Dion raised the filament between their faces.
The ultra-thin string shimmered in the light.
‘Every last second.’
Then, quick as a rattlesnake, Dion brought the filament-blade down hard and Alby yelled in pain as his left hand came away at the wrist and fell into the abyss.
Lily screamed, but her guards held her tightly.
Her eyes searched the area, looking for someone, anyone who would stop this.
Her gaze found Sphinx: he was just watching Dion with a cool evaluating stare.
She glared at Jaeger Eins.
He shrugged. ‘Are you beginning to understand now?’
And then, in that horrible place, while Alby gazed in horror at his missing left hand, something very weird happened.
A phone rang.
A cell phone. Sphinx’s phone.
Sphinx frowned and answered it. ‘Yes?—When?—Okay, we are on our way.’
He hung up, looked at Dion and Jaeger Eins. ‘King Orlando has found the city of Thule. He has sent men into it and is now heading for Atlas. I must go and be there when he arrives. Is the other package on my boat?’
‘It is,’ Jaeger Eins said.
To Lily’s great surprise, Sphinx grabbed her firmly by the hand and pulled her with him. Was she his prize?
‘Let’s go,’ he said.
She resisted. ‘No—’
‘Lily!’ another voice called.
It was Alby.
‘Lily, go! Please’—he gasped—‘Please, go. Don’t see this. I don’t want you to see this.’
‘A nice sentiment,’ Sphinx said. ‘But in truth you don’t have a choice.’
Jaeger Eins and two other Knights dragged Lily to the gantry elevator leading down to the water hangar.
Joined by Dion, she, Sphinx and the Knights stepped into the elevator. Jaeger Eins closed its sliding grille.
‘Alby!’ Lily called. ‘I love you!’
In his cage, with sweat dripping off his face and one of his hands missing, Alby locked eyes with her.
‘I always loved you, Lily,’ he said.
And then Alby vanished from her sight as the elevator whizzed down the side of the rock tower.
The elevator arrived at the water hangar thirty seconds later.
There, Lily was taken to a huge, sleek, 130-foot Princess motor yacht parked beside the Hercules. The luxury boat was almost as big as the plane.
Sphinx had two bodyguards of his own waiting there and the Knights handed Lily off to them.
Pausing on the dock, Sphinx shook hands with Jaeger Eins. ‘Till we meet again, Hunter One.’
‘It is always a pleasure doing business with you, my Lord,’ Jaeger Eins said.
Sphinx then clasped Dion’s hand. ‘You have grown into a fine young man, Dionysius. You will be a great king, greater than your father, of that I have no doubt.’
Dion beamed. ‘I will not forget this; the aid you gave me in my time of need.’
Sphinx bowed.
Then he boarded his yacht after Lily, the seagate opened and the massive motorboat powered out through it into the night and was gone.
London, England
28 November, 1900 hours
It was evening in London.
While Zoe and Iolanthe ate some dinner and Sky Monster dozed, Mae Merriweather sat in front of a computer, illuminated by the glow of its screen, still searching doggedly for anything that might reveal the location of the Prison at Erebus.
After two whole days of failed searches, the mood in the flat at Vauxhall was grim. Despair had set in.
And then, as she scanned some 16th century royal Portuguese correspondence, Mae saw it.
She hurriedly grabbed the others and excitedly brought them to her computer.
‘I think I might’ve found something,’ Mae said. ‘I mean, it’s just a theory, but . . .’
‘Let’s hear it,’ Zoe said.
Mae took a breath. ‘Okay. The royal prison is called Erebus. In Greek mythology, Erebus was a region of the Underworld, its most forbidding depth, a place of pure darkness where death and misery were said to dwell.’
She turned to her computer and pointed to a note on it, an old parchment written in Portuguese.
‘I just saw this note about the famous missing King of Portugal. It mentions a place not unlike that. It was written to his cousin, Isabella, Queen of the Spanish Netherlands.’
‘Oh, my . . .’ Iolanthe said. ‘There’s a connection to the royal world there, too—’
‘Wait, there was a missing King of Portugal?’ Zoe asked.
‘Yes, King Sebastian I of Portugal,’ Iolanthe said, nodding. ‘It’s one of history’s most famous and peculiar vanishings.’
Mae explained. ‘King Sebastian disappeared after the Battle of the Three Kings in northern Morocco in 1578. His forces were routed in the battle, but despite much searching, Sebastian was never seen again. He just vanished from the face of the Earth.’
Iolanthe added, ‘In royal circles, that battle is seen as a struggle between rivals for the Land Kingdom’s African governorship. Sebastian tried to kill his rival and lost. He didn’t go missing. For his impertinence, he was sent to Erebus.’
Mae said, ‘Sebastian was very close to his cousin Isabella. Later, she would marry into the Habsburg line and become a minor queen. In that capacity, she employed a servant to find out what had happened to Sebastian. When the servant finally wrote back to her, he used some very specific and peculiar language—ah, here it is.’
Mae enlarged an image of a scroll, written in Portuguese. She translated it:
‘Your Majesty,
I have discovered the location of your beloved cousin. He lives, but in wretchedness, in a realm of ultimate darkness, in the company of Death and Misery, far beneath an ancient mine on the dreaded Barbary Coast, fifty miles east of the great slave market at Al Jazaer.
I dared not attempt a rescue. To have done so would only have resulted in my sharing his terrible fate.’
‘“In a realm of ultimate darkness, in the company of Death and Misery”,’ Mae quoted. ‘I read this as a reference to Erebus.’
‘“Fifty miles east of the great slave market at Al Jazaer”,’ Zoe said. ‘So where is Al Jazaer?’
‘That’s easier,’ Mae said. ‘The city of Al Jazaer is actually still known by the same name, only the spelling has changed. Al Jazaer is Algiers.’
They did a land-records check of the region east of Algiers.
Sure enough, there was a vast plot of privately held land there containing a gigantic open-cut mine. According to the records, it was owned by an Anglo-French mining company called Briparisi.
‘A company whose board of directors is stacked with shadow royals,’ Iolanthe said. ‘Ladies, we may have just found Erebus.’
Zoe didn’t waste any time after that.
First, she instructed Mae and Iolanthe to continue with the task Jack had originally given them: finding Sir Francis Drake’s coffin based on his note to Queen Elizabeth I.
Then Zoe called Stretch and Pooh Bear in India and met them eight hours later in Malta, in the heart of the Mediterranean Sea and only a few hundred miles from Algiers.
They weaponed up and looked at some satellite scans of the coast fifty miles to the east of the Algerian capital.
Zoe eyed the satellite images, zeroing in on the mine and some cement trucks that moved constantly up and down its road.
It was still dark, 4:45 a.m.
‘We don’t have a moment to waste,’ she said. ‘We go in now, before sunrise.’
And so, nearly three days after Jack had been taken in London—under cover of darkness, dressed in black scuba gear and wearing night-vision goggles and face-paint, and gripping silenced MP-7 submachine guns—Zoe, Stretch and Pooh Bear crept a
shore on the barren coast of Algeria, a few miles from the mysterious mine.
Once on dry land, they ditched their scuba gear and made the rest of the journey on foot, heading for the ancient impregnable prison that held Jack.
The vast crater was silent in the darkness, but it was not still.
Its automated cement-mixer trucks did not sleep, so they just kept labouring through the night, rumbling up and down the mine’s curving dirt ramp, going back and forth to the dock on the coast.
The three figures of Zoe, Pooh Bear and Stretch moved in perfect sync as they swept toward the mine, leapfrogging one another.
There were guards stationed at two watch-houses on the landward and seaward sides of the mine.
They never saw the three figures leap aboard one of the cement trucks as it returned from the dock, empty, and headed back toward the mine; never saw them scamper up onto its back and into its mixer.
The truck rumbled down the ramp and into the circular shed at its base.
Ten minutes later, that same truck was lowered into the prison cavern.
As it came down into the cavern on the extending arms of the elevator platform, Zoe, Pooh Bear and Stretch peered out from the cement mixer on its back and beheld the gigantic cavern one mile beneath the surface.
They saw the multi-levelled castle protruding from one wall, dominating the space. Then they saw the bridge over the pool of liquid stone leading to the Wall of Misery.
‘Lord in Heaven,’ Zoe breathed as she took in the full horror of the Wall.
‘There,’ Stretch whispered, pointing. ‘Bottom row. In the middle.’
Through her NVGs, Zoe followed Stretch’s finger and saw him, half-sunk into a stone slab, his eyes closed in sleep.
Jack.
Six black-clad guards stood in a silent circle in the centre of the cavern, waiting for the elevator platform with the cement truck on it to touch down. A few safety lights on the platform’s rim gave off a dim glow, sending long shadows into the cavern.
The elevator came to a halt—
—and Zoe, Stretch and Pooh sprang from its rear mixer, unleashing a stream of silenced bullets that cut down all six guards in an instant.
The three rescuers leapt down from the cement truck and ran across the bridge leading to the Wall of Misery.
Zoe came to Jack and touched his forehead gently.
‘Jack,’ she whispered. ‘It’s me.’
Jack’s eyes opened, groggy and weary, and then they burst wider in hope.
‘Zoe!’
‘Shhh. We’re going to get you out of here,’ she hissed.
Beside Jack, the madman named Rubles awoke. ‘Why, hello—’ Stretch slammed a hand over his mouth.
Zoe scanned Jack’s liquid stone slab and frowned. ‘I wasn’t expecting this. Shit. How do we extract you from the stone?’
‘You need to heat it very carefully,’ a distant voice called from the darkened castle overlooking the cavern.
Zoe, Stretch and Pooh all spun . . .
. . . as every light in the mine, both on the surface and in the cavern, came on.
Their eyes stinging, they yanked off their NVGs . . . and saw Yago standing on the main balcony of his subterranean castle, surrounded by twenty armed guards, all of their guns aimed at the three intruders.
Yago smiled. ‘But you needn’t worry about that. Soon, you will be joining Captain West in his misery. Please, drop your weapons. Your foolish rescue attempt is over.’
Zoe, Stretch and Pooh dropped their guns.
‘Oh, you’re in trouble now, so much trouble,’ Rubles said. ‘Trouble, trouble, trouble.’
Flanked by a pair of guards, Yago calmly strolled down the stairs of his castle and across the bridge until he stood in front of the three rescuers and Jack.
His other men—eighteen of them—took up positions on the main bridge, blocking any possible escape.
Zoe sighed inwardly.
They were screwed.
Yago stopped in front of her. ‘Ms Kissane, I presume? Ms Zoe Kissane, wife of Captain West? You are truly loyal to your man.’
He snorted. ‘We saw you on our underwater thermal cameras when you were a mile offshore. Out of curiosity, we watched you three come all the way in.
‘I must admit, you have actually done me a favour. It was very helpful to observe your method of entry. I shall know what precautions to take in the future. The perimeter guards who missed you slipping past will, of course, be shot.’
Yago turned to Jack.
‘Oh, Captain. I told you: no-one escapes from this place. You had hoped for a rescue from your friends, but it would appear that you are now officially all out of friends.’
At the exact same moment that Yago was saying this to Jack, a lone plane was flying high above the northern coast of Algeria.
It was a Russian-built fighter-bomber, a hover-capable Sukhoi Su-37, but it was not owned by any Russian.
Nor was it owned by any friend of Jack’s.
Thanks to a layer of black radar-absorbent material, it was invisible to radar.
As it shot above the coast, the plane loosed a small missile that streaked away into the night.
Then the sleek black plane accelerated across the hazy star-filled sky and turned upward until it was soaring almost vertically.
It was only then that a tiny figure leapt out of the plane’s bomb bay.
He was dressed entirely in black—black helmet, black fatigues, black gloves and a black utility vest covered in unusual tools and devices—plus a high-altitude oxygen mask and a parachute pack. He also had something compact and tubular strapped to his chest.
And one other thing: he and Jack West had never met.
Thanks to the plane’s near-vertical flight-path, the figure dropped perfectly vertically, with no sideways movement. This was important.
The man-in-black plummeted toward the Earth, his body stretched out like a spear, flying feet-first, reaching terminal velocity, his target . . .
. . . Yago’s open-cut mine, or, rather, the rusty shed in its middle.
As the man-in-black shot toward the mine like a human bullet, the missile his plane had fired moments before struck the mine.
It slammed into the iron shed that housed the mine’s elevator and blew it to smithereens. The shed’s walls and roof flew outward, exposing the wide round mouth of the mile-deep elevator shaft.
A few seconds later, the man-in-black—falling at close to two hundred kilometres per hour and perfectly vertically—shot straight into the elevator shaft and the real rescue began.
Down in the cavern, Yago felt the shudder of the explosion on the surface.
He spun. ‘What the hell was that?’
The man-in-black shot down the elevator shaft at blistering speed, its walls whipping past him in a superfast blur.
With three hundred feet to go, he activated his parachute, and in the confines of the wide cylindrical elevator shaft, it blossomed to life, arresting his fall.
He glided the rest of the way down the shaft, still moving quite fast, while unclipping four small objects attached to the black utility vest he wore.
In the cavern, Yago gazed around, unnerved. It was perhaps the first time he had ever felt uncomfortable in this place.
His guards on the bridge raised their guns.
All was silent.
And then, without warning, four small objects dropped out of the hole in the ceiling.
With metallic clinks, they landed on the steel elevator platform parked on the floor of the cavern with the cement truck still standing on it.
Grenades.
They detonated.
A zillion flakes of white chaff blasted out from the four grenades, filling the cavern with a wafting snow of the stuff.
The sticky flakes adhered to the uniforms of
Yago’s guards and drifted into the barrels of their guns.
Zoe was totally confused.
She glanced at Stretch. ‘Chaff grenades?’
A second later, the man-in-black burst out of the circular hole in the ceiling of the cavern, hanging from his parachute . . .
. . . now with the compact tubular object he’d been carrying mounted on his shoulder.
A Predator rocket launcher.
The guards opened fire at him—only to see their guns lock up after a single shot, jammed by the chaff.
Still wearing his high-altitude oxygen mask, the man-in-black took in the scene in an instant: he saw Yago and his two guards standing with Zoe, Stretch and Pooh Bear in front of the Wall of Misery; and the eighteen other guards on the bridge.
He didn’t hesitate.
He fired the rocket launcher at the guards on the bridge.
The RPG streaked out from the launcher and detonated right in the middle of the group of guards, exploding violently and sending them flying through the air into the pool of liquid stone.
As smoke billowed and the guards landed with dull squelches in the liquid stone, the man-in-black landed on the elevator platform and with frightening speed, jettisoned his chute and drew two short-barrelled Remington 870 auto-reload pump-action shotguns from holsters on his thighs—both guns, of course, were fitted with anti-chaff valves on their barrels—and sprinted across the bridge toward the Wall of Misery.
Jack watched the man in silent awe. The guy fired his silver-barrelled shotguns as if they were pistols, one in each hand, their auto-reloading actions allowing him to fire repeatedly as he ran—blam-blam-blam-blam-blam!
Beside Jack, Rubles started screaming—with pure joy. ‘Wahoo! Fuck yeah! Shoot ’em up! Shoot ’em all up! Fuck yeah!’
It was an absolutely blistering barrage of gunfire. The man-in-black was a one-man army.
The two guards covering Zoe and her team dropped, hit in the chest, their torsos exploding with blood.
A couple of guards who hadn’t been thrown into the pools of liquid stone were nailed in their heads.
The Three Secret Cities Page 19