That such a historical treasure might be destroyed saddened Evelyn O’Connell, but the stakes today were much higher than that. With luck, her husband’s Plan B would not have to be set in motion. But for now, archaeologist Evy O’Connell was helping the enigmatic Lin finish wiring the charge, the stupa now crisscrossed with sticks of dynamite.
Kneeling, Evy said to Lin, “Hand me the red wire . . . no, make that the blue one.”
Lin’s almond eyes appraised Evy critically. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Of course,” Evy said with cool confidence that she did not feel. “I’ve done this kind of thing a hundred times. Two hundred . . . It’s definitely the red wire.”
Evy clipped the wires into place, then turned to Lin. “I know you have your share of secrets, young lady . . . but Alex is naive in the ways of the heart. Promise me you won’t hurt him.”
Rather solemnly, Lin said, “I promise.”
The two women, Evy in her red fur-trimmed coat, Lin in her brown hooded one, tramped back to the columns of the colonnade.
Evy said to the girl, “Good—because otherwise I’d have to kill you.”
Lin glanced at the woman, to see if this was a joke.
But that remained ambiguous, though Evy was now smirking and saying, “Of course, we’ll probably all die today anyway, so perhaps the point is moot.”
And the two females Alex O’Connell cared most about in the world exchanged tentative smiles that became a sort of truce before a battle with other, shared foes.
• • •
Rick and Alex O’Connell crouched behind columns, scoping out the terrain. To their rear, up the steps, higher columns above provided firing positions for Evy, Lin and Jonathan, ready with weapons trained.
Last night, O’Connell had thought his wife had never looked more beautiful; seeing her with a Winchester in her hands, with a smile anticipating this adventure as much as he was, he decided she was at her loveliest, today.
Earlier Jonathan had inquired why they hadn’t wired the bridge to explode as well, but O’Connell explained that, first, they wanted to lure the Emperor Mummy to his doom; and second, the O’Connell party might like to leave here, themselves, at some point . . .
“Ah,” Jonathan had said. “And without the suspension bridge, that might prove difficult.”
“Bingo.”
O’Connell, spotting some movement, nudged his son, and nodded toward the bridge and the rocks beyond; from around the bend emerged a line of rifle barrels. He grinned at Alex, said, “Let’s give them a warm O’Connell welcome,” and Alex grinned back and nodded.
O’Connell and Alex opened fire, and then so did Evy, Lin and Jonathan. The thin Himalayan air cracked and snapped with gunshots and went thick with lead and gun smoke as Yang’s heavily armed, helmeted troops in full winter gear poured into view, streaming across the bridge single file, firing as they came, slugs carving out chunks of stone from the ancient columns, blasting away ancient faces that would be now and forever lost to history.
After picking off the first two soldiers, sending them over the side of the bridge, screaming their death throes as they fell, O’Connell kept at it, and so did Alex, and they exchanged tight smiles, feeling good about how Plan A was going so far—these poor bastards were sitting ducks.
Behind the enemy lines, Er Shi Huangdi was not impressed either with twentieth-century warfare or his new general. Irritated, the terra-cotta Emperor said in ancient Mandarin, “You send them to their deaths! Change your tactics.”
Yang nodded and deployed two men with bazookas, keeping them on his side of the suspension bridge, and ordered, “Fire!”
Two bazooka-fired rockets streaked across the chasm and the resulting explosions seemed to shake the world, several columns disintegrating, the entire façade of the colonnade crumbling down.
O’Connell and his son had pitched themselves out of harm’s way when the rockets came toward them, but they’d been within seconds of being crushed under falling chunks of stone and showering rubble.
To the trio in the next row of columns, O’Connell called, “Pull back! Pull back!”
And Evy, Lin and Jonathan, with O’Connell and Alex right behind, moved deeper into the courtyard, to reconnoiter.
Behind enemy lines, Er Shi Huangdi demanded of Yang, “Who are these people?”
Yang, expressionless but sweating despite the cold, said, “They are but a minor irritation.”
A couple of bullets pocked the Emperor’s brown clay chest, to him less than a gnat bite; automatically, the bloodless wounds sealed. “Clear a path to the stupa. Show me you are as good a general as you claim to be.”
Yang’s chin went up; he bristled at the challenge, but accepted it unhesitatingly. From his pouch he removed the blossoming gem that was the Eye of Shambhala. He handed it to the Emperor, with a curt bow, saying, “Immortality is at hand, my lord.”
Beyond the columns, the O’Connell party was taking the steps up to the stupa, two at a time, Alex looking back to fire, twice, with a rifle, knocking out the bazookas in a most effective way: hitting the weapons themselves, exploding them to uselessness as well as taking out four soldiers, who went tumbling into the abyss, shrieking in pain that would soon be over.
But this victory proved minor, since the rest of Yang’s forces were now racing onto the bridge.
O’Connell and company were gathered, with not much cover at all, at the base of the small steps leading up to the one-story stupa.
“Jonathan,” O’Connell said, “I would say it’s time for Plan B.”
Nervous as hell, Jonathan said, “I was wondering if we might try Plan C instead.”
“What Plan C?”
“I was hoping you had one, up your sleeve . . .”
O’Connell’s eyes and nostrils flared and he got in his brother-in-law’s face. “We have to blow that dome to Kingdom Come! You’re on deck, Jonathan—we’ll cover you.”
“Fine, and if the explosion gets me, bits and pieces of me will soon cover you . . .”
Jonathan stayed behind, at the stupa’s base, as the others moved along the periphery of the snow-covered courtyard, often with massive icicles above them like crystalline swords of Damocles; they stopped at the crumbling brick walls at the rear, to take cover.
In the meantime, Yang and his men were charging up the steps toward the courtyard, maintaining perfect rifle-company formation, leapfrogging and covering their exposed positions.
At the base of the dynamite-wired golden stupa, Jonathan had dropped to his knees, and was getting out his trusty Dunhill lighter. But when he tried to get the bloody thing to light, it was no go—not the Dunhill’s fault, Jonathan knew, rather his own trembling hands.
First to appear in the courtyard was Yang, shouting orders in Mandarin. O’Connell, from behind a side column, fired off a few quick shots at the general, whose attention was drawn that way, and with a handgun Yang returned O’Connell’s fire. At the same time, troops hustled around the general’s flanks and set up their own positions, firing and diving behind columns and steps.
Finally, Jonathan got a flame going, and was about to light the fuse when shots chewed up the snow inches from him, and he instinctively pitched the lighter and scurried for cover, muttering, “Damnit to bloody hell! That was a gold-plated Dunhill!”
Then Jonathan cut a zigzag path back to O’Connell and Evy, who were together now behind a half-crumbled brick wall.
Elsewhere, Alex was dashing behind a partial brick wall himself as shots pocked around him. He withdrew a roll of electrical tape from his pouch and began to bundle three sticks of dynamite into a makeshift bomb.
At the same time, Alex’s uncle had dived behind that broken wall while Evy provided cover, pumping away with her Winchester, winging a soldier who’d been getting too close, and winning a glance of admiration from her husband.
A startled Alex saw Lin break from cover and run toward the rear of the colonnade, where stood a torii-style ga
teway. Though she was for the moment at the far side of the fray, Lin was nonetheless out in the open and making a perfect target, much to Alex’s dismay. She seemed to be staring up at the open mountain slope behind the colonnade; had she lost her mind?
“Lin!” Alex yelled, and went scrambling after her.
Yang’s brutal onslaught just went on and on, the general and a few helmeted soldiers advancing to the stupa while others inched their way up the courtyard on either side, ducking the bullets of Rick and Evy O’Connell, who exchanged desperate glances as they reloaded.
O’Connell said to his wife, “I guess we’ve been in worse scrapes.”
Evy said to her husband, “Really? If we survive, you’ll have to remind me . . .”
Then a haunting howl cut through even the gunfire, that same mournful bellow that had been heard in the darkness the night before.
O’Connell and Evy’s eyes went to the rear of the colonnade, where, centered within the torii, stood the source of that strange sound—Lin herself!—her hand to her face as she delivered the ululation, like Tarzan calling for the animals of the jungle to come to his aid.
Bullets puffing the snow chased Alex as he ran to the torii within which Lin stood, eyes on the mountainside and the surrounding hills, and half a second after he tackled her, rolling with her to relative safety, strafing gunfire chewed up where she’d been.
That gunfire was still pounding away when a howl like the one Lin had somehow summoned from within her lithe form came down from the slope, horrific and otherworldly, a sound that could stand the hair up on the back of a human neck.
Three shaggy forms came charging down from the hills—at first they seemed to be big men in long fur coats, but quickly they became something else: creatures, nine feet tall, covered in gray-white fur, with smallish heads for such large and powerful frames, with mouths opened wide to show off fierce fangs.
Yang’s men stared in disbelief but so, for that matter, did Jonathan Carnahan, behind the half wall of bricks with his brother-in-law and his sister. “My God, can those bloody things be—”
“Abominable snowmen?” O’Connell said, between submachine-gun bursts. “Yeah.”
“Actually,” Evy said, between Winchester rounds, “the Tibetans prefer ‘yeti.’ ”
“How quaint.” Jonathan threw his sister a withering glance, fired several shots at Yang’s men from his own rifle, then said, “Well, by all means, let’s defer to them on the subject . . .”
Neither husband nor wife seemed particularly surprised about such bizarre reinforcements showing up, but perhaps, Jonathan thought, that was because they were preoccupied with the forces of a reanimated mummy.
And the Yeti indeed seemed to be reinforcements, as Lin dashed out to them and shouted something guttural in a tongue unknown to Jonathan or for that matter O’Connell and, for all her expertise with antiquity, even Evy herself. The creatures were roaring something in response that seemed half animal cry, half spoken word, and then raced by her, apparently doing her bidding.
O’Connell turned to Evy. “Well, now we know a little more about our son’s girl—she apparently speaks yeti!”
Evy said, “Fluently, I should say . . .”
A yeti jumped from the roof of a side building and down into the courtyard, sending up flurries of snow with his feet. The other two yetis were already on the attack, charging toward the forward-flank soldiers, who—as Yang commanded, “Shoot! Kill them!”—raised their carbines to take aim, but not in time. The yeti were upon them to bat away the weapons and grab the soldiers and effortlessly fling them into a nearby stone wall, where the helmeted men thudded and crumpled, like flung rag dolls.
Panic quickly spread among Yang’s men, and the O’Connells took full advantage, father and son charging from either side of the colonnade, with Evy and Lin right behind, attacking a force of far greater numbers but dealing with shocked, distracted, terrified troops, who fell like carnival-midway targets.
The only hitch was when O’Connell’s Thompson jammed, earning him a quick I-told-you-so smirk from his son, whose Russian assault weapon was still doing just fine.
Thinking, I hate it when the kid’s right, O’Connell found himself staring down an enemy’s rifle barrel. But one thing that never jammed was Rick O’Connell’s hand-to-hand combat skills, and he snatched the weapon away from the man and used it to beat him senseless.
O’Connell wheeled to find another soldier bearing down on him with a big knife, held high; grabbing the man’s wrist and giving it a vicious twist, O’Connell broke the bastard’s wrist and then knocked him cold with a good old-fashioned right hook that dumped him on the snowy courtyard floor.
Lin and Evy were also showing off their hand-to-hand skills, more than holding their own with several clearly well-trained martial-arts experts among Yang’s men, one of whom was unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of an Evelyn O’Connell spin kick, which deposited him in the arms of a yeti, who promptly flung him like a javelin into a brick wall.
Yang’s men, however panicked, were managing to hit the trio of yeti now and then, but the slugs seemed to do little more than mildly ruffle the creatures’ fur. The general himself fell back into the small stupa, unaware Alex had ducked in to change ammo, and walked into the boy’s fist.
Blocking the punch, Yang threw a high kick and knocked Alex to the floor of the little structure, then shoved his right boot heel into the young man’s larynx, pinning him painfully.
“Your adventure, young O’Connell,” Yang said through a small, rare smile, “ends now . . .”
But before Yang could deliver a deathblow, a hairy arm reached into the small temple and grabbed the general, yanking him across the interior of the stupa, and through its front entryway, and flung Yang with a momentum that sent the general unceremoniously tumbling down the short flight of steps, bouncing right past the Emperor, who was moving into to the courtyard. Without a glance at, or a thought for, his injured general, Er Shi Huangdi stepped over Yang and moved calmly on through the chaos of battle.
Of all the remarkable feats of bravery on either side—though clearly such feats were more the domain of the O’Connell party—one stood out that afternoon: Jonathan Carnahan, on his hands and knees, crawled through the melee of gunfire and hand-to-hand combat and yetis committing carnage to find his way to his lost Dunhill lighter. Recovering it, Jonathan crawled on to return to the dynamite-strung stupa and, cackling with self-worth, he finally lit the fuse.
“Yes!” he said. “Piece of cake . . .”
Still staying low, Jonathan then turned to crawl away and almost bumped into two huge gray-white legs. He smiled up at a yeti, who looked down at him curiously, the way a monkey might regard a baby bird with a broken wing.
“I say,” Jonathan said cheerily, getting cautiously to his feet. “Wonderful, brisk weather we’re having, don’t you think? Enough snow for you?”
The yeti roared in Jonathan’s face—what had the thing been eating?—and Jonathan, his moment of bravery past, went running pell-mell toward the walls near the rear of the courtyard.
But as Jonathan ran, something strange occurred—even for a day that already included a terra-cotta Emperor Mummy and a trio of yeti—as a great cracking filled the air, like an ice floe breaking itself into pieces. Huge stalagmites of ice burst from the snowy stone floor of the courtyard, massive yet with points as sharp as the tip of a stiletto.
All of them were in danger—O’Connell, Alex, Evy and Lin and Jonathan, too—and had to run a serpentine course to keep from being impaled. The yeti bounded up on the roofs of the side temple buildings, showing themselves capable of caution and good sense.
Only from the entrance to the courtyard to the golden temple of the stupa, with its stairstep walls leading to the gleaming spire, did a clear path remain.
And down this path walked the rust-brown figure of Er Shi Huangdi, who—spotting Jonathan’s fuse—waved a hand and dispatched a knife blade of ice to cut the fuse in half, causing
it to fizzle out.
Seeing this from behind half a brick wall, Jonathan muttered, “Definitely not cricket . . . these damned mummies just don’t play fair . . .”
Into the now-empty courtyard strode the Emperor Mummy, head up, exuding arrogance like heat over asphalt. As he walked, nearby icicles retreated into the snowy courtyard floor.
O’Connell ran up the cleared path and threw himself onto the stupa wall, and began scaling the stairsteplike side. He would beat the son of a bitch to that spire, where if Er Shi Huangdi applied the Eye, all was lost. Alex threw down fire to cover his dad, and even caught the Emperor Mummy with a good volley, for all the good it did.
Almost to the top, O’Connell could see clearly the spire that was the prize, glinting in the sun. What he could not see, on the other side of the stupa, was the smiling Er Shi Huangdi simply touching the little temple and turning O’Connell’s steplike path into a sheet of ice, down which the adventurer slid fast and landed hard against an icy stalagmite.
O’Connell was in the Emperor’s view now and Er Shi Huangdi extended a hand and an arm, the red clay heating up, glowing white-hot; his fingers made a tiny gesture that produced a big fireball that shot out like a meteor at O’Connell, who scrambled out of its path even as it exploded and toasted his heels.
Behind the cover of a column, Alex was readying his homemade bomb . . .
The Emperor had climbed the stairlike side of the stupa and was placing the blossomed Eye in the depression atop the temple golden spire. The Eye began to glow and a rodlike beam of icy blue light shot out, careening against a series of ancient mica reflectors, and finally pinpointing a declivity at the mountaintop opposite.
On a tiled roof nearby, Lin watched, and waited . . .
On her cue, Alex charged out into the open and, as Lin had told him to do, threw the bomb not at the Emperor, but up the mountainside, to disrupt the transformation Er Shi Huangdi intended to initiate.
The Mummy Tomb of the Dragon Emperor Page 12