The Genesis Cypher (Warner & Lopez Book 6)

by Dean Crawford

  ‘Then the tomb could be under fifty feet of sand!’

  Lucy shook her head. ‘Tjaneni was buried some three and a half thousand years ago, so his tomb won’t be against the far back wall of the formation, it’ll be somewhere closer by!’

  Lucy stood up and pointed across the vast formation, through the impenetrable veils of sand sweeping through the air.

  ‘It’s that way, two hundred forty meters!’ she announced.

  Ethan blinked. ‘You’re sure?’

  As if in reply Lucy Morgan pulled the straps of her back pack closer about her shoulders and marched off into the swirling miasma of dust. Ethan and Lopez exchanged bemused glances, and then set off in pursuit with Hellerman and the rest of the team close behind.

  ‘It won’t take Ivan long to figure out where we’ve gone,’ Lopez said as they marched, covering her face against the screaming wind. ‘Those drones might have kept an eye on us long enough to know that we dodged the sulfur gas.’

  Ethan nodded as he looked back to the north, toward the entrance to the formation.

  ‘They probably already know where we’re going if they have Elena with them,’ he replied. ‘The only thing protecting us now is this storm and we don’t know how long it will last.’

  Lopez reached down beneath her shirt and checked her pistol, tucked safely into her shoulder holster.

  ‘Once they break through and find us, we’ll have to hit them hard or they’ll leave us out here to die. There’s nobody coming out here to rescue us this time, you know that, right?’

  Ethan didn’t reply, more than aware that there would be no airstrikes or other fabulous American hardware coming to their aid. With the DIA officially out of the picture and Hellerman now stuck in the desert with them, they were on their own and the Russians would take every advantage of that.

  ‘Let’s just hope that Doctor Indiana Morgan here can get us out of the sh…’

  ‘Sssh,’ Ethan snapped, cutting her off as he raised a hand and listened.

  To his right, beyond the swirling sands and the howl of the gale, he heard the faint rattle of an engine passing by at low speed. He pointed out to his right and looked at Lopez, who listened intently for a moment and then nodded in agreement.

  ‘We need to disappear,’ she said, ‘fast.’

  Ethan looked up to see Lucy Morgan waving them to follow her, and he hurried to the archeologist’s side as they trudged west across the formation.

  ‘It’s this way,’ Lucy said.

  Ethan followed Lucy for some fifty yards or more, the scientist changing direction subtly as she scrutinized the compass in her hand. The sand and dust was gusting across the formation more violently than ever, the light dimming to almost as dark as night as Ethan heard the violent winds screaming across the turbulent sky above reach a new and frightening crescendo.

  The little group hunkered down, shielding their faces from the vicious gale as Lucy reached a spot on the formation and crouched down.

  ‘This is it!’ she yelled above the roar of the wind. ‘This is where the tomb is located!’

  Ethan stared down at an entirely non–descript chunk of sand. With the exception of a slight rise in the level of the ground there was nothing to see, and the storm was now so bad that visibility was down to a few meters.

  ‘How the hell would you know that?’ Lopez demanded. ‘There’s nothing here!’

  Lucy didn’t reply as from her backpack she produced a small folding shovel and began pulling away mounds of sand. Ethan helped her along with the rest of the group as they burrowed down into countless centuries of accumulated sand.

  To Ethan’s amazement within a few moments Lucy’s shovel began scraping against rocks buried three feet below the surface. As they worked feverishly so he could see the smooth, flat surface of cut rocks, too perfect to have been formed purely by nature.

  Lucy hurried to find the outline of the rock, the sand rushing past in painful gusts as the tiny particles hammered against their faces. Ethan found a thin, dead straight crack in the rocks and followed it around, sweeping sand aside with his hands as the rest of the team worked around him. After a few minutes they were all standing on a large cut rock perhaps four feet square, wispy gusts of sand billowing past them. The stone was slanted by about forty–five degrees, like a door cut into the living rock.

  ‘Now what?’ Mitchell asked.

  Lucy crouched down and examined the seal of the tomb, the gaps in the rock so tiny that it would not be possible to slip even a razor blade between them, never mind a crow bar or lever.

  ‘We get creative!’ she yelled back above the noisy gale.

  Ethan looked over his shoulder into the dense, shadowy veils of the storm blasting past them. If the Russians were able to use the oracle to locate the tomb, they wouldn’t be far behind.

  ‘Whatever you’ve got in mind do it now,’ Ethan said, ‘before we’re found!’

  Lucy ordered everybody back from the tomb entrance as she began to work, and Ethan looked up and wondered how long the storm would last to conceal them from the Russian forces he felt sure were breathing down their necks.

  *

  Colonel Mishkin peered through the windscreen of the jeep, a permanent scowl twisting his features as he saw before them nothing but a dense veil of dust and sand beneath a darkened sky. The jeep’s headlights penetrated only a few meters ahead of them, and he knew that Warner’s team had been several hundred meters away when the storm had enveloped Mishkin’s convoy.

  ‘How much further?’ he demanded irritably.

  Gregorie stared directly ahead as he replied, the jeep driving slowly across the rugged terrain.

  ‘We are in the vicinity of the group but they could have gone in any direction or even split up. We will not be able to track them until this storm has subsided, and even then there will be little to go on. The storm will erase any trace of their passing.’

  Mishkin growled and then slammed a balled fist against the dashboard.

  ‘Stop the convoy!’

  Gregorie braked slowly to a halt in the middle of the storm as Mishkin pulled the hood of his smock over his head and clambered out of the jeep. He jogged back to the troop transporter and climbed up into the rear to see his soldiers sitting expectantly on benches either side of the vehicle, a girl pinned between them. Elena’s skin was pale, her eyes closed and her body limp.

  ‘Get her ready!’ Mishkin snapped.

  The Syrian, Akhmed was sitting beside Elena and he stared in disbelief at Mishkin. ‘Ready for what?’

  Mishkin’s fists balled at his sides as he glared at the doctor. ‘We have lost Warner and his people.’

  ‘She is exhausted,’ the doctor replied. ‘There is nothing in this girl left to take.’

  Mishkin took a single pace toward the doctor and swung a fist to crack across Akhmed’s face. The doctor let out a whimper as he cowered away from the towering soldier.

  ‘There is her life,’ Mishkin growled back, ‘and yours. If you value them, get her ready.’

  The doctor reluctantly began fishing about in his kit for the Trans Cranial Stimulator as the soldiers gently lifted the girl from between them on the bench and lay her down in the center of the truck. Too weak to resist or even respond, Elena slumped at the doctor’s feet as he set the device upon her head.

  ‘This will kill her,’ he snapped, his anger overcoming his fear. ‘What use will she be if she doesn’t survive?’

  Mishkin glared down at them both as he drew a pistol. ‘The question you should be asking, doctor, is what use will you be if she dies?’

  The doctor tightened the straps on the cranial device and then connected it to a battery terminal. He waited for a few moments, and then leaned down beside the girl and said a name in a loud, clear voice.

  ‘Ethan Warner!’

  The doctor cranked the terminals and instantly the girl’s weakened body shuddered as live electrical current swept through the TCS and bolted through her weary brain. Mishkin watched as
the girl twitched and writhed, her sightless eyes rolling up into their sockets and her teeth clashing.

  ‘Ethan Warner!’ the doctor repeated, hoping against hope that she could hear him.

  Elena’s body convulsed and she let out a groan as her eyelids closed and she mumbled something that Mishkin couldn’t quite hear above the storm winds buffeting the vehicle.

  ‘Still open… Dove is low.’

  ‘What did she say?’ he demanded.

  The doctor leaned closer to her, and squinted as he tried to focus on her words.

  ‘The seal has been broken!’ the doctor said as he repeated the girl’s broken words. ‘As above, so below!’

  Mishkin thought for a moment.

  ‘They are at the tomb?’ he asked.

  The doctor whispered to the girl and she replied as her body trembled and twitched.

  ‘The true prize is within, not beyond!’

  Mishkin frowned and then he stepped forward and leaned down as he rammed the pistol against the girl’s head.

  ‘Where are they?!’ he roared, tired of the girl’s mystic ramblings. ‘Tell me where they are!’

  The girl’s eyes flew open and Mishkin saw a brief flash of defiance on Elena’s exhausted face.

  ‘They are within reach!’

  The girl’s body arched upward and quivered with a terrible finality and then she slumped onto the floorboards as the doctor tore the headset from her and touched his fingers to her neck. He waited for a few moments and then spoke softly.

  ‘She is alive, but she will not survive another session.’

  Mishkin whirled and yelled at the troops.

  ‘Get outside and fan out!’ he roared. ‘The Americans are close by!’

  The troops tumbled out of the vehicle and spread out as Mishkin turned his back on the doctor and jumped down onto the sand once more. He watched as his men vanished into the gloom that surrounded them, weapons in one hand and radios switched on. Although they were out of contact with the outside world, the signals were strong enough to burn through the storm at close range.

  Mishkin waited for almost ten agonizing minutes before his radio crackled.

  ‘General, we have them!’

  ***

  XLIV

  Mishkin listened intently to the directions given him and then hurried away from the troop carrier, following a mini–compass set into the hilt of his combat knife. As he passed the jeep he ordered Gregorie to follow him.

  The two men trudged through the brutal storm, heading directly south east on a magnetic heading. Although the compass seemed to be keeping them heading in a straight line, Mishkin could not help the feeling that he was being gently turned to the right.

  He was about to call on the radio and get confirmation of the soldiers’ positions when he saw a small group of them directly ahead. Mishkin hurried forward as the soldiers saw him coming and stood back.

  Between them there was a small depression in the sand, and Mishkin could see instantly that there was a smooth stone block inside the depression that was rapidly filling with sand being blown in by the storm. He moved alongside it and peered down at the surface, which was perfectly smooth and devoid of any markings but for the Eye of Horus in relief in its center.

  ‘They must have been here moments ago!’ one of the soldiers shouted above the gale. ‘But this stone hasn’t moved, so they must have given up and fled. Maybe they heard us coming?’

  Mishkin peered down at the stone and then up into the storm around them. It was perhaps possible that Warner and his people might have heard the vehicles approaching the area, but he doubted that they would have simply fled without even trying to open the tomb.

  ‘To hell with them,’ he decided finally. ‘Blow this entrance open, right now!’

  ‘Explosives could collapse the tunnels inside the tomb,’ said one of the soldiers. ‘We might not be able to get in.’

  Mishkin grinned cruelly at the soldier. ‘Then if Warner and his friends are inside, they will not be able to get out either. Hurry!’

  The soldiers began to place explosive charges around the tomb entrance as Gregorie moved to Mishkin’s side.

  ‘If they are not inside the tomb, then where could they have gone?’ the former soldier asked. ‘The nearest town is miles away and they could not have passed us, and this storm could last for days so to travel further into the deserts would be suicide. Where could they be?’

  Mishkin looked at the nearby tomb and then the desert around them, and he had no reply for Gregorie. Warner and his team had simply disappeared.

  The soldiers suddenly leaped up and waved everybody back as one of them unreeled a detonator wire. Mishkin joined them as they fell back and away from the tomb, and then the soldier connected the detonator to the wire and twisted it downward.

  A dull boom reverberated through the ground as the charges blasted the massive stone entrance. Mishkin followed his soldiers back to the tomb and could immediately see large chunks of angular rock poking out of the sand around the site where the entrance had been blasted clear.

  Mishkin gripped his pistol and jogged up to the tomb and aimed down into its depths.

  He hesitated as he saw only sand.

  ‘What? Where is the entrance?!’

  The soldiers gathered around the stone and stared down at it.

  ‘There isn’t one,’ Gregorie said. ‘The stone was just lying here.’

  ‘But it bore the Eye of Horus!’ Mishkin roared.

  Gregorie shook his head.

  ‘It was a deception, to discourage grave robbers. The real entrance must be somewhere else around here.’

  Mishkin roared in frustration and screamed at the soldiers.

  ‘Fan out! Find out where they’ve gone!’

  *

  ‘Take it easy.’

  ‘It’s not my fault, I can’t see a damned thing in here.’

  Ethan slowly lowered the small but heavy block of stone down behind them, cutting off the sandstorm outside, and leaned against the cool stone of a wall. The air was stale and deathly still after the roaring gales. The only light came from Doctor Lucy Morgan’s cell phone screen that illuminated a tiny stone stairwell ahead of them in an unearthly blue glow, narrow steps descending into the darkness far below.

  ‘How the hell did you know that first stone was a fake entrance?’ he asked Lucy.

  Lucy Morgan’s ghostly face smiled back at him over her shoulder.

  ‘The Egyptians often created multiple entrances to tombs when they built them to deter grave robbers,’ she said. ‘Putting the Eye of Horus seal on that other door would have convinced robbers they were onto something and caused a hell of a lot of work for them to lift or break it, only to reveal a fake entrance and deter them from trying again. I figured that the real entrance would be unmarked.’

  Lopez frowned.

  ‘I still don’t get how you found either of them in the first place,’ she said. ‘They were buried under a meter of sand.’

  Lucy led the way slowly down a flight of steps that descended into the darkness.

  ‘Iron,’ she replied. ‘The Egyptians used various metals, usually scarce ones to adorn tombs, and often those metals were from meteorites. They used the iron to make clasps and knives and other tools. Out here, in the absence of any other metal, a tomb will produce just enough magnetism to swing a compass if you’re close enough to it.’

  Mitchell’s voice rumbled in the darkness.

  ‘That only led you to the fake entrance,’ he pointed out.

  ‘That was enough,’ Lucy said. ‘Egyptian tombs were often created using a small pyramid to mark the tomb, called a mastaba, which was built for those noble or wealthy enough to warrant one. Tjaneni ordered his tomb to be unremarkable and hard to locate, but it would still have needed walls and supports to be in place and it couldn’t have been a large workforce or everybody would have known about the tomb.’

  Lopez got it.

  ‘So you scout about a bit more with the compass
and home in on the next biggest signal.’

  ‘That’s about it,’ Lucy replied. ‘Besides, Tjaneni seems to have been a wily old goat. He would have created large and grand false entrances to fake tombs, but I felt he would have built a narrow, insignificant one for himself. Watch your step.’

  The descent into the tomb was through a narrow stairwell, which was unilluminated but for the glow from Lucy’s cell phone as they crept through the silence. Ethan felt the air cooling further as they descended, tainted with the odor of millennia old dust undisturbed since the time of the Pharaohs themselves.

  The narrow steps finally reached a chamber that Lucy led them into, and for an instant they were plunged into darkness as Lucy switched the cell phone for a glow stick that she broke in half. Ethan saw the stick fill the chamber with a warm orange glow and was instantly taken aback.

  They were standing inside a structure that was perhaps forty feet square, with the narrow stairwell behind them and a single doorway in front that was blocked with a gigantic rectangle of solid sandstone. The surface of the block was carved with the unmistakeable cartouche of the Pharaoh Amenhotep, and beneath it the smaller but no–less significant seal of the scribe, Tjaneni. Above all three was the Eye of Horus that watched over the tomb. Between them and the opposite wall were two rows of four massive columns that supported the ceiling, the walls covered in hieroglyphics.

  ‘This is more like it,’ Lopez said as she looked at Ethan. ‘You think we can blast that door out while we hide in the stairwell?’

  Ethan shook his head.

  ‘We don’t know how deep the block goes,’ he replied. ‘What charges we do have either won’t affect it at all or they’ll bring down the whole chamber.’

  Lucy Morgan eased her way closer to the seal and crouched down before it. Ethan watched as her hands traced the outline of the cartouche and she whispered softly to herself, as though she were praying before a three–thousand–year old altar.

  A sudden, deep boom reverberated through the chamber from behind them, and Ethan turned as one hand moved to the pistol at his side.

  ‘The Russians, they’re coming through,’ Hellerman said nervously.