Seven Ancient Wonders - Matthew Reilly [64]
Fireball. Explosion. Dustcloud.
And then, with an almighty craaaack! one of the granite planks that formed the chasm’s ceiling broke in two, and fell from its place, tumbling out of the ceiling formation. It was easily as big as a California Redwood tree, and the great granite plank created a huge splash as it hit the waterway far below.
A cascade of sand streamed in through the newly-formed rectangular opening in the ceiling, followed by a blazing beam of sunlight that illuminated the tower and lit up the chasm in an entirely new way.
Pooh Bear and the others had completely lost track of time, of how long they’d been in the chasm system. It was actually just after noon.
Kallis’s men were still firing RPGs. And Stretch was still picking them off, shot for shot.
Once the Semtex charge had created its opening in the ceiling, Big Ears fired a second grappling hook—only this one did have a rope attached to it.
The hook flew up through the big rectangular hole in the ceiling, disappearing up into the daylight, where it landed and caught hold of something.
‘Up we go!’ Pooh Bear called. ‘Big Ears. You first. Stretch, you’re last.’
‘As always. . . ’ Stretch muttered.
‘Wizard, call the Halicarnassus, send them a pick-up signal.’
‘What about Huntsman?’ Lily asked.
‘I’ll catch up with you all later,’ a voice said in their earpieces.
West’s voice.
‘I’ve got pictures of the Pieces,’ he said. ‘But I can’t get back to you guys at the fortress. I’ll have to get out another way. I’ll call you later.’
And so up the rope they went, climbing up into the blinding daylight, all the while protected by Stretch’s incredible sniping skills.
When at last Stretch himself had to go, he bolted for the rope, latched onto it and started climbing.
Almost immediately, an RPG slammed into the tower beneath him and with an awesome booooom, the left-hand tower of Hamilcar’s Refuge burst outward in a star-shaped spray of giant bricks and shattered rock—bricks and rock that sailed way out into the chasm before plunging down into the waterway below.
And when the smoke cleared, the tower stood deprived of its pinnacle, its upper reaches charred and broken, its high-spired balcony simply gone. The great tower had been decapitated.
All that remained in its place was a rectangular hole in the ceiling, through which glorious sunshine now streamed.
Pooh Bear and his team had escaped.
The Halicarnassus would pick them up ten minutes later, swooping down to the desert plain for a rapid extraction.
There was, however, no further word from West.
Indeed, as the Halicarnassus soared away from the American forces massed around a crater two miles west of the covered Refuge, all contact with West appeared lost.
For the remainder of that day, no-one would hear a word from Jack West Jr.
At 2:55 a.m. the next morning, West finally sent a pick-up signal— from a position one hundred kilometres north of the concealed inlet that housed Hamilcar’s Refuge, a position that put him out in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea!
It was a small Italian resort island, conveniently possessing its own airstrip.
The staff at the resort would long recall the night a dark 747 jumbo jet touched down unannounced on their airstrip and performed a brilliant short-runway landing procedure.
They didn’t know what the plane was, or why it had landed briefly on their island.
Two days later, one of their diving expeditions would find a sixty-year-old World War II–era Nazi U-boat lying aground on a rocky reef just off the southern tip of the island, a submarine that had not been there two days previously.
Its conning tower blazed with the number ‘U-342’.
It would become one of the resort’s favourite dive spots from then on.
His face dark and grim, West strode into the Halicarnassus’s main cabin and without stopping or speaking to any of the assembled team—including Lily—he grabbed Wizard by the arm and hauled him into the back office of the plane with the words: ‘You. Me. Office. Now.’
West slammed the door and whirled around.
‘Wizard. We’ve got a mole in our team.’