The gateway route.
Victory herself landed in the two potted trees that West had placed to her left, her fall cushioned by them.
West rushed over to the upturned statue, and examined her feet, or rather the small cube-shaped marble pedestal on which her feet stood.
He pulled out a big wrench he’d taken from the maintenance room.
“May every archaeologist in the world forgive me,” he whispered as he swung down hard with the wrench.
Crack. Crack. Craaaack.
The tourists on the landing didn’t know what was going on. A couple of men stepped forward to investigate the activity behind the screen, but Big Ears blocked their way with a fierce glare.
After West’s three heavy blows, the little marble pedestal was no more—but revealed within it was a perfect trapezoid of solid gold, maybe eighteen inches to a side.
The Third Piece of the Capstone.
It had been embedded in Victory’s marble pedestal.
“Lily!” West called. “Get a look at this thing! In case we lose it later!”
Lily came over, gazed at the lustrous golden trapezoid, at the mysterious symbols carved into its top side.
“More lines of the two incantations,” she said.
“Good. Now let’s go,” West said.
The Piece went into Big Ears’ sturdy backpack and, with Lily running in the lead, suddenly they were off, sliding under the propped-open grille that led south.
No sooner were they through than West and Big Ears kicked the pot plants free, and the grille slammed fully shut behind them.
Running flat out down a long long corridor, legs pumping, hearts pounding.
Shouts came from behind them—shouts in French, from the museum guards giving chase.
West spoke into his radio mike: “Pooh Bear! Are you out there?”
“We’re waiting! I hope you use the right window!”
“We’ll find out soon enough!”
The corridor West was running down ended at a dramatic right-hand corner. This corner opened onto a superlong hallway that was actually the extreme southern flank of the Louvre. The hallway’s entire left-hand wall was filled with masterpieces and the occasional high French window looking out over the Seine.
And right then, a second team of armed museum guards were running down it, shouting.
West hurled his huge wrench at the first French window in the hallway, shattering it. Glass sprayed everywhere.
He peered out the window.
To see Pooh Bear staring back at him, level with him, only a few feet away…
… standing on the open top deck of a double-decker bus!
Only one thing stands between the Louvre and the River Seine: a narrow strip of road called the Quai des Tuileries. It is a long riverside roadway that follows the course of the river, variously rising and falling—rising up to bridges and dipping down into tunnels and underpasses.
It was on this road that Pooh Bear’s recently stolen double-decker bus now stood, parked alongside the Palais de Louvre. It was one of those bright red open-topped double-deckers that drive tourists around Paris, London, and New York, allowing them to look up and around with ease.
“Well! What are you waiting for!” Pooh Bear yelled. “Come on!”
“Right!”
West threw Lily across first, then pushed Big Ears, with the Piece in his backpack, before finally jumping from the first-floor window onto the double-decker bus—just as the onrushing guards in the hallway started firing at him.
A second after his feet hit the open top deck of the bus, Stretch, in the driver’s seat, hit the gas and the bus took off and the chase began.
The big red double-decker bus rocked precariously as Stretch threw it through the midday Paris traffic at speeds it was never meant to reach.
Police sirens could be heard in the distance.
“Go left and left again!” West yelled down. “Back around the Louvre! Back to the Obelisk!”
The bus took the bends fast, and West came down to look over Stretch’s shoulder.
“When we get there, what then?” Stretch asked.
West peered forward—and saw the Obelisk appear beyond the rushing line of trees to their left, its base still shrouded by scaffolding.
“I want you to ram into the scaffolding.”
The double-decker bus screamed onto the Place de la Concorde, almost tipping over with its speed.
The guards at the scaffolding surrounding the Obelisk realized just in time what it was going to do and leaped out of the way, diving clear a moment before the bus slammed into the near corner of the scaffold structure and obliterated a whole chunk of it.
The bus shuddered to a halt—
—and the tiny figure of Jack West could be seen leaping from its open top deck onto the second level of the scaffolding with some rope looped over his shoulder and climbing gear in his hands.
Up the scaffolding West ran, until he came to the topmost level and saw the Obelisk itself.
The size of a bell tower, it was totally covered in deeply engraved hieroglyphics. It soared into the sky high above him.
The hieroglyphs were large and carved in horizontal lines—approximately three glyphs to a line, depicting pharaonic cartouches, images of Osiris, and animals: falcons, wasps, and, in the second line from the very top, owls.
Using the deeply carved hieroglyphs as hand- and footholds, West clambered up the ancient Obelisk like a child scampering up a tall tree.
Stretch’s voice exploded through his earpiece. “West! I’ve got a visual on six police cars approaching fast along the Champs-Élysées!”
“How far away?”
“About ninety seconds, if that …”
“Keep me posted. Although somehow I think we’re going to have more to worry about than the Paris cops.”
West scaled the great stone needle quickly, climbing higher and higher, until even the big red bus looked tiny beneath him.
He came to the top, more than seventy feet above the ground. The sun reflecting off the golden pyramidion at its peak was blinding.
He recalled the quote from Hessler’s notebook:
THREAD THE POWER OF RA THROUGH THE EYES OF GREAT RAMESES’ TOWERING NEEDLES,
FROM THE SECOND OWL ON THE FIRST
TO THE THIRD ON THE SECOND…
… WHEREBY THE TOMB OF ISKENDUR WILL BE REVEALED.
“The third owl on the second obelisk,” he said aloud.
Sure enough, on the second line of this obelisk—the second obelisk from Luxor—there were three carved owls standing side by side.
And near the head of the third one, was a small circle depicting the Sun.
He imagined that very few people in history had actually seen this carving up close, since it was designed to sit so high above the populace—but up close, the carved image of the disclike Sun looked odd, as if it were not a carved image but rather … well … a plug in the stone.
West grabbed the plug and pulled it free—
—to reveal a horizontal cavity roughly two fingers wide and perfectly round in shape, that bored right through the Obelisk.
Like a kid scaling a coconut tree, West clambered around the other side of the Obelisk’s peak, where he found and extracted a second matching plug, and suddenly, looking through the borehole he could see right through the ancient Obelisk!
“West! Hurry! The cops are almost here …”
West ignored him, yanked from his jacket two high-tech devices: a laser altimeter, to measure the exact height of the borehole, and a digital surveyor’s inclinometer, to measure the exact angle of the borehole, both vertically and laterally.
With these measurements, he could then go to Luxor in Egypt and re-create this obelisk “virtually,” and thus deduce the location of Alexander the Great’s Tomb.
His altimeter beeped. Got the height.
He aimed his inclinometer through the borehole. It beeped. Got the angles.
Go!
And
he was away, sliding down the Obelisk with his feet splayed wide, like a fireman shooting down a ladder.
His feet hit the scaffolding just as six police cars screeched to a halt around the perimeter of the Place de la Concorde and disgorged a dozen cap-wearing Parisian cops.
“Stretch! Fire her up! Get moving,” West called as he ran across the top level of the three-story scaffold structure. “I’ll get there the short way!”
The bus reversed out of the scaffolding, then Stretch ground the gears and the big red bus lurched forward, just as Jack West took a flying leap off the top level and sailed down through the air…
… landing with a thump on the top deck of the bus, a second before it sped away toward the River Seine.
From the moment of their daring heist at the Louvre, other forces had been launched into action.
As one would expect, a theft from the Louvre instantly shot across the Paris police airwaves—airwaves that were monitored by other forces of the state.
What Stretch didn’t know was that the Paris police had been outranked at the highest levels and been taken off this pursuit.
The chase would be carried out by the French Army.
Just as West had anticipated.
And so, as the big red double-decker bus shot away from the Obelisk and its wrecked outer structure, the Parisian police didn’t follow. They just maintained their positions around the perimeter of the Place de la Concorde.
Moments later, five green-painted heavily armed fast-attack reconnaissance vehicles whooshed past the cop cars and shot off after the great ungainly bus.
Horns honked and sirens blared as the double-decker bus roared down the Quai des Tuileries on the edge of the River Seine for the second time that day—weaving between the thin daytime traffic, blasting through red lights, causing all manner of havoc.
Behind it were the five French Army recon vehicles.
Each was a compact three-man scout car known as Panhard VBL. Fitted with a turbocharged four-wheel-drive diesel engine and a sleek arrow-shaped body, the Panhard is a swift and nimble all-terrain vehicle that looks like an armor-plated version of a sports four-by-four.
The Panhards chasing West were fitted with every variety of gun turret: some had long-barreled 12.7mm machine guns, others had fearsome-looking TOW missile launchers.
Within moments of the chase beginning, they were all over the speeding bus.
They opened fire, shattering every window on the bus’s left-hand side—a second before the bus roared into a tunnel, blocking their angle of fire.
Two of the Army Panhards tried to squeeze past the bus inside the tunnel, but Stretch swerved toward them, ramming them into the wall of the tunnel, grinding them against it.
With nowhere to go, both Panhards skidded and flipped … and rolled … tumbling end over end until they crashed to twin halts on their roofs.
On the upper deck, Pooh Bear and West rocked with every swerve, tried to return fire. Pooh spied one of the TOW missile launchers on one Panhard.
“They’ve got missiles!” he yelled.
West called, “They won’t use them! They can’t risk destroying the Piece!”
“West!” Stretch’s voice came over their radios. “It’s only a matter of time before they seal off this road! What do we do!”
“We drive faster!” West replied. “We have to get to the Charles de Gaulle Bridge—”
Shoom—!
—they blasted out of the tunnel, back into sunlight, just in time to see two French Army helicopters sweep into position above them.
They were two very different types of chopper: one was a small Gazelle gunship, sleek and fast and bristling with guns and missile pods.
The other was bigger and much scarier: it was a Super Puma troop carrier, the French equivalent of the American Super Stallion. Big and tough, a Super Puma could carry twenty-five fully armed troops.
Which was exactly what this chopper was carrying.
As it flew low over the top of the speeding double-decker bus, along the rising-and-falling roadway on the north bank of the Seine, its side door slid open and drop ropes were flung from within it—and the French plan became clear.
They were going to storm the bus—the moving bus!
At the same moment, three of the pursuing Panhards swept up alongside the bus, surrounding it.
“I think we’re screwed already,” Stretch said flatly.
But he yanked on his steering anyway—ramming into the Panhard to his right hard, forcing it clear off the roadway, right through the low guardrail fence … where it shot high into the air, wheels spinning, and went crashing down into the river with a gigantic splash.
Up on the top deck, West tried to fire at the hovering Super Puma above him, but a withering volley from the Gazelle gunship forced him to dive for the floor. Every single passenger seat on the top deck of the bus was ripped to shreds by the barrage of bullets.
“Stretch! More swerving please!” he yelled, but it was too late.
The first two daredevil French paratroopers from the Super Puma landed with twin thumps on the open top deck of the moving double-decker bus only a few feet in front of him.
They saw West instantly, lying in the aisle between the seats: exposed, done for. They whipped up their guns and pulled the trigg—
—just as the floor beneath them erupted with holes, bullet holes from a shocking burst of fire from somewhere underneath them.
The two French troopers fell, dead, and a moment later, Pooh Bear’s head popped up from the stairwell.
“Did I get them? Did I get them? Are you OK?” he said to West.
“I’m all right,” West said, hurrying down the stairs to the lower deck. “Come on, we’ve gotta get to the Charles de Gaulle Bridge before this bus falls apart!”
The rising-and-falling riverside drive that they were speeding along would normally have been a tourist’s delight: after leaving the Louvre behind, the roadway swooped by the first of the two islands that lie in the middle of the Seine: the Ile de la Cité. Numerous bridges spanning the river rushed by on the right, giving access to the island.
If West’s team continued along the riverside road, they would soon arrive at the Arsenal precinct—the area where the Bastille once stood.
After that came two bridges: the Pont d’Austerlitz and the Pont Charles de Gaulle, the latter of which sat beside the very modern headquarters of the Ministry of Economics, Finances, and Industry, which itself sat next door to the Gare de Lyon, the large train station that serviced southeastern France with high-speed trains.
The big red tourist bus whipped along the riverside road, weaving through traffic, ramming the pursuing Army cars with wild abandon.
It shot underneath several overpasses and over some raised intersections. At one stage the spectacular Notre Dame Cathedral whizzed by on the right, but this was perhaps the only tourist bus in the world that didn’t care for the sight.
As soon as West had abandoned the upper deck of the bus, the French troops on the Super Puma above him went for it in earnest—despite Stretch’s best efforts at evasive weaving.
And within a minute, they took the bus.
First, two troopers landed on the open top deck, whizzing down the drop-ropes suspended from the chopper. They were quickly followed by two more, two more, and two more.
The eight French troopers now moved to the rear stairwell of the bus, guns up, preparing to storm the lower deck…
…just as, downstairs, West called: “Stretch! They’re crawling all over the roof! See that exit ramp up ahead! Roll us over it!”
Immediately ahead of them was another overpass, with an exit ramp rising to meet it on the right-hand side of the riverside drive. A low concrete guard-rail separated this ramp from the roadway which continued on underneath the overpass as a tunnel.
“What!” Stretch shouted back.
“Just do it!” West yelled. “Everybody, grab on to something! Hang on!”
They hit the exit ramp
at speed, and rose up it briefly—
—at which moment Stretch yanked left on the steering wheel, and the bus lurched leftward, hitting the concrete guardrail and…
… tipped over it!
The double-decker bus overbalanced shockingly and rolled over the concrete fence, using the fence as a fulcrum. As such, the entire double-decker bus rolled, going fully upside down—off the exit ramp, back down onto the roadway proper—where it slammed down onto its open-topped roof…
… crushing all eight of the French troops on its roof!
But it wasn’t done yet.
Since it had tipped over the dividing rail from a considerable height, it still had a lot of sideways momentum.
So the big bus continued to roll, bouncing off its now-crushed roof and coming upright once again, commencing on a second roll—only to bang hard against the far wall of the sunken roadway, which had the incredible effect of righting the bus and plonking it back on its own wheels, so that now it was traveling once again on the riverside drive and heading into the tunnel, having just performed a full 360-degree roll!
Inside the bus, the world rotated crazily, a full 360 degrees, hurling West’s team—Lily included—all around the cabin.
They tumbled and rolled, but they all survived the desperate move.
Indeed, they were all still lying on the floor when West scrambled to his feet and launched into action.
He took the wheel from Stretch as their mangled and dented bus swept out of the tunnel and into the Arsenal district. Having seen what West was prepared to do to anyone who tried to storm his bus from above, the Super Puma just flanked them now, swooping low over the river parallel to the speeding bus.
And just then, the modern glass-and-steel towers of the Economics Ministry came into view up ahead.
“That bridge up ahead is the Pont d’Austerlitz,” Pooh Bear said, peering over West’s shoulder. “The Charles de Gaulle Bridge is the one after it!”
“Gotcha,” West said. “Tell everybody to get their pony bottles and masks ready, then get to the doors. Go!”
Seven Deadly Wonders Page 21