The Six Sacred Stones

Matthew Reilly


ALSO BY MATTHEW REILLY


7 Deadly Wonders


Contest


Scarecrow


Ice Station


Temple


Area 7


Copyright © 2008 by Karanadon Entertainment Pty Ltd.


All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.


For John Schrooten

A great and true friend


THE SIX RAMESEAN STONES


THE MYSTERY OF THE CIRCLES


A mortal battle,


Between father and son,


One fights for all,


And the other for one.


—ANONYMOUS (FROM AN INSCRIPTION FOUND IN A3,000-YEAR-OLDCHINESE SHRINE IN THEWUGORGE, CENTRALCHINA)


Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.


—ARTHURC. CLARKE


The end of all things is near.


—1 PETER 4:7


INTRODUCTION


THE DARK CEREMONY


12:00 MIDNIGHT

AUGUST 20, 2007

LOCATION: UNKNOWN


IN A DARK chamber beneath a great island in the most distant corner of the world, an ancient ceremony was under way.


A priceless gold stone—pyramidal in shape, with a crystal at its peak—was set in place.


Then an ancient incantation, unheard for thousands of years, was uttered.


No sooner had the words been spoken than a great purple beam blasted down from the star-filled sky and lit up the pyramidal capstone.


The only witnesses to this ceremony were five angry men.


When it was over, the leader of the group spoke into a satellite radio: “The ritual has been performed. In theory, the power of Tartarus has been broken. This must be tested. Kill one of them tomorrow in Iraq.”


The next day, on the other side of the world, in war-torn Iraq, an Australian special forces soldier named Stephen Oakes was shot dead by insurgents. Ambushed in his jeep at a security checkpoint, he was torn apart by an overwhelming wave of gunfire from six masked attackers. His body was riddled with over two hundred bullet holes. His attackers were never found.


That an allied soldier should die during the occupation of Iraq was nothing new. Already over thirty-two hundred American servicemen had been killed there.


What was unusual about this death was that it had been an Australian who had been killed.


For curiously, since March 2006, there had not been a single Australian death in combat in any conflict around the world.


In fact, it was well-known among the allied troops in Iraq that Australian servicemen had an uncanny luck. Over the past five months, they had survived all manner of attacks and ambushes—in some cases almost miraculously.


Indeed, this capacity to survive practically any kind of attack was so well-known to their American colleagues that it was considered wise to stand next to an Aussie in a firefight.


But with the death of Specialist Steve Oakes on August 21, 2007, that uncanny luck came to a bloody and conclusive end.


The day after that, an encrypted message was handed to one of the most powerful men in the world.


It read:


SECURE TRANSCRIPT 061–7332/1A


CLASS LEVEL: ALPHA-SUPER


FOR A-1’S EYES ONLY


22-AUG-07


BEGIN SECURE MESSAGE:


Note death of Australian specialist Oakes in Iraq. The power of Tartarus has been nullified. Someone has the other Capstone.


The game is back on.


Now we must find the Stones.


END SECURE MESSAGE.


THE ENTRY CHAMBER


PROLOGUE


WITCH MOUNTAIN


WITCH MOUNTAIN

OFF THE WU GORGE, THREE GORGES REGION

SICHUAN PROVINCE, CENTRAL CHINA

DECEMBER 1, 2007


SITTINGin a sling harness suspended from a long rope and hanging in near-total darkness, Professor Max Epper cracked the top off his flare, illuminating the subterranean chamber around him.


“Oh my…” he breathed. “Ooooh,my …”


The chamber was simply breathtaking.


It was a perfect cube, wide and high, cut out of the living rock, perhaps fifty feet to a side. And every square inch of its walls was covered in carved inscriptions: characters, symbols, images, and figures.


He had to be careful.


The amber light of his flare revealed that the floor directly beneath him contained a well shaft that perfectly matched his opening in the ceiling. It yawned wide, a dark hole of indeterminate depth.


In some circles, Max Epper was known by the call sign “Wizard,” a nickname that was entirely appropriate.


With a flowing white beard and watery blue eyes that glistened with warmth and intelligence, at sixty-seven, he looked like a modern-day Merlin. A professor of archaeology at Trinity College, Dublin, it was said that, among other feats, he had once been part of a secret international team that had located—and reerected—the Golden Capstone of the Great Pyramid at Giza.


Swinging to the floor of the chamber, Wizard unclipped himself and gazed in awe at the text-covered walls.


Some of the symbols he recognized—Chinese characters and even a few Egyptian hieroglyphs. This was not unexpected: long ago, the owner and designer of this tunnel system had been the great Chinese philosopher, Laozi. In addition to being a venerated thinker, Laozi had been a great traveler and was known to have ventured as far as Egypt in the fourth century B.C.


In pride of place in the exact center of the feature wall was a large raised relief that Wizard had seen before:


Known as the Mystery of the Circles, it had not yet been decoded. Casual observers guessed it to be a representation of our solar system, but there was a problem with this analysis: there was one too many planets circling the central Sun.


Wizard had seen the Mystery of the Circles perhaps a dozen times around the world—in Mexico and Egypt, even in Wales and Ireland—and in various forms: from crude scratchings on bare rock walls to artistic carvings over ancient doorways, but none of those renderings was anywhere near as beautifully and elaborately carved as this one.


This specimen was dazzling.


Inlaid with rubies, sapphires, and jade, each of its concentric circles was rimmed with gold. It glittered in the glare of Wizard’s high-powered flashlight.


Directly beneath the Mystery of the Circles was a narrow doorway of sorts: perhaps two feet wide and six feet high, but shallow, recessed a couple of feet into the solid stone wall. It reminded Wizard of a coffin standing vertically, embedded in the wall. Strangely its rear wall wascurved.


Carved above it was a small symbol that made Wizard’s eyes widen with delight:


“The symbol for Laozi’s Stone…” he breathed. “The Philosopher’s Stone.My God. We’ve found it.”


Surrounded by this repository of ancient knowledge and priceless treasure, Wizard pulled out a high-tech Motorola UHF radio and spoke into it: “Tank. You aren’t going to believe this. I’ve found the antechamber, and it’s positively stunning. It also contains a sealed doorway, which I assume gives access to the trap system. We’re close. Very close. I need you to come down here and—”


“Wizard,”came the reply.“We just got a call from our lookout at the docks down on the Yangtze. The Chinese Army is snooping around. Gunboat patrol, nine boats, heading into our gorge. They’re coming this way.”


“It’s Mao. How could he have found us?” Wizard said.


“It may not be him. Could just be a regular patrol,”the voice of Yobu “Tank” Tanaka said.


“Which could actually be worse.” Chinese military patrols were notorious for roughing up archaeological expeditions in these parts in search of petty bribes.


“How long have we got till they get here?” Wizard asked.


“An hour, maybe less. I think it would be wise for us to be gone by the time they arrive.”


“I agree, my old friend,” Wizard said. “We’d better hurry. Get down here and bring some more lights. Tell Chow to fire up his computer: I’m going to get started recording images and transmitting them up to him.”


THE UNDERGROUNDchamber in which Wizard found himself was situated in the Three Gorges region of China, in an area that very much suited him.


This was because the Chinese characterwu means “wizard” or “witch” depending on the context—and it was used often in the names of the area’s features: Wu Gorge, the second of the famous Three Gorges; Wushan, the ancient walled fortress-town that once sat on the banks of the Yangtze; and of course Mount Wushan, the colossal two-mile-high peak that towered above Wizard’s chamber.


Translation: Witch Mountain.


The Wu Gorge area was renowned for its history—shrines, temples, carvings like the Kong Ming Tablet, and rock-cut caves like the Green Stone Cavern—nearly all of which had now been submerged beneath the waters of the 350-mile-long lake that had formed behind the gargantuan walls of the Three Gorges Dam.


The area was also known, however, for certain unusual events.


The Roswell of China, for hundreds of years it had been the site of numerous strange sightings: unexplained celestial phenomena, swarms of shooting stars, and aurora-like apparitions. It was even claimed that on one gruesome day in the seventeenth century the clouds over Wushan had rained blood.


The Wu Gorge area certainly had a history.


But now in the twenty-first century, that history had been drowned in the name of progress, swallowed by the waters of the Yangtze as the great river backed up against the largest structure ever built by mankind. The Old Town of Wushan now lay three hundred feet beneath the waves.


Fast-flowing tributaries that had once gushed into the Yangtze via spectacular side gorges had also been humbled by the expanding Dam Lake—what had once been dramatic four-hundred-foot-high whitewater ravines were now just regular hundred-foot-high gorges with placid water at their bases.


Small stone villages that had once sat on the banks of these little rivers, already far removed from the outside world, had now disappeared completely from history.


But not from Wizard.


In one partially flooded gorge, deep within the mountains to the north of the Yangtze, he had found an isolated mountain hamlet built on higher ground and in it, the entrance to this cave system.


The hamlet was primitive and ancient, a few huts constructed of irregular stones and tilting thatch roofs. It had been abandoned three hundred years ago and the locals thought it haunted.


Now, thanks to the ultramodern dam a hundred miles away, the deserted hamlet was flooded to knee-height.


The entrance to the cave system had been neither guarded by booby traps nor heralded by elaborate gates. It was, rather, its very ordinariness that had kept it secret for over two millennia.


Wizard had found the entrance inside a small stone hut that backed onto the base of the mountain. Once inhabited by the great Chinese philosopher, Laozi—the inventor of Taoism and the teacher of Confucius—this unassuming little hut possessed within it a stone well with a raised brick rim.


And at the bottom of that well, concealed beneath a layer of foul black water, was a false floor—and underneath that false floor, had been this magnificent chamber.


Wizard got to work.


He pulled a powerful Asus laptop from his backpack and connected it to a high-res digital camera and started clicking away, taking shots of the chamber’s walls.


As the camera gathered its images, a rapid-fire series of computations took place on Wizard’s computer screen.


At work was a translation program—a complex database that had taken Wizard years to compile. It featured thousands of ancient symbols, from many countries and cultures, and their accepted translations. It could also perform “fuzzy” translations, a kind of best guess when a symbol’s meaning was ambiguous.


Every time a symbol was captured on the digital camera, it was scanned by the computer and a translation found. For example:


ELEMENT TRANSLATIONS: shi tou(stone) si (temple)


FULL SEQUENCE TRANS:“The Temple of Stone”


FUZZ TRANS POSSIBILITIES:“Stone shrine,” “Stone Temple of the Dark Sun,” “Stonehenge (Match Ref. ER:46–2B)”


Among the other glyphs and reliefs on the walls, the computer found Laozi’s most famous philosophical invention, the Taijitu:


The computer translated: “Taijitu; Ref:Tao Te Ching. Western colloq. ref: ‘Yin-Yang.’ Common symbol for the duality of all things: opposites possess small traits of each other: e.g., in the good there is some evil, and in the evil there is some good.”


On other occasions, the computer found no prior record of a symbol:


In these cases it created a new file and added it to the database, so that if the symbol in question was ever found again, the database would have a record of it.


Either way, Wizard’s computer whirred, absorbing the images hungrily.


After a few minutes of this scanning, one particular translation caught Wizard’s attention. It read:


THE 1ST PILLAR MUST BE INLAID


EXACTLY 100 DAYS BEFORE THE RETURN.


THE PRIZE SHALL BE KNOWLEDGE.**


______


AMBIGUOUS TERMS:


“The First Pillar…” Wizard breathed. “Oh my goodness.”


Ten minutes later, as Wizard continued to feed more photos into his computer, a second figure descended into the chamber.


It was Tank Tanaka, a stocky Japanese professor from the University of Tokyo, Wizard’s research partner on this project and longtime friend. With soft brown eyes, a kind round face, and wisps of gray at his temples, Tank was the professor every history student wanted.


As he swung himself to solid ground, Wizard’s computer pinged loudly, alerting them to a new translation.


The two old professors peered at the screen. It read:


THE COMING OF RA’S DESTROYER


THE COMING OF RA’S DESTROYER


SEES THE STARTING OF THE GREAT MACHINE**


AND WITH IT THE RISE OF THE SA-BENBEN.


HONOR THE SA-BENBEN,


KEEP IT CLOSE, KEEP IT NEAR,


FOR IT ALONE GOVERNS THE SIX


AND ONLY THE EMPOWERED SIX CAN


PREPARE THE PILLARS AND


LEAD YOU TO THE SHRINES AND THUS


COMPLETE THE MACHINE


BEFORE THE SECOND COMING.***


THE END OF ALL THINGS IS NEAR.


________


AMBIGUOUS TERMS:


MATCH REFERENCE:


Ref XR:5–12 Partial inscription found at


Zhou-Zu Monastery, Tibet (2001)


“the Sa-Benben …?” Tanaka said.


Wizard’s eyes went wide with excitement. “It’s a little-used name for the uppermost and smallest piece of the Golden Capstone of the Great Pyramid. The entire Capstone was called the Benben. But the top piece is special, because unlike the other pieces, which are all trapezoidal in shape, it’s a mini-pyramid and so, essentially, a small Benben. Hence the name, Sa-Benben. The Eastern name for it is a bit more dramatic: they call it the Firestone.”


Wizard gazed at the symbol above the translation. “The Machine…” he whispered.


He scanned the translation carefully, saw the match reference at the end of the entry. “Yes, yes, I’ve seen this before. It was on a cracked stone tablet unearthed in northern Tibet. But because of the damage to the tablet, only the first and third lines were readable: ‘The coming of Ra’s Destroyer’ and ‘And with it the rise of the Sa-Benben .’ But this is the full text. This is momentous. ”


Wizard began muttering quickly to himself: “Ra’s Destroyer is Tartarus, the Tartarus Sunspot…But Tartarus was averted…Only…only what if the Tartarus Event started something else, something we didn’t anticipate…And if the Firestone governs the six sacred stones, empowers them, then it’s fundamental to everything…to the Pillars, to the Machine, and to the Return of the Dark Sun—oh dear Lord.”


He snapped up, his eyes wide.


“Tank. The Tartarus Event at Giza was connected to the Machine. I never suspected…I mean, I should have…I should have seen it all along but I—” A frantic look crossed his face. “When did we calculate the Return?”


Tank shrugged. “Not until next year’s vernal equinox: March 20, 2008.”


“What about the placing of the Pillars? There was something here about the First Pillar. Here it is: ‘The 1st Pillar must be inlaid exactly 100 days before the Return. The prize shall be knowledge .’”


“One hundred days,” Tank said, calculating. “That’s…damn…December 10 this year—”


Wizard said, “Nine days from now. Good God, we knew the time was approaching, but this is—”


“Max, are you telling me that we only have nine days to set the First Pillar in position? We haven’t even found the First Pillar yet…” Tank said.


But Wizard wasn’t listening anymore. His eyes were glazed, staring off into infinity.


He turned. “Tank. Who else knows about this?”


Tank shrugged. “Only us. And, I guess, anyone else who has seen this inscription. We know of the tablet in Tibet, but you say it was only partial. Where did it end up?”


“The Chinese Cultural Relics Bureau claimed ownership of it and took it back to Beijing. It hasn’t been seen since.”


Tank scanned Wizard’s frowning face. “Do you think the Chinese authorities have found the other pieces of the cracked tablet and put it back together? You think they already know about this?”


Wizard stood suddenly.


“How many gunboats did you say are coming up this river gorge?”


“Nine.”


“Nine. You don’t send nine gunboats on a routine patrol or a shakedown. The Chinese know, and they’re coming for us now. And if they know about this, then they know about the Capstone. Damn! I have to warn Jack and Lily.”


He hurriedly pulled a book from his backpack. Oddly, it wasn’t a reference book of any kind, but rather a well-known paperback novel. He began flipping pages and writing numbers down in his notebook.


When he was done, he grabbed his radio and called up to their boat top-side.


“Chow! Quickly, take this message down and post it immediately on the notice board.”


Wizard then relayed a long series of numbers to Chow. “Okay, that’s it, go! Upload it now—now, now, now!”


A hundred feet above Wizard, a battered old river barge bobbed among the half-submerged huts of the ancient mountain village. It lay at anchor alongside the stone hut that gave entry to the underground chamber.


Inside its main cabin, an eager grad student named Chow Ling hurriedly tapped out Wizard’s code, posting it on—of all things—a website devoted to the Lord of the Rings movies.


When he was done, he called Wizard on the radio. “Code has been sent, Professor.”


Wizard’s voice came through Chow’s headset:“Thank you, Chow. Good work. Now I want you to forward every image that I’ve sent up to you to Jack West via email. Then delete them all from your hard drive.”


“Delete them?” Chow said in disbelief.


“Yes, all of them. Every last image. As much as you can before our Chinese friends arrive.”


Chow worked fast, tapping keys feverishly, forwarding and then deleting Wizard’s incredible images.


As he tapped away on his computer, he never saw the first People’s Liberation Army gunboat glide by behind him, cruising down the submerged street of the village.


A harsh voice over a loud-hailer made him jerk up:“Eh! Zou chu lai dao jia ban shang! Wo yao kan de dao ni. Ba shou ju zhe gao gao de!”


Translation: “Hey! Come out onto the deck! Remain in plain sight! Hold your hands up high!”


Deleting a final image, Chow did as he was told, kicked back from his desk, and stepped out onto the open foredeck of his barge.


The lead gunboat towered above him. It was a modern one, fast, with camouflaged flanks and a huge forward gun.


Chinese soldiers with American-made Colt Commando assault rifles lined its deck, their short-barreled guns pointed at Chow.


That they held modern American weapons was a bad sign: it meant that these soldiers were elite troops, special forces. Ordinary Chinese infantrymen carried clunky old Type 56 assault rifles—the Chinese rip-off of the AK-47.


These guys weren’t ordinary.


Chow raised his hands—a bare second before someone fired and the entire front half of his body exploded with bloody holes and he was hurled backward with violent force.


Wizard keyed his radio mike.


“Chow? Chow, are you there?”


There was no reply.


Then, abruptly, the harness that until now had hung suspended from the well hole in the ceiling went whizzing back up into the hole like a spooked snake, hauled up by someone above.


“Chow!” Wizard called into his radio. “What are you—”


Moments later, the harness came back into view…


…with Chow on it.


Wizard’s blood turned to ice.


“Oh, dear me, no…” He rushed forward.


Almost unrecognizable from the many bullet wounds, Chow’s body came level with Wizard.


As if on cue, the radio suddenly came to life.


“Professor Epper,”a voice said in English.“This is Colonel Mao Gongli. We know you are in there, and we are coming in. Try nothing foolish, or you shall meet the same fate as your assistant.”


The Chinese troops entered the chamber quickly, abseiling down drop-ropes with clinical precision.


Within two minutes, Wizard and Tank were surrounded by a dozen men with guns.


Colonel Mao Gongli entered last of all. At fifty-five years of age, he was a portly man, but he stood with perfect poise, ramrod straight. Like many men of his generation, he’d been patriotically named after Chairman Mao. He had no operational nickname except the one his enemies had given him after his actions at Tiananmen Square in 1989 as a major—the Butcher of Tiananmen, they called him.


Silence hung in the air.


Mao stared at Wizard with dead eyes. When at last he spoke, he did so in clear, clipped English.


“Professor Max T. Epper, call sign Merlin, but known to some as Wizard. Canadian by birth, but resident Professor of Archaeology at Trinity College, Dublin. Connected with the rather unusual incident that took place atop the Great Pyramid at Giza on March 20, 2006.


“And Professor Yobu Tanaka, from the University of Tokyo. Not connected with the Giza incident, but an expert on ancient civilizations. Gentlemen, your assistant was a gifted and intelligent young man. You can see how much I care for such men.”


“What do you want?” Wizard demanded.


Mao smiled, a thin joyless smile.


“Why Professor Epper, I want you. ”


Wizard frowned. He hadn’t expected that answer.


Mao stepped forward, gazing at the grand chamber around them. “Great times are upon us, Professor. In the coming months, empires will rise and nations will fall. In times such as these, the People’s Republic of China needs knowledgeable men, men like you. Which is why you work for me now, Professor. And I’m sure that with the right kind of persuasion—in one of my torture chambers—you are going to help me find the Six Ramesean Stones.”


GREAT SANDY DESERT

NORTHWESTERN AUSTRALIA

DECEMBER 1, 2007, 0715 HOURS


ON THE DAY his farm was attacked with overwhelming force, Jack West Jr. had slept in till 7:00 A.M.


Normally he got up around six to see the dawn, but life was good these days. His world had been at peace for almost eighteen months, so he decided to skip the damn dawn and get an extra hour’s sleep.


The kids, of course, were already up. Lily had a friend over for the summer holidays, a little boy from her school named Alby Calvin.


Noisy and excited and generally up to mischief, they’d played nonstop for the past three days, exploring every corner of the vast desert farm by day, while at night they gazed up at the stars through Alby’s telescope.


That Alby was partially deaf meant little to Lily or to Jack. At their school in Perth for gifted and talented students, Lily was the star linguist and Alby the star mathematician and that was all that mattered.


At eleven, she now knew six languages, two of them ancient and one of them sign language—it had been easily acquired and was actually something that she and Jack had done together. Today the end tips of her beautiful long black hair were colored electric pink.


For his part, Alby was twelve, black, and wore large thick-lensed glasses. He had a cochlear implant, the miraculous technology that allowed the deaf to hear, and spoke with a slightly rounded inflection—signing was still necessary for those times when he needed to understand extra emotion or urgency in a matter—but deaf or not, Alby Calvin could rumble with the best of them.


West was standing on the porch with his shirt off, sipping a mug of coffee. His left arm glinted in the morning sun—from the bicep down, it was entirely made of metal.


He gazed out at the wide desert landscape, hazy in the morning light. Of medium height, with blue eyes and tousled dark hair, he was handsome in a rugged kind of way. Once upon a time, he had been ranked the fourth-best special forces soldier in the world, a lone Australian on a list dominated by Americans.


But he was no longer a soldier. After leading a daring ten-year mission to acquire the fabled Golden Capstone of the Great Pyramid from the remains of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, he was now more a treasure hunter than a warrior, more skilled at skirting booby-trapped cave systems and deciphering ancient riddles than killing people.


The adventure with the Capstone, which had ended atop the Great Pyramid, had forged West’s relationship with Lily. Since her parents were dead, Jack had raised her—with the help of a truly unique team of international soldiers. Soon after the Capstone mission had concluded, he had formally adopted her.


And since that day nearly two years ago, he had lived out here in splendid isolation, away from missions, away from the world, only traveling to Perth when Lily’s schooling required it.


As for the Golden Capstone, it sat in all its glory in an abandoned nickel mine behind his farmhouse.


A few months back, a newspaper article had troubled West.


An Australian special forces trooper named Oakes had been killed in Iraq, shot to death in an ambush, the first Australian battle casualty inany conflict in nearly two years.


It bothered West because he was one of the few people in the world who knew exactly why no Australian had been killed in battle these past eighteen months. It had to do with the Tartarus Rotation of 2006 and the Capstone: thanks to his performance of an ancient ritual back then, West had assured Australia invulnerability for what was supposed to be a very long time.


But now with the death of that soldier in Iraq, that period of invulnerability appeared to be over.


The date of the man’s death had struck him: August 21. It was suspiciously close to the northern autumnal equinox.


West himself had performed the Tartarus ritual atop the Great Pyramid on March 20, 2006, the day of the vernal equinox, the spring day when the Sun is perfectly overhead and day equals night.


The vernal and autumnal equinoxes are twin celestial moments that occur at opposite times of the year.


Opposites but the same,West thought.Yin and yang.


Someone, somewhere, had done something around the autumnal equinox that had neutralized Tartarus.


West was disturbed from his reverie by a small brown shape cutting across his view to the east.


It was a bird, a falcon, soaring gracefully across the dusty sky, wings wide. It was Horus, his peregrine falcon and loyal companion. The bird landed on the railing next to him, squawking at the eastern horizon.


West looked that way just in time to see several black dots appear in the sky there, flying in formation.


About three hundred miles away, near the coastal town of Wyndham, military exercises were under way, the biennial Talisman Sabre exercises that Australia held with America. Large in scale, they involved all sections of both nations’ armed forces: navy, army, and air force.


Only this year,Talisman Sabre came with a twist: for the first time ever, China was participating. No one was under any illusions. Under the chaperoning of neutral Australia (it had significant trade links with China and long-standing military links with the US), China and America, the two biggest kids on the block, were sizing each other up. At first, the US hadn’t wanted China’s participation, but the Chinese had exerted some considerable trade pressure on Australia to be involved, and the Australians had begged the US to allow it.


But happily, West thought, these weren’t matters that concerned him anymore.


He turned to watch Lily and Alby scamper around the barn, kicking up matching dust trails, when the computer in his kitchen pinged.


Ping, ping, ping, ping.


E-mails.


Lots of them.


Jack stepped inside, still gripping his coffee, and checked the monitor.


Over two dozen e-mails from Max Epper had just come in. Jack clicked on one, and found himself staring at a digital photo of an ancient carved symbol. Chinese by the look of it.


“Oh, Wizard.” He sighed. “What’s happened now? Did you forget to take your extra hard drive again?”


Wizard had done this before. He needed to back something up but had forgotten to take a second hard drive, so he’d e-mailed his photographs to Jack for safekeeping.


With a groan, Jack clicked over to the Internet and brought up a Lord of the Rings chat room, punched in his ID tag:STRIDER 101.


A little-used notice board came up. This was how he and Lily communicated with Wizard: through the anonymity of the Internet. If Wizard was sending a bulk block of e-mails, then he’d probably also sent an explanatory message via the chat room.


Sure enough the last message left on the notice board was from GANDALF 101: Wizard.


West scrolled down to view the message, expecting to see the usual bashful apology from Wizard…


…only to be surprised by what he saw.


He saw numbers.


Lots of numbers, interspersed with parentheses and forward slashes:


(3/289/-5/5) (3/290/-2/6) (3/289/-8/4) (3/290/-8/4) (3/290/-1/12)


(3/291/-3/3) (1/187/15/6) (1/168/-9/11)


(3/47/-3/4) (3/47/-4/12) (3/45/-163) (3/47/-1/5)


(3/305/-3/1) (3/304/-8/10)


(3/43/1/12) (3/30/-3/6)


(3/15/7/4) (3/15/7/3)


(3/63/-20/7) (3/65/5/1-2)


(3/291/-14/2) (3/308/-8/11) (3/232/5/7) (3/290/-1/9)


(3/69/-13/5) (3/302/1/8)


(3/55/-4/11-13) (3/55/-3/1)


Jack frowned, concerned.


It was a coded message from Wizard, a special code known only to the members of their trusted inner circle.


This was serious.


Jack quickly grabbed a paperback novel from the nearby bookshelf—the same novel that Wizard had used to compose the message in China—and began flicking pages, unraveling the coded communication.


He jotted down words underneath each numerical reference until at last he had the full message and his blood ran cold:


(3/289/-5/5) (3/290/-2/6) (3/289/-8/4) (3/290/-8/4) (3/290/-1/12)


GET OUT GET OUT NOW!


(3/291/-3/3) (1/187/15/6) (1/168/-9/11)


GRAB FIRE STONE


(3/47/-3/4) (3/47/-4/12) (3/45/-163) (3/47/-1/5)


AND MY BLACK BOOK


(3/305/-3/1) (3/304/-8/10)


AND RUN


(3/43/1/12) (3/30/-3/6)


NEW EMERGENCY


(3/15/7/4) (3/15/7/3)


VERY DANGEROUS


(3/63/-20/7) (3/65/5/1-2)


ENEMIES ARE COMING


(3/291/-14/2) (3/308/-8/11) (3/232/5/7) (3/290/-1/9)


WILL MEET YOU AT


(3/69/-13/5) (3/302/1/8)


GREAT TOWER


(3/55/-4/11-13) (3/55/-3/1)


THE WORST IS COMING


“Holy shit…” Jack breathed.


He snapped to look back out the kitchen window, saw Lily and Alby still playing out by the barn. Then he saw the hazy orange sky beyond them, glorious in the morning sun—


—as it began to fill with falling figures, dozens and dozens of them, figures that issued blooming parachutes above them, slowing their falls.


Paratroopers. Hundreds of paratroopers.


Coming for his farm.


THE ATTACK ON JACK’S FARM


WEST BURST OUT of the farmhouse, calling, “Kids! Get over here! Quickly!”


Lily turned, perplexed. Alby did too.


West motioned in sign language as he spoke: “Lily, pack a suitcase! Alby, get all your stuff! We’re leaving in two minutes!”


“Leaving? Why?” Alby said.


Lily, however, knew the look on West’s face.


“Because we have to,” she said/signed. “Come on.”


West rushed back into the farmhouse and pounded on the doors of the farm’s two guest rooms. “Zoe! Sky Monster! Wake up! We’re in trouble again!”


Out of guest room No.1 stepped Sky Monster, a hairy New Zealander who was West’s good friend and resident pilot.


With his great black beard, potbelly, and overgrown eyebrows, Sky Monster wasn’t exactly pretty first thing in the morning. He had a real name, but no one except his mother seemed to know it.


“Not so loud, Huntsman,” he growled. “What’s up?”


“We’re being invaded.” West pointed out the window.


Bleary-eyed, Sky Monster looked out through it and saw the swarm of falling parachutes filling the morning sky. His eyes sprang wide.“Australia is being invaded?”


“No, just us. Just this farm. Get dressed and then get down to The Halicarnassus. Prep her for immediate liftoff.”


“Gotcha.” Sky Monster hurried away, just as the door to guest room No.2 opened, revealing a far more pleasant sight.


Zoe Kissane emerged from her room, dressed in a spare pair of West’s pajamas. With sky-blue eyes, short blond hair, and a lightly freckled face, she was a true Irish beauty. She was also on leave from the Sciathan Fhianoglach an Airm, the famed crack commando unit of the Irish Army. A veteran of the Capstone adventure, she and West were close, and—some said—getting closer. The end tips of her blond hair were also electric pink, the remains of a hair session with Lily the previous day.


She opened her mouth to speak, but West just pointed out the window.


“Well, you don’t see that every day,” she said. “Where’s Lily?”


Jack ducked into his room, snatching stuff from all sides: a canvas miner’s jacket, a fireman’s helmet, and a double-holstered gun belt that he strapped round his waist. “Getting her things. Alby’s with her.”


“Oh God, Alby. What will we—”


“We take him with us.”


“I was going to say, what will we tell his mother? ‘Hi, Lois, yes, the kids had a great summer, outran an invading force of paratroopers.’”


“Something like that,” Jack said, dashing into his study and emerging a moment later with a large black leather folder.


Then he hurried past Zoe, heading down the hallway to the back door of the farmhouse. “Get your things and corral the kids. We’re leaving in two minutes. I have to get the top piece of the Capstone.”


“The what—? ” Zoe asked, but West had already dashed out into the sunlight, the screen door clapping shut behind him.


“And grab the codebooks and computer hard drives, too!” came his distant shouting voice.


A moment later, Sky Monster came bustling out of his guest room, buckling his belt and holding his pilot’s helmet. He too shoved past Zoe—with a gruff “Mornin’, Princess”—before stomping out the back door.


And suddenly Zoe woke up to the situation.


“Holy shit.” She hurried back into her room.


Jack West hustled across the backyard of his farmhouse and dashed inside the entrance to an old abandoned mine set into a low hill there.


He hurried down a dark tunnel, guided by the penlight attached to his fireman’s helmet, until after about a hundred yards he came to a larger space, a wide chamber containing…


…the Golden Capstone.


Nine feet tall, glittering and golden, the great mini-pyramid that had once sat atop the Great Pyramid at Giza possessed an authority, a presence, that humbled Jack every time he saw it.


Arrayed around the Capstone were several other artifacts from his previous adventure, artifacts that were all in some way related to the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: the Mirror from the Lighthouse at Alexandria, the head of the Colossus of Rhodes.


On occasion, Jack would come here and just sit and stare at the priceless collection of treasures assembled in the cavern.


But not today.


Today he grabbed an old stepladder and climbed up alongside the Capstone and carefully removed its uppermost piece, the only piece that was itself a pyramid, the Firestone.


The Firestone was small, its square base perhaps as wide as a hardback book. At its summit was a tiny clear crystal, an inch wide. All the other pieces of the Capstone possessed similar crystals in their centers, all seven of which lined up in a row when the Capstone was assembled.


West tucked the Firestone into his rucksack and hurried back out the exit tunnel.


As he ran down it, he triggered several black boxes mounted on wooden supports along the way—red lights blinked on. At the last support beam, he switched on a final box and grabbed a remote hand held unit that had lain on top of the box for just this occasion.


Then West was out, back in the morning sunshine, standing before the entrance to the old mine.


“I never wanted to do this,” he said sadly.


He hit DETONATE on the remote. Muffled sequential booms thudded out from the mine tunnel as each charge detonated, the innermost charges going off first.


Then, with a great rushing whoosh, a billowing cloud of dust came blasting out from the mine’s entrance. As the last charge exploded, it caused a landslide to cascade down from the low hill above the mine entrance, a loose body of rubble, sand, and rocks.


Jack turned and ran back toward the farmhouse.


If he’d had time to look back, he would have seen the great dust cloud settle. Once the dust had completely come to rest, all that remained in its place was a hill—a plain ordinary rock-and-sand-covered hill no different from any of the dozen others in the surrounding area.


Jack returned to the farmhouse in time to see Sky Monster zoom off in a pickup truck, heading south for the hangar.


The parachutes were still falling from the sky, many of them close to the ground now. There were literally hundreds of them, some obviously bearing armed men, while others were larger chutes carrying oversized objects: jeeps and trucks.


“Mother of God…” Jack whispered.


Zoe was pushing Lily and Alby out the back door of the farmhouse, with a computer hard drive tucked under one arm.


“Did you grab the codebooks?” West called.


“Lily’s got ’em!”


“This way, to the barn!” West waved them to follow.


The four of them ran together, two adults, two children, struggling with either backpacks or essential gear, with Horus flying above them.


As he ran, Alby saw West’s guns.


West noticed the shocked look on the boy’s face. “It’s OK, kid. This sort of thing happens to us all the time.”


West came to the barn’s huge door, ushered the others inside before he peered out after Sky Monster’s pickup as it sped south alongside a spur of hills, kicking up a thick dust cloud behind it—


But then a parachutist cut off his view of the truck, a fully equipped Chinese trooper who hit the dusty ground and rolled skillfully, slewed his chute, and quickly pulled out an automatic rifle.


Then he started running directly for the farmhouse.


Another man landed behind him. Then another, and another.


West swallowed. He and the others were cut off from Sky Monster. “Damn it, damn it,” he breathed.


Then he ducked inside the barn as over a hundred more paratroopers hit the ground on every side of his farm.


THE EAST DRIVE


MOMENTS LATER,the barn doors blasted open, and two compact all-wheel-drive vehicles boomed out from it.


They looked like something out of a Mad Max movie.


They were modified Longline “Light Strike Vehicles,” or LSVs—ultralight two-seater dune buggies with chunky all-terrain tires, high-tolerance wishbone suspension, and sleek bodies made only of roll bars and struts.


Jack and Alby were in the first car; Zoe and Lily in the second.


“Sky Monster!” Jack called into the radio-mike wrapped around his throat. “We’re cut off from you! We’re going to have to meet you at the highway! We’ll take the east drive and the river crossing.”


“Copy that,”Sky Monster’s voice replied.“The highway it is.”


“Jack,”Zoe’s voice came in.“Who are these people, and how the hell did they find us?”


“I don’t know,” Jack said. “I don’t know. But Wizard knew they were coming. He sent us a warning—”


Just then, a storm of bullets chewed a line across the dirt road in front of Jack’s car. Jack yanked his steering wheel hard over, blasted through the dust cloud.


The shots had come from a big all-terrain vehicle thundering in from the desert plain to the north.


It was a distinctive six-wheeled vehicle, a WZ-551 armored personnel carrier built by the Chinese North Industries Corporation for the PLA. Featuring heavy armor and a French-made Dragar turret on its top, it had a box-shaped body and a flat prowlike nose that sloped backward underneath it. The Dragar turret boasted a brutish 25mm cannon and a 7.62mm coaxial machine gun.


It was the first of many APCs coming from the north. Jack counted seven…nine…eleven vehicles behind it, plus even more smaller ones, jeeps and trucks, all overflowing with armed troops.


It was the same from the south: men and vehicles had touched down there, discarded their chutes, and were now coming north toward the east drive.


An armada of vehicles coming right at them, from both the north and the south.


Zoe’s voice:“Jack! Those APCs look Chinese!”


“I know!”


He keyed his radio scanner, picked up the broadcast frequency for the Talisman Sabre exercises. A voice was shouting:“Red Force Three! Come in! You are way off course for this drop! What the hell are you guys doing!”


Clever, West thought. His attackers had made this look like an exercise drop gone wrong.


He evaluated his options.


The east drive led to the Fitzroy River, a north–south-running river that was currently full, it being the wet season. A single bridge spanned it. Beyond that river was an old highway which—at one straight section—doubled as West’s own private runway.


If his cars could make it across the river before the inrushing forces cut them off, they could make it to the highway, where they’d rendezvous with Sky Monster.


But a quick glance at the twin columns coming at him from the north and the south revealed a simple mathematical truth: it was going to be close.


West’s LSV roared down the dusty east drive.


In the passenger seat, Alby gripped the roll bar, his eyes wide with terror.


West glanced over at the little boy.


“Bet you never experienced anything like this at another kid’s house over the summer!”


“Nope!” Alby shouted over the whipping wind.


“You a Boy Scout, Alby?”


“Yes!”


“And what’s the Boy Scout motto?”


“Be prepared!”


“Absolutely! Now, young man, you’re gonna find out why you’re not allowed to play on the cattle crossings or the bridge.”


The two LSVs whipped down the dusty road—with their twin hordes of pursuers closing in from either side, converging on them in a V-shaped formation. Giant clouds of dirt rose behind the two incoming forces.


“Zoe! Swing in front!” West called.


Zoe obeyed, pulled her car in front of West’s, just as the two cars zoomed over a cattle grid.


As his LSV shot over the grille, however, West swung left, plowing right into a low signpost that read CATTLE CROSSING.


The post—unknown to the casual observer—was equipped with a trip wire that snapped as the LSV shot over it, triggering a concealed mechanism that launched a hundred six-pronged nails onto the roadway behind the fleeing car.


Alby turned, saw the star-shaped nails bounce down onto the road, fanning out all across it, just as the first pursuing jeep—the men on it firing hard—drove right into the field of nails.


Blasting puncture noises ripped the air as all four of the jeep’s tires blew and the vehicle skidded and then flipped, spraying men in every direction.


A second jeep suffered a similar fate, but the rest skirted the nail field, bouncing around the suspect section of road.


Alby watched them crash, before turning to face West, who shouted over the wind, “Be prepared!”


Alby then swung back to see the trailing APCs, slower than the jeeps, reach the nails—with their runflat tires they just thundered right over them, impervious to damage.


Chasing. Pursuing. Hunting.


As she drove, Zoe continued to monitor the airwaves with her car’s radio scanner. A moment after the two jeeps crashed, it picked up voices speaking in Mandarin over a secure military frequency.


“Jack!” she called into her own mike. “I got the bad guys on UHF 610.15!”


In his car, Jack switched to that channel and heard the voices of his enemy speaking Mandarin:


“Heading east in two cars—”


“Ground Force Seven is in pursuit—”


“Ground Force Six is going for the bridge—”


“Command. This is Ground Force Two. We’re right on their tail. Please repeat capture instructions—”


A new voice came on the line, a calmer one, one possessing clear authority.


“Ground Force Two, this is Black Dragon. Capture instructions are as follows: priority one is the Firestone; priority two, the girl and West, both are to be captured alive, if possible. Any other captives are to be executed. There can be no witnesses to our doings here.”


Hearing this, West snapped to look over at Alby. Then he looked forward at Zoe, driving the lead car.


It was one thing to know that if everything ended badly, you were safe, but it was another thing entirely to know that those dear to you were not.


“You hear that?”Zoe said over the radio.


“Yep,” West said, his jaw tightening.


“Please get us out of here, Jack.”


AS JACK’S AND ZOE’Scars sped away to the east, a Chinese command APC was arriving at Jack’s farmhouse, flanked by several escort jeeps.


As it skidded to a halt, two men stepped out of it, one Chinese, the other American. While the Chinese man was clearly older, both bore the rank of major on their collars.


The Chinese major was Black Dragon, the owner of the voice on the airwaves. Officious and intense, Black Dragon was known for his cold methodical efficiency; he was a man who got the job done.


The younger American with him was tall and broad, powerful, and he wore the customized uniform of a US Army Special Forces operator. He had a sharp-edged crew cut and the unblinking eyes of a psychopath. His call sign:Rapier.


“Secure the farmhouse,” Black Dragon ordered the nearest unit of paratroopers. “But be wary of any improvised devices. Captain West is clearly a man who prepares for eventualities such as this.”


Rapier said nothing. He just stared intently at the abandoned farmhouse, as if absorbing every feature of it.


THE RIVER CROSSING


The bridge was up ahead now, maybe a mile away—an old wooden single-lane bridge.


West saw it come into view, just as three APCs and five Chinese jeeps skidded to a halt in front of it, blocking the way. A roadblock.


They’d got there first.


Damn.


The lead APC lowered its turret-mounted cannon ominously.


At that exact same moment, four Chinese jeeps caught up with West’s cars from behind, two to each side.


The soldiers on the jeeps looked angry as all hell and, buffeted and jostled by the uneven terrain, they tried to aim their rifles at West’s tires.


“Jack!”Zoe called over the radio.“Jack…!”


“Stay on the road! Whatever you do, stay on the road till you reach the windmills!”


Two skinny windmills flanked the road up ahead, halfway between them and the bridge.


An explosion boomed out behind Jack’s LSV—barely three feet behind it—tearing a crater from the road. A shot from the APC’s cannon.


“Sheesh.” Jack turned to Alby. “Do me a favor, kid. Try not to tell your mother about this part of your stay.”


Zoe’s car came to the windmills flanking the roadway, shoomed between them, closely followed by Jack and Alby’s LSV—still harried by the four Chinese jeeps.


Jack cut through the windmills, while the jeeps took them differently: one jeep swung onto the road proper and sped between the windmills, while the three others went wider, whipping around the outside of the windmills and—


Suddenly the first such jeep dropped from view. As did the jeep traveling immediately behind it and the one that had sped around the windmill on the other side of the road.


The three jeeps just fell out of sight, as if they had been swallowed by the Earth.


In fact, that was exactly what had happened. They had fallen into Indian tiger traps—large concealed holes in the ground next to the windmills, designed by Jack for an escape just like this one.


“Zoe! Quickly! Let me pass, then drive exactly where I do!”


Jack zoomed past Zoe’s car and then abruptly shot left, off the road and out onto rough scrubland. Zoe followed him, swinging her LSV left, chased now by the sole surviving Chinese jeep.


Bouncing over the scrub, the river up ahead, the roadblock off to their right.


“Exactly where I drive!” West repeated into his mike.


He swept down an embankment toward the Fitzroy River—a suicidal course. There was no way he could possibly cross the fast-flowing waters of the river in his low-slung LSV.


But into the river he went. At full speed.


The LSV plunged into the Fitzroy, kicking up spectacular fans of spray on either side as it sheared right through the water, unusually shallow water, across an uncommonly smooth section of riverbed: a concealed concrete ford.


As Jack’s LSV skipped out the other side of the river, roaring up the far bank with a three-foot-high jump, Zoe’s car hit the near edge of the stream, at the same time as the last Chinese jeep came alongside it.


Zoe hit the ford, following Jack’s path exactly. But the pursuing jeep didn’t, and the ford was deliberately narrow, a submerged concrete bridge only one car width wide, and thus the Chinese jeep nosedived into the water and came to a jarring, splashing halt, while Zoe’s LSV just continued on, bouncing safely up the far side.


Seeing the two LSVs successfully cross the river to the north, the Chinese troops blocking the bridge leaped into their jeeps and APCs, and started across the bridge in pursuit.


Only to have the bridge collapse completely beneath the first jeep.


Amid a tangled mess of—precracked—wooden beams and struts, the jeep tumbled down into the river, leaving the remaining vehicles bunched up behind the void, now with no bridge to cross.


They hurried for the ford, but by the time they found it and negotiated its narrow span, Jack’s two escape cars were already speeding onto the highway.


THE ESCAPE PLANE


WHILE JACK and Zoe had been fleeing east, tripping nail traps and racing over concealed river crossings, Sky Monster had been busy, too.


He’d arrived in his pickup at the very south of the farm, where he disappeared inside a cabin set into the hillside, a hillside that—when seen from up close—was actually a giant camouflage-netted structure.


A hangar.


And in it was a giant black 747.


If one looked closely at the plane’s underbelly, one could still make out an inscription in Arabic:PRESIDENT ONE—AIR FORCE OF IRAQ: HALICARNASSUS.


It was a plane that had once lived in a secret hangar outside Basra, one of several such 747s that had lain in secret locations around Iraq, ready to whisk Saddam Hussein to safe havens in East Africa in the event of an invasion. Saddam, it turned out, had never been able to use this particular plane. But in 1991, cornered by enemy forces and abandoned by his own men, Jack West Jr. had.


It was now his plane, The Halicarnassus.


The Halicarnassus rumbled out of its hangar and down a wide dirt taxiway, which itself crossed the flowing Fitzroy River via a second submerged concrete ford a few miles south of the rigged bridge.


Once over its ford, Sky Monster brought the big 747 left onto the highway, pointing north.


The giant plane thundered up the desert highway, a great black behemoth speeding along the shimmering blacktop, until Sky Monster saw the two LSVs of Jack and Zoe swing out onto the bitumen a few hundred yards in front of him.


A ramp at the rear of The Halicarnassus lowered to the roadway, kicking up sparks as it did so, and—with the great plane still moving at considerable speed—the two LSVs swung in behind it and zoomed up the ramp into its belly, closely followed by the tiny shape of Horus.


Once the second car was inside and firmly tied down with a crank-harness, the ramp was raised and the plane sped up and hit takeoff speed and slowly, gracefully, lifted off the empty desert highway, leaving the farm—now crawling with Chinese cars and troops—in its wake.


West strode into the cockpit of The Halicarnassus.


“We’re not outta this yet, Boss,” Sky Monster said. “I got incoming bogeys. Four of them. Look like J-9 Interceptors. Chinese MiG variants.”


West charged back into the main cabin, where Zoe was buckling in the kids.


“Zoe,” he said. “To the guns.”


Moments later, he and Zoe were harnessed into The Halicarnassus ’s wing-mounted gun turrets. The plane also had revolving guns on its roof and underbelly that Sky Monster could control from the cockpit.


“They can’t blow us out of the sky, can they?”Sky Monster asked over the intercom.“They’d destroy the Firestone.”


“It’s made of almost solid gold,” West replied. “It’d survive just about anything except a total fuel fire. If I were them, I’d shoot us down and expect to find it in the wreckage.”


“Great. Here they come…”


Four Chinese J-9 Interceptors blasted across the sky in pursuit of The Halicarnassus, screaming low over the desert, unleashing their missiles.


Four small aerial darts zoomed out from their wings, spiraling smoke trails extending out behind them.


“Launch countermeasures!” West called.


“Launching countermeasures!”Sky Monster reported back.


He punched some buttons and immediately, several chaff bombs sprang out from the underbelly of the Hali.


Three of the missiles took the bait, and detonated harmlessly against the fake targets.


West himself nailed the fourth and last one, blowing it to pieces with his cannon.


“Sky Monster! Hit the deck! Rawson’s Canyon! Let’s throw the line and hope Super Betty still works! Go! Go! Go!”


The Halicarnassus banked and dived, swooping for the flat desert floor. Two of the Interceptors took off in pursuit, the other two staying high.


The Halicarnassus came to a rocky canyonland, a wide dry plain flanked by low mesas and hills. It shot into Rawson’s Canyon, a long thin chutelike canyon that ended at a narrow aperture between two mesas. Technically this was all Army land, but no one except Jack West Jr. had set foot out here in years.


The Halicarnassus zoomed low through the canyon, barely a hundred feet off the ground, chased by the two Chinese Interceptors.


The fighters fired their guns.


Jack and Zoe blazed back from their revolving turrets.


Tracers sizzled through the air between the chased and the chasers, the landscape whizzing by in a blur of speed.


Then Zoe got a bead and hammered the left-hand Interceptor with a wave of tracers that entered it square in its intakes. The J-9 shuddered instantly, belching black smoke, before it wobbled in the air and lurched dangerously to the left, popped its ejection seat, and smashed at 500 mph into the canyon wall.


The remaining fighter kept firing, but Sky Monster kept banking within the confines of the narrow canyon and the bullets sizzled past the speeding black plane, nicking its wingtips but hitting nothing of value.


Then The Halicarnassus hit the end of the canyonway and blasted through the narrow exit, just as Jack called: “Sky Monster! Call in Super Betty! Now!”


And—bam!—Sky Monster punched a switch on his console marked:LAUNCH SUP BET.


A hundred feet below and behind him, the solenoid on a large explosive that had sat undisturbed on the desert floor for many months tripped.


The explosive was a large RDX one, based on the principle of the Bouncing Betty land mine. Once triggered, it set off a preliminary blast that launched the main bomb a hundred feet into the air.


Three seconds later, the main charge went off, just like a Bouncing Betty, only much bigger. Plane-sized. And filled with shrapnel.


The Super Betty.


A giant star-shaped blast exploded in the air behind the fleeing Halicarnassus, right in the path of the second speeding Interceptor.


Shards of shrapnel assaulted the fighter jet head-on, smacking against its cockpit canopy, lodging in its reinforced glass, creating a hundred spiderwebs. More shards slammed into the J-9’s air intakes, ripping apart the innards of the plane.


The pilot’s ejection was followed by the fighter’s full-scale explosion. Dead Interceptor.


“I hadn’t checked on Betty for months,” West said. “Glad she still worked.”


the Hali soared up into the sky.


Where the last two Interceptors were waiting.


By now, Sky Monster had taken them northwest, toward the coast, and as The Halicarnassus left the mainland of Australia and shot out over the Indian Ocean, the two Interceptors engaged it.


Missiles, guns: they gave it everything they had.


West and Zoe returned fire with equal violence until finally West nailed one Interceptor with his cannon and…went dry.


“Right-side gun is out!” he called into the intercom. “How’re you traveling, Zoe?”


“Still got a few rounds left,”she said as she fired at the last J-9.“But not many—shit! I’m out, too!”


They were out of ammo and there was still one bad guy left.


“Uh, Huntsman…!” Sky Monster called expectantly. “What are we gonna do now, throw rocks?”


Jack stared at their remaining pursuer—the Interceptor hovered in the sky behind them, waiting, watching, holding back a little, as if it sensed something was wrong.


“Shit. Shit, shit, shit,” he muttered.


He unbuckled himself from his gun chair and hurried back into the main cabin, thinking fast.


Then it hit him.


He keyed his headset radio. “Sky Monster. Take us vertical. As vertical as you can go.”


“What? What are you doing?”


“I’ll be in the rear hold.”


Sky Monster pulled back on the yoke and The Halicarnassus went nose-up into the sky.


Climbing, climbing, climbing…


The Interceptor gave chase, zooming upward after it.


Battling the slope, Jack staggered into the rear hold, clipped a safety rope to his belt, and opened the rear loading ramp.


Air rushed into the hold, and beyond the entryway, he saw the Interceptor immediately behind them—beneath them—framed by the deep blue ocean.


It fired.


Sizzling-hot tracer bullet sentered the hold, smacking into the girders all around Jack—sping!-sping!-sping!—just as he kicked a release lever—the release lever that held his LSV harnessed in place.


The spring-loaded harness retracted instantly, whip-snapping away, and the light strike vehicle rolled out the back of the plane and fell out into the sky.


Seen from the outside, it must have looked very odd indeed.


The Halicarnassus soaring upward with the J-9 behind and below it, when suddenly the LSV—an entire car—came dropping out of the Hali and…


…sailedpast the J-9, the Chinese fighter banking at the last moment, just getting out of the way.


Its pilot grinned, proud of his reflexes.


Reflexes, however, that weren’t fast enough to evade or avoid the second LSV that came tumbling out of The Halicarnassus ’s rear hold a moment later!


The second falling LSV smashed squarely into the fighter’s nose, causing the whole Interceptor to just drop out of the sky. It plummeted to the ocean, ejecting its pilot a moment before it and the car entered the water with twin gigantic splashes.


High above it, The Halicarnassus righted itself, retracted its rear ramp, and flew off to the northwest, safe and away.


“Huntsman,”Sky Monster’s voice came over the intercom.“Where to now?”


Standing in the hold, Jack recalled Wizard’s message. “WILL MEET YOU AT GREAT TOWER.”


He keyed the intercom. “Dubai, Sky Monster. Set a course for Dubai.”


BACK ATWest’s farm, Chinese troops stood guard at every gate.


The two majors, Black Dragon and Rapier, waited formally on the front porch as a helicopter touched down on the dusty turnaround in front of them.


Two figures emerged from the chopper, an older American man shadowed by his bodyguard, a twentysomething US Marine of Asian-American extraction.


The older man walked casually up onto the porch, unchecked by any of the guards.


No one dared stop him. They all knew who he was and the considerable power he wielded.


He was a Pentagon player, an American colonel in his late fifties, and he was fit, extremely fit, with a barrel chest and hard blue eyes. His hair was blond but graying, his features weathered and creased. In stance and bearing, he could have passed for Jack West twenty years from now.


His Marine bodyguard, ever alert, went by the call sign Switchblade. He looked like a human attack dog.


Black Dragon greeted the senior man with a bow.


“Sir,” the Chinese major said. “They have escaped. We brought enormous force and executed our landings perfectly. But they, well, they were—”


“They were prepared,” the senior man said. “They were prepared for this eventuality.”


He strolled past the two majors and entered the farmhouse.


He ambled slowly through West’s abandoned home, taking it in, pausing every so often to examine some trinket closely—a framed photograph on the wall of West with Lily and Zoe at a waterslide park; on a shelf a ballet trophy that belonged to Lily. He lingered longest over a photo of the Great Pyramid at Giza.


Black Dragon, Rapier, and the bodyguard, Switchblade, followed him at a discreet distance, waiting patiently for whatever instructions he might have.


The senior man picked up the photo of West, Lily, and Zoe at the waterslide park. The three of them appeared happy, smiling for the camera, grinning in the sunshine.


“Very good, Jack…” the senior man said, staring at the photo. “You got away from me this time. You’re still wary enough of the world to have a getaway plan. But you’re slipping. You detected us late and you know it.”


The senior man gazed at the smiling faces in the photo and his lip curled into a snarl. “Oh, Jack, you’ve become domesticated. Happy even. Andthat is your weakness. It will be your downfall.”


He dropped the photo, let it shatter against the floor, then turned to the two majors:


“Black Dragon. Call Colonel Mao. Tell him we have not yet acquired the Firestone. But that need not stop him from advancing at his end. Tell him to commence his interrogation of Professor Epper, with extreme prejudice.”


“As you command.” Black Dragon bowed and stepped a few yards away to speak into his sat-phone.


The senior man watched as he did this. After a minute or so, Black Dragon hung up and returned. “Colonel Mao sends his regards and says that he will do as you order.”


“Thank you,” the senior man said. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind, Black Dragon, shoot yourself in the head.”


“What!”


“Shoot yourself in the head. Jack West escaped because of your ham-fisted assault. He saw you coming and so got away. I cannot tolerate failure on this mission. You were responsible and so you must pay the ultimate penalty.”


Black Dragon stammered. “I…no, I cannot do tha—”


“Rapier,” the senior man said.


Quick as a whip, the big man named Rapier drew his pistol and fired it into the Chinese major’s temple. Blood sprayed. Black Dragon collapsed to the floor of Jack West’s living room, dead.


The senior man hardly even blinked.


He turned away casually. “Thank you, Rapier. Now, call our people at Diego Garcia. Tell them to initiate blanket satellite surveillance of the entire southern hemisphere. Target is an aerial contact, Boeing 747, black with stealth profile. Use all aerial signatures to locate it: transponder, contrail wake, infrared, the lot. Find that plane. And when you do, let me know. I’m eager to reunite Captain West with his Jamaican friend.”


“Yes, sir.” Rapier hurried outside.


“Switchblade,” the senior man said to his bodyguard. “A moment alone, please.”


With a deferential nod, the young Asian-American Marine left the room.


Alone now in the living room of West’s farmhouse, the senior man pulled out his own sat phone and dialed a number: “Sir. It’s Wolf. They have the Firestone, and they’re running.”


AS ALL THIS was going on in Australia, other things were happening around the world:


In Dubai, a middle-aged American cargo pilot staying overnight in the Gulf city was being brutally strangled in his hotel room.


He struggled against his three attackers, gasping and thrashing, but to no avail.


When he was dead, one of his attackers keyed a cell phone. “The pilot is prepared.”


A voice responded:“West is en route. We’ll keep watching him, and tell you when to proceed.”


The dead pilot’s name was Earl McShane, from Fort Worth, Texas, a cargo hauler for the TransAtlantic Air Freight company. He was not a particularly noteworthy individual: perhaps the biggest thing he’d done in his life was after 9/11, when he had written to his local newspaper denouncing “the dirty Muslims that done this” and demanding revenge.


At the same time, in rural Ireland—County Kerry, to be exact—a crack force of twelve men in black were advancing stealthily on an isolated farmhouse.


Within seven minutes it was all over.


They had achieved their goal.


All six of the guards at the farmhouse had been liquidated, and in the attackers’ midst as they left the darkened farmhouse was a small boy named Alexander, aged eleven.


As for The Halicarnassus, it shot across the Indian Ocean, heading for the Persian Gulf.


But it didn’t fly there directly. It took a circuitous route that included an overnight stop at a deserted airfield in Sri Lanka, just in case the Chinese had anticipated their escape route.


It meant that they approached Dubai in darkness, late in the evening of December 2.


Inside The Halicarnassus, all was quiet and still. Only a few lights were on. The two kids were asleep in the bunkroom of the plane, Zoe had nodded off on a couch in the main cabin, and Sky Monster was up in the cockpit, staring out at the stars, his face illuminated by the instrument dials.


In a study at the rear of the plane, however, one light was on.


The light in Jack West’s office.


Ever since they had taken off from Sri Lanka—the first time he had truly felt out of reach—Jack had been reading intently from the black folder he had grabbed just before leaving his farm: an old leather binder crammed with notes, clippings, diagrams, and photocopies.


This was Wizard’s “black book,” the one Wizard had instructed Jack to take.


And as he read it, Jack’s eyes grew wide with wonder. “Oh my God, Wizard. Why didn’t you tell me?Oh. My. God…”


BURJ AL ARAB TOWER

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

DECEMBER 2, 2007, 2330 HOURS


THE BURJ AL ARABis one of the most spectacular buildings in the world.


Shaped like a gigantic spinnaker, it is stunning in almost every respect. Eighty-one stories tall, it houses the world’s only seven-star hotel. On its eightieth floor, jutting out from beneath a revolving restaurant, is a huge helipad practically designed for photo opportunities: Tiger Woods once hit golf balls from it; Andre Agassi and Roger Federer once played tennis on it.


It is the most recognized structure of the most modern Arab nation on Earth, the United Arab Emirates.


A great tower, some would say.


The great tower, Wizard would say.


Soon after their arrival in Dubai—the Hali had landed at a military air base—West and his group were flown by helicopter to the Burj al Arab, where they were accommodated in no less than the Presidential Suite, a vast and plush expanse of bedrooms, sitting rooms, and lounge rooms that took up the entire seventy-ninth floor.


This royal treatment was not unwarranted. The Emirates had been a partner in West’s initial adventure with the Golden Capstone, an adventure that had seen a coalition of small nations take on—and prevail against—the might of the United States and Europe.


One of the most heroic members of West’s team on that mission had been the second son of one of the Emirates’ most senior sheiks, Sheik Anzar al Abbas.


West, Zoe, Sky Monster, and most of all, Lily, were always welcome in Dubai.


Alby, needless to say, was impressed. “Whoa…” he said, gazing out the windows at the stunning view.


Lily just shrugged. She’d stayed here before. “I get dibs on the double bed!” she yelled, racing into a bedroom.


The doorbell rang, despite the fact it was almost midnight.


West opened the door to reveal—


—Sheik Anzar al Abbas and his entourage.


With his great beard, round belly, deeply etched olive skin, and dressed in a traditional desert robe and head-scarf, the regal old sheik could have stepped straight out of Lawrence of Arabia.


“The hour is late and Captain Jack West Jr. arrives in haste,” Abbas said in his deep voice. “I sense trouble.”


West nodded grimly. “Thank you once again for your hospitality, Lord Sheik. Please, come inside.”


Abbas entered, his robe flowing, followed by his six attendants. “My son, Zahir, sends his regards. He is currently working as a senior instructor at our special forces training facility in the desert, teaching our best fighters many of the strategies you taught him. He begged me to inform you that he is on his way at all possible speed.”


West walked with the sheik. “I fear the circumstances are grave, far graver than ever before. Where once we banded together to fight against the desires of selfish men, now, if Wizard’s research is correct, we face a far more sinister threat. Wizard hasn’t arrived here yet, but I imagine he’ll enlighten us further when he gets here.”


Abbas’s eyes flickered. “You do not know?”


“Know what?”


“What has happened to Max Epper, the Wizard.”


Jack froze. “What’s happened?”


“We picked it up from Chinese satellite radio chatter last night. Wizard was arrested twenty-four hours ago by Chinese forces not far from the Three Gorges Dam. I fear he won’t be coming here anytime soon.”


Jack could only stare.


“Wizard left this file at my home,” he said, once he and the sheik were settled in one of the sitting areas of the suite. Zoe and Sky Monster were there, too, along with Lily and the rather confused Alby.


Significantly, Sheik Abbas’s entourage had been left in an outer room.


“The file summarizes his research into a set of six stones called the Ramesean Stones and their relationship with six oblong blocks known as the Pillars of the World, or sometimes, the Pillars of Vishnu.”


“Vishnu?” Abbas said, recognizing the word. “As in…”


“Yes,” West said. “As in ‘I am Vishnu, Destroyer of the World.’ The study of the Ramesean Stones was Wizard’s life’s work. Our ten-year mission to locate the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and through them the Golden Capstone was merely a side mission for him. This is the study that has consumed his entire life.


“And now he’s been arrested in China at the same time Chinese forces attacked my supposedly secret farm in Australia. The Chinese know. About his workand that we have the Firestone, the top piece of the Capstone.”


Abbas frowned. “The Capstone has greater significance? Beyond the Tartarus Event?”


“From what I read last night, more significance than we can possibly imagine,” West said. “The striking of the Capstone by the Sun during the Tartarus Rotation was just the beginning.”


At that moment, West seemed to retreat into himself, thinking in silence. Then he said, “I need more time to examine Wizard’s work and make some calls. After that we have to convene a meeting. A new meeting of concerned nations. Give me a day to study all this and then let’s gather here for what might be the most important meeting in the history of mankind.”


WEST SPENT the whole of the next day reading and sorting through Wizard’s voluminous notes.


Names were scattered among Wizard’s writing, of which West knew some but not others.


Tank Tanaka, for instance, he knew. Tank was Wizard’s longtime Japanese colleague; West had met him on numerous occasions.


Others he only knew slightly, like “the Terrible Twins,” Lachlan and Julius Adamson, a pair of mathematical geniuses from Scotland who had studied under Wizard in Dublin. Fast-talking, exuberant, and much loved by Wizard, the twins operated as one brain, and taken together they were arguably the most formidable noncomputerized mathematical force in the world. In their spare time, they liked to beat Vegas casinos at the blackjack tables simply by “doing the math.”


One summary sheet that Wizard had prepared commanded most of Jack’s attention. It was virtually a representation of Wizard’s thoughts, a mixture of diagrams, lists, and handwritten notations by the old professor.


West recognized a few of the terms on the sheet, like the Sa-Benben, Firestone, and Abydos.


Abydos was a little-known but hugely important Egyptian archaeological site. It had been sacred to the ancient Egyptians from the very beginning to the very end of their civilization, spanning some three thousand years. It bore temples belonging to Seti I and his son, Rameses II, and contained some of the earliest shrines in Egypt.


Jack had also seen the Mystery of the Circles before, but had no clue what it meant.


Other things, however, were completely new to him.


The Great Machine.


The Six Pillars. That they might be oblong uncut diamonds was certainly intriguing.


The obscure references to Fabergé Eggs, Easter, and the sinking of the Titanic at the bottom of the page—well, they completely baffled him.


And, of course, the unusual diagrams scattered all over it.


He used this sheet as his central reference point and read on.


Elsewhere among Wizard’s notes, he found some digital photos of stone carvings written in a language he had not seen since the Seven Wonders mission.


It was an ancient script known only as the Word of Thoth—named after the Egyptian god of knowledge.


Mysterious and obscure, it was a language that defied translation even by modern supercomputers. Indeed, its cuneiform-like strokes were often thought to contain secret mystical knowledge.


Historically, only one person in the world could read it: the Oracle of the Siwa Oasis in Egypt. This person, magically it seemed, was born with the ability to read the Word of Thoth. A long line of Oracles had existed right up to the present day, and although it was unknown to her teachers and friends at school, Lily was one of them.


She was the daughter of the last Oracle at Siwa, a foul spoiled man who had died shortly after her birth.


Most unusually for an Oracle, though, Lily was a twin. As Jack had discovered during the Capstone mission, she had a brother named Alexander—like his father, a disagreeable, spoiled boy—who could also read the Word of Thoth. After that mission, Alexander had been spirited away to a quiet life in rural Ireland, in County Kerry.


Jack got Lily to translate many of the Thoth inscriptions in Wizard’s notes. Many were nonsensical to Jack, while some were just plain weird: for instance, one Thoth carving stated that the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur, famous for its huge ziggurat, was an exact replica of “the Second Great Temple-Shrine,” whatever that was.


Jack also showed Lily one prominent Word of Thoth carving from Wizard’s notes:


Lily looked at the complex array of symbols and shrugged, translating it in seconds. “It says:


“With my beloved, Nefertari,


I, Rameses, son of Ra,


Keep watch over the most sacred shrine.


We shall watch over it forever.


Great sentinels,


With our third eyes, we see all.”


“With our third eyes?” Jack frowned.


“That’s what it says.”


“Nefertari was the favorite wife of Rameses II,” Jack said. “And together they keep watch over the most sacred shrine, whatever that is. Thanks, kiddo.”


Lily smiled. She loved it when he called her that.


Later that evening, the outer door to the Presidential Suite opened and Lily rushed into the arms of the man standing in the doorway. “Pooh Bear! Pooh Bear! You came!”


The man was a shorter, younger version of Sheik Abbas. He was the great sheik’s second son, Zahir al Anzar al Abbas, call sign Saladin, but renamed by Lily Pooh Bear. Short, rotund, and bushy-bearded, he had a voice as big as his heart—and that wasbig.


With him was a taller man, thinner, with skeletal features: a master sniper once known as Archer, now Stretch, having also been rechristened by Lily.


Israeli by birth, Stretch had once been a member of the Mossad, but after a certain…conflict…with them during the Capstone chase, he was now persona non grata in Israel. In fact, it was known that the Mossad had put a price on his head for his actions back then.


Greetings were exchanged with Zoe, Sky Monster, and when they finally extracted him from his study, West.


Lily said to Pooh Bear, “And this is my friend, Alby. He’s a whiz at math and computers.”


“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Alby,” Pooh Bear roared. “I hope your intentions with my little Lily are pure. No, let me put that another way: if you break her heart, boy, I’ll hunt you down to the ends of the Earth.”


Alby gulped. “We’re just friends.”


Pooh Bear smiled, winking at Lily. “So, young Alby, are you joining us on this endeavor?”


Lily said, “Alby’s parents are currently in South America and out of phone contact. Alby was supposed to be staying with us at the farm. Now I guess he’s staying with us wherever we go.”


“So, Huntsman!” Pooh Bear exclaimed. “What ails you this time?”


“It could be bad, Pooh. Really bad. Tartarus has been neutralized, and some people want the Firestone badly. We barely got away at all.”


“They found you in Australia?”


“Yes. I’ve called a meeting, one that will bring the original team back together. Fuzzy is the last one. He’s on his way from Jamaica.”


“And Wizard?”


“He’s out of the picture for the moment, but he’s sent me enough information to make a start. With Lily’s help, I’ve managed to decipher a few of his recent discoveries.”


Pooh looked at Lily. “Is that so? How many are you up to now, young one?”


“Five, plus sign language.”


“Good girl,” he said. “Never stop learning. Never stop honing your gift.”


Pooh turned back to West, his face serious. “My father sends a message. At tomorrow’s meeting there will be a few other countries represented. Some not from the original seven. Word has got out, it seems.”


West frowned. This was moving too fast, at a pace beyond his control. It was as if he was still trying to catch up himself.


He pulled out several copies of a five-page summary he’d found amid Wizard’s notes and handed them out to the others.


“This is a summary I’ll be giving to everyone at the meeting tomorrow. It’s about Wizard’s work. Read it beforehand. It’ll be less astonishing that way.”


Then, looking at them all—his old friends, friends who had bonded over the course of a long, hard, and at times seemingly impossible mission—he smiled.


“I’m glad you’re all here for this one.”


THE MEETING

BURJ AL ARAB TOWER

DECEMBER 4, 2007


THE NEXT DAY,as each delegation arrived at the Presidential Suite, they were handed the five-page briefing.


It was a peculiar array of national representatives:


Of the original seven nations who had sponsored West’s initial quest to locate the Golden Capstone, only four were present now: Australia (West), Ireland (Zoe), the UAE (Pooh Bear), and New Zealand (Sky Monster).


Canada’s Wizard was missing in China.


Spain, having lost a man during the first mission, had declined to send a representative to this one. And Jamaica’s man, Fuzzy, was still uncharacteristically late.


“We’re still waiting for Fuzzy and a few others,” West said. “So, please, while you wait, acquaint yourself with the briefing material.”


They did so.


The briefing was headed: “The Six Ramesean Stones and the Pillars of the World.”


THE SIX RAMESEAN STONES AND


THE PILLARS OF THE WORLD


by Professor Max T. Epper,


Trinity College, University of Dublin


THE MYSTERY OF THE CIRCLES


The end of the world has preoccupied humanity for as long as humanity has existed.


For Hindus, Vishnu will destroy the Earth. Christians fear the Apocalypse prophesied in the final books of the Bible. No less than St. Peter himself famously wrote, “The end of all things is near.”


I fear it may be nearer than we think.


THE MARRIAGE OF LIGHT AND DARK


Our small planet does not exist in a void.


It exists in concert with our Sun and the other planets of our solar system.


Certain ancient civilizations knew about these relationships: the Maya, the Aztecs, the Egyptians, even the Neolithic peoples of Britain; all of them saw patterns in the night sky.


And as I myself discovered during the Tartarus Event of 2006, our Earth is directly linked to our Sun.


Our Sun begets life. It provides the light that sparks photosynthesis and the temperate warmth that allows our fragile human bodies to exist without the blood in our veins freezing or boiling.


This, however, is a more delicate situation than many realize.


To paraphrase the Chinese philosopher, Laozi, nothing exists in isolation. For life to exist, there must be balance. Balance implies the harmonic existence of two things, what philosophers call “Duality.”


But not only must there be two of everything—man, woman; heat, cold; light, darkness; good, bad—but inside the good there must be some bad, just as inside the bad, there must be some good. This has never been better displayed than in the famous Taijitu, the Yin-Yang.


So what does this concept of duality mean in the context of our solar system? It means this:


Our Sun does not exist alone.


It has a twin, an opposite, an invisible body of dark matter known as a “zero-point field.” This spherical field roams through the outer regions of our solar system like a moving black hole, not so much possessed of negative energy as no energy at all. It absorbs light. It is indescribably cold. It breaks down oxygen at the molecular level. It is, in short, a variety of energy that is anathema to life as we know it.


And if this zero-point field—this Dark Sun, if you will—ever sweeps into our solar system, it will destroy all life on Earth.


Observe the image at the beginning of this article. It is a carving found all over the world from Abu Simbel in Egypt to Newgrange in Ireland to Peru in South America.


It is called “the Mystery of the Circles.”


A quick glance at it leads the observer to conclude that it depicts our solar system, with the Sun at the center, orbited by nine planets.


Not so.


If you look closely, you will see that the Mystery of the Circles contains ten planets orbiting a central Sun. It also features—somewhat mysteriously—a strange black orb sitting outside the orbits of the ten planets, equal in size to the central Sun.


It is my belief that the Mystery of the Circles is indeed a depiction of our solar system, but not as we see it today. It is a picture of our solar system as it was a longtime ago.


Forget the planets for a moment and keep your eyes on the black orb hovering outside the circles.


This must be the focus of our inquiry.


For it represents our Sun’s dark twin, and it now approaches, bringing with it our destruction.


THE MACHINE


But a mechanism has been put in place to allow us to avert our destruction.


Unfortunately the knowledge crucial to our salvation—to the operation of this “Machine”—which was known to the ancients, has long since been lost through wars, dark ages, witch-hunts, and holocausts.


However, great men and women throughout history have held pieces of this knowledge: Laozi and his famous student, Confucius; Rameses II, the mighty pharaoh, and his priest-builder, Imhotep II; Cleopatra VII, the doomed Egyptian queen; the great Mayan ruler, King Pakal; and in more recent times, Isaac Newton, in his obsessive search for the secrets of alchemy.


In all their writings, there is one common feature. The Machine is always represented by this image:


What the image actually means, though, remains elusive.


THE SIX RAMESEAN STONES


Of all the impressive individuals who have known about this Machine, it is Rameses II—greatest of all the pharaohs, greater even than Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid—who has left us the most information about it and indeed identified the key to solving the mystery.


The Six Sacred Stones.


Six stones which, in his honor, we now call the Ramesean Stones. They are:

The Philosopher’s Stone

The Altar Stone of the Temple of Ra’s Dark Twin (Stonehenge)

The Twin Tablets of Thutmosis

The Killing Stone of the Maya

The Seeing Stone of the Southern Tribe (Delphi)

The Basin of Rameses II


In his temple at Abydos in a remote corner of southern Egypt—not far from his famous list of seventy-six pharaohs carved into a wall—Rameses left a tablet mentioning the “Six Guidestones of Ra’s Dark Twin.”


Now while it is not impossible that Rameses could have seen all of these stones, it is unlikely. It is believed, however, that all six of the stones resided at one time in Egypt, even the Stonehenge and Mayan ones. Whatever the case, Rameses does seem to have been in possession of some advanced knowledge about them, and of all the pharaohs, he alone committed that knowledge to writing.


These guidestones, he said, once “impregnated by the Sa-Benben” would provide “the necessary wisdom” when “Ra’s Dark Twin returned to wreak his vengeance on the world.”


As you can imagine, for many years this confounded Egyptologists. Ra was the Sun. Who or what, then, was Ra’s Dark Twin? Another Sun?


It took the technological wizardry of modern astronomy to find it: the Dark Sun now approaching our solar system.


So what do the Six Ramesean Stones do? Why did Rameses call them guidestones?


Simple: they guide us to the Machine.


And the Machine saves our planet.


We thought our troubles were over when we erected the Capstone atop the Great Pyramid, but no, we were only completing a necessary precondition for this, the main event: we “charged” the Sa-Benben.


And so now the Sa-Benben has been charged by the Sun. As such it is ready to interact with the Six. It is my belief that when the Sa-Benben comes into contact with each Sacred Stone, that Stone will provide a unique insight into the coming of the Dark Sun and the Earth-saving operation of the Machine.


The end of all things is near……but it’s not over yet.


A DOOR SLAMMED somewhere. The assembled delegates looked up from their reading.


“Ah-ha! My son!” Sheik Abbas leaped up from his chair and embraced the handsome young man who had entered the room.


He was Captain Rashid Abbas, commander of the UAE’s elite First Commando Regiment. The sheik’s first son, he was a strikingly handsome man: with a chiseled jaw, dark Arabian skin, and deep blue eyes. His call-sign was typically grand:The Scimitar of Allah, or justScimitar for short.


“Father,” he said, embracing Abbas warmly. “Forgive my lateness, but I was waiting on my friend here.”


Scimitar indicated his companion—who had entered the room almost invisibly, outshone by Scimitar’s luminous presence. He was a delicate, precise fellow, with a bald head and a long ratlike nose. His shifting eyes swept the room, taking in everything, tense and edgy, suspicious.


Scimitar said, “Father, allow me to introduce Abdul Rahman al Saud from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, from their esteemed Royal Intelligence Service. His call sign:Vulture. ”


Vulture bowed to Sheik Abbas, low and slow.


Lily disliked Vulture on sight. His bow was too low, too obsequious, too deliberate.


As for Scimitar, she had seen him once or twice before—and then, as now, she noticed that Pooh Bear retreated into a corner of the room at the arrival of his handsome older brother. It seemed to Lily that the presence of his dashing brother clearly affected the younger and fatter Pooh Bear.


It made her dislike Scimitar, too.


Jack was also disturbed, but for different reasons. While he had expected Scimitar, he had not expected him to bring a Saudi spy along, the first of Sheik Abbas’s uninvited guests.


“Vulture?” he said. “Not the Blood Vulture of Abu Ghraib prison fame?”


Vulture visibly stiffened. So did Scimitar.


During the official investigation into the atrocities at the notorious Iraqi prison, it emerged that Saudi intelligence agents had carried out torture activities that American soldiers were forbidden to do. One such Saudi intelligence agent had performed acts of torture so shockingly brutal that he had earned the nickname “Blood Vulture.”


“I visited that prison on several occasions, Captain West,” Vulture said in a low voice, his eyes locked on Jack’s, “but not at the times the depravities took place.”


“I will personally vouch for this man,” Scimitar said irritably. “We have been through much together, over two Gulf Wars and more in between. The rumors of Abu Ghraib are unfounded lies. He is practically my brother.”


At that, Lily saw Pooh Bear lower his eyes.


Vulture said, “I bring information that I am sure will be useful to you and your cause. For instance, I know the plans of the Chinese.”


That got West’s attention. “You do?”


The phone rang. Zoe got it, turned to West: “Jack. It’s the hotel manager. He says there are a couple of people downstairs who would like an audience with you. He says they’re American.”


Moments later, the door to the suite opened to reveal two men: one a tall gray-haired gentleman in a suit; the second a younger man dressed in plain clothes that scarcely disguised his military physique. A soldier.


From his chair, Sheik Abbas recognized the older man. “Why, Attaché Robertson? What are you—?”


Jack remained standing between the two Americans and the meeting, blocking the way. “Names. Now.”


The older gentleman didn’t flinch an inch. “Captain West, my name is Paul Robertson, special attaché to the US ambassador here in the United Arab Emirates. This is Lieutenant Sean Miller, from the United States Marine Corps, call sign Astro. We’re here to express our country’s…concern…at recent Chinese actions, both military and archaeological, and hopefully assist you in some way.”


Special attaché,Jack thought,meant CIA agent.


“And how can you help me?” he asked.


Jack’s relations with the United States of America were somewhat strained. His mission to locate the Seven Ancient Wonders had been in direct opposition to an influential group of Americans known as the Caldwell Group, who at the time had had the ear of the President. There had been some deaths involved, including people dear to Jack.


Robertson remained impassive, a cool customer. “We know, for instance, where the Chinese are keeping your friend, Professor Epper.”


West stepped aside immediately. “Come on in. Take a seat.”


At that very moment a windowless Boeing 767 cargo plane took off from Dubai International Airport.


On its flanks were emblazoned the words:TRANSATLANTIC AIR FREIGHT.


Its listed pilot: Captain Earl McShane.


And so now the representatives of six nations sat arrayed around the Presidential Suite of the Burj al Arab: Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and the United States of America.


“You’ve all read the briefing document,” West said. “Here is the translation of a carving that I received from Wizard in China just before he was captured by Chinese forces.”


West distributed a new three-page handout. On the first sheet was Wizard’s translation from China:


THE COMING OF RA’S DESTROYER


THE COMING OF RA’S DESTROYER


SEES THESTARTING*OF THE GREATMACHINE**


AND WITH IT THE RISE OF THE SA-BENBEN.


HONOR THE SA-BENBEN,


KEEP IT CLOSE, KEEP IT NEAR,


FOR IT ALONE GOVERNS THE SIX


AND ONLY THE EMPOWERED SIX CAN


PREPARE THE PILLARS AND


LEAD YOU TO THE SHRINES AND THUS


COMPLETE THE MACHINE


BEFORE THE SECOND COMING.***


THE END OF ALL THINGS IS NEAR.


AMBIGUOUS TERMS:


MATCH REFERENCE:


Ref XR:5–12 Partial inscription found at Zhou-Zu Monastery, Tibet(2001)


West said, “As you’ll see, this decryption refers to a Great Machine and the importance of the Sa-Benben. ‘The Second Coming’ to which it refers is the coming of the Dark Sun.”


“This Dark Sun, or Star, this bringer of the Apocalypse, why have astronomers not seen it before now?” Sheik Abbas asked.


“According to Wizard,” West said, “it exists on a light spectrum unknown to humanity, so we can’t see it through any of our telescopes, in any spectra, like infrared or ultraviolet or UVB. Its presence has only been verified by what it blocks from our view.


“From what I’ve read, it seems to roam the outer reaches of our solar system in a hyperelongated elliptical orbit. When it comes near, which is not very often, about once every six million years, Jupiter’s movement shields us from it, blocks us from its deadly radiation. But even if this didn’t happen, you couldn’t see this Dark Sun with the naked eye.


“In any case, it’s close now and this time—apparently—it will emerge from behind Jupiter, and that’s when things get really ugly. That’s when its constant discharge of radiation-like zero-point energy will wash over our planet, killing every living creature on it—unless we can rebuild this Machine. The Machine, apparently, sends out a balancing response that counters the Dark Sun’s energy stream, saving the Earth. It always comes back to balance, to harmony.”


“Come on, Jack,” Zoe said. “Listen to yourself. Are you seriously saying that there is some kind of evil celestial orb out there bent on destroying the Earth?”


“It’s not evil, Zoe. It just is. Call it antimatter, call it a singularity, call it a moving black hole. In the end, it is a net-negative void. A dense moving hole in the air. It’s not evil and it doesn’t hate us. We’re just in its way.”


Stretch said, “And yet somewhere,sometime,someone built a Machine here on Earth that is somehow connected to this Dark Sun. Are you talking about advanced technology, Jack? Alien technology?”


Jack bowed his head. “I don’t know. Wizard doesn’t say.”


Vulture mused aloud: “‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Arthur C. Clarke.”


“So how do we rebuild this Machine?” Sheik Abbas asked. “And why does China have a such a keen interest in doing so by itself? Surely, even the Chinese would realize that a united global coalition would be the best vehicle to achieve this?”


“As always, Lord Sheik, you go directly to the heart of the matter,” West said. “Please turn to the second sheet of your handout.”


They all did so. On it was a photocopy of Wizard’s summarizing page.


West directed them to the center of the page. “To your first question, Sheik: how do we rebuild the Machine? Observe the six Pillars drawn by Wizard and described as ‘oblong uncut diamonds.’ Elsewhere in his notes, he states that these Pillars are each about the size of a brick. He also says—”


“A diamond the size of a brick?” Scimitar said in disbelief. “Just one alone would be larger than the Cullinan, the largest diamond ever found, and beyond value. And you claim there are six of these.”


“Yes, six. Wizard also says that each Pillar must be ‘cleansed’ by the Philosopher’s Stone before being placed in the Machine, inspiring his exhortation that we ‘must have both the Sa-Benben and the Philosopher’s Stone. They are central to everything .’


“The way I see it is this: to rebuild the Machine, we must place the six Pillars—cleansed by the Philosopher’s Stone—in position in this mysterious all-powerful Machine.


“Which leads me to your second question, Abbas, why does China want to do this alone? They want to go it alone because it seems that whoever sets each Pillar in place in the Machine receives fareward.


“You can see the rewards listed by Wizard: knowledge, heat, sight, life, death, power. What these rewards actually are, I don’t know. I assume Wizard knows, but there’s nothing about their actual nature in his notes. But given what the Chinese have already done—grabbing Wizard in China and trying to steal the Sa-Benben from me—I imagine the rewards are pretty damn rewarding.”


West threw a sharp glance at the two Americans, Robertson and Astro.


Robertson cleared his throat. “I am not privy to my country’s research on this matter, so please don’t even ask me about that. But yes, the United States is unwilling to allow China to obtain the benefits you so describe.”


“We’ll be wanting to talk tosomeone about your country’s research soon,” West said pointedly.


“Wait, wait, wait,” Zoe said. “I need to backtrack a bit. The Six Ramesean Stones plus the Sa-Benben give us information about this Machine. The Philosopher’s Stone, once charged by the Sa-Benben, cleanses the Six Pillars, which then have to be placed in the Machine. So what is this Machine? And how big can it be?”


West tapped the image that signified the Machine:


After reading Wizard’s notes these last couple of days, he’d been thinking about the Machine a lot: about this image and Wizard’s scribblings around it.


At last he said, “Wizard doesn’t say what or how big the Machine is. But I have a theory.”


“And?”


West turned to face Zoe. “I think ‘the Machine’ is another name for our planet.” He pointed at the image: “This circle is Earth. And these dark triangles are sites located around the Earth, six sites at which the six Pillars—properly ‘cleansed’ or activated—must be set in place, thus restoring the Machine to working order before the Dark Sun emits its fatal burst.”


“Good God…” someone said.


“Yes. And if we don’t rebuild this Machine by the appointed time, our planet will be destroyed. People, the end of the world really is nigh.”


SHEIK ABBAS breathed, “The end of the world…”


He glanced around the room—only to see that the American, Robertson, was unmoved by Jack’s conclusion; likewise Scimitar and his Saudi companion, Vulture.


Jack said, “You’ll recall that in his article, Wizard mentioned the black orb depicted in the Mystery of the Circles. He suggested that it was a Dark Star, a twin of our own Sun, its opposite. He also mentioned that the Mystery of the Circles depicts our solar system with ten planets instead of nine.”


“Yes…”


“Today, our solar system possesses nine planets plus an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter,” Jack said. “But this may not always have been so. Later in his article, Wizard postulates that that asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter was once a very small planet not unlike our own. Now. If a planet were to be somehow destroyed, its pieces would coalesce into a floating belt of asteroids similar to the one found between Mars and Jupiter.”


There was silence in the room.


“Yes,” Jack said, reading their thoughts. “This has happened before.”


“Ladies and gentlemen,” he went on, “we need to pool our resources and fight this menace. We need to restore this Machine before that Dark Star arrives.


“But at the moment there are too many pieces of this puzzle missing, such as when this Dark Star will arrive and thus the time by which the Machine must be rebuilt. Wizard knows many of the answers to these questions, but I imagine your own researchers know some of them, too. And that’s not even mentioning the rewards and China’s interest in this situation and whatever she might know.”


Jack eyed the group arrayed before him. “I need to know what you all know.”


There was an uncomfortable silence. It was time for some of them to reveal their secrets.


Someone coughed, clearing his throat.


It was the Saudi spy, Vulture.


“My family, the High House of Saud, possesses one of these Pillars you describe,” he said. “It is indeed a large uncut diamond, oblong in shape, translucent to look at, yet still breathtaking to behold. We have held it for generations, always in a secure place. Other identical diamond Pillars are held by the two great European houses of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Oldenburg. I cannot, however, vouch for the whereabouts of the remaining three.”


“Thank you,” Jack said, nodding.


The American “attaché” Robertson cleared his throat. “I am authorized to disclose that the United States of America has in its possession one of the Ramesean Stones you describe: the Killing Stone of the Maya. I am also authorized to make this Stone available to any multinational effort to combat the arrival of the Dark Sun.”


Other minor pieces of information were offered, but after all was said and done, it appeared that the single greatest source of wisdom on the matter of the Machine, the Stones, and the Pillars was Professor Max T. Epper.


“We have to get Wizard back from the Chinese,” Jack said. “Mr. Robertson. It’s time for you to pay your entry fee.”


Robertson said, “Professor Epper is being held at Xintan Prison, a remote facility in the mountains of Sichuan Province in central China. He is classified as a D-class prisoner: high value but subject to vigorous interrogation.”


“You mean torture,” Pooh Bear said.


Scimitar added, “Xintan is a fortress. No man who has entered it against his will has ever left it alive.”


“That’s about to change,” West said.


Vulture backed up Scimitar. “One does not just walk into the torture wing of Xintan Prison and stroll out again. It is beyond fortified. It is impregnable.”


Robertson spoke formally: “The United States would have serious reservations about participating in any incursive act against China, especially one that would appear so aggressive. If Lieutenant Miller here were captured on Chinese soil during such a raid, it would be on the front page of every newspaper in the—”


“Then don’t come,” Stretch said from the side of the room. A veteran of the first mission, Stretch was still seriously wary of these apparently well-meaning intruders.


Jack said, “We’ll handle those logistics when we come to them. Is there anything more? Anyone else have anything to offer?”


The room was silent.


The meeting was over—


But then a hand went up, timidly, hesitantly. A little hand, in the back of the room.


Alby.


Paul Robertson turned and said, “Well, if we’re taking questions from children now, my time here is over. I have things to do.”


Jack wasn’t so dismissive. In fact, he found it quite courageous of Alby to raise his hand, given the company around him.


“What is it, Alby?”


“I think I can help you with something on Wizard’s note page,” the little boy said, signing at the same time.


“What exactly?” Jack was surprised that Alby was using sign language, since it wasn’t really necessary here.


“Here,” Alby said. “Where he says‘Titanic sinking—Dec 2007 & Titanic rising.’ It’s not a reference toTitanic, the boat. It means the sinking and rising of Saturn’s moon, Titan, behind the planet Jupiter. Titanic Sinking and Titanic Rising are terms used by astronomers to describe it. It’s pretty rare, but when Jupiter and Saturn are in alignment—which they will be until next March—it occurs twice a week.”


“And exactly when will Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn be in alignment again?” Zoe asked.


Alby shrugged. “Maybe three, four hundred years.”


Abbas coughed. “This is significant.”


“You bet it is.” Jack glanced at Alby—only to find Alby staring intently back at him, right in the eye. The boy signed:There’s also something else.


Jack nodded in understanding—later—before saying to the group: “Thank you, Alby. That’s a great contribution, and something I imagine Wizard will be able to clarify.”


Beside Alby, Lily gave her friend a proud nudge.


At that moment, two things happened: the doorbell rang and Sheik Abbas’s phone buzzed. The old sheik answered it quietly, “Yes…” while Jack went to the door.


At the door was a hotel clerk, bearing a package for Jack—a designer hatbox, of all things. On it was a card:“For Jack West. From Jamaica.”


Jack frowned as he opened the box and when he saw its contents, he froze in horror, his face draining of blood. “Oh, no. Fuzzy…”


Inside the box was a severed human head.


The severed head of his Jamaican friend, and veteran of the Capstone mission, V. J. Weatherly, call sign Fuzzy.


At exactly the same moment, Abbas frowned into his phone. “Good God. Call the hotel. Order it evacuated. Now!”


Everyone in the room spun as the old bearded sheik ended the call and looked up.


“We have to leave this building immediately. It’s about to be struck by an airplane.”


Jack blinked, put the lid back on the hatbox before anyone else saw what was inside it.“A wha —?”


Then a Klaxon sounded.


A hotel alarm.


Red emergency lights blazed to life as a voice came over the internal PA system, speaking first in Arabic, then in English:“Would all guests please evacuate the hotel. This is an emergency. Would all guests please evacuate the hotel and convene out by the parking lot.”


Everyone exchanged worried glances as the voice went on in other languages.


And then other phones started ringing.


First Robertson’s, then Vulture’s.


“What is it?” Jack asked Abbas.


The sheik’s face was white. “They say a plane that took off a short time ago from Dubai International has departed from its flight plan and deviated from the regular flight corridor. It’s headed this way, toward this building.”


Jack froze. “This can’t be a coincidence. Everybody out! Now! We’ll rendezvous at The Halicarnassus ! Move!”


Everyone cleared the room—Abbas was whisked outside by his minders; Robertson went out all by himself. The Marine, Astro, stayed, saying to Jack: “How can I help?”


Jack was already springing into action. “Zoe! Pooh Bear! Get the kids outta here! I’ve got to grab Wizard’s stuff. Stretch, help me out! Lieutenant”—he said to Astro—“you can help, too. I could use an extra pair of hands.”


It was then that West looked out through the wide panoramic windows of the Presidential Suite.


And his jaw dropped.


He saw a Boeing 767 cargo jet banking across the sky and then leveling out on a dead-straight flight path that would end at the Burj al Arab Tower.


“Oh, crap,” he breathed.


IF YOU COULD have seen it up close, you would have made out the words TRANSATLANTIC AIR FREIGHT on the side of the speeding cargo plane.


And although the pilot listed on its flight plan was Earl McShane, it wasn’t Earl McShane who sat at the controls. It was a lone man who was prepared to die—for a matter of honor.


The 767 zeroed in on the tower.


In the hotel, people were running every which way.


Every elevator was jammed to overflowing. The fire escape stairs were filled with fleeing guests, some in tuxedos, others in their pajamas.


Up on the helipad, high above the world, a helicopter lifted off and powered away from the building.


The PA blared:“This is an emergency. Would all guests please evacuate the hotel…”


Zoe and Pooh Bear burst out of the fire escape into the wide lobby of the hotel, gripping Lily and Alby by the hand.


“This is crazy,” Zoe whispered. “Just crazy.”


They dashed outside into the morning sunshine, into the massing crowd.


Up in the Presidential Suite, Jack, Stretch, and Astro were the last ones left.


They were packing frantically, gathering together all of Wizard’s notes and books in a few sports bags.


When at last they had everything, they ran from the suite, West coming last of all, peering back out the window in time to see the cargo plane looming large right outside.


Then the plane dipped below the window line and a moment later Jack felt the building shudder in a way he wished he’d never feel again.


Seen from the outside, the speeding 767 hit the Burj al Arab Tower about two-thirds of the way up its side, around the fiftieth floor.


The entire plane instantly burst into a billowing fireball, a flaming meteor that spewed out the other side of the waterfront tower.


The building shuddered violently and tottered, belching a great plume of smoke, eerily reminiscent of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 in that terrible hour before they fell.


“We’re cut off!” Stretch called from the entrance to the fire stairs. “We can’t get down!”


West spun. The world around him was literally crumbling. The tower was swaying. Black smoke rose past the windows, blotting out the sun.


“Up,” he said. “We go up.”


Minutes later, the three of them burst out onto the helipad of the burning Burj al Arab Tower.


The coastline of Dubai stretched out before them—a dead-flat desert plain meeting the aqua waters of the Persian Gulf. The Sun was blood red in color, veiled by the smoke.


“This is outrageous!” Astro yelled.


“Welcome to my world,” West called back as he flung open the door to a supply shed situated at the edge of the helipad.


Suddenly, the building rocked. Girders shrieked.


“Huntsman! We don’t have much time!” Stretch yelled. “This building is going to fall any second!”


“I know! I know!” West was rummaging around inside the shed. “Here!”


He hurled something out through the doorway and into Stretch’s arms: a pack of some sort.


A parachute.


“Safety precaution for a helipad this high up,” West said, emerging with two more parachutes. He flung one to Astro. “Again, welcome to my world.”


They strapped the chutes on and hurried to the edge of the helipad, railless and dizzyingly high, eighty stories above the ground.


The building’s steel skeleton shrieked once more. The air around it began to shimmer in the heat. It was about to collapse—


“Jump!” West called.


And they did, together, the three of them base-jumping off the burning building, plummeting through the shimmering sky, the building beside them blurring with speed—


—a bare instant before the whole top third of the Burj al Arab Tower came free from the rest of the building and toppled off it!


The building’s great spire, its helipad, and its top thirty floors all tipped as one, falling sideways like a slow-falling tree, folding at the point where the plane had hit it, before tearing free of the main structure and falling off it, chasing the three tiny figures that only an instant before had leaped off the helipad.


But then abruptly three parachutes blossomed to life above the three figures and they sailed clear of the peak of the tower. They flew away to landward as the now upside-down spire of the building came crashing down into the sea with a momentous earsplitting smash.


The incredible sight would appear in newspapers around the world the following day, images of the half-standing tower.


The culprit: an angry American loner, Earl McShane, seething for revenge for 9/11. Hell, he’d even written to his local paper after September 11 calling for vengeance.


And so he’d decided to exact his own form of revenge on an Islamic country in exactly the same way the Islamist terrorists had attacked America: by flying a plane into their biggest, most well-known tower.


Thankfully, all the papers reported, owing to the professionalism of the hotel staff, their flawless evacuation procedures, and their rapid—almost forewarned—response to the news of the incoming cargo plane, not a single person was killed in the fiendish attack.


In the end, the only life McShane took was his own.


Naturally, in the hours following the event, all air traffic in the region was grounded pending further notice.


The skies above the Emirates remained eerily empty for the entire next day, all flights canceled.


Except for one.


One plane that was given permission to take off from a high-security military air base on the outskirts of Dubai.


A black 747, heading east, for China.


The first plane out the following day was a private Learjet belonging to Sheik Anzar al Abbas, carrying three passengers—Zoe, Lily, and Alby.


After a quick exchange between West and Alby on the tarmac of the military base the previous day, it was decided that the team would split here, with Zoe and the two children heading in the opposite direction: for England.


AIRSPACE OVER SOUTHWESTERN CHINA

DECEMBER 5, 2007


The Halicarnassus soared over the Himalayas and entered Chinese airspace.


Its black radar-absorbent paint and irregular multiangled flanks would ensure that it did not show up on any local radar systems. These features, however, would not protect it from being spotted by other, more advanced, satellite-based systems.


Not long after their takeoff from Dubai, Jack had turned to his two newest team members, the American Marine, Astro, and the Saudi spy, Vulture: “OK, gentlemen. Time to show me what you know. The subject is Xintan Prison.”


The young American lieutenant replied with a question of his own. “Are you sure this is a wise course of action? You seem to work just fine without this Wizard guy. Why not go straight for the Stones and the Pillars? Going after Wizard will only serve to antagonize the Chinese.”


Jack said, “I only know what Wizard has told me or written down. The vast stores of knowledge in his brain on this subject are the only thing that’ll successfully get us through this. That alone is worth antagonizing China for. There’s also another reason.”


“And that is…?”


“Wizard is my friend,” Jack said flatly.Just as Fuzzy was my friend, and look at what happened to him. Jesus.


“And you’d risk our lives and our nations’ reputations just to save your friend—”


“Yes.” Jack didn’t even blink. The image of Fuzzy’s head in that box flashed through his mind, a friend he hadn’t been able to save.


“That’s some loyalty you have there,” Astro said. “Will you risk all that for me if I get into trouble?”


“I don’t know you that well yet,” Jack said. “I’ll let you know later, if you survive. Now. The prison.”


Vulture unfolded some maps and satellite photos he’d brought from Saudi Intelligence. “The Chinese are keeping Professors Epper and Tanaka at the Xintan Hard Labor Penal Facility, a Grade-4 penitentiary in the remote western region of Sichuan Province.


“Xintan is a special facility reserved for political prisoners and maximum-security inmates. Its prisoners are used to dig the tunnels and high passes for China’s high-altitude train lines, like the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, the so-called Roof of the World railway. The Chinese are the best railroad builders on Earth—they’ve built tracks over, under, and through the most mountainous terrain on the planet, many of them connecting the mainland provinces to Tibet.”


At this point, Pooh Bear’s brother, Scimitar, joined in. “They’re using the new railways to flood Tibet with Chinese workers. Trying to wipe out the local population by sheer weight of numbers. It’s a new form of genocide. Genocide by overwhelming immigration.”


Jack assessed Scimitar. He could not have been more unlike his younger brother. Where Pooh Bear was rotund, bearded, and earthy, Scimitar was lean, clean-shaven, and cultured. He had pale blue eyes, olive skin, and an Oxford accent. The classic modern Arabian prince. Jack noticed that he had put China’s railway-building into a political context.


“In any case,” Vulture said, “building the railways is very dangerous work. Many prisoners die doing it and they’re just buried in the concrete. Epper, however, was taken to Xintan because it features an interrogation and debriefing wing.”


“Torture chambers?” West asked.


“Torture chambers,” Vulture said.


“Xintan is notorious for its torture wing,” Astro said. “Fulin Gong devotees, student protesters, Tibetan monks. All have been ‘reeducated,’ as the Chinese put it, at Xintan. The thing is, by virtue of its unusual terrain, Xintan is uniquely positioned to be a perfect interrogation facility. You see, Xintan is built on top of not one but two adjacent mountain peaks known as ‘The Devil’s Horns.’


“Xintan One, the main prison, is located on the primary peak and is entered via a high-altitude railway line that passes directly into the prison via a huge iron gate.”


“Sounds like Auschwitz,” Stretch said.


“Similar, but not entirely,” Astro said. “After dropping off its cargo of new prisoners at the main prison, the railway line continuesall the way through Xintan One, emerging from another gate at the far end. There the railway line crosses a long bridge and arrives at Xintan Two, the smaller wing, the torture wing, situated atop its own peak. The railway enters Xintan Two via a third massive gate and there it ends. Apart from that gate, there is no exit from Xintan Two.”


“Like Auschwitz,” Stretch said again.


“In this respect, yes it is, Jew,” Vulture said.


Sitting nearby, Pooh Bear looked up sharply. “Vulture. I honor you as my brother’s friend. I would ask then that you honor my friend. He is known as Cohen, Archer, or Stretch. You will not call him Jew again.”


Vulture bowed low in apology, again in his slow, calculating way—which bespoke insult as much as it did regret. “I humbly beg your pardon.”


Astro broke the awkward silence with more information: “According to our intelligence, the Chinese also have a chase copter at Xintan in the event someone does escape.”


“What kind of chase copter?” Jack asked, cocking his head.


“A big motherfucking Hind gunship,” Astro said, “the kind of helicopter you don’t mess around with. Captain West, it’s said that the prisoners in Xintan One can hear the screams from the torture victims across the valley in Xintan Two. If there’s one complex in China you don’t want to be in, it’s Xintan Two. No one has ever escaped from it alive.”


“Ever?”


“Ever,” Astro said.


That had been several hours ago.


Now as they entered Chinese airspace, Scimitar charged into West’s office and said: “Huntsman! We just got something from the Americans. NSA intercept. The Chinese are moving your friend Wizard today. In one hour.”


West leaped out of his chair.


The news was bad. Very bad.


Wizard and Tank were being transferred from Xintan Two to Xintan One. From there, they were to be taken by train under armed guard to Wushan. Their presence had been demanded by Colonel Mao Gongli himself.


“What time?” West said, entering the main cabin.


“The train leaves Xintan Two at noon!” Astro called from his seat at a wall console.


“Could they know we’re coming?” Scimitar asked.


West was thinking exactly the same thing.


“It’s certainly possible,” Vulture said. “After Captain West’s rather noisy escape from Australia three days ago and yesterday’s plane crash in Dubai, they could well believe we’re up to something.”


Scimitar said, “But surely the Chinese can’t believe anyone would seriously consider storming Xintan.”


“Sky Monster!” West called to the ceiling. “ETA on Xintan?”


Sky Monster’s voice came back over the intercom:“It’ll be close, but I think I can get you there by noon.”


“Do it,” West called.


This was happening a lot faster than he’d anticipated. He’d expected to have more time to create a plan.


He stepped over to the central table, stared at Astro’s maps of the mountaintop Xintan complex. “The internal transfer is the weak point. The bridge between Xintan One and Xintan Two. That’s where we can get them.”


“The bridge?” Astro said, coming over. “Maybe you didn’t hear us right, Captain. That bridge is inside the complex. Wouldn’t it be better to try to grab Epper and Tanaka later, when they’re traveling on the train outside the prison perimeter?”


West was gazing at the maps, formulating a plan. “No. They’ll assign extra guards for the external leg, probably Army troops, but for the internal transfer, they’ll only use prison guards, regular prison guards.”


Jack bit his lip. “It won’t be pretty—in fact, it’ll be downright ugly if it works at all—but that’s our opening, that’s where we can snatch them.”


XINTAN HARD LABOR PENAL FACILITY

SICHUAN PROVINCE, SOUTHWESTERN CHINA

1159 HOURS


THE TWO GRAY concrete structures sat atop their adjoining mountain peaks like twin castles in a fantasy world, gazing out over the mountain wilderness, high above the cloud layer.


The larger structure, Xintan One, was five stories tall, bulky, and fat. It sat lazily on its peak, bulging over the precipices, as if some god had just dropped a slab of plasticine onto the summit from a great height. Built almost entirely of dirty gray concrete—Communism’s contribution to architecture—it possessed four high towers soaring into the sky.


The smaller structure, Xintan Two, lay to the south of its big brother. It was only three stories tall and had just one tower. But its compact size only seemed to make it harsher, more confident in its authority. It didn’t need to be big to be feared.


Connecting the two wings was a long arched railway bridge, about half a mile in length and spanning a jagged valley gorge hundreds of feet deep. Today, that gorge was obscured by a layer of low clouds that wound its way between the mountains like a river.


High and isolated, and silent save for the whistling of the mountain wind, the scene might have been beautiful if it weren’t for the stench of death and despair that surrounded the place.


At precisely twelve noon, the great iron gates of Xintan Two rumbled open to reveal the prison train.


With black iron flanks and reinforced grilles on every window except for those on the engine cars at either end of the five-carriage-long train, it looked like a ferocious armored beast. Held back at the threshold of the gate, it snorted like a bull, expelling steam, its forward engine growling.


The two prisoners were loaded into the middle car of the train.


They were dressed in rags and blindfolds, and they shuffled rather than walked, their arms and legs bound in chains. There were only the two of them—Wizard and Tank.


Stony-faced prison guards surrounded them, twelve in total, the standard number for an internal transfer. All the guards were aware that two entire platoons of Chinese Army troops were waiting at Xintan One to accompany the prisoners on their external journey.


Wizard and Tank were placed in the third carriage where their leg irons were padlocked to ringbolts in the floor.


Then the sliding door to their carriage clanged shut and a whistle blew and the armored train moved out, expelling more steam, so that as it emerged from the gates, it looked like a great evil thing emerging from the depths of Hell itself.


The train commenced its short journey across the long arched bridge, looking tiny against the wild mountains of China, just as two birdlike objects appeared in the sky above it, descending fast, objects that as they came closer lost their birdlike appearance and took on the appearance of men…two men dressed in black with wings on their backs.


Jack West Jr. shot down through the air at bullet speed, a high-altitude facemask covering his face, a pair of ultrahigh-tech carbon-fiber wings, called Gullwings, attached to his back.


The Gullwings were an FID—a fast-insertion device—developed by Wizard for the US Air Force many years ago. Fast, silent, and stealthy, they were essentially one-man gliders that also possessed small compressed-air thrusters to enable gliding for sustained periods. In the end, the USAF had decided against using them, but Wizard had retained several prototypes, which West kept on the Hali for situations like this.


Zooming down through the sky alongside West, similarly garbed, was Stretch.


Both men were armed to the teeth, with many holsters packed with pistols, submachine guns, and grenades and, in Stretch’s case, one compact Predator antitank rocket launcher.


The prison train thundered across the long, high bridge.


Half a mile away, the great behemoth of Xintan One loomed before it, the railway tracks ending at a solid hundred-foot-high concrete wall fitted with not a single aperture except for the imposing iron gate.


But as the train whipped across the long bridge, closing in on Xintan One, the two winged figures swooped in low over it, traveling horizontally above the five armored carriages, moving gradually forward till they flew only a few feet above the frontmost carriage, the engine car.


Their arrival went unseen by anyone, the guards at Xintan One having long grown complacent with the internal leg of the journey. After all, there had never been an escape in the prison’s history. As such, no one was actually assigned to watch the train during the bridge crossing.


Once the two flying figures had reached the engine car, gliding low over it, West and Stretch retracted their wings and dropped to the roof of the engine, landing perfectly on their feet.


They had to move fast. The train had covered almost two-thirds of its short journey and the gates of the main facility rose large before them.


West drew his two Desert Eagle pistols and leaped down onto the nose of the engine car and proceeded to blow out its two drivers’ windows.


The windows shattered and he swung in through one, landing inside the driver’s compartment.


Both drivers—Chinese Army men—shouted and reached for their guns. They never got to them.


Stretch swung inside the driver’s compartment to find the drivers dead and West taking the controls of the train.


“Predator,” West called above the wind now screaming in through the shattered windshield.


Stretch loaded his antitank rocket launcher, then shouldered it, aiming it out the broken front windows.


“Ready!” he called.


Then, right on cue, the iron gates of Xintan One cracked open, ready to receive the transfer train.


At which point, West jammed forward on the throttle.


AS THE GATES rumbled open, the two platoons of Chinese Army troops waiting on the receiving platform of Xintan One turned, expecting to see the armored train engaging its brakes, disgorging steam, and generally slowing.


What they saw was the exact opposite.


The armored train burst in through the great gateway at full speed, accelerating through the tight confines of the archway and blasting past the siding.


Then a finger of smoke shoomed out from the shattered forward windshield of the engine car—the smoke trail of a Predator antitank missile, a missile that cut a beeline for…


…the other gate of Xintan One.


The outer gate.


The Predator missile slammed into the iron gate and exploded. Smoke and dust billowed out in every direction, engulfing the receiving platform, obscuring everything.


The huge iron outer doors buckled and groaned, their center sections twisted and loosened, which was all West needed, for a moment later his train thundered into them at phenomenal speed and crashed right through them, flinging them open, hurling them from their massive hinges, before the train itself rushed out into gray daylight, racing away from the mountaintop prison, running for all it was worth.


At first, the Chinese were just stunned, but their response when it came was fierce.


Within four minutes, two compact helicopters—fast-attack Russian-built Kamov Ka-50s, otherwise known as Werewolves—rose from within Xintan One and took off after the runaway train.


Another minute later, a much larger helicopter rose from within Xintan Two. It was also Russian-made, but of far highter quality. It was an Mi-24 Hind gunship, one of the most feared choppers in the world. Bristling with cannons, gun pods, chem-weapons dispensers, and rockets, it had a unique double-domed cockpit. It also possessed a troop hold, which today bore ten fully armed Chinese shock troops.


Once clear of the prison’s walls, the Hind lowered its nose and thundered off in pursuit of West’s fleeing train.


The final aspect of the Chinese response was electronic.


The Xintan complex possessed two outer guardhouses situated on the mountain railway a few miles north of the prison, guardhouses that the train would have to pass by.


Frantic phone calls were made to the guards posted at both guardhouses, but strangely no reply came back from either one.


At both outposts the scene was the same: all the guards lay on the floor, out cold, their hands bound with flex-cuffs.


West’s people had already been there.


THE ARMORED train whipped through the mountains at breakneck speed, a rain of snow rushing in through its shattered forward windows.


It roared past the first guardhouse, crashing through its boom gate as if it were a toothpick.


Stretch drove, eyeing the landscape around them—snow-covered mountainside to the left, a sheer thousand-foot drop to the right.


The train rounded a left-hand spur and suddenly the second guardhouse came into view, plus a long soaring iron bridge beyond it.


“Huntsman! I’ve got a visual on the outer bridge!” Stretch called.


West had been leaning up and out through the shattered windshield, setting up some kind of mortar-type device and peering behind them, back at the prison complex. He ducked back inside.


“We got choppers on our tail. Two attack birds and one big bastard Hind—”


“Three choppers?” Stretch turned. “I thought Astro said they only kept one chase copter at Xintan, the Hind?”


“Looks like his intelligence was two choppers short,” West said wryly. “I hope that’s not the only thing he got wrong. Too late to worry about it now. The rotor net is mounted and in your hands. Just get us to that bridge before somebody on that Hind figures out who we are and decides it’s worth blowing the bridge to stop us. Keep me posted. I’ve got work to do.”


West then grabbed a microphone from the dash, keyed the train’s internal intercom, and began speaking in Mandarin: “Attention all guards aboard this train! Attention! We are now in command of this vehicle. All we want are the prisoners—”


In the five regular carriages of the train, every one of the Chinese guards looked up at the voice coming in over the PA.


Among them, one other face snapped up and gasped, the only one to recognize the voice.


Wizard. He was bloody, bruised, and beaten. But his eyes lit up at the sound of his friend’s voice. “Jack…” he rasped.


“—We mean you no harm. We understand that many of you are just doing your job, that you are men with families, children. But if you get in our way, know this: harm will come to you. We will be coming through the train now, so we give you a choice: lay down your weapons, and you will be not be killed. Raise your weapons against us and you will die.”


The intercom clicked off.


Up in the driver’s compartment, West threw open the interconnecting door between the engine car and the first carriage.


Then, holding an MP7 submachine gun in one hand and a Desert Eagle in the other, he entered the prison train.


The three guards in the first carriage had heeded his warning.


They stood backed up against the walls, their Type-56 rifles at their feet, their hands raised. West moved warily past them, his guns up, when suddenly one of the guards whipped out a pistol and—


Blam!


The guard was blown back against the wall of the carriage, nailed by West’s powerful Desert Eagle.


“I told you not to raise your weapons,” he said to the others in a low voice. He jerked his chin at a nearby cell: “Into the cage, now.”


The four guards in the second carriage were smarter. They’d set a trap. First, they’d cut the lights, darkening the carriage; and second, they’d concealed one of their men in the ceiling above the interconnecting doorway while the others feigned surrender to West.


West entered the carriage, rocking with the motion of the train, to see three of them holding up their hands and crying “Mercy! Mercy! Don’t shoot us!” diverting his attention from the man hidden in the shadows above the door.


Then, completely unseen by West, the concealed man extended his arm, aiming his gun at West’s head from directly above—


—and suddenly West looked up, too late—


—just as the entire carriage rocked wildly, pummeled from the outside by a ferocious burst of supermachine gun fire.


The chase copters had arrived, and had started firing on the speeding train!


The guard above him was thrown from his perch above the door and, missing West by inches, hit the floor with a clumsy thud.


Then the other three guards drew their weapons and the darkened carriage erupted in strobelike flashes of gunfire, with Jack West Jr. in the middle of it all, firing in every direction with both of his guns—sidestepping to one side then firing left, right, and down—until at the end of it all when darkness had returned and the smoke had cleared, he was the only one left standing.


He moved grimly onward: next carriage.


The prisoner carriage.


At the same time, outside, the two chase helicopters from Xintan had caught up with the runaway train and were assaulting it with a hail of bulletfire from their strut-mounted 30mm guns.


Stretch brought the train past the second guardhouse, smashing through its boom gate before racing out onto the long swooping bridge that led to the rest of the mountain railway.


Onto the bridge, totally exposed.


One chase chopper swooped low over the train’s engine car—just as Stretch triggered the mortarlike device on its hood.


The device went off with a muffled whump, propelling something into the air high above the speeding train.


It was a wide nylon net with heavy weighted bearings at every corner. It fanned out above the engine car like a giant lateral spiderweb—a spiderweb that was designed to bring down helicopters.


The net entered the rotor blades of the lead chopper and instantly got entangled.


The rotors caught horribly and with a jerk, stopped, and suddenly the banking helicopter became a forward-moving glider with the aerodynamics of a brick.


It sailed down into the ravine below the bridge, falling down and down and down before it hit the bottom with a tremendous explosion.


Stretch left the controls of the train for a moment to grab his Predator rocket launcher and insert a final rocket-propelled grenade into it.


When he returned to the controls, he found himself staring at the huge Chinese gunship, the Hind, hovering off to the side of the long swooping bridge, flying parallel to his engine car.


“Oh shit,” Stretch breathed.


The Hind loosed a single rocket from one of its side-mounted pods—a missile aimed not at the train, but rather at thebridge; a missile that would stop West from snatching Wizard and Tank. That a few guards would also be lost was clearly of no concern to the Chinese generals who had ordered the missile launch.


“Fuck me…” Stretch keyed his radio: “Huntsman! They’re going to take out the bridge…”


“Then drive faster,”came the reply.


“Right!” Stretch hit the gas, pushing the train’s throttle as far forward as it would go.


The missile from the Hind struck the bridge right in its middle, in the latticework of struts that formed the apex of its arch, a bare second after the speeding train had shot over that point.


The detonation of the missile sent a shower of iron girders and beams raining down into the ravine.


But the bridge held…for the moment.


The train sped across it, a hundred yards from the other side and the shelter of a tunnel there.


There came an almighty groan. The distinctive groan of iron girders bending.


Then, in almost glorious slow motion, the great bridge began to sway, and rock, and from the middle outward, it began to drop in pieces into the ravine.


IT WAS an incredible sight.


The slowly collapsing bridge, falling away in its center, while the armored train—still on it—sped off its eastern end, chased by the disintegrating bridge.


But the train was just a fraction too fast.


It shot off the end of the bridge and disappeared into the waiting tunnel a bare second before the rails behind its final carriage—the rear-facing second engine—dropped away into the ravine, disappearing forever.


Inside the train, Jack came to the third carriage, the prisoner car, just as all the lights abruptly went off.


The guards here weren’t going to give up without a fight and now in the darkness of the tunnel, the interior of the prison train was enveloped in near-total blackness.


Snapping the night-vision goggles on his helmet into place, Jack entered the prisoner car, seeing the world in phosphorescent green, and he beheld…


…two burly Chinese guards holding both Wizard and Tank in front of their bodies with guns held to each of the blindfolded professors’ heads. Neither of the guards wore night-vision goggles and they stared wildly into the darkness—they didn’t need NVGs to kill their hostages.


When they heard the heavy interconnecting door open, one of them yelled, “Drop your weapon or we blow their—”


Ba-blam!Two shots.


Both guards dropped. Matching holes in their faces.


Jack never even broke his stride.


The other two guards in the carriage weren’t so bold and Jack quickly herded them into a spare cell before sealing the rear door of the carriage with an axe—he didn’t want any more enemies bothering him.


Then he slid to Wizard’s side, snatched away the blindfold, and gazed in horror at his battered friend. “Wizard, it’s me. Jesus, what did they do to you…”


The old man’s face was a mess of cuts and peeled skin. His arms and chest bore the distinctive scars of electric shock equipment. His long white beard was matted with dried blood.


“Jack!” he sobbed. “Oh, Jack. I’m sorry! I’m so sorry to have brought this on you! I thought I’d die here! I never thought you would come for me!”


“You’d do the same for me,” Jack said, glancing at the thick ringbolts holding Wizard’s and Tank’s leg irons to the floor. “Don’t celebrate too soon. We’re not out of this yet.”


Jack then extracted a hand held blowtorch from his utility belt, fired it up, and went to work.


THE TRAIN zoomed through the tunnel.


As it did so, the remaining chase copter flew ahead, gunning for the tunnel’s exit farther round the mountain.


It beat the train there, steadying itself in a deadly hover just out from the tunnel’s mouth, cannons ready and aimed at the oncoming engine car.


But before the train emerged from the tunnel, something else did.


A Predator missile.


It lanced out from the tunnel’s mouth, a dead-straight tail of smoke issuing out behind it, before it plowed into the hovering copter, blasting it to a million pieces, blowing it out of the sky.


Then the train roared out of the tunnel and swung hard left, following the mountain railway on its course.


But the meanest pursuer of all still remained.


The Hind gunship.


It chased Stretch around every bend, paralleling the fleeing train, harrying the engine car mercilessly with withering fire.


Before suddenly, all the gunfire stopped.


Stretch frowned, confused.


What the—?


Thumps on the roof—


Then before he knew what was happening, a dark figure swung in through one of the shattered forward windows and into the driver’s compartment!


Two boots slammed into his chest, knocking him to the floor.


Damn it! I was stupid!he realized as he tumbled.They’re guards—from the back carriages of the train. Must’ve crawled forward along the roof…


The first guard to land inside the cabin drew his pistol, only for Stretch to kick him viciously—square on the kneecap—breaking it backward, causing the man to howl out in pain, giving Stretch the second he needed to draw his own gun and fire it once, twice, three times into the man’s chest—


More thumps on the roof.


Stretch stood—just in time to see three more pairs of boots jump down onto the hood of the engine car, blocking his view of the track ahead: a long, straight section of track that ended at a sharp left-hand curve. Beyond that curve was a steep downward slope of densely packed snow.


“Huntsman!” he called into his radio mike. “How’s it going back there?”


“I’ve found Wizard and Tank. Just have to cut them free.”


“I got overwhelming company up here, about to storm my position! They came over the roof, from the rear carriages! I have to launch us now!”


“Do it.”West’s voice was calm.“Then get back here.”


“Right.”


Stretch knew what he had to do.


He jammed the throttle fully forward—and the train sped up markedly. Then he wedged a grenade between the throttle and the brakes and pulled the pin.


This was now a one-way ticket.


He dashed back into the train itself, slamming the interconnecting door behind him—


—just as the grenade exploded, ripping the controls to shreds—


—a moment before the entire driver’s compartment was shredded by a volley of bullets, and three more guards swung in through the forward windows.


They entered with their guns up, their leader—an older man, more seasoned than the others, more battle-hardened, the Captain of the Guard—looking pissed as hell at this brazen assault on his train.


THE TRAIN was now rocketing along the high-altitude railway, all but out of control and heading for the sharp left-hand bend that it couldn’t possibly take at this speed.


Stretch burst into the third carriage, the prisoner carriage, where he saw West kneeling beside Wizard and Tank, blowtorch flaring.


Tank was free, but West was still cutting through the leg irons fastening Wizard to the floor.


The Captain of the Guard stormed angrily into the first carriage, not caring for the runaway state of the train—unable to slow it, he was going after the intruders.


He found two of his men huddled in a cell there and heard their pathetic excuses, before he put a bullet in each of their heads for cowardice.


Then he moved on, hunting.


West’s blowtorch blazed away as it carved through Wizard’s chains.


“How long?” Stretch asked anxiously.


“Almost there…” West said, his face illuminated by the blowtorch’s magnesium glare.


The rocking motion of the train was getting wilder.


“We don’t have much track left, Jack…”


“Just…another…second…”


The door to their carriage burst open—revealing the Captain of the Guard!


Stretch spun.


West spun.


The Captain of the Guard stood in the doorway, grinning. He gripped his gun tighter.


But he needn’t have, because it was already too late.


For just then, the runaway train hit the bend.


The speeding train hit the alpine curve going way too fast.


Derailment.


The forward engine car jumped the tracks, bumping roughly over them before skidding out onto the steeply sloping plain of snow beyond the curve.


The rest of the great black train followed the engine car, leaping off the rails before also sliding out onto the snow plain.


The engine car skidded down the slope, its forward grille grinding into the powder, the rest of the train snaking along behind it like a twisted accordion, the whole crashing mess turning laterally as it slid until the entire train was sliding in reverse down the slope and headed inexorably toward the bottom, where there was nothing but a bare cliff edge and a thousand-foot drop.


And circling above all this was the Hind gunship.


Inside the train, the world spun crazily.


The shocking jolt of their derailment had sent the Captain of the Guard flying sideways, slamming into the right-hand wall of the carriage. Then the inertia of the train’s lateral spin as it slid down the slope—at first forward, now backward—pressed him into it.


West and Stretch were better prepared: they’d grabbed hold of the nearest cell bars at the first bump and it still took all of their strength to stay upright during the crazy bouncing of the derailment—Stretch grabbing Tank, West clutching Wizard.


Yet still, in its own out-of-control way, this was part of West’s plan. He’d planned to crash there. To end up on this snow plain with the train buried in the deep snow.


Because he still needed something.


He still needed the Chinese to—


But then with shocking suddenness something happened that West hadn’t planned.


The train went over the edge at the base of the snow slope.


UNFORTUNATELY,the snow hadn’t quite been deep enough, its slick icy base causing the snakelike train to slide all the way down the snow plain to the very edge.


Now traveling backward, the rear engine car went over the edge first, its weight pulling first one, then two, then three carriages over with it—


West felt it coming an instant before it happened.


Felt the distinctive tug of the train’s last three cars—the engine car and the last two regular carriages—going over the precipice a moment before his own carriage lurched sickeningly and…


“Grab something!” he yelled to the others, including Wizard who was still not yet free of his ringbolts.


Their carriage went over the edge.


The world went vertical.


Anything not nailed down dropped the length of the carriage, including one of the Captain of the Guard’s men.


With a cry, the hapless fellow fell the full vertical length of the carriage, hitting the heavy iron door at the bottom with a foul cracking noise.


The Guard Captain and his remaining companion had quicker reflexes: as the carriage fell, they both discarded their guns in favor of having free hands, and rolled into a nearby cell at the top end of the now-vertical carriage.


West and Stretch grabbed the bars of the nearest cell, holding on to Wizard and Tank, before—smack—their carriage’s fall was arrested.


Somehow, the entire train had stopped its plunge down the cliff face, coming to a jarring, crunching halt.


Although they couldn’t see it, the train’s lead engine car had rammed up against a large boulder at the edge of the precipice and lodged there, holding fast, holding the entire train suspended beneath it, dangling over the thousand-foot drop!


West quickly took in their new predicament: he, Stretch, Wizard, and Tank were halfway down the vertical carriage. The Guard Captain and his buddy were up near the top, resting against the now-horizontal wall of their cell, not far from the interconnecting door that led upward to safety.


A grinding groaning sound.


With a jerk the entire train dropped three feet. Chunks of snow rained past the barred windows. The upper engine was slipping, a yard at a time.


West exchanged a look with Stretch.


Then another groan, but a different kind: the sound of a metal coupling straining under the weight of the dangling train.


“We’re gonna fall,” West said to Stretch.“Up! Now!”


“What about you?” Stretch nodded at Wizard’s ringbolt. The old man’s leg irons were still chained to it.


“Just go!” West said. “I’m not leaving him! Go! Someone has to get out of here alive!”


Stretch didn’t bother to argue. He just grabbed Tank and started hauling him up the carriage, using the bars of the cells as ladder rungs.


They climbed up the left-hand side of the carriage’s central aisle—passing the Guard Captain as he emerged from his cell on the right, dazed and gunless.


West went back to work on Wizard’s chains with his blowtorch. He had to do this fast.


Another grinding groan. More snow sailed past the window.


The train dropped another three feet.


The blowtorch cut farther through the chains before—shwack!—the flame sizzled through the final section of chain and Wizard was free.


“Come on, old buddy,” West said. “We gotta move.”


They looked up to see Stretch and Tank disappear through the interconnecting door at the top of the carriage—but also in time to see the Guard Captain step across their line of sight, staring daggers at West, blocking the way.


“This way,” West said, leading Wizard down.


“Down?” Wizard asked.


“Trust me.”


They came to the bottom door of the third carriage just as another metallic groan squealed out from nearby and—crack—the coupling connecting their car to the carriage beneath them broke loose and the bottom two carriages of the train, plus the rear engine car, just fell away into the void.


The three cars fell forever, soaring silently down into the great mountain chasm before they smashed violently against the jagged rocks at the base of the ravine, the engine car exploding in a cloud of flames and black smoke.


“No time to waste,” West said to Wizard. “This way.”


Dangling by their fingertips, they swung out along the underside of their carriage, their feet hanging a thousand feet above the world, before they turned upward, climbing up the outside of the third suspended prison car, using any and every protrusion on it as a handhold—the bars on the windows, hinges, handles, anything.


Up the side of the third carriage they went, moving quickly, Jack helping Wizard. They reached the gap between this carriage and the next one just as the Guard Captain and his companion did—moving inside the train—and so Jack and Wizard just kept on moving, scaling the exterior of the second carriage as quickly as they could until they reached its summit and clambered onto its flat upper surface—


—just in time to see the Guard Captain climb up into the safety of the next (and last) carriage above them, his junior companion still waiting to climb up after him.


It was at that moment that the Captain saw West—and something evil gleamed in his eye.


He reached for the coupling, despite the fact that his own man was still standing on the lower carriage. The junior guard yelped “No!” when he saw what was going to happen but West just moved, leaping for a grille on the upper carriage, calling to Wizard as he did so: “Max! Jump for my legs!”


Wizard jumped immediately, reaching for Jack’s waist as—


The Guard Captain disengaged the coupling.


The second carriage dropped instantly.


It took the junior guard with it, his wide eyes receding into the chasm, his mouth open in a silent scream all the way down.


But West and Wizard were still in the game: West now dangling from the bottom of the first carriage, with Wizard hangingfrom his belt!


“Max, quick, climb up my body!” West yelled, as Wizard quickly and clumsily climbed up the length of West’s frame, at one point using the folded carbon-fiber wings on Jack’s back for handholds.


The look on the Guard Captain’s face said it all. He was furious. He wouldn’t let that happen again.


He ducked back inside the carriage and started climbing—fast.


Jack knew what was happening instantly.


It was now a race to the next coupling.


“Go, Jack! Go!” Wizard yelled. “I’ll catch up!”


West charged up the outer wall of the final carriage, while the Guard Captain raced up its internal aisle.


They both moved quickly, clambering up the vertical carriage.


“Stretch!” West called into his radio as he climbed. “Where are you!”


“We’re up, on the precipice, but we got a prob—”


West knew what that problem was. He could see it.


The Hind chopper was hovering directly above him, a short way out from the cliff top, not far from the sharply tilted engine car hanging out over the edge—waiting for them, if they made it up.


Stay alive,he thought.As long as you’re alive, you have a chance.


Up he climbed, up the outside of the vertical carriage, moving like a monkey.


Then he rose over the final lip and stood…just as the Guard Captain emerged from the doorway there.


Jack had beaten him in this race, got there first by a bare two seconds. He stepped forward to unleash a fierce kick at the Guard Captain—


Only to see a gun appear in the Captain’s hand.


Jack froze as the realization dawned on him: that was why he’d beaten the Captain in their race. The Guard Captain had taken a moment to grab a loose gun on the way up.


Aw, shit…Jack thought.Shit, shit, shit.


He stood there, frozen on the horizontal end section of the upturned carriage, the beating wind from the helicopter hammering his clothes. Without thinking, he raised his hands.


“You lose!” the Guard Captain spat in English, grinning, as Wizard’s face popped up over the edge behind Jack’s boots and saw the situation.


The Captain jammed back on the hammer of his gun.


“Wizard…” Jack said. “It’s time to fly.”


Then, just as Guard Captain pulled the trigger on his gun, quick as a flash, Jack’s raised hands grabbed the safety rod on the coupling above his head and disengaged it—


—causing their own carriage to drop away from the engine car, with them and the Guard Captain on it!


THE GUARD CAPTAIN’S eyes boggled. Jack had just condemned the mall to death.


The carriage fell fast. Down the side of the massive cliff.


The gray rock wall blurred with speed as the iron prison car fell past it.


But as the carriage fell, Jack was all action. He grabbed Wizard and pulled him into a bear hug, yelling “Hold on to me!” as he pressed something on his chest armor and suddenly his Gullwings sprang out from the compact unit on his back and instantly the two of them soared away from the falling armored carriage, at first flying downward at incredible speed before swooping up in a graceful glide, leaving the Guard Captain to fall the rest of the way by himself, screaming all the way to his death.


With Wizard hanging from his chest, Jack caught an upward thermal draft, and they glided away from the mountain railway and the twin mountain peaks that housed Xintan Prison.


“Astro?” West said into his mike. “We’re gonna need a pickup farther down the railway. How about near that farm we saw earlier?”


“Roger that, Huntsman,”came the reply.“Just gotta grab Stretch first. Then we’ll come get you.”


Stretch stood on solid ground, knee deep in snow, with the weary Tank beside him, alongside the engine car of the prison train, tilted on the edge of the precipice, the only carriage still remaining.


Unfortunately, hovering in the air in front of them was the Hind gunship, looming large.


A voice over its loud-hailer commanded in English:“You two! Remain where you are!”


“Whatever you say,” Stretch said.


The Hind landed on the snow plain, its rotors kicking up a miniblizzard.


Ten Chinese troops rushed out of its hold, dashing through the billowing snow, quickly forming a ring around Stretch and Tank.


Sitting in the chopper’s cockpit, the Hind’s two Chinese pilots saw Stretch raise his hands a moment before the miniblizzard shrouded the entire scene in white.


Which was why the pilots never saw the snow plain around their gunship come alive, three ghostlike figures rising from beneath it, dressed in white camouflage gear and bearing MP7 submachine guns: Astro, Scimitar, and Vulture.


The three white-clad men took the unguarded chopper easily and once they had it, Vulture aimed its huge six-barreled cannon at the ten-man Chinese team on the ground and demanded over the loud hailer that they drop their weapons. Needless to say, they complied.


Minutes later, the Hind’s crew and troops stood shivering on the snow plain, dressed only in their undergarments, their helicopter lifting off without them—flown by Astro and Scimitar, with Vulture manning the main cannon and Stretch and Tank safely in the hold.


It was the final piece of Jack’s plan: they’d needed the Hind to land here—so they could steal it for the next part of their mission in China.


THE SALISBURY PLAIN, ENGLAND

DECEMBER5, 2007, 3:05A.M.


THE RENTEDHonda Odyssey zoomed along the A303, alone in the night.


In the glare of a bright full moon, endless fields of Wiltshire farmland stretched away to the horizon on either side of the highway, bathed in eerie blue light.


Zoe drove, with Lily and Alby beside her.


In the back of the S.U.V. sat the two young men who had met her and the kids at Heathrow: the unique Adamson brothers, Lachlan and Julius.


Identical twins, they were both tall and lean, with friendly freckled faces, carrot orange hair, and thick Scottish accents.


Both wore simple T-shirts, one black, the other white. Lachlan’s black shirt read, somewhat enigmatically: “I HAVE SEEN THE COW LEVEL!” while Julius’s white one proclaimed “THERE IS NO COW LEVEL!”


They also had a habit of finishing each other’s sentences.


“Zoe!” Lachlan had exclaimed on seeing her.


“It’s great to see you again!” Julius said. “Hey, this sounds like a secret mission.”


“Is it a secret mission?” Lachlan asked.


Julius: “If it is, don’t you think Lachy and I should have code names, you know, like Maverick or Goose?”


“I’d like to be called Blade,” Lachlan said.


“And I’d like Bullfighter,” Julius said.


“Blade? Bullfighter?”


Julius said, “Pretty rugged and heroic, huh? We’ve been thinking about this while we’ve been waiting for you.”


“Clearly,” Zoe said. “How about Tweedledum and Tweedledee? Romulus and Remus?”


“Aw, no! Not twin code names,” Lachlan said. “Anything but twin names.”


“Sorry, boys, but there’s only one rule when it comes to call signs.”


“And that is?”


“You never get to pick your own.” Zoe smiled. “And sometimes your nickname can change. Look at me, I used to be known as Bloody Mary, until I met this little one.” A nod at Lily. “And now everyone calls me Princess. Be patient, you’ll get call signs when the occasion calls for it. Because, yes, this mission is about as secret as it gets.”


Now, speeding west along the A303, they were heading for a place that of all people Alby had led them to.


The military air base outside Dubai. Two days previously. Just after Earl McShane’s cargo plane had smashed into the Burj al Arab.


Jack West had stood on the tarmac, crouched low over Alby and Lily, while armed men and CIA agents calling themselves attachés spoke into cell phones, a black pillar of smoke rising into the sky above the Burj al Arab in the distance.


“Talk to me, Alby,” Jack had said.


During the meeting, Alby had deciphered one of Wizard’s more obscure notes: the reference to the “Titanic Sinking and Rising.” But he had hinted to Jack that there was more to it.


Alby said, “I also know what one of the symbols on Wizard’s summary sheet means.”


Jack had pulled out the summary sheet.


“The symbol at the bottom right,” Alby said. “Next to the ‘Titanic Sinking’ reference.”


“Yes…” West had said.


“It’s not a symbol. It’s a diagram.”


“Of what?”


Alby had looked up at West seriously. “It’s a diagram of the layout of Stonehenge.”


STONEHENGE


THE HONDA crested a rise, and without warning the cluster of great stones came into view.


Zoe inhaled sharply.


Of course she had been here before, several times. Everyone in the UK had. But the scale of the site, the sheerbravura of it, always took her by surprise.


Stonehenge.


Quite simply, Stonehenge was stunning.


A source of fascination to her for a long time, Zoe knew all the myths: that this ring of towering stones was an ancient calendar; or an ancient observatory; that the bluestones—the smaller six-foot-high dolerite stones that formed a horseshoe-shaped arc within the far more famous trilithons—had been brought to the Salisbury Plain around the year 2700B.C. by some unknown tribe from the Preseli Hillsover 150 miles away in distant Wales. To this day, many believe that the bluestones, even on bitterly cold winter days, remain warm to the touch.


It would be another 150 years, around 2,570B.C., before the spectacular trilithons were raised around this minihenge of bluestones. But the date is important: in 2,570B.C. the Egyptian pharaoh Khufu was completing his famous work on the Giza plateau in Egypt, the Great Pyramid.


Over the years, Zoe knew, cosmologists and astrologers had tried to link Stonehenge with the Great Pyramid, but without success. The only confirmed link was the closely matching dates of their construction.


Other peculiarities of Stonehenge intrigued her.


Like the rare green cyanobacterium that grew on the great trilithons themselves. A variety of lichen, it was a true oddity, an uncommon hybrid of algae and fungus that grew only on exposed coastlines—yet Stonehenge was fifty miles from the nearest sea, the Bristol Channel. The mosslike substance gave the stones a mottled, uneven aspect.


And then, of course, there were the unexplained theories about the site’s location: the unique way the Sun and Moon rise over the fifty-first parallel; and the unusually high number of neolithic sites running the length of the British Isles on the same degree of longitude as Stonehenge.


In the final analysis, only one thing about Stonehenge could be said with any degree of certainty: for over 4,500 years it had withstood the ravages of wind, rain, and time itself, offering a multitude of questions and very few answers.


“OK,” Zoe said as she drove. “How are we going to tackle this? Thoughts anyone?”


“Thoughts?” Lachlan said. “How about this: that there’s no precedent for what we’re about to do. Over the years, scholars and wackos have linked Stonehenge with the Sun and the Moon, with virgins and druids, with solstices and eclipses, but never with Jupiter. If Wizard’s hypothesis is correct and this Firestone is the real deal, then we’re going to see something that hasn’t been seen for over 4,500 years.”


Julius said, “Can I add that the good folk at English Heritage don’t look kindly on people who step over the rope at Stonehenge and walk among the stones, let alone lunatics like us wanting to perform ancient occult rituals. There’ll be security guards.”


“Leave the guards to me,” Zoe said. “You just handle the occult ritual.”


The twins pulled out Wizard’s notes again, gazed at the diagram of Stonehenge:


“In his notes, Wizard says that the Ramesean Stone at Stonehenge is the Altar Stone,” Julius said. “But what about the Grand Trilithon? It’s the signature element of Stonehenge.”


“No, I’d go with the Altar Stone, too,” Lachlan said. “It’s the focal point of the structure. It’s also made of bluestone, laid at the same time as the original ring of bluestones, so it’s older than the trilithons. And fortunately for us, it’s still there.”


Over four-and-a-half millennia, Stonehenge had been pilfered by locals searching for stones to use as walls or as millstones. Nearly all the bluestones of the henge were gone. The bigger trilithons had survived—at over eighteen feet tall (twenty-one in the case of the Grand Trilithon) they had just been too big for the local peasants to move.


Lachlan turned to Alby: “What do you reckon, kid?”


Alby looked up, surprised to be asked his opinion. He had thought that, as kids, he and Lily were just being brought along for the ride, assigned to Zoe to be kept safe.


“Well?” Lachlan said expectantly. “Jack West thinks you’re a clever one and Jack’s a notoriously hard judge. And Zoe here doesn’t hang out with losers—I mean, hey, look at us.”


Lily raised an eyebrow at that.


Julius added, “And weren’t you the one who figured out the connection between the Titanic Rising and Stonehenge?”


Alby swallowed. Lily smiled at him reassuringly. She had long ago become used to this kind of adult treatment.


“I, well,” Alby stammered. “The stone we’re after has to fit some way with the Firestone. I can’t see the Firestone fitting onto the Grand Trilithon in any practical way. But the Altar Stone, if reerected, would be at the very heart of the structure. The other thing to remember is the rising of Titan to the northeast—”


“Ah, yes, yes. Good point,” Julius said.


They had gone through this earlier.


As Alby had explained briefly at the meeting in Dubai, the Titanic Rising and Sinking occurred only when the Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn were in alignment, something that occurred approximately once every 400 years, and which—clearly by no coincidence—was happening right now.


The “rising” of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, actually preceded the passage of Saturn itself, rising from behind the great hulking mass of Jupiter. Soon after this rising, Saturn would sink again behind Jupiter. Due to each planet’s angled orbit around the Sun—its ecliptic—this upward-downward motion occurred eight times in the month that the planets remained aligned.


Seen from Stonehenge, first Jupiter would appear on the northeastern horizon, then Titan, then Saturn.


“So why is this Titanic Rising so important?” Zoe asked. “What does Titan or Jupiter or Saturn have to do with the Sa-Benben and the Dark Star?”


“The connection with the Sa-Benben is straightforward,” Julius said. “It’s the connection between Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid that people have been searching for for centuries. Our theory is simple: the Pyramid is a temple to our Sun. Stonehenge is a temple to the Dark Sun.”


“And the two are most certainly linked geographically,” Lachlan added. “You know how the bluestones were brought to the Salisbury Plain from the Preseli Hills in Wales?”


“Yes, Lachlan,” Zoe said patiently. “I do have two degrees in archaeology. I just didn’t do the subjects on Crazy British Neolithic Cosmology that you obviously majored in.”


“Then you know about the rectangle formed by the four original Station Stones that once surrounded Stonehenge?”


“Yes.”


“I don’t,” Lily said.


To illustrate, Lachlan opened a book, showing Lily a picture of Stonehenge’s layout. Arrayed around the circular henge in a perfect rectangle were four stones known as the “Station Stones.” They formed a 5:12 rectangle.


Lachlan said, “Now, if you draw a diagonal across that rectangle, simple Pythagorean math tells us that the resulting right-angle triangle is a 5:12:13 triangle.”


He drew a triangle on the picture with a pencil.


“Following me?” he said.


“So far,” Lily said.


“Nice triangle, isn’t it?”


“I guess.”


Lachlan then pulled out a map of the United Kingdom. He indicated Stonehenge at the bottom of the map, and then drew the same 5:12:13 triangle on the map using Stonehenge as the tip of the triangle and keeping the triangle’s baseline parallel to the equator.


“The 5:12:13 triangle reveals the original location of the bluestones in Wales: The Preseli Hills,” Lachlan said. “This is pretty exceptional geography for a primitive tribe. It’s so exceptional that some believe the ancients had outside help.”


“I thought you were going to prove a link between Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid,” Zoe said.


Lachlan smiled. He winked to Lily. “Remember how I said it was a nice triangle?”


“Yeah…”


“Well, if you extend the hypotenuse of this wonderful triangle like this…”


“…see what it runs through.”


Lachlan turned to a map of the world and did precisely that.


“No way…” Lily said, when she saw the finished product.


The arrow passed directly through Egypt, right at the Nile Delta…at Giza.


“Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid at Giza,” Lachlan said proudly. “United at last.”


“Which brings us to the second connection,” Julius said. “The connection between all this and Titan, Saturn, and Jupiter. You see, it’s not Titan or Saturn or Jupiter that matters. It’s what lies hidden behind them that matters.”


“Behind them?” Lily asked.


Lachlan grinned. “Yes. We checked the data you sent us from Dubai, the data from Wizard’s notes about this Dark Star and its rate of approach. Seems it’s coming at us from behind Jupiter. Thus the importance of this celestial event, the rising of Saturn behind Jupiter. It is, to put it simply, beyond value, because it will allow us, for the very first time, to see this fearsome Dark Star.”


“How?” Zoe asked, turning in the driver’s seat. “I thought we couldn’t see it in our light spectrum.”


“Well, we won’t see it , we’ll see the dark space that it occupies,” Julius said. “Now, are you familiar with the concept of space-time?”


“Or more specifically the curvature of space-time,” Lachlan added.


“Yes, good clarification, brother,” Julius said.


“Thank you.”


“More or less,” Zoe said. “The gravitational pull of a planet bends the space around it. I once heard it compared to a stretched-out rubber sheet with marbles placed on it…”


“That’s right,” Lachlan said, “and each marble makes a slight depression in the rubber sheet, indicating the curvature of space-time. So if you were in a spaceship traveling past these planets, your trajectory would actually bend as you pass each planet, unless of course you applied more power.”


“Yes…”


Julius said, “Well, it’s the same with light. Light bends, too, as it passes through the gravitational fields of planets and stars.”


Lachlan: “And big planets like Jupiter bend it more than small planets like Mercury.”


“Correct,” Julius said. “So tonight, as we look out at Jupiter from Stonehenge, and see Saturn rise behind it, we will, if only for a moment, thanks to the peculiar bending of light around those two planets, get a glimpse of the section of space hiddenbehind Jupiter.”


Zoe frowned. “And if the Sa-Benben is set in place at that time—positioned atop the Ramesean stone of Stonehenge—what happens then?”


Julius looked at Lachlan.


Lachlan looked at Julius.


Then they both turned to face Zoe and shrugged together.


“That,” Julius said, “is what we’re going to find out.”


The car sped into the night.


STONEHENGE

DECEMBER5, 2007, 3:22A.M.


THEY PARKED on the gravel shoulder a few hundred yards from the henge.


The moon shone down on the wide plain like a great spotlight, illuminating the relentlessly flat landscape all the way to the horizon.


Stonehenge stood at the junction of the A303 and a smaller side road.


Two security guards stood near the great shadowy stones, silhouettes in the moonlight. They saw the Honda stop, but did not investigate: travelers from London often stopped to gaze at the stones while they stretched their legs.


Zoe stepped closer, to within fifty yards of the two guards and then quickly raised a boxy gunlike object fitted with a handgrip and trigger, aimed it at the guards, and called,“Hey!”


The guards looked over.


Zoe pulled the trigger. There was an instantaneous flash from her device accompanied by a deep sonicwhump, and immediately the two guards dropped to the ground like marionettes whose strings had been cut, out cold.


“Whatthe hell was that!” Julius asked, coming up alongside Zoe.


“And where can we get one!” Lachlan added.


“LaSon-V stun gun,” Zoe said. “It’s a nonlethal incapacitator. Laser flash accompanied by a sonic charge. Originally designed for use on planes by sky marshals to subdue hijackers without the risk of shooting out a window and disrupting cabin pressure. The sonic charge would usually be enough to knock out an aggressive attacker, but the laser flash blinds them too. No aftereffects except for a splitting headache. Some people think this is what was used to disorient Princess Diana’s driver just before her fatal car crash.”


“OK…” Julius said. “On that cheery note, let’s get to work.”


A gap was cut in the wire fence surrounding the henge and Zoe and the twins quickly rolled a handcart packed with equipment through it, followed by the kids.


They came to the stones and paused for a moment, awed.


The towering pillars of rock soared into the sky above them, looming large in the moonlight—powerful, ominous,ancient. The biggest of them, the lone pillar of the Grand Trilithon, rose to a massive twenty-six feet, a conical stone “tongue” at its peak indicative of the lintel that had once lain across its top.


“What time is the Titanic Rising?” Zoe asked.


“Jupiter should already be on the horizon,” Alby said, setting up a serious-looking telescope on the grass among the stones. “Titan will rise over it at 3:49A.M., Saturn two minutes later, then, as it rises, a gap will appear between Saturn and Jupiter.”


“And that’s when we see our Dark Star.”


“Correct.”


Zoe checked her watch. It was 3:25. “Let’s move. We’ve got twenty-five minutes.”


By the light of a penlight, Julius examined a more recent plan of Stonehenge, showing the layout of the stones that still stood:


“Three of the five central trilithons are still intact,” he said. “One upright from the Grand Trilithon still stands, and one upright down here, at the bottom right. Might be an issue.”


“What about the Altar Stone?” Lachlan said.


“It’s fallen.”


“Which one is it?” Zoe asked.


“This one.” Lachlan hustled among the towering stones, came to a fallen one, a great horizontal slab, half-buried in the grass within the central ring of stones. It was about eight feet long, slim and lean. A small rectangular hole in the earth lay next to it.


Lachlan examined one of its ends and called, “It’s got a depression in it! Square in shape. Maybe eight by eight inches.”


“That would match the Sa-Benben,” Zoe said.


She stared at the horizontal slab, amazed at what she was about to say: “OK, then. Let’s reerect it.”


They moved quickly but gently, not wanting to damage the 4,500-year-old stones.


Slings were wrapped around the Altar Stone and it was gently lifted by an A-frame pulley system fitted with a diesel-powered cable spooler.


While this was going on, Lily cleared out the hole in the ground near the base of the Altar Stone. Alby was training his telescope on the northeast horizon.


“I see Jupiter!” he called.


Through his telescope, he saw a small orange dot hovering on the horizon, perfectly aligned with Stonehenge’s outer ring of lintels and its famous Heel Stone.


“Hurry!” Zoe called to the twins.


“I am not going to hurry with a national treasure,” Julius said indignantly.


Slowly, very slowly, the spooler reeled the great stone slab upward, pulling it vertical until—whump—Julius jumped at the sound—it slid abruptly downward, slotting into the hole where over four thousand years ago it had originally stood.


Zoe checked her watch.


3:48A.M.


One minute to go.


It was then that she removed something from her backpack.


The top piece of the Golden Capstone.


the Sa-Benben.


The Firestone.


It was stunning to behold. It glimmered in the night, its golden sides shining, its crystalline peak sparkling.


Zoe climbed a stepladder and stood at the top of the now-erect Altar Stone.


She saw the depression in the flat top end of the stone, saw that, yes, it matched the size of the Firestone’s base perfectly.


“All right, then…” she said softly to herself. “The Great Pyramid and Stonehenge. Let’s see what you got.”


With great reverence, she placed the square-based Firestone in the matching recess of the Altar Stone and suddenly, the Altar Stone took on a wholly new appearance: it looked like a mini-obelisk, surrounded by the trilithons of the henge, guardians in the night.

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