Seven Ancient Wonders

hovering with its nose close to the summit of the Great Pyramid at Giza.

From the platform itself, the Halicarnassus loomed large, super-huge, like an angry bird-god descended from Heaven itself to wreak its fury.

The initial spell broken, the surviving American crane swung around to unleash a new burst of AA fire, now from point-blank range.

But Pooh Bear, on the Halt's left wing, was quicker on the draw and also at point- blank range.

He loosed a withering burst of fire—a hyper-fast barrage of gunfire—that shook, shattered and blasted apart the crane, turning its occupants into fountains of spraying blood and the crane into Swiss cheese.

On the platform, Judah's eyes boggled.

He checked the Sun, checked his watch: 11:59:29.

Thirty seconds.

'Hold them off!' he called to his men. 'Hold them off! We only need thirty seconds'.'

Consumed with the spectacular arrival of the Halicarnassus, Judah never noticed a second airborne craft zeroing in on the Pyramid, a

very small craft that came zooming in low and fast from the Western Desert.

It was a man, possessed of carbon-fibre wings.

The tiny man-shaped figure soared low over the desert, before at the last second, he rose up swiftly—up the slanting side of the Pyramid as if it were an aerial ramp—and landed with a graceful plonk on the far side of the Capstone, on the side opposite the attention-grabbing Halicarnassus.

It was Jack West Jr.

Back from the dead, and pissed as hell.

West landed with his wings outstretched and with two big .45 calibre Desert Eagle pistols in his hands. The instant his feet touched the platform, his guns started blazing, taking down four CIEF troopers with four shots.

Then he punched a release clip on his wing-harness and the carbon-fibre wings fell off his back, freeing him, making him even more deadly.

He ran out onto the platform, guns up.

At the same time, in response to the spectacular arrival of the Halicarnassus, four American helicopters lifted off from their positions at the base of the Great Pyramid: three Apache attack birds and the mighty Super Stallion that Judah had used to bring the Pieces to Giza.

A fifth chopper—a Black Hawk—made to follow them, but it seemed to hesitate on the ground as a scuffle occurred inside it.

Then, a few seconds behind the others, it lifted off and headed for the battle going on at the top of the Pyramid.

Pandemonium reigned on the platform.

With the Halicarnassus looming alongside it like a ship from outer space, and Pooh Bear blazing away from the plane's powerful left-side gun turret, all the American troops on the platform were either getting shot or diving for cover behind Samsonite crates or the Capstone itself or retreating to the lower levels of the open-sided

structure.

In the chaos, Wizard hurled himself on top of Lily to protect her.

Del Piero charged across the platform and slid to the ground beside the little channel, to reach for Alexander, still inside the Capstone.

'Not so fast, Father!' a voice said from behind him. Del Piero turned—

—to find himself staring into the barrel of a Glock pistol held by Marshall Judah.

Bam!

The pistol went off and the priest's brains splattered the golden flank of the Capstone.

With a core group of CIEF men surrounding him, Judah stood before the Capstone—cleverly putting it between him and Pooh Bear's guns—and with a glance at his watch, looked to the sky.

At that moment, the clock struck noon and it happened.

It looked like a laser beam from Heaven.

A dead-straight beam of dazzling white light lanced down from the sky, from the surface of the Sun, and accompanied by a tremendous boom, it slammed into the Capstone atop the Great Pyramid.

The Capstone, in reply, caught this ray of hyper-intense energy within its crystal array—so that the beam remained in place, giving the impression that the Pyramid was now connected to the Sun by this superlong and perfectly straight ray of glowing white energy.

It was a stunning image: the Pyramid—surmounted by the great wooden platform, with the Halicarnassus hovering alongside it and with helicopters now buzzing and banking around it—absorbing the blazing white beam of pure energy that was shooting down from the sky.

It was incredible, impossible, otherworldly.

But it was also oddly right. It was as if this was what the Great Pyramid at Giza, dormant and mysterious for so many centuries, had been designed to do.

• * *

The platform was ablaze with light and sound.

Here at the epicentre of the great Sun-ray, the glow was almost blinding. And the noise—it was all- consuming: the colossal boom of the great Sun-ray combined with the roar of the Halicarnassus's retro-thrusters and the turning of its regular engines (which were level with the platform) drowned out all other sound.

And in the midst of all this stood Marshall Judah, before the Capstone. He raised one arm toward the Golden Capstone, palm up, and then in an ancient language not heard in thousands of years, he began to recite an incantation.

The power ritual.

The power ritual was seven lines long.

As Judah began to recite it, several things were happening:

Pooh Bear.

He was waging his own private war with the four American helicopters. He had knocked out one Apache helicopter with gunfire and had just fired a Hellfire missile at the rising Super Stallion. The missile slammed into the front windshield of the Super Stallion just as the big chopper came level with the platform.

The CH-53E exploded in a giant ball of flames—and lurched in mid-air, before it fell, dropping alongside the platform, its swirling rotor blades missing the lower levels of the platform by inches before the whole chopper smashed down in a crumpled heap on the sloping southern flank of the Great Pyramid itself.

It now lay at a 52-degree angle—the slope of the Pyramid—at the spot where the platform's struts met the Pyramid, its body crumpled and broken but its rotors still buzzing in blurring circles of motion.

Judah had recited two lines by this time . . .

Pooh Bear swung around in his gun turret and had just zeroed in on the American Black Hawk chopper when—to his surprise—he saw the Black Hawk fire a missile into the back of one of its own Apache attack birds.

It was then that Pooh saw the pilots of the Black Hawk: Zoe and Fuzzy. In the confusion earlier, they'd escaped their bonds, stolen the Black Hawk and leapt into the fray.

But then suddenly a CIEF trooper leapt up onto the Halicarnassus's wing, trying to take out Pooh Bear's turret guerrilla-style. Pooh

couldn't turn the turret in time. The man had him, raised his Colt rifle—

Bam!

The CIEF trooper was hit in the back of the head by a longdistance sniper shot, a shot that had been fired