The Five Greatest Warriors: A Novel

by Matthew Reilly

  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 the rocky 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 seem ed 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 you you 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 he crouch-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 because you 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 man coughed, 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 the Halicarnassus 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, but because 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 the crater, 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 that spiraled up the outer flanks of the tower. ‘Now what do we—’

  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’s tomb,’ 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 smack bang 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 always have 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 aga
inst 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.