Matthew Reilly: Hell Island

BENEATH THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE

SOUTH AFRICA

DECEMBER 17, 2007, 0325 HOURS

JACK WEST fell.

Fast.

Down into the black abyss beneath the inverted pyramid that was the Second Vertex.

As he plummeted into the darkness, Jack looked up to see the gigantic pyramid receding into the distance, getting smaller and smaller, the jagged walls of the abyss crowding in around it.

Falling through the air beside him was Switchblade, the Japanese-American US Marine who moments earlier had betrayed Wolf and almost derailed his plan to insert the Second Pillar in its rightful place at the peak of the pyramid. It turned out that Switchblade’s Japanese blood was more important to him than his American upbringing.

But after a last-ditch swing from Jack and a desperate struggle above the abyss, Jack had jammed the Pillar in place just as the two of them had dropped from the upside-down peak and commenced their fall into the bottomless darkness.

The rocky walls of the abyss rushed past Jack in a blur of speed. He fell with Switchblade in a tumbling ungainly way, their limbs still awkwardly entwined. As they plummeted, Switchblade punched and scratched and lashed out at Jack, before grabbing his shirt and glaring at him with baleful eyes, screaming above the wind, “You! You did this! At least I know you’ll die with me!”

Jack parried away the crazed Marine’s blows as they fell.

“No, I won’t…” he said grimly as he suddenly kicked Switchblade square in the chest, pushing himself away from the suicidal Marine—at the same time, grabbing something from a holster on Switchblade’s back, something that every Force Recon Marine carried.

His Maghook.

Switchblade saw the device in Jack’s hands, and his eyes widened in horror. He tried to grab it, but now Jack was out of his reach.

“No! No!!”

Still falling, Jack pivoted in the air, turning his back on Switchblade to face the wall of the abyss.

He fired the Maghook.

Whump!

The high-tech grappling hook flew out from its gunlike launcher, its metal claws snapping outward as it did so, its 150-foot-long reinforced-nylon cable wobbling like a tail behind it.

The grappling hook’s claws hit the wall of the abyss, scraped against it, searching for a purchase before—whack!—they found an uneven section of rock and caught—and instantly Jack’s cable went taut—and his fall was abruptly and violently arrested, and it took all his might to keep a grip on the Maghook’s launcher.

Jack swung into the wall of the abyss with a colossal thump that almost dislocated his left shoulder.

Silence.

For a moment, Jack hung there from the cable of Switchblade’s Maghook, dangling from the rocky vertical wall of the great abyss, high above the center of the world and at least a thousand feet below the upside-down bronze pyramid of the Vertex. Despite its immense size, it now looked positively tiny.

Closing his eyes, Jack exhaled the biggest sigh of relief of his life.

“What the hell were you thinking, Jack?” he whispered to himself, catching his breath, letting the adrenaline rush subside.

A flutter of feathers made him spin, and suddenly a small brown peregrine falcon alighted on his shoulder.

Horus.

His faithful bird pecked affectionately at his ear.

Jack smiled wearily but genuinely. “Thanks, bird. I’m glad I survived, too.”

Distant shouts from up in the Vertex made him look up—Wolf’s people must have noticed that the Pillar had been set in place and were now sending men to get it.

Jack sighed. He could never hope to climb back up in time to catch them, let alone stop them. He might have saved the world and their lives and killed the traitor in their midst, but now the bad guys were going to get the booty: the Second Pillar’s reward, the mysterious concept known only as heat.

But there was nothing Jack could do about that now.

He turned to Horus. “You coming?”

And with that, he gazed up at the pyramid high above him and after a deep breath, reeled in the Maghook, grabbed a handhold on the rough surface of the abyss’s wall, and began the long climb upward.

It took Jack nearly an hour to scale the wall of the abyss—by firing the Maghook up it, then ascending its cable 150 feet at a time.

It was slow going, since the rocky wall was largely sheer and slick, and sometimes the grappling hook found no purchase at all and just fell back down toward Jack.

But after about fifty minutes of such climbing, Jack slid over the edge of a stone rail and lay on his back on the precipice, his chest heaving, sucking in air. Horus landed lightly beside him.

When Jack sat up, he saw the magnificent underground city constructed in supplication to the inverted pyramid, with its hollow towers, its streets of inky black liquid and, through the forest of bridges and towers, the massive ziggurat rising in its center; the whole scene lit by Wolf’s dying amber flares.

Of course, the entire supercavern was now deserted, Wolf’s force having long since departed.

Also gone, Jack noted sadly, were his companions, the Adamson twins and the Sea Ranger. Jack imagined that, thinking him dead, they had rightly hurried back down the long underwater passageway that led back to the open ocean in the Sea Ranger’s submarine—

Movement.

Jack spun, his eyes focusing on the summit of the ziggurat, just visible between all the towers.

“Oh my God…” he breathed, registering who it was.

There, sitting totally alone on top of the mighty ziggurat, his head bowed, one of his arms in a sling, was a small boy, his daughter’s best friend, Alby Calvin.

Left alone in this enormous space, with his wounded shoulder aching and with Jack West Jr.’s battered FDNY fireman’s helmet sitting in his lap, Alby had given up all hope of escape and was waiting for the last flares to fizzle out, when he heard the shouting voice.

“Alby! Albeeee!”

He snapped to look up—fresh tears still running down his cheeks—to see a tiny figure over by the edge of the abyss waving his arms.

Jack.

Alby’s eyes nearly popped out of his head.

Jack negotiated his way across the underground minimetropolis, over to the central ziggurat, using Wolf’s plank bridges where he could and swinging across the wider thoroughfares with the Maghook where he had to.

The black ooze that filled the city’s streets appeared to be a thick mudlike substance—semiliquid and goopy. If you fell into it, you didn’t get out.

As he traversed the avenues, he tried his radio. “Sea Ranger, come in? Do you read me?”

No reply.

His small handheld radio didn’t have the signal strength to reach the Sea Ranger in his submarine.

Moving in his unorthodox way, Jack hurried across the underground city.

At last, he came to the base of the ziggurat and bounded up its stairs, arriving at the roof, where he slid to Alby’s side and embraced him as if he were his own son.

Likewise, Alby hurled his good arm around Jack, closing his eyes, tears streaming down his cheeks.

“I thought I was going to die here, by myself in the dark…” he whimpered.

“I wouldn’t let that happen, Alby.” Jack released the boy from his bear hug. “You’re too good a friend to Lily… and to me. Plus, your mother would absolutely kill me.”

Alby stared at him. “You just fell into a chasm with a guy who was trying to kill everyone in the whole world and you’re afraid of my mom?”

“Hell yeah. When it comes to your well-being, your mom’s scary.”

Alby smiled at that. Then he lifted Jack’s fireman’s helmet from his lap and offered it to Jack. “I think this belongs to you.”

Jack took it and placed it on his head, pulling the chin strap tight. Just putting it on made him look and feel whole again. “Thanks. I’ve been missing that.”