Six Sacred Stones

by Matthew Reilly

  Jack bit his lip. “It won’t be pretty—in fact, it’ll be downright ugly if it works at all—but that’s our opening, that’s where we can snatch them.”

  XINTAN HARD LABOR PENAL FACILITY

  SICHUAN PROVINCE, SOUTHWESTERN CHINA

  1159 HOURS

  THE TWO GRAY concrete structures sat atop their adjoining mountain peaks like twin castles in a fantasy world, gazing out over the mountain wilderness, high above the cloud layer.

  The larger structure, Xintan One, was five stories tall, bulky, and fat. It sat lazily on its peak, bulging over the precipices, as if some god had just dropped a slab of plasticine onto the summit from a great height. Built almost entirely of dirty gray concrete—

  Communism’s contribution to architecture—it possessed four high towers soaring into the sky.

  The smaller structure, Xintan Two, lay to the south of its big brother. It was only three stories tall and had just one tower. But its compact size only seemed to make it harsher, more confident in its authority. It didn’t need to be big to be feared.

  Connecting the two wings was a long arched railway bridge, about half a mile in length and spanning a jagged valley gorge hundreds of feet deep. Today, that gorge was obscured by a layer of low clouds that wound its way between the mountains like a river.

  High and isolated, and silent save for the whistling of the mountain wind, the scene might have been beautiful if it weren’t for the stench of death and despair that surrounded the place.

  At precisely twelve noon, the great iron gates of Xintan Two rumbled open to reveal the prison train.

  With black iron flanks and reinforced grilles on every window except for those on the engine cars at either end of the fivecarriagelong train, it looked like a ferocious armored beast. Held back at the threshold of the gate, it snorted like a bull, expelling steam, its forward engine growling.

  The two prisoners were loaded into the middle car of the train.

  They were dressed in rags and blindfolds, and they shuffled rather than walked, their arms and legs bound in chains. There were only the two of them—Wizard and Tank.

  Stonyfaced prison guards surrounded them, twelve in total, the standard number for an internal transfer. All the guards were aware that two entire platoons of Chinese Army troops were waiting at Xintan One to accompany the prisoners on their external journey.

  Wizard and Tank were placed in the third carriage where their leg irons were padlocked to ringbolts in the floor.

  Then the sliding door to their carriage clanged shut and a whistle blew and the armored train moved out, expelling more steam, so that as it emerged from the gates, it looked like a great evil thing emerging from the depths of Hell itself.

  The train commenced its short journey across the long arched bridge, looking tiny against the wild mountains of China, just as two birdlike objects appeared in the sky above it, descending fast, objects that as they came closer lost their birdlike appearance and took on the appearance of men…two men dressed in black with wings on their backs.

  Jack West Jr. shot down through the air at bullet speed, a highaltitude facemask covering his face, a pair of ultrahightech carbonfiber wings, called Gullwings, attached to his back.

  The Gullwings were an FID—a fastinsertion device—developed by Wizard for the US

  Air Force many years ago. Fast, silent, and stealthy, they were essentially oneman gliders that also possessed small compressedair thrusters to enable gliding for sustained periods.

  In the end, the USAF had decided against using them, but Wizard had retained several prototypes, which West kept on theHali for situations like this.

  Zooming down through the sky alongside West, similarly garbed, was Stretch.

  Both men were armed to the teeth, with many holsters packed with pistols, submachine guns, and grenades and, in Stretch’s case, one compact Predator antitank rocket launcher.

  The prison train thundered across the long, high bridge.

  Half a mile away, the great behemoth of Xintan One loomed before it, the railway tracks ending at a solid hundredfoothigh concrete wall fitted with not a single aperture except for the imposing iron gate.

  But as the train whipped across the long bridge, closing in on Xintan One, the two winged figures swooped in low over it, traveling horizontally above the five armored carriages, moving gradually forward till they flew only a few feet above the frontmost carriage, the engine car.

  Their arrival went unseen by anyone, the guards at Xintan One having long grown complacent with the internal leg of the journey. After all, there had never been an escape in the prison’s history. As such, no one was actually assigned to watch the train during the bridge crossing.

  Once the two flying figures had reached the engine car, gliding low over it, West and Stretch retracted their wings and dropped to the roof of the engine, landing perfectly on their feet.

  They had to move fast. The train had covered almost twothirds of its short journey and the gates of the main facility rose large before them.

  West drew his two Desert Eagle pistols and leaped down onto the nose of the engine car and proceeded to blow out its two drivers’ windows.

  The windows shattered and he swung in through one, landing inside the driver’s compartment.

  Both drivers—Chinese Army men—shouted and reached for their guns. They never got to them.

  Stretch swung inside the driver’s compartment to find the drivers dead and West taking the controls of the train.

  “Predator,” West called above the wind now screaming in through the shattered windshield.

  Stretch loaded his antitank rocket launcher, then shouldered it, aiming it out the broken front windows.

  “Ready!” he called.

  Then, right on cue, the iron gates of Xintan One cracked open, ready to receive the transfer train.

  At which point, West jammed forward on the throttle.

  AS THE GATES rumbled open, the two platoons of Chinese Army troops waiting on the receiving platform of Xintan One turned, expecting to see the armored train engaging its brakes, disgorging steam, and generally slowing.

  What they saw was the exact opposite.

  The armored trainburst in through the great gateway at full speed, accelerating through the tight confines of the archway and blasting past the siding.

  Then a finger of smoke shoomed out from the shattered forward windshield of the engine car—the smoke trail of a Predator antitank missile, a missile that cut a beeline for…

  …the other gate of Xintan One.

  The outer gate.

  The Predator missile slammed into the iron gate and exploded. Smoke and dust billowed out in every direction, engulfing the receiving platform, obscuring everything.

  The huge iron outer doors buckled and groaned, their center sections twisted and loosened, which was all West needed, for a moment later his train thundered into them at phenomenal speed and crashed right through them, flinging them open, hurling them from their massive hinges, before the train itself rushed out into gray daylight, racing away from the mountaintop prison, running for all it was worth.

  At first, the Chinese were just stunned, but their response when it came was fierce.

  Within four minutes, two compact helicopters—fastattack Russianbuilt Kamov Ka50s, otherwise known as Werewolves—rose from within Xintan One and took off after the runaway train.

  Another minute later, a much larger helicopter rose from within Xintan Two. It was also Russianmade, but of far highter quality. It was an Mi24 Hind gunship, one of the most feared choppers in the world. Bristling with cannons, gun pods, chemweapons dispensers, and rockets, it had a unique doubledomed cockpit. It also possessed a troop hold, which today bore ten fully armed Chinese shock troops.

  Once clear of the prison’s walls, the Hind lowered its nose and thundered off in pursuit of West’s fleeing train.

  The final aspect of the Chinese response was electronic.

  The Xintan complex possessed two out
er guardhouses situated on the mountain railway a few miles north of the prison, guardhouses that the train would have to pass by.

  Frantic phone calls were made to the guards posted at both guardhouses, but strangely no reply came back from either one.

  At both outposts the scene was the same: all the guards lay on the floor, out cold, their hands bound with flexcuffs.

  West’s people had already been there.

  THE ARMORED train whipped through the mountains at breakneck speed, a rain of snow rushing in through its shattered forward windows.

  It roared past the first guardhouse, crashing through its boom gate as if it were a toothpick.

  Stretch drove, eyeing the landscape around them—snowcovered mountainside to the left, a sheer thousandfoot drop to the right.

  The train rounded a lefthand spur and suddenly the second guardhouse came into view, plus a long soaring iron bridge beyond it.

  “Huntsman! I’ve got a visual on the outer bridge!” Stretch called.

  West had been leaning up and out through the shattered windshield, setting up some kind of mortartype device and peering behind them, back at the prison complex. He ducked back inside.

  “We got choppers on our tail. Two attack birds and one big bastard Hind—”

  “Threechoppers?” Stretch turned. “I thought Astro said they only kept one chase copter at Xintan, the Hind?”

  “Looks like his intelligence was two choppers short,” West said wryly. “I hope that’s not the only thing he got wrong. Too late to worry about it now. The rotor net is mounted and in your hands. Just get us to that bridge before somebody on that Hind figures out who we are and decides it’s worth blowing the bridge to stop us. Keep me posted. I’ve got work to do.”

  West then grabbed a microphone from the dash, keyed the train’s internal intercom, and began speaking in Mandarin: “Attention all guards aboard this train! Attention! We are now in command of this vehicle. All we want are the prisoners—”

  In the five regular carriages of the train, every one of the Chinese guards looked up at the voice coming in over the PA.

  Among them, one other face snapped up and gasped, the only one to recognize the voice.

  Wizard. He was bloody, bruised, and beaten. But his eyes lit up at the sound of his friend’s voice. “Jack…” he rasped.

  “—We mean you no harm. We understand that many of you are just doing your job, that you are men with families, children. But if you get in our way, know this: harm will come to you. We will be coming through the train now, so we give you a choice: lay down your weapons, and you will be not be killed. Raise your weapons against us and you will die.”

  The intercom clicked off.

  Up in the driver’s compartment, West threw open the interconnecting door between the engine car and the first carriage.

  Then, holding an MP7 submachine gun in one hand and a Desert Eagle in the other, he entered the prison train.

  The three guards in the first carriage had heeded his warning.

  They stood backed up against the walls, their Type56 rifles at their feet, their hands raised. West moved warily past them, his guns up, when suddenly one of the guards whipped out a pistol and—

  Blam!

  The guard was blown back against the wall of the carriage, nailed by West’s powerful Desert Eagle.

  “I told you not to raise your weapons,” he said to the others in a low voice. He jerked his chin at a nearby cell: “Into the cage, now.”

  The four guards in the second carriage were smarter. They’d set a trap. First, they’d cut the lights, darkening the carriage; and second, they’d concealed one of their men in the ceilingabove the interconnecting doorway while the others feigned surrender to West.

  West entered the carriage, rocking with the motion of the train, to see three of them holding up their hands and crying “Mercy! Mercy! Don’t shoot us!” diverting his attention from the man hidden in the shadows above the door.

  Then, completely unseen by West, the concealed man extended his arm, aiming his gun at West’s head from directly above—

  —and suddenly West looked up, too late—

  —just as the entire carriage rocked wildly, pummeled from the outside by a ferocious burst of supermachine gun fire.

  The chase copters had arrived, and had started firing on the speeding train!

  The guard above him was thrown from his perch above the door and, missing West by inches, hit the floor with a clumsy thud.

  Then the other three guards drewtheir weapons and the darkened carriage erupted in strobelike flashes of gunfire, with Jack West Jr. in the middle of it all, firing in every direction with both of his guns—sidestepping to one side then firing left, right, and down—until at the end of it all when darkness had returned and the smoke had cleared, he was the only one left standing.

  He moved grimly onward: next carriage.

  The prisoner carriage.

  At the same time, outside, the two chase helicopters from Xintan had caught up with the runaway train and were assaulting it with a hail of bulletfire from their strutmounted 30mm guns.

  Stretch brought the train past the second guardhouse, smashing through its boom gate before racing out onto the long swooping bridge that led to the rest of the mountain railway.

  Onto the bridge, totally exposed.

  One chase chopper swooped low over the train’s engine car—just as Stretch triggered the mortarlike device on its hood.

  The device went off with a muffledwhump, propelling something into the air high above the speeding train.

  It was a wide nylon net with heavy weighted bearings at every corner. It fanned out above the engine car like a giant lateral spiderweb—a spiderweb that was designed to bring down helicopters.

  The net entered the rotor blades of the lead chopper and instantly got entangled.

  The rotors caught horribly and with a jerk, stopped, and suddenly the banking helicopter became a forwardmoving glider with the aerodynamics of a brick.

  It sailed down into the ravine below the bridge, falling down and down and down before it hit the bottom with a tremendous explosion.

  Stretch left the controls of the train for a moment to grab his Predator rocket launcher and insert a final rocketpropelled grenade into it.

  When he returned to the controls, he found himself staring at the huge Chinese gunship, the Hind, hovering off to the side of the long swooping bridge, flying parallel to his engine car.

  “Oh shit,” Stretch breathed.

  The Hind loosed a single rocket from one of its sidemounted pods—a missile aimed not at the train, but rather at thebridge; a missile that would stop West from snatching Wizard and Tank. That a few guards would also be lost was clearly of no concern to the Chinese generals who had ordered the missile launch.

  “Fuck me…” Stretch keyed his radio: “Huntsman! They’re going to take out the bridge…”

  “Then drive faster,”came the reply.

  “Right!” Stretch hit the gas, pushing the train’s throttle as far forward as it would go.

  The missile from the Hind struck the bridge right in its middle, in the latticework of struts that formed the apex of its arch, a bare second after the speeding train had shot over that point.

  The detonation of the missile sent a shower of iron girders and beams raining down into the ravine.

  But the bridge held…for the moment.

  The train sped across it, a hundred yards from the other side and the shelter of a tunnel there.

  There came an almighty groan. The distinctive groan of iron girders bending.

  Then, in almost glorious slow motion, the great bridge began to sway, and rock, and from the middle outward, it began to drop in pieces into the ravine.

  IT WAS an incredible sight.

  The slowly collapsing bridge, falling away in its center, while the armored train—still on it—sped off its eastern end, chased by the disintegrating bridge.

  But the train was just a fraction
too fast.

  It shot off the end of the bridge and disappeared into the waiting tunnel a bare second before the rails behind its final carriage—the rearfacing second engine—dropped away into the ravine, disappearing forever.

  Inside the train, Jack came to the third carriage, the prisoner car, just as all the lights abruptly went off.

  The guards here weren’t going to give up without a fight and now in the darkness of the tunnel, the interior of the prison train was enveloped in neartotal blackness.

  Snapping the nightvision goggles on his helmet into place, Jack entered the prisoner car, seeing the world in phosphorescent green, and he beheld…

  …two burly Chinese guards holding both Wizard and Tank in front of their bodies with guns held to each of the blindfolded professors’ heads. Neither of the guards wore nightvision goggles and they stared wildly into the darkness—they didn’t need NVGs to kill their hostages.

  When they heard the heavy interconnecting door open, one of them yelled, “Drop your weapon or we blow their—”

  Bablam!Two shots.

  Both guards dropped. Matching holes in their faces.

  Jack never even broke his stride.

  The other two guards in the carriage weren’t so bold and Jack quickly herded them into a spare cell before sealing the rear door of the carriage with an axe—he didn’t want any more enemies bothering him.

  Then he slid to Wizard’s side, snatched away the blindfold, and gazed in horror at his battered friend. “Wizard, it’s me. Jesus, what did they do to you…”

  The old man’s face was a mess of cuts and peeled skin. His arms and chest bore the distinctive scars of electric shock equipment. His long white beard was matted with dried blood.