by Rob Jones
Jodie rolled her eyes. “You might want to get back on your feet, soldier. Another one of them wants to use you as a punchbag.”
She was wrong. The man she had warned him about wanted to use him not as a punchbag, but for target practice. He pulled an Uzi from a holster and held it at arm’s length. A rooky mistake to be sure, Hunter thought. With Blanco and Lewis now fighting Belisarius two-on-one, he lunged forward and smacked the weapon’s muzzle out of the way, driving the back of his fist up into the young man’s face. He grunted in pain and squeezed the Uzi’s trigger. A rapid burst of hot nine mill parabellum rounds raked into the adytum’s dusty floor, missing their target by inches.
Hunter rotated on his heel so his back was to the Armenian, placing himself between the man’s body and the arm holding the weapon. Then he simultaneously thrust his head back, piling the back of his skull into his nose and twisting the Uzi from his grip. Swivelling back away from him, he brought the wire stock up into his temple.
The Armenian hit the deck like a sack of wet cement. Hunter didn’t have to check if he was alive or not. No one survived three pounds of gun piled into the temple, not delivered at that velocity, anyway. He snatched up the man’s ammo belt and slung it over his shoulder as chaos erupted in the adytum.
Beside him, Quinn ran for the safety of a stone pillar. Jodie covered her with another Uzi she had snatched up off the floor as Blanco disarmed and knocked out one of the Brothers. Taking his blowback-operated pistol, he fired on some of the men as they fled for whatever cover they could find. Scanning the adytum, Blanco saw no sign of Kandarian.
A man rushed Quinn. She pushed him away. Her courage surprised her, but when she heard more shots she threw herself back down to the ground. She cursed herself for being such a coward, but when the bullets traced across the air only inches above her head, she let it slide. Staring up at the chaos exploding all around her, she decided the safest place to be was up on a ledge she had seen to her right, but before she could get to her knees, the man crashed down on top of her.
She screamed as his hefty weight crushed her into the grit, but then he rolled off and leapt to his feet. He reached for his knife and yanked it from the sheath. Its cold steel blade flashed in the green light of the glow stick. Quinn wanted to cry, but she had been through too much to fall apart at the final hurdle. Whatever happened now, she would not give up and let this man kill her without a fight.
She scrambled to her feet and took a step away, only to feel the rockface at the rear of the alcove bang up against her back. She was trapped and the man was moving closer with evil growing in his narrow eyes.
“Your friends aren’t going to save you now.”
“You keep away from me, you son of a bitch!”
When he laughed, the sound of his voice was swallowed up by the chaos of the fight exploding all around them in the cave system. “Who is going to stop me?”
“Me.”
He paused and stared at the young goth. For a second, he looked almost sorry for her. “You? Don’t make me laugh!”
With her chest heaving up and down with fear, Quinn looked around the alcove and time seemed to freeze. Lewis was hitting another of the men in the face with a hefty punch and knocking him to the floor. Blanco was struggling to pull a hunting knife out of a dead man’s ribcage. She wished she hadn’t seen that.
Then, a loud bang exploded in the cave and the man in front of her froze and dropped the knife. When blood ran from his mouth she guessed what had happened. He crashed down dead onto his face and she saw Amy standing behind him, smoking gun in her hand.
“You okay?” she asked.
As Quinn looked at her, she saw the shining blade of a knife slip in front of her throat. Behind her, a grinning Belisarius grabbed her by the shoulder and called out. “Everyone stop fighting and take a step back, or she dies.”
“Take it easy,” Blanco said, instantly seeing how dangerous the situation had become. “Just take it easy, fella.”
“Shut your mouth and drop your weapons!”
Kandarian strolled forward out of the shadows and gave his follower a pat on the back. “You have done well, Belisarius.”
When the HARPA team had laid down their weapons, he ordered them once again to stand in the corner with their hands raised.
Belisarius pushed Amy over toward her friends so hard she nearly fell over. She turned and stared at Hunter. His eyes were fixed on the Leader of the Brotherhood, and if he was frightened he wasn't showing it. Blanco was struggling and kicking out at two men as they forced him to the ground and began lashing him to a sturdy stalagmite. They had already tied Lewis, Jodie and Quinn down and now they were coming for her and Hunter.
“You can’t do this, Kandarian!” Amy cried out as two more men dragged her across the cave to her own personal stalagmite. On the far side of the cave, they were lashing Hunter against another of the rough, upward-growing basalt mineral deposits.
“I can and I have, Agent Fox,” Kandarian said.
Boots crunched on the stony cave floor as the Brotherhood moved in and out of their line of sight. Belisarius oversaw much of the activity, ordering men back and forth as they finished their work and picked up their packs.
Amy controlled her breathing. “So, you’re going back to the Ark then, huh?”
It was desperate, she knew, but it was all she could think of. Her words got the reaction she was looking for when Kandarian turned and stared at her, the ghost of a smile on his face. “What do you know of the Ark?”
“Enough.”
“You’re bluffing.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Why don’t you let us out of here and we can talk about it?”
Kandarian sneered. “What you do or do not know about the Ark does not matter anymore, Agent Fox. You and all of your friends will be dead in…” he looked at Belisarius. “How long is the timer?”
“Five minutes.”
“Five minutes,” Kandarian repeated and turned to the entrance. “I don’t know what it feels like to have thousands of tons of rock fall on you and crush you to death, but you are about to find out.”
“If I’m going to die,” Amy cried out. “Then you can tell me what this has all been about.”
Kandarian stopped on the spot and turned. She saw from his face he was considering her final, desperate plea.
“Very well, then you shall know.”
Blanco lowered his voice. “I can’t believe that worked…”
“Shh!” she said.
“You already know a great deal about the prophecy.” As Kandarian began speaking, the cave grew deadly silent. “But not everything. The knowledge is a secret, hidden by John the Apostle two millennia ago and guarded by the Brotherhood ever since the fateful day I discovered the terrible truth. This is why he hid the votive statues, the Four Living Beings of the Apocalypse. He had four of his disciples walk them to different sacred sites, so no one person would ever again find all four. One was sent to Mount Sinai, another to Megiddo. The third went to Petra in the Wadi Musa.”
“The Valley of the Moses,” Hunter said.
“Exactly, and the fourth was kept in the Cave of the Apocalypse. Yes, you have found the Tabula Dei, the Map of God. Yes, you have read the map and can see where it is pointing to. Yes, you know the Ark is there even though this is not what you think it is.”
“Is he supposed to be clearing this up or confusing us even more?” Jodie said.
“And yes,” he continued, “John of Patmos wrote twenty-three chapters for his Book of Revelation, not twenty-two as is universally accepted today. Yes, Revelation 23 contains not prophecy as we find in the previous twenty-two verses, but an historical account of something his vision of the Lord told him. But John the Apostle wrote it in an ancient code only the Brotherhood have deciphered. This is why you could not read it.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Lewis said.
Kandarian ignored him. “If you had read it you would already know what I am about to tell you now. The vision told J
ohn of Patmos not only what awaits a world of wicked sinners, but that God had already punished us.”
In the grim silence, Amy said, “And how did he do that?”
“He sent a comet to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah,” Kandarian said casually.
“Tell me,” said Quinn. “Do you spend a lot of time breathing in cheap incense?”
“It’s not as crazy as it sounds,” Hunter said. “You remember when we were on the plane flying to Luxor during the Atlantis mission?”
The young goth shrugged. “Sure. You told us about the Taurus Meteor Shower.”
“Taurid,” he said. “Our planet orbits through it twice a year. Every June and November we pass through it, and some have argued we got badly smashed up on a pass through it around twelve thousand years ago.”
“I remember,” Amy said. “Those meteors crashed into Greenland and nearly wiped out Atlantis, just when Plato said their civilization collapsed. That’s why the Atlanteans created the fire lance – to destroy any future meteors.”
“I knew you were listening,” Hunter said. “The point is that while that happened twelve thousand years ago and wiped out Atlantis, there was another collapse of human civilization much more recently, around four thousand years ago.”
Belisarius rounded on them, gun in his hand. “Shut your mouths and listen to His Eminence!”
“No,” Kandarian said. “Please, Dr Hunter – go on. I’m fascinated. You were saying something about the collapse of civilization four thousand years ago.”
Hunter stared at his captor for a moment and then resumed. “For a long time, archaeologists have struggled to explain the almost simultaneous collapses of several great civilizations. The Harrapin culture in the Indus Valley, Sumerians in Mesopotamia and Egypt’s Old Kingdom all fell at around the same. Over forty cities and their cultures vanished from history at roughly the same point in history.”
“And now you have an explanation?” Kandarian raised an eyebrow.
“Maybe, yes.”
“Enlighten us.”
“Astronomers have calculated that once every two and half thousand years, our planet is bombarded by even more meteorites than usual, and that this bombardment lasts around two centuries.”
“That’s a lot of rocks,” said Jodie.
“It is,” Hunter continued. “And thanks to the work of French archaeologists who found something at three separate areas in the Middle East – a specific calcite substance only occurring in meteorites – the evidence seems clear. Four thousand years ago, in around 2200 BC, the earth was pounded by an intense meteor shower. That was just around the time that…”
“That is talked about in Genesis?” Kandarian said. “Not quite.”
“And this is what you think happened to Sodom and Gomorrah?” Amy asked.
“Again, not quite.” Kandarian paced up and down in the green light of the glow stick. “To begin with, everything Dr Hunter has just said is blasphemous. Remember, Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven. You see, those cities were not wiped out by chance or accident, as Dr Hunter has described, but deliberately destroyed by God for their wicked and depraved sins.”
“We’re back on that,” Jodie said with an eye roll.
If Kandarian heard her, he didn’t show it. “Sodom and Gomorrah were located near modern day Al-Lisān in Jordan. Those cities were obliterated by the Lord, but another meteor that was part of the same shower flew over the top of them and crashed into the Armenian Highlands, near Mount Ararat.”
“Ah, slowly it comes together,” Amy said.
Kandarian gave a cold, emotionless smile. “And that meteorite brought with it a visitor from the heavens.”
“What are you saying?’ Lewis said.
Blanco frowned. “What do you mean when you say a visitor?”
“I mean the relic mentioned in John the Apostle’s missing chapter,” Kandarian said quietly.
“I still don’t get it,” said Amy.
“He’s crazy,” Jodie said.
“No, not crazy,” Kandarian said. “And now it is time for me to go. I have said too much. There is nothing you can do now. The whole world will feel the wrath of God by midnight and there is nothing you can do about it. It is now time for you to go to the Lord and receive judgement. Goodbye, Special Agent Fox.”
Kandarian raised the pistol and pointed it at Amy. She froze in terror, her eyes fixed on the black hole at the end of the gun’s muzzle and certain she was going to die. Then Kandarian lifted the gun above her head and fired at the lantern, plunging the cavern into almost complete darkness.
She watched them leave and when the stone slab crashed down and sealed off the entrance she felt her stomach drop about a million miles. She looked at her team, whose faces were lit now only by the eerie light of the green glowstick, and knew she had let them down.
“This is all my fault.”
Her words were punctuated by the rhythmic bleeping of the digital timer Belisarius had set to detonate the explosives. It was sitting on one of the many packs of C4 the Brotherhood had left positioned all over the cave, each just out of their reach.
“Don’t talk like that,” Blanco said. “We’re all in this together, for better or worse.”
“We’re not the Three Musketeers,” Quinn said.
“For one thing, there are six of us,” sad Jodie.
“Good math, Jodie,” said Quinn. “I can’t understand why you never went to college.”
“I could have gone to college!”
“Sure,” Quinn said. “I know what you’d have done if you went to college.”
“What?”
“Your professor.”
“Hey!”
“Shut up!” Amy cried out. “And I know we’re all frightened, but we’re not going to spend the last few seconds of our lives arguing with each other.”
“Seconded,” Lewis said.
“One minute left until the bang,” Hunter said.
But he was wrong. The bang came seconds after he had spoken. It was a savage flash of blinding light and a deep roar that rocked the cave and then everywhere was obscured by a thick cloud of black smoke.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
In the smoke and confusion, Amy was the first to speak. “What the hell was that?”
“About two C4s, I’d say,” Hunter said.
“Wrong… again.”
In the darkness, Hunter squinted when he heard the voice. It was gravelly, deep.
And Russian.
It spoke again. “It was four C4s.”
Fifty seconds.
A tall, strong man materialized out of the smoky darkness. Then Hunter felt someone hacking at the rope binding him to the stalagmite. When he turned, he could just make out in the clearing smoke the tall, lean figure of Colonel Vladimir Neverov. His face was covered in soot and dust but he was unmistakable.
“I’d reach for a gun to defend myself, Colonel,” Hunter said. “But something tells me you wouldn’t be here if you wanted to kill me.”
“A good deduction.”
With his hands freed, Hunter pulled the rope from his body and ran over to Amy. Whether she was still in shock from the explosion or from Neverov rescuing them, he didn’t know. It didn’t matter. There was less than forty seconds on the timer and there was no time to think. When he had untied her and she was free, they saw that Neverov had already released Jodie and Quinn.
Thirty seconds.
“Don’t forget about me!” Lewis said. “Remember how funny and charming I am?”
Hunter freed Lewis and Neverov unlashed an astonished Blanco. When they were all ready to go, the Russian colonel led them through the stone slab arch he had obliterated with C4 and back up the sloping tunnel to the main entrance. They were outside on the hill when the explosives detonated and they all felt the low rumble beneath their feet. Part of the ground collapsed down in a shallow basin and then a column of dust and smoke blasted out of the entrance inches from where
they were standing.
They dived to the ground and shielded their faces as the rock and dirt and smoke blew past them like a hurricane. When it finally settled back down to earth, they got to their feet just in time to see a line of Humvees cruising away to the south.
“Kandarian…” Neverov pointed to the cars. “He will die for killing my men.”
Amy took the lead, brushing past her friends until she was standing beside the ragged, bruised Russian. “What just happened in there, Neverov?”
“I saved your lives.”
“Yes, but why?”
“And how are you still alive?” Hunter asked. “We saw you die back on the Tiamat.”
“No, you saw what I wanted Kandarian to see.”
“You killed FBI agents,” Amy said coldly.
“No, Gubenko and our Spetsnaz backup killed them. Against my orders, as it happens.”
A long silence.
“And just how did you know to come here?” Jodie asked.
Neverov smiled. “I think maybe I can tell you now. In Athens when you fled from Kandarian and his men in the Acropolis, I had a contact place a tracker in your computer.”
Quinn was shocked. “Wait a minute, my computer?”
“Yes, but don’t feel bad. It leaves no trace. There was no way you could have known it was in there.”
“That makes me feel a lot better, thanks,” she said sarcastically.
“There is no time for this now,” he said. “We must go.”
Amy felt torn. Neverov was the enemy, or at least he had been. Now he had saved their lives but she still felt animosity when she looked at him after all he had put them through. She saw from their faces that the rest of the team felt the same.
“We must go, I say!” he repeated.
“But how?” Amy pointed at their chopper, now no more than a burned out smoking wreck, flames slipping off its bent rotors into the night. The Special Ops helicopter was in the same condition. “Looks like the Brotherhood took out our ride.”
“But not mine,” Neverov said. “When I tracked you here, I called an old friend of mine who lives in Istanbul. Ex-VVS.”
Hunter noted the blank look on Amy’s face. “Russian Air Force.”