The Five Greatest Warriors

by Matthew Reilly

  “Uh-oh,” he breathed. “Wolf is here, but I think our Japanese friends have already arrived as well.”

  JACK, LILY, Wizard, Zoe, and Sky Monster stood beside the parked Chinese vehicles in front of the gigantic burial mound. It towered above them, wide and massive, at least a hundred feet tall.

  “Lily, stay back, okay,” Jack said as he checked the bloodied bodies on the ground.

  They’d all been shot in the head, executed.

  “Chinese special forces, plus a couple of Wolf’s CIEF guys,” he said. “And they were slaughtered.”

  “Jack,” Zoe called. “Look at this.”

  She was standing at the top of the narrow tunnel that burrowed into the base of the mound.

  Joining her, Jack now saw that it was more than just a tunnel. It was a narrow chasm, open at the top and barely a meter wide, which descended via a series of about one hundred stone steps into the ground beneath the mound.

  Jack frowned, threw Zoe a questioning look.

  “Search me,” she replied.

  “Wizard?”

  “I have a feeling,” he said, “that this mound is no mound at all.”

  “Sky Monster, you’re our lookout. Stay up here and maintain radio contact. Zoe, Wizard, and Lily, follow me,” Jack said, lifting his MP7 to his shoulder, assault style, before he headed down the stairs, descending into the earth.

  Jack hustled down the narrow flight of stone steps, the chasm’s earthen walls pressing tight against his shoulders. If he looked up, he would have seen the sky, but right now his eyes were locked dead ahead, fixed down the barrel of his gun.

  Down the stone steps he flew, when all of a sudden the stairway stopped abruptly and Jack skidded to a halt and beheld a stunning, stunning sight.

  JACK FOUND himself staring at what had once been a meteor crater. Only this crater had been roofed over.

  And in its center, mounted in a high upthrust of rock, stood an imposing black structure that appeared to be made entirely of cast iron.

  The overall effect was of a tower the size of an office building built in the middle of a deep circular hole. But it was beautiful; it had style; it was a genuine work of art.

  The whole tower structure must have been fifteen stories tall. Its vertical rocky flanks were lined in a cladding of cast-iron plates (some of them had fallen off), but the defensive structure at its summit seemed to be wrought wholly of cast iron—thick and strong, with the consistency of an anvil.

  Wizard appeared behind Jack. “Like I said, not a mound.”

  “Indeed . . .”

  Jack scanned the “roof” that encased the meteor crater. A chunky iron column rose above the black tower like a spire, only it was not decorative—it was the central support for a circular conical “roof” that fanned out from the column’s uppermost point, reaching down to the rim of the crater.

  Four mighty iron support beams branched out from the tower’s corners, forming the skeleton of this conical roof—hundreds of wooden beams filled in the gaps so that from the outside the conical structure would take the shape of a primitive burial mound.

  “Clever,” Zoe said. “There are thousands of mounds like these all over China and Mongolia. And most of them have nothing beneath them except a single body. So you make your secret arsenal look like one of them.”

  Giving access to the 700-year-old citadel in the middle of the crater was a far more modern creation: a steel-cable suspension bridge. It spanned the hundred-foot void between Jack’s group and the black tower.

  Jack instantly recognized it as a standard US Army model.

  “Wolf,” he said.

  They crossed the long swooping suspension bridge.

  Leading the way, Jack arrived at a platform on the outer flank of the ironclad tower. From there, a steep staircase spiraled up and around the outer flanks of the tower, leading to the squat black citadel at its summit.

  The bridge, the platform, and the outer spiral staircase were all covered by aggressive archer stations, so that—at least in ancient times—no intruder could enter the great citadel easily.

  More bloodied bodies lay here—plus numerous shell casings indicating a fierce firefight—only this time the bodies were Chinese and American . . . plus at least one dead Japanese trooper dressed in black combat gear.

  “God, I hate arriving last,” Jack muttered.

  He, Lily, Zoe, and Wizard pressed on, moving to the summit structure, where a great black cast-iron door yawned before them, recently blasted open by modern explosives. Two more dead CIEF troops lay on the floor here, their blood still warm.

  “NVGs,” Jack ordered.

  If two groups of bad guys were already here, he wasn’t going to reveal his presence by using flashlights or glowsticks. Everyone donned their night-vision goggles.

  “All right, in we go.”

  Inside the citadel tower was a complex network of vertical shafts. Each shaft was square-sided with walls clad in smooth cast-iron plating, offering no handholds. All of them plummeted to ominous black depths.

  Every now and then, however, low horizontal cross tunnels would link the vertical shafts to others—but always leaving a further section of vertical darkness below the cross tunnel: creating hard-walled pits from which unwary tomb robbers could not escape, unless they had ropes going back up to the upper levels.

  Wizard marveled at the engineering of it all. “The false roof, the iron plating, the pits. Genghis didn’t want anyone finding this place, or if they did find it, getting out of it alive.”

  Some of the cross tunnels, Jack noted, were filled with rubble and dust. By the look of it, Wolf’s people had had to jackhammer through rubble that had blocked up the tunnels. That would have taken time.

  Arriving last on this occasion, Jack figured, had actually been beneficial: for a change, his predecessors had done the time-consuming guesswork and gruntwork for him.

  Ropes hanging from A-frames revealed the shafts Wolf had taken successfully and the occasional row of glowsticks showed the correct horizontal cross tunnel to follow.

  It made for an unusually quick descent through the trap system.

  And so after twenty minutes of roping and crab-crawling through the dark network of shafts and cross tunnels, Jack, Lily, Wizard, and Zoe arrived at a final tunnel: one that was not only filled with dust and rubble, but which also contained the three industrial jackhammers that had created the mess.

  This final tunnel ended at an ornate iron doorway where two more American corpses lay in pools of—

  A sudden explosion.

  Short and sharp.

  Jack snapped up.

  It had come from beyond the iron doorway.

  Then he heard a voice—Wolf’s voice—yelling, “You fucking suicidal bastards—!”

  Jack raced through the doorway.

  SIDE VIEW

  OVERHEAD VIEW

  THE ARSENAL OF GENGHIS KHAN

  THE SECRET ARSENAL OF GENGHIS KHAN

  MONGOLIA, 0700 HOURS (ONE HOUR EARLIER)

  SIXTY MINUTES earlier, stepping through the same doorway Jack now stood in, Wolf had gazed in grim satisfaction at the sight.

  After spending nine hours painfully navigating his way through the vertical shaft system—doubling back at dead ends; using jackhammers to cut through the densely packed rubble that filled several of the cross tunnels—he had finally arrived at the Great Khan’s fabled arsenal.

  It was set in the middle of a glorious man-made cave hewn out of the earth beneath the crater.

  And what a cave it was.

  Black iron columns supported a high ceiling, while deep man-made ravines cut across the floor, forming an irregular network of moats that were spanned by narrow stone bridges.

  The only problem, every single one of the stone bridges had been destroyed—there were gaping voids in their middles, preventing access to the centerpiece of the cave:

  The Arsenal.

  A small, box-shaped, garage-sized structure made of dense black iron,
it looked like a colossal Chubb safe.

  It was set atop a high pinnacle of rock so that it stood thirty feet above the rest of the vast room, encircled by the widest ravine of all. Four stepped bridges swooped up toward it in an X-formation, spanning this moat—but like all the other bridges in this cave, they had all been broken in the middle.

  Entranced, Wolf looked down into the moat.

  Hundreds of thousands of human bones lay at its base, two hundred feet below him. The moat’s walls, he noticed, were clad in smooth cast iron, just like the vertical shafts. Once you fell in, you couldn’t climb out.

  “Sacrificial victims?” Rapier asked, arriving at Wolf’s side.

  “No. The bones of the Kwarezmi slaves who built this place. Twenty-five thousand of them. When it was finished, they probably just threw the slaves into the moat and shut them inside, leaving them to starve in the darkness and probably kill and eat each other.”

  He turned to his son and shrugged. “It’s never good to be on the losing side in a war, but back then it was really fucking bad. Come on.”

  Lightweight bridging planks were laid over the destroyed ancient bridges, allowing Wolf to cross the ravine network and arrive at the southwest step bridge leading up to the Arsenal.

  As this was being done, he keyed his radio. “Guard teams, report.”

  “Sir. This is Surface Team, with the vehicles. All clear up here. The only thing on our scopes is our Chinese backup coming from their base over the border.”

  “Sir. This is Tower Team, at the suspension bridge. All clear.”

  A special bridging plank with footholds was set over the step bridge leading up to the Arsenal, spanning the gap in its middle.

  When it was in place and tested, Wolf paused, gazing up at the squat black structure sitting on its rock tower above him.

  He nodded, pleased.

  Then he strode up the bridging plank, crossing the wide central moat, and became the first man in over seven hundred years to enter Genghis Khan’s Secret Arsenal.

  Holding an amber glowstick above his head, he entered a compact, black-walled room.

  Treasures and trophies lined the walls in large unruly piles: crowns of gold; glittering jewels; goblets and chalices; swords and shields; bronze helmets and greaves.

  It was plunder taken from vanquished kings and defeated armies, the colossal booty of wars waged by one of the greatest warriors of all time.

  But it was the object taking pride of place in the very center of the room that seized Wolf’s attention.

  There stood a magnificent stone altar, carved from a single block of black marble. Deeply etched symbols covered it, all of them painted gold. In and of itself, this altar was an artifact beyond value, but here it was merely a pedestal for what sat proudly on top of it.

  Sitting upright in a bowl-shaped indentation on top of the altar was a large egglike object the size of a football.

  No, Wolf corrected himself.

  Not egg like. It was an actual egg.

  A petrified dinosaur egg.

  Illuminating it with his glowstick, Wolf beheld fine carvings and drawings on its curved glasslike outer shell. Carvings in the Word of Thoth, and gorgeous drawings of landscapes and coastlines, mountains and waterfalls.

  The drawings reminded Wolf of medieval Japanese art: they were surprisingly lifelike, with strong lines and three-dimensional depth, and Wolf suddenly realized that maybe medieval Japanese art owed a lot to the discovery of this Egg by the Shogun.

  Like his firstborn son, Jack West Sr. could still be awed by discoveries like this. His wide eyes and sweat-covered face glistened in the light of his glowstick as he gazed upon the marvelous Egg.

  Then Wolf saw two images on the Egg that made him start: some pyramidal rock formations in a desert, which he recognized as the pyramid-shaped rock islands at Abu Simbel in Egypt; and a great flat-topped mountain overlooking a bushy coastline that could only be Table Mountain in Cape Town.

  “The first two Vertices . . .” he breathed. He also saw four other landscapes on the Egg—showing the locations of the remaining four Vertices.

  “Jesus, this thing really is the mother lode. Rapier! Get the cameras and that laser scanner over here and scan this room now!”

  Rapier arrived a minute later, carrying a digital camera and a laser scanner. With him was Dr. Felix Bonaventura, Wolf’s archaeological adviser from MIT, who along with Max Epper was one of the world’s leading experts on the lore of the Machine.

  Bonaventura gazed in awe at the Egg through his round wire-rimmed glasses. “Abu Simbel and Cape Town. This thing would have been very useful last year.”

  “No shit. Photos and scans of the room, with everything in place, then take everything,” Wolf said, stepping away, lifting his radio to his lips. “Guard teams, report.”

  There was a crackle over his radio.

  No reply.

  Wolf frowned. “Guard teams. Report.”

  Still no reply.

  “What the . . .”

  Shwap!

  The head of the CIEF trooper standing in the doorway next to Wolf exploded. The man fell like a rag doll, dropping to the floor.

  Shwap-shwap-shwap-shwap-shwap!

  A volley of silenced automatic gunfire assaulted the cast-iron structure around Wolf, pinging off it, kicking up a thousand sparks. Two more of his men fell, riddled with bullets.

  Wolf dived to the ground, ducking behind the doorframe.

  Beside him, Rapier quickly drew a SIG Sauer, only to have it shot clear out of his hand, the bullet narrowly missing his fingers.

  Losing the gun probably saved his life. The CIEF trooper beside him raised his rifle to fire, just as two black-clad figures appeared in the doorway of the Arsenal bearing silenced Steyr-AUG assault rifles. They blasted the trooper to kingdom come, but merely covered the weaponless Rapier, Wolf, and Bonaventura.

  This in itself said something to Wolf: these men were disciplined enough to distinguish between threats and nonthreats in the heat of combat.

  As they entered the chamber with measured strides and guns up, Wolf got a better look at his two attackers: they were dressed completely in black combat gear, including hockey helmets and black jawguards that concealed their mouths. Glock pistols and steel throwing stars lined their belts, while compact but lethal crossbows were fastened to their wristguards. Only their eyes were visible: and they were deadly eyes.

  Japanese eyes.

  The Steyrs, the jawguards, the ninja stars on their belts, and the crossbows on their wristguards all betrayed them as members of the Japanese Defense Force’s crack 1st Airborne Brigade: special forces troops, modern ninja.

  An older Japanese man entered the chamber behind the two lead assassins, and Wolf recognized him instantly.

  “Tank Tanaka,” he said.

  TANK TANAKA hardly even glanced at the glittering treasure trove around him.

  “Their scanner and hard drive,” he said to one of his men. “Destroy them.”

  The scanner and its drive were promptly shot to shit.

  “The digital camera, too,” Tank said, seeing the camera that Bonaventura had been trying to hide.

  It was seized and blasted to a million pieces as well. Bonaventura winced.

  Tank then stood before the magnificent ancient Egg on the stone altar, assessing it.

  “It really is quite beautiful,” he said. “And filled with so much knowledge.”

  Then, with a triumphant glance at Wolf, he attached a small explosive device to the top of the Egg and flicked the detonate switch on it.

  He stepped back. “Feel free to watch, Colonel West, the explosive is not a large one. Although watch out for shards.”

  The device on the Egg issued a shrill beep. Then—

  —bam!—

  The blast was short and sharp. In a momentary flash the Egg just disappeared, blasting outward in a million glassy fragments that sprayed across the chamber, slamming into every wall before tinkling to the floor.

/>   The Egg, fashioned by an advanced ancient civilization, with all its priceless world-saving information, was no more.

  “You fucking suicidal bastards—!” Wolf yelled.

  Tank was unmoved. “Honor is a far more pure motivation than greed, Colonel. It motivated that young man we slipped into your unit.”

  “Who was last seen screaming all the way to his death,” Wolf spat.

  “It motivates the entire nation of Japan,” Tank said. “We know about the Third Vertex on the Hokkaido coast. We have known about it for centuries. It is sacred to our people, the most holy place in our country. A blockade of Japanese naval vessels guards it as I speak. You will not enter the Third Vertex, let alone find the Third Pillar inside it.”

  “Are you gonna kill me or what?” Wolf said.

  “Yes, I am,” Tank said, whipping up a pistol and firing it in one swift fluid movement.

  Blam!

  Wolf was hit square in the chest and he went flying backward, arms and legs flailing. He crashed into a collection of golden chalices and urns, and lay still on the floor of the Arsenal.

  Rapier roared in protest, only to find himself staring down the barrel of Tank’s gun and—

  “Yobu, what are you doing?” a soft voice broke the moment.

  Tank spun—startled at hearing his real name—to see a very unlikely figure standing in the doorway behind him.

  Wizard.

  Beside Wizard stood Jack West Jr., with an MP7 in his hands, covering the two Japanese special forces troopers in the Arsenal with Tank. The other two ninjas who had escorted Tank down here lay unconscious on the stairs immediately outside the Arsenal, immobilized by Jack and Zoe. When Rapier saw Jack—alive—his eyes sprang wide.

  “Max?” Tank said.

  “Where’s the Egg, Yobu?”

  “It is no more. I destroyed it.”

  “Destroyed it? No . . .”

  “I’m sorry I never told you my true purpose for studying the Machine with you, Max.”

  “And I’m sorry I never saw the hate in you, Yobu.”