‘And reputedly built on top of the ruins of Solomon’s Temple,’ Zoe said.
Jack remained silent.
Then he said, ‘It makes sense. Everything we’ve encountered on this quest has had some connection to existing religions. Certain places are often considered sacred or holy long before they become modern places of worship.’
‘It’s the same with dates,’ Alby observed. ‘Look at today, Christmas Day. December the 25th was originally celebrated by pagan peoples simply because it was the date of the northern vernal equinox, the moment of the year when the days become longer. It heralds the end of winter and the arrival of spring and thus new life.’
Jack added, ‘Modern churches have long been built on local religious shrines. The Dome of the Rock—the whole old city of Jerusalem for that matter—is considered sacred by three religions. The reason it has tremendous significance today might well stem from a significance it had well before Judaism and Islam even existed. And it’s at one end of the Sword of St Michael. Given all that, I like it as a potential site of the fourth iron mountain—’
‘It’s Jerusalem,’ Rufus said firmly.
Everyone turned.
The big kindly pilot wasn’t exactly an expert on historical matters. Yet he had spoken with absolute authority and conviction.
‘How do you know that, big fella?’ Jack asked.
‘Because of that.’ Rufus pointed at a small television at his end of the communications console.
It was tuned to BBC World and on it was an incredible black-and-white shot captured by a closed-circuit security camera in Jerusalem at very long range.
The newsreader was saying: ‘. . . an extraordinary sight captured on a security camera shortly after the entire city of Jerusalem succumbed to the mysterious sleep that has affected ten other cities around the world . . .’
The TV showed a gigantic four-rotored aeroplane bristling with cannons and missile pods hovering above the glittering roof of the Dome of the Rock.
In the dusty air of Israel, the giant plane loomed above the ancient mount, flanked by smaller choppers.
It was Rastor’s V-88 Condor.
And it was already in Jerusalem.
Jack stared at the plane on the TV screen.
‘Shit, he’s there already and he has my mother.’ Jack spun. ‘Alby. Quick. What time will the moon be over Jerusalem tonight?’
Alby tapped away on his computer for a few moments.
‘It’ll be directly above Jerusalem at exactly 10:05 p.m. It’ll stay in that position for fourteen minutes.’
‘We have to get there now.’
Nobody said, ‘Jack, what about the small matter of the moon? It’s no use getting to that lost mountain if we can’t uncover the pedestal on the lunar surface.’
Jack turned to Alby. ‘What have you found?’
‘I found one option that might work, but I have to be honest, it’s a really shitty option,’ Alby said.
Jack shrugged wearily. ‘Right now, son, a shitty option is better than none at all. Hit me.’
Alby told them.
When he was finished, Jack nodded.
‘That really is a truly terrible option. The way I see it, this General Rastor wouldn’t be in Jerusalem if he didn’t have someone handling the moon issue. We’ll go to Jerusalem and hope to piggyback on his knowledge. As a back-up, Alby, I want you to execute the shitty option. Rufus? Are you game to fly Alby to his destination and help him there?’
Rufus looked from Jack to the sleeping figure of his friend, Aloysius, lying on a stretcher nearby.
‘I’m all in, Cap’n. Hundred per cent.’
Alby turned to Easton. ‘Where I’m going, I can’t take the dogs. You okay to look after them again?’
Easton nodded. ‘Always.’
Jack looked over at Iolanthe and Bertie, huddled in a corner of the comms room, discussing something between themselves.
‘Iolanthe? Bertie?’ he said. ‘Anything you’d like to share?’
Bertie said, ‘Captain West, I’ve been thinking about what your wife, Zoe, learned at the Vatican about the location of the blue bell. Specifically, that the Church’s notes about it were taken to “Albano’s emissary”. I have an idea about that and would like to investigate it further . . . in Italy.’
‘Do it,’ Jack said. ‘Nobody, Iolanthe, can you go with him and keep us informed?’
‘Will do,’ Nobody said.
‘Sure,’ Iolanthe said.
Sister Lynda looked up from her computer. ‘Captain, I think I’ve got a hit on Tracy Smith’s location. It could be nothing, but I found a report from some U.S. forces in Aleppo, Syria. Last month, as a bunch of bombs fell on the city, they tried to extract a white female ENT surgeon from Doctors Without Borders but she refused to go. They never got her name, but that sounds like Tracy.’
‘Go,’ Jack said. ‘We need all the help we can get with the Siren sleep. Zoe?’
‘I can fly Lynda there,’ Zoe said. ‘We can take the A-10, and squeeze Lily, Stretch and Aloysius in the back. If this lady knows the cure to that sleep, maybe she can wake them.’
‘All right, people, get moving,’ Jack said. ‘The battle’s already started in Jerusalem.’
THE DOME OF THE ROCK
ON THE TEMPLE MOUNT
JERUSALEM, ISRAEL
The Old City
Jerusalem, Israel
25 December, 2204 hours
The Dome of the Rock sits on the very edge of the Old City of Jerusalem atop a high natural hill known as the Temple Mount.
Over the last two millennia, the Temple Mount has gradually been encased by towering retaining walls and battlements—first by Herod the Great and later by both Christian and Muslim forces during the Crusades—so that today it appears less like a natural hill and more like an imposing square-walled fortress that gazes out over the lesser hills and valleys of modern Jerusalem.
It is considered sacred to Judaism and Islam and, to a lesser extent, Christianity.
The Jews consider it to be the site of Solomon’s Temple, long lost to history.
More than that, they believe that the Temple of Solomon’s most inviolable chamber, the Holy of Holies—the sealed room that housed the Ark of the Covenant, the chest that held the Ten Commandments—was situated on the Mount.
(Jack, of course, knew differently about the Ten Commandments. Rather than containing the ten primary laws sent by God to Moses, they were actually two identical tablets carved with an incantation written in the Word of Thoth. The biblical figure known as Moses was actually Thuthmosis, a renegade Egyptian priest who stole the two tablets from their resting place inside the second pyramid at Giza.
Jack had ultimately obtained the two tablets in a mine underneath the stone churches at Lalibela in Ethiopia during the adventure involving the six Ramesean Stones.)
In any case, devout Jews dare not even set foot on the Temple Mount, out of fear that they might accidentally step on the location of the Holy of Holies. Since the Mount is governed by Muslim authorities, the closest Jews can get to it is a segment of the Mount’s western flank which has become known as the Western or ‘Wailing’ Wall.
For Muslims, it is a little different.
While they revere the site and claim it as their own with great zeal, oddly, the sacred structure that they built on the Mount—the Dome of the Rock, with its striking hemispherical gold roof—is not a mosque.
It is simply a shrine.
An actual consecrated mosque—the Al-Aqsa Mosque—sits a few hundred metres from it, on the southern precipice of the Mount.
Indeed, the Dome’s original roof was not even made of gold, and for many centuries, Muslims cared little for it. While it was said to house the spot from which Mohammed had ascended to Heaven, the Dome lay in forlorn condition until the 20th century when, as reli
gious tensions mounted in the region, the King of Jordan restored it and added the golden roof.
Jack and his sub-team—Pooh Bear and Easton—had sped across the Mediterranean from France to Israel in the C-5 Super Galaxy. By the time they arrived above Israel, after taking into account the time difference, night had fallen on Jerusalem . . .
. . . and a laser-like beam of ethereal green light was lancing down from the moon . . .
. . . and General Rastor had totally and completely blown apart the Temple Mount.
THE TEMPLE MOUNT . . .
. . . AFTER RASTOR
The Old City
Jerusalem, Israel
25 December, 2215 hours
As he rocketed down through the night-time sky on a pair of gull-wings, Jack saw the extremely thin but amazingly bright beam of green light stretching down from the heavens and slamming into Jerusalem.
He was acutely aware that the beam would vanish in a few minutes—
Then he saw the damage.
‘Good God,’ he breathed as he saw what Rastor had done to the Temple Mount.
Rastor hadn’t just blasted open the Dome of the Rock. He had torn open one whole side of the Temple Mount.
A giant ragged hole yawned wide in the eastern wall of the Mount.
It was a huge and ugly gash at least a hundred metres broad.
Giant bricks from the once-mighty retaining wall—blasted outward by what must have been multiple gigantic explosions—had tumbled down the slope away from the hole and come to rest on the road there.
Floodlights ringed the site, bathing it in a white sodium glare.
But there was no movement.
No people were visible.
Two dozen abandoned military excavation vehicles were parked above and to the side of the great gash: bulldozers and cranes that had cleared away the debris to make access to the hole easier.
But their drivers and operators were gone.
And the citizens of Jerusalem, put to sleep by Sphinx’s bell hours earlier, hadn’t been able to offer any resistance to Rastor’s explosive actions.
There was no sign of the huge hover-capable V-88 Condor plane Jack had seen on the television and which Zoe and the others had encountered in Rome.
‘Alby,’ Jack said into his throat-mike. ‘How long till that beam from the moon vanishes?’
‘Four more minutes,’ came Alby’s reply.
Jack swooped in toward the gash, aiming for the now-exposed Falling Temple inside it.
Jack landed inside the enormous space, the whole area bathed in the eerie green glow of the beam shooting down from the moon.
The scale of the wreckage around him was monstrous. Boulders the size of buses surrounded him. Rastor’s excavation efforts had turned the Falling Temple’s once-underground space into a huge open-air grotto.
Jack hurried to the Falling Temple that, until tonight, had been hidden for thousands of years directly beneath the Dome of the Rock.
Like the ones at Mont Saint-Michel and Mont Blanc, this temple was shaped like a spinning top, with an eight-storey-high upper half made of stone and a spindlier lower half of eight open-sided levels connected by ladders on its slim golden pillars.
With the collapse of the cavern’s roof, the temple’s chains had fallen away and yet still, somehow, the structure was poised above the fall shaft.
It was then that Jack noticed four thick steel beams—man-made and modern—holding up the waist-section of the Falling Temple.
What was this? A trap?
Beneath the temple, Jack saw the fall shaft into which it had to drop in order for someone to perform the Fall.
Everything was lit by Rastor’s abandoned floodlights and the green beam from the moon.
This is wrong . . . Jack’s mind warned him.
He stood before the enormous Falling Temple, at the edge of the dark shaft underneath it.
Suddenly a radio squawked, shattering the silence. It was followed by a voice.
‘Greetings, Captain West.’
Rastor’s voice.
Jack whirled around, his eyes searching, and he saw a lone radio lying on the ground a few feet from him, beside the edge of the fall shaft.
‘You’re too late. Both to perform the Fall and to save your mother.’
Jack drew one of his guns and spun, looking for Rastor.
But there was no-one else here.
He was alone in the giant demolished space.
Then he spotted it: a small camera mounted on one of the abandoned bulldozers a short distance away.
Rastor was watching him from somewhere else.
Jack picked up the radio as Rastor spoke again: ‘Your reputation precedes you, Captain. A reputation for determination, for acts of remarkable heroism when all seems lost, for saving others when they cannot save themselves.’
‘While there’s still a chance, I don’t give up,’ Jack said into the radio.
‘Yes, but you are now officially out of chances,’ Rastor’s voice said. ‘I have performed the Fall already. I did it before you arrived here and hauled the temple back up with my plane. You, however, will get no such chance.’
At that moment, as if on cue, the green laser beam from the moon winked out.
‘Alby?’ Jack whispered into his throat-mike.
Alby’s voice said, ‘Jack, the light’s still on up there—you still have three minutes—but something’s blocking it. He must’ve just replaced the reflective Kapton cover on the pedestal on the moon.’
‘That’s precisely what I have just done,’ Rastor said. ‘But come now, Captain. There’s something else you want to ask me.’
‘Where’s my mother?’ Jack said flatly.
‘She is closer to you now than she is to me,’ Rastor said lightly.
Jack turned, his eyes searching the broken cavern around him.
‘Mum! Can you hear me? Mum!’ he shouted.
‘Jack . . . ! Jack . . . !’
It was Mae’s voice.
But muted, echoing, and in pain.
Jack stepped back from the Falling Temple so that he could peer down at its spindly lower levels.
‘Jack!’ his mother called again.
And he glimpsed her.
‘Holy fucking shit . . .’ he gasped.
He could just see Mae down at the lowest level of the Falling Temple.
She lay with her back pressed against the underside of the temple, her head facing downwards, looking directly into the dark abyss like some gruesome kind of figurehead on the leading edge of the falling structure.
Although Jack couldn’t see the terrible sight fully, Mae Merriweather had been crucified with masonry nails to the underside of the Falling Temple’s lowest level.
Rastor’s monstrous intent was clear: when the temple fell and hit the bottom of the shaft, she would be crushed to nothing as the rest of the heavy temple landed on top of her a split second later.
A sinister chuckle came from the radio. ‘What happens when you can’t save someone, Captain? Someone you truly love.’
Jack ignored him. ‘Mum!’ he yelled.
Mae turned her head as best she could and saw him.
Her arms were spreadeagled, cruelly affixed to the stone floor of the temple.
‘Jack!’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll save you!’
‘No! You have to leave!’
Jack’s mind raced.
This was out of control.
The wrecked Temple Mount—the green moonbeam blocked—the Falling Temple—and his mother nailed to the bottom of it poised above the drop.
‘Cubby,’ Mae said.
She said it calmly, firmly, despite her predicament.
‘You can’t save me and the world. Everything I need to say to you is in my Message from th
e Other Side. Now, go! Please!’
‘I can’t leave you to die . . .’
‘Jack! You have to! You have to GET OUT OF HERE AND SAVE THE WORLD! I love you, Cub! Fight to the end. That’s what you do. I’m so proud of you.’
‘Oh, Captain,’ Rastor’s voice said. ‘This is all so touching. But you have no idea what I am prepared to do to destroy this world. One thing I must do along the way, however, is break your spirit.’
Then it happened.
Explosive bolts on the steel beams holding up the Falling Temple at its waist blew and the beams snapped, and suddenly the temple dropped into the shaft with Mae attached to it.
Jack shouted helplessly as the temple dropped away from him.
With a loud whooshing sound, it shot down into the fall shaft that bored into the Earth beneath the Temple Mount . . . with Mae attached to its leading edge.
The Falling Temple plummeted through the darkness of the shaft.
And as it did, Jack West’s mother closed her eyes and took a deep calm breath—
—an instant before the whole massive structure slammed into the hard stone base and the heavy upper half of the temple crashed down on its spindly lower half, blasting through its thin pillars as if they were matchsticks and crushing Mae Merriweather to nothing.
Up at the top of the shaft, Jack heard the temple hit the bottom with a distant, resounding boom.
‘Oh, Mum . . .’ he breathed. ‘Oh, no.’
The following hour was a blur to Jack.
The shock of watching Mae fall to her death, horrifically attached to the Falling Temple, had rattled him terribly.
‘Jack!’ Pooh Bear’s voice called in his ear. ‘Get to the Jaffa Gate! We’ll meet you there to extract you!’
Then he was stumbling through the rabbit warren of alleyways that was the Old City of Jerusalem, heading westward for the Jaffa Gate.
Through the alleys he staggered, bouncing off walls in a daze, his mind racing with images of falling temples and his mother’s awful violent death.
Bumping off one wall as he rounded a corner, his headphones were knocked off his ears and dangled around his neck.
The Two Lost Mountains - Jack West Jr Series 06 (2020) Page 24