Drinking water was thrown onto the superhot stepping stone to cool it. It sizzled loudly.
Rapier leapt out onto the stone, a full striding jump. He landed with a thump. . .
. . . and the stepping stone sank ever so slightly, the trigger for the maze’s elaborate defence system.
And the system came spectacularly alive.
The first tower vomited a bubbling mass of glowing-hot lava from its chimney-like peak, lava that immediately began to ooze down the zig-zagging channels carved into its sides.
‘Go!’ Wolf yelled to Rapier.
Rapier, Astro and the other three CIEF men took off, bolting out across the stepping stone and ascending a narrow stairway that gave access to the first tower.
Astro charged up the stairs behind Rapier, breathing hard and fast.
‘Rapier! Go right and down!’ one of the spotters called in his ear.
They went right and down, skirting the lower half of the tower. Looking up as he ran, Astro glimpsed the oozing red lava trickling down the channels of the upper half, travelling slowly downward. Where he couldn’t actually see it, the telltale yellow glow of the superheated liquid told him where it was.
Guided by their two elevated spotters, the five-man team did a full circuit of the tower, clambering up and down its stairways— and Astro quickly realised that without the guides’ instructions, they would have got hopelessly lost very quickly.
He also noticed something else—something that you could see only when you encountered the tower’s walls up close.
The walls of the tower were not made of sheer stone. Rather the surface of the wall was comprised of a superfine mesh of tiny upwardly-pointed spikes. Touching the micro-spikes, Astro found they were viciously sharp. Just brushing your hand against them drew blood.
Then, abruptly, his group rounded a corner and arrived at the long stone bridge that led to the second tower.
They dashed out across it, Astro running close behind Rapier. As he ran, he saw that a bubbling body of lava was now oozing from the peak of the second tower.
They were being set off in sequence—giving you a chance to reach the summit, but also giving the lava four chances to catch you on the way back.
A spotter called, ‘Okay, cross the bridge and take the stairway leading—shwap!-shwap!’
Standing out on the bridge, Astro spun to look back up at the gateway just in time to see both of his spotters snap backwards, their heads vanishing in matching bursts of red, their bodies tumbling off their perch and freefalling all the way down to the tar lake.
‘What the—?’ the CIEF man behind Astro said a split second before he too was shot and hurled off the narrow bridge. He landed in the tar lake, emitting a half-scream before the simmering black goo melted the skin off his face and sucked him under.
Slit-fzzzzzz!
Astro ducked as a bullet intended for his head nicked his sleeve and fizzed away. He caught a glimpse of muzzle-flash—maybe two muzzle-flashes—high up near the gateway on the opposite side of the crater.
Two more Japanese snipers.
Snipers who had waited for them to get this far before opening fire.
‘We’re under fire!’ Rapier yelled into his throat mike. ‘We need cover! Give us some goddamn cover!’
Down on the path at lake-level, Jack stood and watched in horror as the tower team walked right into the trap.
The full extent of their situation unfolded in his mind:
The Japanese had more people in here.
They’d waited patiently until Wolf’s men had triggered the tower system’s trap. Then they’d taken out the spotters and were now nailing the tower team itself.
Then came the bigger realisation.
This was their only chance to get the Pillar.
It had to be set in place before dawn tomorrow morning. If they didn’t get it now—during this sunset opening—the Japanese forces would win and the world would be doomed.
This was their one, only and last chance.
Jack snapped back to the present, to the scene on the towers.
Bullets were flying.
Men were being hit. Another fell into the foul tar lake.
Lava was still oozing from the tops of the first two towers, running in rivulets down their convoluted channel systems.
Rapier was shouting over the radio ‘—us some goddamn cover!’
‘There!’ Zoe pointed, and Jack saw two Japanese snipers up on the far gateway, on the Vertex-side of the crater, just as one of them fired in his direction.
Beside him, Wolf’s right ear exploded in a starburst of blood, while the man beside him fell, shot through the eye.
Wolf yelled, ‘Return fire!’
And in the midst of all this, amid all the bullets and the shoutjn and the falling lava, Jack West Jr sprang into action.
Jack scooped up his MP-7 plus the MP-5 of the dead man near him, and called, ‘Zoe! Grab the Barrett and come with me! Lily, get behind something and stay down!’
Then he was off, wearing just his white T-shirt, cargo pants and fireman’s helmet, his artificial left forearm glinting, racing across the stepping stone and charging for the first tower with Zoe hurrying to catch up behind him.
More gunfire rang out as they pounded up and down the first tower’s labyrinth of external stairways.
They came to a corner—the next stairway ran around it and underneath the narrow bridge to the next tower.
On the bridge, Jack saw Astro’s team getting annihilated by the gunmen on the far gateway—two more CIEF men were shot. Taking cover behind their dead teammates, Astro and Rapier, outgunned and woefully exposed, were firing their pistols uselessly up at the shooters.
‘Zoe!’ Jack called. ‘One shot then we move!’
Pressed against the corner, Jack waited while Zoe crouched behind him, levelling her Barrett sniper rifle up at the men on the distant gateway.
She fired.
One sniper was thrown backward.
‘Great shot, now go!’ Jack shouted.
And off they went again, racing up and down the stairways of the first tower, now a target of the lone remaining sniper, whose bullets slammed into the walls inches behind them—and suddenly Jack realised that both he and Zoe had taken off their jackets, jackets which had contained their Warblers. They were out here unprotected.
There was also one other thing to worry about: high above them the lava kept oozing downward, slithering like a glowing snake down its channels.
They came to the last corner before the bridge, just out of the line of fire.
‘Okay,’ Jack said to Zoe. ‘You got one shot again. When I run out onto that bridge, he’ll take about two seconds to get a bead on me. In that time, you take him out.’
‘But Jack, what if I miss?’
‘It’s a one-shot contest, Zoe. Either you shoot him or he shoots me. Ready, now!’
Jack broke cover, bolting out into the open, charging onto the bridge, both his guns blazing.
The tiny figure of the Japanese sniper could he seen spotting him and adjusting his aim through his sights and—
Blam!
Gunshot.
Who had fired it, Jack couldn’t tell.
To his horror, he glimpsed a muzzle-flash up at the gateway and for a terrifying moment, he thought that maybe Zoe hadn’t got her shot off in time, but a split second after the muzzle flashed, he saw the back of the sniper’s head blow outwards in a grisly spray of blood and brains—just as the sniper’s bullet sheared through the chinstrap of Jack’s fireman’s helmet.
Zoe had got her shot off perhaps a hundredth of a second faster than the Japanese sniper.
‘Thanks, Zoe! I gotta run!’
He bolted our across the narrow bridge, stepping over the deal bodies of the CIEF team before hurdling Rapier and Astro, and charging for the second tower, now racing on his own against the lava descending from above.
***
As soon as Jack set foot on the first step of the sec
ond tower, lava began oozing out of the top of the third one, so that now three separate rivers of lava were pouring down from the peaks of the first three towers, all at different stages in their descents.
Jack didn’t stop running.
Legs pumping, he negotiated the maze of stairways, working from memory, bounding up them, dancing down them, trying not to touch the wall of the tower—at one point, he brushed against one wall and its skin of tiny razor-sharp teeth sliced through the sleeve of his T-shirt as if it were tissue paper, drawing a large gash in his shoulder that seeped blood down his right arm.
The short sleeve dangled uselessly as he ran, so Jack ripped it off, revealing a totally bloodsoaked arm.
Running hard and fast, Jack came to the bridge leading to the third tower—this one stretched upward and was fitted with stairs.
Jack surmounted the bridge and arrived at the middle tier of the third tower. He was higher up now and he could see this tower’s snake-like lava flow much more closely. It glowed fiercely as it descended steadily through its channels.
It was almost at the halfway point between the peak of the tower and the bridge Jack had just crossed.
If he didn’t grab the Pillar and start his return journey before it reached that halfway point, he’d he screwed, stranded, stuck up here and sentenced to wait for his own painful death.
Can’t stop now.
He ran along a path that cut through the third tower and pounded up a stairway that ran up its far flank, leading to another long bridge that gave access to the fourth tower—across that bridge and up the fourth tower, now dizzyingly high, clambering up rung ladders cut into the flank of that tower’s uppermost tier—within feet of the simmering lava that now oozed down its channels—before he mounted the final super-steep rockbridge, a soaring ultra-narrow piece of stone that sprang up and across to the summit of the central pinnacle, and suddenly Jack found himself standing at the highest point in the crater, inside the glorious cupola housing the Third Pillar.
Had he time to marvel, Jack would have gawked at the cupola atop the central tower. It featured golden columns, a gold pedestal and gold-leafed tiles.
But he didn’t have time.
Instead, he just snatched the cloudy oblong Pillar from its pedestal and commenced the desperate return journey.
Down the rockbridge he flew, stepping onto the fourth tower two metres ahead of its lava flow.
Across the bridge to the third tower, down its steps and then running into the cutaway tunnel in it, dashing through the tunnel just as the molten lava above him split into three channels and came splashing down into the tunnel a bare metre behind his fleeing feet.
Down to the second tower, whose upper half was now positively riddled with glowing lava channels—they looked like iridescent red veins. Here Jack had to navigate three sides and the lava fell from more chutes and in more places—and once it landed on a stairway it sizzled fiercely and chased you further down that stairway: take the wrong stairway and there was no way to retrace your steps. No margin for error.
Over to the first tower he flew, trying desperately to remember the correct stairways to take, hurdling an oozing finger of lava that had edged across his path. The lava was closing around him.
Rapier had already gone all the way back to the safety of the path at the crater’s base and was watching Jack with furious eyes.
Zoe and Astro had lingered at the last set of stairs, waiting anxiously for Jack.
Jack was exhausted. He could only hear the throb of his own heart inside his head mixed with his own breathing.
He tried to concentrate:
Must watch each step . . .
Don’t trip, don’t slip . . .
Lava dripped all round him now, falling in a steady rain of fat drops, but at every turn he was a few inches ahead of it.
Then the final staircase came into view, and he risked a smile—a moment before he slipped on a slick step and went sprawling awkwardly onto his chest, gripping the Pillar for dear life, bouncing face-first down the penultimate stairway, with the ravenous lava still chasing him.
Jack tried to stand, fell, looked back . . . and saw the lava about to touch his feet—when two sets of hands suddenly gripped his shoulders and yanked him away from it.
Zoe and Astro.
They carried him down the last staircase just as the oozing lava flowed onto it. Then they hurled him onto the broad stepping stone, leaping across after him, just as the entire final staircase was completely enveloped by lava.
By this time, all four of the surrounding towers of the labyrinth were glowing red, spectacularly lit by the lava coursing through their channel-mazes.
Jack slumped against the wall of the crater, safely on the path, panting and gasping and holding in his hand the Third Pillar of the Machine.
‘Got the little sucker.’
About ten minutes later, having caught his breath, Jack stood up, put on his jacket and threw the Third Pillar to Wolf. ‘Cleanse it. That thing has to be laid at five minutes past midnight.’
Without waiting for a reply, Jack joined Lily and Zoe and started for the far side of the crater. ‘Let’s go see what laying this Pillar will involve.’
After the Pillar had been cleansed in the Philosopher’s Stone, Wolf’s force—now down to eleven men in total: seven CIEF men plus Wolf, Rapier, Astro and the warlock—caught up with them.
They all followed the path that skirted the base of the crater. It ended at a steep staircase that led to the dark tunnel-like structure that bored through the crater’s far wall.
Jack, Lily and Zoe stepped up onto the summit of the staircase and beheld the tunnel.
Through it, in the distance, they could see the immense hulk of the inverted bronze pyramid that was the Vertex.
The tunnel itself was dark and silent, roughly the size of a subway tunnel. Its stone walls and high ceiling were irregularly shaped, bulging in places. Nooks and dark recesses were everywhere; a balcony level overlooked the main passageway.
‘That bulging is not natural,’ Jack observed. ‘It’s been cut that way. . .’
Evenly spaced along the length of the tunnel was a series of carved stone dragon heads. Beautifully crafted, each one was large, about five feet tall, and they jutted out from the walls as if frozen in mid-lunge, their huge jaws bared in fierce snarls.
‘Dragons?’ Wolf frowned, coming alongside them.
‘Look more like snakes to me,’ Lily said. ‘Serpents. See the bulging of the walls? It’s their bodies.’
‘You’re right . . . ’ Rapier seemed surprised that Lily could be so observant.
She was right. The tunnel had been carved so that it seemed as ii the snakes’ bodies coiled and wound around the entire two-storey passageway, constricting it, creating all the nooks and crannies.
Jack stopped in mid-stride.
He counted the heads.
There were eight in total.
‘Eight heads . . . ’ he whispered. ‘An eight-headed serpent. Orochi . . . the Hall of Orochi in Yomi . . . Oh, shit. Lily, Zoe, take cover! Now!’
Without waiting for a reply, he snatched up Lily and pulled Zoe with him, covering them both with his body as he hurled them behind one of the dragon heads, a bare moment before the entire tunnel erupted in gunfire from over a dozen of the dark recesses in its upper level.
Three members of Wolf’s eleven-strong CIEF force were cut down where they stood, shot to bits, killed instantly.
Two more convulsed violently as they were hit by a second hailstorm of gunfire from above—gunfire from a garrison of Japanese special forces troops stationed inside this tunnel, this bottleneck, this perfect place for an ambush.
In a distant corner of his mind, Jack recalled the intercepted Japanese transmission he’d seen several days previously:
TELL THE GARRISON FORCE AT YOMI
TO MAINTAIN THEIR POSITION INSIDE
THE HALL OF OROCHI.
This tunnel, with its massive carving of an eight-head
ed serpent, was the Hall of Orochi, and this hellish underground landscape was Yomi.