Hafez opened the rear doors. ‘It is big enough for all of you. Including the two men in the trees.’ Again Zane was caught by surprise; the Iranian gave him a yellow-toothed grin.
‘I keep telling this kid how useful experience is, but he won’t bloody listen,’ said Eddie, smirking. Zane shook his head, then signalled for the pair to join the others.
‘So, I am taking you into the Alborz mountains?’ asked Hafez as the Israelis clambered into the van.
‘Yeah,’ replied Nina. ‘The only problem is, I don’t know exactly where. I’ve narrowed it down to a fairly small area near one of the passes, but we’ll still have to search when we get there.’
‘I will get you as close as I can.’ With all the Mossad agents now squeezed inside, he closed the doors. ‘Oh, even though I will take the back roads, you will still need to wear a headscarf,’ he told Nina apologetically. ‘Red hair, it stands out – and with a truck full of spies, I do not want to attract attention!’
‘That’s okay,’ she said, touching her bedraggled ponytail. ‘The state my hair’s in, I’m happy to keep it under wraps.’
Hafez smiled. ‘There is one in the front. Okay, now we can go.’ He opened the passenger door for her and Eddie, then returned to the driver’s seat. There was a packet of Winston cigarettes on the dashboard; he flicked out one of the white cylinders with an almost automatic movement and put it in his mouth, then hesitated. ‘You think I smoke too much?’ Eddie nodded. ‘If you can give up, then bah, so can I.’ He returned the unlit cigarette to its home. ‘For one day, at least.’
Nina fastened a black scarf around her head as the Iranian started the engine. ‘You don’t appreciate your health until you lose it,’ she told him, with a sad look at her husband.
The target area was only some sixty miles from the landing site as the crow flew, but the journey was considerably more circuitous. Hafez was being extra cautious, avoiding major settlements and not wanting to draw the slightest interest from anyone they passed, be they civilian, police or military. By the time they left the coastal plain and began to ascend into the long east–west range of the Alborz, it was after eleven o’clock.
Nina’s prior visit to Iran had taken her to its dry and dusty western region, so the landscape came as a surprise. The mountains trapped clouds rolling in from the Caspian, resulting in a thick verdant carpet of forest covering the entire northern flank of the peaks. ‘Beautiful, yes?’ said Hafez as the van cruised up a tree-lined road winding deeper into the wilderness.
‘It is,’ she agreed. ‘But finding what we’re looking for in these woods might be harder than I thought.’
‘Hopefully Kroll and his lot’ll have the same problem,’ said Eddie.
‘Guess we’ll find out soon.’ There was a satnav on the dash; it showed that they were only a few kilometres from their destination – or at least the start of their search.
Minutes passed, the Iranian swinging the van around a series of hairpin bends as the potholed road ascended the pass. The clouds thickened the higher they climbed, casting a gloomy pall over both the scenery and Nina’s mood. She had barely escaped with her life from the Nazis . . . but now she was likely to face them again.
She had to do it, though. Kroll and the others had been trying to escape the world’s notice. But if they found the spring and shared it with their wealthy backers, they would regain influence around the globe.
She couldn’t let that happen. If she did, Macy and many others would have died for nothing . . .
‘This is it,’ said Hafez, bringing her back to immediate concerns. A muddy track to one side headed into the thick forest.
Eddie was immediately on alert. ‘Someone’s been up there recently,’ he said, spotting tyre marks in the wet earth. ‘Hafez, pull over.’
The back doors were flung open even before the van fully halted. Zane and the other Israelis jumped out and dispersed rapidly into the trees, guns readied. Eddie drew his own weapon, a nine-millimetre BUL Cherokee pistol provided by the Mossad agent. He examined the tracks. ‘A jeep, plus . . . three trucks,’ he reported. ‘Pretty heavily loaded an’ all. They’ve gone into the woods – but they haven’t come out.’
‘I suppose it’s too much to hope that they were full of lumberjacks?’ said Nina.
Zane joined the Englishman. ‘Four-by-fours, big ones,’ he said. ‘Most likely Neynava troop trucks. Three of them would be enough to carry Kroll’s forces. The jeep was probably a Safir – the Revolutionary Guard commander’s ride.’ He saw Eddie’s impressed expression. ‘I might not be as experienced as you, but my intel’s right up to date.’
‘So now what?’ Nina asked.
‘We can’t risk taking the van any further,’ Eddie replied. ‘They might hear it.’
‘I do not want to leave you behind,’ Hafez protested from his vehicle.
‘I’m not saying you should go back home. But you’ll need to get out of sight. There was another track about a mile down the hill; use that.’ He surveyed the cloud-shrouded peaks to the south. ‘Nina, how far are we from the spring?’
Nina checked a map. ‘Six kilometres, at least.’ She had marked the search area; it was higher up the slopes. ‘That way,’ she said, pointing. ‘The tallest mountain could be the one from Andreas’ text.’
‘They won’t get trucks up there,’ Zane noted. ‘They’ll have to go on foot.’
Eddie went to the van. ‘Hafez, we’ll go on from here. Wait for us where I said.’
The Iranian reluctantly agreed. ‘For how long?’
‘Fucked if I know, mate. Jared, you got any walkie-talkies?’ Zane nodded. ‘Okay, give one to Hafez.’ He turned back to the older man. ‘We’ll give you a squawk when we come back. If we come back.’
‘You do not sound confident.’
‘There’s ten of us, and about thirty of them. And they’ve got one of our friends hostage. I’ve had worse odds, but . . .’
Hafez got out and embraced him. ‘Allah be with you, my friend. And you too, Nina,’ he added over Eddie’s shoulder. ‘I will wait for you. Well, until I run out of cigarettes!’
‘Go on, bugger off,’ Eddie told him with a grin. The Iranian detached himself, accepting a radio from Zane and climbing into the van. A quick U-turn, and the vehicle headed back downhill.
Nina took off her headscarf. ‘I just hope we won’t need to get out of here in a hurry . . .’
‘Yeah, me too.’ Eddie gazed back at the mountains. The tallest peak was well over a kilometre high, the uppermost section of its southern face a near-vertical wall dropping down to the steep forest below. ‘Okay, we’d better get started. We should stay clear of this track, though. Just in case someone comes back along it.’
‘Definitely,’ Zane agreed. ‘Which way?’
Eddie checked Nina’s map before indicating a rise about a mile distant. ‘Over there. We can go along that ridge. It’ll be a hell of a lot easier than climbing straight up its side.’
The Israeli nodded, then told his men to move into the trees. ‘You ready for this?’ Eddie asked his wife.
‘Not really,’ she said, ‘but . . . I’m doing it anyway.’
He smiled, then kissed her. ‘Come on, then.’
Hand in hand, they followed the others into the dense, damp forest.
The going soon became harder than expected. Not because the terrain was particularly difficult, though it was quite steep in places. What was wearing the party down wasn’t physical. Under the thick, obscuring canopy of the trees, the atmosphere was oppressive, the very air thick and cloying. With clouds blotting out the sun, there were not even shafts of light through the trees to relieve the twilight gloom.
‘What was this place called in the Alexander Romance?’ Eddie asked as they trudged up the slope.
‘Alexander first knew it as the Land of the Blessed,�
�� Nina replied. ‘But once he was inside, he started calling it the Land of Darkness – or the Region or Kingdom, depending on the translation. Andreas called it the Kingdom of Darkness on the relic. It’s an accurate description, whichever way. There’s a passage in the Romance where it got so dark even in daytime that Alexander and his men couldn’t go any deeper without risking getting lost.’
‘So how did they get through?’
She smiled. ‘Wisdom. There was an old man in Alexander’s army who told him they should only ride mares who had foals. They left the foals behind, so when they eventually returned after exploring, the mares led them back to their children. Alexander was so impressed that he gave the old man ten pounds of gold as a reward.’
‘See, Jared?’ Eddie called to the Israeli, who was a short distance ahead. ‘Age and experience win again.’ He turned back to Nina and asked more quietly: ‘Would that actually work?’
‘I haven’t a clue. I’m not a horse expert. But it was while they were exploring that Andreas found the Spring of Immortality, so if it still exists . . .’ She let the words hang in the stifling air.
Zane slowed to let them draw level. ‘What did it say about the spring in the Alexander Romance? What exactly are we looking for?’
‘There wasn’t much description in the Romance itself,’ Nina told him. ‘Alexander and his men had a choice of paths; the left one turned out to be impassable, so they went right even though it was darker – actually, Alexander later left a message for travellers that to get through the Land of the Blessed, they should always take the right-hand path. They eventually found a place where the water “flashed like lightning”, which Andreas discovered to be the Spring of Immortality. As for what Andreas said on the inscriptions on the fish,’ she glanced over her shoulder at her backpack, which contained the bronze artefact amongst her other gear, ‘the spring is through the Gate of Alexander, which is in the shadow of the area’s tallest peak. The mountain we’re heading for seems to fit the bill, but beyond that, all I can hope is that we’ll know it when we see it. If we see it.’
‘And if we’re not too late to get to it,’ Eddie said with a sudden urgency as he saw the men ahead react to something. ‘Get down.’
They crouched behind a tree. ‘What is it?’ Nina asked.
‘I can hear an engine,’ Zane whispered. ‘It must be on the track.’ He produced a pair of compact binoculars and peered downhill.
The sound of a vehicle jolting along rough ground reached them. But nothing was visible for several seconds . . . until a flicker of movement appeared between the trees, heading towards the road.
‘It’s the jeep,’ said Zane, tracking it. ‘A Safir; I was right,’ he added with a little smugness directed at the Englishman. ‘Looks like an officer in the passenger seat . . . Revolutionary Guard.’
‘What about the other trucks?’ Eddie asked.
‘I can only hear the jeep.’ They waited in silence until the vehicle passed and its engine note died away. ‘I think that was the local Guard commander going home rather than sit around in a damp forest. Leitz paid him to get Kroll and his men to where they want to go, but now that he’s fulfilled his part of the deal, he’s leaving.’
‘I can’t blame him,’ said Nina. ‘But I guess that means they’ve already started their search.’ She looked up the slope, but nothing was visible through the tree cover. ‘And we’ve still got four or five kilometres to go.’
‘We’d better keep moving, then,’ said Zane.
The team continued through the woods, eventually reaching the ridge. The trees thinned out as they climbed, enough of the sky visible to let Nina get a GPS fix. ‘Okay, this is where we are,’ she said, showing the others their position on the map. ‘So it’s about another three kilometres to the search area. I would have tried to use the fish to confirm we’re at the right latitude, but it’s kinda cloudy.’ Muted amusement from the others.
‘It’ll take a while to check the whole thing,’ said Eddie. The zone she had marked covered more than a square kilometre. ‘And that’s assuming it’s not already crawling with Nazis.’
‘We know roughly what we’re looking for, though.’ She produced the bronze fish from her rucksack, running a fingertip along one of the lines of Greek text. ‘The Gate of Alexander seems from the context to be a physical structure. It might still be standing.’
Zane examined the map. ‘Won’t it be lower down than that? Surely a spring can’t start too high up a mountain; where would the water come from?’
‘Actually, there are springs recorded practically on mountain summits. The reservoir can be miles underground – the weight of the rock forces the water up through fissures.’ She folded the map, returning it and the artefact to her pack. ‘But according to Andreas, the Gate of Alexander is in the shadow of the tallest peak, so I’m guessing – I’m hoping – that it’s not right at the top.’
‘She’s usually pretty good at this, don’t worry,’ Eddie told the Israeli. ‘Okay, crack on!’
They set off again, tromping back into the darkness of the forest. The ground became steeper, slowing their progress. It took well over an hour before they reached the edge of the target area, the sheer-sided peak looming over them to the south, and nearly another hour after that before their search found anything.
What they discovered was not a spring, or any kind of gateway.
‘Shit!’ Eddie hissed, waving the others to a halt. ‘Get into cover!’
‘What is it?’ Nina asked as she scurried behind a tree.
‘Footprints. They’re already here!’
The forest floor was covered in a thick layer of fallen foliage, absorbing the group’s individual tracks, but not even the carpet of mulch could hide the passage of dozens of men. A churned trail of boot prints angled up the shadowed hillside.
Zane glared up the slope. ‘They might have found the spring already.’
‘Maybe, but they haven’t come back down yet,’ Nina said. ‘We’ve still got a chance to stop them.’
‘We’re outnumbered at least three to one!’
‘Thought that was what Mossad were into,’ said Eddie with a half-smile. ‘Surrounded by your enemies, never backing down, all that?’
The Israeli was not amused. ‘This isn’t exactly our homeland. But no, I wasn’t planning to back down. Not when we’re this close.’
The team moved parallel to the Nazis’ trail, leaving a gap of about a hundred feet. They headed higher, alert to the slightest activity. But all they heard was glum birdsong. The climb continued, five minutes passing without incident, ten—
One of the Mossad agents raised a hand. Everyone immediately stopped and crouched. Nina saw nothing ahead. She tried to pick out any sounds over the sudden drum of her heart . . .
Faint voices reached her, along with a rhythmic thumping and scraping. Looking uphill, she saw that the slope eased not far above, a broad shelf running across the forested hillside. The noises were coming from higher and to the right. ‘Sounds like they’re digging.’
‘Back up,’ ordered Zane. ‘We’ll go around them and get a view from above.’
‘Keep well clear,’ Eddie warned. ‘They might have posted sentries.’
The group made a wide circle around the hub of activity, looping in towards it from higher up. The digging was taking place a few hundred feet above the shelf, not far from the base of the peak’s southern face. Eddie dropped to a crawl, stopping behind a fungus-covered log. The Mossad agents spread out nearby, Zane and Nina joining the Englishman to look through the trees at what lay below.
‘Oh God,’ Nina whispered. ‘We’re too late . . .’
33
Kroll surveyed his men’s work with satisfaction – and growing anticipation. ‘You should feel proud, Banna!’ he said to the cowed Egyptian. ‘You brought us here, and we’ve found exactly w
hat Andreas described. The Gate of Alexander.’
The Nazi troops were excavating what they had discovered protruding from the slope. Whether it had been deliberately buried or the soil had simply built up over time, Kroll neither knew nor cared; what mattered was that the way to the spring was almost clear. The Gate of Alexander was a stone arch four metres high and three wide, at the end of a passage cut into the hillside. Behind it was a stone slab, clearly covering an entrance; another few minutes of work would see enough dirt cleared away for it to be pulled open.
‘If that’s really what this is.’ Rasche sat on a tree stump nearby, watching with impatience. The silver-lined water barrels were lined up behind him.
‘What else could it be?’ Kroll strode to the arch and pointed at the Greek text carved into it. ‘“This gate marks Alexander’s journey into the Land of the Blessed. Heed his words, and you will have nothing to fear.” This is the place – the spring is here.’
‘Where, though?’ The question came from a figure wearing white, his clothing incongruous amongst the soldiers’ pale brown fatigues. Frederic Leitz had joined them on their arrival in Iran, large sums of money smoothly changing hands to ensure that their presence in the country would go without official notice, and also to provide them with an escort to their destination. The Revolutionary Guard had now gone, but left trucks below to take the Nazis – and the thousands of litres of life-prolonging liquid they hoped to be carrying – back to their chartered plane. ‘If there is a spring here, then where’s the water?’
‘Inside there.’ Kroll jabbed a fat finger at the stone slab. ‘Andreas built a shrine to hide it, so only those equal to Alexander would ever be able to find it. We’ve proved ourselves worthy.’
The entrance was now clear. Ropes were hooked to the top of the slab, then under Schneider’s direction the soldiers formed into lines and heaved upon them. Loose soil dropped around the great block, the lines drawn taut as guitar strings . . . then its upper edge crunched away from the surrounding rock.
Kingdom of Darkness Page 42