Seven Ancient Wonders

Also by Matthew Reilly

ICE STATION

TEMPLE

CONTEST

AREA 7

SCARECROW

HOVER CAR RACER

HELL ISLAND (FOR BOOKS ALIVE, 2005)

MATTHEW REILLY

SEVEN

ANCIENT

WONDERS

For Natalie

This is a work of fiction. Characters, institutions and organisations mentioned in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously without any intent to describe actual conduct.

First published 2005 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited St Martins Tower, 31 Market Street, Sydney

Copyright © Karanadon Entertainment Pty Ltd 2005

The author hereby asserts his moral rights.

All rights reserved.

In ancient times, at the peak of the Great

Pyramid at Giza, there stood a magnificent

capstone made of gold.

It disappeared in antiquity.

A COLLECTION OF WONDERS FROM AROUND THE WORLD

TITLE OF A COLLECTION OF DOCUMENTS WRITTEN BY

CALLIMACHUS OF CYRENE, CHIEF LIBRARIAN OF THE

ALEXANDRIA MUSEION, LOST WHEN THE FAMOUS

LIBRARY WAS DESTROYED IN 48 BC.

COWER IN FEAR, CRY IN DESPAIR,

YOU WRETCHED MORTALS

FOR THAT WHICH GIVETH GREAT POWER

ALSO TAKES IT AWAY.

FOR LEST THE BENBEN BE PLACED AT SACRED SITE

ON SACRED GROUND, AT SACRED HEIGHT,

WITHIN SEVEN SUNSETS OF THE ARRIVAL OF RAS

PROPHET,

AT THE HIGH-POINT OF THE SEVENTH DAY,

THE FIRES OF RAS IMPLACABLE DESTROYER WILL

DEVOUR US ALL.

4,500-YEAR-OLD HIEROGLYPHIC INSCRIPTION FOUND

ON THE SUMMIT OF THE GREAT PYRAMID AT GIZA IN

THE PLACE WHERE THE CAPSTONE ONCE STOOD.

I HAVE BOTH HELD AND BEHELD UNLIMITED

POWER AND OF IT I KNOW BUT ONE THING.

IT DRIVES MEN MAD.

ALEXANDER THE GREAT

THE GREATEST STATUE IN HISTORY

It towered like a god above the mouth of Mandraki harbour, the main port of the island state of Rhodes, much like the Statue of Liberty does today in New York.

Finished in 282 BC after twelve years of construction, it was the tallest bronze statue ever built. At a stupendous 110 feet, it loomed above even the biggest ship that passed by.

It was crafted in the shape of the Greek Sun-god, Helios— muscled and strong, wearing a crown of olive leaves and a necklace of massive golden pendants, and holding a flaming torch aloft in his right hand.

Experts continue to argue whether the great statue stood astride the entrance to the harbour or at the end of the long breakwater that formed one of its shores. Either way, in its time, the Colossus would have been an awesome sight.

Curiously, while the Rhodians built it in celebration of their victory over the Antigonids (who had laid siege to the island of Rhodes for an entire year), the statue's construction was paid for by Egypt—by two Egyptian Pharaohs in fact: Ptolemy I and his son, Ptolemy II.

But while it took Man twelve years to build the Colossus of Rhodes, it took Nature 56 years to ruin it.

When the great statue was badly damaged in an earthquake in 226 BC, it was again Egypt who offered to repair it: this time the new Pharaoh, Ptolemy III. It was as if the Colossus meant more to the Egyptians than it did to the Rhodians.

Fearing the gods who had felled it, the people of Rhodes declined Ptolemy Ill's offer to rebuild the Colossus and the remainder of the statue was left to lie in ruins for nearly 900 years—until 654 AD when the invading Arabs broke it up and sold it off in pieces.

One mysterious footnote remains.

A week after the Rhodians declined Ptolemy Ill's offer to re-erect the Colossus, the bead of the mammoth fallen statue—all sixteen feet of it—went missing.

The Rhodians always suspected that it was taken away on an Egyptian freighter-barge that had left Rhodes earlier that week.

The head of the Colossus of Rhodes was never seen again.

ANGEREB SWAMP

BASE OF THE ETHIOPIAN HIGHLANDS

KASSALA PROVINCE, EASTERN SUDAN

14 MARCH, 2006, 4:55 P.M.

6 DAYS BEFORE THE ARRIVAL OF TARTARUS

The nine figures raced through the crocodile-infested swamp on foot, moving fast, staying low.

The odds were stacked against them.

Their rivals numbered in excess of 200 men.

They had only nine.

Their rivals had massive logistical and technical support: choppers, floodlights for night work, and boats of every kind—gunboats, houseboats, communications boats, three giant dredging barges for the digging—and that wasn't even mentioning the temporary dam they'd managed to build.

The Nine were only carrying what they'd need inside the mine.

And now—the Nine had just discovered—a third force was on its way to the mountain, close behind them, a much larger and nastier force than that of their immediate foes, who were nasty enough.

By any reckoning it was a hopelessly lost cause, with enemies in front of them and enemies behind them, but the Nine kept running anyway.

Because they had to.

They were a last-ditch effort.

The last throw of the dice.

They were the very last hope of the small group of nations they represented.

Their immediate rivals—a coalition of European nations—had found the northern entrance to the mine two days ago and were now well advanced in its tunnel system.

A radio transmission that had been intercepted an hour before revealed that this pan-European force—French troops, German engineers and an Italian project leader—had just arrived at the final entry trap on their side of the mine. Once they breached that, they would be inside the Grand Cavern itself.

They were progressing quickly.

Which meant they were also well versed in the difficulties found inside the mine.

Fatal difficulties.

Traps.

But the Europeans' progress hadn't been entirely without loss: three members of their point team had died gruesome deaths in a snare on the first day. But the leader of the European expedition— a Vatican-based Jesuit priest named Francisco del Piero—had not let their deaths slow him down.

Single-minded, unstoppable and completely devoid of sympathy, del Piero urged his people onward. Considering what was at stake, the deaths were an acceptable loss.

The Nine kept charging through the swamp on the south side of the mountain, heads bent into the rain, feet pounding through the mud.

They ran like soldiers—low and fast, with balance and purpose, ducking under branches, hurdling bogs, always staying in single file.

In their hands, they held guns: MP-7s, M-16s, Steyr-AUGs. In their thigh holsters were pistols of every kind.

On their backs: packs of various sizes, all bristling with ropes, climbing gear and odd-looking steel struts.

And above them, soaring gracefully over the treetops, was a small shape, a bird of some sort.

Seven of the Nine were indeed soldiers.

Crack troops. Special forces. All from different countries.

The remaining two members were civilians, the elder of whom was a long-bearded 65-year-old professor named Maximilian T. Epper, call-sign: Wizard.

The seven military members of the team had somewhat fiercer nicknames: Huntsman, Witch Doctor, Archer, Bloody Mary, Saladin, Matador and Gunman.

Oddly, however, on this mission they had all acquired new call-signs: Woodsman, Fuzzy, Stretch, Princess Zoe, Pooh Bear, Noddy and Big Ears.

These revised call-signs were the result of the ninth member of the team:

A little girl of ten.

The mountain they were approaching was the last in a long spur of peaks that ended near the Sudanese-Ethiopian border.

Down through these mountains, flowing out of Ethiopia and into the Sudan, poured the Angereb River. Its waters paused briefly in this swamp before continuing on into the Sudan where they would ultimately join the Nile.

The chief resident of the swamp was Crocodylus niloticus, the notorious Nile crocodile. Reaching sizes of up to 6 metres, the Nile crocodile is known for its great size, its brazen cunning, and its ferocity of attack. It is the most man-eating crocodilian in the world, killing upwards of 300 people every year.

While the Nine were approaching the mountain from the south, their EU rivals had set up a base of operations on the northern side, a base that looked like a veritable floating city.

Command boats, mess boats, barracks-boats and gunboats, the small fleet was connected by a network of floating bridges and all were facing toward the focal point of their operation: the massive coffer dam that they had built against the northern flank of the mountain.

It was, one had to admit, an engineering masterpiece: a 100-metre-long, 40-foot-high curved retaining dam that held back the waters of the swamp to reveal a square stone doorway carved into the base of the mountain 40 feet below the waterline.

The artistry on the stone doorway was extraordinary.

Egyptian hieroglyphs covered every square inch of its frame—

but taking pride of place in the very centre of the lintel stone that surmounted the doorway was a glyph often found in pharaonic tombs in Egypt:

Two figures, bound to a staff bearing the jackal head of Anubis, the Egyptian god of the Underworld.

This was what the afterlife had in store for grave-robbers—eternal bondage to Anubis. Not a nice way to spend eternity.

The message was clear: do not enter.

The structure inside the mountain was an ancient mine delved during the reign of Ptolemy I, around the year 300 BC.

During the great age of Egypt, the Sudan was known as 'Nubia', a word derived from the Egyptian word for gold: nub.

Nubia: the Land of Gold.

And indeed it was. It was from Nubia that the ancient Egyptians sourced the gold for their many temples and treasures.

Records unearthed in Alexandria revealed that this mine had run out of gold 70 years after its founding, after which it gained a second life as a quarry for the rare hardstone, diorite. Once it was exhausted of diorite—around the year 226 BC—Pharaoh Ptolemy III decided to use the mine for a very special purpose.

To this end, he dispatched his best architect—Imhotep V—and a force of 2,000 men.

They would work on the project in absolute secrecy for three whole years.

The northern entrance to the mine had been the main entrance.

Originally, it had been level with the waterline of the swamp, and through its doors a wide canal bored horizontally into the mountain. Bargeloads of gold and diorite would be brought out of the mine via this canal.

But then Imhotep V had come and reconfigured it.

Using a temporary dam not unlike the one the European force was using today, his men had held back the waters of the swamp while his engineers had lowered the level of the doorway, dropping it 40 feet. The original door was bricked in and covered over with soil.

Imhotep had then disassembled the dam and allowed the swampwaters to flood back over the new doorway, concealing it for over 2,000 years.

Until today.

But there was a second entrance to the mine, a lesser-known one, on the south side of the mountain.

It was a back door, the endpoint of a slipway that had been used to dispose of waste during the original digging of the mine. It too had been reconfigured.

It was this entrance that the Nine were seeking.

Guided by the tall white-bearded Wizard—who held in one hand a very ancient papyrus scroll, and in the other a very modern sonic-resonance imager—they stopped abruptly on a mud-mound about 80 metres from the base of the mountain. It was shaded by four bending lotus trees.

'Here!' the old fellow called, seeing something on the mound. 'Oh dear. The village boys did find it.'

In the middle of the muddy dome, sunken into it, was a tiny square hole, barely wide enough for a man to fit into. Stinking brown mud lined its edges.

You'd never see it if you weren't looking for it, but it just so happened that this hole was exactly what Professor Max T. Epper was searching for.

He read quickly from his papyrus scroll:

'In the Nubian swamp to the south of Soter's mine, Among Sobek s minions, Find the four symbols of the Lower Kingdom. Therein lies the portal to the harder route.'

Epper looked up at his companions. 'Four lotus trees: the lotus was the symbol of the Lower Kingdom. Sobek's minions are crocodiles, since Sobek was the Egyptian crocodile god. In a swamp to the south of Soter's mine—Soter being the other name for Ptolemy I. This is it.'

A small wicker basket lay askew next to the muddy hole—the kind of basket used by rural Sudanese.

'Those stupid, stupid boys.' Wizard kicked the basket away.

On their way here, the Nine had passed through a small village. The villagers claimed that only a few days ago, lured by the Europeans' interest in the mountain, four of their young men had gone exploring in the swamp. One of them had returned to the village saying the other three had disappeared down a hole in the ground and not come out again.

At this point, the leader of the Nine stepped forwards, peered down into the hole.

The rest of the team waited for him to speak.

Not a lot was known about the leader of this group. Indeed, his past was veiled in mystery. What was known was this:

His name was West—Jack West Jr.

Call-sign: Huntsman.

At 37, he had the rare distinction of being both militarily and university trained—he had once been a member of the most elite special forces unit in the world, while at another time, he had studied ancient history at Trinity College in Dublin under Max Epper.

Indeed, in the 1990s, when the Pentagon had ranked the best soldiers in the world, only one soldier in the top ten had not been an American: Jack West. He'd come in at No. 4.

But then, around 1995, West disappeared off the international radar. Just like that. He was not seen at international exercises or on missions again—not even the allied invasion of Iraq in 2003, despite his experience there during Desert Storm in '91. It was assumed he had quit the military, cashed in his points and retired. Nothing was seen or heard of him for over 10 years . . .

. . . until now.

Now, he had re-emerged.

Supremely fit, he had dark hair and laser-sharp brown eyes that seemed perpetually narrowed. Apparently, he had a winning smile, but that was something rarely seen.

Today, like the rest of his team, he wore a decidedly non-military uniform: a rugged caramel-coloured canvas jacket, tattered cargo pants and steel-soled Salomon hiking boots that bore the scars of many previous adventures.

His hands were gloved, but if you looked closely at the left cuff of his jacket, you might catch a glimpse of silver steel. Hidden under the sleeve, his entire left forearm and hand were artificial, mechanical. How they came to be that way not many people knew; although one of those who did was Max Epper.

Expertly trained in the art of war, classically trained in the lore of history, and fiercely protective of the little girl in his care, one thing about Jack West Jr was clear: if anyone could pull off this impossible mission, it was him.

Just then, with a squawk, a small brown peregrine falcon swooped in from above the treeline and landed lightly on West's shoulder— the high-flying bird from before. It eyed the area around West imperiously, protectively. Its name, Horus.

West didn't even notice the bird. He just stared down into the dark square hole in the mud, lost in thought.

He brushed back some mud from the edge, revealing a hieroglyph cut into the rim:

'We meet again,' he said softly to the carving.

He turned. 'Glowstick.'

He was handed a glowstick which he cracked and tossed down the hole.

It fell for 20 feet, illuminating a pipe-like stone shaft on its way down, before—splonk!—it landed in water and revealed—

Lots of crocodiles. Nile crocodiles.

Snapping, snarling and grunting. Sliding over each other.

'More of Sobek's minions,' West said. 'Nice. Very nice.'

Just then the team's radioman, a tall Jamaican with bleached dreadlocks, a heavily pockmarked face and tree-trunk-sized arms, touched his earpiece in alarm. His real name was V.J. Weatherly, his original call-sign Witch Doctor, but everyone here just called him Fuzzy.

'Huntsman,' he said, 'the Europeans just breached the Third Gate. They're inside the Grand Cavern. Now they're bringing in some kind of crane to overshoot the lower levels.'

'Shit

'It gets worse. The Americans just crossed the border. They're coming in fast behind us. Big force: 400 men, choppers, armour, with carrier-launched fighter support on the way. And the ground force is being led by the CIEF.'

That really got West's attention.

The CIEF—the Commander-in-Chief's In Extremis Force, pronounced 'seef—was America's very best special operations unit, a unit that answered only to the President and possessed the real-life equivalent of a licence to kill. As West knew from hard experience, you didn't want to be around when the CIEF arrived.

He stood up. 'Who's in command?'

Fuzzy said ominously, 'Judah.'

'I didn't think he'd come himself. Damn. Now we'd really better hurry.'

West turned to his team.

'All right. Noddy—you've got sentry duty. Everybody else . . .'

He pulled an odd-looking helmet from his belt, put it on.

'. . . it's time to rock and roll.'

And so into the subterranean dark they went.

Fast.

A steel tripod was erected above the pipe-like shaft and, led by West, one after the other, eight of the Nine abseiled down it on a rope strung from the tripod.

One lone man, a dark-haired Spanish commando—once known as Matador, now Noddy—remained up top to guard the entrance.

The Entry Shaft

West sizzled down the drop-rope, shooting past three steeply slanted cross-shafts that intersected with the main shaft.

His falcon sat snugly in a pouch on his chest, while on his head he wore a weathered and worn fireman's helmet, bearing the badge 'FDNY Precinct 17'. The battered helmet was fitted with a wraparound protective eye visor and on the left side, a powerful pen-sized flashlight. The rest of his team wore similar helmets, variously modified with flashlights, visors and cameras.

West eyed the cross-shafts as he slid down the rope. He knew what perils lay within them. 'Everyone. Stay sharp. Do not, I repeat, do not make any contact with the walls of this shaft.'

He didn't and they didn't.

Safely, he came to the bottom of the rope.

The Atrium

West emerged from the ceiling at one end of a long stone-walled room, hanging from his drop-rope.

He did not lower himself all the way to the floor, just kept hanging about 8 feet above it.

By the eerie yellow light of his original glowstick, he beheld a rectangular room about thirty metres long. The room's floor was covered by a shallow layer of swampwater, water that was absolutely crawling with Nile crocodiles—not an inch of floorspace was crocodile-free.

And directly beneath West, protruding half out of the water, were the waterlogged, half-eaten bodies of two twentysomething Sudanese men. The bodies lolled lifelessly as three big crocs took great crunching bites out of them.

'Big Ears,' West said into his throat microphone, 'there's a sight down here that's not PG-13. Tell Lily not to look down when you two reach the bottom of the rope.'

'Righto to that, boss,' came an Irish-accented reply over his earpiece.

West fired a luminescent amber flare down the length of the atrium.

It was as if the chamber came alive.

Deeply cut lines of hieroglyphs covered the walls, thousands of them.

And at the far end of the chamber, West saw his goal: a squat trapezoidal doorway, raised several feet off the watery floor.

The eerie yellow glow of the flare also revealed one other important feature of the atrium—its ceiling.

Embedded in the ceiling was a line of handrungs, leading to the far raised doorway. Each rung, however, was lodged in a dark square hole that disappeared up into the ceiling itself.

'Wizard,' West said, 'I've got handrungs.'

'According to the inscription in Imhotep's tomb, we have to avoid the third and the eighth rungs,' Wizard's voice said. 'Drop-cages above them. The rest are okay.'

'Gotcha.'

The Eight traversed the atrium quickly, swinging hand-overhand down the length of the chamber, avoiding the two suspect handrungs, their feet dangling just a few feet above the crocs.

The little girl—Lily—moved in the middle of the group, clinging to the biggest trooper of the Nine, her hands clasped around his neck, while he swung from rung to rung.

The Low Tunnel

A long low tunnel led away from the atrium, heading into the mountain.

West and his team ran down it, all bent forwards. Horus had been set free and she flew out in front of West, gliding down the passageway. Lily ran fully upright.

Water dripped from the low stone ceiling, but it hit their firemen's helmets and rolled off their curved backs, away from their eyes.

The tunnel was perfectly square—1.3 metres wide, 1.3 metres high. Curiously, these were exactly the same dimensions as the passageways inside the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Like the entry shaft earlier, this horizontal tunnel was intersected by three cross-shafts: only these were vertical and they spanned the entire width of the tunnel, cutting across it via matching holes in the ceiling and floor.

At one point, Lily's guardian, the large trooper named Big Ears, mis-stepped—landing on a trigger stone just before he leapt across one of the cross-shafts.

He knew his mistake immediately and stopped abruptly at the edge of the shaft—

—just as a gushing waterfall of swampwater came blasting out of the upper hole, forming a curtain of water in front of him, before disappearing into the matching hole in the floor.

Had he jumped, the rush of water would have taken him and Lily down into the unknown depths of the lower hole.

'Careful, brother dearest,' the team member in front of him said after the water had passed. She was the only woman in the group and a member of the crack Irish commando unit, the Sciathan Fhianoglach an Airm. Old call-sign: Bloody Mary. New one: Princess Zoe. Her brother, Big Ears, was also a member of the SFA.

She reached out and caught his hand and with her help he leapt over the cross-shaft and, with Lily between them, they took off after the others.

The Water Chamber (The First Gate)

The low tunnel opened onto a chamber the size of a small chapel. Incongruously, the floor of this chamber seemed to be made up of a lush carpet of green grass.

Only it wasn't grass.

It was algae. And beneath the algae, water—a rectangular pool of perfectly flat, undisturbed water.

And no crocs. Not a single one.

At the far end of the chamber—beyond the long placid pool, just above the waterline—were three low rectangular holes, burrowing into the far wall, each roughly the size of a coffin.

An object floated in the pool near the entrance. West recognised it instantly.

A human body. Dead.

The third and last Sudanese man.

Breathless, Wizard came up alongside West. 'Ah-ha, the First Gate. Ooh my, how clever. It's a false-floor chamber, just like we saw beneath the volcano in Uganda. Ah, Imhotep V. He always respected the classic traps . . .'

'Max . . .' West said.

'Ooh, and it's connected to a Solomon's Choice of spike holes: three holes, but only one is safe. This is some gate. I bet the ceiling is on rollers—'

'Max. You can write a book about it later. The state of the water?'

'Yes, sorry, ahem . . .' Wizard pulled a dipstick from a water

testing kit on his belt and dipped it into the algae-covered pool. Its tip quickly turned a vivid red.

Wizard frowned. 'Extremely high levels of the bloodworm Schistosoma mansoni. Be careful, my friend, this water is beyond septic. It's teeming with S. mansoni.''

'What's that?' Big Ears asked from behind them.

'It's a microscopic bloodworm that penetrates the body through the skin or any exposed orifice, and then lays eggs in the bloodstream,' West answered.

Wizard added, 'Infection leads to spinal cord inflammation, lower-body paralysis and, ultimately, a cerebral aneurism and death. Ancient grave robbers went mad after entering places like this. They blamed angry gods and mystical curses, but in all likelihood it was the S. mansoni. But at these levels, gosh, this water will kill you in minutes. Whatever you do, Jack, don't fall in.'

'Okay then,' West said, 'the jump-stone configuration.'

'Right, right . . .' The older man hurriedly pulled a notebook from his jacket pocket, started flipping pages.

A 'false-floor chamber' was a fairly common booby trap in the ancient Egyptian world—mainly because it was very simple to built and exceedingly effective. It worked by concealing a safe pathway of stepping-stones beneath a false layer of liquid—which could be anything really: quicksand, boiling mud, tar, or, most commonly, bacteria-infected water.

You defeated a false-floor chamber by knowing the location of the stepping-stones in it.

Wizard found the page he was after. 'Okay. Here it is. Soter's Mine. Nubia. First Gate. Water chamber. Ah-ha. Five by five grid: the sequence of the jump-stones is 1-3-4-1-3.'

'1-3-4-1-3,' West repeated. 'And which spike hole? I'm going to have to choose quickly.'

'Key of life,' Wizard said, consulting his notebook.

'Thanks. Horus, chest.' On command, the falcon immediately whizzed to West's chest and nestled in a pouch there.

West then turned to the assembled group behind him: 'Okay,

folks, listen up. Everyone is to follow me closely. If our friend Imhotep V follows his usual modus operandi, as soon as I step on the first stepping-stone, things are gonna get frantic. Stay close because we won't have much time.'

West turned and contemplated the placid pool of algae-covered water. He bit his lip for a second. Then he took a deep breath.

Then he jumped out into the chamber, out over the surface of the pool, angling his leap way out to the left.

It was a long jump—he couldn't have just stepped that far.

Watching, Wizard gasped.

But rather than plunging into the deadly water, West landed lightly on the surface of the flat green pool—looking like he was walking on water.

His thick-soled boots stood an inch deep. He was standing on some kind of stepping-stone hidden underneath the algae-covered surface.

Wizard exhaled the breath he'd been holding.

Less obviously, West did, too.

But their relief was shortlived, for at that moment the trap mechanism of the water chamber came loudly and spectacularly to life.

The ceiling started lowering!

The entire ceiling of the chamber—a single great block of stone—began rumbling downwards, descending toward the flat green pool!

The intention was clear: in about 20 seconds it would reach the waterline and block all access to the three low rectangular holes at the far end of the room.

Which left only one option: leap across the concealed stepping-stones and get to the correct rectangular hole before the lowering ceiling hit the waterline.

'Everyone! Move! Follow me step for step!' West called.

And so, with the ceiling lowering loudly above him, he danced across the chamber with big all-or-nothing jumps, kicking up splashes with every landing. If he misjudged even one stepping-stone, he'd land in the water and it'd be game over.

His path was dictated by the grid-reference Wizard had given him: 1-3-4-1-3, on a five-by-five grid. It looked like this:

West came to the far wall of the chamber, while his team crossed it behind him. The wide ceiling of the water chamber kept lowering above them all.

He eyed the three rectangular holes cut into the end-wall. He'd seen these kinds of holes before: they were spike-holes.

But only one hole was safe, it led to the next level of the labyrinth. The other two would be fitted with sharp spikes that lanced down from the upper sides of the rectangular holes as soon as someone entered them.

Each of the spike-holes before him had a symbol carved above it:

Pick the right hole. While the ceiling lowered behind him, about to push his team into the water.

'No pressure, Jack,' he said to himself. 'Okay. Key of life, key of life . . .'

He saw the symbol above the left-hand hole:

Close, but no. It was the hieroglyph for magic. Imhotep V was trying to confuse the flustered, panicking explorer who found himself in this pressure-filled situation and didn't look closely enough.

'How's it coming, Jack?' Big Ears and the girl appeared beside him, joining him on the last stepping-stone.

The ceiling was low now, past halfway and still descending. There was no going back now. He had to pick the right hole.

'West. . .' someone urged from behind him.

Keeping his cool, West saw the symbol above the centre hole .

. . . and recognised it as the hieroglyph for ankh, or long life, otherwise known to the ancient Egyptians as 'the key of life'.

'It's this one!' he called.

But there was only one way to prove it.

He pulled his falcon from his pouch and handed it to the little girl. 'Hey, kiddo. Take care of Horus for me, just in case I'm wrong.'

Then he turned and crouch-dived forwards, rolling into the centre hole, shutting his eyes momentarily, waiting for a half-dozen rusty spikes to spring down from its upper side and punch through his body—

—nothing happened.

He'd picked the right hole. Indeed, a tight cylindrical passage opened up in the darkness beyond this hole, bending vertically upward.

'It's this one!' He called back as he started ferrying his team into it, pulling them through.

Big Ears and Lily went first, then Wizard—

The ceiling was four feet off the water's surface.

Fuzzy and Zoe clambered up next.

The final two troopers in West's team rolled into the hole and last of all went West himself, disappearing into the rectangular hole )ust as the lowering stone ceiling rumbled past him and hit the surface of the water chamber with a resounding boom.

The Slipway and the Second Gate

The tight vertical passage from the spike-hole rose for about 50 feet before opening onto a long tunnel that sloped upward at a steep angle, boring up into the heart of the mountain.

West fired a new amber flare up into the tunnel.

It was the ancient slipway.

About the width of a car, the slipway was effectively a long straight stairway flanked by two flat stone trackways that abutted the walls of the tunnel. These trackways had once acted like primitive railway tracks: the ancient miners had slid giant containers filled with waste up and down them, aided by the hundreds of stone steps that lay in between them.

'Fuzz,' West said, peering up the tunnel. 'Distance?'

Fuzzy aimed a PAQ-40 laser rangefinder up into the darkness.

As he did so, West keyed his radio: 'Noddy, report.'

"The Americans aren't here yet, Huntsman,'' Noddy's voice replied, 'but they're closing fast. Satellite image puts their advance choppers 50 klicks out. Hurry.'

'Doing the best we can,' West said.

Wizard interrupted: 'Don't forget to tell Noddy that we'll be out of radio contact for the time the Warblers are initiated.'

'You hear that?'

7 heard. Noddy, out.'

Fuzzy's rangefinder beeped. 'I got empty space for ... 150 metres.'

West grimaced. 'Why do I get the feeling it isn't empty at all.'

He was right.

The ascending slipway featured several traps: blasting waterfall-shafts and some ankle-breaking trap-holes.

But the Eight just kept running, avoiding the traps, until halfway up the inclined tunnel they came to the Second Gate.

The Second Gate was simple: a ten-foot-deep diorite pit that just fell away in front of them, with the ascending slipway continuing beyond it five yards away.

The lower reaches of the pit, however, had no side walls: it just had two wide yawning 8-foot-high passageways that hit the pit at right angles to the slipway. And who knew what came out of them . . .

'Diorite pit,' West said. 'Nothing cuts diorite except an even harder stone called diolite. Can't use a pick-axe to get yourself out.' 'Be careful,' Wizard said. 'The Callimachus Text says this Gate is connected to the next one. By crossing this one, we trigger the Third Gate's trap-mechanism. We're going to have to move fast.' 'That's okay,' West said. 'We're really quite good at that.' They ended up crossing the pit by drilling steel rock-screws into the stone ceiling with pneumatic pressure-guns. Each rock-screw had a handgrip on it.

But as West landed on the ledge on the other side of the pit, he discovered that the first step on that side was one large trigger stone. As soon as he touched it, the wide step immediately sunk a few inches into the floor—

—and boom! Suddenly the ground shook and everyone spun. Something large had dropped into the darkened tunnel up ahead of them. Then an ominous rumbling sound came from somewhere up there.

'Shit! The next Gate!' West called. 'Swear jar . . .' Lily said.

'Later,' West said. 'Now we run] Big Ears, grab her and follow me!'

The Third Gate

Up the steep slipway they ran, keeping to the stairs inside the rails.

The ominous rumbling continued to echo out from the darkness above them.

They kept running, straining up the slope, pausing only once to cross a five-foot-long spiked pit that blocked their way. But strangely, the stone railway tracks of the slipway still flanked this pit, so they all crossed it rather easily by taking a light dancing step on one of the side rails.

As he ran, West fired a flare into the darkness ahead of them—

—and thus revealed their menace.

'It's a sliding stone!' Wizard called. 'Guarding the Third Gate!'

A giant square-shaped block of granite—its shape filling the slipway perfectly and its leading face covered in vicious spikes—was sliding down the slipway, coming directly towards them!

Its method of death was clear: if it didn't push you into the spiked pit, it would slide over that pit on the stone runners and push you into the lower diorite pit. . . where it would fall in after you, crushing you, before whatever came out of the side passages made its big entrance.

Jesus.

Halfway between the sliding stone and the Eight, sunken into the angled floor of the slipway, was a doorway that opened onto a horizontal passage.

The Third and last Gate.

The Eight bolted up the slope.

The block gained speed—heading down the slope, propelled only by gravity and its immense bulk.

It was a race to the Gate.

West and Big Ears and the girl came to the doorway cut into the sloping floor, ducked inside it.

Wizard came next, followed by Fuzzy and Princess Zoe.

The sliding granite block slid across the top of the doorway just as the last two members of the team were approaching it.

'Stretch! Pooh! Hurry!' West called.

The first man—a tall thin fellow known as Stretch—dived, slithering in under the sliding stone a nanosecond before it completely covered the doorway.

The last man was too late.

He was easily the pudgiest and heaviest in the group. He had the olive skin and deep lush beard of a well-fed Arab sheik. His call-sign in his own country was the rather mighty Saladin, but here it was—

'Pooh Bear! No! Nooof the little girl screamed.

The stone slid over the doorway, and despite a final desperate lunge, Pooh Bear was cut off, left in the slipway, at the mercy of the great block.

'No . . . !' West called, hitting the underside of the sliding stone as it went by, sweeping the helpless Pooh away with it.

'Oh dear, poor Zahir . . .' Wizard said.

For a moment, no-one spoke.

The seven remaining members of the group stood in stunned silence. Lily started to sob quietly.

Then West blinked—something inside him clicking into action.

'Come on, everyone. We've got a job to do and to do it we have to keep moving. We knew this wasn't going to be a cakewalk. Hell, this is only the beginning—'

He turned then, gazing at the horizontal corridor awaiting them. At its far end was a ladder cut into the end-wall, a ladder that led up to a circular manhole cut into the ceiling.

White light washed down through the manhole.

Electric light.

Man-made light.

'—and it's about to get a lot worse. 'Cause we just caught up with the Europeans.'

The Grand Cavern

West poked his head up through the manhole to hehold an absolutely awesome sight.

He was at the base of a gargantuan cavern situated right in the belly of the mountain, a cavern easily 400 feet high.

A former rock quarry, it was roughly triangular in shape, wide at the base, tapering to a point at the top.

West was at the extreme south end of the cavern, while opposite him at the northern end, one hundred yards away, were the Europeans: with their floodlights, their troops . . . and a half-built crane.

Without doubt, however, the most striking feature of the cavern was its chdrcoal-coloured diorite rockface.

The rockface rose for the full height of the cavern, soaring into darkness beyond the reach of the Europeans' floodlights: a giant black wall.

As a quarry, the ancient Egyptians had mined this diorite seam systematically—cutting four narrow ledges out of the great wall, so that now the rockface looked like a 30-storey office building that had been divided into four step-like tiers. Each ledge ran for the entire width of the rockface, but they were perilously narrow: barely wide enough for two men to stand on side-by-side.

If that wasn't dangerous enough, Imhotep V had adapted this already-unusual structure into a masterpiece of protective engineering.

In short, he'd laid hundreds of traps all over it.

The four narrow ledges swung back and forth, each rising

steadily before ending at a cut-into-the-rock ladder that led to the next level.

The only exception was the wall-ladder between the first and second levels: its ladder was situated in the exact centre of the cavern, equidistant from the northern and southern entrances, as if Imhotep V was encouraging a race between rival parties who arrived at the same time.

Since each narrow ledge was cut from pure diorite, a grappling hook would be useless—it could never get a purchase on the hard black stone. To get to the top, one had to traverse every level and defeat the traps on them.

And how many traps there were!

Small arched forts dotted the great wall at irregular intervals, spanning each of the ledges, concealing traps.

Hundreds of basketball-sized wall-holes littered the rockface, containing God-only-knew what kinds of lethal liquids. And where holes were not possible, long stone chutes slid snake-like down the rockface—looking a bit like upside-down chimneys that ended with open spouts ready to spew foul liquids over the unwary intruder.

Seeing the holes, West detected the distinctive odour of oil in the air—giving him a clue as to what might come out of some of them.

And there was the final feature.

The Scar.

This was a great uneven crevice that ran all the way down the rock-wall, cutting across the ledges and the rockface with indifference. It looked like a dry riverbed, only it ran vertically not horizontally.

At the top of the cavern, it was a single thick crevice, but it widened toward the base, where it forked into two smaller scars.

A trickling waterfall dribbled down its length, from some unknown source high up inside the mountain.

To cross the Scar on any of the four ledges meant either tiptoeing across a foot-wide mini-ledge or leaping a small void ... in ^b°th cases in front of wall-holes or other shadowy recesses.

The trickling waterfall that rolled down the Scar fed a wide lake ^at the base of the rockface—a lake that now separated West and his

team from the European force, a lake that was home to about sixty Nile crocodiles, all variously sleeping, sloshing or crawling over each other.

And at the very top of the colossal structure: a small stone doorway that led to this mine's fabled treasure:

The head of an ancient wonder.

Peering over the rim of the manhole, West gazed at the Europeans and their half-finished crane.

As he watched, dozens of men hauled more pieces of the giant crane into the cavern, handing them to engineers who then supervised the attachment of the pieces to the growing machine.

In the midst of this activity, West spied the leader of the European expedition, the Jesuit, del Piero, standing perfectly erect, his hands clasped behind his back. At 68, del Piero had thinning slicked-down black hair, ghost-like grey eyes, deep creases on his face, and the severe expression of a man who had spent his life frowning at people.

But it was the tiny figure standing next to del Piero who seized West's attention.

A small boy.

With black hair and even blacker eyes.

West's eyes widened. He had seen this boy before. Ten years ago ...

The boy stood at del Piero's side with his hands clasped behind his back, mimicking the imperious stance of the old Jesuit.

He seemed to be about Lily's age.

No, West corrected himself, he was exactly Lily's age.

West's gaze shifted back to the crane.

It was a clever plan.

Once finished, the crane would lift the Europeans up over the first ledge and land them on the second.

Not only did this allow them to avoid about ten traps, it also enabled them to avoid the most dangerous trap of all in this cavern:

The Master Snare.

West knew about it from the Callimachus Text—which he suspected del Piero and the Europeans could have had a Vatican copy of. That said, they could have become aware of it from other ancient texts written about Imhotep V.

While the other Imhoteps had their own signature traps,

I Imhotep V had invented the Master Snare, a trap that was triggered in advance of the system's innermost vault—thus making the final leg of the journey a matrix of trap-beating versus time. Or as Wizard liked to say, 'Beating booby traps is one thing; beating them against the clock is another.' That said, the Master Snare was not so crude as to destroy the entire trap system. Like most of Imhotep's traps, it would reset itself to be used again.

No, in most cases the Master Snare left you in a do-or-die predicament: if you were good enough, you could take the treasure. If you weren't, you would die.

The Callimachus Text stated that the trigger stone for the Master

I Snare of this system lay in the very centre of the first level, at the base of the ladder there. Wizard appeared at West's side, peered out from the manhole. 'Mmm, a crane. With that, del Piero and his men will avoid triggering the Master Snare. It'll give them more time up in the Holy of Holies. Very clever.' 'No, it's not clever,' West said flatly. 'It's against the rules.' 'The rules?' 'Yes, the rules. This is all part of a contest that has been held ! for the last 4,000 years, between Egyptian architects and grave-J robbers. And this contest has an honour code—we attack, Imhotep V defends. But by skipping a major trigger stone, del Piero is cheat-I Wg. He's also showing his weakness.' 'Which is?'

'He doesn't believe he can beat the Master Snare.' West smiled. But we can.'

West dropped back down to the base of the ladder, turned to his team of six.

'Okay, kids. This is what we've trained for. Leapfrog formation, remember your places. Lily, you're with me in the middle. Fuzzy, you're the point for the first disable. Then Big Ears, Zoe and Stretch. Wizard, you'll have to cover for Pooh Bear, who was going to cover the fifth. I'll trigger the Master Snare.'

Everyone nodded, game faces on.

West turned to Wizard. 'Okay, Professor. You got those Warblers ready? Because as soon as we break cover, those Europeans are going to open fire.'

'Ready to go, Huntsman,' Wizard said, holding up a large gunlike object that looked like an M-203 grenade launcher. 'I'll need maybe four seconds before you can make a break for it.'

'I'll give you three.'

Then they all put their hands into the middle, team-style, and called 'Kamate!', after which they broke, with Wizard leading the way up the ladder, venturing into the fray . . .

Wizard popped up out of the manhole, his grenade launcher raised. He fired it three times, each shot emitting a loud puncture-like phump.

Phump'.-Phump'.-Phump!

The rounds that burst out of the grenade launcher looked like grenades, but they weren't grenades—fat and round and silver, they fanned out to three corners of the giant cavern, little red pilot lights on them hlinking.

The Europeans heard the first shot and by the third had located Wizard.

A French sniper on the cabin of the crane swung his rifle round, drew a bead on Wizard's forehead, and fired.

His bullet went haywire.

It peeled downwards almost as soon as it left the barrel of the Frenchman's rifle—where it struck an unfortunate croc square in the head, killing it.

The 'Warblers' at work.

The three odd-looking silver rounds that Wizard had fired were more formally known as Closed Atmospheric Field Destabilisers (Electromagnetic), but everyone just called them 'Warblers'.

One of Wizard's rare military inventions, the Warblers created a magnetic field that disrupted the flight of high-subsonic metal )bjects—specifically bullets—creating a gunfire-free zone.

Wizard, one of the leading experts in electromagnetic applica-

^1Qns, had sold the revolutionary technology to Raytheon in 1988

$25 million, most of which went to the New York venture cap-

^tal company that had bankrolled his research. Walking away with

only $2 million, Wizard hated sworn to never work again with venture capitalists.

Ironically, the US Army------as always, thinking it knew better—

ordered Raytheon to reworlc the Warbler system, creating huge problems that had stalled the program for over fifteen years. It had yet to enter active service.

Naturally, Wizard—a Canadian, not an American—had kept a few working prototypes for himself, three of which he was now using.

The Seven burst out from their manhole, one after the other, moving fast, heading for the nearest embedded ladder that led up to the first level.

As he ran in the middle of the group, West set Horus free and the little peregrine falcon soared above the forward-moving group.

The Jamaican, Fuzzy, led the way—dancing along a narrow stone walkway that lay flush against the right-hand wall of the cavern. Pushed up against trie walkway's low edge was a crush of crocodiles.

Fuzzy held in his hands a lightweight titanium bar welded in the shape of an X.

Halfway along its length, the walkway ended briefly at a small void. In the centre of this void was a raised square stepping-stone that also stood flush against the wall and an inch above the croc-filled water.

Cut into the stone wall immediately above this stepping-stone was a dark hole about a metre in diameter.

Fuzzy didn't miss a beat.

He leapt from the walkway onto the stepping-stone—

—and immediately heard a rush of water from up inside the wall-hole, accompanied by a. low crocodilian growl—

—at which point he jammed his titanium X-bar into the wall-hole and hit a switch on the bar.

Thwack!

The X-shaped bar expanded with a powerful springloaded motion, so that suddenly it was wedged tightly in the mouth of the circular wall-hole.

Not a second too soon.

An instant later, a burst of water gushed out of the wall-hole, immediately followed by the jaws of a massive crocodile that slammed at tremendous speed into the X-bar!

The croc roared angrily but its jaws were caught against the X-bar, unable to get past. The rush of water sprayed all around Fuzzy, but didn't knock him over.

'Trap One! Clear!' he called.

The others were already there with him, moving fast, and as Fuzzy kept watch over the writhing croc trapped in the wall-hole, they danced safely by.

Now Big Ears went ahead, racing forwards to disable the next trap, while the rest of them followed, step-jumping past Fuzzy, heading for the ladder at the base of the giant rockface.

The Europeans could only watch in helpless amazement as the Seven raced along the opposite wall to the base of the rockface.

Alone among them, Francisco del Piero eyed West—eyed him with an ice-cold gaze—watched him running with Lily at his side, gripping her hand.

'Well, well, well,' del Piero said. 'Who have you got there, Captain West . . .?'

The Seven hit the base of the rockface.

The building-sized wall towered above them, black as the night.

Big Ears had already done his work, disabling two hand-chopping ^traps halfway up the rock-cut ladder.

Now Princess Zoe leapfrogged ahead. She moved with great ^athleticism, easily the match of the men. About 30, she had

shoulder-length blonde hair, freckles, and the luminous blue eyes that only Irish girls possess.

Onto the First Level she flew, raising two aerosol cans as she did so, filling two wall-holes with a dense expanding foam. Whatever evils had been in those wall-holes were caught by the foam and neutralised.

No sooner had she done this than she was leapfrogged by the seventh member of the group, the tall, thin trooper named Stretch. Once known as Archer, he had a long, sanguine, bony face. He hailed from the deadly Israeli sniper unit, the Sayaret Matkal.

Stretch arrived at the right-side arm of the Scar, where he triggered a huge trap from a safe distance: a bronze cage that fell out of a dark recess in the Scar and clattered down to the lake.

Had any of the team been walking on the foot-wide mini-ledge in front of the recess, the cage would have caught them and taken them down to the lake, to be either eaten by the crocs or drowned under the weight of the cage itself.

Now West and Lily took the lead, crossing the mini-ledge across the Scar, stepping out onto the centre section of the First Level.

Here they found the trigger stone for the Master Snare at the base of the wall-ladder leading up to Level 2. West made to step on it—

'Captain West!'

West froze in mid-stride, turned.

Del Piero and his troops were staring up at him from the base of their half-finished crane, holding their useless guns stupidly in their hands.

'Now, Captain West, please think about this before you do it!' del Piero called. 'Is it really necessary? Even if you trigger the Master Snare, you are only postponing the inevitable. If you do somehow get the Piece, we'll kill you when you try to leave this mountain. And if you don't, my men will just return after the Snare has run its course and we will find the head of the Colossus

and the piece of the Capstone it contains. Either way, Captain, we get the Piece.'

West's eyes narrowed.

Still he didn't speak.

Del Piero tried Wizard. 'Max. Max. My old colleague, my old friend. Please. Reason with your rash young protege.'

Wizard just shook his head. 'You and I chose different paths a long time ago, Francisco. You do it your way. We'll do it ours. Jack. Hit the trigger.'

West just stared evenly down at del Piero.

'With pleasure,' he said.

And with that he stomped on the trigger stone set into the floor at his feet, activating the Master Snare.

The spectacle of Imhotep's Master Snare going off was sensational.

Blasting streams of black crude oil shot out from the hundreds of holes that dotted the cavern: holes in the rockface and its sidewalls.

Dozens of oil waterfalls flowed down the rockface, cascading over its four levels. Black fluid flooded out from the sidewalls, falling a clear 200 feet down them into the croc lake.

The crocs went nuts, scrambling over each other to get away from it—disappearing into some little holes in the walls or massing on the far side of the lake.

In some places on the great tiered rockface, oil came spurting out of the wall, forced out of small openings by enormous internal pressure.

Worst of all, a river of the thick black stuff came pouring down the main course of the Scar, a vertical cascade that tumbled down the vertical riverbed, overwhelming the trickle of water that had been running down it.

And then the clicking started.

The clicking of many stone-striking mechanisms mounted above the wall-holes.

Striking mechanisms made of flint.

Striking mechanisms that were designed to create sparks and . . .

Just then, a spark from one of the flints high up on the left side-wall touched the crude oil flowing out from the wall-hole an inch beneath it.

The result was stunning.

The superthin waterfall of oil became a superthin waterfall of fire . . .

. . . then this flaming waterfall hit the oil-stained lake at the base of the cavern and set it alight.

The lake blazed with flames.

The entire cavern was illuminated bright yellow.

The crocs screamed, clawing over each other to get to safety.

Then more oilfalls caught alight—some on the sidewalls, others on the rockface, and finally, the great sludge waterfall coming down the Scar—until the entire Great Cavern looked like Hell itself, lit by a multitude of blazing waterfalls.

Thick black smoke billowed everywhere—smoke which had no escape.

This was Imhotep's final masterstroke.

If the fire and the traps didn't kill you, smoke inhalation would, especially in the highly prized upper regions of the cavern.

'Fools!' del Piero raged. Then to his men: 'What are you standing there for! Finish the crane! You have until they get back to the Second Level to do so!'

West's team was now moving faster than ever, leapfrogging each other beautifully amid the subterranean inferno.

Up the rockface they went, first to the left along the Second Level, crossing the left arm of the Scar before the thick fire-waterfall got there, dodging wall-holes, jumping gaps in the ledge, nullifying the traps inside the arched forts that straddled the narrow walkway.

Droplets of fire were now raining down all around them—spray

from the oilfalls—but the fiery orange drops just hit their firemen's helmets and rolled off their backs.

Then suddenly West's team ran past the unfinished arm of the Europeans' crane and, for the first time that day, they were in front.

In the lead in this race.

Up the wall-ladder at the end of Level 2, on to Level 3, where they ran to the right, avoiding some chute traps on the way and coming to the fiery body of the Scar. Here West fired an extendable aluminium awning into the Scar's flame-covered surface with his pressure-gun.

The awning opened lengthways like a fan, causing the fire-waterfall to flow over it, sheltering the mini-ledge. The team bolted across the superthin ledge.

Then it was up another ladder to the Fourth Level—the second-highest level—and suddenly six 10-ton block boulders started raining down on them from way up in the darkness above the giant rockface.

The great blocks boomed as they landed on the diorite ledge of Level 4 and tumbled down the rest of the massive tiered wall.

'Get off the ladder!' West yelled to the others. 'You can't dodge the boulders if you're on it—'

Too late.

As West called his warning, a boulder smacked horribly into the last man on the ladder, Fuzzy. The big Jamaican was hurled back down the rockface.

He landed heavily on the Third Level—setting off a trap of spraying flaming oil (it looked like a flamethrower) but he snap-rolled away from the tongue of fire—in the same motion avoiding a second boulder as it slammed down on the ledge an inch away from his eyes!

His roll took him off the ledge, but Fuzzy managed to clasp onto the edge with his fingertips, avoiding the 30-foot drop down to Level 2.

The final wall-ladder was embedded in the centre of the Scar itself, flanked by two fiery waterfalls.

Wizard erected another awning over the mini-ledge leading to the ladder, then allowed West and Lily to rush past him.

'Remember,' Wizard said, 'if you can't get the Piece itself, you must at least note the inscription carved into it. Okay?'

'Got it.' West turned to Lily, it's just us from here.'

They crossed the mini-ledge, came to the rough stone-carved ladder.

Drops of fire rained down it, bouncing off their firemen's helmets.

Every second or third rung of the ladder featured a dark gaping wall-hole of some kind, which West nullified with 'expand-and-harden' foam.

'Jack! Look out! More drop-stones!' Wizard called.

West looked up. 'Whoa shit. . . !'

A giant drop-boulder slicked with oil and blazing with flames came roaring out of a recess in the ceiling directly above the ladder and came free-falling towards him and Lily.

'Swear jar . . .' Lily said.

'I'll have to owe you.'

West quickly yanked an odd-looking pistol from his belt—it looked like a flare gun, with a grossly oversized barrel. An M-225 handheld grenade launcher.

Without panic, he fired it up at the giant boulder freefalling towards them.

The grenade shot upwards.

The boulder fell downwards.

Then they hit and—BOOM!—the falling boulder exploded in a star-shaped shower of shards and stones, spraying outward like a firecracker, its pieces sailing out and around West and Lily on the ladder!

West and Lily scaled the rest of the ladder, flanked by flames, until finally they were standing at the top of the Scar, at the top of the giant rockface, past all the traps.

They stood before the trapezoidal door at the peak of the fire-filled cavern.

'Okay, kiddo,' he said. 'You remember everything we practised?'

She loved it when he called her kiddo.

i remember, sir,' she said.

And so with a final nod to each other, they entered the holy inner sanctum of Imhotep V's deadly labyrinth.

The Innermost Cave

And still the traps didn't stop.

A wide low-ceilinged chamber met them: its ceiling was maybe two metres off the floor . . . and getting lower.

The chamber was about thirty metres wide and its entire ceiling was lowering! It must have been one single piece of stone and right now it was descending on the dark chamber like a giant hydraulic press.

If they'd had time to browse, West and Lily would have seen that the chamber's walls were covered with images of the Great Pyramid—most of them depicting the famous pyramid being pierced by a ray of light shooting down from the Sun.

But it was what lay beyond the entry chamber that seized West and Lily's attention.

At the far end of the wide entry chamber, in a higher-ceilinged space, stood a giant mud-covered bead.

The head was absolutely enormous, at least sixteen feet high, almost three times as tall as West.

Despite the layer of mud all over it, its features were stunning: the handsome Greek face, the imperious eyes, and the glorious golden crown fitted above the forehead.

It was the head of a colossal bronze statue.

The most famous bronze statue in history.

It was the head of the Colossus of Rhodes.

Right in front of it, however, separating the great bronze head from the low-ceilinged entry hall, was a moat of perfectly calm crude oil that completely surrounded the Colossus' head.

The great god-sized head rose up from this oil pool like a creature arising from primordial slime. It sat on no holy pedestal, no ceremonial island, no nothing.

Suspended above the pool was an extra problem: several flaming torches now blazed above it, lit by ancient flint-striking mechanisms. They hung from brackets attached to the end of the entry hall's lowering ceiling—meaning that very soon they would touch the oil pool . . . and ignite it . . . cutting off all access to the Colossus' head.

'Time to run,' West said.

'You bet, sir,' Lily replied.

They ran.

Down the length of the entry hall, beneath its wide lowering ceiling.

Smoke now began to enter the chamber from outside, creating a choking haze.

They came to the oil moat.

'If Callimachus is correct, it won't be too deep,' West said.

Without missing a step, he strode into the pool—plunging to his waist in the thick goopy oil.

'Jump,' he said to Lily, who obliged by leaping into his arms.

They waded across the moat of oil—West striding with Lily on his shoulders—while above them the fiery torches continued their descent toward the pool, the entry hall's ceiling coming ever lower.

With his exit fast diminishing, Jack West Jr stopped a few yards short of the head of the Colossus of Rhodes.

It towered over him, impassive, covered in centuries of mud.

Each of its eyes was as big as Lily was.

Its nose was as big as he was.

Its golden crown glimmered despite its mud coating, while three golden pendants hung from a chain around its neck.

The pendants.

They were each about the size of a fat encyclopaedia and trapezoidal in shape. Embedded in the exact centre of each pendant's upper surface was a round diamond-like crystal.

On the front slanting side of each pendant was a series of intricately carved symbols: an unknown language that looked kind of like cuneiform.

It was an ancient language, a dangerous language, a language known only to a chosen few.

West gazed at the three golden pendants.

One of them was the Second Piece of the Golden Capstone, the mini-pyramid that had once sat atop the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Comprised of seven horizontal pieces, the Golden Capstone was perhaps the greatest archaeological artefact in history—and in the last month, it had become the subject of the greatest worldwide treasure hunt of all time. This piece, the Second, was the segment of the Golden Capstone that sat one place below the fabled First Piece, the small pyramid-shaped pinnacle of the Capstone.

Three pendants.

But only one was the correct one.

And choosing the correct one, West knew, was a do-or-die proposition that all depended on Lily.

He had to take one more step forwards to reach them and that meant triggering the final trap.

'Okay, kiddo. You ready to do your thing? For my sake, I hope you are.'

'I'm ready,' Lily said grimly.

And with that, West stepped forwards and—

—chunk!—

—an unseen mechanism beneath the surface of the oil pool clamped tightly around his legs, pinning them in an ancient pair of submerged stone stocks.

West was now immobile . . . within easy reach of the three pendants.

'Okay, Lily,' he said. 'Go. Make your choice. And stay off me, just in case you're wrong.'

She leapt from his arms, onto the half-submerged collarbone of the great statue just as—

Whoosh!

A huge 10-ton drop-stone directly above West came alight with flames and . . . lurched on its chains!

Imhotep V's final trap in the quarry mine was what is known as a 'reward trap'. It allowed the rightful claimant to the Second Piece to have it, if they could identify the correct one.

Choose the right 'pendant' and the flaming drop-stone remained in place and the submerged leg-clamps opened. Choose the wrong one, and the drop-stone fell, crushing you and igniting the oil pool.

Lily stared at the strange text on each pendant. It looked extremely odd, this little girl evaluating the incredibly ancient symbols.

West watched her, tense, expectant. . . and suddenly worried.

'Can you read it?' he asked.

'It's different to the other inscriptions I've read . . .' she said distractedly.

'What—}' West blanched.

Abruptly Lily's eyes lit up in understanding. 'Ahh, I get it. Some of the words are written vertically . . .'

Then her eyes narrowed . . . and focused. They blazed in the firelight, scanning the ancient symbols closely now.

To West, it seemed as if she had just entered a trance-like state.

Then the flaming drop-stone above him creaked again. He snapped to look up.

The torch-riddled ceiling above the moat kept lowering.

Smoke was now billowing into this area from the main cavern.

West swivelled to see the entry chamber behind him getting smaller and smaller . . .

Lily was still in her trance, reading the runes intently.

'Lily.. :

'Just a second . . .'

'We don't have a second, honey.' He eyed the hazy smoke-filled chamber closing behind them. The smoke was getting denser.

Then, abruptly, one of the flaming torches attached to the descending ceiling dislodged from its bracket. . .

. . . and fell.

Down toward the oil moat where West stood helpless!

'Oh, God no—' was all he had time to breathe.

The flaming torch dropped through the air, into the oil moat—

—before, six inches off the surface, it was plucked from the air by the swooping shape of Horus, his falcon.

The little bird gripped the flaming torch in its talons, before dropping it safely in the closing entry hall.

'Why don't you leave it to the last second next time, bird,' West said.

Sitting now, Horus just returned his gaze, as if to say: Why don't you stop getting into stupid predicaments like this, human.

In the meantime, Lily's eyes glinted, staring now at the symbols on the rightmost of the three pendants:

She read in a low voice:

'Beware. Atone. P° 7*

Ra's implacable Destroyer cometh, 3- 3

And all will cry out in despair, Unless sacred words be uttered.'

Then Lily blinked and returned to the present. 'It's this one!' she said, reaching down for the pendant she had ust read. West said, 'Wait, are you sure—'

But she moved too quickly and lifted the golden pendant from its shallow recess on the Colossus' neck.

The flaming drop-stone lurched.

West snapped up and winced, waiting for the end.

But the drop-stone didn't fall and—chunk!—suddenly his legs were released from their submerged bonds.

Lily had picked the right one.

She jumped happily back into his arms, holding the heavy golden trapezoid like a newborn baby. She threw him a winning smile:

'That felt really weird.'

'It looked really weird,' West said. 'Well done, kiddo. Now, let's blow this joint.'

The Outward Charge

Back they ran.

West charged through the waist-deep oil pool, pushing hard with every stride, the torch-edged ceiling descending above him.

They hit the floor of the entry hall as the lowering ceiling hit 70 centimetres in height.

The smoke coming in from outside was now choking, dense.

Lily crouch-ran across the wide low-ceilinged space, while Horus swooped through the haze.

West was the slowest, scrambling on all fours, slipping every which way in his oil-slicked boots, until at the very end of the chamber, as the ceiling became unbearably low, he dived onto his belly, sliding headfirst for the entire last 4 metres, emerging just as the ceiling hit the floor with a resounding boom and closed off the Colossus' chamber.

Wizard was waiting for them outside on Level 4.

'Hurry! Del Piero's men have almost finished their crane—they'll be on Level 2 any second now!'

Level 4

The other members of the team—Big Ears, Stretch and Princess Zoe—were also waiting on Level 4, covering the first three traps on the way back down.

When he reached them, West handed Big Ears the priceless golden trapezoid, which the big man placed inside a sturdy backpack.

Down the giant rockwall they went, again in leapfrog formation, sliding down ladders, dancing across booby-trapped ledges, all the while dodging flaming waterfalls and fire-rain. Giant drop-stones now fell constantly from the upper regions of the cave, tumbling dangerously down the rockface, blasting through the smoke.

Level 3

West scooped up Fuzzy as they came to Level 3. 'Come on, old friend,' he said, hoisting the big Jamaican onto his shoulder.

They ran down the sloping ledgeway, across the face of Level 3, covering their mouths to avoid inhaling the smoke.

The Europeans had almost finished their crane by now. It was lined with armed men, all waiting for the last piece of the crane to be screwed into place, thus giving them access to Level 2—where they would cut off West and his team.

The last piece of the crane fell into place.

The Europeans moved.

Level 2

West led the way now, leaping down onto Level 2 ahead of Fuzzy, where he landed like a cat—

—and was confronted by a crossbow-wielding French paratrooper, the first member of the European force to step off the now-finished crane.

Quick as a gunslinger, West drew a Glock pistol from one of his thigh holsters, raised it and fired it at the French trooper at point-blank range.

And for some reason his bullet defied Wizard's Warblers and slammed into the Frenchman's chest, dropping him where he stood.

No blood sprayed.

In fact, the man didn't die.

Rubber bullet.

West fired another rubber round—similar to those used by police in riot situations—at the next French paratrooper on the nearby crane, just as the Frenchman pulled the trigger on his crossbow.

West ducked and the arrow-bolt missed high, while his own shot hit its mark, sending the French commando sailing off the crane and into the lake below, still crowded with panicking crocodiles.

Screams. Splashing. Crunching. Blood.

'Move!' West called to his crew. 'Before they switch to rubber rounds, too.'

Now everyone in his team had their guns drawn and as they passed the crane's arm, they traded shots with the two dozen French paratroopers on it.

But they got past the crane just as fifteen French paratroopers came streaming off it, and headed down to Level 1—

Level 1

—where they saw the Europeans' second effort to cut them off.

Down on the ground level, a team of German Army engineers had almost finished building a temporary floating bridge across the croc lake—in an attempt to get to West's manhole entrance on the southern side of the cavern before West and his team did.

They had two segments of the bridge to put in place, segments that were being brought across the half-finished bridge right now.

'Go! Go! Go!' West called.

The flaming cavern—already alive with smoke and flames and falling boulders—was now zinging with crossbow bolts and rubber bullets.

The aluminium crossbow bolts were only mildly affected by the Warblers—they flew wildly, but their first few metres of flight were still deadly.

West's team was running across Level 1, racing the bridge-builders on the ground level.

Big Ears carried Lily. West helped Fuzzy. Princess Zoe and Stretch fired at the paratroopers behind them, while Wizard— coughing against the smoke—led the way, nullifying the traps ahead of them. Above them, Horus soared through the hazy black air.

They had just reached the ladder at the far right-hand end of Level 1 when suddenly a stray French crossbow bolt hit Big Ears in the shoulderblade, knocking him off his feet—causing him to stumble forwards onto his face and . . .

. . . fall off the edge of the ledge, dropping Lily over it!

Lily fell.

Thirty feet.

Into the oily water near the base of the ladder, not far from the walkway that hugged the right-hand wall of the cavern.

By chance she landed in both a croc-free and a fire-free space.

But not for long. The crocs weren't far away, and no sooner had her splash subsided than a large one saw her and charged straight for her.

Big Ears was dangling over the edge of Level 1 directly above her, helpless. 'I can't get to her!'

'I can!' another voice called.

West.

He never missed a step.

Running full tilt, he just leapt off the edge of Level 1 and sailed in a high curving arc through the air toward the croc-lake below.

The big bull croc that was charging at Lily never saw him coming. West landed square on its back, a mere foot away from Lily, and the two of them—man and croc—went under the black water's surface with a great splash.

They surfaced a second later, with the frenzied croc bucking like a bronco and West on its back, gripping it in a fierce headlock.

The croc growled and roared, before—crrrrack—West brutally twisted its neck, breaking it. The croc went limp. West jumped

clear, whisking Lily out of the water and onto the walkway flanking the lake not a moment before six more crocs attacked the carcass of the dead one.

'Th . . . thanks,' Lily gasped, wiping oil from her face and still shaking.

'Anytime, kiddo. Anytime.'

Ground Level

The rest of the team joined them on the walkway.

Now Fuzzy and Big Ears were injured. But they were still mobile, helped along by Zoe and Wizard, while West and Lily were covered by Stretch.

They all hopscotched over the stepping-stone and its wall-hole— inside which the trapped croc still writhed behind Fuzzy's X-bar—and dashed for their manhole, just as the German engineers brought the final piece of their temporary bridge into place.

Forty armed German troops waited for the bridge to be completed. Some fired wayward crossbow shots at the Seven, while others jammed newly found rubber-bullet magazines into their MP-7 sub-machine guns and started firing.

West and Lily came to the manhole. In they went. The others followed, while Stretch covered them all. Big Ears went in . . . then Fuzzy . . . Wizard . . . Zoe and . . .

. . . the final piece of the bridge fell into place . . .

... as Stretch jumped into the manhole and the army of Germans charged over the bridge and the chase through the slipway system began.

The Ante-Chamber (Outward Bound)

Being the last person in a retreating formation sucks. You're covering the rear, the bad guys are right on your ass, and no matter how loyal your team is, there's always the risk of being left behind.

By the time the tall and lanky Stretch had landed in the long ante-chamber beneath the manhole, the others were already entering the slipway at the far end.

'Stretch! Move it!' West called from the slanted doorway. 'Zoe's gone ahead to trigger another sliding stone to run interference for us!'

As if to confirm that, a familiar whump echoed out from the upper regions of the slipway, followed by the rumble of a new sliding stone grinding down the slope.

Stretch bolted toward the slipway—as a dozen wraith-like figures rained down the manhole behind him, entering the ante-chamber.

Gunfire.

Rapid-fire.

Freed from the effects of the Warblers, the Europeans were now gladly employing live ammunition.

Stretch was done for.

He was still five steps away from the safety of the slipway when the first few Germans behind him went down in a hail of withering fire.

For just as they had fired, so too had someone else, someone standing guard in the doorway to the slipway.

Pooh Bear.

Holding a Steyr-AUG assault rifle.

The heavy-bearded Arab—who had last been seen getting cut off behind the previous sliding stone—waved Stretch on.

'Come on, Israeli!' Pooh Bear growled. 'Or I'll gladly leave you behind!'

Stretch staggered the last few steps into the slipway and past Pooh Bear just as a dozen bullet-sparks exploded out all around the stone doorway.

'I thought you were dead,' Stretch said, panting.

'Please! It'll take more than a rock to kill Zahir al Anzar al Abbas,' Pooh Bear said in his deep gruff voice. 'My legs may be stout, but they can still run with some speed. I simply outran the rock and took cover in that spiked pit, and let it pass over me. Now move!'

The Slipway

Down the slipway the Eight ran, dancing around the edge of the small spiked pit—the air filled with the rumble of the new sliding stone—then over the diorite pit that was the Second Gate. The cracked and broken remains of the first sliding stone from before lay strewn about its base.

The Eight swung over the diorite pit, hanging from the steel handholds they'd drilled into the rock ceiling earlier.

'Noddy!' West called into his radio mike when he landed safely on the other side. 'Do you copy?'

There was no answer from Noddy, their man guarding the swamp entrance.

'It's not the Warblers!' Wizard called. 'There must be someone jamming us—'

He was cut off by six Germans who raced into the slipway and opened fire—

—not a moment before the large spike-riddled sliding stone loomed up behind them, rumbling over the doorway to the ante-chamber!

The six Germans ran down the slipway, chased by the sliding stone.

When they came to the spiked pit, one panicked and lost his balance and fell in, chest-first—impaling himself on the vicious spikes sticking up from the stone pit.

The others got to the larger diorite pit of the Second Gate too late.

Two managed to grip West's steel handholds for a couple of swings before all five of the remaining German troops were either impaled on the spikes on the leading edge of the sliding stone or jumped into the diorite pit to avoid those spikes just as— whoosh!—a blast of churning white water shot across the pit, sweeping them away, screaming.

West's team raced ahead now. The sliding stone had given them the lead they needed.

Having been blocked off momentarily behind it, and not having experienced the slipway before, the remainder of the German troops were more cautious.

West's team increased their lead.

They swept down the tight vertical shaft to the spike-hole where West had correctly chosen the key of life, the ceiling of the water chamber having reset itself . . .

Still no radio contact with Noddy.

Across the water chamber, its stepping-stones still submerged beneath the algae-covered pool . . .

Still no radio contact.

Crouch-running down the length of the low tunnel, leaping over its cross-shafts . . .

And finally they came to the croc-filled atrium with its hand-rungs in the ceiling and the vertical entry shaft at its far end.

'Noddy! Are you out there?' West called into his radio. 'I repeat, Noddy, can you hear me—'

Finally he got a reply.

"Huntsman! Hurry!' Noddy's Spanish-accented voice replied suddenly in his earpiece, loud and hard. 'Get out! Get out now! The Americans are here!'

Two minutes later, West emerged from the vertical entry shaft and found himself once again standing in the mud of the mountain swamp.

Noddy was waiting for him, visibly agitated, looking anxiously westward. 'Hurry, hurry!' he said. 'They're coming—'

Shlatt

Noddy's head exploded, bursting like a smashed pumpkin, hit by a high-speed .50 calibre sniper round. His body froze for a brief moment before it dropped to the ground with a dull smack.

West snapped to look westward.

And he saw them.

Saw two-dozen high-speed swampboats sweeping out of the reeds some three hundred metres away, covered by two Apache helicopters. Each swampboat held maybe ten special forces troops, members of the CIEF.

Then suddenly on one of them the muzzle of a Barrett sniper rifle flashed—

—West ducked—

—and a split second later the bullet sizzled past his ears.

'Get Stretch up here!' he yelled as his team emerged from the hole in the mud.

Stretch was pushed up.

'Give me some sniping, Stretch,' West said. 'Enough to get us out of here.'

Stretch pulled a vicious-looking Barrett M82A1A sniper rifle off his back, took a crouching pose and fired back at the American hovercrafts.

Crack. Sizzle.

And two hundred metres away, the American sniper was hurled clear off his speeding swampboat, his head snapping backwards in a puff of red.

Everybody was now up and out of the hole.

'Right,' West said. 'We make for our swamprunners. Triple time.'

The Eight raced across the swamp, once again running on foot through the world of mud.

They came to their swampboats, hidden in a small glade, covered by camouflage netting.

Their two boats were known as 'swamprunners', shallow-draft flat-bottomed steel-hulled boats with giant fans at their sterns, capable of swift speeds across swamps of unpredictable depth.

West led the way.

He jumped onto the first swamprunner, and helped the others on after him.

When everyone was on board the two boats, he turned to grab the engine cord—

'Hold it right there, partner,' an ice-cold voice commanded.

West froze.

They came out of the reeds like silent shadows, guns up.

Eighteen mud-camouflaged CIEF specialists, all with Colt Commando assault rifles—the lighter, more compact version of the M-16—and dark-painted faces.

West scowled inwardly.

Of course the Americans had sent in a second squad from the south, just in case—hell, they'd probably found his boats by doing a satellite scan of the swamp, then sent this squad who'd just come out and waited.

'Damn it . . .' he breathed.

The leader of the CIEF team stepped forwards.

'Well, would you look at that. If it isn't Jack West. . .' he said. 'I haven't seen you since Iraq in '91. You know, West, my superiors still don't know how you got away from that SCUD base outside Basra. There musta been three hundred Republican Guards at that facility and yet you got away—and managed to destroy all those mobile launchers.'

'I'm just lucky, I guess, Cal,' West said evenly.

The CIEF leader's name was Sergeant Cal Kallis and he was the worst kind of CIEF operative: an assassin who liked his job. Formerly from Delta, Kallis was a grade-A psycho. Still, he wasn't Judah, which meant West still held out a hope of getting out of here alive.

At first Kallis completely ignored West's comment. He just whispered into a throat-mike: 'CIEF Command. This is Sweeper 2-6. We're a klick due south of the mountain. We got 'em. Sending you our position now.'

Then he turned to West, and spoke as if their conversation had never been interrupted:

'You ain't lucky anymore,' he said slowly. Kallis had cold black eyes—eyes that were devoid of pity or emotion. 'I got orders that amount to a hunting licence, West. Leave no bodies. Leave no witnesses. Something about a piece of gold, a very valuable piece of gold. Hand it over.'

'You know, Cal, when we worked together, I always thought you were a reasonable guy—'

Kallis cocked his gun next to Princess Zoe's head. 'No you didn't and no I wasn't. You thought I was "a cold-blooded psychopath"— they showed me the report you wrote. The Piece, West, or her brains learn how to fly.'

'Big Ears,' West said. 'Give it to him.'

Big Ears unslung his backpack, threw it into the mud at Kallis's feet.

The CIEF assassin opened it with his foot, saw the glistening golden trapezoid inside.

And he smiled.

Into his throat-mike, he said: 'Command. This is Sweeper 2-6. We have the prize. Repeat, we have the prize.'

As if on cue, at that moment two US Apache helicopters boomed into identical hovers in the air above West and his team.

The air shook. The surrounding reeds were blown flat.

One chopper lowered a harness, while the other stood guard, facing outwards.

Kallis attached the pack holding the Piece to the harness. It was winched up and that helicopter quickly zoomed off.

Once it was gone, Kallis touched his earpiece, getting some new instructions. He turned to West. . . and grinned an evil grin.

'Colonel Judah sends his regards, West. Seems he'd like to have a word with you. I've been instructed to bring you in. Sadly, everybody else dies.'

Quick as a rattlesnake, Kallis then re-asserted his aim at Princess Zoe and squeezed the trigger—just as the remaining Apache helicopter above him exploded in a fireball and dropped out of the sky, hit by a Hellfire missile from . . .

. . . the Europeans' Tiger attack helicopter.

The charred remains of the Apache smashed to the ground right behind the ring of CIEF troops—crashing in a heap, creating a giant splash of swampwater—in the process scattering the CIEF men as they dived out of the way.

The Tiger didn't hang around—it shot off after the other Apache, the one with the Piece of the Capstone in it.

But its missile shot had done enough for West.

Principally, it allowed Princess Zoe to leap clear of Kallis and dive to the floor of her swamprunner just as West started it up and yelled: 'Everybody out! Now!'

His team didn't need to be told twice.

While the Delta men around them clambered back to their feet and fired vainly after them, West's two swamprunners burst off the mark and disappeared at speed into the high reeds of the swamp.

Kallis and his men jumped into their nearby swampboats—four of them—and gunned the engines.

Kallis keyed his radio, reported what had happened to his bosses, finishing with: 'What about West?'

The voice at the other end was cold and hard, and the instructions it gave were exceedingly odd: 'You may do whatever you want with the others, sergeant, but Jack West and the girl must be allowed to escape.'

'Escape?' Kallis frowned.

'Yes, sergeant. Escape. Is that clear?'

'Crystal clear, sir. Whatever you say,' Kallis replied.

His boats roared into action.

West's two swamprunners skimmed across the swamp at phenomenal speed, banking and weaving, propelled by their huge turbofans.

West drove the lead one; Stretch drove the second one.

Behind them raced Kallis's four swampboats, bigger and heavier, but tougher—the men on their bows firing hard.

West was making for the far southern end of the swamp, 20 kilometres away, where a crumbling old road had been built along the shore of the vast waterfield.

It wasn't a big road, just two lanes, but it was made of asphalt, which was crucial.

'Sky Monster!' West shouted into his radio mike. 'Where are you!'

'Still in a holding pattern behind the mountains, Huntsman. What can I do for you?' came the reply.

'We need exfil, Sky Monster! Now!'

'Hot?'

'As always. You know that paved road we pinpointed earlier as a possible extraction point?'

'The really tiny potholed piece-of-shit road? Big enough to fit two Mini Coopers side-by-side?

'Yeah, that one. We're also going to need the pick-up hook. What do you say, Sky Monster?'

'Give me something hard next time, Huntsman. How long till you get there?

'Give us ten minutes.'

'Done. The Halicarnassus is on its way.'

The two swamprunners blasted across the waterfield, ducking the constant fire from the four pursuing CIEF swampboats.

Then suddenly, geyser-explosions of water began erupting all around West's boats.

Kallis and his team had started using mortars.

Bending and banking, West's swamprunners weaved away from the explosions—which actually all fell a fraction short—until suddenly the road came into view.

It ran in an east-to-west direction across the southern edge of the swamp, an old blacktop that led inland to Khartoum. Like many of the roads in eastern Sudan, it actually wasn't that bad, having been built by the Saudi terrorists who had once called these mountains home, among them a civil engineer named Bin Laden.

West saw the road, and risked a smile. They were going to make it. . .

At which moment, three more American Apache helicopters arrived, roaring across his path, shredding the water all around his boats with blazing minigun fire.

The Apaches rained hell on West's two boats.

Bullets ripped up the water all round them as the boats sped through the swamp.

'Keep going! Keep going!' West yelled to his people. 'Sky Monster is on the way!'

But then fire from one of the Apaches hit Stretch's turbofan. Smoke billowed, the fan clattered, and the second swamprunner slowed.

West saw it instantly—and knew what he had to do.

He pulled in alongside Stretch's boat and called: 'Jump over!'

A quick transfer took place, with Stretch, Pooh Bear, Fuzzy and Wizard all leaping over onto West's swamprunner—the last of them, Wizard, leaping across a split second before one of the Apaches let fly with a Hellfire missile and the second swamprunner was blown out of the water, disappearing in a towering geyser of spray.

Amid all this mayhem, West kept scanning the sky above the mountains—and suddenly he saw it.

Saw the black dot descending toward the little road.

A black dot that morphed into a bird-like shape, then a planelike shape, then finally it came into focus and was revealed to be a huge black plane.

It was a Boeing 747, but the most bizarre 747 you would ever see.

Once upon a time, it had been a cargo plane of some sort, with a rear loading ramp and no side windows.

Now, it was painted entirely in black, dull black, and it bristled with irregular protrusions that had been added to it: radar domes, missile pods, and most irregularly of all: revolving gun turrets.

There were four of them—one on its domed roof, one on its underbelly, and two nestled on its flanks, where the plane's wings met its fuselage—each turret armed with a fearsome six-barrelled Gatling minigun.

It was the Halicarnassus. West's very own plane.

With a colossal roar, the great black jumbo jet swooped downwards, angling for the tiny road that bordered the swamp.

Now with all eight of his people on one swamprunner, West needed help and the Halicarnassus was about to provide it.

Two missiles lanced out from its belly-pods, missing one Apache by inches, but hitting the one behind it.

Boom. Fireball.

Then the great plane's underside minigun blazed to life, sending a thousand tracer rounds sizzling through the air all around the

third Apache, giving it the choice of either bugging out or dying. It bugged out.

West's lone swamprunner swept alongside the straight roadway, raced parallel to it. The road was elevated a couple of feet above the water, up a low gently-sloping bank.

At the same moment, above and behind West's boat, the big 747 landed on the little country road!

Its wheels hit the road, squealing briefly before rolling forwards with its outer tyres half off the road's edges. The big jet then taxied down the roadway—coming alongside West's skimming swamprunner, its wings stretching out over the waters of the swamp.

The Halicarnassus was coasting, rolling.

West's boat was speeding as fast as it could to keep up.

Then with a bang, the loading ramp at the back of the 747 dropped open, slammed down against the roadway behind the speeding plane.

A second later, a long cable bearing a large hook at its end came snaking out of the now-open cargo hold. It was a retrieval cable, normally used to snag weather balloons.

'What are you going to do now, my friend!' Pooh Bear yelled to West above the wind.

'This!'

As West spoke, he jammed his steering levers hard left, and the swamprunner swept leftward, bouncing up the riverbank and out of the water, dry-sliding on its flat-bottomed hull onto the bitumen road close behind the rolling 747!

It was an incredible sight: a big black 747 rolling along a country road, with a boat skidding and sliding along the road right behind it.

West saw the loading ramp of the plane, very close now, just a few yards in front of his sliding boat. He also saw the slithering retrieval cable bumping and bouncing on the road right in front of him.

'Stretch! The cable! Snag it!'

At the bow of the dry-sliding swamprunner, Stretch used a long

snagging pole to reach out and snag the retrieval cable's hook. He

got it.

'Hook us up!' West yelled.

Stretch did so, latching the cable's hook around the boat's bow.

And suddenly—whapl—the swamprunner was yanked forwards, pulled along by the giant 747!

Dragged now by the Halicarnassus, the swamprunner looked like a waterskier being pulled by a speedboat.

West yelled into his radio, 'Sky Monster! Reel us in!'

Sky Monster initiated the plane's internal cable spooler, and now the swamprunner began to move gradually forwards, hauled in by the cable, pulled closer and closer to the loading ramp.

While this was going on, the 747's belly-mounted gun turret continued to swing left and right, raining hell on Kallis's pursuing swampboats and the two remaining Apaches, keeping them at bay.

At last, West's swamprunner came to the loading ramp. West and Pooh Bear grabbed the ramp's struts, held the boat steady.

'Okay, everyone! All aboard!' West yelled.

One after the other, his team leapt from the swamprunner onto the lowered loading ramp—Wizard with Lily, then Zoe helping Fuzzy, Stretch helping Big Ears, and finally Pooh Bear and West

himself.

Once West had landed on the loading ramp, he unhooked the swamprunner and the boat fell away behind the speeding 747, tumbling end over end down the little black road.

Then the loading ramp lifted and closed, and the 747 powered up and pulled away from the American Apaches-and swampboats. It hit take-off speed and rose smoothly into the air.

Safe.

Clear.

Away.

The Halicarnassus flew south over the vast Ethiopian highlands.

While the others collapsed in the plane's large main cabin, West went straight up to the cockpit where he found the plane's pilot: a great big hairy-bearded New Zealand Air Force pilot known as Sky Monster. Unlike the others in the group, this had actually been his call-sign before he'd joined the team.

West gazed out at the landscape receding into the distance behind them—the swamp, the mountain, the vast plains beyond it—and thought about del Piero's Europeans engaging the superior American force. Del Piero would have little luck.

The Americans, as always the last to arrive but the greatest in brute force, had allowed West and the Europeans to squabble over the Piece, to lose men finding it, and then, like opportunistic lions, they'd muscled in on the hyenas and taken the prize.

And as the Halicarnassus soared into the sky away from the danger, West gazed at the large American force now gathered at the western edge of the swamp.

A disquieting thought lingered in his mind.

How had the Americans even known about this place?

The Europeans very probably had a copy of the Callimachus Text and, of course, they had the boy. But the Americans, so far as West knew, had neither.

Which meant there was no way they could have known that this was the resting place of the Colossus of Rhodes.

West frowned.

Was his team's cover blown? Had the Americans discovered their base and followed them here? Or worse: was there a traitor in his

team who had given their position away with a tracing beacon?

In any case, Judah now knew that West was involved in this treasure hunt. He might not know exactly who West was working for, but he knew West was involved.

Which meant that things were about to get very intense.

Safe at last, but without their prize, West's plane sped away to the south, disappearing over the mountains.

Exhausted and dirty, West trudged back down into the main cabin. Head down in thought, he almost walked straight past Lily, curled up in the darkness under the stairs, sobbing quietly.

West crouched down beside her and with a gentleness that defied his battered state, brushed away her tears. 'Hey, kiddo.'

'They . . . they just killed him,' she swallowed. 'Killed Noddy.'

'I know.'

'Why'd they have to do that? He never hurt any of them.'

'No, he didn't,' West said. 'But what we're doing here has made some big countries very angry—because they're afraid of losing their power. That's why they killed Noddy.' He tousled her hair as he stood to go. 'Hey. I'll miss him, too.'

Tired, sore and himself saddened by the loss of Noddy, West retired to his small bunkroom in the aft section of the plane.

He collapsed into his bunk and no sooner had his head hit the pillow than he was asleep.

He slept deeply, his dreams filled with vivid visions—of booby-trapped chambers, stone altars, chants and screams, waterfalls of lava, and of himself running frantically through it all.

The interesting thing was, these dreams weren't the product of West's imagination.

They had actually happened, ten years previously . . .

INSIDE THE KANYAMAIMAGA VOLCANO

UGANDA, AFRICA

20 MARCH, 1996, 11:47 A.M.

The images of West's dreams:

West running desperately down an ancient stone passageway with Wizard at his side, toward the sounds of booming drums, chanting and a woman's terrified screams.

It's hot.

Hot as Hell.

And since it's inside a volcano, it even looks like Hell.

It is just the two of them—plus Horus, of course. The team does not even exist at this time.

Their clothes are covered in mud and tar—they've survived a long and arduous path to get here. West wears his fireman's helmet and thick-soled army boots. Ten years younger, at age 27 he is more idealistic but no less intense. His eyes are narrow, focused. And his left arm is his own.

Boom-boom-boom! go the drums.

The chanting increases.

The woman's screams cut the air.

'We must hurry!' Wizard urges. 'They've started the ritual!'

They pass through several booby-trapped passageways—each of which West neutralises.

Ten disease-carrying molossid bats burst forth from a dark ceiling recess, fangs bared—only to have Horus launch herself off West's shoulder and plunge into their midst, talons raised. A thudding

mid-air collision. Squeals and shrieks. Two bats smack down against the floor, brought down by the little falcon.

That splits the bats and the two men dash through them, Horus catching up moments later.

West is confronted by a long downward-sloping shaft. It's like a 100-metre-long stone pipe, steeply slanted, big enough for him to fit if he sits down.

Boom go the drums.

The evil chanting is close now.

The woman's frenzied screams are like nothing he has ever heard: pained, desperate, primal.

West shoots a look to Wizard.

The older man waves him on. 'Go! Jack! Go! Get to her! I'll catch up!'

West leaps feet-first into the pipe-shaft and slides fast.

Five traps later, he emerges from the bottom of the long stone pipe on . . .

... a balcony of some kind.

A balcony which overlooks a large ceremonial cavern.

He peers out from the balcony's railing and beholds the horrifying sight.

The woman lies spreadeagled on a rough stone altar, tied down, legs spread wide, writhing and struggling, terrified.

She is surrounded by about twenty priest-like figures all wearing hooded black robes and fearsome jackal masks of the Egyptian god Anubis.

Six of the priests pound on huge lion-skin drums.

The rest chant in a strange language.

Incongruously, surrounding the circle of robed priests, all facing outward, are sixteen paratroopers in full battle-dress uniforms. They are French, all brandishing ugly FN-MAG assault rifles, and their eyes are deadly.

Beyond all this, the chamber itself catches West's attention.

Cut into the very flesh of the volcano, it branches off the volcano's glowing-red core and is octagonal in shape.

It is also ancient—very ancient.

Every surface is flat. The stone walls are so perfectly cut they look almost alien. Sharp-edged rectangular pipe-holes protrude from the sidewalls.

Hieroglyphics cover the walls. In giant letters above the main door, the biggest carving reads:

'Enter the embrace of Anubis willingly, and you shall live beyond the coming of Ra. Enter against your will, and your people shall rule for but one eon, but you shall live no more. Enter not at all, and the world shall be no more.''

Interestingly, the raised pattern on the high ceiling exactly matches the indentations on the floor fifty feet below.

The ceiling also features a tiny vertical shaft bored into it—in the exact centre, directly above the altar.

This ultra-narrow vertical shaft must reach all the way to the surface because right now, a beam of noonday sunlight—perfectly vertical, laser-thin and dazzlingly bright—shines down through the tiny hole, hitting . . .

. . . the altar on which the woman lies.

And one other thing:

The woman is pregnant.

More than that.

She is in the process of giving birth . . .

It is obviously painful, but it's not the only reason for her screams.

'Don't take my child!' she cries. 'Don't. . . you . . . take . . . my . . . baby!'

The priests ignore her pleas, keep chanting, keep drumming.

Separated from the ceremonial chamber by a chasm fifty feet wide and God-only-knows how deep, West can only stare helplessly at the scene.

And then, suddenly, a new cry joins the wild cacophony of sounds.

The cry of a baby.

The woman has given birth . . .

The priests cheer.

And then the chief priest—he alone is dressed in red robes and wears no mask—pulls the child from the woman's body and holds it aloft, illuminated by the vertical laser beam of sunlight.

'A boy!' he cries.

The priests cheer again.

And in that moment, as the chief priest holds the child high, West sees his face.

'Del Piero . . .' he breathes.

The woman wails, 'Please God, no! Don't take him! No! Noooor

But take him they do.

The priests sweep out the main entrance on the far side of the chamber, crossing a short bridge, their cloaks billowing, the boy held tightly in their midst, flanked by the armed paratroopers.

As they do, the noonday Sun moves on and the dazzling vertical laser beam of light vanishes.

The chief priest—Francisco del Piero—is the last to leave. With a final look, he stomps on a trigger stone in the main doorway and then disappears.

The response is instantaneous.

Spectacular streams of lava come blurting out of the rectangular holes in the walls of the cavern. The lava oozes across the floor of the chamber, heading toward the central stone altar.

At the same time, the ceiling of the chamber starts lowering—its irregular form moving towards the matching configuration on the floor. It even has a special indentation in it to accommodate the altar.

The woman on the altar doesn't notice.

Either from emotional torment or loss of blood, she just slumps back onto the altar and goes still, silent.

Wizard arrives at West's side, beholds the terrible scene.

'Oh my God, we're too late,' he breathes.

West stands quickly.

'It was del Piero,' he says. 'With French paratroopers.'

'The Vatican and the French have joined forces . . .' Wizard gasps.

But West has already raised a pressure-gun and fires it into the lowering ceiling of the chamber. The piton drives into the stone. A rope hangs from it.

'What on Earth are you doing?' Wizard asks, alarmed.

'I'm going over there,' West says. 'I said I'd be there for her and I failed. But I'm not going to let her get crushed to nothing.'

And with that, he swings across the gaping chasm.

The ceiling keeps lowering.

The lava keeps spreading across the floor from either side, approaching the altar.

But with his quick swing, West beats it, and he rushes to the middle of the chamber, where he stands over the body of the woman.

A quick pulse-check reveals that she is dead.

West squeezes his eyes shut.

'I'm so sorry, Malena . . .' he whispers, '. . . so sorry.'

'Jack! Hurry!' Wizard calls from the balcony. 'The lava!'

The lava is eight metres away . . . and closing on him from both sides.

Over at the main entrance, a waterfall of oozing lava pours out of a rectangular hole above the doorway, forming a curtain across the exit.

West places his hand on the woman's face, closes her eyes. She is still warm. His gaze sweeps down her body, over the sagging skin of her abdomen, the skin over her pregnant belly now rumpled with the removal of the child formerly there.

Then for some reason, West touches her belly.

And feels a tiny little kick.

He leaps back, startled.

'Max!' he calls. 'Get over here! NowT

A gruesome yet urgent image: flanked by the encroaching lava and the steadily lowering ceiling, the two men perform a Caesarean delivery on the dead woman's body using West's Leatherman knife.

Thirty seconds later, Wizard lifts a second child from the woman's slit-open womb.

It is a girl.

Her hair is pressed against her scalp, her body covered in blood and uterine fluid, her eyes squeezed shut.

West and Wizard, battered and dirty, two adventurers at the end of a long journey, gaze at her like two proud fathers.

West in particular gazes at the little infant, entranced.

'Jack!' Wizard says. 'Come on! We have to get out of here.'

He turns to grab their loosely hanging rope—just as the spreading lava reaches it and ignites it with a whoosh!

No escape that way.

Holding the baby, West spins to face the main entrance.

Fifteen metres of inch-deep lava blocks the way.

And then there's the curtain of falling lava blocking the doorway itself.

But then he sees it, cut into the left side of the stone doorframe: a small round hole maybe a handspan wide, veiled by the same waterfall of superheated lava.

West says, 'How thick are your soles?'

'Thick enough for a few seconds,' Wizard replies. 'But there's no way to switch off that lavafall.'

'Yes, there is,' West nods over at the small hole. 'See that hole. There's a stone dial inside it, hidden behind that curtain of lava. A cease mechanism that switches off the lavafall.'

'But, Jack, anyone who reaches in there will lose their—'

Wizard sees that West isn't listening. The younger man is just staring intently at the wall-hole.

West bites his lip, thinking the unthinkable.

He swallows, then turns to Wizard: 'Can you build me a new arm, Max?'

Wizard freezes.

He knows it's the only way out of this place.

'Jack. If you get us out of here, I promise you I'll build you a better arm than the one you were born with.'

'Then you carry her and let's go.' West hands the baby to Wizard.

And so they run, West in the lead, Wizard and the baby behind him, across the inch-deep pool of slowly spreading lava, crouching beneath the descending ceiling, the thick soles of their boots melting slightly with every stride.

Then they arrive at the lava-veiled doorway, and with no time to waste, West goes straight to the small hole next to the doorframe, takes a deep breath and—

—thrusts his left arm into the hole, up to the elbow, through the waterfall of lava!

'Ahhhhl'

The pain is like nothing he has ever known. It is excruciating.

He can see the lava eating through his own arm like a blowtorch burning through metal. Soon it will eat all the way through, but for a short time he still has feeling in his fingers and that's what he needs, because suddenly he touches something.

A stone dial inside the wall-hole.

He grips the dial, and a moment before his entire lower arm is severed from his body, Jack West Jr turns it and abruptly all the lavafalls flowing into the chamber stop.

The ceiling freezes in mid-descent.

The lavafall barring the doorway dries up.

And West staggers away from the wall-hole . . .

... to reveal that his left arm has indeed been severed at the elbow. It ends at a foul stump of melted bone, flesh and skin.

West sways unsteadily.

But Wizard catches him and the two of them—plus the child— stumble out through the doorway where they fall to the floor of a stone tunnel.

West collapses, gripping his half-arm, going into shock.

Wizard puts the baby down and hurriedly removes West's melting shoes—before also removing his own a bare second before their soles melt all the way through.

Then he dresses West's arm with his shirt. The red-hot lava has seared the wound, which helps.

Then it is over.

And the final image of West's dream is of Wizard and himself, sitting in that dark stone tunnel, spent and exhausted, with a little baby girl between them, in the belly of an African volcano.

And Wizard speaks:

'This . . . this is unprecedented. Totally unheard of in all recorded history. Two oracles. Twin oracles. And del Piero doesn't know . . .'

He turns to West. 'My young friend. My brave young friend. This complicates matters in a whole new way. And it might just give us a chance in the epic struggle to come. We must alert the member states and call a meeting, perhaps the most important meeting of the modern age.'

O'SHEA FARM

COUNTY KERRY, IRELAND

28 OCTOBER, 1996, 5:30 P.M.

To the untrained eye, it seemed like just another lonely old farmhouse on a hilltop overlooking the Atlantic. To the trained eye, however, it was something else entirely. The experienced professional would have noticed no less than twenty heavily-armed Irish commandos standing guard around the estate, scanning the horizon.

To be sure, this was an unusual setting for an international meeting, but this was not a meeting that the participants wanted widely known.

The state of the world at that time was grim. Iraq had been chased out of Kuwait, but now it played cat-and-mouse games with UN weapons inspectors. Europe was furious with the United States over steel tariffs. India and Pakistan, already engaged in a phony war, were both on the verge of entering the Nuclear Weapons Club.

But all these were big ticket issues, and the small group of nations gathered together today were not big ticket players in world affairs. They were small countries—mice, not lions—relative minnows of world affairs.

Not for long.

The mice were about to roar.

Seven of the eight delegations now sat in the main sitting room of the farmhouse, waiting. Each national delegation consisted of two

or three people—one senior diplomat, and one or two military

personnel.

The view out through the windows was breathtaking—a splendid vista of the wild waves of the Atlantic smashing against the coast—but no-one at this gathering cared much for the view.

The Arabs checked their watches impatiently, frowning. Their leader, a wily old sheik from the United Arab Emirates named Anzar al Abbas, said: 'There's been no word from Professor Epper for over six months. What makes you think he'll even come?'

The Canadians, typically, sat there calmly and patiently, their leader simply saying, 'He'll be here.'

Abbas scowled.

While he waited, he flipped through his briefing kit and started re-reading the mysterious book extract that had been provided for all the participants at the meeting.

It was headed 'The Golden Capstone' . . .

THE GOLDEN CAPSTONE

From: When Men Built Mountains: The Pyramids

by Chris M. Cameron (Macmillan, London, 1989)

Perhaps the greatest mystery of the pyramids is the most obvious one: the Great Pyramid at Giza stands nine feet shorter than it

should.

For once upon a time at its peak sat the most revered object

in all of history.

The Golden Capstone.

Or, as the Egyptians called it, the Benben.

Shaped like a small pyramid, the Capstone stood nine feet tall and was made almost entirely of gold. It was inscribed with hieroglyphics and other more mysterious carvings in an unknown language, and on one side—the south side—it featured the Eye of

Horus.

Every morning it shone like a jewel as it received the first rays

of the rising sun—the first earthly object in Egypt to receive those sacred rays.

The Great Capstone was actually made up of seven pieces, its pyramidal form cut into horizontal strips, creating six pieces that were trapezoidal in shape and one, the topmost piece, that was itself pyramidal (small pyramids such as this were called pyramidions).

We say that the Capstone was made almost entirely of gold, because while its body was indeed crafted from solid gold, it featured a thin bore-hole that ran vertically down through its core, in the exact centre of the Capstone.

This hollow was about two inches wide and it cut downward through each of the seven pieces, punching holes in all of them. Embedded in each of those circular holes could be found a crystal, not unlike the lens of a magnifying glass. When placed in sequence those seven crystals served to concentrate the Sun's rays on those days when it passed directly overhead.

This is a crucial point.

Many scholars have noted that the construction of the Great Pyramid by the pharaoh Khufu curiously coincides with the solar event known as the Tartarus Rotation. This phenomenon involves the rotation of the Sun and the subsequent appearance of a powerful sunspot that comes into alignment with the Earth.

Accomplished Sunwatchers that they were, the Egyptians certainly knew of the Sun's rotation, sunspots, and indeed of the sunspot that we call 'Tartarus'. Aware of its intense heat, they called it 'Ra's Destroyer'. (They also knew of the smaller sunspot that precedes Tartarus by seven days, and so labelled it 'The Destroyer's Prophet'.)

The last Tartarus Rotation occurred in 2570 BC, just a few years after the Great Pyramid was completed. Interestingly, the next Rotation will occur in 2006, on March 20, the day of the vernal equinox, the time when the Sun is perfectly perpendicular to the Earth.

Those theorists who link the construction of the pyramid to

Tartarus also claim that the Capstone's unique 'crystal array' has the ability to capture and harness solar energy, while the more outrageous authors claim it possesses fabulous paranormal powers.

Having said this, however, it should be noted that the Golden Capstone only sat atop the Great Pyramid for a very short time.

The day after the Tartarus Rotation of 2570 BC, the Capstone was removed, and taken to a secret location where it rested for over 2,000 years.

It has since disappeared from history altogether, so that now all that remains of it is an ominous inscription found on the empty summit of the Great Pyramid at Giza itself:

Cower in fear, cry in despair,

You wretched mortals

For that which giveth great power

Also takes it away.

For lest the Benben be placed at sacred site

On sacred ground, at sacred height,

Within seven sunsets of the arrival of Ra's prophet,

At the high-point of the seventh day,

The fires of Ra's implacable Destroyer will devour us all.

A door slammed somewhere. Abbas looked up from his reading.

Footsteps.

Then the sitting room door opened, and through it stepped—

—Professor Max T. Epper and Captain Jack West Jr.

Epper wore a classic academic's tweed coat. His beard back then was just as white and long as it would be 10 years later.

West wore his miner's jacket and some brand-new steel-soled boots. His ice-blue eyes scanned the room, sharp as lasers, ever watchful.

And his left arm ended at the elbow.

Everyone noticed it.

Whispers rippled across the room.

'The ones who found the Scrolls of the Museion . . .' one of the Arabs whispered.

'Epper is Professor of Archaeology at Trinity College in Dublin, a brilliant fellow, but he also has doctorates in physics and electromagnetics . . .'

'And Huntsman?'

'He was military, but not anymore. Worked alongside the Americans in Iraq in '91. But after what the Americans did to him there, well—'

'What on earth has happened to his arm?'

Abbas stood up. 'Where is the girl, Maximilian? I thought you were bringing her.'

'We left her at a secure location,' Epper said. 'Her safety at this juncture is of paramount importance. Her actual presence at this meeting, my old friend Anzar, is not.'

Epper and West sat down at the table, joining the seven delegations.

Epper sat with the Canadians.

West sat alone, attaching himself to none of the seven countries at the table. He was the eighth delegation. His home nation had sent no other representative, having decided that his presence at this meeting was sufficient.

That nation: Australia.

The host, the leader of the Irish delegation, General Colin O'Hara, formally opened the meeting.

'My friends, welcome to Ireland, and to a meeting of tremendous significance. I will get directly to the point. Seven months ago, members of a European military-archaeological team found the pregnant wife of the Oracle of Siwa in her hideaway in Uganda. It is not known how they found her, but we do know that the leader of the European expedition was the eminent Vatican historian Father Francisco del Piero. Del Piero's specialty is ancient Egyptian religious practices, particularly Sun worship.

'In accordance with the dictates of an ancient Egyptian Sun cult, del Piero and his team took the pregnant woman to a remote volcano in Uganda on the day of the vernal equinox, March 20.

'At noon on the day of the equinox, by the so-called "pure" light of the Sun, in a chamber cut into the flank of the volcano, the Oracle's wife gave birth to a son, whom del Piero immediately abducted.

'Del Piero and his military escorts then left, leaving the mother to die inside the chamber.

'But then something most unexpected occurred.

'After del Piero's team had departed, the Oracle's wife gave birth to another child, a girl. Through the extraordinary efforts of Professor Epper and Captain West, this baby girl was recovered, alive and well . . .'

There was, of course, more to it than that, West thought as he listened.

He and Epper had actually found the Oracle's wife a day before the Europeans. Her name was Malena Okombo and she had been living in hiding, in fear of her abusive husband, the present-day Oracle of Siwa. Pregnant with the Oracle's heir (or heirs), she had fled from his fists and rages, the petulant rages of a spoilt man. West had sympathised with Malena immediately, promised to look after her. But then the Europeans had arrived the following day in great numbers and abducted her—leading to the incident at the volcano.

O'Hara was still talking: 'It is this extremely fortunate occurrence—the birth of a second Oracle—that brings us together today. Professor Epper, if you will . . .'

Epper stood up. 'Thank you, Colin.' He addressed the assembled delegates. 'Ms Kissane, gentlemen. Our eight small nations come together today at a pivotal moment in history.

'The actions of Father del Piero and his men in Uganda can mean only one thing, a most dangerous thing. The Europeans are making their move. After 2,000 years of searching, they have just secured the key to discovering the greatest, most sought-after treasure in human history: the Golden Capstone of the Great Pyramid.'

'Allow me to elaborate,' Epper said.

'As you will have read in your briefing materials, there was once a magnificent Golden Capstone that sat atop the Great Pyramid. It, however, was removed from the apex of the structure soon after the Great Pyramid was completed, staying there for only a few short years.

'It is not mentioned in any Egyptian records after that time nor is its final resting place known.

'Over the ages since then, the Golden Capstone has been the subject of countless myths and legends. The Persian King, Cambyses, tried to find it at the Siwa Oasis in the Western Desert, only to lose 50,000 men in the attempt, consumed in a sandstorm of unusual ferocity.

'Julius Caesar tried to locate it, but failed. Napoleon took an entire army to Egypt to find it, and failed. The tale of Jason and the Argonauts and their attempt to acquire a mystical, all-powerful "Golden Fleece"—written by Appollonius of Rhodes—is widely believed to be a thinly-veiled allegory for the search for the Golden Capstone.

'But all the legends have one thing in common. In all of them the Capstone is said to possess unusual properties. It is said to be a source of immense power; it is said to contain the secret to perpetual motion; it is said to be a solar polariser, capable of absorbing the rays of the Sun.

'And then, of course, there are the occult myths: that the Capstone is a talisman of evil, forged in a bloody ceremony by occultist priests; that the nation that claims it as their own and keeps it in their lands will be unconquerable in battle; that it is a piece of alien technology brought to Earth thousands of years ago as a gift from a higher civilisation.'

The representative of New Zealand said: 'And now the European Union wants it—'

'Ahem,' O'Hara said. 'These nations do not represent the European Union. Ireland and Spain are members of the EU, and Father del Piero does not act in our name. While it calls itself an EU mission, it is really a coalition of four "Old European" states: France, Germany, Italy and the Vatican.'

At the mention of France the New Zealander visibly stiffened. Relations between New Zealand and France had been tense ever since the bombing by French agents of the Greenpeace boat, the Rainbow Warrior, in Auckland Harbour in 1985. 'Old Europe then. My point is if Old Europe wants the Capstone, you can be assured that her enemies are aware of this—'

'They are,' Abbas said firmly. 'The Americans are already putting together a rival expedition.'

'Wait a second,' the head of the Jamaican delegation said. 'America and Europe are enemies}'

'As only ex-friends can be,' Epper said. 'Through the vehicle of

the EU, Old Europe has been waging economic warfare on the United States for the last five years. It began when America started unfairly subsidising its steel industry, shutting more efficient European producers out of its market.'

Spain said, 'The US pressures other nations to open their markets, but then it closes off its own home market to them, protecting its own weak industries with tariffs like the steel one.'

Canada nodded. 'And ex-friends, like ex-wives and ex-husbands, make for the bitterest of foes. Europe and America despise each other. And their enmity will only get worse over time.'

Epper said, 'Which is why we are all here today. Our eight small nations are not the enemies of the United States or Old Europe. Indeed, we have fought by their side on many previous occasions. But on this matter, we have decided that we cannot sit idly by while these so-called "Great Powers" engage in a battle for the most powerful artefact known to humankind.

'No. We are gathered here today because we believe that the Capstone should not belong to any one superpower. Its power is simply too great. In short, we are here to save the world.'

'So what about the baby girl—' Abbas asked.

Epper held up his hand. 'In a moment, Anzar, in a moment. Just a little more background first. Throughout history, the Capstone has been sought by many powerful individuals: Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, Richard the Lionheart, Napoleon, Lord Kitchener and, most recently, by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. It is worshipped by organisations such as the Templars and the Freemasons, and, this will surprise some, the Catholic Church. All of them believe the same thing: whosoever finds the Capstone and performs an ancient ritual with it will rule the Earth for a thousand years.'

The room was silent.

Epper went on.

'Only one man in history is believed to have actually held the Capstone in his possession and harnessed its awesome power. He is

also the one who, according to legend, broke the Capstone down into its seven individual Pieces—so that no one man could ever have it whole again. He then had those Pieces spread to the distant corners of the world, to be buried within seven colossal monuments, the seven greatest structures of his age.'

'Who?' Abbas said, leaning forwards.

'The only man ever to rule the entire world of his era,' Epper said. 'Alexander the Great.'

'Seven colossal monuments?' Abbas said suspiciously. 'You're talking about the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World? Alexander had the seven Pieces of the Capstone buried within the Seven Wonders?'

'Yes,' Epper said, 'although in his lifetime, they weren't known as the Seven Ancient Wonders. That label was coined later, in the year 250 BC, by Callimachus of Cyrene, the Chief Librarian of the Library at Alexandria. Why, at the time of Alexander's death in 323 BC, only five of the Seven Wonders had actually been built.'

'My ancient history is a little rusty,' Abbas said. 'Can you remind me of the Seven Wonders, please?'

It was the young Irish woman who answered him, quickly and expertly: 'In order of construction, they are: the Great Pyramid at Giza. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. The Lighthouse at Alexandria. And the Colossus of Rhodes.'

'Thank you, Zoe,' Epper said.

'I thought the Hanging Gardens were a myth,' Abbas said.

Epper said, 'Just because something has not been found yet does not make it a myth, Anzar. But we digress. In his lifetime, Alexander visited all five of the existing Wonders. The last two Wonders—the Lighthouse and the Colossus—would be built by his closest friend and general, Ptolemy I, who would himself later become Pharaoh of Egypt.

'This creates a curious coincidence: taken together, these two titans of their age visited all seven of the sites that would subsequently be called the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World.

'Sure enough, soon after their deaths, the concept of seven "great" structures came into being.

'But don't be fooled. This was no coincidence at all. As I've said, the idea of the Seven Wonders of the World was first espoused by Callimachus of Cyrene in 250 BC. He did this in a text called "A Collection of Wonders around the World" now known simply as the Callimachus Text.

'Callimachus, however, was not publishing some idle list. He was a man who knew everything about Alexander, Ptolemy and the

Golden Capstone.

'By pinpointing these seven structures—and let's be honest, there were other just-as-impressive monuments in existence at the time that were not included—Callimachus was drawing a map, a clear and specific map to the location of the Pieces of the Golden Capstone.'

'According to the Callimachus Text, the Capstone was cut into Pieces like so.' Epper drew a pyramid on the whiteboard and cut across it horizontally, dividing it into seven bands.

'Seven Pieces: one pyramidal tip, six trapezoidal base Pieces, all of varying sizes, which we number from the top down, one through seven. Then they were hidden in each of the Seven

Wonders.'

'Wait,' Abbas said, 'the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World have long since fallen, been disassembled, or simply disappeared. How can we find these Pieces in structures that no longer exist?'

Epper nodded. 'This is a good point. Apart from the Great Pyramid, none of the Seven Wonders has survived to the present day. The Callimachus Text, however, has.

'And let me make something else clear: while it bears his name, Callimachus was not the only person to write it. His Text is a compendium of writings from many writers, all of them members of a secret cult who updated it and revised it over the course of 1,500 years. They did keep track of every Wonder, even after they fell, and

by extension they kept track of every Piece of the Capstone. Allow me to explain.'

'There is a well-known story about Alexander the Great. Before he embarked on his campaign in Persia, Alexander visited an Oracle at the desert oasis of Siwa in Egypt. During this visit the Oracle confirmed Alexander's belief that he was a god, no less than the son of Zeus.

'Less well known, however, is the gift that the Oracle is said to have given Alexander when he departed Siwa. It was never seen, but according to the historian Callisthenes, it occupied "a whole covered wagon that required eight donkeys to draw it".

'Whatever this gift was, it was heavy. Very heavy. Alexander would take it in its shrouded wagon with him on his all-conquering campaign across Persia.'

'You believe the Oracle gave the Capstone to Alexander?' Abbas said.

'I do. I further believe that during that campaign, Alexander systematically hid those Pieces at the five then-existing Wonders. He then left the last two Pieces with his trusted friend, Ptolemy I, who as we know would go on to build the last two Ancient Wonders.

'For, you see, this "Oracle at Siwa" was more than just a seer. The Oracle was—and is to this day—the High Priest of an ancient Sun-cult known as the Cult of Amun-Ra. Interestingly, Egyptian records knew this cult by another name: the Priests of the Capstone. That's right. They are the ones who placed the Golden Capstone on the apex of the Great Pyramid. They are also the ones who took it down.

'This Cult of Amun-Ra has endured to the present day, under many guises. For instance, the Knights of St John of Malta, and some sections of the Catholic Church.

'The Freemasons, too, have long attached great significance to the Great Pyramid—and are often accused of being a thinly-veiled

reincarnation of the Cult of Amun-Ra. Indeed, one very famous Freemason, Napoleon Bonaparte, was initiated into the order's highest ranks inside the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid.

'Other famous individuals who have been associated with the Cult of Amun-Ra include Thomas Jefferson, Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, the designer of the Statue of Liberty, Dr Hans Koenig, the famous Nazi archaeologist, and the American Vice-President Henry Wallace, the man behind the now infamous inclusion of a capstone-bearing pyramid on the US one-dollar bill.

'For our purposes, it should be noted that all of the Chief Librarians of the Library at Alexandria were key members of the Cult—among them Apollonius of Rhodes and Callimachus of Cyrene.'

Epper continued. 'As time passed and each Wonder fell, Callimachus's successors in the Cult of Amun-Ra kept careful watch over the Pieces of the Capstone, recording their resting places in the Callimachus Text.

'For example, when the Colossus of Rhodes was toppled by an earthquake, Egyptian cultists spirited away its head, rescuing the Capstone Piece on its neckpiece. The Colossus' new resting place was then noted in the Callimachus Text—but in a secret language.

'And here, Anzar, lies the importance of the little girl.

'You see, Callimachus and his successors wrote all of their entries in an ancient language, a language unlike any other in the history of man, a language that has defied translation for over 4,500 years, even by modern supercomputers.

'It is a mysterious language known as the Word of Thoth.

'Now, we believe that Father del Piero possesses a Vatican copy of the Callimachus Text—copied in secret by a Vatican spy in the 13th century. But he cannot translate it. And so he went in search of the one person in the world capable of reading the Word of Thoth: the Oracle of Siwa.

'For while Alexander has come and gone, the Oracle of Siwa lives to this very day, albeit in hiding somewhere in Africa.

'In a single unbroken line spanning more than 4,500 years, the Oracle—male or female, the Oracle can be either—has always spawned one child. And the Oracles' offspring have inherited the preternatural "sight" associated with the Oracle, thus becoming the next one.

'The extent of this "sight" has been debated over the years, but one talent peculiar to the Oracle has been documented by Egyptian, Greek and Roman writers alike: the Oracle of Siwa is the only person alive who is born with the ability to read the Word of Thoth.

'Since Callimachus's followers died out sometime in the 14th century, the Oracle is now the only person on Earth who can decode the Callimachus Text and thus reveal the locations of the Seven Ancient Wonders.'

'As we have just heard, led by Francisco del Piero, the European coalition did not locate the Oracle himself, but they did find his pregnant wife, which is just as well: the Oracle, a foul, distasteful man by all accounts, was killed two months later in a drunken accident. Had he been located sooner, this mission would have been significantly easier and could have started immediately.

'In any case, now the Europeans have a new-born Oracle—a boy—which means that when he reaches sufficient age, he will be able to decode the Text. According to ancient sources, a new Oracle begins to command his or her abilities around the age of ten.

'Once del Piero has the ability to decode the Callimachus Text, his European force will commence upon the greatest treasure hunt in history: a search for the seven Pieces of the Golden Capstone.'

The Irish woman, Zoe Kissane, leaned forwards: 'Only on this occasion, by some fluke, the Oracle's wife gave birth to twins. And we have the other child: a girl.'

'Correct,' Epper said. 'And now it becomes a race. A race based solely on the maturation of two children. As they grow, they will learn to command their abilities, and when they are able to read the Word of Thoth, they will be able to decipher the Callimachus Text.'

'Which means the girl's wellbeing is of the utmost importance,' O'Hara said. 'She is to be guarded around the clock, nurtured and brought to maturity, so that when the time comes, she can translate the Text and guide us to the Wonders before the Europeans or the Americans can get them.'

Epper nodded in agreement. 'Make no mistake, people. The odds are against us. Our rivals from America and Old Europe are already employing hundreds of scientists in pursuit of this goal. When the time comes, they will send entire armies after those seven Pieces.

'We do not have their resources, or their numbers. But having said that, we are not entirely without advantages.

'First. Aiding our quest is the fact that the two superpowers do not know we are embarking on it. They don't know we have the girl.

'And second: we are not after the entire Capstone. We only need to get one Piece. If we do that, we deprive our adversaries of the power of the entire Capstone. Granted, getting just one Piece will be a titanic task.'

Epper scanned the room.

'This is a weighty responsibility, too weighty for one nation alone to bear. Which is why we have all come together today, a group of small nations who are prepared to join forces to combat the great powers of our time. And so the following course of action is proposed: each member of this group of nations will provide one soldier to share in the guardianship of the girl—both in her growth and in our ultimate quest to find one Piece of the Capstone.

'But I warn you. This will be a long mission, a mission of years, not months. It will also be one of constant vigilance, self-sacrifice and discipline. The group of chosen soldiers will accompany Captain West and myself to the safehouse where the girl is now being kept. There we shall guard her and raise her, in absolute secrecy, until she is ready to fulfil her destiny.'

The seven delegations formed into huddles, whispered among themselves. Since he was his own delegation, West didn't need to discuss anything with anyone.

At length, they reconvened, each nation presenting its selected guardian.

Canada already had Max Epper.

Sheik Abbas said, 'On behalf of the United Arab Emirates, I offer the services of my second son, Captain Zahir al Anzar al Abbas.'

The trooper who had been sitting beside Abbas for the duration of the meeting stood. He was a rotund fellow, short and round— some would say chubby—with a bushy black beard and turban.

'Captain Zahir al Anzar al Abbas, heavy arms, explosives, 1st Commando Squadron, at your command. Call-sign: Saladin.'

Then the Spaniards' representative stood: tall, handsome and athletic, he looked like Ricky Martin, only tougher. 'Lieutenant Enrique Velacruz. Unidad de Operaciones Especiales, Spanish Marines. Underwater destruction and demolition. Call-sign: Matador.''

The Jamaicans introduced a tall dreadlocked fellow named Sergeant V.J. Weatherly, call-sign: Witch Doctor.

The New Zealanders offered a big hairy-faced NZAF pilot nicknamed Sky Monster.

Last of all, the Irish proffered two representatives: one of which was the only woman to join this special multinational unit.

They sent Zoe Kissane and the giant fellow who sat at her side, her brother, Liam. Both hailed from the famed Irish commando unit, the Sciathan Fhianoglach an Airm.

She introduced herself: 'Sergeant Zoe Kissane, hostage rescue, advanced medical. Call-sign: Bloody Mary.'

He did too: 'Corporal Liam Kissane, also hostage rescue, bomb disposal, heavy arms. Call-sign: Gunman.''

And there they stood, around the wide table, the nine chosen representatives of eight small nations who were about to embark on the mission of their lives.

They would acquire a tenth member soon—Stretch, from Israel— but he would not be a member of their choosing.

They prepared to leave. A plane was waiting to take them out of Ireland and to the secret safehouse.

At the door, Abbas spoke to his son, Saladin, in Arabic. One word kept arising: 'binf.

The short fat trooper nodded.

As he did so, West stepped past them, walking out the door.

'If you're going to talk about her,' he said, 'please stop calling her "the girl". She has a name, you know.'

'You named her?' Saladin said, surprised.

'Yes,' West said. 'I named her Lily.'

They commenced their journey to the safehouse.

It was in Africa, in Kenya, but for secrecy's sake they took a long circuitous route to get there, taking several flights over several days. On one of these flights, Saladin said to Epper, 'At the meeting we were given an extract from a book. It told of the Capstone and the Tartarus Sunspot. What is this Tartarus Sunspot and what relationship does it bear with the Great Pyramid and its Capstone?'

Epper nodded. 'Good question. It is a most curious relationship, but one that takes on a new level of importance at this time.' 'Why?'

'Because in ten years' time, in March 2006, we will see the second great turning of the Sun in modern times, a solar event that has not occurred in over 4,500 years.'

The big-bearded Arab frowned. 'The second great turning of the Sun? What is that?'

'Although you can't see it, our Sun actually spins on its own axis, much like the Earth does. Only it doesn't turn in a flat, even rotation as we do. Rather, it rocks slowly up and down as it spins. As such, every 4,000-4,500 years, a certain section of the Sun—a sunspot known as the Tartarus Sunspot—comes into direct alignment with our planet. This is a bad thing.' 'Why?'

'Because the Tartarus Sunspot is the single hottest point on the surface of the Sun,' Zoe Kissane said, coming over and sitting down. 'The ancient Greeks named it after one of the two realms of their Underworld. The nicer realm was the Elysian Fields: it was a place of eternal happiness. The nasty one, a cursed land of

screaming, flames and punishment, was known as the Tartarus Plains.'

'Global temperatures have been rising steadily for twenty years now,' Epper said, 'because the Tartarus Sunspot is approaching. When it shines directly upon the Earth, as it has done before, for about two weeks, temperatures will rise to unbearably high levels, around 110° Celsius.

'Rainforests will shrivel. Rivers will boil. Humankind will have to move indoors for that time. It will be a literal scorching of the Earth, but it is survivable.

'The problem is: the polar ice caps will melt, causing massive global floods. The oceans will rise by perhaps 15 metres. Many coastal cities worldwide will be severely damaged. But as I say, this is survivable, given due warning.'

'Okay . . .' Saladin said.

Epper wasn't finished. 'Now, we have geological records of similar mass global water-risings in the past—specifically in the years 15,000 BC, 10,500 BC and 6,500 BC.

'The flood of 15,000 BC is believed to have been the giant oceanic movement that flooded the Persian Gulf; while the flood of 10,500 BC is widely acknowledged as the "Great Flood" mentioned in religious texts worldwide: Noah's flood in the Bible, the floods mentioned in ancient Sumerian texts; even the Australian Aborigines refer to a Great Flood in their Dreamtime folklore.

'The most recent global flood, that of 6,500 BC, broadly correlates with the worldwide episode of water-rise known as the Flandrian transgression, where entire coastlines were submerged by about twenty metres.'

Epper leaned forwards to make his point: 'All three of these major global floods occurred during a Tartarus Rotation.

'The thing is,' he raised a finger, 'in 2,570 BC, during the most recent Tartarus Rotation, no such mass global flooding took place.'

Saladin frowned. 'You're saying that something stopped the cataclysm? Something to do with the pyramids?'

'Yes,' Epper said. 'It's complicated but, you see, prior to King

Djoser in 2,660 BC the Egyptians never built pyramids. And after Menkaure in 2,503 BC they stopped building giant ones. The fact is: for a period of 160 years, the Egyptians went on an absolute frenzy of pyramid-building, the high-point of which was the Great Pyramid. And then they never did it again.

'They just stopped . . . immediately after the Tartarus Rotation of 2,570 BC. Later Egyptian architecture was certainly impressive and colossal—but it didn't involve pyramids.''

'So you think the Egyptians knew something about the coming of this Tartarus Sunspot?' Saladin said. 'What, were they visited by aliens or something and told to build the Great Pyramid and put this special Capstone on it?'

Epper just raised his bushy eyebrows theatrically. 'I don't know why the Egyptians started building pyramids. But they did. In a rush and on a scale never seen before then and not seen since. And for some reason, the Tartarus Sunspot had no effect on planet Earth in the year 2,570 BC. The Great Pyramid was built, the sunspot passed—harmlessly—and the Egyptians took down the Golden Capstone, hid it, and stopped building pyramids.' 'So how do you explain it?' Saladin asked. 'Putting aside for the moment all the occultist literature, I believe the crystals in the Capstone are the key. I think the Capstone is a polariser, a crystal array that absorbs the superhot rays of the Tartarus Sunspot, rendering them harmless.'

'And the occultist literature? These tales about obtaining global power for a thousand years?'

Epper's face became grave. 'The scientist in me scoffs at them. But something else gives me pause before discarding them completely. Eve seen enough in my life to know that some things defy scientific explanation.

'The inscription on the summit of the Great Pyramid tells of placing the "Benben"—that's another word for the Capstone—at sacred site, on sacred ground, at sacred height within seven days of the arrival of the minor sunspot, Ra's Prophet.

'This is a reference to an ancient ritual, a ritual passed down

through the Cult of Amun-Ra, a ritual to be performed at the arrival of the Tartarus Sunspot. This ritual involves the intoning of a sacred incantation—the words of which are carved into the very Pieces of the Capstone.

'But this ritual can be performed in two ways: one for good, the other for ill. With the Capstone in place atop the Great Pyramid, if you utter the noble incantation—known as the ritual of peace—the world will be spared the wrath of Tartarus and life will go on. This is also to our advantage: if we fail in our quest to obtain a Piece of the Capstone, we could yet be able to utter the good incantation over the replaced Capstone.'

'And the evil spell?' Saladin asked hesitantly.

Epper's face went grim.

'The evil incantation—the ritual of power—will also spare the world from the blaze of Tartarus by capturing the Sun's rays in the Capstone's crystal array, but at a terrible price.

'For, according to the ancient texts, when the entire Capstone is placed on the summit of the Great Pyramid at noon on the seventh day and a designated amount of pure soil from one nation is placed in a crucible inside it and the ritual of power is uttered, "all earthly power" will be invested in that nation for 1,000 years.'

Epper stared at Saladin. 'The Capstone is the ultimate test of mankind's mettle. In the face of cataclysm, it can be used selflessly for the universal good, or it can be used selfishly, to attain absolute power.'

'Or there is the third option,' Saladin said. 'Our option. If we obtain a single Piece of this Capstone and withhold it, we condemn the world to two weeks of catastrophic weather and floods, but not 1,000 years of slavery. A lesser-of-two-evils argument, Dr Epper?'

'Something like that,' Epper said quietly. 'Either way, my Arab friend, the fate of the world now depends on our efforts.'

VICTORIA STATION SOUTHERN KENYA 1996-2006

Within days of the historic meeting, the team was in Kenya—living and working and training—at a remote farm-station near the Tanzanian border. On a clear day, to the south they could see the mighty cone of Kilimanjaro peeking above the horizon.

Far from the Western world.

Far from their enemies.

The farm—very deliberately—had wide flat treeless pastures stretching for two miles in every direction from the central farmhouse.

There would be no unexpected visitors to this place.

The team raised few eyebrows among the locals.

To the Kenyans, Victoria Station was just another working farm, populated by a few foreigners, all working for the old man, Epper, and his lovely wife, Doris. Grey-haired, patient and kind, she had come from Canada to join her husband on this mission and provide a much-needed grandmotherly figure on the farm.

Of course, the locals soon became aware of a baby girl on the property—every now and then, Doris or a worker from the farm would come into town to buy baby food, formula milk, diapers and sometimes toys.

But the Kenyans simply assumed that the olive-skinned girl was the daughter of the young blonde woman at the farm, who in turn

was presumably the wife of one of the men.

The locals, however, never noticed that every single night, there were always two members of the team patrolling the perimeter of the property.

Lily grew up quickly.

Indeed, she transformed rapidly from a happy gurgling baby into an inquisitive toddler who on taking her first steps became an absolute security nightmare.

It was not uncommon to see seven crack commandos frantically upturning chairs, couches or hay bales trying to find a giggling little girl who could disappear seemingly almost at will.

Then she began to talk and to read.

Inevitably, she was the product of many influences.

When she saw Saladin kneeling towards Mecca, she asked him what he was doing. It was he who taught her about Islam—only growing tongue-tied once when, as a four-year-old, she asked him why some Islamic women wore head-covering burqas.

'If they do not wear the burqa, some men will not. . . er . . . respect them,' Saladin said, clearing his throat.

'Zoe doesn't wear a burqa,' Lily said.

Several members of the team were eating nearby at the time: Zoe, Epper and West. Smiling, Zoe looked expectantly at Saladin, waiting for his answer.

'Well, no, she doesn't, because she is not a Muslim.'

'But you can see her head, right?' Lily asked.

'Yes...'

'Which means, according to Islam, you mustn't respect her.'

Saladin blushed bright pink. 'Well, no ... I do respect Miss Zoe. Very much.'

'Then why do Muslim women wear these burqa things?'

Saladin was helpless.

It was Zoe who saved him. 'Not all men are as gentlemanly as Aziz, Lily. They can't control their urges as well as he can.'

'Urges?' Lily asked, zeroing in on the new word.

Zoe said, 'And that is a topic we will address when you're a little older.'

All this time, a sheet of paper hung in the kitchen, attached by a magnet to the refrigerator—on it were seven boxes, filled with a strange kind of writing, reproductions of the seven main verses in the Callimachus Text. It looked like this:

It was positioned so that Lily saw it every day when she went to get her morning juice. When she asked what it said, Doris Epper answered: 'We don't know. We're hoping that one day you'll be able to tell us.'

When she hit five years of age, Max Epper took charge of her schooling, teaching her maths, science, ancient history and languages—with an emphasis on Latin, Greek and cuneiform.

It turned out she had a singular aptitude for languages, learning them quickly and fluidly—with almost unnatural ease.

By age 7, she had mastered Latin and Greek.

By 8, she was deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics.

By 9, she had outstripped Epper in his knowledge of cuneiform— translating all three of the ancient languages from the Bisitun Monument.

Not to mention the modern languages she was learning just by speaking with her multinational guardians. She particularly loved the difficult Gaelic tongue spoken by her Irish protectors, Zoe and Liam Kissane.

Epper was a wonderful teacher.

Lily just adored him—loved his wise old face, his kind blue eyes, and the gentle yet clever way he taught.

And so she renamed him Wizard.

Every day, she would race to his schoolroom in the east wing of the farmhouse to learn new and interesting things.

Poems like 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' were acted out with verve and energy.

Simple arithmetic was illustrated with farming examples.

And science was a blast—literally. For Wizard had all manner of crazy home-made inventions in his workshop at the farm. Gadgets

and tools that emerged from his dabblings in electromagnetism and foam epoxies.

He once told Lily that a long time ago he had worked at a laboratory called Sandia in the United States, and that it was a secret place where they made secret things.

She liked that. Secret things.

She got along with the team members in different ways.

Although she wasn't a very girly girl, Zoe taught Lily some necessary girly things—like brushing her hair, filing her nails and how to make boys do her bidding.

Matador, the Spanish trooper, spent a lot of time in the gym they'd set up in the smaller barn. At first he let Lily watch him work out. Then, as she grew bigger, he let her sit on one end of a plank of wood while he bench-pressed it, balancing her mass with lead weights at the other end, lifting her high into the air. She loved that.

Witch Doctor, the Jamaican commando, taught her how to tread in silence—they would terrorise Doris Epper, sneaking up on her when she dozed on the veranda in the afternoon Sun.

But the soldier she bonded with most was Zoe's brother, Liam, call-sign Gunman.

Gunman was a big guy, broad and tall, easily six-foot-three— with a wide honest face, a fully-shaven head, and large jug ears.

He wasn't all that smart, but he was a great commando.

With Lily, though, he just clicked—perhaps because they were of an equal intelligence level, even though he was 24 and she was just a kid.

They watched movies and read books together.

They played the video game Splinter Cell endlessly in dual-player mode—killing baddies left, right and centre, co-ordinating their moves with loud shouts and commands. They actually made a good team, winning the inaugural 'Victoria Station Dual-Player Splinter Cell Competition', defeating Wizard and Zoe in a hard-fought final.

They went on adventures around the station—including one visit to a giant hangar concealed in the western hills of the property, inside which they found the towering Halicarnassus.

Lily gazed in awe at the great 747, and felt a thrill of excitement when she walked up to it, touched it and read a peculiar inscription on its underbelly: 'PRESIDENT ONE—AIR FORCE OF IRAQ'.

But most of all, no-one would ever forget the famous tea party held on the front lawn one summer, with Mister Bear, Little Dog, Big Dog, Barbie, Lily and Gunman—huge Gunman, all 6 feet of him, hunched over on a tiny plastic chair, sipping from a plastic teacup, allowing Lily to pour him another cup of imaginary tea.

Everyone in the team saw it—watching from inside the farmhouse, alerted by a whisper from Doris. The thing was, no-one ever—ever—teased Gunman about the incident.

This was unusual.

They were soldiers. They could and did make fun of each other on a regular basis, but for some reason, Gunman's relationship with Lily was off-limits.

Well, except for the time he and Lily broke into Aziz's workshop in the big barn, took a plasticine-like substance from his lock-box and used it to blow up Barbie's campervan.

Both Gunman and Lily copped hell for that.

And so, gradually, the team became a family—a family centred around the protection and nurturing of one little girl.

Of course, Lily loved the attention—like when she discovered ballet and put on a one-girl show to a cheering audience of seven commandos and two grandparent-like figures.

And still every day, when she appeared in the kitchen for breakfast, whoever happened to be there at the time would turn to see if she noticed the sheet of paper magnetised to the fridge.

But then one day, when she was seven, there was a commotion.

As the team was eating breakfast, a radio squawked: 'All units. This is Sentry One, I have an intruder coming in through the main gate:

Everyone leapt up, alarmed at the presence of an outsider, worried that other nations might know of their mission.

The intruder turned out to be a lone man—tall and thin, with a sanguine face—walking casually down the dirt road from the main gate.

Three hidden guns were trained on him as he rang the doorbell.

Wizard answered the door. 'Can I help you, young man?'

'Indeed you can, Professor Epper,' the thin man said. He had a dry pale face, with high cheekbones and deep hollow eye sockets.

Wizard blanched, did a double-take.

The intruder's grey eyes never blinked. He knew that he had just chilled Wizard to the very bone.

'Professor Max T Epper,' he said, 'Professor of Archaeology at Trinity College, Dublin, and the representative of Canada on a secret eight-nation task force protecting the daughter of the Oracle of Siwa, with a view to obtaining the lost Capstone of the Great Pyramid. My name is Lieutenant Benjamin Cohen, call-sign Archer, formerly of the Sayaret Matkal, now of the Israeli Mossad. I've been sent by my government to join your task force.'

West stepped out from behind Wizard.

'Why hello, Jack,' Archer said familiarly. 'Haven't seen you since Desert Storm. Heard about what you did at that SCUD base outside

Basra. Very nice. And Israel appreciated your efforts; although we still don't know how you got out. My bosses said you were involved in this, which was why they sent me. They thought you would accept me more than you would a total stranger.'

'They were right, Ben,' West said. 'It's the only thing keeping you alive right now.'

'Don't shoot the messenger.'

'Why not?' West said and for the briefest of moments, Archer's confident air fell.

West said, 'I don't like having my hand forced, Ben, and you've got us over a barrel here.'

Archer said seriously, 'This is big, Jack. Affairs of state. Fate of the world and all that. This confrontation between Europe and the US has been coming for a long time. Let's just say, Israel always likes to be involved. If it makes you feel better, I have orders to place myself under your direct command.'

West pondered this a moment.

Then he said, 'No contact with home. No reporting back to Mossad until the mission is achieved.'

'I have to report back sometime—'

'No reporting back to Mossad until the mission is achieved or I blow your brains out right now, Ben.'

Archer held up his hands, smiled. 'Can't argue with that. You've got a deal.'

The team was stunned—but they knew they didn't have any choice in the matter.

Either they allowed Archer to join their team or the Israelis would just advise the Americans of their mission.

How the Israelis had discovered them, they didn't know—but then the Mossad is the most ruthless and efficient intelligence service in the world. It knows everything.

What was also apparent, however, was that Israel did not want to see the Capstone fall into the hands of either America or

Europe—which meant Israel had an interest in the mission succeeding. That was good.

The big question, however, was what Israel planned to do at the end of the mission. Could Archer and Israel be trusted then?

At first, hardly anyone even spoke to Archer—which the ever-cool Israeli didn't seem to mind at all.

But no man is an island, and one day he joined West as he carried out some repairs on the station . . . and so began the process of becoming part of the team.

And slowly, over the course of many months, by working and sweating and training with the others, he became accepted as one of them.

One member of their little community, however, always regarded Archer with great suspicion.

Saladin.

As an Arab and a Muslim, he distrusted the Israeli intensely, but he also knew that Archer's presence in Kenya was now a given.

He would often say that while he had to accept Archer's presence, he didn't have to like it.

As all this was happening, Lily's development was proceeding apace.

She was always inquisitive, always watching.

Watching Saladin go off into the big barn and disappear inside his explosives workshop. He was so sweet and cuddly, she renamed him Pooh Bear.

Watching the new man, Archer, go out to the western paddock and practise firing his ultralong Barrett sniper rifle at far-off targets—and hitting the target every single time. She watched him closely, even when he disassembled his rifle. He was so tall and thin, she started calling him Stretch. (She also noticed that Pooh Bear and Stretch hardly ever even spoke. She did not know why.)

Watching Witch Doctor do chin-ups. From an early age, she had loved his wild dreadlocked hair. He became Fuzzy.

Watching the two youngest troopers, Matador and Gunman, jog together, train together and drink together. This earned them their new callsigns: Noddy and Big Ears.

And, of course, watching Zoe.

Idolising Zoe.

Being the only twenty-something female Lily knew, it wasn't unexpected that Zoe would become her feminine role model.

And Zoe Kissane was a good role model. She could outlast the men in fitness tests, outwit most of them at dinner-table discussions, and she could often be found studying history books deep into the night.

It was not uncommon to find Lily sitting in an armchair late at

night beside Zoe, fast asleep with a book open, trying to imitate the pretty Irish woman.

Naturally, Lily called her Princess Zoe.

But above all, the one person Lily enjoyed watching most was Jack West Jr.

She would never forget the day in 2000 when Wizard had presented West with a shiny new silver arm.

With Zoe assisting, Wizard spent the whole day attaching the high-tech arm to West's left elbow, pausing every now and then to frown and say something like, 'The arm's CPU is experiencing interference from somewhere. Aziz, would you turn off the television set, please.' Eventually, he changed some frequencies on the arm's central processing unit and it worked to his satisfaction.

The four-year-old Lily had watched them keenly as they worked.

She was aware that West had lost his arm on the day she was born, in the process of saving her life, so she really wanted his new arm to work.

At the end of the day, the arm was on, and West flexed his new metal fingers. His new hand could actually grip things far more tightly and firmly than his natural right hand could.

True to his word, Wizard had built West an arm that was better than the one he'd been born with.

Other things about West intrigued Lily.

For one thing, of all the team at the farm, he hung out with her the least.

He didn't play with her.

He didn't teach her any special subject.

He would spend most days in his study, poring over old books— really old books with titles like Ancient Egyptian Building Methods, Imhotep and the Architects of Amun-Ra and one really old scroll titled in Greek: A Collection of Wonders from around the World.

Lily loved his study.

It had lots of cool stuff arrayed around its walls: sandstone tablets, a crocodile skull, the skeleton of some ape-like creature Lily couldn't recognise, and hidden in one corner, a glass jar filled with a very strange kind of rusty-red sand. On a secret mission of her own late one night, she discovered that the jar's lid was sealed tight, too tightly for her to open. It remained a mystery.

There was also a medium-sized whiteboard attached to the far wall, on which West had scribbled all sorts of notes and pictures. Things like:

HOWARD CARTER (1874-1939):

Found Tutankhamen's tomb; also discovered Queen Hatshepsut's unused tomb (KV20) in Valley of the Kings in 1903. Empty tomb, never used. Unfinished carving on tomb's east wall is only known picture of Capstone atop Great Pyramid receiving vertical shaft of sunlight:

After this West had noted: 'Queen Hatshepsut: only female pharaoh, prolific obelisk builder'.

One note on the board, however, caught Lily's eye.

It was at the very bottom corner of the whiteboard, under all the others, almost deliberately out of the way. It read simply: '4 MISSING DAYS OF MY LIFE—CORONADO?'

Once, late at night, she had seen West staring at those words, tapping his pencil against his teeth, lost in thought.

Whenever West worked in his study, his falcon always sat loyally on his shoulder—alerting him with a squawk when anyone approached.

Lily was intrigued by Horus.

She was an absolutely stunning bird, proud in her bearing and laserlike in her intensity. She didn't play with Lily—despite Lily's continued efforts to coax her.

Bouncing balls, fake mice, nothing Lily used could draw the falcon out into play. No, whatever silly thing Lily did to get her attention, Horus would just stare back at her with total disdain.

Horus, it seemed, cared for only one person.

Jack West.

This was a fact Lily would confirm through experimentation. One day, when once again Horus would not be drawn from West's shoulder, Lily threw her rubber mouse at West.

The falcon moved with striking speed.

She intercepted the tossed mouse easily—in mid-air halfway between Lily and West—her talons clutching the toy rodent in twin vice-like grips.

Dead mouse.

Lesson learned.

But research was not the only thing West did.

It didn't escape Lily's notice that while she was busy studying in her classroom, Huntsman would often disappear into the old abandoned mine in the hills beyond the western paddock, not far from the aeroplane hangar. Strangely, he would wear an odd uniform: a fireman's helmet and his canvas jacket. And Horus always went with him.

Lily was strictly forbidden from going into those caves.

Apparently, Wizard had built a series of traps in the mine

tunnels—traps based on those in the ancient books that he and West studied—and Huntsman would go in there to test himself against the traps.

Lily found Jack West Jr to be a bit of a mystery.

And she wondered at times, as children do, if he even liked her at all.

But one thing Lily didn't know was just how closely she herself was being observed.

Her progress with languages was being carefully monitored.

'She continues to excel,' Wizard reported, just after she turned nine. 'Her transliteration skills are like nothing I have ever seen. And she doesn't even know how good she is. She plays with languages the way Serena Williams plays with spin on a tennis ball—she can do things with it, twist it this way and that, in ways you or I can't even begin to imagine.'

Big Ears reported, 'She's physically fit, good endurance. If it ever becomes necessary, she can run six miles without breaking a sweat.'

'And she knows every inch of my study,' West said. 'She sneaks in there once a week.'

Zoe said, 'I know it isn't mission-related, but she's actually becoming quite good at something else: ballet. Watches it on cable. Now I know lots of little girls dream of becoming prima ballerinas, but Lily is actually very good at it, especially considering she's self-taught. She can hold a toe-pose unaided for close to twenty seconds—which is exceptional. The kid just loves ballet, can't get enough of it. It's a girl thing. Think you can get some ballet DVDs the next time you go to Nairobi, Wizard?'

'Certainly.'

'Ballet, you say . . .' West said.

It came as a surprise to Lily when she arrived at breakfast one day—again ignoring the sheet on the fridge—and found West

waiting for her in the kitchen, alone, dressed and ready to go somewhere.

'Hey, kiddo. Want to go out for a surprise?'

'Sure.'

The surprise was a private plane trip to Cape Town and a visit to a performance of The Nutcracker Suite by the South African

Royal Ballet.

Lily sat through the entire performance with her mouth agape, her eyes wide with wonder, entranced.

West just looked at her the whole time—and maybe once, just once, he even smiled.

In 2001, she saw the first Lord of the Rings movie. That Christmas, Sky Monster, proud of the New Zealand-born team behind the film, gave her the three books by Tolkien and read them with her. By the time the third film had come and gone in 2003, Lily and Sky Monster had re-read the books to within an inch of their

lives.

And from those readings of The Lord of the Rings, Lily got her

own callsign.

Sky Monster bestowed it on her, naming her after her favourite

character in the epic.

Eowyn.

The feisty shieldmaiden from Rohan who kills the Witch-King of Angmar, the Ringwraith whom no man can kill.

Lily loved her callsign.

And still, every day, she would enter the kitchen and get her juice— and see the sheet of paper with the strange writing on it stuck to the fridge door.

Then one morning, a few days before her tenth birthday, she looked at the uppermost box on it and said, 'Huh. I get it now. I know what that says.'

Everyone in the kitchen at the time—Doris, Wizard, Zoe and Pooh Bear—whirled around instantly.

'What does it say, Lily?' Wizard said, gulping, trying not to show his excitement.

'It's a funny language, uses letters and pictures to create sounds. It says,

Colossus.

Two entrances, one plain, one not,

Carved by the fifth Great Architect,

Out of Great Soter's tenth mine.

The easier route lies below the old mouth. Yet

In the Nubian swamp to the south of Soter's mine,

Among Sobek's minions,

Find the four symbols of the Lower Kingdom.

Therein lies the portal to the harder route.'

The next day, the entire team left Victoria Station on board the Halicarnassus, bound for the Sudan.

That same day the Sun rotated on its axis and the small sunspot that the Egyptians called Ra's Prophet appeared on its surface. In seven days, on March 20, the Tartarus Rotation would occur.

THE PHAROS

As a Wonder of the World, the Lighthouse at Alexandria has always been, terribly unfairly, the perennial runner-up.

It is second in height to the Great Pyramid at Giza—by a mere 29 metres.

It stood, intact and functioning, for 1,600 years, until it was hit by a pair of devastating earthquakes in 1300 AD. Only the Great Pyramid survived for longer.

But ultimately it would defeat the Pyramid on one important count: it was useful.

And because it survived for so long, we have many descriptions of it: Greek, Roman, Islamic.

By today's standards, it was a skyscraper.

Built on three colossal levels, it stood 117 metres high, the equivalent of a 40-storey building.

The first level was square—broad, solid and powerful. The foundation level.

The second level was octagonal and hollow.

The third and uppermost level was cylindrical and also hollow— to allow for the raising of fuel to the peak.

At the summit of the tower stood its crowning glory, Sostratus's masterpiece: the mirror.

Ten feet high and shaped like a modern satellite dish, the mirror was mounted on a sturdy base and could rotate 360 degrees. Its

concave bronze shape reflected the rays of the Sun to warn approaching ships of the dangerous shoals and submerged rocks just off Alexandria.

By night, a huge bonfire was lit in front of the mirror, allowing the great lighthouse to send its beam twenty kilometres out into the

darkened sea.

Interestingly, like the Colossus of Rhodes a few years later, it was built at the request of Ptolemy I of Egypt—Alexander the Great's close friend and general.

AIRSPACE OVER AFRICA

15 MARCH, 2006, 0200 HOURS

5 DAYS BEFORE THE ARRIVAL OF TARTARUS

The Halicarnassus roared toward Kenya.

The huge black 747, with its bristling array of missiles and gun turrets, cut a mean figure in the sky. It looked like a gigantic bird of prey—death on wings.

Inside it, West's multinational team was still recovering from their disastrous mission in the Sudan.

In the main cabin of the jumbo, West, Wizard, Lily and Pooh Bear all sat in contemplative silence. The cabin was fitted with couches, some tables, and wall-consoles for radio and communications gear.

Wizard stood. 'I'd better call the Spanish Army attache. Tell them about Noddy . . .'

He went to a nearby wall-console, grabbed the secure sat-phone there, started dialling.

West just stared into space, replaying in his mind everything that had gone wrong in the Sudan.

Lily sat with Pooh Bear, gazing at the team's original copy of the Callimachus Text.

As for the others, Fuzzy and Big Ears were in the infirmary in the rear of the plane, being treated by Zoe; and Sky Monster was up in the cockpit, flying the plane, with Stretch keeping him company.

In the main cabin, Lily scanned another entry of the Callimachus Text. The symbols on the page were ancient, alien.

Then suddenly she squealed, 'Hey!'

West snapped up. Wizard also spun.

'This entry here. I couldn't understand it before, but for some reason, I can now. It's more complex than the last one. Uses new symbols. But I can read it now.'

'What's it say?' West leapt to her side.

Lily read it aloud:

'The Pharos.

Look for the base that was once the peak of the Great Tower

In the deepest crypt of Iskender's Highest Temple,

Soter's illustrious House to the Muses,

Among the works of Eratosthenes the measurer, Hipparchus the

stargazer,

And Archimedes and Heron the machine makers, There you will find it EUCLID'S INSTRUCTIONS Surrounded by Death.'

Lily frowned. 'The word "it" has been crossed out and replaced with "Euclid's instructions". I don't know what they are.'

'I do,' Wizard said, reaching for a high-tech stainless-steel trunk behind him. It opened with a vacuum-sealed hiss. The trunk was fitted with many pigeonholes, each pigeonhole containing an ancient scroll. Wizard's collection was huge—there were at least 200 tightly rolled scrolls.

'Now where is that index? Ah, here it is.' Wizard pulled a computer printout from a sleeve in the trunk's lid. On it was a very long typewritten list. 'Now, Euclid's Instructions . . . Euclid's Instructions. I'm sure I saw that title once before. Ah, good, there we are. Just a moment.'

Wizard proceeded to rummage through his scrolls. As he did so, West typed out Lily's translation of the Text.

Stretch entered the main cabin, noticed the activity immediately.

'What's going on?'

'We may have had a development,' West said. He read one line

from the translation. '"Soter's illustrious House to the Muses". A House to the Muses is a "museion" or "museum". Soter was Ptolemy I. Soter's House to the Muses is the Library at Alexandria, otherwise known as the Museion.'

'So,' Pooh Bear said, 'in the deepest crypt of the Alexandria Library, among those works mentioned, we'll find "the base that was once the peak of the Lighthouse", whatever that is. I thought the Library was destroyed in antiquity.'

'It was,' Zoe said, coming into the main cabin. 'By the Romans in 48 BC. The Biblioteca Alexandrina was the centre of all learning in the ancient world, possessed of over 700,000 scrolls and the writings of some of the greatest thinkers in human history, and the Romans razed it to the ground.'

She saw West's translation. 'God. Look at those names. It's like a Who's Who of history's greatest minds. Eratosthenes: he calculated the circumference of the Earth. Hipparchus mapped the constellations. Archimedes figured out volume and was a prolific inventor. And Heron. Well. Heron invented geared cogwheels and a primitive steam engine 2,000 years before James Watt was even born.'

Pooh Bear asked, 'And now?'

Zoe sighed. 'The Library is gone. Long since buried underneath modern-day Alexandria. They know where it stood—and the Egyptian Government recently built a new library not far from the old site—but the Romans did their work well. Just as they had done with Carthage a hundred years previously, the Library was removed from existence. Not a single brick, text or crypt remains.'

'So all its scrolls were destroyed, then?'

'Many were, but a large portion of them was spirited away from the Library in the days before the Roman invasion. The scrolls were reputedly taken to a secret location, deep in the Atlas Mountains— and to date, have never been officially found.'

When Zoe said this last sentence, she threw West and Wizard a sideways look.

'Not everyone announces it to the world when they find something important,' West said.

'What—?' Pooh Bear said, whirling to face the scrolls Wizard was rummaging through. 'Are you telling me that those scrolls

are—'

'Ah-ha! Here it is!' Wizard exclaimed.

He extracted an ancient scroll from a pigeonhole. It was beautifully made, with ornate rollers at each end and thick cream-coloured parchment.

Wizard unrolled it, read it.

'Hmmm. Greek text. Handwriting matches that of other known Euclidian texts. One of the greatest mathematicians in history, Euclid. He created plane geometry, you know, a grid with an x and y axis, which we now call Euclidian Geometry. This scroll is undoubtedly written by him, and its title is simply "Instructions". Which makes it Euclid's Instructions, I suppose.'

'What does it say?' Pooh Bear asked.

Wizard scanned the scroll. 'It just seems to restate some of Euclid's more mundane discoveries. No reference to any ancient wonder or Golden Capstone.'

'Damn,' West said.

'Bugger,' Zoe said.

'Wait a second . . .' Wizard held up his hand. 'Look at this.'

He had unfurled the scroll to its edges, revealing a small handwritten notation at the extreme bottom of the parchment, right where it met the lower roller.

Written across the bottom of the scroll were a few lines of text, not in classical Greek, but in another language: the cuneiform-like strokes of the Word of Thoth. It read:

'Lily?' Wizard said.

Lily scanned the ancient document for a moment, then read it aloud:

'Base removed before the Roman invasion, Taken to Hamilcar's Forgotten Refuge. Follow the Deadly Coast of the Phoenicians To the inlet of the two tridents, Where you will behold the easier entrance to The sixth Great Architect's masterwork. The Seventh has lain there ever since..'

'There's that word again,' Pooh Bear said, 'base. Why do they call it a base?'

But West wasn't listening. He turned to Wizard, his face alive with excitement. 'The Callimachus Text doesn't give the location of the Pharos Piece . . .'

'No,' Wizard said. 'This scroll does. And this is the only copy. Which means—'

'—neither the Europeans nor the Americans can possibly know where this Piece rests. Max, we've got a clear run at this one.'

They stared at each other in amazement.

'Holy shit,' West said, smiling. 'We might just have a chance in this race.'

The Halicarnassus zoomed through the dawn, arriving at the northern coast of Libya, soaring over the frothy white line where the waters of the Mediterranean met the shores of the North African desert.

Inside it, West, Wizard and Zoe were making swift progress on Euclid's Instructions.

'"The Phoenicians" was another name for the people of Carthage—the trading state annihilated by Rome in the Third and last Punic War. The state of Carthage approximated modern-day Tunisia, directly south of Italy, across the Mediterranean,' Wizard said.

'And Hamilcar is Hamilcar Barca,' West said, 'father of Hannibal and commander of the Carthaginian forces in the First Punic War. I didn't know he had a refuge, let alone a forgotten one.'

Zoe commented, 'Hamilcar died in Spain in 228 BC, between the First and Second Punic Wars. He must have ordered the construction of a faraway fortress and never lived to see it.'

Wizard was on his computer: 'I'm checking my database for any references to "Hamilcar's Refuge". But I've already found this: the "Deadly Coast" was a name used by Alexandrian sailors to describe the coast of modern-day Tunisia. For 100 miles the shore is all cliffs—400 feet high and plunging vertically into the sea. Major shipwreck area even in the 20th century. Oh dear. If your ship goes down close to the shore, you can't climb out of the water because of the cliffs. People have been known to die within an arm's length of dry land. No wonder the ancient sailors feared it.'

West added, 'And the sixth Great Architect is Imhotep VI. He lived

about 100 years after Imhotep V. Clever trap-builder—fortified the island-temple of Philae near Aswan. Known for his predilection for concealed underwater entrances. There are six at Philae alone.'

Stretch said, 'Wait a moment. I thought the Egyptian civilisation was finished by the time of the Punic Wars.'

'A common misconception,' Wizard said. 'People tend to think that the ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian civilisations existed separately, one after the other, but that's not true, not at all. They coexisted. While Rome was fighting Carthage in the Punic Wars, Egypt was still flourishing under the Ptolemies. In fact, an independent Egypt would continue to exist right up until Cleopatra VII, the famous one, was defeated by the Romans in 30 BC'

'So what are these two tridents?' Pooh Bear asked.

'My guess is they are rock formations just out from the coastal cliffs,' Wizard said. 'Markers. Triple-pointed rock formations that look like tridents, marking the location of the Refuge.'

'One hundred miles of sheer-cliffed coast,' Pooh Bear groaned. 'It could take days to patrol that kind of terrain by boat. And we don't have days.'

'No,' West said. 'We don't. But I'm not planning on using a boat to scan that coastline.'

An hour later, the Halicarnassus was soaring high above the Tunisian coast, travelling parallel to it, heading westward, when suddenly its rear loading ramp opened and a tiny winged figure leapt out of the plane and plummeted down through the sky.

It was a man.

West.

Shooming head-first down through the air, his face covered by a wickedly aerodynamic oxygen-supplying full-face helmet.

But it was the object on his back that demanded attention.

A pair of lightweight carbon composite wings.

They had a span of 2.6 metres, upturned wingtips, and in their bulky centre (which covered a parachute), they possessed six

compressed-air thrusters that could be used to sustain a gliding pattern when natural glide failed.

West rocketed down through the sky at a 45-degree angle, his bullet-shaped winged body slicing through the air.

The Deadly Coast came into view.

Towering yellow cliffs fronted onto the flat blue sea. Giant, immovable. Waves crashed against them relentlessly, exploding in gigantic showers of spray.

West zoomed lower, hitting 180 km/h, before at around 800 feet . . .

... he swooped upwards and entered a slower, more serene glide pattern.

Now he soared, three hundred feet above the waves of the Mediterranean, parallel to the massive coastal cliffs.

He was flying near the Tunisian-Libyan border, a particularly desolate stretch of the North African coastline. Broad flat sand-plains stretched away from the sheer cliffs of the coast. About a klick inland, those plains rammed up against a mountain range made up of a few extinct volcanoes that ran parallel to the shore.

It was a land devoid of life. Desolate. Depressing. A place where nothing grows.

As he flew, West scanned the cliffs, searching for any rock formations on them that resembled a pair of tridents.

After ten minutes of gliding, he lost his natural glide pattern, so he ignited a compressed-air thruster. With a sharp hiss-wapp, it lifted him to a higher altitude, allowing him to glide for longer.

Then after about forty minutes—and three more compressed-air assists—he saw them.

Two rock-islands positioned about fifty metres out from the coastal cliff-face, their rocky shapes each resembling a three-fingered human hand pointing toward the sky.

Or a trident.

Two tridents.

The section of cliff immediately behind the two tridents looked particularly forbidding—vertical and rough, with the upper section of the great cliff partially overhanging its base. Very difficult to scale.

'Wizard! Come in!' West called into his radio mike. 'I've found them!'

An hour later, the Halicarnassus had landed on the flat sandy plain, dropped off a Land Rover four-wheel drive from its belly, and then lifted off to take up a holding pattern a hundred miles to the south.

Bouncing along in the Land Rover, the team joined West—now standing on the windswept cliff overlooking the two tridents. The team numbered seven, since the injured Fuzzy had stayed in the Halicarnassus with Sky Monster, along with Horus. Big Ears, however, was there and still mobile, thanks to a cocktail of painkillers.

Technically, they were in Tunisia. The landscape was empty and dry. There wasn't a village or human settlement for fifty miles in any direction.

In fact, the landscape could better be described as a moonscape: the flat sandplain, the occasional meteorite crater, and of course the chain of mountains guarding the landward approach about a kilometre inland.

'You know,' Big Ears said, 'they filmed Star Wars in Tunisia. The Tatooine scenes.'

'I can see why,' West said, not turning from the view of the sea. 'It's totally alien.'

Wizard came alongside West, handed him a printout. 'This is the only reference my database has for Hamilcar's Refuge. It's a hand-drawn sketch on papyrus found in a worker's hut in Alexandria, an Egyptian worker who must have worked on Imhotep VI's reconfiguration of Hamilcar's Refuge.'

The papyrus sheet bore a carefully-crafted diagram on it:

It was hard to tell exactly what the image depicted. Cut off at the top and bottom, it didn't seem to show the entire structure.

'Aqueducts and guard towers,' West said, 'and a filled-in excavation tunnel. Jesus, this place must be huge.' He scanned the landscape all around him, but saw nothing but barren desert and the harsh coast. 'But if it's so huge, where the hell is it?'

He checked his printout of the Euclidian clue:

Follow the Deadly Coast of the Phoenicians To the inlet of the two tridents, Where you will behold the easier entrance to The sixth Great Architect's masterwork. The Seventh has lain there ever since.

'"The inlet of the two tridents",' he read aloud. 'We've found the two tridents, so there's supposed to be an inlet here. But I don't see one. It's all just one seamless coastline.'

It was true.

There was no bay or inlet in the coast anywhere nearby.

'Just hold on a moment . . .' Epper said.

He dug into his rucksack and extracted a tripod-mounted device.

'Sonic-resonance imager,' he said, erecting the tripod on the sand. He then aimed it downward and hit a switch. 'It'll show us the density of the earth beneath our feet.'

The sonic-resonance imager pinged slowly.

Piiiing-piiiing-piiiing.

'Solid sandstone. All the way to the imager's depth limit,' Wizard said. 'As you'd expect.'

Then he swivelled the imager on its tripod and aimed it at the ground a few yards to the west, the section of coastline directly in line with the two tridents—

Ping-ping-ping-ping-ping-ping . . .

The imager's pinging went bananas.

West turned to Wizard. 'Explain?'

The old man looked at his display. It read:

TOTAL DEPTH: 8.0 m.

SUBSTANCE ANALYSIS: SILICON OVERLAY 5.5 m;

GRANITE UNDERLAY 2.5 m.

Wizard said, 'Depth here is eight metres. Mix of hard-packed sand and granite.'

'Eight metres?' Pooh Bear said. 'How can that be? We're 130 metres above sea level. That would mean there's 92 metres of empty air beneath that section of ground—'

'Oh, no way . . .' West said, understanding.

'Yes way . . .' Wizard said, also seeing it.

West looked back inland at the sandplain stretching to the nearest mountain a kilometre away. The sand appeared to be seamless. 'Amazing the things you can do with a workforce of 10,000 men,' he said.

'What? What?" Pooh Bear said, exasperated. 'Would you two

mind telling the rest of us mere mortals what in the blazes you're talking about?'

West smiled. 'Pooh. There was once an inlet here. I imagine it was a narrow crevice in the coastal cliffs that cut inland.'

'But it's not here now,' Pooh said. 'How does an entire inlet disappear?'

'Simple,' West said. 'It doesn't. It's still here. It's just been hidden. Concealed by the labour of 10,000 workers. The keepers of the Capstone put a roof over the inlet, bricked in the entrance and then covered it all over with sand.'

Five minutes later, Jack West Jr hung from the Land Rover's winch cable fifteen metres down the face of the coastal cliff, suspended high above the waves of the Mediterranean Sea.