Seven Ancient Wonders

by Matthew Reilly

  ‘Sir! The Americans have breached the Giant Stairway! Repeat: the Americans have breached the Giant Stairway! We couldn’t hold them off any longer!’

  ‘You held them off long enough! We have the girl and we have the Piece,’ Avenger replied, grinning. ‘Meet us at the ziggurat and proceed to the other side. We’re going out that way!’

  Stretch ran behind Avenger, saying nothing, his teeth clenched, his eyes vacant and distant, lost in thought.

  The Israeli team reached the bottom of the stalactite—just in time to see Zaeed disappear down the square shaft in the top of the ziggurat: the Priests’ Entrance.

  Avenger didn’t care.

  Although killing the terrorist would have brought him much kudos back home, Zaeed wasn’t his concern here.

  He had to get out.

  Only then, as he clambered down the A-frame ladder at the base of the stalactite and stepped down onto the ziggurat, he saw the Americans enter the supercavern.

  They came rushing in from the Giant Stairway entrance. But it wasn’t the superlarge force of men he was expecting, it was just ten men.

  And oddly, they didn’t venture out across the quicksand lake.

  No.

  Rather, this small group started free-climbing up the sheer wall above that entrance, the wall that had filled in the old Grand Archway.

  And there they—

  ‘Oh, no. . . ’ Avenger breathed.

  —started planting explosives, heavy-duty Tritonal 80/20 demolition charges.

  The Americans worked fast, laying their charges and then getting the hell out of the way.

  The result when it came was as spectacular as it was destructive.

  With a colossal series of booms, the demolition charges went off.

  The rockwall filling up the Grand Archway of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon was ripped apart by twenty simultaneous blasts. Great starbursts of rock sprayed out from it.

  But the charges had been directional, forcing the bulk of the debris to be flung toward the outside world. Only a few smaller boulders landed in the quicksand lake.

  Giant holes were opened in the rockwall.

  Shafts of sunshine blazed in through them.

  And daylight flooded into the supercavern for the first time in 2,000 years, illuminating it gloriously—and in the brilliant light of day, the Gardens took on a whole new level of splendour.

  Then these many holes collapsed, forming one great 50-metrewide hole and through this opening, following hard on the heels of the sunlight, came the American helicopters, roaring into the supercavern with a fury.

  West couldn’t believe what was happening.

  First, he’d been left for dead up in the recess by Avenger.

  And now he could only watch in stunned awe as the entire cavern beneath him was flooded with light.

  Six, then seven, then eight American choppers—Black Hawks and Apaches—banked and buzzed around the immense cavern, hovering above the ancient ziggurat, rising alongside the great stalactite, searching for the enemy, searching for the Piece.

  The roar of their rotors in the cavern was deafening, the wind that they generated, swirling.

  Then West saw one of the Black Hawks rise up directly beneath him, saw the circular speed-blur of its rotors, and he thought, If I fell now, at least death would be quick.

  But the Black Hawk hadn’t seen him and Pooh Bear—it was peering at the stalactite, searching. . .

  It moved closer to the stalactite, for a better look, and suddenly it wasn’t directly beneath West anymore.

  And West saw a way out of his predicament. It was totally crazy, but it might work. . .

  He sprang into action.

  ‘Pooh Bear, get a handhold. I need that rope and piton.’

  Pooh Bear obliged, grabbed a handrung, while—one-handed— West disengaged the piton and wound in the rope. It was about fifty feet in length.

  Then he said, ‘Okay, Pooh, now let go of the handrung and grab my waist.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Just do it.’

  Pooh Bear did. Now he hung from West . . . as West hung from his superstrong mechanical hand, gripping a handrung.

  And then West let go.

  They dropped from the ceiling.

  Straight down.

  They shot like a bullet past the tail of the Black Hawk. . .

  . . . and as they did so, West hurled his piton—still attached to the rope—at the Black Hawk’s landing wheels!

  Like a grappling hook, the steel piton looped around the rear landing wheels of the helicopter . . . and caught.

  The rope played out before—snap!—it went taut and suddenly West and Pooh Bear were swinging, suspended from the helicopter’s landing gear, swooping in toward the giant stalactite!

  The helicopter lurched slightly with their added weight, but it held its hovering position, anchoring their swing.

  They swung in a long swooping arc right over to the path on the flank of the stalactite, where West and Pooh Bear dismounted deftly and released the rope, now back in the game.

  ‘Never thought I’d be happy to see Judah arrive,’ West said. ‘Come on! We’ve got to save Lily.’

  They charged down the path at breakneck speed.

  Chaos. Mayhem.

  Blazing sunlight.

  The roar of helicopters, and now. . .

  . . . hundreds of American regular troops flooded in through the newly-opened Grand Arch.

  Avenger’s Israeli team danced down the far side of the ziggurat and raced out over the quicksand lake on that side. As West had seen before, this side was the mirror image of the entry side: it also featured a concealed path just below the surface with a hexagonal well in its centre.

  Avenger’s team reached the well, raced down into it in two subgroups, beheld another statue of a proud winged lion.

  Avenger and the two Israelis carrying the Piece went first. The trap sprang into action. Quicksand flooded in. The one-gate cage revolved. But they sloshed through the inky sand and emerged from the other side with little difficulty.

  Stretch, the other two Israeli commandos, and Lily went next.

  Again the trap initiated. Quicksand poured into the hexagonal well. The cage rotated. They sloshed across it, knee-deep.

  And suddenly Lily tripped and fell.

  The rising quicksand had caught her feet and she stumbled to all fours with a squeal.

  The sand grabbed her, sticky and foul.

  She screamed in terror.

  Stretch and the other two Israelis spun, saw her struggling. They were almost at the exit doorway and the cage’s rotating gate was about to let them out.

  Avenger called from the doorway, ‘Leave her! We have the Piece! She was only a bonus! It’s the Piece that matters, and if we don’t get it out, this will all have been for nothing! Move!’

  The two commandos with Stretch didn’t need to be told twice. They sloshed toward the gate and slipped through it.

  Stretch, however, paused.

  With quicksand flooding in from every side and the cage turning dizzyingly around him, he looked back at Lily.

  The little girl was struggling against the rising quicksand pool, whimpering vainly with the effort. The sand had wrapped itself around her like a constricting snake, it was up to her neck now, consuming her, dragging her under.

  ‘Cohen!’ Avenger called. ‘Leave her! That’s an order!’

  And with a final look at Lily, Stretch made his fateful decision.

  Flanked by the flying Horus, West and Pooh Bear were bolting down the spiralling path on the stalactite when suddenly the foliage beside them was ripped apart by helicopter gunfire.

  One of the American Apache choppers had swung into a hover right next to them and was now lining them up in its minigun sights!

  They dived into a nearby cross-tunnel just as the Apache’s six-barrelled minigun whirred to life—and came to the vertical bore-hole that ran up the centre of the rock formation.

  ‘They’
re firing at the Hanging Gardens of Babylon!’ Pooh Bear exclaimed. ‘Have Americans no respect for history!’

  Moments later, they emerged from the same bore-hole at the lowermost tip of the stalactite, having slid all the way down it with their hands and feet braced against its walls.

  West jumped down onto the peak of the ziggurat, snapped round to check on the progress of Avenger’s fleeing Israeli team.

  ‘Jesus, no. . . ’ he breathed.

  He spied Avenger and four of his men just as they disappeared through an exit tunnel at the far end of the supercavern, having navigated the quicksand lake and the well on that side.

  Stretch wasn’t with them.

  Nor was Lily.

  And then West saw the well.

  Peering under its canopied stone roof, he could see that the hexagonal well was just then overflowing with quicksand— completely filled.

  ‘Oh, no. No. . . ’ West stared at the scene in horror.

  Worse still, at that very moment, two American Black Hawk helicopters were landing on the star-shaped paths surrounding the well.

  Troops charged out from the choppers, converging on the well from opposite sides.

  Marshall Judah himself stepped out of one of the choppers, directing the operation.

  ‘Oh, Lily. . . ’ West breathed, frozen, stunned.

  At the hexagonal well, a CIEF trooper called to Judah: ‘Sir, you better come and see this.’

  Judah strode to the edge of the well.

  And he was surprised by what he saw.

  There, pressed right up against the roof-bars of the cage inside the well—her face upturned, with only her mouth and nose and eyes protruding above the surface of the quicksand pool that now filled the well, breathing shallowly and desperately, her lips puckered, was Lily.

  Judah wondered how on God’s Earth she had got into this lifesaving position.

  The cage—and the well—must have been at least twelve feet deep. Caught in the grip of the sand, she could never have reached up and grabbed the cage’s roof-bars and lifted herself out—

  There must be someone else in there, he figured. Holding her up.

  Then Judah saw it.

  But only barely, it was so small.

  He saw the tip of a gunbarrel protruding a centimetre above the surface of the quicksand pool right next to Lily’s upturned face. It was the tip of a sniper rifle’s gunbarrel—an ultralong Barrett M82A1A sniper rifle.

  Only this gunbarrel was not being used for its original purpose.

  It was being used as a snorkel by whoever was holding Lily up from below!

  It wasn’t until he had the well-trap reset and drained of quicksand that Judah fully appreciated the scene underneath Lily.

  As the quicksand drained away, he beheld Stretch, standing on top of the statue of the winged lion that itself stood in the centre of the well, his own face upturned, breathing through the barrel of his disassembled Barrett sniper rifle, with Lily balancing on his shoulders in a perfect ballet toe-pose!

  Stretch had indeed made his decision.

  It would turn out to be a very good one, but for another reason entirely: for Judah would take him and Lily away alive.

  Avenger and his team of Israeli commandos would not be so lucky.

  For at the secret rear entrance to the Hanging Gardens, an American CIEF squad led by Cal Kallis was waiting for them.

  And Kallis had strict orders not to be merciful.

  Avenger and his Israelis—thinking they had got away with the Piece—emerged from the underground tunnel system to see their extraction helicopter lying nearby, charred and smoking, destroyed, its pilots shot dead.

  They also found themselves surrounded by Kallis’s team.

  The Israelis were quickly disarmed. Then, slowly and deliberately, Cal Kallis executed them all himself—one by one, shooting each man in the head, killing Avenger last of all, smiling meanly the whole time. This was the kind of thing Kallis enjoyed.

  Then he took the Piece from their dead hands and flew away, leaving the corpses for the desert birds to feast upon.

  And so West watched, helpless, as Lily and Stretch were bundled into Judah’s helicopter—

  —at which moment, a wave of gunfire smacked down all around him, from two Apache attack choppers that appeared suddenly from behind the stalactite.

  Horus squawked.

  West moved too late.

  But Pooh Bear didn’t.

  And he saved West’s life—yanking him out of the line of fire and down into the square-shaped well-shaft of the ziggurat.

  Down on the floor of the supercavern, Judah snapped round to see the cause of the commotion.

  He glimpsed the two tiny figures of Pooh Bear and West up on the peak of the ziggurat—saw Pooh pull West down into the well-shaft that descended into the ziggurat, the shaft known as the Priests’ Entrance.

  ‘Jack. . . ’ Judah whispered. ‘Alas, you’ve served your purpose. You’re no longer a protected species. Time for you to die.’

  Judah returned to his heavily-armed Black Hawk, with Stretch and Lily as his captives. The chopper lifted off and zoomed out of the cavern.

  It was quickly followed by the other choppers: the Apaches and the Black Hawks. The American troops covering the liquid floor of the cavern also pulled out, exiting through the blasted-open Great Arch.

  Once all his people were out, Judah—still eyeing the top of the ziggurat, the last place he had seen West alive—gave his final order.

  ‘Fire into the stalactite. Bring it down on that ziggurat.’

  His pilot hesitated. ‘But sir . . . this place is histori—’

  ‘Fire into the stalactite now or I will have you thrown out of this

  helicopter.’ The pilot complied.

  Moments later, three Hellfire missiles lanced out from the missile pod of the Black Hawk, their three matching smoketrails spiralling in toward the giant rock formation. . .

  . . . and they hit.

  Shuddering explosions. Starbursts of rock and foliage.

  And then, a momentous groaning sound as—

  —the great stalactite slowly peeled off the ceiling of the supercavern, tilting precariously before . . . it fell away from the ceiling.

  It sounded like the end of humanity. The sound was deafening.

  Great chunks of rock were ripped away from the ceiling as the upside-down mountain fell away from it and crashed down onto the ziggurat.

  The tip of the stalactite slammed down against the peak of the ziggurat and the ziggurat—itself the size of a fifteen-storey building —was just crushed like an aluminium can, compressed horribly downwards, totally destroyed.

  Then the great rock formation tipped sideways like a slow-falling tree and splashed down into the quicksand lake on the inner side of the supercavern.

  The stalactite hitting the lake had the impact of an aircraft carrier being dropped from a great height into the ocean. An enormous wave of rolling quicksand fanned out from the impact zone, slapping hard against every wall of the supercavern.

  Then slowly, very slowly, the stalactite—the fabled Hanging Gardens of Babylon—came to rest, on its side, half-submerged in the wide quicksand lake, just another broken rock formation in a world of broken things.

  Thus, the American force left the foothills of the Zagros Mountains with everything they had come for in their grasp: Lily and the Piece.

  And somewhere underneath all the wreckage and destruction they left behind—with no possible chance of survival—were Jack West Jr and Pooh Bear.

  FRANKFURT, GERMANY

  LUXOR, EGYPT

  19 MARCH, 2006

  THE DAY BEFORE TARTARUS

  MESSE TOWER

  FRANKFURT, GERMANY

  19 MARCH, 2006, 1500 HOURS

  1 DAY BEFORE THE ARRIVAL OF TARTARUS

  At the same time as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were crashing into oblivion, Wizard, Zoe and Fuzzy were being transported via limousine—under armed guard—from the airf
ield at Frankfurt Military Base into the city of Frankfurt.

  After they’d been captured in Rome, Wizard and his team had been taken by Lear jet to Germany. Having been held overnight at the base on the outskirts of Frankfurt, they were now being taken to the headquarters of the European coalition: the Messe Tower in central Frankfurt.

  The Messe Tower is one of the tallest skyscrapers in Europe. It stands fifty storeys high and is known for one singular feature: its peak is a magnificent glass pyramid. More importantly—but far less well-known—this pyramid has been ‘sectioned’ horizontally just like the Golden Capstone.

  But when a pyramid surmounts a shaft-like column like a tower, it becomes something more again: it becomes an obelisk.

  The ultimate symbol of Sun-worship.

  Conspiracy theories abound that the Messe Tower, the Canary Wharf Tower in London, and the old World Financial Center in New York—all built in the shape of giant glass obelisks—formed a modern triumvirate of ‘super-obelisks’ built by the two Sun-worshipping cults: the Catholic Church and the Freemasons.

  Wizard thought about these theories as he, Zoe and Fuzzy were brought, handcuffed, to the uppermost floor of the Messe Tower.

  They stood inside its spectacular pyramid-shaped pinnacle. Its slanting floor-to-ceiling glass walls revealed a 360-degree view of Frankfurt and its surrounding rivers and forests.

  Francisco del Piero was waiting for them.

  ‘Maximilian Epper! My old seminary classmate. Oh, how the Church lost a great mind when it lost you. It’s good to see you again, my old friend.’

  ‘I’m not your friend, Francisco. What is this about?’

  ‘What is this about? What it’s always been about, Max: power. The eternal struggle for one man to rule over another. Call it Europe v America. Call it the Church v the Freemasons. It doesn’t matter. It is all one and the same. A ceaseless battle for power that has lasted generations, all of it coming to a head tomorrow, at a once-in-5,000-years event, an event which can grant absolute power: the arrival of the Tartarus Sunspot.’

  Wizard glanced at Zoe, ‘Now you can see why I never went through with becoming a priest.’ To del Piero: ‘But the Americans have four of the Pieces. You have one, and the last two remain unaccounted for.’