fake mask. I dare say there are other pieces scattered across the earth. With a shallow enough trajectory, it is plausible for it to have entered the earth’s atmosphere somewhere above South America, breaking up and dropping chunks into the rainforest, before racing westwards across the Pacific and slamming into the bedrock here.”
“Then, the ancient people of this region, when it was still free of water, fashioned it into what we see before us,” King suggested.
“Is it possible they enclosed the meteorite inside local stone?” Sid asked. “Fashioning these steps and terraces around it. There are similar building styles in Egypt, in the Valley Temple at Giza where some scientists think later builders built over more archaic and more monumental original constructions. Even the pyramids themselves originally had a façade of limestone covering them.”
“It would explain why geologists say the entire structure was fashioned from local rock,” Nadia agreed.
“So what are you saying?” Gibbs demanded. “That there is no temple here? No Moon Mask?”
“No,” King replied testily. “If there is a meteorite in there then the ancients wouldn’t have just ‘walled’ it up. There would be space between the meteoric core and the constructed monument — a temple. If there was a temple, then there must be a door.”
“Then where the hell is it, Doctor?” Gibbs snapped. “In case you hadn’t noticed we’re fighting a pig-ugly current in shark infested waters in China’s backyard. Now, all you nerds can sit around talking about temples and meteors and shit all you like once this is over, but for now all I care about is finding the goddamn door!”
Anger flared through King. “You think I don’t know that, you—”
“Hey, Benny,” Raine suddenly cut in, grasping his forearm through the water. “Chill out, yeah? Gibbs, shut the hell up.” Expertly, he kept hold of King’s arm, achieving perfectly neutral buoyancy, and reached out with his gloved hand to grasp the side of the monument. “Relax. Stop kicking, I’ve got you.” King continued to fin against the current. “Stop kicking,” he reiterated in a no-nonsense voice. “Good, now breathe deeply. Close your eyes, relax your mind—”
“Who are you? Derren Brown?”
“I’m gonna feed you to the goddamn sharks if you don’t shut up,” he snapped. “Now, just close your eyes, relax, and try to remember what you saw in your… vision.”
King floated there, weightless, putting all his faith in the other man not to let any harm come to him. He took several deep breaths and felt the calming effect of the oxygen flowing through his system. His eyes drifted shut and his mind wandered—
A face in the gloom!
He tried to reach out and grasp the face but it vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
A hand reaching out to him!
He jerked back in fright.
“What do you see?” Raine’s voice asked but he seemed to be coming from far away.
“I’m… I’m in a temple,” he replied, his soft voice being transmitted to the entire team. “There are… pillars… dozens, hundreds of pillars. An entire forest of them. They’re… glowing.”
“Glowing?” a woman’s voice entered his thoughts, Sid’s or Nadia’s, he couldn’t tell.
“There are… pictures… images on them… glowing red.”
“Is there a doorway,” Raine asked quietly. “A tunnel… a passage?”
He tried to look around the columned hall but the red glow grew more intense, burning his eyes. Is this how Kha’um found Imhotep’s tomb? he wondered. “No,” he replied. “I can’t see a door.”
“Pointless fucking temple, with no door,” another voice, Gibbs, invaded his head and produced a flash of anger.
Sunlight pierced the temple. !
“What?” Raine asked, feeling him tense. “What do you see?”
… blazing down through holes in the ceiling!
The shafts of light grew narrower, refining to a single laser-like beam until that too was gone.
Darkness.
Such utter darkness.
Then noise.
The roaring of a beast that could never be stopped.
It echoed all around, it pounded against the temple walls, it began to break through.
Then he saw it.
Such a hideous creature. Terrifying and all consuming.
It charged at him—
“I know how to get in!” He twisted free of Raine’s grip and was almost dragged away by the current. “Gibbs, I need some explosives.”
“They knew the end was coming,” King’s voice explained through Nadia’s radio as she came to a neutral hover about half the way up the two megalithic pillars.
Rising from the sea floor almost to the surface sixty feet above, the two enormous columns of rock each weighed almost 200 tonnes and, to the eye, looked almost perfectly straight, with only four inches between them.
They weren’t, however, just rock, as geologists believed from cursory examinations. Rather, just like the main structure itself, they gave of strong magnetic readings. At their core, she knew, lay the same meteoric metal.
Intrigued by King’s description of a columned hall within the temple, while the rest of the team had rendezvoused on the top of the structure and begun carefully setting explosives in one of the three ‘wells’, Nadia had led her buddy, Garcia, to the pillars.
Now she watched as Garcia got to work on the right hand pillar with an air-powered underwater pneumatic hand drill. With a muted pounding, the drill head tore through layers of crusted coral, algae and sponges, creating a cloud of dead micro-organisms which diminished visibility. Then, with a sense of finality, it crunched into the stone proper, adding a mixture of sodden dust to the underwater soup.
“They tried to protect the temple against the flood,” King continued. “They blocked the original entrance and then sealed these holes in the ceiling. But it didn’t work.”