The Five Greatest Warriors

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The Five Greatest Warriors Page 4

by Matthew Reilly


  Pooh Bear began to feel ill.

  He shook the thought away and began searching the tanks for his friend.

  In the first tank he came to, he saw Wolfgang Linstricht suspended in the green haze, eyes closed, asleep. In the next tank, Pooh saw another elderly white man whom he couldn’t place, then in the third, a younger man with the distinctive long beard of an Islamic extremist, and then in the fourth . . .

  . . . Stretch.

  Pooh Bear gasped as he saw his friend spread-eagled in the green liquid, his head bowed, his eyes closed.

  Pooh banged on the glass wall of the tank and Stretch’s eyes opened. At first they squinted in the green gloom but then Stretch seemed to realize that the person standing in front of his tank was not the usual person.

  His eyes sprang open when he saw that it was Pooh Bear. A burst of bubbles exploded from his scuba mouthpiece.

  “Hang on,” Pooh Bear said, even though Stretch couldn’t possibly hear him. “I’m gonna get you out of there—”

  It was at that exact moment that Pooh Bear felt a stinging stab on the nape of his neck. He reached up and felt a small dart there.

  Then his arm fell suddenly limp and a wave of terror shot through him as he realized he couldn’t move his limbs.

  Pooh slumped to the floor in front of Stretch’s tank, his entire body going slack.

  And then he heard a voice.

  “One shouldn’t enter a spider’s web unless he is truly sure the spider won’t return while he is there.”

  A figure stepped into Pooh Bear’s field of vision: he was an older man, bald, fat, and pale, and he smiled meanly. With him was an Israeli soldier, holding a tranquillizer gun.

  “Hello, Zahir al Anzar al Abbas,” the older man said brightly. “My name is Mordechai Muniz. We’ve been watching you on our thermal imagers for two days now. You’ve been a source of immense amusement to me and to the guards at this base. You really are a tenacious son of a whore. That you got this far at all is very impressive. Foolish, but impressive.”

  The Old Master grinned. “You like my living human decorations? The diluted formaldehyde mixture works well—it’s a marvelous preservative, although after a decade or so, its carcinogenic properties seep through the skin to produce very painful cancers in my guests. I learned this technique of ‘live imprisonment’ from a Russian friend of mine, an ex–Soviet general who has a collection of his own. We have a friendly competition going, he and I, to see who can amass the most impressive collection of human beings.”

  Pooh Bear still couldn’t move.

  Muniz shrugged. “Considering the long, silent life your friend has ahead of him, today you have brought him a rare gift: an event. Congratulations, Lieutenant Cohen will get to watch you die in front of him.”

  Pooh Bear could only lie there, helpless on the floor, his eyes wide, his limbs useless.

  But then in a sudden moment of realization, he saw his watch—the watch Jack had given him on the tarmac at Nairobi Airport when they had parted; the watch which Jack had said was fitted with an emergency GPS beacon that Pooh could press if he was captured or in danger.

  With all his might, Pooh Bear willed his right hand toward his left wrist, toward the watch, but no matter how hard he tried or how desperately he focused his mind on it, his right hand wouldn’t—couldn’t—move.

  The watch, his only means of letting anyone know where he was, remained tantalizingly out of reach.

  Pooh slumped his head against the hard marble floor, devastated, and in that moment, he knew this rescue was over, a valiant but foolhardy failure.

  He closed his eyes in disgust . . .

  . . . just as from somewhere outside there came a dull shuddering boom that took both Pooh Bear and Mordechai Muniz by surprise.

  SIRENS WAILED and emergency lights flashed all over the Dimona Nuclear Research Center.

  A great plume of black smoke rose up from one end of Machon-2, the uranium storage warehouse next to the main reactor dome, Machon-1. The charred remains of the giant semitrailer rig that had delivered the uranium shipment the night before now lay in a smoking heap at the building’s docking bay.

  People in uniforms and civilian clothing ran as fast as they could away from the rising column of smoke while, a few minutes later, two fire trucks and three jeeps carrying soldiers in full-body yellow biohazard suits hurried toward the disaster.

  Despite its relative plainness, Machon-2 was actually the most important structure in the whole complex. During a series of now-infamous inspection visits by US nuclear weapons inspectors between 1962 and 1969, the Israelis had built a false wall and an entirely fake control room to conceal the four underground levels beneath the surface structure, levels on which the Israelis built their nuclear devices.

  For an accident to occur in or near it was catastrophic.

  Inside the Old Master’s bunker, Mordechai Muniz snatched up his phone: “What’s going on!”

  “We have a Level-4 situation, sir,” the voice at the other end of the line replied anxiously. “All personnel must evacuate the base immediately. Please report to your rendezvous point for head count.”

  Muniz hung up, glancing over at Pooh Bear on the floor of his private chamber.

  No, he thought. The Arab was passionate, sure, but not nearly clever enough to engineer this.

  Muniz nodded to his private guard, “Let’s go.”

  The two of them hustled out of Muniz’s trophy-lined office, clambered up the stairwell, and threw open the heavy steel door to the Old Master’s lair, only for the guard to be blown away by two shots from a Desert Eagle pistol held by Jack West Jr.

  He wore a bright yellow full-body biohazard uniform, with the hood slung back over his shoulder.

  Quick as a whip, Muniz drew his own pistol, but Jack shot him in the forearm and the gun went skittering away. Muniz roared and clutched his arm, his teeth clenched more in anger than in pain.

  “Morning, General. I’m Jack West Jr., and I’m here to take back my friends.”

  Handcuffed and gagged, Muniz was thrown across the floor of his subterranean lair as Jack stepped down into it.

  “Well this is a just a little creepy . . .” he said on seeing the array of tanks containing Israel’s enemies.

  He went straight to Pooh Bear’s side, slid to the floor beside his fallen Arab friend. Pooh Bear was only just breathing, paralysis setting in.

  “Jack . . . ?” Pooh gasped. “How . . . ?”

  “Tell you later,” Jack said, extracting a hypodermic syringe from the combat webbing beneath his biohazard suit and quickly and precisely stabbing it directly into Pooh’s heart.

  Pooh Bear came leaping up into a sitting position, gasping deep, hoarse breaths, his eyes bulging.

  Jack said, “That’ll wake you up in the morning.”

  As Pooh regathered himself, Jack was already moving toward Stretch’s tank. He paused in front of the big tank—it was only for a moment but it felt like an eternity—and beheld his friend suspended in the green solution, in womblike silence, kept alive by the intravenous drip, a living, breathing trophy.

  Then he raised his .45 caliber Desert Eagle and fired two shots into the thick glass of the tank, angling the shots away from Stretch’s body.

  The front panel of the tank shattered, then quickly collapsed under the weight of liquid pressing against it. A waterfall of green fluid came blasting out of the tank, sloshing all around Jack until all that remained was the empty tank with its front section completely open and Stretch dangling there, still cuffed, the scuba regulator strapped to his face.

  Through bleary, heavy eyes, Stretch looked up to see Jack standing before him.

  Jack nodded curtly. “Welcome to your own rescue. This is the halfway point. Time to start the second half.”

  Reaching up, Jack removed the mouthpiece first—Stretch coughed, then gagged, sucking air into his dry throat. Then Jack extracted the IV drip and, painfully, the excretion catheter from Stretch’s body. After that
Jack used his gun to shoot through the chains of Stretch’s four manacles and Stretch fell out of the tank, free, the manacles themselves still looped around his wrists and ankles like macabre bracelets.

  Jack leaned forward, allowed Stretch to fall onto his shoulders in a fireman’s carry.

  Pooh Bear joined them as Jack raced for the stairs, gun in one hand, Stretch on his shoulders.

  “What about those others?” Pooh Bear said. “In the tanks.”

  “I’m only concerned about one guy today,” Jack said grimly. “Unlike Stretch, those other men did terrible things. I say, if they’ve still got any, we leave it to their friends to rescue them. Come on. We gotta hustle.”

  “HOW DID you find me?” Pooh Bear asked as they bounded up the stairwell. “I never pressed the SOS button on the watch you gave me.”

  Jack spoke as he ran. “The button triggers an active alarm, but the watch sends out a constant passive GPS signal, plus a pulse rate. I kinda didn’t tell you about that.”

  “It was transmitting all along . . .”

  “You’ve covered many miles this past month, my friend.” Jack threw a quick look back at Pooh Bear. “Tel Aviv, Haifa, Buenos Aires. And Rio for the New Year, although I can’t imagine you were there for the fireworks. You became a Nazi hunter.

  “When I saw you turn up here in the Negev outside Israel’s most important nuclear weapons center and stay here for a few days, I knew you’d found him. We hung back, waiting to see how you did. But when we saw your pulse rate start to plummet a short while ago, we made the call and figured you needed a hand.”

  “We?” Pooh asked. “Who’s here with you?”

  As he said this, they burst out into sunlight, just as an Israeli military ambulance came to a skidding halt right in front of them, with Zoe at the wheel. She also wore a yellow biohazard suit with the hood swept back.

  “Everyone’s here,” Jack said, and Pooh felt his heart soar.

  “HOW ON Earth did you get inside this base?” Pooh Bear asked as they arrived at the ambulance.

  “How else?” Jack gave Pooh another enigmatic look. “We came inside last night’s uranium shipment. Where do you think Israel gets its high-grade uranium ore from?”

  “Where?”

  “Biggest uranium producer in the world: Australia.”

  Of course, it was a little more complicated than that.

  What Jack had said about the wristwatch was true. Observing first from Little McDonald Island and later from SAS headquarters in Fremantle, Jack had tracked Pooh Bear’s progress around the world.

  When he saw Pooh head into the Negev and stop for several days in this area—an area that every military organization in the world knew about: Dimona—he knew Pooh had discovered where the Mossad was keeping Stretch.

  The question was whether Pooh could bust Stretch out by himself.

  Some calls were made, and Jack discovered that a shipment of uranium was on its way to Dimona from Australia. It was already halfway across the Indian Ocean, heading for Israel’s Red Sea port of Elat.

  Arrangements were made for Jack and Zoe to rendezvous with the freighter carrying the uranium, and they helicoptered onto the ship in the dead of night three nights ago, along with two trusted military engineers and one lieutenant general whose orders could not be overruled by anyone.

  Some hasty engineering work was carried out on the lead-lined shipping container holding the uranium—it was a ninety-foot container on the outside, but after some quick reconfiguring, it was only eighty-five feet long on the inside: a small gap had been inserted at one end with enough space for Jack and Zoe to stow aboard.

  The irony that they might get past the Israelis’ defenses at Dimona by using the same trick the Israelis themselves had used on the US inspectors in the sixties was not lost on Jack.

  Other precautions were taken: the Sea Ranger was getting into position; and Sky Monster had been dispatched to meet up with some Australian SAS troops in western Iraq, some of them former colleagues of Jack’s. Lily and Alby stayed at Alby’s home in Perth—this mission was far too dangerous to bring them along.

  And so Jack and Zoe had entered Dimona, hidden inside the uranium container, watching Pooh’s pulse rate and waiting. If Pooh got in and out of there alive, they would simply leave inside the empty container when it was picked up a day later. If on the other hand, Pooh’s pulse rate took a sudden dive, then . . .

  That morning, Pooh’s pulse rate had plunged dramatically and Jack and Zoe had sprung into action.

  “Have you got ’em?!” Jack called to Zoe as he placed Stretch into the back of the military ambulance, laying him on its wheeled gurney.

  In the driver’s seat, Zoe turned to answer him but caught herself when she saw Stretch—naked save for Pooh’s jacket, deathly pale and shivering, dripping all over with glistening green wetness and barely able to carry his own weight.

  “Jesus . . .” she breathed. Then, snapping out of it, “Yeah! Got a pair of them!” She patted two chunky-looking silver suitcases on the seat beside her.

  “Then let’s get the hell out of here!” Jack said, slamming the rear doors shut behind him.

  The ambulance shot off the mark.

  Pandemonium reigned all over Dimona.

  Fire trucks roared through the streets of the base. Sirens wailed. Men in biohazard suits rushed toward the smoking hulk of Machon-2. Ambulances loaded coughing people into their rear bays and sped away.

  As three such ambulances sped toward the main gates of Dimona, a fourth military ambulance whipped out of a side street and joined the little convoy.

  All four vehicles were stopped at the gates by the guards: Pooh was hidden beneath Stretch’s gurney, while Jack and Zoe now put on the yellow hoods of their biosuits, revealing only their eyes through Perspex visors.

  The guard who saw Stretch—strapped down, still wet and pale and sickly to look at, with an oxygen mask over his mouth—screwed up his face in disgust and yelled, “Go! Go!” and Zoe floored it and the ambulance sped out of the Dimona Nuclear Research Center.

  “I RECKON WE have about twenty minutes till they figure out who we are and what we’ve taken,” Jack said to Zoe as they sped west away from the base, tailing the other three military ambulances.

  “Which means thirty minutes till they find us with chase choppers,” Zoe said.

  “Where are we going?” Pooh Bear asked, kneeling beside Stretch in the back. “You do have an escape plan, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, but it’s not as imaginative as our entry plan was,” Jack said. “How were you going to get out?”

  “The same way I got in. Slowly and with patience.”

  “Okay, our plan is definitely not like that.”

  “So where are we going?” Pooh asked.

  “Those ambulances are going west to Beersheba, in accordance with Dimona’s Radiation Emergency Evacuation Plan. We’re going to cut south and make for a place called Aroham near Uqaba.”

  “How far is it?”

  “About forty klicks,” Jack said. “Which means it’s going to be close.”

  About five kilometers later, the ambulance convoy came to a fork in the road and the three lead ambulances took the right-hand route, heading for Beersheba. Jack’s ambulance, however, swung left and immediately sped up, zooming down the desert highway, the vast emptiness of the Negev rushing by on either side of it.

  Exactly fifteen minutes later, the first chase helicopters appeared on the horizon behind it: four American-made Apache gunships.

  Attack choppers.

  Jack saw them in his side mirror, then looked forward: to see a rise in the road ahead on which stood the dusty ruins of Aroham, ruins he wanted to reach before the choppers caught up with—

  —their ambulance crested the rise and Jack’s spirits rose at what he saw beyond it: a beautiful black Boeing 747, standing alone on the empty desert highway, beside a smaller set of ruins, wings swept back, tail raised high; a black plane that could only be the Halicarna—


  —but just then one of the Apaches swooped in from the right and swung into a low hover over the road right in front of their ambulance, all its guns pointed right at them, cutting them off from the escape plane!

  There was a dirt side road to the left and Jack yelled to Zoe, “Go left!”

  The ambulance fishtailed as it swung left, zooming onto the dirt road, kicking up a cloud of dust that swirled around the hovering Apache.

  A short way down the dirt road was a sorry collection of half-crumbled sandstone ruins: the Roman ruins of Aroham.

  Seeing the ambulance take the sudden turn, the other three Apaches leaped forward and caught up, pulling into a wide circular formation around the ambulance and the ancient ruins.

  Zoe brought the ambulance to a skidding halt, a dust cloud billowing up all around it as she did so.

  The ambulance’s radio squawked.

  An Israeli voice came over it, speaking in English: “Attention in the ambulance! We know who you are, Captain West! There’s no way out of here. Step out of the vehicle with your hands raised or you will be fired upon!”

  “Jack . . .” Zoe said.

  “On it.” Jack turned, grabbing the radio. He pressed the TALK button. “Israeli helicopter patrol. I hear you, but I suggest you pull back to a distance of two kilometers and hold that radius.”

  “You have to be fucking joking,” came the reply.

  In reply, Jack grabbed one of the two silver briefcases on the seat between him and Zoe and took one step out of the ambulance, holding it high above his head for the encircling helicopters to see.

  “Recognize this?” Jack said into the radio. “I said two kilometers and not an inch closer. Do it now.”

  There was silence on the airwaves, followed by, “That’s a—holy fuck. Copy, Captain. We will comply.”

  Pooh Bear watched the exchange first with curiosity and then with amazement.

  “What’s in the case, Huntsman?” he asked.

  “Zoe and I didn’t spend all night in that shipping container, Pooh. When you’re left inside Machon-2 for twelve hours, there are other things to find that can aid your escape. This case,” Jack said, “is an Israeli suitcase nuclear bomb.”

 

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