“Welcome to Problem No. 1,” West said. “If the Artemis Piece is in St. Peter’s Basilica, it could be anywhere in there. The cathedral itself is a behemoth, the size of about seven football fields, and beneath it is a labyrinth of tombs, crypts, chambers, and tunnels. For all we know, it could be on display in a crypt, worshipped every day by only the most senior cardinals, or it could be embedded in the floor of the main cathedral, twenty feet underground. Searching for a golden trapezoid in there would be like searching for a needle in a mountain of haystacks. It could take years, and we don’t have years.”
“And Problem No. 2?” Zoe asked.
Wizard said, “The Zeus piece. As you said before, this verse gives us absolutely nothing. Beyond the usual legends we have no way of knowing where it is.”
A silence fell on the room. This situation had not been anticipated. The Callimachus Text had served them so well so far, none of them had thought that it would completely fail them on the later Pieces.
“So what do we do?” Zoe asked.
“There is one option,” West said solemnly. “But it’s not one that I’d take lightly.”
“And that is…?”
“We get outside help,” West said. “Help from an expert on the Capstone, perhaps the greatest living expert on it. A man who has devoted his life to pursuing it. A man who knows more about the Seven Ancient Wonders than anyone else alive.”
“Sounds like a guy we should have consulted ten years ago,” Fuzzy said.
“We would have if we could have,” Wizard said, “but this man is … elusive. He is also psychotic.”
“Who is he?” Sky Monster asked.
“His name is Mullah Mustapha Zaeed …” West said.
“Oh no, this is outrageous—” Stretch sat upright.
“The Black Priest of Kabul—” Pooh Bear breathed.
West explained for the others.
“Zaeed is Saudi by birth, but he’s been linked to dozens of Islamic fundamentalist terrorist groups as far afield as Pakistan, Sudan, and Afghanistan, where he was sheltered by the Taliban until September 11, 2001. A qualified mullah, he’s a teacher of fundamentalist Islam—”
“He’s an assassin,” Stretch spat, “responsible for the deaths of at least twelve Mossad agents. Zaeed’s been on the Red List for fifteen years.” The Mossad Red List was a list of terrorists whom any Mossad agent was permitted to shoot on sight anywhere around the world.
“If the Mossad can’t find him, how on Earth are we going to find him at such short notice?” Zoe asked.
West looked to Stretch as he spoke. “Oh, the Mossad knows where he is, they just can’t get to him.”
The tight-lipped expression of Stretch’s face said this was true.
“So where is he then?” Pooh Bear asked.
West turned to Stretch.
Stretch practically growled as he spoke. “Mustapha Zaeed was picked up by U.S. forces during Operation Enduring Freedom, the invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11, the one that toppled the Taliban regime. In early 2002, Mustapha Zaeed was taken to Camp X-Ray, the temporary terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He’s been there ever since.”
“Guantanamo Bay,” Zoe repeated. “Cuba. The most heavily guarded, most secure military compound in the world. And what—we’re just going to stroll in there and walk out with a known terrorist?”
West said, “Naval Station Guantanamo Bay is designed for two things: to keep the Cubans from retaking it; and to keep prisoners in. Its guns are pointed landward and inward. That leaves us one open flank—the sea side.”
Zoe said, “I’m sorry, but are you seriously thinking of sneaking into Guantanamo Bay and busting out one of its inmates?”
“No,” West said, standing. “I’m not planning on sneaking in at all. No, I suggest we do the one thing the Americans least expect. I suggest we launch a frontal assault on Guantanamo Bay.”
NAVAL STATION GUANTANAMO BAY
SOUTHEASTERN CUBA
MARCH 17, 2006, 3:35 A.M.
THREE DAYS BEFORE THE ARRIVAL OF TARTARUS
Naval Station Guantanamo Bay is a true historical oddity.
Born out of two treaties between the United States and Cuba made in the early twentieth century—when the U.S. had Cuba over a barrel—Cuba essentially leases a small chunk of its southeastern coast to America at the obscenely low rent of $4,085 a year (the actual price mentioned in the treaty is “$2,000 in gold per year”).
Since the treaty can only be terminated by the agreement of both parties—and since the U.S. has no intention of agreeing to such a termination—what it amounts to is a permanent military outpost on Cuban soil.
The bay is situated at the extreme southern tip of Cuba, opening onto the Caribbean Sea, facing away from America. Occupying both of its promontories is the U.S. base, and it is very small—maybe four miles deep by six miles long; its twisting and turning landside fence line barely fifteen miles in length.
After all that, its most well known feature (apart from the Tom Cruise movie A Few Good Men) is its status in international law: for as far as international law is concerned, Guantanamo Bay does not exist. It floats in a kind of legal limbo, free of the constraints of the Geneva Convention and other troublesome treaties.
Which was exactly why the United States chose it as a prison for the seven hundred “stateless combatants” that it captured in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom.
The bay itself bends northward like a fat, slithering snake, bounded by dozens of inlets and marshy coves. Its western side is known as Leeward, and it contains little of interest except for the base’s airstrip, Leeward Point Field.
It is on the eastern side of the bay—Windward—where all the real activity takes place. This is where the various Marine barracks and prison complexes are situated. An inactive airfield, McCalla Field, occupies the eastern side of the harbor entrance. Farther inland, there are administrative buildings, a school, shops, and a housing estate for the Marines who live on base.
Further inland still, at Radio Range, in the dead heart of Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, you will find Camp Delta. (Camp X-Ray, with its notorious open-air chain-link cages, was always intended to be temporary. In April 2002, all of its detainees were shipped to the newly constructed Camp Delta, a more permanent complex.)
Camp Delta is made up of six detention camps: Camps 1, 2, 3, 4, Echo, and Iguana. Camp 3 is the “SuperMax” facility. Only the most dangerous prisoners live in Camp 3.
Prisoners like Mullah Mustapha Zaeed.
In short, Camp Delta, nestled in the center of the world’s most heavily fortified base, is a maze of cinderblock buildings and chain-link fences, all topped with razor wire and guarded by stony-faced U.S. Army Military Police.
It is a forbidding installation, one of the bleakest places on Earth.
And yet after all that, only a quarter of a mile from the Camp’s outermost razor-wire fence is something you would find only in an American military base, a golf course.
With two heavily defended airfields to choose from, naturally West aimed for the golf course.
“I know Gitmo …” he said, standing in the cockpit of the Halicarnassus as it roared down through the night sky, descending on Guantanamo Bay.
After a quick refueling in friendly Spain, they had soared off over the Atlantic, commencing the five-hour flight to Cuba.
“… I went there once, after some wargames Australia did with the CIEF. Believe it or not, I actually played on the golf course—Christ, a golf course on a military base. Thing is, there aren’t many trees and the last few holes—the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth—run end to end, separated only by low bushes. They’re wide and straight and long, about five hundred yards each. About runway length. What do you say, Sky Monster? Think you can do it?”
“Can I?” Sky Monster scoffed. “My friend, give me something harder next time!”
“Great.” West turned to leave the cockpit. “See you down on the ground.”
&nb
sp; Ten minutes later, West strode into the lower hold of the Halicarnassus, dressed entirely in black and wearing his back-mounted carbon-fiber wings.
Zoe was waiting for him, also dressed in black, also wearing a wing set. The tight formfitting bodysuit brought out the best in her slender figure. Lean and shapely, Zoe Kissane was beautiful and fit.
“I hope you’re right about this,” she said.
“Surprise is the key. Their guns are pointed at the Cubans and at their seven hundred prisoners. The Americans don’t think anyone is stupid enough to take Guantanamo Bay head-on.”
“Nope. Only us,” Zoe said.
“Have you checked out Stretch’s satellite image of Camp Delta?”
“Three times,” Zoe said. “The intel from Mossad says that Zaeed is in hut C-12 of Camp 3, solitary confinement. Hope we can spot it in the dark. Is there anything Mossad doesn’t know?”
“Mossad knows what my aunt Judy eats for breakfast.” West checked his watch. “We’re eight minutes out. Time to fly.”
Moments later, the rear ramp of the 747 rumbled open and they leaped out of it together, disappearing into the night sky.
Inside the Halicarnassus itself, every battle station was manned.
Big Ears, Fuzzy, Pooh Bear, and Stretch all sat in the great black plane’s four gun turrets—Big Ears and Pooh Bear on the wing-mounted turrets; Fuzzy on the underbelly, and Stretch up on the 747’s domed roof.
Their six-barreled miniguns were currently loaded with superlethal 7.62mm armor-piercing tracer rounds—but they had special instructions from West as to what to use later, when the battle got really hot.
Wizard, Lily, and Horus had been dropped off at a safe island location nearby—it was far too dangerous to bring Lily on this mission.
The Halicarnassus thundered through the night sky.
It flew without lights, so it was little more than a dark shadow against the clouds; and it had long ago been stripped of its transponder—so it gave off no electronic signature.
And its black radar-absorbent paint, the same as that used on the B-2 Stealth Bomber, deflected any radar scans the Americans projected from Gitmo.
It was a ghost.
A ghost the American forces at Guantanamo Bay would not know existed until it was right on top of them.
In the end, it was a pair of night sentries who saw it—or, rather, heard it—first. They were posted on one of the most far-flung sentry towers on the base, on a remote headland overlooking the ocean about two klicks east of Windward Point, near the Cuzco Hills.
They saw the huge black shadow come roaring in low over their heads, zooming in from the south, from over the Caribbean Sea.
They called it in immediately.
And so the alert went out, and the 3,000-strong American force at Guantanamo Bay declared war on Jack West Jr. and his team.
The Halicarnassus shot low over the Cuzco Hills, bearing down on the rumpled moonlit landscape of Guantanamo Bay. It was 3:45 in the morning.
Then the big 747 banked sharply to the left and disappeared below the tree line…
… landing right on the fairway of the sixteenth hole of the Guantanamo Bay Golf Course, its wing lights blazing to life as it did so!
The plane’s massive tires ripped up the pristine fairway, churning up great ragged chunks of grass, its glaring wing lights lighting up the way. It romped down the sixteenth fairway, rumbled onto the seventeenth.
The stand of bushes separating the seventeenth from the eighteenth hole loomed in front of it, and Sky Monster called out on his radio: “Gunners! Mow ’em down!”
All four of his gunners responded immediately—and they let fly with a blazing barrage of tracer fire, a barrage that ripped mercilessly through the stand of trees, cutting through each at the base so that just as the last tree fell, the Halicarnassus blasted over the top of its stump and rumbled down the eighteenth fairway.
Klaxons and alarms wailed all over Guantanamo Bay. Flashing lights erupted everywhere.
Marines leaped out of their beds.
Guard tower sentries scanned the perimeter down the barrels of their M16s.
Spotlights searched the sky for more aircraft.
The word went out: they were being attacked … from the golf course!
Two crack teams of Recon Marines were dispatched to the golf course, while Black Hawk helicopters and a much larger force was assembled to follow up behind them.
And every single jail on the base was instantly placed into lockdown—every gate was double-locked via computer, every guard post sentry team was doubled.
It was chaos.
Pandemonium.
And in all the chaos and confusion that had followed the Halicarnassus’s spectacular landing on the golf course, no one noticed the two black-winged figures that descended over Gitmo with graceful silent swoops, landing lightly and silently on the flat concrete roof of hut C-12 in Camp 3 of Camp Delta.
West detonated a Semtex charge on the roof of the cinder-block cabin, blasting a hole in it big enough for him to fit through.
He jumped down through the hole—
—and landed in darkness on the roof of a cube-shaped wire-mesh cage. A blowtorch made short work of the cage’s roof and West leaped down into it—
—to see a skeletal wraithlike figure come rushing out of the darkness at him, arms outstretched!
West pivoted quickly and sent Zaeed thudding into the wall, where he pinioned the terrorist and shone his barrel-mounted flashlight right into the man’s eyes.
By the light of the flashlight, Zaeed looked positively scary.
The terrorist’s beard and hair had been shaved off, leaving him with a crude stubble on both his angular chin and his scalp. He was thin, malnourished. And his eyes—those eyes—they were hollow, sunken into his skull, accentuating his overall appearance of a living skeleton. They blazed with madness.
“Mustapha Zaeed?”
“Ye-yes …”
“My name is West. Jack West Jr. I’m here to offer you a one-time deal. We get you out of here, and you help us find the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and from them, the Golden Capstone of the Great Pyramid. What do you say?”
Any resistance Zaeed still harbored disappeared in an instant at the mention of the Wonders. In his wild eyes, West saw several things at once: recognition, comprehension, and naked ravenous ambition.
“I will go with you,” Zaeed said.
“Then let’s move—”
“Wait!” Zaeed shouted. “They implanted a microchip in my neck! A locator! You have to extract it, or they’ll know where you’ve taken me!”
“We’ll do it on the plane! Come on, we’ve got to run!” West called above the sirens. “Zoe! Rope!”
A rope was hurled into the hut from the hole in the roof, and together West and Mustapha Zaeed scrambled up it, out of the cell.
Over at the golf course, the two teams of Recon Marines arrived to behold the Halicarnassus standing on the ruins of the shed that had once been their clubhouse, illuminating the area for a full five hundred yards with a dozen outward-pointed floodlights.
Blinded by the dazzling lights, the Marines spread out around the big black 747, raised their guns—
—just as a withering volley of gunfire erupted from the Halicarnassus’s four revolving gun turrets.
The volley of bullets slammed into the Recon Marines, sent them flying backward through the air, slamming them into trees and vehicles.
But they weren’t dead.
The bullets were rubber bullets, like those West and his team had used in the quarry in Sudan.
West’s instructions to his team had been simple: you only kill someone who wants to kill you. You never ever kill men who are just doing their job.
And as far as West was concerned, he had no quarrel with the Marine guards at Guantanamo Bay—only with their government and its shadowy backers.
The rubber bullets, however, had another effect on the Recon Marines—it made them think this
was an exercise; an elaborate surprise in the dead of night designed by their superiors to test their response.
And so they actually became less lethal. They concentrated on surrounding and containing the plane, rather than destroying it.
But then, to their surprise, the big black 747 started moving again, rolling around in a tight circle until it was pointed back up the eighteenth fairway.
Then with its guns still blazing, the big plane’s engines fired up. The roar they made was absolutely deafening in the night.
Then the great plane started rumbling back up the fairway, having unloaded not a single trooper, having done—seemingly—absolutely nothing.
But then came the most amazing sight.
Two winged figures came shooting over the treetops from behind the Recon Marines—black-clad figures wearing carbon-fiber wing sets—chasing after the fleeing 747, firing compressed-air thrusters on their backs. They flew in a series of long swoops, like hang gliders powered by the odd thrust of compressed air.
And as the Marines saw the winged figures more closely, their hearts sank for they now understood that this hadn’t been an exercise at all.
For one of the low-flying winged intruders carried a man harnessed to his chest: a shaven-headed man still dressed in the bright orange coveralls of a Camp 3 detainee.
This was a jailbreak …
The two winged figures swooped in low over the right-hand wing of the rolling Halicarnassus, where they landed deftly and ran inside an emergency door which swung shut behind them.
Then the Halicarnassus picked up speed and thundered down the two fairways and, just before it hit the woods at the far end, it lifted off, taking to the air.
Three Black Hawk choppers followed for a short while, firing after it in vain, but they could never hope to keep up with the fleeing 747.
A couple of F-15 strike fighters would be dispatched ten minutes later, but by the time they were in the air and on the right heading, the ghostly 747—defying their radar scans and transponder searches—was gone.
It was last seen heading south, disappearing somewhere over Cuba’s nearest neighbor to the south.