For the spaceport was indeed a working one. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, it had fallen into disrepair. But with the recent rise of privately-owned satellite-launch companies, it had been bought by a European corporation and retrofitted for launches.
Indeed, as the Sukhoi came in closer to the spaceport, in the dull orange glare of its security lights, Alby saw a modern rocket—tall, white and slim—mounted on the launchpad, ready for launch.
Rufus was also clearly impressed. ‘Holy moly, look at the size of this place.’
As they came nearer, however, Alby’s face fell.
He saw the spaceport’s control tower, a four-storey building that looked like a stunted version of an airport’s air-traffic control tower.
All of its windows were smashed to pieces, blown apart by a fierce explosion.
And in that moment Alby realised.
‘Rastor’s people must have had the same idea we had,’ he said. ‘They used this place’s communications gear to make contact with that second rover on the moon and uncover the pedestal up there when Rastor did the Fall at Jerusalem. When they were done, they replaced the foil cover and then destroyed the control tower behind them, so rivals like us couldn’t use the communications gear afterward. Shit!’
Rufus gazed out over the deserted spaceport. Its towering structures and single rocket glowed orange in the glare of the security lights.
‘I ain’t no genius or anything,’ Rufus said, ‘but maybe there’s still a way we can create an uplink to that rover on the moon.’
‘Say that again, Rufus,’ Alby said.
Cairo, Egypt
26 December, 0210 hours
Jack boomed through the centre of Cairo in his stolen police car, racing through intersections unimpeded, running red lights at speed.
The city was empty.
Nothing moved on the roads. Any cars on them were stopped, either parked by the kerb or crashed against walls or each other.
The whole of Cairo was asleep.
With Zoe by his side, and Lily, Pooh Bear and Stretch in the back seat, Jack swept up a ramp onto an elevated freeway that cut across the city. He kept the headlights off, lest anyone spot their movement.
The high overpass wound between the modern buildings of the Egyptian capital. The skyline of central Cairo is generally low, with a few dozen office buildings and western hotels poking up out of a jumble of mosques, alleyways and markets.
Looming over it all to the west are Egypt’s pride and joy.
Ancient and gigantic, the three mighty pyramids of Giza dominate the city’s western horizon. Several project towers have been built near them in the suburb of Giza, but none of these, no matter how tall, can match the pyramids’ awesome presence.
They are built to a different scale.
They are of another time.
As he dashed westward across the city, whizzing past stationary cars on the freeway, Jack eyed the pyramids.
He recalled his wild battle on the summit of the Great Pyramid over a decade ago, when he had re-erected its capstone.
And now he was back here.
It seemed almost appropriate, actually. In ancient matters, all roads led to Egypt.
Right then, his scanner picked up radio signals from whoever was already at the Giza necropolis.
Voices spoke hurriedly:
‘—Lucifer base, this is Brother Eli with the Giza team. Are you ready?’
‘—Copy, Giza team, this is Lucifer base in Arizona. Uplink has been established. We’re ready when you are, Eli.’
‘—We just broke through the bottom of the shaft cut into the Sphinx’s head and can see a vast space with a Falling Temple in its middle. We are entering it now. Stand by.’
Zoe’s eyes widened. ‘They’ve found the temple underneath the Sphinx.’
‘Who are these guys?’ Lily asked.
‘Monks from the Order of the Omega,’ Jack said. ‘More pals of Brother Ezekiel’s. We think Ezekiel performed the Fall at Potala Palace, before Sphinx blew it up with a nuke. He’s probably on his way to the Supreme Labyrinth now, if he’s not already there. Looks like his buddy Eli is trying to perform the Fall here so they can double their chances in the Labyrinth. We’re behind in this race again.’
‘What’s Lucifer?’ Pooh Bear asked. ‘Seems odd for some Catholic boys to have a base called Lucifer.’
Jack said, ‘It’s a high-tech astronomical observatory run by the Catholic Church at Mount Graham in Arizona, about 150 miles east of Tucson. Lucifer is the nickname for the state-of-the-art telescope there. That must be where the Omega monks are uplinking to a rover on the moon to uncover the pedestal.’
Their car rounded a bend in the freeway—its headlights still off—and suddenly the pyramids rose up in front of them, dark triangles against the night sky.
And there in front of the three pyramids, lying serenely in the spot it had occupied for thousands of years, staring sightlessly eastward, its paws outstretched, its head perfectly poised, mysterious and enigmatic as ever, was the Great Sphinx.
In the harsh glare of their floodlights, three men wearing miners’ headlamps could be seen crawling on top of the huge statue’s head.
A fourth man stood by a van at its base.
The three men on the head of the Great Sphinx had erected an A-frame over the hole. A cable from a motorised winch on the A-frame stretched down into the hole.
Suddenly their radio barked:
‘—Giza team, we just picked up something incoming to our location here at Lucifer. Wait, what—!’
The signal cut to tone.
Jack looked at Zoe. ‘What the hell just happened?’
Stretch answered by holding up his smartphone. He had a live stream of CNN on it.
On the phone, the TV news anchor looked confused. ‘We’re getting . . . wait a minute now . . . we’re getting unconfirmed reports out of Tucson, Arizona, of a nuclear explosion near there. We’re awaiting images but early reports are of an explosion east of the city . . .’
Lily gasped. ‘Like 150 miles east?’
A few moments later, a grainy image appeared on the live stream.
It showed a hellish mushroom cloud rising above the Arizona desert. The chyron below the image read: breaking news: nuclear blast outside tucson, az.
The response from the monks at the Great Sphinx was instantaneous.
‘—Lucifer team, report!’
No answer.
‘—Lucifer team, come in!’
Still nothing.
Jack swallowed. Then he keyed his own satellite radio.
‘Alby, have you arrived at the spaceport yet?’
‘We just got here, Jack. Got some issues, but we might have a way to create an uplink to one of the rovers on the moon.’
‘Whatever you have to do, do it,’ Jack said simply. ‘And watch your back. The bad guys clearly don’t want anyone else performing a Fall and they may come for you.’
Zapadny Cosmodrome
Libyan desert
Over in Libya, a very skilful piece of flying was taking place.
Carefully manoeuvred by Rufus, the Sukhoi Su-37 edged in toward the pointed tip of the two-hundred-foot-tall rocket standing on the launchpad of the Zapadny Cosmodrome.
The rocket resembled a giant spear pointing skyward, supported by a kind of metal framework.
For until it lifted off, the rocket was encased on four sides by gantry scaffolding: a criss-crossing lattice of elevators, ladders, platforms, water pipes, gas pipes, fuel pipes and workrooms. The amazing thing was that the whole four-sided lattice would fold back on huge hinges—like the petals of a flower opening—when the rocket blasted off in a blaze of fire and fury.
When the Sukhoi reached the tip of the rocket, the canopy of the fighter-bomber’s cockpit opened and the tiny f
igure of Alby crept out onto its wing and leapt down onto the uppermost platform of the gantry structure.
Then he ran to the very tip of the rocket.
Buffeted by wind, Alby stood at the peak of the rocket, high above the world. With the additional two hundred feet of drop to the spillway beneath the launchpad, it felt extra high and dizzying.
From this spot, he could see for miles in every direction, across the dead-flat landscape to the dark horizon.
Out here in the desert, the stars winked brightly.
The full moon, huge and round and so bright you could read by its light, was off to the east—almost directly over Giza in Egypt.
Alby didn’t have time to marvel at the view.
Using a powered screwdriver, he hurriedly removed a panel on the rocket’s nose-cone, revealing a bank of data monitors, cables, blinking lights and a small keyboard with a computer screen.
It was the rocket’s guidance and communications system.
The bulk of any rocket is fuel. That’s the two-hundred-foot-tall part. The business end is the nose. This is where you find all the avionics and electronics—including guidance and communications gear—and whatever satellite (which is often quite small) that the rocket is delivering into orbit.
Using a T3 cable, Alby plugged his laptop into the rocket’s communications unit and suddenly he was in.
‘How’s it going, kid?’ Rufus’s voice said in his earpiece.
‘Connecting to the rocket’s comms system now,’ Alby said.
This was Rufus’s brilliant idea.
They needed an uplink powerful enough to reach the moon 240,000 miles away. Not many vehicles in the world had such a system. But an orbital rocket did. And Alby was now going to use it to control one of the rovers on the moon.
Alby tapped on some keys, getting the rocket’s communications system to search for a receiver on the surface of the moon—
—and suddenly the rocket’s system beeped and a screen read:
1 receiver found
i.d. #: rc-7d4 russian space program
type: lunar rover model vs-12-d
Alby ordered the computer to take over the Russian lunar rover’s controls and abruptly an image appeared on the rocket’s computer screen: an image of the moon taken from ground level.
‘Whoa . . .’ Alby breathed.
The landscape that he saw was just like what he’d seen on every documentary he’d ever watched about the lunar surface.
Everything was grey: the ground, the rocks, the boulders. Every shadow was dark, really dark.
Another rover, the original American rover from Apollo 15, sat parked nearby.
And there beside it was an object that while also grey in colour was not natural to the moon.
The pedestal.
That it was alien there was no doubt.
It was rectangular in shape, with sharply cut edges and a perfectly flat upper surface.
But it was covered by a thin sheet of rumpled silver material: Kapton foil that would block its light from bursting forth.
‘Bingo,’ Alby said.
It took him a minute to figure out how to drive the rover and manipulate its gripping prongs. It wasn’t easy. The technology was super old and not very responsive. When he managed to grip the Kapton foil with the prongs, they locked in place, refusing to release it.
He had just grabbed the foil when Rufus said in his ear, ‘Er, kid. We got a problem. Somethin’ incoming and incoming fast.’
Alby snapped around to look up at the sky, worried that it was another nuke, coming to obliterate the spaceport.
And he saw it.
A speck of light among the stars.
Only this ‘star’ was moving. Quickly.
Coming from the north.
Coming toward him.
An incoming plane of some kind.
Alby checked his watch.
2:24 a.m.
One minute till the moon was over Giza. Then Jack would have thirteen minutes to do the Fall.
At that moment, something detached from the incoming speck of light, something dark and rectangular that fell toward the spaceport.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t a missile.
It came roaring out of the sky and slammed into the ground barely three hundred metres from Alby’s rocket, kicking up a monstrous cloud of dust and sand.
Alby peered at the dust cloud, wondering what the hell this was.
Gradually, the cloud cleared and in its place he saw a long black armoured box about the size of a shipping container.
It was an ADS-IRM—Aerial Delivery System for Impact Resistant Material—identical to the ones that had delivered four loads of bronzemen to Novodevichy Convent in Moscow.
With four simultaneous whams, the walls of the container dropped open, revealing sixty bronzemen who immediately began marching toward the rocket on the launchpad.
‘Oooooh, shit,’ Alby said.
He keyed his radio. ‘Jack! Are you at the temple under the Great Sphinx yet? I have an uplink to the moon. Please hurry because a bunch of bronzemen just landed here and are coming for us right now!’
In Cairo, Jack’s car skidded to a dusty halt behind some museum buildings a hundred metres from the Great Sphinx, just out of sight from it.
The handful of Omega monks on the head of the giant statue didn’t see him. In any case, they were swapping confused looks because of the recent nuclear destruction of their uplink in Arizona.
Jack keyed his radio. ‘Expose the pedestal, Alby! We’re going in!’
At the tip of the rocket high above the spaceport, with the bronzemen advancing down the length of the launchpad toward him, Alby worked the controls on the rocket’s communications system . . .
. . . manoeuvring the Russian lunar rover on the surface of the moon, causing it to creep backwards and, with its extendable mechanical prongs gripping the Kapton foil, pull the reflective silver sheet off the ancient pedestal up there . . .
. . . when something happened.
The rover up on the moon abruptly rolled forward—of its own accord—pushing the silver foil back onto the pedestal, covering it again.
‘Damn Russian systems!’ Alby shouted. He fiddled hurriedly with the controls until he figured out what was happening.
It was a glitch, some kind of automated movement programmed into the rover many years ago. The upshot was: every time he reversed it, the rover would move forward again, retracing its steps, replacing the Kapton foil over the pedestal.
‘All right, okay, I can do this,’ Alby said quickly to himself. He’d just have to man the controls the whole time. He reversed the rover again, pulling the Kapton foil off the pedestal, as . . .
. . . the clock struck 2:25 . . .
. . . and—bam!—a blinding beam of brilliant green light shot out from the pedestal, lancing down toward the Earth, toward Giza.
The three Omega monks on the head of the Great Sphinx sprang back in surprise as, in an instant, a blazing beam of green light extended down from the moon and shot between them into the hole in the head of the statue.
Their leader, Brother Eli, was quick-witted enough to realise what had happened.
‘Someone else has exposed the pedestal on the moon!’ he called, his face illuminated by the otherworldly green glow. ‘Guard the entrance! I must do the Fall!’
He hurried to the hole in the Great Sphinx’s head, leaping into a slender steel basket hanging from the A-frame that straddled the hole, and with a whizzing whir, he plunged into the shaft while the other two monks turned to keep guard.
An instant later, two shots felled them and Jack West Jr, Zoe and Lily appeared on the head of the Great Sphinx.
Jack peered down into the hole.
Brother Eli’s motorised winch was still whirring loudly as it unspooled, l
owering the monk into the inky darkness.
‘You both still okay to do this Fall?’ Jack asked.
‘Ready as I’ll ever be,’ Lily said.
‘Not a doubt in my mind,’ Zoe said.
With a loud clank, the motorised winch stopped unspooling.
‘He’s landed on the temple! We don’t have much time. Lily, hang on to me. Zoe, you slide down after us!’
Lily wrapped her arms around Jack’s neck as Jack stepped into the beam of green light and grabbed hold of the cable with his gloved hands.
Then he wrapped his boots around it and slid down the cable into the tight vertical shaft bored into the head of the Great Sphinx of Giza.
A few seconds later, bathed in the green glow of the moon-pedestal’s light, Jack and Lily slid out from the ceiling of a high, domed cavern.
As at the other mountains, the Falling Temple lay directly below them.
It was identical to the others: shaped like a giant spinning top, with a heavy upper half and a spindly lower half. It hung from mighty ancient chains attached to the ceiling. An imposing main obelisk stood on its peak surrounded by four smaller ones.
Brother Eli was just stepping out of his steel basket at the bottom of the cable, right next to the main obelisk, when he saw them.
He dashed for the altar at the base of the main obelisk and reached for one of the four images of a human hand on its sides, the images with raised markings that looked like a W.
Eli pressed his palm against one of the images . . .
. . . and the Falling Temple was released from its chains and dropped with a heavy lurch . . .
. . . just as Jack and Lily, and then Zoe, whizzing down the cable, released their grips on it and hurled themselves at the temple’s uppermost level, landing on it just as the heavy ancient structure dropped and began its ceremonial Fall.
In Libya, Alby was manning the controls atop the rocket while looking frantically below him.
Gunfire rang out as Rufus brought the Sukhoi around and fired on the advancing company of bronzemen.
His bullets took out some but the simple fact was there were too many of them.
The Two Lost Mountains - Jack West Jr Series 06 (2020) Page 27
