The Six Sacred Stones

Lily called, “Quickly! There’s an escape tunnel down here. Come on!”

Alby made to follow Zoe down the steps, but it was right then that the most unexpected thing of all happened.

He got shot.

HE’D BEEN about to follow Zoe down the stairs when suddenly something slammed into his left shoulder, spinning him, hurling him three feet backward, into the nearby wall.

Alby slumped to the base of the wall, dazed, in shock, his left shoulder burning in a way that he’d never felt before. He looked down at it to discover that the entire shoulder was awash with blood.

His blood!

He saw Zoe down at the base of the stairs, saw her try to come for him, but it was too late—the Congolese Army men and the Asian-American Marine were now entering the tower—and Wizard had to pull Zoe back down the stairs and into the escape tunnel down there.

Leaving Alby just sitting there against the stone wall, dumbstruck, bloodied, and horrified, and now at the mercy of the US Marine coming toward him.

DARK, WET,and narrow, the escape tunnel led northward.

Through its tight confines they ran, Ono leading the way, holding a flaming torch above his head. He was followed by Lily and Diane Cassidy, with Wizard and Zoe bringing up the rear.

“Oh, God! Alby!” Zoe cried as she ran.

“We had to leave him!” Wizard said with surprising firmness.

“I think he got hit—”

“Wolf can’t be so evil as to kill a small boy! And we had to get away! We have to protect Lily! What did you manage to get from the sacred island?”

“We grabbed the Orb and its sighting device, but we lost the Second Pillar!” Zoe said. “Alby saved me instead! Wolf’s men got it before they got him!”

Wizard kept running hard. “After he’s done with the Neetha, Wolf and his rogue army will now have both Pillars, plus the Firestone and the Philosopher’s Stone! They’ll have everything they need to perform the ceremony at the Second Vertex and at every other vertex to come! This is a disaster!”

They dashed up a long flight of stone steps and came to a concealed stone doorway cut into a small cave, the end of the escape tunnel.

Emerging from the cave, they found themselves on the banks of the wide jungle river that fed the Neetha waterfall.

To the south, three volcanoes loomed over a seamless green valley—except for a newly opened hole in the canopy, the Neetha’s ravine was completely hidden by the jungle.

Shouts and gunfire made them whip around.

About a hundred yards from the cave, another battle was being waged on the riverbank.

Two Congolese Army pilots were desperately defending a large seaplane from about thirty Neetha warrior-monks. The seaplane—or more correctly, “flying boat”—was a very old model, a Soviet rip-off of the classic Boeing 314 “Clipper.”

Big and bulky, with an upper flight deck and a lower passenger cabin, it had four wing-mounted propeller engines and a huge bulbous belly that sat low in the river. Cheap and old, knock-off Clippers like this one were common in those parts of Africa where the only landing strips were rivers.

Right now this Clipper was literally crawling with Neetha warriors. They were scaling its flanks, jumping on its wings, standing on its nose, and hammering its cockpit windshield with clubs.

Zoe stepped up alongside Wizard, seeing the activity going on all over the big seaplane.

Wizard saw her eyes narrow. “You’re not thinking…”

“You bet I am,” she said, taking the chief’s shotgun from him.

Thus while the plane’s two Congolese pilots fired their guns wildly, defending their plane against the many Neetha attackers, five figures swam silently and unnoticed around the tail fin of the floating plane, around to its open side and to the entry door there.

Zoe led the way, climbing up out of the water and reaching for the door.

She pulled it open—only to be confronted by a yellow-toothed Neetha warrior-monk, looming over her! He whipped up his bow…just as, one-handed, Zoe brought up the shotgun and blasted the monk out of the way.

A minute later, still brandishing the chief’s shotgun, she hustled into the upstairs cockpit, just in time to see the plane’s Congolese copilot get yanked bodily out of the smashed forward windshield, screaming as he went.

Two Neetha monks hacked into the poor man right there on the nose of the plane. When they were done, the two murderers crouched to enter the cockpit, only to find themselves looking straight down the barrel of Zoe’s gun.

Boom! Boom!

The two monks went flying off the nose of the plane, sailing down into the river.

Zoe slid into the pilot’s seat while the others piled in behind her. With Ono beside him, Wizard stood guard at the top of the spiral staircase that led down to the lower passenger deck, covering the stairs with an AK-47 he’d picked up downstairs.

“Can you fly this thing?” Lily asked Zoe.

“Sky Monster’s been giving me lessons.” Zoe scanned the dizzying array of dials in front of her. “It’s not that much different from a helicopter…I think.”

She punched the ignition switch.

The big seaplane’s four turboprop engines roared to life.

Its remaining pilot—firing vainly from the shoreside doorway—was taken completely by surprise as the big Clipper’s propellers began to rotate and then blur with speed.

His surprise was his undoing.

For as he turned at the sound, he was struck by six arrows from his Neetha opponents and he fell from the doorway—and as the plane began to move away from the shore, the ten or so remaining Neetha warrior-monks assailing it from the riverbank went rushing en masse up the gangway before the gangway itself fell away into the water behind the departing plane.

Wind blasted in through the shattered cockpit windshield as Zoe jammed forward on the collective and felt the plane surge beneath her.

The waves of the river started to rush beneath the bow of the seaplane, getting faster and faster, until suddenly they fell away and Zoe had them airborne.

She smiled with relief. “Dear God, I think we made—”

Gunfire from the cabin made her turn.

Wizard was firing his AK-47 at the Neetha warrior-monks trying to enter the upper deck via the stairs.

They were practically suicidal in their assault—hurling themselves over their dead, shrieking and screaming, trying to fire arrows if they could.

If she could have seen her plane from the outside, Zoe would have been shocked: several Neetha men were still on its roof, clambering forward on their bellies toward the open cockpit.

At the same time, two more warriors on one wing were preparing to—suicidally—throw a thick net into one of the propellers. They threw the net…and with a great mechanical jerk, the thick rope got hopelessly entangled in the propeller…and with a blast of black smoke, that engine seized completely!

The entire airplane banked wildly at the unexpected loss of power and the two Neetha men were thrown off the wing and went plummeting to their deaths.

Zoe spun in her seat just in time to see them flail off the wing. She wrestled the plane back level.

“What is wrong with these people!” she shouted.

Diane Cassidy answered: “They guard the location of their realm with rabid fanaticism. If, by his death, a Neetha warrior can prevent an intruder from escaping, then he is assured a place in heaven.”

“So our escape plane is infested with suicidal fanatics,” Zoe said. “Wonder—”

Gunfire cut her off. Oddly distant gunshots.

“Wizard!” she called.

“It’s not me!” Wizard shouted back from the stairs. “They’ve stopped trying to storm the upper deck. A moment ago they all just went downstairs.”

More distant gunshots.

And suddenly Zoe saw another of her wing-mounted engines explode with belching black smoke, its propellers stopping.

Then she realized what was going on.

“Oh,Jesus. They’re firing at the engines from the side doors. They’re going to bring us down that way.”

“If they don’t ignite all the fuel in the wings beforehand!” Wizard called.

More distant gunfire.

“Shit, shit, shit…” Zoe said.

Gripping the pilot’s control yoke, she could feel the plane becoming less responsive.

There’s no way out of this,she thought.You can’t stop someone intent on bringing your plane down this way.

“We’re screwed,” she said aloud.

As if in answer to her comment, her radio abruptly crackled.

“Zoe! Is that you in the Clipper? It’s Sky Monster!”

“Sky Monster!” Zoe grabbed a headset. “Yes, it’s us! Where are you!”

“I’m right above you,”came the reply.

AS THE BIG Clipper seaplane soared over the jungle, an even larger plane swung in low above it, descending from a higher altitude.

The Halicarnassus.

“Sorry it took me so long to get here,”Sky Monster said. “Had to go via Kenya!”

“How did you find us?” Lily asked.

“We’ll discuss that later!” Zoe said. “Sky Monster, we’ve got a bunch of angry passengers downstairs who are trying to bring our bird down from the inside! We need extraction, pronto!”

“Roger that. I see you got no windshield. Are you all mobile?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s do a dog-sniffer. Zoe, power up to four hundred knots and then send everyone over.”

“Gotcha.”

“What’s a dog-sniffer?” Lily asked.

“You’ll see,” Zoe said, turning sharply.

More gunshots were echoing out from downstairs.

The two planes flew over the Congo jungle in formation, the massive 747 looming above the smaller Clipper seaplane.

Then The Halicarnassus powered forward in front of the Clipper and, with its rear loading ramp open, lowered itself in front of the seaplane’s smashed cockpit.

From her position inside the Clipper’s cockpit, Zoe saw the Hali ’s enormous tail section lower into place in front of her, filling her field of vision.

Its rear loading ramp yawned before her, bare yards in front of her own plane’s nose cone.

“OK, Sky Monster!” she yelled in her mike. “Hold her there, I’ll bring us forward and send everyone over!”

Zoe then powered up and edged the seaplane closer to The Halicarnassus ’s rear ramp, until the Clipper’s nose was literally scraping against the edge of the ramp.

Then she yelled, “OK! Wizard, grab Lily, Ono, and Dr. Cassidy, and go!”

Wizard didn’t need to be told twice.

He quickly slid up over the cockpit dashboard and stood out on the nose of the Clipper, in the battering wind,between the two flying planes!

He pulled Lily, Ono, and Cassidy out after him, and after a few hurried steps across the nose of the Clipper, they hopped up onto the rear ramp of the Hali and found themselves standing in the relative calm of the 747’s rear hold.

This left Zoe alone in the cockpit of the seaplane.

She hit autopilot and left the controls, sliding up and out onto the nose cone just as the Neetha managed to hit another of her engines and it exploded and the entire plane lurched wildly.

Too far gone to go back now, Zoe jumped, diving for the Hali ’s rear ramp at the exact moment that the seaplane beneath her just fell away, banking downward at an extreme angle.

Zoe landed awkwardly, her forearms banging on the edge of the ramp, her fingers clutching for a hydraulic strut but missing, and to her utter horror she felt herself drop off the edge of the ramp and fall into the wide blue sky…

…at which point no fewer than three sets of hands grabbed her outstretched arms.

Wizard, Lily, and Ono.

All three of them had seen her leap from the flailing seaplane, seen her clasp the hydraulic strut with one hand, and then seen her grip begin to falter.

And so all three of them had lunged to her rescue, diving for her outstretched hands at the same time.

Now they held her, together, while far beneath Zoe the pilotless Clipper seaplane veered wildly downward and—with its cargo of fanatical Neetha warrior-monks—crashed into the forest, exploding in a great billowing fireball.

Wizard, Lily, and Ono hauled Zoe up into the hold while Diane Cassidy closed the rear ramp. The ramp thunked shut, and they all sat there for a moment on the floor in the wonderful silence of the hold.

“Th-thanks guys,” Zoe gasped.

“You’re thanking us?” Wizard said in disbelief. “You’re thanking us? Zoe, did you see yourself these last few days? You killed a warrior on the Fighting Stone, you deciphered an unconquerable maze, you flew a Neetha-covered plane out of Hell and almost died to make sure we all got off it safely.

“Honestly Zoe, I’ve never seen anything like it. What you’ve done was extraordinary. Jack West Jr is not the only out-and-out hero I know. When he was gone, you stepped up to the plate. You’re an absolute wonder.”

Zoe bowed her head. She hadn’t even thought about what she’d done. She’d just done it.

Lily gave her a huge hug. “You were awesome, Princess Zoe. Five-star girl power. Grrrr!”

And for the first time in days, Zoe smiled.

BACK AT THE Neetha village, through sheer force of arms, Wolf’s people had taken control of the town.

Neetha villagers and warrior-monks were gathered together on their knees, bound with flex-cuffs and guarded by Congolese Army men.

Switchblade came striding over to Wolf.

“Sir, we have it,” he said proudly, stepping aside to reveal the Delta man, Broadsword, who held the Second Pillar.

Wolf’s eyes sparkled at the sight. He took the cleansed Pillar and held it reverently in front of his face.

“We also found this young gentleman.” Switchblade shoved Alby forward, clutching his wounded shoulder. “Name’s Albert Calvin. Says he’s a friend of Jack West’s daughter.”

Wolf eyed the little boy before him and snuffed a laugh. “Tend his wound. He comes with us from here.”

Switchblade went on: “Rapier’s up in the inner sanctum above the maze. He says he’s found the Firestone, the Philosopher’s Stone, and the First Pillar, all laid out on altars. He’s bringing them down.”

“Splendid,” Wolf said. “Splendid. The Neetha took them from Max Epper. This is turning out to be an excellent day.”

He turned suddenly to Switchblade. “What about the Orb, the Delphic Stone?”

“It’s gone, sir. As are Professor Epper and his group.”

Wolf snorted. “Alive or not, Epper won’t be happy. Because he knows that we now have every trump card in the deck: the first two Pillars, the Philosopher’s Stone,and the Firestone.”

“There’s one more thing, sir,” Switchblade said.

“Yes?”

Switchblade nodded to someone, and from the crowd another prisoner was brought forward.

Wolf’s eyebrows arched in surprise.

It was the warlock of the Neetha.

The gnarled old man’s hands were cuffed, but his eyes blazed with rage.

“And just how can you help me ?” Wolf said, knowing the old shaman couldn’t possibly understand him.

To his surprise, the old man answered him. But he didn’t speak in Thoth. Rather, he spoke in a language that Wolf recognized: Greek, classical Greek.

“The Second Corner of the Machine,”the warlock drawled in slow but perfect Greek. “I have seen it. I will take you there.”

Wolf leaned back in surprise, a sly smile forming.

“Switchblade, Broadsword. Fire up the choppers and call our people in Kinshasa. Tell them to prep a plane for Cape Town. It’s time to get our fucking reward.”

AS The Halicarnassus soared southeastward in glorious peace, Zoe and the others joined Sky Monster in the seating area immediately behind the cockpit.

Ono and Diane Cassidy were introduced and Sky Monster explained what had happened to him since they’d left him in Rwanda.

“After Solomon’s boys arrived with some start-up fuel, I flew to the old farm in Kenya and gave my baby a full checkup and refuel, even had a brand-new engine mounted.”

“You keep spare jetengines there?” Zoe asked.

“I might’ve…found…some in my travels and kept them for a rainy day,” Sky Monster said bashfully. “Anyway, I’ve been tracking every aerial scramble in central Africa, and sure enough, earlier today, I spotted these Congolese guys on the satellite scanner—in some Clipper transports and escorted by a few US choppers—all heading to this region. Figured they’d found you, so I tagged along from a distance. Then when I saw you take off in the other direction, I figured it could only be Zoe flying.”

“Ha-de-ha-ha,” Zoe said.

Sky Monster said, “Hey, where’s Solomon? I gotta thank him for sending that fuel.”

Zoe shook her head.

“He died defending me,” Lily said, her eyes downcast.

“Oh,” Sky Monster said softly. “And Alby?”

“Don’t even ask,” Zoe said, rubbing her temples, clearly still dealing with that issue. “Hopefully, he’s not dead, too.”

She glanced at Lily as she said this, and their eyes met. Lily said nothing.

While they talked, Wizard tapped away on a computer, posting an encoded message on the Lord of the Rings noticeboard he, Lily, and Jack used for such communications. If Jack was somehow alive, he would check in on the noticeboard eventually.

“You think Daddy’s still alive?” Lily said, moving behind Wizard as he typed. “Even after that man showed us his helmet?”

Wizard turned to face her.

“Your father’s a very resilient fellow, Lily. The most resilient, stubborn, brilliant, loyal, caring, and difficult-to-kill man I know. As far as I’m concerned, Jack West isn’t dead until I see his unmoving body with my own eyes.”

This didn’t seem to encourage Lily.

Wizard just smiled. “We must always retain hope, little one. Hope that our loved ones are alive, hope that good will prevail over evil in this epic conflict. In the face of powerful opponents and overwhelming odds, hope is all we have.

“Never lose it, Lily. Deep in their hearts, bad people like Wolf have no hope and so they replace it with lust: lust for dominance, for power—and if they ever gain that power they’re only happy because now everyone else is as miserable as they are. Always have hope, Lily, because hope is what makes us the good guys.”

Lily looked at him. “That Wolf man said on the phone before that he’s my grandfather, Daddy’s father. How can Daddy be so good and Wolf be so bad?”

Wizard shook his head. “That I cannot explain. The path a person takes in life is often determined by the strangest, most incidental things. Jack and his father are alike in many ways: both are fiercely determined and incredibly intelligent. Only Jack acts for others, while his father acts for himself. Somewhere in their lives, they each learned to act in these ways.”

“What will I be like then?” Lily asked nervously. “I want to be like Daddy, but it seems that’s not guaranteed. I don’t want to make the wrong choice when it matters.”

Wizard smiled at her, tousled her hair. “Lily, I cannot ever imagine you making the wrong choice.”

“And now that Wolf man has got Alby,” Lily said.

“Yes,” Wizard said. “Yes—”

At that moment, something pinged in the cockpit and Sky Monster went to check on it. Two seconds later, he shouted: “What in the name of…?”

Zoe and the others raced into the cockpit to see what had upset him.

They found Sky Monster pointing at a satellite aerial map of southern Africa.

Dozens of little red dots filled the air above the northern border of South Africa. Many more blue dots flanked the western coast just off Cape Town.

“What is it?” Zoe asked.

“See all those dots,” he said. “The red ones represent military aircraft, the blue ones warships. And there’s a repeating message coming in over all frequencies: the South African Air Force has blockaded South African airspace to all foreign air traffic—military and commercial. At the same time, their Navy’s formed a perimeter around Cape Town, Table Mountain, and half the Cape of Good Hope.”

He pointed to a few white-colored dots on the ocean south of the Cape. “Those white dots, they’re the last civilian craft that were allowed in about an hour ago. Judging from their transponders, they’re South African–registered fishing trawlers returning from the Indian Ocean. They’re the last ones they’ve let back in. Now all the sea-lanes are closed.”

“But we have to get to Cape Town by tomorrow night,” Zoe said.

Sky Monster swiveled in his seat. “I’m sorry, Zoe, but we can’t do that, not without getting shot down. Our enemies have completely shut us out. They musta bought off the South African government with a boatload of cash. I hate to be the one to say this, but we can’t get to Cape Town.”

ENMORE MANOR,

LAND’S END, ENGLAND

DECEMBER 11, 2007

LACHLAN AND JULIUS Adamson sat gloomily in the locked library of Enmore Manor, a secluded estate in the far southwest of England near Land’s End.

The blinking red light of a supersensitive motion-tracking unit gazed down at them, tracking their every movement, telling their Japanese captors that they were still where they were supposed to be.

They sat with Lily’s backpack and nothing else. Only her toys remained in the pack—everything else they had of worth had been taken by the Japanese.

Every now and then, their captors came for them and got them to explain some diagram on their computer or some e-mail that Wizard had written about the Machine.

Tank Tanaka was always polite but curt, his eyes hard and cold, fixed on a purpose that the twins simply couldn’t comprehend.

Only once did Lachlan shake him from his trance. “Yo, Tank! Why are you doing this, man! What about your friends, like Wizard and Lily?”

Tank rounded on him, his eyes flaring. “Friends? Friends! The notion of friendship is nothing compared to the rank humiliation of a nation. In 1945 my country was dishonored, not just beaten in battle, but beaten like a dog before the whole world. Our Emperor, sent to us by God himself, the last in the longest line of kings on this planet, was belittled in front of the entire world. This was a slur that no Japanese has ever forgotten.”

Julius said, “But Japan is strong again. One of the richest and most advanced countries in the world.”

“Robots and electronics do not rebuild honor, Julius. Only vengeance does. I have studied this Machine for twenty years, all the while with vengeance on my mind. In their hearts, all Japanese agree with me, and they will all rejoice when our vengeance is made manifest.”

“But they’ll be dead, ” Julius said. “If you succeed, all life on this planet will be extinguished.”

Tank shrugged. “Death is not death when you take your enemy with you.”

A few times when Tank was out, their Japanese guards conversed in the twins’ presence, assuming that as gaijin the twins did not understand Japanese.

On one such occasion, as he typed on his computer for them, Lachlan, listening discreetly, snapped up.

“What is it?” Julius whispered.

“They’re saying that they just got word from ‘their man in Wolf’s unit,’ some guy named Akira Isaki?”

“Isaki?”

“Whoever he is, he’s not loyal to Wolf. He’s working for these assholes. He just called in and told them—oh, shit—that Jack West is dead and that Wolf is now heading for the Congo, going after the Second Pillar. This Isaki will report back when that’s over and tell our guys whether they have to move or not.”

“Huntsman’s dead?” Julius said. “You think it’s true?”

“I don’t know what to think. But I do know this: our time is limited. It’s time we flew the coop.”

Twelve hours later in the dead of night, one of the Japanese guards came to check on them.

A sensor had detected that one of the windows in the library had been breached, but the motion tracker still showed the twins to be in the library, moving very little, probably sleeping.

The Japanese guard opened the library door, and stopped dead in his tracks.

The library was empty.

The twins were gone.

The only moving object: Lily’s little robot dog, Sir Barksalot, stomping up and down on his little metal legs, barking soundlessly at the dumbstruck Japanese guard.

The alarm was sounded and the grounds lit up with floodlights, but by the time Tank and his men had searched the area for the twins, they were already sitting in the back of a pickup truck speeding east, heading far away from Land’s End.

“So where do we go now?” Julius asked, the wind whipping his hair.

Lachlan grimaced in thought. “There’s only one place I can think to go.”

MINE COMPLEX

SOMEWHERE IN ETHIOPIA

DECEMBER 11, 2007

AT THE SAME TIME Zoe was guiding her group through the wilds of the Congo, and the Twins had been making good their escape from Tank’s Japanese Blood Brotherhood at Land’s End, Pooh Bear was languishing in the mysterious Ethiopian mine, suspended above the arsenic pool in his medieval cage.

Six hours after the shocking death of Jack West—and since his own brother, Scimitar, had left Pooh to die—the working day came to an end, and the Ethiopian Christian guards in charge of the mine shepherded the Ethiopian Jewish miners into their subterranean quarters—dirt-walled caves with planks for beds and rags for blankets. Moldy bread and a soup-like gruel was served up for food.

Once the slave miners were safely locked away, the thirty or so Christian guards gathered around the arsenic pool and stared up at the imprisoned Pooh Bear.

Torches were lit.

Chants were intoned.

A great drum was hammered.

A full-sized Christian cross was erected and set alight.

Then the tribal dancing began.

Once the cross was burning, all the other torches were extinguished, so that it was the only light source in the vast cavern—it lit up the great underground space with a haunting orange glow that bounced off the stone towers half-buried in the mine’s high dirt walls.

Pooh Bear looked out from his cage in horror. His time, it seemed, had come. He shot a sad look at the deep pit about thirty yards from the arsenic pool, the pit in which Jack had met his end.

Then, with a clunking jolt, Pooh Bear’s cage suddenly began to descend toward the steaming pool on its chains. At the edge of the pool, a pair of Ethiopian guards were slowly uncranking a spooler, lowering the cage.

The other guards began chanting quickly. It sounded like the Lord’s Prayer, in Latin, and uttered feverishly fast:“Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum…”

The cage descended.

Pooh Bear shook its bars.

“Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum…”

Pooh’s cage was only ten feet above the simmering pool of black liquid.

“Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum…”

Nine feet, eight feet…

Pooh Bear began to feel the heat of the pool, the hot steam rising all around him.

“Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum…”

The chanting continued.

The dancing continued.

The drum kept booming.

And Pooh Bear’s cage kept lowering.

As his cage descended, Pooh’s eyes flashed from the simmering pool below him to the surging throng of chanting-and-dancing guards and then over to the blazing cross towering over them all—and somewhere in the middle of the hellish scene, over the booming of the drum, he thought he heard another sound, a kind of banging noise, but he couldn’t see where it had come from and he dismissed it.

“Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum…”

The pool was only three feet beneath him now, its steaming fumes engulfing him. Sweating profusely, with death approaching and no avenue of escape, Pooh Bear began to pray.

The heavily muscled Ethiopian guard who had hammered Jack West to his horizontal cross was at that moment leading the sacrificial ceremony, banging on the great drum with gusto.

His eyes widened with delight as Pooh Bear’s cage came to within a few feet of the deadly pool.

Now he hammered harder on the drum, heightening the frenzy of the crowd—just as a thick masonry nail came flying through the air from out of nowhere and lodged squarely in his right eye, driving a full six inches back into his brain, killing him instantly, throwing him to the ground, and abruptly ending the beating of the drum.

Everything stopped.

The dancing, the chanting, the movement. Even the men lowering Pooh Bear’s cage stopped their cranking.

Silence.

The crowd of guards turned.

To behold a man standing at their rear, beside the blazing cross, fearsomely illuminated by its firelight, a terrifying figure literally covered in his own blood—it was on his face, on his clothes, and most obviously, on the rag wrapped around his wounded right hand.

Newly risen from the dead, from beneath a great stone slab at the base of a deep stone pit, it was Jack West Jr., and he was pissed as hell.

IF THE KILLING of Jack West by his own father had raised comparisons to Christ in the minds of the fundamentalist Ethiopian Christian guards, now his resurrection chilled them to the core.

That he had already silently disarmed four of their number during their wild dancing and now held a gun in his good hand only served to make them believe even more that this man had God-like abilities.

Except for one thing.

Jack West Jr. was not a merciful god.

It had taken Jack six hours, six long hours of careful shifting and excruciatingly painful movements to get himself out.

Blocking the fall of the stone slab had been frightening enough.

As the great slab had been slid across his pit, Jack had thought quickly: the only thing he possessed that could possibly withstand the weight of such a slab was his titanium forearm.

And so, at the very moment the slab had slid across the top of his pit, he had clenched his teeth and yanked with all his strength on his nailed-down artificial left hand.

It shook the nail slightly, but on the first pull, he did not pull it loose.

The slab fell into his pit—

—just as he yanked on the nail again, and this time, his metal hand came free, nail and all, and as the huge stone slab fell down into the pit, Jack planted his false arm perpendicular to his body, made a fist and tucked his legs up against his side as—clang!—the full weight of the slab hit his metal fist, crushing two of its fingers, but the arm held and the irresistible force of the slab met the immovable object of Jack’s upraised titanium forearm.

The leading face of the slab came to a stunning halt less than an inch from Jack’s nose, and to anyone looking down at it, it would have appeared that he had been completely crushed by the great stone slab.

Jack, however, had his legs squeezed to the left of his body while his head was facing right, his right hand still nailed to the floor, itself only inches away from the face of the slab above it.

From there, all he needed was courage, strength, and time—courage to grab, with his real right hand, the nail sticking through it; strength to form a fist around the head of the nail and jimmy it from the block beneath it; and time to do so without tearing his own hand apart or dying from shock.

Three times he passed out from the strain, blacking out for he didn’t know how long.

But after a couple of hours of this agonizing sequence of jimmying and yanking, he finally dislodged the masonry nail and got his right hand free.

Deep hyperventilating gasps followed as he then used his teeth to extract the nail from his bloody right palm.

Clenched in his jaws, the nail came free and blood issued from the hole in his palm. Jack quickly unlooped his belt from his trousers and with his teeth created a tourniquet.

At which point, he promptly blacked out again, passing out for an entire hour this time.

He woke to the sounds of chanting, dancing, and drums.

“Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum…”

Now he had to deal with the issue of the slab on top of him.

All he needed was one crack in it, and he found it near where his right hand had been nailed down.

Into this crack he jammed a chewing-gum-sized wad of C-2 plastic explosive—the high-impact low-radius explosive he kept in a compartment in his artificial arm for use in enemy door locks in case of capture.

The C-2 went off—the distant bang Pooh would hear—and a long fatal crack snaked up the length of the slab, breaking it perfectly in two. The partial slab to Jack’s right fell flush to the floor of the pit, providing a narrow aperture through which he could squeeze.

After some careful wriggling, he was all but out, save for his artificial left arm, which still held the other side of the slab off the ground.

A tough predicament—there was no way he could lift the half slab off his titanium arm. So he did the only thing he could.

He simply unlatched the forearm section of his false arm from the bicep section and rolled out.

And so Jack stood at the base of the pit, with one full arm and one half arm, to the sounds of chants and drumbeats—only now he was free.

Another wad of C-2 cracked the section of slab above his artificial forearm, releasing it, and Jack quickly reattached it and tied a rag tightly around his wounded right palm.

Then he climbed the ladder in the wall of the pit and commenced his own one-man war against the guards of his father’s mine.

JACK STOOD before the crowd of guards looking like Death incarnate.

His eyes were bloodshot and a ring of his own blood was caked around his mouth, blood from the masonry nail that he had wrenched from his own hand with his teeth.

But he was still just one man against thirty.

It was then that he brought his spare hand into view. In it was a fire extinguisher, grabbed from over by the gantry elevator.

With a sudden blast of white carbon dioxide, he fired the extinguisher into the burning cross, and it went out, plunging the mine into darkness.

Absolute black.

The guards panicked, started shouting. Then there came the sound of many feet shuffling, moving, and—

—Bam!—

—the mine’s dim emergency lights came on, revealing Jack standing in exactly the same position as before, beside the cross…

…only now an army stood behind him.

An army of several hundred slave miners that he had released from their underground quarters before confronting the guards.

The looks on the faces of the slaves said it all: hatred, anger,vengeance. This would be a battle without mercy to avenge their horrific treatment, to even the score for months, years of slavery.

With a piercing cry, the crowd of slave miners rushed forward, attacking the guards.

It was a slaughter.

Some of the guards tried to get their guns from a nearby rack, but they were intercepted on the way, crash-tackled to the ground, and stomped to death. Others were grabbed by many hands and hurled into the arsenic pool.

A few tried to flee for the gantry elevator—the only exit from the mine—but they were set upon by several dozen slave miners waiting there with nail-studded planks. They were clubbed to death.

Within minutes, all the guards were dead and the mine was eerily silent in the dim emergency lighting.

Jack quickly set about releasing Pooh Bear from his cage. Once he was free and standing on solid ground, Pooh gazed at Jack in horror.

“By Allah, Jack, you look like shit.”

Bloody and filthy and weary beyond all human endurance, Jack smiled a crooked smile. “Yeah—”

Then he fainted into Pooh Bear’s arms.

JACK AWOKE to the wonderful sensation of warm sunlight on his face.

He opened his eyes, to find himself lying on a cot in a guardhouse just inside the upper entrance to the mine, sunshine slanting in through the window.

A fresh bandage was on his right hand and his face had been washed. He also wore crisp new clothes: some traditional Ethiopian robes.

Squinting, he stood and padded out of the guardhouse.

Pooh Bear met him in the doorway.

“Ah, the warrior wakes,” Pooh Bear said. “You’ll be happy to know we now own this mine. We took out the upper guards with the help of the miners—who, it should be said, were most enthusiastic in assailing their captors.”

“I’ll bet,” Jack said. “So where are we in Ethiopia?”

“You’re not going to believe it.”

They stepped out of the office and emerged in bright sunshine.

Jack took in the surrounding landscape.

Dry, barren brushland, with rust-colored soil and treeless hills.

And dotting the hollows of some of those hills were structures—stonebuildings —exquisitely carved buildings, each easily five stories tall, that had been hewn from solid rock and were sunk inside massive stone-walled pits. It was as if they had been cut out of the living rock.

One of the buildings, Jack saw, was carved in the shape of an equal-armed cross, a Templar cross.

“You know where we are?” Pooh Bear asked.

“Yes,” Jack said. “We’re in Lalibela. These are the famous churches of Lalibela.”

“Our mission is in tatters, Huntsman,” Pooh Bear said sadly.

It was a short time later and the two of them were sitting in the sunshine, with Jack nursing his injured right hand. Around them, the freed slave miners variously left, ate, or plundered the upper offices for clothes and booty.

“We’ve been scattered to the winds,” Pooh went on. “Your father sent Stretch back to the Mossad, intent on collecting the bounty on his head.”

“Aw, shit…” Jack said. “And did I see Astro go off with Wolf?”

“Yes.”

“Timeo Americanos et dona ferentes,”Jack muttered.

“I don’t know, Jack,” Pooh said, “from what I could see, Astro didn’t seem, well, himself. And during our mission, he struck me as a fine young man, not a villain. I wouldn’t rush to judgment on him.”

“I’ve always valued your opinion, Zahir. Consider judgment suspended, for the moment. What about Wolf?”

“He set off after Wizard, Zoe, and Lily, to find the ancient tribe and get the Second Pillar.”

“The Neetha…” Jack said, thinking.

He stared out into space for a moment.

Then he said, “We have to catch up with Lily and the others. Make sure they get that Pillar and get it to the next vertex in time.”

“You need rest,” Pooh Bear said, “and a doctor.”

“And a panel beater,” Jack said, touching the two half-crushed metal fingers on his mechanical left hand.

Pooh Bear said, “I say we head for our old base in Kenya, the farm. There you can get some medical attention and rearm yourself. Then you can set out from the farm for the central regions of the continent.”

“Ican?” West said. “What about we can?”

Pooh Bear looked at him closely. Then he looked away into the distance. “I will be leaving you at the farm in Kenya, Huntsman.”

Jack remained silent.

“I cannot leave my friend to suffer in the cells of the Mossad,” Pooh Bear said. “The Mossad do not forget a slight. Nor do they forgive those agents who disobey their orders. Even if the world is to end, I will not leave Stretch to die a cruel death in a dungeon. He would not let such a fate befall me.”

Jack just returned Pooh Bear’s gaze. “I understand.”

“Thank you, Jack. I shall get you to Kenya and there we shall part.”

Jack nodded again. “Sounds like a plan—”

Just then, however, a delegation of about dozen Ethiopian Jews approached them. The leader of the delegation, a dignified-looking man, held a bundle in his hands, wrapped in dirty hessian cloth.

“Excuse me, Mr. Jack,” he said humbly. “As a gesture of thanks, the men wanted to give you this.”

“What is it?” Jack leaned forward.

“Oh, it is the stones your father had us digging for,” the man said matter-of-factly. “We found them three weeks ago, we just didn’t tell him or his evil guards that we had. So we hid them and kept digging as if the stones had never been found, awaiting salvation, awaiting you.”

Despite himself, Jack shook his head and grinned. He couldn’t believe this.

“And since you set us free,” the leader said, “we would like to present the holy stones to you, as a token of our thanks. We think you a good man, Mr. Jack.”

The leader of the Jewish slave miners handed Jack the hessian bundle.

Jack maintained eye contact with the leader as he took it. “I sincerely thank you for this. I also apologize to your people for the cruelty of my father.”

“His acts are not yours. Be well, Mr. Jack, and should you ever need aid in Africa, send for us. We will come.”

And with that, the delegation left.

“Well I’ll be,” Pooh Bear said. “No good deed really does go unrewarded…”

Beside him, Jack gently unwrapped the hessian cloth, to reveal two stone tablets, each the size of a manila folder, and clearly ancient, and both inscribed with half a dozen lines of text, written in the Word of Thoth.

“The Twin Tablets of Thuthmosis,” Jack breathed. “God damn.”

THE SEPARATION OF THE TEAM

KENYAN SAVANNAH

DECEMBER 12, 2007

FIVE DAYS TO SECOND DEADLINE

JACK AND POOH BEAR sped across the vast Kenyan savannah in an old truck they’d taken from the mine at Lalibela.

Pooh Bear drove while Jack sat in the passenger seat, gazing at the two ancient tablets.

“Huntsman. What are those things?”

Staring at the tablets, Jack said, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

Pooh gave him a look. “Try me.”

“Okay. The Twin Tablets of Thuthmosis are a pair of stone tablets once owned by Rameses the Great around the year 1250 B.C. They stood on a holy altar at his favorite temple in Thebes, the most valuable treasure of his reign. But they were taken from Rameses late in his life, stolen from the temple by a renegade priest.”

“I confess I have not heard of these tablets before,” Pooh Bear said as he drove. “Should I have?”

“Oh, you’ve heard of them. Only you’ve heard them called by their other name. You see, the Twin Tablets of Thuthmosis are more commonly known as the Ten Commandments.”

“The Ten Commandments!” Pooh Bear exclaimed. “You can’t be serious. The two carved stone tablets containing God’s laws handed to Moses at Mount Sinai?”

Jack countered, “Or how about two carved stone tablets containing crucial ancient knowledge stolen by an Egyptian priest named Moses from the Ramesesseum at Thebes and spirited to Mount Sinai after making his escape from Egypt.

“And, while we’re being precise about it, originally there was only one tablet,” Jack added. “According to the Book of Exodus, Moses broke the single tablet in two. And it only contained five commands, not ten—the tablets are identical, containing the same text. Whether God sent the tablets to Moses on Mount Sinai or whether Moses just revealed them to his followers for the first time on Mount Sinai, is open to question.”

“It is?”

“Well, let me ask you: who was Moses?”

Pooh Bear shrugged. “A Hebrew peasant, abandoned by his mother to the rushes, who was found by the queen and raised as the brother of…”

“…Rameses II,” Jack finished. “We all know the story. That Moses lived during the time of Rameses the Great is likely. That he was a Hebrew is unlikely, since ‘Moses’ is an Egyptian name.”

“The name ‘Moses’ is Egyptian?”

“Yes, in fact, strictly speaking it’s only half a name. ‘Moses’ means ‘born of’ or ‘son of.’ It is normally combined with a the oriphic prefix pertaining to a god. So Rameses—or spelled another way, ‘Ra-moses’—means ‘Son of Ra.’

“As such, it is highly unlikely that ‘Moses’ was actually the name of the man we call Moses. It’d be like calling a Scotsman Mc or an Irishman O’ without adding the family name—McPherson, O’Reilly.”

“So what was his name then?”

“Most modern scholars believe that Moses’ full name was Thuth moses: the son of Thoth.”

“As in the Word of Thoth?”

“The very same. And as you and I know very well, Thoth was the Egyptian god of knowledge. Sacred knowledge. This has led many scholars to deduce that the man we call Moses was in fact a member of an Egyptian priesthood. More than that, he was a very influential priest: a gifted orator, a charismatic leader of people. Only there was a big problem. He preached a heretical religion.”

“Which was?”

“Monotheism,” Jack said. “The idea that there is only one god. In the century before Rameses ascended the throne of ancient Egypt, Egypt had been ruled by a peculiar pharaoh named Akenaten. Akenaten has gone down in history as the one and only Egyptian pharaoh to preach monotheism. Naturally, he didn’t last long. He was assassinated by a group of holy men, aggrieved priests who had been telling Egyptians for centuries that there were many gods to worship.

“But. If you look at the Biblical Moses, you’ll see that he preached a very similar idea: one almighty God. It’s very probable that Moses was a priest of Akenaten’s who survived his downfall. Now, think about it, if this charismatic priest were to come upon a pair of stone tablets carved by an advanced prior civilization, don’t you think he might use them to augment his preaching, to say to his followers, ‘Look at what God in his wisdom sent you! His immutable laws!’”

“You realize that if you’re right, Christian Sunday schools will never be the same again,” Pooh Bear said. “So what has all this to do with some remote stone churches in Ethiopia?”

“Good question. According to biblical history, the Ten Commandments were kept in the Ark of the Covenant, the arca foedera, inside a special vault deep within the Temple of Solomon. Now, in the movies, Indiana Jones found the Ark in the ancient Egyptian city of Tanis, but according to the people of Ethiopia, Indy was wrong.

“The people of Ethiopia have claimed for over seven hundred years that the arca foedera has resided in their lands, brought there direct from the Temple of Solomon by European knights in the yearA.D. 1280, the same European knights who built the churches of Lalibela. Seems the Ethiopians were right.”

“So if the tablets don’t contain the ten ultimate laws of God, what’s written on them?” Pooh Bear asked.

Jack gazed at the engraved writing on the two tablets in his lap. “What the tablets contain is just as important: they contain the words of a ritual that must be performed at the sixth and last vertex of the Machine, when the Dark Star is almost upon the Earth. The Twin Tablets of Thuthmosis contain a sacred text that will save us all.”

They drove south through Kenya, zooming along its highways until at last they crested a final hill and their old base came into view—a large farmhouse not far from the Tanzanian border. On the distant southern horizon, the cone of Kilimanjaro rose majestically into the sky.

And standing on the porch of the farmhouse waiting for them, were two white men.

One wore a black T-shirt, the other a white one.

The shirts read:“I HAVE SEEN THE COW LEVEL!” and “THERE IS NO COW LEVEL!”

The twins.

Horus was perched on Lachlan’s forearm. She squawked with delight when she saw Jack and flew directly to his shoulder.

“When we got here this morning,” Julius said, “your little friend was waiting.”

“That’s one loyal bird you’ve got there,” Lachlan said.

“Best bird in the world,” Jack said, grinning at the falcon. “Best bird in the world.”

THEY HEADED inside the farmhouse.

“We’ve got a lot to tell you—” Lachlan said as they walked, but Jack just held up his finger and went into his old study.

There he prised open a floorboard and extracted from under the floor a shoebox filled with wads of US dollars and an Australian SAS first-aid field kit.

Jack grabbed a syringe from the kit and loaded it with a drug called Andarin—“Superjuice” as the men of the SAS liked to call it. Andarin was a potent mix of adrenaline and high-grade cortisol. It was a battle drug, designed to mask pain and provide an adrenal kick, and thus get a badly wounded soldier—as Jack was now—through a hostile engagement.

Jack injected it into his arm and instantly blinked. “Ow, that’s powerful stuff.” He apologized to the twins: “Sorry, gentlemen. Just needed something to keep me standing till this is over. Now, tell me everything.”

They settled in the lounge room of the empty farmhouse, and there the twins blurted out everything they’d learned over the last week.

They informed Jack of the location of the Second Vertex: to the south of Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa.

They told him about Tank Tanaka and his Japanese brotherhood’s avowed mission to avenge their national disgrace in World War II—through mass global suicide. They also mentioned their golden piece of knowledge: that this Japanese brotherhood had infiltrated Wolf’s CIEF force with one of their own, a man named Akira Isaki.

While they’d waited at the farmhouse for someone to arrive, the twins had hacked an American military database and discovered that there was indeed a US serviceman named A. J. Isaki—Akira Juniro Isaki—a Marine who had been seconded to the CIEF.

Lachlan said, “Isaki was born in America in 1979 to a Japanese-American couple who—”

“—by all accounts were very lovely people,” Julius added.

“Thing is,” Lachlan said, “his grandparents —his paternal grandparents—were purebred Japanese and during the Second World War, they were imprisoned in a Californian internment camp—”

“Very nasty, those camps. Black spot in American history…”

“But when baby A. J.’s parents were killed in a car crash in 1980, A. J. Isaki was brought up by his grandparents—”

“His now bitterly resentful pure-blood Japanese grandparents, members of the Blood Brotherhood. A. J. joined the Marines, was steadily promoted to Force Recon, and was ultimately seconded—upon his own application—to the CIEF in 2003.”

“His call sign,” Lachlan said, “is Switchblade.”

“Switchblade,” Jack said, vaguely recalling the Asian-American Marine whom Wolf had introduced to him back in the Ethiopian mine, when Jack had been nailed down at the base of the pit. He asked, “You guys still online?”

Julius cocked his head. “Is the starship Enterprise powered by dilithium crystals? Of course we’re online.”

He handed his laptop to Jack.

Jack tapped some keys. “We’ve got to find out if Wizard and Zoe got the Second Pillar from the Neetha. Hopefully, they’ve left a message for me on the Net.”

He brought up the Lord of the Rings chat room, punched in his user name—STRIDER101—and password.

A new screen came up, and Jack scowled. “Nothing.”

No message awaited him.

Wizard’s message would not arrive on the noticeboard for another three days.

Lachlan said, “Jack, there’s one more thing.”

“What?”

“Since we got here we’ve been scanning the military frequencies, searching for news of you or the others. Over the last twenty-four hours, a whole bunch of African nations have scrambled their air forces. There’s also been a spate of air traffic lockdowns in the south of the continent: first Zimbabwe and then Mozambique, then Angola, Namibia, and Botswana. No commercial air traffic allowed. Someone’s cutting off all the air corridors to South Africa.”

Jack thought about that. “The next vertex is underneath Table Mountain in Cape Town, you say?”

“A little to the south of it, yes,” Lachlan said.

“We have to get there,” Jack said, suddenly standing. “We have to get there before the deadline.”

“What do you mean?” Julius asked.

“The way I see it, there are two ways this thing can pan out—one, Wizard, Lily, and Zoe get the Pillar and get to Cape Town; which means they’re going to be arriving in Cape Town with enemies hot on their heels. They’ll need us there.”

“And second?”

Jack bit his lip.

“The second option is worse. It’s that Wolf gets the Pillar and heads for Cape Town with it. If he sets it in place, that’s fine by me—it saves the world for a little longer. But as you’ve just said, Wolf’s CIEF team has been compromised by the Japanese Blood Brotherhood. At least one member of his team, this Switchblade, is a traitor—and he does not want to see the Pillar set in place at all. He wants to destroy the world, to erase Japan’s shame. And if Switchblade is part of Wolf’s Cape Town team, then he’s going to make sure they don’t successfully lay the Pillar.”

“Which would be very bad,” Lachlan said.

“End-of-the-world bad,” Julius said.

“Yeah,” Jack said. “So, either way, we have to get to Cape Town, to help Wizard or—and I can’t believe I’m going to say this—to help Wolf.”

Julius asked, “But how do we get to South Africa within four days and not do it by air?”

Jack gazed out the window.

“There’s one man I know who might be able to help us, but we haven’t a moment to lose.” He stood up. “Come on, gentlemen. We’re going to Zanzibar.”

NAIROBI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

DECEMBER 13, 2007, 1800 HOURS

4 DAYS TO SECOND DEADLINE

THAT EVENING,Jack stood on the tarmac at Nairobi International Airport, about to board a chartered private plane, a little Cessna that he’d paid for wholly in cash, adding a grand to ensure that no questions were asked.

The Kenyan pilot took the money without so much as a blink. Such payments weren’t uncommon for people traveling to Zanzibar.

As the twins boarded the plane, Jack remained on the tarmac with Pooh Bear.

“I guess this is it,” he said.

“It’s been an honor and a privilege to serve with you, Jack West Jr.,” Pooh Bear said.

“The honor has been mine, my friend.”

“When you see Lily again, please give her my love.”

“I will.”

“I am sorry I cannot go with you from here. But I just can’t leave Stretch to—”

“I understand,” Jack said. “If I could, I’d go with you.”

They stared at each other for a long moment. Then, as if he were struck by a thought, Jack reached down and unstrapped his bulky wristwatch. He handed it to Pooh. “Here. Take this. It has an SOS distress beacon, a GPS locater. If you get in trouble, press the button and I’ll know where you are.”

Pooh Bear took the watch and put it on. “Thank you.”

Jack regarded Pooh for a moment, then he stepped forward and embraced the Arab tightly.

“Good luck, Zahir.”

“Good luck to you, too, Huntsman.”

And then they separated and Jack watched as Pooh Bear walked purposefully off the runway, and as he stood there by the steps of his plane, Jack wondered if he would ever see his friend again.

ZANZIBAR

OFF THE COAST OF TANZANIA

DECEMBER 13, 2007, 2345 HOURS

4 DAYS TO SECOND DEADLINE

IT WAS ALMOST midnight when Jack and the twins arrived in Zanzibar in the Cessna.

Zanzibar.

A small island off the east coast of Africa, in the 19th century it had been the haunt of pirates, slave traders, and smugglers—a decadent and lawless hideaway for those with little respect for the law.

In the 21st century, little had changed.

Except for the glitzy waterfront hotels that serviced tourists on their way home from Kilimanjaro, Zanzibar largely retained its centuries-old seaminess: modern-day pirates lurked in back-alley drinking holes while South African fishermen frequented the many gambling dens and brothels, engaging the services of cut-price African native girls in between blackjack hands. Old pirate caves on the island’s ferocious eastern coast were still used.

It was to this ferocious eastern coast that Jack and the twins headed in a crappy old Peugeot rental car, heading for a long-abandoned lighthouse on a remote headland.

They passed through a barbed-wire gate and drove up a long overgrown driveway to the front door of the lighthouse.

Not a soul could be seen anywhere nearby.

“Are you sure about this?” Lachlan asked nervously. He fingered the Glock pistol that Jack had given him.

“I’m sure,” Jack said.

Stopping the car, he got out and walked over to the main door of the lighthouse. The twins followed him, eyeing the waist-high ring of uncut grass that encircled the structure’s base.

Jack rapped on the door three times.

No answer.

The door did not open.

No sound but the crashing of the waves.

“Who are you!” an African-accented voice demanded suddenly from behind them.

The twins whirled. Lachlan whipped up his gun.

“Lachlan, no!” Jack leapt forward and pushed the gun down.

The move saved Lachlan’s life.

They were surrounded.

Somehow, as they’d stood at the base of the lighthouse, no less than ten Tanzanians—all with deep black skin and all wearing navy blue military fatigues and armed with brand-new M16 assault rifles—had crept up on them. Absolutely soundlessly.

Jack recognized the leader of the group.

“Inigo, is that you? It’s me, Jack. Jack West. These are my friends, Lachlan and Julius Adamson, a couple of net jockeys from Scotland.”

The Tanzanian did not acknowledge Jack’s introduction at all.

He just glared at the twins.

“Net jockeys?” he said, frowning fiercely. “Computer persons?”

“Y-yes,” Lachlan said, gulping.

The Tanzanian was still frowning darkly. He had a line of raised traditional markings on his forehead.

“You play Warcraft on Internet?” he demanded.

“Er, yeah…” Julius said.

The African pointed at their “COW LEVEL”T-shirts. “The cow level. You play computer game, Diablo II?”

“Well…yes…”

Abruptly the leader’s dark frown became a broad smile, showing a mouthful of enormous white teeth. He spun to face Jack:

“Huntsman, I have heard of this cow level, but for the life of me, I just cannot get to it!” He turned to the twins: “You two will show me how to find it, you…cowboys!”

Jack smiled.

“Nice to see you, too, Inigo. But I’m afraid we’re in a bit of a hurry. We need to see the Sea Ranger immediately.”

THEY WERE taken into the lighthouse, where instead of going up, they went down—first through a dusty old cellar and then through a storage basement. In this storage basement was a hidden staircase that went even farther down, delving deep into the headland before emerging in a giant cave at sea level.

Sometime in the distant past—probably by pirates in the 1800s—the cave had been fitted with two wooden docks and some cabins. More recently, the Sea Ranger had installed generators, lights, and some concrete extensions for the docks.

Taking pride of place in the center of it all, tied up to one of the docks with its conning tower soaring high, was a Kilo-class submarine.

Jack had been here before, so he wasn’t surprised by the rather impressive sight.

The twins, however, were gobsmacked.

“It’s like the Batcave…” Lachlan said.

“No, better…” Julius agreed.

A winding riverlike passage led out to the ocean, and halfway along it, a movable breakwater protected the cave from the rough seas outside. Exit from the cave could only be achieved at high tide—at low tide, jagged rocks would be exposed along the winding passage.

J. J. Wickham stood waiting on the dock at the base of the stairs: former US Navy XO, brother-in-law of Jack West Jr., the Sea Ranger.

He and Jack embraced. They hadn’t seen each other since that New Year’s Eve party in Dubai.

“Jack,” Wickham said, “what the hell’s going on? These last few days, half the African continent has gone completely nuts. The Saudis put up half a billion dollars for any country that found two people who sounded a lot like my niece and your mentor.”

“The Saudis…?” Jack said aloud.

Up until now, he’d thought the Saudis had been backing him —by sending Vulture to be a part of his team.

Vulture,he thought.You scheming little…

It explained the blocked air corridors in the south of the continent—only the Saudis could afford to pay off whole African countries.

“The Saudis are in league with my father…” he said aloud.

It made sense. The Caldwell Group and the Saudis had long-standing links based on oil. And if the Second Reward—“heat”—was what Wizard suspected it was, an unending energy source, perhaps even perpetual motion, then the Saudis had a huge interest in acquiring it. All this time, he hadn’t just been battling against his father, he’d been fighting a triple threat: the Caldwell Group, Saudi Arabia, and China, all allied together.

He turned to Wickham. “It’s a complicated situation that just got a whole lot more complicated. Right now, I need to get to Cape Town inside of four days, unseen, and I can’t go by air. I can tell you more along the way.”

“Your father is involved?”

“Yeah.”

“Say no more,” Wickham said, already moving toward his submarine. “Fathers-in-law can be tough, but that man was the biggestasshole of a father-in-law a guy ever had.”

Jack walked after Wickham. “Our enemies’ll be on the lookout for subs. You got any kind of cover?”

Wickham kept walking. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

OFF THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE

DECEMBER 16, 2007, 1755 HOURS

THE AFTERNOON BEFORE THE SECOND DEADLINE

THREE DAYS LATER,Jack and the twins found themselves rounding Cape Agulhas, approaching the point where the Indian Ocean met the Atlantic Ocean.

Cape Town lay to the northwest, over a mountainous peninsula of wilderness, facing out over the Atlantic.

They’d made excellent time from Zanzibar, traveling halfway down the east coast of Africa on the surface of the ocean in Wickham’s diesel-electric Kilo-class submarine, rechristened by him the Indian Raider.

The reason they could travel in this way was because of the shell Wickham had recently created to cover his 242-foot-long Russian submarine.

The upper half of an ageing South African fishing trawler—gutted of its engine and heavy machinery—had been mounted on top of the submarine. With the advent of wake-spotting satellites, Wickham had recently decided that he needed an extra level of visual protection, and had hit upon the idea of a “shell” to mount on his sub.

Then a few months back, when a crew of drunken South African fishermen, in port on a break from a six-week cruise, had beaten one of the sweeter prostitutes in town, the Sea Ranger and his men had decided to teach them some manners.

The South African fishermen were dealt with and while they lay unconscious in a back alley, Wickham stole their boat and brought it back to his cave.

There it was stripped and gutted and hoisted on chains, ready for a mission just like this.

As the sub cruised toward Cape Town, Jack told Wickham about his epic quest so far—of negotiating a booby-trapped cavern in China; decoding Stonehenge; finding the incredible First Vertex near Abu Simbel; and then engaging in a bus-vs-747 car chase in the desert.

He also told him about the Six Ramesean Stones, the Six Pillars, and the Six Vertices of the Machine, and how all six Pillars had to be set in place before the arrival of the Dark Star.

At the same time, the twins were getting along famously with Wickham’s crew of Tanzanian sailors, showing them some computer tricks, including guiding them to the cow level on Diablo II, an act which made the sailors gasp in wonder and which finally earned the twins their nicknames:the Cowboys.

Individually, Lachlan became Quickdraw, while Julius was Gunslinger. They loved their call signs.

At regular intervals on the journey, Jack checked the Lord of the Rings notice board for messages from Wizard, Zoe, or Lily.

For three days, no messages appeared.

But then, at the beginning of the fourth and last day, as Jack forlornly signed on, he found a single message waiting for him, from the user ID: “GANDALF101.”

Jack almost leapt out of his chair.

The message had been posted only an hour previously: a cascade of numbers; a coded message that could only have come from Wizard, Lily, or Zoe.

They were alive!

He turned and quickly grabbed the collection of books he had bought at Nairobi Airport, six paperbacks and one hardback novel.

The entire Harry Potter collection.

Jack’s code with the others was a “book code.”

Most book codes used three digits to find words in a single book: the code “1/23/3” means “page 1, line 23, word 3.”

For Jack this wasn’t secure enough. He’d added an extra digit at the start, denoting which Harry Potter book the code was coming from.

Therefore “2/1/23/3” meant “Book 2(Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets) , page 1, line 23, word 3.”

Jack set about decoding the message on the chat-room screen.

When he was done flipping pages in the novels, he was left with:

MISSION TO JUNGLE A DISASTER.

WOLF CAUGHT UP WITH US AND NOW HAS BOTH PILLARS, PHILOSOPHER’S STONE AND FIRESTONE. RON TAKEN PRISONER. KINGSLEY SHACKLEBOLT DEAD.

REST OF US SAFE ON THE HIPPOGRIFF NOW, BUT SOUTH AFRICA CLOSED TO ALL AIR TRAFFIC.

OUT OF OPTIONS AND JUST HOPING YOU’RE ALIVE.

PLEASE REPLY.

Jack reeled at the message.

His worst fears had come true.

Wolf had the Second Pillar. That Wolf might lay the Pillar at the Vertex was disturbing but not disastrous: Jack only wanted to save the world from destruction, and so long as someone set the Second Pillar in place today, the world would be OK for another three months until the next set of four vertices required attending.

But as Jack now knew, Wolf had the suicidal Switchblade in his team.

“Oh, this is bad,” Jack said aloud. “This is very, very bad.”

He stared at the line KINGSLEY SHACKLEBOLT DEAD and sighed. Kingsley Shacklebolt was a tall black wizard from the fifth Harry Potter book and hence their code name for Solomon Kol.

So Solomon had been killed.Damn.

But worse still was the previous line:RON TAKEN PRISONER. Of course “Ron” was code for Alby—for just as Ron was Harry Potter’s best friend, so Alby was Lily’s.

Wolf had Alby.

Jack rarely swore wholeheartedly but he did so now. “Fuck.”

Consulting his Harry Potter books, he quickly typed out a reply, then clicked “POST.”

His message was:

STILL IN THE GAME.

ON WAY TO CAPE TOWN WITH FRED AND GEORGE AND SIRIUS BLACK.

CAN’T RISK CALLING YOU YET. WILL CALL WHEN I CAN.

SO GLAD YOU’RE SAFE. WILL GET RON BACK OR DIE TRYING.

Hidden beneath its false shell, the Indian Raider powered toward Cape Town.

As it happened, it would be the very last boat in a line of about a dozen South African fishing trawlers to be allowed back into South African waters that afternoon.

Then the sea-lanes were closed.

And as the sun set and Cape Town found itself shut off from the world, the night of the second deadline began.

AT LENGTH,the Indian Raider came to the eastern coast of the Cape of Good Hope, a rugged peninsula of densely forested mountains and valleys.

Blasted all year round by biting winds from the Antarctic, and featuring many impassable gorges, it was an inhospitable place and even in the present day, uninhabited.

Nestled up against the immense bulk of Table Mountain on the other side of the peninsula was the modern city of Cape Town. Right now, two dozen South African Navy warships formed a semicircular perimeter around the city, covering the seaward approach.

Anchored in close to the rocky coastline about a mile south of the city’s last seaside residence were a few unmarked American vessels and one private cruiser with Saudi Arabian markings that had arrived several days ago.

In a diving bell beneath those vessels, CIEF troops in scuba gear were busily at work, pulling a veil of seaweed from an ancient stone doorway cut into the rock wall of the coast.

It was the main entrance to the Second Vertex.

But as Jack knew, since the Second Vertex was modeled on the layout of the ancient city of Ur—or more correctly, Ur had been based on the much-older Vertex—there was a second entrance, one that arrived at it from the east before bending down to meet the vertex from the north.

“It’s got to be around here somewhere,” Lachlan said, eyeing the sub’s GPS readout.

“I’m pinging the shore for voids and recesses,” the Sea Ranger said. “But we have to be careful with the active sonar. If someone hears it, they’ll know we’re here.”

He was firing sonar signals at the underwater shoreline; those signals then bounced back to the Indian Raider …unless they disappeared inside an aperture in the rock wall.

“Sir!” a sonar operator called. “Sonar anomaly in the coastline, bearing 351. Depth 170 feet.”

The Sea Ranger came over. So did Jack and the twins.

“Makes sense,” Julius said. “Sea levels are a lot higher now than they would have been back then. An ancient entrance would be underwater now, like at the Cosquer Cave in southern France.”

“Let’s take a look,” the Sea Ranger said. “Fire up the outside forward camera.”

A monitor was switched on, showing the underwater world outside in ghostly night-vision green, thanks to a camera mounted on the sub’s bow.

On the monitor, fish glided by, even a shark or two. Seaweed waved lazily in the current, and beyond it all, the rock wall of the coast cruised by—

“There!” the Sea Ranger said abruptly, pointing at a blurry dark spot on the screen.

Jack leaned close, and his eyes widened.

“Sharpen focus,” the Sea Ranger ordered.

The image was refined, came into clearer focus.

As it did, Jack knew they’d found it.

On the screen in front of him, partially covered by strings of twisting seaweed, was an ornate ancient doorway, huge in size, perfectly square in shape, and beautifully cut out of the solid rock around it.

“Holy shit…we’re here.”

THE EASTERN ENTRANCE TO THE 2ND VERTEX

The Indian Raider jettisoned its trawler shell and dived.

Moving slowly, the sub pushed through the veil of waving seaweed that hung down over the ancient doorway and entered the darkness beyond it.

Twin beams of light lanced through the haze from the two floodlights mounted on its bow.

On the monitor inside the conning tower, Jack saw a square tunnel stretching away into darkness, boring into the very foundations of the Cape itself.

The Sea Ranger kept his men alert, kept them driving the sub slowly and carefully, now using his active sonar without restraint.

After about fifty minutes of this slow travel Jack saw something on the monitor that he’d seen before: columns.

Great, high stone pillars holding up a flat rock-cut ceiling. And yet still the space was wide enough for the 240-foot-long submarine to fit between them.

“This place must be enormous…” the Sea Ranger whispered.

“You should have seen the last one,” Jack said.

A wall of steps appeared in front of them. Just like at the First Vertex at Abu Simbel, it was an enormous mountain of steps,hundreds of them, all as wide as the pillared hall through which they were cruising. Only at this vertex, they went upward not downward, rising up and out of the water.

“Sir, I’ve spotted the surface,” the sonar man said. “There’s an opening up there, at the top of the steps.”

“Let’s see what’s up there,” the Sea Ranger said, swapping a look with Jack.

The Indian Raider rose gracefully through the spectacular underwater hall, gliding silently up past the hall’s massive pillars, following the incline of the submerged superstaircase.

Then it left the hall, breaking the surface.

The Indian Raider ’s conning tower rose silently out of a still body of water, seawater sliding off its sides.

It found itself hovering in a walled pool easily a hundred yards wide. It looked like a miniature harbor, four-sided, with walls on two sides and the ultrawide stairs rising up out of the water on the third. On the fourth side, there were some stone buildings, half-submerged.

Darkness filled the air above this miniharbor. But a sickly yellow light peeked over the horizon at the top of the steps, illuminating the space.

It was a gargantuan cavern, the ceiling easily six hundred feet high.

The hatch on the conning tower swung open and the Sea Ranger and Jack emerged, gazing in wonder at the immense dark space around their little sub.

Wickham drew a flare gun, but Jack stopped him.

“No! Wolf’s already here.”

He nodded up at the sickly yellow glow above them—the result of flares already fired elsewhere in the supercavern.

Within a few minutes, they’d rowed ashore and, with the Sea Ranger and the twins beside him and Horus perched on his shoulder, Jack stepped up the wide hill of stairs, climbing them.

When they reached the top and beheld what lay beyond them, Jack let out a gasp of astonishment.

“God save us all,” he whispered.

THE SECOND VERTEX

AN UNDERGROUND city lay before him.

An entire city.

A collection of stone buildings, all of them tall and thin like towers, stretched away from him for at least five hundred yards. Bridges connected all of them—some dizzyingly high, others very low, others still were constructed of steeply angled stone stairways.

Canals of water filled the “streets” between all these buildings, seawater that over the millennia had seeped in through the cave’s two entrances and flooded the city’s floor.

Dominating the forest of towers before him was a massive ziggurat, a great stepped pyramid that rose up in the very center of the ghost city.

Exactly as it did in ancient Ur,Jack thought.

At the summit of this ziggurat was a very peculiar structure: an ultrahigh and very thin ladder-type object that shot up vertically from the ziggurat’s peak until it hit the rocky ceiling of the cavern two hundred feet above.

At the point where the ladder hit the cavern’s ceiling, a series of rung-like handholds led to the spectacular centerpiece of the cavern, a centerpiece that took Jack’s breath away.

Looming off to the side of the underground city was another inverted pyramid—bronze and immense, exactly like the one Jack had seen at Abu Simbel.

It hung from the ceiling of this cavern, hovering like some kind of spaceship above the vast indoor city, easily twice the size of the ziggurat below.

From where he stood, Jack couldn’t see any buildings directly beneath the pyramid—he guessed that it hung suspended above a bottomless abyss like the one at Abu Simbel had done.

But unlike the one at Abu Simbel, this pyramid was surrounded by its supplicant city, an exact twin of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur.

Jack wondered if all six of the vertices were somehow subtly different, unique shrines built to complement a central upside-down pyramid—Abu Simbel had a massive viewing hall looking out at its pyramid; this one had a city of spectacular bridges kneeling before it.

Suddenly, shouts and mechanical noises made Jack look up. They’d come from the other side of the cavern.

A flight of steep stone steps rose up the side of the nearest tower. Jack climbed them. Arriving at the summit of the tower, he was rewarded with a full view of the immense cavern and a glimpse of exactly where he stood in this life-or-death race.

Things didn’t look good.

There, standing on a rooftop halfway across the vast cavern, having obviously got here some time ago, surrounded by the men of his quasi-private army, was Wolf.

Jack swore.

His enemies were far more advanced across the labyrinth than he was. Once again he was starting from behind.

And then, among the group of soldiers standing immediately behind Wolf, Jack glimpsed a diminutive figure, and his heart sank.

He only saw the figure for a moment, but the image lodged in his brain instantly: head bowed, left arm in a sling, right hand gripping Jack’s fireman’s helmet, terrified and alone, it was a small black boy with glasses.

It was Alby.

COMPARATIVE POSITIONS OF JACK’S AND WOLF’S TEAMS

THE CITY AND THE PYRAMID

THE SECOND VERTEX

BENEATH THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE

SOUTH AFRICA

DECEMBER 17, 2007, 0255 HOURS

JACK TOOK IN the monumental task ahead of him.

First he assessed Wolf’s position, over on the other side of the cavern.

They must have entered via the main western harbor some time ago, because they were standing on a tower roughly halfway between their harbor and the ziggurat.

A big head start.

But as he looked more closely at them, Jack frowned. Wolf’s troops seemed to be laying long bridging planks over the rooftop in front of them and then running across each plank to the next tower.

Jack then looked at his own situation and instantly he saw the reason behind their unusual method of travel.

The tower on which he stood had no roof. In fact,all of the tower tops he saw from up here were roofless.

They were all completely hollow, like smokestacks.

And yet, curiously, nearly every rooftop was connected to two or three more rooftops by the dizzying network of bridges.

“Oh, man,” Jack said, realizing. “It’s a huge trap system.”

Every roof that Jack could see from here was the same.

On each one there was a tongue-like platform stretching out from the leading edge of the roof to its middle, out over that tower’s black hollow core.

Ringing this tongue-like platform were three smaller stepping-stone-like platforms, each situated exactly halfway between the central platform and the roof’s three other edges, and each requiring a substantial jump of about five feet to land on them.

Jack examined the rooftop on which he was standing.

Carved into the stone tongue on which he stood was some text written in the Word of Thoth. On each stepping-stone was a similar carving.

“How does it work?” the Sea Ranger asked.

“Question and answer,” Jack said. “This carving here, on the tongue, is the question. You jump on the stepping-stone carved with the correct answer. If you’re right, the stepping-stone holds your weight.”

“And if you’re wrong?” Lachlan asked.

“If you’re wrong, I imagine it doesn’t hold your weight and you fall down the hollow of the tower.”

The Sea Ranger looked down into the black void inside the tower before them. Its walls were sheer and slick. You’d never be able to climb out, if you hadn’t already landed in something deadly.

Jack said, “I imagine the struts holding up the false stepping-stones are made of a brittle material. They look strong, but they’re not.”

“But you have to get every riddle right all the way across,” Julius said. “Would you stake your life on your ability to answer all those riddles correctly?”

But Jack wasn’t listening anymore.

He was staring into space.

“Riddles,” he said aloud. “Aristotle’s Riddles…”

He turned sharply to the Sea Ranger. “Have you got any sat phones on the Raider, video-capable? We need to call in some expert help.”

Of course, the Sea Ranger had several satellite phones on board the Raider. He even had some small helmet-mounted cameras that could be connected to them. He had them brought out.

Handing one to West, he said, “Jack, if you put out a call on that thing, anyone in the area with even a basic scanner is going to know we’re here.”

“Believe me, they’ll know we’re here soon enough. And if we’re going to survive this, we need help.”

With that, Jack called The Halicarnassus on the videophone.

WHEN THE SATELLITE PHONE console on The Halicarnassus suddenly started ringing, everyone on board exchanged worried glances.

Zoe picked up the phone and cautiously said, “Hello?”

“Zoe! It’s me.”

“Jack!”

Quick greetings were exchanged and an overjoyed Lily blurted out a brief summary of their quest through Africa before finishing with the explosive arrival of Wolf’s forces at the kingdom of the Neetha and the loss of Alby and the Pillar to him.

Wizard leaned in to the mike. “Jack. It was great to get your message. We didn’t know if you were alive. But now we’re in dire straits. We can’t get into South Africa. We’re sitting on an airstrip in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, just north of South Africa, while Wolf has gone to the Second Vertex. Where are you?”

“I’m at the Second Vertex,”Jack said.

Wizard’s jaw dropped.

“And I need all of your help.”

Moments later, Wizard, Zoe, and Lily were gathered around the videophone monitor peering at the feed coming from Jack’s helmet-mounted camera.

Wizard saw the underground city and breathed, “The city of bridges…” but Jack directed their attention to the carved words of Thoth on the first rooftop’s tonguelike platform:

“Lily?”Jack asked.

Lily read the text quickly.

“It says, ‘What is the best number of lies?’” she said.

Standing to Lily’s left, Wizard frowned. “The best number of—wait a minute…”

But then, from her right, Zoe said, “Hey! I’ve seen that carving!”

“Where?” Wizard asked.

It was Jack who answered over the radio: “Somewhere in the Neetha realm, I imagine. Along with a list of other carvings, carvings that looked like numbers maybe.”

“Yes,” Zoe said. “Yes. They were in the very center of the maze there. Carved onto a beautiful white-marble podium. But how could you know that, Jack?”

“Because this is one of Aristotle’s Riddles,”he said.

“Of course,” Wizard said. “Of course…”

“I don’t get it,” Zoe said.

Jack explained, “At the Academy in Greece, Aristotle was Hieronymus’s favorite student, the same Hieronymus who found the Neetha. It makes sense that Hieronymus told his favorite student about the Neetha and what he’d discovered there. Aristotle’s Riddles aren’t Aristotle’s at all. They’re Hieronymus’s. Riddles that Hieronymus found during his time with the Neetha, riddles that I imagine he got someone among the Neetha to translate for him.”

“So what is the best number of lies?” Lily asked.

“One,” Wizard said. “You know the old saying, if you tell one lie, then soon you’ll find yourself telling another and then another to sustain it. But if you can tell only one, it is optimal.”

In the vast cavern of the Second Vertex, Jack checked the carvings on the three stepping-stones in front of him.

“You sure about that, Wizard?”

“Yes.”

“Would you stake your life on it?”

“Yes.”

“Would you stake mine on it?”

“Er…well…I, I mean, I think…”

“It’s OK, Max. I’m not stupid,” Jack said. “I’m gonna wear a rope around my waist when I make the jump.”

Jack gazed at the stepping-stone to his right: it bore a single horizontal slash on it. One.

The stepping-stone seemed to hover above the black void beneath it. Jack still had Astro’s mini-Maghook with him, so he cinched its cable around his waist and handed its launcher to Wickham.

“Here we go,” he said.

Then without another thought, he jumped, out over the void, leaping for the stepping-stone to the right—

—JACK’S BOOTS landed on the stepping-stone and it caught him, holding his weight.

Jack stood on the small flat stone, high above the dark hollow core of the tower beneath him.

After another leap, he was standing at the base of a long stepped bridge that soared upward to the roof of the next tower.

“Hey, Cowboys,” he called back to the twins. “Go grab some spray paint or something from the Raider and then follow us, painting the correct stones as we go. Oh, and if something happens to us, you’ll have to take our place, jumping across these stones.”

Lachlan and Julius both gulped. Then they raced back to the submarine to find some paint.

And so Jack made his way across the labyrinth of high bridges—leaping onto stepping-stones—guided by the voices coming in over his headset, answering the riddles.

“What is the best number of eyes…”

“One,”Wizard’s voice had answered. “The all-seeing eye that appeared on capstones.”

“What is the best life…”

“The second life, the afterlife,”Wizard said. “Jump onto the stone saying ‘Two.’”

He made good progress, with the Sea Ranger and the twins running after him across the bridges and over the hollow towers.

As they advanced across the dazzling bridged city, Jack looked out across the cavern, trying to gauge Wolf’s progress—and to his dismay, he saw that Wolf was moving just as fast, if not faster, than he was.

Then suddenly bullets started pinging off the walls above his head.

Alerted by his radio transmissions, Wolf’s men had spotted him and were now firing at him whenever they got a clear line of sight through the dense forest of towers and bridges.

Jack and the Sea Ranger came to a ledge that burrowed inside one of the hollow towers. Inside the tower, they were presented with another triple choice, only here there were no carvings at all on the three available stepping-stones.

Lily quickly translated the inscription on the ledge. “What is the direction of Death…”

“It’s west,”Wizard said,“the direction of the setting Sun. The ancient Egyptians always thought that the Sun was born every morning in the east and died every evening in the west. That’s why they always buried their dead on the western side of the Nile. The answer is ‘west.’”

Jack jumped for the stepping-stone to the west of him.

It held and he ran up the stair-bridge to the next tower, followed by the Sea Ranger.

They’d made it halfway to the ziggurat in the center of the minicity when suddenly they heard some shouts and Wolf yelling, “Okay! Switchblade and Broadsword! It’s all yours! Go! Go!”

Jack peered out around the corner of a building—and spotted Wolf’s CIEF team scampering up the stairs on the front face of the ziggurat, looking like ants against the scale of the structure.

Damn it, no!Jack thought.

They’d reached the ziggurat first and were now heading for the ladder that led across the ceiling to the great pyramid.

Jack saw Wolf with his son, Rapier, and Alby on the stairs of the ziggurat with the main cluster of CIEF troops. Then he spotted two men dashing out ahead of the main group, running up the ziggurat: one was Caucasian in appearance and wore the uniform of a Delta operator. The second man was of Asian appearance and wore the distinctive battle dress uniform of a Marine Force Reconnaissance trooper.

Switchblade.

The traitor.

And so despite the fact that he was still well behind in this race, Jack just kept going as best he could.

Never stop,he thought.You never give up.

Across the bridges he flew.

Up the ladder, Broadsword and Switchblade went.

Jack leaped across more riddle jumps, aided by Wizard and Lily from afar, all the while under fire from Wolf’s men guarding the ziggurat.

Broadsword and Switchblade reached the top of the ladder, started venturing out across the ceiling of the supercavern, hanging from the rungs by their hands high above the underground city.

Jack’s course from the western harbor took him in a wide northward curve that passed close to the suspended pyramid. Here Jack discovered that there was indeed another abyss delving deep into the Earth directly beneath the immense bronze pyramid.

He came to a tower at the very edge of the city, one that adjoined the abyss itself—the tower’s northern side actually blended perfectly with the near wall of the abyss—and from there Jack got a clear view of the pyramid itself.

He watched as the two CIEF men climbed hand over hand down a line of hand rungs cut into the spine of the pyramid. Dangling high above the seemingly bottomless pit, they edged downward, moving ever closer to the pyramid’s peak.

And Jack came to a horrific realization.

He was too far away.

He was too late.

He couldn’t get there in time—there was no way he could get to the ziggurat, somehow get past Wolf ’s men there, and then scale the ladder and the spine of the pyramid and stop Switchblade from doing whatever he planned to do.

The two CIEF men reached the inverted peak of the pyramid—and Jack watched in wonder as the Delta man named Broadsword slung a climbing harness over the last hand rung and, hanging from it, used his now-free hands to extract from his chest pack…

…the Second Pillar.

Cleansed and ready to be set in place.

On the ziggurat, Wolf also gazed in awe at the scene, his eyes glistening with delight. With him stood Rapier and Alby and the warlock of the Neetha, flanked by two guards.

Wolf’s mind buzzed with the possibilities.

The reward would be his:heat. According to his chief researcher, the MIT professor, Felix Bonaventura, it was heat generated by the secret of perpetual motion. Energy without fuel.Limitless energy that could power electricity grids, airplanes and cars, but which would not require coal or oil or gasoline. The Saudi stranglehold on America would be broken; the entire Middle East would become irrelevant.

It was of course at that precise moment, as Wolf reached a rapture of delight, that the most unexpected thing of all happened.

For then, as Wolf watched in horror, out on the inverted pyramid’s peak—while Broadsword readied the Pillar for placement—Switchblade drew a Ka-Bar knife and sliced it across Broadsword’s throat, grabbing the Pillar from him as he did so.

Broadsword went instantly limp, blood flowing from the gaping hole in his neck and dribbling down into the abyss like a macabre waterfall.

Then Switchblade callously cut Broadsword’s harness and the dying Delta operator fell from the peak of the pyramid, dropping into the fathomless void, his limp figure disappearing into darkness.

“What the fuck…?” Wolf said. “Switchblade!”

From his position on the nearest tower, Jack also watched as Switchblade killed Broadsword.

“Oh, God…” he breathed as he saw Broadsword fall.

Out on the pyramid, Switchblade now hung from his own harness, holding the Pillar in one hand. He held it up for Wolf to see and shouted, “Welcome to the end of the world, Wolf! A world that gloried in the humiliation of my people! Now that world will be no more! Nippon was never defeated!”

“Switchblade! No!” Wolf yelled.

Switchblade snarled, “Covetous man! You want earthly power. There is no greater power on this planet than the ability to destroy it. Now witness that power, and know that, in the end, we won the war!”

He then thrust the Pillar out from his body, his arm fully outstretched, preparing to drop it into the abyss.

“See you in Hell!” he roared.

And with those final hateful words, Switchblade dropped the cleansed Second Pillar into the abyss.

SWITCHBLADE let go of the Pillar—at the exact moment that someone came thudding into him, swinging on a rope of some kind.

It was Jack, hanging on to the end of Astro’s Maghook,having swung across from his tower, two hundred feet away!

With nothing else to call on, he’d fired the Maghook’s magnetic head into the side of the pyramid and hoped to God that the structure had magnetic properties.

It did, and the bulbous magnetic head stuck fast against the pyramid, and Jack swung—a long, swooping arc over the bottomless abyss, an absolutely astonishing two-hundred-foot swing—arriving at the peak just as Switchblade yelled his final insult to Wolf and released the Pillar…

…which Jack caught……a nanosecond before he slammed into Switchblade himself and stopped abruptly, becoming entangled in the insane Marine’s harness! Clutching desperately for a handhold, he was forced to release the Maghook and it swung back toward the city, leaving him clinging to Switchblade at the peak of the pyramid.

Switchblade was furious. His eyes blazed with rage at this intrusion on his triumph.

He punched Jack hard in the face, a withering blow, and Jack recoiled sharply, his helmet-camera dislodging from his head. It plummeted down into the abyss, cartwheeling wildly. As he was flung backward by the blow, Jack only just managed to keep hold of the Pillar with his right hand while clinging to Switchblade’s chest harness with his left.

Hanging on desperately, he looked up into Switchblade’s eyes……and saw that the Japanese madman wasn’t finished.

Switchblade glared at Jack as he began to unclip the central buckle of his harness.

“Oh, you’re not…” Jack said.

He was.

He was going to drop them both into the abyss!

“We’re both going to die anyway!” Switchblade yelled. “Might as well die now!”

And with those words, he managed to unclip the buckle—just as Jack made a final lunge, yanking himself up Switchblade’s body, reaching with his outstretched arm for the peak of the pyramid—and in the very instant that the buckle unclasped and they both dropped together,he jammed the Pillar into its slot in the summit of the pyramid and then fell, with Switchblade but no longer holding the Pillar, dropping away from the pyramid’s peak, watching it get smaller and smaller as the sheer walls of the abyss closed in around him.

And thus Jack West Jr. and the fanatic named Switchblade fell down into the abyss beneath the inverted pyramid of the Second Vertex of the Machine, an abyss that for all anyone knew went all the way to the center of the Earth.

AS THE TWO tiny figures disappeared into the dark abyss beneath the pyramid, the great structure’s mysterious mechanism came loudly and spectacularly to life.

First there was heard an ominous thrumming, then a deafening thunderboom that shook the entire supercavern. Then a dazzling laserlike beam of light lanced out from the pyramid’s apex, shooting down into the abyss, before a moment later it sucked back up into the pyramid’s peak.

Silence.

The combination of the ancient spectacle and the fall of Switchblade and Jack hit the various spectators in different ways.

Wolf.

At first, he’d been shocked by the reappearance of Jack, but he regathered quickly and after the light show he dispatched Rapier to go and grab the now-charged Pillar from the pyramid and thus garner the reward, the secret of perpetual motion.

Once the Pillar was retrieved and in his hands, Wolf swept out of the underground city.

Someone asked him what they should do with the boy, Alby, and he cast a dismissive wave.

“Leave him here,” he said before striding out with his men, leaving Alby alone, on top of the ziggurat in the middle of the city.

The Sea Ranger and the twins.

They just stood motionless on the roof of the tower from which Jack had swung only moments before.

The Sea Ranger stared at the scene, digesting what had just happened.

The twins stood with their mouths agape. Horus, who had been sitting on Lachlan’s shoulder, flew off toward the abyss.

“He did it…” Lachlan breathed. “He fucking-A did it. He set the Pillar in place.”

Julius shook his head. “The guy is frigging Super Jack.”

“You can say that again,” the Sea Ranger said, glancing around them.

None of them had seen Alby through the labyrinth of buildings.

“Come on, gentlemen,” Wickham said. “We can’t stay here. We have to get back out that entry tunnel before Wolf’s buddies send a destroyer to seal it off. Come on.”

They hustled back to the Indian Raider.

“What about Horus?” Lachlan said as they moved.

“That bird’s destiny is with Jack,” Wickham said grimly. “Always has been.”

Alby.

Standing alone on the summit of the ziggurat in the middle of this vast underground space, abandoned by his captors and with darkness descending all around him as their flares began to fade, he felt the most profound sense of aloneness.

The sight of Jack West plummeting from view had shocked him to his very core—till now Jack had seemed indestructible, incapable of dying, but now he was gone, swallowed by the great abyss, dead.

And with that thought, a cold horror swept through Alby’s body as he realised that he was going to die here, in this huge dark cave, alone.

Standing there on the ancient ziggurat in the encroaching darkness, clutching Jack’s helmet, he softly began to cry.

Wizard, Zoe, Sky Monster, and Lily.

They saw it happen on their videophone monitor.

Watching it all first from Jack’s helmet camera and then from the camera that Lachlan had been wearing, they watched in horror as the ultratiny figures of Jack and Switchblade fell away from the tip of the immense pyramid, dropping down into the abyss, before they both disappeared from sight.

“Daddy…!”Lily cried, leaping at the screen. “No!No, no, no…!”

“Jack…” Zoe’s eyes filled with tears.

“Huntsman…” Wizard whispered.

Sky Monster pointed at the screen. “Look, he laid the Pillar before he fell! He did it! The crazy bastard did it…!”

But then an alarm siren blared out in the cockpit and Sky Monster went to check on it and he called, “Zoe! Wiz! We have incoming South African aircraft! F-15s! We have to get out of here!”

Despite their tears, Zoe and Wizard hurried off to man the wing guns, leaving Lily staring at the monitor—alone, frozen, stunned—sobbing deep wrenching sobs and searching for some sign, any sign, that her father was alive but knowing in her heart that he could not possibly be.

“Oh, Daddy…” she said again. “Daddy…”

Then The Halicarnassus powered up and they took to the air, flying north this time, away from southern Africa, fleeing yet again, uncertain and unnerved by the knowledge that now without any shadow of a doubt, they faced the remaining challenges of their quest—the placing of the last four Pillars in March of 2008—alone, without Jack West Jr.

THE END OF

THE 6 SACRED STONES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WRITING A NOVEL can be a somewhat solitary experience: you spend months alone at the keyboard, lost in the world you have created. I happen to find this enormously fun, which is why writing novels is the best job in the world for me.

But when you decide to write a book with ancient Chinese characters and Japanese military language in it, you have to call for help, and this is where I get to thank those many people who helped me along the way.

As always, my wife, Natalie, is the first to read my stuff and her comments still manage to be both insightful and gentle. Having read all my books in draft stage plus all my screenplays, she’s now really quite an experienced manuscript reader!

To my good friend John Schrooten, who (again) read this one while sitting in the M.A. Noble Stand at the SCG while waiting for the cricket to start. The cricket commenced and he just kept on reading, so that was a good sign! Great friend, great guy.

For technical support, I am indebted to Patrick Pow for getting the ancient Chinese scripts from China, and to Irene Kay for putting me in touch with Patrick.

For the Chinese language tips, my thanks go to Stephanie Pow. Likewise, since I know no Japanese, I have to thank Troy McMullen (and his wife and sister-in-law!) for their help!

I read many books while researching The 6 Sacred Stones —from works about space and zero-point fields to more esoteric books about Stonehenge and other ancient places. I’d like to make special mention, first, of the works of Graham Hancock, which I just love and would recommend wholeheartedly to anyone who wants to view global history from an unconventional point-of-view, and second, of a little gem of a book called Stonehenge by Robin Heath. It was in this book that I first saw the theory that connects Stonehenge to the Great Pyramid through a series of right-angle triangles.

I must also send out my heartfelt thanks to Peter and Lorna Grzonkowski for their very generous donations to the Bullant Charity Challenge. The twins in the novel, Lachlan and Julius Adamson, are named after their nephews.

Likewise, Paul and Lenore Robertson, two long-time supporters of my work and another couple who do an enormous amount for charity, for their donations at not one but two ASX-Reuters Charity Dinners! Paul, I hope you don’t mind that I made you a smooth-talking double-crossing bad-guy CIA agent!

And last of all, I thank The WAGS, a great group of guys with whom I play golf on Wednesday afternoons, for their generous donation on behalf of Steve Oakes, the leader of this motley crew. In return for their kind donation to charity, I named a character at the start of this book after Oaksey, and promptly riddled him with bullets. As the boys say, no one likes to see that, but such are the dangers of having a character named after you in a Matthew Reilly book!

To everyone else, family and friends, as always, thank you for your continued encouragement.

—Matthew Reilly

Sydney, Australia

September 2007

AN INTERVIEW WITH MATTHEW REILLY

THE WRITING OF THE 6 SACRED STONES

SPOILER WARNING!

The following interview contains Spoilers from The 6 Sacred Stones.Readers who have not read the novel are advised to avoid reading this interview as it does give away major plot moments from the book.

Q:Let’s get straight to the biggest question of all: how could you end The 6 Sacred Stones with Jack West Jr. falling into a bottomless abyss?

MR: Okay, okay! Yes, I figured this might be an issue, and this is certainly the best place to talk about it. (Hey, I think the interview at the end of Scarecrow saved me from countless emails about what I did in that book!)

When I sat down to write The 6 Sacred Stones, I asked myself, “How can I make this book totally different from the others? What can I do that will be completely unexpected?”

My answer: come up with the biggest, boldest, most outrageous novel yet with the biggest, boldest, most outrageous cliffhanger ending imaginable, one in which the fate of the hero literally hangs in the balance at the end of the book (and as those who have read my other books will know, I love a good cliffhanger). This worked out very well when it became apparent to me that the story I had come up with (involving six pillars being placed at six vertices) was going to be too big to achieve in one book. So the ending is merely the midway point of a larger adventure. I’ve often ended chapters with dire cliffhangers, just think of this as a huge chapter ending!

Jack may well get out of his terrible predicament—indeed one method for his survival has been inserted into the book (and no, it’s not Horus); the fun is in waiting to find out how. The way I see it, it’s a bit like waiting for the next season of a TV show that has ended on a cliffhanger. So in the end, I apologize to everyone for making you wait in such an awful way, but I promise it will be worth it!

Q:7 Deadly Wondersand The 6 Sacred Stones have seen an increase in the scale of your books (solar rays, dark stars, vast ancient structures). What exactly are you trying to achieve with this series?

MR:What I am trying to achieve is really quite simple: I want to create a Lord of the Rings –style epic set in our world, in the present day.

I want it to be a story that is part adventure and part myth in which a small group of seemingly powerless characters struggle against the mighty and all-powerful.

There is another reason for it, too, one that is purely for me as an author. In his Introduction to The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote of his reason for writing that tale: “The prime motive was the desire of a taleteller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them.”

Same here.

I just wanted to try my hand at a really big epic story: a grand sweeping adventure that spans the globe, that looks out at the Sun and space itself, that examines the mysterious ancient places scattered around our planet, and in which—most important of all—the protagonists, in the course of carrying out thrilling feats of heroism, endure profound tests of their character. I also just wanted to try to write a long story.

So in contrast to the Shane Schofield/Scarecrow books, which bring back the same hero in separate adventures, the story begun in 7 Deadly Wonders and continued in The 6 Sacred Stones is actually one big story (indeed, this is why the sections titled “A Girl Named Lily” begin with Part III in this book, Parts I and II having appeared in the earlier novel).

Q:Tell us about some of the “mysterious ancient places” that appear in this book and why you chose them?

MR:I love ancient places and ancient things—from the pyramids to the Rosetta Stone. I can just gaze at them all day long—especially when they defy explanation.

Having explored the Great Pyramid and its fellow “Wonders” in 7 Deadly Wonders, I decided to focus on some of my other favorite ancient places in this book, among them Stonehenge, Abu Simbel, and the Three Gorges region of the Yangtze River in China. (There are, of course, many others that I love just as much, but I’m keeping them for the next book!) I have visited all three of these places.

First, Stonehenge. Seriously, pictures don’t do it justice. Those stones are huge! And the stuff about coastal lichens being on their surfaces is true—it is weird and unexplained!

Abu Simbel is simply colossal, bigger than you can possibly imagine, and built for the same reason the men of Gondor built the Argonath in Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring: to tell encroaching neighbors, “Look at how powerful we are in Egypt! Don’t even think of crossing these borders unless you can deal with the people who built this monument!” And it’s all the better that the UN rebuilt it brick-by-brick to save it from the waters of the Aswan Dam.

Finally, the Three Gorges of China. These are simply beautiful. Natalie and I visited them in 2006, solely to research this book. A side trip into the gorges of the Shennong River system (lush, green, misty, and narrow) really crystallised my mental image of the flooded rural hamlet where Wizard finds the entrance to Laozi’s trap system.

Q:What else have you been working on? How is the Contestmovie coming along?

MR:Earlier this year, I sold a TV script called Literary Superstars to Sony, who successfully licensed it to the US TV network ABC.

It’s a half-hour comedy set in, of all places, the publishing industry. I figured that after ten years in the book world, I’d acquired many funny tales, so I decided to put them into a TV show. The heroine is not an author, though, but a publicist who promotes authors for a publishing house.

The script led a charmed life through Hollywood, going from my agents to Darren Star (producer-creator ofSex and the City) , to Sony, to the lovely actress Jenna Elfman, and then to ABC. For a while there, I was flying back and forth from Sydney to Los Angeles to do meetings with studio and network executives, which was all pretty exciting. We shoot the pilot later this year, so my fingers are crossed that it gets picked up.

This has meant that I’ve put my ambitions for a Contest movie on hold for a while; after all, you have to run with the show that’s actually getting made. But Contest isn’t going anywhere.

Q:One question that many fans are asking is, will we be seeing Shane Schofield again in the near future?

MR:Yes, Scarecrow is a character that my fans really do love—especially after what I put him through in Scarecrow. And, in all seriousness, I thank my readers for allowing me to venture into other stories and write about other heroes (believe me, as an author, it is possible to get pushed into writing about the same character over and over again). When, one day, I look back on my career as a novelist, I’d like to see an array of stand-alone books and different series, from the Schofield and Jack West series, to the (current) stand alones of William Race and Stephen Swain and who knows who else.

That said, having taken a break from Scarecrow, I am rather keen to write about him again, and a new idea featuring him has started to form in my mind. So as I write the sequel to The 6 Sacred Stones (after all, I can’t leave Jack West falling down that abyss forever!), I’ll be fleshing out this idea that I have for a new Scarecrow novel with the hope that it will be the next book I write after that. I should add that I also have lots of kids demanding Hover Car Racer II!

(Oh, and for those who missed it in 2005,Hell Island —the short novel that I wrote for the Books Alive initiative—features Scarecrow and is now available again in stores across Australia and New Zealand.)

Q:Any final words?

MR:As always, I just hope you enjoyed the book; that it took you away from your world for a few hours or a few days and entertained you in the way a good rollercoaster should. And rest assured, I’m already typing feverishly away on the next one.

Best wishes and see you next time!

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I’VE NEVER actually included a bibliography in one of my books before, but with this novel I thought I might since it delves into so many different fields of study (from ancient Egypt and China to the African slave trade, to space and zero-point fields, to the intricacies and history of diamonds). As an author of fiction, I have to be the proverbial jack-of-all-trades and master of none, and while I readily admit that I am no expert in astronomy or astrophysics, I do my best to read as widely as I can so that my characters can be.

I have not divided this bibliography into principal or lesser sources—some might only have provided me with information on a single point in my novel, but that makes them no less valid to my mind (after all, it might have been a big point)—nor is it in any particular order of importance. It is simply here so that readers who have an interest in certain aspects of the book might like to read further.

Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh,The Elixir and the Stone (London: Random House, 1997).

Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln,The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982; London: Century, 2005).

Ian Balfour, Famous Diamonds (London: William Collins & Sons, 1987).

Robert Bauval, Secret Chamber (London: Century, 1999).

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (London: Doubleday, 2003).

Deidre Cheetham, Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

Robert Guest,The Shackled Continent (London: Macmillan, 2004).

Manly P. Hall,The Secret Teachings of the Ages (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2003; original text, 1928).

Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1995; London: Century, 2001).

Graham Hancock, The Sign and the Seal: A Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1992).

Graham Hancock, Underworld (London: Michael Joseph/Penguin, 2002).

Stephen W. Hawking,A Brief History of Time (London: Bantam Press/Transworld, 1988).

Robin Heath, Stonehenge (Glastonbury: Wooden Books, 2000).

Peter Hessler, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (New York: Harper Collins, 2001).

Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (London: Macmillan, 1999).

Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas, Uriel’s Machine (London: Century, 1999).

Peter Marshall, The Philosopher’s Stone (London: Macmillan, 2001).

Giles Milton,White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa’s One Million European Slaves (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2004).

John North,Stonehenge: A New Interpretation of Prehistoric Man and the Cosmos (New York: The Free Press, 1996).

Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince,The Stargate Conspiracy (London: Little, Brown & Co, 1999).

Reader’s Digest, The World’s Last Mysteries (Sydney: Reader’s Digest Services, 1978).

Chris Scarre, ed., The Seventy Wonders of the Ancient World (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999).

Dava Sobel, The Planets (London: Fourth Estate, 2005).

Duncan Steel, Rogue Asteroids and Doomsday Comets (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995).

Gordon Thomas,Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).

Hugh Thomas,The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440–1870 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World’s Two Most Powerful Dynasties (London: Gibson Square Books, 2004).

Peter Watson, A Terrible Beauty (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2000).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MATTHEW REILLY is the international bestselling author of seven other novels:7 Deadly Wonders, Ice Station, Temple, Contest, Area 7, Scarecrow, and the children’s book Hover Car Racer, and one novella,Hell Island. His books are published in more than twenty languages, and he has sold more than 3 million books worldwide. In addition to his novels, he has recently written a television show for the ABC network, set in the world of international publishing.