“Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum…”
Pooh’s cage was only ten feet above the simmering pool of black liquid.
“Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum…”
Nine feet, eight feet…
Pooh Bear began to feel the heat of the pool, the hot steam rising all around him.
“Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum…”
The chanting continued.
The dancing continued.
The drum kept booming.
And Pooh Bear’s cage kept lowering.
As his cage descended, Pooh’s eyes flashed from the simmering pool below him to the surging throng of chanting-and-dancing guards and then over to the blazing cross towering over them all—and somewhere in the middle of the hellish scene, over the booming of the drum, he thought he heard another sound, a kind of banging noise, but he couldn’t see where it had come from and he dismissed it.
“Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum…”
The pool was only three feet beneath him now, its steaming fumes engulfing him. Sweating profusely, with death approaching and no avenue of escape, Pooh Bear began to pray.
The heavily muscled Ethiopian guard who had hammered Jack West to his horizontal cross was at that moment leading the sacrificial ceremony, banging on the great drum with gusto.
His eyes widened with delight as Pooh Bear’s cage came to within a few feet of the deadly pool.
Now he hammered harder on the drum, heightening the frenzy of the crowd—just as a thick masonry nail came flying through the air from out of nowhere and lodged squarely in his right eye, driving a full six inches back into his brain, killing him instantly, throwing him to the ground, and abruptly ending the beating of the drum.
Everything stopped.
The dancing, the chanting, the movement. Even the men lowering Pooh Bear’s cage stopped their cranking.
Silence.
The crowd of guards turned.
To behold a man standing at their rear, beside the blazing cross, fearsomely illuminated by its firelight, a terrifying figure literally covered in his own blood—it was on his face, on his clothes, and most obviously, on the rag wrapped around his wounded right hand.
Newly risen from the dead, from beneath a great stone slab at the base of a deep stone pit, it was Jack West Jr., and he was pissed as hell.
IF THE KILLING of Jack West by his own father had raised comparisons to Christ in the minds of the fundamentalist Ethiopian Christian guards, now his resurrection chilled them to the core.
That he had already silently disarmed four of their number during their wild dancing and now held a gun in his good hand only served to make them believe even more that this man had God-like abilities.
Except for one thing.
Jack West Jr. was not a merciful god.
It had taken Jack six hours, six long hours of careful shifting and excruciatingly painful movements to get himself out.
Blocking the fall of the stone slab had been frightening enough.
As the great slab had been slid across his pit, Jack had thought quickly: the only thing he possessed that could possibly withstand the weight of such a slab was his titanium forearm.
And so, at the very moment the slab had slid across the top of his pit, he had clenched his teeth and yanked with all his strength on his nailed-down artificial left hand.
It shook the nail slightly, but on the first pull, he did not pull it loose.
The slab fell into his pit—
—just as he yanked on the nail again, and this time, his metal hand came free, nail and all, and as the huge stone slab fell down into the pit, Jack planted his false arm perpendicular to his body, made a fist and tucked his legs up against his side as—clang!—the full weight of the slab hit his metal fist, crushing two of its fingers, but the arm held and the irresistible force of the slab met the immovable object of Jack’s upraised titanium forearm.
The leading face of the slab came to a stunning halt less than an inch from Jack’s nose, and to anyone looking down at it, it would have appeared that he had been completely crushed by the great stone slab.
Jack, however, had his legs squeezed to the left of his body while his head was facing right, his right hand still nailed to the floor, itself only inches away from the face of the slab above it.
From there, all he needed was courage, strength, and time—courage to grab, with his real right hand, the nail sticking through it; strength to form a fist around the head of the nail and jimmy it from the block beneath it; and time to do so without tearing his own hand apart or dying from shock.
Three times he passed out from the strain, blacking out for he didn’t know how long.
But after a couple of hours of this agonizing sequence of jimmying and yanking, he finally dislodged the
