Seven Ancient Wonders (23 page)

The bridge was very high—at least 200 feet—long, and very narrow, barely wide enough for one person to stand on. For it was not made for human crossing. Its surface wasn’t even flat; rather, it contained a sunken 2-foot-wide channel for mud to flow across.

‘Oh man. . . ’ he breathed.

He stepped out onto the high aqueduct bridge, and suddenly saw Judah’s men appear on the jetty far below him, pushing their pair of six-wheeled rollers across their fold-out metal bridge. In the recently-bored tunnel on the other side of their bridge, the big tunnel-boring vehicle’s front screw was now folded open, waiting to be loaded. Judah was going to use the tunnel-boring vehicle to carry the Pieces out of here.

West remembered Wizard’s newsflash from before.

‘Check the sketch. . . ’ he’d said.

With a glance back at the oncoming mud, he snatched his printout of the ancient sketch:

Okay, I’m here
, he saw the right-hand aqueduct, labelled
Aqueduct 2
.

Max was right. This aqueduct bridge linked up with the excavation tunnel—the same tunnel that Judah had reopened with his tunnel-borer and which he was now using to get the Pieces out.

West looked up.

If he hurried, he might be able to. . . 

He bolted, raced out across the high aqueduct bridge—while far below him, Judah’s CIEF team loaded their tunnel-boring vehicle with the two golden trapezoids.

On the other side of the Y-junction, Pooh Bear emerged from his aqueduct tunnel—just in time to see the aqueduct bridge in front of him get hit, spectacularly, by a rocket-propelled grenade . . . right in the middle!

One of Judah’s men had been waiting for them, keeping an eye on the bridge through the crosshairs of an RPG launcher.

The RPG hit the multi-arched bridge in the exact centre. A huge explosion billowed outwards, hurling bricks and blasted rock in every direction. When the cloud dissipated it revealed that the aqueduct bridge was now in two pieces, with a gaping void in its middle.

Pooh Bear spun—saw the long finger of dark mud stretching down the tunnel behind him, coming inexorably closer.

And now he and his team had nowhere to go, no bridge to escape across!

‘This is terrible,’ he breathed.

West dashed across his aqueduct bridge unseen, but still pursued by the elongated finger of mud behind him.

He reached the little tunnel on the other side of the chasm and disappeared into it at speed—just as Judah’s people clamped shut the folding front section of their M-113 tunnel-borer and withdrew the temporary bridge.

Judah shouted, ‘CIEF units, fall in! We’re leaving!’

The tunnel-boring vehicle was like a tank, with great tracked wheels and a box-shaped armoured body. The main hold of this body was hollow and it usually held troops. When used as a tunnel-borer, however, it conveyed crushed rock through its body and disposed of it out the rear, laying it against the walls of the tunnel as hard-packed dirt.

Now that the tunnel had been bored, the hold of the M-113 was being used to house the two Pieces of the Capstone.

Four armed CIEF men sat in there with them, guarding them.

The rest of Judah’s force leapt into four cage-framed Light Strike Vehicles—dune buggies essentially—to escort their prize out of the excavation tunnel.

By this time, Cal Kallis and his team, who had been on West’s side of the main chasm, had crossed the main chasm via the broken aqueduct and joined Judah.

‘Mr Kallis,’ Judah said, pointing up at Pooh Bear’s team, trapped up on the partially-destroyed left-hand aqueduct. ‘West’s people do not leave this place alive. I want snipers taking them down one at a time if necessary. Join us when you’re done.’

Then Judah turned and jumped into one of the chase cars.

The CIEF convoy fired up their engines and moved off into the tunnel—two of the small LSVs in front, followed by the big M-113 tunnel-borer, then the other two LSVs behind.

They left Cal Kallis and his men at the mouth of the tunnel, standing at the waterline—eyeing Pooh Bear’s trapped team.

Pooh Bear spun to check the mud behind him. It was close now— only ten metres away and approaching fast.

The aqueduct bridge before him now offered no escape.

But about twenty metres across the cliff-face from him was one of the Refuge’s high-spired towers—and it was connected to Pooh Bear’s bridge by an inch-thin ledge.

‘This way!’ he ordered the others.

And so they edged out across the ledge, standing on their tiptoes, Wizard, Zoe and Lily, Stretch and Big Ears, and finally Pooh Bear, who stepped off the remains of the aqueduct bridge a bare second before the stream of mud shot past him, flowed out over the bridge, and fell—gloriously, as a waterfall of thick dark mud—off the newly-formed void in its middle, down to the waterway 200 feet below.

Moments later, an even larger body of mud came roaring out of the main entry of Hamilcar’s Refuge. It moved fast, pouring down the rampway and out over the jetty, before it tipped out into the waterway, kicking up a hissing geyser of steam.

The huge geyser shot up into the air, its cloudy haze positioned directly
in between
Pooh Bear and Kallis, giving Pooh Bear several valuable seconds of movement.

But then the haze from the geyser began to dissipate and Kallis’s snipers opened fire with a vengeance.

West ran through darkness. Alone.

Guided only by the light of a single glowstick.

His little tunnel was tight, only big enough for him to run through bent-over.

After about a hundred metres, however, he heard engine noises up ahead and suddenly—

—he burst out into a wider tunnel, with hard-packed walls of dirt and wide enough for a tank to pass through. Low mounds of dirt lay at regular intervals along the centre of the roadway— mounds left behind by the tunnel-borer. A long line of fading American glowsticks had been left along its length to illuminate the way back.

It was the excavation tunnel.

The engine noises came from his right, from over a crest in the sloping roadway—the sound of light car engines and the deep-throated diesel roar of the tunnel-boring vehicle.

Judah and his CIEF team.

Approaching fast.

West chucked his glowstick and, thinking fast, quickly rolled out
onto the roadway
.

He rolled into the middle of the tunnel, lying lengthways in a dark shadowy spot, pressing himself close to one of the dirt-mounds in the centre of the road, half-burying himself in the dirt.

Judah’s convoy rose above the crest, headlights blazing.

The lead light strike cars whizzed by West on either side, avoiding the dirt-mound by inches, before. . . 

. . . the great M-113 tunnel-boring vehicle thundered over the crest and rumbled right over the top of West, its huge tracked wheels clanking by on either side of his body!

No sooner was it over him than West quickly whipped out his MP-7 sub-machine gun and, using its grip as a hook, latched it over a pipe on the underbody of the TBV—and suddenly he was swept along with it, hanging from the huge vehicle’s underbelly!

He had to work fast.

He guessed that he had about thirty seconds till they came to the
gorge—the narrow gorge that cut across the excavation tunnel: his escape route.

Vastly outnumbered and outgunned, he could never hope to beat all of Judah’s CIEF force and take the Pieces. Working alone, there was no way he could carry the two huge Pieces anyway.

The thing was, he didn’t want to
carry
them—he just needed to
see
them and take a couple of quick photos of the carvings on their upper sides.

West clambered forward along the underside of the moving tunnel-borer, pulling himself forward hand-over-hand, until he came to the front of the great lumbering vehicle—where he climbed up and over its bow and commenced his one-man war against the CIEF.

Marshall Judah sat in the passenger seat of one of the rear LSVs, keeping an eye on his tunnel-borer up ahead.

He never saw West disappear under it—nor did he see West climb forward along its underbelly to its front bumper—nor did he see West shoot its driver right between the eyes and leap inside the driver’s hatch.

No, all Judah saw was several sudden lightning-flashes of gunfire flaring within the big tunnel-borer—before he saw it veer out of control to the left and grind horribly against the left-hand wall of the tunnel!

The big vehicle crunched against the wall, still moving forward but losing speed, and as it did so, more flashes could be seen flaring within it—only these weren’t muzzle flashes from guns, they were different, almost like. . . 
camera
flashes.

Then the big tunnel-borer regained its alignment and pulled away from the wall, continuing on down the tunnel, where it rumbled across a sturdy ancient stone bridge that spanned a thirty-foot-wide cross-gorge. The drop to the watery floor of the gorge was about eighty feet.

Judah couldn’t be sure, but as he watched the tunnel-borer race across the bridge, he could have sworn he saw a figure leap off its
roof and drop into the narrow black gorge, splashing into the water below.

Either way, as soon as it was across the ancient bridge, the tunnel-borer again lurched leftward, crunching against the wall, before grinding to a slow laboured halt about 80 metres down the tunnel.

The escort cars converged on it, unloaded their men, guns up—

—and found the two golden Pieces still in it, safe and sound.

The driver of the M-113 and the four CIEF guards in it were all dead, shot to bits. Their blood covered the walls of the hold. All had got their guns out—but not a single one of them had got a round off.

Judah just gazed at the human wreckage inside the tunnel-boring vehicle, the work of Jack West Jr.

‘West, West, West. . . ’ he said to the air. ‘You always were good. Perhaps the best pupil I ever had.’

Then he reorganised his men and the convoy shot off down the tunnel again, safe and away.

Sniper rounds slammed into the cliff all around Pooh Bear’s team as they tip-toed across the cliff-face to the fortress’s left-hand tower.

The Warbler in Big Ears’s backpack was working admirably— bending the bullets away—and one by one, Pooh’s team made it to the high-spired tower attached to the fortress.

Far below them, mud continued to flow out of the mouth of the great citadel, while above them, the dark ceiling of the chasm was close now, barely twenty feet above the peak of their tower.

Then abruptly Kallis’s men stopped firing.

Pooh Bear exchanged a worried look with Wizard.

Change of tactics.

A brutal change of tactics.

Frustrated by the electromagnetic field of the Warbler, Kallis and his team started firing RPGs at the tower.

It looked like a fireworks display: long hyper-extending fingers
of smoke lanced upward from their tunnel, streaking up toward the mighty ancient citadel.

‘Oh my Lord,’ Wizard breathed. ‘The Warbler won’t work against RPGs! RPGs are too heavy to divert magnetically! Somebody do something—’

It was Stretch who came up with the answer.

Quick as a flash, he unslung his sniper rifle, aimed and fired it
at the first oncoming RPG!

The bullet hit the RPG a bare thirty feet from the tower and the RPG detonated in mid-flight, exploding just out of reach of the tower.

It was an incredible shot. A single shot, fired under pressure, hitting a high-velocity target in
mid-flight
!

Even Pooh Bear was impressed. ‘Nice shot, Israeli. How many times can you do that?’

‘As long as it takes for you to figure out a way out of here, Arab,’ Stretch said, eyeing a second incoming RPG through his sights.

Pooh Bear evaluated their position. Their aqueduct was shattered, uncrossable. The main entrance to the fortress was filled with flowing mud. No dice there. And the main chasm, with its traps and deadly whirlpools, was guarded by Kallis’s CIEF team.

‘Trapped,’ he said, grimacing in thought.

‘Isn’t there
any
way out of here?’ Big Ears asked.

‘This place was sealed long ago,’ Wizard said.

They all stood in silence.

‘Why not go up?’ a small voice suggested.

Everyone turned.

It was Lily.

She shrugged, pointed at the ‘planked’ granite ceiling not far above the pinnacle of their tower. ‘Can’t we go out that way? Maybe with one of Pooh Bear’s demolition charges?’

Pooh Bear’s frown became a grin. ‘Young lady, I like your style.’