The first three to die had not got past the very first threshold of the trap system: the cylindrical doorway set into the wall. The doorway had rotated abruptly, trapping each man inside it…before dropping a foul-smelling, skin- searing yellow liquid from its hollow ceiling onto the trapped man, a liquid Mao now knew to be a primitive form of sulfuric acid.
So his men had blown open that door with C-2 plastic explosive and entered an inner chamber, the only exit from which was a low pipelike tunnel on the far side.
Thus the next man to die had been lying on his stomach, belly-crawling through the pipe, when he had been skewered through the fucking heart by an iron spike that had risen up from an innocuous-looking hole in the floor. It had slowly and painfully penetrated the man’s entire body, punching out through his back.
Two more men had suffered a similar fate—from other holes in the floor of the tunnel—before Mao’s chief lieutenant had hit upon the idea of pouring quick-setting cement into the murderous holes, plugging them up.
And so cement was sent for—it would ultimately come from the Three Gorges Dam a hundred miles away— and after a two-day wait, they passed through the pipe tunnel.
But still they lost men in the next chamber: a long and magnificent downward-sloping hallway that was lined with silent terra-cotta statues on both sides.
Here one of Mao’s troopers had died when a terra-cotta warrior with a wide yawning mouth had suddenly vomited a spray of liquid mercury into the hapless trooper’s face. The trooper had screamed horribly as the mercury stuck to his eyeballs. The thick liquid clogged every pore of his face, slowly poisoning his very blood. He died in agony, hours later.
More quick-setting cement was brought in.
It was poured into the mouth of the offending terra-cotta warrior, stopping it up. Planning to do the same at every other statue in the hall, Mao’s men had moved on.
Only for another trooper to be killed almost immediately when the second terra-cotta warrior statue shot a crossbow bolt out of itseye socket into his eye.
As a third soldier poured cement into the adjoining statue, he managed to dodge that statue’s lethal defense mechanism: a primitive fragmentation charge, set off by a small amount of gunpowder hidden within the statue’s eyes. A volley of tiny lead ball bearings had blasted out from the statue’s eye sockets, narrowly missing the Chinese soldier but causing him to lurch backward—
—and slip on the wet floor of the sloping passageway and slide out of control down its full length before he just fell off the bottom end of the passageway—dropping into darkness, disappearing from his teammates” view. They soon discovered that he had fallen into a deep and dark underground chasm at the end of the passageway, a chasm of unknown depth.
And they hadn’t got beyond that chasm.
Which was why, earlier that morning, word had been sent to Xintan, demanding that Wizard and Tank be brought back to see if they might reveal the secrets of Laozi’s trap system.
THE SUBMERGED VILLAGE
THE FOUR Chinese sentries left up on the surface of the trap system all looked skyward at the sound of an approaching helicopter, their alertness slackening when they saw that it was one of their own: a Hind gunship with PLA markings.
The big chopper landed on a floating helipad nestled among the half-submerged stone huts, blowing debris and spray through the alleyways of the ancient village.
The sentries ambled over to the chopper, their rifles slung lazily over their shoulders—only to see the side door of the gunship whip open and all of a sudden find themselves staring at the wrong ends of some Type-56 assault rifles and MP7 submachine guns.
Dressed in the Chinese Army uniforms of the helicopter’s crew, Jack West Jr. and his team had arrived.
THE ENTRY CHAMBER
THERE WERE two more low-ranking Chinese sentries in the entry chamber—the same chamber that Wizard had marveled at only four days previously, before he had been captured by Mao, before Mao had murdered his gentle assistant, Chow.
Suddenly an odd-looking silver grenade came flying down into the entry chamber from the well shaft.
The grenade bounced on the floor of the chamber, missing the wide hole in its center, but causing the two sentries to turn.
It went off.
A sunlike flash filled the ancient room, astonishingly bright, and both sentries fell to their knees, clutching their eyes, screaming, blinded, their retinas nearly burned clean off. The blindness wouldn’t be permanent, but it would last for two whole days.
Then Jack came swinging out of the entry shaft, swooping down into the chamber, his boots thumping hard against the stone floor, his gun raised.
He keyed his radio. “Guards are down. Chamber is clear. Come on down.”
It was only then that he noticed the body bags.
There were nine of them, containing soldiers the Chinese had lost inside the trap system.
As Wizard and the others joined him in the chamber—Stretch binding and gagging the two whimpering guards, Wizard gasping at the stench of the body bags—Jack examined the entry chamber’s feature wall.
He beheld the magnificent jewel-encrusted carving of the Mystery of the Circles, ten feet wide and stunning.
And directly below it: a narrow recessed doorway with curved walls. Above the doorway was a small inscription of the Philosopher’s Stone just like the one he’d seen earlier, complete with the Sa-Benben hovering over
