‘The ghoul is an alien from Sirius,’ I said, ‘a Nommo. Since it escaped from Ross it has built up its strength again, and its efforts have been directed to finding the Benben Stone. There’s only one reason it would want the Stone — to send a message to Sirius — to its home world. It’s stranded here like the ancient Nommos and its plan is to to re-enact the ritual of the Firebird Project — to communicate across light—years, to let its race know that it’s still alive. It had to have an illuminatus to operate the Stone, and that’s why they’ve been hunting Ross over the past four years. That’s probably why they wanted him in the first place. Ross is their Chosen One!’ Another thought struck me suddenly. ‘The new capstone!’ I said. ‘They’re going to put a new capstone on the Great Pyramid at midnight on December 31st — the turn of the millennium. But it won’t be a new capstone, it’ll be the old capstone, resurrected after 4000 years!’
‘The perfect cover,’ Daisy said slowly, ‘but they won’t get away with it. First they don’t have the Benben Stone, and second they don’t have the illuminatus to control it. We’re going to make damn sure they don’t get them, either.’
49
The wall suddenly lifted silently as the previous ones had done and we found ourselves in a vaulted tunnel whose arched roof lay hundreds of metres above our heads. At the far end was another door of the same bluish metal, but as we approached we saw that the door was buckled and the hieroglyphs on it burned away with what might have been some kind of acid. I pushed it open, but the antechamber inside had been vandalized in the same way, obscuring the picture and leaving only a few legible hieroglyphs round the edges. ‘Can you make anything out?’ Daisy asked.
‘It’s difficult,’ I said, ‘it gives a warning about “the Sound-Eye”. It says: “and the sages dwelt in the land of Wetjeset-Neter, where they set up the Sound-Eye as the centre of light that illuminated the island. But the Sound-Eye brought Sekhmet and darkness covered Wetjeset-Neter.”’
‘What’s that all about?’ Daisy asked.
I scratched my chin. ‘I think we’re getting warm. Since we entered this place I’ve been wondering why the hell they put the Benben Stone here, way out in the wilderness where no ancient Egyptian would ever go.’
‘Me too,’ said Daisy, ‘it’s like what we do today with atomic waste. And then there’s the sealed doors of what looks like lead.’
‘And there’s nothing to tell us whether the Firebird Project succeeded,’ I added. ‘I mean we have no idea what happened back then.’
We were still pondering the inscription when the wall slid open suddenly and we found ourselves in a room bigger than the biggest aircraft hangar I’d ever seen — it could easily have housed a fleet of jumbo jets. The ceiling stood as high above our heads as the roof of the Empire State Building, and the walls, ceiling and floor seemed to be made of a milky crystal as white as alabaster. The strangest thing about the hall, though, was its shape. It was dodecahedral — with twelve perfectly matched walls set at angles to each other, each covered with blocks of hieroglyphs in ivory, blood red and blue. In the centre of the vast crystal floor was a sort of platform — a twelve sided plinth under a canopy held in place by metal uprights. ‘The Fifth House!’ I said.
‘My God!’ Daisy said, staring round at the room. ‘But this is where the Stone is meant to be!’
I walked slowly, reverently, towards the centre of the room and looked at the dodecahedral plinth. As Daisy joined me, I squatted down to read the hieroglyphs that were inscribed on it.
‘What does it say?’ Daisy asked.
I didn’t look at her. ‘It says “the Sound-Eye”, and look — there are marks inside here where a heavy object stood. But someone got here before us — the Benben Stone’s gone!’
There was a second’s pause and then suddenly I heard the distinct sound of hands clapping — a single pair of hands slapped together slowly and in unmistakable derision, amplified by the acoustics in the great chamber. ‘Bravo!’ a croaking voice said. ‘How very brainy of you, my dear Rashid!’
My Beretta was already half out when the shot cracked out and whizzed off the floor. I froze in mid-movement, then spun round to see a familiar spindly figure in a funereal black suit coming towards us — a figure with a pickled face, a birdlike fringe of hair on the back of his head and a tadpole head. It was Jan Van Helsing, and he was leading a troop of about twenty men in long black coats, all of them toting pump action shotguns and submachine guns. Two of the thugs supported the figure of Omar James Ross, while another two held their weapons to his head. Ross’s eyes darted wonderingly around him, and I realized that he’d got his eyesight back, too late.
‘Although I have to add,’ Van Helsing said, turning to Ross, ‘you took a little longer to get here than I’d anticipated, Mr Ross. Trouble with the old Divine Water was it?’
He moved forward until he was within a couple of metres of us then halted. ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘there are still six days to the millennium, and thanks to you and Miss Brooke we now have everything we need: the alignment of the stars, the Great Pyramid, the Benben Stone — and the illuminatus!’
50
The outer door of the Benben mansion snapped shut behind us, and for an instant I blinked in the blinding light. Two Chinook helicopters had landed in the valley between the dunes, and stood silently like brooding steel insects with a heat haze rising from beneath their engine cowlings. Mansur, Ahmad, Mamoon and ‘Abd al-Hadi were kneeling next to the hobbled camels under a blazing sun, with their hands on their heads, and their rifles and daggers thrown into the sand in front of them. About ten more of Van Helsing’s thugs were standing guard over them with pump action shotguns. As we were shoved towards them I saw Mansur start up, his good eye flashing lividly in the light. There was a sickening crack as one of the black suited guards hit him on the side of the head with the stock of his gun, sending him flying into the sand.
Ross bristled and turned angrily on Van Helsing. ‘You want my cooperation,’ he said, ‘you leave my cousins alone!’
Van Helsing smiled and made a retching chuckle. ‘Oh, I think you’ll cooperate, Ross. You see, I took the liberty of having your wife and son brought to Cairo.’
‘You’re lying,’ Ross said, ‘they’re in a place you won’t find them!’
‘They were in a safe place,’ said Van Helsing, grinning his stupid fishlike grin, ‘until they decided to visit Kharja Oasis. That’s when we got them.’
He felt in his pocket and brought out an Agadez cross of the type worn by Tuareg nomads in the central Sahara. I recognized it at once. It was the one Ross’s mother Maryam had worn — the one he’d presented to his wife Elena when they’d married four years ago.
Ross looked at the cross as if trying to assess its authenticity, then bowed his head. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘but let the others go.’
Van Helsing smiled again and gestured to his guards, who pushed us over to where the four Hawazim were kneeling. They forced us down next to them, and threw our stilettos and my handgun into the sand with the other weapons.
‘I should thank you again, Lieutenant Rashid,’ Van Helsing said, ‘without you we’d never have been able to track down Ross. We’ve been trying to get hold of him for four years, but every time we sent in a unit, he foresaw it and bugged out into the blue. I had a hunch you’d bring him right to us, and you did. This time his head antennae didn’t work — or maybe something warned him but he paid no attention. We had a bug set inside this place and as soon as it was tripped, we were on our way. We moved the Benben Stone days ago, of course. Thanks to Ibram and Sanusi we knew where it was and we didn’t need any map. The whole map story was a set up, Rashid, and you swallowed it hook, line and sinker. We even primed the front desk guy at the Mena to give you Ibram’s case. We let you think we needed it so as you’d think you could get to the Benben Stone before us, otherwise you wouldn’t have bothered. We made it seem like the map was what we wanted, when it was your illuminatus here. Actually the Sto
ne is now safely under guard at the old museum rest house at Giza — you saw it the time you spotted me dressed as a labourer — remember? Oh, you didn’t know I’d seen you but I did. I could have had the Blue Berets take you then but I had a feeling you’d lead us to what we wanted. You see, I knew who and what you were right from the beginning, Rashid. Did you think I was so stupid as to miss that damn great hole in your right ear?’
‘And I know who you are, Van Helsing,’ I said, ‘you’re a dirty, shape shifting Nommo!’
He cackled with laughter.
‘You bastard!’ Daisy said. ‘You won’t get away with this!’
Van Helsing retched. ‘Oh, the famous Miss Dickless Tracy,’ he said, ‘who’s going to stop me? You? Your daddy? He’ll be so proud to know his daughter was killed in action, even if you’re not really his daughter. I know all about you, too, Brooke — I know that’s not your name, and I know you’re not FBI, so please spare me the threats. You’ve been very useful to us in helping to mislead young Lieutenant Rashid here. By the way, I did enjoy throwing a spanner into the works of your little bonding episode by suggesting that you dumped on him. Cause a few lovers’ tiffs, did it? You underestimated old Halaby, though, Rashid. Before we finished with him he was pleading to be allowed to tell us anything and everything. He was aware that the 1916 Firebird file was in the old archives, of course, and it was a damn good bet that you’d try to break in. Had to be in the next twenty four hours, and after that it was a simple matter of ripping out the interesting material and having the river police watch the place. You covered your tracks well with your apartment, but Halaby was an old timer who made it his business to find out things that weren’t of immediate importance. He followed you home one day. When you were bumped by the police on the river you really had no place else to go, and we were waiting.’
I stared at him, dumbly I suppose, and Van Helsing turned and snapped at the black coated figures by the helicopters. ‘Start the motors!’ he bawled. ‘Let’s get our illuminatus on his way!’
There was a roar as the choppers’ engines started and their rotors began to spin lazily. The guards pushed Ross towards the door of the first Chinook and forced him up the ladder. ‘What about the rest?’ one of the guards asked Van Helsing.
‘Kill them!’ he said.
The rotors were spinning faster now, and the guards pumped their weapons. I looked at the desert around me — the lonely wilderness I’d grown to love — and a stream of visions suddenly pulped through my mind like an uncoiling puff adder. There was Andropov in the monastery telling us that the Sahara had turned to desert around 2500 BC, the Blij and Neuven ice core samples showing there’d been an environmental cataclysm about the same time, Ali picking up stone axes in the desert, the mutilated inscription on the door of the Fifth House... ‘and the sages dwelt in the land of Wetjeset-Neter, where they set up the Sound-Eye as the centre of light that illuminated the island. But the Sound-Eye brought Sekhmet and darkness covered Wetjeset-Neter.’ They say death concentrates the mind wonderfully, and with a sudden overwhelming gush of comprehension I saw in full focus the pattern I’d only glimpsed for the past days. Sekhmet meant devastation —that was the message Ibram had left for us. The Benben Stone had brought devastation and had been hidden out here in the deepest desert so that the same thing would never happen again.
‘Stop!’ I told Van Helsing. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing! The Firebird Project failed. When they tried to use the Stone in 2500 BC it set off some kind of atmospheric reaction that converted the green Sahara into a desert, and brought down ancient Egyptian civilization! If you try to use it, the same thing will happen again!’
Van Helsing paused and sneered at me. ‘So what?’ he said. ‘It’s so much easier to colonize a devastated planet!’ He grinned gloatingly. ‘Nice thought to die with, isn’t it? Bye-bye sucker!’ He had just turned his back on me when the rat-tat-tat of a machine gun punched out from somewhere above us and Van Helsing howled and jerked wildly as a couple of tracers smashed into his leg.
The guards threw themselves down, squinting to see where the fire was coming from, and in that instant Daisy moved with blinding speed. She grabbed my Beretta from the pile of weapons and fired, dropping the nearest guard with a single round. She rolled and fired again, and another burst of machine gun fire blatted from a dune top, cutting down two black suited troopers as they dashed towards her. Ahmad, Mansur and the other Hawazim went for their rifles, and I snatched my stiletto. I saw Mansur blast a guard with his old .303 at almost point blank range. The guard sailed back a metre and collapsed on the slope of a shallow dune. Another soldier grabbed Mansur round the neck and put a pistol to his head. In a second I was on him with my stiletto, slashing his neck from ear to ear until the blood splashed over my hands. Ahmad was firing from the hip now, advancing fearlessly towards the helicopters like an automaton, and the rest of the guards had given up the fight and were piling back into them. I looked round for Van Helsing and saw that he was still alive. He’d managed to drag himself to the ladder of one of the choppers and was hauling himself into the hold. ‘Leave them!’ I heard him bawl. ‘Hit them with the missiles.’
The second aircraft wheeled around about a metre off the ground and lurched forward in a shroud of dust, coming straight at us. I could see the pilot in the cabin with his helmet and headphones on, and the missile tubes bristling on the fuselage.
‘Down!’ I screamed, and everyone but Ahmad dropped flat in the sand. The Little Pot ran forward towards the metal beast, coolly dropped on one knee and lifted his rifle. I could almost see the pilot’s finger poised on the missiles ‘Fire’ button. Ahmad worked the bolt, took aim as though he had all the time in the world, and squeezed the trigger. There was a puff of smoke from the rifle, followed by a shuddering detonation as the chopper’s fuel tank went up. A singeing whoff of orange and black fumes Tufted over our heads carrying a rain of grit, fragments of twisted fuselage and bits of flaming human bodies. The blazing skeleton of the aircraft dumped into the sand and I saw shadows flailing frantically inside the shattered frame. Daisy and I stood up, but I knew it was too late to save Ross. The other Chinook, with the amnir and Van Helsing aboard, was sweeping away in a long curve, gaining height steadily in a whirl of smoke and aviation fumes. It passed over us fast, and the last I saw of it was its shadow skimming over the dune crests, heading east.
51
It was only as I watched the Chinook disappearing into 1 the distance that I realized what had really happened. I’d delivered Ross to his enemies packed, sealed and gift-wrapped. Van Helsing had never even needed the map. It had been a scam from the beginning, and he had sacrificed his own men just to convince us. That was how much he’d wanted Ross. The Old Man had saved me from perdition, given me a life, and this was how I’d repaid his trust — by putting the whole tribe in jeopardy. I sank down to my knees and dropped my stiletto, feeling tears coursing down my scorched cheeks. In a dreamworld, far off, I saw the fuselage of the Chinook still blazing, smelt the stink of burning aviation fuel, acrid smoke, grilled flesh, and took in the charred, mutilated bodies of Van Helsing’s foot soldiers scattered across the dunes. I watched numbly as Mansur and Ahmad worked their way through the shattered bodies, slitting the throats of those who were still alive. To them, I knew, it wasn’t cruelty but compassion — they would have done the same for me. I stared as ‘Ali came scooting down the dune face dragging his light machine gun, kicking up spouts of dust, and watched as the others embraced him. It was ‘Ali who had saved us, but I had failed them all. In all the years I’d been with the Hawazim, I’d never felt such an outsider as now. I saw Daisy slap the dust off her jibba, sweep back her golden hair with a single movement of the hand, and look round for me. I saw her bounding over the sand towards me as if in slow motion. The next thing I knew was a savage slap in the face from the left and then another from the right, and Daisy shaking me: ‘Sammy!’ she was shouting, ‘Sammy, you’re in shock! Come on! For Christ’s sake, Sammy! W
e need you!’
It was the word ‘need’ that brought me out, blinking, and I suddenly became aware of a stinging face and a terrible, raging thirst. ‘I fucked up...’ I said, struggling to force the words out of my mucus-clogged mouth. Daisy slapped me again, even harder, with such force that I almost fell over.
‘Jesus Christ!’ she said, with an edge of hysteria in her voice. ‘We all fucked up, Sammy. Don’t dip out on me now!’
I rubbed my cheek and sat in the sand. Someone pushed a gourdful of water into my hand and I turned to see Mansur, grinning, his face burned raw from the Chinook blast. ‘Spoils of war!’ he said. ‘They unloaded five jerry cans to water the troops, but they left in such a hurry, they forgot them! Now, don’t drink too fast, brother — just sip.’
I didn’t sip, I gulped greedily until Mansur grabbed my wrist and stopped me. I felt the liquid seeping down my body, filling my blood like the most powerful drug. Daisy drank a gourdful and when Mansur went off to water the others, she smiled at me weakly through cracked lips. ‘Feel better now?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I led Ross into a trap. I should have seen it coming.’
‘Bullshit, Sammy. I was as much part of it as you were. They set us up so carefully we had no way of knowing. They were determined to get Ross — they must have set us up from the beginning, right from the time they took Ibram’s suitcase. They primed Abd al-Alito give us the case with the map in it.’
‘Well one thing’s for sure, Van Helsing’s not the alien.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because Ross told me that when he shot the creature, it reverted to its original form. When Van Helsing was hit, he stayed Van Helsing. He’s one of the Nommo’s cronies, but he’s not the Nommo himself.’
Firebird Page 33
