Six Sacred Stones Part 43

"But we have to get to Cape Town by tomorrow night," Zoe said.

Sky Monster swiveled in his seat. "I'm sorry, Zoe, but we can't do that, not without getting shot down. Our enemies have completely shut us out. They musta bought off the South African government with a boatload of cash. I hate to be the one to say this, but we can't get to Cape Town."

ENMORE MANOR,.

LAND'S END, ENGLAND DECEMBER 11, 2007.

LACHLAN AND JULIUS Adamson sat gloomily in the locked library of Enmore Manor, a secluded estate in the far southwest of England near Land's End.

The blinking red light of a supersensitive motiontracking unit gazed down at them, tracking their every movement, telling their j.a.panese captors that they were still where they were supposed to be.

They sat with Lily's backpack and nothing else. Only her toys remained in the pack- everything else they had of worth had been taken by the j.a.panese.

Every now and then, their captors came for them and got them to explain some diagram on their computer or some email that Wizard had written about the Machine.

Tank Tanaka was always polite but curt, his eyes hard and cold, fixed on a purpose that the twins simply couldn't comprehend.

Only once did Lachlan shake him from his trance. "Yo, Tank! Why are you doing this, man! What about your friends, like Wizard and Lily?"

Tank rounded on him, his eyes flaring. "Friends? Friends! The notion of friends.h.i.+p is nothing compared to the rankhumiliation of a nation. In 1945 my country was dishonored, not just beaten in battle, but beaten like a dog before the whole world. Our Emperor, sent to us by G.o.d himself, the last in the longest line of kings on this planet, was belittled in front of the entire world. This was a slur that no j.a.panese has ever forgotten."

Julius said, "But j.a.pan is strong again. One of the richest and most advanced countries in the world."

"Robots and electronics do not rebuild honor, Julius. Only vengeance does. I have studied this Machine for twenty years, all the while with vengeance on my mind. In their hearts, all j.a.panese agree with me, and they will all rejoice when our vengeance is made manifest."

"But they'll bedead, " Julius said. "If you succeed, all life on this planet will be extinguished."

Tank shrugged. "Death is not death when you take your enemy with you."

A few times when Tank was out, their j.a.panese guards conversed in the twins' presence, a.s.suming that asgaijin the twins did not understand j.a.panese.

On one such occasion, as he typed on his computer for them, Lachlan, listening discreetly, snapped up.

"What is it?" Julius whispered.

"They're saying that they just got word from 'their man in Wolf's unit,' some guy named Akira Isaki?"

"Isaki?"

"Whoever he is, he's not loyal to Wolf. He's working for these a.s.sholes. He just called in and told them-oh, s.h.i.+t-that Jack West is dead and that Wolf is now heading for the Congo, going after the Second Pillar. This Isaki will report back when that's over and tell our guys whether they have to move or not."

"Huntsman's dead?" Julius said. "You think it's true?"

"I don't know what to think. But I do know this: our time is limited. It's time we flew the coop."

Twelve hours later in the dead of night, one of the j.a.panese guards came to check on them.

A sensor had detected that one of the windows in the library had been breached, but the motion tracker still showed the twins to be in the library, moving very little, probably sleeping.

The j.a.panese guard opened the library door, and stopped dead in his tracks.

The library was empty.

The twins were gone.

The only moving object: Lily's little robot dog, Sir Barksalot, stomping up and down on his little metal legs, barking soundlessly at the dumbstruck j.a.panese guard.

The alarm was sounded and the grounds lit up with floodlights, but by the time Tank and his men had searched the area for the twins, they were already sitting in the back of a pickup truck speeding east, heading far away from Land's End.

"So where do we go now?" Julius asked, the wind whipping his hair.

Lachlan grimaced in thought. "There's only one place I can think to go."

MINE COMPLEX.

SOMEWHERE IN ETHIOPIA.

DECEMBER 11, 2007.

AT THE SAME TIME Zoe was guiding her group through the wilds of the Congo, and the Twins had been making good their escape from Tank's j.a.panese Blood Brotherhood at Land's End, Pooh Bear was languis.h.i.+ng in the mysterious Ethiopian mine, suspended above the a.r.s.enic pool in his medieval cage.

Six hours after the shocking death of Jack West-and since his own brother, Scimitar, had left Pooh to die-the working day came to an end, and the Ethiopian Christian guards in charge of the mine shepherded the Ethiopian Jewish miners into their subterranean quarters-dirtwalled caves with planks for beds and rags for blankets. Moldy bread and a souplike gruel was served up for food.

Once the slave miners were safely locked away, the thirty or so Christian guards gathered around the a.r.s.enic pool and stared up at the imprisoned Pooh Bear.

Torches were lit.

Chants were intoned.

A great drum was hammered.

A fullsized Christian cross was erected and set alight.

Then the tribal dancing began.

Once the cross was burning, all the other torches were extinguished, so that it was the only light source in the vast cavern-it lit up the great underground s.p.a.ce with a haunting orange glow that bounced off the stone towers halfburied in the mine's high dirt walls.

Pooh Bear looked out from his cage in horror. His time, it seemed, had come. He shot a sad look at the deep pit about thirty yards from the a.r.s.enic pool, the pit in which Jack had met his end.

Then, with a clunking jolt, Pooh Bear's cage suddenly began todescend toward the steaming pool on its chains. At the edge of the pool, a pair of Ethiopian guards were slowly uncranking a spooler, lowering the cage.

The other guards began chanting quickly. It sounded like the Lord's Prayer, in Latin, and uttered feverishly fast:"Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum..."

The cage descended.

Pooh Bear shook its bars.

"Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum..."

Pooh's cage was only ten feet above the simmering pool of black liquid.

"Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum..."

Nine feet, eight feet...

Pooh Bear began to feel the heat of the pool, the hot steam rising all around him.

"Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum..."

The chanting continued.

The dancing continued.

The drum kept booming.

And Pooh Bear's cage kept lowering.

As his cage descended, Pooh's eyes flashed from the simmering pool below him to the surging throng of chantinganddancing guards and then over to the blazing cross towering over them all-and somewhere in the middle of the h.e.l.lish scene, over the booming of the drum, he thought he heard another sound, a kind of banging noise, but he couldn't see where it had come from and he dismissed it.

"Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum..."

The pool was only three feet beneath him now, its steaming fumes engulfing him.

Sweating profusely, with death approaching and no avenue of escape, Pooh Bear began to pray.

The heavily muscled Ethiopian guard who had hammered Jack West to his horizontal cross was at that moment leading the sacrificial ceremony, banging on the great drum with gusto.

His eyes widened with delight as Pooh Bear's cage came to within a few feet of the deadly pool.

Now he hammered harder on the drum, heightening the frenzy of the crowd-just as a thick masonry nail came flying through the air from out of nowhereand lodged squarely in his right eye, driving a full six inches back into his brain, killing him instantly, throwing him to the ground, and abruptly ending the beating of the drum.

Everything stopped.

The dancing, the chanting, the movement. Even the men lowering Pooh Bear's cage stopped their cranking.

Silence.

The crowd of guards turned.

To behold a man standing at their rear, beside the blazing cross, fearsomely illuminated by its firelight, a terrifying figure literally covered in his own blood-it was on his face, on his clothes, and most obviously, on the rag wrapped around his wounded right hand.

Newly risen from the dead, from beneath a great stone slab at the base of a deep stone pit, it was Jack West Jr., and he was p.i.s.sed as h.e.l.l.

IF THE KILLING of Jack West by his own father had raised comparisons to Christ in the minds of the fundamentalist Ethiopian Christian guards, now his resurrection chilled them to the core.

That he had already silently disarmed four of their number during their wild dancing and now held a gun in his good hand only served to make them believe even more that this man had G.o.dlike abilities.

Except for one thing.

Jack West Jr. was not a merciful G.o.d.

It had taken Jack six hours, six long hours of careful s.h.i.+fting and excruciatingly painful movements to get himself out.

Blocking the fall of the stone slab had been frightening enough.

As the great slab had been slid across his pit, Jack had thought quickly: the only thing he possessed that could possibly withstand the weight of such a slab was his t.i.tanium forearm.

And so, at the very moment the slab had slid across the top of his pit, he had clenched his teeth and yanked with all his strength on his naileddown artificial left hand.

It shook the nail slightly, but on the first pull, he did not pull it loose.

The slab fell into his pit- -just as he yanked on the nail again, and this time, his metal hand came free, nail and all, and as the huge stone slab fell down into the pit, Jack planted his false arm perpendicular to his body, made a fist and tucked his legs up against his side as-clang!-the full weight of the slab hit his metal fist, crus.h.i.+ng two of its fingers, but the arm held and the irresistible force of the slab met the immovable object of Jack's upraised t.i.tanium forearm.

The leading face of the slab came to a stunning halt less than an inch from Jack's nose, and to anyone looking down at it, it would have appeared that he had been completely crushed by the great stone slab.

Jack, however, had his legs squeezed to the left of his body while his head was facing right, his right hand still nailed to the floor, itself only inches away from the face of the slab above it.

From there, all he needed was courage, strength, and time-courage to grab, with his real right hand, the nail sticking through it strength to form a fist around the head of the nail and jimmy it from the block beneath it and time to do so without tearing his own hand apart or dying from shock.

Three times he pa.s.sed out from the strain, blacking out for he didn't know how long.

But after a couple of hours of this agonizing sequence of jimmying and yanking, he finally dislodged the masonry nail and got his right hand free.

Deep hyperventilating gasps followed as he then used his teeth to extract the nail from his b.l.o.o.d.y right palm.

Clenched in his jaws, the nail came free and blood issued from the hole in his palm. Jack quickly unlooped his belt from his trousers and with his teeth created a tourniquet.

At which point, he promptly blacked out again, pa.s.sing out for an entire hour this time.

He woke to the sounds of chanting, dancing, and drums.

"Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum..."

Now he had to deal with the issue of the slab on top of him.

All he needed was one crack in it, and he found it near where his right hand had been nailed down.

Into this crack he jammed a chewinggumsized wad of C2 plastic explosive-the high impact lowradius explosive he kept in a compartment in his artificial arm for use in enemy door locks in case of capture.

The C2 went off-the distant bang Pooh would hear-and a long fatal crack snaked up the length of the slab, breaking it perfectly in two. The partial slab to Jack's right fell flush to the floor of the pit, providing a narrow aperture through which he could squeeze.

After some careful wriggling, he was all but out, save for his artificial left arm, which still held the other side of the slab off the ground.

A tough predicament-there was no way he could lift the half slab off his t.i.tanium arm.

So he did the only thing he could.

He simply unlatched the forearm section of his false arm from the bicep section and rolled out.