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  The Complete Short Fiction

  Matthew Reilly

  (custom book cover)

  Jerry eBooks

  Title Page

  About Matthew Reilly

  Bibliography

  Epigraph

  JACK WEST JR AND THE HERO’S HELMET

  ROGER ASCHAM AND THE KING’S LOST GIRL

  COMPLEX 13

  THE DEAD PRINCE

  TIME TOURS

  THE ROCK PRINCESS AND THE THRILLER WRITER

  ALTITUDE RUSH

  A BAD DAY AT FORT BRAGG

  THE MINE

  THE FATE OF FLIGHT 700

  REWIND (a screenplay)

  MATTHEW JOHN REILLY was born on July 2, 1974 in Sydney, Australia.

  He is an action thriller writer whose novels are noted for their fast pace, twisting plots and intense action.

  After graduating from Sydney’s St Aloysius’ College in 1992, Reilly studied Law at the University of New South Wales, where he was also a contributor to the student law society publication “Poetic Justice”.

  Reilly wrote his first book Contest while just 19 and self-published it in 1996. It was rejected by every major publishing company in Sydney, leading Reilly to self-publish 1,000 copies using money borrowed from his family.

  His dedication paid off, and was discovered by Pan Macmillan’s then commissioning editor Cate Paterson. His first industry-produced novel, Ice Station, proved so monumentally popular, that it had to be reprinted six times in its first two years.

  The continued success of his novels has been attributed to not only the accessible, ‘storyteller’ style of writing, but also the highly charged and kinetic action sequences that take place throughout his works, deliberately making use of his ‘unlimited budget’ of imagination to create scenes ‘too big for Hollywood’.

  Reilly’s second book, Ice Station was also written whilst a student at the University of NSW.

  Matthew’s novels have also—unexpectedly—become a major tool in the fight to get teenagers into reading. While written for a mature readership, Matthew’s novels have become very popular with reluctant male readers. This may stem from Matthew’s own childhood experience, citing his dislike for set reading projects in high-school as his main inspiration to ‘do it better’.

  Reilly owns several movie prop reproductions including a life-size statue of Han Solo frozen in carbonite (Star Wars), a golden idol (Raiders of the Lost Ark) and a working DeLorean DMC-12 (Back to the Future). A big fan of Hollywood blockbusters, Reilly hopes to direct one of his own books as movies someday.

  Outside of the entertainment industry, Matthew has also partaken in several charity, celebrity and publicity based events. As part of a charity dinner for the NSW Cancer Council in 2002, he offered to name a character in Scarecrow after the highest bidder. The winner was Alec Christie. Look for his name in Scarecrow! Matthew has played in several celebrity cricket matches and golf days alongside members of INXS, rugby union legend Matthew Burke and a host of other Australian celebrities.

  He regularly attends writer’s festivals around Australia as a speaker or panelist.

  In 2000, Matthew was a delegate at the What Makes a Champion conference in Sydney. Nelson Mandela gave the opening address at the conference, and it featured such luminaries as Edmund Hillary, Richard Butler and Shane Gould.

  On January 1st, 2001, Matthew walked in the Australian Centenary of Federation Parade as a representative of Australian Literature.as appeared on the Big Breakfast television show in Britain.

  In 2001 and 2002, Matthew was a special ambassador for National Youth Week, an initiative designed to get young people to chase their dreams.

  In 2003, he is one of the faces of the Australian government’s National Literacy and Numeracy Week.

  In August, 2003, his book, Ice Station, will be one of six books sold at less than half price as part of a special literacy-driven project called Books Alive.

  He has since sold over 7 million copies of his books worldwide, in over 20 languages. Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves was the biggest-selling fiction title in Australia in 2011. Three more of Reilly’s books have been the biggest-selling Australian titles of their years of release: Seven Ancient Wonders (2005), The Five Greatest Warriors (2009) and The Tournament (2013).

  In 2007, Reilly wrote a half-hour television script titled Literary Superstars. The script was picked up by Darren Star (Sex and the City) and bought by Sony Pictures for the ABC Network. Jenna Elfman signed on to play the lead role. The pilot episode was at the casting stage when the 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America strike began, paralyzing Hollywood. The pilot was placed on indefinite hiatus before ultimately being dropped by the ABC.

  Matthew Reilly owns several movie prop reproductions such as a life-size statue of Han Solo frozen in carbonite from Star Wars, a golden idol from Raiders of the Lost Ark, and a DeLorean DMC-12 from Back to the Future. A big fan of Hollywood blockbusters, Reilly hopes to one day direct a movie adapted from one of his own books.

  In 2004 Reilly married his childhood sweetheart, Natalie Freer. Freer attended a nearby high school, Loreto Kirribilli and also went to the University of New South Wales, where she studied Psychology. Reilly credits Freer with encouraging him to self-publish his first book. In early December 2011, while Reilly was in South Australia on a book tour promoting Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves, Natalie, who had suffered from anorexia and depression, committed suicide. Reilly subsequently cancelled his remaining book tours and announced his intention to take a break from online communications for a while.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Stand-alone Novels

  Contest (1996)

  Temple (1999)

  Hover Car Racer (2004)

  The Tournament (2013)

  The Great Zoo of China (2014)

  Troll Mountain (2014)

  Novel Series

  Scarecrow

  Ice Station (1998)

  Area 7 (2001)

  Scarecrow (2003)

  Hell Island (2005)

  Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves (2012)

  Jack West

  Seven Ancient Wonders (2005)

  The Six Sacred Stones (2007)

  The Five Greatest Warriors (2009)

  The Four Legendary Kingdoms (2016)

  Short Fiction

  Jack West Jr and the Hero’s Helmet

  Roger Ascham and The King’s Lost Girl

  Complex 13

  The Dead Prince

  Time Tours

  The Rock Princess and the Thriller Writer

  Altitude Rush

  A Bad Day at Fort Bragg

  The Mine

  The Fate of Flight 700

  Rewind

  “You only get one first novel. Give it your all.”

  Matthew Reilly

  JACK WEST JR AND THE HERO’S HELMET

  About Jack West Jr and the Hero’s Helmet

  Jack West Jr.

  Adventurer. Scholar. Warrior.

  He is known for his cool head under pressure . . .

  . . . and also for the battered fireman’s helmet he has worn

  throughout his adventures.

  This is the story of how he got it.

  BEWARE OF THE HALF TRUTH.

  YOU MAY HAVE GOTTEN HOLD OF THE WRONG HALF.

  UNKNOWN

  1

  THE TEMPLE OF DENDUR

  8:35 P.M. 24 DECEMBER 1994
r />   Night had fallen by the time Jack West Jr was able to erect his high stepladder and get up close to the roof of the stone temple.

  He peered at a single crumbling 2,000-year-old sandstone brick. It was weathered and worn yet oddly beautiful. It was one of eight such bricks that ran along the roofline of the gate of the Egyptian Temple of Dendur.

  Peering closer, Jack saw it, and his heart almost skipped a beat.

  There, in the top left corner of the brick, was the inscription that he had based his entire thesis upon: a tiny shepherd’s crook hewn into the off-yellow stone.

  He couldn’t believe he was about to do this. If what he had postulated was true, then it would make his name in the world of international archaeology . . . and he was only twenty-five.

  He gazed at the stone brick that surmounted the Egyptian temple’s entrance and for the hundredth time wondered if there was indeed something embedded within that lone brick—

  ‘Mommy! I wanna go home!’ a child’s voice said from somewhere nearby and Jack turned from his perch.

  The Sackler Wing of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was emptying and the kid who had cried out was one of a dozen or so people remaining in it. The ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur stood in the middle of the Sackler Wing, a stupendous high-ceilinged glass-walled space that had been purpose-built to house the structure when it had been gifted to the United States by the Egyptian government in 1978.

  It had taken thirteen years to dismantle the 800-ton temple—one piece at a time—from its original position on the Nile south of Aswan, ship it to New York, and then re-erect it, once again one piece at a time.

  Jack never tired of coming to the Met to see the Temple of Dendur—to see something so monumentally old contained inside something so monumentally modern always gave him a thrill—but apparently that was not the case for this lad.

  Jack saw the kid—a sullen-looking boy in NBA everything—and his harried parents. The mother grabbed him by the hand and led him out of the great glass-walled hall.

  Jack looked at his watch. It was 8:40 p.m. The Met closed at nine, but they cleared out all the exhibits at 8:45. And when the clock struck 8:45, he would be allowed to do his thing.

  Back in those days Jack West Jr was twenty-five and already a decorated member of the SAS. A veteran of the Gulf War—during which he had famously stolen Saddam Hussein’s own 747 to escape from Basra—he had sandy blond hair, blue eyes and, at that time, he still had his own left arm. The incident underneath the Kanyamanaga volcano in Africa in which he would lose that arm—and save a newborn baby girl whom he would later name Lily—would not happen for another fifteen months.

  But in 1994, having only been recently listed as one of the top ten special forces soldiers in the world, Jack had surprised many when he had abruptly taken a leave of absence from the military. He was going to study ancient history at Trinity College in Dublin under the tutelage of Professor Max T. Epper, the famous Canadian scholar and Jack’s good friend.

  Jack’s main area of interest was Egypt and, with Epper, he had co-authored several articles for scholarly journals about topics as diverse as the location of the lost Mouseion of Alexandria, the true date of the construction of the Sphinx and the capstone that had once stood atop the Great Pyramid of Giza.

  But this trip to New York City was something new again.

  Jack had come here with Max to find evidence to support his first solo article in the highly esteemed Journal of Egyptian Archaeology: after many letters and phone calls, the Met had finally allowed him to come and use a non-invasive technique to see if there was an ancient weapon buried within one of the bricks of the Temple of Dendur.

  As the last members of the public ambled out of the Sackler Wing, Jack and Max went about setting up their Ground Penetrating Radar kit at the top of the twenty-foot stepladder.

  One of the Met’s conditions of their visit—in addition to the absolutely inviolable order that they were not to in any way touch or penetrate the ancient brick—had been that they had to do their work after hours, so as not to impinge upon the general public’s viewing time, hence the late hour and the odd date, Christmas Eve.

  As Max handed up the last pieces of the GPR kit, Jack caught sight of a figure standing at the back of the hall: a lone man in a tan trench coat with the collar turned up.

  Jack frowned. ‘Hey, Max. Trench Coat Guy is still here.’

  Max Epper turned from his position at the base of the stepladder. ‘So he is. Maybe he’s as keen on Egypt as we are.’

  ‘Or maybe he’s employed by the Met to keep an eye on us,’ Jack said. They’d been accompanied by two uniformed security guards ever since they’d arrived earlier that afternoon but this guy had the distinct look of a senior executive who wanted to watch them himself.

  ‘Power please, Max,’ Jack said as he lined up the Ground Penetrating Radar sighter at the suspect brick: the second one from the left atop the temple’s front-facing roof. The GPR worked by sending a pulse of high-frequency microwaves into the stone; those waves would then bounce back off any object embedded inside the rock and the pattern they formed would give Jack a clear image of that object.

  If it was in there.

  ‘Power is on,’ Max called from an outlet by the wall. ‘It’s now or never. Fire it up.’

  ‘Right,’ Jack said. ‘Now or never.’

  He hit the switch and the GPR fired its pulse into the 2,000-year- old sandstone brick.

  The GPR unit pinged and its screen refreshed at ten-second intervals. As it did so, like a naval vessel’s radar, the image on it materialised, becoming clearer with every renewal of the screen.

  Jack’s eyes never left the monitor.

  The rectangular outline of the stone brick was depicted in pale grey. Slowly, with each refreshing of the image, a white object began to appear within it.

  Jack felt his heart begin to race as the image resolved into something resembling a ‘t’.

  ‘Come on, baby . . .’ Jack breathed.

  His postulation in his article was that there was a knife in the brick, a knife that had belonged to Osiris, the famed Egyptian god of the afterlife, the underworld and resurrection. Of course, Jack didn’t think Osiris had been a god at all: his theory was that Osiris had been a famous warrior or king, just one whose great deeds during his life had been elevated to god-like status over the millennia.

  As the image resolved further, Jack began to smile. The ‘t’ was looking more and more like the hilt and crossguard of a knife.

  ‘Max!’ he called. ‘Get ready to be happy. I think we got it . . .’

  At which moment, all the lights in the Metropolitan Museum of Art suddenly went out, the Sackler Wing was plunged into darkness and an emergency siren began to blare in Jack’s ears.

  2

  Jack spun from his position atop the stepladder and immediately he smelled it. Smoke.

  He couldn’t tell where it was coming from, but it was definitely in the air. ‘This is not happening,’ he said. He looked around the vast darkened hall, suspicious at the timing of the interruption.

  No, it’s just a bad coincidence.

  A way-too-pleasant automated woman’s voice came in over the loudspeakers: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is an evacuation. Please proceed calmly to the nearest exit. We apologise for this inconvenience. Your cooperation is appreciated.’

  Jack reluctantly descended the stepladder, rejoining Max and the two security guards at its base.

  As they headed for the exit, Jack saw Trench Coat Guy also turning to go.

  Jack, Max and the security guards wended their way through the splendid corridors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, joining the moving crowd of people heading for the front entrance: the last remaining visitors to the museum and a handful of staff members who had still been in the building.

  Sirens could be heard outside.

  As Jack and Max came to the front entrance of the Met and headed out, a gaggle of five firefighters with helmets that re
ad FDNY PRECINT 17 shoved past them, rushing inside, leaving a red fire engine, also labelled ‘17’, parked on the kerb of Fifth Avenue at the base of the Met’s high entry steps, its flashing emergency lights bathing the area in a strobing red glow.

  Jack sighed.

  It was cold out here. A light snow fell on Fifth Avenue. More Fire Department of New York trucks arrived.

  ‘Who would believe it?’ Jack said to Max. ‘Just as I saw the knife . . .’

  After a few minutes, the five firefighters emerged, their commander holding up his hands. ‘It’s okay, folks. Just a broken fuse that set off the smoke detectors. It’s all good now.’

  The five firemen hurried away, climbing back into the truck marked ‘17’. Max and the security guards turned to head back inside.

  At that moment, a small boy standing near Jack said to his father, ‘That’s not right.’

  ‘What’s not right, son?’ the boy’s dad said.

  ‘Truck 17 is a ladder truck, not a regular engine,’ the boy said. Jack frowned. ‘Excuse me, kid, but what did you say?’

  ‘I love firetrucks,’ the boy said earnestly. ‘Every fireman has the number of his truck on his helmet. If his helmet says “17”, then he’s from truck number 17. FDNY truck 17 is famous; it’s a ladder truck. But that one over there’—he pointed to the engine marked ‘17’—‘is just a regular fire engine. It’s got the wrong number on it.’ Jack gazed at the No. 17 fire engine as it began to pull away from the kerb.

  As he was doing this, the commander of one of the other fire- trucks ascended the stairs and called out as if he were the most senior man there: ‘Okay, what’s going on here?’

  Jack turned to Max. ‘Max, quick, go back inside now. Check the temple. Keep your cell phone on.’

  ‘What about you?’ Max asked.

  Jack was already stepping slowly towards the fire engine marked ‘17’. ‘I’ll be here, watching them . . .’

  Professor Max Epper knew that tone of voice, so he knew not to argue.

  He hurried back inside the museum, with the two guards. Max was also younger then, faster, too. Within a minute, he burst back into the Sackler Wing and beheld the Temple of Dendur in its glorious exhibition space.