The Six Sacred Stones jw-2

by Matthew Reilly

  The Chinese major was Black Dragon, the owner of the voice on the airwaves. Officious and intense, Black Dragon was known for his cold methodical efficiency; he was a man who got the job done.

  The younger American with him was tall and broad, powerful, and he wore the customized uniform of a US Army Special Forces operator. He had a sharp-edged crew cut and the unblinking eyes of a psychopath. His call sign:Rapier.

  “Secure the farmhouse,” Black Dragon ordered the nearest unit of paratroopers. “But be wary of any improvised devices. Captain West is clearly a man who prepares for eventualities such as this.”

  Rapier said nothing. He just stared intently at the abandoned farmhouse, as if absorbing every feature of it.

  THE RIVER CROSSING

  The bridge was up ahead now, maybe a mile away—an old wooden single-lane bridge.

  West saw it come into view, just as three APCs and five Chinese jeeps skidded to a halt in front of it, blocking the way. A roadblock.

  They’d got there first.

  Damn.

  The lead APC lowered its turret-mounted cannon ominously.

  At that exact same moment, four Chinese jeeps caught up with West’s cars from behind, two to each side.

  The soldiers on the jeeps looked angry as all hell and, buffeted and jostled by the uneven terrain, they tried to aim their rifles at West’s tires.

  “Jack!”Zoe called over the radio.“Jack…!”

  “Stay on the road! Whatever you do, stay on the road till you reach the windmills!”

  Two skinny windmills flanked the road up ahead, halfway between them and the bridge.

  An explosion boomed out behind Jack’s LSV—barely three feet behind it—tearing a crater from the road. A shot from the APC’s cannon.

  “Sheesh.” Jack turned to Alby. “Do me a favor, kid. Try not to tell your mother about this part of your stay.”

  Zoe’s car came to the windmills flanking the roadway, shoomed between them, closely followed by Jack and Alby’s LSV—still harried by the four Chinese jeeps.

  Jack cut through the windmills, while the jeeps took them differently: one jeep swung onto the road proper and sped between the windmills, while the three others went wider, whipping around the outside of the windmills and—

  Suddenly the first such jeep dropped from view. As did the jeep traveling immediately behind it and the one that had sped around the windmill on the other side of the road.

  The three jeeps just fell out of sight, as if they had been swallowed by the Earth.

  In fact, that was exactly what had happened. They had fallen into Indian tiger traps—large concealed holes in the ground next to the windmills, designed by Jack for an escape just like this one.

  “Zoe! Quickly! Let me pass, then drive exactly where I do!”

  Jack zoomed past Zoe’s car and then abruptly shot left, off the road and out onto rough scrubland. Zoe followed him, swinging her LSV left, chased now by the sole surviving Chinese jeep.

  Bouncing over the scrub, the river up ahead, the roadblock off to their right.

  “Exactly where I drive!” West repeated into his mike.

  He swept down an embankment toward the Fitzroy River—a suicidal course. There was no way he could possibly cross the fast-flowing waters of the river in his low-slung LSV.

  But into the river he went. At full speed.

  The LSV plunged into the Fitzroy, kicking up spectacular fans of spray on either side as it sheared right through the water, unusually shallow water, across an uncommonly smooth section of riverbed: a concealed concrete ford.

  As Jack’s LSV skipped out the other side of the river, roaring up the far bank with a three-foot-high jump, Zoe’s car hit the near edge of the stream, at the same time as the last Chinese jeep came alongside it.

  Zoe hit the ford, following Jack’s path exactly. But the pursuing jeep didn’t, and the ford was deliberately narrow, a submerged concrete bridge only one car width wide, and thus the Chinese jeep nosedived into the water and came to a jarring, splashing halt, while Zoe’s LSV just continued on, bouncing safely up the far side.

  Seeing the two LSVs successfully cross the river to the north, the Chinese troops blocking the bridge leaped into their jeeps and APCs, and started across the bridge in pursuit.

  Only to have the bridge collapse completely beneath the first jeep.

  Amid a tangled mess of—precracked—wooden beams and struts, the jeep tumbled down into the river, leaving the remaining vehicles bunched up behind the void, now with no bridge to cross.

  They hurried for the ford, but by the time they found it and negotiated its narrow span, Jack’s two escape cars were already speeding onto the highway.

  THE ESCAPE PLANE

  WHILE JACK and Zoe had been fleeing east, tripping nail traps and racing over concealed river crossings, Sky Monster had been busy, too.

  He’d arrived in his pickup at the very south of the farm, where he disappeared inside a cabin set into the hillside, a hillside that—when seen from up close—was actually a giant camouflage-netted structure.

  A hangar.

  And in it was a giant black 747.

  If one looked closely at the plane’s underbelly, one could still make out an inscription in Arabic:PRESIDENT ONE—AIR FORCE OF IRAQ: HALICARNASSUS.

  It was a plane that had once lived in a secret hangar outside Basra, one of several such 747s that had lain in secret locations around Iraq, ready to whisk Saddam Hussein to safe havens in East Africa in the event of an invasion. Saddam, it turned out, had never been able to use this particular plane. But in 1991, cornered by enemy forces and abandoned by his own men, Jack West Jr. had.

  It was now his plane, The Halicarnassus.

  The Halicarnassus rumbled out of its hangar and down a wide dirt taxiway, which itself crossed the flowing Fitzroy River via a second submerged concrete ford a few miles south of the rigged bridge.

  Once over its ford, Sky Monster brought the big 747 left onto the highway, pointing north.

  The giant plane thundered up the desert highway, a great black behemoth speeding along the shimmering blacktop, until Sky Monster saw the two LSVs of Jack and Zoe swing out onto the bitumen a few hundred yards in front of him.

  A ramp at the rear of The Halicarnassus lowered to the roadway, kicking up sparks as it did so, and—with the great plane still moving at considerable speed—the two LSVs swung in behind it and zoomed up the ramp into its belly, closely followed by the tiny shape of Horus.

  Once the second car was inside and firmly tied down with a crank-harness, the ramp was raised and the plane sped up and hit takeoff speed and slowly, gracefully, lifted off the empty desert highway, leaving the farm—now crawling with Chinese cars and troops—in its wake.

  West strode into the cockpit of The Halicarnassus.

  “We’re not outta this yet, Boss,” Sky Monster said. “I got incoming bogeys. Four of them. Look like J-9 Interceptors. Chinese MiG variants.”

  West charged back into the main cabin, where Zoe was buckling in the kids.

  “Zoe,” he said. “To the guns.”

  Moments later, he and Zoe were harnessed into The Halicarnassus ’s wing-mounted gun turrets. The plane also had revolving guns on its roof and underbelly that Sky Monster could control from the cockpit.

  “They can’t blow us out of the sky, can they?”Sky Monster asked over the intercom.“They’d destroy the Firestone.”

  “It’s made of almost solid gold,” West replied. “It’d survive just about anything except a total fuel fire. If I were them, I’d shoot us down and expect to find it in the wreckage.”

  “Great. Here they come…”

  Four Chinese J-9 Interceptors blasted across the sky in pursuit of The Halicarnassus, screaming low over the desert, unleashing their missiles.

  Four small aerial darts zoomed out from their wings, spiraling smoke trails extending out behind them.

  “Launch countermeasures!” West called.

  “Launching counterme
asures!”Sky Monster reported back.

  He punched some buttons and immediately, several chaff bombs sprang out from the underbelly of the Hali.

  Three of the missiles took the bait, and detonated harmlessly against the fake targets.

  West himself nailed the fourth and last one, blowing it to pieces with his cannon.

  “Sky Monster! Hit the deck! Rawson’s Canyon! Let’s throw the line and hope Super Betty still works! Go! Go! Go!”

  The Halicarnassus banked and dived, swooping for the flat desert floor. Two of the Interceptors took off in pursuit, the other two staying high.

  The Halicarnassus came to a rocky canyonland, a wide dry plain flanked by low mesas and hills. It shot into Rawson’s Canyon, a long thin chutelike canyon that ended at a narrow aperture between two mesas. Technically this was all Army land, but no one except Jack West Jr. had set foot out here in years.

  The Halicarnassus zoomed low through the canyon, barely a hundred feet off the ground, chased by the two Chinese Interceptors.

  The fighters fired their guns.

  Jack and Zoe blazed back from their revolving turrets.

  Tracers sizzled through the air between the chased and the chasers, the landscape whizzing by in a blur of speed.

  Then Zoe got a bead and hammered the left-hand Interceptor with a wave of tracers that entered it square in its intakes. The J-9 shuddered instantly, belching black smoke, before it wobbled in the air and lurched dangerously to the left, popped its ejection seat, and smashed at 500 mph into the canyon wall.

  The remaining fighter kept firing, but Sky Monster kept banking within the confines of the narrow canyon and the bullets sizzled past the speeding black plane, nicking its wingtips but hitting nothing of value.

  Then The Halicarnassus hit the end of the canyonway and blasted through the narrow exit, just as Jack called: “Sky Monster! Call in Super Betty! Now!”

  And—bam!—Sky Monster punched a switch on his console marked:LAUNCH SUP BET.

  A hundred feet below and behind him, the solenoid on a large explosive that had sat undisturbed on the desert floor for many months tripped.

  The explosive was a large RDX one, based on the principle of the Bouncing Betty land mine. Once triggered, it set off a preliminary blast that launched the main bomb a hundred feet into the air.

  Three seconds later, the main charge went off, just like a Bouncing Betty, only much bigger. Plane-sized. And filled with shrapnel.

  The Super Betty.

  A giant star-shaped blast exploded in the air behind the fleeing Halicarnassus, right in the path of the second speeding Interceptor.

  Shards of shrapnel assaulted the fighter jet head-on, smacking against its cockpit canopy, lodging in its reinforced glass, creating a hundred spiderwebs. More shards slammed into the J-9’s air intakes, ripping apart the innards of the plane.

  The pilot’s ejection was followed by the fighter’s full-scale explosion. Dead Interceptor.

  “I hadn’t checked on Betty for months,” West said. “Glad she still worked.”

  the Hali soared up into the sky.

  Where the last two Interceptors were waiting.

  By now, Sky Monster had taken them northwest, toward the coast, and as The Halicarnassus left the mainland of Australia and shot out over the Indian Ocean, the two Interceptors engaged it.

  Missiles, guns: they gave it everything they had.

  West and Zoe returned fire with equal violence until finally West nailed one Interceptor with his cannon and…went dry.

  “Right-side gun is out!” he called into the intercom. “How’re you traveling, Zoe?”

  “Still got a few rounds left,”she said as she fired at the last J-9.“But not many—shit! I’m out, too!”

  They were out of ammo and there was still one bad guy left.

  “Uh, Huntsman…!” Sky Monster called expectantly. “What are we gonna do now, throw rocks?”

  Jack stared at their remaining pursuer—the Interceptor hovered in the sky behind them, waiting, watching, holding back a little, as if it sensed something was wrong.

  “Shit. Shit, shit, shit,” he muttered.

  He unbuckled himself from his gun chair and hurried back into the main cabin, thinking fast.

  Then it hit him.

  He keyed his headset radio. “Sky Monster. Take us vertical. As vertical as you can go.”

  “What? What are you doing?”

  “I’ll be in the rear hold.”

  Sky Monster pulled back on the yoke and The Halicarnassus went nose-up into the sky.

  Climbing, climbing, climbing…

  The Interceptor gave chase, zooming upward after it.

  Battling the slope, Jack staggered into the rear hold, clipped a safety rope to his belt, and opened the rear loading ramp.

  Air rushed into the hold, and beyond the entryway, he saw the Interceptor immediately behind them—beneath them—framed by the deep blue ocean.

  It fired.

  Sizzling-hot tracer bullet sentered the hold, smacking into the girders all around Jack—sping!-sping!-sping!—just as he kicked a release lever—the release lever that held his LSV harnessed in place.

  The spring-loaded harness retracted instantly, whip-snapping away, and the light strike vehicle rolled out the back of the plane and fell out into the sky.

  Seen from the outside, it must have looked very odd indeed.

  The Halicarnassus soaring upward with the J-9 behind and below it, when suddenly the LSV—an entire car—came dropping out of the Hali and…

  …sailedpast the J-9, the Chinese fighter banking at the last moment, just getting out of the way.

  Its pilot grinned, proud of his reflexes.

  Reflexes, however, that weren’t fast enough to evade or avoid the second LSV that came tumbling out of The Halicarnassus ’s rear hold a moment later!

  The second falling LSV smashed squarely into the fighter’s nose, causing the whole Interceptor to just drop out of the sky. It plummeted to the ocean, ejecting its pilot a moment before it and the car entered the water with twin gigantic splashes.

  High above it, The Halicarnassus righted itself, retracted its rear ramp, and flew off to the northwest, safe and away.

  “Huntsman,”Sky Monster’s voice came over the intercom.“Where to now?”

  Standing in the hold, Jack recalled Wizard’s message. “WILL MEET YOU AT GREAT TOWER.”

  He keyed the intercom. “Dubai, Sky Monster. Set a course for Dubai.”

  BACK ATWest’s farm, Chinese troops stood guard at every gate.

  The two majors, Black Dragon and Rapier, waited formally on the front porch as a helicopter touched down on the dusty turnaround in front of them.

  Two figures emerged from the chopper, an older American man shadowed by his bodyguard, a twentysomething US Marine of Asian-American extraction.

  The older man walked casually up onto the porch, unchecked by any of the guards.

  No one dared stop him. They all knew who he was and the considerable power he wielded.

  He was a Pentagon player, an American colonel in his late fifties, and he was fit, extremely fit, with a barrel chest and hard blue eyes. His hair was blond but graying, his features weathered and creased. In stance and bearing, he could have passed for Jack West twenty years from now.

  His Marine bodyguard, ever alert, went by the call sign Switchblade. He looked like a human attack dog.

  Black Dragon greeted the senior man with a bow.

  “Sir,” the Chinese major said. “They have escaped. We brought enormous force and executed our landings perfectly. But they, well, they were—”

  “They were prepared,” the senior man said. “They were prepared for this eventuality.”

  He strolled past the two majors and entered the farmhouse.

  He ambled slowly through West’s abandoned home, taking it in, pausing every so often to examine some trinket closely—a framed photograph on the wall of West with Lily and Zoe at a waterslide park; on a shelf a b
allet trophy that belonged to Lily. He lingered longest over a photo of the Great Pyramid at Giza.

  Black Dragon, Rapier, and the bodyguard, Switchblade, followed him at a discreet distance, waiting patiently for whatever instructions he might have.

  The senior man picked up the photo of West, Lily, and Zoe at the waterslide park. The three of them appeared happy, smiling for the camera, grinning in the sunshine.