by Rob Jones
“Holy Mother of God!” she screamed, and dived into the water just as the missile ripped into the hull of the jet boat. A meaty explosion blasted the tourist boat into dozens of pieces and Hawke strained to raise himself out of the rushing river to see if Lea had made it.
Before he got the confirmation he needed, he saw a red light moving rapidly along the surface of the water toward him and followed its path to see Kruger now racing ever closer. They were nothing more than fish in the proverbial barrel, at the mercy of these men who were now hunting them for sport.
“What are we going to do?” Lea screamed.
Hawke’s mind raced, but then he had an idea. “Over in the northern cliffs is a small cave – they can’t follow us in there. Everyone dive and swim to the cave!”
Hawke pushed himself underwater and began to swim toward the small cave he’d seen in the base of the cliff. Its ceiling looked only a foot or so above the waterline from out on the river but when he emerged inside it he realized it was bigger than it looked and more than enough to give them cover while they figured out what their next play was.
“What now?” Lea said, wiping the water from her eyes and sweeping her long hair back. The others looked at him for a decision.
Hawke swam over to the entrance and looked up into the sky. “They’re giving up and moving on. We wait till they’re out of sight and then we go back to the tomb.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Alex Reeve had been staring at Ryan’s email of the symbols for a long time when she finally blinked and rubbed her eyes. She needed a break, and now she was looking up at her father on the giant plasma screen in the Elysium briefing room. The sound was muted but she was reading the news ticker running along the bottom the picture. When he’d won the nomination to be the party’s candidate she knew life was going to change for everyone, but only half as much as it would if he won the election.
Tonight was the first debate with Bill Peterson and the tension ran through the air like electricity. Peterson was a skilled orator and master-manipulator of public opinion who knew how to use rhetoric to get what he wanted. Not only that but tonight’s debate was in New York, Peterson’s home state – the state he had served as senator for longer than anyone could remember.
According to Team Brooke, they were expecting somewhere in the region of ninety million viewers and the general opinion was the first debate was the most critical – after that a good chunk of those millions would get the picture and not bother tuning in again. Everything was riding on it and she could see the tension on her dad’s face as he stepped off the jet and made his way to his car among a throng of journalists and news crews. I hope it’s worth losing your family for, Daddy.
She returned to her laptop where the symbols were still on the screen, along with a series of image attachments of various pictograms from inside the chamber in the Dadès Gorge mesa. Ryan had also included a terrible selfie of himself using perspective to make it look like he was squeezing Jack Camacho’s head. The American was in the background talking to a Moroccan soldier and had no idea what Ryan had done.
She rolled her eyes, closed the selfie and turned her attention to the pictograms. Yes, Ryan was right when he said at least one of them was a symbol of Tanit, which was hardly surprising given it was her tomb, but like Ryan, something about it was bothering her.
Ryan’s theory was pivoting around his Atlantis idea, and that was as good a place as any to start. She’d been with ECHO long enough to know that dismissing the impossible was usually a bad idea. After Poseidon, Lei Gong, Osiris, Medusa, Valhalla and Mictlan, she had no reason not to believe in Atlantis any more.
“I know what you’re thinking.”
Startled, she turned to see Richard Eden entering the room with two coffees.
“And what am I thinking?”
He pointed at the symbol of Tanit. “That Atlantis is a bridge too far?”
“Maybe, but if it was good enough for Plato then it’s good enough for me.”
Eden laughed and looked at the TV. “You think he’ll win the debate?”
Alex shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I never gave a damn about his career and I’m not going to start now.”
“I thought you built some bridges during the Medusa mission?”
Alex sighed. “Maybe, but you never know with Jack Brooke.” She said the name as if he were just another politician. “He’s Dad one minute and then Mr Secretary the next.”
“Or maybe Mr President the next?”
She looked at Eden, saddened that she probably had a healthier relationship with him than she did with her own father. “Like I said, don’t ask me.”
Eden smiled briefly and decided not to push it. Instead, he changed the subject and brought things back to business. “Any luck with the pictograms?”
“Yes and no. I don’t know a whole lot about Phoenician culture, but this broken symbol here could be what we’re looking for,” Alex said, and let her hair down, shaking it loose and relaxing for the first time that day. She wheeled her chair across to another computer and opened another window. “Ryan found this one where the key was found so I think it’s very important and connected to the key’s meaning. I used some imaging software to clean it up and enlarge it.”
Eden peered in closer at the pictogram Alex was indicating. Half of it had been blown away by a bullet in the fire fight, but what was left looked like a man’s face and his raised hand. “You mean the raised hand?”
“I do.”
“The raised hands of Ka?”
Alex shook her head. “A good guess, but I don’t think so. The raised hands which made up the Egyptian symbol for Ka – their ‘vital spark’ or life essence – were never pictured with a face or head like this, but just two hands, usually forming a U shape.”
“So what is it then?”
“Considering a bullet blew half of it away, it was tough, but at first I was thinking this is Atlas.”
“Atlas?”
“Sure. If you look carefully you can see the hand is holding something up – indicated here by this very faint line – it has a convex curve, see? And here is a second arm. He’s holding the world up.”
Eden put his glasses on and leaned in close to the screen. “Well, bugger me! I think you might have something here. You said you thought it was Atlas at first – so you think something else now?”
She nodded. “I do. At first I got all excited because… you know – a symbol of Atlas in the Atlas Mountains, bla bla bla, but then I realized this wasn’t Atlas at all but Hercules.”
“Hercules?”
“Uh-huh?”
“What makes you say that?”
“The arms holding the world are straight like pillars.”
“But we decided this was someone holding the world up. I might have been at school several hundred years ago but my recollection is that Atlas held up the world.”
“Right,” Alex nodded. “After the Titanomachy Atlas was ordered to hold the sky up above the world for eternity, and for whatever reason he was linked to the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. They were named after him, of course.”
“So Hercules..?”
“According to legend Hercules also held the world up for a short time, so I think this symbol is a depiction of him performing that task. It’s an allegory representing a great burden perhaps carrying ancient knowledge.”
“I see.”
“Not only that but this symbol of Tanit also points in the same direction. To the untrained eye it looks like a woman in a skirt who is holding her arms out either side of her body in an upright position.”
“And to the trained eye?”
“The other way to interpret this symbol is two pillars either side of the sun, on top of a mountain. In fact the symbols of Tanit and the pillars are closely connected. Most depictions of the Pillars of Hercules show Hercules struggling between two collapsing pillars in an attempt to hold them up, and for this reason they are leaning in toward him and make a triangle – jus
t like the ‘skirt’ of Tanit. It all points to the same thing.”
Eden squinted and cocked his head as he studied the image again. “Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure, yeah. These two symbols are both direct references either to Hercules or the Pillars of Hercules.”
“Just tell me you know what you’re doing.”
“I do, but I can’t take this any further now without specialist knowledge. I’m ninety percent certain that both these symbols are pointing to the far north of Morocco, but after that I’m out of ideas.”
“Mr Bale?”
“A polymath genius, Rich, for sure… but not this stuff – his knowledge is broad but not always deep. We’re going to need someone to help us decode these symbols. Any ideas?”
Eden frowned. “There are only two people in the world who have the knowledge to decode this stuff, and one of them is Dirk.”
“And the other?”
“Dr Maati Khatibi. He’s second only to Dirk when it comes to researching Phoenician and Punic semiotics. He’s our best chance.”
“Where does he work?”
“He doesn’t – he retired last year. His last academic post was the Oxford Center for Phoenician and Punic Studies, but from what I can gather he’s back in Morocco now.”
“Do we have an address?”
“Only if you can find one,” Eden said.
Alex turned around and begun furiously tapping into the computer. Eden took a moment to clear his mind and had a sip of the coffee. Five minutes later, Alex cleared her throat to get his attention and spun the monitor around for him. “I hacked the payroll in Oxford.”
“Where?”
“The Blue Pearl.”
“Ah,” Eden said, his face lighting with pleasant recognition. “I know it well. You try and get in touch with him and I’ll let Lea know where they’re going.”
“Sure,” she said, and Eden left the room.
She pushed her chair back to the plasma screen and looked up at the towering figure of her father, only now he was barely recognizable because the news network were playing old videotape footage of him descending a military aircraft’s airstair in his Delta Force dress uniform. Before she was born, she thought, and a smile broke out on her face without her even knowing it. He looked so young, she thought. He would be about her age right now with his whole life ahead of him.
She quietly wished him luck, not even knowing if she meant it or not, and switched off the plasma screen.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Ryan Bale received Alex’s text with a mixture of happiness and frustration. She was replying to his earlier email and as usual she’d got right on it. She’d even come up with some stuff about the raised arms being a symbol of the Egyptian Ka – another reference to eternity. He was happy that they had a good lead but irritated that she had once again beaten him to it, but that was the way things went with Alex Reeve. She was sharper than a serpent’s tooth, as someone once wrote, and he was proud to work with her.
Scarlet poked him in the ribs. “So what does HQ say?”
“Alex is of the view that the key Kruger stole is supposed to unlock something to do with the Pillars of Hercules… I just knew this had something to do with Hercules!”
“Hercules?”
“Or Heracles – same dude so take your pick.”
With Chabat’s men guarding the tomb and waiting for backup, they were making their way down the track toward the river in the hope of meeting up with Hawke and the others. Instead, they saw something altogether different – a number of men flying through the sky toward them at speed.
“What the hell are they” Maria asked.
“Paragliders,” Camacho said, his tone indicating trouble ahead.
“Could just be tourists,” Scarlet said.
Camacho shook his head and took a closer look. “Tourists aren’t usually armed.”
Maria took a step forward and shielded her eyes from the sun as she looked into the sky. “What?”
“They’re carrying weapons of some kind,” Camacho said.
“And if they’re here on their way to us, then where the hell is Joe?” Ryan said.
“Just what I was thinking,” Maria said. “Maybe something happened to them.”
Scarlet slid the bolt-action on her gun and rolled her eyes. “All right, no need to turn into a bunch of big girls’ blouses,” she said sharply. “We have an enemy engaging with us so get into defensive positions.”
“You’re not the boss of me, lady,” Camacho said with a grin.
“You can’t possibly believe that, can you Camo?”
Now the enemy was close enough for them to hear the buzzing hum of the paramotors and then they saw the red dots of the laser sights.
“I’m getting a bad feeling about this,” Ryan said as he watched the crimson-colored dot racing along the track toward them.
“Whatever they’ve got is laser-guided,” Camacho said.
“Which means our day just got really shit,” said Scarlet.
“And that little red dot is getting closer,” Maria said. “Only twenty meters.”
A puff of smoke from one of the paragliders and a cracking sound a second later was the opening shot of the attack.
“Run for cover!” Scarlet screamed, and they scattered over the side of the mesa as the laser-guided missile raced toward them at seven hundred miles per hour.
They took cover in the sagebrush as the paragliders deftly swung the airborne fighting machines away from the river and toward their enemy. The out-of-synch buzzing of the motors was now much louder as Kruger and his men approached rapidly from the east.
Ryan watched with unconcealed terror as the laser dots danced around on the ravine floor, snaking and hopping over the sandstone boulders as they closed in on them. “This is not good,” he mumbled, but no one else heard.
The red dots were closer now, flicking like fire through the canopies of the jujube trees and canary grass a few yards from their defensive position.
Ten meters to his right, he watched Scarlet Sloane take a calm, measured aim with her gun, and then there was a puff of smoke and a cracking sound. A second later one of the airborne goons was dead, slumped forward in his harness and his Pike tumbling out of his hands. It landed on the rocky slope with a metallic smack, followed a moment later by a handful of the small missiles.
“I’ve got to get that bastard weapon,” he heard Scarlet say.
“Why?” he called out to her. “Is it more effective or something?”
“Without a doubt,” she called back. “But I just want to play with it.”
And with that she was gone, kicking up dust as she scrambled through the juniper and esparto grass on her way to the weapon. Above her, the dead man in the paraglider was spinning around out of control as he lost altitude.
He raced toward the slope, his corpse still slumped in the harness, and rammed into the side of the canyon at speed. A terrible crunching sound echoed down the canyon as the paraglider dropped from the sky and smashed into the river’s rocky shore a hundred feet below.
Not fifty yards west, Scarlet was snatching up the weapon and turning to get back to cover. Camacho was firing with his pistol to keep the paragliders busy, but it wasn't enough, and now Scarlet was running with all her might as several little red dots chased her along the rocky shore.
Another goon fired, and a Pike rocket raced toward the former SAS woman faster than the speed of sound.
“Hurry up!” screamed Maria.
“Show us what you’re made of!” Camacho yelled.
“She’s made of vodka and bullets,” Ryan called back, shaking his in disbelief at the indescribable act of courage he was witnessing as Scarlet leaped into the air. She dived for the cover of a juniper pine just as the rocket slammed into the ground at her feet and exploded.
The force of the explosion propelled her through the hot, desert air and she crashed into a clump of acacia before cursing loudly and rolling into the cover of an almond t
ree a few yards away. A cloud of gritty dust blasted up into the hot Moroccan air and the desert breeze whirled it all around her. “Is that all you’ve got?” she screamed as she loaded the Pike and aimed it at the man who had shot at her. “Pathetic!”
She fired the laser-guided missile at the man and grinned as he struggled to manoeuvre the paraglider out of the way. Below in her defensive position, Scarlet Sloane casually kept the laser dot on his body as he twisted and turned in the harness in a desperate attempt to shake it off.
“What’s the matter?” she screamed up at him. “Want to cancel our date already?”
The man fumbled to unstrap himself from the harness, the idea presumably being to drop into the river which he could use for some kind of cover, but he couldn’t extricate himself from the harness anywhere quick enough, and a split second later the rocket blasted through him and detonated. The man, the paramotor and the rig above him were consumed by an enormous white-hot fireball and plummeted down through the blue sky into the river like a dead bird.
When the others saw Scarlet had secured one of the Pikes, they knew their advantage was gone, and quickly turned in the sky. They gained altitude and seconds later disappeared over the ridge line of the canyon high above. Scarlet and everyone else knew it would take half an hour to hike to the ridge, and accepted the enemy had gotten away.
She didn’t have much time to think about it because as soon as she got up from her cover and began dusting herself down Camacho noticed a beleaguered Joe Hawke and the others from the team marching in their direction along the south bank of the Dadès River.
“What the hell happened to you?” Ryan asked.
“You’ll never guess,” Lea said.
Ryan smiled. “Um – you were shot at by a bunch of psychopaths in paragliders holding laser-guided missiles?”
“Don’t tell me…” Hawke began.
“All right, we won’t,” Scarlet replied curtly. “We need to get out of here anyway, so there’s no time.”
“You mean you don’t want to brag about how you saved all our asses just now?” Camacho said, giving Scarlet a tight shoulder-squeeze.