Yago staggered for the stairs leading to the upper deck and the cockpit.
‘What do you mean, hacking the plane?’ he shouted angrily.
The plane banked wildly the other way, and Yago had to clutch the rail of the stairs so as not to go tumbling back down them.
‘Somebody’s taken control of our avionics! Looks like they hacked the navigation system! We no longer have control of this plane!’
Easton watched all this in both terror and confusion. The bronzemen who had been tasked with walking out of the plane with him had just been getting back to their feet when the second sudden banking move had sent them falling the other way.
And then, as if all this hadn’t been surprising enough, the most unexpected thing of all happened.
The rear ramp of the enormous plane began to rumble open.
A mini-cyclone of wind rushed into the hold, whistling around all the bronzemen standing in it.
Then, following the inrushing wind, came an entire seaplane, bouncing into the hold from behind, crashing through the ranks of bronzemen and knocking them down like bowling pins!
The plane was a little ICON A10 emblazoned with the name Sexy Prince One.
It skidded to a halt . . .
. . . and out of it leapt Jack West Jr, with two Remington shotguns raised, his teeth clenched and his eyes furious.
‘I’m looking for my friend, Easton!’ he shouted.
Of course, it wasn’t just Jack behind the daring rescue.
It was everybody.
And it hadn’t been easy.
As soon as Jack had heard from Alby that Easton had been taken by Sphinx’s forces at Alsace-Lorraine, he had got Alby to get a fix on the plane that had taken him.
The Super Galaxy had been found and, after a quick stop at Hades’s estate, Jack had asked Nobody to fly after it in their much smaller—but speedier—seaplane.
When they were within sight of the giant cargo plane, he’d told Alby—sitting in a black Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van that had been waiting at the other end of his escape tunnel and using Aloysius Knight and Rufus’s top-secret GPS-satellite/nav-system hack—to hack the Super Galaxy, take control of it, and open its rear ramp.
And then Jack had got Nobody to fly the little A10 seaplane into the Super Galaxy.
If anyone had been up in the sky to see it, it was, quite simply, an astonishing sight.
They would have seen the massive C-5M Super Galaxy thundering through the moonlit sky . . .
. . . only to then spy the tiny seaplane swooping up suddenly from below and behind it. Then the seaplane hit the gas and pressed forward, disappearing inside the bigger plane’s rear end!
The cargo hold of the Super Galaxy was a maelstrom of furious wind.
The seaplane lay tilted at a thirty-degree angle, with at least a dozen bronzemen pinned beneath it or hurled off their feet. But forty of them still stood, impassive and silent, unmoved by the spectacular entrance of the little seaplane into the hold.
Jack stood in front of the plane, his silver shotguns raised. Nobody sprang out beside him.
Standing near Easton, Yago pointed his ringed finger at them: ‘Bronzemen! Kill those men!’
The still-standing bronzemen turned their faceless heads toward Jack and Nobody . . .
. . . just as Jack levelled his two guns at them.
Yago laughed. ‘Your bullets are useless here, West!’
Jack gave him a wry grin.
‘Are they?’
And with those words, he raised his guns and fired them at the nearest bronzeman’s head.
The bullets slammed into the metal head of the bronzeman—and tore right through it, blasting out the back—and the bronzeman stopped dead in its tracks . . .
. . . and fell, immobilised, dead.
The look on Yago’s face said it all.
‘That can’t be . . .’ he gasped.
He couldn’t have known about Stretch’s project back at the estate, the one that had involved working away at the blade of the fabled sword Excalibur with a metal grinder.
The one that had involved affixing—by hand, with glue, one by one—a shaving of Excalibur’s gleaming blade to the tips of hundreds and hundreds of bullets.
That had been Easton’s tedious task.
He had spent many hours at it: affixing shavings to bullets and shotgun shells, hundreds of them, and then loading those rounds into clips.
Jack hadn’t had those rounds for the Moscow mission, but he had them now, having picked them up during his quick stop at the estate on the way here.
Jack and Nobody fired hard as they advanced together down the windblown hold—Jack with Aloysius’s silver shotguns, Nobody with two pistols.
Bronzemen fell on all sides as they were shot in the head.
But only shots to their heads dropped them. Anything astray of that—shots to the chest or limbs—only left holes in their metal skins but did nothing to slow them.
The C-5’s hold was now a bizarre scene: a crashed seaplane lying askew, many fallen bronzemen, many standing bronzemen, Jack and Nobody firing their guns as they moved forward from the rear and Yago and Easton up at the forward end of the long space.
‘Kill them! Kill them! Kill them!’ Yago roared.
There were bronzemen everywhere: too many of them, no matter how many special bullets Jack and Nobody had.
Easton looked from Yago to Jack and Nobody to the bronzemen and he knew he had to do something to help, so he sprang upward—his hands still bound behind his back—and shoulder-charged Yago from behind, knocking him to the metal floor of the hold.
As he himself hit the floor, Easton pulled up his knees and rolled his hands under his feet, bringing them in front of his body.
Jack and Nobody kept firing hard: left and right, right and left.
Jack’s shotguns boomed. Nobody’s pistols blazed.
But the bronzemen just kept coming, their faceless faces showing no fear as they advanced into the storm of specially tipped bullets coming at them.
Then Jack’s Remingtons ran dry so he holstered them and drew his Desert Eagle pistols from a pair of shoulder-holsters and resumed firing.
Nobody kept shooting as well, then he too went dry and hurriedly reloaded.
But they just kept coming.
And in that moment Jack knew.
He’d miscalculated.
There were just too many bronzemen.
He kept firing, even though in his heart he knew it was hopeless.
The bronzemen were all around him and Nobody.
Jack ‘killed’ a bronzeman with a shot to the forehead at point-blank range, just as another bronzeman swung a razor-sharp claw at his head.
Jack ducked the blow and shot that one, too.
Nobody covered their left flank, firing repeatedly. But for every bronzeman he shot, another took its place.
‘There’re too many!’ he yelled.
‘We gotta . . . keep trying . . .’ Jack called back just as the slide of one of his guns racked back, dry.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Easton and Yago rolling around on the floor, struggling, grappling, fighting.
And then a bronzeman smacked Jack’s other gun clean out of his hand and it went flying away. Jack dove against the wall of the hold, now totally defenceless.
The bronzeman advanced on him quickly, raised its clawed hand and without any hesitation swung at his throat and Jack shut his eyes—
—as a voice called, ‘Bronzemen! Stop!’
The bronzeman’s claw halted in mid-swing, inches from Jack’s neck.
Jack snapped round to see who had spoken and his eyes widened when he saw that it had been Easton.
The sweet little minotaur had kicked himself clear of Yago and was standing apart from him.
Hi
s hands were still cuffed in front of him but on one of them, he was now wearing Yago’s signet ring.
Every bronzeman in the hold stopped where it stood.
Jack was still pressed against the wall, but the bronzeman that seconds before had been about to slay him now stood dumbly and silently in front of him, motionless.
Yago sprang up from the ground, only for Easton to round on him and yell, ‘Bronzemen! Seize him!’
The two nearest bronzemen snatched hold of the furious Yago, gripping him by his arms.
And suddenly Yago and Easton’s roles were reversed: now the bronzemen held Yago in front of the short minotaur.
Wind whistled through the hold, but with the battle over, it was now much more quiet and still. It was only then that the other two passengers in the ICON A-10 dared to peer out from it: Iolanthe and Bertie. Iolanthe hopped lightly out of the plane. Bertie looked shell-shocked.
‘Nobody, Iolanthe,’ Jack said, ‘go up to the flight deck and bring down the crew.’
Nobody reloaded his guns and headed upstairs with Iolanthe.
Jack joined Easton, removed his handcuffs, and stared impassively at Yago.
Easton turned to Jack, clearly confused. ‘Captain Jack come to save Easton? Why?’
‘Because you’re part of my family now. Alby told me you got captured saving Ash. That in itself warrants a full-scale five-alarm rescue.’
‘But Captain Jack could have died. Saving Easton might have ruined your plan to save world.’
Jack gave Easton a kind smile. ‘We all get through this or we all die trying. No-one gets left behind, Easton.’
‘Thank you, Captain Jack.’
He handed Jack the signet ring. ‘Here. Easton think it is best for Captain Jack to have this. It command bronzemen.’
Jack turned the ring over in his fingers. It was exceedingly old and very striking.
Easton nodded at it. ‘If you wear ring, bronzemen will do whatever you command. He was going to have the bronzemen walk me out that door.’
Jack looked at Yago. ‘Is that so?’
Yago glared at Jack. ‘I should have killed you when you were at Erebus.’
‘As I recall, you were quite happy to let me rot there for the rest of my life,’ Jack said. ‘I was also at Hades’s penthouse in New York when you had all his servants killed. You’re a nasty piece of work, Yago.’
‘You can’t win this!’ Yago spat. ‘Sphinx is already at the gates to the Supreme Labyrinth. You will soon be living under his rule.’
Jack nodded sagely . . .
. . . as he slid the signet ring on his finger.
‘But you won’t. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Bronzemen, walk him out that rear ramp.’
Yago gaped in horror as the two bronzemen gripping him carried him toward the still-open rear ramp of the C-5.
Yago thrashed and screamed—‘No! Nooooo!’—as they dragged him to the edge of the ramp and without so much as a pause simply stepped off it and dropped out of sight, taking Yago with them.
He fell twenty thousand feet, screaming all the way down, before he and the two bronzemen slammed into the Earth together.
Jack was kinder to the two pilots of the Super Galaxy.
He bound their hands behind their backs and put parachutes on them. Then he shoved them out the back of the plane, yanking on the ripcords as he did so, causing the parachutes to open. The two pilots would survive the fall.
Then, standing there inside the hold of the massive Super Galaxy with Easton and surrounded by bronzemen, Jack did something unexpected.
He handed Easton the signet ring.
‘I think this should be yours, Easton,’ he said. ‘What we have here is a mini-legion of bronzemen and I can’t think of a better guy to command them. Thanks for saving my dog.’
He gave Easton a big hug, a hug that the short minotaur returned in full.
Jack gazed around the hold and his searching eyes landed on some paint cans. They appeared to be filled with pale blue Air Force paint, the colour one applied to the exterior of a plane.
‘Easton, you may want to use some of that paint to make sure we know which bronzemen are ours,’ he said.
Easton nodded. ‘Leave that to Easton, Captain Jack.’
‘Jack,’ Nobody’s voice came in over the plane’s intercom. ‘Where to now?’
Jack keyed the intercom. ‘Mont Blanc. In a hurry.’
While all this was happening, Hades’s estate lay eerily empty and silent.
Someone arrived at the estate.
Two someones.
A pair of men who gazed around at the evidence of the brutal assault that had taken place there.
The main house had literally been torn apart. Hit by the missile, its roof had been completely blown off. The once-gorgeous chateau was now a charred, open-air ruin.
The two men stared at the damage, taking it all in.
Then they strode away toward the lake.
THE AIGUILLE DU MIDI MOUNTAIN
IN THE MONT BLANC MASSIF
THE AIGUILLE DU MIDI
AND THE MONT BLANC TUNNEL
Mont Blanc Massif
French–Italian Border
24 December, 0340 hours
It wasn’t a long flight to the French Alps—barely thirty minutes—so Jack got there quickly in his new Super Galaxy cargo plane.
What he wasn’t expecting was all the activity on the airwaves as he arrived.
For as the snow-capped peaks of the Alps came into view—shimmering silver in the light of the full moon—frantic shouts and explosions blared out from his digital radio scanner.
Dion DeSaxe’s voice was yelling: ‘Keep firing! Keep firing, damn it!’
Another voice shouted: ‘Jaeger Eins, I got more enemy vehicles coming in from the Italian end of the motorway tunnel! Looks like the monks brought Romanian special forces with them.’
Jaeger Eins called: ‘Jaeger Drei, get over there with the bronzemen! Lord Dion and I are pinned down on the temple. Hold them off! We need more time in here!’
And behind it all, the roar of helicopter rotors.
As Jack beheld the colossal mountain range before him—with the great bulk of Mont Blanc lording over all the other peaks—he listened to the voices of his enemies.
It sounded like chaos down there.
When he’d initiated the radio interception algorithm, Jack had hoped to hear a few bland sit-reps or sentry check-ins that might give him a clue as to the location of the Falling Temple within the mountain range.
What he heard was gunfire, explosions, panicked orders and helicopters.
Dion’s voice again, furious: ‘Fucking Omega monks! Cut them down! CUT THEM DOWN!’
Jaeger Eins’s voice was calmer: ‘Knights, I repeat, hold off their reinforcements in the motorway tunnel. We can’t do the Fall in here until the clearing pod has removed all the ice and snow from the moon shaft. Jaeger Vier, report.’
‘Sir, this is Vier. All quiet here in the observa—’
Gunfire.
An explosion.
Screams.
‘Sir! This is Vier! Correction! We have hostile contacts attacking us up in the observatory! Maybe ten men in total. Paratroopers. Coming in from the air!’
‘Hold that observatory, Vier, till we do the Fall. Then carry out your orders. Eins, out.’
Jack listened in stunned silence.
Beside him in the cockpit of the stolen Super Galaxy, Nobody, Iolanthe, Bertie and Easton did the same.
Jack’s mind spun: temples, observatories, a clearing pod, the Knights of the Golden Eight . . . and one specific detail.
‘The motorway tunnel,’ he said. ‘That’s the way in. There must be a side tunnel branching off it somewhere under the mountain, a tunnel that gives access to the Falling T
emple. Iolanthe, you once told me that there was a hollow structure inside Mont Blanc that your father wouldn’t let you see. It must be the Hall of the Falling Temple. Looks like you get to it via the motorway tunnel that runs underneath the massif.’
Bertie asked, ‘What’s a clearing pod?’
‘It’s a little cable-mounted elevator-cage that you use to clean out mine shafts that have been clogged up with debris,’ Jack said. ‘Mont Blanc isn’t like Mont Saint-Michel. It’s been open to the elements for centuries, so its moon shaft must have got filled with ice and snow. Dion has to clear it out before the moon arrives directly overhead.’
Nobody said, ‘But it sounds like someone else came here as well: the Omega monks, with Romanian muscle.’
That was when a second set of voices—hushed, cooler and calmer—came in over the intercepts:
‘Brother Esrael. Take that temple chamber. If we are to help Brother Ezekiel, we must have control of this temple before the shaft is cleared, the moon is overhead and the DeSaxe boy can do the Fall—’
‘Copy that—’
Brother Ezekiel, Jack thought, hearing the familiar name.
The leader of the Order of the Omega, the secretive brotherhood of monks from Venice who knew more about the Omega Event than anyone and who had vanished a few weeks ago. Mae and Lynda had encountered a few of them in Rome and now more of them were here, evidently trying to perform the Fall and thus get access to the Supreme Labyrinth, and also, from what they were saying, to somehow help their leader, Brother Ezekiel, who was elsewhere.
‘The Omega monks,’ Jack said, his eyes narrowing. ‘This could be a break for us. While these two forces fight, we might be able to slip past them and do the Fall. Hit the gas. We have to get to that motorway.’
Opened in 1965, the Mont Blanc motorway tunnel connects France with Italy. It is over ten kilometres long.
An incredible feat of engineering, it is an important trade route that allows freight trucks from both countries to go under the otherwise impassable Alps.
As Jack knew, however, it is also slightly misnamed.
The Two Lost Mountains - Jack West Jr Series 06 (2020) Page 19