The Eight bolted up the slope.
The block gained speed—heading down the slope, propelled only by gravity and its immense bulk.
It was a race to the Gate.
West and Big Ears and the girl came to the doorway cut into the sloping floor, ducked inside it.
Wizard came next, followed by Fuzzy and Princess Zoe.
The sliding granite block slid across the top of the doorway just as the last two members of the team were approaching it.
'Stretch! Pooh! Hurry!' West called.
The first man—a tall thin fellow known as Stretch—dived, slithering in under the sliding stone a nanosecond before it completely covered the doorway.
The last man was too late.
He was easily the pudgiest and heaviest in the group. He had the olive skin and deep lush beard of a well-fed Arab sheik. His call-sign in his own country was the rather mighty Saladin, but here it was—
'Pooh Bear! No! Nooof the little girl screamed.
The stone slid over the doorway, and despite a final desperate lunge, Pooh Bear was cut off, left in the slipway, at the mercy of the great block.
'No . . . !' West called, hitting the underside of the sliding stone as it went by, sweeping the helpless Pooh away with it.
'Oh dear, poor Zahir . . .' Wizard said.
For a moment, no-one spoke.
The seven remaining members of the group stood in stunned silence. Lily started to sob quietly.
Then West blinked—something inside him clicking into action.
'Come on, everyone. We've got a job to do and to do it we have to keep moving. We knew this wasn't going to be a cakewalk. Hell, this is only the beginning—'
He turned then, gazing at the horizontal corridor awaiting them. At its far end was a ladder cut into the end-wall, a ladder that led up to a circular manhole cut into the ceiling.
White light washed down through the manhole.
Electric light.
Man-made light.
'—and it's about to get a lot worse. 'Cause we just caught up with the Europeans.'
The Grand Cavern
West poked his head up through the manhole to hehold an absolutely awesome sight.
He was at the base of a gargantuan cavern situated right in the belly of the mountain, a cavern easily 400 feet high.
A former rock quarry, it was roughly triangular in shape, wide at the base, tapering to a point at the top.
West was at the extreme south end of the cavern, while opposite him at the northern end, one hundred yards away, were the Europeans: with their floodlights, their troops . . . and a half-built crane.
Without doubt, however, the most striking feature of the cavern was its chdrcoal-coloured diorite rockface.
The rockface rose for the full height of the cavern, soaring into darkness beyond the reach of the Europeans' floodlights: a giant black wall.
As a quarry, the ancient Egyptians had mined this diorite seam systematically—cutting four narrow ledges out of the great wall, so that now the rockface looked like a 30-storey office building that had been divided into four step-like tiers. Each ledge ran for the entire width of the rockface, but they were perilously narrow: barely wide enough for two men to stand on side-by-side.
If that wasn't dangerous enough, Imhotep V had adapted this already-unusual structure into a masterpiece of protective engineering.
In short, he'd laid hundreds of traps all over it.
The four narrow ledges swung back and forth, each rising
steadily before ending at a cut-into-the-rock ladder that led to the next level.
The only exception was the wall-ladder between the first and second levels: its ladder was situated in the exact centre of the cavern, equidistant from the northern and southern entrances, as if Imhotep V was encouraging a race between rival parties who arrived at the same time.
Since each narrow ledge was cut from pure diorite, a grappling hook would be useless—it could never get a purchase on the hard black stone. To get to the top, one had to traverse every level and defeat the traps on them.
And how many traps there were!
Small arched forts dotted the great wall at irregular intervals, spanning each of the ledges, concealing traps.
Hundreds of basketball-sized wall-holes littered the rockface, containing God-only-knew what kinds of lethal liquids. And where holes were not possible, long stone chutes slid snake-like down the rockface—looking a bit like upside-down chimneys that ended with open spouts ready to spew foul liquids over the unwary intruder.
Seeing the holes, West detected the distinctive odour of oil in the air—giving him a clue as to what might come out of some of them.
And there was the final feature.
The Scar.
This was a great uneven crevice that ran all the way down the rock-wall, cutting across the ledges and the rockface with indifference. It looked like a dry riverbed, only it ran vertically not horizontally.
At the top of the cavern, it was a single thick crevice, but it widened toward the base, where it forked into two smaller scars.
A trickling waterfall dribbled down its length, from some unknown source high up inside the mountain.
To cross the Scar on any of the four ledges meant either tiptoeing across a foot-wide mini-ledge or leaping a small void ... in b°th cases in front of wall-holes or other shadowy recesses.
The trickling waterfall that rolled down the Scar fed a wide lake at the base of the rockface—a lake that now separated West and his
team from the European force, a lake that was home to about sixty Nile crocodiles, all variously sleeping, sloshing or crawling over each other.
And at the very top of the colossal structure: a small stone doorway that led to this mine's fabled treasure:
The head of an ancient wonder.
Peering over the rim of the manhole, West gazed at the Europeans and their half-finished crane.
As he watched, dozens of men hauled more pieces of the giant crane into the cavern, handing them to engineers who then supervised the attachment of the pieces to the growing machine.
In the midst of this activity, West spied the leader of the European expedition, the Jesuit, del Piero, standing perfectly erect, his hands clasped behind his back. At 68, del Piero had thinning slicked-down black hair, ghost-like grey eyes, deep creases on his face, and the severe expression of a man who had spent his life frowning at people.
But it was the tiny figure standing next to del Piero who seized West's attention.
A small boy.
With black hair and even blacker eyes.
West's eyes widened. He had seen this boy before. Ten years ago ...
The boy stood at del Piero's side with his hands clasped behind his back, mimicking the imperious stance of the old Jesuit.
He seemed to be about Lily's age.
No, West corrected himself, he was exactly Lily's age.
West's gaze shifted back to the crane.
It was a clever plan.
Once finished, the crane would lift the Europeans up over the first ledge and land them on the second.
Not only did this allow them to avoid about ten traps, it also enabled them to avoid the most dangerous trap of all in this cavern:
The Master Snare.
West knew about it from the Callimachus Text—which he suspected del Piero and the Europeans could have had a Vatican copy of. That said, they could have become aware of it from other ancient texts written about Imhotep V.
While the other Imhoteps had their own signature traps,
I Imhotep V had invented the Master Snare, a trap that was triggered in advance of the system's innermost vault—thus making the final leg of the journey a matrix of trap-beating versus time. Or as Wizard liked to say, 'Beating booby traps is one thing; beating them against the clock is another.' That said, the Master Snare was not so crude as to destroy the entire trap system. Like most of Imhotep's traps, it would reset itself to be used again.
&
nbsp; No, in most cases the Master Snare left you in a do-or-die predicament: if you were good enough, you could take the treasure. If you weren't, you would die.
The Callimachus Text stated that the trigger stone for the Master
I Snare of this system lay in the very centre of the first level, at the base of the ladder there. Wizard appeared at West's side, peered out from the manhole. 'Mmm, a crane. With that, del Piero and his men will avoid triggering the Master Snare. It'll give them more time up in the Holy of Holies. Very clever.' 'No, it's not clever,' West said flatly. 'It's against the rules.' 'The rules?' 'Yes, the rules. This is all part of a contest that has been held ! for the last 4,000 years, between Egyptian architects and grave-J robbers. And this contest has an honour code—we attack, Imhotep V defends. But by skipping a major trigger stone, del Piero is cheat-I Wg. He's also showing his weakness.' 'Which is?'
'He doesn't believe he can beat the Master Snare.' West smiled. But we can.'
West dropped back down to the base of the ladder, turned to his team of six.
'Okay, kids. This is what we've trained for. Leapfrog formation, remember your places. Lily, you're with me in the middle. Fuzzy, you're the point for the first disable. Then Big Ears, Zoe and Stretch. Wizard, you'll have to cover for Pooh Bear, who was going to cover the fifth. I'll trigger the Master Snare.'
Everyone nodded, game faces on.
West turned to Wizard. 'Okay, Professor. You got those Warblers ready? Because as soon as we break cover, those Europeans are going to open fire.'
'Ready to go, Huntsman,' Wizard said, holding up a large gunlike object that looked like an M-203 grenade launcher. 'I'll need maybe four seconds before you can make a break for it.'
'I'll give you three.'
Then they all put their hands into the middle, team-style, and called 'Kamate!', after which they broke, with Wizard leading the way up the ladder, venturing into the fray . . .
Wizard popped up out of the manhole, his grenade launcher raised. He fired it three times, each shot emitting a loud puncture-like phump.
Phump'.-Phump'.-Phump!
The rounds that burst out of the grenade launcher looked like grenades, but they weren't grenades—fat and round and silver, they fanned out to three corners of the giant cavern, little red pilot lights on them hlinking.
The Europeans heard the first shot and by the third had located Wizard.
A French sniper on the cabin of the crane swung his rifle round, drew a bead on Wizard's forehead, and fired.
His bullet went haywire.
It peeled downwards almost as soon as it left the barrel of the Frenchman's rifle—where it struck an unfortunate croc square in the head, killing it.
The 'Warblers' at work.
The three odd-looking silver rounds that Wizard had fired were more formally known as Closed Atmospheric Field Destabilisers (Electromagnetic), but everyone just called them 'Warblers'.
One of Wizard's rare military inventions, the Warblers created a magnetic field that disrupted the flight of high-subsonic metal )bjects—specifically bullets—creating a gunfire-free zone.
Wizard, one of the leading experts in electromagnetic applica-
1Qns, had sold the revolutionary technology to Raytheon in 1988
$25 million, most of which went to the New York venture cap-
tal company that had bankrolled his research. Walking away with
only $2 million, Wizard hated sworn to never work again with venture capitalists.
Ironically, the US Army------as always, thinking it knew better—
ordered Raytheon to reworlc the Warbler system, creating huge problems that had stalled the program for over fifteen years. It had yet to enter active service.
Naturally, Wizard—a Canadian, not an American—had kept a few working prototypes for himself, three of which he was now using.
The Seven burst out from their manhole, one after the other, moving fast, heading for the nearest embedded ladder that led up to the first level.
As he ran in the middle of the group, West set Horus free and the little peregrine falcon soared above the forward-moving group.
The Jamaican, Fuzzy, led the way—dancing along a narrow stone walkway that lay flush against the right-hand wall of the cavern. Pushed up against trie walkway's low edge was a crush of crocodiles.
Fuzzy held in his hands a lightweight titanium bar welded in the shape of an X.
Halfway along its length, the walkway ended briefly at a small void. In the centre of this void was a raised square stepping-stone that also stood flush against the wall and an inch above the croc-filled water.
Cut into the stone wall immediately above this stepping-stone was a dark hole about a metre in diameter.
Fuzzy didn't miss a beat.
He leapt from the walkway onto the stepping-stone—
—and immediately heard a rush of water from up inside the wall-hole, accompanied by a. low crocodilian growl—
—at which point he jammed his titanium X-bar into the wall-hole and hit a switch on the bar.
Thwack!
The X-shaped bar expanded with a powerful springloaded motion, so that suddenly it was wedged tightly in the mouth of the circular wall-hole.
Not a second too soon.
An instant later, a burst of water gushed out of the wall-hole, immediately followed by the jaws of a massive crocodile that slammed at tremendous speed into the X-bar!
The croc roared angrily but its jaws were caught against the X-bar, unable to get past. The rush of water sprayed all around Fuzzy, but didn't knock him over.
'Trap One! Clear!' he called.
The others were already there with him, moving fast, and as Fuzzy kept watch over the writhing croc trapped in the wall-hole, they danced safely by.
Now Big Ears went ahead, racing forwards to disable the next trap, while the rest of them followed, step-jumping past Fuzzy, heading for the ladder at the base of the giant rockface.
The Europeans could only watch in helpless amazement as the Seven raced along the opposite wall to the base of the rockface.
Alone among them, Francisco del Piero eyed West—eyed him with an ice-cold gaze—watched him running with Lily at his side, gripping her hand.
'Well, well, well,' del Piero said. 'Who have you got there, Captain West . . .?'
The Seven hit the base of the rockface.
The building-sized wall towered above them, black as the night.
Big Ears had already done his work, disabling two hand-chopping traps halfway up the rock-cut ladder.
Now Princess Zoe leapfrogged ahead. She moved with great athleticism, easily the match of the men. About 30, she had
shoulder-length blonde hair, freckles, and the luminous blue eyes that only Irish girls possess.
Onto the First Level she flew, raising two aerosol cans as she did so, filling two wall-holes with a dense expanding foam. Whatever evils had been in those wall-holes were caught by the foam and neutralised.
No sooner had she done this than she was leapfrogged by the seventh member of the group, the tall, thin trooper named Stretch. Once known as Archer, he had a long, sanguine, bony face. He hailed from the deadly Israeli sniper unit, the Sayaret Matkal.
Stretch arrived at the right-side arm of the Scar, where he triggered a huge trap from a safe distance: a bronze cage that fell out of a dark recess in the Scar and clattered down to the lake.
Had any of the team been walking on the foot-wide mini-ledge in front of the recess, the cage would have caught them and taken them down to the lake, to be either eaten by the crocs or drowned under the weight of the cage itself.
Now West and Lily took the lead, crossing the mini-ledge across the Scar, stepping out onto the centre section of the First Level.
Here they found the trigger stone for the Master Snare at the base of the wall-ladder leading up to Level 2. West made to step on it—
'Captain West!'
West froze in mid-stride, turned.
Del
Piero and his troops were staring up at him from the base of their half-finished crane, holding their useless guns stupidly in their hands.
'Now, Captain West, please think about this before you do it!' del Piero called. 'Is it really necessary? Even if you trigger the Master Snare, you are only postponing the inevitable. If you do somehow get the Piece, we'll kill you when you try to leave this mountain. And if you don't, my men will just return after the Snare has run its course and we will find the head of the Colossus
and the piece of the Capstone it contains. Either way, Captain, we get the Piece.'
West's eyes narrowed.
Still he didn't speak.
Del Piero tried Wizard. 'Max. Max. My old colleague, my old friend. Please. Reason with your rash young protege.'
Wizard just shook his head. 'You and I chose different paths a long time ago, Francisco. You do it your way. We'll do it ours. Jack. Hit the trigger.'
West just stared evenly down at del Piero.
'With pleasure,' he said.
And with that he stomped on the trigger stone set into the floor at his feet, activating the Master Snare.
The spectacle of Imhotep's Master Snare going off was sensational.
Blasting streams of black crude oil shot out from the hundreds of holes that dotted the cavern: holes in the rockface and its sidewalls.
Dozens of oil waterfalls flowed down the rockface, cascading over its four levels. Black fluid flooded out from the sidewalls, falling a clear 200 feet down them into the croc lake.
The crocs went nuts, scrambling over each other to get away from it—disappearing into some little holes in the walls or massing on the far side of the lake.
In some places on the great tiered rockface, oil came spurting out of the wall, forced out of small openings by enormous internal pressure.
Worst of all, a river of the thick black stuff came pouring down the main course of the Scar, a vertical cascade that tumbled down the vertical riverbed, overwhelming the trickle of water that had been running down it.
And then the clicking started.
The clicking of many stone-striking mechanisms mounted above the wall-holes.
Striking mechanisms made of flint.
Striking mechanisms that were designed to create sparks and . . .
Just then, a spark from one of the flints high up on the left side-wall touched the crude oil flowing out from the wall-hole an inch beneath it.
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