Seven Ancient Wonders - Matthew Reilly [115]
It moved closer to the stalactite, for a better look, and suddenly it wasn’t directly beneath West anymore.
And West saw a way out of his predicament. It was totally crazy, but it might work. . .
He sprang into action.
‘Pooh Bear, get a handhold. I need that rope and piton.’
Pooh Bear obliged, grabbed a handrung, while—one-handed— West disengaged the piton and wound in the rope. It was about fifty feet in length.
Then he said, ‘Okay, Pooh, now let go of the handrung and grab my waist.’
‘What!’
‘Just do it.’
Pooh Bear did. Now he hung from West . . . as West hung from his superstrong mechanical hand, gripping a handrung.
And then West let go.
They dropped from the ceiling.
Straight down.
They shot like a bullet past the tail of the Black Hawk. . .
. . . and as they did so, West hurled his piton—still attached to the rope—at the Black Hawk’s landing wheels!
Like a grappling hook, the steel piton looped around the rear landing wheels of the helicopter . . . and caught.
The rope played out before—snap!—it went taut and suddenly West and Pooh Bear were swinging, suspended from the helicopter’s landing gear, swooping in toward the giant stalactite!
The helicopter lurched slightly with their added weight, but it held its hovering position, anchoring their swing.
They swung in a long swooping arc right over to the path on the flank of the stalactite, where West and Pooh Bear dismounted deftly and released the rope, now back in the game.
‘Never thought I’d be happy to see Judah arrive,’ West said. ‘Come on! We’ve got to save Lily.’
They charged down the path at breakneck speed.
Chaos. Mayhem.
Blazing sunlight.
The roar of helicopters, and now. . .
. . . hundreds of American regular troops flooded in through the newly-opened Grand Arch.
Avenger’s Israeli team danced down the far side of the ziggurat and raced out over the quicksand lake on that side. As West had seen before, this side was the mirror image of the entry side: it also featured a concealed path just below the surface with a hexagonal well in its centre.
Avenger’s team reached the well, raced down into it in two subgroups, beheld another statue of a proud winged lion.
Avenger and the two Israelis carrying the Piece went first. The trap sprang into action. Quicksand flooded in. The one-gate cage revolved. But they sloshed through the inky sand and emerged from the other side with little difficulty.
Stretch, the other two Israeli commandos, and Lily went next.
Again the trap initiated. Quicksand poured into the hexagonal well. The cage rotated. They sloshed across it, knee-deep.
And suddenly Lily tripped and fell.
The rising quicksand had caught her feet and she stumbled to all fours with a squeal.
The sand grabbed her, sticky and foul.
She screamed in terror.
Stretch and the other two Israelis spun, saw her struggling. They were almost at the exit doorway and the cage’s rotating gate was about to let them out.
Avenger called from the doorway, ‘Leave her! We have the Piece! She was only a bonus! It’s the Piece that matters, and if we don’t get it out, this will all have been for nothing! Move!’
The two commandos with Stretch didn’t need to be told twice. They sloshed toward the gate and slipped through it.
Stretch, however, paused.
With quicksand flooding in from every side and the cage turning dizzyingly around him, he looked back at Lily.
The little girl was struggling against the rising quicksand pool, whimpering vainly with the effort. The sand had wrapped itself around her like a constricting snake, it was up to her neck now, consuming her, dragging her under.
‘Cohen!’ Avenger called. ‘Leave her! That’s an order!’
And with a final look at Lily, Stretch made his fateful decision.
Flanked by the flying Horus, West and Pooh Bear were bolting down the spiralling path on the stalactite when suddenly the foliage beside them was ripped apart by helicopter gunfire.
One of the American Apache choppers had swung into a hover right next to them and was now lining them up in its minigun sights!
They dived into a nearby cross-tunnel