Seven Ancient Wonders - Matthew Reilly [22]
West’s lone swamprunner swept alongside the straight roadway, raced parallel to it. The road was elevated a couple of feet above the water, up a low gently-sloping bank.
At the same moment, above and behind West’s boat, the big 747 landed on the little country road!
Its wheels hit the road, squealing briefly before rolling forward with its outer tyres half off the road’s edges. The big jet then taxied down the roadway—coming alongside West’s skimming swamprunner, its wings stretching out over the waters of the swamp.
The Halicarnassus was coasting, rolling.
West’s boat was speeding as fast as it could to keep up.
Then with a bang, the loading ramp at the back of the 747 dropped open, slammed down against the roadway behind the speeding plane.
A second later, a long cable bearing a large hook at its end came snaking out of the now-open cargo hold. It was a retrieval cable, normally used to snag weather balloons.
‘What are you going to do now, my friend!’ Pooh Bear yelled to West above the wind.
‘This!’
As West spoke, he jammed his steering levers hard left, and the swamprunner swept leftward, bouncing up the riverbank and out of the water, dry-sliding on its flat-bottomed hull onto the bitumen road close behind the rolling 747!
It was an incredible sight: a big black 747 rolling along a country road, with a boat skidding and sliding along the road right behind it.
West saw the loading ramp of the plane, very close now, just a few yards in front of his sliding boat. He also saw the slithering retrieval cable bumping and bouncing on the road right in front of him.
‘Stretch! The cable! Snag it!’
At the bow of the dry-sliding swamprunner, Stretch used a long snagging pole to reach out and snag the retrieval cable’s hook. He got it.
‘Hook us up!’ West yelled.
Stretch did so, latching the cable’s hook around the boat’s bow.
And suddenly—whap!—the swamprunner was yanked forward, pulled along by the giant 747!
Dragged now by the Halicarnassus, the swamprunner looked like a waterskier being pulled by a speedboat.
West yelled into his radio, ‘Sky Monster! Reel us in!’
Sky Monster initiated the plane’s internal cable spooler, and now the swamprunner began to move gradually forward, hauled in by the cable, pulled closer and closer to the loading ramp.
While this was going on, the 747’s belly-mounted gun turret continued to swing left and right, raining hell on Kallis’s pursuing swampboats and the two remaining Apaches, keeping them at bay.
At last, West’s swamprunner came to the loading ramp. West and Pooh Bear grabbed the ramp’s struts, held the boat steady.
‘Okay, everyone! All aboard!’ West yelled.
One after the other, his team leapt from the swamprunner onto the lowered loading ramp—Wizard with Lily, then Zoe helping Fuzzy, Stretch helping Big Ears, and finally Pooh Bear and West himself.
Once West had landed on the loading ramp, he unhooked the swamprunner and the boat fell away behind the speeding 747, tumbling end over end down the little black road.
Then the loading ramp lifted and closed, and the 747 powered up and pulled away from the American Apaches and swampboats. It hit take-off speed and rose smoothly into the air.
Safe.
Clear.
Away.
The Halicarnassus flew south over the vast Ethiopian highlands.
While the others collapsed in the plane’s large main cabin, West went straight up to the cockpit where he found the plane’s pilot: a great big hairy-bearded New Zealand Air Force pilot known as Sky Monster. Unlike the others in the group, this had actually been his call-sign before he’d joined the team.
West gazed out at the landscape receding into the distance behind them—the swamp, the mountain, the vast plains beyond it—and thought about del Piero’s Europeans engaging the superior American force. Del Piero would have little luck.
The Americans, as always the last to arrive but the greatest in brute force, had allowed West and the Europeans to squabble over the Piece, to lose men finding it, and then,