A rush of utter terror hit her.
The spearhead!
Wilde must have thrown the case into the wheel well just before it closed. The bomb was no longer aboard the Pacifia – it was behind her!
She stabbed at the switch to lower the landing gear and drop the spearhead into the sea—
Too late.
The magnetic field inside the Atlantean crystal finally weakened to the point of collapse – releasing all the remaining antimatter.
Freed of their constraints, the antiparticles slammed against the spearhead’s pitted and corroded inner surface. Matter touched its inverse, causing mutual annihilation in an unimaginable burst of primal energy.
Alula and the helicopter were not merely vaporised. They ceased to exist, every molecule torn apart in a billionth of a second. The atmosphere itself became a searing sphere of plasma, for an instant a thousand times hotter than the heart of a star – then the explosion’s force blasted it outwards at hypersonic speed, compressing the surrounding air almost to a solid before the shock wave burst free.
A new sun rose over the Persian Gulf.
Ingels and his bridge crew watched in horror as the initial dazzling flare faded to reveal a seething fireball. The warning from the Atlantia had been true: Alula had indeed been using their ship to carry a weapon of mass destruction.
The bomb might have gone off at a safe distance, but the ten thousand souls aboard the liner were still in danger. ‘Bring us about!’ he ordered. ‘Turn the bow towards the blast! Sound the general alarm, and get all the passengers into cover!’
His officers scrambled to obey, the man at the helm station rotating the azipods to bring the great ship into line with the explosion. A white haze obscured the horizon beneath it – the oncoming shock wave.
There were no windows in the medical centre, but the general alarm – seven short bursts followed by one longer – told Eddie and Nina something had happened. It was not hard to guess what. ‘Everyone hold on!’ the Yorkshireman shouted. ‘A bomb’s just gone off – we’re gonna have a rough ride!’
The nurse looked up from cutting away Nina’s trouser leg. ‘What kind of bomb?’
‘Let’s just call it a nuke to save time!’ Shock and fear spread through the room as an urgent voice boomed over the PA system, ordering people to seek shelter away from any windows. ‘If you can get down on the floor, get down – otherwise, hold on tight!’ Everyone hurried to obey.
Nina readied herself for a terrifying – and potentially terminal – experience. ‘Oh, I’m so not going to enjoy this, am I?’
For once, Eddie didn’t have a tension-relieving wisecrack. Instead, he took hold of her. ‘I’ve got you,’ he whispered.
She managed a smile. ‘You always have.’
They kissed, then held each other—
A growing rumble shook the ship, the wind outside rising as the shock wave closed in – then the Pacifia reeled violently as if struck by a giant hammer. A colossal boom echoed through the enormous vessel as the blast wave hit, windows shattering along its length. But even this noise was not enough to drown out the horrifying sound of thousands of people screaming as one.
Loose objects flew across the infirmary, several patients flung from their beds as the deck bucked beneath them. Eddie clung to Nina, but even braced, he couldn’t withstand the earthquake-force impact. ‘Nina, hold on!’ he cried as he fell.
She gripped the stretcher, but the cot itself slid sideways as the ship pitched. It tipped over, throwing her to the floor—
Her broken leg hit the deck. An explosion of pain – and everything went black.
The spearhead’s detonation hit far more than just the liner.
There was no nuclear fallout. Like an atomic blast, the explosion released huge amounts of gamma radiation – but the sheer force of the explosion actually served to absorb it, the shock wave compressing the atmosphere around it as densely as the thickest lead shielding.
There was still considerable destruction, though. Even though much of the blast wave’s energy dissipated over its thirty-mile journey, windows were smashed and buildings damaged throughout northern Qatar. The gleaming skyscrapers of Manama had their facades shattered, though luckily the explosion’s distant flash had provided enough warning for those within to get clear of their glass frontages before they were shredded by flying shards.
Injuries were inevitable – widespread, often serious – but astoundingly, the only person killed as a direct result of the Atlantean artefact’s annihilation was Alula herself.
Nina opened her eyes, squinting at the painful brightness. It took a moment for the brilliance to fade, revealing that she was no longer in the Pacifia’s infirmary. The last thing she remembered was Eddie holding her, then an explosion of pain, then nothing . . .
Eddie! Where was he? She tried to sit up—
And flopped back down as she discovered her broken leg was now immobilised in a cast.
‘Whoa, easy!’ said Eddie, jumping up from a chair beside her bed. A bandage covered the laceration across his head, other dressings on his left hand and arm. ‘How’re you feeling?’
‘Like crap,’ she replied. ‘Where are we? How long was I unconscious?’
‘Hospital in Dhajan,’ he told her, perching on the bed. ‘You’ve been out for about eight hours, although some of that was because the doctors gave you a sedative. And a shitload of painkillers.’
‘Yeah, I thought “crap” seemed remarkably good, considering.’ She looked down at her leg. ‘How bad is it?’
‘You won’t be riding around Central Park with Macy for a while. You broke your shin when you fell off the chopper.’
Nina winced. ‘Ow.’
‘Yeah. But it could’ve been worse. Seeing as you drowned.’
‘I what?’ she yelped.
‘You went over the edge of the deck into the sea. You weren’t breathing – I had to give you mouth-to-mouth.’
‘Saved by a kiss, huh?’ They both smiled. ‘So what happened? The ship got hammered, so the damage on the shore must have been bad.’
‘The glaziers in Bahrain’ll be quids-in. Lots of skyscrapers with broken windows. But the spearhead blew up far enough out that the actual blast didn’t do too much damage on land. I was talking to the Emir earlier, who’d been talking to someone in the States – they reckon the explosion was about forty megatons.’
‘Much less than it could have been.’ She rested her head on the pillow. ‘I suppose the antiparticles inside the spearhead would have decayed over time. And maybe it didn’t capture many new ones inside the vault. Gold’s nearly as effective a shield as lead, after all.’
‘Well, whatever, we got lucky. There’s been loads of property damage, but I haven’t heard about anyone being killed. Well, except Alula, but fuck her. Lots of the Pacifia’s passengers were hurt, but apparently everyone got off the ship alive.’
‘What about the Atlantia? You said you spoke to the Emir . . .’
‘The US Navy recovered the lifeboats. Everyone’s okay, including Lobato.’
Nina nodded. ‘What about Macy? Have you called her?’
‘Yeah, a couple of hours ago. She’s flying over with Olivia tomorrow – the Emir’s sending a private jet.’
‘Good. I want to see her. I need to be back together with my family.’
‘Had enough of going on adventures on your own, eh?’
‘Had enough of adventures, period,’ she scoffed. ‘After the Congo, I just wanted to work on my books and my research. I’m thinking that twice as much now! Maybe it’s time to get back into academia – professors usually have a quiet life.’
Eddie raised an eyebrow. ‘So you never want to go out into the field again?’
‘Well, never say never. But I really, really, really would like to be able to work without guns and explosions and massive destruction all around me. Just once.’
He laughed. ‘Won’t make for a very exciting film, but we’ll see how it goes.’
; Nina managed to raise herself on one elbow. She put her other arm around her husband’s waist and hugged him to her. ‘So long as we go there together.’
Epilogue
New York City
Two Months Later
‘What do you mean, the vault is gone?’ Nina demanded in disbelief.
She had called Oswald Seretse at the United Nations to check on the IHA’s plans to secure the buried Atlantean chamber in Turkey. The last she had heard, a couple of weeks previously, the IHA had reached an agreement with the Turkish government – under considerable pressure from the US and other major powers – to excavate the vault and transport it elsewhere for examination by experts. While she still had no intention of returning full-time to the IHA, she had hoped to help discover more of the strange structure’s secrets.
Seretse had dashed those hopes, though – and raised chilling questions. ‘I mean that quite literally, Nina,’ said the Gambian. It took a lot to worry him, but this was one of those rare occasions. ‘An IHA team arrived on site two days ago to begin digging out the vault. They found that the hilltop had already been excavated and the vault itself removed. By helicopter, apparently, as there were no heavy vehicle tracks. Whoever was responsible worked quickly, as the site had been visited by the IHA the day before and everything was still intact. But the culprits remain persons unknown.’
‘Persons unknown!’ she echoed sarcastically. ‘What, Berk and Elmas didn’t see all this going on fifty feet from their house?’
‘The Onans relocated last month. The Turkish government expropriated their property. They were far from happy with the amount paid, I understand, but had little choice but to accept it. Such is the nature of autocratic regimes.’
She shook her head. ‘So the Turks have the vault?’
‘They deny all knowledge of its removal.’
‘Well, of course they would!’
‘For what it is worth, I believe them. I have not been idle in this matter, Nina,’ he went on, a little condescendingly. ‘I spoke to my sources in the military and intelligence communities, and all heavy-lift helicopters belonging to the Turkish government were accounted for on the night in question. That does not rule out the use of privately owned aircraft, of course, but it is a start.’
‘It’s not an end, though,’ she said. ‘If it’s not the Turks, who has the resources to dig out and steal something that must weigh twenty tons from right under their noses?’
‘That is a very good question,’ Seretse replied. ‘I will keep you informed should I learn anything.’
‘That’d be great, Oswald. Thank you.’
She hung up and sat back, thinking. The amount of work needed to excavate the Atlantean vault over a single night would have been phenomenal . . .
Eddie opened her study door. ‘Something up, love? You were getting a bit loud.’
‘Oh no, nothing’s wrong,’ she said sarcastically, running a hand through her hair – it had returned to its natural red colour and was growing back from its close crop. ‘Only that Oswald just told me the vault’s been stolen, and nobody has any idea who did it.’
‘What did they steal from the vault? There wasn’t much in it.’
‘No, they didn’t steal anything from the vault – they stole the vault, the whole thing.’
‘You what? It must weigh twenty tons!’
‘Yeah, tell me about it.’ She stood, wincing a little. Her cast had been removed a week earlier, but she was still suffering some residual pain. ‘So much for my plan to finish my paper about the spearheads with an analysis of the vault. I was kinda hoping to have a closer look at the Atlantean technology. If it even counts as technology, that is. I mean, it was crystals powered by earth energy! I don’t think it could have been more stereotypically New Age if it had been tie-dyed.’
‘Could it be dangerous?’ Eddie asked. ‘Last time someone tried to use something like that, they were planning to take over the world.’
‘Yeah, I remember. And the time before that, they wanted to start a world war. I thought I’d seen the last of it, but I guess the Atlanteans had other ideas.’
‘Bunch of arseholes for burying secret weapons all over the world, eh?’
‘Damn right. Why couldn’t I have gone into a safe and non-controversial line of archaeology like, I dunno, looking for the body of Christ?’
They both laughed, then went into the living room. Macy, playing with a toy trikan, looked up. ‘Are you okay, Mommy?’ she asked. ‘You were shouting.’
‘I wasn’t shouting, honey,’ Nina assured her. ‘I just had some news I wasn’t expecting. What are you up to?’
‘Trying to do the trick I did on the ship.’ The little girl flicked the elaborate yo-yo out on its line. It whizzed away almost horizontally, spinning at the end of the string before looping back and snapping into its holder.
Her mother was impressed. ‘You’re getting really good at that. When I had a yo-yo as a kid, I could barely get it to come back to me.’
Macy frowned, not accepting the compliment. ‘No, it’s wrong. When I was on the ship, I made it go a different way just by wanting it to. Why can’t I do that now?’
‘It’s just a toy, love,’ Eddie reminded her. ‘Maybe there’s something different about the way the real one works.’
‘I can’t believe you even got the real trikan to work,’ said Nina. ‘Everyone who’s examined it says there’s too much friction in the mechanism to throw it, never mind have it come back.’
‘It did work!’ Macy insisted angrily. ‘If you’d been there, you would believe me!’ She scowled, then stalked out of the room.
‘I didn’t mean it like that!’ Nina called after her, but her daughter was gone. A few seconds later, the apartment reverberated to the sound of her bedroom door slamming. ‘Oh, she’s a handful,’ she sighed.
‘You think she’s bad now, wait till she’s fifteen,’ Eddie said, smirking.
‘It’s all right for you. She’s a daddy’s girl; she never gives you any trouble. Me? I’m just remembering how much trouble I caused my mom in my teens.’
The smirk grew wider. ‘Karma’s a bitch, innit?’
‘I’ll remember you said that the next time something bad happens to you. Oh well. Life goes on.’ They sat together on the couch, Nina gingerly stretching out her sore leg. ‘Hopefully nice and quietly.’
‘Well, you won’t get that with a seven-year-old, but at least nobody’ll be shooting at us. Fingers crossed!’ He slipped his arm around her; she snuggled against him, glad of the chance to relax. ‘You fancy watching a film?’
‘Got anything in mind?’ she asked.
‘How about Speed 2?’
The Yorkshireman’s cackling ‘Oof!’ as his wife hit him was loud enough to reach Macy, but she ignored it, still fuming. Why wouldn’t anyone believe her? The trikan had gone where she’d wanted it to – where she’d told it to. She knew it had!
She snapped the toy version out and back, out and back, sweeping it around in increasingly elaborate loops and twirls. She practised with it whenever she had a spare moment, trying to repeat what she had done aboard the liner – and to show her parents she hadn’t been imagining things, or lying. But while her skills had improved hugely, so far she hadn’t reached her ultimate goal.
She knew what had happened, though. She had done something amazing – but nobody believed her.
Some day, she was going to prove it. To everyone.
Loved The Spear of Atlantis? Read King Solomon’s Curse, another thrilling instalment of the Wilde and Chase adventure series
Nina Wilde is in Jerusalem where clues found at the Ark of the Covenant recovery site have led her to the ruins of the First Temple, buried beneath Temple Mount. Within them, Nina spots an opening to a previously hidden chamber – a map room which contains a model of a mysterious city thought to contain a great yet dangerous power hidden by King Solomon himself. Analysing the clues, Nina believes that the city is located in the Democratic Republic of Congo,
one of the most dangerous locations on Earth.
Eddie Chase has had his own problems in the DRC in the past but he isn’t about to let Nina go there alone.
Joining forces, Nina and Eddie are about to start a chain of events from which there might be no return . . .
Get your copy here: http://smarturl.it/KingSolomonsCurse
The Spear of Atlantis (Wilde/Chase 14) Page 53