by Rob Jones
“What happened?” Joumari said, poking a nervous face outside the door and seeing the two unconscious guards.
“We had a small disagreement about visiting times,” Hawke said.
Freshly armed, they moved through the shadows until they reached the custody area. When the three men approached Khatibi’s cell and pulled the keys out the other prisoners began to roar and whoop and bang on their cell doors. Despite the location Hawke was surprised by the strong smell of hash in the cell block, and moved fast to unlock Khatibi’s door.
Hawke peered inside and saw a short man with perfectly combed hair and an expensive jacket. A pair of tortoiseshell glasses perched on an aquiline nose and concealed two dark brown eyes. “Who are…”
Before the sentence had left his lips, Hawke and Reaper burst in and grabbed Khatibi giving him no chance to respond or even talk. Both men had trained for extractions like this and both of them had done it more than once for real so it took seconds to drag him down the corridor and through the reception area.
As they burst into the street a number of soldiers had positioned themselves on the roof of the police station and were putting some heavy assault rifle fire on the Pajero.
Hawke was surprised by the speed of their reaction and knew there was no way they could cross the street and get to the Pajero without getting turned to Swiss cheese by those rifles. He made a split-second decision and yelled at Lexi to get away and a second later the Pajero was skidding along the avenue. He breathed a sigh of relief as it turned a heavy left and got out of range of the snipers.
But he was still exposed and so was Reaper and Khatibi.
“What now?” Reaper said.
“This way!”
Hawke and the Frenchman grabbed Khatibi’s arms and hauled him up a flight of steps which led into a small garden area to the south of the police station. “This place is like a rabbit warren,” he said. “We’ll lose them in here and coordinate with Lea to rendezvous with the car.”
“Who are you?” said the old man, in a panic. “What do you want?”
“Relax, Professor Khatibi,” Hawke said, grunting as he pounded up the steep, blue steps. “We want to talk to you about Atlantis.”
“About Atlantis?” Khatibi said. “Are you crazy?”
Hawke was considering how to answer this when a chunk of wall twelve inches from his head exploded in a blast of bright blue plaster and sprayed all over him. He turned to see the soldiers were closing fast, able to move much quicker without the extra weight of a hostage.
Reaper pulled the PAMAS from his holster and opened fire on the soldiers. They hit the deck and rolled to the sides of the stone alleyway. “I can’t keep them back forever, Joe…”
“What do you mean… Atlantis?” Khatibi asked again. “This is nonsense.”
“We haven’t got time to explain,” Hawke said, fixing his eyes on Khatibi. “Will you come with us?”
A second gunshot exploded into the stone steps at their feet and kicked up another cloud of the blue paint and fragments of rock chips.
“We have no time. Do you want to help us find it or not?”
“I…”
Hawke rolled his eyes and pulled his phone from his pocket. A second later the professor gasped when he saw the photos they had taken of the carvings back in the Tomb of Tanit. “Ya Allah! Where did you get this?”
A third shot nicked Khatibi’s shoulder and tore his jacket. His eyes widened with horror as he realized he was now a fugitive. “I have little choice.”
“In that case run for it!”
The three men sprinted up the stone steps and rounded a corner. To the east a crescent moon was rising above the ghostly blue town.
“So what now?” Reaper asked,
Hawke pulled out his phone again and started to make a call.
“What are you doing?” Khatibi asked nervously.
“Nil desperandum, Dr Khatibi,” Hawke said. “Just calling a cab and then we’re out of here.”
“But we need to get to my house. I need my papers.”
Hawke gave him a look and sighed. What is it with professors and papers? “Fine,” he said. “We’ll take the cab to your place.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
They coordinated with Lea as they sprinted through the twists, turns and winding steps of the Blue Pearl, always one step ahead of the local police and soldiers. Turning a corner in the moonlight, they found themselves at the top of a fight of stone steps, and waiting at the bottom for them was their ride.
“There!” Hawke yelled.
They sprinted down the steps, dodging the bullets from their pursuers who were now barking orders into radios.
“Get in!” Hawke said to Khatibi.
“But can I really trust…”
Before he could finish his sentence they were bundling him into the back of the Pajero. It was a tight squeeze inside but Scarlet had improvised by ordering Ryan into the trunk space at the back. Now Lexi hit the gas leaving the local police with nothing but a shower of grit in their faces and a cloud of diesel fumes drifting slowly up into the twilight sky.
“I enjoyed that!” Hawke said. “Last time I did anything like that was when we got a journalist away from the Taliban.”
“Enjoyed it?” Scarlet said. “It was a total pig’s breakfast.”
“All right,” he conceded with a mischievous grin. “It wasn’t the best exfiltration.”
“You can say that again,” Lexi said, glancing in her mirror. “Where are we going?”
“To hell in a handbasket,” Scarlet said.
Hawke gave her a look. “To Professor Khatibi’s place. He needs his notes.”
“Ah… notes,” Ryan said, tapping his temple with his forefinger. “All my notes are up here.”
“Like all your friends, you mean?”
“I do not have imaginary friends!”
Khatibi huffed. “Who are you people?”
Lea showed him her ID, issued by Eden.
“You know Richard Eden?” he said.
“Yes,” Lea said. “We’re all on the same side here.”
“All right,” Khatibi said, beginning to relax. “Where did you get the pictures I saw on this man’s phone?” He gestured to Hawke.
“In Tanit’s tomb,” Ryan said nonchalantly.
“Tanit’s tomb?” Khatibi replied. “Is this some kind of joke?”
“No joke,” Scarlet said, fishing a crumpled packet from her pocket and jamming a bent cigarette in her lip. “True story.”
Khatibi looked at them like they were insane. “Tanit was a goddess…a mythological figure! You are clearly deranged.”
Lea held up her phone and showed him more photos of the symbols Ryan had taken in the Atlas Mountains. Khatibi leaned in closer, a look of interest growing on his face. “Where did you take this photograph?”
“Same place as the others, Doc,” Hawke said. “The Dadès Gorge.”
“You mean the Dadès Gorge in the Atlas Mountains here in Morocco?”
“Yes,” Lea said. “We found the tomb of Tanit there but it was looted by a man named Dirk Kruger.”
Khatibi’s face fell. “Dirk Kruger? I hate that man!”
“Join the club. We think he stole some kind of key, and there was an inscription in the tomb that referred to the Pillars of Hercules, but beyond that we need your help.”
“Are you with us?” Hawke asked.
“Yes but I still need my notes!”
As he spoke, Lexi skidded to a halt outside his house and seconds later they were filing inside his home.
Khatibi called out for his brother but there was no reply. “We don’t have long,” he said. “This is the first place they will look for me.”
Hawke watched as the professor began fumbling about through piles of disordered papers stacked up all over his front room. Clutter filled every corner – cups of cold mint tea, a damaged backgammon board, two broken television sets, at least half a dozen ashtrays and even an old oud being used as a boo
kend. Above the desk was a fine-looking scimitar, which Khatibi proudly described as an original Ottoman antique.
“Hurry up, professor!” Lea said, glancing nervously out the window.
“I have them!” he said proudly. “My filing system looks messy I know, but I can find everything when I need to – ah wait.”
“What is it?” Hawke said, glancing at his watch.
“These are not the papers we need.” He put them back down and resumed his search through the endless piles of junk.
“Bloody hell, you could lose a corpse in here,” Scarlet said.
“Aha! At last, I have them.” Khatibi waved a thin sheaf of papers in the air victoriously. “We can go.”
“Great, let’s get out of here,” Hawke said.
The professor took a closer look at the papers and shook his head. “No…no – wrong ones. Sorry!”
He crouched down his knees and started going through more stacks under the desk, throwing any unwanted papers out behind him where they drifted back to the floor like giant snowflakes.
“This is ridiculous!” Reaper said.
“This is why you should keep your notes in your head,” Ryan said smugly.
“We’re not all fucking polymorphs, dweeb,” Scarlet said.
“Polymaths, darling,” Ryan replied. “A polymorph is…”
Scarlet pointed a black fingernail in his face. “Shut up!”
“Got it.”
Khatibi finally spoke from beneath the desk. “Now I have them!”
“Are you very sure, professor?” Lea said gently.
“Yes, absolutely… yes!” He crawled out backwards, smacking his head on the bottom of the desk as he emerged back into the light. He cursed in Arabic and then stood and faced them. “Here they are. We may go!”
“Too late,” Reaper said. “Our friends are here.”
The door smashed in and soldiers rushed into the house.
Khatibi looked like he needed to change his trousers and then surrender, but Hawke knew there was no talking your way out of a situation like this. From the authorities’ point of view they had broken into a public building, snatched a citizen currently being held in custody and then fired on both policemen and soldiers. It would take months to sort out and those months would be spent split up from each other and in prisons all over the country.
So he exploded into action, and the rest of the team needed no orders to join him, with only Khatibi scuttling away. He hid back under his desk and covered his head with the sheaf of research papers in his shaking hands.
Camacho grabbed the first man, immediately disarming him and punching him in the face, but he was tougher than he looked and fought back hard, improvising by snatching Khatibi’s scimitar off the wall and whirling around with the vicious blade to get the feel of it.
Camacho took a step back and searched for a defensive weapon while the man grinned and pushed forward. He slashed the blade through the dusty air of Khatibi’s apartment with a metallic whoosh sound and almost took off his head, but the American ducked just in time and staggered backwards away from the sword.
The man pounded closer, but Camacho reacted like lightning and smacked the sword out of his hand. He brought his fist up hard into the man’s temple and knocked him out cold.
Hawke looked up to see Scarlet struggling with another soldier.
“Any help, Cairo?”
“No, I’ve got it thanks.”
She ducked and spun around striking him off balance with the heel of her boot.
“He’s got a hookah pipe, Cairo.”
“I know!” she said excitedly. “That’s even better than a fez.”
“Cairo, correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t you called Cairo because you were born in Cairo?”
She spun around again and knocked the man out with a second axe kick. “True story, Josiah.”
“So why the mindless amusement about hookah pipes and fez hats?”
“Just trying to lighten the load and put a smile on your face.”
Another soldier burst into the room, and Scarlet snatched up Khatibi’s hookah pipe from the unconscious man’s grip and rammed it into her new opponent’s face. The pipe’s windguard tore into his cheek and he howled in agony in response to the wound before knocking the pipe to the floor.
Scarlet snatched the pipe back up. “Don’t you ever break my hookah pipe,” she said, and gripped the pipe by the water jar as she swung it at the man’s head. The hose flicked out like a whip and lashed his eyes, causing him to stumble backward and grunt in pain as he reached up and rubbed his eyes with his hands.
She struck again. It came to a sudden stop when the pipe’s plate smashed the bridge of his nose. With the bone and septal cartilage now crushed down into his nasal cavity, the man’s instinct was to take a step back and reach up to his face with his hands.
As he desperately tried to measure the damage done, Camacho stormed forward, grabbed a heavy marquetry chair and brought it down on the soldier’s head, wincing as the back of the chair smashed to pieces. The man dropped down to the floor, almost out for the count and covered in a shower of mother-of-pearl inlay that had popped out of the teak panel with the force of the blow.
He groaned and tried to get up, but Scarlet seized the day and brought the pipe down on his head. The heavy glass water jar at the base of the hookah shattered on contact with the man’s skull and he went down like a bag of lead weights.
“Turns out all he needed was a good hookah,” Scarlet said.
“I like your style,” Camacho said, and winked at her. “Babe.”
Hawke was wrestling with another soldier now who was approaching fast with his gun raised. A yard from Hawke he suddenly toppled over to reveal the winking face of Lexi Zhang standing behind him. She was holding Khatibi’s lampshade, and had used the chrome tube like a kendo shinai sword to belt the soldier around the back of his head and knock him unconscious.
“Thanks, I owe you.”
“Yes… you do,” she said and fled into the hall to take down another of the men. A second later she was making short work of the last man in the hall, essentially using his face to practice some Kung Fu hook kicks she had been learning. The man looked like he’d rather fight a starving lion, but there was no escaping the wrath of Agent Dragonfly tonight as she knocked him out of the hall and through the kitchen. Another kick sent him tumbling out into the rear courtyard. He tried to get up but the blows were relentless.
The final strike sent him stumbling backwards until he tripped over the small wall running around Khatibi’s fountain and he went arse-over-backwards into the water, cracking the back of his head on the flow control cap. He collapsed and the blood from his wound spilled into the bubbling water, turning the zellige tilework from terracotta to crimson. Outside, the local muezzin was reciting the adhan, and the Islamic call to prayer now mixed with the noise of the chaotic scene inside Khatibi’s apartment.
“I hate that these guys can’t last longer,” Lexi whined to Ryan.
“Said the actress to the bench of bishops,” he replied.
“Don’t overdo it,” Scarlet called out from across the room.
“Sorry.”
A quiet voice squeaked from under the desk. “Is it over?” It was Khatibi.
“Yes, and thanks for the help,” Scarlet said. During the fight the overhead light had gotten knocked and was now swinging back and forth creating crazy moving shadows over the cluttered room.
“Ah, you’re welcome!” he said. “Because while you were brawling like thugs I found what we’ll need when we get to the Pillars of Hercules.” He pushed his head out from behind the safety of the desk and looked up at them, blinking at the swaying light bulb. “Shall we?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The Eurocopter’s powerful Turboméca Arriel’s turboshaft powerplant was cruising them high above the Moroccan clouds. They reflected the bright light of the crescent moon back up to the chopper, almost as bright as day. Everyone was tired, and m
ost were sleeping, but Hawke, Lea, Ryan and Maria were awake and counting the minutes down until their arrival at Jebel Musa, the Mount of Moses.
The Pillars of Hercules was the ancient name given to the two elevations either side of the Straits of Gibraltar – the Rock of Gibraltar to the north and Jebel Musa to the south. Some had argued that the southern pillar was Monte Hacho in Ceuta, a Spanish city in Africa which bordered Morocco. Khatibi had spent his life studying the region and was certain the southern pillar was Jebel Musa.
On the flight, Khatibi and Ryan used the professor’s research to work out the inscription was also indicating some kind of temple, and given Jebel Musa was on the tourist trail, that meant it had to be underground.
“So we’re definitely looking for an entrance inside the mountain,” Khatibi repeated.
Scarlet cupped her hands on the glass so she could see below and peered dismissively out the chopper’s window. “So that pointy little mountain is the southern Pillar of Hercules?”
Khatibi nodded. “Yes.”
“Not more bloody potholing,” was all she said, and then she leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes again.
Lea looked at the twin peaks far below them. “So what’s the skinny on old Heracles, Ry. Why did he get these named after him?”
“During his Twelve Labours, this was the furthest west he got… simple. Back in those days, if you were Greek, then this was pretty much the end of the world. It was the tenth challenge, when he had to collect the Cattle of Geryon.”
“Now he’s talking about cows,” Scarlet said. “Heaven help us.”
“Let him finish, Cairo,” Maria snapped.
Camacho stepped in. “Just everyone calm down. Ryan – please.”
“I’m not talking about cows per se, but Hercules’s mission to cross the Libyan desert to fetch them. It was one of his twelve labours. There are several references made by writers such as Pindar or Strabo that refer to the limits of his journey in the far west as being marked by the Pillars of Hercules, and Plato even goes so far to state that it is beyond these pillars that Atlantis is to be found.”
