Jack bit his lip. “If the maze is as big as the Shogun said it was, it’ll take time to get through. We don’t want to get there too late. And at the moment, Wolf is the only person who can actually cleanse the Third Pillar and set it in place, since he has the Philosopher’s Stone and the Firestone.”
“So what do we do?” Zoe asked.
“The only thing we can do right now is watch. Watch from afar. We’re only an hour away by air from the coast of Hokkaido. We watch Wolf’s progress from a distance, and hope he can find the entrance and negotiate the maze inside.”
“Do you think he can?” Lily asked.
“He’s a ratbastard, but he’s smart, smart enough to do this,” Jack said. “And unlike the Japanese Blood Brotherhood, he’s not suicidal. My father wants to rule the world and to do that he needs to lay this Pillar.”
Just then, from behind them, Tank groaned, waking.
He was bound to a flight seat with flex-cuffs, his face blistered and scorched by the blast of his own grenade inside Genghis’s Arsenal. His cheeks and forehead glistened underneath a layer of antiseptic cream Jack had applied to the burns.
The old Japanese professor blinked awake, took in his surroundings. Then, feeling his bonds, he looked up sharply at Jack, Lily, and Zoe.
“You failed, Tank,” Jack said.
Tank said nothing.
“You destroyed the Egg, but Genghis copied its images onto his shield.” Jack held up the magnificent pentagonal shield.
Tank still said nothing.
“We’ve deduced that the Third Vertex is on the coast of Hokkaido. Now thanks to this shield, we know what the entrance looks like. It’s only a matter of time till Wolf finds it and, for a change, we have a little time on our hands.”
Tank snorted derisively.
Then he spoke in a hoarse croaking whisper.
“You don’t have time.”
“What?”
“You’re out of time,” Tank grinned through his burned face. “You still don’t understand, do you? My blood brothers and I do not act alone in our mission to stop you placing the Pillars. We are but the point of a much larger sword.”
Jack frowned at that.
Tank said, “The imperial rulers of Japan have long known the location of our nation’s Vertex. It is our people’s most sacred shrine, its location passed down from emperor to emperor since the time of the Great Khan’s visit.
“Jack, you foolish man, understand! I do not represent some small group of ageing fanatics bent upon destroying the world out of simple vengeance. I represent the entire nation of Japan bent upon righting the most profound insult to our honor.
“If you venture toward Hokkaido now, you will find the coast guarded by warships of the Japanese Imperial Navy. You will find the landward approach guarded by our finest special forces troops. Throughout this mission, I have acted on the express authority of my government and my emperor. You are not doing battle against just me and my brethren, Jack West, you are fighting the entire nation of Japan.”
Jack’s face fell.
Zoe turned to him. “A naval blockade of the coastline? How is Wolf going to get past that?”
Jack was thinking fast. “I don’t know, I hadn’t—”
“Jack,” Sky Monster said from the top of the stairs. “Pooh Bear’s on the line from England.”
Stunned, Jack, Zoe, and Lily headed to the upper deck to take the call.
On a monitor in the Hali’s upper deck, Jack saw Pooh Bear in London.
Pooh Bear, Stretch, and the twins were sitting a cheap hotel room not far from Waterloo Station.
Jack informed them of Wizard’s death in Mongolia.
“Oh, no . . .” Pooh Bear breathed.
“It was a disaster,” Jack said. “The Japanese Blood Brotherhood were there, Wolf, too, and a massive Chinese contingent. My father killed Wizard.”
“Jack, I’m sorry,” Stretch said.
“And the mission?” Pooh asked gently.
“We got what we needed,” Jack said. “We didn’t get the Egg, but we have the images from it: pictures of the entrances to all six vertices. Genghis Khan had them inscribed on his shield. Zoe’s e-mailing you a digital photo of it right now.”
“Got it,” Julius said from his computer nearby, eyeing the jpeg of the shield. “Sheesh, that’s beautiful . . .”
“How about you guys?” Jack asked. “Did you get the Basin?”
“We got it,” Pooh said.
Stretch added, “But we were hoping to talk with Wizard about our next step. Lily said that the last three Pillars must be cleansed twice: in the Philosopher’s Stone and in the Basin in the pure waters of the Spring of the Black Poplar. We have the Basin, now we need to find the Spring of the Black Poplar, whatever that is.”
Julius said, “We also need the Fourth Pillar, which we cleansed at that base on Mortimer Island, back when we cleansed the First Pillar, when that royal chick, Iolanthe, was on our side. I assume she still has it.”
“But how will we find her?” Lachlan asked.
“Maybe the answer is to get her to find you,” Jack said. “Sorry guys, you’re gonna have to figure out the rest of this by yourselves, because we’re about to get very busy over here. The Third Vertex is more heavily defended than we anticipated. We’re watching Wolf now: he’s got to get past a massive Japanese naval blockade of Hokkaido just to get into the maze protecting the Vertex.”
“Right, then,” Zoe said, “we’d all better get cracking . . .”
At that moment, her laptop pinged. The videolink window was flashing with an icon that read: “RON.”
“It’s Alby!” Lily exclaimed, immediately clicking on the icon. At the same time in London, Pooh Bear did likewise, making it a conference call.
Jack and Lily huddled around the screen, eager to see—
—the dark beaklike face of Vulture appeared.
“Hello, minnows,” the Saudi intelligence agent said. He stepped aside to reveal—
Alby and Lois gagged and bound behind him, covered by Scimitar. They were in a beige cabin of some sort: the interior of a private jet. Lois was slumped in her seat, unconscious. Alby’s eyes were wide with fear.
“Look what I found,” Vulture hissed. Then he noticed Pooh Bear: “Why, Zahir, you escaped from that mine in Ethiopia. You might not be as useless as I first thought.”
“What do you want, Vulture?” Jack demanded.
Vulture shrugged carelessly. “You know, Huntsman, they say children can withstand a considerable amount of pain. I’ve often wondered how much torture a small boy could tolerate—torture exacted upon him, or perhaps witnessed by him when it is exacted on his mother. What do I want? I want your attention, Huntsman, and I think I just got it.”
The screen cut to hash.
Lily burst into tears. Zoe spun to face Jack.
Jack closed his eyes.
Vulture and Scimitar had Alby and his mother. It was one thing to take a hostage dear to Jack. It was another to take someone dear to his daughter.
Goddamn it . . .
“Jack.” Sky Monster emerged from the cockpit. “Wolf just launched his attack on Hokkaido and it sounds like World War III just started. If you want to keep an eye on it, we have to go now.”
Jack sat up straight, collected himself, and said, “Pooh Bear, find that spring. We gotta move.”
AIRSPACE OVER THE ARABIAN SEA
IN THE plush cabin of his Gulfstream-IV private jet, Vulture turned from the computer, smiled at Alby, and removed the boy’s gag.
“Thank you, Albert. Part of every battle is the psychological war, and you’ve proved to be quite useful, again.”
“Again?” Alby frowned. Beside him, his sedated mother groaned in her restless drug-induced sleep.
“But of course, you don’t know . . .” Vulture said, sliding into a wide leather chair. “You will recall that last year, Captain West experienced an unfortunate invasion at his farm in the Australian desert.”
“I was there.”
“We know you were.” Vulture grinned over at Scimitar, who knocked back a slug of whiskey. “It was you who led us to the Huntsman’s farm, Albert.”
“What?” Alby sat upright.
“The Huntsman is a skilled operator, a man who makes few mistakes. We watched the girl, of course, but he ensured she was well protected when at school. And he never returned to his farm via the same route, even when he picked her up from that school of yours in Perth. So we could never find his farm and the Firestone it contained.
“But then you befriended the girl. So we started watching you, and suddenly the Huntsman made a rare error. For you, young man, do not possess the fieldcraft of a professional. When you went to their farm for a holiday, you were being watched the whole way there. It was you who led our associates—Wolf and Mao and Mao’s Chinese force—to Jack West’s home in the desert. Yes, Albert, you were his biggest mistake.”
Alby was horrified that this might be true. Could he really have led Lily’s enemies right to her secret home?
“We know a lot about you, Albert,” Vulture said, clearly enjoying Alby’s discomfort. “We know how your mother dotes on you, how your brother ignores you, and how your father distances himself from you, appalled by your bookishness, your softness.”
Tears began to well in Alby’s eyes.
Scimitar glanced over at him. “Oh, cut that out. You remind me of my own worthless brother.”
Scimitar extracted a glistening knife from his belt. It was an extraordinary blade, long and sharp, with an exquisite gold and jewel-encrusted hilt.
“See this?” he grunted. “A gift from my father, given to me on my thirteenth birthday. A gift from a man to a man. To this day, my father has not given a similar one to Zahir, because Zahir is not a man, because Zahir has not proved himself worthy of such a gift.”
“Pooh Bear is twice the man you’ll ever be—”
Scimitar crossed the cabin with surprising speed and before Alby knew it, the ornate knife’s blade was pressed against his throat and Scimitar’s hot whiskey-flavored breath was right in his face.
“Say that again,” Scimitar hissed softly. “Just say that again . . .”
“Scimitar!” Vulture barked. “Not now—”
A pair of thunderous noises from outside made everyone spin.
To Alby, they sounded like sonic booms . . .
He peered out the windows of the Gulfstream and suddenly saw two MiG fighters with Russian markings swing into formation on either side of the private jet, paralleling it, flanking it. They were so close, Alby could see the visors of their Russian pilots glinting in the sun.
“They’re ordering us to follow them or they’ll shoot us down!” the Saudi pilot called back from the cockpit.
Vulture seemed both enraged and perplexed at the same time.
“What the hell is this . . . ?” he breathed as he moved from window to window.
Abruptly, one of the MiGs fired a burst of tracers across the bow of the Gulfstream.
“What do you want me to do!” the pilot asked urgently.
“There’s nothing we can do,” Vulture said, his mind whirring at this unexpected turn of events. “We go where they tell us to go.”
And so the Gulfstream banked away to the right, departing from its intended course, escorted by the two Russian fighters.
THE THIRD VERTEX
AS DEPICTED ON GENGHIS’S SHIELD
THE NORTHWESTERN COAST OF HOKKAIDO, JAPAN
MARCH 9, 2008, 0730 HOURS
2 DAYS BEFORE THE 3RD DEADLINE
THE FIERCE ocean storm that assailed the northwestern coast of Hokkaido on the 9th of March, 2008, would break records. Never once in 1,300 years of precise Japanese record-keeping had a storm of such ferocious intensity been encountered.
Huge fifty-foot waves crashed against the coastal cliffs. Sleet lashed down from low storm clouds. Icy gusts of snow swirled down from the mountains bordering the strife-torn sea.
And that was all before one beheld the four gigantic tsunami waves that were approaching the coast from the west, each one the equivalent of the devastating Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004.
Local fishermen knew the perils of this strip of coastline and so kept well away from it even at the best of times. It was notoriously dangerous. Submerged rocks tore through hulls with ease. Powerful offshore currents dragged even the largest boats toward the jagged shore.
And so it was here, in an already dangerous channel, in a record-breaking storm, that Wolf’s full-frontal military shore landing would take place.
As the raging sea pounded the coast of Hokkaido—boom!-boom!-boom!—equally thunderous booms sounded in the sky above it.
Twenty-three vessels from the Japanese Navy were gathered in a semicircular formation, all facing outward from the snow-covered coast, and all engaged in a vicious firefight with a force of incoming American aircraft.
Every kind of warship short of an aircraft carrier was there: destroyers, frigates, cruisers, even two submarines, all of them determined to defend Hokkaido to the bitter end.
A wave of American UAVs—unmanned aerial vehicles or “drones”—led the way for Wolf’s assault force.
Despite the fact they had no pilots, the drones were heavily armed and they soared down from the sky at the same angle as the sleeting rain, plunging into a dense storm of upward-firing tracers.
A dozen drones were blasted out of the sky in sudden flashing explosions, but another dozen punched through the bombardment, including three important drones: those carrying ALQ-9 tactical jamming systems and LDS laser-blinding systems.
These were important because they formed a safe aerial entry corridor for the second wave of assault vehicles that was coming in behind them: a collection of bullet-shaped armored pods, holding four men each.
The aerial assault had been precisely timed to coincide with the incoming tsunamis, or rather a peculiar phenomenon associated with tsumanis.
Before a tsunami strikes, it is always preceded by a “sucking back” of the coastal waters. The ocean literally recedes from the shore as the approaching wave runs up over shallower ground and crests, folding over on itself before crashing into the coastal land formation.
During the famous Lisbon tsunami of 1755, the ocean receded, revealing many shipwrecks and cargo crates on the floor of Lisbon’s harbor. Curious and greedy onlookers ran out across the exposed seabed to plunder the wrecks, only for the tsunami to arrive twenty minutes later, drowning them all.
The size and duration of a “tsunami recession” depends solely on the size and power of the incoming wave. The bigger the wave, the longer the recession.
The Japanese naval vessels defending Hokkaido that day were well aware of the concept of tsunami recession, and so set their perimeter a full two kilometers out from the coast.
It would prove to be their only weak point.
Soaring down through the sky inside one of his armored pods, high above the Hokkaido coast and the Japanese fleet defending it, Wolf watched the ocean pull back from the northwestern coast of Hokkaido on a monitor.
It was a stunning sight to behold from this angle.
A vast semicircle of water swept back from shoreline in a gigantic curving arc, revealing the flat seabed. It looked like an enormous beach, and on it Wolf discerned several rust-covered shipwrecks: fishing trawlers, two ancient Chinese junks, and, dominating the exposed seabed, one massive modern supertanker, lying on its side close to the shore.
He could also see a series of sharply pointed black objects on this newly formed “beach,” but he couldn’t tell what they were from this height.
Most importantly, however, perfectly replicating the image he had photographed on the Dragon’s Egg, he saw a semifrozen waterfall dropping into the sea from a triangular fissure in the coastal clifftop. On the landward side of this waterfall loomed an extinct volcano.
And directly beneath the waterfall, exactly as it was depicted on the Egg, at the now-exposed
base of the coastal cliff, he saw an enormous rectangular stone doorway the size of an airplane hangar.
It was the entrance to the Third Vertex.
Covered by the squadron of drones, Wolf’s armored pods—they were PA-27 Airborne Assault Pods, used exclusively by the CIEF—zoomed down toward the entrance to the Vertex.
Waves of antiaircraft fire from the Japanese warships on the ocean surface—as well as from a dozen land positions on the cliffs—lanced up toward the incoming pods. Ordinary rounds just bounced off the assault pods’ tungsten armor, while RPGs and missiles were nullified by their advanced laser-blinding system.
When the pods’ altimeters sensed that they were two hundred feet above the exposed seabed, a pair of rotors flipped out laterally above each pod and instantly began rotating in opposite directions, arresting their falls.
Wolf’s pod landed lightly on the seabed, helicopter style, only a hundred yards from the entrance to the Vertex, not far from the wreck of the supertanker.
Its armored door hissed open and Wolf emerged, flanked by two CIEF troops and the Neetha warlock.
On his back Wolf wore a Samsonite pack containing the Firestone. Out of another pod nearby stepped Rapier—he carried the Philosopher’s Stone in a similar backpack.
It was only now that he was on the ground that Wolf saw what the pointed black objects on the seabed were: they were towering black rocks, all of which had been sharpened to jagged points by the hand of man, their edges deliberately serrated.
“They’re designed to sink any ship that comes too close to the entrance . . .” a CIEF trooper observed.
“Indeed,” Wolf said.
There must have been thirty of the things, arrayed in a random pattern around the coastal cliffs. Good protection for a secret place.
All around Wolf, forty CIEF troopers were hustling out of the ten other PA-27 pods that had landed on the seabed.
It was then that gunfire began to rain down on them from Japanese troops positioned on the clifftops overlooking the exposed beach.
The Five Greatest Warriors Page 14