Part 20 (1/2)

A wide ascending tunnel bored into the earth behind the fortress, continuing in a straight line from the Great Arch's entry rampway. Indeed, this tunnel and the rampway were connected by a flat path that crossed the pillared hall and also featured raised gutters on its edges.

Zoe said, 'Looks like these gutters are designed to funnel some kind of liquid that flows out from the tunnel's core, through this hall, and down the front ramp.'

'No time to stop and stare,' West said. 'Keep moving.'

They ran across the stupendous hall, dwarfed by its immense pillars, and entered the gently-sloping tunnel sunk into its innermost wall.

At the same time, outside in the chasm, Big Ears, Stretch, Wizard and Pooh Bear were engaged in their fierce gunbattle with the CIEF force over in the other sentry tower.

'Keep firing!' Wizard yelled above the din. 'Every moment we keep Judah pinned down is another moment Huntsman has inside the Refuge-'

He was abruptly cut off as, all of a sudden, the entire chasm shook and shuddered.

For a moment, he and the others stopped firing.

So did Judah's men-in fact, they suddenly started to abandon their position on their sentry tower.

'What is this ...?' Big Ears eyed the cavern around him.

'It feels like an earthquake...' Pooh Bear said.

'It's not an earthquake,' Wizard said, realising.

The next instant, the source of the great rumbling burst out of the wall at the base of Judah's sentry tower, just above the waterline of the main chasm itself.

It was an M-113 TBV-MV (Tunnel-Boring Vehicle, Medium Volume). The military equivalent of a commercial tunnel-boring engine, it was in truth an M-113A2 bridge-laying vehicle that had been adapted for tunnel-making.

The size of a tank, it had a huge pointed nose that whizzed around and around, screw-like, obliterating everything in its path. Chewed-up rock and dirt were 'digested' through the centre of the vehicle and disposed out the rear. It also bore on its roof a foldable mechanical bridge.

The tunnel-boring vehicle poked out through the wall at the base of the sentry tower and stopped, its drill-bit still spinning, only twenty horizontal metres from the jetty that West had ziplined down to.

'They drilled through the filled-in excavation tunnel...' Wizard breathed in awe. 'How clever. It wouldn't have given a modern tunnel-borer much resistance.'

'It helps if you have the logistics,' Stretch said.

'Which they do,' Pooh Bear said.

At that moment, the tunnel-boring vehicle engaged its internal engines to fold forward the steel bridge on its roof. The mechanical bridge unfolded slowly, stretching out in front of the tunnel-borer until it was fully flat and extended. At which point, it touched down lightly against the jetty twenty metres away.

The American tunnel and the jetty were now connected.

'Man, they're good...' Big Ears said.

A second later, Judah's team rushed across the bridge, guns up, having raced down the internal stairs of their sentry tower.

They fired up at Wizard's men as they crossed the metal bridge.

Big Ears and the others tried to halt them with more cover fire, but it was no use.

Judah's men were across the waterway and racing up the rampway into Hamilcar's Refuge.

They were going in, only a minute behind West, Zoe and Lily.

West, Zoe and Lily raced up the ascending tunnel behind the fortress, guided by glowsticks.

As he ran, West noticed large clumps of dried solidified mud clinging to the edges of the rampway. He frowned inwardly. Dried mud? How had it come to be here? Dried mud? How had it come to be here?

'Jack! Zoe!' Wizard's voice called in their earpieces. 'Judah's crossed over the waterway! I repeat, Judah has crossed the waterway! He's right behind you!'

After about a hundred metres of dead-straight, steadily-rising tunnel, they emerged in a high dome-ceilinged chamber- -and froze.

'What the-' Zoe breathed. 'There are two two of them...' of them...'

The chamber was perfectly circular and it reeked of gaseous sulphur, the smell of volcanoes. It was also distinctly holy, reverential, a shrine.

Alcoves lined its curved walls-housing broken and decayed Carthaginian statues-while on the chamber's far side rose a wide granite dam, behind which simmered a wide pool of bubbling volcanic mud, the source of the foul sulphurous odour.

And lying on the floor before West, Lily and Zoe were six skeletons of long-dead n.a.z.i soldiers. All were hideously deformed: the bottom half of each man was missing, their legs simply gone. Indeed, the lower ends of their spinal columns seemed to have melted melted ... ...

Beyond the grisly skeletons, however, was the main feature of the holy chamber.

Rising up in the chamber's exact centre, 10 feet above the floor of the perfectly round room, was an elevated platform, fitted with a single flight of wide rising steps, and on it-to West's surprise- lay not one but two two Ancient Wonders. Ancient Wonders.

Mounted atop the island-like platform, aimed upwards like a satellite dish, stood the fabled Mirror of the Lighthouse of Alexandria.

It was completely covered in grey volcanic ash, but its outline was unmistakable. With its wide 15-foot dish, it was simply astonis.h.i.+ng astonis.h.i.+ng in its beauty. in its beauty.

West's eyes, however, fell immediately to its base.

Its solid trapezoidal base, also covered in a layer of grey ash.

Suddenly something made sense: the continual use of the word 'base' in the texts he had followed to get here. He recalled the original clue to the location of the Pharos Piece:

Look for the base that was once the peak of the Great Tower

And Euclid's Instructions:

Base removed before the Roman invasion, Taken to Hamilcar's Forgotten Refuge.

The Mirror of the Lighthouse was a wonder unto itself, but its base-its plain trapezoidal base-was of immensely greater value.