The Pillar locked into place and Jack released his grip on it—and just as he’d anticipated, he was instantly hurled by the flowing water over the edge and thrown down into the abyss. . .
. . . where Iolanthe caught him!
She was hanging by one hand from her belt, still looped over a handrung, while gripping his waistband with the other.
She could easily have let him fall—and given their rival sides in this quest, could well have been expected to.
But to Jack’s surprise she hadn’t.
She’d saved his life.
He climbed up her body and grabbed hold of a handrung, just as the Vertex came to life.
A blazing white beam of light shot like a laser down from the peak of the inverted pyramid into the dark abyss beneath them, illuminating the depths of the great shaft, disappearing into infinity.
LUNDY ISLAND (4TH VERTEX)
A similar event was happening at the Fourth Vertex.
Julius and Lachlan Adamson stood in stunned awe as the inverted pyramid at their Vertex loosed its own blinding white beam into the abyss beneath their half-bridge. The great pyramid thrummed loudly as the entire cavern was lit up by the harsh white light.
‘Good God!’ Julius shouted.
Then abruptly, the mighty shaft of light vanished, plunging the wide abyss back into the pale light of their glowsticks and flares.
The Pillar pulsed in the pyramid’s peak, crystal clear, white Thoth glyphs appearing on its sides, glyphs that described its reward, life, in detail.
Julius reached out and grabbed it, and the glass-like Pillar came away from the peak, leaving a small pyramidal part of itself there.
‘Julius! We have to go!’ Lachlan called, eyeing the still-falling series of waterfalls gaining on them.
‘Right!’ Julius started running.
Guided once again by Pooh Bear and Stretch, they struggled back up the mini-city, following a winding vertical path through the labyrinthine watercourse.
Like Jack, Pooh and Stretch had counted the symbols they’d used to this point: to get to the pyramid, they’d used exactly half the symbols. It was Stretch who’d realised that the remaining symbols provided the safe path back up through the mini-city.
Streams of water still flowed off every towertop but on a select few it was shallow and had formed into gentle swirling pools—this was the safe way up.
At one point, the exhausted Lachlan, trudging against the knee deep flow, lost his footing and was swept backwards, toward the brink of a large fall. Diving back, Julius managed to grab his anti and pull him back to his feet.
But Lachlan had lost it. Lost the will. ‘Go, Julius! Get out of here! Don’t let me slow you down!’
‘Shut up, Lachie . . .’
‘I’m sorry, Julius!’ Lachlan called. ‘I’m sorry I can’t keep up! I just can’t! And I’m sorry about Stacy Baker, too!’
In the endless spray of the waterfalls, the two brothers stood there, facing each other, wondering what to do.
Some time later, Pooh Bear and Stretch were standing again on the summit of the miniature city, waiting tensely.
At length, Julius’s hand appeared above the edge of their tower and he hauled himself over the rim, soaking and breathless.
There was no immediate sign of Lachlan, and Pooh Bear gasped.
Then he saw him. Draped over Julius’s back, clinging to him in piggy back -style.
Julius had carried Lachlan up the last half of the journey.
The two young men rolled to the ground, sucking in air. Pooh and Stretch rushed to their side.
Stretch bent to help Julius, grabbing Lachlan’s other arm. ‘Here, let me help, he must be heavy.’
Julius smiled grimly, his face dripping with water. ‘He’s not heavy, he’s my brother.’
DIEGO GARCIA (5TH VERTEX)
At the Fifth Vertex, the water kept flowing down the spiral road way, but after a few minutes it began to lose its intensity and diminished to a trickle.
When the flow was weak enough, Jack again hoisted himself above the water-curtain and snatched the Pillar from the pyramid’s peak, then swung back down to his handrung on the underside of the stone tongue. Like the Pillar at Lundy Island, this Pillar now glowed with lines of ancient white text: text that outlined its reward, death.
‘What now?’ Iolanthe asked.
‘Well—’ Jack began.
‘Captain West!’ a voice over a megaphone called from somewhere above them. ‘We have just received some new orders from your father. He has informed the entire force here at Diego Garcia that after successfully laying the Pillar, you and the royal are not to be permitted to leave this island alive. The entire American garrison at Diego Garcia has been ordered to kill you.’
Out on Diego Garcia’s southern runway, Sky Monster saw clear evidence of his hosts’ change of heart almost immediately.
Six fearsome Avenger-class Humvees came rushing across the causeway, speeding toward the island airstrip. Each Avenger was equipped with two upwardly-pointed pods containing four Stinger surface-to-air missiles. That meant eight missiles per car, forty-eight missiles in total.
A dozen Army Rangers started running on foot toward the 747 from the airstrip’s tower, while five pilots in full flight-gear hustled across the runway toward some F-15 Eagle fighter jets.
The timing of all this wasn’t lost on Sky Monster. The time for laying the Pillar had just passed. Jack must have set it in place and now the bad guys were doing what bad guys did: fucking you over after you saved their asses.
Diego Garcia had just declared war on Jack and his team.
Closing the exterior door and running for the cockpit—with no objection from his two Spetsnaz minders—Sky Monster decided to declare war right back at them.
Inside the Vertex, Jack, Lily and Iolanthe were still hanging from the stone tongue.
‘We can’t go out the way we came in,’ Jack said. He jerked his chin at the pair of square stone holes at the end of their line of handrungs. ‘We make the last choice and see where it takes us.’
The left-hand hole was the correct one and it led into a long upwardly-sloping tunnel that wound higher and higher until it ended abruptly at a dead-end made of a single sandstone block.
As they arrived at the dead-end, Sky Monster’s voice came through Jack’s earpiece: ‘Huntsman! You still alive down there? I just came under attack on the runway and had to take off and launch about a billion countermeasures! It’s pandemonium up here!’
Explosions boomed in the background.
‘Can you touch down at all to pick us up?’
‘Er, negative.’
‘What about an aerial option? Is that available?’
‘I can do that. Near the runway’s hangar. Hurry, Jack. I can hold them off for another ten, maybe fifteen minutes. After that I’ll be a sitting duck up here.’
‘We’ll get there as fast as we can. Thanks, Monster.’
***
Outside, explosions boomed and columns of smoke rose as the Halicarnassus banked in the sky above the island runway, unleashing tracer bullets and dropping incendiary bombs on the airstrip below.
Sky Monster’s first wave had taken out the two Patriot missile launchers at the end of the runway; his second had created deep craters in the runway that prevented the launching of the F-15s.
Stinger missiles lanced into the sky from the Avengers on the ground, but the Hali’s electromagnetic countermeasures were way too good for them and they just veered wildly away before ditching into the sea.
The F-15 fighters themselves were Sky Monster’s next target. Although they couldn’t take off now, they might later—and Sky Monster was just pissed off—so he nailed the first three on the short taxiway outside their hangar, hitting them in their forewheels, so that they crumpled nose-down onto the taxiway, their broken carcasses blocking the way of the two unhit fighters.
He swung in a wide circle over the V-shaped atoll and loosed another pair of missiles at Die
go Garcia’s main runway on the western arm. High-spraying explosions of asphalt and dirt rose into the air. That runway wouldn’t be launching anything either.
‘You want a war!’ Sky Monster shouted. ‘I’ll give you a motherfucking war!!!’
Shwack!
The blast from Jack’s C-2 plastic explosive was short and sharp and it cracked the thick sandstone brick blocking their way.
The brick crumbled and Jack threw its pieces behind him, creating a small hole—
—only to see the wheels of a huge HEMTT truck rumble by right in front of his nose.
Enlarging the gap, Jack discovered that they had arrived hack at the entry tunnel leading to the spiral cavern; the brick he’d just blasted was part of the tunnel’s sandstone wall.
The tunnel was dimly lit and as he pulled the crumbling pieces of the brick away, making the gap wide enough to fit through, Jack saw several Humvees speed by, heading for the Vertex, their headlights bouncing in the darkness.
Heading in the other direction, however, were some of the earth-filled HEMTT dumptrucks Jack had seen on the way in. They were getting them out of the way of the incoming troops.
‘Quickly!’ Jack whispered to Lily and Iolanthe. ‘This way!’
Moments later, one of the fleeing HEMTT dumptrucks emerged from the tent-covered pit into bright daylight, swerving to avoid a bunch of Humvees rushing into the pit complex.
No-one saw the three figures clinging to its underside. Nor did they see them leap into the cab of a HEMTT towing a Patriot missile launcher, immobilise the driver, and rumble off in the direction of the strife-torn southern runway.
Jack’s HEMTT sped across the long causeway that gave access to the island runway. Smaller jeeps carrying armed troops overtook it, heading for the battle there.
Jack knew exactly where he was going: the hangar that had housed the base’s F-15s. Only he didn’t enter it from the front.
Instead, his giant truck blasted through the flimsy rear wall of the hangar, smashing through it and skittling a couple of FA-18 fighters as if they were toys, before Jack brought the big truck to a skidding halt beside one of the semi-destroyed F-15s on the taxi-way in front of the hangar.
Of course, the fighter’s pilot had long since abandoned the broken jet, its nose tilted down over its destroyed forward landing gear.
‘Into the cockpit!’ Jack pulled Lily with him, Iolanthe running along behind them. Into his radio: ‘Sky Monster! Aerial pick-up! On the next pass! Give us thirty seconds!’
‘You got it, Jack!’ The Halicarnassus swept round in a wide arc until it was flying directly toward the taxiway.
Jack clambered into the cockpit of the damaged fighter.
Iolanthe hesitated. ‘What are you doing! This thing isn’t going to fly!’
Jack hoisted Lily onto his lap and started checking the cockpit. ‘It’s not but we are. Now you can come or you can stay.’
Iolanthe bit her lip, and decided that whatever Jack West Jr was planning was better than staying at Diego Garcia.
‘Where do I sit?’
‘On my lap, with Lily in between us and the seatbelt around all three of us.’
Iolanthe did as she was told. She now sat facing Jack, on his lap, with Lily snuggled between them. Jack clicked the seatbelt around them all.
‘Is this plan as crazy as I think it is?’ Lily asked him softly.
‘Pretty much.’ Jack looked up at the sky.
Iolanthe saw this and suddenly she got it. ‘Oh, you can’t he serious—’
‘Hang on, princess.’
And with those words, Jack yanked on the F-15’s ejection cords.
Whoosh!
The ejection seat of the F-15 rocketed into the sky above the island runway, bearing Jack, Lily and Iolanthe on it.
It shot a full two hundred feet into the air before a parachute blossomed above it and the seat itself fell away, leaving the three of them dangling awkwardly from the chute.
Normally, with such extra weight, the chute wouldn’t have been able to hold them for long—but today it didn’t have to.
For, a second later, the Halicarnassus came roaring by, trailing a long hook from its open rear hold. Designed for snagging weather balloons, Wizard had reconfigured it using the arresting hook from an old F-14 Tomcat. It was kept for occasions just like this: for a hot extraction where no landing was possible.
The hook snagged Jack’s parachute perfectly and swept it forward, pulling it along behind the low-flying 747, the arresting hook’s elasticised cable taking the brunt of the massive whiplash.
Then the Halicarnassus was out of there, a tiny speck soaring off into the lightening sky dragging the parachute behind it, speeding away from the American base at Diego Garcia and the ancient Vertex concealed beneath it.
LUNDY ISLAND (4TH VERTEX)
At length, Pooh Bear, Stretch and the twins emerged from the Fourth Vertex, resigned to being picked up by their Royal Marine helicopter outside.
The four of them climbed out of the Well, stepping up into the rain. Waves crashed all around them.
They signalled to the Royal Marine chopper and held up the charged Pillar, and saw the chopper’s co-pilot say something into his radio.
Then the chopper exploded. Suddenly. Unexpectedly. It just burst apart in a billowing ball of flames.
The night sky flared with orange light and the Royal Marine chopper fell into the sea, a flaming smoking wreck—in doing so, revealing another helicopter in the sky far behind it.
‘What the hell—?’ Stretch shouted.
This new helicopter came closer and as he saw it clearly, Pooh sighed with relief: it bore the markings of the Irish Army. It was friendly.
Indeed, sitting in its co-pilot’s seat, smiling at them, was their Irish liaison officer, Captain Cieran Kincaid.
CARNIVORE’S LAIR
FAR EASTERN RUSSIA
18 MARCH, 2008, 1133 HOURS LOCAL TIME
(0233 GMT)
MINUTES AFTER THE 4TH AND 5TH DEADLINES
As soon as he was certain that the Fourth and Fifth Pillars had been laid at their respective Vertices, Carnivore gave the order.
His small personal force of Spetsnaz guards had been busy these last thirty-six hours.
Key equipment had already been gathered and taken on board Carnivore’s private jet—a sleek black Tupolev-144. With its delta shape, long slim body and distinctive downturned nose, the Tu-144 looked like the long-lost twin of the famous Aerospatiale Concorde. Indeed, like the Concorde, it was capable of supersonic cruise.
Under Diane Cassidy’s direction, all manner of documents, computers and astronomical charts—all of Carnivore’s research on the Machine—had been brought onboard the Tu-144.
Then the calls came in: from the Royal Marines hovering in their chopper above Lundy Island and from Diego Garcia. The Pillars had been laid successfully.
It was time to go.
Carnivore was abandoning his lair.
As his men departed, the wily old Russian royal stood for one last time in front of his grisly collection of human trophies encased in their liquid tombs. Diane Cassidy stood by his side.
Carnivore gazed at the formidable Wolf; at the younger soldiers, Zoe and Astro; at Anzar al Abbas, the proud sheik from Dubai; at the Neetha warlock; and last of all, at the very end of the line of tanks, at the little figure of Alby Calvin, the friend of the Oracle, beside his mother.
Carnivore smiled philosophically.
It was a shame to leave behind such a fine collection.
He pressed an intercom button connected to speakers inside all the tanks.
‘My guests. Sadly, the time has come for me to leave. I thank you all for the pleasure you have given me—in the cases of some of you, for many years. This base is being abandoned. The consequence for all of you is unfortunately somewhat dire. With no-one manning this base, there will be no-one to replenish the oxygen tanks connected to your mouthpieces. At a guess, I imagine you have about 72 hours of air lef
t, longer if you can breathe shallowly. Goodbye.’
The responses from his captives were varied: Abbas shouted soundlessly; Zoe looked up sharply; Astro just bowed his head wearily; and Alby’s eyes boggled. Wolf did nothing but stare evenly back at Carnivore.