But it wasn’t happening.
Rodriguez was aiming the gun at his heart. Matt could almost feel the policeman’s finger tightening on the trigger.
And then Fabian stepped into the line of fire.
“You don’t have to kill them,” he said.
“Get out of the way!” Rodriguez commanded.
Fabian was walking towards him. “No, no, no,” he was saying. “There’s no need for this. You don’t have to kill anyone. We’ve won! It’s what Salamanda always said. In an hour, the Old Ones will be here and the whole world will be ours. I’m sorry, Captain Rodriguez. I don’t care what you say. I’m not going to stand here and watch you shoot a child.”
“Get out of my way!”
“No!” Fabian had reached him. He was unsteady on his feet – from the drink or exhaustion. But he was between Rodriguez and Matt, his hand pressing down on the policeman’s arm. “Salamanda promised me the boy wouldn’t be hurt,” he said.
“Salamanda lied!” Rodriguez laughed and pulled the trigger. Matt flinched. Fabian was thrown backwards but somehow remained standing. He looked down. Blood was gushing out of him. His shirt and his trousers were already saturated. Then he collapsed quite suddenly, as if every nerve in his body had been whipped out of him.
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. He had no idea how they had done it, 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 quantity of plastic explosive. Matt saw everything quite clearly through the glass dome. There was a great flash of light as the steel mast was cut in half. Flames leapt 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 travelling 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 concentration had been on Matt. He had been perhaps half a second away from shooting him. He hadn’t seen what had happened until it was too late.
Half a ton of steel girders, cables and satellite dishes crashed into the control 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 but found that his leg wouldn’t obey him. For a moment he was terrified. Had he been crushed under the weight of the radio mast?
“Richard…!” he shouted.
“Over here!” Richard sounded a long way away.
Slowly Matt picked himself up. Apart from a few superficial 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 forehead. But he was all right too.
And then the door opened and Pedro came running in. He had his slingshot in one hand. There was a ferocity 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 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 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.
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 blowup. The fuel…”
“Atoc…?” Pedro asked.
Atoc was slumped in the front seat and Matt saw that he was dead. He also knew that it was Atoc’s blood that had splattered onto him. The Inca had fought hard to save the two boys but he hadn’t been able to save himself. Looking at him, Matt felt a great wave of sadness descend on him. First there had been Micos, killed at the hacienda at Ica. And now Atoc. Two brothers, both so young and both of them dead. Why? Did they really believe 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 for all the other adults with their greed and their ambition … 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 looked at him questioningly. By the look in his eyes it was obvious what he meant: What now?
“We find Salamanda,” Matt said. “We stop him.”
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 in front of him 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, neither of them said anything.
One boy will stand against the Old Ones and alone he will fall.
The words of the amauta seemed to whisper back to Matt 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. “Adiós,” he said.
“No. Matteo…”
“I have to go.” Matt stood up. The wreckage of the helicopter 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 any more.
Matt turned and walked away.
He was still hurting. His head was pounding and every bone in his back and neck seemed to have been twisted out of shape. He looked down at his hands and saw there were cuts all over them. His shirt was torn. It occurred to him that if anyone was watching, he would look like a walking corpse.
And yet, as he limped forward, the pain seemed to slip away. It was a strange feeling, as if he was leaving the pain behind him like a set of discarded clothes. There had been a breeze when he started, but now it died down and he was able to hear the soft contact of his feet with the earth. There was an extraordinary stillness in the desert. The whole world seemed to be holding its breath. He glanced up at the sky, black and littered with stars. He could make out the rise and fall of the mountains in the distance, nothing more than a single brushstroke on the great canvas that was the night. Briefly he wondered about the condors that had attacked him the last time he was here. What would he do if they returned?
He was alone. He had never felt so alone. He could see himself as a tiny speck in this vast, empty desert, making his way to what he knew must be certain death. Why was he doing this? He had no weapons. Atoc must surely have had a gun, but Matt hadn’t even looked for it in the wreckage of the helicopter. Why not? The answer came to him at once. He had his power, of course. For a brief second he was back at Forrest Hill and saw the chandelier destroy itself, the glass bulbs exploding one after another. He had used his power then. No – that wasn’t true. It had been his power that had used him.
The mobile laboratory was in front of him. The helicopter had come down le
ss than a quarter of a mile away. Now that he was closer he could see that the laboratory was part lorry, part container, part mobile home. It had been driven here on eight fat, rubber tyres but once it had arrived it had been jacked up on steel legs so that the wheels were about twenty centimetres off the ground. There was a driving cabin at the front – empty – and a door with three steps at the side. Matt’s eyes were drawn to the roof. Another satellite dish, about three metres wide, pointed upwards, connected to the main body of the vehicle by a series of thick wires. There were other machines surrounding it. A ladder led up the very back.
Perhaps he could climb up. But even if he did, even if he wasn’t discovered, what would he do then? He couldn’t cut the wires. He’d brought nothing with him. And someone would shoot him down the moment he began.
Nothing moved. What time was it? Matt still had no watch and he wondered if it was too late, if midnight had already passed. In that case, somewhere in the Nazca Desert, or perhaps in another part of Peru, the gate would have opened. The Old Ones would already be walking, once again, on the face of the earth.
He refused to accept it. Salamanda was in front of him, inside the laboratory. Matt still had time to do what had to be done. Everything that had happened to him since he had arrived in Peru – indeed, long before – had been building up to this moment. He was here for a reason.
He closed his eyes.
The power. Find it. Use it. Direct it. It’s inside you. You only have to use the trigger.
It was the smell of burning. Matt knew that somehow all this had begun with the death of his parents in a car accident when he was eight years old. That morning, his mother had burnt the toast. And whenever his power came back to him, so did the memory of that single, defining moment in his life. When Gavin Taylor had tripped him up at Forrest Hill, he had smelled burning. And the next day, in class, as Gwenda prepared to drive a petrol tanker into the school … the same thing.