dreamed of Lily, of her bright smiling face and the home they’d made together in the remote northwest corner of Australia…
GREAT SANDY DESERT
NORTHWESTERN AUSTRALIA
MARCH 2006–DECEMBER 2007
IN THE MONTHS after the Tartarus Rotation of March 2006, Jack West’s team returned to their countries of origin—with the exception of Stretch, since his home nation, Israel, had declared him persona non grata after his actions during that mission. He variously stayed with Jack, Wizard, and Pooh Bear.
Reports had to be filed, careers had to be restarted. After all, it was not exactly common for a professional soldier to disappear on a ten-year mission, and such an absence had to be explained to the various bureaucracies. Backdated promotions, for instance, were given to all of them.
Naturally, this disbanding of the team had an effect on Lily, for that team of soldiers was the closest thing to family she had ever known.
She felt like Frodo at the end of her favorite book,The Lord of the Rings. Having completed a huge Earth- changing mission, now they all had to return to normal life—and how could life ever satisfy someone who had participated in such an adventure. Worse, how did you deal withordinary people who didn’t—couldn’t—know of the great deeds you’d done on their behalf.
Fortunately, the team came to visit her and Jack at the farm often; and once she got her own cell phone—a big day—Lily kept in touch with them by SMS. And of course, whenever it could be arranged, she went to visit them: seeing Pooh Bear in Dubai, Fuzzy in Jamaica, Wizard all over the place, and Zoe in Ireland.
Zoe.
Lily’s favorite times, of course, were Zoe’s visits to Australia. But at first this had been difficult, since an insensitive lieutenant colonel in the Irish Army—ignorant of the heroic role she had played in the Seven Wonders mission—had insisted she retrain and be regraded in the Sciathan Fhianoglach an Airm.
Ordinary people, Lily sighed. Urgh.
Naturally, Jack was aware of this. Indeed, sometimes he felt the same way himself.
The solution was simple.
They had to find new challenges to occupy them.
Which was OK for him, Lily thought, as Wizard would often send him queries and conundrums via e-mail. Things like: “Jack, can you look up the Neetha Tribe for me, from the Congo?” Or: “Can you get an authoritative translation of Aristotle’s Riddles?” Or: “Can you find out the names of all the Bird-Men of Easter Island?”
But then, just when she had been at a loss for interesting challenges, Jack had provided Lily with a startling new one that she had not been prepared for:
School.
Since schools were kind of hard to come by in the northern deserts of Australia, Lily was sent to a prestigious boarding school for gifted children in Perth.
But prestigious or not, kids are kids, and for a little girl who had grown up as an only child among crack troops on an isolated farm in Kenya, school proved to be a confusing and tough experience.
Of course, Jack had known this would be the case—but he also knew that it was necessary.
Just how tough it had been, however, became clear at his first parent-teacher meeting.
Dressed in jeans and a jacket that concealed his muscular physique and work gloves that hid his artificial left hand, Jack West Jr.—commando, adventurer, and owner of two master’s degrees in ancient history—sat in a low plastic chair at a tiny plastic desk in front of Lily’s personal guidance counselor, a bespectacled woman named Brooke. A “guidance counselor,” Jack was told, was simply a teacher assigned to monitor Lily’s overall progress at school.
Brooke’s long list of comments made Jack smile behind his concerned exterior:
“Lily has been embarrassing her Latin teacher in class. Correcting her in front of the other students.”
“She’s scoring excellently in all her subjects, averaging over ninety percent, but I get the feeling that she can do better. She seems only to be doing what is necessary to get a tick, not what she is truly capable of. Our syllabus is the most advanced in the country, yet she seems, well, bored.”
“She’s very choosy when it comes to friends. She hangs out with Alby Calvin, which is great, but from what I’ve seen she appears to have no female friends at all.”
“Oh, and she made young Tyson Bradley cry by bending his wrist backward with a strange grip. The school nurse says she almost broke his arm.”
Jack knew about that one.
Young Tyson Bradley was a little ratbastard and garden-variety bully, and one day he’d tried to bully Alby into giving up his lunch money.
Lily had intervened, and when Tyson had reached out for her throat, she had grabbed his wrist and twisted it inside out, forcing Tyson to his knees, almost breaking his wrist—exactly as West had trained her to do.
Young Tyson had not bothered Alby or Lily again.
It was at that parent-teacher night that West had first met Alby’s mother, Lois Calvin.
A sweet, timid woman from America, she was living in Perth with her mining executive husband. Anxious and nervous, she worried constantly about her gifted son.
“That awful sportsmaster just terrorizes him,” she complained to Jack over coffee. “I honestly don’t see why a gentle boy like Alby should have to play a sport. What if he gets a knock to the head? My son can do amazing things in mathematics—things his teachers couldn’t evendream of doing—and that could all be ruined by a single head injury in a soccer game. But that horrible sportsmaster insists that sport is compulsory and I can’t persuade
