The Sacred Vault

by Andy McDermott

  His adversary smashed his free hand down on the Englishman’s head. Another harsh blow to the base of his neck dropped him to one knee. Eddie was still gripping his attacker’s right wrist, but could feel him twisting the gun round at him—

  He punched the gunman’s stomach again. From his awkward position it didn’t cause any real damage, provoking only a gasp and a flinch - but that was all he needed.

  His hand slid up from the man’s wrist to the MP5K’s butt, finding his opponent’s forefinger . . . and squeezing as he yanked the weapon downwards.

  The gun blazed on full auto. Its remaining bullets slammed into the ground between the two men, fire meeting ice - and lead meeting leather as the last bullet tore through the gunman’s boot and blasted off his big toe. He screamed, hopping as blood spurted from the neat nine millimetre hole.

  Eddie wrested away the empty gun - and viciously smashed it into the wounded man’s face. Nose crushed, the gunman fell on his back. Eddie dived on him, pushing the gun down hard against his neck. The man struggled, spitting blood and thrashing at Eddie’s face . . . then there was a wet crunch deep inside his throat. With a final gurgling breath, he fell still.

  The other snowmobile’s passenger was also breathing his last, flailing blindly in the pool of burning fuel before slumping, flames roiling over his body.

  The force of the explosion had knocked Nina to the floor. Wincing at the unexpected wave of heat, she staggered upright. A swathe of the ice channel was now a lake of fire; the Twin Otter’s main fuel tanks were in its belly, and had ripped open when the fuselage broke in half, spewing out the volatile liquid. ‘Guess we don’t have to worry about freezing to death,’ she told Probst - before realising the danger was not over.

  The second snowmobile was still coming. And she had dropped the flare gun when she fell.

  Defenceless.

  Eddie found a spare magazine on the dead man’s belt. He slapped it into place and pulled back the MP5K’s charging handle with a clack, then ran round the broken fuselage to see the remaining snowmobile’s red tail light passing the burning wreckage of the wing.

  The rider was well out of the sub-machine gun’s effective range. He had to get down the hill fast to save Nina - but how?

  The auroral glow shimmered over an intact piece of the plane on the ground. That was one way . . .

  Nina dragged Probst into the cockpit. The bulkhead wouldn’t give them much protection, but it was better than nothing.

  The snowmobile skidded to a stop. Nina cautiously looked round the doorway, seeing a shadowy figure climb off the idling machine. He had a gun in his right hand . . . then switched it to his left to take something from a pocket.

  A grenade.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ Nina whispered. She backed into the cockpit, but there was no solid door that could be closed, just a flimsy sliding partition. No protection. She could flee through the broken window, but that would mean abandoning Probst to his death - and even if she did, there was nowhere to run, nothing but bleak ice for a hundred miles in every direction.

  The man hooked a finger round the pin, pulled it out—

  And whirled at a noise from behind.

  Eddie hurtled down the slope, riding the de Havilland’s cabin hatch like a sledge and howling like a banshee. The startled man fumbled with his gun and the grenade, trying to switch the two weapons between his hands without releasing the latter’s springloaded spoon and arming the fuse. He brought up his MP5K—

  So did Eddie. The compact weapon spat flame. Bullets twanged off the wreckage behind his target, but one shot hit, a puff of blood bursting from the man’s thigh. He screamed, instinctively dropping what he was holding to clap both hands to the wound as he fell . . .

  On his own grenade.

  Eddie dived off the hatch, covering his head with his arms. ‘Grenade!’ he yelled—

  The explosion this time was considerably more muffled. Pieces of the luckless gunman splattered down around the steaming crater in the ice.

  Eddie stood and circled the starburst of red to the broken fuselage. ‘Nina! You all right?’ She appeared in the doorway, face alight with relief, and embraced him. He kissed her, then saw Probst in the cockpit. ‘Are you okay?’ The German nodded. ‘What about the other guy?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ Probst said flatly.

  ‘Dammit . . .’ He noticed that some of the lights on the instrument panel were still active - including the radio. ‘Is that jammer still running?’

  Probst listened to the electronic warbling. ‘Yes. This radio won’t have enough power to break through it, not on the emergency battery.’

  ‘Then we’ll have to shut it off.’ He regarded the glow on the horizon, then his gaze moved to the puttering snowmobile. ‘Think I’ll meet our new neighbours,’ he said, checking his gun’s remaining ammo.

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ Nina said.

  ‘No, you stay here with him.’

  ‘Eddie, I am coming with you,’ she said defiantly, taking more items from the survival kit - a pair of foil blankets, a small roll of duct tape and a compact oil heater. She started to tape one of the blankets over the broken cockpit window. ‘I think there’ll be more people than just Pramesh and Vanita in that place. You’ll need all the backup you can get.’ The makeshift windbreak in place, she helped Probst into the pilot’s seat and draped the other blanket over him, then propped the heater on the control yoke. ‘Walther, as soon as we take out the jammer, you send an SOS.’

  ‘How much time will you need?’ he asked. A glass tube set in the little heater’s side revealed the oil level; considering the small size of the tank, it was unlikely to last long.

  ‘If we haven’t done it in an hour, we probably won’t be doing it at all.’ Pulling the partition across the doorway as she exited, she faced Eddie. ‘Okay, let’s go.’

  ‘Seriously. You’re not coming,’ he said as she pushed past him and headed for the snowmobile.

  ‘Oh, I seriously am.’

  ‘You don’t have a gun.’

  Nina picked up the exploded snowmobiler’s MP5K. ‘I do now.’ She trudged through the snow to the waiting vehicle and straddled it. ‘Whose turn is it to drive?’

  33

  They rode up the icy hill, Eddie at the controls. In the aurora’s ever-shifting light, it was easy to follow the trails of the two snowmobiles.

  Not that there was any doubt about where to go. The glow grew brighter as they neared the hill crest. ‘So, do you have a plan?’ Nina said.

  ‘Let’s see what we’re dealing with, first.’ They reached the summit . . . and radar station DYE-A came into view.

  Internet photos had not truly prepared them for the sight. The main structure, the ‘composite building’, was huge, an enormous black block over a hundred and twenty feet high - and that was without the radome elevated on the building’s central core atop it. The dome itself was lit from within; when Eddie had glimpsed it from the plane it had been a vivid blue, but now other colours pulsed inside, an amped-up electronic version of the aurora overhead. Communications masts festooned with dishes sprouted beside it.

  Brilliant spotlights illuminated the surrounding ground, revealing that the composite building stood within a crater-like depression in the ice. The black walls absorbed what little heat came from the sun at this latitude, raising the air temperature around them just enough to slow the accumulation of snow. The main block was supported by eight massive legs - hydraulic jacks, able to lift the station higher if the drifts became too deep.

  The radar installation was not the facility’s only structure. Several smaller buildings were clustered to one side, and at the end of the long ice runway was an aircraft hangar. A path marked by a line of lights on poles ran from it to the edge of the depression beneath the composite building, where a covered walkway extended across the gap to its lowest floor.

  ‘Looks like they’ve made themselves comfortable,’ said Eddie, taking it in. He indicated a line of large cylindrical tanks. ‘Thos
e’ll be full of diesel - enough to keep them going for months.’

  ‘However long before they feel it’s safe to poke their noses out of their rat-hole after the apocalypse,’ Nina guessed. ‘What do we do?’

  He scanned the area for signs of life. ‘Do you see anyone?’

  Nina squinted into the wind. ‘Nope.’ She looked up at the windows, which in the interests of preserving heat were small and few in number; all were lit, but nobody was silhouetted in them. ‘Windows look clear too.’

  ‘Okay, let’s look for something to break.’

  ‘Did I ever tell you that I love you for your subtlety?’ Nina joked as they warily headed for the walkway. It would surely not be much longer before somebody realised the men sent to finish off any crash survivors were overdue. ‘Whoa, wait. Look at that.’

  A broad ramp descended into the depression beneath the main building, where a path had been dug to a boxy metal structure extending down from the base of the radar station - and into the ice below. The path led to a pair of large sliding doors. ‘It’s an elevator shaft,’ she realised.

  ‘Big elevators,’ Eddie added.

  ‘Very big elevators. Big enough to take all the equipment for a Cold War bunker . . . or Michelangelo’s David, you think?’

  ‘Easily.’ There was a hatch beside the two doors. ‘We might be able to get in there. Maybe there’s a ladder.’

  ‘Or we could just, y’know, use the elevator,’ she said as they descended the ramp.

  ‘That might be a bit of a giveaway that we’re here. See? I’m being subtle.’

  They reached the hatch. ‘Is it locked?’ Nina asked as Eddie tried the handle.

  ‘Who’s going to break in, Nanook of the North?’ He rattled it until the crust of ice over the jamb broke away. Opening it, he jabbed his gun inside.

  Nobody lay in wait. The entrance led to an emergency ladder running parallel to the elevator tracks. He stepped on to the walkway inside, about to climb the ladder when he looked down through the gridwork floor. The shaft dropped into blackness, a line of small maintenance lights shrinking to pinpricks in the dark. ‘Bloody hell. How deep is it?’

  ‘I don’t know, but they would have built the bunker deep enough to survive a nuclear strike . . .’ She tailed off.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Eddie began, before some form of spousal telepathy - or realisation of the inevitable - gave him the answer. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake. You want to climb down there, don’t you?’

  ‘If the US military’s built you a mini-NORAD, you might as well make use of it. Whatever the Khoils are doing, that’s probably where they’re doing it from.’

  ‘It’s a bloody long climb!’

  ‘Well, we could take the elevator . . .’

  Eddie made a disapproving sound, then grudgingly mounted the ladder. ‘All right. But for God’s sake don’t slip.’ He began to descend, boots clunking on the metal rungs.

  Nina followed suit. The descent was easy at first, but after a few minutes her muscles started to ache - and the bottom of the shaft didn’t seem any nearer. ‘I just had a depressing thought.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what I want to hear right now,’ Eddie said. ‘What?’

  ‘What if they dug the bunker out of the actual bedrock? The Greenland ice sheet is over two miles thick in places.’

  ‘If we have to climb down a two-mile fucking ladder,’ he warned, ‘I’m going to throw you down the quick way!’

  ‘I, uh, don’t think it’ll be quite that far,’ she said. All the same, she looked down the shaft with increasing frequency, hoping for some sign of the bottom.

  It came after another few minutes - still some distance below, but a dimly lit rectangle of grey was now visible at the end of the trail of lights. The sight rejuvenated them, and they increased the pace of their descent.

  Finally, they reached the bottom. Eddie stepped on to another walkway and went to the hatch at its end. The bottom of the shaft proper was about six feet below, a concrete block covered by icy water. As Nina climbed off the ladder behind him, gratefully resting her arms, he opened the metal door a fraction of an inch.

  More drab grey concrete greeted his eyes as warm air blew past him; a wide corridor, lit by sickly fluorescent bulbs. The hatch opened into an alcove in its side, blocking his view down the passage. Gesturing for Nina to stay still, he took hold of his gun, then stepped through and peered round the corner.

  The corridor was about thirty feet long. At its far end was a huge metal door, painted a dull institutional green. Another, larger alcove on the opposite side contained a desk, the sleek laptop on it in marked contrast to the Cold War clunkiness of the surroundings. An Indian man was passing the time in exactly the same way as any bored worker in a regular office: surfing the internet.

  ‘There’s one guy,’ Eddie whispered to Nina, ‘and a huge bloody door. We’ve found the bunker.’ He brought up the gun. ‘Wait here.’

  He checked that the man was still fixated on the laptop, then slipped round the corner and advanced quickly along the corridor. Unless the guard had the peripheral vision of a boiler-suited sentry in a Bond movie, he would spot the intruder at any moment . . .

  Eddie made it almost halfway before the man’s eyes flicked sideways. He jolted in his seat, startled, then lunged for a control box on the wall—

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ Eddie said, MP5K fixed on the man’s head. He froze, outstretched palm stopped a few inches from a large red alarm button. ‘Sit back down. Hands in the air.’ The guard obeyed. Eddie came to the desk, keeping the gun locked on him. ‘Okay, Nina,’ he called.

  Nina hurried to him, pointing her own gun at the guard as Eddie frisked him. ‘I see what you mean about the door,’ she said. ‘It must weigh ten tons! How are we going to get inside?’

  ‘Let’s ask Chuckles here,’ said Eddie. He shoved his gun’s muzzle under the guard’s chin. ‘How do you open the door?’

  ‘You - you push that button,’ the guard stammered, indicating the control panel.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The one that says Open.’

  Nina examined the panel, finding that one of the buttons on it was indeed marked Open. ‘Huh. Whaddya know?’

  ‘You do the honours, love,’ Eddie told her. She glanced at the guard for any signs of treachery, but the only thought in his head appeared to be the very real concern that a bullet might go through it. Shrugging, she pushed the button.

  Yellow warning lights flashed, and a low mechanical drone filled the corridor. With surprising speed for its size, the door smoothly swung outwards, revealing that it was over two feet thick. Beyond it, oddly, was darkness: Nina had expected to see some sort of control room. ‘That was . . . kinda easy.’

  ‘It’s a bunker, not a bank vault,’ Eddie replied. ‘You don’t want to wait five minutes to get inside while there’s a nuclear missile on its way.’

  ‘Good point.’ She looked at the guard. ‘What about him?’

  Eddie cracked him sharply on the forehead with his gun. The man slumped to the floor. ‘What about him?’

  ‘The subtlety phase was pretty short-lived, I see.’ She stepped through the door into the chamber beyond.

  Even without lights, she could tell it was large, her footfalls soaked up by the space. A small bulb beside the doorway illuminated another control panel. A bank of what looked like light switches was topped by a button marked Main L; she pushed it. With a clack, the overhead lights came on. She turned . . .

  Her assumption that the Khoils were using the Cold War bunker as an operations centre had been wrong. They had found a more spectacular use for it - the chamber had been turned into their own personal museum, a display of some of the world’s greatest treasures. Eddie moved past her to investigate some doors in the far wall, but Nina’s eyes were only on its contents.

  The statue of David dominated, but the marble figure was surrounded by other artefacts of equal - perhaps even greater - value. A quartet of terracotta warriors stood guard on each s
ide, stolen from the vast archaeological dig at the tomb of the First Emperor in Xi’an. Before them, mounted on a stand, was a sculpted piece of polished silver standing roughly four feet high. At its centre, an oval orifice contained a large piece of what appeared to be dark glass. The Black Stone, the sacred Muslim artefact set into place in Mecca by Muhammad himself.

  She recognised numerous other treasures as she entered the bunker. The Standard and Mantle of Muhammad stolen from Topkapi Palace in Turkey, the Antikythera mechanism from Athens . . . There were even artefacts she didn’t recognise, which the Khoils had presumably decided met their personal criteria for ‘protection’ - a painting on silk of a woman in feudal Japanese dress; some kind of stone altar carved with an unfamiliar script—

  ‘Holy shit!’ she gasped.

  Eddie returned from his explorations, having found extensive living quarters beyond one of the doors. He regarded the incredible collection. ‘Took the words right out of my mouth. Not a bad lot at all.’

  ‘No, I mean - look at this,’ she said, hurrying to one item on the periphery of the display. A crude figurine, carved from an odd purple stone . . .

  ‘They nicked Prince out of your office?’ asked Eddie. ‘Cheeky bastards!’

  ‘It’s not the same one,’ Nina said. The figure was in a different pose from the primitive sculpture discovered in the Pyramid of Osiris. There was nothing to indicate why the Khoils considered it important enough to steal, or even from where it had been taken. It seemed as out of place amongst the incredible treasures around it as its near-twin had in the Egyptian god-king’s tomb . . . but the mere fact of its presence suggested there was more to the figurine - to both figurines - than met the eye.

  But it was clear which treasure the Khoils thought most valuable. The centrepiece of the fantastic display was the chest from the Vault of Shiva. It was closed, but Nina found when she lifted the lid that all the stone tablets were still inside. No doubt the ancient texts had already been scanned, translated and analysed by Qexia. The Khoils had what they needed to spread their own warped interpretation of their god’s word.