The look on the Guard Captain"s face said it all. He was furious. He wouldn"t let that happen again.
He ducked back inside the carriage and started climbing-fast.
Jack knew what was happening instantly.
It was now a race to the next coupling.
"Go, Jack! Go!" Wizard yelled. "I"ll catch up!"
West charged up the outer wall of the final carriage, while the Guard Captain raced up its internal aisle.
They both moved quickly, clambering up the vertical carriage.
"Stretch!" West called into his radio as he climbed. "Where are you!"
"We"re up, on the precipice, but we got a prob-"
West knew what that problem was. He could see it.
The Hind chopper was hovering directly above him, a short way out from the cliff top, not far from the sharply tilted engine car hanging out over the edge-waiting for them, if they made it up.
Stay alive,he thought.As long as you"re alive, you have a chance.
Up he climbed, up the outside of the vertical carriage, moving like a monkey.
Then he rose over the final lip and stood...just as the Guard Captain emerged from the doorway there.
Jack had beaten him in this race, got there first by a bare two seconds. He stepped forward to unleash a fierce kick at the Guard Captain- Only to see a gun appear in the Captain"s hand.
Jack froze as the realization dawned on him: that was why he"d beaten the Captain in their race. The Guard Captain had taken a moment to grab a loose gun on the way up.
Aw, s.h.i.t...Jack thought.s.h.i.t, s.h.i.t, s.h.i.t.
He stood there, frozen on the horizontal end section of the upturned carriage, the beating wind from the helicopter hammering his clothes. Without thinking, he raised his hands.
"You lose!" the Guard Captain spat in English, grinning, as Wizard"s face popped up over the edge behind Jack"s boots and saw the situation.
The Captain jammed back on the hammer of his gun.
"Wizard..." Jack said. "It"s time to fly."
Then, just as Guard Captain pulled the trigger on his gun, quick as a flash, Jack"s raised hands grabbed the safety rod on the coupling above his head and disengaged it- -causingtheir own carriage to drop away from the engine car, with them and the Guard Captain on it!
THE GUARD CAPTAIN"S eyes boggled. Jack had just condemned themall to death.
The carriage fell fast. Down the side of the ma.s.sive cliff.
The gray rock wall blurred with speed as the iron prison car fell past it.
But as the carriage fell, Jack was all action. He grabbed Wizard and pulled him into a bear hug, yelling "Hold on to me!" as he pressed something on his chest armor and suddenly his Gullwings sprang out from the compact unit on his back and instantly the two of them soared away from the falling armored carriage, at first flying downward at incredible speed before swooping up in a graceful glide, leaving the Guard Captain to fall the rest of the way by himself, screaming all the way to his death.
With Wizard hanging from his chest, Jack caught an upward thermal draft, and they glided away from the mountain railway and the twin mountain peaks that housed Xintan Prison.
"Astro?" West said into his mike. "We"re gonna need a pickup farther down the railway.
How about near that farm we saw earlier?"
"Roger that, Huntsman,"came the reply."Just gotta grab Stretch first. Then we"ll come get you."
Stretch stood on solid ground, knee deep in snow, with the weary Tank beside him, alongside the engine car of the prison train, tilted on the edge of the precipice, the only carriage still remaining.
Unfortunately, hovering in the air in front of them was the Hind gunship, looming large.
A voice over its loudhailer commanded in English:"You two! Remain where you are!"
"Whatever you say," Stretch said.
The Hind landed on the snow plain, its rotors kicking up a miniblizzard.
Ten Chinese troops rushed out of its hold, dashing through the billowing snow, quickly forming a ring around Stretch and Tank.
Sitting in the chopper"s c.o.c.kpit, the Hind"s two Chinese pilots saw Stretch raise his hands a moment before the miniblizzard shrouded the entire scene in white.
Which was why the pilots never saw the snow plain around their gunship come alive, three ghostlike figures rising from beneath it, dressed in white camouflage gear and bearing MP7 submachine guns: Astro, Scimitar, and Vulture.
The three whiteclad men took the unguarded chopper easily and once they had it, Vulture aimed its huge sixbarreled cannon at the tenman Chinese team on the ground and demanded over the loud hailer that they drop their weapons. Needless to say, they complied.
Minutes later, the Hind"s crew and troops stood shivering on the snow plain, dressed only in their undergarments, their helicopter lifting off without them-flown by Astro and Scimitar, with Vulture manning the main cannon and Stretch and Tank safely in the hold.
It was the final piece of Jack"s plan: they"d needed the Hind to land here-so they could steal it for the next part of their mission in China.
THE SALISBURY PLAIN, ENGLAND.
DECEMBER5, 2007, 3:05A.M.
THE RENTED Honda Odyssey zoomed along the A303, alone in the night.
In the glare of a bright full moon, endless fields of Wiltshire farmland stretched away to the horizon on either side of the highway, bathed in eerie blue light.
Zoe drove, with Lily and Alby beside her.
In the back of the S.U.V. sat the two young men who had met her and the kids at Heathrow: the unique Adamson brothers, Lachlan and Julius.
Identical twins, they were both tall and lean, with friendly freckled faces, carrot orange hair, and thick Scottish accents.
Both wore simple Tshirts, one black, the other white. Lachlan"s black shirt read, somewhat enigmatically: "I HAVE SEEN THE COW LEVEL!" while Julius"s white one proclaimed "THERE IS NO COW LEVEL!"
They also had a habit of finishing each other"s sentences.
"Zoe!" Lachlan had exclaimed on seeing her.
"It"s great to see you again!" Julius said. "Hey, this sounds like a secret mission."
"Isit a secret mission?" Lachlan asked.
Julius: "If it is, don"t you think Lachy and I should have code names, you know, like Maverick or Goose?"
"I"d like to be called Blade," Lachlan said.
"And I"d like Bullfighter," Julius said.
"Blade? Bullfighter?"
Julius said, "Pretty rugged and heroic, huh? We"ve been thinking about this while we"ve been waiting for you."
"Clearly," Zoe said. "How about Tweedledum and Tweedledee? Romulus and Remus?"
"Aw, no! Not twin code names," Lachlan said. "Anything but twin names."
"Sorry, boys, but there"s only one rule when it comes to call signs."
"And that is?"
"You never get to pick your own." Zoe smiled. "And sometimes your nickname can change. Look at me, I used to be known as b.l.o.o.d.y Mary, until I met this little one." A nod at Lily. "And now everyone calls me Princess. Be patient, you"ll get call signs when the occasion calls for it. Because, yes, this mission is about as secret as it gets."
Now, speeding west along the A303, they were heading for a place that of all people Alby had led them to.
The military air base outside Dubai. Two days previously. Just after Earl McShane"s cargo plane had smashed into the Burj al Arab.
Jack West had stood on the tarmac, crouched low over Alby and Lily, while armed men and CIA agents calling themselves attaches spoke into cell phones, a black pillar of smoke rising into the sky above the Burj al Arab in the distance.
"Talk to me, Alby," Jack had said.
During the meeting, Alby had deciphered one of Wizard"s more obscure notes: the reference to the "t.i.tanic Sinking and Rising." But he had hinted to Jack that there was more to it.
Alby said, "I also know what one of the symbols on Wizard"s summary sheet means."
Jack had pulled out the summary sheet.
"The symbol at the bottom right," Alby said. "Next to the "t.i.tanic Sinking" reference."
"Yes..." West had said.
"It"s not a symbol. It"s a diagram."
"Of what?"
Alby had looked up at West seriously. "It"s a diagram of the layout of Stonehenge."
STONEHENGE.
THE HONDA crested a rise, and without warning the cl.u.s.ter of great stones came into view.
Zoe inhaled sharply.
Of course she had been here before, several times. Everyone in the UK had. But the scale of the site, the sheerbravura of it, always took her by surprise.
Stonehenge.
Quite simply, Stonehenge was stunning.
A source of fascination to her for a long time, Zoe knew all the myths: that this ring of towering stones was an ancient calendar or an ancient observatory that the bluestones- the smaller sixfoothigh dolerite stones that formed a horseshoeshaped arcwithin the far more famous trilithons-had been brought to the Salisbury Plain around the year 2700B.C. by some unknown tribe from the Preseli Hillsover 150 miles away in distant Wales. To this day, many believe that the bluestones, even on bitterly cold winter days, remain warm to the touch.
It would be another 150 years, around 2,570B.C., before the spectacular trilithons were raised around this minihenge of bluestones. But the date is important: in 2,570B.C. the Egyptian pharaoh Khufu was completing his famous work on the Giza plateau in Egypt, the Great Pyramid.
Over the years, Zoe knew, cosmologists and astrologers had tried to link Stonehenge with the Great Pyramid, but without success. The only confirmed link was the closely matching dates of their construction.
Other peculiarities of Stonehenge intrigued her.
Like the rare green cyan.o.bacterium that grew on the great trilithons themselves. A variety of lichen, it was a true oddity, an uncommon hybrid of algae and fungus that grew only on exposed coastlines-yet Stonehenge was fifty miles from the nearest sea, the Bristol Channel. The mosslike substance gave the stones a mottled, uneven aspect.
And then, of course, there were the unexplained theories about the site"s location: the unique way the Sun and Moon rise over the fiftyfirst parallel and the unusually high number of neolithic sites running the length of the British Isles on the same degree of longitude as Stonehenge.
In the final a.n.a.lysis, only one thing about Stonehenge could be said with any degree of certainty: for over 4,500 years it had withstood the ravages of wind, rain, and time itself, offering a mult.i.tude of questions and very few answers.
"OK," Zoe said as she drove. "How are we going to tackle this? Thoughts anyone?"
"Thoughts?" Lachlan said. "How about this: that there"sno precedent for what we"re about to do. Over the years, scholars and wackos have linked Stonehenge with the Sun and the Moon, with virgins and druids, with solstices and eclipses, but never with Jupiter.
If Wizard"s hypothesis is correct and this Firestone is the real deal, then we"re going to see something that hasn"t been seen for over 4,500 years."
Julius said, "Can I add that the good folk at English Heritage don"t look kindly on people who step over the rope at Stonehenge and walk among the stones, let alone lunatics like us wanting to perform ancient occult rituals. There"ll be security guards."
"Leave the guards to me," Zoe said. "You just handle the occult ritual."
The twins pulled out Wizard"s notes again, gazed at the diagram of Stonehenge: "In his notes, Wizard says that the Ramesean Stone at Stonehenge is the Altar Stone,"
Julius said. "But what about the Grand Trilithon? It"s the signature element of Stonehenge."
"No, I"d go with the Altar Stone, too," Lachlan said. "It"s the focal point of the structure.
It"s also made of bluestone, laid at the same time as the original ring of bluestones, so it"s older than the trilithons. And fortunately for us, it"s still there."
Over four and a half millennia, Stonehenge had been pilfered by locals searching for stones to use as walls or as millstones. Nearly all the bluestones of the henge were gone.
The bigger trilithons had survived-at over eighteen feet tall (twentyone in the case of the Grand Trilithon) they had just been too big for the local peasants to move.
Lachlan turned to Alby: "What doyou reckon, kid?"