Lily was silent for a moment.
‘And yet that civilisation was still wiped out,’ she said as they walked. ‘By something.’
Jack nodded. ‘Every empire comes to an end eventually, kiddo. Nothing lasts forever. Nothing we build can ever outlast the relentless march of space and time. Whether it’s a Dark Sun, a rogue asteroid or a shift in the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, this planet is still just a small rock in the vastness of space. And space and time always win eventually.’
‘So if these ancient people were smart enough to survive the coming of the Dark Sun, what killed them?’
‘I don’t know.’ Jack turned to face her as he walked. ‘Hey, I’m finding this Dark Sun thing hard enough.’
***
At length, the group came to what appeared to be the centrepiece of the mighty cavern: a huge volcano cone.
Into the face of this cone had been carved a stupendous multi-levelled castle-like structure. Flowing freely over its fortifications were several waterfalls of magma.
Traversing the structure, however, still meant choosing one of three paths or stairways, and this took a whole hour by itself—but eventually the group arrived at the uppermost level of the massive castle, where a cleft had been cut into the rim of the cone and two soaring stone buttresses formed a gateway leading into it.
As he arrived at the gateway, Jack beheld the inside of the crater beyond it, and caught his breath.
‘Mother of mercy. . . ’ he said in disbelief.
Jack looked down on five magnificent spires: four pinnacle-like towers surrounding a taller fifth one.
The four outer towers were all made of a pale grey igneous rock and they all bore complex winding channels cut into their flanks. The central tower was made of darker stone and it had sheer polished sides. Its sole defence was an encircling gutter four-fifths of the way up its body. All five buildings rose up out of a foul black lake of bubbling tar.
Then Jack saw it.
There, mounted on a pedestal inside a cupola at the lofty summit of the central tower, looking like a cloudy glass brick, was the Third Pillar.
It was actually quite close to him—so high was the tower, it was almost level with his gateway. But to get to the Pillar, Jack saw, one had to negotiate a series of narrow swooping bridges that connected the four outer towers in an anti-clockwise sequence before a final bridge sprang up at a frightening angle from the fourth tower to the cupola on the central pinnacle.
It was dizzying just to look at.
Beyond the Pillar in the cupola, directly across from his position on the rim of the crater, Jack saw the opposite rim—and beyond that, glimpsed a now-familiar shape.
The upper reaches of an immense inverted bronze pyramid.
The Third Vertex itself.
Wolf gazed at the five towers nestled in the crater.
‘The Shogun’s maze-within-the-maze,’ he said. ‘The rest of this place was built by the ancient makers of the Machine, but these towers were built by the Japanese at the time of Genghis Khan.’
‘The smaller maze they built to protect the Third Pillar,’ Zoe said.
‘So how does it work?’ Rapier asked.
Jack took in the towers and bridges. ‘Looks like a time-and-speed trap . . . ’
‘Hey,’ Lily said from behind him. She was standing near a statue of a dragon at the edge of the gateway platform. She pointed to a Japanese inscription carved into the dragon’s podium. ‘It says:
‘A simple test,
Held at the birth and death of Ra each day.
The brave warrior ascends while the fire liquid descends.
He who beats the deadly fluid to the summit, will keep
the Great Khan’s gift;
He who beats it back, will keep his life.’
Jack assessed the twisting channels cut into the flanks of the four surrounding towers. At the top of each tower was a chimney-like opening in which bubbled a level pool of lava. At some trigger, he guessed, the lava overflowed from the chimney-opening and made its way down the channels. If you wanted the Pillar, you had to negotiate the maze of zig-zagging stairways on the towers’ flanks and get to the cupola—and then you had to get back down again before the descending lava cut off your retreat.
Jack looked out across the seventy metres of air separating his platform from the central tower.
‘It’s at times like this, I wish I’d brought Horus along,’ he said. He’d left her with Sky Monster in the Halicarnassus.
‘Too far for a Maghook to reach,’ Zoe said.
‘The birth and death of Ra . . . ’ Astro said. ‘Sunrise and sunset. So at sunrise and sunset every day, the tower system becomes accessible?’
Jack jerked his chin at a couple of broad stepping stones down at lake-level giving access to the first tower. There was a wide gap between the stones, a gap that could not be jumped. ‘I imagine twice a day, at dawn and dusk, a stepping stone rises up out of the tar, allowing you to get across to the first tower. Then you race the lava coming down the towers.’
“What time is it now?’ Wolf asked.
‘Eleven in the morning,’ Rapier said.
‘When’s sunset?’
‘Around 5:50 p.m.’
‘And when is tomorrow’s Titanic Rising?’
‘0005 hours. Five past midnight,’ Jack said.
Wolf took a deep breath and sat down against the wall of the high gateway. ‘Almost seven hours till we can make a run for this Pillar. Another six after that before the Pillar has to be set in place. Looks like we’re stuck here for a while.’
He smiled at Lily.
‘How delightful. It will give us a chance to get to know each other.’
The hours ticked by.
The members of the mismatched group slumped around the gateway platform, variously resting against its walls or pacing to stretch their legs.
Lily slept in Zoe’s lap. Wolf sat across from them, staring at Lily intently—as if he were pondering exactly how she worked.
At Jack’s insistence, Wolf sent two men ahead to scout the terrain on the far side of the volcano’s crater—to make sure there were no surprises there, especially more Japanese ones, and that laying the Pillar could be done inside the seven hours after sunset.
The two men crossed the crater without incident and disappeared inside a long tunnel-like structure on the other side, sending back images on a digital video camera. At first, interference from the Warblers affected the signal, so Jack had them switched off.
The dark tunnel was about fifty yards long and two storeys high, roughly the size of a train tunnel. After passing through it, the two scouts emerged on the other side of the crater.
Here their camera showed the massive inverted pyramid of the Vertex surrounded by another lake of lava and suspended above a great abyss like at the other Vertices. No mazes or labyrinths protected it. Seven hours would be more than enough time to get to it.
The two scouts returned.
Astro was standing at the edge of the gateway platform, gazing out over the five towers in the crater, when Jack joined him.
‘It’s been a while, Astro.’ Astro didn’t reply.
‘What did they tell you about me?’ Jack asked.
Astro was silent for a long moment, then he said, ‘They said you were planning to kill me as soon as we got out of Egypt.’
Jack had wondered what had happened to Astro. The young Marine had joined their team during the first meeting in Dubai, at the request of Paul Robertson of the CIA, just before a plane had smashed into the Burj al Arab tower.
From there, Astro had accompanied Jack through Laozi’s trap system in China, been at a second meeting at Mortimer Island in the Bristol Channel, and then gone with Jack to Abu Simbel—during which time Jack had felt he had become a loyal team member.
But then after the wild chase on the desert highway involving the Halicarnassus and several dozen Egyptian Army vehicles, Astro, Jack, Pooh Bear and Stretch had all been captured. At
the time, Jack was knocked out and had woken up crucified inside Wolf’s mine in Ethiopia. . .
. . . where he had seen Astro standing loyally beside Wolf.
Jack had felt betrayed, and had said so to Pooh Bear. But Pooh Bear had advised him not to rush to judgement on Astro.
‘Do you seriously think I wanted to kill you, after all we’d been through? Does that match up with what you’ve seen me do?’ Jack asked.
Astro said nothing.
‘Do you remember seeing me in that mine?’ Jack said.
Astro frowned, as if trying to recall. ‘I don’t remember much after Abu Simbel, and certainly not any mine. I woke up at the airbase on Diego Garcia, in a hospital bed. They said I’d fallen to the road during an armed pursuit and been airlifted out. I was unconscious for two whole days, they said.’
‘You don’t remember the Ethiopian mine at all?’
‘No.’
This was unexpected. Pooh Bear’s advice might have been very wise.
‘You didn’t fall to the road,’ Jack explained. ‘We all survived that episode just fine. They must have drugged you after they pistol-whipped me.’
‘They told me you’re actually working against America. And that by helping you, so was I. Wolf said Robertson should never have assigned me to your team. After Abu Simbel, because of my experience with all this ancient stuff, I was reassigned to Wolf’s team.’
It was then that Jack realised that Astro had not been present when Jack had become aware of the complex network of clandestine international alliances surrounding this mission: that Wolf was working not for America but for the rich and powerful Caldwell Group—with its network of rogue elements in the American armed forces and completely outside American oversight—alongside China and Saudi Arabia.
‘Astro,’ he said, ‘I represent a group of concerned small nations who don’t want to see the world get destroyed, that’s all. As for you, I think you’re a pawn in someone’s larger game. I think Wolf and Robertson are working together and that they used you because you’re an honest soldier who follows orders. But what if the people giving those orders are morally bankrupt? They put you into my team not so America could join our coalition, but so they could watch me.’
‘Easy to say, hard to prove,’ Astro said.
‘Not so hard. I imagine you’ll discover the truth soon enough.’
Jack turned to go.
‘Jack.’ Astro stared off into the distance. ‘After the Pillar is found and set in place, I have orders to kill you. So does every member of this CIEF team.’
Jack paused. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. I sincerely hope you’re not the one who has to do it.’
Jack returned to Lily and Zoe just as Lily awoke. She smiled up at him.
‘Hi Daddy.’
‘Hey kiddo.’
‘Ah, the model family,’ Wolf said from across the platform. ‘So touching.’
‘You got a problem with families?’ Lily said.
Wolf toyed with his thick Annapolis graduation ring as he spoke. ‘The concept of “family” is a human invention and a flawed one at that. There is only procreation for the male, there’s no such thing as family. I always loved my offspring more than their mothers.’
Lily said, ‘A strong family is greater than the sum of its parts.’
‘Oh, really? Do you believe, then, that your little family here is strong?’ Wolf asked, eyeing Lily closely.
‘Yes,’ Lily said firmly.
‘Loyal?’
‘Absolutely.’
Wolf nodded slowly.
Then he glanced enigmatically in Zoe’s direction. ‘They haven’t always been so.’
Lily frowned, so did Zoe.
Lily turned to face Jack questioningly.
‘My father,’ Jack said to her, ‘thinks about families differently to me. He thinks men just want to sire children and women are merely vessels to supply those children. He doesn’t believe in the family that is created when two people have a child.’
‘And what is your theory then?’ Wolf said to him. ‘Please. Enlighten me.’
Jack looked back at him evenly. ‘Family members are like the ultimate best friends. Their loyalty always lasts longer than their memory.’
A few hours later, most of the combined group were sleeping, including Wolf.
Jack was keeping watch while Lily and Zoe dozed. To keep himself alert, he stood on the edge of the platform and stared out at the towers in the crater, trying to figure out the best path through the stairmazes on their flanks—
A voice in his ear made him start. ‘l’m going to kill you, you know.’ Rapier stood right behind Jack, his face close behind Jack’s left ear.
Jack said nothing. He was very aware of how close he was to the precipice.
Rapier nodded over at the sleeping figure of Wolf. ‘While you’re alive, I’ll always be the second son, and in his eyes, the second best son. He respects you, you know, in a way he doesn’t respect me. And while you live and breathe and carry his name, I will always be number two. But if I kill you, then I prove that I’m the better soldier, the better man, the better son—’
‘Get away from him.’
Both men spun to see Zoe awake and on her feet with her Glock pistol raised at Rapier.
With a casual shrug, Rapier stepped away from Jack. ‘The better son,’ he said.
Only when he was a safe distance away did Jack release the breath he’d been holding and unclench every muscle in his body.
In the hour before sunset, the combined force made their way to the base of the crater via a set of extremely steep stairs and a high wall-ladder.
They stepped out onto a low stone path that ran around one side of the tar lake. The simmering black lake smelled disgusting, like rotten eggs; the odd slow-forming bubble popped wetly on its surface. It was hotter down here in the crater, so Jack and Zoe took off their jackets.
A nearby CIEF man stared at Jack’s now-visible left arm: while Jack still wore a leather glove on that hand, his left forearm could now be seen to be made of glistening silver steel: this was the high-tech artificial arm Wizard had made for him many years ago.
‘What?’ Lily said to the gawking man. ‘You never seen a bionic arm before?’
As they walked, Jack and Zoe gazed up at the nearest tower, trying to figure out the labyrinth of criss-crossing stone stairways on the flanks of its lower half.
‘Looks like you have to go down to go up,’ Zoe observed. ‘Those upper stairways all arrive at dead-ends just short of the bridge to the second tower. It’s a trap. You’re so keen to get to the bridge, you rush straight up, but in reality you have to go all the way down to the lake level, run along that low path, and then up the other side.’
‘All while the lava is coming down from the top,’ Jack said. ‘Not only do you have to move fast, you can’t make too many mistakes. Every mistake you make on the way up gives the lava a better chance to cut you off on the way down, and if you go too slow, you’re stranded. Then all you can do is wait to die.’
***
A few minutes before, they stood on the low stone ledge facing the first tower, separated from it by the lake of bubbling black tar.
Five CIEF men, including Rapier and Astro, stepped forward. They wore the lightweight plastic-polymer armour of Delta specialists and they carried climbing gear—pitons, ropes, carabiners. They’d discarded their heavy weapons and now only carried Glock pistols in thigh-holsters.
‘This is the team that will retrieve the Pillar,’ Wolf said. ‘My fastest men. Do you approve?’
Jack raised his palms and sat down by the wall. ‘I’m happy to leave this one to you and your All Stars. I hate time-and-speed traps.’
‘I’ve sent two men back up the wall-ladder,’ Wolf said to his tower team. ‘They’ll act as spotters for you, giving you guidance via radio from the higher vantage point. The rest of us will wait down here.’
‘Roger that,’ Rapier said.
Astro just nodded.
> ‘All right, get ready . . . ’ Wolf said.
A few minutes later, on a horizon they could not see, the Sun set, and as it had done every night and every morning for the last seven hundred years, a broad stepping stone rose from beneath the tar lake to allow whoever might dare to cross it access to the five-towered fire maze.
The Five Greatest Warriors: A Novel Page 18