He wriggled out from under her and quickly used his jacket to extinguish her flaming shirt. Then he picked her up—unconscious and limp—and stood there openmouthed amid the carnage: smoke, the damaged cars, and the bloody remains of Ashmont’s Royal Marines.
There came a shrill scream, and Wizard spun.
The real tourists in the real buses nearby had seen the horrific blasts and, fearing a terrorist incident like the one that had occurred at Hatshepsut’s Mortuary Temple in 1997, stampeded back into their coaches.
Wizard’s eyes swept the area and landed on Iolanthe and the rucksack on the ground beside her.
Carrying Lily on his hip, Wizard raced over to Iolanthe’s body and scooped up the rucksack with the Pillar inside it. Then he swung into one of Ashmont’s Suburbans, gunned the engine, and sped out of the lot.
“Sky Monster! Sky Monster!” Wizard yelled into his radio as he sped away from Abu Simbel, heading south. He had a clear signal. Ashmont’s jamming device must have been destroyed in the suicide blasts.
“Wizard! Where’ve you been! I’ve been trying to contact you guys for the last twenty min—”
“Sky Monster, it’s all gone sour!” Wizard blurted. “The British blindsided us and then got blindsided themselves! Now Lily’s out cold and Jack was sealed inside the shrine and Alby, Pooh Bear, and Astro were left to die in the lake with the crocodiles! Oh, Alby—”
“Alby’s fine,”another voice came in over the airwaves.
Jack’s voice.
Jack was walking quickly around the far side of the pyramidal island, skirting its lower edge, followed by the others.
“He’s with me. So are Pooh, Astro, and Zoe. We’re all safe. What happened, Wizard?”
Wizard’s voice said,“Four men, Japanese, just blew themselves up near Ashmont’s escape cars at the dock. It was an ambush. They were waiting. It was like they wanted to destroy the Pillar. I’m in one of the British escape cars now, heading south, away from the town.”
“What about Iolanthe and the Pillar?”
“She was knocked to the ground, so I took the Pillar. Not sure if she’s dead or not.”
“OK,” Jack said. “I want you to get as far away from there as you can, to a spot where Sky Monster can grab you. Sky Monster, Stretch: we need you to give us a boat-drop so we can get back to the shore and catch up with Wizard—”
Sky Monster’s voice came in.“Er, Huntsman, I don’t think that’s going to be possible—”
Circling in the sky high above Abu Simbel, Sky Monster peered down at the vast body of Lake Nasser and the highway leading into the town from the north. Stretch sat in the copilot’s seat beside him, also gazing down at the landscape.
“—This is what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Sky Monster said. “It’s why I’ve been trying to get in contact. Thatsecond convoy we saw earlier is now only about three miles out from the town, approaching fast from the north and it’s not just comprised of tourist coaches. The coaches are cover. It’s a military convoy: rapid-strike cars, armored jeeps, Humvees, and troop trucks. My guess, it’s the Egyptian Army—tipped off by someone. They’re gonna hit your town in about four minutes.”
Sky Monster and Stretch looked down at the highway coming from the north, a thin ribbon of black overlaid upon the dull yellow of the desert.
There they saw the convoy speeding along it.
Tourist coaches led the way, kicking up a tail cloud of dust behind them as they hit the shoulder of the highway, a cloud that concealed dozens of military vehicles: trucks, Humvees, and machinegun-mounted jeeps. All up, the convoy looked like it possessed about fifty vehicles and maybe three hundred men.
“This is seriously deep shit,” Sky Monster breathed.
JACK SAID,“OK then. The plan stays the same. Wizard, you run: get out of there; take the highway and head south for the Sudanese border. Sky Monster can scoop you up somewhere down there. We’ll follow as best we can and try to catch up.”
“Okay…”Wizard said doubtfully.
Sky Monster said,“Huntsman, standby. I’m sending you two packages. Couple of early Christmas presents.”
From his rocky island, Jack looked up to see the dark shape of The Halicarnassus bank around in the dawn sky.
Then he saw the big 747 swing low, barely a hundred feet above the lake, and as it roared by something dropped from its rear loading ramp—something with a parachute attached to it, arresting its fall. Perfectly released, the speeding object landed with a great splash about fifty yards out from Jack’s rocky island.
As soon as it hit the water, the object sloughed its outer casing and inflated rapidly—revealing itself to be a brand-new Zodiac complete with outboard engine.
“Merry Christmas,” Jack said.
Minutes later, he and the others were skimming across the surface of Lake Nasser, heading back for the western shore.
They hit land a few miles south of the massive statues of Abu Simbel, at a remote fishermen’s dock.
No sooner had the Zodiac slid to a halt on the decrepit boat ramp than a second parachute-equipped pallet from The Halicarnassus landed lightly on the desert floor a few hundred yards in front of them.
Sitting on the pallet was a compact Land Rover Freelander four-wheel drive—donated to The Halicarnassus by the British at Mortimer Island—stripped and modified for military work.
And sitting at the wheel was Stretch.
“Need a ride?” he asked.
The Freelander’s tires squealed as the little four-wheel drive shot off the mark.
Jack sat in the passenger seat while Stretch drove. Piled into the back were Astro, Alby, Pooh Bear, and Zoe—nestled amid a pile of guns and Predator rocket launchers that Stretch had brought along.
Jack tried his radio again, “Scimitar! Vulture! Come in!” No reply. They were meant to be covering the dock, Jack thought, but Wizard had made no mention of them in his report of the suicide attack. Scimitar and Vulture were suspiciously absent without leave.
The little Freelander sped across the desert, kicking up a dust cloud behind it, heading for the blacktop highway leading south.
On that highway, Jack and the others could see the chase at hand: Wizard’s lone white Suburban out in front of the convoy of Egyptian Army coaches, jeeps, trucks, and Humvees.
“If nothing else,” Jack said to Stretch, “we have to get that charged Pillar out of here safely. The knowledge on it is priceless.”
“What about getting us out of here safely?” Stretch asked.
“Only Lily matters. The rest of us are secondary. If we can’t get out ourselves, we have to get her away. She’s more important than any of us.” He offered Stretch a wry look. “Sorry, buddy.”
“Nice to know where I stand in the scheme of things.”
Jack nodded at the scene ahead of them: “See that last bus in the convoy, the one trailing behind all the others.”
“Yeah…”
“I want it.”
Wizard drove frantically.
He gripped the steering wheel of his stolen Suburban with white knuckles, anxiously swinging his eyes between three sources: the road in front of him, the convoy of pursuers behind him, and the passenger seat next to him—in which Lily lolled lifelessly, swaying with every bump in the road, her eyes closed, bloody scratches on her face.
The chase cars were catching up, filling his rearview mirror. Two fearsome-looking Humvees with gun turrets on their backs were about to pull up on either side of his Suburban.
“Sky Monster!” he yelled. “Where are you!”
“Here!”
Voooooom!
Without warning, the enormous black underbelly of The Halicarnassus thundered low over the top of Wizard’s car and landed on the highway in front of him, its rear loading ramp folding open as it did so…right in front of Wizard’s speeding car.
“OK! I’ll slow a little! Bring yourself on board!”Sky Monster’s voice called.
The big black 747 rolled along the desert blacktop at a cool 80 mph, its wings stretched out over the dusty shoulder, speeding out in front of the collection of cars on the roadway.
Wizard floored the Suburban.
It leaped forward, heading directly for the yawning rear ramp of the jumbo.
At which point, the two Humvees behind it opened fire.
Bullet sparks exploded all over the Suburban and the plane, even in the hold up inside the loading ramp.
The rear and side windows of the Suburban shattered. Wizard ducked, shielding his face.
But he remained focused on the ramp of The Halicarnassus.
The Suburban began to wobble and slide, but he held her tight and with a final thrust on the gas pedal, he took the plunge and lunged at the ramp…and hit it perfectly…and swooped up into the rear hold of the Hali where he slammed full tilt into the forward wall!
The Suburban jolted to a halt, safely inside.
“Oh my goodness, I did it…” Wizard exclaimed.
“Jesus, Wizard, you did it!”Sky Monster said.“Man, I thought you were going to miss by a yard! Nice driving, Fangio…”
Wizard turned to check on Lily, and he saw her eyes open weakly.
“Hi there. Nice to see you awak—”
He was cut off as their car was jolted violently, hit from behind by one of the Egyptian Humvees that had itself charged up the loading ramp after them!
Wizard was thrown forward, then he snapped round and saw the intruder.
Instinct kicked in.
He jammed the Suburban into reverse and hit the gas.
The Suburban lurched backward and slammed into the unsuspecting Humvee, shunting itback down the ramp and out of the plane, back into the sunshine, where the hapless Humvee hit the road and, its brakes locking, jackknifed sideways and tumbled into a roll. Two chase cars managed to avoid it before a third car—a big troop truck—hit it square in the side and finished both of them off.
“Sky Monster!” Wizard called from the hold. “Pull up that ramp and go!”
“On it, Wiz!”
the Hali ’s engines roared louder, firing up for takeoff. At the same time, the loading ramp came up and through the slowly closing aperture, Wizard saw the chase convoy—an angry body of heavily armed vehicles.
But then just as the ramp was about halfway closed, he saw the convoy split in the middle and allow a Humvee to come to the front: a Humvee with a rocket-launcher pod mounted on its back.
The Humvee fired—a single lethal rocket streaking out of its pod, and Wizard’s eyes boggled at the thought that the rocket might shoot inside the hold and go off, but instead the missile banked away to the side, darting out of Wizard’s sight.
He sighed with relief. A miss.
Only to realize a sickening moment later that it wasn’t a miss at all.
For right then he heard one of the Hali ’s two starboard engines get hit.
IT WAS A DIRECT HIT—the missile slammed into The Halicarnassus ’s outer starboard engine, causing it to blast out in a thousand pieces and spew a thick horizontal column of black smoke.
“Fuck me sideways!”Sky Monster yelled, flicking switches, dumping fuel that could be ignited by the exploded engine and cutting all excess lines so that the fire didn’t spread to the tanks inside the wing.
He looked out his starboard cockpit window. The engine was a tangled mess of twisted metal and smoke. He’d have to jettison it. Takeoff was still possible, but with only three engines it would be a whole lot harder: they’d need a longer runway.
The damage had been done.
The plane slowed.
And the chase convoy pounced.
It was an incredible sight.
A 747 jumbo jet racing down a vast desert highway, pursued by a horde of military vehicles—Humvees, jeeps, trucks, and coaches—all of them rushing along at well over sixty miles an hour, like a pack of hyenas chasing down a wounded water buffalo.
When they got in range, the chase convoy attacked.
Naturally, their first strategy was to fire at the Hali ’s tires, but the big plane had a set of Kevlar guards shielding them and the bullets just pinged away.
So the chasers adopted a second, more ruthless option.
The first chase truck rushed forward and swung in under the left-hand wing of the Hali, where it threw off its canvas roof to reveal a platoon of fully armed Egyptian special forces troops.
They wasted no time employing a standard plane-storming technique—they danced up onto their truck’s driver’s cabin and from there leaped up onto the wing at its lowest point, at the spot where it met The Halicarnassus ’s fuselage.
Sky Monster watched helplessly from the cockpit. “Oh, damn, damn, damn.”
He went to the window on the other side and saw an entire bus of soldiers swing in under the armpit of the starboard wing with more men climbing up through a hatch onto its roof, readying themselves to storm that wing.
“Shit, shit, shit…”
Wizard arrived in the cockpit with Lily. “What’s going on?”
“We’ve lost engine four and now they’re boarding us via the wings!” Sky Monster said. “And we have no defense against that! They’re like fleas I can’t shake.”
“You have to do something…!”
“Wizard, I don’t know of any pilots who’ve been in this kind of situation before! I’m adapting the best I can!”
“Can we take off?”
“Yes, but we’ll need a hell of a long runway.” Sky Monster started swinging The Halicarnassus wildly left and right.
On the wing outside, the Egyptian troops staggered and struggled for balance, grabbing for handholds, one of them dropping off the wing with a shout and falling to the road below.
But they soon got their balance, and the bus under the starboard wing began unloading more troops.
The Halicarnassus —speeding along the desert highway, unable to take off—was under siege.
In the cockpit, Wizard clumsily unfolded a map. “This highway straightens out in about three miles into a long unbroken stretch about two miles long. But after that it twists and turns through hills all the way to the Sudanese border.”
“Then that’s our runway,” Sky Monster said.
“Our only runway.”
Sky Monster was still staring anxiously out the starboard window. “Wizard, you think you can drive this for a few minutes,” he said, standing suddenly.
“Drive?” Wizard blanched. “I don’t even drive a car very well, Sky Monster.”
“Well it’s time to learn. Here, pay attention, I’ll show you how…”
About a mile behind the desperate scenes on the Hali, the last bus in the Egyptian military convoy drove quietly in its allotted place, everyone on board it keenly watching the spectacular goings-on up ahead.
They never noticed the little Land Rover Freelander—now driven by Pooh Bear—swing onto the highway behind it, never noticed it creep right up close to its rear bumper, never noticed the three figures of West, Stretch, and Astro clamber out onto the hood of the Freelander and climb up the ladder attached to the back of the big coach.
The three small figures then danced along the roof of the speeding coach, pausing briefly to drop two of Astro’s knockout-gas grenades through a hatch.
A moment later—as all the occupants of the bus passed out and the coach began to veer off the bitumen, West lay on his belly and reached down, unlatching the safety catch on the coach’s forward door, and swung himself inside, followed by his two comrades-in-arms.
Inside the bus, wearing his lightweight half gas mask, West pulled the unconscious driver out of the driver’s seat and took the wheel.
He scanned the road ahead: beyond the convoy, he saw the wounded Halicarnassus lumbering along, spewing black smoke from its right wing, and bearing bad guys on the inner segments of both its wings.
Astro examined the rest of their bus. It was filled with slumped-over soldiers, all of them low-level infantrymen.
“They’re Egyptian Army,” he said, grabbing the uniform of the nearest trooper.
“Like a lot of African countries, sometimes Egypt’s army is up for hire,” Jack said. “If you’ve got enough dough and the right contacts, you can buy yourself some local muscle for a day or two. The question is: Who’s paying for Egypt’s services today? Now, if you don’t mind, it’s time to clear the road and get those bastards off our plane. Stretch, I don’t need this windshield anymore.”
Stretch stepped forward and fired a burst from his submachine gun into the windshield. It shattered and dropped from view. Wind rushed in.
“Gentlemen,” Jack said, removing his gas mask. “Tires.”
With wind now blasting into his bus, West gunned it, lifting his coach to over 80 mph and bringing it forward through the convoy, at the same time as Stretch and Astro fired their guns out the open front windshield, blasting the rear tires of the other buses in the convoy.
The tires of the other buses punctured loudly and caught off guard, they fishtailed crazily, skidding off the roadway and onto the sand shoulder while West’s bus shot past them, moving ever forward.
After four such bus crashes, one of the Egyptian Humvees noticed West’s rogue bus and it turned its turret gun on Jack—just as Stretch nailed the Humvee with a Predator missile. The Humvee exploded, lifting completely off the ground before flipping and rolling in the dust.
Another jeep saw them and brought its gun around, only for West to ram it with his bus, sending the jeep spinning off the road like a toy.
“Pooh Bear!” he called into his radio. “Stay in our shadow! We’ll shield you all the way to The Halicarnassus ’s loading ramp!”
At the wheel of the Freelander, Pooh Bear shouted, “Roger that!”
Beside him, Zoe and Alby peered out at Jack’s stolen coach and at the vehicles of the enemy convoy ahead of them.
They were now only about sixty yards behind The Halicarnassus —on which they could see about a dozen armed men, six on each wing and gathering at the wing doors. Four more buses and a couple of Humvees stood between them and the fleeing 747, all of the enemy cars hovering at the flanks of the plane, tucked under its wings.
They heard Jack in the stolen coach calling over the radio:“Sky Monster! Come in! We need you to open the rear ramp!”
But, oddly, there was no reply from Sky Monster.
AT THAT VERYsame moment, the Egyptian troops on the left-hand wing of The Halicarnassus managed to get its wing door open. They flung it wide—
Boom!
The first Egyptian trooper was blown off his feet by a massive shotgun blast.
All the other troopers dived for cover as they saw the enraged figure of Sky Monster standing inside the doorway, shucking a Remington twelve-gauge, readying it for the next shot.
“Get off my plane, yer ratbastards!” the hairy-faced New Zealander shouted. Unseen by him, his radio earpiece dangled uselessly off his ear—dislodged in his desperate scramble to get down here from the cockpit.
At the same time back up in the cockpit, Wizard drove the speeding plane—terribly—but right now any driver was better than none.
“Damn it,” Jack swore. “I can’t get hold of Sky Monster, so I can’t open the ramp.”
He stared up at The Halicarnassus from his speeding bus, trying to figure out another way to board it, when suddenly Astro leaned forward and said, “May I make a suggestion?”
As he spoke, he pulled an unusual weapon from a holster on his back and offered it to Jack.
Seconds later, Jack and Astro found themselves again standing on the roof of their speeding coach, only this time they were looking up at the gigantic tail fin of The Halicarnassus looming directly above them.
Astro held his unusual weapon in his hands.
It was a weapon peculiar to the elite of the United States Marine Corps, the Force Reconnaissance Marines: an Armalite MH-12A Maghook.
Looking like a twin-gripped Tommy gun, a Maghook was a pressure-launched magnetic grappling hook that came equipped with a 150-foot length of high-density cable. It could be used either as a conventional grappling hook—with its clawlike anchor-hook—or as a magnetic one, with its high-powered magnetic head that could attach to sheer metallic surfaces. The “A” variant was new, smaller than the original Maghook, about the size of a large pistol.
“I’ve heard of these, but never seen one,” Jack said.
“Don’t leave home without it,” Astro said, firing the Maghook up at the tail fin of The Halicarnassus. With a puncture-like whump, its magnetized hook soared into the air, trailing its cable behind it.
The hook slammed into the Hali ’s high tail fin and held, suctioned to the great steel fin with its magnet, holding firm.
“Now hold tight,” Astro said as he handed Jack the Maghook and pressed a button on it marked RETRACT.
Instantly, Jack was whisked up off the roof of the speeding bus, reeled upward by the Maghook’s powerful spooler.
He came level with the tail fin of The Halicarnassus and swung himself onto one of its flat side fins. Then, safely on the plane, he grabbed the Maghook again and prepared to throw it back down to Astro, so that he could come up after—
But Astro never got a chance to follow Jack: at that moment, his bus was hit from the side by one of the Egyptian coaches, a great thumping blow that knocked Astro off his feet and almost off the roof entirely.
Driving the bus, Stretch swung to look right…and found himself staring into the angry eyes of the driver of the other coach.
The driver raised a Glock pistol at Stretch—
—just as Stretch drew a Predator RPG launcher in response, holding it like a pistol, and fired.
The RPG blasted through his automatic door, smashing through the glass, and drilled into the rival bus. An instant later, the Egyptian bus traveling alongside his coach lit up with blazing white light before bursting like a firecracker into a million pieces.
Inside The Halicarnassus, Sky Monster was standing guard at the open port side wing-door, the wind whipping around him, with his shotgun levelled and ready to fire at anything that dared poke its head through the doorway.
Abruptly, two troops on the port wing slid across his view, and he fired but missed, they were too fast, and for a moment he wondered what they had been trying to do—their movement hadn’t achieved anything, when suddenly it dawned on him that it had done something: it had captured his attention.
Almost immediately, the starboard side wing-door behind him was blown inward and stormed by Egyptian SF troopers.
More raging wind rushed into the cabin.
One, then two, then three troopers charged in, AK-47s up and ready to shred the totally exposed figure of Sky Monster—
Blam!-blam!-blam!
Multiple gun blasts filled the cabin.
Sky Monster was ready to collapse under a hailstorm of bullets, but it was the three intruders who fell, their bodies exploding in fountains of blood.
As they dropped to the floor, Sky Monster spun and saw who had shot them: Jack, standing on the port wing, his Desert Eagle smoking. He must have fired over Sky Monster’s shoulder from behind.
Sky Monster sighed with relief, only to see Jack’s expression turn to one of horror. “Monster! Look out!”
Sky Monster spun, bewildered, to see one of the three fallen Egyptians, hit but not dead, whip up a pistol with a bloodied hand and aim it at him from point-blank range. The Egyptian pulled the trigger—just as from out of nowhere a speeding blur of brown whooshed past him and in the blink of an eye the Egyptian was gunless.
It was Horus.
Jack’s little falcon—who’d remained on board the Hali during the mission at Abu Simbel—had snatched the gun from the attacker’s bloody fingers!
Jack stepped past Sky Monster and kicked the shocked Egyptian out the starboard doorway and suddenly there was silence in the cabin, a brief moment of respite.
Horus landed on Jack’s shoulder, presenting him with the Egyptian’s pistol. “Good work, bird,” Jack said, striding back to Sky Monster and replacing the hairy pilot’s earpiece in his ear. “If you’re down here, who’s driving?”
“Wizard.”
“Wizard can hardly ride a bicycle,” Jack said. “Get back up top, I need you to open the rear ramp—we have to get the others on board. I’ll cover the entrances down here.”
“Jack, wait! I have to tell you something! We’re gonna run out of road soon! With only three engines we need a longer runway to take off and this stretch of road coming up is the last chance we’ve got.”
“How soon till we hit it?”
“Couple of minutes, at the most. Jack, what do I do if…if not everyone gets on board in time?”
Jack said seriously, “If it comes to that, you get Lily, Wizard, and that Pillar out of here. That’s the priority.” He clapped Sky Monster on the shoulder. “But hopefully you won’t have to make that call.”
“Roger that,” Sky Monster said, bolting back up the stairs toward the upper deck.
AFTER THEIR first failed attempt, the Egyptians now doubled their efforts to storm the 747: two more buses swung under The Halicarnassus ’s smoking right wing, traveling in single file, one in front of the other, disgorging armed men who ran across the roofs of both buses before leaping up onto the wing.
Where they were met by Jack.
Bent on one knee, half-hidden in the wing door and blasted by speeding wind, Jack fired away at the onslaught of invading troops.
But just as he took down one man, another would appear in his place.
He couldn’t keep this up for long, and with a quick glance over his shoulder, he saw a bend in the highway up ahead. Beyond it was—
—the long straight strip of highway.
Their last chance of escape.
Better do something fast, Jack…
Bullets slammed into the doorway above him and he saw the next wave of Egyptian assailants—and to his horror saw that these guys carried lightweight armored shields, like the ones riot police use, complete with little peepholes in them.
Shit.
Blam! He fired—and the first attacker to appear on the wing dropped, hit in the eye, shot through the peephole.
This is getting totally out of hand,he thought.
But then he saw the road behind him and a look of total despair fell across his face.
His enemy’s reinforcements had arrived……in the form of six American Apache helicopters thundering low over the highway from the direction of Abu Simbel, blasting through the heat haze. Beneath them was another armada of military vehicles, this time American vehicles.
“I guess we know who’s paying now,” he breathed as the lead chopper loosed two Hellfire missiles in his direction. “Sky Monster—!”
Sky Monster charged into the cockpit of The Halicarnassus and slid into the captain’s chair, hitting LOADING RAMP OPEN as he did so.
The rear loading ramp of the Hali instantly lowered, kicking up sparks as it hit the fast-moving roadway.
Then Jack’s voice exploded in his ear:“Sky Monster! Deploy decoys, now, now, now!”
Sky Monster hit a button marked CHAFF DECOYS —and immediately two firecracker-like objects shot out from the Hali ’s tail, springing up into the air.
The first Hellfire missile hit one of the decoys and exploded harmlessly high above the speeding Halicarnassus.
The second missile—confused by the decoys, but not completely suckered—shot right past them and slammed into the roadway next to the 747’s right wing—causing the entire plane to shudder wildly and almost taking out the two Egyptian special forces coaches laying siege to that wing.
It was chaos. Total chaos.
And in the midst of all this mayhem, the plane and its chasers took a final bend in the road and swung onto the last straight stretch of highway in Egypt.
THINGS WERE happening everywhere now.
Sky Monster yelled into his radio: “People, whatever you’re gonna do, do it soon, because we’re about to run out of road!”
As his bus took the final bend behind The Halicarnassus, Stretch saw a third Egyptian bus swing unseen beneath the plane’s left wing with men on its roof.
“Pooh Bear!” he called to the Freelander behind him. “You’ll have to make your run for the ramp by yourself! I have to get that bus!”
“Got it!”Pooh Bear replied.
Stretch peeled off to the left, powering forward, leaving Pooh’s Freelander thirty yards directly behind the now-open loading ramp of The Halicarnassus.
Speeding wildly, Stretch’s bus rammed into his opponent, causing it to fishtail wildly, the enemy bus’s tires slipping off the bitumen and onto the rubble shoulder, where it lost all grip and control, and it flipped horribly…and rolled…an entire bus tumbling over and over in a great cloud of dust and smoke and sand.
Pooh Bear gunned his Freelander—with Zoe and Alby still in it with him—accelerating hard, his eyes fixed on the loading ramp of the Hali.
The little Freelander skimmed along the highway, gaining on the plane, when suddenly Alby called, “Look out!” and Pooh yanked on the steering wheel just in time to avoid a kamikaze-style lunge from an enemy Humvee on the right.
The Humvee missed them by inches and went careering off the road, bouncing away into the dust.
“Thanks, young man!” Pooh shouted.
At that moment, Zoe’s cell phone rang. Thinking it’d be Wizard or one of the others, she answered it with a yell, “Yeah!”
“Oh, hello,”a soft female voice said pleasantly from the other end.“Is that you, Zoe? This is Lois Calvin, Alby’s mother. I was just calling to see how everything was going there on the farm.”
Zoe blanched. “Lois! Er…hi! Things are going…great…”
“Is Alby there?”
“Wha—huh?” Zoe stammered, trying to process the weirdness of receiving this call at this moment. In the end, she just handed the phone to Alby. “It’s your mother. Please be discreet.”
A missile whooshed by overhead.
“Mom…” Alby said
Zoe didn’t hear the other end of the conversation, only Alby saying, “We’re out in the east paddock in a jeep…I’m having a great time…oh yeah, we’re keeping busy all right…Lily’s good…I will…yes, Mom…yes,Mom…okay, Mom, bye!”
He hung up and handed the cell phone back.
“Nice talkin’, kid,” Zoe said.
“My mom’d have kittens if she knew where I was now,” Alby said.
“So would my mother,” Pooh Bear growled as he pulled the Freelander right in behind The Halicarnassus and readied to zoom up its ramp when—bamthey were hit with terrible force from the left, by another Humvee that none of them had seen.
The Freelander was thrown violently to the right, out of alignment with the Hali ’s ramp, and it slammed up against the broad flank of one of the two Egyptian buses attacking the plane’s starboard wing, pinned against it by the Humvee.
“Blast!” Pooh Bear shouted.
On the right wing of The Halicarnassus, Jack was still doing battle with the oncoming Egyptian forces—firing hard, with Horus hovering nearby—when he saw the Freelander bounce into view from underneath the tail of the speeding 747, the little 4WD being squeezed up against one of the Egyptian buses by a far bigger Humvee.
His first thought, strangely, was of Alby—Lily’s friend; Lily’s loyal little friend—and how he was still in the Freelander, and suddenly in a strange disconnected corner of his mind, Jack knew that Alby’s destiny was connected to Lily’s, that he somehow sustained her, gave her strength, and in that moment Jack knew that he couldn’t let anything happen to the boy. Zoe and Pooh Bear, they could take care of themselves, but not Alby.
And so he acted.
“See you later, bird,” he said to Horus. “Any cover you can provide would be appreciated.”
Just then two more Egyptian troopers tried to mount the starboard wing—both of them bearing riot shields—at the exact same moment that Jack charged out from his cover onto the wing, shot both of them through their eye slits and in one clean move, scooped up one of the dead men’s shields and leaped down… onto the roof of the first Egyptian bus driving along beneath the wing!
There he was met by no less than seven Egyptian special forces troops, momentarily shocked to see him, one lone man, attacking them.
At which point Horus rushed into their midst, talons slashing, slicing three deep claw marks across the first soldier’s face and unbalancing the second.
It gave Jack the moment he needed, for he wasn’t planning on staying on that roof for long.
Holding the riot shield in one hand, he pivoted quickly and dropped off the bus’s leading edge, dropping down in front of its windshield—attaching the grappling hook of Astro’s Maghook to the forward edge of the roof as he fell.
He swung down in front of the speeding bus’s windshield—completely shocking its driver—but continued downward, dropping the Kevlar shield underneath him as he hit the speeding roadway, using it as a body-board and disappearing under the bumper of the big coach!
Down the length of the bus Jack slid—under it—lying on his back on the riot shield, using the Maghook’s rope to control his slide.
As he went, he grabbed his Desert Eagle and fired it into every vital mechanical part he could see: axles, electronics, brake cables, fluid hoses—so that just as he popped out from underneath its rear bumper, the Egyptian bus started to veer wildly, out of control, off the highway and away from the plane.
But Jack’s wild slide wasn’t finished yet.
The second Egyptian bus—the one Pooh’s Freelander was pinned against—was tailing the first one, so underthat bus Jack went, still sliding on his shield.
As he went under the second bus, he hit a button on his Maghook, causing it to reel in quickly.
Free-sliding under the second bus, he could see the speeding wheels of the Freelander only a few yards away and, beyond them, the larger tires of the Humvee—so as he slid, Jack extended his gun hand sideways and fired through the wheels of the Freelander, hitting the tires of the Humvee, puncturing them.
The Humvee instantly lost control and skidded away—but not before two of the Egyptian troops on it had leaped aboard the Freelander, attacking Pooh Bear.
Despite the fact that he was wrestling with two men, Pooh Bear pulled the Freelander away from the bus and once again aimed it at the rear loading ramp of The Halicarnassus, now with a clear shot at it.
Zoe leaned forward to help Pooh with his two attackers, but as she did the Freelander swayed wildly: if they gunned it now, they’d hit one of the loading ramp’s struts and crash terribly.
Pooh Bear seemed to realize this, too. And he grabbed hold of the two men assailing him and in a fleeting moment locked eyes with Alby and Zoe.
“Get away from here,” he growled.
And then, before they could stop him, Pooh Bear leaped from the speeding Freelander,taking the two stunned Egyptian troopers with him!
They landed on the roadway together, rolling and tumbling—although Pooh had made sure that his attackers took the brunt of the fall.
Alby spun to watch them recede back down the highway, tears in his eyes, while Zoe climbed into the driver’s seat and took the wheel—now with a clear run at the loading ramp.
Zoe floored it.
The Freelander hit the ramp at phenomenal speed, leaping up into the hold and skid-smashing into the white Suburban already parked there, but at last safe and inside.
From his position underneath the second Egyptian coach, still sliding on the riot shield, Jack had seen Pooh Bear whip back down the roadway with his two attackers; he’d also just seen the Freelander shoom up into the hold of the Hali.
Abruptly something cut across his view: the side of a bus, with its forward door open, traveling right alongside him.
Jack whipped up his gun—only to see Astro appear in the open door of this new bus, lying on its steps on his belly. “Jack! Give me your hand!”
Thirty seconds later, Astro was hauling Jack out from under the Egyptian coach and up into his stolen bus, where Stretch was still at the wheel.
After he hefted Jack up, Astro deftly attached a magnetic explosive charge to the Egyptian bus and yelled, “Clear!”
Stretch pulled them a safe distance away as the charge detonated and the entire side of the Egyptian bus just blew off it.
Suddenly Sky Monster’s voice came through Jack’s earpiece:“Huntsman! Where the hell are you! In about ten seconds I have to power up or else we’re not going to be able to take off!”
Jack looked forward at the plane, and the realization hit him:it was too far away. He, Stretch, and Astro could never get to it in time.
Then a dull echoing boom caught his attention, and he spun to look back behind him—and saw another Hellfire missile heading down the highway, chasing the fleeing plane.
“Monster,” he said. “We can’t catch you.”
“What?”
Both Stretch and Astro heard this, too, and they exchanged a look.
Then Lily’s voice came over the line:“No, Daddy! We’ll wait for you—”
“No, honey. You have to get away. I’ll find you, Lily. I promise. But trust me,you have to get away from here. We’re not as important as you are.You have to survive. You, Zoe, Wizard, and Alby—you have to continue this mission and find the Second Pillar and place it in the Second Vertex. Call the twins, use their help. This is your mission now. I love you. Now Sky Monster, go.”
He clicked off the radio and turned to Stretch: “Stop the bus.”
Having heard everything Jack had said, Stretch just glanced questioningly at him.
“Sideways. Across the road. Now,” Jack said.
Stretch did so, bringing the bus to a skidding squealing halt across the center of the highway, blocking the road completely.
The Halicarnassus powered off down the blacktop, disappearing into the heat haze, speeding up.
“And now, gentlemen,” Jack said,“run.”
Jack, Stretch, and Astro abandoned the bus, racing across the road and diving into the sand just as it was hit by the incoming missile intended for The Halicarnassus.
The bus exploded—a billowing fireball that mushroomed into the sky, raining twisted metal everywhere.
Covered in sand, blood, and sweat, Jack looked up to see The Halicarnassus rushing away to the south, getting smaller and smaller, until eventually, slowly and painfully, it lifted off into the sky, carried by its three remaining engines.
Within a minute, a half dozen American-manned Humvees skidded to simultaneous halts around him. The six Apaches patrolled the air overhead, kicking up a sandstorm of their own.
Jack stood, dropping his weapons and raising his hands behind his head as the first soldier—an American trooper—strode up to him and wordlessly smashed him in the face with the butt of his gun and instantly Jack saw nothing but black.
K-10 SUBMARINE BASE
MORTIMER ISLAND
BRISTOL CHANNEL, ENGLAND
DECEMBER 10, 2007, 2200 HOURS
AT THE K-10 BASE on Mortimer Island, six SAS troopers stood guard outside a small building at the edge of the complex, grim sentries standing in the pouring rain.
Inside the outbuilding, the Terrible Twins, Lachlan and Julius Adamson, were working away at adjoining computers.
Lachlan talked as he typed. “You know that 5:12:13 right-angle triangle that connects Stonehenge to the Great Pyramid at Giza? Its right-angle corner actually touches an island not far from here, Lundy Island—”
Suddenly Julius leaped back from his computer and punched the air. “I’ve got it! I’ve got the Second Vertex!”
He kicked back his chair to allow his brother and Tank Tanaka to see his monitor. On the screen was a digital photo of one of the trilithons at Stonehenge, taken during the light show:
Surrounding this image was a collage of satellite images of southern Africa, maps of the Cape of Good Hope, and even one window opened onto Google Earth.
Julius smiled, pointing at the number “2” at the bottom of the trilithon. “It’s near Table Mountain.”
“In Cape Town?” Lachlan said.
“Are you sure?” Tank said.
“Positive. It’s about three miles to the south of Table Mountain,” Julius said. “In the hills and mountains there. The whole area is densely forested, uninhabited, and very difficult to get to. I am the master!”
He grinned triumphantly just as Tank’s cell phone rang. He stepped aside to answer it, saying a muffled, “Hello? Ah, konichiwa …”
Lachlan said to Julius, “You do realize this doesn’t mean you’re in any way superior to me. No. 2 was an easy one. The outline of Africa was obvious. I’m still just trying to figure out where the coastline for No. 3 actually is. It doesn’t match any known coastline on the Earth today.”
In the corner, Tank frowned at his phone. “Oh?”
Julius clasped his hands behind his head mock-smugly. “Maybe I can give you some tutoring in topographical analysis sometime, dear brother. Hey, you know, that could be my call sign:Analyzer.”
“Sure. And we can shorten it to Anal. You better send that location to Jack and Wizard, Anal. They’ll be pleased. Oh, and while you’re at it, tell Lily that I found her backpack in the observation room. She must’ve left it behind in the rush to leave.”
“Righteo.” Julius tapped some keys, then cheerily hit SEND.
As he did so, Tank ended his call with a curt,“Yoroshii, ima hairinasai,” and hung up.
He walked back over to the twins.
“Hey, Tank,” Julius said. “What do you think about the call sign Analyzer for me?”
Tank smiled sadly. “That would seem most appropriate, young Julius.”
“So who’s coming in?” Lachlan asked Tank.
“What?”
“You said it on the phone just now,‘Yoroshii, ima hairinasai.’ It means, ‘OK, you may come in now.’”
Tank frowned. “You speak Japanese, Lachlan?”
“A little. I once dated a Japanese science major—”
Julius scowled. “You didn’t date her! You corresponded with her in a chat room!”
Lachlan blushed. “There was a connection there, Anal. Which means it qualifies as dating—”
Abruptly, the door to their study slammed open and one of their British SAS guards was hurled into the room by a wave of silenced gunfire: phwat-phwat-phwat-phwat-phwat-phwat!
Blood sprayed the walls and all over Lachlan’s glasses. The corpse of the SAS guard hit the floor with a loud thud.
Then the study was stormed by six black-clad men, all moving low, with perfect balance and posture, and all holding MP-5SN silenced submachine guns pressed to their shoulders in the special forces way, their goggle-covered eyes looking straight down the barrels.
As five of the intruders covered the twins, the leader of the team went straight over to Tank and removed his goggles, to reveal a young Japanese face.
“Professor Tanaka, we have a chopper outside. What about these two?”
Two guns cocked next to the twins’ heads.
Lachlan and Julius froze, holding their breath.
For a long moment Tank eyed the two brilliant young men, as if he was deciding their fate: whether they lived or died.
At last he said, “They can still be of much use. We take them with us.”
And with that, Tank swept out of the study, walking with purpose, leading the way. The twins were shoved from the building after him at gunpoint and as they stepped out into the pouring rain, they passed the bodies of their SAS guards, all dead, all shot in the head.
AIRSPACE OVER AFRICA
DECEMBER 10, 2007, 0930 HOURS
BELCHING SMOKE from its wounded starboard engine, The Halicarnassus limped through the African sky. The landscape below it was an undulating carpet of lush green hills.
They had been flying for nearly two hours since their dramatic escape from Abu Simbel and were now flying over Uganda in eastern Africa.
Their current plan was to head for their old station in Kenya and regroup.
Zoe and Wizard entered the cockpit, where Sky Monster sat alone, flying the plane. Lily and Alby were downstairs, sleeping after their exciting morning.
“You rang?” Zoe said.
“Got good news and bad news,” Sky Monster said. “Which do you want first?”
“The good news,” Wizard said.
“OK. A message just came in from England, from the twins. Something about the Second Vertex.”
Wizard leaped to a nearby computer and scanned the message. “Cape Town. Table Mountain. Oh, those boys are talented. Good work, boys.
Good work !”
Zoe turned to Sky Monster. “And the bad news?”
“We’re almost out of fuel and Kenya just became a no-go zone.”
“What!”
“How so?”
“About ten minutes ago I started picking up aerial signals running north–south grid patterns up and down the Kenyan-Ugandan border.Perfect north–south runs, which means computer-driven planes, which means unmanned aerial drones. Predators.”
“But only the US and the Saudis have Predator drones—” Wizard began.
“The fuel situation,” Zoe said. “How much longer can we stay in the air?”
Sky Monster grimaced. “I had to dump a lot back on that highway when our engine got hit. I figure we got enough fuel to reach Rwanda. Another hour at the absolute most. Then we’ll be on fumes.”
“We’re going to have to land in Rwanda?” Zoe said.
“We can land or we can crash,” Sky Monster said. “Either way, we’re going to be on the ground somewhere in Africa within the hour.”
Zoe exchanged a look with Wizard.
Wizard said, “We have seven days to get to the Second Vertex. But we need to find the Second Pillar first, and Iolanthe said it still resides with the Neetha tribe in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We’ll need a chopper at some point, but we can make it to the Congo going overland through Rwanda.”
“Overland through Rwanda?” Zoe said. “I hate to remind you, Max, but Rwanda is still classified as the most dangerous place on Earth, with the Congo a close second.”
Wizard grabbed a map of central Africa and unrolled it on the cockpit’s console:
Sky Monster said, “We’re here, over Uganda, just north of Lake Victoria.”
Wizard pointed at the vast southern regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo—taking up the whole left-hand side of the map. “The DRC’s nearly all jungle. Dense jungle. Few roads, no runways for a 747 anyway. Maybe we can steal a chopper in Rwanda, the UN left dozens of supply depots there.”
“We’re gonna need help,” Zoe said. “Supplies, language, local customs. Solomon?”
Wizard nodded. “Solomon. I’ll call him at the farm in Kenya. See if he can hightail it to Rwanda with supplies and anything else he can muster.”
Sky Monster added, “See if he can bring some jet fuel while he’s at it. I don’t want to abandon my plane in Rwanda. She deserves more than that.”
Zoe saw the look on Sky Monster’s face—to abandon his trusty plane in one of the wildest countries in Africa hit him hard.
But then he said, “Go on, you guys. Better grab whatever you’re going to take with you, because in about forty-five minutes, we’re going down.”
WOLF’S MINE
SOMEWHERE IN AFRICA
DECEMBER 11, 2007, 1800 HOURS
DARKNESS,silence, peace.
Then a blinding flash of violent pain in his right hand jolted Jack West awake.
His eyes shot open—
—and he found himself lying on his back on a large slab of stone, at the base of a deep square-shaped pit, with his arms spread wide…and a large black man hammering a thick nail into his right palm!
The man brought his mallet down again, and to Jack’s horror the nail now went all the way through the flesh of his palm and into a small block of wood buried in the stone beneath it. Blood splattered from the wound.
Jack began to hyperventilate.
He snapped to look at his left arm, only to discover that it had already been nailed down into another block sunk in the slab—his mechanical left hand still wore its leather glove. His legs were tied down.
It was then that the full horror of the situation hit him.
He was being crucified…
Crucified on his back against a slab of stone, at the bottom of a pit in God-only-knew-where.
Still breathing fast, he scanned the pit around him. It was deep, about twenty feet, with sheer rock walls, and the world beyond its rim appeared dark, lit by firelight, like a cave or a mine of some kind.
Then the muscular black man hammering his hand into the stone called, “He is awake!” and four men appeared up on the rim of the pit, gazing down into it.
Two of the four Jack didn’t recognize: they were a pair of American soldiers, the first was a bulky young trooper with wide unblinking eyes, the second a compact Asian-American wearing Marine fatigues.
Jack did know the third man. He was Chinese, older, and had furious eyes. It was Colonel Mao Gongli of the People’s Liberation Army, whom Jack had last seen in Laozi’s trap system, gagging on the contents of a smoke grenade. Jack vaguely recalled pistol-whipping Mao as he’d run past him there, breaking his nose.
The fourth man, however, was a man Jack knew very well, and he figured (correctly) that the two younger troopers were his lackeys. Blond-haired and blue-eyed, the fourth man was an American colonel who went by the call sign Wolf. Jack hadn’t seen him in years and was quite happy with that.
Wolf gazed down at Jack—helpless on his back, nailed to the pit floor—with a peculiar look on his face.
Then he smiled.
“Hello, son,” he called.
“Hello, Father,” Jack said.
The man standing above him was Jack West Sr.
JONATHAN WEST SR.—Wolf—gazed down at his son from the top of the pit.
Behind him, unseen by Jack, lay the workings of an enormous underground mine. In it, hundreds of emaciated Ethiopians stood on ten-story-high scaffold towers, toiling with picks and shovels at great walls of dirt, clearing centuries of hard-packed grit from what appeared to be a collection of ancient stone buildings.
“Isopeda Isopedella,”Wolf said slowly, his voice echoing in the vast mine.
Jack didn’t reply.
“The common huntsman spider,” Wolf said. “A large-bodied, long-limbed spider native to Australia. Similar to the tarantula in size and general notoriety, it’s known to grow to sizes in excess of six inches.”
Still Jack said nothing.
“But despite its fearsome appearance, the huntsman spider is not a lethal spider. In fact, it is not dangerous at all. A bite will cause no more than transient local pain. It is a fake, a fraud. An animal that attempts to mask its general ineffectiveness with the appearance of size and power, much like you. I never liked your call sign, Jack.”
A bead of sweat trickled down Jack’s forehead as he lay on his back at the bottom of the pit.
“Where are my friends?” he asked, his throat coarse and dry. He was thinking of Stretch, Pooh Bear, and Astro—all of whom had failed to escape after the chase from Abu Simbel.
At that moment, Wolf guided Astro into view beside him. Jack saw the young American Marine through blurry eyes. He seemed okay and, importantly, he wasn’t wearing any handcuffs. He said nothing, just looked down coldly at Jack.
Had Astro been with Wolf all along?Jack thought. It had always been a possibility. But no, he thought he’d picked Astro as a good man, loyal. He couldn’t have been a plant.
“What about the other two?”
“Never mind their fate,” Wolf said. “They will certainly outlive you, but not by much. We were talking about the flaws in your chosen call sign, son.”
“I didn’t choose it. You don’t choose your own call sign.”
Wolf looked away.
“How is your mother?” he asked suddenly. “No matter how hard I try, I just can’t seem to find her. It’s as if she doesn’t want me to locate her.”
“I can’t imagine why,” Jack said.
To explain what had gone wrong with his parents’ marriage meant understanding Jack’s father.
Powerful physically and brilliant mentally, John West Sr. was an intellectually vain man, convinced of his superiority in all matters. As a strategist, he was unrivaled in the US, his methods were bold, vicious and, most of all, successful. These accomplishments only bolstered his sense of omnipotence.
But when this viciousness seeped into his marriage and took violent form, Jack’s mother had left Jack Sr. and, infuriating him further, divorced him in an Australian court—an Australian court.
After that, Jack’s mother had disappeared and now resided in the remote town of Broome in a distant corner of Western Australia, not far from Jack’s farm. It was a location that only Jack and a few others knew.
Wolf shrugged. “She’s of no importance right now. But when this is all over, I’m going to make a point of finding her.”
“If only she could see us now…” Jack said.
“You did well to better Marshal Judah in your race to find the Seven Ancient Wonders,” Wolf said. “He was smart, Judah. Although did you really have to throw him into the engine of a jet plane?”
“At least I didn’t crucify him.”
Wolf’s face went hard. “Judah worked for me. Just as, once upon a time, you could have worked for me. In the end, his failure, while regrettable, was not total. Tartarus was just the beginning. A far larger mission—the repelling of the Dark Star and the acquisition of its rewards—is now at hand. And as we both know, the Power of Tartarus was nullified recently by our mutual enemies, the Japanese Blood Brotherhood.”
Jack didn’t know this, and the look on his face must have shown it.
Wolf grinned. “You didn’t know? About the counter ceremony they performed at the autumnal equinox, at the second Great Pyramid beneath Easter Island, the geographical opposite of Giza? Some of us want to rule the world, Jack, others like you wish to save it, others still, like our honor-obsessed Japanese friends, wish to end it.
“It was they who flew that plane into the Burj al Arab in Dubai, trying to destroy the Firestone. It was they who ambushed the British Marines near the dock at Abu Simbel with their suicide bombers. Death does not frighten them. Indeed, like their kamikaze forebears, a glorious self-sacrificing death is the ultimate honor.”
Jack grimaced in pain, nodded at Mao. “So are America and China in this together? The Chinese attack on my farm. The torture of Wizard in China by that asshole.”
Mao visibly stiffened. Wolf was the picture of calm.
“Sadly, I do not formally represent America anymore,” Wolf said. “After Judah’s failure with the Seven Wonders, the Caldwell Group was cut loose by the Administration. But our influence still runs deep in the halls of power and in the military, especially in the Army and the Air Force. We will certainly outlast this Administration.
“No, our small group of concerned patriots feels that consecutive American governments have not taken America far enough in its role as the only remaining superpower on this planet. America needs to rule this planet with an iron fist, not with diplomacy or conciliation. We do what we want. We do not ask permission.
“As for China, well, it is no secret that the Chinese wish to rise in the world, to be respected as the behemoth that they are. The Caldwell Group’s relationship with them is mutually beneficial. We have much to offer each other—we have information; they have muscle.”
Jack called to Mao, “Hey, Mao. He’ll cut your throat as soon as he’s used you.”
“I will take that chance, Captain West,” Mao replied coolly. “You are lucky he won’t let me cut yours right here and now.”
“So who’re they?” Jack jerked his chin at the two men beside his father.
Wolf indicated the Asian-American first. “This is Switchblade, United States Marines, but now on loan to the CIEF.”
The CIEF,Jack thought grimly.Technically, it was the Commander-in-Chief ’s In Extremis Force, but in reality it was the Caldwell Group’s private army.
Wolf then threw an arm around the larger man with him. “And this young man, Jack, this is your half brother, my other son, Grant West. Army Special Forces, and also now CIEF. Call sign: Rapier.”
Jack assessed the wide-eyed young man standing next to his father. Big, burly, and intense, Rapier just glared back at him, not blinking. Judging by his age, Jack figured Rapier had been born while Wolf had still been married to Jack’s mother—another reason to dislike his father.
“He’s not unlike you, Jack,” Wolf said, “talented, driven, resourceful. But in many ways he is also an improvement on you: he’s a better soldier, a more disciplined killer. He is also obedient, although perhaps this can be attributed to his higher level of breeding.”
“Just what you always wanted,” Jack said, still grimacing with pain. “Your very own attack dog. So what’s with all this?” He indicated his position. “Couldn’t you just shoot me?”
Wolf shook his head. “Oh, no. No, no, no. You see the man beside you, Jack? The one who just nailed you to that slab? He is an Ethiopian Christian, as indeed, you are now in Ethiopia.”
Ethiopia?
“Ethiopia is a curious country,” Wolf mused, “with an equally curious mix of faiths. Christianity is unusually strong here, brought here in the Middle Ages by the Templars. The well-known Churches at Lalibela are testimony to their presence. And did you know that according to some legends, Ethiopia is the final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant, spirited here directly from Solomon’s Temple.
“Islam is practiced in some areas, but most curiously, there exists in this country an underclass of Jewry. Like many Jewish populations elsewhere in the world, they are horribly persecuted by the other faiths.
“In fact, in this mine, most of our slave miners are Ethiopian Jews. Our guards, however, are Ethiopian Christians, and here lies the meaning behind your means of execution.
“Our guards are most devout in their Christianity, Jack. Indeed, at Easter every year, they choose one of their own to play the Christ and they crucify him in much the same manner as you are now crucified. To die in such a manner is a great honor.”
Jack felt a chill run through him.
“My guards fear me,” Wolf said, “as they should. They guard well because they fear the consequences of failure. Likewise, all the guards in this mine are aware that you are my firstborn son. For me to kill my firstborn in such a way strikes fear into their very hearts. I am like God himself—subjecting my own son to this, the most cruel of deaths. Your death will make me a god in their eyes.”
“Great,” Jack rasped.
As he spoke, he noticed the Ethiopian hammer-holder scuttle up a ladder cut into one wall of the pit, hurriedly escaping from it.
For Wolf wasn’t finished. “Note the stone slab on which you lie, my son. It is one of dozens that have been dropped into that pit over the last three hundred years. Right now, you lie on layer upon layer of previously crucified Ethiopian Christians. You will not die from the crucifixion—crucifixion is notoriously slow, sometimes taking up to three days. No…”
At that moment, Jack heard an ominous grinding noise and suddenly a large flat stone slab was dragged across the corner of the pit’s upper rim, pushed on rollers by a team of Ethiopian guards. The square-shaped slab perfectly fit the dimensions of the deep square pit.
“…you will be crushed, and thus become another layer in these people’s remarkable faith.”
Jack’s eyes went wide.
The square stone slab was now halfway across the pit’s opening.
They were going to drop it into the pit.
They were going to drop it into the pit now.
Holy shit.
This was happening too fast.
Jack began to breathe faster. He looked all around himself, and he beheld his right hand, bloodied and nailed to the slab beneath him.
The slab beneath him:the thought of it made him sick, picturing all the previously crucified Ethiopian men lying immediately below him, crushed between dozens of piled-up slabs.
“Good-bye, Huntsman,” Wolf intoned, as the slab cut him off from Jack’s view. “You really were a good soldier, a true talent. Believe me when I say that it’s a terrible shame. We could have fought together and we would have been unbeatable. But now, because of the choices you’ve made, like the spider of your namesake, you must be crushed. Good-bye, my son.”
The slab came fully across the pit, and as Jack shouted, “No!” the team of Ethiopian draggers withdrew the wooden rollers holding it poised above the pit and suddenly the great slab fell, fell a full twenty feet—down into the pit, its hard edges skimming against the pit’s walls, down toward Jack West Jr.—before it hit the bottom with a shocking boom that echoed throughout the mine.
WOLF GAZEDdown at the stone slab that had just crushed his son to death. The slab had landed askew, as it did when it landed on a human body. Over the coming days it would slowly sink down farther on Jack West Jr.’s body, flattening it.
Then with a shrug Wolf turned on his heel and walked toward the gantry elevator that led out of the mine. Mao, Rapier, and Switchblade followed.
Astro, however, did not.
He wobbled on his feet, drugged and dazed, held up by two Ethiopians who had been out of Jack’s sight.
“Father,” Rapier said, indicating Astro. “What do we do about him?”
Wolf stopped, gazed at Astro for a moment. “A futile gesture from our enemies back in the US—a pitiful play from a weak-willed Administration that has thrown its lot in with these pathetic small nations. But there can be no evidence we killed American servicemen. Take him with us. When he recovers his senses, he gets a choice: he either joins us or he dies.”
“What about the other two?” Switchblade said softly. “The Israeli sniper and Anzar al Abbas’s fat second son.”
Wolf paused a moment. “The Israeli is still upstairs?”
“Yes.”
“There is a considerable bounty on his head. Sixteen million dollars. The Mossad put it up after he refused to obey their orders at the Hanging Gardens. His fate is sealed: we return him to the Old Master and claim the reward. Sixteen million dollars is sixteen million dollars. Then that vengeful old bastard Muniz and the Mossad can torture him for as long as they like.”
“And Abbas’s second son?”
Wolf looked back out over the grim mine complex.
On the other side of the vast space, against the far wall, hung a small medieval cage, suspended above a wide pool of simmering liquid.
Imprisoned inside this cage, hanging ten feet above the dark pool, was Pooh Bear.
He was dirty, bloodied, and bruised from his tumble along the highway in Egypt, but alive. His hands were spread wide, held by manacles that were themselves attached to the bars of the cage.
The liquid in the pool beneath him was a mix of water and arsenic. While this wasn’t technically a gold mine, occasionally the miners found traces of gold in the walls and they used the arsenic-infused liquid to separate it from the earth. They also used it to punish anyone caught hiding gold on his body—thieves would be lowered, inside the cage, into the pool where they would drown in the thick black liquid.
To the guards’ great surprise, Wolf and his people didn’t seem to care for the gold that was found and they happily allowed the guards to keep any that was unearthed by the slave miners.
No, Wolf and his minions cared for something else, something that according to an ancient legend lay buried somewhere within the towerlike stone structures that bounded the walls of the mysterious subterranean complex.
Wolf gazed at the pathetic figure of Pooh Bear, dangling in his cage above the deadly pool.
“Let the guards sacrifice him to their god. He is of no use to anyone anymore.”
And with those words, Wolf left.
He came to the gantry elevator, where he was met by two figures standing in the shadows there.
One of them stepped forward.
It was Vulture.
“American,” he said slyly to Wolf. “My government grows impatient. You arrived at Abu Simbel too late and the Pillar got away. You knew our bargain: we get the First Pillar—with its reward—and you get the second one.”
“I know the bargain, Saudi,” Wolf said. “You will get the First Pillar, but not before we have our hands on the Second. I know you, Vulture. I also know your methods: you’ve been known to abandon your allies when your ends have been achieved but not theirs. And I want to know for sure that I have your allegiance for the entirety of this mission. The First Pillar is not in our possession right now—Max Epper has it—but it is easily acquired. It’s the Second that poses a more immediate problem.”
“Why?” Vulture said.
“Captain West’s plane was last seen heading south into Africa. They’re going for the Second Pillar, among the Neetha tribe in central Africa. But the Neetha are elusive.”
Vulture said, “Epper thinks he can locate them.”
“So if we find him, we find the Neetha and their Pillar. This should suit the House of Saud, Vulture, for when we catch up with Epper, we get your Pillar. This is why you’re going to help me now: call your government and get them to open their treasury and offer every African nation between Sudan and South Africa whatever it costs to hire their army and cover every road, river, and border in central Africa. With Huntsman dead and Wizard on the run, it shouldn’t be hard to find him. It’s time to shut them down.”
Wolf then stepped into the gantry elevator and accompanied by Mao, Rapier, and Switchblade, whizzed up the side of the mine, leaving Vulture and his companion there. He exited the complex at ground level via an earthen doorway two hundred feet above the floor of the great cave.
As they strode out of the mine, Switchblade whispered to Wolf, “Will the knowledge of Epper be enough to find the Neetha?”
Wolf kept walking. “Max Epper is the world’s leading authority in this field, and his conclusions thus far have matched our own. Should he stumble or die, it will be of little concern, we have our own studies to fall back on. Plus we have our own expert on these matters to aid us.”
Wolf stepped out into daylight—passing several more Ethiopian guards on the way—to behold, seated and smiling in the back of his car, Miss Iolanthe Compton-Jones, Keeper of the Royal Personal Records of the United Kingdom, last seen unconscious on the docks at Abu Simbel.
VULTURE and his companion remained at the base of the gantry elevator on the floor of the mine. Vulture’s companion had requested a few additional moments here before they left.
The two of them strode across the mine floor and stopped before the lone cage suspended above the pool of arsenic.
Pooh Bear stood in the tiny medieval cage with his hands manacled, looking like a captured animal.
From his cage, he had not been able to see Vulture and his companion talking with Wolf at the elevator—so when he suddenly saw them approaching now, he mistook their presence for a rescue.
“Brother!” he cried.
Vulture’s companion—Scimitar, Pooh’s older brother—gazed up at Pooh Bear impassively.
Pooh Bear shook his bars. “Brother, quickly, set me free! Before they return—”
“They will not be returning,” Scimitar said. “Not for some time anyway. Not until this mine yields its secret.”
Pooh Bear froze, stopped shaking his bars.
“Brother, are you not here to release me?”
“I am not.”
Scimitar strolled over to the pit in which West had been killed, idly looked down into it, saw the great slab that had crushed Jack West.
He walked back over to the arsenic pool. “Brother, you have always had a fatal flaw. You ally yourself with the weak. Even as a schoolboy in the playground you defended the scrawny and the frail. This appears noble but it is ultimately foolish. There is no future in such a course.”
“And what strategy do you champion,brother ?” Pooh Bear said, anger now in his voice.
“I side with the strong,” Scimitar said, his eyes dead. “I do so for the good of our family and our nation. There is nofuture in your alliance with the small nations of the world. Yours is a childish dream, the stuff of fairy tales and children’s stories. Only an alliance with the powerful, with those who will rule, will be of any benefit to the Emirates.”
“So with your skulking Saudi friend here you side with these renegade Americans?”
“The American colonel and his Chinese allies are useful to us at the moment. Wolf uses the Chinese, the Chinese are most assuredly using him, and we use both of them. This arrangement has its dangers, but still it is better than your coalition of minnows.”
“I’d rather be in a coalition of minnows than a coalition of bandits,” Pooh shot back. “Remember, brother, there is no honor among thieves. When things go awry, your allies will not remain by your side. They will abandon you in a second.”
Scimitar gazed steadily at Pooh Bear, genuinely curious. “You value these people?” A nod at the pit: “The tragic Captain West? The Israeli Jew who is right now being sent to face the Mossad? The vulgar daughter of the Siwa Oracle—a girl who presumes it is her right to learn and who disgraces you by addressing you with the name of a fat storybook character?”
“They have become my family, and now I realize that they are more family to me than you.”
“There is no honor in living this way, Zahir. It is a slap in the face to every tradition we hold dear. Muslims do not befriend Jews. Girls do not go to school. Nor do they address Muslim men with comical nicknames. The world I shall make will reimpose tradition. It will restore the old notions of honor. You clearly have no place in such a world, which is why you must die.”
“At least I die for my friends. You, my brother, will surely die alone.”
“I see.” Scimitar looked down at the ground. “So be it.” He began to walk away. “Out of respect for our father, I shall tell him that you died honorably, Zahir, shielding my body from an enemy bullet. I will not allow him to be shamed by your death. I leave you to the savages.”
Then, with Vulture beside him, Scimitar departed via the gantry elevator, shooting up out of the mine.
“Do as you will, my brother,” Pooh Bear said after him. “Do as you will.”
And thus Pooh Bear was left alone in the vast underground mine, suspended in a medieval cage above a pool of foul liquid, not forty yards from the pit where his good friend, Jack West, Jr. had met a violent death at the hands of his own father.
Tiny against the vast scale of the mine, abandoned by his own brother, and now totally alone in the darkness, Pooh Bear began to weep.
KIBUYE PROVINCE, RWANDA
DECEMBER 11, 2007, 2335 HOURS
HAMMEREDby pouring rain, out of gas, and using only three of its engines, The Halicarnassus made an unseen landing on a stretch of highway in the remote southwestern Rwandan province of Kibuye.
Once the 747 was down, its rear ramp yawned open and out of it zoomed the Freelander—with Zoe, Wizard, and the kids on board. They took with them Wizard’s laptop computer, a multifrequency radio scanner, some jerry cans filled with petrol, and a couple of Glocks.
Thirty minutes earlier, a call had gone out to Solomon Kol in Kenya. Ever knowledgeable about the local hazards and safe meeting points, Solomon had instructed them to link up with him at an abandoned United Nations repair depot, number 409, on the outskirts of the Rwandan town of Kamembe, located in the southwesternmost province of the country, Cyangugu.
Sky Monster, however, did not go with the others.
He stayed with his beloved plane, alone, wearing twin holsters on his waist and a shotgun on his back. He was going to remain with The Halicarnassus and wait for some companions of Solomon’s who were to bring him some jet fuel, enough to limp over Lake Victoria to the old farm in Kenya when the aerial patrols were called off.
And so as the Freelander sped away, Sky Monster stood beneath the giant Halicarnassus, alone in the Rwandan hills.
In the distance, something howled.
Wizard, Zoe, Lily, and Alby sped along a remote Rwandan highway.
As Zoe drove, Wizard kept the radio scanner on, searching the airwaves for transmissions.
Just before sunset, the scanner picked up a military signal instructing all government forces to be on the lookout for a compact Land Rover just like theirs, carrying passengers just like them: a blond woman, an old man with a beard, perhaps a third male, and two children.
Zoe swore. Unmanned drones patrolling the air over Kenya. Rwandan forces combing the country for them. It felt like every bad guy in Africa was on their tail.
This wasn’t altogether untrue.
She didn’t know that twelve hours previously, on instructions from Vulture, a series of multimillion-dollar wire transfers had fanned out from the treasury of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia into the bank accounts of a dozen desperately poor and hopelessly corrupt African regimes. Each transfer was accompanied by a message:
Find a black Boeing 747 that was expected to make an emergency landing somewhere in central Africa. On it would be at least two Western fugitives: an old man with a long white beard, a woman with pink-tipped blond hair, and possibly a third man, a pilot from New Zealand. With them would be two children: an Egyptian girl, also with pink in her hair, and a little black boy with glasses.
Any African nation that partook in the search would receive $50 million simply for their efforts.
To the country that found the fugitives and captured the old man and the little girl alive would go an additional $450 million.
Thanks to a half-billion-dollar price on their heads, they really did have a dozen African regimes hunting them in the most dangerous place on the planet.
AFRICA.
In this age of GPS satellites and rapid air travel, it’s easy to say the world is small, but it is Africa that shows what a lie such a statement is.
Africa is big and despite centuries of exploration, much of its jungle-covered central region remains untrampled by modern man. Its outer territories—like Nigeria with its oil and South Africa with its diamonds—have long ago been plundered by European nations, but the unforgiving nature of the interior has defied Western penetration for over five hundred years.
With isolation comes mystery, and the mysteries of Africa are many.
Take, for instance, the Dogon tribe of Mali. A primitive tribe, the Dogon have known for centuries that the star Sirius is in fact atrinary system: it is accompanied by two companion stars invisible to the naked eye, stars known as “Sirius B” and “Sirius C.” Western astronomers using telescopes only discovered this fact in the late 20th century.
In their ancient verbal legends, the Dogons also state that stars are in fact suns, an astounding thing for a primitive tribe to know.
Exactly how the Dogon people know what they know is one of Africa’s great mysteries. The thing is, they are not the only African tribe to possess unusual and ancient secrets.
In the middle of the vast and dark landmass of Africa is the tiny country known as Rwanda.
Hilly and jungle-ridden, it is barely 125 miles wide and would fit easily inside the state of Connecticut, one of America’s smallest states.
Of course, the world now knows of the 800,000 Tutsis massacred by ethnic Hutus in the space of a month in 1994—an orgy of obscenely violent killing in which the murderers used machetes and nail-studded clubs called masus. In one month, 10 percent of Rwanda’s 7.5 million people were wiped off the face of the Earth.
Less well-known however is the plight of the survivors of the genocide: the many Tutsis who were not killed had their arms cut off by the machete-wielding Hutus. Today it is not uncommon to see half-armed or one-armed locals quietly going about their daily farmwork.
Desperately poor, decimated by an unprecedented bloodletting, and with nothing to sell that the world wants, Rwanda has been cast aside as an ugly example of the worst of human nature.
In an already dark continent, it is a black hole.
That night the Freelander stood parked behind an abandoned church in the south of Kibuye Province, covered in branches and a filthy tarp.
The church near it was a frightening sight.
Bullet holes and dried blood covered its walls. In the decade since 1994, no one had even bothered to clean it.
Zoe stood at the back of the building, peering out into the darkness, gripping an MP-5. Wizard and the kids sat inside the church.
“During the genocide, the Tutsis fled to churches like this,” Wizard explained. “But often the local priests were in league with the Hutus and their churches became cages into which the villagers willingly ran. The priests would keep the Tutsis inside with promises of safety, while at the same time notifying the dreaded Hutu patrols. A patrol would show up and kill all the Tutsis.”
The kids stared at the bloody bullet holes in the walls around them, imagining the horrors that had happened in this very room.
“I don’t like this place,” Lily said, shivering.
“So, Wizard,” Zoe said from the doorway, deliberately changing the subject. “Tell me something. What does all this really mean? When all the Pillars and sacred stones and underground vertices are stripped away, what’s this mission about?”
“What’s it all about?” Wizard said. “The Apocalypse, Judgment Day, the end of the world. Every religion has an apocalypse myth. Whether it’s the coming of the four horsemen or a great day on which everyone is judged, ever since humans have walked this planet, they have had the idea that one day it will all end badly.
“And yet—somehow—we have been provided with this test, this test of tests, this system of vertices built by some advanced civilization in the distant past that will allow us to avert this terrible end,if we are up to the challenge. Which reminds me: Lily, can you have a look at this, please?”
Wizard grabbed Zoe’s digital camera and clicked through to a photograph she’d taken at the First Vertex, one of the golden plaque they’d seen on the main wall there:
“Can you translate those lines?” he asked Lily.
“Sure,” Lily said. “Looks like a list, a list of…do you have a pen and paper?”
Scanning the image of the plaque, she quickly jotted down a translation. When she was done, it read:
1st Vertex
The Great Viewing Hall
2nd Vertex
The City of Bridges
3rd Vertex
The Fire Maze
4th Vertex
The City of Waterfalls
5th Vertex
The Realm of the Sealords
6th Vertex
The Greatest Shrine of All
“It’s a description of all six vertices…” Zoe said.
Wizard said, “And thus perhaps the clearest description of the immense challenge we face.”
“A city of bridges? A fire maze?” Alby whispered.” What’s a fire maze? Geez…”
It got Wizard thinking, too. “Lily, can you grab the Pillar, please, the one that was charged at Abu Simbel?”
Lily extracted the Pillar from its rucksack.
It still looked extraordinary—no longer cloudy but clear, with its luminescent central liquid and the mysterious white writing on its glasslike exterior.
“Do you recognize the writing?” Wizard asked her.
Lily peered at the Pillar closely…and her eyes widened.
She spun to face Wizard.
“It’s a variety of the Word of Thoth,” she said. “A very advanced variety, but it’s Thoth for sure.” She scanned the white writing closely.
After a minute she said, “It seems to be a mix of instructions, diagrams, and symbols grouped into formulas.”
“Knowledge…” Alby said.
“Exactly,” Wizard said. “The reward for successfully placing the First Pillar in the First Vertex. The other rewards are heat, sight, life, death, and power. Those formulae you see on this charged Pillar are some kind of secret knowledge being handed down to us from the builders of the Machine.”
Lily grabbed another sheet of paper, started copying down the writing on the Pillar. Then, joined by Alby, she began translating it.
Zoe came beside Wizard and nodded at the two children: “They’re holding up well.”
“Yes. It’s important to keep their spirits up, because this is going to get scary.”
“Scarier than the Rwandan genocide stories you’ve been telling them?”
Wizard went red. “Oh. Yes. Mmmm.”
“Doesn’t matter. Listen, I got something else that’s bothering me,” Zoe said.
“What?”
“You.”
“Me? What about me?” Wizard asked, confused.
Zoe was looking at him in a strange almost amused way. Then in answer she held up a toiletry bag, and extracted from it some scissors and a razor.
“Oh, no, Zoe…” Wizard protested weakly. “No…”
Ten minutes later, Wizard again sat with the children, only now he was beardless and his usually long shock of white hair had been shaved bald.
He looked completely different; thinner, more gangly.
“You look like a shorn sheep,” Lily giggled.
“I liked my beard,” he said sadly.
Lily tittered again.
“All right, Lily,” Zoe said, holding up the scissors. “Take a seat in the barber’s chair. Your turn.”
“My turn?” Lily’s face went white.
Five minutes later, she sat beside Wizard, head also bowed, with her own hair cut dramatically short, the pink tips long gone.
Now Wizard chuckled.
Alby did, too. “Lily, you look like a boy…”
“Shut up, Alby,” Lily grumbled.
“Sorry I had to do that, little one,” Zoe said, reaching around to grab her own hair. “Wanna cut mine for me?”
Lily did so, sadly snipping off the pink end tips from Zoe’s shoulder-length blond hair—undoing the work they had performed together in happier times. When she was done, Zoe looked like a short-haired punk rocker.
“Come on, it’s time we all got some sleep,” Zoe said. “Wizard, you have the first watch. I’ll take the late shift.”
With that they each found a space on the floor, and with Wizard standing guard at the back door, curled up to sleep inside the isolated Rwandan church, a place that stank of death.
LILY WOKE with a startled gasp to find a hand smothering her mouth.
It was Zoe.
“Stay still, we’re in trouble.”
With frightened eyes, Lily peered around her. They were still in the abandoned church. Near her, Alby was crouched on the floor, not daring to make a sound. Wizard was nowhere in sight. Through a dirty cracked window, Lily saw the dim blue glow of predawn—
A figure crossed the window.
A black man wearing camouflage fatigues, a helmet, and carrying a machete.
“They arrived a few minutes ago,” Zoe whispered.
Wizard arrived at Zoe’s side, staying low. “There are four of them and they have a technical parked at the side of the building.”
A technical was the name of a truck common in Africa, a large pickup with a machine gun mounted on its open rear tray.
Wizard said, “Their uniforms are old. Probably ex–Army soldiers that the government couldn’t afford to pay, now a rape gang.”
In the wasteland that Rwanda now was, rape gangs prowled—human predators looking for women and children in isolated farmhouses and villages. They were known to terrorize whole towns, sometimes for a week at a time.
Zoe pursed her lips, then said: “You take the kids and wait by the back door. Get ready to make a run for that technical.”
“The technical?”
“Yes.” Zoe stood, her eyes fixed and focused. “We need a new car anyway.”
Several minutes later, the leader of the rape gang rounded the front corner of the church.
Skinny but muscled, he was dressed in ragged Army fatigues with his shirt open at the front. His helmet, however, was not standard military—it was a vivid sky-blue helmet with “UN” written in large white letters on it; a gruesome prize that was highly regarded by the thugs of Rwanda: at some time, this man had killed a UN peacekeeper.
The lead rapist crept onto the wooden porch of the church, gripping a machete in his fist—
“Looking for something?”
He spun, to see Zoe standing in the front doorway of the derelict church.
At first, the man was stunned at what he saw: a woman, a white woman. Then his eyes narrowed with evil intent. He called to his comrades in Kinyarwanda.
The other three came running from their truck and when they saw Zoe, they formed a loose ring around her.
Zoe tapped her foot on the floorboard—the signal for Wizard and the kids to leave via the back door—and then stepped forward, into the middle of the ring of rapists.
What happened next happened very fast.
The leader of the gang lunged at Zoe—just as Zoe, moving with lightning speed, punched him hard in the throat.
The leader dropped to his knees, gagging, at which point, the other three attacked—but in a flurry of moves, Zoe kicked one in the midsection, snapping his ribs, broke another’s nose with a vicious elbow, and hit another, baseball-bat style, with the second man’s machete, square in the groin. He screamed wildly as he fell.
It was all over in seconds, and when it was done, the four Rwandans lay writhing on the ground beneath the standing figure of Zoe.
“You got off lightly,” she said as the technical skidded to a halt nearby, now driven by Wizard with the kids in the back.
She took the gang’s machetes and their leader’s Army shirt—plus his UN helmet—then she leaped aboard the technical and it roared away into the dawn.
LATER THAT MORNING,Zoe and the others sped into the province of Cyangugu in their stolen technical.
Zoe drove, now wearing the Army shirt she had taken from the rape gang leader, while beside her, Wizard sat tall wearing the UN helmet, giving them the appearance of a senior UN official being driven around the country by his female driver.
The carcasses of militia jeeps lay beside the road, their wheels and tires long since stripped. A distressing number of one-armed women cooked outside their homes. Children splashed in open sewers. Local men lay passed out on doorsteps, drunk before noon.
One such fellow, Zoe noticed, had a dirty cell phone clipped to his belt.
The untraceable phone was quickly acquired and as they neared the town of Kamembe, Lily tried Jack’s cell phone number. Putting the call on speakerphone, the others listened, too.
The phone rang once…
Click.
“Hello…?” It sounded like Jack.
“Daddy!” Lily exclaimed.
“No, this is not your daddy, Lily. But it’s a pleasure to meet you at long last. I’m your grandfather, Jonathan West Sr. and I regret to inform you that I killed your daddy two days ago. Thank you for calling, though. Now my people can triangulate your position.”
Lily jammed down on the END CALL button, her face white with shock.
Zoe exchanged a look with Wizard. “They killed Jack…”
She grabbed the phone from Lily and tried Pooh Bear’s and Stretch’s numbers, but both calls went straight to voice mail—for whatever reason, their phones were off.
“Jonathan West Sr….” Wizard breathed. “The Wolf. Good God, he’ sin charge. And now he knows where we are…which means he’ll figure out we’re going after the Neetha.”
Zoe looked away, her mind buzzing.
Jack is dead, and we’re out here in the middle of Africa, alone and hunted…
Beside her, Lily stared into space, blank-eyed. Then she started sobbing—deep, aching, wrenching sobs. Alby put his arm around her.
“We can’t give up,” Wizard said softly but firmly. “Jack wouldn’t want us to give up. We have to stay focused and find the Neetha and the Second Pillar.”
Zoe was silent for a long time, her mind still racing. In one fell swoop, she’d learned the man she loved was dead and a great responsibility had fallen on her shoulders—the Neetha, the Pillars, keeping Lily and Alby safe—and she wasn’t sure she could handle it. She wanted to cry, too, but knew she couldn’t in front of the others.
Then Lily spoke and Zoe blinked back to the present.
“I’m sorry,” Lily said. “I didn’t mean to let them know where we are—”
“Don’t be sorry, honey,” Zoe said kindly. “We all wanted to call him.”
Lily looked at Zoe, tear streaks on her cheeks. Zoe returned her gaze, and then Lily dived into her arms and burst out crying again, clutching Zoe tightly.
As they embraced, Zoe looked out at the road ahead of them.
The jungle-covered mountains of the Congo loomed over the western horizon. The Congo was far more rugged than Rwanda, more densely forested, more impenetrable.
Somewhere in there were the Neetha, a mysterious tribe known for their deformed faces and wanton savagery, the guardians of the Second Pillar.
And now, alone and without Jack, Zoe had to find them.
Around two that afternoon they arrived at the outskirts of Kamembe, where they quickly found the abandoned UN depot they were after.
It looked like a dump. The depot’s ten-foot-high chain-link fence was broken in several places and near an old gate was a battered sign:UNITED NATIONS—DEPOT 409: AIRCRAFT REFIT AND REFUEL.
Through the fence, Zoe saw a few fuel trucks mounted on bricks, their tires and vital parts long gone, and a couple of rusty old Huey helicopters that no longer possessed any landing skids.
A man stepped out from behind the nearest chopper. A very tall black man.
Zoe whipped up her gun—
“Zoe? Is that you?” he said.
Zoe heaved a sigh of relief and for the first time in days, smiled.
There, emerging from behind the rusty old chopper, was Solomon Kol.
Solomon had two porters with him, carrying fuel cans on poles across their shoulders.
“These are my friends,” Solomon said. “They have fuel for your plane. We have been here since early morning and were starting to wonder if you had been waylaid by bandits.”
“Almost,” Wizard said.
“We also have food,” Solomon smiled.
“Oh, Solomon,” Zoe said, “we are so glad to see you.”
They sat and ate inside the fenced UN depot.
“A friend of mine has a Fokker, for dusting crops. He flew us in this morning, dropping us off a few miles to the east of here,” Solomon said. “There were rumors in the villages we passed through of an announcement over the government radio network. It spoke of a vast reward to the person or persons who found a group of white fugitives believed to be in Rwanda. Our enemies have cast a wide net for you and they summon the common people to aid them—”
“Hey! I think I’ve got it…” Alby said suddenly.
He had been sitting apart from the others, still examining the charged First Pillar.
It had become something of an obsession for him, figuring out what the Pillar’s glowing symbols meant. With Wizard’s and Lily’s help, he knew what some of them stood for, but now he’d made another connection.
“What is it, Alby?” Wizard said.
Alby held up the oblong glasslike Pillar with its pyramidal void at one end. He showed its four long sides. All contained the glowing white writing.
“See this side, with the spiderweb-like matrix on it. This matrix is actually a variety ofcarbon matrix—an extremely complex interconnection of carbon atoms, far more complex than anything we have today.”
“Meaning?” Lily asked.
“Carbon forms the basis of diamonds, the strongest substance on Earth. Carbon fiber, too, is superstrong but light—fighter aircraft and race cars use it to reinforce their cockpits. Strong and light. Titanium, steel, they’re strong but they’re heavy. This matrix, however, is something else: a carbon-based alloy that’s unbelievably strong yet incredibly light.”
“Technical knowledge…” Wizard breathed. “It’s technical knowledge.”
“Have you deciphered any of the other sides?” Zoe asked.
“Partially. This one here seems to be a representation of the star Sirius and its two companion stars. The second companion star is shown as a zero-point field, the same stuff that our Dark Star is made of.”
“Nice to know this may happen elsewhere in the universe,” Wizard commented.
“The next side of the Pillar is even wilder,” Alby said. “It, well, it seems to be an explanation of the Universe Expansion Problem.”
“Goodness…” Wizard’s eyes widened. “Are you sure?”
“The what expansion problem?” Lily asked.
Wizard explained. “It’s commonly accepted that our universe is expanding. The problem faced by astrophysicists and theoreticians, however, is that it should be expanding faster than it actually is. This has caused scientists to conclude that there is anegative energy or force somewhere out there holding the universe together—binding it, so to speak—and thus slowing its expansion. The discovery of the physical components of this negative energy would win you the Nobel Prize tomorrow.”
Lily smiled at Alby. “Better start writing your speech.”
“I don’t think finding an ancient Pillar and reading it counts as discovering anything,” Alby said.
“The point is,” Wizard said, “these are incredible things to know; incredible knowledge. Alby’s discovery is essentially the explanation for the state of balance in our universe; the so-far-inexplicable balance that exists between a universe that has been expanding since the Big Bang yet which is held in perfect check by a counteracting force. This is momentous. Advanced knowledge being passed down to us by an exceedingly generous prior civiliza—”
A scream pierced the air, echoing out over the hills. A completely random scream.
There was a momentary silence as they all looked out into the Rwandan countryside. Alby’s discovery had briefly made them forget where they were.
When all was silent again, Wizard said, “I’ll be very interested to know what the last side of the Pillar says. Good work, Alby, you’ve done very well. Jack always said you were a special one. Lily’s lucky to have a friend like you.”
Alby beamed.
Zoe had observed the entire exchange with interest—focusing on these problems and puzzles was a good way to keep their minds off the loss of Jack. She leaned forward, “So if this is knowledge, what is the next reward,heat ?”
All eyes turned to Wizard.
“Something similarly advanced, I assume. But somehow different from pure knowledge like this. I once knew an American academic who was interested in the Ramesean Stones, a fellow at MIT named Felix Bonaventura.
“Bonaventura was mostly interested in the second reward. He interpreted heat to mean energy, an energy source of some kind, since all our known sources of energy require the production of heat: coal, steam, internal combustion, even nuclear power. But if one could produce heat or motion without the need for fuel, one would have an unlimited supply of energy.”
“Are you talking about perpetual motion?” Alby said in disbelief.
“That’s exactly what Bonaventura thought the second reward was,” Wizard said. “The secret of perpetual motion.”
Zoe said, “It’d be something China would kill for. It’s choking on its own coal-based pollution.”
“Same for America,” Alby said. “It wouldn’t need Middle Eastern oil anymore.”
“The whole world would change,” Wizard said. “The Saudis and their vast oil reserves would no longer be needed. Coal would be useless. Why, warfare as we know it would be transformed. Did you know that by the end of World War II, the Nazis were using horses and carts because they’d run out of petrol. As a reward, pure heat would certainly be a world-changing one.”
Throughout the afternoon, Solomon and Zoe set about repairing one of the Hueys in the UN compound. Unlike the trucks, the choppers’ engines were more or less intact, and where one of them was missing parts, they could mostly scavenge matching parts from the other.
Late in the afternoon, Solomon came over from the chopper, wiping his hands on a rag. “Ladies and gentlemen. Your helicopter is ready.”
Wizard stood. “Then let’s go find the Neetha.”
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
DECEMBER 11–13, 2007
THE RUSTY OLD UN Huey helicopter soared low over the jungle-covered mountains of the eastern Congo, still without any landing skids.
Zoe flew, with Wizard beside her, flipping between a tangle of maps, notes, and his laptop computer.
“A few years ago I got Jack to do some research on the Neetha,” he said, finding a certain page in his notes:
NEETHA TRIBE
Remote tribe from Democratic Republic of the Congo/Zaire region; warlike; much feared by other tribes; cannibals;
Congenital deformities in all members, variety of Proteus Syndrome (bony growth on skull, similar to Elephant Man);
Found by accident by HENRY MORTON STANLEY in 1876; Neetha warriors killed seventeen of his party; Stanley barely escaped alive; years later, he tried to find them again, but strangely he could not locate them.
Possibly the same tribe encountered by the Greek explorer HIERONYMUS during his expedition into central Africa in 205 B.C. (Hieronymus mentioned a tribe with terrible facial deformities in the jungles south of Nubia. It was from the Neetha that he stole the clear spherical orb that was later used by the Oracle at Delphi.)
BEST KNOWN EXPERT: DR. DIANE CASSIDY, Anthropologist from USC. But her whole 20-man expedition went missing in 2002 while searching for the Neetha in the Congo.
Cassidy found this cave painting in northern Zambia and attributed it to ancestors of the Neetha:
Seems to depict a hollowed-out volcano with the Delphic Orb at the summit but its meaning is unknown.
“Hey, I’ve seen that painting!” Zoe said. “It was at…”
“It was at the First Vertex,” Wizard said. “Which suggests a clear connection between our quest and the Neetha. The key, however, is Hieronymus.” He clicked through the database on his laptop. “Hieronymus…Hieronymus…Ah, here it is!”
He’d found the entry he was after: a scan of an ancient scroll, written in Greek.
“What’s that?” Lily asked.
“It’s a scroll that was kept at the Library of Alexandria, a scroll written by the great Greek teacher and explorer, Hieronymus.”
Years before, Wizard and Jack had uncovered a vast collection of scrolls in the Atlas Mountains—a collection which, it turned out, was that of the fabled Alexandria Library, long believed to have been destroyed when the Romans burned down the famous Library. After months of careful scanning, Wizard had managed to load all the scrolls onto his various computers.
“Hieronymus was a truly exceptional man. Not only was he a great teacher, he was also an explorer beyond comparison, the Indiana Jones of the ancient world. He taught alongside Plato at the Academy, teaching no less a student than Aristotle himself. He was also the man who stole the Delphic Orb from the Neetha and took it back to Greece, where the Oracle at Delphi later used it to foretell the future.”
“The Delphic Orb?” Zoe said as she flew. “You mean the Seeing Stone of Delphi? One of the Six Sacred Stones?”
“Yes,” Wizard said. “Hieronymus stole it from the Neetha, but from what I’ve studied of him, he always intended to return it. That was why he wrote this scroll—it’s a set of instructions detailing the location of the Neetha, so that the Orb could one day be returned.”
“Was it ever returned?” Alby asked.
“After they saw its power, the Greeks didn’t want to give it back,” Wizard said, “but late in his life Hieronymus crept into the Oracle’s temple-cave, grabbed the Seeing Stone, and fled from Greece by boat. He stopped in Alexandria—where he deposited these scrolls, written in Greek and Latin, at the Library—before he headed south into Africa. He was never seen again.” Wizard turned to Lily. “Think you can translate this scroll?”
She shrugged. It was in Latin, and Latin was easy for her. “Sure. It says:
“AT THE VALLEY OF THE ARBOREAL GUARDIANS
AT THE JUNCTION OF THE THREE MOUNTAIN STREAMS
TAKE THE SINISTER ONE
THERE YOU WILL ENTER THE DARK REALM OF THE TRIBE THAT EVEN GREAT HADES FEARS.’”
“‘The tribe that even great Hades fears’?” Zoe said. “Charming.”
Solomon said, “The Neetha have a reputation so fearsome it has become myth; many Africans use tales of Neetha bogeymen to frighten young children: cannibalism, human sacrifice, killing their young.”
“Takes more than a scary story to frighten me off,” Lily said in her best adult voice. “So what’s the ‘Valley of the Arboreal Guardians’? That seems to be the starting point.”
“Arboreal means trees,” Alby said. “The tree guardians?”
Wizard was clicking through more entries on his computer. “Yes, yes. I’ve seen a reference to just such a valley before. Here it is. Ah-ha….”
Lily leaned over, and saw on his screen the title page of a book, an old 19th century pulp fictioner called Through the Dark Continent by Henry Morton Stanley.
“Stanley wrote many books about his expeditions in Africa, most of them pure romantic rubbish,” Wizard explained. “This one, however, detailed his genuinely remarkable trip across the African continent, from Zanzibar in the east to Boma in the west. Stanley departed from Zanzibar with a caravan of 356 people and, over a year later, emerged at the Congo River estuary near the Atlantic with only 115, all of them on the verge of starvation.
“Over the course of his journey, Stanley recounted numerous gun battles with native tribes, including one particularly gruesome skirmish with a tribe that resemble the Neetha. Immediately before that battle Stanley recounted traveling through an isolated jungle valley in which the trees had been carved into marvelous statues, towering statues of men, some of them over seventy feet high.
“Such a valley has never been found, an unfortunate fact that has only added to the overall historical opinion that Stanley made up most of his adventures.”
“So…” Zoe prompted.
“So, I believe Stanley was telling the truth; he just got the details of his route wrong—something he did quite a lot. That’s why no one’s ever found this valley. But if we can reconstruct Stanley’s actual route from landmarks and land formations mentioned in his book, we just might get lucky.”
“Can’t say I’ve got a better plan,” Zoe said.
“Me neither,” Lily said. “Let’s do it.”
THE CONGO.
Formerly known as Zaire but renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1997, the Congo is the third largest country in Africa, almost as big as India. Yet only 3 percent of its vast land area is cultivated, meaning 97 percent of the Congo is pure jungle, much of which remains unexplored to this day.
It is a brutal land—from the dangers of the mighty Congo River to dense jungles teeming with snakes and hyenas, not to mention the chains of active volcanoes in the wild southeast—the dark heart of the Dark Continent.
Following Wizard’s directions, Zoe took them south.
They flew for three days, stopping occasionally at abandoned UN depots to steal food and helicopter fuel, until they entered the least-populated area of the country—perhaps the entire continent—the Katanga Plateau in the deep south.
Dotted with volcanoes, mountains, and lush river valleys, it was as spectacular as it was remote. Giant waterfalls plummeted from mountain clefts. Fed by constant humidity, the layers of mist that shrouded the valleys remained in place all day long.
As she flew, Zoe keyed her radio scanner so that it continuously monitored all frequencies, military and commercial, allowing her to keep track of any radio activity in the area: Congolese Army patrols, UN people and maybe…
“—Wolf, this is Broadsword. Just picked up a rogue signal south of Kalemie. Huey signature. Could be them—”
“—Check it out—”Wolf’s voice replied.
Wolf’s people were close behind.
Then, late on the third day, after following a dozen false leads, Wizard spotted a mountain that had been mentioned by Stanley in his book, a mountain with twin waterfalls.
“That’s it!” he called excitedly over the roar of the rotors. “Zoe! Cut southwestward!”
Zoe did so, bringing the chopper low over a densely forested river valley that was itself fed by three small fast-flowing mountain rivers.
“Bring us down at the junction of the rivers,” Wizard called.
They landed on the riverbank, the strutless Huey landing lightly on its belly. Then, cautiously, they stepped out of the chopper.
It was Lily who spotted them first.
“Now that is cool…” she breathed, gazing at the nearby jungle.
Alby came up beside her. “What—oh my…”
His jaw dropped.
There in front of them, stretching away into the hazy mist, was a forest of enormous trees.
Ghostly gray in color, they soared to a height of two hundred feet, their interlocking upper leaves forming a canopy through which the Sun couldn’t penetrate.
But it was their trunks —their wide, huge trunks—that seized the children’s attention.
Each gigantic trunk, dozens of them, rank upon rank, all at least thirty feet in diameter, had been beautifully carved into the shapes of men.
Some depicted old chiefs, others warriors and priests. All were stern in appearance, fierce, warlike.
And they were old,really old. The great trees were faded with age and strangled by countless vines, vines that seemed to constrict around the figures like giant coiled snakes. The figures stretched away into the mist, an army of sentries standing guard over time itself.
The air was still, the dense jungle silent.
Wizard came up alongside Lily, put a hand on her shoulder.
“The Valley of the Arboreal Guardians,” he said softly.
“So where do we go now?” Solomon asked.
Alby had Zoe’s digital camera slung around his neck. He raised it and took a series of quickfire photos of the incredible carved forest.
Wizard recited Hieronymus’s scroll: “‘At the valley of the Arboreal Guardians/At the junction of the three mountain streams/Take the sinister one.’ It seems pretty clear. We proceed to the junction of the three streams near here and take the sinister fork.”
“The sinister one?” Solomon said.
Lily smiled. “I don’t think it’s supposed to be scary, Solomon. In ancient Latin,‘sinister’ or ‘sinistra’ means left. We take the left-hand tributary.”
While the others were staring in awe at the huge carved forest, Zoe was exploring the riverbank upstream.
Something had caught her eye about fifty yards in that direction and she wanted to see what it was.
She came around a bend in the river……and stopped dead in her tracks.
“Oh, shit,” she breathed.
No fewer than thirty riverboats lay before her, crumpled and broken, half-sunk in the river. Derelict boats of various types and ages. Some were recent designs, others were World War II–era patrol boats, others older still: 19th-century modular riverboats of the kind used by Henry Morton Stanley. There were even a couple of semidestroyed seaplanes and one crippled helicopter with the insignia of the Angolan Army on it.
Zoe froze.
It was a collection of vehicles that had arrived at this place and never left.
“Shit. We just walked into a trap.”
She spun, calling, “Lily! Wizard! Get back to the chopp—”
It was at that moment, however, that their helicopter exploded.
THE EXPLOSION echoed throughout the valley.
Wizard, Solomon, and the kids all spun as one to see the chopper burst out in a massive fireball.
Zoe came running back along the riverbank, staring at the flaming wreck of the Huey.
Then a branch snapped on the opposite bank and she whirled to see a dark figure slither out of the water and disappear into the foliage.
A native.
Then it hit Zoe.
The Neetha had been found over the centuries, probably on many occasions. By explorers, by accident, even by one Angolan patrol, it seemed. But if an outsider who found the tribe never got away to tell the world about them, then the Neetha would forever remain the stuff of legend.
And what better way to distract a recently arrived visitor than with these spectacularly carved trees—the great statues absorbed the visitor’s attention while the tribe’s saboteurs sank their boat or disabled their chopper.
And now they’ve trapped us, too,Zoe thought.
“Christ,” she said. “How could I have been so—oh, damn.”
They emerged from the foliage at the base of the huge carved trees: dark-skinned tribesmen, their faces covered in harsh white warpaint, their yellow eyes bloodshot. Foul bony growths protruded from their foreheads and jaws, giving them a gruesome, less-than-human appearance.
Proteus Syndrome,Wizard thought.Deformities caused by diet and worsened by years of inbreeding.
There were maybe sixteen of them and they held bows and guns in their hands. They crept forward in a low manner, cautious but strong.
As they approached from all sides, Zoe, Solomon, and Wizard instinctively formed a circle around the two children.
“I think our search is over,” Solomon whispered. “It appears the Neetha have found us .”
THE REALM OF THE NEETHA
THE REALM OF THE NEETHA
KATANGA PROVINCE, CONGO
DECEMBER 14, 2007, 1930 HOURS
SURROUNDED by Neetha warriors, Zoe and the group were force-marched up the left-hand river fork—a winding walk through dense foliage and past some rocky rapids. At one point in their journey, Wizard tripped on a root and fell; he rose to his knees only to find a knife pressed again his throat, a Neetha guard gripping him in the apparent belief it had been an escape attempt.
“Quwanna wango,”the Neetha man hissed. Wizard froze as his captor slowly pressed the blade against his throat, drawing a thin line of blood. Zoe and the others all held their breath…but abruptly the guard released Wizard with a rude shove. No one else lost their footing after that.
As night fell, they came to a great cliff that rose high above the jungle.
A large crack in the otherwise-solid natural wall loomed before them, a dramatic ravine perhaps twenty yards wide.
Plugging the base of this ravine was an imposing man-made structure—a huge stone fort lit by flaming torches and constructed of enormous cube-shaped boulders. Hundreds of sharpened elephant tusks flanked a steep stone stairway that led up to the structure, all pointing aggressively outward.
The only gap in the fort was a great gateway at its base. At least twenty feet high, it was built in the shape of an animal’s jaws bared wide. A fast-flowing river gushed out from its lower half and tumbled down a canal in the center of the stone stairs—so that there seemed to be no actual footway that allowed access through the gateway.
Ten Neetha warriors manned a platform in front of the gate. With them, snarling and grunting and straining on leashes, were hyenas.
“Tamed hyenas?” Zoe breathed in horror as they climbed the stairs.
Wizard whispered, “Hieronymus claimed that the Neetha used hyenas as hunting dogs, but his claims were dismissed as fanciful. He said they rear hyenas from cub age and train them using a terrible system of beatings and starvation.”
Solomon hissed, “If a hyena could be tamed, it would be an incredible asset. Their sense of smell is second to none. You could never hope to escape a pack hunting you.”
“A trap back at the river. Destroyed boats and planes. Hyenas as guard dogs,” Zoe said. “What the Hell have we got ourselves into?” She gripped Lily’s hand a little more tightly.
They came to the great gate at the top of the stairs. One of the sentries there blew a horn, and suddenly a wooden bridge fitted with steps was lowered from inside the arch structure. It slotted into place so that it straddled the flowing river rushing out from the gate’s yawning mouth.
Dwarfed by the terrible archway, surrounded by their fearsome guards, Zoe and her team stepped onto the drawbridge and disappeared inside the gate, entering the realm of the Neetha.
They emerged inside the ravine.
Sheer vertical cliffs rose dramatically on either side of them, soaring toward the sky.
At the top of the ravine, four hundred feet overhead, the trees of the rain forest had been deliberately bent, forced to grow inward so that they formed a canopyover the ravine, blocking it from outside view. To an observer flying overhead, the ravine—already hidden among three extinct volcanoes—would have been indistinguishable from the sea of green jungle above it.
During the daytime, Zoe figured, dappled light would shine through the canopy, but right now, thin shafts of moonlight cut through it, illuminating the gorge in a haunting bluish glow.
As she gazed up at the enormous walls, Lily saw that they possessed a strange kind of movement: a constant trickle that flowed down the uneven rock walls, feeding the clumps of twisted vines that had attached themselves there. Among the snakelike vines were all manner of real snakes, speckled African rock pythons, black mambas, and various others slithering in and out of every available orifice.
“Do you see them?” she gasped.
Alby nodded vigorously, terrified. “Yuh-huh.”
The ravine before them stretched away into misty darkness, twisting and bending, blocked in places by stone forts that prevented an intruder from moving in a straight line.
Likewise, the gorge’s base was made up of difficult-to-pass substances.
Mostly, it was just water, a flowing stream that ultimately flowed out through the gate. But along the way, this stream passed through two dense reed fields, three mud ponds, and one foul stinking bog inhabited by several semihidden Nile crocodiles.
As the group emerged from the great gate, the lead guard blew another horn and a huge cogwheel at one of the forts upstream was turned by a slave gang. Without warning, a series of stone platforms that had previously been hidden beneath the waters of the stream rose up from beneath the waves right in front of Zoe’s team, instantly providing a zigzagging walkway that allowed one to proceed up the ravine unhindered.
“These people are most able,” Solomon said, “for a tribe of cannibals untouched by civilization.”
“Just untouched by our civilization,” Wizard said.
“Wizard,” Zoe whispered, “what’s going to happen?”
Wizard stole a glance at the children, made sure they couldn’t hear. “We’re marching to our deaths, Zoe,” he said. “The only question is how long the Neetha keep us alive before they eat us one severed limb at a time.”
But then he was shoved onward by the guards and thus they progressed through the dark ravine, passing the various fortifications until they turned a final bend and emerged into a wider space, lit by grim firelight.
“God in all creation…” Wizard breathed as he beheld the realm of the Neetha.
THE REALM OF THE NEETHA
THEY HAD COME to a point where their ravine met another smaller one—a T-junction of two ravines nestled among three extinct volcanoes—and suddenly they found themselves in a very wide space.
A broad lake lay in the middle of what could only be described as an ancient village built into the walls of the giant ravine junction.
It looked like nothing they had ever seen.
Dozens of stone stuctures dotted the walls of the junction, some at dizzying heights, and they ranged in size from small huts to a large free-standing tower that rose up from the waters of the lake itself.
Ladders led to the upper huts while swooping rope bridges crisscrossed the minor ravine to the left, connecting the structures.
For Zoe, it was the bridge-building skills of these people that was most remarkable: rope bridges; the concealed stone bridges that she had walked on from the main gate; she even saw a series of drawbridges giving access to the tower out on the lake.
“Wizard,” she said, “did these people—”
“No. They didn’t build this place. They just moved in. Like the Aztecs did at Teotihuacán.”
“So what civilization did?”
“I imagine the same one that built the Machine. Would you look at that…”
They’d stepped out onto the main square of the town and Wizard was gazing off to the right, out over the lake.
Zoe turned. “At what—”
She cut herself off.
An incredible structure lay across the lake.
It was utterly immense, literally carved out of the cone of the extinct volcano that lay on the far side of the ravine.
It looked like a modern stadium, an enormous circular arena. A series of round walls could be seen inside it—a maze of some sort. And rising up out of the very center of the circular maze like the needle on a sundial was a superthin yet superhigh stone-staircase easily ten stories high.
Made of hundreds of steps, the thin staircase was wide enough for one person only and had no rail, and it rose precariously to a squat trapezoidal doorway built into the rock face on the far side of the maze.
The challenge was clear: only if you made it to the center of the maze could you ascend this mysterious staircase.
There was one other thing that Zoe noticed about the village area: there was a small triangular island located out in the middle of the lake, in the exact center of everything, as if it were the focal point of the entire ravine junction.
Erected on this little island was a bronze tripod-like device that looked to Zoe like some ancient kind of inclinometer.
And on a pedestal next to the “inclinometer,” raised for everyone in the village to see, were two very sacred objects:
A smoked-glass Pillar and a beautiful crystal orb.
Wizard saw them, too, and he inhaled sharply. “The Second Pillar and the Seeing Stone.”
They weren’t able to stare at the little sacred island for long, however, for just then their guards brought them to a deep semicircular pit off the main square: in it were two square granite platforms that rose twenty feet above the pit’s muddy base.
Down in the mud, looking up at Lily and Alby with unblinking eyes, prowled two large crocodiles.
Two drawbridges thunked into place and the group was shoved at sword point onto the granite slabs: the two girls on one, the two men and Alby on the other. Each towerlike platform was about ten feet from the edge and seven feet from each other, so escape was impossible. Both bore frightening axe marks and bloody scratches on their surfaces.
The drawbridges were removed.
A crowd had gathered around the platforms—curious Neetha townsfolk, all of them possessing bony growths on their faces, and all staring at the captives, murmuring animatedly among themselves.
But then the whispering ceased, and the crowd split as a series of flaming torches cut through their ranks, and an official party emerged.
Twelve men, led by a great obese fellow whose animal-skin outfit was covered in weapons, skulls, and ornaments. His fleshy face was disgusting, covered in growths. Among the weapons on his belt, Wizard saw a nineteenth-century Winchester rifle.
The chief of the tribe. Bearing the weapons and skulls of those his line had vanquished over the centuries. Good Lord…
Seven younger men, all standing tall and proud, escorted the chief.
Probably his sons,Wizard thought.
The other four men in the leadership group were different:three were clearly warriors; lean and muscled, with fierce eyes and warpainted faces.
The fourth and last man, however, was just bizarre.
He was old and gnarled, hunched, with the worst facial growths of any of them. He too had a warpainted face and he possessed the most terrifying eyes Wizard had ever seen in his life—this hunched old man had diseased yellow irises that stared crazily at both everything and nothing.
He was the warlock of the Neetha.
Their belongings were emptied in front of the warlock.
Watched by the chief, the warlock rummaged through their stuff, before with a cry he held aloft the clear First Pillar.
“Neehaka!”he yelled.
“Neehaka…ooh, neehaka…”the crowd murmured.
“Neehaka bomwacha Nepthys! Hurrah!”
Wizard didn’t have a clue what was being said.
But then, from the other slab, he heard Lily say: “He’s speaking the language of Thoth. Speaking it. ‘Neehaka’ is‘nee,’ ‘The First,’ and‘haka,’ ‘Great Pillar.’ The first Great Pillar.‘Bonwacha’ means infused or impregnated. ‘The First Great Pillar has been infused by Nepthys.’”
“Nepthys is another name for the Dark Star,” Wizard whispered. “Its Greek name.”
Then the warlock extracted the Philosopher’s Stone and the Firestone from Lily’s pack and his eyes went even wider.
He shot a look at Wizard and barked a flurry of phrases.
Lily translated timidly. “He wants to know how you came upon the great tools of cleansing.”
“Tell him, ‘After much study and many years of searching.’” Wizard said.
In a frightened voice, Lily conveyed this.
The warlock inhaled sharply and muttered something, his eyes remaining wide.
Lily said to Wizard, “He’s surprised that I can speak Thoth. He finds this prophetic. He is a warlock, and he thinks that you must be one also—”
A shout from the warlock silenced her.
Then the warlock turned suddenly and called for someone. Again the crowd parted, and now a woman stepped forward from the back of the group.
When she saw her, Lily gasped.
So did Wizard.
It was a white woman, perhaps fifty-five years of age, with gray-blond hair and an elfish face that seemed beaten down, worn. She was dressed like the other Neetha women, in a leather hide and with primitive jewelry.
Wizard breathed, “Dr. Cassidy? Dr. Diane Cassidy?”
The woman looked up sharply at his words, as if she hadn’t heard English in a long, long time.
The warlock barked at Cassidy, and instantly she bowed her head.
So this was what had become of Dr. Diane Cassidy, expert on the Neetha. She had found the lost tribe and in return they had enslaved her.
The warlock spoke curtly with Cassidy.
Lily listened to their exchange. “He’s calling her ‘the Great Chief’s Eighth Wife.’ He mustn’t trust me. He wants her to translate.”
The warlock spun and gazed angrily at Wizard, speaking harshly and quickly.
Diane Cassidy translated slowly and softly in English:“The great warlock, Yanis, desires to know if you have come here to steal the Pillar of the Neetha?”
“Oh no,” Wizard said. “Not at all. We have come here to beseech you for the use of your Pillar, to borrow it in our quest to save the world from the Dark Star, the one your warlock calls Nepthys.”
Dr. Cassidy translated.
The warlock reeled at the response, shocked beyond measure. When he spoke, he spat.
Cassidy translated:“Yanis says that Nepthys rules as he pleases. Such is his divine right. Who are you to deny Nepthys his will?”
Wizard said, “I am one of a small few who wish to save our world.”
The warlock spat again.
“Yanis says if Nepthys wishes to destroy this world, then that is what Nepthys will do. It is our privilege to be alive when he unleashes his godly power. Yanis will speak with you no more.”
And with that the warlock swirled on the spot and stormed off, taking all of their belongings—including the Firestone, the Philosopher’s Stone, and the First Pillar—with him.
LILY AND THE OTHERS were left to sit on their bare stone platforms for the rest of the evening: waiting, helpless, fearful.
The warlock had retreated to a large fortress-like building to the north of the platforms which backed onto the central lake.
Fitted with dozens of outward-pointing elephant tusks, this temple-fortress was guarded by four white-painted priests bearing spears. A few also wore guns on their hips.
Wizard said, “Warrior-monks. The finest Neetha warriors join the holy class. There they receive special training in fighting and the art of stealth. Hieronymus once said that by the time you discovered a Neetha priest had hunted you down, your throat would already have been cut.”
Throughout the evening, the townsfolk gathered to gawk at the mysterious prisoners, gazing curiously at them as if they were animals in a zoo.
The children eyed Alby with particular curiosity.
“What are they saying?” Alby said, unnerved.
“They’re wondering about your glasses,” Lily said.
The women pointed at Zoe, whispering among themselves. “Because of your cargo pants and short hair, they’re not sure if you’re a woman or a man,” Lily said.
But then some men came and the Neetha women and children scattered, and the atmosphere around the platforms changed.
The men were clearly persons of standing in the tribe and they gathered before Lily and Zoe’s platform, pointing and gesticulating at them like horse traders. Clearly the biggest fellow among them was the leader of the group and the rest his entourage.
“What are they saying?” Wizard asked, concerned.
Lily frowned. “They’re talking about Zoe and me. The big one is saying that he doesn’t want Zoe, since she has most likely already been touched, whatever that means—”
Without warning, the biggest Neetha man shouted at Lily and spoke quickly.
Lily was taken aback. She shook her head and said, “Ew, no.Niha. ”
The cluster of Neetha men instantly fell into a huddle of intense muttering and whispering.
“Lily,” Wizard said. “What did he just ask you?”
“He asked if I had a husband. I said no, of course not.”
“Oh, dear,” Wizard breathed. “I should have anticipated this—”
He was cut off as the big fellow laughed loudly and marched back to the largest house in the village, followed by his entourage.
“What was that about?” Lily asked Zoe.
“I don’t think you want to know,” Zoe said.
Late in the night, sometime long after midnight when all the villagers were sleeping, Lily awoke to see a procession of warrior-monks led by the warlock cross the lake via the drawbridges and, holding flaming torches aloft, head for the large circular maze on the other side.
One of them, Lily saw, carried the Firestone reverently, with outstretched arms. Another carried the Philosopher’s Stone with equal veneration. Behind him, a third warrior-monk carried the First Pillar.
Lily noticed that Zoe was already awake—she’d been keeping watch. They hissed to Wizard and the others on the other platform, waking them.
They all observed the warlock break away the larger group and stride out onto the sacred triangular island in the center of the lake, via a stone bridge that rose from beneath the rippling surface. There the Delphic Orb and the Second Pillar sat proudly on their stone pedestal.
With great reverence, the warlock lifted the Delphic Orb from its pedestal and handed it to one of his monks, who dashed off to rejoin the procession.
The warlock stayed on the island, where he was joined by the two monks bearing the Philosopher’s Stone and the Firestone.
Lily and the others then watched in awe as, with great solemnity, the warlock placed his people’s Pillar—the Second Pillar—inside the Philosopher’s Stone.
When the Firestone was set atop it, a familiar white flash flared from within the Philosopher’s Stone, and when the warlock removed the Neetha’s Pillar from it, the Pillar was no longer hazy and cloudy. Its rectangular glass body was perfectly clear.
Cleansed.
The warlock looked like a man who had seen his god.
The ceremony complete, he replaced the Second Pillar on its pedestal. As for the Firestone and the Philosopher’s Stone, he handed them to his monks and while he remained on the sacred island, they took them—along with the First Pillar—into the maze.
About twenty minutes later, the warrior-monks with the Firestone, the Philosopher’s Stone, and the First Pillar emerged on the narrow flight of stone steps that rose out of the center of the maze.
“They know how to get through…?” Lily said, confused.
“Mazes like this were common in the ancient world,” Wizard said. “The labyrinth of Egypt; the palace at Knossos. But such mazes are not designed to be impenetrable. Each possesses a secret solution and so long as you know the solution, you can pass through a given maze quite quickly.”
Zoe said, “Most often, only royalty or royal priests knew the solution. It’s a cunning way to keep your treasures safely hidden from the commoners.”
The monks climbed the great staircase and then disappeared inside the trapezoidal doorway at its summit, entering some kind of inner sanctum where the two stones—the Firestone and the Philosopher’s Stone—and the First Pillar would be kept safe and secure.
Low chanting followed. The fires of their torches danced.
Then, a few minutes later, a speck of firelight appeared in the sky through a carefully cut gap in the tree canopy that covered the ravine—it appeared at a spot directly above the inner sanctum. One of the monks must have climbed up an internal shaft and emerged at the very summit of the volcano 650 feet aloft.
Suddenly—whap!—the speck of firelight was replaced by a completely otherworldy purple glow.
“It’s the Orb,” Wizard whispered. “They must have taken the Firestone up to the summit, too. They’ve placed the Orb atop the Firestone and unleashed its special power.”
“And what is that?” Solomon asked.
“The ability to see the Dark Star,” Alby answered solemnly. “Look.”
He pointed over at the warlock, still standing on the triangular island—only now the gnarled old man was bent over the inclinometer there, peering through an eyepiece on it, an eyepiece that was angled straight up at…the purple glow of the Delphic Orb high up on the volcano’s summit.
“It’s a telescope ,” Alby said. “A tubeless telescope like the kind Hooke built in the 1600s. A telescope doesn’t necessarily need a tube, only two lenses, one at the bottom and another at the top, set at the right focal length. Only this tubeless telescope is huge, the size of that volcano.”
“A telescope designed for one purpose,” Wizard said. “To see the Dark Star.”
As if on cue, the warlock howled with delight, his eye locked to the eyepiece.
“Nepthys!”he cried. “Nepthys! Nepthys!”
Then he intoned something in his own language.
Lily listened, then translated.“‘Great Nepthys. Your loyal servants are ready for your arrival. Come, bathe us in your deadly light. Rescue us from this earthly existence.’”
“This is bad…” Zoe said.
“Why?”
“Because this warlock has no intention of saving the world from the Dark Star. He wants it to come. He wants it to unleash its zero-point field on the Earth. More than anything, this man wants to die at the hands of his god.”
LILY AGAIN fell asleep, but just before dawn, something else happened.
It was many hours after the warlock and his monks had concluded their nocturnal activities by returning their people’s sacred objects to their usual places: the Delphic Orb and the (now cleansed) Second Pillar were returned to the pedestal on the triangular island, alongside the ancient inclinometer. After that, the priests had retired to their temple-fortress and the village was still—a stillness that had prevailed until Lily was woken by a series of small objects pelting her body.
“Huh?” she looked up with bleary eyes……to see a young Neetha man tossing pebbles at her.
She sat up.
He was perhaps twenty years old and short, and if you could have removed the growth on his left temple, he would have qualified as a fresh-faced youth.
“Hello?” he said tentatively.
“You speak our language?” Lily asked, stunned.
He nodded. “Some. I am student of Chief’s Eighth Wife,” he said slowly, articulating each word carefully. “She and I both oppressed in tribe, so speak much. I have many asks for you. Many asks.”
“Such as?”
“What is your world like?”
Lily cocked her head, looking at this Neetha youth more closely, and she softened. Amid all the fierce trappings of this ancient warrior tribe was the most universal kind of individual, a gentle and curious young man.
“What is your name?” she asked.
“I am Ono, seventh son of High Chief Rano.”
“My name is Lily. You speak my language very well.”
Ono beamed with pride. “I am keen student. I enjoy to learn.”
“Me, too,” Lily said. “I’m good with languages. Yours is a very old one, you know.”
“This I know.”
Ono, it turned out, was a very curious young man who had many questions about the outside world.
The concept of flight, for example, intrigued him. As a younger man he had helped disable a seaplane down at the carved forest. After the unfortunate people in the plane had been taken away and eventually killed and eaten, he had examined the plane for hours. But try as he might, he hadn’t been able to figure out how such a heavy object could fly like a bird.
Likewise, he had a radio—Zoe’s radio, taken from their belongings—and he asked Lily how such a device could enable two people to speak over great distances.
Lily did her best to answer his questions, and the more she talked with him, the more she found Ono to be not only curious but sweet and kind.
“Can you tell me about your tribe?” she asked.
He sighed. “Neetha have long history. Power in tribe rests on, how you say, balance between royal family and priests of Holy Stone.
“My father chief because family strong for many years. Strong chief respected by Neetha. But I think my father brute. My brothers brutes, too. Large of body but small of mind. But here, strong get all they desire—healthy women, first food, so strong continue to rule. They beat the weak and take from them: animals, fruit, daughters.
“But warrior-priests also have power because they guard maze. Inside their fortress, from very young age, them study and learn spells and also fighting arts so when come of age, emerge as killers.”
Lily eyed the dark temple-fortress nearby. With its high battlements, tusks, and folding drawbridges, it looked fearsome.
She asked, “Is their fortress the only way to get to the maze and the sacred island?”
Ono nodded. “Yes. Over centuries, ruling clan and priest class find it…beneficial…to honor each other’s power. Royal family orders people to honor priesthood, while priests approve royal marriages and support ruling clan by punishing any person who attacks royal.”
“What’s the punishment for attacking a royal?” Lily asked.
“One is sentenced to the maze,” Ono said, looking out at the massive circular structure across the lake. “Animals lurk in it. Sometimes accused is hunted in there by priests; sometimes by dogs; other times, condemned man is left to roam maze until starve or take own life in despair. No man ever escape maze.”
Ono looked off sadly into the distance.
“Sweet Lily. I am not strong. I small, but have keen mind. But keen mind mean nothing here. Disputes settled on Fighting Stone.” He nodded at a large square stone platform that sat between Lily’s slab and the triangular island on the lake. “I could not hope to defeat my brothers in fight, so I reduced to shadow life. Life in my tribe is not happy life, Lily, even when you chief’s seventh son.”
Ono bowed his head, and Lily looked kindly at him.
But then abruptly something clinked somewhere and Ono stood.
“Dawn comes. Village awakes. I must go. Thank you for talk, sweet Lily. I sorry for you, for day ahead of you.”
Lily sat upright.
“The day ahead of me? What do you mean?”
But Ono had already dashed away, disappearing into the shadows.
“What about the day ahead of me?” she said again.
MORNING CAME.
Shafts of sunshine lanced down through the tree canopy above the Neetha gorges as a large crowd gathered around the two prisoner platforms.
The enormous warrior who had previously assessed Lily and Zoe now stood before the assembled crowd. Beside him stood the fat Neetha chief, looking proud and approving of what was to come.
The big warrior addressed the crowd in a loud booming voice that Lily translated quietly:
“Subjects of the High Chief Rano, our great and noble king, champion of the maze, conqueror of white men and owner of a white woman, listen to my words! As the firstborn son of our glorious chief, I, Warano, seeking to follow in my illustrious father’s footsteps, claim this white woman!”
Lily’s eyes boggled.What?
This ugly Neetha man was claiming Zoe.
“Unless another among you dares challenge me for her, I will, now and at this moment, take her to my bed and consider her my wife!”
The crowd remained silent.
No one, it seemed, dared to challenge this mountain of a man.
Lily spotted Ono in the back of the crowd, saw him bow his head sadly. She also spied Diane Cassidy, and saw her turn away in horror, covering her mouth.
Then Lily turned to Zoe—only to see that Zoe’s face was as white as a sheet.
Lily frowned, confused.
She spun again and this time saw that all the Neetha women in the crowd were pointing ather, looking her up and down and nodding approvingly.
And then it hit her.
This man wasn’t claiming Zoe.
He was claiming her.
Lily’s blood froze.
The crowd was still silent. The chief’s eldest son eyed her lustfully, his mouth opening slightly to reveal foul yellow teeth.
His wife? But I’m only twelve!her mind screamed.
“I will fight you for her,” a voice said evenly, in English, invading Lily’s thoughts.
She turned.
To see Solomon standing up on his platform, tall, thin, and gangly, yet firm and noble in his stance.
“I will resist your claim,” he said.
The chief’s first son—Warano—turned slowly to face Solomon. Clearly, he had not expected any challengers. He assessed Solomon from head to toe before snorting derisively and shouting something loudly.
Cassidy translated. “Warano says, ‘So be it. To the Fighting Stone!’”
PLANKS were laid out and Warano and Solomon strode across them, out onto the Fighting Stone—the wide square platform at the edge of the central lake.
This platform was lower than the prisoner slabs, barely a foot above the surface of the water. Several large crocodiles lay at its edges, ever watchful.
The Neetha villagers swarmed to take their places on the steps flanking the Fighting Stone, to watch the bloodsport.
Two swords were tossed onto the Fighting Stone.
Lily watched in horror as Solomon picked up his blade—he held it all wrong, as though he had never swung a sword in anger in his life, which so far as Lily knew, was probably true.
Warano, on the other hand, twirled his sword easily and fluidly in one hand: seasoned and experienced.
Ono appeared beside Lily’s platform, spoke across the ten-foot gap. “This madness. Even if thin man beat Warano, he be sentenced to maze for killing royal son. Is your friend skilled fighter?”
Lily’s eyes were filling with tears. “No.”
“Then why does thin man challenge Warano for you?”
Lily couldn’t answer. She just gazed out at Solomon, standing out on the Fighting Stone on her behalf.
Zoe answered Ono’s question. “Where we come from, sometimes you stand up for your friends, even when you can’t win.”
Ono frowned. “I see no sense in this.”
At that moment, a great drum was struck and the obese chief of the Neetha assumed his place in a royal box overlooking the Fighting Stone and called, “Fight!”
It would be the most horrific spectacle Lily had ever seen.
Warano lunged at Solomon with a flurry of powerful blows, and Solomon—gentle Solomon, kind Solomon, who had bounced Lily on his knee as a baby—parried them as best he could, staggering back toward the edge of the Fighting Stone.
But it was clear this was a total mismatch.
Wide-eyed and venomous, with five crashing blows, Warano disarmed Solomon and then without so much as a blink, ran him through, the bloody blade of his sword protruding from Solomon’s back.
Lily gasped.
Solomon dropped to his knees, skewered by the sword, and he looked over at Lily, locking eyes with her, uttering, “I am sorry, I tried,” a moment before Warano sliced his head from his body.
Solomon’s corpse slumped to the ground, headless.
The crowd roared.
Tears flowed down Lily’s cheeks. Zoe clutched her to her chest, holding her tight. Wizard and Alby just stood on their slab, watching in abject horror.
Warano raised his fists in triumph, his eyes insane, before casually using Solomon’s body to wipe the blood off his blade.
Then he kicked the body off the Fighting Stone, leaving the crocs to fight over it.
“Are there any other challengers!” he roared. “Does anyone dare oppose me now!”
The crowd of natives cheered.
Lily sobbed.
But as she did so, in a distant corner of her mind, she heard a strange voice coming from Ono’s radio saying,“—picked up a residual heat signature about a half hour ago. Just found it. Looks like a downed Huey, UN markings. Near a strange-looking forest. Sending you my co-ordinates now, sir—”
The cheering died down and suddenly there was silence around the Fighting Stone.
Long silence.
The only sound was the foul crunching of the crocs tearing Solomon’s body apart.
“So there is no one then!” Warano shouted again, quickly translated by Cassidy. “Excellent! I shall take my new woman and enjoy her…!”
But then someone spoke.
“I challenge you.”
This time it was Zoe.
THE RESPONSE from the assembled Neetha said it all. They had never seen anything like this.
A woman challenging a royal son.
They murmured animatedly, aghast.
“Unless the chief’s son is too cowardly to do battle with a woman,” Zoe said.
Sensing the moment, Diane Cassidy immediately translated Zoe’s words for the others and the crowd went into total apoplexy.
Zoe shouted to Warano, adding the sweetener. “If he defeats me, this Warano can have two white wives.”
When Cassidy translated this, Warano’s eyes lit up like lightbulbs. To own a white woman might have been the ultimate status symbol, but to own two…
“Bring her to me!” he called. “After I beat her, I shall keep her, but as a master keeps a dog.”
Zoe was released from her platform, and she strode down the long plank that gave entry to the Fighting Stone.
Once on the Stone, the plank was withdrawn, and she faced off against the giant Warano.
Wearing only a singlet, cargo pants, and boots, she wasn’t exactly big. But her lean muscular shoulders, glistening with sweat, contained a wiry strength.
Standing before the Neetha chief’s number one son, the top of her blond head came level with his shoulders. The great black warrior loomed over her.
He kicked Solomon’s sword across to her, saying something derisive in his own language.
“Is that so?” Zoe picked up the sword. “But I don’t think you’ve ever met a woman like me before, asshole. Let’s dance.”
With a roar, Warano lunged forward, swinging his sword in a crushing downward motion that Zoe parried away with some difficulty before sidestepping out of the way.
Warano stumbled and turned, snorting like a bull.
He engaged Zoe again, raining a flurry of blows down on her, only for Zoe to desperately deflect each one, her sword vibrating terribly with each thunderous hit.
Warano was obviously stronger, and he seemed to gain confidence with every volley of blows he unleashed. Zoe was doing all she could to defend herself, so much so that she hadn’t even been able to attack once. This, it seemed to the assembled Neetha, would be easy.
But as they continued to fight—as Zoe continued to parry all of Warano’s lunging blows—it soon became apparent that it wasn’t going to be so easy at all.
Five minutes became ten, then twenty.
As she watched the fight tensely, Lily could see Zoe just weathering the storm, blocking blows and then retreating and waiting for the next flurry.
And gradually, Warano’s attacks became slower, more labored.
He was sweating profusely, tiring.
And Lily began to recall a movie she’d watched with Zoe once—a documentary about a boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Africa. Foreman had been bigger, stronger, and younger than Ali—but Ali had just weathered his punches for eight whole rounds, letting Foreman grow tired in the process, and then Ali had pounced—
Zoe pounced.
As Warano lunged wearily in another attack, quick as a flash, Zoe dodged out of the way and plunged her short-bladed sword into his fleshy throat, right through his Adam’s apple, all the way up to the hilt.
The big man froze where he stood.
The entire crowd gasped.
The chief leaped to his feet.
The warlock turned to his priests and nodded. Some priests dashed away.
Warano wobbled unsteadily on the Fighting Stone—alive but incapable of movement, speechless on account of the sword lodged in his throat, his bulging eyes staring incredulously at her, at this woman—this woman! —who had somehow bested him.
Zoe just stood in front of the paralyzed giant, looking him right in the eye.
Then, slowly, she took his sword from his useless right hand and held it in front of his horrified eyes.
She addressed the crowd: “That sword in his throat is for all the little girls this man has ‘married’ over the years.”
Diane Cassidy translated in a quiet voice.
The crowd watched in stunned silence.
“And this is for the friend of mine he killed today,” Zoe said, grabbing the grip of the sword lodged in Warano’s throat and gruesomely pushing on it, driving him back toward the edge of the Fighting Stone, where he fell, landing on the very edge.
Zoe then kicked his useless legs out over the rim, allowing Warano to watch in paralyzed terror as the nearest crocodile saw them. With a fearsome lunge, the croc launched itself out of the mud and brought its jaws down on Warano’s feet with a crunching sideways bite.
A second croc joined in, and before he was dragged into the muddy pool, Warano got to watch as the two crocodiles ripped two of his limbs from his body, literally eating him alive.
His blood washed across the Fighting Stone before the crocs took him under and the muddy waters were still once again.
“Holy fucking shit,” Alby gasped, breaking the stunned silence that followed.
The chief stood in his box, speechless with rage. His firstborn was dead, killed by this woman.
But the warlock beside him still had his wits about him. He called out in his native tongue, shouting in a shrill voice.
Diane Cassidy translated: “A member of the royal clan has been slain! All know the punishment for such an outrage! The murderer must face the maze.”
ZOE’S CHALLENGE: THE MAZE
PLANKS were thrown down onto the Fighting Stone and Zoe was suddenly surrounded by warrior-monks. She dropped her sword and was immediately shoved at spear point off the Stone toward the temple-fortress, the only point of entry to the giant maze on the other side of the lake.
The warlock stood beside Zoe at the gate to the temple-fortress.
“This woman has taken royal blood!” he called. “Her sentence shall be as follows: she will be condemned to the maze, where she will be hunted by dogs. Should the gods in their eternal wisdom allow her to emerge from the other side alive and unscathed, then it is not for us to deny the great gods their will.”
“Such an old conceit,” Wizard spat. “Since she can’t escape the maze, the gods will be assumed to have sanctioned her death. It’s like dunking a woman accused of witchcraft in a river and saying if she drowns, she’s not a witch. It’s a no-win situation for her and an all-win situation for the priest who claims a connection with the divine.”
Standing at a discreet distance, Diane Cassidy said formally to Zoe, “The maze has two entrances, one to the north, another to the south. It also has many dead ends. Both entrances have separate routes that lead to the center. You will be thrown in at the northern end—a few minutes later, four warrior-monks with hyenas will enter behind you. To live, you must navigate your way to the center of the maze and from there, successfully negotiate the southern half to the south entrance. That is the only way to survi—”
The warlock barked something at Zoe. Cassidy translated: “The warlock asks if you have any final requests.”
Zoe gazed out from the gate of the temple-fortress. She looked out at Lily and Wizard on their platforms, their eyes wide with horror, and at Alby as well—when suddenly she spotted something hanging from Alby’s neck.
“As a matter of fact, I do have a request,” she said.
“Yes?”
“I would like one of my group to accompany me in the maze: the boy.”
Wizard and Lily both blurted,“What?”
Alby pointed at his own chest. “Me?”
Diane Cassidy frowned with surprise, but relayed Zoe’s words to the warlock.
The warlock glanced at the little figure of Alby and, apparently seeing no danger in him, nodded his assent.
Alby was taken from his prison platform and led to the steps of the temple-fortress, where he joined Zoe.
“Zoe…?”
“Trust me, Alby,” was all she said as the gate to the temple-fortress rumbled open, lifted on chains.
Just before the two of them were led inside it, Zoe called back to Lily: “Lily! Keep listening to your friend’s radio!”
“Huh?” Lily said.
But by then the great gate to the temple-fortress had rumbled ominously shut behind Zoe and Alby.
Two mighty drawbridges were lowered into place and they crossed them, arriving at the edge of the vast circular maze, looking back at the village; at Lily and Wizard on their platforms; at the villagers on the amphitheater-like seating around them; and at the sacred island with the Orb and the Second Pillar displayed on it.
A snarling noise made them turn.
Four warrior-monks emerged from a cage dug into the wall nearby, holding four large spotted hyenas on leashes.
The doglike animals heaved and strained—they seemed starved, just for occasions like this—and they barked and snapped, saliva spraying from their jaws.
“Tell me again why you brought me along,” Alby whispered.
“Because you can read maps better than I can.”
“Because I can what?”
“And because you have my digital camera around your neck,” Zoe said, looking at him meaningfully, “and my camera holds the secret to this maze.”
“How?”
Before Zoe could answer, they were brought to the northern extremity of the maze and the entrance there: a wide arch set into the outermost stone ring.
The stonework of the wall itself was remarkable—a marble-colored rock without any visible joins or seams. Somehow the superhard igneous stone had been cut and smoothed into this incredible configuration, work that was far too advanced for a primitive African tribe.
The warlock addressed the crowd across the lake, calling loudly: “Oh mighty Nepthys, dark lord of the sky, bringer of death and destruction, your humble servants commend this taker of royal blood and her companion to your maze. Do with them as you will!”
With that, Zoe and Alby were thrust through the archway and into the maze, the ancient labyrinth from which no accused had ever emerged alive.
THE MAZE OF THE NEETHA
THE MAZE OF THE NEETHA
AHEAVY DOORboomed shut behind them and Zoe and Alby found themselves standing in a superlong open-topped white-walled corridor that curved away in both directions.
Looming above the maze’s ten-foot-high walls, rising out of its very center, was the spectacular stone staircase that led up into the volcano, into the priests’ inner sepulcher. Right now ten warrior-monks stood on the staircase, guarding the inner sanctum in the unlikely event Zoe and Alby got to the center.
They had three choices.
Left, right or—through a yawning gap in the next circular wall—straight ahead.
On the muddy floor in that gap, however, blocking the way, was the foul decaying skeleton of a very large crocodile that hadn’t quite made it out of the maze. Half-eaten, the skeleton still had rotting flesh on it.
What on earth ate a crocodile? Alby thought.
Then it hit him.
Other crocodiles. There are other crocodiles in here…
“Quickly, this way,” Zoe said, dragging Alby left. “Give me the camera.”
Alby extracted the camera and gave it to her. As they ran, Zoe clicked through its stored photos, clicking back through their African adventure—shots of the Neetha’s carved tree forest, of Rwanda, then of Lake Nasser and Abu Simbel and…
…the shots Zoe had taken at the First Vertex.
Images of the immense suspended bronze pyramid leaped off the camera’s little screen, and then shots of the walls in the Vertex’s massive pillared hall, including the picture of the golden plaque.
“That one,” Zoe said, showing it to Alby. “That’s the one.”
He looked at the photo as they hurried down the long, curved passageway:
The photo showed two curious circular images intricately cut into a rockwall. Images of a maze.This maze. One image showed the maze empty, while the other showed two routes through it, one from the north, the other from the south, both ending at the center.
Alby shook his head. With its ten concentric rings and the straight narrow staircase branching from its center out to the right, it certainly looked like their maze…
“That warlock and his priests probably have this exact carving somewhere,” Zoe said. “That’s how they alone know how to successfully navigate the maze.”
“Zoe! Wait! Stop!” Alby shouted, halting suddenly.
“What?”
“According to this, we’ve gone the wrong way!”
“Already?”
Peering at the camera’s tiny screen, they checked the carving showing the route through the maze. They had gone immediately left, racing around the outermost circle of the maze—
“We should have jumped over that crocodile carcass and taken the next circle,” Alby said. “Look. This route only leads to a bunch of dead ends. Quickly! We have to go back before they release the hyenas!”
“Glad I brought you along.” Zoe smiled.
Back they ran, arriving at the huge entry gate and again they saw the half-eaten crocodile carcass. They hurdled it.
“Nowwe go left,” Alby directed.
Left they went, running desperately around the curving alleyway.
They saw the high staircase looming above them, coming nearer, saw a semicircular archway in its base, allowing them to run under it if they wished.
“No!” Alby called. “Go right, into the next circle!”
Bam!
A banging noise echoed throughout the maze.
It was closely followed by the barking of the hyenas and the rapid splashing of paws on mud.
“They just let the dogs in,” Zoe said.
Through the maze they ran.
Dashing down its long curving alleyways, often hearing the hyenas over the walls.
Occasionally, they came to a pit filled with dank, stinking water and inhabited by a crocodile or two. Human remains were often nearby; crocodile skeletons, too, of those reptiles that hadn’t made it out before they’d starved.
These they skirted or jumped, not daring to slow down—although on one occasion, Zoe grabbed a long, thick croc bone from one of the skeletons.
They kept running.
All the while, the central staircase came nearer.
“Zoe,” Alby asked. “What are we gonna do if we get out of here? Won’t they just kill us some other way?”
“Not if what I think is going to happen happens,” Zoe said. “I needed to buy us some time. That’s why I took so long to kill that asshole prince.”
Alby was shocked. “You deliberately took that long? Why? What’s going to happen?”
“The bad guys are going to arrive.”
“I thought the bad guys already had us.”
“The badder guys, then. The ones who chased us out of Egypt and killed Jack. They’re almost here. And when they arrive and attack the Neetha, that’s our chance. That’s when we want to be out of this maze and ready to run.”
Out in the main village, Lily sat alone on her high stone platform. Ono sat across from her, as close to her as he could.
Abruptly, the radio around his neck squawked.
“—Ground Team Leader, this is Wolf, come in.”
“—This is Ground Team Leader. What is it, sir?”
“—Switchblade, be alert. While you and Broadsword have been rubbernecking at those big carved trees, we’ve spotted some heat signatures coming your way. Human signatures, about a dozen of them, and they’re sneaking up on your choppers from the east.”
“—Thanks for the heads-up, sir. We’ll handle it. Switchblade, out.”
Lily turned to Wizard on the other platform. He’d heard it, too.
“Wolf’s men…” he said. “They’re almost here…”
Zoe and Alby plunged deeper into the maze, racing down its long bending passageways, with Alby directing and Zoe looking out for danger. Curiously, as she ran, she also dragged her crocodile bone against the wall, scraping it harshly.
The staircase in the center gradually came nearer and just after they hurried through one of the ten archways cutting through its base, they suddenly found themselves in a perfectly round space fitted with two entrances and, momentarily shocking them both, the base of the narrow staircase itself.
They were in the center of the maze.
Alby gazed up the superhigh staircase. Its steps stretched up and away from him into the lofty heights of the hollowed-out volcano, wide enough only for one person at a time and without any kind of safety rail. Fierce-looking warrior-monks bearing spears and guns stood along its length.
At the base of the stairs, in the exact center of the entire maze, stood an ornate marble podium. Carved into it was a list of some sort, written in the Word of Thoth:
Given the podium’s central position, Alby figured the carvings on it were important, so he quickly snapped off some photos before Zoe yanked on his hand. “Come on, we have to get through the second half, and we still have those dogs on our tai—”
A blur of brown knocked her off her feet, tearing her away from Alby.
Alby fell backward, his mouth falling open as he saw the massive animal straddling Zoe.
A hyena.
The thing was huge, with foul brownish fur, matted and speckled, and the signature stunted hind legs of the hyena.
But it was alone. The pack must have split up in their hunt.
Zoe rolled underneath the snarling jaws of the hyena. Then she slammed it with her boot into the marble-like wall of the maze and the animal yelped. But it instantly pounced back at her, jaws bared—only to impale itself on the now sharpened crocodile bone held in Zoe’s outstretched right hand.
Zoe extracted the weapon, allowing the lifeless hyena to slump to the floor.
Alby stared. “This is hard-core…”
“Fuckin’-A it is,” Zoe said, already on her feet again. “I bet your mother wouldn’t want to see you doing this. Let’s go.”
Out in the village, again Lily heard a message over Ono’s radio:
“—Rapier, this is Switchblade. Neutralized the bogeys who were sneaking up on our chopper. Natives. Nasty. They were trying to sabotage the chopper. We’ve found the entrance to their base—due east of the carved forest; a fortified gate of some sort; heavily guarded. Gonna need some more men.”
“—Copy that, Switchblade. We’re on the way, coming in on you signal.”
Lily looked up in horror.
With Zoe and Alby in the maze, and Wizard and her trapped on their platforms, Wolf’s men were arriving at the main gate and they were about to storm the realm of the Neetha.
Desperate running through the maze.
Zoe and Alby didn’t dare stop. Now they were making their way through the southern half of the maze, heading away from the central staircase.
They encountered more muddy croc pits, a few deep holes, and even more human remains.
Halfway across, a second hyena caught up with them, but Zoe smashed it in the face with a crocodile skull, using the skull’s teeth as a multiedged blade that pierced the side of the snarling hyena’s head. The hyena howled and skulked off, blood all over its face.
They kept running, until after a time, brilliantly guided by Alby, they entered the outermost circle of the maze and charged around its long sweeping curve until they came to a high archway just like the one through which they had entered the maze.
The southern entrance.
Zoe halted twenty yards short of it. “We don’t want to leave the maze too early,” she said. “We have to wait for the time to be just right.”
“And when will that be?” Alby asked.
Just then, right on cue, the distinctive blast of a grenade explosion echoed out from somewhere in the Neetha ravine system.
“Now,” Zoe said. “The badder guys just arrived.”
WOLF’S ROGUE CIEF force stormed the main gate of the Neetha, led by the Marine trooper named Switchblade and a Delta man named Broadsword and supplemented by no less than a hundred Congolese Army troops bearing AK-47s.
Essentially bought with Saudi money, the Congolese soldiers were there literally as an army for hire, and Switchblade used them as such, as frontline fodder.
He hurled them at the main Neetha defenses in the mouth of the ravine—a series of booby traps and hidden positions that took out a point man or two, but which were soon nullified by the sheer number of advancing troops.
Some of the Neetha guards had guns—but most of them were old and poorly maintained, and they were no match for the modern weapons of the invading force.
And so Wolf’s force advanced through the ravine system, killing Neetha defenders on every side. The Neetha fought fanatically, giving away nothing, fighting to the bitter end. Many Congolese troops were killed, either by gun or by arrow, but their numbers were too great and their techniques too good, and soon they were spilling out onto the main village square.
As the invasion of the ravine system began, pandemonium broke loose all around the prisoner platforms.
The villagers—until then eagerly awaiting the results of the hunt in the maze—had scattered. So too the royal clan members, taking up their weapons.
Any warrior-monks who had remained near the platforms quickly dashed to the safety of their temple-fortress, crossing its first drawbridge and taking up positions in their holy tower—the four-story structure situated out on the lake, halfway between the temple-fortress and the opposite shore.
As for Lily and Wizard, they were simply left on their platforms.
They could only watch helplessly as explosions and gunfire rang out from the ravine, growing louder and closer.
But then Lily saw some movement on the other side of the lake.
She saw the warlock and two monks dash out to the triangular island in the middle of the lake and scoop up the three sacred items sitting there: the Delphic Orb, the Second Pillar, and the inclinometer-like sighting device.
Then they turned and bolted for the opposite shore, arriving at a narrow path next to the maze’s outer wall just as—
—Zoe and Alby dashed out along the same path, racing out from the shadows at the southern end of the maze!
Lily almost cheered.They’d got through the maze…
A struggle ensued, with Zoe disarming the two warrior-monks before jamming the butt end of a spear into the warlock’s face, felling him, knocking him out cold.
Lily then watched as Zoe and Alby snatched up the three sacred objects and—
Clunk!
Lily turned at the sudden sound.
And saw Ono standing opposite her platform, holding a plank vertically, as if he was ready to lay it down across the void to her platform. Diane Cassidy stood similarly near Wizard’s platform, also with a plank in hand.
They both held rather old-looking pistols in their spare hands.
In the chaos all around them—Neetha warriors rushing to the defenses, exploding grenades, wild gunfire—the prisoner platforms were being ignored.
Ono said quickly, “Young Lily! There is escape tunnel hidden within priesthood’s island tower! I will show you…if you take us with you.”
“Deal,” Lily said.
Ono didn’t understand the word.
“Yes, yes,” Lily said quickly. “We’ll take you with us.”
Clunk! Clunk!
Both planks thunked loudly into position on the two platforms and Lily and Wizard dashed off them, free at last.
As they ran toward the temple-fortress of the priesthood, Wizard saw Zoe and Alby on the other side of the lake, running in the same direction, carrying the island’s sacred objects.
“Zoe!” he called. “Get to the central tower! The priests’ tower! It’s an exit!”
“Got it!” Zoe yelled.
No sooner had she spoken than a great explosion blasted out above the huge waterfall at the northern end of the Neetha ravine.
The awning of bent-over trees concealing the ravine there spontaneously erupted in flames, and burning branches and tree trunks rained down onto the lake below, falling a full four hundred feet.
Then with a terrific roar, two CIEF Black Hawk helicopters swooped down through the opening that had been created, hovering perfectly—noses up, tails down—directly above the priests’ island tower!
They were modified Black Hawks known as Defender Armed Penetrators, or DAPs—although the only modifications they possessed were in the amount of weaponry they carried. These choppers were armed to the teeth with guns, rocket pods, and missile launchers.
Rockets shot out from the two DAPs, hitting every one of the Neethas’ strategic defensive positions. Stone towers were blown to pieces. Warriors were hurled into the lake. Obstacles in the main entry ravine were blown clear out of the water, allowing the Congolese foot soldiers to pour into the village unopposed.
The priesthood’s temple-fortress was also hit by a rocket from above.
In a single instant, flames flared from every one of its narrow stone windows, and a moment later its huge armored doors flew open and burning warrior-monks came spilling out of it, rushing down the steps and hurling their flaming bodies into the lake…where the flames were doused, but where the ever-patient crocodiles lay waiting.
Screams. Splashing. Thrashing.
“This is our chance,” Wizard said. “Inside! Now!”
With Lily, Ono, and Cassidy behind him, he rushed for the temple-fortress, ducking arrows and dodging bullets—
—only to be blocked at the steps of the temple-fortress by three unexpected players: the obese chief of the Neetha and two of his sons, all of them brandishing pump-action shotguns aimed right at Wizard’s fleeing group.
The chief barked some angry words at Ono and Cassidy, and they immediately lowered their little pistols.
“What’d he say?” Wizard whispered.
“He says that we cannot leave,” Cassidy said. “He says that I am his, that he owns me. When this is all over he says he will teach me a lesson in his bedroom, and that he will thrash Ono to within an inch of his worthless life.”
Cassidy glared at the chief.
“There will be no more lessons in your bedroom,” she said flatly, defiantly, just as she whipped up her pistol and fired it twice—expertly—into the foreheads of the two royal sons.
Both men dropped, the backs of their skulls bursting with blood, dead before they hit the ground.
Stunned, the chief whipped up his own shotgun, only to find himself already staring into the barrel of Diane Cassidy’s pistol.
“I’ve been waiting five years for this,” she said.
Blam!
The bullet went through the Neetha chief’s nose, breaking it on the way into his brain, causing a massive geyser of blood to splatter all over his face.
The fat ruler collapsed onto the steps of the temple-fortress, his body sliding down them, his cracked-open skull oozing brains.
The King of the Neetha was dead.
Diane Cassidy stared down at his body with a mix of disgust and bloody triumph.
Wizard scooped up the fallen chief’s shotgun and grabbed Cassidy’s hand. “Come on! Time to go.”
THE DRAWBRIDGES AND THE TOWER
WIZARD’S GROUP hurried through the temple-fortress of the Neetha priesthood.
It was like running through a Gothic freak show.
Bloody skeletons hung from torture devices, steaming pots of foul liquids simmered, ancient inscriptions lined the walls.
They hurried up some stairs and came to a long drawbridge that led to the central tower out on the lake. A second matching drawbridge stretched out from the tower itself, meeting with their lowered bridge in the middle.
“This way!” Ono said, rushing out onto their drawbridge.
The group raced across it.
But when they were halfway across, a call stopped Wizard dead in his stride.
“Epper! Professor Max Epper!”
Wizard turned…to see Wolf standing down near the Fighting Stone, looking directly over at him.
“We found you, Max! You knew we would! You can’t win this! My son couldn’t, so how can you?”
Wolf held up something for Wizard to see:
A battered and worn fireman’s helmet, bearing the badge: “FDNY Precinct 17.”
Jack’s helmet.
Beside him, Wizard heard Lily gasp as she saw it.
“I watched him die, Epper!” Wolf called. “My own son! You’re all out of heroes! Why keep running?”
Wizard instinctively clenched his teeth. “Not completely out,” he said softly, taking Lily by the hand and racing into the tower.
On their side of the lake, Zoe and Alby were also heading for the central tower inside the priests’ enclave.
They were rushing along a narrow lakeside path toward a small fort nestled up against the ravine wall when a new wave of Wolf’s men entered the ravine, this time from the north, from above the waterfall.
They came abseiling down the cliffs there on drop ropes, two dozen Congolese and American troops, covered by one of the Black Hawks.
Alby was gazing up at this new wave of attackers when suddenly a Neetha warrior-monk popped up into view on the roof of the little fort in front of him and fired—of all things—an Angolan RPG up at the Black Hawk!
The RPG hit its mark, and hovering above the lake, the Black Hawk exploded, blasting apart. Bleeding smoke, it nosedived into the water, landing with a massive splash not far from the tower.
“Jesus, I think these Neetha guys have kept every weapon they’ve ever found,” Zoe said.
As the Black Hawk crashed, the warrior-monk who’d fired the rocket ducked from sight, probably to reload.
His disappearance gave Zoe and Alby the opening they needed to race to the cliff-side fort, dash inside it, and climb its internal stone stairs.
One floor up, they came to a stone half-bridge stretching out from the fort toward the central tower. Mounted on several stone columns, this half-bridge was designed to meet the island tower’s eastern drawbridge when it was fully lowered—as it was now.
As they looked out across this double-bridge, they spotted Wizard standing in the doorway to the tower, waving them over.
“This way! Hurry!” he yelled as, without warning, the drawbridge in front of him began to rise.
Wizard seemed perplexed. He wasn’t doing it. Someone else was.
“Run!” he called.
“Run!”Zoe said to Alby.
She and Alby dashed out into open space, gunfire and explosions ringing out all around them, an RPG zooming past them, its smoke trail slicing through the air before it slammed into the cliff-side fort behind them and detonated. The fort erupted. Rocks and debris flew every which way.
But the RPG-firing warrior-monk who had been on its roof had already got out of there—and he came charging out of the little fort behind Zoe and Alby, also seeking to cross the double-bridge and get to the tower.
The drawbridge was rising—one foot above the leading edge of the half-bridge. Two feet…three…
Zoe and Alby were almost at it.
The monk was sprinting hard behind them.
Zoe and Alby got there as the rising wooden drawbridge rose four feet above the gap. Zoe quickly picked up Alby and hurled him at the rising bridge’s edge.
Alby flew through the air and thudded chest first into the leading edge of the drawbridge. The hit winded him but he got a handhold, and held on, half-bent over the edge of the rising bridge.
With Alby safely on the drawbridge, Zoe jumped for it herself, leaping from the end of the stone half-bridge, arms outstretched, and she caught the edge of the drawbridge with her fingertips and exhaled a sigh of relief.
Until the warrior-monk behind her also leaped for the drawbridge and, since he could no longer reach it, caught her by the waist!
Zoe was jerked downward, yanked by the extra weight, but she held on, her fingers going white as they gripped the edge of the ascending drawbridge.
Ever rising, the drawbridge passed through twenty degrees, thirty, then forty-five degrees…
Bent over the leading edge of the rising bridge, clutching the Second Pillar in one hand, Alby saw Zoe beneath him, struggling with the warrior-monk. He shifted awkwardly, juggling the Pillar, so that he could get into a position to help her…
…when—thunk!—without warning the whole huge drawbridge stopped with a violent lurching jolt that sent the unbalanced Alby flying clear off its upper edge and tumbling down its length, heading into the tower!
Alby rolled down the steep drawbridge, trying his best to keep hold of the Pillar. But at the very bottom of his fall, he landed heavily on the stone base of the half-raised drawbridge and the Pillar popped from his grip and bounced away from him, through the tower and out onto the other drawbridge, the one that stretched back toward the village.
Alby watched in horror as the glasslike Pillar came to rest out on the other drawbridge, right at the point where it joined with the matching drawbridge that folded out from the temple-fortress.
“Alby!” a voice called.
He turned, and saw Wizard standing at the bottom of a flight of stone steps that burrowed down into the floor to his right. Lily was with him.
But then Alby heard more voices, and he looked out at the Pillar just in time to see, appearing inside the temple-fortress beyond it, some heavily armed Congolese Army men led by an Asian-American US Marine.
The Pillar lay exactly halfway between them and Alby.
A pained shout from Zoe made Alby spin on his knees. He saw her fingers at the top of the half-raised drawbridge. Saw them slipping slowly out of view…
This is all happening too fast,his mind screamed.Too many choices, too many variables. Escape with Lily, grab the Pillar, or help Zoe …
And suddenly everything went silent and time slowed for Alby Calvin.
In the silence of his mind, Alby faced his choice.
Of his three options, he could do two.
He could make it to the Pillar and get back to Wizard and Lily in the tower—but he couldn’t do that and help Zoe. If he took this option, Zoe would drop into the croc-filled lake and die.
Or he could help Zoe and, with her, join Wizard and Lily—but that would mean leaving the Pillar to these intruders. And that could have global ramifications.
Global ramifications,he thought.
The Pillar or Zoe.
One choice could potentially save the world. The other would save a single life: the life of a woman who was dear to him and to those he cared about, Lily, Wizard and Jack West.
It’s not fair!he thought angrily.This is not a choice a kid should have to make! It’s too big. Too important.
And so Alby made his choice.
A choice that would have far-reaching consequences.
Time sped up again and Alby leaped to his feet and ran back toward the half-raised drawbridge, toward Zoe.
He scrambled up the sloping wooden bridge, clawing at it with his fingernails. He came to Zoe’s fingers, hooked over the edge, just as they slipped a final time—
—and he caught one of her hands with both of his, leaning back with all his strength to hold her.
Below him, Zoe snapped to look up, a new look of hope leaping across her face. Then, knowing that one of her hands was secure, she used her other hand to loosen the grip of the warrior-monk hanging from her belt and wrenched him free of her.
The warrior-monk screamed as he fell away from her, landing with a splash in the water below before several large reptilian shapes converged on him and took him under.
Then with Alby’s help, Zoe hauled herself up and over the edge of the drawbridge.
“Thanks, kid.”
“We really have to go,” he said.
They slid together on their butts down the sloping drawbridge, landing on their feet inside the tower—just in time to see the Congolese Army men reach the Pillar on the other drawbridge and bring it to the attention of Switchblade.
“Damn. The Second Pillar…” Zoe breathed.
Alby swore under his breath, but he’d made his choice.
“This way,” he said firmly, pushing Zoe down the stone steps inside the tower, to the spot where Wizard and Lily waited with Ono and Diane Cassidy.