For the Mont Blanc Tunnel does not actually pass beneath Mont Blanc. Rather, it passes directly underneath the summit of another mountain of the Mont Blanc Massif: the high peak known as the Aiguille du Midi—the Needle of Midday.
The Aiguille du Midi is a truly striking mountain, tall and slender, with almost vertical flanks dropping away from its pointed peak. A cluster of man-made structures sits atop that summit, perched precariously above the drop, looking out over the glorious mountain range.
Among these structures—all connected by walkways and bridges—is a cable-car station, some tourist viewing balconies, a twelve-storey-tall astronomical observatory with a domed roof encasing its telescope and, on the mountain’s summit, a high needle-like antenna.
As their huge plane began its descent, Jack looked out at the snow-covered mountains below him. The Mont Blanc Massif was a mini mountain range of eleven peaks that were part of the larger French Alps.
‘We don’t have time to be pretty about this,’ he said grimly. ‘We go in hard and we go in ugly but most of all, we go in fast.’
Fifteen minutes later, with the blazing full moon now almost directly over the Mont Blanc Massif, Jack’s stolen Super Galaxy zoomed in low over the Alps.
Alby had done the calculations. The moon, with its pedestal, would be directly overhead at 4:03 a.m.
Suddenly, two tiny figures—Nobody and Iolanthe, dressed in high-altitude parachute gear—dropped out of the Galaxy’s rear ramp and plummeted through the sky toward the moonlit mountains.
Back in the Super Galaxy, Jack, Easton and four of their newly- painted bronzemen manoeuvred the A10 seaplane—still sitting askew in the hold—toward the open rear ramp.
Since the heads of Easton’s bronzemen were all now splattered with pale blue Air Force paint, Jack had decided to call them ‘palemen’.
Jack tethered the seaplane to the Super Galaxy with a cable and ordered Easton and the four palemen into it.
As they jumped inside, Jack went over to Bertie, the last remaining member of their team on the plane and the only one who would stay on it, with the remaining thirty palemen.
Bertie looked doubtfully at the little seaplane. ‘The landing gear looks like it took a beating when you crashed this plane inside the hold. You sure you can land it?’
Jack shrugged. ‘It’ll be okay. Landing gear isn’t necessary for my plan.’
‘Okay,’ Bertie said. ‘What about this plane? Tell me again how this cargo plane is going to land safely without anyone flying it?’
In answer, Jack hit his radio. ‘Alby? You there?’
‘Copy, Jack,’ came Alby’s voice.
‘Have you got full control of the C-5M now?’
Alby said, ‘Banking left now.’ The plane banked gently to the left.
Jack nodded to Brother Bertie. ‘Alby has control of this plane. He’ll land you at a private airport outside Dijon. It’s the best I can do, unless you want to join me in a hellish firefight.’
‘Well, I . . . I mean—’ Bertie stammered.
‘You’ll be fine,’ Jack said. ‘I gotta go.’
‘But will you be fine?’ Bertie said. ‘That nasty DeSaxe boy, the Omega monks, the Knights of the Golden Eight, plus who knows how many bronzemen. You don’t know what you’re flying into.’
Jack pursed his lips and nodded. ‘We still have to try. See you on the ground.’
He strode back to the seaplane, now perched on the edge of the Super Galaxy’s rear ramp.
He untethered it, then climbed in and nodded to Easton, who called to the first row of palemen still standing in the hold: ‘Push this vehicle out!’
The palemen did so and with a sudden lurch . . .
. . . the seaplane dropped, rear-end first, out of the cargo plane.
It fell through the sky backwards at first, before reorienting itself nose-down . . .
. . . when its engines kicked in and the plane swooped away, guided by Jack in the pilot’s seat, heading full tilt toward Mont Blanc and the Aiguille du Midi.
Jack recalled Dion saying over the radio that the Omega monks’ forces were attacking from the Italian end of the car tunnel, so he aimed for the northern end, the French end, near the town of Chamonix.
Jack flew low and tight against the mountains, keeping to the valleys and canyons so as to avoid being detected by any radars, until at the very last moment, as his little seaplane approached Chamonix, it sprang out from behind a mountainside, banking hard and zooming fast.
As Jack had hoped, Dion’s forces had gone into the tunnel to tackle the Omega threat coming from the other end, which meant there were only a few vehicles here: three troop trucks and a couple of machine gun–mounted jeeps.
Dion’s troops were all caught by surprise by the sudden appearance of the seaplane whipping out from the darkness behind a nearby mountain.
They were doubly surprised when the little plane, flown determinedly by Jack, didn’t stop.
It swept in over the road, zooming just above the vehicles parked near the tunnel’s entrance, impossibly low, before—whoosh!—it shot like a bullet into the motorway tunnel!
From Jack’s point of view, it was hair-raising.
One second he was soaring in the silver moonlight through snow-covered canyons flanked by rocky mountainsides.
The next, he was blasting out over the road and some military vehicles and then—
—whoosh!—
—the walls of the tunnel were shooting past him on either side in superfast blurs of motion.
The tunnel was modern and wide, with two broad lanes big enough to accommodate two full-sized semitrailers travelling in opposite directions, plus raised sidewalks on either side in case of breakdowns.
Which is to say the car tunnel was just wide enough for Jack’s seaplane to fly down it at insane speed.
It took all of Jack’s concentration to keep from hitting the tunnel’s walls with his wingtips, but he managed it and after a short time, he saw them: a larger cluster of parked trucks, motorcycles, jeeps—and dead bodies, perhaps twenty of them—arrayed around an open escape door set into the left-hand wall of the tunnel.
He turned to Easton and his four palemen. ‘Hang on! This is gonna be really ugly!’
What he’d said about not needing landing gear was true.
Jack pressed forward on his steering yoke and brought the seaplane into a controlled skid against the asphalt surface of the tunnel’s roadway.
The sleek A10 touched down . . . its landing pontoons screaming against the asphalt before snapping off . . . and then the little plane skidded on its belly, kicking up a thousand sparks . . . right into the midst of the vehicles parked at the side door.
The runaway seaplane drove through the cluster of vehicles, sending them flying every which way, before it hit a jeep, bounced off it and slammed up against a parked troop truck.
Jack was already moving, unbuckling his seatbelt and kicking open his door.
Easton and his palemen did the same, following him.
In his radio earpiece, Jack heard gunfire, the roaring of chopper rotors and the desperate shouts of Dion and the Omega monks doing battle inside the temple chamber.
Jack pointed at the large escape door set into the left-hand wall.
‘Easton! Get your palemen into formation around us. We’re going into a hornets’ nest, where two groups of hornets are already fighting.’
With those words they ran from the crumpled seaplane—Sexy Prince One, once Dion’s pleasure flyer but now a battered wreck—through the side door that led to the Hall of the Falling Temple of this Iron Mountain.
They ran for about a hundred metres down a wide rough-walled tunnel.
At the end of the tunnel was an enormous ancient archway covered in Thoth glyphs and, on its magnificent keystone, a primitive version of Newton’s drawing of the moon poised over th
e Earth, its lone mountain aimed down at one on the surface of the Earth.
Artificial light from floodlights leaked out through the archway from within.
Flashes of gunfire strobed.
The thump-thump-thump of a helicopter shook the air.
And Jack caught glimpses of running men—or bronzemen, he couldn’t tell—racing across the entryway, silhouetted against the light.
He swallowed.
It was a hornets’ nest all right.
Then he arrived at the archway and gazed out into the space and said, ‘What have we walked into?’
THE FALLING TEMPLE
INSIDE THE AIGUILLE DU MIDI
(SIDE VIEW)
THE FALLING TEMPLE
(OVERHEAD VIEW)
It was absolute pandemonium.
The battle raging inside the chamber of this Falling Temple was big, wild, loud and bitter.
There was movement everywhere and it took Jack a moment to take it all in.
First, there was the place itself.
It looked broadly similar to the Hall of the Falling Temple he’d seen at Mont Saint-Michel: a gigantic rock-walled cavern with a gorgeous multi-levelled spinning top-shaped temple in its centre. As at Mont Saint-Michel, this Falling Temple was suspended by ancient chains above a broad shaft that plummeted into the bowels of the Earth.
Likewise, directly above the temple was a much narrower shaft—barely wider than a man—that shot upward, presumably, Jack figured, all the way up through the body of the Aiguille du Midi to its summit.
A tiny cable snaked out from this smaller shaft, reaching down to the top level of the Falling Temple where it ended at a little man-sized cage.
The cage had a motorised winch of some kind attached to it, plus a lever. It was the shaft-clearing pod that Dion’s men had used to clean out the moon shaft, preparing it for the moon’s arrival overhead.
Jack figured that among the many structures perched on top of the Aiguille du Midi, one was basically a cap that concealed the moon shaft. But those structures hadn’t been built till recent times. Centuries of hard-packed snow must have filled the shaft and Dion had had to clean it out.
But that was just the place.
Then there were the two rival forces in it—men, vehicles and weapons.
The two forces were positioned simply: one was in the centre of the cavern, either on or defending the Falling Temple. That was Dion and his people.
The second force was arrayed around the temple, trying to move in on it and take it. That was the Order of the Omega and their troops.
Jack took in the battle from the centre outward.
Standing on the temple itself, taking cover behind its obelisks and podiums, were Dion DeSaxe and Jaeger Eins, firing their guns desperately.
They were on the second-to-top level of the temple, trying to reach the enormous main obelisk on the topmost level, and they were flanked by two Knights of the Golden Eight, their guns also raised and firing.
Ringing the base of the Falling Temple—just outside the narrow gap between it and the edge of the shaft—were perhaps fifty bronzemen, facing outward and now armed with glistening bronze spears. Jack didn’t know where they’d got those from.
But the Knights and the bronzemen were not Dion’s only allies.
Not one but two Super Stallion helicopters hovered in the air above the temple, tongues of fire blazing out from their side-mounted cannons, defending Dion.
It was an impressive and bizarre sight: seeing two of the world’s biggest military choppers flying inside an enclosed space like this.
They fired heavy-bore tracer rounds and their already deafening rotor-noise echoed off the walls of the giant cavern, making it hard to hear anything else above the din.
Thick hauling chains dangled from the two choppers, flailing around like dangerous whips as the two choppers banked and fired.
Why bring helicopters here? Jack thought.
And then he saw the chains above the Falling Temple and he understood.
The chains were frozen solid, encased in thick ice. Dion had brought the choppers in to haul up the Falling Temple—with him on it—after he’d performed the Fall.
Three tanks, three troop trucks and two long flatbed transporter trucks—which must have brought in the choppers with their rotors folded on their backs—were parked at the near edge of the temple.
Jack then took in the second, outer force trying to reach the Falling Temple.
It comprised five military jeeps, each mounted with a powerful 23-millimetre anti-aircraft cannon and marked with a blue-yellow-and-red flag on its flanks.
The jeeps were parked just inside the archway, their cannons pointed both upward at the choppers and downward at the bronzemen, the camouflaged soldiers on their rear trays firing relentlessly at both targets. Unlike regular pistol and rifle rounds, the larger anti-aircraft rounds hurled the bronzemen off their feet, forcing them back but not killing them.
Jack saw the blue-yellow-and-red flag painted on the jeeps.
The Romanian flag.
Romanian troops, he thought. The Omega Order’s muscle. Probably a handful of ultra-conservative Catholic regiments from an ultra-conservative Catholic country, glad to assist the ultra-conservative order of monks.
Sure enough, Jack saw then that the two men leading the Romanian troops, barking orders at them, were Omega monks.
And, last of all, there was Easton and him and their four palemen.
‘Okay,’ Jack said, ‘how are we gonna do this—?’
At that moment, a rogue bronzeman appeared right beside Jack, emerging from underneath a toppled vehicle, and lunged at him, only for two of the palemen to cut between it and Jack, tackle it and fight it off.
‘Sheesh . . .’ Jack gasped.
‘Jack!’ Alby’s voice burst through his earpiece. ‘The moon is coming into position above the Aiguille du Midi! It’ll be in place directly above you in about ten seconds and stay there for fourteen minutes. If you want to do the Fall here, you better get moving!’
‘Right,’ Jack said, his mind spinning.
Suddenly, one chopper’s tracer fire hit one of the jeeps and there was a huge explosion and the jeep flew backwards through the air, slamming into the wall a metre to Jack’s right.
Return fire from three of the other jeeps hit that Super Stallion and its engines blew apart. It wheeled in the air and began to list . . . falling . . .
. . . and with a colossal noise, the great chopper crashed down on top of twenty bronzemen, its rotors slashing against the stone floor of the chamber, kicking up sparks, emitting an ear-splitting squeal before the entire chopper exploded and shrapnel showered out like bullet-fire in every direction.
Every man in the cavern, including Jack, ducked for cover as sizzling pieces of the chopper lodged in the walls.
The bronzemen didn’t duck. Those that were in the direct line of the explosion were knocked down by the force of the blast or the shrapnel, but not killed.
It was exactly the distraction Dion needed.
For right then, it happened.
The clock struck 4:03 and the moon moved into position directly above the Aiguille du Midi and a laser-like beam of green light shot down from it into the mountain’s moon shaft and slammed into the obelisk atop the Falling Temple, illuminating the entire cavern in an unearthly green glow.
Jack looked at the brilliantly illuminated temple in dismay. ‘No!’
He could only watch helplessly as, at that moment, while everyone else in the cavern was still taking cover, Dion bounded up onto the topmost level of the Falling Temple.
There, covered by Jaeger Eins and the other two Knights of the Golden Eight, their guns extended and firing hard, Dion planted his right hand on one of the palm symbols at the base of the main obelisk and suddenly the whole massive
sixteen-storey temple dropped from Jack’s sight, disappearing into the shaft.
The temple fell fast, the walls of the shaft whipping upward on every side of it.
On the temple, Dion knew what he had to do, and with Jaeger Eins by his side, after holding his palm to the altar as it passed through the upper annulus, he sprinted down the many levels of the temple—its eight upper levels and its eight lower ones—until he came to the bottommost level, where he planted his palm on a hand image cut into the second altar there just as the temple shot through the lower annulus set into the shaft’s curving walls.
He now had the vital key-marks seared onto his hand.
And then, just as had happened with Sphinx at the Falling Temple at Mont Saint-Michel, the ‘brakes’ of this temple extended out from its middle level and grinded loudly against the stone walls of the shaft, bringing the great falling structure to a spectacular halt.
Gasping with relief and exhilaration, Dion and Jaeger Eins looked at each other and clasped hands.
Dion had performed the Fall.
Dion clambered back up onto the upper half of the Falling Temple.
He looked up the shaft.
High above him, tiny in the distance, he saw his remaining Super Stallion chopper, its rotors spinning in a blurring circle.
He keyed his radio. ‘Chopper Two, get down here and pick us up. With Chopper One down, we won’t be able to haul this temple back up. Come down and get us!’
He caught his breath and keyed his radio again. ‘Observatory team. We’re done down here. You good up there?’
‘We’re fine, sir,’ came the reply from the Knight up there, Jaeger Vier. ‘We held them off and killed them all. They appear to have been Romanian paratroopers.’
Dion said, ‘Use the lunar rover to cover the pedestal again with the Kapton foil sheet and then destroy the uplink to the rover. No-one else can be allowed to do another Fall at any other mountain now.’
Dion turned to Jaeger Eins. ‘My friend, we did it. Let’s get the fuck out of this place and go join Sphinx at the Labyrinth.’
The Two Lost Mountains - Jack West Jr Series 06 (2020) Page 20