This book is dedicated to

allthe men and women

whoserve in the

Australian Defence Force

The Five Greatest Warriors

Matthew Reilly

THE FIRST

SHALL BE THE NOBLEST, SCHOLAR AND SOLDIER BOTH.

THE SECOND

A NATURAL LEADER OF MEN,

NONE SHALL ACHIEVE GREATER FAME THAN HE.

THE THIRD

SHALL BE THE GREATEST WARLORD KNOWN TO HISTORY.

THE FOURTH

IS THE GREAT OBSESSOR, SEEKING ONLY GLORY,

BUT GLORY IS A LIE.

THE FIFTH

SHALL FACE THE GREATEST TEST AND DECIDE IF

ALL SHALL LIVE OR DIE.

5,000 YEAR OLD INSCRIPTION FOUND ON

THE SPHINX STELE, GIZA, EGYPT KNOWN

AS THE RHYME OF THE WARRIORS.

A MORTAL BATTLE,

BETWEEN FATHER AND SON.

ONEFIGHTS FOR ALL,

AND THE OTHER FOR ONE.

3,OOOYEAR OLD INSCRPTON FOUND ON A

CHINESE SHRINE IN THE WU GORGE, CENTRAL CHINA.

THE STORY SO FAR.

TheFive Greatest Warriors is the third part of the story begun withSeven Ancient Wonders and continued in TheSix Sacred Stones .

InSeven Ancient Wonders , an intrepid international team led by CAPTAIN JACK WEST JR found the fabled Capstone of the Great Pyramid at Giza among the (widely scattered) remains of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

After rescuing and raising a young girl named LILY—who along with her brother, ALEXANDER, was the latest in a long line of gifted Oracles fromSiwa in Egypt—Jack managed to set the Capstone in place on the summit of the Great Pyramid before the occurrence of a rare solar event known as the Tartarus Rotation.

Jack’s multi-national team was made up of soldiers from several of the world’s smaller nations. It included: ZOE KISSANE, from Ireland; Sergeant Zahir al Anzar al Abbas from the United Arab Emirates who was renamed POOH BEAR by Lily; Lieutenant Benjamin Cohen from Israel, now known as STRETCH; a crazy pilot from New Zealand named SKY MONSTER; and a rogue American submariner named J.J. Wickham, a.k.a. the SEA RANGER.

Providing the team with research and expert knowledge was Jack’s long-time mentor and friend, Professor Max T. Epper, call-sign WIZARD, and two young Scottish grad students, the red headed twins LACHLAN and JULIUS ADAMSON (call-sign: the Cowboys).

As it happened, the Tartarus Rotation was actually the precursor to a far larger celestial event, the return of a ‘Dark Star’—the opposite of our Sun,its dark twin. Known as a zero-point field, this Dark Star is a moving body of negative energy that will destroy all life on Earth when it returns to the edge of our solar system in March 2008.

InThe Six Sacred Stones , it was discovered that this Dark Star was indeed returning to the outer reaches of our solar system. It was further discovered that a device built by a mysterious ancient civilisation and known as THE MACHINE exists on our planet and which, if rebuilt, will repel the negative energy of the Dark Star and save the world.

Rebuilding the Machine, however meant first finding six magnificent underground ‘temple-shrines’ scattered around the Earth, each built in the shape of an inverted bronze pyramid and known as a VERTEX.

At each Vertex, a long-lost PILLAR—a dazzling rectangular diamond the size of a brick—must be set in place: the First Pillar at tile First Vertex, the Second at the Second Vertex and so on. Thelocations of the six lost Pillars was another mystery that had to be solved.

It was this mission, the mission to rebuild theMachine, that was begun inThe Six Sacred Stones .

During that quest, it was discovered that other parties were also seeking to rebuild the Machine: a powerful triple alliance of the Caldwell Group from America, China and Saudi Arabia.

The American side of this alliance was led by Jack’s father, JACK WEST SR (known as WOLF), the Chinese by COLONEL MAO GONGLI and the Saudis by a Saudi spy named VULTURE who had worked for a time with Jack’s team, only to betray them. Aiding Vulture was SCIMITAR, Pooh Bear’s older brother, who joined Vulture in his betrayal of the team.

Through the influence of the shadowy Caldwell Group—a military-industrial organisation that had once held sway over the American president—Wolf still commanded a special forces branch of the US military, the Commander-in-Chief’s In Extremis Force, or THE CIEF, which he used as his own private army.

Jack and his father had long been estranged, and at one point in the adventure, in a mysterious mine in Ethiopia, Wolf ruthlessly tried to kill Jack, but failed.

A further group aiding Wolf was a coalition of three European royal houses, those of Britain, Denmark and Russia. They were represented by the beautiful IOLANTHE COMPTON-JONES of the British Royal Family.

Finally, a sinister brotherhood of Japanese nationals, humiliated by Japan’s defeat in World War II, entered the fray, only with a different agenda: they did not want to see the Machine rebuilt at all. Led by Wizard’s one-time colleague TANK TANAKA, this Blood Brotherhood wanted to see the world destroyed by the Dark Star, to avenge their defeat in World War II. To achieve this end, they managed to infiltrate Wolf’s team with one of their own men, a Japanese—American Marine codenamed SWITCHBLADE.

After many adventures, Jack ultimately managed to plant the First and Second Pillars at the First and Second Vertices (at Abu Simbel and Cape Town respectively), but not without loss, forThe Six Sacred Stones ended with tile team in desperate straits.

One of their number, Stretch, having been captured by Wolf, was taken back to Israel to face his angry former masters at the Mossad. Pooh Bear was last seen heading off to rescue his friend.

Zoe, Wizard and Lily—having survived a terrifying ordeal at the hands of the Neetha tribe in the jungles of the Congo—dashed to southern Africa in Jack’s plane, theHalicarnassus , to help Jack at the Second Vertex.

They brought with them DIANE CASSIDY, an American archaeologist whom they had rescued from the Neetha. Unfortunately, before they could help Jack, they were forced to flee southern Africa in theHalicarnassus , with enemy fighters on their tail.

One unexpected witness to Jack’s astonishing success at the Second Vertex was Lily’s best friend, 12-year-old ALBY CALVIN, who had been brought there by Wolf as his captive. After Jack had laid the Pillar, Wolf left young Alby to die in the dark cavern containing the Second Vertex.

As for Jack himself, after laying the Second Pillar—and foiling Switchblade’s plan—he was last seen falling into the fathomless abyss beneath the Second Vertex alongside the furious Switchblade.

The fates of Jack, Stretch, Pooh Bear, Lily and their team, and the search for the final four Vertices and the laying of the last four Pillars are the subject ofThe Five Greatest Warriors .

THE SECOND VERTEX

BENEATH THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE

SOUTH AFRICA

17 DECEMBER, 2007, 0325 HOURS

Jack West fell.

Fast.

Down into the black abyss beneath the inverted pyramid that was the Second Vertex.

As he plummeted into the darkness, Jack looked up to see the gigantic pyramid receding into the distance, getting smaller and smaller, the jagged walls of the abyss crowding in around it.

Falling through the air beside him was Switchblade, the Japanese— American US Marine who moments earlier had betrayed Wolf and almost derailed his plan to insert the Second Pillar in its rightful place at the peak of the pyramid. It turned out that Switchblade’s Japanese blood was more important to him than his American upbringing.

But after a last-ditch swing from Jack and a desperate struggle above the abyss, Jack had jammed the Pillar in place just as the two of them had dropped from the upside-down peak and commenced their fall into the bottomless darkness.

The rocky walls of the abyss rushed past Jack in a blur of speed.

He fell with Switchblade in a tumbling ungainly way, their limbs still awkwardly entwined.

As they plummeted, Switchblade punched and scratched and lashed out at Jack, before grabbing his shirt and glaring at him with baleful eyes, screaming above the wind, ‘You! You did this! At least I know you’ll die with me!’

Jack parried away the crazed Marine’s blows as they fell.

‘No, I won’t . . . ’ he said grimly as he suddenly kicked Switchblade square in the chest, pushing himself away from the suicidal Marine—at the same time, grabbing something from a holster on Switchblade’s back, something that every Force Recon Marine carried.

His Maghook.

Switchblade saw the device in Jack’s hands and his eyes widened in horror. He tried to grab it, but now Jack was out of his reach.

‘No!No!! ’

Still falling, Jack pivoted in the air, turning his back on Switchblade to face the wall of the abyss.

He fired the Maghook.

Whump!

The high-tech grappling hook flew out from its gun-like launcher, its metal claws snapping outward as it did so, its 150-foot-long reinforced nylon cable wobbling like a tail behind it.

The grapplinghook’s claws hit the wall of the abyss, scraped against it, searching for a purchase before—whack!—they found an uneven section of rock and caught—and instantly Jack’s cable went taut—and his fall was abruptly and violently arrested and it took all his might to keep a grip on the Maghook’s launcher.

But hold on he did and as he swung in toward the vertical wall of the abyss, the last thing he saw behind him was the shocked, furious, powerless, horrified andbeaten look on Switchblade’s face as he fell into black nothingness, his evil mission a failure—a failure that was multiplied a hundredfold by the realisation that Jack West had got the better of him with one of his own weapons and that he was now going to die alone.

Jack swung into the wall of the abyss with a colossal thump that almost dislocated his left shoulder.

Silence.

For a moment, Jack hung there from the cable of Switchblade’s Maghook, dangling from the rocky vertical wall of the great abyss, high above the centre of the world and at least a thousand feet below the upside-down bronze pyramid of the Vertex. Despite its immense size, it now looked positively tiny.

Closing his eyes, Jack exhaled the biggest sigh of relief of his life. ‘What thehell were you thinking, Jack?’ he whispered to himself, catching his breath, letting the adrenalin rush subside.

A flutter of feathers made him spin and suddenly a small brown peregrine falcon alighted on his shoulder.

Horus.

His faithful bird pecked affectionately at his ear, nuzzling him.

Jack smiled wearily. ‘Thanks, bird. I’m glad I survived, too.’

Distant shouts from up in the Vertex made him look upward— Wolf’s people must have noticed that the Pillar had been set in place and were now sending men to get it.

Jack sighed. He could never hope to climb back up in time to catch them, let alone stop them. He might have saved the world and their lives and killed the traitor in their midst, but now the bad guys were going to get the booty: the Second Pillar’s reward, the mysterious concept known only as heat.

But there was nothing Jack could do about that now.

He turned to Horus. ‘Youcoming?’

And with that, he gazed up at the pyramid high above him and after a deep breath, reeled in the Maghook, grabbed a handhold on the rough surface of the abyss’s wall, and began the long climb upward.

It took Jack almost an hour to scale the wall of the abyss—by firing the Maghook up it and then climbing up the hook’s cable one hundred and fifty feet at a time.

It was slow going, since the rocky wall was largely sheer and slick, and sometimes the grappling hook found no purchase at all and just fell back down towards Jack.

But after about fifty minutes of such climbing, Jack slid over the edge of a stone rail and lay on his back on the precipice, his chest heaving, sucking in air. Horus landed lightly beside him.

When Jack sat up, he saw the magnificent underground city constructed in supplication to the inverted pyramid, with its hollow towers, its streets of inky black liquid and, through the forest of bridges and towers, the massive ziggurat rising in its centre; the whole scene lit by Wolf’s dying amber flares.

Of course, the entiresupercavern was now deserted, Wolf’s force having long since departed.

Also gone, Jack noted sadly, were his companions, the Adamson twins and the Sea Ranger. Jack imagined that, thinking him dead, they had rightly hurried down the long underwater passageway that led back to the open ocean in the Sea Ranger’s submarine—

Movement.

Jack spun, his eyes focusing on the summit of the ziggurat, just visible between all the towers.

‘Oh my God . .. ’ he breathed, registering who it was.

There, sitting totally alone on top of the mighty ziggurat, his head bowed, one of his arms in asling, was a small boy, his daughter’s best friend, Alby Calvin.

***

Left alone in this enormous space, with his wounded shoulder aching, and with Jack West Jr’s battered EDNY fireman’s helmet sitting in his lap, Alby had given up all hope of escape and was waiting for the last flares to fizzle out, when he heard the shouting voice.

‘Alby!Albeeee!’

He snapped to look up—fresh tears still running down his cheeks—to see a tiny figure over by the edge of the abyss waving his arms.

Jack.

Alby’s eyes nearly popped out of his head.

Jack negotiated his way across the underground mini-metropolis, over to the central ziggurat, using Wolf’s plank bridges where he could and swinging across the wider thoroughfares with the Maghook where he had to.

The black ooze that filled the city’s streets appeared to be a thick mud-like substance—semi-liquid andgoopy . If you fell into it, you didn’t get out.

As he traversed the avenues, he tried his radio. ‘Sea Ranger, come in? Do you read me?’

No reply.

His small handheld radio didn’t have the signal strength to reach the Sea Ranger in his submarine.

Moving in his unorthodox way, Jack hurried across the underground city.

At last, he came to the base of the ziggurat and bounded up its stairs, arriving at the roof, where he slid to Alby’s side and embraced him as if he were his own son.

Likewise, Alby hurled his good arm around Jack, closing his eyes, tears streaming down his cheeks.

‘I thought I was going to die here, by myself in the dark . .. ’ he whimpered.

‘I wouldn’t let that happen, Alby.’ Jack released the boy from hisbearhug . ‘You’re too good a friend to Lily . . . and to me. Plus, your mother would absolutely kill me.’

Alby stared at him. ‘You just fell into a chasm with a guy who was trying to kill everyone in the whole world and you’re afraid of my mom?’

‘Hell yeah.When it comes to your well-being, your mom’s scary.

Alby smiled at that. Then he lifted Jack’s fireman’s helmet from his lap and offered it to Jack. ‘I think this belongs to you.’

Jack took it, and placed it on his head, pulling the chin-strap tight. Just putting it on made himlook and feel whole again.

‘Thanks. I’ve been missing that.’

He nodded at Alby’s sling. ‘So what happened to you?’

‘I got shot.’

‘Jesus Christ, your morn’s really gonna kill me.By who?’

‘By that guy who fell into the chasm with you.Back in Africa, in the Neetha kingdom.’

‘Maybe there is justice in the world,’ Jack said. ‘Come on, little buddy, this ain’t over yet, we gotta move. We have to catch up with the Sea Ranger and the twins.’ He hefted Alby to his feet.

‘How are we going to do that?’ Alby asked.

‘The old-fashioned way,’ Jack said.

Jack and Alby hustled back across the city, heading for the north-east harbour, racing over bridges or swinging—with Alby piggybacking on Jack’s back.

After twenty minutes of this kind of travel, they came to the hill of stone steps that descended into the enclosed harbour there.

‘I just hope they haven’t cleared the tunnel and got to the open sea yet,’ Jack said, pulling off his helmet and stepping knee-deep into the water.

Then he began banging the metal helmet against the first stone step beneath the waterline.

Dull clangs rang out. Three short ones, three long ones, then three short ones again.

Morse code, Alby realised.

Jack clanged the helmet against the stone some more, punching out another code.

‘Let’s hope the sonar operator knows his Morse,’ he said.

‘How will they know it’s you?’AIby said. ‘They might think it’s a trap, that it’s Wolf trying to bring them back.’

‘I’m signalling: “S.O.S. COWBOYS COME BACK.” The twins only just got their nicknames, nicknames Wolf can’t possibly know.’

‘How will you know if they’ve heard you?’

Jack sat down on the top step, holding his helmet limply in his hand. ‘I can’t know. All we can do now is wait and hope they haven’t already gone out of range.’

Jack and Alby waited, sitting on the top step of the hill of stairs rising out of the ancient walled harbour, in the dying yellow light of Wolf’s flares.

The shadows lengthened as the flares began to sink and fizzle out. The majestic underground city and the pyramid lording over it, having existed in darkness for so many centuries, were about to be plunged back into blackness.

And as the last flare began to flicker and die, Jack put his arm around Alby. ‘I’m sorry, kid.’

The flare went out.

Darkness engulfed them.

A moment later, a colossal whooshing noise filled the air, followed by splashing and the sound of water running off the flanks of a—

Bam!

A spotlight lanced out of the darkness, exposing Jack and Alby on their step, illuminating them in a circle of harsh white light. They had to shield their eyes, the light was so bright.

A Russian-made Kilo-class submarine loomed in the water in front of them, dark and immense.

A hatch opened beside the external spotlight and out of it stepped J.J. Wickham, the Sea Ranger, Jack’s long-time friend and captain of theIndian Raider . With him were the Adamson twins, Lachlan and Julius, Jack’s mathematical and historical experts.

‘Jack!’ the Sea Ranger said. ‘And you must be Alby—Jack’s told me all about you. Well, come on! Get in! We were in the middle of a perfectly good escape when you called us back. You can tell us all about how you escaped certain death when we’re out of here. Now, move!’

Jack could only smile. He grabbed Alby’s hand and they leapt down into the water and clambered aboard the submarine.

An hour later, the sub emerged from the ancient tunnel and powered out into the Indian Ocean, barely beating a South African Navy frigate sent to investigate the waters off the Cape of Good Hope.

Once they were safe and clear, the Sea Ranger sought Jack out in his quarters. He found him sitting with Alby, re-dressing the little boy’s bullet wound.

‘You’re lucky the bullet went right through,’ Jack was saying.‘Took a little chunk of your shoulder with it. You’ll have full range of motion again in about six weeks.’

‘What’ll I tell my morn?’ Alby asked.

Jack whispered conspiratorially, ‘I was kinda hoping you’d let me put a cast on your arm and we’d tell your mum you broke your arm falling out of a tree.’

‘Done.’

‘Er, Jack,’ Wickham interrupted. ‘What do we do now?’

Jack looked up.

‘We regroup. As soon as we’re in safe radio-space, call the others on theHalicarnassus and tell them to rendezvous with us at World’s End.’

‘World’s End?I thought it’d been abandoned.’

‘Itwas abandoned, which is why it’s perfect for us right now. Zoe and Wizard know the co-ordinates.’

‘I’ll get on it.’ Wickham left.

Jack watched him go, lost in thought.

Alby was eyeing Jack. ‘Mr West?’

‘Yeah?’Jack came out of his reverie.

‘That Wolf guy has the first two Pillars, fully charged, plus the Firestone and the Philosopher’s Stone. That English lady, Iolanthe, has the Fourth Pillar. We have no sacred stones, no Pillars, no nothing. Have we lost this fight?’

Jack looked down at his feet. Then he replied, ‘Alby, we’re playing a different game to them: they want power and strength and riches. We just want to keep the world turning. And while we’re still breathing, we’re still in the game. No fight is over till the last punch is thrown.’

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA

17 DECEMBER2007, 0600 HOURS.

The South African Navy patrol boat came alongside a military dock in the shadow of Table Mountain.

As soon as its gangway hit the dock, Jack West Sr—Jack’s father and bitter rival in this quest—strode off the boat and stepped straight into a waiting limousine. Known as Wolf, in his late fifties, he was burly and strong, and he looked just like Jack West Jr, with a creased face and ice-blue eyes, only twenty years older.

With Wolf was his five-person entourage, a mixed group that represented the coalition of nations and organisations backing Wolf’s participation in the quest to lay the Six Pillars at the Six Vertices: China, Saudi Arabia, the royal families of Europe, and his own American military-industrial cabal, the Caldwell Group.

Representing China was Colonel Mao Gongli. Known as the Butcher of Tiananmen, he’d supplied Chinese weapons and manpower to the cause. His dead eyes hardly ever registered emotion, not even when he shot someone in the back of the head.

Representing the Caldwell Group along with Wolf was Wolf’s second son, a cold-blooded CIEF operator, formerly of Delta, who went by the call-sign Rapier.

Representing Saudi Arabia was the man who had betrayed Jack West Jr’s team earlier in the mission: thin and angular, with a long rat-like nose, he was an agent of the notorious Saudi Royal Intelligence Service, known as Vulture.

Accompanying Vulture was a handsome young captain from the United Arab Emirates named Scimitar. The first son of its chief sheik—and thus the older brother of Pooh Bear—Scimitar had joined Vulture in his betrayal of Jack and Pooh Bear, even going so far as to leave his younger brother to die in an Ethiopian mine.

The last member of Wolf’s entourage was a woman, a beautiful and poised young lady in her thirties: Ms Iolanthe Compton-Jones, the Keeper of the Royal Records of the House of Windsor.

As the six of them sat in the limousine bound for Cape Town’s military airstrip, Wolf pulled a glittering Pillar from his pack and handed it to Vulture.

‘As per our bargain, Saudi,’ Wolf said. ‘Once I got the Second Pillar, fully charged, you became entitled to the First, also charged.’

Vulture took the First Pillar, charged at the First Vertex at Abu Simbel, eyeing it with barely concealed delight.

When he replied, his eyes scanned Wolf’s closely. ‘That was indeed our bargain, Colonel West. I thank you for honouring the agreement. I wish you good fortune in the remainder of your mission. Should you require any further assistance from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, you need only call.’

The limousine arrived at the military base. Passing the gatehouse without any checks, it arrived at two Gulfstream-IV private jets parked side-by-side.

Vulture and Scimitar boarded one and immediately departed.

Wolf, Rapier, Mao and Iolanthe watched them go.

Mao said, ‘I don’t trust the Saudis for a moment. They have money but they have all the honour of a gang of desert bandits.’

‘They had their use,’ Iolanthe shrugged. ‘We used them.’

‘And they came through,’ Wolf said.

‘So what now?’Mao asked.

‘Now,’ Wolf said, ‘we get a reprieve of approximately three months, till March next year. And we’ll need that time to research the locations of the remaining four Pillars and Vertices.’

Iolanthe said, ‘I have the Fourth Pillar already. The Third Pillar is believed to be in the possession of the Japanese Imperial Family. I understand that after the Second World War, a team of American agents was sent to find it but failed. Is this true?’

Wolf nodded. ‘Hirohito hid it during the war. We never found it. We assume it’s still somewhere in Japan.’

‘Which means we have in our possession the Second and Fourth Pillars,’ he continued. ‘The Third, Fifth and Sixth Pillars must still be found. Likewise, all four of the remaining Vertices need to be discovered before the return of the Dark Sun in March next year. I’ve had my scientific people working on the Stonehenge data while we’ve been traipsing around Africa, and I imagine our new African friend, the Neetha holy man, will have unique knowledge as well.’

‘What about this coalition of minnow nations?’ Mao growled. ‘This group led by your first son, the Australian.’

‘He doesn’t lead them anymore,’ Wolf said, thinking of Jack falling into the abyss. ‘Without him, they’re weakened but not destroyed. The Irish woman is formidable, as we discovered in Africa, and Professor Epper is resilient. In the short-term, pressure needs to be exerted on their masters.’

‘And in the longer term?What if they cross our path again?’

‘Then we crush them with overwhelming force,’ Wolf said.

‘Good,’ Mao said.‘Finally.’

AIRSPACE OVER NAMIBIA

17 DECEMBER 2007, 0645 HOURS

TheHalicarnassus thundered through the sky, banking dramatically to evade the line of glowing tracer rounds that sizzled through the air all around it, tracers that had been unleashed by a pursuing South African Air Force F-15, the first of four fighters chasing it.

The big black 747 rocketed westward, crossing the boundary between the drab brown Namib Desert and the Atlantic Ocean, heading out over the vast expanse of blue.

It had been fleeing like this for almost an hour, since South Africa—all their expenses paid by the Saudis—had scrambled an air patrol to take it out: and in the last ten minutes, as the fighters had caught up with the big jet, it had become a running aerial gun-battle.

As theHalicarnassus flew, it returned fire at the lead F-15 from one of the 50mm gun turrets mounted on the inner sections of its wings.

Manning the starboard gun—facing backwards as the jumbo screamed forward through the air—was Zoe Kissane. She drew a bead on the trailing F-15 and assailed it with a withering blast of 50mm fire.

But the South African pilot was skilled and he barrel-rolled clear of the stream of gunfire.

‘Sky Monster . . . ! ’ Zoe called into her radio. ‘This is like shooting at goddamn bumblebees! What’s ourplan! ’

Sky Monsters voice came in from the cockpit: ‘They might be smaller and faster than we are, but we can fly further than they can. They gotta be running low on fuel. So the plan is: you keep holding them off while I get us as far as possible over the ocean, till they decide they’re too low on gas and have to turn back. We beat them with range.’

Sky Monster proved to be correct.

A few minutes later, the lead South African fighter loosed a single AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missile and bugged out, heading back for the mainland with his buddies.

Zoe took care of the Sidewinder with a directed microwave burst that literally cooked the missile’s dome-mounted infra-red targeting system and the missile ditched harmlessly into the ocean.

The aerial battle over, she wearily headed up to the 747’s cockpit, where she found Wizard and Lily with Sky Monster.

Oddly, they were grinning, beaming even.

‘Zoe,’ Wizard said. ‘We just got a call from the Sea Ranger. Jack’s alive and he has Alby with him. The Sea Ranger has them both. They want us to rendezvous at World’s End.’

Zoe sighed with relief. ‘Thank God. Take us there.’

LITTLEMcDONALD ISLAND INDIAN OCEAN

20 DECEMBER 2007

3 DAYS LATER

At the bottom of the Indian Ocean, in one of the most remote regions of the world, there can be found a cluster of barren rocky islands.

TheKerguélen Islands are administered by France, while the Prince Edward Islands are claimed by South Africa. But south of them all, battered all year round by icy Antarctic winds and the rolling waves of the southern seas, is the Heard group of islands. They are administered by Australia.

One of the Heard islands is Little McDonald Island. It has no wildlife and little flora. There is literally no reason to go there.Which is probably why it was used during World War II as a resupply base for the Australian Navy, complete with fuel dumps, storage warehouses and even a short landing strip.

By the 1990s, its use as a base was long obsolete and it was shut down in late 1991. Whole containers of canned food and diesel fuel had been left there and in sixteen years, not a single can had been stolen. It wasn’t worth the effort to get there.

Thus no-one in the world noticed the Kilo-class submarine and the black Boeing 747 that arrived at Little McDonald Island two days after the high drama at the Second Vertex.

Of course, they knew the island by another name: World’s End.

***

The reunion of Jack and the team was a joyous occasion.

Lily leapt into Jack’s arms, hugged him tightly—then she ran over to Alby and hugged him even harder.

Zoe and Jack also embraced warmly, holding each other for a full minute.

‘Alby told me all about what happened with the Neetha,’ Jack said softly. ‘You must have been incredible.’

Zoe didn’t answer.

She just began sobbing on Jack’s shoulder, burying her head in his neck, unleashing the pent-up stress and emotion that had been inside her since her bloody encounter with the lost tribe of African cannibals.

When at last she spoke, she said in a hoarse voice, ‘Next time,let’s let somebody else save the world.’

Jack laughed, stroking her hair gently.

As he held Zoe, he saw Wizard and, with him the archaeologist and Neetha expert Diane Cassidy, plus the Neetha youth, Ono, who had helped them during their escape from the remote tribe.

Wizard smiled. ‘Clearly, it’s not the fall that kills you, Jack.’

‘Right,’ Jack said.

‘Hey,’ Lily said, looking around, suddenly alarmed. ‘Where’s Pooh Bear? And where’s Stretch?’

Once the reunion was complete and introductions made, the team went inside a decrepit old warehouse beside the island’s airstrip. Water was heated for showers; canned food was opened and eaten; and Jack explained to the others what had happened to him before he’d arrived at Cape Town.

He told them what had happened at the mine in Ethiopia, including the betrayal of Vulture and Scimitar, his own gruesome crucifixion, his and Pooh Bear’s bloody escape and the parting gift they’d received from the Ethiopian slave-force there: the fabled Twin Tablets of Thuthmosis.

Jack pulled the two stone tablets from his rucksack, which had been kept on the submarine during the events at the Second Vertex. Wizard audibly gasped at the sight of them.

‘If Thuthmosis was actually Moses,’ he said, ‘then that would make these the TenComm —’

‘Yes,’ Jack said.

‘Goodness-gracious-Mother-of . . . ’

‘As for Stretch,’ Jack went on, ‘Wolf didn’t bring him to the mine. Instead, he took him back to the Mossad in Israel, to claim the sixteen-million-dollar bounty on Stretch’s head.’

‘Oh no . .. ’ Lily breathed.

Jack said, ‘After Pooh Bear and I escaped from that mine in Ethiopia, we headed south to the old farm in Kenya. But when I set out for Zanzibar to find the Sea Ranger, Pooh Bear didn’t come with me. He went off to rescue Stretch from the Mossad’s dungeons. That was nine days ago. I haven’t heard from him since.’

A solemn silence descended on the group.

Lily broke it.

‘When we were in the Hanging Gardens,’ she said, ‘Stretch defied an Israeli Army squad and saved my life. He chose us over them and now they’re making him pay.’

She recalled the scene vividly: trapped in a filling pool of quicksand, she had stood on Stretch’s shoulders to poke her nose and mouth above the surface, while he had breathed through his sniper rifle’s gun-barrel, using it as a snorkel.

Alby asked, ‘What does the Mossad do to Israeli soldiers who switch sides and fight against them?’

Jack threw a glance at Zoe and Wizard. Zoe nodded silently. Wizard just bowed his head.

When he finally answered, Jack spoke in a low voice, his face serious. ‘The Mossad isn’t known for showing mercy to its enemies. Traitors like Stretch receive the harshest punishment of all. There are stories of maximum-security desert prisons, their locations kept strictly secret, where high-grade prisoners are kept under twenty- four-hour guard and . . . mistreated . . . for years.’

‘Mistreated?’ Lily said.

‘Foryears ?’Alby said.

Jack said, ‘if Pooh Bear even manages to discover where they’re keeping Stretch, getting in and busting him out will be an all-but-impossible task. It’d be like breaking into Guantanamo Bay and running off with a terrorist.’

Lily said, ‘Youdid that once, Daddy. Can’t we go and help Pooh Bear?’

Jack looked at her sadly. ‘Lily.Honey. There are some operations that even I wouldn’t dare attempt, and this is one of them. I’m sorry, I really am, but we have to leave that to Pooh Bear and keep our eyes on the larger mission. It’s a hard decision for me to make, really hard, believe me, but weighing up the possibilities and probabilities of success, I have to make it this way. I’m sorry.’

Jack bowed his head, but not before he saw the look Lily gave him—a look he’d never seen on her face before. It was a look of the most profound disappointment, and in that moment, he hated himself.

‘So whatare we going to do now then?’ Lily asked in a sour tone.

‘First of all,’ Jack said, ‘Alby is going back to his mother in Perth; she’ll be beside herself when she sees his arm. And after Christmas, I’ll be sending you to join him. Keep you two out of harm’s way for a while.’

‘What!’ Lily protested. ‘What about the rest of you?’

‘We’re going to try to find the remaining Pillars and Vertices before the world ends in March next year.’

WOLF’S MINE

LALIBELA, ETHIOPIA

11 DECEMBIR 2007

ONE WEEK EARLIER

Wolf and Mao Gongli emerged from the mine, stepping out into bright sunshine.

It was six days before the events at the Second Vertex.

Wolf had just seen his son Jack West Jr crushed underneath a massive stone slab, seemingly killed. He’d also left Pooh Bear down there to be sacrificed by the mine’s zealous religious guards.

Waiting calmly and casually up here was the British woman, Iolanthe. Waiting less casually—hogtied hand and foot with handcuffs, bleeding from a beating, his eyes blindfolded by a filthy rag, and lying face-down in the bed of a pick-up truck—was Stretch.

Arriving at the pick-up, Wolf stood over Stretch for a long moment, as if assessing him.

‘Lieutenant Benjamin Cohen,’ Wolf mused. ‘Once of theSayaretMatkal , the famed Israeli sniper force, where you attained the call-signArcher . Transferred to the Mossad in 2003 and soon after assigned to infiltrate the multi-national team led by Jack West Jr and monitor its attempts to locate the pieces of the Golden Capstone of the Great Pyramid. But you went native and youjoined West and his team, culminating in a terribleSolomonic Choice where you had to choose between your new friends and your old masters.’

Wolf paused. ‘And you chose your new friends.’

Beside him, Mao grunted in disgust.

‘Which is why your old bosses at the Mossad made you a Category 5 Enemy of the State of Israel—a category usually reserved only for ex-Nazis and terrorist leaders. They put a price on your head, sixteen million dollars, which I will be only too happy to collect. You chose wrong, Lieutenant Cohen.’

With his head pressed against the hard steel bed of the pick-up, beneath his blindfold, Stretch closed his eyes in dismay.

A single tear appeared from underneath his blindfold and trickled down his cheek.

Curiously, Wolf himself took Stretch to Israel.

Of course Stretch was kept blindfolded for the duration of the short journey—during which time he heard Wolf occasionally speak on a satellite phone with his team in Africa, the team pursuing Wizard, Zoe, Lily and Alby through Rwanda and the Congo.

But for the final leg of his journey to his former masters, Stretch was drugged and his world went black.

When he awoke, he found—to his horror—that he was suspended upright inside a reinforced glass tank of some sort, his hands and feet spreadeagled, star-like, manacled to chains at the four corners of the phone-booth-sized tank.

He was naked.

He noticed an IV drip stuck into his right arm—its tiny clear tube rose up and out the open top of his rectangular glass coffin. A catheter-like excretion unit covering his groin area took away waste.

Beyond the confines of his tank, Stretch saw Wolf talking with an older man whom Stretch had met only once in his time at the Mossad: Mordechai Muniz, the ruthless former head of the Mossad, nowits ‘official advisor’.

Bald, fat and pale, with pitiless black eyes, Muniz had been on the team that abducted Adolf Eichmann from Argentina in 1960.

He had also captured the Black September mastermind behind the Munich Olympics massacre: alive. The terrorist had not been seen since. In the world of spy agencies, Muniz was a legend and his nickname, ‘the Old Master’, was well deserved.

The Old Master turned to appraise Stretch, surveying his manacled and exposed body like a hunter assessing a captured lion.

Muniz smiled thinly, revealing a set of uneven yellow teeth. ‘Lieutenant Cohen. Welcome back to your homeland. You know, there are some who believe that traitors like you should simply be executed for their crimes. But in the higher echelons of the Mossad, we believe that as a punishment death is too easy, too quick, for one such as you: you the wrongdoer suffer no consequence for youractions, you don’t get to really think about what you’ve done.’

As Muniz spoke, Stretch saw two technicians climb up a pair of stepladders on either side of his nine-foot-tall glass tank. One of them reached in the open top of the tank and jammed a nose-and-mouth scuba-diving regulator over Stretch’s mouth and nose, securing it firmly to Stretch’s head so he couldn’t dislodge it. The regulator’s oxygen tube snaked up and out of the big tank to an air canister attached to its rear flank.

The second technician did something far more frightening.

He angled a wide-borefirehose into Stretch’s tank and pulled a lever, unloading gallon after gallon of a stinking green liquid into the tank. The liquid swelled around Stretch’s feet, sloshing wildly, quicklyrising to his knees . . . then his waist . . . then his chest

Bang!

The two technicians slammed a thick glass lid down onto the tank’s open top and started welding it into place with blowtorches.

Welding it. . .

His mouth covered by the breathing apparatus, Stretch’s eyes boggled.

They were welding him inside this tank!

The sickly green liquid rose ever higher, reaching his throat. Muniz’s voice sounded hollow now, distant. He said, ‘No, Lieutenant Cohen, death is far too good a sentence for you. Your crime deserves more than that: it requires substantial suffering. This is where I come in. Trust me, after several years down here with me, you’ll wish we’d executed you.’

And with that the foul green liquid sloshed over Stretch’s face and he began to breathe quickly, desperately, through his scuba mouthpiece.

The world around him became blurred, veiled in pale green.

Stretch could just make out Muniz and Wolf shaking hands, and Muniz handing Wolf a suitcase of some kind.

Then Wolf left.

Muniz returned, alone.

And he stood before Stretch’s tank, arms folded, just staring up at Stretch—naked and spreadeagled, submerged in the foul green liquid, encased in the welded-shut reinforced glass tank.

Unable to move, and hearing only the sound of his own breathing inside his head, Stretch watched the blurred figure of Muniz standing there gazing at him.

Then Muniz went over to his desk and casually sat down to make a phone call, and in a moment of the purest horror, Stretch suddenly saw how he was destined to spend the rest of his natural life.

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL

31 DECEMBER 2007, 2358 HOURS

It had taken Pooh Bear almost three weeks and two million dollars to find him.

Money certainly made things move more quickly, he thought. The Israelis had spent sixty years trying to capture Wolfgang Linstricht, but to no avail. Once, in Buenos Aires, a Mossad assassin had found him, but Linstricht had killed the man with a bread-knife through the ribs, having stalked his stalker through the grimy alleyways of the Argentine capital.

A lifetime ago Linstricht had been the sergeant-at-arms at the notorious Nazi concentration camp Treblinka. He had been Franz Stangl’s enforcer: when the commandant ordered that someone be shot, it was Linstricht, a towering six-foot-four brute, who’d carried out the order.

But when World War II ended and top Nazis likeStangl scattered, Linstricht also slipped the net and fled to South America, and had not been seen since.

As Pooh Bear had discovered, Linstricht moved constantly between South American countries to avoid capture: from Brazil to Argentina to Chile. The Israeli abduction of Adolph Eichmann must have scared the shit out of him. But as the episode with the Mossad stalker showed, even at age 86 and constantly hunched to disguise his height, Linstricht was still lethal.

And now here he was, Pooh Bear saw, right there across the street, and old man chatting up a long—legged Brazilian prostitute amid the fireworks and festival atmosphere of New Year’s Eve in Rio.

Pooh Bear watched them from the shadows, watched them head hack to Linstricht’s hotel.

After Pooh Bear and Jack had parted ways at Nairobi airport three weeks earlier, Pooh Bear had headed back to his home country of the United Arab Emirates, his primary goal: to discover where the Israeli Secret Service, the Mossad, was keeping his friend Stretch.

He also wanted to inform his father the Emirates’ chief sheik, Anzar al Abbas, of his brother Scimitar’s heinous betrayal.

But en route to Dubai, Pooh Bear had discovered from a friend in the Intelligence Service that only a day before, his father had abruptly disappeared. The old sheik, he was told, had been summoned by Scimitar to join him in Riyadh. Shortly after, all contact with him had been lost.

Dubai, Pooh Bear’s friend told him, was now in the hands of his brother’s cronies. It was not safe for him to return.

Despite the state of affairs back home, being the second son of the Emirates’ chief sheik still had its advantages. Pooh Bear had contacts in the international intelligence community and large amounts of his own trust-fund money—a couple of million dollars—to throw around.

For a week, Pooh Bear made calls, did research, paid bribes and spoke with Mossad watchers both legitimate and not-so-legitimate. For a quarter of a million dollars, he acquired a collection of CIA intercepts of phone conversations between the highest ranked Mossad officials.

After all that, his key discovery about Benjamin Cohen—once known as Archer, but known to Pooh by the name Lily had given him, Stretch—was that he had been designated a Category 5 Enemy of the State of Israel for the crime of treason.

Israel’s ‘Category 5 List’ was an elite one, reserved for the worst of Israel’s enemies.

But despite his intelligence contacts, intercepts and money, Pooh Bear could not discover where captured Category 5 enemies were jailed. No-one knew. Lesser targets were placed in military prisons orsupermax jails. But not Category Fivers. If they were jailed, no- one knew where, and if they were executed no-one knew where or how such executions were carried out.

The only thing that Pooh knew for sure was that if Israel captured a Category 5 enemy, that man disappeared from the face of the Earth.

And so he formed a plan.

He would find a Category 5 Enemy of the State of Israel and turn him in to the Mossad—but not before doing one last thing.

The target he chose was Wolfgang Linstricht.

Fireworks exploded in the sky above Rio.

Ten minutes after the New Year was rung in and with the last fireworks still flaring above the city, Pooh Bear kicked in the door of Room 6 of a run-down hotel on the waterfront.

Wolfgang Linstricht leapt out of bed, naked, hurling the woman off him, reaching for a pistol among his clothes—but Pooh Bear was faster, bounding across the room. He must have looked fearsome to the ageing German: a burly, dark-eyed, big-bearded, olive-skinned Arab, charging across the dingy room. Pooh kicked Linstricht to the ground before he could grab the gun and jammed a handheld taser into the German’s ribs.

Linstricht convulsed violently and then slumped to the floor. The prostitute screamed.

‘Get out,’Pooh Bear growled.

She scuttled out, clutching her clothes, leaving Pooh Bear standing over the unconscious Linstricht in the damp little room.

Pooh Bear pulled a capsule from his pocket—it was the size of a standard headache pill—slid it into Linstricht’s mouth and pinched the man’s nose, forcing him to swallow it.

Then Pooh Bear called the Mossad.

DIMONA NUCLEAR RESEARCH CENTRE

NEGEV DESERT, ISRAEL

10 JANUARY, 2008, 0530 HOURS

Ten days later, Pooh Bear lay flat on his belly in the hills of the Negev Desert in the barren core of Israel.

Two hundred metres ahead of him stood an enormous military facility, the centrepiece of which was a sixty-foot-high shiny silver dome. Arrayed around the dome were a dozen warehouse-sized buildings, two concrete smokestacks and a cluster of satellite dishes and radio antennas. Anti-aircraft gun emplacements marked every corner of the base—emplacements, Pooh had noticed,that were manned twenty-four hours a day.

It was the Dimona Nuclear Research Centre, the beating heart of the Israeli nuclear weapons programme, a programme whose very existence Israel has neither confirmed nor denied since the 1960s.

As Pooh Bear well knew, Israel possessed nuclear weapons—about two hundred of them, in fact—and they built them here at Dimona, making it the most heavily guarded installation in the country.

It was curious then, Pooh thought, that the capsule-sized GPS transponder that he’d slipped down Wolfgang Linstricht’s throat had led him here. After the Mossad had picked up Linstricht— based on Pooh’s tip-off—they had taken a circuitous three-day journey halfway around the world that had ended here at Dimona.

And according to Pooh’s GPS monitor, Linstricht had been taken to a small bunker-like building half-buried in the earth in the isolated north-eastern corner of the base.

***

The Negev Desert is one of the most desolate places on Earth.

The ruins of ancientwaystations , stopping points on the spice route, can be found among its rocky hills and valleys. Likewise, Roman-era quarries and mines are common: King Herod’s vast salt mine,Baqaba , lies forty kilometres south of Dimona, not far from its smaller sister mine,Uqaba . Crumbling mesas and craters provide the only sights. It is a dead land: vast, empty and of little interest to anyone. Nothing grows in the Negev.

It had taken Pooh Bear four days to get into position close to thefenceline .

Four days of careful slow crawling, so as not to set off any motion sensors; sleeping under a camouflaged thermal blanket so as not to betray a heat signature; and lying still during the day so as not to catch the eye of the sentries who periodically patrolled the perimeter of the complex.

He’d spent half of one day locating some kind of weak-point in the fence—and found it in a small eroded crevice of crumbled rock that straddled the base of the fence on the eastern side of the complex. The second half of that day had been spent chipping away at the crevice, making it wide enough for him to slip through under the fence.

After that, he’d backed off and waited till this morning to make his move.

The reason: according to hisintel , the previous night Dimona was to receive a large shipment of enriched uranium, during which security would be upgraded.

Hisintel proved to be correct: that night the whole base had lit up like a football stadium, with floodlights blazing and extra guards patrolling the fences. Around midnight, over at the main gates on the western side of the complex, a large semi-trailer rig—with a lead-lined shipping container on its back and flanked by escort jeeps equipped with .50 calibre machine guns—had rumbled into the complex and headed for the base’s storage and enrichment facility, Machon-2.

This morning, with the operation safely over, the extra guards were let go and—Pooh wagered—the base guards would be unwinding, glad it had gone off without a hitch. They would be looser. They would be careless.

Pooh Bear gazed up at the massive silver dome rising above the base before him—the main reactor, known as Machon-1.

Game time, he said to himself.

Dawn came and Pooh Bear made his move.

He slipped under the fence and crouch-ran toward the isolated bunker. A small explosive blasted open the lock on its heavy steel door and Pooh Bear was in.

Dark concrete corridors, a darker concrete stairwell plunging down into the bowels of the Earth, and suddenly a strange pungent odour that made his nose crinkle, an odour that smelled like formaldehyde.

Moving fast and low with his MP-7 gripped tightly and guided by his blinking GPS receiver, Pooh Bear emerged from the stairwell into a wider space . . .

. . .and his mouth fell open.

‘Allah in Heavensave me. . . ’ he breathed in horror.

Pooh Bear foundhimself standing in an ancient subterranean room built by Roman engineers over two thousand years ago: multiple sandstone arches and ornate columns dominated each side of the square three-storey-high space. A small pool, empty of water, lay to one side, once a Roman bath.

A large desk and a high-backed leather chair sat at one end of the chamber, facing the source of Pooh’s horror.

On the opposite side of the room, arrayed in three horizontal rows of four so that they were positioned within the Roman arches, stood twelve massive water tanks, each the size of a large telephone booth.

Each tank was filled to the brim with a pale green liquid and encased in them, hovering in the liquid, arms and legs outstretched in humiliating star shapes, weremen —naked men wearing half-face scuba breathing masks and plugged into IV and excretion tubes.

Pooh Bear found he couldn’t breathe.

It was a wall of human trophies.

Livinghuman trophies.

They looked like a dozen HarryHoudinis , all having failed the same water-tank escape trick. Lines of bubbles rose from their mouthpieces.Some of them blinked, alert and awake in their liquid hells.

So this is what happens to Israel’s most reviled enemies, Pooh thought.

And in an instant the meaning of the pungent odour became clear: the green liquid was formaldehyde or a watered-down form of it, and formaldehyde was an excellent preservative. These men were being kept alive andpreserved in their tanks.

Pooh Bear began to feel ill.

He shook the thought away and began searching the tanks for his friend.

In the first tank he came to, he saw Wolfgang Linstricht suspended in the green haze, eyes closed, asleep. In the next tank, Pooh saw another elderly white man whom he couldn’t place, then in the third, a younger man with the distinctive long beard of an Islamic extremist, and then in the fourth. . .

. . .Stretch.

Pooh Bear gasped as he saw his friend spreadeagled in the green liquid, his head bowed, his eyes closed.

Pooh banged on the glass wall of the tank and Stretch’s eyes opened. At first they squinted in the green gloom but then Stretch seemed to realise that the person standing in front of his tank was not the usual person.

His eyes sprang open when he saw that it was Pooh Bear. A burst of bubbles exploded from his scuba mouthpiece.

‘Hang on,’ Pooh Bear said, even though Stretch couldn’t possibly hear him. ‘I’m gonna get you out of there—’

It was at that exact moment that Pooh Bear felt a stinging stab on the nape of his neck. He reached up and felt a small dart there.

Then his arm fell suddenly limp and a wave of terror shot through him as he realised he couldn’t move his limbs.

Pooh slumped to the floor in front of Stretch’s tank, his entire body going slack.

He heard a voice.

‘One shouldn’t enter a spider’s web unless he is truly sure the spider won’t return while he is there.’

A figure stepped into Pooh Bear’s field of vision: he was an older man, bald, fat and pale, and he smiled meanly. With him was an Israeli soldier, holding a tranquilliser gun.

‘Hello, Zahir al Anzar al Abbas,’ the older man said brightly.

‘My name is Mordechai Muniz. We’ve been watching you on our thermal imagers for two days now. You’ve been a source of immense amusement to me and to the guards at this base. You really are a tenacious son of a whore. That you got this far at all is very impressive.Foolish, but impressive.’

The Old Master grinned. ‘You like my living human decorations? The diluted formaldehyde mixture works well—it’s a marvellous preservative, although after a decade or so, its carcinogenic properties seep through the skin to produce very painful cancers in my guests. I learned this technique of “live-imprisonment” from a Russian friend of mine, an ex-Soviet general who has a collection of his own. We have a friendly competition going, he and I, to see who can amass the most impressive collection of human beings.’

Pooh Bear still couldn’t move.

Muniz shrugged. ‘Considering the long silent life your friend has ahead of him, today you have brought him a rare gift: an event. Congratulations, Lieutenant Cohen will get to watch you die in front of him.’

Pooh Bear could only lie there, helpless on the floor, his eyes wide,his limbs useless.

But then in a sudden moment of realisation, he saw his watch—the watch Jack had given him on the tarmac at Nairobi Airport when they had parted; the watch which Jack had said was fitted with an emergency GPS beacon that Pooh could press if he were ever captured or in danger.

With all his might, Pooh Bear willed his right hand toward his left wrist, toward the watch, hut no matter how hard he tried or how desperately he focused his mind on it, his right hand wouldn’t—couldn’t—move.

The watch, his only means of letting anyone know where he was, remained tantalisingly out of reach.

Pooh slumped his head against the hard marble floor devastated, and in that moment, he knew this rescue was over, a valiant but foolhardy failure.

He closed his eyes in disgust. . .

. . .just as from somewhere outside there came a dull shuddering boom that took both Pooh Bear and Mordechai Muniz by surprise.

Sirens wailed and emergency lights flashed all over the Dimona Nuclear Research Centre.

A great plume of black smoke rose up from one end of Machon-2, the uranium storage warehouse next to the main reactor dome, Machon-1. The charred remains of the giant semi-trailer rig that had delivered the uranium shipment the night before now lay in a smoking heap at the building’s docking bay.

People in uniforms and civilian clothing ran as fast as they could away from the rising column of smoke while, a few minutes later, twofiretrucks and three jeeps carrying soldiers in full-body yellow biohazard suits hurriedtoward the disaster.

Despite its relative plainness, Machon-2 was actually the most important structure in the whole complex. During a series of now-infamous inspection visits by US nuclear weapons inspectors between 1962 and 1969, the Israelis had built a false wall and an entirely fake control room to conceal the four underground levelsbeneath the surface structure, levels on which the Israelis built their nuclear devices.

For an accident to occur in or near it was catastrophic.

Inside the Old Master’s hunker, Mordechai Muniz snatched up his phone: ‘What’s going on!’

‘We have a Level-4 situation, sir,’ the voice at the other end of the line replied anxiously. ‘All personnel must evacuate the base immediately. Please report to your rendezvous point for head-count.’

Muniz hung up, glancing over at Pooh Bear on the floor of his private chamber.

No, he thought.The Arab was passionate, sure, but not nearly clever enough to engineer this .

Muniz.noddedto his private guard, ‘Let’s go.’

The two of them hustled out of Muniz’s trophy-lined office, clambered up the stairwell and threw open the heavy steel door to the Old Master’s lair, only for the guard to be blown away by two shots from a Desert Eagle pistol held by Jack West Jr.

He wore a bright yellow full-body biohazard uniform, with the hood slung back over his shoulder.

Quick as a whip, Muniz drew his own pistol, hut Jack shot him in the forearm and the gun went skittering away. Muniz roared and clutched his arm, his teeth clenched more in anger than in pain.

‘Morning, General. I’m Jack West Jr and I’m here to take back my friends.’

Handcuffed and gagged, Muniz was thrown across the floor of his subterranean lair as Jack stepped down into it.

‘Well, this is just a little creepy. . . ’ he said on seeing the array of tanks containing Israel’s enemies.

He went straight to Pooh Bear’s side, slid to the floor beside his fallen Arab friend. Pooh Bear was only just breathing, paralysis setting in.

‘Jack. .?‘ Pooh gasped.‘How. .?‘

‘Tell you later,’ Jack said, extracting a hypodermic syringe from the combat webbing beneath his biohazard suit before quickly and precisely jabbing it directly into Pooh’s heart.

Pooh Bear came leaping up into a sitting position, gasping deep hoarse breaths, his eyes bulging.

Jack said, ‘That’ll wake you up in the morning.’

As Pooh regathered himself, Jack was already moving toward Stretch’s tank. He paused in front of the big tank—it was only for a moment but it felt like an eternity—and beheld his friend suspended in the green solution, in womb-like silence, kept alive by the intravenous drip, a living, breathing trophy.

Then he raised his Desert Eagle and tired two shots into the thick glass of the tank, angling the shots away from Stretch’s body.

The front panel of the tank shattered and then quickly collapsed under the weight of liquid pressing against it. A waterfall of green fluid came blasting out of the tank, sloshing around Jack until all that remained was the empty tank with its front section completely open and Stretch dangling there, still cuffed, the scuba regulator strapped to his face.

Through bleary, heavy eyes, Stretch looked up to see Jack standing before him.

Jack nodded curtly. ‘Welcome to your own rescue. This is the halfway point.Time to start the second half.’

Reaching up, Jack removed the mouthpiece first—Stretch coughed and gagged, sucking air into his dry throat. Then Jack extracted the IV drip and, painfully, the excretion catheter from Stretch’s body. After that Jack used his gun to shoot through the chains of Stretch’s four manacles and Stretch fell out of the tank, free, the manacles still looped around his wrists and ankles like macabre bracelets.

Jack leaned forward, allowed Stretch to fall onto his shoulders in a fireman’s carry.

Pooh Bear joined them as Jack raced for the stairs, gun in one hand, Stretch on his shoulders.

‘What about those others?’ Pooh Bear said.‘In the tanks.’

‘I’m only concerned about one guy today,’ Jack said grimly. ‘Unlike Stretch, those other men did terrible things. I say, if they’ve still got any, we leave it to their friends to rescue them. Come on. We gotta hustle.’

‘How did you find me?’ Pooh Bear asked as they bounded up the stairwell. ‘I never pressed the SOS button on the watch you gave me.’

Jack spoke as he ran. ‘The button triggers an active alarm, but the watch sends out a constant passive GPS signal, plus a pulse rate. I kinda didn’t tell you about that.’

‘It was transmitting all along...’

‘You’ve covered many miles this past month, my friend,’ Jack threw a quick look back at Pooh Bear. ‘Tel Aviv, Haifa, Buenos Aires. And Rio for the New Year, although I can’t imagine you were there for the fireworks. You became a Nazi hunter.

‘When I saw you turn up here in the Negev outside Israel’s most important nuclear weapons centre and stay here for a few days, I knew you’d found him. We hung back, waiting to see how you did. But when we saw your pulse rate start toplummet a short while ago, we made the call and figured you needed a hand.’

‘We?’Pooh asked. ‘Who’s here with you?’

As he said this, they burst out into sunlight, just as an Israeli military ambulance came to a skidding halt right in front of them, with Zoe at the wheel. She also wore a yellow biohazard suit with the hood swept back.

‘Everyone’shere,’ Jack said, and Pooh felt his heart soar.

‘How on Earth did you get inside this base?’ Pooh Bear asked as they arrived at the ambulance.

‘How else?’Jack gave Pooh another enigmatic look. ‘We came inside last night’s uranium shipment. Where do you think Israel gets its high-grade uranium ore from?’

‘Where?’

‘Biggest uranium producer in the world: Australia.’

Of course, it was a little more complicated than that.

What Jack had said about the wristwatch was true. Observing first from Little McDonald Island and later from SAS headquarters in Fremantle, Jack had tracked Pooh Bear’s progress around the world.

When he saw Pooh head into the Negev and stop for several days in this area—an area that every military organisation in the world knew about: Dimona—he knew Pooh had discovered where the Mossad was keeping Stretch.

The question was whether Pooh could bust Stretch out by himself.

Some calls were made, and Jack discovered that a shipment of uranium was on its way to Dimona from Australia. It was already halfway across the Indian Ocean, heading for Israel’s Red Sea port ofEilat .

Arrangements were made for Jack and Zoe to rendezvous with the freighter carrying the uranium, and theyhelicoptered onto the ship in the dead of night three nights ago, along with two trusted military engineers, and one lieutenant general whose orders could not be overruled by anyone.

Some hasty engineering work was carried out on the lead-lined shipping container holding the uranium—it was a 90-foot container on the outside, but after some quick reconfiguring, it was only 85 feet long on the inside: a small gap had been inserted at one end with enough space for Jack and Zoe to stow aboard.

The irony that they might get past the Israelis’ defences at Dimona by using the same trick the Israelis themselves had used on the US inspectors in the ‘60s was not lost on Jack.

Other precautions were taken: the Sea Ranger was getting into position; and Sky Monster had been dispatched to meet up with some Australian SAS troops in western Iraq, some of them former colleagues of Jack’s. Lily and Alby stayed at Alby’s home in Perth— this mission was far too dangerous to bring them along.

And so Jack and Zoe had entered Dimona, hidden inside the uranium container, watching Pooh’s pulse rate and waiting.If Pooh got in and out of there alive, they would simply leave inside the empty container when it was picked up a day later. If on the other hand, Pooh’s pulse rate took a sudden dive, then. . .

That morning, Pooh’s pulse rate had plunged dramatically and Jack and Zoe had sprung into action.

‘Have you got ‘em?!’Jack called to Zoe as he placed Stretch into the back of the military ambulance,lying him on its wheeled gurney.

In the driver’s seat, Zoe turned to answer him, hut caught herself when she saw Stretch—naked save for Pooh’s jacket, deathly pale and shivering, dripping all over with glistening green wetness.

‘Jesus . .. ’ she breathed. Then, snapping out of it, ‘Yeah!Got a pair of them!’ She patted two chunky silver suitcases on the seat beside her.

‘Then let’s get the hell out of here!’ Jack said,slamming the rear doors shut behind him.

The ambulance shot off the mark.

***

Pandemonium reigned all over Dimona.

Firetrucksroared through the streets of the base. Sirens wailed. Men in biohazard suits rushed toward the smoking hulk of Machon-2. Medical crews loaded coughing people into ambulances and sped away.

As three such ambulances sped toward the main gates of Dimona, a fourth military ambulance whipped out of a side street and joined the little convoy.

All four vehicles were stopped at the gates by the guards: Pooh was hidden beneath Stretch’s gurney while Jack and Zoe now put on the yellow hoods of theirbiosuits , revealing only their eyes through Perspex visors.

The guard who saw Stretch—strapped down, still wet and pale and sickly to look at, with an oxygen mask over his mouth— screwed up his face in disgust and yelled, ‘Go! Go!’ and Zoe floored it and the ambulance sped out of the Dimona Nuclear Research Centre.

‘I reckon we have about twenty minutes till they figure out who we are and what we’ve taken,’ Jack said to Zoe as they sped west away from the base, tailing the other three military ambulances.

‘Which means thirty minutes till they find us with chase choppers,’ Zoe said.

‘Where are we going?’ Pooh Bear asked, kneeling beside Stretch in the back. ‘You do have an escape plan, don’t you?’

‘Yeah, but it’s not as imaginative as our entry plan was,’ Jack said. ‘How were you going to get out?’

‘The same way I got in.Slowly and with patience.’

‘Okay, our plan is definitely not like that.’

‘So where are we going?’ Pooh asked.

‘Those ambulances are going west to Beersheba, in accordance withDimona’s Radiation Emergency Evacuation Plan. We’re going to cut south and make for a place called Aroham nearUqaba .’

‘How far is it?’

‘About fortyklicks ,’ Jack said. ‘Which means it’s going to be close.’

About five kilometres later, the ambulance convoy came to a fork in the road and the three lead ambulances took the right-hand route, heading for Beersheba. Jack’s ambulance, however, swung left and immediately sped up, zooming down the desert highway, the vast emptiness of the Negev rushing by on either side of it.

Exactly fifteen minutes later, the first chase helicopters appeared on the horizon behind it: four American-made Apache gunships.

Attack choppers.

Jack saw them in his side mirror then looked forward: to see a rise in the road ahead on which stood the dusty ruins of Aroham, ruins he wanted to reach before the choppers caught up with—

—their ambulance crested the rise and Jack’s spirits rose at what he saw beyond it: a beautiful black Boeing 747, standing alone on the empty desert highway, beside a smaller set of ruins, wings swept back, tail raised high; a black plane that could only he theHalicarna —

—but just then one of the Apaches swooped in from the right and swung into a low hover over the road right in front of their ambulance, all its guns pointed right at them, cutting them off from the escape plane!

There was a dirt side-road to the left and Jack yelled to Zoe, ‘Go left!’

The ambulance fishtailed as it swung left, zooming onto the dirt road, kicking up a cloud of dust that swirled around the hovering Apache.

A short way down the dirt road was a sorry collection of half- crumbled sandstone ruins: the Roman ruins of Aroham.

Seeing the ambulance take the sudden turn, the other three Apaches leapt forward and caught up, pulling into a wide circular formation around the ambulance and the ancient ruins.

Zoe brought the ambulance to a skidding halt, a dustcloud billowing up all around it as she did so.

The ambulance’s radio squawked.

An Israeli voice came over it, speaking in English: ‘Attention in the ambulance! We know who you are, Captain West! There’s no way out of here. Step out of the vehicle, with your hands raised or you will be fired upon!’

‘Jack . ..‘ Zoe said.

‘On it.’Jack turned, grabbing the radio. He pressed the TALK button.‘Israeli helicopter patrol. I hear you, but I suggest you pull back to a distance of two kilometres and hold that radius.’

‘You have to be fucking joking,’came the reply.

In reply, Jack grabbed one of the two silver briefcases on the seat between him and Zoe and took one step out of the ambulance, holding it high above his head for the encircling helicopters to see.

‘Recognise this?’ Jack said into the radio. ‘I said two kilometres and not an inch closer. Do it now.’

There was silence on the airwaves, followed by, ‘That’s a—holy fuck.Copy, Captain. We will comply.’

Pooh Bear watched the exchange first with curiosity and then with amazement.

‘What’s in the case, Huntsman?’ he asked.

‘Zoe and I didn’t spendall night in that shipping container, Pooh. When you’re left inside Machon-2 for twelve hours, there are other things to find that can aid your escape. This case,’ Jack said, ‘is an Israeli suitcase nuclear bomb.’

‘A suitcase nuke!’Pooh Bear exclaimed.

Jack said, ‘Theysay there are Israeli suitcase bombs at secret locations in all the major capitals of the world—New York, Washington, London, Moscow, Paris—and in the major cities of Israel’s key enemies: Damascus, Tehran, Cairo. They’re Israel’s ultimate insurance policy.Small nuclear devices. Fifty-kiloton yield, blast radius of two kilometres, minimal fallout—but everything within that radius will be vaporised. Nice thing to mention in passing to your enemies.’

‘So what do we do?’ Pooh said. ‘We can’t get to theHalicarnassus . It’s a stand-off.’

‘It is,’ Jack said. ‘Which is exactly what I want.’

It was indeed a stand-off, a stand-off in the middle of the desert. The Roman ruins at Aroham were once an ancient spice-routewaystation . Their only claim to fame: their deepwater well. Now not even tourists bothered to stop there.

Twenty minutes ticked by and the rest of the Israeli chase force arrived on the scene.

Six more choppers, plus a convoy of vehicles on the highway: command vans, troop trucks, anti-aircraft jeeps.

Inside the main command van, his face red withfury, was Mordechai Muniz.

Of course by now it was known that the blast at Dimona had not caused any radiation leak. Jack’s detonation had only blown the outer wall of Machon-2, but at a facility like Dimona, in the event ofany blast, full emergency procedures had to be observed.

But now the Israelis were pleased—they’d managed to cut Jack off from his escape plane. And sieges like this always came out in favour of the force with time and food on their side, and the Israelis had all the time in the world.

General Mordechai Muniz raised his binoculars.

He saw the big black 747 in the distance, just visible about four hundred yards beyond the ruins on the low hilltop. The scene had not changed for thirty minutes now. Occasionally, movement could be spotted within the ruins, a figure crossing a doorway, a head bobbing up.

‘What about their plane?’ a lieutenant asked. ‘Choppers are awaiting instructions.’

‘Don’t destroy it yet,’ Muniz said calmly. ‘They need to think they have a chance of escape.’

He brought his radio to his lips. ‘Captain West. Captain Jack West Jr. Come in. Let’s talk.’

Silence.

After a moment, Jack’s voice came in, crackly and grainy over the speaker.‘You offeringa deal, General? ’

Muniz rolled his eyes. ‘This is unpleasant, Captain. What do you honestly hope to achieve here? Your rescue attempt, while loyal and inventive, has failed. You cannot escape from this situation.’

‘Don’t even think of storming these ruins. If I see anyone come within the two-klickperimeter, I’ll detonate the nuke.’

‘What do you want?’ Muniz demanded flatly.

‘I want access to our plane and safe passage to Syrian airspace. I can’t imagine you’ll shoot a nuclear-loaded plane down over Israeli population centres, nor would you like to have one of your nukes go off over Syria.’

‘Not going to happen.’

‘You goingto wait us out, General?’

‘Captain West, be serious, even if you did board that plane, I’d still shoot you out of the sky as soon as you took off. Then your suitcase merely becomes a dirty bomb, and dirty bombs mean little out here in the desert.’

‘How about I just detonate the suitcase bomb right here, right now and we all die together. The concussion wave from the blast is easily enough to take you with us.’

‘You’re not like that,West ,’ Muniz said. ‘I’ve seen your profile: you wouldn’t kill those you love. On the contrary, you prefer to risk your own life for theirs.’

‘And I know this about you, Old Master. You don’t want to die. Let’s see who blinks first.’

‘I don’t bluff, Captain.’

‘Neither do I.’

And at precisely that moment, an hour after the siege had begun, several things happened at once.

***

‘Sir!’ an Israeli corporal called from a radio console. ‘Aerial Two just called in! They’ve been watching the plane over in the next valley—someone just ran over to it from asecond cluster of ruins over there! The plane is starting to taxi down the highway . . . ’

‘It’s doing what—?’ Muniz turned, frowning.

‘Sir!’ another Israeli trooper ran into the command van, holding some plans. ‘Those ruins they’re holed up in! They’re an ancient entrance toUqaba , the salt mine that runs underneath this plateau.’

‘A salt mine. . . ’ Muniz’s mind began to race.

There was a salt mine underneath this plateau?

‘Where are the other entrances and exits to this salt mine?’

‘It’s huge, sir. There are over a dozen entrances, some as far as ten miles away. Thenearest one is in the next valley, right near their plane,’ the corporal said. ‘That second set of ruins is another entrance to the mine.’

Muniz’s eyes widened as suddenly he saw Jack’s plan. Jack hadn’t been holed up here at Aroham by chance. He’dwanted to get here, to these exact ruins. He’dwanted the chase helicopters to catch up to him when they did. He’dwanted to stage a stand-off here and then slip through the mine tunnels to his plane while they wasted time negotiating. . .

Muniz thundered: ‘Stop that plane, now—’

‘Sir!’ a third soldier called urgently. This trooper was manning a radiation console.‘Sir! Geiger counters and passive radiation meters just went off the charts! The suitcase bomb has gone into the primary stage! He just activated the nuke...’

‘Can we get to it in time?’ Muniz asked.

‘No, the primary ignition phase is fiveminutes, we can’t get to itand disarm it in that space of time. That thing’s going to go off. Our friend Captain West just initiated the detonation of a nuclear device.’

‘Get everybody back!’ Muniz roared.‘As far back as possible. The blast won’t reach us, but the shock wave will. Go! Go! Go! The man is insane.’

The Israeli force leapt into action, retreating back north as fast as their vehicles could carry them.

At the same time, the big black 747 that had been pinned down in the next valley lifted off into the sky and banked round, heading west, cutting a bee-line for the nearest border, that of Egypt.

Five minutes after that, the small-yield suitcase-borne nuclear bomb went off.

The flash was blinding.

A colossal boom followed, the ground shook, and then a great towering mushroom cloud rose high into the sky above the Negev Desert, like some kind of unearthly force released from captivity.

In the five minutes they’d had, Muniz and his force had managed to get twelve kilometres away from the blast. To them, the mushroom cloud looked like a skyscraper looming on the southern horizon. Thanks to the compact size of the device, at this distance the electromagnetic pulse from the blast only served to disrupt their communications mildly.

For a long moment, Mordechai Muniz just stared at the eighty-storey-high cloud growing into the sky.

His lieutenant came alongside him.‘Sir. What should we do now?’

Muniz ground his teeth. ‘Scramble some F-15s. Tell them to acquire that 747 and blast it out of the fucking sky.’

Two F-15 fighters were launched from a nearby base and within twenty minutes they had acquired theHalicarnassus , fleeing over the Sinai Peninsula, well into Egyptian airspace.

Maybe West figured he’d be safe once he’d crossed the border, Muniz thought.Maybe he thought our fighters would pull back once he was over sovereign Egyptian territory.

They didn’t.

The Israeli F-15s just flew straight into Egypt and the lead plane unleashed two Sidewinder missiles at the fleeing jumbo jet.

Both missiles hit their mark.

And the big black 747 simplyexploded in the sky, cracking in the middle, bucking in mid-air, orange flames spewing all around it and a long thin line of black smoke trailing it as it rushed downward at outrageous speed and crashed into the side of a rocky mountain in the Sinai.

TheHalicarnassus was no more.

Egyptian Air Force personnel monitoring the area would later report that three illegal aerial signatures had entered Egyptian airspace that morning: two F-15 fighter signatures and one civilian airliner.

The two fighters left the area soon after they’d entered it, while the airliner signature had simply disappeared from their screens. A check was made, hut no commercial airliners had been reported missing.

Curiously, however, just before the two fighters had caught up with the airliner, the Egyptians had noticed a minuscule signature soaring down through the airbeneath the airliner.

It was a very small signature, too faint to be an aircraft of any kind, more like the ghost-like trace signal one saw when a paratrooper did a drop. The Egyptian Air Force personnel dismissed it as a software glitch.

Back in the Negev Desert, about ten miles to theeast of the towering black mushroom cloud that stood above what had once been the Aroham ruins, Zoe, Pooh Bear and Stretch drove toward the Jordanian border.

They travelled in an old WWII-era jeep that Jack and Zoe had left here earlier, one without electronics that could be affected by the EMP emitted by the blast.

The labyrinthine salt mine beneath the ruins had indeed been vast, with tunnels running in every direction—including the one that had headed south towards the valley containing the black 747, and another running eastward. While Jack had gone south to be seen boarding the plane—talking to Muniz on his radio as he did —the others had long before entered the mine and hurried east, getting nearly an hour’sheadstart .

The only things that had been in the Aroham ruins when the nuke had gone off were their escape ambulance, some crudely strung-up human-shaped dummies that would move every few minutes to create the illusion of their presence, and of course the suitcase bomb.

After a few hours, the jeep crossed the border into Jordan where it beheld a sea of sand dunes. As it crested the first dune, both Stretch and Pooh Bear’s jaws dropped, as they saw what lay before them.

TheHalicarnassus .

Jack’s big black 747 stood proudly on a blacktop road, flanked by giant sand dunes, its black-armoured sides and wing-mounted guns giving it a particularly fearsome look. Beside it, standing equallyproudly, was Sky Monster.

‘Hello, folks,’ he said jovially.

‘But how. . . ’ PoohBear said. ‘I thought. . . ’

‘That other plane you saw, it was a black 747, sure,’ Sky Monster said, ‘but did it have guns like this one?Or stealth panels? Or was it just black?’

‘But where did you get a—’ Stretch said, his voice husky and dry.

Sky Monster grinned. ‘Remember how Jack got theHalicarnassus in the first place: it was one of several escape planes Saddam Hussein had stashed around Iraq.One ofseveral. Jack’s SAS buddies in western Iraq had found one of the others a while back and Jack called ‘em to say he needed it.’

Sky Monster held out a portable radio handset. ‘Here.’

Pooh and Stretch took the radio. ‘Hello?’

‘You got away? Good,’ Jack’s voice said. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, would someone please come and get me? I parachuted into the middle of goddamn nowhere! I’m in the Sinai somewhere. .. ’

‘Quit your whining, West, it was your stupid plan,’ Sky Monster grinned. ‘We’ll meet you at the rendezvous point as intended. You’ll have to get there under your own steam.’

‘Copy that,’ Jack said. ‘Oh, Pooh and Stretch . . . it’s good to have you back.’

Stretch and Pooh Bear smiled.

‘Hey, Jack,’ Stretch croaked.

‘Yeah?’

‘Thanks.’

ZANZIBAR

14 JANUARY

TWO MON2008

TWO MONTHS BEFORE THE 3RD DEADLINE

Four days later, Jack rejoined the group, meeting them at the Sea Ranger’s hideaway buried within the eastern coast of Zanzibar, underneath a long-dead lighthouse.

By the time Jack arrived there, Stretch had been cleaned up and had slept for almost twenty-six hours straight. He was sitting up in bed with a notebook computer on his lap when Jack walked in.

‘I wasn’t sure you’d come for me,’ Stretch said.

‘Had a gap in my schedule,’ Jack said. ‘And really it was Pooh Bear who did all the legwork.’

‘Is that Daddy?’ a voice said from the laptop.

Stretch swivelled the computer so Jack could see Lily on its screen. She was still at Alby’s place in Australia, and until now had been unaware of the mission to save Stretch.

‘You could’ve told me what you were doing,’ she said.

‘No, I couldn’t,’ jack said. ‘It was too dangerous even for you to know. I’m sorry about that.’

‘But. . .’ she hesitated. ‘I was awful. I’m sorry, Daddy.’

‘Don’t be sorry, kiddo. You were right,’ Jack said, ‘and your instincts were right, too. We don’t leave any of our friends behind. We bust ‘em out or we die trying. I’m just sorry I had to keep it from you and make you so upset.’

Lily smiled. ‘I’m proud of you, Daddy.’

‘I like making you proud. Thanks.’ He turned to Stretch. ‘It’s great to have you back, buddy. Eat up and get some strength, because things are about to get hectic.’

‘Why? What happens now?’

‘Now we figure out where the other Pillars and Vertices are, and we go after them.’

Jack’s team assembled around a long table in a glass-windowed office inside the Sea Ranger’s underground submarine dock. The dark grey conning tower of the Ranger’s stolen Kilo-class submarine loomed outside the office’s windows.

Jack sat at the head of the table, with Wizard and Zoe beside him. Pooh Bear and Stretch sat with the twins, Lachlan and Julius Adamson. Sky Monster lounged on a couch under the window, dozing, while J.J. Wickham watched from the doorway.

Also there was the newest member of the group, the archaeologist Diane Cassidy. While Jack’s team had gone to Israel, she’d taken the African youth, Ono, to an orphanage in Mombasa that helped dislocated Africantribesfolk adapt to the modern world. Cassidy had also used that time to return to the States and contact family and friends, to let them know she was alive. Eager to repay her rescuers with any information she could provide, she had returned the day before.

Lastly, Lily and Alby were present viavideolink , patched in from Perth.

Strewn over the table were numerous sheets of paper—the random notes of Wizard, Jack and the twins, photos of Stonehenge, maps with notations scribbled on them, plus Wizard’s summary sheet:

‘All right,’ Jack said.‘While we’ve been breaking into high-security bases, Wizard’s been working on the next phase of our mission.Max, the dates.’

Wizard stood and wrote on a whiteboard:

3RD PILLAR - MARCH 11

4TH PILLAR - MARCH 18

5TH PILLAR - MARCH 18

6TH PILLAR - MARCH 20 (DUAL EQUINOX)

‘For your benefit, Diane,’ Wizard said as he wrote, ‘allow me to summarise. Late last year, at a secret base off the coast of England, we placed the Firestone atop the Mayan Killing Stone—one of the Six Sacred Stones—and thus discovered these crucial dates. They are the dates on which the remaining four Pillars must he laid at the last four Vertices. As you can see, they are clustered within March of this year.’

‘The Fourth and Fifth Pillars have the same date,’ Pooh Bear said. ‘Can that he right?’

‘It’sright,’ Wizard said.‘I triple-checked it.’

‘Which means?’ Stretch queried.

‘It means that Pillars Four and Five must be set in placeat the same time .’

‘But those vertices could be on different sides of the world . . . ’

‘We know,’ Jack said. ‘But we’ll come to that later. Wizard informs me that March 11 and March 18 are both dates for the celestial event we know as the Titanic Rising, an event that coincided with the first two Pillarplacings at Abu Simbel and Table Mountain. The last date, March 20, is not a Titanic Rising.’

‘What is it, then?’ the Sea Ranger asked.

‘It’s the big one. On all the other occasions, Jupiter, Saturn and Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, serve to bend the light of the Dark Star. That bending of the light also weakens it somewhat. But on March 20, it’ll be different.Wizard?’

Wizard explained. ‘March 20, 2008, is a rare event, one that has not occurred in thousands of years. It is adual equinox, a time when both our Sun and its twin, this Dark Star, are aligned on opposite sides of the Earth. Only on that date, Jupiter and Saturn will not shield us from the Dark Star’s rays. On that date, the Dark Star will emerge fully from behind them and shine its deadly light directly onto our planet.’

‘By which time, the Machine must be ready, all its Pillars set in place,’ Jack said.

‘Or what?’ the Sea Ranger asked.

‘Or we all get to witness the end of the world,’ Wizard said.

‘And what exactly will the end of the world look like?’

Wizard paused. ‘Hit by the Dark Sun’s fearsome energy, our planet will spasm from within, causing it to go wild on the surface.

‘Imagine every volcano on Earth erupting at the same time. Imagine tsunamis crashing onto every shore. Imagine earthquakes at every fault-line. And all this will go onfor years .

‘Undersea eruptions will heat the oceans, turning them into boiling nightmares. The sky will go dark with ash and the atmosphere will quickly be filled by sulphurous gases escaping from the planet core. The air will become poisonous to breathe.

‘Our planet is very robust, but life on it is not. Humans can survive only on the Earth’ssurface, and after March 20 that surface will become a hellish environment totally hostile to life—a landscape of black cloud, raging seas, endless fire and choking gas.’

‘Spectacular, gruesome and total.That is what the end of the world looks like.’

‘Right, well . .. ’ the Sea Ranger said. ‘That puts it all in perspective.’

‘If it makes you feel better, this has probably happened several times before over the eons,’ Wizard said.

‘No, that doesn’t make me feel any better.’

At that point, Jack took over.

For Wickham’s and Diane Cassidy’s sake, he went over what they knew about the Machine, the Pillars and the Vertices: how the Saudis had possessed the First Pillar for many generations; the Neetha, the Second; and the British Royal Family, the Fourth.

As for the other three Pillars, they had only very scant information about their whereabouts: apparently, the Japanese Imperial Family, the oldest royal line in the world, possessed a Pillar—and according to the British royal, Iolanthe Compton-Jones, they’d managed to conceal it from the Americans at the end of World War II.

Iolanthe had also told Jack that the pre-eminence of three European royal households—the British Royal Family, the Danish Royal Family and the Romanovs of Russia—had been due solely to their possession of Pillars.

Beyond that, Jack knew nothing of the whereabouts of the remaining three Pillars.

The all-important Firestone and Philosopher’s Stone—needed to cleanse the Pillars—were currently in Wolf’s hands, taken during the battle with the Neetha tribe in Africa. Where Wolf was getting his information from, apart from his researcher, Felix Bonaventura, Jack didn’t know.

S for the locations of the remainingVertices , Jack’s team still had their photos of thetrilithons of Stonehenge, lit by the light of the Dark Star, pin-pointing the locations of the six great temple shrines on ancient maps of the world, maps that—unfortunately—depicted global coastlines long before the oceans had risen to their current levels. This had made deducing the exact locations of the Vertices extremely difficult.

Despite this, the twins had spent every day of the past month knuckling down to the immense task, comparing the ancient coastlines to modern ones, looking for matches.

‘And what have you found?’ Diane Cassidy asked them.

‘Because it’s the next one to happen,’ Lachlan said, ‘we’ve been focusing on the third light-shaft that struck Stonehenge.This one.’ He spun his laptop around so Cassidy could see the image on its screen:

‘The coastline featuring the point marked “3” is a tough one to deduce,’ Julius said. ‘It could be the east coast ofany continent, country or landmass: Africa, India, Argentina, Sweden, even somewhere up among the islands of northern Canada. Even the scale is misleading, because it isn’t drawn to the same scale the African one was.’

Lachlan said, ‘We’ve checked every book we could find on ocean-level rises and ante-diluviancoastlines . . . ’

‘And?’Jack asked.

‘And we’re no closer to finding it,’ Lachlan said sadly.

Julius said, ‘Put simply, we need more to go on, Jack, we need more information.’

A silence descended over the table. It was Diane who broke it.

‘I might have something that could help.’

Diane lifted up her backpack, the only thing she’d taken with her during their escape from the Neetha, and extracted from it a battered leatherbound notebook.

Flicking the notebook open, she revealed page after page of hand-drawn images and densely packed notes.

She held the notebook open to a page on which was written:

THE RHYME OF THE WARRIORS

(Sphinx, Giza)

The First

shallbe the noblest, scholar and soldier both.

The Second

anatural leader of men, none shall achieve greater fame than he.

The Third

shallbe the greatest warlord known to history.

The Fourth

isthe greatobsessor , seeking only glory, but glory is a lie.

The Fifth

shallface the greatest test and decide if all shall live or die.

Below the poem were images of hieroglyphs and maps, plus scribbled notes.

Diane looked at Wizard. ‘You’ve never asked mewhy I went in search of the Neetha in Africa, Max.’

‘I . . . well . . . I guess I assumed that you simply had gone in search of them, to see if this fabled lost tribe actually existed.’

‘While I became something of an expert on the Neetha, I wasn’t searchingfor the Neetha. I also know of the Six Sacred Stones and the Pillars. My expertise in the Neetha was purely the result of my larger search: to discover if these fabled sacred stones and diamond bricks actually existed.

‘I figured that the Neetha, as the original owners of one of the Six Sacred Stones—the Delphic Orb—might have information about the others, which they certainly did. My quest is the same asyours, it’s just that my key reference point—this poem,The Rhyme of the Warriors —was different.’ She turned to Jack. ‘You know it?’

‘I do,’ Wizard answered for him. ‘It was found carved on a tablet between the front paws of the Sphinx. Napoleon’s men unearthed it.’

‘That’s correct. And that tablet now resides in the British Muse urn.’

‘So what’s the poem’s significance?’ Jack asked.

‘Max suspected it had significance, didn’t you, Max?’ Diane said.

‘For a time, but I couldn’t make it fit.’

Diane nodded at Wizard’s summary sheet. ‘You even mention “Five Warriors” on your sheet as possible holders of the Pillars.’

‘He does?’ Jack checked the sheet and to his surprise discovered she was right.

There it was, under theheading ‘THESIX PILLARS’ :

Whereabouts?The Great Houses of Europe;

Perhaps the Five Warriors???

‘I believe,’ Diane said, ‘that this poem is directly related to our mutual quest. I believe it tells of the five people who over the course of history have most affected the fates of the Firestone, the Six Sacred Stones, the Pillars and the Vertices.’

Diane projected the poem onto the whiteboard and with a marker began circling various words and adding notes in the margins.

As she wrote, she spoke confidently and expertly: ‘As we all know, the Great Pyramid was built by Khufu. The Sphinx, however, sits in front of thesecond pyramid at Giza—built by Khufu’s son,Khafre —so for a long time archaeologists simply assumed it had also been built byKhafre . Today, however, many Egyptologists believe thatKhufu , the builder of the Great Pyramid, actually built the Sphinx, too.’

‘We’ve had some experience with the Great Pyramid,’ Jack said kindly.

‘But perhaps you haven’t yet realised the monumental importance of its builder,’ Diane said. ‘I mean, the Great Pyramid, the Golden Capstone, the Firestone:all three of them have been integral to your mission. And it was Khufu who erected all three of them. It was Khufu who had all of them in his possession. Doesn’t it make sense that Khufu might have had some knowledge—a very high level of knowledge—about your Machine?’

‘It does when you put it that way,’ Jack said, eyeing Wizard.

The old professor just shrugged bashfully. ‘We concentrated on Rameses and the Six Ramesean Stones.’

‘Understandably,’ Diane said, finishing her writing on the whiteboard. ‘But did you ever ask yourself, where did those Six Sacred Stonescome from ? And where did the six oblong diamond pillarscome from ?

‘At some point in time, they must have all been together, right? And the first time we find them together is with Khufu—this is why in some texts, the Firestone, the Six Sacred Stones and the Six Pillars are collectively referred to as “Khufu’s Treasure” or “Khufu’s Wisdom”. And the answer to what became of Khufu’s Treasure lies in this poem, written over 4,000 years ago.’

With a flourish, she stepped away from the whiteboard, revealing her handiwork:

‘Genghis Khan. . . Napoleon. . . ’ Wizard said.

‘Jesus Christ . .. ’ Zoe breathed, ‘a warrior?’

Julius jerked his chin at the whiteboard. ‘I think you meant to say “Lachlan Adamson” for the fourth warrior. He’s the greatobsessor . Geez, you should see him combing his hair in the morning. That’s obsessive . . . ’

‘Hah-de-ha-ha,’ Lachlan replied.

‘Thisis what I was studying,’ Diane said. ‘This is what led me to the Neetha—to see what information they might possess about the rhyme. I just never expected to be captured and enslaved by them.’

Jack remained silent for a long moment, gazing at the whiteboard.

Then at last he said softly, ‘It’s aprophecy . . . ’

Diane nodded, impressed. ‘Yes, Captain. Yes, it is. A foretelling, an insight into the five individuals who over the centuries will most affect the fate of Khufu’s Treasure: the Firestone, the Six Sacred Stones and the Six Pillars.’

Jack said, ‘So you’re thinking that if we follow the trail of these five great warriors, follow their lives and histories, we’ll find the Pillars and maybe also some clues to the locations of the remaining Vertices.’

Diane Cassidy pointed at him. ‘That’s exactly what I’m thinking.’

‘Okay,’ Jack said. ‘So how’d you figure out thatthese guys are the warriors mentioned in the Sphinx tablet? I mean, what about other great military types like Raleigh or Nelson—’

‘—or Caesar or Hannibal—’ Zoe added.

‘—Saladin or Alexander—’ Pooh Bear said.

‘—Hitler, Patton or Rommel—’ Julius said.

Diane held up her hands. ‘I know, I know. Believeme, I looked into all those figures and more before I settled on these ones. It took years of work.’

‘Sorry. So how’d you decide on these ones?’

‘Right.Well. Let’s start with Moses. Now remember, the historical and biblical figure we know as Moses was actually an Egyptian priest named Thuthmosis. Moses orMosis simply means “son of”, soThuth mosis means “son of Thoth”,the Egyptian god of wisdom.So Moses the man is the namesake of one of the Ramesean Stones: the Twin Tablets of Thuthmosis.’

‘Otherwise known as the Ten Commandments,’ Pooh Bear said. ‘We’re aware of this.’ He threw a look across the room at the Twin Tablets of Thuthmosis.

‘Oh, yes, right,’ Diane said.

Jack asked, ‘So how did you figure that Moses was the first warrior in the rhyme?’

‘The rhyme is not the only ancient text mentioning five fabled warriors,’ Diane said. ‘There are two others, one from the Wu Gorge in China, which is generally attributed to the philosopherLaozi ; and a second from the ruins of Karakorum in Mongolia. This is the first one.’

She turned to a very old sepia toned photograph stapled into her notebook. It showed a stone pedestal engraved with ancient Chinese calligraphy. She’d translated it:

The Five

1.A humble priest, son of the great god of wisdom, will flee his home, and a great king’s hatred.

2.A seer, a healer, a man all would be, will die atop a hideous tree.

3.A lord of war but a ruler most wise, from the barren plateau his kingdom will rise.

4. He shall seek empire but find only tears, his empire shall last not one score of years.

5.A mortal battle, between father and son, one fights for all, and the other for one.

Wizard said, ‘I saw this pedestal when I was at the Wu Gorge. It’s still there, only it’s ten feet underwater now.’

Diane turned to a second photograph, this one showing a large cast-iron door covered with studs and symbols that looked like a variety of ancient Chinese writing.

‘The language is Mongolian,’ she explained. ‘This door is one of the gates of Karakorum, the Black City,the capital of the Khanate. This is from the time of Genghis Khan.’

Everyone read Cassidy’s translation of it:

The Five Greatest Warriors

The First, the Warrior-Priest, will bring the treasure out of the ancient land and found the great lineage.

The Second, the Warrior-King, will join two royal lines and thus continue the God King line. He will break the treasure in two and leave his mark on the world forever.

The Third, the Horse-Warrior, will loyally guard the treasure in his halls of iron and pass it to those he deems worthy.

The Fourth, the Emperor-Warrior, will pursue the treasure for his own glory and succeed only in scattering it further. It shall forever remain out of his reach.

The Fifth, the Brilliant Warrior, will be there at the Second Coming and will decide the fate of all.

Diane said, ‘This is how I settled on Moses, Jesus, Genghis and Napoleon. When you cross-reference all three sources—and numerous other historical clues—you can see how they all fit. I don’t yet know the last warrior, the fifth one—the Black City text says the fifth warrior will be at the “Second Coming”, which is the return of the Dark Star in March.’

Lachlan Adamson turned to Jack.‘A mortal battle between a father and son, Jack.Could be you and your asshole dad, fighting it out to the end.’

Jack gave Lachlan a sideways look. ‘I seriously doubt that I am the subject of an ancient prophecy. Besides, these texts don’t specify whether the fifth warrior is actually the father or the son. The warrior could be my father or Pooh Bear’s father or even someone we haven’t encountered yet.’

Zoe still looked unconvinced. ‘Jesus Christ is not commonly called a warrior. He was a man of peace.’

‘He carried a sword,’ Wizard countered, ‘and at one famous point in the Gospel of Luke, he urged his followers to go and buy swords.’

‘And many of those followers were revolutionaries urging insurrection against Rome,’ Julius said.

‘And Napoleon?’Zoe said.‘The emperor—warrior? The guy failed more than he succeeded.’

Jack answered that. ‘True, but he did have himself proclaimed Emperor of France. He was also an Egypt nut. It’s because of him that we have the RosettaStone and deciphered hieroglyphics. And he was famously initiated into Freemasonryinside the Great Pyramid. There’s no Western leader in history with closer links to Egypt.’

Jack turned back to Diane Cassidy.

‘This is very helpful, you might he on to something here. Let’s assume for the moment that you’re right and chase up these four historical figures a hit further: Moses, Jesus, Genghis and Napoleon.

‘Everybody, it’s time to hit the books. I want you to cross- reference these four warriors with everything we know about the Machine, the Pillars and the Vertices.

‘Cover everything, from astronomy and Egyptology to ancient mythology; from the sites of Vertices we’ve been to—Abu Simbel and Cape Town—to Aristotle, Rameses, Khufu, Hieronymus, the Neetha and the Great Houses of Europe.Anything and everything. Look for connections, crossed-paths, any kind of common denominator that will lead us to the remaining Pillars and Vertices.

‘And just for you, Zoe, look for any other contenders for the title of “Great Warrior”, in case Dr Cassidy here has got it wrong.

‘All right, folks, let’s move.’

ZANZIBAR

FEBRUARY 2008

THE MONTH BEFORE THE 3RD DEADLINE

Over the next few weeks, the team immersed themselves in research, reading anything and everything they could about the lour known ‘Greatest Warriors’—Moses, Jesus, Genghis Khan and Napoleon—noting journeys they had taken, texts they had written or books that had been written about them.

They read the Bible, plus the other known gospels; they readThe Secret History of the Mongols , the great work recording the achievements of Genghis Khan, searching for any mention of ancient knowledge, ‘wisdom’ or ‘treasure’.

Every two days they would convene for a meeting, at which Jack would write up key points on the whiteboard at the front of the room.

Sure enough, over the course of their research, curious connections came up.

The Great Houses of Europe, for instance, called themselves the ‘Deus Rex’—the God Kings—the name used in the Mongolian Black City text to describe the line of Jesus Christ.

It went up on the whiteboard.

Likewise, it was found that Napoleon had shown an inordinate amount of interest in Rameses II. During his famous expeditions to Egypt, Napoleon had given explicit orders that all discoveries connected to Rameses the Great he brought directly to him.

One historical inscription insideRameses’s palace ruins at Luxor had consumed him. It had read:

A LONE BEKHEN SENTINEL STANDS GUARD

OVER THE ENTRANCE TO THE GREATEST SHRINE.

The Greatest Shrine was a reference, of course, to the Sixth and last Vertex. And ‘bekhen’ was a rare variety of brownish-black basalt.

And so Napoleon had ordered his scientists to scour Egypt for monuments made ofbekhen stone.Their most famous discovery was the RosettaStone , but beyond that only a few small obelisks were found and none of them stood over the entrance to any underground shrine.

In addition to his obsession with Egypt, it was discovered that Napoleon also had an unusual fascination with astronomy—including a particular interest in Saturn and Jupiter.

The French emperor was intrigued as to why the orbits of these two planets sometimes lagged behind their predicted positions. It was as if, he observed, someoutside force were acting on their celestial movements.

‘In artillery school, Napoleon was taught by the scholar Pierre Simon de Laplace—’ Zoe reported to the group at one of their meetings.

‘Laplace?’ Wizard looked up. ‘He was one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. He came up with the concept of the metre. He was also a leading figure in astronomy, some say superior even to Isaac Newton in the field of celestial mechanics.’

Zoe said, ‘Well, when Napoleon became emperor of France, he brought Laplace to his court to consult on matters astronomical, in particular, to investigate the cause of the lag in Saturn’s and Jupiter’s orbits.’

Jack said, ‘So Napoleon knew a lot about Egyptand about the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter. We can probably assume then that he knew about the Dark Sun.’

That too went up on the whiteboard.

At the mention of Isaac Newton, Stretch chimed in.

‘I’ve been following up on Wizard’s reference to Newton’s alchemical work. Newton was a fanatic about alchemy, the “science” of turning lead into gold. It was his obsession. He wrote more about it than on any other subject.’

‘And?’

‘It’s very dense and complicated and a lot of the time it just doesn’t make sense at all. Call me crazy, but sometimes I felt Newton was using the term “alchemy” as a codeword for something else.’

Wizard said, ‘Isaac Newton was notoriously secretive, and even in his time alchemy was a debunked notion. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Newton’s “alchemy” was actually a cipher for some other kind of transformation.’

‘Does any of his work refer to the Dark Sun?’ Jack asked.

‘Not that I’ve found,’ Stretch said. ‘No direct references, anyway.’

Jack said, ‘So ishe relevant?’

Wizard answered for Stretch: ‘Oh, most assuredly. Even today, Sir Isaac Newton remains one of the world’s greatest experts on planetary motion. He was, after all, the first person to accurately predict the Titanic Rising. Given Newton’s proclivities toward the esoteric and the vast amount of work that hedidn’t publish, it’s possible he discovered the Dark Sun and kept it to himself. We ignore Newton at our peril.’

It went on the whiteboard.

One quiet afternoon, Jack took Wizard into an office to chat privately. He wanted to discuss something that had been troubling him.

‘Max, the reward for laying the First Pillar,knowledge , was highly advanced knowledge. The second reward,heat , was the secret of perpetual motion. Do you have any idea what the last four rewards are?’

Wizard shrugged.‘Guesses mostly. Information on the nature of the rewards is fragmentary at best. Take the third reward:sight . Is it seeing the future?The past?Or the ability to see into the hearts of men? I once read about an Egyptian blood ritual in which a priest slashed his own palm and then gripped a sacred gem in his bloody hand—it was said that he would then have visions.’

‘Why, our Chinese philosopher friend,Laozi , once postulated that the greatest thing of all to see would be the time of one’s own death, so one could be prepared for it. ConsideringLaozi’s connection with our quest, this might be an allusion to the reward known assight .’

‘What about the others?’ Jack read from Wizard’s summary sheet: ‘Life,death andpower ?’

Wizard said, ‘Remember what Stretch said about Isaac Newton the other day? That he might have used the word “alchemy” as a code for something other than the transformation of lead into gold? I’ve often wondered if Newton’s alchemical quest was actually an attempt to transform the ordinary human lifespan into a longer one.’

‘You think the reward,life , is longlife . .

‘I like Newton’s metaphor,’ Wizard said. ‘That our ordinary lifespan is lead, while an extended one would be golden.’

‘What about the fifth reward then,death ?’

‘Piecing together some Egyptian references—the Pyramid Texts, the Book of the Dead—my guess is this reward is a weapon of some kind.The ability to deal out death to one’s enemies.’

Jack thought for a moment. ‘Is it possible that the two rewardslife anddeath are somehow connected?Death might be some kind of power to kill, butlife might be an antidote todeath ? After all, those two Pillars are the only two that have to be laid at the same time.’

‘Mmmm, I hadn’t thought of that,’ Wizard mused. ‘That could definitely be a possibility.’

‘And what about the last reward?’ Jack asked.‘Power?’

Wizard spread his hands wide. ‘It’s the reward of rewards: absolute Earthly power to the one who repels the Dark Star. But what form that power takes, no one knows—’

There was a knock at the door.

Zoe poked her head in. ‘Hey. Lily just called from Australia. She says she’s got something big to report.’

The group gathered in the meeting room, facing a projector screen and the whiteboard.

Wizard stood at the front of the room. Lily’s face was on a computer monitor, coming in viavideolink from Perth.

Wizard projected a digital photo onto the screen. It depicted the golden plaque he and Zoe had photographed at the First Vertex at Abu Simbel, the one containing the descriptions of all six of the Vertices:

‘So what’s up?’ Zoe asked.

Lily said, ‘I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. Look closely at the left-hand side of this plaque and you will see the Thoth numerals for each Vertex listed as horizontal lines. Underneath each Thoth numeral, however, you will see a V-shaped marking. This is the Thoth symbol forcleansing .’

Zoe shrugged. ‘Sure.The cleansing of each Pillar by the Philosopher’s Stone.’

‘Partly,’ Lily said. ‘Look more closely. The numerals for the last three Vertices havetwo Vs underneath them.’

‘Oh yeah. . . ’ Lachlan said.

‘Huh. . . ’ Julius said, seeing it for the first time.

Jack frowned. ‘What does that mean? Some sort ofdouble cleansing?’

‘Yes,’ Lily said.

Wizard said, ‘I’ve just been checking my database for references to a second form of cleansing. It seems that because the Dark Sun will be a lot closer to Earth in late March and thus emitting more power, the Machine requires anextra form of cleansing for the last three Pillars. The key source I’ve found is this.’

He projected another image onto the screen, one of an ancient Egyptian wall, filled with hieroglyphs.

‘This is from a chamber at Saqqara south of Giza,’ Wizard said. ‘The hieroglyphs read:

Cleanse the last three also in my basin,

In the pure waters of theSpring of the Black Poplar.

Do this and Ra’s Twin will be satisfied and

Upon you he will confer their bounties.

‘Their bounties?’Stretch said. ‘The last three rewards?’

‘That’s right,’ Wizard said.

‘So to stop the Dark Sun at the last three Vertices,’ Jack said, ‘we need to cleanse the last three Pillars not only in the Philosopher’s Stone, but also in the waters of this “Spring of the Black Poplar”. . . ’

‘. . .and this must be done “in my basin”, in Rameses II’s Basin, the last of the Six Sacred Stones,’ Wizard said.

‘And the only one we’ve been completely unable to locate,’ Jack said. ‘This is going to be a problem. Lily, Alby,Wizard : I want you guys to stick solely with this from now on. Find out what happened to that Basin and figure out where this poplar spring is.’

The research continued.

In between group meetings and reading sessions, Jack and the other soldiers in the team would go outside to exercise or maintain their weapons skills.

Jack and Zoe would go for morning runs along the remote coast. Pooh Bear created a man-sized mannequin out of sandbags into which he threw knives, and Stretch, now almost back to full fitness, fired long-distance sniper rounds.

One day, at Lily’s urging on the videophone, he drew a smiling, bespectacled face on it. Lily then christened the mannequin ‘George’. After that, when anyone went out to train, they’d leave with the words: ‘I’m just going outside to kill George a few times.’ When the battered mannequin was brought back in—leaking sand, sometimes decapitated, usually missing a limb—someone would invariably say, ‘Poor George.’

The research went on.

More links between the great warriors were discovered and the whiteboard filled up. But it soon became apparent that some of the most startling—and most important—connections revolved around one particular warrior.

Jesus the Nazarene.

‘No single individual has had a greater impact on the world than Jesus Christ.’ Lachlan was giving the group a presentation with his brother, Julius. (As they often did, today the twins were wearing competing T-shirts—Lachlan’s read ‘Stewie Griffin for President’ while Julius’s countered ‘Stewie Griffin is an Evil Genius’.)

‘We’ll leave or another time the question as to whether Jesus was the son of a divine being,’ Lachlan said. ‘What all agree on, believers and atheists alike, is that Jesus was a man who lived in the Judea region about 2000 yearsago. ’

‘His teachings are promulgated by the organisation we know as the Catholic Church, but questions remain as to whether this organisation is really just a revived version of an Egyptian sun-cult—’

‘We’ve had dealings with them on this issue,’ Jack said.

‘—yes, but are you aware of the critical importance to the Church ofEaster this year, in 2008? Wizard even mentions this at the bottom of his summary sheet.’

‘Enlighten me.’

‘Well, as you’re probably aware, the date for Easter changes every year, but do you knowhow the date for Easter is calculated?’

‘How?’Pooh Bear asked.

Julius said, ‘Itwas originally calculated this way: Easter Sunday shall fall on the first Sundayafter the first full moon following the northern vernal equinox.’

‘The Sunday after the first full moon of spring,’ Lachlan simplified.

‘Sun-cult,’ Stretch said.

Lachlan said, ‘But this year, in 2008, something very special happens. This year, Easter falls righton the equinox. Our day of reckoning is March 20 and this year, March 20 is Holy Thursday, the beginning of the Easter celebration that commemorates Jesus’s death and supposed resurrection.’

‘The sun at equinox and the return of the Dark Star,’ Jack said. ‘It’s a religious perfect storm.’

‘Too right.For the Catholic Church, March 20, 2008, is theultimate holy date,’ Lachlan said, ‘when everything they believe in comes together.’

‘You think they’re still in this game?’

‘The Church might have gone silent since your battle with its agents at the Great Pyramid, but it would be dangerous to mistake silence for inactivity. I’d proceed on the assumption they will be observing our mission very closely come the 20th of March.’

‘Getting back to Jesus himself,’ Julius went on. ‘As most of you will know, he was called the “Messiah”, a moniker that has acquired religious meaning over the years but which actually is a term connected withlineage .

‘Much has been made of Jesus’s paternal ancestry, his father, Joseph, being from the royal line of David. On his father’s side, Jesus was from very wealthy stock. He wasn’t a poor carpenter. Indeed, nowhere in the Bible is it said that Jesus ever actually worked at all.’

Lachlan took over: ‘But on his mother’s side, the story becomes even more interesting. Mary was from the line of Aaron, another royal line. Who was Aaron, you ask?’

Lachlan grinned. ‘AaronwasMoses’s brother . Jesus, our Second Warrior, was a very, very distant descendant of the family of Moses, our First Warrior.’

Julius said, ‘Jesus was thusmonumentally important even before he said a word. He was the living breathing union of two powerful royal lines: the lines of David and Aaron. The linking of these two great lines had even been prophesied and the one who joined them would he known as the Messiah.’

‘It makes sense, then, that a sacred family heirloom such as the “treasure” that Moses spirited out of Egypt would have been passed down through the generations until it came to Jesus. What Jesus did with that treasure is then the big question.’

‘According to one of Dr Cassidy’s poems,’ Julius went on, ‘the Second Great Warrior—Jesus-----would “break the treasure in two and leave his mark on the world forever.”

‘Well, we know Jesus left his mark on the world. “To break the treasure in two”, we take that to mean dividing the Six Pillars into sets of three.

‘Now, after a lot of research and a little hit of gap-filling, Lachie and I have come up with the following diagram, which summarises our best guesses as to the whereabouts of the Six Pillars:

Julius said, ‘It looks complicated, so allow us to explain. First, we need to work backwards from what we know now: that the Saudis had the First Pillar, the Neetha had the Second and the Brits have the Fourth. They’re marked I, II and IV on the diagram.’

‘So knowing those end-points, let’s go back to Jesus,’ Lachlan said. ‘How does he split the Six Pillars in two? Well, they are valuable heirlooms, so he probably wanted to keep them within his family. . . ’

Julius continued ‘. . . so again, working with what we know now, we think that Jesus kept three Pillars within his own immediate family, the now famous family born of himself and Mary Magdalene that popped up in France soon after Jesus’s crucifixion. It is this holy-royal lineage, the DeusRex, that certain European royal families claim as their birthright.’

‘And the British Royal Family, as we know, has one such Pillar in their possession, the Fourth. We believe that another Pillar, thanks to centuries of royal intermarriage and warfare, has been held equally between the Danish Royal Family and the Romanov descendants of the last Russian Tsar, Nicholas II.’

Jack said, ‘You said Jesus kept three Pillars. That’s only two. What do you think happened to the third one?’

Lachlan glanced at Julius.

Julius glanced at Lachlan.

Then they both shrugged.

Lachlan said, ‘We have no reason to believe the third Pillar travelled out of Judea after Jesus’s crucifixion. While historians are sure that Mary Magdalene went to France, no-one is certain that Jesus left Judea at all. We think he stayed and he kept his Pillar with him.’

‘What?’ Wizard exclaimed.

‘So what happened to it, then?’ Zoe asked carefully, considering the implications.

‘Well,’ Lachlan hesitated. ‘We think Jesus had it buried with him.’

***

‘You’re saying that we have to find the tomb of Jesus Christ . . . !’ Zoe said in disbelief.

‘More or less,’ Julius said apologetically.

Lachlan said, ‘Whether or not he rose from the dead, no-one’s ever actually foundthe tomb where he was laid to rest, either in Jerusalem or elsewhere.’

‘So how do we go about finding it?’ Zoe asked.

Lachlan said, ‘We’ve only found one ancient document concerning Jesus that mentions both a resting place and his “wisdom”: a letter in Aramaic discovered in a church in southern France, purported to be from Jesus’s brother, James, to Mary Magdalene. It’s pretty vague but it translates as follows:

‘He lies in peace,

In a place where even the mighty Romans fear to tread

In a kingdom of white

He does not grow old.

His wisdom lies with him still,

Protected by a twin who meets all thievesfirst. ’

‘No names, no locations,’ Zoe said. ‘Typical.’

‘But a clear reference to “his wisdom”,’ Diane observed.

Zoe sighed. ‘That letter could have been written by anybody—’

‘What about the other three Pillars Jesus possessed?’ Jack said gently, moving on. ‘Where did they go?’

Lachlan nodded.‘Right, right. In the Gospel of Peter, there is mention of Jesus giving “three pieces of wisdom” to James shortly before he himself was detained in the Garden of Gethsemane. We’ve interpreted this as a reference to the three remaining Pillars. Remember, family heirlooms, and James was an heir as well. Jesus also trusted James greatly.’

‘Again, working backwards from what we know—that the Knights Templar ransacked the Temple and stole a Pillar which ended up with the Neetha—we can postulate that it was probably James who hid that Pillar in the Temple,’ Julius said. ‘As a member of the line of David, he had privileged access to the inner sanctum of the Temple.’

Lachlan said, ‘As for the other two Pillars, James ended his days at the Fortress of Van, a great hilltop city in modern-day Turkey, situated between the Black and Caspian seas. The route he took to get there is given in great detail, town by town, in the same Gospel of Peter.’

Lachlan opened a nearby book to a photo of an ancient parchment, on which was a long handwritten list:

Julius said, ‘James went to Van and a thousand years later, guesswho sacked Van with his armies?Genghis Khan.Another link between the Five Warriors.’

‘Interesting,’ Jack said. ‘Did Genghis attack Van just to get the Pillars?’

‘That’s not known, hut it is possible. Either way, Genghis got his hands on the two Pillars kept at Van and one of those Pillars—the First—ended up with the Saudi Royal Family.

‘How it got to them is unknown, but we do know that, as thanks for helping his army approach theKwarezmi Empire in secret from the west, Genghis gave a Bedouin chief a “brick-like stone of tremendous beauty the likes of which none had ever seen”. Hundreds of years later, that Bedouin tribe became the House of Saud.’

***

‘And the last Pillar?’Jack asked. ‘Genghis’s other Pillar?’

Julius flashed a 13thcentury portrait of Genghis Khan onto the projector screen.

A stern-looking Mongolian with a long grey beard glared out at them. He was dressed in leather and bronze armour and a sturdy helmet, and he held in one hand a pentagonal shield, covered in studs and raised images. Even in painted form, the man’s eyes cast a spell. They blazed with authority.

“Attack with aggression, but alwayshave a plan of retreat,” Julius said.‘Genghis Khan’s famous military axiom, and also the central thesis of countless business self-help books in the 1980s.’

Lachlan said, ‘Did you know that Genghis conquered all of China and half of Europe?’

‘More or less,’ Jack said.

‘But he never conquered Japan,’ Lachlan said, ‘and it was a lot closer than Europe. Ever wondered why?’

‘Should I have?’

Julius said, ‘Around 1220 AD, Genghis made a secret voyage to the northernmost island of Japan, Hokkaido, where it is said he met with the Japanese Emperor and his most senior commander, the Shogun.

‘Genghis liked the Emperor, but he was even more impressed by the Shogun, who wielded the real power in Japan. Genghis figured, correctly, that it was the Shogun who was responsible for the orderly and dignified running of Japanese society. Given the unruly state of his own empire and the quarrels among his sons over succession, Genghis later wrote that he left with the Shogun “the wisdom of my life”.’

‘A Pillar. . . ’ Wizard said.

‘We think it was the Third Pillar. The Shogun in question,HojoYoshitoki , had a unique carving hewn into his burial headstone: a white oblong with three horizontal lines inscribed on it.’

Lachlan said, ‘The Shoguns would rule Japan for the next hundred years as a military junta, with a series of puppet emperors, but eventually the Imperial Family regained control of the country and presumably the Pillar.’

‘That supports Iolanthe’s story of the Japanese Imperial Family hiding their Pillar from the US at the end of World War II,’ Jack said.

‘The Americans weren’t the only ones to make a play for it,’ Julius said. ‘One of Genghis Khan’sgrandsons , Kublai Khan, tried to invade Japan on two occasions, and failed both times, repelled by the Shogun’s forces. We found a Mongolian record of his campaigns: curiously, Kublai was attacking the remote north-western coast of Hokkaido, a region known for its high cliffs and violent seas. It has no strategic value at all, yet Kublai attacked ittwice .’

‘You’re thinking Kublai Khan wanted to get his grand-daddy’s Pillar back,’ the Sea Ranger said.

‘That’s right.’

Jack leaned back in his chair, glanced at Wizard. ‘It’s good, but...’

‘One more thing.’Lachlan projected one of their photos of Stonehenge onto the screen:

‘You see the coastline with “3” marked on it? Inspired by Genghis’s secret journey andKublai’s failed attacks, we think we might know where the Third Vertex is.’

Jack leaned forward. So did the others.

‘Where?’

‘This coastline changed considerably over the millennia, which is why it was so hard to deduce.’ Lachlan flashed up two new images. ‘On the left is a close-up of the upright at Stonehenge; on the right is a map from today.’

‘As you can see, whole seas have flooded into hollows in the landmass,megafloods that created Korea and all the islands of Japan. And right there is the Third Vertex: situated on thenorthwestern coast of Hokkaido in Japan.’

‘This is splendid work, boys,’ Wizard said. ‘But—’

‘But a Vertex without a Pillar is useless,’ Jack said.

Lachlan said, ‘It is indeed. We’re not done.’

‘My humble apologies.’

Lachlan went on: ‘Soon after Genghis Khan died, messengers from the Shogun came to see him. They found his son,Ogedei , on the throne. According to a scroll in the Shanghai Museum, it’s said that they gaveOgedei a most peculiar gift: a beautiful glass orb, cloudy-white in colour, the size of a football,and covered with intricately painted pictures .’

‘With the gift came a message from the Shogun intended for Genghis:

Great Khan, after nine long years, the works are complete. A maze of our own devising—a match for the one already there—has been constructed within the temple-shrine to protect your glorious gift to my people.

It is our honour to present to you this Wingless Dragon’s Egg, found at the temple-shrine during our excavations. It portrays the glorious cliffs above the shrine’s entrance, plus images of five other most beautiful landscapes. Its artistry is beyond compare.’

Wizard said, ‘So Genghis gave the Japanese the Third Pillar as a gift and the Japanese hid it within the Third Vertex itself. The Pillar isinside the Vertex . . .’

Lachlan turned to Jack. ‘A Vertex without a Pillar might indeed be useless, but I’d say one with its matching Pillar inside it is prettyfuckin ’ awesome.’

‘Touché,’ Jack bowed his head in acknowledgement.

‘A Wingless Dragon?’Pooh Bear said. ‘What is that?’

‘The term “Wingless Dragon’s Egg” is very peculiar,’ Julius said. ‘But think about it. What would a wingless dragon look like?’

‘Like a dinosaur. . . ’ Lily said over thevideolink .

‘That’s just what we think,’ Lachlan nodded. ‘We figure this Wingless Dragon’s Egg is actually some kind of petrified dinosaur egg, or a glass version of one, that was decorated with painted images.’

Jack turned to Wizard. ‘Max? Any famous eggs we should know about?’

Wizard said, ‘Only the most famous. In the late 19th century, the Russian tsars commissioned fabulous jewelled artworks in the shape of eggs from the master craftsman Peter Carl Fabergé. I mention them in my summary sheet.’

‘Fabergé Eggs are beautiful, rare and practically priceless. One such Fabergé Egg—made of gold and lost during the Bolshevik revolution—apparently depicted landscapes such as the twins describe. Given the Russian Royal Family’s links to the Machine, I have often wondered if that Fabergé Egg was created as a replica of this or perhaps another Dragon’s Egg. If there was an Egg found at this Vertex, there might be other Eggs at other venues, Eggs that the royals already possess.’

‘If the royals have one, it would explain some of Iolanthe’s superior knowledge,’ Jack said.

‘It certainly would.’

Jack said, ‘Well, whatever it is, this Dragon’s Egg is central to everything. If it depicts the landscapes around the entrances to this and all five of the other Vertices, we have to get it.’

At that point, Diane Cassidy chimed in. ‘There were pictures of a sacred orb such as you describe among the carvings of the Neetha tribe. If Jack’s father is still travelling with the Neetha warlock then it’s likely he knows about this Egg, too.’

‘We have to assume Wolf is doing exactly what we’re doing,’ Wizard said, ‘researching and planning. Likewise the royals, especially if they have the Fabergé replica.’

‘I’ve got someone keeping track of my father,’ Jack said, somewhat enigmatically. ‘According to my guy, Wolf’s been hunkered down at the American base at Diego Garcia for the last two weeks. If he knows about this, he hasn’t gone after it yet.’

Alby said over thevideolink : ‘According to the Shogun’s message, this Dragon’s Egg was found inside the Vertex, which would mean the ancient builders of the Machine left it there.’

‘Which means we’re going to need Lily to decipher it.’ Jack turned to the computer. ‘Looks like you’re back in the game, kiddo.’

‘Yay,’ Lily squealed over thevideolink .

Jack turned to the twins: ‘Don’ttell me, no large intact dinosaur egg has ever been found, either in Japan or Mongolia?’

Julius shook his head. ‘No.Never.’

‘So let me get this straight,’ Zoe said. ‘You’re saying that if we find this Egg, and combine the images on it with the knowledge we have of the Hokkaido coast, we can find the Third Vertexand the Third Pillar?’

‘Yes,’ Julius said.

‘Yes,’ Lachlan said.

‘So we find it,’ Jack said resolutely. He turned to the twins:

‘Okay, my Mongolian experts, where did it go? Where do you think this Wingless Dragon’s Egg ended up?’

AIRSPACE OVER WESTERN CHINA

28 FEBRUARY, 2008, 0800 HOURS

12 DAYS BEFORE THE 3RD DEADLINE

(2008 BEING A LEAP YEAR)

‘Genghis Khan’s Arsenal,’ Lachlan’s voice said over the speakerphone in the main cabin of theHalicarnassus . ‘That’s where the Dragon’s Egg ended up.’

‘His arsenal?’Jack said.

Jack, Lily, Zoe and Wizard were soaring over central Asia, heading towards Mongolia. Guessing that the Egglay somewhere in Genghis’s former empire, they’d headed here while the twins had researched the matter further.

On the way, they had picked up Lily in Perth. When they’d collected her, however, Alby had mentioned something about a discovery he’d made regarding the Basin of Rameses II—and so Pooh Bear, Stretch and the twins had been dispatched to, of all places, England. Diane Cassidy had gone home to America, to rebuild the pieces of her life and put together all her research so she could help from there.

Sadly for Lily, Alby couldn’t come on this trip. After he’d arrived home from their last adventure with his arm in a sling, his mother Lois wasn’t letting him out of her sight.

Julius’s voice said, ‘While readingThe Secret History of the Mongols,we found a few odd references to something called “the Lost Arsenal of the Khan”. Apparently, it was a secret redoubt of Genghis’s, a last refuge, and also the place where he kept all the treasures he’d acquired on his many conquests. Not even his sons knew where it was, which pissed them off immensely. Its location is one of history’s greatest mysteries .’

‘Of course it is,’ Jack said drily.

‘It was reputedly built by 25,000Kwarezmi slaves—only when it was finished, they were all executed, so they couldn’t reveal its location,’ Lachlan said.

‘Effective way to keep a secret,’ Wizard said.

‘So how are we supposed to find it?’ Zoe asked.

Lachlan said, ‘Artefact thieves have been searching for the Lost Arsenal for years. All we can do is what we’ve been doing: connect some otherwise random dots and hopefully get an idea where to look. For instance, there are reports in Mongol literature that after a long campaign, Genghis would go off to the distant village ofUnjin in the lands of theUyghurs to meditate and recuperate—’

‘Or to go and deposit extra special booty,’ Jack finished for him. ‘Like the Egg.’

‘Exactly,’ Lachlan said. ‘Now,Unjin still exists and the ancient lands of theUyghurs correspond to the modern Mongolian province ofBayanhongor ; it’s in the south-west of the country and incorporates a large section of the Gobi Desert. It’s remote, hard to get to, and the northern half of the province is perpetually covered in permafrost.’

Julius added, ‘There’s also a curious land feature about twenty miles to the west ofUnjin : a desert plain at the base of the Altay Mountains that’s pock-marked with meteor craters, some big, some small, about thirty in total. Dotted all around these craters are burial mounds, dozens of them, some as small as haystacks, others almost as big as the pyramids.’

‘Sounds like a good place to start looking,’ jack said. ‘Keep at it, Cowboys.’

‘Jack.’ Sky Monster emerged from the cockpit and handed Jack a printout. ‘Just came in from Pine Gap.’

Pine Gap was an ultra-secure communications station in outback Australia, not far from Alice Springs. Jointly owned and operated by the Australian and US militaries, the facility was used by the US to co-ordinate its satellite communications in Asia and the Middle East. What the Americans didn’t know today, however, was that an Australian operator at Pine Gap was surreptitiouslymonitoring their transmissions.

‘What is it?’ Zoe asked.

‘My guy keeping track of Wolf.’Jack scanned the printout. ‘Thirty minutes ago, Pine Gap picked up some encrypted radio chatter on a US Navy satellite frequency. My man didn’t have authorisation to decrypt exactly what they were saying but he could seewhere the signal came from: south-western Mongolia, got the GPS co-ordinates here.’

Jack punched the co-ordinates into a plotting computer.

‘Son of a bitch, he left Diego Garcia.’ A map came up on the screen. ‘And he’s now inBayanhongor Province, Mongolia, ten miles west of the village ofUnjin . Damn it!’

Zoe said, ‘The twins were right . . . ’

‘They were,’ Jack said. ‘Only we were too slow. We’re behind. Wolf is following the same lead and he’s already there.’

‘Jack, there’s more,’ Sky Monster said, holding up a second printout and handing it to him.

Jack read it quickly . . .

. . .and this time his face went pale.

‘Oh, no . . .no. . . ’

‘What is it?’

Jack looked up. ‘Pine Gap just picked up asecond cluster of encrypted transmissions coming from the exact same area an hourafter the US Navy signal. Only these transmissions could be decrypted, because they weren’t American.’

‘And?’

‘The encryption algorithms matched those currently used by thespecial forces section of the Japanese Defence Force,’ Jack said. ‘Two messages were decoded. The first:

TELL THE GARRISON FORCE AT YOMI

TO MAINTAIN THEIR POSITION INSIDE

THE HALL OF OROCHI.

‘Yomi?’Jack looked to Zoe. ‘My Japanese geography is kinda rusty.’

‘You’re not going to find Yomi on any map,’ she said. ‘Yomi is the name given to the underworld in Japanese mythology, like Hades or Tartarus . . . ’

‘And the Hall of Orochi?’

‘Orochi is a gigantic eight-headed serpent, also from Japanese mythology. But I’ve never heard of a hall dedicated to him.’

Jack nodded. ‘Okay. The second message is less cryptic:

OUR ENEMIES HAVE FOUND THE

ARSENAL OF THE KHAN.

IMPERATIVE THAT THEY DO NOT

ACQUIRE THE EGG.

DO WHATEVER IS REQUIRED.

‘Tank and the Blood Brotherhood are going for the Arsenal,’ Jack said. ‘Damn, this could get very crowded.’

Zoe said, ‘Jack, you said these messages were encrypted with systems used by Japanese special forces. You think Tank might be getting some unofficial help from inside the Japanese military establishment?’

Jack gave her a look. ‘I don’t know. It’s a possibility. Either way, once again we’re bringing up the rear. Sky Monster, get us there, now.’

TheHalicarnassus rolled to a halt on a windswept plateau twenty miles north of the remote Mongolian town ofUnjin . Stretching away to the south of the plateau was the vast emptiness of the Gobi Desert.

For most of the year the Gobi was a land hostile to human existence—desolate, dry and brutally cold—but in late February, hostile was an understatement.

Snow fell. A layer of permafrost blanketed the landscape in grey. Biting winds swept across the plain, penetrating to the bone, lowering the daytime temperature to -22 degrees. The combination of temperature and altitude prevented any kind of helicopter activity—rotor blades could not get any lift in the thin, cold air. Withoutultralong landing strips, jets like theHali struggled; indeed, this was why they’d had to land so far away.

As the big black 747 stood parked on the remoteclifftop , two small dots sped away from it, racing out across the desert floor: a pair of all-terrain quad-bikes.

Jack drove one of them, with Wizard riding pillion and Lily sitting on his lap. Zoe drove the second bike, with Sky Monster as her passenger. Not used to travelling under someone else’s command, the big hairy-faced Kiwi pilot was terrified and he rode with his hands gripping Zoe’s waist tightly. Zoe grinned at his discomfort. All of them wore heavy-duty snow gear—parkas, hoods, goggles, gloves.

As they crested a low hill, Jack scanned the terrain through some digital binoculars.

They were in the foothills of the Altay Mountains, which ran in a long line from west to east, providing something of a northern boundary to the Gobi. The desert beyond the hills was huge: ii stretched away to the southern, western and eastern horizons, flatter than flat, vaster than vast. Jack could see a narrow, dirt road heading east for thirty miles without a bend or a turn.

Everything—mountain, road, plain—was covered in permafrost.

But then he spotted something in the distance . . . on the dirt road . . . something moving.

A large white-grey dustcloud.

And it was advancing toward them.

Zoe saw it, too. ‘What is that . . . ?‘

Jack was about to say something about a sandstorm when he zoomed in with his binoculars and saw what lay at the head of the dustcloud.

Two main battle tanks.

Chinese Type-90s.Behind the lead tanks were two long columns of more tanks and armoured vehicles, vehicles that were no doubt filled with Chinese infantry troops.

Jack couldn’t guess how many troops were coming toward him: it might have been as many as fifteen hundred men. With 1 .6 million soldiers, China had the largest land army in the world. Deploying a battalion of them to the Gobi Desert was not a major challenge.

Was Wolf, with his Chinese ally, Colonel Mao Gongli, leading that massive force?

For a moment, Jack felt elated at the thought that he might have leapfrogged Wolf and would get to the Arsenal of Genghis Khan first.

From his hilltop position, Jack could see down a long narrow valley flanked by low mountains and hearing perfectly-formed meteor craters all the way along its length, every one of them covered iii a layer of the white-grey frost. Interspersed among the remarkable craters were conical earthen mounds—primitive burial mounds, some eight feet tall, others fifty or even a hundred feet high.

Jack scanned the isolated valley through his high-tech binoculars.

Beside one of the larger mounds—a towering frost—covered mass nestled close to a mountain—he saw a cluster of military vehicles, troop trucks and jeeps, all bearing red stars on their sides. They were parked beside a very narrow tunnel that appeared to burrow into the base of the giant mound.

An advance team, he thought. Damn. Wolf did get here first.He must have led a smaller, lighter team here, to be joined by the larger Chinese force later — But then, panning over the scene through his binoculars, Jack saw that nobody was moving near these parked vehicles, not even sentries standing guard. In fact, there appeared to be no-one at all stationed with the cars.

Curious, Jack increased his magnification and a horrific image appeared in his viewfinder.

Beside the Chinese Army vehicles were bodies, about ten of them, all lying with their heads face-down in star-shaped pools of blood.

‘Uh-oh,’ he breathed. ‘Wolfis here, but I think our Japanese friends have already arrived as well.’

Jack, Lily, Wizard, Zoe and Sky Monster stood beside the parked Chinese vehicles in front of the gigantic burial mound. It towered above them, wide and massive, at least a hundred feet tall.

‘Lily, stay back, okay,’ Jack said as he checked the bloodied bodies on the ground.

They’d all been shot in the head, executed.

‘Chinese special forces, plus a couple of Wolf’s CIEF guys,’ he said. ‘And they were slaughtered.’

‘Jack,’ Zoe called. ‘Look at this.’

She was standing at the top of the narrow tunnel that burrowed into the base of the mound.

Joining her, Jack now saw that it was more than just a tunnel. It was a thin chasm, open at the top and barely a metrewide, that descended via a series of about one hundred stone steps into the ground beneath the mound.

Jack frowned, threw Zoe a questioning look.

‘Search me,’ she replied.

‘Wizard?’

‘I have a feeling,’ he said, ‘that this mound is no mound at all.’

‘Sky Monster, you’re our lookout. Stay up here and maintain radio contact. Zoe, Wizard and Lily, follow me,’ Jack said, lifting his MP-7 to his shoulder, assault-style, before he headed down the stairs, descending into the earth.

Jack hustled down the narrow flight of stone steps, the chasm’s earthen walls pressing tight against his shoulders. If he looked up, he would have seen the sky, but right now his eyes were locked dead ahead, fixed down the barrel of his gun.

Down the stone steps he flew, when all of a sudden the stairway stopped abruptly and Jack skidded to a halt and beheld a stunning, stunning sight.

Jack found himself staring at what had once been a meteor crater. Only this crater had beenroofed over .

And in its centre, mounted in a high upthrust of rock, stood an imposing black structure that appeared to be made entirely of cast-iron.

The overall effect was of a tower the size of an office building built in the middle of a deep circular hole. But it was beautiful; it was a genuine work of art.

The whole tower structure must have been fifteen storeys tall. Its vertical rocky flanks were lined in a cladding of cast-iron plates (some of them had fallen off), but the defensive structure at its summit seemed to be wrought wholly of cast-iron—thick and strong, with the consistency of an anvil.

Wizard appeared behind jack.‘Like I said, not a mound.’

‘Indeed. . . ’

Jack scanned the ‘roof’ that encased the meteor crater. A chunky iron column rose above the black tower like a spire, only it was not decorative—it was the central support for a circular conical ‘roof’ that fanned out from the column’s uppermost point, reaching down to the rim of the crater.

Four mighty iron support-beams branched out from the tower, forming the skeleton of this roof—hundreds of wooden beams tilled in the gaps so that from the outside the conical structure would take the shape of a primitive burial mound.

‘Clever,’ Zoe said. ‘There are thousands of mounds like these all over China and Mongolia. And most of them have nothing beneath them except a single body. So you make your secret arsenal look like one of them.’

Giving access to the 700-year-old citadel in the middle of the crater was a far more modern creation: a steel-cable suspension bridge. It spanned the hundred-foot void between Jack’s group and the black tower.

Jack instantly recognised it as a standard US Army model.

‘Wolf,’ he said.

They crossed the long swooping suspension bridge.

Leading the way, Jack arrived at a platform on the outer flank of the iron-clad tower. From there, a steep staircase spiralled up and around the four sides of the tower, leading to the squat black citadel at its summit.

The bridge, the platform and the outer spiral staircase were all covered by aggressive archer-stations, so that—at least in ancient times—no intruder could enter the great citadel easily.

More bloodied bodies lay here—plus numerous shell casings indicating a fiercefirefight —only this time the bodies were Chinese and American . . . plus at least one dead Japanese trooper dressed in black combat gear.

‘God, I hate arriving last,’ Jack muttered.

He, Lily, Zoe and Wizard pressed on, moving to the summit structure, where a great black cast-iron door yawned before them, recently blasted open by modern explosives. Two more dead CIEF troops lay on the floor here, their blood still warm.

‘NVGs,’ Jack ordered.

If two groups of bad guys were already here, he wasn’t going to reveal his presence by using flashlights or glowsticks. Everyone donned their night-vision goggles.

‘All right, in we go.’

Inside the citadel tower was a complex network of vertical shafts. Each shaft was square-sided with walls clad in smooth cast-iron plating, offering no handholds. All of them plummeted to ominous black depths.

Every now and then, however, low horizontal cross-tunnels would link the vertical shafts to others—but always leaving a further section of vertical darknessbelow the cross-tunnel: creatinghardwalled pits from which unwary tomb robbers could not escape, unless they had ropes going back up to the upper levels.

Wizard marvelled at the engineering of it all.‘The false roof, tile iron plating, the pits. Genghis didn’t want anyone finding this place, or if they did find it, getting out of it alive.’

Some of the cross-tunnels, Jack noted, were filled with rubble and dust. By the look of it, Wolf’s people had had to jackhammer through rubble that had blocked up the tunnels. That would have taken time.

Arriving last on this occasion, Jack figured, had actually been beneficial: for a change, his predecessors had done the time-consuming guesswork andgruntwork for him.

Ropes hanging from A-frames revealed the shafts Wolf had taken successfully and the occasional row of glowsticks showed the correct horizontal cross-tunnel to follow.

It made for an unusually quick descent through the trap system.

And so after twenty minutes of roping and crab-crawling through the dark network of shafts and cross-tunnels, Jack, Lily, Wizard and Zoe arrived at a final tunnel: one that was not only filled with dust and rubble, but which also contained the three industrial jackhammers that had created the mess.

This final tunnel ended at an ornate iron doorway where two more American corpses lay in pools of—

A sudden explosion.

Short and sharp.

Jack snapped up.

It had come from beyond the iron doorway.

Then he heard a voice—Wolf’s voice—yelling, ‘You fucking suicidal bastards—!’

Jack raced through the doorway.

THE SECRET ARSENAL OF GENOHIS KHAN

MONGOLIA, 0700 HOURS

ONE HOUR EARLIER

Sixty minutes earlier, stepping through the same doorway Jack now stoodin, Wolf had gazed in grim satisfaction at the sight.

After spending nine hours painfully navigating his way through the vertical shaft system—doubling back at dead-ends; using jackhammers to cut through the densely-packed rubble that filled several of the cross-tunnels—he had finally arrived at the Great Khan’s fabled arsenal.

It was set in the middle of a glorious man-made cave hewn out of the earth beneath the crater.

And what a cave it was.

Black iron columns supported a high ceiling, while deep manmade ravines cut across the floor, forming an irregular network of moats that were spanned by narrow stone bridges.

The only problem, every single one of the stone bridges had been destroyed—there were gaping voids in their middles, preventing access to the centrepiece of the cave:

The Arsenal.

A box-shaped garage-sized structure made of dense blackiron, it looked like a colossal Chubb safe.

It was set atop a high pinnacle of rock so that it stood thirty feet above the rest of the vast room, encircled by the widest ravine of all. Four stepped bridges swooped up toward it in an X-formation, spanning this moat—but like all the other bridges in thiscave, they had been broken in the middle. Entranced, Wolf looked down into the moat.

Hundreds of thousandsof human bones lay at its base, two hundred feet below him. The moat’s walls, he noticed, were clad in smooth cast-iron, just like the vertical shafts. Once you fell in, you couldn’t climb out.

‘Sacrificial victims?’Rapier asked, arriving at Wolf’s side.

‘No.The bones of theKwarezmi slaves who built this place.Twenty-five thousand of them. When it was finished, they probably just threw the slaves into the moat and shut them inside, leaving those who didn’t die from the fall to starve in the darkness and kill and eat each other.’

He turned to his son and shrugged. ‘It’s never good tohe on the losing side in a war, but back then it was really fucking bad. Come on.’

Lightweight bridging planks were laid over the destroyed ancient bridges, allowing Wolf to cross the ravine network and arrive at the south-west step-bridge leading up to the Arsenal.

As this was being done, he keyed his radio. ‘Guard teams, report.’

‘Sir.This is Surface Team, with the vehicles. All clear up here. The only thing on our scopes is our Chinese back-up coming from their base over the border.’

‘Sir.This is Tower Team, at the suspension bridge.All clear.’

A special bridging plank with footholds was set over the step- bridge leading up to the Arsenal, spanning the gap in its middle.

When it was in place and tested, Wolf paused, gazing up at the squat black structure sitting on its rock-tower above him.

He nodded, pleased.

Then he strode up the bridging plank, crossing the wide central moat, and became the first man in over seven hundred years to enter the Lost Arsenal of Genghis Khan.

***

Holding an amber glowstick above his head, he entered a compact, black-walled room.

Treasures and trophies lined the walls in large unruly piles: crowns of gold, glittering jewels; goblets and chalices; swords and shields; bronze helmets and greaves.

It was plunder taken from vanquished kings and defeated armies, the colossal booty of wars waged by one of the greatest warriors of all time.

But it was the object taking pride of place in the very centre of the room that seized Wolf’s attention.

There stood a magnificent stone altar, carved from a single block of black marble. Deeply etched symbols covered it, all of them painted gold. In and of itself, this altar was an artefact beyond value, but here it was merely a pedestal for what sat proudly on top of it.

Sitting upright in a howl-shaped indentation on top of the altar was a large egg-like object the size of a football.

No, Wolf corrected himself.

Not egg-like. It was an actual egg.

A petrified dinosaur Egg.

Illuminating it with his glowstick, Wolf beheld fine carvings and drawings on its curved glass-like outer shell.Carvings in the Word of Thoth, and gorgeous drawings of landscapes and coastlines, mountains and waterfalls.

The drawings reminded Wolf of medieval Japanese art: they were surprisingly lifelike, with strong lines and three-dimensionaldepth , and Wolf suddenly realised that maybe medieval Japanese art owed a lot to the discovery of this Egg by the Shogun.

Like his first-horn son, Jack West Sr could still he awed by discoveries such as this. His wide eyes and sweat-covered face glistened in the light of his glowstick as he gazed upon the marvellous Egg.

Then Wolf saw two images on the Egg that made him start: some pyramidal rock formations in a desert, which he recognised as the pyramid-shaped rock islands at Abu Simbel in Egypt; and a great flat—topped mountain overlooking a bushy coastline that could only be Table Mountain in Cape Town.

‘The first two Vertices . .. ’ he breathed. He also saw four other landscapes on the Egg—showing the locations of the remaining four Vertices.

‘Jesus, this thing really is the mother lode. Rapier! Get the cameras and that laser scanner over here and scan this room now!’

Rapier arrived a minute later, carrying a digital camera and the laser scanner. With him was Dr Felix Bonaventura, Wolf’s archaeological advisor from M.I.T., who along with Max Epper was one of the world’s leading experts on the lore of the Machine.

Bonaventura gazed in awe at the Egg through his round wire- rimmed glasses.‘Abu Simbel and Cape Town. This thing would have been very useful last year.’

‘No shit. Photos and scans of the room, with everything in place, then take everything,’ Wolf said, stepping away, lifting his radio to his lips. ‘Guard teams, report.’

There was a crackle over his radio.

No reply.

Wolf frowned.‘Guard Teams.Report.’

Still no reply.

‘What the . . . ’

Shwap!

The head of the CIEF trooper standing in the doorway next to Wolf exploded. The man fell like a rag doll, dropping to the floor.

Shwap-shwap-shwap-shwap-shwap!

A volley of silenced automatic gunfire assaulted the cast-iron structure around Wolf, pinging off it, kicking up a thousand sparks. Two more of his men fell, riddled with bullets.

Wolf dived to the ground, ducking behind the doorframe.

Beside him, Rapier quickly drew a SIG Sauer, only to have it shot clear out of his hand, the bullet narrowly missing his fingers.

Losing the gun probably saved his life. The CIEF trooper beside him raised his rifle to fire, just as two black-clad figures appeared in the doorway of the Arsenal bearing silenced Steyr-AUG assault rifles. They blasted the trooper to kingdom come, but merely covered theweaponless Rapier, Wolf and Bonaventura.

This in itself said something to Wolf: these men were disciplined enough to distinguish between threats and non-threats in the heat of combat.

As they entered the chamber with measured strides and guns up, Wolf got a better look at his two attackers: they were dressed completely in black combat gear, including hockey helmets and blackjawguards that concealed their mouths. Glock pistols and steel throwing stars lined their belts, while compact but lethal crossbows were fastened to theirwristguards . Only their eyes were visible: and they were deadly eyes.

Japanese eyes.

TheSteyrs , thejawguards , the ninja stars on their belts and the crossbows on theirwristguards all betrayed them as members of the Japanese Defence Force’s crack 1st Airborne Brigade:special forces troops, modern ninja.

An older Japanese man entered the chamber behind the two lead assassins, and Wolf recognised him instantly.

‘Tank Tanaka,’ he said.

Tank Tanaka hardly even glanced at the glittering treasure trove around him.

‘Their scanner and hard drive,’ he said to one of his men. ‘Destroy them.’

The scanner and its drive were promptly shot to shit.

‘The digital camera, too,’ Tank said, seeing the camera that Bonaventura had been trying to hide.

It was seized and blasted to a million pieces as well. Bonaventura winced.

Tank then stood before the magnificent ancient Egg on the stone altar, assessing it.

‘It really is quite beautiful,’ he said.‘And filled with so much knowledge.’

Then, with a triumphant glance at Wolf, he attached a small explosive device to the top of the Egg and flicked the detonate switch on it.

He stepped back. ‘Feel free to watch, Colonel West, the explosive is not a large one. Although watch out for shards.’

The device on the Egg issued a shrillbeep . Then—

—bam! —

The blast was short and sharp. In a momentary flash the Egg just disappeared, blasting outward in a million glassy fragments that sprayed across the chamber, slamming into every wall before tinkling to the floor.

The Egg, fashioned by an advanced ancient civilisation, with all its priceless world-saving information, was no more.

‘You fuckingsuicidal bastards—!’ Wolf yelled.

Tank wanunmoved. ‘Honour is a far more pure motivation than greed, Colonel. It motivated that young man we slipped into your unit.’

‘Who was last seen screaming all the way to his death,’ Wolf spat.

‘It motivates the entire nation of Japan,’ Tank said. ‘We know about the Third Vertex on the Hokkaido coast. We have known about it for centuries. It is sacred to our people, the most holy place in our country. A blockade of Japanese naval vessels guards it as I speak. You will not enter the Third Vertex, let alone find the Third Pillar inside it.’

‘Are you gonna kill me or what?’ Wolf said.

‘Yes, I am,’ Tank said, whipping up a pistol and firing it in one swift fluid movement.

Blam!

Wolf was hit square in the chest and he went flying backwards, arms and legs flailing. He crashed into a collection of golden chalices and urns, and lay still on the floor of the Arsenal.

Rapier roared in protest, only to find himself staring down the barrel of Tank’s gun and—

‘Yobu, what are you doing?’ A soft voice broke the moment.

Tank spun—startled at hearing his real name—to see a very unlikely figure standing in the doorway behind him.

Wizard.

Beside Wizard stood Jack West Jr, with an MP-7 in his hands, covering the two Japanesespecial forces troopers in the Arsenal with Tank. The other two ninjas who had escorted Tank down here lay unconscious on the stairs immediately outside the Arsenal, immobilised by Jack. When Rapier saw Jack—alive—his eyes sprang wide.

‘Max?’ Tank said.

‘Where’s the Egg, Yobu?’

‘It is no more. I destroyed it.’

‘Destroyed it? No . . . ’

‘I’m sorry I never told you my true purpose for studying the Machine with you, Max.’

‘And I’m sorry I never saw the hate in you, Yobu.’

‘We fight on different sides now, my old friend.’

‘I don’t think I’m your friend anymore.’

Jack whispered to Wizard: ‘If the Egg’s cactus, we don’t need to be here. We’ve got half the Chinese Army closing in. We have to go...’

Wizard scanned the Arsenal, and seemed to see something. ‘Not just yet—’

He never finished the sentence.

Because at that moment, Tank yanked a grenade from his belt and pulled the pin, holding the grenade above his head and yelling, ‘Banzai!’—

—at the very same instant that Wolf rose from the ground behind him, his eyes deadly, a black Kevlar vest visible beneath the ragged bullet hole in his jacket, and his own SIG Sauer now gripped in his hands.

He came up firing, taking out the greatest danger first: the two Japanese ninja troopers. Both men dropped, each taking a hit in the forehead, their faces bursting with blood.

His stream of gunfire never stopping, Wolf turned his gun on Tank and hit him in the back three times, causing Tank to fall to his knees . . . and drop the live grenade.

The grenade bounced to the floor with several dull clunks, rolling wildly.

Jack saw it.

Wolf saw it.

Rapier saw it.

And then, in the confined space of the ancient Arsenal, the grenade went off.

The blast rocked the chamber—a concussion wave shook its wills—and a cloud of smoke shot out its doorway.

As the grenade detonated, Jack pushed Wizard out the door before he scooped up an ancient cast-iron Mongol shield leaning against the doorframe and whipped it up between himself and the fiery cloud that came rushing at him.

The force of theblastcloud sent him and the shield rolling back out the doorway, and in a distant corner of his mind, he was glad he’d decided to leave Lily back at the entrance to the cave with Zoe.

Inside the Arsenal, Wolf and Rapier leapt behind the marble altar that until today had held the fabulous Egg, also avoiding the deadly blast. Their comrade, Felix Bonaventura, seeing them move, ducked behind an ancient studded trunk and covered his head.

In the end, it was Tank himself who took the brunt of the grenade’s force. He was flung into the cast-iron wall closest to him and hit it with terrible violence. He slumped to the ground, still.

Small fires burned in the corners of the chamber as Wolf and Rapier stood, arming themselves with the dead Japanese troopers’ weapons.

‘Still got your camera?’ Wolf called to Rapier.

‘Got it!’Rapier held up a second digital camera, a basic Sony model,one that Tank had not seen.

‘How many shots of that Egg did you get?’ Wolf asked.

‘Six or seven.Got every side.’

‘That’ll do,’ Wolf said. ‘Felix! Get up!Time to get out of here!’

***

Still lying flat on his back on the stone steps just outside the Arsenal, Jack could see Wolf and Rapier scooping up the Japanese men’s Steyr rifles.

He had to think fast.

Wolf and Rapier versus him and Wizard was a totally unfair fight.

And when you can’t fight, you run.

He spun and saw the rebuilt bridge behind him—it led back to the cave’s entrance, where Zoe and Lily waited, looking very concerned.

‘Zoe! Find somewhere to hide!’ Jack said into his radio as he assessed his own options.

He could go for the rebuilt bridge, but it would be the first place Wolf would fire at when he emerged from the Arsenal. He and Wizard would be shot in their backs as they fled.

And so Jack dragged Wizard the other way, around the squat Arsenal structure atop therocky mount , still gripping his gun and his newfound iron shield.

Corning around the cast-iron building, he saw the broken step-bridge leading to the north-east corner, the one directly opposite the repaired bridge to the south-west.

If they could jump the gap, they could take refuge among the columns on the island-like platform over there.

Wizard seemed to see what he was thinking. He eyed the gap in the middle of the step-bridge: it was about twelve feet across.

‘Jack, I can’t possibly jump that far—’

‘We’re higher, which makes the gap smaller.’

‘I still don’t think—’

‘You have to, old buddy, or you die.’

They hit the steps at the top of the broken bridge, hurried down them.

Gripping his shield and his gun, Jack jumped first, without breaking his stride.

He soared through the air—leaping across the void—before he landed with a dusty thump safely on the lower section of the step-bridge.

He turned to wave Wizard on. ‘Come on, Max!’

Wizard seemed to hesitate, hut then he bit his lip, increased his speed and jumped.

The older man’s flight through the air was not as graceful as Jack’s, nor as athletic. He thudded chest-first into the top step of the lower section, his fingers scrabbling and clutching desperately for a handhold, his legs dangling over the two-hundred-foot drop to the bone-filled base of the moat.

He had just got a decent grip when Jack grabbed his wrist and started helping him up.‘Told youyou could make it.’

‘I should know by now not to doubt you, Jack—’

‘Yes, he should, Jack,’ another voice said, making them both look up. ‘Yes, he should.’

There, standing above them at the upper end of the broken step-bridge, with a Japanese crossbow levelled at them, was Wolf.

Jack and Wizard were totally exposed: Jack lay flat on the steps, gripping Wizard, who dangled awkwardly from the broken bridge with his back to Wolf.

Wolf gazed down at them. ‘Twice now you’ve returned from the dead, my son.Seems the huntsman is a tough spider to crush.’

Jack didn’t reply. He’d holstered his gun to help Wizard, and his shield was now slung across his back, offering no protection. He just remained frozen where he lay, hanging onto Wizard, his eyes searching the upper platform for Rapier, but from this low angle, he couldn’t see him anywhere.

Wolf grinned. ‘Sadly, time is of the essence and I have to go. But if I can’t crush your life, Jack, maybe I can crush your spirit.’

Wolf raised his crossbow and Jack waited for the end, for the sharp pain of the arrow-bolt hitting him in the head—

Wolf fired.

Jack saw the blur of the bolt come rushing out from it, but it was too fast to follow and he waited for the impact—

Wizard jolted violently, his grip weakening around Jack’s wrist, and in an instant Jack realised that Wolf hadn’t been aiming at him at all. He’d been aiming at Wizard, at his back.

Wizard’s watery eyes locked onto his. ‘Jack . . . ’

‘Oh, God,no . .. ’ Jack breathed, tears forming in his eyes.

Wizard’s weight became heavier as the old man’s grip slackened and Jack had to take all his weight himself.

Above them, Wolf turned to go, taking one last look at the pathetic sight of his son grappling with the dead weight of the old man.

As Wolf stepped aside, he revealed Rapier standing behind him, gripping a silenced Steyr assault rifle.

Jack saw the gun and his eyes boggled and as Rapier shucked the safety, Jack summoned all his strength and swung Wizard up onto the remains of the step-bridge and hurled him down the steps. Then he dived down them after him.

Rapier opened fire.

A brutal barrage of bullets hammered against Jack’s cast-iron shield as hecrouch- ran down the step-bridge, trying to cover Wizard with the shield.

With rounds banging against the shield on his back, Jack joined Wizard at the base of the step-bridge, scooped him up, and—sliding on his knees—dragged him behind the nearest column.

A wave of bullets pummelled the massive column, but Jack just held Wizard close to him, tears rolling down his cheeks, huddling up against the column while the bullets struck it.

Then abruptly the bullet-storm stopped and the cave was silent, ominously silent.

At which point, Jack heard Wolf call: ‘Here’s some free advice, son! You can’t win this. You can’t win this becauseyou are not good enough! You are resilient but you are not brilliant. You keep surviving by your wits, but eventually that sort of luck runs out.’

Taking cover behind the column, Jack said nothing. But he was listening.

Wolf kept calling: ‘You fight for your pussy friends. I fight to win. And as you are finding out at this very moment,you are out of your league here ! A hero you are not, so stop trying to be one! Consider your spirit broken, my son!’

Wolf’s voice was replaced by rapid footfalls.

Jack could only remain huddled behind the column, gripping Wizard and staring into space as Wolf’s footfalls grew ever more distant, until at last he could hear them no more, and the great cavern, filled with the cordite smell of spent rounds and exploded grenades, was completely and utterly silent.

***

Wolf, Rapier and Bonaventura would emerge from the great tower above the Arsenal thirty minutes later—passing but not seeing Zoe and Lily as they hid in the darkened lower section of the vertical shaft outside the doorway to the Arsenal’s cave.

The three Americans crossed the suspension bridge, leaving the concealed crater, and emerged on the Mongolian plain. They joined Mao Gongli about a mile away at the head of his huge Chinese force.

‘Did you get the Egg?’ Mao asked.

‘No, but we got photos of it,’ Wolf said. ‘Mao, my errant firstborn son is inside that Arsenal. Consider this a gift: I leave him to you to do with as you please.’

Mao smiled. ‘Thank you. I will make a trophy of his head.’

‘So be it,’ Wolf said. ‘I have to get to Hokkaido.’

A lone figure watched this exchange from the top of the steps that led down into the crater: Sky Monster.

As Wolf had emerged from the crater, alerted by a quick radio message from Zoe, Sky Monster had hidden underneath one of the abandoned vehicles there.

He’d then watched as Wolf and his men departed while Mao’s massive force continued on toward the disguised crater.

‘Oh, crap.’ Sky Monster hurried down the steps, heading into the crater.

Down in the underground cave, Jack knelt behind a column, holding the shivering figure of Wizard in his arms.

The bloody tip of Wolf’s arrow-bolt protruded from Wizard’s chest, a ragged chunk of flesh hanging from it. It had almost gone right through his body.

Wizard was hyperventilating, speaking rapidly: ‘Oh, Jack,Jack. . . his shield. . . his shield. . . and the altar. . . did you see . . . it’s not, it’s not an—’ but then he seemed to snap out of his delirium. ‘Oh, Jack, I’d hoped it wouldn’t end like this.’

‘It’s not going to end,’ Jack said. ‘I’m going to get you out of here.’

‘Not this time, my friend. Not this time.’

The old mancoughed, a convulsive heaving hack that produced blood. The arrow had pierced his lung.

‘Max, you gotta stay with me, you gotta fight this. This is your life’s work—’

‘No, Jack,’ Wizard’s voice was oddly calm. ‘This is your quest now.Yours and Zoe’s and Lily’s.’

Tears streaked down Jack’s face. Through all his adventures, Wizard had been his loyal friend and mentor: from finding Lily as a newborn baby in a volcano in Uganda, to Wizard constructing Jack’s extraordinary artificial left arm following his injuries in that volcano; to raising Lily with their international team in Kenya; to the time Wizard, a terrible driver, had sped the unconscious Lily to safety from Abu Simbel, chasing after theHalicarnassus while outrunning dozens of enemy vehicles; to the aftermath of the horrific execution of Wizard’s wife, Doris, at the hands of Marshall Judah.

‘I can’t do this without you,’ Jack blurted.

‘Yes you can. You always could. And your father is wrong about you—you are so much better than he is, not because you are brilliant or resilient, butbecause you care . You care about people and that’s what makes you a hero to me. Jack, it was my privilege to be by your side all these years.’

At that moment, Zoe and Lily appeared beside them, having traversed the Arsenal’s cave.

‘Oh, God, Max . .. ’ Zoe breathed, seeing the arrow and the blood.

‘Wizard!’Lily squealed. ‘No!’

‘Lily,’ Wizard’s voice was serene.‘Sweet Lily. You’re like the granddaughter I never had. I love you.’

Lily held him tightly, sobbing.

‘And Zoe,’ Wizard smiled through his bloody teeth.‘Brave Zoe. You have to look after Jack here . . . and Lily . . . ’

‘I will, Max.’

‘You know,’ Wizard winced, ‘Jack was . . . Jack was going to ask you to marry him once.’

‘Hey—’ Jack began.

Zoe spun from Wizard to Jack, her eyes widening.

‘It was’—another hacking cough—’soon after the Capstone mission. But you got called back to Ireland while he was away in Perth. And when he lost the moment, he lost his nerve. I’ve never seen it before: Jack West Jr losing his nerve.’

Zoe looked at Jack.

Wizard chuckled. ‘It’s the only time I’ve ever seen it happen. And I’m glad. It proves he’s human—’

Three gut-wrenching coughs hit Wizard. More blood dribbled from his mouth.

He looked up at the three of them, his eyes sad but also calm, peaceful.

‘Jack, Lily, Zoe. Do this. Win this. Save this terrible, awful world. I have to . . . I have to go now and see my lovely Doris again . . . ’

And with those words, his eyes closed and his body went limp and in that dark subterranean cavern, Jack, Lily and Zoe could only kneel beside their fallen friend and bow their heads.

Jack closed his eyes to hold back the tears.

Thoughts of Wizard swirled through his mind: of his gentle smile, his patient way of teaching,his thirst for knowledge. He saw a world without Wizard and a profound sadness struck him.

Then anger stirred—a deep fury at Wolf who knew exactly how deeply Wizard’s death would cut Jack. Wolf had done many awful things to Jack, but this went beyond them all.

Jack was kneeling there in the underground cavern with his head bent and his eyes closed when a voice came in through his earpiece.

‘Huntsman. . . ’ It was Sky Monster. ‘I don’t know what’s going on down there, but we got a rapidly deteriorating situation up here.’

Jack blinked, snapping out of his reverie as if roused from a dream. The soldier in him was back. ‘What?’

Sky Monster stood on the tower-side of the suspension bridge that spanned the meteor crater. He was hurriedly unscrewing its fasteners. The final screw came loose and the great swooping bridge dropped down into the crater, swinging limply up against the opposite side.

‘Our crater is about to be invaded by a small army,’ he said plainly.

Seconds after the bridge hit the outer wall of thecrater, the first Chinese troops arrived at the platform down there and began firing.

‘Cut the suspension bridge,’ Jack ordered.

‘Already done that.’Sky Monster hustled up the stairs thatspiraled up the outer flanks of the tower. ‘Now what dowe —’

He never finished the sentence, because right then a shell of some kind hit the roof above the crater and a gigantic explosion rang out.

The roof shuddered violently. . .

. . .and then it began to fall apart.

Great tree-sized lengths of wood and cast-iron rained down into the crater, one of them narrowly missing Sky Monster. Huge drifts of snow followed.

Shafts of grey daylight lanced into the crater, illuminating it majestically.

Then a second—and a third and a fourth—shell hit the conical roof, destroying it entirely. The whole structure plummeted into the crater, exposing the tower to the sky for the first time in seven hundred years.

As the roof rained down around him, Sky Monster hauled ass up the spiral stairs. By the time he reached the cast-iron citadel at the top of the tower—coming slightly higher than the rim of the crater—he saw the full horror of his predicament.

Mao’s fifteen-hundred-strong army—rank upon rank of men, tanks, artillery, troop carriers and snowmobiles—stood poised around the rim of the crater, completely surrounding it.

‘Fuck me . .. ’ Sky Monster gasped. ‘We’ve never been in this much trouble before.’

Jack draped Wizard’s jacket over his lifeless face. Lily sobbed softly nearby.

Zoe said gently, ‘Jack, come on, we have to move.’

‘I want to take him with us.’

‘You can’t, we can’t. If we survive all this, we can come back for him. And truthfully, I think he’d be happy resting here with Genghis Khan.’

At her words, Jack turned suddenly.

‘What did you say?’

‘I said,he’d be happy knowing that he was buried here with Genghis Khan.’

‘This isn’t Genghis Khan’stomb ,’ Jack said. ‘That’s never been found. This is his arsenal, his treasure chest.’

Zoe shrugged. ‘That sarcophagus up there would suggest otherwise.’

‘What sarcophagus?’ Jack frowned.

‘The big marble one smackbang in the middle of the Arsenal. How could you not see it?’

Jack recalled seeing a solid marble altar in the middle of the Arsenal, on which had sat the ancient Egg. But Zoe had not seen it as an altar: she had seen it as a—

And suddenly Jack recalled Wizard’s rant from before: ‘his shield. . . his shield. . . and the altar. . . did you see. . . it’s not, it’s not an. . .’

‘It’s not an altar,’ Jack said flatly. ‘It’s a coffin. Zoe, you’re a genius.’

Showing even greater genius, when she and Lily had jumped across the broken step-bridge earlier to join Jack and Wizard in the corner of the hall, Zoe had tied a rope to herself. Now, she, Jack and Lily used that rope to get back across to the Arsenal.

Jack hurried into the cast-iron structure.

“Attack with aggression, but alwayshave a plan of retreat,” he said, repeating Genghis Khan’s great military maxim.

He stood before the solid marble altar in the centre of the Arsenal, only now he was looking at it in a completely different way.

. . .and suddenly the ‘altar’ looked like something else entirely: a great stone sarcophagus.

The sarcophagus of Genghis Khan.

‘Jack,’ Sky Monster’s voice called. ‘What are you doing down there?’

Jack gazed at the great stone coffin.‘Maybe finding a way out of here, Monster. What’s happening up there?’

Sky Monster stared in horror as Mao’s small army moved three huge 155mm artillery guns to the rim of the crater, aiming them directly at the cast-iron citadel.

‘We’re about to be blown to hell.’

Lifting together, Jack and Zoe raised the great stone altar/sarcophagus slowly to reveal that it was indeed hollow.

Careful not to damage it or what lay beneath it, they tilted the big hollow piece of marble backwards, so that it leaned back at a 45-degree angle against a couple of treasure-filled wooden chests, in the process revealing—

—a crumbling skeleton, clad in full Mongolian armour: helmet,shoulderplates and greaves. A decorated pentagonal shield and a sword lay over the skeleton’s chest.