Seven Deadly Wonders

by Matthew Reilly

  “Ah-ha! Here it is!” Wizard exclaimed.

  He extracted an ancient scroll from a pigeonhole. It was beautifully made, with ornate rollers at each end and thick cream-colored parchment.

  Wizard unrolled it, read it.

  “Hmmm. Greek text. Handwriting matches that of other known Euclidian texts. One of the greatest mathematicians in history, Euclid. He created plane geometry, you know, a grid with an x and y axis, which we now call Euclidian Geometry. This scroll is undoubtedly written by him, and its title is simply Instructions. Which makes it Euclid’s Instructions, I suppose.”

  “What does it say?” Pooh Bear asked.

  Wizard scanned the scroll. “It just seems to restate some of Euclid’s more mundane discoveries. No reference to any ancient wonder or Golden Capstone.”

  “Damn,” West said.

  “Bugger,” Zoe said.

  “Wait a second …” Wizard held up his hand. “Look at this.”

  He had unfurled the scroll to its edges, revealing a small handwritten notation at the extreme bottom of the parchment, right where it met the lower roller.

  Written across the bottom of the scroll were a few lines of text, not in classical Greek, but in another language: the cuneiform-like strokes of the Word of Thoth. It read:

  “Lily?” Wizard said.

  Lily scanned the ancient document for a moment, then read it aloud:

  “Base removed before the Roman invasion,

  Taken to Hamilcar’s Forgotten Refuge.

  Follow the Deadly Coast of the Phoenicians

  To the inlet of the two tridents,

  Where you will behold the easier entrance to

  The sixth Great Architect’s masterwork.

  The Seventh has lain there ever since.”

  “There’s that word again,” Pooh Bear said, “base. Why do they call it a base?”

  But West wasn’t listening. He turned to Wizard, his face alive with excitement. “The Callimachus Text doesn’t give the location of the Pharos Piece …”

  “No,” Wizard said. “This scroll does. And this is the only copy. Which means—”

  “—neither the Europeans nor the Americans can possibly know where this Piece rests. Max, we’ve got a clear run at this one.”

  They stared at each other in amazement.

  “Holy shit,” West said, smiling. “We might just have a chance in this race.”

  The Halicarnassus zoomed through the dawn, arriving at the northern coast of Libya, soaring over the frothy white line where the waters of the Mediterranean meet the shores of the North African desert.

  Inside it, West, Wizard, and Zoe were making swift progress on Euclid’s Instructions.

  “The Phoenicians was another name for the people of Carthage—the trading state annihilated by Rome in the Third and last Punic War. The state of Carthage approximated modern-day Tunisia, directly south of Italy, across the Mediterranean,” Wizard said.

  “And Hamilcar is Hamilcar Barca,” West said, “father of Hannibal and commander of the Carthaginian forces in the First Punic War. I didn’t know he had a refuge, let alone a forgotten one.”

  Zoe commented, “Hamilcar died in Spain in 228 B.C., between the First and Second Punic Wars. He must have ordered the construction of a faraway fortress and never lived to see it.”

  Wizard was on his computer: “I’m checking my database for any references to ‘Hamilcar’s Refuge.’ But I’ve already found this: the ‘Deadly Coast’ was a name used by Alexandrian sailors to describe the coast of modern-day Tunisia. For a hundred miles the shore is all cliffs—four hundred feet high and plunging vertically into the sea. Major shipwreck area even in the twentieth century. Oh dear. If your ship goes down close to the shore, you can’t climb out of the water because of the cliffs. People have been known to die within an arm’s length of dry land. No wonder the ancient sailors feared it.”

  West added, “And the sixth Great Architect is Imhotep VI. He lived about a hundred years after Imhotep V. Clever trap builder; fortified the island-temple of Philae near Aswan. Known for his predilection for concealed underwater entrances. There are six at Philae alone.”

  Stretch said, “Wait a moment. I thought the Egyptian civilization was finished by the time of the Punic Wars.”

  “A common misconception,” Wizard said. “People tend to think that the ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian civilizations existed separately, one after the other, but that’s not true, not at all. They coexisted. While Rome was fighting Carthage in the Punic Wars, Egypt was still flourishing under the Ptolemies. In fact, an independent Egypt would continue to exist right up until Cleopatra VII, the famous one, was defeated by the Romans in 30 B.C.”

  “So what are these two tridents?” Pooh Bear asked. “My guess is they are rock formations just out from the coastal cliffs,” Wizard said. “Markers. Triple-pointed rock formations that look like tridents, marking the location of the Refuge.”

  “One hundred miles of sheer-cliffed coast.” Pooh Bear groaned. “It could take days to patrol that kind of terrain by boat. And we don’t have days.”

  “No,” West said. “We don’t. But I’m not planning on using a boat to scan that coastline.”

  An hour later, the Halicarnassus was soaring high above the Tunisian coast, traveling parallel to it, heading westward, when suddenly its rear loading ramp opened and a tiny winged figure leaped out of the plane and plummeted down through the sky.

  It was a man.

  West.

  Shooming headfirst down through the air, his face covered by a wickedly aerodynamic oxygen-supplying full-face helmet.

  But it was the object on his back that demanded attention.

  A pair of lightweight carbon-composite wings.

  They had a span of 8.5 feet, upturned wingtips, and in their bulky center (which covered a parachute), they possessed six compressed-air thrusters that could be used to sustain a gliding pattern when natural glide failed.

  West rocketed down through the sky at a forty-five-degree angle, his bullet-shaped winged body slicing through the air.

  The Deadly Coast came into view.

  Towering yellow cliffs fronted onto the flat blue sea. Giant, immovable. Waves crashed against them relentlessly, exploding in gigantic showers of spray.

  West zoomed lower, hitting 110 mph, before at around 800 feet…

  … he swooped upward and entered a slower, more serene glide pattern.

  Now he soared, three hundred feet above the waves of the Mediterranean, parallel to the massive coastal cliffs.

  He was flying near the Tunisian-Libyan border, a particularly desolate stretch of the North African coastline. Broad flat sand plains stretched away from the sheer cliffs of the coast. About a klick inland, those plains rammed up against a mountain range made up of a few extinct volcanoes that ran parallel to the shore.

  It was a land devoid of life. Desolate. Depressing. A place where nothing grows.

  As he flew, West scanned the cliffs, searching for any rock formations on them that resembled a pair of tridents.

  After ten minutes of gliding, he lost his natural glide pattern, so he ignited a compressed-air thruster. With a sharp hiss-wapp, it lifted him to a higher altitude, allowing him to glide for longer.

  Then after about forty minutes—and three more compressed-air assists—he saw them.

  Two rock-islands positioned about fifty meters out from the coastal cliff face, their rocky shapes each resembling a three-fingered human hand pointing toward the sky.

  Or a trident.

  Two tridents.

  The section of cliff immediately behind the two tri-dents looked particularly forbidding—vertical and rough, with the upper section of the great cliff partially overhanging its base. Very difficult to scale.

  “Wizard! Come in!” West called into his radio mike. “I’ve found them!”

  An hour later, the Halicarnassus had landed on the flat sandy plain, dropped off a Land Rover four-wheel drive from its belly, and l
ifted off to take up a holding pattern a hundred miles to the south.

  Bouncing along in the Land Rover, the team joined West—now standing on the windswept cliff overlooking the two tridents. The team numbered seven, since the injured Fuzzy had stayed in the Halicarnassus with Sky Monster, along with Horus. Big Ears, however, was there and still mobile, thanks to a cocktail of painkillers.

  Technically, they were in Tunisia. The landscape was empty and dry. There wasn’t a village or human settlement for fifty miles in any direction.

  In fact, the landscape could better be described as a moonscape: the flat sand plain, the occasional meteorite crater, and of course the chain of mountains guarding the landward approach about a half mile inland.

  “You know,” Big Ears said, “they filmed Star Wars in Tunisia. The Tatooine scenes.”

  “I can see why,” West said, not turning from the view of the sea. “It’s totally alien.”

  Wizard came alongside West, handed him a printout. “This is the only reference my database has for Hamilcar’s Refuge. It’s a hand-drawn schematic found in a worker’s hut in Alexandria, an Egyptian worker who must have worked on Imhotep VI’s reconfiguration of Hamilcar’s Refuge.”

  The papyrus sheet bore a carefully crafted hand-drawn sketch on it:

  It was hard to tell exactly what the image depicted. Cut off at the top and bottom, it didn’t seem to show the entire structure.

  “Aqueducts and guard towers,” West said, “and a filled-in excavation tunnel. Jesus, this place must be huge.” He scanned the landscape all around him, but saw nothing but barren desert and the harsh coast. “But if it’s so huge, where the hell is it?”

  He checked his printout of the Euclidian clue:

  Follow the Deadly Coast of the Phoenicians

  To the inlet of the two tridents,

  Where you will behold the easier entrance to

  The sixth Great Architect’s masterwork.

  The Seventh has lain there ever since.

  “The inlet of the two tridents,” he read aloud. “We’ve found the two tridents, so there’s supposed to be an inlet here. But I don’t see one. It’s all just one seamless coastline.”

  It was true.

  There was no bay or inlet in the coast anywhere nearby.

  “Just hold on a moment …” Epper said.

  He dug into his rucksack and extracted a tripod-mounted device.

  “Sonic resonance imager,” he said, erecting the tripod on the sand. He then aimed it downward and hit a switch. “It’ll show us the density of the earth beneath our feet.”

  The sonic resonance imager pinged slowly.

  Piiiing-piiiing-piiiing.

  “Solid sandstone. All the way to the imager’s depth limit,” Wizard said. “As you’d expect.”

  Then he swiveled the imager on its tripod and aimed it at the ground a few yards to the west, the section of coastline directly in line with the two tridents—

  Ping-ping-ping-ping-ping-ping …

  The imager’s pinging went bananas.

  West turned to Wizard. “Explain?”

  The old man looked at his display. It read:

  TOTAL DEPTH: 26.2 ft.

  SUBSTANCE ANALYSIS: SILICON OVERLAY

  18.0 ft.; GRANITE UNDERLAY 8.2 ft.

  Wizard said, “Depth here is twenty-six feet. Mix of hard-packed sand and granite.”

  “Twenty-six feet?” Pooh Bear said. “How can that be? We’re three hundred feet above sea level. That would mean there’s two hundred eighty feet of empty air beneath that section of ground—”

  “Oh, no way …” West said, understanding.

  “Yes way …” Wizard said, also seeing it.

  West looked back inland at the sand plain stretching to the nearest mountain a half mile away. The sand appeared to be seamless. “Amazing the things you can do with a workforce of ten thousand men,” he said.

  “What? What?” Pooh Bear said, exasperated. “Would you two mind telling the rest of us mere mortals what in the blazes you’re talking about?”

  West smiled. “Pooh. There was once an inlet here. I imagine it was a narrow crevice in the coastal cliffs that cut inland.”

  “But it’s not here now,” Pooh said. “How does an entire inlet disappear?”

  “Simple,” West said. “It doesn’t. It’s still here. It’s just been hidden. Concealed by the labor of ten thousand workers. The keepers of the Capstone put a roof over the inlet, bricked in the entrance, and then covered it all over with sand.”

  Five minutes later, Jack West Jr. hung from the Land Rover’s winch cable fifty feet down the face of the coastal cliff, suspended high above the waves of the Mediterranean Sea.

  He probably could have blasted through the eight meters of sand and granite with conventional explosives, but using explosives was risky when you did not know what lay beneath you—it could close off tunnels or passageways in the system below; it could even bring down the entire structure, and West’s team didn’t have the time or the manpower to sift through a thousand tons of rubble for months.

  West now aimed Wizard’s sonic resonance imager at the vertical cliff face in front of him.

  Ping-ping-ping-ping-ping-ping …

  Once again the imager’s pinging went wild.

  The display read:

  TOTAL THICKNESS: 13.5 ft.

  SUBSTANCE ANALYSIS: SANDSTONE

  OVERLAY 5.25 ft.; GRANITE UNDERLAY 8.2 ft.

  West gazed at the cliff face in wonder. It looked exactly like the rest of the coastline: same color, same texture; rough and weatherworn.

  But it was a hoax, a ruse, an entirely artificial cliff.

  A false wall.

  West smiled, called up. “It’s a false wall! Only thirteen feet thick. Granite, with a sandstone outer layer.”

  “So where is the entrance?” Zoe asked over West’s radio.

  West gazed straight down the sheer cliff face—at the waves crashing at its base.

  “Imhotep VI reconfigured this one. Remember what I said before: he was known for his concealed underwater entrances. Haul me up and prep the scuba gear.”

  Minutes later, West again hung suspended from the Land Rover’s superlong winch cable, only now he had been lowered all the way down the false cliff face. He dangled just a few meters above the waves crashing at its base.

  He was wearing a wetsuit, full face mask, and a lightweight scuba tank on his back. His caving gear—fireman’s helmet, X-bars, flares, ropes, rock-screw drill, and guns—hung from his belt.

  “OK! Lower me in, and do it fast!” he called into his throat mike.

  The others obeyed and released the cable’s spooler, lowering West into the churning sea at the base of the cliff.

  West plunged underwater—

  —and he saw it immediately.

  The vertical cliff continued on under the surface, but about six meters below the surface it stopped at a distinctly man-made opening: an enormous square doorway. It was huge. With its bricked frame, the doorway looked like a great airplane hangar door carved into the submerged rock face.

  And engraved in its upper lintel was a familiar symbol:

  West spoke into his face mask’s radio. “Folks. I’ve found an opening. I’m going in to see what’s on the other side.”

  Guided by his Princeton-Tec underwater flashlight, West swam through the doorway and into an underwater passage that was bounded by walls of granite bricks.

  It was a short swim.

  About thirty feet in, he emerged into a much wider area—and instantly felt the tug of unusually strong tidal motion.

  He surfaced in darkness.

  While he couldn’t see beyond the range of his flashlight, he sensed that he was at one end of a vast internal space.

  He swam to the left, across the swirling tide, to a small stone ledge. Once he was out of the water and on the ledge, he fired a flare into the air.

  The dazzling incandescent flare shot high into the air, higher and higher and higher, u
ntil it hovered nearly 250 feet above him and illuminated the great space.

  “Mother of God …” he breathed.

  At that very same moment, the others were peering down the cliff face outside, waiting for word from West.

  Suddenly, his crackly voice came in over their radios: “Guys. I’m in. Come on down and prepare to be amazed.”

  “Copy that, Huntsman,” Zoe said. “We’re on our way.”

  Lily stood a short distance from the group, staring inland, out across the plain.

  As the others started shouldering into their scuba gear, she said, “What’s that?”

  They all turned—

  —in time to see a C-130 Hercules cargo plane bank lazily around in the sky high above them, and release about a dozen small objects from its rear.

  The objects sailed down through the air in coordinated spiraling motions.

  Parachutes. Soldiers on parachutes.

  Heading straight for their position on the cliff top!

  The Hercules continued on, touching down on the plain several klicks to the east, stopping near one of the larger meteor craters over there.

  Wizard whipped a pair of high-powered binoculars to his eyes—zoomed in on the plane.

  “American markings. Oh, Christ! It’s Judah!”

  Then he tilted his binoculars upward to see the incoming strike team directly above him.

  He didn’t need much zoom to see the Colt Commando assault rifles held across their chests and the black hockey helmets they wore on their heads.

  “It’s Kallis and his CIEF team! I can’t imagine how, but the Americans have found us! Everybody, move! Down the cable! Into the cave! Now!”

  Exactly six minutes later, a pair of American combat boots stomped onto the spot where Wizard had just been standing.

  Cal Kallis.

  In front of him stood the abandoned Land Rover with its winch cable stretched out over the edge of the cliff face and down to the waves four hundred feet below.