The Tomb of Hercules_A Novel

by Andy McDermott

  Nina scowled and drew in a deep breath through her nostrils, hoping to calm herself. The technique didn’t work. “You know, Eddie,” she began, voice flinty, “I’m getting pretty fucking tired of your sarcasm.”

  “Oh, is that a fact?” he replied. Sarcastically.

  “Yes, it’s a fact! You’ve been acting like a complete asshole for days—no, weeks, now I think about it. No, actually, months! What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” said Chase. “If anyone’s acting like a complete arsehole, it’s you.”

  “Me?” she exclaimed, shocked and offended. “What have I done wrong?”

  Chase snorted. “It’s a long list.”

  “Well, how about you tell me? I mean, it’s obviously been preying on your mind, so come on! Enlighten me!”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Yes! I do! Come on, tell me why I’m the worst person in the world compared to St. Sophia!”

  “Oh, it all comes out,” said Chase, a mocking smile curling his lips. “This is what it’s all about, isn’t it? You think you don’t want me anymore ’cause I don’t fit into your perfect world of fancy offices and poncy apartments and rubbing shoulders with the rich and powerful, but as soon as Sophia turns up you have a massive fit of jealousy!”

  “When did I ever say that I didn’t want you anymore? When?” Chase didn’t answer her. “And Sophia didn’t just ‘turn up.’ You disappeared and flew halfway around the world to get her—and brought her back into our home!”

  “She was in trouble, she needed my help. She used to be my wife, for Christ’s sake. What else was I going to do?”

  Nina narrowed her eyes. “How about, y’know, not running to do whatever she says when she snaps her fingers? She’s your ex-wife, Eddie. Ex. As in former. And you don’t owe her anything.”

  “So being a historian makes you an expert on my past now, does it?”

  “I know you never talk about it, but I do know some things. I know why you and Sophia broke up, for a start. Hugo told me.”

  “Oh, he did, did he? He never could keep his bloody mouth shut.”

  “Coming from you, that’s ironic. He said that your wife had an affair. With Jason Starkman.”

  “Ha!” Chase barked in angry triumph. “Jason told me before he died that nothing happened between them, and she admitted it.”

  “So you’re happy that she lied to you in order to end your marriage?” Nina asked. He looked away. “And I’m willing to bet that even if she did lie about Jason Starkman, there were others.”

  “Woman’s intuition?” he sneered.

  “But I’m right, aren’t I? She married you because you rescued her, and then after the euphoria wore off, she decided she’d made a mistake and did everything she could to end things quickly. However much that meant hurting you.” Chase didn’t reply, instead fixing his eyes on the distant hut. “Eddie, I talked to her on the flight. She practically told me straight out that she cared more about her relationship with her father and his business than she did about you. I don’t know why on earth you’d want to keep on defending her.”

  Chase set his jaw, the tendons in his neck standing out. “Maybe it’s because I loved her,” he began, voice a low growl. “And you know what? At least when I was with her, there was something there. There was some fucking life, and it was all about us.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “It means,” Chase said, getting louder, “that Sophia actually lives life rather than just sitting at a desk reading what some dead guy wrote about life thousands of years ago.”

  “I live life!”

  “Yeah? When was the last time you actually left your office and went out in the field? When did you last do anything spontaneous or romantic or sexy?”

  “Oh ho-ho,” Nina said, laughing accusingly, “now we’re getting down to it! It all comes down to sex, doesn’t it? All that pent-up frustration you’re feeling because now you’re stuck in an office instead of running around the world shooting people, and of course I’m to blame because I have a career with responsibilities rather than attending to your every sexual whim!” She clapped a theatrical hand to her chest. “Oh, how dare I!”

  “At least Sophia actually knew how to have a good time in bed,” Chase shot back. “Yeah, I wasn’t her first, and I wasn’t her last, but you know what? Experience helps! She didn’t need a copy of The Dummies’ Guide to Sex!”

  “Nor did I!” shrilled Nina, outraged.

  “Oh take it from me, you do. There are more than three positions! Now Sophia, she had positions that aren’t even in the fucking Kama Sutra! You think that just because she’s posh, she’s all prim and proper? Oh no. She was a fucking animal in bed.”

  “If she’s so great,” Nina seethed, “then why don’t you just marry her? Oh, wait—you did! And that turned out like a Harlequin romance, didn’t it? Her ladyship and the soldier, new heir to the manor!”

  “I never cared about any of that,” objected Chase.

  Nina raised her eyebrows. “Oh really? Y’know, for someone who thinks he lives his life according to the lyrics of ‘Free Bird’ you certainly change a lot whenever she’s around.”

  “Bollocks!”

  “Oh yeah. Everything about you! You stand up straighter, you swear less, even your accent changes! Whenever she’s there, you sound like you’re trying to be Hugh Grant! You might not admit it, but you so desperately, desperately want to be accepted by her as an equal because deep down you think she’s better than you!”

  Chase bared his teeth. “Well, I’m fucking well fucking swearing now, aren’t I, so what the fucking fuck does that fucking tell you?”

  “I know what it tells me,” Nina said coldly. “I’ve always known. It’s a defense mechanism. That’s something else Hugo told me about you. You get crude and offensive whenever you can’t handle dealing with people emotionally and want to push them away. I guess it’s about the only thing Sophia gave you from the divorce.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Chase spat. “Absolute fucking crap.”

  “Then how come I’ve been hearing a hell of a lot more of it from you recently? Eddie …” She looked at him, wanting him to look back at her, softening her voice slightly. “You’ve fought in wars, faced terrorists, had so many people try to kill you that you’ve probably lost count… but the thing you’re most afraid of is talking to me?”

  He was silent for a moment. Then: “I’m not afraid of anything. Fuck that, and fuck you too.” Before Nina could express her shock, he pressed on, a hint of quite deliberate cruelty in his voice that she’d never heard before. “You know what? After I get us out of here, I’m going to go and rescue Sophia, and if I’m lucky then maybe she’ll fall in love with me all over again. But even if she doesn’t, at least I’ll know that she’s not going to waste her life afterwards on some bloody idiotic, empty obsession.”

  “How dare—”

  Chase stopped walking, pulling Nina to a halt and turning to face her. “It’s not even a real obsession! For fuck’s sake, Nina! The only reason you ever gave a shit about this stupid fucking Tomb of Hercules in the first place was that you had a big hole in your life after you found Atlantis! This was just something to fill it! You had your new job, you had me, but that wasn’t enough for you because you didn’t have some great mythological quest anymore. All your life you’ve been trying to be like your parents because they had an obsession too, and look where they ended up because of it—dead in a fucking cave!”

  Nina hit him. It wasn’t a slap, but an actual punch to his face. Although it hurt, he was more startled by it than anything. “Fuck you, Eddie,” she snarled, tears welling in her eyes. “Fuck you! You want Sophia? Have her, I don’t care. Go and pretend to be something you’re not with somebody who looks down on you. I don’t care anymore.” She turned away and limped down the slope, feeling pain shoot through her with each step but refusing to show it to Chase.

  “Nina!” Chase called after
her. “Nina! Shit.” He quickly caught up.

  “Leave me alone, Eddie,” she said, angrily shaking him off when he tried to support her.

  “I can’t right now, can I? We’re kind of in the middle of a situation. You remember, men with guns? Look, let’s get out of here first, and then we can …” He realized he had no idea what his true feelings were, anger and confusion still boiling inside him. “We can do… whatever.” He pointed at the hut. “Come on, it’s not far now.”

  Nina stared at the building, refusing to look at him. She too was unable to resolve her feelings, a mixture of betrayal and humiliation failing to cover the true regret beneath. “All right,” she finally said. Reluctantly, she let him take hold of her again to ease the load on her leg. “Let’s go.”

  The hut turned out to be a ranger station, a work-place-cum-residence for one of the Okavango’s game wardens. The vessel moored at the jetty was an airboat, a flat metal hull with an aircraft propeller mounted above its stern inside a protective metal grid, controlled from a spindly elevated seat in front of it. Chase had driven similar craft before; they were noisy and tricky to control, but their extremely shallow draft meant they could easily negotiate marshland that a conventional boat would find troublesome.

  That the boat was there at all suggested the ranger station was occupied, which proved to be the case when Chase knocked on the door. An elderly, potbellied Botswanan wearing a khaki uniform of short-sleeved shirt and shorts opened it, looking surprised to have visitors, and more so as he took in their battered and bloodied state. “Hello?” he said cautiously.

  “Hi,” said Nina as Chase helped her limp into the room. A radio was playing music. “We’re so glad you’re here! We had an accident, and we’re kind of stranded. Is there any chance you could give us a ride out of here?”

  “Are you hurt?” the ranger asked, a moment later rolling his eyes as if wondering whether he could have asked a question with a more obvious answer. “Let me get the first-aid kit.”

  “We’re okay; it looks worse than it is,” Chase tried to assure him, but with no luck. The man opened a cabinet and took out a medical kit, gesturing for them to sit down.

  “What happened to you?” he asked. “Our truck rolled over,” Nina told him as she sat, being technically truthful. “So, about that ride?”

  The ranger opened the kit and took out a bottle of antiseptic and some bandages. “The nearest place where you could get proper help is the diamond mine, about six miles south of here.”

  “Actually, we were sort of wanting to go the other way. As in, as far from the mine as possible.” The ranger gave her an odd look. “Because, uh, we’re very strongly ethically opposed to diamond mining. You know, cartels, price-fixing, blood diamonds, all that. Diamonds are, um, for never! Yeah.”

  “I’ll remember you said that,” Chase remarked quietly.

  “Oh, shut up. Ow.” Nina winced as the ranger dabbed antiseptic onto the cut across her forehead.

  “We do not have blood diamonds in Botswana,” said the ranger, offended.

  Chase smirked. “You see, Nina?” he said patronizingly. “I told you we were in the wrong country to protest about blood diamonds, but would you listen? Women,” he added to the ranger, with a sigh and a shrug. The ranger nodded knowingly.

  “Hey!” snapped Nina.

  The ranger finished with the antiseptic, and carefully applied a bandage over the cut. He was about to turn his attention to the wound on Chase’s cheek when the music coming from the radio stopped and an announcer said, “We interrupt this program for some breaking news.” Nina and Chase exchanged glances.

  A dramatic musical sting played, followed by a newsreader. “An attempt has been made on the life of President Molowe, in an attack which also saw the murder of Minister of Trade and Industry Michael Kamletese. The president was attending a ceremony at a diamond mine in the Northwest Province when the attack took place. The assassins are both white, a man and a woman in their thirties. They escaped the scene, but security sources have named them as Edward Chase and Nina Wilde—”

  The ranger’s mouth fell open as he realized the identities of his visitors, but Chase had already pulled out the gun he’d taken from the dead guard at the processing plant and aimed it at him. “Okay, stay calm, mate.”

  “What?” Nina spluttered. “What? We didn’t assassinate the minister of trade, we didn’t assassinate anybody! What the hell’s going on?”

  “We’re being set up,” Chase told her, standing.

  The ranger stared at the gun, wide-eyed. “Now, ah, you’re not going to do anything unreasonable, are you?”

  “Not if you don’t. Where’re the keys to your airboat?”

  “And I’m only twenty-nine,” Nina added indignantly.

  “Media accuracy’s not really our biggest worry right now,” Chase told her as the ranger nervously handed him a set of keys. “You got a two-way radio?”

  The ranger indicated a radio set at the rear of the room. Still keeping the gun aimed at him, Chase went to it and yanked its power cord from the wall before throwing it to the floor, putting his foot on the case and ripping out the other end of the lead. “Okay, take a seat, mate. Nina, tie him to the chair.” He tossed the cord to her.

  “Today just keeps getting better,” Nina grumbled as she tied the ranger’s hands behind him, then knotted the other end around his ankles, pulling his feet back under the chair. “First we’re accused of murder, now we’re assaulting a park ranger and committing grand theft… boat.” Once she’d finished, Chase checked the knots, tugging them tighter. The ranger winced.

  “It won’t hold him for long,” Chase told Nina as he led her from the hut, “but we won’t need long to get away from here. These airboats can move.”

  “Yeah, but where to?” she asked.

  Chase thought for a moment, then ducked back into the cabin, returning with a tourist map of the Okavango Delta. “Hey, it’s better than nothing,” he said as he hopped onto the jetty to untie the airboat.

  Nina stepped cautiously aboard, the flat hull rocking beneath her. With both the propeller and the driver’s seat raised high above the metal deck, the vessel looked horribly top-heavy. “Is this thing safe?”

  “Safe as any other vehicle we ever get into.”

  She buried her face in her hands. “Oh, God …”

  Chase threw the mooring rope aboard and climbed into the boat, examining the engine. He inserted the key and turned it. “Okay, this is going to get loud!” The propeller growled into a blur behind the protective metal grill. He clambered up into the driver’s seat and buckled himself in, resting his feet on the pedals and taking hold of the two long levers that controlled the steering vanes behind the propeller before revving the engine. The air-boat slid from the jetty, then accelerated away.

  Nina and Chase barely exchanged ten words in as many minutes as the airboat sped north, and it wasn’t because the noise of the propeller made conversation difficult. She barely even looked back at him, instead watching the vibrant wetlands glide past. In return, the inhabitants of the Okavango watched them as they headed along the winding river. Buffalo and wildebeest warily observed their passage from the muddy banks, shoals of glittering fish darting out of the airboat’s path beneath the clear water.

  There were other, less timid creatures in the water as well. Crocodiles occasionally surfaced to investigate the noise, while Chase made a point of giving larger animals like elephants and hippos a wide berth. A small group of leopards on the shore tracked the boat with unblinking stares as it passed.

  Nina gazed back at the silent predators, her awe at their surroundings numbed by the aftermath of her fight with Chase, muddled feelings sitting in her stomach like a stone. Finally, she looked back at him. “Where are we going?”

  He slowed the engine, the propeller’s rasp falling. “There was a village on the map to the north that had an airstrip. Somebody’ll have a phone—we can call TD and get her to pick us up.” He looked around to g
et his bearings, noticing that the aircraft he’d seen earlier was now closer, circling slowly off to the northeast. He tossed the folded map down to her. “Actually, check the route, make sure we’re going the right way.”

  Nina opened the map, which flapped in the breeze. “Where are we?”

  “Find Ranger Station 12; that’s where we were. Bottom left corner.”

  She scanned the map. “Got it.” Running her finger up the page, she found a village with the symbol of an aircraft next to it. “Did you mean Nagembe?”

  “Is there an airfield there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then yeah. How far is it?”

  Nina checked the map’s scale. About forty kilometers. “Twenty-five miles.”

  “Be there in less than an hour, then. No problem.” Chase noticed Nina’s face fall as she saw something behind him. “Or not…”

  He looked around through the grill of the propeller—to see three speedboats racing along the river behind them.

  Closing fast.

  Even from a distance, Chase picked out Fang in one of the boats, his ponytail streaming in the wind behind him.

  “Great, a killer with a grudge!” he said as he jammed the airboat to full power.

  14

  How fast can this thing go?” Nina shouted.

  Chase looked back at the other boats, which were eating up the distance between them. “Not as fast as them!” The airboat relied for its speed on its shallow draft to lower the water resistance, but its square bow was far from hydrodynamic.

  He looked ahead again. There was no way to outrun the boats on the open river. They would catch up very quickly.

  Which meant he had to get off the open river…

  He tossed the gun to Nina. “Use it if they get too close,” he told her, steering the airboat towards a vast field of tall reeds. “Tell me what they’re doing!”

  “Coming after us … Still coming after us …You get the idea!”