He arrived at the ledge, did a strenuous chin-up to raise his head above its rim.
And his eyes widened.
Sitting there before him, mounted proudly inside this exceedingly difficult to reach altar, was a medium-sized golden trapezoid.
The Hanging Gardens Piece.
* * *
It was one of the middle Pieces, about the size of a washing basket. Too big for one man to carry by himself. He pulled out his pressure-gun, fired a piton into the rockwall, looped his rope around it.
'Pooh Bear,' he said into his mike. 'Can you come over here? I need your help. Avenger: send some of your people to the other end of our rope to catch this when we send it back.'
Pooh Bear joined West—after a precarious climb—and together they managed to pull the Piece from its holy alcove and, placing it safely in a pulley-harness that hung from the return rope, they sent it whizzing back down the return rope to the catwalk.
Nestled in its harness, the Piece slid down the length of the rope, arrived back at the catwalk, where Avenger caught it with gleaming greedy eyes.
'Have you got it?' West's voice said into his earpiece.
Avenger replied: 'Yes, we have it. Thank you, Captain West, that will be all. Goodbye.'
And with that Avenger cut the return rope at his end and let it swing out over the void.
From his position, West saw the rope go slack, now only hanging from its piton at his end.
'Oh, shit! Shit!' he swung past Pooh Bear, moving fast down the handrungs in the slanting wall of the recess, reaching the bottom— the flat ceiling of the supercavern—just in time to see Avenger and his men run to the far end of the catwalk and toss three hand grenades behind them.
The grenades bounced along the rotten wooden catwalk.
And detonated.
The ancient catwalk never stood a chance.
The grenades exploded—and with a pained shrieking, the catwalk fell away from the ceiling . . .
. . . and sailed in a kind of slow motion all the way down to the sand-lake, 500 feet below.
West watched it all the way, knowing exactly what this meant.
With the catwalk gone, he and Pooh Bear had no way to get back to the stalactite.
The horror of their predicament hit home.
Lily and the Piece were in the hands of the escaping Israelis, the Americans were banging on the door, and now . . . now he and Pooh were stranded on the ceiling of the biggest cave he had ever seen with no way or hope of getting back.
After watching the destruction of the catwalk with grim satisfaction, Avenger scooped up Lily. He turned to head back down the stalactite's spiralling path.
'We won't be needing Captain West or the Arab anymore. Nor—' he drew his pistol—'will we be needing you, Mr Zae—'
But Mustapha Zaeed, his animal instincts ever alert, had already seen what was coming.
By the time Avenger had his pistol drawn, Zaeed had already broken into a run—dashing off down the path and into one of its cross-tunnels.
'He won't get far. Come. Let's get out of here.' With Lily in his grasp, he led his men down the path.
'Huntsman,' Pooh Bear gasped. 'I'm ... er ... in some trouble here . . .'
West rushed back—swinging with his hands across the rocky ceiling—to check on Pooh Bear in the recess.
Pooh was heavier than he was, with far less arm-strength. He wouldn't be able to hold himself up for long.
West swung alongside him. 'Hang in there, my friend. No pun intended.' He quickly tied the now loose return rope around and under Pooh's armpits—allowing Pooh Bear to hang from it without effort.
As for himself, West could hang from his mechanical arm longer—but not forever.
'The Israelis?' Pooh Bear asked.
'They destroyed the catwalk. Took the Piece and Lily. We're stranded.'
'If I ever catch him, I'll throttle Stretch,' Pooh Bear said. 'You know, for a moment there I actually thought he might have become one of us. But I was wrong. Dirty betrayer.'
'Pooh, right now, I'd just be happy to get out of here alive.'
The Israeli team charged back down the stalactite, with Lily and the Piece in their possession.
As they reached the tip of the great stalactite, they saw their two rear-guards come running into the supercavern.
'Sir! The Americans have breached the Giant Stairway! Repeat: the Americans have breached the Giant Stairway! We couldn't hold them off any longerV
'You held them off long enough! We have the girl and we have the Piece,' Avenger replied, grinning. 'Meet us at the ziggurat and proceed to the other side. We're going out that way!'
Stretch ran behind Avenger, saying nothing, his teeth clenched, his eyes vacant and distant, lost in thought.
The Israeli team reached the bottom of the stalactite—just in time to see Zaeed disappear down the square shaft in the top of the ziggurat: the Priests' Entrance.
Avenger didn't care.
Although killing the terrorist would have brought him much kudos back home, Zaeed wasn't his concern here.
He had to get out.
Only then, as he clambered down the A-frame ladder at the base of the stalactite and stepped down onto the ziggurat, he saw the Americans enter the supercavern.
They came rushing in from the Giant Stairway entrance. But it wasn't the superlarge force of men he was expecting, it was just ten men.
And oddly, they didn't venture out across the quicksand lake.
No.
Rather, this small group started free-climbing up the sheer wall above that entrance, the wall that had filled in the old Grand Archway.
And there they—
'Oh, no . . .' Avenger breathed.
—started planting explosives, heavy-duty Tritonal 80/20 demolition charges.
The Americans worked fast, laying their charges and then getting the hell out of the way.
The result when it came was as spectacular as it was destructive.
With a colossal series of booms, the demolition charges went off.
The rockwall filling up the Grand Archway of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon was ripped apart by twenty simultaneous blasts. Great starbursts of rock sprayed out from it.
But the charges had been directional, forcing the bulk of the debris to be flung toward the outside world. Only a few smaller boulders landed in the quicksand lake.
Giant holes were opened in the rockwall.
Shafts of sunshine blazed in through them.
And daylight flooded into the supercavern for the first time in 2,000 years, illuminating it gloriously—and in the brilliant light of day, the Gardens took on a whole new level of splendour.
Then these many holes collapsed, forming one great 50-metre-wide hole and through this opening, following hard on the heels of the sunlight, came the American helicopters, roaring into the super-cavern with a fury.
West couldn't believe what was happening.
First, he'd been left for dead up in the recess by Avenger.
And now he could only watch in stunned awe as the entire cavern beneath him was flooded with light.
Six, then seven, then eight American choppers—Black Hawks and Apaches—banked and buzzed around the immense cavern, hovering above the ancient ziggurat, rising alongside the great stalactite, searching for the enemy, searching for the Piece.
The roar of their rotors in the cavern was deafening, the wind that they generated, swirling.
Then West saw one of the Black Hawks rise up directly beneath him, saw the circular speed-blur of its rotors, and he thought, If I fell now, at least death would be quick.
But the Black Hawk hadn't seen him and Pooh Bear—it was peering at the stalactite, searching . . .
It moved closer to the stalactite, for a better look, and suddenly it wasn't directly beneath West anymore.
And West saw a way out of his predicament. It was totally crazy, but it might work . . .
He sprang into action.
'Pooh Bear, get a handhold. I ne
ed that rope and piton.'
Pooh Bear obliged, grabbed a handrung, while—one-handed— West disengaged the piton and wound in the rope. It was about fifty feet in length.
Then he said, 'Okay, Pooh, now let go of the handrung and grab my waist.'
'What!'
'Just do it.'
Pooh Bear did. Now he hung from West... as West hung from his superstrong mechanical hand, gripping a handrung. And then West let go.
They dropped from the ceiling.
Straight down.
They shot like a bullet past the tail of the Black Hawk . . .
. . . and as they did so, West hurled his piton—still attached to the rope—at the Black Hawk's landing wheels!
Like a grappling hook, the steel piton looped around the rear landing wheels of the helicopter . . . and caught.
The rope played out before—snap!—it went taut and suddenly West and Pooh Bear were swinging, suspended from the helicopter's landing gear, swooping in toward the giant stalactite!
The helicopter lurched slightly with their added weight, but it held its hovering position, anchoring their swing.
They swung in a long swooping arc right over to the path on the flank of the stalactite, where West and Pooh Bear dismounted deftly and released the rope, now back in the game.
'Never thought I'd be happy to see Judah arrive,' West said. 'Come on! We've got to save Lily.'
They charged down the path at breakneck speed.
Chaos. Mayhem.
Blazing sunlight.
The roar of helicopters, and now . . .
. . . hundreds of American regular troops flooded in through the newly-opened Grand Arch.
Avenger's Israeli team danced down the far side of the ziggurat and raced out over the quicksand lake on that side. As West had seen before, this side was the mirror image of the entry side: it also featured a concealed path just below the surface with a hexagonal well in its centre.
Avenger's team reached the well, raced down into it in two subgroups, beheld another statue of a proud winged lion.
Avenger and the two Israelis carrying the Piece went first. The trap sprang into action. Quicksand flooded in. The one-gate cage revolved. But they sloshed through the inky sand and emerged from the other side with little difficulty.
Stretch, the other two Israeli commandos, and Lily went next.
Again the trap initiated. Quicksand poured into the hexagonal well. The cage rotated. They sloshed across it, knee-deep.
And suddenly Lily tripped and fell.
The rising quicksand had caught her feet and she stumbled to all fours with a squeal.
The sand grabbed her, sticky and foul.
She screamed in terror.
Stretch and the other two Israelis spun, saw her struggling. They were almost at the exit doorway and the cage's rotating gate was about to let them out.
Avenger called from the doorway, 'Leave her! We have the Piece! She was only a bonus! It's the Piece that matters, and if we don't get it out, this will all have been for nothing! Move!'
The two commandos with Stretch didn't need to be told twice. They sloshed toward the gate and slipped through it.
Stretch, however, paused.
With quicksand flooding in from every side and the cage turning dizzyingly around him, he looked back at Lily.
The little girl was struggling against the rising quicksand pool, whimpering vainly with the effort. The sand had wrapped itself around her like a constricting snake, it was up to her neck now, consuming her, dragging her under.
'Cohen!' Avenger called. 'Leave her! That's an order!'
And with a final look at Lily, Stretch made his fateful decision.
Flanked by the flying Horus, West and Pooh Bear were bolting down the spiralling path on the stalactite when suddenly the foliage beside them was ripped apart by helicopter gunfire.
One of the American Apache choppers had swung into a hover right next to them and was now lining them up in its minigun sights!
They dived into a nearby cross-tunnel just as the Apache's six-barrelled minigun whirred to life—and came to the vertical bore-hole that ran up the centre of the rock formation.
'They're firing at the Hanging Gardens of Babylon!' Pooh Bear exclaimed. 'Have Americans no respect for history!'
Moments later, they emerged from the same bore-hole at the lowermost tip of the stalactite, having slid all the way down it with their hands and feet braced against its walls.
West jumped down onto the peak of the ziggurat, snapped round to check on the progress of Avenger's fleeing Israeli team.
'Jesus, no . . .' he breathed.
He spied Avenger and four of his men just as they disappeared through an exit tunnel at the far end of the supercavern, having navigated the quicksand lake and the well on that side.
Stretch wasn't with them.
Nor was Lily.
And then West saw the well.
Peering under its canopied stone roof, he could see that the hexagonal well was just then overflowing with quicksand— completely filled.
'Oh, no. No . . .' West stared at the scene in horror. Worse still, at that very moment, two American Black Hawk helicopters were landing on the star-shaped paths surrounding the
well.
Troops charged out from the choppers, converging on the well
from opposite sides.
Marshall Judah himself stepped out of one of the choppers, directing the operation.
'Oh, Lily . . .' West breathed, frozen, stunned.
At the hexagonal well, a CIEF trooper called to Judah: 'Sir, you better come and see this.'
Judah strode to the edge of the well.
And he was surprised by what he saw.
There, pressed right up against the roof-bars of the cage inside the well—her face upturned, with only her mouth and nose and eyes protruding above the surface of the quicksand pool that now filled the well, breathing shallowly and desperately, her lips puckered, was Lily.
Judah wondered how on God's Earth she had got into this life-saving position.
The cage—and the well—must have been at least twelve feet deep. Caught in the grip of the sand, she could never have reached up and grabbed the cage's roof-bars and lifted herself out—
There must be someone else in there, he figured. Holding her up.
Then Judah saw it.
But only barely, it was so small.
He saw the tip of a gunbarrel protruding a centimetre above the surface of the quicksand pool right next to Lily's upturned face. It was the tip of a sniper rifle's gunbarrel—an ultralong Barrett M82A1A sniper rifle.
Only this gunbarrel was not being used for its original purpose.
It was being used as a snorkel by whoever was holding Lily up from below!
It wasn't until he had the well-trap reset and drained of quicksand that Judah fully appreciated the scene underneath Lily.
As the quicksand drained away, he beheld Stretch, standing on top of the statue of the winged lion that itself stood in the centre of the well, his own face upturned, breathing through the barrel of his disassembled Barrett sniper rifle, with Lily balancing on his shoulders in a perfect ballet toe-pose!
Stretch had indeed made his decision.
It would turn out to be a very good one, but for another reason entirely: for Judah would take him and Lily away alive.
Avenger and his team of Israeli commandos would not be so lucky.
For at the secret rear entrance to the Hanging Gardens, an American CIEF squad led by Cal Kallis was waiting for them.
And Kallis had strict orders not to be merciful.
Avenger and his Israelis—thinking they had got away with the Piece—emerged from the underground tunnel system to see their extraction helicopter lying nearby, charred and smoking, destroyed, its pilots shot dead.
They also found themselves surrounded by Kallis's team.
The Israelis were quickly disarmed. Then, slowly and deliberately, Cal Kallis executed the
m all himself—one by one, shooting each man in the head, killing Avenger last of all, smiling meanly the whole time. This was the kind of thing Kallis enjoyed.
Then he took the Piece from their dead hands and flew away, leaving the corpses for the desert birds to feast upon.
And so West watched, helpless, as Lily and Stretch were bundled into Judah's helicopter—
—at which moment, a wave of gunfire smacked down all around him, from two Apache attack choppers that appeared suddenly from behind the stalactite.
Horus squawked.
West moved too late.
But Pooh Bear didn't.
And he saved West's life—yanking him out of the line of fire and down into the square-shaped well-shaft of the ziggurat.
Down on the floor of the supercavern, Judah snapped round to see the cause of the commotion.
He glimpsed the two tiny figures of Pooh Bear and West up on the peak of the ziggurat—saw Pooh pull West down into the well-shaft that descended into the ziggurat, the shaft known as the Priests' Entrance.
'Jack . . .' Judah whispered. 'Alas, you've served your purpose. You're no longer a protected species. Time for you to die.'
Judah returned to his heavily-armed Black Hawk, with Stretch and Lily as his captives. The chopper lifted off and zoomed out of the cavern.
It was quickly followed by the other choppers: the Apaches and the Black Hawks. The American troops covering the liquid floor of the cavern also pulled out, exiting through the blasted-open Great Arch.
Once all his people were out, Judah—still eyeing the top of the ziggurat, the last place he had seen West alive—gave his final order. 'Fire into the stalactite. Bring it down on that ziggurat.' His pilot hesitated. 'But sir . . . this place is histori—' 'Fire into the stalactite now or I will have you thrown out of this helicopter.'
The pilot complied.
Moments later, three Hellfire missiles lanced out from the missile pod of the Black Hawk, their three matching smoketrails spiralling in toward the giant rock formation . . .
. . . and they hit.
Shuddering explosions. Starbursts of rock and foliage.
And then, a momentous groaning sound as—
—the great stalactite slowly peeled off the ceiling of the super-cavern, tilting precariously before ... it fell away from the ceiling.
It sounded like the end of humanity. The sound was deafening.
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