Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear (5 page)

The smell was stronger now, and no doubt at all about its source. Gabriel saw Sheba turn aside, one hand clapped over her mouth.

“If you insist on being sick, Miss McCoy,” DeGroet said, “please do so quickly. We have work to do.” He swung around, saw Zuka kneeling over Rashidi’s remains, seemed about to say something, then held himself back. He paced over to the still considerable heap of mud on the ground and kicked at it, sending a clod or two against the wall. There was a second metal pail where he’d picked up the first one, and he snagged its handle on the end of his sword. Without looking, he lifted it into the air and sent it flying behind him—in Gabriel’s direction.

“You,” he said. “You’re not fat, at least. Why don’t you give it a try?”

Gabriel caught the pail against his chest with the arm in which he held the torch; in the other, he still held the shovel and the rifle. The folds of the burnoose were wound around the bottom half of his face but Karoly, looking over, recognized him from outside. “Lajos, no,” he said in Hungarian, “this man’s clumsy as hell, he’ll be dead in no time.”

“Well, if he is so clumsy,” DeGroet said, loudly, in English, “then his death will be no loss.” Without looking over at him, he snapped a command at Gabriel. “Fill it!”

Gabriel hesitated a moment, his fist tightening on the rifle’s stock. He saw Karoly’s hand drop to the sidearm on his hip. With his own hands full like this, there was no way he could beat Karoly to the draw.

He let the rifle down slowly, set it against the wall, then put the pail down beside the mud pile. He used the shovel to fill it, then set that aside, too. The pail was heavy when he lifted it, the metal of the handle cutting into his palm.

He kept his face averted as he walked past DeGroet toward the far wall and its deadly tunnel.

The hole loomed. What had Sheba called it? The portal. For nine men it had been a portal to the underworld, from this life to the next. What chance was there that it would be anything less for him?

Nonsense, he said to himself. You’ve been in tighter spots. (Though measuring the tunnel’s narrow opening against his shoulders, he wasn’t so sure.) You’ve seen traps like this before and defeated them.

Yes, replied a little voice in his head, but all the knowledge and experience in the world won’t stop a ten-ton boulder from snipping you in half if you’re lying beneath it.

“Miss McCoy, have you got any advice for our newest volunteer?”

Sheba looked up. She’d been leaning against the wall with her eyes closed, her chest heaving. It was one hell of a chest, and Gabriel had to admit that, if this had to be his last sight on earth, there were worse ones to have. With DeGroet behind him, he pulled the burnoose to one side, uncovering his face, and cocked a crooked smile at Sheba. “Do not cry,
effendi,
” he said softly in Arabic, and recognition came all at once into her eyes. She started toward him but he shook his head minutely. With an enormous effort she restrained herself, but the
look in her eyes changed from momentary relief to terror, a mute pleading.

“No,” she said to DeGroet, “no, this man can’t go, you can’t send him, he’ll die—”

“We all must die sometime,” DeGroet said. “But if you are so concerned for his well-being, why don’t you tell him something that might help him once he’s in there?”

“But I don’t know anything,” she said, and Gabriel could tell that she wished with all her heart that this wasn’t so. “A tribute,” she said rapidly, running through the text in her head, “an offering to Hathor, the river’s wealth, must deposit a heavy burden to make her heart light…that’s all it says. Please…please don’t send him.” Her eyes slid shut again and her voice got very small. “Send me.
I’ll
do it. Send me instead.”

“Oh, don’t worry, my dear,” DeGroet said. “You’ll be next.”

Gabriel felt the flat of DeGroet’s blade strike his calves.

He handed the torch silently to Sheba, bent to set the pail down within the hole, and shoved it far enough in that he could squeeze in behind it. The tunnel walls just barely accommodated his shoulders and for a few feet he feared he might actually get stuck, but the tunnel widened slightly after that, the left and right walls angling away from one another at the top, almost like an inverted trapezoid. He found the fit snug but not uncomfortably so. He
had
been in tighter spots—while caving, for instance. And he’d gotten out of those, hadn’t he?

With his arms outstretched, he pushed the pail ahead of him, a few inches at a time, and then followed slowly behind it, feeling his way. The darkness was complete,
not a trace of light from either end. He dug beneath the fabric of the burnoose to his jacket underneath, straining to reach the closed inner pocket with the Zippo lighter inside. He brought the lighter out and flicked it open. A tiny orange flame bloomed.

The inner walls the flame revealed were smooth, though hand-carved. They were damp, not just beneath him, where the smell of Rashidi’s blood explained it, but on the sides and ceiling as well. He could see the pronounced V-shape the walls made—though the hole in the other room had been circular, the tunnel itself was more like a trough or a channel, with the tops of the side walls significantly farther apart than their bottoms. And there were no carvings on either of the walls, no further instructions for those of Sekhmet’s priests who made it this far.

He thought about the text Sheba had read, describing the required offering. The opposition of “heavy” and “light” wouldn’t have been accidental. Not when the instruction involved placing something heavy—he pushed the pail forward another few inches—into a receptacle; not when it was the descent of some sort of heavy mechanism that had separated Rashidi into top and bottom halves.

He crept another foot forward and then, feeling ahead of him, found the rim of the basin into which Rashidi had poured his bucket of mud. The bucket was nowhere to be seen, and the top half of Rashidi’s body, similarly, had vanished.

From outside he heard a voice, DeGroet’s. “What have you found?”

“Nothing,” he called back. It was the truth.

“Well get a move on,” came the shouted reply.

He held the flame of his lighter to the basin—it was empty. How that could be, he didn’t know, given that it had been full just minutes earlier. He felt around the
basin for any drainage hole through which the mud might have escaped—nothing.

Turning over, he looked up at the ceiling. At a glance it looked no different from the rest of the tunnel, but upon closer inspection he could make out the concealed edges of a distinct block, much like those of the section of the Sphinx’s paw Zuka and Hanif had manhandled out of the way at ground level. Clearly this block could move, too—specifically, it could come down, with great force, and anything lying beneath it would get driven violently down along with it.

But what would happen then? Wouldn’t the stone block hammering down shatter the basin beneath it when it struck, or at least leave crushed, pulped matter behind when it rose again?

It would—unless, Gabriel realized, the block containing the basin moved as well, swung out of the way at the same time the block descending from above came down. He pictured the block containing the basin and the one above it as teeth on a giant stone gear that rotated when provoked. You poured your mud into the basin, after a moment the weight caused the wheel to turn, the basin block fell out of the way and the new block from the ceiling rotated in to take its place—with a new empty basin of its own on its upper surface.

And anything that happened to be lying between the two blocks at the time got chopped as the upper block rotated down to take the place of the lower.

It was a devilish trap—clever but simple, and a marvel mechanically. The stone gear must weigh tons, many tons; how it had been carved and moved into place and mounted on some sort of axle and hidden within the rock he couldn’t imagine. But then no one had figured out how the Egyptians had managed to build the pyramids either. There was no shortage of mechanical marvels on the Giza Plateau.

Of course, the question of how one might build a trap like this was of secondary importance. The first order of business was surviving this one.

So: what to do?

Not pour the mud, clearly; he couldn’t even move the pail onto the stone surface surrounding the basin, since the weight would set off the trap. Nor could he put his own weight on it—but how could he make it across to the other side without doing so?

Gabriel thought about it. It had taken perhaps half a minute between when Rashidi had poured the mud and when the mechanism had crushed him. In theory Gabriel might be able to rush across in that time and be out of the way of the descending block before it fell. In theory. And in practice, too, if he’d been upright, with room to maneuver. But not in this tight, narrow tunnel—he couldn’t inch his way far enough fast enough, which no doubt had been what the men who built the tunnel had in mind.

But there had to be a way through. Unless the builders were merely playing a cruel game and there was no reliquary to be found, only a tool for slaughtering unwary priests who were foolish enough to follow the instructions you gave them, to deposit the treasure of the Nile in the place you provided for it…

The place provided for it.

If Gabriel had had more room, he might have slapped himself on the forehead. Of course. What if there had been more than one place provided for it? A priest of Sekhmet would know how to follow the instructions properly, while an impostor would make the same mistake Rashidi and Sheba had made, and that Gabriel had nearly made himself.

Where did Hathor’s floods deposit the life-giving silt that brought fertility to the Nile Valley? In a basin at the
bottom of the river? No—on the river’s banks, for Egyptians to find and harvest.

And here he was in a V-shaped channel, with the walls angling away to either side—like a river.

Who said the blocks before him were the only portion of the tunnel walls that could move?

Gabriel reached into the pail, grabbed a handful of mud, and smeared it on the wall beside him, as high up as he could reach. He coated the surface and went back for more. He slapped the mud onto the stone, piling it up, replacing it when bits slid down. Bit by bit, he built up the upper portion of the V, filling in the angle, adding the weight of the mud to the stone surface. He felt it move, very slightly, as the mud accumulated—and as he reached the bottom of the pail, he heard a soft grinding noise deep inside the wall.

This was it. A mechanism was turning.

But
which
mechanism?

He looked up at the deadly stone above him, ominous in the flickering flame of his lighter. If it came down, it would come in an instant, snuffing him out like…well, like the flame went out now as he hastily pocketed the lighter.

The sound grew louder, and apparently it was audible outside, too, because he heard Sheba scream, “Gabriel, no!”

“Gabriel?” DeGroet said, and then he said something else, but Gabriel couldn’t hear what it was because the grinding of the stone was too loud in his ears—

And then the angled wall beside him began to turn in earnest beneath its mantle of mud.

As the wall rotated counterclockwise, the top portion headed downwards—but the bottom portion, the portion closer to Gabriel, turned upwards, and it wedged itself under Gabriel as it went, lifting him, till finally a long
section of the side wall was horizontal and he was lying on top of it, his burnoose thickly covered with mud.

And it wasn’t done yet.

One more turn of the hidden mechanism and the wall was now angled downward again—only in the opposite direction, facing away from the tunnel rather than toward it.

At which point gravity took over, and Gabriel went sliding through the mud, off the edge, and out into space.

He fell for just an instant—then landed with a thud on a stone floor. Standing, he stripped off the ruined burnoose, flung it down and flicked open his lighter again.

The room was large, the flame tiny. But bit by bit it revealed his surroundings. There was a wall covered with hieroglyphs beside him and, leaning up against the wall at an angle, a huge stone carving of a Pharaoh’s face, similar to the face of the Sphinx itself. Just past that were two upright caskets, both standing open. The dead body in one was partially mummified, its head and arms and upper torso preserved in linen bandages, the rest of its body uncovered and worn down by the centuries till all that remained were prominent bones encased in shrunken, leathery flesh. The other casket was empty but for a handful of broken lengths of bone at the bottom.

Gabriel picked up one of these, returned to where he’d landed, and tore the driest strip he could from the burnoose. It took half a minute, after he’d wrapped the fabric tightly around the bone, for the flame from the lighter to catch and the fabric to ignite. What he wouldn’t have given for one of those accelerant-treated torches now…

A voice slithered in through the tunnel, a shout in tone but muffled due to the distance it had to travel.
“Hunt! I know it’s you. And I know better than to believe you’re dead. Say something, damn you!”

Gabriel didn’t say anything. Instead, he took a quick tour of the room. On the surface of one wall there was a recessed rectangular groove, roughly the shape and size of a door—this was the other side of the panel with the writing on it in the entry chamber, Gabriel realized. It was barred crosswise by two long pieces of granite resting in stone brackets protruding from the wall, which suggested that the giant block the groove outlined might be movable, if the bars were removed.

“Hunt!”

The neighboring wall was the one with the hieroglyphics and the caskets. Beside the caskets there were shelves carved into the wall with rows of canopic jars lined up on them, their tops sculpted with images of the sons of Horus: Duamutef, with his jackal’s head; Qebehsenuf, with the head of an eagle; and so forth. These would have held the organs of the mummified man in the coffin—or of
some
mummified man, anyway.

“Answer me, Hunt! I can hear you walking, for Christ’s sake!”

He kept walking, his flickering torchlight illuminating the walls as he passed them.

The third wall was bare, nothing on it or before it. But the fourth—

The fourth was something else entirely.

“Hunt,”
DeGroet shouted.
“Hunt, if you don’t answer me, I will kill her.”
And he heard Sheba scream.

“You won’t kill her,” Gabriel shouted back, “or I will destroy what you came here to find.”

The canopic jars, the caskets, the half-wrapped mummy—these things were priceless, it was true, and sufficiently impressive additions to any man’s collection to warrant the expense and trouble DeGroet had undertaken to find them. But as soon as he approached the
fourth wall Gabriel knew that DeGroet was after a much bigger prize.

The wall was painted, from floor to ceiling, with a map. Or more precisely with part of a map, since what there was ended at a jagged line and was clearly, deliberately incomplete. The outlines of a triangular landmass were traced, and the upper portion of a teardrop-shaped island below. But the lower portion of the island was missing.

And seated before the map, directly below this missing portion, was a stone sculpture of a sphinx.

Not the crude sort of monumental stonework that defined the Great Sphinx itself, or even the more careful, delicate sculpture of the canopic jars—that was still stylized rather than naturalistic. But this sculpture…Gabriel approached it, circled around to view it from all sides. It was almost like a piece from Europe’s Baroque period, with loving attention lavished on realistically depicting the rippling muscles beneath the skin of the leonine torso, the sunken cheeks and troubled brow and half-open mouth of the human head. It was life-size, perhaps a bit larger—maybe nine feet long and four feet tall. He’d never seen Egyptian sculpture that looked like this. He didn’t think anyone had.

And on its flank was carved an inscription. His Ancient Egyptian was rusty—Sheba would have done a better job of translating it. But as best he could make out, it said something like,

Here reposes for eternity the Father of Fear,

His mortal portions entombed,

His secrets kept by stone tongue,

His divine treasure returned

To the Cradle of Fear

DeGroet’s voice thundered:
“You wouldn’t dare destroy it, Hunt. An artifact this important, you wouldn’t—”

“Let her go,” Gabriel shouted, “or I swear to you there’ll be nothing here but rubble.”

“All right,”
DeGroet said.
“All right.”
Then, after a moment:
“Tell him you’re free, my dear. Go on.”

Sheba’s voice floated in:
“I’m…free, Gabriel.”

The tension in her voice made him skeptical.

“There’s a hidden doorway to the room you’re in, Lajos,” Gabriel said. “It’s the only way you’re going to get in here unless you want to crawl through the tunnel, and I don’t think you do.” He was still looking at the extraordinary statue.
His secrets kept by stone tongue…
He wondered how literally the inscription was to be taken.

“I am willing to open the doorway,” he called, “but only if you promise that no harm will come to either Miss McCoy or myself. Do you agree?” He knew DeGroet’s word was worthless and paid no attention to the man’s shouted response. Gabriel was just playing for time while, holding the torch close to the head of the sphinx, he stuck the smallest finger of his free hand into its mouth and felt beneath the statue’s tongue.

There was something there.

“I said I agree,”
DeGroet shouted.
“Now open the door, Hunt.”

“All right,” Gabriel said, fishing out the hard, circular, metal object. “Step away from Miss McCoy. I don’t want you anywhere near her, and no guns pointed at her either. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

The object was the size of a coin, with an image of a sphinx on one side. A sphinx with wings. A Greek sphinx.

“Sheba,” Gabriel called, “have they stepped away?”

Sheba answered:
“A bit. Not very far.”

“Enough’s enough, Hunt,”
DeGroet shouted.
“Open the door now.”

“All right.” Gabriel returned to the wall separating this room from the entry chamber and lifted the granite bars from the brackets one by one. He leaned then against the wall. Then he put his shoulder to the rectangular block outlined by the recessed groove, braced himself and shoved.

The block rotated a few inches, as if on a central axis, then a few more when he shoved again. One more shove should do it—but Gabriel stepped back instead.

If he pushed it the rest of the way open, he might well find himself walking into an ambush. Whereas if he made them do it…

He darted over to the two open caskets. Ancient Egyptians hadn’t been six feet tall—but by bending his knees, Gabriel was able to fit himself into the empty one. He pressed the end of his torch to the ground, stepping on it to extinguish the flame, then dropped it and took his Colt from its holster.

The room was perfectly, completely dark. And for a moment it was silent.

Then a crack of light appeared as he heard the sound of a shoulder ramming against the stone door from the other side. The crack widened into a wedge, and a moment later he saw Zuka charge through the opening holding a torch in one hand and brandishing a deadly looking curved sword in the other. He was wearing an expression that contained all of his grief, transmuted into rage.

Hanif came through the doorway behind him, his red fez tipped slightly forward, tassel soaring, mouth open in a bellow—and in his fist he held a poignard, a short dagger with a silver blade, ready to plunge it down between Gabriel’s shoulder blades if only he could find them.

Finally DeGroet entered, forcing Sheba ahead of him at swordpoint.

Gabriel raised his Colt. He aimed carefully at Zuka and squeezed the trigger.

Nothing happened.

The hammer fell—but no gunshot followed. The wrong bullets, damn it! But the sound of the hammer landing had been loud enough to give away his location.

Gabriel dived out of the casket and heard it crash to the ground behind him. He barreled through the semidarkness directly at Sheba and snatched her out of in front of DeGroet’s saber with one arm around her waist. He saw her hands fly up and her mouth go wide in a terrified scream. He leaned close to her ear and whispered, “It’s me.”

But there was no time for further conversation. Zuka and Hanif were coming at them from opposite directions, blades held high—and in the tumult he saw Karoly enter the chamber, too. No sword for him: he raised an automatic pistol and leveled it at Gabriel’s chest.

Desperately Gabriel raised the Colt and fired again. This time, for whatever reason, the firing pin struck true, and flame spat from the end of the revolver. He saw Karoly’s hand jerk back and his pistol go flying. The short man swore loudly, a vicious Magyar curse.

Gabriel lifted Sheba off her feet and swung her toward Hanif. She lashed out with one bare foot at the top of her arc, cracking him across the face and sending his fez flying. Gabriel, meanwhile, kicked backwards with one leg, catching Zuka in the gut. The man collapsed, gasping.

Gabriel set Sheba down on the ground again and whispered urgently: “Run!”

“Where?” she said.

“Out,” Gabriel said, and fired another shot in Karoly’s direction. He looked around, but couldn’t see DeGroet
anywhere. Maybe the old man had fled to a safer spot when he realized he was in a situation where a sword couldn’t offer much in the way of protection.

Gabriel pointed Sheba toward the doorway and gave her a shove. It was all she needed—she was off and running. Gabriel followed close behind, but was pulled back by an arm around his throat. Karoly? Hanif? It didn’t matter which. He swung around and smashed whoever it was into the giant carved stone face behind him, which teetered from the impact. The man’s arm didn’t release, though. He smashed backwards again and then once more, and finally the man’s grip loosened and he tumbled off.

The doorway was just steps away. Gabriel ran through—

—and felt a long narrow blade slide deep into the flesh of his arm.

He jerked free, saw DeGroet outlined by the torchlight from the other room. The sword blade flickered briefly in the darkness like a serpent darting. It caught him across the cheek, opening a gash. He tasted his own blood, running into his mouth.

He remembered Karoly’s warning to Andras earlier, at the airport:
Maybe he’ll use you for practice. Cut you to ribbons.

“You’ve interfered with my plans for the last time, Hunt,” DeGroet said, his voice all the more frightening for being quiet and calm. “Now I rid myself of you once and for all.” And he gave a little salute with his sword before lunging in for the kill.

Gabriel whipped the bandolier of rifle bullets over his head and caught the blade with it as DeGroet sent it stabbing toward his chest. Sidestepping, he yanked hard, pulling DeGroet’s sword arm wide. That gave him room to step in and swing a fist into the side of DeGroet’s
skull. It wouldn’t have been quite as powerful a blow if Gabriel hadn’t been holding his gun in that hand; but he was, and DeGroet crumpled to the floor at his feet.

He ran. His left arm ached where DeGroet’s blade had penetrated it; his sleeve was slick and heavy with blood. And his cheek felt like it had been split open to the bone. But he couldn’t think about any of that now. Behind him he heard voices shouting in Arabic, English, and Hungarian, angry shouts coming closer as he plunged down the stairs in the darkness. He raced across the long tunnel that would return him to the surface, heavy pounding footsteps clamoring behind him and lighter ones pattering desperately up ahead—Sheba’s. He caught up with her halfway up the staircase and they plunged through the hole in the Sphinx’s paw together.

Dawn was just starting to break over the Nile, the rising sun’s rays streaking the sky a hundred shades of pink and purple and amber. It was a staggering sight and Gabriel would have given anything to be able to take pleasure in it. But he couldn’t. Their pursuers were only steps behind, and the workers out here, though temporarily startled to see them emerge, wouldn’t stay dumbstruck for long.

He grabbed Sheba’s arm and steered her down to where the camels and cars stood side by side. The drivers’ seats of the cars were empty, but so were the ignition slots. One good thing about a camel, he thought, as he slung Sheba up onto the back of a particularly tall and hardy-looking animal and then vaulted up after her: no key required.

He kicked the camel’s sides sharply and they took off into the desert.

“They’re coming,” Sheba said, looking back.

“Of course they are,” Gabriel muttered. “Why wouldn’t they be.”

“They’re getting in the cars!”

“Naturally,” Gabriel said. In the distance he could hear the engines revving. He was holding onto the reins for all he was worth and driving the animal forward at top speed. For the time being their lead was still widening—but that wouldn’t last long.

“What are we going to do?” Sheba said, facing forward again. She was clinging tightly to Gabriel from behind. It was a pleasant sensation, her soft flesh pressing up against his back, but not quite enough to make him forget about the pain in his arm—or about the men coming up behind them.

“Couple of options,” he said as they raced over the hard-packed sand. “We can’t outrun them, and we won’t be able to lose them if we head into Cairo—they’d have the advantage there. But if we can get into an area where this guy can travel but cars can’t…”

“Do you know of one near here?”

“No,” Gabriel said.

“What’s the other option?”

“Get captured,” Gabriel said. “Probably get killed.”