Seven Ancient Wonders (19 page)

But yet again, the Nazis had bridged this peril with a gangway.

West flew down the stairs—running beneath a large and rather ominous wall-hole mounted above the tunnel’s doorway.

‘Jack!’ Wizard called. ‘Trigger stones! Find them and point them out for the rest of us, will you!’

West did so, avoiding any step that was askew or suspicious, and identifying it for the next person in their line.

Their progress was slowed at two places along the staircase— where the stairs had decayed and fallen away, meaning they had to make precarious jumps over the voids.

It was just as the last man in their line—Pooh Bear—was leaping over the second void that another CIEF trooper appeared at the top of the staircase!

Pooh Bear jumped.

The CIEF man charged.

And in his hurry, Pooh Bear landed awkwardly . . . and slipped . . . and fell, dropping clumsily onto his butt, and landing squarely on a trigger stone.

‘Blast!’ Pooh Bear swore.

Everyone froze, and turned.

‘You stupid, stupid Arab. . . ’ Stretch muttered.

‘Stretch . . . not now,’ West snapped.

An ominous rumbling came from the wall-hole at the top of the long curving staircase.

‘Let me guess,’ Stretch said. ‘A big round boulder is going to roll out of that hole and chase us down the stairs, just like in
Raiders of the Lost Ark
.’

Not exactly.

Three wooden boulders, all a metre in diameter and clearly heavy, came rushing out of the hole in quick succession—and each was fitted with hundreds of outward-pointing bronze
nails
.

They must have weighed 100 kilograms each and they bounded down the stairway, booming with every impact, bearing down on the team.

West scooped up Lily. ‘Go!
Go! Go!
’

The team bolted down the stairs, chased by the nail-ridden boulders.

So did the lone CIEF trooper.

West came to the base of the stairs, to the Nazi gangway balanced across the whirlpool there at an odd angle.

He sprang across it, leading Lily by the hand, followed by Zoe and Big Ears, then Wizard and Stretch.

But the CIEF man was also fleet-footed and, chased by the nail-boulders, he hurdled the two voids easily and almost caught up with Pooh Bear, running last of all, red-faced and breathless.

But at the final moment, Pooh dived forward, leaping full-stretch onto the gangway. The CIEF man did the same, but in the instant he leapt into the air, the first of the nail-boulders
slammed
into him, piercing his body with at least twenty jagged nails, and swept him into the whirlpool at the base of the stairs, closely followed by the other two boulders, which bounced off the gangway’s handrails and away into the water.

‘Ouch. . . ’ said Pooh Bear, lying on the gangway.

‘Come on, Pooh!’ West called. ‘No time for resting now.’

‘Resting? Resting! Pity those of us who don’t have your energy, Captain West.’ And so with a groan, Pooh Bear hauled himself up and took off after the others.

The Drowning Cage

Crossing the Nazi gangway, they arrived at a sizeable stone platform separated from the next large stepping-stone by a five-foot-wide gap of water.

A further five feet beyond that stepping-stone was another staircase, going upwards. However, this staircase was difficult to access—its first step lay seven feet
above
the swirling water, an impossible leap.

The biggest problem, however, lay above the stepping-stone itself.

A great cube-shaped cage was suspended above it, ready to drop the moment someone landed on it.

‘It’s a drowning cage,’ Wizard said. ‘We jump onto the stepping-stone and the cage traps us. Then
the whole platform
lowers into the water, cage and all, drowning us.’

‘But it’s the only way across. . . ’ Zoe said.

Stretch was covering the rear. ‘Figure something out, people. Because Kallis is here!’

West spun—

—to see Kallis emerge from the sinkhole cave at the top of the staircase behind them.

‘What do you think, Jack?’ Wizard asked.

West bit his lip. ‘Hmmm. Can’t swim around it because of the whirlpools. And we can’t climb up and around it: the wall here is polished smooth. There just doesn’t seem to be any way to avoid it. . . ’

Then West looked over at the ascending staircase
beyond
the drowning cage’s stepping-stone.

Three Nazi skeletons lay on it—all headless. But beyond them, he saw something else:

A square doorway sunk into the wall, covered in cobwebs.

‘There
is
no way to avoid it,’ he said aloud, ‘so don’t avoid it. Wizard. The Templar Pit in Malta. Where we found the Museion scrolls. It’s just like that. You have to enter the trap in order to pass it.’

Stretch urged, ‘Some action, people. Kallis is halfway down the stairs. . . ’

Zoe said to West: ‘Enter the trap in order to pass it? What do you mean?’

‘Hurry
up
, people. . . ’ Stretch said. ‘Warblers don’t work at point-blank range.’

West spun to see Kallis gaining on them, still with nine more men, only thirty yards away and closing.

‘Okay, everyone,’ he said, ‘you have to trust me on this one. No time to go in groups, we have to do this together.’

‘A bit all or nothing, isn’t it, Jack?’ Zoe said.

‘No other choice. People, get your pony bottles ready. Then we all jump onto that stepping-stone. Ready . . . go!’

And they all jumped together.

The seven of them landed as one on the wide stepping-stone—

—and immediately, the great cage above it dropped, clanging down around them like a giant mousetrap, trapping them under its immense weight—

—and the entire ten-foot-wide stepping-stone began
to sink
into the swirling depths of the waterway!

‘I hope you’re right, Jack!’ Zoe yelled. She grabbed her pony bottle from her belt, put its mouthpiece to her mouth. You breathe from a pony bottle just like you do from a regular scuba tank, but it only has enough air for about three minutes.

The cage went knee-deep in water.

West didn’t answer her, just waded over to the wall-side of the cage and checked its great bronze bars.

And there he found it—a small archway cut into the cage’s wall-side bars, maybe three feet high, large enough for a man to crawl through.

But the stone wall abutting that side of the cage was solid rock. The little arch led nowhere. . . 

The cage sank further into the swirling water and the little arch went under.

Waist-deep.

Big Ears lifted Lily into his arms, above the swirling waterline.

On the stairway behind them, Cal Kallis paused, grinned at their predicament.

‘
Jack
. . . ’ Zoe called, concerned.

‘
Jack
. . . ’ Wizard called, concerned.

‘It has to come,’ West whispered to himself. ‘It has to—’

The cage went two-thirds under, and as it did so, West cracked a glowstick, put his pony bottle to his mouth, and ducked under the choppy surface.

Underwater.

By the light of his glowstick, West watched the cage’s bars slide past the stone wall. . . 

Solid rock.

Nothing but solid rock flanked the cage on that side.

It can’t be
, his mind screamed.
There has to be something down here!

But there wasn’t.

There wasn’t anything down there.

West’s heart began to beat faster. He had just made the biggest mistake of his life, a mistake that would kill them all.

He resurfaced inside the swirling cage.

The water was chest-deep now, the cage three-quarters under.

‘Anything down there!’ Zoe called.

West frowned, stumped. ‘No . . . but there should be.’

Stretch shouted, ‘You’ve killed us all!’

Neck-deep.

‘Just grab your pony bottles,’ West said grimly. He looked to Lily, held high in Big Ears’s arms. ‘Hey, kiddo. You still with me?’

She nodded vigorously—scared out of her wits. ‘Uh-huh.’

‘Just breathe through your pony bottle like we practised at home,’ he said gently, ‘and you’ll be all right.’

‘Did you mess up?’ she whispered.

‘I might have,’ he said.

As he did so, he locked eyes with Wizard. The old man just nodded: ‘Hold your nerve, Jack. I trust you.’

‘Good, because right now I don’t,’ West said.

And with that, the great bronze cage, with its seven trapped occupants, went completely under.

With a muffled
clunk
, the cage came to a halt, its barred ceiling stopping exactly three feet below the surface.

The underwater currents were extremely strong. On the cage’s outermost side, the silhouette of a whirlpool could be seen: a huge inverted cone of downward-spiralling liquid.

Pony bottle to his mouth, West swam down to check the little arch one final time. . . 

. . . where he found something startling.

The little arch had stopped perfectly in line with a small dark opening in the stone wall.

Shape for shape, the arch matched the opening exactly, so that if you crawled through the arch, you escaped
into
the submerged wall.

West’s eyes came alive.

He spun to face the others, all trapped in the submerged cage with pony bottles held to their mouths, even Lily.

He signalled with his hands:

Wizard would go first.

Then Big Ears with Lily. Zoe, Stretch, Pooh Bear, and West last of all.

Wizard swam through the arch, holding a glowstick in front of him, and disappeared into the dark opening in the wall.

West signalled for Big Ears to wait—wait for Wizard to give them the all-clear.

A moment later, Wizard reappeared and gave an enthusiastic ‘OK’ sign.

So through the little arch they went, out of the cage and into the wall, until finally only Jack West Jr remained in the cage.

No-one saw the relief on his face. He’d made the call, and almost killed them all. But he’d been right.

Kicking hard, he swam out of the cage, his boots disappearing into the tiny opening.

The opening in the wall quickly turned upwards, becoming a vertical shaft, complete with ladder handholds.

This shaft rose up and out of the sloshing water before opening onto a horizontal passage that led
back
to the main chasm, emerging—unsurprisingly—at the cobweb-covered doorway a few steps up the ascending staircase, the same doorway West had observed earlier.

As they stepped out from the passage, West saw Kallis and his men arriving at the base of the previous staircase, stopped there by the now-resetting cage.

Lying on the steps in front of West were the three headless Nazi skeletons he had spied before.

Wizard said, ‘Headless bodies at the
bottom
of a stairway mean only one thing: blades at the top somewhere. Be careful.’

Retaking the lead, West gazed up this new stairway. ‘Whoa. Would you look at that. . . ’

At the top of the stairs was a truly impressive structure: a great fortified guard tower, leaning out from the vertical cliff 200 feet above the watery chasm.

The ancient guard tower was strategically positioned on the main bend of the chasm. Directly opposite it, on the other side of the roofed chasm, was its identical twin, another guard tower, also jutting out from its wall, and also possessing a stairway rising up from a drowning cage down at water-level.

West had taken one step up this stairway when—

‘Is that you, Jack!’ a voice called.

West spun.

It hadn’t come from Kallis.

It had come from further away.

From the other side of the chasm.

West snapped round.

And saw a
second
American special forces team standing on the path on the other side of the chasm, on the platform preceding the drowning cage on that side.

They had emerged from a side doorway in the rockwall over there,
twenty-four men
in total.

At their head stood a man of about 50, with steely black eyes and, gruesomely,
no nose
. It had been cut off sometime in the distant past, leaving this fellow with a grotesque misshapen stump where his nose should have been.