charismatic priest were to come upon a pair of stone tablets carved by an advanced prior civilization, don’t you think he might use them to augment his preaching, to say to his followers, ‘Look at what God in his wisdom sent you! His immutable laws!’”
“You realize that if you’re right, Christian Sunday schools will never be the same again,” Pooh Bear said. “So what has all this to do with some remote stone churches in Ethiopia?”
“Good question. According to biblical history, the Ten Commandments were kept in the Ark of the Covenant, the arca foedera, inside a special vault deep within the Temple of Solomon. Now, in the movies, Indiana Jones found the Ark in the ancient Egyptian city of Tanis, but according to the people of Ethiopia, Indy was wrong.
“The people of Ethiopia have claimed for over seven hundred years that the arca foedera has resided in their lands, brought there direct from the Temple of Solomon by European knights in the yearA.D. 1280, the same European knights who built the churches of Lalibela. Seems the Ethiopians were right.”
“So if the tablets don’t contain the ten ultimate laws of God, what’s written on them?” Pooh Bear asked.
Jack gazed at the engraved writing on the two tablets in his lap. “What the tablets contain is just as important: they contain the words of a ritual that must be performed at the sixth and last vertex of the Machine, when the Dark Star is almost upon the Earth. The Twin Tablets of Thuthmosis contain a sacred text that will save us all.”
They drove south through Kenya, zooming along its highways until at last they crested a final hill and their old base came into view—a large farmhouse not far from the Tanzanian border. On the distant southern horizon, the cone of Kilimanjaro rose majestically into the sky.
And standing on the porch of the farmhouse waiting for them, were two white men.
One wore a black T-shirt, the other a white one.
The shirts read:“I HAVE SEEN THE COW LEVEL!” and “THERE IS NO COW LEVEL!”
The twins.
Horus was perched on Lachlan’s forearm. She squawked with delight when she saw Jack and flew directly to his shoulder.
“When we got here this morning,” Julius said, “your little friend was waiting.”
“That’s one loyal bird you’ve got there,” Lachlan said.
“Best bird in the world,” Jack said, grinning at the falcon. “Best bird in the world.”
THEY HEADED inside the farmhouse.
“We’ve got a lot to tell you—” Lachlan said as they walked, but Jack just held up his finger and went into his old study.
There he prised open a floorboard and extracted from under the floor a shoebox filled with wads of US dollars and an Australian SAS first-aid field kit.
Jack grabbed a syringe from the kit and loaded it with a drug called Andarin—“Superjuice” as the men of the SAS liked to call it. Andarin was a potent mix of adrenaline and high-grade cortisol. It was a battle drug, designed to mask pain and provide an adrenal kick, and thus get a badly wounded soldier—as Jack was now—through a hostile engagement.
Jack injected it into his arm and instantly blinked. “Ow, that’s powerful stuff.” He apologized to the twins: “Sorry, gentlemen. Just needed something to keep me standing till this is over. Now, tell me everything.”
They settled in the lounge room of the empty farmhouse, and there the twins blurted out everything they’d learned over the last week.
They informed Jack of the location of the Second Vertex: to the south of Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa.
They told him about Tank Tanaka and his Japanese brotherhood’s avowed mission to avenge their national disgrace in World War II—through mass global suicide. They also mentioned their golden piece of knowledge: that this Japanese brotherhood had infiltrated Wolf’s CIEF force with one of their own, a man named Akira Isaki.
While they’d waited at the farmhouse for someone to arrive, the twins had hacked an American military database and discovered that there was indeed a US serviceman named A. J. Isaki—Akira Juniro Isaki—a Marine who had been seconded to the CIEF.
Lachlan said, “Isaki was born in America in 1979 to a Japanese-American couple who—”
“—by all accounts were very lovely people,” Julius added.
“Thing is,” Lachlan said, “his grandparents —his paternal grandparents—were purebred Japanese and during the Second World War, they were imprisoned in a Californian internment camp—”
“Very nasty, those camps. Black spot in American history…”
“But when baby A. J.’s parents were killed in a car crash in 1980, A. J. Isaki was brought up by his grandparents—”
“His now bitterly resentful pure-blood Japanese grandparents, members of the Blood Brotherhood. A. J. joined the Marines, was steadily promoted to Force Recon, and was ultimately seconded—upon his own application—to the CIEF in 2003.”
“His call sign,” Lachlan said, “is Switchblade.”
“Switchblade,” Jack said, vaguely recalling the Asian-American Marine whom Wolf had introduced to him back in the Ethiopian mine, when Jack had been nailed down at the base of the pit. He asked, “You guys still online?”
Julius cocked his head. “Is the starship Enterprise powered by dilithium crystals? Of course we’re online.”
He handed his laptop to Jack.
