“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 base-jumping 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 top thirty floors all tipped as one, falling sideways like a slow- falling 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 upside-down 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 half- standing 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 well-known 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 high-security 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 radar-absorbent 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, satellite-based 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.
