The Five Greatest Warriors: A Novel

by Matthew Reilly

  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 Heaven save me. . . ’ he breathed in horror.

  Pooh Bear found himself 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, were men—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.

  Living human trophies.

  They looked like a dozen Harry Houdinis, 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 and preserved 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, two firetrucks and three jeeps carrying soldiers in full-body yellow biohazard suits hurried toward 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 levels beneath 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. nodded to 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 to plummet 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’s here,’ 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 of Eilat.

  Arrangements were made for Jack and Zoe to rendezvous with the freighter carrying the uranium, and they helicoptered 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.

  Firetrucks roared 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.