The Five Greatest Warriors: A Novel

by Matthew Reilly

  Jack sat on the wraparound verandah of his farmhouse, sipping a cup of coffee with Zoe. In the dusty yard before them, Lily and Alby were playing happily, throwing a fake mouse for Horus to catch in mid-air and return to them.

  Jack looked out at the hangar, where he saw Sky Monster doing some work on the black Tupolev- 144 they had liberated from an enclosure at Easter Island’s airport a few weeks before. It was smaller than the Hali had been, but then it was also faster. Sky Monster loved his new plane. He’d christened it the Sky Warrior.

  As a bonus, they had found inside the Tupolev all of Carnivore’s records on the Pillars, the Machine and the Dark Star, including charts, maps and digital photos of the white Thoth writing on the Pillars.

  As for the five remaining Pillars themselves, they now resided inside the farm’s little salt mine by the lake, in a whitewalled chamber sealed with salt crystals, behind a wooden door marked with Thoth symbols carved by Lily.

  They glistened, their liquid cores glowing brilliantly, unseen by anyone.

  While the Pillars remained here—hidden from the world, far from humanity and the human lust for power—their rewards would remain unused, however powerful, deadly, life-saving or far-reaching they might be.

  Jack had told his superiors that all of the Pillars had been lost during the confrontation at the final Vertex, that they had fallen with Wolf and the Sixth Pillar into the bottomless abyss there, never to be seen again. This news had been taken with some grumbling, but then, since Jack had saved the world from both destruction and tyrannical rule, it was accepted without much questioning.

  In the end, Jack had decided, humanity would just have to make do on its own, without the knowledge and powers of the fabled Pillars.

  As they sat together on the deck, Zoe reached out and held Jack’s hand. They both now wore matching wedding rings, thanks to a civil ceremony performed the week before.

  ‘And so the world is quiet once more,’ she said.

  ‘I have to say, I kinda like it that way,’ Jack said.

  ‘It’s a good thing that whoever built that Machine built it,’ Zoe said. ‘They saved our asses. But what bothers me is: they themselves ultimately didn’t survive. Somewhere along the way, their civilisation disappeared, despite their obvious technological advancements.’

  Jack shrugged. ‘The Earth is over two billion years old, Zoe. Yet in a mere 5,000 years, our version of humanity has gone from hunter-gathering to space travel. The builders of the Machine were just a civilisation that rose to a great height and then, well, who knows? Maybe they got a disease. Maybe they fought among themselves. Maybe a rogue asteroid they never saw coming wiped them out. Civilisations rise then die, and then it all starts over again. That’s the way it goes. Our civilisation will end one day—and, yes, we might bring about that end ourselves—only that’s not going to happen just yet, not if I have anything to say about it.’

  Zoe smiled. She pulled out a notebook. ‘You know, there’s still one other thing we never figured out.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  The identity of the Fifth Greatest Warrior. Let me read three quotes to you.’ Zoe held up the notebook:

  ‘“A mortal battle between father and son, one fights for all, the other for one.’

  “The Fifth, the Brilliant Warrior, will be there at the Second Coming, and decide the fate of all.” And,

  “The Fifth will face the greatest test and decide if all shall live or die.”’

  ‘As I said, we never found out who the Fifth Warrior was,’ Zoe said.

  She looked at Jack closely. He just stared out at the horizon, squinting, aware of her gaze.

  ‘You were at the final Vertex during the Second Coming, the return of the Dark Sun,’ she said. ‘You battled with your father, and from what you’ve told me, you could have picked up that Pillar and wielded its incredible power. You could have changed the entire nature of life on Earth, you could have ruled it or let Wolf rule it. But by knocking it into the abyss, you determined our fate, you decided if humanity would live or die.’

  ‘I might have,’ Jack said innocently.

  ‘Oh, sweet Lord . . .’ Zoe said. ‘You know, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s occurred to me, yes.’

  Zoe shook her head. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, we’ll never hear the end of it. Jack West Jr . . . you’re the Fifth Greatest Warrior.’

  And as she said it, Jack turned to face her, and he smiled.

  THE END

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The greatest thanks, as always, must go to my wonderful wife, Natalie, for indulging all of my creative eccentricities (yes, I have them) and for coming with me on an unforgettable research trip to Easter Island.

  I must also send out very special thanks to Ron Cobb, the famous futurist, artist and movie art director, for generously allowing me to use his concept of the PA-27 Airborne Assault Pod in this book. Ron has designed spaceships and DeLoreans for Hollywood movies as well as real-life military applications like the assault pods, so it was a privilege for me to discuss the future of aerial bombardment with him. Thanks, Ron!

  Sincere thanks also to all of the guides at the Explora Lodge at Easter Island: Nico, Tito and especially Yoyo who took Natalie and me to the Ahu Vai Mata on the remote north-west coast of the island. If you want to see Easter Island properly, look no further than the Explora Lodge.

  At one point in the novel, I mention the Easter Island statue at the British Museum: it is indeed one of only four moai made of basalt, it was taken from Easter Island in 1868 by the British, and, yes, it was once erected in the cafeteria of the British Museum!

  It was our young Easter Islander guide, Nico, travelling through England, who complained to the Museum’s staff about it. Nico, you’ll be pleased to know that when I last went there, the basalt moai was on display in a prominent and central position worthy of its historical status.

  I am often asked by aspiring writers if they need to visit a location in order to write about it. The answer is: no, you don’t, but it certainly helps. I had to go to Easter Island to find the really good stuff for this book. That said, I still haven’t been to Antarctica (Ice Station was researched in my local suburban library!).

  To everyone else, family, friends and the good folk at Pan Macmillan, thank you all once again. Never underestimate the power of your encouragement.

  Matthew Reilly

  Sydney, Australia

  September 2009

  AN INTERVIEW WITH MATTHEW REILLY

  SPOIIER WARNING!

  The following interview contains SPOILERS from The Five Greatest Warriors. Readers who have not yet read the novel are advised to avoid reading this interview as it does give away major plot moments in the book.

  After leaving readers falling down the abyss with Jack West Jr at the end of The Six Sacred Stones, was it good to resume the story in The Five Greatest Warriors?

  It certainly was! Over the past two years, I’ve received countless emails from readers wanting to know when the next novel is coming out. (I even did a library speaking tour in 2008 and the first question I received at every event was, ‘When is the next damn book coming out!’)

  When I wrote The Six Sacred Stones (6SS) way back in 2006, I knew how Jack was going to get out of his situation. Now, while I wasn’t planning to start The Five Greatest Warriors (5GW) for several months after finishing 6SS, I decided that I would write the first fifty pages of 5GW straight away, so that the flow at the beginning of that book would be exactly the same as the flow at the end of 6SS.

  I very much enjoyed finishing 6SS with a huge cliffhanger ending. The only regret I have about it is that my biggest fans (those wonderful readers who bought the book in its first week of release) had to wait the longest to find out what happened to Jack. They had to wait the full two years between 65S and 5GW, so I apologise to them!

  What did you enjoy most about writing The Five Greatest Warriors?

  The Five Greatest Warriors was a lot of fun to write,
chiefly because it’s all action. It’s essentially the second half of the story begun in 6SS. Since I’d done all the set-up work in 6SS, 5GW was just going to be one great big rollercoaster ride to the finish.

  I got a lot of satisfaction revealing the many plot twists that I’d planted in 6SS: for instance, all the locations of the remaining Vertices (Hokkaido, Lundy Island, Diego Garcia and Easter Island) had to be figured out when I wrote 6SS, because they had to be drawn onto the images of Stonehenge.

  I particularly enjoyed revealing the location of Lundy Island in the Bristol Sea. As an author, that’s one of those twists that you just love writing: the answer is right there in plain sight (the right-angle of the triangle), but readers are hopefully looking at something else that is being talked about (the connection between Stonehenge and the Giza pyramids).

  Similarly, planting the solutions to the last four Vertices’ protective mazes in the frame of the golden plaque was another twist I took great pleasure in writing. Like the Stonehenge images, I designed that plaque way back in 2006 and it’s only now, in 2009, that I get to reveal it as a twist. When you sit on something for such a long time, it’s really, really fun to reveal it!

  How did you come up with the notion of linking five great historical figures to the story?

  I like the idea that ‘everything is connected to everything else’, that stories or information or treasures travel down through history and that many of the great individuals in history might have been aware of such things.

  To work that into my story meant researching some of history’s most famous warriors and seeing what connections I could make between them and the story I had started in Seven Ancient Wonders. As always, a lot of the most interesting and intriguing stuff is true. Napoleon really did study artillery under Pierre Laplace and he really did bring him to his court as a consultant on Saturn’s and Jupiter’s movements. Genghis Khan’s grandson Kublai Khan really did try to invade Japan twice and failed both times. The Jesus—Moses link via the line of Aaron is legitimate. As for the location of Jesus Christ’s tomb, well . . .

  How did you come up with the rather gruesome idea of the ‘living human tombs’ employed by Mordechai Muniz and Carnivore?

  In my opinion, one of the key elements of a good thriller is the villain. I think we as readers and moviegoers actually quite enjoy being appalled by great villains: Darth Vader, Hannibal Lecter, Heath Ledger’s Joker.

  In creating Muniz and Carnivore, the two villains who would make their first appearances in 5GW, I really wanted readers to fear them. I wanted readers to see that the consequence of crossing these men was beyond terrible. Now, any villain can shoot someone, but that’s old. What about a villain who keeps their victims alive for years? That, I thought, would be fearsome. And as Muniz says, just killing his enemies would be too easy; he wants them to suffer for their actions.

  As with the twists I mentioned earlier, I determined Stretch’s fate way back when I wrote 6SS, so the idea of the living tombs has been something I’ve been sitting on for a very long time. It’s very satisfying to unleash it now.

  Do you ever feel that you’re taking too many liberties with history?

  Ooh, that’s a very interesting question, because it relates not just to authors of historical fiction but also to the very nature of ‘history’ itself. Do I take liberties? Of course I do, but, then, what is history? Who writes it? What is ‘real’ history and what is not and who is the judge? Every few years, I see newspaper stories about Japanese school textbooks that claim the US was the aggressor in World War II. Is that history? Is Wikipedia a reliable source of history? The entry for ‘Matthew Reilly’ on Wikipedia is extraordinarily inaccurate—it contains several basic errors about me, including claims that I went to a high school I’ve never heard of in a town I’ve never been to. In China, if you Google ‘Tiananmen the Square’, you will find no mention of the massacre of 1989. Authors who write history books are often accused of making errors. What I’m saying is that history can he distorted, manipulated and sometimes simply changed—it’s often blurry.

  And when you’re dealing with ancient history as I am in the Jack West Jr novels, I think it gets very blurry very quickly. And where the margin for historical error is large, I have no problem taking liberties or making educated guesses. (Can we really know what Khufu was thinking when he built Great Pyramid? Can we know where Genghis Khan is buried? Can we be sure there actually was a Trojan Horse?)

  Ultimately, I write to entertain. I do not write textbooks. I will happily state that 85 per cent of the historical statements in my novels are true, hut don’t go using my books as a source for your high school history assignment because (a) I might have blended the truth with some fiction and (b) I won’t tell you when you’re reading the 15 per cent which is made up! (And if I’ve done my job as an author, you won’t be able to tell the real from the fake!)

  In the end, it’s the story that matters to me—a good, fast-paced, fun story. I’ll happily use commonly accepted history as a background to my larger story, but when it gets blurry, I’m more than happy to fill in the gaps myself.

  You’ve written Seven Ancient Wonders, The Six Sacred Stones and The Five Greatest Warriors. Will the Jack West series of stories count down all the way to The One. . ?

  I very much enjoy writing about Jack and his team, (and I especially like writing about Jack, Lily and Alby). So yes, I’m working on a new idea for Jack, which will be The Four Something Somethings.

  I’ll have to make sure that it’s a huge story idea. To my mind, any new Jack West Jr novel will have to be bigger and bolder then the three I’ve already written. And if I do decide to write it, I will do so with a plan to creating a story that will count down all way down to a seventh and final novel (The One Something Something). So it’s a good bet that The Four Something Somethings will end with a cliffhanger.

  What else have you been up to? Any Hollywood news?

  I’ve just finished writing the screenplay for a film adaptation of my novel Scarecrow. It was a really challenging project as the producers want Scarecrow, if all goes well, to be the first movie in a series of Shane Schofield movies. But as my readers will know, it’s the third book in the Schofield series.

  So what I set about doing in the Scarecrow screenplay was introducing the characters we encounter in the first novel, Ice Station (Scarecrow, Mother, Fox, Book etc), but within the story structure of Scarecrow. I’m really pleased with the result, but as I well know, Hollywood is a fickle place and writing a script is but the first step in a long journey to getting a blockbuster movie made. Fingers crossed.

  ‘The TV show I wrote, Literary Superstars, tragically bit the dust during the Writers Guild strike of 2007-2008. I couldn’t believe it. We had Jenna Elfman signed to star in it, Darren Star producing it, Sony and the (US) ABC network making it, and I was sitting in casting sessions watching actors read my lines (a real buzz, let me tell you) when the Writers’ Guild strike hit. The strike dragged on and by the end of it, the network wanted rewrites and eventually went cold on the project. But that’s Hollywood. You come to learn that until your show/movie is up there on a screen in front of an audience, it’s still just a dream. But I’m hanging in there! It’s always exciting to go to L.A. and ‘take meetings’, and, hey, Hover Car Racer is still at Disney. . .

  So what’s next? What does the future hold for Matthew Reilly?

  Well, I plan to write my next novel over the course of 2010. I’m not sure what it will he about yet, whether it will feature Jack West Jr or the Scarecrow or perhaps a new hero altogether. I’ve even got a story idea for Aloysius Knight, so who knows?

  In the end, I feel extraordinarily fortunate to tell stories for a living, I just keep trying to top myself with each book and come up with the fastest most out-of-control action-adventure stories imaginable, and so long as readers keep enjoying them, I’ll keep writing them.

  As always, I just hope you liked the book and I’ll see you next time!

&nb
sp; M.R,

  Sydney, Australia

  August 2009