Seven Ancient Wonders jw-1

by Matthew Reilly

  In the Pit, the ceiling was still lowering fast. It was only seven feet above the surface now and closing quickly.

  The pythons circled, moving in on West and Pooh Bear.

  Without warning, one dived under the surface—and reappeared slithering up Pooh's body with frightening speed! It constricted violently, trying to crack his spine—just as Pooh Bear swiped hard with his K-Bar knife and the python froze in mid-action. Then its head fell from its body.

  The ceiling kept descending.

  Five feet.

  West was very worried now.

  Four feet.

  The pythons cut and run—fleeing for their wall-holes, knowing what was about to happen. Three feet. . . 'Horus ...!' West yelled.

  In the bucket-shaft, Horus searched patiently, just as she had been taught.

  And she found the reset catch: a little hinged hook that, when released, righted the empty bucket.

  Horus bit into the hook with her tiny beak . . .

  Two feet. . .

  West called: 'Horus! Come on! You can do this! Just like we practised at home!'

  One foot. . .

  He and Pooh Bear now had only their upturned faces above the surface of the quicksand.

  Six inches . . .

  'Take a deep breath, Pooh,' West said.

  They both sucked in as much oxygen as they could hold.

  In the bucket-shaft, Horus continued to bite at the reset hook. It wouldn't budge.

  In the Pit, the lowering ceiling met the surface of the quicksand . . . and touched it, pushing West and Pooh Bear under—

  —just as Horus got a good grip on the hook with her beak . . . and lifted it!

  The response was instantaneous.

  With a silent lurch, the great empty bucket rolled upwards on its hinges, offering its open mouth to the cascade of water pouring down above it.

  The bucket immediately began to fill with water.

  And with the added weight, the great clay bucket now began to lower on its chains . . .

  . . . which by virtue of the pulley now pulled the ceiling of the Pit upward . . .

  . . . raising it off the quicksand pool!

  West and Pooh Bear burst up from underneath the quicksand, gasping for air.

  As the ceiling above them rose, they grabbed the two handrungs nearest the exit-end, and allowed the ceiling to hoist them all the way up the Pit.

  Hauled up by its water mechanism, the ceiling slab returned to its original position, and West and Pooh suddenly found themselves hanging in front of the exit tunnel—where Horus now sat proudly, staring triumphantly up at West.

  He swung into the tunnel, crouched before her, gave her a much-loved rat treat.

  Horus gobbled it up whole.

  'Thank you, my friend, nice work,' he said. 'You saved our bacon. Imhotep didn't count on grave-robbers having friends like you. Now let's get the hell out of here.'

  Through the Priests' Entrance they bolted—West, Pooh Bear and Horus.

  Ten minutes later, they emerged from an inconspicuous cleft in a rocky hillside, a barren desolate hillside that faced onto a barren desolate valley that appeared to have no natural exits. The valley was on the Iranian side of the Hanging Gardens, far from

  the waterfall entrance on the Iraqi side.

  But it was so inhospitable, so bleak, that no human being had had any reason to come here for 2,000 years.

  West froze as a thought struck him.

  There was no sign of Mustapha Zaeed.

  He wondered where Zaeed had got to. Had he at some point on this journey called his terrorist pals and told them to pick him up here?

  West thought about that: perhaps Zaeed had triggered a locater signal when they'd stopped by at his old hideout cave in Saudi Arabia. West knew Zaeed had grabbed other things while they were there, including the beautiful black-jade box filled with fine sand.

  He considered the rogue signal that he'd picked up on the Halicarnassus on the way to Iraq. He'd first believed it had been sent out by Stretch, alerting the Israelis to their location.

  But something Avenger had said to Stretch inside the Gardens now made West revise that belief. When he had first appeared, Avenger had said to Stretch: 'I apologise for surprising you in this way.'

  Stretch hadn't known of the impending arrival of Avenger's team.

  The Israelis had been tracking him and he hadn't known. Now West believed that the Israelis had been tracking Stretch from the very start via some other kind of bug—probably a surgically-implanted locater chip that Stretch never knew he'd been carrying.

  Granted, the signal from the Halicarnassus could also have been sent by Zaeed—alerting his allies to his whereabouts—but West doubted that.

  He actually had another theory about that rogue signal, a theory that made him sick to his stomach.

  But now, right now, he worried if by breaking Zaeed out of Guantanamo Bay he had unleashed an unspeakable terror on the world.

  Zaeed wasn't going to abandon his quest for the Capstone, not when he knew where the final Piece could be found, not when it was this close. The terrorist wasn't out of this race. He would reappear before the end.

  West radioed Sky Monster and arranged to rendezvous with the Halicarnassus on some flat ground at the far end of the valley, then he and Pooh Bear headed out across the valley on foot.

  They never saw the lone figure crouched on the rocky hill high above them watching them as they did so.

  Never saw the figure pursue them from a careful distance.

  Twenty-five minutes later, West and Pooh Bear, with Horus, strode up the rear loading ramp of the Halicarnassus, dirty, bruised and beaten.

  Inside the main cabin, West paced, thinking aloud. Pooh Bear and Sky Monster just watched him.

  'Every move we've made, Judah's known it ahead of time,' he said. 'We arrived in the Sudan, and he showed up soon after. Tunisia, the same. And in Kenya, hell, he got there before we did. He was waiting for us. And now Iraq.'

  'It's like he's had a beacon on us all along,' Pooh Bear said. 'A tracing signal.'

  West pursed his lips, repeated Judah's taunt from before: '"There is nowhere you can go that I cannot follow. There is nowhere on this Earth you can hide from me." I think he's had a tracking beacon on us all along.'

  'What? How? Who?

  West looked hard at Pooh Bear.

  'Four missing days, Pooh. Four missing days from my life.'

  'What are you talking about, Huntsman?' Sky Monster asked.

  'Zaeed had a chip in the neck, implanted while he was imprisoned in Cuba, making him forever traceable by the Americans. I can't account for four days of my life, Pooh, four days when I was exclusively in American hands.''

  West stood up abruptly and grabbed the AXS-9 digital spectrum analyser—the same bug detector that he had used before to test for the locater chip in Zaeed's neck.

  He flicked it on, and fanned it over Pooh's entire body. Nothing. No bugs.

  Sky Monster was next. Also nothing. As expected.

  West looked at them both . . .

  . . . before he turned the wand on himself, running it up his entire body.

  Legs: nothing.

  Waist: nothing.

  Chest: nothing.

  Then the spectrum analyser came level with his head, and it started beeping off the charts.

  Pooh Bear and Sky Monster gasped, speechless.

  West just closed his eyes, cursing himself.

  All the time he'd thought there had been a traitor in their midst—in particular, Stretch or Zaeed—but there had been no such traitor.

  It had been him.

  He had been the one leading the Americans to their location every single time.

  Four days of his life: those four days he had spent in that American military hospital after his accident in the wargame exercises at Coronado.

  Four days during which the Americans had tagged him with a microchip, so that they could keep track of him over the ensuing years.
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br />   Why? Who knew—because he had talent, because they wanted to keep track of everyone, friend and foe alike.

  West couldn't believe it. Australia was a close ally of America's. And this was how the US treated it. America, it seemed, treated its allies no differently than its enemies. No, it was simpler than that: America treated everyone outside the US as a potential enemy.

  He thought about Judah. Somewhere amid Judah's equipment there was a GPS-equipped computer with a map of the world on it and a little blinking blip that represented Jack West Jr—a blip that had represented him for nearly 15 years.

  The Americans had known about the safehouse in Kenya since Day One.

  Likewise they had known about the mine in the Sudan from the

  moment he'd got there; it was the same for the Tunisian coast— which only West and Wizard knew about. It also meant that Judah and the Americans would know it was West who had busted Zaeed out of Guantanamo Bay. They wouldn't have liked that.

  West strode across the cabin, watched in stunned silence by Pooh and Sky Monster. Over by the rearmost console, he picked up the EMP gun that he had used before to neutralise the locater chip inside Zaeed's neck.

  He pointed it at his head like a man about to shoot himself—

  —and he pressed the trigger.

  At that very moment, inside a US Black Hawk helicopter landing in Basra, a technician at a portable GPS-equipped computer snapped up.

  'Colonel Judah, sir! Jack West's locater signal just dropped out.'

  'Where was he when the signal disappeared?'

  'Judging by the GPS, still in the vicinity of the Hanging Gardens,' the tech said.

  Judah smiled. 'That tracer's biometric, grafted onto the living tissue of his brain. If West dies, the tracer chip dies with him. He must have been wounded by the collapse of the ziggurat and held on this long before he died. Rest in peace, Jack . . . never knowing that you led us every step of the fucking way. Fortunately, we don't need you anymore. Kallis. Feed the men, replenish their arms, and set a course for Luxor.'

  LUXOR INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT LUXOR, SOUTHERN EGYPT 20 MARCH, 2006, 0200 HOURS THE DAY OF TARTARUS

  In the early hours of the morning on the day the Tartarus Sunspot would turn to face the Earth, three hundred European troops lay in wait around Luxor International Airport, ready to ambush the American force arriving in the southern Egyptian city that night.

  Bisected by the River Nile, Luxor is a fairly large town. Heavily dependent on tourism, on its East Bank one will find the Karnak and Luxor temples, two of the most impressive sites in Egypt. The Luxor Temple sits right on the bank of the river, separated from it by a splendid riverside drive called the Corniche.

  On the West Bank of Luxor, one will find a cluster of high brown mountains and jagged dry hills that rise up from the desert floor. The very first valley of these dusty hills is the famous Valley of the Kings—the extraordinary collection of deliberately plain tombs that were once filled with all the riches of the pharaohs. It is the home of Tutankhamen's tomb, Rameses the Great's tomb, and hundreds of others. Even today, every few years a new tomb is unearthed.

  On this western bank, you will also find one of the most mysterious sites of ancient Egypt: Hatshepsut's Mortuary Temple, constructed by the brilliant woman pharaoh, Hatshepsut.

  Built into a great rocky bay in the mountainside, Hatshepsut's Mortuary Temple is composed of three gigantic colonnaded terraces, all stretching backwards—like three god-sized steps—each flat tier

  connected to the next by a colossal rampway.

  From its dominant position at the base of the cliffs, it stares proudly back at Luxor, facing the rising Sun. The size of three football fields, it is unique in all of Egypt.

  It is also notorious.

  In November 1997, six Islamist terrorists armed with machine guns massacred 62 tourists in rank cold blood at the site. The terrorists hunted down the unarmed tourists over the course of a terrifying hour, pursuing them through the Temple's colonnades, before committing group suicide themselves.

  Luxor is steeped in history, both ancient and recent.

  Luxor's airport, however, is on the eastern bank, and the American planes landed in the darkness, one after the other, their lights blinking—two C-130 Hercules cargo planes, and landing lightly after them, one sleek Lear jet.

  It was a small force—just big enough to safely convey the Pieces in its possession but small enough not to attract too much attention—as Marshall Judah had stated in his intercepted transmission.

  As usual, the Egyptian Government, desperate for American approval and money, had allowed their entry into the country with not a single question asked.

  But the Egyptian Government did not know of the 300-strong European force that was at that moment surrounding Luxor's airstrip, aiming their weapons at the arriving Americans.

  Father Francisco del Piero sat in a big Toyota Land Cruiser parked just outside the airport, waiting for his French and German troops to make their move. With him were Wizard, Zoe and Fuzzy—handcuffed and immobile, also waiting tensely.

  In the Land Cruiser with them was the boy, Alexander, and safely in a large steel trunk, one Piece of the Golden Capstone: the Artemis Piece, recently removed from the main altar of St Peter's Basilica.

  • • •

  On the runway, two desert-camouflaged Humvees sped out from the cargo hold of the first Hercules and skidded to twin halts beside the Lear jet—the jet that held the Pieces.

  A line of troopers emerged from the Lear, guarding a smaller group of men who carried among them five Samsonite cases of varying sizes. These men started loading the Samsonite cases onto the rear tray of a third Humvee—a black one—that had just arrived.

  The Pieces.

  The Europeans sprang their trap—in a kind of surreal unearthly silence.

  They leapt from the shadows—French and German commandos—black-clad ghosts wearing night-vision goggles and running with sub-machine guns pressed to their shoulders, the muzzles of those guns spitting forth silenced tongues of deadly fire.

  The American troops at the Lear never stood a chance.

  They fell in a hail of blood and bullets, dropping to the tarmac. Likewise all the drivers of the Humvees: they were ripped to shreds by the charging French and German commandos.

  It was over in minutes.

  As various 'Clear!' signals were given, del Piero drove out onto the runway.

  He joined the European troops gathered around the black Humvee parked beside the Lear.

  With a smile of supreme satisfaction, he strode over to the Humvee's rear tray, opened it, and unclasped the lock on the nearest Samsonite case—

  —to discover that it was filled with worthless bricks and a single Post-it note:

  Careful, Father del Piero.

  Don't let any blood get on you.

  Judab.

  Del Piero's eyes went wide.

  He whirled around—

  —just as an absolutely devastating burst of co-ordinated sniper fire whistled all around him—sizzling and popping past his ears— and in a single terrifying instant, every one of the ten troopers standing around him was hit by separate sniper rounds, their heads all exploding in simultaneous bursts of red, their bodies crumpling like rag dolls.

  Only del Piero was unhit. Only he remained standing. The burst of fire had been so well-aimed, so well-co-ordinated that this was clearly deliberate.

  Blood, bone and brain matter had sprayed everywhere, splattering all over del Piero's face.

  At which moment, the 1,000-strong American force that had been lying in wait in the mudbrick houses and sewers of Luxor behind the European ambush force moved in.

  They were merciless, ruthless—as ruthless as the Europeans had been to the Americans. Even those European troops who surrendered were executed where they stood.

  None were left alive—except for del Piero and the four other people who were inside his Land Cruiser:

  Wizard, Zoe, Fuzzy and t
he boy, Alexander.

  It was at this time that the real American air convoy arrived at Luxor.

  The first one had been a decoy, its men expendable: live bait to draw out the waiting European force.

  Now with the airport secured, Judah arrived in a second Lear jet, flanked by a couple of F-15s and tailed by no less than six massive Hercules cargo planes.

  The air convoy landed, one plane after the other, their landing lights blazing through the clear night air.

  Judah's Lear swung to a halt beside the first 'decoy' Lear . . .

  . . . where del Piero still stood like a thief caught with his hands in the till, covered now by American CIEF troops and surrounded by the bloodied corpses of his own men.

  Judah just strolled casually out of his private jet, appraised del Piero coldly, before nodding at the blood on the priest's face.

  'Father del Piero. My old teacher. It's good to see you again. You didn't heed my warning. I told you to be careful about the flying blood.'

  Del Piero said nothing.

  Just then, a figure appeared behind Judah: an old, old man, gnarled and hunched. He had a bare blotch-speckled scalp and wore a leather coat and thick Coke-bottle glasses that obscured his evil little eyes.

  Judah said, 'Father, I don't believe you've met Hans Koenig. He's been a guest of the United States since 1945 and has been searching for the Capstone for a very long time.'

  Del Piero gasped, 'Koenig and Hessler. The two Nazi explorers . ..'

  'Colonel Judah!' Cal Kallis called from the rear of the Land Cruiser. He stood by the boot of the big four-wheel drive, having opened the steel case there, revealing the Artemis Piece. 'We have the Europeans' Piece. We also have the boy . . . and a couple of West's people.'

  Kallis held Alexander out in front of him. His men covered the handcuffed Wizard, Zoe and Fuzzy.

  Judah grinned. 'Why, Father del Piero, what possible reason could you have for bringing these good people along on your mission? I imagine it will be exactly the same reason I will keep you with me.'

  Del Piero's eyes went wide with fear.

  Judah enjoyed it. 'What does the Bible say? Do unto others as you would have them do to you. How ironic'

  He beheld the boy. So did the Nazi, Koenig.

  'So this is him. The son of the Oracle. Alexander, I believe,' Judah bowed respectfully. 'My name is Marshall Judah, from the United States of America. It's my honour to make your acquaintance.'