The Heretic's Treasure

by Scott Mariani

  There had been just a thin smattering of passengers gathered on the station platform in Cairo to board the night train, and so Ben wasn’t surprised to find the bar empty. The white-jacketed attendant had dark circles under his eyes, and served the double Scotch he asked for without a word. He sat there for a while, lost in thoughts that he hoped the drink would help to chase away. He wasn’t sorry when he sensed a movement behind him and turned to see another passenger wander into the bar. He was about thirty-five, dressed in a denim shirt and pressed jeans. He perched himself on one of the fixed stools, glanced amicably at Ben and asked the barman for a beer. He sounded Canadian, maybe from Toronto. Ben remembered him from the railway station where he’d been boarding the train with his wife and young son.

  It wasn’t long before they were engaged in the kind of easy, loose, noncommittal dialogue fellow travellers fall into to pass the time. The man’s name was Jerry Novak, and he was a computer salesman touring Egypt with his wife, Alice, and their boy, Mikey, who was seven. For the purposes of the conversation, Ben was a freelance travel journalist checking out the Cairo-Aswan rail route for a magazine.

  Drinks finished, they bade each other goodnight, and Ben started making his way back to his sleeping compartment. As he walked from carriage to carriage, he sensed that the train had slowed right down to a crawl. Up the corridor from his compartment, he met the guard coming back, accompanied this time by two plainclothes cops.

  ‘Is there a problem with the train?’ Ben asked the guard as he passed them.

  ‘Nothing to worry about, sir. We are experiencing minor engine trouble. Engineers are waiting at the next station, and we hope to be able to resume normal progress presently.’

  Back in the compartment, Kirby was still fast asleep on the bottom bunk. Ben clambered quietly up to the top and lay back on the narrow mattress, frustrated at the slow pace of the journey.

  Time passed, the luminous hands of his watch ticking slowly around. The train seemed to take forever to crawl to the next station and it was a long time before they got moving again. He could hear the voices and clinking tools as workmen fixed the engine problem. Eventually the whine of the diesel started up again, and the carriages gave a jerk as the locomotive took up the slack and moved off. The rumbling clatter grew as the train picked up speed again and Ben lay staring up into the darkness, feeling the vibration of the wheels on the tracks pulsating through the bunks and the thin plywood partition wall next to him.

  Sleep escaped him for a long, long time. Then, as the first fiery streaks of dawn began to light up the sky, he closed his eyes and felt himself drift. His body rocked gently with the motion of the train. His breathing was slow and shallow, his eyes closed. In his dreams, he was far away.

  The air was cool and tangy and the sea sparkled under the sun. He was standing on the polished white wood deck of a yacht. Warmth on his face. The whisper of the blue-green waters lapping at the hull.

  He heard a voice, and turned slowly to see where it was coming from.

  Standing at the end of the deck, the endless expanse of water behind him, was Harry Paxton. He wore a friendly smile, and his old military battledress from Makapela Creek.

  In front of him, her back clasped tightly to his body, was Zara. She was struggling against his grip, eyes full of fear. Against her right temple was the muzzle of the pistol Paxton was holding.

  Ben started running towards them, shouting ‘No! Let her go!’ But his voice was weak and, the faster he ran, the further Paxton and Zara seemed to shrink away from him, until the deck stretched out between him and them for hundreds of yards.

  Then it seemed to slope upwards more and more, so they appeared far above him. He clambered desperately up it, sliding back, struggling onwards, sliding back again, shouting ‘No! No!’ as he saw Paxton’s finger tighten on the trigger.

  The shattering gunshot made Ben jerk upright in his bunk and crack his head on the low ceiling of the sleeper compartment.

  Only a dream.

  But it wasn’t a dream. Kirby was thrashing and yelling in a startled panic on the lower bunk as more shots rang out, followed by a burst of automatic fire. Suddenly a line of holes was punched across the bodywork of the carriage. Thin beams of sunlight streamed in.

  Ben hurled himself down from his bunk. Still dazed from the nightmare, he staggered to the window and ripped up the blind. Out in the dawn light, about sixty yards away from the tracks where the scrub grass met the edge of the desert, four dusty 4x4 vehicles were bouncing and bucking at high speed over the sand, blowing up clouds of dust in their wakes and keeping pace with the train as it sailed along.

  Eight men inside, and they weren’t tourists. The lead vehicle was a black Nissan Patrol with spot lamps and bull bars. Behind it was a rusty Dodge SUV. The other two vehicles were what the army called ‘technicals’-big open-backed off-road pickup trucks with .50-calibre heavy machine guns mounted behind their cabs. Both of the fearsome weapons were manned by gunners wearing masks and dark glasses. Both were swivelled towards the train.

  Ben saw flame spit from their muzzles and threw himself to the floor as they strafed the carriages a second time and bullets punched through the flimsy bodywork, zinging everywhere. Broken glass blew inwards, and suddenly there was a stinging, sand-laden wind roaring through the compartment.

  Kirby was gibbering in horror, pressed flat to the floor. Ben jumped up, grabbed his arm, tore open the sleeper door and hauled him roughly out into the corridor. They crawled rapidly on their bellies as more bullets chewed the carriage to pieces and debris and shards of metal flew around them.

  Up the corridor and in the next carriage, Ben could see passengers screaming and running in panic. In the heaving, swaying space between carriages one of the plainclothes cops was clutching an MP5 and firing out of a window at the attackers.

  As Ben watched, more gunfire blasted through the train and the cop was thrown back by multiple bullet strikes. Blood hit the wall behind him. His weapon went spinning to the floor as he collapsed.

  Ben ran back inside the compartment to grab the canvas holdall from the luggage rack. Glanced through the shattered window just in time to catch a glimpse of the front passenger inside the black Nissan. For one split second they locked eyes.

  Kamal.

  Then one of the pickups drew up level between Kamal’s vehicle and the train, and Ben lost sight of him. But there was something else to worry about in the back of the wildly swinging, bouncing truck. Ben recognised the familiar shape of the weapon that was swinging around to bear on the train. A Soviet RPG-7 anti-tank weapon, its distinctive conical snout lining up on its target, ready to launch a high-explosive missile straight into its flank.

  Ben ripped open the zipper of the holdall and wrenched out his FN rifle. He raced to load a 40mm grenade into the launcher tube under the stubby barrel, every muscle and nerve in his body screaming move, move. Ignoring the sixty-mile-an-hour sandstorm that was lashing through the broken window, he poked the rifle out through the jagged glass and quickly acquired the weaving, bouncing truck in his sights. Through the scope he could see the gunner’s face screwed up in concentration as he readied himself to fire.

  A broadside duel to the death. It was just a question of who could shoot first. Within a fraction of a second, the FN’s laser rangefinder was sending data to the fire control system computer. Distance to target flickered up on the LCD display. The elevation diode in the sight reticule flashed red. Ben tilted the muzzle up a few degrees and the diode turned green and he fired.

  The FN flashed and boomed. Before the RPG could let off its missile, the 40mm grenade blew the truck into a rolling fireball. It skidded, overturned. Bounced end-to-end across the sand, spewing wreckage and flames. Kamal’s Nissan veered away sharply, and for a tiny second Ben thought he saw the terrorist’s hate-filled face glaring at him through the dust and smoke.

  He dashed out into the corridor. The train was slowing down again. Either the driver was dead or he was acting out of blind
panic. In the next carriage, passengers were screaming and yelling, one of the guards trying and failing to control them. Ben caught a glimpse of another familiar face among the chaos. It was Jerry Novak. Beside him was his wife, looking almost catatonic with terror. Novak was clutching his little son to his chest, trying to shield him with his body. His horrified gaze landed on Ben standing there with the rifle. Ben shouted at them to stay down as he ran up the corridor to where the dead cop lay, hauling Kirby along with him.

  He glanced out of the shattered window, too late to react to what he saw next.

  Fifty metres from the train, the black Nissan was drawing level again. The rear passenger was aiming another RPG out of the window. There was a blast of smoke as the missile burst from the weapon. Ten metres into its parabola, the missile’s rocket motor engaged. The high-explosive round snaked through the air leaving a white vapour trail, and Ben could only stare as it closed on the train.

  Then it hit.

  Chapter Fifty

  The blast ripped through the train, obliterating everything in its path with fire and shrapnel.

  The heat and noise were terrifying as Ben felt himself flying through the air. He cannoned backwards off something solid, collapsed to the floor as the fireball rolled over him. As if in slow motion, the train was knocked sideways with a sickening lurch by the impact and went careering off the rails. A screeching, juddering, bone-wrenching crash of buckling metal as it ploughed into the ground at forty miles an hour, kicking up a giant wave of sand and dirt and rocks as it twisted and broke apart. Ben was dimly aware of the carriage he’d just been standing in flipping upwards and crashing down with a deafening crunch.

  Another impact tossed him violently sideways, and for a few moments he was aware only of the beating of his heart and the blood pounding in his ears.

  Through the floating dust that choked the air came the screams and groans of the survivors. Ben struggled to his feet and saw that his carriage had stayed upright. Smoke was pouring from its far end, and through it he could see tongues of flame licking the roof and rapidly gaining ground.

  Next to him, Kirby was stirring into consciousness. ‘Are you OK?’ Ben asked him, shaking his arm.

  Kirby looked up. His face was pale and caked with dust and sand. ‘I’m OK,’ he croaked. ‘I think.’

  Ben glanced around him at the carnage. Not far away, the guard who’d been trying to control the passengers a moment earlier was lying dead. Jerry Novak lay sprawled unconscious beside him in the broken glass that littered the carriage floor, a trickle of blood on his brow, his clothes singed. Alice Novak was up shakily on her feet, wailing for help. There was a cut on her face. She was pointing wildly back at the smoke.

  Ben suddenly understood what she was trying to communicate. In the impact she’d been separated from her son, Mikey, and he was somewhere at the back of the burning carriage.

  Ben slung the rifle over his shoulder and ran into the fire, feeling the flames searing his legs. The far end of the sleeper car had crumpled into a concertina shape, plywood partitions and fittings and twisted bits of bunk all piled up and burning. He kicked away the wreckage, anxiously watching the blaze as it quickly spread across the width of the carriage. The smoke was thick and acrid, and it was hard to see. But, as he ripped away a section of crushed wall partition, he saw the huddled form of the child wedged in underneath. He was alive and moving.

  Ben grasped hold of the coughing, wheezing boy and hauled him bodily out of the wreckage. His face was blackened, but there was no sign of burns on his skin or clothes. Ben carried him back to the other end of the carriage and passed him over to his mother. Alice Novak embraced her child, sobbing. Her husband was coming around, moaning in pain. They’d been lucky.

  ‘We need to get out of here, now.’ Ben pointed at the ragged exit hole the RPG round had made in the side of the train. Beyond it, the sun was shining through the smoke and he could make out the shapes of large boulders in the tufted grass and sand. Helping Jerry Novak to his feet, he guided the little group quickly out of the smashed carriage as the fire started gaining control of its mid-section, and directed them towards the rocks. ‘Move, move.’

  The train lay strewn across the ground like a broken necklace. Other passengers were emerging from points along its twisted length, staggering and dazed, some of them bleeding, supporting one another. Ben looked at the shattered ruins of the two carriages that had flipped over and virtually fused together with the impact. Flames were pouring like liquid from their windows. If anyone had been in there, they weren’t coming out. His fists tightened with rage at what Kamal had done.

  ‘They’re coming back,’ Kirby said in a shaky voice.

  Across the tracks, a slanting column of black smoke was rising from the wreck of the terrorists’ vehicle. The remaining pickup truck, the black Nissan and the Dodge had tracked around in a wide arc and now they were approaching fast for another pass, dust clouds billowing in their wake. Ben watched the black Nissan and instantly knew Kamal’s intention. The terrorist was going to kill every single man, woman and child on board, just to get to him.

  Except Ben wasn’t going to let that happen. Not today. He dived back inside the burning train, battled through the smoke to what was left of his and Kirby’s sleeper compartment, found the holdall among the wreckage, dragged it out and grabbed another grenade.

  The three vehicles came roaring in across the sand. The black Nissan on the left, the Dodge on the right, the armed pickup in the middle. The .50-cal spurted flame. Bullets chewed through the smashed train.

  ‘The rocks!’ Ben yelled at the staggering survivors. ‘Make for the rocks!’

  People fled in panic as gunfire churned up the sand. A middle-aged man in a business suit was desperately running for cover, clutching an attaché case, when a long sustained chattering burst from the machine gun pitched him forward with his arms outflung. Papers from his ripped attaché case tumbled across the ground.

  But he was the last victim that the gunner would ever claim. The fire control system diode turned green as Ben’s sights locked onto the pickup. The FN blasted its grenade and the truck exploded violently. The other vehicle swerved out of its path as it flipped and rolled.

  Ben loaded another grenade. Aimed at Kamal’s Nissan and fired. But the driver somehow managed to swerve out of his line of fire. The grenade impacted on the rusty Dodge and kicked it away like a toy. It blew apart into a million pieces as the fuel tank ruptured.

  The Nissan was the only one left now. The driver banked sharply off course and the engine rasped as he accelerated away in the sand, wheels spinning. Ben chased the vehicle with a long burst of automatic fire, the FN bucking in his hands. Then his magazine was empty and the Nissan was disappearing fast into the morning heat haze.

  He lowered the rifle. It was over for now. Kamal had taken a battering, down from eight men to three. But Ben knew he hadn’t seen the last of him.

  He ran back to the small crowd of survivors huddled among the rocks. Faces watched him, pale and frightened, streaked with dust and tears.

  ‘Will they come back?’ a woman asked.

  ‘No,’ Ben replied. ‘They’re gone.’

  Suddenly the questions were firing from all sides.

  ‘I can’t find my wife.’

  ‘What’s going to happen to us?’

  ‘How far are we from Aswan?’

  Then a small Egyptian man in his late fifties stepped up. His suit was dusty and rumpled, and his long, thin face bore the melancholy look of someone who’d seen a lot of suffering in the past and was resigned to the knowledge that he’d see a lot more in the future. ‘I am a doctor. Let me help you.’

  Ten minutes later, the wounded were being attended to as well as the doctor could manage with the limited first-aid kit from the guard’s van. All the water supplies they could find were gathered together in the shade of a rock. Ben used the radio from one of the dead cops to call the attack in to the Cairo police. Emergency teams would be on their
way. He gave Kirby the rifle and the holdall to look after as he ran the length of the train, pulling open doors, searching through corridors and sleeper compartments, looking for more survivors. The first carriage he searched was sitting at a crazy angle, propped up against the one in front of it. Inside, he found a frail old man lying splayed out on the sloping floor. His neck was broken. It looked like he’d been sleeping when the crash happened, come flying off his bunk and hit the washbasin. Ben felt deeply saddened by the sight, and his hands were shaking with rage as he lifted the body out and laid it carefully on the ground outside.

  In a short time, he found four more survivors in the wreck, three of them walking wounded and one with a concussion, and delivered them to safety among the rocks. But there were more dead than alive inside the train. The driver had taken a bullet as he sat at the controls. The guard nearest to the RPG strike had had his throat blown out by shrapnel, the other had been crushed in the impact of the derailment. All three plainclothes cops had been shot dead. One of them had caught a burst of machine-gun fire across the torso that had separated him into two pieces. The same string of bullets had killed a young couple as they sat together on their bunk.

  Eleven bodies in all, not counting the charred remains that everyone knew were still trapped inside the smoking husks of the two badly burned-out and overturned carriages. Their recovery would be the terrible task facing the paramedic teams and fire crew, when they arrived.

  Ben arranged the dead in a row on the ground a few yards from the train, and a woman passenger who turned out to be an ex-nurse helped him to cover them with sheets and blankets that they weighed down with rocks. Then he gathered up the weapons from the three dead cops, in case they fell into the wrong hands. Finding a fire extinguisher in the guard’s van, he used it to douse the flames in the carriages that were still smouldering.