Seven Ancient Wonders

spray.

Amid all this mayhem, West kept scanning the sky above the mountains—and suddenly he saw it.

Saw the black dot descending toward the little road.

A black dot that morphed into a bird-like shape, then a planelike shape, then finally it came into focus and was revealed to be a huge black plane.

It was a Boeing 747, but the most bizarre 747 you would ever see.

Once upon a time, it had been a cargo plane of some sort, with a rear loading ramp and no side windows.

Now, it was painted entirely in black, dull black, and it bristled with irregular protrusions that had been added to it: radar domes, missile pods, and most irregularly of all: revolving gun turrets.

There were four of them—one on its domed roof, one on its underbelly, and two nestled on its flanks, where the plane's wings met its fuselage—each turret armed with a fearsome six-barrelled Gatling minigun.

It was the Halicarnassus. West's very own plane.

With a colossal roar, the great black jumbo jet swooped downwards, angling for the tiny road that bordered the swamp.

Now with all eight of his people on one swamprunner, West needed help and the Halicarnassus was about to provide it.

Two missiles lanced out from its belly-pods, missing one Apache by inches, but hitting the one behind it.

Boom. Fireball.

Then the great plane's underside minigun blazed to life, sending a thousand tracer rounds sizzling through the air all around the

third Apache, giving it the choice of either bugging out or dying. It bugged out.

West's lone swamprunner swept alongside the straight roadway, raced parallel to it. The road was elevated a couple of feet above the water, up a low gently-sloping bank.

At the same moment, above and behind West's boat, the big 747 landed on the little country road!

Its wheels hit the road, squealing briefly before rolling forwards with its outer tyres half off the road's edges. The big jet then taxied down the roadway—coming alongside West's skimming swamprunner, its wings stretching out over the waters of the swamp.

The Halicarnassus was coasting, rolling.

West's boat was speeding as fast as it could to keep up.

Then with a bang, the loading ramp at the back of the 747 dropped open, slammed down against the roadway behind the speeding plane.

A second later, a long cable bearing a large hook at its end came snaking out of the now-open cargo hold. It was a retrieval cable, normally used to snag weather balloons.

'What are you going to do now, my friend!' Pooh Bear yelled to West above the wind.

'This!'

As West spoke, he jammed his steering levers hard left, and the swamprunner swept leftward, bouncing up the riverbank and out of the water, dry-sliding on its flat-bottomed hull onto the bitumen road close behind the rolling 747!

It was an incredible sight: a big black 747 rolling along a country road, with a boat skidding and sliding along the road right behind it.

West saw the loading ramp of the plane, very close now, just a few yards in front of his sliding boat. He also saw the slithering retrieval cable bumping and bouncing on the road right in front of him.

'Stretch! The cable! Snag it!'

At the bow of the dry-sliding swamprunner, Stretch used a long

snagging pole to reach out and snag the retrieval cable's hook. He

got it.

'Hook us up!' West yelled.

Stretch did so, latching the cable's hook around the boat's bow.

And suddenly—whapl—the swamprunner was yanked forwards, pulled along by the giant 747!

Dragged now by the Halicarnassus, the swamprunner looked like a waterskier being pulled by a speedboat.

West yelled into his radio, 'Sky Monster! Reel us in!'

Sky Monster initiated the plane's internal cable spooler, and now the swamprunner began to move gradually forwards, hauled in by the cable, pulled closer and closer to the loading ramp.

While this was going on, the 747's belly-mounted gun turret continued to swing left and right, raining hell on Kallis's pursuing swampboats and the two remaining Apaches, keeping them at bay.

At last, West's swamprunner came to the loading ramp. West and Pooh Bear grabbed the ramp's struts, held the boat steady.

'Okay, everyone! All aboard!' West yelled.

One after the other, his team leapt from the swamprunner onto the lowered loading ramp—Wizard with Lily, then Zoe helping Fuzzy, Stretch helping Big Ears, and finally Pooh Bear and West

himself.

Once West had landed on the loading ramp, he unhooked the swamprunner and the boat fell away behind the speeding 747, tumbling end over end down the little black road.

Then the loading ramp lifted and closed, and the 747 powered up and pulled away from the American Apaches-and swampboats. It hit take-off speed and rose smoothly into the air.

Safe.

Clear.

Away.

The Halicarnassus flew south over the vast Ethiopian highlands.

While the others collapsed in the plane's large main cabin, West went straight up to the cockpit where he found the plane's pilot: a great big hairy-bearded New Zealand Air Force pilot known as Sky Monster. Unlike the others in the group, this had actually been his call-sign before he'd joined the team.

West gazed out at the landscape receding into the distance behind them—the swamp, the mountain, the vast plains beyond it—and thought about del Piero's Europeans engaging the superior American force. Del Piero would have little luck.

The Americans, as always the last to arrive but the greatest in brute force, had allowed West and the Europeans to squabble over the Piece, to lose men finding it, and then, like opportunistic lions, they'd muscled in on the hyenas and taken the prize.

And as the Halicarnassus soared into the sky away from the danger, West gazed at the large American force now gathered at the western edge of the swamp.

A disquieting thought lingered in his mind.

How had the Americans even known about this place?

The Europeans very probably had a copy of the Callimachus Text and, of course, they had the boy. But the Americans, so far as West knew, had neither.

Which meant there was no way they could have known that this was the resting place of the Colossus of Rhodes.

West frowned.

Was his team's cover blown? Had the Americans discovered their base and followed them here? Or worse: was there a traitor in his

team who had given their position away with a tracing beacon?

In any case, Judah now knew that West was involved in this treasure hunt. He might not know exactly who West was working for, but he knew West was involved.

Which meant that things were about to get very intense.

Safe at last, but without their prize, West's plane sped away to the south, disappearing over the