‘It’s time,’ he said to Hellerman. ‘Give me the map and the satellite images.’
Hellerman handed them over and Ethan turned and set off at a run for the slopes of the hills, following the flat terrain of the desiccated flood plain until he hit the slopes and began to climb. Beside him Lopez kept pace, Doctor Morgan trailing slightly as they scaled the low hills with frenzied steps until Ethan reached the peak of a flat–topped mesa. He turned and saw the brilliant sunrise searing the horizon to the east, and the distant greenery of the Nile and Edfu, the flood plain sprawling away beneath them toward the river.
Beyond, far on the horizon, he saw what looked like lines of dark cloud as though distant thunderstorms were rising up in the dawn.
‘Are we there yet?’ Doctor Morgan asked as she joined them breathlessly.
Ethan squatted down on the rocks and used a few small stones to pin both the satellite image and the map down before him, both of them orientated north.
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘Tjaneni’s tomb is supposedly concealed within a wadi to the west of the House of Life in Edfu, south of Luxor.’
‘Radford said that the burial was made in a wadi that “held the heavens in its palm”,’ Lopez added, ‘and was three ituru east of Edfu, or twenty thousand cubits.’
Ethan measured out from Edfu and with a pen drew a neat arc describing a thirty–kilometre radius from the city on the Nile. Then he leaned close and examined the various flood plains from the satellite image, searching for anything that might look like a hand or the palm of a hand. Within seconds he realized that he could see nothing that looked like either.
‘I don’t see anything,’ he said.
‘The Egyptians are not always to be taken literally in their descriptions,’ Lucy said as she crouched alongside him. ‘Think out of the box for a moment. The Egyptians wouldn’t have had a map like this, so they would have described the terrain as they saw it.’
Ethan frowned at the map but he could not see anything out of the ordinary until Lopez suddenly pointed at the satellite map.
‘There,’ she said, ‘it’s right in front of us.’
Ethan peered at the spot and saw a perfectly ringed canyon, almost as though something had crashed down into the desert hills and forged an impact crater that opened on its north western side onto a vast and ancient river wadi.
‘Brilliant,’ Lucy Morgan said. ‘It’s not a hand shape on a map, but it would appear to hold the heavens in its palm if you were standing inside it looking up at the stars.’
‘See?’ Lopez nudged Ethan. ‘I’m not just a pretty face, I have an amazing brain too.’
‘And a head big enough to fit it in,’ Ethan replied as he looked at the most prominent terrain features he could find around them, mainly Edfu itself and some high hills to the north. He drew several lines on the map corresponding to where they saw those features, and then pin–pointed their precise location.
‘We’re here, on this ridge at the mouth of the old river,’ he said as he pointed at the map. ‘The terrain feature Nicola identified is three kilometres away to the south west, directly up the river wadi.’
‘We’d best move fast then,’ Lucy Morgan said as she jumped up. ‘The Russians won’t be far behind us, and they’ll locate us more easily in the day.’
Ethan looked out to the east again at the dark clouds that looked suddenly higher and more ominous than he had suspected, and almost immediately he spotted a smaller, closer cloud of disturbed dust and sand spiralling up from the desert, catching the rays of the rising sun. Ethan squinted at them, and in an instant he knew what they were. ‘They’re already coming,’ he said as he pointed out across the flood plain. ‘Let’s move, now!’
*
Gregorie drove the jeep across the rugged desert terrain, having driven off the main highway a quarter mile back. The jeep’s wheels churned the sand up around him, and in the mirrors he could see the five vehicles following him doing precisely the same, advertising their approach.
The risk was worth the reward. He knew that Warner and his entourage were by now on foot, poorly armed and heavily outnumbered. What was more, far out here in the lonely deserts and unsupported by the DIA, Gregorie could kill them and nobody would ever know.
‘How long until we get there?!’ Colonel Mishkin called above the wind buffeting the jeep as it careered across the deserts.
‘The location is ten miles ahead of us, inside the hills,’ Gregorie replied with mechanical efficiency. ‘We will have to go in on foot.’
Mishkin nodded and then he grabbed a radio and spoke into it.
‘Launch the drones, find them!’
Gregorie glanced in his mirror as they drove, and from behind them he saw one of the vehicles pull out of line into clear air. A large troop carrier, it was adorned with radio antennas along with two delta–winged drones mounted on the roof.
As Gregorie watched, the two drones spewed a thin stream of exhaust smoke and then rocketed into the air. Each was powered by a small jet turbine designed to carry them rapidly to altitude, from where they would glide on thermals before delivering their lethal payload.
‘Drones airborne,’ came the reply to Mishkin on the radio. ‘If Warner and his people are out there, they won’t be alive for much longer.’
Mishkin grinned as he gripped the radio. ‘Fire upon identification,’ he ordered.
The drones sailed over head, climbing into the brightening sky as the sound of their jet turbines was lost with increasing altitude. Out here in the uninhabited deserts, the canisters of lethal mustard gas would do their cruel work and then be dispersed to nothing by the endless desert winds.
***
XLII
‘Almost there.’
Ethan led the team at a brutal pace through the broad valley, sheer cliffs of sandstone rising up either side of them but still some distance apart. The sun was well above the horizon now, the winds likewise whipping up and gusting as the temperature soared.
‘I’ve got less than a mile,’ Hellerman said from behind them as he scrutinized a GPS display. ‘We should almost be able to see it by now.’
Ethan squinted ahead to where what had once been a broad river that had carved out the immense wadi turned to the left gently, the opposing sides of the valley closing in on them and funnelling the desert winds up the wadi. The rising heat of the vast plains beyond in the center of the deserts was drawing forth the cooler air nearer the Nile, and Ethan noticed a considerable acceleration of that wind as he walked, dust spiralling up off the desert floor around them and sweeping in angry vortexes against the canyon walls.
Ethan turned and looked back to the east and almost immediately he saw the strange haze hanging over the horizon, a bizarre orange glow in the light of the rising sun that seemed to swell before his very eyes.
Lopez noticed the direction of his gaze and turned to see the same thing.
‘Dust storm,’ she identified it immediately, ‘and a big one too.’
Ethan cursed mentally as he realized that there was no possible way for them to get back to civilization before the huge storm swept in across the Nile and the deserts beyond.
‘Keep moving,’ he said as he heard what he assumed was the faint hum of the desert winds soaring toward them. ‘We need to get into cover before that thing hits.’
He was about to turn and start walking faster when the hum of the storm changed note abruptly. Ethan hesitated, tilted his head up to look at the skies above as he realized that the brisk winds were carrying the sound of some kind of engine toward them.
Lopez too turned her head to the sky, but it was Mitchell who called the warning.
‘Drones!’
The light of the low sun caught the edge of a small aircraft with a wing span that Ethan guessed was probably no more than four meters. A second identical machine followed the first, sweeping this way and that in the turbulent air.
‘Get into cover!’ Mitchell urged them.
Ethan frowned uncertainly. �
��They’re too small to be carrying ammunition,’ he said
Lopez raced past him as she shouted above the growing winds.
‘They don’t need bombs to take us out!’
Ethan began running as he saw the two drones wheel over in the sky, their delta wings flashing as they suddenly dove directly toward him. The sky behind the drones was filling with a billowing wall of sandy colored cloud that stretched high into the atmosphere in vast golden veils as it advanced toward them.
Ethan saw the drones grow in size as they rushed down and he prepared to duck as they opened fire, but to his amazement they rushed overhead and soared back up into the sky once more.
‘Where are they going?’ Mitchell gasped as they ran.
The drones wheeled about again, and this time they descended more gently as though carefully lining up their targets. As Ethan watched, he saw a small object fall from each of the drones and then they turned sharply away and veered off to either side of the fleeing group.
The two objects hit the desert floor fifty meters behind where Ethan stood and immediately a cloud of yellow smoke burst from them and began drifting toward Ethan and his companions on the high winds, driven toward them by the storm.
‘Landing zone smoke?’ Hellerman hazarded.
‘You think they’re marking our position?’ Lopez asked.
Ethan had never known yellow smoke to be used as an LZ marker before, and he felt a premonition of doom as he yelled out a warning.
‘Gas! Get away from the clouds and stay away from the canyon walls!’
Ethan dashed to his right, heading out into the canyon wash as the billowing fog of acrid yellow smoke tumbled on the winds toward them in two dense streamers, the huge wall of cloud behind them now dense and dark. He saw Lopez scatter to his left, Hellerman close behind as Lucy Morgan ran hard to keep up with Ethan.
‘It’s mustard gas!’ Mitchell shouted as they ran.
Ethan felt his guts convulse within him as he heard the warning. One of the most horrific of all chemical weapons, mustard gas was capable of inflicting horrendous burns on human skin, blisters the size of melons and life–long injuries including blindness. Illegal in all but the most brutal of regimes, it had been deployed by both sides of the Syrian conflict to devastating effect.
‘Get upwind of the canisters!’ Ethan yelled as he saw the two drones repositioning for another sweep. ‘Don’t try to outrun it!’
The clouds of yellow gas tumbled on the wind as Ethan’s group ran past them on one side while Lopez and the others maintained pace between the two streamers of gas. Ethan looked up into the sky and saw that the two drones were lining up to deliver the next canisters in between the existing ones, spreading the lethal toxin across the entire wadi and forcing Ethan and the others back toward the Russians.
‘Where’s the canyon we’re looking for?!’ Ethan yelled to Hellerman.
The scientist looked about them as he ran, and then he pointed to a large eroded gap in the canyon wall ahead and to their left.
‘There, I can see it!’
Ethan looked over his shoulder, and there in the distance he could see the Russian convoy of jeeps and trucks closing rapidly on them, perhaps only a mile or two behind and like tiny black specks against the immense bulk of the advancing sand storm.
Ethan looked up again at the two drones and watched as they swooped in toward the group. There was still a faint stream of ugly sulfur drifting between Ethan and Lopez as the dispensers emptied their lethal cargo, cutting him off from them along with Mitchell and Lucy Morgan.
There was no way they could outrun the smoke and wind, and Ethan knew there was only one way to defeat the attack and sneak past.
‘Cut back and around them as soon as they deploy the next canisters!’ he yelled.
Mitchell understood immediately and prepared to change direction, Lucy keeping pace with the big man as the drones soared overhead. Ethan saw two freshly dropped canisters hit the desert floor and explode with clouds of lethal gas.
‘Now!’
Ethan scrambled to a stop and turned back on his own path, sprinting upwind as the canisters bounced and tumbled toward him nearby. Mitchell and Lopez followed, running hard into the wind as specks of sand pummelled their faces like little ice picks scouring their skin.
Ethan saw the thick clouds of sulfur smoke rush past him from where the nearest canister had rolled to a halt, and he ran in a wide circle upwind of it before turning downwind again and sprinting in pursuit of Hellerman and the others. He checked behind him and saw Mitchell and Lucy Morgan following but tiring, and behind them the pursuing convoy of Russian military vehicles.
The huge clouds of billowing sand loomed over the sky in an apocalyptic wave of darkness, the brilliant sunshine to the east a blaze of light on one horizon as on the other the clouds reared up against the blue sky overhead. Instantly the temperature plummeted as Ethan ran, the wind cool now and the desert enveloped by deep shadow as it seemed night was about to fall once again. As Ethan looked behind him he could see men mounted on the back of the Russian jeeps with heavy weapons, still tiny against the vast storm.
‘Stay in the middle of the wadi!’ Ethan yelled to Hellerman ahead. ‘Don’t let them figure out where we’re going!’
‘They’ll be on us within a minute and they’ll shoot us dead!’ Lucy Morgan replied.
Ethan looked behind him and smiled grimly, the storm’s arrival both a curse and a blessing.
‘No, they won’t!’
*
‘Faster!’
Colonel Mishkin yelled at Gregorie, but the soldier’s boot was flat against the floor pan as he drove the jeep at its maximum speed across the desert.
‘It will not go any faster!’
Mishkin scowled and leaped up into the rear of the jeep as he cocked the machine gun there and aimed it out across the deserts ahead to where he could see the fleeing Americans. He looked up and saw the apocalyptic cloud towering above him as it waiting to crash down upon them, and ahead the sky was a thin bright line of molten metal as though he were in a cave looking out across the deserts.
‘They’re not in range!’ Gregorie shouted.
Mishkin ignored the soldier and took aim, and then he pulled hard on the trigger and the machine gun clattered and rattled as it spewed hot lead across the desert before them, tracer fire zipping like laser beams in the growing darkness.
*
Ethan heard the first rounds zip past by nearby and looked back to see tracer fire rocketing wildly across the desert in all directions as the Russian gunners opened up in an attempt to catch a lucky shot before they were consumed by the storm.
‘Incoming!’
Ethan did not dodge left and right to evade the bullets, figuring that it was better to let the pursuing jeep’s motion over the rough ground spoil the Russians’ aim. Instead he kept running and hoped that the storm would swallow the Russians before they came within lethal range.
A salvo of shots clattered against the walls of the canyon to his left and he saw the huge crater–like canyon open up before him, a vast amphitheatre of solid rock carved as though by human hands from the hills.
Ethan looked behind him, saw more tracer fire flash toward him and heard the bullets smash into the desert floor as the jeep came within range, and then suddenly the Russian vehicles were swallowed by the storm and he lost sight of them even though the tracer fire still rocketed toward them out of the roiling storm.
‘Now!’ he yelled. ‘Everybody into the crater!’
Ethan changed direction and sprinted across the wadi as he saw Hellerman and Lopez lead the way just ahead of him, clearing the weakening streamers of gas tumbling down the wadi. Lucy Morgan scrambled up over loose rubble and into the huge natural canyon with Mitchell close behind as Ethan sprinted up behind them and clambered up off the wadi floor.
‘We need cover from the storm!’ Lopez gasped, her chest heaving as she rested her hands breathlessly on her knees.
Ethan looke
d at the huge circular cliffs around them and shook his head as he saw no features that suggested a tomb entrance or even a human presence.
‘I don’t know where to go from here,’ he admitted, ‘other than we should get into the leeward side of the canyon real fast.’
Ethan jogged across the wide expanses of the canyon, the rest of the team laboring behind him as the storm arced over them like a gigantic wave and a deep darkness fell as the wind began to howl and particles of sand poured down upon them like glass rain.
‘Get close into the wall,’ Ethan yelled.
They huddled into the wall of the cliffs as the storm burst overhead and the bright dawn sky finally vanished, the features of the canyon lost as the visibility dropped to almost zero. Ethan squinted against the driving, swirling sand as he pulled a kerchief over his face and looked at Lucy.
‘How are we going to find the entrance to the tomb in this?!’ he yelled.
Lucy Morgan pulled something out of her pocket and held it out to him.
‘Easy,’ she replied, as though she’d known all along. ‘We’ll use this!’
***
XLIII
The entire basin of the crater was filled with a sandy fog of particles gusting like dirty brown rain that forced Ethan to shield his eyes. Beside him, Doctor Lucy Morgan crouched down and pulled out a small map upon which she orientated herself to the north.
‘What’s that going to do?’ Lopez asked her, shouting to be heard above the gale screaming across the upper ridges of the crater.
‘This formation wasn’t caused by an asteroid impact,’ Lucy shouted back. ‘It was caused by erosion from the passage of water from the highlands to the west. The sand from the deserts then filled the void after the water was gone.’
Ethan frowned.
The Genesis Cypher (Warner & Lopez Book 6) Page 28
