Jack grimaced. ‘Unfortunately, all this knowledge isn’t enough. Now I have to get there and finish this thing once and for all.’
‘How are you going to do that?’ Julius asked incredulously. ‘Look at this plane. Look at all of us.’
Jack did exactly that. He thought about his team and it made him feel ill.
They were broken, wounded and bloodstained. This gigantic mission had taken them all to the very limit and it had torn them to shreds.
Wizard was dead.
Pooh Bear and Stretch were now incapacitated by hideous wounds; indeed, Stretch had never quite recovered fully from his time in Mordechai Muniz’s dungeon.
Sky Monster: throwing up due to Cieran’s nerve-agent.
The twins: scratched and gashed from their brave run through the Fourth Vertex, both were now sickly pale due to Cieran’s drug.
Lily: in Carnivore’s hands, heading toward the Sixth Vertex.
That wasn’t even mentioning Zoe, Alby and Lois back at Carnivore’s lair in eastern Russia, imprisoned in their formaldehyde tanks.
And then there was Jack himself. Bruised and wounded, his nose broken.
This team—this wonderful team of international warriors—had been beaten to a pulp.
And all Jack could think was: I did this. I did this to them. I didn’t lead them well enough and now look at them. Now I have to make it right.
He clenched his jaw and stood up.
‘Julius, Lachlan,’ he said. ‘I need you two to help me one last time.’
It took them four tries, but eventually they got the jeep in position. As it was no longer capable of vertical lift-off these days, they had to find another way to get the Halicarnassus into the air.
Sitting in the pilot’s seat, Jack had reversed the down-tilted plane, scraping its wheelless forward landing strut back along the roadway. Then he had quickly brought the plane forward, making it leap slightly and lurch upward, causing the wheelless landing strut to rise a few feet into the air. . .
. . . at which point the twins had quickly backed the jeep in under the landing strut, just as it came down again . . .
Bam!
The thick vertical strut thunked down onto the bed of the jeep, landing squarely on a big pile of sandbags the twins had positioned just behind the front seats. The jeep’s tyres had also been half- deflated, to account for the expansion of the air in them when they heated up later.
Most of a 747’s weight is in its middle—mainly due to the engines and fuel in its wings—so the jeep just had to bear the lesser weight of the Halicarnassus’s front section. And the Hali was also already much lighter than most jumbos, so Jack figured if they could keep the jeep moving, that might disperse the weight a little and maybe they could get the plane into the air.
While the twins had been preparing the jeep, Jack had cleared the Hali of any excess weight and all its passengers: Pooh Bear, Stretch and Sky Monster.
Then he boarded the plane, alone. Not even Horus would accompany him on this final mission.
Pooh, Stretch and Sky Monster—with Horus tethered unhappily to his wrist—now sat on the salt hill watching the plane-jeep hybrid like spectators at a football match. They were surrounded by water bottles, guns and as much medical equipment as they could carry.
If Jack got the Halicarnassus up and away, the twins would try to get them all to Amman somehow.
With its front strut resting on the jeep, the mighty Halicarnassus rolled around on the desert highway.
From the hill, Sky Monster watched sadly. ‘That plane has been a goddamn warhorse, as much a part of this team as any of us. If Jack gets her into the air, he won’t be able to land her conventionally. I’m never going to see her again. See you later, Halicarnassus.’
The great black 747 was pointed down the highway now. The road stretched away to the horizon.
‘Okay, boys,’ Jack said into his radio. ‘Take-off speed is about 140 miles an hour. Just stay with me as long as you can, then throw the jeep into neutral and, whatever you do, keep her straight.’
‘We’ll do our best,’ Lachlan replied from the jeep.
Jack powered up the Hali’s engines.
Lachlan revved the jeep.
Then the big black 747 started moving forward, with the jeep moving with it, acting as its forward landing gear.
Travelling in this way, the two vehicles sped down the highway, getting faster and faster, and for as long as he could, Lachlan kept the gas pedal floored and gripped the steering wheel tightly.
The road sped by beside him, the Hali’s nose looming above him and Julius, and then suddenly the twins felt the acceleration of the plane propel them powerfully forward.
‘Neutral!’ Julius yelled above the din. ‘Put her into neutral!’
Lachlan did so and the jeep went into overdrive—shooting along the road at terrific speed, the bitumen streaking by on either side, and Lachlan’s knuckles went white on the steering wheel, grappling with it in a desperate effort to keep the jeep moving in a straight line.
‘I’m losing it!’ he yelled. ‘I can’t hold it straight much long—’
Then his front left tyre exploded, just as there came an almighty roar from behind him and the jeep spun out, skidding laterally off the highway—round and round and round, kicking up a huge cloud of dust, before it lurched to a halt in the sand beside the highway, and Lachlan and Julius spun in their seats to see. . .
. . . the Halicarnassus soaring into the sky!
Its nose had lifted off their jeep at the exact same moment their tyre had burst.
Jack was away.
And so after all his previous missions with his band of loyal team-mates, in the final confrontation to come, it would just be Jack, alone.
He flew into the night, the last night before the day of the dual equinox, headed for the Sixth and final Vertex.
THE WORLD
20 MARCH, 2008 (HOLY THURSDAY)
THE DAY OF THE FINAL DEADLINE
As Thursday, March 20, dawned, weather systems around the world went haywire.
Mountainous waves rolled across the south Atlantic, battering the coast of Africa. In the Indian Ocean, supertankers were thrown around like bath toys. In the Pacific, tsunami warnings had been issued in nine countries.
Tornadoes raged across the American mid-west. Cyclones battered Asia. Active volcanoes from Mount Aetna in Italy to the Cerro Azul in the Galapagos started throwing up fountains of lava while dormant ones started to rumble and smoke, suggesting they wouldn’t he dormant for long.
Photos from the International Space Station showed several dozen dramatic cloud formations across the globe, the deep whirlpool-shaped signatures of hurricanes and cyclones.
The world was going mad.
It was as if it were convulsing.
At the same time, astronomers from observatories around the world reported that similar things were happening throughout the solar system: the gaseous atmospheres of Jupiter, Neptune and Saturn were churning and roiling. Volcanoes on Jupiter’s geologically active moon, Io, were erupting with such force that their projectiles were escaping the moon’s atmosphere.
It wasn’t just Earth, the astronomers said. Some silent invisible force was acting on the whole solar system.
Scientists had no answers, governments called for calm, and people across the world flocked to churches, mosques and synagogues. Evangelists and New Agers proclaimed the arrival of the end of the world and for once, they appeared to be right.
The Dark Sun had arrived at the edge of the solar system.
In the midst of this unprecedented weather, two behemoths of the sea powered southward across the storm-ravaged Pacific Ocean.
They were the two newest additions to the Chinese fleet, the mighty aircraft carriers the Mao Zedong and the China.
Normally the two grey-hulled monsters—and their escort groups of frigates and destroyers—dominated the ocean, but today, lashed by heavy rain and pounded by massive waves, they were making t
erribly slow progress. Due to the weather, their planes were either stored in their hangars belowdecks or tied down on the flight deck.
On the bridge of the China stood Colonel Mao Gongli, alongside Wolf—who a day before had taken one look at Mao’s Sixth Pillar and thrown it to the floor, declaring it a crude fake.
Spectral analysis confirmed his opinion. Mao’s Pillar was an impressive replica carved from selenite crystal. Vulture and Scimitar had tricked him.
Wolf glared at the horizon, teeth grinding.
They were already a day-and-a-half late and he cursed himself for placing his trust in Mao and his aircraft carriers. After escaping Carnivore’s lair, he should have flown directly here, flying above the bad weather, but instead he’d gone directly to Beijing, where he’d been transferred to the Chinese carriers already en route to the final Vertex.
At last, their destination came into view.
It was a tiny barren island in the middle of the largest ocean on the planet. Barely ten miles long and covered with dry grass and low hills, it was famous worldwide for the cult of giant statue-building that had obsessed its inhabitants for nearly a thousand years.
It was Easter Island.
Wolf thought about Easter Island.
Its mysterious moai had long intrigued the world. Reaching heights of over eleven metres—forty feet—they were colossal in every sense of the word. Every statue faced inland (except for a unique set of seven which for some reason stared to the southwest), chins raised, gazing forever up at the sky.
Their size, their peculiar elongated faces, and the utter remoteness of the island itself had made the statues a source of mystery and speculation since Europeans found them on Easter Sunday, 1722.
Most experts agreed that the moai represented dead chiefs, hut over the years, some writers have claimed that they depict extraterrestrial visitors—an argument that gained credibility from the fact that the earliest statues are not elongated, indeed, the earliest moai do not look human at all.
Added to this is the fact that while the first Easter Islanders were Polynesian, nowhere in Polynesia is there a history of giant statue-building.
Some scholars have used this information to postulate that the earliest statues on the island were already there when the first Polynesians arrived.
This then raised the much bigger question: who built the first statues?
Unfortunately, the arrival of white men severed the historical trail. In the 1800s, Spanish slave ships kidnapped the last of the Easter Islanders en masse, sending them to work and die in the guano mines of Peru, and so any ancestral knowledge of the statues—especially the earliest ones—was lost forever.
***
Wolf gazed at the island before him, covered by low stormclouds, veiled in rain.
If he was angry before, he became positively furious when he arrived at the island thirty minutes later.
A black Tupolev- 1 44 jet was already parked on the island’s runway.
EASTER ISLAND, PACIFIC OCEAN
20 MARCH, 2008 (HOLY THURSDAY)
1730 HOURS
30 MINUTES BEFORE THE FINAL DEADLINE
Throughout that afternoon, in the slashing rain and violent seas, the dual-carrier Chinese fleet set about surrounding Easter Island. They anchored the Mao Zedong off the north-west corner and the China to the south, near the island’s sole airport.
The China towered above the small town of Hanga Roa, the only town on Easter Island, dwarfing it. Chinese troops poured ashore, ordering the three thousand inhabitants of the island to remain in their homes—it wasn’t hard; owing to the drenching rain, most of them were already there.
On Wolf’s instructions, the Mao Zedong was moved a few kilometres away from the north-west corner—a four-wave tsunami was coming in from the north, and when it arrived, the coastal waters would recede, exposing the seabed. The aircraft carrier needed to be far enough out to avoid being grounded.
Four MiG-26 interceptors and one aerial early-warning plane were launched from the carrier to patrol the skies for intruders.
Finally and most importantly, Wolf led an advance party ashore, landing on the north-west corner of the island above a steep earthen cliff. Sonar scans had revealed a large underwater entrance at the base of the cliff, similar to the entrances at the Second and Third Vertices. On the hill overlooking the cliff, Wolf saw the ruins of a lone moai platform known as the Ahu Vai Mata.
The statue lay on its side in front of the stage-like platform was one of the four rare moai carved from basalt and one of the oldest statues on the island, from the early period when the statues were shorter, their races more horizontally aligned; it was one of the statues suspected to have existed before the arrival of the Polynesians.
Had it been standing, Wolf saw, it would have perfectly matched the picture of this Vertex’s entrance depicted on the Dragon’s Egg.
‘The first wave of the tsunami is coming!’ Mao yelled to Wolf as they stood on the rainswept cliff.
‘I’m counting on it!’ Wolf called back above the wind. ‘Carnivore’s already inside. I assume he used scuba gear to get in. But the sea is too rough for that now! Besides, we’re not gonna need scuba gear. When the wave arrives, the ocean will retreat and that’s when we’ll be going in. Tell your men to get their ziplines ready!’
Minutes later, just as Wolf had predicted, the waters to the north of Easter Island suddenly receded, sweeping dramatically backward a full five hundred metres, retreating in a wide whitewater curve that revealed the sandy ocean floor.
Directly beneath his position on the clifftop, Wolf saw the imposing entrance to the Sixth Vertex. As at Hokkaido, it was rectangular and hangar-sized and cut into the base of the cliff.
Mao gasped, ‘Good God. . .’
Wolf just yelled, ‘Okay! Go! Down the ziplines!’
Not wasting a moment, their advance party—Wolf, Mao and five Chinese paratroopers—abseiled down the face of the now-exposed cliff, until they eventually landed on wet sand, right in front of the massive stone entry doorway.
Looking inside the doorway, Wolf saw another many-pillared hall that disappeared into darkness, ending at a hill of steps, again just like at Hokkaido.
‘Inside! Before the wave arrives!’ he yelled.
He had just started to run inside when a frantic voice came in over their radios in Chinese and at first, Wolf couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
‘Sir! Hostile aircraft detected! It’s a 747, stealth signature! It is incoming at considerable speed, on a dead-straight bearing! It’s coming right for us!’
The Halicarnassus dropped out of the cloud layer, flying at a shallow descending angle.
It did not bank. It did not swerve. It flew in an unwavering dead-straight line.
A moment after it appeared on their screens, the Chinese radar operators on the Mao Zedong and in their AWACS plane detected a smaller signature zipping away from the 747.
Wolf had warned them about that: his son had a set of carbon-fibre wings called Gullwings that he sometimes used for covert aerial insertions. Predictably, he was using them now.
The MiGs were dispatched with orders to shoot down the Halicarnassus and locate-and-destroy the Gullwings.
But when they fired on the steadily-descending Halicarnassus, they found it emitting a veritable storm of electromagnetic interference and their missiles veered away from it. They tried guns but had even less luck with them. They couldn’t know that inside the plane were some jerry-rigged Warblers, amped up on super-high power levels, so that the Hali now had, for a short time at least, its own aeroplane-sized Warbler.
Oddly, though, in the face of all this fire, the plane did not deviate once from its course.
It still didn’t bank or swerve.
It just kept on flying down through the driving rain.
Either its pilot was crazy or nerveless or—someone realised— there was no-one at the controls at all . . .
While two MiGs chased down the tiny aerial signature th
at had zipped away from the Halicarnassus earlier, the remaining two MiGs pulled alongside the downward- flying black 747 to visually examine its cockpit.
They flew on either side of it, keeping pace with it. At no time did the Halicarnassus fire on them or even seem to notice their presence.
‘Mao Zedong, this is Interceptor One,’ one of the pilots reported. ‘I have a visual on the cockpit of that plane. I see no pilot in there. Thing must be flying on autopilot—’
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