The Six Sacred Stones Read online

  “What is it, Alby?”

  “I think I can help you with something on Wizard’s note page,” the little boy said, signing at the same time.

  “What exactly?” Jack was surprised that Alby was using sign language, since it wasn’t really necessary here.

  “Here,” Alby said. “Where he says‘Titanic sinking—Dec 2007 & Titanic rising.’ It’s not a reference toTitanic, the boat. It means the sinking and rising of Saturn’s moon, Titan, behind the planet Jupiter. Titanic Sinking and Titanic Rising are terms used by astronomers to describe it. It’s pretty rare, but when Jupiter and Saturn are in alignment—

  which they will be until next March—it occurs twice a week.”

  “And exactly when will Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn be in alignment again?” Zoe asked.

  Alby shrugged. “Maybe three, four hundred years.”

  Abbas coughed. “This is significant.”

  “You bet it is.” Jack glanced at Alby—only to find Alby staring intently back at him, right in the eye. The boy signed:There’s also something else.

  Jack nodded in understanding—later—before saying to the group: “Thank you, Alby.

  That’s a great contribution, and something I imagine Wizard will be able to clarify.”

  Beside Alby, Lily gave her friend a proud nudge.

  At that moment, two things happened: the doorbell rang and Sheik Abbas’s phone buzzed.

  The old sheik answered it quietly, “Yes…” while Jack went to the door.

  At the door was a hotel clerk, bearing a package for Jack—a designer hatbox, of all things. On it was a card:“For Jack West. From Jamaica.”

  Jack frowned as he opened the box and when he saw its contents, he froze in horror, his face draining of blood. “Oh, no. Fuzzy…”

  Inside the box was a severed human head.

  The severed head of his Jamaican friend, and veteran of the Capstone mission, V. J.

  Weatherly, call signFuzzy.

  At exactly the same moment, Abbas frowned into his phone. “Good God. Call the hotel.

  Order it evacuated.Now!”

  Everyone in the room spun as the old bearded sheik ended the call and looked up.

  “We have to leave this building immediately. It’s about to be struck by an airplane.”

  Jack blinked, put the lid back on the hatbox before anyone else saw what was inside it.“A wha —?”

  Then a Klaxon sounded.

  A hotel alarm.

  Red emergency lights blazed to life as a voice came over the internal PA system, speaking first in Arabic, then in English:“Would all guests please evacuate the hotel. This is an emergency. Would all guests please evacuate the hotel and convene out by the parking lot.”

  Everyone exchanged worried glances as the voice went on in other languages.

  And then other phones started ringing.

  First Robertson’s, then Vulture’s.

  “What is it?” Jack asked Abbas.

  The sheik’s face was white. “They say a plane that took off a short time ago from Dubai International has departed from its flight plan and deviated from the regular flight corridor. It’s headed this way, toward this building.”

  Jack froze. “This can’t be a coincidence. Everybody out! Now! We’ll rendezvous at theHalicarnassus ! Move!”

  Everyone cleared the room—Abbas was whisked outside by his minders; Robertson went out all by himself. The Marine, Astro, stayed, saying to Jack: “How can I help?”

  Jack was already springing into action. “Zoe! Pooh Bear! Get the kids outta here! I’ve got to grab Wizard’s stuff. Stretch, help me out! Lieutenant”—he said to Astro—“you can help, too. I could use an extra pair of hands.”

  It was then that West looked out through the wide panoramic windows of the Presidential Suite.

  And his jaw dropped.

  He saw a Boeing 767 cargo jet banking across the sky and then leveling out on a dead

  straight flight path that would end at the Burj al Arab Tower.

  “Oh, crap,” he breathed.

  IF YOU COULD have seen it up close, you would have made out the wordsTRANSATLANTIC AIR FREIGHT on the side of the speeding cargo plane.

  And although the pilot listed on its flight plan was Earl McShane, it wasn’t Earl McShane who sat at the controls. It was a lone man who was prepared to die—for a matter of honor.

  The 767 zeroed in on the tower.

  In the hotel, people were running every which way.

  Every elevator was jammed to overflowing. The fire escape stairs were filled with fleeing guests, some in tuxedos, others in their pajamas.

  Up on the helipad, high above the world, a helicopter lifted off and powered away from the building.

  The PA blared:“This is an emergency. Would all guests please evacuate the hotel…”

  Zoe and Pooh Bear burst out of the fire escape into the wide lobby of the hotel, gripping Lily and Alby by the hand.

  “This is crazy,” Zoe whispered. “Just crazy.”

  They dashed outside into the morning sunshine, into the massing crowd.

  Up in the Presidential Suite, Jack, Stretch, and Astro were the last ones left.

  They were packing frantically, gathering together all of Wizard’s notes and books in a few sports bags.

  When at last they had everything, they ran from the suite, West coming last of all, peering back out the window in time to see the cargo plane looming largeright outside.

  Then the plane dipped below the window line and a moment later Jack felt the building shudder in a way he wished he’d never feel again.

  Seen from the outside, the speeding 767 hit the Burj al Arab Tower about twothirds of the way up its side, around the fiftieth floor.

  The entire plane instantly burst into a billowing fireball, a flaming meteor that spewed out the other side of the waterfront tower.

  The building shuddered violently and tottered, belching a great plume of smoke, eerily reminiscent of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 in that terrible hour before they fell.

  “We’re cut off!” Stretch called from the entrance to the fire stairs. “We can’t get down!”

  West spun. The world around him was literally crumbling. The tower was swaying. Black smoke rose past the windows, blotting out the sun.

  “Up,” he said. “We go up.”

  Minutes later, the three of them burst out onto the helipad of the burning Burj al Arab Tower.

  The coastline of Dubai stretched out before them—a deadflat desert plain meeting the aqua waters of the Persian Gulf. The Sun was blood red in color, veiled by the smoke.

  “This is outrageous!” Astro yelled.

  “Welcome to my world,” West called back as he flung open the door to a supply shed situated at the edge of the helipad.

  Suddenly, the building rocked. Girders shrieked.

  “Huntsman! We don’t have much time!” Stretch yelled. “This building is going to fall any second!”

  “I know! I know!” West was rummaging around inside the shed. “Here!”

  He hurled something out through the doorway and into Stretch’s arms: a pack of some sort.

  A parachute.

  “Safety precaution for a helipad this high up,” West said, emerging with two more parachutes. He flung one to Astro. “Again, welcome to my world.”

  They strapped the chutes on and hurried to the edge of the helipad, railless and dizzyingly high, eighty stories above the ground.

  The building’s steel skeleton shrieked once more. The air around it began to shimmer in the heat. It was about to collapse—

  “Jump!” West called.

  And they did, together, the three of them basejumping off the burning building, plummeting through the shimmering sky, the building beside them blurring with speed—

  —a bare instant before the whole top third of the Burj al Arab Tower came free from the rest of the building and toppled off it!

  The building’s great spire, its helipad, and its to
p thirty floors all tipped as one, falling sideways like a slowfalling tree, folding at the point where the plane had hit it, before tearing free of the main structure and falling off it, chasing the three tiny figures that only an instant before had leaped off the helipad.

  But then abruptly three parachutes blossomed to life above the three figures and they sailed clear of the peak of the tower. They flew away to landward as the now upsidedown spire of the building came crashing down into the sea with a momentous earsplitting smash.

  The incredible sight would appear in newspapers around the world the following day, images of the halfstanding tower.

  The culprit: an angry American loner, Earl McShane, seething for revenge for 9/11. Hell, he’d even written to his local paper after September 11 calling for vengeance.

  And so he’d decided to exact his own form of revenge on an Islamic country in exactly the same way the Islamist terrorists had attacked America: by flying a plane into their biggest, most wellknown tower.

  Thankfully, all the papers reported, owing to the professionalism of the hotel staff, their flawless evacuation procedures, and their rapid—almost forewarned—response to the news of the incoming cargo plane, not a single person was killed in the fiendish attack.

  In the end, the only life McShane took was his own.

  Naturally, in the hours following the event, all air traffic in the region was grounded pending further notice.

  The skies above the Emirates remained eerily empty for the entire next day, all flights canceled.

  Except for one.

  One plane that was given permission to take off from a highsecurity military air base on the outskirts of Dubai.

  A black 747, heading east, for China.

  The first plane out the following day was a private Learjet belonging to Sheik Anzar al Abbas, carrying three passengers—Zoe, Lily, and Alby.

  After a quick exchange between West and Alby on the tarmac of the military base the previous day, it was decided that the team would split here, with Zoe and the two children heading in the opposite direction: for England.

  AIRSPACE OVER SOUTHWESTERN CHINA

  DECEMBER 5, 2007

  THE HALICARNASSUS soared over the Himalayas and entered Chinese airspace.

  Its black radarabsorbent paint and irregular multiangled flanks would ensure that it did not show up on any local radar systems. These features, however, would not protect it from being spotted by other, more advanced, satellitebased systems.

  Not long after their takeoff from Dubai, Jack had turned to his two newest team members, the American Marine, Astro, and the Saudi spy, Vulture: “OK, gentlemen. Time to show me what you know. The subject is Xintan Prison.”

  The young American lieutenant replied with a question of his own. “Are you sure this is a wise course of action? You seem to work just fine without this Wizard guy. Why not go straight for the Stones and the Pillars? Going after Wizard will only serve to antagonize the Chinese.”

  Jack said, “I only know what Wizard has told me or written down. The vast stores of knowledge in his brain on this subject are the only thing that’ll successfully get us through this. That alone is worth antagonizing China for. There’s also another reason.”

  “And that is…?”

  “Wizard is my friend,” Jack said flatly.Just as Fuzzy was my friend, and look at what happened to him. Jesus.

  “And you’d risk our lives and our nations’ reputations just to save your friend—”

  “Yes.” Jack didn’t even blink. The image of Fuzzy’s head in that box flashed through his mind, a friend he hadn’t been able to save.

  “That’s some loyalty you have there,” Astro said. “Will you risk all that forme if I get into trouble?”

  “I don’t know you that well yet,” Jack said. “I’ll let you know later, if you survive. Now.

  The prison.”

  Vulture unfolded some maps and satellite photos he’d brought from Saudi Intelligence.

  “The Chinese are keeping Professors Epper and Tanaka at the Xintan Hard Labor Penal Facility, a Grade4 penitentiary in the remote western region of Sichuan Province.

  “Xintan is a special facility reserved for political prisoners and maximumsecurity inmates. Its prisoners are used to dig the tunnels and high passes for China’s highaltitude train lines, like the QinghaiTibet Railway, the socalled Roof of the World railway. The Chinese are the best railroad builders on Earth—they’ve built tracks over, under, and through the most mountainous terrain on the planet, many of them connecting the mainland provinces to Tibet.”

  At this point, Pooh Bear’s brother, Scimitar, joined in. “They’re using the new railways to flood Tibet with Chinese workers. Trying to wipe out the local population by sheer weight of numbers. It’s a new form of genocide. Genocide by overwhelming immigration.”

  Jack assessed Scimitar. He could not have been more unlike his younger brother. Where Pooh Bear was rotund, bearded, and earthy, Scimitar was lean, cleanshaven, and cultured. He had pale blue eyes, olive skin, and an Oxford accent. The classic modern Arabian prince. Jack noticed that he had put China’s railwaybuilding into a political context.

  “In any case,” Vulture said, “building the railways is very dangerous work. Many prisoners die doing it and they’re just buried in the concrete. Epper, however, was taken to Xintan because it features an interrogation and debriefing wing.”

  “Torture chambers?” West asked.

  “Torture chambers,” Vulture said.

  “Xintan is notorious for its torture wing,” Astro said. “Fulin Gong devotees, student protesters, Tibetan monks. All have been ‘reeducated,’ as the Chinese put it, at Xintan.

  The thing is, by virtue of its unusual terrain, Xintan is uniquely positioned to be a perfect interrogation facility. You see, Xintan is built on top of not one but two adjacent mountain peaks known as ‘The Devil’s Horns.’

  “Xintan One, the main prison, is located on the primary peak and is entered via a high

  altitude railway line that passes directly into the prison via a huge iron gate.”

  “Sounds like Auschwitz,” Stretch said.

  “Similar, but not entirely,” Astro said. “After dropping off its cargo of new prisoners at the main prison, the railway line continuesall the way through Xintan One, emerging from another gate at the far end. There the railway line crosses a long bridge and arrives at Xintan Two, the smaller wing, the torture wing, situated atop its own peak. The railway enters Xintan Two via a third massive gate and there it ends. Apart from that gate, there is no exit from Xintan Two.”

  “Like Auschwitz,” Stretch said again.

  “In this respect, yes it is, Jew,” Vulture said.

  Sitting nearby, Pooh Bear looked up sharply. “Vulture. I honor you as my brother’s friend. I would ask then that you honor my friend. He is known as Cohen, Archer, or Stretch. You will not call him Jew again.”

  Vulture bowed low in apology, again in his slow, calculating way—which bespoke insult as much as it did regret. “I humbly beg your pardon.”

  Astro broke the awkward silence with more information: “According to our intelligence, the Chinese also have a chase copter at Xintan in the event someone does escape.”

  “What kind of chase copter?” Jack asked, cocking his head.

  “A big motherfucking Hind gunship,” Astro said, “the kind of helicopter you don’t mess around with. Captain West, it’s said that the prisoners in Xintan One can hear the screams from the torture victims across the valley in Xintan Two. If there’s one complex in China you don’t want to be in, it’s Xintan Two. No one has ever escaped from it alive.”

  “Ever?”

  “Ever,” Astro said.

  That had been several hours ago.

  Now as they entered Chinese airspace, Scimitar charged into West’s office and said:

  “Huntsman! We just got something from the Americans. NSA intercept. The Chinese are moving your friend Wizardtoday. In one hour.”

&nbs
p; West leaped out of his chair.

  The news was bad. Very bad.

  Wizard and Tank were being transferred from Xintan Two to Xintan One. From there, they were to be taken by train under armed guard to Wushan. Their presence had been demanded by Colonel Mao Gongli himself.

  “What time?” West said, entering the main cabin.

  “The train leaves Xintan Two at noon!” Astro called from his seat at a wall console.

  “Could they know we’re coming?” Scimitar asked.

  West was thinking exactly the same thing.

  “It’s certainly possible,” Vulture said. “After Captain West’s rather noisy escape from Australia three days ago and yesterday’s plane crash in Dubai, they could well believe we’re up to something.”

  Scimitar said, “But surely the Chinese can’t believe anyone would seriously consider storming Xintan.”

  “Sky Monster!” West called to the ceiling. “ETA on Xintan?”

  Sky Monster’s voice came back over the intercom:“It’ll be close, but I think I can get you there by noon.”

  “Do it,” West called.

  This was happening a lot faster than he’d anticipated. He’d expected to have more time to create a plan.

  He stepped over to the central table, stared at Astro’s maps of the mountaintop Xintan complex. “The internal transfer is the weak point. The bridge between Xintan One and Xintan Two. That’s where we can get them.”

  “The bridge?” Astro said, coming over. “Maybe you didn’t hear us right, Captain. That bridge isinside the complex. Wouldn’t it be better to try to grab Epper and Tanaka later, when they’re traveling on the train outside the prison perimeter?”

  West was gazing at the maps, formulating a plan. “No. They’ll assign extra guards for the external leg, probably Army troops, but for the internal transfer, they’ll only use prison guards, regular prison guards.”