Six Sacred Stones Part 19

"They divorced when Lauren and I were in our teens. My mother was a high school teacher. History. A smart and quiet woman. And my dad, well-"

Lily waited, holding her breath.

West stared off into s.p.a.ce for a moment. "He was with the US Army, met my mum while out here on exercises. He was on the fast track up the promotions ladder and always wanting to go higher. Ambitious. He was also intelligent, really intelligent, but conceited about it-he looked down on anyone who didn't know as much as he did, talked down to them, including my mother. Which was why they split in the end. She won't see him now."

"Do you keep in touch with her?" Lily had never met Jack's mother.

Jack laughed. "Of course I do! It's just that...she doesn't want my father to know where she is, so I only see her rarely. I was actually going to ask you if you wanted to join me the next time I visited her. She's very keen to meet you."

"Is she? I'd love to!" Lily exclaimed, but then she frowned: "What about your dad? Do you ever see him?"

"No," Jack said firmly. "We never really got along. In fact, I can honestly say I don't ever want to see him again."

Despite the fact that Jack was no longer on active service, the military never quite went away.

On one occasion in late 2006, an Australian general came to visit Jack at the farm and asked him lots of questions about the Capstone mission.

The general also asked Jack if he knew the whereabouts of someone called the Sea Ranger.

This Sea Ranger, Lily gleaned, was a modernday pirate of some sort, cruising the east coast of Africa in some kind of boat.

Jack told the general he hadn't seen the Sea Ranger in years.

But the thing about Jack that was of most interest to Lily was his relations.h.i.+p with Zoe.

When Zoe was finally able to come to Australia more often, Lily was thrilled-especially when she could see how close Zoe and Jack were becoming.

They would smile when they talked on the balcony or went for walks together at sunset.

Lily also enjoyed doing girly stuff with Zoe-painting toenails, doing each other's hair, dyeing their end tips in matching electric pink-but more than anything else, she loved how Zoe made Jack happy.

She once asked Zoe if she was in love with Jack. Zoe had just smiled. "I've loved him from the first moment I met him. But, well-"

"But what?" Lily had asked gently, but Zoe didn't reply, she just stared off into s.p.a.ce, her eyes moist with tears.

Lily let it go, but more than once she imagined Jack and Zoe getting married, and it made her happy because then Zoe would officially be her mom.

Christmas 2006 was an occasion Lily would remember for a long, long time.

She and Jack spent it in Dubai, at the Burj al Arab tower, with all the members of the team that had found the Seven Wonders and the Capstone.

Pooh Bear and Stretch were there, as was Fuzzy, having come all the way from Jamaica.

Zoe and Sky Monster, Wizard and Tank.

The whole family, back together again. Lily loved it.

She spent much of the next week with Pooh Bear and Stretch, visiting Pooh's father's palace.

There she met Pooh's older brother, Scimitar, but he talked to her like she was a child, so she didn't like him too much.

What shedid like was Pooh's demolition shed out beyond the mansion's stables. An explosives expert, Pooh had all manner of blasting supplies there. He even showed Lily a strange foamlike epoxy that Wizard had given to him: it was called BlastFoam and it came from the famous Sandia Laboratories in the US. You sprayed foam from a small canister around a live grenade and it couldabsorb the blast of the grenade.

He also showed Lily how to use C2 plastic explosive-a smallradius/highimpact explosive used by archaeologists on delicate sites. It could blast away tight sections of rock but not damage nearby relics.

"It can also blow locks," Pooh Bear whispered to Lily. "Which is why Huntsman always keeps a little wad of it in a compartment in his artificial arm, and why I keep some in this"-he indicated the ornamental bronze ring that kept his ma.s.sive beard in check.

"Don't leave home without it."

Lily grinned. Pooh Bear was cool.

A WEEK LATER, the team celebrated the New Year on the rooftop helipad of the Burj al Arab tower, watching a fireworks display in the Arabian sky alongside many of Sheikh Abbas's powerful friends and a.s.sociates.

Despite the fact that she should have been in bed, Lily sneaked out in her gown and slippers and watched the gathering from the storage shed on the helipad.

The women wore sparkling dresses-even Zoe, who Lily thought looked just beautiful- and all the men wore smart dinner suits or Arabianstyle robes. Even Jack wore a tux, which Lily found very funny. It didn't suit him at all, and he seemed very uncomfortable in it, but it did make him look very handsome.

Arriving late at the New Year's celebration, just before midnight, had been Jack's brotherinlaw, J. J. Wickham.

Wickham was a few years older than Jack and seriously goodlooking, with short brown hair and a rough unshaven jaw a s.e.xy guy. All the women on the pad cast sideways glances at him as he walked by.

Accompanying Wickham was an exceedingly tall and skinny black man named Solomon Kol. His skin was a deep, deep black and his eyes were kind. He walked with a long loping stride and stood with a stoop, as if to diminish his considerable height.

Lily stared at the two men, frowning, struck by a strange feeling of recognition. She felt she had seen both of them before but couldn't remember where.

"Why if it isn't the Sea Ranger!" Pooh Bear exclaimed, clasping Wickham's hand warmly.

"Hey, Zahir," Wickham said quietly. "Sorry, it's Pooh Bear now, isn't it?"

"It is indeed and it is a name I wear with pride. 'Tis a great honor to be renamed by young Lily. I hope you have that honor one day."

Lily smiled inwardly. She just loved Pooh Bear.

"Wick," Jack said, coming over. "Glad you could make it. And Solomon, my old friend, how are you?"

The giant African smiled broadly. "We miss you in Kenya, Huntsman. You must visit again soon. Magdala misses young Lily terribly. She yearns to see how she has grown."

"Oh, she's grown all right," Jack said. "And she's hiding right now in the shed over there.

Lily! You can come out now."

Lily emerged, head bowed, in her gown and slippers.

Jack put a hand on her shoulder. "Lily, I'm not sure if you remember Solomon. He used to live next door to our farm in Kenya, and would come over often. He now looks after it for us, just in case we ever return."

"My, my, you have grown, little one," Solomon said. "Soon you will be as tall as me!"

Wickham was also gazing down at Lily, but silently, sadly.

Then he turned to Jack: "I can't stay long. Got the Man on my tail again. But thought I'd swing by and say hi."

Jack said, "They came asking about you last month. Arms smuggling. Said you grabbed an American weapons s.h.i.+pment by mistake."

"Oh, it wasn't a mistake. I knew exactly what it was," Wickham said. "And I knew exactly where those weapons were heading."

"Be careful, Wick," Jack said. "One man's crusader is another man's pirate."

"They're calling me a pirate now?"

"You keep grabbing CIA weapons s.h.i.+pments to African warlords and soon you're gonna have the whole Seventh Fleet combing the Indian Ocean for your a.s.s."

"Bring it on," Wickham said. "The American military can be beaten. I mean, h.e.l.l, look at whatyou did, and you're a chump!"

Jack smiled. "Watch yourself is all I'm saying."

"I will. Call me if you're ever in Zanzibar," Wickham said. "Buy you a beer."

Then the midnight fireworks started going off. Seen from the helipad of the Burj al Arab, they were simply spectacular. The a.s.sembled crowd oohed and aahed as the desert sky lit up in a million colors.

But when Lily turned back from the dazzling fireworks display, J. J. Wickham was gone.

A few days later, when they were alone, Lily asked Jack about him.

"He's a good man," Jack said. "A decent man who got courtmartialed by the US Navy for doing the right thing."

"What did he do?"

"It was more what hedidn't do. Wick was the XO on a submarine in the US Navy, a little Sturgeoncla.s.s sub operating out of Diego Garcia, the US base in the Indian Ocean, doing patrols off eastern Africa.

"Anyway, a few years after theBlack Hawk Down incident in Somalia, his boat intercepted an unregistered Kilocla.s.s submarine en route to the private dock of a Somali warlord: Russian pirates in an old Russian sub, smuggling arms. Wick's captain ordered him to take a boarding party onto the Kilo and sail it back to Diego Garcia.

"When he got on board the Kilo, however, Wick found a dozen crates of American Stinger missiles and one very p.i.s.sed off CIA agent. Turned out the CIA was in the process of destabilizing east Africa by armingall the warlords."

"So what did he do?" Lily asked.

"Wick did what he'd been ordered to do. With a small team, he secured the Russian pirates, took command of the Russian sub, and began sailing it back to Diego Garcia.

"But halfway there, he got a priority signal from Naval HQ, telling him to hand the sub back to the CIA man and forget he'd ever seen it.

"Wick was stunned. The big shots back home were actuallysupporting this operation. So he made a decision. He figured enough was enough, and since he no longer had a family to worry about, he'd do something. And so he stopped the sub in the middle of the Indian Ocean, threw all its crew-including the enraged CIA man-into a liferaft and set them adrift.

"Knowing a courtmartial would follow, he offered all his men on board the sub the opportunity to leave-indeed, he encouraged them to do so, to think of their careers. Most did and he set them adrift as well, in life rafts with homing beacons.

"And so with a skeleton crew Wickkept the Russian submarine and has been using it ever since, conducting his own private patrols off the coast of Africa, using several old World War II submarine refueling stations as his bases. He was courtmartialedin absentia for desertion and disobeying a direct order and sentenced to twentyfive years in a military prison. There's still an outstanding warrant for his arrest."

"So is he a pirate?"

"To the people of Africa, he's a hero, the only guy who stands up to the warlords, by intercepting their arms s.h.i.+pments. He also brings the people food, free of charge and obligation. They call him theSea Ranger. Unfortunately, he steals much of the food from western cargoes, so the US and British navies call him a pirate."

Lily frowned. "When I saw him on New Year's Eve, he seemed, I don't know, familiar.

Like I'd seen him before."

"That's because you have seen him before."

"I have? When?"

"When you were very young and we were living in Kenya. You were just a toddler and Wick had only just started sailing his own private submarine. He was on the run, so I let him hide out with us for a while.

"He played hideandseek with you, peekaboo, that sort of thing. You loved it. Now that you're officially my daughter, he's officially your uncle. He lives mostly on the island of Zanzibar, off the KenyanTanzanian coast. But wherever he is and wherever we are, we'll always be family."

And so life went on for Lily-at the farm with Jack and at school with Alby, and with Zoe and Wizard when they came to visit-until that fine summer's day when the sky above the farm filled with parachutes.

K10 SUBMARINE BASE.

MORTIMER ISLAND.

BRISTOL CHANNEL, ENGLAND.

DECEMBER 9, 2007, 2145 HOURS.

"DADDY!"

Lily leaped into West's arms as he strode into the central lab of the submarine base, K10, having taken three full days to get to England.

Situated on a windswept island in the mouth of the Bristol Channel, K10 had been a refueling and repair station for US naval vessels in the Second World War. After the war, as a gesture of thanks to the Americans, the British had allowed them to keep using the island. To this day it has remained a US base on British soil.

In the American cla.s.sification system, it is a Level Alpha base, the highest security level, and along with Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, is the only base outside of continental America to maintain and store SLBMs-submarinelaunched ballistic nuclear missiles.

About a dozen people milled around the hightech lab: Zoe and the kids the twins in their "Cow Level" Ts.h.i.+rts two Saudi commandos, guarding a small velvet case between them-Vulture went directly to them and Paul Robertson, the American diplomat/spy they'd met in Dubai, who had arrived with a larger Samsonite trunk.

When Lily saw Wizard-his welts and cuts still pink-she released Jack and threw her arms around the old man.

Jack went straight to Zoe. "Hey. So?"

"We've been busy while we were waiting for you. The data from Stonehenge is absolutely mindblowing."

Jack glanced at Robertson. "He brought the Killing Stone of the Maya?"

"Arrived about an hour ago all by himself. With the Mayan Stone in his big case."

"He didn't bring a Pillar, too?"

"No. He said America didn't possess one."

"Hmmm. What'd he say about the SaxeCoburg Pillar?"

"Apparently a member of no less than the British Royal Family is coming here, bringing it. Mr. Robertson certainly has some pull."