of his palm and into a small block of wood buried in the stone beneath it. Blood splattered from the wound.
Jack began to hyperventilate.
He snapped to look at his left arm, only to discover that it had already been nailed down into another block sunk in the slab—his mechanical left hand still wore its leather glove. His legs were tied down.
It was then that the full horror of the situation hit him.
He was being crucified…
Crucified on his back against a slab of stone, at the bottom of a pit in God-only-knew-where.
Still breathing fast, he scanned the pit around him. It was deep, about twenty feet, with sheer rock walls, and the world beyond its rim appeared dark, lit by firelight, like a cave or a mine of some kind.
Then the muscular black man hammering his hand into the stone called, “He is awake!” and four men appeared up on the rim of the pit, gazing down into it.
Two of the four Jack didn’t recognize: they were a pair of American soldiers, the first was a bulky young trooper with wide unblinking eyes, the second a compact Asian-American wearing Marine fatigues.
Jack did know the third man. He was Chinese, older, and had furious eyes. It was Colonel Mao Gongli of the People’s Liberation Army, whom Jack had last seen in Laozi’s trap system, gagging on the contents of a smoke grenade. Jack vaguely recalled pistol-whipping Mao as he’d run past him there, breaking his nose.
The fourth man, however, was a man Jack knew very well, and he figured (correctly) that the two younger troopers were his lackeys. Blond-haired and blue-eyed, the fourth man was an American colonel who went by the call sign Wolf. Jack hadn’t seen him in years and was quite happy with that.
Wolf gazed down at Jack—helpless on his back, nailed to the pit floor—with a peculiar look on his face.
Then he smiled.
“Hello, son,” he called.
“Hello, Father,” Jack said.
The man standing above him was Jack West Sr.
JONATHAN WEST SR.—Wolf—gazed down at his son from the top of the pit.
Behind him, unseen by Jack, lay the workings of an enormous underground mine. In it, hundreds of emaciated Ethiopians stood on ten-story-high scaffold towers, toiling with picks and shovels at great walls of dirt, clearing centuries of hard-packed grit from what appeared to be a collection of ancient stone buildings.
“Isopeda Isopedella,”Wolf said slowly, his voice echoing in the vast mine.
Jack didn’t reply.
“The common huntsman spider,” Wolf said. “A large-bodied, long-limbed spider native to Australia. Similar to the tarantula in size and general notoriety, it’s known to grow to sizes in excess of six inches.”
Still Jack said nothing.
“But despite its fearsome appearance, the huntsman spider is not a lethal spider. In fact, it is not dangerous at all. A bite will cause no more than transient local pain. It is a fake, a fraud. An animal that attempts to mask its general ineffectiveness with the appearance of size and power, much like you. I never liked your call sign, Jack.”
A bead of sweat trickled down Jack’s forehead as he lay on his back at the bottom of the pit.
“Where are my friends?” he asked, his throat coarse and dry. He was thinking of Stretch, Pooh Bear, and Astro—all of whom had failed to escape after the chase from Abu Simbel.
At that moment, Wolf guided Astro into view beside him. Jack saw the young American Marine through blurry eyes. He seemed okay and, importantly, he wasn’t wearing any handcuffs. He said nothing, just looked down coldly at Jack.
Had Astro been with Wolf all along?Jack thought. It had always been a possibility. But no, he thought he’d picked Astro as a good man, loyal. He couldn’t have been a plant.
“What about the other two?”
“Never mind their fate,” Wolf said. “They will certainly outlive you, but not by much. We were talking about the flaws in your chosen call sign, son.”
“I didn’t choose it. You don’t choose your own call sign.”
Wolf looked away.
“How is your mother?” he asked suddenly. “No matter how hard I try, I just can’t seem to find her. It’s as if she doesn’t want me to locate her.”
“I can’t imagine why,” Jack said.
To explain what had gone wrong with his parents’ marriage meant understanding Jack’s father.
Powerful physically and brilliant mentally, John West Sr. was an intellectually vain man, convinced of his superiority in all matters. As a strategist, he was unrivaled in the US, his methods were bold, vicious and, most of all, successful. These accomplishments only bolstered his sense of omnipotence.
But when this viciousness seeped into his marriage and took violent form, Jack’s mother had left Jack Sr. and, infuriating him further, divorced him in an Australian court—an Australian court.
After that, Jack’s mother had disappeared and now resided in the remote town of Broome in a distant corner of Western Australia, not far from Jack’s farm. It was a location that only Jack and a few others knew.
Wolf shrugged. “She’s of no importance right now. But when this is all over, I’m going to make a point of
