The Six Sacred Stones

by Matthew Reilly

  She was also on leave from the Sciathan Fhianoglach an Airm, the famed crack commando unit of the Irish Army. A veteran of the Capstone adventure, she and West were close, and—some said—getting closer. The end tips of her blond hair were also electric pink, the remains of a hair session with Lily the previous day.

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

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

  Jack ducked into his room, snatching stuff from all sides: a canvas miner’s jacket, a fireman’s helmet, and a doubleholstered gun belt that he strapped round his waist.

  “Getting her things. Alby’s with her.”

  “Oh God, Alby. What will we—”

  “We take him with us.”

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

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

  Then he hurried past Zoe, heading down the hallway to the back door of the farmhouse.

  “Get your things and corral the kids. We’re leaving in two minutes. I have to get the top piece of the Capstone.”

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

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

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

  before stomping out the back door.

  And suddenly Zoe woke up to the situation.

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

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

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

  …the Golden Capstone.

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

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

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

  But not today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Jack turned and ran back toward the farmhouse.

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

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

  The parachutes were still falling from the sky, many of them close to the ground now.

  There were literally hundreds of them, some obviously bearing armed men, while others were larger chutes carrying oversized objects: jeeps and trucks.

  “Mother of God…” Jack whispered.

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

  “Did you grab the codebooks?” West called.

  “Lily’s got ’em!”

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

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

  As he ran, Alby saw West’s guns.

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

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

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

  Then he started running directly for the farmhouse.

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

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

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

  THE EAST DRIVE

  MOMENTS LATER, the barn doors blasted open, and two compact allwheeldrive vehicles boomed out from it.

  They looked like something out of a Mad Max movie.

  They were modified Longline “Light Strike Vehicles,” or LSVs—ultralight twoseater dune buggies with chunky allterrain tires, hightolerance wishbone suspension, and sleek bodies made only of roll bars and struts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  It was a distinctive sixwheeled vehicle, a WZ551 armored personnel carrier built by the Chinese North Industries Corporation for the PLA. Featuring heavy armor and a French made Dragar turret on its top, it had a boxshaped body and a flat prowlike nose that sloped backward underneath it. The Dragar turret boasted a brutish 25mm cannon and a 7.62mm coaxial machine gun.

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

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

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

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

  “I know!”

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

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

  He evaluated his options.

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

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

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

  West’s LSV roared down the dusty east drive.

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

  West glanced over at the little boy.

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

  “Nope!” Alby shouted over the whipping wind.

  “You a Boy Scout, Alby?”

  “Yes!”

  “And what’s the Boy Scout motto?”

  “Be prepared!”

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

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

  “Zoe! Swing in front!” West called.

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

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

  The post—unknown to the casual observer—was equipped with a trip wire that snapped as the LSV shot over it, triggering a concealed mechanism that launched a hundred six

  pronged nails onto the roadway behind the fleeing car.

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

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

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

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

  Alby then swung back to see the trailing APCs, slower than the jeeps, reach the nails—

  with their runflat tires they just thundered right over them, impervious to damage.

  Chasing. Pursuing. Hunting.

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

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

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

  “Heading east in two cars—”

  “Ground Force Seven is in pursuit—”

  “Ground Force Six is going for the bridge—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Yep,” West said, his jaw tightening.

  “Please get us out of here, Jack.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  THE RIVER CROSSING

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

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

  They’d got there first.

  Damn.

  The lead APC lowered its turretmounted cannon ominously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  But into the river he went. At full speed.

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

  As Jack’s LSV skipped out the other side of the river, roaring up the far bank with a three

  foothigh jump, Zoe’s car hit the near edge of the stream, at the same time as the last Chinese jeep came alongside it.

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

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

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

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

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

  THE ESCAPE PLANE