The Five Greatest Warriors: A Novel Read online

  ZANZIBAR

  14 JANUARY

  TWO MON2008

  TWO MONTHS BEFORE THE 3RD DEADLINE

  Four days later, Jack rejoined the group, meeting them at the Sea Ranger’s hideaway buried within the eastern coast of Zanzibar, underneath a long-dead lighthouse.

  By the time Jack arrived there, Stretch had been cleaned up and had slept for almost twenty-six hours straight. He was sitting up in bed with a notebook computer on his lap when Jack walked in.

  ‘I wasn’t sure you’d come for me,’ Stretch said.

  ‘Had a gap in my schedule,’ Jack said. ‘And really it was Pooh Bear who did all the legwork.’

  ‘Is that Daddy?’ a voice said from the laptop.

  Stretch swivelled the computer so Jack could see Lily on its screen. She was still at Alby’s place in Australia, and until now had been unaware of the mission to save Stretch.

  ‘You could’ve told me what you were doing,’ she said.

  ‘No, I couldn’t,’ jack said. ‘It was too dangerous even for you to know. I’m sorry about that.’

  ‘But. . . ’ she hesitated. ‘I was awful. I’m sorry, Daddy.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry, kiddo. You were right,’ Jack said, ‘and your instincts were right, too. We don’t leave any of our friends behind. We bust ‘em out or we die trying. I’m just sorry I had to keep it from you and make you so upset.’

  Lily smiled. ‘I’m proud of you, Daddy.’

  ‘I like making you proud. Thanks.’ He turned to Stretch. ‘It’s great to have you back, buddy. Eat up and get some strength, because things are about to get hectic.’

  ‘Why? What happens now?’

  ‘Now we figure out where the other Pillars and Vertices are, and we go after them.’

  Jack’s team assembled around a long table in a glass-windowed office inside the Sea Ranger’s underground submarine dock. The dark grey conning tower of the Ranger’s stolen Kilo-class submarine loomed outside the office’s windows.

  Jack sat at the head of the table, with Wizard and Zoe beside him. Pooh Bear and Stretch sat with the twins, Lachlan and Julius Adamson. Sky Monster lounged on a couch under the window, dozing, while J.J. Wickham watched from the doorway.

  Also there was the newest member of the group, the archaeologist Diane Cassidy. While Jack’s team had gone to Israel, she’d taken the African youth, Ono, to an orphanage in Mombasa that helped dislocated African tribesfolk adapt to the modern world. Cassidy had also used that time to return to the States and contact family and friends, to let them know she was alive. Eager to repay her rescuers with any information she could provide, she had returned the day before.

  Lastly, Lily and Alby were present via videolink, patched in from Perth.

  Strewn over the table were numerous sheets of paper—the random notes of Wizard, Jack and the twins, photos of Stonehenge, maps with notations scribbled on them, plus Wizard’s summary sheet:

  ‘All right,’ Jack said. ‘While we’ve been breaking into high-security bases, Wizard’s been working on the next phase of our mission. Max, the dates.’

  Wizard stood and wrote on a whiteboard:

  3RD PILLAR - MARCH 11

  4TH PILLAR - MARCH 18

  5TH PILLAR - MARCH 18

  6TH PILLAR - MARCH 20 (DUAL EQUINOX)

  ‘For your benefit, Diane,’ Wizard said as he wrote, ‘allow me to summarise. Late last year, at a secret base off the coast of England, we placed the Firestone atop the Mayan Killing Stone—one of the Six Sacred Stones—and thus discovered these crucial dates. They are the dates on which the remaining four Pillars must he laid at the last four Vertices. As you can see, they are clustered within March of this year.’

  ‘The Fourth and Fifth Pillars have the same date,’ Pooh Bear said. ‘Can that he right?’

  ‘It’s right,’ Wizard said. ‘I triple-checked it.’

  ‘Which means?’ Stretch queried.

  ‘It means that Pillars Four and Five must be set in place at the same time.’

  ‘But those vertices could be on different sides of the world . . . ’

  ‘We know,’ Jack said. ‘But we’ll come to that later. Wizard informs me that March 11 and March 18 are both dates for the celestial event we know as the Titanic Rising, an event that coincided with the first two Pillar placings at Abu Simbel and Table Mountain. The last date, March 20, is not a Titanic Rising.’

  ‘What is it, then?’ the Sea Ranger asked.

  ‘It’s the big one. On all the other occasions, Jupiter, Saturn and Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, serve to bend the light of the Dark Star. That bending of the light also weakens it somewhat. But on March 20, it’ll be different. Wizard?’

  Wizard explained. ‘March 20, 2008, is a rare event, one that has not occurred in thousands of years. It is a dual equinox, a time when both our Sun and its twin, this Dark Star, are aligned on opposite sides of the Earth. Only on that date, Jupiter and Saturn will not shield us from the Dark Star’s rays. On that date, the Dark Star will emerge fully from behind them and shine its deadly light directly onto our planet.’

  ‘By which time, the Machine must be ready, all its Pillars set in place,’ Jack said.

  ‘Or what?’ the Sea Ranger asked.

  ‘Or we all get to witness the end of the world,’ Wizard said.

  ‘And what exactly will the end of the world look like?’

  Wizard paused. ‘Hit by the Dark Sun’s fearsome energy, our planet will spasm from within, causing it to go wild on the surface.

  ‘Imagine every volcano on Earth erupting at the same time. Imagine tsunamis crashing onto every shore. Imagine earthquakes at every fault-line. And all this will go on for years.

  ‘Undersea eruptions will heat the oceans, turning them into boiling nightmares. The sky will go dark with ash and the atmosphere will quickly be filled by sulphurous gases escaping from the planet core. The air will become poisonous to breathe.

  ‘Our planet is very robust, but life on it is not. Humans can survive only on the Earth’s surface, and after March 20 that surface will become a hellish environment totally hostile to life—a landscape of black cloud, raging seas, endless fire and choking gas.’

  ‘Spectacular, gruesome and total. That is what the end of the world looks like.’

  ‘Right, well . . . ’ the Sea Ranger said. ‘That puts it all in perspective.’

  ‘If it makes you feel better, this has probably happened several times before over the eons,’ Wizard said.

  ‘No, that doesn’t make me feel any better.’

  At that point, Jack took over.

  For Wickham’s and Diane Cassidy’s sake, he went over what they knew about the Machine, the Pillars and the Vertices: how the Saudis had possessed the First Pillar for many generations; the Neetha, the Second; and the British Royal Family, the Fourth.

  As for the other three Pillars, they had only very scant information about their whereabouts: apparently, the Japanese Imperial Family, the oldest royal line in the world, possessed a Pillar—and according to the British royal, Iolanthe Compton-Jones, they’d managed to conceal it from the Americans at the end of World War II.

  Iolanthe had also told Jack that the pre-eminence of three European royal households—the British Royal Family, the Danish Royal Family and the Romanovs of Russia—had been due solely to their possession of Pillars.

  Beyond that, Jack knew nothing of the whereabouts of the remaining three Pillars.

  The all-important Firestone and Philosopher’s Stone—needed to cleanse the Pillars—were currently in Wolf’s hands, taken during the battle with the Neetha tribe in Africa. Where Wolf was getting his information from, apart from his researcher, Felix Bonaventura, Jack didn’t know.

  S for the locations of the remaining Vertices, Jack’s team still had their photos of the trilithons of Stonehenge, lit by the light of the Dark Star, pin-pointing the locations of the six great temple shrines on ancient maps of the world, maps that—unfortunately—depicted global coastlines lon
g before the oceans had risen to their current levels. This had made deducing the exact locations of the Vertices extremely difficult.

  Despite this, the twins had spent every day of the past month knuckling down to the immense task, comparing the ancient coastlines to modern ones, looking for matches.

  ‘And what have you found?’ Diane Cassidy asked them.

  ‘Because it’s the next one to happen,’ Lachlan said, ‘we’ve been focusing on the third light-shaft that struck Stonehenge. This one.’ He spun his laptop around so Cassidy could see the image on its screen:

  ‘The coastline featuring the point marked “3” is a tough one to deduce,’ Julius said. ‘It could be the east coast of any continent, country or landmass: Africa, India, Argentina, Sweden, even somewhere up among the islands of northern Canada. Even the scale is misleading, because it isn’t drawn to the same scale the African one was.’

  Lachlan said, ‘We’ve checked every book we could find on ocean-level rises and ante-diluvian coastlines . . . ’

  ‘And?’ Jack asked.

  ‘And we’re no closer to finding it,’ Lachlan said sadly.

  Julius said, ‘Put simply, we need more to go on, Jack, we need more information.’

  A silence descended over the table. It was Diane who broke it.

  ‘I might have something that could help.’

  Diane lifted up her backpack, the only thing she’d taken with her during their escape from the Neetha, and extracted from it a battered leatherbound notebook.

  Flicking the notebook open, she revealed page after page of hand-drawn images and densely packed notes.

  She held the notebook open to a page on which was written:

  THE RHYME OF THE WARRIORS

  (Sphinx, Giza)

  The First

  shall be the noblest, scholar and soldier both.

  The Second

  a natural leader of men, none shall achieve greater fame than he.

  The Third

  shall be the greatest warlord known to history.

  The Fourth

  is the great obsessor, seeking only glory, but glory is a lie.

  The Fifth

  shall face the greatest test and decide if all shall live or die.

  Below the poem were images of hieroglyphs and maps, plus scribbled notes.

  Diane looked at Wizard. ‘You’ve never asked me why I went in search of the Neetha in Africa, Max.’

  ‘I . . . well . . . I guess I assumed that you simply had gone in search of them, to see if this fabled lost tribe actually existed.’

  ‘While I became something of an expert on the Neetha, I wasn’t searching for the Neetha. I also know of the Six Sacred Stones and the Pillars. My expertise in the Neetha was purely the result of my larger search: to discover if these fabled sacred stones and diamond bricks actually existed.

  ‘I figured that the Neetha, as the original owners of one of the Six Sacred Stones—the Delphic Orb—might have information about the others, which they certainly did. My quest is the same as yours, it’s just that my key reference point—this poem, The Rhyme of the Warriors—was different.’ She turned to Jack. ‘You know it?’

  ‘I do,’ Wizard answered for him. ‘It was found carved on a tablet between the front paws of the Sphinx. Napoleon’s men unearthed it.’

  ‘That’s correct. And that tablet now resides in the British Muse urn.’

  ‘So what’s the poem’s significance?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Max suspected it had significance, didn’t you, Max?’ Diane said.

  ‘For a time, but I couldn’t make it fit.’

  Diane nodded at Wizard’s summary sheet. ‘You even mention “Five Warriors” on your sheet as possible holders of the Pillars.’

  ‘He does?’ Jack checked the sheet and to his surprise discovered she was right.

  There it was, under the heading ‘THE SIX PILLARS’:

  Whereabouts? The Great Houses of Europe;

  Perhaps the Five Warriors???

  ‘I believe,’ Diane said, ‘that this poem is directly related to our mutual quest. I believe it tells of the five people who over the course of history have most affected the fates of the Firestone, the Six Sacred Stones, the Pillars and the Vertices.’

  Diane projected the poem onto the whiteboard and with a marker began circling various words and adding notes in the margins.

  As she wrote, she spoke confidently and expertly: ‘As we all know, the Great Pyramid was built by Khufu. The Sphinx, however, sits in front of the second pyramid at Giza—built by Khufu’s son, Khafre—so for a long time archaeologists simply assumed it had also been built by Khafre. Today, however, many Egyptologists believe that Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid, actually built the Sphinx, too.’

  ‘We’ve had some experience with the Great Pyramid,’ Jack said kindly.

  ‘But perhaps you haven’t yet realised the monumental importance of its builder,’ Diane said. ‘I mean, the Great Pyramid, the Golden Capstone, the Firestone: all three of them have been integral to your mission. And it was Khufu who erected all three of them. It was Khufu who had all of them in his possession. Doesn’t it make sense that Khufu might have had some knowledge—a very high level of knowledge—about your Machine?’

  ‘It does when you put it that way,’ Jack said, eyeing Wizard.

  The old professor just shrugged bashfully. ‘We concentrated on Rameses and the Six Ramesean Stones.’

  ‘Understandably,’ Diane said, finishing her writing on the whiteboard. ‘But did you ever ask yourself, where did those Six Sacred Stones come from? And where did the six oblong diamond pillars come from?

  ‘At some point in time, they must have all been together, right? And the first time we find them together is with Khufu—this is why in some texts, the Firestone, the Six Sacred Stones and the Six Pillars are collectively referred to as “Khufu’s Treasure” or “Khufu’s Wisdom”. And the answer to what became of Khufu’s Treasure lies in this poem, written over 4,000 years ago.’

  With a flourish, she stepped away from the whiteboard, revealing her handiwork:

  ‘Genghis Khan. . . Napoleon. . . ’ Wizard said.

  ‘Jesus Christ . . . ’ Zoe breathed, ‘a warrior?’

  Julius jerked his chin at the whiteboard. ‘I think you meant to say “Lachlan Adamson” for the fourth warrior. He’s the great obsessor. Geez, you should see him combing his hair in the morning. That’s obsessive . . . ’

  ‘Hah-de-ha-ha,’ Lachlan replied.

  ‘This is what I was studying,’ Diane said. ‘This is what led me to the Neetha—to see what information they might possess about the rhyme. I just never expected to be captured and enslaved by them.’

  Jack remained silent for a long moment, gazing at the whiteboard.

  Then at last he said softly, ‘It’s a prophecy. . . ’

  Diane nodded, impressed. ‘Yes, Captain. Yes, it is. A foretelling, an insight into the five individuals who over the centuries will most affect the fate of Khufu’s Treasure: the Firestone, the Six Sacred Stones and the Six Pillars.’

  Jack said, ‘So you’re thinking that if we follow the trail of these five great warriors, follow their lives and histories, we’ll find the Pillars and maybe also some clues to the locations of the remaining Vertices.’

  Diane Cassidy pointed at him. ‘That’s exactly what I’m thinking.’

  ‘Okay,’ Jack said. ‘So how’d you figure out that these guys are the warriors mentioned in the Sphinx tablet? I mean, what about other great military types like Raleigh or Nelson—’

  ‘—or Caesar or Hannibal—’ Zoe added.

  ‘—Saladin or Alexander—’ Pooh Bear said.

  ‘—Hitler, Patton or Rommel—’ Julius said.

  Diane held up her hands. ‘I know, I know. Believe me, I looked into all those figures and more before I settled on these ones. It took years of work.’

  ‘Sorry. So how’d you decide on these ones?’

  ‘Right. Well. Let’s start with
Moses. Now remember, the historical and biblical figure we know as Moses was actually an Egyptian priest named Thuthmosis. Moses or Mosis simply means “son of”, so Thuthmosis means “son of Thoth”, the Egyptian god of wisdom. So Moses the man is the namesake of one of the Ramesean Stones: the Twin Tablets of Thuthmosis.’