The second white-clad figure on the snowbike threw off her scarf to reveal herself to be significantly older than the rider. She was a woman of maybe seventy, with a wrinkled but kind face.
‘Move your ass, kid! We’re not here to hurt you!’ the older woman barked as she leapt nimbly down from the tray. ‘We’re nuns, we’re fans of the Oracle and we’re pissed as hell because these motherfuckers killed all our sisters at the convent! Now, haul ass!’
Alby hauled ass.
‘You’re nuns?’ he said as with the older one’s help he loaded Lily and Stretch into the tray of the snowbike.
‘Kick-ass nuns,’ she said. ‘She’s Sister Agnes and I’m Sister Lynda.’
With Lily and Stretch safely in the tray, Alby and Sister Lynda leapt into it and the old nun yelled, ‘Agnes! Punch it!’ and the younger nun in the saddle gunned the engine.
The snowbike peeled out, its rear tracks kicking up snow as it sped away down the wide frozen river, now chased by the three enormous car-carriers.
It zoomed southwestward, following the curves of the Moskva, heading toward a bunch of road-bridges that spanned the river.
Sunken twenty feet below the level of Moscow’s riverside boulevards, the frozen-over river was essentially a broad trench with high walls on both of its sides.
As the nimble snowbike sped down this trench, the big-engined car-carriers thundered over the ice behind it, gaining.
Alby looked back anxiously: the three car-carriers were huge and still bearing on their skeletal trailers at least a dozen bronzemen each.
And then, as Alby watched, a man in black combat gear—a Knight or squire of the Golden Eight, he guessed—leaned out from the cabin of the first car-carrier with a rocket launcher mounted on his shoulder.
He fired.
A rocket-propelled grenade lanced out from the launcher, issuing an extended trail of smoke behind it, and slammed down into the ice right in front of the fleeing snowbike.
A geyser of snow and ice blasted up into the snowbike’s path.
Sister Agnes cut right, avoiding by bare centimetres the gaping hole that the RPG had created in the ice.
‘They’re trying to break holes in the ice layer!’ she called.
‘Sons-a-bitches . . .’ Sister Lynda yelled.
Then another RPG came in.
Another explosion of snow and ice.
The snowbike banked hard around it before it whipped underneath the next bridge spanning the river—the Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge—shooting under its low steel arch just as the bridge’s north-side pylon was hit, devastatingly, by a missile.
This was not the work of a shoulder-launched RPG.
It was the work of a full-size air-to-ground missile . . .
. . . fired from the wing of Rufus’s Sukhoi Su-37, which now swooped in low over the frozen river behind their pursuers!
The Sukhoi’s engines boomed as it half flew, half hovered over the river.
Alby blanched at the sight of it.
This chase now involved one snowbike, three car-carriers and a Russian fighter-bomber flying over the frozen Moskva River in the middle of a comatose Moscow.
The Sukhoi’s air-to-ground missile had blown the north pylon of the Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge to smithereens—
—causing the entire steel bridge to collapse!
With its northern end blown away, the bridge toppled that way and fell.
The lead car-carrier managed to speed under it before the bridge came down, but not the second.
The immense steel bridge slammed down right on top of the second car-carrier, flattening the long vehicle and its occupants, before driving it down through the ice and under the surface!
The third and last car-carrier had nowhere to go.
The collapsed bridge was entirely blocking its path and it was travelling way too fast to stop.
Its driver hit the brakes, but it was no use, not on a surface this slippery: the speeding car-carrier smashed into the collapsed bridge, nose first, crumpling like an accordion.
‘Thanks, Rufus!’ Alby yelled.
Inside the Sukhoi, Jack looked down on the speeding snowbike now pursued down the wide river by only one car-carrier.
Jack was sitting in the rear seat of the cockpit, at the missile controls.
‘Keep us low, Rufus,’ he said to the big-bearded pilot. ‘I gotta make one more shot.’
He fired another missile.
A second air-to-ground missile lanced out from the Sukhoi’s right wing and thundered directly into the surviving car-carrier.
For a brief moment, the car-carrier lit up with white light before it blew apart in a colossal explosion.
The wild chase over, the snowbike pulled into a ferry dock at the same time as the Sukhoi landed on the roadway above the dock.
Alby rushed to Jack with Lily in his arms.
‘Thanks, Jack,’ he said.
‘Hey, thank you,’ Jack said. ‘I’d be dead if you hadn’t shown up at the cathedral before.’
He turned to the two women dressed in their bulky white snow gear.
‘We also owe you a debt of gratitude, ladies,’ he said. ‘I’m Jack West Jr. This is Lily and Alby. Who’re you?’
The older nun said, ‘Sisters Lynda and Agnes from the Order of Serene Maidens at Novodevichy Convent. Although to be honest we never really went in for all the nun shit, did we Agnes?’
‘Celibacy sucks,’ the younger nun agreed.
Jack blinked ever-so-briefly. ‘I appreciate you helping us out just now, but you’ll understand if—here, now, in an empty city—I’m a little wary of anyone I don’t know.’
‘Captain West,’ Sister Lynda said. ‘We know who you are. Everyone in our world knows who you are: the fifth greatest warrior and the surprise winner of the Great Games who threw the ruling royal elites into turmoil. A thoroughly deserved turmoil, in my opinion. And you and I have actually met before, although you were too young to recall it. I held you in my arms when you were a month old.’
Jack cocked his head, confused. ‘Wait. You knew my—’
‘Yes, I knew your mother,’ Lynda said. ‘A long time ago. Before she married that gigantic douchebag, Jonathan West Sr. I’d say marrying him was the biggest mistake of her life, but then she gave birth to you and you became the fifth warrior and all that.’
Lynda nodded at the unconscious Lily. ‘And we also know who she is: the Oracle of Siwa, the one you raised as your own daughter.’
‘And we know the nature of the sleep that grips her,’ the younger nun, Agnes, said meaningfully.
Jack eyed the two nuns closely.
Sister Lynda took a deep breath, collecting herself.
‘Captain, we’ve had a shitty fucking morning, so let me say this: you need not fear our motives or doubt our loyalty. Our order cheered your actions at the Great Games from afar and we have no love for Sphinx. He just murdered all of our sisters, a singular group of intelligent, kind and wonderful women.
‘Agnes and I were lucky. It was our turn to be designated survivors: every night two nuns have to stay offsite, in case something like this happens. Tonight was our night.
‘We were listening to it all on a live radio link,’ she added. ‘It was horrible. Sphinx toyed with our abbess Sister Beatrice before he threw her to some cannibal Vandals he brought with him and had all of our fellow sisters shot.
‘We are now alone in this world, but we are not powerless. We have knowledge that can help you stop Sphinx and we want you to stop him. We know all about the ancient bells he took from our convent and the sleep they cause, and maybe even someone who can undo it.’
‘Undo it?’ Jack said.
‘Yes. This will be vitally important given what Sphinx intends to do with the bells in the coming days. We also know about the trial he must perform to claim his thr
one.’
‘The second trial,’ Jack said. ‘The Trial of the Cities was the first one. The Trial of the Mountains is the second. “Five iron mountains, five bladed keys . . .”’
‘“. . . and five doors forever locked,”’ Sister Lynda finished. ‘I can also tell you something else.’
‘What?’
‘When the Omega Event will occur.’
Jack looked long and hard at the old nun before he jerked his chin at the plane.
‘Get aboard, then, and let’s get out of here.’
They boarded the Sukhoi, took to the sky and shot away from Moscow.
The fighter-bomber was not designed to carry so many people and was kind of crowded.
In addition to Jack, Rufus, Alby and the two nuns, it now also carried the comatose bodies of Lily, Stretch and Aloysius.
Sitting in the gunner’s seat in the cockpit, Jack keyed the secure radio. ‘Sky Monster? Pooh Bear? You guys out there?’
No reply.
Jack repeated his question.
Still nothing.
‘Rufus,’ he said, ‘Can you track the Sky Warrior? See where it’s got to?’
It took Rufus a minute.
‘Found ’em, but it don’t look good, Cap’n West.’
‘What do you mean?’
Rufus nodded at his radar screen. A lone dot on it was flying northward in a dead-straight line.
‘I mean, they’re flying due north, totally straight, but they ain’t responding,’ Rufus said. ‘That usually means a ghost plane. It happens when a plane loses cabin pressure and everyone on it passes out and the plane keeps flyin’ on autopilot. But here, well . . .’
Jack nodded, understanding.
‘Sky Monster and Pooh Bear got knocked unconscious by the ringing of that bell in Moscow and now the plane is flying itself on autopilot.’
‘Yup.’
‘What’s going to happen to it?’ Alby asked, standing behind them in the doorway to the bomb bay.
Rufus said, ‘Usually, a ghost plane just keeps on flyin’ till it runs outta fuel and crashes.’
‘We’re not going to let that happen to our friends,’ Jack said determinedly. ‘Chase it.’
Twenty minutes later the Sukhoi Su-37 caught up with the sleek black Concorde-like Tupolev Tu-144.
It was a tiny black dot several miles in front of them, flying in a steady straight line toward the northern horizon.
Sky Monster and Pooh Bear returned no hails.
The Sky Warrior just flew silently northward.
Jack, Alby and Rufus watched the distant plane from the cockpit of the Sukhoi.
‘Cap’n West,’ Rufus said, seeing something on his scopes.
‘Yes?’
‘Three aircraft just took off from Moscow behind us and are coming our way. They’re all C-5 Super Galaxy heavy-lift cargo planes. Those are big-ass planes, sir.’
‘You’d need some big-ass planes to carry all those bronzemen,’ Jack said. ‘And those Super Galaxies are some of the biggest you can get. They following us?’
‘Either us or your plane.’ Rufus nodded at the silent Sky Warrior. ‘To finish us off.’
Jack looked out at the tiny Tupolev, flying high in the grey sky far ahead of them, zooming dead straight, with its occupants Sky Monster and Pooh Bear not responding—
It came from above them, slamming into the Sky Warrior so suddenly it made Jack jump.
An orbit-to-air missile.
The Sky Warrior exploded, cracking in the middle before blowing apart in a billowing ball of fire. The broken pieces of the Tupolev Tu-144 peeled downward, trailing ribbons of black smoke as they fell out of the sky.
Jack’s mouth fell open.
Sky Monster and Pooh Bear . . .
Shot down. Killed in their sleep . . .
‘Oh, Jesus.’ Jack stared in shock at the smoking wreckage dropping out of the sky.
Rufus was also stunned, but he wasn’t looking down.
He was looking up.
‘I got a second one!’ he shouted as he yanked on his control stick and the Sukhoi banked hard left.
Jack and Alby were thrown sideways. So were the nuns in the back.
‘Initiating electromagnetic countermeasures!’ Rufus yelled, flicking switches.
An instant later, a second missile roared out of the cloud-strewn sky, coming at them vertically from directly above.
But it shot past, thanks to both the electromagnetic jamming signals Rufus had initiated and his quick banking manoeuvre. The missile screamed by so close Jack saw its white-hot tail flame.
‘Get us out of here!’ he called.
‘On it!’ Rufus replied.
The Sukhoi swept left as three more missiles rained out of the sky, launched from low-orbit Russian military satellites. The missiles, of course, were illegal, built in breach of every major treaty about weaponising space, but both Russia and America had them.
And clearly now Sphinx had the use of them.
Rufus’s countermeasures, however, sent these new missiles streaking harmlessly by and as the Sukhoi sped westward, away from Moscow and Russia, back toward Europe, Jack gazed sadly back at the spot where the Tupolev had been blown apart—with Sky Monster and Pooh Bear on it, unconscious and defenceless.
The remnants of the fiery explosion receded into the distance, wisps of smoking debris that floated down to the snow-covered landscape below.
‘Damn,’ Jack sighed. ‘Damn.’
He swallowed deeply, trying to process everything he’d seen that morning.
Moscow: struck down.
Lily, Stretch and Aloysius: unconscious.
Sky Monster and Pooh Bear: dead.
The Sky Warrior lost.
Missiles coming at them from orbit.
And three cargo planes filled with bronzemen chasing them.
Sphinx was rampaging toward his destiny with superior knowledge of the Trial of the Mountains and almost unlimited firepower. Christ, he had space-launched missiles at his disposal.
Plus, of course, the coming Omega Event.
Jack turned to the others.
‘Alby, call our team at Hades’s estate: Zoe, Hades, my mother and Iolanthe. Tell them we’re on our way and tell them I need to know everything they’ve got about the Trial of the Mountains, specifically the five iron mountains. We are now way behind Sphinx in this race. We need to put our heads together and figure out how we’re gonna catch up before it’s too late.’
St Peter’s Square
Vatican City, Rome, Italy
23 December, 1545 hours
The giant four-rotored military helicopter landed in the middle of St Peter’s Square, right beside the gigantic Egyptian obelisk that stands out in front of the largest and most important church in Catholicism.
The Pope himself stood waiting for it, his vestments billowing in the big chopper’s downdraft. He was a portly man, fat and jowly, unlike his predecessor, Francis. Also unlike Francis, this pope enjoyed the finer things in life.
Thousands of tourists, Christians from all over the world, gawked and took photos with their camera-phones, wondering who could possibly land a helicopter on the Vatican’s doorstep with the clear permission of the Pope.
The helicopter was one of the largest rotored aircraft in the world: a giant Mi-4000 quadcopter. It was a Russian-built heavy-lift troop carrier/gunship that was essentially two Chinooks bolted together side by side with steel crossbeams, creating a superchopper with four rotors.
The massive chopper dominated St Peter’s Square and from it emerged . . .
. . . Sphinx and Cardinal Mendoza.
They had flown here from Moscow.
Sphinx extended his hand to the Pope. Rather than the other way around, the Pope dropped to his knees and kissed the ring on Sphinx�
�s hand.
Some people in the crowd gasped. A few crossed themselves in shock.
‘Greetings, sire,’ the Pope said.
‘Do you have what we need?’ Sphinx said.
‘I do.’ The Pope waved forward two priests.
One carried a bronze globe.
It was obviously ancient, its surface covered in scratches and dents, yet it was still stunning: it was a glistening orb depicting the planet Earth. Protruding from it like tiny spikes were three little mountains.
The second priest carried a file filled with old documents and rumpled pieces of parchment.
The Pope said, ‘The ancient globe and every document we have on the location of the Orphean Bell.’
The priests handed them to Sphinx’s men.
Sphinx smiled his big leonine grin at the Pope. ‘Thank you, Your Holiness. A new world order is approaching.’
‘We cannot wait, sire,’ the Pope said. ‘The world has become a den of wickedness and sin. It is time to cleanse it. Restart it anew. Recommence things with our noble Church as the world’s moral leader at the top of the social hierarchy.’
He turned to Mendoza. ‘You have done well, Cardinal Mendoza, as I would expect of one so devoted to the precepts of Amon-Ra. I appreciate your work.’
Mendoza bowed his head.
Sphinx snorted.
Then he turned his back on the Pope and twirled his fingers in the air, indicating to his people that it was time to leave.
And then he did one more thing.
He quickly put on his ear-protecting headphones.
So did Mendoza.
The Pope frowned. ‘What are you—?’
He didn’t get out another word, for right then a second chopper rose up into view above Rome and a spherical bell hanging from it rang out loudly and the Pope collapsed.
It was quite a sight.
The thousands of tourists staring at the superchopper in the middle of St Peter’s Square all toppled as one, falling like dominoes.
It was the same across the whole of Rome.
Inside St Peter’s, inside coffee shops, inside cars, buses, planes and trains—people collapsed, succumbing to the mysterious sound of the Siren bell . . .
The Two Lost Mountains - Jack West Jr Series 06 (2020) Page 7