It wasn’t West.
It was one of his companions.
The Israeli, wearing West’s gull-wings and drop gear.
Jaeger Acht keyed his radio. ‘Zwei, come in! It’s not—’
Acht never saw the blow coming.
Someone hit him in the back of the head with a pistol butt and he fell, knocked out cold.
A figure stepped out from behind Jaeger Acht, emerging from the shadows of the portico, dressed in a thick brown parka, tan cargo pants, sturdy boots and a fireman’s helmet.
‘It’s not me,’ he said, standing over the fallen man.
It was Jack West Jr.
Beneath Moscow
15 minutes earlier
The ultra-modern train boomed through the tunnel underneath southern Moscow, rushing toward the Kremlin and Red Square.
The train belonged to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, but he wasn’t travelling in it today.
No, today it held Jack West Jr, Aloysius Knight and Alby Calvin.
They were the only occupants of the train and they all stood in the driver’s compartment.
Jack gazed out through the forward windshield, watching the tracks sweep by beneath him at speed.
His eyes were fixed.
His jaw was set.
His entire body was energised like it had never been before.
Lily was here.
And he was coming to get her.
The train in which Jack was travelling—and the tunnel around it—was exceedingly modern.
For it was not a regular Moscow subway train. Nor was this a regular subway tunnel.
It had been Knight’s suggestion to enter Moscow this way.
His reasoning: only a select few people knew about the secret railway; it led directly into the heart of Moscow; and it could get them there both unseen and fast.
In his dark past as an international bounty hunter, Aloysius Knight—or as some knew him, the Black Knight—had done a job for Vladimir Putin.
The details of the mission were murky, but it had involved an incident early in Putin’s presidency: the kidnapping of his niece and the delivery of some of her fingers to Putin.
When Russian intelligence and its military had failed to locate the child, Aloysius Knight had been called in.
He’d rescued the girl—minus the fingers—killed her captors and returned her to her uncle.
His reward had been his plane, a hover-capable Sukhoi Su-37 fighter-bomber and refuelling privileges at any Russian base in the world. (For a bounty hunter this was a worthy prize, especially the refuelling part.)
What the mission had also revealed to Aloysius Knight was this secret train line that ran underneath the southern sector of Moscow’s subway system.
‘It’s known as “Subway 2” or, in intelligence circles, “D-6”,’ Aloysius said as their high-speed train blasted through the tunnel. ‘A secure subway line that can get you from the Kremlin to Vnukovo Airport south of the city in ten minutes flat. It was designed to allow senior leadership figures a rapid escape from the city, should such an evacuation be required.’
‘A secret presidential train line,’ Jack said.
‘That’s some nice insider knowledge you got there, Captain Knight,’ Alby added.
‘You think this is nice,’ Aloysius said, ‘let me know when you want to take over an aeroplane remotely. A few years ago, a government that shall not be named gave me a nice little hack of the GPS satellite system used for navigation by most military and commercial aircraft. The hack of the nav-system lets you take over a plane’s controls. Doesn’t work every time, but it got me out of a couple of pretty tight situations.’
Alby nodded. ‘Love your style, man.’
‘Hey,’ Aloysius said. ‘You guys got your secret ancient world, I got my secret government one.’
As Stretch and Lily had been collapsing on the steps of St Basil’s, Jack, Aloysius and Alby had been landing in Knight’s Sukhoi Su-37 at Vnukovo Airport.
They found the entire airport still.
All the staff lay motionless on the ground, a light snow falling on their bodies.
Jack had checked the pulses of two of them.
‘They’re alive,’ he said. ‘It’s like they’re sleeping.’
Aloysius slapped one comatose man hard across the face. He didn’t wake.
‘This isn’t sleeping,’ he said sourly. ‘I think this is more of your weird ancient shit, Jack.’
Cynical and dry at the best of times, Aloysius Knight had been consistently struck by the stranger elements of Jack’s world after he had been brought in by Shane Schofield to rescue Jack from the Royal Prison at Erebus.
They dragged the comatose ground crew members into shelter and hurried—unchallenged, since all the guards had also collapsed—into the bowels of the airport and to its secret presidential train line.
As they rushed into central Moscow on Vladimir Putin’s private bullet train, Jack turned to Alby.
‘You getting anything from Stretch?’
‘Not a word,’ Alby said from his portable radio console. ‘Stretch, Pooh and Sky Monster are not responding. Jack, all of Moscow is silent. No radio, no TV. Nothing.’
Jack frowned. ‘What happened here?’
Stretch had made it to Red Square and confirmed that it was indeed Lily seated out in front of St Basil’s Cathedral and that she was alive.
But then, moments later, Stretch had suddenly and inexplicably gone off the air.
There was no word from Lily.
Or from Pooh and Sky Monster in the Sky Warrior.
Jack swore.
He was racing into an empty city whose citizens lay unconscious and where three of his friends and his daughter had just gone unexpectedly and ominously silent.
The secret train squealed to a halt inside a concrete-and-steel station buried beneath the presidential palace in the Kremlin.
Jack emerged from the engine car, gun up and hyper-alert, flanked by Knight and watched by Alby.
It was a very modern station, clean and well lit.
Every single uniformed guard lay slumped on the floor or inside glass booths.
‘This way,’ Knight said. ‘There’s a tunnel that leads under the square to St Basil’s. I think it’s best we get to your girl as unobserved as possible.’
‘I concur,’ Jack said. ‘Alby, you stay here. Go to the engine car at the other end of the train, start it up and keep the engine running, in case we need to make a quick getaway.’
‘Jack—’
‘I know you want to come, son,’ Jack said. He glanced at the high-tech metal hand now affixed to Alby’s left wrist. They’d successfully attached it on the flight back and Alby had spent most of the journey practising with it, grasping and holding large objects then smaller ones. It would still take time to get fully used to it. ‘You’re more help to her here and you know it.’
Alby nodded. ‘Okay.’
Jack and Aloysius swept out of the deserted underground train station, dashing into a long foot tunnel that cut eastward.
Aloysius led the way and after a few minutes, they emerged in a crypt underneath St Basil’s Cathedral.
‘This way,’ Aloysius said, hurrying up some stairs.
Up they went, before they arrived inside the nave of the cathedral. It soared above them for hundreds of feet, decorated with paintings of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary.
Jack and Aloysius didn’t stop to gawk.
They ran across the wide empty nave, guns up.
As he ran, Jack heard the distant thump of a helicopter somewhere outside.
He kept going, knowing that his desperation to get to Lily was blinding him.
He didn’t care.
He had to find her.
With his gun raised, he hurried with
Aloysius down the covered steps of the cathedral’s west portico, until suddenly, at the base of the stairs, he saw a man dressed in the black uniform of the Knights of the Golden Eight standing over the slumped bodies of Lily and Stretch.
Jack pistol-whipped the Knight and the man fell to the ground.
Then Jack hurried over to the prone bodies of Lily and Stretch.
Behind him, Aloysius stopped dead in his tracks, gazing out at the empty square and the scattered bodies all over it.
‘Jesus, it’s all of Moscow,’ he breathed.
As he came closer to them, Jack saw that Lily and Stretch lay slumped beside two headless bodies perched on a pair of chairs.
He raced past them, going directly to Lily, sliding to his knees beside her, snatching her up in his arms.
She lolled lifelessly, her eyes closed.
Was she dead?
He checked for a pulse.
Found one, a weak one.
Thank goodness . . .
‘Lily! Wake up!’
She didn’t respond.
‘Lily! Come on, please . . .’ Jack had tears in his eyes.
She was cold, very cold, but alive and by the look of it, in the same somnolent state as the other people they’d encountered on the way here.
He held her tight against his body, trying to warm her.
As he gripped her, Jack closed his eyes for a moment.
He recalled his anguish three weeks previously when, at the Rock of Gibraltar, he’d thought she was dead, the victim of Sphinx’s cruel sacrificial rite there. It had been the lowest point of his life. He had felt that everything he’d ever lived for was gone.
Now it was the opposite. Now he was energised beyond measure. That she was in this mysterious unconscious state was unexpected, but he didn’t care.
She was alive and he’d found her.
At that moment, as he held Lily in his arms, Jack was being watched.
Jaeger Zwei scowled. ‘Fuck.’
The first guy hadn’t been West.
But here he was now.
Zwei reached for the remote that controlled the drone Chinook helicopter with the bell while at the same time lifting his radio to his mouth and yelling: ‘West is here! Squires! Bring in the trucks!’
Jack turned to Aloysius.
‘We’re lucky we got here when we did. If she was out in this weather much longer, she’d be dead of hypothermia.’
Aloysius’s eyes were searching the area. ‘We need to leave. Right now . . .’
His voice trailed off as four huge trucks emerged from the four corners of Red Square, tyres squealing, and skidded to matching halts around St Basil’s Cathedral, surrounding it.
They were not regular trucks.
They were big semi-trailer rigs, but with unusual trailers. They were full-sized Scandia car-carriers, equipped with superlong skeletal trailers designed to carry upward of ten cars each.
Except these four car-carriers did not carry cars.
On their platforms stood dozens of bronzemen.
As Jack held Lily, he and Aloysius snapped round to look at the four rigs loaded with bronze automatons now surrounding their position.
Both men had encountered the bronzemen before. Silent, faceless, robotic and remorseless, they had resided for thousands of years in coffins at the Three Secret Cities and the Underworld. At the completion of the Great Games at the Underworld in India, the deadly bronzemen had been awakened. They were impervious to bullets and could not be reasoned with.
‘Not these things again,’ Aloysius said.
Jack bit his lip. ‘If they’re here, I’m guessing that Sphinx must somehow now control them.’
It was at that moment that Aloysius looked down and saw a sheet of paper on the mushy ground beside Lily.
He picked it up and read it.
‘Oh, fuck . . .’ he said, spinning around suddenly. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’
Jack turned. ‘What?’
And then Aloysius did the strangest thing.
He looked Jack in the eye and said, ‘The world needs you right now more than it needs me.’
And with those peculiar words, Aloysius snatched his own helmet off his head—complete with its attached ear-protection headphones—and threw it to Jack.
‘Put the headphones on, Jack! Put them on now! Or we’re all done for. Don’t let me do this for nothing.’
Confused, Jack looked from Aloysius’s eyes to his helmet with its dangling earphones.
Aloysius Knight was a soldier’s soldier and a seriously tough motherfucker. Jack had never heard him speak like this before.
So he whipped off his own fireman’s helmet and put on Aloysius’s helmet, sealing his ears inside its headphones.
A bare second later, a massive double-rotored Chinook helicopter rose into view above them, appearing from behind the spires of St Basil’s, and Jack saw the enormous, ancient, gold-and-silver bell suspended from its underbelly and then the chopper rocked and the bell rang out.
At the sound of the spherical bell, Aloysius Knight’s eyes rolled up into his head and he collapsed instantly.
He hit the ground and groaned, clawing with his fingers for a few seconds, before all his muscles relaxed and he went still, unconscious.
Jack had seen many things in his adventures, but nothing like this.
Aloysius’s words echoed in his mind.
The world needs you right now more than it needs me.
Then he’d thrown him his protective headphones.
That had been after he’d read the note.
Jack snatched up the note.
He saw the original message on it, written in bold black letters:
YOU
WILL
WAKE
AS
SLAVES
But after that were scrawled additions in Lily’s distinctive handwriting:
Sphinx has a sonic weapon
Protect ears!
He also knows about Omega:
Newton’s planet, Friedmann + Einstein k>0.
I love you, Daddy.
I knew you’d come for m
The final word was unfinished.
Me.
Lily’s pen had trailed off as she’d evidently lost consciousness.
But her warning had done its job.
It had galvanised Aloysius Knight to sacrifice himself and give his helmet with its protective earphones to Jack. If the world was to be saved from Sphinx and the coming Omega Event—Aloysius had deduced in that split second—it was Jack West Jr, with all his historical knowledge and experience, and not Aloysius, who had the best chance of saving it.
Jack looked desperately around himself.
He was alone, on his knees, out in front of St Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square, wearing another guy’s helmet and earphones, with the limp body of Lily in his arms and the slumped bodies of Stretch and Aloysius on the ground beside him . . . while at least one hundred bronzemen had arrived around the cathedral, flanking it on every side.
‘You have got to be kidding . . .’ he said to no-one.
And then the small army of bronzemen stepped off the car-carriers in unison and started striding toward him.
The four groups of bronzemen closed in on the cathedral from all four of its corners.
In the face of their approach, Jack did the only thing he could think to do.
He threw Lily over his left shoulder. He detached the carbon-fibre gull-wings from Stretch’s body and grabbed hold of him by a strap on his dropsuit. As for Aloysius, Jack clipped his own fireman’s helmet onto Aloysius’s head, snatched him by the hard collar of his body armour and hauled him along the ground into the west portico of the cathedral.
He moved awkwardly backwards, dragging two men and holding one young woman on his s
houlder.
Lily wasn’t a huge burden. Twenty years old, slim and fit, she didn’t weigh much. In any case, Jack would have dragged her out of Hell itself with his last dying breath.
But Stretch was a full-grown man and Aloysius was heavier still.
It was a huge amount of weight for one man to pull, but Jack did it, grunting with the exertion, heaving with all his strength.
The four ranks of bronzemen kept advancing.
Jack dragged his companions under the portico’s awning, panting desperately, glancing back at the approaching bronzemen as he did.
There must have been thirty bronzemen in the group nearest to him. Four groups meant over a hundred in total.
Their footfalls boomed in the chilly air.
The body of a Russian Army trooper lay face-down on the ground between Jack and the bronzemen nearest to him.
The first bronzeman stomped on the man’s head, smashing it under its metal foot, making his skull burst like a tomato.
The following ranks of bronzemen, marching forward, ground the rest of the man to nothing, crushing his remains into the slush, discolouring the snow with his blood.
None of them even noticed what they were stepping on.
Jack did. ‘Shit.’
He kept staggering backwards under the weight of his daughter and his friends further into the portico.
If he could get back to the tunnel under the main nave, he might be able to—
And then Jack fell.
His foot slipped on some ice and he toppled onto the steps of the portico, losing his grip on Stretch and Aloysius and almost dropping Lily.
It was simply too much to carry all three of them on his own.
He couldn’t do it alone.
But he couldn’t leave them.
Wouldn’t leave them.
Jack bowed his head, exhausted, beaten.
‘Need a hand?’ a voice said from behind him.
Jack spun.
Alby stood at the top of the steps: a young black man of twenty-one, with one natural hand and one prosthetic one, and nothing protecting his ears.
Yet somehow he was okay . . .
He must have entered the cathedral via the underground tunnel from the Kremlin.
The Two Lost Mountains - Jack West Jr Series 06 (2020) Page 5