Part 43 (2/2)
”Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum...”
Nine feet, eight feet...
Pooh Bear began to feel the heat of the pool, the hot steam rising all around him.
”Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum...”
The chanting continued.
The dancing continued.
The drum kept booming.
And Pooh Bear's cage kept lowering.
As his cage descended, Pooh's eyes flashed from the simmering pool below him to the surging throng of chantinganddancing guards and then over to the blazing cross towering over them all-and somewhere in the middle of the h.e.l.lish scene, over the booming of the drum, he thought he heard another sound, a kind of banging noise, but he couldn't see where it had come from and he dismissed it.
”Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum...”
The pool was only three feet beneath him now, its steaming fumes engulfing him.
Sweating profusely, with death approaching and no avenue of escape, Pooh Bear began to pray.
The heavily muscled Ethiopian guard who had hammered Jack West to his horizontal cross was at that moment leading the sacrificial ceremony, banging on the great drum with gusto.
His eyes widened with delight as Pooh Bear's cage came to within a few feet of the deadly pool.
Now he hammered harder on the drum, heightening the frenzy of the crowd-just as a thick masonry nail came flying through the air from out of nowhereand lodged squarely in his right eye, driving a full six inches back into his brain, killing him instantly, throwing him to the ground, and abruptly ending the beating of the drum.
Everything stopped.
The dancing, the chanting, the movement. Even the men lowering Pooh Bear's cage stopped their cranking.
Silence.
The crowd of guards turned.
To behold a man standing at their rear, beside the blazing cross, fearsomely illuminated by its firelight, a terrifying figure literally covered in his own blood-it was on his face, on his clothes, and most obviously, on the rag wrapped around his wounded right hand.
Newly risen from the dead, from beneath a great stone slab at the base of a deep stone pit, it was Jack West Jr., and he was p.i.s.sed as h.e.l.l.
IF THE KILLING of Jack West by his own father had raised comparisons to Christ in the minds of the fundamentalist Ethiopian Christian guards, now his resurrection chilled them to the core.
That he had already silently disarmed four of their number during their wild dancing and now held a gun in his good hand only served to make them believe even more that this man had G.o.dlike abilities.
Except for one thing.
Jack West Jr. was not a merciful G.o.d.
It had taken Jack six hours, six long hours of careful s.h.i.+fting and excruciatingly painful movements to get himself out.
Blocking the fall of the stone slab had been frightening enough.
As the great slab had been slid across his pit, Jack had thought quickly: the only thing he possessed that could possibly withstand the weight of such a slab was his t.i.tanium forearm.
And so, at the very moment the slab had slid across the top of his pit, he had clenched his teeth and yanked with all his strength on his naileddown artificial left hand.
It shook the nail slightly, but on the first pull, he did not pull it loose.
The slab fell into his pit- -just as he yanked on the nail again, and this time, his metal hand came free, nail and all, and as the huge stone slab fell down into the pit, Jack planted his false arm perpendicular to his body, made a fist and tucked his legs up against his side as-clang!-the full weight of the slab hit his metal fist, crus.h.i.+ng two of its fingers, but the arm held and the irresistible force of the slab met the immovable object of Jack's upraised t.i.tanium forearm.
The leading face of the slab came to a stunning halt less than an inch from Jack's nose, and to anyone looking down at it, it would have appeared that he had been completely crushed by the great stone slab.
Jack, however, had his legs squeezed to the left of his body while his head was facing right, his right hand still nailed to the floor, itself only inches away from the face of the slab above it.
From there, all he needed was courage, strength, and time-courage to grab, with his real right hand, the nail sticking through it strength to form a fist around the head of the nail and jimmy it from the block beneath it and time to do so without tearing his own hand apart or dying from shock.
Three times he pa.s.sed out from the strain, blacking out for he didn't know how long.
But after a couple of hours of this agonizing sequence of jimmying and yanking, he finally dislodged the masonry nail and got his right hand free.
Deep hyperventilating gasps followed as he then used his teeth to extract the nail from his b.l.o.o.d.y right palm.
Clenched in his jaws, the nail came free and blood issued from the hole in his palm. Jack quickly unlooped his belt from his trousers and with his teeth created a tourniquet.
At which point, he promptly blacked out again, pa.s.sing out for an entire hour this time.
He woke to the sounds of chanting, dancing, and drums.
”Pater Noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen Tuum...”
Now he had to deal with the issue of the slab on top of him.
All he needed was one crack in it, and he found it near where his right hand had been nailed down.
Into this crack he jammed a chewinggumsized wad of C2 plastic explosive-the high impact lowradius explosive he kept in a compartment in his artificial arm for use in enemy door locks in case of capture.
The C2 went off-the distant bang Pooh would hear-and a long fatal crack snaked up the length of the slab, breaking it perfectly in two. The partial slab to Jack's right fell flush to the floor of the pit, providing a narrow aperture through which he could squeeze.
After some careful wriggling, he was all but out, save for his artificial left arm, which still held the other side of the slab off the ground.
A tough predicament-there was no way he could lift the half slab off his t.i.tanium arm.
So he did the only thing he could.
He simply unlatched the forearm section of his false arm from the bicep section and rolled out.
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