Six Sacred Stones, Page 2

  “What about the placing of the Pillars? There was something here about the First Pillar.

  Here it is: ‘The 1st Pillar must be inlaid exactly 100 days before the Return. The prize shall beknowledge .’”

  “One hundred days,” Tank said, calculating. “That’s…damn…December 10this year—”

  Wizard said, “Nine days from now. Good God, we knew the time was approaching, but this is—”

  “Max, are you telling me that we only have nine days to set the First Pillar in position?

  We haven’t evenfound the First Pillar yet…” Tank said.

  But Wizard wasn’t listening anymore. His eyes were glazed, staring off into infinity.

  He turned. “Tank. Who else knows about this?”

  Tank shrugged. “Only us. And, I guess, anyone else who has seen this inscription. We know of the tablet in Tibet, but you say it was only partial. Where did it end up?”

  “The Chinese Cultural Relics Bureau claimed ownership of it and took it back to Beijing.

  It hasn’t been seen since.”

  Tank scanned Wizard’s frowning face. “Do you think the Chinese authorities have found the other pieces of the cracked tablet and put it back together? You think they already know about this?”

  Wizard stood suddenly.

  “How many gunboats did you say are coming up this river gorge?”

  “Nine.”

  “Nine. You don’t send nine gunboats on a routine patrol or a shakedown. The Chinese know, and they’re coming for us now. And if they know about this, then they know about the Capstone. Damn! I have to warn Jack and Lily.”

  He hurriedly pulled a book from his backpack. Oddly, it wasn’t a reference book of any kind, but rather a wellknown paperback novel. He began flipping pages and writing numbers down in his notebook.

  When he was done, he grabbed his radio and called up to their boat topside.

  “Chow! Quickly, take this message down and post it immediately on the notice board.”

  Wizard then relayed a long series of numbers to Chow. “Okay, that’s it, go! Upload it now—now, now, now!”

  A hundred feet above Wizard, a battered old river barge bobbed among the half

  submerged huts of the ancient mountain village. It lay at anchor alongside the stone hut that gave entry to the underground chamber.

  Inside its main cabin, an eager grad student named Chow Ling hurriedly tapped out Wizard’s code, posting it on—of all things—a website devoted to theLord of the Rings movies.

  When he was done, he called Wizard on the radio. “Code has been sent, Professor.”

  Wizard’s voice came through Chow’s headset:“Thank you, Chow. Good work. Now I want you to forward every image that I’ve sent up to you to Jack West via email. Then delete them all from your hard drive.”

  “Delete them?” Chow said in disbelief.

  “Yes, all of them. Every last image. As much as you can before our Chinese friends arrive.”

  Chow worked fast, tapping keys feverishly, forwarding and then deleting Wizard’s incredible images.

  As he tapped away on his computer, he never saw the first People’s Liberation Army gunboat glide by behind him, cruising down the submerged street of the village.

  A harsh voice over a loudhailer made him jerk up:“Eh! Zou chu lai dao jia ban shang!

  Wo yao kan de dao ni. Ba shou ju zhe gao gao de!”

  Translation: “Hey! Come out onto the deck! Remain in plain sight! Hold your hands up high!”

  Deleting a final image, Chow did as he was told, kicked back from his desk, and stepped out onto the open foredeck of his barge.

  The lead gunboat towered above him. It was a modern one, fast, with camouflaged flanks and a huge forward gun.

  Chinese soldiers with Americanmade Colt Commando assault rifles lined its deck, their shortbarreled guns pointed at Chow.

  That they held modern American weapons was a bad sign: it meant that these soldiers were elite troops, special forces. Ordinary Chinese infantrymen carried clunky old Type 56 assault rifles—the Chinese ripoff of the AK47.

  These guys weren’t ordinary.

  Chow raised his hands—a bare second before someone fired and the entire front half of his body exploded with bloody holes and he was hurled backward with violent force.

  Wizard keyed his radio mike.

  “Chow? Chow, are you there?”

  There was no reply.

  Then, abruptly, the harness that until now had hung suspended from the well hole in the ceiling went whizzing back up into the hole like a spooked snake, hauled up by someone above.

  “Chow!” Wizard called into his radio. “What are you—”

  Moments later, the harness came back into view…

  …with Chow on it.

  Wizard’s blood turned to ice.

  “Oh, dear me, no…” He rushed forward.

  Almost unrecognizable from the many bullet wounds, Chow’s body came level with Wizard.

  As if on cue, the radio suddenly came to life.

  “Professor Epper,”a voice said in English.“This is Colonel Mao Gongli. We know you are in there, and we are coming in. Try nothing foolish, or you shall meet the same fate as your assistant.”

  The Chinese troops entered the chamber quickly, abseiling down dropropes with clinical precision.

  Within two minutes, Wizard and Tank were surrounded by a dozen men with guns.

  Colonel Mao Gongli entered last of all. At fiftyfive years of age, he was a portly man, but he stood with perfect poise, ramrod straight. Like many men of his generation, he’d been patriotically named after Chairman Mao. He had no operational nickname except the one his enemies had given him after his actions at Tiananmen Square in 1989 as a major—the Butcher of Tiananmen, they called him.

  Silence hung in the air.

  Mao stared at Wizard with dead eyes. When at last he spoke, he did so in clear, clipped English.

  “Professor Max T. Epper, call sign Merlin, but known to some as Wizard. Canadian by birth, but resident Professor of Archaeology at Trinity College, Dublin. Connected with the rather unusual incident that took place atop the Great Pyramid at Giza on March 20, 2006.

  “And Professor Yobu Tanaka, from the University of Tokyo. Not connected with the Giza incident, but an expert on ancient civilizations. Gentlemen, your assistant was a gifted and intelligent young man. You can see how much I care for such men.”

  “What do you want?” Wizard demanded.

  Mao smiled, a thin joyless smile.

  “Why Professor Epper, I wantyou. ”

  Wizard frowned. He hadn’t expected that answer.

  Mao stepped forward, gazing at the grand chamber around them. “Great times are upon us, Professor. In the coming months, empires will rise and nations will fall. In times such as these, the People’s Republic of China needs knowledgeable men, men like you. Which is why you work for me now, Professor. And I’m sure that with the right kind of persuasion—in one of my torture chambers—you are going to help me find the Six Ramesean Stones.”

  GREAT SANDY DESERT

  NORTHWESTERN AUSTRALIA

  DECEMBER 1, 2007, 0715 HOURS

  ON THE DAY his farm was attacked with overwhelming force, Jack West Jr. had slept in till 7:00A.M.

  Normally he got up around six to see the dawn, but life was good these days. His world had been at peace for almost eighteen months, so he decided to skip the damn dawn and get an extra hour’s sleep.

  The kids, of course, were already up. Lily had a friend over for the summer holidays, a little boy from her school named Alby Calvin.

  Noisy and excited and generally up to mischief, they’d played nonstop for the past three days, exploring every corner of the vast desert farm by day, while at night they gazed up at the stars through Alby’s telescope.

  That Alby was partially deaf meant little to Lily or to Jack. At their school in Perth for gifted and talented students, Lily was the star linguist and Alby the star mathematician and
that was all that mattered.

  At eleven, she now knew six languages, two of them ancient and one of them sign language—it had been easily acquired and was actually something that she and Jack had done together. Today the end tips of her beautiful long black hair were colored electric pink.

  For his part, Alby was twelve, black, and wore large thicklensed glasses. He had a cochlear implant, the miraculous technology that allowed the deaf to hear, and spoke with a slightly rounded inflection—signing was still necessary for those times when he needed to understand extra emotion or urgency in a matter—but deaf or not, Alby Calvin could rumble with the best of them.

  West was standing on the porch with his shirt off, sipping a mug of coffee. His left arm glinted in the morning sun—from the bicep down, it was entirely made of metal.

  He gazed out at the wide desert landscape, hazy in the morning light. Of medium height, with blue eyes and tousled dark hair, he was handsome in a rugged kind of way. Once upon a time, he had been ranked the fourthbest special forces soldier in the world, a lone Australian on a list dominated by Americans.

  But he was no longer a soldier. After leading a daring tenyear mission to acquire the fabled Golden Capstone of the Great Pyramid from the remains of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, he was now more a treasure hunter than a warrior, more skilled at skirting boobytrapped cave systems and deciphering ancient riddles than killing people.

  The adventure with the Capstone, which had ended atop the Great Pyramid, had forged West’s relationship with Lily. Since her parents were dead, Jack had raised her—with the help of a truly unique team of international soldiers. Soon after the Capstone mission had concluded, he had formally adopted her.

  And since that day nearly two years ago, he had lived out here in splendid isolation, away from missions, away from the world, only traveling to Perth when Lily’s schooling required it.

  As for the Golden Capstone, it sat in all its glory in an abandoned nickel mine behind his farmhouse.

  A few months back, a newspaper article had troubled West.

  An Australian special forces trooper named Oakes had been killed in Iraq, shot to death in an ambush, the first Australian battle casualty inany conflict in nearly two years.

  It bothered West because he was one of the few people in the world who knew exactly why no Australian had been killed in battle these past eighteen months. It had to do with the Tartarus Rotation of 2006 and the Capstone: thanks to his performance of an ancient ritual back then, West had assured Australia invulnerability for what was supposed to be a very long time.

  But now with the death of that soldier in Iraq, that period of invulnerability appeared to be over.

  The date of the man’s death had struck him: August 21. It was suspiciously close to the northern autumnal equinox.

  West himself had performed the Tartarus ritual atop the Great Pyramid on March 20, 2006, the day of thevernal equinox, the spring day when the Sun is perfectly overhead and day equals night.

  The vernal and autumnal equinoxes are twin celestial moments that occur at opposite times of the year.

  Opposites but the same,West thought.Yin and yang.

  Someone, somewhere, had done something around the autumnal equinox that had neutralized Tartarus.

  West was disturbed from his reverie by a small brown shape cutting across his view to the east.

  It was a bird, a falcon, soaring gracefully across the dusty sky, wings wide. It was Horus, his peregrine falcon and loyal companion. The bird landed on the railing next to him, squawking at the eastern horizon.

  West looked that way just in time to see several black dots appear in the sky there, flying in formation.

  About three hundred miles away, near the coastal town of Wyndham, military exercises were under way, the biennialTalisman Sabre exercises that Australia held with America.

  Large in scale, they involved all sections of both nations’ armed forces: navy, army, and air force.

  Only this year,Talisman Sabre came with a twist: for the first time ever, China was participating. No one was under any illusions. Under the chaperoning of neutral Australia (it had significant trade links with China and longstanding military links with the US), China and America, the two biggest kids on the block, were sizing each other up. At first, the US hadn’t wanted China’s participation, but the Chinese had exerted some considerable trade pressure on Australia to be involved, and the Australians had begged the US to allow it.

  But happily, West thought, these weren’t matters that concerned him anymore.

  He turned to watch Lily and Alby scamper around the barn, kicking up matching dust trails, when the computer in his kitchen pinged.

  Ping, ping, ping, ping.

  Emails.

  Lots of them.

  Jack stepped inside, still gripping his coffee, and checked the monitor.

  Over twodozen emails from Max Epper had just come in. Jack clicked on one, and found himself staring at a digital photo of an ancient carved symbol. Chinese by the look of it.

  “Oh, Wizard.” He sighed. “What’s happened now? Did you forget to take your extra hard drive again?”

  Wizard had done this before. He needed to back something up but had forgotten to take a second hard drive, so he’d emailed his photographs to Jack for safekeeping.

  With a groan, Jack clicked over to the Internet and brought up aLord of the Rings chat room, punched in his ID tag:STRIDER 101.

  A littleused notice board came up. This was how he and Lily communicated with Wizard: through the anonymity of the Internet. If Wizard was sending a bulk block of e

  mails, then he’d probably also sent an explanatory message via the chat room.

  Sure enough the last message left on the notice board was fromGANDALF 101: Wizard.

  West scrolled down to view the message, expecting to see the usual bashful apology from Wizard…

  …only to be surprised by what he saw.

  He saw numbers.

  Lots of numbers, interspersed with parentheses and forward slashes:

  (3/289/5/5) (3/290/2/6) (3/289/8/4) (3/290/8/4) (3/290/1/12) (3/291/3/3) (1/187/15/6) (1/168/9/11)

  (3/47/3/4) (3/47/4/12) (3/45/163) (3/47/1/5)

  (3/305/3/1) (3/304/8/10)

  (3/43/1/12) (3/30/3/6)

  (3/15/7/4) (3/15/7/3)

  (3/63/20/7) (3/65/5/12)

  (3/291/14/2) (3/308/8/11) (3/232/5/7) (3/290/1/9) (3/69/13/5) (3/302/1/8)

  (3/55/4/1113) (3/55/3/1)

  Jack frowned, concerned.

  It was a coded message from Wizard, a special code known only to the members of their trusted inner circle.

  This was serious.

  Jack quickly grabbed a paperback novel from the nearby bookshelf—the same novel that Wizard had used to compose the message in China—and began flicking pages, unraveling the coded communication.

  He jotted down words underneath each numerical reference until at last he had the full message and his blood ran cold:

  (3/289/5/5) (3/290/2/6) (3/289/8/4) (3/290/8/4) (3/290/1/12)

  GET OUT GET OUT NOW!

  (3/291/3/3) (1/187/15/6) (1/168/9/11)

  GRAB FIRE STONE

  (3/47/3/4) (3/47/4/12) (3/45/163) (3/47/1/5)

  AND MY BLACK BOOK

  (3/305/3/1) (3/304/8/10)

  AND RUN

  (3/43/1/12) (3/30/3/6)

  NEW EMERGENCY

  (3/15/7/4) (3/15/7/3)

  VERY DANGEROUS

  (3/63/20/7) (3/65/5/12)

  ENEMIES ARE COMING

  (3/291/14/2) (3/308/8/11) (3/232/5/7) (3/290/1/9)

  WILL MEET YOU AT

  (3/69/13/5) (3/302/1/8)

  GREAT TOWER

  (3/55/4/1113) (3/55/3/1)

  THE WORST IS COMING

  “Holy shit…” Jack breathed.

  He snapped to look back out the kitchen window, saw Lily and Alby still playing out by the barn. Then he saw the hazy orange sky beyond them, glorious in the morning sun—

 
—as it began to fill with falling figures, dozens and dozens of them, figures that issued blooming parachutes above them, slowing their falls.

  Paratroopers. Hundreds of paratroopers.

  Coming for his farm.

  THE ATTACK ON JACK’S FARM

  WEST BURST OUT of the farmhouse, calling, “Kids! Get over here! Quickly!”

  Lily turned, perplexed. Alby did too.

  West motioned in sign language as he spoke: “Lily, pack a suitcase! Alby, get all your stuff! We’re leaving in two minutes!”

  “Leaving? Why?” Alby said.

  Lily, however, knew the look on West’s face.

  “Because we have to,” she said/signed. “Come on.”

  West rushed back into the farmhouse and pounded on the doors of the farm’s two guest rooms. “Zoe! Sky Monster! Wake up! We’re in trouble again!”

  Out of guest room No.1 stepped Sky Monster, a hairy New Zealander who was West’s good friend and resident pilot.

  With his great black beard, potbelly, and overgrown eyebrows, Sky Monster wasn’t exactly pretty first thing in the morning. He had a real name, but no one except his mother seemed to know it.

  “Not so loud, Huntsman,” he growled. “What’s up?”

  “We’re being invaded.” West pointed out the window.

  Blearyeyed, Sky Monster looked out through it and saw the swarm of falling parachutes filling the morning sky. His eyes sprang wide.“Australia is being invaded?”

  “No, just us. Just this farm. Get dressed and then get down to theHalicarnassus. Prep her for immediate liftoff.”

  “Gotcha.” Sky Monster hurried away, just as the door to guest room No.2 opened, revealing a far more pleasant sight.

  Zoe Kissane emerged from her room, dressed in a spare pair of West’s pajamas. With skyblue eyes, short blond hair, and a lightly freckled face, she was a true Irish beauty.