Oh boy, review time. Temple by Matthew Reilly.
Matthew is an Australian author who is know for his pretty good action scenes in his book. This was the second book he published way in 1999, I hadn't read it in 20 years and haven't read any of his work in 10 but remember liking this so I wanted to read it again. Also spoilers because this is a 23 year old book.
Basic plot is ancient Incan Idol made of rare material. A plot is William Race going after the Idol while Nazis, another US team and some separatist Texans try to get it. B plot is retelling how the Idol got to where it currently is.
Action scenes are good (Penultimate battle is falling in an Abrams tank 18,000 feet in the air while disarming a bomb), characterization is almost non-existent (the Texans are introduced about 100 pages from the end to replace the Nazis as the bad guys) and overall the book isn't all that bad. Don't regret spending a weekend on it.
Now let me get to why I wanted to talk about this.
1. Plot holes
There are some major ones:
First one is disarming the first bomb the Nazis set up. The disarm code that William enters 11221945, the execution date of a Nuremberg Trial Nazi scientist who escaped. From this sentence you can see the problem, William being American entered the month, day, year but the Nazi being German would enter day, month, year, like any civilized person in the world does. That bomb should have gone off in his face or the disarm code come back false.
Second one is the whole reason the US is sending two teams to retrieve the Idol. According to an inter-department memo signed by the secretary of defense and the President in 1992, one of the armed service branches would be dismantled by 2010. This is pants on head stupid by 1999, it is downright hilarious by 2022. To start with that the invasion of Afghanistan was only two years after this book was made, not to mention the decade long struggle in Iraq two years after that. The fact that the US would dismantle a service branch, which is essentially giving the enemy they encounter an advantage is stupid. Instead of a more reasonable plot point like "We wanted to increase our budget, the Idol made from rare material can justify increased spending in that branch plus R&D", instead it's "The Navy and Army are sending teams to get the Idol separately because who has it will survive into the new millennium."
The idea of the armed services of the US engaged in a cold war against each other for budget spending and launching covert strikes against each other is a really good one, especially considering this was after the Cold War but before Iraq, meaning you could do something like that. Not today though.
So this plot point is bad and the idea basically wasted.
Third one is the villains. First are the Nazis, because of course it's an ancient treasure hunt against Nazis who all get killed. Second one is more weird. It's a Texan separatist group that let in Aum Shinrikyo cult members into their group that spread ideology coupled with a tech based militia called the Freedom Fighters and you have a powerful ad-hoc group who wants to bring about the end of the world. This is only revealed and resolved in the last 100 pages, to call it a waste is an understatement.
2. Fantastical 90s tech
The Nazis use G-11s, all of them. The Texans exclusively use Calicos. Chlorine explosives with the yield of a small tactical nuke. Jetpack armor that is crux for the falling tank. The American's using M-16 rifles, when they were being phased out already by the M-4. That would pick up more traction as Iraq happened.
The Army ambush the Navy team with 2 Comanche helicopters. The Comanche program was shut down in 2004 after spending seven billion dollars.
The department encrypted e-mail for the Army on a secure network is just a dump box. No modern email structure of inbox, spam and the like. I don't know if you've seen
Phantasmagoria 2 Game Dungeon? but it was similar to that, each reply generated a new email and you had to search for any relevant email you want to find because the box would be cluttered with thousands of messages.
The Nazis sent their demands for
100 billion dollars using a fax machine. Not kidding. They get a reply from the secretary of defense with the fax entitled:
SECURE FACSIMILE TRANSMISSION
The end has William talking to an FBI agent on a mobile phone he picked up. This was the late 90s, mobiles weren't ubiquitous yet but mobile tech already had the small brick kind and even flip phones by 1999.
3. Red-pill moment.
During the monologue by the Nazi leader, he explains how he wants to devalue the US currency by dumping 100 billion dollars worth 1 cent each onto the stock market, causing it to crash. He actually name drops Geroge Soros, saying he was the cause of the Asian financial crisis. And that's actually true.
"The foreign ministers of the 10 ASEAN countries believed that the well co-ordinated manipulation of their currencies was a deliberate attempt to destabilize the ASEAN economies. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad accused George Soros of ruining Malaysia's economy with "massive currency speculation". Soros claims to have been a buyer of the ringgit during its fall, having sold it short in 1997."
This book was first published 1999, well beyond the modern conspiracies surrounding him that began to pop up around 2015.
Overall it's not a bad book, quite an interesting one that I remembered for a reason but more focused on the subtext and character than the action these days. Which is fine.
