Part 15 (1/2)

THE ENTRY CHAMBER.

LAOZI'S TRAP SYSTEM, BENEATH WITCH MOUNTAIN.

SICHUAN PROVINCE, CENTRAL CHINA.

DECEMBER5, 2007.

COLONEL Mao Gongli swore loudly.

In the four days since he'd captured Max Epper and sent him off to Xintan for interrogation, his force of Chinese troops had made little headway through the underground tunnel system that protected Laozi's legendary stone.

Chiefly, their progress had been hindered by numerous antiintruder devices: b.o.o.by traps.

Mao cursed himself. He should have known better.

For over three thousand years, Chinese tombs have been renowned for their ingenious protective mechanisms: for instance, the tomb complex of Emperor Qin in Xi'an-the home of China's famous terracotta warriors-was equipped with automatic crossbows and ”murder holes,” out of which oil and liquid tar once poured onto unwary archaeologists.

But the traps protecting this system were of a higher order, beyond anything Mao had seen, as clever as they were vicious.

He'd already lost nine men, all in horrific ways.

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 foulsmelling, skinsearing 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 C2 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, bellycrawling through the pipe, when he had beenskewered through the f.u.c.king heart by an iron spike that had risen up from an innocuouslooking 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 quicksetting 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 twoday wait, they pa.s.sed through the pipe tunnel.

But still they lost men in thenext chamber: a long and magnificent downwardsloping hallway that was lined with silent terracotta statues on both sides.

Here one of Mao's troopers had died when a terracotta 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 eyeb.a.l.l.s. The thick liquid clogged every pore of his face, slowly poisoning his very blood. He died in agony, hours later.

More quicksetting cement was brought in.

It was poured into the mouth of the offending terracotta 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 terracotta 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 pa.s.sageway and slide out of control down its full length before he justfell off the bottom end of the pa.s.sageway-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 pa.s.sageway, 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 guns.h.i.+p with PLA markings.

The big chopper landed on a floating helipad nestled among the halfsubmerged 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 guns.h.i.+p whip open and all of a sudden find themselves staring at the wrong ends of some Type56 a.s.sault 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 lowranking 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 a.s.sistant, Chow.

Suddenly an oddlooking 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, astonis.h.i.+ngly 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 jewelen crusted 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 theSaBenben hovering over it: The curved cylindrical doorway was roughly the size of a coffin, and on one side of it there were three castiron levers and the Chinese symbol for ”dwelling”: The ceiling of this tiny s.p.a.ce was crudely stopped up with concrete-presumably plugging a pipe out of which fell some horrific liquid.

”Not exactly elegant,” Jack said. ”But effective.”

Wizard shook his head. ”This system was designed by the great Chinese architect, Sun Mai, a contemporary of Confucius and, like him, once a student of Laozi. Sun Mai was a brilliant craftsman, a man of rare flair. He was also a castlebuilder, fortifications and the like, so he was well suited to this task. And how does Mao tackle him? With concrete.Concrete. Oh, how China has changed over the centuries.”

”The trap system,” Jack said seriously, gazing at the darkness beyond the open doorway recess. ”Any research? Like the trap order?”

”You cannot study this system's traps beforehand,” Wizard said. ”It possesses multiple thresholds, through which one pa.s.ses by answering a riddlein situ.”

”Riddles in situ. My favorite...”

”But riddles related to the works of Laozi.”

”Oh, even better.”

Wizard examined the concreted doorway and the chamber beyond it, then he nodded at the body bags. ”It seems our Chinese rivals have met with some considerable difficulty. If they'd asked me the right questions during my interrogation, I might have been more helpful.”