Moon Mask

by James Richardson

  “Sid,” King said, trying to restrain her. The shock of Nadia’s betrayal erupted like Vesuvius in his fiancée. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She pulled against him again and nearly broke loose but this time Lake intercepted as well.

  “Get her back!” Gibbs yelled again. “Garcia-”

  “This is a mistake,” Nadia protested. “Do you really think I would betray you? To the Russians?!” The question was directed solely at Raine, totally oblivious to the commotion Sid was causing or the three guns pointed at her. Garcia holstered and secured his weapon and then stepped forward. Nadia didn’t resist as he took her hands behind her back and bound her wrists with plastic ties.

  “I would see all of Russia burn in the fires of hell and damnation before I ever raised a finger to help them!” The ice was gone from her voice. The fire burned. “My precious Russia, to whom I have betrayed you, killed my father and raped and abused me! Perhaps you should have done your homework more thoroughly before you started pointing fingers, Nate!”

  “Come on,” Garcia said, shoving her roughly away. Gibbs and West followed, keeping their weapons trained on her. On the far side of the hanger, Sid was dragging in deep breaths in an effort to calm herself.

  “You have made a mistake, Nathan!” Nadia shouted back to him as she was ushered into the office. “And now, I think, you will die because of it!”

  39:

  The Mummy’s Curse

  Poldark Mine,

  Cornwall, England

  “Which way now?”

  “Uh . . . that way.” King pointed down the left most tunnel out of the selection of three. Raine stepped ahead, the torch beam affixed to the helmet of his NBC suit slicing through the gloom while his handheld torch darted around the walls and ceiling of this latest tunnel.

  As with the other tunnels they had trekked down for the last twenty minutes, the wooden support beams put in place centuries ago by the ancient tin miners had rotted away. Much of the wall had sagged, the damp soil slouching down to the ground, covering the tracks of whatever antiquated system of carts had once prowled these depths of the earth, ferrying ore to the outside world. In some places the ceiling had caved in completely but narrow gaps had allowed them to squeeze through into the tunnels beyond. Nevertheless, it had been a precarious adventure since they had been lowered down through the shaft which they had discovered and ventured deeper and deeper into the depths of the earth.

  Moisture glistened from the walls, large drops echoing loudly as they splashed into stagnant pools. The shards of rotten wood creaked under the pressure of three hundred feet of earth above their heads.

  Preparing for his and Raine’s mission into the mine, King had read up on the history of Cornish mining. Now, he wished he hadn’t, because of all the statistics he’d read about - about mines with around forty miles of tunnels dropping to depths of almost 3,000 feet - it was, unsurprisingly, the accident rates that had wedged themselves into his memory. Tale after tale of cave-ins, explosions and gas leaks. And those mines were kept in comparatively good condition, maintained to some degree at least by the miners. He guessed that this however, perhaps a southern extremity of Poldark Mine, had been long since abandoned even in Kha’um’s day. Despite Poldark’s modern visitor centre and underground tours and ghost hunts, he guessed that this branch had been cut off from the main network centuries before. Abandoned, lost and forgotten about.

  Which meant, of course, no maintenance whatsoever.

  Their booted feet sloshed through the muddy ground as Raine led the way cautiously down this latest tunnel. King held a tablet computer in his hand. Small, flat and compact, its touch screen now displayed an enhanced image of the route etched into Abubakar’s dagger but trying to juxtapose it into his real life surroundings was proving to be very difficult.

  Raine had barely said a word since they had started their descent, except for the odd instruction to assist with overcoming some of the obstacles. But King knew it wasn’t just the oppressiveness of the low and crumbing ceiling that kept him quiet.

  “You know, it doesn’t make sense.” King had to break the silence. The sense of claustrophobia had been slowly gnawing at him.

  “What doesn’t?” Raine’s voice came back to him through tinny-sounding speakers set into his clumsy helmet. His breathing sounded not dissimilar to Darth Vader. As well as offering some limited protection from the tachyon emissions– despite Nadia’s assurances that their bodies were immune to the effects- the suits also protected them from any potentially fatal gases which had been trapped down here for the past three centuries.

  “Well, Bill – the mercenary leader – didn’t sound the remotest bit Russian. Surely-”

  “It makes perfect sense. You said it yourself, Benny. He was a merc. Nadia fed Moscow our itinerary and Moscow relayed it to their hired help. If the Russians had sent their own team and they’d been discovered, they’d be in the same boat as the Chinese right now.”

  “So you’re saying that by using mercenaries, the Russians have got plausible deniability?”

  “Something like that,” Raine replied, non-committal. “I guess they figure one international incident is enough at the moment, and it’ll take a lot of people’s bank balances to go through to find the paper trail linking the mercs to Moscow.”

  “But we’ve got the proof of the data-bursts.”

  “Yeah, but to use that as official evidence means sacrificing the CIA’s ‘asset’ in Moscow, which I guarantee you won’t happen.”

  “So, what? Nadia’s going to walk?” There was a longer pause than he had expected. “Nate?”

  “She won’t walk,” he replied. “And she won’t talk.”

  His words sent a chill running through King. “What do you mean by that?” Raine didn’t answer. “Nate?” Still nothing.

  King grasped the other man’s arm and swung him around. A flash of anger flared across Raine’s features and King thought for a moment that he was going to hit him. Then his expression mellowed again.

  “There are . . . ways of governments dealing with . . . sticky situations.”

  “What do you-” He cut himself off. “You don’t mean . . ?”

  “Moscow will deny all knowledge of her. Washington won’t be able to let her go. So, she’ll be . . . absorbed, I guess you could say.”

  “Absorbed?” King was disgusted. He tried to read Raine’s expression behind the glass face plate but found, once again, that he was unreadable.

  “She’ll vanish into the bureaucratic regime of two supposedly peace-time nations, pushed out of existence, forgotten about. Too dangerous to release, too embarrassing to keep.”

  “We can’t let that happen. Whatever she’s done-”

  “Nadia knew the risks,” Raine replied harshly. “Just as I did.” He laughed bitterly. “We’re pawns to them, Benny. To Washington, Moscow, London, Beijing. You name it. We’re nothing more than pieces to be moved across the playing board. And if sacrificing a pawn to save the king is the only option . . .” He didn’t need to finish his statement. Without another word, he turned and continued down the tunnel. King stood glued to the spot for a moment more, watching the other man’s silhouette fade into the gloom and, once again, he wondered about his history.

  He was dangerous, that was for sure. Yet he had also shown an honourable side. But he was branded a traitor. Even O’Rourke had confirmed that. And King suddenly realised, with a sense of dread, the irony of a convicted traitor producing evidence to implicate another right at the moment of achieving the mission’s goal.

  If anyone had something to gain by jumping into bed with the Russians, it wasn’t the woman whose family had been massacred by them. It was the man who had been imprisoned and sentenced to death by Russia’s greatest rival.

  Alone, trapped beneath hundreds of feet of crumbling earth with a hardened killer, Benjamin King suddenly realised that he could be in a lot more trouble than he’d realised.

  What if Nadia
wasn’t the traitor?

  What if it was Raine?

  United Nations Headquarters,

  New York City, USA

  Alexander Langley watched the video feed which was streaming from a camera mounted on Raine’s helmet, now almost three thousand feet below ground, three and a half thousand miles away. The audio feed had been cut while Raine and King made their way through the treacherous labyrinth. Occasionally, Raine’s voice would crackle over the com-link, checking in with the rest of the team posted at the entrance to the mine shaft.

  He absently stroked his chin as he watched the men’s progress. He felt nervous for them, knowing that the ancient mine could come crumbling down on their heads at any moment. Then there was the added Russian involvement. If Moscow had betrayed the U.N. agreement, was the team safe even in the middle of a British naval base? The Russian agent, Nadia Yashina, had been detained, so an angry Gibbs had reported to him, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be some other attempt to snatch the Moon Mask from Raine and King. The Russian Permanent Representative had been refusing to return his calls, his aides fobbing him off with one weak excuse after another ever since their treachery had come to light.

  He had delayed taking this information straight to the U.N. Security Council, knowing that it would spark yet another major international incident.

  The situation with the Chinese had gone from bad to worse. The situation was spiralling out of control. Heated discussions in the Norwegian Room had erupted into full scale arguments between the members of the Security Council. Threats and allegations of wrong doing, all centred around the Moon Mask, were hurled like spears. The former façade of friendship and cooperation was beginning to crack. The promise of the power of a tachyon bomb was bringing out the worst in all involved. To openly accuse the Russians, even with the evidence he had, would form a schism from which the council, and indeed, the world, may not recover.

  The nuclear threat had fuelled the paranoia of the Cold War. Would the power of the tachyon erupt into a second Cold War? Or worse?

  Yet something still didn’t sit quite right in his gut. And, in his line of work, Alexander Langley had learned to trust his gut instinct.

  As he continued to watch the live video feed, he typed his password into another computer on his overburdened desk. Before the mission, background files had been accumulated on the three civilians, King, Siddiqa and Yashina. He tapped his keyboard, bring up the file which had been compiled by the CIA, the NSA and the FBI on the Russian woman. He had read it before the mission, but now he read it again.

  Born in the old oil extraction town of Izberbash on the Caspian coast, part of the Republic of Dagestan, Nadia had won a scholarship to the Moscow State University at the age of sixteen. There, as one of Russia’s brightest young minds in the turbulent years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, she had become one of the youngest people to earn a PhD in Quantum Physics. She then went on to study across a wide range of fields, earning degrees in mathematics, practical science and medicine. But then her life took a very different course. During the resurgence of separatist hostilities in Dagestan, her father, mother and three sisters were killed by Russian Special Forces. The reports claimed that her father, Iosef Yashin, himself a respected physicist, had been feeding sensitive information to the followers of Abdul Madzhid, the leader of the militant organisation Shariat Jamaat until his death in 2008.

  Fearing for her life also, Nadia had fled to the west, seeking and being granted political asylum in Great Britain where she had attended Oxford University and deviated her studies towards archaeology, earning a second PhD, this time in osteoarchaeology.

  “Why would you sell us out to the people that killed your entire family?” he asked the photo of the woman on the screen. But the answer was obvious.

  She hadn’t.

  He read through the files on King and Siddiqa too, and he likewise came to the same conclusion that they were innocent. Besides, they had both been prisoners at the time one of the data-bursts was sent.

  Which meant it had to be one of the SOG operatives.

  But they had all been through the most rigorous vetting process imaginable. No one got to be on what some people considered to be the ‘President’s Private Guard’ without being one hundred percent loyal to the most powerful man in the world.

  No one, he suddenly realised with a gut wrenching sense of despair, except Nathan Raine.

  RNAS Culdrose,

  Cornwall, England

  “I have to talk to Gibbs,” Nadia demanded futilely. “Or Doctor Siddiqa.”

  Locked inside the office compartment of Hanger 14, she became exasperated and in her temper she kicked the desk that occupied the middle of the room.

  “Hey!” Garcia snapped through the glass window at her. The traitor had been handcuffed to one of the hot water pipes that ran from floor to ceiling and stripped of all her equipment. The young soldier couldn’t help but admire the curves of her body. Her black pants and vest-top clung to her and perspiration glistened on her smooth skin. “Shut it, or I’ll gag you.” In truth, he wouldn’t mind doing just that if it gave him the excuse to get his hands on those curves for thirty seconds.

  He and Murray had been left to guard the prisoner while the rest of the team, Gibbs, O’Rourke, Lake, West and Siddiqa were stationed at the mine shaft, monitoring Raine and King’s progress on a laptop which West, the teams communications specialist, had rigged up to a camera on Raine’s helmet.

  “Garcia,” Nadia replied. “Screw you!”

  “I wish,” Garcia mumbled under his breath. Murray chuckled next to him. Outside, more jet engines thundered above the airbase and across the way hoards of spectators milled about food stands, market stalls and static aircraft displays.

  “Take me to see Gibbs!” she demanded. “Now!”

  “Okay, I’ve had it,” Garcia complained. “Cover me,” he told Murray as he unlocked the door and walked into the office. Murray pulled out his M1911 handgun and kept it trained on Nadia’s prone form while Garcia plucked a small roll of duct tape from one of the pockets of his tac-vest and-

  Nadia’s legs moved in a blur, whipping out and wrapping tightly around Garcia’s neck. She clamped hard, cutting off his airflow, but that wasn’t the main threat.

  “Drop it!” she demanded of Murray. His gun remained steady in his hand but Nadia had positioned Garcia’s body between them. She clung to the metal pipe, her athletic body tangled around her captive, her knees clamped firmly on either side of his head. “One twist, and his neck will break like a twig,” she explained calmly to Murray in her accented voice. “I will not hesitate to do it. So, last warning, Murray. Drop your weapon and kick it to me.”

  Garcia, for his part, was gagging. His neck firmly squeezed, he struggled to draw any oxygen into his lungs. His face had turned deep red and his eyes bulged but Nadia did not relinquish her hold on him. She twisted slightly, producing a yelp from her hostage.

  “Okay, okay!” Murray held his gun away from him and then slowly lowered it to the ground. He kicked it towards her.

  “And the rifle,” she ordered and Murray pulled the M14 from over his shoulders and again kicked it towards her. “Good, now cuff yourself to that pipe behind your head. Slowly,” she added. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Garcia’s hand move towards his holstered gun, more instinctual than orchestrated. She squeezed tighter, twisted. He yelped once before sagging to the ground, her body lowering with him.

  “You double crossing bitch!” Murray barked at her but by now he had already tied his wrists to the pipe with plastic ties.

  Expertly, Nadia dragged Garcia’s body towards her then crouched down, feeling around his belt until she found his knife and pulled it free. “He’s not dead,” she explained to Murray. “But he’ll have one hell of a headache when he wakes up.” She inverted the knife’s blade towards her and quickly cut through her own plastic bonds. Then she slipped the knife into her waistband and picked up
Murray’s handgun. As she ran out the doors, she jabbed the handle of the gun into the base of Murray’s neck with calculated force. It slammed his head forward into the water pipe and he sagged, unconscious.

  Alysya Siddiqa’s eyes were fixed on the laptop screen, carefully following each movement that Nathan Raine made through the ancient network of tunnels three thousand feet below the naval base. She knew that Ben was somewhere behind him and, not for the first time, wished that the camera had been fixed to his helmet instead of Nate’s. Instead, all she could do was hope that her fiancée was in fact behind the man assigned to protect him.

  In the hours since Nadia’s arrest, Sid had been feeling more vulnerable than normal. The betrayal of her friend had hit her hard, shaking her to her core. Once she had calmed down, her mind had gone into overdrive, seeing villains in everyone around her. If her best friend couldn’t be trusted, then how could she trust Gibbs and his team? Or Nathan Raine?

  Raine had insisted on carrying a gun into the tunnels. Gibbs had argued that it wasn’t necessary but Raine had proved persuasive. It was his job, after all. The reason he had been released from prison and issued with a presidential pardon- to follow Ben wherever their mission led, as the only other person immune to the tachyon emissions, and protect him against whatever threat awaited.

  Now, however, Sid couldn’t help but find some agreement in Gibbs’ argument. The threat had been neutralised. Nadia was under armed guard. The mercenaries employed by the Russians had been reduced down to two and surely they wouldn’t launch an assault on a Royal Navy base. Nor would the Chinese for that matter. Due to the stash’s location beneath Culdrose, the threat of enemy attack was practically nil. So, why the hell did he need a gun?

  “According to the map, it should be just around this corner,” King’s voice suddenly cut in over the com-link.