The Heretic's Treasure

by Scott Mariani

  The long, weary trek continued. Sometime in the late afternoon they crossed over the unmarked border and became illegal immigrants into Sudan. No sign of army patrols. No sign of anything except sand and rock and the relentless sun. Another endless stretch of bumping, jolting, creaking drive as they slowly cooked inside the pizza oven of the Toyota. Another freezing night, as they lay listening to the howls of jackals across the rocky valleys.

  Then it was another whole day of driving as Ben ploughed doggedly onwards. Whenever they stopped for rest and water he was sitting down with his phone and fine-tuning his calculations. Whereas Wenkaura’s expedition had headed due south and then west, Ben had cut from point A to B directly to form an isosceles triangle. The geometry was hard to pinpoint, but going by the fairly precise co-ordinates from the ancient map, he was sure he was close now. The treasure site was near. He could almost feel it.

  But where could it be?

  Late in the afternoon they hit a wadi, a dry river bed that had probably remained unchanged since prehistoric times. Its winding path snaked between increasingly high rocky banks that before long had grown up into the walls of a canyon either side of them. There was no turning off. Ben gritted his teeth and kept going.

  Up ahead, the canyon path bore around to the right. Ben turned the bend, and braked to a halt.

  Kirby had been dozing again. ‘What’s happening?’ he slurred, sensing that they’d stopped.

  Ben didn’t reply.

  Three hundred yards away up the canyon, a high rocky ridge dominated the skyline. Its top was flat and smooth and silhouetted black against the sky. Cut into the horizon, as symmetrical as the V-notch of a gun rearsight, was a perfect cleft. Ben studied it for a moment, shielded his eyes and looked up at the golden disc of the sun. It was dropping fast as evening drew on, and its line of arc was heading right for the cleft. In a few more minutes, it would be exactly positioned in the V-notch.

  It was a stunning, perfect, completely accurate physical representation of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for the word ‘horizon’. Now he knew he’d been right that day in Claudel’s study. Wenkaura had meant to convey more than just an abstract symbol.

  ‘Jesus, Kirby, I think we’ve found something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look.’

  Kirby looked, frowned, and understood. ‘Holy crap. That’s it. That’s got to be it.’ Not taking his eyes off it, he opened his door and stepped down from the car. ‘That’s our landmark. The heretic’s treasure is right here in front of us. It’s somewhere inside that ridge, or under it. There’s got to be a cave or something.’

  He started walking towards it, as if hypnotised by the spectacle.

  ‘Stop,’ Ben called after him. ‘Wait.’

  ‘What now?’ Kirby said dreamily.

  Ben pointed. ‘Look there.’

  Fifty feet away, directly between them and the ridge, was a crater hollowed in the sand. What had once been some kind of desert creature, maybe a fennec fox, lay ripped to pieces around the hole. The badly mutilated corpse was still fresh, a cloud of flies buzzing over it. Around the remains of the dead animal, scattered across the crater and for a wide radius around it, were fragmented shards of dark metal.

  ‘Landmines,’ Ben said.

  ‘Landmines?’

  ‘This place has been a war zone for years. They have a habit of getting left around.’

  Kirby turned and scurried back to the car on the tips of his toes, clambered back inside and slammed his door, breathing hard. ‘Shit. This is very, very bad.’

  ‘This is Africa.’

  ‘Where the hell could they be?’

  ‘Anywhere,’ Ben said. ‘Everywhere. They could be all around us, and we’d never know until we step on one.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘You really need me to tell you that?’

  ‘This is all we need,’ Kirby groaned. ‘After all this way. Can we get round the edge?’

  Ben shook his head. ‘The canyon walls are too steep. Perfect spot for a minefield. There’s only one thing for it. We’ll have to dig them out, one by one, and hope we don’t hit any big ones.’

  Kirby gulped. ‘Big ones?’

  ‘Twenty-five kilos of high explosive in a solid metal casing,’ Ben said. ‘Not the easiest things to handle in loose sand. And they become unstable after a few years. Nasty tendency to go off in your face.’

  ‘This is just intolerable,’ Kirby whined.

  Suddenly the canyon was filled with the sound of engines and crackling gunfire. Ben and Kirby piled out of the Toyota and scrambled for cover.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Around the corner came two off-road trail motorcycles, then a third, all speeding like lunatics, bucking wildly over the rough ground. The buzz of their two-stroke engines echoed off the canyon walls as they approached on full throttle. Two of the bikes had pillion passengers, dressed, like the riders, in Bedouin garb. The passengers were twisted backwards in the saddle, holding on tight and rattling off one-handed bursts of automatic fire from Uzi submachine guns at whatever it was that was following them.

  Ben watched from the rocks, all senses on full alert and the Jericho ready in his hand as the bikes came screaming past. He could hear something else over the noise of their engines. Something unmistakeable. A steady, high-pitched whirring and creaking sound that he hadn’t heard for years but wasn’t ever going to forget. He tensed and watched the bend in the canyon, waiting for the inevitable.

  The main battle tank came scuttling around the corner, an inhuman thing, like a grey-green steel dinosaur. The squealing clatter of its treads and roar of its engine reverberated through the canyon. Forty-six tons of pure brutal force, twelve feet wide and over twenty long, crushing stones into dust as it lurched forward. Its 105mm gun swept left and right, as if surveying the scene. Then fired.

  The deafening boom was followed by a wail like an express train as its high-explosive shell hurtled through the canyon. It impacted against the rock wall in a gigantic blast of smoke and fire and tumbling rubble. The rear motorcycle was flung in the air by the blast, twisting and cartwheeling. Its rider and passenger were dashed against the rocks.

  Kirby was pressed to the ground at Ben’s feet, his face twisted in terror and his hands clapped over his ears. Stone chips, sand and dust showered down on them. Ben watched helplessly as the fallen motorcycle passenger jumped up and staggered away from his dead companion, firing his Uzi back at the tank. A long, deafening burst from the tank’s heavy machine guns and the running man was cut down, his white robes spattered red.

  Ben quickly realised what he was witnessing here. They’d stumbled into a running firefight between the Sudanese military and Bedouin militia rebels-only the balance of power was massively uneven as the army ruthlessly stamped out these last pockets of resistance in the wake of the Darfur war.

  Up ahead the remaining bikes were tearing through the canyon. The one in front was suddenly blown in the air. Wreckage and body parts rained down on the canyon floor. It had hit a mine.

  The big gun fired again. The screech of the shell passing overhead, and a wall of the canyon disintegrated in a plume of dust and fire and smoke.

  The last of the motorcycles was charging straight for the ridge, dead ahead. The sun was right in the cleft, exactly as the glyph on Wenkaura’s map had predicted.

  The tank lurched along the canyon in pursuit of its prey, its turret whirring from side to side as it tracked the target. Then it fired another deafening blast from its main gun. The shell slammed explosively into the ridge a few yards ahead of the machine. The bike wobbled, but somehow the rider kept going. The machine cannon blasted out another burst and he was blown off the bike and tumbled to the ground like a bloody rag doll. The bike slid down on its side with a shower of sparks, flipped and lay silent.

  The tank came rumbling on, unstoppable. Now it was just yards from their Toyota and Ben realised it wasn’t even going to slow down.

  And it didn’t. The
tank’s twelve-foot width kept on coming. The caterpillar tracks seemed just to engulf the parked vehicle. The tank’s front lifted as it rode straight up on top of it, then sank down as the forty-six tons of steel and armour plate bore down, crushing it like an eggshell. The huge machine lumbered onwards as if it hadn’t even noticed. In its wake, the Toyota was a flattened mess of twisted metal.

  Kirby turned in horror to Ben. ‘Now we’re totally fucked’, he screamed over the roar.

  Before Ben could stop him, the historian ripped the little .38 revolver from his pocket and aimed it at the tank.

  Ben knew what would happen if he fired. It was like pitching a child’s dart gun against a raging bull. The low-velocity round would whang harmlessly against the massive armour plate. It wouldn’t even dent it, but the crew inside would hear. Then the tank would stop. The gun would swivel around towards them. It would locate them in an instant, and it would blow them to pieces. At this range, their bodies would be scattered over a circle of desert two hundred yards across.

  Kirby squeezed the trigger. The .38 round kicked dust off the gun turret.

  And at the exact same moment, the tank detonated with a gigantic fiery explosion and a screech of ripping armour plate.

  Both of them ducked instinctively as the ground rocked under them. Shrapnel and pieces of caterpillar track and rocks and boulders blasted in all directions. The turret hatch burst open, and flames and black smoke poured from the hole. A burning man tried to scramble out, but fell back with his arms waving in agony. He disappeared as a secondary explosion tore the turret from its mountings. The armoured beast seemed to crumple and sink in death.

  ‘Got the bastard!’ Kirby yelled, waving his little revolver in glee.

  Ben was stunned for a second before he realised what he’d just seen. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, professor. That was a landmine.’ And a big one, he thought. Maybe fifty kilos of high explosive. If they’d driven over it in the Toyota, they’d have been vaporised. He glanced skywards and said another quick thanks under his breath.

  ‘Felt good anyway,’ Kirby said. He was about to clamber over the rocks when Ben stopped him.

  ‘Wait. And give me that before you do anything else stupid with it. You could have got us both killed.’ He snatched the .38 from him.

  They waited two minutes, then three, and Ben listened hard. But other than the crackle of the flames from the burning tank, the desert was silent. He guessed that wherever the rest of the Sudanese armoured division were, they weren’t close enough by to worry about-at least, not yet.

  After four minutes, Ben decided that he and Kirby were the only living human beings within a wide radius, and he stepped out from behind the rocks and surveyed the smoking battlefield.

  He threw a long, regretful look at the ruin of the Toyota. There was nothing left there to salvage. No weapons, no equipment. And no water. The dark patch where their bottles had burst was quickly evaporating on the hot sand. With no vehicle, the only thing between them and a slow, baking death was what little water they carried in their belt canteens.

  That was something else he could worry about later. Evening would soon be falling. Dying of thirst would be a more pressing issue in the morning. In the meantime, he had a treasure to find.

  He wiped the dust and sweat off his face. ‘Let’s go,’ he sighed to Kirby, and led the way through the canyon towards the ridge. Fifty yards further on, he stepped over the body of the motorcyclist who’d almost made it. The sling of the dead Bedouin’s AK-47 had been snapped by a bullet and the weapon was lying a few feet away. Ben picked it up. The stock was decorated with metal studs and mother-of-pearl insets. The barrel was crushed and bent from a shrapnel impact.

  He tossed the useless weapon back down. Walked grimly on.

  The sun had sunk below the cleft now, just a shimmering golden rim of its disc visible over the rocks. Without the glare in his eyes, Ben could see the towering rock in more detail. He ran his eyes down its craggy face.

  And stopped.

  And stared at the cave entrance that hadn’t been there before. The tank’s final shell had carved away a section of the ridge, exposing a jagged black crevice a few metres up its face that before must have been covered with millennia of fallen rock and storm-blown sand.

  Kirby had seen it, too. They glanced at one another, and ran. Sand and loose stone slithered underfoot as they clambered up the slope towards the cave entrance. Ben got there first, and peered cautiously into the dark space.

  ‘We need a torch,’ Kirby panted.

  Ben ran back down the slope and trotted back to the motorcyclist’s body. ‘What are you doing?’ Kirby called after him. Ben snatched up the ruined AK rifle and tore the dead man’s robe away. He ripped it into ten long strips, stuffed nine of them in his pocket and wrapped the tenth around the end of the rifle. He ran back up to join Kirby at the cave entrance, took out his Zippo, flipped it open and lit the strip of material.

  The improvised torch cast a dull, flickering glow on the rock walls ahead as they moved deeper into the cave. The tunnel was long and winding.

  ‘We’re going downwards,’ Kirby’s voice echoed.

  Ben nodded. The cave was leading them deep underground. The light began to burn out, and he quickly wrapped another strip of cloth around the rifle. They walked on.

  From somewhere deep inside the rock came a long, low rumble. Dust and stones showered lightly down from the ceiling. Ben froze and tensed, waiting for a massive cave-in.

  It didn’t come. The dust shower stopped and he could breathe again. ‘I don’t think that tank shell did this place any favours,’ he muttered.

  The tunnel kept snaking downwards. It was a natural cave, but Ben could see from areas of smoothed wall that someone, somewhere in time, had been here before. Had that someone been Wenkaura, leading his expedition deep under the ridge, a procession of men carrying caskets of treasure to a place where the heretic pharaoh could never find it?

  ‘It seems to go on forever,’ Kirby whispered.

  ‘There’s a bend up ahead,’ Ben said.

  A few metres on, the claustrophobic atmosphere of the narrow tunnel suddenly seemed to lift, as though a bigger space had opened up around them. Ben wrapped more cloth around the dying torch and the flame burned brighter. He raised the flickering light over his head.

  ‘Sweet Jesus, look at this,’ Kirby murmured.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  The scene ahead in the torchlight was breathtaking. They were standing at the opening of an underground cavern the size of the largest of cathedrals. The fire glittered off weird and wonderful rock formations.

  ‘This is fantastic,’ Kirby said, stepping forward.

  ‘Careful,’ Ben said, stopping him. He shone the torch downwards.

  ‘Whoops,’ Kirby breathed.

  Below them was a deep abyss, falling away into blackness. Massive pointed stalagmites jutted up from the depths like huge stakes, waiting to impale anyone who fell into the chasm. Ben raised the torch higher, and the orange light flickered off great craggy stalactites that hung down from the cavern’s ceiling a hundred feet above them.

  ‘Looks like giant fangs,’ Kirby whispered in awe. ‘Like an enormous mouth. A shark’s mouth.’

  ‘Not a shark,’ Ben said. ‘A crocodile. You’re looking at the teeth of Sobek, the crocodile god. “Pass through the teeth of Sobek, and you will discover.”’

  Kirby gasped at the realisation. ‘But how the hell do we get across?’

  Ben stepped towards the edge and the torchlight glinted off something in front of him. A rope bridge, spanning the void, stretched far into the darkness ahead. Ben put out his hand and his fingers closed around the thick, taut rope. It felt strong and dry in his fist.

  ‘This way,’ he said.

  ‘No way,’ Kirby protested. ‘It’s thousands of years old. It’ll never take our weight.’

  Ben stepped out onto the bridge. The wooden slats were cracked and grey with age, and the creak of the ancie
nt ropes echoed through the cavern. But it held. He took another step. He was standing right over the abyss now. He turned to Kirby. ‘Are you coming or what?’

  Kirby hesitated.

  ‘Fine.’ Ben took another step. ‘Then I’ll find the treasure myself.’

  ‘Not on your life,’ Kirby said, following quickly behind. The bridge creaked and swayed as they made their way towards the darkness.

  Another deep rumble echoed through the cavern. Stone grinding on stone. Millions of tons of pressure bearing down above them. Ben glanced up at the jagged ceiling and sucked his breath in between his teeth. Something was not right up there. Something fundamental within the structural integrity of the rock had been dislodged by the enormous impact of the tank shell. Maybe it was nothing. Or maybe it would all come crashing down at any moment and this place would be their tomb. There was only one way to find out, and only one way forwards.

  ‘I feel like I’m walking into hell,’ Kirby said shakily behind him.

  ‘Maybe you are,’ Ben said.

  Another grinding rumble from above, and a shower of small rocks fell from the ceiling. One shattered off a stalagmite. The rest dropped away into nothing. It was a long, long way down.

  From somewhere below in the abyss came another sound. The distant rush of fast-moving water. An underground river, an ancient relic from the days when the Sahara desert had been a lush, green paradise.

  The crossing of the rope bridge seemed like an eternity, but eventually they reached the far side. Kirby took the last few steps at a run. The sweat was shining off his face in the torchlight. ‘Thank Christ that’s over.’

  ‘Until you have to cross the other way,’ Ben said.

  ‘I really needed to be reminded of that.’

  Ben didn’t reply. He was already pushing on into the tunnel, wrapping another piece of cloth around the torch as he went.