“That’s the way it is,” Pooh Bear said grimly, “and the fate of the world depends on us helping them!”
A minute later, Pooh Bear and Stretch were out on the section of the narrow path that ran along the adjoining wall of the great abyss.
From here they could see more symbols carved into the walls of the towers—each symbol was positioned a short way below the gaps in each tower’s waist-high stone guardrail. Wall ladders were carved everywhere, giving anyone brave enough to challenge the maze a dizzying array of choices.
Pooh Bear raised some night-vision binoculars to his eyes. “Stretch! What’s the second symbol on the plaque?”
“Three horizontal lines, if you read it upward. A box with a single diagonal line if you read it downward.”
“I see two ladders that the boys can take, and the choices are three horizontal lines or three vertical lines. It reads upward.” Then, into his radio he yelled: “Boys! Take the gap to the left, that’s the safe one!”
On the exposed rooftop below the summit, the twins were awaiting instructions when a thick torrent of water came surging through the gap above them and gushed down on top of them with tremendous force.
Both of them were thrown off their feet, the water now pouring over the lip of the summit in a thick unbroken stream.
Instantly drenched, they struggled to their feet, sloshing in ankle-deep water. Now this rooftop was rapidly filling up.
Pooh Bear’s voice called in their earpieces: “Take the gap to the left, that’s the safe one!”
Julius plunged toward that gap, pushing his way through the churning seawater.
A quick glance behind him revealed that at least two spectacular waterfalls were now launching themselves off the summit of the vertical city. He assumed a third one was flowing off the other side, but it was out of his sight.
“See any waterfalls now?” he yelled to Lachlan.
“Mother of Mercy!” Lachlan shouted back. “This is not the kind of study that I’m used to!”
“Move!”
Through the next gap they went, climbing down the wall ladder below it, while the incoming seawater behind them rose and rose . . . until it flowed out through the other gaps in the stone guardrail as magnificent cascading waterfalls.
After a hasty dash, Pooh Bear and Stretch reached the observation platform.
From here they had a clear view of the entire collection of towers. It was a stunning sight—an enormous miniature city attached to the sheer cliff, suspended above the abyss; and now, adding to the spectacle, it featured some glittering waterfalls tumbling over its uppermost levels.
More importantly, however, from here they could make out the series of symbols cut into the towers’ sides that showed the safe path down through the maze.
From this angle Pooh and Stretch could only see two of the three sides of each tower, but that was enough. If they didn’t see the symbol they were looking for, they assumed it was on the unseen side and sent the twins that way.
It was 1:50 A.M.
They had forty-one minutes to get to the bottom of the maze.
THE 5TH VERTEX
DIEGO GARCIA, INDIAN OCEAN
DIEGO GARCIA (5TH VERTEX)
IT WAS like standing in the back row of a football stadium, Jack thought.
The Fifth Vertex lay before him, and it was completely different from any of the Vertices he’d seen so far. Indeed, the only familiar thing about it was the immense bronze pyramid hanging over the gigantic underground space.
A huge bowl-shaped cavern dropped away from the archway in which Jack and the others now stood. The cavern was perhaps a thousand feet across and roughly circular in shape. A broad curving roadway—it was the width of a city street and guarded on the inner side by a seven-foot-high stone barrier—swept around the cavern in a smooth descending spiral that converged on the peak of the pyramid.
“It’s shaped like a big seashell,” Lily gasped.
She was right, Jack thought. The great spiraling road began with a long straight section, like the horn of a seashell. Then it wound in on itself, plunging downward as it spiraled inward, the roadway gradually diminishing in size as it did so, until it reached the epicenter of the cavern, the peak of the pyramid, as a thin path.
The final feature of the cavern that caught Jack’s eye was not part of the Vertex: over the years, the various owners of this island had been busy.
The spiraling roadway was strewn with vehicles and odd constructions.
Jeeps and motorcycles lay on their sides, rusted over; several large-tracked bridging vehicles had been upturned near the entrance; and bizarrely, some horse-drawn cannons lay overturned further down the curving road.
The most prominent man-made additions to the space, however, were two very modern hammerhead construction cranes, enormous T-shaped cranes that had been erected at strategic points along the road: one near the entrance archway, another halfway down the spiraling road.
Both cranes were fitted with steel baskets that could hold several people. The baskets could then be drawn out along each crane’s arm and lowered vertically to a lower level of the spiral.
The two cranes stood on solid concrete bases that were themselves guarded on the high side of the road by thick A-shaped concrete barriers.
The presence of the cranes and their curiously shaped protective barriers meant a lot to Jack.
“Let me guess,” he said. “Every time you venture down that roadway, you trip some unseen mechanism and a gush of—I don’t know—seawater floods down the roadway, sweeping away any person or vehicle in its path, until the water ultimately flows down into the abyss at the bottom.”
Bonaventura was surprised. “How could you know—?”
“The overturned bridging vehicles are the first clue—only a big wave of water could knock over one of those brutes—but the concrete barriers protecting your cranes are a bigger clue. The A-shape of the barriers sends any oncoming wave around the crane. I just guessed it was seawater, since we’re on an atoll in the middle of a fucking ocean, you dolt.”
“Swear jar,” Lily whispered.
Bonaventura took the insult in his stride. “Those cranes have allowed us to make detailed observations of this site. Scans of the pyramid, of the ancient glyphs cut into its sides and the road. I myself have spent countless hours in the basket of the lower crane inspecting the pyramid at close range. It’s given us crucial information about the locations of the other Vertices and the nature of some of the rewards.”
“But it all counts for nothing without the Pillar,” Jack said. “As the French and British found out before you.”
“The knowledge we found here enabled us to find a few things before you,” Bonaventura shot back.
Jack checked his watch.
It was 4:50 A.M.
They had forty-one minutes.
He keyed his radio. “Pooh Bear? How’re you doing up there?”
His earpiece crackled sharply before a hashing roar came through it, followed by Pooh Bear’s shouting voice.
“It’s all happening here, Huntsman! Sorry! Can’t talk! Gotta guide the twins through the maze! Will call you back!”
The signal cut off.
Jack looked at Lily, then turned to General Dyer.
“I’m gonna need a motorbike.”
A MILITARY MOTORCYCLE was brought down the entry tunnel and handed over to Jack.
Jack straddled the bike. Lily jumped on behind him, riding pillion, gripping the double-cleansed Pillar.
Bonaventura was shocked. “You’re not going to use the cranes?” He looked to Iolanthe for support. “But they’re the safest way down . . .”
The first hammerhead crane was indeed level with them, its counterbalanced rear arm only a few feet away.
Jack shook his head. “You just don’t get it, do you? In a place like this, you can’t cheat, you can’t bypass the traps. Did it ever occur to you that the Vertex might reward the person who can figure out its trap system?”
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“Well, I—”
Jack said, “These trap systems are just like those of the Egyptians, the Chinese, and the Maya: they’re designed to keep the unknowledgeable out. Which means they’re designed to allow the right people in. If you have the Pillar in your hands, this system will let you pass through it safely. But if you try to cheat it, it’ll attack you.”
Bonaventura and General Dyer turned to Iolanthe, as if she were the ultimate judge.
She just shrugged. “Let him do it his way. He knows what he’s doing.”
“Thanks,” Jack said drily.
“You’ll be dead before you reach the second ring,” Bonaventura snorted. “And then we’ll have to clean up what’s left of you and plant the Pillar ourselves.”
“Then it’s been nice knowing you,” Jack said, gunning the motorbike and bouncing it down the short set of stairs that gave access to the roadway.
Then he hit the bottom of the stairway near the base of the crane, and swung left, zooming down the outermost ring of the deadly spiraling roadway.
A hundred yards into their journey, Jack and Lily came to a jagged chasm that sliced across the roadway.
Three stone bridges spanned it.
Two red crosses had been crudely spray-painted across the two outer bridges, while a green arrow indicated that the middle bridge was the safe one.
Jack, however, ignored the painted markings. Instead, he gazed at a smaller and far more ancient marking carved neatly into the stone bridge beneath the green-painted arrow:
“Plaque?” he asked Lily.
“Plaque.” Lily pulled out her digital camera and brought up the photo of the golden plaque from the First Vertex.
They both saw that along the top edge of the frame, the same symbol appeared as the first in a sequence:
Looking out over the stadium-like space, Jack counted several more chasms cutting across the spiraling road. Over each of the chasms were two or sometimes three bridges. As at Hokkaido, you had to choose the correct bridge or else you set off the trap mechanism.
He turned to Lily. “What do you say, kiddo?”
“Let’s kick some ass.”
“Couldn’t have said it better myself.”
And so guided by the symbols depicted on their camera, they took off down the wide spiraling avenue, speeding toward the heart of the Fifth Vertex.
THE CITY OF WATERFALLS
LUNDY ISLAND (4TH VERTEX)
The silence at the Fifth Vertex could not have been more unlike the chaos at the Fourth.
From his position on the observation platform, Pooh Bear looked out at the miniature city mounted on the wall of the abyss.
By now, the entire upper half of the city was overflowing with waterfalls—dozens of them, all cascading in glorious vertical streams down the many levels of the structure, before they hit the next rooftop and separated, left or right or straight ahead, ever forced by gravity to search for the path of least resistance downward.
Pooh Bear was amazed. It looked like the world’s biggest water feature.
And there, clambering down the wall ladders cut into the towers of the minicity, running across rooftops, sloshing through knee-deep water, microscopic specks against the grandeur of the structure, were the two tiny figures of Lachlan and Julius Adamson running for their lives in a desperate race against the ravenous streams of water tumbling down the system behind them.
They were about halfway down the enormous structure and it was already 2:11 A.M.
It had taken them twenty minutes to get this far, and now they only had twenty minutes to get through the bottom half. It was going to be close.
“Go left!” Stretch yelled into his radio. “No! Left! Left!”
Out on the rooftops, the twins spun, disoriented.
If they hadn’t had Pooh Bear and Stretch to guide them, they would have got hopelessly lost by now and been swept to their deaths by the cascading torrents of water coming down behind them.
Instead, they were still in the game, only saturated and shivering, their red hair plastered flat against their scalps, rivulets of water running down their faces and off their chins.
Julius hurried to the left-hand gap in the guardrail of their current rooftop.
“Yes! That one!” Stretch’s voice yelled over the radio.
Julius stopped at the precipice, turned.
Behind him, Lachlan was struggling. Although they were identical in looks—and in many tastes, hobbies, and other things—they were not identical in fitness. Julius was far fitter than Lachlan. He ate better and sometimes he even joined Jack and Zoe on their morning runs. Lachlan ate a lot of junk food and did little exercise.
And now it was showing.
Lachlan was lagging behind, heaving for breath.
“Boys! Look out—!” they heard Pooh Bear shout.
With startling suddenness, a drenching waterfall came slamming down on top of the twins, engulfing them completely.
Both were hurled against the guardrail and Lachlan almost fell down the newly created waterfall beside it, but Julius threw out a hand and clutched his wrist at the last moment. He hauled him back to safety and they straggled over to the correct gap.
“Thanks, brother!” Lachlan shouted.
Julius didn’t answer.
“You know, this may not be the right time, but I’m really sorry about Stacy Baker!”
Julius just said, “Come on, we have to keep going!”
Down the side of that tower they went, clinging to the wall ladder cut into its side.
DIEGO GARCIA (5TH VERTEX)
Jack and Lily zoomed round the enormous spiraling roadway of the Fifth Vertex on their motorbike.
As they rode, they swept past the remains of a variety of vehicles strewn across the road: evidence of the violence this trap system could unleash.
Using the symbols on the upper edge of the golden plaque, they’d successfully crossed five of the chasms cutting across the roadway without setting off the master trap.
It was 5:11 A.M. and, with twenty minutes to go, they’d barely made one full circle of the giant descending spiral. It was slow going. Too slow, Jack thought. We need to get cracking.
To this point, the green arrows and red Xs spray-painted onto the bridges had been correct; the result, Jack guessed, of deadly trial and error by his French, British, and American predecessors over the years. He noticed, however, that the spray-painted advice ceased at the next chasm.
He and Lily came to it and stopped. Two bridges spanned this one.
While there were a couple of wrecks in this chasm, Jack suddenly noticed that there were no more vehicle wrecks on the road beyond it. “This is where all our predecessors lost their way. Until the Americans started using cranes, no one ever got past here—”
Oddly, neither of the two symbols carved into the ground before this chasm’s bridges matched the next symbol from the golden plaque. The next symbol on the plaque was:
whereas the two symbols on the ground were:
Suddenly, an ominous rumble echoed out from somewhere above him.
“Uh-oh . . .” Jack snapped to look up.
It had come from the uppermost section of the spiral, from the large tunnel up there.
“Oh, damn,” Jack said.
Bonaventura’s voice came over the radio: “You fool! You’ve set it off! The master trap is about to go off!”
“We didn’t set anything off,” Jack said. “We didn’t do anything.”
“That symbol looks like a pillar . . .” Lily said.
Jack was really worried now.
“We’ve missed something,” he said softly.
The rumbling from above grew louder.
“I told you to use the cranes!” Bonaventura was panicking.
But Jack wasn’t.
He spun, looking back up the curving road behind them, his eyes searching—
—and he spotted something on the ground underneath an upturned 1930s British jeep back there.
He
swung the motorbike around and gunned it back to the overturned jeep, where he jumped off, slid to the ground and peered at the roadway.
Carved into the stone roadway was the familiar image of the Machine:
And it was life-sized, its rectangular depictions of the Pillars were the same size of the Pillar in his pack. And while five of them were simple carvings, one was fully indented into the road.
Jack had seen this before, back at the First Vertex at Abu Simbel. He snatched his Pillar from his pack and jammed it into the indented rectangle in the carving.
The rumbling from above stopped instantly.
Silence enveloped the cavern once again.
“You did it . . .” Bonaventura said, amazed. “No one’s got past there before.”
“What can I say, we’re specialists,” Jack replied. But in his mind, he was thinking about the advanced technology at work within this place: technology that worked in concert with the Pillar.
“Now the symbols on the golden plaque make much more sense,” Lily said.
“See, there’s a Pillar symbol every so often. At those times, we have to place the Pillar in a carving like this. Otherwise, the system’s master trap goes off. No wonder no one could get past this bridge. They would always set off the big trap.”
“Like I said,” Jack turned to her, “you’re not allowed to cheat in a place like this. If you can figure it out, the system lets you pass. That’s why it was built: to allow the knowledgeable to enter and keep the pretenders out.”
Armed with this knowledge, Jack and Lily made rapid progress through the lower half of the spiral.
Traveling in this way, they encountered no more difficulties and ten minutes later, arrived at the lowest and innermost ring.
Coming to that ring, they saw a long tongue of stone stretching out to the peak of the inverted pyramid. Cut into the ground near its starting point was one last carving of the Machine.
The Five Greatest Warriors Page 24