by Rob Jones
“Shut it, Ryan,” Lea said. “I don’t think Joe’s in the mood.”
Scarlet slapped the back of Ryan’s head as she walked past him to the front where Hawke was savagely beating a giant pandan into submission with his machete. A lizard darted across one of the seven-meter leaves as he finally hacked a way around it.
“Having fun?”
“Oh, yes. This is my favorite thing to do of all time,” he said.
“We should have just driven down the drive,” Zeke said.
Reaper laughed. “Good one.”
“As plans go,” Scarlet said. “That’s a real turd rolled in glitter, boy.”
“Eh?”
“The drive to this property is three miles long, boy,” said Scarlet. “With a gatehouse at both ends. Something tells me we might just get rumbled before reaching Razak if we tried your plan, don’t you?”
“All right, take it easy woman.”
Scarlet was holding her machete at shoulder height ready for another swing when she turned and looked at Ryan, her lips pursed.
“Cairo,” he squeaked. “I meant take it easy, Cairo.”
Scarlet said nothing. She turned and continued hacking away at the jungle up beside Hawke.
Lexi laughed. “You’re such a pussy cat, Bale.”
Some token laughs, but everyone was getting tired. The air was hot and humid and the sun burned down through the tropical canopy, scorching their necks and backs. Ezekial and Nikolai surprised everyone by their strength. Neither whined or complained and they never fell a step behind the rest of the team.
“What made you join the Athanatoi, Kolya?” Lea asked.
He paused before speaking, and when he did his thick Russian accent sounded odd in the steamy jungle. “My family were killed in Moscow when I was a child. They were killed by accident in a gangland drive-by shooting.”
“My God,” Lea said, her voice soft and respectful. “I’m so sorry.”
He shrugged. “I was a small child and I barely remember them or my older sister, but I know that until that day life was perfect. They loved me and I loved them. They both worked hard in their restaurant business and provided me with a solid childhood. I never went hungry and we had lots of friends who came and went into the restaurant scrounging for free dinners. It was a good time, but when they died I was an orphan with no family and the state put me into the care system.”
“Tough,” Hawke said.
“Yes, very tough. The little boy from the restaurant who raised a laugh serving customers and who helped his papa clean the dishes or wash the windows found himself in a brutal dog-eat-dog place where you had no friends. I was beaten and thrashed and robbed until I joined a gang and swore allegiance to the same sort of scum that had killed my parents.”
“Man,” Zeke whistled. “Talk about a shitty time, Kolya.”
“I got strong. I vowed when I was older, I would find any way I could to get my revenge on the gang who killed my parents. If you search hard enough, you always find and I found the Athanatoi while I was still a teenager. They sensed my vulnerability and drew me under their wing. I started to work my way through their hierarchy.”
Nikolai stopped dead on the spot, his eyes hardening like steel. “And one day when I was strong enough I killed every last member of the gang who murdered my parents, and then the next day I killed every single one of the boys who had bullied and tortured me at the orphanage. I do not regret it.”
A long silence followed his words, which seemed to hang from the trees surrounding them like dead animals in traps.
“I don’t blame you,” Scarlet said. “I know what it’s like, Kolya. My parents were murdered when I was a child too.”
“I am sorry.”
She gave him a reluctant smile. In the wildest of circumstances, she had found someone who really understood what had happened to her all those years ago.
“But why betray the Athanatoi?” Ryan asked.
“Betray?”
“Back in the monastery,” he said. “When you killed the man trying to kill Lea.”
“I did not betray the Athanatoi. They betrayed me. When the Oracle found out I had murdered those people without his sanctioning their deaths, he told me I had betrayed the Order and would never have the power of immortality revealed to me. That is why I was in brown robes.”
“I wondered about that,” Reaper said. “Most of the cultists wear black robes, or black suits.”
“The brown robes are for the lower orders. We are the servants, not full acolytes. I realized I had been hurt again, and decided to end my association with them. That is why I killed him and helped you. That is why I gave you the Codex. If the Athanatoi ever find me, I will be executed where I stand.”
“Holy crapola.” Zeke took off his cowboy hat and wiped his brow. “Nasty.”
“You’re with us now,” Hawke said. “We don’t tolerate dishonesty or treachery, but if you’re straight with us then you’re in. You heard it from the boss himself back on the ship.”
“Yes, but after this mission I will return to Russia. I must leave this world behind. All I want is a farm in the countryside to the south of Moscow.”
“Up to you, mate.”
Merciless tropical heat crushed them like a vice and drained their energy like they were running a marathon. This was a steamy landscape itching with cockroaches and silkworms and mosquitoes. Ryan pointed out a praying mantis to a yawning Scarlet. Hawke kicked his way around a patch of blood-red bromeliads.
Another punishing hour passed before the rainforest started to thin out and allow an easier passage through to the western approaches of Razak’s sprawling plantation.
“We did a lot of this in the Legion.” Reaper untied his skull and cross bones bandana and wrung out the sweat before tying it back on. “It’s not so bad.”
Hawke laughed for the first time that day. “If you say so, Vincent.”
“Hey, it’s…”
Before he could say it, the rest of team answered in unison. “It’s Reaper… I’m on a mission!”
Now Reaper laughed. “Am I that predictable?”
“Yes.”
Reaper gave a token laugh as he lit a cigarette, struggling to ignite the match in the damp air. “Tell me, Ryan,” he said, thinking of his twin boys. “If it’s real, what does this Land of the Gods mean for us, for my kids?”
“Theories of antediluvian civilization aren’t uncommon. The word antediluvian itself just means ‘before the deluge’ and by that we mean flood – as in the Bible.”
Scarlet hacked at some undergrowth, the sweat running off her back. “Here beginneth the lesson.”
“Tell me more,” Lexi said. “Those of us who can read are interested.”
A howl of laughter.
“Those who went to Sunday School will already know that the two major events in Genesis describe the creation and fall of humans and then the massive global flood. What makes this so fascinating is how these flood myths aren’t restricted to the Christian Bible and are found in cultures all over the world.”
“Like where?”
“Most ancient cultures do, to be honest. Aztecs, Mayans… even Australian aboriginal dreamtime stories. The most important one is found carved in the Sumerian King List.”
“What is that?” Nikolai said.
“It’s a stone tablet from the Bronze Age which lists all the various kings of ancient Sumer, and it includes references to antediluvian kings. Some dispute these were real rulers but instead just legends, but I think we all know better than to believe this now. Anyway, tucked away on this tablet is a very clear reference to a king named Ubara-Tutu of Shurupakk. He was the very last king of antediluvian Sumer and his reign of over eighteen thousand years was brought to a brutal end by the deluge, just like Noah’s father Lamech. It says so right there on the stone tablet – and then the flood swept over.”
“Sorry, he was king for eighteen thousand years?” Lea asked.
“Eighteen thousand, six hundred t
o be exact.”
Hawke stopped hacking and turned. “So, he was another of these immortals.”
Ryan shrugged. “Either that or he had a hell of a health plan.”
“I remember reading about how people in the beginning of the Bible all lived for a very long time,” Reaper said.
“There were seven in all, Ryan said. “Each of them lived over nine hundred years – in order these were Adam, Seth Enosh, Kenan, Jared, Methuselah and Noah. The most important detail was that they were all born in the time before the great deluge.”
“People just don’t live that long anymore,” Lexi said.
“Not even if they quit smoking,” said Scarlet.
Lexi sighed. “I was going to say, that it’s like it was a totally different world back then.”
“That’s the heart of antediluvian theory,” Ryan said. “That another civilization, or world, if you prefer, existed before the history books. That a totally different culture inhabited this planet that we basically know nothing about.”
“Freaks me out how all those cultures had flood myths,” Lea said. “They were all so far apart they couldn’t be sharing each other’s stories.”
Ryan turned to her with his serious face. “Oh yeah, the deluge story is real. There’s no doubt. Fact is, we teach our kids that humans developed over a certain time period, essentially evolving from the domain eukaryota just over two billion years ago. So far so good. This evolved into the family of great apes around twenty-eight million years ago, and then to chimpanzees around twelve million years ago but it wasn’t until maybe five million years ago that the subtribe hominina split away from chimps and slowly morphed into the genus homo. That happened around two and a half million years ago. Humans as we know them only turned up around three to eight hundred thousand years ago.”
“As we know it is the bit that scares me,” Zeke said.
“But are we getting to the end of this lecture?” Scarlet said. “Your droning is almost as tiring as this humidity.”
“My point,” he said with emphasis, “is that we pretty much date human history, and therefore the history of civilization back to just a few hundred thousand years ago, but what if there was another branch of humans – or something similar to us – evolved from the great apes ten or twelve million years ago? Our entire history would be wrong. If there were intelligent, civilized cultures on this planet millions of years ago, everything we thought we knew about ourselves would be wrong.”
He turned to Reaper with a look of apology on his face. “That’s what it all means for your kids. They could simply be the latest in a long line of cyclical civilizations, each one either dying off or wiping itself out before the next cycle begins.”
Ryan’s words were subdued in the dense thicket, almost drowned out by the howl of insects. The moment was ended when Hawke finally broke through the last wall of heavy vegetation, his boots crushing the damp earth of the jungle floor beneath. He paused where he stood before turning to the rest of his team. “Looks like we’re here, kids.”
When he stepped out of the way, they all saw the corpse at the same time. It had once been a man, but was now almost skeletal. Tied to an enormous kempas tree with ropes, the blindfolded man had been killed where he sat.
“This is odd.” Hawke crouched down in front of the skeleton until he was face to face with the skull.
Lea stepped over. “What?”
“If you look through the eye socket you can see a perfect hole burnt right through the trunk.”
“Oh yeah!”
Ryan looked confused. “Eh? Let me have a look.”
He leaned forward with his hands on his knees and peered through the eye socket. “Looks charred inside the tree.”
“What did this?” Lexi asked.
“I know it sounds crazy,” Hawke said. “But the first thing that struck my mind was a laser of some kind.”
“Me too,” Ryan said.
“I know of no such weapon that could do this, mes amis.”
Zeke shook his head. “Me neither. Kolya?”
“Nyet.”
“But look here.” Hawke pointed at the man’s rib cage. “Those are normal crossbow bolts, so it looks like he was attacked with more than one kind of weapon.”
Scarlet looked at the skeleton without pity. “Whatever killed him, his body was just left here for the insects to devour.”
What was left of his skin was now dried leather stretched in patches across his sun-bleached bones. A hand-painted sign hung around his neck, and his lower jaw was hanging off at a grim angle. When Hawke touched it with the toe of his boot a cockroach scuttered out of one of the eye sockets.
Lea grabbed her mouth and turned away. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
“What does the sign say, mate?”
Ryan stepped up to the base of the towering kempas tree and squinted. “Pencuri is Malay for thief. The other words are damaged by the rain. Looks like saya seorang pencuri though.” He turned to the others. “I am a thief.”
Hawke pulled one of the normal crossbow bolts from a gap between the man’s ribs. “Looks like our Mr Razak has a zero-tolerance approach to employee misbehaviour.”
Lexi raised an eyebrow. “I can hardly wait to meet him.”
Hawke silenced her with his hand and signaled everyone to crouch low on the ground. He scanned the tree line to the east. “I think we have company.”
His words were punctuated by the sound of a crossbow bolt racing past them and shooting through one of the skull’s eye sockets, shattering the skull and burying itself an inch deep in the trunk of the kempas tree.
“Take cover!” Hawke yelled.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“No! Stay where you are!”
The command echoed around the jungle. Gradually, Hawke noticed at least two dozen heavily camouflaged men break though the tree line surrounding them. Each was holding a submachine gun.
“And drop your weapons!”
He signaled to the others to lower their guns and take a step back, raising their hands as they did so. The leader of the small army walked over to them, a pistol in his hand and a cruel smile on his lean, sweaty face. He stared at Hawke before turning to the skeleton lashed to the tree trunk. “I see you met Ibrahim. How’s he doing? He’s not very talkative these days.”
“Most people with a crossbow bolt through their eyes aren’t.”
“Bring them back to the base!”
Hawke held Razak’s eyes as his goons cuffed their hands behind their backs and ordered them to march through some long grass and into some trees to the east. The walk was short but hot and tiring. When they arrived, they saw a small clearing with some military tents dotted around.
“Welcome to my field HQ.” Razak gestured for Hawke and the others to step inside one of the tents. “Please, come out of the heat and away from the mosquitoes.” He turned to a man at his side and ordered that he remove their cuffs. “You’re not going anywhere in this jungle, that’s for sure.”
Lea scowled at him. “You can’t do this to us,” Razak.”
He slipped his hands in his pockets and strolled to where the mosquito mesh draped down to the ground. “Am I supposed to be impressed that you know my name? Many people do. Ibrahim over there certainly did. He tried to sleep with my daughter. Big mistake.”
“You should be in prison, you psycho!” Zeke said.
He laughed. “Men like me do not go to prison – we’re too busy searching for rings.”
Hawke caught the fear in Lea’s eyes. “What did you just say?”
“Oh, you thought I believed there was just one ring?” There was a smugness in his voice, and a fiendish sparkle in his eye. He was clearly delighting in toying with them. “Please, you’re not so conceited to think that only the great ECHO team know the value of these rings?”
“I don’t understand,” Lea said. “The Codex was…”
Hawke gripped her arm. “Don’t tell him anything. He’s fishing.”
Raza
k’s smile faded. “I don’t go fishing, Englishman. Neither am I as stupid as you seem to think I am. You think you can break into my apartment or raid my plantation without me knowing about it? Without knowing who you are and what you want?”
Now, for the first time he brought his hand out of his pocket and held it up in front of their faces. They all saw it at once, sparkling dully in the diffused light of the tropical thunderstorm.
“The ring!” Lexi said.
Lea couldn’t take her eyes off it. “My God…”
“My Gods,” Razak emphasized, and then laughed again. “When I was a young man I inherited this rubber plantation from my father. As you can see, it’s a very substantial property and we are a very wealthy family and if you know your commodity prices then you will know that the price of rubber has gone up considerably in the last twenty years.”
“This is fascinating,” Ryan said. “I wish I had a notebook.”
“Silence!” Razak snapped.
“Don’t be too angry with him,” Scarlet said. “He’s always had a thing about rubber.”
Razak smacked his hand down on the table and brought the laughs to an abrupt end. “If this is amusing you perhaps one of you would like to see how young Ibrahim died, first hand?”
A man with a crossbow stepped forward, pulled a string back on his weapon and slotted a sharpened bolt down in the flight groove.
Razak waited for silence. “I thought not… As I was saying, the price of rubber is better now, but when my father died I was a very young man and back then the price of our commodity was flatlining, as you say.”
“What’s the point of this lecture?” Hawke said.
Razak ignored him. “I decided to expand the business and go into palm oil.”
“So you love orangutans as much as I do, then,” Lea said.
“Spare me, please,” Razak looked at her with contempt. “You couldn’t go fifteen seconds without using a product made with my palm oil. It’s a fascinating substance, but it requires the clearing of vast amounts of land in order to plant the oil palms. We started work the day after my father’s funeral, clearing some jungle in the north of the property, and that’s when we found it.”
