“I hope you’re right, Jack!” Zoe yelled. She grabbed the pony bottle from her belt, put its mouthpiece to her mouth. Breathing from a pony bottle is just like breathing a regular scuba tank, except it only has enough air for about three minutes.
The cage went knee deep in water.
West didn’t answer her, just waded over to the wall side of the cage and checked its great bronze bars.
And there he found it—a small archway cut into the cage’s wall-side bars, maybe three feet high, large enough for a man to crawl through.
But the stone wall abutting that side of the cage was solid rock. The little arch led nowhere…
The cage sank farther into the swirling water and the little arch went under.
Waist deep.
Big Ears lifted Lily into his arms, above the swirling waterline.
On the stairway behind them, Cal Kallis paused, grinned at their predicament.
“Jack …” Zoe called, concerned.
“Jack …” Wizard called, concerned.
“It has to come,” West whispered to himself. “It has to—”
The cage went two-thirds under, and as it did so, West cracked a glowstick, put his pony bottle to his mouth, and ducked under the choppy surface.
Underwater.
By the light of his glowstick, West watched the cage’s bars slide past the stone wall…
Solid rock.
Nothing but solid rock flanked the cage on that side.
It can’t be, his mind screamed. There has to be something down here!
But there wasn’t.
There wasn’t anything down there.
West’s heart began to beat faster. He had just made the biggest mistake of his life, a mistake that would kill them all.
He resurfaced inside the swirling cage.
The water was chest deep now, the cage three-quarters under.
“Anything down there?” Zoe called.
West frowned, stumped. “No … but there should be.”
Stretch shouted, “You’ve killed us all!”
Neck deep.
“Just grab your pony bottles,” West said grimly. He looked to Lily, held high in Big Ears’s arms. “Hey, kiddo. You still with me?”
She nodded vigorously—scared out of her wits. “Uh-huh.”
“Just breathe through your pony bottle like we practiced at home,” he said gently, “and you’ll be all right.”
“Did you mess up?” she whispered.
“I might have,” he said.
As he did so, he locked eyes with Wizard. The old man just nodded: “Hold your nerve, Jack. I trust you.”
“Good, because right now I don’t,” West said.
And with that, the great bronze cage, with its seven trapped occupants, went completely under.
With a muffled clunk, the cage came to a halt, its barred ceiling stopping exactly three feet below the surface.
The underwater currents were extremely strong. On the cage’s outermost side, the silhouette of a whirlpool could be seen: a huge inverted cone of downward-spiraling liquid.
Pony bottle to his mouth, West swam down to check the little arch one final time…
… where he found something startling.
The little arch had stopped perfectly in line with a small dark opening in the stone wall.
Shape for shape, the arch matched the opening exactly, so that if you crawled through the arch, you escaped into the submerged wall.
West’s eyes came alive.
He spun to face the others, all trapped in the submerged cage with pony bottles held to their mouths, even Lily.
He signaled with his hands:
Wizard would go first.
Then Big Ears with Lily. Zoe, Stretch, Pooh Bear, and West last of all.
Wizard swam through the arch, holding a glowstick in front of him, and disappeared into the dark opening in the wall.
West signaled for Big Ears to wait—wait for Wizard to give them all clear.
A moment later, Wizard reappeared and gave an enthusiastic OK sign.
So through the little arch they went, out of the cage and into the wall, until finally only Jack West Jr. remained in the cage.
No one saw the relief on his face. He’d made the call, and almost killed them all. But he’d been right.
Kicking hard, he swam out of the cage, his boots disappearing into the tiny opening.
The opening in the wall quickly turned upward, becoming a vertical shaft, complete with ladder hand-holds.
This shaft rose up and out of the sloshing water before opening onto a horizontal passage that led back to the main chasm, emerging—unsurprisingly—at the cobweb-covered doorway a few steps up the ascending staircase, the same doorway West had observed earlier.
As they stepped out from the passage, West saw Kallis and his men arriving at the base of the previous staircase, stopped there by the now-resetting cage.
Lying on the steps in front of West were the three headless Nazi skeletons he had spied before.
Wizard said, “Headless bodies at the bottom of a stairway mean only one thing: blades at the top somewhere. Be careful.”
Retaking the lead, West gazed up this new stairway. “Whoa. Would you look at that …”
At the top of the stairs was a truly impressive structure: a great fortified guard tower, leaning out from the vertical cliff two hundred feet above the watery chasm.
The ancient guard tower was strategically positioned on the main bend of the chasm. Directly opposite it, on the other side of the roofed chasm, was its identical twin, another guard tower, also jutting out from its wall, and also possessing a stairway rising up from a drowning cage down at water level.
West had taken one step up this stairway when—
“Is that you, Jack!” a voice called.
West spun.
It hadn’t come from Kallis.
It had come from farther away.
From the other side of the chasm.
West snapped round.
And saw a second American special forces team standing on the path on the other side of the chasm, on the platform preceding the drowning cage on that side.
They had emerged from a side doorway in the rock wall opposite, twenty-four men in total.
At their head stood a man of about fifty, with steely black eyes and, gruesomely, no nose. It had been cut off sometime in the distant past, leaving this fellow with a grotesque misshapen stump where his nose should have been.
Yet even with this glaring facial disfigurement, it was the man’s clothing that was his most striking feature right now.
He wore steel-soled boots just like West did.
He wore a canvas jacket just like West did.
He wore a belt equipped with pony bottles, pitons, and X-bars, just like West did.
The only difference was his helmet—he wore a lightweight caver’s helmet, as opposed to West’s fireman’s helmet.
He was also older than West, calmer, more confident. His small black eyes radiated experience.
He was the one man West feared more than any other on Earth. The man who had been West’s last field commander in the military. The man who had once left West for dead on the plains outside Basra in Iraq.
He was a former commander of Delta Team Six, the best within Delta, but was now, thanks to the machinations of some very powerful men, the commanding officer of the CIEF, the very best special forces unit in the world and a power unto itself.
He was Colonel Marshall Judah.
In their current positions, West and his team were marginally ahead of Judah.
Given that the paths running on either side of the chasm were identical, West’s team was one trap ahead. Judah had yet to pass the drowning cage on his side, and had just stepped out onto the base of the descending stairway over there, in doing so setting off—
—three nail-studded boulders.
The three boulders tumbled down the stairway toward Judah and his men.
Juda
h couldn’t have cared less.
He just nodded to three of his men, who quickly and competently erected a sturdy tripodlike barricade between their team and the oncoming nail boulders.
The titanium-alloy barricade blocked the entire width of the stairway and the boulders slammed into it one after the other, each one being deflected by the sturdy barricade and bouncing harmlessly away into the water.
Judah never took his eyes off West.
“How are those dreams going, Jack? Still trapped in that volcano?” he called. “Still haunted by the chants and the drums?”
On his side of the chasm, West was stunned. How could Judah know that …
It was exactly the response Judah had wanted. He smiled a thin, cold smile. “I know even more than that, Jack! More than you can possibly suspect.”
West was rattled—but he tried not to show it.
It didn’t work.
Judah nodded at the fireman’s helmet now back on West’s head. “Still using that fireman’s hat, Jack? You know I never agreed with that. Too cumbersome in tight places. It always pains a teacher to see a talented student employing foolish methods.”
West couldn’t help himself—he glanced up at his helmet.
Judah followed through, driving home his edge. “Looks like we’ve got something of a race on our hands here, Jack. Think you can outrun me? Do you seriously think you can outrun me?”
“Everybody,” West said quietly to his people, not taking his eyes off Judah. “We have to run. Fast. Now. Go!”
West’s team bolted up their stairs, heading for the guard tower at its peak.
Judah just nodded calmly to his men, who immediately began erecting a long gangway to bypass their drowning cage and reach the ascending stairway on their side of the chasm.
The race was on.
THE GUARD TOWER AND THE GORGE
West and his team ran up their stairway.
Just before the guard tower, a narrow gorge cut across their path. It was maybe fifteen feet across, with sheer vertical sides. This little gorge actually sliced all the way across the main chasm, and as such, had a twin over on the other side.
And once again, the Nazis had been helpful. It seemed that the ancient Carthaginians had built a complex chain-lowered drawbridge to span the gorge—a drawbridge that the Nazis had managed to lower into place, spanning the void.
Taking any luck they could get, West and his team sprinted across the ancient drawbridge, and arrived at the guard tower high up on the next bend in the chasm.
There was a ladder hewn into the guard tower’s curved flank, a ladder that wound around the outside of the structure, meaning they had to free-climb two hundred feet above nothing but the swirling waters below.
Two head-chopping blades sprang out from slits in the wall ladder, but West neutralized them with sticky foam, and his team, roped together, successfully climbed around the gravity-defying guard tower.
On the other side of the chasm, Judah’s long lightweight bridge fell into place and his men ran across it, completely avoiding their drowning cage, reaching the base of their ascending staircase.
The wall ladder on the outside of West’s guard tower brought his team up onto its balcony.
A tight tunnel in the back of the balcony delved into the chasm wall itself and emerged on the other side of the bend, where West fired off three self-hovering flares…
… to gloriously reveal the far end of the chasm and their goal.
“Holy shit …” Big Ears gasped.
“Swear jar,” Lily said instantly.
Standing there before them in all its splendor, towering above the waterway, lording over it, easily fifteen stories tall and jutting out from the far-facing rock wall, was a gigantic ancient fortress.
The steaming vents of the chasm gave the fortress a grim haunting look.
A supersolid box-shaped keep formed the core of the structure, with a giant gaping archway in its exact center. This central section was flanked by two soaring defensive towers, high-spired pinnacles in the darkness. The style of these towers matched that of the guard tower that West had just passed through—only these were taller, stretching all the way up from the water.
Stretching downward from the Great Arch in the center of the keep was a wide, guttered rampway that lanced all the way down to the waterway, ending at a flat stone jetty. At least 130 feet in length, with stairs nestled in its center, the rampway resembled the step ramps on Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple near the Valley of the Kings.
Never finished and never used for its intended purpose—and long since concealed by an ingenious Egyptian architect—this was Hamilcar’s Refuge.
West snatched his printout from his pouch, examined it:
Just like on the ancient drawing, the chasm before him ended at a Y-junction, splitting into two diverging channels. The Refuge sat nestled in the V at the top of the Y, facing the long upright “stem.”
Two more spirelike “sentry towers” sat on either side of the stem, facing the two towers of the Refuge itself.
As if all this weren’t colossal enough, the Refuge featured two more soaring aqueduct bridges to add to the broken one in the main chasm—two hundred feet high and made of many bricked arches.
These two new bridges spanned the Y-channels of the waterway, but unlike the one crossing the main chasm, they were whole and intact.
It was Zoe who noticed the rock wall behind the Refuge.
“It slopes backward,” she said. “Like the cone of a—”
“Come on, we don’t have time,” West urged them on.
The final stretch of the chasm featured a descending stairway followed by an ascending ramp. The ramp slithered up the left-hand wall of the chasm, bending with every curve. Curiously, it bore a low upraised gutter on its outer edge, the purpose of which was not readily apparent.
Of course, this stairway-ramp combination was mirrored on Judah’s side of the chasm.
West and his team charged down their descending stairway, avoiding a couple of blasting steam vents on the way.
In the meantime, Judah’s team had just crossed their little gorge and arrived at their guard tower.
They started climbing around it.
THE ASCENDING RAMP
An unusually high stepping-stone separated the base of the descending stairway from the base of the ascending ramp. It jutted out from the wall about thirty feet above the waterway.
The guttered ascending ramp rose above West and his team, stretching upward for a hundred yards, ending at the left-hand sentry tower. It was four feet wide, enough for single file only, and a sheer drop to the right of it fell away to the swirling waters below.
The ramp featured two openings along its length: one two-thirds of the way up that looked like a doorway; the second all the way at the very top of the ramp, that looked more like a pipe.
Ominously, a wispy thread of steam issued out from the pipe, dissipating as it spread into the chasm.
Wizard was enthralled. “Ooh, it’s a Single-Exit Convergence Trap …”
“A what?” Pooh Bear said.
West said, “He means it’s a race between us and whatever liquid comes out of that pipe. We have to get to the doorway before the liquid does. I assume the high stepping-stone triggers the contest.”
“What kind of liquid?” Big Ears asked.
Wizard said, “I’ve seen crude-oil versions. Heated quicksand. Liquid tar …”
As Wizard spoke, West stole a glance back at Judah’s men.
They were climbing around the outside of their guard tower, high above the waterway, moving in a highly coordinated way—far faster than his team had.
The first CIEF man climbed over the balcony and disappeared inside the tower.
“No time to ponder the issue,” he said. “Let’s take the challenge.”
And with that he jumped onto the stepping-stone and bounced over onto the ascending ramp.
No sooner had his foot hit the stepping-stone than a blast of
superhot volcanic mud vomited out from the pipe at the top of the ramp. Black and thick, the mud was so hot it bore thin streaks of golden red magma in its oozing mass.
The ramp’s gutter instantly came into effect.
It funneled the fast-oozing body of superheated mud down the ramp, toward West’s team!
“This is why we train every day,” West said. “Run!”
Up the ramp the seven of them ran.
Down the ramp the red-hot mud flowed.
It was going to be close—the ramp was obviously constructed in favor of the mud.
But West and his team were fit, prepared. They bounded up the slope, heaving with every stride, and they came to the doorway set into the wall just as the mud did and they charged in through it one after the other, West shepherding them through, diving in himself just as the volcanic mud slid by him, pouring down the ramp, where it ultimately tipped into the waterway at the bottom, sending up a great hissing plume of steam.
Judah’s team, close behind West’s, handled their ramp in a different way.
They sent only one man up it: a specialist wearing a large silver canister on his back and holding a device that looked like a big-barreled leafblower.
The specialist raced up the ramp and beat the flowing mud to his doorway, where instead of disappearing inside the doorway, he fired his big “leafblower” at the ramp.
Only instead of hot air, the device he held spewed forth a billowing cloud of supercooled liquid nitrogen, which instantly turned the leading edge of the mud-flow into a solid crust that acted like a dam of sorts, funneling the rest of the oncoming mud off and over the outer edge of the ramp!
This allowed Judah and his team to just stride up their ramp in complete safety, heading for the sentry tower on their side—moving ever forward.
In stark contrast, West and his team arrived in their sentry tower breathless and on the run.
“Even if we get this Piece of the Capstone,” Stretch said, “how can we possibly get it out? How can we get it past the Americans? And if it’s a large Piece, it’ll be nine feet square of near-solid gold—”