by Ed Kovacs
As luck would have it, the Shan sappers never made it to the river. As soon as they had tossed their grenades into the lab, before the projectiles exploded, they ran smack into twelve Burmese soldiers on their way to find Captain Moe. The Shan sappers wailed on full-auto then dove for cover as the lab right next to them blew. Eight of the soldiers died on the spot. Three lay wounded and one somehow scrambled to his feet and ran like hell for the river.
When the lab blew, two rebel RPG teams targeted the military vehicles sitting fat like ducks in a pond, blasting them into flaming hulks.
The compound lay strung out with its back to the river. When the RPGs hit the trucks, Wilder, Dang, and Zou, each leading a squad of five men, attacked in a pincer movement from both flanks and from the front. Their hope was that Diana was being held in one of the huts.
Not that it would be safe for her in the huts. Friendly fire was her biggest danger, but what choice did they have? They weren’t commandos, they weren’t even trained soldiers. They were a mostly malnourished and sickly rag-tag group of angry men and boys taking on thirty or forty better-armed, better-fed, better-trained professional troops. Sky hoped Diana would hit the deck once the shooting started and that would be her saving grace. The whole thing was a crap shoot, so they rolled the dice.
The sappers had been slightly wounded by the lab blast, but they picked themselves up, executed the three wounded Burmese, then engaged targets of opportunity from their little circle of death. In one serendipitous fell swoop, they had eliminated almost one-third of the Burmese troop strength. Not quite as fortunate was the recon, that failed to spot a Bell Jet Ranger sitting quietly in a dark clearing right off the river two hundred meters north of the compound. A stand of bamboo shielded line-of-sight to the copter, and the rebels simply hadn’t seen it.
###
After briefly hunkering down to get her bearings, Diana ran in near pitch black south along the river. She paid more attention to the location of the river, and didn’t see the dark form rushing in on her periphery until the last second. She stumbled trying to stop, but like two coked-up outfielders going after the same fly ball, her flesh-and-bone met a Burmese soldier’s flesh-and-bone on a dead run. She didn't know it, but it was the soldier whose eleven buddies had just bought the farm. Diana and the soldier collapsed akimbo. Bleeding from her nose and mouth, Diana sprawled unconscious.
The dazed soldier landed two meters away, but it simply wasn’t his night; he landed on top of a full grown male Python reticulatus in mating heat, a river-dwelling Southeast Asian reticulated python nine meters long and weighing over 250 pounds. Pythons, primitive snakes who still show signs of their lizard ancestry with their two tiny hind limbs, rarely kill humans, but this was a rare night.
###
Burmese soldiers stood and fought the frontal assault from their huts as Forte, Rene and Pratt crept north along the river bank behind them. Bullets whizzed over their heads and between them as they doggedly moved forward.
At the same time, Wilder led his team in from the south to almost no resistance. The defenders he should have come up against were already dead at the hands of the sappers. He led two of Zou's men into a hut where three unarmed chemists cowered. As the Chinese civilians moved to raise their hands, a young rebel cut them in half with his AK. The other rebel struck a match to the thatch and set it ablaze. Just like that, they were gone, on to the next hut.
Sky hesitated; the chemists had been surrendering. It was the reality of the brutality of war, the seductive drug-like wave of death energy when your side was kicking ass and taking names. It repelled him and yet resonated. From another lifetime? He’d have to ponder that later, for now, his men had gotten ahead of him.
His squad formed up with the sappers, then advanced to an empty hut and found Captain Moe’s body. As a rebel was about to torch the hut, Sky called out, “Wait!” He looked around, saw the wine bottle, the crystal goblets... crystal goblets! “They were here. Forte and Diana were here!”
His fighters didn’t understand what he said, but they knew it was important, and followed him out through the tear in the rear wall.
###
Like the U.S. Marines, Zou had led his team hey diddle diddle, straight up the middle at ninety degrees to the river. They fired disciplined, single-shot, well-placed grazing fire, keeping the troops in the main body of huts pinned down.
Dang took his team all the way to the vehicle park. Two trucks not hit by RPGs were disabled with grenades. Dang flanked two men toward the river to cut off any escape to the north, but an explosion prevented him from seeing both of them cut down and killed by Burmese fire. If Diana had been watching, she would have seen a vision of Dang, backlit by a sheet of flame, very much like what she saw in her remote viewing session at Mae Hong Son.
###
From the darkness along the river, every thread of his being told Wilder that Diana was on the run somewhere with Forte. He knew they weren’t holed up in these last huts making a stand. His feeling became concrete with the sickening sound of the Jet Ranger rising on the horizon. He watched helplessly as the copter zoomed off nose down, he was sure, with Diana Hunt, toward Rangoon.
No reason to hold back now. Wilder and his unit attacked the huts from the rear, locking them in a withering cross fire. They threw grenades and some of Diana’s homemade pipe bombs. Tracer rounds set thatch on fire. The remaining Burmese mounted an unorganized retreat to the river. The gunplay became close quarters and some fighting raged hand-to-hand. When Zou and Dang’s teams swarmed in, it ended quickly.
The route became a massacre, prisoners and wounded executed on the spot, before Sky could intervene. Food stocks, ammunition and guns were plundered, all huts searched then destroyed. He had earlier instructed Tasnee to have the extraction copter in Mae Hong Son gassed and ready to go, and he now sent a burst transmission with the exact coordinates. Amazingly, Zou’s men suffered only three dead and four wounded.
The Burmese fared much worse. A few made it to the river and an uncertain fate. The bodies of at least thirty others lay strewn in the carnage. A half-hearted final site search failed to locate any trace of Diana.
One blessing did present itself. The boys who'd been dragooned from Zou’s village to be porters and servants had fled to the river at the first sounds of fighting. With the battle ended, they emerged and tearfully reunited with their friends, fathers and brothers.
The extraction copter landed in the same clearing the Jet Ranger had used. A silent handshake to Zou signaled good-bye, then Wilder and Dang were aboard and rising into the night sky.
Braving the rotorwash, a jubilant, scruffy semicircle of men and boys screamed a salute, raising their weapons in the air. Sky saluted them, his exhilaration tempered by the knowledge that if the tatmadaw somehow traced the destruction of this outpost back to Zou’s village, the reprisals would be merciless.
The helicopter leveled out for a non-stop hop to Chiang Mai. Wilder felt bad about leaving Tasnee waiting breathlessly in Mae Hong Son, but he needed to catch the first thing smoking to Bangkok, then on to Cairo. With the full moon coming—a blue moon—he knew Forte would be there. Since Klaymen was dead, Cairo might be Sky's only chance to save Diana.
And maybe himself.
###
A bright sunny day. She floated languidly on the lake, paddled a U-turn, then floated again, not a care in the world, the sun warming her face. A blissfully simple time in a safe, secure place.
Diana opened her eyes. The sun shone, but she wasn’t floating on any lake. She turned her head and screamed. A few feet from her, a dead, horribly bloated Burmese soldier stared at her lifelessly, the huge python tightly wrapped around his body.
Heart instantly racing, she eased away then sprang to her feet. Her body hurt, her face hurt. She felt the caked blood on her lips and chin.
A look around to get her bearings. The river snaked behind her, the huts... well, there were no huts, only ashes, not even smoldering anymore. She stumbled forward and
saw the distended bodies of dead soldiers. Lots of them. Scrounging for weapons or food, she found a charred bayonet in the burnt remains of a truck cab.
Without hesitation, she held the knife over the back of her head and sliced the tip deep into the flesh between her shoulder blades. Tears erupted from her eyes as she then dug her finger into the wound and rooted around. Sweat beads instantly formed on her forehead and her eyes started to glaze over. She screamed, then gritted her teeth as she painfully pulled out the microchip, small as a grain of rice, from inside her body.
Tears of relief replaced tears of pain. She found an empty plastic water bottle in a garbage pit crawling with rats. After placing the tracker into the water bottle and sealing it, she tossed it into the river and watched as the current carried it away.
Fighting to keep from passing out, she forced herself to locate the dirt road she’d ridden in on last night before the shooting started. She took several deep breaths, then set off on foot. She needed to put distance between herself and this battleground.
Gaining strength as she walked, she pushed herself hard for seven hours, following the truck tracks. With dusk approaching, she trudged onto the site of the Edwardian house in the mist-shrouded valley. Except the house wasn’t there, only its smoldering ruins.
Parched and famished, instinct told her to circle the grounds. She found two dead soldiers near what had been the back door. Their weapons were gone, but she found canteens and food rations. Gloriously, one of them had a small first aid kit.
She ignored the stink and the maggots and buzzing flies and sat down next to her dead benefactors. She applied antiseptic and a bandage to the self-inflicted wound on her back, then ate and drank the rations.
What the hell happened? Is Sky alive somehow? Or did this house serve as his funeral pyre? She could always RV that question, when she felt up to it, which she didn’t.
With luck, with great luck, it would take her maybe two-and-a-half days to reach the Thai border. If she could avoid the Burmese patrols, the mines, the tigers, the malaria, the bandits, the thises and the thats. Dammit all to hell! Cairo, Sky said. Have to get to Cairo.
She stood and took one last look at the blackened stone foundation, remembering the trepidation she'd felt upon first seeing the house. Forte. It all led back to Simon Forte. Her countenance hardened, then she turned and set off at a brisk pace, disappearing into the mist-shrouded valley.
CHAPTER 25
Simon Forte had purchased a $4,000,000 cottage on exclusive Gezira Island, which divided the Nile in the downtown Cairo area, in the hopes that one day he would need it as a temporary base of operations. That day dawned. Not that Forte was a stranger to Cairo. He'd used the Egyptians as go-betweens on several deals with the Syrians and various Islamic militias in Libya, and he’d bartered some shady agreements with the Egyptian military for technology purchases.
But at its core, Cairo had always been about co-opting certain key officials who exercised control over the Giza Monuments. Forte started the effort almost a decade earlier when he first became obsessed with the tablets of Hui and dreamed of how he could use immortality to gain a lot more than mere everlasting life. Simon Forte really believed in the possibility that physical immortality could be achieved through Egyptian sorcery-alchemy. If the procedure failed, he stood to suffer no great loss; if it succeeded, he could parlay the process into stratospheric wealth and power, eclipsing the fortunes of the Rothschilds, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg. A creator of demigods, he alone would control who became immortal.
All of the pieces now waited in place for the initial event, the crowning of a new god and goddess, an event which could be counted down in hours. Thirty-eight hours.
God how he hoped it would work.
Forte stared at the Burmese tablet on the table in front of him as he and Rene sat on a terrace off the master suite sipping demitasses of ahwa turki, Turkish coffee. Armed bodyguards patrolled the walled grounds below as a dry breeze blew in from the desert, ruffling photos of the other tablets and a voluminous file on Hui. Forte even had a copy of Wilder’s book with several pages bookmarked.
Rene worked on a secure laptop connected to the Athanor mainframe back in Reston. She paused to spritz her face with designer mineral water even though the heat of the day wouldn’t come until later. “Our Thai hit team seems to have mysteriously disappeared in Mae Hong Son,” she mused.
Forte looked up from his reverie. “So my hunch was right. Diana cut out the microchip and retraced her steps back to Thailand.”
“You shouldn't have told her about it. You have a soft spot for her.”
“Soft spot?” he asked, defensively. “I sent a Burmese hit team to kill her while she was still in Myanmar, and then a Thai hit team to kill her if she returned to Thailand. That doesn’t sound like a soft spot to me, and I'm not happy that both of those teams failed.” He drained the caffeinated liquid leaving the small cup caked with rich-smelling grounds. “I showed her some kindness, and look what it got me.”
“She's very dangerous, Simon. We have to assume she took out both assassination teams and knows you sent them. She'll come looking for us.”
Forte let out a deep breath. “Perhaps. Something’s amiss. Dental remains in the Lear jet crash have been identified as General Klaymen’s, but my source at Walter Reed claims there are anomalies. And Wilder’s remains haven't been found in Burma.”
Rene stood, naked under a thin silk robe, and moved behind Forte, gently rubbing his shoulders. “Yes, but everything else is going our way. We’ve got the tablets, we have access to the sites here in Cairo, the timing is right, the First Lady is coming, and the WOR is in disarray. Klaymen and Wilder are most likely dead, and we got a hundred kilos of heroin free because Rangoon thinks Shan rebels took the money. We’re on a roll, angel. I’ll put out a shoot-on-sight alert for Diana. That way, you can relax and focus your energies on the big event.”
She leaned over to kiss his cheek and slid a hand into his crotch. “Well maybe not all of your energies, maybe you can spare me just a little since you were too tired last night.” She teased his ear with her wet tongue and exhaled warmly, then straddled him backwards in the chair, the way he liked it, the folds of her robe covering them like a shroud. She was already wet, so it was easy to slip him into her, and he simply sat there as she bounced up and down with exaggerated moans.
Forte didn’t know the moans were exaggerated for his benefit, nor would he have cared. The simple fact was Rene Bailey made him hard. There was no need for tonics or Chinese herbs, oysters, porn videos or Viagra.
He’d had other women in the three years they’d been together, but none of them could engage his sexual switch the way Rene did without even trying. He couldn’t explain it and didn’t try to. He loved Rene, as much as he could love anyone, that is, but as he reached around to squeeze her breasts, he couldn’t help remembering what it was like to bed Diana Hunt.
###
Dr. Yuseff Fakhry, the fifty-two year-old Director of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, sipped a hot cup of shy binannah, mint tea, as he waited patiently in Simon Forte’s well-appointed sitting room for their morning meeting. The thousands of Egyptian bureaucrats and workers under his control would never dare keep him waiting, but dealing with Forte was always a humbling, yet lucrative experience.
Years ago, money didn’t mean much to him. He'd been a bribe-proof, pious man. Then... well, those sons of donkeys, the CIA, set him up for sexual blackmail. He'd been a faithful husband, but was drugged and framed in a honey-trap with a beautiful woman. They’d been videoed having kinky sex. Then they recorded him engaging in extremely unnatural acts. Sick stuff. And very effective as a motivational tool.
Simon Forte, who was still head of DISC back then, had rescued him, so-to-speak, and made Fakhry his own asset. Since then, his career had really taken off. Forte never referred to the CIA blackmail material, treated him like an old friend, and kept the baksheesh—the tips—flowing, such as Thai units of Nu
mber Four. The drug pushing ensured his three children received top-drawer college educations overseas.
Beyond all that, Forte had engineered Fakhry’s placement on the UNHCR board four years ago. It gave the doctor international prestige and opened the door to foreign contacts that proved profitable. So he understood his immense debt to Forte and thought that maybe getting photographed in the sack with a shepherd and one of his flock hadn't been such a bad thing, after all.
And now, after so many years, if his benefactor was correct, Fakhry stood to gain... everything! He'd readily been using his organization to control information management, somewhat like a secret grand jury, sucking up all testimony and evidence but never releasing any meaningful reports or indictments that could endanger the cover-up. Researchers—pests like the American Dr. Sky Wilder—who had used seismic sounding equipment looking for secret rooms under the Sphinx had been booted off the plateau and banned; permission had been denied to explore beyond blocked passageways; proponents of dating the monuments to much earlier epochs were mocked, discredited and smeared.
Thanks to Fakhry’s efforts, the world had yet to learn of a vast underground tract beneath the Giza Plateau which the Antiquities Council gained access to recently, a complex visited frequently and partially looted by Forte. A complex which contained a hidden chamber used during the reign of Ramses III by the sorcerer Hui. A chamber exhaustively explored by he and Forte, but which had refused to yield its magical treasure. A treasure they stood poised to claim now that the keys had been acquired. The keys being the three tablets of Hui.
###
Arabic pop music blasted at ear-shattering decibel levels throughout Zinc, an exclusive nightclub atop a boutique hotel on 26th of July Street with an interior design of post-industrial meets the lap of luxury. A Lebanese businessman had once explained to Wilder the philosophy and success behind extremely loud Middle Eastern night spots: the din made conversation impossible unless close proximity existed between the speaker and listener, hence, physical intimacy, usually shunned in public, resulted, and magnetism had a way of taking care of the rest.
