Seven Ancient Wonders

by Matthew Reilly

  At the same time, in the domed chamber itself, Marshall Judah was evaluating the podium-island in the middle of the room with a portable X-ray scanner.

  The staircase giving access to the island was indeed one great big trigger stone. And the domed roof was solid diorite—offering no purchase for drilled handholds.

  The situation was clear, and typical of Imhotep VI: to get onto the raised island, you had to trigger the trap.

  Which meant Judah and his men would have to be quick.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘It is an Imhotep VI, Type 4 trap. Time will be short. Prepare the rollers. I want an eight-man lifting team for the Mirror Piece, and a four-man team for the Pillar Piece.’

  ‘Do you want us to take the Mirror and the Pillar themselves?’ one lieutenant asked.

  ‘I don’t give a shit about the Mirror and the Pillar. All I want are the Pieces,’ Judah snapped.

  The CIEF men got into position.

  They brought forward two six-wheeled ‘roller units’—to convey the heavy Pieces out.

  ‘Okay, here we go,’ Judah said.

  And with those words, he trod on the first step of the staircase, setting off the deadly trap mechanism.

  At that moment, several things happened.

  The trooper who had been peering down West’s tunnel placed his night-vision goggles to his eyes—and immediately saw West, crouched in the tunnel like a trapped animal.

  The trooper whipped up his Colt Commando—

  Bam!

  Gunshot.

  From West.

  The trooper dropped dead, hit right between the eyes.

  In the chamber, three other CIEF men saw their comrade go down and they charged for the right-hand arched tunnel, leading with their guns.

  But at the exact moment the CIEF trooper fell, Judah had stepped on the stairway, setting off its trap mechanism.

  And the mighty nature of that trap meant he didn’t see the CIEF trooper behind him fall.

  For as Judah stepped onto the trigger stone, the great granite dam at the far end of the chamber instantly began to lower, releasing the pool of boiling volcanic mud behind it into the chamber!

  With a titanic whoosh, the foul stinking body of mud oozed over the lowering dam and began to fan out slowly into the round chamber.

  Judah’s men rushed forward, clambering up onto the central island, where they pushed the Mirror and Pillar from their bases.

  The spreading body of mud split into two fat fingers that oozed around both sides of the island. . .

  A quick wipe to each base revealed its glittering golden surface beneath the layer of ash.

  Then the CIEF teams grabbed the two bases, moving fast.

  The fingers of mud were two-thirds of the way around the island now and moving quickly, ready to devour anything that lay in their paths. . .

  Leaving the Pharos’s Mirror and the Mausoleum’s Pillar lying pathetically on their sides on the island, Judah’s team bounded off the raised platform, returning to the chamber’s main doorway just as the two creeping fingers of molten mud enveloped the base of the island and touched, surrounding the island completely, sealing it off.

  But the mud continued to flow, spreading ever outward. . .

  Judah’s eight-man A-team loaded the Mirror’s base onto one of the six-wheeled rollers—a couple of them noting that unlike the other Piece, the Pharos Piece had a human-shaped indentation carved into its underside. Curious. But they didn’t have time to examine it now.

  The B-team loaded the Mausoleum Piece onto their roller.

  And then they were off, led by Judah, racing back down the entry tunnel with the two large golden trapezoids in their midst.

  By this time, the three CIEF men who had seen West’s victim fall arrived at the right-hand arched tunnel—but with the spreading mud closing in behind them.

  Guns up, they peered down the tunnel and saw West, trapped, dead to rights. . .

  . . . a moment before they were all assailed by a withering volley of gunfire from somewhere behind them.

  The three CIEF men convulsed in grotesque spasms, erupting in a thousand blood-spurts, peppered by automatic gunfire.

  This volley of gunfire had come from the left-hand arched tunnel, on the other side of the main entrance, where Pooh Bear and Big Ears now stood, their Steyr-AUG and MP-7 sub-machine guns still smoking!

  Guided only by Wizard’s incomplete sketch of the Refuge, they had guessed—correctly—that their aqueduct’s tunnel led to the same place as the fortress’s main ascending tunnel.

  West ran to the top of his tunnel, peered out, saw his lifesaving team-mates on the other side of the lava-filled chamber—saw Lily and Zoe safely in their midst.

  He would have yelled his thanks, but he arrived there just in time to see the spreading body of mud reach his tunnel’s raised entrance and swallow the corpses of the four CIEF men as it went by.

  The molten mud just seared right through their bodies, liquefying them in an instant, before oozing over them, absorbing them into its mass.

  It was the same on the other side of the chamber—the creeping body of mud had just flowed across the entrance to Pooh Bear’s little tunnel and was now heading quickly towards the main doorway of the domed chamber.

  The effect was simple.

  West was now cut off from both his comrades on the far side of the chamber and from the main entrance.

  And the level of the flowing mud river was rising.

  Any second now, it would rise up over the lips of the two arched aqueduct tunnels . . . and flow down them!

  From the look on his face, Pooh Bear had seen this, too.

  ‘Pooh Bear! Get out of here!’ West called.

  ‘What about you!’ Pooh yelled back.

  West nodded back down his aqueduct tunnel. ‘No other option! I have to go this way!’

  ‘Jack!’ Wizard called.

  ‘What!’

  ‘Judah used a tunnel-boring vehicle to drill through the old filled-in excavation tunnel! They must be planning to take the Pieces out that way! Check your sketch! You may still be able to get a look at the Pieces! All may not be lost!’

  ‘I’ll do my best!’ West nodded at the expanding mud pool. ‘Now get out of here! Call Sky Monster! Get to the Halicarnassus! I’ll catch up somehow!’

  And with that, West’s team split, went their separate ways, disappearing into the two arched tunnels on either side of the domed chamber—the chamber whose perfectly round floor was now little more than a lake of stinking dark mud, a lake that surrounded a raised island containing the only existing remains of two Ancient Wonders, now lying discarded and broken on their sides.

  West bolted down his aqueduct tunnel as fast as his legs could carry him. It was long and tight and dead-straight.

  In the main tunnel of the fortress, Marshall Judah and his two teams were also hustling, pushing their six-wheeled rollers—bearing the two Pieces of the Capstone—down the slope.

  They rushed through the many-pillared hall of the fortress before they emerged in the chasm and raced down the guttered rampway that stretched down from the front of the Refuge.

  While in the left-hand aqueduct tunnel, Pooh Bear, Big Ears, Stretch, Wizard, Zoe and Lily also rushed headlong through their own tight dark passageway.

  All three groups ran for good reason—for in the domed chamber high behind them, the radially-expanding mud lake finally reached the edge of the round room and began to rise up and over the lips of the three tunnels. . .

  . . . at which point it flooded rapidly down each of them!

  Three surging fingers of mud roared down the three sloping tunnels.

  Since they were tight and small, the two rivers of mud flowing down the aqueduct tunnels moved faster than the one flowing down the wider main tunnel.

  As he ran, West turned to see the boiling hot liquid pouring down the tunnel behind him. It moved powerfully, relentlessly, as if it had a will of its own, a will bent on destroying any living thing
in its path.

  Then, abruptly, West burst out into open space—and found himself standing on the high aqueduct bridge that spanned the right-hand arm of the Y-junction.

  The bridge was very high—at least 200 feet—long, and very narrow, barely wide enough for one person to stand on. For it was not made for human crossing. Its surface wasn’t even flat; rather, it contained a sunken 2-foot-wide channel for mud to flow across.

  ‘Oh man. . . ’ he breathed.

  He stepped out onto the high aqueduct bridge, and suddenly saw Judah’s men appear on the jetty far below him, pushing their pair of six-wheeled rollers across their fold-out metal bridge. In the recently-bored tunnel on the other side of their bridge, the big tunnel-boring vehicle’s front screw was now folded open, waiting to be loaded. Judah was going to use the tunnel-boring vehicle to carry the Pieces out of here.

  West remembered Wizard’s newsflash from before.

  ‘Check the sketch. . . ’ he’d said.

  With a glance back at the oncoming mud, he snatched his printout of the ancient sketch:

  Okay, I’m here, he saw the right-hand aqueduct, labelled Aqueduct 2.

  Max was right. This aqueduct bridge linked up with the excavation tunnel—the same tunnel that Judah had reopened with his tunnel-borer and which he was now using to get the Pieces out.

  West looked up.

  If he hurried, he might be able to. . .

  He bolted, raced out across the high aqueduct bridge—while far below him, Judah’s CIEF team loaded their tunnel-boring vehicle with the two golden trapezoids.

  On the other side of the Y-junction, Pooh Bear emerged from his aqueduct tunnel—just in time to see the aqueduct bridge in front of him get hit, spectacularly, by a rocket-propelled grenade . . . right in the middle!

  One of Judah’s men had been waiting for them, keeping an eye on the bridge through the crosshairs of an RPG launcher.

  The RPG hit the multi-arched bridge in the exact centre. A huge explosion billowed outwards, hurling bricks and blasted rock in every direction. When the cloud dissipated it revealed that the aqueduct bridge was now in two pieces, with a gaping void in its middle.

  Pooh Bear spun—saw the long finger of dark mud stretching down the tunnel behind him, coming inexorably closer.

  And now he and his team had nowhere to go, no bridge to escape across!

  ‘This is terrible,’ he breathed.

  West dashed across his aqueduct bridge unseen, but still pursued by the elongated finger of mud behind him.

  He reached the little tunnel on the other side of the chasm and disappeared into it at speed—just as Judah’s people clamped shut the folding front section of their M-113 tunnel-borer and withdrew the temporary bridge.

  Judah shouted, ‘CIEF units, fall in! We’re leaving!’

  The tunnel-boring vehicle was like a tank, with great tracked wheels and a box-shaped armoured body. The main hold of this body was hollow and it usually held troops. When used as a tunnel-borer, however, it conveyed crushed rock through its body and disposed of it out the rear, laying it against the walls of the tunnel as hard-packed dirt.

  Now that the tunnel had been bored, the hold of the M-113 was being used to house the two Pieces of the Capstone.

  Four armed CIEF men sat in there with them, guarding them.

  The rest of Judah’s force leapt into four cage-framed Light Strike Vehicles—dune buggies essentially—to escort their prize out of the excavation tunnel.

  By this time, Cal Kallis and his team, who had been on West’s side of the main chasm, had crossed the main chasm via the broken aqueduct and joined Judah.

  ‘Mr Kallis,’ Judah said, pointing up at Pooh Bear’s team, trapped up on the partially-destroyed left-hand aqueduct. ‘West’s people do not leave this place alive. I want snipers taking them down one at a time if necessary. Join us when you’re done.’

  Then Judah turned and jumped into one of the chase cars.

  The CIEF convoy fired up their engines and moved off into the tunnel—two of the small LSVs in front, followed by the big M-113 tunnel-borer, then the other two LSVs behind.

  They left Cal Kallis and his men at the mouth of the tunnel, standing at the waterline—eyeing Pooh Bear’s trapped team.

  Pooh Bear spun to check the mud behind him. It was close now— only ten metres away and approaching fast.

  The aqueduct bridge before him now offered no escape.

  But about twenty metres across the cliff-face from him was one of the Refuge’s high-spired towers—and it was connected to Pooh Bear’s bridge by an inch-thin ledge.

  ‘This way!’ he ordered the others.

  And so they edged out across the ledge, standing on their tiptoes, Wizard, Zoe and Lily, Stretch and Big Ears, and finally Pooh Bear, who stepped off the remains of the aqueduct bridge a bare second before the stream of mud shot past him, flowed out over the bridge, and fell—gloriously, as a waterfall of thick dark mud—off the newly-formed void in its middle, down to the waterway 200 feet below.

  Moments later, an even larger body of mud came roaring out of the main entry of Hamilcar’s Refuge. It moved fast, pouring down the rampway and out over the jetty, before it tipped out into the waterway, kicking up a hissing geyser of steam.

  The huge geyser shot up into the air, its cloudy haze positioned directly in between Pooh Bear and Kallis, giving Pooh Bear several valuable seconds of movement.

  But then the haze from the geyser began to dissipate and Kallis’s snipers opened fire with a vengeance.

  West ran through darkness. Alone.

  Guided only by the light of a single glowstick.

  His little tunnel was tight, only big enough for him to run through bent-over.

  After about a hundred metres, however, he heard engine noises up ahead and suddenly—

  —he burst out into a wider tunnel, with hard-packed walls of dirt and wide enough for a tank to pass through. Low mounds of dirt lay at regular intervals along the centre of the roadway— mounds left behind by the tunnel-borer. A long line of fading American glowsticks had been left along its length to illuminate the way back.

  It was the excavation tunnel.

  The engine noises came from his right, from over a crest in the sloping roadway—the sound of light car engines and the deep-throated diesel roar of the tunnel-boring vehicle.

  Judah and his CIEF team.

  Approaching fast.

  West chucked his glowstick and, thinking fast, quickly rolled out onto the roadway.

  He rolled into the middle of the tunnel, lying lengthways in a dark shadowy spot, pressing himself close to one of the dirt-mounds in the centre of the road, half-burying himself in the dirt.

  Judah’s convoy rose above the crest, headlights blazing.

  The lead light strike cars whizzed by West on either side, avoiding the dirt-mound by inches, before. . .

  . . . the great M-113 tunnel-boring vehicle thundered over the crest and rumbled right over the top of West, its huge tracked wheels clanking by on either side of his body!

  No sooner was it over him than West quickly whipped out his MP-7 sub-machine gun and, using its grip as a hook, latched it over a pipe on the underbody of the TBV—and suddenly he was swept along with it, hanging from the huge vehicle’s underbelly!

  He had to work fast.

  He guessed that he had about thirty seconds till they came to the gorge—the narrow gorge that cut across the excavation tunnel: his escape route.

  Vastly outnumbered and outgunned, he could never hope to beat all of Judah’s CIEF force and take the Pieces. Working alone, there was no way he could carry the two huge Pieces anyway.

  The thing was, he didn’t want to carry them—he just needed to see them and take a couple of quick photos of the carvings on their upper sides.

  West clambered forward along the underside of the moving tunnel-borer, pulling himself forward hand-over-hand, until he came to the front of the great lumbering vehicle—where he climbed up and over its
bow and commenced his one-man war against the CIEF.

  Marshall Judah sat in the passenger seat of one of the rear LSVs, keeping an eye on his tunnel-borer up ahead.

  He never saw West disappear under it—nor did he see West climb forward along its underbelly to its front bumper—nor did he see West shoot its driver right between the eyes and leap inside the driver’s hatch.

  No, all Judah saw was several sudden lightning-flashes of gunfire flaring within the big tunnel-borer—before he saw it veer out of control to the left and grind horribly against the left-hand wall of the tunnel!

  The big vehicle crunched against the wall, still moving forward but losing speed, and as it did so, more flashes could be seen flaring within it—only these weren’t muzzle flashes from guns, they were different, almost like. . . camera flashes.

  Then the big tunnel-borer regained its alignment and pulled away from the wall, continuing on down the tunnel, where it rumbled across a sturdy ancient stone bridge that spanned a thirty-foot-wide cross-gorge. The drop to the watery floor of the gorge was about eighty feet.

  Judah couldn’t be sure, but as he watched the tunnel-borer race across the bridge, he could have sworn he saw a figure leap off its roof and drop into the narrow black gorge, splashing into the water below.

  Either way, as soon as it was across the ancient bridge, the tunnel-borer again lurched leftward, crunching against the wall, before grinding to a slow laboured halt about 80 metres down the tunnel.

  The escort cars converged on it, unloaded their men, guns up—

  —and found the two golden Pieces still in it, safe and sound.

  The driver of the M-113 and the four CIEF guards in it were all dead, shot to bits. Their blood covered the walls of the hold. All had got their guns out—but not a single one of them had got a round off.

  Judah just gazed at the human wreckage inside the tunnel-boring vehicle, the work of Jack West Jr.

  ‘West, West, West. . . ’ he said to the air. ‘You always were good. Perhaps the best pupil I ever had.’

  Then he reorganised his men and the convoy shot off down the tunnel again, safe and away.