The Mongol Objective mi-2

by David Sakmyster

  She pointed to the first intersection, then glanced at Qara to see her reaction, but her face was cloaked in shadow. “Here, there’s something nasty waiting for us.”

  “What?”

  “Huge metal spikes. As far as I could tell, they blast out from either side.”

  “How do we avoid them?” Orlando asked.

  “There’s a trail I saw, highlighted in green, something about the stones which make up that section. I think we’ll see it when we get past this door.”

  “And how,” Renee said, flashing her light back to the Temujin’s haughty face, “do we do that?”

  Phoebe sighed, then turned to Qara. “On this part, I’m sorry to say, I’m blind. I saw them build it, set it in place. It’s seriously thick, but I couldn’t see how it opens.”

  “That’s unacceptable,” Renee said.

  Caleb turned to Qara. “You want to help?”

  The Darkhad grinned through her pain. Shook her head.

  Renee raised her. 45, pointed it at Qara’s leg. “Oh, she’ll help.”

  “Wait!” Orlando shouted. “Hold on, I’m not bad at these things, either. After all, I did see you.”

  Renee lowered the gun. “Very well. Go on.”

  Orlando studied the door, narrowed his eyes and took a deep breath. He took a few steps forward, palms out. Phoebe experienced a moment of dread, fearing that to touch the door would release some kind of horrific trap to bury them all. She really hadn’t seen anything about this door, and that alone surprised her. Had no one been through here since they set the door in place? She had concentrated on seeing the door open, had asked that question, but nothing came of it, just a humming and the consistent view of the mural-covered wall.

  “Try remote viewing the unlocking mechanism,” Caleb suggested. “They must have built one, although my guess is that no one has ever used it.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m trying, boss.”

  “Wait,” Renee said. “I thought Kublai and his other sons were buried here too. Wouldn’t they have had to open the door?”

  Phoebe shrugged. “That’s what I thought too, but I’m not getting anything.”

  Qara had overheard and when Caleb glanced in her direction, she gave a grudging nod. “Temujin alone lies here. His descendents, like the rest of Mongolia, feared to trespass upon his necropolis.”

  “But Kublai had no problem building his own city above it?”

  “That was part of Temujin’s will,” she said. “We never knew why. It made the sacred mission of the early Darkhad difficult, since it brought undue attention to the very area we wished to conceal.”

  “I can think of two reasons,” Caleb said, raising his hand with two fingers out. “One is that Kublai would have subscribed to the same tenets as his grandfather. He knew the value in hiding secrets in plain view. And the second reason has to deal with symmetry and the mystical precept of ‘as Above, so Below.”

  “That never gets old,” Orlando says. “Kind of like Twinkies.”

  “So where are they? His sons?” Caleb asked. “Back on the Sacred Mountain?”

  Qara’s expression never wavered. “Perhaps.”

  “Hang on,” Orlando said, brushing off more dirt from his face. He lurched toward the door, shook his head to clear a vision, then headed right. Three soldiers moved out of his way, keeping their lights on him as he moved along the wall, past the script and to the corner. He pointed. “Up there.”

  The lights followed his outstretched hand and index finger indicating the broken section Caleb had noticed before, the area he thought had crumbled through, pierced by a tree root.

  “That would have to be some seriously deep root.”

  “Not a root,” Orlando replied. “Although designed to look the part. Get two of your men, Agent Wagner. One boost the other. Grab hold and pull.”

  Renee snapped her fingers, then brought her flashlight to the scene as two commandos rushed around Orlando. One knelt and made a step out of his hands to lift the other, then pushed him up on his shoulders. The top man gripped the root-like thing.

  “It is tough rope,” he shouted back in accented English. “I-”

  “Wait!” Orlando shouted. “I didn’t finish. You have to pull it, hand over hand, like you’re opening a set of curtains. And you pull from left to right. If you go the other way…”

  Phoebe gasped, holding her head. A flash revealed…

  … a scene where dozens of men with helmets and torches stand back on the stairs, bows drawn, arrows aimed at a man on a ladder in the same corner. With a sheepish look, the prisoner grasps the rope and pulls right to left as he was told. And something shiny, flickering with all the torchlight, rips across the room, at about neck-height. It is secured by three iron bars from the ceiling, running on embedded tracks. The ladder is severed at the eighth rung, just below the man’s feet, as the room-width blade whisks past. He falls, rolls and is about to get up when he sees it coming back, hauling across again to its starting position. So he ducks, hugging his knees — which leaves him in the perfect position to be sliced in half by the second blade, which rips from the right to left, two feet off the ground.

  Phoebe staggered back, fighting the bile rising in her throat, still blinking away the sight of the prisoner’s two halves flopping and unraveling on this very floor, while the Khan’s men admired the effectiveness of their trap.

  She grabbed a flashlight from one of the men and directed it to the side wall. “There. See the three vertical tracks? And it’s probably imperceptible, but there should be two horizontal ones too, for the blades. The first one decapitates a normal-sized man, the second, coming from the other side, ensures that at the least, they aren’t walking forward.”

  “Jeez,” Orlando said to Qara. “You guys aren’t very hospitable to visitors.”

  Renee started backing up, heading to the stairs. “Okay, left to right then, but just to be sure…” She took a few steps up, then nodded to Chang, who remained in the middle of the room, his face cloaked in fear. “Now, do it.”

  The man took a deep breath, closed his eyes, then pulled. Once, twice. Something made a grinding noise, the room shook, and the great stone door trembled. He kept pulling, and then a crack released from the left-most edge. He pulled, as the man holding him strained to keep his balance. The crack grew. Two feet. Four. Five. Six.

  “Enough,” said Renee.

  The man released his hold on the rope. But then the door started to close. He grabbed it and kept pulling. “Get it open all the way!” Orlando shouted. “Otherwise it slams shut, and I think that just might set off that trap.”

  “Pull!” Chang ordered, and eight flashlight beams, including Caleb’s, stabbed at the blackness through the gap as the door continued sliding open.

  Qara inched closer to Caleb, watching as the portal that hadn’t been opened in almost eight hundred years moved to one side. She held her ribs, wheezing. “That,” she said, “was the easy part. I hope you’ve got a lot more in your bag of tricks, because once we walk through there, I’m not going to be much help.”

  “Don’t let Renee hear that,” Caleb whispered.

  “I don’t care. I’ve failed my master. Brought you right to his doorstep.”

  Caleb touched her elbow, leading her ahead. “I thought that only death released a Darkhad from her sacred obligation.”

  She nodded grimly. “Then my release, which will come at the same time as yours, is imminent.”

  Just past the door, Chang set up the generator and hooked up the portable floodlights. Soon, all the soldiers had gathered inside the first area before the intersection, and the passageway was bathed in light. What stopped them, piled high in a heap against the left wall, were skeletons. The laborers, killed and left here to ensure their silence.

  “Hey there,” Orlando said reverently, meeting the hollow stares of bleak eye sockets set in a dozen cracked skulls. “Should’ve unionized.”

  “Shh,” Phoebe scolded. “And don’t move any close
r.”

  The walls were bare, white and sturdy. But the floor, revealed in the brilliant light, was smooth up until the “T” twenty yards ahead, where they could see the large square about forty feet to a side set in the floor between the east and west passages. It was set with a mosaic-tiled surface. Beyond this square and the intersection, the passage continued on into the regrouping darkness.

  “A map,” Renee said, pushing past the others and gingerly walking close to the edge and gazing at the mosaic picture on the floor. “Looks like China and Mongolia, Arabia, and part of Russia.”

  “The Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan,” Caleb said.

  Orlando whistled. “And let me guess: step on the wrong one and you wind up on a rotisserie?”

  “You got it,” Phoebe said. “I saw at least a dozen spikes from each side, spring-loaded and launched across on some kind of harness.”

  Renee pointed and Chang’s men complied. A few of the soldiers shined their lights east and west, glancing their beams off the far wall, highlighting a slab that looked like Swiss cheese, full of various-sized holes.

  “Okay, so where’s the path?”

  Caleb passed the iPad back to Orlando, then stood beside Renee, hands on his hips. He scanned the map, the beautiful mural with its vibrant colors, mini-tiles making up each of the four hundred or so larger tiles.

  “Need me to RV it again?” Phoebe asked.

  Caleb shook his head. “No, I’ve got it. Even without your vision, I think we could have figured it out.”

  “Maybe after a few of us got spiked first?”

  Caleb turned to Chang. “Do you have a piece of chalk, or I don’t know, a paint gun?”

  “No.”

  “Bread crumbs?”

  Chang thought for a moment, then called one of his men over, who carried a cooler. “We have raw Marmat meat.” He smiled at Caleb. “Very raw.”

  “Ewww,” Phoebe said, covering her mouth when the lid was opened.

  “That’ll do,” said Caleb. “Give it here. I’ll use the blood to mark each tile as I cross over, and you can follow after.”

  “What’s the trick?” Renee asked.

  “His last siege,” Caleb answered, heading for the fifth square from the left and setting foot on it. “Lucky I’m a history professor with a good memory. Here, at Xi-Xia, he died, most believe after a fall from his horse weeks earlier. He had been boar hunting, despite warnings from the philosopher Chi-Chang that he should give up hunting. Internal injuries perhaps. But while laying siege to the rebellious Xi-Xia, he passed on. Although there are some who claim the besieged kingdom had sent him a princess who delivered him a mortal wound while in bed together, but that’s-”

  “Vicious lies,” Qara said under her breath.

  “Probably. In any case, the path to take would be the reverse of his last mission, back from here, through Ghazni and Balkh, here.” After marking the first tile with the dripping Marmat meat, he took another step, diagonally to the left. When nothing happened, he smiled and smeared another X with the bloody chunk of flesh. He closed his eyes for a moment, remembering the history. “Around Samarkand, through Bukhara…” He took two steps ahead, covering two more squares, marking each.

  Then he paused, thinking again.

  “To your right.” Phoebe pointed. “I can see it again, from my vision. I’ll guide you if you get lost.”

  “Ok,” he said, taking a step. “Then northeast through Otrar, and continuing at this angle…” Slowly, carefully watching every footstep, he took ten more large strides, marking each as he picked up speed, seeing it all now, just as Phoebe must have seen it. “Back to Lake Baikhal where his armies launched their missions.”

  He was one foot away from the edge of the mosaic floor. Marking this last tile, he stepped off onto the clear granite on the other side. He turned around, breathing a sigh and only then realizing how tense his muscles had been. He set down the cooler and wiped his hands on his pants, a little disgusted.

  Then, one by one, the others came across, following the trail of blood across the tiles. Phoebe and Orlando went next, followed by Qara, who almost slipped at one tile, having some trouble walking while handcuffed and still weak. Finally, Renee and Chang made it over.

  They had to leave the heavy lights on the other side and reverted to using flashlights going forward.

  “Keep moving,” Renee ordered. Then all the Maglites aimed ahead, piercing the darkness. “Any more surprises we need to know about?”

  Phoebe waited for her to catch up. “Yes, and a choice to be made.” She pointed about fifty feet ahead, where the passage came to a dead end. A corridor led to the east and another to the west.

  They stood at the crossroads, lights shining in either direction. Two scouts went ahead, one left, one right. Moving cautiously, assault rifles at the ready, their lights darted around. Orlando turned on his iPad again, displaying the image Phoebe had drawn.

  “You’ve got a long passageway in each direction, both ending in large rooms. Any other impressions?”

  Phoebe held her forehead, her eyes closed. The air was growing tighter, thicker. The taste of fear and dread became almost palpable. “No. I can’t see. But I do sense something.” She stepped forward and rubbed some dust off the wall ahead.

  “What are you doing?” Caleb asked.

  “Saw something here.” She brushed away another section and revealed a single line of script. More characters like before, this time in a single horizontal line.

  “Darkhad.” Renee aimed her light on Qara, then the wall. “Translate.”

  Stepping forward, giving Renee a dull glare, Qara bent down and analyzed the symbols. “It says, Sometimes the best choice is not to choose.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Renee snipped.

  Just then, twin screams cut through the passage. Then a merciless thudding sound came from the left. Men bolted in each direction, flashlight beams shaking. Chang barked orders amidst the shouts and frantic screams.

  “What’s happened?” Renee yelled into her transceiver. Garbled answers returned, men screaming all at once.

  “So it begins,” Qara said, ominously.

  “What?” Phoebe asked.

  “The curse. Turn back now and you will live.”

  Fuming, Renee ran to the right, grabbed hold of Chang and spun him around. “What happened?”

  His face paled. The commander pointed to where the beams revealed something rising slowly. The floor itself was ascending, but there was something thick dripping from the center.

  “The ceiling,” Chang said. “It fell!”

  “And the other?” Renee turned, looking in the other direction.

  “False floor,” Chang said, relaying what his men were screaming back to him. “And a pit of spikes.”

  “So there’s our choice,” Orlando said. “Go right and get crushed, go left and be skewered.”

  Renee took a moment, thinking it through. “We can, it seems, set off the trap in this direction, wait for the ceiling to drop, and then run across it, assuming there’s a door or some other exit on the far side.”

  “True,” said Caleb. “And this direction”-he pointed to the left-“might work the same way. Trigger the collapsing floor, prevent it from rising somehow, lower ourselves down, avoid the spikes, then walk to the other side. So we still have to choose.”

  “Do we even know there are exits?” Renee asked.

  “Yes,” said Orlando, pointing to the iPad screen. “I think Phoebe’s got them drawn here.”

  “I saw that much,” Phoebe recalled. “And I just had the impression that beyond each of those rooms there were underground streams in the darkness. Both leading to a magnificent city set in a cavern.”

  “So which door?” Renee asked.

  “How about neither?” Caleb offered. He pointed to the wall ahead. “Remember the riddle? Sometimes the best choice is no choice. I would say that means-”

  “To stay here,” Orlando said, eying the wall ahead of them.
“And what then?”

  “Shine your lights here,” Renee ordered. “All around this wall. And use your gloves, sleeves, to clear the dust so we can look for outlines.”

  Caleb noticed Qara in his peripheral vision. Her head down, breathing excitedly. He moved closer to her and in the noise of scuffling and rubbing, he whispered, “What is it? You know this too, don’t you? Is it a trick?”

  She shrugged, poker-faced. “Use your mind powers if you want the answer, and make sure you see the right thing. I will say nothing else.”

  “Please help us. My son is going to be coming this way soon, and I can’t let him get caught in one of these deadly traps.”

  “Then I hope he’s better at this than you are.”

  Caleb glared at her, then turned his attention back to the soldiers brushing away at the wall under Renee’s supervision. He wasn’t sure which woman he was angrier at right now-Renee or Qara. But then, of course, he couldn’t forget Nina. It seemed, all in the course of this single day, his wife was snatched from him and cruelly the gods put in her place three heartless substitutes.

  “Found it!” Chang yelled, pointing. “Outline here, a small door. Do we push? I see no other mechanism.”

  They all looked at Qara, who merely shrugged. Caleb walked over to Phoebe and Orlando. And silently, as if communicating telepathically, they each lowered their heads, closed their eyes and willed themselves forward in space and backward in time, searching, seeing.

  “I’ve got it!” Orlando yelled, clapping his hands for the want of a game-show buzzer. “Just push anywhere along the right edge and it’ll swing inward.”

  “And beyond the door?”

  “A staircase,” Phoebe said, rubbing her temples, feeling like a sudden migraine just bored through her skull. “Leading down to what looked like a fancy golden crypt.”

  Renee’s face brightened. “We’ve found it!” And she quickly ordered her men to open the door and light the way.