Seven Ancient Wonders (26 page)

With two heavily defended airfields to choose from, naturally West aimed for the golf course.

‘I know Gitmo. . . ’ he said, standing in the cockpit of the
Halicarnassus
as it roared down through the night sky, descending on Guantanamo Bay.

After a quick refuelling in friendly Spain, they had soared off over the Atlantic, commencing the five-hour flight to Cuba.

‘ . . . I went there once, after some wargames my country did with the CIEF. Believe it or not, I actually played on the golf course— Christ, a golf course in a military base. Thing is, there aren’t many trees and the last few holes—the 16th, 17th and 18th—run end-onend, separated by only low bushes. They’re wide and straight and long, about 450 metres each. About runway length. What do you say, Sky Monster? Think you can do it?’

‘Can I?’ Sky Monster scoffed. ‘My friend, give me something harder next time!’

‘Great.’ West made to leave the cockpit. ‘See you down on the ground.’

Ten minutes later, West strode into the lower hold of the
Halicarnassus
, dressed entirely in black and wearing his back-mounted carbon-fibre wings.

Zoe was waiting for him, also dressed in black, also wearing a wing-set. The tight form-fitting bodysuit brought out the best in her slender figure. Lean and shapely, Zoe Kissane was beautiful and
fit
.

‘I hope you’re right about this,’ she said.

‘Surprise is the key. Their guns are pointed at the Cubans and at their 700 prisoners. The Americans don’t think anyone is stupid enough to take Guantanamo Bay head-on.’

‘Nope. Only us,’ Zoe said.

‘Have you checked out Stretch’s satellite image of Camp Delta?’

‘Three times,’ Zoe said. ‘The intel from Mossad says that Zaeed is in hut C-12 of Camp 3, solitary confinement. Hope we can spot it in the dark. Is there anything Mossad doesn’t know?’

‘Mossad knows what my Aunt Judy eats for breakfast.’ West checked his watch. ‘We’re eight minutes out. Time to fly.’

Moments later, the rear ramp of the 747 rumbled open and they leapt out of it together, disappearing into the night sky.

Inside the
Halicarnassus
itself, every battle station was manned.

Big Ears, Fuzzy, Pooh Bear and Stretch all sat in the great black plane’s four gun turrets—Big Ears and Pooh Bear on the wing-mounted turrets, Fuzzy on the underbelly, and Stretch up on the 747’s domed roof.

Their six-barrelled miniguns were currently loaded with super-lethal 7.62 mm armour-piercing tracer rounds—but they had special instructions from West as to what to use later, when the battle got really hot.

Wizard, Lily and Horus had been dropped off at a safe island location nearby—it was far too dangerous to bring Lily on this mission.

The
Halicarnassus
thundered through the night sky.

It flew without lights, so it was little more than a dark shadow against the clouds; and it had long ago been stripped of its transponder—so it gave off no electronic signature.

And its black radar-absorbent paint, the same as that used on the B-2 Stealth Bomber, deflected any radar scans the Americans projected from Gitmo.

It was a ghost.

A ghost the American forces at Guantanamo Bay would not know existed until it was right on top of them.

In the end, it was a pair of night sentries who saw it—or, rather,
heard
it—first. They were posted on one of the most far-flung sentry towers on the base, on a remote headland overlooking the ocean about two klicks east of Windward Point, near the Cuzco Hills.

They saw the huge black shadow come roaring in low over their heads, zooming in from the south, from over the Caribbean Sea.

They called it in immediately.

And so the alert went out, and the 3,000-strong American force at Guantanamo Bay declared war on Jack West Jr and his team.

The
Halicarnassus
shot low over the Cuzco Hills, bearing down on the rumpled moonlit landscape of Guantanamo Bay. It was 3:45 in the morning.

Then the big 747 banked sharply to the left and disappeared below the treeline. . . 

. . . landing right on the fairway of the 16th hole of the Guantanamo Bay Golf Course, its winglights blazing to life as it did so!

The plane’s massive tyres ripped up the pristine fairway, churning up great ragged chunks of grass, its glaring winglights lighting the way. It romped down the 16th hole, rumbled onto the 17th.

The stand of bushes separating the 17th from the 18th hole loomed in front of it and Sky Monster just smashed straight through them, crunching over them in an instant, and the rampaging
Halicarnassus
rumbled down the 18th fairway.

Klaxons and alarms wailed all over Guantanamo Bay. Flashing lights erupted everywhere.

Marines leapt out of their beds.

Guard-tower sentries scanned the perimeter down the barrels of their M-16s.

Spotlights searched the sky for more aircraft.

The word went out: they were being attacked . . . 
from the golf course!

Two crack teams of Recon Marines were dispatched to the golf course, while Black Hawk helicopters and a much larger force were assembled to follow up behind them.

And every single jail on the base was instantly placed into lock-down—every gate was double-locked via computer, every guard-post sentry team was doubled.

It was chaos.

Pandemonium.

And in all the chaos and confusion that had followed the
Halicarnassus
’s spectacular landing on the golf course, no-one noticed the two black-winged figures that descended over Gitmo with graceful silent swoops, landing lightly and silently on the flat concrete roof of hut C-12 in Camp 3 of Camp Delta.

West detonated a Semtex charge on the roof of the cinder-block cabin, blasting a hole in it big enough for him to fit through.

He jumped down through the hole—

—and landed in darkness on the roof of a cube-shaped wire-mesh cage. A blowtorch made short work of the cage’s roof and West leapt down into it—

—to see a skeletal wraith-like figure come rushing out of the darkness at him, arms outstretched!

West pivoted quickly and sent Zaeed thudding into the wall, where he pinioned the terrorist and shone his barrel-mounted flashlight right into the man’s eyes.

By the light of the flashlight, Zaeed looked positively
scary
.

The terrorist’s beard and hair had been shaved off, leaving him with a crude stubble on both his angular chin and his scalp. He was thin, malnourished. And his eyes—those eyes—they were hollow, sunken into his skull, accentuating his overall appearance of a living skeleton. They blazed with madness.

‘Mustapha Zaeed?’

‘Ye-yes. . . ’

‘My name is West. Jack West Jr. I’m here to offer you a one-time deal. We get you out of here, and you help us find the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and from them, the Golden Capstone of the Great Pyramid. What do you say?’

Any resistance Zaeed still harboured disappeared in an instant at the mention of the Wonders. In his wild eyes, West saw several things at once: recognition, comprehension and naked ravenous ambition.

‘I will go with you,’ Zaeed said.

‘Then let’s move—’

‘Wait!’ Zaeed shouted. ‘They implanted a microchip in my neck! A locater! You have to extract it, or they’ll know where you’ve taken me!’

‘We’ll do it on the plane! Come on, we’ve got to run!’ West called above the sirens. ‘Zoe! Rope!’

A rope was hurled into the hut from the hole in the roof, and together West and Mustapha Zaeed scrambled up it, out of the cell.

Over at the golf course, the two teams of Recon Marines arrived to behold the
Halicarnassus
standing on the ruins of the shed that had once been their clubhouse, illuminating the area for a full 500 yards with a dozen outward-pointed floodlights.

Blinded by the dazzling lights, the Marines spread out around the big black 747, raised their guns—

—just as a withering volley of gunfire erupted from the
Halicarnassus
’s four revolving gun turrets.

The volley of bullets slammed into the Recon Marines, sent them flying backwards through the air, slamming them into trees and vehicles.

But they weren’t dead.

The bullets were rubber bullets, like those West and his team had used in the quarry in Sudan.

West’s instructions to his team had been simple:
you only kill someone who wants to kill you. You never ever kill men who are just doing their job.

And as far as West was concerned, he had no quarrel with the Marine guards at Guantanamo Bay—only with their government and its backers.

The rubber bullets, however, had another effect on the Recon Marines—it made them think this was an
exercise
, an elaborate surprise in the dead of night designed by their superiors to test their response.

And so they actually became
less
lethal. They concentrated on surrounding and containing the plane, rather than destroying it.

But then, to their surprise, the big black 747 started moving again, rolling around in a tight circle until it was pointed back up the 18th fairway of the golf course.

Then with its guns still blazing, the big plane’s engines fired up. The roar they made was absolutely deafening in the night.

Then the great plane started rumbling
back up
the fairway, having unloaded not a single trooper, having done—seemingly— absolutely nothing.

But then came the most amazing sight.

Two
winged
figures came shooting over the treetops from behind the Recon Marines—black-clad figures wearing carbon-fibre wing-sets—chasing after the fleeing 747, firing compressed air thrusters on their backs. They flew in a series of long swoops, like hang-gliders powered by the odd thrust of compressed air.

And as the Marines saw the winged figures more closely, their hearts sank for they now understood that this hadn’t been an exercise at all.

For one of the low-flying winged intruders carried a
man
harnessed to his chest: a shaven-headed man still dressed in the bright orange coveralls of a Camp 3 detainee.

This was a jailbreak
. . .

The two winged figures swooped in low over the right-hand wing of the rolling
Halicarnassus
, where they landed deftly and ran inside an emergency door which swung shut behind them.

Then the
Halicarnassus
picked up speed and thundered down the two fairways and just before it hit the woods at the far end, it lifted off, taking to the air.

Three Black Hawk choppers followed for a short while, firing after it in vain, but they could never hope to keep up with the fleeing 747.

A couple of F-15 strike fighters would be dispatched 10 minutes later, but by the time they were in the air and on the right heading, the ghostly 747—defying their radar scans and transponder searches—was gone.

It was last seen heading south, disappearing somewhere over Cuba’s nearest neighbour in that direction.

Jamaica.

An hour later, in another part of the world, a digital teleprinter printed out an intercepted radio transmission:

VOICE 1 (USA):
The President is becoming increasingly anxious, Colonel. And his mood was not lifted by a report that just came in from Gitmo: someone broke a terrorist out of Camp Delta, a Saudi named Zaeed who we’ve discovered has connections with the Capstone project.
VOICE 2 (EGYPT):
It was West. He’s bold, I’ll give him that. He must have hit a snag and decided he needed Zaeed.
VOICE 1 (USA):
Does he? Do we need this Zaeed?
VOICE 2 (EGYPT):
No. We got all we needed from Mustapha Zaeed while he was under.
[LONG PAUSE]
VOICE 1 (USA):
Colonel Judah, should we be nervous? The President has ordered that a draft ‘Address to the Nation’ be written, concerning the evacuation of the coastal cities, just in case you don’t succeed.
VOICE 2 (EGYPT):
Tell him we will succeed. To date, everything has gone according to plan. West is containable at any time we choose, but it’s also very useful to have him running around. And the Europeans have acted just as we anticipated. Tell the President to go ahead and write his speech, but he’ll never have to use it. Judah, out.

VICTORIA STATION, KENYA
2003–2006

VICTORIA STATION SOUTHERN KENYA 2003–2006