The Six Sacred Stones

by Matthew Reilly

  Minutes later, the Hind’s crew and troops stood shivering on the snow plain, dressed only in their undergarments, their helicopter lifting off without them—flown by Astro and Scimitar, with Vulture manning the main cannon and Stretch and Tank safely in the hold.

  It was the final piece of Jack’s plan: they’d needed the Hind to land here—so they could steal it for the next part of their mission in China.

  THE SALISBURY PLAIN, ENGLAND

  DECEMBER5, 2007, 3:05A.M.

  THE RENTED Honda Odyssey zoomed along the A303, alone in the night.

  In the glare of a bright full moon, endless fields of Wiltshire farmland stretched away to the horizon on either side of the highway, bathed in eerie blue light.

  Zoe drove, with Lily and Alby beside her.

  In the back of the S.U.V. sat the two young men who had met her and the kids at Heathrow: the unique Adamson brothers, Lachlan and Julius.

  Identical twins, they were both tall and lean, with friendly freckled faces, carrot orange hair, and thick Scottish accents.

  Both wore simple Tshirts, one black, the other white. Lachlan’s black shirt read, somewhat enigmatically: “I HAVE SEEN THE COW LEVEL!” while Julius’s white one proclaimed “THERE IS NO COW LEVEL!”

  They also had a habit of finishing each other’s sentences.

  “Zoe!” Lachlan had exclaimed on seeing her.

  “It’s great to see you again!” Julius said. “Hey, this sounds like a secret mission.”

  “Isit a secret mission?” Lachlan asked.

  Julius: “If it is, don’t you think Lachy and I should have code names, you know, like Maverick or Goose?”

  “I’d like to be called Blade,” Lachlan said.

  “And I’d like Bullfighter,” Julius said.

  “Blade? Bullfighter?”

  Julius said, “Pretty rugged and heroic, huh? We’ve been thinking about this while we’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Clearly,” Zoe said. “How about Tweedledum and Tweedledee? Romulus and Remus?”

  “Aw, no! Not twin code names,” Lachlan said. “Anything but twin names.”

  “Sorry, boys, but there’s only one rule when it comes to call signs.”

  “And that is?”

  “You never get to pick your own.” Zoe smiled. “And sometimes your nickname can change. Look at me, I used to be known as Bloody Mary, until I met this little one.” A nod at Lily. “And now everyone calls me Princess. Be patient, you’ll get call signs when the occasion calls for it. Because, yes, this mission is about as secret as it gets.”

  Now, speeding west along the A303, they were heading for a place that of all people Alby had led them to.

  The military air base outside Dubai. Two days previously. Just after Earl McShane’s cargo plane had smashed into the Burj al Arab.

  Jack West had stood on the tarmac, crouched low over Alby and Lily, while armed men and CIA agents calling themselves attachés spoke into cell phones, a black pillar of smoke rising into the sky above the Burj al Arab in the distance.

  “Talk to me, Alby,” Jack had said.

  During the meeting, Alby had deciphered one of Wizard’s more obscure notes: the reference to the “Titanic Sinking and Rising.” But he had hinted to Jack that there was more to it.

  Alby said, “I also know what one of the symbols on Wizard’s summary sheet means.”

  Jack had pulled out the summary sheet.

  “The symbol at the bottom right,” Alby said. “Next to the ‘Titanic Sinking’ reference.”

  “Yes…” West had said.

  “It’s not a symbol. It’s a diagram.”

  “Of what?”

  Alby had looked up at West seriously. “It’s a diagram of the layout of Stonehenge.”

  STONEHENGE

  THE HONDA crested a rise, and without warning the cluster of great stones came into view.

  Zoe inhaled sharply.

  Of course she had been here before, several times. Everyone in the UK had. But the scale of the site, the sheerbravura of it, always took her by surprise.

  Stonehenge.

  Quite simply, Stonehenge was stunning.

  A source of fascination to her for a long time, Zoe knew all the myths: that this ring of towering stones was an ancient calendar; or an ancient observatory; that the bluestones—

  the smaller sixfoothigh dolerite stones that formed a horseshoeshaped arcwithin the far more famous trilithons—had been brought to the Salisbury Plain around the year 2700B.C. by some unknown tribe from the Preseli Hillsover 150 miles away in distant Wales. To this day, many believe that the bluestones, even on bitterly cold winter days, remain warm to the touch.

  It would be another 150 years, around 2,570B.C., before the spectacular trilithons were raised around this minihenge of bluestones. But the date is important: in 2,570B.C. the Egyptian pharaoh Khufu was completing his famous work on the Giza plateau in Egypt, the Great Pyramid.

  Over the years, Zoe knew, cosmologists and astrologers had tried to link Stonehenge with the Great Pyramid, but without success. The only confirmed link was the closely matching dates of their construction.

  Other peculiarities of Stonehenge intrigued her.

  Like the rare green cyanobacterium that grew on the great trilithons themselves. A variety of lichen, it was a true oddity, an uncommon hybrid of algae and fungus that grew only on exposed coastlines—yet Stonehenge was fifty miles from the nearest sea, the Bristol Channel. The mosslike substance gave the stones a mottled, uneven aspect.

  And then, of course, there were the unexplained theories about the site’s location: the unique way the Sun and Moon rise over the fiftyfirst parallel; and the unusually high number of neolithic sites running the length of the British Isles on the same degree of longitude as Stonehenge.

  In the final analysis, only one thing about Stonehenge could be said with any degree of certainty: for over 4,500 years it had withstood the ravages of wind, rain, and time itself, offering a multitude of questions and very few answers.

  “OK,” Zoe said as she drove. “How are we going to tackle this? Thoughts anyone?”

  “Thoughts?” Lachlan said. “How about this: that there’sno precedent for what we’re about to do. Over the years, scholars and wackos have linked Stonehenge with the Sun and the Moon, with virgins and druids, with solstices and eclipses, but never with Jupiter.

  If Wizard’s hypothesis is correct and this Firestone is the real deal, then we’re going to see something that hasn’t been seen for over 4,500 years.”

  Julius said, “Can I add that the good folk at English Heritage don’t look kindly on people who step over the rope at Stonehenge and walk among the stones, let alone lunatics like us wanting to perform ancient occult rituals. There’ll be security guards.”

  “Leave the guards to me,” Zoe said. “You just handle the occult ritual.”

  The twins pulled out Wizard’s notes again, gazed at the diagram of Stonehenge:

  “In his notes, Wizard says that the Ramesean Stone at Stonehenge is the Altar Stone,”

  Julius said. “But what about the Grand Trilithon? It’s the signature element of Stonehenge.”

  “No, I’d go with the Altar Stone, too,” Lachlan said. “It’s the focal point of the structure.

  It’s also made of bluestone, laid at the same time as the original ring of bluestones, so it’s older than the trilithons. And fortunately for us, it’s still there.”

  Over four and a half millennia, Stonehenge had been pilfered by locals searching for stones to use as walls or as millstones. Nearly all the bluestones of the henge were gone.

  The bigger trilithons had survived—at over eighteen feet tall (twentyone in the case of the Grand Trilithon) they had just been too big for the local peasants to move.

  Lachlan turned to Alby: “What doyou reckon, kid?”

  Alby looked up, surprised to be asked his opinion. He had thought that, as kids, he and Lily were just being brought along for the ride, assigned to Zoe
to be kept safe.

  “Well?” Lachlan said expectantly. “Jack West thinks you’re a clever one and Jack’s a notoriously hard judge. And Zoe here doesn’t hang out with losers—I mean, hey, look at us.”

  Lily raised an eyebrow at that.

  Julius added, “And weren’t you the one who figured out the connection between the Titanic Rising and Stonehenge?”

  Alby swallowed. Lily smiled at him reassuringly. She had long ago become used to this kind of adult treatment.

  “I, well,” Alby stammered. “The stone we’re after has to fit some way with the Firestone.

  I can’t see the Firestone fitting onto the Grand Trilithon in any practical way. But the Altar Stone, if reerected, would be at the very heart of the structure. The other thing to remember is the rising of Titan to the northeast—”

  “Ah, yes, yes. Good point,” Julius said.

  They had gone through this earlier.

  As Alby had explained briefly at the meeting in Dubai, the Titanic Rising and Sinking occurred only when the Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn were in alignment, something that occurred approximately once every 400 years, and which—clearly by no coincidence—

  was happening right now.

  The “rising” of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, actually preceded the passage of Saturn itself, rising from behind the great hulking mass of Jupiter. Soon after this rising, Saturn would sink again behind Jupiter. Due to each planet’s angled orbit around the Sun—its ecliptic—this upwarddownward motion occurred eight times in the month that the planets remained aligned.

  Seen from Stonehenge, first Jupiter would appear on the northeastern horizon, then Titan, then Saturn.

  “So why is this Titanic Rising so important?” Zoe asked. “What does Titan or Jupiter or Saturn have to do with theSaBenben and the Dark Star?”

  “The connection with theSaBenben is straightforward,” Julius said. “It’s the connection between Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid that people have been searching for for centuries. Our theory is simple: the Pyramid is a temple to our Sun. Stonehenge is a temple to the Dark Sun.”

  “And the two are most certainly linked geographically,” Lachlan added. “You know how the bluestones were brought to the Salisbury Plain from the Preseli Hills in Wales?”

  “Yes, Lachlan,” Zoe said patiently. “Ido have two degrees in archaeology. I just didn’t do the subjects on Crazy British Neolithic Cosmology that you obviously majored in.”

  “Then you know about the rectangle formed by the four original Station Stones that once surrounded Stonehenge?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t,” Lily said.

  To illustrate, Lachlan opened a book, showing Lily a picture of Stonehenge’s layout. Arrayed around the circular henge in a perfect rectangle were four stones known as the “Station Stones.” They formed a 5:12 rectangle.

  Lachlan said, “Now, if you draw a diagonal across that rectangle, simple Pythagorean math tells us that the resulting rightangle triangle is a 5:12:13 triangle.”

  He drew a triangle on the picture with a pencil.

  “Following me?” he said.

  “So far,” Lily said.

  “Nice triangle, isn’t it?”

  “I guess.”

  Lachlan then pulled out a map of the United Kingdom. He indicated Stonehenge at the bottom of the map, and then drew the same 5:12:13 triangle on the map using Stonehenge as the tip of the triangle and keeping the triangle’s baseline parallel to the equator.

  “The 5:12:13 triangle reveals the original location of the bluestones in Wales: The Preseli Hills,” Lachlan said. “This is pretty exceptional geography for a primitive tribe. It’sso exceptional that some believe the ancients had outside help.”

  “I thought you were going to prove a link between Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid,”

  Zoe said.

  Lachlan smiled. He winked to Lily. “Remember how I said it was a nice triangle?”

  “Yeah…”

  “Well, if you extend the hypotenuse of this wonderful triangle like this…”

  “…see what it runs through.”

  Lachlan turned to a map of the world and did precisely that.

  “No way…” Lily said, when she saw the finished product.

  The arrow passed directly through Egypt, right at the Nile Delta…at Giza.

  “Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid at Giza,” Lachlan said proudly. “United at last.”

  “Which brings us to the second connection,” Julius said. “The connection between all this and Titan, Saturn, and Jupiter. You see, it’s not Titan or Saturn or Jupiter that matters. It’s what lies hiddenbehind them that matters.”

  “Behind them?” Lily asked.

  Lachlan grinned. “Yes. We checked the data you sent us from Dubai, the data from Wizard’s notes about this Dark Star and its rate of approach. Seems it’s coming at us frombehind Jupiter. Thus the importance of this celestial event, the rising of Saturn behind Jupiter. It is, to put it simply, beyond value, because it will allow us, for the very first time, to see this fearsome Dark Star.”

  “How?” Zoe asked, turning in the driver’s seat. “I thought we couldn’t see it in our light spectrum.”

  “Well, we won’t seeit , we’ll see the dark space that it occupies,” Julius said. “Now, are you familiar with the concept of spacetime?”

  “Or more specifically thecurvature of spacetime,” Lachlan added.

  “Yes, good clarification, brother,” Julius said.

  “Thank you.”

  “More or less,” Zoe said. “The gravitational pull of a planetbends the space around it. I once heard it compared to a stretchedout rubber sheet with marbles placed on it…”

  “That’s right,” Lachlan said, “and each marble makes a slight depression in the rubber sheet, indicating the curvature of spacetime. So if you were in a spaceship traveling past these planets, your trajectory would actually bend as you pass each planet, unless of course you applied more power.”

  “Yes…”

  Julius said, “Well, it’s the same with light. Light bends, too, as it passes through the gravitational fields of planets and stars.”

  Lachlan: “And big planets like Jupiter bend it more than small planets like Mercury.”

  “Correct,” Julius said. “So tonight, as we look out at Jupiter from Stonehenge, and see Saturn rise behind it, we will, if only for a moment, thanks to the peculiar bending of light around those two planets, get a glimpse of the section of space hiddenbehind Jupiter.”

  Zoe frowned. “And if theSaBenben is set in place at that time—positioned atop the Ramesean stone of Stonehenge—what happens then?”

  Julius looked at Lachlan.

  Lachlan looked at Julius.

  Then they both turned to face Zoe and shrugged together.

  “That,” Julius said, “is what we’re going to find out.”

  The car sped into the night.

  STONEHENGE

  DECEMBER 5, 2007, 3:22A.M.

  THEY PARKED on the gravel shoulder a few hundred yards from the henge.

  The moon shone down on the wide plain like a great spotlight, illuminating the relentlessly flat landscape all the way to the horizon.

  Stonehenge stood at the junction of the A303 and a smaller side road.

  Two security guards stood near the great shadowy stones, silhouettes in the moonlight.

  They saw the Honda stop, but did not investigate: travelers from London often stopped to gaze at the stones while they stretched their legs.

  Zoe stepped closer, to within fifty yards of the two guards and then quickly raised a boxy gunlike object fitted with a handgrip and trigger, aimed it at the guards, and called,“Hey!”

  The guards looked over.

  Zoe pulled the trigger. There was an instantaneous flash from her device accompanied by a deep sonicwhump, and immediately the two guards dropped to the ground like marionettes whose strings had been cut, out cold.

  “What the hell was t
hat!” Julius asked, coming up alongside Zoe.

  “And where can we get one!” Lachlan added.

  “LaSonV stun gun,” Zoe said. “It’s a nonlethal incapacitator. Laser flash accompanied by a sonic charge. Originally designed for use on planes by sky marshals to subdue hijackers without the risk of shooting out a window and disrupting cabin pressure. The sonic charge would usually be enough to knock out an aggressive attacker, but the laser flash blinds them too. No aftereffects except for a splitting headache. Some people think this is what was used to disorient Princess Diana’s driver just before her fatal car crash.”

  “OK…” Julius said. “On that cheery note, let’s get to work.”

  A gap was cut in the wire fence surrounding the henge and Zoe and the twins quickly rolled a handcart packed with equipment through it, followed by the kids.

  They came to the stones and paused for a moment, awed.

  The towering pillars of rock soared into the sky above them, looming large in the moonlight—powerful, ominous,ancient. The biggest of them, the lone pillar of the Grand Trilithon, rose to a massive twentysix feet, a conical stone “tongue” at its peak indicative of the lintel that had once lain across its top.

  “What time is the Titanic Rising?” Zoe asked.

  “Jupiter should already be on the horizon,” Alby said, setting up a seriouslooking telescope on the grass among the stones. “Titan will rise over it at 3:49A.M., Saturn two minutes later, then, as it rises, a gap will appear between Saturn and Jupiter.”

  “And that’s when we see our Dark Star.”

  “Correct.”

  Zoe checked her watch. It was 3:25. “Let’s move. We’ve got twentyfive minutes.”