Six Sacred Stones Part 15

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."

"So what's the trick?" West said.

Wizard smiled. "What is Laozi's most wellknown contribution to philosophy?"

"The Yin Yang."

"Yes. The concept ofduality. The idea that there are two of everything. Elemental pairs.

Good and evil, light and dark, and all that. But there's more to it: every pair isconnected.

In the good, there is some evil, and in the evil, some good."

"Which means..." Jack prompted.

Wizard didn't answer. Let him figure it out for himself.

"...if there's two of everything, then there are two entrances to this system," Jack said.

Wizard nodded. "And?"

Jack frowned. "The second entrance isconnected to this entrance?"

"Well done, my friend. Full marks."

Wizard strode to the wide circular well shaft in the floor, the one that matched the entry shaft in the ceiling, and peered down into it.

"There is indeed a second entrance to this trap system. Down there."

Wizard said, "The tunnel system branching off this chamber is called the Teacher's Way.

A second tunnel system situated below us is called the Student's Way."

"So how are they connected?"

"Simple. They must be tackled simultaneously. Two people, one in each tunnel, moving alternately through their respective traps, each disabling the other's traps."

"You have got to be kidding me..." Jack had survived many trap systems over the years, but he had never encountered anything like this.

"It's the ultimate trust exercise," Wizard said. "As I set off in the upper tunnel, I trigger a trap. That trap is nullified not by me, but byyou in the lower tunnel. My life is in your hands. Then the opposite occurs-you trigger a trap, and I must save you. This is why our Chinese friends are experiencing such difficulty in there. They don't know of the lower route. So they use concrete and brute force, and in the typical Chinese way"-he nodded at the body bags-' they just weather the losses and make very inefficient progress.

They'll eventually get through, but it will cost them many lives and much time."

Jack bit his lip, thinking. "All right then. Stretch. You take Scimitar, and find the lower entrance. I'll enter through here with Astro and Wizard. Tank, you stay here with Pooh Bear. Keep in radio contact with Vulture up in the chopper, because I suspect we'll be needing a rapid evac. All right, everyone. Buckle up. We're going in."

LAOZI'S TRAP SYSTEM ENTRY TUNNELS THE CYLINDRICAL DOORWAY (LOWER).

MINUTES LATER, Stretch's voice came over West's earpiece:"We've found the second entrance. About sixty feet below you. Narrow doorway, cut into the wall of the shaft.

Identical to yours. But intact. No concrete clogging its upper recess."

"Step into it," West instructed.

Down in the shaft, Stretch and Scimitar were hanging from individual ropes in front of a narrow recessed doorway hewn into the wall of the vertical shaft.

The shaft itself dropped away beneath them into infinite black, depth unknown. Guided by his helmet flashlight, Stretch stepped off the rope and into the doorway...

...only to see the entire doorway suddenly rotate around him on its axis, its curved walls spinning ninety degrees so that the entry gap was sealed, and he found himself trapped in the coffinsized recess, bounded on every side, with nowhere to go.

Claustrophobia gripped him. His rapid breathing echoed in his ears. His flashlight's glow was too close against the tight walls.

Then something gurgled in the void above him and Stretch's blood went cold.

"Er, Jack..."

Up in the doorway of the Teacher's Way, Jack a.s.sessed the three castiron levers in the wall, one on top of the other, next to the Chinese symbol for "dwelling": none of the levers boreany marks or carvings they were completely plain.

"Er, Jack..."came Stretch's voice."Whatever you have to do up there, please do it soon..."

"Pull the bottom lever," Wizard said. "Now."

Jack yanked on the bottom lever- -and at the same moment, down in Stretch's route, a slab of stone slid across the ceiling and the cylinder rotated another ninety degrees, and suddenly, Stretch saw a new chamber on the other side, a cubeshaped stone room.

He quickly stepped out of the deadly cylinderdoorway and said, "I'm though. Thanks, guys. Scimitar, your turn."

In the upper tunnel, Jack turned to Wizard: "How did you know?"

Wizard said, "Famous quote from Laozi. 'In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In dwelling, live close to the ground.' Since our clue was 'Dwelling,' I picked the lever that was closest to the ground."

"Nice."

After getting Scimitar through the same way, Jack, Wizard, and Astro just stepped through their open entry door, its trap disabled by the concrete of Mao's troops.

THE CRAWLING TUNNEL.

Both sets of men were now met by identical cubeshaped rooms.

Four lifesized terracotta warriors-all magnificently detailed-stood in the corners of each room. In West's room, their mouths had been plugged with cement, while in Stretch's they yawned wide, revealing only darkness within.

"Don't step near the statues," Wizard warned. On the far side of each room was a low tunnel at floor level. Barely two feet square and pipelike, it was the only exit from the stone room.

Jack peered into his: it stretched for about a hundred yards, maybe more. Along its length were numerous tennisb.a.l.l.sized holes cut into the floor, all of which had been filled with concrete.

"Spike holes," Wizard said. "Stretch?"

"We got a tunnel down here, low to the ground, looks long, and it appears we can only get through it by crawling on our stomachs. Lots of holes in its floor."

Jack said, "Careful with those holes. Iron spikes."