Seven Ancient Wonders (6 page)

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 protégé.’

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 sidewall touched the crude oil flowing out from the wall-hole an inch beneath it.

The result was stunning.

The superthin waterfall of oil became a superthin waterfall of
fire . . .

. . . then this flaming waterfall hit the oil-stained lake at the base of the cavern and set it alight.

The lake blazed with flames.

The entire cavern was illuminated bright yellow.

The crocs screamed, clawing over each other to get to safety.

Then more oilfalls caught alight—some on the sidewalls, others on the rockface, and finally, the great sludge waterfall coming down the Scar—until the entire Great Cavern looked like Hell itself, lit by a multitude of blazing waterfalls.

Thick black smoke billowed everywhere—smoke which had no escape.

This was Imhotep’s final masterstroke.

If the fire and the traps didn’t kill you, smoke inhalation would, especially in the highly prized upper regions of the cavern.

‘Fools!’ del Piero raged. Then to his men: ‘What are you standing there for! Finish the crane! You have until they get back to the Second Level to do so!’

West’s team was now moving faster than ever, leapfrogging each other beautifully amid the subterranean inferno.

Up the rockface they went, first to the left along the Second Level, crossing the left arm of the Scar before the thick fire-waterfall got there, dodging wall-holes, jumping gaps in the ledge, nullifying the traps inside the arched forts that straddled the narrow walkway.

Droplets of fire were now raining down all around them—spray
from the oilfalls—but the fiery orange drops just hit their firemen’s helmets and rolled off their backs.

Then suddenly West’s team ran past the unfinished arm of the Europeans’ crane and, for the first time that day, they were in front.

In the lead in this race.

Up the wall-ladder at the end of Level 2, on to Level 3, where they ran to the right, avoiding some chute traps on the way and coming to the fiery body of the Scar. Here West fired an extendable aluminium awning into the Scar’s flame-covered surface with his pressure-gun.

The awning opened lengthways like a fan, causing the fire-waterfall to flow
over
it, sheltering the mini-ledge. The team bolted across the superthin ledge.

Then it was up another ladder to the Fourth Level—the second-highest level—and suddenly six 10-ton
block boulders
started raining down on them from way up in the darkness above the giant rockface.

The great blocks boomed as they landed on the diorite ledge of Level 4 and tumbled down the rest of the massive tiered wall.

‘Get off the ladder!’ West yelled to the others. ‘You can’t dodge the boulders if you’re on it—’

Too late.

As West called his warning, a boulder smacked horribly into the last man on the ladder, Fuzzy. The big Jamaican was hurled back down the rockface.

He landed heavily on the Third Level—setting off a trap of spraying flaming oil (it looked like a flamethrower) but he snap-rolled away from the tongue of fire—in the same motion avoiding a second boulder as it slammed down on the ledge an inch away from his eyes!

His roll took him off the ledge, but Fuzzy managed to clasp onto the edge with his fingertips, avoiding the 30-foot drop down to Level 2.

The final wall-ladder was embedded in the centre of the Scar itself, flanked by two fiery waterfalls.

Wizard erected another awning over the mini-ledge leading to the ladder, then allowed West and Lily to rush past him.

‘Remember,’ Wizard said, ‘if you can’t get the Piece itself, you must at least note the inscription carved into it. Okay?’

‘Got it.’ West turned to Lily. ‘It’s just us from here.’

They crossed the mini-ledge, came to the rough stone-carved ladder.

Drops of fire rained down it, bouncing off their firemen’s helmets.

Every second or third rung of the ladder featured a dark gaping wall-hole of some kind, which West nullified with ‘expand-andharden’ foam.

‘Jack! Look out! More drop-stones!’ Wizard called.

West looked up. ‘Whoa shit . . . !’

A giant drop-boulder slicked with oil and blazing with flames came roaring out of a recess in the ceiling directly above the ladder and came free-falling towards him and Lily.

‘Swear jar . . .’ Lily said.

‘I’ll have to owe you.’

West quickly yanked an odd-looking pistol from his belt—it looked like a flare gun, with a grossly oversized barrel. An M-225 handheld grenade launcher.

Without panic, he fired it up at the giant boulder freefalling towards them.

The grenade shot upwards.

The boulder fell downwards.

Then they hit and—
BOOM!
—the falling boulder exploded in a star-shaped shower of shards and stones, spraying outward like a firecracker, its pieces sailing
out and around
West and Lily on the ladder!

West and Lily scaled the rest of the ladder, flanked by flames, until finally they were standing at the top of the Scar, at the top of the giant rockface, past all the traps.

They stood before the trapezoidal door at the peak of the fire-filled cavern.

‘Okay, kiddo,’ he said. ‘You remember everything we practised?’

She loved it when he called her kiddo.

‘I remember, sir,’ she said.

And so with a final nod to each other, they entered the holy inner sanctum of Imhotep V’s deadly labyrinth.

The Innermost Cave

And still the traps didn’t stop.

A wide low-ceilinged chamber met them: its ceiling was maybe two metres off the floor . . . 
and getting lower.

The chamber was about thirty metres wide and its entire ceiling was lowering! It must have been one single piece of stone and right now it was descending on the dark chamber like a giant hydraulic press.

If they’d had time to browse, West and Lily would have seen that the chamber’s walls were
covered
with images of the Great Pyramid—most of them depicting the famous pyramid being pierced by a ray of light shooting down from the Sun.

But it was what lay beyond the entry chamber that seized West and Lily’s attention.

At the far end of the wide entry chamber, in a higher-ceilinged space, stood a giant mud-covered
head
.

The head was absolutely enormous, at least sixteen feet high, almost three times as tall as West.

Despite the layer of mud all over it, its features were stunning: the handsome Greek face, the imperious eyes, and the glorious golden crown fitted above the forehead.

It was the head of a colossal bronze statue.

The most famous bronze statue in history.

It was the head of the Colossus of Rhodes.