Moon Mask

by James Richardson

  “Come on, lover boy,” Raine said, scrambling past Gibbs to take King’s arm and guide him to a bench where Nadia was busy opening a first aid kit. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

  King reluctantly released his new fiancée yet despite all he had just been through, he couldn’t wipe the world’s biggest grin off his face. He allowed Raine and Nadia to gently get to work on his injuries.

  “There’s no sign of any mercs, Boss,” O’Rourke replied.

  Gibbs moved into the cockpit but his voice could still be heard. “Lake, anything on infrared?”

  “No sir,” she replied. “And there’s no sign of the stealth plane either.”

  “Damn,” King muttered, trying his best to ignore the fact that he still had two nails protruding from his body. With the adrenaline wearing off, they were starting to hurt like hell. “He got away with the map.”

  “No,” Sid corrected. Raine noticed a certain degree of reluctance in her face, as though revealing what she was about to could ruin the happiness she had just found. The quest for the mask was far from over, but had King overcome his obsession?

  Before taking a seat next to her fiancée, she pulled a golden dagger out of her waistband and presented it like a prize to King. “These guys chased him off before he could retrieve it,” she explained.

  King took the dagger in his left hand and turned it over, studying it fully for the first time. He noticed again the worn leather of the handle, the hieroglyphs and the precious stones, most striking of which was a large red gem in the centre of the hilt, but he still wasn’t sure how it could be a map.

  Then he noticed something which seemed out of place. Twisting in a seemingly random pattern down the length of the golden blade was a crude engraving, a single line which stretched in what he could only describe as a ‘squiggle’ down the metal. Unlike the fine craftsmanship of the rest of the knife, the line was ugly and rough. Certainly like nothing he had seen on a ceremonial Egyptian weapon before.

  A vibration in the deck indicated that the Osprey was moving, its tilt-rotors shifting position to pull the plane out of the hover it had maintained to proceed to the rendezvous with O’Rourke.

  “I don’t see what good it’s going to do us though,” Sid frowned, looking at the ornate knife, wondering who it had once belonged to. Nadia paused in her administrations to glance at it also.

  “Kha’um’s map will lead us around the coastline of an unknown island,” King told them what he had learned from the Kernewek Diary, unaware that Mrs Marley had already told Raine. “This,” he held up the dagger, “must lead us through the system of caves to where they stashed the treasure. But we still need to figure out where Emily’s piece of the map is. And I have no idea where to start looking,” he admitted.

  Raine grinned triumphantly at him. “Well, smarty-pants,” he said, “look no further. Miss Yashina,” he said to Nadia as she finished wrapping King’s hand, the nail now removed and the wound coated in antiseptic ointment. “If you please.”

  Not playing up to Raine’s theatrics, Nadia nevertheless flipped open the laptop screen to display an image of an area of land easily identifiable to an Englishman.

  “Cornwall?” King asked. Then it all clicked into place and he slapped his forehead, instantly regretting the action as it sent new bolts of pain through his hand, his arm and his head. “Of course!”

  “Of course . . . what?” Sid asked, not understanding.

  The Osprey settled into another hover low to the glacier, scarcely three feet above a flat section of ice and one by one O’Rourke, Garcia and West clambered on board. Seconds later, Lake piloted the tilt-rotor up and away from the glacier and headed east over the mountains.

  “Forever more, the bearer of my name shall hold my piece of the map in their hand,” King repeated the final passage of Emily Hamilton’s diary. “I took that to imply that the bearer of her name, her descendants, would look after her piece of the map. That it was kept somewhere safe in the Hand of Freedom building. But she wasn’t talking about her great, great, great grandchildren or whatever,” he said excitedly. “She literally meant the bearer of her name, which she changed to Kernewek.” To Sid’s blank expression, he added: “Kernewek is the traditional language of Kernow . . . Cornwall, the southern peninsula of Great Britain, and home to a long legacy of piracy and smuggling. The coastline is riddled with caves, many of which were expanded on by smugglers to gorge their way through the county and avoid the authorities.”

  “So, the bearer of her name was another entity entirely,” Sid confirmed. “Not a person but the actual landmass where the treasure was buried. Not an island, but a peninsula.” She frowned. “But what about the hand? Her clue suggests that the map was somewhere in the Hand of Freedom building.”

  Raine answered that. “May I?” he asked, plucking the laptop from Nadia. Gibbs was too busy working out the logistics of getting them to England to notice his indiscretion and Raine took that as a mini triumph.

  “This is a map of Cornwall,” he showed them the image on the screen:

  Then he brought up a satellite image of the Hand of Freedom building which they had previously used to plan their infiltration and juxtaposed the image on top of the map:

  “Forgive the pun,” he said with a grin, “but it fits like a glove.”

  Indeed, the Hand of Freedom building hadn’t been designed in the shape of a hand at all, but rather as a copy of the iconic shape of the southern tip of England.

  “So now we just need to work out what part of the coastline Kha’um’s tactile map represents and-”

  “We’ve been busy,” Nadia cut King off, taking the laptop back off of Raine and tapping at the keyboard. King recognised the computer program Sid had been using back at the U.N. to fit the contours of the tactile map into the coastline of a landmass. But without any idea of where to start, it had been like looking for a needle in a haystack.

  Now, however, the computer had only a limited landmass with which to work with and had found a fit easily:

  King remembered the small depression on the face of the tactile map which he had assumed to be the metaphoric X marking the spot. Looking at the overlaid image of the two maps, he saw that that point lay in the middle of an area known as The Lizard. He could picture in his minds-eye Kha’um, Emily Hamilton and Abubakar rowing in a boat laden with a pharaoh’s treasure around the rugged coastline under the cover of darkness, navigating with nothing more than a piece of bone crafted into the shape of the coast. They would have come in off the English Channel, rounded the southern point of the Lizard and then cut in land, following the course of the Helford River until it branched into the numerous small creeks which fed it. They had followed one such creek, now dried up and gone, to a point in the middle of a field which, he saw, today was situated inside the perimeter of a Royal Naval Air Station.

  But where had they gone from there? The modern map indicated no caves. Part of him wondered whether, true to the cliché, they had simply dug a hole in the middle of the field and dumped their hoard. But that didn’t make sense.

  “So where’s the treasure?” Raine asked with a gleam in his eyes.

  King looked at the Egyptian dagger in his hand, following the twisting line snaking down the blade, etched into its surface, he believed, thousands of years after its original owner’s tomb had been sealed. Then he turned the knife diagonally and followed the line in the opposite direction, from the tip of the blade to the red stone in the centre of the hilt.

  That was when he recognised the shape of what he was looking at: the route, and the final destination.

  The line terminated in the centre, where the blade, the handle and the hilt all met, forming a very obvious + shape.

  He grinned back at Raine. “X marks the spot,” he said.

  Raine rolled his eyes. “I hate clichés.”

  38:

  Traitor

  United Nations Headquarters,

  New York City, USA
<
br />   Alexander Langley pressed the palms of his hands into the balls of his eyes in a futile attempt to alleviate the building pressure throbbing through his skull.

  His team had touched down in Great Britain without further incident and had been assigned quarters within the Royal Naval Air Station Culdrose. Safely tucked away inside a military base in England allowed them all to have a few hours down time before moving on to the final stage of the mission. Even the seemingly resourceful mercenary Bill Willis couldn’t touch them there and the Chinese certainly would think again before attacking a British military base.

  He hoped.

  Along with the ongoing logistics of running this operation- the Jamaicans were still pissed, the Argentines were less than happy and he owed a Peruvian Army general a big favour- he had been keeping apprised of the deteriorating relations with China.

  Affronted by accusations, they had made a shocking decision to withdraw from the U.N. Security Council, sending both the United Nations and governments around the world into panic.

  Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, he thought sardonically.

  In an even more dramatic move, they had closed their borders to all non-Chinese incoming travellers. Tens of thousands of travellers and holiday makers, due to meet connecting flights or stopovers within the P.R.C. were stranded and holiday companies were struggling to redirect them and sort out the mess. Trade had been suspended, a bizarre decision that could irretrievably damage the country’s own economy but had nevertheless put the cat among the pigeons in the halls of power around the globe. It would only be a matter of time before they ejected foreign ambassadors and Langley knew once that happened, there would be no coming back from this chaos.

  There was no doubt about it. China was on a war footing. Large numbers of troops had been mobilised around the major cities, their missile control centres were on high alert, their air bases operating at maximum readiness and a naval fleet, commanded by their brand new aircraft carrier, had embarked on ‘war games’ in the Pacific.

  Japan was jumpy and had mobilised its own military in response, as had Russia. The Pacific coast of the U.S. was also on high alert and a large task force was heading towards Asia, also on ‘exercises’.

  The only public statement China had released said that they had taken precautionary actions in response to an undisclosed threat they faced. Their movements were not aggressive and Washington, Moscow and London could rest assured that the People’s Republic of China meant them no ill-will.

  But Langley knew exactly what this was all about. He had heard the panicked chatter in the back channels of power- secret talks between China and North Korea. Vietnam was considering closing its own borders as were other South East Asian countries.

  Langley understood Beijing’s worry. It all pivoted around the existence of an ancient deity carving fashioned out of a piece of meteorite. The Moon Mask.

  The posturing was simply China’s way of telling those in ‘the know’ that they were watching the Moon Mask Mission and if they weren’t happy with the way it was handled, if they felt they were being left out of the loop, if they felt that any one country, namely the United States of America, was taking control of the power of the tachyon single-handedly, then they were ready to fight for it.

  Could it really be that World War Three could be ignited by something as simple as an ancient mask?

  The shrill chime of his intercom buzzer shocked him out of his dark thoughts.

  “I said I wasn’t to be disturbed,” he snapped irritably to his aide in the adjoining room.

  “Yes sir, I’m sorry,” she replied. “It’s just that there is a Jack Harman here to see you. He says it’s urgent.”

  Jack Harman? Langley thought. What the hell is he doing here?

  “Send him in,” he told his aide. A second later the forty-nine year old man walked into his office, closing the door behind him. His sandy-brown hair, as always, bobbed up and down on his head as though he was auditioning for a roll in a shampoo commercial but his belt was a few notches looser than the last time he’d seen him. Langley supposed that the desk job had added a couple inches to his own belt in recent years.

  “Jack,” he greeted his old comrade, walking around his mahogany desk to shake his hand. They had served together in the CIA’s Special Operations Group. Harman, however, had opted out of the field almost a decade ago to take a desk job in Virginia and start a family and had risen to the position of ‘Intelligence Director’ only eight months ago. Nevertheless, they had kept in touch, meeting up socially with one another at least a couple of times every year, and meeting each other in an official capacity with increasing regularity.

  “Not that it’s not good to see you,” he said as pleasantly as he could, “but I’m afraid I’m quite busy. I would have thought you’d have your hands full with the Chinese-”

  “This isn’t a social call, Alex,” Harman cut him off.

  “Then what’s this about?”

  “I know you’re heading up a special U.N. mission involving one of our SOG teams.”

  Langley was taken aback. As far as he knew, the mission’s existence hadn’t been disseminated down from the CIA Director. Sure, Harman was a powerful man in the company, but . . .

  “I had to come here, to warn you in person,” Harman continued.

  “Warn me? About what, Jack?”

  Harman’s voice was grave. “You have a security leak in your team.”

  RNAS Culdrose,

  Cornwall, England

  The thunderous boom of jet engines reverberated through the air as the Red Arrows seared across the azure blue sky. The Royal Air Force’s world famous aerial aerobatic team twisted and spun, cart-wheeling and barrel-rolling to the delight of spectators far below.

  Each year, Royal Naval Air Station Culdrose played host to an International Air Day, presenting hundreds of aircraft from around the globe to gawping members of the public. Many of the displays were static, the parked jet fighters and helicopters standing in hangers or on runways, cordoned off and guarded by military police and base personnel. But the main focus of the thousands of civilians who were allowed into the base, catered for by souvenir stands, craft markets and fast-food vans, was the ‘central arena’ where the amazing war machines of militaries from around the world took to the skies to perform daring stunts to the awe of the masses.

  And of all the aerial displays, none attracted more attention than the famous Red Arrows. Only the Royal Air Force’s ‘best-of-the-best’ ever got behind the controls of the bright red and white BAE Hawk T1As. Small, fast and manoeuvrable, the nine jets screamed through the skies above South West Britain, performing their carefully choreographed sequence of daring fly-bys at speeds in excess of ten miles per second. Often their fly-by would take them out into the distant horizon until they were little more than pinpricks. But the thunderous boom of their sonic engines signalled their return even before their sleek, predatory shadows raced across the throngs of civilians.

  Sheltering in the shade of one of the navy base’s large aircraft hangers on the far side of the arena, Raine, King, Sid and Nadia stood just outside the entrance watching the display.

  After a quick touch down at a Chilean Air Force base, the team had quickly migrated onto a waiting transport jet and made the long flight to England. They had spent much of that time resting and, having landed at Culdrose in the dead of night, they had been assigned quarters. In the morning, as hoards of camera toting members of the public were being thoroughly searched before being admitted into the base, the team had been escorted by Royal Marines to the point indicated on Kha’um’s tactile map.

  It was an empty field in the wasteland just to the east of the base, still within the razor-wire perimeter. There were indications of an ancient creek bed which had long since dried up and been claimed by the luscious green grass of the West Country.

  Nadia had taken a radiation reading but there was no evidence of any tachyon emis
sions.

  “Maybe we were wrong,” Raine had suggested.

  In response, King chucked him one of the shovels they had brought along. With the help of the grumbling marines, it hadn’t taken long to dig a six-foot deep hole even as the first of the day’s air displays thundered into the sky.

  One of the shovels had hit something hard then. Not rock, however, but what little remained of a rotten wooden board.

  “A mine shaft,” Sid had stated the obvious. Indeed, a shaft, roughly five feet wide had been sealed and then buried beneath layers of earth and turf. Shining a flash light into the gloom revealed a tunnel stretching away into darkness.

  “Still no tachyon emissions,” Nadia had reported.

  King had pulled the data tablet out of his satchel on which was an image of Abubakar’s dagger, the real thing now kept under guard back at the base. He zoomed in on the line etched into the blade. “It’s the route they took through the mine,” he realised.

  Gibbs had ordered the marines to secure the perimeter and for Raine and King to suit up into their NBC suits when an urgent call from West had stopped them. Ambassador Langley was ordering the entire team back to the hanger they had been assigned. Reluctantly leaving the mine shaft under the protection of the marines, Gibbs had led them back to the base and vanished into the small office in which West had set up the com equipment. He hadn’t looked happy.

  Now, the four civilians stood watching the Red Arrow display while Gibbs barked down the radio, demanding an explanation from Langley.

  Raine glanced into the hanger to see the SOG team preparing the equipment he and King would need to go down into the mine. His eyes settled on the curvaceous form of Kristina Lake. She gave him no attention whatsoever, but that hadn’t been the case during the night.