by Dana Fredsti
“Opisthochórisi!” Lucius yelled. He wheeled his horse around, but no one could hear his call for retreat. The guns continued their deadly arc across the charging cavalry, but the tank’s own gunfire ignited the spill, engulfing the war engine in a fiery shroud. Still the machine guns roared their defiance, cutting down charging and retreating horsemen alike.
The lead Panzer’s victory proved as short-lived as it was pyrrhic. All the tanks in the wedge were ablaze. The few tankers who managed to extricate themselves opened fire with their side arms. One commander, hungry for vengeance, stood high upon the flaming ruin of his vehicle and opened up on the confusion of galloping horses. His submachine gun’s ferocious chatter merged with the sounds of screaming horses and men.
An instant later his head snapped back, and with a strangely relaxed grace his body toppled to the ground. On horseback a few hundred meters away, a Gallic sniper in his pill cap leisurely turned his aim toward a new target. His squad of French Foreign Legionnaires had accompanied the cavalry and the Zouaves. They picked off the last of the tanker crews with their stolen German rifles.
In less than three minutes, the defenders had destroyed nine Panzer tanks.
* * *
The cramped interior of Dietrich’s Panzer rocked as the front wedge trundled over the necropolis’s broken ground, navigating near-blind through the smoke and dust. He frowned at the confused radio chatter coming from the tanks in the rear wedge, hidden from sight behind their own formation.
“What the hell is going on back there?” he muttered.
His driver looked up. “Do you want us to turn around to investigate, Herr Oberleutnant?”
The commander shook his head. “No, I’m sure they can handle themselves against bows and arrows,” he said, instantly regretting his unfortunate choice of words.
No matter. All the infantry had been up front with him. The tanks in the rear wedge had no such Achilles’ heel. Besides, the source of the damnable arrows wasn’t far off. Time to press on, cut through this labyrinth of smoke, put a swift end to every last one of these miserable bow-plucking savages, then break down the front doors and ransack their anthill of a city.
One of the Panzers to their right suddenly disappeared into the earth, sending up a billowing of dust and a booming crash— magnified by the unmistakable explosion of an anti-tank mine.
“Was zur Hölle?” Dietrich shouted in shock. He raised the hatch and climbed up to see for himself. Flames rose up from the camouflaged hole where the tank disappeared. Pit trap. Even as he watched, there came another crashing thump and fiery explosion as the treacherous ground swallowed up a second tank, the furthest on the other side of the V-formation. Flames and black smoke belched up from both holes, stinging his nasal passages with the acrid reek of burning oil and hot metal.
The commander shook his head in frustrated disgust.
“All drivers, halt!” he ordered into the microphone. “Ahead quarter speed. Keep a sharp eye out for more pit hazards.” He paused before adding, “And when we catch these vermin, we will crush them beneath our treads and bury them.”
* * *
In the dark of the subterranean catacombs, only the unsteady light of a few small clay oil lamps broke the gloom. Blake cradled his submachine pistol, a stolen German Schmeisser MP-40, listening intently to the noises seeping down from above and idly wishing for electric lanterns.
He leaned against the clammy wall, surrounded on all four sides by carefully stacked stone shelves of skulls and grim mosaics depicting funerary rites. Alongside him stood a marble statue of Anubis, the Egyptian Lord of Death.
Irritated by a sudden prick of anxiety, he shot a look up at the face of his silent companion. The sputtering light of the lamps lent the jackal-headed deity an eerie semblance of life— he seemed to be sporting a sinister grin.
“Go on and laugh, you old bastard,” Blake growled under his breath. “Enjoy your bloody field day.”
Blake had known what Rommel would surely realize—the mausoleums made perfect strongpoints for armed soldiers. Which was why Blake had kept his forces out of them. Instead, he’d hidden his makeshift army below the surface—in the newly dug trenches, carefully concealed spider holes, and throughout the necropolis’s extensive network of underground corridors, catacombs, and galleries.
He and the dozen commandos with him waited in the dark like a tomb full of ghosts, faces dimly lit in masks of lamplight as they sat in silence, listening to the approaching Panzers above. The soldiers he’d freed from the German camp—all veterans of the battle of El Alamein—formed strike teams in place throughout the underground complex. The mix included British and East Indians, New Zealanders and Maoris, and the South Africans, along with the French and Zouave contingent deployed with the cavalry—hopefully attacking the rear of the German column.
Hopefully.
Not for the first time Blake wished they had radios. Coordination was difficult in the best of battlefield circumstances, and this day’s horribly mismatched guerrilla skirmish was far from ideal. No telling if the cavalry attack had yet occurred, or if it had been a success or a suicidal massacre.
A sharp jolt interrupted his glum thoughts. The walls shook with a muffled double-burst of thunder, followed a few moments later by a second round, this one nearer to their position. Two of their pit traps had snagged their prey. Some of the men allowed themselves a smile.
Blake stared up at the ceiling of the catacombs as the rumbling of the tanks reverberated off the walls and ceiling, sending a faint rain of powdered limestone down on the men concealed there. His Indian and Kiwi sappers had done the numbers and were confident the layer of stone above them would hold—a Panzer’s formidable weight was so well-distributed along the treads, it should simply roll right over them.
Nursing a grim fatalism, Blake was less sanguine about the odds.
Somewhere above, the rumbling stopped for a half-minute before resuming again, closer than before. Blake lifted his eyes to the ceiling. A few moments more, and they’d all know whether or not the roof would hold.
The sound of the approaching tanks grew louder, steel treads and bogey wheels creaking like the chains on a medieval drawbridge above the rising diesel growl of the engine. Another soft trickle of dust dropped from overhead. The men in the stone tomb held their breath as they felt the ground trembling all around them—and then the nearest Panzer passed directly over them.
The roof held.
They exhaled again. Blake thumped the shoulder of Navan Singh, the sapper from the 4th Indian division and Blake’s senior demolitions man. The Sikh grinned, then climbed atop the chamber’s sarcophagus, pushing aside the small marble headstone concealing one of their spyholes. He peered through his handmade periscope.
“The Jerries are headed straight for the city gates. They’ll be on top of our first trench shortly unless we draw them away now.”
“Hoots, mon! Let’s gang!” The Scots bagpiper, Duncan MacIntyre, stood up, ready to sound the charge again. “We can come up behin’ them an’ put a right wallop up their crease afair they e’en ken we’re there!”
“That’s a negative, MacIntyre,” Blake ordered.
“Wha’r’ we waitin’ fur, then? Noo’s our chance, mon!”
“We’re going to stay right here—and keep your goddamned voice down.”
The Scotsman lowered his voice to a harsh whisper.
“Are ye off yer haid, Blake? They’ll overrun our line, an’ then the whole city’s tits up! We’re just gonnae let them?”
“If it comes to that, yes.”
“For the sweet love ay Christ, why, mon?” The Scot’s ginger brows furrowed in disbelief. Blake leaned in closer, eyes locked on MacIntyre’s.
“Because we can’t win this battle.”
11
Aboard the Siu-Tuait
Ten days after the Event
Amber cast a baleful look at Dee, lying next to her with his back against the bow. The sound of blissful snores rose up from the hood shading his f
ace from the sun. She envied him. She hadn’t managed more than an hour or so of broken slumber since they’d set out for Alexandria.
They had traveled the Nile all day and night and all the next morning. Though the rowers continued with superhuman endurance and speed, to Amber it felt as though the Star of the Dawn was crawling up the river on a leisurely pleasure cruise—one she was incapable of enjoying. She was exhausted by Dee’s psychic exercises, and sick with worry for Nellie and the men, not knowing if any of them were still alive. She was worried about the Vanuatu, and couldn’t shake the mental image of a clock ticking inexorably down to zero.
“We’ll never get there,” she groaned, resting her arms on the bow. A half-submerged log floated in the river below, but a closer look revealed half-lidded reptilian eyes. Crocodiles, Amber thought with a shudder. Or possibly something even more dangerous. Luckily it seemed content just to watch them.
“We Arabs say that to travel along the Nile, one must use sails of patience,” Ibn Fadlan commented, ever the teacher.
“We have many sayings about the vanity of haste,” Leila added, winking at Amber from behind Ibn’s back, “but don’t worry. Really, we’re making phenomenal time. We’re already on the tributary to Alexandria. We’ll be there soon and will find out where your ship and your friends are.”
“Really?” Amber perked up. “We’re nearly there?” The landscape had remained unchanged for nearly the entire trip, mostly just sand and palm trees, with occasional shore birds or pterodactyls. Now that Leila mentioned it, though, here it seemed more like hill country—and was it just her imagination, or could she smell sea air?
“What’s that? Is there a ship ahead of us?” Cam, standing on deck with Kha-Hotep, pointed downriver. What looked like a lone beam of incandescent light came from out of the river, stark white against the relentless blue of the Egyptian sky.
“Too bright for a signal light,” Kha-Hotep said, shielding his eyes with his hand.
Dee got to his feet, wiping sleep from his eyes. “Trouble?”
“I’m not sure. I…” Amber trailed off as a second shimmering spotlight joined the first, quickly followed by another half-dozen or so more—all different colors and widths, accompanied by a high-pitched keening sound that carried across the water. The volume increased as the Siu-Tuait drew closer, the pillars lighting up the skies like a firework show working up to the big finale.
Oh god. Amber’s breath caught in her throat as her hair whipped around her face from static electricity. She knew what this meant. Reaching out, she grabbed Leila’s hand and squeezed tightly.
A massive wall of brilliant iridescence rose up in the middle of the river, less than a hundred yards ahead of the boat. With a furnace blast of searing heat and steam, the keening spiraled up into a wailing shriek, water bubbling furiously where the pillar bore through the Nile. Dead fish rose to the surface, along with a crocodile unlucky enough to be too close. Amber heard Kha-Hotep’s deep voice, shouting to the oarsmen.
“Row for shore! Hard to port!”
A moment later, all the aftershocks vanished together, their ear-splitting wails cutting off as if a switch had been thrown— coring out a deep chunk of the Nile with them.
“Hang on!” the captain yelled.
For a split-second, the boat seemed to stand perfectly still. Then the river surged forward, rushing to fill in the gap even as the oarsmen looked around in confusion. The placid, meandering river became a deluge, the torrent hurling them forward straight into the mouth of a newly formed maelstrom. The hapless rowers could do nothing to stop it. The barge crested the edge of the huge funnel, and then, as its horrified passengers watched, dipped over the top.
Like a leaf carried down a swirling gutter, the vessel plunged down the curve of the waters on a steep spiral heading, threatening to capsize at any moment. But the same forces that had pulled it down the sloping downdraft, listing precariously to the port side, now kept it from overturning as it careened in ever-decreasing circles. Then, with a final roar of white water, the gyre thundered back in on itself, closing off the vortex—and slamming into the stricken craft.
Smashed by the collision of waves, the deck lurched crazily as if the barge were attempting a somersault. Men went flying overhead into the river, while others were thrown against the protruding oars. Amber and Dee clung to the bow, barely keeping their grip as another pounding wall of water swept over them, sweeping up more victims and pitching them off the barge.
Something slammed into Amber, threatening to knock her overboard as well.
Leila.
The girl shrieked and grabbed for them as the angry river rushed in to swallow her up. Amber caught her wrist and held on, even as Leila’s weight nearly wrenched her arm from the socket. Strong arms wrapped around her as Dee helped haul Leila back to safety.
“Are you okay?”
Nodding, Leila coughed up a mouthful of water. The turbulence was subsiding, though the barge still bobbed up and down. Amber turned to see if anyone else needed help, lending a hand to a rower climbing back on deck. All around her, those still aboard were helping rescue those thrown overboard. Further back, she spotted Kha and Ibn Fadlan pulling Cam out of the water, bleeding from his head and arm.
“Cam!” Running to his side, she pulled his hair back from the gash on his skull, relieved to see tiny hair-thin silver hexagons beginning to appear as his medical nanites stitched up the wound there and along his arm.
Kha-Hotep and Ibn Fadlan looked on in fascination.
* * *
Two crewmen were still missing when the last man was pulled from the water. They called out for them, but there was no sign, dead or alive.
“There!” Cam, back on his feet, pointed at one of the nearby crocodiles, one of the unfortunate rowers dangling lifeless from its jaws. As they watched, a trio of slender tendrils, each tipped with a ridge of curved teeth-like horns, slipped up from the depths and in a moment, snared the big reptile and its meal, dragging them both under the surface.
Shaken, they manned their stations again, and continued on toward Alexandria.
* * *
A short time later Amber heard a new noise coming from up ahead.
It sounded like the fourth of July.
* * *
When they finally caught sight of the ancient city walls, there was no mistaking the sound of bombardment. The wild river turned into a wide aqueduct and they followed it, threading between the city’s southern wall and vineyards, and the marshy banks of Lake Mareotis where long-necked dinosaurs grazed, until finally it turned abruptly northward, through an opening in the wall.
It proved to be a dark vaulted tunnel that opened up into a canal that cut through the city. They could see roofs and obelisks, and a majestic building atop a high hill, but no place to tie up until they had crossed nearly the entire width of Alexandria. There, near the edge of the sea, the canal dumped into a square inner harbor ringed by a neighborhood of markets and warehouses. The docks seemed oddly deserted, perhaps because of the growing sound of cannon fire from the southwest.
Kha-Hotep steered the barge to a landing, and Cam swiftly tied it to the mooring. Once the rowers banked their oars, they immediately slumped forward, unconscious.
“When they wake up, we’re going to need to feed them—a lot,” DeMetta said. “They deserve medals. For now, just let them sleep.”
The six of them ascended the stone steps to the street level. DeMetta stopped just before the final step, a concerned look on his face.
“Wait,” he said. “There’s something—”
Thick fishing nets, weighted with heavy stone sinkers, came flying overhead, entangling them on the steps.
“Seize them!”
“Quick, kill him!”
Those shouts and more were followed by a crowd, armed and angry. The closest assailant ran up brandishing a boat hook like a spear. DeMetta couldn’t even raise an arm to defend himself as the attacker lunged at him, but the fatal blow never landed. Inst
ead, the would-be spearman stiffened and fell backward, the barbed pole clattering to the flagstones.
Two more attackers were right behind, clubs raised, but they abruptly stopped in their tracks and crumpled as well. At that the leader of the mob, a grizzled old fisherman, suddenly froze with a blank look on his face, then raised his hands.
“Stop!” he shouted in a commanding voice. The other attackers halted, confused and frightened. “This man is not János Mehta,” he pronounced. “This is his twin brother, come to destroy him. We must offer him and his companions all our help!”
The crowd’s attitude flipped at once, and they rushed forward to help pull the heavy netting off of the prisoners. The trio of stunned attackers began to move, sitting up and rubbing their heads. That was when Amber realized that all three were teenaged girls. The small gang was composed entirely of young boys, adolescent girls, and old men—all slaves and street urchins.
She looked at DeMetta, impressed. He raised an eyebrow.
“Keep practicing, and you’ll be able to do that.”
* * *
“No sense in triggering further attacks.” DeMetta borrowed a short cloak from one of their erstwhile attackers to use as a concealing hood. Then the gang of defenders led them out of the square inner harbor they called Kibotos, “the Box,” and past the rows of warehouses, the old arsenal fort and the Heptastadion causeway, down to the open-air agora marketplace.
The wide city square was bustling with women and girls, the elderly, and young boys. It looked to be everyone who couldn’t fight with the army outside the gates, but was still able-bodied enough to pitch in, making preparations for the defense of the city.
Amber was surprised to see three big army transport trucks parked in a row.
“Amber! Cam!” Nellie’s voice rang out from near the trucks, and she ran across the wide-open space to grab them both up in a hug. She didn’t bother trying to hide tears of joy and neither did Amber.
“My daring girl, my Celtic prince. Look at you both!”
