The 5 Greatest Warriors

by Matthew Reilly

  And that was all before one beheld the four gigantic tsunami waves that were approaching the coast from the west, each one the equivalent of the devastating Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004.

  Local fisherman knew the perils of this strip of coastline and so kept well away from it even at the best of times. It was notoriously dangerous. Submerged rocks tore through hulls with ease. Powerful offshore currents dragged even the largest boats toward the jagged shore.

  And so it was here, in an already dangerous channel, in a recordbreaking storm, that Wolf’s full-frontal military shore landing would take place.

  As the raging sea pounded the coast of Hokkaido—boom!-boom! boom!—equally thunderous booms sounded in the sky above it.

  Twenty-three vessels from the Japanese Navy were gathered in a semi-circular formation, all facing outward from the snow-covered coast, and all engaged in a vicious firefight with a force of incoming American aircraft.

  Every kind of warship short of an aircraft carrier was there, destroyers, frigates, cruisers, all of them determined to defend Hokkaido to the bitter end.

  A wave of American UAVs—unmanned aerial vehicles or ‘drones’—led the way for Wolf’s assault force.

  Despite the fact they had no pilots, the drones were heavily armed and they soared down from the sky at the same angle as the sleeting rain, plunging into a dense storm of upward-firing tracers.

  A dozen drones were blasted out of the sky in sudden flashing explosions, but another dozen punched through the bombardment, including three important drones: those carrying ALQ-9 tactical jamming systems and LDS laser-blinding systems.

  These were important because they formed a safe aerial entry corridor for the second wave of assault vehicles that was coming in behind them: a collection of bullet-shaped armoured pods, holding four men each.

  The aerial assault had been precisely timed to coincide with the incoming tsunamis, or rather a peculiar phenomenon associated with tsunamis.

  Before a tsunami strikes, it is always preceded by a ‘sucking back’ of the coastal waters. The ocean literally recedes from the shore as the approaching wave runs up over shallower ground and crests, folding over on itself before crashing into the coastal land formation.

  During the famous Lisbon Tsunami of 1755, the ocean receded, revealing many shipwrecks and cargo crates on the floor of Lisbon’s harbour. Curious and greedy onlookers ran out across the exposed seabed to plunder the wrecks, only for the tsunami to arrive twenty minutes later, drowning them all.

  The size and duration of a ‘tsunami recession’ depends solely on the size and power of the incoming wave. The bigger the wave, the longer the recession.

  The Japanese naval vessels defending Hokkaido that day were well aware of the concept of tsunami recession, and so set their perimeter a full two kilometres out from the coast.

  It would prove to be their only weak point.

  Soaring down through the sky inside one of his armoured pods, high above the Hokkaido coast and the Japanese fleet defending it, Wolf watched the ocean pull back from the north-western coast of Hokkaido on a monitor.

  It was a stunning sight to behold from this angle.

  A vast semi-circle of water swept back from the shoreline in a gigantic curving arc, revealing the flat seabed. It looked like an enormous beach, and on it Wolf discerned several rust-covered shipwrecks: fishing trawlers, two ancient Chinese junks, and dominating the exposed seabed, one massive modern supertanker, lying on its side close to the shore.

  He could also see a series of sharply-pointed black objects on this newly formed ‘beach’, but he couldn’t tell what they were from this height.

  Most importantly, however, perfectly replicating the image he had photographed on the Dragon’s Egg, he saw a semi-frozen waterfall dropping into the sea from a triangular fissure in the coastal clifftop. On the landward side of this waterfall loomed an extinct volcano.

  And directly beneath the waterfall, exactly as it was depicted on the Egg, at the now-exposed base of the coastal cliff, he saw an enormous rectangular stone doorway the size of an aeroplane hangar.

  It was the entrance to the Third Vertex.

  Covered by the squadron of drones, Wolf’s armoured pods—they were PA-27 Airborne Assault Pods, used exclusively by the CIEF— zoomed down toward the entrance to the Vertex.

  Waves of anti-aircraft fire from the Japanese warships on the ocean surface—as well as from a dozen land-positions on the cliffs—lanced up toward the incoming pods. Ordinary rounds just bounced off the assault pods’ tungsten armour, while RPGs and missiles were nullified by their advanced laser-blinding system.

  When the pods’ altimeters sensed that they were two hundred feet above the exposed seabed, a pair of rotors flipped out laterally above each pod and instantly began rotating in opposite directions, arresting their falls.

  Wolf’s pod landed tightly on the seabed, helicopter-style, only a hundred yards from the entrance to the Vertex, not far from the wreck of the supertanker.

  Its armoured door hissed open and Wolf emerged, flanked by two CIEF troops and the Neetha warlock.

  On his back Wolf wore a Samsonite pack containing the Firestone. Out of another pod nearby stepped Rapier—he carried the Philosopher’s Stone in a similar backpack.

  It was only now that he was on the ground that Wolf saw what the pointed black objects on the seabed were: they were towering black rocks, all of which had been sharpened to jagged points by the hand of man, their edges deliberately serrated.

  ‘They’re designed to sink any ship that comes too close to the entrance . . . ’ a CIEF trooper observed.

  ‘Indeed,’ Wolf said.

  There must have been thirty of the things, arrayed in a random pattern around the coastal cliffs. Good protection for a secret place.’

  All around Wolf, forty CIEF troopers were hustling out of the ten other PA-27 pods that had landed on the seabed.

  It was then that gunfire began to rain down on them from Japanese troops positioned on the clifftops overlooking the exposed beach.

  ‘All units!’ Wolf yelled. ‘Return fire! And get to the entrance before the wave comes in!’

  Circling in the Halicarnassus in clear skies high above the stormclouds fifty miles to the west, Jack listened in on Wolf’s communications—at the same time watching the battle via a live satellite infra-red feed beamed to him from Pine Gap.

  He saw the entire battle from a black-and-white overhead view: saw the Japanese warships firing tracers skyward; saw the American armoured pods raining down; and most bizarrely, he saw the waters of the Sea of Japan retreat in a wide semi-circle away from the coastal cliffs, revealing the seabed, the shipwrecks and the jagged rocks.

  ‘—All units! Return fire! And get to the entrance before the wave comes in!’

  Gunfire. Orders. Whizzing bullets. And then came the screams.

  ‘—Thompson’s hit!’

  ‘—Fuck!’

  ‘—Team One is inside the entrance! Come on, people! Move it!’

  ‘—Sir, this is Rapier! I’m experiencing heavy fire from those fuckers on the cliffs—we’re pinned down at the supertanker!’

  ‘—Well, you better get fucking unpinned, because that tsunami is nine minutes away! All units, provide cover fire for Rapier. I need him inside! He’s carrying the Philosopher’s Stone—’

  Jack snapped upright.

  Wolf had timed his forced insertion perfectly, coinciding it with the outflow of the tsunami wave. But now the tidal wave was coming in and one of his units—the one carrying the all-important Philosopher’s Stone—was stuck out on the exposed seabed under heavy fire from the Japanese forces on the cliffs.

  Then, to his surprise, Jack heard a familiar voice over the radio.

  ‘—Sir, this is Astro’—the puncture-like whump of a rocket launcher rang out—‘We’re targeting those guys up on the cliffs with RPGs. Rapier! Go!’

  Rapier: ‘—Can’t! That fire is still too strong!’

  Astr
o: ‘—Hang tight! We’re coming to you!’

  Astro, Jack thought. He’d last seen him inside that mine in Ethiopia, standing beside Wolf. Had Astro really betrayed Jack’s group? Had he been working for Wolf all along?

  More gunfire. More RPG explosions. It sounded like total battlefield hell.

  Astro’s voice came in again. ‘—Sir! That cover fire from the cliffs ain’t stopping! We can’t get to Rapier! Oh shit, do you see that. . .’

  Gun in hand, Lieutenant Sean Miller—‘Astro’—stood on the most bizarre battlefield he had ever seen.

  He was crouched behind a high triangular boulder out on the exposed seabed beneath the cliffs of the Hokkaido coast, pelted by sleet and ducking a seemingly unending fusillade of bullets and rocket-propelled grenades coming from the Japanese troops on the clifftops above him.

  The Japanese were annihilating them.

  Astro had landed with a force of forty CIEF men, at least fifteen of whom were now dead. This was a nightmare.

  ‘—We can’t get to Rapier!’ he yelled into his radio, seeing Rapier’s team pinned down behind the upturned supertanker a hundred yards from the Vertex’s entrance. Some of them lay dead on the wet sand. Rapier himself was huddled behind the massive rusted propeller of the wreck, bullet-sparks impacting all around him.

  It was then that Astro saw the wave on the horizon. ‘Oh shit, do you see that. . .’

  It looked like a thin line of dark-blue superimposed on the grey ocean, stretching across the width of the horizon, a great rolling wave that had not yet crested.

  A wall of water.

  And it was advancing fast.

  The exposed section of seabed wasn’t going to be exposed for much longer.

  Wolf’s voice exploded in his ear: ‘Team Four, do whatever you have to do to get Rapier out of there! We need that Stone!’

  ‘Sir,’ Astro saw Wolf taking shelter inside the hangar-like entrance cut into the cliff’s base, ‘those Japanese guys on the clifftops are dug in! They’ve had years to prepare this place for a defence like this!’

  ‘Get—That—Fucking—Stone!’

  Astro spun, wondering how he was possibly going to get out of this alive, when he again saw the wave . . .

  . . . only now he saw something in the air above it, a small fast-moving aircraft flying incredibly low over the advancing sea, also incoming.

  What the hell. . . ?

  The sleek black glider skimmed over the surface of the Sea of Japan, flying at phenomenal speed low over the waves.

  It shot between two Japanese warships—ships whose radar crews hadn’t even noticed the tiny attack plane until their gunners saw it whiz by the deck.

  Designed by Wizard, it was a very small Light Attack Glider, christened by him the ‘Black Bee’. Based on the dual-tailfin airframe of the highly manoeuvrable ARES light attack fighter, the Bee had no engine to weigh it down. All it had was an advanced stealth bodykit and a super-lightweight carbon-fibre cockpit that seated two people.

  Without the heat signature of an engine, its stealth profile was tiny, smaller than that of a seagull. Indeed, the Bee was so physically small, Jack had long kept it in pieces in a single Ziploc bag in the hold of the Hali.

  Of course, being a bee it still possessed a vicious sting: two Sidewinder missiles hung from its swept-back wings, weighing more than the plane itself.

  As the Black Bee sped toward the Hokkaido coast, it overtook the fast-moving tsunami wave, zooming out over the expanse of bare seabed in front of the coastal cliffs.

  In the cockpit, Jack flew, while Zoe sat in the rear navigator’s seat with Lily on her lap. ‘Would you look at that wave . . . ’ Zoe gasped.

  Jack, however, was looking intently forward.

  Hokkaido loomed before him.

  It was covered in snow, almost totally white. Its endless mountain ranges were covered in drifts, while directly ahead of him, just as it was depicted on Genghis Khan’s shield, he saw an immense extinct volcano towering above a frozen coastal waterfall.

  At the base of the waterfall, he could just make out the rectangular hangar-sized Vertex entrance and the shipwrecks on the seabed before it.

  ‘Hang on,’ he said as he fired both Sidewinders and brought the Bee even lower over the seabed, extending its ski-like landing struts as he did so.

  The two missiles lanced out toward the Japanese positions on the clifftops, smashing into them simultaneously, sending twin geysers of snow, dirt and men flying into the air.

  The Bee’s struts touched down on the exposed seabed and the little glider slid across the hardpacked sand like a car on a wet road.

  It skidded to a stop right alongside the rusty wreck of the super-tanker and Rapier’s CIEF team trapped behind it.

  Jack flung open the Bee’s canopy and leapt out, with Zoe providing cover and Lily running between them.

  Despite the barrage of Japanese fire raining down at them, not a single round struck them.

  The reason: Jack and Zoe carried activated Warblers in their jacket pockets.

  Jack hadn’t used Warblers since that time at Hamilcar’s Refuge in Tunisia. Designed for frontal assaults just like this, the Warbler was another invention of Wizard’s: a grenade-sized Closed Atmospheric Field Destabiliser that created a powerful electromagnetic field which disrupted the flight of high-subsonic projectiles like bullets. They had only one drawback: their superstrong electromagnetic fields also disrupted radio signals.

  And so the wave of Japanese bullets just fanned out, left and right, away from them as they ran across the open ground of the sea floor.

  Jack, Zoe and Lily came to Rapier—hunched behind the enormous propeller of the beached supertanker and now out of ammo. Only one other member of his team had survived the assault from the cliffs, and he lay on the ground with wounds to his chest. Dead men lay all around them.

  ‘Get up, you’re coming with us,’ Jack said roughly, ripping the Samsonite pack off Rapier’s back and slinging it over his shoulder while dragging his half-brother toward the cliffs, firing with his spare hand.

  Zoe covered them as they went, firing measured bursts. The two Sidewinder hits had been very effective, blowing apart the Japanese nests closest to the Vertex’s entrance, while the Warblers took care of the rest.

  Jack saw the entrance before him.

  It was absolutely huge—high and rectangular with sharp edges, it was an intricately-crafted yet massive stone doorway cut into the uneven natural stone of the cliff.

  He was reminded of the underwater entrance to the Second Vertex near Cape Town. It had been easily large enough for an entire submarine to pass through it. This one was just as big. It looked like the biggest aeroplane hangar in the world.

  Jack saw Wolf and his remaining men—twenty-two of them, plus Astro and the Neetha warlock—huddled at the base of the gigantic entrance, waving them over.

  Jack, Zoe, Lily and Rapier joined Wolf at the entrance, but didn’t stop. Wolf and his men—including Astro and the warlock—fell into step beside them, hurrying inside the cave.

  ‘I’m getting tired of watching over you,’ Jack said. ‘Didn’t expect this many Japanese defenders?’

  ‘We suspected the Brotherhood was acting with the tacit approval of the Japanese government. We didn’t know it was the government,’ Wolf said.

  ‘Let’s just get through this, ‘cause while I’m pretty fucking angry with you right now, I’d rather save the world first. How you doing, Astro?’ Jack said as he passed the astonished young Marine. ‘Long time, no see.’

  Astro just hurried to keep up, momentarily speechless.

  The cave inside the entrance was broad and high-ceilinged, with a polished floor and smooth stone walls, all covered in Thoth hieroglyphs; a long and broad avenue of thick columns supported the soaring ceiling.

  About five hundred yards in, Jack saw a small mountain of steps rising into a wide void in the ceiling.

  Just like at Cape Town, he thought.

  He and Zoe both g
rabbed Lily by the hand, and with Wolf’s team around them, they started climbing the hill of stone stairs at speed.

  Then a chilling rush of air billowed in through the entrance and a great roar filled the cavern. Jack spun as he climbed the stairs to see a terrible sight filling the entrance doorway.

  The tsunami had arrived.

  Through the rectangular frame of the entrance, Jack saw the massive tsunami rush across the exposed seabed, easily travelling at 100 kilometres an hour.