Seven Ancient Wonders - Matthew Reilly [134]
As Judah began to recite it, several things were happening:
Pooh Bear.
He was waging his own private war with the four American helicopters. He had knocked out one Apache helicopter with gunfire and had just fired a Hellfire missile at the rising Super Stallion. The missile slammed into the front windshield of the Super Stallion just as the big chopper came level with the platform.
The CH-53E exploded in a giant ball of flames—and lurched in mid-air, before it fell, dropping alongside the platform, its swirling rotor blades missing the lower levels of the platform by inches before the whole chopper smashed down in a crumpled heap on the sloping southern flank of the Great Pyramid itself.
It now lay at a 52-degree angle—the slope of the Pyramid—at the spot where the platform’s struts met the Pyramid, its body crumpled and broken but its rotors still buzzing in blurring circles of motion.
Judah had recited two lines by this time. . .
Pooh Bear swung around in his gun turret and had just zeroed in on the American Black Hawk chopper when—to his surprise—he saw the Black Hawk fire a missile into the back of one of its own Apache attack birds.
It was then that Pooh saw the pilots of the Black Hawk: Zoe and Fuzzy. In the confusion earlier, they’d escaped their bonds, stolen the Black Hawk and leapt into the fray.
But then suddenly a CIEF trooper leapt up onto the Halicarnassus’s wing, trying to take out Pooh Bear’s turret guerrilla-style. Pooh couldn’t turn the turret in time. The man had him, raised his Colt rifle—
Bam!
The CIEF trooper was hit in the back of the head by a long-distance sniper shot, a shot that had been fired by—
—Stretch, sitting in the side door of the stolen Black Hawk, holding a sniper rifle.
Pooh saw the Israeli, alive and with the good guys, and he smiled for the briefest of moments.
Judah had recited four lines. . .
West.
He was waging his own private war against the eight men guarding Judah at the Capstone: six CIEF troopers, Koenig and Kallis.
He strode forward, eyes fixed, face set, both of his guns held outstretched in front of him.
The old warrior in Jack West—a warrior Judah had helped create—had returned . . . and he was a mean motherfucker.
West shot four of the troopers—all right between the eyeballs. One shot, one kill.
Another he grabbed from behind, snapping his neck, before using the dead man’s body as a shield to receive fire from Cal Kallis while emptying the dead man’s M-4 into two others. Then the wily old Nazi, Koenig, lunged at him from the side with a knife, but he received two rounds to the nose for his trouble, the force of the shots sending him flying clear off the platform.
Judah finished the sixth line. . .
‘Hold him off!’ he called to Kallis as he began the last line.
That left West facing Cal Kallis—who now stood between West and Judah—in the midst of the maelstrom of light, wind and sound.
It was a stand-off from which there could be only one winner.
But there was also one more figure at work in all this.
Beyond the mayhem happening on the platform, unseen by anyone,the exit door above the left wing of the Halicarnassus opened and a figure emerged from it, skulking low, moving swiftly, holding something small in his hands.
He scurried out from the doorway and onto the wing. Then he leapt down from the front of the wing onto the wooden platform, heading—again unseen—in the direction of Wizard and Lily.
West and Kallis faced each other.
Then they moved, at exactly the same time, lifting and firing their guns simultaneously, like a pair of wild west gunslingers—
Click! Click!
They were both dry.
‘Fuck!’ Kallis yelled.
‘No . . .’ West breathed.
For he knew that it didn’t matter now.
Judah also knew. Their eyes met, and West’s face fell.
He was too late.
By a bare few seconds—no a bare few metres—he was too late.
With a smile of insane delight, by the light of the Tartarus Sunspot on the Day of the Rotation, Marshall Judah uttered the final words of the ritual of power and looked triumphantly to the heavens.
Nothing