The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET

by Scott Mariani

  For the first few hours, the road was metalled and quite busy in places with huge trucks that flew along, with scant regard for other traffic. Ben cautiously passed a couple of military patrols, but nobody stopped him.

  Hours passed, Kirby slept on and Ben kept pushing the Toyota hard and fast. Later in the day, the road had thinned out to a track. An hour after that, Ben was driving on sand and forced to keep his speed down to reduce fuel consumption. Kirby drifted in and out of his doze, and they barely spoke. Only once every few hours did they see another vehicle passing the other way. The terrain was as flat as the sea, stretching out to infinity all around. It was more like navigating a ship than driving a car. With no visual references it was all too easy to drift off course, and Ben had to keep checking the compass to maintain their southwesterly bearing.

  A tiny dot on the horizon. He watched as it grew larger, until the shape of the armed Land Rover was shimmering close in the heat haze. The vehicle flashed at them to halt. Soldiers climbed down, guns slung low.

  ‘Who are they?’ Kirby asked anxiously.

  ‘Egyptian army.’

  ‘What is this, a shakedown?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘What’ll we do?’

  Ben said nothing to that.

  The officer in charge swaggered casually up to them and leaned on the door sill. His eyes were hidden behind mirrored aviator sunglasses. ‘Salaam Alaykum.’

  ‘Alaykum Salaam,’ Ben replied with a respectful bow of the head.

  The officer smiled. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘British nationals,’ Ben said. ‘Just touring.’

  ‘There has been terrorist activity to the north. It is dangerous for foreigners to travel alone in the desert. Do you require an escort to the nearest town?’

  Ben replied politely that they didn’t. The officer shrugged, signalled to his men and they climbed back in their Land Rover and drove off. Ben let out a breath as he watched them go.

  ‘That was close,’ Kirby said, glancing behind him at the holdall full of weapons and ammunition.

  ‘It’ll get closer,’ Ben replied.

  They travelled on, always southwest. The sun bore murderously down, a stark white ball of molten steel in the sky. Its glare played endless tricks with depth perception. As they entered a zone of huge, undulating sand dunes, Ben almost drove straight into a near-vertical slope thinking it was flat. A few minutes later, Kirby was convinced he could see a village in the distance. It turned out to be a discarded jerrycan just eighty yards away.

  The dunes became a miniature mountain range of soft, crumbly sand. Cresting a dune at any kind of speed was dangerous, as the weight of the vehicle could cause a slipaway that would risk their overturning. If that happened and they were lucky, they might be able to dig out a trench to roll the Toyota upright. If they were unlucky, it meant they would cook out here.

  Slowly, the landscape began to grow rockier, until Ben found himself lurching over sandstone ridges and tracks so rutted that the suspension bottomed out with a jarring thump every few yards. He drove in silence while beside him Kirby gripped his seat, letting out a loud groan every time they hit a bad bump or crashed down into a ditch. But it was the kind of rough work that the Toyota was made for. Ben forced it on mercilessly, knowing it would take more than a few bumps to test the military vehicle to its limits.

  With the cruelly slow passing of time, the sun faded from white to gold and sank back down in the sky as the temperature dwindled from that of a blistering furnace to merely insanely hot. Evening fell. Ben finally let the Toyota roll to a halt and got out, stretching his stiff limbs. He took a long, long drink of water from the canteen on his belt, feeling it soothe his parched mouth. ‘We’ll stop here tonight,’ he said. He would have liked to keep going, but night driving in the desert wasn’t advisable and he badly needed to rest.

  ‘It gets cold so suddenly here,’ Kirby said. ‘It’s like someone turned off the heater.’

  They unpacked some of the dry meat and fruit, and sat on the sand a few yards from the car to eat, listening to the silence. Ben kept the FN rifle nearby. When night descended fully and the temperature plummeted further, he lit the solid fuel stove and brewed up some tea in their tin mugs. Kirby had little to say for himself, rocking slowly back and forth, huddling under his goatskin and sipping his drink.

  Ben allowed himself a few hours’ sleep. The first red and gold streaks of sunrise were in the sky when he awoke, long shadows cast over the dunes. It was cold, and he was shivering as he washed sparingly with their precious water supply. He nudged Kirby awake with a kick.

  The historian stirred, grunted and squinted up at him.

  ‘I want to show you something,’ Ben said.

  ‘What?’

  Ben tossed the little .38 revolver down on Kirby’s goatskin next to him. ‘I’m going to teach you to use it.’

  Kirby jumped up, scowling. ‘I told you back in Cairo. I want nothing to do with it.’

  ‘I need you to be armed, Kirby. We’re not playing games here. So learn to shoot it, or I’ll shoot you with it.’

  Kirby hesitated, narrowing his eyes. ‘You don’t really mean that, do you?’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not.’ Ben picked up an empty plastic water bottle and tossed it a few yards away across the sand. He pointed at it. ‘Now shoot that.’

  ‘I protest at this,’ Kirby muttered as he picked up the little revolver. ‘I really do.’ He screwed up one eye as he raised the gun.

  ‘The other eye,’ Ben said.

  Kirby corrected his aim. ‘How do I know it’s loaded?’ he asked.

  ‘See the edges of the brass cartridge rims there between the cylinder and the frame? That’s how you know. Then just squeeze the trigger. There’s no hammer, no safety. Just pull. Like I said, an idiot could use it. Which makes it perfect for you.’

  Kirby glanced hotly at him, but kept his mouth shut. He aimed the revolver at the water bottle, his tongue protruding in concentration. Then he fired.

  The snap of the low-powered .38 was lost in the flat air. The bottle spun as the bullet caught its neck. Kirby jumped back, the gun dangling loose in his hand as though it had stung him. ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Come on, Kirby. There’s hardly any recoil from that. Four rounds left. Keep going.’

  Kirby squeezed the trigger four more times with his finger in his ear. His second and third shots missed the bottle completely. The fourth one clipped it again, and the last one punched a hole right through the middle.

  ‘Not bad,’ Ben said. ‘At least if Kamal is standing right in front of you and keeps still for long enough, you might get him worried.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear that,’ Kirby said.

  Ben took the revolver from him, flipped out the cylinder and ejected the five empty brass cases. He dropped them in his pocket and loaded five fresh cartridges, snapped it shut and handed it back to him. ‘Keep it with you at all times.’ He patted his right hip, where he had the Jericho hidden in his belt. ‘I’m doing the same.’

  ‘Kamal could be close, couldn’t he?’ Kirby asked nervously.

  ‘He could be anywhere.’ Ben turned and headed back towards the vehicle. ‘Go and pick up the bottle,’ he told Kirby. ‘We’re moving on again.’

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  The sun climbed, and the hellish heat returned. Neither of them had any appetite for food, but Ben made sure they kept themselves nourished with dried fruit and meat to keep up their energy levels. After a few more hours they stopped among the rocks and thorny shrubs to rest and drink in what little shade they could find. The bottled water was lukewarm, but nothing had ever tasted so good. Ben wrapped his Bedouin scarf around his head to keep the sun off, and Kirby imitated his example. Then Ben sat down and spent a few minutes studying the map and making his calculations from the GPS locator on his phone.

  ‘So, where are we?’ Kirby asked.

  ‘Cutting southwest, past Lake Nasser and about level with Abu Simbel.’

&nbs
p; Abu Simbel,’ Kirby echoed. ‘The great temple of Ramses II.’

  Ben nodded. ‘More importantly, it means we’re close to the Sudanese border. Things are going to become more interesting. If we don’t get shot by border patrols, there’ll be rebels out looking to kidnap us. Couple of juicy white men like us are worth a good ransom.’

  Kirby paled, but didn’t reply. Ben folded up the map and stood up. There was the faintest breeze, and he pulled back the hem of his headgear to let it ruffle his hair and cool his scalp. He clambered up a sloping flat rock and surveyed the landscape. It was almost Martian in its aridness, and completely empty. He wondered about Kamal. And about Zara. He’d never have let Kirby see it, but he was as close to despair as he’d felt for a long time.

  A yell from the Toyota burst his thoughts and made him turn around suddenly. He looked down and saw Kirby bent over in pain with his hand clamped between his knees.

  He ran over. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Kirby’s face was pale as he showed him his trembling hand. It was bloody.

  ‘What happened?’

  Kirby looked sheepish. ‘I got a thorn.’

  ‘For God’s sake. Sit down.’

  Kirby did as he was told, and Ben inspected his hand. ‘OK, hold tight. This’ll hurt.’ He grasped the end of the thorn, and yanked it out sharply.

  Kirby let out a yelp. Ben examined the inch-long thorn to make sure he’d got it all out, then tossed it away, grabbed Kirby’s wrist and had a look at the bloody puncture wound.

  Kirby yanked it away. ‘It’ll be fine. I’ll wrap a bit of tissue round it.’

  Ben shook his head. ‘Even a trivial wound can get badly infected in this climate.’

  ‘What are you going to do? I didn’t see you buying any disinfectant.’

  ‘Yes, you did.’ Ben walked to the Toyota, spent a moment rummaging around in the back, then returned with the jar of honey.

  ‘You see any hot buttered toast around here?’ Kirby muttered. ‘What use is honey to me?’

  Ben unscrewed the lid, dipped a finger in the warm honey and started smearing it over Kirby’s wound. ‘So the professor finally admits that he doesn’t know everything there is to know about ancient Egypt.’

  ‘Give me a break.’

  ‘Best antibacterial known to man,’ Ben said. ‘The Egyptians knew it thousands of years before we ever started fucking about with penicillin.’ He screwed the lid back on. ‘Now you can wrap it up with a tissue. And try not to play with thorns again, all right?’

  The long, weary trek continued. Sometime in the late afternoon they crossed over the unmarked border and became illegal immigrants into Sudan. No sign of army patrols. No sign of anything except sand and rock and the relentless sun. Another endless stretch of bumping, jolting, creaking drive as they slowly cooked inside the pizza oven of the Toyota. Another freezing night, as they lay listening to the howls of jackals across the rocky valleys.

  Then it was another whole day of driving as Ben ploughed doggedly onwards. Whenever they stopped for rest and water he was sitting down with his phone and fine-tuning his calculations. Whereas Wenkaura’s expedition had headed due south and then west, Ben had cut from point A to B directly to form an isosceles triangle. The geometry was hard to pinpoint, but going by the fairly precise co-ordinates from the ancient map, he was sure he was close now. The treasure site was near. He could almost feel it.

  But where could it be?

  Late in the afternoon they hit a wadi, a dry river bed that had probably remained unchanged since prehistoric times. Its winding path snaked between increasingly high rocky banks that before long had grown up into the walls of a canyon either side of them. There was no turning off. Ben gritted his teeth and kept going.

  Up ahead, the canyon path bore around to the right. Ben turned the bend, and braked to a halt.

  Kirby had been dozing again. ‘What’s happening?’ he slurred, sensing that they’d stopped.

  Ben didn’t reply.

  Three hundred yards away up the canyon, a high rocky ridge dominated the skyline. Its top was flat and smooth and silhouetted black against the sky. Cut into the horizon, as symmetrical as the V-notch of a gun rearsight, was a perfect cleft. Ben studied it for a moment, shielded his eyes and looked up at the golden disc of the sun. It was dropping fast as evening drew on, and its line of arc was heading right for the cleft. In a few more minutes, it would be exactly positioned in the V-notch.

  It was a stunning, perfect, completely accurate physical representation of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for the word ‘horizon’. Now he knew he’d been right that day in Claudel’s study. Wenkaura had meant to convey more than just an abstract symbol.

  ‘Jesus, Kirby, I think we’ve found something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look.’

  Kirby looked, frowned, and understood. ‘Holy crap. That’s it. That’s got to be it.’ Not taking his eyes off it, he opened his door and stepped down from the car. ‘That’s our landmark. The heretic’s treasure is right here in front of us. It’s somewhere inside that ridge, or under it. There’s got to be a cave or something.’

  He started walking towards it, as if hypnotised by the spectacle.

  ‘Stop,’ Ben called after him. ‘Wait.’

  ‘What now?’ Kirby said dreamily.

  Ben pointed. ‘Look there.’

  Fifty feet away, directly between them and the ridge, was a crater hollowed in the sand. What had once been some kind of desert creature, maybe a fennec fox, lay ripped to pieces around the hole. The badly mutilated corpse was still fresh, a cloud of flies buzzing over it. Around the remains of the dead animal, scattered across the crater and for a wide radius around it, were fragmented shards of dark metal.

  ‘Landmines,’ Ben said.

  ‘Landmines?’

  ‘This place has been a war zone for years. They have a habit of getting left around.’

  Kirby turned and scurried back to the car on the tips of his toes, clambered back inside and slammed his door, breathing hard. ‘Shit. This is very, very bad.’

  ‘This is Africa.’

  ‘Where the hell could they be?’

  ‘Anywhere,’ Ben said. ‘Everywhere. They could be all around us, and we’d never know until we step on one.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘You really need me to tell you that?’

  ‘This is all we need,’ Kirby groaned. ‘After all this way. Can we get round the edge?’

  Ben shook his head. ‘The canyon walls are too steep. Perfect spot for a minefield. There’s only one thing for it. We’ll have to dig them out, one by one, and hope we don’t hit any big ones.’

  Kirby gulped. ‘Big ones?’

  ‘Twenty-five kilos of high explosive in a solid metal casing,’ Ben said. ‘Not the easiest things to handle in loose sand. And they become unstable after a few years. Nasty tendency to go off in your face.’

  ‘This is just intolerable,’ Kirby whined.

  Suddenly the canyon was filled with the sound of engines and crackling gunfire. Ben and Kirby piled out of the Toyota and scrambled for cover.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Around the corner came two off-road trail motorcycles, then a third, all speeding like lunatics, bucking wildly over the rough ground. The buzz of their two-stroke engines echoed off the canyon walls as they approached on full throttle. Two of the bikes had pillion passengers, dressed, like the riders, in Bedouin garb. The passengers were twisted backwards in the saddle, holding on tight and rattling off one-handed bursts of automatic fire from Uzi submachine guns at whatever it was that was following them.

  Ben watched from the rocks, all senses on full alert and the Jericho ready in his hand as the bikes came screaming past. He could hear something else over the noise of their engines. Something unmistakeable. A steady, high-pitched whirring and creaking sound that he hadn’t heard for years but wasn’t ever going to forget. He tensed and watched the bend in the canyon, waiting for the inevitable.

/>   The main battle tank came scuttling around the corner, an inhuman thing, like a grey-green steel dinosaur. The squealing clatter of its treads and roar of its engine reverberated through the canyon. Forty-six tons of pure brutal force, twelve feet wide and over twenty long, crushing stones into dust as it lurched forward. Its 105mm gun swept left and right, as if surveying the scene. Then fired.

  The deafening boom was followed by a wail like an express train as its high-explosive shell hurtled through the canyon. It impacted against the rock wall in a gigantic blast of smoke and fire and tumbling rubble. The rear motorcycle was flung in the air by the blast, twisting and cartwheeling. Its rider and passenger were dashed against the rocks.

  Kirby was pressed to the ground at Ben’s feet, his face twisted in terror and his hands clapped over his ears. Stone chips, sand and dust showered down on them. Ben watched helplessly as the fallen motorcycle passenger jumped up and staggered away from his dead companion, firing his Uzi back at the tank. A long, deafening burst from the tank’s heavy machine guns and the running man was cut down, his white robes spattered red.

  Ben quickly realised what he was witnessing here. They’d stumbled into a running firefight between the Sudanese military and Bedouin militia rebels-only the balance of power was massively uneven as the army ruthlessly stamped out these last pockets of resistance in the wake of the Darfur war.

  Up ahead the remaining bikes were tearing through the canyon. The one in front was suddenly blown in the air. Wreckage and body parts rained down on the canyon floor. It had hit a mine.

  The big gun fired again. The screech of the shell passing overhead, and a wall of the canyon disintegrated in a plume of dust and fire and smoke.

  The last of the motorcycles was charging straight for the ridge, dead ahead. The sun was right in the cleft, exactly as the glyph on Wenkaura’s map had predicted.

  The tank lurched along the canyon in pursuit of its prey, its turret whirring from side to side as it tracked the target. Then it fired another deafening blast from its main gun. The shell slammed explosively into the ridge a few yards ahead of the machine. The bike wobbled, but somehow the rider kept going. The machine cannon blasted out another burst and he was blown off the bike and tumbled to the ground like a bloody rag doll. The bike slid down on its side with a shower of sparks, flipped and lay silent.