Seven Ancient Wonders

by Matthew Reilly

  The screaming stopped.

  Now completely alone, West breathed, ‘Fuck me . . .’

  The wider pit continued to fill with sticky quicksand—rising past his waist.

  And seeing Schaefer die had made him completely lose his bearings. He didn’t know which was the right exit door. He was starting to panic himself.

  Only the bravest souls . . .

  Only the bravest . . .

  Don’t panic, Jack. For God’s sake, don’t panic—

  And then he heard Lily scream.

  He spun, saw her behind the bars of the moving cage—Avenger and the others had retreated back up their entry steps, but Lily was crouched on the stairs, peering through the doorway, trying to see West.

  ‘Daddy . . . no!’ Lily yelled.

  And suddenly, amid all the mayhem, all the pouring sand and the turning of the cage, time stood still for West.

  Daddy?

  Did she just say ‘Daddy’?

  And in that single flashing instant, a wave of adrenaline surged through him—a feeling that he had only ever felt once before, inside that volcano in Uganda, exactly ten years previously, when he had held her in his arms as a crying baby.

  I . . . Am . . . Not . . . Going . . . To . . . Die. . .

  I am not going to let her down.

  Clarity returned.

  Only the fucking bravest . . .

  And it hit him: Brave men don’t panic. They remain calm in the face of danger.

  Right.

  He spun, his mind now hyper-alert, thinking not panicking, no longer rattled by the elaborate deathtrap he found himself in.

  No sooner had he done so than the answer came.

  In fact, it was Lily’s shout that provided the answer.

  According to the map, the correct exit door was the one directly opposite her door.

  Lily, West realised, was his advantage. Most tomb robbers would not leave someone behind in the entry doorway—they’d all walk into the pit together, go for the rubies on the winged lion, trigger the trap and lose their bearings, and then die.

  ‘Don’t give up on me, kiddo!’ he called. ‘I’m not dead yet!’

  He started wading powerfully across the pit, past the lion statue, over toward the stone doorway opposite Lily’s door. He arrived there as the swirling pool of sand reached his chest.

  The cage rotated, bringing its gate into alignment with that door.

  Gate and door became one.

  West surged through it, pushing through the quicksand, and found himself standing in a tight coffin-sized space just like the one Schaefer had entered—and in a single horrifying instant, he knew that he’d made a terrible, terrible mistake.

  No, he hadn’t.

  It wasn’t an enclosed space at all—there was just a sharp right-angled bend in the passageway here, a bend that led to a set of narrow steps which themselves led . . . upward!

  West clambered up those steps, out of the deadly pool of quicksand, and emerged in open space, on a low path again, safely on the other side of the well.

  As he crawled onto the path, he must have depressed a trigger stone that reset the trap, because suddenly the cage rotated back to its original position and the pit drained of quicksand.

  Across the top of the well, he could see Avenger.

  ‘You’re all going to have to come across!’ he called. ‘It’ll seem disorienting, but I’ll stand at the correct door. Just come to me.’

  And so the rest of the group all crossed the well safely.

  It took two trips, and each time the pit filled with quicksand and its cage revolved dizzyingly, but knowing the correct exit they all just forged across the quicksand and exited the pit before it had even risen to knee-height.

  When she emerged out the other side, Lily leapt up into West’s arms and hugged him tightly.

  ‘Don’t leave me,’ she whispered.

  He held her firmly. ‘No matter how bad it gets, kiddo, I’ll never leave you. Always remember that.’

  Thus reunited, they pressed on and, following the submerged path on the other side of the gazebo, they arrived at the ziggurat that lay in the very centre of the supercavern.

  And there, looming above the ziggurat like some kind of otherworldly spaceship, suspended from the cave’s ceiling, impossibly huge, was the great stalactite that was the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

  They climbed the ziggurat quickly.

  Very quickly. In fact, there was not a single trap on the structure’s ceremonial stairway.

  At first, West was surprised by this, but then he realised that this was the first Ancient Wonder they had actually entered on this mission.

  All of the other Pieces they had encountered so far—those of the Colossus, the Pharos, the Mausoleum, the Statue of Zeus and the Temple of Artemis—had been removed from their original structures. They had all been guarded by trap systems built after the original structures had been lost or destroyed.

  Not so the Gardens.

  They alone remained in their original condition. And therefore the Piece they contained also remained in its original resting place.

  But what West also realised as he climbed the ziggurat was that Imhotep III had shown respect for the Wonder he was defending: sure, he had surrounded it with booby traps, but out of deference to its original architect, he hadn’t laid any traps on the Wonder itself.

  Gunfire continued to ring out from the two Israeli rear-guards stationed on the Giant Stairway, still holding off the American force.

  West and his group arrived at the peak of the ziggurat, and found themselves standing seven feet below the jagged point of the stalactite.

  It was truly mind-bending to stand beneath such an enormous natural formation. It was just too big, too immense to comprehend. It was like standing underneath an ocean liner hanging from its stern, its bow pointed right at your nose.

  Directly above them, a tight circular shaft bored up into the tip of the stalactite, driving up into its core.

  But there was also a notable feature below them.

  The peak of the ziggurat was flat and square—about five by five metres—but taking up nearly all of its floor space was a wide square hole that disappeared down into the ziggurat, into inky darkness.

  Ladder handholds ran down into this square well-like shaft, and, of course, the square shaft was perfectly aligned with the round one in the stalactite directly above it.

  Zaeed bent to read an inscription on the rim of the ziggurat’s square well-shaft.

  ‘It is the Priests’ Entrance,’ he said to West. They both glanced at Avenger.

  The Israeli commander did not seem to recognise the term—or its importance—and by some unspoken agreement neither Zaeed nor West felt the need to enlighten him.

  West, Pooh Bear and Stretch unloaded their caving equipment from their packs and started constructing a large tripod-like ladder over the square shaft.

  Within minutes, they had an A-shaped ladder standing astride the square shaft and reaching up to the tip of the stalactite above it.

  ‘Move,’ Avenger nudged West forward.

  West climbed the ladder, and disappeared up into the bore-hole carved into the great stalactite.

  This tight vertical shaft had ladder-like handholds, too, making progress quite easy.

  But it wasn’t for the claustrophobic. Glistening wetness trickled down its close, tight walls.

  Guided by the flashlight on his fireman’s helmet, West climbed cautiously upwards until he emerged in a flat man-sized tunnel that led out to the exterior of the stalactite.

  There he stepped out onto the path that spiralled up the outside of the Gardens.

  By the light of his previously fired flares, he beheld the supercavern from above. The view was breathtaking. He saw the ziggurat far below him, its steps fanning outward, with the quicksand lake all around it, and—in the middle of the lake—the Well of the Winged Lion, with its star-like series of paths radiating out from it.

  Interesti
ngly, he saw that the Well had a twin on the other side of the ziggurat—complete with an identical semi-submerged path.

  He recalled Imhotep III’s words: the Gardens had been constructed as a mirror image, where both entrance and exit were alike.

  There must be another exit out that way, he thought. And now that he thought about it, he realised that Avenger and the Israelis knew of this exit: that was how they intended to leave all along, without being caught by the Americans.

  So Avenger wasn’t entirely ignorant about this place—

  ‘Come on, Captain,’ Avenger said, arriving at West’s side, rousing him from his thoughts. The rest of his team came up behind him, guiding Lily and Pooh Bear with them. ‘You’re not done yet.’

  West led the group up the path that spiralled around the stalactite.

  Everything was moist, all the overgrown foliage was like that found in a rainforest: plants and mosses that needed moisture rather than sunlight to live.

  At times the going was difficult, since some of the bushes had grown out and over the path and hung off the edge, out over the drop.

  Although it pained him to do it, West hacked through the fabled plants with a machete, to carve the way.

  Higher and higher they went, into the upper reaches of the supercavern.

  The great quicksand lake and the ziggurat fell further and further away from them. The drop down to the lake was now a clear 400 feet, dizzyingly high.

  At one point along the path, they came across a surprising splash of colour: a beautiful cluster of roses. White roses.

  ‘How can they survive here without sunlight?’ Pooh Bear asked.

  West was thinking the same thing, when he saw the answer: a series of tiny bore-holes cut into the rocky ceiling of the cavern. They were barely a few inches wide, but they seemed to emit light—natural light. The little bore-holes must have reached all the way to the surface of the mountain.

  West noticed that the roses would catch daylight from some of the holes for a few moments every day—enough to keep them alive and regenerating.

  ‘The Persian White Desert Rose,’ he breathed. ‘Extinct. Till now.’

  ‘Come on,’ Avenger shoved him on, oblivious to the monumental discovery. ‘I’ll put some of them on your grave.’

  They pressed on.

  On a couple of occasions the path delved into the stalactite— crossing through its core. Whenever it did this, the path met and crossed the claustrophobic vertical bore shaft that West had climbed into at the bottom. The shaft, it seemed, bored all the way up through the great stalactite. On these occasions, the group would just jump across the narrow shaft.

  The Catwalk and the Most Holy Shrine

  At length, they came to the point where the stalactite met the ceiling of the supercavern.

  Here, a rotten wooden catwalk stretched out from the stalactite across the upper surface of the great cave.

  The ancient catwalk threaded itself through several U-shaped beams that hung from the ceiling, and it stretched for about fifty metres before it stopped just short of a very large recess in the ceiling.

  Handrungs continued from there, heading out across the ceiling and up into the dark recess. To hang from the handrungs meant dangling by your hands high above the quicksand lake 500 feet below.

  ‘This is it,’ West said. ‘This is where all roads end.’

  ‘Then go,’ Avenger said. ‘You may even take the Arab with you—although I shall keep the girl with me as insurance.’

  West and Pooh Bear ventured out across the ancient catwalk, high above the supercavern.

  The wood creaked beneath their feet. Dust and debris fell off the catwalk’s underside, sailing all the way down to the sand-lake. Twice the catwalk lurched suddenly, as if the entire assembly was going to fall.

  They reached the end of the catwalk.

  ‘I’ll go first,’ West said, eyeing the handrungs. ‘I’ll trail a return rope as I go. If the Piece is up in that recess, we’ll need a rope to send it back.’

  Pooh Bear nodded. ‘I want to kill them all, Huntsman, for holding a gun to her head.’

  ‘Me, too. But we have to stay alive. So long as we’re breathing, we’ll still have a chance to do exactly that,’ West said. ‘The key is to stay breathing.’

  ‘Be careful.’

  ‘I’ll try, buddy.’

  And with that, West grasped the first handrung, and swung out onto it, 500 feet above the world.

  Against the spectacular backdrop of the mighty Hanging Gardens, the tiny figure of Jack West Jr swinging hand-over-hand across the rungs in the ceiling of the supercavern looked positively microscopic.

  Fluttering near him, watching over him as always, was Horus.

  Trailing a ‘return rope’ from his belt—a rope that went all the way back to Pooh Bear—he came to the large recess in the ceiling.

  It was shaped like a trapezoid, with steep inwardly-slanting walls tapering upwards to a point. More handrungs ran in a line up the slanting wall—so that it was now like free-climbing up an overhang, with your legs hanging beneath you.

  But it was the focal point of the recess—the highest point—that seized West’s attention.

  It was a square horizontal ledge cut into the rock, about the size of a large refrigerator.

  In stark contrast to the rough rocky surface of the rest of the recess, it was ornately decorated—with gold and jewels, making it look like a shrine.

  From his current position, West couldn’t see inside it. He scaled the handrungs on the near side of the recess, holding his entire body up with only his arms.

  He arrived at the ledge, did a strenuous chin-up to raise his head above its rim.

  And his eyes widened.

  Sitting there before him, mounted proudly inside this exceedingly difficult to reach altar, was a medium-sized golden trapezoid.

  The Hanging Gardens Piece.

  It was one of the middle Pieces, about the size of a washing basket. Too big for one man to carry by himself. He pulled out his pressure-gun, fired a piton into the rockwall, looped his rope around it.

  ‘Pooh Bear,’ he said into his mike. ‘Can you come over here? I need your help. Avenger: send some of your people to the other end of our rope to catch this when we send it back.’

  Pooh Bear joined West—after a precarious climb—and together they managed to pull the Piece from its holy alcove and, placing it safely in a pulley-harness that hung from the return rope, they sent it whizzing back down the return rope to the catwalk.

  Nestled in its harness, the Piece slid down the length of the rope, arrived back at the catwalk, where Avenger caught it with gleaming greedy eyes.

  ‘Have you got it?’ West’s voice said into his earpiece.

  Avenger replied: ‘Yes, we have it. Thank you, Captain West, that will be all. Goodbye.’

  And with that Avenger cut the return rope at his end and let it swing out over the void.

  From his position, West saw the rope go slack, now only hanging from its piton at his end.

  ‘Oh, shit! Shit!’ he swung past Pooh Bear, moving fast down the handrungs in the slanting wall of the recess, reaching the bottom— the flat ceiling of the supercavern—just in time to see Avenger and his men run to the far end of the catwalk and toss three hand grenades behind them.

  The grenades bounced along the rotten wooden catwalk.

  And detonated.

  The ancient catwalk never stood a chance.

  The grenades exploded—and with a pained shrieking, the catwalk fell away from the ceiling. . .

  . . . and sailed in a kind of slow motion all the way down to the sand-lake, 500 feet below.

  West watched it all the way, knowing exactly what this meant.

  With the catwalk gone, he and Pooh Bear had no way to get back to the stalactite.

  The horror of their predicament hit home.

  Lily and the Piece were in the hands of the escaping Israelis, the Americans were banging on the door, and now . . .
now he and Pooh were stranded on the ceiling of the biggest cave he had ever seen with no way or hope of getting back.

  After watching the destruction of the catwalk with grim satisfaction, Avenger scooped up Lily. He turned to head back down the stalactite’s spiralling path.

  ‘We won’t be needing Captain West or the Arab anymore. Nor—’ he drew his pistol—‘will we be needing you, Mr Zae—’

  But Mustapha Zaeed, his animal instincts ever alert, had already seen what was coming.

  By the time Avenger had his pistol drawn, Zaeed had already broken into a run—dashing off down the path and into one of its cross-tunnels.

  ‘He won’t get far. Come. Let’s get out of here.’ With Lily in his grasp, he led his men down the path.

  ‘Huntsman,’ Pooh Bear gasped. ‘I’m . . . er . . . in some trouble here . . .’

  West rushed back—swinging with his hands across the rocky ceiling—to check on Pooh Bear in the recess.

  Pooh was heavier than he was, with far less arm-strength. He wouldn’t be able to hold himself up for long.

  West swung alongside him. ‘Hang in there, my friend. No pun intended.’ He quickly tied the now loose return rope around and under Pooh’s armpits—allowing Pooh Bear to hang from it without effort.

  As for himself, West could hang from his mechanical arm longer—but not forever.

  ‘The Israelis?’ Pooh Bear asked.

  ‘They destroyed the catwalk. Took the Piece and Lily. We’re stranded.’

  ‘If I ever catch him, I’ll throttle Stretch,’ Pooh Bear said. ‘You know, for a moment there I actually thought he might have become one of us. But I was wrong. Dirty betrayer.’

  ‘Pooh, right now, I’d just be happy to get out of here alive.’

  The Israeli team charged back down the stalactite, with Lily and the Piece in their possession.

  As they reached the tip of the great stalactite, they saw their two rear-guards come running into the supercavern.