Seven Ancient Wonders - Matthew Reilly [26]
—thrusts his left arm into the hole, up to the elbow, through the waterfall of lava!
‘Ahhhh!’
The pain is like nothing he has ever known. It is excruciating.
He can see the lava eating through his own arm like a blowtorch burning through metal. Soon it will eat all the way through, but for a short time he still has feeling in his fingers and that’s what he needs, because suddenly he touches something.
A stone dial inside the wall-hole.
He grips the dial, and a moment before his entire lower arm is severed from his body, Jack West Jr turns it and abruptly all the lavafalls flowing into the chamber stop.
The ceiling freezes in mid-descent.
The lavafall barring the doorway dries up.
And West staggers away from the wall-hole . . .
. . . to reveal that his left arm has indeed been severed at the elbow. It ends at a foul stump of melted bone, flesh and skin.
West sways unsteadily.
But Wizard catches him and the two of them—plus the child— stumble out through the doorway where they fall to the floor of a stone tunnel.
West collapses, gripping his half-arm, going into shock.
Wizard puts the baby down and hurriedly removes West’s melting shoes—before also removing his own a bare second before their soles melt all the way through.
Then he dresses West’s arm with his shirt. The red-hot lava has seared the wound, which helps.
Then it is over.
And the final image of West’s dream is of Wizard and himself, sitting in that dark stone tunnel, spent and exhausted, with a little baby girl between them, in the belly of an African volcano.
And Wizard speaks:
‘This . . . this is unprecedented. Totally unheard of in all recorded history. Two oracles. Twin oracles. And del Piero doesn’t know . . .’
He turns to West. ‘My young friend. My brave young friend. This complicates matters in a whole new way. And it might just give us a chance in the epic struggle to come. We must alert the member states and call a meeting, perhaps the most important meeting of the modern age.’
COUNTY KERRY, IRELAND
28 OCTOBER, 1996
7 MONTHS LATER
O’SHEA FARM
COUNTY KERRY, IRELAND
28 OCTOBER, 1996, 5:30 P.M.
To the untrained eye, it seemed like just another lonely old farmhouse on a hilltop overlooking the Atlantic. To the trained eye, however, it was something else entirely. The experienced professional would have noticed no less than twenty heavily-armed Irish commandos standing guard around the estate, scanning the horizon.
To be sure, this was an unusual setting for an international meeting, but this was not a meeting that the participants wanted widely known.
The state of the world at that time was grim. Iraq had been chased out of Kuwait, but now it played cat-and-mouse games with UN weapons inspectors. Europe was furious with the United States over steel tariffs. India and Pakistan, already engaged in a phony war, were both on the verge of entering the Nuclear Weapons Club.
But all these were big ticket issues, and the small group of nations gathered together today were not big ticket players in world affairs. They were small countries—mice, not lions—relative minnows of world affairs.
Not for long.
The mice were about to roar.
Seven of the eight delegations now sat in the main sitting room of the farmhouse, waiting. Each national delegation consisted of two or three people—one senior diplomat, and one or two military personnel.
The view out through the windows was breathtaking—a splendid vista of the wild waves of the Atlantic smashing against the coast—but no-one at this gathering cared much for the view.
The Arabs checked their watches impatiently, frowning. Their leader, a wily old sheik from the United Arab Emirates named Anzar al Abbas, said: ‘There’s been no word from Professor Epper for over six months. What makes you think he’ll even come?’
The Canadians, typically, sat there calmly and patiently, their leader simply saying, ‘He’ll be here.’
Abbas scowled.
While he waited, he flipped through his briefing kit and started re-reading the mysterious book extract that had been provided for