The Six Sacred Stones jw-2

by Matthew Reilly

  Then he fainted into Pooh Bear’s arms.

  JACK AWOKE to the wonderful sensation of warm sunlight on his face.

  He opened his eyes, to find himself lying on a cot in a guardhouse just inside the upper entrance to the mine, sunshine slanting in through the window.

  A fresh bandage was on his right hand and his face had been washed. He also wore crisp new clothes: some traditional Ethiopian robes.

  Squinting, he stood and padded out of the guardhouse.

  Pooh Bear met him in the doorway.

  “Ah, the warrior wakes,” Pooh Bear said. “You’ll be happy to know we now own this mine. We took out the upper guards with the help of the miners—who, it should be said, were most enthusiastic in assailing their captors.”

  “I’ll bet,” Jack said. “So where are we in Ethiopia?”

  “You’re not going to believe it.”

  They stepped out of the office and emerged in bright sunshine.

  Jack took in the surrounding landscape.

  Dry, barren brushland, with rust-colored soil and treeless hills.

  And dotting the hollows of some of those hills were structures—stonebuildings —exquisitely carved buildings, each easily five stories tall, that had been hewn from solid rock and were sunk inside massive stone-walled pits. It was as if they had been cut out of the living rock.

  One of the buildings, Jack saw, was carved in the shape of an equal-armed cross, a Templar cross.

  “You know where we are?” Pooh Bear asked.

  “Yes,” Jack said. “We’re in Lalibela. These are the famous churches of Lalibela.”

  “Our mission is in tatters, Huntsman,” Pooh Bear said sadly.

  It was a short time later and the two of them were sitting in the sunshine, with Jack nursing his injured right hand. Around them, the freed slave miners variously left, ate, or plundered the upper offices for clothes and booty.

  “We’ve been scattered to the winds,” Pooh went on. “Your father sent Stretch back to the Mossad, intent on collecting the bounty on his head.”

  “Aw, shit…” Jack said. “And did I see Astro go off with Wolf?”

  “Yes.”

  “Timeo Americanos et dona ferentes,”Jack muttered.

  “I don’t know, Jack,” Pooh said, “from what I could see, Astro didn’t seem, well, himself. And during our mission, he struck me as a fine young man, not a villain. I wouldn’t rush to judgment on him.”

  “I’ve always valued your opinion, Zahir. Consider judgment suspended, for the moment. What about Wolf?”

  “He set off after Wizard, Zoe, and Lily, to find the ancient tribe and get the Second Pillar.”

  “The Neetha…” Jack said, thinking.

  He stared out into space for a moment.

  Then he said, “We have to catch up with Lily and the others. Make sure they get that Pillar and get it to the next vertex in time.”

  “You need rest,” Pooh Bear said, “and a doctor.”

  “And a panel beater,” Jack said, touching the two half-crushed metal fingers on his mechanical left hand.

  Pooh Bear said, “I say we head for our old base in Kenya, the farm. There you can get some medical attention and rearm yourself. Then you can set out from the farm for the central regions of the continent.”

  “Ican?” West said. “What about we can?”

  Pooh Bear looked at him closely. Then he looked away into the distance. “I will be leaving you at the farm in Kenya, Huntsman.”

  Jack remained silent.

  “I cannot leave my friend to suffer in the cells of the Mossad,” Pooh Bear said. “The Mossad do not forget a slight. Nor do they forgive those agents who disobey their orders. Even if the world is to end, I will not leave Stretch to die a cruel death in a dungeon. He would not let such a fate befall me.”

  Jack just returned Pooh Bear’s gaze. “I understand.”

  “Thank you, Jack. I shall get you to Kenya and there we shall part.”

  Jack nodded again. “Sounds like a plan—”

  Just then, however, a delegation of about dozen Ethiopian Jews approached them. The leader of the delegation, a dignified-looking man, held a bundle in his hands, wrapped in dirty hessian cloth.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Jack,” he said humbly. “As a gesture of thanks, the men wanted to give you this.”

  “What is it?” Jack leaned forward.

  “Oh, it is the stones your father had us digging for,” the man said matter-of-factly. “We found them three weeks ago, we just didn’t tell him or his evil guards that we had. So we hid them and kept digging as if the stones had never been found, awaiting salvation, awaiting you.”

  Despite himself, Jack shook his head and grinned. He couldn’t believe this.

  “And since you set us free,” the leader said, “we would like to present the holy stones to you, as a token of our thanks. We think you a good man, Mr. Jack.”

  The leader of the Jewish slave miners handed Jack the hessian bundle.

  Jack maintained eye contact with the leader as he took it. “I sincerely thank you for this. I also apologize to your people for the cruelty of my father.”

  “His acts are not yours. Be well, Mr. Jack, and should you ever need aid in Africa, send for us. We will come.”

  And with that, the delegation left.

  “Well I’ll be,” Pooh Bear said. “No good deed really does go unrewarded…”

  Beside him, Jack gently unwrapped the hessian cloth, to reveal two stone tablets, each the size of a manila folder, and clearly ancient, and both inscribed with half a dozen lines of text, written in the Word of Thoth.

  “The Twin Tablets of Thuthmosis,” Jack breathed. “God damn.”

  THE SEPARATION OF THE TEAM

  KENYAN SAVANNAH

  DECEMBER 12, 2007

  FIVE DAYS TO SECOND DEADLINE

  JACK AND POOH BEAR sped across the vast Kenyan savannah in an old truck they’d taken from the mine at Lalibela.

  Pooh Bear drove while Jack sat in the passenger seat, gazing at the two ancient tablets.

  “Huntsman. What are those things?”

  Staring at the tablets, Jack said, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  Pooh gave him a look. “Try me.”

  “Okay. The Twin Tablets of Thuthmosis are a pair of stone tablets once owned by Rameses the Great around the year 1250 B.C. They stood on a holy altar at his favorite temple in Thebes, the most valuable treasure of his reign. But they were taken from Rameses late in his life, stolen from the temple by a renegade priest.”

  “I confess I have not heard of these tablets before,” Pooh Bear said as he drove. “Should I have?”

  “Oh, you’ve heard of them. Only you’ve heard them called by their other name. You see, the Twin Tablets of Thuthmosis are more commonly known as the Ten Commandments.”

  “The Ten Commandments!” Pooh Bear exclaimed. “You can’t be serious. The two carved stone tablets containing God’s laws handed to Moses at Mount Sinai?”

  Jack countered, “Or how about two carved stone tablets containing crucial ancient knowledge stolen by an Egyptian priest named Moses from the Ramesesseum at Thebes and spirited to Mount Sinai after making his escape from Egypt.

  “And, while we’re being precise about it, originally there was only one tablet,” Jack added. “According to the Book of Exodus, Moses broke the single tablet in two. And it only contained five commands, not ten—the tablets are identical, containing the same text. Whether God sent the tablets to Moses on Mount Sinai or whether Moses just revealed them to his followers for the first time on Mount Sinai, is open to question.”

  “It is?”

  “Well, let me ask you: who was Moses?”

  Pooh Bear shrugged. “A Hebrew peasant, abandoned by his mother to the rushes, who was found by the queen and raised as the brother of…”

  “…Rameses II,” Jack finished. “We all know the story. That Moses lived during the time of Rameses the Great is likely. That he was a Heb
rew is unlikely, since ‘Moses’ is an Egyptian name.”

  “The name ‘Moses’ is Egyptian?”

  “Yes, in fact, strictly speaking it’s only half a name. ‘Moses’ means ‘born of’ or ‘son of.’ It is normally combined with a the oriphic prefix pertaining to a god. So Rameses—or spelled another way, ‘Ra-moses’—means ‘Son of Ra.’

  “As such, it is highly unlikely that ‘Moses’ was actually the name of the man we call Moses. It’d be like calling a Scotsman Mc or an Irishman O’ without adding the family name—McPherson, O’Reilly.”

  “So what was his name then?”

  “Most modern scholars believe that Moses’ full name was Thuth moses: the son of Thoth.”

  “As in the Word of Thoth?”

  “The very same. And as you and I know very well, Thoth was the Egyptian god of knowledge. Sacred knowledge. This has led many scholars to deduce that the man we call Moses was in fact a member of an Egyptian priesthood. More than that, he was a very influential priest: a gifted orator, a charismatic leader of people. Only there was a big problem. He preached a heretical religion.”

  “Which was?”

  “Monotheism,” Jack said. “The idea that there is only one god. In the century before Rameses ascended the throne of ancient Egypt, Egypt had been ruled by a peculiar pharaoh named Akenaten. Akenaten has gone down in history as the one and only Egyptian pharaoh to preach monotheism. Naturally, he didn’t last long. He was assassinated by a group of holy men, aggrieved priests who had been telling Egyptians for centuries that there were many gods to worship.

  “But. If you look at the Biblical Moses, you’ll see that he preached a very similar idea: one almighty God. It’s very probable that Moses was a priest of Akenaten’s who survived his downfall. Now, think about it, if this charismatic priest were to come upon a pair of stone tablets carved by an advanced prior civilization, don’t you think he might use them to augment his preaching, to say to his followers, ‘Look at what God in his wisdom sent you! His immutable laws!’”

  “You realize that if you’re right, Christian Sunday schools will never be the same again,” Pooh Bear said. “So what has all this to do with some remote stone churches in Ethiopia?”

  “Good question. According to biblical history, the Ten Commandments were kept in the Ark of the Covenant, the arca foedera, inside a special vault deep within the Temple of Solomon. Now, in the movies, Indiana Jones found the Ark in the ancient Egyptian city of Tanis, but according to the people of Ethiopia, Indy was wrong.

  “The people of Ethiopia have claimed for over seven hundred years that the arca foedera has resided in their lands, brought there direct from the Temple of Solomon by European knights in the yearA.D. 1280, the same European knights who built the churches of Lalibela. Seems the Ethiopians were right.”

  “So if the tablets don’t contain the ten ultimate laws of God, what’s written on them?” Pooh Bear asked.

  Jack gazed at the engraved writing on the two tablets in his lap. “What the tablets contain is just as important: they contain the words of a ritual that must be performed at the sixth and last vertex of the Machine, when the Dark Star is almost upon the Earth. The Twin Tablets of Thuthmosis contain a sacred text that will save us all.”

  They drove south through Kenya, zooming along its highways until at last they crested a final hill and their old base came into view—a large farmhouse not far from the Tanzanian border. On the distant southern horizon, the cone of Kilimanjaro rose majestically into the sky.

  And standing on the porch of the farmhouse waiting for them, were two white men.

  One wore a black T-shirt, the other a white one.

  The shirts read:“I HAVE SEEN THE COW LEVEL!” and “THERE IS NO COW LEVEL!”

  The twins.

  Horus was perched on Lachlan’s forearm. She squawked with delight when she saw Jack and flew directly to his shoulder.

  “When we got here this morning,” Julius said, “your little friend was waiting.”

  “That’s one loyal bird you’ve got there,” Lachlan said.

  “Best bird in the world,” Jack said, grinning at the falcon. “Best bird in the world.”

  THEY HEADED inside the farmhouse.

  “We’ve got a lot to tell you—” Lachlan said as they walked, but Jack just held up his finger and went into his old study.

  There he prised open a floorboard and extracted from under the floor a shoebox filled with wads of US dollars and an Australian SAS first-aid field kit.

  Jack grabbed a syringe from the kit and loaded it with a drug called Andarin—“Superjuice” as the men of the SAS liked to call it. Andarin was a potent mix of adrenaline and high-grade cortisol. It was a battle drug, designed to mask pain and provide an adrenal kick, and thus get a badly wounded soldier—as Jack was now—through a hostile engagement.

  Jack injected it into his arm and instantly blinked. “Ow, that’s powerful stuff.” He apologized to the twins: “Sorry, gentlemen. Just needed something to keep me standing till this is over. Now, tell me everything.”

  They settled in the lounge room of the empty farmhouse, and there the twins blurted out everything they’d learned over the last week.

  They informed Jack of the location of the Second Vertex: to the south of Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa.

  They told him about Tank Tanaka and his Japanese brotherhood’s avowed mission to avenge their national disgrace in World War II—through mass global suicide. They also mentioned their golden piece of knowledge: that this Japanese brotherhood had infiltrated Wolf’s CIEF force with one of their own, a man named Akira Isaki.

  While they’d waited at the farmhouse for someone to arrive, the twins had hacked an American military database and discovered that there was indeed a US serviceman named A. J. Isaki—Akira Juniro Isaki—a Marine who had been seconded to the CIEF.

  Lachlan said, “Isaki was born in America in 1979 to a Japanese-American couple who—”

  “—by all accounts were very lovely people,” Julius added.

  “Thing is,” Lachlan said, “his grandparents —his paternal grandparents—were purebred Japanese and during the Second World War, they were imprisoned in a Californian internment camp—”

  “Very nasty, those camps. Black spot in American history…”

  “But when baby A. J.’s parents were killed in a car crash in 1980, A. J. Isaki was brought up by his grandparents—”

  “His now bitterly resentful pure-blood Japanese grandparents, members of the Blood Brotherhood. A. J. joined the Marines, was steadily promoted to Force Recon, and was ultimately seconded—upon his own application—to the CIEF in 2003.”

  “His call sign,” Lachlan said, “is Switchblade.”

  “Switchblade,” Jack said, vaguely recalling the Asian-American Marine whom Wolf had introduced to him back in the Ethiopian mine, when Jack had been nailed down at the base of the pit. He asked, “You guys still online?”

  Julius cocked his head. “Is the starship Enterprise powered by dilithium crystals? Of course we’re online.”

  He handed his laptop to Jack.

  Jack tapped some keys. “We’ve got to find out if Wizard and Zoe got the Second Pillar from the Neetha. Hopefully, they’ve left a message for me on the Net.”

  He brought up the Lord of the Rings chat room, punched in his user name—STRIDER101—and password.

  A new screen came up, and Jack scowled. “Nothing.”

  No message awaited him.

  Wizard’s message would not arrive on the noticeboard for another three days.

  Lachlan said, “Jack, there’s one more thing.”

  “What?”

  “Since we got here we’ve been scanning the military frequencies, searching for news of you or the others. Over the last twenty-four hours, a whole bunch of African nations have scrambled their air forces. There’s also been a spate of air traffic lockdowns in the south of the continent: first Zimbabwe and then Mozambique, then Angola, Namibia, and
Botswana. No commercial air traffic allowed. Someone’s cutting off all the air corridors to South Africa.”

  Jack thought about that. “The next vertex is underneath Table Mountain in Cape Town, you say?”

  “A little to the south of it, yes,” Lachlan said.

  “We have to get there,” Jack said, suddenly standing. “We have to get there before the deadline.”

  “What do you mean?” Julius asked.