The Milky Way would be blasted apart. The sun and every planet in the solar system would either be vaporised in an instant or scattered into space.
And we’d never see it coming.
We would actually be long dead before the runaway galaxy smashed through the Earth. It was so immense, its gravitational effects so strong, it would rip the Earth asunder from many light years away. Our deaths would be instantaneous—one second we would be here, the next we would not.
‘How long have we got?’ Jack asked.
Redbeard stepped in. ‘At its current velocity, we estimate that the runaway galaxy’s destructive gravitational field will start to affect us in approximately two months. Earth has sixty days to live.’
‘Jack,’ Abrahamson said, ‘we’re lucky we turned on the SKA Array when we did. We would never have seen this coming.’
Jack stared at the galaxy depicted on the screen. ‘So what do you think I can do?’
Abrahamson said, ‘I don’t know. But I do know that you’ve seen some crazy shit in your travels. I was hoping maybe one of your history books or ancient texts might mention this thing.’
Jack looked again at the image on the screen. ‘It does resemble the tetra-gammadion . . .’
‘The tetra what?’ Redbeard asked.
‘The tetra-gammadion. The symbol that today we call the swastika, although this one is reversed,’ Jack said.
He grabbed a pen and paper and scribbled quickly. ‘It’s usually drawn like this, with four curved or bent outer arms, four inner arms and some dots nestled inside them.’
‘A swastika?’ Abrahamson said distastefully.
Jack said, ‘Long before Hitler and the Nazis appropriated the swastika and made it a symbol of evil, it was actually a very positive religious symbol meant to bring good luck and ward off wickedness. In India, for example, it’s sacred to both Buddhists and Hindus. There are also older examples. Swastika images have been found in the Ukraine that date back to 10,000 B.C. Oddly, no-one has ever discovered what made the symbol so popular in those ancient cults. Maybe it was this galaxy.’
Redbeard shook his head. ‘How could ancient civilisations know of a galaxy halfway across the universe? One that we couldn’t see until now?’
Jack said, ‘It’s happened before. The primitive Dogon tribe in West Africa knew that the star, Sirius, had two companion stars long before we confirmed it with modern telescopes.’
‘And how do you explain that?’
‘I can’t,’ Jack said. ‘No-one can. Visitors from space? Time travellers giving them advanced knowledge? The world is full of things we don’t understand. I’ve seen enough of them to keep an open mind.’
Jack turned to Abrahamson.
‘That’s the best I can offer you, sir. Maybe I can look up the tetra-gammadion in some of my books and texts but, really—’
It was then that Jack smelled it.
An odd odour.
He frowned. He suddenly began to feel dizzy.
He spun . . .
. . . and saw the nearest air-conditioning vent.
A faint gas was issuing from it, causing the air to shimmer.
‘There’s something in the air ducts,’ he said just as, on a nearby security monitor, he saw masked men with assault rifles burst into the reception area of the base.
‘We . . . have to . . . move . . .’ His speech was slurring now.
Jack turned to face Abrahamson just as, to his horror, he saw Redbeard draw a pistol and fire it into the back of Abrahamson’s head.
Then Redbeard calmly put on a gas mask.
Jack staggered away.
His mind was a blur and his legs felt like lead. Whatever the gas was, it was making him groggy, slow, dull.
Must get . . .
. . . to Lily and Alby . . .
He lurched pathetically away from Redbeard. Redbeard calmly followed him, gun held lazily.
‘Don’t worry, Jack,’ Redbeard said. ‘I’m not going to kill you. I need you. My royal house needs you.’
His eyes watering, his throat tightening, his balance failing, Jack stumbled out the doors of the control room. He teetered a short way down a corridor and realised that he wasn’t going to make it back to Lily and Alby.
He needed to do something.
He looked about himself and saw it: a kitchen. It looked like a regular office kitchen, with a microwave on the bench and a refrigerator by the door.
Jack fell into the kitchen and toppled the refrigerator so that it blocked the door, at least for a short while.
Thirty seconds later, General Conor Beard shoved aside the fridge and fully entered the kitchen, his pistol raised.
Redbeard smiled. ‘Don’t be afraid, Jack. You’ve been chosen for a very great honour. Who knows, maybe you can do something about this runaway galaxy.’
The last thing Jack saw, blurry and out of focus, was Redbeard’s gas-mask-covered face.
Then he lost consciousness and everything went black.
He would wake up two days later in a dark stone cell in time to see a minotaur charging at him with a knife.
Two hours after the gas had been released throughout Pine Gap, two figures arrived at the secret base in a private jet bearing the markings of the United Arab Emirates.
They could not have been more different from each other.
One was tall and skinny; the other short and round. The tall one was clean-shaven, the short one had a heavy beard that was held in check by a jewelled brass ring. The tall one was handsome; the short one was not: he even wore a pirate-like eye patch over his left eye.
Their real names were Benjamin Cohen, former captain in the Israeli Mossad, and Major Zahir al Ansar al Abbas, second son of the Emir of the United Arab Emirates.
Despite their differences, they were the firmest of friends, brought together by a common cause and a mutual love of a little girl and her father.
They were known to their friends by the names Lily had bestowed on them many years ago: Stretch and Pooh Bear.
Bad weather over the Indian Ocean had delayed them and now they were two hours late for the meeting. They stood at the base of the airstairs of their private jet.
‘Something’s wrong,’ Pooh Bear said, his good eye scanning the base. ‘Where’s the Sky Warrior?’
Jack’s plane was nowhere to be seen.
‘Where are the guards?’ Stretch said. ‘This base is Level Nine Restricted. There should be a lot of men with automatic weapons out here and there’s nobody.’
They both drew their guns.
Then, very cautiously, they headed inside.
Inside the main building, they beheld the evidence of a fierce firefight.
The walls were shredded with bullet holes. Blood splatters were everywhere. Five dead guards lay piled behind the reception counter with bullet holes in their heads.
‘Jack . . .’ Pooh Bear started running, searching every room.
There was not a single person alive in the place.
They found the body of General Eric Abrahamson lying face-up, eyes open, inside a Mission Control–like room. They searched the rest of the building.
No Jack, Lily, Alby or Sky Monster.
Pooh Bear and Stretch exchanged a look.
‘Why kill everyone but take Jack and his crew?’ Stretch asked.
Pooh Bear scanned the eerie rooms of the deserted, bloody base.
‘Jack West Jr doesn’t emerge from his secret home very often,’ he said. ‘Maybe that was their goal: to take Jack. They got wind that he was coming here and they set a trap. Everyone else was just collateral damage.’
Stretch sniffed the air . . . and frowned.
‘Smells like chloroxipham.’
‘What’s that?’
‘A quick-acting nerve gas,’ Stretch said. ‘Non-letha
l. They must’ve piped it into the air-con.’
‘Who uses it?’ Pooh Bear asked.
‘Western anti-terror units mainly,’ Stretch said. ‘The British SAS are known to use it in siege situations. If terrorists take an embassy or a theatre, they pump it into the air-conditioning ducts to knock out the bad guys but not kill any hostages.’
Pooh Bear started striding down a corridor. ‘Hopefully Jack stayed conscious long enough to leave us a message.’
He turned into the base’s kitchen and went straight to the refrigerator tipped on its side.
It was a fallback protocol they had for use in emergencies.
If any of Jack’s team were to encounter trouble at any place, they were to find the kitchen—since almost every venue had one—and there they were to leave a message in the one thing that most kitchens had: a milk bottle or carton.
Pooh Bear pulled a milk carton from the sideturned fridge and tipped its contents out.
Milk poured out of the carton . . .
. . . and so did something else.
A teaspoon.
It came tumbling out of the milk carton and clattered into the sink.
‘Good work, Jack!’ Pooh Bear said, snatching it up and examining it.
There was writing on the little spoon in black marker. It read:
‘What is that symbol?’ Pooh Bear asked.
‘No idea,’ Stretch said. ‘And “MM”. Do you think Jack means—?’
‘Oh, man, yes.’
Stretch looked from the spoon to Pooh Bear. ‘He must be in serious shit. MM. Mabel Merriweather. A most formidable woman once known as Mabel West. Jack wants us to go and find his mother.’
Pooh Bear and Stretch dashed back to their plane.
They didn’t want to be here when the authorities arrived. That would mean hours, possibly days, of explaining. If they were going to help Jack, they needed to get out of here right away.
Stretch pulled out his cell phone as he ran. ‘I’d better call Zoe,’ he said. ‘She’s in the Pacific, checking out a find with the Twins.’
The call went straight to voicemail.
‘Damn it,’ Stretch said. ‘Phone’s off or she’s out of range.’
‘She could be 20,000 leagues under the sea right now,’ Pooh said. ‘We’ll try again later.’
Right then, as he raced across the tarmac, Pooh spotted something out on the desert floor: three wild dogs, or dingoes as Australians called them.
The dogs were moving cautiously, as a pack, surrounding something on the ground.
Pooh Bear paused, stepped closer, trying to see what they were hunting.
Then he saw it. A little puff of sand on the ground that they were slowly converging on.
It was an animal. A bird.
A downed bird.
One of its wings flapped limply, causing another puff of sand.
Pooh Bear went over to it . . . and when he recognised the bird, he hurried forward, yelling at the dogs to scat.
He fell to his knees beside the bird.
It was Horus, Jack’s peregrine falcon.
The wounded bird lay on its side in a drying pool of blood, cooing weakly. Pooh Bear saw a bullet wound to her left wing.
‘There, there,’ he said, cradling the brown falcon in his arms. ‘You’re all right now.’
He carried her back to the jet, climbing in and closing the door as Stretch hit the gas.
The private jet soared away into the sky, leaving behind the bloody crime scene that had once been the secret base of Pine Gap.
CHAMPION PROFILE
NAME: DEPON, TENZIN
AGE: 22
RANK TO WIN: 3
REPRESENTING: SKY
PROFILE:
A Tibetan prince from the Sky Kingdom, Tenzin Depon took his holy orders at the age of eight, forsaking his inheritance to become a warrior-monk.
He has been training full-time for these Games for the last fourteen years.
Ranked 3rd out of 16 to win the Games.
FROM HIS PATRON:
‘This is Tenzin’s time.’
Kenzo Depon, King of the Sky
On the balcony overlooking the flooded arena of the Second Challenge, the wealthy spectators chatted as they sipped champagne and ate hors d’oeuvres.
Snippets of their conversations could be heard:
‘—I heard she wanted to marry him so she could weasel her way into the Rothschild bloodline—’
‘—I love how newcomers to the White House think they have actual power—’
‘—and then he said, “Well, they are new money.” I almost laughed. His family’s fortune only goes back to 1790. He is new money as far as I’m concerned!’
A few of the men commented on the champions:
‘—The fifth warrior is out of his depth. He barely scraped through the first two challenges, and they are by far the easiest—’
‘—My money’s on the SAS fellow, Brigham. Iolanthe tells me he’s been training for this for a year using replicas of previous mazes and arenas.’
‘—What about the US Marine? The one who took out Majestic-12?’
‘—He did us all a favour, really. The Majestic-12 were out of control. Forgot who they were serving.’
‘—Keep an eye on the two warrior-monks from Tibet, especially the one named Tenzin. It says here in the official program that he’s been preparing for this since he was eight years old.’
In his team’s hostage carriage above the arena, Jack sat with his back against the iron wall. After he’d calmed down a little, he had begun to recall more of the details of what had happened before his capture at Pine Gap. He told the others about the runaway galaxy in the shape of a curling tetra-gammadion that was hurtling towards Earth.
‘So, where in the world are we?’ Lily asked.
Jack said, ‘Judging from those catfish, somewhere in Asia, but I can’t be sure.’ Roxy nuzzled up against his leg and he patted her.
Alby said, ‘Hades? The Underworld? What is all this and why are we here?’
‘These,’ said a woman’s voice, ‘are the Great Games of the Hydra, and you are here to represent my royal house.’
Jack turned to face the speaker but he had already recognised her voice.
A beautiful woman with perfect porcelain skin, emerald-green eyes and gorgeous auburn hair stepped into view outside his cell.
She stood with her hands behind her back and wore a sparkling figure-hugging silver gown that showed off her slender legs and narrow waist. She was a woman who over the course of several encounters with Jack had variously tried to kill, seduce and even help him.
She was Iolanthe Compton-Jones, Keeper of the Royal Records for the ancient line of European kings known as the Deus Rex.
A man stood with her, a short bald guy wearing glasses and carrying a compact suitcase.
Iolanthe nodded to a nearby minotaur guard. ‘This is our house’s personal doctor. Admit him.’
The minotaur opened the barred door to Jack’s cage, allowing the bespectacled man inside.
‘Hullo,’ he said in a very British accent. ‘My name’s Barnard. Dr Harold Barnard. Now hold still, dear boy, and let me have a look at these scratches.’
He opened his suitcase to reveal that it was full of medical equipment: bandages, pills, ampoules, syringes, even a pair of small portable defibrillator paddles.
Iolanthe remained outside the cell.
‘Why, Jack,’ she said, ‘you didn’t need to dress up for the occasion.’
As Barnard tended to his wounds, Jack looked from his wet and dirty Homer Simpson t-shirt to Iolanthe’s glamorous silver gown.
‘Bite me, Iolanthe,’ he said.
Iolanthe turned to Lily. ‘And Lily, I’m so delighted to see you again. I am certain you will fin
d this whole experience most stimulating.’
‘You’re a real bitch, lady,’ Lily said.
Iolanthe smiled tightly. ‘How charming. Here, Jack, I brought you a gift.’
Her hands emerged from behind her back holding a battered fireman’s helmet. Its badge read FDNY PRECINCT 17.
She passed it through the bars of the cell. ‘It was on your plane. We can’t have Jack West fighting without his famous helmet, can we?’
Jack took it. ‘Where are we and how did we get here, Iolanthe?’
‘You know, Jack, you can’t imagine how disappointed I was when I heard you’d married that pretty Irish girl, what’s-her-name. Hearts broke around the world when it became known that the fifth greatest warrior was off the market.’
‘Where are we and how did we get here?’
‘You are in India, Jack,’ Iolanthe said, suddenly serious. ‘Exactly where in India, well, I am not at liberty to say, but it is remote, in one of India’s many desert regions. This,’ she waved her hand, ‘is the original ancient city of the Hydra: Old Hyderabad.’
‘And how did we get here?’
‘Oh, I had you kidnapped,’ Iolanthe said simply. ‘From Pine Gap. You’re a very hard man to find, Jack West. But I had someone at Pine Gap—General Beard—who informed me that you were emerging from your splendid isolation to go there for a meeting.’
‘Why am I here?’
‘I would have thought you’d have figured that out by now. As I just said, you have been brought here to compete for my royal house in the Great Games of the Hydra.’
She paused, looking at Jack closely.
‘You’ve not heard of the Games?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘Never?’
‘Not ever.’
‘Oh, dear. Given your adventures, I’d thought you would know of them. I had better start from the beginning, then.’
Iolanthe explained. ‘Do you recall in your travels around the ancient places of the world ever seeing a carving of four kings seated side-by-side on four thrones?’
Jack thought about that. After a moment, he saw it in his mind’s eye: a carving on the wall of an ancient underground complex depicting five warriors standing behind four seated kings, a striking image that had stood out amid a larger adventure.
The Four Legendary Kingdoms Page 5