Wizard found an inscription above his tunnel, this time accompanied by a single lever that could be pushed up or down. The inscription read: "Genius," Wizard said. "It's the Chinese symbol for 'genius.'"

At either extremity of the lever were two images: above it was a carving of a beautiful tree, below it was a picture of a very plain seed.

"Ah..." Wizard said, nodding. "'To see things in the seed, that is genius.' Another maxim of Laozi. Pull the lever down, Jack."

West did so.

"OK, Stretch, you should be safe," Wizard said into his radio mike.

"Should be safe?" Scimitar scowled, looking at Stretch. "This whole situation troubles me greatly."

"It's a trust exercise. It's only troubling if you don't trust your friends."

Scimitar eyed Stretch for a long moment. "My sources tell me it was the Old Master himself who put that ma.s.sive price on your head. "

Stretch froze at the name. The "Old Master" was the nickname of a Mossad legend, General Mordechai Muniz, a former head of the Mossad who many said, even in retirement, was still the most influential figure in the organization the puppetmaster who pulled the strings of those ostensibly in charge.

"Sixteen million dollars," Scimitar mused. "A good price, one of the highest ever. The Old Master wants to make an example of you."

"I chose loyalty to your brother over loyalty to the Mossad," Stretch said.

"And perhaps this is why you have become such friends. My brother thinks too often with his heart and not his head. Such thinking is foolish and weak. Look where it has got you."

Stretch thought about Pooh Bear up in the entry chamber. "I would lay down my life for your brother, because I believe in him. But you do not. Which makes me wonder, first son of the Sheik, what do you believe in?"

Scimitar did not answer that.

Shaking his head, Stretch crouched and entered the low tunnel, bellycrawling through it.

It was a tight journey, claustrophobic in the extreme. The tight, wet walls brushed against his shoulders.

Then he slithered over the first hole in the floor, and he held his breath, waiting for- -but nothing sprang up from it.

Scimitar followed close behind him and the two of them wriggled along the tunnel until they emerged into standing room once more, finding themselves at the top of a steep, downwardsloping hallway.

On the wall behind them, above the exit to the low tunnel, was a lever just like the one West had pulled, with the Chinese symbol for "knowledge" alongside it.

Above this lever was a picture of an ear below it, a picture of an eye.

Stretch relayed this to Wizard and West.

"The correct answer is the ear,"Wizard replied."Since you're in the Student's Way, your riddles are Confucian, Laozi's most talented and trusted student. Confucius said, 'I hear and I know, I see and I remember.' Knowledge is then hearing. As for us, once again, thanks to Mao's concreters, we don't need your help on this one."

THE GRAND HALL OF THE WARRIORS.

It took them a while, but soon West's team was through their low tunnel. Now, like Stretch and Scimitar, they stood at the top of a magnificent downwardsloping hallway.

It was absolutely beautiful-with soaring corbelled ceilings at least twenty feet high and lined with gigantic warrior statues, each one seven feet tall and bearing a weapon of some kind.

The hallway seemed to stretch for over a hundred yards, sloping sharply downward but with no stairs to get a foothold, delving deep into the bowels of the Earth. The floor was wet and slippery. Batterypowered lamps left by Mao's men lined the walls like dim runway lights.

Distantly, West heard something coming from the end of his superlong tunnel.

Voices.

Accompanied by the movement of lights and glowsticks.

It was Colonel Mao and his men, held up at a trap at the bottom end of the tunnel.

They'd caught up.

ASTRO CAME up beside West and they peered together down into the darkness, in the direction of the voices.

Without a word, Astro held up a grenade, this one with a yellow stripe on it.

West turned, saw it. "Do I even want to know what's in this one?"

"CSII. Variety of tear/nerve gas, with covering smoke," Astro said. "It's a little stronger than the usual kind of CS gas you use in hostage situations. Designed for situations like this, where you need to get past an enemy force holding an entryway but don't necessarily want to kill them. Although if you want to dothat- "

"Tears and unconsciousness will be fine, Lieutenant," West said. "I don't like killing someone if I don't have to. Max, oxygen kit."

At this point, Jack grabbed his trademark fireman's helmet and attached its full face mask and oxygen kit. The others did the same.

Moments later, three of Astro's yellowstriped grenades came bouncing down the hallway and entered the midst of Mao's Chinese force gathered at its base, at the edge of the abrupt vertical drop there.

Flash-bang!

Hissing gas and dense smoke engulfed the dozen or so Chinese troops. They instantly began coughing and gagging, their eyes watering uncontrollably.

Through this hazy gasfilled environment, three figures moved like ghosts.

Wearing fullface oxygen masks and moving quickly, Jack, Astro, and Wizard slipped between the screaming Chinese as they fell to the floor, losing consciousness-although Jack did take the opportunity to give Colonel Mao a sharp blow with the b.u.t.t of his Desert Eagle on the way past, breaking the Chinese commander's nose and dropping him.

Then he came to the spot where the hallway's floor just fell away into nothingness.

"Mother of G.o.d..." he breathed.

Mao and his men had set up a diesel generator and some arc lights to illuminate the area, and now, in the haze of the gas, the vast s.p.a.ce that opened up before Jack took on a mystical, almost otherworldly appearance.

A vast chasm dropped away in front of him-perhaps thirty yards across and of unknown depth. On its far side was a sheer polished stone wall. This wall was literally covered in round holes, hundreds of them laid out in a grid, each about the size of a human hand.

And in the exact center of the wall was a small square tunnel, heading deeper into the mountain .

Standing on the edge of the chasm, Jack kicked a dropped Chinese gun over the edge.

It sailed down into the darkness.

Silence as it fell.

Long silence.

Then, finally, a distantclunksplonk.

"Whoa..." West whispered.

"Jack!"a voice called both in his earpiece and from somewhere nearby."Down here!"

West looked down, and saw Stretch and Scimitar poking their heads out from an identical ledge sixty feetbelow his.

The only walkways connecting their tunnels to the magnificent dotted wall were a pair of narrow ledges-one for each hallway: West's higher one ran along the shortleft hand connecting wall Stretch's lower one ran along theright side one.

Along each narrow ledge were more of the handsized holes-handholds, Jack guessed, but lethal ones. Each hole, he noticed, every single one, had a small carved Chinese symbol above it.

"Cla.s.sic Chinese tomb trap," Wizard said. "The easy way to spot a grave robber in ancient China was to spot the guy with the missing hand. Those are handchopping holes.

Some have grips inside them, to help you climb. All the others have springloaded scissor blades. If you know which ones are safe, you get across. If you don't, you lose a hand and in all likelihood fall to your death."

"What's the clue?" West said.

"It's here." Wizard went to a panel on the wall, on which was written: "'The greatest treasure,'" Wizard translated. "What, according to Laozi, was the greatest treasure?" he asked aloud. "Ah..."

He recalled the old philosopher's axiom in his mind: Health is the greatest possession, Contentment the greatest treasure, Confidence the greatest friend, Nonbeing the greatest joy.

"It's contentment," he said to Jack.

Sure enough, one of the handholes on the lefthand ledge bore the symbol for contentment--above it. So did the third one, and the fifth, and several more.

"Go!" Wizard said. "Go! Go! Go!"

Wasting no time and trusting his friend, Jack plunged his hand into the first hole...

...and found a handgrip.

Then he was off, out along the ledge, above the bottomless black of the subterranean chasm.

Stretch called in: "We got an inscription, too:'The n.o.blest path to wisdom.'"

Following close behind Jack, Wizard said, "That's an easy one. Look for the Chinese symbol for 'reflection.' It's a Confucian saying: 'There are three paths to wisdom: first, by reflection, which is n.o.blest second, by imitation, which is easiest and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.'"

After Wizard described it, Stretch said,"Got it. It's above every second or third handhole."

"Use only those holes, Stretch," Jack said. "If you use any of the others, you'll lose a hand. See you on the other side."

At length, Jack came to the great pockmarked wall itself, and saw that again every single hole had a symbol carved above it.

It made for a bamboozling sight, and to the uninitiated, it would have seemed totally incomprehensible.

But following the holes that bore the symbol for "contentment," he found a continuing path that ended at the square hole in the center of the polished wall.

Freeclimbing across the sheer slippery wall, high above the deep black chasm below it, he traced a winding path from the left, while Stretch and Scimitar followed a similar trail from their ledge on the lower right: And all the while, Mao and his crew lay on the floor of the hallway, a few of them groaning weakly on the edge of consciousness.

Jack, Wizard, and Astro came to the square hole, where they were soon joined by Stretch and Scimitar.

"Looks like we go together from here," Jack said.

He cracked a glowstick and tossed it into the dark hole, revealing another ultralong tunnel, squareshaped this time, big enough to crawl through and stretching away into distant darkness.

"What choice do we have?" he said to no one.

And so he hoisted himself up and climbed into the square hole and guided by his helmet flashlight and another glowstick, disappeared into the pa.s.sage.

THE CAVERN OF THE TOWER.

THE CAVERN OF THE TOWER.

AFTER CRAWLING for about 600 feet, Jack emerged in a dark chamber of some kind, where he could stand easily. He removed his breathing mask.

For some reason, however, his flashlight couldn't penetrate the darkness around him. He could see a lake of some kind immediately in front of him, but no walls. Only black, infinite black. It must have been a large s.p.a.ce.

He cracked a glowstick, but it revealed little more.

So he fired his flare gun...

...and beheld the s.p.a.ce in which he stood.

"Hooah..." he breathed.

In his time, Jack West Jr. had seen some big caverns, including one in the southeastern mountains of Iraq that had housed the fabled Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

But even that cavern paled in comparison to this one.

It took seven more flares to light it fully.

The cavern that West saw wasimmense -utterly immense roughly circular in shape and at least five hundred yards in diameter.

It was also a masterpiece of structural engineering: it was a natural cave, sure, but one that had been shaped by the work of men-tens of thousands of men, Jack guessed-to be even more impressive than Nature had originally made it.

Eight towering pillars of stone held up the cavern's soaring ceiling. They had clearly once been limestone stalact.i.tes that, over thousands of years, had eventually met their matching stalagmites on the floor of the cavern, forming into thick roofsupporting columns. But somewhere in history, a Chinese workarmy had shaped them into beautifully decorated columns, complete with faux guard balconies.

But it was the column in the very center of the cavern that dominated the scene.

Thicker than the others and entirely manmade, it looked like a glorious tower, a great twentystory fortified tower, reaching all the way to the cavern's superhigh ceiling, where it joined with it.

It was easily the most intricately decorated of all the columns: it bore many balconies, doorways, archer slits, and at its base, four sets of rising stone stairs leading to four separate stone doorways.

Surrounding the tower and each of the other columns was a wide perfectly still lake of a dark oillike liquid that was certainly not water. It glinted dully in the light of West's flares. Stretching across it from West's position all the way to the tower in the middle of the cavern was a long series of sevenfoothigh steppingstones-a bridge of sorts, but one that no doubt possessed its own nasty surprises.

"Liquid mercury," Astro said, raising his gas mask to briefly sniff the lake's fumes. "You can tell by the odor. Highly toxic. Clogs your pores, poisons you right through the skin.