They reached Nigde just before noon. After a quick lunch at the Grand Hotel, they climbed back into the Land Rover and in a few minutes were speeding over a road that angled southwest through the furrowed landscape to Bor. Three miles further south lay the small town of Kemerhisar.
Skarda consulted his map. “It looks like the ruins are on the north edge of town.”
In the rear seat Flinders was browsing through pages on the laptop. “Wow,” she said, “there’s not much left. Maybe a pillar or two and a Roman aqueduct.”
April glanced back at her. “At least it’s a starting point. We’ve got to find those marching soldiers.”
The ruins turned out to be an arched limestone aqueduct from the reign of Caracalla and a network of Roman baths scattered over the three hills between the towns of Bahçeli and Kemerhisar. April parked the Land Rover in a crushed-stone lot and they climbed out into the brilliant sunshine. The heat hit Skarda like a force field, causing prickly sweat to instantly break out on his arms and between his shoulder blades. Taking a slug from his water bottle, he pulled their packs from the rear seat while April popped open the trunk to retrieve the weapons.
To mask their presence, they’d decided to leave the Land Rover and make the trek to the site on foot. But he was worried about Flinders. Even though the excitement of their quest was driving her, the stress was carving lines around her eyes.
He handed her her pack, but she was staring off into the distance, a look of wonderment on her face. “Earth!” she shouted, clapping her hands. He turned to look in the direction she was pointing, seeing a low, rounded hill topped with the remains of two marble pillars.
“It’s the Hill of Semiramis,” she explained. “She was an Assyrian queen, if she existed as an historical person at all. It’s possible that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were built for her. She may have founded Tyana, so certainly the hill named after her would have been regarded as a local landmark.”
Skarda studied the map. “Okay, I’ll buy that. It looks like there a valley a bit east of here called ‘Emli’. A valley can mean a dried-up river.”
“So we’re on the right track!”
“Let’s hope so.”
April grunted her impatience. “All right, let’s get going. Straight north.”
Shrugging into the knife sheath, she rammed the Glock into the waistband of her jeans and slung the Komar over her shoulder. Then she picked up the steel case housing the Steyr AUG and strode forward, her boots crunching on loose stones.
Skarda grinned as they took off after her.
“Is she always like this?” Flinders asked.
“She’s very task-oriented,” he answered.
Twenty minutes later the ruins were lost behind them in the distance. Here the plain angled at a slight rise, broken by gullies and shallow ravines and huge boulders glaring in the sun, starkly outlined in the heat-glazed air.
“There’s a canyon up here,” April called back to them, coming to a halt. She had been outpacing them, scouting ahead for any sign of trouble.
As they walked closer to her position, Skarda could see the depression of the shallow canyon opening below him, shaped liked a gigantic U, as if some primordial god had taken a bite out of the landscape. Like the rest of the terrain, the canyon floor was made out of soft volcanic tufa, but in many places it had eroded away to expose a bedrock of basalt and limestone slabs, clenched by long fingers of solidified lava three stories high. Fifty miles to the northeast the snow-covered cone of Mt. Erciyes rose thirteen thousand feet into the dazzling blue sky. Staring down at the floor of the canyon, Flinders pointed, letting out a little yelp of delight.
Skarda stared in the direction of her outstretched finger. In the middle of the canyon, surrounded by outthrust fingers of lava, a series of huge fairy chimneys marched in a single row, their flaring conical bases looking like the kilts of Hittite soldiers and their dark basalt caps perched on the tapering apexes like battle helmets.
“Marching soldiers,” April said quietly.
A narrow neck opened ahead of them, leading downward between two huge, tilted boulders to a steep, rock-strewn slope towards the bottom of the canyon. The sun beat down on their heads like a physical weight and with each step clouds of choking dust rose up, filling their throats and nostrils. The windless air smelled hot, like the exhaust from a blast furnace, laced with faint traces of fragrant cedar. By the time they reached the canyon floor, Skarda’s cotton shirt was heavy with sweat, but on his bare arms and face the perspiration had evaporated almost instantly. April looked like she was out for a stroll on a balmy spring day, but when he glanced over at Flinders, he saw that her face was red with exertion.
“Give me your pack and have some water,” he said, winking. “You’re not as tough as we are.”
She shot him a look. But then she acquiesced and shrugged off the backpack, pulling out a water bottle and taking a grateful swig. “This climate just sucks the juice out of you!”
Hefting up the pack, Skarda slung it over his shoulder and they moved forward.
At their highest point, the canyon walls towered about one hundred and fifty feet. Ash-and-dun-colored conical tufa formations rose up in serrated rows like fangs, interspersed with basalt and slabs of dried volcanic mud, hard as concrete. Scraggly cedar and spruce trees clung tenaciously to the naked rock, their roots inching into the dark fissures zigzagging over jagged blocks of limestone.
By the time they reached the line of the marching soldiers Flinders was exhausted. Dropping to a table-like boulder darkened by a pool of shadow, she pushed back her glasses, let out a long breath, and tilted her water bottle to her mouth.
Skarda and April moved into the coolness of the shadow, too. April’s eyes roved over the tapering column of the stone soldier that was sheltering them. It stood at least fifty feet high, its dark basaltic head blocking out the sun.
She glanced at Skarda, not looking happy. “There’s a lot of ground to cover here.”
Taking a swig of water, he nodded, looking out over the vast expanse of rock where the air shimmered with suspended heat. Enemies could arrive at any moment and they were out in the open.
To Flinders he said, “Time to go.”
She made a face, but took another gulp of water and got to her feet.
___
It was only by chance that they discovered the cave opening. After two hours of searching in the hot, breezeless air they had still come up empty. Massive clumps of dried lava, thrusting out from the sheer wall of the canyon, encircled the columns of soldiers on both sides like clasping hands as methodically they climbed over each wadi-like rise and depression while the sun blasted down its ferocious heat, blurring the big rocks with dancing heat-shimmers.
Then, scrambling up a valley littered with limestone scree, April noticed an abruptly-angled shadow from a fifteen-foot-tall slab of basalt that resembled a doorway. She climbed toward it, pushing herself into the black cleft. In the deep darkness she found a vertical crack in the rock wall, large enough for a big man to squeeze through.
When she came out again, she said, “There’s a body in here.” She disappeared back into the shadow.
Turning sideways to force his tall frame through the opening, Skarda stepped inside the cave behind Flinders, feeling relief at the sudden drop in temperature. April was on her haunches, playing her LED over the shriveled corpse of a small man lying face-down on the stone. Flinders dropped to her knees next to her. Moving closer, Skarda could see that the man’s skin had shrunk on his skeleton, like mahogany-colored crepe paper pasted on sticks of bone, held together by dried strings of tendon. Also plastered against his skin were a pair of baggy, pajama-like pants and a pale-colored chemise torn by two ragged holes ringed by brownish-black stains.
April looked up. “Shot,” she said. “9mm slugs.”
“How long’s he been there?” Skarda asked.
She shook her head. “Hard to say. 9mm spans a lot of territory.”
He flashed h
is lamp around the chamber. The space was V-shaped, with the base end opening to the outside, tapering back to another larger fissure leading back into the interior of the cave.
“Let’s see what’s back there.”
Stooping through the passageway, they followed a twisting, downward-angled path until it opened onto a massive natural gallery that expanded out into darkness. With cautious steps, they moved into the massive cavern, panning their LED’s in front of them. Finally April’s lamp raked over an outcrop of rock where the rear wall of the gallery rose up in sheer vertical slabs. Swinging his flash to the right, Skarda’s beam caught glints of light that shone like amber. More corpses, their shrunken limbs frozen in contorted positions, their eye sockets empty black holes, lying on top of each other like a pile of discarded dolls.
He sucked in a sharp breath, feeling Flinders’ nails digging into his arm.
Striding forward, April swept her light across the bodies. All were dressed in similar style to the man at the entrance.
“All shot,” she announced. “Looks like a machine gun. Probably the one at the entrance got away and they chased him down.”
“Who?” Flinders asked, tearing her gaze away from the grisly mound of mummies.
Skarda swung his light. The beam bounced off the dull sheen of a man-sized stainless steel tub, rounded and closed at both ends.
Their edges limned by the light, straight lines etched in the metal formed the image of a swastika.
“Nazis!” Flinders exclaimed.
April had moved closer to the cavern wall. “These walls have been dynamited and mined,” she said. A cavity had been excavated from the wall about twenty feet long and six feet high. It was gouged and fractured by pickaxes, and several small holes had been drilled where the miners would have inserted sticks of dynamite. Her flash picked up a pile of pickaxes, shovels, and an ore cart tipped over on its side. “Those bodies were probably locals the Nazis forced to do their labor for them, then they were shot when the job was finished.”
“The Nazis were looking for Vril,” Flinders said. “So this must have been where the meteorite crashed, the source of the Atlantean orichalcum.”
April ran her lamp along the interior of the cavity. “Nothing but bedrock here now,” she announced. “If they found the orichalcum, they cleaned it out.”
Skarda moved down the length of the cavern. Next to the stainless steel tub more equipment lay abandoned: electrical consoles, steel tubes and wiring, and a large black rectangular apparatus that looked like a scaled-down industrial furnace.
“Shine your lights on this stuff,” he said. “I want to send a picture of it to Candy Man.” Taking out his Stealth, he snapped off a series of images and e-mailed them.
They explored the rest of the long cavern but found nothing but more abandoned mining equipment.
Skarda’s smartphone chimed. The answering message from Candy Man. He scanned it, then read it out loud: “’looks like equipment for kroll process, refinement of van arkel–de boer crystal bar process of 1925 for making titanium bars. raw ore put in fluidized bed reactor, heated to a liquid, then moved to a stainless steel reactor vessel where treated with water and hydrochloric acid to a porous solid, then melted in an electrode arc furnace and turned into ingots.’”
Closing out the screen, he met the eyes of the women. “So that’s it. The Nazis mined the orichalcum, melted it into ingots, and moved it out of here.”
Flinders’ shoulders slumped, her face slack with disappointment.
“All right,” April said. “Not much we can do here.”
Picking up the steel gun case, she headed for the way out.
___
They had just climbed out into the open air when they heard the staccato clatter of a helicopter rotor tearing apart the parched silence of the canyon.
THIRTY-FIVE
“GO! Go! Go!” April yelled.
They dived for the cover of a fractured boulder, merging with its deep shadow. Crouching forward, April peered around the edge of the rock, staring out over the canyon floor, where the late afternoon sun was casting long shadows across the labyrinth of stone.The khaki-and-sand-colored chopper was settling to earth at the far end of the row of rock soldiers.
“Eurocopter Tiger. Probably Jaz,” she said. Thirty seconds passed before she saw the tall, spiky-haired woman jump out, followed by three men wearing black body armor despite the heat. “Yep. Jaz. Plus three guys.”
Scuttling back to Skarda and Flinders, she issued terse orders. “Park, take Flinders and find some place to stash her—someplace with lots of dark shadows so she won’t be seen. Then climb up on that ledge over there and stay hidden in those big rocks. I’m going to cover the other side. We left plenty of fresh footprints, so they’re going to know we’ve been here, and they’re not going to have any problem following our trail to the cave. If I were Jaz, I’d send a couple of men to look for us, just in case we’re still here. Our best bet is to keep hidden until they’re gone.”
Popping open the gun case, she assembled the Steyr with expert fingers. Then she thrust the rifle into Skarda’s hands and glanced back along the maze of rock formations. “Good thing we walked. She won’t know when we were here, and that’s to our advantage.”
From the canyon floor shouts of discovery reached their ears. They’d found the footprints. Skarda took Flinders’ arm, half-turning his head to lock eyes with April. Some unspoken communication passed between them, something deep and intimate, that Flinders recognized but couldn’t define or understand.
Then, pulling the Glock from her waistband, April took off running in a half-crouch for the dense, purpling shadows of the rocks.
___
Skarda led Flinders up a narrow trail of broken limestone to a position on the rock wall where enormous chunks of basalt had tumbled to form a darkened overhang that looked out over the western half of the canyon. At this time of the day the sun had lowered to the point that the giant boulders were casting almost horizontal shadows, plunging the overhang into total darkness.
Scrambling up the basalt scaffolding, Skarda cast a glance into the deep fissure formed by the overhang. Then he climbed back down to give Flinders a boost up. “Stay there,” he said in a low voice, watching her crawl back into the interior. “Don’t move until we come back and call out your name, okay? In a place like this, any movement stands out like a neon sign.”
When he heard her whisper back, he dropped to the ground and retraced his steps to the ledge April had pointed out to him. Climbing into the shadow of a towering shoulder of limestone, he rested the barrel of the Steyr on a flat shelf of rock and looked out over the maze of humps of ancient lava, conical tufa formations, and blackening shadows. There was no sign of Jaz and her men.
Or of April.
Now the only thing he could do was sit back and wait.
___
The shadowed side of the sawtoothed tumulus of basalt looked like the entrance to a dark cave. Scuttling toward it, April dropped to her knees, merging with the inky blackness. From this position she could see three towering rock formations shaped like gigantic mushrooms sprouting from a field of granite boulders, standing like sentinels over the flat plateau that sloped down to the cave entrance on the lava field below. Anyone stalking them would have to make their way through the mushrooms.
Settling back, she became utterly motionless, a part of the rock itself. Either the men would come right away or they wouldn’t. Her black eyes probed the lengthening shadows, her ears straining for the scrape of boot leather against stone.
But there was nothing. Only the faint susurration of the wind whispering around the rocks.
She gave them ten minutes. Then she moved forward in a low crouch, keeping to the shadows, careful to place her feet on bare rock to minimize stirring up puffs of dust. When she reached the shattered ruins of a limestone wall, she dropped to all fours and crawled closer. Pushing the Komar further toward the middle of her back so it wouldn’t clank against the
stone, she used the wall’s natural ledges to haul herself up in two smooth movements.
When she was just high enough to peer down into the canyon, she stopped. Her searching gaze swept over the chopper squatting on the tufa plain below, but she could see no sign of Jaz or her men. That meant they were most likely inside the cave.
Satisfied, she turned around and retraced her steps, dropping down the wall and crouching low as she hurried forward, retracing her steps along the way she’d come. When she reached the ledge where Skarda should be waiting, she froze in her tracks, listening, her fingers wrapping tightly around the butt grip of the Glock.
Something cold blew against the back of her neck.
Skarda should have signaled her. Which meant something had gone wrong.
Skirting around a field of loose stones, she scuttled toward an egg-shaped boulder in the shadow of the rock ledge, flicking a glance up at it. He wasn’t there. She dropped to her haunches, crab-walking around the boulder and leaning out so that she could look down into the deep channel of rock that ran below her position like a miniature canyon.
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