The Exodus Quest dk-2

by Will Adams

  'Yes, what?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'That's better.' Khaled glared back and forth between Faisal and Nasser, then looped the rope around the rock once more, thinking about how to make best use of his limited resources. No way could he trust Faisal up here alone; he'd run like the coward he was the first chance he got. 'Nasser, you stay here. Guard our backs. Faisal, you come down with me.'

  'But I-'

  Khaled pressed the muzzle of his Walther against Faisal's cheek. 'You do exactly as you're damned well ordered,' he yelled. 'Am I clear?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  II

  'Others are coming,' gasped Lily, clinging to the wall. 'Please tell me others are coming.'

  'Yes,' Knox assured her. 'Others are coming.'

  'Then where are they?'

  'They'll be here as quick as they can,' he promised. 'There's one hell of a storm going on.'

  'You're Knox, aren't you? Daniel Knox?' She nodded at Gaille. 'She said you'd come for us. She said you'd save us.' But then she looked around, realized he was in no position to save anyone, had to fight back the tears.

  'It's okay,' he assured her. 'It's going to be okay. You've done really well.' He shone his torch around again, to change the atmosphere as much as anything, picking out the wooden planks and empty water bottles floating in the water, the sheer walls, the rim a good fifteen feet above their heads. He felt his pockets. He still had the scissors from the car. But even if he could gouge holds in the limestone, the shaft would have been far too high for him to climb out on his own, let alone with Gaille and Lily to worry about.

  He adjusted Gaille in his arms. Her head lolled back, revealing an ugly gash in her scalp leaking watery blood. 'What happened?' he asked.

  'Those planks were across the top,' sobbed Lily. 'They must have come crashing down. I was underwater, trying to dig through the wall.'

  'Dig through the wall?'

  Lily nodded vigorously, her hope rekindling. 'We found some talatat down there. We got one out, hoping we could give the water somewhere to drain off to. But then everything came crashing down. Stafford was… he was…'

  Knox nodded. He needed to check this out. 'Can you hold Gaille a minute?' he asked.

  'I can't,' wailed Lily. 'I'm sorry. I can't. I just can't.'

  'Please. Just for a little while. You've got to try.'

  She looked unhappy, but nodded all the same. He passed Gaille over, took out the scissors, gouged a deep groove in the wet limestone wall, slotted one end of a wooden plank in it, then lowered the other end like a drawbridge against the wall opposite until it had jammed at an angle. He swam across the shaft, hauled himself up onto the higher end, jumped up and down on it until it had wedged so tight that it was bowing in the middle. Lily was beginning to cry out with the strain. He took Gaille back from her, pulled her up onto the plank, laid her out on her back, then helped Lily up too, gave her his torch to hold. 'I need to go and check out that talatat wall,' he told her. 'I won't be long.'

  He packed his lungs with air, dived for the foot of the shaft, felt blindly along the rocky debris until he found the hole where the brick had been. He attacked the softened plaster with the scissors, hacking it free. His lungs began to protest. He kicked for the surface, filled his lungs once more, returned back down, aware how little time he had should Khaled and his men come in after him.

  III

  Khaled descended the rope first. He'd planned to wait on the ledge for Faisal, but curiosity got the better of him. He shone his torch inside the entrance chamber to check for an ambush, then advanced warily along the passage, perversely excited by the situation.

  Noises ahead. He froze, crouched, aimed his Walther. But it was only water splashing into the shaft. With luck, it would have saved him a job. He continued his advance, catching another noise now, almost in harmony with the first, a woman sobbing. He tiptoed to the rim of the shaft, peered down.

  Gaille was stretched out on a wooden plank just a little above the rising water level, her head in Lily's lap. No sign of Stafford, nor of their mysterious pursuer. But then the water boiled and he appeared, gasping for air.

  Khaled put his Walther quietly away. Handguns weren't designed for jobs like this. Besides, he'd always been curious about what a grenade could do in a live situation. He plucked one from his belt, pulled the pin with his teeth, then lobbed it into the shaft.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  I

  Movement caught Knox's eye. He looked up to see Khaled toss the grenade down the centre of the shaft, froze for a moment as he watched its lethal arc. Lily saw it too, screamed and closed her eyes, bracing her body against mutilation and death. Her shriek shocked Knox into action. He dived towards the grenade, arms outstretched, some futile notion in his mind of trying to throw it back up, impossible though he knew it to be.

  It slapped the heel of his right palm, heavier than he'd anticipated, like a ball of lead, throwing up a splash as it bounced from his hand. He reached after it, fumbling it with his fingertips, finally grabbing it, but already deep underwater, no time to think, only to kick deeper and thrust it into the talatat hole, then turn and kick for the surface, hope the limestone would protect him from-

  The explosion ripped through the water, his world spinning crazily, bell-towers clanging in his head, arms flapping uselessly, mind scrambled, swallowing water, unsure which way was up. His head struck rock, scraped along it. He stabilized himself, kicked upwards, broached the surface, coughing and hacking for air, splashing around with Lily, the plank dislodged by the blast. And then something suddenly gave way. The water all gushed out, leaving him, Lily, Gaille and the planks stranded bewildered on the shaft floor.

  He looked up. Khaled was staring down in dismay, fumbling for his handgun, muzzle flashing, bullets ricocheting wildly. Lily recovered first, throwing herself through the gaping hole that the grenade had ripped in the wall into a new chamber, half filled with water. Knox scooped up Gaille and tumbled after, bumping into something bulky and soft: Stafford's body, floating face down. He glanced at Lily, her torch making eerie patterns in the rippling water. She shook her head and turned away, not able to talk about it.

  A narrow dark arched passage led off the chamber. Lily said something he couldn't catch, his ears still ringing from the blast. But her meaning was clear enough. He nodded for her to lead the way, then adjusted Gaille in his arms and set off after her.

  II

  Khaled reloaded his Walther as he stared down at the hole in the side of the shaft. What the hell had they found down there? Footsteps behind. Faisal was hurrying up, drawn by the blast, the shots. 'Look!' said Khaled, pointing down. 'I told you we just had to keep digging.'

  Faisal stared incredulously at him. 'You're worried about that now?'

  'We need to get down there. We need to finish this. Go get the rope.'

  'Rope? What rope?'

  'The one we climbed down on, idiot. Get Nasser to throw it down to you.'

  'But we need it to get back out.'

  'We'll use the path. The rain has to stop sometime, doesn't it?'

  'But-'

  He smacked Faisal across the cheek with the barrel of his Walther. 'That wasn't a request. It was an order. Now carry it out.' He watched Faisal stalk away, fretted for him to return with the rope, then anchored the slipknot around the iron peg, tossed the rest down into the shaft. He was about to go first when he realized what a perfect spot it would make for an ambush, so he took Faisal's AK-47 from him. 'You go,' he said. 'I'll cover you.'

  'Unarmed?' snorted Faisal.

  'Here,' scowled Khaled, giving him his Walther. 'Take this, then.'

  'Why can't we just-'

  'Don't you want to see what's down there?'

  'Yes, but-'

  'We're going to be rich,' insisted Khaled. 'The three of us will have more money than you've ever dreamed of. Just do as you're told.'

  Faisal looked sullen as a mule, but he tucked the Walther into his waistband, grabbed hold of the rope, tug
ged it to make sure it was secure, then lowered himself over the edge, climbed without incident down to the foot.

  Khaled allowed himself a little smile. The three of us indeed! First Abdullah, then Faisal. What a tragic night for his unit it looked like being.

  III

  Gaille's head lolled against Knox's shoulder as he picked his way carefully over treacherous submerged rubble, Lily out in front, her torch playing shadow-theatre on the walls. The corridor sloped gently upwards so that soon the water was only calf-deep, making progress easier, but forcing Knox to concentrate harder on his footing. Maybe that was why Lily noticed the murals first. 'What are they?' she asked, illuminating the gypsum-covered wall with her torch.

  He went closer to examine them. Faded paintings of stunted trees. Row upon row of them, column after column; the motif endlessly repeated, like ancient wallpaper. And the same on the right-hand wall, too.

  'Well?' asked Lily.

  Knox shook his head. He'd never seen anything like it before. At least, trees and other vegetation were common enough in Ancient Egyptian art, but only as part of greater scenes, typically filled with people, livestock, water, birds. Never just one tree endlessly repeated like this. Or was it just one tree? Those to his right looked distinctly different from those to his left. The Egyptians had been meticulous about such things. But this was scarcely the moment for detailed investigation. They continued on, emerged from the water altogether, were able to see that the passage wasn't sloped but rather was cut with long, shallow steps that had been turned into a gentle ramp by the thick covering of sand, rubble and dirt.

  Something glinted on the floor where Lily had stepped. He swept it with his foot to reveal a metallic strip running down the centre of the passage. 'Over here,' he said. 'Let's have some light.'

  Lily shone down her torch. 'Jesus!' she muttered. 'Is that… gold?'

  'Looks like it.'

  'What is this place?'

  A memory sprang then to Knox's mind: Kostas describing the link between Harpocrates and Akhenaten, the Luxor Temple on which were depicted wise men coming from the east to celebrate his birth, and the gifts they brought with them. These trees on the walls, not trees at all, but shrubs. Specifically, frankincense and myrrh. And suddenly it all started to make a kind of sense to him, this Exodus quest he'd so unwittingly started out on.

  'What is it?' asked Lily, reading it on his face. 'Do you know where we are, or something?'

  'I think I do,' said Knox slowly. 'I think we're in the Cave of Treasures.'

  FIFTY-FIVE

  I

  The storm was finally raining itself out as the truck arrived at the end of the Royal Wadi road and parked next to Khaled's truck. Naguib jumped down. The place was still awash with water; all around them was the sound of it trickling and splashing down the hillsides.

  Tarek tapped his arm, pointed up at the cliff-top. 'See that?'

  Naguib squinted. The cloud-cover was just beginning to disperse, and one or two stars were peeking through, enough to show the silhouette of the wadi cliffs. He shook his head. 'See what?'

  'A man. He ducked down. He's hoping we haven't seen him.'

  'Can you get us up there?'

  Tarek nodded. He led them close to the base of the cliff to avoid making easy targets of themselves, then east along the wadi. It was Mahmoud who made the grisly discovery of one of Khaled's men lying spread-eagled on the wet rocks. Naguib knelt down. A single glance was all it took to know it was too late for this one. They climbed the side of the wadi, the light growing stronger all the time. 'Spread out,' murmured Tarek as they reached the top.

  'And if we meet anyone?' muttered a voice.

  'Order them to surrender,' said Naguib.

  'And if they won't?'

  'You've got a gun, haven't you?' said Tarek.

  II

  'The Cave of Treasures?' asked Lily.

  'A famous place in Jewish legend,' Knox told her. 'A cave in a desert beside a great river. Adam and Eve were sent there after being expelled from the Garden of Eden. But that was only the start of it. There's a whole literature on it, not least because many of the Hebrew patriarchs were supposedly buried inside. Adam and Eve themselves. Abel, after being murdered by Cain. Noah. Abraham. Jacob. Joseph. Some even say Moses.'

  'Pretty big damned cave.'

  Knox nodded. 'Jewish archaeologists have been hunting it for centuries. Quite something to find the tombs of all those Bible legends.'

  'So what would it be doing in Egypt? Shouldn't it be in Israel?'

  Noise behind them. Someone had started wading through water. The passage ahead showed no sign of ending, though it curved sinuously this way and that, limiting their horizons. 'You've got to understand,' he told her, 'that the Bible isn't historical. It's a collection of folk-tales designed to convince the Jews that they'd brought their Babylonian exile and the destruction of the Temple upon themselves. That's why so many of the stories follow the same basic moral path.'

  'Man makes covenant with God,' murmured Lily. 'Man breaks covenant. God punishes man.'

  'Exactly,' said Knox. He set Gaille down a moment, giving his arms a rest, flexing his fingers. 'One explanation is that the person or people who put the Bible together actively looked for stories that fitted this pattern. But there's another possibility. Take Adam and Eve. The first man and woman, right? Yet even the Bible tacitly admits there were other humans around.' He picked Gaille up again, continued walking. 'Cain was branded for killing Abel, for example, so that others would know not to harm him. Which others? He married and had a son called Henoch who founded a city, which you can't exactly do if you're alone in the world. So maybe Adam and Eve weren't the first humans in a biological sense, only in a spiritual sense. That's to say, maybe they were the first to understand the true nature of God.'

  'Akhenaten and Nefertiti?' said Lily sceptically.

  'Think about it,' said Knox. 'Here you are, living in Amarna. It's your paradise, your Eden, your Promised Land. You're certain nothing can go wrong, because this is the home on earth of the One True God, and you're under His protection. But something does go wrong. You're expelled, forced to flee in the night, then to leave Egypt altogether. How is this possible? Surely the only explanation is that you made your God angry for some reason, that you failed him in some manner. You vow never to let that happen again. You renew your covenant. And in return God gives you a new Amarna, a new Eden, a new Promised Land. But not in Egypt this time. In Canaan.

  'Decades pass. Centuries. The people of the Exodus splinter into different settlements, different tribes, each with their own identity, though still with that common bond of flight from Egypt. They pass their stories down from father to son, time after time after time, so that they gradually blur with narrative invention and blend with local folklore until, hundreds of years later, they're not only unrecognizable from what really happened, but from the folk-histories of their neighbours too, even though they're describing the same events.

  'Then the Babylonians arrive. They defeat the Israelites in battle, destroy their temple, take them into exile. They become introspective, wondering once more how such a calamity could have overtaken God's chosen people. They look to their heritage for answers, gathering all these different traditions together and weaving them together with their favourite Mesopotamian and Canaanite myths to create a single narrative about Adam and Eve, Abraham and Moses, all those journeys back and forth between Egypt to Canaan, all those Edens and Promised Lands and New Jerusalems. But in fact these stories aren't about numerous patriarchs and ages and places at all. They're about one patriarch, one age, one place. They're about Akhenaten and Amarna.'

  'It can't be,' muttered Lily weakly.

  'Did you know that Akhenaten solicited gifts of exotic animals from his brother kings? He kept them here. The whole Amarna plain would have flooded during the annual inundation of the Nile. All those animals would have had to be loaded onto rafts. Remind you of any Bible story at all?'

  'It can
't be.'

  'When Adam and Eve were in the Cave of Treasures, God gave them the very first possessions ever owned by man: gold, frankincense and myrrh. We even know how much gold they got. Seventy rods of it. Which is really odd, because a rod's not a unit of weight, but of length. About five metres, as it happens. Much the same as each of these steps.'

  'So seventy rods would make three hundred and fifty metres,' murmured Lily.

  'Yes.'

  Ahead, the passage opened up into a chamber, the golden thread coming to an end at the base of the wall opposite. 'So how far do you reckon we've come?' she asked.

  'About three hundred and forty-nine, I'd guess.'

  III

  Khaled joined Faisal at the foot of the shaft, peered through into the new chamber and passageway. A man's body was floating face down in the water. He lifted his head by a hank of blooded hair to check. Stafford, the TV presenter. One down, three to go. He dropped him again, held his flashlight and the AK-47 at the ready as he waded through the chamber then along the passage. 'Well?' he snapped at Faisal, who was holding back. 'Are you coming or not?'

  'Let's just get out of here,' pleaded Faisal. 'We've still got time.'

  'And then what?'

  'What do you think? We vanish.'

  Khaled hesitated. A new life somewhere no one knew him. Port Said. Aswan. Or over the border into Sudan or Libya. It was easy enough buying a new identity if you had contacts and baksheesh. But a new identity was only the start. And the prospect of starting over in a new land with nothing to his name made his heart sink to his boots.

  Leave now and he'd be poor forever. He wasn't designed for poverty. He was designed for good things. And they were so close. At the very least, he had to see what lay at the end of this passage. 'We're finishing this,' he said. 'Trust me. No one will ever find out.' He smiled encouragingly, then turned his back on Faisal and walked on, knowing that the man was weak, that he'd buckle and follow.