by J. R. Rain
Every looter lived for that flash of gold. Well, it was flashing now, and I think I was grinning from ear to ear.
“Gold makes me happy,” said Ishi.
“It makes me happy, too,” I said, caressing the smooth handle. “Very, very happy.”
“I knew it!” enthused Akiiki, shouldering past me. “I wonder if it is booby trapped?”
“You’ve spent too much time watching Indiana Jones,” I said. “Let’s see what’s on the other side. Maybe Sekhmet herself will be there to greet us.”
“Perhaps, indeed!” laughed Akiiki.
It was hard to ignore the pictographs on the walls—images that hadn’t been seen for thousands of years. I moved closer to study them, even if briefly, adjusting my dust mask since God only knew what ancient pathogen might be waiting for us. The images of a goddess, half lioness and half human, dominated the imagery. But the story itself could take weeks, if not months, to translate. Complicating things were other symbols similar to what Ishi and I encountered in South America.
I thought of the other night...the tunnel was eerily similar to the one in my dream. Dad’s treasure chamber lay beyond the open doors in his tunnel. Would it be the same for us?
“Do you wish to help me open this one?” asked Akiiki, once I joined him, grinning like a kid at Christmas. He didn’t wait to test one of the handles.
“Sure. Close your eyes, everyone, in case this thing goes kaboom!”
“Are you serious, Boss?” Ishi wheezed, as he caught up to us. I motioned for him to pull up his mask and wear the damned thing.
“No. But it was worth hearing your reaction, Ishi.”
“Still, we should be careful, you never know what might be waiting for us on the other side...”
Marie’s voice trailed off as we pulled the doors open. Well, sort of open, as getting them to budge was no easy feat. Something glittered beyond the doorway, captured by the flashlight’s errant beams as we followed Akiiki beyond the doorway.
“Holy shit,” I whispered, unable at first to muster much else.
The flashlight’s beam revealed a small statue bearing colored details painted on gold. Flashing the beam to either side of us revealed many more statues, along with piles of gold furnishings and trinkets. Hell, the room was enormous and I couldn’t determine where it ended in the dimness beyond the initial piles sparkling with embedded jewels.
“Oh, my God...this has to be the right place!” Marie grabbed the light from Ishi and passed it slower to reveal more of the room and its contents. The cache was much bigger than even I expected. “There’s no way we can carry this stuff out of here! Not even if we remain in Egypt for a few months, traveling back and forth to Cairo. It’s incredible! It’s...”
We all heard it: a rumbling above our heads.
“We’ve got to get out of here. Now!” I urged everyone, fearing it was already too late. Someone was outside. Many someones. The rumbling sounded like a fleet of trucks.
We quickly retraced our steps. But before we reached the main entrance, a handful of men had descended into the hole with ropes tied around their waists, each packing military hardware, including automatic rifles and holstered pistols.
Definitely not the local welcome wagon lady stopping by to see how we liked our new digs.
“Shit! We can’t get out here—we need to go back!” I whispered, hissing the words. I spun around and pushed Ishi and Marie ahead of me. Akiiki kept pace as we scurried down the tunnel back toward the treasure room.
“Stay right where you are!” The accent was similar to Akiiki’s, although the venomous delivery of the words was not. Two bright halogens greeted us as we looked back, blinding us from seeing the owners of the heavy footsteps coming our way. “Move a muscle—or even sneeze—and we will cut you in half where you stand.”
Chapter Seven
Motumbo Kalabi was the bandit leader’s name.
“So, Nicholas Caine...what brings you to the land of the Sudanese?” He was holding my passport and driver’s license.
It wasn’t the first interrogative question from Mr. Kalabi. But after being bitch-slapped and sucker-punched, I figured it marked the official start of the question/answer game to determine how much longer we’d enjoy our earthly stay.
By my count, there were seventeen miscreants. All armed as heavily as the bastards who forcibly dragged our asses out of the tunnel, up the sides of the hole, and in front of one of two technicals. For the uninformed, these are small trucks carrying tripod machine guns in the back. The thieves had also brought a bigger truck equipped with caterpillar tracks to prevent sinking in the sand.
With nowhere to escape, offering resistance seemed ill advised. Marie looked to me for assurance when two of the men bound her arms behind her—similar to the rest of us. One of the men brushed his hands back and forth across her breasts while the other tightened the rope. I wanted to launch myself at the asshole. Launching myself would get us all killed. Me first.
Down boy. Live to fight another day.
I said, “Last I checked, we’re still in Egypt. That means you’re trespassing. I’ll accept your surrender.”
His laughter was more boisterous than I’d expected. “You think you are a comedian, Mr. Caine?”
He nodded to one of three muscular men who looked as if they could be Akiiki’s brothers. I prepared for another blow—or kick, since they liked to mix it up—but the man tightened the garrote attached to my wrists, pulling my arms up higher behind my back. I think I would have preferred to be kicked. I was certain my arms were going to break.
“Are you ready to answer me now, Mr. Caine?”
To say I nodded with some enthusiasm would be an understatement.
He nodded, too, although not quite as enthusiastically. “Tell me again why you are here, Mr. Caine.”
“We were given permission to dig here by the Ministry of Antiquities,” I confessed, determined to stick to the least revealing facts.
“How interesting,” he chuckled, and eyed Akiiki. “And, you...you are nothing more than a slave to these whites and their mongrel they brought with them from overseas. No?”
“I answer to no man or woman,” said Akiiki, raising his chin defiantly. “I am more a free man than you and your puffed-up, peacock foolishness will ever be. You are ruler to these bad men who would all cut your throat for the right price. I, on the other hand, am lord to myself, and at peace with whatever fate awaits.”
Insanity or brilliance? It depended on how the Lord of the Flies reacted. The look reflected contempt, but his shaking fist, which I feared might render my drivers license to a useless wad of plastic, was of greater concern. The man, if anything, could barely control himself. How many people he had killed, I didn’t know. But my loose guess was: many.
Meanwhile, the calm serenity in Akiiki’s countenance made me rethink my earlier opinions of him. Either this cat was a saint or the biggest fool I’d ever met.
I expected Akiiki to become victim number one. Most violent men like to make an example of one of their captives to ensure subservience from the rest. It’s why Leo Da Vinci killed my buddy Mario Thomas long ago. As a kid fresh out of college, I sang like a canary while Mario’s brains ran down my shirt.
“Perhaps we shall soon see how happy you are with your fate,” Motumbo advised, and returned his gaze to me. “You have many enemies, Nick Caine. Did Yassir Ali happen to mention how much he loathes American profiteers like you? He was most disappointed you came back for a treasure you’re not entitled to—no more than your friend who died in your arms searching for the same damned thing.”
He paused to gauge my reaction. Though my heart raced, I fought to remain calm. The only weapon I had access to was my stubborn resilience. The game would end if I cracked mentally, or worse, emotionally.
“Have you no response?” he said, after nearly a minute passed in awkward silence. Motumbo studied my face intently, as if searching for the slightest twitch, while I eyed him as if he were a spring rose
instead of the rancid piece of shit I regarded him as. “I believe you have something that now belongs to me.”
He motioned for the guy behind me to frisk me, digging his fingers into a few sensitive places. The map they sought was inside my left boot, which they didn’t check. But my relief was short-lived. Motumbo said something to the pair guarding Marie, as apparently she was next.
“It’s inside my shoe!” I blurted out. I couldn’t stand the thought of her being violated as I had been. “The map is there, inside my sock.”
Motumbo raised his hand, and the men back away, glaring at me. If I wasn’t careful, the woman who captured my affections could be ravished violently next time. I had no choice but to cooperate.
“It is the map that led us here,” I said.
“To find the Hittite gold?”
I cast a nervous glance at Marie, Ishi, and Akiiki. All three wore expressions begging for silence. But we had no other immediate bargaining chip. The Beretta had escaped detection, strapped to my inner thigh, but would only be of use in the right situation. Now wasn’t the time.
“Yes,” I said.
He chuckled and moved closer. God these mothers needed a bath something awful.
“So...is it down there?”
He pointed to the hole, where our ruptured scaffolding peered out. Strong gusts sent drifting sand towards the opening.
“Yeah...yeah it is,” I confirmed, my voice void of emotion. I felt defeated, and both betrayer and betrayed. Betrayer to my friends and betrayed by corrupt officials, who were the very thing that set me on the path to become a looter instead of the scientist I was schooled for. Why fight them, when you could work around them?
“Then you have found the temple of Sekhmet, Mr. Caine?”
“We believe so.”
He grinned broadly, then instructed his men back into the tunnels. Then he turned back to me. “I wish to correct your erroneous way of thinking before we finish our business here today.”
His words sounded ominous. An obvious threat of worse things to come? I thought about the immense room below, with untold riches, and glanced at the bigger truck. Motumbo was off his frigging rocker if he believed he was going to transport the gold horded below in just a few trips.
“That you have accepted my offer to surrender?”
Except he wasn’t really listening. He was looking up into the sky, a far-off look to his eye. He said, “Maybe Sekhmet will smile on us if we slit your throats and let your blood bathe the sand.”
Next to me, Marie squeaked. I might have squeaked, too, although in a more manly way.
Motumbo lowered his gaze back to us, then pulled back his vest to reveal the ivory handle to a long, curved blade. “If it were ever true that the lioness goddess is real, then the gold stored here is unlike any other from around the world. It is the fuel to take her home.”
“Do you seriously believe the nonsense about her being from outer space?”
“It depends on my mood,” he said. “It is part of the same debate about killing you now or letting you live a while longer. I could go either way, and sleep well all the same.”
The iciness in his tone chilled me, and Marie moved closer to me. Ishi uttered a Tawankan prayer, barely audible. Or was it a curse? Only Akiiki looked at peace. Dude was damned near impossible to figure out.
At that moment, the men sent to verify my gold story clambered out of the hole, shouting something indiscernible to me. Once Motumbo had them repeat their announcement, he whirled around to face me, the knife drawn from its hilt.
“What do you take me for?” He brought the knife up to my throat.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I said, or tried to say. Hard to talk with a blade pressed against your Adam’s apple.
“The gold! Where is it?”
“It’s where I told you it is.”
The faint smell of previously shed blood wafted from the blade, and the chipped edge of the blade pricked my skin.
“You’re lying! My men said they found the room you spoke of. It’s empty!”
“That’s impossible!”
But it turned out to be the truth.
Somehow, in the twenty minutes that had passed since our discovery of the treasure room, the gold had disappeared. All of it...vanished.
And now we were going to die.
Chapter Eight
“My patience is wearing thin, Mr. Caine!” Motumbo warned.
A pair of torches carried by his men made his features, and especially his blood-rimmed eyes, look diabolical. “I will ask you one last time, and then the fun will begin. We’ll take the one you call Ishi outside, strap him to one of your metal walkways, and take turns shooting off body parts. Great enjoyment for us all, and it could take hours before he finally dies. So, where is the gold?”
We stood in what seemed like the exact room we visited thirty minutes earlier. I say ‘seemed’ since we came in the same entrance, walked down the same tunnel, climbed over the same debris, and...found ourselves standing in an enormous empty room. Barren and clean, as if nothing—including several millenia of dust—had ever been there.
It wasn’t possible...no frigging way does a room spanning a soccer field go from crammed full of an array of gold items to nothing. But it did. Or, somehow we got turned around and ended up in a different entrance, tunnel, etc. Following the pair holding the torches gave a slightly different feel as compared to the more powerful halogens we used earlier. Still, too much evidence said we were in the right location. Besides, while the ancients loved to drive home a point in their pictographs, they weren’t OCD about it. And whatever the translated story turned out to be from the tunnel wall’s images, it was definitely the same one we viewed earlier.
“Well, where is it?”
I glanced at the dozen men who accompanied us inside the dig site. Rifles poised at our heads, the wrong answer could speed up the death sentences for us all.
“It was here...and now it’s gone.”
“Yes, that’s the same bullshit you’ve been feeding me for the past ten minutes. Take Ishi upstairs!”
“Wait!”
“For what reason? Unless you are prepared to tell the truth, we are done here.”
“Do you believe what you said about Sekhmet, or was that a bunch of bullshit?”
Honestly, the question disappointed me. It reeked of desperation as it tripped out of my mouth. But it was based on logic, even if stretched. Motumbo had shown reverence in speaking of Sekhmet outside the dig perimeter, though at the time I dismissed him as being an arrogant dumbass. But, his aversion to getting too close to the half lioness/half human glyphs along both walls in the tunnel gave me an idea, and a sliver of hope.
The look on Motumbo’s suggested that I’d hit a nerve. I tend to do that. “What in the hell does Sekhmet have to do with your deceit, Mr. Caine?”
I glanced at my three companions, whose gazes were locked on me—including Akiiki’s. He seemed to have lost some of his confidence, perhaps realizing the likely execution of my little buddy loomed ahead. Or maybe what happened here was freaking him out. After all, he was the first among us to see and touch the gold.
“Sekhmet might have everything to do with my perceived deceit. Then again, I’m not the one who first brought her up...you did.”
Wrong response, and if I had to do it over, I would’ve turned on the charm instead.
Motumbo nodded thoughtfully, or so it seemed. But the hazel in his bloody eyes suddenly ignited as if on fire. He barked a command to his men in a Sudanese dialect, and the guns trained on our heads drew closer. Akiiki understood what was said, and his expression told me what to prepare for.
Shit!
“If I knew where it disappeared, I swear to God I’d tell you!” I said, as one of the guards flanking me grabbed my arms to drag me to the room’s exit. Ishi and Marie received similar treatment, while the bandits to either side of Akiiki wrapped a rope around his neck. “You don’t need to hurt anyone! We’d tell you i
f we knew where it was!”
“You, Nick Caine, don’t get to call the shots!” Motumbo crowed. “We will conduct our business the Darfur way.”
A blow to the side of my head announced the end of our conversation. Before I could muster anything else, the four of us were dragged out of the chamber, up the tunnel, and out into daylight. The sun’s searing heat bore down upon us, and the bandits stationed around the dig site pulled us up by our shirts, nearly tearing Marie’s and Ishi’s off their backs.
Never before could I recall feeling as helpless as I did then...I couldn’t come to anyone’s rescue, and the anguish I felt toward Ishi was majorly compounded for Marie. The rage and despair I felt was unlike any emotion I had ever experienced, and when our adversaries brought us to our camp I knew we were out of time. It was now or never, and I swung a leg to trip the bandit on my right, and rammed myself into the guy to my left, driving him into the sand. If I could only free my hands...
I went for the dude’s knife with my mouth after kicking him in the face.
A scarab knife to my neck ended that futility.
“I must admit to admiring your spunk, Mr. Caine. At least to some small degree,” said Motumbo, dragging me up by my collar and bringing his shit-house breath up to my face. The scarab etched my skin along my throat, with a rivulet of blood following immediately after. “But unless you can find a way to make your treasure reappear, or even better, tell us truthfully where to find it, you and your friends will die.”
He released me, laughing as he pointed to the fire pit we had used to cook the past two days. A large pot had replaced the rack that held our kettles and pans over the pit, and two of the men were tending to a fire. It seemed a bit early to be cooking supper...lunch, perhaps?
“I think if we shoot Ishi, it would be a waste of meat. And if we eat Ms. Da Vinci, then we miss out on other fun we can have with her,” he said. The soulessness of his tone sent a shiver up my spine. “As delicious as your brain may taste, Mr, Caine, I think we shall start with...” he turned and pointed at Akiiki, “...you.”