‘They’re blasting the door out,’ Ethan confirmed. ‘We’ve only got a few minutes before they get down here.’
Lucy ran her hand swiftly over the lines of hieroglyphics that surrounded them, carved in relief into the ancient sandstone walls.
‘The tomb of Tjaneni,’ she whispered, ‘scribe to the God King Thutmose III, servant of the Kingdom of…’
Ethan listened as she hurried along the walls, tracing the lines of text and reading them as swiftly as he might have read a newspaper article. A few of her words leaped out at him: great power, feared King, immense treasures…
‘Immense treasures?’ Lopez enquired innocently.
‘Treasure has more than one meaning in this sense,’ Lucy replied as she worked.
‘I like the meaning it has for me,’ Lopez replied. ‘Do tell more.’
Lucy worked her way around the chamber even as Ethan heard another deep blast from outside, and this time he heard the clatter of rock fragments spilling down the stairwell.
‘We’re almost out of time,’ he urged her. ‘They’ve found the right entrance.’
Lucy stepped back from the wall and stared up at the ceiling.
‘They’re coming through!’ Lopez whispered harshly.
Ethan grabbed his pistol and turned toward the entrance to the chamber as he heard the seal being lifted and Russian voices yelling above the gale outside, and then heavy boots thumped onto the stone steps.
***
XLV
‘Go, now!’
Colonel Mishkin grabbed the nearest soldier and shoved him down the ragged hole in the stone and sand that their charges had created, the gale gusting over the dark cavity as the other soldiers followed him in.
Gregorie shoved his way past all of them and vanished down into the darkness with an AK–47 cradled in his massive arms, eager to confront Warner and his team. Mishkin checked over his shoulder to ensure that nobody was following them through the savage gale and caught the gaze of three of his men.
‘Guard the entrance!’
Mishkin turned and stepped down into the stairwell. The roar of the wind subsided as he descended into the darkness, his way illuminated by small glowing crushable spheres dropped by the troops ahead to guide the way without compromising night–vision in the gloomy conditions. Mishkin hurried down into the chamber, rows of pillars supporting the ceiling, and saw his men standing and looking at a gigantic door of solid sandstone on the far side of the chamber. The walls were covered with hieroglyphics that shimmered as though alive from the glowing spheres tossed liberally around the chamber.
‘There’s nobody here,’ Gregorie said, now barely able to contain his frustration as he looked at the Colonel. ‘Where the hell are they?’
Mishkin approached the huge door and looked at the seal of Tjaneni, the cartouche of the Pharaoh Amenhotep and the Eye of Horus confronting him once more.
‘Who cares?’ he said. ‘This must be the entrance to the tomb. We can blast it out and see what’s behind it.’
Gregorie moved to his side. ‘They came this way. They were ahead of us. How can they have vanished into thin air?’
Mishkin looked at the towering soldier for a brief moment. ‘Gregorie, are you scared?’
For a moment it seemed as though the huge soldier was about to reach out and crush Mishkin’s skull with his bare hands. His jaw clenched and his gaze became as hard and cold as Siberian steel as he replied.
‘I fear only losing our prize,’ he growled. ‘They have disappeared, and that can mean only one thing.’
Mishkin took a deep breath and swallowed his pride. He too was afraid of losing the very thing they had worked so hard and travelled so far to obtain. The power of logic revealed to him that there was only one possible solution to the puzzle.
‘They found another way past the stone.’
Gregorie seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.
‘We cannot chase them like this,’ he insisted. ‘We must use guile to defeat them.’
‘How many ways out of here can there be?’ Mishkin asked rhetorically.
‘Dozens,’ Gregorie replied. ‘The Egyptian Tjaneni wanted to hide his prize well, for good reason.’
Mishkin turned to the soldiers and barked an order.
‘Get the seismic detector and search the area,’ he snapped. ‘Find the hidden entrance and quickly! If I have to I’ll blast Warner and his people to hell before I’ll let them walk away with our prize!’
The soldiers dashed to carry out the order as Gregorie looked at the tomb surrounding them.
‘The oracle is useless to us now,’ he said. ‘Warner has the scientist on his team, and she may be the only person able to reach the tomb.’
Mishkin peered at Gregorie. ‘If they reach the ark first then they will hide behind its power! How will we achieve our goals then, Gregorie?’
‘The object is not something out of a Hollywood movie, colonel,’ Gregorie uttered. ‘They will find it and when they do they will have to transport it out of here. How do you think they will be able to do that when they have no vehicles and their support from America has been cut off? Use the girl as leverage against them.’
Mishkin thought for a moment and then he nodded as they walked together out of the chamber and ascended the stairwell.
‘Very well, Gregorie, when we find them we will follow and see where they lead us.’
*
The corridor was pitch black, a narrow, high fissure through the solid rock that allowed only a little light to filter out from the two glow sticks Ethan held in his hand as he followed Lucy. The entire team shuffled sideways through the passage, one wall at their backs and the other brushing against their chests.
‘How did you even know this was here?’ he asked Lucy as they shuffled along.
‘I didn’t,’ she replied with a shrug, ‘but the hieroglyphics told the story of Thutmose III’s victories in battle and the riches he brought back to Egypt. That story was broken by a vertical line of hieroglyphics that was highly unusual, and only when I read them from top to bottom did I realize that they were concealing this passage.’
Ethan had helped her to pull several sandstone blocks out of the wall one by one, the blocks sealed only with loose mortar and a dried out paste that was probably made by the tomb builders from sand and water to conceal the joins in the brickwork. Once removed, the tiny fissure had been revealed travelling deeper into the tomb.
Ethan had hurried the rest of the team into the fissure, each of them carrying a single brick over their heads, and then he had followed them in and one by one replaced the bricks with a thin layer of sand between them, thus loosely sealing the entrance. They had waited in silence, barely breathing, as they had listened to the Russians discussing where they had gone before leaving the tomb outside.
‘How long do you think they’ll be fooled for?’ Lucy asked as they moved.
‘Not long,’ Mitchell whispered from further down the line. ‘They mentioned seismic instruments. They’ll get a reading on this passage soon enough, and that will force them to look a little closer at the wall.’
Lucy kept moving, leading the team through the tiny corridor. Ethan knew from his mental map of their course into the tomb that they were heading through the canyon toward the crescent shaped cliffs, roughly south east. Although he could not know what awaited them, he was fairly certain that with the increased depth there could be little chance of an escape route to the south.
‘If we find what we’re looking for here,’ he said, ‘there’s no way we can get it out again.’
‘You’re right,’ Lopez replied, ‘this fissure is too small to carry anything larger than a house brick out of here.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Lucy said. ‘Whatever Tjaneni hid in here, it’s not coming out with us. He would have built this place to ensure that the only way to escape with the prize would be to excavate the entire tomb complex.’
Ethan reflected briefly that it would be possible only for Egypt
itself to excavate the tomb, and that would be almost impossible to do without the media becoming aware of it. If there was indeed an object of considerable power and perhaps extra–terrestrial origin inside the Ark, then they could hardly extract it without somebody knowing something about it.
‘There’s an opening up ahead,’ Lucy said.
Ethan kept moving, and as he did so he heard a distant, dull thump that shuddered through the walls and his own chest as though an earthquake were shaking the entire tomb.
‘They’ve started,’ Mitchell rumbled ominously. ‘It will only take them a few minutes to find us now.’
Suddenly, the fissure ended and Ethan saw light bloom ahead as glow sticks were tossed by Lucy into another chamber. The sounds they made suggested a much wider cavity and he followed Lopez out of the fissure and into a colossal subterranean chamber.
The glow sticks were not quite powerful enough to illuminate the tomb in all of its glory, but Ethan could see immense pillars holding the roof aloft leading away from them in a double row. Vast, smooth walls were covered in a mixture of hieroglyphic representations of great battles, of sun gods and other Egyptian iconography drawn in large scale all around them, while between the images were enormous statues carved out of the rock of Thutmose III sitting with his hands on his knees staring out over the chamber, his son Amenhotep alongside him.
‘Wow,’ Lopez murmured, her voice echoing slightly in the silence.
On the flanking walls of the tomb were upright sarcophagi, huge stone tombs that lined the walls one after the other, each marked with a single cartouche.
Ethan looked naturally down the line of pillars dominating the chamber much as the rest of the team did, and there he saw a wide, low bank of steps that led up to a sort of altar. The faint glow of the sticks flickered and reflected off something that was standing upon the altar, and even in the low light Ethan knew instantly what he was looking at. The glow of polished gold was impossible to mistake for anything else.
It was Lucy who spoke, her voice soft as though to utter the words were itself a blasphemy that could provoke the wrath of the gods.
‘The Ark of the Covenant.’
***
XLVI
Ethan took a pace closer and stared in awe as Mitchell cracked two more glow sticks and tossed them ahead into the chamber. They burst into life as they skittered across the smooth stones of the floor and their light flared off the sides of the Ark, illuminating it for the first time in thousands of years.
Ethan heard a faint gasp from Lucy as he saw the Ark glow as though aflame in the orange light. Its sides were of solid gold and the same size as they had expected it to be, just like the wooden Ark found in King Tutankhamun’s tomb a century before.
Atop the Ark were two golden Cherubim, their wings touching each other, while embossed into the golden side of the Ark was a relief of Anubis, Egyptian God of the Underworld, the canine appearance obvious even from this distance. Ethan could see the rods used to hold the Ark aloft, the ornate edges of the Ark’s lid and even the faint layer of dust that had accumulated upon it. All around the Ark’s sides were reliefs of Egyptian gods: Horus, Amun–Ra, Osiris and others parading in a line with the Eye of Horus watching them from above.
Lopez turned to look at Ethan.
‘Is this where we open it and tongues of flame and fire blast us all to hell?’
Lucy stepped closer to the Ark. ‘There’s no power of God in that thing,’ she insisted as she climbed the steps toward it. ‘It was never anything to do with Yawheh, the God of the Bible, and it exists only in the myths of Israel’s Torah. The Ark is an Egyptian relic, remember?’
‘Yes, doctor,’ Lopez said as she flipped Lucy a salute. ‘So what do we do now?’
Lucy climbed the steps toward the Ark and Ethan was struck by how incredible it looked from his perspective. Steven Spielberg had tried his hardest but his movie was still nowhere near the spectacle of seeing the Ark in all its glory, amid the orange glow and the shadowy confines of the incredible subterranean temple.
Lucy paused before the Ark and examined it.
‘I’ll need help to get the lid off. It must weigh a ton.’
Ethan and the others moved slowly up to the steps as Hellerman stared in wide–eyed wonder at the Ark.
‘This is the first time that anybody has laid eyes on the Ark since it vanished thousands of years ago,’ he said almost reverentially. ‘Do you really think that we should be opening it here and now?’
‘Whatever the Russians want is inside it,’ Ethan pointed out, ‘and it’s also one of the artefacts that allegedly caused the government to form Majestic Twelve back in 1947. Whatever it is, we need to see it.’
Hellerman stepped back from the Ark, uncertainty writ large upon his features as he moved to stand alongside one of the giant pillars nearby.
‘I don’t know Ethan,’ he said fearfully. ‘We don’t know what might happen.’
Ethan got his hands under the Ark’s lid and prepared to lift as Mitchell stood the other side. Lucy Morgan and Lopez readied themselves at either end, and then Lucy braced herself and said a single word.
‘Now.’
Ethan heaved upward with the rest of the team and the lid lifted an inch off the Ark. Then a deafening crash thundered through the room with enough force to cause Ethan to stumble to one side as a brilliant light flared around them, as though lightning had struck the interior of the tomb. The Ark’s lid smashed back down as Ethan blinked, stars of white light flashing in his eyes.
Boots thundered against the ancient stone behind them and Ethan turned to see a dozen heavily armed Russian soldiers rush into the temple with their weapons raised and pointed toward them. Ethan saw Gregorie and Colonel Mishkin hurry into the temple behind their men, an exhausted young girl whom he recognized as the oracle Elena pinned between them, and then gaze upon the Ark for a moment with genuine surprise and wonder.
For the briefest of moments Ethan realized that despite their differences the Russians only wanted to find out what was inside the Ark as much as he did. All of the wars, the propaganda, the lies and the mistrust all melted away in the face of human curiosity and the wonder of discovery.
Colonel Mishkin’s transparent joy at finally laying eyes upon the Ark suddenly vanished as he aimed a pistol at Ethan.
‘My congratulations, Mister Warner, for ensuring that Russia will be for all time accredited for locating the long–lost Ark of the Covenant and repatriating it to the Motherland.’
Ethan glanced at Elena, pinned between the Russian soldiers, and he switched his aim to her.
‘Without her you have nothing!’ Ethan snapped.
Lopez leaped forward. ‘Ethan, no!’
Mishkin hesitated for a moment, and then he sneered at Ethan. ‘You and I both know that you’re no cold blooded murderer, Warner. Take his weapon away, now!’
A soldier grabbed Ethan’s pistol from his hand, Ethan not resisting as his bluff was called. He held his hands up and replied.
‘The Ark’s no more Russian than I am. It belongs here.’
‘A noble sentiment,’ Mishkin observed, ‘but, as you Americans say, finders–keepers? Step away from the Ark, all of you!’
Ethan stepped down off the altar as the Russian troops surrounded the Ark. Gregorie walked up to Ethan and towered over him, his fists balled by his side.
‘I have waited a long time for this moment, Warner,’ he rumbled.
Ethan smiled back up at the Russian.
‘You’re gonna have to wait a bit longer, ‘cause you won’t be getting the Ark out of here.’
‘We don’t want the Ark,’ Mishkin pointed out cheerfully. ‘Who wants a fancy golden box anyway. It’s so last millennia. We want what’s inside it. Open it up!’
Ethan watched as the Russians heaved the Ark’s ornate golden lid upward. The soldiers shuffled to one side and then lowered the lid onto the altar as they looked down as one into the Ark.
Mishkin and Gregorie hurried to t
he Ark, desperate to get a look inside. Ethan looked to his right and saw Hellerman still behind the large pillar. Protected from the Russian stun–grenades, he had remained out of sight. Ethan jerked his head toward the exit, and the scientist silently made his way toward the fissure like entrance to the tomb and vanished into the shadows.
Gregorie and Mishkin each reached inside the Ark, and as Ethan watched so each of them lifted out thick, heavy tablets of stone that were engraved with markings that looked like hieroglyphs but were somehow different.
‘The Black Knight,’ Lopez gasped in a whisper as she saw the tablets. ‘That’s the same writing that was around the rim of the satellite.’
Ethan nodded, saying nothing as the two Russians reverentially carried the two tablets away from the Ark and set them down alongside each other on the stone flags near where Ethan stood.
‘Behold,’ Mishkin said in awe, ‘the real tablets that were broken and placed inside the Ark. It was not Moses who was a party to this moment in history when a man spoke with the gods, but the Pharaoh Thutmoses III. There, our ancestors encountered an intelligence that to them appeared to be god–like, and they recorded the event upon these stones.’
Mishkin looked up at Ethan and grinned cruelly.
‘Of course now that we have them we no longer have a need for any of you, or the Ark.’
Mishkin shoved the exhausted oracle toward them and Mitchell caught her as she fell toward the stone flags. Ethan watched as Mishkin’s men carefully packaged the tablets and packed them into a pair of Bergens. Gregorie moved again to face Ethan and this time he smiled.
‘Goodbye, Mister Warner.’
The blow from Gregorie’s fist hit Ethan deep in the belly and folded him over as the breath rushed from his lungs and his eyes bulged as though they were about to pop out of their sockets. Ethan dropped to his knees and gasped for air as Gregorie’s boot landed on his shoulder and sent him sprawling across the dusty stone flags.
‘You worked hard for the Ark,’ Mishkin said, ‘and thus I don’t have the heart to take it from you. Therefore, I shall kill several birds with one stone and leave you here with it. Within a matter of minutes this entire place will be blasted back into history, and all of you with it.’
The Genesis Cypher (Warner & Lopez Book 6) Page 30
