Jack ducked into his room, snatching stuff from all sides: a canvas miner’s jacket, a fireman’s helmet, and a double-holstered gun belt that he strapped round his waist. “Getting her things. Alby’s with her.”
“Oh God, Alby. What will we—”
“We take him with us.”
“I was going to say, what will we tell his mother? ‘Hi, Lois, yes, the kids had a great summer, outran an invading force of paratroopers.’”
“Something like that,” Jack said, dashing into his study and emerging a moment later with a large black leather folder.
Then he hurried past Zoe, heading down the hallway to the back door of the farmhouse. “Get your things and corral the kids. We’re leaving in two minutes. I have to get the top piece of the Capstone.”
“The what—? ” Zoe asked, but West had already dashed out into the sunlight, the screen door clapping shut behind him.
“And grab the codebooks and computer hard drives, too!” came his distant shouting voice.
A moment later, Sky Monster came bustling out of his guest room, buckling his belt and holding his pilot’s helmet. He too shoved past Zoe—with a gruff “Mornin’, Princess”—before stomping out the back door.
And suddenly Zoe woke up to the situation.
“Holy shit.” She hurried back into her room.
Jack West hustled across the backyard of his farmhouse and dashed inside the entrance to an old abandoned mine set into a low hill there.
He hurried down a dark tunnel, guided by the penlight attached to his fireman’s helmet, until after about a hundred yards he came to a larger space, a wide chamber containing…
…the Golden Capstone.
Nine feet tall, glittering and golden, the great mini-pyramid that had once sat atop the Great Pyramid at Giza possessed an authority, a presence, that humbled Jack every time he saw it.
Arrayed around the Capstone were several other artifacts from his previous adventure, artifacts that were all in some way related to the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: the Mirror from the Lighthouse at Alexandria, the head of the Colossus of Rhodes.
On occasion, Jack would come here and just sit and stare at the priceless collection of treasures assembled in the cavern.
But not today.
Today he grabbed an old stepladder and climbed up alongside the Capstone and carefully removed its uppermost piece, the only piece that was itself a pyramid, the Firestone.
The Firestone was small, its square base perhaps as wide as a hardback book. At its summit was a tiny clear crystal, an inch wide. All the other pieces of the Capstone possessed similar crystals in their centers, all seven of which lined up in a row when the Capstone was assembled.
West tucked the Firestone into his rucksack and hurried back out the exit tunnel.
As he ran down it, he triggered several black boxes mounted on wooden supports along the way—red lights blinked on. At the last support beam, he switched on a final box and grabbed a remote hand held unit that had lain on top of the box for just this occasion.
Then West was out, back in the morning sunshine, standing before the entrance to the old mine.
“I never wanted to do this,” he said sadly.
He hit DETONATE on the remote. Muffled sequential booms thudded out from the mine tunnel as each charge detonated, the innermost charges going off first.
Then, with a great rushing whoosh, a billowing cloud of dust came blasting out from the mine’s entrance. As the last charge exploded, it caused a landslide to cascade down from the low hill above the mine entrance, a loose body of rubble, sand, and rocks.
Jack turned and ran back toward the farmhouse.
If he’d had time to look back, he would have seen the great dust cloud settle. Once the dust had completely come to rest, all that remained in its place was a hill—a plain ordinary rock-and-sand-covered hill no different from any of the dozen others in the surrounding area.
Jack returned to the farmhouse in time to see Sky Monster zoom off in a pickup truck, heading south for the hangar.
The parachutes were still falling from the sky, many of them close to the ground now. There were literally hundreds of them, some obviously bearing armed men, while others were larger chutes carrying oversized objects: jeeps and trucks.
“Mother of God…” Jack whispered.
Zoe was pushing Lily and Alby out the back door of the farmhouse, with a computer hard drive tucked under one arm.
“Did you grab the codebooks?” West called.
“Lily’s got ’em!”
“This way, to the barn!” West waved them to follow.
The four of them ran together, two adults, two children, struggling with either backpacks or essential gear, with Horus flying above them.
