Seven Ancient Wonders

by Matthew Reilly

  The blow connected. . .

  . . . and had no effect on Kallis at all.

  The big CIEF trooper just grinned back at West through bloody teeth.

  Then he replied with three awesome punches of his own—all vicious, all hard, all to West’s face.

  Once, twice, three times, each blow sent West staggering backwards.

  ‘You feel that, West! You feel that!’ Kallis roared. ‘I’ve been waiting all fucking week for this! But I had to keep you alive, to let you lead us to each site. But not anymore. My boys got your Spanish friend in the Sudan! But I was the one who of fed your dumb Irish lad in Kenya! He was still alive after you left, you know—a gurgling bloody mess. I was the one who put a bullet in his brain to finish him off.’

  A fourth blow, then a fifth.

  On the fifth punch, West’s nose broke, exploded with blood, and his boots came to the edge of the platform and he teetered there for a moment, glanced quickly behind him.

  Immediately below him, thirty feet down, was the crashed Super Stallion—its still-spinning buzzsaw-like blades directly beneath him!

  Kallis saw them too. ‘But while I enjoyed snuffing out the Irish kid, I’m glad I’m the one who gets to kill you. See you in Hell, West!’

  And with that, Kallis unleashed the final crushing blow.

  Just as West himself lunged desperately forward, his left arm lashing out, extending fast—a final last-gasp all-or-nothing strike.

  His blow struck Kallis a nanosecond before Kallis’s blow struck him.

  Phwack!

  Kallis froze in mid-action—

  —with West’s artificial left fist, his metal fist, lodged deep in the centre of his face, having thundered right through his nose. The blow had been so powerful, it had dented Kallis’s nose three inches inward, breaking it in several places. Blood had sprayed everywhere.

  Incredibly, Kallis was still conscious, his eyes bulging, his entire body twitching, but his limbs were no longer responding to his brain.

  He wouldn’t be alive for long.

  ‘This is for Big Ears,’ West said, yanking Kallis around and hurling him off the edge of the platform.

  Kallis fell—thirty feet, straight down—and in his very last moment of consciousness, he saw, to his horror, the spinning rotor blades of the Super Stallion rush up to meet him. . .

  He made to scream, but the shout never came. In a single split second, Cal Kallis was diced into a million bloody pieces.

  On the other side of the platform, Wizard had watched in horror as West had fought Kallis.

  He wanted to help, but he also didn’t want to leave Lily.

  But then he saw Jack nail Kallis with his brutal punch, saw the foul explosion of blood from Kallis’s face and he suddenly felt like they might just have a chance—

  Wizard was struck viciously from behind . . . by the figure who had emerged from the Halicarnassus.

  He fell, and his world began to darken at the edges.

  Oddly, the last thing he heard before he fell into blackness was Lily shouting to someone: ‘No! Forget Alexander! Take me instead!’

  His face a mess of blood and dust, West rose from the edge of the platform and turned to head back to the Capstone—

  —only to find himself staring into the barrel of Marshall Judah’s Glock, just as del Piero had. He froze.

  ‘You should be proud, Jack!’ Judah called. ‘This is all your doing! You led us to this juncture! But all the while you were working for me! There is nothing you can think of, nothing you can do, nothing you have, that I do not already possess! Why, I even have your little girl to use for the ritual! Tragically, you won’t live to see her fulfil her destiny! Goodbye, Jack!’

  Judah tightened his trigger finger. . .

  ‘That’s not true!’ West shouted above the din. ‘I do have one thing you don’t have! Something that was once yours!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Horus!’

  At that instant, a blurring flash of brown streaked through the air, cutting across Judah’s face, and suddenly Judah screamed, his face spraying blood. He threw his hands to his eyes, still half-holding the gun.

  Horus swooped clear of the screaming Judah, clutching something in her talons . . . something white and round and trailing a ragged bloody tail.

  It was Judah’s entire left eye, including the optic nerve.

  Horus had ripped it clean from its socket!

  Judah dropped to his knees, wailing, ‘My eye! My eye!’

  At the same time, with his good eye, he saw the Capstone and yelled with even more anguish: ‘Oh, God, no . . . !’

  West spun too—and he also saw the nightmare scenario take physical form.

  For there, standing at the Capstone, having taken Lily from Wizard and ushered her at gunpoint into the sacrificial cavity in the base of the Capstone and having re-filled the crucible inside the cavity with exactly one deben of the fine-grained sand from his black-jade box, was Mustapha Zaeed, now reading from Judah’s notebook, performing the ritual of power!

  It was Zaeed who had crept unseen from the wing-door of the Halicarnassus earlier, having stowed aboard the plane in Iran after the confrontation at the Hanging Gardens.

  It was he who had followed West and Pooh Bear to the rendezvous with Sky Monster and crept aboard the plane through its landing gear, unnoticed—assuming correctly that West would come here to confront the Americans one last time.

  Once on board, Zaeed had crept to his old trunk and pulled from it his prized black-jade box, filled with the fine-grained sand, sand that he had kept for so long in his secret cave in Saudi Arabia—sand unique to the Arabian Peninsula, sand that would bring to the Muslim world a thousand years of unchallenged power.

  Now, here, on the platform, it was he who had struck Wizard from behind. As he’d done so, he had spotted Alexander lowering himself over the edge nearby, and he’d been about to grab the boy to perform the ritual, when suddenly Lily had said, ‘No! Forget Alexander! Take me instead!’

  And so Zaeed had.

  Now he only had to utter seven lines.

  It took him fifteen seconds.

  And there, atop the Great Pyramid at Giza, under the blinding Sun-ray from the Tartarus Sunspot in the roaring wind and the blazing heat, to the horror of everyone else watching powerlessly, Mustapha Zaeed—his voice resonating with evil reverence— uttered the final words of the ritual of power.

  This time, West had no doubt that the ritual had been performed correctly.

  It sounded like the end of the universe.

  Flaring light.

  Clashing thunder.

  The very Earth shook.

  What followed next made man’s most spectacular fireworks shows look positively puny.

  The dazzling-white beam of light reaching down from the Sun pulsed brilliantly, as if it were doubling in intensity.

  An unearthly thunderclap boomed, causing West’s ears to ring, and a white-hot ball of superbrilliant energy thundered out of the sky, racing down the length of the vertical beam before rushing headlong into the Capstone. . .

  . . . where the Capstone received it within its crystal array.

  Inside the Golden Capstone, the energy-burst rushed down through its seven layers of crystals—each layer refining the beam into an ever-smaller, ever-more-intense thread of superluminous light.

  And then this superthin beam struck Lily in the heart.

  The little girl convulsed, hit by the lightbeam. The beam, however, seemed to pass right through her chest and strike the soil in the crucible.

  With a blinding flash, the soil was instantly transformed to cinders.

  Seen from the outside, the Capstone shone with blinding brilliance as it received the energy-burst, before with a terrible whump, the white-hot ball disappeared into it, and the phenomenon abruptly ceased and all was quiet, save for a deep humming that came from the Capstone and the drone of the Halicarnassus’s engines.

  West could only stare at the Capstone, and
wonder what had happened to Lily inside it. Could she have survived such a phenomenon? Or had Zaeed been right when he’d said she would die in the ceremony?

  Zaeed stood beside the Capstone, his arms raised in triumph, his face upturned to the sky. ‘A thousand years! A thousand years of Islamic rule!’

  He rounded on West, eyes glowering, hands spread wide.

  ‘The ritual is done, infidel! Which means my people are unconquerable! Invincible! And you—you—will be the first to feel my wrath!’

  ‘Is that so?’ West said, jamming a new clip into one of his Desert Eagles and aiming it at Zaeed.

  ‘Fire your weapon!’ Zaeed taunted him. ‘Bullets cannot help you anymore!’

  ‘Fine,’ West said.

  Bam!—he fired.

  The bullet hit Zaeed square in the chest, sending him jolting backwards. Blood sprayed outwards and the terrorist dropped to the ground, to his knees, his face the picture of shock and confusion.

  He stared at his wound, then up at West.

  ‘But . . . how . . . ?’

  ‘I knew you were on my plane after the Hanging Gardens,’ West said. ‘I knew you’d try to stow aboard. How else were you going to get here? You’ve been chasing this all your life, you weren’t going to stay away. So I let you stow aboard.’

  ‘But the sand. . . ’

  ‘While you were hiding in the belly of my plane, I took the liberty of changing the sand in your black-jade box,’ West said. ‘It’s not the soil of Arabia anymore. What you put inside the Capstone was the soil of my homeland. You just performed the ritual of power for my people, Zaeed, not yours. Thanks.’

  Zaeed was thunderstruck. He looked away, considering the consequences. ‘Your soil? But that would mean. . . ’

  He never finished the sentence, for at that moment life escaped him, and Mustapha Zaeed dropped to the platform, dead.

  There came a sudden pained shout—‘WEST!’ —and West spun to see Marshall Judah lunging toward him, blood and flesh dangling from his ripped-open eye socket, and an M-4 assault rifle in his hands, taken from one of his dead CIEF troops.

  It was point-blank range.

  Judah couldn’t miss.

  He jammed down on the trigger.

  The gun literally exploded in Judah’s hands.

  It wasn’t a misfire, or a jam. It was a total outward explosion. The gun broke outwards in a hundred pieces and fell crumbling from Judah’s hands.

  Judah frowned, confused—then he looked up in horror at West and said, ‘Oh my God . . . you. . . you have the power. . . ’

  West stepped forward, his eyes deadly. ‘Judah, I could forgive you for what you did to me, putting that chip in my head. I could forgive you for the beatings you gave Horus. But there’s one thing I cannot forgive: killing Doris Epper. For that you have to pay.’

  As he spoke, West picked up the end of Judah’s long safety rope, unclipped it from its anchor near the Capstone.

  Judah stepped backwards, toward the edge of the platform where the Halicarnassus’s wing loomed. He held his hands up. ‘Now, Jack. We’re both soldiers and sometimes soldiers have to—’

  ‘You executed her. Now I’m going to execute you.’

  And West threw his end of the safety rope past Judah . . . into the still-rotating jet engine of the Halicarnassus that hovered immediately behind Judah.

  Judah spun as the rope flew by him, saw it enter the yawning maw of the engine.

  Then he saw the future, saw what would happen next and his one good eye boggled with fear.

  He screamed, but his scream was cut short as the enormous turbine swallowed the rope . . . and sucked the rest of the safety rope in after it.

  Judah was yanked off his feet, doubling over as he was sucked backward through the air. Then he entered the engine and— thwack-thwack-CHUNK!—was chewed alive by its hyper-rotating blades.

  And suddenly the summit of the Great Pyramid was still.

  Seeing the awesome blast of light from the Sun and the deaths of their summit team, the American force at the base of the Pyramid fled, leaving West and Wizard up on the platform, alone.

  Moments later, Zoe’s Black Hawk landed on the platform and Zoe, Fuzzy and Stretch came rushing out of it—at the same time as Pooh Bear leapt onto the platform from the Halicarnassus’s wing.

  They all arrived on the platform to find West—watched by Wizard—crawling underneath the Capstone to check on Lily.

  West bellycrawled through the tight channel carved into the stone beneath the Capstone.

  He came to Lily, found her lying motionless inside the human-shaped cavity in the Capstone’s lowest Piece. Her eyes were closed. She seemed calm, at peace . . . and not breathing.

  ‘Oh, Lily . . .’ West scrambled forward on his elbows, desperate to get to her.

  His head came alongside hers. He scanned her face for any movement, any sign of life.

  Nothing. She didn’t move at all.

  He deflated completely, his entire body going limp, his eyes closing in anguish. ‘Oh, Lily. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry’

  He bowed his head, tears rolled from the corners of his eyes, and he said, ‘I loved you, kiddo.’

  And there in the cavity, in the golden glow of the Capstone, lying before the body of the happy little girl he had guarded and raised for ten whole years, Jack West Jr wept.

  ‘I love you, too, Daddy. . . ’ a soft voice whispered weakly from nearby.

  West snapped up, his eyes darting open, to see Lily staring back at him, her head rolled onto its side. Her eyes were milky, dazed.

  But she was alive, and smiling at him.

  ‘You’re alive. . . ’ West said, amazed. ‘You’re alive!’

  He scooped her up in his arms and hugged her firmly.

  ‘But how . . . ?’ West asked aloud.

  ‘I’ll tell you later,’ she said. ‘Can we please get out of here?’

  ‘You bet,’ he breathed. ‘You bet.’

  Minutes later, the Halicarnassus powered up and lifted vertically into the sky, rising on its eight massive retro thrusters.

  Once it was high enough, it pivoted in mid-air and allowed itself to drop, nose-down. It fell briefly, plummeting towards the ground, before it engaged its regular engines, using the short vertical fall to get up to flight speed. Its main engines firing, it swung up at the last moment and soared away from the Pyramids on the Giza Plateau.

  The Great Pyramid was left standing there behind it, with the half-destroyed platform shrouding its summit, and the American helicopters and cranes lying smoking and broken on its flanks. The Egyptian Government that had aided and abetted the American ritual would have to clean it all up.

  Importantly, however, the peak of the Pyramid was also once again nine feet shorter than it should have been.

  West and his team had taken the Capstone—the entire Capstone—with them.

  Inside the main cabin of the Halicarnassus, West and the others gathered around Lily, hugging her, kissing her, clapping her on the shoulders.

  Pooh Bear embraced her: ‘Well done, young one! Well done!

  ‘Thanks for coming back for me, Pooh Bear,‘ she said.

  ‘I was never going to leave you, young one,’ he said.

  ‘Nor was I,’ said Stretch, stepping forward.

  ‘Thanks, Stretch. For saving me at the Gardens, for staying with me when you could have gone.’

  Stretch nodded silently, to Lily and also to all the others, especially Pooh Bear. ‘They don’t come often,’ he said, ‘but every now and then, there come times in your life when you have to choose a side; choose who you are fighting for. I made my choice, Lily, to fight with you. It was a hard choice, but I have no doubt that it was the right one.’’

  ‘It was the right one,’ Pooh Bear said, clapping a hand onto Stretch’s shoulder. ‘You are a good man, Israeli . . . I mean, Stretch. I would be honoured to call you my friend.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Stretch said with a smile.’Thank you, friend.’’

&
nbsp; When all the back-slapping was over, West was eager to understand how Lily had survived.

  ‘I went willingly,’ she said simply.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ West said.

  Lily grinned, obviously proud of herself. ‘It was the inscription cut into the wall of the volcano chamber where I was born. You yourself were studying it one day. It said:

  ‘Enter The Embrace Of Anubis willingly, and you shall live beyond the coming of Ra.

  Enter against your will, and your people shall rule for but one eon, but you shall live no more.

  Enter not at all, and the world shall be no more.

  ‘Like the Egyptians, we thought it was simply a reference to the god Horus, accepting death and being rewarded for that with some kind of afterlife. But that was wrong. It was meant to apply to me and Alexander—to the Oracles. It’s not about accepting death willingly. It’s about entering the cavity, the embrace of Anubis, willingly.

  ‘If I entered it of my own accord, I would survive. If I went unwillingly, I’d die. But if I didn’t go at all, and the ritual was not performed, you would all have died. And I, well, I didn’t want to lose my family.’

  ‘Even if that meant giving Zaeed power for all eternity?’ Pooh Bear said in disbelief.

  Lily turned to him, and her eyes glinted.

  ‘Mr Zaeed was never going to rule,’ she said. ‘When he grabbed me, I saw the soil in his jade box.’ Lily turned to West. ‘It was a kind of soil I’d seen many times before. I’ve been fascinated with it for a long time. It has been sitting in a glass jar on a shelf in Daddy’s study for years. When I saw it in Mr Zaeed’s box, I knew exactly what it was, and so I knew I wasn’t giving Mr Zaeed any power at all.’

  Pooh Bear said, ‘Did del Piero know this, too? Is that why he treated Alexander like a little emperor, ready to rule? Did he want Alexander to enter that cavity willingly?’

  ‘I think so,’ West said. ‘But there was more to it than that. Del Piero was a priest and he thought like a priest. He wanted Alexander to survive the ritual not because he wanted the boy to live and rule, but because he also wanted a saviour, a figurehead, a focal point for his new ruling religion. A new Christ figure.’