The Two Lost Mountains - Jack West Jr Series 06 (2020)

by Reilly, Matthew

  Jack heard Dion’s words over his earpiece.

  The first part about not being able to haul the temple back up was bad enough. But the last part gave Jack a chill:

  ‘Use the lunar rover to cover the pedestal again with the Kapton foil sheet and then destroy the uplink to the rover. No-one else can be allowed to do another Fall at any other mountain now.’

  As he listened, he watched the remaining Super Stallion lower itself into the wide stone shaft into which the ancient temple had dropped. It was going down to pick up Dion.

  His mind raced.

  They’d arrived here minutes too late and now Dion had performed the Fall, granting him the ability to enter the Supreme Labyrinth.

  Worse, it also looked like he had people remotely operating a lunar rover on the moon and using it to cover the pedestal up there with thermal foil, the pedestal that was crucial to performing another Fall.

  The lunar mountain, an ancient pedestal, thermal foil, a rover, plus iron mountains and multiple forces down here. It was all too much.

  Then the Super Stallion reappeared from the shaft and Jack glimpsed Dion and Jaeger Eins in it, flanked by Knights and bronzemen.

  A missile streaked out of the chopper’s right-side pod and shot down into the shaft. A few seconds later, an explosion boomed from deep down there.

  Jack reeled.

  ‘He just destroyed the Falling Temple,’ he said. ‘So no-one can lift it up again and do a Fall. He’s ensuring no-one can follow him and Sphinx into the Supreme Labyrinth.’

  The Super Stallion carrying Dion and Jaeger Eins pivoted in the air, turning toward the entrance tunnel.

  But as it did, Jack heard a series of muffled booms coming from that tunnel.

  Boom . . .

  Boom . . .

  Boom . . .

  Jack frowned.

  They didn’t sound like explosions. They sounded more like . . . like a truck or large vehicle pounding through smaller ones—

  With a mighty roar, a massive Mack truck with a metal snowplough mounted on its nose thundered into the cavern from the entrance tunnel!

  It was a huge thing and it pushed two jeeps and a troop truck ahead of it, having collected them on its way in.

  As it sped out into the wider cavern, two 50-millimetre anti-aircraft cannons mounted on the truck’s rear bed mowed down the bronzemen in the hall with tracer fire, ripping their heads off, so large and powerful were the rounds.

  The mighty Mack truck took out the other vehicles parked near the entrance, sending them tumbling left and right as they bounced off its huge grille.

  As it did so, its guns kept blazing wildly and Jack saw one of his palemen over by a jeep near the fall shaft—it was one of the two that had saved his life—get decapitated by one of the huge rounds and fall instantly, dead.

  Then a second identical Mack truck—also with a snowplough and anti-aircraft cannons—came in behind the first one and it stopped right in the archway of the cavern, blocking the exit almost completely.

  A giant of a man stepped out of the first Mack truck and gazed over the cavern as if he owned it.

  He took in the scene: Dion’s force and the Omega force, but he did not see Jack and Easton behind a toppled jeep.

  Jack didn’t recognise him.

  ‘Who is this guy?’ he breathed. Could it be the general named Rastor that Zoe had talked about?

  The giant looked up at Dion in his hovering chopper and smiled a wicked, amused grin.

  ‘Hades Junior!’ the giant called. ‘You have performed the Fall! Respect to you!’

  From his hiding spot, Jack watched the exchange closely: Dion’s chopper hovering inside the cavern, facing off against this huge fellow and his two trucks blocking the exit. Oddly, despite Dion’s clear advantage in firepower, the giant seemed to dominate the situation.

  Dion’s voice came over the Super Stallion’s speakers: ‘General Rastor! A new era is upon us! A new world order! Join Sphinx and me! Be our general!’

  So this is Rastor, Jack thought.

  The giant smiled again.

  A truly sinister grin.

  ‘I work for no man,’ he boomed. ‘I have been freed from Erebus, and with the world open for the taking, I will impose my own order. Run, Hades Junior! Run to the maze, because I will meet you there soon enough!’

  Jack saw Dion shout some orders to his pilots and, to Jack’s astonishment, the chopper immediately banked away from General Rastor and made for the opposite side of the cavern . . .

  . . . where Jack spied a lone jeep parked at the mouth of a small tunnel, a tunnel Jack hadn’t seen until now.

  ‘There’s another exit,’ he whispered. ‘A priests’ tunnel. I should’ve known.’

  Before Jack could do anything more, the chopper hovered close to the ground, allowing Dion and Jaeger Eins to jump down directly into the jeep. They sped away into the little tunnel in the jeep, fleeing, while the chopper immediately took to the air again to defend them.

  As the jeep shoomed off into the darkness of the tunnel, Jack saw Jaeger Eins toss a couple of grenades behind it and the grenades detonated.

  Two short, sharp explosions . . .

  . . . and the entryway to the little escape tunnel caved in, filling with rocks and dust.

  And suddenly Jack and Easton were stuck in the cavern of the Falling Temple with the monks of Omega and the fearsome General Rastor.

  What happened next happened really fast.

  A grey-clad masked trooper sprang from Rastor’s Mack truck with an RPG launcher on his shoulder and fired it at the Super Stallion that had unloaded Dion.

  The shot hit its mark and the chopper exploded and wheeled around wildly inside the enclosed space of the cavern, engines squealing, smoke belching from its wound.

  The huge helicopter slammed down against the stone floor of the cavern nose-first, its rotor blades snapping off instantly.

  As this happened, the chopper’s tail got entangled in one of the mighty ancient chains dangling from the ceiling of the cavern and the whole sorry helicopter ended up nose down, ass up: its nose balanced on the edge of the fall shaft, its tail hanging from the ancient frozen chains.

  Five Omega monks and five of their Romanian troops tried to make for the exit tunnel, but more of Rastor’s troops—perhaps twenty of them—sprang from his Mack trucks and quickly encircled them, guns up, and the monks and the Romanians dropped their weapons and raised their hands.

  And Jack and Easton—hiding behind their overturned jeep—got to watch a most unusual exchange.

  Rastor stood over the lead monk, gripped by two of his grey-clad, masked troops.

  ‘What is your name, monk?’

  ‘Brother Esrael.’

  ‘And your position in your order?’

  ‘I am second to Brother Ezekiel.’

  Rastor nodded. ‘I know your ways, monk, for I was once one of you. Tell me, did Ezekiel succeed at Potala before the iron mountain there was destroyed by Sphinx’s missile?’

  Jack shot bolt upright at that.

  So did Brother Esrael.

  ‘I . . . he . . . how did you know . . . ?’ the monk stammered in surprise.

  Rastor reached down and grabbed Brother Esrael by the throat with one of his massive hands.

  He lifted the helpless monk two feet off the ground.

  ‘I said, did your brother monk perform the Fall at the iron mountain underneath Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet, before Sphinx destroyed that mountain with a nuclear missile?’

  Gasping for air, his hands clawing at the mighty fist gripping his throat, Brother Esrael choked: ‘Yes . . . yes, Ezekiel did.’

  ‘And he is now heading to the Supreme Labyrinth?’ Rastor asked.

  ‘Yes . . .’

  Jack watched in stunned silence, his mind now spinning even mo
re at what he was hearing.

  Sphinx had performed his Fall at Mont Saint-Michel.

  And Dion had just done the same here at Mont Blanc.

  But Ezekiel had also performed the Fall at another iron mountain in Tibet and was right now on his way to the Supreme Labyrinth.

  Still holding the monk high above the floor, Rastor shook his head in disappointment.

  ‘Your order seeks a world where women and their bodies are the property of men. If your Brother Ezekiel succeeds at the great maze, that is the world he will fashion.’

  The monk named Esrael continued to choke.

  Rastor continued. ‘What a petty philosophy.’ He held the choking monk’s face up to his own. ‘Why have men, women, or even a universe at all?’

  And with those words, the giant general broke the monk’s neck and Brother Esrael’s body went limp, dead.

  Rastor threw his corpse to the floor.

  ‘Kill these other monks and their Romanian friends,’ he said to his troopers as he strolled casually toward the fall shaft.

  Machine-gun fire rang out. The remaining monks and Romanians were shot to bits where they knelt.

  Reaching the edge of the fall shaft, Rastor paused at a body on the ground. It was the body of a bronzeman that had been shot clean through the head by one of his huge 50-millimetre rounds.

  ‘What have we here?’

  The bronzeman’s head and shoulders were marked with pale blue Air Force paint. It was one of Easton’s palemen. The one Jack had seen get shot before.

  ‘A bronzeman marked with paint . . .’ Rastor said. ‘Most irregular. But clever. Now who would think of such a thing?’

  The giant turned and raised his voice. ‘Captain West! Are you in here? If you are, you might as well reveal yourself, because we will find you eventually.’

  Jack’s heart almost stopped.

  ‘What do we do?’ Easton whispered.

  Jack didn’t answer.

  He just stood up, revealing himself to Rastor.

  Rastor stared evenly at Jack.

  ‘Captain West,’ he said slowly. ‘The man who tore asunder the system of the four kingdoms. Word of your remarkable exploits at the Great Games reached all the way to the innermost dungeon of Erebus. Why, I believe we were both residents there at the same time, for a short while at least.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Jack said.

  ‘My name is General Garthon Rastor. As a young man, I was a member of the Omega Order. There I learned about the end of all things. But monastic life did not suit me, so I joined an army. Ruthlessness served me well and I rose in rank until I was a general of the four kings.

  ‘I was their sword, their finest general . . . until I was not. Until they came to fear me. Then one day they drugged my wine and abducted me and locked me away in the bowels of Erebus.’

  As Rastor spoke, Jack pushed Easton backwards, toward the downward-tilted Super Stallion helicopter tangled in the chains above the fall shaft.

  ‘Why would the four kings fear you?’ he asked.

  ‘Why does any king fear a general of his? Because the general was becoming too beloved by his troops. Because he was becoming a threat. And because I—and those who follow me—believe in nothing.’

  ‘Nothing? What does that mean?’ Jack said. The chopper was now right behind him and Easton.

  Rastor grinned that grin of his.

  ‘I believe in the Omega Event. The end of all things. The nothing that must follow the moment when the universe collapses in on itself.

  ‘I don’t seek to rule the world like Sphinx and his ilk. I don’t seek to enslave women like the monks of Omega wish to. I want to enter the Supreme Labyrinth in order to stop Sphinx and the monks from sitting on the World Throne. I desire that no-one sits on that throne when Omega comes. I want to let the Omega Event happen as it should. I want the universe to collapse as it is meant to.’

  In that moment, Jack saw madness—pure yet calculated madness—in Rastor’s eyes.

  ‘We have to get out of here, now,’ Jack whispered to Easton. ‘Just follow me, okay.’

  Without warning, Jack dived into the cockpit of the downturned Super Stallion and pulled the missile-launch trigger on its control stick.

  A missile blasted out from the chopper’s port-side pod and, with a whoosh, flew right into Rastor’s lead Mack truck and blew it apart in a booming explosion.

  The truck was lifted completely off the ground and slammed back against the stone wall behind it.

  Rastor’s men dived for cover. Rastor hardly even flinched.

  Easton was watching all this in amazement when Jack yanked hard on his arm, pulling him up onto the roof of the steeply-tilted helicopter’s fuselage . . .

  . . . and all of a sudden the two of them were running up the length of the crashed helicopter, toward its tail, still entangled in one of the ancient chains hanging from the cavern’s ceiling.

  Easton had no idea what Jack was thinking when he saw it.

  A short distance from the chopper’s tail was the clearing pod, still suspended from its cable, the cable that ran up into the slender moon shaft at the very peak of the temple chamber.

  When the Falling Temple had been in its resting position, the pod had been hanging above its upper levels. But after the temple had fallen, the pod had simply been left to hang from its cable above the yawning fall shaft.

  As Jack and Easton came to the tail of the downturned chopper, Jack called, ‘Jump!’

  He and Easton dived together off the tail of the chopper.

  Jack caught the bottom edge of the clearing pod and Easton caught Jack.

  The pod was little more than an open-air cage with a diesel motor and some ice-drills for chipping away at obstructions in the shaft.

  Rastor called, ‘Kill them!’

  Hanging from the bottom of the pod by his titanium left hand, Jack reached up with his natural right hand and yanked on the lever that activated the pod’s motorised winch.

  And suddenly the little pod shot upward on its cable, zooming up into the moon shaft, and as their enemies opened fire and the hard stone roof of the cavern was strafed with bullets, Jack and Easton whizzed up into the hole in the middle of ceiling.

  Jack and Easton shoomed up the tight, dark shaft on their pod, its cable-winch whirring shrilly.

  The cylindrical stone walls rushed by close beside them, barely a foot away.

  As they whizzed upward, Jack spoke into his throat-mike: ‘Nobody! Iolanthe! I don’t know if you’re up at the observatory yet, but Easton and I are on our way there via the moon shaft!’

  They shot vertically upward for quite a distance before they burst out into bright light inside a room at the summit of the Aiguille du Midi. Their pod hung from a sturdy tripod that straddled the moon shaft.

  The pod jerked to a halt and Jack and Easton swung dumbly as their upward journey abruptly ceased.

  They looked around themselves—

  —to see many dead bodies arrayed around them. The bodies of dead Romanian paratroopers.

  ‘Jack!’ someone called and Jack spun to see Iolanthe and Nobody running into the room.

  Nobody lifted Jack and Easton out of the pod. ‘We got lucky. Musta missed the firefight by minutes. Dion’s people just left here in a chopper.’

  ‘Jack, come on,’ Iolanthe said. ‘There’s something up here we have to show you.’

  SUMMIT OF THE AIGUILLE DU MIDI

  Nobody and Iolanthe guided Jack and Easton through the collection of structures that sat perched atop the Aiguille du Midi mountain.

  It was an odd assortment of buildings—some new, some old; some made of concrete and steel, others of faded wood—all constructed at different times in history.

  Jack and Easton had emerged at the very peak of the mount, far from the tourist viewing balconies, the publ
ic cafeteria and the enormous cable-car station. Their shaft had literally bored down through the spine of the mountain. It had been capped by a high antenna which Dion’s people had moved to one side for the Fall.

  Nobody and Iolanthe guided them further away from the public areas, toward the ‘professional area’ on the other side of the Aiguille du Midi; a group of structures that included weather huts, satellite dishes and, most striking of all, the observatory.

  Twelve storeys tall, silver and cylindrical, more than anything else, the Aiguille du Midi Astronomical Observatory resembled a wheat silo.

  Its curving silver walls gleamed in the moonlight, looking like something out of a science fiction movie.

  Its top was domed, and poking out from it was the tip of a massive optical telescope.

  ‘This way,’ Nobody urged, guiding Jack inside the observatory.

  Moments later, Jack stood inside the main chamber of the observatory.

  The huge telescope dominated the space, rising high above him, its colossal lens pointed almost vertically upward, directly at—

  ‘The moon,’ Jack said.

  Iolanthe nodded as she raced to the base of the massive telescope and its eyepiece. A rolling trolley stacked with computers and other devices sat beside it.

  One of the computers, Jack glimpsed as he went past it, was horribly smashed and broken, as if someone had taken to it with a sledgehammer.

  ‘Quickly, Jack, you have to see what it’s pointed at,’ she said.

  Jack hurried over to the eyepiece. It was so strange, he thought, that this massive device served a single human eye.

  Jack peered into the eyepiece—

  —and saw the surface of the moon in astonishingly close-up detail.

  He saw a grey sandy expanse, a crater, some mountains, and in the exact middle of the image—

  —two small vehicles with square metal bodies, spindly arms and six fat tyres each.

  ‘Lunar rovers,’ Jack breathed.

  ‘Look at what’s beside them,’ Iolanthe said.

  Jack did.

  And he swallowed deeply.

  Beside the lunar rovers, on the otherwise barren surface of the moon was a perfectly rectangular slab of rock.