The two canoes arrived back at the dock and there both Jack Wests, Senior and Junior, fell onto solid ground, the clear diamond Pillar in their grasp, its internal liquid core pulsing, its glass-like flanks smeared with their bloody fingerprints.
Lily hurried to Jack’s side as Zoe and Rapier came down from the fort.
‘Daddy! You did it!’ Lily hugged him.
Rapier lifted Wolf to his feet, the older man still clutching the charged Pillar. Then Rapier levelled his pistol at the back of Jack’s head, coldly cocked the hammer and—
‘No!’ Wolf barked at him.
‘He’s no more use to us! We should have killed him before!’
‘No, Rapier,’ Wolf said in a tone that surprised Jack. It was a tone he’d never heard from his father before—one of quiet respect. To Jack: ‘You just. . . saved my life. . . Why?’
Jack actually didn’t know why. It had been instinctive. He didn’t respond. Lily and Zoe watched this exchange, frozen in horror.
Wolf seemed genuinely confused. ‘You could easily have let me go, let me fall off the bottom of that chute, and yet even after everything I’ve done to you, you didn’t.’
Jack was silent for a long moment. Then he said:
‘I’m not like you.’
Wolf looked at Jack.
‘You most certainly are not,’ he said. ‘I’m not given to acts of gratitude or mercy, my son, but today I will make a once-only exception. I’m not going to kill you. Rapier.’
He turned and left, leaving Rapier glaring at Jack, before he reluctantly followed their father.
Wolf, Rapier and the Neetha warlock swept back up the stairs behind the dock, taking the charged Pillar with them, leaving Jack, Lily and Zoe there.
They paused briefly at the fort where Astro lay wounded, looking pale and clutching his new wounds. Rapier checked the damage and shook his head.
‘He’s alive, but he’ll be a bitch to carry back through this place. He’ll slow us down.’
‘Leave him,’ Wolf said. ‘We have to catch our sub.’
Thus with only the Neetha warlock and one of the forty CIEF men they had brought with them to the Third Vertex, Wolf and Rapier headed back toward the flooded entrance to the cave system.
Wolf led the way, striding purposefully across the high narrow bridge that led back to the volcano.
Rapier followed—the only person to escape this terrible place unscathed, unwounded—and with a sly look back at Jack, unseen by Wolf, he casually dropped a grenade inside the small watch-house in the centre of the narrow bridge.
Moments later, as Rapier stepped off that bridge, the grenade detonated and in a great blast of stonedust, the middle section of the bridge blew apart. The bridge tumbled down into the lava lake, leaving a wide void between the two towers that gave access to the dock. . .
. . . leaving Jack and the others stranded in the dark heart of the Third Vertex of the Machine.
Wolf turned at the unexpected explosion, saw the destroyed bridge. He glanced at Rapier but said nothing.
He just moved on.
After the bridge had crashed down into the lake of lava, Jack just shook his head.
‘Never saw that coming,’ he said wryly.
With the immense bronze pyramid looming above him, he went up to the little fort to check on Astro.
‘How are we going to get out of here?’ Lily asked.
‘We’ll find a way, kiddo.’ Jack grabbed a syringe from his first aid pouch and jabbed it into Astro’s leg. ‘This’ll numb your leg little while I extract the bullet.’
Astro grimaced.
‘But it’s still gonna hurt like hell.’ Jack grabbed some tweezers and set about finding the bullet in Astro’s calf. Despite the anaesthetic, Astro grunted in agony until Jack finally extracted the bloodstained round.
Astro lay back, gasping. Jack started bandaging the wound.
‘Why did you save Wolf?’ Lily asked, an edge to her voice. ‘He murdered Wizard.’
Jack didn’t look up. ‘Like I said, I’m not like him.’
‘But he’s a bad man. I think you should have let him fall and die.’
Jack stopped bandaging for a moment and looked up at her. ‘Killing someone is a terrible thing, Lily, and not something to wish on anyone lightly. I’ve killed quite a few people in my life—and then only when they were trying to kill me or someone I loved. But even then, not once has it made me happy or satisfied. Trust me, killing someone is not something you ever want to do.’
‘But he—’
‘I know. Listen, you’re angry right now and I understand that. But if we’re going to win this thing, we have to win it being true to ourselves, being who we are.’
‘What do you mean?’
Jack sighed. ‘My father doesn’t care about anyone but himself— he takes what he wants and doesn’t care who gets hurt in the process. He kills people who oppose him. I don’t. And if I ever do, then I’ll be no better than him.
‘Yes, I’d like to see him get what’s coming to him for what he did to Wizard but my first instinct is always to save someone, to not let them fall. That’s who I am. If I’d let him fall when I could have saved him, I’d have become him. And I don’t ever want to be like him.’
‘Hmm,’ Lily frowned, not really satisfied.
‘Zoe,’ Jack said, resuming his dressing of Astro’s leg, ‘what’s the reward for laying the Third Pillar? Sight?’
‘Yes. But I’m not sure if we ever figured out what that meant.’
‘Well, I certainly saw something when I touched that Pillar.’
He described to the others the flashing vision he’d had when he’d gripped the charged Pillar with his bloodied hands, a fantastical vision of falling beneath a Vertex with a one-winged black 747 falling with him.
‘Wizard and I once talked about it,’ Jack said. ‘He never got a definitive answer as to what sight meant, but he had a theory.’
‘And what was that?’ Lily asked.
‘He said the reward sight was the ability to see one’s own death.’
Neither Zoe nor Lily had a reply for that.
Jack finished Astro’s leg and hoisted the young Marine to his feet, slinging one arm over his own shoulder. Astro hopped on his good leg.
‘How’s that feel?’
‘Hurts like hell, but I can make it. And hey, at least you didn’t leave me to die like my asshole commanding officer just did. How can you help me after what I did to you?’
‘It wasn’t you who did it. You thought you were following legitimate orders,’ Jack said, shrugging. He glanced at Lily. ‘Beyond that, same reasons I gave her.’
He looked up at the volcano cone and the exploded bridge leading back to it. ‘Now. How about we figure a way out of this godforsaken place?’
Two hours after Wolf had abandoned them on the dock, a second explosion rang out in the underground cavern.
This one came from a bunch of grenades—the entire collection of Jack, Zoe and Astro—that Jack had lowered by winch-cable to the base of their tower.
He had lowered the cluster of grenades down the side of the tower, pulled the pin on one via a second cable and then raced back down to the fort near the dock.
The grenades detonated—a huge blast at the base of the tower—and a second later, the great tower fell, tipping over from its blasted-open base like a slow-falling tree, tilting away from the dock and across the void left by Rapier, landing with a colossal bang up against the second tower, coming to rest at a precarious thirty-degree angle, awkwardly bridging the gap.
‘Go! Before it slips!’ Jack called, supporting Astro on his shoulder and running up the slope of the semi—fallen tower . . . as the whole structure began to groan ominously.
Lily ran out in front, and the small group of tiny figures hustled up the fallen tower, arriving at its pointed summit and jumping across a short gap onto the flat upper ledge of the still-standing second tower.
‘Keep going!’ Jack called to Lily. ‘Get t
o the volcano!’
Lily obeyed and together they all ran across the narrow elevated pathway that led back to the volcano, arriving at the safety of the tunnel there just as the fallen tower brought down the standing one and amid the deafening groan of rending stone, the two towers fell sideways into the molten lake, creating a tremendous lava splash and taking half the elevated pathway with them.
Like some living breathing predator, the lava lake proceeded to swallow the two towers whole and soon all that remained between the volcano and the pyramid of the Third Vertex was the low stone dock and a section of the path behind it, now an island out on the simmering molten lake.
It would take jack several hours to get back to the entrance to the Vertex. It was very slow going: Lily and the limping Zoe walked out in front, while he trailed behind with Astro draped over his shoulder, all the while negotiating the booby-trapped triple-pathways.
On the way, they had rummaged through the Japanese ambush station inside the tunnel and grabbed food and water . . . and the scuba gear the Japanese soldiers had used to penetrate the Vertex’s submerged ocean entrance.
At last, standing at the flooded entrance to the Vertex, with a lake of glowing lava behind him and a lake of sloshing ocean water before him, Jack saw no sign of Wolf.
Astro mentioned Wolf saying something about catching a retrieval sub, but it must have been and gone.
‘What are we going to do when we get outside?’ Lily asked. ‘The Japanese ships will still be out there, plus the shooters on the cliffs.’
Jack helped the wounded pair of Zoe and Astro get into the scuba gear. ‘I’m hoping Wolf had a plan for that which might allow us to get ashore somehow and call Sky Monster. All I know for certain is we can’t stay in here.’
So out they went, wearing the scuba gear of the Japanese garrison.
Jack pulled Astro through the deep blue haze while Lily helped Zoe—the four of them gliding past the gargantuan pillars of the entry hall.
At length they emerged from the hangar-like doorway to the Vertex, feeling the rhythmic tug of the ocean as they ascended.
Then they surfaced.
Hovering in the seething ocean, Jack spat out his mouthpiece, looked around, and said, ‘Oh, shit.’
Driving ocean rain slammed down on Jack’s face as he took in the scene off the Hokkaido coast.
It was not as he had left it a day before.
The ships of the Japanese Navy had backed off, and were now distant specks on the horizon.
Wolf’s retrieval sub—a small American Sturgeon-class boat—lay immobile on the waves, surrounded by six heavily armed Russian Mi-48 Chinook-clone helicopters and five Hind gunships.
A gang of twelve MiG fighters boomed across the sky, keeping the Japanese Navy at bay.
‘Who the hell are these guys?’ Jack asked. ‘Russians?’
The four of them were spotted quickly and with no possible escape were winched up into one of the big double-rotored Chinooks.
A moment after he dropped to the deck of the chopper’s hold, wet and exhausted, Jack was surrounded by six Spetsnaz commandos wearing oversized helmets and brandishing VZ-6 1 Skorpion machine pistols.
‘Captain West?’ the leader yelled over the din of the rotor blades. ‘Captain Jack West Jr, no?’
‘Yes!’ Jack nodded.
Whack.
The blow came from the side, from one of the other Russian commandos, and Jack dropped to the steel floor of the hold, hearing Lily scream a moment before everything went black.
NORTHERN SCOTLAND
15 MARCH, 2008. 0700 HOURS.
The high-speed train zoomed through the highlands of northern Scotland. A grim sky touched grim mountains which towered over grim snow-filled valleys. It was two degrees Celsius but the wind- chill made it seem colder.
The train thundered into a tunnel bored into the base of a mountain, enveloping it in noisy darkness.
In a private first-class cabin at the front of the train, Lachlan Adamson shook his head. ‘I don’t know, Julius. First we moved some 5,000-year-old stones at Stonehenge. Now we’ve stolen an ancient Egyptian basin from the British Museum. What’s next? Taking the Scottish Crown Jewels?’
‘Hey, we’re saving the world here,’ Julius said. ‘Besides, the British Museum has no idea how important that Basin is. At least we’re using it. Seriously, that museum has no clue as to how special some of its items are. Like that Easter Island statue in the cafeteria, it’s one of only four moai carved from basalt, and they have it on display in the cafeteria. You remember when we went to Easter Island—’
‘You guys have been to Easter Island?’ Stretch said.
‘Sure, back in ‘02. Awesome place,’ Julius said.
‘What is the story with the statues there?’ Stretch asked.
‘Well. . .’ Julius rubbed his hands. ‘For over 700 years, the Easter Islanders built their huge statues, called moai. They made over 1200 of them, ranging from little six-foot-tall ones to absolute monsters that are eleven metres tall and weigh eighty tons. But nearly all of those 1200 statues were carved from tufa, a soft volcanic rock. Only four were fashioned from basalt, a much harder stone, so they would have taken a lot longer to carve.’
Lachlan said, ‘And when the British came in 1868, they stole only two moai and both of them were made of basalt. They knew exactly what they were after: the rare basalt ones. They knew they were special, unlike today.’
‘That island is way cool,’ Julius said to Stretch. ‘Seriously, if we survive this, you should go sometime. We backpacked there with a couple of hottie American anthropology students, Penny and Stacy Baker. God, I had such a thing for Stacy. You remember her, Lachie? Stacy Baker?’
A momentary look of shock spread across Lachlan’s face. ‘What, oh, yeah, sure . . . she was . . . nice.’
Julius saw it. His eyes narrowed. ‘Nice or nice, brother?’
Lachlan’s face went red. ‘Julius, I always meant to tell you about Stacy, but I never got the chance. . .’
Julius’s jaw dropped. ‘You hooked up with Stacy Baker? On Easter Island?’
‘Yeah . . . one night after you fell asleep—’
‘You knew I liked her!’
‘It sort of . . . well . . . just happened, Julius—’
Julius was furious. ‘These things don’t just happen! You lying, sneaking traitor. I’ll give you a new call-sign: Judas—’
‘Boys!’ Pooh called from his laptop nearby. ‘Some quiet, please! I just got a message from Sky Monster. He says he’s somewhere near Vladivostok. He’s lost contact with Jack on Hokkaido, but since the time for laying the Third Pillar is past and the world is still turning, he thinks Jack must have laid it successfully.’
‘Or someone else did,’ Stretch said. ‘So let me get our mission straight: before the last three Pillars are placed at their Vertices, they must be cleansed twice, in the Philosopher’s Stone and in the Basin “in the pure waters of the Spring of the Black Poplar”?’
‘Correct,’Lachlan said.
‘And we have the Basin,’ Julius said, still scowling at his brother.
‘So all we need to do now is find this mysterious Spring.’ Stretch looked at the twins. ‘And you think it’s up here?’
‘Not us,’ Julius said, ‘Wizard. It was on his summary sheet all along. We just verified it through some of Isaac Newton’s writings.’
At that moment, right on cue, the train burst out of the tunnel, revealing a dramatic landscape ahead of it: a long almost eerily flat lake, veiled in fog and flanked on both sides by mountains that plunged directly into it.
It was perhaps the most famous lake in the world.
Loch Ness.
After Jack had tasked the twins with finding the Spring of the Black Poplar, it had been Julius who had provided the breakthrough.
His starting point had been the initial reference to the Spring, the inscription at Saqqara:
Cleanse the last three also in my basin,
In the pure w
aters of the Spring of the Black Poplar.
Do this and Ra’s Twin will be satisfied and
Upon you he will confer his bounties.
While the others had been looking up references to black poplars in the historic and scientific literature, Julius had glanced at Wizard’s summary sheet for the millionth time and noticed something: