An unstoppable reach that had now become horrifically tangible.
“They told him, you know. In Romania, when he arrested those operatives, they told him that he’d pay for it when he least expected.” Sam sniffed as he vigorously wiped his eyes. Suddenly Sam's eyes became clear and he swallowed back his worry. “I have to call him.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea, Sam?” Nina asked. “He’s not going to be pleased to hear from you, I think.”
“I don't care, Nina. He’s my best friend. Now he needs my support, for God's sake. I can’t just leave him stewing in this shit, can I?” he explained with frustration in his voice.
“Aye, I get it. Okay, call him,” she reluctantly suggested. “Would you like me to give you some privacy?”
“Please, if you would.”
Nina left the room and went out onto Sam's patio to mull things over. It was a sore subject indeed, family. She’d been fortunate not to have the ancient society of devils harm her family, although they got far more personal when they experimented on her and almost killed her by manipulating her health. Sam was broken for a reason. They’d indirectly been responsible for the death of someone closest to him when the arms ring run by an affiliate of the Black Sun had shot Sam's fiancée dead right in front of him.
Nina believed that that deeply traumatizing experience was the root of Sam's concern for Paddy's emotional condition. Sam stepped out onto the deck, looking ashen and shattered. Tremors shook his fingers as he ran them through his thick, black hair and when he looked at Nina he could barely keep it together.
“He wants nothing to do with me.”
6
Purdue's legs twitched as he readied himself to run for the wall, as his Egyptian employee had suggested. He had no one else to trust, being surrounded by men who all wanted him dead for desecrating their land, so he chose to do what the Egyptian had said. However, his eyes kept finding the arcane artifact he’d come to find, the very item he’d financed the excursion for. Purdue figured that, once he managed to escape, he would never be able to return again to claim the interesting replica of the Ark of the Covenant—a most dangerous notion for someone like Purdue.
The white-haired billionaire waited for the first sign of open aggression from any of the men who leered at him.
“Go, Purdue Effendi, or else they will hang you in the desert sun for the buzzards,” the Egyptian warned quietly, his lips virtually static.
“In a moment. Just give it a moment,” Purdue replied as he propped himself up on his hands to make his flight easier when he did take off. But he did not tell his employee that he aimed for the wooden box first, before he had worked out the trajectory of his endeavor. “Listen, I’ll pay you three times your fee if you get me out of here with the Ark.”
The Egyptian looked at him in astonished bewilderment. If Purdue had not been his employer he would have answered with an exclamation of assumed lunacy for even the thought, but he couldn’t say what he truly thought. “That is quite impossible. It is madness, Effendi. We will surely be killed then.”
“Four times your fee,” Purdue persisted as the men started babbling among themselves about the correct way to dispose of the wealthy intruder. Again, the man could not believe how mercenary the rich European was. As a man of common sense, he could not fathom how Purdue could possibly make a connection between a higher price and a higher probability of success.
“It matters not what you pay me. Our chances of escape remain the same,” he tried to communicate his logic to Purdue.
“I realize that, my friend. But increasing your fee should give you some incentive to fight harder for your survival,” Purdue argued in a whisper. “Just imagine if you survived this, what you could do for your family with four times your fee.”
The Egyptian gave Purdue a look of defeated morality and unabridged malcontent, deciding that he was working for the devil and had to admit that he’d allowed the blasphemous privilege. “It is a very heavy box. It will take three to four men to carry it.”
Purdue smiled. “I venture to guess that it’s not heavy at all, my friend. Not with those clasps and hinges. Those fixtures would break under the weight of the true Ark of the Covenant. Trust me. No engineer worth his salt would tell you any different. No, there might be some value to that box, but the Power of God is definitely heavier than what that shoddy workmanship can hold.”
“Respectfully Effendi, you are a fool. A brilliant inventor and remarkable architect of technology, but a fool all the same,” the Egyptian smiled, looking hopelessly enticed by the prospect of the excitement. “Ever been in a fight with a group of bullies as a young boy?”
“Yes, constantly, in fact,” Purdue said. “Why?”
“We will have to use schoolboy tactics, Effendi,” the Egyptian sighed. With that he surreptitiously displayed to Purdue a handful of loose sand.
Purdue smiled, although his heart was throbbing wildly from the hazardous circumstances. He clutched at the ground where he was seated, filling his fists with sand while the Egyptian relayed the plan to his associate next to him.
“I asked Donkor to get our vehicle started while we make our escape, Effendi. We have no time to waste.”
“Donkor. And what is your name?” Purdue asked.
“Adjo, Effendi.”
“Alright, Adjo. I’m trusting you and Donkor to get me...and that box...out of here intact. You will be justly rewarded,” Purdue reminded him.
At once Donkor jumped up and raced towards the exit. He did it so spontaneously that it took the men a moment to realize that he was fleeing; the perfect moment of confusion to execute the rest of the plan. As they charged for the fleeing Egyptian, Purdue and Adjo raced for the box, hurling handfuls of sand and dust at the eyes of those who tried to perturb them.
Unable to see, the men fell to their knees, rubbing at their eyes while Purdue and his employee retrieved the chest with surprising ease. “Effendi! Run for the wall! Run for the wall!” Adjo urged loudly as the temporarily blinded men rose again to come after them. Purdue was still not certain about that.
“You want me to run into the wall? I'm not looking for Hogwarts, you know!” Purdue shouted as he kicked an assailant away from him. Adjo had no idea what he was talking about. “Never mind,” Purdue said and bolted for the dense, rock-hard mountain wall that made up the interior of the cave-like hall.
The men with sand in their eyes vaguely saw their associates run out after the first Egyptian escapee as they slowly regained their sight. But they were amazed to see the white man and his Egyptian lapdog hasten away with the Holy Box, disappearing as they reached the wall. What was a certain obstacle had been easily breached by the two men they chased after, sending the superstitious men to their knees in an instant.
“Glory! It truly is the Power of God!” one man shouted in repetitive chants.
“Did you see that?” another asked the others. “The Holy Box helped them to escape. The Holy Box took away the stone from their bodies so that they could pass through the mountain!”
Stunned at what they’d just witnessed, the Ethiopian village men in the cavern tried to understand why their Holy Box would aid charlatans and thieves to escape them. Was their God on the side of the white man? If so, why would He protect a thief? Why would He allow His Ark to be stolen from the people who had been protecting it for centuries? All this they could not understand and it drove them crazy. Some contemplated defecting to another faith for it; others found it to be some kind of reprimand about their conduct or their arrogance.
But none considered that the miraculous escape of the intruders had just been a trick of optics and design. Just short of the interior wall of the mountain cave, a postbox hole had been cut through to the tunnel under the floor, excavated as a fail-safe for emergencies and to allow more air into the chamber. Purdue and Adjo had simply fallen through the floor just before they reached the wall, chest and all.
Outside the exit of the tunnel, a thick brush of milkweeds co
vered the mouth of the sub-cavern, obscuring its existence to the eye of those who didn’t know it was there. A few meters away Purdue and Adjo could still hear some of the Ethiopians chasing after Donkor.
“Does he know where we are?” Purdue puffed, drenched in perspiration from the weighty prize he’d lugged with him.
“Yes, he knows. He helped me to construct this emergency air duct, but we have never used it as an escape route before,” Adjo smiled. “I’m quite proud of how well it worked for us.”
Purdue smiled. “As well you should be, Adjo. It’s a stroke of genius.”
From a distance they could hear a Jeep engine roaring, quickly growing louder as it headed their way.
“Come. This way,” the Egyptian told Purdue. “He will meet us at the ledge.”
“The ledge?” Purdue asked, but Adjo was too preoccupied to answer. Carrying one side of the chest, he directed Purdue where to follow by practically pulling his employer after him. They ran out over a steep hillock of weeds and loose sand, finally calming its temperatures as the day drew to a close. Around the side of the vast mountain face they dragged the artifact, slipping on large rocks that gave way under their hastening steps.
The thick, loose soil impaired their speed as they rushed to get ahead of their pursuers. Purdue's rather fit physique had met its match in the Ethiopian desert. His calves tightened and tugged at his Achilles tendons as he ascended the side of the hill. Inflamed at the exertion, his thighs screamed under the weight of his body, now exacerbated by the added force of the stolen relic.
“Good God, how far still?” he forced through panting breath as they reached a perilous ledge near the top of the mountain.
“Up ahead, Effendi. Donkor must already be waiting, which means they’re close on our heels,” Adjo huffed madly. The poor overweight man had a time of it to make it up the mountain, but he kept thinking about his reward for aiding Purdue.
“Adjo,” Purdue groaned as they carefully navigated the narrow ledge with unsure footing, “do you trust your friend Donkor not to betray us?”
“I trust him with my life, Effendi,” Adjo admitted. He looked back at Purdue with an expression dancing between a wince and a smile; a somewhat tortured happiness. “He is my little brother.”
7
The revelation took a load off of Purdue's mind. He felt reassured by it, although blood was not always thicker than water, as his relationship with his late twin sister attested. Still, he hoped that Donkor and Adjo were closer friends than he and his sister had been.
“We wait here,” Adjo said, gently setting down his side of the box.
From beneath the ledge they could hear the engine straining up the hill. Purdue thought to call his pilot so to get ready for a lift out of Ethiopia to expedite matters. From his bottom left pocket of his utility vest he pulled his minute, streamlined tablet, which was barely larger than a match box in its store form. He let it lay on his open palm and with his other hand he brushed his index finger and thumb across the gadget, enlarging it as he did so until it was the size of a cell phone.
Bullets began to rain on them just as Purdue called up the coordinates of his position. “Down!” Adjo shouted and they both fell to their bellies. Purdue memorized the coordinates and dialed out to his pilot while covering his head with one hand, as if that would avert an R-1 round from penetrating his skull.
“Why is he shooting at us?” Purdue bellowed over the din of the attack.
“It’s not my brother, Effendi! It’s the lady you spoke to earlier today outside the tent camp! Look, it's her people!” Adjo panicked. He was worried about his brother's fate and what may have befallen him. Suddenly Adjo cried out, as two slugs ripped through his flesh, staining Purdue's clothing with Egyptian blood under the eye of the setting sun.
“Adjo! Adjo, can you hear me?” Purdue howled as the engine drew nearer. But Adjo had stopped moving.
“Sphinx-1, come in! Sphinx-1, do you copy?” Purdue wailed desperately as he watched Adjo's blood meander through the sandy mounds around his head. His own face was wet with perspiration and covered in sand, and the dust had turned his trademark white hair to brown.
Cutting the engines for a minute, Purdue could hear his hunters shout orders in Italian and Amharic. He feared that his nerves would kill him while he perked his ears for any sign that they were nearby. They would not be able to see the stolen relic, because Purdue had placed it too far in from the edge of the ledge. That was as far as anyone could observe it from the road. “Sphinx-1! Larsen, I swear to Christ, if you’re off shagging some young slut from ground staff again, I’ll kill you!” he threatened as softly as he could into the mic of the device.
Now the pursuers were quiet. So were their vehicles, leaving Purdue no way to determine where they could be. He dared not move. Either he would be detected or he would compromise his safety without Adjo's guidance.
“This is Sphinx-1,” the loud crackling voice came over the speaker of the tablet, jolting Purdue’s heart with its sudden broadcast. “Sphinx-1 copying. Go ahead.”
Purdue rapidly slammed his hand over the speaker to dampen the sound, although the damage had been done already. He whispered hard into the microphone, “Switch to silent mode. Over.”
The blue LED background of the tablet turned red to signify that all vocal communications would be sent in text format. Purdue's eyes combed the immediate vicinity before he spoke again. “Larsen, I'm in deep shit here. I’m sending you my position, but be advised of hostile fire. I repeat, hostile fire. Do you copy that?”
He waited for a few seconds before red lettering appeared on the screen. It was Larsen's voice recording coming through as a written message, something Purdue had installed on all his communication devices with his staff for just such an incident. “Roger that. On my way. ETA ten minutes. Over and out.”
Ten minutes, Purdue thought to himself. I'll be dead in five, I'm sure.
Concerned about his position, Purdue carefully inched forward. Bit by bit he progressed, still listening for voices or radio contact, wondering if his own communication had been intercepted. With the impending dark, it would become exceedingly difficult for Purdue to make it onto the helicopter without plummeting over the ledge. And transporting the wooden relic would prove nearly impossible, not because of its average weight, but because of its shape. Shaped like a short coffin, it was very difficult to carry the box by himself, but it had to be done. It had cost Adjo his life, and probably that of his brother's too. And now it had almost got him killed as well. Purdue thought leaving it behind after the price his men had had to pay to help him steal it would be ridiculous and insensitive.
He discerned Medley's voice among the audible discussions that ensued beneath him on the winding mountain road. Purdue and Medley had always been at loggerheads, but he still found it shocking that she would be chasing him with gunfire. Medley had always been more of a ‘war of the wits’ kind of competitor. It was hard to imagine her as a gun-toting tyrant, as she had apparently become. Maybe, Purdue thought, it was the influence of her mafioso husband that had turned her into a bully.
“Here,” Purdue heard a man's voice report in a very heavy accent. “Up here is where he hit the Arab. We did not see them flee, so we think our bullets did their work on them both.”
“Right, then let's get up there. I want the Ark,” Purdue heard Medley say. He didn’t know what to do. If he as much as moved, they would discover him. However, staying would seal his demise. Their footsteps crunched on the gravel and rock as they climbed the steep slant up to the ledge. Medley and three men moved swiftly up to where the so-called Ark was last seen.
One of the men with her suddenly yelped in pain from some sort of impact and fell down the slope next to her.
“What the hell just happened?” she shouted, but the man did not answer. In the light of her flashlight she could see the awful evidence of a crushed skull and a bloody rock lying next to him. Before Medley could convey her next orders, her men scattered in
panic, protectively pulling her with them. Thundering down the mountain slope in the dark the tumbling rocks fell, propelled higher and faster each time they hit the slope with force and velocity. A few men were struck, some fatally, by the apparent rock fall they could not outrun in time. So fierce was the danger, they didn’t have a chance to glance back up where Purdue was sitting at the top of the chaos he’d started by dislodging one large round rock that had been holding a few more together in the bed of sand.
Causing the deadly tumbling of geological canon balls onto his enemies was all he could do to mar their discovery of him and his claimed prize. It was, after all, his life at stake, so he’d had to find a way to combat them and buy time for his pilot to arrive and rescue him. It was a successful strike, for now.
Like a sight from a Biblical tale of mercy, the sharp spotlights of Sphinx-1 appeared in the evening sky. Purdue's ears had not heard such a sweet melody in a long time as the clapping of the rotor blades echoed in the valley below where the three vehicles of Medley's people had been decimated by rocks. Larsen took care not to give them a clear shot at his craft, landing it on the other side of the summit just above Purdue. Larsen's co-pilot came out to Purdue to assist him in getting the wooden relic on board the craft before Medley could alert the local authorities about their presence.
Order of the Black Sun Box Set 6 Page 4