The Israelis moved quickly, leaping out from the entry tunnel, grasping the handbars, moving across the high ceiling of the cavern.
There were six of them, and they all emerged from the entry tunnel ahead of the sliding stone—it just rumbled out of the tunnel harmlessly behind them, dropping into the quicksand pool.
But they also moved in a brilliantly co-ordinated fashion—so that at any moment, one of them hung one-handed and always had his gun aimed at Lily.
Within a few minutes, they were across the cavern and surrounding West's little team.
The Israeli leader eyed West menacingly.
Stretch made the introductions. 'Captain Jack West Jr . . . this is Major Itzak Meir of the Sayaret Matkal, call-sign: Avenger.'
Avenger was a tall man, broadchested, with hard green eyes that were entirely lacking in nuance. For him, black was black, white was white, and Israel always came first.
'The famous Captain West.' Avenger stepped forwards, relieving West of his holstered pistol. 'I've never heard of a soldier enduring so much failure, and yet still you keep picking yourself up, dusting yourself off, and coming back for more.'
'It's never over till it's over,' West said.
Avenger turned to Stretch. 'Captain Cohen, congratulations. You have done a fine job on an unusually long mission. Your work has been noted at the highest levels. I apologise for surprising you in this way.'
Stretch said nothing, just bowed his head.
Pooh Bear, however, was livid.
He glared at Stretch. 'Accept my congratulations, too, Israeli. You performed your mission to the letter. You led them to us and you sold us out just in time to hand them the last available Piece. I hope you're satisfied.'
Stretch still said nothing.
Lily looked up at him. 'Stretch? Why . . . ?'
Stretch said softly, 'Lily, you have to understand. I didn't—'
Avenger grinned. 'What is this? "Stretch"? Have you been renamed, Cohen? How positively sweet.'
He turned to Pooh Bear. 'Alas, everything you say is true, Arab.
The last available Piece is to be ours, one Piece of the Capstone that will give Israel all the leverage it needs over the United States of America. Now, Captain West, if you would be so kind. Lead the way. Take us to this Piece. You work for Israel now.'
But no sooner had these words come out of his mouth than there was a great explosion from somewhere outside.
Everyone spun.
West swapped a glance with Pooh Bear.
They all listened for a moment.
Nothing.
Silence.
And then West realised: silence was the problem. He could no longer hear the constant shhh of the waterfall up at the entrance to the tunnel system.
The shooshing had stopped.
And the realisation hit.
Judah had just used explosives to divert the waterfall—the entire waterfaW. He was opening up the entrance for a mass forced entry.
In fact, even in his wildest dreams, West still hadn't fully imagined the scene outside.
The waterfall had indeed been diverted, by a series of expertly-laid demolition charges in the river above it. Now its triple-tiered rockface, criss-crossed with paths, lay bare and dry, in full view of the world.
But it was the immense military force massing around the base of the dry waterfall that defied imagining.
A multitude of platoons converged on the now tranquil pool at the base of the triple-tiered cliff-face. Tanks and Humvees circled behind them, while Apache and Super Stallion choppers buzzed overhead.
And commanding it all from a mobile command vehicle was Marshall Judah.
He sent his first team in from the air—they went in fast, ziplining down drop-ropes suspended from a hovering Super Stallion direct to the top tier of the dry falls, by-passing the paths.
Guns up and pumped up, they charged inside.
From their position at the far end of the quicksand cavern, West and his new group saw the Americans' red laser-sighting beams lancing out from the entry tunnel, accompanied by fast footsteps.
'American pigs,' Zaeed hissed.
But then suddenly—whump—the Americans' footfalls were drowned out by a much louder sound: the deep ominous grinding of a third sliding stone!
Gunfire. The Americans were firing their guns at the sliding stone!
Shouts.
Then running—frantic running.
Seconds later, the first desperate American trooper appeared on the ledge on his side of the cube-shaped cavern.
He peered around desperately—looking left and right, up and down—and he saw the quicksand floor far below; then he saw the handrungs in the ceiling. He leapt for them—swung from the first one to the second, grabbed the third—
—which fell out of its recess and sent the hapless commando plummeting ten storeys straight down.
The man screamed all the way until—splat!—he landed in the gelatinous floor ... at which point he starting screaming in a whole new way.
The screams of a man caught in the grip of a force he cannot resist, a man who knows he is going to die.
His five team-mates arrived at the tunnel's edge just in time to see him get sucked under, his mouth filling with liquid sand. Now trapped on the ledge, they glanced from the deadly handrungs back to the sliding stone, then down to the quicksand.
Two tried the handrungs.
The first man reached the sixth rung—which felled him. The second man just slipped and fell all on his own.
The other three were beaten by the sliding stone.
It burst out of the tunnel behind them like a runaway train and collected them on the way—hurling them all out into the air, sending them sailing in a high curving arc ten storeys down before they all landed together with simultaneous sandy splashes.
As the massive stone itself landed, it smacked one of the American soldiers straight under the surface. The other two bobbed on the gluggy surface for a few seconds before they too were sucked under by the hungry liquid floor.
West and his group saw it all happen.
'That won't happen again,' West said to Avenger. 'Judah sent that team in to die—a junior team without instructions, without warnings. He was just testing the trap system. When he comes in, he won't be so foolish.'
The Israeli major nodded, turned to two of his men. 'Shamburg. Riel. Make a rear-guard post here. Hold them off for as long as you can, then catch up.'
'Sir!'
'Yes, sir!'
Avenger then grabbed Lily from West, held her roughly by the collar. 'Lead the way, Captain.'
They hadn't taken ten steps down the next tunnel before they heard gunfire from the two rear-guards.
Sustained gunfire.
More Americans had arrived at the sand cavern—having probably completely disabled the sliding stone mechanism by now.
Two men wouldn't hold them off for long.
The Giant Stairway
After passing through the short tunnel, West led his now-larger group into another cube-shaped chamber—about fifty feet high, wide and long—only this time, his tunnel opened onto the chamber from the base, not up near the ceiling.
Before him was a rail-less stone path which hugged the chamber's left-hand wall. A quicksand pool lay to the right, filling the rest of the floor.
The low stone path, however, led to something quite astonishing.
Seven giant stone steps that rose magnificently upward to a doorway cut into the ceiling of this chamber. Each step must have been at least seven feet high, and they all bristled with holes and recesses of various shapes and sizes, some of them door-sized, others basketball-sized, every one of them no doubt fitted with deadly snares just waiting to be triggered.
To the left of the giant stairway, flush against it, was the same stone wall that flanked the path. It was also dotted with variously-sized trap-holes. To the right of the stairs, there was nothing but empty air.
The intent was clear: if you were
thrown off the stairs, you fell all the way down to the floor, made entirely of quicksand.
'It's the levels,' Zaeed realised.
'What?' West said.
'Remember the progress report I found, the sketch of the Gardens under construction. These steps weren't originally steps at all. They were the step-like levels that led up to the main archway of the cave. Imhotep III converted them into this ascending stairway trap.'
'Clever.'
Zaeed said, 'If I'm right, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon lie beyond that doorway in the ceiling.'
Avenger pushed West forwards—while maintaining his grip on Lily. 'Captain West, please. Time is of the essence. Lead the way.'
West did so, taking on the giant steps.
He encountered traps on nearly every one.
Blasts of quicksand, trapdoors, upward-springing spikes designed to lance through his grasping hands, even a one-ton boulder that rolled suddenly across the fifth step.
But through skill and speed and quick thinking, he got past them all, until finally he stepped up into the opening in the ceiling, emerging on a dark platform which he sensed opened onto a wider, infinitely more vast space. And so he lit a flare and held it aloft and for one brief moment in time, standing alone in the darkness, Jack West Jr beheld a sight no-one had seen for over 2,500 years.
Standing there before him, in all their incredible glory, were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
He needed eight more flares to illuminate the gargantuan cavern fully.
It was hetter described as a supercavern, for it was the size of twenty football fields laid out in a grid. It was perfectly square in shape, and its floor was made up entirely of quicksand—giving it the appearance of a vast flat lake of yellow sand.
And rising up from this sand-lake, in the exact centre of the supercavern, was a fifteen-storey ziggurat—the variety of stepped pyramid common in ancient Mesopotamia.
But it was the natural feature that lay above the ziggurat that inspired sheer wonder.
An absolutely immense limestone stalactite hung from the ceiling of the cave directly above the ziggurat. It was so huge, its mass so great, it dwarfed the ziggurat. Perhaps 25 storeys tall, it looked like an inverted mountain suspended from the ceiling of the super-cavern, its pointed tip reaching down to meet the upwardly-pointed peak of the ziggurat on the ground.
But this incredible natural feature had been modified by the hand of man—thus lifting it out of 'incredible' and into the category of 'wondrous'.
A pathway had been hewn into its outer flank—in some sections it was flat and curving, while in others it took the form of short flights of steps. This path spiralled up and around the exterior of the great stalactite, rising ever higher, heading for the ceiling of the cavern.
Dotting this path were nearly a hundred semi-circular archways, each archway containing vines and shrubs and trees and flowers—
all of them overgrown to excess, all hanging out and over the edge of the stalactite, dangling precariously 300 feet above the world.
It defied belief.
It was stupendous.
A truly hanging garden.
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
As the others joined him, West noticed the wall soaring into the upper reaches of the supercavern immediately above and behind them.
While it was made of densely-packed bricks, West could make out at its edges the traces of another earlier structure, a structure that had been trapezoidal in shape and huge—300 feet high—like a giant doorway of some sort that had been filled in with these bricks.
West grabbed Zaeed's sketch from his pocket—the drawing of the great stalactite (shrouded in scaffolding) visible from outside the mountain through a window-like trapezoidal archway:
At that moment, he remembered a reference from the Nazi Hessler's diary. He pulled the diary from his jacket pocket and found the page:
1ST INSCRIPTION FROM THE TOMB OF IMHOTEP III:
WHAT AN INCREDIBLE STRUCTURE IT WAS,
CONSTRUCTED AS A MIRROR IMAGE,
WHERE BOTH ENTRANCE AND EXIT WERE ALIKE.
IT PAINED ME THAT MY TASK—WHAT WOULD BE MY LIFE'S
MASTERWORK—WAS TO CONCEAL SO MAGNIFICENT A STRUCTURE.
BUT I DID MY DUTY.
WE SEALED THE GREAT ARCHWAY WITH A LANDSLIDE.
AS INSTRUCTED, THE PRIESTS' ENTRANCE REMAINS OPEN SO THEY
MAY TEND THE SHRINES INSIDE—THE PRIESTS HAVE BEEN
INFORMED OF THE ORDER OF THE SNARES.
'"We sealed the great archway with a landslide'",'' West read aloud. 'Imhotep bricked up the archway and then triggered a landslide to cover it. But he wasn't done. Then he diverts a river outside to cover the whole thing. My God, he was good . . .'
'The Third Great Architect was indeed a master,' Zaeed said, coming alongside West.
Beside them, the others were arriving and taking in the awesome sight.
Lily's mouth hung open.
Stretch's eyes were wide.
Even Avenger was impressed enough to fall silent.
It was Pooh Bear who summed up their mood: 'So this is why they call them Wonders.''
But they weren't there yet.
The wide lake of quicksand still lay between them and the zig-gurat—the only means of getting up to the Hanging Gardens.
Halfway between them and the ziggurat, seemingly floating on the surface of the sand-lake, there stood a small roofed structure that looked like a gazebo. Made of stone, it was hexagonal in shape and roughly the size of a single-car garage, but it had no walls, just six pillars holding up a heavy-looking stone roof.
A dead-straight path barely an inch above the surface of the lake stretched out from their position directly toward this hexagonal gazebo—only to end abruptly thirty metres short of the structure.
The path re-emerged nearer to the gazebo, its submerged centre section presumably consumed by the quicksand sometime in the distant past.
As West looked more closely, he saw more paths.
Radiating out from the hexagonal sides of the gazebo, creating a star-shaped pattern, were six stone paths that were also virtually level with the surface of the lake.
Each of these paths also ended abruptly about fifteen metres out from the gazebo.
'How do we get across?' Pooh Bear asked. 'The paths have long been swallowed by the quicksand lake.'
'Can't we just follow the straight path?' Avenger said. 'Surely it continues just beneath the surface.'
'Yes. Let's do exactly that and why don't you lead the way, you stupid fool Israeli,' Zaeed said.
Avenger frowned.
'He means, walk that way if you want to die,' West said. 'It's a trap for the unwary and uninformed. This looks to me like a false-floor trap—the biggest false-floor trap I've ever seen. There must be a safe route just underneath the surface of the lake, but you have to know the route to use it and we don't.'
'I think we do,' a quiet voice said from behind him.
Lily.
Everybody turned to face her.
'We do?' Pooh Bear said.
'Yes,' Lily said. 'It's the second "safe route" that the German man wrote down. The first was the safe pathway up the waterfall. This is the second. That's why he put them together.'
She took Hessler's diary from West and flipped back a couple of pages, to reveal the page they had looked at only half an hour before, entitled 'Safe Routes':
But whereas before they had been looking at the right-hand image, now it was the left-hand one that concerned them.
Sure enough, it matched the view before them exactly.
Only it revealed a path hidden beneath the quicksand lake—a circuitous path that skirted the walls of the cavern, crossed through the hexagonal gazebo, and ended at the top of the page, at the base of the ziggurat.
West nodded at Lily, very impressed.
'Nice work, kiddo. Glad we've got someone here who's got their head screwed on right.'
Lily beamed.
; Suddenly Avenger's earpiece burst to life and he spun around to see his two rear-guards enter the Giant Stairway cave behind and below them.
'Sir!' one of them said over the radio. 'The Americans are crossing the first cavern! There are just too many of them! Under cover of sniper fire, they brought in pontoons and extendable ladders to cross the cavern at its base! They just had too much firepower for
us! We had to retreat! Now they're coming!'
Avenger said, 'Okay. I'll send Weitz back to guide you up the Stairway. Once you're up, set up another rear-guard position at the top. We still need every second we can get.'
Avenger turned to West. 'It's time for you to test your little girl's theory, Captain. I hope for your sake she's right. Move.'
And so following the map, West took a hesitant step off the main path, heading left, out over what appeared to be pure quicksand
and ...
... his boot landed on solid ground, on an unseen pathway hidden a couple of inches below the oozing surface of the lake.
Lily exhaled in relief.
West tested the lake on either side of the path—and found only inky quicksand of uncertain depth.
'Looks like we found the pathway,' he said.
After a quickly-sketched copy of the safe route was made and left for the rear-guards, the group ventured gingerly out across the sand-lake, led by West.
They followed the map, seemingly walking on water, on nothing but the flat surface of the wide quicksand lake, heading way out to the left, then stepping along the left-hand wall, before cutting back toward the centre of the lake and arriving at the central gazebo.
The Gazebo
The 'gazebo' structure surprised them all.
For, unlike the hidden path, its floor was not level with the surface of the lake. It was sunken twelve feet below the level of the lake, a stone rim holding back the sea of quicksand around it.
It was also solid as hell—thick-walled and sturdy.
A short and narrow flight of stone steps led down into this pit— which like the gazebo itself was also six-sided, with doors cut into every one of its sides. The structure's thick stone roof loomed over it all, a few feet above the rim, resting on its pillars, like a dark thundercloud just waiting to do its worst.
Curiously, just inside the walls of the hexagonal pit, forming a kind of inner wall to the structure, was a cylindrical bronze cage— also twelve feet high, made of imposing vertical bars, and criss-crossing bars across its top.
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