The Mummy Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

by Max Allan Collins

  Fry, smiling just a little, perhaps already knowing he had them hooked, flipped the lid and light winked off the gem within in a thousand directions, a magnificent blue diamond gripped by a lattice of golden snakes rising from an oval plaque, nestled in velvet. The cut of the stone made myriad shades of blue: dark, light, the sea, the sky . . .

  “The blue hue, of course,” Fry said, “results from trace amounts of boron in the stone’s crystalline structure.”

  “Of course,” O’Connell said. “However it got made, that’s a nice slice of ice. Which Vanderbilt’s engagement ring is that?”

  The “slice of ice” had frozen Evy—not by the romance of such a stone or even its potential value; nor was this the reaction of the female of the species to a lovely jewel, rather that of a scholar, staggered, stunned, in awestruck recognition.

  “It’s the Eye of Shambhala,” she said in hushed reverence. “Popularly known as the Eye of Shangri-la. My God . . .”

  O’Connell, a hand on his wife’s arm, frowned at her and said, “Stay-young-forever Shangri-la?”

  She smiled at him, but her eyes were in some distant place. “Is there any other kind? If you believe the legend, that gem points the way to the Pool of Eternal Life.”

  “Which is, naturally,” Fry said lightly, “Oriental poppycock. But I realize, Mrs. O’Connell, that such myths, such legends of magic, are of historical interest to you.”

  O’Connell nodded at the sparkling stone. “I have a historical interest, too. Like where did you get that hunk of junk?”

  Evy frowned at him for this disrespect.

  Fry took it in stride, however, and said, “The Eye was smuggled out of China in 1940—relatively recent history. Now, in these turbulent postwar times, we have a rare opportunity to show good faith to the Chinese government, who would very much like to see this artifact returned to their Shanghai Museum.” To both of them, he said, “An old friend of yours is director there. Roger Wilson?”

  O’Connell smirked. “No kidding? Leave it to ol’ Roger to land on his feet again.”

  “Given your expertise in the field,” Fry said, eyes first to O’Connell, then to Evy, “we naturally thought of you.”

  Evy shrugged. “But really, we’d just be a glorified delivery service. My training wouldn’t enter in at all. Not that we aren’t flattered . . . but Rick and I made a promise to each other that after the war we’d settle down.”

  Fry heaved a sigh. “Well . . . I must confess I’m disappointed. Postwar China is a dangerous, unpredictable place. With the Eye’s unfathomable value on the black market, any number of factions could attempt to steal it, for political purposes, out of religious fanaticism . . . or frankly, just plain greed.”

  O’Connell shifted on the sofa.

  So did Evelyn.

  Fry said, “In lesser hands, the Eye could be lost forever.”

  “Well,” Evelyn said, “we would hate for that to happen.”

  O’Connell began tapping a foot.

  Fry said nothing.

  Evelyn sneaked a look at her husband.

  Finally O’Connell stuck in a toe: “Well, uh, you know Evy’s brother, Jonathan, does live in Shanghai. Haven’t seen him in some time. Could check up on him.”

  Fry smiled and nodded. “Yes, yes—he owns a nightclub, if I’m not mistaken.”

  Evelyn gestured with open hands. “And we have been meaning to visit Jonathan. Maybe we could surprise him.”

  O’Connell was nodding. “It would make a perfect cover story.”

  Evelyn was nodding, too. “My thought exactly.”

  Fry twitched a smile. “Then I trust that means we can count on the O’Connells, one last time?”

  After Fry had filled them in on the particulars, the couple showed him to the door and watched him drive off in a sleek black government limo.

  “Do you hear that, Evy?”

  “Hear what, Rick?”

  Her hand was in his and he squeezed it. “That’s adventure calling.”

  2

  Colossal Beauty

  Ningxia Province, China

  The landscape could not have been less remarkable, a scrubby wasteland, a rolling near-desert plain in the middle of nowhere, with one notable exception—exposed from the sandy, barren expanse, the slightly tilted head of a Sphinx-size giant appeared to peek above the surface as if the earth were water and he a swimmer.

  But had this been water, not earth, this “swimmer” would have sunk like the stone he was, a brown, ancient representation, on a massive scale, of an ancient ruler from 200 B.C. This colossus had once been the symbol of Emperor Er Shi Huangdi’s absolute power, a man about whom history had little kind to say.

  The excavation site was still in its early stages, a handful of tents and wooden pulleys and other fundamental mechanisms there to help two crews of a dozen or so Chinese diggers each in what promised to be one of the major archaeological finds of the twentieth century. The man responsible was named O’Connell, but his first name was not Richard.

  Alex O’Connell, twenty, and a fugitive from his education, stood atop a mound of moved earth to survey what had been done so far, dwarfed by the partially excavated bust of the onetime Emperor of China. Had the real man’s eyes been so cold, Alex wondered, under the peak of that battle helmet?

  Alex, a handsome, husky youth with his mother’s heart-shaped face and his father’s steel-blue eyes (and unruly brown hair), did not look like a Harvard sophomore, although he did allow himself a Boston Red Sox baseball cap, to shade him from an unforgiving sun.

  He looked like Rick O’Connell, a quarter century before, in dusty apparel suited to an explorer—brown leather jacket over green shirt and khaki trousers with boots and, of course, a satchel of tools on a shoulder strap, a Browning nine-millimeter automatic on his hip. Right now he had a ragged five-day growth of beard that gave him more authority than most collegians playing hooky.

  From time to time, he would refer to pages in a large, battered, leather-bound journal. He was supervising one of the crews of Chinese diggers. The other crew had uncovered a pair of stone stairways that indicated a structure was down under the still mostly concealed colossus. They had cleared both stairways and, with the judicious use of dynamite, had carved quite a hole at the base of the Emperor’s bust.

  He yelled down, in perfect Mandarin, “Chu Wah, you find the door to that tomb yet?”

  The digger—as youthful as Alex himself—looked up and called, also in Mandarin, “No boss! Still looking!”

  From behind him echoed a distant voice: “Alex O’Connell . . . !”

  He turned and gazed out at the endless nothingness until a pack train of mules revealed itself in the heat shimmer.

  Good, Alex thought with a smile. Wilson’s back!

  He called down in Mandarin to the workers, in the valley they had made: “The professor will give one hundred U.S. dollars to the man who discovers the entrance!”

  That got a cheer out of them. He only hoped the guy who found the damn door didn’t get killed by a coworker seeking the credit, and the hundred bucks.

  Fifteen minutes later, Roger Wilson dismounted from his mule, obviously at least as weary as the animal; in his early sixties, Wilson had spent decades at dozens of sites for nearly as many museums, and he was yet to have truly made his mark.

  The balding, white-haired Britisher wore an olive-colored shirt with suspenders and chinos and he too was layered with the dust of these near-desert conditions. He received a warm hug from Alex, patting the boy on the back and turning the melancholy line that was his mouth into a smile.

  Alex grinned and said, in an English accent not unlike his mother’s, “What a relief you’re here. You’re a couple of days late, Professor—I was beginning to think you’d run into bandits.”

  “Appreciate the concern, dear boy,” Wilson said, and mopped his brow with a filthy hanky. “But it was nothing so glamorous—we simply had some minor difficulties lining up proper supplies.”

 
; Alex handed his mentor a canteen and the man gulped from it, then the professor’s eyes took in the impressive strides in the excavation that had been made in his absence. “Very good, Alex. Fine work indeed.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  He put a hand on Alex’s shoulder. “You know, when I saw you standing on that mound, surveying your kingdom, so to speak . . .” He chuckled. “. . . I thought for a moment there I was looking at your father. You are definitely Rick O’Connell’s son.”

  With half a grin, Alex said, “Let us hope after this discovery, he’ll be known as Alex O’Connell’s father.”

  Wilson’s smile spoke of obvious affection and pride, and this Alex relished.

  The professor, hands on hips, appraised the partly exposed head of the colossus. “What a powerful gaze our friend has . . . My colleagues at the museum were of course thrilled when I told them you’d discovered the Er Shi Huangdi Colossus—but they have the, uh, well, usual questions expected from those who fund such expeditions.”

  Alex smirked. “They want to know when I’m going to find the tomb. They want us to get in there and find the good stuff for them.”

  Wilson smiled, seemingly at Alex’s frustration, the boy not realizing the professor found it amusing when Alex spoke idiomatically like his father in the cultured accent of his mother.

  “Dear boy,” he said, again placing a hand on Alex’s shoulder, “you can’t let the bureaucrats get you down. Not if you want to last in this game . . . You’ll find the entrance, I know you will. I have the utmost confidence in you.”

  Alex grinned. “Thanks, Professor. You believing in me, well . . . it means a lot.”

  Their eyes met and the older man nodded and again a smile formed on the gruff, weathered face. Alex wondered why his own father didn’t treat him with this kind of respect, or for that matter warmth.

  The moment was interrupted by a shout from below. Alex and Wilson moved to where they could look down into the pit and saw Chu Wah looking up excitedly even as he pointed to what appeared to be the tomb’s entrance, at the bottom of the sheer cliff of earth they’d excavated below the partially exposed Colossus.

  “Boss!” Chu Wah yelled in Mandarin. “I found the door, boss!” Then in English: “I get hundred smackers, right?”

  Alex laughed and called down: “You do indeed!” Then to Wilson he said, “Grab the dynamite! They’ve found the entrance . . . By the way, you owe Chu Wah a hundred bucks.”

  “I do?”

  “You do.”

  Alex slipped the battered leather-covered journal into his satchel as he charged off, leaving Wilson to ponder how he’d managed to incur this debt, not having been here.

  Within minutes, Alex was back, and he moved the older man to a safe position, and advised him to cover his ears, which he did. So did Alex, and then a huge explosion shook the plains and sent dirt and rock spewing upward, as if the earth had spit out a distasteful mouthful.

  With another grin, Alex turned to his mentor and asked, “Ready to make history, Professor?”

  Wilson chuckled. “Indeed I am. I have waited a very, very long time to make it . . .”

  And they headed toward stairs that had been installed over two thousand years before, by slaves whose bones had become one with the earth the modern-day diggers had just disrupted.

  With a flashlight in his gloved hand, Alex led the way into the mausoleum with Wilson just behind him, followed by Chu Wah and a pair of Chinese diggers. Shafts of daylight slanted like swords in a magician’s box through the deadfall of beams and structure caused by the blast. Despite the dynamite-created clutter, the space was too large and too dark to see much of anything. No one had set foot in here for many centuries . . .

  . . . so why did Alex sense something was wrong?

  “Move!” he said, but Wilson froze, and Alex had to grab the older man and yank him forward, just as two huge wooden arms, each affixed with a spiked plate, swung down from the ceiling, smacking together like huge cymbals right where the professor and his prize pupil had been standing.

  The only victim, fortunately, was Alex’s baseball cap, though one might also mark the nerves of Chu Wah and his diggers as casualties, the workers exchanging looks of alarm and muttering in Mandarin.

  To the wide-eyed Wilson, Alex said, “Apparently the Emperor wasn’t big on houseguests.” Then in Mandarin he said, “Stay together!”

  They stayed together, all right, cautiously descending a long, impossibly wide stone stairway with many massive stone beams at landings every dozen steps or so. The feel, now, was that of a temple, rife with Chinese carvings and figures on the walls. At the next landing, a shadowy figure could be glimpsed, mostly hidden in back of the beam just below, as if lying in wait for them, positioned to pick them off.

  Alex stopped his little party with an upraised hand. He frowned. No one else had been in this mausoleum for several thousand years, right? Or had someone with his own agenda slipped inside right after the explosion—a religious fanatic maybe . . .

  Alex withdrew his sidearm and called, “You can come out now. We see you.”

  No answer.

  With another upraised hand, he gestured for Wilson and the others to hang back on the stairs; then Alex went on down to the next landing. When he cocked the nine-millimeter Browning, the small sharp sound seemed deafening.

  Stepping around the stone pillar carefully, nose of his gun paving the way, he could see the figure standing there, but slumped; and then his flashlight showed him who—or what—their one-man welcoming committee really was: a skeletal corpse. Its head bowed under a safari hat, the very old corpse was stuck to the beam, impaled by an Oriental throwing knife. On the rotting khaki shirt were initials: CB.

  “It’s all right!” Alex called, his voice echoing, and the others joined him on the landing. He turned to Wilson. “Sir Colin Bembridge, almost certainly.”

  Wilson frowned. “How in God’s name did he get in here?”

  “I don’t know. Must be a way in we don’t know about.”

  The head of the Bembridge Scholars was known to have gone searching for the tomb of Er Shi Huangdi, making several expeditions, the last one some seventy years ago, from which he never returned.

  “Well,” Wilson said, nodding toward Alex’s satchel, “you can thank the old boy for that journal of his.”

  If Alex hadn’t discovered the long-forgotten book in the archives of the library at Harvard, this expedition would not have happened.

  “Thanks,” Alex said softly to the corpse.

  He lifted the safari hat by its brim and the skull rolled off and down the stairs, making little clunks as it went; the absence of the skull revealed (stuck in the stone) an oversized bronze throwing star.

  “Somebody left him here,” Alex said, his gut wrenching with sympathy for the poor bastard, “as a warning.”

  “Unfortunately for Sir Colin,” Wilson said, “he’s not the dead man we’re looking for. He won’t make us rich and famous . . . Let’s keep moving, shall we?”

  Alex nodded, but his first step depressed a floor tile, setting something strange and wonderful in motion: dumping accumulated sand, skylights slid back one by one, allowing shafts of sunlight to cascade down, thanks to the dynamite clearing away much of the roof of the mausoleum.

  Now the awestruck group got a sense of the enormity of their find. The space was vast and entirely covered by an array of terra-cotta warriors, many with terra-cotta horses, standing at attention and lined up on wooden-plank flooring to stretch into the dimmest recesses of the mausoleum. Oddly, the soldiers seemed arranged to face a large open space at their center . . .

  Beside Alex, Wilson said, “Incredible . . . no two faces are alike. Can you imagine how long it must have taken to cast all these? What sort of artists they must have had!”

  Alex shook his head. “Not artists, if the ancient legends are to be believed—more like sorcerers.”

  “Surely you can’t believe that.”

  But he di
d. He had reason to. He said, “They weren’t cast, Professor—trust me, they were cursed.”

  Wilson snorted a laugh. “Don’t tell me you actually believe such mystical poppycock! What sort of tales did your parents tell you at bedtime? Oh, don’t remind me—I’ve heard the wild stories flying around Cairo about your parents, and mummies being raised from the dead to walk among us.”

  They did more than just walk, Alex thought. He had been there—he had been Imhotep’s prisoner, and he had fought side by side as a boy of ten, with his father, to defeat the Mummy and his minions. But in his mind he could see his mother, with a finger to her lips in shush fashion: “Family secret, Alex. Family secret . . .”

  “Professor,” Alex said, “you have really got to stop reading my mummy’s mummy books.”

  Wilson, interested neither in puns nor curses, moved ahead, and Alex fell in with him, the Chinese trio behind them. In awe, the party walked down an aisle between uniform rows of terra-cotta soldiers and horses. Their flashlights cut the dust-mote-filled air like blades.

  They trod on, in cathedral-like silence, until Chu Wah stepped on another tile, triggering a blast of yellow gas that shot up from the floor and into his startled face. He began to choke and gag and do a terrible dance, his skin blistering horrifically.

  And then he collapsed.

  “Chu Wah!”

  Quickly Alex went to his loyal crew captain and knelt and checked for a pulse.

  Too late.

  “Poor bugger’s dead,” Alex said, looking up at the professor, who frowned but said nothing.

  None of the party could see, nearby in the shadows, an ancient seismograph with bronze balls resting delicately on its lids. The commotion Chu Wah made dying had shaken the lid and the balls thereon, which were now rolling to fall off and into a bronze frog’s mouth . . .

  A ratchet sound echoed in the chamber.

  Alex rose from the corpse of his crew captain and looked around as the grinding sound continued.

  And when it stopped, crossbow bolts thwacked as dozens of arrows flew from the darkness like strafing machine-gun fire. Alex was right in their path, and Wilson yelled for him to run, and he did, but the Chinese digger just behind Alex was nailed by a volley and pinned to the floor, the sharp arrows ripping through him, killing him before he could even cry out.