The Five Greatest Warriors: A Novel

by Matthew Reilly

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 their biosuits, 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 with Dimona’s Radiation Emergency Evacuation Plan. We’re going to cut south and make for a place called Aroham near Uqaba.’

  ‘How far is it?’

  ‘About forty klicks,’ 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 the Halicarna—

  —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 spend all 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, ‘They say 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 the Halicarnassus. 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-route waystation. 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 with fury, 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 of any 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 offering a 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-klick perimeter, 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 going to 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 s
uitcase 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 a second 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 to Uqaba, 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. The nearest 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’d wanted to get here, to these exact ruins. He’d wanted the chase helicopters to catch up to him when they did. He’d wanted 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 five minutes, we can’t get to it and 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 the Halicarnassus, 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 simply exploded 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.

  The Halicarnassus 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 air beneath 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 the east 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’s headstart.

  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.

  The Halicarnassus.

  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 equally proudly, was Sky Monster.

  ‘Hello, folks,’ he said jovially.

  ‘But how. . . ’ Pooh Bear 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 the Halicarnassus in the first place: it was one of several escape planes Saddam Hussein had stashed around Iraq. One of several. 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.’