Seven Ancient Wonders

by Matthew Reilly

  Pooh Bear scowled. ‘Always argue the negative, don’t you, Israeli. Sometimes I wonder why you even bothered to come on this mission.’

  ‘I came to keep an eye on all of you,’ Stretch retorted.

  Wizard said, ‘If we can’t get the Piece, we at least need to see the Piece. Lily has to see the positive incantation carved into its upper side.’

  West ignored them all.

  He just peered out from the balcony of the sentry tower, down at the Great Arch of the Refuge.

  He eyed the jetty at the bottom end of the guttered rampway stretching down from the Great Arch. The jetty stood at a point exactly halfway between the two sentry towers and it was covered by a small four-pillared marble gazebo. The vertical distance from West’s balcony to the little gazebo: maybe 50 metres.

  ‘Big Ears. I need a flying fox to that gazebo.’

  ‘Got it.’

  Big Ears whipped out his M-16, loaded a grappling hook into its underslung grenade launcher, aimed and fired.

  The hook whizzed out across the chasm, arcing high through the air, its rope wobbling behind it. Then it shot downward,toward the marble gazebo on the jetty, until—thwack!—the hook whiplashed around one of the gazebo’s pillars and took hold.

  ‘Nice shot, brother,’ Zoe said, genuinely impressed.

  Big Ears looped his end of the hook’s rope around a pillar in the sentry tower’s window and the rope went taut—creating a long steep zipline that stretched down and across the chasm, from the high sentry tower down to the low jetty.

  ‘Lily,’ West said, ‘you’re with me from here. Grab on. We go first.’

  Lily leapt into West’s arms, wrapped her hands around his neck. West then slung a compact handlebar-like flying fox over the rope and pushed off—

  —and the two of them sailed out over the immense chasm, across the face of Hamilcar’s Refuge, tiny dots against the great ancient fortress—

  —before they slid to a perfect halt on the surface of the little jetty that lay before the dark looming structure.

  ‘Okay, Zoe, come on down,’ West said into his radio.

  Zoe whizzed down the rope on her own flying fox, landing deftly next to West and Lily.

  ‘Wizard, you’re nex—’ West said.

  Bam!

  Gunshot.

  It echoed loudly across the great chasm.

  West spun, saw one of Judah’s snipers aiming a long-barrelled Barrett rifle out from their sentry tower’s balcony . . . and suddenly realised that he was no longer within the protective range of the Warbler.

  But strangely no bullet-impact hit near him, Zoe or Lily.

  And then the realisation hit West.

  The sniper wasn’t aiming for them.

  He was aiming at the—

  ‘Damn it, no. . . ’

  Bam!

  Another shot.

  Ping! Shwack!

  The flying fox’s rope was severed right in its middle and went instantly slack, cut clean in two. It dropped, limp, into the water.

  And suddenly West, Zoe and Lily were out on the jetty, all on their own, completely separated from the rest of their team.

  ‘No choice now,’ West said grimly. Then, into his radio: ‘Big Ears, Pooh Bear, Stretch. Give us some cover fire. Because in four seconds we’re gonna need it!’

  Exactly four seconds later, right on cue, a withering barrage of gunfire blazed out from Judah’s sentry tower.

  A wave of bullets hammered the marble gazebo where West, Zoe and Lily were taking cover.

  Impact-sparks exploded all around them.

  But then the reply came from West’s team, on their tower: roaring fire, aimed at the opposite sentry tower.

  Bullets zinged back and forth across the main chasm, between the two towers.

  The cover fire had its intended effect: it forced Judah’s men to cease firing briefly and thus gave West the opening he needed.

  ‘Okay, now!’ he yelled to Zoe and Lily.

  Out of the gazebo they ran, up the wide guttered rampway that gave access to the fortress, tiny figures before the enormous ancient citadel.

  They flew up the stairs and, to the sound of gunfire outside, disappeared inside the dark yawning entrance to Hamilcar Barca’s long-abandoned Refuge.

  They entered a high-ceilinged many-pillared hall. The pillars ran in long sideways lines, so that the hall was exceedingly wide but not very deep.

  It was absolutely beautiful—every column was ornately decorated, every ghost-like statue perfectly cut. It was also curiously Roman in its styling—the heavy-trading Carthaginians had been incredibly similar to their Roman rivals. Perhaps that was why they had been such bitter enemies over three bloody Punic Wars.

  But this hall was long-deserted. Its floor lay bare, covered in a layer of grey ash.

  It had also been modified by the Ptolemaic Egyptian engineers.

  A wide ascending tunnel bored into the earth behind the fortress, continuing in a straight line from the Great Arch’s entry rampway. Indeed, this tunnel and the rampway were connected by a flat path that crossed the pillared hall and also featured raised gutters on its edges.

  Zoe said, ‘Looks like these gutters are designed to funnel some kind of liquid that flows out from the tunnel’s core, through this hall, and down the front ramp.’

  ‘No time to stop and stare,’ West said. ‘Keep moving.’

  They ran across the stupendous hall, dwarfed by its immense pillars, and entered the gently-sloping tunnel sunk into its innermost wall.

  At the same time, outside in the chasm, Big Ears, Stretch, Wizard and Pooh Bear were engaged in their fierce gunbattle with the CIEF force over in the other sentry tower.

  ‘Keep firing!’ Wizard yelled above the din. ‘Every moment we keep Judah pinned down is another moment Huntsman has inside the Refuge—’

  He was abruptly cut off as, all of a sudden, the entire chasm shook and shuddered.

  For a moment, he and the others stopped firing.

  So did Judah’s men—in fact, they suddenly started to abandon their position on their sentry tower.

  ‘What is this . . . ?’ Big Ears eyed the cavern around him.

  ‘It feels like an earthquake. . . ’ Pooh Bear said.

  ‘It’s not an earthquake,’ Wizard said, realising.

  The next instant, the source of the great rumbling burst out of the wall at the base of Judah’s sentry tower, just above the waterline of the main chasm itself.

  It was an M-113 TBV-MV (Tunnel-Boring Vehicle, Medium Volume). The military equivalent of a commercial tunnel-boring engine, it was in truth an M-113A2 bridge-laying vehicle that had been adapted for tunnel-making.

  The size of a tank, it had a huge pointed nose that whizzed around and around, screw-like, obliterating everything in its path. Chewed-up rock and dirt were ‘digested’ through the centre of the vehicle and disposed out the rear. It also bore on its roof a foldable mechanical bridge.

  The tunnel-boring vehicle poked out through the wall at the base of the sentry tower and stopped, its drill-bit still spinning, only twenty horizontal metres from the jetty that West had ziplined down to.

  ‘They drilled through the filled-in excavation tunnel. . . ’ Wizard breathed in awe. ‘How clever. It wouldn’t have given a modern tunnel-borer much resistance.’

  ‘It helps if you have the logistics,’ Stretch said.

  ‘Which they do,’ Pooh Bear said.

  At that moment, the tunnel-boring vehicle engaged its internal engines to fold forward the steel bridge on its roof. The mechanical bridge unfolded slowly, stretching out in front of the tunnel-borer until it was fully flat and extended. At which point, it touched down lightly against the jetty twenty metres away.

  The American tunnel and the jetty were now connected.

  ‘Man, they’re good. . . ’ Big Ears said.

  A second later, Judah’s team rushed across the bridge, guns up, having raced down the internal stairs of their sentry tower.

  The
y fired up at Wizard’s men as they crossed the metal bridge.

  Big Ears and the others tried to halt them with more cover fire, but it was no use.

  Judah’s men were across the waterway and racing up the rampway into Hamilcar’s Refuge.

  They were going in, only a minute behind West, Zoe and Lily.

  West, Zoe and Lily raced up the ascending tunnel behind the fortress, guided by glowsticks.

  As he ran, West noticed large clumps of dried solidified mud clinging to the edges of the rampway. He frowned inwardly. Dried mud? How had it come to be here?

  ‘Jack! Zoe!’ Wizard’s voice called in their earpieces. ‘Judah’s crossed over the waterway! I repeat, Judah has crossed the waterway! He’s right behind you!’

  After about a hundred metres of dead-straight, steadily-rising tunnel, they emerged in a high dome-ceilinged chamber—

  —and froze.

  ‘What the—’ Zoe breathed. ‘There are two of them. . . ’

  The chamber was perfectly circular and it reeked of gaseous sulphur, the smell of volcanoes. It was also distinctly holy, reverential, a shrine.

  Alcoves lined its curved walls—housing broken and decayed Carthaginian statues—while on the chamber’s far side rose a wide granite dam, behind which simmered a wide pool of bubbling volcanic mud, the source of the foul sulphurous odour.

  And lying on the floor before West, Lily and Zoe were six skeletons of long-dead Nazi soldiers. All were hideously deformed: the bottom half of each man was missing, their legs simply gone. Indeed, the lower ends of their spinal columns seemed to have melted . . .

  Beyond the grisly skeletons, however, was the main feature of the holy chamber.

  Rising up in the chamber’s exact centre, 10 feet above the floor of the perfectly round room, was an elevated platform, fitted with a single flight of wide rising steps, and on it—to West’s surprise— lay not one but two Ancient Wonders.

  Mounted atop the island-like platform, aimed upwards like a satellite dish, stood the fabled Mirror of the Lighthouse of Alexandria.

  It was completely covered in grey volcanic ash, but its outline was unmistakable. With its wide 15-foot dish, it was simply astonishing in its beauty.

  West’s eyes, however, fell immediately to its base.

  Its solid trapezoidal base, also covered in a layer of grey ash.

  Suddenly something made sense: the continual use of the word ‘base’ in the texts he had followed to get here. He recalled the original clue to the location of the Pharos Piece:

  Look for the base that was once the peak of the Great Tower

  And Euclid’s Instructions:

  Base removed before the Roman invasion,

  Taken to Hamilcar’s Forgotten Refuge.

  The Mirror of the Lighthouse was a wonder unto itself, but its base—its plain trapezoidal base—was of immensely greater value.

  Its base was the Seventh Piece of the Golden Capstone.

  But there was a second monument standing proudly atop the platform—next to the Mirror, on the right-hand side.

  It was a huge octagonal marble pillar, standing upright, perhaps eight feet in height and seven feet in circumference. Its upper portions had long since been hacked away, but its lower section was perfectly intact.

  And just like the Mirror, its base was trapezoidal.

  It was another Piece of the Capstone.

  ‘Oversized octagonal pillar. . . ’ Zoe said, her mind racing. ‘Only one ancient structure was known to possess oversized octagonal pillars—’

  ‘The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus,’ West said. ‘Lily hasn’t been able to read its entry yet, but I bet when she does, the Callimachus Text will say that its Piece is with the Pharos Piece. When you find one, you find the other. Zoe, we just hit the jackpot. We just found two Pieces of the Capstone.’

  ‘We have to do something!’ Pooh Bear growled.

  ‘What can we do?’ Stretch sighed. ‘They’re done for. This mission is over. I say we save ourselves.’

  They were still in their sentry tower, having watched Judah’s force enter the Refuge.

  ‘Typical of you, Israeli,’ Pooh said. ‘Your first instinct is always self-preservation. I don’t give up so easily, or give up on my friends so easi—’

  ‘Then what do you suggest, you stupid stubborn Arab?’

  But Pooh Bear had gone silent.

  He was staring out to the left of the fortress, out towards the high multi-arched aqueduct that spanned the channel on that side of the Y-junction.

  ‘We cross that,’ he said determinedly.

  In the holy chamber, West approached the central island.

  In addition to the two priceless treasures standing on it, one other thing was visible atop the raised island: a seventh Nazi skeleton, lying all on its own, curled in the foetal position on the topmost step.

  Unlike the others, this skeleton was not deformed in any way. It was whole and intact, still wearing its black SS uniform. Indeed, its bones were still covered in decaying flesh.

  West approached the island and its flight of steps cautiously— the whole flight was probably just one great big trigger stone.

  He scanned the skeleton.

  Saw a pair of spindly wire-framed glasses still sitting on its nose, saw the red swastika armband, saw the purple amethyst ring on its bony right hand, the ring of a Nazi Party founding member.

  ‘Hessler. . . ’ he gasped in recognition. It was Hermann Hessler, the Nazi archaeologist, one-half of the famed Hessler–Koenig team.

  Oddly, the skeleton’s right hand was outstretched, seemingly reaching down the steps, as if it had been Hessler’s last earthly movement, grasping for. . .

  . . . a battered leatherbound notebook that lay on the bottom step.

  West grabbed the notebook, flipped it open.

  Pages of diagrams, lists, and drawings of each of the Ancient Wonders stared back at him, interspersed with German notes written in Hermann Hessler’s neat handwriting.

  Suddenly, his earpiece roared to life:

  ‘Jack! Zoe!’ Wizard’s voice called. ‘You have to hide! Judah’s going to be there any moment now—’

  West spun, just as a bullet sizzled out of the entry tunnel behind him and whizzed over his head, missing his scalp by centimetres.

  ‘You two, that way!’ he ordered Zoe and Lily to the left side of the doorway, while he himself scampered to the right of the stone doorframe, peered back, and saw dark shadows rising up the tunnel, approaching fast.

  Decision time.

  There was no way he could get to the podium containing the Lighthouse’s Mirror and the Mausoleum’s Pillar before Judah’s force arrived. No way to allow Lily to glimpse their carved incantations.

  His eyes scanned the chamber for an escape.

  There was some open space on the far side of the island, but it offered no escape: only the wide granite dam that held back the pool of superhot mud lay over there—presumably waiting to be set off by the trigger-stone steps.

  And in an instant, it all made sense: the rising tunnel with the clumps of dried mud at its edges, the guttered path in the hall below and the similarly gutter-lined stairs down at the Great Arch: this molten mud, when released from its dam, would flow around the raised island containing the Mirror and Pillar and then down through the Refuge, all the way to the water in the chasm, killing any crypt-raiders in the process and protecting the two Pieces.

  The half-bodied Nazi skeletons, melted at the waist, now also made sense: they’d been killed trying to outrun the mud. Hessler himself must have been trapped atop the podium as it had been surrounded by the stuff. He had then died in perhaps the worst way of all—of starvation, in the dark, alone. His buddy, Koenig, must have escaped somehow and trekked across the desert to Tobruk.

  Among the many statue alcoves that lined the circular wall of the chamber, West also saw two smaller openings on either side of the main entry doorway.

  They were low arched tunnels, maybe a metre high—and e
levated slightly above the floor of the chamber by about 2 feet.

  West didn’t know what they were, and right now he didn’t care.

  ‘Zoe! That little tunnel! Get Lily out of here!’

  Zoe swept Lily into the low arched tunnel on their side of the doorway, while West himself charged over to the right-hand one and peered down it.

  The low tunnel disappeared downwards in a long dead-straight line.

  ‘No choice,’ he said aloud.

  He ducked inside the little arched tunnel—just as Zoe and Lily did the same on the other side of the chamber—a bare second before Judah’s force swept into the holy chamber.

  At that exact same moment, four tiny figures were hustling across the superhigh aqueduct bridge that spanned the left arm of the Y-junction.

  Led by the frumpy but determined Pooh Bear they looked like a team of tightrope walkers. But they made it across and disappeared into the small metre-high arched tunnel on the far side.

  Marshall Judah stepped into the domed chamber and gazed up at the Mirror and the Pillar.

  He grinned, satisfied.

  His eyes searched the area for West—scanning the many alcoves, nooks and crannies.

  No sign of him. Yet.

  He called: ‘I know you’re in here, Jack! My, my, twice in two days. Looks like you’ve failed again. . . ’

  His men fanned out, searching the chamber, guns up.

  West backed down his little arched tunnel, praying that the darkness concealed him.

  As he moved, he drew his H&K pistol from his thigh holster and aimed it up the tunnel—when with startling suddenness, a CIEF trooper appeared at the top of the tunnel, gun up!

  West’s finger balanced on his trigger—firing might save him momentarily, but it would also give away his position. . .

  But the trooper didn’t fire.

  He just peered down the tunnel, squinting, searching.

  He couldn’t see West . . .

  But then the CIEF trooper reached for the pair of night-vision goggles hanging from his belt.