Journey of the Pharaohs - NUMA Files Series 17 (2020)

by Cussler, Clive

  The body armor was weak there and the .45 caliber slug hit hard enough to crack his collarbone and drop him to the floor. He fell with a grunt of pain, which was drowned out as his colleagues opened fire.

  The response was tactical. Short bursts hit each of the landings and the other sections of the empty stairwell. Kurt rolled back into the hall just as a spray of shells tore into the space he’d been occupying.

  As the silence returned again, Kurt heard muffled radio sounds as the men spoke into headset-mounted mics and replies came through the tiny speakers attached behind their ears.

  He couldn’t tell what was being said, but standard military procedure would be to call in the second group and get at Kurt from his flank.

  Kurt decided to interrupt that plan.

  He fired two shots down the hall toward the east end of the rotunda and then held the gun over the railing and fired back three more shots down and around sporadically.

  Hoping he’d forced the men into cover, Kurt left his position and rushed up the stairs, firing twice more as he went.

  The men below spotted him. They unleashed a hail of gunfire aimed in his direction. The bullets tore into the wall above, then trailed him as he ran up in a circle. For now, the marble steps prevented them from shooting through the floor. But he couldn’t keep them at bay for long.

  Reaching the top landing, Kurt had achieved a small advantage. He was directly above the assailants with two full circuits of the curving stairs between himself and them. From here, he could shoot the second they appeared.

  They must have realized this because they chose a wiser approach, shooting a stun grenade in his direction. It landed across from him and half a circuit down, but too close for comfort. Kurt barreled through the door and onto the roof, diving flat, just before the flashbang explosion went off.

  The blast was mostly contained in the stairwell, though it blew the door halfway off its hinges.

  Kurt found himself on a flat roof with spires in several places and gables jutting out over the front side of the house. Joe, Morgan and DeMars were near the back edge, releasing the anchors on a small scaffold that could be lowered over the side.

  It didn’t look like a fast way down. But it was better than the stairs.

  The sound of pounding footsteps racing up the stairway proved that. Kurt rolled to the side and got up, pressing himself against the thin wall of the turret’s crown. A boot kicked the door open and a burst of gunfire poured through.

  Kurt knew what would come next, another concussion grenade, tossed to prevent someone from hiding just the way Kurt was.

  Kurt counted down quickly, imagining the man pulling out another grenade from his harness, grasping it solidly, pulling its pin and then getting ready to kick the door open again. Three … two … one … At that exact moment, Kurt launched himself forward. His timing was impeccable.

  The mercenary kicked the door open and swung his arm underhand, hoping to toss the grenade softly. To the man’s utter shock, the door he’d just kicked open snapped back on him, batting the grenade back in his face.

  Had he been a little faster, he could have caught it, but the best he could do was knock it down. It exploded at his feet, blinding him and sending him stumbling backward. He hit the railing and tumbled over it. His drop ended abruptly as he was impaled on Joan of Arc’s triumphal banner staff.

  The two surviving attackers opened fire en masse.

  There would be no trickery now, this was a full-on broadside assault. All Kurt could do was run as countless bullets ricocheted off the dilapidated steel door, tore through the walls of the turret and cracked and splintered the windows in the skylight.

  From the mercenaries’ point of view, what had looked like an impressive use of force turned into a slow-motion catastrophe as cracks spread in all directions, causing the entire canopy to give way. Large chunks and small angular pieces of glass, accompanied by a thousand shards and splinters, rained down like knives.

  They had no choice but to cover up and hope the body armor would absorb any jagged, deadly trajectories.

  The glittery storm ended quickly. After waiting for one last dagger-shaped shard to fall and explode on the tile down below, Kappa got up and began to move once again.

  By then, Kurt had run across the open expanse of the roof and dropped over the side onto the slowly descending platform there.

  CHAPTER 27

  Joe and Morgan were letting out the ropes on the platform as Kurt landed in between them. “Nice of you to join us,” Joe said.

  “I thought you didn’t want to engage in a shoot-out,” DeMars said.

  “Apparently, they didn’t get the memo,” Kurt replied. “Is this as fast as this thing goes?”

  “We had to manually release the cables,” Morgan said, “since the power is out.”

  They continued down past the fourth-floor windows and down toward the third floor. Without warning, the cable on Joe’s side jammed.

  “Problem,” Joe said.

  The descent stopped instantly, but the jarring left the platform swaying from side to side. Kurt and DeMars grasped the wall of the château and used the handholds to steady the rig while Joe tried to release his line.

  “No good,” Joe said. He tied off the cable. Morgan did the same on her side, leaving the platform slightly tilted.

  “We need to jump,” Morgan said, gauging the distance.

  “It’s a ten-meter drop,” DeMars said. “Thirty feet.”

  “We can’t stay here,” Morgan said.

  “The ground looks soft,” Joe added.

  “Not soft enough,” Kurt said. He was looking around for another option. He found it off to the side. “Joe, can you reach that window?”

  Joe saw what Kurt had in mind. On his side was a recessed window. A six-inch ledge fronted it with shutters pinned back in the open position.

  Moving to the edge of the platform, Joe climbed up on the rail and stretched out a leg. “I’m a little short.”

  “Hang on,” Kurt said.

  The platform was hanging by its two cables. By pushing against the wall, Kurt got it moving from side to side. It swung right, then left, then back to the right again. As it neared the window, Joe leapt nimbly onto the narrow ledge. He immediately wedged his hands against the window’s frame to keep himself steady.

  “Nice landing,” Kurt said. “Can you open it?”

  The window was latched, but the mechanism was old and flimsy. It had been installed decades ago, and a third-floor window on the back of the house surrounded by walls and security cameras didn’t warrant much attention. With a firm shove from Joe, the latch gave way and the lower sash slid upward.

  Joe pushed it to its stops and climbed into the darkened room. Turning around, he held the platform and reached out to the others. “Let’s get a move on,” he said, offering his hand.

  Morgan went first and then DeMars. After swinging the scaffolding one last time, Kurt leapt to the windowsill and climbed inside.

  As Kurt moved into the room, Joe slid the window shut.

  “Now what?” DeMars asked. “Do we hide?”

  Kurt looked around. The room was vast and dark. In the moonlight, he could tell they’d entered a bedroom suite. It had a canopied four-poster bed off to one side, a complete living area with love seat and chairs on the other. To Kurt’s right stood a full bathroom with an old clawfoot tub sitting on black and white tile. It would have been a nice place to stay had the circumstances been different, but it offered little in the way of shelter or a place to hide.

  “We’ve bought some time,” Kurt said, “but that’s all. It’s not going to take them long to search the roof. When they don’t find us up there, they’ll start looking over the side. And once they see that platform, it’ll lead them right here. We have to keep moving.”

  Nearest to the exit, Morgan had unholstered her pistol and put an ear to the door. “I don’t hear anything outside. They’re probably up top looking for us. We could head for the stairs n
ow.”

  Kurt considered that a last resort. “These aren’t the Keystone Kops we’re dealing with. They’re in communication with each other, using night vision gear and military tactics. They left people guarding the stairs. Accounting for us trying to get down and out.”

  “What about the east stairwell?” DeMars asked.

  “We have no reason to believe that’s not guarded as well. As soon as they see us, we’ll be swarmed. We need another option.”

  Morgan turned to DeMars. “Did you grow up in this house?”

  “Yes,” DeMars said, trying to steady a pair of trembling hands. “I was born here.”

  “Did you play hide-and-seek as a child?” she asked.

  “Of course,” he said. “We played many games as children. Why are you asking that now?”

  “When I was a child,” she said, “we visited my aunt, who lived in a big country house out in Somerset. Our greatest joy was using the dumbwaiter as an elevator, until we grew too big. Even then, we could still use the laundry chute as a slide. I’m hoping you did similar things here.”

  Despite his trembling hands, DeMars genuinely smiled. “Yes,” he said. “Of course we did.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Robson and his men had been left behind as the shooting began. Considering the firepower and coordination of Kappa’s team, he gave their adversaries only a puncher’s chance of surviving. Still, he recognized the signs of overconfidence in Kappa’s approach and he wondered if that would be Kappa’s demise.

  When the shooting began and the grenades went off, it sounded more chaotic than controlled. But when one of Kappa’s mercenaries fell from the top floor and wound up impaled on Joan of Arc’s staff, he took a twisted kind of delight in the failure. The puncher had landed the first blow.

  “He’s underestimated them.”

  “Bloody hell,” Gus said as the barrage went full auto and a wave of glass fell into the rotunda.

  “This is going badly,” Robson told his group.

  “Then why are you grinning?” Snipe asked.

  “What’s bad for Kappa is good for us. If enough of his blokes get killed, if he fails, we get back in the driver’s seat. And that ups our piece of the take.”

  “What do you want us to do?” Fingers asked.

  “You and Gus, get back to the van. Keep your eyes sharp for any sign of trouble and be ready to get out of here. Snipe, you’re with me. Let’s see what we can find in this bloody mess.”

  Robson and Snipe moved cautiously toward the rotunda. They passed the dead mercenary and came to a halt beside Kappa’s other operative who’d been shot from up above. Despite a shoulder injury, the man maintained his position. He put a hand out to stop Robson and Snipe from passing.

  “My orders are to guard the stairs.”

  “Your numbers are dwindling,” Robson said, pointing to the dead man. “Kappa might need our help up there.”

  More shooting erupted as Kappa and his partner forced their way out onto the roof. “Go,” the injured man said with a wave.

  Taking the stairs, Robson moved quickly. Without all the body armor and equipment, he and Snipe were lighter and nimbler. Arriving at the fourth floor, they paused.

  Footsteps pounding on the roof told him Kappa and his men were clearing sections of the roof. It was a big job, dangerous and time-consuming.

  “Shouldn’t we be helping them?” Snipe asked.

  “We were ordered to stay out of the way, remember?” Robson said. “Besides, the one-eared butler said DeMars and his guests had come up here. We might as well see what they were looking at.”

  They took the fourth-floor landing and entered the study. Milling about, Robson absentmindedly pulled a few books off the shelf and glanced through them. He tossed them aside and moved to the desk, where the stack of journals remained. “They must have been reading these.”

  He gave them to Snipe and moved on. “Bring them with us.”

  “This is a waste of time. Let’s just help them find DeMars and get out of here. Even I know you can’t shoot up a big house and set off grenades without bringing the police down on your head. We need to go.”

  Robson ignored Snipe for the moment, but he was absolutely right. This operation had taken too long already. He glanced around, looking for anything else of importance. His eyes fell on a large atlas that had been laid down on another table and opened.

  A magnifying glass rested on the page. Robson picked it up and peered through it, feeling like a silly Sherlock Holmes. And yet it revealed something to him, something he soon realized was important. “I don’t think we’re going to need DeMars after all.”

  He studied the notes and the dates on the page. It was a narrow river valley in Spain. A town had been circled. The name rewritten in ink beside it. It had to be.

  Robson ripped the page out of the atlas, closed the book and turned back to Snipe. “Time to go.”

  Up on the roof, Kappa and his men had cleared the spires and turrets and worked their way to the center, meeting in the middle. “We’ve covered every inch of the place,” one of the men said. “They’re not here.”

  “They didn’t grow wings and fly away,” Kappa insisted. “Keep looking.”

  “Over here,” another of the men shouted.

  Kappa jogged to the edge of the roof and looked down. A painter’s scaffolding hung next to the wall. “What floor is that?”

  “I’d say third,” the man who found it estimated. “Back side of the house. Dead center.”

  “From both sides,” Kappa said. “I want no mistakes this time.”

  The groups divided once more and backtracked to the individual turrets. Rushing down the stairs to the third floor, they slowed as they entered the hallway, moving quietly along the carpeted corridor.

  Kappa pointed to a pair of doors aligned roughly with the center of the house. Readying his weapon, he silently counted down with his fingers. When he curled his index finger into his fist, two of his men kicked the doors open simultaneously.

  Concussion grenades were tossed inside, with the mercenaries turning away and closing their eyes as the flashes went off. In the aftermath of the explosions, they rushed in, quickly covering every section of the room.

  “No sign of them,” the team leader reported.

  Kappa’s blood began to boil.

  “We’re way off schedule,” one of his men said. “Five minutes over and counting. Every minute we stay makes it less likely for a safe departure.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” Kappa snapped. “We cannot return to Barlow and tell him we’ve failed.

  “Spread out and check every room,” he said. “Stay on the radios. Any sign of them, call out. The sooner you find them, the sooner we leave.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Kurt heard the commotion from inside a dark, vertical tunnel. He was suspended with his arms and legs spread outward in an X formation, each palm pressed firmly against a smooth wall, each booted foot wedged tight in an effort to defy gravity.

  Below him, Joe was holding fast in similar fashion. Farther down, Morgan and DeMars had already reached the bottom of the tunnel, where a large hopper of unfolded laundry caught them.

  The sound of Kappa shouting at his men carried through the wall and into the chute. He was yelling at his men, ordering them about. The stress in his voice was obvious. It brought a smile to Kurt’s face. “We’re getting to them.”

  “As long as they don’t get to us,” Joe whispered back.

  Kurt doubted they’d be found. The door to the laundry chute was hidden behind a panel that looked exactly like the rest of the wall, the wainscoting and wallpaper matching identically. Even DeMars had found the opening difficult to locate.

  Outside, the argument ended and the mercenaries fanned out. Kurt heard the angry soldiers starting to lose their discipline. Their boots pounded the floorboards as they went from room to room. Furniture was noisily shoved aside and flipped over, belongings smashed. They’d given up any pretense of ste
alth and were now acting like a marauding army.

  The noise only made it easier to escape. “Slide down,” Kurt said.

  Joe began to move, sliding a bit, stopping and then picking up speed over the last several feet until he dropped into the pile of sheets and overstuffed down comforters.

  Kurt came down in a more controlled fashion, landing beside Joe.

  Down in the basement, it was pitch-black. Kurt pulled out his phone, allowing the glow from the screen to illuminate the laundry room. “Excellent idea,” he said. “Brilliant, in your English vernacular.”

  “Earlier, I saw the maid carrying a bundle of sheets,” Morgan said. “She went down the hall with them and came back with nothing in her arms. I assumed she wasn’t tossing them out a window. My biggest worry was whether we’d fit.”

  “Mine as well,” DeMars said. “I was nine years old the last time I slid down this chute. Never thought I’d be repeating my escapades as an adult.”

  “I’m just glad there was laundry in the hopper,” Joe said, looking comfortable amid the pile. “What’s next? Underground tunnel to the forest?”

  Kurt climbed from the basket and looked at DeMars. “I don’t suppose you have one.”

  DeMars shook his head. “Sorry, nothing like that.”

  “What do you propose we do?” Morgan asked.

  “They’re still looking for us upstairs,” Kurt said. “But they’ll work their way down eventually. Before they get here, we should surprise them. Rising up like phantoms in their midst.”

  “The ground floor is the last place they’d expect us,” Joe said.

  “And that’s exactly where we’ll be.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Under the light of Kurt’s phone, DeMars drew a rough map of the basement. “You can take the servants’ stairs from the pantry to the kitchen and then move through the scullery to the servants’ hall, which connects directly to the east rotunda.”