Seven Ancient Wonders - Matthew Reilly [86]
West grabbed the plug and pulled it free—
—to reveal a horizontal cavity roughly two fingers wide and perfectly round in shape, that bored right through the Obelisk.
Like a kid scaling a coconut tree, West clambered around the other side of the Obelisk’s peak, where he found and extracted a second matching plug and suddenly, looking through the bore-hole, he could see right through the ancient Obelisk!
‘West! Hurry! The cops are almost here. . . ’
West ignored him, yanked from his jacket two high-tech devices: a laser altimeter, to measure the exact height of the bore-hole, and a digital surveyor’s inclinometer, to measure the exact angle of the bore-hole, both vertically and laterally.
With these measurements, he could then go to Luxor in Egypt and recreate this obelisk ‘virtually’, and thus deduce the location of Alexander the Great’s Tomb.
His altimeter beeped. Got the height.
He aimed his inclinometer through the bore-hole. It beeped. Got the angles.
Go!
And he was away, sliding down the Obelisk with his feet splayed wide, like a fireman shooting down a ladder.
His feet hit the scaffolding just as six cop cars screeched to a halt around the perimeter of the Place de la Concorde and disgorged a dozen cap-wearing Parisian cops.
‘Stretch! Fire her up! Get moving,’ West called as he ran across the top level of the three-storey scaffold structure. ‘I’ll get there the short way!’
The bus reversed out of the scaffolding, then Stretch grinded the gears and the big red bus lurched forward, just as Jack West took a flying leap off the top level and sailed down through the air. . .
. . . landing with a thump on the top deck of the bus, a second before it sped away toward the River Seine.
From the moment of their daring heist at the Louvre, other forces had been launched into action.
As one would expect, a theft from the Louvre instantly shot across the Paris police airwaves—airwaves that were monitored by other forces of the state.
What Stretch didn’t know was that the Paris police had been outranked at the highest levels and taken off this pursuit.
The chase would be carried out by the French Army.
Just as West had anticipated.
And so, as the big red double-decker bus shot away from the Obelisk and its wrecked outer structure, the Parisian police didn’t follow. They just maintained their positions around the perimeter of the Place de la Concorde.
Moments later, five green-painted heavily-armed fast-attack reconnaissance vehicles whooshed past the cop cars and shot off after the great ungainly bus.
Horns honked and sirens blared as the double-decker bus roared down the Quai des Tuileries on the edge of the River Seine for the second time that day—weaving between the thin daytime traffic, blasting through red lights, causing all manner of havoc.
Behind it were the five French Army recon vehicles.
Each was a compact three-man scout car known as a Panhard VBL. Fitted with a turbo-charged four-wheel-drive diesel engine and a sleek arrow-shaped body, the Panhard was a swift and nimble all-terrain vehicle that looked like an armour-plated version of a sports 4x4.
The Panhards chasing West were fitted with every variety of gun turret: some had long-barrelled 12.7 mm machine guns, others had fearsome-looking TOW missile launchers.
Within moments of the chase beginning, they were all over the speeding bus.
They opened fire, shattering every window on the bus’s left-hand side—a second before the bus roared into a tunnel, blocking their angle of fire.
Two of the Army Panhards tried to squeeze past the bus inside the tunnel, but Stretch swerved toward them, ramming them into the wall of the tunnel, grinding them against it.
With nowhere to go, both Panhards skidded and flipped . . . and rolled . . . tumbling end over end until they crashed to