Seven Ancient Wonders

by Matthew Reilly

  Sniper rounds slammed into the cliff all around Pooh Bear’s team as they tip-toed across the cliff-face to the fortress’s left-hand tower.

  The Warbler in Big Ears’s backpack was working admirably— bending the bullets away—and one by one, Pooh’s team made it to the high-spired tower attached to the fortress.

  Far below them, mud continued to flow out of the mouth of the great citadel, while above them, the dark ceiling of the chasm was close now, barely twenty feet above the peak of their tower.

  Then abruptly Kallis’s men stopped firing.

  Pooh Bear exchanged a worried look with Wizard.

  Change of tactics.

  A brutal change of tactics.

  Frustrated by the electromagnetic field of the Warbler, Kallis and his team started firing RPGs at the tower.

  It looked like a fireworks display: long hyper-extending fingers of smoke lanced upward from their tunnel, streaking up toward the mighty ancient citadel.

  ‘Oh my Lord,’ Wizard breathed. ‘The Warbler won’t work against RPGs! RPGs are too heavy to divert magnetically! Somebody do something—’

  It was Stretch who came up with the answer.

  Quick as a flash, he unslung his sniper rifle, aimed and fired it at the first oncoming RPG!

  The bullet hit the RPG a bare thirty feet from the tower and the RPG detonated in mid-flight, exploding just out of reach of the tower.

  It was an incredible shot. A single shot, fired under pressure, hitting a high-velocity target in mid-flight!

  Even Pooh Bear was impressed. ‘Nice shot, Israeli. How many times can you do that?’

  ‘As long as it takes for you to figure out a way out of here, Arab,’ Stretch said, eyeing a second incoming RPG through his sights.

  Pooh Bear evaluated their position. Their aqueduct was shattered, uncrossable. The main entrance to the fortress was filled with flowing mud. No dice there. And the main chasm, with its traps and deadly whirlpools, was guarded by Kallis’s CIEF team.

  ‘Trapped,’ he said, grimacing in thought.

  ‘Isn’t there any way out of here?’ Big Ears asked.

  ‘This place was sealed long ago,’ Wizard said.

  They all stood in silence.

  ‘Why not go up?’ a small voice suggested.

  Everyone turned.

  It was Lily.

  She shrugged, pointed at the ‘planked’ granite ceiling not far above the pinnacle of their tower. ‘Can’t we go out that way? Maybe with one of Pooh Bear’s demolition charges?’

  Pooh Bear’s frown became a grin. ‘Young lady, I like your style.’

  A minute later, as Stretch kept the incoming RPGs at bay, Pooh Bear fired a grappling hook up at the high ceiling of the chasm, almost directly above his tower.

  The hook he fired was a rock-penetrating climbing hook—but instead of rope, attached to it was a Semtex-IV demolition charge.

  The climbing hook slammed into the granite ceiling, embedded itself in it.

  One, one-thousand.

  Two, one-thousand.

  Three—

  The Semtex charge went off.

  Fireball. Explosion. Dustcloud.

  And then, with an almighty craaaack! one of the granite planks that formed the chasm’s ceiling broke in two, and fell from its place, tumbling out of the ceiling formation. It was easily as big as a California Redwood tree, and the great granite plank created a huge splash as it hit the waterway far below.

  A cascade of sand streamed in through the newly-formed rectangular opening in the ceiling, followed by a blazing beam of sunlight that illuminated the tower and lit up the chasm in an entirely new way.

  Pooh Bear and the others had completely lost track of time, of how long they’d been in the chasm system. It was actually just after noon.

  Kallis’s men were still firing RPGs. And Stretch was still picking them off, shot for shot.

  Once the Semtex charge had created its opening in the ceiling, Big Ears fired a second grappling hook—only this one did have a rope attached to it.

  The hook flew up through the big rectangular hole in the ceiling, disappearing up into the daylight, where it landed and caught hold of something.

  ‘Up we go!’ Pooh Bear called. ‘Big Ears. You first. Stretch, you’re last.’

  ‘As always. . . ’ Stretch muttered.

  ‘Wizard, call the Halicarnassus, send them a pick-up signal.’

  ‘What about Huntsman?’ Lily asked.

  ‘I’ll catch up with you all later,’ a voice said in their earpieces.

  West’s voice.

  ‘I’ve got pictures of the Pieces,’ he said. ‘But I can’t get back to you guys at the fortress. I’ll have to get out another way. I’ll call you later.’

  And so up the rope they went, climbing up into the blinding daylight, all the while protected by Stretch’s incredible sniping skills.

  When at last Stretch himself had to go, he bolted for the rope, latched onto it and started climbing.

  Almost immediately, an RPG slammed into the tower beneath him and with an awesome booooom, the left-hand tower of Hamilcar’s Refuge burst outward in a star-shaped spray of giant bricks and shattered rock—bricks and rock that sailed way out into the chasm before plunging down into the waterway below.

  And when the smoke cleared, the tower stood deprived of its pinnacle, its upper reaches charred and broken, its high-spired balcony simply gone. The great tower had been decapitated.

  All that remained in its place was a rectangular hole in the ceiling, through which glorious sunshine now streamed.

  Pooh Bear and his team had escaped.

  The Halicarnassus would pick them up ten minutes later, swooping down to the desert plain for a rapid extraction.

  There was, however, no further word from West.

  Indeed, as the Halicarnassus soared away from the American forces massed around a crater two miles west of the covered Refuge, all contact with West appeared lost.

  For the remainder of that day, no-one would hear a word from Jack West Jr.

  At 2:55 a.m. the next morning, West finally sent a pick-up signal— from a position one hundred kilometres north of the concealed inlet that housed Hamilcar’s Refuge, a position that put him out in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea!

  It was a small Italian resort island, conveniently possessing its own airstrip.

  The staff at the resort would long recall the night a dark 747 jumbo jet touched down unannounced on their airstrip and performed a brilliant short-runway landing procedure.

  They didn’t know what the plane was, or why it had landed briefly on their island.

  Two days later, one of their diving expeditions would find a sixty-year-old World War II–era Nazi U-boat lying aground on a rocky reef just off the southern tip of the island, a submarine that had not been there two days previously.

  Its conning tower blazed with the number ‘U-342’.

  It would become one of the resort’s favourite dive spots from then on.

  His face dark and grim, West strode into the Halicarnassus’s main cabin and without stopping or speaking to any of the assembled team—including Lily—he grabbed Wizard by the arm and hauled him into the back office of the plane with the words: ‘You. Me. Office. Now.’

  West slammed the door and whirled around.

  ‘Wizard. We’ve got a mole in our team.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,’ West said. ‘Twice now Judah and his Americans have arrived at our location only hours after we got there. The Sudan wasn’t conclusive, since they could have tracked the Europeans there. But Tunisia was different. First, the Europeans weren’t in Tunisia. Second, even if Judah has a copy of the Callimachus Text, he couldn’t have found Hamilcar’s Refuge. He needed Euclid’s Instructions to find it and we have the only copy in existence. They followed us there. Someone on our team led them there. Sent up a tracing signal, or somehow got a message out to Judah.’

&
nbsp; Wizard’s face fell. The thought of a rat in their ranks actually pained him—he felt like they had all become something of a family. ‘Jack, we’ve been working with these people for ten years. How could any of them undermine our mission now?’

  ‘Stretch hasn’t been with us for ten years. He’s only been with us for three. And he wasn’t a part of the original team. He crashed the party, remember. And he represents Israel, not the coalition of the minnows.’

  Wizard said, ‘But he’s really become a part of the team. I know he and Pooh Bear have Arab–Israeli issues, but I’d say he’s blended in rather well.’

  ‘And if he hasn’t been making secret reports to the Mossad, I’ll eat my own helmet,’ West said.

  ‘Hmmm, true.’

  West threw out another option: ‘Pooh Bear? The Arab world is five hundred years behind the West. They’d love to get their hands on the Capstone, and Pooh’s father, the Sheik, was unusually keen for the United Arab Emirates to be involved in this mission.’

  ‘Come on, Jack, Pooh Bear would step in front of a runaway bus to save Lily. Next theory.’

  ‘Big Ears trained with Judah at Coronado in the States a few months before our mission began—’

  ‘Freight train,’ Wizard said simply.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘If Pooh Bear would step in front of a bus to protect Lily, then Big Ears would step in front of a freight train to save her. And as I recall, you yourself also once went to a US-sponsored training course at Coronado Naval Base in the States, a course conducted by Marshall Judah and the CIEF. That’s not even mentioning your mysterious work with him in Desert Storm.’

  West slumped back in his chair, thought about it all.

  The problem with a multinational team like this was the motivations of its members—you just never knew if they had the team’s interests at heart or their own.

  ‘Max. This is not what we need. We’re going up against the two biggest fish in the world and getting our asses kicked. We’re hanging on by our fingertips.’

  He took a deep breath.

  ‘I can’t believe I’m going to do this: conduct surveillance on my own team. Max, set up a microwave communications net around this plane. A net that will catch all incoming and outgoing signals. If someone’s communicating with the outside world, I want to know about it when it happens. We gotta plug this leak. Can you do that?’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘We keep this to ourselves for the time being, and we watch everyone.’

  Wizard nodded. ‘I’ve got another issue for you.’

  West rubbed his brow. ‘Yes?’

  ‘While you were getting away from Tunisia on that U-boat, I set Lily to work on the Callimachus Text again. It’s odd, she says that the language of the Text gets more and more difficult. But at the same time she herself is progressing in skill: sections that she couldn’t read yesterday, she can suddenly comprehend today. It’s as if the very language of the Text is determining the order in which we can find the Pieces.’

  ‘Uh-huh. And. . . ’

  ‘She’s read the next three entries—the Mausoleum one came next and it just said, “I lie with the Pharos”. The next two entries concern the Statue of Zeus at Olympia and the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus.

  ‘Following on from the ones we’ve already translated, these new entries confirm a curious pattern: the Text is guiding us through the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World from the youngest Wonder to the oldest. The Colossus, the most recently built, came first, then the Pharos, then the Mausoleum. The next two, those of the Statue of Zeus and the Temple of Artemis, are the next oldest Wonders in the progression.’

  ‘The Middle Wonders,’ West said, nodding. ‘And you say Lily has now read the entries for them?’

  ‘Yes. And in doing so, she has revealed some very serious problems.’

  Wizard told West the situation.

  After he’d done so, West sat back in his chair and frowned, deep in thought.

  ‘Damn. . . ’ he said. Then he looked up. ‘Assemble everyone in the main cabin. It’s time to make a tough decision.’

  The entire team gathered in the main cabin of the Halicarnassus.

  They sat in a wide circle, variously sitting on couches or at the desk-like consoles that lined the walls. Even Sky Monster was there, leaving the plane to fly on autopilot for a while.

  West spoke.

  ‘Okay, here’s the state of play. We’re 0-for-2 after two efforts at the plate. In those two missions, three Pieces of the Capstone have been unearthed and we have none of them.

  ‘But we’re not completely dead yet. We may not have got any of the Pieces, but so long as we keep seeing the Pieces and accumulating the lines of the positive incantation carved into them, we still have a chance, albeit a very slim one.’

  ‘Very, very slim,’ Stretch said.

  West threw Stretch a look that would’ve frozen water. Stretch retreated immediately. ‘Sorry. Go on.’

  West did. ‘So far the Callimachus Text has been an excellent guide. It has led us accurately to the Colossus and to the Pharos Pieces, and the Mausoleum Piece.

  ‘But now,’ West said seriously, ‘now Lily has managed to translate the next two entries, and we have a problem.’

  He flicked a switch, projecting Lily’s translations of the next two entries of the Callimachus Text onto a pull-down screen. They read:

  The Statue of cuckolded Zeus,

  Cronos’s Son, the false deity.

  While his statue was immense, his power was illusory.

  No thunderbolts did he wield, no wrath did he bear,

  No victory did he achieve.

  Indeed, it was only the Victory in his right hand that made him great,

  Oh winged woman, whither didst thou fly?

  The Temple of the Huntress,

  In heavenly Ephesus.

  The sister of Apollo, Ra’s charioteer,

  Has never let go of her Piece,

  Even when her Temple burned on the night of Iskender’s birth.

  Through the exertions of our brave brothers,

  It has never left the possession of our Order.

  Nay, it is worshipped every day in our highest temple.

  Zoe saw the first problem immediately. ‘There are no clues in these verses. . . ’ she said with dismay.

  ‘There’s nothing for us to go on,’ Fuzzy said.

  ‘More than that,’ Stretch said, ‘the writers of the first verse didn’t even know where the Statue of Zeus went. This is a total dead-end.’

  ‘You do always argue the negative, don’t you, Israeli?’ Pooh Bear scowled. ‘After all they’ve done, have you no faith in Wizard and Huntsman?’

  ‘I believe in what is achievable,’ Stretch shot back.

  ‘Gentlemen. Please,’ Wizard cut in. He turned to Stretch. ‘It’s not a total dead-end, Benjamin. Close, but not total. The Zeus verse is indeed disappointing, as it offers no clues at all to the location of its Piece.

  ‘But the verse about the Temple of Artemis—the goddess of the hunt and, in Greek lore, Apollo’s sister—is actually quite clear about the location of its Piece of the Capstone.

  ‘It states that, through the efforts of its priests over the ages, the Artemis Piece has never left the possession of the Cult of Amun-Ra. It even gives us an exact location: the highest temple of the Cult of Amun-Ra. Unfortunately, this means that the Piece is almost certainly already in the hands of our European competitors.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Sky Monster asked. ‘I didn’t realise that the Cult of Amun-Ra was still around. I thought it died out. What is it and where is its “highest temple”?’

  ‘Why, Sky Monster,’ Wizard said, ‘the Cult of Amun-Ra is most certainly alive and well. Indeed, it is one of the most widespread religions in the world today.’

  ‘A religion?’ Big Ears asked. ‘Which one?’

  Wizard said simply: ‘The Cult of Amun-Ra, my friend, is the Roman Catholic Church.’

  �
��Are you saying that the Catholic Church—my Catholic Church, the church I have attended all my life—is a Sun-cult?’ Big Ears asked in disbelief.

  Very Irish and hence very Catholic, he spun to face West—who just nodded silently, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

  ‘Come on,’ Big Ears said. ‘I read The Da Vinci Code, too. It was a fun book and it had a great conspiracy theory, but this is something else.’

  Wizard shrugged. ‘Although its everyday followers don’t know it, the Catholic Church is indeed a thinly veiled reincarnation of a very ancient Sun-cult.’

  Wizard counted the points off his fingers:

  ‘The virgin birth of the Christ character is a direct retelling of the Egyptian legend of Horus—only the names have been changed. Look at the vestments Catholic priests wear: emblazoned with the Coptic Cross. But 2,000 years before that symbol was the Coptic Cross, it was the Egyptian symbol, ankh, meaning life. Look at the Eucharistic chamber on any altar: it is in the shape of a dazzling golden Sun. And what is a halo? A Sun-disc.

  ‘Go to Rome and look around. Look at all the obelisks—the ultimate symbols of Sun worship, pointing up at their deity. They are all genuine Egyptian obelisks, transported from Egypt to Rome by Pope Sixtus V and erected in front of every major church in the city, including St Peter’s Basilica. There are more obelisks in Rome than any other city in the world, including any Egyptian city! Why, Liam, you tell me, what word do you say at the end of every single Catholic prayer you utter?’

  ‘Amen,’ Big Ears said.

  ‘The Ancient Egyptians had no vowels in their writing. Amen is simply another way of spelling Amun. Every time you pray, Liam, you intone the most powerful god of ancient Egypt: Amun.’

  Big Ears’s eyes went wide. ‘No way. . . ’

  Zoe brought the conversation back to the point: ‘But the Artemis verse says that its Piece is worshipped every day in the Cult of Amun-Ra’s highest temple. If what you say is true, then the highest temple of the Roman Catholic Church would be St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican in Rome.’

  ‘That is my conclusion too,’ Wizard said.