The Six Sacred Stones jw-2

by Matthew Reilly

  The Six Sacred Stones

  ( Jack West - 2 )

  Matthew Reilly

  THE END OF THE WORLD IS HERE

  Unlocking the secret of the Seven Ancient Wonders was only the beginning...

  After their thrilling exploits in Matthew Reilly's rampaging New York Times bestseller, 7 Deadly Wonders, supersoldier Jack West Jr. and his loyal team of adventurers are back, and now they face an all-but-impossible challenge.

  A mysterious ceremony in an unknown location has unraveled their work and triggered a catastrophic countdown that will climax in no less than the end of all life on Earth.

  But there is one last hope.

  If Jack and his team can find and rebuild a legendary ancient device known only as the "Machine," they might be able to ward off the coming armageddon. The only clues to locating this Machine, however, are held within the fabled Six Sacred Stones, long lost in the fog of history.

  And so the hunt begins for the Six Sacred Stones and the all-important knowledge they possess, but in the course of this wild adventure Jack and his team will discover that they are not the only ones seeking the Stones and that there might just be other players out there who don't want to see the world saved at all.

  From Stonehenge in England to the deserts of Egypt to the spectacular Three Gorges region of China, The 6 Sacred Stones will take you on a nonstop roller-coaster ride through ancient history, modern military hardware, and some of the fastest and most mind-blowing action you will ever read.

  The Six Sacred Stones

  Matthew Reilly

  ALSO BY MATTHEW REILLY

  7 Deadly Wonders

  Contest

  Scarecrow

  Ice Station

  Temple

  Area 7

  Copyright © 2008 by Karanadon Entertainment Pty Ltd.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For John Schrooten

  A great and true friend

  THE SIX RAMESEAN STONES

  THE MYSTERY OF THE CIRCLES

  A mortal battle,

  Between father and son,

  One fights for all,

  And the other for one.

  —ANONYMOUS (FROM AN INSCRIPTION FOUND IN A3,000-YEAR-OLDCHINESE SHRINE IN THEWUGORGE, CENTRALCHINA)

  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

  —ARTHURC. CLARKE

  The end of all things is near.

  —1 PETER 4:7

  INTRODUCTION

  THE DARK CEREMONY

  12:00 MIDNIGHT

  AUGUST 20, 2007

  LOCATION: UNKNOWN

  IN A DARK chamber beneath a great island in the most distant corner of the world, an ancient ceremony was under way.

  A priceless gold stone—pyramidal in shape, with a crystal at its peak—was set in place.

  Then an ancient incantation, unheard for thousands of years, was uttered.

  No sooner had the words been spoken than a great purple beam blasted down from the star-filled sky and lit up the pyramidal capstone.

  The only witnesses to this ceremony were five angry men.

  When it was over, the leader of the group spoke into a satellite radio: “The ritual has been performed. In theory, the power of Tartarus has been broken. This must be tested. Kill one of them tomorrow in Iraq.”

  The next day, on the other side of the world, in war-torn Iraq, an Australian special forces soldier named Stephen Oakes was shot dead by insurgents. Ambushed in his jeep at a security checkpoint, he was torn apart by an overwhelming wave of gunfire from six masked attackers. His body was riddled with over two hundred bullet holes. His attackers were never found.

  That an allied soldier should die during the occupation of Iraq was nothing new. Already over thirty-two hundred American servicemen had been killed there.

  What was unusual about this death was that it had been an Australian who had been killed.

  For curiously, since March 2006, there had not been a single Australian death in combat in any conflict around the world.

  In fact, it was well-known among the allied troops in Iraq that Australian servicemen had an uncanny luck. Over the past five months, they had survived all manner of attacks and ambushes—in some cases almost miraculously.

  Indeed, this capacity to survive practically any kind of attack was so well-known to their American colleagues that it was considered wise to stand next to an Aussie in a firefight.

  But with the death of Specialist Steve Oakes on August 21, 2007, that uncanny luck came to a bloody and conclusive end.

  The day after that, an encrypted message was handed to one of the most powerful men in the world.

  It read:

  SECURE TRANSCRIPT 061–7332/1A

  CLASS LEVEL: ALPHA-SUPER

  FOR A-1’S EYES ONLY

  22-AUG-07

  BEGIN SECURE MESSAGE:

  Note death of Australian specialist Oakes in Iraq. The power of Tartarus has been nullified. Someone has the other Capstone.

  The game is back on.

  Now we must find the Stones.

  END SECURE MESSAGE.

  THE ENTRY CHAMBER

  PROLOGUE

  WITCH MOUNTAIN

  WITCH MOUNTAIN

  OFF THE WU GORGE, THREE GORGES REGION

  SICHUAN PROVINCE, CENTRAL CHINA

  DECEMBER 1, 2007

  SITTINGin a sling harness suspended from a long rope and hanging in near-total darkness, Professor Max Epper cracked the top off his flare, illuminating the subterranean chamber around him.

  “Oh my…” he breathed. “Ooooh,my …”

  The chamber was simply breathtaking.

  It was a perfect cube, wide and high, cut out of the living rock, perhaps fifty feet to a side. And every square inch of its walls was covered in carved inscriptions: characters, symbols, images, and figures.

  He had to be careful.

  The amber light of his flare revealed that the floor directly beneath him contained a well shaft that perfectly matched his opening in the ceiling. It yawned wide, a dark hole of indeterminate depth.

  In some circles, Max Epper was known by the call sign “Wizard,” a nickname that was entirely appropriate.

  With a flowing white beard and watery blue eyes that glistened with warmth and intelligence, at sixty-seven, he looked like a modern-day Merlin. A professor of archaeology at Trinity College, Dublin, it was said that, among other feats, he had once been part of a secret international team that had located—and reerected—the Golden Capstone of the Great Pyramid at Giza.

  Swinging to the floor of the chamber, Wizard unclipped himself and gazed in awe at the text-covered walls.

  Some of the symbols he recognized—Chinese characters and even a few Egyptian hieroglyphs. This was not unexpected: long ago, the owner and designer of this tunnel system had been the great Chinese philosopher, Laozi. In addition to being a venerated thinker, Laozi had been a great traveler and was known to have ventured as far as Egypt in the fourth century B.C.

  In pride of place in the exact center of the feature wall was a large raised relief that Wizard had seen before:

  Known as the Mystery of the Circles, it had not yet been decoded. Casual observers guessed it to be a representation of our solar system, but there was a problem with this analysis: there was one too many planets circling the central Sun.

  Wizard had seen the Mystery of the Circles perhaps a dozen times around the world—in Mexico and Egypt, even in Wales and Ireland—and in various forms: from crude scratchings on bare rock walls to artistic carvings over ancient doorways, but none of those renderings was anywhere near as beautifully and elaborat
ely carved as this one.

  This specimen was dazzling.

  Inlaid with rubies, sapphires, and jade, each of its concentric circles was rimmed with gold. It glittered in the glare of Wizard’s high-powered flashlight.

  Directly beneath the Mystery of the Circles was a narrow doorway of sorts: perhaps two feet wide and six feet high, but shallow, recessed a couple of feet into the solid stone wall. It reminded Wizard of a coffin standing vertically, embedded in the wall. Strangely its rear wall wascurved.

  Carved above it was a small symbol that made Wizard’s eyes widen with delight:

  “The symbol for Laozi’s Stone…” he breathed. “The Philosopher’s Stone.My God. We’ve found it.”

  Surrounded by this repository of ancient knowledge and priceless treasure, Wizard pulled out a high-tech Motorola UHF radio and spoke into it: “Tank. You aren’t going to believe this. I’ve found the antechamber, and it’s positively stunning. It also contains a sealed doorway, which I assume gives access to the trap system. We’re close. Very close. I need you to come down here and—”

  “Wizard,”came the reply.“We just got a call from our lookout at the docks down on the Yangtze. The Chinese Army is snooping around. Gunboat patrol, nine boats, heading into our gorge. They’re coming this way.”

  “It’s Mao. How could he have found us?” Wizard said.

  “It may not be him. Could just be a regular patrol,”the voice of Yobu “Tank” Tanaka said.

  “Which could actually be worse.” Chinese military patrols were notorious for roughing up archaeological expeditions in these parts in search of petty bribes.

  “How long have we got till they get here?” Wizard asked.

  “An hour, maybe less. I think it would be wise for us to be gone by the time they arrive.”

  “I agree, my old friend,” Wizard said. “We’d better hurry. Get down here and bring some more lights. Tell Chow to fire up his computer: I’m going to get started recording images and transmitting them up to him.”

  THE UNDERGROUNDchamber in which Wizard found himself was situated in the Three Gorges region of China, in an area that very much suited him.

  This was because the Chinese characterwu means “wizard” or “witch” depending on the context—and it was used often in the names of the area’s features: Wu Gorge, the second of the famous Three Gorges; Wushan, the ancient walled fortress-town that once sat on the banks of the Yangtze; and of course Mount Wushan, the colossal two-mile-high peak that towered above Wizard’s chamber.

  Translation: Witch Mountain.

  The Wu Gorge area was renowned for its history—shrines, temples, carvings like the Kong Ming Tablet, and rock-cut caves like the Green Stone Cavern—nearly all of which had now been submerged beneath the waters of the 350-mile-long lake that had formed behind the gargantuan walls of the Three Gorges Dam.

  The area was also known, however, for certain unusual events.

  The Roswell of China, for hundreds of years it had been the site of numerous strange sightings: unexplained celestial phenomena, swarms of shooting stars, and aurora-like apparitions. It was even claimed that on one gruesome day in the seventeenth century the clouds over Wushan had rained blood.

  The Wu Gorge area certainly had a history.

  But now in the twenty-first century, that history had been drowned in the name of progress, swallowed by the waters of the Yangtze as the great river backed up against the largest structure ever built by mankind. The Old Town of Wushan now lay three hundred feet beneath the waves.

  Fast-flowing tributaries that had once gushed into the Yangtze via spectacular side gorges had also been humbled by the expanding Dam Lake—what had once been dramatic four-hundred-foot-high whitewater ravines were now just regular hundred-foot-high gorges with placid water at their bases.

  Small stone villages that had once sat on the banks of these little rivers, already far removed from the outside world, had now disappeared completely from history.

  But not from Wizard.

  In one partially flooded gorge, deep within the mountains to the north of the Yangtze, he had found an isolated mountain hamlet built on higher ground and in it, the entrance to this cave system.

  The hamlet was primitive and ancient, a few huts constructed of irregular stones and tilting thatch roofs. It had been abandoned three hundred years ago and the locals thought it haunted.

  Now, thanks to the ultramodern dam a hundred miles away, the deserted hamlet was flooded to knee-height.

  The entrance to the cave system had been neither guarded by booby traps nor heralded by elaborate gates. It was, rather, its very ordinariness that had kept it secret for over two millennia.

  Wizard had found the entrance inside a small stone hut that backed onto the base of the mountain. Once inhabited by the great Chinese philosopher, Laozi—the inventor of Taoism and the teacher of Confucius—this unassuming little hut possessed within it a stone well with a raised brick rim.

  And at the bottom of that well, concealed beneath a layer of foul black water, was a false floor—and underneath that false floor, had been this magnificent chamber.

  Wizard got to work.

  He pulled a powerful Asus laptop from his backpack and connected it to a high-res digital camera and started clicking away, taking shots of the chamber’s walls.

  As the camera gathered its images, a rapid-fire series of computations took place on Wizard’s computer screen.

  At work was a translation program—a complex database that had taken Wizard years to compile. It featured thousands of ancient symbols, from many countries and cultures, and their accepted translations. It could also perform “fuzzy” translations, a kind of best guess when a symbol’s meaning was ambiguous.

  Every time a symbol was captured on the digital camera, it was scanned by the computer and a translation found. For example:

  ELEMENT TRANSLATIONS: shi tou(stone) si (temple)

  FULL SEQUENCE TRANS:“The Temple of Stone”

  FUZZ TRANS POSSIBILITIES:“Stone shrine,” “Stone Temple of the Dark Sun,” “Stonehenge (Match Ref. ER:46–2B)”

  Among the other glyphs and reliefs on the walls, the computer found Laozi’s most famous philosophical invention, the Taijitu:

  The computer translated: “Taijitu; Ref:Tao Te Ching. Western colloq. ref: ‘Yin-Yang.’ Common symbol for the duality of all things: opposites possess small traits of each other: e.g., in the good there is some evil, and in the evil there is some good.”

  On other occasions, the computer found no prior record of a symbol:

  In these cases it created a new file and added it to the database, so that if the symbol in question was ever found again, the database would have a record of it.

  Either way, Wizard’s computer whirred, absorbing the images hungrily.

  After a few minutes of this scanning, one particular translation caught Wizard’s attention. It read:

  THE 1ST PILLAR MUST BE INLAID

  EXACTLY 100 DAYS BEFORE THE RETURN.

  THE PRIZE SHALL BE KNOWLEDGE.**

  ______

  AMBIGUOUS TERMS:

  “The First Pillar…” Wizard breathed. “Oh my goodness.”

  Ten minutes later, as Wizard continued to feed more photos into his computer, a second figure descended into the chamber.

  It was Tank Tanaka, a stocky Japanese professor from the University of Tokyo, Wizard’s research partner on this project and longtime friend. With soft brown eyes, a kind round face, and wisps of gray at his temples, Tank was the professor every history student wanted.

  As he swung himself to solid ground, Wizard’s computer pinged loudly, alerting them to a new translation.

  The two old professors peered at the screen. It read:

  THE COMING OF RA’S DESTROYER

  THE COMING OF RA’S DESTROYER

  SEES THE STARTING OF THE GREAT MACHINE**

  AND WITH IT THE RISE OF THE SA-BENBEN.

  HONOR THE SA-BENBEN,

  KEEP IT CLOSE, KEEP
IT NEAR,

  FOR IT ALONE GOVERNS THE SIX

  AND ONLY THE EMPOWERED SIX CAN

  PREPARE THE PILLARS AND

  LEAD YOU TO THE SHRINES AND THUS

  COMPLETE THE MACHINE

  BEFORE THE SECOND COMING.***

  THE END OF ALL THINGS IS NEAR.

  ________