Seven Ancient Wonders (20 page)

Yet even with this glaring facial disfigurement, it was the man’s clothing that was his most striking feature right now.

He wore steel-soled boots just like West did.

He wore a canvas jacket just like West did.

He wore a belt equipped with pony bottles, pitons and X-bars, just like West did.

The only difference was his helmet—he wore a lightweight caver’s helmet, as opposed to West’s fireman’s helmet.

He was also older than West, calmer, more confident. His small black eyes radiated experience.

He was the one man West feared more than any other on Earth. The man who had been West’s last field commander in the military. The man who had once left West for dead on the plains outside Basra in Iraq.

He was a former commander of Delta Team Six, the best within Delta, but was now the commanding officer of the CIEF, the very best special forces unit in the world.

He was Colonel Marshall Judah.

In their current positions, West and his team were marginally ahead of Judah.

Given that the paths running on either side of the chasm were identical, West’s team was one trap ahead. Judah had yet to pass the drowning cage on his side, and had just stepped out onto the base of the descending stairway over there, in doing so setting off—

—three nail-studded boulders.

The three boulders tumbled down the stairway toward Judah and his men.

Judah couldn’t have cared less.

He just nodded to three of his men, who quickly and competently erected a sturdy tripod-like barricade between their team and the oncoming nail-boulders.

The titanium-alloy barricade blocked the entire width of the stairway and the boulders slammed into it one after the other, each one being deflected by the sturdy barricade and bouncing harmlessly away into the water.

Judah never took his eyes off West.

‘How are those dreams going, Jack? Still trapped in that volcano?’ he called. ‘Still haunted by the chants and the drums?’

On his side of the chasm, West was stunned.
How could Judah know that
. . . ?

It was exactly the response Judah had wanted. He smiled a thin, cold smile. ‘I know even more than that, Jack! More than you can possibly suspect.’

West was rattled—but he tried not to show it.

It didn’t work.

Judah nodded at the fireman’s helmet now back on West’s head. ‘Still using that fireman’s hat, Jack? You know I never agreed with that. Too cumbersome in tight places. It always pains a teacher to see a talented student employing foolish methods.’

West couldn’t help himself—he glanced up at his helmet.

Judah followed through, driving home his edge. ‘Looks like we’ve got something of a race on our hands here, Jack. Think you can outrun me? Do you seriously think
you
can outrun
me
?’

‘Everybody,’ West said quietly to his people, not taking his eyes off Judah. ‘We have to run. Fast. Now. Go!’

West’s team bolted up the stairs, heading for the guard tower at their peak.

Judah just nodded calmly to his men, who immediately began erecting a long gangway to bypass their drowning cage and reach the ascending stairway on their side of the chasm.

The race was on.

The Guard Tower and the Gorge

West and his team ran up their stairway.

Just before the guard tower, a narrow gorge cut across their path. It was maybe fifteen feet across, with sheer vertical sides. This little gorge actually sliced all the way across the
main
chasm, and as such, had a twin over on the other side.

And once again, the Nazis had been helpful. It seemed that the ancient Carthaginians had built a complex chain-lowered
drawbridge
to span this gorge—a drawbridge that the Nazis had managed to lower into place, spanning the void.

Taking any luck they could get, West and his team sprinted across the ancient drawbridge, and arrived at the guard tower high up on the next bend in the chasm.

There was a ladder hewn into the guard tower’s curved flank, a ladder that wound
around
the outside of the structure, meaning they had to free-climb 200 feet above nothing but the swirling waters below.

Two head-chopping blades sprang out from slits in the wall-ladder, but West neutralised them with sticky foam and his team, roped together, successfully climbed around the gravity-defying guard tower.

On the other side of the chasm, Judah’s long lightweight bridge fell into place and his men ran across it, completely avoiding their drowning cage, reaching the base of their ascending staircase.

The wall-ladder on the outside of West’s guard tower brought his team up onto its balcony.

A tight tunnel in the back of the balcony delved into the chasm-wall itself and emerged on the other side of the bend, where West fired off three self-hovering flares. . . 

. . . to gloriously reveal the far end of the chasm and their goal.

‘
Holy
shit. . . ’ Big Ears gasped.

‘Swear jar,’ Lily said instantly.

Standing there before them in all its splendour, towering above the waterway, lording over it, easily fifteen storeys tall and jutting out from the far facing rockwall, was a gigantic ancient fortress.

The steaming vents of the chasm gave the fortress a grim haunting look.

A super-solid square-shaped keep formed the core of the structure, with a giant gaping archway in its exact centre. This central section was flanked by two soaring defensive towers, high-spired pinnacles in the darkness. The style of these towers matched that of the guard tower that West had just passed through—only these were taller, stretching all the way up from the water.

Stretching downward from the Great Arch in the centre of the keep was a wide guttered rampway that lanced all the way down to the waterway, ending at a flat stone jetty. At least forty metres in length, with stairs nestled in its centre, the rampway resembled the step-ramps on Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple near the Valley of the Kings.

Never finished and never used for its intended purpose—and long since concealed by an ingenious Egyptian architect—this was Hamilcar’s Refuge.

West snatched his printout from his pouch, examined it:

Just like on the ancient drawing, the chasm before him ended at a Y-junction, splitting into two diverging channels. The Refuge sat nestled in the V at the top of the Y, facing the long upright ‘stem’.

Two more spire-like ‘sentry towers’ sat on either side of the stem, facing the two towers of the Refuge itself.

As if all this weren’t colossal enough, the Refuge featured two more soaring aqueduct bridges to add to the broken one in the main chasm—200 feet high and made of many bricked arches.

These two new bridges spanned the Y-channels of the waterway, but unlike the one crossing the main chasm, they were whole and intact.

It was Zoe who noticed the rockwall behind the Refuge.

‘It slopes
backward
,’ she said. ‘Like the cone of a—’

‘Come on, we don’t have time,’ West urged them on.

The final stretch of the chasm featured a descending stairway
followed by an
ascending
ramp. The ramp slithered up the left-hand wall of the chasm, bending with every curve. Curiously, it bore a low upraised gutter on its outer edge, the purpose of which was not readily apparent.

Of course, this stairway–ramp combination was mirrored on Judah’s side of the chasm.

West and his team charged down their descending stairway, avoiding a couple of blasting steam vents on the way.

In the meantime, Judah’s team had just crossed their little gorge and arrived at their guard tower.

They started climbing around it.

The Ascending Ramp

An unusually high stepping-stone separated the base of the descending stairway from the base of the ascending ramp. It jutted out from the wall about thirty feet above the waterway.

The guttered ascending ramp rose above West and his team, stretching upward for maybe 100 metres, ending at the left-hand sentry tower. It was maybe four feet wide, enough for single-file only, and a sheer drop to the right of it fell away to the swirling waters below.

The ramp featured two openings along its length: one two-thirds of the way up that looked like a doorway; the second all the way at the very top of the ramp, that looked more like a
pipe
.

Ominously, a wispy thread of steam issued out from the pipe, dissipating as it spread into the chasm.

Wizard was enthralled. ‘Ooh, it’s a single-exit convergence trap. . . ’

‘A what?’ Pooh Bear said.

West said, ‘He means it’s a race between us and whatever liquid comes out of that pipe. We have to get to the doorway before the liquid does. I assume the high stepping-stone triggers the contest.’

‘What kind of liquid?’ Big Ears asked.

Wizard said, ‘I’ve seen crude-oil versions. Heated quicksand. Liquid tar. . . ’

As Wizard spoke, West stole a glance back at Judah’s men.

They were climbing around the outside of their guard tower,
high above the waterway, moving in a highly co-ordinated way— far faster than his team had.

The first CIEF man climbed over the balcony and disappeared inside the tower.

‘No time to ponder the issue,’ he said. ‘Let’s take the challenge.’

And with that he jumped onto the stepping-stone and bounced over onto the ascending ramp.

No sooner had his foot hit the stepping-stone than a blast of superhot volcanic mud vomited out from the pipe at the top of the ramp. Black and thick, the mud was so hot it bore thin streaks of golden-red magma in its oozing mass.

The ramp’s gutter instantly came into effect.

It funnelled the fast-oozing body of superheated mud down the ramp, towards West’s team!

‘This is why we train every day,’ West said. ‘Run!’

Up the ramp the seven of them ran.

Down the ramp the red-hot mud flowed.

It was going to be close—the ramp was obviously constructed in favour of the mud.

But West and his team were fit, prepared. They bounded up the slope, heaving with every stride, and they came to the doorway set into the wall just as the mud did and they charged in through it one after the other, West shepherding them through, diving in himself just as the volcanic mud slid by him, pouring down the ramp, where it ultimately tipped into the waterway at the bottom, sending up a great hissing plume of steam.