The Five Greatest Warriors

by Matthew Reilly

  “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 realized 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 stair mazes on their flanks—

  A voice in his ear made him start.

  “I’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 crisscrossing 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 sunset, 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 armor 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.

  Drinking water was thrown onto the superhot stepping-stone to cool it. It sizzled loudly.

  Rapier leaped out onto the stone, a full striding jump. He landed with a thump . . .

  . . . and the stepping stone sank ever so slightly, the trigger for the maze’s elaborate defense system.

  And the system came spectacularly alive.

  THE FIRST tower vomited a bubbling gout of glowing-hot lava from its chimneylike peak, lava that immediately began to ooze down the zigzagging channels carved into its sides.

  “Go!” Wolf yelled to Rapier.

  Rapier, Astro, and the other three CIEF men took off, bolting out across the stepping-stone and ascending a narrow stairway that gave access to the first tower.

  Astro charged up the stairs behind Rapier, breathing hard and
fast.

  “Rapier! Go right and down!” one of the spotters called in his ear.

  They went right and down, skirting the lower half of the tower. Looking up as he ran, Astro glimpsed the oozing red lava trickling down the channels of the upper half, traveling slowly downward. Where he couldn’t actually see it, the telltale yellow glow of the superheated liquid told him where it was.

  Guided by their two elevated spotters, the five-man team did a full circuit of the tower, clambering up and down its stairways—and Astro quickly realized that without the guides’ instructions, they would have got hopelessly lost very quickly.

  He also noticed something else—something that you could see only when you encountered the tower’s walls up close.

  The walls of the tower were not made of sheer stone. Rather the surface of the wall was comprised of a superfine mesh of tiny upwardly pointed spikes. Touching the microspikes, Astro found they were viciously sharp. Just brushing your hand against them drew blood.

  Then, abruptly, his group rounded a corner and arrived at the long stone bridge that led to the second tower.

  They dashed out across it, Astro running close behind Rapier. As he ran, he saw that a bubbling body of lava was now oozing from the peak of the second tower.

  They were being set off in sequence—giving you a chance to reach the summit, but also giving the lava four chances to catch you on the way back.

  A spotter called, “Okay, cross the bridge and take the stairway leading—shwap!-shwap!”

  Standing out on the bridge, Astro spun to look back up at the gateway just in time to see both of his spotters snap backward, their heads vanishing in matching bursts of red, their bodies tumbling off their perch and free-falling all the way down to the tar lake.

  “What the—?” the CIEF man behind Astro said a split second before he too was shot and hurled off the narrow bridge. He landed into the tar lake, emitting a half scream before the simmering black goo melted the skin off his face and sucked him under.

  Slit-fzzzzzz!

  Astro ducked as a bullet intended for his own head nicked his sleeve and fizzed away. He caught a glimpse of muzzle flash—maybe two muzzle flashes—high up near the gateway on the opposite side of the crater.

  Two more Japanese snipers.

  Snipers who had waited for them to get this far before opening fire . . .

  “We’re under fire!” Rapier yelled into his throat mike. “We need cover! Give us some goddamn cover!”

  Down on the path at lake level, Jack stood and watched in horror as the tower team walked right into the trap.

  The full extent of their situation unfolded in his mind:

  The Japanese had more people in here.

  They’d waited patiently until Wolf’s men had triggered the tower system’s trap. Then they’d taken out the spotters and were now nailing the tower team itself.

  Then came the bigger realization.

  This was their only chance to get the Pillar.

  It had to be set in place before dawn tomorrow morning. If they didn’t get it now—during this sunset opening—the Japanese forces would win and the world would be doomed.

  This was their one, only, and last chance.

  Jack snapped back to the present, to the scene on the towers.

  Bullets were flying.

  Men were being hit. One fell into the foul tar lake.

  Lava was still oozing from the tops of the first two towers, running in rivulets down their convoluted channel systems.

  Rapier was shouting over the radio “—us some goddamned cover!”

  “There!” Zoe pointed, and Jack saw two Japanese snipers up on the far gateway, on the Vertex side of the crater, just as one of them fired in his direction.

  Beside him, Wolf’s right ear exploded in a starburst of blood, while the man beside him fell, shot through the eye.

  Wolf yelled, “Return fire!”

  And in the midst of all this, amid all the bullets and the shouting and the falling lava, Jack West Jr. sprang into action.

  JACK SCOOPED up his MP7 plus the MP-5 of the dead man near him and called, “Zoe! Grab the Barrett and come with me! Lily, get behind something and stay down!”

  Then he was off, wearing just his white T-shirt, cargo pants, and fireman’s helmet, his artificial left forearm glinting, racing across the stepping-stone and charging for the first tower with Zoe hurrying to catch up behind him.

  More gunfire rang out as they pounded up and down the first tower’s labyrinth of external stairways.

  They came to a corner—the next stairway ran around it and underneath the narrow bridge to the next tower.

  On the bridge, Jack saw Astro’s team getting annihilated by the gunmen on the far gateway—two more CIEF men were shot on the bridge. Taking cover behind their dead teammates, Astro and Rapier, outgunned and woefully exposed, were firing their pistols uselessly up at the shooters.

  “Zoe!” Jack called. “One shot then we move!”

  Pressed against the corner, Jack waited while Zoe crouched behind him, leveling her Barrett sniper rifle up at the men on the distant gateway.

  She fired.

  One sniper was thrown backward.

  “Great shot, now go!” Jack shouted.

  And off they went again, racing up and down the stairways of the first tower, now a target of the lone remaining sniper, whose bullets slammed into the walls inches behind them—and suddenly Jack realized that both he and Zoe had taken off their jackets, jackets which had contained their Warblers. They were out here, unprotected.

  There was also one other thing to worry about: high above them, the lava kept oozing downward, slithering like a glowing snake down its channels.

  They came to the last corner before the bridge, just out of the line of fire.

  “Okay,” Jack said to Zoe. “You got one shot again. When I run out onto that bridge, he’ll take about two seconds to get a bead on me. In that time, you take him out.”

  “But Jack, what if I miss!”

  “It’s a one-shot contest, Zoe. Either you shoot him or he shoots me. Ready, now!”

  Jack broke cover, bolting out into the open, charging onto the bridge, both his guns blazing.

  The tiny figure of the Japanese sniper could be seen spotting him and adjusting his aim through his sights and—

  Blam!

  Gunshot.

  Who had fired it, Jack couldn’t tell.

  To his horror, he glimpsed a muzzle flash up at the gateway and for a terrifying moment, he thought that maybe Zoe hadn’t got her shot off in time, but a split second after the muzzle flashed, he saw the back of the sniper’s head blow outward in a grisly spray of blood and brains—just as the sniper’s bullet sheared through the chin strap of Jack’s fireman’s helmet.

  Zoe had got her shot off perhaps a hundredth of a second faster than the Japanese sniper.

  “Thanks, Zoe! I gotta run!”

  He bolted out across the narrow bridge, stepping over the dead bodies of the CIEF team before hurdling Rapier and Astro, and charging for the second tower, now racing on his own against the lava descending from above.

  As soon as Jack set foot on the first step of the second tower, lava began oozing out the top of the third one, so that now three separate rivers of lava were pouring down from the peaks of the first three towers, all at different stages in their descents.

  Jack didn’t stop running.

  Legs pumping, he negotiated the maze of stairways, working from memory, bounding up them, dancing down them, trying not to touch the wall of the tower—at one point, he brushed against one wall and its skin of tiny razor-sharp teeth sliced through the sleeve of his T-shirt as if it had been tissue paper, drawing a large gash in his shoulder that seeped blood down his right arm.

  The short sleeve dangled uselessly as he ran, so Jack ripped it off, revealing a totally blood-soaked arm.

  Running hard and fast, Jack came to the bridge leading to the third tower—this one stretched upward and was
fitted with stairs.

  Jack surmounted the bridge and arrived at the middle tier of the third tower. He was higher up now and he could see this tower’s snakelike lava flow much more closely. It glowed fiercely as it descended steadily through its channels.

  It was almost at the halfway point between the peak of the tower and the bridge Jack had just crossed.

  If he didn’t grab the Pillar and start his return journey before it reached that halfway point, he’d be screwed, stranded, stuck up here and sentenced to wait for his own painful death.

  Can’t stop now.

  He ran through a path that cut through the third tower and pounded up a stairway that ran up its far flank, leading to another long bridge that gave access to the fourth tower—across that bridge and up the fourth tower, now dizzyingly high, clambering up rung ladders cut into the flank of that tower’s uppermost tier—within feet of the simmering lava that now oozed down its channels—before he mounted the final supersteep rock bridge, a soaring ultranarrow piece of stone that sprang up and across to the summit of the central pinnacle, and suddenly Jack found himself standing at the highest point in the crater, inside the glorious cupola housing the Third Pillar.

  HAD HE time to marvel, Jack would have gawked at the cupola atop the central tower. It featured golden columns, a gold pedestal, and gold-leaved tiles.

  But he didn’t have time.

  Instead, he just snatched the cloudy oblong Pillar from its pedestal and commenced the desperate return journey.

  Down the rock bridge he flew, stepping onto the fourth tower two meters ahead of its lava flow.

  Across the bridge to the third tower, down its steps, and then running through the cutaway tunnel in it, dashing through the tunnel just as the molten lava above him split into three channels and came splashing down into the tunnel a bare meter behind his fleeing feet.

  Down to the second tower, whose upper half was now positively riddled with glowing lava channels—they looked like iridescent red veins. Here Jack had to navigate three sides and the lava fell from more chutes and in more places—and once it landed on a stairway it sizzled fiercely and chased you further down that stairway: take the wrong stairway and there was no way to retrace your steps. No margin for error.