He quickly returned to his erstwhile cargo. ‘Major Wu brought the Nephilim a little present to celebrate getting out of prison – a nuke.’

Nina’s eyes popped wide. ‘What?’

‘It’s on a timer, and it’s got . . . buggeration, two minutes left!’

‘Can’t you defuse it?’

‘I tried. Didn’t go well – it should have had twenty-two.’

‘Oh, that’s just super-fine! So now what do we do?’

He strained to lift the heavy bomb again. ‘Chuck it down the hole and run like fuck! Sorry, Macy,’ he added.

‘Totally forgiven,’ his suddenly pale-faced daughter assured him.

‘What do you mean, chuck it down the hole?’ said Nina. ‘It’ll still blow up! And even if I could run, which I can’t, we can’t outrun a nuclear explosion!’

‘We’ll have a couple of miles’ head start by the look of it,’ he replied, peering down to the great glowing pillar’s vanishing point far below. ‘And if we’re lucky, the thing’ll smash to bits when it hits the bottom!’ He swung the nuke around – and before Nina or Macy could protest further, heaved it over the edge.

Nina stared after it in stunned dismay. ‘I’m glad you’re so confident about that.’

Macy was equally appalled, but for different reasons. ‘Dad, you . . . you just threw a nuke into the middle of Uluru! It’s a sacred site! The bomb’ll have radioactive stuff in it – you’ll poison the whole desert!’

‘It’d be a lot more poisoned if it went off here rather than all the way down there,’ Eddie pointed out. ‘And since it’s a sacred site, maybe the local spirits’ll be good to us. But we don’t have time to stand around arguing about it. We need to move.’

He returned to Nina and picked her up. She moaned as Macy released her hold on the wound. Eddie gave it a quick but practised look. ‘The jeep should have a first-aid kit. I’ll be able to patch it up until we can get you to a hospital.’

‘If we can get to the jeep,’ she countered.

‘We’ll know in about a minute and a half! Macy, come on.’

They started across the bridge as quickly as they could. Nina looked back as they reached the archway. The stunning secret of Uluru lay behind them: an enormous crystal pillar acting as a focal point for the earth’s mysterious energy field, containing the last of a long-lost race, the fallen angels of biblical myth, trapped in suspended animation. They had survived undisturbed for hundreds of millennia; if the bomb did not destroy them, they might continue for at least as long again, perhaps one day awakening into a world she couldn’t even imagine.