The Five Greatest Warriors

by Matthew Reilly

  “Jack . . . !” Pooh Bear called again, opening his good eye.

  “I’m here,” Jack said gently. “We’re here.”

  “I’m a little . . . wounded . . . over here, Jack,” Pooh gasped. “Just give me . . . a minute . . . to catch my breath.”

  “Buddy, after what you just did, you take all the time you need.”

  WHILE IT had taken Jack almost an hour to descend to the bottom of the salt mine, it took him three hours to retrace his steps.

  First, he had to tend to Pooh Bear and Stretch’s wounds, and they were severe. Beyond their gashes and cuts, Pooh’s eye was a gory mess and the stab wound to Stretch’s lower back was life-threatening.

  Pooh Bear had been able to walk back to the jeep, leaning heavily on Jack’s shoulder, but Stretch was a different story. To get him out, Jack had constructed a stretcher from some old wooden ladders and with Lily and Iolanthe holding a corner each, they had slowly and carefully carried Stretch back up to the parked jeep.

  Only then could Jack drive them back to the surface, and even then, very slowly so as not to jolt Stretch unnecessarily.

  During the long journey up, Pooh Bear had told Jack how, after speaking with him earlier, they had come directly here, guided by the Halicarnassus’s transponder beacon over the final stages. Cieran and the twins were right now up on the surface—having overcome the Russian guards, Ding and Dong—with the charged Fourth Pillar in their possession and a helicopter they’d chartered from Amman airport.

  “I’m glad you got here when you did,” Jack said. “You saved our asses.”

  They turned a final corner and saw a small square of daylight up ahead, the outside world.

  The jeep rumbled out of the mine, bouncing out into glorious desert sunshine.

  Jack brought it to a halt and, smiling with relief, looked down the hill at the Halicarnassus, expecting to see the twins and Sky Monster with Ding and Dong subdued—

  His face fell.

  Down by the Hali, he saw Sky Monster and the twins slumped on the ground, handcuffed to the cargo ramp’s struts. All three sat with their heads bent, unmoving.

  A Bell helicopter stood beside the 747—Pooh Bear’s chopper from Amman—but so did another aircraft, parked on the desert highway.

  It was a sleek black Concorde-like jetliner with a sharp beaklike nose and missiles on its wings.

  A Tupolev-144.

  And standing there on the dusty turnaround outside the mine, flanked by four of his own Spetsnaz guards plus Ding and Dong, waiting for Jack, was Carnivore.

  “WEST THE Younger.” Carnivore grinned, his gruesome steel jaw glinting. “My, what a handy tool you have turned out to be. I’ll take that.”

  He took the Jesus Pillar from Jack. “It will go well with the one your friends laid in the Bristol Channel.”

  With Jack and the others disarmed and covered by the Spetsnaz troops, Iolanthe stepped out of the jeep and joined Carnivore. “The Chinese colonel has a fake Pillar and the Saudi spy is dead,” she reported.

  “The Blood Vulture is no more?” Carnivore seemed genuinely surprised. “Killed by Young West?”

  “No, by Anzar Abbas’s second son. He defeated his elder brother too in single combat. It was impressive.”

  “Indeed.” Carnivore eyed the terribly wounded Pooh Bear. “The Blood Vulture was a very dangerous man.”

  “Did Mao call you about the Pillar he acquired?” Iolanthe asked.

  “He did. He said he was on his way to eastern Russia with it, but the tracker sewn into his skin indicates that he and his forces are heading directly for the Sixth Vertex. The fool probably thought he could get to the Vertex and force me to cooperate with him.”

  As they spoke, Jack gazed out at Sky Monster and the twins cuffed to the Hali’s rear ramp.

  What had happened here? And where was—

  “Hello, Jack.” Cieran Kincaid emerged from behind Carnivore. He was unbound, moving freely.

  Jack stared at the young Irish captain, at first not comprehending. Then it all made sense: the raid on Alexander’s safe house in County Kerry last year, and the scene here. Cieran had helped Pooh Bear and Stretch “overcome” Ding and Dong; they had then gone into the mine to help Jack while Cieran had released the two Spetsnaz guards and turned on Sky Monster and the twins.

  Carnivore said, “I told you once before, Young West, that our tentacles spread far and wide.”

  But Jack only had eyes for Cieran. “You goddamn bastard. It was you who gave them the location of the safe house holding Alexander. Only members of Colin O’Hara’s inner circle in Ireland knew where that safe house was, and you were part of that circle . . .”

  Cieran smiled, the airy smile of the true believer. “My allegiance to God is greater than my allegiance to a mere nation, Jack.”

  “What?”

  “The Deus Rex, Jack. The God Kings. They were chosen by our Lord. They rule by His decree. Nations are the creation of men; the Deus Rex are the chosen vessels of God himself. They are as close to Him as you or I shall ever get.”

  “Maybe as close as you’ll get,” Jack said, thinking about his experience down in the tomb.

  “It’s my honor to serve them. You don’t understand, which is why you are lost,” Cieran said.

  “Is that so?” Jack said.

  Iolanthe and Carnivore had finished speaking and were now watching this exchange with amusement.

  Carnivore gazed at Jack, but when he spoke, it was to Iolanthe: “Thoughts?”

  “He’s truly remarkable, cousin,” Iolanthe said. “It would be a shame. I would prefer we not do so.”

  Carnivore seemed to think about that. “If we take the girl, he’ll come after her, and that’s far too dangerous. He would have to be immobilized till the final Pillar was laid. I can’t have him running around . . .”

  “I’ll kill him,” Cieran said firmly, turning to face them.

  Carnivore glanced at Cieran, considering the offer.

  Jack just turned from Cieran to Carnivore to Iolanthe, suddenly aware that his life was under judgment. His gaze came to rest on Carnivore, the final arbiter, deep in thought.

  As Carnivore deliberated, Cieran stepped close behind Jack.

  “You know, Jack, we have more in common than you think,” he whispered. “Like Zoe Kissane. “

  Jack cocked his head sideways.

  “Oh yes, she tasted nice, that night in Dublin a few years back,” Cieran smirked.

  Jack stared forward.

  Cieran said, “Sure, I might have plied her with more alcohol than she was used to, and maybe even slipped some extra shots into her drinks, but it’s never just the alcohol, is it? She wanted something to happen. Although you should have seen her the next morning, when she woke up in bed beside me. She was in quite a state, saying ‘Oh, God, what have I done? What have I done?’ ”

  Cieran chuckled.

  Jack said nothing, but his jaw was grinding.

  “You two-faced treacherous pig!” Pooh Bear spat from behind him. “I thought sex outside of marriage wasn’t the done thing for religious fanatics like you.”

  Cieran said airily, “Alas, it is my weakness, and on that occasion, as on similar ones before it, I confessed my sins at church and the Lord in his infinite mercy absolved me.”

  Jack still said nothing. But his face was deadly.

  It was then that Carnivore made his decision.

  To Iolanthe, he said: “Take the girl. Better to have her with us in case something happens to the boy.”

  Covered by the six Spetsnaz guards, Iolanthe pulled Lily away from Jack.

  “Daddy . . .” Lily said, clearly more afraid for him than for herself.

  Carnivore addressed Jack.

  “West the Younger. You’re a brave man and you have fought well”—he grabbed a Skorpion machine pistol from one of his bodyguards and threw it roughly to Cieran—“but sadly your time has come. I can’t risk you being alive any longer.”

  To Cieran: “Shoot him a
nd the others. Then join us at the plane. And Captain Kincaid, no games, no speeches, no gloating, just do it now. Make sure of it.”

  Carnivore headed off toward his plane, with his guards, Iolanthe, and Lily in tow.

  “Farewell, Jack West Jr.,” Iolanthe said, looking back. “My apologies. I didn’t think it should end this way for you.”

  Lily stared fearfully back at Jack as she walked, and at Pooh Bear and the bedbound Stretch, until she was shoved down the rocky slope, out of sight.

  Jack watched as she disappeared down the hill, to be replaced moments later by Cieran, holding the Skorpion machine pistol aimed directly at Jack’s eyes.

  Weaponless and with absolutely nowhere to run this time, Jack stood tall and closed his eyes.

  “Not this way . . .”

  Then without so much as a blink Cieran Kincaid pulled the trigger.

  TWENTY YARDS down the hill, Lily and Iolanthe heard the rapid-fire clatter of the Skorpion.

  Lily turned and saw the distant figure of Cieran blasting away. Jack was out of her line of sight, hidden by the slope of the hill.

  Lily burst into tears and shouted, “Daddy! No . . .!”

  Iolanthe just shook her head and pulled Lily along, heading for the Tupolev.

  Lily had taken only a few more steps when she heard Cieran yell, “What the fuck!”

  She spun. So did Iolanthe—

  —just in time to see Jack crash-tackle Cieran—hard—hurling him off the edge of the turnaround and sending them both tumbling out of sight, down the other side of the hill in a cloud of dust and sand.

  Carnivore saw them, too.

  “Get to the plane! Leave him!” he ordered. Then, to his men: “Missiles! Disable their plane and destroy that helicopter!”

  Flanked by their six Spetsnaz bodyguards, Carnivore, Iolanthe, and Lily rushed aboard the Tupolev.

  As she was pushed inside the sleek black plane, Lily looked back and said, “Go Daddy . . .”

  Moments later, two missiles shoomed out from the Tupolev’s wings—the first smashed through the windshield of Pooh Bear’s chartered helicopter and blew it to pieces; the second slammed into the forward landing gear of the Halicarnassus.

  The big 747’s nitrogen-filled forward wheels blasted outward in a gaseous explosion, and the great black plane’s nose lurched downward, dropping suddenly, its forward landing strut—now wheelless—crunching down onto the bitumen of the desert highway.

  The Halicarnassus wasn’t going anywhere soon.

  Then the sleek black Tupolev turned away and taxied down the remote highway, speeding up quickly before lifting off into the sky.

  AS FOR Jack, he tumbled and rolled in a dusty heap with Cieran Kincaid.

  In the moment before Cieran had fired on him, Jack had done one simple thing.

  Pushing through the fabric of his jacket, he had flicked the switch that initiated the grenade-sized Warbler in his pocket.

  As such, to Cieran’s amazement, all of his bullets had swept apart in a V-shape, fizzing harmlessly past Jack, missing him on either side until the Skorpion started dry-clicking, its magazine spent.

  At which point, Jack charged.

  He came bounding forward and when he tackled Cieran, it was a crashing hit to the solar plexus that sent the two of them tumbling down the rocky hillside.

  When they hit the bottom of the slope, both men leaped to their feet.

  Cieran quickly unsheathed a Bowie knife, but what happened next happened way too fast for Cieran Kincaid to comprehend.

  No sooner had he extracted the knife than Jack was on him and gripping his knife hand, their faces inches apart, Jack’s face twisted in a fury that chilled Cieran to his very core.

  Then with brutal force and a sickening crack!, Jack broke Cieran’s wrist and Cieran yelled, his knife hand bent grotesquely round the wrong way, but his scream cut off abruptly as Jack proceeded to slash the knife, still actually gripped by Cieran himself, in a powerful lateral swipe.

  Cieran froze, swaying on his feet but still upright, his eyes boggling. Then the deep horizontal gash across his throat started to leak blood, buckets of it.

  His horrified eyes looked directly into Jack’s, but he was incapable of speech now.

  Jack wasn’t.

  “See you in Hell,” he said through clenched teeth, “ ’cause that’s the only place you’re going, you crazy zealot son of a bitch.”

  Cieran dropped to the dusty ground in a heap, his dead eyes staring up into the sky.

  WITH CIERAN dead and Carnivore gone, Jack went to check on his battered and injured team.

  First he went down to Sky Monster and the twins at the Halicarnassus’s rear loading ramp and sawed through their handcuffs.

  Sky Monster, it turned out, had been rendered unconscious by some kind of nerve agent Cieran had unexpectedly sprayed in his face soon after Pooh Bear and Stretch had gone inside the mine. When he came to, he vomited violently.

  As for the twins, they’d been drugged by Cieran shortly after they’d arrived at the mine, too—a barbiturate of some sort slipped into their water bottles. When they finally awoke, they looked very pale and had headaches as bad as Sky Monster’s.

  In the meantime, Jack set about getting Pooh Bear and Stretch into the Hali’s infirmary.

  Owing to the plane’s destroyed forward landing gear, all of its interior cabins were tilted at an extreme angle. But everything was still in workable order, and over the course of two hours, working methodically with Horus perched behind him, Jack West patched up his badly broken team.

  It was late in the afternoon of Wednesday, March 19, when Jack emerged from the infirmary, having cleaned up Stretch and Pooh Bear and dosed them up with heavy sedatives. Sky Monster was in his bunkroom, still vomiting into a bucket every fifteen minutes.

  The twins greeted Jack as he returned to the main cabin and fell into his seat. They were still pale and sipping Gastrolyte.

  “So, where do we stand?” Lachlan asked. “Is this where our mission ends, one step short of the finish line?”

  Jack didn’t respond.

  His eyes were glued to the floor.

  At last he said, “Carnivore has all the pieces he needs. He has the three cleansing stones—the Philosopher’s Stone, the Firestone and the Basin of Rameses—water from the Ness Spring; the last Pillar; the Twin Tablets of Thuthmosis for the incantation; and Lily and Alexander to read from them . . .”

  “. . . and, I presume, the location of the Sixth and last Vertex,” Lachlan said.

  “Which we never figured out,” Julius added.

  Jack said softly, “I have to get to that Vertex. I have to get Lily back and stop Carnivore before he performs the final ceremony.”

  “Jack! Are you listening to us?” Julius said. “We never found the last Vertex!”

  Jack turned to face them, calm and focused.

  “Oh, I know where the last Vertex is.”

  “What!” Julius exclaimed. Horus looked up sharply.

  “You know where the last Vertex is?” Lachlan said.

  “I’ve known for a while,” Jack said. “I think Wizard had a good suspicion, too. Your light show at Stonehenge wasn’t conclusive by itself, but combined with some other factors that have come to light, it helped settle the issue for me.”

  “What do you mean?” Lachlan asked. “What other factors?”

  Jack said, “The Chinese aid payments to the Chilean government two months ago. The inscription in Egypt: ‘A lone bekhen sentinel stands guard over the entrance to the greatest shrine.’ Of course, the clincher was the picture from Genghis Khan’s shield: of a coastal hill with a single figure standing on it.”

  Julius couldn’t contain himself. “Well, come on, Jack! Where the bloody hell is it!”

  Jack shrugged sadly. “You’ve actually been there before, Julius. You, too, Lachlan. The Sixth Vertex is in the Pacific Ocean, underneath Easter Island.”

  “FORGIVE MY slowness,” Lachlan said, “but how do all those thi
ngs point to Easter Island?”

  Jack flicked on a nearby computer, pulled up one of the twins’ photos from Stonehenge:

  “See the left-hand upright. It’s almost all ocean. Now, I figured this could be the Pacific Ocean and that landmass on the right is the western shore of South America. But that’s a pretty big guess to make. Only then I saw a picture on Wizard’s summary sheet . . .”

  Jack pulled out a photocopy of the summary sheet:

  “See that picture at the bottom left, over which Wizard scribbled “WRONG!” I didn’t recognize it at first, but that’s a map of Easter Island. The dots around the edges are the positions of the moai statues around the island’s coast.

  “And see where Wizard wrote “Easter and the equinox??” We all thought it was a reference to the special status of Easter this year, occurring on equinox. But it wasn’t. It was a reference to Easter Island being the location of the ceremony that must be performed during tomorrow’s Dual Equinox.

  “The Stonehenge image was starting to show promise.

  “And then came the other factors,” Jack said. “Easter Island is technically part of Chile. Those Chinese ‘aid payments’ to Chile are more likely bribes to get exclusive use of the island for a few days. I imagine Chinese forces are there now.

  “And the ‘bekhen sentinel’ who guards the final shrine is not an Egyptian basalt monument as Napoleon thought it was . . .”

  “It’s one of the four basalt moai that have been found on Easter Island,” Julius said, understanding. “In the 1800s, the British took the two biggest ones—”

  “But they were the wrong ones,” Jack said. “They should have taken the oldest one. I’ve been to Easter Island, too, so I know that the more recent statues, all twelve hundred of them, are all cut from volcanic tufa which, while certainly impressive to look at, are of little value to our mission.

  “The oldest moai, however—which are possibly thousands of years old, which some say predate the arrival of Polynesians to the island—look nothing like the famous newer ones. They’re smaller, with more rounded heads. They look more like E.T. than human beings. And the oldest basalt, or bekhen, statue is still on the island, standing all by itself on the northwest corner, on a platform called the Ahu Vai Mata. It is the ‘lone bekhen sentinel’ that Napoleon never found.